October 6, 2011
Professor Nichol's remarks before the Orange County Democratic Women meeting in Chapel Hill, Saturday, October 22nd 2011.
Good afternoon. What a
great crowd. Apparently you all didn’t realize there’s a Carolina
football game going on right now. I told my daughter this morning,
though, that even Chapel Hill Democrats wouldn’t conflict with a UNC
basketball game.
I’m honored to be here. The Orange County Democratic Women’s Luncheon. Encompassing four of my favorite categories of human beings: residents of Orange County, Democrats, Women, and people eating lunch. And if we were to be honest, which I’m dead set on being today, we’d say, that we never thought we’d be precisely in this spot.
Nationally, our Republican adversaries mount a presidential campaign dominated by candidates that you wouldn’t feel safe trusting to run the check out line at Harris Teeter. Even the ‘ten items or less’. They seem to believe that to show sufficient contrast with President Obama they need to turn to folks not working from a full deck.
I saw Mary Chapin Carpenter at Memorial Hall the other night. She reported her favorite bumper-sticker: “Palin-Bachman 2012 – It’s a No-Brainer.”
And when they come together, for their version of debate and discourse; the crowd boos a soldier returning from Iraq because he’s gay; they applaud the idea of letting Americans die, unattended, in hospital emergency rooms; and they cheer the cold efficiency of Texas’ express lane for executions - a lane open only to the poor and marginalized.
And despite clear proof that thievery, criminality and unyielding greed on Wall Street have directly caused the loss of at least eight million jobs – for which we’ve bailed them out and they’ve used the money to pay themselves obscene bonuses -- a debate crowd this week cheered the declaration that fourteen million unemployed Americans ‘should blame themselves, not Wall Street.’ I’m not making this up.
In the Congress, Republicans are so completely and unalterably focused on assuring a brilliant young black man not be re-elected president of the United States, that they would say, over and over again, to millions and millions of uninsured, unemployed, uncompensated, unfed, unhoused, uneducated, unsafe, and now unbelieving Americans: “Too bad, your desperation is not as important as our intransigence, our ideology; our belief that the only thing wrong with America is those at the bottom have too much and those at the top don’t have enough. We’ve planted our flag. There we’ll stand."
And in Carolina, a Republican legislature faces down the worst economic challenges we’ve seen in seventy-five years by trying to ban gay marriage; and prevent the threatening sweep of Sharia law; by passing the harshest and most degrading abortion bill in the U.S.; by making it harder to get secure affordable financial aid at community colleges; trying to gut our state earned income tax credit – raising the taxes of families making $35,000 a year – to cut the corporate tax rate for millionaires; by firing thousands of teachers and professors; throwing Medicaid recipients in the street; and denying thousands of others the right to vote.
This purported economic recovery plan is something of a meandering stream. It seems mainly to embrace every Republican social cause that has raised its ugly head in the last three decades. I understand they’re about to go after fluoride in the water.
Both in Washington and Raleigh, the Republican Party is now dominated by twin beacons – the Evangelical Right and the Tea Party. A Christian Right whose political agenda cannot be squared with – and is a formal rejection of – the Sermon on the Mount. And a Tea Party calling itself “constitutionalist” -- whose agenda cannot be squared, no matter how many tri-cornered hats they wear -- with the Constitution of the U.S.
All this would be funny if it weren’t so unspeakably tragic. But it should come as no surprise from a gang led by a Speaker of the House who would say, and I want to be fair, get the words exactly right, Speaker Tillis, would say this:
"What we have to do is find a way to divide and conquer the people who are on assistance. We have to show respect for that woman who has cerebral palsy and had no choice in her condition. And we need to get those folks to look down at those people who chose to get into a condition that makes them dependent on the government."
I always have to stop for a minute and let that sink in. “We need to get cerebral palsy victims to look down on the unemployed and destitute of Carolina. Treat them with appropriate disdain”.
Like Richard Burr’s claim, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, a couple of years ago, that poor parents, trying to secure Medicaid coverage for their children were “pigs at the trough.” Pigs at the trough. On the floor of the Senate. Standing where Frank Porter Graham represented N.C. Burr should have been forced to resign.
And there are, this day, fights that we have to win. Unless we’re willing to throw over, to abandon, to give up on being the sort of people, the sort of state, the sort of nation, that we have professed, and so long, sought to be. We’re now called, like our forebears, to help “achieve our nation”. Or, on the other hand, we can embrace this new vision of ourselves pressed by Republicans. What I’ve come to think of, in shorthand, as “STSC” - Slouching Towards South Carolina.
Will we allow, for example, our government to say to our gay and lesbian sisters and brothers that we’re so dead set committed to treating you with derision and disdain that we’ll write into our constitution “thou shalt never have full dignity, full membership, full equality?” We have to do this, we read, because of clear and present danger that the North Carolina Supreme Court will reach out, at any moment, and lead the western world in the recognition of avant garde gay rights. The Court that, thus far, has shown interest in leading the nation only in gun rights for felons and bold, previously unseen, exercises in Republican gerrymandering. It’s more likely Roy Williams and Mike K. would change jobs and work pro bono than the North Carolina Supreme Court would become this feared sanctuary of gay liberation. This is, instead, an open exercise in degradation we cannot allow to become part of our constitutional charter. Not now. Not ever.
