LeBron James and Dwayne Wade with Michelle Obama
First Ladies have traditionally taken on some issue or project during their husbands' occupancy of the Oval Office. Lady Bird Johnson beautified America's highways with wildflowers. Laura Bush worked hard to fight illiteracy. The endeavors are generally apolitical. Unless your last name happens to be Obama. Then, whatever you do will be framed by your marriage to that Kenyan, Muslim, radical communist. Even if what you are doing can save lives.
Perhaps you have seen some of the tweets at #ThanksMichelleObama that show some pretty unappealing school lunches. Complaining about school lunches used to be what we did at lunch when I was in school. I don't think they have ever been noted for high quality or anticipated with mouthwatering delight. Then schools started serving fast food, their vending machines were filled with sodas and sweets. Children got fat.
In an effort to save them from a lifetime of health issues, the federal government, which pays for many of the lunches, decided to provide healthier food. Michelle Obama has been at the forefront of this movement and has even launched Let's Move! to combat childhood obesity. This has made her a target for teens on Twitter.
I’m sure she has faced much worse, but it reminded me of another time a First Lady got involved with the daily lives of school children. It was way back in the 1980s when Nancy Reagan rolled out the feel-good PR program to support her husband’s War on Drugs, Just Say No.
Our granddaughter was in elementary school at the time, and came home one day with a bagful of goodies from D.A.R.E. (the companion program started by Daryl Gates, then chief of the Los Angeles Police Department). Colored pencils, posters, bumper stickers—it got a little awkward when she asked us to put one on our car.
For a walk down memory lane and a glimpse of the terrible price of that program, follow me below the fold.
The program initially gave me a creepy feeling, but then I was an unreconstructed hippie with a strong aversion to the government telling children to inform on their parents. And even though at that time, my drug of choice was Scotch, I had no problem with others using marijuana.
It was while campaigning for her husband in 1980, that Nancy Reagan stumbled upon the phrase that would define her efforts. From the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library:
“A little girl raised her hand,” Mrs. Reagan recalled, “and said, ’Mrs. Reagan, what do you do if somebody offers you drugs?’ And I said, ’Well, you just say no.’ And there it was born.”
The phrase caught on, and was eventually adopted as the name for clubs and school anti-drug programs. By 1988 more than 12,000 Just Say No clubs had been formed across the country and around the world.
It was developed into a brilliant marketing campaign to sell a war that would be fought against illegal drugs whose use was, at the time, in decline. Though presenting a facile solution to a complex issue, the phrase eventually became part of our modern-day lexicon.
Nancy Reagan worked hard at promoting her program, traveling some 250,000 miles around the country, and then around the world, spreading the anti-drug message. Often surrounded by children or speaking at schools, she ensured her work cultivated the image that this was a campaign to save children.
Nancy Reagan at a "Just Say No" rally at the White House in 1986.
Looking back from 30 years later, it is rather obvious that not all dog whistles in the War on Drugs were verbal. It is doubtful that the children selected to stand on or near the stage with Nancy Reagan were chosen at random. And I can't help but wonder how many of those young people were able to remain outside of the prison walls once the war started tearing apart their neighborhoods.
According to her biography at the National First Ladies' Library:
When President Reagan signed the October 27, 1986 "National Crusade for a Drug Free America" anti-drug abuse bill into law, she considered it a personal victory and made an unprecedented joint address to the nation with him on the problem.
I doubt that she had any idea of the tremendous damage that program would do. The bill of which she was so proud authorized $1.7 billion for the drug war and created the mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses that have seen our prison population climb from 300,000 in 1980 to over 2 million today. According to Michelle Alexander, author of
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness:
No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison. Similar rates of incarceration can be found in black communities across America.
The drug war that Nancy embraced and made family-friendly has cost us over a
trillion dollars and millions of lives ruined. And as a result, today a gram of pure cocaine costs $177.26,
74 percent cheaper than it was 30 years ago.
And that does not even begin to include the damage that it has done to our communities. In the heavy enforcement of this ridiculous war, the police have made themselves an enemy of the black community. They are feared and despised by the very people who need their help. The money of the drug war has flooded into local police departments that are now as well-armed as many of the world's armies.
Meanwhile, the
Let's Move campaign of Michelle Obama, which sadly does not have a catchy one-liner, is unlikely to lead to a war against fast food, no matter how much projecting those on the right continue to do.
No one is going to be busted for selling a Whopper or a Quarter-Pounder on a street corner. Nor will we be spending our hard-earned tax dollars into beefing up patrols at white suburban high schools to prevent students from a trip to Carl’s Jr. at lunch time. There is even a chance that students could actually start enjoying fresh fruits and vegetables. (According to surveys, that has already begun.)
In spite of the Twitter storm from high school students, 30 years from today, it is doubtful that anyone will look back at the work of Michelle Obama and be able to measure the cost of her efforts in numbers of lives destroyed and dollars wasted.