Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Balancing Act - 4/15/2008

Governor Jennifer Granholm made a tactical mistake in her state of the state address last January, a mistake similar to the one that cost the first George Bush his presidency.

She appeared to promise to avoid raising taxes or fees of any kind this year. Now, it is absolutely true that the present shell-shocked legislature would be unwilling to raise taxes even if doing so could cure cancer and make the Detroit Lions a winning team.

Yet you never want to limit your options, or paint yourself into a corner. That is what George H.W. Bush did when he told the Republican National Convention twenty years ago, “Read My Lips.

“No New Taxes!” Two years later, he found it impossible to avoid raising taxes. Conservatives felt betrayed, and Democrats, who had been in favor of raising taxes, used the moment and the sound bite to gleefully portray Bush as a typical hypocritical politician.

Bush had some excuse for tying himself into knots over taxes. At the time, he was running for president and trailing Michael Dukakis in the polls. Dukakis later self-destructed magnificently, but when Bush promised no new taxes, he couldn’t have foreseen that.

Granholm had far less excuse and as a matter of fact, doesn’t really seem to have completely closed the door. What she said on January 29 was this: “The budget I’ll present to the Legislature next month will contain no new fees or taxes.”

As I read it, that says nothing about not raising taxes if a sudden crisis comes and the roof falls in or the Canadians cross the border and seize Port Huron. Yet her remarks were immediately seized on as a pledge never to raise taxes, and judging by everything she has said since, the governor seems to regard it that way.

She did that, I think, to try to make nice with the legislative Republicans, who still control the state senate.

But I am a bit surprised she gave away a bargaining chip in advance.

True, nobody is going to go for another general tax increase. But you can make a good case for raising hunting and fishing licenses, for example; ours are cheaper than many other states.

There are probably other fees that it would make sense to raise and which would cause a minimum amount of pain. After all, nobody makes you go hunt deer or bear, for example.

That’s not an argument in favor of more taxes. But the nation in now commonly acknowledged to be moving into a recession. That means, almost certainly, that state revenue will fall short.

Which will mean last-minute budget cuts. Now, I just renewed my driver’s license for four years. That cost me eighteen dollars.

If they kicked that up to twenty-five bucks, almost none of us would really notice the difference, and it would mean about ten million new dollars a year for the state. If that helps Lansing from further slashing aid to education, I’d be there in a heartbeat.

And bet you would be too.

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Essay: Charging the Mayor - 3/24/08

Let’s tell the truth about what’s going on in Detroit today. Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy would say that her decisions as to who to prosecute and what charges to bring are simply about the law, the evidence, and justice.

My suspicion is that she would deny that any of this is about race. On one level, she is certainly right. There is no reason to impugn her integrity or the integrity of the prosecutor’s office.

Yet on another level everything in Detroit is about race. Essentially, our legacy of racial injustices of the past and the reality of modern-day misunderstandings, pervade nearly everything in American life. The legacy of slavery and segregation influenced the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial.

Racial stereotypes and anger and resentment are why ninety-five percent of the 1950s white population of Detroit has left the city.

The legacy of racism, and the continued difficult relationship between two peoples, one formerly slaveholders and the other formerly slaves, has defined this nation from our beginnings.

It’s what Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal correctly called “the American Dilemma.” And it cuts both ways.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was never charged with any crime, but resigned two days after his involvement with a prostitute became public knowledge. The scope of abuses of power in Detroit clearly go far beyond mere sexual failings, based on the 14,000 text messages between the mayor and his chief of staff.

My suspicion is that if a scandal of this kind were to involve the mayor of Grand Rapids or the governor, they would have resigned long before this. Yet the mayor of Detroit has openly tried to make this about race, though all the parties involved are black.

Because of race, there are those in his city who will defend him no matter what the evidence or the verdict.

Because of race, there are those who would attack him or any black politician no matter what the evidence.

If you doubt this, glance at the website Detroit is Crap.com,

I don’t know how all this will play out. I do know, however, that a politician did say something insightful last week. He said that while black anger is based on a authentic legacy of humiliation and doubt and fear, “at times that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.”

And, “in fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community,” also justified. He said, “This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.”

But this politician said he is convinced that by working together “we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds.”

And in fact, we have no choice but to try. The man who said those words is both black and white. He is also leading the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Michigan might do well to keep his words in mind as Detroit moves through the weeks and months ahead.

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Interview: Michael Rubyan - 3/12/08

It’s not unusual for talented student filmmakers to make their own documentary films these days. But not many get people like Mike Wallace, Janet Reno and the head of the Senate Armed Services Committee to star in them. Michael Rubyan is a student at the University of Michigan. He produced, “Life is For the Living,” a documentary about stem cell research. It premieres tonight at the Michigan Theatre in Ann Arbor. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Rubyan about the film.

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Essay: Giving Thanks - 11/21/07

Several years ago, a big red steer escaped somehow from a slaughterhouse and went running down Jefferson Avenue in Detroit. He led police on a chase O.J. Simpson could only envy.

