I hope you will indulge this very personal (even more than usual) posting, but as my time at Project Vote draws to a close, I hope I’m allowed to let my thoughts roam freely.
As I think about retiring from a career of progressive advocacy, the concept of TIME keeps coming up. There are many words and popular expressions that allude to time, either literally or by implication. This is a survey of some of them.
“Progressive” itself is a way of denoting a forward direction, but the word also invokes time. It looks to the future and connotes movement toward it. It is also used in contradistinction to “revolutionary,” a word that I, as a child of the 60s, used quite liberally. (Liberal, by the way, being a synonym for progressive.) Progressive advocacy is a gradual, measured way of achieving change for the better, and I am proud to have made it my career.
Which brings me to the word “cyclical.” Anyone engaged in this business is well aware that progress is not a straight line, and there are inevitable setbacks. Over time, I have seen politics go up and down and sideways. Just when I’m ready to give up and leave the country, something really promising happens. The election of the first African-American president comes to mind—an event that literally made me weep with joy. The relentless attempts to discredit and undermine him have been just another part of the cycle, but if history teaches us anything, we know it won’t always be thus. Just look at marriage equality.
“Patience” is another concept that relates to time. Accepting that progress takes time is an exercise in learning how to wait. Now anyone who knows me at all knows that patience is not my strong suit. (Maybe that comes from my “education” in the ‘60s too.) But I’ve gotten better. We know that sometimes a policy change takes several years to take hold. It shouldn’t take so long, but it does. Watching Florida advocates struggle for three years to pass online voter registration—something as uncontroversial as online voter registration, which is the law in such progressive states as Utah and Oklahoma!—is a lesson for all of us about patience.
Clocks, the physical embodiment of time, are also referenced in two expressions I use routinely. When it comes to legislatures, we speak of “running out the clock”—that is, hoping the session will expire before something really bad is allowed to happen. Sometimes the mere passage of time lets us relax a bit—though just as often it is simply delaying the inevitable. But in most states, running out the clock, for good or ill, gives us a breather between battles. We won’t discuss legislatures that are in session year-round. How they can live like that all the time is beyond me.
And anyone who’s been around as long as I have is quite familiar with “turning back the clock.” I think I first heard the expression during the “Battle of Bork,” when it was said that confirming someone with his views to the Supreme Court would turn back the clock on progress in this country. I myself am confident that that was a true statement. At least with respect to regulation of business, racial equality, and women’s rights, his ideology clearly erected roadblocks to social and legal progress. I don’t think LGBT rights were even discussed during his marathon hearings in 1987. The recent loss of preclearance from the Voting Rights Act has also been referred to as “turning back the clock,” as it surely is.
Looking back and looking forward are two time-related concepts I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. When I look back over 30 years, certain events, both wins and losses, punctuate my time as an advocate and as a lawyer. Even during a brief period in private practice, most of my efforts were devoted to a massive lawsuit brought by coal miners against a coal company. Almost as soon as it was over, I became a public interest lawyer. I obviously have trouble doing things I don’t believe in, but most lawyers don’t have that luxury. More and more, crushing law school debt forces the most committed of progressive advocates to put off what they believe in for a time—sometimes a long time. And sometimes we lose their talents forever, as the law firm lifestyle’s perks prove too tempting, despite the long hours and 7-day work weeks. I wish they could just experience some of the triumphs and even the reverses that I have experienced—the high-dollar settlement of the suit against the coal company, the defeat of Bork, the ongoing struggle to retain the right to abortion and the right to vote, the forward progress of women, minorities, and gay people—despite a lot of bumps along the way, including the recent outbreak of complicated racial and class tensions in my hometown of Baltimore.
Perhaps the most personally poignant expression of time for me today is “it’s time” and the related concept, “its time.” It’s time for me to begin a new phase of my life with the hope and expectation that younger people, or maybe older-but-new people, will carry on this work. The good news is that there always seem to be terrific people out there willing to forego the money and the glory of more traditional lawyer jobs. The bad news is that’s there’s always more to do to move things forward, or at least keep them from moving backward.
And finally, “its time. ” In the 1970s, Paul Masson wines (do they even exist anymore?) had a memorable ad campaign: the sonorous voice of Orson Welles pronouncing “We will sell no wine before its time,” which is particularly fitting for me to remember because I plan to spend a lot of time in Sonoma County. When society is ready for something new, we say it is that it is “its time.” And by analogy, when a person is ready for something new, she says it is “my time.” It is my time to move on and start something new, although I suspect progressive advocacy will always be in my heart.