image by luis de bethencourt

The election campaign last fall mobilized hundreds of thousands of people across the country that weren’t just going to go back to their private lives once Obama was elected into office. I knew I wasn’t, too, and it was the same for many of my friends. We all felt and still feel that some kind of window opened into a different possibility in politics and culture and that, if we weren’t making the biggest possible use of this moment to help make a difference in whatever way we could, we would always regret it.

A group of us kept meeting weekly, trying to figure out how we can best use our particular talents and training. As much as some of us wanted to just go ahead and do something, like collecting food for the increasing number of folks who are dependent on food banks right now, it also seemed important to take the time to think about what our mission and vision actually is. So while we have been collecting food, we have also thought a lot about the context and scope of change that Obama represents and that has triggered in us a passion and a call to respond.

We are now planning to hold a Memorial Day event here in Lenox, MA, in which we want to ignite and motivate grassroots support for Berkshire County becoming a zero net energy community. This means the county will locally and sustainably generate as much electricity as it uses. We think that in order to move this possibility forward it will take the larger public thinking about and being behind such a bold and ‘on the edge’ vision.

Our second track is supporting Obama in his vision for the future that is laid out in the priorities he has set for his budget: education, energy independence and healthcare. On Saturday, eight of us went canvassing, asking people to pledge their support for his plan, to call their representatives and help in whichever way possible to pass it through Congress.

A lot of people appreciated us doing this and were immediately willing to pledge their support. At the same time, the canvass also sparked a number of conversations, in which people expressed their disappointments or worries about the way things are still being run in Washington. No one seems to know what the right thing to do really is, and of course, none of us are experts either.

When we talked about this last night, some of our own questions and uncertainties came to the surface. Are we deluded, romantic, naïve about what is possible? Are we thinking we are doing something, when in reality bigger and maybe unseen powers are pulling the strings? How can we really be sure about what is going on? For a while there we were swimming in a current of doubt and fear.

But again and again we returned to this point: trustworthiness. At the core of the crisis is the, our, my, human condition. As we pursue what looks like the best path forward we need to include our own, inner change. Speaking about ‘them’ and ‘us’ will not get us where we need to be. Power and money are powerful forces that corrupt all but the rarest people.

The more we spoke about this and the more we pointed the finger at ourselves, the clearer our sense of the necessary change became. We are not just figures in someone else’s game. The bar is actually a lot higher than that. It is up to us to formulate a vision, to fight for it and to demonstrate it in the way we work together and with others. It’s ‘heavy duty’ as one of us said and it occurred to me that that actually is true about life as a whole. We are just not used to thinking about it this way.