Tell The Story Right: The Jobs Plan We Need, Part 2

Public policy should be driven by a few essential questions: Who are we? What do we stand for? How do we want to be remembered; what is our legacy to the future? These foundational questions underpin this second essay on the jobs plan we need.

Before you dismiss this out of hand as absurdly idealistic, impractical, and altogether unreal, I ask you to consider where that response may originate. Take a breath and check in with yourself. That dismissive voice in my head is linked to a powerful visual image, one implanted in childhood: I see adult faces, wearing expressions of amused scorn, condescending to correct my childish views. “My dear girl,” one of the voices says, dripping with sarcasm, “you have no idea what life is really about.”

A valid purpose is not discredited because it will take a great deal of time and effort to attain. A valid purpose is a guiding star to steer by, a way to check our alignment with worthy moral and ethical principles, a goal to spur us on. Even if it takes a million steps to arrive, setting out to fulfill it puts us on the right path, bringing us closer each day. A valid purpose is a journey worth undertaking.

Yet few things are as sure to draw ridicule as the unironic assertion of higher purpose in public affairs. We are living in times characterized by widespread conviction that a truly humane society is impossible. We have been taught from infancy to believe that living in harmony with others, cherishing the planet and its gifts, and caring for those in pain and in need are laughably naive, unattainable aims. What’s more, we have been taught that it is acceptable—indeed inevitable—for experts and leaders to determine our collective course based on altogether different criteria, most of which are never spoken aloud.

Tacitly, we accept that the profits of oil companies and war industries will weigh more in our policy calculations than the well-being of ordinary citizens. Tacitly, we accept policy parameters we had no direct say in setting: we’ve spent $1.25 trillion on wars since 2001. In mainstream policy discourse, that money is essentially an a priori allocation: when leaders say we can’t afford adequate schools or housing or healthcare, they are implicitly asserting that we can, however, afford to spend $125 billion a year punishing our overseas enemies. When leaders say we can’t afford environmental protection or cultural development, they are implicitly asserting that we can, however, afford to maintain the largest prison population and incarceration rate at the highest cost on the planet.  (Oh yes, and we can’t afford education, drug treatment, and rehab programs for the incarcerated, but we can, however, afford to guard SuperMax prisoners 24/7, just as often as a no-hope, no-mercy criminal justice system returns them to prison.) Tacitly, we accept the idea that continuous growth in profits is the only valid economic path, pursuing the bottom line, heedless of the cost to life on this planet.

Who are we? What do we stand for? How do we want to be remembered; what is our legacy to the future?

Of course, plenty of other questions come after those: What’s the best way to accomplish our aims? How shall we pay for it? Have we fully considered the possible consequences? How will we reckon success? But those are details of the journey; our destination matters most. If our driving public purpose is not to husband our commonwealth; ensure the well-being of citizens and guests; live as good neighbors to the other peoples of the world; cherish mother earth; and knit the social fabric that holds us all, then we are on the wrong track, plain and simple.

In these times, those who stand for telling the story right, for doing the right thing, must be willing to risk ridicule. But as risks go, it isn’t fatal, and once you get used to it, kneejerk ridicule fades to the background, like the buzzing of flies. Go ahead, take the risk, you won’t regret it.

In the first part of this feature, I discussed the narrowness of official Washington’s job-creation thinking, showing how concern for our damaged physical infrastructure hasn’t been matched by concern to repair our cultural and social infrastructure. I explained that jobs are the engine of prosperity regardless of their nature. When they make a decent living and feel secure about spending, the money that teachers, police officers, construction workers, and community artists put into circulation helps equally to expand the flow of goods and services, creating other jobs and boosting the economy. Public-sector and public-benefit jobs multiply that impact when they are understood as investments in the public interest. They help individuals and families to survive and prosper, while simultaneously advancing public goals.

The jobs plan we need should extend into every aspect of public responsibility. I’m all for the creation of jobs that address physical infrastructure and conventional public provision, like those the President mentioned in his speech on Thursday. But every one needs to be matched by jobs that mend social and cultural infrastructure, and since the President didn’t address that need, I will. As examples, I will focus on four humane, democratic public policy aims. Below each aim, I describe some of the need, and some of the job-creation initiatives that would address it. If as you read, you hear a voice in your head saying “we can’t afford it,” please consider the source of that sentiment. Despite voluminous propaganda to the contrary, redeploying just part of the public funding that now goes to reducing millionaires’ taxes, subsidizing corporate profits, locking up vast numbers for crimes that ought to be treated as disorders, arming the world, and destroying the lives and homelands of distant enemies could pay for all this, and much, much more.

The jobs plan we need can take different forms: the container isn’t as important as the contents. As in the 1930s, we can create a purpose-built program like Federal One, in effect, a new public-sector employer. Or we can mimic the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) of the 1970s, which set up pools of money open to application by public agencies and nonprofit organizations to underwrite employing people in public service. (Scroll down on this page to read a little about it.) Eventually, we can start adding to every public agency allocation an additional line-item for jobs like those I describe below—but at the beginning, we need special programs to highlight attention.

