The new dance

There's a new dance of citiizenry, new steps in being an involved citizen. This is a major change from what it used to mean to be a citizen. The change, interestingly enough, is in the direction of greater visibility but less real power.

It works this way. It used to be that politics, like religion, was pretty private. The secret ballot was sacred. I can remember my parents trying to guess if new friends were Democrats or Republicans! It was bad form, bad manners, to ask. Folks who flaunted their politics with lawn signs were the exception, not the rule.

An advantage to this was that you could make friends easily with folks with whom you had political disagreements -- because the disagreements were never visible.

Today everyone is asked to have a public opinion about everything. It's a big deal on news shows to broadcast the views of citizens. The rub is, so what? In fact, we have less real power than ever before. Corporations rule most of our lives, and government comes in a distant second. What we buy, what products are offered to us, what choices we get in the marketplace, all the accouterments of our lives, are determined by corporate marketing departments. If we actually want something in numbers, like cars that get better mileage, it takes forever for the message to invoke change.

The way we take control over our lives is almost to drop out: to refuse to be a consumer in the mainstream.

And yet, we have our views broadcast to millions as if they actually meant more than a single powerless opinion.

I prefer the way my parents had it. People kept their political beliefs to themselves. Corporations had not taken control of our lives yet. Family restaurants outnumbered chain fast food joints, by many times over. Indeed, one of the real joys of traveling used to be to discover all the little family restaurants with regional cooking. You can still do some of that but main street now has the same fast food places offering the same menu in huge numbers. None of those existed half a century ago. They were all individual, personal family restaurants, not monolithic corporate restaurants.

Of course no one is boycotting these places.

"What the people expect, they get. What they get, they deserve. Always." --The Stiff, a play by Charles Deemer