Mitt Romney says that we should discuss income inequality, if at all, only in “quiet rooms.” There was a time when people said the same thing about racial inequality. Luckily, however, there were people like Martin Luther King who refused to stay quiet. And we should follow their example today. For the fact is that rising inequality threatens to make America a different and worse place — and we need to reverse that trend to preserve both our values and our dreams.
Those words are the concluding paragraph of a powerful column by Paul Krugman titled How Fares the Dream? which I strongly recommend.
This post is not about the column, except for the use of those words already quoted.
Rather it is about the immorality of "quiet rooms" with respect to the real issues that plague this country.
Immorality may seem too harsh a word.
This is a representative democracy. It is a nation in which the voices of the people should be heard on all issues, even if ultimately those we elect may exercise their independent judgment and go in a direction those that elected them might not choose. After all, that is in part how racial progress in this nation began to be achieved.
Once we had quiet, "smoke-filled" rooms in which political bosses made deals in the selection of political nominees, up to and including candidates for the presidency. Now we have primaries and caucuses, even if we still have super delegates with the ability to act independently.
We still have the quiet spaces of private golf courses and clubhouses where too many are excluded - sometimes still by race, religion, and very often still by economics - where deals are made and decisions debated. These are private associations, but often they are making decisions that rightly belong in the public sphere, not in such "quiet rooms" and spaces.
Too many of our decisions are made by those already having wealth and with that wealth power, excluding those with less of either or both. Why should we be surprised if the resulting decisions benefit those who were in those "quiet rooms" where discussions take place while ignoring so many?
America has never been completely moral. We have never as a nation fully lived up to our ideals. The American Dream has not always been available to everyone. But there was a promise in which people believed, in which they could hope, perhaps best expressed by a gay black poet in the first part of the previous century, with whose words I will begin below the fold. . .
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.
O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!
Somehow when I think of "quiet rooms" I wonder if words like those of the poem by Langston Hughes are ever heard, or if the only concern ever raised is not the pain of those being excluded and harmed but how to coopt a sufficient number to prevent revolution?
Revolution.
My freshman year at Haverford saw a conference with hundreds of students from other colleges pouring in to Haverford and Bryn Mawr. Devoted to the Civil Rights Movement then ongoing (the March on Washington had been the previous August), it was called the 2nd American Revolution. The Bryn Mawr chair was the daughter of a notable lawyer, whose town house (next to that of Dustin Huffman) later blew up when she - Kathy Boudin - and others were making bombs. From an advocate of the civil rights movement she became a violent revolutionary.
Let me turn to other words of Hughes, also relevant to "quiet rooms" that are use to maintain control over the masses excluded from them:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Or does it explode? Perhaps that is the only recognition of those in "quiet rooms" of those whose voices and interests are excluded - how to prevent the explosion, the real possibility that those voices might come together as a mighty force and they might lose their privilege and their power. After all, 99% very much outnumber 1%, even with the wealth and the force that can be purchased by that wealth of the latter.
We should not need to talk about revolution and explosions. They might not happen. But the dream is not merely being deferred, it is being destroyed before our eyes.
And the likely nominee of one of our major parties for the highest political office thinks we should not talk about such things except in "quiet rooms."
It was not in "quiet rooms" that the stain of chattel slavery was overcome, but by open words and then violent actions of a war of brother against brother, a Civil War.
It was not in "quiet rooms" that we got the labor rights now being eroded by wealth and power and propaganda, but in demonstrations and massacres - Ludlow, anyone?
It was not in "quiet rooms" that for a while we seemed to be overcoming the legacy of slavery still staining the nation in Jim Crow laws and informal agreements, but in marches, sit-ins, demonstrations - here, too there were deaths and violence, firehoses and dogs people buried in earthen dams. . . .
Krugman asks "How Fares the Dream?" on this day on which we remember a man who spoke words about a dream. We should remember that man was assassinated while working to help people get basic labor rights, that the speech in August 1963 for which he is so remembered was given at a march for Jobs and Freedom, and that in the famous speech, there were words other than those so often quoted.
For example, there were these:
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
And there were these:
There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: "For Whites Only." We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until "justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."¹
I stop and ask myself, when did justice and righteousness flow from "quiet rooms"?
Do we not need the words of true prophecy - the calling to account of those in power - to be clarion calls for us all?
More words of the man whose legacy we celebrate today:
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Will we ensure that when decisions on priorities for the nation are discussed these words will break into the "quiet rooms"?
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction...The chain reaction of evil -- hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
Light and openness let us understand when our own words and actions begin to approach darkness. Secrecy begets a response of anger which too easily turns into hatred and evil.
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
In "quiet rooms" some men plot, some determine how to pit one group against another so that those still in the room maintain their control, regardless of the cost to the rest of us.
I could quote more, much more from King. Or from the Bible upon whose words he so often relied.
No one should be "other" - by race, gender, religion, national origin, economic class, political party or philosophy, sexual orientation, physical disability, or any other distinction we might be prone to make among our fellow men. No one should be excluded from participation in the dream that has inspired so many, including the man whose legacy we commemorate today.
There is a place for "quiet rooms" of a different kind. As we can read in Chapter 6 of the Gospel of Matthew, words I suggest some on our political scene might do well to remember:
And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
It is in this chapter that we encounter the words of the most famous of Christian prayers, those of the Lord's prayer, followed by additional admonitions that those who tend to gather in "quiet rooms" to maintain their power, wealth and influence would do well to read, words on serving two masters, and also "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."
I sit now in a quiet room of a different kind. The only sounds are those of my fingers on the keyboard and of cats next to me, purring in contentment. I can stop, I can reflect, and in that silence I can open myself to the entire world.
A quiet room, a quiet space, a quiet time - these are good. In these we can compose ourselves. In these we can contemplate. In these we can remember our connection with the rest of the world, the rest of humanity.
But "quiet rooms" where the powerful and wealthy come together to plot and scheme are not merely not good. They are contrary to the very spirit that has powered the American Dream, however incomplete and flawed that dream may have been. Those "quiet rooms" are exclusionary, and the dream should be inclusive. Those "quiet rooms" bespeak privilege, the dream should be of opportunity.
A man who would say some matters should only be spoken of in such "quiet rooms" does not want to upset the order which has given him power and privilege and wealth - he does not want to address the "dream deferred" of which Hughes wrote so cogently, he does not want to achieve the noble dream of being judged by "the content of their character" for he thinks that the wealth he has achieved gives him the right to make decisions for those without wealth, who are somehow less than is he, and he will make those decisions in such "quiet rooms."
For the rest of us? The only quiet room he would leave many is that of the padded cell when desperation drives some to madness.
I say that to confine our discussions of serious issues like income and other inequalities in our society to "quiet rooms" is immoral.
I think we are better than that.
I think we need to challenge ourselves to something more, openly, as did Martin Luther King in the words and deeds of his too short life.