Sounding Off Social
The tassels and caps are flying! Whether it’s in middle school through college or trade school, many graduates are taking their last strolls before leaving campus. With Covid being less of a factor there’s room to laugh, hug and for some maybe even twerk their way to the next stage in learning, work and life.
Others have an eye on the reopening of stadiums with more butts in the seats. Fans got a treat recently when Simone Biles did a jaw-dropping routine that’s never been done before by a female gymnast. Maybe in the same sports report on the evening news we heard about Phil Mikelson becoming the oldest player to win a PGA tournament at age 50.
While all that good stuff is happening, we’re still trying to figure out hot-button social issues. Sometimes it’s a gut-wrenching tragedy that makes no sense. Other times it’s head-scratching comments made by public officials. These make you wonder when things are gonna settle back to ‘normal’ after the pandemic, social protests and post-election drama showing up as voting audits with shady intentions.
It’s time for ‘Smart Civics 101’ and We the People to influence culture to the max in the classroom, at work or your field of dreams. It’s gonna take a new push in social intelligence. What’s that you ask? Well with current challenges around homeland security, we rely on national intelligence. Troop deployment and readiness rely on military intelligence. So, we can do more to better handle bias, hate and the culture war that’s at play. It’s why we need social intelligence more than ever before.
Remember those days as kids when we’d sing the words to a song but as we grew older, we realized we were singing the wrong words? Nowadays you can search the lyrics online and set yourself straight. That’s exactly how SAIC sees things from the point of view of civic/social issues. It’s about how we deliver not lyrics but civics so that you can see things straight with the issues of the day. This means bringing:
- Awareness
Folks from the deep south know about the Tulsa Massacre 100 years ago. The painful stories still bubble-up some anger today. There’re also stories of lynching that make your body coil. Consider the lynching cases or racial attacks in history that were often based on a lie? Someone is falsely accused of winking at a girl (e.g. Emmett Till), then a mob showed up to do damage. What do we see today, that’s repeating itself? Restrictive voting laws being passed based on a lie, which will disenfranchise people as a kinda lynching of democracy. We need more social intelligence to build knowledge.
2. Knowledge
With American history, we learn about Settlement, Slavery, Independence, Civil War, Reconstruction, Segregation & Civil Rights. But did you know that throughout history there’s been this repeating back-and-forth between greater promise and power struggle? In the early days it was between “all men created equal” and abolishing slavery. What followed that was between Emancipation Proclamation and the fight to end segregation with civil rights. These days the back-and-forth is between multi-racial society and white nationalism wrapped-up with disinformation. We need more social intelligence to build smarts.
3. Smarts
During normal educational training we go from awareness to knowledge too. Then we arrive at a point of developing smarts. This way we can apply concepts in context to solve more difficult problems. If you’re working with software and writing code, the most basic instruction you learn to use is the ‘If’ clause. It’s a critical part of knowing whether a statement or system condition is true, before the next step. Otherwise, the system can get into a suspended or ‘hung’ state. That’s another reason why we need more social intelligence today to avoid being in a ‘hung-up’ state with civic/social issues and to build more hope.
4. Hope
Think about when you graduated to the next level? Getting to that point gave you hope for the future. But there seems to be a breakdown happening. How else do we explain the Tulsa Massacre then or recent mass casualty incidents now? It’s mental health, seething hate or lost hope where folks don’t see themselves contributing to society. Dr King ended his famous speech with the repeated refrain ‘I Have a Dream’. He hoped for a day when his children wouldn’t be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Well, we can build hope by raising the content of our character or the ‘smarts’ of our civics.
This isn’t about ‘smart shaming’ people. It’s about adding ‘smarts’ to civics like with gadgets and building social intelligence. Throughout history we’ve gone from forming a nation with the Declaration of Independence. We’ve come through freeing a people with the Emancipation Proclamation. Then we had a phase of challenging a ‘separate but equal’ notion to achieve civil rights legislation. Now we’re at a point of up-leveling our citizenship by how we reboot civics education. That’s gotta be for us like fuel for today, hope for tomorrow and motivation to run on and experience personal power or higher achievement.
You can join the conversation and support our efforts with SAICs “Dear America 2021” Letters and Impact Statement at the Facebook ‘Hometown Chat’ Page here http://www.Facebook.com/seeamericaincolor.
Tracks: One Republic – Run – https://youtu.be/TKkcsmvYTw4
Coldplay – Higher Power – https://youtu.be/gXgf5smLEgQ
6/4 Finale Event registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYkf-6hrDkvHN05O9ehnqgNwGBiHsXSan-d
See America In Color 