By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Talking to college students from across the state, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Connie Schultz shared how they started their own journeys.
Schultz and Brown, who are married, gave the opening presentation at the Propel Ohio Collegiate Leadership Summit. This is the fifth such summit, which was launched by Brown. This is the first time Bowling Green State University has hosted the event.
The 400 students from 65 colleges are already leaders, Schultz said. “Now you have to decide what kind of leader you want to be.”
The couple started by telling something about their first steps on the path to success.
Schultz grew up in a working class home in Ashtabula. Her father was a utility worker who put his faith in his union and the Democratic Party. Her mother was a nurse’s aide who put her faith in Jesus.
Once her father told her: “You could teach a monkey to do what I do.”
He didn’t want any of his four children to have to carry a lunch pail to work like he did. Schultz, the eldest, recalled talking with her guidance counselor about her career options. Her mother wanted her to be a nurse, but Schultz couldn’t stand the sight of blood. She thought maybe social work. But the counselor felt that she would get so emotionally invested she quickly burn out.
He looked at her scores and saw she was good at writing. Why not journalism?
She gave him a puzzled look.
He told her: “‘Connie, you’re going to be working for a long time. You should love what you’re going to.”
“Nobody ever told me that,” Schultz said. “All I knew work to be was that my parents put everything they had into it so they could get weekends and occasional vacation days, and they could support their children and send them off to college. So that changed my life.”
In 40 years in journalism she’s never wanted to do anything else, until her recent foray into fiction.
Brown got into politics before he even graduated from college.
Brown said he had advantages that she didn’t have. He was the son of a doctor.
His mother came from the segregated south. She found segregation at first puzzling, and then repugnant, Brown said.
So civil rights was a driving force in 1970, when a 21-year-old Brown ran for the state legislature.
No one expected Brown to win. Not his opponent, nor the Democratic Party leader who recruited him.
Brown knocked on 20,000 doors, and won a seat to the Ohio Legislature.
He’s been a politician since.
Brown said he and Schultz are often asked how they can keep from being discouraged in the current political climate “where politics so partisan, so divisive.”
Brown said: “We’ve never seen a president who engages in name calling and divisiveness and sometimes rhetoric that borders, that more than borders, on racist.”
Schultz said the president has called journalists “the enemy of the people.”
“Journalism is the first amendment in practice,” she said. “I wear a pin that says: ‘America needs journalism.” I don’t think it’s ever been more true than it is right now
She regrets the media adopted the term “fake news,” because “if it’s news, it’s not fake, and if it’s fake, it’s not news.”
Brown urged the students to organize. Special interest groups want people to be tired of politics.
But it was people getting together in their union halls, in church basements, on their campuses who care about the environment, children’s welfare , and civil rights who bring about change.
That is the way to counteract this big money in politics, he said. People getting together on an issue, and regularly letting himself or his fellow Ohio senator, Rob Portman, know how they feel. “Most of us in public office will listen. … You can amplify your voice.”
If young people voted at the same rate as people like him — white guys in their 60s — elected officials would start caring as much about Pell grants as they do about Medicare.
“You too have a voice that needs to be heard,” Schultz said.
Brown speculated that maybe “a state legislature frankly that doesn’t care much about higher education and primary and secondary education and would rather give tax cuts to the rich than invest in public schools” would take note if it saw huge voter registration numbers in college areas.
One of the attendees from the Dayton area, a police officer, rose to thank Brown for speaking about a slain Dayton detective on the floor of the Senate, and for his support for police officers.
Then he asked about “the war on law enforcement.” “I’ve never seen the animosity toward law enforcement I see now,” he said.
Schultz said, in the interest of balance, people have never seen the number of videos showing police officers overstepping their bounds. The victims in those cases are often people of color.
Those police officers are minority, she said. Good officers are appalled by their behavior.
But the black community has reason to be concerned. She noted that the dispatcher who botched the call in the case of the killing of Tamir Rice five years ago has just been disciplined.That’s too long, she said.
Brown recalled the officers who responded to the mass shooting in Dayton. They ran toward the gunman and in a matter of seconds were able to stop him before he could kill more people. They are heroes, he and Schultz said.
Brown said there are just “too many guns on the street.”
Yet because of the power of the gun lobby, which is funded by gun manufacturers, what he called “common sense” restrictions cannot be enacted, even when they have public support. That’s the case, he said, with universal background checks.
He also supports a ban on “assault weapons,” which are not meant to be used by civilians or for hunting, and stopping people on terrorist watch list from buying guns.
“I can’t say if we do that we’ll end gun violence,” Brown added. The problem is too complex, with too many contributing factors, including violence in the home, poverty, social conditions, and a gun culture.
Schultz said people need to listen to “the thoughtful thinkers” with whom they disagree.
“If we stop talking to the people who we think we have nothing in common then we are the ones making the mistake.”
