During the course of this grueling campaign, I’ve thought many times about what this phrase, “yes we can,” actually means. Somewhere along the way, I began to realize this phrase meant more than I thought.
Obviously, it referred to a Presidential campaign that came out of nowhere and basically had little chance. The campaign started by going up against a candidate who had the establishment, the money, and the power on her side. Assuming it could leap this insurmountable hurdle and win the Democratic primary, the campaign would have to overcome race, religion, and the strongest movitator in history, one which has infused our collective pysche. Fear. Yes we can.
But this slogan referred to much more than that.
It also referred to the planet and America’s place in it. America is bogged down in a war that was based on lies, a war that costs our nation an astonishing amount of money, energy, and human lives. Most of the world believes we went to Iraq for vengeance and oil. We are one of the few nations on earth who refused to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol, a realistic proposal that might actually begin to curb the devestating effects of global warming. As the only superpower on earth, we’ve sat idly by and watched genocide occur in Sudan after promising never again. Between global poverty, AIDS, ethnic cleansing, human rights violations, and environmental devestation, it is up to us, as the beacon of hope, to lead the way. We simply have not been doing so. Yes we can.
It also referred to every person, ethnicity, gender, and race in this nation that has been persecuted, marginalized, and discriminated against. Entire classes of people who’ve given up hope and come to believe, as did their parents and their parent’s parents before them, that it’s just not worth it and it’s just not possible. Yes, we’ve come along way from slavery, Jim Crow, disenfranchisement for women and people of color, lynchings, and cross burning. But the very sad reality is that women are still objectified far more than they are revered and black men adorn the cover of the sports section, the entertainment section, and the most-wanted section with far greater frequency than the front of the classroom, the front of the boardroom, or the front page of the newspaper. I try to look at the world through the eyes of a woman who is working three jobs and raising her children alone. Through the eyes of a man who has been rejected from one hundred jobs straight. Through the eyes of my black son who is just starting to shape his view of the world and his place in that world. Yes we can.
But to me, this slogan stands for a single ideal that far surpurasses anything written above. The ideal of humanity. Not as a species, but as a quality, a condition, a goal toward which we should forever aspire. Goodness, compassion, love, and justice are principles of which all humans have shown themselves capable. Black and white, rich and poor, liberal and conservative. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, agnostic, or athiest. We show it in the love we shower upon our children, the compassion we rain upon our sick, and the resources we pour into our most vulnerable. We illustrate it in our relationships with friends, family and even complete strangers. But we continue to use violence as our primary means for conflict resolution, despite our profound knowledge that an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. We continue to sit by and watch as people across the planet and across the street suffer. We are frozen into inaction by the reality that one billion people go to bed hungry every night, that forty five million working Americans remain without healthcare, and that huge swaths of people have lost all hope for something better. We prioritize profits over our planet. And we continue to be motivated by fear instead of love. Can we change? Can we try something new? Can we cherish our planet and affirm the worth and dignity of every human?
Yes we can.
I woke up this morning and looked at my children. My eyes filled with tears and my heart almost exploded with hope. As a nation, we opened our eyes and looked. Looked at the state of the world, the condition of our cities, and the direction our nation and our world are headed. We looked at ourselves in the mirror. We overcame our fear. And we elected a black man President of the United States of America.
Is it possible? Can we really do this?
Yes we can.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Saturday, August 23, 2008
The Truly Essential Service
A July 11 editorial in the WSJ commended the Madison City Council for getting “back to the basics” and focusing on basic services instead of “grand gestures of social reform.” As a first-year alder, I struggle deeply with how to react to this. I recall year-long and often multi year-long battles over the minimum wage, smoking ban, and paid sick leave with both sadness and exhaustion. I still can’t fathom how measures to help the most vulnerable among us are met with such disdain and why they tear our community apart so dramatically. Although some may call our work “getting back to basics,” my reluctance to initiate sweeping policy initiatives thus far stems almost solely from my disinclination to create these huge rifts in our community.
