History Has Its Eyes on Us

 

Most of you know that I teach AP United States History and AP United States Government and Politics at the high school level, and that I was, for years, a lawyer on both the defense and the prosecutorial sides of the criminal justice line, and filing the occasional habeas corpus or con law-oriented argument in appellate court.  The work load kept my mind sharp, but I was burning out on the lack of making any dent in the problems that I saw every day in the courthouse.  It was this constant, nagging feeling that I was slapping a band-aid on a huge, gaping wound, throwing a problem in jail for a bit, but knowing that the issues involved would not fully heal.  When I was blogging full time, there were moments when I felt like I was making a dent -- a legislative victory that I helped push over the line; a legal analysis that got into the mainstream press, especially during the Libby trial coverage days; and highlighting issues that might otherwise go unmentioned because poverty and children's issues, in particular, impact people who can't exactly afford a lobbyist in the halls of power to speak for them.

Using my legal degree to raise a generation of thoughtful, analytical students who value integrity and the rule of law as the bedrock of American government is such a blessing.  It feels like I'm helping to raise that next generation of thoughtful American voters who will, hopefully, take their responsibilities as citizens and all that this entails very seriously.

We get so lost sometimes in the day to day chaos, the relentless press of one running news story after another, that we forget that we are not the first generation of Americans to feel this way.  Not by a long shot.

But it is imperative that we all pay attention to our history and its precedents in times of chaos and how we have come back from the brink, rebuilding from the bedrock of the rule of law upward, each and every time.  

Sometimes this happens through some cataclysmic event (think about the Civil War or the fights about privacy rights and state surveillance in the aftermath of 9/11 and the Patriot Act).  Sometimes change for the better occurs through gradual but consistent pushing and prodding, bit by bit raising public outcry against an injustice or the need for reform until the folks inside the Beltway can no longer ignore the noise from outside the usual echo chamber of the cocktail weenie power crew in DC.  Sometimes it takes ratcheting up that pressure over years and years - looking at you, Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall, Dr. King and John Lewis, and everyone putting their on lives on the front lines behind you.

What we can never forget is that citizenship is a full on contact sport.  

You want change?  Then you have to show up and do the work.  Because we will undoubtedly need those lessons in the days ahead.  Every generation of Americans faces some trial or tribulation.  The saying that "history never repeats, but it often rhymes" has never been more on point.

Several years ago, I was asked to speak at a conference on media, race and poverty issues put together by the Eisenhower Foundation.  It was a pinch me moment for me, sitting in the same room with Eugene Robinson and Ray Suarez and Colby King, all of whose work had influenced and informed me for years.

Highlighting issues important to me meant speaking about some personal experiences in my professional life, and what I had seen day to day in and out of the courthouse and in my community.  Issues that are still front and center, festering as I type this, percolating in every community in America, just waiting for the government that we elect to serve our public good to wake up and get to work for the betterment of our communities, instead of serving their own infotainment, attention interests.  A healthy democracy requires a working press with integrity and the freedom to be honest with the public and our leaders, as I said then:

...there have been fundamental shifts in the media over the last 40 odd years that lend themselves to a lot of significant questions about the purpose and the scope of what we can expect reporters and pundits and media conglomerates to be willing to do or not do on the issues that we talk about today. Any publicly traded media company, and this has been discussed a little bit before, but I want to go into a little bit of detail on it at the moment. Any publicly traded media company is beholden to one thing and that is maximizing shareholder profits. That's what they do. That's what they're required to do by law and that's what shareholders will hold them accountable to by suit if they do not. Period, end of story.

And to be fair, that's true for any publicly traded company, not just for media conglomerates, so this isn't just a media issue. This drives everything including the selection of stories and the focus of the news organization be it print, radio or television or all three in the case of the bigger conglomerates. Thanks to media consolidation and corporate considerations such as maximizing profit share and revenue we are all living in an age where business school graduates are running the media show. Where shows like Fear Factor get a lot of great hype, while a valuable show like Nightline gets to languish in obscurity because ABC News decides that paying Ted Koppel's salary doesn't fit into their bottom line obligations.

Any and all folks in the media are focused in small and large ways to cater to the middle and occasionally to the lowest common denominator and I think one only need to think back about a week in media coverage here in this country of Britney Spear's panties or the lack thereof to know exactly where I'm going with this. Let's call this the RupertMurdoch paradigm. Consolidating a large empire of print, radio, television outlets under one group's control, and in Murdoch's case, a group with a decided political agenda and a penchant for making its own reality through rampant [repetitive] editorializing that they like to disguise as fair and balanced news. You add to that a hefty dose of infotainment, which appeals to the segment of the population that has the lowest attention span, and you maximize revenue and increase market share by any means necessary.

Where does that leave news organizations and reporters who are committed to in-depth journalism? At the moment, especially in print journalism, it leaves a lot of them downsized. Across the country cost cutting measures at newspapers, which are struggling to compete economically mean fewer real reporting jobs thereby increasing the bottom line of the paper by reducing the salaries they have to pay while maximizing their ad revenue which makes the folks on Wall Street happy, but makes all of us as readers and consumers of news media not so happy. It becomes all about the bottom line and that has nothing whatsoever to do with quality. That is a disservice to all of us because a story about poverty or race or all of the multitude of issues that are involved require an exceptional voice to tell that story well.  We have lost far too many of those...