Imagine yourself in conversation with grown-up versions of the babies just now being born: how will it sound to say we couldn’t find the funds needed to put people to work in the public interest, but we managed to scrape up trillions to spend on war, prison, and tax breaks for corporations and millionaires? Truly, we can’t afford to find out.

Strengthening social fabric, promoting cross-cultural interaction and understanding

In times of exceptional economic and social pressure, scapegoating rises. People gaze at their neighbors and see unfathomable others. The kind of dog-whistle racism typical of Tea Party rhetoric reflects this, as does persistent anti-immigrant feeling, blaming newcomers for problems they did nothing to create or perpetuate. When cultural fabric is strong, a condition of true cultural citizenship pertains. As I’ve explained in many essays (this quote is from one I published last December):

Understanding cultural citizenship requires considering this question: how would the place you live be different if the same presupposition of full cultural citizenship—of heritage mattering, of voices counting, of entitlement to have a say in our collective future, of being welcomed, of feeling seen, of feeling at home—were given to every person as to its wealthiest and most powerful citizens? Seriously: every person. To the extent that we regard cultural citizenship as a privilege—treating it as natural and inevitable that some people will count far more than others—we enter into a damaging pact, as by keeping family secrets at the cost of well-being, of integrity and ethical alignment.

The warp and weft of a strong social fabric is shared stories, the opportunity to know each other despite barriers put in place by those who wish to divide and conquer. There are so many ways to advance this aim with public service jobs, I could list them forever. I will content myself with offering a few examples.

My friend Eric Booth has been deeply involved in bring El Sistema to the USA: El Sistema is an intensive program of musical study open free to children who commit to its rigorous expectations, and in return, experience mastery, loving support, and community. Here’s how the El Sistema USA Website puts it: “A visionary global movement that transforms the lives of children through music. A new model for social change….33 years ago in a parking garage in Caracas, Dr. José Antonio Abreu gathered together 11 children to play music. El Sistema was born. It now teaches music to 300,000 of Venezuela’s poorest children, demonstrating the power of ensemble music to dramatically change the life trajectory of hundreds of thousands of a nation’s youth while transforming the communities around them.” Click here to download an essay by Eric on El Sistema in Venezuela, and here for one coauthored with Tricia
Tunstall on “Batuta: The Colombian ‘SISTEMA.’” Then imagine that every child in this country was given the same opportunity to engage in creative discipline under conditions of absolute equality and support.

I’ve written often before about the Thousand Kites Project, which uses theater, music, poetry, radio, film, and other artforms to bring the story of the burgeoning prison-industrial complex home, in the hope of reversing our status as Corporation Nation. One of the deepest divides in this nation is between those for whom the criminal justice system is a lifelong presence (and a feared destiny), and those whose race, class, and condition make it seem like a distant nightmare (or even nothing at all). This project powerfully makes the point that all of us are implicated, and all of us have a role in changing things.

Community murals are collaborative works of public art that embody people’s aspirations or challenges, creating public sites as opportunities for dialogue, engagement, and learning about our own communities. Look at the Restorative Justice program at Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program for a remarkable example; or check out “The Great Wall of Los Angeles,” the world’s longest mural, sponsored by the Social and Public Art Resource Center, which will celebrate the mural’s restoration next weekend, marking a 35-year commitment to depicting the buried history of this diverse state.

In very different ways, all of these projects (and many more like them) engage people who are often considered marginal to social power, bringing their lives into the public sphere, extending cultural citizenship. Funding for this work has never been abundant; at the moment, it is dismal. There are legions of artists qualified and ready to put their skills at the service of democratic public purpose, hoping against hope for the opportunity. Every public initiative should include programs like these to embody the public interest, involve people, share stories, and thus build the kind of resilience and connection we need to face the future.

Educating for the future

Arts education and arts programs have been cut in just about every school district in America. I don’t think it is hyperbolic to call this “insane.” How will future generations see it? That U.S. leaders decided that children don’t need to develop their own creativity and imagination? That they don’t need to learn to read and handle their own emotions through drama and music? That when it came to curriculum, improvisation, innovation, resourcefulness—the skills of artists that will drive the future—were expendable? The Partnership for 21st Century Skills’ research found that “Students’ capacity to create and express themselves through the arts is one of the central qualities that make them human, as well as a basis for success in the 21st century.” (Click here to download their 21st Century Skills Map.)

