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Spring Newsletter 2009
A View from Inside the Beltway
Change is in the air in the nation’s Capitol. Johnnies who work in advocacy and education inside the Beltway offer their wish lists for change.
Keep the conversation going! Share your thoughts on the Online Alumni Community.
Leah Lavin (AGI07) development coordinator with the Justice Project: “In the context of my work, I would love to see the Innocence Protection Act reauthorized this year in Washington. The Innocence Protection Act was signed into law by President Bush in 2004 as part of the larger Justice for All Act. The Innocence Protection Act includes a program named after my friend and colleague, Kirk Bloodsworth, the first death row inmate to be exonerated with DNA testing. Kirk was sentenced to death in Maryland for a rape and murder he did not commit. The Kirk Bloodsworth Post-Conviction DNA Testing Program authorized $25 million over five years to help states pay for the cost of post-conviction DNA testing. The Innocence Protection Act also authorizes grants to states for capital prosecution and capital defense improvement to train, oversee, and improve the quality of death penalty trials, as well as assist families of murder victims. This important program is up for reauthorization this year.”
Alka Kothari (A95), writer, international election observer, and former World Bank consultant: “What I wish to see in D.C. can't be seen for years, maybe even a generation. The Obamas have brought family into the 21st century. The caterpillar minds and self-images of toddlers and tweens around the country, especially in the predominately black District of Columbia are forming, filling with images of happy, dark-skinned girls playing with their articulate, loving father on a playground set outside his office. A mother who is powerful in mind and muscle - one who speaks publicly about the organic freshness of their dinner table and homework assignments and making the bed. A couple so clearly friends as well as ardent lovers and committed parents. Who knows if the stimulus will work, or whether Democrats and Republicans will ever find a way to work together. But I am anxious to see what the new butterfly generation will look like. Children who will take these new images to heart, creating stronger, smarter, solid families on both sides of the aisle, slowly mending our racial divide.”
Sara Barker (A98), is director of Communications and Development for the Women's Foreign Policy Group and Chair, Gender in Foreign Policy Discussion Group, Young Professionals in Foreign Policy: “I would like to see the incentives for home ownership in this country diminish and the incentives for saving for the future (such as children's education, elderly care, and retirement) increase. I’d also like to see more women running for pubic office at younger ages. The number of women versus the number of men under 50 running for public office is abysmal. Though I do not believe it necessitates any sort of government-funded program, I would like to see more organizations looking at and trying to improve gender parity in this country.”
Rhonda Franklin Ortiz (A04) is a teacher at St. Ann’s Academy: “The Washington Opportunity Scholarship program for District of Columbia residents is a voucher program that has had great success. Our school has several students who are recipients of these vouchers, and otherwise these students would be stuck in underperforming public schools. Right now it’s on the chopping block in Congress, and private schools are hoping that Congress continues to fund the program. Vouchers, in this situation, work. The parent has the freedom to choose, and they choose the best school that their child can get into. Until [Schools Superintendent] Michelle Rhee and company can turn public schools around and show that all of their schools are viable, I think that all taxpaying parents of D.C., not just the affluent ones, deserve to have greater freedom of choice on behalf of their children.”
Aaron MacLean (A03), U.S. Marine Corps: "I would like to see the new administration not shrink from the responsibilities that accrue from our unique position in world affairs. In particular, I hope that it will not surrender Afghanistan to further decades of ruin and totalitarian theocracy because it perceives that to be the easier, more 'realistic' path. To do so would be utterly immoral and would justify the basest rhetoric of our enemies. We have a responsibility to that country and have had one ever since we allowed it to descend to its present state."
Isaac Smith (A03), Research Analyst, Energy Programs Consortium: "As both an observer of political events and as someone who works in the public policy industry, I've often been troubled by the growing solipsism of political debate in Washington. It isn't merely that it's mostly focused on what's affecting Americans, which is unavoidable; it's that we seem unable or unwilling to take on matters that entail our obligations as members of a larger international community. Besides the casual disregard of world opinion at the onset of the Iraq War, the United States has become notorious for refusing to ratify a number of treaties, even noncontroversial ones like the Law of the Sea Convention, that could potentially place restraints on the exercise of American power abroad. On climate change, where our actions threaten the future livelihood of billions of people in developing countries, arguments for curbing carbon emissions on the basis of justice for those people are scarcely made at all, while the immediate effect of regulation on Americans' gasoline and electricity costs is thrashed out ad nauseam. We also seem to assume that the way Americans do things is necessarily the best way—a far cry from the founders of this country, who constantly compared their ideas for governing to those of other countries past and present. I'd like to see more policymakers and powerbrokers in Washington try to break free of this tendency; it would be gratifying to see more of our leaders consider themselves, like Diogenes, a citizen not only of the United States, but of the world."