Category: Democracy

Living the DaVita Way

Posted on | by Sam | 3 Comments on Living the DaVita Way

On a chartered bus in Nashville, surrounded by colorfully-clad nurses and office administrators, I knew I was in for a different sort of experience when the woman next to me found out I was a newbie, leaned closer and assured me: “Everyone remembers their first.”

It’s not what you think.

In fact, it was the annual conference for the 41,000 employees of DaVita, a Fortune 500 company that specializes in renal care – and, as it turns out, in creating a transformational organizational culture.

The bus was part of an elaborate plan to ensure that every arrival to the conference felt welcomed and valued. Volunteers were scattered throughout the airport with signs leading us slowly to the bus, where we boarded amidst an expectant, cheerful din. An orientation video provided further clarity of what to expect, although nothing can really prepare you for arriving at a hotel and being greeted by hundreds of red-shirted DaVita employees, a house band playing Jumpin’ Jack Flash, and the company’s CEO, Kent Thiry, personally greeting – and hugging – each new arrival.

Veteran staffers refer to it as “the DaVita way”, and it was on display for the next three days. Yet DaVita’s story is not just remarkable for what it is, but what it was, and how it remade itself.

Headquartered in Denver, DaVita was, as recently as 1999, nearly bankrupt. That’s when Thiry took the top post and chose to embark on an organization-wide effort to craft a new set of core values and sense of mission, and a work culture of shared responsibility, democratic decision-making, and continuous learning and growth.

“About a third of the staff said, ‘OK, that’s the fad of the month,’ Thiry recalled for the Stanford Business Review. “A third of the room was literally insulted that I would be demeaning them by thinking that they’d fall for that sort of rhetorical flourish. And maybe a third were interested.”

But Thiry persisted, so certain was he that a healthy culture helps people “feel an emotional level of trust and mutual commitment” and frees them from the feelings of fear, confusion and mistrust that plague unhealthy work environments.

After years of working at it, DaVita now describes itself as a global village with a Trilogy of Care: “for our patients, our teammates and our world.” As DaVita Chief Wisdom Officer Steve Priest explains, “When we choose to become citizens of the DaVita community, we make a decision to engage our head, heart and hands for the greater good of those around us.”

That means employees are expected to watch out for each other and work toward the good of the community. It means DaVita’s business objectives are always designed to support the village first, and the bottom line second. And it means that what drives each employee has more to do with who they are than what they do. “We say we are a community first and a company second,” Thiry said. “That doesn’t mean we don’t care about profit, but it’s a means, not the end.”

The clarity of this vision is on ubiquitous display at a DaVita conference. Giant banners list the company’s mission and core values, alongside personal testimonials from staff, clients and patients that testify to the power of the DaVita way. Thiry also models the values by publicly sharing the results of his own 360-degree performance review – and publicly reflecting on the areas where he sees himself in need of the most improvement.

As one attendee told me, “What makes us special is that our goal is not just to create better workers. We value all aspects of a person – head, heart and hands – and we evaluate people that way as well. That’s why our culture is so strong – we share a mission to cultivate healthy, happy people – our patients, our clients, and ourselves – and that is the standard against which we measure our work each year.”

Thanks to this clarity of purpose, the dark days of 1999 have given way to annual revenue in excess of $6 billion, alongside a strong commitment to organizational democracy. “A company produces most what it honors most,” says Thiry. “And we want a community of citizens, not just employees. You can’t create citizens unless you ensure that everyone has a voice and an understanding of how to use it effectively. It really is that simple – and that difficult.”

My neighbor was right. Everyone really does remember their first.

In Defense of the Department of Education, Diplomacy and . . . Defense

Posted on | by Sam

Two unrelated articles in yesterday’s New York Times – one about the ostensible decline of influence in American geopolitics, and the other about the ostensible rise of autism in American schoolchildren – have led me to consider a radical proposal:

Let’s merge the Departments of Education, State and Defense.

Georgetown professor of foreign policy Charles Kupchan indirectly argued for such blasphemy when he noted the ways in which the landscape of modern diplomacy is shifting uneasily beneath our once-sturdy Western feet. Pointing to the nascent revolutions in the Middle East, the success of state capitalism in China and Russia, and the growth of left-wing populism in India and Brazil, Kupchan illustrates the ways in which “rising nations are fashioning their own versions of modernity and pushing back against the West’s ideological ambitions. As this century unfolds,” he argues, “multiple power centers, and the competing models they represent, will vie on a more level playing field. Effective global governance will require forging common ground amid an equalizing distribution of power and rising ideological diversity.”

In foreign policy circles, Kupchan’s observation is not a new one. Just a year ago, two members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff anonymously released a Pentagon report (published under the nom de plume of “Mr. Y.”) in which they questioned America’s ongoing willingness to overvalue its military might, and undervalue its young people.  “By investing energy, talent, and dollars now in the education and training of young Americans,” they argued, “we are truly investing in our ability to successfully compete in, and influence, the strategic environment of the future.” In a subsequent article for Foreign Policy, Center for American Progress scholar John Norris sang a similar tune: “The key to sustaining our competitive edge, at home or on the world stage,” he wrote, “is credibility – and credibility . . . requires engagement, strength, and reliability – imaginatively applied through the national tools of development, diplomacy, and defense.

Meanwhile, in the same section of the paper, journalist Amy Harmon reported that one in 88 American children are now diagnosed with some form of autism. While not everyone agrees about the root cause for the spike in numbers, Thomas Frazier, director of research at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Autism, thinks it’s an accurate reflection of modern society. “Our world is such a social world,” he said. “I don’t care if you have a 150 I.Q., if you have a social problem, that’s a real problem. You’re going to have problems getting along with your boss, with your spouse, with friends.”

Drawing a link between these two articles may feel like a stretch until you consider that the central problem in both stems from the same troubling source: our systemic inability to make deep and lasting sense of the perspective of others. In fact, there’s a growing theory in the scientific community that autism is the result of an early developmental failure of mirror neurons – the cells in the brain most responsible for allowing us to imagine (and empathize with) the thoughts and feelings of others. This theory may help explain why the greater the impairment in an individual on the autism spectrum, the greater the likelihood that individual will fixate on objects, not people. And it may help explain why some of the most promising new treatments involve little more than non-autistic adults imitating the behavior of autistic children. As UCLA neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni explains, “When the therapist imitates his patients, he may activate their mirror neurons, which in turn may help the patients to see their therapist, literally.”

What both articles underscore is how badly we need to invest in our collective capacity to see the world, and each other, more clearly. Kupchan’s characterizations about the changing landscape of geopolitics echo Dwight Eisenhower’s warning of more than 50 years ago, in his final formal act as commander-in-chief, when the five-star general suggested that the most promising path to peace rests in “learn[ing] how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.” And Harmon’s report on the rise of autism speaks to a larger deficit in our society – a deficit we have partly fueled by putting the knowledge cart before the emotional horse for so long. Indeed, whereas the 20th century cast the quest for global harmony as a black and white battle between neatly categorized competitors, the 21st century playing field is shrouded in overlapping shades of gray. To negotiate such a surface effectively, we need citizens endowed with a different set of habits and skills – ones more aligned with what Tom Friedman famously called the end of the “command and control” system of organization, and the beginning of the “connect and collaborate” approach.

For these reasons, the future fates of these three departments – Defense, Education and State – are more inextricably linked than ever before. America’s approach to foreign and domestic policy cannot be separated any longer. “Smart power” abroad will never be wielded without “smart growth” at home. And when it comes to contemporary notions of diplomacy and national defense, there is no American institution more essential to the unique modern cause than our public schools, and no skill-set more valuable than the ability to see – and be seen – without firing a single bullet.

