Odd day of hope

It’s
9/11 all over again as I write this. Two years dead and gone, and the
tragedies, ironies, and absurdities keep coming.

            A request is floated for $87 billion
to maintain an illegal military occupation; a treasured veterans’ hospital
meanwhile faces closure. A top Nazi propagandist dies at 101; her methods are
immortalized on Fox and talk radio. The Italian PM tidies up Mussolini’s
résumé. The “other 9/11,” the September 1973 launching in Chile of a
US-sponsored coup that also killed around 3,000, is largely ignored. (Here, not
there.) And Kissinger, hard and dense as depleted uranium, is on a book tour.
Maybe you saw him on the NewsHour September 9, getting a journalistic hand-job.

            But I have to admit, I found Old
Henry almost comforting as he droned on. It’s like when I dream of Richard
Nixon, famously the “last liberal president.” Those guys were pretty moderate
compared to their counterparts today. Oh, for the old breed of Republican. I
mean an older breed than George Pataki, a liberal here or there but
fundamentally a capital Grinch.

My real
problem is frustration with the Democrats, though.

            My heart and usually my votes are
with the oppositional left. I come from a family of FDR-worshipping
Pennsylvania coal miners, but the Dems long ago alienated me with their
repudiation of the New Deal legacy. Most of them have lost the battle for their
own hearts and minds, sometimes
parroting right-wing beliefs, sometimes actually believing them. Either way, we
all lose.

            But I still look for hopeful signs
within “the system.” And I’m pleased to report that one such sign came the
morning of September 11, in an almost off-the-cuff interview with a rising star
in state government.

            David Paterson, the new State Senate
minority leader, dropped by the office, accompanied by former Senator Rick
Dollinger. Paterson (Democrat-Liberal-Working Families) has represented New
York City’s Upper West Side and Harlem since 1985, when he was all of 31. His
bio speaks openly of the “effort to secure social and economic justice for all
New Yorkers.” Today, them’s fighting words.

            As an African-American, Paterson has
taken on issues important to people of color. He’s worked on legislation
against bias-related crime and to prevent cutbacks in urban mass transit. His
interest in accessible transportation comes at least partly from the fact that
he’s legally blind. A proponent of universal health insurance, he wants to make
health insurers cover mental health services. So he’s supporting “Timothy’s
Law,” named for a Schenectady preteen whose depression worsened because of
limitations on coverage, and who committed suicide in early 2001.

            Paterson’s been outspoken for true
reform of the Rockefeller drug laws, too. (I interviewed him on this point
years ago, before the cause became fashionable in Albany.) But does his rise to
minority leader mean the Senate, long a bastion of Republican conservatism, is
near the tipping point on Rocky drug-law reform? “I thought we were there last
year,” he says. “Even the conservatives have said [the drug laws] are not what
they intended.” He says the governor’s bill would give prosecutors too pivotal
a role in appeals of these cases. And prosecutors, he says with justification,
have a “vested personal interest” in keeping the conviction rate high.

            Then there’s the state Sexual
Orientation Non-Discrimination Act passed last year. Paterson was a point
person on this one; for a time, he held out for total victory on SONDA, which
would have meant including the transgendered. Ultimately the bill passed
without this provision. But for Paterson there was a principle at stake. “I
want to be consistent with my personal belief that to exclude anyone is an
affront to everyone,” he told the New
York Observer.

No Upstater
can talk to a state legislator without plumbing the local economy — and plumbing seems
just the right word.

            So what would Paterson do? Well, for
starters, he would undo this region’s
small-town tendency to woo prisons. “The classic ‘not in my backyard’ syndrome
got turned on its ear when they learned in the 1970s to put prisons in these
communities,” he says. There are 10 counties in New York State, he says, where
the prison industry is the biggest chunk of the economy.

            And how ironic: As Paterson says,
the state’s “rather precious location” is unchanged and can be restored as an
economic engine. He reminds us that the history of New York — city and state
— would have been quite different without the Erie Canal and its link with
the Atlantic, not to mention this region’s wealth of rail and highways. “We can
still lever this to our advantage… if we just followed history,” he says.
“We’re not making the same investments that our ancestors made.”

            Nor are we doing the routine
maintenance. One of Paterson’s big concerns is the State Superfund, designed to
clean up hundreds of toxic waste sites throughout New York and make them usable
again. He favors legislation that would mandate a site’s return to something
like pristine condition; some alternative bills would require the site be
cleaned up only enough for industrial re-use. “You can’t have a clean-up bill
that doesn’t clean everything up,” says Paterson quite sensibly.

The minority
leader passes my acid test, too.

            Here we are near the Canadian
border, and we’re watching our brothers and sisters across the lake legalizing
gay marriage. Some gay and lesbian Rochesterians already have tied the knot up
there. What comes next for New York?

            “I personally think that people who
want to get married” and are in either a homosexual or heterosexual
relationship “ought to be able to do it,” says Paterson. He assumes some form
of civil union will come first.

            But again taking the long view, he
puts it down to social evolution: What’s happening with gay people today, he
says — what they’re demanding, and how the majority society views them —
differs little from what happened 40 years ago with black people sitting on
buses.

            This evokes other painful times in
American history. But it also reminds me that progress is one of America’s most
important products. Yes, 9/11 and endless war keep weighing me down.

            But thanks, Senator Paterson. You
made my day.

This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2003.