A useful first step can be teaching ourselves to get better informed
Let's help each other to get smart, informed, and able. We can gently resist being suppressed. Our learning and understanding has been suppressed and for that we are responsible. Together we can learn better and understand better. To be together well takes trust. To trust realistically we need to come to understand one another better.
For example, if you are interested in becoming a more effective citizen, or something else, consider a good way for you to find another with a similar interest. Give yourself a good chance for finding that person. Find that person. Talk with that person about your mutual interests. Tell that person that you believe that the two of you can increase your understanding and power by finding a couple of more people to meet and talk and maybe develop your mutual interest.
I suggest that you meet find a democratic way to choose specific topics of talk and of making sure that each of you take equal time to listen and to speak. After only three or four such meetings you will feel and find understandings starting to grow among you. You may find appropriate trust appearing among you to. As an important common interest appears among you, you may find yourselves gathering and sharing information on that topic. You have come a long way. You can begin to recruit. You may want as many as 30 persons, but 17 a good solid number. You will want the strength variety.
You can talk about your freedom to learn and know. We can learn to c0-operate to help each other to learn how to find out what is going on. With understanding, trust, and the practice of co-operation we have the start of a strong organization. You have the start of a good, practical organization which can provide pleasure and satisfaction without being a to burdensome responsibility. Everyone is helped to be useful, supported and valued equally. Relax and let everyone benefit as fairly as possible. Equality is a direction to take, to move forward toward, but may never be perfect.
You can help others to be responsible for their personal governance and your common governance. An important early step is to co-operate and organize to inform yourself on our common interest.
We can find out if there are any among us willing to check a library (why not) for good information that they believe will interest us with honest and realistic information. Powerful and useful information has many sources. Maybe there are those among us who can help us to be better honesty and reality detectors. There are those of us who are sensitive trickery in words used in advertising and politics.
As we practice our democratic kind of dialogue at meetings we will find ourselves talking among ourselves in better ways and also may be doing so with others.
We may discover fun ways of doing somethings for ourselves rather than having them done to, ah, for us. We may get better at informing one another in, honest, useful, realistic ways.
We may learn to be more pleasantly active in governing ourselves. We can practice do that which has some effect on what is done around us and how it is done. That is we can practice a modest self governance. Practice can lead to improvement. Practice is an experience and experience can be a good teacher.
We can come to honestly say that we each matter, that we are each co-equal members of the we, we have become, that we are willing to see that each is treated fairly and justly. We are beginning to learn that it may not be difficult to move toward helping to see that it is not always necessary to let anyone govern any one of us without our permission.
We have come to understand and respect one another more fully. In our talks we are coming words like justice, fairness, equality, and many others to get our meanings straight. That is we are coming to see how others have their particular way of understanding and and thinking about a given word or concept.
Each of us has good reasons for our understandings; each of us has had differing learning experiences. I time we may be able to know more about the experiences of another.
We can learn more about realities of governance by getting more facts about how our town has be and is governed. We can do the same with our county, state, country, water district or where ever our interests lie.
News shows on TV are not a super source of good information. How can we get more useful sources of information. How and where can we get better, more useful information? Where can we get sources which are better for us? Where can we get more trustworthy info? I'd like to have a handful of sources of useful information which I knew how to trust. I'd like to be honestly informed by one who was well informed and smart.
I believe that we can help to make governance easier to understand and simpler to do. With the help of another group or two like ours we could pay a couple of reporters to report to us for us. Or we could have a couple of group members gather information from among and perhaps another group and report back to use. We might find that in some things we could inform ourselves very well and that in another we were sadly ignorant. We may also find that we were capable of lifting and alleviating our own ignorance.
You can do acts of governance for yourself by yourself as you as you learn about organization. Find out who your elected representatives are at the levels and in the areas which interest you. Next you can begin to find out more about them and their doings. You may find that in this effort it is more easily and effectively accomplished by co-operation. Your next interesting learning experience experience can be beginning a contact with a representative. Choose one and consider a plan of approach. Making contact with another interested in the same representative and be interesting and helpful. Co-operating with such another can prove a powerful yet comfortable experience.
It is not unusual to find that a representative you are attending to begins to note you. That representative may suspect that you vote and that you know other voters. She may find that you have some knowledge of an area of interest of hers. You now seem to be a truly active citizen. You may find that another is co-operating with you. Could that entail a bit of organization. You have
made significant progress.
You have made a start toward more rewarding self governance. You have a more significant stance. You are likely to have a more realistic yet positive point of of view. You may be taking better care of yourself and even helping others to do the same. You could actually register to vote and then to actually vote. You may have a much more complete and realistic concept of how your vote is likely to have a positive effect on issues which are important to you. Your social wisdom seems to be developing. You have found or made ways to be more usefully informed.
You may have found time to co-operate with others interested in your interests. You may have found your way to positively effective participation in the nominating process of candidates and in moving a bill through Congress effectively. You do not have to participate in any of these doings. You can just become a more satisfied citizen that is doing that which supports good governance around you and yours.
You may have found that social and governmental issues have been called planks. And found that such planks were used to build the platforms of co-operating citizens. Platforms gave them standing and clarified that which they stood for.
We can. We can do. We can do it in co-operation with others. To do it together really well we may need to improve ways of communicating and understanding among us. We can practice the best ways of communicating we have. We can practice taking of our doings. We can practice listening, hearing, and understanding.
Thank you for reading.
bye for now,
R. C. Sheehan