"The Common Good"
Senator Scott Dibble
Sunday, April 17th 2005
"The Common Good"
Senator Scott Dibble
Sunday, April 17th 2005
Nelson Mandela, a man of action, was forced to endure 27 years in prison. He was called to change the injustice he saw all around. But he also knew that his larger calling was to liberate the conscience of a nation.
Imagine the sense of despair one might face…all of the power…the entire government, all commerce, every single dominant institution, held in the hands of an oppressive white majority. The ANC was founded in 1912. When he was arrested in 1962 apartheid was still in full force and effect. He was forced to hammer rocks. But then, in 1990, after years of growing a movement, Mandela was released and in 1994 he was elected president of South Africa and began building a constitutional democracy that included hope and opportunity for EVERYONE. It is a journey they’re still on.
We are in the midst of a struggle for the future of our state and country that is no less epic…the stakes are no less high. The need for immediate action is great. No less important is the need to create lasting change.
This struggle is not unique to our time. Our society has been here before. Ours was a country born with a great promise and it is incumbent on each successive generation to keep that promise and to overcome those who would break it.
What is that promise? That this country, founded by a minority people, themselves driven from their own lands by oppression, represents the coming together of a diverse people in a common effort - continues to perfect the pursuit and the definition of liberty, freedom and opportunity for everyone, regardless of the circumstance of their birth.
We just need to look around to see how many blessings have flown to Minnesota from its rich traditions of inclusion, tolerance, cooperation across differences. For years it was a true statement to say that despite our political, religious and geographic diversity that in the end we could pull together and work for the same thing: happy families, healthy communities, dignity for all people.
That is not true today.
In the name of our country, even in the name of God, there is a deliberate effort to cut some out of our shared economic and community life, to eliminate their access to hope and opportunity. We are facing a very powerful challenge to democracy and religious freedom.
Consider these realities from the current budget that has been proposed:
Children and youth, healthcare, housing, education, transportation, jobs - the return on our investment in these things are not an abstraction. Over the past decades, Minnesota has transformed itself into a state with tremendous wealth and corresponding opportunity for its citizens.
A budget is how we outline, define and measure our values. Who we have been, who we are and who we want to become. It is how we shape our common life, as Bishop Rogness tells us.
A budget that favors just a few people flies in the face of the bedrock American principle that we value all people equally.
Paul Wellstone loved to say, “When we all do better, we all do better.”
We pay for that budget with taxes.
Quoting the late great Governor, Elmer Andersen, “Taxes are the way people join hands to get things done. That’s the tradition of Minnesota…he went on to say, “We wanted to have good services and to put the common good above the individual welfare. We are a state where people have been willing to join hands to pay taxes for public service, a way of life and a culture of caring.”
Or as George Lakoff urges in his book Don’t Think of an Elephant, we can think of taxes as a patriotic act, “paying your dues, your membership fee in America,” honoring the sacrifice made by our parents and grandparents who built a great country and great communities that we have benefited from, whose assets they created are now our responsibility to maintain and to pass that same legacy onto our children. Those who try to avoid taxes are trying to get something for free and getting rich on what others pay for.
At the same time we grapple with the budget, we grapple with powerful forces seeking every means to lock their grip on power, lock others out, and eliminate dissent. Consider the efforts to eliminate access to the ballot, erode the guarantees in the Bill of Rights: due process and civil liberties, undermine a free and independent judiciary - historically the only place a misunderstood minority people have to turn to gain a toehold for their civil rights, cynical efforts to stoke the fires of fear and resentment against native people, immigrants and GLBT people, a reach into our very constitution to cement discrimination there, cutting off free and fair debate, hampering the rights to organize in the workplace. Every day we hear political and religious leaders use the language of division, even telling beautiful young people, born in God’s own image that they are intrinsically evil and morally disordered.
Sadly, we have been here before. In the early days -- after 100 years and a war -we finally woke up to the incompatibility of slavery with our constitution, likewise that women are not property…more recently, overcoming the McCarthy era, ushering out the Jim Crow era, coming to our senses after imprisoning Japanese American citizens. In every one of these cases at first a few brave people have stood up and reminded us that our country must return to its core purpose…that never ending attempt to more perfectly define liberty, freedom and opportunity.
And we do this not just as a solo quest…as autonomous individuals and disconnected family units, but in the context of our connection to each other in community in a shared effort to find the common good.
And we don’t do this just by getting cranked up and calling the governor or my office (which is good), but we also talk to our friends, our neighbors, our professional peers, our schoolmates, our newspaper. We engage in sustained, ongoing, deliberate, strategic, intentional political action.
Our generation’s time to keep the promise has come.
We hear the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “The ultimate measure of a [person] is not where he [or she] stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he [or she] stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
And we must find the ability to look to the example of Nelson Mandela, to find grace and balance among our impatience, even our fury and indignation with the injustice we witness today.
The need to act..and fast: The knowledge that if I don’t do something, maybe no one will. Tomorrow may be too late. A child’s brain is growing today. Failure to nourish it, give them the love they need locks in hopelessness for their lifetime. People don’t always recover from the loss of hope, loss of dignity. Violence against someone’s soul creates scars that may never heal. We know that people’s lives won’t wait.
Balance all of that urgency with Nelson Mandela’s great persistence, fortitude and serenity.
Even when our country seems to need to learn these lessons over and over again, we know that our work today lays the foundation for justice in the future.
Last night I was at the Night of Noise, a celebration to break the Day of Silence in which hundreds of young people took a day long vow of silence to “protest the discrimination and harassment -- in effect, the silencing -- experienced by LGBT students and their allies.” Their hope and optimism was infectious.
Again, we hear across the years from Martin Luther King Jr., ““I know you are asking today, ‘How long will it take?’ I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because the truth pressed to earth will rise again.
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