How the Other Half Lives: The Perils of Being Female in Many Countries

Her name was Romina, she lived in Iran, and she was 14. Her life ended when her father beheaded her with a farm sickle because she ran away with her boyfriend. The lawyer said at most her father would get ten years for the “honor killing.” Hanieh Rajabi, a Ph.D. student, was luckier. She survived her father’s lashing, the result of  walking home alone from class instead of taking the bus.

Stories like these are rife in Iran, where women are educated, hold political office and have professional careers, providing a male relative allows them to, all while covering their hair, arms and curves. They must seek permission from a male relative to work outside the home, or if they wish to leave the country or file for divorce.

But Iran isn’t the only country where women’s lives can be miserable. When I read about Romina and Hanieh I remembered the women I met over years of working internationally on women’s health and gender issues.

I recalled Charity, a housemaid, who told me polygamy saved her from nights of abuse. A Muslim woman said she would be punished for attending the United Nations Decade for Women conference in Nairobi but she came anyway. Others in black chadors tried to shake their male chaperones. I heard of a teacher whose husband put her eyes out in front of her children because he thought she was unfaithful. Other stories revealed women slashed with razors to make them unattractive to other men.

In Sudan there were tales of female genital cutting, a practice in many counties across Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.  Often mistaken for a Muslim ritual, amputating a female’s genitals is undertaken as a way to make girls “marriageable,” and to ensure their “virginity, purity and sexual restraint.” More than 100 million women and girls living today have experienced some form of female genital mutilation or cutting, usually in unsterile and torturous conditions. There is no way to know how many victims have died from the practice and FGM has now been transported to western countries due to immigration, despite laws prohibiting it, because the tradition is so deeply embedded in the cultures of 29 nations worldwide.

In conversations with Indian women in Nairobi I learned that the Hindu tradition of “sutee” is still occasionally practiced. Sutee refers to a widow burning herself to death on her husband’s funeral pyre, once a voluntary act considered to be heroic. It later became a forced practice and it is still done secretly in some rural villages. The last known case of sutee occurred last year when an 18-year old woman named Roop Kanwar’s death stunned the nation, forcing a rewrite of Indian law banning the horrific ritual.

Another horrendous example of women’s oppression internationally stems from a medical condition known as fistula. It occurs when a woman has a prolonged, obstructed labor but can’t access emergency care or a C-section. The laboring mother can experience agonizing pain for days and often loses her child. At least a million women in Africa and Asia suffer from an untreated fistula after a painful or tragic birth. They often face physical and psychological consequences because a fistula, or severe tear that can easily be repaired, is left untreated, rendering her incontinent.

Unable to control the leaking of body waste, she suffers chronic infections and pain, and the odor drives away her husband, family and friends.  Often living in isolate huts these young women are frequently blamed for their condition, which usually occurs with a first pregnancy. They may not know that others have suffered the same thing and they certainly don’t know that the problem can be remedied with surgery.  Performed properly a woman with fistula can return to normal life and a happy future. Instead most rural women with this condition live lives of hopelessness, ostracized and alone.

In other parts of the world, women’s oppression takes the form of sexual slavery and abuse. In Paris alone, for example, thousands of teenage girls from the Middle East disappear into forced prostitution every year while globally wives, daughters and partners suffer emotional or physical abuse, often beaten, drugged or sold into sexual submission.

The refugee crisis many now experience adds another dimension to women’s oppression. The war in Syria provides a glimpse into sex trafficking. Fleeing to Lebanon, refugees are victimized by sexual slavery and are treated as criminals despite the country’s legalization of prostitution after WWI. Hundreds of women and girls have found themselves forced into prostitution.

Women in refugee camps also suffer sexual abuse and sex trafficking. I met one of them when I volunteered in a camp in Greece.  Young, pretty, and alone in the world, she had been sold from one man to another until she escaped to Turkey, then Greece. Her story was impossible to imagine, her fortitude incredible.

The dimensions of women’s suffering can make us uncomfortable but they are important to know because victims of violence also matter, and because no systemic oppression should be ignored or continued. Whatever its form, it always calls for resistance and reform, which is why I am compelled to tell these women’s stories.

