You know, fatalism gets kind of a bum rap. As if a crushing sense of the deep futility of life is the worst thing that could happen in the world.
Yesterday, my colleague Peter Levine rightly expressed concern at the fatalism inspired by Paul Krugman, Cass Sunstein, and others when it comes to transforming our civil society. In a letter to the New York Review of Books, Levine joined Harry Boyte and Albert Dzur in writing:
Sunstein, like Habermas and many others, sees major institutions as largely fixed and unchangeable, not subject to democratizing change. This assumption generates fatalism, which has shrunk our imaginations about decision-making, politics, and democracy itself.
While I’d be inclined to agree that we shouldn’t consider institutions as fixed and unchangeable, I’m not convinced that an unmovable task should signal the end of the work. As I’ve written before, even if the cause is hopeless, sometimes it is still worth fighting for.
But perhaps more importantly, believing in the people’s ability to generate change doesn’t dissolve the possibility of fatalism.
Imagining institutions as malleable and subject to the will of the people, for example, doesn’t imply that change will always be good.
For his part, James C. Scott argues that “so many well-intended schemes to improve the human condition have gone so tragically awry.”
Scott warned of an authoritarian state that is “willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being.”
But this warning could be easily extended to the general will of the people. Perhaps the technocratic approach of a few experts imposing their vision is a project doomed to fail – but that doesn’t mean that the will of the people is destined to succeed.
For after all, what is the “will of the people”?
As Walter Lippmann has noted, there is no such thing. There is merely the illusion of “society as a body, with a mind, a soul and a purpose, not as a collection of men, women and children whose minds, souls and purposes are variously related.”
And surely, people can be wrong.
Even if we were to overcome the challenges of factions, overcome the disparate opinions and experiences that shape us, even if we united diverse peoples in collaboration and dialogue, worked collectively to solve our problems – even then we would be prone to imperfection.
This, then, is the real fatalistic danger – What if people can change institutions, but the institutions they build will always be fundamentally flawed?
It’s like when “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” seemed like a good idea. At the time it seemed progressive, welcoming even. It was a positive change, yet still deeply flawed.
But again, this fatalism doesn’t have to lead to paralysis.
In many ways, the intrinsically imperfect institution is the backbone of Roberto Unger’s thesis. Far from running short on ideas for change, Unger takes ideas to extremes.
He has no patience for what he calls “reformist tinkering,” preferring instead radical change, “smashing contexts.”
In Unger’s view it is exactly that reformist tinkering which leads to fatalism. “Only proposals that are hardly worth fighting for – reformist tinkering – seem practicable,” he writes.
Unmoved by these modest, mediocre plans, people feel resigned to accept the status quo, rather than thinking more radically about what might change.
But Unger confronts this fatalism in a surprising way: seemingly accepting the inevitability of failed human ventures, Unger recommends creating a whole branch of the government tasked with reforming and radicalizing any institution which has become too static.
He envisions a world where institutions are constantly being torn down and rebuilt to repair the mistakes of the past and meet the needs of the day.
What could go wrong? You can almost hear Scott say in response.
In defending his originalist view of the Constitution, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argues that interpreting the Constitution based off today’s morals “only works if you assume societies only get better. That they never rot.”
Justice Scalia may not be my model of justice, but he does have a point.
It would be almost foolish to assume we’ll never be imperfect. Unger goes too far.
But where does that leave us? In a world of broken institutions where change is a herculean task and where that change may not be the ideal solution we might hope for, it’s easy to how fatalism might be inspired.
But I still find myself thinking – fatalism isn’t so bad.
Regardless of the changes, regardless of the outcomes, as individual citizens we’re still left with three fundamental choices: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.
Why choose to exercise voice?
Because really…what the hell else is there?
Perhaps it’s better that we go into it knowing that change is hard; accepting that human capacity to create perfect systems is limited.
We must constantly challenge ourselves and our works. Are we pushing for change hard enough? Are we expecting too much of our solutions?
After all It’s not a static world we’re fighting for, but one we can continually co-create together.
