Yes, I do mean good news. And yes, I know that may be hard to grasp. It is an understatement to say that it has been incredibly challenging for the last several years to recognize or pay attention to the positive things that have occurred because there has been so much going on that was complicated and difficult for all of us.
My personal theory is that often things have to break before we are pushed to pay attention and fix what has needed to be attended to for quite a while. Just as a leaky pipe can all of a sudden cause a flood under the sink, so can a lack of attention to a social or environmental problem all of a sudden cause another type of setback, a calamity, or even a catastrophe. But grab our attention it does. However, moaning and complaining to each other doesn’t make things better. Then we are compelled to decide how we will address the problem. Do we contact our elected leaders, or a manufacturer, talk to our circles of friends, sign petitions, and connect with our neighbors? We need to get involved and engaged and claim our agency.
I want to pass on a few examples of positive changes that I think are good news:
*Vote Forward, and several similar groups have organized to write letters in a nonpartisan attempt to encourage voter engagement across the board, simply asking citizens to participate in our democracy by voting. Addressing civic engagement is a mode of having influence. As more people get involved in decision-making, the legitimacy of the election increases. Civic behavior is a way of gifting one’s self. And it really does make a difference:
“Maria Eckert, 68, wrote 159 letters for Vote Forward in about two months, including the one that reached Ms. East. Ms. Eckert, a New Jersey resident and — as Ms. East intuited — former early childhood and special education teacher, said she got “goosebumps” upon learning about the fruits of her labor, her first foray into political volunteering. “I hate to admit it, but I took democracy for granted for many years,” said Ms. Eckert. “I’m not as comfortable making phone calls or trying to persuade people for one side or the other. So this was a great opportunity for me. The one thing I was hoping,” she added, “was that one person out of all those letters would vote.”
For example, the Democracy Action Team of 14 people at the UUFC (Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Corvallis) I attend wrote over 1,175 letters asking folks to vote in the election of a new Supreme Court Judge in Wisconsin. (See more at end of this article.)
*Backyard National Park is a program proposed by the author of Nature’s Best Hope, Douglas W. Tallamy. My book group read it recently, and we were astonished at how little we knew about how crucial native plants keep our entire ecosystem functioning. Without native plants, insects and birds cannot survive and flourish, and without them, the ecosystem will collapse. I put that in bold on purpose. Now you are probably thinking, “Why is she telling us this is a positive thing?” Here’s my response: if we don’t have this information, we cannot make the necessary changes needed to sustain the species that all life depends on. One of my friends was filled with guilt when she realized that her front yard was full of plants that were attractive but had little or no benefit. However, I reminded her that if we don’t have the information, we can’t know the impacts of our choices. Thank goodness we are learning this now, at least, so we can do something about it. Tallamy’s idea is to plant natives in our backyards to attract and encourage the native species, hence Backyard National Park. And one very cool outcome is seeing all the native birds and butterflies that come to the yards.
*Braver Angels is an organization promoting conversations between people who consider themselves conservatives, liberals, and independents. The goal is to bridge and diminish the divide to help us recognize our commonality and to “fix our broken politics from the bottom up .”I first heard about Braver Angels at a presentation about U.S. political history. I have long felt that we need to actually talk to our fellow Americans in a polite, inquisitive manner to better understand each other’s points of view. There has been too much yelling. The idea of breaking down the walls between our perceived stances on issues reminds me of the scene in The Wizard of Oz when Toto pulls back the curtain and exposes the man trying to control everything. Braver Angels provides opportunities to find common ground, which makes us better, more civil, and more engaged citizens who feel like we are working together to find the best solutions for all of us.
These are just three examples of the good news I referred to above. We can’t engage with everything, but we can engage with something that speaks to us. And we can also change our focus and realize that there are lots of positive things happening. In fact, give yourself the assignment to look for at least one good news story each week and share it with your circles of friends (See the link at end of this article.)
RESOURCES
Organizations
*Vote Forward: votefwd.org
From the local UUF: “The 2022 November Midterm Election was our first large scale writing project. Of the 125 members on our UUFC Democracy Action Team, 45 members became writers who together wrote 17,634 letters.
Of those, one person wrote 3,900, one person wrote over 1,900, two persons wrote over 1,700 each, and another person wrote over 1,300
This was part of a national writing project sponsored by Vote Forward, so we joined thousands nationwide to write, much of it in homes and by Zoom.
The second large writing project was needed when Georgia required a runoff between two candidates. This time, 23 of our Team members stepped forward right after the midterm election. They wrote 2,079 letters and postcards in just three weeks in time for the early December 2022 runoff.
Our most recent writing project was conducted January through April of this year for a state-level election on April 4th in Wisconsin for a Supreme Court Judge. For that, 14 people stepped forward to write1,175 letters.”
*Braver Angels: braverangels.org
Books
Articles
Betty Shelley
Betty Shelley is a Master Recycler (class #2), a former Metro Recycling Information Specialist, an Agent of Change, and the founder of Reduce Your Waste Project. Betty found Northwest Earth Institute in 1993 when it was founded in Portland. The NWEI discussion courses made her more aware of the choices we make as well as the consequences of those choices. Since 2006, Betty and her husband, Jon, have had just one 35-gallon can of garbage per year. The Shelleys offer the class “Less is More: Getting to One Can of Garbage a Year”.