Two unrelated articles in yesterday’s New York Times – one about the ostensible decline of influence in American geopolitics, and the other about the ostensible rise of autism in American schoolchildren – have led me to consider a radical proposal:

Let’s merge the Departments of Education, State and Defense.
Georgetown professor of foreign policy Charles Kupchan indirectly argued for such blasphemy when he noted the ways in which the landscape of modern diplomacy is shifting uneasily beneath our once-sturdy Western feet. Pointing to the nascent revolutions in the Middle East, the success of state capitalism in China and Russia, and the growth of left-wing populism in India and Brazil, Kupchan illustrates the ways in which “rising nations are fashioning their own versions of modernity and pushing back against the West’s ideological ambitions. As this century unfolds,” he argues, “multiple power centers, and the competing models they represent, will vie on a more level playing field. Effective global governance will require forging common ground amid an equalizing distribution of power and rising ideological diversity.”

In foreign policy circles, Kupchan’s observation is not a new one. Just a year ago, two members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff anonymously released a Pentagon report (published under the nom de plume of “Mr. Y.”) in which they questioned America’s ongoing willingness to overvalue its military might, and undervalue its young people.  “By investing energy, talent, and dollars now in the education and training of young Americans,” they argued, “we are truly investing in our ability to successfully compete in, and influence, the strategic environment of the future.” In a subsequent article for Foreign Policy, Center for American Progress scholar John Norris sang a similar tune: “The key to sustaining our competitive edge, at home or on the world stage,” he wrote, “is credibility – and credibility . . . requires engagement, strength, and reliability – imaginatively applied through the national tools of development, diplomacy, and defense.

Meanwhile, in the same section of the paper, journalist Amy Harmon reported that one in 88 American children are now diagnosed with some form of autism. While not everyone agrees about the root cause for the spike in numbers, Thomas Frazier, director of research at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Autism, thinks it’s an accurate reflection of modern society. “Our world is such a social world,” he said. “I don’t care if you have a 150 I.Q., if you have a social problem, that’s a real problem. You’re going to have problems getting along with your boss, with your spouse, with friends.”

Drawing a link between these two articles may feel like a stretch until you consider that the central problem in both stems from the same troubling source: our systemic inability to make deep and lasting sense of the perspective of others. In fact, there’s a growing theory in the scientific community that autism is the result of an early developmental failure of mirror neurons – the cells in the brain most responsible for allowing us to imagine (and empathize with) the thoughts and feelings of others. This theory may help explain why the greater the impairment in an individual on the autism spectrum, the greater the likelihood that individual will fixate on objects, not people. And it may help explain why some of the most promising new treatments involve little more than non-autistic adults imitating the behavior of autistic children. As UCLA neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni explains, “When the therapist imitates his patients, he may activate their mirror neurons, which in turn may help the patients to see their therapist, literally.”

What both articles underscore is how badly we need to invest in our collective capacity to see the world, and each other, more clearly. Kupchan’s characterizations about the changing landscape of geopolitics echo Dwight Eisenhower’s warning of more than 50 years ago, in his final formal act as commander-in-chief, when the five-star general suggested that the most promising path to peace rests in “learn[ing] how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.” And Harmon’s report on the rise of autism speaks to a larger deficit in our society – a deficit we have partly fueled by putting the knowledge cart before the emotional horse for so long. Indeed, whereas the 20th century cast the quest for global harmony as a black and white battle between neatly categorized competitors, the 21st century playing field is shrouded in overlapping shades of gray. To negotiate such a surface effectively, we need citizens endowed with a different set of habits and skills – ones more aligned with what Tom Friedman famously called the end of the “command and control” system of organization, and the beginning of the “connect and collaborate” approach.

For these reasons, the future fates of these three departments – Defense, Education and State – are more inextricably linked than ever before. America’s approach to foreign and domestic policy cannot be separated any longer. “Smart power” abroad will never be wielded without “smart growth” at home. And when it comes to contemporary notions of diplomacy and national defense, there is no American institution more essential to the unique modern cause than our public schools, and no skill-set more valuable than the ability to see – and be seen – without firing a single bullet.

How Much Parent Power is Too Much?

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on How Much Parent Power is Too Much?

Should parents who are unhappy with their local school have the power to replace the entire staff, turn it into a charter school, or shut it down completely – even if just 51% of the school’s families agree?

It’s an enticing, polarizing proposal – the so-called “parent trigger.” It’s also now a law in four states, and the subject of debate in scores of others. But is it a good idea? In the end, will parent-trigger laws help parents more effectively ensure a high-quality public education for their children, or will they result in a reckless short-circuiting of the democratic process itself?

The answer, of course, is “it depends,” and what it depends on is the way parents and communities go about evaluating the quality of their neighborhood schools – and, when necessary, deciding on the most constructive path forward.

Continue reading . . .

When it comes to the free-speech rights of teachers, the joke’s still on us

Posted on | by Sam

The good news is that Republican lawmakers in Arizona are now retreating from their recent proposal to require teachers to limit their speech to words that comply with FCC regulations on what can be said on TV or radio — a half-baked idea rightly characterized by one critic as the “most hilariously unconstitutional piece of legislation that I’ve seen in quite some time.”

The bad news is that, Arizona’s foolishness aside, when it comes to the free-speech rights of teachers, or any other public employee, the joke is on us.

The dark days began back in 2006, when a closely divided U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 ruling in the case Garcetti v. Ceballos. Up to that point, courts had always looked for two things when evaluating a public employee’s free-speech claims: first, whether the person was speaking out on a matter of public concern, and not just some personal grievance; and second, what the proper balance was between the individual’s right to free expression and the employer’s interest in ensuring an efficient, disruption-free workplace.
The legal precedent for this test stemmed from a 1968 Supreme Court case in which a public school teacher had been fired for writing a letter to his local paper in which he criticized budgetary decisions by the local school board. A lower court upheld the school’s decision to fire the teacher, but the highest court in the land reversed. Writing for the Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall was clear: “Absent proof of false statements knowingly or recklessly made by him, a teacher’s exercise of his right to speak on issues of public importance may not furnish the basis for his dismissal from public employment.”
Then came Garcetti in 2006, a case that began when an assistant district attorney from Los Angeles, Richard Ceballos, wrote a memorandum criticizing the failure of his office to dismiss a case that was marred by false testimony. Ceballos no doubt felt comfortable that his actions would be protected under the existing standard for public employee speech, and, sure enough, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his right to blow the whistle on his superiors. But five Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, resulting in not just a dramatic turn of events for Richard Ceballos, but a new categorical exclusion for official, job-related employee speech.
As First Amendment Center scholar David Hudson explains, “The Garcetti decision caused a sea change in public-employee First Amendment jurisprudence, as many employees who speak out on important issues or blow the whistle on corruption no longer have a constitutional claim.”
Sure enough, since 2006 it has become increasingly difficult for public employees to speak out on matters of public concern that relate to their official duties. As Hudson explains, “After Garcetti, the importance of the information is not relevant. Many employees have spoken out on matters of public concern – even rank corruption in the workplace – but if the speech can be classified as official, job-duty speech they have no First Amendment protection.” Hudson says this new climate has led to a new term lawyers use to describe their clients who still seek First Amendment protection. Instead of getting justice, they get “Garcettized.”
So let’s enjoy a short laugh at the foolishness and the poorly-constructed effort of Arizona’s lawmakers to muzzle their state’s public school teachers. And then let’s remember that a more carefully constructed bill may not be as outlandish, and unlikely, as we think.
(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Require kids to stay in school? Not so fast…

Posted on | by Sam | 4 Comments on Require kids to stay in school? Not so fast…

Anytime you hear government officials mandating new behaviors to a broad swath of the population, that mandate is likely to run afoul of the First Amendment. And so it is with President Obama’s announcement last night that all states must “require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18.”

Although Mr. Obama made other pronouncements about education — see Dana Goldstein’s good summary analysis in The Nation — the stay-in-school mandate was the one that caught my ear, since enforcing it would run afoul of both the United States Supreme Court and our historic commitment to religious liberty.

