Women I Have Wanted To Like But Can’t: A Reflection on the Death of Thatcher

Posted by Kim Klein

When I was a child, there was a complete dearth of women in political office.  I remember having a fight on the playground (a way too often occurrence of my elementary school years) when a boy yelled, “Girls can’t be in charge” as I tried to be in charge of our mixed gender softball team.  I yelled back, “Yes, we can.  Girls are in charge of a lot of things.”  “Like what?”  he replied.  Too late I realized I had fallen right into a hole.  “Well” I stuttered, “England, dope.  Have you heard of the QUEEN of England?” 

He was temporarily chastened but came in the next day to tell me that the QUEEN was not in charge of England—the Prime Minister was, and he was A MAN!!!  For years after that, I looked for women in politics.  I felt my heart beat faster when Indira Gandhi came to power in 1966 in India  or when Golda Meir was elected Prime Minister of Israel in 1969.  Meir died in 1978.  Gandhi was assassinated in 1984.  Both were called “Iron Ladies” well before the woman who would embody that title came to power.  In 1979, when I was in my late twenties, England elected the first (and, so far, only) woman prime minister—Margaret Thatcher, who died on Tuesday. 

I so wanted to like and admire these women.  The problem is that to know them was to despise much of what they stood for.  Golda Meir was tough, brave, smart, but so blind to the existence of Palestinians that she once said, “There are no Palestinians.”   Indira Gandhi created one of the darkest periods in Indian history, euphemistically called “the Emergency” where she savagely suppressed any dissent and virtually shut down India’s free press. 

And Thatcher?  Many of us who were activists in the 1980’s spent a lot of energy protesting her policies and disagreeing with her politics, along with her good friend and President of the United States, Ronald Reagan.  They always seemed separated at birth in some ways and ironically they both suffered from dementia for many years before finally dying.  Thatcher once called Nelson Mandela a terrorist.  She privatized British mining, causing 20,000 people to lose their jobs almost overnight.  The list of things she did that we decried could fill a book. 

But here is the funny thing about Thatcher as we look back on her.  Today she would be seen as almost a socialist.  Froma Harrop, writing in Nation of Change, notes Thatcher’s reflection in her memoir on the national health service, “I believed that the NHS was a service of which we could genuinely be proud. It delivered a high quality of care — especially when in it came to acute illnesses — and at a reasonably modest unit cost, at least compared with some insurance-based systems."   She goes on to point out that Thatcher greatly admired Friedrich Hayek's "Road to Serfdom," a book conservatives consider a great repudiation of socialism, but that Hayek himself wrote, "there can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody ... Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision." For insurable risks, he added, "The case for the state's helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong." http://www.nationofchange.org/moderation-margaret-thatcher-1365518121

The list of women in political power is much longer than when I defended the Queen in 1963, and I am happy to say that I do admire many of them:  Barbara Lee, who is my representative, Karen Bass, Maxine Waters, Tammy Baldwin, Elizabeth Warren….the list is long.  But I am now much more focused on keeping our country from moving any further to the right.  I do not want, from my perch at the Shady Rest Nursing Home, to watch the funeral of someone like Michele Bachman and have to say, “Today she would practically be a socialist.” 

Commons on the Airwaves

Posted by Caitlin Endyke

Born 4 years after the Fairness Doctrine was revoked in the courts, I can't tell you that I remember a time when listening to the radio was an opportunity to catch up on community issues and open productive public discourse.  But I was intrigued by this piece, recently posted on onthecommons.org, that provides an excellent history on just how the American airwaves went from platforms for addressing community issues to the sports-talk-radio complex it has become today- filled with little more than Top 40 and hate-based political pundits (and the occasional This American Life episode).  I'm always most interested in ways that different technologies can both promote and hinder commons-based efforts, and this example is a bit of both.  Originally ruled as a resource that needed to be owned and operated for public benefit, the radio was perhaps the commons ideal- a cheap-to-produce broadcast system that was legally bound to offer an open dialogue and address community needs.  Yet over time, and with the changes in certain governing laws, radio has become a place (more on some stations than on others, for sure) for people like Rush Limbaugh to prattle on unstopped (and uncensored at least in the content of his speech, though perhaps not in the actual words he's allowed to use). 

