Take the occupiers out to tea

I clearly remember a day in high school that has proven to be a major formative moment for me (and no, it’s not THAT day, thank you very much). I had a social studies teacher whose name is lost to my aging memory who went off on a riff about how what we see as a political spectrum with opposite ends is actually more of a circle (and if you Google political spectrum as circle, you’ll quickly find a bunch of geeky posts that illustrate this – to any number of individual points). My teacher’s point (what was his name?) was simply that we are more alike than different. I was reminded of this when I saw the lead item in today’s New York Times reporting on the universal disappointment with the lack of results from the vaunted super committee “A Failure Is Absorbed With Disgust and Fear, but Little Surprise” NYT 11/21/11 by Michael Cooper.

Cooper does a great job of bouncing back and forth from liberal to conservative, and showing how both sides are disgusted. And it hit me that this is not just a watershed moment for our country, but a defining moment for social entrepreneurship. We (social entrepreneurs) say that the process of creating value is not in itself flawed. It is the application of that value that has brought us to this precarious moment. The infamous notion that the sole purpose of business is to maximize profit to shareholders is what leads us astray. And that’s why we need to take the occupiers out to tea.

We have two major social movements going on right now in the good old US of A. On the left, we have the occupiers – not just of Wall Street, but Baltimore and Oakland and DC and dozens of other cities. And they’re saying that their sick and tired of the system, it’s broken and needs to be fixed. And then we have the tea party movement - A bit older (in more ways than one) and WAY down on the opposite end of the spectrum. In fact, a steel cage match between an occupier and a tea partier would probably sell out our local football stadium quicker than a Ravens-Steelers Super Bowl game. And what is the tea party saying? That the system is broken, they’re sick and tired, and things need to change. Oh wait, that’s what the….. oh my (what was his name?).

So, let’s do some quick math. Depending on the poll you read, somewhere between 15 and 20% of the voting public views itself as sympathetic to the Tea Party Agenda. A similar percentage (maybe more, maybe less) seems to identify with the occupiers. Put them together and you’ve got a sizable force that may in fact NOT be that ideologically separate. Cooper’s piece in The Times reports that “a record 84 percent of Americans said they disapproved of the way Congress was handling its job in the most recent New York Times/CBS News poll last month.”

Now, before you start ranting about how these two groups are SO different, and whichever side you support is the correct one, and the other guy is just a wacko (as the tea party recently did on it’s website), just stop for a second and think about one thing. What if we stopped screaming at each other long enough to compare notes? What about focusing on ways forward, rather than furthering the space in the divide? What if what feels like extremes is actually the new middle? What if we took the occupiers out to tea?


And yes, I am aware that the notion that there are similarities between the two movements is not unique to my feeble mind. Not just Cooper's piece today, but the polar opposite voice of conservatism The Wall Street Journal also recently published a similar piece (Populist Movements Rooted in Same Soil, WSJ 11/15/11 by Gerald F. Seib) Come to think of it, the Times and the Journal making the same argument may be the only support this notion needs.


But to move forward, we need an answer, not just more questions. And that answer, my friends, is Social Enterprise.