The Horror of Healthcare Financing

It’s no secret that America’s healthcare system is broken. Most of us can cite a litany of problems we’ve personally experienced. But few would include the travesty surrounding how healthcare costs are billed and covered.  I ventured into that morass recently and what I learned provided another compelling reason for universal healthcare and a single payer system.

 It began with a pneumonia vaccination that I received at my doctor’s office instead of a Walgreens pharmacy. I expected a charge but assumed it would be minimal. Then I got the “patient statement” from the hospital where my doctor practices. On the statement a “pharmacy” line item appeared in the staggering amount of nearly $700. Other charges were for “preventive care services” and “physician fees.” I saw these charges as redundant since I saw my doctor for a “wellness check” that constituted preventive care with a physician.

 Although I was billed a small amount for these services because “contractual allowance adjustments” covered the bulk of the bill, I began trying to learn what it all meant. I started with two simple questions: Who sets healthcare costs and fees, and who regulates those fees, which included overhead costs and $243 the hospital is charged for “medicine” (serum). 

 Thus began an exhaustive search for answers that led me down a frustrating rabbit hole. Among the Vermont state offices called for information were the Governor’s office, the Healthcare Administration Financial Regulations office, the Division of Licensing Protection, the Department of Health Division of Rate Setting, and more.  Fifteen calls later I still had no answers. Instead, each call resulted in a circular handoff, often to agencies I’d already called. No one in these agencies, it seemed, had any idea how costs were established, who regulated them, and who paid for them.

 This led to a discussion with my local hospital’s CEO and financial officer who walked me through a bureaucratic maze of rules and regulations emanating from federal and state mandates, organizational finance relationships and more. It was so complex that even though I worked in public health as an educator, policy analyst, and advocate for over forty years and hold a master’s degree in health communication and promotion I could not understand everything they shared with me.

One of the things I learned is that no one actually pays the gross charges, which are based on what will be reimbursed by insurance companies, and the costs of various services and procedures as identified by Medicaid and Medicare, with fixed rates periodically negotiated based on current reimbursements. This is known as “cost shifting.” In Vermont, organizational relationships regarding financing of healthcare also play a part in this cost sharing.

 Christopher Dougherty, CEO of Brattleboro Hospital, agrees that the current system of healthcare financing is an odd system that “puts us at risk.” He is troubled by the fact that the financing system is modeled on covering the costs of services rather than measurable outcomes of patient care. That viewpoint aligns with equitable, accessible, quality healthcare for all and it is grounded in the holistic and cost-saving idea of health promotion and wellness, and the fact that healthcare is a human right.  

To explain the convoluted, crazy financing of American healthcare, which is fundamentally a national disaster, requires a full investigative report if not an entire book. My purpose here is two-fold: First, it’s to expose the problems in healthcare financing and to encourage healthcare consumers to self-advocate when those, or other healthcare dilemmas, affect them personally. That means asking key questions of politicians and healthcare professionals along with other measures that lead to accountability and transparency. It also means voting for leaders who understand and care about healthcare issues.

My second objective is to underscore the urgency of a universal healthcare system that eliminates the outrageous bureaucratic enigma and the power brokers that now drives health care and costs. To paraphrase the late Princess Diana, “there are three [organizations] in this marriage,” and one of them is not the patient. It is Big Pharma, the insurance industry, and the fact that healthcare delivery systems like hospitals are increasingly dedicated to business models rather than putting people above profits. This powerful triumvirate must be called into question, revised and re-invented in ways that will be difficult to achieve. But they are not impossible.

In 2020, T.R. Reid wrote a book called The Healing of America.  Reid researched five developed countries in which some form of universal healthcare was practiced. Drawing upon what he learned, he developed a model of universal healthcare that would be viable in the U.S. His recommendations went nowhere because Americans are loathe to pay higher taxes for social services (a chunk of which would be financed by corporate America paying its fair share of taxes), and very few in Congress, who are loathe to lose an election, understand what a social democracy looks like.

 Ironically, when I was mired in trying to get to the bottom of healthcare costs, not just in my state, but nationally, I was facilitating a seminar for hospital personnel, called “Humanity at the Heart of Healthcare.”  As great physician writers and profoundly humanistic caregivers still out there know, we need to return to that foundational idea in the delivery of health care. With enough people standing up for the principle that caring and curing can go hand in hand, we can focus on the Hippocratic idea to “do no harm,” (including financially).

As poet Amanda Gorman wrote in her poem Hymn for Humanity, “May we not just ache, but act.”  Now is the time.

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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 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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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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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 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. 

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.

Feminism Isn't Dead, It's Exhausted

Just days before the horrific Supreme Court decision that killed Roe v. Wade, a grievous act that rendered women and girls property of the state and subjected them to forced childbearing, a spate of opinion pieces appeared bemoaning the fact that feminism was all but gone in the face of massive backlash. Feminists I admire wrote disheartening columns that included expert opinion, research findings and personal analysis.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote that “As the backlash gains steam, a lot of feminism feels enervated. There had been a desperate hope, among reproductive rights activists and Democratic strategists alike, that the end of Roe v. Wade would lead to an explosive feminist mobilization, that people committed to women’s equality would take to the streets and recommit themselves to politics. But after the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, it’s far from clear whether a political groundswell will materialize.”

Susan Faludi’s New York Times piece argued that pop culture, celebrity, rampant consumerism along with fierce individualism has fueled not just a backlash but a subtle generational divide in which younger feminists can be said to fight against “practical impediments to equality,” while second wave feminists (like myself) were “old-fashioned shoe-leather organizers” who were “oblivious to race and class.” In making her argument against generational conflict she asks for “a reckoning with feminism” that “goes beyond generational indictments. It’s an admirable goal that has merit but her language seems to fuel the divide.”

