To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility
A Thirty Year Update of the National Commission On the Causes and Prevention of Violence
The Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation
Washington, DC
Contents
Principal Findings
Principal Policy Recommendations
Executive Summary
1. Introduction
2. American Violence since the Commission: Regaining Perspective
3. Has the Commission's "City of the Future" come to Pass?
4. National Urban and Criminal Justice Policy
5. Financing National Urban and Criminal Justice Policy, and Creating
Political Will
6. Entertainment Media and Violence
7. Firearms and Violence
8. A New Political Alliance
Appendix 1: Biographical Summaries of the Original Members of
the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention
of Violence.
Appendix 2: Table of Contents
of the Forthcoming Book
Appendix 3: Biographical Summaries of the Panel of Contributors
to the Forthcoming Book
Appendix 4: Foreword by Fred Graham and Hugh Davis Graham to the Forthcoming Book
Appendix 5: Statistical Trends
on Fear and Violence
Chapter Notes
Principal Findings
The 1969 National Violence Commission understood
that pervasive and deep-rooted violence in a
highly fragmented and unequal society cannot be reliably contained by criminal
justice policies -- even extreme ones.
The experience of the past 30 years has proven the Commission
right, indeed more dramatically than anyone could then have expected. The
Commission has been proven correct in its vision
of a "City of the Future" with rampant suburbanization
as a response to central city decline. But it did not foresee how unsuccessful
and self-defeating the strategy would turn out to be. Crime and violent acts
in the suburbs, such as the Littleton massacre,
and the deterioration of the older "inner-ring" suburbs
show that, in the long run, one can’t simply abandon the nation’s social
problems. The Commission foresaw that a city
based on the principle of flight to safety would
only deepen social divisions.
In spite of welcome reductions of fear and violence since about 1993 that have been coterminous with the economic boom and less unemployment in the inner city, fear and the FBI Index of violent crime have increased when the late 1960s are compared to the late 1990s. Specifically, in a national poll in 1967, Americans were asked, "Is there any area right around here -- that is within a mile -- where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?" In 1967, 31% answered yes. In 1998, 41% answered yes. Similarly, the FBI Index of violent crime (murder, rape, robbery and assault combined) has increased from a big city offense rate per 100,000 of 860 in 1969 to 1218 in 1998. (Appendix 5.) America’s rates of violence remain much higher than most other industrialized nations, as in the 1960s. Today the rate of homicide death for a young man is 23 times higher in the U.S. than in England. In 1995, handguns were used to kill 2 people in New Zealand, 15 in Japan, 30 in Great Britain, 106 in Canada, 213 in Germany and 9,390 in the United States. In addition, official "crime" statistics in the U.S. do not measure the rate at which our nation produces criminality. Official statistics understate and hide the endemic problem.
America’s failure to reduce endemic fear and violence over the long run is paralleled by its failure to establish justice. Nearly 1 quarter of all young children live in poverty. America is the most unequal country in the industrialized world in terms of income, wages and wealth. As a result of the racial bias in our mandatory sentencing system, especially for drugs, 1 of every 3 young African-American males is in the prison-industrial complex, on probation or on parole in America at any one time. In big cities, it is about 1 of every 2.
There is a new "triumphalism" about crime that is misleading. The triumphalism exaggerates the role of tough sentencing and "zero tolerance" policing and underestimates the role of explanations that may be more important, like the economic boom and the related waning of the crack epidemic.
Prisons have become our nation’s substitute for effective public policies on crime, drugs, mental illness, housing, poverty and employment of the hardest to employ. In a reasonable culture we would not say we had won the war against disease just because we had moved a lot of sick people from their homes to hospital wards. And in a reasonable culture we would not say we have won the war against crime just because we have moved a lot of criminals from the community into prison cells.
The good news is that we are at a point in our history when we actually have the wherewithal -- both the knowledge and the material resources -- to launch an honest and effective attack on the violent crime that still afflicts us, in ways that are both enduring and community-wise. Since the late 1960s and based on scientific evaluations, we have learned a great deal about what doesn’t work and about what does work to insure domestic tranquility at the same time that we establish justice. America has the scientific information and the money to replicate what works at a scale equal to the dimensions of the problem.
Much of what doesn’t work also is immoral -- like tax breaks for the rich while young child poverty is almost 25% and more spending by the states on prison building than on higher education.
Local televison news too often emphasizes violence and too seldom produces thoughtful stories on what works. This helps create a "mean world syndrome" in the minds of viewers, who then often conclude that nothing works. In terms of network television entertainment violence, not every child who watches a lot of violence or plays a lot of violent games will grow up to be violent. Other forces must converge, as they did recently in Colorado. But just as every cigarette increases the chance that someday you will get lung cancer, every exposure to violence increases the chances that some day a child will behave more violently than they would otherwise.
If there ever were a metaphor for a failure of democracy, lack of firearms control may be it. The firearms death rate in America is 8 times greater than those of the 25 other wealthy nations combined. In the late 1960s, there were 90 million firearms in the U.S. Today, there are almost 200 million firearms in this country. They are no longer mostly designed for hunting and target-shooting. Today, most are high-powered, rapid-firing, easily-concealed weapons that have no other logical function than to kill humans. The impact of a flood of such weapons into an urban society is profound. Any confused teenager feeling disparaged by fellow students can blow a number of them away. A worker who has problems on the job can put an end to it with a massacre at the office. A litigant who feels wronged by the justice system can set it right by shooting up the courthouse. Most people resolve things in a more reasonable way -- but in a nation of 230 million people and 200 million firearms, the law of averages is producing a growing number of massacres. In the 1960s, the dialogue on firearm violence was dominated by political assassinations and the shock of losing some of our nation’s most promising leaders. In the 1990s, the dialogue has shifted to our children, and to public shootings in schools, places of worship and day care centers.
Dominated by the economic system, America’s leaders presently lack the will to act, to replicate to scale what we already know to work based on scientific evidence -- in spite of considerable public opinion to the contrary and unprecedented prosperity.
Principal Policy Recommendations
1. A new "grassroots federalism" is needed in
which the federal government identifies sufficient
resources to replicate what works to a scale equal to the dimensions of the
problem -- but then targets most funds directly
to local governments, and to the local, private,
nonprofit organizations responsible for so much of what works. With the
economic boom, we can find the money now to replicate
to scale. The federal government also
should require revenue sharing alliances among central cities, inner ring suburbs
and, if possible, suburbs further out.
The model experience of Minnesota should be replicated widely.
2. Funding priority needs to be given to replicating to scale investments that have proven through scientific evaluations to reduce crime at the same time they improve educational performance and help develop children, youth and young adults in positive directions. Most of these successes also reduce drug involvement and increase employability. Leading examples include Head Start preschool; safe havens after school -- like the Dorchester Youth Collaborative in Boston, Koban, Inc. in South Carolina, and Centro Isolina Ferre in San Juan; the public School Development Plan of Professor James Comer at Yale University; full service community schools, like the El Puente Academy in Brooklyn, where nonprofit organizations partner with individual inner-city schools; the Ford Foundation’s Quantum Opportunities Program to keep inner-city youth in high school; the South Bronx Argus Community’s "training first" (not "work first") job preparation investments in out-of-school youth; YouthBuild USA in which drop outs rehab houses; problem-oriented, community-equity policing in which minority officers are trained by local, private, nonprofit organizations to mentor at-risk youth; and the San Francisco Delancey Street model for self-sufficient reintegration of ex-offenders. To better measure the successes of replicating what works to scale, we need new measures of endemic criminality.
3. To help finance what works to scale, we need to cut back on programs that don’t work -- including the "war on drugs," prison building, boot camps, supply side tax breaks to the rich, Enterprise Zones, and the Job Training Partnership Act for high risk youth. We need to reduce by a fraction affirmative action for the rich, corporate welfare and the military budget. We need to use a fraction of any future budget surpluses.
4. To support what works, we need a macroeconomic policy that gives first priority to eliminating child poverty and generating full employment for the hardest to employ in the inner city and in pockets of rural poverty. In spite of official and media reports, the present "jobs gap" for the hard-to-employ is perhaps 4 million -- not counting the almost 2 million in prison. To generate jobs, we need to invest in more local, private, nonprofit community development corporations, as pioneered by the Ford Foundation and modeled after Robert Kennedy’s Mobilization for Youth, and invest in local, private, community-based banking, like Chicago’s South Shore Bank, on a much broader scale. The for-profit private sector should be encouraged to close as much of the "jobs gap" for the hardest to employ as it is willing and able. But public sector jobs are needed. Public urban infrastructure regeneration is in great demand, as is public service employment -- especially for child care, work in schools, and work with local inner city nonprofit organizations.
5. Federal and local policy should significantly shift away from prison building and toward cheaper, more effective treatment alternatives in the community, following the model of the state of Arizona. Interrelated models of success like Delancey Street for the reintegration of ex-offenders, drug courts and community courts should be replicated much more widely. A National Sentencing and Drug Treatment Commission should be formed to review federal and state sentencing practices, the impact of recent sentencing trends on the fiscal health and public responsibilities of state and federal governments, the impact on serious crime, and the feasibility of a broad range of alternatives. The Commission should gather evidence on promising alternatives, including innovations in other nations that have kept their levels of incarceration relatively low by American standards. The Commission should propose a new policy to eliminate the disparity in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine, by reducing excessively long sentences for crack-related offenses.
6. Established progressive foundations and new foundations generated by information technology fortunes should fund a major new communicating what works movement that lets citizens know we do have the answers. "Televison Schools" need to be funded to train perhaps a thousand nonprofit leaders each year in how to perform effectively on television, how to advocate for reduced violence on televison news and how to organize to persuade media to increase news on what works. The clergy need to be organized to communicate that we know what works and that what doesn’t work often is immoral. Building on ideas by Bill Moyers, "high tech pamphleteering" needs to be funded to create a new generation of advocacy-based, community web sites, run by grassroots, private, nonprofit organizations and the youth they serve. The sites should function as ongoing town meetings, debate reform, reformulate budget priorities, organize against local television news that leads with violence and fails to report on what works, and support candidates who have a what works agenda.
At the same time, the federal government should reduce the power of big media conglomerates so we can reduce entertainment and commercial violence on televison, reinvigorate public televison, and establish a national media literacy policy as a core component of the K-12 education curriculum. National nonprofit organizations should advocate that the television industry needs to pay for use of the electromagnetic spectrum. Presently it doesn’t. This amounts to taxpayer subsidies of billions per year -- almost enough to fully fund Head Start.
7. Established progressive foundations and new foundations generated by information technology fortunes should increase funding to private, nonprofit organizations, like Public Campaign, to educate the public and fight for lasting campaign finance reform to overturn our present "one dollar one vote democracy." We need to level the political playing field -- so that more persons can be elected who are not beholden to an America economic system that presently runs our political system. In many ways, real campaign finance reform is the reform that makes possible the replication to scale of education and jobs programs that work in the inner city and for the truly disadvantaged.
8. Just as the President and Surgeon General successfully framed smoking as a public health issue and changed the tobacco industry, so they need to frame network television entertainment and commercial violence, local televison news violence and firearms violence as public health issues requiring changes in industry behavior. Campaign finance reform will reinforce such a campaign by the President and Surgeon General, better controlling the power of media conglomerates and big monied special interest groups that presently protect television and firearms violence.
9. Established progressive foundations and new foundations generated by information technology fortunes should increase funding to national and local nonprofit organizations and other citizens groups to educate the citizenry on the need for more state-based and. local-based initiatives against firearms; local alliances between city residents and more conservative "soccer mom" suburbanites in the wake of the killings of youth in our schools; litigation against firearms manufacturers; a national handgun licensing system; a federal ban on Saturday night specials; and federal regulation of firearms as consumer products.
10. Private national and local nonprofit advocacy organizations should refocus their education and organizing efforts on the creation of a new voting majority, a new political alliance in America. The alliance should bring together middle income Americans (who often need 2 or 3 jobs in the family to make ends meet) wage earners (who need to be reminded that their CEO’s earn on the average 419 times as much as they do) and the poor (who suffered in the 1980s and hardly improved in the 1990s). The alliance should unite around an unfair economic deal, resentment over economic rewards to the rich that are disconnected from the efforts that go into securing them, and the education and training needed by the poor, working income people and middle income people to compete in the global marketplace.
Executive Summary
In June, 1968, a few days after the assassination
of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and 2 months
after the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King, President Lyndon
B. Johnson established the National Commission
on the Causes and Prevention of Violence -- with Johns
Hopkins President Emeritus Milton S. Eisenhower as chairman and Judge A. Leon
Higginbotham, Jr. as vice-chairman. On December
10, 1969, the Commission issued its final report,
preceded by many volumes of staff task force reports.
The Commission was bipartisan. In terms of philosophy, the views of Commission members ran the gamut from Judge Higginbotham, Michigan Senator Philip Hart, Ambassador Patricia Roberts Harris and longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer to Terrence Cardinal Cooke, Ohio Representative William McCulloch, Arizona Judge William McFarland and Nebraska Senator Roman Hruska. (Appendix 1 has biographical summaries of all Trustees and Milton Eisenhower’s letter of transmission to the President, dated December 10, 1969.)
Lacking public action, the Commission predicted, in 1969, a "city of the future" in which the affluent would escape to gated communities and more distant suburbs. The suburbs would be connected by "sanitized corridors" to high rise office buildings protected by high technology in central business districts that would become deserted at night. The corridors would run over or bypass "ghetto slum" neighborhoods -- places of "terror and widespread crime."
Principal
Findings
Based on the Preamble to the Constitution, the
Commission’s final report on December 10,
1969 was titled, To Establish
Justice, to Insure Domestic Tranquility.
Our principal finding is that, 30 years
later, these goals have not been met.
How do we stand on justice today? Almost a quarter of all children 5 and under live in poverty. America is the most unequal country in the industrialized world in terms of income and wealth. The "digital divide" is accelerating the gulf between our haves and have nots. The average CEO makes 419 times as much as the average worker, and this ratio has greatly increased over the last 3 decades. The states spend more on prison building than on higher education, whereas the opposite was true at the time of the Commission. One in 3 young African-American men is in prison, on probation or on parole, up from 1 in 4 a decade ago. The rate of incarceration of African-American men today is 4 times higher than the rate of incarceration of Black men in pre-Mandela, apartheid South Africa. A primary reason is the racial bias in our sentencing laws. Filled disproportionately by minorities, our rapidly expanding prison-industrial complex is run by white men, and rural white communities send lobbyists to Washington to win grants for prisons to help in local economic development.
How do we stand on domestic tranquility today? There have been drops in violent crime, fear and unemployment since about 1993. That is welcome news -- though homicide increased by about 10% in New York City in 1999.
However the short-run decline in fear and violence since 1993 has led politicians and the media to a new and misplaced "triumphalism." To some extent, the new triumphalism represents a state of denial -- in which we exaggerate our recent successes against serious crime and ignore the implications of our high violence rates vis-a-vis other countries, not to mention our vast prison population. But there is also another problem. Although there have been significant reductions in violent crime since the early 1990s, the new triumphalism is misleading on the "why" of those declines. This interpretation is dangerous, in that it could lead us to adopt (or to continue) all the wrong anticrime policies while ignoring the things that could make an enduring difference.
The misleading triumphalism has 2 facets. First, it exaggerates the role of tough sentencing laws and tough "zero tolerance" policing in accounting for the welcome declines in crime in the last few years. Second, it underestimates the role of other, economic and human investment factors, like reduced unemployment, that may be more important. Put together, those twin fallacies constitute the core of a rigid policy ideology. In the words of historian Barbara Tuchman, "Rigidifying leads to increase of investment and the need to protect egos; policy founded on error multiplies, never retreats."1
Most important, in spite of our present short run gains and in spite of a sevenfold increase in the prison population since the Violence Commission, fear and violent crime is for the most part higher today than in 1969, when a Commission task force report said "few things are more pervasive, more frightening, more real today than violent crime and the fear of being assaulted, mugged, robbed or raped."
Specifically, in a national poll in 1967, Americans were asked, "Is there any area right around here -- that is within a mile -- where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?" In 1967, 31% answered yes. In 1998, 41% answered yes. Similarly, the FBI Index of violent crime (murder, rape, robbery and assault combined) has increased from a big city offense rate per 100,000 of 860 in 1969 to 1218 in 1998. (Appendix 5). America’s rates of violence remain much higher than most other industrialized nations, as in the 1960s. Today the rate of homicide death for a young man is 23 times higher in the U.S. than in England. In 1995, handguns were used to kill 2 people in New Zealand, 15 in Japan, 30 in Great Britain, 106 in Canada, 213 in Germany and 9,390 in the United States.
How
Officials and The Media Underreport Criminality
One of the most distinctive things about the
United States with respect to crime and punishment
is that we not only have an unusually high level of serious violent crime --
but we maintain that high level of violent
crime despite the fact that we also
boast the highest level of
incarceration of any country in the world but
1 (and when it comes to incarceration for ordinary street
crimes, we probably even beat Russia).
This distinction points to a serious defect in the crime statistics used by our officials and reported by the media. What we call the "crime rate" measures the activity of those criminals who are still on the street. That kind of measure is useful in many ways. But as a measure of the deeper problem of criminality -- as an indicator of the tendency of our society to produce criminals -- it is obviously defective. Measuring crime this way is like measuring the extent of some physical illness in our society while systematically excluding from the count all those people who are so sick we've had to put them in the hospital. No one would think of doing that in the field of public health: We do it as a matter of course when it comes to the official crime statistics used by our leaders and the media.
If we were to measure our crime problem by our tendency to produce criminality, then we may be in a real sense losing the "war on crime" even as we have successfully hidden some of the losses behind prison walls -- and therefore appear superficially to be winning it.
That obviously gives us a very different sense of the health of our society and the effectiveness of our present policies. But looking at crime this way is only common sense. We feel intuitively that something is especially wrong if we have both very high rates of violent crime and very high incarceration rates, at the same time -- something that isn't captured in the conventional crime rate alone. Suppose 2 countries have the same official rate of violent crime, but 1 country has, proportionally, 5 times as many violent offenders behind bars. Do they really have the same violent crime problem?
This is much more than a statistical quibble. The fact is that this is the way we go about measuring most other social ills -- with the exception of criminality. In a reasonable culture we would not say we had won the war against disease just because we had moved a lot of sick people from their homes to hospital wards. And in a reasonable culture we would not say we have won the war against crime just because we have moved a lot of criminals from the community into prison cells.
What
Works?
Yet, since the Violence Commission, we have
learned a great deal about policy that doesn’t
work and that does work, based on scientific evaluation. Accordingly, our primary
policy recommendation in this 30 year update
is to stop doing what doesn’t work and to replicate
what does work -- but at a scale equal to the dimensions of the problem.
What doesn’t work particularly well includes prison building, bootcamps, "zero tolerance" policing, the "war on drugs," supply side tax breaks for the rich, Enterprise Zones and the Job Training Partnership Act for high school dropouts.
What doesn’t work often is sugar coated with false political rhetoric. For example, America won the Gulf War in the early 1990s with sufficient numbers of sufficiently paid staff and good equipment. Yet we are told that money for staff and equipment for inner city schools and for dynamic, private inner city, nonprofit organizations is not available. Instead, we often are told, inner city solutions largely should be based on "volunteerism," "self-sufficiency" and "empowerment." Sometimes, that is a double standard by officials who will not invest in human capital.
What doesn’t work also can be immoral. For example, we believe it is immoral for the states to spend more on prison building than higher education, especially when almost a quarter of the youngest children live in poverty. There is a need for a national campaign to mobilize the clergy to regain the high moral ground.
What works, based on scientific evaluation? Leading examples include Head Start preschool, safe havens after school, the public School Development Plan of Professor James Comer at Yale University, full service community schools in which nonprofit organizations partner with individual inner-city schools, the Ford Foundation’s Quantum Opportunities Program to keep inner-city youth in high school and "training first" (not "work first") job preparation for out-of-school youth modeled after the Argus Community in the South Bronx. All of these successes reduce crime. All also improve educational performance and develop youth in positive directions. Most also reduce drug involvement and improve employability. All have been successfully replicated.
Other examples of what works include YouthBuild USA, in which dropouts rehab housing; nonprofit community development corporations, modeled after Robert Kennedy’s Mobilization for Youth, to generate inner city jobs; community-based banking to generate inner-city capital; problem-oriented, community-equity policing in which young minority officers mentor youth; diversion of nonviolent offenders from prison to treatment as begun by the State of Arizona; proven high quality drug treatment in the community closely integrated with local drug courts; the Delancey Street model in San Francisco for self-sufficiently reintegrating ex-offenders back into the community; and in-prison drug treatment like Delaware’s Key Program.
Together, these existing successes simultaneously reduce crime and fear, improve education, increase employment and economically develop the community. Replicated to scale by knowledgeable leaders, what we already know to work can create a comprehensive, interdependent, national urban and criminal justice policy that simultaneously establishes justice and insures domestic tranquility. Such investment needs to be supported by a national economic policy that gives first priority to eliminating child poverty and creating full employment for all, including, especially, the hard-to-employ in the inner city and pockets of rural poverty.
A
New Grassroots Federalism
Corporations should be asked to play as great
a role as they are capable of in such a policy
-- especially in terms of training and jobs. But the failure of supply side
economics has made it painfully clear
that only the federal government can raise the funds needed for a national
policy that replicates what works to scale, eliminates
child poverty and secures full employment for
the hard-to-employ. At the same time, we need a new grassroots federalism in
which the federal government then distributes
most resources directly to local government, and especially to the
private, nonprofit, inner-city organizations responsible for so much of what
works.
Grassroots federalism replicated to scale should be financed through reductions in programs that don’t work; fractional reductions in affirmative action for the rich, corporate welfare and the military budget; and use of a small part of the budget surplus. If, as part of its $1.8T federal budget, the nation will not find the resources to replicate what works to scale during an unprecedented economic boom, it is uncertain whether America ever will solve its endemic problems, even though we have the knowledge to do so.
Changing
the Will of Our Leaders
Public opinion polls tend to support the priorities
set forth on these pages. For example, new
public opinion findings by Albert and Susan Cantril show a majority of voters
are against "government" in the abstract
but for specific government investments, especially in education, training
and jobs.
In spite of public opinion to the contrary, too much federal legislation in recent years has sought to expand programs that don’t work and reduce programs that do work. Nor has there been any federal legislative attempt to replicate what works to a scale equal to the dimensions of the problem.
To change the will and action of political leaders, and, if necessary, to help bypass them through grassroots action and referendums, we need real campaign finance reform and a communicating what works movement that better informs voters that we do have the answers. One part of such a movement is training thousands of grassroots, nonprofit inner city leaders, advocates and clergy in "Television School," to learn how to combat the overemphasis by local television news on negative and violent stories and underemphasis on stories about what works. These local television news priorities can cause many average citizens to believe no positive solutions exist. Another part is for new foundations based on information age fortunes to fund local community web sites through which grassroots leaders and clergy can organize advocacy against misleading mainstream media and for candidates pledged to what works.
Sentencing,
Media and Firearms
A comprehensive national policy based on existing
scientific evidence needs to reduce the disparity
in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine, by reducing excessively long
sentences for crack-related offenses; reduce
the power of big media conglomerates so we can diminish
entertainment and commercial violence on television; reinvigorate public television;
create a national media literacy policy as a
core component of the K-12 education curriculum; link firearms
control to campaign finance reform; reinforce recent state and local successes
in firearms control; encourage litigation
against firearms manufacturers; create a national firearms licensing
system; enact a federal ban on Saturday night
specials; and regulate firearms as consumer products.
There is considerable public opinion to support these recommendations -- including,
for example, new political alliances between
central city residents and more conservative "soccer mom"
suburbanites in the wake of the recent wave of gun killings of children and
youth in our schools, day care centers
and places of worship.
A
New Political Alliance
To turn our recommendations into policy, we
need a new voting majority, a new political alliance.
The alliance must bring together middle income Americans (who often need 2 or
3 jobs in the family to make ends meet)
wage earners (who need to know that their CEOs earn on the average
419 times as much as they do) and the poor (who suffered in the 1980s and hardly
improved in the 1990s). The alliance should be
based on the common ground of education and re-education, training
and re-training for the global marketplace. It also should be based on growing
resentment by many Americans of an unfair economic
deal -- in which the wealth of the super rich
who are getting richer is not earned, but falls into place without effort as
a result of our one dollar, one vote democracy.
In the late 1960s, after numbing assassinations and street riots, and with an understanding of how America’s culture of violence produced crime rates far higher than other industrialized nations, the Violence Commission concluded that the greatness and durability of most civilizations has been determined not by external assault but by internal decay. Our civilization will be no exception.
The challenges within America require vision, not incrementalism and policy bites. Vision is needed from the grassroots to the White House. We need big solutions to big problems. That is what America always has been about. It is about dreaming and trying to fulfill those dreams, however long they may have been deferred.
In the words of historian James MacGregor Burns, "While centrists cautiously seek the middle way, leaders in science, technology, education, entertainment, finance and the media pursue their own transforming visions."2 Isn’t it time to establish justice and insure domestic tranquility through the transforming visions of grassroots movements and, perhaps, even of our leaders?
home top