Category Archives: Ideas

Ideas

An Election 2012 Mini-Dispatch: America deserves a strong alternative to Obama…but Mitt’s not it

In advance of election 2012, here’s my take — America deserves a strong alternative to Obama…but Mitt’s not it — in video and written form:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIxz0Jy9zPs

Part 1: A nation in trouble

Our Economy, Our Democracy and Our Earth are in trouble.

With regard to the Economy:

  • A financial crash that destroyed $11 trillion four years ago has not been investigated and prosecuted.
  • Students are still trained for lame 20th century corporate life instead of disruptive and innovative 21st century start up life.
  • and Economic inequality is on the rise, ripping America in two and calling into question the continued existence of the American dream

With regard to our Democracy:

  • The branch of government that was designed to remain closest to the people — our American Congress — has an approval rating in the high single digits.
  • Congressmen spend an average of 30-70% of their day dialing donors for dollars, resulting in Congress to be reliant not on the People alone, as the Constitution states, but rather on the Funders.
  • and our elections have become national jokes, leaving us no more informed about federal issues than we were before they started and, worse off, leaving us wrongly believing that democracy is about our role as spectators of the powerful and not as generators of change ourselves.

With regard to our Earth:

  • Global warming is real and the most powerful nation on Earth has yet to develop a serious response.
  • Drone strikes abroad, in addition to killing over 176 children, have become the recruiting tool of choice for militants.
  • Martin Luther King’s call to acknowledge that we are in an “inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny” with our fellow man worldwide remains unanswered when we treat rising education levels and job opportunities in other countries as something to fear.

Part 2: Failed Democrats 

And yet, the contemporary incarnation of the Democratic Party fails to provide a vision to meet these challenges.

  • It has become a reactionary party, defending the glorious victories of the past — Social Security, Medicare, women’s health rights and the like — without pairing that necessary conservatism with a progressive vision for the future.
  • It has failed to prosecute the financial crisis nor empower the poor.
  • Despite claiming to not wish to “play the game better” in Washington, but rather “change the way the game is played,” President Obama — who ran as the transformational anti-Clinton — has embraced the Clintonian politics of transaction and triangulation, utilizing cultural wedge strategies to micro-target voters by demographic, thus continuing the culture war he dreamed of moving us past.  All the while, he has failed to address the implicit corruption of epic proportions that money in politics has been wreaking on our legislative system.
  • The party has failed to speak truth to corporate power on global warming and has continued the militaristic rhetoric of the Cheney era.
  • Worst of all, it has embraced a politics of personality, inspiring young people like myself to exercise our citizenship not through civic creativity and action in our own communities, but rather through our continued spectatorial support of politicians in Washington acting as proxy citizens for us.

It is no surprise that such a party is polling at no more than 51-52% while facing off against such a weak candidate and a tired, occasionaly-grotesque opposition party.

Indeed, we desperately need an alternative.

Part 3: Inadequate Romney

Unfortunately, Mitt Romney and the contemporary incarnation of the Republican Party is not the alternative that we need.

Their three central claims to the Presidency — that Mitt Romney knows how to create jobs, that Paul Ryan knows how to cut the deficit, and that the Congressional Republicans know how to be bipartisan — are not credible.

3a. Romney is not a job creator

Romney’s claim that his business experience proves his ability to create jobs fails to withstand scrutiny.

Bain Capital is not a standard firm in the Capitalism 101 sense of the term.  It does not make money by selling a valuable good or providing an excellent service, like Apple and Starbucks do… or George Romney’s American Motors Corporation did.  It also is not a standard venture capital firm, which makes money by taking supportive risks on entrepreneurs that want to sell valuable goods or provide excellent services.

It used to be, when Romney helped get Staples off the ground.  But then Bain Capital changed, seeking higher profits.  It became a leveraged buyout operation, which followed a different playbook: seek out a struggling business, put down a small amount of money, get a big bank to put down a lot more, use the two to buy a controlling stake in the business thus buying it out, charge management fees for your ‘consultations’ in turning the business around, occasionally call in ‘special dividends’ as payouts to you and other stakeholders, try to turn the firm around to an IPO, sell your stake, and leave… leaving the target business to pay off your original bank debt and management fees and leaving you to profit irregardless of whether the company makes it far past its turnaround.

Whether Romney’s tenure at such an operation is good or bad is for you to decide.  But what it is definitely not is a credential as a job creator.  A 2008 study showed that the job growth of companies bought by private-equity firms is about one percent slower than that of average similar firms. Even Marc Wolpow, a former Bain colleague of Romney’s, has stated: “job creation was not Romney’s or Bain’s or the industry’s primary objective.  The objective of the leveraged buyout business is maximizing returns for the investor.” And in fact, even Bain Capital’s record at maximizing returns is mixed.  Bain’s returns on 67 of 77 deals were lower than what you would have earned from investing in an index fund at the time.  Only ten investments were home runs and four of those ended in bankruptcy for the targeted firms.

Romney likes to talk about how creative entrepreneurs move our country forward through taking risks, creating jobs and producing valuable products.  I agree…I just don’t buy that Mitt Romney’s work at Bain Capital resembles entrepreneurship: taking risks, creating jobs, or producing valuable products.  And many who do know something about entrepreneurship — like Howard Schultz of Starbucks, Michael Bloomberg of Bloomberg and various tech leaders in Silicon Valley — have endorsed Romney’s opponents.  Take Gary Johnson, Romney’s Libertarian Party opponent as a contrast: he founded Big J Enterprises in 1976 as a one-man mechanical contracting business.  He eventually grew Big J into a multi-million dollar corporation, hiring 1,000 employees.  By the time he sold the company in 1999, it was one of New Mexico’s leading construction companies.  If Romney had a similar background, his claim to being a job creator would be much more credible.

