Breakthrough Generation

With Barack Obama as the democratic nominee for the presidency, a long and arduous primary season seems to be slowly but surely winding down. Talk around the office between the summer fellows has drawn a lot of parallels between Breakthrough’s ideology (a “politics of possibility”) and Barack Obama’s message of hope, and it seems that, if not in the same words, Barack Obama is working towards the same asset-based, inspiring politics of possibility that we aspire to bring to society.

All this has brought an important question to my mind: what kind of individual, personal actions can help focus each of our efforts on a politics of possibility?

Growing up in the Washington D.C. area, political talk is all talk—shop talk, dinner party conversation, idle chatter, pre-preview movie theater whispers—all anyone talks about is politics. I entered my first year of college in the Boston area last September, and the election and political talk, while not as pervasive, was definitely in the air. This didn’t strike me as all that odd until a friend who grew up outside Boston told me that this level of talk about the political process, in fact any level, was completely new to her. Upon further reflection, I was surprised and encouraged by the level of political conversation that had sprouted up, not just on my campus, but apparently across the country. The candidates were strong willed, and Obama especially seemed to galvanize supporters in a way that had not been seen for a while. Obama clearly reaches and brings to the fore an active, politically interested aspect to many Americans.

Obama seems to me and his supporters, and even many people who supported Hillary, to be a man who favors expansive solutions, bringing people together, speaking frankly about the state of the world and where things should be taken from here, and evaluating a problem from many sides. Frankly, although the cynic in me laughs at myself, I want to be part of the America that Barack Obama brings to the table. It is this sense of wanting to join something that is bigger than me that I think Obama instills in many people across the country that is his most valuable characteristic. Obama strongly believes, and makes others feel, fundamentally, that the political process is an act of creating the America and the world that we want to live in, and that this creating is ultimately an act of self-creation. Whether we are senators or students, Democrats or Republicans, regardless of race or where we grew up, Obama instills in us a confidence in ourselves that stems from a confidence that he seems to have for us. Our self-creation will help create a better America.

Self-creation, self-actualization, is a powerful concept. Realizing one’s true potentials, and where one stands in relation to the world, is a noble quest. The process of self creations allows us to lead more active, engaged lives and develop more interest in and motivation to change the world around us. Traditional environmentalism has long been known for fostering a sort of self-creation through intentional living. Acts like showering quickly, eating less meat, and other “carbon foot-print reducing” actions have long made the mark of an environmentalist’s intentional living. “How can I have as little effect on the world as possible?,” the environmentalist As a report released by the United Nations Environmental Programme today shows, this type of thinking is far from done with. It is hard to imagine how this type of intentional living could ever catch on, how this type of self-creation could create a political or social movement. What’s worse, projecting these nano-practices onto the larger environmental movement and creating a paradigm that regards them as the solutions to our climate crisis only serves to marginalize any type of environmentalism.

Rather than focusing on limiting our negative impact, I think that a politics of possibility lends itself to a type of intentional living that can focus on expanding our positive impact. I wrote yesterday about how large scale government investment can harness the power of the free market from the top down, igniting the transition to a clean energy economy. However, as individuals, we can try to affect the same changes from the ground up. Microfinance through institutions like kiva.org is a smaller scale way of using the market as a means to bring about change. Kiva.org and microfinance in general allows impoverished people to lift themselves and their communities out of poverty by making use of the market to borrow money and start entrepreneurial efforts to create new businesses. I can think of no better example of positive intentional action than being part of an effort to allow communities to meet their own survival and material needs and set them on their way to a position where they will be able to consider their own post-material needs and think ecologically.

It is these sorts of actions that can build a bridge between our personal lives and the Breakthrough ideology and mission