What these two essays have in common is a focus on millennial feminism and their collective analysis should be taken seriously, But what troubles me is the notion that feminism, in all its variations and iterations, has spawned a powerful backlash and become divisive to the point of annihilation. As a second wave feminist I reject that idea having worked, marched, protested with and mentored millennial women. The feminism of my generation, flawed though it has been, is not dead; it is exhausted. In the words of the beloved civil rights leader Fanny Lou Hamer, we are simply “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Our fight has been long and arduous and unless you’ve been through it it’s impossible to grasp what it took to keep on keeping on, and how punishing it could be – which leads me to some thoughts on younger feminists.

First, with due respect to millennial women who never experienced a pregnancy scare in pre-Roe v. Wade times, times when women couldn’t get credit without a male guarantor, could be fired for being pregnant, couldn’t earn anything like what men doing the same work did, had no recourse to domestic violence, and more, there are lessons to be learned from those feminists – their mothers and grandmothers - who preceded and fought for them. Sadly, they are about to find out what it’s like and what it takes to begin again from the ground up. When they do find out their elders will be marching, protesting, voting, lobbying and more by their side. There will be no false dichotomy because we are all women who have been there or find ourselves there now. In that sense, context, as older feminists know, is everything; and “the personal [really] is political” because what happens to one of us can happen to all of us when male power presides over our lives.

In that context I urge young women to educate themselves fully about women’s history and courageous fights for equality, full personhood, social justice and human rights in this country. Our battles cross every sector of society and we have fought them well so that our daughters and granddaughters could lead better lives than many of my generation did.

As I tell my young friends, there is a qualitative difference between pussy hats and T-shirt slogans, and social media is not the same as showing up in big numbers, which takes organizing on a scale that can feel overwhelming. (Just ask Stacy Abrams.) Also, it’s deeply important to understand the politics of power, and the power of politics in order to think and act sufficiently strategically so that change becomes a new reality.

I’m not arguing against a new, different feminism; as the wise Greek philosopher Heraclitus knew, “The Only Constant in Life Is Change.” I’m making a case for a hybrid feminism that doesn’t fall prey to conflict among its constituents for lack of context, depth, and experience.

As for the disastrous decisions of a Supreme Court run amok, Rebecca Traister offered this call for hope: Noting that the situation is “wretched and plain” and will get worse,” she wrote in The Cut, “the task for those who are stunned by the baldness of the horror, paralyzed by the bleakness of the view, is to figure out how to move forward anyway. … because while it is incumbent on us to digest the scope and breadth of the badness, it is equally our responsibility not to despair.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Tina Smith agree. Writing in a New York Times op ed., they noted that this is a “dark moment” that “will require a long, hard fight.” As second wave feminists, they know what they’re talking about. “The two of us lived in an America without Roe v. Wade, and we are not going back. Not now. Not ever.” I’m with them.

The Death of Stare Decisis and the Demise of the 4th Amendment

I was out of the country in May when news of the SCOTUS leak in which Justice Samuel Alito’s policy statement went viral.  I hadn’t watched TV for a week and barely signed onto social media but when I did, I read astute and deeply troubling reactions to the document designed to overturn Roe v. Wade, which has been considered established law for 50 years.

The document Justice Alito wrote was supported by four of his Court colleagues, revealing unsurprisingly that a majority of the Court concurred with ending women’s right to abortion. The timing of the leak was significant; it occurred when the Court was scheduled to rule on the constitutionality of a Mississippi abortion law which prohibits abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

If the Court finds that the Mississippi law stands, it will have sanctioned ending Roe v. Wade, allowing states to make their own laws regarding abortion. Some states have already established Draconian laws that include charging women with murder if they miscarry or have an abortion. Some have ruled that physicians who perform abortions can be charged with a felony crime and some have set up vigilante laws that could affect anyone who helps a woman get an abortion.

Essentially the demise of the constitutional right to abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy will end women’s right to abortion in over half the states in this country. The implications are huge, not only for American women but for the future of the country, and they are abundantly clear.

Many analysts and pundits have written cogently and urgently about the legal, physical, economic and emotional consequences for women and others in this country, and for all of us with respect to our civil and human rights. As a women’s health educator and advocate I am all too familiar with those consequences. I have heard women’s testimonials, read their memoirs, listened to their stories.  I have helped them access abortion care and as a doula I have helped them give birth to much wanted babies.

After the Alito document was revealed (and during the last confirmation hearings) I thought about the great legal minds of the past who had served on the Supreme Court, Justices like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg among them. Now I mourn what has become of that institution, where several judges lied under oath to Congress regarding precedent, and where many are willing to ignore the Constitution’s 4th amendment right of Americans to be “secure in their persons” and to “not be violated or subjected to “unreasonable searches and seizures.”  

It pains and frightens me that faulty - some might say puerile logic - superficial, antiquated, cliched justifications, overt sexism, and religious ideology are blatantly on display. (It is worth noting that seven of the current justices are Catholic and no Protestants are on the bench).

Couple that with the less than stellar records and legal experience of several justices, the alleged sexual harassment conduct of two justices, the conflict of interest on the part of a justice whose wife actively supported the insurrection, along with the majority’s willing abrogation of civil and human rights and one can question where “liberty and justice for all” has gone.

How, I ask myself in these traumatic judgment days, has this largely trusted American institution so quickly deteriorated into depravity? How did its majority come to rely on bumper sticker taglines, social media tropes, and arguments so weak and sloppy that they wouldn’t pass muster in a law school? Where has compassionate consideration in difficult matters gone? Why have context, untoward consequences, and the reality of people’s lives disappeared?

The fact is the Supreme Court has become a political organization with its own dark agenda and its reputation will forever be tarnished, all because four men and one woman who should know better, appointed by a far right, self-serving autocrat, are now seated for life on the highest court in the land, along with several hundred inappropriate federal judges.

The price we’ll all pay for judicial travesties, individually and together, grows ever clearer and more threatening. If Roe v. Wade is overturned women’s lives will be destroyed. Precedent in other matters (gay and interracial marriage, LGBTG rights and more) will no longer be valid, and revision of laws that wreak havoc because of ignorance and a taste for punishment will return. 

