Iconoclasm: Civics, media education and the New American Story

On March 30th, I wrote a blog article on Senator Bill Bradley's new book  The New American Story, which examined the senator's view of our place in the world.  But really, citizenship by nature begins at home.

Not only at home within our borders, but at home within our communities, and at home within our own households.  It begins with the morning news, continues with our discussions with friends, co-workers, and family, and ends with our thoughts (and perhaps our prayers) before sleep.

But America has gotten out of the habit of taking individual responsibility for our civic engagement, our citizenship.  "Activism" has become a perjorative term in the media.  Activism has, in fact, largely become a lost art, and been replaced with disorganized mass actions.

In the 60's, young Americans decided that taking to the streets was the only way to stop the Vietnam War.  Because the waning public will did end that war, the common wisdom became that spontaneous mass protest was the way to get things done.

This has satisfied neither the left nor right, the "establishment" nor the "activists" -- no one, in fact.

When my dad was a proud liberal in the 40's and 50's, as a labor organizer, he knew that half the struggle for social change was done in back room discussions and negotiations.  The threat of press and direct actions such as marches were held as a reserve if negotiation broke down.  This was also the heart of nonviolent movements including Gandhi's and Dr. King's.

But by my youth, coming of age in the 70's, it was uncool to protest, people were worried about their jobs, and marches were considered passe.  Unfortunately no one was teaching us to negotiate or work the press either.

Today, we need to regain the art of negotiation, of politics, of giving good press.   We also need to learn to consume press wisely.  The skills of organizing and working with and consuming media deserve to be the New Civics.

Yet this New Civics won't be taught in the schools, where at best civics education has been structural.  How else?  Public employees can hardly risk their jobs teaching the down and dirty of media criticism and political organizing to children!  

So, we have to create a new structure for teaching each other and ourselves media criticism, media use, organizing, and politics (and history as a preamble and casebook to politics).  We have to do more than learn the form of a press release.  We need to learn what journalists need, how to cultivate relationships with press, how to get published, how to organize campaigns of influence, the use of political and social advertising, and so on.

Where do people learn these skills?  Traditionally they've been handed down, practically by apostolic succession, from organizer to organizer.  No one wants to publish how to really organize, what the tricks are to work with press, and so on -- the "other side" might benefit.

It is critical to our modern democracy that the arts of media education and organizing be "open sourced" -- that people organize themselves to teach themselves, that the Internet be used to share techniques, ideas, information, media and skills.

The best examples of this I can think of in recent decades are the rise of the Christian school boards organized by the religious right, and the Dean presidential campaign (and later, less heralded, his successful campaign to head the Democratic Party).  Independent of goal and ideology, both of these movements focussed on grassroots, on creating empowered local organizations and individuals, and on imparting skills normally reserved for perceived "elites" -- and also, both movements gave trust that a common set of values would lead to a powerful organization emerging in the absence of top-down control.

We need to learn from these successes, and create empowered, literate, capable citizens, as suggested in Senator Bradley's book.  But I believe we need to also co-opt existing local organizations.  All politics is local.  Progressive democrats from the Dean campaign created peaceful insurgencies in many states.  Likewise, the Republicans were co-opted by the religious right grassroots (much aided by the right's stronger culture of civic service and political voluntarism and unity).

If liberals want to influence this country, they have to get off the internet and into the parlors, coffeeshops, meeting rooms, even the bars of our communities -- to talk, to learn, and to plan to act wisely for our values.

We must learn to think historically, and to project into the future -- to think in systems about our communities and our country and the world.  We need to learn enough economics, enough foreign policy, enough comparative media to be able to create and to share intelligent plans.

At MIT I teach a class called "How to Save the World in Your Spare Time" -- community organizing for middle and high school kids.  In ninety minutes I can show a classroom the basics of how to take apart a social problem and sketch out a plan of local action to effect change.  In fifteen hours, I can help the kids run through plans for individual projects.  It's civics, it's media literacy, and it's leadership education.

I can do the same for adults, but the adults will shut out the possibility of change.  Be bold!  We can effect change.  We must be open to learn, willing to listen, receptive to negotiation, and devoted to action. 

If we devote ourselves to social change, we will achieve a New American Story.

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Shava Nerad, News and Opinion Correspondent:

Shava’s column, Iconoclasm, published several times a week to Gather Essentials: Newsis an examination of the provocative ideas emerging in media and world culture behind the news.

Shava Nerad has been working on the Internet for twenty-five years, at the boundaries of Internet and social issues.  She is executive director of The Tor Project as her day job.  She lives in Somerville, MA with her teenage son, her fiance (a professional magician and fundraising coach), and a corgi/dachshund mutt named George.

Opinions here have nothing to do with Tor. 

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