WAIT A MINUTE: Though I consider Deval Patrick a very good candidate, what is it that he is saying? "Believe again?"

He sat in a meeting of a public foray while a State Representative who supported him was discriminating against a disabled man. He said nothing to the State Representative in the forum. Later Deval Patrick acknowledged privately that the State Representative, a progressive, discriminated against that disabled man. What are we suppose to believe again? That the so called progressives are going backwords?

When you bring up issues that are different from the so called reformers/progressives, they boo you, hiss at you and make it impossible for you to come back to meetings to bring up anything that is different than what they say. I would call it an intellectually dishonest approach. Instead of bringing us forward, it brings us backwards in a progressive reform.

Reformers look at institutions as individuals with the same individual rights as humans. The human beings who disagree are looked upon as the enemy of the people, since the only people are supposedly the reformers and the progressives. How do you work together with people who are coming from a position of inequality?

It appears that you and I live in two different worlds. I believe in human progress and institutions that push human progress, not sloganism or policies that takes the place of real progress.

Many times I have asked progressives, what is your philosophy? All the time I get no answer other than sloganism. A few give the impression that they are nothing more than laissez faire liberals. At times, they diametrically oppose themselves with little reform in their message. That is to say they will create a city of the rich and poor while increasing the tax base for highest and best use, keeping the poor as servants to that tax base. Of course, this means they push out the middle class. This is not reform.

Solving the social and economic problems of people is true reform. Not allowing institutions to have $12 billion dollars in untaxable profits (Harvard University), a great land mass of non taxable land (Harvard University), then requiring the middle income and low income to pay a third of their meager salaries to augment those institutions. The purpose, of course, is to keep the institutions in power with antiquated laws on charitable giving. These laws were intended to help the insitution gain a major role in our society. If you are intellectually honest, you will state that these institutions have gained the role of prominence in our society and that those laws need to now be changed. This change will create reform, which I will not fully go into at this time. Changing the misconception that institutions should have the same rights as individuals and changing the philosophy that instituional policy override legal rights is reform.

As we have seen, though, policies of insitutions are not reform. This is not progress. This is nothing more than backward thinking.

Dr. Wood,

Thank you for responding to my post. While I don’t know the specific anecdote you are referring to, I would like to suggest that we damage ourselves and our causes by getting caught up on specific anecdotes or single issues. Instead, we should be looking at the underlying “roots, goals, and intentions of democratic governance in the United States”.

Beyond that, I am fairly confused about what you are trying to say. To a certain extent, it sounds like you are arguing for my underlying case. In specific, the conservative movement has been based primarily on the idea that ‘Government is bad’. They have been fairly effective in their efforts "to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" to quote Grover Norquist.

Instead, I am suggesting that a response from Reform Democrats is to recognize that “We are all in this together” and that “We are at our best when we are working together”. Deval Patrick and John DeStefano are at least communicating a message of the importance of working together, unlike too many of the so call progressives.

This is about much more than ‘slogans’. It is about how we understand the underlying social contract. Your question, “How do you work together with people who are coming from a position of inequality?” gets directly to this point. Conservatives, in their effort to drown the government, would argue that we don’t need to work together with people coming from a position of inequality. There isn’t a need for that.

Progressives, on the other hand, should be seeking to work together with people coming from a position of inequality. There may be instances where they don’t do a good job of it. There may be progressives that don’t seek to work together with people coming from positions of inequality. They may not seek to work together with others effectively all of the time. However, if we are going to build a successful movement, whether we call it progressivism, Reform Democrats, we must encourage people to reach out to others who are not like them.

From such a starting point, we can look at issues such as tax policy or the roles of institutions to determine if the policies are actually encouraging people to work together or they continue to promote the ‘virtue of selfishness’ that the conservatives espouse.

From such a starting point we can start to build effective coalitions between different groups that think they know it all, which in their thinking that they know it all are actually reflecting the selfishness of conservatives and not the commitment to working together that has been and should again be the virtues of progressives.

