A quickie… I seem to run across quite a few oddities in my classes. I love learning, and I am often astonished at what passes for scholarship, and more often, I am flabbergasted that words are being used more for their connotative values than their denotative values. I wonder sometimes if definitions actually matter to some students. "Why do people have such a hard time understanding what I am saying?" is a question that quite often strikes me as deliberately obtuse. I am frankly disdainful of the bewildered looks that accompany this question. Is it possible that these bewildered looks, this apparent confusion is a direct result of their own lack of clarity? I wonder at my own impatience… so, an example with the word politics. The reason the shelter did not get funded was politics and people with power, (i.e., people with money) forcing officials to spend the budget on less worthy projects
It seems politics and rich people are to blame for shutting a shelter down. What follows is more an observation than a simple criticism, and it is an invitation to clarify my perspective. I'm not trying to draw fire here, not to be simply contentious, but I am incredibly curious about the use of the word politics – whether in my class, in everyday conversation, or on the job the word simply doesn't mean what dictionaries indicate it means. It seems it is a word typically used with strongly charged negative connotations, and yet the denotative term, as defined by Wikipedia is:
Politics is the process by which groups make decisions. It is the authoritative allocation of values. Although the term is generally applied to behavior within governments, politics is observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions.
The Wiki article is expansive, including the notion of "office politics" when referring to small group dynamics. By definition, when a minority group exercises its influence in order to gain ascendancy, better treatment, etc., it is politics. When we, as a group of concerned citizens, lobby to gain more funding for our policemen, our teachers, our prison workers, it is politics. Most of the dictionaries and encyclopedias I've perused define politics pretty much the same way. I understand the suspicion associated with "people that have power." However, while money definitely helps, it isn't an absolute necessity to get something accomplished.
If, by extension, we said that politics is the search for, the acquisition, maintenance, and distribution of power, then the million man march was a very obvious political event expressing black men's political will. When Hispanic legal and illegal immigrants took a day off, that was a display of political power.
I guess I'm just saying that politics is a value neutral word – it is a process. It is not of itself some evil thing. Of course, there is the use of "dirty" politics to achieve an end, but that's descriptive of how the process is used rather than whether the process is used. Like I said, I'm not trying to deliberately contentious, but I am trying to ascertain whether most people actually view politics, wealthy people, and powerful people as somehow the enemy of us common folk…
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