Dawns of Freedom

A lifetime and a year.  My lifetime, and 1961.  Who knows what happened in 1961?  Don’t ask me - wasn’t here yet.  The gap between The Lonely Crowd, first published by Yale University Press in 1961, and Our Kids, published on March 10 of this year, spans generations.  The Ford Mustang was still the Ford Falcon.  Nine U.S. Presidents hadn't yet raised their right hand when David Reisman pondered what was becoming of America as the Baby Boom horde began taking the training wheels off their bicycles.

I’ll spare you three hundred and five pages of sociology treatise on the changing character of the first generation of Americans weaned on mass television marketing.  Suffice it to say he was concerned American individualism was in decline.  And then, with one page left to go, this paragraph …

"Is it conceivable that these economically privileged Americans will some day wake up to the fact that they overconform?  Wake up to the discovery that a host of behavioral rituals are the result, not of an inescapable social imperative but of an image of society that, though false, provides certain secondary gains for the people who believe in it?  Since character structure is, if anything, even more tenacious than social structure, such an awakening is exceedingly unlikely – and we know that many thinkers before us have seen the false dawns of freedom while their compatriots stubbornly continue to close their eyes to the alternatives that were, in principal, available.  But to put the question may at least raise doubts in the minds of some."

Ok.  That’s good stuff.  But where’s the closing?  Then...  This…

"Occasionally city planners put such questions.  They comprise perhaps the most important professional group to become reasonably weary of the cultural definitions that are systematically trotted out to rationalize the inadequacies of city life today, for the well-to-do as well as for the poor.  With their imagination and bounteous approach they have become, to some extent, the guardians of our liberal and progressive political tradition, as this is increasingly displaced from state and national politics.  In their best work we see expressed in physical form a view of life which is not narrowly job-minded.  It is a view of the city as a setting for leisure and amenity as well as for work.  But at present the power of the local veto groups puts even the most imaginative of city planners under great pressure to show that they are practical, hardheaded fellows, barely to be distinguished from traffic engineers."

Holy (cursing) cow.  Your life’s work.  Right there.  Without warning.  Out of nowhere.  On page 306.   From 1961. You’re darn right Riesman!  Let’s ask some questions about what is going on.  About why cities matter.  About how they can improve lives.  About the callous indifference to children in need.  Let's tell the local veto groups we're sick of their traffc engineer proclivities (no offense Gary, you're the best).  Straddling the boundary of city planner / city manager at the time, I’ve carted the book around like a talisman.

Fast forward a couple decades and I’m making my way through another social studies tome by Harvard professor Robert Putnam.  It’s a weighty effort about the past fifty years and how way too many American kids are being left behind.  With a half century of advances in social science, Our Kids includes charts, graphs and carefully crafted narrative.  The press kit plays up the book as you’d expect, but the span of praise is especially noteworthy, with politicians as disparate as President Obama, Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton and Paul Ryan consulting with professor Putnam on the scope of the problem.

It is an excellent book, and the City Council has taken on the task of reading it, while the Davenport School Board discusses their own reading assignment; See Poverty, Be The Difference.

Here’s the part that snapped my head back like another shot of Everclear poured by Riesman.  Last four paragraphs, of the last page.

"This is not the first time in our national history that widening socio-economic gaps have threatened our economy, our democracy, and our values.  The specific responses we have pursued to successfully overcome these challenges and restore opportunity have varied in details, but underlying them all was a commitment to invest in other people’s children.  And underlying that commitment was a deeper sense that those kids, too, were our kids.

Not all Americans have shared that sense of communal obligation.  In his essay “Self-Reliance,” Boston Brahmin Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “Do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations.  Are they my poor?  I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong”.  Emerson spoke eloquently for the individualist tradition in America.

The better part of two centuries later, speaking of the recent arrival of unaccompanied immigrant kids, Jay Ash, city manager and native of the gritty, working-class Boston suburb of Chelsea, drew on a more generous, communitarian tradition: “If our kids are in trouble – my kids, our kids, anyone’s kids – we all have a responsibility to look after them.”

In today’s America, not only is Ash right, but even those among us who think like Emerson should acknowledge our responsibility to these children.  For America’s poor kids do belong to us and we to them.  They are our kids."

A city manager (now Massachusetts Secretary of Housing and Economic Development) telling straight, practical truth.  A city manager telling it like it is - you invest in these kids now, or society carries them around the rest of their burdensome lives.  A city manager, going toe to toe with one of the high priests of American mythology.  You go, Jay.

It has been a lifetime and a year between The Lonely Crowd and Our Kids.  The question is … a year from now, what will be different?

To be continued …