They didn’t get the word that we’re supposed to be depressed or in a recession or unloved by the rest of the world. They didn’t get the word that new immigrants are supposed to wait their turn, college dropouts are supposed to flip hamburgers, and people of color are supposed to go to the back of the bus. Instead, they just get on with it—whatever “it” is. For all our ailments as a country today, our society and economy are still the most open in the world, where individuals with the spark of an idea, the gumption to protest, or the passion to succeed can still get up, walk out the door, and chase a rainbow, lead a crusade, start a school, or open a business. “Show me an obstacle and I will show you an opportunity” is still the motto of many, many Americans, be they business entrepreneurs or civic and charitable entrepreneurs. So Rosa Parks just got on that bus and took her seat; so new immigrants just went out and started 25 percent of the new companies in Silicon Valley in the last decade; so college dropouts named Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg just got up and created four of the biggest companies in the world. So, when all seemed lost in the Iraq war, the U.S. military carried out a surge, not a retreat, because, as one of the officers involved told Tom, “We were just too dumb to quit.” It was never in the plan, but none of them got the word.
Through his reporting, Tom has had a chance to meet and interview some of these Americans who just didn’t get the word, who are just too dumb to quit, in the very best and most complimentary sense of that phrase. They range from soldiers and sailors, to teachers and inventors, to civil-society organizers, to small-business entrepreneurs. When you hear their voices you will understand why, if we were to draw a picture of America today, it would depict the space shuttle taking off. It would show enormous thrust coming from below, pushing the shuttle upward through the clouds. In our case, that thrust is coming from all the Americans who didn’t get the word. Unfortunately, though, right now, our booster rocket—the American political system—is cracked and leaking energy. And the pilots in the cockpit—politicians in Washington, D.C.—are fighting over the flight plan. As a result, we can’t generate the escape velocity we need to get to the moon or beyond. So, yes, we must repair that booster rocket, and the pilots must agree on a flight plan. But have no doubt that if and when they do, America’s natural thrust coming from below is still powerful enough, if harnessed, to take us to any galaxy.
Here are profiles of some Americans who did not get the word, along with a discussion of how our government can function as a more effective booster rocket to help the entrepreneurs among them to expand their businesses and create more jobs.
Far Too Dumb to Quit
In July 2009, Tom followed along with Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on his trip to Afghanistan. One of their first stops was Camp Leatherneck, in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. This is the most dangerous part of the country. It’s where mafia and mullah meet—the place where the Taliban harvest the poppies that get turned into the heroin that funds their insurgency. After President Obama announced the more than doubling of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the first group of fresh marines deployed to the country landed at Camp Leatherneck. It was 115 degrees in the sun the day Tom covered Admiral Mullen’s visit, a day that began with the chairman addressing all the soldiers in the camp in a makeshift theater.
“Let me see a show of hands,” Mullen began, “how many of you are on your first deployment?” A couple of dozen hands went up. “Second deployment?” More hands went up. “Third deployment?” Still lots of hands were raised. “Fourth deployment?” A good dozen hands went up. “Fifth deployment?” Still a few hands shot up. “Sixth deployment?” One hand went up. Admiral Mullen asked the soldier to step forward to shake his hand and have a picture taken with him.
Watching the scene, Tom recalled, “I could only shake my head in wonder: What have we done to deserve such people?” As in all such big gatherings of U.S. troops, you could be sure there were mothers who had left their husbands and children for a year. There were soldiers who came back to the fight after being injured. There were infantrymen who first signed up after 9/11 simply because they thought it was their duty to defend their country. These soldiers are a reminder that the spirit of sacrifice for the nation is not dead in America, even if it could use some bolstering. Never have so many asked so much of so few—and never have those few delivered so much for so many and asked for so little in return.
Ride, Mister?
Tom was attending the Energy and Resources Institute climate conference in New Delhi in February 2009, when during the afternoon session two young American women—along with one of their mothers—propositioned him. Well, not exactly propositioned, but they did propose an excursion. “Hey, Mr. Friedman,” they asked, “would you like to take a little spin around New Delhi in our car?”
Tom replied that he had heard that line before. Ah, they answered, but you haven’t seen this car before. It’s a plug-in electric car that is also powered by rooftop solar panels. The two young women, recent Yale graduates, had just driven it all over India in a “climate caravan” to highlight the solutions to global warming being developed by Indian companies, communities, campuses, and innovators, as well as to inspire others to take action. They asked Tom if he wanted to drive, but he had visions of being stopped by the police for driving on solar power without a license and ending up in a New Delhi jail. Not to worry, they told him. Indian policemen had been stopping them all across India. First they would ask to see driver’s licenses, then they would inquire about how the green car’s solar roof managed to provide 10 percent of its mileage—and then they would try to buy the car.
They headed off down Panchsheel Marg, one of New Delhi’s main streets, with Caroline Howe, then twenty-three, a mechanical engineer on leave from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, at the wheel and her colleague in this endeavor, Alexis Ringwald, a Fulbright scholar who was then studying in India and is now a solar entrepreneur, sitting in the back. Young Americans like them can be found literally all over the world today. They obviously did not get the word and they are unabashedly optimistic that if something they strongly believe in is not happening, it is because they’re not doing it.
