Clarence: I grew up in a different country, so I'm an immigrant. That may be one way of putting it. I grew up in Canada. I was born in Canada, just in the Niagara Peninsula, close to where Niagara Falls is. In a small rural place, in a small town. And I grew up there and then I moved halfway growing up grade four to a small city called Hamilton, Ontario, where I spent the rest of my growing up days. My parents and many of the people that I knew were post-Second World War immigrants from the Netherlands. And so, I grew up in an immigrant working class community, religiously conservative, for most of my life. How about you? Where did you grow up?
Andy: I grew up on the north end of Grand Rapids and feel very grateful for a very blessed like suburban childhood with a bunch of kids my age in the neighborhood and a stay-at-home mom that was always there. We always ate dinner together. My dad was a small business owner. I like to joke that I'm an only child with a sister. My mom and dad are all first kids too and so hard for my sister to get a word in edgewise growing up. I was one of those kids that loved school. Then went off to Michigan State, so not even that far away, and then thought Mid-Michigan was just okay, and when the opportunity came back to live and work in Grand Rapids, I jumped at it, because I love it. Been a lot of different places, and it's a great place to live. As a kid, were you aware that you were poor growing up?
Clarence: As a kid, you're not all that reflective necessarily. I remember our church had boxes of clothes that were donated by my guess is, people from Grand Rapids (laughing) among other places, sent to the poor people in Canada. We would get clothes out of the box that we got sent, and then we just wore those. I remember having a pair of skates. The stitches had rotted out, and so I tied a piece of cloth around it, skated that way. And I remember wishing I had a good pair of skates and knowing that we couldn't afford that. When my dad died, that was 1966. My mother became a single parent and had to go into the workforce to make ends meet for a family. Well, she recognized almost instantly how women were discriminated against in the workforce. How she couldn't get as good at paying job as a male down the street or another male in our congregation. And mostly because people said, well, males are breadwinners and females aren't. And so that's how the pay structure reflected it. So as a result, she could only get jobs that were actually paying below the poverty line. I knew that as a 12, 13, 14-year-old. I had a job since I was 11. I had to pay for my own clothing, I paid for my own car insurance, et cetera. In 1970, we pooled our money, my two older siblings and I with our mother to buy a new car because she couldn't afford to buy a car by herself.
Andy: Did those experiences help you lead to the passion for social justice and equality or was there another inspiration there?
Clarence: That certainly was the base, one of the bases. I think I've always had a sense of justice, you know, as a little kid, but that's of course a kid's sense of justice. It made me not trust the status quo as being fair. It made me recognize that the way society was organized wasn't fair to people like my mother. So yes, that also helped shape my passion for justice and equality.
Andy: In your own words, how do you describe your personal political values?
Clarence: I could boil it down to maybe three-ish values. So, one value that is central is caring for protecting, supporting vulnerable communities in society. The other, I've since my university days, I've been passionate about environmental issues. I can remember the first Earth Day. I can remember learning about global warming in 1970s in my geography class about the greenhouse effect. I mean, I've been an environmental activist in some way or other since then. Perhaps the third is more positively, I'm passionate about human flourishing. It's not just enough to exist. I think humans should flourish. I think all humans should flourish in some way. And that to me forms the framework for thinking about more specific things. Will this disadvantage a certain population and stop them from flourishing well? Or do we need a special support for this group to have them flourish like other groups flourish? So human flourishing, I think, is overarching. I'm not sure if you would call that a political value, but I think I would. How about yourself? You know, you say you're a policy guy, et cetera, and you work for the chamber and so forth.