It is no stretch to say that we will become an even more divided and dangerous nation, two-tiered and binary in ways that we can’t yet imagine. Violence is likely to flourish along with racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and increased marginalization. The elderly, young, disabled, and ill will suffer even more profoundly.  Murder charges, incarcerations and suicides will become commonplace. Poverty will prevail for those in the 99 percent, while corporations and billionaires flourish. Family structures will be deeply and sadly impacted. The earth will be at risk sooner than predicted. 

This is not solely about women’s rights, and it is not hyperbole. It’s a harbinger of what is to come because of laws we must live with, who makes and enforces those laws, who adjudicates disputes, what national priorities are established and by whom. It is about the future, which now is in the hands of the Supreme Court – a court plunged into decline that endangers us all. 

It’s a court that is beyond disappointing, a court with extraordinary power to shape our lives, and it grows ever more dangerous.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health, politics and social issues. www.elayne-clift.com

Another Day, Another Newtown: The Obscenity of Gun Violence

When news of another school slaughter broke, this time again in Texas, the bile that rose in my throat was as bitter as the memory of Columbine, Newtown, Parkland – and the other grievous incidents of gun violence in schools – all 554 of them since Columbine, as NPR has reported.

From the Carolinas to California, 27 school shootings are among the 200 mass shootings this year alone in America, and it’s only May.   But this is not a time for numbers. It is a time for unprecedented action borne of rage about what is happening in our country. It is also time to answer burning questions: why is it happening, and what are we going to do about it? It is a time to shout our disgust and dismay, to demand gun legislation now, and to take action to end the slaughter of innocent children.

Here is what I believe must happen NOW. All living presidents (with the exception of Donald Trump) should stand together before Congress and declare that we are done with thoughts and prayers. We are done with the platitudes that surround grief and loss. We are done with inaction, and with turning the other way because political power is more important than loving our babies, especially among those who champion fetuses but ignore the needs of living children.

Go on strike because that is what it will take – teachers, clergy, workers, moms, women and men alike. Call for and participate in a national strike against violence and the insanity of mass murder. Bring down the economy as well as the evil that prevails on Capital Hill if that’s what it takes to stop the killing.

Call it what it is: a public health epidemic, not a gun violence or mental health issue.  We can and must learn the lessons of pioneering health communication campaigns, including, against all odds, the successful fight against the tobacco industry, which saved the lives of hundreds of thousands and demonstrated that people are capable of change.

It is vital for Americans to vote, this year and in 2024, with all the energy a soul can muster.  Stand in line for days if that’s what it takes to be counted among the family of humankind, and the families who must now endure unimaginable and unending sadness.

Most importantly, Americans who want the massacres of innocents to stop must demand an end to the filibuster and lobby for killing the Second Amendment -- the only way to halt the madness we’ve grown used to. Forget appeasing the irresponsible, vicious right wing with calls for limited legislation; go for the one thing that can stop gun violence faster and more conclusively than anything else -- an end to an irrelevant and antiquated amendment written before bullets and rifles that tear bodies apart in seconds were invented.

I believe that what lies at the heart of the tragic problem that is ours alone among developed countries is this: We are a nation wedded to violence and we always have been.

From the time white men first set foot on American soil guns have been used in genocides to eliminate non-white Native American peoples. During slavery guns were a way (along with physical punishment) to ensure forced labor and to instill terror among human beings who were bought and sold. Throughout our entire history guns have been part of our increasingly lethal war arsenals and today the sale of weapons in the U.S. is higher than it has ever been, while the people least likely to be killed by a bullet are made exceedingly rich.

Killing, it appears, is in our DNA. Mass murder has come to define us, whether through war, incarceration, racist law enforcement, the consequences of ignoring poverty while clamoring for personal and financial power, and random gun violence. All of it results in deep-seated human pain in a nation that is “exceptional” in all the wrong ways. We must end our killing fields if we are ever to have pride in a country that asks us to pledge our allegiance.

We have become a country in which the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, appears at NRA’s convention, held in Texas, three days after 19 children were brutally shot to death there, a country where a former president who tried to overthrow an election, and a Senator from Texas who thinks we need more guns, join the governor. It is a country that exposes the personification of evil and reminds us how often scum rises to the top.

So I say this to Governor Abbott: Have you, at long last, no decency? And to Ted Cruz I say: You are not sorry. You are guilty. You have colluded with mass murderers. May the words spoken to me by a 4-year old child ring in your adult ears for all eternity: “Sometimes sorry is not good enough.”  As for Donald Trump, there are no words.

To all the others akin to these monsters, I say only this: We condemn your evil. We will inscribe your names and your deeds and your selfishness in the world’s history books, and we will celebrate the end of your cruelty for all our days.

Pathologizing Grief: How Long Can You Be Sad?

Here we go again. The so-called experts in psychiatry charged with updating the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), the less than empirical “bible of psychiatry” that clinicians rely on for reimbursable diagnoses, have decided that six months, maybe a year if they’re generous, is sufficient time to recover from a life-shattering loss.

This pathologizing of “prolonged” grief is yet another example of the arbitrary labeling of human feelings that is present in every version of the DSM, and a reflection of the culture of pathology we have fallen prey to. Big Pharma couldn’t be more pleased as its chemists race to their labs in search of new psychotropic pills. I couldn’t be more concerned about the price women will pay.

Consider this comment by the psychiatrist who chaired the steering committee overseeing revisions to the DSM-5. While being interviewed for a story in the New York Times in  March he said, “They were the widows who wore black for the rest of their lives. They were the parents who never got over it, and that was how we talked about them. Colloquially, we would say they never got over the loss of that child.”

The absence of context in that statement is stunning.  The widows who wore black were likely not grieving forever; they were more likely observing a cultural norm. And can anyone who has not lost a child begin to understand the emotional agony of that experience? The insensitivity, judgmental language, assumptions, and lack of empathy and context among diagnosticians like that is nothing short of staggering. How can one practice psychiatry devoid of the emotional intelligence necessary to accompany someone on the long, sad journey of grief?

