What Do You Want, America?

Regardless of what happens today, It's time to change the conversation. That, of course, is the intention of Spiritually Responsible Politics in the first place.

I honestly thought I would have been blogging throughout this midterm campaign, but I just couldn't summon the energy. The desire to respond to whatever was happening nationally and within the hundreds of individual campaigns, large and small, just fell flat. Today, however, I am on fire again because changing the conversation is, to me, an exciting project and I have a plan.

In the language of spiritually responsible politics, it is about engaging the law of attraction - that thing that is always on - in a way that moves us in the direction of what it is we are wanting instead of keeping us mired in that which we don't want. If, for example, we don't want dishonesty in politics yet all we do is see examples of dishonesty in politics and then complain to our friends about dishonesty in politics and hear radio and television reports and stories about dishonesty in politics and, on top of all of that, feel rage and disgust and shame about how our country's politics are mired in dishonesty, guess what we are going to get more and more of?

When, on the other hand, we can clearly articulate our thoughts and feelings about what our desire for honest politics looks like - elections where we trust that our vote is being fairly counted, for example, and the ability to know without a doubt who is funding which candidates and campaigns, for another example, and feel the feelings of pride and security that accompany it - law of attraction says we will get more and more of that. It simply is the way things are.

So here are ten overarching issues for us to begin with:

• Reputation on the world stage
• Economy/Commerce/Taxes/Budget
• Education
• Environment/Energy
• Immigration
• Health Care
• Cities
• Politics
• Defense
• Social Safety Net/Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Aid to Dependent Families
  

Certainly, issues will overlap with each other. But in the coming weeks and months we will create clear pictures of what we want with regard to these topics, in the manner that I just touched on with the issue of honesty in politics. We'll do it by concentrating on how we would like things to be - in an ideal world where nobody can say no and money is no object - rather than how they are now or how they have been. This is how we change the conversation.

So in the next post I will begin by taking one of the issues and sketching out what we might want it to look like. I say we because I intend for this to be a collaborative process that includes as many people who care to be included in a way that builds and builds. To that end - and given that I have a total of zero readers at the moment - I thank you in advance for sharing this previously un-promoted blog with anyone you know who might be interested - by way of the 15 concepts with which we work here - in helping to change the conversation.

Your comments are most welcome starting now.