THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL

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Gustavo Ramos Rivera, “En vez de silencio”, oil on canvas, 2003.

THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL

by Anthony Torres

I view my curation and art criticism for the popular press as an educational cultural interventions aimed at addressing how art and exhibitions embody historical and ideological discourses, concerned with how contemporary artists utilize diverse formal means as personal aesthetic social strategies. As such, I am concerned with addressing linkages between art practices and the complex social structures that inform the content of the work through myriad forms.

In the past, I was particularly interested in politically motivated art, and art as a politics of articulation, in which images and aesthetic strategies — drawn from an international reservoir of ideas and discourses formed from histories of cultural contact and conflict — constituted a counter-hegemonic cultural social discourse.

This resulted in identifying political art as: work having an overt or accessible political message often aimed at demystification; issue identification aimed at inciting political action; the transformation of consciousness as a vehicle for social transformation; the creation of solidarity centered in political identification; and more inclusively, as a means of affirming the “human” in an otherwise alienating world in which people are separated from nature, from each other, and from themselves in processes of social reification.

This led to developing and refining a tactically based criticism centered in specific goals, questions, and issues:

1. Addressing and analyzing how artistic practices that serve as a means of addressing social histories through self-representation and political identification, are connected to, but not wholly informed by, Euro-American institutional standards of “quality,” “value,” or tradition.

2. Addressing the potential of “identity politics” to degenerate into ethno-nationalist sentiments, and conversely de-legitimizing Euro-Americentric characterizations of “othered” artists as exotic, and challenging simplistic characterizations of artists with agendas that challenge the hegemony of mainstream art institutions by addressing issues related to address race, class, and gender.

3. Recognizing and addressing the diversity and complexity of Latino, African American, and various “ethnic artists,” in an effort to combat essentializing and simplistic view of artists who have been “othered” because of race, class and gender.

4. Recognizing the social and culturally syncretic nature of “ethnic” artistic practices as constituting a complex range of artistic practices, and to challenge and undermine the schismization/segregation of “ethinic” art from a legacy of Euro-american art, since this simplistic division along nationalist/ethnic lines, marginalizes certain artists and militates against a more complex understanding of their work and its potential for cross-cultural communication, and an inclusive and expanded redefinition of “American” art.

5. In all cases, to connect a range of diverse artistic practices to present, living, historical and contemporary cultural discourses, via a discussion of the complex specificity of the each work or artist under discussion.

My focus over the last few years has been to translate and apply a range of theoretical discourses — cultural studies, semiotic theory, post-colonial theory, into accessible language, and make it available to the general public through a free community based street press. This orientation has in one way or another conditioned all the reviews I have written, based on the dictates of the particular tasks and issues I hope to address in the reviews.

–Anthony Torres

PUBLIC EDUCATION

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bostonlatin_school

The first publicly supported secondary school in the United States, the Boston Latin School, founded in 1634, in its current location in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood.

HECKUVA JOB, ARNE

Why is Obama continuing the failed conservative & corporate-driven “education reform” policies of George Bush?

by Horatio Guernica

It’s not been a great few weeks for Obama’s education secretary and basketball buddy Arne Duncan.

In USA Today on July 12 “Chicago schools report contradicts Obama and Duncan,” he took a hit for padding his resume with false triumphs.

A new report shows that the so-called Chicago Renaissance 2010 that happened on his watch as “CEO” of Chicago’s public schools for seven years before being tapped by Obama didn’t actually happen as stated. Writes Greg Toppo:

The Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago, a supporter of Duncan and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s push for more control of city schools, issued the report June 30. It says city schools have made little progress since 2003.

Its key findings stand in stark contrast to assertions President Obama made in December when he nominated Duncan as Education secretary.

Uh oh.

Toppo continues: In December, Obama said that during a seven-year tenure, Duncan had boosted elementary school test scores “from 38% of students meeting the standards to 67%” — a gain of 29 percentage points. But the new report found that, adjusting for changes in tests and procedures, students’ pass rates grew only about 8 percentage points.

It would appear that many measures President Obama touted to explain his promotion of Duncan to top edu spot have turned out to be false.

The article likens this story to a similar tale of trumped up “improvements” that happened in Texas on Superintendent Rod Paige’s watch, who became George Bush’s education czar. Unfortunately, Obama’s education guy and Bush’s education guy share more than padded resumes.

In fact, through Arne Duncan, Obama is pretty much continuing the failed No Child Left Behind mindset and policy of the Bush era, which lashes everyone to the whipping post of standardized testing, blames teachers for all of schools’ (and by extension, society’s) ills, and quashes pretty much all chance of creativity, ingenuity in the classroom and, essentially, happy kids and schools. The so-called “education reformers” are now comprised of an unholy alliance of conservatives and neo-liberals who meet on the board of the Broad Foundation or their indoctrinating retreats. They preach the gospel of the business model as the panacea for all that ails our public schools, and are frothing at the mouth to privatize one of our last remaining public assets, public schools. They weren’t able to convince the nation of the virtue of vouchers so now they demand charters –or else!– which follows a similar scheme: public funding gets rerouted into private hands.

Until recently, Duncan was on the board of directors of the Broad Foundation, the pro-charter, pro business-model organization of AIG billionaire Eli Broad, which practices what it labels “venture philanthropy,” along with Obama’s checkered economic advisor Larry Summers, KIPP charter’s CEO Richard Barth, Teach for America CEO Wendy Kopp, and controversial reformite school superintendents Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and Maria Goodloe-Johnson.

It’s the “or else!” part of the equation that’s the most disturbing and, frankly, offensive. Duncan has said he will award grants from the $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund, education money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, only to states that implement merit pay for teachers and allow charters into their public schools. (The 10 states that currently do not allow charters are apparently SOL.)

President Obama and Arne Duncan are essentially dangling money over funds-starved school districts and saying “Do it our way, or no stimulus money for you!”

The problem is, it’s becoming more and more evident that the reformers’ “solutions” don’t work, and above all, may even harm the very kids whom they claim to be concerned about.

In fact, according to a recent (6/15/09) study by the Center For Research On Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University (ironically funded by the pro-charter Dell and Walton foundations), charters schools do not necessarily perform any better than public schools. In fact, 37 percent perform worse. And 46 percent perform no better than public schools. Only 17 percent of charter schools performed any better than public schools.