Suddenly everyone wants to do a “deep dive” into every subject. Today, for instance, Pew offers a “Deep Dive into Party Affiliation.” The phrase appears in The Ridiculous Business Jargon Dictionary right after “decruit,” an Orwellian term for firing someone. I would have said that metaphorical uses of “deep diving” were much less common even a year ago, but these things are hard to measure. Books always provide a lagging indicator and don’t necessarily catch up with spoken language even after a delay. But the Google book trend for the phrase “deep dive” is interesting. It shows a rapid increase in the 1970s, a bear market for deep diving in the 1980s-1990s (my impressionable years), and then a steep upward slope until 2008, which is the last year of available data.
To decode the scale: this graph means that one of every five million phrases in printed books in 1972 was the phrase “deep dive.” Some uses probably referred to pearl fishers and Soviet submarines. But the increase could reflect an emerging business metaphor.
The word “cliché” was invented by French printers in the age of moveable type to refer to a precast word or phrase that could be dropped into text for efficiency. I don’t think you would bother to forge a cliché for the word “deep dive” as long as it stayed at the level shown above. Thus it isn’t literally a cliché. But two parts in every ten million seems like plenty to me.
The post a deep dive on deep dives appeared first on Peter Levine.
(Washington, DC) Harry Boyte, Albert Dzur, and I have a letter in the latest New York Review of Books that is pertinent to today’s column by Paul Krugman. Krugman’s piece, entitled “Economics and Elections,” is deeply depressing and depressed, exemplifying the very mode of thought that Harry, Albert, and I wanted to challenge in our letter about Cass Sunstein and Michael Walzer, which we wrote more than a month ago.
Krugman argues today that the British Tories did immense and unnecessary damage to the UK economy by enforcing austerity policies. However, the British economy has grown of late, and “a large body of political science research” finds that what determines the outcome of a national election is economic growth during “the last two quarters before the election.” That factor is much more important than any behavior or rhetoric by politicians or anything that the media can say or do. It explains why the Tories may win.
For politicians, the lesson is to ignore the good of the country if you want to be reelected. In fact, “the politically smart thing might well be to impose a pointless depression on your country for much of your time in office, solely to leave room for a roaring recovery just before voters go to the polls.” Scholars and public intellectuals can do little to change this reality, Krugman argues, but they should commit to the truth anyway, like geeky existentialists. Our duty as intellectuals:
Try to get it right, and explain our answers as clearly as we can. Realistically, the political impact will usually be marginal at best. Bad things will happen to good ideas, and vice-versa. So be it. Elections determine who has power, not who has the truth.
(By the way, this is an interesting reversal for Krugman, who early in the Obama years was quick to accuse the president of not using the Bully Pulpit effectively. As he now notes, political scientists basically don’t believe in the Bully Pulpit.)
Cass Sunstein, a distinguished and often insightful political scientist, has collected evidence along similar lines to the “large body” of research cited by Krugman today. Sunstein and his co-author Reid Hastie argue that individuals and groups reach irrational conclusions because of hard-wired cognitive limitations, such as a tendency to “groupthink.” The behavior of voters in a national election is just an example.
Such evidence should be taken seriously. But Michael Walzer offered an important critique in the New York Review of Books that could also apply to Krugman’s article today. Walzer argued that problems (like groupthink) that bedevil discussions inside Congress, the Supreme Court, or any committee room may not be as serious as “powerlessness and inequality.” He concluded:
Organizing, agitating, demonstrating—these are ways of bringing the powerless to the attention of the powerful. They can contribute importantly to democratic decisions, even if they seem nondeliberative. … Sometimes we will want the people outside the room actually to win—to organize and agitate so successfully that they take over the small groups who dominate decision-making, with the result that they change the political conversation. … So, yes, we need to be wiser in the ways described by Sunstein and Hastie; but we also need a radically different kind of decision-making than what they describe, involving a larger number of people inside and outside the rooms where small groups sit.
We concur but would push the argument further. Political institutions can be changed. This is not only a matter of adjusting the rules that govern, for instance, parliamentary districts in the UK or campaign finance in the US. It is also about achieving cultural change within major institutions, such as legislatures, newspapers, and schools and colleges. It is about changing us (the citizens), not just them (the rulers). We wrote:
Sunstein, like Habermas and many others, sees major institutions as largely fixed and unchangeable, not subject to democratizing change. This assumption generates fatalism, which has shrunk our imaginations about decision-making, politics, and democracy itself. The challenge is to recognize that institutions of all kinds are human creations that in turn can be recreated, reconnected to questions of civic and democratic purpose. For this task we need to bring in Max Weber as well as Machiavelli and Marx [whom Walzer had recommended in his review]. Weber described the “iron cage” that results from technical rationality. In his essay “The Profession and the Vocation of Politics,” Weber also evocatively termed the pattern “the polar night of icy darkness.” Thawing the polar night is a frontier of democracy in the twenty-first century.