There are psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers who share this view. They are openly critical, arguing that pathologizing a fundamental aspect of the human experience is not only morally wrong, it’s dangerous, warning that being told you have a mental illness when you are emerging from a period of deep grief can add to despair and a debilitating sense of vulnerability.

The backlash against re-defining depression to include grief has been ongoing for at least a decade or more, along with longer term concerns about arbitrary labeling, lack of evidence-based diagnoses, overmedication of patients, and the lack of context in diagnosis, especially for women, who are all too often subjected to meaningless labels like “borderline personality disorder” and “premenstrual dysphoric disorder.”

Women are significantly more likely than men to be diagnosed with a range of psychiatric illnesses. They are also more likely than men to be prescribed psychotropic medication, given electroconvulsive therapy and hospitalized for psychiatric illness.

 One of the leading critics of the DSM was the late Dr. Paula Caplan, a pioneering feminist psychologist who resigned from the DSM-4 committee because she recognized that over-diagnosing and overmedication were occurring on the basis of unscientific labeling and diagnosing, especially for women. In a piece she wrote in 2012 in the Washington Post she said, “Since the1980s, I have heard from hundreds of people who have been arbitrarily slapped with a psychiatric label and are struggling because of it.”   She noted that “About half of all Americans get a psychiatric diagnosis in their lifetimes which can cost anyone their health insurance, job, custody of their children, or right to make their own medical and legal decisions.”

Others in relevant professions have similar, significant concerns about the DSM. Their concerns include oversimplification “of the vast continuum of human behavior,” misdiagnosis and over-diagnosis “simply because [the patient’s] behavior does not always not always line up with the current ideal,” labeling and stigmatization. The American Psychological Association, the American Counseling Association, and the society for Humanistic Psychology are among the professional organizations who have publicly shared their concerns about the DSM.

Psychiatric care and psychological counseling, of course, have their place in mental health. But practitioners, especially those charged with oversight of the troubling DSM, a reference book some professionals argue should be abandoned, as well as those who seek reimbursement for services, do clinical studies that require funding, and especially those who ignore context or lack sufficient empathy, must recognize their moral obligation to “do no harm.” That includes avoiding judgmental diagnoses, false assumptions, heavy reliance on medication, unhelpful labeling, and inherent sexism.

Paula Caplan had it right when she said “In our increasingly psychiatrized world, the first course is often to classify anything but routine happiness as a mental disorder, assume it is based on a broken brain or a chemical imbalance, and prescribe drugs or hospitalization…. These days you would think there is no such thing as normal.”

Perhaps the next DSM revision should include a new disorder: “Prolonged insensitivity to suffering.” It would be easily diagnosed by an absence of compassion and the overuse of meaningless labels upon meeting new people. Surely no one would argue with that.

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Elayne Clift is a health communications specialist and former Program Director for the National Women’s Health Network. She writes from Vermont. 

An Artist, A Mission and a Meaningful Moment

There are occasions in life that gift us serendipitously. Often they move us. Such was my experience when I met Russian born Alexey Neyman, an 83-year old Jewish artist whose work was sold at the Creative Connections Gallery in Ashburnham, Massachusetts recently in support of Ukraine.

 Neyman ‘s exhibition, “The Habitual Light of Memory,” was mounted to raise funds for Ukraine.  The works raised over $4,600 on the first day of the exhibit and the funds were immediately sent to the International Rescue Committee’s Ukrainian relief effort.

That’s because Neyman, who was born in Moscow and frequently visited Ukraine, lost his grandparents, one of whom was a rabbi, to Nazi cruelty in Ukraine during WWII. He still has family and friends in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and Poland. He and his daughter, son, and Polish son-in-law are actively supporting refugees and will soon bring family to the U.S.

But there is more to the artist’s story which involves his philosophy of art. “In this time of crisis in Ukraine,” the gentle artist with twinkling eyes and a ready smile says. “Artists can contribute to the efforts of humanitarian aid, which is why we are donating proceeds from the art show to help Ukraine. It’s also why I went to protest the war in Times Square right after the war broke out.”

Formally trained as an architect, Neyman still designs Russian Orthodox churches and supervises their construction. He also studied the art of painting with Valdimir Weisberg, a renowned Russian painter and art theorist, for ten years. He is dedicated to “the philosophy of art,” which is contemplative and includes understanding how colors work in various mediums. He believes as well that “color has a life of its own,” as Weisberg and Cezanne did. The result is subtle, evocative, soft works that draw the viewer into paintings that are often inspired by people Neyman knows and places he has lived or visited. “I like to immerse the viewer in a visual experience they might not get elsewhere because the qualities and properties in works of art require an awareness of the color as an instrument.”

 One painting that conveys that idea is a portrait of the artist’s long-time partner who is from Ukraine. In her portrait she wears the colors of the Ukrainian flag. “My heart is with the people of Ukraine, and with the people of Russia who are protesting the war, Neyman says. “Everyone will pay a price that is too high. Being genuine and straightforward in my work is the one thing I can do in response to all war crimes.”

Listening to the quietly powerful words Neyman spoke, which closely align with his artistic sensibilities, moved me mightily.  They were the words not only of an artist, but of a humanist, an activist, and a man of deep character. They were also wise words spoken softly by someone who helped me believe that there was still hope for the world.

There is another reason I was moved to know Alexey Neyman.  I too am Jewish, and my grandparents and parents were born in Ukraine.  They fled the Russian pogroms of the early 20th century and in doing so, unlike some of the artist’s family, survived the atrocities.  Another connection we share is that we both engage with the world creatively, me as writer and Neyman as artist, both addressing human rights and social justice. That too was part of our serendipitous meeting.

Painting for nearly sixty years, Neyman’s work has been widely exhibited in the US, Russia, and Europe,  as well as in private and state art collections including the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. But perhaps his greatest gift to others is his gentle, human words: “Ukraine can’t be explained by human language. Art helps.”

Neyman’s art has indeed helped, not only esthetically but practically. His work of expression and remembrance continues. So, too, does our friendship.

