Introductions

Introductions

I’m invited to attend a meeting to discuss ways to help kids overcome poverty.  It’s the fourth meeting of the group and when I read the minutes of the first three meetings to prepare, I find the meeting gets underway with introductions.  When the intros get around to me I simply say, “I’m Craig Malin, Community Advocate” and hand out a narrative that attendees can later read or discard at their discretion.

Too poor to have a family.  If you’re a kid and you’re wondering just how poor you are, realizing the grown-ups have distracted you with a swing set while your mom drives away from the orphanage affords clarity.  Already unlucky enough to have your father taken to a tuberculosis sanitarium, you’re now too poor to have a family.  You have some clothes, a few comforting books and your ball glove.  That’s it.  Your older brother isn’t taking it well, and you need to decide, then and there, if life is going to break you.

Life is socially constructed.  Every part of it.  The distance of our homes to each other, the distance of our factories to our homes, and the distance of sprawl’s edge to the center are all carefully set in place by regulations, economics and social norms so utterly accepted they are not discussed in polite company.  So too the distance of ourselves to each other.  Poverty exists because it is socially constructed.  Poverty makes wealth far more satisfying, and keeps the not wealthy but not poor wholly focused on being good, dependable cogs in the machine.  The poor are incarcerated, the not wealthy but not poor are happy to be on the free side of the bars, and the wealthy sell and hold the bonds for it all.   Literally, and metaphorically.

Poverty isn’t really the problem.  Complacency is.  The able among us all have the capacity to contribute more, to care more, to dare more.  But that starts with questioning all the convenient excuses.  Past practice.  Local custom.  Lack of resources.  State regulation.  Who sits in the White House, Governor’s mansion, or City Hall.  None of these are really the issue.  What we dare dream together, and how we - together - dare defy those who’ll keep our children from their dreams is the issue.

Intergenerational despair is the disease.  Left to spread, it kills people, neighborhoods, regions and even nations.  Education, and the prosperity it fosters, is the cure.

The Davenport community has every resource, tool and law necessary to offer world class education and prosperity for all.  Not one penny of new taxes is required.  What is required is leadership which reconfigures allocation of existing public resources, focused on the future rather than the past.  The K-12 standard of the past two centuries is not adequate to the global marketplace of today, much less the future.  A 12th grade education prepares you for a life of servitude, if that’s where your education stops.  Kids with more than enough sense but not nearly enough support understand this, and wonder why the grown-ups are themselves distracted from solutions which require just a modicum of candor and courage.

With one vote, the combined leadership of the Davenport community could sweep away all the convenient excuses – including poverty – for enrollment decline, achievement gaps and a regional workforce at risk.  The Davenport community could offer pre-K education to all, an unmatched array of K-12 choices and post-secondary education for all.  There is sufficient law to break free from the miserly patriarchy of 400 East 14th. Street in Des Moines.  There is sufficient evidence of transformative community potential.  There is more than sufficient local authority to chart our own path forward.

Poverty isn’t the problem, and it must stop being an excuse.  Being too comfortable in the past is the problem.  Confront it.  Fix it.  Have the courage to remake the future, and do not let anyone outside this great community stop you.