The evidence that Krugman and Sunstein cite is empirical. By definition, it derives from the past. In the case of Krugman’s column today, it derives from quantitative studies of US presidential campaigns since World War II. We should pay attention to trends in the recent past so that we know what to change. But we cannot allow the past to become a dead hand so that we surrender our political agency.
I addressed the very same topic in We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For (pp. 26-7):
The outcome of presidential elections in the United States is strongly correlated with the performance of the economy in the previous year. That means that all the deliberate work of campaigns, parties, and independent advocacy groups matters less than the blind, impersonal force of the business cycle.
Nevertheless, working together in small groups is morally important—it is what we should do and should care most about. To be a good person is to do this work well. That is reason enough to make it a central question for reflection and research. In addition, deliberate human action has significant impact. Small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens do make a difference under appropriate circumstances, as shown by the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the conservative legal movement, and numerous other examples. … Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for demonstrating that the organization and governance of voluntary groups affects whether they can solve social problems. These findings suggest that “small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens” matter, even if other factors matter too.
If the leaders of the South African freedom movement reviewed the scholarly literature on democratization during the apartheid years, they must have found it depressing. Prosperity, economic equality, and ethnic homogeneity were the factors that had been found to increase the odds of a successful transition to democracy. These structural factors were all evidently absent in South Africa. … Thus, if the African National Congress and other democratic reformers had been guided by hard-nosed, empirical research, they would have chosen a goal short of democracy, something like a negotiated arrangement among separate authoritarian communities. But they were right to ignore the scholarly literature because it was based on empirical data—in a word, on the past—and the past can never determine the future. So far, their peaceful revolution appears a monumental work of deliberate human agency.
The post against fatalism: responding to Krugman and Sunstein appeared first on Peter Levine.
I’ve been reading Doug McAdam’s seminal book Freedom Summer. I’m a little less than halfway through it, but already it’s been a compelling read.
McAdam had initially set out to study the network of activists engaged in the major struggles of the 60s. He knew anecdotally that many of the white leaders known for organizing against the war or for women’s liberation had their roots in the civil rights movement, but the Standford sociologist wanted to understand this connection more systematically.
He had hoped to find a list of the white Northerners who had traveled to Mississippi in 1964 to register black voters for the Freedom Summer project. From this list, he would be able to identify which participants went on to lead other social movements and explore what had compelled this further action.
But he didn’t find a list of participants.
He found something better.
At the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center in Atlanta, while sifting through miscellaneous materials on the Summer Project, McAdam stumbled across something remarkable: “there, nicely organized and cataloged, were the original five page applications filled out by the volunteers in advance of the summer.”
That trove included applications of those who were rejected, those who were accepted but who never-showed up, and applications of those who ultimately spent their summer in Mississippi.
He spent the next six years comparing at the characteristics of the volunteers and no-shows, exploring the experience of the summer, and examining the impact of that summer experience.
I haven’t gotten to the longitudinal part of his work yet, but I’ve been very struck by his description of the volunteers going into the summer.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the primary organizer of the summer made some intentional choices about recruitment. They reached out heavily to students at ivy-league and prestigious universities. They looked for volunteers who could pay their own way and support themselves for the summer.
The sensibilities of the time may have been shifting, but the attitudes of the volunteers were distinctive. As McAdam writes:
Academically, they numbered among “the best and the brightest” of their generation, both in the levels of education they had obtained and the prestige of the colleges and universities they were attending. Reflecting on their privileged class backgrounds as much as the prevailing mood of the era, the volunteers held to an enormously idealistic and optimistic view of the world. More importantly, perhaps, they shared a sense of efficacy about their own actions. The arrogance of youth and the privileges of class combined with the mood of the era to give the volunteers an inflated sense of their own specialness and generational potency.
I was struck by how much this description fits the often stereotypical view of Millennials. They are optimists who think change is possible. They are self-important and think they are special.
In the Freedom Summer volunteers, these elements combined for a remarkable effect: young people who thoroughly believed they were special enough to undo centuries of racism.
And perhaps the remarkable thing is that they were not wrong.
