Let me clear. This is not a book review per se, even as I absolutely urge you to read Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America, which was published on October 7. As I have read I have been reflecting back on my own thoughts and writings here over the past decade plus, on things I have read by the likes of Joe Stiglitz (quoted in the book), Diane Ravitch (likewise), Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders, Eugene Robinson, Nick Kristof, Harold Meyerson, and others.
Yet actually my thoughts quickly went back to a book I read many years ago. Michael Harrington's The Other America was published in the early 1960s, and had a profound impact upon our wealthy young president Jack Kennedy. Harrington had started with an essay that became a book that was very influential - it made visible for the first time since the Great Depression the perilous economic state of many Americans, invisible and ignored in the midst of the growth of the Middle Class in the years after World War II, despite occasional glimpses at SOME who lived in deprivation, for example the superb television documentary by Edward R. Murrow on migrant farm workers in Harvest of Shame.
In a sense Herbert's book has the potentiality of a similar impact, except it is not clear that we have any longer the kind of consensus necessary to make the changes necessary to address the problems afflicting so many of us - Herbert seems to think it is still possible to turn around our ship of state and society, about which more anon.
It is not that Herbert is addressing anything we have not heard. He focuses on issues of infrastructure, loss of meaningful employment, shift of wealth and income upward, what is happening to our schools, our misguided war adventurism, and our failure to care for our troops. He talks with experts, and with ordinary folks whose lives have been deeply affected by all of these issues.
What makes the book powerful is how he can weave all this together, combining the words and experiences of others - well-known and not so known - with data and with incisive analysis and commentary.
Rather than review the book per se, I want to offer some selections that particularly struck me, along with my own reactions. I hope in the process, if I have not already done so, to convince you to immediately go out and get this volume and devour it.
Please keep reading.
I want to begin by quoting three paragraphs from page 5, from the Author's Note. They are offered after Herbert quotes a WWII veteran wondered "What happened?" to the America that did so much for so many in the 3 decades after that conflict ended:
The most direct answer to the veteran's question was that as a society we had behaved irresponsibly, self-destructively, for decades. We lost sight of the effort and sacrifice required to build and maintain a great nation. We refused to fend off the destructive excesses of free-market zealots and casino capitalists. Greed was not only tolerated but encouraged, and that led to catastrophic imbalances in wealth, income, and political power. Over time, the great American ideals of fairness and justice for all, and the great American values of thrift and civic engagement, began to lose their hold on us. We embraced shopping. We behaved as if the acquisition of materials goods, from sneakers and gold chains to vast seaside estates, was the greatest good of all.
The devastating wounds that have caused Americans such pain were self-inflicted. We fought wars that never should have been fought. We allowed giant banks and predatory corporations to plunder the nation's wealth and resources without regard for the damage done to the economy, the environment, or the people. We neglected the nation's physical infrastructure to the point where bridges were collapsing, water systems were failing, and the historic city of New Orleans was submerged in a catastrophic flood that shocked not just the nation but the world.
After so much neglect and so many bad policy decisions, we ended up with a government and an economy incapable of meeting the human needs of a complex and divers nation of more than 300 million people.
All of this should be familiar to those of you reading these words. Many have written about such issues. Some are famous pundits and authors. Others are political figures, office holders and candidates. Some are activists and thinkers who participate in this and other virtual communities, including a high school social studies teacher who at times wonder whether there is any point in teaching his adolescent students about a government that seems no longer to be part of a functioning liberal democracy, and this year a course in economics whose premises and assumptions seem totally unconnected to what happens in the real world national and global economies.
I acknowledge that at times I wonder if I have reached a breaking point. I remember an exchange with my friend Diane Ravitch about whether we had already lost the war to save public education. She told me that might be so, but she intended to go down fighting. Since then she and others - like my friends Anthony Cody and Jeff Bryant, fiery Fordham professor Mark Naison, teachers like Jesse Hagopian in Seattle, students in Providence, principals like Carol Burris in New York, superintendents like John Kuhn in Texas and Pam Moran in Virginia and Josh Starr in Maryland - have organized and pushed back against the education "reformers" and the discussion on schools and teaching and learning and testing seem to be changing.
Herbert's book is not a lamentation. He documents where things have gone wrong, but usually in the context of providing hope, or at least attempting to provoke us to believe that our actions can still make a difference. Thus immediately after the words I have just quoted we read on pp. 5-6:
The abiding premise of this book is that things do not have to be this way. There is no reason to sit still for an intolerable status quo. Democracy is still alive, if not particularly healthy, in America, Ordinary citizens can still roll up their sleeves and - with enough effort, commitment, and willingness to sacrifice - reclaim their nation's lost promise. The dream can still be revived. Wounds can heal. A fresh start can be made. But only if citizens overcome their reluctance to engage in collective civic action on an organized and ongoing basis. In other words, only if ordinary citizens choose to intervene aggressively and collectively in their own fate.
He quotes Howard Zinn as saying if their is going to be real change it will be from the bottom up.
Much later in the book he cites as an example the four freshmen from North Carolina A&T who one day sat down at a segregated lunch counter in a Woolworth's in Greensboro NC, an action that sparked a broad movement that fueled the passion of the Civil Rights Movement.
