An Awakening: School Holidays + Political Power

“Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it’s important.”

-- Sen. Eugene McCarthy, 1967

Last week, the New York Times and the Boston Globe wrote about the hot-button issue of religious equality in school holidays. In Massachusetts, the last state in the Union to dismantle its State-sponsored church (in 1833!), the controversy is over the decision of 17 school districts to open on Good Friday. In New York City, the debate is over whether to add the Muslim holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha to the calendar of the nation’s largest school system.

In the Bay State, districts are responding to demographic shifts, seeking to find a consistent balance in an increasingly secular world.

In New York, the situation is far more interesting. In 2009, the City Council (with only one dissenter) approved a resolution calling on Mayor Michael Bloomberg to add the two holidays to the school calendar. The dissenter, Councilmember and former Attorney General G. Oliver Koppell (D-Bronx), worried about the potential for a proliferation of holidays, inquired, “Where are we going to end with this?” The answer, as it turns out, is based in no small part on how well different communities are able to organize.

Five years later, with a Mayor in office who campaigned to add the holidays to the calendar, what we’ve witnessed is the culmination of efforts to mobilize an entire population to wield political power—call it a “secular awakening” of sorts. As the Times wrote, the vigor and organization of the effort is “a testament to how the city’s Muslim community is gaining a measure of political confidence.”

The renewed campaign to get holy days on the school calendar comes on the heels of the launch of the City’s first Muslim-American Democratic Club, the aptly named Muslim Democratic Club of New York (MDCNY) in 2013—a club that understands that its mission is to simultaneously inspire and deliver.

As MDCNY states, its mission is to, “mobilize and empower the American Muslim community in NYC by nurturing a culture of civic participation.” That lofty and important aspiration is grounded in a real politik concern as well. “Our goal in establishing a democratic club is to increase the number of American Muslim triple prime Democratic voters” (that is, voters who cast ballots consistently in primary, general, and special elections).

Other organizations, from the Arab-American Family Support Center (founded in 1994), to the Arab American Association of New York (launched in 2001), which worked with NYU to produce a groundbreaking survey of Arab Americans in NYC in 2012, community groups serving NYC’s Arab American community are thriving as the population in the Metro area continues to climb (hard data is notoriously difficult to come by, but the general direction is clear).

It goes without saying, of course, that even within these groups, there is immense diversity. Arab American groups are made up of members of many of the world’s great faiths and the membership of Muslim groups is a cross-section of the City in that it is a mixture of American and foreign-born advocates. In 2009, the Times noted that this very diversity could be an obstacle to effective political organizing and that the community had, at times, “seen its social and political ambitions hamstrung by schisms among competing groups.”

That lesson—of learning to compromise internally in order to project a unified, forceful position externally—is part of how a community learns to transform its economic and demographic clout into political power.

The next step—after celebrating what we hope will be a great victory on school holidays—is to bring that same political energy and passion to bear on issues that affect people beyond the community. Indeed, by the 2017 election, my hope as a New Yorker is that the MDCNY and others are getting calls from candidates and elected officials not only about issues of particular salience to the Muslim community—like school holidays and surveillance—but on a whole host issues, from landmarking and tax policy to economic development and transportation.

It will be at that moment when the awakening of a community will have become cemented into the political fabric of the City, never again to be overlooked and forever more to be valued as a key contributor throughout the five boroughs.

Climate and Community: Solarize, Mosaic, and Economies of Scale

“Economies of scale are a good thing. If we didn’t have them, we’d still be living in tents and eating buffalo.”

-- Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO, J.P. Morgan, 2010

This weekend, the Globe highlighted Solarize, a pilot program that encourages development of residential and business solar arrays by taking advantage of economies of scale to drive down cost.

Since Beverly High School installed solar panels in 1981 (see image), the North Shore has been at the cutting edge of renewable energy installation. It comes as no surprise, then, that Round 2 of Solarize includes the North Shore communities of Salem and Swampscott, which together have signed up so many people that they have reached “Tier 4” (of 5) status, meaning additional savings for participants in the program and an even greater snowball effect to encourage neighbors to join the movement. Other cities and towns across the Commonwealth are also taking part in the current round, from Andover to Egremont.