Even more, Obama’s jobs record isn’t as bad as Romney casts it.  The trend of increasing month-to-month job losses turned around immediately after the stimulus bill passed.  As Michael Grunwald reports, “top economic forecasters estimate that the stimulus produced about 2.5 million jobs and added between 2.1 percent and 3.8 percent to our gross domestic product.”  And the stimulus’ green energy investments (like Solyndra) that are so often criticized by Romney?  The program as a whole had only a 2.6% default rate… much less than the failure rate of the investments of Bain Capital.

3b. Ryan is not a deficit hawk

The second central claim of the Romney campaign is that he has a plan to balance the federal budget and roll back the national debt.  They doubled-down on this claim by selecting Paul Ryan as a running mate, who had gained prominence through his famed Path to Prosperity budget.

Unfortunately, Paul Ryan is a deficit hawk like Mitt Romney is a job creator…he is not.  In 2001, he complained that Bush’s $1.2 trillion tax cut was too small.  He lobbied Republicans to pass the 2003 deficit-financed prescription-drug benefit.  In 2006, he opposed a measure requiring that any new spending or tax cuts be offset by new revenue or spending cuts.  He opposed the Bowles-Simpson plan to reduce the deficit (in part because it included a tax increase).  His opposition to deficit-lowering increases to the top-bracket income tax and capital gains tax rates is based on the claim that low rates lead to economic growth which in turn lowers the deficit… despite the fact that a recent Congressional Research Service report shows that changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and capital gains tax rate are not correlated with economic growth.

His budget proposal bases its claim of deficit reduction on promises to eliminate trillions of dollars’ worth of tax deductions, but fails to give details as to which ones. Even more, when it does give details, they’re disturbing.  Because Ryan’s plan does not raise taxes, two-thirds of Ryan’s cuts affect programs for the poor. In Ryan’s budget, proposed sacrifice for the wealthy, the middle class and seniors is vague and distant; proposed sacrifice for the poor is detailed and immediate.  For example, as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops pointed out in a letter to Congress on budgetary respect for “human life and dignity,” Ryan’s Plan threatens the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps feed millions of households.

Obama administration policies (namely the stimulus) have added $1.44 trillion to the deficit, but the entirety of the Obama deficit is smaller than the deficit-financed Bush tax cuts alone.  Romney, in not putting tax increases on the table (with the exception of vague loophole-closing rhetoric), has failed to provide a compelling case that he will do better than Obama at addressing the national debt.  And Ryan has proved himself to be less of a deficit hawk than an anti-tax ideologue.

3c. Congressional Republicans are not committed to bipartisanship

The final major claim to the Presidency that Mitt Romney puts forward is that he — unlike President Obama — is committed to bipartisanship.  Again, both halves of this claim — first, that Obama was inadequately bipartisan and second, that Romney and the Congressional Republicans have proven to be — do not hold water.

On the policy front, Obama was exceptionally bipartisan from the outset.  He invited conservative Evangelical Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural.  He sat down in his transition with conservative writers, like Bill Kristol and Peggy Noonan, before meeting with liberal writers.  He made sure that tax cuts composed a third of his stimulus bill.  He completely ignored calls from the Left-wing of his party to pursue a single-payer health care bill, instead choosing an individual mandate system inspired by a Republican Massachusetts governor.  He continued the Bush/Cheney anti-terror policies, extended the Bush tax cuts and adopted the GOP-favored Cap-and-Trade response to climate change instead of the Left-wing favored Carbon Tax response.  His education policy is widely praised by Republicans and criticized by those from his Left.  He engaged in long budget deliberations with John Boehner throughout most of 2011.  This is not the tale of a partisan ideologue.

Meanwhile, early in Obama’s term, Republican leader Mitch McConnell stated: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”  Pete Session echoed: “The purpose of the minority is to become the majority.”  Indeed, Congressional Republicans have successfully executed on a plan of blanket refusal to participate in any bipartisan achievements. Conservative and respected political scientist Norman Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute recently published a piece titled: “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the Problem.”  It is worth quoting at length:

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional.  In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warrented.  Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics.  It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

Democrats are hardly blameless, and they have their own extreme wing and their own predilection for hardball politics.  But these tendencies do not routinely veer outside the normal bounds of robust politics.  If anything, under the presidencies of Clinton and Obama, the Democrats have become more of a status-quo party.  They are centrist protectors of government.

As proud conservative Andrew Sullivan points out, the contemporary incarnation of the GOP resembles the radicals that have always been the enemies of conservativism.   Whereas conservatism has always been a philosophy that “tends to argue that less equals more, that restraint is sometimes more powerful than action, that delay is often wiser than headlong revolution” and that reality is more important than ideology, the contemporary GOP holds that 97% consenses on climate science aren’t to be trusted, that the deficit can be closed without increasing taxes, that the Constitution should be swiftly amended to criminalize abortion, that new preemptive wars in the Middle East should be on the table, that the President should be openly accused of having “Kenyan, anti-colonial values”, and that a sitting Congressmen should be able to accuse 70-80 of his fellow members of being Communists without recourse.  As Republican Dick Lugar put it, upon losing his primary to a Tea Party challenger who had accused Lugar of working too much with Obama: “Republicans cannot admit to any nuance in policy on climate change. Republican members are now expected to take pledges against any tax increases. For two consecutive presidential nomination cycles, GOP candidates competed with one another to express the most strident anti-immigration view, even at the risk of alienating a huge voting bloc.”

Romney fails to provide a compelling case that he will stem this radicalization and has yet to demonstrate courage in combatting it.