Andy: I'm laughing because you took the words right out of my mouth, which is if I was going to start this conversation, it's about human flourishing. And how do we set up systems and societies that are going to support human dignity, human potential, freedom, and safety where those things can happen? Somebody once said, it really stuck with me, is that our society is invaded by savages every generation. We just call them children. Our job is to download the new software into them, right? You know, being a dad was really interesting because my youngest is a blessing. We had our first two and then this third came along, and I swear if she was born in a Viking village, she would pick up that shield and be a Viking, right? Like I can see it in her, right? And so, we're downloading different software into our kids of what our political values are, like what our society says is important. I would say also, just a lot of these lines, I'm pretty much a classical liberal. I'm a sucker for the enlightenment values and thoughts. But as you point out, I also truly recognize the history of when those, you know, enlightenment values came up. It was a very much an unfair society and how we were trying to work to improve it continually so that all can participate in that. Just went through an Institute for Healing Racism class. And I mean, it should be apparent to everyone that we're not on the same starting line. I don't have to think about my race every day because of my privilege. And we need to recognize that when we talk about policy implications as well. I'm just nuts about free market capitalism because the data is irrefutable. That nothing...nothing in human history has lifted more people out of poverty than free market capitalism. But I also recognize that it's not perfect and it pollutes the environment. It's our job to make it work better for us to drive better outcomes. My father-in-law, we don't necessarily align politically, and we were talking about issues regarding waste. And I've always joked that, you know, if we ever made contact with aliens, they come down and we're talking to them and they go, hey, what do you guys do with your trash? And we say, you know what we do? We dig a big hole out back and we just bury it and try to forget about it. And the reason I say that too is because I think human civilization, we are very egotistical. We think we got it all figured out, but I think we really got a long way to go and a lot of improvement to make to support human flourishing, to support a better environment.
Clarence: Somehow, I feel I want to tell you this story. I was a university professor for 28 years or so, and now I'm retired. I'm working at a small nonprofit called Home Repair Services. I don't know if you know that organization.
Andy: My leadership Grand Rapids class, one of our projects was supporting Home Repair Services in 2010. So, I'm quite familiar, yes.
Clarence: I work there part-time, three days a week. And in a sense, I haven't had so much meaningful meaning in my life for a long while, for decades. I certainly enjoyed my time as a professor. I did meaningful work. I wrote meaningful stuff. But there was something about this tangible hands-on work in the community that just spoke to me and just makes me feel really happy.
Andy: Well, you can see what got accomplished at the end of the day. What I have a story that my dad made me get a character-building job growing up because you know I grew up suburban you know. I worked at a golf course. I worked for my grandma's condo association. He's like, well you're going to get a job working construction. I did manual labor and man I loved it because at the end of the day I'd be like I destroyed that wall you know.
Clarence: Yeah, exactly.
Andy: Or I built that wall and then you could kind of leave it, you know, you can kind of turn it off at the end of the day. So, kind of what I do now, you know, working in policy, some days it's like, did I accomplish much? Right. Did I move the ball forward? And that can be frustrating sometimes. So, I think that that's, that's so important.
Clarence: So, I was a little nervous coming into this conversation. I know that I started out in my younger life being very argumentative. So, I worried about when push comes to shove that old self will show up. But this has been a very rewarding experience, just getting to know you a little bit, who you are, what your ideas are. And I'm glad that you're younger, I don't know how old you are, but you look young.
Andy: Thank you.
Clarence: So, this is also a cross-generational discussion. All my friends are basically my age, so having a cross-generational discussion is really cool too, and I appreciate that.
Andy: What I'm going to take away from this is that I love meeting people like you. What I'm going to remember is the meaning you're getting out of volunteering after your retirement, too, because I'm also thinking long-term about my life. And I've recently come into some folks of people who had very prominent careers and then they retired and then they felt like they lacked meaning and frankly got depressed and couldn't find ways to deliver. I want to have that challenge myself, because I think if you just look around you for problems and say, the old saying, somebody should do something about that. And guess what? I'm somebody and I can probably do something about that. The more we can get folks to like having one-on-one conversations off social media, you know, out there helping each other, I think we'll all be better off. And I love that we both had similar feelings of we want to do something to promote more civility and civil discourse. We've been kicking it around at the chamber a lot. We do it kind of every day almost with our interactions with community leaders and government leaders, but we're trying to share that message more broadly. Recently led the region's first ever Civics Bee for middle schoolers and want to get more people engaged in that. So, I'm going to take away positive feelings and good memories from learning more about you and just knowing that there's other people out there like you that want to improve things.