In 2011 and 2012, Solarize Mass led over 900 residents and business owners in 21 communities to install over 5.6 megawatts of solar electricity. The 10 cities and towns that participated in Round 1 of 2013—including my beloved Lee, Mass.—added another 3800 kilowatt hours of solar capacity.

This type of community-oriented green energy strategy has emerged with force in recent years. In particular, Mosaic, an investment platform that uses a crowd-funding model to finance solar farms across the country, has showcased the incredible potential of leveraging the pent-up demand for renewable power by bringing individuals together.

From the installation of 47 kWh of solar through Oakland, California’s Youth Employment Partnership (6.38 percent yield) to powering New Jersey’s Wildwood Convention Center (4.5 percent yield) and creating a solar roof on a school in Connecticut (5.5 percent yield), Mosaic has already provided a mechanism for thousands of Americans to directly invest millions of dollars in solar projects in their backyards and across the country.

The uptick in community-based economies of scale is not only spurring green energy (and in turn, reducing carbon emissions), it is also being used by Google to promote high-speed fiber Internet connectivity in cities across the country. Google Fiber expands to “fiberhoods” if/when communities secure enough signups to make the construction of the infrastructure economically viable.

Of course, this model has its pitfalls, particularly when it comes to ensuring access to new technologies across the income spectrum. As Newsweek noted last month, when Kansas City’s fiberhoods were unveiled in 2012, “the online map of fiber-hoods was largely divided by lines like Troost Avenue,” a street that for generations has separated affluent white families to the west and poor families of color to the east.

This outcome was not for lack of trying on Google’s part. As Newsweek stated, the company offered lower-speed broadband service on a monthly payment plan, partnered with community organizations on outreach, and hired people to canvass poor neighborhoods, sometimes with free ice cream. And yet, the divide remained.

This fact should not dissuade us from using community-based economies of scale to nudge neighborhoods toward taking up innovative technology. Rather, it simply highlights the fact that the State must do even more to subsidize the use of green tech in poor communities, many of whom stand to benefit disproportionately from its effects (such as reduced emissions).

In Massachusetts, this means expanding Solarize from the relatively wealthy communities that it has targeted thus far, to communities across the income spectrum—from Lawrence and Lynn to Springfield and Southbridge. It also means changing regulations to allow individual investors to pool resources through platforms like Mosaic.

While Congress dithers on climate policy (and tries to block the President’s historic regulatory efforts related to power plant emissions), communities across the country are hungry to support grassroots efforts to rid America of dirty energy and do their part to make the U.S. a leader in the green tech economy of the 21^st century.

Part II: An America United: Valuing Diverse Means to Common Ends

Yesterday, we explored “The Big Sort” of the American electorate. Today, in Part II, we’ll examine ways to combat this trend.

“Look, men, let’s quit arguing and kidding ourselves. We’re all in the same boat. And we’re all gonna sink unless we stick together.”

-- John Wayne, Three Faces West, 1940

Maintaining unity in a nation as diverse as America can sometimes seem impossible. As President John Adams wrote in 1818:

The colonies had grown up under constitutions of government so different, there was so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners, and habits had so little resemblance, and their intercourse had been so rare, and their knowledge of each other so imperfect, that to unite them in the same principles in theory and the same system of action, was certainly a very difficult enterprise.

And yet, against all odds, “Thirteen clocks were made to strike together — a perfection of mechanism, which no artist had ever before effected.”

In the ensuing two centuries, the U.S. has welcomed millions of immigrants from every corner of the globe. As we seek to stitch together the fraying threads of common experience and values that are central to the preservation of the Union, it is useful to look at what drew these immigrants to the Golden Door.

The American Dream is often cast in material terms, but its true nature is much deeper. As James Truslow Adams wrote in 1931:

[The American Dream] is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

Waves of immigrants came to America with different customs, languages, skills, beliefs, and histories. However, their united purpose—a new life in a new land, one that offered opportunity and liberty, was and is stronger than their differences.

That’s why the first step in maintaining a united America is to acknowledge and honor our common ends.

Of course, it gets harder from there; for while we understand that we share a common set of goals as Americans, it is inescapable that we view distinct means as pathways to those ends.  Sometimes these disagreements will be intractable. There is, after all, no daylight between those who believe that LGBT Americans deserve equal protection of the laws and those who believe that discrimination on account of sexual orientation should be legal.

