For the first time in my life I felt moved to donate to a political campaign. I gave a small donation to the Obama candidacy and have been on their email list throughout the campaign. But now, even though he’s won, I still receive their communications.
It seems I am on Barack Obama’s email list. Here’s the message I got from the man who in three days will be our next President.
In the book The Cultural Creatives the named group is described as, among other attributes, not being engaged in the political system. The Creatives (whose values as catalogued by the books editors are values that I hold) are not joiners. I would attribute this to not finding very many groups that reflect my values. But I felt compelled to give to the Obama campaign not out of a sense of guilt or shame, but because I believed that this man who was passing the hat, was different. He seemed to me to be the friend who was collecting up-front money for the roadtrip adventure that we were all invited on. I was up for an adventure.
Perhaps Creatives like myself have not been impressed with the performance of organizations religious, political and otherwise who have courted joiners. The authors of The Cultural Creatives also describe the group they call the Cultural Creatives as a group that, given the chance, would not join itself! They liken us to an audience in a movie theatre who are all watching and reacting to the same movie, but who are unable or unwilling to turn our heads to either side and recognize that we are in fact connected through our common experience. And yet we connect through the internet in numbers that are astonishing. We do feel the need to connect.
I count this attribute, or this non-attribute, of not joining among my own personality traits. I would never describe myself as Democrat or Republican or Green or even Independent when it has a capital “I” attached to it. I tend to take people on an individual basis whether I am voting for them, or offering them a hand-out.
With this particular campaign season I found myself disgusted with America and her satisfaction with really being offered only two parties to choose from. I supposed that the European system might be better in offering people someone to vote for and eliminating the “lesser of the two evils” vote which I think has no place in Democracy or anywhere else in life.
Once I got past this initial distaste I was again offended by the fact that both available parties were participating in anti-democratic (small d) tactics of setting up “protest areas” out of range of the cameras. Gimme a break! Is this Glasnost? A kinder, gentler totalitarinanism?
But, as the campaign marched on, I have to admit that I fell in love with the idea of an Obama Presidency. And here’s the caviat:
My joining along with the Obama campaign was based on some very Cultural Creative-minded thinking. We don’t join because we don’t believe that joining will really get us anything. We don’t join because we don’t see ourselves as having a place in the people who think they want us as members. The fact is, most groups really wouldn’t want us as members because unless we are intrinsically motivated to perform, we simply don’t perform. It’s why we tend to move on from employment to employment every three or so years… or else we simply opt out of traditional employment altogether.
But, I see Obama as a leader I would consider following because he made me feel that he stood for all the things that stand as a testament to good societies. When I donated I had hope that he would lead us down the road of building a better place for our children to inherit. I didn’t get the feeling that McCain knew what that kind of world would look like muchless be able to lead us there.
If I’m going to join any group I want it to be a group whose building something I believe in. What are those things to be built? Hopefully they are the things that will make our world cleaner. Hopefully they are the things that will attract the best people to America, but will still afford us something to offer to the least of our brothers both here and abroad. Hopefully, they will be admirable things that will raise our esteem as they raise the bar for how those endangered species called nations will behave synthroid price.
So I was happy to see that even though Obama won office, he still realized that for America to win he would need to remain in contact with the people who joined with each other and put him into power as our leader. This email from Barack did not ask for money. It asked for me to join with him and others to continue networking and working for America. And it said that he realized that to truly lead in change for the better a President needs to utilize the best networking tools out there, namely the internet, to bring out the best qualities in the Creatives, the people who believe in change, all American, and indeed, everyone in the word whom he can reach out to.
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