The case that established the precedent originated in Wisconsin, where a group of Amish families were convicted of violating the state’s school attendance law by withdrawing their children after they graduated from the eighth grade (the law required kids to stay in school until they turned 16). In the place of further formal schooling, the Amish children were expected to begin vocational apprenticeships in their communities that would better prepare them for the particulars of Amish life (and shield them from the vagaries of high school, which their parents felt would endanger their eventual salvation in the eyes of God).

The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the rights of the Amish families, a ruling the U.S. Supreme Court then affirmed. As Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote, “There is no doubt as to the power of a State, having a high responsibility for education of its citizens, to impose reasonable regulations for the control and duration of basic education. . . [But] however strong the State’s interest in universal compulsory education, it is by no means absolute to the exclusion or subordination of all other interests.”

I would imagine that Obama’s logic for the new mandate mirrors the logic that drove Wisconsin’s state officials, who advanced two arguments in support of their compulsory-education law. Referencing the writings of Thomas Jefferson, they pointed out how essential some degree of education is toward preparing citizens to “participate effectively and intelligently in our open political system if we are to preserve freedom and independence.” And they noted that education “prepares individuals to be self-reliant and self-sufficient participants in society.”

The Court accepted the merit of both assumptions — and saw a limit to the logic. “When Thomas Jefferson emphasized the need for education as a bulwark of a free people against tyranny,” Burger wrote, “there is nothing to indicate he had in mind compulsory education through any fixed age beyond a basic education. . . . The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

Consequently, the likelihood that this idea goes beyond last night’s speech is almost nil.  But the bigger issue is our willingness to accept such a simplistic notion about how to solve our school’s dropout crisis. Although there are myriad reasons why young people drop out of school, many do so because they feel uninspired and unengaged. If we begin with that basic fact, the real crime is less that so many children are dropping out, and more that so many of our schools are failing to ignite their students’ passion for learning or adequately prepare them for the world they will enter as adults.

The president’s proposal is therefore merely the latest example of our tendency to craft policies that address the symptom, and ignore the root. And that’s not change I can believe in.

Other People’s Children

Posted on | by Sam | 3 Comments on Other People’s Children

Last week, CNN reported on recent events in Garfield Heights, Ohio, where austerity measures have led local school officials to shorten the schoolday to five hours, get rid of subjects like art, music, and PE — and send kids home before lunch.

What didn’t come out during the piece was that these drastic decisions were fueled in part by the community’s refusal, over a 20 year period, to pass a levy that would help support the schools. Like many places across the country, Garfield Heights’ residents were getting older, its younger people were moving away, and those that remained didn’t see sufficient value in a measure that would be used to support the education of other people’s children.

In this way, the events in Garfield Heights are a poignant window into a larger issue about what we value, and don’t value, in modern American society. And the reality is that despite our historic commitments to both liberty and equality, American education policy reflects our willingness to honor liberty at the expense of equality.

It wasn’t that long ago that four U.S. Supreme Court justices believed the way we finance public education in this country was unconstitutional. Five of their colleagues disagreed, however, leading Justice Thurgood Marshall to speak forcefully in dissent. “The majority’s holding,” he wrote, “can only be seen as a retreat from our historic commitment to equality of educational opportunity and as unsupportable acquiescence in a system which deprives children in their earliest years of the chance to reach their full potential as citizens.”

Marshall and his colleagues had been asked to rule on the funding policy of Texas, in which, like so many other places, the wealthier the community was, the more resources it had to provide for its schools. A group of poor Texas parents brought suit, claiming that the policy of relying on property taxes to fund schools was an unconstitutional violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Speaking for the narrow majority, Justice Potter Stewart disagreed, despite conceding that the Texas school system “can fairly be described as chaotic and unjust. . . . [But] it does not follow,” Potter continued, “that this system violates the Constitution.”

Marshall was incredulous. “The Court concludes that public education is not constitutionally guaranteed,” he wrote, even though “no other state function is so uniformly recognized as an essential element of our society’s well being.”

Marshall’s central point was simple: without equal access to a high-quality public education, democracy doesn’t work. “Education directly affects the ability of a child to exercise his First Amendment rights,” he explained. “Education prepares individuals to be self-reliant and self-sufficient participants in society. Both facets of this observation are suggestive of the substantial relationship which education bears to guarantees of our Constitution.”

Indeed, public education is our surest form of “national security.” It provides the most likely path out of poverty, helps prepare young people to be successful workers and citizens, and reminds us all of who, on our best days, we aspire to be. And yet the reality is we continue to tolerate a system in which your zip code determines your access to the American Dream, and in which communities refuse to fund their schools because “their” children no longer go there.

We can do better. But first we need to correct the error the Court made in 1973. We need to admit that the way we fund public education in this country is unconstitutional, and we need to craft a new system that funds schools equitably.

Should Schools be More or Less Democratic?

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on Should Schools be More or Less Democratic?

Like most parents of a young child, I’m trying to decide which environment will be the best for my son when he enters a public school for the first time next fall. At nearly every open house my wife and I attend, cheerful administrators and educators tout the advantage of being a “participatory” school, and of “giving children the opportunity to learn and work in groups.” Send your child here, they tell us, and he’ll acquire a core set of democratic skills – from working collaboratively to acting empathetically – that will help him successfully negotiate our increasingly interconnected global community.

Sounds great, I say – until I open my Sunday New York Times and read a cover story warning against the rise of a new type of groupthink. “Most of us now work in teams,” writes author Susan Cain, “in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.”

Whom should we trust? Have we overvalued democratic skills like collaboration and shared decision-making to our own detriment? And, in the end, should our schools be more or less democratic?

The answer, of course, depends on which values and behaviors we associate with that word – democratic. And the reality is that too often, too many of us – from local educators to federal policymakers – define it in a way that limits our collective capacity to understand what a healthy, high-functioning learning community really looks like, and requires.

In many schools, “democracy” is a subject students study in social studies, or via a special add-on program, or, if your school still has such a thing, in civics class. It’s something schools and districts seek separate grant money to support. And it’s something that, in the end, you learn about – whether it’s the three branches of government or the legislative process or the twenty-seven Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Call it “Democracy via Content.”

In other schools, the word stands for something very different – a philosophy of human interaction that guides how adult decisions are made and how students interact with each other. In these places, what matters most is how the classroom itself is structured (or unstructured), and the messiness of the approach becomes the central message about what it all means. Call it “Democracy via Process.”

Problems arise whenever we overvalue either approach. In an environment where democracy is seen solely as a subject, children memorize their rights but never practice them. And in a classroom where democracy is seen primarily as a process, children sit in circles or work in teams – regardless of whether or not those methods are helping them learn more effectively.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan underscored this point at a recent White House forum. “The goals of traditional civic education – to increase civic knowledge, voter participation, and volunteerism– are all still fundamental,” he asserted. “But the new generation of civic learning puts students at the center. It includes both learning and practice — not just rote memorization of names, dates, and processes.” Harvard’s Tony Wagner agrees, noting that there is a “happy convergence between the skills most needed in the global knowledge economy and those most needed to keep our democracy safe and vibrant.”

In a healthy school, educators know which skills – from collaboration to self-direction – their students must develop to be successful as adults, and which combination of content and processes will get them there. Some days, that might mean working in groups; other days, it might mean listening to an old-fashioned lecture. And every day, it means school leaders are aware of the paradoxical human impulse at the center of any democratic society – a point Ms. Cain makes in her Times article. “Most humans have two contradictory impulses,” she writes. “We love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy.”

A democratic learning environment honors both needs. That’s why from now on, the first thing I’ll ask at the open house is if the school understands which specific skills it wants to cultivate in its students, and why. I’ll ask which processes the teachers will use to engage kids in their own learning, and why. And when I find a school with clear answers and a clear plan for developing both “choice and voice,” I’ll know where to send my son.

Epicenter

Posted on | by Sam

Here, in Léogâne, halfway between Port-au-Prince and the epicenter of the 2010 earthquake that unleashed Haiti’s latest round of devastation, death and hardship, Doug Taylor is building houses.