Who We Are, Who We Could Be

“This is not who we are.” “We are better than this.” 

I can’t bear to hear those platitudes from people who are blind, lazy, or have no sense of American history.

This is who we are, and who we have been since Columbus stood on American soil. Since then Native American peoples have been oppressed and the oppression continues.  Forced into soul-destroying reservations, the 17th to 20th century Indian Wars led to the Wounded Knee massacre where thousands of Native Americans were slaughtered. The Trail of Tears march that forced native people off their land killed more than 15,000 first Americans. Today Customs and Border Protection contractors tear through sacred tribal sites destroying archeological treasures that represent America’s history and culture to build a wall for keeping brown people out of this land.

This is who we are, and who we have been since lynching terrorized black Americans into submission and an inferior caste system. Post-Civil War to the 1950s, African Americans living in the south were subjected to unimaginable physical torture that usually ended with being hung and set on fire. Jim Crow laws legalized racial segregation to ensure African American’s couldn’t vote, hold decent jobs, or get a good education.

In 1921 black residents in Tulsa, Oklahoma were driven from their homes while their entire community was burnt to the ground. The crime was so effectively silenced that few people today know about it.

The infamous Tuskegee Study subjected black WWII airmen to syphilis without their consent so that researchers could conduct experimental treatments. None of the 399 men infected with syphilis received penicillin even though it proved to be an effective treatment.

This is who we still are, as police continue murdering black men and women and bludgeoning peaceful protesters standing up for justice in the names of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, and multitudes more.

But fragile though they are, there are signs of who we can be in the face of dictatorial repression. Mass protests, along with global solidarity from people of all ages, races, and economic strata willing to risk Covid in the name of justice, offer hope for another kind of “new normal” as we move forward in these deeply difficult, terribly troubling times.

Police taking a knee and line dancing with protesters gives me hope. Children, black and white, singing and chanting “No Justice, No Peace” gives me hope. Local leaders, like the mayor of Washington who painted the street with “Black Lives Matter” in defiance of a would-be monarch in her city give me hope, as do those who are calling racial injustice an emergency that requires ending police funding and forging new paths to saner, safer policing.

Organizations ranging from local theaters to community foundations to businesses publicly apologizing and pledging reform in hiring, training, and intolerance of racial injustice gives me hope. People learning about the history and violence of institutional racism gives me hope. Bad cops getting charged with felonies gives me hope. Whistleblowers and those willing to forfeit their careers in the name of justice give me hope. Political and military figures who say Enough is Enough! Give me hope. Rev. Al Sharpton’s eulogy of George Floyd gives me hope.

Recent polls like those conducted by Monmouth University and CBS News give me hope. The Monmouth poll showed that 76 percent, including 71 percent of white people, called racism and discrimination a “big problem” in the U.S., an increase of 26 percent since 2015.  Almost 60 percent of Americans see protesters’ anger as fully justified. And the CBS poll revealed that almost 60 percent of Americans believe police officers are more likely to treat black people unfairly than to mistreat whites.

I’m not saying the change we urgently need will be fast, easy or unanimous.  But we are at a bend in the road, because we are on the brink of disaster. We can no longer deny, disregard or ignore that reality. We know now that there is no justice, no peace without racial justice and that demands that we understand the connections between race, class, poverty, discrimination, i.e. “intersectionality.”  Black writers and leaders like James Baldwin and Angela Davis and Martin Luther King, Jr. understood that before many of us did. Today no one understand it better than African Americans who still can’t get a good education, a decent job, or a safe roof over their heads and who worry every day about driving, jogging, living while black.

“What’s really driving home for me right now, what this moment is teaching me, what the death of George Floyd and all the other losses teaches us is that there is no justice anywhere for anyone until there is racial justice. That’s the starting point, the nexus for change,” a friend wrote me.

Her comment reminded me of another crucial moment, and movement, that demanded sustained change. The women’s movement’s starting point, its nexus for change came with the realization that unless women had agency over their own bodies, there would be no justice, no equality, no self-determined future. The movement had measurable results and it’s not finished yet.