More often than not, however, there is room for experimentation, for trial and error, for pragmatic (rater than ideological) efforts to change policy. Most Americans agree that a building block of society is that children receive a high quality education. And while you may hear otherwise from various interest groups, the truth is that nobody knows exactly how to achieve that and no group has a monopoly on good ideas.

Instead of bowing to vitriolic attacks on the very character of those who disagree with us about the means, we should remember the foundational commonality of purpose and seek to further different ideas simultaneously in an effort to get at scalable solutions to serious problems.

 

Workers at CCC Camp, Liberty Island, NY, 1935

This effort is made more difficult by our propensity to live, work, and socialize in relatively homogenous bubbles. In fact, technology—which in many ways has brought the world closer together than ever before—will continue to have the paradoxical effect of dividing us, unless we calibrate it to nudge people toward ideas/people different from themselves (see generally, Cass Sunstein's Republic.com 2.0).

We ought not assume, however, that technology can save us from ourselves. Rather, an understanding of and respect for one another must go far deeper than the “newsfeed” or promoted tweet of the day.

It starts early, by bringing together children of different backgrounds in furtherance of common goals. But it shouldn’t end there. My grandfather, Louis Airoldi, was one of over 3 million young American men to participate in the Civilian Conservation Corps—a program that not only built many of our cherished national treasures, but also brought together people of very different backgrounds in furtherance of a common goal.

As author Jonathan Alter told PBS’ American Experience, “The CCC Corps members…were thrust together, sent out from whatever neighborhood they came from, out into the countryside, put in these barracks. And they had to learn how to deal with each other. The only thing they had in common was that they were poor. And they needed a job.”

The anecdotal experience of team-building from the CCC camp has been reaffirmed by studies suggesting that tasking individuals with a common goal or purpose leads them to develop team-like relationships that otherwise may not have taken place.

While we lack the material urgency of the Depression, we are experiencing signs of a different kind of malaise—declining social institutions, a deep sense of “otherness”, and an inability to speak to, rather than beyond, one another. We may not need a second CCC to put people to work, but we could certainly use a second CCC (or equivalent public service program) to bring women and men together in furtherance of a common purpose greater than themselves.

But beyond any big program or new initiative, what is needed more than anything else is for leaders to set an example for the nation by employing a dialogue of understanding and respect; embracing a self-effacing modesty about the truth of one’s own values and beliefs and eschewing the politics of party for the politics of the possible.

In the West Wing episode Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics, President Josiah Bartlet (a New Hampshire liberal) approaches Senator Max Lobell (a conservative Republican) about an issue of mural interest. The dialogue reads:

President Bartlet: We agree on nothing, Max.

Senator Lobell: Yes, sir.

President Bartlet: Education, guns, drugs, school prayer, gays, defense spending, taxes - you name it, we disagree.

Senator Lobell: You know why?

President Bartlet: Because I'm a lily-livered, bleeding-heart, liberal, egghead communist.

Senator Lobell: Yes, sir. And I'm a gun-toting, redneck son-of-a-bitch.

President Bartlet: Yes, you are.

Senator Lobell: We agree on that.

President Bartlet: We also agree on campaign finance.

Senator Lobell: Yes, sir.

After President Bartlet secures Lobell’s promise to support his nominees to the Federal Election Commission, Lobell asks, “And what do I get in exchange?” Bartlet responds, “The thanks of a grateful President.”

We may live in a cynical age, where the no-holes-barred, backroom backstabbing of House of Cards reflects our current belief (or lack thereof) in the state of politics. But the truth is that the “better angels of our nature” are in line with the hope and aspiration of The West Wing—the type of hope that has long embodied the American Experience; the type of hope that will ensure that the Experience long endures.

Part I: A House Divided: "The Big Sort" and Its Threat to Republicanism

This week, we’ll explore polarization in America. Today’s post dives into the data behind the phenomenon. Tomorrow, we’ll look at how America can remain united by recognizing how diverse means can be applied to common ends.

“Whether you hail from Surbiton, Ulan Bator or Nairobi, your genetic make-up is strikingly similar to that of every other person on Earth.”

