“Freedom is participation in power” – Marcus Tullius Cicero

In a world where people will try almost anything – drugs, extreme sports, nightclubs, eating, sex, and religion included – to achieve happiness, it may be that taking back our government is among the most effective strategies. Happiness experts tell us that dedicated friends and close-knit families make us happy. I agree. However, as Francis Moore Lappe writes compellingly in the Winter ’09 issue of YES! Magazine, no one talks about power as a key to happiness.

The power referred to by Lappe is not power in the well-known sense. When most of us consider the word “power,” we think of its corrupting influence. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, right? “Power” inspires images of God-like creatures hurling lightning bolts from the heavens, tyrannical dictators imprisoning detractors and corporate chieftains devouring smaller competitors and spitting out the remains.

I don’t deny that power corrupts. But it turns out that the Latin root of the word “power” means “to be able.” So perhaps “power” is better understood as empowerment, the ability to make a difference, to have an impact on the world.

By that definition, We The People have had very little power for some time now. How else to explain the fact that most Americans want our government to change so many of its policies, but our will is never done? Perhaps that’s why many of us are not very happy.

Supermajorities of us believe we’re headed in the wrong direction as a nation. Most Americans decry the corruption in politics, the separation of our nation into “haves” and “have nots,” the coronation of corporations as the new Gods, the disappearance of jobs, the ruination of our environment, the lack of affordable health care and, perhaps more than any of these, the lack of time for simple leisure activities such as meeting with friends and enjoying nature.

We live our lives on a treadmill that drains us of time, energy and yes, even emotion. Depicted so well in Annie Leonard’s wonderful video “The Story of Stuff” (www.storyofstuff.com), we work ourselves blue, sometimes at two or three jobs, so we can come home to the mindless entertainment of TV, on which we see commercials that tell us our lives are meaningless and incomplete without this or that latest gadget. We need two or three jobs just to make ends meet.

Except now, of course, for many Americans, the ends no longer meet. We stand quite literally at the crossroads of our American way of life, wondering how we can wake ourselves up from the mind-numbing nightmare of the treadmill. All this is unsustainable.

Perhaps the solution is to regain some of our power. As people in dead relationships will tell you, the point where they finally realize the relationship is hopeless is not during the angry part, but when that gives way to the “not caring” part. Perhaps the opposite of happiness, then, is not really depression but instead the hypnotized state of apathetic submission in which most of us now exist. If this is true, then the solution involves once again tapping those sources of long-dormant power.

But how do we start? Where do we begin when the problem seems so enormous and entrenched?

An ancient proverb tells us that all thousand-mile journeys begin with a single step. Our work to take back our government begins the same way.

People sometimes ask me why I do what I do when it all seems so hopeless. My response is that, hopeless or not, it’s the right thing to do. My job - and all of yours as well - is not to determine whether things are hopeless. Selfishly, if nothing else, we need to do something positive. Besides, I don’t think it’s hopeless.

At “This Is MY Government,” the chair lifting each of us up has four legs: civic education, media reform, citizen empowerment, and special interest regulation. It is my thesis that each of these efforts promises happiness to those who engage in them because they’re all designed to give We The People the power our founders promised us. Let’s look at each in turn.

Undeniably, education is power. Without information on how government and society are supposed to work, we have nothing to which we can compare our “democracy.” It’s no wonder that most of us seem content to consign our hopes, dreams, and ambitions to politicians who don’t know who we are and are much more likely to return the call of a major donor than an average citizen. That’s not how it’s supposed to be and far from the promise described by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Learning about the wide and growing gap between what we have and what we should have must happen early. Civic education must be restored to a position of prominence in our schools.

As we grow older, the educational venue changes from schools to the media. Most adults receive the facts and opinions that make up their view of the world from TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet. Unfortunately, all of these sources except the Internet are owned by a handful of very large corporations, all of which have a huge stake in the status quo because it is the status quo that allows them to grow ever larger and more dominant which better serves their only Gods – their stockholders. We need a rich breeding ground of ideas on the state of our economy, our government and our world, not car crashes, child kidnappings, and celebrity misdeeds. To reform the media, we must work to de-consolidate the major media companies, strengthen local and public media, and ensure that the last great hope for information, the Internet, remains widely available.

The last two legs of the chair are opposite sides of the same issue. Citizens and special interests sit on opposite sides of a teeter totter, but the weight of special interests means that We The People are always stuck up in the air, not really having a good time. We must re-balance the teeter totter by taking away some of the power of special interests and returning that power to citizens. To do this, we must restore local control to the people. No more should cities, states and even countries have their laws and regulations struck down because they limit commerce opportunities for corporations and other special interests. No more should special interests be able to place robot politicians in office and get bills passed that hurt the people but help their own interests. No more should there be a revolving door between special interests and the government agencies that are supposed to protect us from toxic substances, unsafe drugs, and other things that make our happiness impossible.

Contrary to accepted truth since the 1980s, the only power in the universe strong enough to fight against the forces that keep us unfulfilled, overworked and unhealthy is government. Government is We The People, or at least it was supposed to be.

The movement for change has reached a tipping point. Now is a good time to jump on board. Creating change will make you happy. If enough of us become motivated, all of us can be empowered.