In the end, they knocked him out with a tranquilizer dart. I remembered vaguely that there had been protests from people who thought he deserved to live. One day I asked my friend Jennifer Sullivan, an animal rights person, if she knew whatever happened to him.

“Yes. We took him out to Sasha Farm.” That was the first I ever heard of the place. It was, she told me, the Midwest’s largest farm sanctuary, in the country near Manchester, west of Ann Arbor.

The next weekend we went out there. It looked like a well-managed Garden of Eden. Jefferson, well, what else were they going to name him was there, supremely uninterested in the media. There were other cattle, and hogs and chickens and a whole host of dogs that had been saved from Hurricane Katrina. There was Boris, a wild boar who had been found newborn by a hunter, as well as a legion of potbellied pigs bought as cute “fad” pets and later discarded. There was a magnificent racehorse who barely escaped becoming dog food. And then there were a few animals who still showed signs of a life of torture. Chickens without beaks, for example. They cut them off in factory farms so they won’t peck each other. They do it without anesthesia.

And then there was Samson, a magnificent red chow.

Officially Dorothy Davies and her husband, Monte Jackson, run Sasha Farm, but it was clear that Samson really watched over the whole place. That’s when they told me that he had been rescued from what they called a vivisection lab.

Dorothy and Monte are vegans now. Not everyone who supports Sasha is a vegan or even a vegetarian. But spending time there gives you a different perspective. Whatever else you say about primitive man, they had to meet the meat they ate.

We mostly never do. You may still want to eat turkey, but after you meet the birds at Sasha Farm, you are unlikely to think of them in quite the same way. The turkeys looked happy when I went back to see them this fall. Happy, healthy, and well-adjusted.

Dorothy and Monte have been saving animals since soon after they moved here in 1981. Monte was terribly injured in a trucking accident last year, but he’s recovering gradually.

Samson was still hanging on when I was there in September, but a few days later, he started showing signs of nerve damage.

He died in his sleep, and they buried him on a hillside the day before Halloween. Sasha Farm hasn’t elected a new straw boss yet, but my money is on a very stubborn baby pygmy goat named Stephen Colbert. He intends to have a nice thanksgiving tomorrow.

Regardless of what’s on your plate, here’s hoping you do too.

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Interview: Dorothy Davies - 11/21/07

Tomorrow, millions of Americans will eat millions of pounds of turkey during Thanksgiving. However, on Sasha Farm in Manchester, Michigan things are a little different. There, the turkeys will get to join in on the feast. Dorothy Davies is the co-founder of Sasha Farm, the biggest farm sanctuary in the Midwest. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with her.

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Essay: Segregation - 8/2/07

Years ago, I told a prominent black woman friend that I was happy to say that I now lived in a truly integrated suburban neighborhood. The population on my street was about 60 percent white and 40 percent black. Everyone seemed to like each other.

My friend laughed at me. Poor fool. “Integration is best defined as the period of time between the day the first black family arrives and the last white family leaves,” she said.

That, she guessed, normally took about four or five years.

Fifteen years later, there is one white family living on that block, and it isn’t mine. My wife, who is as innocent of racism as any adult I know, determined we had to move eleven years ago. That was indeed, largely, because we needed a larger house.

But she also was concerned about housing values. Our house represented the lion’s share of our assets, and she didn’t want its net worth depreciating. Today, the old neighborhood is just as lovely.

However, adjusted for inflation, the houses are selling for less. Two years ago, I drove by and saw our old house was for sale.

I was curious to know how much they wanted for it. I called and left messages, but never got a call back. Finally, I got a live person, who explained off the record that my voice was clearly white.

They thought calling me back would be a waste of time. White folks didn‘t move there any more. This is all anecdotal, but seems pretty conclusive evidence that integration doesn’t yet work.

And the reason is largely because most white people want to live in a solidly white neighborhood. They aren’t cross-burners.

They are just more comfortable living with people who look like them, and worry about their property values. Here’s another story that illustrates what we are up against. I wrote about two mayoral elections in the prosperous suburb of Southfield ten years ago.

Ten years ago, it became majority black. Two close mayoral elections then followed between a white incumbent who had been there for thirty years, and highly qualified black women.

The first time the white candidate won, the second time, the black one did. But looked at precinct by precinct, the results were baffling. The black candidates did far better than expected in solidly white precincts. But they did worse than normal in black precincts.

What happened was this. Many whites were tired of their mayor, who they felt had served too long and whose ties to developers seemed increasingly questionable.

But many blacks were like one young accountant I met. He didn’t want to live someplace with a black mayor. He wanted to live in a suburb, he said, not a ghetto.

Realistically, I think it will take a good long while, but we’ll get past all this. Eventually, with more and more interracial couples and children, our systems of established prejudice will crumble.

And we’ll be forced to find some new basis on which to discriminate.