Part 4: Vision

4a. An era in need of a vision

 Two decades-old coalitions are reaching the ends of their arcs:

The 20th century conservative movement that started with Goldwater, ascended with Reagan and expanded with Bush Jr. is fracturing and greying.  If Romney loses tonight, Republicans will have lost the popular vote in five of the last six Presidential elections.  Party leaders know that they are failing to inspire young people, Black people, Hispanic people, gay people and single women.  As Senator Lindsey Graham has said: “if we lose this election, there is only one explanation – demographics.”  As a Bush official echoed: “We’re in a demographic boa constrictor and it gets tighter every single election.”

The late-20th century Democratic party coalition that re-emerged with Clinton and peaked with Obama in 2008 has also failed to inspire a lasting majority.  When the Republican Party becomes more inclusive of minorities, gay people, and pro-choice women, the Democratic Party’s majority coalition will fracture.  Soon enough, they will no longer be able coast on being “the party that does not have Michele Bachmann in it.”

Meanwhile, dissatisfaction with American political life increases with each news cycle and calls for fundamental reform grow louder with each election.

Times like these provide an opening for a strong, passionate vision for our new century; one that can jump-start our 21st century movement.

4b. The proceduralists

And yet, Mitt Romney’s political personality seems defined by his lack of vision.  When asked about his ideology by the Wall Street Journal in 2007, Romney responded, “Obviously, I have — just like in the consulting world — I have ‘concepts’ that I believe.”  “What Romney values most,” Ezra Klein writes, “is Management.  A lifetime of data has proven to him that he’s extraordinarily, even uniquely, good at managing and leading organizations, projects and people.  It’s those skills, rather than specific policy ideas, that he sees as his unique contribution.The irony here is that the other major politician of our time defined by his lack of ideological vision is Barack Obama.  What Obama values most is Facilitation.  He ascended in politics as a post-ideological politician, skilled in the procedures of pragmatic deliberation.  “He revels in the back and forth,” Lawrence Kudlow writes, “and he wants to keep the dialogue going with conservatives.”  He was elected President of the Harvard Law Review not due to a vision for the Review, but rather due to his ability to be trusted by both the conservative and the liberal blocs of the editorial staff.  In 1998, after helping to pass a campaign-finance bill in the Illinois Senate, he boasted in his community paper less about the merits of the bill and more that “the process was truly bipartisan from the start.”  The Audacity of Hope was filled less with a vision for the future, but rather a description of how our politics can transcend partisan and ideological strategy.  “If there was a single unifying argument that defined Obamaism from his earliest days in politics to his Presidential campaign,” Ryan Lizza write, “it was the idea of post-partisanship.  He was proposing himself as a transformative figure, the man who would spring the lock.”

Both men, at their core, are Proceduralists: they believe that any given cause matters less than the procedure by which you make decisions while executing on that cause.  Mitt’s style of procedure is management consulting: “Let me see the data,” Mitt told the Wall Street Journal in 2007. “I want to see the client’s data, the competitors’ data.  I want to see all the data.”  Barack’s style of procedure is community deliberation: “Let’s get everyone in the room,” Barack probably said at some point. “I want to hear our views, I want to hear our opponent’s views. I want to talk to everyone.”  

The thing about proceduralists is they are really good at being in charge once the creative challenge of setting a vision has already been met.  They’re much better long-term executors than the visionaries are.  But in an era in need of a vision, proceduralists don’t have much to offer.    They might very well end up doing “more good than bad,” making a rusty era slightly more efficient.  But they’re not the Teddy Roosevelt our time calls for.

4c.  Who is the alternative?

I’m probably going to end up voting for the proceduralist I trust over the proceduralist I don’t, but I shouldn’t fool myself: Second-term Barack Obama is not the alternative to first-term Barack Obama that we desparately need.

Who is it then?  Who is to provide a vision for the next American century?  Who is going to seriously address the crises facing Our Economy, Our Democracy, and Our Earth?  Who are we waiting for?

You.

‘The system’ has not produced major candidates who have the vision to build the next great American century.  Fortunately, this is America, so we don’t have to wait for ‘the system’ to make something happen.  Our generation has the tools and the passion to build it ourselves.

So let’s not make the same mistakes we did last time:

  • treating Election Day as the end of our involvement in American democratic life;
  • believing that all we need to do is watch powerful people make change for us;
  • treating the political areas outside of federal government policy — like our local communities — as not worthy of time and intelligence;
  • ignoring the great change we can make outside of law and statecraft, with the tools of business, social enterprise, media, education, community initiatives, and the internet.
  • forgetting that, as Howard Zinn wrote, “historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action;”
  • and failing to grasp, as Dr. King reminded, “that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.”

An insightful 2008 Presidential Candidate once said: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. You are the ones you’ve been waiting for. You are the change that you seek.”

I think it’s time we start to take him at his word.

Community Projects, Ideas

Civic Creativity: Democracy as a Platform for Our Public Projects

For my senior thesis, I wrote a piece called Civic Creativity: Democracy as a Platform for Our Public Projects.  You can download the work here.

Here’s a summary from within the work:

The first big idea is that, for the individual citizen, there is a new mode of civic action – independent of voting, deliberating, and protest – which I call: civic creativity. It is defined as “the imagining and implementing of public projects over multiple platforms.”  In Part 1, I will describe the history of the three commonplace modes of civic action (voting, deliberating and protest), define civic creativity as new mode of civic action, and compare civic creativity to the other three modes.

