I've always been more sure of what I didn't want to do with my life than really understanding what I did want to do. I didn't want to be a pastor and I didn't want to be a lawyer. I wanted to make a change, I wanted to positively impact society, but for some reason, I knew there was going to be a different road than the traditional judicial or spiritual approach. I looked heavily into public policy schools, knowing my love for politics could easily translate into the makings of a good policymaker, but I realized that I believed more in a combination of a quantitative and qualitative research, not the almost completely statistical nature that public policy schools bring home. I want it to be both/and, not either or.
Before class today, I expected most of my reflection to be based around the idea that perhaps the abortion legislation has hijacked the whole women’s rights movement, but then class discussion steered more heavily into the realm of quantitative data, statistics, the very thing I wanted to steer clear from. Worse par t is, I found myself defending its use, especially for legislative purposes.
To be clear, I understand completely that statistics require a critical eye and careful interpretation. We must be fully aware that no research can be completely comprehensive and its more than likely that no answers will come from data, as it easily becomes outdated. All of this said, I believe very strongly in the use of numbers and quantitative research in order to make moves towards justice.
If we expected our legislators, our judges, our leaders, to base every decision they make on their own personal experiences or based on the experiences they have heard from others, I contend that our already slow and arduous law-making process would become even slower, even more obsolete. We need certain data to tell us which areas of town need public transportation more heavily than others, we need the census to tell us how best to distribute monetary funds, we need numbers to tell us which children are struggling in school. We need numbers and statistics as much as we need emotional stories of heartbreak and heroism. In order for our political system to function at a high level, we need to be fully aware of the demographics that exist in our country as a whole. Especially if there are parts of this country crying out for change.
That said, I still don’t want to be a lawyer. If Rosenburg’s The Hollow Hope reinforced anything for me, it’s that the judicial system takes a much larger stand after public opinion has already been swayed. They follow; it’s the people who lead. This does not make the judicial system at all unnecessary or never capable of creating change, but it puts a large emphasis on the understanding that all political bodies need to be at work, and preferably all at once. We need an organized community, armed with personal testimonies and empirical data alike, to inform and encourage our legislative bodies, who then create policies to fulfill the people’s need. Those policies need to be interpreted by our judicial body and then enforced through the executive branch. And going further, we need people to respond and criticize the policy measure and let the whole process begin again.
I do believe that politics and quantitative research have an important place in our desire for change. Meshing with the qualitative and passionate aspects of society, chances of success will be high. It’s mixing of the black and white that makes such an approach so appropriately gray.
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