GUEST WORDS-The two of us are about to embark on careers that will require us to swear professional oaths to the people we serve. We'll swear these oaths because people need to trust their doctors and lawyers.
People also need to trust their public servants, yet the oaths they swear -- like the oaths of office taken by Senators Rod Wright, Ron Calderon and Leland Yee -- seem more meaningless by the day to our generation.
We constitute nearly 40 percent of the state, and as we come of age, we're finding that hopelessness and mistrust define our relationship with Sacramento. California's past and current policy making generations have hamstrung our aspirations and eroded our public spirit.
They've done this by demanding services but refusing to fund them. By agitating for more taxes, but never on themselves. By decrying the cost of prisons, but supporting mass incarceration. By rallying to fund classrooms, but skipping payments to underfunded teacher pension accounts. By calling for transparency, but hiding hundreds of billions of unfunded obligations behind intentionally opaque accounting methods. By scrambling to fix cracked sidewalks (in the right neighborhoods), but deferring decades of maintenance to critical infrastructure. By waxing egalitarian about the University of California, but stripping its funding, banning affirmative action, raising tuition and cutting financial aid.
And yes, by taking bribes.
Disgusted by duplicity, shut out from opportunity and disabled by the myopia of our forebears, our generation is turning off and dropping out of public life. The two of us need look no further than the Stanford campus, where students are encouraged by lecturers such as Balaji Srinivasan to abandon public affairs and join an "opt-in society based on technology, and apart from the United States."
The social contract between policy makers and our generation is withering, and a sad, fractured dystopia is rising in its stead: one where the most vulnerable are ceded to the state, and the state is ceded to the interests. The fragile state of affairs can neither survive the extinguishment of our idealism, nor the denial of our opportunity to build a better state.
So we have a proposal for the unindicted members of the Legislature: make the change.
When you pass a budget that purposefully excludes more than $6 billion of costs and obscures hundreds of billions of future obligations, don't tell us we have a $4 billion surplus. When the teachers' pension fund has a multibillion-dollar hole, don't proclaim that Prop 30 dollars will only go to classrooms.
When a bill to reinstate affirmative action is tabled, keeping the best public higher education beyond the grasp of so many Californians our age, don't say it's because the issue needs to be studied.
When our property tax system is broken and you can fix it, don't tell us it's a "third-rail issue."
And when the prison guards' and oil companies' money floods Sacramento -- or when legislators broker deals with international arms dealers -- don't pretend it won't influence the seriousness with which you tackle reform. That kind of doublespeak forestalls action, and failing to act will eviscerate our generation's faith in the state and rob us of what hope we have left for fixing it.
This crisis, a generational crisis of hope and trust, presents an existential threat to California's ability to lead and inspire. Please, remember the oaths you took, and remember to whom you swore them. We love this state too, and we deserve a fair shot at moving it forward.
(Nuriel Moghavem is a second-year medical student at Stanford School of Medicine and a Public Service Fellow of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford. Adam S. Sieff is a third-year law student at Stanford Law School and chair of the Stanford Law Democrats and a native Angelino. This article was posted earlier by the Mercury News. It was provided to CityWatch by the author.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 36
Pub: May 2, 2014