Once One Loses Civic Life You become a Refugee
By Lowell F. Christy, Jr, Ph.D.
What does it mean when a person or People loses the interactions, interrelationships and interdependence of a well run civic order?
In traditional societies banishing a person outside the community was equivalent to a death sentence. Security provided by the groups many eyes to see danger is reduced to two, tasks for food gathering, processing and storage once shared rests on one's shoulders and being part of something larger than oneself is gone. In an unforgiving world of Nature and now having a target painted on one's back for other's to see survival is counted in days or weeks, not months.
Once Civic Life is lost in a People we all become refugees looking for a new home. Now the target becomes visible on a whole People.
A refugee need not simply lose their physical home. Losing the ability to make sense of the world casts one's Mind to the winds. Too often those losing the ability to navigate seek the first life raft offered to them.
Political vultures circle a People cast adrift from the moorings of old answers that no longer speak to realities they now encounter. Authoritarian voices with their simple answers identify the source of the People's suffering. In the gathering storm it becomes clear in the universal Door to War - it's US against Them.
The hawkers of simple solutions of us against some convient scapegoat find a natural audience in the dispossessed seeking their new identity, their new home. Those seeking power weaponize words. Weakened identity cast adrift from from yesterday's answers and unable to ask a new order of questions capable of new answers and identity, there are no exits. The new masters of power now have their pawns to do whatever they like. The Midas' of the real world does not merely create gold but the pawns to gather the real gold - POWER.
Today with the incoming tides of globalization pulling local agency from communities where civitas and citizens live with locally sourced solvable problems. With news cycles drawing the extremes into 24/7 focus and ideological axles around which to wrap the viewer"s mind. With government and business in cohoots deploying Mind bending technologies to corral and disembodied citizen into overstuffed consumers death does not come suddenly as an individual banished in olden times - death of self and society come gently. We gratefully sign our and societies death warrant.
With numerous calls about the demise of democracy we are growing numb. The link between a democratic society and the life of how we iive together has become severed. "My God did you see the price of gasoline'" - ignorant of twice the cost paid around the world. "Have you seen the gristly pushing of a person on the New York subway" - when thousands are dying in a war betwen authoritarian and more open socities. "How can I worry about gerrymandering and a few more hurddles to the voting booth when I buy Kevlar backbacks for my 12 year old" - when the news media channels only provide ideological answers of which tribal extremme makes it either/or.
Too much ignore words of "The Boy who called Wolf" until thw wolf is at the door. Where are the exits, the concrete methods ,the outposts of innovation by citizens. The last defence of Democracy is activation of the Agency of the Citizen. What can you and those like you do to unleash the Genius of the People. The Founding Thinkers gave us the Fourth Branch of Governing -The Citizen. Will we squander that antidote to corrupting power, also?
Lowell Christy, Co-Founder THE FORUM
Seneca, Maryland