Years ago, I made my first Congressional constituent call. It was an initiation of sorts into citizen power. Too many of us feel powerless in life for no other reason than that we haven’t really exercised our power. And politics is a powerful place to do it.
The U.S. Senate was debating at that time—and then turned down—an amendment to the budget bill that would have added a 43-cent tobacco tax on every pack of cigarettes, creating $30 billion in revenue to pay for health insurance for millions of children of the working poor. The amendment, which lost by only ten votes, had been proposed by conservative Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah and the late liberal Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts.
President Clinton had helped defeat the amendment because then Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott had called it a “deal breaker” in working out the budget agreement. Opponents of the amendment were saying amazing things like, “Voting for this bill will actually hurt the poor because they’ll just keep on smoking but it will be more expensive.
Senator Hatch said, “It’s Joey versus Joe Camel, and no procedural niceties can obscure this reality and everybody here knows it.” Senator Kennedy said, “We shall offer it again and again until we prevail. It’s more important to protect children than to protect the tobacco industry.” I agreed with Ted Kennedy, and was all fired up one morning as I read about it over coffee.
I was living in California at the time, and I saw one of my senators voted to defeat the rider. She’s a good senator and I respected her, particularly her stand on gun control, but on this one issue I strongly disagreed with her vote. I called the main switchboard at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. (202-224-3121; that number should be in your phone, by the way), and asked for her office. The switchboard connects you immediately to whatever office you request. “Senator Feinstein’s office please,” I said.
A nice young staffer was on the other end of the line.
“Hello,” I said. “This is a constituent call. My name is Marianne Williamson, and I’m calling to express profound disappointment that the Senator helped defeat the rider yesterday that would have provided money for children’s health insurance. Could you explain to me why she did that please?” Remember: they work for you. I was simply asking an employee why she had done something.
“Certainly,” he said, and put me on hold. In a few seconds he was back. “The Senator felt she had to do it because the Majority Leader said it was a deal breaker for the budget deal.”
“Yes, I know that he said that. I read that in the newspaper. But quite a few people argued that that was a bluff. Why must we so consistently cave in to those who would have us balance the budget on the backs of our children, rather than on the back of the tobacco industry? Could you explain that to me, please?”
Yes, certainly,” he said, and put me on hold again.
In a few moments, he returned. “I was told to tell you that the President himself called here yesterday, and asked that the Senator vote the way she did.”
“Would you please tell the Senator that my response to that is, ‘So what?’ ”
“Yes, of course,” he said.
“Please tell the Senator that at least one of her constituents wants to go on record saying that doing the right thing is never a wrong move.”
“Thank you,” he said, “I will tell her that.”
Like hell he will, I thought, as I put down the phone. I had no illusions, of course, that the Senator would be told what I said. But I knew this: if she received a hundred calls like that—or, better yet, two hundred—she certainly would hear about it, and I even think she would care. These people still run for election. In fact, we know that far fewer than one hundred calls coming into a senator’s office is enough to get their attention.
There are millions of people in America who read about what happens in Washington and are disgusted at how we keep selling out to various industries at the expense of American families, day after day. But too many of us don’t call Washington, don’t write any letters, and don’t even vote; we just feel the darkness in our guts, knowing what we know but doing nothing. It’s like David saying about Goliath, “Geez, he really is big. Maybe I won’t do this.”
But Goliath isn’t that big. And each of us has a slingshot.
Life isn’t just about what happens to us; it’s about who we choose to be within the space of what has happened to us. The issue isn’t just how your representatives in Washington vote; the issue is how you, as a citizen, respond one way or the other. Just responding through a vote every four years, or even two years, is simply not enough. If anything should be obvious by now, it’s that.
The term “nonviolent resistance” is nonviolent, yes—but it’s also resistant! Without the serenity of inner peace, there is no character formation; but without the commitment to resisting injustice, there is no impulse to powerful action. We desperately need both, particularly politically. There is no machine, technology, or scientific project that can renew and restore democracy. If we want that done, it’s a job we have to do ourselves.
Don’t just call a friend; call your reps. Don’t just march; march to the polls. And don’t just get pissed; get powerful.
AFTER HE LEFT the presidency, Harry Truman was asked how it felt no longer being President. He responded that he had gotten promoted to a better job: “Mr. Citizen.”
Most Americans do not even vote. For years, people have felt as though politics was a distant reality having little to do with their actual lives. It became a spectator sport, when it was intended to be a participatory drama. No American citizen should be watching the action from the sidelines, when each of us has important lines to say. And now, we have paid a heavy price for this. Even Plato knew the dangers of political nonparticipation, having said this: “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
Hello.
“The people of every country are the only safe guardians of their own rights,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “and are the only instruments which can be used for their destruction. It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves. . . .”
