Troubling Times in the Bush, and in Media's Back Rooms

Everyone now recognizes Cecil, the majestic lion who roamed the Zimbabwean savannah until he was lured into danger by an American hunter who paid megabucks to kill him. Cecil’s death set the Internet on fire and garnered huge amounts of mainstream media attention.  The Doris Day Animal League demanded “Justice for Cecil” and the Empire State building put his regal face on its urban façade as if he were part of a guerrilla marketing campaign. A bill introduced in Congress named after Cecil aimed to extend U.S. import/export restrictions on animal trophies that are threatened or endangered.

All the attention about poached, murdered African animals is good and necessary; what’s happening to these magnificent creatures is horrifying and reprehensible. Anyone lucky enough to have visited Africa and seen its animals knows how small our own place on the planet can seem.

Still, as attention paid to Cecil grew, I wondered why it was that everyone knew a lion’s name and face while virtually no one knew the name or face of a Palestinian baby burnt alive by an Israeli zealot or of a young woman stabbed to death because she attended Gay Pride in Jerusalem. (The baby’s name was Ali Dawabshe. Shira Banki was the sixteen year old murdered in Jerusalem). 

Writer Roxane Gay captured this troubling situation in The New York Times. “I’m personally going to start wearing a lion costume when I leave my house so if I get shot people will care,” she wrote, while acknowledging the brutality of Cecil’s death. But, she said, while “some people also mourn the deaths of Sandra Bland and Samuel DuBose, this mourning doesn’t seem to carry the same emotional tenor. A late-night television host did not cry on camera for human lives that have been lost. … He did, however, cry for a lion and that’s worth thinking about.”

When Cecil’s picture lit up the Empire State Building, I thought, why not Sandra Bland or one of the other 678 Black men and women killed in the last seven months at the hands of law enforcement? Why not that Israeli baby or teenager? Why not one of Boka Haram’s captured girls or one of the women suffering unfathomably at the hands of ISIS?

Then MSNBC announced that it was cutting several journalists: Ed Schultz, Alex Wagner, and four hosts of The Cycle, liberals all. (Joy Reid had already been demoted to “national correspondent”). 

That’s when I began to feel like I was watching a drama that was bizarrely like Out of Africa meets Citizen Kane. (Kane, you will recall, began a career in the publishing world because he was idealistic but he gradually became ruthless in his pursuit of power.)

What, I wondered – if not profit and market share - was going on with mainstream media (which now includes cable news)? Why were TV talk shows and news programs barely covering heartbreaking stories of people in distress (immigrants, refugees, captives, disaster victims) and instead cuing up footage of Cecil interspersed with true crimes stories, weather disasters, and replays of a piece of MH 370? Why were they bringing back bad boy Brian Williams and giving ho-hum Chuck Todd more talk time in place of journalists who are unafraid to do their homework or ask tough questions? In short, why are media moguls allowing Fox News to set the nation’s media agenda?

Out of curiosity I did some research. Google turned up a number of stories about females suffering in the grip of ISIS but with one exception none was more recent than 2014. (Been there, done that?) And none of them delved into the personal stories of the enslaved women. At best, there was a cursory quote or two, but nothing like the heartrending testimonials to be found via alternative sources.  The New York Post did run a story in 2015; it was about “Why are girls flocking to ISIS?” (Borderline sensationalism?)

Meanwhile, Cecil still roams on in our imaginations, kept alive by pundits, reporters and news readers whose editors and producers want to avoid tackling tragedies with a human face because their sponsors know that all the world loves a lion.

Another movie, The Wizard of Oz, also has a lion.  He longs for courage while his friend the Scarecrow wants a brain and the Tin Woodman desires a heart.

It seems to me that we are all in need of courage, intelligence, and a heart in our daily news cycle. Journalists need the courage to ask hard questions without fear of reprisal, and the people who own their outlets and employ them must exhibit intelligent judgment and a sense of priority and balance as they determine the day’s top stories. Working together, they must draw upon what we must hope remains on the road to power, and that is compassion.

As for news consumers, we need to care as much about human beings as we do about animals like Cecil. Only when we demand a more courageous and compassionate media will we have brought home our collective, truly important trophy.

Ferguson, Feminism and Faith Offer Lessons for Our Common Future

In colonial America and beyond, men, women and children, stolen from their native countries, were stripped naked, beaten, chained and sometimes caged, then sold to the highest bidder.  Fathers watched helplessly as their dark-skinned sons were humiliated by potential buyers. Mothers witnessed their beautiful black daughter’s forced to endure virginity tests before they were torn from them forever.

Today, in Iraq and Syria, women and girls are also kidnapped, beaten, caged, forced to undergo virginity tests, and sold to their captors for as little as the price of a pack of cigarettes in some cases. (Virgins sell higher while children under twelve garner the best price.)

Atrocities are taking place in our own time just as they did long ago. Injustices are occurring in Baltimore, Ferguson, and elsewhere in America reminiscent of other travesties (including lynchings) that have occurred in our lifetimes. Black boys and men (as well as girls and women) are being gunned down for walking down the street, playing in the park, selling cigarettes, wearing a hoodie, driving a car.

Recently, in the south, in the 21st century, nine amazingly good people were shot to death by a stranger whom they had welcomed with open arms. Their brutal deaths gave us pause to remember three little girls in another southern church, three young, murdered civil rights workers, Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr. and others.

Most of the deeply moving stories of the people in these scenarios we will never hear. But this much we do know: Racism, human chattel, misogyny and stereotyping continue unabated in a country that insists upon seeing itself as a self-righteous model, and in a world growing ever darker, while these blots on our collective soul continue to destroy our common humanity.          

I think about this because of a speech I read given by Carlton Turner, executive director of Alternate Roots, an Atlanta-based non-profit arts organization that calls for social and economic justice and works through the arts to dismantle all forms of oppression.

In his speech Turner challenged people to examine how cultural beliefs and practices find their way into personal behavior as well as national policies propagated by a dominant majority.  “Categorization and separation [are] long-standing tactics of those in power,” Turner said. “They produce a tangible system that promotes inequity and inflicts deep psychological damage.” Individuals and institutionalized systems that play on these constructed differences, he argues, are complicit in perpetuating harmful dichotomies that encourage, and in some cases condone, violence.

Turner posits that the arts can play an important role in raising awareness and changing social norms. He cites Martin Luther King, Jr. as “a true twentieth century artist” because Dr. King was “adept in his understanding of the Southern oral traditions…masterful in his use of theater…to create dynamic responsive spaces…in the form of public spectacle.” King, he explains, would have understood that the people of Ferguson  and elsewhere who mounted  the Black Lives Matter campaign were demanding to be seen and heard in the public square, in order to declare to the world, ‘we are human!’”

That is exactly what women of the world were saying when, during the UN Decade for Women, they declared, “We are here. We are there. We are everywhere, and we are not going away!”

It is what slaves sang to each other in their soulful spirituals as they picked cotton in their masters’ fields.

It is what nine good people spoke wordlessly when they welcomed Dylan Root into their church and what one of them said as he was about to be killed: “We welcome you here. You don’t need to do this.”

The testimonials that emerged during the civil rights and women’s movements of the 20th century had much to teach us about the power of truth-telling in public arenas. They and the oral traditions of the African-American community taught us that we are not very different from each other in matters of the heart and spirit. Our journeys are all fraught with pain but they are often filled with stories of hope as well.

The narratives we know, whether they are slave tales, stories of violence against Blacks and women’s oppression, or expressions of faith and kindness in the face of horrific fear help us to realize each others' humanity. They engage us, free of learned judgment, as we begin to realize our common bond in the human struggle for freedom and dignity. They say to us all, “We are human!”