Education Week reported, “If this study shows anything, it shows that we’ve got a two-to-one margin of bad charters to good charters,” said Margaret E. Raymond, the director of the center and the study’s lead author. “That’s a red flag.”

Apparently charter schools have long had a mixed record.

The CREDO results are not surprising when you consider that the media is peppered with fairly constant reports of negative or disturbing stories about privatized charters (including the reformers’ ballyhooed KIPP model), like “Charter school faces withdrawals over punishment” or even this supposed “success story” in the L.A.Times.

Faced with such evidence, Duncan himself was recently forced to make a distinction between good charters and bad ones.

Even fellow reformite Bill Gates’ School of the Future has failed. The bookless, pencil-less, high surveillance (Gates proposed video cameras in the gym for instant replays– okay, but has also proposed having cameras in classrooms so principals can monitor teachers—creepy), high tech experiment for poor kids of color in Philadelphia hasn’t produced great results. For one thing, the kids are afraid to take home their Microsoft donated laptops for fear of getting robbed on the way.

Actually, let’s pause for a moment on this simple image: a school without books or pencils. Is that a school that anyone would like to go to? That doesn’t even sound like a school, but some kind of sterile institution. It would seem that Gates and his allies want to prepare our kids for a life as computer drones.

Meanwhile, Duncan’s record in Chicago is more troubling the deeper you look.

The disturbing alliance between private charters and the military has brought multiple ROTC schools to Chicago, also on Duncan’s watch. This makes Chicago’s school system “the most militarized in the country,” reported writer Andy Kroll back in January when Duncan was first tapped by Obama. In “The Military-Corporate Legacy of the New Secretary of Education,” from Tom Dispatch, Kroll wrote of Duncan:

“He was described as the compromise candidate between powerful teachers’ unions and the advocates of charter schools and merit pay. He was also regularly hailed as a “reformer,” fearless when it came to challenging the educational status quo and more than willing to shake up hidebound, moribund public school systems.”

“Yet a closer investigation of Duncan’s record in Chicago casts doubt on that label. As he packs up for Washington, Duncan leaves behind a Windy City legacy that’s hardly cause for optimism, emphasizing as it does a business-minded, market-driven model for education. If he is a “reformer,” his style of management is distinctly top-down, corporate, and privatizing. It views teachers as expendable, unions as unnecessary, and students as customers.

Disturbing as well is the prominence of Duncan’s belief in offering a key role in public education to the military. Chicago’s school system is currently the most militarized in the country, boasting five military academies, nearly three dozen smaller Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs within existing high schools, and numerous middle school Junior ROTC programs. More troubling yet, the military academies he’s started are nearly all located in low-income, minority neighborhoods. This merging of military training and education naturally raises concerns about whether such academies will be not just education centers, but recruitment centers as well.”

In March, blogger Kenneth Libby at Our Global Education also cast doubt on Duncan’s accomplishments. At Ariel Community Academy, for example, kids are indoctrinated in the glories of capitalism. They are given a $20K portfolio to manage. When they graduate from eighth grade, they are expected to hand over the profits to the first graders. This past year, their investments have suffered the ravages of the economy and profits have been scarce. Talk about a “teachable moment.” Maybe the Ariel kids are learning a valuable life lesson after all, about the empty values and promises of capitalism.

Meanwhile, over in D.C., the accomplishments of another “education reformer” have come into question recently.  According to the Washington Post on July 16, a report says D.C. School Chancellor Rhee tweaked test results too. Writes Bill Turque,

“These include intensive test preparation targeted to a narrow group of students on the cusp of proficient, or passing, scores, and ‘cleaning the rosters’ of students ineligible to take the tests — and also likely to pull the numbers down. Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee described some of these approaches as the pursuit of ‘low-hanging fruit.’”

The practice is not illegal, but it does spike test results and create the illusion of student “improvement.”

The saddest part about this is that the kids who need the most help are not getting it from these schools district chancellor/CEOs/superintendent “reformists” who appear to care more about test scores and their own self-aggrandizement than actually educating kids.

So why is Obama forcing bad policy down everyone’s throats? Moreover, why is he continuing the conservative NCLB policies of George W. Bush? And why does the president persist in dashing everyone’s hopes with policy capitulations like “education reform” and by consorting with discredited recidivist capitalists who helped bring our economy down in the first place?

The original idea of charter schools was a much more organic one. Parents, community members banded together to create schools that can have some independence in curriculum while still open to public school kids. Most public school parents I know have no problem with that idea. But that model has been hijacked by the free marketers who want a piece of that public funding action, and think they know better how to run a school, or can at least feign it long enough to cash in before they ship out. They talk about “eliminating the achievement gap” but measure that solely, it appears, through test scores. But their real results are questionable. There are too many reports of charter schools that limit or don’t admit special needs kids (that’s one way to keep test scores up, right?) or throw challenging kids out of the school mid-year, after they have cashed in the kids’ per-pupil state funds, and sometimes before the testing season so these kids’ scores don’t sully the schools’ records.

Do these kinds of practices help the most needy kids at the bottom of the gap? Obviously not.

Is it good business though? You betcha—it makes these “enterprises,” which are run by CEOs, by the way, so much more “efficient.” Why, after all, waste resources on a troublesome product (or is it “customer”)?

This is pretty damn unconscionable.

It appears that more and more of these ‘miracle’ charter corporations are discovering that educating a child takes something other than a laptop, a uniform, rigid discipline or an energetic young teacher with a shallow education background who is easily spent and replaced after a couple of years.

Educating kids is hard work that takes a long time. A lifetime, even. Results are not always immediate or tangible. Sometimes the most significant measure of a child’s development is that spark in their eye when they understand something for the first time, and not by how many little eggs they can fill out correctly on a Scantron test card using a No. 2 pencil in a set amount of time. Knowing how to teach well doesn’t happen immediately either. Time, experience, familiarity with what comprises an inspiring curriculum, a deep understanding of the ways and wiles and woes of children–these conspire to make a teacher great.  And yet another mantra of the reformists is that all older teachers are bad and need to be replaced. This of course has more to do with the privatizers’ mission to break the teacher’s union, than actually support of good teaching in our schools.

