Harris is the author of “Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy” and the founder of RESULTS and Civic Courage. This is part of a series focused on better understanding transformational advocacy: citizens awakening to their power.
In a recent New York Times column titled “The Junkification of American Life,” David Brooks wrote about society’s rush to the bottom. “[W]e settle for the junky things that provide the quick dopamine hits,” Brooks wrote. “We could all be eating a Mediterranean diet, but instead it’s potato chips and cherry Coke. … [W]e’re now in a culture in which we want worse things — the cheap hit over the long flourishing. You reach for immediate gratification, but it fails to satisfy. It just puts you on a hamster wheel of looking for the next mild stimulus and pretty soon you’re in the land of addiction and junk food, you just keep scrolling.”
Social media, laziness and low expectations have brought us the junkification of advocacy too. It’s much easier to ask our members to sign an online petition that almost no congressional aide thinks is highly effective. It’s much easier to ask our members to sign and email a form letter than to ask them to meet with their members of Congress and do some practice sessions ahead of time. To do that, you have to get organized. You have to talk to people. You have to face rejection.
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I was on a panel at Stanford University when someone commented that people want to get more involved and are excited about being more active with their democracy. Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts, a fellow panelist, jumped in and said what I was thinking: It’s much easier to get people to the first meeting than it is to have them keep coming back. That’s the hard part and it is why we keep going for junk advocacy, preferring “the cheap hit over the long flourishing” that transformational advocacy can bring. It’s hard to engage people because of our deep levels of despair.
An article by Alabama Media Group political commentator Kyle Whitmire about yet another spate of gun violence spoke to the despair and hopelessness most people experience. Under the title “What reason have we given our children to love America?” Whitmire expressed the powerlessness and futility felt by most Americans when it comes to our ability to change government policy:
“I don’t think I ever really wanted to hurt anybody before, but when my son told me where his hiding place was in his classroom, for a second, I wanted to hurt everybody.
“Such is the feeling when you realize the world doesn’t care about the safety of your child.
“Such is the futility of that anger when you know there’s nothing you can do personally and nothing anyone else will do collectively.”
Whitmire’s sense of powerlessness resides in almost all of us and it won’t be released with more email form letters, it won’t be changed with actions that don’t change us. That’s what transformational advocacy seeks to address. It requires that we do the hard but fulfilling work. Talking to our members and inviting them to join and lead local chapters. Providing a monthly webinar with guest speakers, Q&A and inspiration. Providing in-depth and ongoing training. And, the piece that changes us: encouraging breakthroughs.
Brooks concluded his column with this: “I imagine the cultural decline … can be turned around if people can experience, at school or somewhere else, the emotional impact of a great film, a great novel, a great concert.”
Aren’t our nonprofit organizations a prime example of a “somewhere else”? If not, shouldn’t they be? Paraphrasing Brooks, I imagine the cultural decline can be turned around if people can experience from their nonprofit organizations the emotional impact of great advocacy — advocacy that changes an issue and changes them in the process.
That requires going for the long flourishing rather than the cheap hit.
