Monthly Archives: June 2012

Words to live by and share

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A big part of remaking our world is using words that respect and recognize what’s important to people — both in private and in public.

Words can be used in two ways: to tear down people and dismiss alternatives; or to build people up, and encourage good things to get done together. If you put those two types of words on a balance today it would crash down onto the negative side.

Partisan bickering and marketing hype have become the norm, raining down on us every day as part of the news, airwaves and the Internet — striving to divide us, escalate our differences, and convince us with half-truths. There is constant and confusing yelling, while calm and considered public discussion is left unheard or dismissed in twisted sound bites. 

Listen instead of yelling

Words now have less meaning, and everyone is feeling it, with companies, politicians and media pundits bending our ears repeatedly for their own benefit, not ours. That part is finally becoming clear: that the yelling is rarely for the benefit of the regular person.

One way that people deal with the bickering is to pick a side, and keep their heads down. Sometimes that lets us ignore the yelling, as we struggle with daily challenges and hope that things work out.

Unfortunately, the stakes keep getting higher, with escalating financial inequality, division and decisions threatening to edge more people out of work and into poverty.

So it’s time for us to start using positive words, especially in public — between each other — between friends, between coworkers, between the people you interact with every day. Let people know, and let others hear, that you care about people.

Getting back to focusing on people has to start somewhere, and that’s with us — regular people.

Hard-working and considerate people have a proven track record for helping each other out of tough times. Our shared values of health, family, community, fairness and employment are our shared strengths, and our way out of the global crisis created by those using the dual swords of money and power on people.

We all know how to be kind and considerate. Let’s show the people around us that they matter.

Words to live by:

Respect

 Friends

Intentional

Purposeful

Caring Opportunity

Active

Together

Participation

Choices

 Build
Community

Neighbours Listening Family
Mutual respect

Healthy

Sharing
Listening Appreciating

Be an example

Role Model Encouragement

 

Agent of change

 Include

Viewpoints

 Singing

Start something

Recognizing

 

Make a
difference

 

Stand up
for people

  

Decisions

Relationships

Network

Local Projects

People matter most

 Alternatives

Thankful

Art
Creative

 

Boycott

Choosing

Hope

 

Help

Employment

Self-organized
New ideas

Change

Including

Develop

Communicate

Compassion

Community

Fairness

New balance

Outdoors

 

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What NeoPeopleism is and is not

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Here are some things that NeoPeopleism IS and IS NOT.

NeoPeopleism is NOT a religion, a political ideology or a form of socialism. You can be of any religion, political party or economic system and be part of NeoPeopleism. It can exist within capitalism — just not the winner-take-all form of capitalism currently practised.

NeoPeopleism IS the affirmation that cooperation and community are at the centre of humanity’s strengths and successes, and always have been. It is based on the timeless fact that people matter most — all people.

Two characteristics that NeoPeopleists often show are their caring and intentionality. We are all witnesses to positive changes when we are appreciative, respectful and encouraging of others. The more we do this, the more the world’s focus shifts to what matters to people.

The basis of NeoPeopleism has always existed, and is woven deeply into the fabric of our lives. Even those infatuated with extreme wealth and power know that it is the widespread good will and well-being of regular folks that allows our society to function, and them to have become wealthy.

Many of the world’s struggles are seeing bubbles of NeoPeopleist activity, as people rail against whatever and whoever is resisting the focus being on people. This includes the rising discontent with political parties, the Occupy Movement, tuition demonstrations, and Black Lives Matter. NeoPeopleism is needed and active wherever people are second class citizens, suffering beneath the interests of money and power. NeoPeopleism is needed in all scenarios of injustice, violence and poverty.

In North America, hard-working people are being denied good jobs, yet encouraged to live a money-focused, debt-inducing life style. As with other versions of inequality and injustice, people will tolerate this for a while, then find ways to set things right.

Various forms of fear, politics and social control keep people from actively pursuing improved living conditions. Most recently, people have been kept distracted by big screen TVs and cell phones — both of which are terrific for entertainment and communication. But even excellent tech cannot mask the growing divide in wealth and the loss of focus on people.

Our current winner-take-all economy is at odds with people’s natural sense of fairness, cooperation and human dignity. So it’s time for NeoPeopleism to rev up.

It’s time to get back to focusing on people.

[Return to the home page of NeoPeopleism.com.]

3 key components for us to move forward

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When it comes to changing the world regular folks have a few choices.

  • We can elect people and empower them to hopefully work on our concerns. This is the system that is currently floundering in a sea of lobbyists, #extremegreed and global complexities.
     
  • We could get someone with an MBA to make a lot of fancy flow charts that show the hundreds of steps and departments needed to get anything done.
     
  • Or we could look around at the people in our lives — in our neighborhood and our workplace — and wonder what we can accomplish together, on things that we care about, using our own skills and connections. Let’s go with this one.

 

Here are the 3 key components to improving life for people:

1) We need individuals to raise the priority of people in their personal and business life. We need to take the saying “People matter most” to heart, and live it.

2) When people are together, we need to encourage each other, and to make decisions that are respectful of people’s needs, skills and relationships. This includes wealthy people and policy makers who have become disconnected from the joy of community and the value of building good things together (“We miss you! Come back soon!”).