“Essential services” are not so easily defined. I have constituents who don’t own a car. Fixing a pothole couldn’t be further down their list of priorities. Those living in challenged neighborhoods – most often the victims of crime – do not believe that additional police are the solution. Madison has a growing homeless population, and for them, a basic service is a meal and a warm bed in a safe place. Every alder in this city has constituents who are impacted by the sad reality that Dane County has the fourth worst black / white incarceration discrepency in the nation. We live in one of the wealthiest communities on the planet, yet thousands of our neighbors continue to suffer from our unwillingness to prioritize resources to address hunger, education, affordable housing, job training, AODA issues, domestic violence, and a myriad of other barriers that affect our community every day.
It is hard to imagine these services as anything other than basic. However, regardless of how we define basic services, the sad truth is that we are not focusing nearly enough attention on them. Our public transit system fails to connect those most dependent upon it to basic needs like employment and health care. Our education system slams into revenue caps annually, while the population of minority, special needs, and poor children grows at exponential rates. Our job creation and economic development programs are focused appropriately around our university but fail to recognize the importance of family-supporting jobs for people without four-year or advanced degrees. Our social services struggle to help people with food, shelter, and job training while our spending on police and prisons continues to escalate.
That is only part of the story. Equally disturbing is that our primary method of dealing with this appalling conundrum is the through criminal justice system. We somehow convince ourselves that the arrest-conviction-imprisonment cycle works for society, makes us safer, and costs less.
It is not that the council doesn’t care about these “basic” problems or prioritize their importance. The real issue is that attemps to make investments in people, investments that we know pay themselves back many times over in the long run, continue to tear our community apart and that we fail to consider these investments “essential services.”
We live in such an amazing community, a city that most of us love dearly. Yet we are increasingly surrounded by islands of abject poverty, and I am left bewildered by both our ignorance of their existence and our unwillingness to take immediate and drastic action. We all know that up-front investments pay off in the end: preventing prison is less expensive than incarceration; job training is less expensive than a family unable to make ends meet; and rent assistance is less expensive than eviction and homelessness. We are undergoing a seismic shift in demographics and huge investments will be necessary if we are to create the skilled workforce we need to meet the demands of our economy and retiring baby boomers.
Somewhere within the hundreds of millions of dollars that flow through our local economy every year, there exist the resources to attack these problems with the vigor necessary to ensure that every Madisonian has access to the basic services he or she needs. However, it can’t come from the council alone; the recognition that food and shelter are as essential as potholes and police protection needs to come from all of us. Eighty-four percent of Americans currently feel the country is heading in the wrong direction. One thing is for sure, it is not because we’re focusing too much energy on compassion and equal opportunity.
“Essential services” are not so easily defined. I have constituents who don’t own a car. Fixing a pothole couldn’t be further down their list of priorities. Those living in challenged neighborhoods – most often the victims of crime – do not believe that additional police are the solution. Madison has a growing homeless population, and for them, a basic service is a meal and a warm bed in a safe place. Every alder in this city has constituents who are impacted by the sad reality that Dane County has the fourth worst black / white incarceration discrepency in the nation. We live in one of the wealthiest communities on the planet, yet thousands of our neighbors continue to suffer from our unwillingness to prioritize resources to address hunger, education, affordable housing, job training, AODA issues, domestic violence, and a myriad of other barriers that affect our community every day.
It is hard to imagine these services as anything other than basic. However, regardless of how we define basic services, the sad truth is that we are not focusing nearly enough attention on them. Our public transit system fails to connect those most dependent upon it to basic needs like employment and health care. Our education system slams into revenue caps annually, while the population of minority, special needs, and poor children grows at exponential rates. Our job creation and economic development programs are focused appropriately around our university but fail to recognize the importance of family-supporting jobs for people without four-year or advanced degrees. Our social services struggle to help people with food, shelter, and job training while our spending on police and prisons continues to escalate.
