Brinksmanship over the federal budget, the debt ceiling and the Affordable Care Act has offered an especially harsh backdrop to my recent conversations on reclaiming democracy. Whenever an interviewer asks about my work to create the political will to end poverty or ensure a stable climate, I am always sensitive to the audience’s despair about making a difference on these issues and their deep cynicism about the political process. As a result, I constantly begin by describing my own journey from hopelessness to action.
When I started that journey more than 35 years ago I was a musician and, like most people, I was pretty ignorant about environmental issues and problems like hunger and poverty. But the death of a friend in 1964 and the death of Robert Kennedy four years later got me to asking questions of purpose. Why am I here? What am I here to do? Mark Twain wrote, “The two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” Those two deaths put me on the quest to answer that “why?”
Political Gridlock Is No Reason to Give Up
http://www.borgenmagazine.com | By Sam Daley-Harris | October 11, 2013