What's Missing in Dialogues About Poverty?

When six Republicans met in South Carolina recently to discuss combating poverty their focus was predictable. Marco Rubio talked about broken families, dangerous neighborhoods, substandard housing, failing schools, and drug dealers, all while rejecting the idea of raising the federal minimum wage. He argued that welfare should be turned over to states, especially those that have recipient work requirements.

Jeb Bush, who agrees with Rubio on states taking over welfare, blathered about giving Americans the “right to rise.” Ben Carson said that “some people hate rats, some hate roaches, I hated poverty.” And Chris Christie warned against drug addiction as the gateway to incarceration.

Rubio invoked his parents, a bartender and a maid, to extol rising above poverty. But they had jobs which presumably they could get to without too much hassle, steady incomes, and, it would seem, someone to watch the kids.  Bush’s comments smacked of not wanting the problem in his neighborhood, and Carson seemed to equate poor people with vermin.

It reminded me of Paul Ryan and the accolades he received when he said he “could not, and would not, give up [his] family time” to serve as House Majority Leader. But does he hold to that ideal for people who spend hours waiting for several buses to get to two or three minimum wage jobs, worried that there is no “angel in the house” to take care of the kids, and no decent day care? Does he realize, as Judith Shulevitz pointed out in a recent New York Times op ed., that there are more than four times as many American families run by single moms as by single dads, and that a third more households are headed by women on welfare than those run by men?

The fact is the competing Republicans don’t get the reality of poverty. They’ve never lived it and they don’t like it. The only emotion it seems to raise in them is pity. God knows it’s never empathy. Nor do they get the interconnections between major federal issues in need of urgent attention and poverty alleviation.  Shove punitive, top-down, us/them welfare problems back to the states is their mantra. They don’t want to see it and they don’t want to deal with it, because dealing with it means addressing really big issues, and then funding them.

Transportation infrastructure is one example. None of the naysayers has ever had to get to work without a car (and often a driver). How willing would they be to rise in the wee hours of the morning to catch several buses in any kind of weather? How many of them have ridden sophisticated transportation systems in other countries, where wait times are almost nil and connections are well planned so that people who really work for a living can be moved about by the millions with relatively little hassle?

How many of the Horatio Alger guys have had to worry about quality, affordable, accessible daycare? Hey People on the Hill: Poor folk don’t have nannies!  They don’t have stay at home spouses. They don’t even have enough food to feed their kids half the time and some of you want to cut food stamps?

Speaking of nutrition, it’s a big part of staying healthy so you can work. So is affordable, accessible, quality healthcare.  It might be worth factoring that into the equation for ending poverty while you’re trying to gut Obamacare or avoid universal health care.

I wish Republicans who talk in clichés would understand important connections like these.

Judith Shulevitz raised an interesting approach in her Times piece. She pointed out that a number of countries are contemplating a “universal basic income” or U.B.I. A proposal in Finland, for example, would experiment with giving every adult 800 Euros (about $870) a month. Switzerland and Canada are among other countries calling for similar experimentation.

The rationale is that it’s a way to reimburse people who lead productive lives, like mothers and other caregivers who don’t receive money for what they contribute to society.  (About thirty years ago a social scientist figured out that if women were remunerated for all they do their worth would be something like $40,000 annually. Imagine what that is in today’s economy!) The U.B.I. also reflects “a necessary condition for a just society,” as Shulevitz puts it. It’s seen as a general entitlement in this framework. It’s also been called “a floor below which nobody need fall.”  

Basic income proposals like this one from both right and left are not new but they are complex. It’s something to think about while good folks genuinely strategize around ending poverty in our rich country. Of course, the Republicans who flap their cake holes about poverty would never consider such an idea.

The thing is, maybe it can help move them toward more rationale, responsible thinking about poverty alleviation. At least they might not dump it all on the states as nothing more than a local problem loaded with society’s detritus.

Overcoming the Politics of fear

Sometimes when I am contemplating a commentary events conspire to help me reflect more deeply on the subject at hand. Such was the case when, after Donald Trump’s outrageous suggestion that Muslims in America should be registered and no more Muslims should be allowed to enter the country, I began to write about the politics of fear. 

I first recalled what Franklin D. Roosevelt told Americans during World War II: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” the president said. He was cautioning a frightened population against fear-induced paralysis. It was an especially important message given that considered, decisive action and not passivity was urgently needed to defeat evildoers like Hitler. Perhaps he was also warning us not to cower in the face of demagogues and not to yield to unacceptable language that serves to fuel heinous deeds. Quite possibly he was also cautioning against becoming inured to a kind of evil that can invade our collective psyche so that seemingly innocuous words like “normal,” “necessary “and “needed”  begin to justify a nation’s dangerous, destructive, shameful behavior.

While I was thinking about this I happened to be reading an extraordinary novel by the Russian-born writer Paul Goldberg. The Yid is about Stalinism, anti-Semitism, racism and more in 1950s Russia and it struck me as incredibly relevant. Goldberg’s protagonist, for example, compares political purges to epidemics that “start out with a small, concentrated population, then expand their reach nationally, even globally.” Epidemics of infectious diseases, he says, “can reach a peak” before inevitably receding. He concludes that Fascism is an infectious disease and Stalinism is a plague. Neither can survive, but in their long brutality many people suffer and die.

I can’t be the only one to read this book and think of Donald Trump’s vicious talk and insidious proposals when it comes to Muslims or immigrants and refugees.

Goldberg’s character was right to say that epidemics – even political ones - can become global. The growth of France’s right wing party or for that matter the far right voters in the UK, Poland, and elsewhere demonstrate that. Never has there been a more urgent time to ask ourselves, as Goldberg does, “What are we dealing with? Is this outburst of ignorance and hatred akin to systemic disease? What if you could find a way to intervene and neutralize it?”

Then something else happened as I was tossing all of this around in my mind.  I attended an amazing non-denominational religious service in which a gifted minister spoke about fear and what it can do to us. Without ever mentioning refugees, immigrants, Republicans, or Muslims, and using only Good Samaritan stories to make his point, this good, compassionate, intelligent man hit the nail on the head. 

Fear, he said, leads to hate and hate leads to demonizing people who may be different than we are. We need to see past those differences. We must be global citizens and good neighbors. We must recall and reclaim our national shame in remembering what America did to Native Americans, to Japanese Americans during the war, to the Jews we turned away when they were desperate to escape Nazi atrocities, to the multitudes of Black Americans who died hanging from trees or attacked by dogs when they fought for civil rights, to HIV/AIDS or Ebola victims – all because we saw these human beings as “they,” The Other, the Outsider, the threat that fueled our fear. We need also to reclaim our own Good Samaritan stories if we are to survive, the minister reminded us. We must reject the fearmongering of Biblical literalists who often forget that to be human is to behave humanely.

So, no more polemicists like Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson who preach fear and hatred from their pulpits.  No more demonizing of others by right-wing zealots in Congress or elsewhere. No more Trump travesties or political poison born of bigotry. No more foul-mouthed, unfounded accusations. No more letting fear dominate our decisions and behavior. No more fear defining our national character so that other nations no longer want to engage with us.

The time for proclaiming with our voices and our vote that we are not going to do it anymore is now. The time is here to say clearly that we reject fear as our future. Instead, let us see past challenging times in order to survive as a unified, dignified nation. Let us be a country whole and healthy. Let the fearmongers slink away and find their own place in the world, but let it not be ours.    

Shut Up and Put Up: A Military Culture of Retaliation When Rape Happens

Sometimes as a journalist one thing leads to another and you suddenly find yourself going down a dark rabbit hole that you hadn’t planned to visit. That’s what happened to me recently when I was writing a piece about how the Veterans Administration’s mental health system and the military in general were failing women in need of care following sexual assault.

I interviewed a lot of women veterans who had suffered military sexual assault while serving their country for that piece and what I heard wasn’t pretty. Nor were the things they said about what had happened to them when they sought help, or when they tried to tell their stories. That’s the part that led me down the rabbit hole, because the truth is retaliation is rampant in the military against those who tell the truth about what happens to victims of abuse.

“It’s a culture of silencing,” one source who’d been warned not to talk to the media told me. “They take away your First Amendment right to free speech.” Then he called me, twice, in a panic.  “Don’t use my name,” he said. “I still work for the VA.” Soon afterwards I got a call from another source who asked that I water down her comments. “My husband still gets his care at the VA,” she explained.

But don’t take my word for it. In May 2015 Human Rights Watch released a report called “US: Military Whistleblowers at Risk” in which it detailed retaliation for reporting sexual assault. “Military service members who report sexual assault frequently experience retaliation that goes unpunished,” the report said after its 18-month investigation in partnership with the human rights organization Protect Our Defenders. “Despite extensive reforms by the Defense Department to address sexual assault, the military has done little to hold retaliators to account or provide effective remedies for retaliation,” the report said, adding that “the Military Whistleblower Protection Act has yet to help a single service member whose career was harmed.”

Let’s put a human face on this travesty. “A Sergeant told me he would kill me if we ever went into Afghanistan because ‘friendly fire is a tragic accident that happens’,” a female soldier told Human Rights Watch.  Another reported that she was assaulted by a cook whose colleagues harassed her so much she couldn’t eat in the mess hall. She “lived off of cans of tuna” for seven months. In another case a female Marine’s name and photo were posted to a Facebook page where other Marines could comment. “Find her, tag her, haze her, make her life a living hell,” someone wrote. Another soldier said she should be silenced “before she lied about another rape.”

Is it any wonder that one advocate I interviewed said she advises women who come to her for help to “get out right now because you life is on the line.” She told me “it’s not unusual for women to go missing” or to have their deaths called a suicide.

A study conducted by the Rand Corporation in 2014 revealed that 62 percent of women who reported unwanted sexual conduct to military authorities experienced some form of retaliation. The study also found that 35 percent of women reporting sexual assault suffered an adverse administrative action, 32 percent suffered professional retaliation and 11 percent were punished for infractions after reporting. It didn’t count the number of women who receive pseudo-psychiatric diagnoses like “Borderline Personality Disorder” which is often used to damage or end a victim’s career.

“These sickening stories of retaliation against survivors should make every American angry,” Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand (D-NY) has said. “We keep hearing how previous reforms were going to protect victims, and make retaliation a crime. Yet there has been zero progress on this front and this mission is failing. Survivors will not be able to get the justice they deserve until we change this business-as-usual climate without any real accountability and create a professional, non-biased and independent military justice system.”

Don Christensen, president of Protect Our Defenders, agrees. “When no one is held accountable for retaliation, it creates a hostile environment for all survivors, and sends a message to criminals that they can act with impunity. When a survivor who reports sexual assault is 12 times more likely to suffer retaliation than they are to see their rapist convicted, it demonstrates the military has a long way to go to fix this problem.”

After talking to so many brave women who have suffered terribly, first by being raped and then for telling the truth about it, I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I’ve written their stories here and elsewhere, which has led me to wonder occasionally if I will be retaliated against in some way. So if my column doesn’t appear next month please come looking for me. Maybe you should start with that ultimate black hole – a military brig – where someone who bears an uncanny resemblance to Al Capone may well be watching over me.

Got Chutzpah?

It’s one of my favorite Yiddish words. Chutzpah. It means guts, balls, a touch of arrogance, courage. To be full of chutzpah is to be a risk taker, a speaker of truth to power, a pain in the butt, a winner, a cool dude, a person who gets things done. Even then, there are nuances to the word that are hard to convey whenever you try to translate Yiddish words into English, even when they’re part of the general lexicon.

A joke may help. An old woman gets on a crowded bus. Standing in front of a seated young girl hand held to her chest, she says, "If you knew what I have, you would give me your seat." The girl gives up the seat. The girl takes a fan and fans herself. The woman says, "If you knew what I have, you would give me that fan." The girl gives her the fan. Minutes later the woman says to the bus driver, "Stop, I want to get off here." The driver says he must stop at the next corner. Hand across her chest, she says, "If you knew what I have, you would let me out here." The bus driver pulls over and lets her off. "Madam, what is it you have?" he asks. "Chutzpah," she replies.

The first time I realized I the rewards of chutzpah I was in eighth grade. In those days girls had to take sewing while boys enjoyed shop. To this day I can barely sew a button back on so having to make a nightgown was unbearably challenging, especially since the sewing teacher only helped girls who liked sewing. One day I said as much to her in a pique of frustration while struggling to thread a bobbin. The sewing teacher was black; next thing you know I’m hauled into the principal’s office accused of making racist remarks having to do with a nightgown. Stunned, I faced the principal and said, “I never did any such thing. What I said was, ‘You only help girls who like to sew.’ Then I drew myself up and continued. “I’m a minority myself. I’m Jewish. Do you think I would make nasty remarks to another minority?” The nonplussed principal stared at me. “You must apologize!” he demanded. “I’m sorry but I cannot apologize because I did nothing wrong,” I countered. Then, in the absence of a response, I left the room. And that was that. Score one for chutzpah.

There have been many more incidents since then when chutzpah held me in good stead. On my first job interview I pretended to take shorthand when in fact I was remembering what the man said before racing to the typewriter to tap the words onto paper. Later, after I had worked some months for him (and taken Speedwriting), he said, “I knew what you were doing. I figured anyone who could pull that off deserved the job!”  

 I’ve played the chutzpah card in Bali when a cop tried to con me out of money for a faux traffic violation, and in Chiang Mai when an optician overcharged me for glasses. Chutzpah trumped passivity when I reserved a 16-pound turkey for Thanksgiving at a well-known Washington, DC food emporium and was given a 22 pounder instead. It happened again at Christmas; I got my turkey and two bottles of wine free. The ultimate chutzpah, I suppose, is that I married a gentile man in the days when you could get disowned for such a thing.  

But here’s the really important thing about chutzpah. It’s not just something you call upon for fun or to flex your muscle, and it’s not something you use solely to get what you want.

Rather, it’s a strategic way to stand up for yourself, like Gandhi did in order to free his Indian nation from British rule. It’s what you draw upon in certain circumstances so that you are not duped or diminished. Chutzpah well-demonstrated is an effective way to remind people that you matter and that you are not going to be ignored, trivialized, disrespected or rendered invisible. It’s a way of saying, “Don’t mess with me because I’ve got your number!”

Yiddish – derived from German and Hebrew – is a marvelous language. Some of its words are so filled with nuanced meaning we just couldn’t get along without them. How else can you convey the fatigue of a long schlep or the aggravation of someone else’s mishagoss? How can you describe all the joy embedded in a Mazel Tov? What better conveys a complainer than someone who qvetches endlessly?

Still, for me, chutzpah rises to the top of my limited Yiddish tongue. It serves my inner rebel, reinforces me in my convictions, and most happily of all, renders me a force to be reckoned with. Who could ask for more than that in a single word?

He Said, She Said: An Election Dilemma

Like a lot of other politically active liberal Democrats, I’m in a pre-primary quandary. Hillary or Bernie? One day I’m for one candidate, the next I’m leaning toward their contender. Both make a lot of sense to me and represent my world view. But both have done things (or not) that make me wonder about their ability to lead the country (and the world) in a way that makes me feel totally comfortable and confident.  

I’d love to see a woman president in my lifetime, but I voted for Barack Obama the last time Hillary ran because I have reservations about her that persist, and I don’t like political dynasties. And I like what Bernie stands for, but he’s troubled me on a few issues, and I wonder if he has the personality, patience and negotiation skills required to get things done on the Hill and around the world, progressive ideology notwithstanding.

The Democratic candidate who emerges will have my full and active support. I will go to the mat to ensure that whichever Republican is nominated has no chance of wreaking the havoc each of them has promised. But here are some things I need to see in a Democratic frontrunner in order to be a proud American again, and to feel that there is hope for the future of our country, our world, and our planet.

First, at the national level, I need to know that serious, enforceable gun control legislation will be among the new president’s priorities.  I need to stop seeing daily reports of senseless gun deaths, reports so ubiquitous that we are no longer shocked by them because they are as common as a bad weather report. We have become our own killing field and an enigma to the civilized world. It’s time to understand the 18th century intent of the Second Amendment and to question its relevance today. It’s time to tell the NRA to take a hike.

I also need to see reforms within our justice system, our prison-industrial complex and our approach to incarceration overall. Enough of people like Carlos Mercado, a 45-year old diabetic man who died after 15 hours at New York’s notorious Rikers Island for lack of medical attention as guards stepped over him as he lay dying. Enough of women like Sandra Bland dying in prison for not using a turn signal. Enough of white- collar criminals walking away while black boys and men waste away in lockup. Enough of the torture of solitary confinement and of innocent people incarcerated for years and sometimes put to death by the state. Enough of police brutality, bad lawyering, powermongering parole boards, and judicial corruption. Enough of swat teams in place of community-based policing and sufficient mental health services.

I need to see serious attention being given to rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure before it literally falls down around us. Whether its endangered bridges, potholed roads, a ridiculous Amtrak system instead of high speed rail and mass transit like the rest of the developed world has, or up-to-date air traffic control technology, it’s time we stopped gluing ourselves back together, or ignoring altogether disasters waiting to happen. Instead of building walls to keep people away or devising ways to take a one-way trip to outer space perhaps we could make life safer and more comfortable for folks moving around in our own neighborhoods and cities.

With a view to the wider world, I need to know that the next president grasps the reality and urgency of climate change. It’s imperative that he or she gets the fact – the indisputable fact - that we are on the cusp of extraordinary, irreversible disaster if we don’t act now to save our planet. Reports by multiple, credible scientists of sea changes and weather events driven by global warming - including water shortages that could result in insufficient food, new migrations and conflicts over water - are already here. What will it take for naysayers to get the severity of the issue? One answer is a president who prioritizes climate change and acts responsibly along with other global leaders.

Clearly, anyone in the Oval Office needs to be absolutely dedicated to human rights – which include women’s right to agency over their own bodies and lives – and to making such dedication clear and operational.  That means ensuring that quality health care and education is accessible and affordable for everyone. It means having a viable strategy for helping the world’s refugees, people of color, and those from other ethnic or religious backgrounds to feel safe and to live dignified lives.

Finally, I need the president to be absolutely savvy about foreign affairs and to have the kind of experience, advisors, and negotiating skills that give all of us the best chance of living in a world in which armed conflict is reduced and terrorism is eliminated without the slaughter of innocents.

It’s a tall order. But Hillary and Bernie have a year in which to convince me which one of them is up to the job. Until then, I’ll just have to live with uncertainty. 

A Glimmer of Hope

Listening to Donald Trump’s continuing trash talk, watching the climate change-induced infernos burning on the west coast, hearing Republicans medieval take on women’s rights, and suffering reports of continuing gun violence, it’s hard to find anything positive to say about the future of the human race. 

Still, there have been glimmers of hope on the horizon. One of the biggest examples is individuals’ response to the heartrending refugee crisis - and let’s be clear about that term: Migrants leave home for economic reasons; the thousands of people fleeing war, starvation, persecution and death in countries like Syria and Afghanistan are refugees.  While some countries (like Germany) have behaved better than others (like Hungary) in trying to offer a humane response to a human tragedy the proportions of which we have not seen since World War II,  it’s really what individual people have done that offers hope for the better side of our nature.

In Germany, for example, hundreds of peopled signed up on the website Refugees Welcome to offer accommodation in their private homes. Described as an “Air B’n’B for refugees,” the Berlin-based site has helped people from Africa, Syria and elsewhere. Many other EU countries have followed their example. According to The Guardian, the group has been overwhelmed by people in various countries wanting to help.

Another strategy assisting refugees is the wide petitioning of governments to accept more people, as Icelanders, Brits and others have done. And many groups have formed or joined the attempt to help too. Calais Migrant Solidarity, for instance, organized aid from the UK and delivered clothes and food to stranded refugees in France. Doctors of the World have been providing care to vulnerable people with health risks. Folkstone United helped get donated goods and volunteers to makeshift refugee camps. Individuals have also driven to refugee sites from all over Europe, bringing supplies and in many cases driving exhausted refugees to borders.

One notable individual who offers hope for the future of the world in most people’s minds is Pope Francis, who before traveling to Cuba and America presided over the marriage of nearly two dozen couples from Rome in St. Peter’s Basilica. What made this ceremony exceptional was that one bride was already a mother, some of the couples had been living together, and others had been married before. 

The Pontiff, who has yet to fully address women’s issues and the pedophilia disaster in the Church has, to his credit, convened an Extraordinary Synod to take place this month, only the third such meeting since the Synod of Bishops was created in 1965.  The topic of discussion is how the Church can be more compassionate with respect to modern views and practices regarding sexuality.  Pope Francis has also encouraged people to imagine a more hopeful future with his push for greater action on climate change, his utterly humane view of the poor, and his endorsement of the Iran deal.

Those of us who value negotiation over armed conflict and war can take some hope from the Pope’s position on Iran nuclear disarmament and from the Senate’s defeat of Republican efforts to kill the deal. We can also take solace in the fact that attempts to defund Planned Parenthood and to end the constitutional right to abortion at 20 weeks were defeated in the Senate. And some Republicans are now espousing criminal justice reform, including ending solitary confinement, while Democrats like Hillary Clinton, who once called for “tougher sentences for repeat offenders” and “three strikes and you’re out” policies” are calling for police reform and an end to “mass incarceration.”

Talking about politicians, what could auger hope more than the paralleled political lives of presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders in the U.S. and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK? The comparison between the two men - one an avowed Social Democrat, the other a card-carrying Socialist who just became Labour Party Leader - is stunning: they are both people whose campaigns were not taken seriously at first, they both vigorously defend putting principles above political expediency, and they both believe that we need, as Corbyn has said, “a force for change in the word, a force for humanity in the world, a force for peace in the world, and a force that recognizes we cannot go on like this…”

Whether or not either of these left-leaning, newly emerging politicians can make it in their respective forthcoming elections is something we will have to see. For now, we can leave their chances to analysts and pundits. What’s important and relevant here is that people like Sanders and Corbyn are making it to the world’s political podiums.  They are being heard and applauded and believed as they bring a new and better vision of a sustainable world to us.

Happily, they are like the good people flocking to help thousands of refugees find hope in a frayed world. They embody the spirit and the possibility of a negotiated future. And perhaps most important of all, unlike Donald Trump, they talk truth, not trash, to their adoring crowds.

The Fine Art of Listening

When I was a communications major in graduate school, “active listening” was a big piece of the curriculum. It seemed a light weight subject at the time. Later, when I taught listening skills to my own students, they too assumed it was a ho-hum ‘no brainer’ largely because the literature on paying attention to others - really hearing them - seemed to belabor the obvious: People need to be heard, validated and appreciated.

But the fact is that listening – giving our full attention to another - does not always come naturally. And the value of full attention, which leads to understanding and therefore appropriate response (which in some cases is no response, just listening), is often overlooked.

I was reminded of this on several occasions recently.  The first was when a young woman I know told me how much she appreciated the fact that I always listen to her. It was a simple statement of gratitude but one laden with meaning. What she was really saying was that she valued the fact that I took her feelings seriously and offered genuine support, which made her life easier and provided comfort in difficult circumstances. That was deeply important and helpful to her, and it was important to me too.  I felt the reward of knowing that by “simply” listening I had made someone’s journey a little bit easier.

That sense of easing someone’s journey through totally silent, wholehearted listening is part of an initiative called The Welcome Johnny and Jane Home Project launched by psychologist and writer Paula J. Caplan.  As Caplan explains, “Through free, voluntary, private, and respectful listening sessions, volunteer listeners help to reduce the common chasms between veterans and non-veterans through the simple act of a non-veteran listening to a veteran from any era. This helps veterans through the power of human connection.”

Listeners who volunteer to “Listen to a Veteran” are not therapists and they are not engaged in active listening that allows listeners to speak, Caplan explains. Except for speaking two sentences, one at the beginning and one sometime during the session, they do nothing but listen. “But they do so with 100% of their attention and their whole hearts. This model works beautifully,” says Caplan. And according to research conducted by Harvard University, veterans describe the listening sessions as helpful while listeners say it is wonderfully transformative for them.

"When I came back from Afghanistan, hearing the words “Thank You” from people who didn’t know what I did or saw was an empty gesture,” one Afghanistan army veteran reported. “More than anything, I wanted my community to listen to the stories of veterans like myself—to participate in that moral struggle, and gain a deeper awareness of the meaning of war. The Welcome Johnny and Jane Home Project understands the important role that civilians can perform simply by listening to veterans actively and without judgment, generating new opportunities for veterans to serve their communities by educating them about the nuanced reality of war." 

The third time I thought about the incredible importance and impact of active listening came from a training workshop that was part of a collaboration between two community-based theaters and a multi-generational performance project called Race Peace, developed in the south “to create a space where people form diverse backgrounds can safely and aggressively challenge the realities and myths of racism in America.” Race Peace also considers “how art can engage people in noteworthy dialogue about challenging social issues.”

Race Peace worked with Next Stage Arts Project (NSAP) and Sandglass Theater, community-based theaters in Putney, Vt., to conduct a training workshop that included Story Circles in which people sat in small groups and shared their stories. They were stories of humanity being stripped away. They were tales of wounding behavior. They revealed moments of humiliation and injustice. The participants, including actors, police officers, and a theater director among others, listened – really listened – to each other. They were, they said, deeply moved and changed by the experience, as were community members who saw their stories performed, by coincidence, the week of the Baltimore riots.

“The workshop made racism tangible,” Eric Bass, co-founder of Sandglass Theater, noted. “Real emotions were awakened, there was true honesty and bridges were built.”

“The training was unorthodox by law enforcement standards,” Brattleboro Police Chief Michael Fitzgerald said. “It was amazing what emerged when we examined personal prejudices.”

“When creative expression of the human experience is shared we are all present for each other in the moment. It’s extremely powerful,” adds Maria Basescu, executive director of Next Stage Arts Project.

These reactions from a variety of arenas testify to the importance and power of active listening in numerous contexts. I wish someone had shared them with me when I was a student, as I would like to have shared them with others when I was teaching.

Perhaps they have even more meaning in today’s world, where the need to listen to each other, to validate and bring comfort, grows ever more vital. Indeed, it seems fair to say, it has never been greater.
                                   

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.