Well, not entirely wrong. There is plenty more work to do, plenty of racism still thriving in this country, but while we still have far to go – I think the Freedom Summer volunteers did accomplish something.
We could argue about just how much affect they had, but on the whole, I would say, they bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice.
Perhaps today’s young people could be just as remarkable.
But there’s something deeply unsettling and ironic about the impact of Freedom Summer.
The SNCC leaders knew it all along:
Nobody cared when they fished black bodies out of the river. But when America’s white sons and daughters were at risk, America paid attention.
The summer served to gain some ground in the civil rights movement, but it also served to reinforce the deep, systemic injustices of our country.
A summer of action from naïve whites affected more change than decades of black leadership.
The summer proved what SNCC leaders knew all too well: blacks in Mississippi really were powerless and these young, elite Northerners had good cause to be confident in their own efficacy.
Yes, it was black leaders who planned, designed and implemented Freedom Summer. It was black leaders who taught organizing and trained volunteers in effecting change. It was black leaders who put themselves most at risk.
But ultimately, it was the whiteness of the young volunteers that made the biggest impact.
I can’t imagine the dilemma the SNCC leaders were in. They knew what they were getting into going into the summer – they had some great debates about whether recruiting white northerners was the best strategy. But ultimately, they decided, attracting the privileged youth of white America was the best move they could make.
And those young people brought plenty of paternalism with them. As McAdam describes, “for their part, a good many of the volunteers brought a kind of “missionary” attitude to the project that only aggravated existing tensions. Hints of paternalism and insensitivity show up with great frequency in the volunteer’s letters and journals.”
Perhaps this could not be avoided. The volunteers were shaped by a racialized America as well.
In another comment that rings true of today McAdam says the volunteers “were not to much color-blind as supremely desirous of appearing color-blind.”
With the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer taking place last year, there’s been lots of talk – do we need another Freedom Summer?
Clearly, we need to do something. Black men and women are killed every day. Many live lives markedly different from their white peers. The racism and injustice that’s been rampant in this country is at the fore of our national consciousness, and for the first time in a long while it feels like something could change for the better.
And we should all fight for that change.
But invoking Freedom Summer we should be mindful.
Is the civil rights movement of today one where young, privileged, white people will continue to take their place as the face of a moment? Where those heirs to to power will deign to use their power for good – rather than disrupt those systems of power altogether?
It’s too early to say.
One of the most exciting things about Black Lives Matter has been the emergence of young, black leaders. It’s not their job to fight alone, but it is their place to lead.
For those of us in white America, the legacy of Freedom Summer should be an important reminder: change can happen, but for change to last – for systemic change to occur – it is not enough for us to use our privileged to shape our world. We must check our privilege and support the impressive black leaders among us.
They are the true face of change.
This pamphlet from Institute for Local Government, Building Healthy & Vibrant Communities: Achieving Results through Community Engagement, highlights information for public engagement in land use planning. The pamphlet reviews: What is Land Use Planning, Who is Involved, Why Community Engagement Matters and How to Engage. Download the pamphlet here.
About the Institute for Local Government
The Institute for Local Government is the nonprofit research education affiliate of the League of California Cities and the California State Association of Counties. Its mission is to promote good government at the local level with practical, impartial and easy-to-use resources for California communities. The Institute’s goal is to be the leading provider of information that enables local officials and their communities to make good decisions. Founded in 1955, the Institute has been serving local officials’ information needs for 55-plus years. Some of the highlights of that history are detailed in the story below. While respecting and honoring its past, the Institute is also intently focused on the present and future. In these difficult economic times, the need for the Institute’s materials for local officials is even greater.
Follow on Twitter: @InstLocGov.
Resource Link: www.ca-ilg.org/post/building-healthy-and-vibrant-communities
Our friends at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation recently shared a great post on their Challenges to Democracy blog highlighting five examples of democratic innovation from Participedia that we found quite interesting (one even involves an NCDD member organization!). It’s invigorating to see concrete reminders that our work is making real changes, so we encourage you to check out the list below or find the original post here.
Participedia is an effort that hopes to become a key resource for scholars, activists, policy makers, and citizens who are interested in new democratic practices and institutions. And it is always worth looking back to some of the most interesting cases recently added to Participedia for some inspiration. This selection from the frontlines of participatory innovation reflects both the diverse nature and the global span of Participedia.
