~A Little Heaven Behind
“For Fate is within us as much as without: it is made what we are and what we love” — Jacques Barzun
While reading the articles, especially reading through Cornell West’s Moral Obligation of Living in a Democratic Society, the ideas that we impact each other and fate that has occurred to us in our childhood affects how we act throughout our childhood and as adults had a major impact on me. Connecting such concepts to my community partner, I quickly notice that those concepts are true. For example, this last week, I decided to stay with one child and play with him throughout the duration of the volunteering shift. He definitely taught me a great amount about word choice and pattern. At one instance, I tried to encourage him to wait for his turn to use more than one inflatable tube, but he wouldn’t agree with me. Then one of the adults was very clever to say that when the other child was done playing with the tube, that it would be his turn to play with it, and he completely stopped trying to get the tube from the other child. I was definitely in awe and acknowledged the adult’s vocal skills, and she explained to me that phrasing the command into giving them the opportunity and the choice really helps, even if the opportunity doesn’t come today or any time soon. That completely reminded me of Cornell’s concept of struggling to create democracy, and that “the roots of democracy are fundamentally grounded in mutual respect, personal responsibility, and social accountability. How she gave the child those three pillars of democracy at that moment made the child feel like he was in control, at the same time, teaching him fairness and equality.
“Every claim creates an obligation” — William James
That being said, being part of a democratic community means having lots of opinions. And by having lots of opinions, we must find ways to understanding and formulate solutions from those opinions. From the values of humanistic ethics from each article, finding what is beneficial for that person and what is detrimental for that person can help us impact how to we decide what to do with the community and what will benefit them and us. Each of us plays a part in the overall success of the group or community and, like Carol Travis from the podcast says, “We need each other form the day we hatched”. However, reaching a cohesive resolution to so many problems is not simple because the issue can be sometimes misguided to a certain group, creating problem people who are not the real problems rather than addressing the true problem. This results in countless minutes, hours, days, months, years, or decades of struggle, trying to find and resolve the true problem. Although much time might be wasted talking and discussing suggestion after suggestion, this struggle is what makes us a democracy. We can collectively work out the underlying question, and find multiple reasonable solutions, rather than one not so reasonable solution. If we did not struggle, we most likely would not have fairness or freedom of speech or free will. If we let someone else take care of our own problems and we do not like it, it may become completely out of our control, diminishing the qualities of the democracy, as a nation, seek to obtain.