That is only part of the story. Equally disturbing is that our primary method of dealing with this appalling conundrum is the through criminal justice system. We somehow convince ourselves that the arrest-conviction-imprisonment cycle works for society, makes us safer, and costs less.
It is not that the council doesn’t care about these “basic” problems or prioritize their importance. The real issue is that attemps to make investments in people, investments that we know pay themselves back many times over in the long run, continue to tear our community apart and that we fail to consider these investments “essential services.”
We live in such an amazing community, a city that most of us love dearly. Yet we are increasingly surrounded by islands of abject poverty, and I am left bewildered by both our ignorance of their existence and our unwillingness to take immediate and drastic action. We all know that up-front investments pay off in the end: preventing prison is less expensive than incarceration; job training is less expensive than a family unable to make ends meet; and rent assistance is less expensive than eviction and homelessness. We are undergoing a seismic shift in demographics and huge investments will be necessary if we are to create the skilled workforce we need to meet the demands of our economy and retiring baby boomers.
Somewhere within the hundreds of millions of dollars that flow through our local economy every year, there exist the resources to attack these problems with the vigor necessary to ensure that every Madisonian has access to the basic services he or she needs. However, it can’t come from the council alone; the recognition that food and shelter are as essential as potholes and police protection needs to come from all of us. Eighty-four percent of Americans currently feel the country is heading in the wrong direction. One thing is for sure, it is not because we’re focusing too much energy on compassion and equal opportunity.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Priorities 101
I am growing so weary of the news that keeps reminding us, repeatedly, that our criminal justice system is beyond repair and needs a complete overhaul. But I grow even wearier of our inexplicable unwillingness to learn this lesson and take a different path. The most recent news is astounding. The Pew Center on the States announced yesterday that one in every hundred American adults is in jail or prison, for the first time in history. Yes, history. Like, forever.
Do you feel safer? Do you feel more secure? Does anyone feel as though this straight-line shot toward 2.3 million adults in prison has made us happier? We have more people in prison than any country in the world (yes, that would include China, with five times the population and, supposedly, one thousand times the human rights violations). In 1988, 20 years ago, the 50 United States spent less than $11 billion on corrections. Last year, we spent $49 billion.
Do we really believe that spending 77 cents on corrections for every dollar we spend on education, as we do in Wisconsin, is the best use of our precious resources? And this doesn’t even begin to discuss the racial disparity I’ve written about in the past. The Pew Study once again confirmed the astonishing realities of this: 1 in 30 men age 20-34 are behind bars, but it’s 1 in 9 for black men in that age group.
It is not hard to imagine, in the not too distant future, a scenario in which we’d spend more on corrections that we do on education. It is also hard not to imagine why our schools are crumbling, our class sizes are increasing, and the US is falling behind third world countries in its ability to educate its children.
Anyone else ready to try something new?
Do you feel safer? Do you feel more secure? Does anyone feel as though this straight-line shot toward 2.3 million adults in prison has made us happier? We have more people in prison than any country in the world (yes, that would include China, with five times the population and, supposedly, one thousand times the human rights violations). In 1988, 20 years ago, the 50 United States spent less than $11 billion on corrections. Last year, we spent $49 billion.
Do we really believe that spending 77 cents on corrections for every dollar we spend on education, as we do in Wisconsin, is the best use of our precious resources? And this doesn’t even begin to discuss the racial disparity I’ve written about in the past. The Pew Study once again confirmed the astonishing realities of this: 1 in 30 men age 20-34 are behind bars, but it’s 1 in 9 for black men in that age group.
It is not hard to imagine, in the not too distant future, a scenario in which we’d spend more on corrections that we do on education. It is also hard not to imagine why our schools are crumbling, our class sizes are increasing, and the US is falling behind third world countries in its ability to educate its children.
Anyone else ready to try something new?
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