Welcome Back!
(Ew. I cannot believe I just typed out “2022.” That doesn’t seem like a real year. But I digress.)
This blog will be the written home for all things democrat here at Penn State. We’ll cover special topics, cover major political news and shake ups, as well as feature content from members of the PSU College Democrats! To find out more on exactly how the blog will run this year, see the end of this post. For now, let’s meet our administrators!
For its 2021-22 season, Being Blue at PSU will be run by the College Democrats’ two Communications Co-Chairs, who’ll introduce themselves to you in this very post. First up is little ol’ me.
My name’s JT Thomas. I’m a second-year student from Harrisburg, PA. Some of my hobbies include singing, writing, and reading.
I feel like being a democrat was kind of inevitable for me. My family is Unitarian Universalist, a faith that I very affectionately refer to as “the hippies of religion.” Essentially, we believe that there is no one way to the divine (or lack thereof), and that every individual should be supported on their spiritual journey. Because of our individualized approach to spirituality, we don’t follow a set creed. Instead, we focus more on just being generally good people. This includes a lot of social justice work. Ever since I was a child I’ve been working with and hearing about people that the system has left behind.
Middle school and high school were also instrumental in my political development. My school district back home is big; so big that it’s split in half. On the one hand, we have the side that is populated by the more affluent, mostly white kids and families. Then, there’s the side where they shoved all of the middle to lower class, majority minority kids and families. If all this seems a bit fishy to you, congratulations! You’re correct. Our district lines were purposefully gerrymandered to segregate the district. Now, I could go on and on about how racist and classist the Central Dauphin School District is, but that’s a story for another day. The reason why I bring it up is because I had the great fortune of living on the side that was far more diverse and far more reflective of the outside world. I say good fortune because, even though UUism taught me well, I was still a little white boy who came from a firmly middle class family. On the CD East side, I was able to befriend people who didn’t look like me, who didn’t have the same religion that I did, and who’s life experience so far had been drastically different from mine.
To sum up: I was already aware that there were inequalities in the world. But now I was getting fired up about them, and I was raging to try and help fix them.
Alright, enough backstory. Let’s come back to the here and now: I’m a progressive democrat and proud of it. So, what are some political issues that I’m really interested in? I’d have to say that my top two are budget and tax reform.
Real pantie droppers, I know. Super exciting stuff. Just hear me out.
Whenever the left proposes something like universal healthcare, or college for all, or the Green New Deal, one of the right’s first (coherent) arguments against it is “we don’t have the money.” And they’re right. We don’t. But we could, very easily in fact. If we didn’t spend nearly $800 billion on the military annually, and if we made the uber-rich pay their fair share in taxes, we could have plenty to go around. This money could be used to do all sorts of things: fund social programs, pay reparations to the black and indigenous communities, stimulate the economy to work for the majority, not the minority. It could level the playing field for so, so many.
But enough about me. Time to kick it over to my Co-Chair. Take it away!
***
Hello! My name is Declan Caviston, I’m a sophomore here at Penn State! I am currently studying Political Science (BA), and I’m hoping to graduate with a degree in Labor and Human Resources (BA) as well! Besides politics, my interests range from tabletop games, to Marvel movies, comic books, science fiction at large, writing, and basically anything nerdy you could manage to fit in-between.
As for my political background, I’ve been somewhat exposed to politics my entire life. My grandfather was a union negotiator, then later an organizer, and my father was a member of my local school board since before I was born. While I wasn’t very interested in politics until I reached high school, I suppose I was always somewhat aware of class struggles and issues like public school funding due to just being around my father and grandfather.
If I was going to sum up where I stand politically, I would say I’m a Social Democrat, or a Welfare Capitalist. I don’t believe that you can have a truly free or equal society until you equalize the outcomes of society, until anyone living in a society has the same opportunity of success as anyone else, regardless of where in society they may have been born into. This includes equalizing any advantages or disadvantages that society at large has control over, such as access to necessities for our modern world (food, housing, healthcare, education, etc). There is no reason as to why your chances at success in the United States should be influenced by what social class you were born into, what color your skin is, what gender you were assigned at birth, or any other of the various factors that may cause you to struggle in society. Until success is proportional in the United States, I believe that we are failing at our claim of being the “land of the free”.
The policies that most interest me in the current political field have to be infrastructure reform and strengthening worker’s rights. As it stands, the infrastructure in America is abysmal. There are immediate infrastructure issues that plague citizens during their day to day lives, like roads littered with potholes, piping that results in unsafe water, and lack of access to essential services such as child care. On top of that, there are issues that may not be immediately apparent during people’s day to day lives but are contributing to larger declining trends in America, such as the death of small towns. These issues include, but are not limited to, the lack of access to public transportation (such as buses on a local scale and train on a larger scale), the lack of affordable or subsidized housing complexes, and the lack of high-speed internet infrastructure (something essential for many jobs in the current day). Addressing these issues would not only assist in reinvigorating communities that have currently been left behind in America, but would likely create hundreds of thousands of new unionized jobs, jobs created to install this infrastructure.
On the topic of union jobs, America direly needs to reform our labor laws and practices. I think that issue is much more self-evident. Unions have been on the decline in America for decades now, due to predatory business practices and outright illegal behavior from large corporations (like Amazon’s anti-union propaganda they force workers to view during their training). Unions are the best tool to help workers combat the power imbalance in the workplace, but the government has been failing to protect the integrity of this tool. I think reforming worker’s rights laws, adding more extensive protections to unions, and including punishments for predatory practices such as anti-union conditioning during hiring processes could be a great first step in addressing the tipped scales in the workplace.
That’s a little bit about me and where I stand! Thanks for giving this a read, and I hope we can have some great discussions with the blog this year!
***
Alright, now a bit about how this blog is going to run this year. Ideally, we’ll be posting one or two posts in a month. One will be written by the Co-Chairs, focusing on a specific topic. If you have any ideas or would like to have us answer a question, feel free to let us know! You can reach us at:
JT: jet5547@psu.edu
Declan: dzc99@psu.edu
The other post will be written by you, the community members, and it can be just about anything you want it to be. Satire pieces, arguments for or against a current bill, op-eds, even school-appropriate rants are all welcome! Just submit your piece to one of the emails above, and if we think it’s appropriate, we’ll post it! I can’t wait to see what we come up with this year. Looking forward to hearing from you soon!
Comments
Post a Comment