The Tragedy of Van Jones

As most of you know, last week Van Jones was forced out of his job as the head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. More precisely, Obama caved to Glenn Beck and the other proto-fascists in classic weak Democratic fashion. But that's not why I am writing. Losing Jones is sad, particularly as he is one of the only leading African-American environmental voices in the country and as he is a man with excellent ideas for connecting working-class people and environmentalism.

I'm writing because Jones' dismissal exposes a deep flaw in our political system. He was attacked for saying all sorts of radical things in his youth. Now, we all say we hate politicians. They are shallow, soulless, corrupt, robotic, etc. But to no small extent that's because they have to be in today's climate. How many of us have made political statements we later regret? How many of us have said radical things on the internet? How many times have I done these things on this blog? If I were appointed to a political position and some right-wingers wanted to see me eliminated, they'd have enough material from posts I wrote when I was angry or drinking or just when I didn't phrase something as judicially as I might have to banish me from public life for 10 lifetimes.

If we hate politicians but we tolerate the blackballing of good people from politics who come from outside the political class because they were angry or rallying people to action and said something stupid or flirted when radicalism when they were young, where does that lead us? With the same old political class. These are people who decided to be politicians when they were 16 years old and stuck to it. They've never put themselves on the line or went to the mat for a cause or said anything in public that could come back and haunt them 20 years later. I've know these people. It's really sad.

Thus the tragedy of Van Jones is far bigger than the man itself. It's about who can and cannot hold prominent positions in the American political system.

Van Jones in the White House!

Obama has just recruited environmental justice activist Van Jones to join the Council on Environmental Quality as a special advisor for green jobs.

I cannot overstate how much I LOVE this man.  He has been an advocate for green jobs as a solution to the environmental crisis and the growing economic inequality in the U.S. since before the economic crisis, but his work is even more important now.  He is the founder of the advocacy group Green For All, which advocates for government commitment to creating jobs and providing job training - especially for people from disadvantages communities - that will move the US toward a clean energy economy.  He is also the author of the New York Times best-seller, The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems.  To top it all off, he is also an amazing and inspirational speaker.  

Most importantly, I think Van Jones and Majora Carter and other activists like them represent the beginning of the end of the racially-exclusive environmental movement.  Up until very recently, the mainstream environmental movement has been very limited to upper middle class white people, and some would even argue that women were kept out of the leadership of the movement as well.  Now environmental leaders like Jones and Carter (both black) are changing all of that.  Van Jones advocates changing the whole system - not just the pollution.  Taking the pollution out of a broken (read: racist, sexist, violent, etc.) system will only leave a racist world with solar-powered wars fought over the lithium for batteries.  ...And yeah, it's really easy to recognize that we have a lot of problems, but Van Jones also has a solution, which is why I'm glad he's starting at the White House next week.