On the eve of the first anniversary of President Obama's inauguration, it's become painfully obvious that elected officials are not going to save us. The 2008 election was all about "Hope." But Hope is simply not cutting it.
What we need is Hope 2.0: the realization that our system is too broken to be fixed by politicians, however well intentioned -- that change is going to have to come from outside Washington.
This realization is especially resonant as we celebrate Dr. King, whose life and work demonstrate the vital importance of social movements in bringing about change. Indeed, King showed that no real change can be accomplished without a movement demanding it.
As Frederick Douglass put it: "Power never concedes anything without a demand; it never has and it never will."
The perfect example of this came in March 1965. In an effort to push for voting rights legislation, King met with President Lyndon Johnson. But LBJ was convinced that the votes needed for passage weren't there. King left the meeting certain that the votes would never be found in Washington until he turned up the heat in the rest of the country. And that's what he set out to do: produce the votes in Washington by getting the people to demand it. Two days later, the "Bloody Sunday" confrontation in Selma -- in which marchers were met with tear gas and truncheons -- captured the conscience of the nation. And five months later, on August 6th, LBJ signed the National Voting Rights Act into law, with King and Rosa Parks by his side.
At that March meeting, LBJ didn't think the conditions for change were there. So Dr. King went out and changed the conditions.
Similarly, before the start of WWII, legendary labor leader A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, lobbied FDR to promote equal employment opportunities in the defense industry. Roosevelt was sympathetic but made no promises. Randolph responded by taking his cause to the American people, organizing a massive march on Washington. Concerned about the impact the march would have on the country's wartime morale, Roosevelt got Randolph to call it off by issuing an executive order banning discrimination in defense industries and creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee to watch over hiring practices.
And since the days of FDR and LBJ, the system has only gotten more rigged, and the powers-that-be more entrenched. As Janine Wedel shows in Shadow Elite, the power of special interests to thwart meaningful change -- often by co-opting the rhetoric of change but producing in its name a further consolidation of the status quo -- has never been stronger. The health care bill's path from fundamental reform to fiasco is only the latest example.
A year ago this week, Obama proclaimed, "We gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics."
One year later, wracked with conflict and discord, and battered by petty grievances, false promises, and worn out dogmas, we stand on the verge of passing a giant boon to health insurance companies and calling it "reform."
The reason we are given? What else: the votes just aren't there for a real reform bill.
That's where Hope 2.0 comes in. If the votes aren't there, the people need to create them. Just like King did. They need to build a movement. And to make that happen, we need to adopt another of the great lessons of Dr. King's life: elevating the role empathy must play in our society.
We've seen a great outpouring of empathy this past week, spurred by the wrenching scenes of devastation in Haiti. With the rare exception of the likes of Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh, empathy comes naturally to most people. Indeed, 16 years ago I wrote a book -- The Fourth Instinct -- about the instinct that compels us all to go beyond our impulses for survival, sex, and power, and drives us to expand the boundaries of our caring beyond our selves and our families to include people we may never meet, and parts of the world we may never see.
It's an instinct that, if harnessed, can have powerful political implications. King showed that for a movement to become broad-based enough to produce real change, it must be fueled by empathy.
In his famous 1963 "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," King lamented the failure of "white moderates" to "understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality."
He went on: "Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."
And that's exactly what his nonviolent direct action sought to do. King understood that he needed to tap into the empathy of whole constituencies that would not themselves be the direct beneficiaries of the civil rights movement. And so he set about making a compelling moral case by bringing the "ugliness" and "injustice" front and center -- forcing many in white America to see for the first time that millions of their fellow citizens were effectively living in a different reality than they were. He created pathways for empathy and then used them to create a better country for everybody.
"A man," said King, "has not begun to live until he can rise above the narrow confines of his own individual concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity."
While taping last week's Left, Right & Center, I was discussing Jeremy Rifkin's powerful piece on empathy. Tony Blankley teasingly retorted: "Evolution, cruel as it is, determined that empathy is not a survival trait." And if you watched the Big Bank CEOs testify on the Hill last week, you would agree that empathy has not been a trait necessary for success, let alone survival. But if we are to continue to survive -- maybe not as a species, but certainly as a thriving democratic society -- human evolution has to, well, evolve. And we are going to need all the empathy we can get. Without it, we'll never be able to create the kind of national consensus required to tackle the enormous problems that face us.
Watching the CEOs, I was stunned by the utter lack of even a feigned sense of empathy for those whose lives the banks have destroyed. Only a complete inability to feel empathy could explain the fact that the bankers are not just back to operating at their old bonus levels, but at their old smugness levels as well.