Still, we can hope that the hymn is right: “Once [we were] lost, but now [we’re] found, now we see.” As Rev. Sharpton said, the time has come.

The Pain of Feeling Other's Pain

More and more I avoid watching the news. I closed my Twitter account ages ago and I rarely visit Instagram, now more political than picturesque. I recoil at the thought of opening Facebook.

 Every day it’s one sad, upsetting, outrageous story after another. Innocent black youth murdered by police. Armed men with Nazi flags entering a state capital building. Newspaper headlines screaming “Syrian Children Freeze to Death. Bombs Rain Down,” while in an Afghan maternity hospital women and newborns are gunned down, and in America refugees seeking asylum are given a choice by ICE: Separate from your children or remain in detention indefinitely.

 All the cruelty makes me weep, and reflect that we can drown in the agonies and sorrows of our time - or we can choose to act.  I empathize with those who agonize, and I admire those who act.

 Recently a book inspired me to act. It is called The Book of Rosy: A Mother’s Story of Separation at the Border to be published this month. It’s a well-told tale by and about two remarkable women and how they connected with each other. It is also the story of an amazing grassroots organization and the Latin American women they have reunited with their children after being separated at the U.S. border. 

Co-author Rosayra Pablo Cruz crossed the border with her two sons because she had survived an attempt on her life and her older son was subsequently threatened.  Separated from her sons upon arriving in the U.S, she was sent to detention in Arizona while her sons were put in foster care in New York. With the help of a grassroots organization called Immigrant Families Together, Rosy, who now lives in New York, was finally reunited with her sons months later. In February she was granted asylum.

Julie Schwietert Collazo, a bi-lingual writer, editor and translator is the founder of the organization that helped Rosy. Dedicated to reuniting and supporting immigrant families separated at the US/Mexico border, the organization’s story is extraordinary.

It began with Yeni Gonzalez, an immigrant mother from Guatemala whose three children were transported by ICE agents to New York. When she was unable to pay a $7,500 bond, a group of American mothers led by Julie, who heard Yeni’s story on NPR, quickly mobilized to raise the bond money. Then they arranged to transport Yeni safely, state by state, to New York. There she was reunited with her children and Immigrant Families Together (IFT) was born. To date it has raised over a million dollars and paid over 100 bonds.

 Rosy’s story is stunningly moving as she describes the magnitude and the impact of the human tragedy taking place still. She shares the horrific journey north this way: “The trip is long enough for your stomach to struggle to accept food and water when you finally have access to them again. … The journey is long enough for you to make choices that, when you think about them later, fill you with disgust, like eating mangoes full of worms or drinking dirty water from a creek where cattle stand to cool off. You grip the mango with both hands… and you’re so ravenous, you don’t even avoid the worms.”

 Of the agony of detention, she writes, “In my short time here, I have seen women go crazy with hysteria. They curl up on their bunks and refuse to leave their cells. They cry without ceasing, as if their hoodies are bottomless wells of tears. I have seen them shut down, becoming shells of who they once were. I have seen them lose their will to fight, their will to go on. … I ache for my two boys, of course, but if I let my tears flow, I will become one of those women, hanging on the edge of her own being, and then, what will I be able to do to get my boys, who have been taken from me, back into my arms?”

 Her description of the icebox detention cells is as chilling as the cells themselves. “Months from now, Rosy writes, “when there are news stories about children dying in the icebox I won’t be surprised.”

 Concluding her story, Rosy says, “This is the immigrant experience I wish people could see, not because it’s my experience, but because it’s the story of so many of us, coming to the United States to escape violence and to build lives in which we will contribute to society. … We want to be part of your American dream. We want to help you realize it. We want to share it with you.”

 Rosy’s story is particularly compelling because Donald Trump, on advice of his revered advisor Stephen Miller, has closed the border with Mexico indefinitely, using Covid-19 as the excuse, when it’s really meant to end immigration altogether.

 I’ve been wanting to go to the border to help for a long time, so pre-Covid I contacted Julie. She led me to organizations that still need volunteers. I don’t know when, but I hope to go after the pandemic ends. The detention centers will still be full, despite Covid deaths and deportations.

