“A Promise We Must Renew and Defend Every Day”

Twenty-nine years ago, I was a legislative assistant and speechwriter for Sen. Russ Feingold, the progressive Democrat from Wisconsin and one of the smartest, bravest, most principled people I’ve ever met. He was invited to speak at an MLK Day event, and I wrote this for him:

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been 66 years old this month.

Throughout his life, he spoke of love, of brotherhood, of equality.  But he also spoke of economic justice and its natural connection to civil rights.

In his last speech as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in August, 1967, he went so far as to call for a national guaranteed income.  When he was cut down in April, 1968, he was working in support of a garbage workers’ strike in Memphis.

His loss still hurts 27 years later.  Perhaps more tragically, the wounds he hoped to bind remain open.  The divisions he hoped to mend are still separating us.  The need for justice he saw so clearly has not been met.

Dr. King knew it was not enough to stop the lynchings, to extend the right to vote, or even to defeat segregation.  Without justice, he knew, there is no peace.

Not only justice in legal terms, but in moral and economic terms as well.  So long as a nation allows poverty, hunger, sickness, ignorance, and desperation to exist, the potential for division and violence will always be present and will always be ripe for exploitation by unprincipled opportunists.

You may remember news reports late last year that Americans are growing less tolerant, less concerned about equality, and more suspicious of institutions like their government.

Some of us heard those reports and felt concern.  We saw a challenge to re-kindle the faith, the optimism, and the sense of justice that are essential to progress.

Others heard these same reports and saw an opening.  There are reactionary voices in America who have locked themselves into the past and fought progressive change tooth and nail.

These voices have sought to encourage the cynicism, the divisions, the fear and pronounce a cure: turn back the clock to a time when large parts of our society were essentially second-class citizens, people for whom the promise of America was, in Dr. King’s famous words, “a bad check, a check which has come back marked, ‘insufficient funds.’ “

But retreat is not the answer.  As Dr. King also said, “We refuse to believe that they bank of justice is bankrupt.”

Indeed, it is not, and we hold the key to the vault.

The principle of justice must always be the basis for our actions.

Our sense of justice forbids us from allowing poverty, hunger, ignorance, sickness, and desperation.  For we do “allow” these to exist if we fail to exercise our power to correct these conditions.  And make no mistake, it is within our power to do this.

To claim we have no such power is to ignore our basic responsibility as citizens.

There are those who believe otherwise, who argue that we must make so-called “tough choices” to save some and to cast others adrift.

Those are not “tough choices;” they are wrong choices.

When faced with these conditions, our sense of justice requires us to act inclusively, not exclusively.

When we come upon someone wrapped up in newspapers, sleeping on a park bench, we must act.

When we hear the cries of children as they bury their brothers and sisters killed in street violence, we must act.

When we see the weary eyes of workers who’ve lost their work and risk losing hope because they cannot find new jobs, we must act.

When we observe the bent hand of an old woman who must sell her possessions and sink into poverty to obtain medical care, we must act.

When we see families and businesses denied credit or insurance of similar necessities of modern life for no other reason than their race or economic station, then we must act.

When we see the statistics and hear the stories telling us many people are working harder for smaller rewards, that their children face more uncertain futures, that they are losing ground while a few expand their estates, becoming further isolated from their neighbors, we must act.

When we hear and see racism and bigotry, even as they are dressed up in new rhetorical clothes, we must act.

It is fashionable in some circles to sneer at the prospect of action.  Stop whining, we are told; we cannot solve every problem.  Life is hard; life is unfair; and those are immutable laws of nature.

Nonsense.  We can decide how hard, how unfair, life can be.

We must reject callousness and negativity.  We must reject is as an abdication of our responsibilities towards one another as neighbors.

We must reject it as fundamentally un-American.

Our Constitution asserts we created our government “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare.”

That assertion places upon us the responsibility to act individually and collectively, and that’s sometimes means acting through government.

Government must step in when it would be futile for individuals to act alone, or when other cultural forces refuse to act against the interests of the common good.

We must act to defend the principle that we are one nation, indivisible, that we draw our strength collectively and so must use it for the benefit of all.

In defending that principle, we must not find ourselves defending ideas and programs which have worn out their usefulness.  We must not lose sight of our goal in order to cling to our method.

That said, however, we must not allow flaws in that method to be the focal point of a wholesale attack on the goals.  We cannot right the ship of state by throwing people over the side.

We are a large, wealthy, and diverse nation about to enter a new century.  None of us succeeds alone.  We depend on upon one another, and, therefore, we have an obligation to one another.

We have not merely the obligation to be civil, but to be active.

Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams recognized this obligation as they were helping bring this country into being.  They urged the adoption of our national motto, “E Pluribus Unum,” “Out of many, one.”

There are those who would replace that  motto.  They would perhaps substitute something like, “Many are called, but few are chosen.”

They would have the country organized not as a democracy but as some kind of exclusive club, and those who cannot afford the membership fee or who do not pass muster with those already safely inside need not apply, but must sit by the front gate.

The justification for this anti-democratic attitude?  Anger.

We hear often that Americans are angry, that last November’s elections were a revolution of anger.  I am not convinced that is true, at least not in the way we are told.

To whatever extent that anger drives politics, we must replace it with reason.

Anger gets us nowhere.  It leads to rash actions, even violence, and then attempts to serve as its own defense.

