Baby Bribery: The Height of Hypocrisy

Remember the political phrase some years ago endorsed by Republicans who called themselves “the moral majority” while critics’ responded that they were neither? Or the Democratic crie de coeur that Republicans only cared about children from conception to birth?  Well, the time has come to recall those responses.

It’s clear that the Trump administration is embracing a pronatalist position taken straight out of the Hitler playbook. Adolf rewarded women who birthed lots of Aryan children, and Donald is now embracing the idea of incentivizing women to have at least six children.

At the same time as the president blathers on about “traditional family values,” he’s on a diabolical mission to convince women to have more babies – at least six of them. If they meet that goal (and what woman would want to?) he would reward them with a $5,000 “baby bonus” – get this – reserve some scholarships for mothers who are married with children.  But wait a minute: What mother of six would have the time or energy required in the marketplace, the academy, corporations, factories, farms or elsewhere other than the kitchen and laundry room. To top off this amazing offer, he would also give them “motherhood metals.”  Who could resist that?

To support baby making he would also bump up financial support for more IVF because he claims to be the “fertilization president” and the “king of IVF.”  This delusion at the same time that women are going to jail for miscarriage and dying from lack of pre-natal and birthing care.

The fact is that laws relating to miscarriage in many states have proliferated since Roe v. Wade was overturned, despite the statistic that about 30 to 50 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. That’s a lot of women who are at risk of criminal prosecution.

The hypocrisy doesn’t stop there. The faux IVF maven and his gang of goons are simultaneously slashing every program that helps children and their families, including cuts to maternal and child health programs, the Head Start program for low-income families, childcare support, paid maternity leave, and daycare, as well as Medicaid. It’s relatively easy to increase the fertility rate, but where does protecting our progeny fit into this Draconian plan?

So much for family values. In March the U.S. Department of Agriculture cut $500 million from the Emergency Food Assistance Program and cut more than $1 billion from two programs that help food banks and school meal programs, including $660 million for schoolchildren because, they said, it was “nonessential.” Hundreds of school systems and food banks are not facing rising food prices along with food insecurity, according to a .Stateline report.

As the 19th century clergyman, Frederick William Robertson, said, “There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy: Hypocrisy, fraud and tyranny. “

This White House fits that sentiment along with being amazingly inept in making moral decisions, understanding connections or caring about them, as it continues its insane tyranny over safety nets and vital resources.  Schools, for example, are taking a big hit when it comes to government support for all the babies it wants to see born.  Fewer financial resources for schools, from early education programs through higher education, impact how those babies will grow and develop in the best possible ways.

Minnesota based Walden University, which specializes in programs related to education, cites the results of fewer resources available to schools, especially those with ill-funded school budgets. Students in these schools don’t perform as well as they could because schools can’t buy updated textbooks in a variety of fields, and updated educational technology takes a hard hit when funds are cut, along with art supplies, extracurricular activities, and transportation. Larger classrooms stand to see dozens of students with one teacher, making individualized assistance unlikely.

As educator John Dewey noted, “Education is Life Itself.”  Would that this administration realized that and valued our children enough to act like grownups in the room.  

In the health sector, the impact of Medicaid cuts on children is alarming. They can lead to fewer providers, longer waiting times, and limited access to essential services, especially for special- needs children. Support services like school-based programs or important in-home care will be curtailed, and rural communities will be hit hard by cuts that lead to health disparities. Children with disabilities will suffer reduced interventions and therapies, which will compromise their physical development and mental health. These cuts are grounded in the fact that children are often overlooked in budget debates because they have no political voice.

As Nelson Mandela said, “History will judge us by the difference we make in the everyday life of children.”  And history will also judge this administration for its hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny along with its lack of compassion, humanity, and lack of morality.

As for bribes for babies, I wouldn’t start making any motherhood medals. 

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt. 

The Machinations Just Won't Quit

Lately, I’ve been worried about some new steps the Trump administration has in mind. There’s the gigantic Trojan horse airplane that the president is excited about. And the threat of millions of Americans losing Medicaid coverage as lawmakers consider changing the health care insurance program that benefits more than 70 million people nationwide, according to a Newsweek Report.

Republicans on the committee that oversees Medicaid had contemplated $800 billion in spending cuts, which largely affected Medicaid, so that the administration could increase tax breaks for the rich. The Congressional Budget Office estimated at the time that the bill could result in over 10 million people losing some coverage and more than seven million going without any insurance. Those most affected by Medicaid cuts include low-income individuals and families, the elderly, disabled, and immigrants. Amazingly, Republicans in Congress have argued for even larger cuts.

The original bill required that able-bodied adults work or volunteer for many hours a week. In a moment of generosity, the proposed bill would exempt pregnant women or anyone with a proven short-term hardship. There would also be new co-pays for those earning over a certain threshold. Medicaid recipients who make around $32,000 a year for a family of four would be required to pay $35 for some services.  That could mean a difficult decision when it’s time to buy groceries or your kids’ meds.

I’m also worried about a House bill that wants the Treasury Secretary to designate any nonprofit he choices a “terrorist supporting organization” without justification. Such nonprofit organizations would have their tax-exempt status removed without due process, according to the Americans Against Government Censorship.

As the AAGC notes, “no administration should be able to weaponize the government against their political opponents in a power grab [nor should] the federal government use its power to punish and attack any organization that stands in their way.”

In the first 100 days of his administration President Trump pursued an agenda aimed at silencing any organization that expressed views that were counter to his public policies. Churches, universities, government agencies and officials, law firms and media were subject to punishment because they spoke out against the administration’s agenda. The bullying of opponents was shocking, but it shouldn’t have been. It was all there, overtly or by inuendo in Project 2025.

There are close to two million nonprofit organizations based in the U.S. They include charities, private foundations and other types of NGOs that provide food assistance, medical care, disaster relief, educational resources, and more. If that law passes, every American would become vulnerable in a variety of ways should the multitude of programs, agencies, and funders of civil society and social justice organizations lose their tax-exempt status.

As the executive director of Americans Against Government Censorship, put it, “It’s a sad day in this country when organizations that provide critical services to their communities are under attack from their government.” It’s also a sad time when a slew of executive orders and Draconian laws devised by ignorant, selfish people make others in all walks of life feel fearful, humiliated, insecure, ill, anxious and hopeless. 

Then birthright citizenship showed up on political radar screens. On Day One of his current presidency, Donald Trump followed up on his pledge to issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship. He signed an executive order that day. The problem is that only constitutional amendments, not executive orders or legislation, can change the Constitution.