1) Argentina – DEMOS
The purpose of the DEMOS project was to enable civic participation in the debate about high-profile law proposals in the Buenos Aires Legislature in Argentina, using the DemocracyOS software of the Democracia en Red foundation. The web app used was demos.legislatura.gov.ar and the initiative was open to civic participation for 35 days in November and December 2014.
In the project’s first phase, citizens were invited to rank their interests about 16 bills that had been introduced in 
the legislature, corresponding to 12 political parties. The goal was for citizens to chose which were the 3 most important bills that should be debated online. And in the second phase, the top 3 bills were submitted for online discussion, both at an overall level and broken down into the sections of each bill.
Over 13,000 citizens visited the app and almost half of them signed up to participate. The online debate phase produced several interesting outcomes: there was one bill (about nurses’ working conditions) which received overwhelming support mostly because of the mobilization of activists from the party sponsoring that bill, and there was another very controversial bill (about informal parking guards) that led to high levels of polarization and disagreement among participants.
The DEMOS pilot was an unprecedented participatory initiative in Argentina’s history using online tools, and was relatively successful in terms of citizen turnout. The project was very innovative in enabling civic engagement in real-world bills that are important to the day-to-day life of citizens. One of the most interesting characteristics of DEMOS was that it was a success story of partnership with a government institution and with politicians from the whole political spectrum.
Read more about DEMOS in Participedia.
2) Australia – Tasmanian Deliberative Democracy on Biobanks
Biobanks – which store and catalog human tissue specimens (such as purified DNA, saliva, blood, and plasma) using genetic markers and other traits such as age, gender, blood type, and ethnicity – have come to play an increasingly important role in biomedical research. As biobanks have become more common, critical bioethical questions of privacy, ownership, and commercialization have also surfaced. A number of deliberative events have been conducted to address these questions, with the goal of enhancing communication between the research community, regulators, stakeholders, and the public.
One such process was recently conducted in Tasmania. This event brought 25 participants together to deliberate. It was led by faculty at the University of British Columbia and the Menzies Research Institute Tasmania. While the selection process was random, quotas were used to ensure that relevant demographic groups were adequately represented in the process. Participants learned about the issues in various ways. They were provided with an information booklet, they had access to a private portal on the project’s website, and during the first days of the process, they listened to presentations by experts and asked questions.
Deliberation over a period of two weekends in April 2013, with a 12-day break of dialogue and information in between, led to 17 conclusions on eight topics. The participants showed strong support for the continued existence of biobanks in general, and a Tasmanian biobank in particular. Throughout the deliberations, participants became part of the policy-making process as opposed to mere observers of decisions made elsewhere, and this helped create a strong sense of personal involvement and commitment to the process among participants. The use of random processes to select participants helped ensure that the process included those who might not be involved in more traditional consultation processes, and this, in turn, helped ensure that a diverse range of viewpoints and opinions were expressed.
Read more about Tasmanian Biobanks Deliberative Democracy in Participedia.
3) United States – Boston’s Youth Participatory Budgeting
In 2014 the City of Boston launched “Youth Lead the Change,” the first participatory budgeting process in the US focused exclusively on youth. Its goals included civic education and engagement, and the inclusion of youth voices that are typically excluded from politics in the City’s capital planning process. Participants were primarily from Boston public high schools, and participation rates were high among young people of color from low-income neighborhoods.
The process, which was implemented by the Participatory Budgeting Project organization, had several key stages. First, a Steering Committee made up of youth organizations was established, and this Committee created a rulebook to guide the process. Second, youth assemblies were held in neighborhoods throughout Boston to generate ideas and identify priorities. This stage of the process generated 473 ideas and funding proposals, which were then divided into six categories by organizers. Third, a core group of young people was engaged as Change Agents to turn the ideas identified in the youth assemblies into specific investment proposals. They engaged in a dialogue with City officials who helped determined whether or not the ideas were eligible and feasible. The City also provided cost estimates for individual proposals.
The Change Agents made collective decisions deliberatively using a decision matrix that considered various factors including feasibility, impact, and need. Ultimately, 14 proposals were identified as priorities. At the end of the process, the Change Agents held a vote to determine which 7 priorities would be funded through the 1 million dollar youth budget.
Read more about Boston’s Youth Participatory Budgeting in Participedia.