An Indiana native in his 25th year of working for Habitat for Humanity, Taylor is tanned, serious and unshaven, with sandy straight hair that hangs as though it has been weighted down with stones. On a sunny day in December 2011, Taylor greets a visitor before 155 brand-new homes, all arranged in orderly rows, all built to a uniform size and shape, and all painted bright colors of pink, blue or green – a Haitian Levittown.

By the end of 2012, Taylor and his colleagues – a mixture of fellow Habitat employees, local builders, and members of the families that will eventually be moving in – will have built 500 houses on a patch of land which, like much of the surrounding area, forms a flat basin ringed by rugged mountains.

Surveying the site, including one house bearing former president Jimmy Carter’s signature – just a month earlier, he and his wife Rosalynn were part of a volunteer force that erected more than 100 homes in a week – Taylor feels both satisfied and uncertain. “This project is unlike anything I’ve ever been a part of,” he explains. “Most of our work involves building single homes for families that are professionally employed – a way of anchoring those professions and communities. Here we’re building for families that live on less than 50 cents a day. And 500 homes is a small town. There are a lot of grand visions – a health clinic, a couple of schools, and supposedly Nike is committed to doing a recreational field. We’ve got parks space, green space, but at this point those are just suggestions from the community’s input. We don’t yet have the partners to do all of that. And anyway, the biggest problems in a project like this are the ones we don’t usually have to face – how will this community make decisions? How will safety be secured? Where will the jobs and the food and the transportation come from – and what will unite these families in common cause?”

As he speaks, a stout dark-skinned woman named Mari approaches from behind and envelops Taylor in a surprise hug.  He turns to greet her, and she smiles widely from underneath the brim of her large black bonnet. “THIS is my house,” she says, before asking that a visitor take her photograph. She poses for the camera, leaning against the broom she was using to clean sawdust off her small porch.

“Mari is the president of the local organization representing the families,” Taylor says. “She’s the one making sure all decisions unfold in a participatory style. It’s really inspiring – and the level of experience most Haitians have with making decisions democratically is a story most people simply aren’t aware of. At the same time, there are so many different pieces of building a healthy community that need to be thought through, and that all influence each other.

“Five years from now,” he confessed over the din of hammers and saws, “we’re going to visit this site and feel one of two things: it’s either going to be our greatest success, or our biggest failure.”

* * *

Even before the earthquake that struck on January 12, 2010, killing tens of thousands and leaving millions homeless, Haiti was one of the poorest, least functional states in the world.  Its unemployment rate tops 70%. The average income is between $600-$700 a year.  The judicial system is corrupt and inefficient; as many as 80% of the country’s prisoners have never been formally charged with a crime. And for the bulk of its history, Haiti’s national leaders have been autocratic, self-serving, and, in time, both violent and violently overthrown.

The nature of Haiti’s challenges is apparent to any first-time traveler to the country. On the plane out of Miami are a mixture of aid workers, missionaries, and returning nationals. Even the plane itself is in need of modernization; there are still ashtrays in the armrests, and as it lands, a giant piece of the overhead compartment comes off and crashes in the aisle, exposing someone’s happenstance effort to re-affix it prior to departure with glue and tape.

Outside the airport, which has all been rebuilt since the earthquake, the extent of the devastation becomes clear. Just beyond the windows lining the long immigration corridor leading to customs are the remnants of the former airport – now condemned, its sides marked in red spray paint for “demolio”, a faded Air France sign peeking out from behind a heaping pile of rubble, 10 million cubic meters of which were left in the quake’s aftermath, and only half of which have been removed.

At the bottom of an escalator near the final stage of customs, a band plays festive Kompa music. The musicians wear red Digicel t-shirts (“Roam with the bigger, better network”), and point to a CD they’d like visitors to buy. Amidst the clamor, no one notices the accident that follows an abrupt stop of one of the escalators. An elderly white couple is sent tumbling. A Haitian woman yells for the people in front to pay attention – but the music is too loud.

The shuttle weaves through piles of wreckage that have yet to be cleared, past corrugated tin-roofed storage shelters on the right and patchy grass on the left where a single helicopter and a rusting airplane are parked, and past a long queue of passengers waiting to board a battered plane marked World Atlantic Air.

Inside the customs tent are scores of ceiling fans, spinning slowly as all arrivals are gradually herded into lines. Signs on the wall in Creole trump the importance of clean drinking water, and of breastfeeding.

Just outside the terminal, a swarm of frantic faces fill up the arrival space to jockey for position, pleas for bread replaced by a request to carry someone’s bags. Piles of cinderblocks make unintentional obstacle courses on the airport exit road. Shells of the former airport line the right side of the road, and everywhere the earth is a petrified sea of stone, rubble and concrete.

At one point, the car’s driver stops to get some water and snacks. The convenience store’s shelves are thinly stocked, its fryer long empty. The bottled water and snack bar are both locally made – a sign of real progress. Just outside, a dusty pregnant woman sits expressionless on the ground, her legs apart. A cardboard box sits between them, on top of which is a stack of Ramen noodle packages for sale. Waves of uniformed schoolchildren pass by the woman, neither taking notice of the other. As the driver heads back to the tinted-window SUV, he passes a young boy begging for money, wiping car windows with a dirty cloth. The doors close and the car speeds off.

* * *

It was also here, in Haiti, that the only successful slave rebellion in history occurred, leading to the birth of a newly independent nation that promised a full embodiment of the Enlightenment vision of a more just, equitable society.  In this way Haiti’s story is not just its own, but also a story at the epicenter of all of Western civilization, still struggling to understand what it means to be free.

First, though, before there was ever a free nation of Haiti, there was the island of Hispaniola, a place that served as ground zero for European colonialism in the Americas. And fittingly, that era began with the arrival of Christopher Columbus, who, in 1492, left behind a small group of Spanish sailors and renamed the island La Española – the local Taino Indians had called it Ayiti, or land of mountains. Within twenty years, the island had become a highly lucrative source of sugarcane – and the indigenous population had been almost entirely wiped out by conquest, servitude and disease. By the mid-sixteenth century, any remnants of Taino culture had been permanently extinguished.

The Spaniards were soon distracted by bigger riches – the Aztec and Inca empires awaited – but in their stead other European powers laid their claims, and in 1697, the western portion of the island was officially ceded to France. Soon, the newly crowned colony of Saint-Domingue became France’s most profitable outpost – yielding sugarcane in the basins, and coffee in the mountains. Before long, it became the centerpiece of the Atlantic slave system, and before its slaves won their independence, Saint-Domingue received as many as one million of them from Africa – accounting for as much as 10% of the entire Atlantic slave trade.

As the eighteenth century neared its conclusion, revolution was in the air – from France to the nearby American colonies – and the spirit proved contagious. “People here are drunk with liberty,” wrote a deputy in Saint-Domingue at the time. “The peril is great; it is near.” Initially, that spirit of liberty was limited to free people of color on the island, but before long both free and enslaved inhabitants were referencing the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and its notion that “men are born and remain equal in rights.”

In August 1791, a series of nighttime meetings of slaves took place in the northern region of the colony. By month’s end, a makeshift army of 2,000 slaves traveled from plantation to plantation, killing the owners, burning the houses and cane fields, and spreading the promise of freedom. A few weeks after the uprising, an insurgent was captured by white soldiers. In his pocket was a pamphlet from France, filled with utopian visions of a more egalitarian future.

Two years later, France shocked the world by granting the slaves of their most profitable colony their freedom – and a charismatic ex-slave turned military leader named Touissant Louverture assumed the task of protecting, and defining, what this newly won liberty would look like.

It was a long, slow birth. Louverture felt the only way a new nation of former slaves could survive in the eighteenth-century global economy was by maintaining the plantation hierarchy that had proved so lucrative for France. He imposed martial order, demanding that people “blindly obey the laws.” And he kept a close watch abroad, where the egalitarian fervor of the French Revolution was subsiding, where exiled plantation owners were lobbying their government for a return to the previous order, and where an ambitious general named Napoleon eventually set his sights on recapturing his country’s Caribbean outpost.

