What future will use us?
The heart of the matter
By Jim Selman
On what it means to be a citizen in a spectator society, and what can we do after the 2024 U.S. election to positively impact the future
Can we escape being merely spectators of the 2024 election?
Many Americans are trapped in a speculative media free-for-all. Our daily newsfeed is filled with endless hours of assessments, opinions, and speculations about our political leaders, about what is happening today, and what this will all mean for our collective future. In scanning my own newsfeed today, I counted 48 so-called stories about Donald Trump and a dozen or so about Kamala Harris. Most of the Trump items were about his downward spiral cognitively and, increasingly, politically. Many of the ‘stories’ were made up of observations and opinions. Some didn’t even report any facts, instead spouting opinions about opinions as if they were the truth.
One of the most enlightening things I’ve learned in life is that opinions can never be true or false. They are—always and only—points of view. At best, they may be thoughtful conclusions based on fact. But even then, they aren’t true or false.
One of the ideas I teach is that people’s behavior and actions are always a correlate of how they are relating to the future. I am not an expert, but it makes sense to me that most, if not all of our behaviors and our moods, are a function of how we relate to our respective ‘realities’ and how everything ‘shows up’ for us. Said differently, the future we observe uses us.
If we believe certain opinions/assessments are the truth, then those opinions/assessments will shape our perception of how the future is unfolding and, consequently, our individual and collective responses as well. In effect, when enough people buy into a particular ‘story’ about the future, that ‘story’ eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
How can this be? From what I understand, current research on the brain suggests that our brain is already engaged and committed BEFORE our conscious mind makes a decision. That is, our conscious mind moves into gear after the fact. For example, if the situation we’re in appears to be dangerous or threatening, almost everyone will do whatever they do in that kind of a situation. Whether it’s fight or flight, freeze or faint, our responses will tend to be automatic and dependent upon our competence and what we have at stake. Hence, we will respond differently, depending on which political narrative of America’s future we buy into.
If you believe what’s being said in the media, it’s beginning to look like Trump is on the decline, and we may yet dodge an authoritarian take-over of our country. Since Kamala became the Democrats’ official nominee, many of us have been starting to imagine (again) a future in which our democracy prevails. A future that could work for most, if not all, of us. However, the pundits are quick to remind us not to count our chickens before they hatch.
Politics in America has become a spectator sport that has us trapped in a speculative free-for-all. What’s the remedy?
In a word…
Citizenship
I suggest that one of the conversations that seems to be missing in today’s discourse has to do with what it means to be a citizen of this (or any) country. Most schools have stopped offering classes in civics. Too many people either take their citizenship for granted or think it is the same thing as membership. Citizenship isn’t about membership.
Citizenship is a privilege and a set of promises:
- It is a promise we make to all the other citizens of our country to honor certain values.
- It is a promise to accept that living with our fellow citizens doesn’t mean everyone gets what they want all the time.
- It is a promise that, over time, we can trust that the future that emerges will be a reflection of the majority.
- It is a promise to each other to trust that the process we have in place will allow our country and we, as a people, to change and evolve.
Hopefully, enough of us are engaged and involved as citizens to sustain our democracy in November and maintain some degree of workability in the United States of America. But it’s time to think past the election. It’s time to begin repairing the damage that has been done to our relationships with our fellow citizens. The tragedy of the MAGA movement has been in alienating us as citizens and undermining our most basic institutions, primarily the news media and the legal system. The fragmentation of our body politic will not recover overnight—and may even worsen—unless enough of us can take on the notion that it is our individual responsibility as citizens to begin the process of altering the discourse of American politics.
As a concerned citizen of America, I was inspired to hear two consistent and, for me, believable themes from the speakers during the Democratic National Convention. First, some form of ‘healing’ the Red/Blue divide is a priority in the Kamala Harris administration. I was particularly moved by Senator Warnock of Georgia as he pointed to the fact that his children can’t be safe if his neighbor’s children aren’t safe. (Essentially, it’s in your self-interest to care for your neighbors.) He extended his examples to illuminate the obvious: we’re all in this together, regardless of our beliefs, and everyone in this country should have a stake in building a future that can include everyone. This theme, however, was balanced by a second and equally loud call to “fight, fight, fight” for the preservation of our democracy, for a “non-zero sum game” in our country (a win-win game in which the winnings and losses of all the citizen players don’t add up to zero). Translation: a future which includes everyone and in which everyone can gain.
Admittedly, I don’t want extremists and ideologically driven people—from either the Left OR the Right—shaping or determining my future. I don’t want to see policies implemented within an inclusive covenant of laws and regulations based on protecting the health, prosperity and well-being of the population at large that either control my behavior or limit my choices. At the same time, I am personally committed to a future in which: a) every individual is accepted and respected, and b) the values and principles upon which our country was founded that are still relevant today remain the prevailing criteria for getting along.
Under our system of governance and decision-making, the underlying assumption of a viable and vibrant democracy is that each citizen has a voice and the space to express their views freely. For most people, this comes down to how you vote. That’s all well and good.
However, I’ve noted over the years that one of the perils of our system is that too many of us fail to ‘own’ the results of our elections. The day after someone is elected, there is a shift in how the population relates to the winner.
So what can you and I do after the election to have the most positive impact on our future?
My starting point is to remember that the ‘playing field’ in the game of life is conversation. Most of us have had the experience of speaking with someone who profoundly changed our life in some way or another. Those kinds of conversations are usually, but not always, with someone we love, someone we deeply trust, or someone we hold in very high regard. What if you and I were to have that kind of life-changing conversation with someone we don’t deeply trust or hold in high regard?
I have a relationship with at least one person in my life who, for whatever reason, has a political point of view very different from my own, almost diametrically opposed to what I believe. (Who doesn’t these days?) What if I were to have a conversation with that person that could allow for our differences to exist? What if that conversation could restore the quality and humanity of our relationship, perhaps even restore the human-to-human connection we used to have that has be fractured by the political discourse in our nation of the past few years? Assuming Kamala prevails and becomes our President, I see this conversation as a distinct possibility.
But if Kamala doesn’t win the election in 11 weeks, I don’t see such a conversation happening, simply because I do not accept that Donald Trump and Project 2025 are legitimate and acceptable options in America. I believe Trump and the Heritage Foundation are committed to creating a fascist state and, should they prevail, we would no longer have a constitutionally based democracy. We would no longer be the United States of America. I won’t speculate here what the most ethical and appropriate response of a responsible citizen might be in the event that sort of upheaval should occur.
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Originally posted August 22, 2024 on Jim Selman’s Substack “At the Crossroads”
© 2024 Jim Selman