President Obama should can No Child Left Behind. He should sic his basketball pal on the harder task of listening, observing, talking to local school communities and finding out what really works, what parents really want, and expand and duplicate those models.There are terrific public schools out there giving kids a great and nurturing education. They should not be destroyed in the name of “reform” or because they represent someone’s idea of “the status quo.”

If Obama is going to play the conservative game, then why doesn’t he honor state’s rights and let each state decide for itself, each school district, even, how it will spend the stimulus money, with a plan and goals that are germane to the children in their community?

And how many more signs of the Apocalypse will it take for these “reformers” to see that the American way of doing business is not necessarily the best way to run things? It hasn’t worked well for our economy, has it, so why foist it on our kids’ schools?

Right now, schools and school districts are being ravaged or short-changed in the name of “education reform” from Oakland to Antioch to Seattle.

I am willing to believe that if Barack Obama were to listen to the parents, teachers and communities of America’s public schools – instead of just the Gates, Broads and Walton billionaires who have no background in education, but financial incentives to meddle with education — he would not continue with this failed agenda.

The president should read ex-Microsftie Scott Oki’s book Outrageous Learning in which he says things like: “When it comes to education, one size does not fit all. Despite our highly-industrialized modern society, there is no way to automate learning. Even today, every child’s education should be hand-crafted, with knowledge patiently passed from the teacher to the mind of the student.”

President Obama should read and heed Herb Kohl’s insightful “Open Letter to Arne Duncan”.

“It is possible to maintain high standards for all children, to help students learn how to speak thoughtfully, think through problems, and create imaginative representations of the world as it is and as it could be, without forcing them through a regime of high-stakes testing. Attention has to be paid to the richness of the curriculum itself and time has to be allocated to thoughtful exploration and experimentation. It is easy to ignore content when the sole focus is on test scores.

Your administration has the opportunity, when NCLB comes up for reauthorization, to set the tone, aspirations, and philosophical and moral grounds for reform that develops the intelligence, creativity, and social and personal sensitivity of students.”

It makes one wonder why Obama didn’t instead choose an educator like Linda Darling-Hammond for his top post, as suggested by education scholar and author Alfie Kohn back in December 2008?

Perhaps this punitive approach to “reforming” public schools is a way for the neo-liberal Democrats to divert attention from the fact that they too have failed our poorest, most vulnerable families and kids, with their bankrupt rah rah Wall St. alliances and capitulations on issues that would make everyone’s standard of living better, from single payer health care to gun control.

That’s really what’s at the heart of the matter—how to help the kids who already have hurdles in their life. To what extent can a teacher or a school be expected to transcend all the obstacles of poverty, racial inequity, language barriers?

It’s all too easy for the rich “philanthropists” to blame teachers or public schools for failing our most vulnerable kids, rather than acknowledge and address the truly difficult, profound and complex social injustice and class inequality in our country that hold too many kids down – and the free market system that helped create this inequity in the first place, not least of which by sending our economy into its current Depression.

Our nation’s public schools should not be forced to accept failed “solutions” devised by corporate myopics. It says something about the legitimacy of such “reforms” when the president has to have his education secretary threaten states with ultimatums rather than winning community support.

That was the Bush/Cheney way of doing things. Didn’t American voters just vote to end all that?

Horatio Guernica is the pen name of a West Coast writer.

SPECIAL ELECTION

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AdrielSonCrosses2_052309

Photo at the Crosses of Lafayette by Jeremy Maurer.

TILT AT WINDMILLS, SLAY GIANTS

Congress, CA10

by Adriel Hampton

My campaign for the Democratic nomination in District 10’s special election to replace Rep. Ellen Tauscher – with just six weeks to go after yesterday’s filing deadline – vies at the same time for the most creative and the most destructive thing I’ve ever done.

You don’t wake up one morning and run for Congress. You think about it, you meditate on it, you discuss it. In my case, I’d been pondering it since 2002, surfacing it in conversations interrupted by months or years. You see, when your local Congresswoman is a Blue Dog, a go-to Democrat for Wall Street, it’s not just the authorization of force in Iraq that’s got you holding a grudge.

And it’s not just your local Congresswoman. It’s that the entire system is rigged against everyday folks. It’s tightly managed candidates and a political and corporate reality where elites float along while the masses suffer or numb out with TV and other distractions.

These struggles are not from one administration to another, they are fundamental, generational.

This is why I am running for Congress in CA-10, running with all my strength to win. I believe in workers’ rights, in single-payer health care, in peace and equality. I believe in people and in our power.

And while I’ve been mocked as delusional for running against the entrenched power of the Contra Costa Democratic Party and its candidate, Sen. Mark DeSaulnier (a former Pete Wilson appointee), I’m also pragmatic. Elections have consequences, winners write the histories.

I’m a Democrat because I believe that there is a large element within the party that understands the generational struggles we face. On Friday, I spoke to a room of die-hard progressive Democrats, most of whom wore proud heads of gray. Progressive youth cannot deny their fight. It’s time to pick our battles and take our shots.

We can build a better body politic on the common dreams we share. We must use the tools, the vehicles, the sacrifices that have blazed the trails, and we must keep on fighting for an economy that serves us instead of we serving it, for an end to global war, for sane agriculture policies and an end to the Drug War.

We must tilt at windmills; we must slay giants.

Adriel Hampton is a journalist, Gov 2.0 and new media strategist, public servant, and licensed private investigator. He is running for U.S. Congress in the 2009 special election for California’s 10th District. He has pledged to vote against funding for expansion of the Iraq and Afghan wars.

//

MY MUSICAL CORKAGE FEE

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dog sign

MY MUSICAL CORKAGE FEE

by Gabriela Barragan

When I leave my house it’s inevitable: I cork my ears with trusty earbuds, sheathed in silicone, to create a steely seal against the blaring cacophony of the outside world. All this so I can continue the heady love affair with my current iPod playlist – from hearth to, say, the Hayes-21, providing my own personal musical soundtrack.

There have been times, pre, mid, and post corking, that I have wondered if it might be a better idea to pocket the headphones and the iPod and walk the streets, or ride the bus, with naked ears.  I get a nagging feeling that sometimes I’m missing out by this constant corking, no matter how much the songs on my current playlist light up my brain.  I’ve been wondering what kind of price I’ve been paying for this musical corkage.