Yet many Americans do not exercise their rights because they have come to take them for granted or underestimate their power. It is often when people have been denied their civil rights that they most appreciate how important such rights are.
When this book was first published, I had seen the problem already bubbling up among us. I read about a woman named Michele McDonald, an African-American single mother who lived in the inner city of Hartford, Connecticut, and attended the President’s Summit on Volunteerism, held in Philadelphia in 1997, and had this to say about it:
The Conference is a nice concept, but it’s missing the element of real democracy. What we want are the tools of power. We want to be the driving force of the richness of our own community.
We want to be the ones to determine the needs of our own community; we appreciate people coming in to help, but we don’t want to just be an object of someone’s “needs assessment” program. That makes us victims, and it disempowers us. What we want is to learn the tools of democracy, so we’re not just drowning in the system—we want to learn Civics!
The system shouldn’t be deciding what I need; I want to tell them what I need. I want to learn how to be a better citizen in my community and my nation. I want to help my neighbors be more focused on their gifts than on “their deficits. What I want to know is how to empower my own community, so we’ve got real input on where we’re going. We want to be empowered to take care of our own neighborhood.
Those people don’t want us to have the tools because then we’d have real power. That’s what’s really going on.
Sometimes they say they want parents from the community to sit on their boards and things, but once we get there, they don’t want us to know how to really use the system. We’re supposed to just sit there and be quiet, but they can point to us and say, “See, they’re included.
This woman understood the game that was being played: a system that constitutionally owes her much was patting itself on the back for giving her just a little. Michele was part of a burgeoning impulse to take back the tools of democracy.
Now, twenty years later, the situation is not just problematic; it is dire. Many Americans have internalized their powerlessness but have awoken and are ready to reclaim it. Nothing less than a massive citizen uprising, in consciousness and in civic activism, can save our country from the clutches of some seriously antidemocratic forces that have their hands upon it now. Serious voter suppression efforts are emerging around the country. The institutional levees we would have thought would keep them at bay have broken, and the only thing that stands between us and the demise of our democracy is our willingness to wield the power of our citizenship in a deep, and meaningful, and seriously kick-ass way.
WHILE THE AMERICAN political system should be a context for the discovery of solutions, the system itself is beset by some of our most severe wounds. The selfishness, violence, absence of teamwork, shortage of creative thinking, lack of courage to take risks, propensity to put the protection of entrenched interests before the pursuit of truth, obsolete hierarchical management systems, glorification of external resources, underemphasis on internal resources, lack of integrity, and diminished standards of excellence that are all hallmarks of a crumbling system are, if anything, more prevalent in politics than in any other institution in America. A weakened structure cannot give us strength. Far from being a fount of answers, politics in America is a big part of our problem. If democracy is a river that would provide the water to help us spring back to life, current politics is a dam that holds the water back. It is a conversation stuck at the level of a shouting match, an adversarial us-versus-them debate of total polarization and very little synergy.
Instead of endeavoring to present the political issues of our time in as historically and socially significant ways as possible to ensure the deepest exercise of democracy, the political establishment has turned itself into a clone of the advertising industry and the workhorse of a ruling class. It works less to serve than to exploit us, to manipulate the electorate for the sake of its own power.
Neither Democratic nor Republican establishments saw the writing on the wall, but it was there. It might have been written in invisible ink, but it was there. The rising economic inequality of the last thirty, almost forty years was a like a pressure cooker that was bound to blow, and anyone whose politics were led by their heart rather than their pocketbook could see it from miles away.
Over the last few decades, fueled mainly by the increasingly undue influence of money that was allowed to pour into our system (from the Supreme Court declaring that “money is free speech” to the disastrous Citizens United decision), both major political parties became too-frequent accomplices to corporate rather than democratic rule.
Political parties at their best stand for ideas about what the country should be, ideas about how to achieve that, and ways for the average citizen to be involved in the effort. Yet the average American citizen is too often seen by the major parties as mere cannon fodder in their fights for power. Both major parties are now challenged to reclaim their souls, in order to achieve again a true connection with the hearts of the American people.
We are living at a crossroads now. Our choice is between serious political darkness or serious political light.
IN HIS FAREWELL Address, George Washington had the following to say regarding political parties:
They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put in the place of the delegated will of the Nation, the will of a party; often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the Community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the Mirror of the ill concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests. However combinations or Associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the Power of the People, and to usurp for themselves the reins of Government destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
He added, “Let me now . . . warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party.”
There’s nothing in the Constitution that says, “You will be divided into two main political parties, and together they will determine the direction of the country, even if that direction is into the ground.”
While historically, third parties have been a very important contribution to American democracy, bringing to the political table such issues as Abolition, women’s right to vote, antimonopoly legislation, child labor laws, and even Social Security, slowly, ever since the late 1960s, both Democratic and Republican legislatures have passed laws making it more and more difficult for third-party candidates to get on ballots around the country.