The second big idea is that the individual act of civic creativity, being a social and collective practice, has ramifications for our understanding of democratic society as a whole— that there is a new way to understand democratic governance that goes hand-in-hand with this new mode of civic action: democracy as a platform for our public projects. In Part 2, I will describe this new way of thinking. In this understanding, governance is not just Government— the institution commonly referred to as the government is not the only force that governs our lives. Rather, the model acknowledge that a network of various institutions – the media, corporations, religion, web platform architecture, culture, language, neighbors, foundations, universities, civic groups, and more – also govern our lives. Each of these governing forces are themselves governed by rules. To turn a civic creation idea into a reality, you must navigate the various “platforms of governance,” convincing various people and entities that your creations and purposes are worthy of their support.

Plus, here’s the table of contents to pique your interest:

Introduction: A New Paradigm Shift in Democratic Theory

  1. Strange civic actions
  2. A disconnect between such actions and common civic concepts
  3. Paradigm shifts in democratic theory.
  4. Outline of the argument for a new democratic model

Part 1: A New Mode of Civic Action 15

  1. Beyond civic engagement finger-wagging
  2. The three dominant modes of civic action: a history of voting, deliberation and protest
  3. Another turn in democratic thought
  4. Gaps in the three dominant modes of civic action
  5. How the three dominant modes capture and fail to capture the new civic actions
  6. Civic Creativity: A New Mode of Civic Action
    1. Spearheading instead of just participating
    2. Problem solving rather than law
    3. Decentralized work instead of a focus on the state
  7. A broader understanding of civic creativity

Part 2: A New Understanding of Democratic Governance 79

  1. The restricted spectrum of democratic models
  2. The restrictive assumption of the two models
  3. Democracy as a network of platforms of governance
    1. Governance is more than government 87
    2. Platforms of governance have their own specific rules and procedures 90
    3. Multi-platform governance and civic creators 92
    4. The ramifications of multi-platform governance 93
  4. Democracy as a platform for our public projects 96

Conclusion: On Generativity

I hope to develop these ideas into a book. You can follow progress on that book’s development here.

Ideas, Press

MLK Jr. Day Celebration Speech @ St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Cambridge, MA

This week, I gave a speech at the Cambridge Peace Commission’s MLK Jr. Day Celebration in Cambridge, MA.  Here‘s the audio file. The Saguaro Seminar — Robert Putnam and Tom Sander’s initiative to study social capital and civic engagement in America — published the speech in full with annotations.  Here it is, with their annotated links:

Hello, everyone — it is an honor to be here at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church on my favorite holiday of the year, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I’m happy that MLK day is the first holiday of the year, because you start the New Year with all these personal New Year’s resolutions, and you say, “I’m going to cut back on the sweets”, “I’m going to make time to go running everyday” and then right about around this weekend, two weeks into the year, you’ve given up on all them… and you’re feeling down and don’t know what to do. And then Martin Luther King, Jr. Day comes along and reminds you that you can start your New Year off with not just personal resolutions but community and citizen resolutions — like “I’m going to cut back on my pre-judgment of others” ,“I’m going to make time to go help out and speak out and act out more around school or church or my local community every day” — and those are resolutions that are harder in practice, but easier to fight for, because you’re not just fighting for yourself.

But I’m getting ahead of myself — my name is Pete Davis and I am a student down the road at Harvard, and I am here today because I had the great pleasure of being part of a recreation of an important Civil Rights project when this past summer I rode with 39 other students, a team of PBS cameras and a handful of Civil Rights Movement heroes in a recreation of the 1961 Freedom Ride. And I’d like to take part of my time here to look backward and tell a brief, yet harrowing, story about what one Civil Rights project accomplished in the 1960s, and then take the other part of my time here to look forward and share what one young, wide-eyed college kid from a small town in Virginia thinks about what we might just be able to accomplish in the 2010s.

In 1961, a group of young people led by Congress of Racial Equality DirectorJames Farmer wanted to test if adc_cropSupreme Court decision integrating interstate bus travel was being implemented on the ground. So, 13 riders — six white, seven black, including one future Congressman John Lewis — set out on Greyhound and Trailways buses down South. When they got to Atlanta, they had a brief reception hosted by the big man, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. himself. They wanted him to come on the ride as well, but he pulled a few of their leaders aside and said, “I’m not going to get on the buses with you, and if I were you, I probably wouldn’t go into Alabama…The Alabama Klan is preparing quite a welcome.” And, like good young people, they didn’t listen to him and kept going on to Alabama. And like wise, older people, King was right. The riders were met with Klan violence, they were firebombed and some were even beaten with lead pipes. But they made it all the way down to Birmingham, Alabama.

The Kennedy administration got word of this, and Bobby Kennedy called for a “cooling down” period after this first round of Freedom Riders got home. But, a young woman from Nashville by the name of Diane Nash would have none of it, and she organized a set of Tennessee students to leave school – during their final exams – and become a new set of riders to bus down to Birmingham. One night, after brutal beatings in Montgomery, these new Freedom Riders packed into Reverend Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church and heard James Farmer, the great Fred Shuttlesworth (who passed away last year), and Dr. King, give rousing speeches as a mob gathered outside and threatened to attack the attendees. Dr. King had to get on the phone with the Kennedy administration to get the National Guard there for protection. These Freedom Riders were creating quite the ruckus.