Anger is a poor foundation for building, maintaining, and governing a society.

We do not need to be trading blows; we need to be joining hands.  Our means, Dr. King reminded us often, should not be to humiliate our opponents, but to win them over.

It won’t be easy.  But we begin by seeing to it that all voices are acknowledged, so that one one needs to shout.

There is already shouting enough.

You can hear it in the gloating of activists on the right, from talk-show millionaires to freshman legislators, all claiming that the nation has somehow been “taken back” and that individual liberty will be restored by the simple expedient of cutting taxes and spending.

That will free us from the onerous burden of government, they say, forgetting for the moment that our government was not constructed merely to exercise power but to provide a forum for justice, to give all Americans a place to go to petition for relief.

Yes, government lays taxes and spends money, but it also provides services, and it protects citizens from fraud, discrimination, harassment, and violence, and where it cannot protect, it can at least prosecute.

This is a part of government we must not ignore.

Government is not working better if our country continues to drift into factions of have and have not.

Government is not more efficient if it cuts taxes on the wealthy and shifts the burden of paying for public services to the middle class.

It is not improved if its protections for the vulnerable are withdrawn.

For my part, I am introducing various bills in the Senate to cut spending and make government work for efficiently.

But I am also introducing legislation to improve and guarantee long-term care for the elderly and disabled.

I am introducing legislation to prevent insurance companies from practicing economic racism by redlining.

I am introduction legislation to clean up the system for financing political campaigns and reduce the influence of moneyed interests in Congress.

I am doing these things because I believe it is not enough to run a government more smoothly or less expensively.  It is equally important to government represent and serve us all.

When I hear the right revel in its power and claim it has, at last, through enough sand against the seas to stop the tides of progress, I wonder . . . .

If this were 1965 and not 1995, what would they be saying about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Would they lend their strength to the courageous struggle for justice he helped lead, or would they join the reactionary forces who fought against the inevitable wave of the future and who gave comfort to those who reacted with violence and bloodshed?

Would they side with Dr. King and his movement, or would they hide behind the smokescreen of “states’ rights,” which cloaked institutional racism?

Where would they be?  On which side would they fight?

That is, I believe, a reliable litmus test for judging their credibility.

When you listen to political debates and pundits, you often hear references to “the mainstream,” the source of communal values and ideals.

Well, that mainstream is a broad and deep river, not a narrow, winding creek.  It’s character is fed by tributaries from all directions.

Like most Americans, my ancestors came here on a boat.  Our forebears came from all points on the compass.  Some arrived comfortably; many others came with little more than their clothes.  Some arrived in chains.

The great promise of America is that all of them are now free, now equal, and that none can lose rights, dignity, or opportunity because of their race, religion, or station.

It is a promise we must renew and defend every day.

How we are zoning millions of kids out of their futures

Brookings has a a new report tracing the connection between exclusionary zoning, housing affordability, and how millions of girls and boys from low-income families are getting locked into crummy schools; because their families can’t afford to live near the good ones.

This is not how most people think about zoning and affordable housing, but it’s a direct consequence of local regulations passed, frankly, to keep poor folks at bay. I worked in affordable housing for eight years, and I have lost track of the number of times I heard some NIMBY jackass say, “I didn’t move here to look at houses.” My usual retort was, “Well, dude, somebody’s looking at yours.”

There was even a land-use attorney who advertised his services to clients seeking to stop “inappropriate housing” from being developed in their neighborhoods. And more than a few of these selfish, elitist swine were “good liberals,” taking all the right positions, making all the right donations, festooning their cars with all the right bumper stickers, and wearing the right t-shirts. No war in Iraq, Eat More Kale, No Nukes, the whole package EXCEPT when it came to having to live near the undesirables, the people who had junk cars in their driveways and got into fights with their spouses on Saturday nights, all that stereotyping.

So, we create gated neighborhoods, even if the gates aren’t the physical kind. We cordon off affordable housing and the people who live in it with low-density zoning, large minimum lots, and such. And, in too many cases, we’re pushing kids into an economic hole they may never climb out of. They will not get the same kind of education the NIMBYs’ kids get, so they won’t be able to compete for colleges and jobs down the road.

The report’s author, Jonathan Rothwell, notes that, if kids from low-income families are given a shot at attending good schools with good teachers, research shows there will be tangible benefits.

Now, some, particularly those on the Right whose real motive is to attack teachers’ unions (note Willard, and more on that later) will shout out, “See? We should have school choice and vouchers!” No, we should have a mix of housing that allows people from different income levels to have easy access to good schools.

Of course putting more money into improving schools might help, but this is about land use, not financing.

Bottom line – we are making the comfort of affluent homeowners a priority over providing the best possible start for kids who deserve a shot every bit as much as the ones who’re driven to school every day in BMWs. So, each day those low-income kids walk through their schoolhouse door, they are slipping a little further behind. That’s a crime.

The report is getting a lot of notice, by the way:

Huffington Post education writer Joy Resmovits has an excellent piece on the report.

HuffPost Business Editor Peter Goodman takes this a step further and ponders the impact of the foreclosure crisis.

Education Week likewise has a detailed story.

NYT’s Motoko Rich posts on the paper’s Economix blog.

Life and the law put a lot of obstacles in the path of the poor. In a nation that likes to think of itself as offering opportunity to anyone willing to work for it (“your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”) keeping them out of good schools shouldn’t be one of them.

Later,