A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #144

A little something to think about before Tuesday’s election:

To Tom Hayden, participatory democracy meant “number one, action; we believed in action. We had behind us the so-called decade of apathy. We were emerging from apathy. What’s the opposite of apathy? Active participation. Citizenship. Making history. [ . . . ] Voting was not enough. Having a democracy in which you have an apathetic citizenship, spoon-fed information by a monolithic media, periodically voting, was very weak, a declining form of democracy. And we believed, as an end in itself, to make the human being whole by becoming an actor in history instead of just a passive object. Not only as an end in itself, but as a means to change, the idea of a participatory democracy was our central focus.”

– from the chapter “Participatory Democracy” in Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago by James Miller

(*The late Tom Hayden was a founder of Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s. He passed away earlier this year.)

Filed under: Civil Rights, Critical Thinking, Social Justice, Teaching, Voting, Writing and Editing