They boarded a bus to Jackson, Mississippi and were promptly arrested and sent to the infamous Parchman Prison. The Mississippi Governor thought he had squashed ‘em — they’re now just stuck in Parchman Prison…what are they gonna do? Well, as one historian put it, they responded, “Fine, we’ll go to Parchman, and we’ll fill Parchman up, and we’ll have Parchman be the next site of the Civil Rights Movement.” And it became so. Hundreds of people across the country boarded buses, and headed to Jackson. They filled up the prison, and kept their morale by singing to their jailers, “Buses are a comin’ oh yeah, Buses are a comin’ oh yeah, Better get you ready oh yeah.” They took 300 riders of different races, religions, different regions, different political philosophies…and turned Parchman into a University of Non-Violence…a place to become more committed, more tough…and as one guy put it, to become “the shock-troops of the movement.” On September 22, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued its order: the “whites only” signs came down at bus and rail stations across the South. Two years later, President Kennedy — who had wanted to ignore civil rights and focus on foreign policy for his Presidency, who only had to start paying attention because, “those darn agitators” (as the Riders were called), had caused a ruckus — gave a speech in June 1963, calling on Congress to pass legislation to end Jim Crow altogether. The Freedom Riders — after arrests, beatings, and warnings to slow down by not only the Administration but also Civil Rights Movement leaders, themselves — had won.

And it was 50 years later that I and other college students had the great blessing of recreating the ride on our own bus…except, in this time around, the bus had Wi-fi and air conditioning; and lacked the threat of arrests and Klan mobs, fortunately. And I want to spend the rest of my time here talking about what I learned from this experience — one that involved seeing former Jim Crow cities up close and personal, talking with Civil Rights leaders new and old, and, most importantly, getting to know 39 diverse student activists from all across the country.
And I know what you’re expecting: a heartwarming tale from me about how we students — black, white, and brown, 50 years later — held hands in a big circle, sang “We Shall Overcome,” and declared racism over. Though we did hold hands at times, and though we did sing We Shall Overcome so many times that I was considering singing We Shall Overcome-the-singing-of-We Shall Overcome… that’s not the tale I’m going to tell here today. Because we all know that resting too long on our laurels of the victories of yesterday is a recipe for not opening up our eyes to the injustices of today. So, instead here’s Three Lessons from the ride with our sight set on tomorrow.

The first thing I learned on our Ride was that most people in the Civil Rights Movement did not have Civil Rights as their number one cause. Everyone, fromJim Zwerg — a white man who was beaten with a lead pipe in Alabama — toDiane Nash — the lead organizer of the second round of the rides — had an underlying loyalty that was the foundation of all their actions in their surface level causes: a loyalty to Non-Violence. When Zwerg and Nash spoke to us, they hardly focused on racial discrimination — they wanted to spend their time sharing with us their philosophy and lifestyle of non-violence.

To the Freedom Riders, to Martin Luther King: nonviolent resistance was not the absence of violence– it was the presence of what Nash called Agapic energy, from the Greek term ‘agape’, meaning brotherly, sisterly love or love of mankind. It was a belief that people were never your enemy– unjust political systems, unjust economic systems, unjust attitudes were your enemy. And you can attack those systems, without attacking the people that participated in them. It was a belief that oppression always requires the cooperation of the oppressed, and that it could end if only you respected yourself enough and if only you reflected enough on how you were participating in your own oppression and if only you were brave enough to stop participating,

They did not see non-violence or agapic energy as a ‘lovey-dovey’ ‘give peace a chance, man’ concept. They would not have liked to be known just as pacifists… they were activists! They would not have described themselves as having no weapons or as not waging war. They saw non-violence as a powerful, strong strategy, a weapon…the only weapon they had in this fight…and an energy that was not born out of thin air…it was based on a serious theory of how to win conflicts, and solve problems for justice… a philosophy that was put best when Dr. King explained that: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” And, indeed, they couldn’t have won if it was a violent conflict — they were churchmen and women up against the state police and governments in the South, with their batons, and guns, and in the case of Sheriff Bull Connor in Alabama, tanks. But what they could do, is contrast their “dignified, disciplined, non-violent actions” against the other side’s grotesque reaction of violence, leaving no way — for the millions who would watch on TV — to confuse their confrontations.

Martin-Luther-King-Statue-creased-forehead-Credit-NPS-GOVmlk3And when they learned that philosophy — in long training sessions for the Riders, where they practiced being beaten and not responding — and when they committed to it, when they put in the hard work and discipline to live by its principles… it worked. Out of that foundation, came more surface level tactics. Out of those tactics came victories. And if we want to learn from the Civil Rights movement to repeat their success today…if we only looked at those tactics, we might never understand what made the Civil Rights movement so successful — we have to look at their deep commitment and loyalty to foundational principles about how justice is won in history. And that’s the lesson for today’s justice movements: If we don’t have an equally strong commitment to foundational principles in our movements — if we believe we’re only fighting for environmental reform or gay rights or urban renewal… only our specific issues and not, also…, always…, at the same time… re-affirming our commitment to agapic love, to our civic connection our fellow community members — …then we are … like a sail without a mast… just flapping around in the wind…not harnessing energy to move society in any direction.

So, given that lesson…why don’t we just do what they did? Why don’t we just believe in non-violence and use their tactics…get on buses, start marching, provoke some confrontations with the police? Well, people have tried that. People have taken to the streets, people have had millions at marches in my lifetime. People have occupied public spaces and provoked the police. And yet, we have not had as big a victory for justice in my lifetime as King did in his. And I think that’s because, as I learned in the second big lesson on my trip — a lesson that came to me as I saw the contrast between how the elders on the trip talked about the problems of their day and the students on the trip talked about the problems of ours — the second big lesson is that the problems of today are taking different forms than they did back in the 60’s!

