In the news today, there is a story with the headline "Cat has Realistic Chance of Becoming Mayor" for Halifax, Canada. I didn't need to read the article, because the title said it all. Hmm…the idea of a cat on the ballot for political office. I like it. Here's why.
Next month we vote for president. What do you think of the candidates? How do you feel about their advertisements? How are we supposed to feel?
There are often shiny pictures of our candidates (which, really, isn't hard, when you look as good as Barack Obama does to begin with. Not too bad yourself, Romney . . . ) and even shinier, brief messages that can be fit into a short commercial or rectangular billboard.
But what is behind the picture or the message? Is it us, voters at large? What if our president was not our hero or our savior, but merely the best tool we can find to help us accomplish our job?
Where is our sense of citizen responsibility? Do we consider the plight or success of this country and world to be lying in our hands? If so, let us use politicians and our president as weapons in our fight, and nothing more. If the cat wins the seat in Canada, the good news is that people will be required to take on more responsibility than we have grown accustomed to.
"Yes We Can" was the key slogan that President Barack Obama pushed in his 2008 presidential campaign. Even as an Obama campaign admirer, I wish he would have said "Yes, You Can" – the exact translation of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers motto of the Spanish "Si se puede."
As a union organizer, every time I said or chanted Si se puede! with workers, what I meant was "You can do it!" I know that an organizer is just that — an organizer. The type of Office Max tool that can help you to help yourself. But c'mon — there is no singular magic machine. YOU still have to do it and lead it yourself. An organizer that pretends to be you — the one that needs to move the change — is a low down n' dirty organizer. Because that can't work.
Obama or Romney could pretend in their campaigns and/or office to be us, the leaders of the change (let me not exclude Roseanne Barr with the Peace and Freedom party). But let us at least know, in the end, that a working change comes down to us and the way in which we choose to use our weapon.
That's the ultimate empowerment.
