Are You Politically Homeless Like Me?
I live in the cultural divide between breakfast at Cracker Barrel and picking up dinner from Whole Foods
“I’m not represented well by either political extreme and feel politically homeless.” I originally posted that years ago in response to an article in which the author analyzed the country’s political polarization “by examining how Democratic presidential candidates performed in counties with a Whole Foods…and in counties with a Cracker Barrel.”
I asked, “I wonder what he did in a county like Greenville, SC, with a Whole Foods within walking distance of a Cracker Barrel? I live on this divide, meeting people for breakfast at Cracker Barrel in the morning, and stopping by Whole Foods to pick up something for dinner in the afternoon.”
We benefit from living in an affluent, educated society.
It is in our enlightened self-interest to ensure that everyone can reach their full human potential, from the skilled mechanics who service our cars to the skilled surgeons who operate on our hearts.
Virginia Postrel in The Future and Its Enemies said, “a dynamic civilization allows its members to gain from the things they themselves do not know but other people do… and to develop, extend, and act on their particular knowledge without asking permission of a higher, but less informed, authority.” That’s the free society I want to live in.
Teachers are not respected.
That society requires an educated population. Once an education leader, the United States now trails much of the rest of the world in K-12 education. Let that sink in.
At the highest levels of K-12 education, teachers are not respected as professionals so we pile on more high stakes testing and bureaucracy. We’ll never transform K-12 education into the system our children need and deserve until we treat teachers as professionals with the flexibility to innovate in their classrooms, and allow money to follow the child so parents can choose the best education options for their children.
There is hope.
Legacy Early College is an outstanding charter school in Greenville that can be a model for the country. 85% of Legacy’s students live in poverty. If students come to school hungry or sick, they’re not going to learn. Legacy meets students where they are, feeding them and providing access to healthcare before they enter the classroom. Legacy delivers results. 100% of Legacy’s students graduate and are accepted to college, and 76% are still in college two years later. Educational entrepreneurs must lead the transformation of education.
Economic development must create good jobs so smart young people and other talented folks can stay here and thrive. Greenville illustrates a success the entire country needs. In the past fifteen years, we built from dirt one of the world’s best graduate engineering schools at the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research.
CU-ICAR also illustrates the challenge much of the country faces. Most graduates leave the state. We need to create their best career opportunities here by growing more entrepreneurial companies and attracting more innovation facilities and corporate headquarters. We attracted Michelin branch manufacturing which led to attracting Michelin R&D and finally the Michelin North America headquarters. Economic development must be reinvented to do more of that.
Without education, your prospects are dim.
During the technology bust of 2000, I was the public face of the global capacitor manufacturer KEMET announcing the layoffs of thousands of people. If you were a 55-year-old capacitor maker with a high school education who got laid off, you were screwed through no fault of your own. Your KEMET job wasn’t coming back. It was going to be very difficult to find a comparable job in our highly globalized and automated economy. Much of the justifiable political rage in the country is people caught in this dilemma. We can’t leave anyone behind.
Society must be just.
We can’t have a free society until we have a just society. A police officer stopped me at 11:30 pm one evening to give me a ticket for not using a turn signal despite almost no other traffic. I’m white, and while respectful I wasn’t concerned about sharing my intense displeasure. I had little concern about being arrested.
On the US Senate floor, Tim Scott shared his experience of being stopped numerous times by police for being black in an expensive car in an affluent neighborhood in his hometown of North Charleston. I appreciate the anxiety and frustration this causes my black and Hispanic friends, especially when it is their children who are stopped. It’s self-evident that today we’re not all perceived as equal in the eyes of the law. That needs to change.
Demagogues on both extremes blame our problems on others. Most of the 1% I know worked hard to build the wealth they have. Most Hispanic immigrants I know are hard-working people who risked a lot to taste the freedom the rest of us take for granted.
Where is the political movement that celebrates the success that many have achieved in America, while at the same time recognizing that all of us must be treated fairly and that no one can be left behind?
When I find that movement I’ll join it. My guess is you will too. How do we create this movement together?