The narratives we don’t know - the stories that are still waiting to be told and which will move us to a place of unity – are urgently in need of telling, because nothing less than our common humanity is at stake.  Surely the time has come when we must begin listening – really listening to each other - with open hearts and minds -  so that we can be “free at last” from the myths that have burdened us for so long.

Where Are Women's Organizations in the Fight for Reproductive Rights?

In 411 BC, a comedy by Aristophanes rocked Greece. Lysistrata was a play about one woman’s mission to end the Peloponnesian War by persuading other women to withhold sex from their husbands and lovers until they had negotiated a peaceful settlement.

More than two millennia later, on October 24, 1975, 90 percent of women in Iceland went on strike for a day in the name of economic and social justice. They refused to go to work, to cook or to take care of children. It called to a halt every sector of the country.

On April 25, 2004 the national Mall in Washington, DC witnessed the March for Women's Lives which drew over 800,000 people. Organized by the Feminist Majority, NARAL Pro-Choice America, NOW and Planned Parenthood Federation of America among others multi-generational attendees focused on reproductive rights alongside entertainers, politicians and icons of the feminist movement. The press had a field day.

Each of those events represents a strategy for social change that helped shape history. I’m wondering where such strategies are now among women’s organizations.

Following the recent Black Lives Matter marches that were so effective in garnering media attention and which helped push President Obama to call for renewed efforts to enact new gun-related regulations, I began to wonder why there isn’t a more visible, strategic presence among women’s organizations given the growing attacks on women’s reproductive rights at both national and state levels.

While I recall the power of the many marches I participated in during the 1980s in which issues such as abortion, women’s privacy and their human rights were captured through sheer numbers, compelling personal testimonies, and a responsive media, I’m not necessarily making a case for such mass protests as the best strategy. I understand that from police protection to publicity to Porta-potties, such events involve extraordinary organizational skills and plenty of personnel. They are also hugely expensive. I also know that many of the marches of my day had less than the desired impact on legislation.

I get as well that social media and the Internet have changed the way organizations do things in major ways. But beyond asking people to sign petitions and donate money what is their impact in the absence of human-face, big numbers activism? What exactly is the social media strategy? And what is being done to augment it? (I ask these questions while acknowledging Planned Parenthood’s impressive use of social media under the leadership of Cecile Richards.)

So I decided to put these questions to more than half a dozen key women’s organizations – including the very ones that had organized the 2004 March for Women’s Lives. It breaks my heart to report that with one exception none of them even bothered to answer my repeated calls and emails, even though I’m a bona fide journalist with a certain amount of name recognition among these groups. (Perhaps, like the National Organization for Women they’re too busy promoting “pink Viagra”). The one organization that responded after much prodding was Naral Pro-Choice America; they sent me a bit of canned PR stating that they were “committed to amplifying the voices of Americans who believe that women should be in charge of their own healthcare choices.” The piece mentioned “in-person rallies” and “online petitions” and “getting Google and Yahoo to remove their false advertising.” It said they had challenged TED Talks “to change their policy from one that excludes abortion talks to one that embraces them.” 

 Excuse me? That’s it?

One woman I did talk to was Donna Dees-Thomases, who organized the highly successful Million Mom March in 2000 calling for an end to gun violence. The march, which boasted 750,000 people in Washington, DC and 250,000 others marching in satellite rallies in over 70 American cities on Mothers Day that year, led to a highly successful grassroots movement in which chapters were established around the country. Now united with Handgun Control, Inc. and the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence and known as the Brady Center, their chapters continue to advocate for gun violence prevention legislation primarily at the local and state levels, resulting in many legislative successes. That’s strategy at work.

“Women are organizers,” Dees-Thomases told me, explaining the successes the Brady Center has had. “They’re out in front and they’re making an impact.” At the same time, she thinks too many women in leadership may have become “institutionalized thinkers.” They don’t realize, she explains, that, for example, simply organizing and assisting a few women to visit their state legislators, to testify, to write letters can have a big impact. In other words, it seems to me, they no longer think strategically, or put effort into that kind of activism.

They don’t even bother talking to feminist journalists anymore, it seems, and that gives me pause (especially when I pull out my checkbook.) It also leaves me wondering where the women’s movement goes from here. I guess I won’t be waiting for a callback on that.

Policing Post Mortem: What Needs to Happen Next?

Ever since the indictments came down against six Baltimore police officers after the death of Freddie Gray there’s been a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking and political punditry about what should happen to correct the epidemic of police brutality aimed largely at young Black men. 

But talk is cheap and action speaks louder than words: In the aftermath of Newtown, Ct. we have yet to pass sensible gun laws or to close dangerous loopholes. And when it comes to the horrendous backlash against women’s rights, even the rhetoric is missing.

Having listened to the gaggle of talking heads on TV news shows, it seems to me that several things are needed if change is to happen.

First, let’s listen to people who really understand the problems we face and have good ideas about how to fix them. Some awesome voices and astute analysis came out of Baltimore from within the Black community; “experts” need to listen to them. Among them were the Mamas who head households and raise kids, youth, clergy, and neighborhood leaders. They have a lot to say about what people in the trenches need to survive with dignity. Talking with grassroots folks is at the heart of qualitative research about community problems and how to tackle them and the process works best when it isn’t based on top-down assumptions or value judgments. Where were those voices in the public arena?

Then we have to stop the Blame Game and own the problem, because it belongs to all of us. It’s easy for pundits to blame unions, welfare, single mothers, absent fathers (many of whom are incarcerated) and lack of training (for nonexistent jobs). But the reality is that responsibility for an epidemic of police violence and the reaction to it lies within institutions, governments, corporations, businesses, and with individuals who must recognize the prejudices they harbor.  As economist Paul Krugman pointed out, lagging wages, poor health care, failing education systems, false assumptions and deifying middle class values have all contributed to the crisis.

Telling the truth about what happened and why in cities like Baltimore is urgent. Further, we must be innovative, perhaps even risk-taking, in thinking of ways to address urban America’s problems, not in the future, but now. We must answer hard questions: What needs to happen immediately? Where will necessary resources (human and financial) come from? Where is money invested and what’s the measurable outcome? How can we work strategically, collaboratively and productively and avoid competition or duplication?

Then there’s White-Man-Speak. Are others are as tired as I am of listening to political rhetoric from people (usually male) who have no first-hand experience of the problems about which they pontificate? I’m tired of the Us/Them dichotomy reflected in superficial statements presented as “analysis” from “experts.” I’m fed up with folks who can’t say “I’m sorry” or “I was wrong,” as the mayor of Baltimore couldn’t when she referred to young, frustrated citizens as “thugs.” I’m tired of people like Martin O’Malley, former governor of Maryland and a potential Democratic presidential candidate, using their media time for campaign pitches thinly veiled as solutions.

Frankly, I’m tired of media establishment journalists who don’t have the guts to ask hard questions and press for answers. Why didn’t hosts of Meet the Press and Face the Nation ask the retired detectives they dug up about the legality of locking up hundreds of people in heinous conditions without charge or bail for 48 hours in Baltimore? Why not one question about the millions of dollars paid in reparations for police brutality in Baltimore? Why not hold Speaker Boehner’s feet to the fire when he pouts and ignores questions?

The fact is that superficial talk, assumptions framed as gospel, and blaming vs. getting to the bottom of behavioral precipitants are no substitute for communicating with each other – cops, business people, parents, teachers, kids, clergy, local officials, community opinion leaders. (Attorney General Loretta Lynch made a good start.)  Key questions need to be asked: “What are the biggest obstacles to change? How can we work together to overcome them? Where are we getting it wrong? What do YOU need to feel you have a chance at life? How can we get there together? What are top priorities and how should we begin to approach them? When should we talk again about how we’re doing?”