Louverture’s response, in 1801, was to draft Haiti’s first Constitution, and decree both that Saint-Domingue was still a “part of the French empire,” and that it must also be governed by a set of “particular laws” – chief among them that “servitude is permanently abolished.”

Napoleon responded by sending fifty warships and 80,000 French soldiers. Over the next three years, the ex-slaves and their former masters fought a gruesome, vengeful war. Eventually, however, the will of the insurgents, coupled with the devastating effects of disease on the French soldiers, led France to formally surrender.

On January 1, 1804, the free nation of Haiti celebrated its formal birth by vowing to negate not just the era of French colonialism, but also the entire legacy of European aggression in the Americas. Louverture was not present for the celebration – he had died a year earlier in captivity – but his final words reflected the spirit of the new nation he had fought to secure. “In overthrowing me, you have cut down in Saint-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty of the blacks,” he vowed. “It will grow back from the roots, because they are deep and numerous.” A Frenchwoman present during the years of war agreed. “We kill many of them,” she wrote to a family member back in France, “and they seem to reproduce themselves out of their ashes.”

* * *

On the aging French veranda of the Hotel Oloffson, a place where, as the British author Graham Greene once wrote, “you expected a witch to open the door to you or a maniac butler, with a bat dangling from the chandelier behind him,” Benaja Antoine wants to talk about public education in Haiti.

Antoine is fresh from the ferry that shuttles people between Port-au-Prince and La Gonâve, the island on which he grew up. A young father of twin girls, Antoine is working with members of the local community who are creating collaborative social businesses, the profits from which will fund their schools. “For many, this is the first time they’re going to try something like this,” he explained in a soft, confident voice. “People feel a lot of hesitation, so we’re going to work on that and do what we can to get them in a position where they feel more confident.”

To build this confidence, Antoine is working with the Grameen Creative Lab (GCL), an organization that was founded just a year before the earthquake. GCL is led in Haiti by Claudine Francois. “The difference between rich and poor here is not wealth but opportunity,” she suggested one day in Grameen’s conference room, a Spartan setup with a long rectangular table and chairs, a water cooler in the corner, and a single framed oil painting of pumpkins on the wall — each Independence Day, Haitians serve themselves pumpkin soup, a local delicacy they were formerly required to serve their French masters. “The poor are the world’s greatest entrepreneurs, but it’s a type of entrepreneurship that’s more concerned with survival than innovation. We need to change that by giving them resources, showing them how to leverage those resources, and getting out of the way. People talk a lot in this country of the old proverb, ‘Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll never be hungry.’ I’m sick of that saying here in Haiti. We have thousands of fish, and it’s still not enough. Now what?”

Francois returned to her native country from work in Africa because she believed GCL was committed to answering that question – and that the answer was social business. “We’ve all been taught to believe that any sort of economic growth will eventually trickle down to benefit the poor as well. We believe in economic growth, and we want to make it work for everyone by creating a different business model that is not just about private interest but also collective benefit. This type of social business is not supposed to replace traditional business, merely to coexist with it – and to expand our idea of what it can mean to ‘do business’.”

Francois knows of what she speaks. Tall, strong, and sharply dressed in a pink blouse and gold jewelry, Francois’s career began in the private sector, and her experiences are what led her back not just to development, but to a deeper understanding of what people need to become more effective. “When I was younger, I think I made the mistake of letting arrogance dictate my behavior; I was convinced I had all the answers, and so I didn’t listen well to what other people were saying. Our work at GCL and in communities like La Gonâve is the opposite – and what I’ve learned is that when you start a relationship by asking questions and listening – not fixing problems and talking – your business efforts improve. But this is not how things are generally done in Haiti. This country is a catalog of unfinished projects and failures. We need to start working together in a different way, and we need our main decision-makers to do the same.”

Antoine agrees. Like many Haitians, his own education was limited to high school – 90% of Haiti’s schools are privately run, a reflection of the country’s almost complete lack of infrastructure – but in the years since he’s developed a deep understanding of democratic decision-making practices, as well as strategies for how to help people experience them. Today, he works for Haiti Partners, a faith-based organization that helps schools and non-profits use democratic processes to create healthier learning environments. A former teacher himself, Antoine had spent several years working at a “really progressive school” on La Gonâve. “Every single decision at that school needed to have the approval of the staff,” he recalls proudly. “And so everyone had a voice to say what they think. I was happy, but four years ago that started to change, and our leaders started to make more decisions by themselves. That cut our feelings, and I left. Now I get to work with lots of teachers, and help them get things right. But there’s a lot of work to do, because there’s still a lot of corporal punishment in the system here, and a lot of memorization. If you don’t memorize something, you get beat.”

It’s fitting that Antoine would describe his challenges at the Hotel Oloffson, which has been at the center of so much of Haiti’s modern history, and which reflects the country’s particular mixture of local and foreign cultural influences. The main courtyard is filled with voodoo sculptures in which pieces of wood, metal and glass are mixed with personal items like eyeglasses and clothing to form a bizarre cadre of creatures, babies and monsters. The paint is slightly chipped on the walls and ceiling, and the floors provide a colorful checkerboard under the mixture of foreigners and well-to-do Haitians there for a leisurely midweek lunch.

The hotel was constructed in the late 19th century as a private home for a wealthy Haitian family. The father of that family, Tiresias Sam, was president from 1896 to 1902 – a time when U.S. economic and military interests in Haiti were intensifying. In 1915, Sam’s son followed in his footsteps, but it was a period of massive unrest, and after just five months on the job, the son was literally torn apart by an angry mob.

Haiti’s period of instability provided space for America’s period of opportunity, and on July 28, 1915, the USS Washington delivered the first U.S. Marines into the harbor of Port-au-Prince. The American soliders would stay for another twenty years, ostensibly to ensure order and usher in a more democratic era, but in reality the main objective was to make Haiti safe for corporate investment, and to establish it as a strategic military outpost.

For the duration of the occupation, the Oloffson was used as a U.S. military hospital, and Haitians were left to confront the realization of their biggest fear – that a foreign power would return and deny them their hard-fought prize of self-determination. As one Haitian politician put it at the time, “The white soldiers had come to defile our independence: where were the ancestors? Finally the ancestors were no more.”

In truth, Haiti was an easy target. Deeply saddled by an indemnity it agreed to pay France as recompense for the lost profits of exiled plantation owners, Haiti was paying as much as 80% of its total budget to its former colonial masters by the time the Americans arrived. For all of the nineteenth century, Haiti struggled through an ever-weakening cycle of civil wars and forceful usurpations of power. And within a few years of the U.S. occupation, young Haitian men found themselves back in shackles, working forcibly on the construction of new roads, enduring the scorn of racist American soldiers, and watching Haiti’s founding laws get revised to make the country more hospitable for foreign investment.

In the end, however, a trend that began during the days of Louverture proved equally resilient throughout the American occupation: a locally governed counter-plantation economy in which Haitians farmed small plots of land, pooled resources and responsibilities, and weathered the inefficiencies of the central state. As historian Laurent Dubois writes, this system of local governance “developed largely in the absence of – indeed, in opposition to – the Haitian government. Unable to transform the national political system, rural residents found another solution: they created an egalitarian system without a state.”

Today, more than seventy years after the last American soldiers left in 1935, Benaja Antoine’s work at Haiti Partners continues to build on this legacy of local decision-making. His organization’s newest project is a new school that will open in September 2012. “We want it to be a motor of development for the whole community,” he said. “The idea is to have the school serve as a residency for training, and a learning hub for other schools. I believe education is the absolute key – it’s the only way to change things over the long-term. And there’s great creative potential here – but it needs to start doing something other than figuring out how to survive. Most teachers here still don’t have any real formal training – many never finished high school themselves – and half our young people aren’t even attending school. So how do you take an underfunded system and end up having enough schools to meet the needs of the people?”

