SEPTEMBER 29, 2024 – Friday our good friend Sally texted to see if we’d like to join her and Camila and Claudio, an interesting and engaging couple from South African ex-pats now living in Portugal but visiting Minnesota in connection with the current World Press Institute fellowship program. Camila is a WPI alumna, fellow board member and a professional journalist specializing in AI. The appointed place of our rendezvous was the locally popular El Burrito Mercado across the street from Neighborhood House in Saint Paul’s West Side.
Neighborhood House is one of the oldest and most robust charitable organizations in the Twin Cities. Founded in 1897 by women of Mt. Zion Temple to serve Jewish refugees fleeing the latest pogroms in Tsarist Russia, Neighborhood House has continued to support newcomers from over 50 national and cultural backgrounds.
After a delectable meal and scintillating conversation covering myriad topics—but landing on AI and its implications, ramifications for journalism—Sally led us over to the Wellstone Center, the central facility of Neighborhood House, of which she has served on the board for many years and led as president.
In the central atrium the visitor is greeted by the famous axiom of the much-revered, greatly missed Senator Paul Wellstone: “We all do better when we all do better” . . . featured in English and a dozen other languages.
The Wellstone worldview is as intuitive as it is simple, but Claudio, an eminently likable intellect, was quick to question the implicit universality of the Wellstone axiom.
“Many people wouldn’t see the world that way,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.
I laughed, catching immediately his point. “I don’t suppose so. In our culture especially, many people would say, ‘If you’re doing better, it means I’m not doing as well as I should be. For every credit assigned to you means one less credit for me.’”
This precipitated a larger discussion about immigration—the Republican harangue of the day, fueled by its candidates for prexy and vice-prexy, and slavishly fertilized by news media of all stripes and assumed by Democrats, as well, in an attempt to co-opt Republican messaging. Based on my own direct encounters with fellow citizens and my broader observations of American attitudes, I think Wellstone’s adage embraced by Neighborhood House would be challenged by a good 47% to 50% of the electorate . . . with the 3% to 0% between 47% and 50% being proverbially “undecided.”
Sure, when Americans see fellow Americans being rescued from the rooftops of houses submerged to the soffits by floodwaters, donations run freely—until the images of destruction wrought by the latest hurricane fade (with alacrity) from the front. When it comes to addressing the well-established link between the burning of fossil fuels and extreme weather (record warm seawaters), we quickly shift gears, threatening uncharitably to “Toss the rascals out!” when gasoline prices—the cheapest in the world—go up. Yet, global warming, just as a global pandemic, is a prime case of “We all do worse when we all do worse.” Likewise, providing support for the poor and disadvantaged is a waste of hard-earned (especially in the case of billionaires) taxpayer money; a much better system is for people without bootstraps to tug at the loose stitching of their soles.
This anti-“We do better when we all do better” attitude is very much a part of American culture, particularly in the realm of immigration. Since time immemorial in this country, the most recent “tired, poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free” have been shin-kicked and shunned. The Neighborhood House-like charities being exemplary exceptions, we’ve not been the welcoming nation that our own propaganda would have us believe. The ugly, angry rhetoric over immigration today is nothing new. What’s most dispiriting about this in my own direct experience is that some of the most anti-immigrant attitudes are expressed by immigrants themselves[1].
Unfortunately, Democratic messaging has a long way to go to convince half the country that whether you’re the fiercest of laissez-faire capitalists or an incorrigible leftie, “We all do better when we all do better.” Until the tight weave of inter-dependencies and relationships among all the elements of our pluralistic and complex society can be seen and understood under the lens of a high-powered microscope, at least half the country won’t subscribe to the Wellstone worldview.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
[1] I’ll never forget my shock and dismay when a recently immigrated couple from Croatia blasted newcomers from just about every corner of the globe—except their mortal enemies, the Serbs, of whom they signaled their approval with an enthusiastic “thumbs up” gesture and “Dobry, dobry; Serbs dobry [good]!” Or the reaction of a Latino immigrant, who, upon hearing my anecdote about an encounter with a “Trumper” who claimed without a scintilla of evidence that “Immigrants crossing our southern border get $20,000 credit cards, free cars and free homes,” said, “No way is that happening. I never got any of that stuff . . . but Palestinians? Oh yeah! They get free credit cards, free cars, free houses. It’s just not right!”
