One of our big concerns at CDB is about how we all re-engage with the concept of community, serving that community and being accountable to that community.
America - seems to be doing a big rethink at the moment, though I might add its about time, Gary Young on the news last night said that one of the wonderful things about America is that even when it goes off-piste, and slumps into the doldrums it has a capability of reasserting the optimism that always made it such an attraction.
In My country, ’tis of thee The economist looks at recent political developments generated out of the various campaigns to be the next President.
Barak Obama
Last week in Colorado lectured Americans about their responsibility to change their country, a topic he expounded at greater length in May, when he told a group of graduating university students that “individual salvation depends on collective salvation”, not a surrender to America’s “money culture”. Getting them to serve “a greater good”, he said, would be a major goal of his presidency.
and
Researchers have found that, by nearly every indicator, Americans’ “civic engagement” declined dramatically in the last three decades of the 20th century. A smaller share of Americans voted, joined civic-minded clubs, attended public meetings or volunteered on a campaign. After September 11th volunteering and some other measures of civic engagement shot up, but that now seems to be reversing. And military recruiters are struggling to meet their goals.Still, Robert Putnam, a Harvard professor whose article “Bowling Alone” first raised the alarm back in 1995, argues that the generation of Americans currently in their teens and 20s—more deeply affected than their elders by the terrorist attacks—will be the most engaged in their communities since the famous “greatest generation” of Americans who fought in Europe and then oversaw the prosperity that followed the second world war. Decades-long trends are shifting: youth voter turnout has increased in the last three election cycles, the first time that has happened since 18-year-olds were admitted to the franchise. Studies have shown that college students are more interested in talking about and taking part in politics than their counterparts in the 1990s. If the primary campaign was any indication, in the autumn young foot-soldiers will not only turn out to vote in large numbers but will also volunteer in droves.
So there is societal change and an understanding that the American Dream still has to be worked at, and, is not given as a birthright and - there is the digital connection, connectivity has allowed young people to connect and to collaborate like their elders were never able to do.
Hei Tomi
I note your comment on "reassertion of optimism" within the American psyche. I blogged on something very similar.
http://longyear44.blogspot.com/
Tim
Posted by: Tim | July 14, 2008 at 10:14 AM