Avid sports fans form strong bonds with their teams. Allegiances to sports teams can span generations and the emotional bonds can often feel as strong as blood relations. You can spot a devoted fan, including me, by the fact that we refer to our teams in the first person. “We Won!” or “We played really bad this week”.

Almost a year ago I remember having a conversation with several of my best friends about what’s wrong with our government and why so many Americans have given up on it. We all agreed that the typical response to the word “government” was to wince (maybe even get a little sick to your stomach). We rarely ever speak about the government in the first person. The more people become disgusted with government, the less interested we all are in making it work and the fewer good people actually want to work in government. Of course, that just leads to a less effective government and that leads to more disgust with the idea of having government “help”. The cycle has been churning for a very long time. The result is that government is no longer “us”. It’s “them”. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve heard during the election that addressed the government this way.

So what happens when this philosophy sets in? In my eyes, the Bush administration was the result of almost 30 years of our government leaders teaching us to speak about our government in the third person. I’m sure this idea goes back for centuries, but Ronald Reagan was the first president that actually voiced this to the American people so clearly.

"Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem." – Ronald Reagan

That statement helped him win an election and began a wave of change in America. Unfortunately, it’s like McDonald’s telling its customers that French fries are the sole cause for diabetes. There might be some shred of truth behind the claim, but it wouldn’t be good for business. I spent a couple of decades buying into Reagan’s rhetoric. It was drilled into my head in business school. The sport of attacking government has replaced baseball as the national pastime. That attitude and the resulting decades of deregulation and privatization of important government functions that sprang from this philosophy have horribly failed our nation. Now we are in a place where any leader’s call to action or a simple suggestion of sacrifice is labeled “socialism” (or worse). Not only is that a misunderstanding of socialism, it’s a miserably dim view of American patriotism.

My friends and I came up with the idea that we need a public relations firm to sells us on us. We need somebody to sell us on our own ability to work as a team without screwing everything up. We need motivation and a hint of confidence that we could actually change this mess. My friends and I figured that campaign promises come and go, but once in office, politicians rarely attempt to motivate the nation or involve citizens in getting the job done. Maybe politicians refer to citizens as “them”?

One of the reasons I voted for Barack Obama is that I suspected he might actually understand this concept. Yesterday, his transition staff launched a site at change.gov to help us change the way we interact with government. He’s actually planning on extending the kind of grass roots organizational empowerment used in his campaign to involve us in the process of changing the nation. It looks like he’s decided to make sure that when he takes office we all feel like we are part of his transition team. We are going to transition the government together. The site includes important agenda items, information on how a presidential transition works, what staff appointments and accomplishments are being made, and ways we can get involved during and after the transition. The site even includes links to the transition resources that are given to every incoming president’s staff. Is this the start of a more transparent and responsible government? Are you curious?

So here is my challenge to everyone….

Let’s try on the word “we” for a while. Instead of waiting for government to fix itself before we will buy into it, maybe the government needs our buy-in before it could ever get fixed. Why not try? We can always go back to “they”. That’s easy. We can elect Sara Palin or Mitt Romney in 2012 and let them slash and burn what’s left in Washington and rekindle the fire of self-loathing "NO WE CAN'T" politics. But what if we can actually make this work? Wouldn’t that be so much better? Wouldn’t we be in better shape if we had a government we respected?