Be Bold Tool Box Strategy #5: Don’t Abandon Democracy. Here’s what you can do!

by | Jun 25, 2019 | Jill Cody

Don’t Abandon Democracy!

Be a Bold Citizen/ Keep-Stop-Start Actions

KEEP:

  • Keep your wits about you, keep cool, keep calm.
  • Keep yourself from being destructively angry or disruptively fearful. They are “living in the red” emotions. Cheryl Strayed said “Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves”. What stories are you accepting into your life? Fox News grievance?
  • Keep loving America even in trying times like these. Love is a verb. Activate your individual duty and responsibility.
  • Keep embracing science and facts!

 

STOP:

  • Stop thinking you can’t make a difference. We came out of the 18th Century medievalism, religious mysticism, and authoritarianism.
  • Stop being exploited: emotionally, politically, financially (tv ratings= money). Who is exploiting you for profit?
  • Stop just talking (or twittering or facebooking, etc.) and do something! Knowing /Doing Gap business management consultants Geoffrey Pfeiffer and Robert Sultan. Can you promise to not abandon America? Do something!
  • Stop listening to grievance/victimhood TV and radio.
  • Stop demonization and duplicity (political correctness, women, democrats are enemies, regulations, refugees, etc.).
  • Stop the politics of cruelty (the weaponization of politics – children are dying at the border!).(jillcodyauthor.com)

 

START:

  • Start reading the Constitution – really read it!
  • Start checking in with you – what have you abandoned? Are you able to self-reflect? Are you in a tribe? Are you in cult ideology? What is your Whoness and Whatness?
  • Start being constructively outraged and courageously fearful. Start taking responsibility – we’ve grown to fear it because we’re afraid of the unknown consequences. But, look at what the real consequences are today?
  • Start creating a 4-part plan:

1)  Decide what country you want to live – there are many forces that are fighting against Democracy (Libertarianism, Corporatocracy, Theocracy)

2)  Blow up the phones and send postcards to elected representatives!

  • Pick your issues two or three of them. Fight being overwhelmed. Become a Bold Citizen (climate crisis, gun control, body sovereignty, the media, democracy, climate change, etc.). Find related books, websites, and podcasts. Fund them. Join the organizations. Volunteer for them. Join the local chapters such as Indivisible, Flippable. Want to know how? America Abandoned-The Secret Velvet Coup That Cost Us Our Democracy contains Keep/Stop/Starts at the end of each chapter. The Citizen Lobbyist – A how-to manual for making your voice heard in government by Amanda Knief is good too.
  • Take a sledgehammer to the two decades of armor surrounding Fox viewers and right-wing talk show listeners and to their tribe and cult thinking. Tell them that Fox News mal-informs them. That they actually believe wrong things (multiple studies proving it-example Republican Justin Amash town hall conservative attendee!). Tell them that they’ve been manipulated and exploited for another’s power and gain – not theirs. Tell them that this non-reality must be over or their worst fears will be realized – their freedom and liberty taken (Authoritarianism, etc.). Read Gabe Sherman’s book, The Loudest Voice in the Room.
  • Start thinking about what I’ve missed in this list of KSSs that you can do to make a difference? Yes, you are a small rock in a small pond. So am I, but think about the size boulder we can make if we all take responsibility and refuse to abandoned democracy. I started by writing a book. Then, was offered a radio show. Ripple! Ripple!
  • Start to realize we’re in a battle for the soul of this country.