WHEN I was young it was terribly exciting when a three-ring circus came to town. We were unrestrained when Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey came with five rings and paraded their elephants, caged animals and clowns down the main street. How to restore focus on common good
Under the tent we loved the challenge of action all around us: acrobats swinging overhead, clowns parading the oval track and acts sometimes in all rings at once.
In today's circus of life, five rings are nothing. In the communication age of proliferating print, radio, TV and cyberspace we have hundreds of rings to choose among every minute. It overwhelms us.
I fully understand a recent college graduate who said: "It's hard to have an intelligent conversation with someone our age about politics. The world's too big. That's why I gave it up. I used to be more interested, but it's impossible today to really be completely informed."
The same can be said about many more things than politics. So what do we do? We specialize. We delegate. We narrow our focus to the three or five rings we can cope with. And some of us just opt out - lose all sense of community, turn amoral, turn to crime, worry about little but ourselves.
How do we recapture peace and security in our lives? How do we restore greater focus on the common good? How do we stimulate our socially best instincts instead of our worst ones?
This topic is being attacked in many ways. A renewed emphasis on family and community seems to be one. A return to religion is another. More and better education - obviously.
Something our politicians can and should do is to delegate more power and responsibility to local communities -and send money along with it. Giving up power and perks is not attractive. But we, the people, should insist on it.
We see encouraging manifestations in the devolution of welfare and Medicaid to the states, in privatization, in charter schools and in school/community-based management. Hawaii ought to return most land-use control and more taxing power to the counties. Statewide school administration ought to be shrunk to an oversight role with a small staff.
Some of these thoughts flow from a forum held a few months back at Honolulu Community College sponsored by the national honor society for community colleges, Phi Theta Kappa. It combined a nationwide TV discussion of "Renewing America's Civic Life in an Information Age" with local panel commentary afterward.
HIGHLIGHTS in my notes are these: More young blacks are in jail than in college . . . More children are in poverty than 30 years ago . . . The middle class is shrinking . . . The rich-poor gap is widening . . . We have communities that are uninhabitable yet inhabited . . . Cynicism abounds.
Citizens have become consumers rather than contributors . . . We must become cynical about cynicism . . . Government doesn't have to be bad . . . The Progressive movement rose up as a corrective to the rich-poor gap of 100 years ago.
Get involved at the family/community level . . . Take more responsibility . . . Match our success with the elderly to help other sectors . . . Share resources with poor neighborhoods but send power down there, too . . . Money alone hasn't done it.
How do we deal with boredom and apathy? . . . Technology is only a tool . . . We are letting it make us a less civil society . . . The media concentrate too much on blemishes . . . We must learn to respect those with whom we differ.
America is sick and tired of being sick and tired.