I may be strikingly close to the textbook definition of an introvert, but I’m not one entirely.  I actually do cherish random, spontaneous conversations with strangers – not limited to, but somehow mostly on MUNI – but I rarely invite these experiences.  In fact, I’ve been consistently bent on thwarting them by filling my ear canals with music and podcasts, pretty much effectively nullifying the outside world.

It began innocently enough.  As a newly minted college graduate and San Francisco resident a decade ago, I created my own music bubble to deter “the crazy” – in all its forms – and especially when I rode public transportation after twilight.  After a few random – and awesome – interactions with strangers (likely when my iPod had died or I was in between headphones) it began to dawn on me that I was cloaking myself with a sonic veil, so every now and again I would gingerly stow the music away as if conducting my own personal experiment in approachability.  But this was rare.

Recently, as I was taking a walk through my parents’ suburban neighborhood on the way to a soul-boosting mocha, I crossed paths with a young jogger.  Despite having exchanged an urban landscape for a suburban one, I hadn’t discarded my modus operandi for daily walks: earbuds firmly embedded, my focus was on the sonic landscape rather than the one through which I traipsed, the one with trees and flowers and, you know, other living things.

As the jogger came closer we made eye contact.  He raised his right hand.  In fact, his hand was poised as if to give me a…high five? This stranger?  With, what is that?  A smile stretched across his face?  Sometimes, I’m slow.  By the time it occurred to me to raise my own hand to meet his cheerful intention with a conclusionary, flesh-smacking handclap, a random and transient thing that could have boosted me more than a mocha, the moment passed.  His right hand never met mine because it remained at my side, gripping my iPod, that sonic seal I had created unbroken.  And it sucked.

I regretted my reticence, and I marveled at the stranger who had just dashed by, and his in-the-moment inclination to boost us both with a fleeting act:  a freaking high five, a sort of impromptu namaste.  And then it hit me:  how many times have I thwarted a simple “good morning,” or “hello?” while ensconced in my cocoon of musical bliss?  How many meaningful exchanges have I missed out on that could have been pleasant or thought-provoking punctuations to the daily routine, to otherwise ordinary days?

Last week I was in the same neighborhood.  I offered a nod and a smile to those with whom I made eye contact.  I paid attention.  And if I hadn’t been, I would have missed the flyer.  It was a “Thank You” to those in the neighborhood who had helped return their beloved and heretofore wayward canine.  I stood in front of the flyer for a while, outside of my usual cocoon, hearing the mechanical wooshing of cars going by, squeaking breaks, occasionally thumping bass lines, and fragments of conversations spilling out of open windows.  This flyer was a high five in paper form, and though it was not meant for me, I was absolutely moved by the earnestness of the message.

I’ve decided to build windows in my sonic wall, so it’s less barricade and more permeable membrane, allowing for greater connection/interaction with the outside world.  There’s no changing my clinical (or technical) introversion, but I’ve seen that the outside world, this planet, is a good place and worth connecting with – if sometimes to the soundtrack of my making.

Gabriela Barragan is a recent MBA graduate, freelance writer, marketing consultant, and extremely dedicated musicophile.  She wakes up in either Salinas or Emeryville, CA. Her blog, “House of G”, focuses on music and musings.


IN SO MANY WORDS: THE OVER-INTELLECTUALIZATION OF ART, CULTURE AND POLITICS

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Franz Kline, “Mahoning”, 1956, from the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art

IN SO MANY WORDS: THE OVER-INTELLECTUALIZATION OF ART, CULTURE AND POLITICS

by Diana Cristales

Has the way we discuss art, culture and politics become a kind of verbal masturbation? After all, who are we really speaking to? We say that we want to participate in shared dialogue, but perhaps only with those with the same educational background or those who might share the same perspective. Are we able to speak to a person whtat has a sixth grade education about their perspective on art, politics and culture? Do we even want to?

When I was in my twenties, I loved going to art shows.  Hearing people discuss, analyze and elaborate. That was joyful for me.  Years later I find the talking more of a distraction from the art itself.  I stopped wanting to talk about art and realized that for me, making art was enough.

Remember when art was simple?  As children and we didn’t have the need to attach our own opinions or understandings to other people’s artwork in order to enjoy it.  We accepted it as it was.  Accepted its beauty and flaws.  Then in grade school you either liked someone’s work or you didn’t.  Simple.  It was in college where many of us learned the importance and value of a good critique. We started to project our own observations, reference points, even our own personal baggage to other people’s art.  We adopted the audacious right to validate someone else’s creativity.  Suddenly other people’s art became either worthy or unworthy of value, all by the mere use of words.  But what use do words serve if you bore your audience by the use of too many.

In reference to politics, it is easy to be put off by the use of too many words.

I would assume that the general public wants a politician to say what they mean and make it happen.  Most people learn as much as they can before voting, ask someone they trust, seek out key issues, vote and then trust that the rest will take care of itself.   Then they watch the network commentators battle it out after debates or speeches and whoever resonates with what they believe the most, or speaks loudest wins.  Intellectual bullies seem to have more power than the candidates themselves.

When things become too confusing we just change the channel and trust it will work itself out.  Meanwhile lives are lost, decisions are made and economies are disrupted.

We are doing a disservice to ourselves by making the things we value difficult to understand.   Ask yourself, can people actively participate in something they do not understand?  Isn’t it easier to manipulate the general public if they don’t even know what you are talking about?  Making politics understandable is a revolutionary act!

A greater understanding of the decisions being made might inspire active participation in making positive changes.   Perhaps the general public wouldn’t be so wary and disenfranchised with politics and politicians and the value for arts and culture would be more widely shared

Diana Cristales is a visual artist, community worker and mother of three, who resides in Lake Tahoe, California.

Health Care Reform

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dc_whitehouse_arrests_050409
Eight Single Payer activists were arrested in May for attempting to tell the truth about health care reform at the Senate Finance Committee meeting.

Corporate Dems, “Single Payer” Health Care, and Two Party System Failure–All Made Real Simple

–Kara Allison

It is only natural that so many people are talking about health care and health care reform these days. I cannot express how excited I am to see the grassroots effort that many of my friends and colleagues have participated in, finally get the national attention it deserves.

But I have to be honest here…

Most of the conversations I hear swirling in and out of coffee shop doors, hovering outside entrances of local pubs, and even those that have boldly entered the confining walls of academia are incredibly misinformed. In these conversations I hear people throwing around words like “single payer” and “universal” interchangeably… Using words they don’t even know the meaning of, like they coined the words themselves.