4) Greece – Vouliwatch
Vouliwatch was launched on March 16, 2014 and went viral on the same day on Greek social media. As of January 2015, the project had 44,470 unique visitors. So far, 1,048 participants have submitted 409 questions to their representatives and the site has generated 25 crowdsourced policy ideas. Importantly, representatives have also embraced the project. They have, thus far, provided 50 official answers to questions raised by citizens.
The web application has five main functions: 1) it provides individuals with an opportunity to ask their representatives questions; 2) it functions as a source of crowdsourcing; 3) it helps citizens monitor the voting behaviors of representatives; 4) it provides users with a direct newsfeed of Parliamentary events; and 5) it provides an online debate forum that is, in effect, a “live” political chat lab.
Two additional features were introduced for the 2015 general election: 1) a “Policy “Monitor” function that allows voters to compare and evaluate party platforms; and 2) a “Candidate Watch” function which makes it possible for citizens to interact directly with candidates.
Despite widespread public skepticism of political institutions in Greece, the reticence of Greek politicians to engage their publics, and the divide between those with easy access to the internet and those without, Vouliwatch has managed to establish itself as a credible, non-partisan and independent source of information that extends beyond the limits of traditional online organizing efforts. In addition to partnering with numerous civil society organizations to promote open government (both locally and abroad), Vouliwatch has also sought close cooperation the Greek Parliament’s administrative system and the Ministry of Reform and e-Government in particular. Organizers and proponents of the site have been asked to join the Forum of the Open Government Partnership, which will assess opportunities for institutional reform in Greece.
Read more about VouliWatch in Participedia.
5) Tunisia – Civic Participation in the Constitution Drafting
Tunisia’s democratic transition was one of the more successful revolutions associated with the 2011 Arab Spring. Tunisia has a new constitution that was developed through an extensive, representative, and participatory process. The participatory components of the process were supported, in part, by the expertise of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
As part of this effort, the UNDP sponsored and organized a dialogue between elected officials, individual citizens, and civil society organizations in Tunisia’s 24 governorates. In total, 80 members of the National Constituent Assembly were involved in the process. They were trained in the art of drafting legislative and constitutional clauses, and they were introduced to different public consultations techniques and procedures. In turn, more than 5,000 individuals and 300 civil society organizations participated in the dialogue. The fact that public officials were meaningfully engaged (and committed) to the process helped ensure that the contributions of citizens and their organizations were taken into account during the drafting of the new constitution.
The UNDP process also aimed to include two groups who are typically underrepresented in Tunisian politics: 1) young people; and 2) women. The Ministry of Higher Education worked with universities to encourage students to participate in the process, and a total of 320 students made contributions to the dialogue. The process might have been made even more representative if young people outside the university system were encouraged to participate as well. The representation of women was encouraged by a parallel UNDP program, which trained 4,200 women and sensitized them on democratic processes, with a focus on the constitutional process. This effort to include women is notable given the region’s track-record on women’s rights.
Read more about Tunisia’s Constitution Drafting in Participedia.
We look forward to another year of great new ideas and insights from these and other innovations in public participation in 2015. If you have an idea you would like to share, contact us or add it to the comments below!
Also note that the Ash Center will soon announce the finalists for its special Innovations in American Government Award recognizing government-led innovations that best demonstrate enhanced public engagement and participation. A key feature of the Ash Center’s Challenges to Democracy public dialogue series, the winner of the Roy and Lila Ash Innovations Award for Public Engagement in Government will receive a $100,000 grant to support replication and dissemination activities.
You can find the original version of this Challenges to Democracy piece at www.challengestodemocracy.us/home/looking-for-inspiration-five-innovations-in-public-participation/#sthash.zZRduCgG.XsyztMNX.dpuf.
Little shoots of green – crocuses or tulips, perhaps – push up through the thawing ground.
The birds go mad. Tweeting, chirping, singing, calling. They haven’t seen so much food in months.
The streets run clear with the water of melted snow banks.
There is trash everywhere.
The roads and walkways bleed dust and stone from the deep gashes winter left behind.
It might snow this weekend.
But today it is warm. Today that taste of change is in the air – the deep breath of spring before the lazy days of summer.
I saw someone grilling outside.
As if anything is possible.
The wet spot on my patio is the last vestige of a man-size snow pile. It is gone now, leaving only happy moss behind.
The world wakes up. Finding new life and energy. As if anything is possible.
It is spring.