He will remind us as well that the 1963 March on Washington was intended as much for jobs as for justice, something upon which I as a participant have often reflected and shared with my students, and an event he tells us that convinced a young Joe Stiglitz to change his major to economics in order to make a difference in the lives of others and the society in which we live.
The actual book begins with the collapse of the I-35 bridge as a metaphor for America's failing infrastructure.
Don't worry, I won't go through the entire book. But for this, as for each of the areas Herbert explores, he connects it with the lives of "ordinary" people who experienced the impact, as well as the observations and comments of 'experts.'
Allow me to share a few quotes of things that throughout the book caught my attention:
There had always been a link between the state of the infrastructure and the social and economic health of the society. . . . The human toll has often been profound, as the tragedies in New Orleans and Minnesota have demonstrated. But the social and economic costs - the lost prosperity, the forfeiture of discoveries and innovations that would have come with modernization, the myriad employment and other opportunities that never materialized - have also been enormous. Those losses have damaged the nation as surely as the I-35 bridge collapse damaged the victims and their families.
pp 13-14
America once had the finest infrastructure in the world, and that magnificent system of public works went hand in hand with a remarkably robust economy. But now that infrastructure is in sad shape, and it's no coincidence that the economy is as well.
p. 20
Two selections from p. 39-40
What is important to understand is that it was no accident that so many Americans have had to struggle economically for so long. A vast and shameful array of deliberate policy choices, going back decades, shaped the U. S. economy in ways that the benefits of growth would go overwhelmingly to those who were already at or near the top of the nation's financial pyramid.
From 2000 to 2012, no net new jobs were created in the United States - not one - even as the working-age population continued to grow. That's a recipe for societal breakdown. From 1999 to 2009,a stunning one-third of all American families experienced the loss of employment by a household head. The first ten years of the twenty-first century achieved the dubious distinction of being the only decade since the 1930s in which the nation's median household income actually declined.
In answer to the question of how in a country as rich as our so many were falling behind he writes on 62-63:
The biggest factor by far was the toxic alliance by government and America's megacorporations and giant banks. That alliance of elites, fueled by limitless greed and a near-pathological quest for power, reshaped the rules and regulations of the economy and the society at large to heavily favor the interests of those who were already well-to-do. In the process they trampled the best interests of ordinary Americans.
It is tempting to offer quote after quote but by now you should have a sense of the power of this book.
There are somethings that may surprise - that are largest employers have gone from the likes of Ford and GM to Walmart and McDonald's; that the soldier honored by President Obama at a State of the Union message got severely injured on his TENTH deployment; that the interstate highway system build under the leadership of REPUBLICAN Dwight D. Eisenhower is the largest public works project in history, and as a result Eisenhower spent more on public works than did Roosevelt during the New Deal. Herbert addresses the unwillingness of Republicans and some Democrats to fund rebuilding our infrastructure (at a time when, as people like Krugman have noted interest rates on borrowing the money to do this are at historic lows and the spending would more than pay for itself) with a pointed paragraph on p. 206, having already reminded us that Lincoln pushed the Transcontinental Railroad while fighting this nation's bloodiest conflict:
Lincoln could have said that investments in infrastructure were unaffordable in the midst of the Civil War. Roosevelt could certainly have said it during the Depression. Harry Truman and a Republican Congress could have said it about the Marshall Plan in the aftermath of World War II. They all chose to follow a more visionary path.
We need our visionaries today.
They may not be those we currently view as leaders. Perhaps one or more of us in this community, or someone who reads our words or about the actions we do, will become inspired to step up. Herbert argues that the movements that have changed America have usually begun with "ordinary" people drawing a line, making a stand, as did those four students from NC A&T. Actions like that, and like that of Rosa Parks and others in Montgomery, may provide the occasion for others - say M L King Jr - to step up and provide leadership. And remember, King was only 26 when he became the voice of the boycott, only 35 when he was the Nobel Peace Laureate, only 39 when he was assassinated.
Herbert argues that the key has to be meaningful employment, writing on p. 255 "If America cannot get its act together on the jobs front, its many other serious wounds will not heal." He quotes Walter Reuther, head of the UAW - the only major majority white union to support the 1964 March, at that event: If we can have full employment and full production for the negative ends of war, then why can't we have a job for every American in the pursuit of peace?
He acknowledges that the odds those of us committed to righting the course of our nation and society is steep, and the challenges are great, but they are no more unrealistic than what was faced by those in previous movements towards equity - civil rights, women's right, labor. He reminds us that despite being originally dismissed they endured and ultimately prevailed.
There are two more lines, his final two lines, with which I will end. But first I offer this:
I have acknowledged that at times I wonder if I am at the point of despair about the future. When recently I ruminated about such on Facebook an acquaintance reminded me about starfish, about the little boy who while he could not save all the beached starfish was saving those he could.
it is why I continue to write.
It is why I continue to teach.
I am 68. I am past the point where I expect to be a leader of anything.
But perhaps I can help inspire or provoke or encourage others.
Having no biological children, lacking wealth for gifts and endowments, that is all I have to offer as a way of paying forward the benefits I received from a middle class childhood and upbringing in the period after WWII when we actually saw the building of the great middle class, the expansion of the American dream to many more.
And now for Herbert's last words, on p. 25^:
If our nation is to be changed for the better, ordinary citizens will have to intervene aggressively in their own fate. The tremendous power in the hands of the moneyed interests will not be relinquished voluntarily.
Peace??
