IN SOLIDARITY - Season 4, Episode 2: Embracing power and education for civic health

You know, power and law and policy have been deployed in structural ways throughout our history, you know, the history of Wisconsin politics, the history of the ways in which the power of money and capital and Wall Street, to squeeze and grind down farmers and to kind of impose, you know, standards of rootless capital as against rooted agrarian life. [...] I mean there's a lot the poison of national politics that is trickling down to local politics nowadays and the fights that you see about schools and libraries and curriculum and book banning and the rest, but it's still the case, even on some of these hot issues, that oftentimes, even when you're divided across some of these issues, that you know this person, that your kids go to school together,. [...] What it means, in fact, to reckon with racial inequity is, in fact, to pursue liberty and justice for all and to claim that and to recognize that throughout this country's history, the only times that we have moved the dial on closing the gap between our creed and our actual deeds, between our aspirations and our actually institutions, has been when people who had every reason to quit on this coun. [...] Why is power so important in the civic education part of this conversation? >> Well, I mean I think, as I said earlier, we define citizenship as power plus character, and so civics, which is the teaching of how to live like a citizen, how to be a member of a community, how to, and not just in the abstract, but how to be a member of this American community, and then from that, of your Green Bay com. [...] And yes, there are deep, profound differences, huge differences in orientation between them, but there are surprising amounts of overlap and surprising amounts of overlap in the way which you can contest the question of what does it mean to actually show up and take responsibility for liberty and whose liberty and at liberty to do what to whom and so on and so forth.