Yesterday our team was at Slippery Rock State University, one hour from Pitssburgh, to speak with students there, in a working class town in Western PA, one hour from Pittsburgh…a different environment than many of the campuses we had visited this trip…generally, more blue collar, loess elite (even at some of the larger State schools, a tad more rarified air)…the kids at Slippery Rock were SOOOO wonderful, in certain ways more passionate and engaging than they have been in certain other places…maybe because there is less between their lives and “out there”…they feel what’s going on in the world profoundly, and it seems to an extent, have been for longer…less posturing, more right here...because, without question, at this school whose student body is pretty much exclusively made up of kids from families from Main Street, there are no Wall Street descendants there…their answers and goals and desires at Slippery Rock so direct and incisive…the kind of people who have learned experientially, who have seen so much, with their eyes, not just in the news…
I got to thinking, while driving through the hills here (I have always wanted to visit Pittsburgh…and, I now know why friends have recommended it…it has a great energy, the architecture is fabulous, the Three Rivers surrounding it make for amazing views and bridges, the people are that unique combo of Rust Belt, East, Midwest), it struck me right between my eyes how so many people really struggle during tough economic times because they have worshipped the “False God of $”...believing that wealth and possessions, and “success” would take them through, carry them over, shield them from the pains and feelings and full-bodied experience of life...and, when THAT God, that idol (yes, an "American Idol"...maybe the world's Idol), falls away, when one can’t rely on what one has grown up to understand to be a measuring stick, what is it that gets me/you/us through...what have any of us developed to fall back on, if not faith...one needs to believe in SOMETHING...so many people elected to invest that energy and hope and attachment to money, success, wealth, accumulation...often at the expense of other values...so, now, we see so many of our fellow citizens freaking out, people having no choice (I think) but to have to re-examine where they had allocated their emotional, personal resources for so many years...for what end game...they look at their “bank accounts” and see less there than had been there a day before…how to make sense out of what happened…
So, that is why this has shook people to their core, because the confluence of events have shocked the foundation of their, and society’s, belief system...the values that we have all been programmed, generally to believe in…if you take a money focus out of the equation, what are you left with? Each person has their own definition of what that means, how it impacts one’s lives. What to do, how to be, how to have “faith” (as differentiated from fear) if you don’t have something to really hold to inside – within - something to keep oneself solidified in times of stress, or when we are “shaken”…in simple mathematics language (I know, me with a math metaphor?...so weird!), “life” minus “success” (or money, or whatever or however one may externally determine, not personally define, senses of what that actually means, individually) equals what? What is often left is so much emptiness, a free fall…fear.
What does one replace that with? If one hasn’t really exercised that “muscle”, how can we be strong for ourselves…and, thus, for our kids and loved ones? It seems to me that for myself, it has had to be opening up to something of sustenance, and sustainability, to help me dig in and transcend the tough times, the fear-based messages that are incessantly thrown at us by society and individuals and perpetuated by the media…as someone who grew up, as so many of us, in fear-based households, it has been a long journey, one that is forever evolving, deepening and often… it’s one thing when we “adults” may not have the grist inside to draw on…however, it can certainly be even more frightening for kids, who don’t have the breadth of life experiences, and the life lessons that can be found in picking oneself up after getting knocked down, to learn that the REAL manna from heaven is inside of us, not on the outside…that is where the substantive nurturing and inner peace comes from, as I see it…
So, it is for that reason, among many, that I feel we really need to develop these skill sets, to help young people learn that value of aspirations that touch on a congruent life…to be successful in understanding the wonderful possibilities in creating our own senses of a successful life, integrating celebrations of mind, body and spirit…
In talking to a multitude of kids from all types of family backgrounds, who have grown up in all types of communities, one of the things that really strikes me, that saddens AND pisses me off so much, is how the last 8 years have really ripped out the innocence of youth... the world of being an “adult” has so dramatically, and seemingly suddenly, infiltrated their lives…earlier than they expected…certainly they are not the only generation to feel it, and they are surely experiencing it now, all of them… I see it in so many kids, in their eyes...in their questions…wondering if there will be jobs for them, wondering if there will be student loans and affordable education and healthcare…their focus on economic conditions, the disquiet they are reading and hearing about constantly, has been profound…and, whether their friends, who are in Iraq, will come back…and, come back OK…their neighbors and siblings and classmates…
