To watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsxbCplcfHI
Susan Ochshorn is an advocate for early childhood education and a deep-blue progressive.
In this article, she
explores how she reacts to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.
In
her own decision-making, Ochshorn ordered a copy of Hillary’s book It Takes a Village. She liked what she read.
She
writes:
The
book is a love letter to America’s children. At Yale, Clinton had gotten
permission to study child development, adding a year to her legal studies. She
wondered about the kids she saw in New Haven, worrying about their journeys to
adulthood. She reveled in Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences,
which transformed our attitudes about human ability and potential.
Clinton also weighed in on the nascent findings of neuroscience. Long before adverse childhood experiences entered the lexicon, and @acestoohigh became a Twitter handle, she understood the impact of toxic stress.
“Some communities are so
besieged by issues of survival that children’s needs get pushed aside,” she
wrote. We get a glimpse of the young social justice warrior, side-by-side with
Marian Wright Edelman at the Children’s Defense Fund.
Her
framework is pure Urie Bronfenbrenner. A child psychologist, he emigrated from
Russia in 1923, making his way to Ithaca, New York, and a distinguished career
at Cornell. This scientist understood the need for interdependence; he knew
that children, and their parents, don’t develop in isolation.
First and
foremost, he believed, every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally
crazy about him or her—the core of his elegant bio-ecological theory, which
undergirds America’s bare-bones social policy, including Head Start, which he
helped to design, community schools, and Promise Neighborhoods.
It
Takes a Village is also personal. Clinton talks about the embarrassed silence
that greeted her at her law firm when she became pregnant in 1979. She captures
the transformation that Chelsea’s birth wrought, the quotidian details of early
parenthood, including the horror she felt as her baby started foaming at the
nose during a bungled breast-feeding session.
She beautifully renders that
sense of helplessness, and the aspirations for her infant, so deeply shared by
all American parents.
I
was captivated. But the interplay of my own nature and nurture complicated
matters. In the New York primary, I voted for Sanders and split the delegates,
my schizophrenia rearing its ugly head.
I’m
a Brooklyn girl, an alumna of the high school that spawned Bernie Sanders.
In
the 1968 race between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, my father cast his
vote for Dick Gregory, an African-American comedian, civil rights activist, and
write-in candidate of the Freedom and Peace Party. I’m also the daughter of a
second-wave feminist, a member of Women’s Strike for Peace, who clawed her way
to a solid career in mid-life.
I’ve
been tangled up in blue, of the progressive hue.
Clinton
is the smartest, sanest, and most competent one in this horrifying political
nightmare. The media coverage of her has been seriously gendered. Why has no
one given her credit for venturing forth into the maelstrom of health care
reform? And yes, I long to see the ultimate glass ceiling broken.
Yet, as a
public servant, Clinton has adopted policies, or supported those of her
husband, that have been seriously at odds with my core values—and in some
cases, her own. Like mass incarceration and welfare reform, each of which had a
devastating impact on black women, children, and men.
Early
this year, in a conversation with Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black
Lives Matters, New Yorker editor David Remnick summed up Clinton’s stance in a
meeting she’d had with movement representatives.
“You’re interested in changing
hearts,” he recounted her saying, “I’m interested, as a politician, in changing
laws.” Garza’s vote would go elsewhere. “We’re always in a dialectical
relationship between changing culture, or changing hearts or changing policy,”
she said.
Clinton
needs to be nimble, to move among the different elements of the dialectic, her
heart open, policy responsive, and ear to the ground on the seismic cultural
changes of our time. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and their supporters have
pushed her along, and they’ll continue to do so.
So will the “mothers of the
movement,” those of slain black men, who have been given pride of place at the
Democratic convention. Not to mention Michelle Obama, who stole the show with
her spirited validation of her husband’s former opponent.
The
choice is between someone we hope will show her true self: Hillary Clinton–and
someone whose true self is abhorrent to all progressive values.
Let
Hillary be Hillary.
