Why Politics? - The power to make meaningful change
by Charlene Lee
At New Politics Leadership Academy, we dedicate every day to training servant leaders and transforming our politics, but in my personal life, I didn’t always understand the urgent need for political change.
I grew up in an upper middle class suburb in New Jersey, where it felt like everything around us was the same: nice neighborhoods with colonial homes and quarter acre yards. Each day seemed routine: some kind of practice before and after school, dinner at six, homework, and then bedtime. The most injustice I saw was the plight of stray animals. Because of this, I devoted myself to animal welfare.
It wasn’t until I went to college that I started becoming aware of the inequities rampant throughout society. It’s embarrassing to admit this now, but I was shocked that some people owned private jets while others were sleeping on the streets, and that racism and sexism were still such ubiquitous forces.
This realization began my quest to figure out how I could do my part to tackle the inequities I was now seeing everywhere around me.
What I saw is that politics is power — the power to affect change on an unparalleled scale. Nonprofits play a critical role complementing good public policy and ameliorating the consequences of bad policy; for-profits have the resources to make great change, but their incentives aren’t always oriented toward the public good. While both sectors are able to influence — and are affected by — public policy, they are not the ones directly creating and voting on it. A new law or executive action can achieve or negate what others may have spent years or millions of dollars trying to achieve.
This realization is what brought me to New Politics. Getting our political system to work is the only way we’re going to make sustained progress as a country. We can argue about how to do it — and we should, because there’ll always be a healthy debate between political ideologies and about what is “right”. But at the end of the day, politics is where we work out those differences and ultimately move forward together. It’s where big, meaningful change happens.
We might be frustrated by our politics but we still need politics. We need good politicians who are motivated first and foremost by doing what’s best for the country, not themselves — because they’re the ones who have the power to improve the systems in our country. That’s why I believe so strongly in the power of politics, and why I dedicate myself to our mission at New Politics every day.