Corey Booker, mayor of Newark, New Jersey, is a new, true, blue blood on the scene. He's young. Articulate. Intelligent. Inspiring. And he's not talking about change. He's making it happen.
Get this: Since Booker took his oath as mayor not quite two years ago, Newark's murder rate has decreased 70 percent.
How did he accomplish this? He's involved. He not only invites the people to come talk to him, but he gets out in the trenches and talks to the people as well. He's more than willing to help, but he expects personal responsibility to be the driving force. This mayor pulls people over in traffic if he sees them throw litter out of the car - and he gives their litter right back to them. This 38-year-old Rhodes Scholar, Standford football star and Yale Law School grad, left his comfortable home in the burbs more than 10 years ago to live in a Newark project for 8 years. He left that project for a rental unit in a drug- and gang-plagued neighborhood on Newark's south side.
Corey Booker doesn't talk about problems. He knows the problems first hand and he tackles them in a manner you would expect of a football star. He works for one America - a united America - and inspires citizens to take accountability to create it.
Oh, yes. Corey Booker is a black man. A black man who says, "My father grew up in a very segregated world. I grew up in a very integrated world." (newsday.com article here.) How refreshing.
This snippet from an interview with Bill Moyers gives one hope for a better America:
"What we have to realize is we can get caught up as pundits sitting there talking about sound bites and race, which is so not helpful. Or we can say, 'Hey, black, white or whatever, let's change policy to react to the concerns that we have.' My passion, my life is not about trying to create justice for one group over another group. It's to understand that we are one nation. We are in this together. We're either gonna race together to the bottom or we're gonna rise together to the top."
(Give yourself an inspiring moment and watch the whole interview here.)
Corey Booker is a man with the heart of Martin Luther King Jr. How well I remember that horrible April 4th, forty years ago when Rev. King was assassinated. It seemed something terrible was taking hold of our country. I was a senior in high school, and we all mourned the loss of Rev. King (as a Catholic school student, I had attended school with blacks in the South long before it was mandated by law.) Corey Booker wasn't even born, but Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream is alive in his heart.
Too bad Corey isn't running for president. He's a reformer who could bring Americans together. Now that's a dream worthy of pursuing.
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2 comments:
I love the idea of personal responsibility as well as the "we're all in this together" attitude. Kind of makes the motto "E Pluribus Unum" mean something again.
The interesting thing will be to see if he can survive a move to the national stage. The FDR/Kennedy/Pelosi socialists hate the idea of a bright, articulate, conservative person of color who rebukes the concept of victimhood.
It's amazing what happens when someone gets involved in the community and actually tries to make a difference. It's nice to see someone fighting for a united America and not their own agenda.
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