50th Reunion Thoughts
I graduated from law school 51 years ago; our class celebrated the occasion of our 50th virtually last weekend. It had been a time of much killing in our nation and of great social progress and civil rights advances as well.
At the time of our graduation, US armed forces were fighting a war in Vietnam, and Richard Nixon was President; he ordered the invasion of neighboring Laos and Cambodia. The National Guard killed four peaceful demonstrators protesting against the war at Kent State, and police officers shot and killed two anti-war demonstrators at Jackson State. Two of our Presidents in a row lied repeatedly to the American people about the Vietnam War – Johnson and Nixon – sowing long-term distrust of and distaste for government and politicians.
The decade of the 60’s marked the end to a century of racial segregation under the force of law with the passage of civil rights legislation assuring voting rights, and ending discrimination in housing and employment. Opponents reacted with violence and murder. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas Texas in 1963. Civil rights workers, Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner were murdered in Mississippi in 1964. In 1968, student protestors against racial segregation were shot down by the state Highway Patrol officers at Orangeburg State College in South Carolina. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a racist in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968. That same year, Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, California by a Palestinian Christian outraged by his support for Israel. Fred Hampton, a Black Panther leader from Chicago who had formed a revolutionary, multi-ethnic Rainbow Coalition with like-minded, young Hispanics and young Whites, was killed by the Chicago Police and the FBI while he was sleeping in his apartment in 1968. And a fellow college student was jailed and charged with sedition for helping his fellow citizens to register to vote in Americus Georgia.
While we were students, the Supreme Court decided the Miranda v. Arizona, Gideon v. Wainwright, and Mapp v. Ohio cases on unreasonable searches and seizures, the rights to counsel and against self-incrimination. While we were students, Congress passed Medicare and Medicaid providing health care to seniors, the disabled and many of the nation’s poor. Head Start and Food Stamps were established, and Social Security was vastly expanded to reduce poverty among the elderly and disabled. While we were students, Congress established and funded legal services for the poor – a program I was later so proud to have the opportunity to join.
While we were students, women began to enter the law and other professions in increasing numbers and transformed historically male dominated institutions and the entire society.
While we were students, Nixon and Kissinger opened friendly diplomatic relations with China and signed non-proliferation treaties with Russia. While we were students, Israel fought and won the Six Day war with Egypt, Syria and Jordan and annexed East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, West Bank, Gaza and the Sinai. It seemed at the time to be a bi-polar world with the US and its allies juxtaposed to Soviet Russia and its allies.
While we were students, American companies moved their manufacturing plants South in search of cheaper labor and less costly land. The US economy was strong, and our manufacturers and their goods were world-renowned for their excellence.
Now 50 Years Later.
We are in the middle of yet another great transformation of American society. Part is economic; part is cultural, and all is political. The Covid pandemic may accelerate that transformation in ways unforeseeable to most of us.
A strong black middle class has emerged, and the nation has twice elected an African American President. Police are far too frequently killing African Americans during their traffic stops, arrests, and executions of search and seizure warrants. African American are far more frequently stopped, searched, frisked, killed, executed and incarcerated than white Americans. An emerging Black Lives Matter movement challenges these racial injustices.
We have been transitioning from a manufacturing economy into a service economy, from a blue collar and male, manufacturing and extractive industries workforce towards an economy with a large influx of women workers and a high skilled, knowledge-based economy. Our old strong union movements have declined, and the social system of benefits (like pensions and health coverage) built around the job has eroded. Wealth and job growth have become ever more concentrated on the coasts and in the big cities, and massive wealth has accumulated among the hands of a fortunate few. The new information economy is displacing some economic sectors nearly entirely, and augmenting others at a very rapid pace – creative and wrenching disruption.
Trump has taken on the role of 1968 Presidential candidate, Alabama Governor George Wallace, preaching and leading racial divisiveness, first as unlikely candidate and then as a norm-busting President with an apparently unquenchable penchant for disinformation/lying and a rapt audience for his non-stop tweets and utterances. While Wallace was a fringe candidate, Trump amassed electoral support in the mid 40’s as the unlikely tribune of a populist revolt.