Dear Mr. Aldon Hynes:

I have heard this same type of argument when I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We are all in this together. It would seem to me that if we are all in this together than the workplace would have 25% disabled members, approximately 13% African Americans and 13% Hispanic representation in all classes of jobs. Do you work around that many percentages in your job? Do you live around that many percentages in your life? If you don't, please don't say that we are all in this together. Many of us have been left out of our society. I consider myself one of those people since I have been disabled all my life.

I have heard this type of argument throughout my career working as a volunteer grassroots political organizer for the last forty years. If I paid attention to it, I would never as a disabled man been able to accomplish much in my life. I wouldn't think. I wouldn't participate and I wouldn't force people to confront their own bigotry. Unfortunately, it takes a great toll to stand up for moral rights and real reform.

When I started programs in Cambridge in the 1960's without the benefit of the social government's help, I heard similar arguments from liberal reformers. "Let's work together." Don't bring up ancedotal evidence. Don't listen to others who have been there and done that. This is always the reformers attitude toward people like myself, who push the envelope for real reform, not sloganism.

There is much we can agree upon. But the one thing we cannot agree upon is that your statements mislead any type of real change. Do you honestly believe that African Americans are not getting discriminated against in this country? Do you honestly believe that sexism has been eradicated? Do you honestly believe that gays and lesbians get full participation in our society? All you need do is ask them, and they will all agree that they do not get full participation.

On the other hand it would be poltically incorrect to state that they are getting better participation than the disabled in this country. To state so would be real reform since all those groups encompass the disabled. Ancedotal stories represent a large group of people since hard science refuses to do real studies on the disabled.

Your inadvertent attack, which you may not understand, is exactly what I am talking about. Attacks like this stop real reform since you do not really want to get out of the academic structure of thinking. You really don't understand working with reformers and progressives. They are going to lead me and others like me into their specific type of issue at any given point in time. They are not going to look at the broad based issue of social reform or political reform, which would work for the best interest of all concerned. And they will lead the movement without regard to the issues that affect the lower classes in this country. Without participation of those classes and their representatives, reformers action become meaningless.

You can continue to write for people like yourself. But when confronted with real life experiences in this movement, you may find yourself being criticized and out thought because experience has taught many of us real reformers that we need to go under ground and not profess the knowledge that we have.

Again, you may not understand what I just said because you as a person will not understand that ancedotal evidence shows you a piece of Americana that is representative of the grassroots and is used in social sciences all the time. When the grassroots recognize that the candidate is a hypocrite to their own philosophy, they react not to reform but to what they see and how they feel about what they see.

If you really want reform, stop using statements that infer you are confused by thoughts that go outside of linear reform thinking. There is a lot of things that confuse everybody. Verbiage such as that is basically used to stop dialogue. I hope that wasn't your intent, but it appears that you have been trained to respond that way instead of reflecting on a different point of view and asking why one states those things.

Of course, should we all go out and vote for a reform candidate when the candidate has no clothes? Taking this is from the emperor has not clothes fable, it is a question of substance versus sloganism.

Dr. Wood

Dr. Wood: It sounds as if you are saying you are not in it with me, even though you have not met me. You are not in it with people who speak about trying to work with others but do not live up to your personal ideals. It sounds to me as if you are self-righteous and don’t really care about building bridges and finding ways to address the problems our country faces. It seems to me as if this sort of approach is one of the leading reasons we have conservatives in power today.

It sounds to me as if you want to continue your forty years of organizing as we see more and more people slip into poverty and as we see more and more conservatives gain power. You won’t force people to confront your own bigotry. So perhaps I shouldn’t try to get you to confront your bigotry against people who don’t live up to your ideals.

I wish you the best of luck going off and doing whatever you chose to do. However, I would encourage you to think about if you are being most effective by alienating people from your causes. My ‘inadvertent attack’ is merely reflecting back to you your apparent unwillingness to work with people that are not like you.