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Home  Community Voices An Open Letter to President Obama
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An Open Letter to President Obama |
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Thursday, 02 April 2009 |
Our generation has accomplished a lot. Sometimes at great personal
sacrifice. Too often, however, our accomplishments have been made based
on sacrifices that will need to be made in the future-and now, as Wall
Street tumbles, we are getting a preview of the future we have laid
down.
I am embarrassed to say that our objectives have been too narrow-minded and frequently selfish. We cordon off something we want to accomplish, dismember it from the rest of reality, and focus exclusively on our own goals: making a profit, teaching a child, helping a family in distress, bringing better wages to workers or cleaning up the air.
Certainly, chopping up a problem into separate chunks is an important tool in analysis. However, relying on this alone is also a tool of expediency and selfishness. Who is left to think how all these pieces will fit together? If we don't each take some time to temper our actions with their wider consequences and to talk to people with other interests, America will not be a nation that is greater than the sum of all its interests.
We are encumbered with debt from a million irresponsible gambles that didn't pay off. Each was someone's ticket to Easy Street, whether a new home in Stockton or a billion dollar, leveraged corporate buy out. We have polluted the earth and depleted many of its natural resources to critically low levels because it was expedient to do so. Because, as with debt, the consequences of our actions, of depleting the oceans and changing the climate, are likely not ones we'll have to deal with. Clearly, the smarter Americans of the future will invent their way out of these in a snap.
Hereby, we have done exactly two things that Thomas Jefferson warned we should never do. We have indentured the next generation with debt and robbed them of their share of natural resources. Unfortunately, we are also not preparing the next generation well for the legacy of daunting challenges we will encumber them with. One in two children in Los Angeles and many big cities never graduate from high school. Three in four in Detroit do not. The very science and math education we need to secure this future invention is on the skids. This is not the portrait of a nation that will long endure.
As with the rest of the nation, the future of my home community here in San Pedro Bay, California, will depend on the course we set in the next few years. We have but forty years to completely retool our economy and civilization to be sustainable and carbon neutral. A great reinvention must occur. Screwing in compact florescent lights and paying down our debt will be nowhere near enough, though they will be important first steps.
Today, we need to be laying the plans to completely electrify our overland goods movement infrastructure. This means replacing 19th century rail with 21st century electric technology, from San Pedro, through Kansas, and on to Chicago and New York. This project by itself is as ambitious as the work we first did in building our railroads and highways. We need to balance our trade, so we don't waste our money and resources moving empty containers half way around the world.
Today, we need to be planning the foundation to reshape our communities, to reinvigorate our struggling downtown areas with a new vitality, as large walking centers which are well served by public transit and with smarter development that makes wise use of increased density and provides more open space.
Today, we need to ensure that the workers of the new economy will have livable wages so that they can support their own communities with the money they earn rather than with federal handouts. It is hard for parents to push for better schools when they struggle to keep a roof over their families head. Likewise, we need carrots and sticks that give those small merchants eager to move to a new economy an incentive while prodding those who are stuck in old ways.
We dream this, of integrating our downtowns with our waterfronts, of connecting our sea port with Los Angeles' airport and downtown via electric rail transit, with making better use of our land so that it isn't squandered on parking lots and overrun with roadways. And though we differ in details, we share a lot in our dreams between members of the chamber of commerce, labor and environmental organizations and neighborhood groups.
We have worked through a good share of squabbles-and have more to work through-but have established some common ground. It is in this common ground that we have the opportunity to begin integrating that bigger picture that helps to address all of our concerns, by working on them in unison rather than in opposition. We will not accomplish our goals without national help, but no amount of national help well advance us if we do not establish this dialogue.
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