That approach is labor-intensive and costly in both human and financial terms. It requires a deep commitment to getting things right and seeing things through, no matter how challenging. It means compromising and yielding ego. It means learning to trust others, no matter where they come from or what credentials they hold, or lack. It’s never easy but it is always worthwhile.

Wes Moore, a Black Baltimore resident, retired veteran, and author appearing on Meet the Press said, “People need to think you care before they care what you think. Everyone needs to feel safe. It’s a matter of human intelligence.”

His statement seems like a fine place to start talking before translating words into action.

A Vote for Hillary May be Hard but Consider the Alternative

Last year when author Marianne Williamson posted an open letter to Hillary Clinton, many left-leaning Democrats nodded in agreement.  “I want a woman president,” Williamson wrote, … “and you’d know what to do from Day 1. … But none of that is enough to get the vote of a lot of people …Stop cozying up to the banks, the chemical companies, the military-industrial complex, the party machine, and all the various financiers who make up the plutocracy now ruining this country,” she continued. “If we have a sense that you’d be just another puppet of the elite, then I don’t believe you will win.”

Williamson’s message resonated. I’d chosen Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton when he won his first term, much to the consternation of my feminist friends. But in addition to being against political dynasties, right or left, there was too much about Hillary that worried me, including her relationship to corporations, Wall Street, and an inbred group of “experts” who would likely become her advisers.

I was reminded of that time of testy political discourse during a recent online conversation with a group of women I hold in high regard. One woman wrote, “We’ll never get out of the two-party system and we’ll never get out of big-money politics unless we can demonstrate that we will no longer play their game. I get frustrated hearing that I ‘have’ to vote for the Dems or else the Reps will win. It just continues to support the current paradigm. We have to re-frame the game…”

Another woman added, “Not even entertaining the idea of another party, or independent, is why we are in this mess. If we don’t change how we do things, we are doomed to the same result. Change is needed: Truth to Power!”

I appreciate the point these women are making. But as I responded, “I just shudder to think of having one of the Republican Neanderthals as president. I would like to see Hillary get elected [if she is the Democratic nominee now that Bernie Sanders is running] and then hold her accountable to the choices she makes as President. In light of current realities, that’s the time to hold her feet to the fire, in addition to asking tough questions when she is campaigning, but we just can’t lose this one!”

After more comments ensued, I added, “I really get scared when progressives (like me) divide the vote because of what I will call ‘political posturing’ at crucial times, thus handing the result to Republicans. That’s how we got a Republican governor in Vermont, and it’s how we got a disastrous Republican president when Gore lost.

“It’s so important to be realistic about the political world,” I continued. “Yes, we need to change the system and I hope we can somehow, but the fact is that we are a two-party system (controlled by big money). In light of that reality we must be smart about how and when we work for change. A desperately important election is not the time to take risks because we always lose ‘the game!’ Please, let’s be careful. In my view neither Bernie Sanders nor Elizabeth Warren has a chance of winning and we need to keep the White House!”

To those arguments I would add that we are living in a time when dangerous demagogues are rattling sabers, revealing incipient racism and other prejudices, and exerting a newly malicious misogyny. The actions of some Republican governors and members of Congress during recent weeks and over the course of the Obama administration shine a terrifying light on what would likely become law in America should a Republican win the next election. And it’s not just about the legislative branch of government. We would be choosing federal judges and Supreme Court justices. We would be voting on the future of the planet. We would be deciding not if but when to go to war, and where. And that’s just for starters.

That’s why I am pleading with my progressive friends to be realistic and to get behind Hillary assuming she does emerge as the Democratic candidate. This is not a time for political polemics. Neither is it a time to be divided among ourselves or to engage in brinksmanship. Rather it is a time to be forward thinking, street–smart, united and decisive. That may be an argument for the lesser of two evils but we don’t have a lot of choice right now. The time to take on Hillary and her party will come, and it should. I just hope we don’t end up shooting ourselves in the foot yet again before then.

Like Marianne Williamson, “I’d love to clamor for [Hillary], to work for [her], to cheer [her] on,” and to see her “name the real problems so we can trust [she’d] provide some real solutions.” But I too have reservations. 

I just have a lot more of them when I envision any of the Republicans on the horizon moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The very thought of it chills me to the bone.

What to Do About a Collective Unconscious in Despair

“Every great social movement begins with a set of ideas validated, internalized, and then shared and amplified through media, grassroots organizations, and thousands, even millions, of conversations,” David Korten wrote in Yes! Magazine in 2011.  “A truth strikes a resonant chord, we hear it acknowledged by others, and we begin to discuss it with friends and associates. The new story spreads out in multiple ever-widening circles that begin to connect and intermingle.”

That was the spirit, post-Ferguson and the killing of Michael Brown, it seemed to me, that resonated with so many of us when the call came from many quarters for a new civil rights movement. We had seen again the incipient racism in America that remained unresolved by activism or legislation in the 1960s, racism that was fueled rather than dissipated by the election of our nation’s first Black president.  We saw another March on Washington and it reminded us of the days when Rosa Parks (and a pregnant teenager named Claudette Colvin) refused to sit in the back of the bus and Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream.  We began to think that a new civil rights movement was being born, and that it would carry us forward to a new and better time. Maybe it still will.

Another civil rights movement started in the 1960s, aided by a book called The Feminine Mystique and other feminist truth-telling tales. That movement too needs to be resurrected as a new Congress tries to deny the elementary reality that women are people too.  In its first three days, three measures were proposed in the House of Representatives striving to deny women their reproductive (and constitutional) rights. Such repressive legislation is offered by uninformed, uncaring, and dare I say stupid people akin to the anti-woman gadabout Phyllis Schafly, who remains stuck in the 1950s notion that happiness for women resides in marrying the right man who will give her children, a frost-free refrigerator, and dinner out on a Saturday night.

Marches representing women’s fight for justice and equality also took place in the time of 20th century civil rights activism and they were just as powerful as those led by Rev. King and other Black leaders. The marches for women led by Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem and others were attended by huge numbers of diverse people who thought it was time to end discrimination, second-class status, and state-sanctioned abrogation of human rights.  As the growing chorus for women grew to be global during the UN Decade for Women (1975 – 1985) women began to see themselves and the world through the lens of gender and were changed forever. They are still forcing legislation to catch up.

Many social critics, activists, and others - me among them - believe these movements for civil rights and women’s rights were the two greatest social movements of the 20th century.

But there was another movement during that time that we must remember and resurrect as well. I mean the environmental movement launched by Rachel Carson and her 1962 book Silent Spring.  The book prodded us to examine our relationship to nature and asked that we value the earth we inhabit because its resources are not infinite.  Carson singlehandedly awakened the world to the fact that it was imperative to take responsibility for protecting and conserving nature if we were to enjoy a safe, healthy collective future.

Each of these movements served to transform the way we live. So did the intercultural exchange that became inevitable with the jet age and now the Internet. As David Korten put it, “Together the great social movements of the 20th century and the expansion of international communication has unleashed global scale liberation of the human mind that transcends the barriers of race, class and religion and has enabled hundreds of millions of people to see themselves and the larger world in a new light.”

We need, rather urgently it seems to me, newly-resurrected movements that will take us further in the direction of healthy social change and lead us away from our growing collective despair.  Efforts like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Planned Parenthood’s Action Fund, organizations like Environmental Action and others represent good and necessary grassroots action.  But something even bigger has to happen, something on the scale of the civil rights and women’s movements that draws huge numbers of people together in solidarity and makes them visible and powerful enough to exert real influence on those who make policy and control purse strings.