As the authors note, "Fifteen years [after the Fairness Doctrine was revoked] talk radio has changed the nature of political discourse. Some persuasively argue it has changed our very culture. Media scholar Henry Giroux describes a “culture of cruelty” increasingly marked by racism, hostility and disdain for others, coupled with a simmering threat toward any political figure who comes into the crosshairs of what many now call hate radio".

How do we curb this trend? Can we go back?  In an era where the numbers of regular radio listeners  is continuing to dwindle, do we need to?  And if we don't, what are some other technologies that would allow us to establish a similar commons-based broadcast approach? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

Entry Denied

Posted by Caitlin Endyke

I was always a sucker for any historical museum that did it's best to put visitors in the shoes of the people or the time period the museum was trying to illustrate.  As a kid (and future history major) my favorite family vacation was to Colonial Williamsburg.  So I was intrigued when I came across this link shared by someone I know on Facebook.  The site, run by a Jewish organization but focused on progressive immigration reform, takes users through how their ancestor's immigration story would play out if they were coming to America under current laws and regulations.  Its goal is to illustrate how hard a pathway to citizenship has become since boats of Western European immigrants were unloading at Ellis Island (though conditions then were not exactly great either, and new immigrants often faced various forms of discrimination), and to remind visitors that at one time or another most of our ancestors were similarly coming to America hoping to find a better life.

 Recently, we've become increasingly focused on individualism (take my recent post on "Prepping", for example), to the detriment of commons-based policies and practices that would be more beneficial for society as a whole . Too often we not only forget to put ourselves in the current shoes of those around us, but we also forget the common histories that link us all together.

Who Needs Government?

Posted by Kim Klein

Time is the most important commons we have.  This article shows how one of the government’s job is to help people have time to be engaged in pursuits beyond survival.

Read the full text here: http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/who-needs-government

Millennials and the Commons

Posted by Caitlin Endyke

As an early-twenty-something reading through the New York Times this morning, one headline in particular caught my eye- “Do Milliennials Stand a Chance in the Real World?”  The article, written by Annie Lowrey, goes on to talk about everything I’ve heard before- as a generation that entered the workforce during the depth of the recession, we are likely to continue to experience the effects of the economic downturn for the rest of our lives, both emotionally and economically.  We are the first generation since the great depression where our earning potential as individuals is likely to fall below that of our parents’.  It’s nothing we haven’t heard before.  

Yet this piece did bring up an interesting thought- is the millennial generation, because our most formative years were spent under the shadow of 9/11, the collapse of the housing market, and the subsequent recession, most affected by income inequality? This article alleges that Milliennials, more than any other generation, think American economic policies only benefit the wealthy. Consequently, they have caught up the “We are the 99%” rallying cry perhaps more than any other group.  

Because of this, could the millennial generation, even for all they’ve been often criticized for, become the generation to most support commons-based policies?  They’ve grown up in a time where the profit-driven market clearly did not serve them well, so could they imagine a different and more inclusive model?  When contemplating an audience that is most primed for the Commons-based argument, perhaps those parents' basement-dwelling, student loan-paying, over-stressed twenty-somethings would be the most receptive.

Organizing+Education+Service+Policy = Profound and Lasting Change

Posted by Kim Klein

The Christian Science Monitor of Feb 25, 2013 has an article titled, “US Domestic Violence Falls:  It’s down 64% between 1994 and 2010.”  I read this article with great interest because I started my fundraising career in the domestic violence movement.

I was a seminary student in 1976 and had to do a field placement as part of my studies.  I did it at La Casa de las Madres  which was (and remains) the domestic violence program serving the county of San Francisco, CA.  They had just opened a shelter which was the first in California and the fifth to open in the United States.   We were then called the “battered women’s movement” which started in England when Erin Pizzey and others opened the first shelter  in Chiswick in 1970.  The first shelter in the USA opened in St. Paul, MN in 1973 and the movement got quite a bit of publicity when Erin Pizzey published the groundbreaking, “Scream Quietly or the Neighbors Will Hear” in 1974. 