According to the ACLU and other legal scholars the president’s order is clearly unconstitutional because it  violates the 14th Amendment, which states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” guaranteeing  that no politician can decide who among those born in our country is worthy of citizenship.

The issue loomed large recently when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments concerning Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship. The arguments weren’t about birthright citizenship per se. That issue in its entirety will be heard later. Instead, arguments were about the merits of the case with a focus on procedural questions. As MSNBC’s legal expert Lisa Rubin noted, the most significant moment in the hearing came when the Trump administration’s lawyer blew his case with an irrelevant statement to which Justice Amy Coney Barrett responded that it sounded like “a troubling sign of creeping authoritarianism.”

Now Attorney General Pam Bondi wants “subpoenas, court orders, and search warrants to compel” reporters to reveal information about their sources. She has said that the Justice Department “will not tolerate disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies.” The Draconian act would overrule the PRESS Act, which had bipartisan support pre-Trump. It would have codified protections against subpoenas for reporters’ records if Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer hadn’t let the proposed Act die, according to a recent post on The Intercept.

It's obvious that further threatening legislation lies ahead. It will be up to the courts, public vigilance and protests, and pleas to Congress to end the dangerous dysfunction we are experiencing if we are to avoid the authoritarianism that already looms large.

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro Vermont.

A New Eugenics Wave: Trying to Make Disability and Disease Disappear

Back in the 1980s when I was a budding journalist publishing articles related to women and health while working as Program Director for the National Women’s Health Network, I had the privilege of interviewing Judy Heumann and her collaborator Ed Roberts. Judy was known by then as the Mother of the Disability Movement and Ed was called the Father of Independent Living.

Judy, who died in 2023, had contracted polio as a child who then spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair.  She was denied the right to attend school because she was considered a fire hazard at the age of five. That was the seed that led to her life’s work. Determined to work with other disabled people, she helped found the Berkeley Center for Independent Living and the World Institute on Disability with Ed, who also had polio at the age of fourteen. It left him completely paralyzed and on a respirator for the rest of his life.  Undeterred, Ed fought to attend UC Berkeley, and ultimately became the first student to use a wheelchair there, let alone a respirator.

Their stories opened my mind to justice issues as no one else had. Together Judy and Ed changed the lives of all disabled people by helping to institute laws like the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), and much more. They weren’t afraid of shocking people, and they knew how to mobilize the media. In 1990 they led a demonstration in which thousands of activists abandoned their wheelchairs and mobility aids, many of them crawling up the eighty-three steps of the U.S. Capital building. The youngest one among them was eight years old.

A recent article in The Guardian noted that the day after Donald Trump was sworn for a second term was the day that the accessibility page and all assisted living content was removed from the White House website. Live interpretation (ASL) was removed from the White House and various federal agencies too.

Additionally, words like “diversity,” “women,” “accessibility” and “disability” were listed as reason to reject grant applications at the National Science Foundation, scaring other agencies and research institutions. That was followed by the order to dismantle the Department of Education, with over 1300 employees fired, and seven regional offices were closed. Special education and rehabilitation services along with the department’s office of civil rights were affected – after Linda McMahon, Trump’s Secretary of Education, promised that those programs would not be affected.

As the Guardian pointed out, early intervention programs and post-high school transition programs, including those that help with employment for disabled workers, are being slashed. They even went so far as to scrub the Special Olympics.  Services like speech, physical and occupational therapy have been cut. So were funds for ramps and braille materials, along with the idea of preferential seating and more. Some have called the treatment of disabled people “the canary in the coal mine.”  After all, Hitler started his elimination campaigns with disabled people. 

What’s happening here now smacks of Eugenics, which was first passed in the U.S. in 1907 in Indiana. Eugenics laws targeted disabled people in schools, institutions, and jails.  Sterilization was mandated for “criminals, idiots, rapists, and imbeciles” in the state. Another law passed that year called for compulsory sterilization for those with “heredity diseases, which included deafness, blindness, epilepsy, and a lot of other conditions. In 1930s Germany mandatory abortions were also required if a parent had one of the identified conditions.

In the U.S. it remains legal in at least 31 states and Washington, D.C. to forcibly sterilize people because of a 1927 SCOTUS decision that upheld sterilization in Virginia. That decision has never been overturned.

This is the stuff of nightmares, and horror stories. It’s a shameful piece of American history, and a frightening example of what can happen when dictators and oligarchs take over a country and massacre their laws, ignore their courts, and extort institutions of learning, law, and civil rights. It’s beyond Draconian and Dystopian.  It’s just plain evil.

Alongside these travesties it bears illuminating what is happening at the same time in the health sector.  An April post on Bluesky by someone named Josh Marshall made the case that “most of the country has little idea of what has happened at NIH or through it the entire ecosystem of biomedical research in the U.S.” Marshall reminds us that cancer research has been put back decades along with other research about treatments and cures for other illnesses that lead to disability or death.

“It’s real, and it’s happened so quickly that most of the country doesn’t know it yet [including] the biomedical research world outside of NIH. … The prospect of more lifesaving cures and treatments [is] bleak,” Marshall says. So is life for disabled or otherwise comprised Americans, including children, elders, and those with chronic illnesses or disease, all because of political extremism led by totally incompetent people with no relevant experience or an ounce of empathy.

The canaries in the coal mines are sounding alarms. We must stay alert and actively resist in whatever ways we can. Our lives and our loved ones depend on us.  As Dylan Thomas famously said, “Do not go gently into the night.  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt. 

The Power and Promise of Resistance

It’s become clear that the time to act against political evil is now because this is an extraordinary moment in our history: We stand to lose the democracy we have taken for granted. Luckily, we are not new to resistance. We’ve done it before, and we’ve learned lessons from the past. But there are new lessons to be learned.

As Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard, points out, we have a history of resisting authoritarianism. Pro-independence colonists organized campaigns refusing to buy British goods and refused to abide by laws that required colonists to export raw materials to Britain. They defied other orders from Britain when they mounted the Boston Tea Party and undertook other  rebellious acts

More recently we have realized success by resisting modern travesties. The civil rights movement achieved desegregation with noncooperation campaigns like the Montgomery bus boycotts, lunch counter sit-ins, strikes, business boycotts, marches, demonstrations and the power of Martin Luther King Jr.’s oratory along with legal action. The women’s movement of the 1960s that continues today changed social norms and misogynist legislation, and organized resistance helped end the Vietnam War.