At a social networking website recently, I noted one person admitting in a comment thread that he knew nothing about Obama’s proposed health care plan, but acknowledging, in the same breath, that reform is needed.  This person took the “I trust Obama, so just pass the bill through” stance.  I navigated away from this site only to return to someone else grumbling about how he shouldn’t have to pay another dime to support the “deadbeat Americans who are too lazy too work”.

I looked down at my check stub for a moment and did some quick math.  Then I decided to visit the World Health Organization’s (WHO) website to look at their health care rankings. France currently holds the number 1 ranking for the best health care system in the world. Their citizens pay about 10% of their income in taxes.  This includes militia, health care, transportation, etc. I looked down at my check stub again, noting duly, that I pay roughly 23% more in taxes than the average French citizen, work more hours a week on average, and if I get sick, well… I’m fucked.

This past week the House Democrats presented their health care reform bill.  While many people believe that a step in any direction, is a step forward regarding an issue that has been immobile for so long, Obama’s plan—even if it passes—it destined to fail.

Single Payer Action’s http://singlepayeraction.org/index.php Russell Mokhiber, in an email earlier this week, tells us why:

    Because it keeps the insurance industry in the game.
    It will cost a trillion dollars over ten years.
    It won’t cover tens of millions of Americans.
    It won’t control costs.
    And it’s a bailout for the insurance industry.
    Only a single payer — everybody in, nobody out — national health insurance bill (co-sponsored by 85 members of the House — most recently by Congressman John Murtha (D-Pennsylvania) will hit the grand slam — cover everyone, save money, control costs, and fix a broken health care system.
    But what struck me yesterday while watching the Democrats was the depth of their deception.
    There was Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.
    Both heaping praise upon and honoring Congressman John Dingell (D-Michigan).
    And his father — John Dingell, Sr.
    John Dingell, Sr. represented Michigan’s 15th district for 22 years until his death in 1955.
    John Dingell, Jr. has represented the district ever since.
    But not once during the press conference did anyone mention that it was John Dingell, Sr. who first introduced a single payer bill in Congress in 1943.
    And it was Democratic leaders in Congress and President Barack Obama who took single payer off the table.
    The Republicans will tell you straight up — we’re for big business.
    Single payer is socialism.
    And that’s why we’re against single payer.
    When the Democrats are out of power, they will tell you what you want to hear — we’re for single payer.
    They then take power, and all of a sudden, they are against single payer.
    Take Henry Waxman (D-California) as a case in point.
    For years, Henry Waxman was a co-sponsor of HR 676 — the single payer bill in the House.
    Until earlier this year, when he became part of the leadership in the House.
    Then Waxman took his name off the single payer bill.
    In 2003, Barack Obama said he was for single payer.
    Obama said at the time that we would have single payer in America only when the Democrats took back the White House and Congress.
    Last year, Obama and the Democrats took back the White House and Congress.
    And now President Obama is opposed to single payer.
    The reality is that there is only one solution to the health care crisis — get the insurance companies out of health care.
    The Democrats are now engaged in what Dr. Marcia Angell — former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine — calls “the futility of piecemeal tinkering.”
    Angell and a majority of doctors in the United States — and a majority of the American people — believe that only a major single payer overhaul will get the job done.
    That’s why we’re challenging the Democrats around the country.
    And we will continue to challenge them, and the health insurance industry to whom they are beholden, until single payer becomes a reality in America.

Many health care reform advocates warn that we need to press for “single” payer” and not the “public option” for many reasons: the public option is NOT single payer, it does not confer the benefits of single payer, and is too expensive. The inevitable failure that will result from the “system” including the public option but which also preserves the insurance companies, will only serve to discredit the idea of single payer and set back present and future efforts.

So what’s the solution?

I believe Dennis Kucinich is headed in the right direction with HR676, which is explained in the following:

    Healthcare: Change the Debate
    Support a Real Public Option
    In mid-May, in an effort to reach consensus, President Obama secured a deal with the health insurance companies to trim 1.5% of their costs each year for ten years saving a total of $2 trillion dollars, which would be reprogrammed into healthcare. Just two days after the announcement at the White House the insurance companies reneged on the deal which was designed to protect and increase their revenue at least 35%
    The insurance companies reneged on the deal because they refuse any restraint on increasing premiums, copays and deductibles – core to their profits. No wonder a recent USA Today poll found that only four percent of Americans trust insurance companies. This is within the margin of error, which means it is possible that NO ONE TRUSTS insurance companies.
    Then why does Congress trust the insurance companies? Yesterday HR 3200 “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act,” a 1000 page bill was delivered to members. The title of the bill raises a question: “Affordable” for whom?.
    Of $2.4 trillion spent annually for health care in America, fully $800 billion goes for the activities of the for-profit insurer-based system. This means one of every three health care dollars is siphoned off for corporate profits, stock options, executive salaries, advertising, marketing and the cost of paper work, (which can be anywhere between 15 – 35% in the private sector as compared to Medicare, the single payer plan which has only 3% administrative costs).
    50 million Americans are uninsured and another 50 million are under insured while for-profit insurance companies divert precious health care dollars to non-health care purposes. Eliminate the for-profit health care system and its extraordinary overhead, put the money into healthcare and everyone will be covered, everyone will be able to afford health care.
    Today three committees will begin marking up and amending HR3200. In this, one of the most momentous public policy debates in the past 70 years, single payer, the only viable “public option,” the one that makes sound business sense, controls costs and covers everyone was taken off the table.
    In contrast to HR3200 … HR676 calls for a universal single-payer health care system in the United States, Medicare for All. It has over 85 co-sponsors in Congress with the support of millions of Americans and countless physicians and nurses. How does HR-676 control costs and cover everyone? It cuts out the for-profit middle men and delivers care directly to consumers and Medicare acts as the single payer of bills. It also recognizes that under the current system for-profit insurance companies make money NOT providing health care.
    This week is the time to break the hold which the insurance companies have on our political process. Tell Congress to stand up to the insurance companies. Ask members to sign on to the only real public option, HR 676, a single-payer healthcare system.
    Hundreds of local labor unions, thousands of physicians and millions of Americans are standing behind us. With a draft of HR3200 now circulating, It is up to each and every one of us to organize and rally for the cause of single-payer healthcare. Change the debate. Now is the time.