What I’m talking about goes beyond post Gilded Age populism.  And it is not anarchy; it’s not even a call for – God forbid – socialism.  I’m simply wondering if we have what it takes to meet the urgent need for unified action that can move us toward the right to dignity, the right to safety in our own communities, the right to privacy in our personal decisions, the right to economic security, the right to a Congress, let alone a justice system, that is colorblind, fair and above all, just.

Just the thought of it goes a long way to altering a collective unconscious in despair.

The Myth of a Model Country

Presidents and politicians in this country love to tout America as the best and the brightest nation on earth.  It’s in their DNA, their job descriptions and their speech writers Cliff Notes. They can’t say we’re the biggest nation on earth – that distinction goes to Russia. Nor can they say we’re the richest country on the globe. That would be Qatar, based on comparing countries’ 2014 GDP per capita.

They can claim, as President Obama did in his first inaugural address, that we are “indispensable” to the world and they would probably prove right by many measures.  
But by many other measures no responsible national leader can possibly position America as a model country and here’s why.

So long as the kind of racism we just saw at a frat house in Oklahoma - hot on the heels of the 50th anniversary of the historic march across Pettus Bridge - is still with us, we are not a model country.

So long as we continue to kill each other every day for lack of sensible gun laws no one can make sanctimonious statements about America being a model country.

 So long as our infant and maternal mortality rates remain embarrassingly high for a developed nation we are not a model country.  According to a 2013 Save the Children report, the US has the highest first-day death rate in the industrialized world. “An estimated 11,300 newborns die annually here on the day they are born – that’s 50 percent more first-day deaths than all other industrialized countries combined. And alarmingly, deaths related to pregnancy and childbearing have increased in the US over the past decade, putting maternal mortality at nearly its highest rate in a quarter century according to a recent report published in The Lancet. The US is one of just eight countries where maternal deaths increased between 2003 and 2013; the other nations in this dubious category include Afghanistan, El Salvador, Belize, and South Sudan.

So long as income inequality prevails we are not a model country. According to Laura Tyson, former chair of the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisers, “during the last several decades, income inequality in the US has increased significantly -- and the trend shows no sign of reversing. … Such a high level of inequality is not only incompatible with widely held norms of social justice and equality of opportunity; it poses a serious threat to America's economy and democracy.” According to the Council of Economic Advisers, says Tyson, “if the share of income going to the bottom 90 percent was the same in 2013 as it was in 1973, median annual household income would be about $9,000, higher than it is now.” By comparison, “during the last three decades, middle-income households in most developed countries enjoyed larger increases in disposable income than comparable U.S. households. In 2014, the U.S. lost the distinction of having the ‘most affluent’ middle class to Canada, with several European countries not far behind.”

So long as we are not willing to invest in our crumbling infrastructure, we are not a model country.  Blogger Michael Snyder recently shared two dozen well-documented facts about our infrastructure crises. Among them were these startling facts: The American Society of Civil Engineers has given America’s crumbling infrastructure a grade of D, in part because close to a third of all highway fatalities are due “to substandard road conditions, obsolete road designs, or roadside hazards.” One out of every four bridges in America either carries more traffic than originally intended or is in need of repair. There are over 4,000 dams in the US at risk of failure, a number that has risen by more than 100 percent since 1999. Our aging sewer systems spill more than a trillion gallons of untreated sewage every single year; it costs more than 50 billion dollars annually to clean up that sewage. Further, estimates are that rolling blackouts and inefficiencies in the U.S. electrical grid cost the U.S. economy approximately 80 billion dollars a year. The World Economic Forum now ranks U.S. infrastructure 23rd in the world while we fall farther behind the rest of the developed world every day.

So long as the fact remains that it will take nearly 500 years for women to reach fair representation in US government at the current rate of progress, so long as political corruption prevails in America, so long as the US is ranked 32nd in press freedom by Reporters Without Borders, so long as we still have climate change deniers, and so long as we lead the world in rates of incarceration, we are not a model country.
And that’s not even a complete list of indicators by which one can judge mythical exceptionalism.

Despite the problems of its Nepalese refugees, perhaps we need to take a chapter from Bhutan’s playbook.  The little country with gorgeous green mountains promotes Gross National Happiness which resides in four main pillars: “equitable and equal socio-economic development, preservation and promotion of cultural and spiritual heritage, conservation of the environment, and good governance – all of which are interwoven, complementary, and consistent.”

Till then, the words of one beloved American president ring true. As FDR once said, “This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today.”

Vaccines, Crusades & VicariousThrills

Ever since measles, a criticized speech by President Obama, and a network news scandal hit the media I’ve been trying to identify common denominators to the disparate stories, involving vaccine bundling, possible rhetorical bungling, and Brian Williams.

Each story is complex in ways that are ignored in the sound bytes that substitute for “breaking news.”   In the case of the measles outbreak and the debate about immunization, interesting legal and parental rights issues arise. But it’s also important to understand the facts about measles and vaccines used to prevent “the most deadly of all childhood rash or fever illnesses” as the CDC puts it. 

Measles spreads rapidly and is a disease that can kill.  Before widespread vaccination an estimated three to four million people got measles every year in the U.S. Nearly 500 of them died, 48,000 were hospitalized, and 4,000 developed encephalitis.  I understand the fear of links to autism (which may be reduced by unbundling vaccines) but international research has never established empirically a causal effect. People who don’t remember the sound of a child with whooping cough gasping for breath or the summer terror of polio have room to question immunization.  But for those of us who do remember, and for millions of children alive today in the developing world because of vaccinations, the jury seems to be in.

As for President Obama’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in February in which he invoked the Crusades and the Inquisition to point out that Islam should not be judged unique among religions that have fostered terrible acts, I am among those who saw nothing inflammatory in his honest assessment.  Let the right wing naysayers remember that, to cite a few examples of Christianity run amok, abortion clinics and the people who serve them have been bombed and murdered by zealous Christians, the KKK is predominantly Christian, and Hitler, a self-proclaimed Christian, said that eliminating Jews was “doing Christianity a great favor.” 

I believe the president “wanted to be provocative in his remarks” as his staff said, “because he wanted to make people think about the need to stand up against those who try to use faith to justify violence, no matter what religion they practice.” Could he have done it better or in a different forum? Perhaps. Still, to me, his motivation was right on.

The suspension of Brian Williams because he lied about being in a helicopter in Iraq, and possibly more, shook the news-cum-entertainment world.  A longtime NBC face, Williams had a distinguished, award-winning career.  Some people think he was too severely punished for possible failures of memory. Others, including me, see him as having betrayed all that is sacred and ethical in journalism. 

But the purpose of this piece is not to debate the merits of vaccines, presidential speeches or news people who mess up.  Rather, it is to reflect upon what these three news stories had in common. There seem to be several themes:  Credibility and Trust, Honesty, and Judgment.

Any government agency, especially one invested in keeping us healthy like the CDC, any president or other national leader, and any member of the Fourth Estate needs to be credible and trustworthy.  The skepticism Americans feel about government, politics and media is alarmingly high and growing, and for good reason. The fact is, a growing number of us no longer trust agencies, politicians, or news people to do their jobs, free of corruption and guided by moral decision-making because we’ve been betrayed too many times. It’s not just an American problem and it’s not new, but it’s something we need to recognize as serious in its implications.

Honesty is at the heart of behaving morally. That’s why I do not fault the president on his choice of venue or his remarks about religiously motivated violence. We need to recognize, as Mr. Obama has done, that terrible things have been done throughout history in the name of religion, because without that kind of truth there is no end to violence, and no reconciliation. And the critical issue of honesty is why I believe Mr. Williams cannot be exonerated.  You cannot lie to people and remain a trustworthy conveyer of what is happening in the world. We need to know that what you tell us is true and real, not from the perspective of a media star, but of a common man doing the common good.

