Rosenberg Fund for Children

Radical Solutions, Not Compromise, Needed

Over the last six months I’ve discussed the progress of the Obama administration with hundreds of friends and RFC community members. The views I’ve encountered fall into two general categories.

The first group says, “Give the guy some breathing room. He’s so much better than Bush was or McCain would have been. He’s doing what he can with the material he’s got to work with [meaning Congress] and the forces he’s up against [powerful, entrenched and well-financed corporate interests, and their Republican and Democratic allies]. If he were to push more radical proposals it would cause a backlash and he’d accomplish nothing. And it’s a pleasure to have a hard-working intelligent leader we can be proud of who speaks in complete sentences.”

The second says, “Being better than Bush is not good enough. Obama sounds good, but his actions are not. The ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq aside, his human rights record (Guantánamo, torture, detention, black site prisons, etc.) is abysmal. His inaction on LGBT rights is more than disappointing. His environmental legislation started out timid and ended up pitiful. The Wall Street fox is guarding the financial henhouse. His refusal to back single-payer healthcare means that any ‘reform’ bill that passes will have little positive impact.”

I fall into the latter camp. I believe we’re in a radical moment, a time when caution is a guarantee of failure. Kevin Baker, in an article in the July 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine, put it well when he wrote that the Obama administration is “espousing a ‘pragmatism’ that is not really pragmatism at all, just surrender to the usual corporate interests. The common thread running through all Obama’s major proposals right now is that they are labyrinthine solutions designed mainly to avoid conflict. … They bear the seeds of their own defeat.”

If that is right, the quagmire we are in will only deepen. The worsening conditions will demand not more compromise, but more mass organizing, agitation and conflict. And I don’t doubt for a minute that there will be an upsurge of activism which will create a new generation of potential RFC beneficiaries, and that current RFC families will be on the front lines. The need for our aid will grow dramatically.

There are many ways that you can help us to meet this emerging challenge. Your contributions are always welcome, but you can also help us by spreading the word about the RFC’s mission to your friends and community. Send them to our website – easy to do by clicking the links to “Tell a friend about us” (upper left corner) or “Email this page” (bottom, center) on every page of this site. And get them on our mailing list (our site also has easy email and surface mail sign-up forms on every page).

Help us to build the RFC and prepare for the onslaught.

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June 19th, 1953; Not all Bad?

I could easily fill up a book with the stories people have told me about the impact the events that took place on June 19th, 1953 had on their lives. That was the day my parents were executed. Most of the stories are sad, even tragic. Others can make you very angry. But there were also some good things that happened on that day.

I received the following note from a supporter yesterday:

“On the day of the scheduled execution of your parents my then ‘boy friend’ and I went to Union Square to wait to hear of a possible stay. Then we heard the horrible news. The crowd moaned and both of us began to cry. When I saw his tears I knew that this was a man I would want to marry! We are still married!”

Actually, this story is not so unique. In fact, it fits what I think of as a pattern of resolve. I’ve heard from dozens of people in that crowd of up to 10,000 that the experience of that rally and the intensity of the emotion that swept through that gathering, for them set in motion a lifetime of activism. Since I’ve only had the privilege of meeting a small number of those who attended that rally, there must have been hundreds of people in Union Square that day who in reaction to my parents’ execution swore that they’d dedicate their lives to working for peace and justice. And I know from personal experience that many kept their promise.

June 19th, 1953 will never be a good day for me. But thinking about the amount of good that must have been accomplished by all the people who were moved to a life of activism by their experiences on that day, gives me great comfort.

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Not All Youth Are Inactive

I just finished reading an AlterNet article by Bruce E. Levine entitled “8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance.” The 8 reasons are:

“1. Student-Loan Debt … a pacifying force
2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance
3. Schools that Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy
4. ‘No Child Left Behind’ & ‘Race to the Top’… standardized-testing tyranny that creates fear
5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education – But Not Their Schooling – Seriously
6. The Normalization of Surveillance
7. Television
8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism.”

I don’t have the space to summarize Levine’s reasoning, but I suspect almost all of my readers can glean what he’s talking about from the titles. And I suspect that like me they will find his points well taken. However, I see an important ninth reason the author did not list. I also think Bruce Levine should have qualified his claim, and, finally, that this passivity should be placed within a larger social context.

I’ll address the last point, first: One might think that the article claims that youth in our country are less active than older adults. I know from reading other things Bruce Levine has written that the author does not believe this, but he doesn’t make this clear. Levine points out that while young people are generally the most active segment in many societies that is not the case in the United States today, but he doesn’t acknowledge that American youth are simply falling in step with social compliance in general.

Second: I think the author should have inserted the word “many” or “most” as the third word in his title. Perhaps my unique position at the Rosenberg Fund for Children gives me a skewed picture because I hear stories of courageous youth action constantly. I am not in position, and neither is anyone else I know, to measure the percentage of young people who seek to engage and change the world, but there are plenty of them out there. From Tim DeChristopher, whose heroic act of civil disobedience when he was 27-years-old saved 130,000 acres of public land from being despoiled by fossil fuel companies, to other young environmental and animal rights activists. From the thousands of students at the University of Puerto Rico who took over their campus for two months at the turn of the year to resist a massive fee increase, to the growing number of young undocumented activists who have spoken up for their human rights. Just read any of our newsletters describing grants to targeted young activists and you’ll learn about many more.

But tremendous forces are arrayed against this growing resistance. Reports in the The Nuclear Resister show that arrests at protests are increasing each year. Over 2600 people have been arrested in the United States at demonstrations since Obama took office: 665 in 2009, 1290 in 2010, and a total that likely will top 1600 this year. These statistics illuminate the missing ninth reason - a repressive counter-attack that seeks to pacify both young and old.

The prosecution in Tim DeChristopher's case, (which ended with the young activist being sent to prison for two years), recommended a harsh sentence that would act as a deterrent to others. The escalating jail terms handed out to young and old for symbolic civil disobedience at the annual School of the America’s demonstration also attests to this trend. The young environmentalist defendants in the “Green Scare” cases, and animal rights activists, have been given multi-year and even multi-decade “terror-enhanced” sentences for the “crime” of organizing, and for engaging in property damage offenses. The University of Puerto Rico students were gassed, beaten, placed in choke holds and sexually assaulted for their peaceful protests. And undocumented youth who speak up are experiencing an avalanche of physical intimidation and hate mail, plus the threat of deportation to lands they left as infants.

My point is not to criticize Bruce Levine’s article. It is a good piece that provides a service by helping us all to understand the reasons behind many young people’s acquiescence, and I believe his goal in disseminating this information is to overcome that inaction. My objective is to supplement what he wrote, as well as to reiterate what I’ve written elsewhere. Rather than bemoan the inactivity of the current generation lets get behind ALL who are active, both young and old.

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