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Elayne Clift writes about art, politics, women and social justice.

The Act of Resistance Through Art

Goya did it in 1814 with his powerful painting “Third of May” which depicted the horror of war in the face of a screaming soldier being shot to death. So did Picasso in his iconic 1937 painting “Guernica,” a stunning indictment against the suffering of innocent people during the Spanish Civil War. Diego Rivera did it in his famous 1920s mural renderings in Mexico that attacked the ruling class, the church and capitalism.

Resistance art is a longstanding tradition that has grown larger over time as a form of political protest grounded in the mobilization and activism of people who wish to resist nonviolently. It has come to represent popular power and strength by offering activists something to rally behind, as art historian and critic Ruth Millington has pointed out. “Protest artwork can question, disturb, and even change the status quo,” she says, citing AIDS awareness campaigns in the 1980s and the more recent Guerilla Girls, a group of anonymous feminist advocates who got their start pushing for gallery representation of female artists. Now they protest, speak and perform, their identities concealed since they are working artists. Their humorous in-your-face posters, flyers, billboards and books are widely recognized and revered.

For all of history brave and creative people have fought oppression, injustice and inequality through various forms of art. They have stood for and led those who are without voice, marginalized because of their class, gender, age, disability, race, or social status. They have been the embodiment of the slogan “Power to the People” as they lead the way in acts of defiance that inspire connection and conviction.

Today protest art is even more important and possible thanks to the prolific possibilities of social media. It also takes numerous forms beyond paintings and poetry. But all of it, whether literature, drama, dance, puppetry, posters, or strobe lights on public buildings, it speaks volumes, encouraging public gatherings and passive resistance.

Music can also move people to action. Think Arlo Guthrie, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan.  Or YoYo Ma playing the Ukrainian national anthem on his cello in front of the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. Or just think of the beauty of the little girl with the golden voice who sang from a bunker in Ukraine and went viral.  Watch the Ukrainians singing their national anthem in front of Russian tanks.

Photography can also be social reform art.  The work of 1960s photographer Diane Arbus revealed the pain of poverty and otherness, while the work of Margaret Lange, whose “Migrant Mother” moved millions during the Depression and Dust Bowl days.  Social reformers like Jacob Riis used their social reform photography to bring evidence of their claims of injustice to viewers, conveying potent messages that engaged others. They communicate ideas that resonate across time, place, and context.

Such ideas are shared in the simple act of witnessing. Who would not be moved by the overwhelming crowds of protesters all over the world moving silently along the boulevards of their cities, placards in hand, as Ukrainians suffer? Who could not be mesmerized by the courageous woman fleeting across a live Russian state TV program with a placard that said simply, “Stop the War!” Who is not motivated to act in whatever why they can when we witness bombed babies and birthing mothers on Facebook and Twitter?

Whether it’s a universal image of a closed fist on a poster, a bit of graffiti on a building or bridge, an outrageous visual by the Guerilla Girls, or a simple rendition of the Ukrainian flag, powerful images like those of Iranian artist Shirin Neeshat, who advocates for women in Iran, call us to action because, as she says, “Art is our weapon.”

It is also a common thread among those of us who wish to be counted in the struggle against cruelty, injustice, and violence, and to those of us who want to bring about positive societal change. In light of all that this fragile world is confronting in these times, I am grateful for all forms of art that humanize and galvanize us, as they move us to resist when resistance is needed.

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River, Vt. 

The Mysterious Draw of Crime Drama During the Winter of Our Discontent

Winter 2022. Another season of isolation. Trips cancelled. Theater, museums, movies, restaurants now no-go zones. Closeted clothes. Manicures and make-up a thing of the past. Exercise more resolution than reality. Occasional beans on toast for supper. Panic attacks when a book stash is low. FaceTime with friends. House arrest that feels like life in solitary. (How do people survive that?)

On dark days I think of Hildegard von Bingen, who became a German Benedictine abbess, composer, philosopher, medical writer, and healer during the Middle Ages - once she overcame her years of solitude as an anchorite, one of many young girls sealed in secluded brick chambers in remote abbeys with only a straw bed, a bible, and if they were lucky, a tiny garden. Hildegard grew medicinal herbs in hers as she watched her chamber mate slowly go mad.  Occasionally she joined other veiled young women to sing to priests from behind a latticed wall, and somehow kept her wits about her. Having proved her intelligence and genius for healing, the abbot finally released to start her own convent where nuns were free to move about, read, write, study, garden, and engage in intellectual and social discourse.

Sometimes I think about all the women in the world whose entire universe consists of a lonely hut where daily life revolves around a husband, children, backbreaking chores, and subsistence gardening. I even recall poor Rapunzel alone in her castle. That’s when I thank God for good books, streaming platforms, and FaceTime friends.

Now that my husband and I have become Netflix junkies we try to vary our choices, but invariably when we can’t find a good movie, we resort to watching BBC mysteries and other fictional stories that revolve around crime. Apparently so do a good many other people.  

My research about why some people get hooked on true crime, or well-scripted fictional mysteries, wasn’t particularly enlightening, but one article in the New York Times tried to explain the phenomenon.  Writing in October, Stephen Graham Jones posited that “Horror can offer comfort, can offer solace. Not because it’s an accurate representation or dramatization of our turmoil…but because horror comes packaged…in stories that end. … For all of us who sense no end to our own daily horror stories, that’s what’s so “important.”

A Google search was totally useless because no matter what search terms I offered it revealed list upon list of why people watch copious true crime stories. But I never watch true crime because it’s so depressing. However, well-crafted, complex mystery stories like the ones Agatha Christie wrote and Hercule Poirot solved are worthy of attention even if they are a bit outdated.

Psychologists were the least helpful as I tried to answer the question of why so many of us are drawn to mystery dramas, but a few did offer some insight. Most of them agreed that we like stories that offer a battle between good and evil. We also, they say, like things to be resolved almost as much as we want to escape from the crises in our own lives. We seek respite from our anxieties, and in these days from our isolation, and we enjoy helping clever detectives solve fictional crime.

Not being satisfied with expert opinion I began to ponder a few other questions. For example, who dreams up such complex plots surrounded by numerous subplots? What makes these mysteries so compelling? Why do we care so much about the outcome? 

Being a writer helped me answer my own questions. I know that good drama must be grounded in strong plot lines, clever dialogue, brilliant acting, and credible, likeable characters. It helps if at least one character is attractive, even sexy.  Take the vicar in PBS’s” Grantchester.” Not only was he better at solving crimes than his best friend, Gordy, the detective; the actor James Norton was incredibly loveable as a sleuth, a guy conflicted about God, and a priest leading his flock.

Then there was “Astrid,” the Danish autistic savant who bested the pathologist in every episode by paying much deeper attention to corpses than the forensic guy did. Brilliantly acted by a young actress who captured Astrid’s autistic compulsions along with her astounding qualities emanating from her love of solving puzzles, the friendship she formed with the female detective who understood her was a heartwarming aspect of the weekly stories.

And how could I not recommend “Unforgotten,” a series about long unsolved crimes in which the British actress Nicola Walker portrays a compassionate detective so committed to solving challenging 20-year-old crimes that it gets her in trouble.  Like Astrid and her detective, Walker has great chemistry with her male deputy in a relationship of understanding and trust vs. sexual attraction.

All of this is the stuff of good drama and compelling mystery that, for whatever reason, serves up distraction, makes us feel we are in good company, and leads us to believe that trouble ends, and all will be well. That’s enough to make any dark night feel less threatening or lonely. After all, Hildegard went on to do great things, and Rapunzel was rescued from her castled solitude, proving that hope works in mysterious ways, even in Covid times.

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Elayne Clift is a writer. She has never written a mystery and seldom reads them but she watches lots of TV. 

Fanning the Flames of Poverty

A child plays with a lighter in a three-story apartment building in Philadelphia resulting in a fire that kills twelve people, mostly children. A malfunctioning hallway door in a Bronx high-rise apartment building leads to the death of seventeen people, including eight children – all within one week. Both tragedies housed low-income people. Both speak to the need for compliance with coded housing safety measures.

In the case of the Bronx high-rise building a self-closing door malfunctioned, filling a staircase with rapidly spreading suffocating smoke. The building had no fire escapes and residents reported that the building had door problems for years. They also reported persistent heat and fire safety issues, including fire alarms that no one actually paid attention to because “they rang at all hours of the day.”

In 2018 a fire in a residential building in the Bronx killed another dozen people. At the time, Rep. Richie Torres (D-NY) was a Bronx City Council member. He co-sponsored a bill that mandated all residential buildings in the Bronx have self-closing doors by the middle of last year. Now he has announced a federal, state, and local task force to examine residential building fire safety hazards. “We have to ensure that the housing stock is brought to the 21st century when it comes to fire safety, and the Bronx is no stranger to deadly fire,” he told the local press.

According to the press report, the Bronx building, built in 1972 under New York’s affordable housing program, only had sprinklers in the basement because, as a spokesperson for the owners of the building said, “its ceilings and floors are poured concrete and its fire doors are sufficient to make the building qualify as “non-combustible.” It’s worth noting that the current building owners include the son of a for-profit affordable housing developer.

Safe, affordable housing is a critical issue that gets little attention until there is a tragedy. Profit over people is usually the name of the game among developers and building owners, and politicians often look the other way or just don’t find time to address the urgent problems inherent in housing for low-income residents. Those problems often create health as well as safety issues, yet they remain ignored or skirted around because they are part of a complex, failing infrastructure too long denied, not only because of the expense of ensuring safety, but because building tenants at risk are not a high priority group for many building owners or politicians.

Sometimes it’s a matter of benign neglect on the part of landlords, but more often than not in large cities like New York, corruption fuels code breaking. And no landlords are more corrupt than so-called “slum landlords” whose neglect is criminal.

Take, for example, Jared Kushner, whose abuse of tenants was documented in a film by Alex Gibney called “Dirty Money,” in which one person interviewed called Kushner a “tier one predator.” According to the documentary, Kushner’s properties “have received hundreds of health code violations, including the presence of lead paint, lung carcinogens, and fire safety hazards.” In many documented cases, “the New York City Housing authority had issued violations but never followed up on collecting fine payments” nor had they checked to see if Kushner’s company actually fixed any dangerous living conditions.

Not all landlords rise to the level of Kushner’s abuse, but there are enough bad players that one guy’s mission in life is to keep landlords out of trouble. He calls himself “the real estate solutions guy” on his website which warns building owners about twelve common code enforcement violations. They include missing or inoperable smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, plumbing, heating, and electrical deficiencies, insufficient ventilation and rodents and infestations. Some cities, he adds, separate priority and non-priority violations. On his list of non-priorities? Missing or non-functioning smoke detectors.

Jessie Singer, in her forthcoming book There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise in Injury and Disaster – Who Profits and Who Pays the Price, points out that “the term ‘accident’ itself protects those in power and leaves the most vulnerable in harm’s way, preventing investigations, pushing off debts, blaming the victims, diluting anger, and even sparking empathy for the perpetrators,” her publisher, Simon and Schuster, says, adding “As the rate of [all] accidental death skyrockets in America, the poor and people of color end up bearing the brunt of the violence and blame, while the powerful use the excuse of the ‘accident’ to avoid consequences for their actions.”

That insight gets to the heart of the matter when it comes not only to building codes and fire safety but to the fundamental human right to safe, adequate shelter, as expressed in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, Article 25, which begins with these words: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing …”

As Jessie Singer said on an Instagram post following the Bronx tragedy, “Seventeen people in the Bronx died in a fire for the same reason that many Americans die in a house fire in 2022, because the only housing accessible to them is housing that is unsafe.”

In 2022, that is not only a human tragedy. It is a national disgrace.