La Casa was in a large funky house and  was chaotic and badly run.  (La Casa moved a few times when the address of the shelter would become too well known, but I mostly worked in one location.)  I would arrive for my shift and be told we didn’t have enough food for the residents for whatever the next meal was and I needed to find some free food fast.  Having no idea how to do that, I would go from church to church to see if they had food in their pantries they could give us.  Thus dinner might be all kidney beans and ketchup or breakfast might be apple juice and canned spaghetti.  We always seemed to have a lot of kids and they actually liked the food but it was not nutritious or well balanced.  

The women we were sheltering were, of course, traumatized and sometimes took it out on each other or their kids.  Kids were spanked or yelled out way out of proportion to their offense. The women themselves occasionally came to blows.   The shelter workers (like me) had little training and at age 23, little in the way of experience to bring to bear on the situation.   

While others tried to figure out how to actually manage the shelter,  I  started raising money from churches and synagogues, then from individuals.   Fundraising took me away from the day to day work of domestic violence, and I watched as this feminist movement transformed into a social work discipline.   I didn’t go into any shelters for many years, and then in the last ten years, I have toured several and been amazed by them.  Well furnished, lovely kitchens, childcare spaces, and sometimes even play equipment in yards!   Trained social workers and counselors know what to do.  It is a far cry from where we started.   Second stage housing, job training, anger management workshops, and so much more is now de riguer in domestic violence work.

In reading the article referenced above, I feel some pride.  I was one of thousands of people who helped start this.  We can document, finally, that we have less domestic violence than we used to.  Organizing and fundraising played a big role.  But also research on the nature of this kind of violence including the twin realizations that men were sometimes battered by women and that violence amongst gay and lesbian couples was not uncommon, led from “battered women”  to  the current and more accurate “intimate partner violence” or IPV.

From the 1970’s to the early 1990’s, IPV did not go down.  Some years it went up, reflecting mostly that people were reporting it more often and that it was becoming much less tolerated by everyone in the community.  However the incidence of domestic violence began its slow trajectory downwards in 1994, which is the year Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).  Joan Meier, professor of clinical law at George Washington University says , “I am willing to speculate that VAWA had a direct impact on reducing violence.”  VAWA was a federally funded approach to domestic violence which particularly took into account the role of law enforcement in dealing with this issue.  It provided sensitivity trainings for police, funded  legal services for victims, and encouraged states to adopt mandatory arrest laws.  The latter are controversial in their impact but the fact is that we wouldn’t be able to know what is good and what is problematic about mandatory arrest if we didn’t have 22 states requiring it. 

What does this have to do with the commons?  To me, it is an example of a small movement that became a bigger movement that become a social service and an academic area of research, and by being all those things, many times all at once, became a force for advocating that the government of the country do one of its most important jobs which is to protect the residents  from violence.  Only large federally funded programs can really address these kinds of problems and hope to make lasting change.  (It is ironic that VAWA ‘s reauthorization was opposed by 130 Republicans, but this is proof we still have work to do!)  If we continue to have the progress we have had since 1994, we could see an end to domestic violence in the next two generations.  And that would be a major step toward rough social equity and a commons based society.  

Shaming on the Subway

Posted by Caitlin Endyke

On my commute home last night, my subway car had one of the ads mentioned in this CBS piece- ads produced by the City of New York in an effort to curb teen pregnancy.

And I was about as irked by them as the people mentioned in that article (the piece spells out a pretty good argument for why they are insensitive and ineffective, which I won’t repeat here, but it’s worth a read).  But after ranting to my roommate about them, I thought about how these ads were also indicative of how we talk about issues like these in society, in general.  

What these ads do is place blame squarely on individuals (and not even adult individuals, at that), without offering any concrete solutions or positive examples.  They essentially say, in provoking imagery and language, “Don't Do This”, or even, “The Situation You're Already In Has Ruined Your Life”, yet they do nothing to offer constructive alternatives or get at root causes of the issues that might be leading people to find themselves in these situations in the first place.  This, I think, is the kind of discourse that really needs to be taking place both on the local and national levels in this country.  On both sides of the political spectrum we spend so much time denouncing the efforts of the other side, and so little time offering alternatives or speaking to what got us here in the first place.  I think one of the first steps towards a commons-based society would be to stop blaming the people around us and start having real conversations about how we can best help our fellow citizens. We need to do more than try to scare or intimidate people.  We need to provide our communities with information, resources and examples of how we can all support each other in leading more fulfilling lives.