My Vote is My Voice

Rights, Recovery & Renaissance

After seeing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, I decided to offer myself to recovery efforts in my professional area - as a management educator and researcher of organizations.

A vehicle for my contributions has been the Mosaic Project, which I launched in September.  In recent months, the project served as a means for my students to learn about management while contributing to the Post-Katrina service efforts.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~vox/0506/1205/mosaic.html

http://www.mosaic-nola.org

Through the Mosaic Project, I helped organize a summit in Baton Rouge.  "Rights, Recovery & Renaissance" was hosted by the Louisiana NAACP with the assistance of Democracy for America. 

www.rightsrecovery.com

It was gratifying to bring together two organizations (and associated communities) that might not otherwise have joined forces, and I'd like to see more of this.   Generally, I'd like to see new relationships formed to help Katrina/Rita evacuees recover and rebuild their lives.   

Overall, I think our country's political parties have been too slow to address the needs of displaced and returning Gulf residents.   

A Living Democracy/Equitable Sharing of the Earth's Resources

Similar to the recent toxic benzene spill on the Songhua River some 236 miles upriver from Harbin, China - which eventually contaminated the city's water for some 4 million residents, and was not reported for 10 days after the spill - the true long term environmental disasters facing New Orleans are mostly unreported and don't seem to appear as a concern for the current administration.
As Vandana Shiva states in her paper The Myths of Globalization Exposed: Advancing toward Living Democracy - "...as millions lose their livelihoods, millions lose their democratic rights."
Economically, environmentally, and politically our globally dependent corporate systems are failing us and the consequences could become explosive in nature as people strike out to recover their livelihoods.
Vandana suggests that we take three steps in a movement toward a "living democracy" where there is an equitable sharing of the earth's resources.
1] Passing legislation which decentralizes democracy - where local communities and towns have more power than state or federal governments,
2] Electing, by law, at least 30% women representatives - thereby our governing bodies woud become more inclusive, less sexist, and a more balanced form of governance, and
3] Developing an earth or ecological community - a sense of place - where we live, work, and share a common ecological vision.
Whether New Orleans is rebuilt or reconstructed elsewhere, perhaps the new "sustainable politics" as suggested by Vandana is an urgent first step in the right direction.