In “The Long, Hot Summer of Service: Community Artists on The Job,” published a couple of years ago on the much-missed Community Arts Network, I offered several examples of teaching artists corps, where trained artists work in school and community settings to teach artistic skills, and also to use their gifts to improve the quality of teaching in other subjects, especially to connect the material with kids far more powerfully than is possible merely by assigning reading or parking them in front of computers. There are many organizations active in this field; check out the Association of Teaching Artists and Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education for more examples. To prepare students for the future they will face, every school—every classroom—should have daily access to the work of teaching artists to supplement and support the work of teachers and administrators.

Protecting the environment and greening the economy

The second of ten proposals in Rebuild The Dream’s Contract for The American Dream is to “Create 21st Century Energy Jobs”:

We should invest in American businesses that can power our country with innovative technologies like wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal systems, hybrid and electric cars, and next-generation batteries. And we should put Americans to work making our homes and buildings energy efficient. We can create good, green jobs in America, address the climate crisis, and build the clean energy economy.

A factsheet supporting those contentions can be downloaded by clicking here.

The cultural dimension of greening energy and our economy is just as important as understanding where on the industrial landscape green jobs can be created. How do people’s habits and consumer choices shift from dirty to clean energy? From all we know, that kind of personal change results when people feel a direct emotional connection to both a problem and its solutions. We have to be able to envisage the consequences to the planet of continuing on our destructive path, and to feel in our own lives and communities the relief of helping to bring about what Joanna Macy calls The Great Turning.

Providing people with the means and opportunity to experience those feelings should be a public responsibility. Green energy facilities ought to be equipped with public spaces, such as parks, gardens, and visitor centers, where people can learn more—and not only those who are disposed to learn by researching facts and figures, reading white papers and scholarly books. Look at how widely Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff has been circulated, using basic artistic tools—storytelling, imagery, animation—to convey powerful, urgent truths in ways anyone can understand. Nearly a million and half people have viewed it on YouTube alone. Individual artists across the country have created works that embody the values we call “green.” Check out the amazing work of sculptor Ned Kahn, who has focused on making invisible natural processes visible through his art.

Imagine artists and creative organizers employed in every community to create the works and interactions that bring energy issues down from the abstract plane into people’s own lives, spurring them to make choices that help heal the planet, and to press both the public and private sector to do likewise. I’d like to see us use what we know about how human minds change: I’d like to see a Green Arts Corps be part and parcel of any green jobs initiative from day one.

Promoting health and well-being

Nowadays, it is generally acknowledged that the mind and spirit have as much to do with healing as does the purely physical. The body of research proving this has grown so much, it can’t be ignored. (Check out the Foundation for Art & Healing Website, for instance, where you can download a compendium of findings on art and public health that appeared last year in the American Journal of Public Health or read about performance artist Robbie McCauley’s one-woman show about coming to terms with diabetes.) One of my personal favorites is the work of Harvard neuroscientist Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, who showed the 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science Conference how brain-damaged individuals can regain the power of speech through singing, and whose Harvard-based Music and Neuroimaging Lab is a leader in the field.

Every form of health promotion and treatment needs to speak to the mind and spirit as much as the body, and the best way to do that is through employing trained community artists as teachers, storytellers, and group leaders. They can help people face the fear and loss that often accompany illness; connect people to healthier ways of eating, exercising, and living that can contribute to illness prevention; and illuminate the ways that public health challenges are public issues as well as private troubles, best addressed through collective knowledge and collective action. Imagine how healthcare would change if clinics, hospitals, and hospices were infused with cultural creativity, guiding people in drawing on their own heritages and imaginations to support their healing. What if every ward had its own storyteller, its own musician, its own visual artist to help patients and their loved ones generate the images and experiences that can strengthen the ability to heal and support their ability to cope when healing is not possible? Considering the high cost of conventional medical treatment, these are jobs that can save money, save suffering, and even save lives.

I am trying to tell the story right. In the story I am telling, job creation proceeds from a radical shift in our understanding of work and its rewards, from a radical shift in our understanding of the public interest. We can make this shift, to be sure, but will we? If you still think we can’t afford it, click back to the doubletime ticker adding up our investment in war.

All I know is that, individually and collectively, I don’t want to waste this lifetime settling inside the limitations imposed by other people’s fears or false beliefs. I want it to be used as fully as possible.

Whether my own little life or the large life of my country will fulfill its destiny: who knows? But it helps me to remember the deep, knife-sharp truth expressed in Lucinda Williams’ achingly gorgeous song, “Born to Be Loved.” We deserve better. Maybe it will help you to remember that too.

You weren’t born to be abandoned
You weren’t born to be forsaken
You were born to be loved
You were born to be loved

You weren’t born to be mistreated
And you weren’t born to misguided
You were born to be loved
You were born to be loved

You weren’t born to be a slave
You weren’t born to be disgraced
You were born to be loved
Hmm hmm, you were born to be loved

You weren’t born to be abused
You weren’t born to lose
You were born to be loved
You were born to be loved

You weren’t born to suffer
And you weren’t born for nothing
You were born to be loved
Hmm hmm, you were born to be loved