Universal Empowerment Creates Common Ground

Mainstream and Subculture

Subcultures are fun. They're not intended as a solution for everyone though. They're too insular and exclusive to allow major impacts on society.

Many groups like Rant Media identify themselves as outspoken and unapologetic counterculture. Activists express opinions in a take it or leave it fashion that inspires those who resonate and baffles others. Lines are drawn in the sand.

Imagine rubbing all such lines out and drawing only the line between apathy and empowerment, putting people of widely differing opinions together in one basket and disinterested bystanders in the other.

The goal is to help everyone take action. The Empowerment aims to expand participation in activist citizenship beyond traditional "hardcore" circles to supersede the mass culture of apathy.

To empower people of all ideas, Empowerment must adhere to a more measured and neutral tone akin to the "NPOV" (Neutral Point of View) sought by Wikipedians.

The Empowerment exists to empower people of all ideas and doers of all persuasions. Empowerment can enable you to enhance a subculture. Projects that espouse specific points of view can use The Empowerment, but they cannot be endorsed as representative of the institutionally neutral core. The Empowerment can cover controversial issues without taking sides, giving doers of all stripes a common ground.

Empowerment Is Broadly Inclusive of Many Ideas

History is full of movements that championed narrow causes to achieve limited success because they could not really engage their opposition before attrition wore out their momentum and resources. As long as the battlefield puts activists in the trenches slugging it out against equally entrenched enemy lines, the idea war will continue to be an end onto itself that consumes combatants like a maelstrom. The state of warfare perpetuates falsehood on both sides as necessary evils because both believe the other will use it to gain an advantage. The atom bomb was justified by its researchers because the Nazis were expected to try to use it too. Likewise, misleading and manipulative media tactics are a prerequisite to competing in the modern mind war.

Think Outside The Trenches

World War I provides a moving lesson to illustrate absurd conflict. The fighting bogged down into a bloody stalemate where neither side could win a decisive victory. Generals on both sides poured millions of lives into the deathtrap of trench warfare. They lacked the technological and strategic capability to win so they settled for a war of attrition rather than rejecting the stalemate and seeking an alternative course of action.

But an unexpected glimmer of a solution appeared. Soldiers from the German and British lines put aside their spirit-crushing military struggle to sing carols together in No-Man's Land and celebrate what they had in common. It showed the arbitrary nature of war between ordinary people who just wanted to live and let live.

On Christmas Day, 1914, only 5 months into World War I, German, British, and French soldiers, already sick and tired of the senseless killing, disobeyed their superiors and fraternized with "the enemy" along two-thirds of the Western Front (in times of war, a crime punishable by death). German troops held Christmas trees up out of the trenches with signs, "Merry Christmas." "You no shoot, we no shoot." Thousands of troops streamed across a no-man's land strewn with rotting corpses. They sang Christmas carols, exchanged photographs of loved ones back home, shared rations, played football, even roasted some pigs. Soldiers embraced men they had been trying to kill a few short hours before. They agreed to warn each other if the top brass forced them to fire their weapons, and to aim high.

A shudder ran through the high command on either side. Here was disaster in the making: soldiers declaring their brotherhood with each other and refusing to fight. Generals on both sides declared this spontaneous peacemaking to be treasonous and subject to court martial. By March, 1915 the fraternization movement had been eradicated and the killing machine put back in full operation. By the time of the armistice in 1918, fifteen million would be slaughtered.

—The Christmas Truce

Not surprisingly, the military brass didn't approve and artillery bombardments of No Man's Land prevented any more lulls in the fighting.

But what if the peacemakers had been celebrated as heroes and inspired their nations to end the killing? The fog of war may have made it impossible for the sides to reconcile then, but today we still have a chance to see the absurdity in some of our struggles and find common ground.

Being No One's Pawn

"Are you still alive? You have the devil's own luck, no matter what you do. On the battlefield, a soldier's life is worth no more than a silver coin. As if it were nothing, most men's lives are controlled by a handful of nobles and royalty. Well even a king is really unable to live his life as he pleases... We all just rely upon this great flow known as fate until eventually we leave this world. Time will run out, and the tide of life will recede before we know who we really are."

One of the reasons people don't get involved in politics is that they don't want to feel like a pawn in someone else's struggle. It is more rewarding to act as an empowered individual than as a "human resource" cancelling out opposing pawns.

Some Shared By Left, Right And In Between

The word empowerment is popular amongst conservatives and liberals alike.

• Conservative lobby group Empower America (now Freedom Works): neutral Wikipedia profile, critical SourceWatch profile.

Providing a Means to YOUR End

In high-school, during the first student council meeting that I attended, a teacher was temporarily mediating the council until a student president was elected. Once we were assembled the teacher drew a diagram on the whiteboard. At the top and bottom he wrote '15%', and in the middle he wrote '70%'. He pointed to the top and said,

"These are the students who actually care about school. They work hard and apply themselves, this is where all of you are." He then pointed to the middle, "these are the students who dont really care, they do the work, they show up, but they are largely indifferent to what happens at school." Lastly he pointed to the bottom percentage and said, "these are the students who hate school, they despise being here, they skip class, slack off, and don't get anything done." I smiled to myself because I identified more with the bottom 15% than the top that were supposed to be here. I hated high school. I absolutely hated it. There was no disparity, the students were treated like cattle wihtout the right of everyday human beings, and therefore we had no say in how policy was made or how the school was run. The only reason I was in the student council was because it was the best place to spark any change. I didn't get to be student president, and I didn't change much while I was there.

But looking back at the experience I find myself amused by the fact that the council was seen as a place for those who had no problem with the system rather than those who did, and there is no doubt that this was the purpose of the council. The only things they ever accomplished were social events designed to make the school feel less like some kind of twisted low-security prison and more like a twisted cult (hell, most of us had the track suits and sneakers already). I wonder now why no one was bothering to listen to the disenfranchised students, the ones who could tell the faculty what was wrong with the school and how they could change it, to be more appealing to the student body. They weren't all stoners and slackers- I applied myself at every assignment, got almost straight As, and never touched drugs, but I still hated it there.

If only The Empowerment had been born before I found myself in that situation, and if only I had been able to find a copy on some library shelf or at a random street corner, I may not have given up so easily. I may have found an alternate route to the faculty, and had my voice heard. With The Empowerment I would have had the tools to help me be an activist for the students that the system wasn't serving. The Empowerment would have given me the means to the ends that I still regret not accomplishing.

That is what The Empowerment is about. It is about acknowledging that the ideas we have do not correspond with the world that we see, and provides us all with the means to realize those ideas in the real world. The Empowerment doesn't serve the keeners and optimists in the top 15%, or the slackers and the rebels at the bottom. The Empowerment doesn't distinguish between those on the right or the left, those who believe and those who do not. The Empowerment distinguishes between those who want to change something, and those who cannot be bothered."

—KindelingBoy