3) We need people using more of their time and their skills on things that are important to their communities and their environment. This won’t always be paid work, but it can bring joy and new friendships, which are the building blocks for positive change, and the core of a really good life.

 

The feedback loop of people caring about people, and making life better:

  • When we see someone caring about others, and caring about us, we feel connected and thankful.
  • When we see our own efforts making things happen, and contributing to a good result, we feel valued and appreciated.
  • When we realize what people can get done together, without big formal structures, we feel inspired and hopeful.
  • When we feel connected, appreciated, inspired and hopeful we want to share that with others, and around goes the feedback loop.

One thing leads to another, except this time it’s things that people need and care about. We find we are making things better, in new ways that we couldn’t see before. Because now we’re working on things together, for us.

 

Be a role model right where you are:

Think about a day in the life of your life. You leave the house, you see people, you’re helped by people working somewhere. What if more of the people you see cared about you, appreciated your help, and shared more of their time and skills making life better for you? That would be good.

Now turn it around. Be the person who gives a smile, and treats each person helping you throughout the day like they matter more than whatever task they just did. Be the person who talks with their friends about things that need fixing and figure out how to actually do the fixing. Be the person who volunteers for things and lends a hand.

Be a role model, building the feedback loop of people caring about people. And don’t be surprised when you see more people joining you. 🙂

[Return to the home page of NeoPeopleism.com.]

Something’s not right here – The List

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Life in the 21st century has a lot of really good things. There’s been health advances, new music and art, and amazing technology. There are powerful ways for people to share and communicate, from Facebook to Pinterest to Skype. On paper it sounds pretty good. On screens it looks even better!

But we’re clearly sensing that something’s not right here. There are too many things going on that miss the mark for regular folks, taking us to places that we didn’t expect to end up, both personally and as nations.

For a while we were hoping that if we just kept our heads down it would all sort out, but it hasn’t. There’s been so much wrong stuff happening that it’s getting hard to keep it all straight.

So we’re going to make a list of the stuff that needs fixing.

This list will be a way for us to see a bigger picture, and give us a springboard for action — a place to pick some things that we could see changing, and making better.

Because we want to share the hope that things can be made right for people.

The List: 5 things that aren’t right that affect regular folks

1) Much of politics today is aimed at keeping big businesses happy, and leaving the regular person behind.

There’s a persistent disconnect between the needs of people and our political representatives. We vote but then see the concerns of people left unfulfilled. We’re made to feel that big, important business and multi-national issues need to be sorted out first, over and over. At the end of the day, and the end of the year, it stays the same: there’s not enough focus on people and not enough involvement by people who care.

Our experiments in global economies have veered too far away from local jobs and to global corporations with extreme power, uncontrollable by single countries.

We need new ways and new people to get involved and stand up for regular folks at all levels of governance.
2) There is more wealth and possibility than ever, but most of it is tied up in the hands of just a few.

Wealthy people used to invest in new and bigger companies that employed people. Now they multiply their money in hedge funds without regular folks ever benefiting. Most people don’t need or want a limo, but we all want to be part of the main money loop again.

If people had good jobs and a future, do you think there’d be as much social and economic angst? The smaller the piece of pie the more fighting and stress we have. Any financial system that creates billionaires and poverty at the same time needs to be fixed.

We need better ways for regular folks to prosper.
3) Our lifestyle is causing problems in our lives

When we’re told hundreds of times a day what we should buy, wear and eat it’s no wonder we join in. It’s great having lots of shopping and entertainment choices, but we are under constant pressure to buy things and watch things. We’re in an endless cycle of replacing things that still work and hearing opinion that pretends to be fact.

We are manipulated by social media, which pretends to be connecting people, but whose guiding purpose is to capture our attention and sell our information and lives to advertisers. Social media is now the leading distributor of non-truths, conspiracy theories, and division.

The resulting pressure, confusion and conflict is hard on people,  families and businesses.

We need to dial back on shopping and social media, use truth-focused news sources, and get outside more often.
4) Things we need and use every day aren’t getting fixed.

Cities cut services and say they have no way to make the needed improvements. Chunks fall from bridges, parks turn to weeds, and too many folks can’t get even basic health care. Even though there is more wealth than there’s ever been, it doesn’t find its way to things that are the backbone of daily life.

Administrations talk about giant infrastructure projects, and how those could give many people jobs, but “Infrastructure Week” never arrives.

We need fresh thinking about how to fund and provide the things that people count on and could participate in.
5) We use a lot of our time being entertained, not doing things.

There was an old saying: “Religion is the opium of the masses” Now it’s “Entertainment is the opium of the masses”. Screens and marketing keep us distracted, and inactive — convinced that we don’t have the time or need to change things.

Our society has a wealth of knowledge and potential, but we don’t do much with it. It’s tough to hear, but we spend a lot more time watching screens and snacking than we do helping our neighbors and getting good things done.

We each have ways to help each other more, and to make a real difference.

We need to do stuff, not just watch stuff.

 

So that’s The List.

You can probably think of many things that make our society a tough place. Guesses are a lot of them are in one of these five categories, but there could be more!

The first good news is that  it’s not just a few people who think things are going the wrong direction. You’re in good company!

The second good news is that everything in this list can be set right with people getting involved, focusing more on people, and playing more active roles in our communities.

Hey, we need a list for that too! 🙂 

[Return to the home page of NeoPeopleism.com.]