Is This Another Upswing?

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

Something is going on in the American culture and psyche, a change that I believe will return us to a more optimistic era of hope and possibilities.

I see what Pulitzer prize-winner and Political Scientist Robert Putnam (author of Bowling Alone) and co-author Shaylyn Romney Garrett describe in their new book, The Upswing; How America Came Together a Century Ago and How WE Can Do It Again, as a return to a more progressive “We” era, a societal coming together with less divisiveness than we have experienced in recent decades.

Simon&Shuster

“Americans Hate Divisiveness, We Need to Demand More,” is the headline of a recent PEW Research poll, in which: “57 percent of Americans believe that partisan conflicts receive too much attention these days. And 78 percent say there is too little focus on important issues facing the country. But if we want something different in the political dialogue, we the people need to demand it by rejecting divisive rhetoric and rewarding substance and solutions.”

I have called recent decades the Age of Narcissism. It was a time when “what’s in it for me” topped “what’s in it for us.”

Putnam and Garrett describe American history over the past 125 years with the “I-We-I” curve, using a series of bell-shaped curves to evidence the history of “a gradual climb into greater interdependence and cooperation, followed by a steep descent into greater independence and egoism.”

There is mounting evidence we have begun such a change that resembles earlier, more progressive eras. Putnam and Garrett have called it “The Upswing”, a return to the “We” era that we last experienced in the 1960s, before the Vietnam War and killings of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr., tore our country apart in a de facto civil war of red states vs. blue states.

The Kennedys and MLK, Jr. were the upholders of the last “We” era before we descended into our dark ages, accompanied by a greater lawlessness and distrust of our laws and institutions.

The sixties was the decade of greater voting and civil rights, income equality, and equal opportunities in education and the workplace with the enactment of anti-discrimination laws.

I came of age when President Kennedy promised a New Frontier of peace and end to the cold war that I also believed would happen after listening to him as a student and then volunteering for the Peace Corps. Kennedy instilled a ‘can do’ spirit that anything and everything was possible when he said there were better ways to serve the country than war: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Sarge Shriver, the Peace Corps first director, then adopted Rotary’s motto for PC Volunteers, “Service Above Self.”

The descent into darkness was also a time when many Americans were in the throes of “Deaths of Despair…” said Nobel Prize-winner Angus Deaton and Anne Case, who uncovered the damage done by drug use and suicides among the rust-belt workers who had lost their industrial age jobs.

Maybe the change from the darkness to light was first noticeable during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the weaknesses of excessive individualism became evident in the partisan divide over the treatment of its victims—when literal survival required cooperation over competition, regardless of the politics or religion.

Positive changes also occurred with modern technologies such as the Internet that enabled Americans to talk to each other more freely. This may sound counter-intuitive with the ‘anything goes’ frontier mentality of its abusers and propagandists, but it has enabled the younger generations to be seen and heard much more than older generations.

Pollsters have seen the changes in our younger generations towards more communality. They are the Internet generations that communicate and get their news via cell phones and laptops, are more ethnically diverse, and less intolerant.

PEW reported in 2020, “Generation Z represents the leading edge of the country’s changing racial and ethnic makeup. A bare majority (52%) are non-Hispanic white – significantly smaller than the share of Millennials who were non-Hispanic white in 2002 (61%). One-in-four Gen Zers are Hispanic, 14% are black, 6% are Asian and 5% are some other race or two or more races.”

The earliest era of great change described by Putnam and Garrett was when citizens and parties come closer together in the turn of the last century, the Progressive era, which gained full force when Vice President Teddy Roosevelt became the President with the assassination of William McKinley in 1901.

“The Progressive movement did not eliminate polarization, to be sure, but in reflecting reformist, egalitarian, and even communitarian sentiments among leaders of both major parties, it laid the groundwork for decades of declining polarization,” they said.

There is something else bringing people together, much of it involuntary—the growing threat of climate change. The overheating and droughts in major regions of planet Earth have caused massive migrations from areas of famine and overpopulation that is creating a more global population mix.

There’s a consequent backlash that is creating anti-immigrant policies such as Brexit, but it is being countered with the so-called DEI policies (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) policies created by progressives that increase egalitarianism, which is another way of saying it means to reduce the record wealth and income inequality fostered during the dark ages.

It will require more egalitarianism among developed countries with labor shortages such as the U.S. as we become even more ethnically and racially diverse. We have no choice but to welcome immigrants to maintain economic growth.

In fact, we see it already happening with the younger generations.

“A recent online survey found that younger generations are more optimistic than older generations about becoming wealthy in the future.  Fully 69 percent of Gen Zers and 54 percent of millennials who don’t consider themselves wealthy now said that they think that they will be wealthy someday, a survey by Lending Tree revealed, as opposed to 41 percent overall. The survey, conducted by Question Pro in early September was taken by 2,000 U.S. consumers ages 18 to 77.”

I have listed just a few of the changes for good that are coming. It’s happened in the past and WE are doing it again!

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

How Should We Remember 9/11?

ANSWERING KENNEDY’S CALL

BuildingCommunity

I wanted to remember 9/11 when I wrote my memoir on the Kennedy era that has just been released. It was also a time of busted communities, and a Vietnam War that split Americans. It was an Imperial America that wanted to make the world in its image, rather than create peaceful change that tolerated other peoples and cultures such as I worked for during the following years, after President Kennedy’s death.

I began writing this memoir about my work in public service in 2017, after wondering how it was possible that Americans had elected a president suffering a severe mental disorder. Did it mean our democracy was dying or already dead, and Americans now wanted a demagogue as president who believed that he was above all laws and the constitution?

