Aspen Ideas to Go The Aspen Institute

With millions of Americans already infected with COVID-19, public health officials are working to ensure that a safe and effective vaccine is available for every American who wants one. They also want to be sure people aren’t afraid of getting those shots. Nancy Messonnier, M.D., is director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. She leads the Center for Disease Control’s COVID-19 vaccine efforts in the areas of distribution, administration, implementation, safety, and access.

The American Dream says hard work will lead to a better life. But Harvard professor Micheal Sandel says climbing the ladder of success is getting harder in the United States, because the rungs on the ladder are growing further apart.

Current political fault lines are fracturing American society as people grow further apart from one another due to differing beliefs and opinions. We often see people we disagree with as caricatures, and think we can never reconcile our differences. Yet despite that sense of contradiction we are much closer to each other than we think.

It’s time to slow down and start again to remake American culture and undo systemic racism, says author and Yale professor Claudia Rankine. White Americans must wade into the waters of Whiteness, and interrogate their own responses to Blackness.

The civil rights movement has affected all Americans, whether they realize it or not. The opportunity for everyone to vote represents a major shift, but changes in education, housing and even sports reflect the strategic leadership of activists throughout American history. Civil rights experts and Stanford University professors Pamela Karlan and James Steyer discuss the history of civil rights movements in this country including racial equality, women's and LGBTQ rights and how those efforts inform the work that still needs to be done today.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks says liberal democracy has become about “me” instead of “us.” In his new book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, Sacks says we are losing our strong, shared moral code and that’s challenging our sense of community and common good. Growth comes from an openness to others who may not be like us and, he says, developing a moral bond based on mutual acceptance will reduce conflict. In today’s show he speaks with Reverend Serene Jones, the first woman president of the Historic Theological Seminary in New York City.