Deliberate Democracy

Focus on Research | Citizens at state and local levels show real success in deliberating issues | Living | CentreDaily.com

Today, as we mourn the death of Senator Arlen Specter, one of the last true centrists in the U.S. Congress, I was very pleased to see this article about the use of citizen panels to deliberate on major policy issues in Oregon.  The idea that we can make better public policy decisions when we deliberate over the issues instead of simply hearing testimony before acting on ideology, is a lesson to all of us, at every level of public life.   We should demand of our leaders a "deliberate democracy" instead of a polarized debate. 

Grandpa in Chicago

I am working on an “Education and Society” blog posting about the birth of progressive education in Chicago in the 1890s.  It reminded me of a story my grandfather used to tell on himself.

            Grandpa was born in 1883.  His father, who had been born in Prussia, died in 1899.  Grandpa had hoped to attend a seminary in Erie, but, with his father’s death, that goal had been abandoned.  Charlie, the older of the two sons, stayed home with his mother, Lizzie.

            They lived on Strawbridge Avenue in Hickory Township (now Hermitage, Pa.), where his parents had owned about 8 acres of land.  One day, Lizzie sent Charlie to the grocery story to buy some pork chops.  On his way to the store, he encountered a friend who was driving a wagon filled with his personal belongings.

            “Where are you headed?” Charlie asked his friend.

            “Chicago,” the friend, forever nameless in Grandpa’s story, answered. “Want to come along?”

            “Sure,” said Grandpa, and hopped on board and went to Chicago.

            He stayed there for two years, working among the immigrants who dominated the workforce in those days.  When he returned, Grandpa recounted, he stopped at the grocery store and picked up those pork chops before heading home. 

            I think about that story when I read or write about John Dewey and Jane Addams in Chicago, about Hull House or the Pullman Strike.  I wonder if Grandpa ever found himself in Halstead Street—home to many German immigrants—or at Hull House itself.

           Grandpa never talked about Chicago itself, only about going and returning. I suspect Chicago was a brief period of excitement in a life that was otherwise tormented by alcoholism and disappointment.  It is part of my memory of him (he died in 1960) and one that has been renewed as I study the great things that were happening in Chicago around the same time as his visit.   It is nice to have another connection with him.

Antique Music

Karen and I dropped in at a big antiques mall near Milroy, Pa., the other day.  Two stories of great old stuff.  I bought three LPs for less than $5, including the Eagles Greatest Hits.  Back in the 1990s, this was the best selling LP of all time.  I am playing it as I write this.  It is good music. 

I also bought two Christmas albums.  One by Kate Smith ("Christmas Eve in My Home Town" is an old favorite) and Eddie Arnold (my Mom loved his music and he has a really solid style).  We have an incredible library of old Christmas albums that we bought at yard sales and antique stores, plus a few that we've carried with us through the years.  These will be good additions.  Christmas is a time for memories.  I remember, for instance, that my mother gave me my very first LP for Christmas:  Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a'Changing."

Instructions for Life from the Dalai Lama

Below are the “Instructions for Life” by the Dalai Lama—“20 Ways to Get Good Karma.”  They are worth keeping posted on your bulletin board or inside your medicine cabinet or on your refrigerator.  I especially like the last two.

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
3. Follow the three R’s:
   -  Respect for self,
   -  Respect for others and
   -  Responsibility for all your actions.
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great relationship.
7. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
8. Spend some time alone every day.
9. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
11. Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and
    think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.
12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.
14. Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.
15. Be gentle with the earth.
16. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.
19. If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.
20. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

"Where are the Others?"

I just finished reading Along the Way, an excellent father/son memoir by Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez. Toward the end, Sheen writes:

"There's an old saying: If you arrive at the Kingdom alone you must answer just one question: 'Where are the others?' We are made so that we must travel alone, yet we cannot do so without community. No one can live our lives for us or carry our inner burdens, yet we can come to know ourselves only through our compassion for others." 

This, it seems to me, is what is missing from the public debate over health care, gun control, and some other issues today.   Our nation has polarized over political ideology.  And, for the most part, that ideology itself is not well-articulated or well-communicated.  Instead, people latch on to pieces of it:  freedom of markets, corporations as independent operators in society,  the right to keep and bear arms, etc.  Missing is a discussion of fundamental moral issues: 

What defines the U.S. as a "community?" 

As citizens, what are our responsibilities to others who share our community?

The big public policy issues are, in the final analysis, not questions of cost or freedom of markets, but of responsibility.  What is our responsibility to others?   Government--and the taxes that support it--are the vehicle by which we help each other in order to sustain our community.   If we believe the Christian adage, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," how should we use our government?  And, as a community, what should we expect of corporations that thrive on the work of individuals in our community?