 How could I not choose to act after reading Rosy’s story and knowing the vital work of Immigrant Families Together?  

Diminished, Dismissed, Misdiagnosed: When Doctors Don't Trust Women

Rana Mungin was 30-years old when she died of Covid-19 in March. A black teacher in Brooklyn with asthma and hypertension, she was twice diagnosed with having a panic attack in an ER, despite a fever and shortness of breath.

That reaction and lack of appropriate response by doctors was not a fluke. It happens frequently if you are female, especially if you’re a black woman, as several recent books about women’s health care reveal. That’s not news to women’s healthcare advocates, but perhaps now healthcare providers who may not have considered inherent problems involving diagnosing and treating women will be more enlightened.

Possibly the most important book on this issue is Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick by Maya Dusenbery. Adding to the impressive and important literature of women’s health, Dusenbery addresses two of the biggest impediments to women getting good care, the “knowledge gap” and the “trust gap.”

 The knowledge gap refers to the fact that many doctors don’t know enough about women’s bodies, their symptoms, or the diseases that affect them disproportionately. The trust gap speaks to the stereotyping of women as unreliable reporters at best, and hysterical at worst. These gaps are apt to occur more often with black women. Dusenbery’s central and necessarily repeated mantra is that women are either not trusted when they report symptoms or they are labeled crazy, malingering, or opioid- addicted.

“This book is not about a few sexist bad apples within the medical profession,” Dusenbery says in her introduction. “It is about how all health care providers, like all of us, have unconscious biases by virtue of living in a culture that holds certain stereotypes about women.”

These biases are revealed over and over again as women share their first-person horror stories of trivialization, misdiagnosis, not being believed and more, whether they suffer chronic pain, autoimmune diseases, reproductive problems, heart attacks or other life-threatening emergencies. 

Here’s one example. “I was asking for help. But my doctor said, ‘I don’t think you’re at the point where medication is an option, and it can be addictive. Keep exercising and doing yoga and maybe consider meditating. Try to get more sleep. If your symptoms persist, come back in a few months.”

Here’s another. A black woman I know was found to have multiple cysts in her body. She had gained weight and stopped menstruating. What did the doctor tell her? “You have a demanding job and a young child. I think it’s stress.” That opinion was rendered with no diagnostic workup, no referral to an endocrinologist, no curiosity or concern about what systemic problem might be causing the troubling symptoms.

Dusenbery backs up her conclusions with copious references to research studies, women’s personal stories, and other books in the women’s health canon, as she exposes “bad medicine and lazy science” in compelling and convincing ways.

“Doctors think that men have heart attacks and women have stress” speaks to the frequency with which women are told their symptoms are due to stress, a theme played over and over again in the stories women share. “It’s hard work behaving as a credible patient,” as one woman said, underscoring how often pain is deemed to be “all in your head.” 

A chapter in Dusenbery’s book called “This is Not Normal” reveals how often women must insist on having diagnostic workups. “Young women aren’t the only group of patients who frequently find their symptoms dismissed as ‘normal’ by healthcare providers. The tendency to normalize symptoms associated with women’s reproductive functions finds echoes in the way elderly patients, trans patients, and overweight patients are often treated.”

 “The Career Women’s Disease” points to the modern version of age-old myths suggesting that motherhood and work are incompatible. One 20th century “expert” on endometriosis notoriously stated that the painful condition was on the rise because of “delayed and infrequent childbearing.” The 19th century version of this myth was that if a woman exercised her brain her uterus would atrophy.

Autoimmune diseases are especially challenging for physicians who receive about five hours of lectures on this difficult topic during their entire medical education. Research has shown that women with these diseases, like with many others, see about five physicians over a period of seven years before receiving a correct diagnosis.

The frustration of not being believed or properly diagnosed is intense.  As Dusenbery puts it, “The long, frustrating search for a diagnosis is such a common theme running through the stories of women patients that many feel immense relief to finally get a diagnosis, any diagnosis. Being sick without knowing why is very stressful; being sick and told ‘nothing’s wrong,’ is more stressful still.” 

Delayed, downplayed, poorly diagnosed illnesses are not simply a medical issue. In this time of “intersectionality,” it’s important to realize that race, class, age, gender and more come into play. As one analyst put it, “if you’re not wealthy, not white, and not heterosexual, you may be receiving less than optimal care.”

That’s why Rana Mungin’s story is so sad, and why Dusenbery’s message, echoing that of other healthcare advocates, is so important. “Listen to women. Trust us when we say we’re sick. Start there, and you’ll find we have a a lot of knowledge to share.”  Books like Doing Harm go a long way in arming women for the task.

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Elayne Clift has been a women’s healthcare educator and advocate for over three decades. She lives in Saxtons River, Vt.  

The Death of Privacy: Big Brother is Watching You

Every day I feel guilty numerous times, not because of something I’ve done wrong.  It happens because of something I haven’t done. Although I’m an activist worried about what is happening in the world in which we now live, I don’t sign online petitions, answer surveys, or vote on Facebook posts or in emails, no matter how urgent the issue.  Nor do I answer phone calls if I don’t recognize the number.

These sins of omission are easily explained. I don’t respond to requests or calls to “make a difference” because it’s very likely I am being surveilled. It’s likely you are too. The fact is our privacy is rapidly eroding and becoming a thing of the past.

Chilling evidence is emerging about how readily everything from our whereabouts to our political views and personal preferences are known and shared. The New York Times and other publications have reported on this issue and explained how spying on our privacy is done and how information is being used.

A recent report in The New York Times revealed that data used by the government is provided by location data companies that “collect precise movements of all smartphone-owning Americans through their phone apps.” The data these companies collect and store is then sold to third party buyers, including the government. And because the data is for sale, the government is convinced that no legal oversight is needed.

The Wall Street Journal points out that the Trump administration “has bought access to a commercial database that maps movements of millions of cellphones in America and is using it for immigration and border enforcement.” Customs and Border Protection thinks that practice is fine. As a spokesperson told The Times, “While the C.B.P. is being provided access to location information, it’s important to note that such information does not include cellular phone tower data, is not ingested in bulk, and does not include the individual user’s identity.” Really? Shouldn’t that be challenged in court? And what exactly does “ingested in bulk” mean anyway? Who sees the data, where is it kept, and for how long?

The truth is that when we accept those long, difficult to read “terms and conditions” that keep being revised and stuffed into our Inboxes, we really have no idea what data is being collected about us and how it is being used. More worrisome is that we are consenting to possible future uses that are unpredictable.

That’s why Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts wrote in a 2018 decision, “When the government tracks the location of a cellphone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user.”

 This whole mess started with an Australian guy who invented an app that allows facial recognition (which is why Hong Kong protesters wear face masks). His company, Clearview AI, means that an uploaded picture of someone can be linked to public photos of that person and to other links where the photos have appeared. According to The Times, the database of more than three billion images that Clearview has were taken from millions of websites, including Facebook and YouTube. Federal and state law enforcement, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, have used the Clearview app along with over 600 law enforcement agencies that used it just in the past year.

“The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” a co-director of the Santa Clara University High Tech Institute in California told The Times.  “Imagine a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”

Given our present political climate, thoughts of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 come to mind. Considered one of the most terrifying novels ever written, it showed what actions individuals can take when given too much power. In the story the political “Party” takes control over most of the world’s population resulting in individualism and independent thinking being banned.  Everyone is manipulated -- and under constant surveillance. “Big Brother” is watching them. The members of the “Party” use force and mind control to ensure that individuals are kept in line. Anyone who tries to live by their own rules (or tells the truth) is labeled a traitor and terribly punished.

 “Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship,” Orwell wrote.

Tactics like face recognition surveillance used today against immigrants could easily be used tomorrow for enforcement of other nefarious laws. That’s why Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), head of the Oversight and Reform Committee in the House, is calling for lawmakers to hold hearings and to protect people legally from abuses that can occur when law enforcement and others use Clearview and other private entities to track people.

“I am deeply concerned by reports that the Trump administration has been secretly collecting cellphone data, without warrants, to track the location of millions of people across the United States to target individuals for deportation,” Maloney told The Times. “Such Orwellian government surveillance threatens the privacy of every American.”

