Letter To My Daughter

“All meaningful resistance takes place outside the formal political structures.” Chris Hedges, Truthdig

In a few weeks you will turn eighteen. You will be eligible to vote, a right that women in this country struggled to obtain for three quarters of a century. Fearless women. Women armed with iron will and determination. Resolute women. You should never forget -- or take for granted -- the blood, sweat and tears that made it possible for you to exercise the franchise. Civil rights in this country are never given -- they have to be won -- and then protected, guarded, with unrelenting vigilance. 

Your education in our local public schools didn’t prepare you to be an engaged citizen, and our degraded media landscape, 95% of it controlled by corporations with their own interests and agendas, which, you will learn, has little to do with your interests. Corporate media mainly serves to obscure, confuse, or distract the public. How many times in your young life have you heard me rail at the television, furious at the mindless trivia that passes for news or apoplectic at the refusal of the weather person to say the words “climate change?” Understand, my daughter, that you must pay more attention to the subjects the corporate media doesn’t cover than those it does. If you want to be informed, you must look elsewhere, to independent media where real journalists are more intent on exposing the motivations of the powerful than they are cozying up to them and repeating their talking points. Here are a few names. Amy Goodman. Jeremy Scahill. Allan Nairn. Mehdi Hasan. Patrick Cockburn. Abby Martin. Robert Fisk. 

It’s no fault of your own that you have yet to realize how limited American democracy -- and I refer here to federal and state offices more than local ones -- is, and that it is so by design. The Founding Fathers, all white, all male, many of them slave owners, placed, from the beginning, the sanctity of private property above the needs of the people. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, and Thomas Jefferson, to name a few, had no love of popular democracy. They feared the mob, the uneducated masses whose passions might be manipulated by a demagogue or charlatan, and they created impediments to popular sovereignty. One of these constructions, the Electoral College, is why the nation and the world is saddled with the malignant fraud who currently occupies the White House. 

Polls consistently show that the majority of the American public supports some form of universal health care, secure retirement, good and affordable public education, protection of the environment, higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and a reduction in military spending. The problem is that what people want and what the political system is willing to deliver are two completely different things. The United States Senate is firmly in the hands of the Republican Party whose base of support is in underpopulated rural states; our state, for instance, has nearly 40 million people, but we have the same number of Senators as Wyoming and North and South Dakota whose combined populations are puny by comparison. You are destined to learn about the tyranny of the minority. This is not an accident. It’s one reason why the popular will is continually thwarted. 

As it is want to do, money has perverted our political system. There is a pathology of great wealth in America. Too few hands control too much wealth, and that wealth enables these few hands to bend the political system to their will and for their interests. This breeds more tyranny. The wealthy are largely unaccountable. Their greed is sanctioned and protected by the legislators they buy and control. 

The broad American middle class built after World War II, when Germany and Japan and most of Europe was in ashes, has been shrinking for decades. Today it’s practically shrivelled. To go into all the reasons here would make this letter too long, but let me give you a thumbnail version: the decline of manufacturing and organized labor, and the decision of the Democratic Party to abandon its traditional constituencies after electoral losses in 1968 and 1972, coupled with a conservative backlash against the 1960’s counterculture, got the ball rolling away from the middle class and toward the wealthy. Ronald Reagan convinced people that government was the source of their problems, and that cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy was the magic solution. Democrats went right along. 

I have this nagging feeling that I haven’t done enough to leave you and your brother a more just world and a more promising future. I write this letter to you because I’m afraid of what’s coming, of the world you are soon to inherit. The dark forces of racism, ignorance, cruelty, brutality and bigotry are marching all over the world. Almost as deadly is the absolute denial in the corridors of power, particularly in Washington D.C., of the onrushing climate catastrophe. It borders on the criminal, but to whom can we appeal? The wealthy believe their money, power and influence will shield them from climate change, as if they inhabit an alternate biosphere. Climate change is only for the rest of us. 

The answer? I don’t know. Vote wisely, but don’t expect too much from political leaders. Cultivate a healthy suspicion and remember that all governments lie, as the great American journalist I.F. Stone famously said. Real social change rarely comes from the top -- it starts from the bottom, with people willing to demand change, like the brave women who agitated for decades until they won the right to vote. Carry that legacy into your future.