A Globalization Moment

Several years ago, I was in New York City for a board meeting of the International Council for Distance Education.  After the session, several of us decided to have dinner together.  We were four—from Germany, India, Norway, and myself from the U.S.

            We set out to find a good restaurant, deciding that we could easily find good food within walking distance of our Manhattan hotel.  We came to the door of a well-known Italian restaurant and were about to enter when our Indian colleague stopped.  “I’ve never understood Italian food,” he told us.  “I don’t think I am ready for this.”

            We stood on the sidewalk and discussed where to eat.  Eventually, we all agreed on Chinese food.  We had passed a Chinese restaurant on the way and so backtracked to it.  It was late, and the restaurant had on a few tables with customers.  Our waiter, apparently, was born in China and, if his grasp of English was any indication, had arrived fairly recently.   We struggled to identify what was in the different menu items.  Finally, my Norwegian colleague found something he liked.

            “Bueno!” 

            He had a habit of exclaiming in Spanish like that. 

            Our waiter’s eyes lit up.  “Quiere esto?”  he asked.  It turned out that, in the New York neighborhood where he lived, Spanish was more common than English.  It was his American language.

            After that, we had no problem.  We ordered the rest of our Chinese dinner in English, confirming the details in Spanish.  It was a great evening.  Smiles all around, including the waiter, who was much relieved.

            It was a globalization moment—a little example of how our new world works.  We are all in this together.  All of us equals in a world, all of us trying to find a language that will help us become part of the new community in which we find ourselves.  There is no room for xenophobia in this world:  we are all strangers here.

Reading Memoirs

I have become a big fan of memoirs.  Not biographies, but books where interesting individuals explore major events in their own lives.

            It began with One Hundred Names for Love, Diane Ackerman’s memoir of life with her husband, novelist Paul West, after he suffered a stroke that affected his ability to communicate.   This was a very personal memoir for me.  I took several courses from Paul when he taught at Penn State.  More than that, I thought of him as a mentor and role model at a time when I hoped to become a writer myself.  I don’t know Diane, but we very likely were both students at Penn State during the late sixties and early seventies.   She is a wonderful writer in her own right, the author of The Natural History of the Senses,among other books.  She had been researching a book about the brain when Paul suffered his stroke.  As a result, her memoir starts with the science of what he suffered and expands to explore how their relationship evolved as he recovered and, ultimately, how he himself experienced the stroke and its aftermath.   The powerful aspect of this memoir, though, is her description of their daily life together, both before and after the stroke. 

            I then read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which starts with the sudden death of her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, and her life over the next twelve months.   I knew little about Didion at the time.  I discovered that she was an inspiration for a generation of women and that she and her husband had been an important screenwriting team.  From her narrative, I learned that she was also a “tough customer.”  As she describes it, when her husband died, she went to the hospital, not knowing whether he was alive or dead.  When the attending physician came in, she overheard the EMT tell him, “It’s okay.  She’s a tough customer.”   For a while, she takes that as an ironic nickname.   Reading Magical Thinking was a bit like moving into a new neighborhood and getting to know a wonderful, but complex neighbor. 

            I had just finished Magical Thinkingwhen Karen and I took a vacation to Maine.  We stopped by the public library in Kennebunkport, where I was delighted to find a copy of John Gregory Dunne’s last novel.   Interesting how reading can become a family affair.  Didion completed a second memoir—about the death of her daughter—before she died earlier this year.  I have yet to read that one, but I will.

            I knew almost nothing about Patti Smith, the punk rock poet, until I picked up Just Kids, her memoir about her early days in New York and her relationship with the photographer Robert Maplethorpe.   She is just about my age.   She ran away to New York from New Jersey in the 1960s and recounts her life there during the flowering of the American counter culture.  I was amazed to read about a peer’s experiences, so different from my own, but with many of the same cultural contexts as background.  I immediately went out and bought Horses, her breakthrough album.

            This week, I started another memoir—Along the Way, a father-son memoir by Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez.  Again, I was confronted by two people who experienced some of the same events that I did—the death of Robert Kennedy, for instance—but from two very different perspectives:  one, a man a few years older than me; the other, his son, much younger than me.   I could identify with both as they talked about their experiences in the 1960s—Martin getting starting his career and his family in a time of cultural revolution, Emilio experiencing a nomadic childhood in a strong family.  I am still reading this one, but it promises to be very revealing of the dynamics between two creative people in a demanding profession.

            What I like about all of these books is the way these first-person accounts are like sitting down and catching up with an old friend.  In the end, I feel a personal connection with the authors.  It is a fantastic literary experience.