Nor, can we permit North Carolina to say to her children: "We’re too selfish, too greedy, too self-absorbed, too attached to our own tax breaks, to educate you to the best of our ability and your own? So we’re going to descend to 50th place in funding for K-12, and demolish early childhood programs like Smart Start and More at Four. See kids, you came along at the wrong time. We’re not like our parents. We won’t do whatever it takes to give you the best chance in life. Our folks sacrificed to give us the richest opportunity they could muster. But we’re not like them. It’s more important to save a penny in sales tax. We have our priorities."
Nor can we sit back and say, "We’ll abide an abortion law that says to women, in their most vulnerable and intimate moment – we’re going to make you undergo a sonogram procedure that has nothing to do with medicine. But that conscripts you, and your body, and your doctor in a state-mandated propaganda regimen to coerce and intimidate you out of exercising your constitutional rights. No step, no matter how intrusive, no matter how totalitarian, is beyond us. So certain are we of our religion and our politics. We demand them for you too. We force them on you no matter how you might protest. God is on our side."
And we – our legislature has shown – we’ll even go after people’s right to vote. I would have thought, given our history, given our premises of government, given the wars we’ve fought, given the civil rights struggles we’ve endured, and given the things we repeatedly pledge allegiance to, the one thing that would be agreed upon by all – the uncontestable in America – was the sanctity of the right to vote. The right that Mrs. Hamer always referred to as the core of “first class citizenship.” But our adversaries have pressed disenfranchisement into their agenda as well. Even racial disenfranchisement. Moving purposefully, knowingly, intentionally, strategically, cynically, to make it harder for persons of color to vote. Forgetting our past. Or maybe, in this case, embracing it. There are some sins against the American democracy not to be forgiven.
But most of all, most profoundly, our challenges ask whether we’ll continue to accept government of wealth, by wealth, for wealth, through wealth – in place of actual democracy. Whether we’re untroubled, in the richest nation on earth, the richest nation in human history, with the highest levels of poverty, especially child poverty, in the industrial world. The greatest gaps between rich and poor, by far, among major nations. The greatest concentration of wealth in the top five per cent in a hundred years. A feudal regime of unemployment and stagnation for the rest. Cash register government. A politics of the Koch brothers, and Art Pope, and Wall Street, and John Roberts, and Nino Scalia, and Citizens United, the Chamber of Commerce, and Bank of America – malefactors of wealth. Or whether we’ll say, "We’re not going to take it. We’ll occupy not only Wall Street, we’ll occupy America."
We are heirs to the greatest democracy on earth. We won’t have it bought or stolen out from under us. We are not made of sugar candy. We’ll show, after all, that majority rules. Not money. And we’re gonna prove it. Power concedes “nothing without demand,” as Frederick Douglas put it. And we mean to make the demand. And, as Ibsen reminded, “when you go out to fight for justice, don’t wear your best trousers.” We won’t.
So we’re headed for a fight. That we are. And we could wish that it wouldn’t be such a boldly challenging one. That there weren’t such forces of wealth and power and privilege, and sometimes even hate, arrayed against it. That it wasn’t such an up-hill, against the odds, effort. That it was easier sledding, more certain of success.
But the apostles of the American democracy have faced tougher roads before. I’m pretty sure Fannie Lou Hamer didn’t do an opinion poll before she started the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. And Rosa Parks didn’t conduct a focus group before she sat down for freedom.
This party started over 200 years ago. And it started in a fight. A fight between Jefferson and Hamilton. Jefferson stood strong for the future. Committed to democratic decision-making, citizen participation and humane ideals. Hamilton represented a gaggle of moneyed interests, happy enough to leave the rest of us out.
We face the same choices today. Will we choose to be the heirs of Jefferson? Recognizing both the rights and the responsibilities of citizenship. Because in the end, the obligations of citizens are less like ideas than they are deeply felt emotions, like courage and commitment. And ultimately they’re to be found only within our own hearts.
And I know that some have grown cynical, and given up hope and they don’t believe we can win this daunting battle. But imagine saying that to Harry Truman or Robert Kennedy or Cesar Chavez or Barbara Jordan or Paul Wellstone or Molly Ivins. Or think of saying it to John Lewis. Cynicism has no more place in the Democratic Party than privilege does.
So we ask you, again, even more powerfully, to enroll your spirits, to enlist your hearts. To make this defining cause your own. To enlist your all. To enlist because…
1. Somewhere we read, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all are created equal.”
2. And somewhere we read, that we are “One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
3. And somewhere we read that “History will judge us on the extent to which we have used our gifts to lighten and enrich the lives of our fellows.”
4. And somewhere we read, that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”.
5. And somewhere we read, “We have to believe the things we teach our children”, believe them and make them real.
6. And somewhere we read that ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
7. And somewhere we read, that “Whenever you did these things for the least of these, you did them for me.”
8. And somewhere we read, “You reap what you sow.”
9. And somewhere we read that the pursuit of justice and the pursuit of happiness can be as one. They march not in opposite directions, but hand in hand.
10. And somewhere we read, “No, we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
