Sep 12, 2021
Thinking Citizen Blog — Eric Adams: “Upstream Progressive,” the Vegan Metaphor, Charter Schools
Thinking Citizen Blog — Sunday is Political Process, Campaign Strategy, and Candidate Selection Day
Today’s Topic: Eric Adams: “Upstream Progressive,” the Vegan Metaphor, Charter Schools
Eric Adams, probably the next Mayor of New York City, calls himself an “upstream progressive.” What does that mean? Is it a good thing? What does it have to do with veganism? Today, a few notes from an interview in the Wall Street Journal. Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
WHAT IS AN UPSTREAM VERSUS A DOWNSTREAM PROGRESSIVE?
1. Downstream progressives (like current Mayor Bill de Blasio) “spend a lifetime pulling people out of the river.”
2. Upstream progressives “prevent them from falling in the first place.”
3. “Eighty percent of inmates don’t have a high-school diploma and 55% have a learning disability. So if we want to decrease crime in our city, how about doing dyslexia screenings in every school?”
NB: “In the first 1,000 days of life we determine brain development, the ability of the child to learn. It’s the seed…Why wait until the child’s foundation is destroyed, and then look in the 10th or 11th grade to retrieve what we should have fixed in the beginning?”
ENDING DE BLASIO’S WAR ON CHARTER SCHOOLS
1. We need to “scale up excellence.”
2. “It doesn’t matter to me if it’s a private, religious, charter, or district school.”
3. “He would leave unchanged the admission criteria for existing specialized high schools, which have come under fire for admitting disproportionately many Asian students and few black and Hispanic ones.”
NB: “But he would create five new specialized schools through which “we can diversify the student body. Let’s leave the ones we have already the way they are, because there’s too much emotion, too much political capital, to be wasting four years on.”
BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND — Brooklyn Borough President, retired police officer, vegan
1. Brooklyn Borough President since 2013. Re-elected in 2017. Retired Captain from the NY Police Department where he served for two decades.
2. The victim of police abuse as an adolescent and a past critic of “stop and frisk,” he is now a supporter of “stop, question, and frisk.” “If you have a police department where you’re saying you can’t stop and question, that is not a responsible form of policing.”
3. He is the author of “Healthy at Last: A Plant-Based Approach to Preventing and Reversing Diabetes and Other Chronic Illnesses.” The book, published in 2020, is the story of his successful battle with diabetes.
FOOTNOTE — THE VEGAN METAPHOR FOR NEW YORK CITY
1. “He was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2016. His body was ravaged: He was nearly blind, had stratospheric cholesterol and blood-pressure levels, and was told by doctors that nerve damage in his hands and feet could lead could lead to amputation.”
2. “In desperation, he went to see one last doctor, who recommended a near- monastic vegan diet. Mr. Adams was skeptical. “I’m going blind,” he says with a chuckle “and this damn guy is telling me to stop eating chicken.”
3. “But he tried, and his vision returned in three weeks. Three months later, “my nerve damage went away, my diabetes went in remission, an ulcer went away, and I dropped 35 pound.” Instead of popping pills defensively for each of his life-threatening problems, he says, he’d addressed the “underlying cause.”
NB: “My plant-based diet for the city is to govern upstream, not downstream.”
Opinion | Will New York Come Back? Will New Yorkers?
THE LAST THREE YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY ARE AVAILABLE HERE:
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest thing you learned in the last week related to political process or campaign strategy or 2020 candidate selection or anything else for that matter.
This is your chance to make some one else’s day or change their thinking. Or to consolidate in your own memory something worth remembering that might otherwise be lost. Or to clarify or deepen your own understanding of something dear to your heart. Continuity is key to depth of thought.
