Real Change Happens Off-Line

Sally Kohn — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 04:21:23 -0700

Today's American young people feel a deep connection to people in Tibet and Darfur, want to hold corporations accountable to environmental standards and worker justice, and value the role of government in meeting our shared needs. Yet the Internet tools that help Millennials appreciate our interconnectedness may actually erode the community values they seek.

The Millennials, or the cluster of young folks born roughly between 1980 and 1995, were raised between two conflicting phenomena. On the one hand, they have grown up with new technologies that have helped the world connect more easily; on the other hand, they have been raised alongside the rise of hyperindividualism in American culture that has isolated us from each other and the world around us.

As the Millennials were learning to walk, Ronald Reagan proclaimed that the only "excuse government has for even existing" is to protect the rights of individuals, not the larger, common good. Having once played a cowboy on the silver screen, Reagan helped transform America into a radical Darwinian Wild West. Industries were privatized, public school budgets and other social programs slashed, Wall Street given free rein. Reagan's British counterpart, Margaret Thatcher, went a step further, declaring, "There is no such thing as society." In the neoconservative political vision of the era, people were left to fend for themselves.

At the same time, the world became more interconnected than ever. Technology allowed the Millennials not only to imagine the children in Ethiopia, but to actually see them and, eventually, become their friends on Facebook. Changing demographics made the new generation more comfortable with difference and diversity than their parents. Plus, technological connectivity opened the door to economic interdependence.

Today, workers in China rely on shoppers in Chicago; investors in Boston track the latest trends from Bangladesh. And, via their cellphones, the Millennials are plugged into it all.

The political aims and vision of the Millennials clearly buck the Reagan "rugged individualism" in favor of the community values of connectedness, inclusion, and mutual responsibility.

But social movements are based on collective action. The American Revolution, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and every significant social change movement in between and since has relied on community organizing, building mutually responsible communities to challenge the status quo.

On their own, for example, none of the activists in the civil rights movement had sufficient power and influence to end segregation. Coming together in local committees, led mainly by young people, they used the tools of face-to-face community organizing, developing shared strategies to address shared problems. And they took shared action; in sit-ins and Freedom Rides, they formed groups that were more than the sum of individual parts.

By contrast, Internet activism is individualistic. It's great for a sense of interconnectedness, but the Internet does not bind individuals in shared struggle the same as the face-to-face activism of the 1960s and '70s did. It allows us to channel our individual power for good, but it stops there.

This is great for signing a petition to Congress or donating to a cause. But the real challenges in our society -- the growing gap between rich and poor, the intransigence of racism and discrimination, the abuses from Iraq to Burma (Myanmar) -- won't politely go away with a few clicks of a mouse. Or even a million.

Millennials are poised to lead us all to reject the hyperindividualism and isolation that has dominated our recent past and recognize the deep interconnectedness and mutual responsibility that is our present and future.

The lone cowboy story was a myth. Our greatest accomplishments, as individuals and as a nation, have almost always come from hitching our wagons to others and working together, not just in going it alone.

To avoid eroding the values Millennials so appreciate, and to truly influence the world around them, they must transform their online activism into off-line communities and build an effective movement for change. From church basements to campus meetings to voters' doors, Millennials need to add face-to-face action to their innate sense of community.

Sally Kohn is a senior campaign strategist with the Center for Community Change, which runs Generation Change, a training program for the next generation of community organizers.

We've been going to movies about going it alone

Sally Kohn — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 12:13:34 -0800

Originally published Orange County Register, February 22, 2008

This year's most-honored films mostly are rather bleak. "If a movie-goer manages to see all the Oscar-nominated films, a generous dose of antidepressants will be in order," remarked Washington Post writer Robin Givhan.

With at least one survey finding 75 percent of Americans feeling that our country is on the wrong track, the trend toward gloomy movies may seem to be a case of art imitating life. Yet as the ideology of hyper-individualism runs its dangerous course through our politics and culture, the American public may be drawn to entertainment that depicts the future we're desperate to avoid.

In the 1932 film "Grand Hotel," Greta Garbo uttered her most famous line, "I want to be alone!" Yet, despite her anguished pleas for solitude, in the end Garbo's once-suicidal misanthropic character seeks out love and companionship. The tragedy of the film is that the companion she now craves has been killed.

Many of this year's films follow an opposite path. When Best Picture nominee "There Will Be Blood" begins, Daniel Day-Lewis' character is part of a community – trying to figure out together how to more efficiently extract oil from the earth. The film tells the dark tale of his descent into loneliness, as he pushes away – or kills – everyone around him. The tragedy is not that Day-Lewis' character ends up alone despite wanting community. The tragedy is that he chose isolation and then learned its consequence.

Films like "No Country for Old Men," also up for Best Picture, and "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" similarly progress from being stories of community – husband-wife, parent-child, sheriff-town – to everyone being on his or her own, fighting in isolation, one against the other.

Thomas Hobbes' "war of all against all" leading to lives that are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" is a popular story line in our culture today. From "Survivor" to "American Idol," we enjoy watching people duke it out in mock struggles of life and death, or being voted off the show, which equals death in reality TV. But perhaps these films and shows are popular not because they reflect our lives but because they repulse us. For every Lone Ranger on the screen, there are thousands of families and communities pulling together and looking out for one another. Maybe we enjoy watching malnourished fashion models eliminate each other precisely because we can turn the TV off and turn to the people around us, safe in the knowledge that they help us when we're in need and help us achieve our dreams.

To be sure, individualism and community are not at odds. The Rabbi Hillel said, "If I am not for myself, who will be? And if I am only for myself, what am I?" Individual autonomy and expression are essential to a democratic society. Yet our increasingly high-tech, low-touch consumerist society has force-fed us the idea that we're nothing more than individuals.
This year's breakaway hit film was "Juno," in which a high school student who got pregnant by "connecting" with a schoolmate, decides to give her baby to a suburban mother longing for connection herself. Throughout the film, Juno's family and friends support her. It's the kind of movie that makes us feel good because it captures the world we crave, where the ideology of individualism succumbs to a deeper sense of interconnectedness. The same hunger for positive change and unity is clearly transforming political discourse as well.

In a moment of self-reflection in "There Will Be Blood," Day-Lewis' character confesses, "I have a competition in me; I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people." But then, foreshadowing his descent into selfish isolation, he says, "I can't keep doing this on my own." None of us can. And the moral of this year's stories is that none of us want to.

Community Values

Real Change Happens Off-Line

We've been going to movies about going it alone