The worst global pandemic in a century is killing people all over the world and wrecking many economies. Low-income workers and their families, the elderly and the disabled poor are suffering the worst in our country while many more fortunate others were quickly vaccinated and able to readily work from home. Latinos and African Americans have lost thee full years of life expectancy so far. Public health responses and vaccination campaigns across the US are being hobbled by our nation’s political divisiveness and by rampant disinformation about vaccines, masks and social distancing spread nearly instantaneously through the Internet.
Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, and most states are implementing the largest expansion of health coverage for Americans since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid. The national GOP is still trying to repeal Medicaid and ObamaCare and replace them with health care block grants to the 50 states, and a handful of populous states, primarily in the South are refusing to expand their state’s Medicaid coverage to the working poor despite highly advantageous federal financial match incentives. We still lack health insurance coverage for about 30 million Americans, and our per capita health spending is about twice the average of other developed nations.
During the pandemic, Congress passed unprecedented stopgap relief for small businesses, unemployed workers, the airline industry, schools, and state and local governments. It has not yet made any permanent changes to the underlying social safety net programs and services, which have been eroding for the past 40 years.
In a national first, a sitting President was defeated at the polls, then refused to accept his defeat, claimed fraud and summoned his supporters to DC to contest his very large popular vote and Electoral College loss. They invaded the US Capitol, engaged in combat with the Capitol Police and sought to intimidate their elected representatives into overturning the electoral defeat of their preferred candidate. After the largest electoral turn out in over 100 years, some GOP led states like Georgia and Florida, Texas and Arizona are seeking to suppress voting among minorities. Trump supporters in Congress are seeking to minimize and rewrite the history of their post-election efforts to overturn Biden’s election.
Our federal and state courts stood strong in rejecting the baseless lawsuits from Trump, Giuliani, and crew to reverse Trump’s defeat at the polls. The Supreme Court, however, has been steadily whittling back the progress achieved through an earlier generation of court leaders. In the Shelby County voting rights case, the court chose to repeal federal supervision of state efforts to disenfranchise minority voters. That opened the floodgates to the raft of voter suppression legislation we have seen in states since then. They have walked back our nation’s landmark efforts to desegregate the nation’s public schools, even going as far as striking down voluntary school desegregation efforts in Seattle and Louisville; our school systems have been steadily re-segregating their poor and minority students. In the Heller case, the Court broke new ground by interpreting the Second Amendment to invalidate state and local gun control laws. A federal district court judge in California, applying that precedent quite broadly, recently stuck down our state’s long time assault weapons ban at a time of ever increasing mass murder incidents across the nation. In the pending Mississippi abortion case where the state of Mississippi is asking the Supreme Court to over-rule Roe v. Wade, the Court may decide to give states ever greater leeway to restrict a women’s right to choose.
Our nation of immigrants has been experiencing a large increase in immigration from Central America, Mexico and Asia, and we are in the process of becoming an ever more multi-racial and multi-cultural society. The 11 million undocumented workers in our midst work hard, pay taxes, qualify for few public benefits and cannot vote. We are also deep in a period of reactionary nativism and rise in anti-immigrant sentiments, not seen in the US to this degree since the 1920’s.
We have witnessed the rise of extreme right wing groups dedicated to white supremacy, to authoritarianism and to political violence both in the US and Europe. We have witnessed their alliance with the right-most fringes of the GOP in Congress and inside the Trump Administration. This was galvanized by the political aftershocks of Obama’s victories, Trump’s victory and defeat, and the economic distress occasioned by the 2008 economic meltdown and the 2020 pandemic. These movements represent serious challenges to our democracy and society; they have been and are being abetted by Putin’s operatives, as his best chance to weaken Western democracies.
We have witnessed extreme right wing takeovers of the US Capitol in an effort to assure the re-election of Donald Trump. We are becoming increasingly aware of their penetration into law enforcement and the US military. Some prominent religious evangelical leaders have embraced their cause. Surprisingly, they have allies among some elected members in the House and Senate.