In the end it all comes down to judgment.  Whether CDC scientists or the President of the United States, or a media golden boy, that’s what we rely on.  We need to trust that people in high places and public arenas to whom we look for sound information, carefully considered guidance, unadulterated facts and occasional reminders about our better selves will exercise good judgment. We need to know they will not cheat or manipulate us and that they will take risks, rhetorical or otherwise, to help make us alert and aware. That is the challenge of the laboratory, the oval office, and the newsroom. It is the challenge for all of us.

Are There Lessons to be Learned from Kayla Mueller's Sad Story?

I had just filed a book review about a woman who risked her life in 2013 trying to help people in the Congo suffering under the rule of Joseph Kono and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) when I happened to see a journalist on CNN talking about Kayla Mueller, the young woman killed by IS in Syria.  The juxtaposition of what I’d written and what the journalist said about having met Kayla just before she entered Syria was striking, and could offer important lessons for other young idealists who want to head off to foreign lands to help people in war-torn zones.

The book I reviewed is called Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen by Lisa J. Shannon,

a young woman with courage, conviction and a craving for adventure. Shannon went to the Congo with a Congolese friend to tell the stories of what was happening there under Kono in the hope that their narratives would motivate governments and individuals to intervene and provide aid.

By weaving narratives of what life was like pre-LRA and what it had become, Shannon skillfully revealed a tapestry of events at once moving and frightful.  Central to the tale is Mama Koko, a matriarch who stays strong as her family loses everything and is driven into the bush with slim hopes of survival. One by one her relatives become victims of unimaginable cruelty.  Back in town Shannon lives with Mama Koko and other survivors. She hears their stories and films people she interviews, putting herself and her friend Francisca in harm’s way to capture what they are willing to share with her.

The question becomes, why?  When a UN security officer asks, “Who are you with? What is your function?” she struggles to answer that question for herself. “It was weird enough in the US answering questions about how I supported myself as a volunteer, the independent nature of my work. … The strangeness [in Congo] was exacerbated by the fact that I wasn’t sure I knew, even secretly, what my ‘function’ was.” It was a question that troubled Francisca the longer they remained in danger.

Why put yourself and others in terrible danger when you have no sponsor, no media assignment, and no organizational support, I wondered.  What was the expected outcome and how, specifically, might what Shannon did help the victims of a long and vicious war? I questioned whether the author’s ego may have played a part in her altruism, a thought that was supported by what Shannon recalled about leaving the Congo. “The question [was] what now? I had decided how I wanted all of this to end. … Francisca would emerge a leader for her country. I had … suggestions for [her] future leadership role, the one I had built up in my head...” 

But years later, “Kony was still out there.” There were more deaths and greater shortages. And “for the people of [Mamma Koko’s town] there are all the things that are gone, that will never come back.” 

In no way am I suggesting that Kayla Mueller, that beautiful, budding young woman who loved life and wanted to do good things, had an over-sized ego.  Nor do I know if Lisa Shannon does. But like Shannon, Kayla was young and idealistic. It appears that she, like Shannon, acted independently in entering a war-torn country, without any of the rigorous and urgent training required by such groups as Doctors Without Borders, United Nations affiliates, or NGOs.  It also appears that she had no plan for how to translate her efforts into helpful action when she did leave Syria. She didn’t even have an exit plan.

The journalist who met Kayla on the Turkish border with Syria before she embarked on her self-appointed mission described Kayla as “young and naïve.” The seasoned professional who had worked in many terrifying conflict countries worried about what would happen to Kayla, especially in the absence of training and affiliation. She reaffirmed all that was good and true in Kayla and her motives. Then she warned other young idealists not to do foolish things.

During the years when I worked in international development I met a lot of Shannons and Kaylas.  They often came to me to ask for advice about how to implement their plans to “help people.” They were special young adults with a lot of stars in their eyes. I always found them inspiring. But very few of them knew the reality of aid work, affiliated or not. And that was in the days before terrorist groups like IS were even imagined.

So I honor Kayla Mueller, and I grieve her premature death.  Like other bright twenty-somethings, she gave us all hope for a better future when our kinder natures might prevail to prove that love conquers all. You only had to look at pictures of her bright, smiling face to know what she might have given the world had she made it out of Syria.

And therein lies the tragedy of Kayla’s untimely death, and the lessons it might hold for other young, vital idealists. Because the question is not only why? That’s not so difficult to answer. The hard questions are what is my plan and is it realistic, am I properly prepared, how dangerous is it and what are the costs and benefits, how will I make a difference, and maybe most important of all, who will have my back when I need to get out of there?

Can We Do Better on Childcare in America?

On a recent visit to Sweden, I was struck by something having nothing to do with hair color, bike paths or the high cost of living.  It had to do with who takes care of the kids. I saw so many dads pushing strollers, holding toddlers on their shoulders, or talking to kids on their way to school that it stopped me short. The delight of observing male parenting led me to thoughts of other forms of child care, something that many countries can be proud of. Sadly, America is not among them.

Here is the sad reality of child care in this country.  A substantial number of daycare centers are poorly run and often unsafe, despite the fact that childcare now costs more than college tuition in most states while almost 20 percent of working moms with young children work in low-wage jobs. 

According to a 2013 story in the Washington Post, while experts recommend a ratio of one caregiver to every three infants, only a third of children are in settings meeting that standard.  Childcare providers are often poorly paid and trained. Some of them need only minimal or no training in health, safety or child development to get their jobs.  States often lack enough regulators to visit child centers as often as mandated so that even serious violations often go unrecorded or corrected.

At the same time, child care costs are expensive and rising. Child Care Aware of America (CCAA), the country’s leading voice for child care, reported in 2013 that families are paying a significant part of their earnings for the care of their children.  During 2012, for example, the cost of child care increased up to eight times the rate of increases in family income. 

Some family members work two or three jobs just to cover child care costs, and children are often placed in multiple child care arrangements, especially if parents work during non-traditional work hours.  Financial insecurity can lead some parents to remove their children from organized child care and simple “make do.”  The CCAA report concludes that “after six years of studying child care regulations and oversight, we still cannot say with confidence that America’s children are protected by state licensing and oversight systems. Nor can we say that child care policies are in place to help young children learn and be ready for school.”

That last point is important.  A National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) found that high quality child care leads to more positive outcomes even during the teenage years. Even ten years after leaving child care young people experienced high academic achievement and other positive outcomes.

It’s not only child care experts who agree that investment in high quality early care pays off. Economists say that good preschools save future dollars for everyone.  Economic studies show that kids who have experienced high quality early learning environments are more likely to succeed at all levels of education and to gain stable employment, which correlates to lower crime rates.

President Obama raised the issue of childcare in his State of the Union speech last month, underscoring what experts have been saying: a national discussion on the importance of safe, affordable child care is urgently needed, along with an analysis of the true social cost of not providing quality child care.

Meanwhile, other countries already realize the importance and positive impact of carrying for their young. They treat day care as an absolute priority – as we did during WWII when women were needed in the factories and factory crèches were established. However, once Johnny came marching home again, American day care was returned to the realm of mothers who lost gainful employment, economic autonomy and all too often, their sanity in 1950s suburbs.  

It isn’t only Scandinavian countries that can be looked to for models.  France, for example, has a government run system considered by experts to be exemplary. Parents who stay at home to care for their children or hire their own caregivers receive generous tax breaks, which allows 80 percent of French women to work without worrying about their children.  While France spends more on care per child than we do, most French families pay far less out of pocket since the government subsidizes child care with tax dollars and sets fees according to a sliding scale based on income.  The French government allocates roughly one percent of its gross domestic product to child care; that’s more than twice as much as the U.S. does.  And as we all know, “you get what you pay for.”

