Week 1 of the Occupation: Life, Liberty and Happiness

As Kevyn Orr assumes civil powers in Detroit, the mainstream media has launched a campaign to tell us all how glad we should be that such a fine person now has charge of everything. They have shared a “glimpse” of his personal life, detailed facts about his career, and generously overlooked embarrassing tax questions or potential conflicts of interest. They have assured us that he wants to extend “a sincere olive branch and an opportunity for us to work together.”

They have also taken a curious turn in their arguments for why we should all welcome the loss of our democratic rights. It seems we will now have safe streets, with the street lights Stephen Henderson has so longed for back on, and wonderful city services.

In one of the most curious guest editorials I have ever read, former city councilwoman Sheila Cockrel argued that "Voting is a fundamental right, of course, but isn't the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of equal importance?" Professor John Patrick Leary offers a critical analysis of this position concluding, “Cockrel's retail approach to democracy is also a misunderstanding of how rights work: in a truly democratic society, it's not life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness, best two out of three, but all of them, together, of equal importance. You can't lose one without degrading the others. To rationalize otherwise means that this sort of liberalism is really as bankrupt as the city is about to be...”

Toward a Restorative Justice in Detroit

By Marcia Lee

For the past four years Forbes magazine has ranked Detroit as the most violent city in the nation. Some might argue that this is because we are a city without much financial capital and/or because there are too many guns on the street. Although there is truth in both these statements, I believe, as my colleague Henry McClendon likes to say, “The problem is not that we have a violence problem in Detroit; it’s that we have a relationship problem.”

There was a time when we did not go to the police to solve problems in our communities. Instead we would gather with the people in our communities, with our cousins and elders. Together we would solve conflicts in our communities.

There was a time when the focus was on listening to what people said had happened and working with the people who had been impacted to resolve the problem instead of forced separation and punishment. There was a time when elders guided younger generations and younger generations worked with elders to maintain the community...