Howe and Ringwald joined with Kartikeya Singh, who was then starting the Indian Youth Climate Network (IYCN) to connect young climate leaders in India, a country coming under increasing global pressure to manage its carbon footprint. “India is full of climate innovators, but they are so spread out across this huge country that many people don’t get to see that these solutions are working right now,” Howe explained. “We wanted to find a way to bring people together around existing solutions to inspire more action and more innovation. There’s no time left just to talk about the problem.”
Howe and Ringwald thought the best way to do that might be a climate-solutions road tour, using modified electric cars from India’s Reva Electric Car Company, whose CEO Ringwald knew. They persuaded him to donate three of his cars and to retrofit them with batteries that could travel ninety miles on a single six-hour charge, and to include a solar roof that would extend them farther.
Between January 1 and February 5, 2009, they drove the cars on a 2,100-mile trip from Chennai to New Delhi, stopping in fifteen cities and dozens of villages, training Indian students to start their own climate action programs and filming twenty videos of India’s top homegrown energy innovations, which they posted on YouTube. They also brought along a solar-powered rock band, plus a luggage truck that ran on plant oil extracted from jatropha and pongamia, plants locally grown on wasteland. A Bollywood dance group joined at different stops, and a Czech who learned about their trip on YouTube took part with his truck that ran on vegetable-oil waste.
Deepa Gupta, twenty-one, a co-founder of IYCN, told the Hindustan Times that the trip opened her eyes to just how many indigenous energy solutions were budding in India, “like organic farming in Andhra Pradesh, or using neem and garlic as pesticides, or the
kind of recycling in slums, such as Dharavi. We saw things already in place, like the Gadhia solar plant in Valsad, Gujarat, where steam is used for cooking and you can feed almost 50,000 people in one go.” At Rajpipla, Gujarat, when they stopped at a local prince’s palace to recharge their cars, they discovered that his business was cultivating worms and selling them as eco-friendly alternatives to chemical fertilizers.
“Why did this tour happen?” asked Ringwald. “Why this mad, insane plan to travel across India in a caravan of solar electric cars and jatropha trucks with solar music, art, dance, and a potent message for climate solutions? Well … the world needs crazy ideas to change things, because the conventional way of thinking is not working anymore.”
Howe and Ringwald’s adventure is just one small piece of evidence that the spirit of enterprise, innovation, and adventure that have done so much to make America what it is today is alive and well among its youth—even 10,000 miles away.
America’s All-Girl Navy
In October 2005, Tom spent a couple of days on the USS Chosin, a guided-missile cruiser patrolling the northern end of the Persian Gulf, where it protected the main export terminal for all the oil that is pumped in the southern half of Iraq. The terminal is about ten miles into the gulf, inside Iraqi waters, but only a few hundred yards from Iranian waters. Iraqi fishermen and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in speedboats have to be regularly shooed away by the U.S. Navy when they get too close to the pumping station.
The first morning he was aboard ship, Tom recalled, he woke up at 5:00 a.m. in a tiny guest bunk, splashed some soap and water on his face, and went out to walk laps around the deck just as the sun was coming up. As he did, his mind kept coming back to the extraordinary contrast between the political culture of the U.S. Navy and the political culture of both the Iraqis on land and the Arab and Iranian fishermen in the Persian Gulf. Iraq is a multiethnic society, but one without a melting pot. For decades it had to be held together by a dictator’s iron fist. And now, as we see, Iraqis are still trying to find a way for Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis to live together peacefully, but without that iron fist. When the Iraqi navy dropped Tom off on the Chosin, two things struck him. One was the diversity of the U.S. Navy—blacks, whites, Hispanics, Christians, Jews, atheists, Muslims, all working together, bound by a shared idea, not by coercion. The Iraqi navy, by contrast, is all male and almost all of them are Shiite Muslims. As Mustapha Ahansal, a Moroccan American sailor who acted as the Chosin’s Arabic translator when its commandos boarded ships in the gulf to look for pirates or terrorists, told Tom, “The first time I boarded a boat we had six or seven people—one Hispanic, one black person, a white person, maybe a woman in our unit. [The Iraqi] sailors said to me, ‘I thought all Americans were white.’ Then one of them asked me, ‘Are you in the military?’ It shocks them, actually. They never knew that such a world exists, because they have their own problems. I was talking to one of their higher-ups in [the Iraqi] coast guard and he said, ‘It is amazing how you guys can be so many religions, ethnic groups, and still make this thing work and be the best in the world. And here we are fighting north and south, and we are all cousins and brothers.’”