Surely we should be willing to pay more to ensure the safety and healthy development of our nation’s children, right?  Somehow, given the new Congress, I doubt that the discussion will even take place.  In my book that constitutes a travesty, and a disaster waiting to happen.

Time to End a Two-Tiered Justice System

In the wake of former Virginia Governor Bob McConnell’s measly two year sentence for corruption, and the fact that grand juries failed to indict police officers in the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, is it any wonder that Deborah Foster wrote these words in 2013 in Politicus USA: “One would have to be exceptionally naïve to believe that the American criminal justice system doles out punishments fairly.”

“Justice is supposed to be blind,” Foster continued, “but the reality is that economic status, skin color, where you live, and who you hire as an attorney more likely determine your fate than the facts of your case.”

Carl Gibson wrote about “our fraudulent two-tiered justice system” in a 2014 Huffington Post piece. “The most glaring evidence of our fraudulent judicial branch is shown in the treatment of Credit Suisse’s admission that it helped up to 22,000 wealthy Americans hide approximately $12 billion in assets from the IRS. … . Credit Suisse…was allowed to slide back into good graces by paying a $2.6 billion fine…a lesser rate than lawful Americans pay in taxes.”

Think about that when you consider what happened to Cecily McMillan, whom Gibson cites by way of comparison. McMillan, a graduate student who attended an Occupy Wall Street protest in New York, testified that as she attempted to leave the protest a man who never identified himself as a plainclothes police officer grabbed her breast from behind. Reflexively, she struck him with her elbow for which she was beaten in the street, refused medical attention, and arrested on the charge of assaulting a police officer. At her trial the judge would not allow discussion of her attacker’s violent past, nor would he allow talk of the NYPD’s violent crackdown on nonviolent protests in the Occupy encampment. McMillan was sent to the notorious Rikers Island jail for three months (plus five years probation). She could have gotten seven years. Her attacker, whom many said was guilty of sexual assault, was never tried.

A December 2014 editorial in The New York Times revealed just how bad things are for people like McMillan - vs. Gov. McConnell or Wall Street bankers - who are sent to Rikers Island.  In “the quest to end the barbarism that has long dominated New York’s Rikers Island jail,” the Times editorial announced, the Justice Department plans “to join a pending class-action lawsuit that charges the Department of Correction with failing to discipline officers engaged in abuse.”

The jail’s “deep-seated culture of violence” was revealed in a “lacerating” report put out in December by the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan.  It cited in particular “bloodcurdling examples of sadistic violence” perpetrated against adolescent inmates and revealed that “inmates were sometimes …taken to isolated areas…where they were beaten by groups of officers” who were subsequently “promoted right up the line.”

Antonio Bascaro, who has been in prison for over 34 years (with no prior criminal record) for a non-violent first-time marijuana-only offence, is in Florida, not in Rikers Island, so maybe he doesn’t have to fear this kind of prison violence. That’s good because Mr. Bascaro, the longest serving marijuana prisoner in the history of the U.S., is eighty years old now and wheelchair-bound.

But Wall Street banker Jeffrey Epstein, the so-called “Gatsby of his time,” who was first arrested in 2005 for sexual trafficking to “prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known prime minister, and other world leaders,” as The Guardian put it in January, is unlikely to see jail any time soon. His bevy of well-paid lawyers (one wonders if some of them were his clients) are sure to keep appealing any convictions he receives for years to come. Even if he does go to prison, it’s going to be one of those where white-collar criminals enjoy certain amenities that the Antonio Bascaros of the prison-world can’t even dream of.

When Attorney General Eric Holder expressed concern about Wall Street banks being too big to prosecute for fear of having “a negative impact on the national economy,” Federal Judge Jed Rakoff shot back, “To a federal judge, who takes an oath to apply the law equally to rich and poor, this excuse…is frankly disturbing for what it says about the department’s apparent disregard for equality under the law.  If you’re going to put people in jail for having a joint in their pocket…you cannot let people [at HSBC] who laundered $850 million for the worst drug offenders in the world walk.”

But perhaps it is Matt Taibbi, author of The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, who says it best.  “It is grotesque to consider the non-enforcement of white collar criminals when you consider how incredibly aggressive law enforcement is with regard to everyone else.”

No doubt Cecily McMillan, the kids trapped on Rikers Island, Antonio Bascaro and so many more like them, agree and find a modicum of solace in knowing that a few of us get just how bad our two-tiered system of justice is, and are taking the trouble to call for reform.

Who Will Tell the Stories of Missing Girls & Captured Women?

I can’t get them out of my mind.  Can’t stop wondering what has become of them? Can’t stop trying to imagine how they face day after day after day in captivity?   I’m talking about the 200 girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria and the countless women and girls in Syria and Iraq subjected by ISIS to circumstances unbearable to contemplate, let alone endure.

The hope in October that the Nigerian girls might be freed was dashed when a Boko Haram leader declared triumphantly that the girls had been converted to Islam and married off soon after an announced ceasefire collapsed.  “The issue of the girls is long forgotten because I have long ago married them off,” he laughed in a video message.

According to Human Rights Watch as reported in USA TODAY recently, about 500 young women have been abducted in the past five years. In December over 100 more were taken from their village. Some kidnapped girls have managed to escape, but the majority of them remain in captivity. Victims and witnesses to the abductions report physical and sexual abuse, rape, forced labor and beatings.  We are talking about teenagers.

To make matters worse, the Nigerian government, headed by a president with a big black hat who goes by the name Goodluck Johnathan, has done little if anything to find out where the girls are.  According to Human Rights Watch, escaped girls have never been interviewed by government officials nor has any kind of rigorous government investigation taken place.  Meanwhile the president in the silly black hat hopes to be re-elected.

In Iraq and Syria the situation for women and girls is even more desperate.  Thousands of Yazidi women have been abducted and subjected to unspeakable physical and sexual violence.  According to Nazand Begikhani, a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol’s Center for Gender and Violence Research in England, the horrific treatment of women by ISIS must be treated as genocide.

Here is just one 19-year old woman’s account as reported by CNN.  “They put us in trucks and drove us away. … They separated me along with other young ones and ordered us to stay while taking away the elderly women.  The man I was given to raped me several times and left me in the room on my on. I was shaking from pain and fear…Suddenly another man came and did what he wanted to do despite me crying and begging him, kissing his foot to leave me alone…”

Women like this are systematically separated by age and appearance, forced to convert to Islam, and subjected to various forms of physical and sexual violence, including sexual slavery.  They are sold like cattle, complete with price tags, in markets in Iraq and Syria. Their price ranges between $25 and $1,000. If they resist they are killed. Some become pregnant pariahs, open to honor killings. Many are subjected to genital mutilation. Some commit suicide.

Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, (whom I had the privilege of interviewing after her 2007 release for solitary confinement in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison) has asked why ISIS’s cruelty toward women gets such scant attention in the world’s media while beheadings and executions of captured men are front and center in the news.  “Why,” she asks, “are there no demonstrations in Western and Muslim societies against this barbaric onslaught on women and girls?”

Once again when it comes to resisting, exposing and ending violations of women and their human rights, women are taking the lead.  In both Iraq and Syria they have taken up arms, organized civil protests, and tried to warn the world about ISIS. According to Frida Ghitis, a columnist writing for CNN, a woman is leading Kurdish forces in Kobani and more than a third of Kurdish troops in Syria are women.  They do it, she says, “because women have more to lose than anyone else.”

They do it because of reports like this from a Kurdish woman who got hold of a cell phone.  “Please bomb us,” she begged. “There is no life after this. I’m going to kill myself anyway. …I’ve been raped 30 times and it’s not even lunchtime. I can’t go to the toilet. Please bomb us.”

