BroadSnark

Considering the amount of people who seem to do nothing but talk about themselves on their blog, Facebook or Twitter accounts, you may think I’m crazy for suggesting that we don’t have enough “I” in our lives.

But hear me out.

How many times have you heard people bitch about the anonymous “they” that should have taken care of some problem.  Why haven’t “they” shoveled the sidewalk?  Why didn’t “they” help that poor person?  How are “they” going to protect me from the other “they.”

We’ve been trained to be that way, of course.  And our language is perfectly set up for avoidance of responsibility.  You don’t have to say “I broke it.”  You can say “it broke.”  No responsibility here.

During this winter’s snowmaggedon in DC, a local blogger complained about an incident with DC police.  There was a very drunk man walking in the road and falling down.  The blogger flagged down a cop.  The cop did nothing.  The blogger was upset that the cop wouldn’t even check to see if the guy was o.k.

Why didn’t the blogger just check to see if the guy was o.k.?  Great to be a concerned citizen, but why does concern only go so far as to try and get someone else to do something about it?

We’ve all gotten so accustomed to thinking that someone else will handle things that we aren’t using our common sense or common decency.  I understand the hesitancy.  Changing means taking on responsibility.  It means putting yourself at risk.  It means learning how to deal with difficult people.

But the alternative is handing your power over to people who may or may not ever try to use it to help and will often use it to hurt.  So how about a little less “they” and a little more “I” or , even better, “we?”

Conservatives like to talk about personal responsibility.  By that they mean taking responsibility for your own well being and perhaps that of your family and community.  But if you are not within the circle, what that comes down to is “fend for yourself.”

Liberals talk about taking responsibility for the less fortunate.  By that they mean donating time or money to organizations (that employ other liberals) and letting them help people in need.  But that creates dependency and doesn’t question the privilege underlying their altruism.

Anarchism, as a system based on cooperation, addresses the weaknesses in both liberal and conservative philosophies.

Like conservatives, anarchists think we should be taking personal responsibility for ourselves, our families, and our communities.  But where conservatives want to put up a wall, beyond which their responsibilities don’t go, anarchists have always understood that resolving our problems requires taking responsibility on a worldwide scale.

Like liberals, anarchists are concerned with the vast majority of people who struggle to have even the basic necessities of life.  But anarchists don’t want to install themselves in positions of power where they can met out drips and drabs of whatever liberals have been willing to give up.  Anarchists want to work side by side with people, questioning the hierarchies and privileges that cause those inequities.  We are not creating dependency, we are recognizing interdependency.

And anarchist principles work.

Worker managed coopertives are more productive than hierarchical models.  Community policing is more effective than conservative models.  Community involvement in schools means better results for kids.  Community involvement in budgeting means better allocation of resources.  The more people around when a conflict begins, the less likely that conflict will escalate.

These examples aren’t perfect representations of anarchism by any stretch of the imagination, but they do exhibit anarchist principles of responsibility and cooperation.  They demonstrate that we can solve our own problems.

Its easy to sit here and criticize our “leaders”.  But what did we expect?  Did people think we could just pull a lever every few years and then go back to watching American Idol?  If we want problems to be solved, we need to take responsibility for solving them.  And anarchism is a philosophy built around taking responsibility.