Back then, we had Jim Crow, explicit racism and segregation by the government. Today, segregation is not by law, but by structural circumstance, as segregation plagues not our drinking fountains nor our diners, but becomes a good way to describe how our justice system and our prisons work, when 1 in 3 black men will go be imprisoned at some point in their life. Back then, explicit racial discrimination in employment was commonplace throughout the South. Today, there’s a whole division of the Justice Department to challenge explicit racism on the job, but, today, black unemployment still stands at more than twice the rate of white unemployment, with almost 1 in 5 black men in June 2011 being without work. Racism burbles up inside of us in unexpected places, as our focus on overcoming racism here at home might sometimes forget that it is also racist to believe that a human life is less worthwhile, more disposable — more collateral and incidental and less sacred — if it’s an Afghani or Pakistani life or an indigenous person’s life.  We have struck a strong blow to the type of racism that allows leaders to make slurs publicly without recourse or state legislatures to write the word “colored” into legislation. But the problems of racial disparity remain, in new forms… that can’t be overcome with the stroke of President’s pen.

And the same is true for Materialism. In King’s time, the environmental movement was just in its infancy, and the concept of widespread corporate watchdogging was just an idea in Ralph Nader’s head. And today, we do see blowback against the incessant pursuit of material things, as community gardens, farmer’s markets, car sharing, slow food movements, and lifestyles around living on less are cropping up, reminding us that there still is a live belief that people are more important than, as Dr. King put it, “machines and computers, profit motives and property rights.” But, today we face unending advertising on half a dozen types of screens telling us that all our problems will be solved, all our insecurities will be vanquished, and all our deepest wants will be realized…if only we buy one more thing, use one more service. Today, our activists that are fighting to move our nation from, as Dr. King called them to do, a “thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society” are facing a steeper climb, as the monied interests grip ever tighter on the neck of our democratic institutions.

And the same is true for Militarism. In King’s time, we had tens of thousands of American men and Vietnamese men, women and children killed in a grueling war. Today, we face no draft, and less civilian casualties in our militaristic pursuits overseas. But, today, we have even more trouble breaking the cycle of — what King called — the “madness of militarism” and the “self-defeating effects of physical violence” when wars are felt less back home, because the fighters are drones or soldiers from an economic bracket we never interact with.

Whereas Jim Crow and Vietnam was a tumor on a part of society, many of the problems of today are more like sicknesses in the bloodstream, unable to be pinpointed. There used to be a Civil Rights song, “O Freedom”, where you’d sing about the specific thing you wanted to overcome… No Segregation, No Segregation, No Segregation over me…or No Bull Connor, No Bull Connor over me. But with problems as complex as today, what can we sing about in our O Freedoms? No more prison-industrial complex, no more prison-industrial complex over me…no more global warming caused by various forms of carbon emissions, no more global warming caused by various forms of carbon emission over me…no more deregulation of the financial industry…over me…you get the point.

In the age of 24 hours news blaring and blog posts and tweets and status updates whizzing around our heads…it gets confusing even knowing what’s happening and feels with these multiple storylines going at once. Our time feels new and it feels dreadfully old. It feels like networked freedom and it feels like the old power structure is still in charge. It feels like a black president but more black people in poverty. It feels like a shiny new iPhone and a hollowed out Detroit. It feels like we don’t know what the problem is and we all know what the problem is. It feels like the solutions were made 15 years ago and are waiting to be implemented and like they’re just 15 years into the future out of our reach.

And for us who want to change the world, who want to walk in King’s footsteps, we sometimes just don’t know where to start:

Whereas our heroes knew their adversaries, ours aren’t in a single form.

Whereas our heroes fought clearer, visual problems, ours are invisible and baked into institutions all around us.

Whereas they had a sense of what solutions looked like, we have trouble having a clue.

In the confusion about the content of the solutions, we latch onto forms of the past – we think to be an activist means to be a marcher, a rallier, a person that needs to use dramatic, direct action.

But what works for civil rights, for women’s rights, for getting troops pulled out of Vietnam is not necessarily going to work to solve global warming, to fix our food system, to raise our neighborhoods out of poverty, or to invigorate our public schools.

What do we act against?
Where do we march?

They had all these signs up throughout our trip that say “Would you get on the bus?” But the question is less, “Would someone today get on the bus?” and more “Which bus should I get on? Darn it…all the buses are telling me they’re the right bus!? IS this bus doing more harm than good? Oh no! This bus isn’t carbon neutral!”

Oh, the postmodern condition…it’s so hard to find something true to get excited about in such a time. We look back on Dr. King and part of us thinks, “wow that must’ve been hard, he must’ve been one brave genius.” But then another part of us still whisper, “That was easy…Dr. King, get a load of today!”

So what do we do? How do we keep The Freedom Riders and Dr. King’s dream alive? How do we take our agapic love and translate it into action in a world with new, confounding problems? Well, I learned on the ride that we have a choice.

Option 1: Give up. Escape from the confusion of our era into safe places. Some have made that choice: those who choose to be cynical, those who use irony to distance themselves from any conviction, who laugh at those who care too much; those who complain and yearn for nonexistent pasts when ‘everything was better’, who simplify and blame it all on the other; those who keep the wheels turning on the structures that have left us all so distraught so as to see what they can privately squeeze out of it; who ignore the great public problems of our time and reject the great life in favor of the big life; and those who throw up their hands, screaming “There’s no such thing as truth and we don’t now to do…so let’s just watch some cat videos.” There’s a lifetime supply online…that’s a live option.  But, we don’t want to give up.

So there’s Option 2: Hope someone else takes on the great problems of our time and solves them for us. There is a certain quality to us that makes it easier for us to propose problems than to propose solutions. We all get riled up pointin’ to why this is bad, and that’s messed up, and that over there is being done totally backwards…and then we yell it out and hope someone else out there hears us and does something about it.

