I do think
long-term institutional support to achor organizations
with flexibility to move and seize opportunities
is key
I think funding organizing
particularly among the most disenfranchised communities in our
country is critical
and without that
I think everything else becomes academic
I do think there has to be a
serious and sustained effort to fund civic participation as a piece of that
and
you know I personally think it's scandalous that in this two thousand
ten-year
there is hardly a dime
being spent on civic participation in the country
and then I think we need, Bill and I have talked about this and I think the
other pillar of the strategy, I'm not sure what the content is
I defer to you
because I do think there has to be a communication s strategy
that is serious and robust and at scale that's not a boutique strategy but
that can get
to where we need to go
I agree with all those things and I also
tried,and we do in the article try to sketch out some of the elements
of what we need to build and I think it has to be on a number of
interconnected fronts
but I also want to say, when you talked about the evangelicals
and gay marriage, I have
tended to see as a bright spot
in recent
months as I see the kind of unraveling with the Tea Party and so on
I had tended to think that well things are bad for immigrants, things are bad in the economy
but you know it looked to me like we were overcoming
gay rights as a wedge issue right
and they weren't being played out in elections that much and so on, Ithink
that is to some extent true and there's been a lot of forward movement and I think that
the longer term hope that we have both on let's say immigration
is that we have a country that is more black and brown as well as white and we
have diverse country that looks very different and that inevitably
change is going to come
and that younger people on a lot of issues have more progressive attitudes
they're growing up in a more multiracial society , they have better attitudes about gay
marriage and so on, the numbers are moving in the right direction however
if you look on the one hand at S_B ten seventy in Arizona and the
so called park fifty-one mosque episode, with the most virulent kinds of racism that
we've seen in a long time and sadly in the last couple of weeks at the epidemic of
suicides of young L_G_B_T people
the civil society response to that has been really moving
but you've got Carl Paladino out there and people who make no apologies for
their bigotry
a lot of work needs to be done and I guess I choose to see all these as a
backlash when you have forward movement
when people are coming to claim their space in the society whether they
are immigrants, or whether they are black or brown people or whether they are lesbian and
gay people
people are threatened by that and you're seeing a lot of, at the
same time and I think in history would show this often as paired, you're seeing
the most significant advances
coupled with the most virulent kind of backlash and we just have to do
the best we can to live through that time , but in the longer term I'm quite optimistic
The last point comes with the prerogative of the chair
I think it was Oscar Wilde, it may have been George
Bernard Shaw who said
it's the mark of a truly educated person to be deeply moved by statistics
and to see the reality that lies behind the statistics and when you
think about
how do you defeat the power of big media and how do you overcome the power of
money it is always with human beings
who want a better life and who are grieved at the situation that has been
denied them and I just brought these figures with me
the average age of a u_s_ senator is sixty nine
while the median age of Americans is just over thirty five
women are a majority of the population today but only seventeen percent of the
senate
only four senators are African-American, Hispanic
or Native American
while these groups represent a third of our population
most senators are also millionaires
most Americans are not
you can't look at our political structure and system without realizing
how deeply unjust it is
revolutions come from those who want justice
even if they don't have money and even if they don't have media so it seems to me
you're on the right
track, both of you, that if you can reach
enough women
and enough of the minorities and enough of people who aren't millionaires
you've got the makings of a really
progressive movement