Globally, the world has turned upside down since we graduated.
Israel has made peace with Egypt and Jordan, Abu Dhabi and Morocco, but has proven unable to negotiate peace and a two state solution with the Palestinians; the fault lies on both sides. Israel and Hamas are yet again fighting in Gaza.
We are exiting Afghanistan after an inconclusive twenty years war there, potentially exposing Afghani women and girls to a brutal re-imposition of Taliban intolerance and oppression. We exited Iraq after wrongfully invading and occupying their nation under the false assumption and pretenses that they were developing weapons of mass destruction.
China has replaced Soviet Russia and become our foremost global competitor. Its economic growth rate far exceeds the US, and it is on track to replace the US as the largest economy in the world. Its diplomacy and economic outreach are visible and effective throughout Africa, Asia and South America. Its military growth is perceived as a threat in Southeast Asia, Japan and India, as well as by the US. Our economies are intertwined, and we have become large and interconnected trading partners – a huge difference from the self-contained US/Russian blocs of 50 years ago. China has developed a successful, state managed, capitalist economy, governed by a Communist party, which brooks no political dissent. Unlike Russia, China has not been supporting revolutionary communist movements to export its system across the globe.
The Soviet Russian version of communism collapsed both in Eastern Europe and in Russia itself. The Russian Empire broke apart into many separate nations; some continue to ally with the much-diminished nation of Russia, while many others now ally with the US, NATO and the EU. Communism in the Soviet Russian style still persists in Cuba and North Korea, but not much of anywhere else. The Russian Communists have been replaced by the Putin regime that still threatens parts of Europe and the Middle East; Russia has become an authoritarian, capitalist kleptocracy with a weak economy but a strong and adventurist military. Trump tried to build political alliances with Putin’s Russia throughout his Presidency without any readily apparent success.
Iran turned from strong US ally in the Middle East to a dedicated foe financing Islamic revolutionary movements threatening the Saudis, the Israelis, the Gulf States and others in the region. As the US has moved to its own energy independence and is transitioning away from a fossil fuel-based economy, the significance of Iran may well fade.
Communist and united Vietnam has surprisingly now become a significant US trading partner and a quasi ally in responding to Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea. Kerry and McCain deserve a lot of credit for the progress on our end of this development.
Where are we going?
Biden is trying both to rebuild the social safety net decimated under the Reagan and Clinton presidencies and to create strong foundations for our evolving economy. Biden is seeking to regain the trust and support of disaffected, working class whites in alliance with voters of color and college educated suburban whites. The rebuild has two dimensions: one through employers and one through government. For example, on the employer side are proposals such as a push for family and medical leave and for a $15 minimum wage. On the government side are proposed increases in funding for childcare and home care, funding for families with children, and funding for health coverage for uninsured workers.
To meet the challenges of educating our nation’s workers for the evolving and globally competitive economy, Biden is proposing public funding for two years of community college and two years of pre-K. To my mind, we as a nation must pay greater attention to introducing better accountability into the K-12 public education system that is faltering in educating our children as compared to our economic competitors.
Biden is trying to rebuild the Trumpian fractures in our alliances and our credibility in Europe and Asia, but does not seem to be paying much or enough attention in either Africa or South America, let alone to our closest neighbors in Canada and Mexico. We do have our nation’s hands full with Covid and our own economic recovery, but this pandemic is global in nature, and it requires an international dimension to our efforts.
When we were students, our environmental concerns were badly polluted air and waterways, and the DDT poisoning of our waters and wildlife. These could be addressed with federal, state and local action, and to a remarkable degree, they have been. Now we must face the challenges of overheating the entire planet – an issue that can only be resolved through fast, sustained, collective, global action. We lack both an effective global governance and decision-making structure and the steadfast, planet-wide, political will that will be needed to act for our common survival on this marvelous planet, we call Earth.
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
Dated: 7/23/21