Lessons from the past are instructive. For example, Plato wrote that Socrates risked “all consequences in preference to becoming a partner in their iniquitous deeds.” Perhaps that inspired him to write The Republic in 380 BC in which he envisioned a just society in which “The best and most just of all rulers are those who are most reluctant to govern, while the worst and most unjust are those who are most eager. “

            Aristophanes wrote Lysistrata, a play in which the women of Athens occupied the Acropolis and went on a sex strike until the men agreed to make peace. Lysistrata stated that even if I was born a woman, don't hold it against me if I manage to suggest something better than what we've got now."

             Gandhi’s Quit India campaign, a unifying rallying cry for civil disobedience spread quickly and culminated in his 1930 Salt March which inspired the march on Washington in 1963 and the Selma to Montgomery march two years later. “Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt”, King wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which included his famous statement that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

             There are many ways to resist, and literature, music, and art have played their part. A strong artistic protest against injustice occurred in the Baker Library at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH in the 1920s when Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco painted frescoes that depict the history of the American continent from the immigration of native peoples in prehistoric times to the arrival of the Europeans and their impact on native civilization.  Diego Rivera also used murals as a way to resist tyranny.  He called Orozco the conscience of his generation because of his intentional speaking out about things without fear of the consequences.  

            Music also rails against injustice. The Beatles, Arlo Guthrie, Helen Reddy, and many more recognized the importance of resistance through protest songs which still resonate today.

              American writers wrote books of resistance about political and social issues, mobilizing public opinion, advocating for the persecuted and marginalized, celebrating resisters, making space for direct action, aimed at a way forward. Protest literature made its mark with books like John Hersey's Hiroshima, a masterful anti-war book. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring woke people up to environmental issues, and James Baldwin’s essays in The Fire Next Time explored the American civil rights movement while Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee chronicled the violence of America's systemic destruction of Native America’s indigenous peoples and their culture.

            This cultural context is enlightening but as Erica Chenoweth points out “today’s political terrain calls for a more muscular movement strategy” centered on economic resistance given that our future elections are at risk. She agrees with other strategists that withholding labor and purchasing power along with strikes or slowdowns, are both effective methods of resistance.

I personally advocate for a national strike day, and a Project 2028 document (which needn’t be 900 pages long) that blasts Project 2025 and states specifically what new leadership would do to roll back Trump travesties and makes clear what antidotes will restore civil and human rights.

Another resistance tool for pressuring policy makers is employing a proven communication strategy aimed at raising awareness, increasing knowledge of what’s at stake, addressing attitudes, practices and beliefs and conveying a visionary, achievable future. Such a strategy calls for acting vs. reacting and focusing on “target audiences” by meeting them where they are and hearing what they say and think.

When stories are localized and opinion leaders and trusted change agents are in partnership with the media the results can be amazing.  I know because I worked internationally on a successful communication project that involved media advocacy methods vs. political public relations. It saved lives. Sadly, our politicians have not realized the potential and efficacy of well-researched and designed messages that rely on multiple ways to convey information and inspire action.

Add that to the mix and Erica Chenweth could be right. “Americans seem to be rediscovering the art, science, and potency of noncooperation, combined with a robust protest capacity and legal action, [that suggests] resistance against Trump’s agenda in America is not only alive and well. It is savvy, diversifying and probably just getting started.”

Let’s hope she’s right.

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.

The Price of Purges

Imagine this: A historic hurricane barrels towards Florida’s Gulf Coast, or massive fires move quickly through California, or a giant tornedo tears through the Midwest. But there is no way to know these disasters are coming because the Trump administration has fired hundreds of workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the agency that tracks and monitors weather events that threaten massive numbers of people who live in susceptible areas.

There is no help during or after these disasters occur because the Trump administration has made deep cuts to staff at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that are alarming state officials and some Republican lawmakers.  

Imagine kids going hungry because as the Food Research and Action Center notes, millions of people throughout the country are struggling to make ends meet while Congress is cutting food programs that feed hungry kids.  SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is among the cutbacks that provide school meals critical to children’s health and learning. More than 42 million people rely on SNAP to put food on the table.

The program not only reduces hunger. It improves health outcomes and reduces health care costs. Any cuts to SNAP harm children, older adults, and people with disabilities, who make up the majority of SNAP households.  Reducing SNAP benefits increases food insecurity and shifts the burden to local governments and charities who can’t fill the gap. Local economies are also harmed, especially in rural areas. Cuts to other food programs result in some schools not being able to serve free school meals affecting 12 million children.

The list of purge problems continues.  According to Kevin Caroll, author of a piece in The Dispatch in February and a former military intelligence officer and CIA case officer points out that investing in intelligence saves U.S. taxpayers’ money and American Lives.

There are eighteen agencies in the intelligence community augmented by civilian and military intelligence organizations. They prevent attacks by terrorists and vigilantes. They aid in diplomacy efforts through intelligence about foreign countries.

The economic costs to Americans are disconcerting. According to a Wall Street Journal report on price hikes due to tariffs, cars, fuel, building materials, appliances, beef, clothing, and computers will take a hit of up to a 10 to 45 percent increase. Cars, for example, will go up to $50,000 to 59, 000 while computers will rise above $1000.

Imagine how climate changes are rapidly imperiling the planet. As John Wesley Powell wrote after navigating the river at the Grand Canyon in 1896, “We are now ready to start our way down the Great Unknown. We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not.”

It seems apt given an article by Yale Climate Connections that addresses the importance of climate change when we consider budget cuts like those taken at NOAA, FEMA and other federal agencies. The article states that “the impacts of climate change will be apocalyptic for many nations and people, particularly those that are not rich and White. People and communities with the least resources tend to be the first and hardest hit by climate change, not only because poorer people and communities are inherently more vulnerable to the impacts of any disaster, but also because the extremes induced by climate change tend to be worse in the tropics and subtropics, home to many poor nations.”

Global extreme weather events are becoming more common and increasingly worrisome.  Japan’s tsunami is not that far behind us and recent warnings of possible other lethal waves have occurred. The Santorini earthquakes and elsewhere are alarming along with fires that burned large swaths of Los Angeles.  We’ve seen photos of scary floods, starvation from droughts, and fluctuating temperatures globally. 

All these events have policy implications. As Thomas Edsall wrote in The New York Times on March 3rd, (edited for length) we should “Expect the elimination of thousands of jobs, the decimation of liberal institutions, reduced funding of safety nets, more homelessness, hunger and disease, poverty, financial starvation of universities and nongovernmental organizations, unannounced raids, unreliable data, an increasingly authoritarians worldwide, pervasive suspicion and revenge. Expect more suffering, fear, less security and happiness.” That’s not hyperbolic. The purges are impacting American and global economies, housing crises, absent insurance policies, agriculture and food supplies, not to mention morbidity and mortality.

