The Empowerment Ventures

TELL US WHAT YOU THINK!

(Copy Protected, Oct. 2005. By Allan Shore)

The Empowerment Ventures is a column about the evil, ugly, underutilized aspects of progressive advocacy. It is about commercializing advocacy into action. It is about what we miss out of as people who invest our lives in social/community concerns, only to find out that most of the people of the "non-advocacy" world have little understanding of and very little respect for the kinds of accomplishments we generate.

In fact, as it stands now, collectively the people of our communities invest more social and cultural value in the stories of CGI heroes and heroines (regardless of the species of origin) than they do in the adventures and struggles of activists in action.

I came to this realization in a typically painful way.

I was chatting with a friend who, like me, had devoted her life to the nonprofit sector. The majority of her efforts were geared toward helping other women who had lived through the most ugly aspects of domestic violence. But in her later years she moved on to organizing gender and sexual justice advocates around the country—helping to build networks of others like her who believe they know how to stop such manipulative hurting.

She was, in fact, sharing with me stories of they way they had brought together teams of monitors (to keep an eye out for the evil ones), escape artists (to get women out of town when their monsters were getting ready to explode), makeup experts (to hide the evidence of the damage done), and skilled professionals who helped them hide their trails and start new lives somewhere else.

So I asked her, a bit jokingly, what a Super Heroine modeled after her accomplishments would "look like," in the sense of reflecting her vision of the world if it was projected on the Big Screen.

I think she is still alternatively laughing and crying. She could in no way conceive of any kind of adventure plot that sought to entertain the masses with the details of her mission. And that made her sadder than any thoughts she had about the shade of her tights. 

So I asked myself: why should it be a surprise to us that so few people care enough to really model their lives after these kinds of everyday agents of good?

Let's get a reality check folks. When the violence-infused Grand Theft Auto interactive game gets criticized for stereotyping African-American men as criminals, the collective answer is to find ways to include more villains of other races (more villains of other races). The first time heard this I wanted to puke. 

We don't need more action-packed bad guys of any color, shape or orientation. We need more heroes and heroines who are suave and adventurous with the weapons of justice and equality. We have too many who use greed, selfishness, prejudice and social stigmatizing as their tools of choice.

Virtually all advancements in civil, humanitarian, human and planetary rights have come from the work of advocates who gave their livelihoods if not lives to fight off our cultural enemies. But seldom do they ever get more attention than a one-night date on an under funded public television screen.

And, frankly, folks, I know there is a market for the idea that Goodness Sells.

If you don't know what http://www.Food-Force.com is, go check it out. It was someone's brilliant idea to market through technology the UN's worldwide food distribution and mobilization efforts across the globe. And it includes the kind of "real-life" (in a CGI sense) heroes and heroines that I've been talking about; characters that learn their knowledge from being part of teams of anti-hunger activists.

To me, anything that improves the image of the UN by commercializing its world mobilization techniques is good stuff to be read about or watched with a box of Earth-friendly popcorn. And apparently 2 million other people agree too.

The purpose of The Empowerment Ventures is to tell the stories of the struggles, gains, ideas and opportunities that I know exist out there in the real world, and to use this space to find ways to get the entertainment professionals to answer when they don't.

With your help we expect to post here:

* Just what empowerment ideas are, and how they are being used already.

* What it might mean if we started looking at our social problems from a different perspective and coming up with other plans for solutions.

* Stories of what a new "Jane Bond" might actually look and act like if she were vested with the desire to really change why we have bad guys and gals in the first place.

* The words and motivations of people who really are advocates in action for change.

Or maybe other ideas that you provide.

I picked up a book recently called The European Dream by Jeremy Rifkin (http://utne.com). He makes the case that like a lot of other folks of our age (just past the boom crowd, if you will) started our live infatuated with the idea behind the American Dream. But even he believes that commercialism and other faults have drive away that wish and replaced it with one that is distinctly more continental in its origins.

As he says so well: "That's why it saddens me to say that America is no longer a great country. Yes, it's still the most powerful economy in the world, with a military presence unmatched in all of history. But to be a great country, it is necessary to be a good country. It is true that people everywhere enjoy American cultural forms and consumer goods. America is even envied, but it is no longer admired as it once was. The American Dream, once so coveted, has increasingly become an object of derision. Our way of life no longer inspires; rather, it is now looked on as outmoded and, worse yet, as something to fear, or abhor."

I happen to believe that our dream doesn't have to have died from inaction—at least now without a good fight based on the substance of justice we admire. It simply needs to be re-scripted to get back to its humanitarian plot. I hope that the Empowerment Ventures is a draft in that direction.

I hope you agree. Write me and tell me what you think!

AllanShore@msn.com

The next chapter: What would happen if Michael Jackson really had the courage of his convictions?