“The other thing that struck me,” Tom recalled, “was that a disproportionate number of the Chosin’s officers were women, so you heard women’s voices all day long giving orders over the ship’s loudspeaker and radio. And because the local Arab fishermen also hear this chatter, many of them probably thought the Chosin was an all-female ship.” The 110-foot U.S. Coast Guard cutter Monomoy, alongside the Chosin, had a female deputy captain, who often led the landing parties that inspected boats in the gulf. One of the navy’s fast patrol boats, also alongside the Chosin, had a female captain. “Being a female boarding officer is a huge asset because they are so curious they want to talk to us more, so we can learn more things,” said Reyna Hernandez, the twenty-four-year-old executive officer of the Monomoy.
Nagga Haizlip is an Iranian American sailor who served as the Chosin’s English-Farsi translator when it confronted boats from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Dressed in navy fatigues, she told Tom, “If I call [the Iranians] on bridge-to-bridge radio, they will not want to talk to me. They will say, ‘I want to speak to a man.’” As for the Iranian fishermen, she said, “They don’t understand I am actually in the U.S. Navy. That surprises them. It is different from their culture. They ask how do people get along [on the Chosin] and how do they live together. They are curious.”
They’re curious because they can see that this diversity clearly doesn’t detract from our military might. It is actually a vital source of our strength, although one that we often take for granted.
Teach for America
What can you say about Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America (TFA), other than that she absolutely, positively did not come even remotely close to getting the word? Kopp’s great insight was recognizing that many others in her generation hadn’t, either.
In 1989 she wrote her senior thesis at Princeton about an idea she had for college graduates, including those from the most prestigious universities in America. She conceived of a program where graduates would take a five-week summer crash course in the basics of education and then spend the next two years teaching in the most challenging and poorest public schools in the country.
At Princeton that year, Kopp recalled, “Everyone was thinking that all we want to do is make money, and I was descending into a funk. I had applied to every two-year program—McKinsey, Morgan Stanley, Procter & Gamble, and Bain & Company. But I was also looking for other things. I had no passion to do something with corporations. I was looking for what I could do to make a real difference. I was convinced that I was not alone. I felt I was like thousands of people. I didn’t know one person who was going to these Wall Street firms who really wanted to do that. I had been focused on education. So one day I realized that no one was recruiting anyone to teach in high-poverty communities as they were [recruiting people] to go to Wall Street.”
Kopp was certain, even though she had no proof, that America’s education problem “was solvable if we just made it our generation’s priority.” She had an intuition that if Princeton graduates went to the Mississippi Delta and discovered how many fifth graders there were reading on a first-grade level, they would be as outraged about that injustice as their parents had been about “separate but equal” education, and would want to make changing that condition their cause. If that happened, she thought, Teach for America could spawn “a generation of new leaders who would work together for the rest of their lives to affect the fundamental changes needed to truly solve America’s education problem. That was my insight in the beginning.”
It took a while to prove, but Kopp’s intuition turned out to be correct, and then some. “At first,” she recalled, “everyone I met said, ‘This is a great idea, but college students will never do this.’ People would actually start laughing when I told them the idea. Back in the summer of 1989, after I graduated from college, when I showed the list of the 100 colleges where we were going to recruit, the human resources director of the L.A. school district said to me, ‘You get me 500 students from Stanford who want to teach in my public schools and I will hire all 500 of them.’ So we spread flyers under doors [at these colleges] and 2,500 applied in the first year—in response to a one-page flyer that basically said we need real leaders in our generation to address the education problem in our country. I just think there is an inclination to serve, and we needed to give people viable paths to act on this inclination. In the first decade we were getting 3,000 to 4,000 applications a year with just flyers and posters.”
Kopp was confident that her organization had the capacity to grow faster and bigger but knew it needed to recruit with something more than flyers. So she developed teams of recruiters and TFA grads who went out on campuses, told of their own experiences, identified students with leadership potential, and urged them to try out. It worked.
“Last year we had 46,000
applicants and 4,500 were accepted,” said Kopp. The number of applications in 2010 increased 32 percent over 2009, a huge jump even with a slumping economy. About 40 percent of African American seniors at Harvard applied for TFA, and at both Harvard and Yale nearly 20 percent of the entire senior classes applied. More than 25 percent of all Spelman College seniors applied. At 130 colleges and universities more than 5 percent of the senior class applied, including big schools such as Michigan and Wisconsin. That is some of that thrust coming up from below.
Kopp said that of all the TFA grads, about one-third stay on as teachers, one-third stay in education, and one-third go on to other things. Not all education experts support the program, because it puts the least experienced teachers in the most challenging classrooms. It will take more time to determine how much of a difference TFA teachers are making in the lives of children, but the organization is clearly spawning some of the leaders that Kopp hoped for. Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of the Washington, D.C., schools, and Michael Johnston, the Colorado state senator who spearheaded the Colorado education reform, are both TFA alums.
“People are ready to be called upon to serve and make a difference,” said Kopp. “The energy is there. It is just all about finding it and tapping into it … We now even have adults applying.”
There is something Teach for America has taught us all: Many, many Americans, including the most academically accomplished, are still eager to help solve the country’s hardest problems, if we create effective frameworks for them to do so. Many young people today are much more motivated by “Show me the significance” than they are by “Show me the money.”
That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back Page 36