Given deep worries about looming healthcare crises I must include the horrific impact of shutting down research and practices that relate to whether we live or die. Imagine this: you or someone you love is in treatment for cancer but will no longer be able to access experimental protocols or proven therapies, or your child has a chronic condition that requires inaccessible special care and protection, or measles, polio, and pandemics like those now rampant in other countries, return with a vengeance but there are no vaccines, or data, available.   

The time to address these likely catastrophes driven by narcissists, oligarchs, and bullies is now, whether in the halls of Congress, the media, on the streets, in town halls, and in voting booths. We can do this if we really try, and try we must.

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, VT 

The Demise of Education is a Looming Catastrophe

It’s happening slowly but the consequences will be stunning. From pre-school to elementary and high school to higher education we stand to lose generations of youth and emerging adults who will have been denied their right to accessible, quality education that fosters critical thinking, higher learning, and skills that will allow them to be valuable members of society no matter what they choose to undertake as adults in the workforce.

They may want to be tradespeople, future teachers, scientists, healthcare professionals, policymakers, business owners, and more, but no matter what level they have achieved in school during the Trump administration their educational growth will not be met without a Department of Education. Their futures (and ours) will be compromised and stifled by the myopic, unformed policies promulgated by ignorant sycophants who don’t value education or expertise and fail to understand the importance of quality educated citizens if a nation is to thrive.

What we are facing is a frontal assault on excellence in education that will have higher social costs than we can imagine. We will have forfeited the “American exceptionalism” that many of us like to claim because curiosity and creativity will be absent from curricula.

 Right wing authoritarianism, couple with sheer stupidity, will mean no more excellent faculty at every level who leave the profession because they fear what they say, write, or say will be cause for dismissal. No longer will there be truthful historical context, great literature, and Socratic challenges upon which to build. The truths we tell our children and the ways we help them develop as competent, caring adults will disappear. Bullying will grow bigger while brains shrink, along with our values, compassion and sensitivity toward others because they are things we also learn in school.

Consider what an education department does.  It manages over a trillion dollars of student loan debt and oversees the Pell Grant that provides aid to students below a certain income. It also administers student aid which enables universities to offer financial aid. Its Office for Civil Rights conducts investigations and issues guidance on how civil rights laws should be applied and tracks a database that shows disparities in resources, course access, and discipline for students of color and lower socioeconomic groups.

But the Trump administration has instructed the office to prioritize complaints of antisemitism and has opened investigations that relate to transgender rights. Much of the department’s money for K-12 schools is allocated to large federal programs for low-income schools and disabled individuals.

The Trump administration has also slashed funding that colleges and universities depend on including grants and contracts that support research being conducted in these venues. These cuts result in researchers being fired, and fewer Ph.D. students being accepted at colleges and universities. This impacts highly motivated and competent immigrants who want to advance their scientific training in the United States and who contribute enormously to research and innovation in all fields.

The withdrawal of grants and contracts normally provided to places of higher learning along with targeting schools over antisemitism and diversity initiatives is why so many colleges and university have stopped student organizations and pro-Palestinian protests and have started violating First Amendment rights of free speech and peaceful assembly.

It’s sickening to see places that were once revered as bastions of growth, academic distinction, personal achievement, and logical thinking fold. Universities have always been the reservoirs of knowledge, discourse, increased insight, and realized aspirations. Now they aren’t playing that role because they are being silenced, made fearful and irrelevant, while bowing to power instead of upholding principles that were formerly embraced as guides to learning since the days of ancient places of learning.

At lower levels of education, teachers’ responses to what is happening as a result of the administration’s attitude toward the closing of the Department of Education are telling. In a survey by PBS News Hour in February respondents made clear what’s at stake.

They are worried about the elimination of special education and disability services because of teacher cuts or resignations which will result in larger classes and no accommodation for various learning needs. Rural schools will be among the hardest hit schools. Many will close or consolidate, and teachers will likely be less qualified.

One respondent noted that “the loss of DOE will be predominantly felt in all our programs designed to help economically disadvantaged students and families…it will be like going back in time to the 1960s, when children with learning differences and challenging behaviors were not entitled to an education at all.” Funding for computers, lab equipment and other learning tools will not be funded, nor will technical and training support for teachers exist. Graduate programs  will end.

Linda McMahon, who has no relevant credentials to bring to bring to her job as head of the Education Department, as long as it lasts. She has called her “final mission” to be eliminating what she sees as bureaucratic bloat. She wants to turn the agency’s authority to the states, and we all know how block grants turned out.  If you lived in some states, you were definitely screwed. While the elimination of the department requires an act of Congress, the show of ring-kissing at the State of the Union speech made clear that the department is in very deep trouble. 

It doesn’t take much imagination to understand what’s at stake here, whether you are a student, a parent, an educator, a policymaker, or a sensible, compassionate human being.  We cannot let this stand. Make sure your legislators know that.

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.  www.elayn-clift.com/blog

From Chattel to Child to Red-cloaked Mother

Throughout the ages it’s been true. Now, here we go again. Sexism and misogyny 3.0. With the second reign of Donald Trump women will continue to be ignored, excluded, trivialized, objectified, assaulted, shamed, and afraid.

In the truly old days women became chattel when nomadic societies ceased to be mobile and agrarian. Before yielding to land ownership, life meant that everyone in the family and community had respectable tasks. Men hunted, women planted, and no one was treated as a lesser being. When land was claimed and “owned,” everything changed. Men became warriors who fought each other for everything that was on the property, including livestock, tools, furnishings, and women, along with children, who were regarded as a husband’s personal property.

Fast forward to modern times and notice how women are still treated as chattel. Here’s a true example, shared by Catherine Allgor, Ph.D. at the National Museum of Women’s Art in 2012.  A woman applies for a mortgage to buy a house. She is older than her husband, is senior to him in their careers and earns more money. She has bought houses before, her spouse has not. Still, in the transaction, she is listed as “wife,” and as such she is subjected to the legal practice of coverture, a term that still exists since colonial times.

Based on English law, coverture meant that no female had a legal identity. A child was covered by her father’s identity, and a wife’s identity relied on her husband’s, which is why till relatively recently wives assumed her husband’s surname. Before that, wives were considered to be “feme covert,” a covered woman who did not exist legally. (Sound familiar?) Originally that meant that females couldn’t own anything, had no rights to their inheritances, or their children. They couldn’t work, enter a contract, or have bodily autonomy because husbands had the legal right to rape.

Coverture, Allgor explains, is why white women weren’t allowed to vote until 1920. They couldn’t serve on juries until the 1960s, and marital rape wasn’t a crime until the 1980s. In my personal experience during that decade, I was denied in-state tuition when I earned my master’s degree, because although I met every requirement for it, including being co-owner of a house, the college argued that I wasn’t legally a resident of Maryland because I didn’t earn half of our family income.  It took me seven years to win the case against them.

Women are still infantilized and treated as children. It occurs in the workplace, the marketplace, the academy, religious institutions, and in homes when others, often men in domestic settings, treat women as errant children. Infantilizing women is linked to objectification because it sets up an unequal power and control situation. Women in various settings threaten the androcentric paradigm that has us locked into various, unrelenting forms of patriarchy. Examples include using demeaning nicknames, suggesting that women don’t understand a topic, using physical gestures like a hug that they wouldn’t use to greet women vs. men All of these gestures and words are meant to convey to women that men have superiority over the person who is subjected to these differentiations.

In 2018 the Harvard Business Review published an article written by four female researchers that revealed that words used in the business sector choose different ways to describe women vs. men in significant ways. Their research found that even young females are often described as “bossy” while that term is not applied to boys. In adulthood being called “ambitious” is an insult for women but not for men. … “The problem is that the words used to evaluate women differ from those used to evaluate men which reinforces gender stereotyping,” say the authors. “Similarly, people are more likely to use [words] like “superb,” “outstanding,” “remarkable,” and “exceptional” to describe male job applicants. In recommending female applicants, people used fewer superlatives but less specificity.” Then fact is: Words matter.

The incoming president and his pals play all these cards in spades.  Name calling, put downs, sexual transgressions and more will not suddenly quiet down or disappear. The likelihood is they will be exacerbated by an overblown sense of superiority and adoration by Donald Trump’s second win. Every bit of misogyny and sexism women have had to endure in the past will be more pronounced and dangerous by this administration and its rightwing collaborators.

Consider the fact that women have been robbed of bodily autonomy, lifesaving reproductive healthcare, and policies that are geared to breeding rather than being. Already women are dying from preventable crises during pregnancy and miscarriage. That is nothing short of state sponsored femicide. Women, like words, matter, but not in the incoming administration.

 An article in The Brooklyn Rail published in 2017, shortly after the last election Donald Trump won, captures the shocking reality that links the political situation ahead of us to the chillingly relevant book The Handmaid’s Tale, which suggests “parallels between a fictional totalitarianism, and the policies and ideological proclivities of Donald Trump’s administration. In many ways, these comparisons make sense: the world of The Handmaid’s Tale contains the brutal objectification of women, widespread loss of civil rights, the manipulation of facts to control the political narrative, and an authoritarian state that fetishizes a return to religious or   traditional values.”

Is it any wonder that the red cape symbolizes what women have feared since Roe v. Wade was overturned? Will history prove to be prologue?

# # #

Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.

Taking Stock of Election Shock

Usually around this time I begin thinking about writing my cheery Christmas letter to share the highlights of another year in the life of our family. This year is different. I’m still trying to grasp what just happened and what it will mean for all of us.

My initial reaction was blurted out in staccato texts to friends who were in the same state as I was: “Stunning!” “Horrific!” “Devastating!” “Dangerous!” Then I entered an emotionally strange place that felt like a Venn diagram in which anxiety and numbness meet in the center of a space that felt more like despair. Now I’m asking myself how and why the shock of the election happened.

It started with questions.  How could a 34-time convicted felon and a man who was found guilty of sexual assault be able to run for president? Why was the Justice Department so slow in moving forward on his trials? How could the Supreme Court grant him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted to if he were president again? How could people vote for someone who lies incessantly, whose language is vile, whose racism and misogyny are so blatant, who dreams of being a dictator, not be enough to stop him?

Then I moved to what I fear most.  People like Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Steven Miller, the authors of Project 2025, and other-like minded tyrants taking control of every government agency and firing thousands of career civil servants.

I worried about what it would mean to close or limit agencies like the EPA, the Department of Education, NOAA, and FEMA and to ignore the ever-worsening climate crisis.

I thought about a country with such a broken, for-profit healthcare system that would result in skyrocketing illnesses and deaths (with no data to prove it), and millions of people suffering as a result. I wondered how bad it would get without vaccinations, fluoride, Medicaid, reduced Medicare, and no insurance.

I thought of the women who will have no agency over their own lives, and I imagined the women who would die because they couldn’t get reproductive healthcare when they were in crisis or who would be jailed for having a miscarriage. I worried about a reprise of the Comstock Act that would ban abortion nationally and deny women any form of birth control (except sterilization, which some young women have already resorted to).

I worried about people of all ages who would be rounded up, separated, and held in the equivalent of prisons indefinitely. I really worried about revenge politics, roundups of opposition leaders and activists, the disappearance of news outlets, and random violence. As Robert Reich said in a piece in The Guardian the day after the election, “Countless people are now endangered on a scale and intensity unheard of in modern America.”

I also worried mightily about our lost standing in the global community and the threat of an expanded war in the Middle East while Ukraine is handed to Putin who can then march into the NATO countries to start a Third World War with nukes.

Then I began to question what kind of a country we have been historically, culturally and now presently. How did we allow this to happen? I came to this conclusion:  We are a country conceived and birthed by smart, visionary, educated men who were elite white supremacists wedded to racism, misogyny, religious singularity, patriarchy, and conformity.

What we are seeing now, it seems to me, is the underbelly of an America that has always flourished, and has grown in modern times, driven by color, caste, economic advantage or disadvantage, religious beliefs, ethnicity, power, and corrupted politics, all of which have divided us into Us and Them. That makes for a dangerous, disquieted and increasingly binary way to live. It stokes fear, limits compassion and clear thinking, and people like Donald Trump rely on it for their own gains.

As an Instagram post said the day after the election, “America has showed its true character and it’s heartbreaking,”

So where do I go from here?  My answer begins with my belief that resistance doesn’t die, it re-emerges when it is vital to survival. Early Americans knew that when they threw tea into Boston harbor. Slaves resisted in various ways including dancing and drumming. People stood up to McCarthyism and to an American fascist movement in the 1930s and 40s. We started labor movements and unions to protect workers, and we made sure women could vote by refusing food and enduring forced feeding. We resisted a war in Vietnam and successfully ended it. It’s in our DNA in huge numbers when things get bad because ultimately,  most of us refuse oppression, discrimination, exploitation, and evil and choose instead to embrace freedom and democracy. 

There are some among us who don’t get that yet, but they will soon see how powerful and effective it is.  Paraphrasing Billy Wimsatt, Executive Director of the Movement Voter PAC the day after the election, we have what it takes to meet and overcome this moment as our elders and ancestors did under unthinkably difficult circumstances. We can draw on their strength and wisdom as we chart our way forward and join what is likely to be one of the largest resistance movements in history.

For now, we must take a breath and remember all we did together to avert this outcome. In that spirit let’s comfort each other as we regroup before continuing the fight for a compassionate country grounded in equality, justice, and sustainable freedom and democracy.

Were We the Lucky Ones?

A docudrama, We Were the Lucky Ones, streaming on Hulu recently inspired me to consider this question: Were Americans in my generation the lucky ones, post WWII? In the story a real family scattered across Europe during the pogroms against Jews in the war. Miraculously they managed to survive and to reunite with their loved ones.

Now I wonder if those of us who have lived in America since the 1940s may be the lucky ones. We have lived in a post-war period of democracy, freedom from fear, and peace for the most part, without the obscenity of war and dictatorship on our doorsteps. We have never had to experience the terror of autocratic regimes. Most of us can’t even imagine what that is like. We have been able to trust our families, friends, and neighbors, and to receive uncensored information free of propaganda, to travel freely across state lines and to other countries without being impeded or interrogated. We have never had a government that destroyed the basis of our republic in the document called the Constitution. Most of us were able to live decent lives and to sleep soundly at night.

Admittedly the “good old days” weren’t all good. They were rife with racism, antisemitism, sexism, discrimination, and fear of the Other. We lived in a time when America flirted seriously with fascism, schools were segregated, domestic violence and sexual abuse were hidden. We lived to see the development of nuclear weapons and suffered the threat of the Bay of Pigs, when Russian threatened us with missiles from Cuba. There were race riots and a war we never should have been in, political assassinations of some of our beloved leaders, terrorist attacks and later an insurrection, and so much more that never should have happened in “the land of the free and the brave.” 

But still we were mostly the lucky ones. We never headed to bomb shelters, most of us could feel safe in our homes, and we proceeded with our lives under the protection of the Constitution. It was safe to send our kids to school, to go to a café, a concert, a grocery store, and to worship in a variety of religious environments.

We could choose our politicians in free and fair elections and vote them out of office when we needed to.  When necessary, we protested what we believed was wrong in our local communities and nationally, peacefully and without fear of being silenced or arrested. We chose whether or when to start families, we read the books we wanted to. We trusted our friends and neighbors to look out for each other, and most of all we felt free.

Those freedoms could now become fading memories.  What looms large in November is a clarion call for civility, compassion, humanity, intelligent leadership, sound judgement, and continuing democracy.  Our country cannot afford to lose its standing in a global world or risk the hideous thought of a nuclear war because we have felons and fascists in charge who admire the likes of Mr. Putin and other autocrats and dictators.

Unless we act appropriately, the idea of American exceptionalism will be nothing more than a memory embedded in the jargon of despair. In the past, Americans have managed to come together in critical times in ways that revealed our character and upheld the principles of this country. We have demonstrated to the world our capacity for cohesion, compassion, sound judgement and right action. Now is the time to reclaim that spirit by making a commitment to disavow a dystopian future.

We stand now on the precipice of a giant sink hole that would take years to dig out of, if not generations. We owe it to our progeny to leave them a world in which we proved again our resilience and our love of freedom. 

We need to make sure that they too are the lucky ones who remain free of oppression and disaster,  the lucky ones who reunite with the spirit of this country in hard times, and the lucky ones who build a new and secure future together. That means doing the right thing in November for the loved ones in your life.

                                                            # # #

Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.

Democracy vs. Fascism: America's Choice in the 2024 Election

Let’s get real about the most vital issue Americans face as we slowly march toward our dubious future as a nation.

It’s not about President Biden’s age which is annoyingly centerstage. After all, Donald Trump is only three years younger than the president, morbidly obese, and an obvious psychopath.  It’s about one issue and one issue only and that is whether we survive as a democracy and what will happen if not.

So far in this threatening time President Biden is the only viable candidate if we value our freedom in this contentious time. Given his commitment to the principles of democracy and the protection of the Constitution and his years of experience and achievement domestically and internationally, there is no other choice. That story needs to be told often and powerfully. The fact is you don’t have to like him or always agree with him, but you do need to realize that our future depends on his re-election, because once democracy disappears you never get it back, at least not for decades if you’re lucky. Every other issue from the economy, taxes, gun control, reproductive healthcare, First Amendment rights, education, a free press, and our stature in the world depends on saving our democracy. It’s that simple – and that urgent.

Americans are lucky. We haven’t lived under an autocracy or a dictatorship. We have no idea what that’s like in real terms, but it’s never pretty. There are many examples of how bad it is. To be clear, autocratic governments and dictatorships are similar but there is a distinction between them as the Carnegie Foundation has noted. As they point out, there are two important differences: An autocracy focuses power on a single person, while single-party dictatorships can share power through a small group of people who are appointed by the dictator. Dictatorships always include inherent abuse of power, while some autocrats relying on centralized power can sometimes effect positive change for their citizens. Both autocrats and dictators, however, exercise total control.

It’s important to realize that dictators have absolute power (think Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler).   Human rights are suppressed, and any sign of opposition is quickly shut down with intimidation, imprisonment, physical violence, or assassination. Citizens have “shallow levels of freedom,” and “no personal autonomy or quality of life. Social organizations and democratic institutions cease to exist, and democratic countries see the end of their rights as enshrined in constitutions.” People can lose their religion, see sexual orientation and same-sex marriage outlawed while security police are ubiquitous, and surveillance is prevalent. Over time no one dares to trust anyone.

According to the Carnegie Foundation democracies flourished in the 20th century but by 2019 dictatorships outnumbered democracies, sharing features including repressed opposition, control of communications, punishment of critics, imposed ideology and frequent attacks on democratic ideals.  Cross-border travel is stopped, and fear prevails as information becomes propaganda.

In the course of my international work, I became aware of the reality of autocratic and dictatorial countries. Even knowing I could leave, if I behaved myself, I sensed the oppression.  A Kenyan woman advised me to be cautious about the kind of questions I asked. In 1960s Greece when the political future there was bleak, I naively remarked to a man sitting next to me on an airplane that I didn’t think much of his government.  He interrogated me for the rest of the journey about who I’d been speaking with. In Romania, where the deceased dictator Ceausescu had mandated monthly pelvic exams for female students and workers to ensure pregnancies were carried to term I saw scores of children in an orphanage as a result. The visit shook me to the core. In Burma someone whispered her oppression, and in China, at the 1995 UN women’s conference, as a journalist I was barred from opening ceremonies, and I suspected I was surveilled and tapped in my hotel room. My relief as the plane departed was palpable.

We need to think about what life was like in the Franco, Marcos or Pinochet regimes in Spain, the Philippines or Chile. Today we must think about what life is like in Hungary under the control of Viktor Orban. In power for years he has “chipped away at the foundations of democracy,” as Vox.com put it. There journalism requires permits, propaganda prevails, and refugees and Muslims are seen as an existential threat. Dissent is silenced or disappears if it occurs in public or on blogs. Books vanish from libraries and shops. It didn’t happen overnight. It was achieved gradually in subtle ways.

Nationalism, right wing religion, militarism, anti-liberalism, and the silencing of citizens are deeply destructive forces that result in devastation and despair.  We cannot, we must not, ignore the signs of autocracy and fascism that already exist, or the dangerous pledges of Donald Trump. Nor can we think it can’t happen here. Our challenge is to ensure that autocracy or dictatorship doesn’t surprise us because we ignored its signals or couldn’t envision such systems. To protect ourselves and our country we must exercise the strongest sign of resistance to oppression, and that is our vote. It is incumbent upon each of us to keep that focus as we head to local, state, and national polling stations.

We must be prepared to save our democracy.

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Balfour's Big Blunder and Today's Israel

“What goes around, comes around” and “You reap what you sow” are truisms that come to mind when I learn what is happening in Israel. I wouldn’t know much about it if I relied on mainstream media or cable news because no editorial decisionmakers dare risk raising the issue of ethnic cleansing in a country that the U.S. supports in policy, rhetoric, and military support, despite the consequences. Nor do policymakers want to utter a word that might result in the alienation of Jewish organizations, funders, or voters. 

As a Jewish American, like many others, I am heartbroken by what is happening to Palestinians because of the excessively rightwing government now in power in Israel, a country that was founded because of atrocities committed against them. 

Understanding how Israel got here is helpful. A brief history is instructive. In 1917 a document, the Balfour Declaration, was issues by the British government calling for the establishment of a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine. It was the first time the term “Zionism” was used by Britain, a major political power.   No boundaries for what would constitute Palestine were specified in the document, but it was made clear, rhetorically, that the national home of Jews would not cover all of Palestine. The declaration also called for safeguarding the civil and religious rights for Palestinian Arabs, who made up a vast majority of the local population.  In 2017 the British recognized publicly that the Balfour Declaration should have assured political rights for Palestinians in the declaration.

So how did we get here? That question is largely answered in Ilan Pappe’s 2006 well documented book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. He explains that in 1948 over 700,000 Arabs, three fourths of the Palestinians living in territories that became Israel, fled or were expelled from their homes. Pappe identifies that exodus as the planned beginning of ethnic cleansing by Israel, designed by David Ben Gurion, a leader in the Zionist movement, and his advisors who had declared before 1948 that they were developing plans for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in order to establish Israel. The exodus and expulsion of 500 Arab village residents along with terrorist attacks against civilians came from that plan known as Dalet.

The Palestinians called the ethnic cleansing occurring during Israel’s establishment Nakba (catastrophe) as they became “stateless refugees.” For Palestinians, Nakba continues, and no wonder. Many Israelis, including political and religious leaders think Plan Dalet didn’t go far enough. In March, for example, a Palestinian man was killed by an Israeli soldier or settler. Israeli settlers then set hundreds of Palestinian homes and cars on fire in the occupied West Bank and Netanyahu’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a senior member of the Knesset, said in an interview that he thought “the village needed to be wiped out.” Two years ago he told Palestinian members of the Knesset that “it’s a mistake that Ben Gurion didn’t finish the job and throw you out in 1948.” Smotrich was recently appointed governor over the occupied West Bank.

Another favorite ethnic cleanser advocate, National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, has been given an Israeli national guard, actually a militia. He’s the guy who went to Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque in May and stood there in mock prayer as a Jew in an affront to Palestinians, thus mixing politics with religion. (The site of the mosque is called Temple Mount by Jews.)

Clearly tensions are mounting. No wonder. In February the Israeli military killed ten Palestinians, include two elderly men and a child, and injured numerous others in a raid on Nablus, then blocked Palestinian medical teams from treating them. More recently Israeli forces raided a refugee camp along with several Palestinian cities and villages where they fired live ammunition into crowds of people, injuring over 70 and killing two young Palestinians, one of whom had a disability. Again, they blocked Palestinian ambulances from providing medical care and used tear gas in a hospital.

Attacks are increasing and getting worse. In June a brutal assault was carried out, authorized by Smotrich, to hasten settlement expansion. F-16s and Apache helicopters fired on Palestinian ambulances, killing a teenager. Also in June, Israeli forces fired at a car, killing a two-year-old and critically injuring his father outside their home. Mohammad, the child, was the 27th Palestinian child killed by the Israeli military in the first half of this year. His death will not be the last of the child victims.

Palestinian journalists are also being targeted. In June six of them covering Israeli raids, were targeted. A cameraman was shot covering the Jenin killings, a journalist was killed in raids along with two youngsters, and another journalist was shot in the head. Let’s not forget that it’s been a year since the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by Israeli forces – an anniversary that American media failed to mention.

I have written frequently about Israel’s increasing violence against Palestinians, so I know to expect blowback, some of it chilling. But I cannot remain silent, and neither should our government in light of what has just occurred in Jenin, and is likely to continue elsewhere. As Israel becomes a fascist dictatorship, it’s imperative that we call out the “intentional escalation of violence by an occupying military power” as Jewish Voice for Peace says.

We must not reap what we sow in silence.

Are We Ready for Another Pandemic?

Almost four decades ago, when I was deputy director of the first major global health communications program supported by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), my work involved child survival and family planning.  But our project, and its lessons learned about health promotion, went further than that, modeling a proven methodology related to behavior change for better health outcomes. 

It was during those years that the HIV/AIDS crisis erupted, which I learned about before most people took it seriously, through a journalist I knew who had written about what was coming at us around the world and here at home. When I alerted my boss to what would become a deadly epidemic, advising him that as a health communication organization we needed to be paying attention to the problem and thinking of ways to mount a strategic health communication response, was typical.  “If you’re not gay it’s not going to amount to much,” he said, which in itself was shocking in its prejudice. It was also irresponsible coming from someone working in public health. When HIV hit hard and several gay men in our organization began to die, the head of the organization publicly apologized to me in a staff meeting for not taking the crisis seriously.

 Later, when I worked in public health advocacy, promotion, and communication internationally, I followed news, challenges, and concerns shared with the public health community from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC). That’s how I knew that they were worried because, they said, we were long overdue for another huge epidemic, bigger than the early 20th century “Spanish flu,” and we weren’t prepared for it.

So when Covid-19 showed up, I wasn’t surprised that we still weren’t prepared, nor was I particularly shocked when the Trump administration was totally unprepared for an event that would take millions of lives here and globally. What was shocking was the disinformation, misinformation, and dangerous false information Republicans glibly spread in soundbites and press briefings as more and more people succumbed to the virus.

Those memories come back to me now because history seems to be repeating itself when it comes to public health preparedness related to epidemics and pandemics in light of myriad lessons learned by now.

It’s not for lack of scholarship on this issue. In researching this topic, I found no shortage of analysis about a rising concern about what’s going on as we recognize that we’re going to have to struggle all over again when another health crisis occurs.

The pressing issues include the need for more research as new and mutant viruses rise, scaling up production of newly developed and FDA approved vaccines, planning for broad and  rapid vaccine distribution, cost containment, and equal access to vaccines from various health facilities. It’s no longer only about Covid. Other infectious diseases are on the rise. According to WHO, “zoonosis”, infectious diseases that jump from animals to humans, now number over 200 identified bacterial, viral or parasitic agents. “They can be transmitted through direct contact, food, water, or the environment, constituting a major public health problem,” WHO says. “Many of these emerging infections have the potential to cause global  pandemics.”

The Covid pandemic revealed the challenges related to supply chains and their disruptions when it comes to vaccine distribution, in addition to vaccine shortages, which can occur when companies no long choose to make vaccines, often because of manufacturing and production problems. That leads to insufficient stock piles, and reduced competition so that prices for vaccines rise.

Another major failure in pandemic preparedness revealed itself during the Covid crisis. As health communication specialists like Kizzmekia Corbett, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) point out, “Public health practitioners need to recognize that our research is only as strong as our communication. Even our strongest peer reviewed, evidence-driven findings won’t have full impact if we cannot clearly and effectively communicate them to the public.”

Practitioners also need to understand and respect the field of health communications as a multidisciplinary methodology aimed at behavior change for health promotion and disease prevention. Vicki Freimuth, former director of communications at the CDC, says that “the agency struggles to assure that experienced communication professionals are included in decision-making and developing scientifically sound public messages free of political influence.” (personal communication).  The exclusion of experts whose work has proven that behaviors can be changed (e.g., mask wearing) with research-based messaging is a troubling omission.

According to a poll taken in March and reported by  Politico, two-thirds of respondents believed the threat of future deadly pandemics is growing, while almost 90 percent wanted the federal government to be more prepared for another pandemic in its budget and planning. Still, the focus in Washington, DC seems to be on assessing what went wrong during Covd-19.

Mauricio Santillana, a professor at Northeastern University paints a daunting picture regarding future efforts. He says the influence of politics on government funding causes a “collective amnesia,” that leads to reactive responses to crises vs. proactive  prevention.

If the government prioritizes the prevention of deadly viruses, perhaps they will remember to include health communication strategies along with financing and other challenges that accompany pandemics that need to be stopped quickly. I’m not holding my breath.

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Elayne Clift has a master’s degree in health communications and has worked internationally with a focus on maternal and child health. 

Choosing Freedom: A Political Imperative

 When Franklin Delano Roosevelt uttered his famous phrase, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” at his first inaugural address in 1933, he recognized that fear of the Great Depression could paralyze people and interfere with ways to address an unprecedented economic crisis. He realized that catastrophic thinking and overwhelming anxiety had the power to harm his plan for economic (and political) recovery.

 He recognized, as Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl did, that “between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

FDR and Frankl were both right, and in many ways, we find ourselves in that space where fear and insecurity reside, inhibiting our ability to respond appropriately and effectively to the political, economic, and emotional situation we find ourselves in as a nation as we approach the most crucial election of our time.

In his 1941 State of the Union address, FDR also said that there was “nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy.” He noted that he looked forward to “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms, as the New York Times pointed out in an op-ed. by Jamelle Bouie last month .Those were the freedom of speech and expression, the freedom of every person to worship God in his [sic] way, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear. They were the guiding lights of his New Deal, and “they remained the guiding lights of his administration through the trials of World War II,” as Bouie reminds us.

In his essay, Bouie also enumerated four freedoms that today’s Republican party embraces. They are, he says, the freedom to control, the freedom to exploit, the freedom to censor, and the freedom to menace. “Roosevelt’s four freedoms,” he claims, “were the building blocks of a humane society – a social democratic aspiration for egalitarians then and now. These Republican freedoms are also building blocks not of a humane society but of a rigid and hierarchical one, in which you can either dominate or be dominated.” 

It’s a parallel vision of a future in which we do not have the basic freedoms and human rights that FDR espoused. Should the Republicans win the White House and the Congress next year, we will find ourselves living in a theocratic, oppressive country driven by oligarchs and dictators who embrace fear, violence, and autocracy with absolutely no regard for fundamental freedom, privacy or self-determination.

So let’s think about some of the freedoms that should drive us to the polls in droves next November. First and foremost are the freedom from fear and the menace of gun violence as we walk the streets, attend houses of worship, schools, entertainment or simply go to the market, the movies, and the mall.

Let us also think about the urgency of freedom to control our bodies and our futures as we remember the women and girls who have been denied bodily autonomy and privacy and who have suffered and died as a result of forced pregnancy because the State owns their wombs. Let us remember the women jailed for miscarriage, the health providers who live in fear of losing their licenses, or worse, and the mothers, sisters, friends, advocates who could well be imprisoned for driving someone to the airport or across a state line.

Let us remember the freedom to speak openly and honestly, and to gather, as guaranteed by the First Amendment, and the freedom from censorship so that we can read books we choose, and the freedom to worship in our own ways, and the freedom to keep our children free from want, whether it’s food or healthcare or the right to be who they are. Let our friends and families be free to live in the houses and neighborhoods they wish, be they Chinese, Syrian, Cuban, Muslim, Jewish, gay or straight, or otherwise. Let there be an end to Otherness, persecution, blinding stereotyping, and ungrounded assumptions that strike fear in the hearts of so many of us in this time.    

Let us be free from financial and physical exploitation in the workplace, especially when that exploitation involves children. And let us be free from willful prejudice, evil intentions, unenlightened faux leaders, and restrictive political actions that inhibit democracy, human rights, and social justice once and for all.  

And let us remember the wisdom of Nelson Mandela, who said “To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others,” along with the wise words of Dag Hammarskjold, former General Secretary of the United Nations, who so wisely noted that “’Freedom from fear’ could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights.”

It’s a philosophy we need to value, remember, and embrace. We are called upon it in this moment and in the days to come to do the right thing for future generations.

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 Elayne Clift writes about women, health, politics and social justice from Brattleboro, Vt. www,elayn-eclift.com

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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