About
The Second Bill of Rights is articulated in eight succinct statements and are FDR’s vision of the elements of a just and equitable society – a vision from a president who had provided leadership for a nation suffering from the sustained ravages of the Great Depression. This was not a theoretical set of considerations, but ideas borne of experience and a realization that society was ever vulnerable to similar catastrophe without an internalized set of values that would guide the nation’s citizens, its leaders and legislators to ensure the economic safety and security of all.
I am the offspring of parents whose own childhoods were shaped by the Great Depression – one growing up in rural poverty in Louisiana, the other in dire straits, the son of a widowed mother, in urban Milwaukee; it was the impact of some of the programs of economic and social justice that allowed my parents’ lives to be transformed and therefore my own.
My father took the opportunity of the G.I. Bill in the 1950s, and obtained an advanced education going on to become a college professor. My mother, the first in her family of ten to graduate from high school, went on later to get her own degree and became a high school teacher. As they raised a family, access to affordable healthcare and a quality education for their children was readily available. As they moved into their older years, they have been able to provide for themselves adequately in retirement.
As a child growing up in Louisiana in the 1950s and 1960s, I understood, by witnessing the process of desegregation firsthand, that an unjust status quo could be challenged and transformed. Later, when I moved to the North and went to high school and college in Wisconsin in the late ’60s and ’70s, I learned that social activism could lead to economic betterment, increased access to education and opportunity, and that civil rights could be extended to all sectors of society.
It is with that heritage in mind and in the face of my growing sense of anguish that the progress of social equity achieved after WWII has profoundly eroded over the last 30 years, that I am now moved to use this blog site to revitalize and renew the vision of the Second Bill of Rights. It is a small stone cast into the pond of civic life, but perhaps its ripples will have good effect.
I dedicate my work to my children and grandchildren – it is a legacy well worth establishing.
@damecitizen
California
The photograph in the home page banner is of the Roman Forum, the center of civic life in ancient Rome.