It reminded me in many ways of the 1960s when there was just as much social unrest and different ideas of democracy. This was the era of McCarthyism and communist witch-hunting, right wing against left wing political views, the civil rights movement, and an unpopular war in Vietnam that was fracturing American communities.

We coped with the dysfunction and cynicism then by searching for communities that could mirror our values and ideals, and when we found them, to contribute to their growth.

I am writing about my years working to develop successful communities to show that it is possible to do it today in the face of so much social unrest that has created deep divisions and the possibility of future wars.

I believe that spirit of service is alive in younger generations that also want to make their country a better place. Many of them in the Millennial and Generation Z population groups are also searching for like-minded communities that serve a greater cause, that will bring people together in common purpose rather than separate them.

The Peace Corps was such a cause I believed in. I became a Peace Corps Volunteer to work in a program that improved the lives of Turkish farmworkers. A few years later I joined the Environmental Protection Agency at its inception because it was an organization dedicated to protecting the environment with the newly enacted Clean Water and Air Acts.

My membership in the United Farmworkers Union under César Chávez later in the mid-1970s was more happenstance. A cousin of mine in the construction trades roped me into helping him rebuild the UFW’s new headquarters, and it was extremely difficult to withstand the charisma of its founder and president, César Chávez. I was soon swept up in his vision of a union formed to improve the working conditions of Mexican farmworkers.

These were organizations dedicated to improving lives that taught me the fundamentals of healthy communities, fundamentals that enabled me to continue to improve the lives in my own community and led to the formation of a new California city.

There were many others doing what I did in that era. My history is one small part of the change that has been happening in American communities, towns, and cities whose members seek to improve their lives.

Former President Obama challenged Americans to inspire the youth to a life of service in 2017 after he left the presidency; and the youth he talked about are my target audience.  He said then:

We have some of the lowest voting rates of any democracy and low participation rates that translate into a further gap between who’s governing us and what we believe. The only folks who are going to be able to solve that problem are going to be young people, the next generation. And I have been encouraged everywhere I go in the United States, but also everywhere around the world to see how sharp and astute and tolerant and thoughtful and entrepreneurial our young people are. A lot more sophisticated than I was at their age. And so the question then becomes what are the ways in which we can create pathways for them to take leadership, for them to get involved?1

President Obama’s words came from his experience as a community organizer in Chicago. And studies show that Millennials and Generation Z youth now reaching adulthood want to make the world they have inherited a better place to live. Millennials’ preferences will be influential for no other reason than they are the largest generation ever, born from 1980 to 1996, outnumbering even their Baby Boomer parents.  They are also a much more diverse and tolerant population, which is why they are picking up where we left off in their preference for making worthwhile life choices. 

“Almost two-thirds (64 percent) of Millennials said they would rather make $40,000 a year at a job they love than $100,000 a year at a job they think is boring,” the Brookings Institution recently noted in a report by Morley Winograd and Michael Hais titled “How Millennials Could Upend Wall Street and Corporate America.”2

It cites a 2013 survey of over 1,200 U.S. adults that found Millennials to be the generation most focused on corporate social responsibility when making purchasing decisions.  Almost all Millennials responded with increased trust (91 percent) and loyalty (89 percent), as well as a stronger likelihood to buy from those companies that supported solutions to specific social issues (89 percent). A majority of Millennials reported buying a product that had a social benefit, and 84 percent of a generation that accounts for more than $1 trillion in U.S. consumer spending considered a company’s involvement in social causes in deciding what to buy or where to shop. In 2013, 89 percent of all American consumers said they would consider switching brands to one associated with a good cause if price and quality were equal.

One 30-year-old Millennial said in 2013, the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s death: “Though his [Kennedy’s] goals were typically big, what he sought from individuals was often rather small. Not everyone was expected to join the Peace Corps or become an astronaut or participate in the Freedom Rides. But citizens were asked to do their part—to think about how they could improve their community or make another person’s life easier—to look past their differences and focus on our common humanity. We badly need this message again. I believe it is one that resonates deeply with young Americans who are yearning for a time when we can search for new frontiers and once again be part of the same team.3

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Call for Peace

Answering the Kennedys’ Call

Daily Kos

Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, and his loss is felt even more than 50 years later as we continue to fight wars both foreign and domestic. He was organizing a march on Washington when he was killed. Who knows what might its effect have been on the Vietnam War if he had lived and mobilized America to end the war sooner?

King called it the Poor People's Campaign, said a Daily Kos commentator on Monday’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. He wanted to dramatize the suffering of the nation's poor by bringing them to the capital. Poor people would live together on the National Mall - the long strip of land between the U.S. Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial - and engage in widespread civil disobedience. King wanted to force the federal government to deal with poverty.

MLK gave a speech on 4 April, 1967 to over 3,000 at New York’s Riverside Church that is memorialized at Stanford’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.  King’s address emphasized his responsibility to the American people and explained that conversations with young black men in the ghettos reinforced his own commitment to nonviolence.

The Vietcong's TET Offensive of January 30, 1968 had just happened, which was when Americans first realized that we weren’t winning the Vietnam War. Robert Kennedy, campaigning in Indianapolis, gave an impromptu speech on learning of his death:

“What we need in the United States is not division;: said Kennedy, "what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black. So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King -- yeah, it's true -- but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love -- a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.”

Robert Kennedy was assassinated two months later on June 5, 1968, just after he was declared the winner in the South Dakota and California presidential primary of the 1968 election. It looked like he would ride the Kennedy tide to become President, instead of Richard Nixon, who managed to prolong the war until 1974 and his impeachment.

These were our visionary leaders of that time we remember for what they stood for—that one day we may realize their hope for a peaceful America.

Harlan Green © 2019

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen