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May 22 - June 25, 2020
The American Jeremiad described a distinctly American form of rhetoric that goes back to Puritan sermons and persists in our culture even now: a way of castigating society for failing to live up to its sacred covenant, while reinforcing the sense of promise in what we could become.
Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy each used the same phrase, “city upon a hill,” to describe America’s destiny among nations. In doing so, they used imagery that traces back to John Winthrop and the sermon he gave using that same phrase almost four hundred years ago, aboard the ship that would bring him and his followers to America.
Interestingly, he misses the Biblical reference that underlies all 3 speeches. Or does he deliberately avoid it?
We might have had, in those years, a more serious conversation about what each of us owes to the country in a time of conflict. We might have been asked to weigh what risks we are willing to tolerate, personally, in order to remain certain that this is a free country. But after those first few seemingly enlightened days, the country’s leadership showed little interest in helping us confront the choices we would have to make between safety and freedom.
And this was repeated with the Corona virus!
John Rawls
Read more about this guy
Rawls became famous for creating a new definition of justice, which boils down to this: a society is fair if it looks like something we would design before knowing how we would come into the world.
This is why you should read more!
This vision of justice is often compared to being asked how you would want a cake to be divided if you did not know which piece will be yours: equally, of course.
Good talking point!
Kantians, who believe that your motivation is the most important thing in deciding whether you are doing good, and utilitarians, who look only to the outcome of your deeds, not your intent.
In reality, it's a combination of both. Good motivation without addressing the results of your actions can mean unintended suffering. Witness so many of our social welfare laws! Looking at the outcome of deeds without considering why the actions are being taken can wreak horrible suffering. There is a reason why "The ends justify the means" has been closely linked to evil. Two questions are vital: why are we taking action? and what is the likely consequences of taking this action? Sometimes a third question is relevent: what would God think about this? This third question is not to impose religion but to help us be brutally honest with ourselves. For example: We may think that our highest value is compliance with the laws of the land. There is even biblical justification for this in 1 or 2 places. But then we look at the Old Testament concept of welcoming the stranger & treating them fairly that permeates the Old Testament & even impacts inaccurate understandings of New Testament verses, & you see that mercy to the stranger supersedes obeying the laws of the land & should be considered first. The law should be considered after the heart of God in PERSONAL decisions (including protesting treatment of undocumented aliens).
I learned to debate the remarkable finding by political scientists that truly democratic countries almost never go to war with one another.
I came to understand in thorough mathematical detail why supply and demand cannot be expected to deliver fair prices or efficient outcomes in many situations. Indeed, even the most orthodox economic theories showed that market failures were all but guaranteed to occur in situations, like health care and education delivery, where a seller has power over a buyer, or a buyer is seeking a service that can’t easily be assigned a dollar value, or the seller and the buyer have different levels of information about the product.
This is an argument that is not often discussed but should be. It seems everyone jumps to socialism if the free market is criticized without ever considering that any system has limitations. People who lived through the Cold War are especially prone to this!
AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Classes from Military Service—and How It Hurts Our Country, Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer
Put on the to be read list!
At its best, the practice of politics is about taking steps that support people in daily life—or tearing down obstacles that get in their way.
As a social worker, I've seen too much that gets in the way of people living their daily lives. Few people talk about removing those obstacles!
I share my official views on the progress of the road-funding bill in Indianapolis while fighting the urge to insist on a rule that I believe should be understood implicitly: anyone not wearing pants should not have to talk about work.
😂
But this was the point: you do not necessarily console through the wisdom of your words, especially as a public official.
Compassion!
that as an elected official, I had become a symbol. What mattered to her was that I showed up. In contrast to my student or consulting days, the value was not in the cleverness of what I had to say, but simply the fact of my being there.
again, compassion! It does make me think of the advice: never enter the sacred place of another's pain without the name of Jesus on your lips - not because you want to preach but because Jesus showed us how to have compassion.
I learned this lesson: symbols and ceremonies very much matter because they establish the tone for all of the work we come to do in the public square.
former Baltimore Mayor and then-Governor Martin O’Malley about being a good mayor: that leaders make themselves vulnerable.
And we have in 2020 a president incapable of being vulnerable!
The more a policy initiative resembles a performance where people are eager to see if the performer will succeed, the more vulnerable—and effective—an elected leader can be.
began to realize that the job was not about how much I knew, but how much I was willing to put on the line.
Over time, I’ve learned a number of rules that have helped us to make sure the use of data makes sense, and does good.
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First, know the difference between reporting an issue and resolving it.
second rule we learned quickly was to recognize that responsiveness and efficiency are not the same thing; in fact, they can sometimes pull against each other.
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Under the wrong balance of responsiveness and efficiency, data can actually make us worse at our job.
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A third lesson on data and efficiency is to be honest at the beginning about whether you are willing to follow the data where it leads.
Ah! Honesty with yourself is very hard when you are trying desperately to make things happen & get an inert system to move!
A fourth data lesson came from the ShotSpotter experience: follow the data where it leads, and recognize that it could show you the answers to questions you never even asked.
And questions you never asked can be inconvenient if you can't be brutally honest about the situations you are facing.
“Law enforcement projects an air of omniscience. If residents hear a gunshot and don’t see an officer coming to the scene, they don’t think it’s because we don’t know about it. They assume we know about it, and that we’re not there because we don’t care.” With the new technology, officers appeared on the scene of shootings we simply didn’t know about before.
Reminds me of the 1960's case in sociology texts of the woman brutally murdered in the Bronx while the whole neighborhood listened to her screams and cries for help, each thinking someone else had called the cops.
This leads to another concern when it comes to data-driven government, or government in general: the confusion of technical problems with moral ones.
Moral problems can be very difficult when each person thinks they make their own morals & right & wrong are all relative. Even Christians are saying they have no right to assess the moral compass of a president that has none.
Elected officials earn our keep by settling moral questions, ones where there is no way to make someone better off without making someone else worse off.
one last concern around the use of data-driven techniques to bring about better government: the importance of exceptions, otherwise known as mercy.
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sometimes our moral intuition just tells us that making an exception is the right thing to do, even if we can’t explain or defend the precedent.
This is wisdom & a rare quality in people in general!
Nothing is more human than to resist loss, which is why cynical politicians can get pretty far by offering up the fantasy that a loss can be reversed rather than overcome the hard way. This is the deepest lie of our recent national politics, the core falsehood encoded in “Make America Great Again.”
To defeat this temptation is to see what actually lies on the other side of acceptance: not diminished expectations, but still greater ones. For us, paradoxically, the only way to relive anything like our hometown’s former greatness is to stop trying to retrieve it from our vanished past.
But there has to be a leader who can instill hope!
The founders of car manufacturing here would scarcely recognize this industry as their own—but it echoes their originality and audacity, showing that the less we concentrate on emulating our forebears, the more we begin to resemble them at their best.
I WOULD LOVE TO BE TRANSPORTED, for an evening, back in time to the South Bend of 1960, 1940, or even 1920. I would love to stroll the pavements of the past, and see Michigan Street fronted by an uninterrupted wall of active building façades, rather than the urban missing teeth left by Nixon-era demolitions.
The view of a gut level historian!
The problem, politically, is that we keep looking for greatness in all the wrong places.
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when in reality it is available only to those who fix their vision on the future.
When a kind of greatness in our society became a beacon for others around the world, helping us to prevail in the Cold War, it did so because of a global admiration not only for our space program and our skyscrapers but also the everyday prosperity, however imperfect and unequal, that could be observed in so many of our neighborhoods.
Our city administration’s mission is to “deliver services that empower everyone to thrive.”