Brutality such as the beheading of westerners needs to be reported, of course.  But where is this woman’s story being told?  Why do she, and multitudes more women like her, remain invisible in the story, and the stopping of unimaginable terrorism on a medieval scale?  As Haleh Esfandiari asks, “how much longer will the world watch these horrors against women and children before speaking out and acting forcefully to protect them and rid the [world] of such calamity?”

Revisiting "The Banality of Evil"

In the midst of troubling times that include torture, police brutality, sexual abuse, and other acts of violence I happened to be reading about the German-born Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, best remembered for her phrase “the banality of evil.” 

Arendt was writing about Adolph Eichmann after having covered his trial in Jerusalem in 1961 when she wrote those words. “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” which first appeared as a five-part series in The New Yorker, was considered a “masterpiece” by many and is still widely studied and debated. It also continues to spawn vivid controversy about the meaning of her words and thoughts, which some consider to be wrong theoretically while others call them outrageously anti-Semitic.

What people thought – not about her but about how to live their lives – is a loaded word in the context of Arendt’s work.  Thinking – being a sentient human being - was central to Arendt’s thesis that Eichmann was not only “monstrous” but “terrifyingly normal.” In an attempt to explain intellectually the horrific times in which she lived she posited that Eichmann acted devoid of critical thought as much as ideology or other sinister factors in his character.  He was, she suggested, not very different from multitudes of others whose behavior may not be as hideous but who are all too willing to act without compunction, whether to succeed or to survive.

Arendt wrote later that she was “struck by a manifest shallowness in [Eichmann] which made it impossible to trace the incontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives.  The deeds were monstrous, but [Eichmann] … was quite ordinary, commonplace…”  Eichmann was, she had said, “a leaf in the whirlwind of time.”

While Arendt may have been wrong about Eichmann in terms of his capacity for evil, her argument that ordinary people can be brutal seems to stands up.  As Yehuda Kurtzer pointed out in a November Times of Israel blog, most Germans went along with events that led to the Holocaust.  Even Jews assisted the SS to buy time in their own lives. Later, decent men bombed North Vietnam because they were unquestionably following orders from what Arendt called “desk murderers.” 

In Diving for Pearls: A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt, Kathleen B. Jones writes that what troubled Arendt most “was how many others were like [Eichmann] – terrifyingly normal, banal perpetrators of evil. What had happened, Hannah wondered, to make so many people thoughtless?”

After reading Eichmann in Jerusalem Jones wrote, “If I’d been born at another time, in another place, I could have been an Eichmann,” not because of any similarities in their lives or characters, but because of “the uniquely ordinary tale Hannah wove out of the facts of Eichmann’s life…I began to see I could no longer be certain I’d not only know the right thing to do but would do it.”  She continues: “I began to think the Eichmanns among us exist because the world has changed and there are no longer any simple formulae distinguishing right from wrong to turn to when we’re confronted with something unexpected. We have to decide all on our own what we should do and what we might have to risk doing it.  Thinking demands a burdensome kind of vigilant, imaginative observation of the world. Maybe that’s why many people prefer to avoid it.”

In a society in which police can shoot unarmed children and choke a man to death for selling cigarettes and not be indicted maybe we need to think about what Hannah Arendt was trying to tell the world.  When one out of five female college students is sexually assaulted on campus, when military women can’t report sexual abuse for fear of retaliation, and when famous men are alleged to have drugged and raped numerous women whose stories are doubted perhaps we need to think about how easily cruelty can enter our lives.  When politicians with an extraordinary lack of insight, compassion and intelligence can condone torture and legislate against ordinary people and when the ultra-wealthy spend untold amounts of money to buy those politicians, maybe it’s time to think about how quickly so many of us acquiesce and collude. Shouldn’t we be asking ourselves if this is a time to think again about “the banality of evil”?

In 2013, writing about “The Banality of Systemic Evil” on The New York Times Opinionator blog, Peter Ludlow made the observation that Hannah Arendt was making “a statement about what happens when people play their ‘proper’ roles within a system, following prescribed conduct with respect to that system, while remaining blind to the moral consequences of what the system was doing – or at least compartmentalizing and ignoring those consequences.”

It’s an observation that seems eerily prescient, and one that makes me suspect Hannah Arendt got a bad rap when what she was trying to do was simply make people think about some of the most urgent issues of the times in which we live.

The Real Stunner in the Midterm Elections

The day after the election, after I picked myself up from the floor and stopped pulling my hair out, I had a fantasy that went like this:  Michelle Obama walks to a podium, somber and clearly containing her anger.  She pans the room, pauses, and says, “I’m going to take a risk. Many of you won’t like what I have to say. My handlers will hate it. But I’m going to throw away my script and speak from the heart.” 

“My husband did not deserve the terrible, bruising rebuff he suffered in the election. No president in modern history has had to suffer the levels of disrespect and attacks on his character and abilities, nor has any president I can recall had so many crises to deal with simultaneously.  And no president in our history has been subjected to the incipient racism that is part of America’s underbelly.  Whatever you think of him, or his policy decisions and actions, he did nothing to warrant the horrific way he’s been treated, and he did not deserve to be betrayed by his fellow Democrats such that Republicans – many of whom should have their characters and abilities examined – swept into unquestioned power, something I think we will all come to regret.”

The First Lady could not say this, much as she might have fantasized doing so.  But those of us who are not public figures can. And we should, because what happened in the election was unconscionable. It was also deeply dangerous because it has led us one step closer to the demise of democracy, and the rise of an American oligarchy.  Anyone who thinks that won’t happen, or doesn’t matter, will learn too late that they got what they didn’t vote for.

Less than 40 percent of Americans voted in the midterm elections. That’s not surprising if you consider the history of midterms, but it is alarming: History also tells us that passivity is the path to the abuse power.

Why did people vote against their own interests?  Why did they re-elect those who screw them out of needed support systems? Why do they endorse politicians who are in trouble with the law?   

Here’s what I really don’t get.  Why did Democrats run so far from their president and the values he represents?  Why not campaign on those values, and tout the president’s achievements?  What was the Democratic debacle, that huge and ugly betrayal, about?

Here are just some of the achievements I wish the Dems had campaigned on and that voters should have been reminded to consider. President Obama reduced the unemployment rate from over 10 percent when he took office to 5.8 percent. There are now over three and a half million private sector jobs that didn’t exist during the Bush recession and there is huge reduction in the deficit. The U.S. auto industry still exists. The president also stood up to Wall Street and helped avert a global financial collapse. Under his administration, the tax rates for average working families are the lowest since 1950; the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act cut taxes for 95% of America's working families.

The president has understood that women and gays are people too.  He signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act instituting equal pay for women. He expanded funding for the Violence Against Women Act and appointed two pro-choice women to the Supreme Court. He repealed “Don’t ask don’t tell” and appointed more openly gay officials than anyone in history. He also extended benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees and changed HUD rules to prohibit gender and sexual orientation-based discrimination in housing.

President Obama also made us a little safer.  He eliminated Osama bin Laden, disrupted Al Quaeda terrorist plots, toppled Gadhafi, ended two wars, and helped restore America's reputation around the world. He signed an Executive Order banning torture and put the U.S. in compliance with the Geneva Convention.

He addressed education and health care head on.  The president increased funding for student financial aid, cut banks out of the process by reforming student loan rates and expanding the Pell Grants program providing opportunities for low income students. Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act he invested in all levels of education, including Head Start.

With the Affordable Health Care Act, President Obama expanded health insurance coverage to 30 million more people, expanded Medicaid and reduced Medicare costs. He increased federal support for biomedical and stem cell research. He increased the number of children covered by health insurance by four million and extended COBRA health coverage for the unemployed.