After lunch, Antoine hops into a car to visit the school’s construction site, a mile up the hill from the home of Haiti Partners’ co-founder, an American expat named John Engle.  The road leads slowly out of the city, past a giant intersection piled high with discarded wicker furniture, past gas stations and women with baskets on their heads filled with bananas, carrots and avocadoes, and past half-built cinderblock structures and piles of rubble alongside new buildings under construction. Rebar wires shoot up and out of the cinderblocks – a sign of what’s to come, like frozen fountains.

Gradually the car makes its way out of the central city and up into the hills, past tent cities and an iron bridge stretching across a barren river of trash and debris. “The UN presence here is still very controversial,” Antoine explained. “There are many people who feel that it feeds the previous dysfunctional system, and keeps Haiti stuck in the past. So many people are so desperate here. In the end, is the UN helping us address those issues and become more independent – or is it keeping us stuck in the wrong worldview?”

Along the way Antoine stops briefly at the Big Star Market, one of Haiti’s more upscale grocery stores. Inside, well-dressed women complete their daily grocery shopping amidst well-stacked shelves, cool air-conditioning and quiet. A man outside guards the parking lot with a shotgun slung over his shoulder. Antoine pushes a cart of beer and soda to the checkout aisle, past holiday displays of Ferrero Rocher chocolate, copies of L’Express magazine, and large bags of Pedigree dog food.

The last half-mile of the drive is extremely rough, like climbing a mountain of stones. As the car nears the top, the landscape of white and pink gravel – all generated by hand-swung pickaxes that made the roadway real – gives way to a denser tropical feel; tree roots stick out from the starkly-cut sides of the roadway, and lemon trees mix with large ferns. The temperature drops as well.

The car pulls past a large red gate and John hops into the car for the final drive to the school, where workmen are digging a trench around its main building. It’s a beautiful patch of land, overlooking all of downtown Port-au-Prince and the bay, and pointed west, toward Léogâne, and toward the quake’s epicenter.

John Engle first moved to Haiti in 1991, after making a two-year commitment to join the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education. He is clean-shaven with thin eyeglasses and a black Casio watch. Always neatly dressed, on the day of Antoine’s visit he wears blue jeans, sneakers, and a white short-sleeved shirt covered with hand-sewn patterns of local farmers. “I first heard the organization’s founder, Tony Campolo, speak when I was 19, and I immediately liked his philosophy,” John said. “It was a vision of evangelicalism that was about empowerment, that was about collaborative inquiry, and that was highly culturally sensitive. I grew up working for my dad, selling electric typewriters and other forms of office equipment. I had gotten married at 20 – and divorced at 25. So as I look back, I think what happened is that I quickly had a comfortable life, but it was hollow. Those years before I moved to Haiti and got divorced, I was increasingly ready to do something radically different.”

The end of Engle’s prior professional and personal life coincided. “I left my dad’s company to try my own entrepreneurial venture – importing low-tech products in Taiwan. I was struggling to get the business off the ground, I was mired in debt – and then I found out my wife was having another affair.”

Within months, Engle was living alone. He worked briefly as a district sales manager for Panasonic to pay off his debts. Two years later, debts paid, he boarded a plane to Haiti. That was 1991.

Engle remembers the day of the 2010 earthquake well. “We were packing to leave the country, and we had just added the second floor of our house, all of which was done in the traditional way – with lots of concrete. The first tremor lasted for 40 seconds, and I remember thinking I didn’t realize a concrete house could shake that badly.

When the first tremor stopped, John and his family were fine; the house had stood. They wondered how bad the devastation had been elsewhere. Then they looked down from their veranda, toward the city below. “All we could see was dust rising out of the valley. Then, wave upon wave of people rose out, too, covered in dust and blood, and we realized this was a nation-changing event.”

* * *

The next day, in a different part of the city, on the campus of the L’ecole Supérieure Infotronique D’Haiti – or ESIH – John Engle and Benaja Antoine join an eclectic mix of Haitians and foreigners for OpenHaiti, a meeting that had been billed as an open-source exploration of “things worth doing.”

Considered one of Haiti’s best universities, ESIH greets its visitors with a giant message hanging on the school’s dreamsicle-colored walls: “Embody the inconceivable is what makes the world change. WE, Haitians, can do it when WE start making hard choices.”

The meeting takes place in a computer lab on the top floor of a building that overlooks both the central Bay of Port-au-Prince and a labyrinth of neighboring shelters and homes that stretch all the way to the nearest mountain. The shelters and school are separated by a single ten-foot wall. On the other side, women hang drying laundry as children arrive home from school to help out.

The room is arranged to house two concentric circles of chairs. A screen is at the front, and a young Finnish man named Jaakko is working feverishly to secure a livestream of the event. Jaakko is a passionate believer in the “power of organizing out in the open, and of organizing without organizations. The open-source paradigm has already revolutionized software programming,” he explains to a new arrival, “yet it does not exist as widely in international development efforts. Why?” As he speaks, one of the event’s organizers, a graduate student in computer science named Alain, works on the final bits of technological troubleshooting as people start to find seats or stand a few more moments just outside the room on the narrow railway overlooking the city below.

One of the early arrivals is Steven Werlin, an American who has lived in Haiti off and on for more than a decade, and who currently serves as the regional manager of an extreme poverty program for an organization called Fonkoze. He has the body of a long-distance runner, and on this day he wears a tan shirt, pants and flip-flops. His eyes are intelligent, focused and calm, and he wears oval-shaped glasses. “The economy here looks entirely different from other places because the largest piece of it is entirely informal. Most of my days are spent seeing stunningly poor families working their way to near-poverty. We help them get to a space where they can manage their own path forward. What I’ve found is that people need assets, first and foremost, they need training in how to use those assets, and they need ongoing coaching as they learn to think of their lives in new, more promising ways.”

Seated nearby is another American, a young woman named Loralei. Until yesterday, Loralei was an employee of one of the many organizations doing relief work in Haiti since the earthquake. The day before was her last day, however; her job is now filled by a young Haitian man. “I think it’s really important when doing development work to be aware of your position,” she says. “My organization has been really careful to build in a process that will make it sustainable.”

A native of Vermont, Loralei has long wavy black hair, a silver nose ring, large cobalt blue eyes, and big silver earrings with a single turquoise stone. She hugs her teeth with her lips when she speaks, and her voice is both husky and soft. You must lean in to hear her, and you want to; intense and thoughtful, in the past eighteen months she has seen things most of us have not.

“I arrived shortly after the earthquake,” she began. “Before I’d been working for the Vermont Medical Response Team, and although I’d lived around the world growing up, I’d never experienced life in a post-emergency zone. There was rubble everywhere, and in the main camp I worked at, there were over 60,000 people, all living on a former golf course.”

Initially, Loralei joined the displaced by erecting her own tent; she lived in it for ten months before getting an apartment nearby. “I realized it was probably a good idea to get out of relief mode and more into development mode,” she explained. As part of her work, Loralei and others focused on camp management, education programs, and successfully relocating people back into their communities.  “Some of the education and training work is a challenge because there’s a mindset here that ‘free’ means there is no quality. Being accustomed to scarcity makes people feel things like these training programs – on issues like microcredit and small-business skills – are too good to be true. But now there are just 26,000 people living in that camp, and several of the public squares in Port-au-Prince that had been tent cities since the earthquake are now gone.

“I’ve learned that the best and worst feature of Haiti is that there is no “normal” here,” she continued. “There are so many deep-rooted injustices in Haitian society that it’s going to be a long haul. Now that we’re two years removed from the quake, it’s really interesting to see the new types of investments that are coming here – but at the same time, as money is being released, I keep wondering, ‘What is the model of investment going forward?’ Is it the right model, or merely the one that is available? So this moment in Haitian history is one of great opportunity – and great vulnerability.”

