When I purchased my first external hard drive about 20 years ago, I knew I was getting a fantastic deal. I had taken the time to drive out to a parking lot near the beach, where some discount outfit was holding a one-day sale. For only about $600, I was able to purchase 105 megabytes of storage, more than triple the capacity of my computer’s internal hard drive.
This past Friday, I purchased my second external hard drive: 500 gigabytes of storage, enough to hold all of my photos and sound files with plenty of room to spare. If the per-byte price had remained at its 1990 level my new hard drive would have cost me roughly $3 million—and that’s without adjusting for inflation, which would have jacked up the price another couple of million dollars! But in fact, it cost me $72. And instead of driving for an hour to a sale in a distant parking lot, I bought it on Amazon.com.
The truth is that while the U.S. economy is in the tank and a lot of people are hurting, in some ways it has never been easier to be a consumer. Our ability to access information, goods and services on demand is unparalleled in human history. Our expectations and sense of entitlement are so fantastically high that we—OK, I—get frustrated when it takes an extra 10 seconds for a web browser to load a file it might have taken a month to locate and acquire when I was in college.
I love being an empowered shopper. But I believe our shopper mentality—our insistence on convenience and instant gratification, and our sense of entitlement—is a root cause of the degraded state of our politics. As one of my intellectual heroes, Harry Boyte, and his colleague Nan Kari have written: “From a nation of free citizens, we have become a nation of individualists and consumers for whom liberty means the right to be left alone and the right to choose among brands of toothpaste.”* The work of building a prosperous, just and healthy nation involves very little instant gratification. But many citizens have no patience for the messiness and compromises, the hard, sustained work and sacrifices necessary to real progress in building strong communities, restoring the economy, improving public education and preventing climate change. What too many of us want to hear from politicians is, “It’s OK, I’ve got this. Don’t worry; it’s all perfectly simple. You want the benefits of government without the burdens? No problem. I’m on it. Just vote for me on Election Day, and your problems will be solved.” And there is no shortage of politicians who are eager to tell us exactly what we want to hear. As Boyte recently observed, even President Obama has shifted from the campaign rallying cry of “yes, we can” to a governing rhetoric of “look at everything I’m trying to do for you.”
As a person who believes that a profound change in our politics is possible in the years ahead, I’m deeply encouraged by what I see around me each day on this campus: shared governance, innovations in student empowerment and service-learning, and a culture of entrepreneurship that rejects complacence. I believe what we’re seeing in this collaborative work at UMBC is a glimpse of our civic future. But as a voter in the 2010 election, I’m impatient with the status quo. I want our aspiring political leaders to challenge and support me as a civic producer, not isolate me with promises of a shopper’s paradise.
*Boyte, Harry C. and Kari, Nancy N. (1996). Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. P.16.
