White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

  • Home
  • King’s Commentaries
  • Random Features
  • Photos
  • Public Speaker
  • WHC Episodes
  • About WHC
  • Carrying Stations
  • ME/CFS Alert
  • Contact Us

History Shows That Reform Is Perishable

June 13, 2020 by Llewellyn King 2 Comments

Reform is in the air. Beware of it. Often it evaporates as the generation that spawned it moves on.

I take you back to the 1960s when reform was everywhere. We came out of that tumultuous decade with high hopes for a better deal. Some reform movements left a lasting effect, but others faded away.

Here, in no order, are what I see as the seminal reforming events of the ’60s.

The anti-Vietnam War movement; the environmental movement; the civil rights movement; the women’s movement; and the prison reform movement. Considering what’s happening on the streets of America now, it can be argued that the biggest disappointment was in civil rights, despite what’s been achieved.

To be sure, schools and colleges integrated, big institutions offered some colorblind promotion. Legislation guaranteeing civil rights, voting rights and banning overt segregation in housing, for example, was passed.

But social integration failed. After the riots of 1968, triggered by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., whites left cities in droves for the suburbs. It was termed “white flight.”

Much of the civil rights legislation over time has been whittled away, particularly that associated with President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. It was often replaced with harsh policing and an attack on welfare.

It became a myth that The Great Society failed. It didn’t. The Great Society wasn’t given a fair shake before it was replaced with The Great Lockup Society.

Fear of drugs and related crime was greeted in the 1970s and 1980s with a philosophy that it was best to lock people up for a long time with mandatory sentencing and zero tolerance. The burden fell disproportionately on young African-American and Hispanic men.

The young people who’d marched around the White House in opposition to the Vietnam War, and belonged to what was called at the time “the new class,” were going to bring in a new society. They were articulate idealists who wanted a better world.

However as other problems gripped the national attention, like energy, the new class matured into the old class. They forgot the heady hopes of the ’60s when they’d dreamed of utopia.

Our politics hardened, too. The whole political apparatus moved to the right. If blacks were thought of at all by whites, it was as though their problems had been solved: Heck, there were black people all over television.

The big issues of healthcare and education weren’t addressed and if they were, the answer was unhelpful: private healthcare and private education.

We started graduating an almost unemployable class through the broken public-school systems. Then we said, “See, they’re unemployable, ignorant, and fit for a few minimum wage jobs like hamburger flipping.” If you are born into poverty and have little enlightened parenting at home, failure is nearly guaranteed.

Not only are we graduating students who can hardly read, but we aren’t telling them what reading is about: living a whole life.

My wife and I were filming a television program at the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston, S.C., a few years ago. This private college should be a template for the future of small colleges. Students study liberal arts in tandem with a trade: blacksmithing, carpentry, classical architecture, plaster, stone carving and timber framing.

One student we interviewed — who was a little older than most college students (like most of the student body) — was an African American who had served in the Marine Corps. “What do you like about college?” I asked. “Dickens,” he replied.

He loved the literature component of the liberal arts education. Then, with a winning smile, he added, “They don’t teach that sort of thing in the high schools around here (Charleston).”

Students with a trade tend to start businesses. We were told that about a third of ACBA graduates start a small business within five years of graduation. Business is within the grasp of anyone who has a trade to sell like carpentry, stone carving or metal working.

Dignity is beyond price and it comes with success in small business. The key is the right kind of education: teaching down-home skills while lighting up the mind.

Email, RSS Follow
Email

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

Comments

  1. Edgar Boshart says

    June 13, 2020 at 12:27 pm

    Spot on!

    Reply
  2. Lisa Holt says

    June 17, 2020 at 10:49 pm

    You are on to something here.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

White House Chronicle on Social

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube
Police Beatings Deserve Outrage, but It Isn’t Easy Being Blue

Police Beatings Deserve Outrage, but It Isn’t Easy Being Blue

Llewellyn King

Police excess gained huge attention after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 and again after the alleged beating death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis last month. But police excess isn’t new. A friend, who had been drinking and could be quite truculent when drunk, was severely beaten in the police cells in […]

IRENA Panel Urges Youth To Move from Anger to Action on Energy Transition

IRENA Panel Urges Youth To Move from Anger to Action on Energy Transition

Linda Gasparello

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate change canary, didn’t participate in the 13th assembly of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), held in Abu Dhabi on Jan. 14 to 15. Perhaps it was because she was otherwise engaged in protesting against the razing of the German village of Lützerath for […]

Big Tech First Cornered the Ad Market, Now Practices Censorship

Big Tech First Cornered the Ad Market, Now Practices Censorship

Llewellyn King

Big tech has siphoned off advertising and wants to be a global censor.  The Department of Justice has filed suit against Google for its predatory advertising practices. Bully! Not that I think Google is inherently evil, venal or greedier than any other corporation. Indeed, it is a source of much good through its awesome search […]

Going Green Is a Palpable Need but a Tough Transition

Going Green Is a Palpable Need but a Tough Transition

Llewellyn King

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — I first heard about global warming being attributable to human activity about 50 years ago. Back then, it was just a curiosity, a matter of academic discussion. It didn’t engage the environmental movement, which marshaled opposition to nuclear and firmly advocated coal as an alternative. Twenty years on, there […]

Copyright © 2023 · White House Chronicle Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in