If you read about the controversy swirling around the head of Harvard regarding her recent statements on Hamas, and other instances where the university took a stance on political controversies, you might notice something odd:
In upholding certain values, like democracy, nonviolence, and human rights, Dr. Claudine Gay simultaneously accepts status quo family norms – in the region and elsewhere – that quietly undermine the values. We see this if we focus on the actual creation – through families and childbearing – of power relations.
- Claudine might seem to value nonviolence. She does nothing to end family norms – devoid of parental readiness requirements – that ensure 46 million children have been abused in their homes in the region.
- Claudine might seem to value human rights. She does nothing to end a fundamentally unjust family system based on top down adult choice, rather than a bottom up system where – through entitlements – children are born and reared in conditions that comply with, minimally, the Children’s Rights Convention.
- Claudine might seem to value democracy, but citizens in the region have seen their role in self-governance diluted by ecosocial growth and massive economic inequity, growth that – in universal system from which Harvard benefits – undermines democracy.
Urge Dr. Gay to embrace Fair Start reforms. The fundamental problem there, and elsewhere, is solvable through family-based enfranchising.
Urge her to back the retaking of wealth as climate reparations to benefit the future generations who absorbed its true costs. Urge her to admit their is only a fundamental obligation to follow the law in systems that create influential citizens – as ends in themselves – rather than growth-based economic inputs who serve as means for others.
