Tag Archives: politics

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Milwaukee’s Race for City Hall

Amidst one of the most divisive presidential primaries in recent history, the city of Milwaukee turns its eyes toward the exercise of democracy at the local level. This year’s mayoral election is gearing up to be as polarizing as what we have seen in the national landscape.

Today’s debate was hosted by the good people of the Public Policy Forum. The incumbent, Mayor Tom Barrett, faced the challenger, Alderman Bob Donovan, a 16-year veteran of the city’s Common Council. Opening remarks were done away with and the first question came before the small contingent of electors had fully settled. “What will your top three priorities be in your first one hundred days?”

Mayor Barrett spoke about jobs, new developments and took the opportunity to bash the City of Chicago “for having to borrow $220 million to make its pension payments”. In contrast “his city” did not, thanks to “the strong fiscal stewardships we’ve had for the last 12 years”. As if Rahm Emanuel wasn’t having a hard enough time as it is, his counterpart in Milwaukee has chosen to throw him under the bus while seeking reelection.

Continue reading Milwaukee’s Race for City Hall →

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The Great Society

In May of 1964, President Johnson delivered a speech to the University of Michigan graduating class. I came across it while watching the PBS series American Experience.

Undoubtedly the Vietnam War casts a long shadow over President Johnson’s tenure in the White House. Political opinions aside, he cannot be faulted for lacking vision.

Hearing the speech, I was reminded that pragmatism can sometime give way to the idealist that dwells within.

I will share some excerpts with you.

The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.

It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.

…expansion is eroding the precious and time honored values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference.

…once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.

Our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination.

…we must give every child a place to sit and a teacher to learn from. Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

We must seek an educational system which grows in excellence as it grows in size. And this means better training for our teachers. It means preparing youth to enjoy their hours of leisure, as well as their hours of labor. It means exploring new techniques of teaching, to find new ways to stimulate the love of learning and the capacity for creation.

You have the chance never before afforded to any people in any age. You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation.

…our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit…

We have the power to shape the civilization that we want.

So let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will look back and say, “It was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life.”

It is as true today as it was when it was first spoken in 1964. Reading The Great Society speech, afforded me a chance to reflect on the current state of affairs. I hope it creates a similar effect on other readers.

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Theodore Roosevelt and Our Economy

Written over a century ago, these observations by Theodore Roosevelt deal with the relation between education and economy.  They furnish a partial explanation for the widening gap between economic classes in today’s society.  I hope you find them as insightful as I did.

The teaching which I received was genuinely democratic in one way. It was not so democratic in another. I grew into manhood thoroughly imbued with the feeling that a man must be respected for what he made of himself. But I had also, consciously or unconsciously, been taught that socially and industrially pretty much the whole duty of the man lay in thus making the best of himself; that he should be honest in his dealings with others and charitable in the old-fashioned way to the unfortunate; but that it was no part of his business to join with others in trying to make things better for the many by curbing the abnormal and excessive development of individualism in a few. Now I do not mean that this training was by any means all bad. On the contrary, the insistence upon individual responsibility was, and is, and always will be, a prime necessity. Teaching of the kind I absorbed from both my text-books and my surroundings is a healthy anti-scorbutic to the sentimentality which by complacently excusing the individual for all his shortcomings would finally hopelessly weaken the spring of moral purpose. It also keeps alive that virile vigor for the lack of which in the average individual no possible perfection of law or of community action can ever atone. But such teaching, if not corrected by other teaching, means acquiescence in a riot of lawless business individualism which would be quite as destructive to real civilization as the lawless military individualism of the Dark Ages. I left college and entered the big world owing more than I can express to the training I had received, especially in my own home; but with much else also to learn if I were to become really fitted to do my part in the work that lay ahead for the generation of Americans to which I belonged.

(Original source: Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt)