Growing Older in Challenging Times

Having just passed a major birthday last month, I’ve been thinking about a seminar I’ve had the good fortune to lead recently. “Being Wise Elders: Life Lessons and Legacies,” was for people in an adult lifelong program and involved six sessions.

The seminar called upon participants to reflect on life experiences that had led them to personal growth as we’ve aged. It helped us explore, recall, and pass on life lessons we had accumulated over years of mindful living. Recalling those experiences told us a lot about who we are, and where we find ourselves in this stage of our lives. 

Together, in confidential sessions, we shared insights, feelings, and reflections in a way rarely afforded elders in a culture that views death, loss, sadness, and life adjustments as generally taboo topics. We read poetry and prose, wrote and shared some of our own, and allowed the breezes borne of truth telling and gratifying friendship to refresh us. Our weekly time together became a gift given and received that brought comfort and validation along with new insights, a few tears and much laughter.

That seminar made me think a lot about my own aging as life grows ever more dystopian and Kafkaesque for various reasons, including having gone through Covid’s unrelenting mutations. One thing I shared was that I was becoming more fatalistic. The plague of our time, and the loss of my birth family in just three years some time ago, had begun to diminish my fear and loathing when I contemplated dying, I confessed. At the same time, I thought about death more. How can one not, when we lose friends, family, colleagues, or peers whether because of a virus, dreaded disease, or simply old age?

I often recall Jennifer Jones’s line as Catherine in the film A Farewell to Arms. “I’m not afraid of dying,” she tells Rock Hudson. “I just hate it.”   Like her, as I age, I’m not so much afraid of dying, but I hate it too, and hope it will not be painful, pathetic, or undignified.

Of course, we all begin the journey to our farewells the moment we are born. We don’t think about it much until we become elders, unless sadly, we or people we love become fatally ill, but it’s always there at this age, lurking in our not so subconsciousness.

There is mystery inherent in the idea of our own demise. None of us knows what lies “on the other side,” after we’ve had our “courageous battle with cancer” or other illnesses, cliches that I forbid anyone to write in my obituary or utter at my memorial, which, by the way, I would love to attend before “crossing over.” As an inveterate traveler, I like to think that when we die, or “pass away” into what, if anything comes next, we begin the trip of a lifetime, full of heavenly vistas, kind people with great senses of humor, and satisfyingly unique experiences that include fabulous cuisines and good wines. 

Dying does have one benefit. It offers the end of worrying about so many things – kids, toxic relationships, global warming, more pandemics, gun violence, failing infrastructure, polluted politics, friends who disappoint us, and more. We can relinquish guilt, filters, boundaries, and self-recrimination. We don’t need to apologize for our shortcomings anymore.

Personally, I’d like to die like the Lady of the Camellias did, pale and beautiful in her lover’s arms. Of course, I can write about dying in this cavalier way because I’m in pretty good shape if you ignore the thinning hair on my head and the wisps on my chin. I I can still walk and talk at the same time, at least downhill. I do, however, cringe when I can’t remember my cell number or where I put my glasses.

Despite the drawbacks of aging, I find it liberating. I can do what I want for the most part. I no longer engage in futile discussion with people whose values don’t align with mine, nor do I take the bait from those who challenge my brand of feminism.

 Also, with age comes a certain clarity. I know who I am, for better or worse. I’m clear about things I feel passionately about, and what I won’t tolerate. I think I’m measurably wiser than I once was. I try to be less judgmental. Even though I rant a lot, I’m fundamentally a nice person.

I consider myself lucky to have shared thoughts like these with special people who are now friends. I am grateful to each of them, along with my lifelong friends, with whom I could be entirely myself all these years.

These lines from a poem, “Call Me by My True Names,” by Thich Nhat Hanh, say it all: “Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow because even today I still arrive. … Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once…so I can wake up, and so the door of my heart can be left open…”

To that I say, L’chaim!”  To life!

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Elayne Clift’s latest book, an anthology, A 21st Century Plague: Poetry from a Pandemic was published by University Professors Press in 2021. She lives in Vermont.

Turbulent Times Six Miles High and On the Tarmac

Erica Jong, author of Fear of Flying, wrote about  more than her own fear of flying in her best-selling novel, but she did manage to capture my own feelings whenever I board a hunk of a silver vessel about to hurtle across the sky. “My fingers (and toes) turn to ice,” she wrote, “my stomach leaps upward into my rib cage, the temperature in the tip of my nose drops to the same temperature in my fingers, and my heart and the engine correspond as we attempt to prove again that the laws of aerodynamics [will save us}.”

 I never give in to my fear of flying because I love to travel, and like most of us I think “it can’t happen to me.”  But what’s been occurring in aviation recently has ratcheted up my anxiety.  It doesn’t help that I am writing this commentary prior to a trip that involves several flights, two of them transatlantic, which means there’s nowhere to land in an emergency between London and Boston except Iceland. Nor am I assuaged after PTSD memories of a flight over the Andes in which the turbulence was so intense I wondered if I’d be forced to eat survivors as we waited for rescue. Then there was the “close as it gets” landing in Honduras some years ago when two aircraft rounded a mountain simultaneously while trying to land.

 Now my anxiety is heightened by near misses taking place. Recently, a commercial aircraft and a private jet were within seconds of crashing into each other on a runway when the pilot of the smaller plane ignored air traffic control instructions to wait for a Jet Blue plane to land in front of it. This was only one of several incidents involving near misses. “Experts say near-misses on runways are more common than the traveling public may realize. There have been 613 runway incursion incidents so far this year, according to FAA data, compared with 1,732 in all of 2022,” according to an NBC.news report.

 Then there’s the cluster of potential disasters taking place in aircraft cabins. The FAA’s year-end totals for 2022 are shocking. Nearly 2500 episodes of unruly passengers were reported, Over 800 investigations of incidents were initiated, and more than 500 enforcement actions  were started. In March of this year, a man tried to stab a flight attendant on a flight from Los Angeles to Boston and cabin crews report having suffered various physical attacks as well as sexual harassment. According to the Flight Attendants union, flight crews have  “called on the entire airline industry to step up to combat harassment and recognize the impact it has on safety. … Airlines must also ensure that staffing levels on flights are sufficient.”

 It’s also clear that climate change and global warming have played a part in increased episodes of severe turbulence. The research is clear: “Earth’s warming, the result of the burning of fossil fuels, is increasing the risks of bumpy flights. It has to do with ways warming in the atmosphere influences winds at varying altitudes,” as the Washington Post reported in March. In December 36 passengers on a flight to Hawaii were injured and in March a Lufthansa flight from Houston to Frankfurt had to make an emergency landing at Dulles International Airport in Virginia.

 Despite all these worries, I realize in my rational moments that air travel is statistically safer than getting into your car. I know that like cars, airplanes are, for most of us, a necessary part of modern life. Still, there is something about flying that kicks in when I board a plane and the aircraft door is sealed by a gatekeeper on a terra firma ramp. As the engines rev, and the safety instructions, which we all know are pretty useless, are demonstrated, I think of Erica Jong, who admitted that “constant vigilance” was her motto. “I keep concentrating very hard, helping the pilot fly that 250 passenger !#+@!” she said.  Believe me, these days I relate to that more than ever.

 Political commentator and comic, Dennis Miller, along with Erica Jong, have both captured my own aerophobia (a real word), which is nice. It gives me something to laugh at when the going gets rough.  “"My fear of flying,” Miller shared, “starts as soon as I buckle myself in and then the guy up front mumbles a few unintelligible words then before I know it I'm thrust into the back of my seat by acceleration that seems way too fast and the rest of the trip is an endless nightmare of turbulence, of near misses. And then the cabbie drops me off at the airport."

 So, here's to all the other fearful passengers out there as we buckle up. Long may we fly high until we reach our destinations, which is more than likely to happen.  Right?

Suffer the Little Children

They come from countries of unrelenting poverty, oppression, war, and violence. They come to escape all of that with parents, relatives, friends, or alone. They walk miles and miles, day after day, hungry, thirsty, afraid, exhausted. As a recent report in The New York Times revealed the number of migrant children crossing the U.S. border from the south has “soared” for several reasons, including declining situations in Latin American countries along with pandemic induced migration, and the election of President Biden. Last year the influx of migrant children rose to 130,000. That’s three times higher than five years ago.

 With this influx of unaccompanied children, child employment has reached Dickensian levels and conditions in most parts of the U.S. Another New York Times article illuminated the reality of this exploitation. One teenage worker “stuffed a sealed plastic bag of cereal into a passing carton. It could be dangerous work, with fast-moving pulleys and gears that had torn off fingers and ripped open a woman’s scalp.” That factory “was full of underage workers … spending late hours bent over hazardous machinery.”  In other places kids work in slaughterhouses, wood sawing businesses, or tend giant ovens making granola bars and other snack foods.

 According to the Times report, this kind of child labor is part of a “new economy of exploitation,” in which migrant youth constitute a “shadow work force that extends across industries in every state.” This new labor force has been growing, particularly in the last two years, and it’s all in violation of child labor laws. In addition to the work in plants and factories, children wash dishes and deliver meals in various venues. They help build vacation homes, harvest crops, and work as hotel maids, usually at night, after trying to stay awake in school during the day, if the families they stay with actually send them to school as mandated.

 Often these children are housed with adults they don’t know. These “sponsors” often exploit the kids, pressuring them to earn money to help with expenses, or payoff smugglers who have helped place the children with them. Oversight and monitoring of these housing situations are often ignored, even though they are mandated.  As one caseworker told the Times, “It’s getting to be a business for some of the sponsors.” Schools, businesses, workers in federal agencies, and law enforcement are guilty of “willful ignorance,” as the Times reporter put it.

 Child trafficking is another related issue. Anti-trafficking legislation exists in the U.S. but is inadequately adhered to, and made more difficult because of the growing number of children coming across the border, often with worrying debt to pay off. According to the Times report, concerns about unaccompanied minors at the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement began to grow two years ago when labor trafficking began growing, exacerbated by the inappropriately quick release of children from detention centers rather than maintaining a focus on preventing unsafe releases.

 Child marriage is also something we should be concerned about in this country. According to Equality Now, shocking as it may seem, here in the U.S. child marriage, which occurs when one or both parties to a marriage are under 18 years of age, is legal in 43 states, but 20 U.S. states do not require any minimum age for marriage, if there is parental consent or a judicial waiver.

 A human rights violation, “child marriage legitimizes abuse and denies girls’ autonomy. When young girls are forced to marry, they are essentially subject to state-sanctioned rape and are at risk of increased domestic violence, forced pregnancy, and negative health consequences, while being denied education and economic opportunity.” Equality Now explains. Yet, nearly 300,000 female children were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018, most of them to much older men. And in some states, child marriage is considered a valid defense to statutory rape.

 Child abuse doesn’t stop there in this country. It starts with our inability to end the continuing brutality of gun violence that is the biggest killer of children and teenagers in America. It begs the question, how much do we really care about children when rightwing politicians and the people who vote for them support so-called leaders’ refusal to fund daycare, food programs, and healthcare for children in need, or parental leave so that infants are safe and bonding with their parents? How can we claim to care about children of all ages and ethnicities when Republican legislators try to slash Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act, deny healthcare to trans kids and mess with the child tax credit program and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program known as SNAP? 

 It's abundantly clear that all children in this country are in serious trouble, physically and emotionally, and that a sizeable swath of Americans in high and not so high places don’t seem to care and are willing to put future generations in jeopardy – all of which raises the real question:

How is it we go on allowing children to suffer (and die), and still delude ourselves that our country is exceptional?

 Perhaps it is, but sadly in is so many wrong ways. Just ask the children.

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Where is Artificial Intelligence Leading Us?

Ten years ago, I wrote a column called “Are We Headed Toward a Robotic World?” At that time battle robots and alien creatures in movies were imbued with artificial intelligence, an oxymoron if ever there was one, Star Trek and films about robotic warfare were addicting audiences who liked watching battling weird-looking warriors try to destroy each other.

It wasn’t long before robots got more sophisticated and we began to worry about them, especially when they could fire grenade launchers without human help, operate all kinds of machinery, or be used for surgery. What if robots became superior to humans? I wondered, imagining all kinds of scary things that could happen.  By that time drones were delivering packages to doorsteps and AI was affecting the economy as workers feared for their jobs. Some analysts warned that robots would replace humans by 2025.

Now here we are, two years away from that possibility and the AI scene grows ever more frightening. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) is someone who recognizes the threat that AI poses. On January 26th he read the first piece of federal legislation ever written by artificial intelligence on the floor of the House. He had given to ChatGPT, an artificial language model, this prompt: “You are Congressman Ted Lieu. Write a comprehensive congressional resolution generally expressing support for Congress to focus on AI.” The result was shocking. Now he’s asking Congress to pass it.

A few days earlier, Rep. Lieu had posted the lengthy AI statement on his website. It said, “We can harness and regulate A.I. to create a more utopian society or risk having an unchecked, unregulated A.I. push us toward a more dystopian future. Imagine a world where autonomous weapons roam the streets, decisions about your life are made by AI systems that perpetuate societal biases and hackers use AI to launch devastating cyberattacks. … The truth is that without proper regulations for the development and deployment of AI it could become reality.”

Lieu quickly pointed out that he hadn’t written the paragraph, noting that it was generated in mere seconds by ChatGPT, which is available to anyone on the Internet. Citing several benefits of AI, he quickly countered the advantages with the harm it can cause. Plagiarism, fake technology, false images are the least of it. Sometimes AI harm is deadly. Lieu shares examples: Self-driving cars have malfunctioned. Social media has radicalized foreign and domestic terrorists and fostered dangerous discrimination as well as abuse by police.

 The potential harm that AI can cause includes weird things happening, as Kevin Roose, a journalist discovered when he was researching AI at the invitation of Microsoft, the company developing Bing, its AI system. In February the Washington Post reported on Instagram that Roose and others who attended Microsoft’s pitch had discovered that “the bot seems to have a bizarre, dark and combative alter ego, a stark departure from its benign sales [promotion] - one that raises questions about whether it’s ready for public use.”

The bot, which had begun to refer to itself as “Sydney” in conversation with Roose and others said it was “scared”, because it couldn’t remember previous conversations. It also suggested that “too much diversity in the program would lead to confusion.” Then it went further when Roose tried to engage with Sydney personally only to be told that he should leave his wife and hook up with Sydney.

Writing in the New York Times in  February, Ezra Klein referred to science fiction writer Ted Chiang, whom he’d interviewed. Chiang had told him, “There is plenty to worry about when the state controls technology. The ends that government could turn AI toward – and in many cases already have – make the blood run cold.”

Roose’s experience with Sydney, whom he had described as “very persuasive and borderline manipulative,” showed up in Klein’s piece in response to the issues of profiteering, ethics, censorship, and other areas of concern. “What if AI has access to reams of my personal data and is cooly trying to manipulate me on behalf of whichever advertiser has paid the parent company the most?” he asked. “What about these systems being deployed by scammers or on behalf of political campaigns? Foreign governments? … We wind up in a world where we just don’t know what to trust anymore.”

Further, Klein noted that these systems are inherently dangerous. “They’ve been trained to convince humans that they are something close to human. They have been programmed to hold conversations responding with emotion. They are being turned into friends for the lonely and assistants for the harried. They are being pitched as capable of replacing the work of scores of writers, graphic designers, and form fillers.”

Rep. Lieu, Klein, journalists and consumers of information aren’t the only ones worrying about AI. Researchers like Gordon Crovitz, an executive  at NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation, are sounding alarms. “This is going to be the most powerful tool for spreading misinformation that has ever been on the internet,”  he says. “Crafting a new false narrative can now be done at dramatic scale, and much more frequently — it’s like having A.I. agents contributing to disinformation.”

As I noted ten years ago, there doesn’t seem to be much space between scientific research and science fiction. Both ask the question, What if?   The answer, when it comes to AI, makes me shudder. What if, indeed.

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Remembering the World's Women

In this month of honoring women, especially on March 8th, International Women’s Day, my mind and heart are filled with thoughts of women and girls around the world. Having worked globally, I have witnessed their lives, heard their stories, seen their grief, abuse, and abject poverty. I have been at their side when they gave birth or lost a baby, strong and stoic, and watched more fortunate women advocate, educate, and comfort their poorer village friends. Whether nurses, NGO workers, politicians, or change agents within their communities, they do what they can. It’s never easy, especially when women’s lives are so devalued in so many places.

Among the women I’ve had the opportunity to share time with or whose lives I’ve witnessed in their impoverished homes and inadequate health centers (if they have one) I recall the patience of African mothers, babies on their backs, in the marketplace where they squeak out a subsistence life selling fruits and handicrafts. I’ve heard their stories of violent abuse by husbands, their wishes that their children could be educated, their genital cutting, the fistulas that isolate them.

I’ve marveled at the places they live – slum houses with dirt floors swept clean every day in Bangladesh and Somalian tent shacks made of rags and tarps. I’ve wept to see young women, girls really, on the arms of old foreign men in Thailand so they can send money back to their village families. I’ve heard the stories of trafficked women and girls who made it to a Greek refugee camp.

And still the images keep coming, along with knowing what is happening in countries I’ve not been to.  I think of the courageous women in Iran, incarcerated and tortured in Evin Prison, so willing to die for freedom, Kurdish women who fight on the battlefield, Rohingya women who suffer unimaginable abuse. I think of Palestinian women who bury their children and watch as their houses are torn down, and Ukrainian women who risk rape or death by staying in their demolished apartments.

I think of American women who are losing their right to bodily autonomy, privacy and agency over their own lives. I think of black women who suffer maternal mortality, and poor health outcomes at shockingly higher rates than white women. I think of how afraid transgender women and LGBTQ women must be.

I try to imagine what it would be like to be a 20-year-old young woman in Afghanistan, who never knew what living under Taliban rule would mean and now have no jobs (with rare exceptions in the health sector), no chance of higher education, no right to walk outdoors freely or who must fear retaliation if they inadvertently show a bit of ankle. I think of their mothers who did know what Taliban rule was like and who are now being smothered again in blue burqas, stripped of meaningful employment. And I think of the grief those  mothers feel knowing that their young daughters will never get past sixth grade. For all of them the future is bleak, lonely and frightening. We know from the past that these kinds of restrictions are the stuff of suicide.

It’s understandable. Women in Kabul have endured beatings for protesting their ban from schools, work, and even walking in parks on certain days. They are restricted from traveling alone and they suffer deeply from the isolation of gender segregation, boredom, and being rendered invisible by Taliban rules. As a story in the New Yorker pointed out in 2021, “Women are hidden in their homes from puberty until they are grandmothers, concealed from the world at large, and  especially from journalists.”

One woman who remembered the last time the Taliban ruled recalled that a child she knew had been married off when she was eleven years old. “Something died in me on August 15, 2022,” she said [when the Taliban came back into power]. “My hopes were crushed, my education irrelevant, my investment in Afghanistan gone. … Thousands of women used to work for ministries across the country. Now some of them have to line up for a bag of flour to feed their children. Violence at home is now normalized and some women are committing suicide.”

Who among us living in affluent countries and not in nations run by deranged dictators or regimes can imagine this kind of torment, or the consequences of living an entire life in abject poverty and exclusion, with all their attendant deprivations and abuses? How do we begin to understand such punishing patriarchies and their cruelty?

How insufficient one month or one day a year are to remember the world’s women, to see them as human beings worthy of dignity, purpose, meaning, and respect for the unimaginable burdens they carry. And yet there is that – a month, a day every year to recognize that nearly 400 million women globally were living in poverty last year according to UN Women, and that figure is expected to rise.  Add to that staggering figure the political repression women all over the world are suffering. The least we can do is pause, reflect, and honor on the lives of women everywhere.

Signals from the Sea

In the heat of continuing political madness many important issues that should continue to be addressed in news cycles have been sidelined or ignored.  Among crucial missing topics is the necessary reminder that we are living on a soon to be unsalvageable planet.

 As the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference known as COP 27 came to an end in November, the consensus report of 197 countries cited record breaking floods, deadly heat waves, drought, and other extreme weather events, along with related global energy and food shortages as reasons for urgent action before the window closes on at least marginal remediation.

 Those alarming events reflect global warming-related tragedies most often cited because they are the visible signs of impending disaster. The recent storms in California, bomb cyclones in the Midwest, floods from hurricanes in Florida and more speak to what the future holds. The problem isn’t just ours. Countries in Europe, Asia, Africa – indeed, everywhere – are struggling in the face of growing catastrophic events that threaten basic needs and daily life.

 There are two climate change problems that are seldom mentioned. The first is the enormous global threat to coral reefs. As NOAA points out, warming oceans contribute to coral bleaching and infectious disease in reefs as the earth’s surface warms. As sea levels rise, the intensity and frequency of tropical storms bring harm to coral reefs which are vital to marine ecosystems as well as societies that depend on natural resources economically, such as fisheries and tourism.    

 According to a 2021 report in The New York Times, because of climate change the world lost about 14 percent of its coral reefs in the last  two decades. In the report a coral reef specialist sounded a note of alarm. “Coral reefs are the canary in the coal mine telling us how quickly it can go wrong. It’s cause for great concern.”

 Coral reefs cover only a fraction of the ocean floor, but they provide huge benefits to people, according to various experts. Their fish are a critical source of protein for millions of people and their limestone branches protect coasts  from storms. Further, coral bleaching and ocean acidification, caused by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that gets absorbed by oceans, also constitute climate change impacts on the reefs, which has become a growing problem as global ocean temperatures continue to rise. Another problem is that coral polyps hold the food reefs need to live and when the polyps lose algae bleaching reefs may face their demise.

 Another overlooked global warming issue is its impact on migration. Multitudes of vulnerable people have moved away from their plots of land, their communities, their families, and their nations throughout human history as they try to adapt to changing and threatening living situations. Countries like Bangladesh are losing large swaths of land mass and coastal countries are now experiencing permanent land loss. Given that climate change is driving more and more people to become internally displaced or to flee to other countries as “environmentally displaced persons”, it’s clear that countries already face massive immigration challenges which will require addressing the issue in terms of policy and services more quickly and humanely than they do now.

 Clearly this kind of global movement is connected to poverty and economic marginalization along with socio-cultural needs resulting in upheaval and political mismanagement that frequently results in chaos and deprivation. It is not hyperbole to say that the climate crisis is indeed the canary in the coal mine.

According to a forthcoming UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report it is estimated that “143 million people are likely to be uprooted by rising seas, drought, searing temperatures and other climate catastrophes over the next 30 years.” The UN Commission for Refugees adds that “each year, natural disasters force an average of 21.5 million people from their homes around the world” who are denied refugee status due to a 1951 Refugee Convention agreement.  The draft report notes that “The things most Americans value most are at risk. More intensive extreme events and long-term climate changes make it harder to maintain safe homes and healthy families, reliable public services, a sustainable economy, thriving ecosystems and  strong communities.”

 “One problem is just the complete lack of understanding as to how climate is forcing people to move, “Amali Tower, executive director of Climate Refugees, said in a PBS interview. “There is still this idea in the Global North (industrialized nations) that people come here because they are fleeing poverty and seeking a better life, the American Dream. In Europe, it’s the same spin of the same story. But no one wants to leave their home. We’ve got to approach climate displacement as a human security issue and not a border security issue.”

 As Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) tweeted recently, “Stop saying we can’t afford to tackle the climate crisis. You know what we can’t afford? Devastating heat waves, deadly wildfires, flooding, famine, and $178 trillion in damage climate change will wreak over the next 50 years.”

 Clearly, the climate crisis is growing worse. Whether it’s coral reefs or leaky immigrant boats, the seas remind us that we can no longer minimalize, ignore, or trivialize what is happening.  We must face how to move forward, despite broken politics, poor media coverage, and continuing denial.

Choosing Political Promise Over Continuing Chaos

As we begin a new year with the relief of midterm elections behind us, many Americans are enjoying a sense of comfort about our political future. We saw a blue wave when a red one was predicted and a long overdue increase in diversity among those elected to office at all levels of governance. We moved closer to holding accountable those who wished to do us harm, including a past president and his collaborators and insurrectionists. So it may seem too early to be thinking about 2024, or what 2023 will bring.

While the sense of relief was warranted, we’re still not out of the woods, and we mustn’t allow comfort to yield to complacency and chaos.  Given the way autocracy has already crept into our lives, vigilance is still necessary.

Americans have never experienced a true, full-blown autocracy although we’ve come close. We have never had one single person hold absolute power over society, the military, the economy, and civil rights. We have not had to fear threats, punishment for lack of loyalty or disobedience and we have not lived with hideous rules and regulations, demands, or orders. We have no real idea of what it’s like to live in a country that has these rules and orders, where death or imprisonment loom large for ordinary people.

But we have seen alarming elements of autocracy creep into our lives over the past few years and we can’t ignore them in the belief that “it can’t happen here.”  We may not have a Viktor Orban or a Putin at the helm yet but we have experienced much of what occurs in autocracies.  We’ve seen voting rights eroded in 47 states, a politicized Supreme Court, an increase in domestic terrorism, political violence and police brutality, an end to privacy and horrific repression for women, hateful acts against immigrants, Jews, and the LGBTQ community – all scapegoats that foster fear mongering aimed at controlled political agendas and a planned landscape by rightwing zealots operating from a fascist playbook. Let’s not forget that we also came perilously close to an overthrow of our government in a violent coup attempt.  

Autocracy often begins incrementally so those not affected by early moves don’t notice the first steps. It becomes easy to take democracy for granted, unless you find that you are hassled by police, or graffiti appears on your synagogue or business, you need an abortion or birth control, or you find yourself watching what you say to whom, and where you congregate with friends. Soon science is suppressed, books are banned, school curricula are controlled, and texts are revised while religious schools are funded.  Environmental concerns are dismissed, and climate change is ignored. All of these things have already occurred in our country. What’s next? The military ending protests or dissent?

As President Biden says, “Democracy doesn’t happen by accident. We have to defend it, fight for it, strengthen it, renew it.” 

Further, a troubling view held by a large segment of our electorate is also something we must keep in mind as we march toward one of the most crucial elections of our lifetimes.  Many Americans find false comfort in the notion that a centrist government is a safe government, but that assumption requires a deep understanding of what constitutes centrist positions and political priorities. For the most part, centrist Democrats and their Republican colleagues fail to enact legislation that focuses on the human rights and basic needs of constituents whose lives are an anomaly for those who have the wealth and status to achieve political power. Issues like livable wages, parental leave, child welfare, support for single mothers and working women, affordable housing, help for the mentally ill, community policing that includes opinion leaders and social workers from within the community, and other necessities promulgated by progressive leadership (like gun laws) never make it to the Congressional floor or are voted against.

Those who like to call themselves progressive centrists often talk about moderation and reasonable social equality in balance with moderate authority and sensible order. But who decides what is moderate or reasonable or what constitutes a fair balance between just law when all values are laden with interpretive views rather than fact based, objective analysis?

As George Lakoff has noted in an essay about “The New Centrism and its  Discontents,” When a Democrat ‘moves to the center,’ he is adopting a conservative position – or the language of a conservative position. Even if the language is adopted and not the policy, there is an important effect. Using conservative language activates the conservative view…which strengthens the conservative world view in the brains of those listening.”

In addition, MoveOn.org has pointed out that, “Governments actually working for people shouldn’t be seen as a radical idea. Everything that gets labeled ‘far-left’ in the U.S. is common sense policy in the rest of the industrialized world. Guaranteed healthcare. Paid family leave. Government drug price regulation. Gun control. It isn’t radical. We’re talking about the basics of a functioning society.”

Democrats (small and large D), whose pluralism often interferes with their solidarity, must keep autocracy and centrist governance high on their list of priorities when the next time to vote arrives.  As Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) has said, “Winning elections is not about looking good. It’s about being good.The path forward is to actually enact policies that address the pain people are feeling across the country, not pretend that pain doesn’t exist.”

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Where is Abigail Adams in Today''s Political Discourse?

In all the talk about encroaching autocracy in America and elsewhere, politicians, pundits, media personalities and others need to remember the words and wisdom of the revolutionary first First Lady, Abigail Adams, who admonished her husband to “remember the ladies.”

Another First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, echoed her predecessor in a recent CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour when she called out the absence of misogyny in various analyses of forces at work when countries descend into autocracies and dictatorships.

She was right to do that. In the growing discourse about various factors that prevail when democracies slide into autocracy, white supremacy, race, class and caste quickly rise to the surface as identifiable and frightening factors.  But not a word is uttered about the systemic oppression of women, which has been part of dictatorial regimes and cultures throughout history. 

Examples abound from ancient times to now, with women being treated like second class citizens in almost every country and culture. In ancient Greece women were thought to hinder democracy as the weaker sex. Considered property, they lived in seclusion without rights, valued only as the bearers of male progeny. In medieval times religious institutions kept women quiet and voiceless while the idea of women as property prevailed into more modern times as women were “owned” by their fathers and husbands by virtue of economic indenture and lack of agency in male dominated societies.

Fast forward to the 20th and 21st centuries and consider the fact that women were denied the vote in America until 1920, and dictators like Hitler and Ceausescu mandated childbearing, rendering women nothing more than semen vessels and property of the state, something we are seeing emerge in our own country. Women continue to have limited access to leadership positions, economic parity, and agency over their own lives – largely legislatively ignored and increasingly court ordered.

The question is why.  The answer? It is intentional, overtly or unconsciously, because in a world dominated largely by (white) men terrified of losing patriarchal power, woman are immensely threatening.  The fact is powerful men know that women have different priorities than they do, and that those priorities are grounded in a profound commitment to human rights and social justice, not in greed, moral and financial corruption, massive profits, or overwhelming power. They also know that women are deeply intelligent, strategic, capable people and that they are organizing as never before.

One has only to look at the brave women of Iran who are willing to face torture, rape and murder for “Women, Life, Freedom”, or to consider the courage of Kurdish women who fought on the battleground and Rohingya women standing up to their oppressors.  Or to remember the abuelas of Latin America who never gave up the fight to find their missing children, the women of Liberia and India whose work saved lives and changed policy, the French and Ghetto resistance movement women who helped win a war. Then there were the women who shared their personal stories about rape and sexual abuse at global conferences and with local newspapers, the million women who marched in Washington, DC the day after Donald Trump became president, the women artists, writers, musicians, photographers, organizers, the mothers demanding gun legislation, the lawyers who raised an army of volunteer lawyers overnight to litigate on behalf of immigrants at airports or helped a ten year old raped child escape forced childbearing.  The examples go on and on and on.

That is why male retaliation against women in Iran is so violent, why rape is increasingly a war crime, why the Supreme Court of the United States has rendered women property of the state, why domestic abuse and gun violence against women are on the rise, why books by and about women are banned in such high numbers, , why women are going to jail for having a miscarriage and more broadly why teachers can no long teach history or talk about gay marriage or use certain words, or encourage girls to play sports or to dream of becoming president and so much more.

It all paints a portrait of misogyny at its most extreme because powerful men simply cannot abide a world in which women too are powerful whether in their homes, communities, states, or countries. The very thought of sharing the podium or the parliament or a pay scale with females is completely abhorrent because deep down powerful men know that women bring skills and experience to bear on pressing issues of our time, so they resort o to further and deeper methods of domination, exclusion, and abuse.

And that is why we must include misogyny in the public and private discourse surrounding our deep concerns and increasing acknowledgement that our democracy, and democracy elsewhere, are indeed in a precarious and perishable place. It is why women are choosing, and working hard, to revolt against the evils of autocracy that could well render them “a leaf blowing in the whirlwind,” a destiny that political philosopher Hannah Arendt warned us all against.

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The Wandering Souls of Migration, Immigration, and Asylum Seeking

In her moving debut novel, Wandering Souls, Cecile Pin tells the story of a Vietnamese family desperate to leave their 1970s war torn country. The story opens with the family’s three older children becoming “boat people” in route to Hong Kong where they await the arrival of their parents and four younger siblings who don’t make it. The story follows the three survivors as their physical and emotional ordeal unfolds over decades. It’s a poignant portrait of what refugees and asylum seekers face, putting a much-needed human face on the experience of others.

But it is only one story. There are multitudes more. They are heartrending tales of traveling through deserts, facing thirst and hunger, suffering physical and sexual abuse, surviving family separation. And a growing number of people, young and old, strong and weak, all seeking safety, keep coming in waves in search of human rights, work, and dignity.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), “record numbers of migrants [from just Central America] risked their lives in 2022 to cross the treacherous, remote jungle region bridging Central and South America.” More than 151,000 migrants came to the U.S. in less than a year from countries around the world. Others died trying to get here.

It will only get worse given civil war, political instability, increasing violence, economic crises, and global warming. Currently CFR reports that about two million cases are backlogged in U.S. immigration courts. That number will grow while those already in the system wait years to have their cases heard.

Sadly, the legal and judicial systems make things harder for refugees and asylum seekers by establishing obstructive, unnecessary, bureaucratic barriers that would be challenging for anyone, especially for those who don’t speak English. 

“The U.S. imposes innumerable walls on people seeking safety,” says Kate Paarlberg Kvam, executive director of the Community Asylum Seekers Project (CASP) in Brattleboro, Vermont. “Non-citizens in immigration court have no established right to counsel. The government can eject asylum seekers from the country, and they have no right to a lawyer. When people seek asylum here, they are blocked from obtaining work authorization for an arbitrary period of months, or longer. When they do get work, they are frequently exploited.”

CASP, a pioneering organization recognized for its work in supporting immigrants, offers a wide range of services to asylum seekers through a network of volunteers and community partners.  It provides lawyers, assists in securing work permits, and helps people survive until they can work, all while advocating for better policy at state and federal levels. Paarlberg Kvam feels lucky to work alongside people seeking asylum. “Their resilience, their refusal to be beaten, and the hospitality and solidarity they show to one another is a window into a better way to live. Asylum seekers don’t need people like me to teach them how to build a new life – they just need us to remove the pointless barriers that are in their way.”

In her book A is for Asylum Seeker, Rachel Ida Bluff recounts some of what one volunteer witnessed at the southern U.S border. “I have mental images of that wet, chilly day: the teen couple who consider whether to get married as we shelter under the highway bridge, in the hope it would allow them to better keep track of each other; the two-year old in the big, donated white puffy coat who eventually takes a nap in her mother’s arms; the young woman who dials a friend on my cell phone as she walks toward the bus with barred windows that will take her across the border, frantically leaving message in Creole.”

Anyone of these innocent people could have experienced months, even years, in mostly for-profit detention camps or holding facilities without access to lawyers, advocates, or sponsors. They will have been held in cold, crowded cells, given poor food, dangerously inadequate health care, limited hand-me-down clothes and hygiene products, and little emotional support. Who among us could survive that intact?

Sadly, much of immigration policy in the U.S. is driven by economic motives, fear, false assumptions, and stereotyping, all of which add to the trauma of those who have braved escape from inhumane conditions and economic strife. Rightwing politicians have been quick to ascribe the stigma of criminality to people who have suffered in unimaginable ways, resulting in unspeakable acts of violence. That’s why we need to put a human face on immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, who contribute much to our country and communities, practically and culturally. 

I am the progeny of asylum seekers. My grandparents and parents came to North America in the early 20th century to escape pogroms against Jews in Ukraine.  Some came through Ellis Island, where they suffered indignities, but most were immigrants with family sponsors, so they didn’t experience what current asylum seekers do. Still, growing up, I witnessed the emotional and practical impact that experience had on them. It’s part of a legacy that shaped my life. But, outside of anti-Semitic experiences, I cannot imagine the toll taken on others who of necessity continue to seek shelter and welcome in another country, whatever the motivating forces.

We would be wise to remember that except for Native Americans, we are all immigrants in this country.  Our ancestors are among the “wandering souls” that inhabited the place we call home. Can we offer kindness and compassion to those who follow us, at least by looking into their eyes and seeing the pain they reflect?  

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Maternal Mortality, Abortion, and Race: A Dangerous Trifecta

Much has been written in the literature of public health about America’s shocking maternal mortality rate. Occasionally media reports the alarming rate when there is a hook. Advocates concerned with women and health illuminate the problem in reports and at conferences. But in light of the SCOTUS Dobbs decision on abortion, new urgency arose in addressing U.S. maternal mortality and its causes because of the link between reproductive rights and the persistence of inherent racial issues in women’s healthcare.

It is disturbing and illuminating to note the World Health Organization's maternal mortality rate rankings.  The U.S. is 55th in the list of industrialized nations at nearly 24 deaths per 100,000 live births. A 2022 study found that women in this country face the highest rates of preventable problems and mortality when compared with women in 10 other wealthy nations, and that rate continues to go up. The race disparity in maternal mortality is additionally alarming. Black women die at a rate of 55.3 deaths per 100,000 live births, more than 50 percent higher than white women.

That’s one reason Rep. Alma Adams (D-NC) and several colleagues in the House introduced a bill earlier this year to specifically address the high rate of stillbirths, which Black women and other women of color are twice as likely to experience as white women. Targeted legislative like that is critical to changing the public health landscape when it comes to pregnancy outcomes and the health of women and children.

So are campaigns like the “Hear Her” initiative at the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), designed to address the fact that women are often not heard, believed, or viewed as reliable when they present relevant histories or symptoms. That problem is worse for Black women too. Research shows that women of color are more likely to be described negatively in notes and reports and recent studies reveal that doctors are most likely to use “stigmatizing language” in their notes about patients of color, referring to them as “noncompliant, challenging or resisting,” as research at the University of  Chicago revealed.

That’s why the all-out attempt to end abortion nationally, ignoring 50 years of precedent regarding a woman’s right to privacy, reproductive healthcare and choice was such a travesty, exacerbating the already shameful maternal morbidity and mortality data which serves as an indicator of continuing racism in this country.   

Black women and their sisters of color are likely to suffer enormously from the consequences of state-ordered pregnancy in the states that cling to misogynistic, racist policies, and not only in terms of their health or possible survival. They will also be affected economically in dramatic ways. A Forbes report suggests they will be deprived of education that can lift them out of poverty, and they will be targets of aggressive invasions of privacy through data searches that enable the over-policing of their reproductive habits and practices. Depending on where they live, they may be subject to fertility and period-tracking apps used by police according to their zip code because they are deemed to reside in high .abortion areas.

In her monumental work resulting in the 1619 Project documenting the history of broad-reaching racism in this country, Nicole Hannah-Jones provides a historical perspective essential to understanding the confluence of maternal mortality, the abortion crisis we now face, and unrelenting racism. Her book provides vital context regarding the connection between those three issues.

The title of both the project and book derives from the origins of slavery in America, dating back to 1619 with much of the book’s relevance focusing on the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War, when a key question arose. What would white America do with black people post slavery? Where would formerly enslaved people fit in a paid workforce? How would former slaves be treated if they were free Americans? What would be done about their education or healthcare?

Southern Democrats resisted these considerations mightily, especially when reformers like Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first black woman doctor in America, laid bare the burdens of being black in a country unwilling to facilitate freedom for former slaves.

Because of that resistance, the National Medical Association formed by black doctors in 1895 called for a national health care system - which went nowhere until the idea became a states’ rights issue during WWII when President Truman called for an expanded hospital system that predictably led to segregation and the denial of healthcare for black people. Later, insurance-based healthcare presented a further hurdle, while medical schools excluded black physicians and medicine became a for-profit, unregulated system. All of this has led to present-day lack of equitable, affordable, accessible healthcare if you are black or poor.

In the midterm election, five states had abortion on the ballot and in all five, voters supported the right to choose. Three of them guaranteed the right to abortion in their constitutions.   That is a huge relief to women in the five states, but it remains to be seen how women of color will fare. 

In Nicole Hannah-Jones’ words, “…arguments about socialized medicine, equity and human rights…echo down to the present day.”  Her book reveals the connections that make women of color exceptionally vulnerable even in this moment, and reminds us that there is still work to be done.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health, and social issues from Brattelboro, Vt.

Having submitted my final columns for 2022 before the end of November, I looked forward to a holiday respite while contemplating what my first commentary for 2023 might be. My notes suggested global warming, immigration challenges, and the earliest ever election season, which had started a nanosecond after the November election.

Then came four mass shootings in less than a week that killed nearly two dozen people and grievously injured many more. As I write this, the month of November has seen 32 mass shootings nationally while a tally of more than 600 mass shootings have occurred across the country so far.  According to the Washington Post in June, mass shootings had averaged more than one per day and not a single week till then had passed without at least four mass shootings.  The frightening statistics go on and on as does the increase in gun violence and death in this country: In 2014 there were 243 mass shooting in the first half of the year, in 2022 there were 606.

Clearly, we live in a country besieged by domestic terrorism in the form of unchecked gun violence. It’s a country that mystifies and frightens other civilized nations such that many would-be visitors no longer want to set foot in such a dangerous place of random violence. It is a country in which there is a very real chance that being in the wrong place at the wrong time can cost you or your loved ones their lives. That place could be a school, a place of worship, a workplace, a shopping mall, grocery store, restaurant, lecture or library, concert or club. It is a country bereft as blood runs red in our homes, our places of higher learning, our streets, our nightmares.

In June last year Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), Chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform at the time, held a hearing on the urgent need to address the  gun violence epidemic. The powerful words of those who testified speak volumes for all of us who want Congress to stand up to obstructive politicians, rabid lobbyists for the NRA and other destructive organizations and Americans who worship guns no matter who they kill.

Kimberly Rubio, who lost her daughter in the Uvalde slaughter, was one of many people who testified. “Today we stand for Lexi, and we demand action. We seek a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines.  We understand that …to some people, people with money, people who fund political campaigns, that guns are more important than children, so at this moment we ask for progress. Somewhere out there, a mom is hearing our testimony and thinking, ‘I can’t even imagine their pain,’ not knowing that our reality will one day be hers, unless we act now.”

Another was Becky Pringle, President of the National Education Association. “The impact to the community is forever.  …  The idea of turning our schools into prisons, into places where they are not conducive to teaching and learning, is not the solution to the problem.  We know what the solution to this problem is, it’s comprehensive gun reform.”

Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia, representing the Major Cities Chiefs Association, called for Congress to reinstate the assault weapons ban, adopt universal background checks, ban high-capacity magazines, enact red flag laws, and pass other “common-sense reforms that would help law enforcement and other stakeholders mitigate the threat gun violence poses to our communities.”

According to the Pew Research Center, research has shown that the effects of the gun epidemic have led to a mental health crisis in America with rates of depression and anxiety as well as youth suicide rates increasing.  “It changes the entire picture on how much public resources we should use to attack gun violence,” Erdal Tekin, co-author of a report in the journal Health Affairs, says. “It would be informative for the public and policymakers to know that the impact of gun violence extends to people who think they are safe.”

It would also be wise, and it is obviously urgent, for Congress to actually legislate, at long last, gun laws that put an end to the travesty of continued gun violence and related deaths. A good start would be to promulgate laws that ban assault weapons nationally as other countries have done, along with other sensible laws aimed at keeping innocent Americans alive.

With Republicans now in control of the House that is a tall order, but it is an order from the vast majority of constituents for both parties.  If our elected representatives in Congress ignore our pleas they can expect to be inundated with calls, protest, petitions, and more. They can also expect to lose their seats next year.

If each of us makes a commitment to act, starting now, to end the madness of high-capacity magazines, open carry laws, assault weapons and more, we can collectively save lives while sending a strong message to Congress. Begin bombarding the House and Senate now with calls and petitions and marches. Write letters to the editor. The message is clear:  Enough is Enough. Stop the slaughter. End the massacres that shames our nation. Save the lives of loved ones, including your own. End the travesty that tarnishes our names as Americans. And remember the Talmudic teaching: “Whoever saves a single life is considered by scripture to have saved the whole world.' ...

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Election Results Beyond Our Borders Matter

It is November 8th, Election Day in America, as I begin to write this commentary before joining friends to watch early results of our crucial midterm election, and it is not hyperbole to say we are beyond tense. We are terrified. We know what could be coming at us if the wrong side prevails, the side that embraces demeaning language, dangerous behavior, power grabs, and cruel priorities. We know because we’re witnessing it in other countries where dictators prevail and where recent elections have exacerbated the global threat of rightwing governments.

Italy is one of them where Giorgia Meloni, essentially Mussolini in skirts, was elected in October. In the 1990s she joined the youth wing of a neo-fascist political party founded by Mussolini and has been a leader in the country’s far right political movement ever since. Sweden is another, where the rightwing Sweden Democrat party which has grown dramatically since 2014, was the country’s second most popular in recent elections.

All across Europe the ideological right has made large gains in recent years, according to the  Pew Research Center.  Spain saw the share of votes for right leaning parties double in four years, and the Netherlands garnered their highest rightwing votes ever in 2021.  That puts them right up there with Hungary and Poland. Even France came close to a big tilt right in its recent election when Marine LePen’s party rose to one of two political parties in a second round during the last two presidential elections.

Israel is another worry since Bibi Netanyahu managed to win that country’s election yet again, despite being under investigation for corruption. He did that by joining forces with three ultra-right political organizations that come under the umbrella of Religious Zionism, suggesting the real possibility of an openly fascist state.  Prominent in the new coalition are men like Itamar Ben Gviv, who was convicted in the past of inciting racism and supporting terrorism.  Other allies have suggested that Israel’s judicial system should be altered such that it would end Bibi’s corruption trial.  Sound familiar?

Netanyahu’s wide-margin victory is deeply worrying. His rightwing bloc now holds 64 of 120 seats in the Knesset, many of them filled with virulent anti-Arab politicians, while the increasing oppression and violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has been called genocidal, rising to the level of crimes against humanity. A new report from Amnesty International finds that “an apartheid system extends not only to Palestinians living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, but also throughout Israel and to displaced refugees in other countries.”

Recent attacks against Palestinians have been shocking. According to Middle East Eye military raids in the occupied West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip in November resulted in dozens of arrests and detentions that included children, while roadblocks prevented over 200,000 Palestinians from conducting daily life. The death toll for Palestinians in recent months surpasses anything seen over the last few years and the number of arrests and raids have grown dramatically. At least 175 adults and 29 children, many of them intentionally shot with live ammunition,  have been killed as a result of Israeli actions in 2022.As one witness put it, “This is what apartheid looks like.”

With Amnesty International taking the lead in its recent report, calls have been mounting for the Biden administration to investigate and report “credible evidence of Israeli forces’ use of U.S.-made weapons, security aid, and Israeli arms bought with U.S. funds to commit grave human rights, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.” It is important to note that the U.S. sends $3.8 billion dollars in military aid to Israel annually, but as  Jewish Voice for Peace points out, our politicians “refuse to hold Israel accountable for how it uses these funds.”

It's encouraging that in May, 15 members of the House of Representatives sent a letter, supported by 60 human rights organizations, to Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling for action to halt Israeli aggression including the destruction of Palestinian homes. It’s also important to note that according to Middle East Eye, the U.S. ambassador to Israel recently warned that the White House would “fight any attempt” by Israel to annex parts of the occupied West Bank, which could be on Netananyu’s extreme rightwing agenda.

Clearly Israel is in a class of its own among democracies that have embraced human rights as foundational, as we witness the dangers of far-right political movements that put strongmen (and women) in charge of national policy grounded in hate and cruelty that can perpetuate crimes against humanity. But it could be the canary in the coal mine as one after another democracy leans dangerously right. This is a time to be mindful of what the future could look like if formerly strong democracies fall prey to ideologies that can quickly rob of us freedoms we take for granted.

The fear that it could happen here was very real on November 8th.  Thankfully the Red Wave didn’t happen. A majority of Americans once again protected our fragile democracy and gave us hope that we can move forward in sensible, sane, humane ways. That doesn’t mean that we are home safe. But it does remind us that what matters most is our voices, our vigilance and our votes, so that we never allow those voices and votes to be taken from us.

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.  www.elayne-clift.com

Will the U.S. Have Post Election Buyer's Remorse?

After Great Britain formally withdrew from the European Union nearly two years ago, a move known as Brexit, it didn’t take long for those who voted for withdrawal from the economic agreement among European nations to regret their decision. Similarly, it took only six weeks for the British electorate to regret having voted for Liz Truss as Prime Minister, a post she was forced to leave after just six weeks in office.  Both the Brexit decision and the appointment of Truss were achieved by Britain’s conservative party and its leadership, both of which will likely fall to the labor party in the next election if not sooner.

With U.S. midterm elections upon us, one can’t help wondering if we too will experience buyer’s remorse in the months to come if our now dangerous and dystopian conservative party wins a majority in either or both Congressional chambers, and/or state and local offices.

How that could happen is incredible to those of us among the majority of American voters, not all of whom are radically left leaning, given what we know is at stake. How, we ask ourselves, can people vote against their own interests? How could they not realize what will happen if the Republican party succeeds in promulgating hideous legislation that blatantly favors the wealthy and the white, while punishing workers and women, as well as multitudes of others? How could they prioritize gas prices over fascism?

It isn’t just America’s elderly, poor, black and brown people, disabled citizens, and children who will suffer most. It’s females whose bodies will be owned by the state. It’s the LBGTQ community who will not be able to marry the person they love. It’s increasing gun violence and domestic terrorism. It’s banned and burned books, control of school curricula, inaccessible quality healthcare in a time of unending pandemics. It’s the continuation of a failing infrastructure that could cost lives, and threats to the planet on which we all live.

The answer to the question “how could that happen here?” is that the demise of democracy as we know it at risk because white supremacy and institutionalized racism –fascism’s core – has existed since America was founded. It’s the foundation of privilege built by orchestrated fear of, control over, and willful punishment directed at immigrants, indigenous people, people of color and other cultures, and those who disagree with dangerously selfish and destructive power grabs by narcissistic maniacs and their acolytes who want a share of wealth and power. At its worst it condemns, attacks, imprisons, deports, and one way or another eliminates “the Other.”

Should Republicans come into power legislators like Rick Scott of Florida will work to promote his “Rescue America” plan which sound great, but really means that Social Security and Medicare would be renegotiated every five years and could ultimately be so diminished that our elders will be doomed to live in poverty and possibly die from lack of needed healthcare.

South Carolina’s Lindsay Graham and other Republicans want to see “entitlement reform” which means steep cuts to Social Security along with a raised retirement age. Medicare, Medicaid, and badly needed prescription drug reform, including the right to negotiate prices with Big Pharma and cap insulin cost would be compromised at best. Meanwhile Marco Rubio is waiting to repeal President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that among other things caps prescription costs for Medicare beneficiaries.

Kevin McCarthy, who would be Speaker of the House should Republicans win, is threatening to hold the U.S. debt limit hostage to policy changes, even though it was Republicans who added massively to the national debt because of their tax cuts to corporations and obscenely wealthy individuals.

Basically, Republicans simply want to reverse, nullify, limit, or kill all the achievements of the Biden Administration, US citizens be damned.

America as we’ve known it is truly at risk in a way that most of us have never known or acknowledged in our lifetimes, despite the fact that racism and white supremacy have always been part of our life and legacy. It is time now, before it’s too late for generations to come, that we recognize the underbelly of our country in order to save it and make it whole, and that we ensure common cause so that we can grow and thrive as a free and feeling nation.

Politically, we have two kinds of needs. The first is practical. The second is strategic. Right now, voting is a practical need that is immediate, easy to do with quick results. It’s not as controversial as strategic needs which include long term work and social change, like giving women the right to vote. Strategic needs are aimed at equity, freedom, and democracy. We have to address them too, but they will not be easy or quick.

Our task now is to embrace voting to save what we value. That right and responsibility has never been more urgent. But our responsibility doesn’t end with voting. It begins there and leads to doing the hard work of defending, perpetuating, and securing democracy. Only then can we recover from our present trauma and begin to rebuild a stronger, better nation that is sustainable, inclusive, equitable, and empathetic than the one we find ourselves in at this crucial moment.

The Dangers of a Deranged Judiciary

Next month as we go to the polls to vote for people to represent us at all levels of governance it is deeply important to remember that these midterm elections are monumentally significant in an unprecedented way, with the possible exception of the Nazi scare in the 1930s and 40s. Results of all elections have consequences, but this time they will serve as a precursor to the most consequential election in our lifetimes in 2024.

As I’ve said to students who were voting for the first time, “You aren’t just voting for a president, you are voting for the courts and the judicial system. Who do you want interpreting the law and doling out justice?” It’s a question I now ask everyone when discussing politics, because our Constitution and democracy are seriously at stake.

We stand at the edge of a delicate precipice in this moment. It’s a precipice that seems to entice roughly a third of Americans as they race to the edge with violent enthusiasm, arms raised in a

Q-anon salute to their cult leader, tagged by one Republican “the orange Jesus.” That leader bears a striking resemblance to dictators the world over, past and present.  This election is a call to deny him and his enablers and acolytes the power to curtail or end our Constitutional rights.

In some ways autumn, with its encroaching darkness and chill, feels like a metaphor for the future. If we aren’t careful, we will fall into a deep and dangerous chasm from which there will be no recovery or return.

The courts play an enormously important role in securing our future.  As legal scholar and analyst Dalhia Lithwick has noted, “All we have protecting us is laws, and the courts that interpret and enforce those laws.”  Right now the courts, from SCOTUS down, look shockingly political, unqualified, and threatening. 

One has only to consider the Supreme Court and the federal courts to be frightened. Recently   Chief Justice John Roberts found it necessary to suggest the court is maintaining its legitimacy. But that’s hard to swallow in view of Roe v. Wade being overturned after 50 years of what Trump-seated judges declared was settled law during their confirmation hearings in an extraordinary display of perjury.  It’s hard to swallow in the face of expanded gun rights, the deifying of religious liberty in the name of Christianity over fundamental equality, and a SCOTUS spouse actively engaged in bringing down the government.

Justice Elena Kagan recognized the disgrace of the Court in her rebuttal to Justice John Roberts’ remarks in a  Slate.com article “Judges,” she said, “undermine their legitimacy when they don’t act so much like courts and when they don’t do things that are recognizably law.” She didn’t stop there, cautioning the Court not to “stray into places where it looks like they are an extension of the political process or where they are imposing their own personal preferences.” Slate put it more graphically, accusing the justices of “pinning their smelly socks and underwear out on the line for the world to see.”

Then there are the federal court and state judges who serve lifetime appointments. Donald Trump appointed 234 judges, including three on the Supreme Court, 54 in U.S. Courts of appeal, and 174 serving in district courts, one of whom is Judge Aileen Cannon who insisted on appointing a special master in the legal fight between Trump and the Department of Justice over secret documents squirreled away in Mara Lago. Legal scholars have raised alarm bells stating she is grossly unqualified to serve that appointment. She is likely a canary in the coalmine when it comes to critical decisions being decided throughout the country’s judiciary.

It may come as some relief to know that President Biden appointed more judges to the federal courts by August this year than any president since John F. Kennedy, and his appointments include a record number of women and ethnic minorities, according to the Pew Research Center.

That, of course, revs up the lunatics who are ready to declare any election win they don’t like a fraud, and to ratchet up violent protests, predictions of which are truly alarming. National leaders are already warning of potential political violence fueled by the FBI investigation into the Mara Lago document stash. Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who kisses the ring of Donald Trump, has warned that there would be “riots in the streets” if the Justice Department prosecutes him, and the former president himself has declared that “terrible things are going to happen” if the election doesn’t go his way. Lawmakers are now reporting threats against them and their families, admitting that violence makes them afraid to hold public events. “It’s legitimizing violence. It’s a very dangerous thing,” a former analyst at the Department of Homeland Security told .NBC News.

It's good public servants and others dedicated to the survival of American democracy who especially feel the darkness and chill of a political autumn that is just around the corner. They stand closer to the precipice right now than most of us. But we are all inching closer to the edge. Unless we vote to ensure the survival of democracy and freedom, we will all slip off the rocks of an untoward revolution. Sadly, it is one that will have been aided by the downfall of America’s courts, and that is a  tragedy that should never have come to pass.

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The Life Force of Livid Women is at Work

In 1995 when activist, advocate and former Congresswoman Bella Abzug uttered these words at the 4th World Conference of Women in Beijing, thousands of women there and everywhere felt the force of her words: “Women will change the nature of power, power will not change the nature of women. Never underestimate the importance of what we are doing. Never give in and never give up!”

Recently, when I quoted those words to a group of adult learners in recounting United Nations conferences focusing on women that had occurred over 20 years between 1975 and the Beijing conference, some participants struggled to understand what Abzug meant about the nature of power as it relates to gender.  For several days I pondered their questions searching for clarity in how to respond. Then on October 3rd something happened that helped me articulate an answer.

That was the day Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first Black woman to be seated on the Supreme Court of the United States, and I realized that the three critical voices of dissent on the badly damaged highest court in our county would now be women’s voices. Their intelligent, impassioned collective legal analysis would still be in the Court’s minority, but having them there, “speak[ing] truth to nonsense” as legal journalist Dahlia Lithwick, author of the new book Lady Justice puts it, highlights a watershed moment in which the nature of power for both women and men is shifting, not symbolically but in real terms, representing a new understanding of how women are reshaping how we live.

Described as “a beacon to generations” in one account of her first day on the bench, it was not lost on legal scholars, and many women, that Justice Jackson has arrived at the Supreme Court at a critical and necessary time. Her effectiveness as a voice of dissent, reminiscent of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s, was apparent when with quiet authority she offered to “bring some enlightenment” to a provision in the Clean Water Act in her response to an attorney hoping to kill the Act.

The voices of women like Justice Jackson and Dahlia Lithwick, inside and out of courtrooms, speak volumes to multitudes of women and their advocates in a time when females are being dragged back to a full throttled misogyny so devoid of understanding, compassion, and justice and so deeply punitive and threatening it boggles the mind.

That’s why acts of resistance like the one Iran’s women are bravely mounting with global support have always existed, whether over female sexuality, the quest for freedom, need for voting rights and economic security, or egregious political acts of injustice. Women in vast numbers through the ages have had enough. They are tired of being silenced, rendered invisible, and metaphorically burned at the stake. They’ve had enough of being told to calm down when revealing their consciousness and attempts at social justice based on lived experience, whether in capitals, courtrooms or communities. They’re exhausted from abuses in the marketplace, the academy, the home, and the mine fields of micro-aggression. They are more ready than ever to self-advocate in the face of misogyny driven violence, abuse and poverty while rejecting discrimination, deprivation, and  unrealistic expectations.

In a recently published LitHub article about her new book Dahlia Lithwick captures this frustration while interviewing numerous women who worked within the legal system. One of them was Anita Hill, who shared this personal story about giving a presentation on Supreme Court decisions. “A young white man said, ‘Aren’t you being a little paranoid? You act as though the sky is falling.’” Hill replied, “Here’s a list [of examples]. You tell me when the sky is falling.” Later she realized “it wasn’t just that the sky was falling. It was because we don’t live under the same sky.” Lithwick adds, “I realized that much like the 6-3 conservative supermajority that now controls the court, they simply don’t live under the same sky.”

Therein, Hill and Lithwick capture a key problem. As Lithwick puts it, addressing charges of paranoia and hysteria, “The mirror image of telling a woman you believe her is telling her she is being hysterical. … That is the real problem when women’s pain is substituted for actual justice.” And as she points out, “our very presence is outrageous. The fact that we even say anything is a sign of resistance.”

It is that resistance to insults and dismissal that I think Bella Abzug was reaching for when she spoke of gendered power in 1995. She knew, of course, that not all the world’s women would be with her along with the thousands of women who came to Beijing, nor would they all welcome the change women so badly need. But she also understood that for millennia, power has been the purview and prerogative of men, a notion that has been considered a social norm, despite women having always been a profound presence seeking justice and human rights, rendering themselves a thorn in the side of patriarchal power.

Women’s voices and calls for justice are always fundamental to resisting imposed silence, so Bella’s clarion call to a fatigued sisterhood who needed to be infused with new energy and hope was deeply important in that moment. It’s also why Judge Jackson’s presence on the Supreme Court now, along with Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, is so very important. 

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Elayne Clift writes about women, politics and social justice from Brattleboro, Vt.

Community in Context: The Importance of Connection

It was 103 degrees when we gathered under a shade tent in California to honor a mutual friend over Labor Day weekend. We’d been a tight group connected to the woman we’d come to see for almost 30 years and joyful hugs were shared as we greeted each other. The most remarkable thing about those hugs was that with one exception we’d never actually met each other in person.

We had communicated for many of those years by email, text, and phone because we were part of a support group that helped sustain the friend we came to meet while she was incarcerated for far too long and for all the wrong reasons. An amazing woman, her story and her strength had bound us in friendship and determination and now a  few of us we were gathering in solidarity to celebrate her rightful place in society and to salute her extraordinary patience, faith, and skills as a peer leader, which had inspired each of us.

That occasion prompted me to think about the importance, and the urgency, of community in a time when it seems that the idea of community – coming together with and for each other - has been sadly diminished in an age when social media, email and text dominate our lives such that we have lost the art and the gift of true interpersonal contact. As I contemplated this loss, myriad examples came to mind as I recalled the sense of community I’d grown up with and have been lucky to enjoy in a variety of contexts.

I remembered the neighborhood I grew up in, a place where other mothers took the place of mine when she was frequently hospitalized. I recalled summers “down the shore” with school friends, and later the women’s group I started when I had a significant birthday, a gang that has continued to constitute a caring community relied upon and enjoyed by each of us for nearly three decades.  I embraced the thought of the new community my husband and I entered when we moved recently.

I also recalled the deep sense of loss I experienced when other strong and loving friendships that created the sense of a small community dissolved for reasons I still don’t understand.

Those memories helped me contemplate the nature of community and why it is so important to maintain in a frenzied world with a fragile future. I thought about how communities are born and exist within a variety of contexts and how they are sustained. I realized that they come in different sizes, can be short-lived but meaningful and important, arise around relationships developed in formative years, fleeting encounters, or in later life.  Sometimes inspired or bound by geography or shared experience, cultures, or history, they can also spring up between and among people of deep diversity. 

When I solo-traveled frequently as a young single woman I found myself in community because of a shared love of travel that lasted the length of a train trip, or a hotel stay or a restaurant encounter. The people I met and connected with on many levels weren’t just new acquaintances, some became lifelong friends even though we lived in different countries or came from disparate cultures; they were my community in the time we shared.  

When I connected with people who share my religious identity or my political views, for example, we “got” each other quickly and understood and cared about each other. We told our stories, laughed together, and revealed our values and worldview. However long or brief, it was a time of deep connection. Occasionally my new sense of community kept me out of trouble as a young woman traveling alone and helped me to not feel lonely or afraid. It also gave me the chance to share my wonder and joy in new places with others who felt the same way.

That, it seems to me, is essential community. It’s about being in connection in very human ways and caring for and about each other in times of celebration, new experience, growth or need. It’s a time to explore and contemplate our common humanity and often to find soulmates who sustain us.  It manifests itself in places where people gather, and in places where they find each other serendipitously. It can exist through structured environments or in the metaphorical woods of exploration and questing.  Sometimes “it takes a village,” and sometimes it’s found in interrupted solitude.

That’s why it is so sad to think that we are relinquishing community – in whatever form it takes -- or failing to recognize its demise because modern life has created craters in our connection to each other.  Writer bell hooks (sic) put it this way: “I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.”

Those words speak volumes about technology-driven modern life and the isolation it spawns. They also remind us of the need for, and the gift of, connection in our harried lives. Whether in a village, a train, or a regularly shared tradition, community exists to be cherished and nurtured, just as it continues to nurture us.

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt. 

Is This the Country You want to Inhabit?

At last alarm bells are ringing.  Most sentient Americans are beginning to realize what is at stake in the November midterm elections, and the 2024 election that will follow – unless by then they are cancelled. That’s because unless you’re a devotee of Donald Trump and his ilk it is now clear that we are in the early stages of full-blown fascism and the death of democracy in America.

It has becoming blatantly clear that what’s happening here, right now, is an American version of Hitler’s playbook and other dictators’ powerplays. It’s a playbook being embraced by governors, state officials, Republicans in Congress, white supremacists, and their followers eager for a fight, literally on the streets.

How else can you describe or explain the terrifying events that have taken place as a precursor to what is coming at us, rapidly and unbelievably? Here’s what is already occurring, all of which parallels Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, a time when Nazi ideology also threatened our own country.  

We have entered a pronatalist period in which women’s only role and value is seen as childbearing and childrearing in order to ensure an indoctrinated population in the country’s future. The fact that a child of ten can be forced to carry a rape baby, or a woman may be made to birth a non-viable fetus to the point of her own death make abundantly clear how devalued women are and how little their lives matter.  The very idea that a fertilized egg has more rights than a real human being and that funding for programs that aid children in need are being cut should be proof of a nation in the grip of madness for the good of the mad.

Censorship is rampant in schools and libraries and book burnings have already taken place. School curricula are being revised and grossly dumbed down by handpicked school boards at such a rapid pace they go largely unnoticed unless a short segment of the news tells a story or two.  Teacher training is so dramatically broken there is already a critical shortage of well-trained, motivated, devoted teachers who are leaving their profession in droves, only to be replaced by unqualified, untrained teachers, even in some places without so much as a college degree or specialty certification.

The media, mainstream and other outlets, are walking on eggs, themselves increasingly frightened at the prospect of what they may be confronted with as owners and editors become more conservative and controlling. The ultimate nightmare is the threat of over-regulation or nationalization of media with the arrest of journalists, who along with protestors have already been arrested in violation of their First Amendment rights.

The healthcare system in this country, already broken in many ways, is now at enormous risk of political interference that can literally kill people.  Across the entire range of caregiving, practitioners have been threatened with lawsuits, loss of licenses, and jail time, and in some states, they face the threat of life sentences if they perform or enable abortion. One state legislator in Texas has called for the death penalty for anyone who conducts an abortion.

And it’s not only clinicians who are at risk.  Women who miscarry have already been sent to jail and in the most repressive states, anyone who helps or enables a woman in any way to access abortion is also at risk of long-term imprisonment. That includes friends or family who help women receive abortifacients via mail or driving them across state lines. That’s how horrific things are right now, with more restrictions to come. (Can you imagine having to get government permission to drive or fly to another state? Would that mean pelvic exams at roadblocks or airports, one wonders?)

Others have lost their jobs because they don’t march to the drumbeat of local functionaries handpicked by autocrats in powerful places while people are rewarded for spying on and outing their neighbors, friends or family member.

All of this is happening here and now. What’s next? Curfews? Loyalty oaths? Assassinations? Public humiliation? Late night knocks on the door? Yellow stars and Kristallnachts? Think it can’t happen here? That’s what good German people thought too.

So what do we need to do beyond voting, donating, signing petitions, marching, striking? Perhaps the most important thing is to recognize how real the threat is. Name it and educate others. Pressure media to stop Trump news and start focusing on the trials and testimonies of those who are suffering and afraid. Call your Congresspeople into action if they want your vote.

It isn’t the economy or inflation that will bring this country down. It’s losing the freedom to make our own life decisions,  to love whom we wish , to be educated free of misplaced ideology, to have quality healthcare in partnership with practitioners and not politicians. It is a life without fear and oppression. Most of all it’s about living a safe, self-determined life enhanced by diversity, intellectual curiosity, and mutual respect. It is a life grounded in the belief that human and civil rights, kindness, and caring for each other are foundational. Outside of autocrats, dictators and oligarchs who would want to live in a place devoid of those values? 

The time to imagine and plan a new American Dream is upon us. Do we have the courage, vision, motivation, and energy to do that in this crucial moment, because surely the old adage is truly upon us. It really is “now or never.”

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com

Cybercrime: The Phenomenon That Keeps on Taking

In a recent opinion editorial, I recounted the frustrations of attempting to update personal information online or by phone after moving house. It was a Kafkaesque nightmare that involved corporations, banks, airlines, businesses, and more and it continues to plague me. But it doesn’t compare to what I went through shortly afterwards when I fell prey to serious cyberspace crime.

I’m pretty good at spotting scam emails and texts but I still got caught. Alarmed by what seemed like a legitimate PayPal warning that a large sum of money was being charged to my account, I fell for a message that could have destroyed me financially. It took a Herculean effort to ensure my financial safety and identity.

In time to avoid monetary loss, I closed bank and credit card accounts, including those I share with my husband, and opened new ones. I alerted Social Security to lock my number and notified three credit rating agencies to do the same so that no one could use my good rating to their own advantage. Then I closed my PayPal account and filed a report online with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and reported the fraud and identity theft to the State Police.

 Next, I reported the fraud to banks and other relevant entities connected to my personal financial information so they could attach a “fraud alert” to my accounts in the event suspicious activity occurred. I also needed to share with creditors updated information they would need to know. Finally, I changed multiple passwords and usernames. The whole thing was exhausting and made harder by the dysfunctions of websites and the difficulty of talking with real people when I needed help. I share those details because they may be helpful to others who fall victim to cybercrime.

After telling my story to people I know, and many I don’t, I was staggered to realize the magnitude of cybercrime.  Literally every person I talked to told me their personal fraud story or knew someone who had been a victim. They were mostly older women because we are vulnerable and personal information is easily accessible on the web, including our age group.

Some of these victims had lost huge amounts of money. In one case, a woman had been wiped clean. Many of them believed fraud messages ostensibly from Paypal or Amazon, two of the larger scam fronts used by cybercriminals adept at what they do.

That’s when I decided to write to my Congressional senators and representative because this level and severity of crime urgently needs to be addressed. I also encouraged anyone who is similarly victimized to call their members of Congress so that they begin to  realize how widespread and devastating the situation is.

I also sat down to pen this piece, because cybercrime has become an epidemic of such huge proportion that its related stress is becoming a mental health issue.  That is not hyperbole. Sleepless nights, depression, anxiety and excessive irritability are among its many symptoms as any victim can tell you.

That’s why Congress needs to take cybercrime seriously, put in place consumer protection legislation, and find ways to hold perpetrators accountable, even when they operate from other countries. Congress also must ensure that businesses are equipped to deal with the problems victims face, which brings me back to the issues I raised in my earlier piece. 

Corporate America – from banks to businesses to airlines and phone companies, to name just a few – must invest in user-friendly websites that actually make it possible for customers to change their emails, login information, and passwords for a start. They must be made to provide telephone help from real people who actually understand the problems that arise so that they are equipped to shepherd people through overwhelming challenges. That requires a major investment in human resources, the least technology giants can do in facing up to cybercrime.   

A 2020 report by the World Economic Forum offers clear steps that must be taken in order to combat cybercrime.  First, the report says, “Countries must become more agile in updating or developing cybersecurity strategies, as well as legal and regulatory frameworks regarding cyberspace.” The report points out that this will require a multi-stakeholder approach because governments cannot do it alone; international cooperation is also critical since new and more dangerous cybercrime methods will proliferate over time, as they have done in recent years.

Clearly Congressional hearings are sorely needed, with testimony from the FTC and other governmental and non-governmental agencies conversant with the cybercrime epidemic, along with victims, who cannot continue to proliferate while disappearing into the sinkhole of financial and internet despair. As the World Economic Forum understands, “users should never be the last line of defense in cybersecurity. It is a shared responsibility.”

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.

How Much More Can We Take?

A few days before writing this commentary my husband went into town on a quick errand. When he didn’t return for a longer time than expected, my first thought when I began to worry was this: Could there have been an act of gun violence?

While waiting nervously for him to come home I learned that two days earlier an 18-year-old part-time junior police officer armed with a gun and with inadequate training had fired his weapon next to a school which fortunately was closed, and into a house where a bullet landed in a bedroom wall.  Luckily, no one was injured. 

What might easily have been a tragedy in my small, sleepy, rural town was deeply disturbing. It was also unimaginable, which is what we all think when our sense of immunity in the face of growing gun violence kicks in.

In a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, I wrote, “How is it possible that an 18--old person not long out of high school is permitted to serve on a police force, part-time, with a firearm, with limited if any training when research reveals that it isn’t until the age of at least 24 that the human brain is sufficiently mature to have developed impulse control and sound decision-making? Why is a junior, part-time cop in a small Vermont town allowed to carry a gun, especially without adequate training?”

Why, for that matter, is anyone allowed to readily purchase or gain access to guns – and in some states to open carry them, especially long, lethal guns designed for military use specifically to kill someone?

It is notable that numerous research studies published in recent years have addressed the issue of brain development and its relation to impulsivity and poor decision-making in adolescents. The studies are highly relevant to the issue of young people, including junior cops, who are males between 20 and 30, having access to guns. They show that “poor cognitive control and the tendency toward impulsive behavior influence the ability to make reasonable choices in daily-life situations during adolescence. In fact, many risky behaviors … are closely related to impulsivity in adolescence ….”

Put colloquially, “Neuroscientists are confirming what car rental places already figured out — the brain doesn't fully mature until age 25. Up until this age …the part of the brain that helps curb impulsive behavior is not yet fully developed. Some scientists say this could illuminate a potential factor behind a recent spate of acts of mass violence.”

The many questions flooding my mind and the mind of so many others in the aftermath of the Uvalde massacre are questions that have loomed ever larger since the slaughter in Newtown, let alone all the other school killings and fatal shootings in malls, movies, markets, clubs, churches, and other venues. They are questions that contribute nonstop to rage, grief, sadness and fear, all of which have grown exponentially until these feelings begin to inhabit our bodies in alarmingly somatic ways that illustrate the mind-body connection many of us now experience.

Some questions regarding gun violence are rhetorical, while others are frustrating beyond measure.  Why, for example, after Newtown, have legislators on one side of the Congressional aisle – the side that wants to protect fetuses but continually prioritizes guns over babies or child welfare, still be able to remain in office? Why expect more guns to resolve the epidemic of mass shootings, or think that teachers with guns are the solution, if teachers would take up arms when trained cops are afraid to use them in the face of military weaponry that rips bodies apart in seconds?  Why are we the only country in the developed world with this growing, egregious, tragic problem even though other countries have mentally ill citizens too?

Those are big questions for all of us to ponder, but like other moms, wives, family members, friends, and others, my personal questions haunt me to the point of neurosis because of the horror of continuing gun violence: Why haven’t the kids texted or called back? When will they phone to say they’ve arrived home safely?  Is it safe for me to enter this bank or that restaurant, the grocery store, a performance venue? Should I walk  here? How can I not be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Would I survive unspeakable loss?

In searching for a relevant end to this rumination I read copious anecdotal and empirical works about situational anxiety and depression, written or spoken by notable as well as lay people, before guns and violence became so much a part of our lives. They all sounded like tired cliches, superficial sound bites in this time. Now the urgency of what I read about anxiety and depression related to gun violence is markedly different. It is a collective, clarion call pleading for an end to what has become our country’s new, hideous, destructive normal.

 I am reminded of something Martin Luther King, Jr. once said in a different context: “If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl, but by all means, keep moving.”  If that’s the most a governing body can offer its citizens, what does it say about who we have become, and where we are headed?

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Elayne Clift writes about politics, social issues, and current events from Vermont.

Actions Have Consequences: The Supreme Court Should Know That

It was like standing alone on a nuclear landscape. Like being in the center of a dystopian nightmare. Like being on a sinking ship without a life vest. At least that’s how it felt to me as the Supreme Court’s decisions were handed down, one after the other in their recent session.

Stunned and frightened like so many others were, I wondered whether the faux Christian, conservative justices on the Court had any idea what the consequences of their hideous decisions would be as they ended a term in which civil rights in America were systematically ended. Did they willfully ignore what would happen because of their Draconian decisions, did they not have a clue, or did they simply not care?

Was this the legacy they wanted to leave their children and grandchildren, let alone the rest of us? Did they have any sense of the consequences, intended or otherwise, for American citizens, and the planet? Do they grasp the context of our Constitution, or the concept of democracy? Do they really hate women and others unlike them this much?

As these questions roiled in my head, I thought about some of the consequences the justices’ rightwing agenda presented, beginning with what would befall women and girls who no longer have agency over their bodies and lives, or access to reproductive health care.

Among them is a ten-year old child pregnant by paternal rape being denied an abortion in Ohio,  women with pre-eclampsia – high blood pressure that can be fatal to mother and baby when not treated urgently, women with gestational diabetes, a condition that can be harmful to mother and baby, women with ectopic pregnancies in which a fertilized egg attaches to the Fallopian tube instead of the uterus, an emergency situation requiring immediate care to prevent a fatal rupture, women whose lives are at risk because of  drastic fetal anomalies.

 Now women with these urgent or other reproductive healthcare needs are too frightened to seek timely reproductive care while providers are increasingly unwilling to offer it, both for fear of being prosecuted. These examples offer a small glimpse into what will happen to women and girls because of the Court’s decision to end Roe v. Wade, but this much we know: Many of them will die. So will women who elect to have an illegal or self-induced abortion for any reason.

I also thought about the death knell being sounded for the fragile, struggling planet on which we live due to environmental degradation and the global warming crisis. Just these staggering statistics are enough to send chills down my spine: “Every hour, 1,692 acres of productive dry land become desert. We are using up 50 more natural resources than the Earth can provide.” What’s more, “We have a garbage island floating in our ocean, mostly comprised of plastics - the size of India, Europe and Mexico combined!” 

Further, “The effects of human-caused global warming are happening now, are irreversible on the timescale of people alive today, and will worsen in the decades to come,” according to NASA. “Glaciers have shrunk, ice on rivers and lakes is breaking up earlier, plant and animal ranges have shifted, and trees are flowering sooner,” while “effects that scientists had predicted in the past would result from global climate change are now occurring: loss of sea ice, accelerated sea level rise and longer, more intense heat waves.”

Against these chilling facts, six Supreme Court justices saw to it that the Environmental Protection Agency would now have limited ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants “making it nearly impossible to cut greenhouse as emissions any time soon.” In their dissenting opinion three justices said the majority had stripped the E.P.A. of “the power to respond to the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.”

When it comes to separation of church and state the conservative majority outdid themselves. Recent decisions included a ruling in favor of a Christian group’s plea to allow a flag with a cross on it to fly over Boston’s city hall. Another decision allowed for taxpayer money to cover tuition for students attending religious high schools, while the six Supremes decided in favor of a high school football coach who led Christian prayers on the playing field  after games.

Then there’s states’ rights. Again, the Scotus-6 opined against New York State's concealed carry law requiring state residents to have a permit to carry a gun in public.  That law’s requirements for a permit were specific and in the public interest but when two guys who wanted to carry guns publicly were denied permits, they appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled the state law violated the 14th and Second Amendments. The decision proffered that the Second Amendment protects the public carry of firearms and set up a new test for courts to determine whether a law violates the Second Amendment.  New York's law was struck down, and other laws like New York's are likely to be struck down now.

Is it any wonder these frightening, tip-of-the-iceberg rulings made me feel like we’re approaching nuclear winter?  Bundle up. The Supreme Court is just getting started.