The healthiest period of our democratic system was from the 1870s to the 1880s, when voter turnout was around 80 percent. During that time, many powerful third parties existed, keeping the vast majority of voters engaged in the political process owing to a genuine sense of viable political alternatives. Before 1888, there were no ballot access requirements; from 1888 to 1920, minimal requirements were passed; during the 1930s, ballot access laws became far more restrictive; and in the 1960s, laws began to be passed making third-party involvement in the electoral process extremely difficult. It has been noted that our great-great-grandfathers, if they were American voters, had a greater opportunity to change public policy with their votes than we do today.
It is important that we recognize the history of political parties in America, but today stakes are too high not to be deeply realistic about the situation we are in and the choices that confront us. What we most need now is for both the Democrats and Republican parties to reclaim their souls: to return to their values, to remember the people they are here to serve, to stop their slavish devotion to huge political donors, and remember their moral responsibility to the American people. Both of them deserved a huge comeuppance in 2016, but the American people did not deserve the form that that comeuppance took.
We must concoct something new now: If we harness our best ideas, our love for each other, and our commitment to the furtherance and betterment of our society, then a new vortex of social and political power will emerge in our midst. It seems to some as though this is just a pipe dream, but the most serious among us would not think that at all. It is not naïve to think we can heal our democracy; it is naïve to think it can survive another one hundred years if we do not. If we were serious about democracy then voter registration would occur automatically on an American citizen’s eighteenth birthday, voting would be held on a Saturday or Sunday and possibly for more than one day, early voting would be expanded, and the polls would be open for twenty-four hours. It cannot be said that the current system encourages voter participation.
If we were serious about democracy, we would mandate free TV time for all candidates, where they are free to speak for themselves but their Madison Avenue handlers have to keep their paws off our brains.
If we were serious about democracy, our legislators would not feel free to continuously avoid grappling with the challenge of limiting the influence of money on the electoral system. Americans have turned off to politics now because we know it’s such a sick, corrupt game. What we need to remember, however, is that while current politics is just a game, democracy is not. It’s as though we own a house and we do not like the current tenants. So you don’t avoid the house or burn down the house; you remove the tenants and put in new ones!
While our party affiliations come and go, our citizenship itself is a permanent aspect of our relationship to this country. And citizenship is a relationship. It is, when we allow it to be, a process of interaction that fosters growth and betterment. America is better off when we’re involved with its governance, and we ourselves are better off when we can effectively participate in making the world a better place.
Below are some very simple basics for making a political difference. Sometimes something very small can go a long way, and if all of us did even a few of these things, this country would completely change.
It is estimated that fewer than 10 percent of American voters will ever write to elected officials. Yet contacting our elected officials with a letter is an important part of making a difference. They work for you. They theoretically want to hear our views, and they definitely can’t afford to ignore them. It’s our responsibility to express those views.
Like voting, communicating our views in the political arena increases your own power. The universe registers your every serious intention and vigorous action on behalf of what you perceive to be a greater good.
You may think your elected officials are flooded with letters on issues you care about. The truth is that most members of Congress receive fewer than a hundred letters on any one issue. On the state level, elected officials often receive fewer than ten letters on a particular issue. Your letter can carry a lot of weight.
Your opinions are particularly important when an issue is timely—for example, when a vote is expected or when there is a lot of news coverage of the subject.
Tips for your letter: Be brief, address only one issue at a time, keep the letter down to four or five sentences; say why the issue or legislation matters to you; state your reason for opposing or supporting a particular bill. If you have particular expertise, then say what it is. Be positive and constructive, give compliments if they’re sincere. Send or email a copy to your local newspaper to help build support for the issue. Use the appropriate title of the elected official. After you have written once, then keep up the contact and periodically communicate that you’re following closely what happens; thank the official and state that you’ll be following up with a phone call in a week to receive a response, and then do so.
As effective as one email or letter is, twenty-five on the same issue are even better. Getting others who are concerned about the same issue to send letters is not as hard as you might think.
KNOW YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS
USA.gov/elected-officials is a government-run site that allows us to find our representatives—local, state, and federal—by entering our zip code.
Send your letter or email to:
The Honorable _____
United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Honorable _____
United States House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515
Both the legislative and executive branches have Web pages: www.House.gov, www.Senate.gov and www.WhiteHouse.gov
DON’T HESITATE TO PICK UP THE PHONE
By phone, you can call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121. The switchboard can connect you with your representative’s or senator’s office. The White House switchboard is 202-456-1414, and the White House comments line is 202-456-1111.
Say who you are, why you’re calling, give facts and background about the issue, state your position and why, say what you want, and use a pleasant but firm closing that lets them know you’ll be contacting them further. If there is a bill number related to the issue you’re calling about, make sure you give them that. Then follow up with a letter or email or call.