Imagining a New Normal

What will it be like, I wonder, when this terrible pandemic ends? Sure, we will never take toilet paper, pasta, or flour for granted again. We may feel less guilty about binge watching TV. Maybe we’ll even say “I love you” more often. But how will we be changed personally, professionally, culturally?  What lifestyle changes will we choose to make? What will “community” look like? Where will we work and how will we play?

No one knows for sure how we will be irrevocably altered by what has happened, but sociologists, psychologists, writers, and homespun “experts” are beginning to suggest answers to those questions, and to speculate on, or idealize, a remodeled future. Some of these people were invited to weigh in on a “new normal” in a recent article in Politico.

Communications professor Deborah Tannen thinks that having been so vulnerable to calamity will change us forever such that we will become compulsive hand washers who distance ourselves from others. Some analysts counter with the idea that we’ll be drawn together in real and virtual communities that we may not have considered joining or building before we experienced the loneliness of isolation. I agree with their assessment. I think we’ll become closer to family and friends, some of whom we’ve already re-connected with as a result of the pandemic.

Peter Coleman, a psychology professor, suggests that the shock of Covid-19 could put an end to the “escalating political and cultural polarization we’ve been trapped in, and could help us to change course toward greater national solidarity and functionality.” Sociologist Eric Klineberg adds that market-based models for social organization will fail. “When this ends,” he posits, “we will reorient our politics and make substantial new investments in public goods, especially for health and public services.” Given the blatant flaws in our health care system that have been exposed during the current crisis Americans will surely demand urgently needed healthcare reform, whether we call it Medicare for All or universal health care.

The digital lifestyle will likely take on new meaning and new tasks, as Sherry Turkle of MIT says. Whether it’s watching a performance, taking yoga or meditation classes, communicating with legislators, staying connected to long-distance friends and family, or telecommuting to work there are measurable benefits (and some drawbacks) that accompany such a change. One of the benefits is a cleaner environment, as demonstrated by the unpolluted air over cities like Beijing and Sao Paulo, Venetian canals no longer smelling like sewers, rivers running clean again, and the earth’s surface quieting down, which all attest to the benefits of living less frenetic lives and appreciating nature’s healing gifts.  

Two things that will make a comeback in the new normal are a renewed respect for science, and the realization that good governance along with ethical institutions are essential to a functioning democracy, writer Michiko Kakutani suggests. Applying lessons learned from the Trump administration’s failures, he believes people will realize that “government institutions need to be staffed with experts, and decisions need to be made through a reasoned policy process predicated on evidence-based science and geopolitical knowledge.  … We need to remember that public trust is crucial to governance, and that trust depends on telling the truth.”

Consistent with the urgency of good governance in this country is the recognition that we live in a globalized world.  Participation in international organizations, cooperation with other nations, and empathy for multitudes of people who live in conditions we cannot imagine, whether in shanty towns, refugee camps, detention centers, or on the streets has become essential. We can no longer avert our eyes when it comes to human frailty and suffering. 

In the U.S. we also can no longer live with the stark divide between an insanely wealthy one percent world while the 99 percent struggle to survive. As one pundit put it, change is inevitable and social justice actions will make the Occupy Wall Street movement look like child’s play.

There is another change that hasn’t received sufficient attention: More women are likely to be in leadership positions given their proven expertise in handling the pandemic and modeling leadership at all levels. Whether mayors, governors, community organizers, or prime ministers, women have proven their political and practical skills.

For example, New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s early actions, including shutting down tourism and imposing an immediate month-long lockdown, limited the spread of Covid-19 and the death toll dramatically. So did the actions of Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s president, who ordered all planes arriving from Wuhan to be inspected as soon as the outbreak there was identified.  She also opened an epidemic command center and ramped up production of personal protective equipment resulting in a stunningly low number of Covid-19 cases and deaths. These two examples help illustrate that women have proven their decision-making and managerial skills, especially in a crisis.