--Roger Highfield, “DNA Survey Finds All Humans are 99.9pc the Same,” The Telegraph, 2002 

For generations, “We’re not so different, you and I,” has been a recurring trope in Hollywood, from James Bond to Austin Powers. The phrase, often said by a villain to a protagonist in a moment of self-serving self-reflection, evokes a sentiment that is universal—that for all that separates us from one another (race, sex, class, nationality, religion), there is so much more that we all have in common.

To paraphrase President Clinton’s famous line from his first inaugural address, no difference between people is so vast that the fear and hatred it evokes cannot be cured, mitigated, and ultimately overwhelmed, by our common humanity.

It hasn’t always been easy for people to acknowledge this essential truth. In earlier eras, when the world was flat (not in the Thomas Friedman-sense of the term), interactions between peoples of different backgrounds often carried significant risk of violence.

As Harvard University Professor Steven Pinker detailed in his book The Better Angels of our Nature, the world has witnessed an immense decline in violence over the past several centuries (and an even greater decline when compared to previous millennia). Pinker argues that the “pacification process” (where people agree that a State-like authority should have a monopoly on violence), when combined with the “civilizing process” (in part a boom in commerce between and among peoples) and the “humanitarian revolution” (a recognition of human rights and the moral ill of violence and torture), has led to the steep declines in violence across the globe.

In short, while ignorance of the customs of another tribe is a common prelude to fear and conflict, an understanding of those customs and a symbiotic relationship between peoples (via commerce, art, storytelling, etc.) can be preludes to inspiration and interconnectedness.

Nevertheless, despite Pinker’s exhaustively researched book and the undeniable genetic truth that we are all more alike than may appear at first glance, people continue to struggle to make sense of our differences. Nowhere is this more evident than in politics.

 

CC License: Flickr User "jermiac"

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported on an extraordinary series of studies and polls that “paint a picture of two Americas—not just with differing proclivities but different life experiences.” The core difference identified by researchers is not political party or race, sex, or class. Rather, it boils down to where you live—in a rural or urban setting.

One data point is a particularly blunt indication of this phenomenon. “In 1992, Bill Clinton won 60% of the Whole Foods counties and 40% of the Cracker Barrel counties, a 20-point difference. That gap that has widened every year since, and in 2012, Mr. Obama won 77% of Whole Foods counties and 29% of Cracker Barrel Counties, a 48-point difference.” 

This trend is grounded in the continued self-segregation of Americans by ideology. In McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203 (1948), a case involving the “set aside” of time in public schools for “voluntary” religious instruction, Justice Felix Frankfurter declared that such “voluntary” instruction was not truly voluntary because, “The law of imitation operates, and non-conformity is not an outstanding characteristic of children.” 

Frankfurter was surely right. But maybe his grand conclusion was too narrow. Maybe non-conformity is not an outstanding characteristic of people. As Bill Bishop states in his groundbreaking book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart, “As Americans have moved over the past three decades, they have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and, in the end, politics.”

Indeed, as recently as 1976, 27 percent of Americans lived in counties where the Presidential election was a landslide (defined as a margin of 20 percent or greater). In 2012, over 52 percent of Americans lived in these counties.

The political effects of this clustering are stark. As David Jarman wrote for Daily Kos in 2012, “Even without considering the pernicious effects of gerrymandering, the clustering of more and more Democrats in fewer and fewer places creates a lopsided map of fewer dark-blue districts and more light-red districts,” making it harder for Democrats to win the House of Representatives even as they continue to triumph in national races, as detailed here….and here.

While the effects on the fortunes of political parties continue to generate significant debate (not to mention consternation in many circles), what is most troubling to me as a citizen is the potentially devastating long-term effect of this division on the strength of the American Republic.

From the beginning of our great experiment in democratic self-government, we have recognized that a spirit of cooperation—of common values and principles (even within an otherwise diverse polity)—is essential to our success. In a letter to publisher Hezekiah Niles in 1818, President John Adams famously wrote, “The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations…This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.”

What happens to a society when those “principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections” are no longer common to all who pledge allegiance to our flag? And what, if anything, can we do to mitigate the effects of the “Big Sort” and prevent the Nation’s foundations from being eroded by division? (if you think this is hyperbole, take a look at the recent rise in secessionist movements in the U.S.).

We’ll tackle those questions (and try to find some solutions!) in tomorrow’s post.