A View of the World Through a Gendered Lens

As a feminist writer I often refer to “the lens of gender,” a term that refers to looking at the world through metaphorical spectacles that allow one to view people and events via a special filter. That filter exposes women’s experiences, needs, and perceptions while revealing the realities, needs and perceptions of men in new ways too.  Our vision becomes refined, more acute, and more humane when we don these spectacles, allowing us to see things more clearly and compassionately. By becoming aware of context, we find new meaning in our own and others’ experiences. 

Looking at the world through the lens of gender allowed Jean Kilbourne, for example, to shine light on the world of advertising in a way that no one had done before her. She demonstrated through her writing and classic video series that women were being objectified and sexualized by advertising that seemed clever, until the gender lens revealed advertising’s alarming or violent subtext.

Another kind of gender lens was more literal as photographers Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Diane Arbus and others revealed. Lange and Bourke-White were social realists whose visionary work revealed what Henry James referred to in literature as an “air of reality.”  Like James their work valued accurate representations of the psychological and material realities of life.

Lange achieved this reality by capturing historically important events, including the Dust Bowl and Depression-era days.  Committed to revealing the hardships visited upon poor migrants, she afforded her subjects dignity and respect, and by offering a literal gender lens, she also revealed what it looked like to be frightened, unbearably fatigued and marginalized.  Lange's images, like the iconic “Migrant Mother,” were often confrontational calls to conscience exposing the need to defend against a lack of interest or skepticism, especially among policymakers.

Margaret Bourke-White offered something new with her imagery of industrial America, 1930s Russia, and the horrors of World War II as no one else had. She also proved adept at capturing human moments in the lives of both the powerful and the poor in a body of work that ranged from the uncompromising to the personal. Women were often among the people she photographed to tie picture essays to real lives and individual experiences in a human way.

Diane Arbus once noted, “There are things nobody would see if [we] didn’t photograph them.”  Thankfully, she and other women photographers did view their work through a gender lens, for without that lens we would never have known so much of the world or the historical events that challenged everyone, including women and children. 

Martha Gellhorn was an intrepid journalist who covered several wars through a literary lens of gender. Leaving the news of bombs, battleships and martyred soldiers to the male press corps, she used her reporting to show the world what civilian women and children were suffering in war torn places By telling their stories she put a human face on the dreadful effects of conflict.

These innovative photographers and reporters, along with others, paved the way for women writers and photojournalists who were compelled to address social justice issues. Marion Palfi, for example, combined her art form with social research which resulted in her iconic images, including the 1940s photo “Wife of a Lynch Victim.” Social documentarian Mary Ellen Mark’s work explored homelessness, addiction, mental illness and teenage pregnancy, as seen from the inside.  (In 1976 she spent 36 days in the women’s maximum- security section of an Oregon mental institution.)

I can’t help thinking now about women like these as we contemplate the suffering occurring in the world in our own time. What might we learn in larger social justice terms if unflinching photographs of the vacant stares and skeletal bones of children starving in Yemen, Afghanistan and parts of Africa were in our minds, or we heard the stories of grieving mothers, themselves hungry and frail? Would we see the face of famine differently?

Would we more fully empathize with the pain of incarceration, wrongful or otherwise, or the unending grief of parents who bury their children because of gun violence? Would we view addiction or mental illness differently? Would we be less judgmental about those who live in family structures unlike our own? Would we understand more deeply what it is like to lose everything in a natural disaster, or to grow old alone?

If we saw the faces of hopelessness, terror, marginalization, solitude, and profound sadness might we be inspired to show up at the polls to vote for change, to advocate vociferously, to press for more humane legislation?

As feminists know, context is everything. When the world is viewed through the lens of gender, social change becomes a political imperative. Stories of real people who live punishing lives for various reasons become compelling through a visual medium that offers powerful testimony to the reality of lives lived outside our own spheres. 

In short, seeing is knowing. And knowing, we can no longer look away.

The Normalization of Fascism

When my siblings and I were growing up and we did something untoward that got us into trouble my mother would say, “Let that be a lesson to you!” I’ve remembered that line whenever someone thinks I’m over-reacting when I say the Trump administration has opened the way to a functioning autocracy rapidly morphing into full-blown fascism.

I think about the truism that “history is prologue.  We should be taking that truth more seriously.

A chilling December article in The Guardian by Jason Stanley revealed why. “America is now in fascism’s legal phase,” Stanley posits.

His article begins with a 1995 quote by the late Toni Morrison. “Let us be reminded,” the writer said, “that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”

Morrison recognized the connection between racism, anti-Semitism and fascist movements propagated by and aligned with oligarchs, as Stanley does. His compelling article lays out the various ways in which Donald Trump led us to the tipping point “where rhetoric becomes policy.”

Among the issues Stanley discusses are the takeover of our courts by Trump appointees, right wing attempts at voter suppression, increasing corporate influence, the crackdown on reproductive rights and enforced gender roles, Jim Crow laws and controlled school curricula, increased political and police violence, mass incarceration particularly among blacks, threatening vigilante groups, and punitive actions towards journalists and non-loyalists. It’s a gobsmacking portrait of where we are now as a country on the brink.

This isn’t the first time America has had to confront insurrection and political violence, but it is a time to consider history, and to remember that this isn’t America’s first fascist threat.

The lessons of history include a close look at all dictatorships. In this moment, it is urgent that we consider Hitler’s rise to power. As Stanley and others make clear, Hitler and his minions were adept at using propaganda and lies to create a narrative that led to his election, and his subsequent hideous policies. Citing “the big lie” that the last election was stolen, Stanley notes that “we have begun to restructure institutions, notable electoral infrastructure and law” and that “the media’s normalization of these processes encourages silence at all costs.’

German fascism didn’t arise overnight. Germany’s National Socialist Party began small, but extremely right wing and anti-democratic, according to historians. Masked in nationalist rhetoric, its agenda resonated with people who felt worried and humiliated. They welcomed scapegoats. Stanley put it this way: “The central message of Nazi politics was to demonize a set of constructed enemies, an unholy alliance of communists and Jews.” Nazi leaders “recognized that the language of family, faith, morality, and homeland could be used to justify especially brutal violence against an enemy represented as being opposed to all these things.”