The meeting begins with an official welcome in French from Marlene Sam, ESIH’s director of external relationships, and herself a member of a same prominent family whose misfortunes sparked the start of the U.S. occupation. Engle follows by explaining the basic principles of open space technology, and invites people to propose discussion groups that relate to things worth doing in Haiti. People propose workshops in Creole and French, and volunteers provide real-time translations. Then the groups disperse to dive into issues as varied as addressing agricultural sustainability – Haiti has experienced an almost total level of deforestation – to identifying ways to take advantage of the fact that, despite such high unemployment, over 80% of the Haitian population owns a mobile phone.

After the meeting wraps up, Alain leans against the railway outside the meeting room; it’s now dusk, and the lights of the city are slowly coming on in specks underneath him, while below the railing fellow students mill about in the school’s central courtyard. “I believe this sort of gathering is what we need most in Haiti,” he says. “Everyone needs to come together to build something together – to build a better Haiti. And the first step is getting together.”

* * *

The next morning, Engle and Antoine are back on the hill where their school is being built, preparing to facilitate a community meeting; for all aspects of the school’s construction and development, local residents are directly involved. As Antoine assembles a circle of chairs in the shade of a nearby tree, Engle talks about the challenges – and the opportunities – of modern Haiti.

“There’s some cautious hope about the new government,” he begins, “and about the idea that Haiti may be entering a more stable period of its history. But our present is still in many ways a product of our past, and the types of things people have experienced here don’t get shaken off easily.”

In particular, Engle references the decades-long dictatorship of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, “Baby Doc” – a reign of terror that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Haitians, that led to as many as a million more fleeing the country, and that didn’t end until 1986. A relative unknown when he first assumed power in 1957, Duvalier quickly proved himself to be an astute scholar of Haitian history – tapping into the historic tensions between lighter- and darker-skinned Haitians, and feeding a cult of personality that eschewed individual freedoms in favor of an all-knowing police state. “As President I have no enemies and can have none,” he announced. “There are only the enemies of the nation. And these the nation must judge.”

Before long, Duvalier had done away with everything from Haiti’s bicameral legislature and methods of dissent to the Lord’s Prayer itself. In its place, Haitians would spend their Sundays paying homage to “Our Doc, who art in the Palais National for life, hallowed be Thy name by present and future generations. Thy will be done, in Port-au-Prince as it is in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti and forgive not the trespasses of those antipatriots who daily spit upon our country; lead them into temptation and, poisoned by their own venom, deliver them from no evil.”

In addition to creating a climate of fear, Duvalier assured that Haiti would spend decades with little more than a shell of a national state – almost all taxes and foreign aid went directly into the bank accounts of his fortunate few, once again leaving Haitians to create their own forms of order and agency at the local level.

To an observer like Engle, this is Haiti’s double-edged sword – the destructive legacy of autocratic national rule and corruption, juxtaposed with the generative legacy of democratic local rule and equity. “A constant question here is when and where to push for excellence – no matter what it is – amidst a larger societal context in which people’s whole lives have been about survival for so long. Thanks to the legacy of its dysfunctional central governments, there are a lot of Creole phrases that carry the message, ‘If you try too hard, you’ll just get discouraged.’ To survive and not go crazy, people have become conditioned to take it, and to endure it. And yet it’s also true that since the days of Independence, there is this deep tradition of democratic decision-making at the local level. When do you push for deeper reflection and deeper performance, and when do you make sure you work within what people are most used to so you don’t push too far too fast? I’m still struggling with that.”

* * *

Under the late afternoon sun, twenty community members – old and young, male and female – fill the seats of Antoine’s circle to talk together about what their community’s new school should look like. The sounds of roosters and pigs float up from further down the hill, while construction work continues nearby – a constant reminder of how much remains to be done before opening day arrives.

Like most democratically led conversations, the topics veer in a number of directions, and towards the end of the meeting, it’s unclear what specific next steps have been identified.

Then, during closing comments, an elderly man speaks up for the first time. “I was born here,” he said. “I’ve grown up here. And I never thought I would see anything like this. I give thanks to God for keeping me here long enough to see it.”

Art in the Ownership Society

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Art in the Ownership Society

If you’re looking for the latest signs of America’s cultural descent into inanity, look no further than this past weekend’s Sunday Styles section in the New York Times, and its review of Maria Abramovic’s performance piece at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s recent fundraising gala.

What you’ll find is a double-dose of a certain kind of worship; on one hand, there’s Abramovic herself, whose willingness to serve as the evening’s “benevolent despot” stems from her own love of the power to make powerful people do her bidding amidst a surreal backdrop of human centerpieces, heads emerging through holes in tables, and mandatory white lab coats being donned by partygoers whose fancy outfits were intended to provide their own form of artistic expression. And then there’s the Times review itself, which is less about journalist Guy Trebay’s assessment of Abramovic’s ability to surface submerged truths through her art, and more about his own infatuation with the event’s outer trappings, from its 800 socialite and celebrity attendees to Abramovic’s “$1,500 handbag from Givenchy.”

I took note of the article because it was just a week ago that I first heard about the MOCA event, courtesy of the California-based collaborative artist, Brett Cook. Cook’s own work is currently on display throughout the streets of Oakland as part of his Reflections of Healing project, a series of eight murals of local community healers whose portraits, colorfully completed by local residents with spray paint, depict each adult as he or she looked as a teenager – “in order to honor the ways young people have reshaped their worlds and, by extension, transformed ours” – and which are now permanent installations at libraries throughout the city.

“The goal of the series is to remind us of the everyday heroes and heroines who are sustaining life and change in our communities,” explained the forty-three-year-old Cook, who is tall, thin, and buoyant. “And the murals are meant to be just one part of a larger community development effort that is designed to get local residents reflecting on some core questions: What sustains life in the city of Oakland, and how do we model the world we want to see?”

It was through the prism of those questions that Abramovic’s piece came up amidst a small group of artists and friends who were sitting in the center of Cook’s crowded, colorful Oakland studio on a recent weekday afternoon, surrounded by oversized portraits of labyrinthine faces and photographs of Cook’s past public projects. To what extent should we be mindful – as private citizens and/or public artists – of modeling what we wish to see in the world? And if, as the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn says, “Our actions are our only true belongings,” what is the relationship between what we choose to produce, and what processes we use to (co) create them?

For Cook, the answers are clear: “The process I employ with others to create something together is just as important as any end product we produce. It’s about learning to see in a new way with others, more than it is about me imposing my view of the world on anyone else.”

By contrast, the core questions animating the MOCA event weren’t representative of any shared vision of the world; they were reflective of an ersatz veneration of the art of the spectacle itself. As Eli Broad, the museum’s major benefactor, put it, “I know other institutions don’t do things the way we do, but people should do it more.” (Do what exactly?) Museum director Jeffrey Deitsch added his own coda: “We can take risks. We can break a few rules. That’s who we are as people.”

To be clear, artists like Abramovic, and institutions like MOCA, must be free to take whatever risks they wish. It’s also clear that the timing of the event coincides with the myriad upheavals mobilizing so many of us around the world – from Tahrir Square to Zucotti Park – all of which are based on a shared belief that what will sustain societies in the 21st century are not autocratic governments, invite-only fundraisers, and conspicuous consumption, but a more human scale of life and living, a veneration of process as much as product(s), and a commitment to equip all people with the skills and self-confidence they need to become equitable, visible contributors to the common good.

In a recent piece about the Occupy movement for the New York Review of Books, Mark Greenberg captures these values well. “Speaking to protesters in Zuccotti Park recently, I got the sense that they wished people would stop demanding a demand because the idea of one was of little interest to them. It seemed beside the point. What they cared about was the ‘process,’ a way of thinking and interacting exemplified by their daily General Assembly meetings and the crowded, surprisingly well-mannered village they had created on the 33,000 square feet of concrete that comprises Zuccotti Park.

“This,” Greenberg writes, “was really the main project of the Occupy Wall Street organizers: to acquaint new volunteers with their new version of democracy. Why, they asked, curtail the growing mystique of [the movement] with something as ordinary as a political demand?”

