Joe Brewer, Cognitive Policy Works
by Joe Brewer, Reprinted with permission
If you’ve been watching the Occupy Wall Street protests these last few weeks, you may be surprised by how quickly it spread from a small group of disgruntled youth in New York to a planetary mobilization that is now active in more than 100 cities – all in a few short weeks. This is an unprecedented ripple of change in local conversations, media coverage, global consciousness, and international solidarity.
Main Street Wilmington, OH
Steve Brown, Director, Main Street Wilmington, dropped by my office today and asked a very open ended question (Thanks, Steve): What should we be doing in Wilmington, OH?
In a nutshell I answered that we need business men and women taking time out of the routine of business planning and making money to think about how we can expand human rights and the freedoms of our neighbors. Think of it as giving back.
From a brain insights perspective we need business men and women (all of us really) to spend time every day exercising that part of our brains where empathy and compassion reside. The plutocracy infrastructure of financial language / neural pathways is well-developed; the democracy infrastructure of human rights language / neural pathways is extremely underdeveloped.
If our existing infrastructure of two party representatives per precinct in our county of 38 precincts were actively seeking to facilitate neighborhood conversations that matter in our county, that would mean 76 weekly conversations.
Assuming a dozen people at each weekly gathering to exercise our 1st Amendment freedoms to petition government, where do we find 76 public meeting rooms? Just a thought.