Sound familiar? We’ve already heard talk of book burning, spying on each other, and Jews altering their behavior as precautionary measures. We’ve witnessed racist violence, attacks on peaceful protesters, and acts of white supremacy grounded in the claim that we are a Christian nation. Congress has its share of pro-autocracy politicians, and our local and state governments have all been infiltrated. Vigilante groups prowl the streets, guns and hate placards waving.

What more do we need to wake up?

This is not the first fascist threat to American democracy but the pro-Nazi movement of the 1930s and early 1940s was the most frightening to date. Characterized by a 1939 event at Madison Square Garden, a rally of 22,000 members of the German party known as the Bund, saluted large banners in Nazi fashion. The banners showed George Washington surrounded by swastikas.  

The movement included summer camps for children, billed as family friendly venues, where Nazi indoctrination took place.  At one of them in New York state an annual German Day festival attracted 40,000 people. Germany’s brown-shirted camp kids later became SS thugs. 

The American Nazi movement, with which Charles Lindbergh sympathized, came to an end only after the 1939 invasion of Poland by Hitler, followed by the Bund being outlawed in 1941. All of this is captured in Philip Roth’s semi-autobiographical novel The Plot Against America.

Nevertheless, America has continued to witness Nazi inspired acts. In 1978 a rally in Skokie, Illinois repeated the language of the Third Reich. Donald Trump coopted a German slogan in “America First” as support for anti-immigration sentiments. And now white supremacist rhetoric is being spewed as it was in Charlottesville in 2017. A year ago, a massive crowd of insurrectionists stormed the Capital wearing T-shirts embossed “Camp Auschwitz.”  

In her speech at Howard University, Toni Morrison asserted that fascism relies upon media to convey an illusion of power to its followers.  Now, finally, the media is listening to booming alarm bells and the military is preparing for an all-out coup which could happen in 2024 if not before.

It’s time now to ask for whom the alarm bells toll. As Ernest Hemingway knew, it tolls for all of us.

The Hands That Rock the Cradle Need Help

After MSNBC anchor Katy Tur gave birth to her first child in 2019 she devoted her come back show to the need for a Family Leave policy that matches that of other developed countries. Her plea was personal.  She had undergone an unplanned C-section to deliver her son and had struggled with breastfeeding her small baby who needed to nurse frequently. She also got a post-op infection which slowed down her surgical recovery. All of this made her feel exhausted to the point of hallucinations, and she feared being home alone with her newborn after her supportive husband returned to work. It’s not an atypical story, especially for first-time parents.

“Mothers and fathers need time with their babies and they need support,” she said then. “Lawmakers talk about family leave but nothing gets done. It’s shameful.” She might have made the exact same plea after the birth of her daughter earlier this year.

Tur was one of the lucky ones. Her employer had an excellent, supportive family leave policy. Most women – and men – are not so fortunate. Many women must return to work within a couple of weeks of giving birth because they can’t afford unpaid leave. Seventy percent of men must return to work within ten days or less after becoming a father.

An estimated 80 percent of U.S. employers do not have paid parental leave or have miserably inadequate plans, often following the federal government which gives most federal workers just twelve weeks of paid parental leave. That’s a pittance compared to other countries.

A 2019 study of 41 countries conducted by the Pew Research Center revealed the dismal U.S. situation. Countries like Estonia, which topped the list at 86 weeks of paid leave, Japan, Norway, Luxembourg, Malta, Korea and others had impressive leave policies. The U.S. ranked last.

Clearly, another Labor Day, a day on which we honor the country’s workers, has come and gone and still we fail to support women’s ongoing labor - in the workplace, at home, and essentially after childbirth.

While we have yet to enact a national mandate for paid family leave, some states do have paid leave policies in place. They report a measurable reduction in the number of women leaving their jobs in the first year after giving birth and up to a 50 percent reduction after five years, according to a 2019 study conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Paid leave is gaining more traction as an issue in need of legislation. In addition to an increasing number of national models that shame our own, more U.S. women are in the workforce and more families have two working parents. And paid leave isn’t needed just for new moms and dads. It may be necessary to recover from an illness or to care for a sick or disabled family member or elderly relative.

That’s why The Family and Medical Leave Insurance (FAMILY) Act was introduced by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D – CT) yet again in 2019.  The Act, modeled after successful state programs, uses a social insurance system to provide workers with comprehensive paid family and medical leave. Comparable models have been passed in four states and the District of Columbia.

This year the two legislators have tried again to get Congress to pass a permanent paid leave policy nationally, arguing in language that male and conservative legislators like; The FAMILY Act, they said, would spur economic recovery and growth.

The Act would ensure that every worker, no matter the size of their employer, self-employed status, or part-time work would have access to twelve weeks of paid leave equal to up to 66 percent of wage replacement for every serious medical event every time it’s needed.

In defending the Act, Sen. Gillibrand noted that the Covid pandemic seriously impacted women in the workforce and hit middle class families hard. “Women have been forced to make the impossible decision between caring for their families or earning a paycheck.”

Rep. DeLauro added, “Long before this crisis there has been a desperate need for paid family and medical leave. This problem must be addressed in a permanent way.”

“It’s a national disgrace that our federal government doesn’t guarantee paid family and medical leave for the American people,” activist Melanie Campbell, CEO of The National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, says.

Activists like her and others aren’t mincing words. “They know what it means to go back to work three weeks after giving birth. They know the extraordinary cost of having to start from scratch because of lost income while caring for a loved one with a disability,” Sade Moonsammy of Family Values @ Work said in support of the FAMILY Act, which has been endorsed by more than 85 national organizations.

It’s an Act that is long overdue, as Katy Tur and other new moms and dads know. It’s time to join the list of countries that get it, and care enough to do something meaningful in support of American workers and their families. The hand that rocks the cradle has long needed a hug and a little help. Surely that’s not asking too much.

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