Obviously, 9/11 affected, and affects, us all…and, those of us who lived in NYC felt that horror in different ways, in ways that touched us more directly and experientially than those who lived elsewhere…for these kids, who are now at least a third of their lives older than in 2001, the “world economic crisis” (as most call it verbatim) is the most pervasively impactful events that they have lived through…I remember Cooper (then almost 7), on 9/13/01, asking questions to Maia and me as we walked down Macdougal Street, the smell of the Towers still so very full in the air…and, Maia, then 11, saying to him, “usually kids look to their parents for answers to make it OK…Cooper, now is a time when parents don’t have the answers.” I remember being blown away by that comment…how absolutely right she was, and how that is certainly true today (one could replace “parents” with “experts” or “government” or “business”, and it would be true as well)…we need to help our kids develop values that will aid them in holding themselves up, in addition to also appreciating the wonder that comes from helping and supporting each other…sustainability…for ourselves, so essential, I feel, at a time when people in general are feeling insecure, unsafe, on all levels…the grounding has to start inside, for it to be really impactful…
My friend, and colleague, Bob Ciosek, has done substantive market research, on a very complex level...for major companies and entities, including in media and entertainment and politics...in his political research 4 years ago, it was clear to him that people do not generally, deeply, vote about the "issues" first, it is generally about something more subtle...
UNLESS...
“it” impacts them personally...and, there are daily reminders at this place, at this time in history, that what is going on impacts everyone...PARTICULARLY the youth, who are now conscious that they will be paying for their elder's allocations or resources and their government's "mistakes"...they see the priorities of this country, and that war and banking take precedence over education and healthcare...the cost of a semester in college...the ability to gain student loans...very real shit, my friends, that is not just words in a newspaper column...the girl at Penn State who noted that her parent’s annuities (a word I didn’t even know at 19) had lost half their value in the last month…oh yeah, she is voting for John McCain because she doesn’t want her father, who has worked hard, to pay for lazy people and to suffer as a result of what Democrats will do with taxes…
There is no escaping the reality…and, as my friend Susan Epstein said to me in an email a week ago, "I'm still waiting for people to talk seriously about changing our lifestyles and the system of consumption on which the world economy is unsustainably built, but I think the shit is going to have to really hit the fan in the guise of lots of hungry, unemployed and perhaps homeless Americans bringing that reality home. Denial is a powerful thing and human beings are so incredibly resistant to change...we do what we can and hope for the best..." How much loss or pain are we, as a society, going to have to bear before we listen and make substantive transformations…
I was thinking about this Bus Tour (while rolling through PA) and realized that “everything starts with nothing”…every great project or opportunity started just with the spark of thought in someone’s head…nothing more…the coming together of My First Vote certainly reinforces that to me…
A sidebar: this trip has been what I have called either “The IntuitionTour”…we have bee in synch, and have all witnessed first hand that thoughts do become things…early yesterday morning, I was carrying the computer early through the “oliday Inn”….saying to my colleagues, outloud, that today feels like it’s going to be a good media day…I had gotten some emails that just felt good..5 hours later, I got a call from a producer at Good Morning America telling me that they found our site (through googling around), loved what we are doing, LOVE the site, and that they want to use pieces of our footage on a piece about youth voters..this morning…it took my breath away…we worked late into last night picking clips and uploading them (the whole technology aspect of what we are doing is such a trip, editing in the back of an RV, and sending videos and documents from the road, without wires)…anyway, it was suppose to run this morning, it didn’t, and regardless, ABC wants to use us in other pieces, they say…we will see…and, certainly hope so…in the end, it was such a wonderful reinforcement for us, of what we are doing…and, we will for the next few days continue to do our version of “synchronized swimming”…on the road…
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