There are approximately 200 countries that exist on our planet and each of these countries has devised its own plan to meet the health care needs of its citizens.  When studying collectively the health care systems of the world, one will note that four patterns tend to emerge.  Hence, health care systems can be divided, for the most part, into four basic models.  A brief outline of  the four health care models can be found at : http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/countries/models.html.

The United States is unlike every other country because it maintains so many separate systems for separate classes of people. All the other countries have settled on one model for everybody. This is much simpler than the U.S. system; it’s fairer and cheaper, too. The time for health care  reform in the United States has finally come.  It is imperative that we educate ourselves and press our government to make the right decision.  A weak foundation now, will be the cause of failure in the future.  How much more failure can we afford?

Kara Allison is an academic librarian, freelance writer, and activist living in Cincinnati, Ohio.


ART REVIEW

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William Theophilus Brown, Untitled #3, 2005, Acrylic Collage on paper.

A BLOGAGE PLANE

by Jack Freeman

Bill Brown’s collages in paint start from scratch. This began when he started cutting up his old palettes to glue into his art. Now he squeegees, brushes, splashes paint on paper then cuts them up. Palettes are amazing things. Rubens, realizing what amazing surprises can happen between the mind and hand, the unconscious being an unknown concept in the 17th Century, said that even his paint rag is art. I use mine as a guide to let me know how I am using color or at times I somehow paint another, freer landscape and hang it on the wall. For Bill it is a new beginning and there is a wealth of images to tear up and make new, in this case using primarily in primary colors.  They leave you undone, wanting more to discover like he did.  His gallery director, Mr. Eagles-Smith was nice enough to let me see some which are now in the corner of the office, this afternoon.

Matisse said he chose colors without theory. He let his hand do it, randomly.  Some part of collage art should be done that way too. Not that you can’t carefully cut out stuff. With Bill however, it is more like without Mercy. The only rule is there are no rules. A new vocabulary can literally be discovered that way for is not unlike scat-jazz, words torn up and rearranged vocally. Anita O’Day said she was often describing something someone in the audience was wearing, and at times not.  It was an idea she got from painters… and their palettes.

The last time I saw Bill was at dinner with some friends: Paul Reidinger, the local food critic for the Bay Guardian, Steve Weisner, MD, Jane Brady and my wife Nancy…. Might as well add their names to this blogage because friends never are included in reviews and they are an indispensable influence on what is done in the studio. Bill 90, was sipping blue/green Chartreuse at the end of the table, at the end of dinner last time I saw him. We were talking about maps, a globe sitting in a frame in the far corner, as an orderly, visual reference to places recently travelled. Bill, Steve, who has a vast, new, contemporary art collection, and I had been talking about the many modern masters whom Bill knew in Paris as a youth…he probably knew Braque who designed camouflage for the French Army in WWI, trying hide things, huge things, from being blown up. Shrapnel. Sculpt a 3D peace collage! Been done. Peace Brother! Amazing what forms art can take.

From the War Room to the Dining Room to the Gallery Office to A New Order in the World of Art: Textures, shapes and primary colors like you have never seen them. I am glad I went to the gallery to see for myself because Bill cuts through his paint to make shapes. At times he raked and scratched instruments through semi-dried paint to reveal strange sub-surface images peaking through that would become more surreal after bring juxtaposed somewhere in a new format: pre-painted & cut up. Then, perhaps, reworked again? Perhaps. Scat-shapes. Imagine the pieces scattered all over his studio, resolved and not, then looking for something… yes!  Let your hand select it…or your eye pick it out. Yes!  Scrap. No! Shapes. Yes! Then cut and paste again, and…

I imaging there are several stages Bill goes through in arriving at something new to look at. First paint, then cut, then arrange and glue and arrange and glue again….1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 1, 3…. Or destroy, then search, then find. These collages are not Synthetic or Analytic…they are Emotional non-isms. They just are.

Collage means glue in French and decollage is lift off, ie, planes of any kind.  In all steps and stages, cutting and arranging, collaging and decollaging there is a search, the search on another level, a process… Bill’s way of working, like a state of being something….they are fresh starts, looking for a new way, trying to get at something as sort of vehicular,  as if that will find something different or just very fine like searching for a new power in the primary color that will carry over. He did. Since the pieces are relatively small, 15” x 12” or so, they are intense. And personal. Even in the brochure there is a power fresh and vigorous, bold and raw that demands to be seen. They may surpass in terms of energy of color the measured Orphism of Sonya and Robert Delaunay.

When you look at the work, there are wonderful and strange things…sort of abstract fantasies. Parallel, wormy, groovy black and white squiggly lines…Free forms of primary colors. Grays just happen…not many measured… it would be inconsistent way to work. Whole colors want to float almost like block 3D letters. But, cookie cutter art this ain’t. And one would not expect it. There are sideswipes, brush marks, butter paint quality, surprise shapes whose negative sides move into the body of the main shape or into the format outside, sort of head on collisions..violent and calm some where else…Random fits in a meandering flow of independent, interlocking shapes…Weird textures, wild color.

I know Bill to be a scholar, classical musician, linguist and painter. It is no surprise then that tradition of Western Art comes through and with authority of experience on the one hand and discovery on the other. He discovered what paint is….indelible since that is what looking at his painted collages is as an experience. The most obvious is the most difficult thing to find. Unforgetable.

Jack Freeman is a painter and percussionist.

ART REVIEW

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Untitled #1, 2008, Acrylic Collage on paper.

Elins/Eagle-Smith Gallery

THEOPHILUS BROWN: RECENT ABSTRACT COLLAGES

by Anthony Torres

Theophilus Brown: Recent Abstract Collages at Elins Eagle-Smith Gallery in San Francisco presents 20 acrylic-on-paper collages that represent a new direction for Theophilus Brown, an artist always interested in the figure, who has been associated with Bay Area figuration and the exploration of the dialectical relationship between of abstraction and figuration since the 1950s.

In the Recent Abstract Collages, done over the last four years, we see the results of a self-reflexive practice of selecting, re-claiming, and manipulating painterly residues left from previous excursions and experiments in studio — peeled acrylic paint shards from his palette — that Theophilus Brown deploys as a strategy for engaging non-figurative aesthetic concerns associated with American abstraction.

