What kind of country do we want to live in?
Welcome back to my tenth Freedom for People First post at cwatts.us. I appreciate you. Check out my updated ABOUT THIS SITE page. This post is in preparation for a Zoom forum I'm attending this Monday at Empathy Surplus Network USA.
Now is also the time to check out Indivisible's new conversation tool, Neighbor2Neighbor, and engage our Democratic neighbors and celebrate Kamala's endorsement by our beloved POTUS.
Empathy is the soul of democracy and crucial for expanding freedoms for all. I encourage you to make empathy (care) central to constant public discourse. All Aboard the 3:12 Empathy to Freedom Train is on page 8. Listen to Hidden Brain Innovation 2.0: The Influence You Have to learn how effectively you could expand our freedoms. Consider joining the PROJECT CARE TEAM to help me find legislative sponsors for CARE Education in your state.
THANK YOU. I am amazed that some of you read everything I send you. Please consider a paid subscription. If you do, I'll send you a complimentary copy of George Lakoff's Your Brain's Politics: How the Science of Mind Explains Our Political Divide.
As progressives, we want freedom from want and fear for all.
What kind of country do we want to live in? (1) Do we want a country where everyone is free to live fulfilling lives and be treated fairly? Or do we want a country where freedom is limited to a few billionaires and the rest of us continue to suffer? That’s the question the politically active care and cruel wings of our populace are debating. Do we commit to our legal duty to care for each other’s freedom and elect neighbors who will help us protect and empower each other? Or do we continue to allow billionaires to run and ruin our lives with impunity and subject us to a fascist dictator?
We can help frame the narrative of care that we want.
Framing and or reframing our narrative of the world changes our reality of the world. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. If we want strong, diverse communities of nurturing families caring for each other, we must use science-based communication to frame our debate to fit this vision.
We ALL do what we think. Let's cultivate the duty to care.
These are the lessons of science-based, moral reasoning, what cognitive scientists call doing what we are thinking. (2) Human beings act out our unconscious moral metaphors of restitution and reparations or retribution and punishment. Progressives choose restitution and reparation to expand freedoms.
For most of us, someone picked us up when we cried as infants. Others who weren't so lucky learned cruelty.
Most of us were picked up as infants when we cried. (3) We must channel that nurturing and cooperative skillset. (4) We must continually and repeatedly call for care over harm to activate the neural circuitry for freedom restitution. We know that the freedom not just to get by but to get ahead takes others we don’t even know paying it forward. We know that freedom from fear of mass murder means demanding care over harm. We know the freedom to make decisions about our own bodies takes cooperative protection of each other.
Yes, we CAN be free - together.
We choose freedom from fear and want. To get these freedoms, we must repeat them and activate one another’s duty to care for each other’s freedom. Billionaires must be reined in and forced to repair the breaches in our democratic institutions through increased public protections and the raising of public revenues. Their theft of our freedoms must stop. Yes, we CAN be free - together.
#GoEmpathySurplus
Chuck
(1) Harris, Kamala, Campaign Ad, July 2024, https://youtu.be/_z3yMK0m6rQ?si=X7f-VuKr7lhT6Wia
(2) Lakoff and Wehling, Your Brain’s Politics, Ch 1.9 The Public Brain: Metaphors in political discourse, p. 23, Imprint Academic, Exeter, 2016.
(3) IBID, Ch 2.3, As You Deal with Children, So with Citizens You Shall Deal: Parenting and Politics, p. 34.
(4) IBID, Ch 3.4, Governing with an Empathic Eye: The Nurturant Parent Model and Progressivism, p. 45.
