Forwarding the Conversation

This afternoon, in typical Sunday afternoon fashion I found something incredibly trivial to do with my spare time. So, my girlfriend and I went to redbox and rented Milk.  It was a great movie, and somewhere in the middle Harvey Milk speaks about the words engraved in the pedastel of the Statue of Liberty. Below is the full poem, I wanted to post it because I think that it truly reflects not only my own ideals and values, but those of our Nation.

Below is a guest contribution by a close friend of mine named Jonathan Smith. He is a great thinker and I am glad that he is contributing to the conversation on this site.

Before you read this posting please vote in the poll and let everyone know which political party you think embodies “small town values?” You can also drop a comment on the page. Thanks!

The Great Divide

By Jonathan W. Smith

It’s true America. I appreciate everything Ross has done in creating this blog to help foster the civil conversation and as his title suggests—move it forward. We need to stop being drowned by our petty fears and differences and start uniting at the local level to bring about the change we desire. If we want less partisanship in Washington, I believe we need less partisanship in our communities.

Unfortunately, I’m not going to talk about that. Now wait, before you turn away from this blog, hear me out. I tried. I really did. I tried to be a vocal proponent of going to the table and hearing every side. I grew up in Houston, Texas and daily listened to how I was going to go to hell if I believed in evolution. My earliest mentors (Sunday school teachers) to this day send me links to articles about how a Muslim Obama will sneak terrorists in and plant them in key positions in our government to eventually bring about our demise. I took these lies and my own damnation with a grain of salt until Sarah Palin visited NYC.

I’ve been living here for 2 years now and I’m a New Yorker through and through. Not to say I don’t keep my Texas roots a live and close to my heart (every Saturday I’m at Brother Jimmy’s watching UT trounce the competition as I pound PBRs, or as I like to refer to them “nectar of the gods”). Both sides of my family hail from Virginia. Not upstate, D.C. NoVA, but backwoods, piedmont, gun toting Lynchburg and Roanoke. There I’m simply known as Everett’s boy. I keep these Southern Roots close to me because despite the all the problems that my parents faced, segregation being the biggest, their hope wasn’t wrapped in just the American flag but also the fertile soil of the America below the Mason/Dixon line. From slavery to Jim Crow, my family stayed in the South because their attachment to Southern culture was stronger than any fear they felt. If that’s not loving your country, I don’t know what is. Since moving to NYC, I’ve found that the same values that bind my parents to Virginia are the same values the bind New Yorkers to Old New Amsterdam. These values: hard work, duty to family, and service are the very values that have turn New York City into the financial and cultural capital of the country so I was a bit mystified when Sarah Palin claimed that she wanted to bring small town values to Washington, D.C. What the hell are small town values and why on Earth are they any better than big city values? What makes Wasilla, Alaska more American than New York, New York? What really made me mad was after she professed small town values she comes to NYC and marches up to Ground Zero and proclaims that she will be the one to protect New York City. In one hand she holds up NYC as an example of what America shouldn’t be while with the other hand she promises to defend New York City. I’m not buying it sister.

As I continue to watch her rallies one thing sticks out in my mind, the great divide isn’t North – South like in antebellum America. It isn’t East – West made famous by Tupac and Biggie (may they rest in peace, holla) as it was in the 90s. In this day and age, it’s Urban vs Rural. For the longest time Urban meant black. Businesses would send out memos telling their employees to find avenues at attracting the Urban crowd. Chappelle at Comedy Central wasn’t “black” but was “Urban”. Decades of white flight had created a divide between the serene suburbs and the Urban Jungle. Years later as minorities became successful they bought into the “white flight” hysteria as my parents did. Living in the city was just too dangerous to raise a family. Kids need grass, fresh air, and small town / 1950’s values to keep them safe. As the city became more taboo our curiosities became profound. The mundane boredom of cookie cutter houses lined up in rows stopped appealing to my generation and the constant revival of the streets attracted us. My street corner in the East Village constantly changes while my parent’s sidewalk remains the same. At first we just went to schools in the city. Had our fill of “dangerous” living and then settled into a two story brick house with a white picket fence. Nowadays, we linger in these cities. Look at the rate of gentrification in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, and D.C. Yuppies move in and push the inhabitants who created the culture we desire out. Major college towns such as Austin find themselves building up to accommodate the post grads who wish to stay in a more liberal-minded city that provide a unique culture and society. Listen to the thunderous roar of approval when Sarah Palin uses the phrase “small town values” or “1950 values”. Her rallies are becoming cesspools hatred. There’s a current that winds through each and every one of them. Wall Street (NY) got us into this mess and Main Street (middle America) is feeling the consequences. The flimsy allegiance with in the Republican Party between the money managers in New York and the anti-abortion church goers in Waco is falling apart. New York, too many, is becoming so unrecognizable to American values that they support a bi-cultural African-

American with a Jewish Muslim name for president—the nerve of these elitists!

Maybe someone can explain to me why 1950’s values are so good. I did some research. In the 1950’s we were losing the space race to the Russians because we hadn’t adequately funded math and science in schools. The stupidity of the Monkey-Scopes trial of 1925 still hung around our necks as many parents grew up in an age of learning that taught evolution as a “black art”. Hysteria was running rampant at the fear that our next door neighbors might have an accent and therefore be communists. Woman earned 59 cents, on average, to every dollar a male made and I would have gone to a school that was “separate but equal”. The 1950s sucked! Why would we ever want to return to those days? Every time Sarah Palin revs up a crowd by evoking the 1950s, she’s harkening to the days of Xenophobia, Homophobia, Segregation, and Sexism. We can not allow this to happen! We must make a stand, here and now, that big city values are distinctly American values and are no less patriotic than the values you find walking down Wasilla Main Street. Tell Governor Palin that she has no right to point to NYC on a map and tell a crowd in Bumble Fuck, Idah-who-cares that it’s us versus them. We are all Americans and we must all move forward together. Thank you.

Bobby Kennedy on the quality of youth:

“Our answer is the world’s hope; it is to rely on youth. The cruelties and obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans. It cannot be moved by those who cling to a present which is already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement and danger which comes with even the most peaceful progress.

This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. It is a revolutionary world we live in, and thus, as I have said in Latin America and Asia, in Europe and in the United States, it is young people who must take the lead. Thus you, and your young compatriots everywhere, have had thrust upon you a greater burden of responsibility than any generation that has ever lived.”

Youth is a quality and a state of mind that gives us the ability to continually see the world through new eyes and different lenses. Bobby Kennedy spoke of the outworn dogmas and slogans of the previous generation and cited that what we need is the quality of youth. If we are to tackle the growing problems of tomorrow we need to go back to the visions of yesterday. We need to go back to a time when we saw the world differently: before we decided things are just the way they are. 

When a newborn baby opens its eyes for the first time it sees a world without labels and identities. It sees a world through the eyes of infinite possibility. That is the quality that we need now, not just in our leaders but among the general populace. Kennedy said that in order to create the world that we all want to pass down to our children that we require the “qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.”

It’s time that we demand this quality of our leaders and of ourselves. I will now leave you with some questions to spur some creative thinking…

When you were a child how did you see the world?

How does the way that you saw the world as a child differ from the way you perceive the world now?

What is not possible now that you thought was possible when you were a child?

Who do you know that as an adult displays the ‘qualities of youth’ that Kennedy describes?

If you know a person like that, how do they personify these qualities?

Bobby Kennedy is an example of someone who displayed the qualities of youth. The video below is another speech that he gave called the Mindless Menace of Violence which highlights his thinking.