Bowling Together: "Being Somebody" in Modern America

 “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

-- George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1874

On August 14, 1851, Rev. Horace Bushnell of Hartford, Connecticut, delivered a speech titled The Age of Homespun, in which he mocked the effort of historians to catalog famous dates and persons and insisted that the truly valuable acts of our world are those performed by the “average” citizen.

[In] our historic pictures, we are obligated to sink particulars in generals, and so to gather, under the name of a prominent few, what is really done by nameless multitudes. These, we say, led out the colonies, these raised up the states and communities, these fought the battles. And so we make a vicious inversion, not seldom, of the truth; representing as causes those who, after all, are not so much causes as effects, not so much powers as instruments, in the occasions signalized by their names—caps only of foam, that roll conspicuous in the sun, lifted, still, by the deep under-swell of waters hid from the eye.

Bushnell’s simple conclusion: “True worth is for the most part unhistoric.”

I thought about Bushnell’s thesis as I unforgivingly traversed the dusty clay streets of Easter Island with my then-67-year-old mother in May 2012. Perhaps to ward off utter exhaustion or to refrain from saying what she really felt about my insistence that we walk every last inch of one of the world’s most mysterious and secluded locations, Mom took the opportunity to talk at length about her childhood, our family, and what she dreamt of as a child growing up in the small Berkshire village of Lee, Mass.

One of the most striking things that Mom said, with a tone of considered disappointment, was that she “always through she’d be somebody.” This struck me as an odd statement, and a troubling one. Mom was (and is) so many things to so many people. Within our family alone, Mom is the third child of a civil servant father and a homemaker mother, a sister to three brothers and sisters, a mother to two (and a surrogate for more), not to mention an ever-patient and forgiving spouse (right, Dad?) for 40+ years.

Beyond the familial, Mom’s life has been equally infused with meaning. She won multiple national teaching awards during her 35-year career as an educator (mainly at Swampscott, Mass. public schools). She’s been treasurer of our local library, a deacon at the First Church of Wenham Congregational, and an ever-present volunteer at Appleton Farms in my hometown of Hamilton, Mass (just to name a few of her many activities).

And of course, neither of my parents can travel the North Shore without bumping into old students who remember Ms. Airoldi (later Mrs. Kalloch) and Mr. Kalloch fondly as critical players in their emotional and intellectual development.

So how could it be that my mother didn’t think she was somebody?

In 1995, Robert Putnam, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, wrote an article in the Journal of Democracy titled, “Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital.” The article, which Putnam eventually turned into a book in 2000, was centered on the idea that the “vibrancy of American civil society” (what Putnam terms “social capital”) had notably declined in the second half of the 20^th century and that such a deterioration was having a multitude of unintended and unhealthy consequences on the state of the American republic.

Putnam continues to be one of several thinkers whose work has had a profound effect on the way I approach politics—so expect to see more of him in “First Principles” posts in the months to come. For the purpose of this post, Putnam’s observation is critical to understanding the answer to the question posed above.

Simply put, I think my mother’s conclusion is a product of how our society has slowly but surely chipped away at viewing community connections and social linkage as critical elements of a life well lived.

 

Everyone plays a role in how a society functions. Everyone is somebody to someone—and often many things to many people, all at the same time. And everyone needs to value each other’s contributions to our collective effort as citizens to make a freer, more just world for our neighbors, whether down the block, across the country, or around the world.

I’ll end—if you will indulge me—with one more familial vignette. Like my own mother, my mother’s mother, Mildred Anson Airoldi, played a variety of roles in her community. One role was as a volunteer at the local information booth on the Lee Town Green (see photo), which still stands at the corner of Main Street and Park Street.

Like many Berkshire towns—from Stockbridge and Great Barrington in the south to Williamstown and Adams to the north—Lee has long relied on tourism to boost its economy, especially as manufacturing fled in post-war period. My grandmother would welcome visitors to the Gateway to the Berkshires, whether they came to enjoy a concert at nearby Tanglewood in the summer, our famous foliage in the fall, or snow sports in the winter.

My grandmother was doing her part for her community. She was part of a world in which we “Bowled Together” and which that togetherness was valued. It’s a world that has, in some ways, passed us by. But it is also a world that can inspire us to do better—to appreciate the roles we play in one another’s success and to remember that while the world will long be full of unvisited tombs, it must never forget the people who inhabit said tombs. Those people were somebody.