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Interview: David Freund - 8/2/07

It is no secret that neighborhoods tend to be segregated. Not just in Michigan, but everywhere in the nation.  Historian David Freund has looked at more than half a century of housing patterns in the Detroit area.   Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him about his new book called “Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America.”

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Essay: The Crisis - 7/6/07

For many years I have had my shoes repaired by a now elderly African-American gentleman named Mr. Moore, a quiet, soft-spoken man of great dignity. I know that he suffered discrimination.

I know that he was badly wounded in Italy in World War II, and felt he didn’t get the medical treatment and care that he might have gotten had he been white. It was a long time before he told me anything about his experiences. He is a bit shy and grew up in an era where you didn’t talk about such things to white folks. But when you walk into his tiny shop in a Detroit suburb, the one thing that you immediately know is that Mr. Moore is a life member of the NAACP.

His walls hold a collection of plaques and certificates and commendations. One thanks him for giving the organization a thousand dollars, which then and now, was a lot of money for him.

He knows that NAACP was there when nobody else was. They were there at the Emmett Till trial, and with Rosa Parks. They were there fighting against lynching, and for access to federal jobs.

Yet I don‘t sense that his grandson shares his dedication.  And I know my black students at Wayne State University do not. They treat the NAACP with respect. Many get involved briefly, often during the big annual dinners, for a chance to meet the rich and famous.

Others get interested when they are discovering their origins and the history of civil rights. But this doesn’t seem to lead to a continuing involvement, at least not at this point in their lives.

Now I know as young people trying to finish school and work and date they have other priorities. I also am aware that I am an old white guy. I don’t know everything that does on in the black community, especially in younger circles. But still, it doesn’t seem to me that the NAACP is making a major effort to go after young people.

The average age of members is something like sixty. That’s more than twenty years older than Martin Luther King when he died. And despite membership drives, fewer than one percent of black folks in the nation are members today.

I wonder whether the NAACP is worried enough about that. There are many once-mighty groups in this country which have dwindled to mummified relics attended only by a dwindling band of senior citizens.  If that happens to the NAACP, it would be a tragedy. Few groups have done as much for America.

I would like to see the NAACP define itself and its cause in a way that can galvanize the next generation. When I was young, they used to sing this song: If there was one thing we did right/It was the day we started to fight. Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.

Surely there are a lot of worthwhile fights left, and a lot of prizes yet to be won.    

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Interview: Ruby Bailey - 7/6/07

The NAACP’s 98th annual convention is being held in Detroit.  It’s  the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization.  But the NAACP is struggling with its identity and battling to convince younger people that it is still relevant. The Detroit Free Press’s Ruby Bailey has taken an in-depth look at the NAACP and Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with her. 

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Essay: Brave New World - 6/19/07

Professor Jed Magen is a psychiatrist, a medical doctor, and an expert in the behavioral problems of young children. I am none of those things.  He is also not overly concerned by the dramatic rise in the number of children being given anti-depressant drugs.

But that deeply frightens me. Not because I know anything unique about drugs or children. What I do know about is adult behavior and human nature, and what is happening in society.

Human beings love to take the easy way out. Consider our national obesity problem. We know how to lose weight. People in ancient Rome knew how to lose weight. For the vast majority of us, you eat less, and you exercise. However, that is hard . .  which is why I am overweight.  What I want is a diet on which I can eat pasta and blueberry pie and drop twenty pounds.

That’s why there are so many new diet books. However, once the blueberry pie diet fails, we think we ought to be able to take a pill that will melt the pounds away. Actually, we want a pill that will solve any and all of our problems. One pill to make you larger, and one pill to make you small. Well, why not one pill to make your teenager behave, and another to stop those tantrums of the “terrible twos.”

If I had a very young child suffering from a mental or emotional illness, I would have no problem taking my baby to Michigan State and having Dr. Magen’s specialists oversee treatment.

However, that should be something done as a last resort. I have known parents who turned their young son into a walking drugstore because that was far easier than dealing with his behavior problems, which seemed to me to be perfectly normal.

Anne Stanton, an investigative reporter for the Northern Express newspaper in Traverse City, has been looking into this question with the aid of Ben Hansen, a local activist.

Though they have been having difficulty getting records from the courts, they have established that in 2005, more than three thousand prescriptions for psychiatric drugs were issued to children in Michigan who were under the age of five.

According to Stanton, an official report said that the vast majority of these drugs were never approved for use by children.

And some came with warnings that they may cause suicidal thoughts and behavior. Now -- some of this might be justified in some cases under careful supervision.

But not all parents provide such supervision. We live in an overstressed world. Dad may not remember if Mom gave Susie her pills. A few years ago, elementary school kids on various behavioral drugs in one Oakland County district were discovered trading pills at the bus stop, as if they were Halloween candy.   

For centuries, modern medicine has been based on the principle of “First, do no harm.” To that, I wish they’d add, “and when dealing with children, be very, very careful.”

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