One year ago, writing about former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain and his now infamous $1.2 million office redecoration in the midst of the economic collapse, I bemoaned the Marie Antoinettes of the Meltdown, and our era of Not Getting It.
Little did I realize just how small-scale Thain's outrages would now seem, and how much worse things would get in the ensuing year. Lloyd "Doing God's Work" Blankfein and his fellow "too big to fail" CEOs -- with their utter cluelessness about the public's anger over what they've done and continue to do -- take Not Getting It to a whole other level.
Luckily for them, society has evolved, and we express our anger differently than we did in Marie Antoinette's day. "Off with their bonuses" is a lot less painful than "off with their heads."
But the question is, can this righteous -- and entirely justifiable -- rage be productively channeled to produce a real movement for reform, or will it be hijacked by tea party wackos and dangerous demagogues?
Five-and-a-half years ago, Hope was ignited by an unknown state senator standing up and proclaiming that we are not blue states and red states, but one people. One people that can only solve our problems together.
One year ago, Hope was about crossing our fingers and electing leaders that we thought would enact real change. Hope 2.0 is about using the lessons of Dr. King to create the conditions that give them no other choice.
Follow Arianna Huffington on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ariannahuff
'Shadow Elite' by Janine Wedel is the book Arianna's been reading for the month of January. Thanks to Janine Wedel and many others, the book has initiated a crucial debate over the survival of democracy in America.
Janine R. Wedel: 'Shadow Elite': Do You Know Whose Agenda You're Being Sold?
In the community of fewer than 2,000 in which I grew up, the proverbial six degrees of separation melt away. You can't help but play...
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Henry Ford said that "people deserve the government they get," and how right he was. It is a fearful and fragmented population to blame when it allows the leaders of this Great Union to commit wholly un-America
Let's remember this: our leaders are a mirror of the state of our consciousn
It is We the People who need to change.
There are immediate steps we can take in our own lives to help this movement that Arianna speaks of come to pass.
We need to challenge the fear in our individual lives. We need to get comfortabl
If we can get comfortabl
More on this here: http://mov
It needn't be so. With the possible exception of sociopaths
We mustn't lose sight of the compassion present even in the hearts of the most reactionar
We also need to remember that we're the majority. As the greedy minority consolidat
I call on the countless unemployed and disaffecte
Meet me out there! Let's start to clog!
The trust is broken and the faith evaporated
You can't make a new cake with the same ingredient
Fool me once and shame on you. Fool me twice and it's shame on me. I don't intend for that to happen..
We stand at a new moment today. Business as usual cant continue. Depression era legislatio
Rollback bankruptcy laws and interest rate laws back to twenty years ago.
Where do you think all those bonuses and profits are coming from?
NO MORE USURY .. all the fat cats are making their Billions on the backs of the less fortunate.
Hope 2.0 means us.....
My first thought when seeing Obama sit on his hands while my usurious Citigroup credit card interest rates became even more usurious is that I will never bother to vote again. I still haven't heard peep about these outrages being rolled back. Americans, including myself will buy nothing, take no trips, indulge in no dinners out, etc, when we know it's going to cost 24% or more in interest.
No wonder Citigroup put its credit operations in South Dakota; very hard to stage a meaningful protest and get to such a far-flung outpost. Considerin
NO MORE "HOPE OR CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN".
I no longer believe.
The crucial mistake Obama made was to allow himself to become disconnect
He handed over his political fortune to Congressio
Unless Obama re-claims that mandate he will be lost. The problem indeed is that he has already lost so much credibilit
He must roll up his sleeves and abandon false ideas about bi-partisa
I think you're saying we need a leader. I wonder who could that be?
On the other hand, if you really want to know who HAS gotten off their rears and are trying to take action, you can try this google search: "progressi
http://www
You will find that millions of us are doing just that and are trying to make our voices heard. Apparently
Open your eyes, every WH adviser are all from Wall Street, Special Interest, big industries and Lobbyist - the very ones who ruined the country. That's just too close for comfort.
AND OF COURSE YOU SUMMARILY DISMISS THAT TOO.
QUOTE: Nationally
The Media and the Internet Blogs molded an unsustaina
It's about time the electorate to remind themselves that we need differing opinions - not united robots.
DEMOCRACY DEMANDS VARYING OPINIONS, NOT ONE MOLDED BY THE MEDIA TO SELL A FLAWED FANTASY ABOUT A LEADER WHO WAS NEVER QUALIFIED TO GOVERN.
You keep looking for that silver lining with Obama. You failed to notice during the primaries that he wasn't The One. You should have vetted him more closely rather than go with the hype. From the Canada-NAF
How's that working out for ya? This office requires some experience at least in management