And my generation is particularly plagued by this quality, and the last few years for many young people, has been a great example of this option. In the Presidential Election in 2008, we young people had finally thought we had found someone who was going to solve all of the public problems we had been worried about throughout our lives. On election night in 2008 — when millions of young people around the country were cheering, singing and rallying together — I had thought that we were celebrating the first shot of a revitalized movement…. a launch party of sorts for the years of collective problem solving work we had in store for us. Barack was kicking down the door to a new era and we — the people! — were going to storm in!

However, after Inauguration Day 2009, the surge of youth engagement receded. The entire Obama youth movement packed up and went home, believing their work to be done, their mission accomplished. Instead of continuing to actively organize for change, we simply waited, expecting the Presidency that we had brought to the White House to solve everything for us. When it did not work out exactly as planned, the cynicism re-emerged as we were left wondering how we, yet again, found ourselves with most of the same ol’ problems that we had before.

And there lies the problem with Option 2. History — and especially American Civil Rights history — teaches that we should not be surprised at all. Of course it is not the leaders we elect who bring major change to government policy. It is social movements and citizen projects from outside of government that force those leaders to act.

Lincoln penned the Emancipation Proclamation, but abolitionists provided the link. FDR signed off on the New Deal, but for the workers’ movement, it was old news. Maybe Nixon proposed the Environmental Protection Agency ‘cuz he was tree hugger at heart… or maybe he faced the biggest environmental movement in history!

Indeed, as historian Howard Zinn put it, “government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action.” Indeed, it was that 2008 Presidential candidate that we all fell in love with himself who put it best: “You are the ones you have been waiting for…you are the change that we seek.”

The Freedom Riders of 1961 understood that extraordinary ordinary citizens had to hold leaders’ feet to the fire if they wanted to spur those leaders to action. When the Kennedy Administration was asking for a ‘cooling off period’ from direct action by civil rights advocates, activists kept the Rides going, understanding that it was exactly direct citizen action in times of administration uneasiness that could lead to major societal change. Their success in convincing the Kennedy Administration to support bus de-segregation proved their belief true.

But there still remains the question of “What is to be done?” now…well, there’s a final option: get to work, continue the struggle, know that if we collaborate and focus and work hard, we can figure out what’s going on, identify and articulate problems, and imagine, experiment with and implement solutions.The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in D.C. is the only memorial that features a statute that is not free standing…rather, Dr. King’s towering figure is emerging out of a large stone of hope. It’s quite appropriate, because even Dr. King is not the be-all-end-all of the Civil Rights movement…his work and leadership only could emerge out of the tireless efforts of the tens of thousands that made up the movement. And that was the final lesson of my trip – that the real movers of American government and society are not the leaders, but rather the groups of unelected, extraordinary ordinary people who decide to commit to public action.

Back in Dr. King’s day, in the post-World War II era, America was prosperous, and Dr. King’s battle was to include a group of people in that prosperity. He literally spoke in the I Have a Dream speech about a promissory note to African Americans that wasn’t cashed, despite the fact that the “great vaults of opportunity” of the nation had enough funds to cash it. When Civil Rights activists sat in at the lunch counters, they were sincere about it – they really wanted to eat at those lunch counters. It was a great house his generation inherited, and he was fighting to have equal access to all its floors and rooms.

But, today, America isn’t doing so well. The vaults of opportunity are defaulting on their loans. Most families are having a harder time finding the excess income to eat out at a lunch counter. The house my generation inherits has some pipes leaking and broken windows and failed expansion projects.

But the reason I say this is because, with the house in shambles, with the house due in for some remodeling…we have a shot. Every crisis comes with an opportunity. And America is going to be rebuilt, I’m confident of that. The question is, rebuilt by whom, and rebuilt in what spirit? There are people out there, like you in the crowd, who understand Dr. King’s dream, who know agapic love, who can imagine what a world with less racism, militarism and materialism might look like. If people like you are not in on the remodeling of America, our nation is at risk of being rebuilt with the same ol’ built-in problems, the same ol’ built-in injustices. But, if people like you participate in this rebuilding of America, out of the Great Recession of the 2000s, and into the Great Revival of the 2010s – if people like you who understand the Dream put in the hard work to participate vigorously in your neighborhood and churches and schools and campuses and elections and communities small and big…if you craft solutions that make our problems that much more meliorated… if you bend the blueprints a bit more towards justice…if you put in the focus and hard work that is necessary to make anything that matters shake and move…then the dream lives to see another day.

But only if you choose to participate.

At my Father’s graduation from Antioch College in 1965, a preacher by the name of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put what I am trying to say best, exclaiming that: “Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with god.”

Let’s get to work.

Ideas

Barack and Obama: We are the change that we seek

Today, I gave a speech at Occupy Boston on taking seriously then-candidate Obama’s challenge that “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time.”

Here’s an audio re-creation of the speech:

Here’s the transcript:

We are the Change that we Seek – presented @ Occupy Boston on October 16, 2011

We should care a lot more about what happens to Obama than we do about what happens to Barack.

Barack is a 50-year-old man who lives in Washington, D.C.

327307_10150363360902334_1988423013_oObama is a set of hopes and commitments regarding the future of our country.

Barack is a President who has occasionally accomplished things and occasionally disappointed.

Obama is a body of ideas and practices that might just solve our nation’s great public problems.

Barack is going to remain in power for four more years if he wins re-election.

But the fate of Obama … is going to be determined by much more than how many people we can get to enter a voting booth next November.

On election night in 2008 — when millions of young people around the country were cheering, singing and rallying together — I had thought that we were celebrating the first shot of a revitalized movement…. a launch party of sorts for the years of collective problem solving work we had in store for us. Barack was kicking down the door to a new era and we — the people! — were going to storm in!