The president may not have addressed climate change adequately but he strengthened environmental protection through new laws and policies. He fast-tracked regulations to increase fuel efficiency standards and ordered energy plants to plan for producing at least 15% of all energy through renewable resources.

It would take another column to record all the Obama administration has done to make our country safer, healthier, better educated, more economically sound, and more respected within the international community.  Still, these facts alone should have been enough to keep Democrats from abandoning a president who like all former presidents, and human beings, is not perfect.

That they behaved so badly is the truly stunning surprise of the 2014 midterm elections.

Is America a Failed State?

As we say in New England, it’s been a wicked bad time lately. What with Ebola, ISIS, climate change induced weather crises, the situation in Ferguson, MO, the Secret Service scandals and more, we all feel shaken and fearful for the future.

It’s not only Americans who are feeling less secure and more frightened about what lies ahead. Worldwide, there is a growing sense of insecurity, anxiety and vulnerability. Still, I can’t help noticing the ways in which the U.S. is moving in dangerous directions, revealing flaws so serious that one wonders what separates us from countries that we like to call “developing countries.”  “American Exceptionalism” – a term that smacks of superiority – may no longer imply what is best in our national culture.  Now it may stand for all that is exceptional in negative ways in American life and politics.

Think about the growing corruption in our electoral system, typical in “less developed countries.” The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision dealt a terrible blow to our political process when it ruled that essentially corporations are people. The rise of Super PACS and the power afforded individuals like the Koch brothers will have alarming consequences in the 20016 elections.

Anonymous political giving is growing exponentially. Voters are increasingly accosted by advertising from groups with seemingly benign names and dubious agendas.  These groups are required to disclose their finances only on federal tax returns, and the names of donors are exempted.  Approximately 55 percent of broadcast advertising has been paid for by groups like this recently.  Then there is gerrymandering and changes – attempted or achieved - to voting laws designed to keep certain people from voting the way some folks want them to. 

Then there’s police brutality and our deeply broken justice system. I’m not only talking about what happened in Ferguson or St. Louis or other places where black kids are shot to death by white cops, which obviously has a lot to do with the abysmal state of race relations in this country.

I’m talking about stories that seldom make the news, although the case of Lisa Mahone and her boyfriend Jamal Jones did get coverage. Mahone and Jones were rushing to the hospital where her mother was dying when they were stopped by police because Lisa wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. Before the whole thing was over, police had drawn their guns and Jamal was tasered because he didn’t have an ID and was too afraid to get out of the car.   All of this occurred with two terrified children in the back seat of the car.

The police are simply out of control. They have turned into militarized forces and SWAT teams because they’ve been trained to act like they work in a war zone by people who have done exactly that, many of whom are now cops on the beat. 

Police departments and drug task forces have been allowed to take millions of dollars from Americans under federal civil forfeiture laws with which they buy Humvees, automatic weapons, night-vision scopes and sniper gear, according to the Washington Post. The Justice Department’s Equitable Sharing Program allows local and state police to keep up to 80 percent of assets they seize, even without charging anyone with a crime. In order to retrieve their assets, victims must prove that the seized money or property was acquired legally. Mainly used by the Drug Enforcement Administration or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, there have been 62,000 cash seizures since 9/11 without search warrants or indictments. 

As for the justice system, take the case of teenager Courtney B. who was falsely accused by another teen of unwanted sexual touching, an accusation invented by a mother who wanted to sue a school district for money.  Courtney was arrested in Arizona without due process, held without bail for 66 days, and wrongfully convicted of child molestation by a judge. Sentenced to 11 years, she is required to register as a sex offender upon release. Despite proof that the alleged crime never happened, the county attorney, disbarred after copious alleged ethics violations, refused to admit he’d made a mistake. So this young woman languishes in jail - like so many others with similarly tragic stories, and many exonerees who finally make it out.

Clearly, we are failing as an exceptional, First World, democratic country in many ways.

In a recent column in The New York Times related to the Secret Service debacle, Thomas Friedman put his finger on something important and relevant. “Just look at Washington these days and listen to what politicians are saying,” he wrote. “Watch how they spend their time. You can’t help but ask: Do these people care a whit about the country anymore?”

We should all be asking that question with all due speed and gravity before we too become known as a “less developed country” struggling with political and moral corruption.

The Heart of Birthing: Doulas & the Support They Offer

Having just witnessed another birth, I’ve been reflecting once more on why I became a volunteer doula and what the work means to me.

I’m a baby freak, plain and simple.  As a young candy-striper I routinely snuck into the pediatrics ward so I could rock sick kids.  While my high school friends dated, I babysat.  If I hadn’t been a product of the fifties, I might have considered becoming a obstetrician or a midwife.  Instead I followed the path that most girls my age did: I went to college for a liberal arts degree and then became a secretary -- a medical secretary.

My real career began when I became program director in 1979 for the National Women’s Health Network, a Washington, D.C.-based education and advocacy organization dedicated to humane, holistic, evidence-based, feminist approaches to women’s health care. In 1985 I went to Nairobi for the final international conference of the United Nations Decade for Women (1975-1985).  Inspired by that amazing event and armed with a master’s degree in health communication, I began working internationally on behalf of women and children, always trying to bring a gender lens to the table.

In the midst of all this, I gave birth twice.  My children were born in the seventies as the women’s health movement, and individual women, were beginning to advocate for natural childbirth and to resist the traumas of overly-medicalized birth experiences.  We took Lamaze classes, learned about nursing, expected dads to be active in our deliveries.  I was lucky:  not only were my labors quick and unremarkable, but the small community hospital where I delivered was sympathetic to the changes taking place in birthing.  There were no monitors, no drugs “to take the edge off” if you didn’t want them, no enemas, no shaving, and no macho-docs (although I couldn’t talk my doctor out of the episiotomy).  I labored with my nurse and my husband and when the time came to push, I watched my babies come into this world in total awe of what had just happened and what I had done.

Several years ago, I learned that my local hospital had a volunteer doula program.  Signing up was a no-brainer and I’ve now had the honor of supporting dozens of women and their partners as they’ve done the hard work of delivering a baby.  Not one of them has failed to say afterwards, “I couldn’t have done it without you!” (They could, but I’m glad to have eased their experience.)

One of the early births I attended stands out in my mind.  It was a first pregnancy and the mom labored stoically for thirty-six hours, pushing for five, before her son was born. As the hours passed, I held her hand, wet her lips, wiped strands of matted hair from her eyes, rubbed her back.  “You can do this,” I whispered in her ear when she grew doubtful. “You’re doing a magnificent job! Soon your baby will be born.”  As the baby finally crowned, wet, dark hair pressing urgently against her, I held the mother’s leg in my arm, her hand clenching my free wrist as she cried out with that guttural groan of a woman pushing her child to life outside the womb. And suddenly, there he was, head emerging, wet and pinking up even as his perfect little body swam into being. Later, swaddled and suckling at his mother’s breast, his father, eyes wet, whispered across the bed to me, “Women’s bodies are so miraculous!”

“Yes,” I said, my own eyes filling, “Miraculous.” Always miraculous, no matter how many times you give witness, or weep yourself to see a woman giving birth.

Doula supported childbirth has been proven to reduce the incidence of c-sections, shorten the length of labor, reduce the number of medicated births, increase breastfeeding and provide higher satisfaction for mothers regarding their birth experience. As one pediatrician put it, we are “the descendants of those millions of women who gathered at bedsides around the world” to help women through labor and delivery.  “Some day we may again reach a point where women rely on the traditional circle of birth-experienced [women] to ease them through childbirth. … Until then, skilled, compassionate doulas will ably stand in for them.”

That is why I feel privileged to do this voluntary work.  It is simply an honor to give witness to birth, and to offer as many women as possible the opportunity to have a birth that is supported, memorable, and full of joy.