Me
I have been asked who I am. An honest easy answer is "me." Longer answers which are the truth, the whole and nothing but the truth are more difficult. I'll try a longer answer, but not so long that it might contain outright lies. Let's see, I seem to have become a very old man who's brain is in a bit better shape than his body. I was mostly raised in a tiny desert town in the state of California, USA. I am the one who signs many of these essays "rcs." My full name is Richard Carroll Sheehan. Richard and Carroll are my given names and Sheehan is my surname or last name. Carroll was the family name of my paternal great grandmother. I am an American citizen living in Colombia. I am, in important part the result of my history. Still, it seems to me these days that I wake up each morning a bit different person than the one who went to sleep the night before.
As a youngster I was taught that the U.S.A. was a republic which a great many citizens wanted to become increasingly democratic. We were taught that full democracy was governance directly by all the people and that each of those people was a citizen. This full real democracy had never been accomplished, but was a good orienting goal. It was a way to go. We could move toward a democratizing republic. I learned that the American Declaration of Independence strongly suggested that in the new nation the people were to be the citizens; democratically active self-governing citizens; citizens, by right, responsible for governing the nation. That is the ideal to be striven for.
History
Still, many of the founders of the country realized that the majority of the prospective citizens had little experience at self-governance. They saw that the new citizens could use some preparation to become self governors. The U.S. Constitution was designed with that in mind as so it was written as a sort of representative democracy. They certainly did not want the country to be a kingdom, theocracy, or anything but a republic with a chance of becoming a growing democracy.
From my reading of our history I gathered that the idea was the people, the new citizens, of America to become increasingly the more democratic govenors of the republic.
We were choosing to govern ourselves as we wanted in our nation of self made and self chosen laws. So our style of government would be the one we chose, devised, and ran. It was our responsibility and right to govern ourselves.
Today, at a national level, it seems that most of us have chosen to abdicate the right and responsibility to rule. We have already abdicated many of the rights and responsibilities we had. It seems that many of us have not considered that this may be a slide into powerlessness and uselessness. It also seems that this abdication of active citizenship is not working out well for us.
We have a lot to learn and a lot to begin practicing.
Most of us have never become Federalists but we have some history of being democratic republicans.
I know of the abdicators I have written of above, for I have been one of them. I did not abdicate my active citizenship from conviction but rather most from some laziness and considerable ignorance. I seem to have walked around in a fuzzy have with some deeply buried idea of something like a democratic republic while acting as though voting and being a fairly decent person made me an effective, active, citizen. What a strange dream.
Now I may be "to soon old and too late smart." I know I now have much less energy than I once had, but I believe that it is not too late to do something. Now I am doing something to claim or reclaim some rights. Those rights seem mostly to be about governing myself as a American citizen together with my fellow citizens, or perhaps together with my brother and sister citizens, or better, my family of citizens.
Our Beliefs
I believe that our voices matter. I believe that it is important that we be heard. I believe that it is important that we hear each other. I believe that listening and listing to understand is a skill we can practice to our great benefit. I believe that we can effectively claim justice and equality, responsibilities and rights. I strongly believe that our republic and its democracy depends on our daily engagement in governance. I believe that our governance depends on the quality of our discourse. Our thoughts and our communication direct our mutual activities. Our actions, our activities orient our governance. I believe we govern well when we practice our governance together.
I begin to see our discourse as a form of our "new" dialogue. To get our governance done well I believe that we need to claim time to listen to one another more and probably to do so more regularly. We need to have opportunity to listen to each other's say about our wants and needs, and importantly, about the nature of our governance.
Our Dialogue
We can claim and reclaim rights to govern ourselves together with fellow citizens. An important right is the right of association an important part of the right of association is the right to talk among ourselves, to listen to each other, to dialogue. Take a look at the Bill of Rights part of our Constitution.
Our voices matter, our faces to. Our face to face talk can be a great power and great satisfaction. To be a we, our association is vital. It is vital that we be heard and that we hear each other. All topics of our dialogues can be important. That dialogue can be about a traffic light or about justice, equality, public health or anything we want it to be about. Democracy can be a topic of our dialogue. I strongly believe that our depends on our engagement and the quality of our discourse. For many the nature of our democracy and of democracy in general can be an important topic of our talk.
I have begun to call our discourse, our group talk, our new dialogue. Our dialogue is important. It helps us to be us and to be we the people. Our thoughts and our communication direct our mutual activities. Our activities, our actions, orient our governance. Our dialogue helps us to practice our governance together.
To get our governance done well we need to claim the time to listen to one another enough; that includes regularly enough. We need opportunity to have our say about our wants and needs about the nature of our governance, to listen to what others have to say. Including talk about our experience and how it has affected our point of view can be a way to improved understanding and appropriate trust.
Our dialogue is a great aid to our co-operation and decision making. Our working together effectively and appropriately can be strongly supported by our ongoing dialogue, our hearing one another, and understanding each other. Our democratic decision making can be well begun with dialogue.
Certainly our responsibility as citizens is to govern ourselves and that by doing so we can live more pleasantly and abundantly. We can learn from one another and practice our learning together. Our dialogue leads to our resilience.
Our governance is up to us, its abdicaction is likely to be a step toward uselessness, toward a uselessness which may be worse than slavery.
The power of determining our governance is ours. Not practicing it is our loss. Practicing our governance is a way to a of life that it is a satisfaction and pleasure to have and hold. Together we can provide ourselves for a greater chance for a civic life of pleasure and satisfaction. You can come see that governance is part of life: family, work, town, state, and more. You to are a part of our life. Voting is not enough. It is not always necessary, but part of voting is finding your way to the nominating process. Together we can do all that is necessary for our governance. Neither you nor I have to do everything, but all of us together have the responsibility for, as a US example, state and county governance. We are responsible for the people in state and county positions. Often we are responsible for their nomination, election and oversite. That is a lot to do; luckily we are very many and we are the bosses and can work out ways to make our effectiveness easy on ourselves. The support of government is up to us. If we do not accept our responsibility will take it up as theirs and they by boss us, dismiss us. or deal with us as they will. It be as my old aunt used to say "Üse it or lose it."
We can think of governing ourselves as a major way of taking care of ourselves together. We do not have to take care of ourselves. When we do take care of ourselves we so not have to do it all at once. We can take it up as our orientation and goal. Now is the best time to get started. The longer we wait the more difficult doing so becomes.
Taking up a responsibility can be work or much like work, but togetherness often brightens one's days.
So, we find that we can talk and that we can cooperate, and begin to be aware of being a we. We may begin to consider what kind of we we are. We may find that many of us consider ourselves citizens. Some begin to consider the nature of a citizen. Than we find ourselves reading these paragraphs.
Here we read that the writer seems to value a kind of talk he calls dialogue. We may find that he considers dialogue may improve our ability to cooperate. I am that writer. Maybe I can find the ability to clarify that which I am writing about. I am writing about two fairly large topics: dialogue groups and democratic governance.
A dialogue group is a way a number of persons to talk together to better effect than is often usual.
Democratic governance is a way to better government than many of us has experience. Democratic governance may be better called participatory governance or participatory democratic governance. It is a form governance which emphasizes the active involvement of citizens in the decision-making process. It aims to insure that all citizens have an equal opportunity to participate in shaping policies and influencing the direction of their communities or countries.
Thank you for reading.
RCS