Democracy is for Children Too, by Peggy O'Mara

Issue 103
By Peggy O'Mara 

For over 20 years, I have been working for social change in the arena of childbirth reform and natural parenting. Until recently, I believed that if I just thought it right, said it right, or wrote it right, others would understand the importance of these issues and appropriate changes would be made in society. In many ways this has been so, but I and others have also been severely hampered by the special moneyed interests that compete with our parental influences.

When I speak about special interests, I am speaking not only about unnatural products that compete for our children's attention but also about the political climate of our times.

As a young woman, I believed that raising a healthy family and making peace with my family of origin was the way to be truly political, and I still do. I now feel, however, a renewed duty to be not only a mother but also a citizen.

As a citizen, I am acutely aware of the unique privilege I have to publish my opinions. As editor, publisher, and owner of a national magazine, I am an increasingly rare breed. And, as part of the independent press, I have great responsibility.

This responsibility means that I must try not only to balance all opinions but also must have the courage to tell it like it is. While I have thought that many of the societal influences on my children were out of my control, I now realize that I have been mistaken. I, like so many of us, have been content to create in my own life what Winona LaDuke calls "a little island of political correctness." I have believed that the virtue of that island would emanate out into the larger world and heal it.

In many ways this is true, but there are powerful influences in our society that I can barely compete with, neither as an individual parent nor as an independent publisher. I have been informed about these influences almost accidentally, through alternative radio broadcasts and through the activism of my oldest daughter.

About a year and a half ago, I happened to hear a radio broadcast of a speech by Robert McChesney, a communications professor at the University of Illinois. In his speech and in his pamphlet entitled Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy, McChesney makes a very convincing argument for a parallel between the increased consolidation of corporate media in the 1990s and a decrease in democracy.

Democracy works best when at least three criteria are present, says McChesney.
Parity in the distribution of wealth and property ownership among citizens so that they can act as equals.

A sense of community and a belief that an individual's well-being is determined by the larger community's well-being.

An effective system of political communication. In democratic societies, control of the means of communication is integral to economic and political power.

We have increasing economic disparity in our society. Over 90 percent of the wealth in our country is in the hands of less than 10 percent of the citizens. On a global level, the top 100 corporations control 33 percent of the world's assets but employ only 1 percent of the world's workforce. Our society does not seriously encourage a sense of community responsibility, and media ownership is dangerously concentrated.

At first this information overwhelmed me. I didn't want to believe that there was anything wrong with our democracy. While there are many things in our materialistic society that I would like to change, I had not doubted the integrity of our democracy. Now I see that this degradation of democracy is at the root of many of our social problems.

Most of us are so busy with our children and our families that we cannot imagine doing anything more, and we hope that our contributions to worthwhile causes and organizations will make a difference. Many of us have become largely apolitical in both our actions and our thinking. A kind of fatalism has overtaken us. Meanwhile, the heart and soul of our country is being bought and sold. It's time we took back what belongs to us.

My daughter and her generation went to Seattle to take back democracy. While the media either maligned or ignored them in Seattle, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, her stories of the actual events and the things that happened to her have changed our lives.