We knew that the nation that had created “My Super Sweet Sixteen” could also create a health care system where every citizen was cared for; that we could transform our energy system into one that didn’t rely on moody foreign governments selling us underground earth-warming black goop; that we could strike at the root of why 2.5 million Americans go to sleep in a prison every night; that, at the very least, we could figure out a way to make our Congress select for members who are good aBarack_Obama_Hope_postert legislating, as opposed to the current skill it selects for: dialing donors for dollars. We were set to solve these problems!!

But, after Inauguration Day, the entire Obama youth movement packed up and went home…their mission ‘accomplished’. Instead of making change, we just waited. We though the President we carried to the White House would solve everything for us.

This is the original sin of our generation’s civic young adulthood: we committed to one man…and not to a body of good ideas. As it turns out, we had not been celebrating Obama on election night… we had been celebrating Barack.

Our generation thought it was a clean break that night: Goodbye George, Hello Barack; Goodbye Seinfeld Reruns, Hello TEDTalks; Goodbye Lost Decade, We have found our way!. But then we were back… three years later and that cynicism that our generation had tried so hard to avoid — that disappointment in government feeling that was supposed to be left with the last decade, the last generation — was back again. “How could this happen, again? I thought he was different!” whisper millions under their breath.

But, history — and especially American history — teaches that we should not be surprised at all. Of course it is not the leaders we elect who bring major change to government policy. It is social movements and citizen projects from outside of government that force those leaders to act.

Lincoln penned the Emancipation Proclamation, but abolitionists provided the link. FDR signed off on the New Deal, but for the workers’ movement, it was old news. Maybe Nixon proposed the Environmental Protection Agency ‘cuz he was tree hugger at heart… or maybe he faced the biggest environmental movement in history!

I’m not letting Barack off the hook. His administration still lacks coherent vision, courage, and imagination.

But, perhaps the story we should be telling now is not, “The President failed us, so it is time that we step it up” — perhaps it is “The President failed us because we did not step it up!” Barack needed Obama, and we did not BRING IT TO HIM!

If you ever wrote your email down anywhere during 2008 — be it onBarackObama.com, on a clipboard held by some scraggly bearded 20-something at your door or accidentally scribbled on a napkin anywhere in the vicinity of Iowa or New Hampshire — it is likely that you are still getting bombarded with messages about how you can help Barack out in the coming year. I want to take this time to give two mindsets about how you can forget about Barack and start helping Obama out this year:

ONE: Learn the lesson that Lincoln, FDR and Nixon all learned: a President and Congress might be in office, but we, the people, are in charge. Take seriously citizen movements outside of establishment politics that are strategizing to set the agenda of those who are in office.

TWO: Start seeing that the federal government isn’t the only force that governs our lives. We are also governed by state governments, local governments, media, the internet, neighbors, clubs, corporations, churches, universities, and even social networks. These are forces we can harness to solve great public problems ourselves. We can join our local and state governments and boards, start and support businesses that are more in line with our vision for a sustainable future, and spearhead creative community projects that solve problems big and small. I can take over my local party chapter and commandeer it to fit our vision of how the national party should be operationg. Me and my buddies can form a task force to rebuild local infrastructure while sitting around a table at McDougall’s bar after work, I can become a citizen expert on global energy networks and tell my state delegate about what she’s ignoring using only Brookline Public Library.. We can start our own media, our own cultural movements, and not just react to others agendas, but set…our…own!

This path to change isn’t easy — no single pill can cure your weight problem…and no President can solve the problems that our country is facing.

And no single citizen needs to solve them alone.. We can each take on a piece of our national public problems. Pick something specific or local, become an expert on it, form a group among your friends or co-workers, propose a solution, test it out, reflect, test, repeat. If Barack won’t achieve the Obama dream, perhaps we can crowdsource Obama!

An insightful Presidential Candidate once said in 2008 that “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

I think it’s time that we start to take him at his word.

Ideas

Civics Education Lacking in F.C. City Schools

I recently had a Fourth of July-themed letter to the editor in the Falls Church News-Press regarding civic education in Falls Church. Here it is in full:

Editor,

The best way Falls Church citizens could honor the spirit of the Fourth of July would be to encourage Falls Church City Public School officials to take a serious look at bolstering the role of civic education in Falls Church schools.

I commend the work of Mary Ellen Henderson’s Rory Dippold in implementing a Civics program at the middle school. However, the rest of the school system should take a page out of Mr. Dippold’s book and implement a strong civics curriculum for the whole school system.

The current state of civic education in our schools falls short in two ways. First, our civic education needs to be broader. If knowing the tools of democratic participation is as important as knowing the tools of literary analysis, why is the latter taught for 13 grades and the former is taught for only two? Civic education should be present in every grade’s curriculum and the values of public activism should be engendered across subjects.

Second, our civic education needs to be deeper. Service learning and knowledge of the branches of government is not enough – Falls Church students need to know how to play active and effective roles in our community and democracy. If we can set standards that ensure that every Falls Church student can read, practice the scientific method and understand algebra by the end of senior year, surely we can set standards that ensure that every student can file a Freedom of Information Act request, hold a press conference, build a coalition group, utilize their civic imagination, and identify and actively take on community problems by graduation day.

Our schools should not only train students for their role in our economy – they should also help develop students’ public spirits and empower them for their role in our democracy. A good place to start the Falls Church civic education renaissance would be to ask the school board and Superintendent Berlin to initiate an official comprehensive review of the current state of civic education in Falls Church schools. If they were to do that, it would be a first step towards ensuring that all Falls Church students could play active roles in our democratic community. Now what’s more patriotic than that?

Peter Davis

Falls Church