Here, the acrylic-on-paper constructions are formed from a process of cutting, moving, and manipulating the painted materials — used as base components of the collages — that reveal Brown’s artistic virtuosity through the juxtaposition of lines, shapes, and a continuum of colors, which range from bright primaries to stark contrasts of black and white, and earth tones, integrated and bound by incised lines embedded in the paint surfaces, to reveal the painted colors underneath.

In many of the collages, the painterly gestural “actions” are evidenced all over the picture plane, in others, it appears in the applied shards of paint. In many cases the shapes, area borders and lines are formed by the edges of the cut over-laid painted paper, while in others by the incised lines in the paint. In all cases, he utilizes these pictorial elements to create dynamism through the pictorial structure, composition, and the placement of the colors in the work.

Despite the dense fusion of these varied components, there seems to be identifiable “types” of work within collages in the exhibition, characterized by painterly gestural abstraction, by geometric architectonic structures, and those that emphasize a fractured pictorial surface construction.

Within these varied works, there are nonetheless unifying qualities, such as balanced symmetry, a sense harmonious discordance that speaks to the rhythmic ebbs and flows in the work that are bound by associated compositional counterpoints.

If this body of work may be thought of as partaking of a constellation of modernist ideas based in Cubist, Dadaist, and Surrealist disruptions anchored in formal strategies that problematized Western painterly representations centered in illusions of three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface, they do so by revealing that formal techniques are capable being co-opted, disavowed, and subsumed through technical appropriation in the service of addressing a fundamentally different sets of issues.  Here Brown translates the formal vocabularies of collage in the service of non-objective abstract sensibilities.

Through a self-reflexive practice of selecting, re-claiming, and manipulating painterly residues leftover from addressing formal challenges and experiments in studio, Brown re-deploys and thus re-signifies these remnants as a strategy to engage non-figurative aesthetic concerns associated with American abstraction.

While the significance of Theophilus Brown, who recently turned 90 years old, is usually anchored in the past through his associations with artists like Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Mark Rothko and his close friendships with Willem and Elaine de Kooning, whom he says had a strong influence on his work, as well as Brown’s integral participation in the development of San Francisco Bay Area Figurative art, what is crucial in reflecting on what unifies his diverse bodies of work is recognizing his ongoing formal concern with integrating volumes and shapes, balancing illumination and compositional structures across different media, content, and genres, and his ability to manipulate the tools and materials at his disposal, to (re)presenting his varied subjects in pictorial space, through knowledge and lessons learned over years of artistic practice, which in the collages function as a form of visual allegory for individual artistic subjectivity, and a greatness wholly infused and implicated in living and making art.

Anthony Torres is an independent art critic and curator who has taught at Ohio State and UC Santa Cruz.

THE UNDIVIDING LINE BETWEEN LITERARY AND POLITICAL

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THE UNDIVIDING LINE BETWEEN LITERARY AND POLITICAL

by Okla Elliott

It has been said that poetry feeds no one, and no doubt, I have felt occasionally that reading or writing literature is merely an indulgence, one many people cannot afford. But that’s a rather limited view of how literature, the presses that publish it, and its practitioners function in the world.

In many ways, literature offers an opportunity to be political completely outside the electoral arena, something the people of this country (which has a two-party duopoly currently in place) sorely need.

Who can read a novel like The Quiet American (Graham Greene) and not rethink the Vietnam Conflict in human terms? Who can read Fox Girl (Nora Okja Keller) and not be heartbroken over how US military bases in South Korea negatively impacted the lives of the people who inhabited the camptowns around them? And, here again, in human/emotional terms, not mere numbers which lose meaning in their abstraction. Gore Vidal’s historical novels help readers to review American history from a different perspective. War memoirs personalize tragedies via the concrete and hellish details, as opposed a government’s abstractions of patriotism, freedom, or liberation which try (quite effectively) to dehumanize what is going on and thereby make it more stomachable.

That is perhaps literature’s greatest strength. It removes the easy cleanness of abstraction and introduces the muck and blood of reality into political thought. I do not mean to suggest that more rigid statistical analysis doesn’t have a very important role in politics; of course it does, as nearly everyone agrees. But literature can bring life to those numbers in a way that can motivate people to act, which our emotions are more likely to do than our intellect in most cases.

Unfortunately, however, too often writers in the United States eschew the political as beneath the dignity of high art. Not only is this a view solely held by our nation (in Europe, Africa, South America, etc, politics and art/literature quite often go hand in hand), but it is also so obviously nonsensical, I don’t see how it gained such ideological traction. Am I to believe that the lives and deaths of my fellow man are beneath the purview of art? Or that war cannot or should not produce insightful novels and poems?

But literary work doesn’t have to be openly political to perform a political or ethical function. When a middle-aged man in upstate New York reads a novel about a young girl in an impoverished Kentucky town, his knowledge of humanity is broadened as are his powers of empathy. And empathy makes us less likely to support policies that harm others.

And it’s not just the work itself that is political. There is a political aspect to the publishing and purchasing of books.

Let’s look at small presses for a moment. The term “small press” is an elusive term, as it includes presses with an all-paid staff and tens of thousands of dollars in grant support, as well as presses run by an all-volunteer staff out of someone’s apartment. But what small presses definitely are not are the huge publishing houses owned by corporations like AT&T that largely crank out books with cute cats on the cover or books that otherwise play to our basest sensibilities. Take, as an example of an excellent small press, Ugly Duckling Presse, which specializes in experimental literature and literature in translation. Experimental literature might have no overt political message, but it seeks to shake things up or offer an alternative view on human experience and thought. And translation is highly political, even when the content of what is translated is not. Every translation is an entry into another culture, an invitation to understand how people live in other parts of the world. By better understanding other cultures, it strikes me that we are more likely to respect them and therefore less likely to want to bomb the shit out of them. And, aside from the occasional blockbuster hit, most translation comes out of university presses or small presses, as well as small literary journals.

To take a cue from this blog’s name, I’ll not be merely descriptive of what literature can and does do; I’ll be prescriptive about what editors, writers, and readers ought to do (or ought to do more of), bringing us to the classic progressive question—what is to be done? First, editors need to solicit more well-crafted political writing, more translations, and more travel literature (whether it be poetry or prose, fiction or non-). Second, more writers need to be producing such work (and here I don’t mean preachy, one-dimensional stuff, but rather complex, well-crafted, multiply indicting work). Third, lovers of literature and writers (or people who hope to be writers) need to support the small press industry with subscriptions to journals and by buying books.  We also need to purchase well-written and politically sophisticated books from the major publishers to teach them in the only terms they understand (i.e., profits) to produce more books like the aforementioned Fox Girl (out from Penguin) and fewer books with cats dressed in cowboy hats or superman capes or whathaveyou.