When you have a press whose independence is constantly being challenged, questioned and ultimately beholden to a corporate financial target over factual accuracy and in-depth address of some incredibly complex and important issues on the front burner of our nation's simmering political powder keg.  When things feel this volatile, that is the moment when you truly need the press to excel at exposing the corruption, the self-dealing, and the lack of attention and respect being given to expertise, governmental rules and regulations, and the simple integrity of putting the public good at the forefront of our day to day, in politics, in our communities and in our daily lives.  

Our American social contract needs renewal.  Badly.  Less division, less "all for me, and the hell with you," and a lot more "we, the people."  We can't wait for someone else to do the work.  So pick and issue and find a way to make some change for the better.  Working together, instead of allowing ourselves to be divided and conquered in the blue v. red dichotomy we find ourselves mired in at the the moment, will truly be the gift that keeps on giving to ourselves, and our posterity.

We need to all step up and put our American social contract front and center, start working for the great good of our communities and our nation together, and fast!

One of the things we talk about a lot in my classes is the parallels between prior historical moments and the present day.  As a West Virginia girl, born and bred, poverty and inequality and how it impacts our families and businesses and communities is endemic in our day to day.  We hold backpack drives, food drives, clothing drives, you name it, to help lift up our fellow West Virginians, every year.  But solving the problems here, as in a lot of places in America, hasn't been easy.  My words from the Eisenhower Foundation speech ring so true, and yet so hollow, to me now:

In my experience as a defense attorney and then as a prosecutor, the bulk of the cases that I saw day in and day out at the court house were predicated on economic hardship, lack of opportunity, and a whole host of problems associated with poverty and the despair that goes with it. I grew up in Appalachia, I'm from West Virginia, you could probably tell that from my accent. In a mostly blue collar family with folks in it who got food assistance and who had trouble with drugs and spousal abuse and alcohol, well you can pretty much name a problem and somebody in my family has probably lived it at some point or another. My whole family pretty much still lives in West Virginia or nearby and poverty and hardship are issues with which I'm very familiar. Not just in my own family, but in my community and my state as a whole. Racial issues are less prevalent where I live, simply because we have fewer folks of color, but...I have lived, in an urban neighborhood that was a kaleidoscope of color in west Philly when I was in graduate school and my first roommate in college was a very strong woman from Jamaica Queens, New York who never let me forget that I needed to look at the other side of the block as often as I possibly could. So, I'm not completely oblivious as a white-bread girl from the sticks.  However, economics, rather than color, drove a lot of what I saw in my day-to-day life at the courthouse, and that was across every racial line that we ever had. 

In an abuse/neglect case, I would see the following pretty frequently: mental health issues that had gone untreated for years because there was no mental health treatment available because there was no funding for that treatment; parenting skills counseling that we had to set up for parents who had no idea how to actually be parents before they had a child; drug and alcohol rehab; anger management counseling; sex abuse therapy; individual and group for both the perpetrator and the survivor of that abuse and often those were one in the same; foster care, medical intervention, criminal charges, job training needs, government benefits sign-up; medical cards that had to be established for kids who had never had adequate medical care; budgeting skills classes; life skills classes including things like why should you clean your house, why bathing is important and what constitutes proper hygiene; intervention services to assist the mentally challenged, both parents and children; Medicare benefits problems; disability and Workers' Comp benefits problems; social worker rotation through long-term cases because social workers are paid next to nothing to do jobs that are so hard sane people would never choose to do them in a million years if they didn't care about the people they were trying to help; cuts in education benefits for Head Start and valuable early intervention programs, like the birth to three program, which I'm sure some of the folks in the room have probably never heard of, but it's one of the most critical programs that we have in this country today in terms of very early intervention, it can make a huge difference; lack of prenatal care and awareness; even more drug and alcohol rehab -- you have to go through that a lot in abuse and neglect cases; prison time for one or more parents -- and on and on and on. 

And that's just in an abuse/neglect case context, and that's what I did day in and day out, every day in the courthouse in a little town in West Virginia. And when you magnify that to what you have to deal with in West Baltimore and what you have to deal with in D.C., what you have to deal with in the major urban environments all over this country, it is huge. And that does not even touch on folks living below the poverty line who were never in trouble with the law in their lives, folks who are working two and three jobs trying to raise their families with no child care assistance and little to no safety net; folks for whom an illness could mean financial catastrophe for the entire family; folks who are living one paycheck away from homelessness -- and I saw that every single day. And none of this addresses the questions of race and culture which enter into the mix in so many communities, big and small across this nation of ours. From Hmong refugees, from transplanted Iraqis to inter-city enclaves of African-American and Hispanic groups -- and we're not even going to get into the sub-sets of all of those. All over the map in terms of origin. 

These are enormous problems that do not translate well in the age of sound- bite journalism. What does translate, though, and this is where I think some progress can be made is the individual stories that are involved. This is something that Colbert King, I think, addressed in the earlier panel. What does -- the family narrative that grips your heart as much as it grabs your intellect -- that's what translates well. At our root, we are still humans in search of a good story, and I think that may be the key to bringing this issue to the public fore again.

In order for us to function together in our ever-changing "e pluribus unum," we all have to put the "we" part of our social contract front and center.  See each other as fellow human beings.  Remember to do unto others, because we are better people and a better nation when we do.  Raising our voices for the voiceless, asking that our elected leaders act with integrity and honor in our names, and vote them out when they don't.

We need to treat citizenship as an action verb, and not a passive noun.

History has its eyes on us.