Why indeed? After all, whether it’s an Occupy camp site or a community-based art project, sometimes, in an ownership society that has gone bankrupt, what’s most valuable is not what we produce, but which processes we use to help people recapture the human scale of life, and which spaces we open up for all of us to make visible what we wish to see more of in the world.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Is this Occupy DC’s future?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Is this Occupy DC’s future?

It was a nightmarish image for any American President to consider – U.S. soldiers attacking U.S. veterans in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. But on July 28, 1932, Herbert Hoover believed it had to be done. “For many weeks,” he announced in a press statement, the veterans gathered in Washington had “been given every opportunity of free assembly, free speech and free petition to the Congress.” Now, he said, “in order to put an end to this . . . defiance of civil authority, I have asked the Army to . . . restore order.”

It had all started peacefully, three months earlier, when the first groups of First World War veterans gathered in the nation’s capital to demand early payment of a bonus Congress had promised them. The payment was not scheduled until 1945, but the veterans could not wait that long. As a result of the Great Depression, many had lost their jobs and been stripped of their life savings, leaving them struggling to keep their families from starving. Believing protest was better than idleness, large groups of veterans – who became known as the Bonus Expeditionary Forces (B.E.F.) – set out for Washington, D.C., to peaceably demand that Congress give them their bonus.

Their cause quickly became front-page news across the country. Hitching rides and relying on the kindness of strangers, the veterans ingratiated themselves by heeding the gentlemanly instructions of their unofficial “commander,” Walter W. Waters, a former sergeant who had been unemployed for eighteen months. Waters insisted that the men agree not to panhandle, drink, or cause trouble, and rallied veterans along the way with the cry, “Let’s hit the road to Washington!”

The good feelings for the B.E.F. continued when the first forces, also called the Bonus Marchers, arrived in the nation’s capital. Police superintendent Pelham Glassford, a retired brigadier general, arranged for the marchers to camp in two abandoned federal buildings, and secured portable kitchens for them. Secretary of War Patrick Hurley ordered two thousand beds for the men, and several civic organizations provided two tons of straw for extra padding.

As more and more men arrived, however, Congress worried about how the veterans’ protest could peaceably be resolved. “If they come here and sit down and have three meals furnished free every day,” worried one congressman, “then God knows what will happen to us. There are more than 8,500,000 persons out of work in this country, most of them with families. If the government can feed those who are here, then we can expect an influx that will startle the entire country.”

To make matters worse, the veterans were demanding their bonus – between two and four billion dollars in total – at a time when the federal government was already in dire financial straits. But Waters was unmoved. “We mean to stay until the bonus is paid,” he said, “whether it is next year or 1945.”

To help their uphill cause, the B.E.F. had a key ally in the House, a freshman congressman from Texas named Wright Patman. Patman kept the marchers’ hopes alive by steadily presenting new bonus bills, and urging his fellow congressmen to put money in the hands of “the little fellows in every nook and corner of the nation” instead of “the big boys [in] New York.” None of the bills was passed, but Patman’s public support convinced thousands of discontented veterans that their protest in Washington was worth a protracted fight.

Then, on June 15, the House passed Patman’s latest bill. With the Senate set to vote on it two days later, the veterans migrated to the steps of the U.S. Capitol, eagerly awaiting good news and a return to their families. The Senate, however, voted against the marchers yet again. At that point, hundreds of veterans, convinced their cause was hopeless, headed home. But thousands more stayed. Encamped on the mud flats of the Anacostia River, their new rallying cry became “Stay ‘till 1945.”

Wives and children joined the men, swelling the camp’s ranks to between ten and fifteen thousand. With an increase in the camp’s population came a decrease in the quality of life. Rats and flies abounded; there was no running water, no electricity, and no toilets. By early July, the lack of food had gotten so bad that Superintendent Glassford spent a thousand dollars of his own money to provide temporary relief.

The conditions, made worse by the sweltering midsummer heat, prompted President Hoover to make a last-gasp effort at easing the tension. With the help of Congress, he secured funds to send willing veterans home. Many–approximately five thousand–accepted the offer. The rest remained in the camps.

As the summer droned on, as it got hotter, and as the conditions of the camp grew worse, many veterans grew irritable. Before long, the first minor clashes between marchers and police broke out. The situation worsened when Congress adjourned for the summer, and D.C. officials decided the marchers had worn out their welcome. They ordered Glassford to remove the veterans from the two federal buildings, which were awaiting demolition. Glassford refused to remove the marchers by force, warning that a bloodbath would follow if he did.

On the morning of July 28, when workmen arrived on Pennsylvania Avenue to begin the demolition, the trouble began. According to a New York Times report, “the clash with the police . . . was short and furious. The advancing police, met by a hail of brickbats, first used their nightsticks and then began to shoot.”

Later that day, the commissioners of the District of Columbia wrote President Herbert Hoover: “This morning, officials of the Treasury Department, seeking to clear certain areas  . . . in which there were numbers of these bonus marchers, met with resistance and a serious riot occurred . . . In view of the above . . . the Commissioners of the District of Columbia, therefore, request that they be given the assistance of Federal troops in maintaining law and order in the District of Columbia.”

Hoover granted the request. “There is no group,” he explained forcefully in a July 28, 1932 press statement, “no matter what its origins, that can be allowed either to violate the laws of this country or to intimidate the Government.”

A reporter for the Baltimore Evening-Sun wrote one version of what happened next:

The cavalry clattered down Pennsylvania Avenue with drawn sabers. The infantry came marching along with fixed bayonets. All Washington smelled a fight, and all Washington turned out to see it. Streets were jammed with automobiles. Sidewalks, windows, doorsteps were crowded with people trying to see what was happening . . . Veterans in the rear ranks of a mob that faced the infantry pushed forward. Those in front pushed back. The crowd stuck. An order went down the line of infantrymen. The soldiers stepped back, pulled tear-gas bombs from their belts, and hurled them into the midst of a mob. Some of the veterans grabbed the bombs and threw them back at the infantry. The exploding tins whizzed around the smooth asphalt like devil chasers, pfutt-pfutt. And a gentle southerly wind wafted the gas in the faces of the soldiers and the spectators across the street.

Gradually, the army pushed the marchers back across the Anacostia Bridge to their shantytowns along the river’s edge. Then, according to the New York Times, “the infantry and cavalry donned gas masks and moved systematically in a contracting circle, hurling tear gas bombs before them and giving the veterans an unwilling taste of old times, when they used similar methods on German strongholds in the World War.” Everyone was evicted.

Was the use of the U.S. military on the veteran marchers justified? Douglas MacArthur, head of the U.S. forces that day, believed it was. In MacArthur’s Report on the Battle of Anacostia Flats, he wrote: “Had the president not acted today . . . had he let it go on for another week, I believe that the institutions of our government would have been severely threatened.” And Attorney General William D. Mitchell, in his private report to the President, said “the prompt use of the military to outnumber and overawe the disturbers prevented a calamity . . . The right peaceably to petition Congress for redress of alleged grievances,” wrote Mitchell, “does not include assemblage of disorderly thousands at the seat of Government for purposes of coercion.”

The public disagreed. Americans across the country reacted to the images of soldiers attacking veterans. “What a pitiful spectacle is that of the great American Government,” wrote the editors of the Washington Times, “mightiest in the world, chasing unarmed men, women and children with Army tanks. If the Army must be called out to make war on unarmed citizens, this is no longer America.”

One bonus marcher, Henry Meisel, described it differently in his book, Bonus Expeditionary Forces: The True Facts: “America, you belong to your people! Herbie Hoover, we shall not rest until you and your favored few are out of office. You cannot run our country . . . We shall beat you and yours with the mighty American vote.”

Four months later, Herbert Hoover lost the Presidential election to the former governor of New York Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And in 1936, the veterans’ initial decision to exercise their First Amendment right to peaceably assemble and to petition their government paid off. They got their bonus, nine years early.

(NOTE: This story is part of the collection included in First Freedoms: A Documentary History of First Amendment Rights in America.)