In closing, I offer a very abbreviated list of books, journals, and presses that might be of interest. If you have any to add, please feel free to do so in the comments section below.

Books

Rising Up and Rising Down (nonfiction), by William T Vollmann; After the Lost War (poetry), by Andrew Hudgins; Disgrace (fiction), by J.M. Coetzee; This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (fiction), by Tadeusz Borowski; Salazar Blinks (fiction), by David Slavitt; Cancer Ward (fiction), by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; Our Lives Are Rivers (poetry) by Mark Smith-Soto; A Gesture Life (fiction), by Chang-Rae Lee; Selected Poems (poetry), by Marina Tsvetaeva; Death and the Maiden (drama), by Ariel Dorfman; Christopher Unborn (fiction), by Carlos Fuentes; and, again, Fox Girl (fiction), by Nora Okja Keller.

Journals

Blue Mesa Review, Circumference, Contrary, Crab Orchard Review, Hobart, Indiana Review, International Poetry Review, The Literary Review, Main Street Rag, Monthly Review, Natural Bridge, New Letters, New York Quarterly, A Public Space, and The Sun.

Presses

Copper Canyon Press, Dzanc Books, Graywolf Press, Monthly Review Press, Press 53, Red Hen Press, Seven Stories Press, and Wave Books—as well as dozens of university presses (e.g., Ohio State, LSU, Northwestern, etc).

“A NEW ERA OF ENGAGEMENT”, BUT FOR WHOM?

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migrant child central valley california grape harvest 2008 Joseph Szymanski

Migrant Child, Central Valley, California, 2008. Photo by Joseph Szymanski.

“A NEW ERA OF ENGAGEMENT”, BUT FOR WHOM?

by Nathan Birnbaum

On February 24, 2009, the Obama Administration took a basic step towards returning our nation to its rightful place in the global arena by re-opening America’s doors to the United Nations.  Timing his announcement with a visit from Japan’s Prime Minister Taro Aso, President Obama candidly stated that, “In words and deeds, we are showing the world that a new era of engagement has begun. For we know that America cannot meet the threats of this century alone, but the world cannot meet them without America.”

This oratory is satisfactory on the surface yet it fails to acknowledge where the United States has fallen behind, even in areas of near universal acceptance.  Nowhere is this disparity more glaring than America’s continued reluctance to ratify the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

With many of its 54 articles taking their substance from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the CRC reaffirms the position that children constitute the most vulnerable members of society.   As a result, this document holds that they must be given special treatment in the face of inadequate social conditions, natural disasters, and armed conflict (to name a few).  None of the rights afforded to children in this convention would strike the average American as unreasonable: don’t we all expect to be free from discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, nationality, and expressed opinion?  Do we not hope for the highest standards of health and treatment?

Signatories bound by the CRC are required to submit a thorough report on their implementation of the convention’s articles every five years to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, who in turn makes recommendations on areas where a country might improve.  While opponents to the CRC’s ratification in the U.S. maintain that such oversight would infringe upon both national and state sovereignty, a quick glance at our country’s sobering child abuse statistics renders such “scare tactics” moot.

According to the latest statistics gathered by The Children’s Bureau, an estimated 1,760 child fatalities in 2007 were attributed to child abuse in the United States.  Response to this abuse continues to be hindered by inaccurate and inconsistent reporting as well as lack of adequate training for law enforcement, which consistently fails to investigate abuse claims thoroughly.

If such statistics weren’t scary enough, a law on the books in Ohio actually condones corporal punishment in all cases unless it “creates a substantial risk of serious physical harm to the child.”  Unfortunately for Ohio’s youth, this “serious physical harm” is defined as death or risk of permanent disfigurement.

To date 193 countries have signed onto the legally-binding CRC, with the United States joining the failed state of Somalia as the only nation not to do so.  This fact in and of itself should be cause for embarrassment.  And given the above examples one would think that a little oversight and guidance, as embraced by the international community, would go a long way.  Yet, nearly 15 years after Madeline Albright signed the CRC on behalf of President Clinton and the United States, American opponents of the convention continue to press their representatives to stall its ratification.

Oppositionalists’ extreme and misguided notions hold that the CRC would infringe upon the parent-child relationship, allow children to bring lawsuits against their own family members, and even…wait for it…join gangs.

Putting aside the ridiculousness of that final claim, it is only fair to right these misconceptions.

The CRC does not constitute an authoritarian directive on the role of parents in a child’s life.  In fact, Article 5 recognizes the primacy of this relationship by clearly stating that, “State Parties shall recognize the responsibilities, rights, and duties of parents.”  Rather than legislate parenting techniques, the CRC is merely concerned with upholding a child’s fundamental rights in the home.

Furthermore, nowhere in the CRC is there any indication that a child can (or should) file a lawsuit against their parents.  As the Campaign for the U.S. Ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child rightly points out, “Any legal action brought by children against their parents must be based on existing federal or state laws, not on provisions contained in the CRC.”  Under our state and federal laws, this would only become applicable when a parent is found to have grossly abused or neglected their child.

And if our youngest generation is so-inclined to display their violent street smarts, they will find no approval within the text of the Convention.  Instead, they can simply look to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to protect their free speech rights.

This is not a contentious legal, religious, or class-based issue (ratification is supported by hundreds of organizations, individuals, and academic institutions, including American Baptist Churches, the American Bar Association, and the United Food and Commercial Workers Labor Union).  Its passage in 1989 reflected multilateral consensus within the UN, whose founding Charter reaffirms faith in the “basic dignity and worth of the human person.”  Ultimately, international peace and security depends upon a future generation growing up with hospitable living conditions and fair treatment under the law.

Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, recently told a group of Harlem school children that the U.S. is actively discussing “how and when it might be possible to join” the CRC.  But this is a conversation we’ve been having for too long.  It is time for America to declare and solidify its support for children’s rights on the global stage.

Lets see a little audacity Mr. President!

Nathan Birnbaum is a Drama major at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.