I just read I don't believe in this country anymore. I can feel along with its author the pain he experiences, for I have seen it in the faces of some of my fellow teachers and far more often in the faces of the families of the students I have taught recently. Increasing numbers of our graduates focus on state colleges and universities because other opportunities have been foreclosed by finances, by loss of financial aid possibilities.
Yet I still believe in this country. If I did not, I would not have spent this past weekend in Providence, at Netroots Nation.
I would not have brought John Jackson and Diane Ravitch in to speak about how we can win the war on public education.
I would not have spent the past 17 years teaching in public schools, trying to convince my young people that they have a future they can create for themselves.
I acknowledge many reasons for people to despair.
I see in the increasing inequity of our nation - I have written my fair share of pieces about it.
I am old enough to understand the increasing threats of environmental catastrophe, of pandemics spread easily through global travel of sectarian violence spreading first regionally and then internationally, of so many more personal issues, like caring for fading elders at a time when the social safety net is being shredded for personal and political gain.
So why do I still believe in this country?
We still have the ability to go beyond ourselves, as we saw in Providence in the coming together in support of women's rights, especially when Darcy Burner asked people to stand up - remember, there were more men standing than women, because rights of anyone are the rights of all of us.
I am someone who lived through the civil rights era. Yesterday was not only the 45th anniversary of the seminal Supreme Court Decision Loving v Virginia, it was also the 49th anniversary of the assassination of Medgar Evers in Jackson MS. My nephew's wife is African-American. Our President is African-American. So is our Attorney General. So is the Governor of MA. When I first attended Haverford we had very few students of color, now the college is more than 1/4 students of color.
I lived in NYC at the time of Stonewall. Until then police would with impunity raid a bar that catered to gays. Now we are seeing the spreading of marriage equality - it is progress, painful at times, not without its missteps. But it is progress.
Corporations are finding that ordinary people can come together and push back - yes, Glen Beck may have another contract, but we got him off the air for a while, corporations and politicians are quitting ALEC, Limbaugh has lost advertisers.
The Governor may have survived recall in Wisconsin, but the people learned how to come together and organize. Sometimes it is in defeat that we learn how to win, to make positive change. Think back to the Civil Rights era, how many losses were suffered, not just of political contests, but of lives of those who risked. Eventually the conscience of the nation was provoked and great progress was made.
We have today tools that enable us to organize in different ways than in the past. We are still learning how to use them, the positive impact they can have.
In the Fifties people were often afraid to rock any boat. A man could bloviate and bluster like Joe McCarthy. Yet McCarthy found that others would stand up to his bullying - Edward R. Murrow, Joseph Welch, some of his fellow Senators including Republicans Margaret Chase Smith of Maine and Prescott Bush of Connecticut.
This nation has survived many trials and tribulations. We were born in a Revolution that by all rights should have failed. Washington lost far more battles than he won, and perhaps our best fighting general, Nathaniel Greene, effectively never won a battle yet ran Cornwallis ragged chasing him around the South. Thomas Jefferson had to flee to avoid capture by British troops.
Even after the Revolution we again fought Britain, saw our national capital city burned, and survived that conflict more because of the British need to focus on Napoleon than by our own military prowess.
We survived, however badly, the damage that the continuation of slavery did to this nation. That includes the internecine conflict that came close to consuming us in the 1860s.
Our history has not always been pretty. Gaining of basic rights has required struggles - by freed slaves, by women, by Hispanics, by Native Americans, by some religious groups, by the LGBT community.
Some of those struggles are ongoing.
We suffer some defeats. We will continue to suffer defeats, but it will not be only defeats.
Consider:
In 1963 when I graduated from High School, I do not think either I or most of my classmates could have conceived of an openly gay Congressman chairing a major House Committee as did Barney Frank, or of a Black President, or of increasing numbers of women in major positions of authority in business, politics, or religion.
Perhaps it is because I have spent the largest portion of my waking hours for the better part of two decades working with adolescents that i still believe in this country. I see their capacity for compassion, I know their sense of justice and injustice.
Our elders did not quite know what to do with us - we challenged authority in ways they could not understand. Here I recall two verses from Bob Dylan:
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.
The times are still changing.
The young people will challenge what we give them in ways as different to some of us as our ways were to our parents.
The passion and compassion of the American people are being provoked by those who seek to divide us by fear - Scott Walker's divide and conquer of labor, for example. Yet the result is not what they expected - they have unleashed forces that can overcome those who would divide us, those who would oppress us, those who seek to accumulate power and wealth to their own narrow purposes.
In 2006 there were far fewer of us in Las Vegas than there were this past weekend in Providence.
There are increasing numbers of young people getting involved - think of the various occupy movements.
Four of my grandparents immigrated to this country.
My father grew up poor.
I have experienced a middle class life, not always without its challenges.
I have by birth and then by choice been a member of a number of religious traditions clearly in the minority.
My family and friends include blacks, hispanics, native americans, east asians, south asians, straights, gays, so many variants of the human existence whose presence in my life enriches me greatly.
All of this is because I am an American.
It is because I am an heir to the American tradition, as flawed as it may be, that I am passionate about things -
- about human rights
- about the environment
- about education as a means of opening doors to possibilities
- about justice
- about equity
We face challenges, but those challenges give us opportunity, an occasion to organize, to push back.
My life has been enriched because of this country, even with all its flaws.
I can understand all of the frustrations so many feel.
Hell, at times I wonder if wars important to me, such as that to save public education, are not already lost.
But then I get angry.
I get determined.
I remember history, and how seemingly impossible situations have been overcome.
Were I to give up now, then my 17 years in the classroom would have been wasted. Then I would have betrayed the students I have tried to inspire. Then my life would cease to have meaning.
I still believe in this country, with all of its flaws and all of its difficulties, because I know how I have benefited.
I have benefited because others before me took on struggles that at times may have seemed hopeless.
Some were broken. Some died.
But America survived.
I can turn to words of poets like Langston Hughes or songs of protest to remind me that there have always been struggles.
This land belongs to you and me. Guthrie wrote and sang it. I believe it.
I will be damned before I give up on that ideal.
I still believe in this country.