Elizabeth Warren Bares Soul To Brown University
Brown University’s campus was blessed by Elizabeth Warren yesterday, and I had the distinguished honor of watching her speak on a screen two-tenths of a mile away in the MacMillan Chem 0330 classroom, which was still being aerated from the toxic fumes of stress, stress sweat, and STEM stress sweat that were emitted during that morning’s midterm exam. After almost three years (time flies!) of adapting to the Roman-colosseum-variety of X-Treme! politics, I, a cynist, signed up for my Simulcast ticket expecting the talk to either be extremely wild (presidential bid?) or the dry, bland product of too many rounds through focus groups. While I can’t comment on the environment in Salomon prior to Warren’s arrival, MacMillan was perpetuating a pretty wholesome atmosphere. Despite the three emails I got saying that the Simulcast was booked full, the room was sitting comfortably at around a fourth of capacity and was heavy on the elevator jazz, which was much needed in the wake of the heart breaking midterms (both the real, fate-deciding political one and the also-real, premed-fate-deciding Chem one) less than 24 hours before.
First up on the podium was Taubman Center director Susan Moffitt, who dropped the bombshell that Warren, in this hour-long event, would speak for about 30 minutes and then answer questions that were sent in by students online prior to the event—ie. there will be no random from the crowd asking the questions that we’re here for. Great!Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse then took the stage to introduce Warren for a second time, because she’s Elizabeth Warren. He made a quip about Warren, a Bostonian, being his “colleague from some northern suburb of Massachusetts,” which, while I’m sure it was a hit in Salomon (noises from the crowd aren’t picked up by the Simulcast technology), fell kind of flat in MacMillan. After establishing himself as a “fun guy” with the Boston joke, Whitehouse went on to relay the story of the galapagos reptile that Darwin forgot, Mitch McConnell, trying to censure Warren and the “Nevertheless, she persisted” mantra that came from it, and thus set the moving and, dare I say, presidential tone for the rest of the evening.Warren, dressed in a purple jacket (“It’s a metaphor,” according to Bianca Eagan ‘22), finally made her appearance, and opened up with a joke of her own, saying that, “You have a great senator in Rhode Island, Jack Reed is wonderful.”Warren then went on to summarize her childhood—“a story of middle class America way back when”—of living paycheck to paycheck. This cycle was broken when her father had a heart attack and couldn’t go back to work, forcing her mom to break out “the dress” and find a minimum wage job at the local Sears. This job provided her mom with a steady paycheck, a steady work schedule, and the means to keep her family of three afloat, a concept foreign to today’s America.
Warren cited this as a story of a government that was working for families, in contrast to our modern government who, Warren said, is prioritizing big corporations. This shift, she said, is a result of our government ignoring the need for new labor laws to aid the uncertainty of minimum wage work, and to raise the minimum wage itself. Using this anecdote as the foundation for the rest of her presentation, Warren, a dynamic presence on the stage, took the rest of her time to step between different periods in history in order to delineate the devolution of government from one “for the people” to one with skewed priorities, starting in 1935. She argued that government intervention helps to shrink the gaps dividing the U.S., whether they’re by race or economic status, and pinpointed the ‘80’s establishment of Ronald Reagan’s “trickle down economics” plan as the catalyst for the inequality we see today.Warren’s experience as a professor imbued her presentation with a vibrancy and communicability that most lack. I hate to use the word dynamic again, but its the best way to describe her massive presence on the stage (or, the MacMillan screen). Not many people can make an economic history lesson interesting, but Warren flowed naturally between her three illustrating narrative lines: the United State’s past, the United State’s present, and her own sympathetic past, and in it gave a raw, and compelling lesson. The quality of her slides was almost too good, and were imbued with fun graphics and animations that, unless Warren snuck into a couple CS classes, had some talented intern's hands all over them.And then came the Q&A session, which was opened with a question on student loan debt (met with a “good question!” from the MacMillan crowd). Without skipping a beat, Warren linked our present “snowball of debt” to an anecdote from her past, in which she dropped out of college to get married (“oof,” she said), had her dreams of becoming a teacher crushed, and then had her dreams rekindled when she discovered a $50 per-semester community college—which she paid off while working part-time as a waitress. She juxtaposed this to a different America, an America in which the government was willing to invest in its schools and students.She then took a question regarding her housing crisis bill, which asked whether it followed the “housing first model.” Warren went straight into the history of housing inequality and the practice of “redlining,” and then how her bill addresses it through the construction of 3.2 million homes and the reinstitution of the estate tax. She was warned that this tax would prevent her bill from ever passing, which would require the richest 10,000 families to pay taxes at death, to which she said, “You only get to run up the debt if you’re giving a trillion and a half dollars to billionaires.” “I think we can have a government that works for everyone,” Warren said to a couple awkward MacMillan claps.And then, finally, one of the two questions that everyone had on the tip of their tongue made it to the Salomon stage: her decision to release her DNA test, what’s up with that?In the interest of preserving the beauty of such a carefully planned and well-executed dodge, I tried to transcribe it as accurately as possible, with as little commentary as possible from the peanut gallery (myself):“So some of you may know, Donald Trump has attacked me for a long time now for my ancestry,” she began, “Both of my senate opponents were doing the same. And my response to attacks is to try and be as transparent as possible. I’ve put out my tax returns, I’ve put out every single one of my hiring records and documents that I’ve put my hands on, and, yeah, I took a DNA test. And I put it all out on the internet so that anybody can see it and make of it what they want.”“I get it, I’m not going to keep Donald Trump from hurling racial insults. I’m not going to stop Donald Trump from trying to turn Americans against each other. But I think this is a time when we have a choice to make, as Americans. It’s whether or not we’re going to go to our corners, or whether or not we’re going to pull together. I am not a tribal citizen. Tribes and only tribes determine tribal citizenship,” she said, and at which point someone in MacMillan began snapping, “but every single one of us should be outraged when Donald Trump attacks Native Americans. I am not a person of color, but every single one of us should acknowledge that communities of color are under assault. I am not an immigrant, but every single one of us should speak out when the Trump administration takes babies away from their mothers and locks up little children at the border. I believe in the worth of every single human being, and I believe that’s how we build something together.” She then mentioned the results of the midterm elections, and how she’s excited to have so many new people in office. While I may have missed a few filler “um’s” and words of the like in this transcription, I did not accidentally drop anything along the lines of “whoops! That was a mistake, and I apologize,” or, “Haha geez guys, I really screwed up, and I realize that, shouldn’t of lied about being a minority!” or, “What a collosal fuckup on my part! Zoo-we-mama.” From the artful spin maneuver, Warren landed in the next question that was burning in the back of everyone’s minds: 2022. Sike! It was a question on her 21st century Glass Steagall act.“Anytime you get to end on Glass Steagall, you know it was a good day,” Warren concluded. Images via, via.
