By: Jean Camp

I am a Reform Democrat. I want to reform the party all the way back to the last century. Decades ago, Democrats defined what we stood for:

freedom of speech
even to disagree with the government

freedom from want
a nation of charity without homelessness and hunger

freedom of worship
no state interference in internal religious debates

freedom from fear
functioning police, military and emergency services

I am blogging this now because it is safe to disagree. For a while disagreement was unpatriotic. Disagreeing was harming young men and women already in harm’s way in Central Asia. I was a bad American. Now I can write this. I know that some people will flame this. I know that common courtesy is now decried as politically correct. But I can speak, and you can declare you desire to silence me. And both are better than any alternative.

We can be free to speak but not free from speech.

When I was a child, I had never seen a homeless person. I saw people who depended on the government. We held church suppers in places where the only landlord was the government. I stood in line with kids with free lunch tickets. There were not homeless families. There were no “bag ladies”, also known as homeless women. Why did that change? Reagan’s American decided to embrace homelessness by stopping the construction of large housing projects. Reagan’s American and various ideological fools decided to institute homelessness for the mentally ill by closing down the hospitals and homes for the chronically mentally ill. It was later, shortly after I learned to drive, that I saw entire families standing up by the highway desperate for a better place and with nothing left to leave.

We can be free from homelessness as a nation.

When I was a child, I learned the words “integration” and “segregation” and “desegregation” in first grade. I didn’t use “desegregation” until the third grade. I could understand that the other two were opposite but that third word was a bit too complicated. I understood that the schools were the public charge, but that there were some churches that sought integration and some that did not. In many churches the congregation was deeply divided. Today, issues that belong in church, like the death of poor wasted Terri Schiavo, are in Congress. There is an effort to decide who my pastor can marry, by defining marriage in the Constitution. I can change churches if I have deep spiritual disagreements, or even change religions. But what about when the religion is put into the Constitution?

We can live with those who worship differently, who believe different, in a different God or looking at a different face of the same God. We can be free in worship.

When I became a mother, I learned the advice “tell your child to talk to a policemen if lost” no longer works. With the privatization of policing there is not enough oversight. We learned Sept 11 that the private security firms work for the first class passengers, whoever they are. You cannot trust some random minimum wage worker with your child because the mall has given him a uniform. Now parents say, “Find a lady with a stroller. She will help you.” The common interests of motherhood with hope that the person is kind has replaced the faith that a uniform and charge to protect the public interest has meaning. Privatization of security means the security firms don’t work for all of us.

We can be free from fear of those in uniform, return to a system where the police served us all.

All these freedoms are what generations of Americans have fought for, and waves of first-generation of Americans have sought.

I am Reform Democrat. I believe in freedom, like the Democrats before me. Reform, return, and remember why we are Democrats.

Feed on comments to this Post