WRITING FOR THE Op-ED PAGE
This is easier than you might think. If you have a strong idea or opinion about a public issue that you’d like to express, write it out. Write it well, communicating your personal experiences. Make your position clear from the beginning, get right to the subject, make your sentences relatively short. Be sure all names are correct and all quotations accurate. End your article with a forceful conclusion, and write your name, address, and phone numbers on your submission. A good op-ed piece is about 750 words, or three double-spaced typewritten pages. Write in the active voice, get your facts right, and make sure you’re adding some new insight into the argument.
MEETING WITH ELECTED OFFICIALS
Visiting elected officials is an important part of promoting our points of view. A citizen visiting his or her elected officials is visibly identifying himself or herself as a constituent or a voter. Because the official is focusing on you as an individual and as a voter, a visit will have great impact.
One of the important ways of effecting change with elected officials is by building a strong relationship. Developing strong relationships with them is an important part of exercising our power in a democracy. It is especially important to develop relationships with staffs of elected officials. Elected officials and their staffs are eager to get information that they can use in speeches and when working with constituents.
1. Make an appointment by calling the elected official.
2. Indicate the issues you want to discuss.
3. Study the issues to be covered in the visit. Keep the discussion to one or perhaps two issues.
4. Keep the atmosphere friendly and open. You are there to exchange ideas; under no circumstances should you become angry.
5. Limit the time of the meeting. Don’t let the conversation drag.
6. If you don’t know the answer to a question the official asks you, just say so and explain that you’ll get the information. Make sure you follow through.
7. Leave some information with the elected official on the issue. This will help him or her remember your visit.
8. Follow your visit up with a thank-you note. Remember—your main objective is to establish a continuing dialogue with your elected officials.
SITTING AROUND WAITING for someone to tell us what to do is not the pulse of this moment or in keeping with the gift of democracy. Today’s zeitgeist is to do the thing that each of us knows is the one pure thing that stands before us on the road of life, the undone task of personal growth or community involvement that paves the way to our higher becoming. That is the critical issue in democracy today: that each of us rises to the nobler places within us, to the stuff of integrity, excellence, and love.
No one can lift the fog in your mind except you, yourself. Some of us need to read more; some of us need to pray more; some of us need to go to therapy; some of us need to get a job; some of us need to be more generous; some of us need to participate more fully in our family or community; some of us need to forgive someone, some of us need to ask forgiveness; almost all of us need to become more politically involved. All of us need to do something that we know is the next step in the journey of our soul’s unfoldment, and most of us know deep in our hearts what that is.
Leadership itself is changing from a top-down, old-fashioned Newtonian model of someone acting on a system from the outside to try to change it, to a new-paradigm image of change from within. The primary responsibility of leadership in the era now upon us is to hold a space for the genius of others. In the presence of someone who believes in us, we move more quickly into who we might become. Becoming different, we behave differently. And then the world begins to change.
There are universal laws of consciousness that apply to social change.
1. It is always our prerogative, as individuals and as nations, to choose again: to say no to a direction we’ve been moving in and yes to a new one. Our greatest power is our capacity to change our minds.
2. Alignment with higher principle is always supported by invisible forces.
3. If an energy is not in alignment with love, it is ultimately temporary. It will not last forever and is more vulnerable than it appears.
4. The universe is impersonally invested in evolving toward goodness, and uses any available conduit for purposes of doing so. Willingness to be so used activates the conduit. You’re as good for the job as anyone else, and your past is “totally irrelevant.
5. Don’t expect the old order to like you.
6. A life of love and effort on behalf of the collective good promises the satisfaction of knowing you are doing what you are born to do. You are not, however, promised specific results as you might define them.
7. Your happiness regarding the reality that’s coming is a more potent method of social conversion than is your anger regarding the reality now.
As my father used to say, “You know. Now do.”
Chapter 9 will be emailed to you tomorrow!
Chapter 2: Dreams and Principles
Chapter 4: An American Awakening
Chapter 5: The Eternals of Finance
Love this - especially your (partial) quote, "Without the serenity of inner peace, there is no character formation...". That quote should be adopted by the pro-choice community in my opinion. I know it speaks to me and I imagine it will speak to other pro-choice individuals❣️
Also appreciated the quotes from George Washington and Plato. As well as all of the encouragement to get politically active. I am definitely considering volunteering to register people for the midterms. I am so worried about the midterms and that seems like a good use of energy!
Thank you for a great post❣️
Thank you for sharing this. If only the youth in USA would realize their power (they already have the numbers - MAJORITY) & actually exercise it, they could design their future. I really don't understand their reticence -- ignorance, laziness, cynicism, distraction?
Try to help them stand up & exercise their Power, before they lose it.