Julio Gambuto, writing for Cognoscenti, noted that “this is our chance to define a new version of normal, to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes us truly proud. …We can do it in our communities, in what organizations we support, what truths we tell. We can do it nationally by considering “to whom we give power.”

We need only look to New Zealand and Taiwan for models.

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

Love Thy Neighbor - Until There's a Pandemic

It was Day Ten of social distancing when someone in my Vermont community posted the governor’s phone number on Facebook, urging people to call about too many New Yorkers flocking to Vermont to escape the pandemic. The usurpers were allegedly hoarding, emptying local groceries, and using medical services meant for Vermonters. Even  second homeowners paying taxes were trouble. Something needed to be done about it.

“Check out Rhode Island’s measures on how to handle this,” wrote one responder. “We can’t stop them from coming, but we can make sure they follow the rules.” I wondered if she realized how Draconian Rhode Island’s plan was and if she knew it had been rescinded. I also wondered what rules she thought the invaders were breaking?

Another post read, “I never thought I would suggest surveillance of population, or rationing of a sort, but I am leaning toward such measures…. There is just not enough we can do to keep them out.”

Posts like that made me cringe so I responded. “These posts reveal an underbelly I never expected in my chosen state,” I wrote. “They smack of a new kind of xenophobia. Where were the outcries of gluttony in grocery stores when Vermonters left no toilet paper for others? Where had all the flour gone? Why so hard to get bread? Who among us would not do what we need to in order to protect our families? To survive? It is coming close to Passover. Do I need to ask ‘why is this [time] different from others? Do I need to wonder what we’d be thinking if they weren’t New Yorkers, but Jews? (Or is this really about NY Jews?) I could weep for what these posts reveal.”

That’s when rebuttals started flying.  “Chill,” wrote the writer of the original post. “This is only about stay home, stay six feet apart, don’t hoard, don’t buy all the food in a small grocery store just because you can. … Don’t make it into something it’s not.”

The thing is, I wasn’t making it about something it’s not.  I was exposing how easy it is to slide into subliminal stereotyping, shaming, blaming, casting out, scapegoating -- in other words, how quickly one can slide down the slippery slope leading to what Hannah Arendt referred to as “the banality of evil,” a phrase my admonisher found despicable. “We are all in this together,” she wrote. “We are all Jews, Muslims, Christians,” she said, not realizing the irony in the photograph she posted for my benefit of a chapel table upon which sat a large cross and several other small religious icons, while the star of David was conspicuously absent.

 I used the example of Jews to make my point not only because New York is home to many Jews, but because it is my historical context; I know what it’s like to be treated as an Outsider and I am sensitive to matters of exclusion. I could as easily have used Asian, or Latina, or Black or immigrant populations to make my point. After all, let’s remember that in addition to millions of Jews, almost as many gays, priests, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people and others were put to death during WWII.

The issue is Otherness, the shunning of people in dark times, the underbelly of racism and violence, the xenophobia that is gripping our nation in the face of a pandemic threat. Stories are emerging about what is already happening. An Asian woman’s jaw was broken because she wasn’t wearing a mask. Three Asian Americans in the same family were stabbed. One was two years old, another was six. Three young men who arrived before shelter-in-place was implemented in a small town in Maine had a tree felled so that they could not escape quarantine.

In contrast to the posts I read, Senator Patrick Leahy’s message demonstrated another way entirely to speak to the difficult issue of asking others not to come to Vermont.  He acknowledged the economic contribution visitors and second homeowners make to the state. He said they would be very welcome once the pandemic is over.  He made clear that the issue was public health and safety, the only reason he was asking people from out of state to remain in their own homes.

In her famous essay, “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag, dying of cancer, argued that people who are ill are often stigmatized as sinners. In our time, those who literally cross the [state] line, especially if they come from places hardest hit by the pandemic, are seen as sinning against residents.

Ian Buruma, writing in The New York Times, reminds us of the “long history of illness being used to stoke hatred.” It goes as far back as ancient times and reminds us of the European plague of the 14th century, he says, when “disease was seen as a foreign invader, an alien attack on people,” for which, by the way, Jews and foreigners were blamed.

But it was Camus who put it most succinctly in The Plague: “The only way to fight the plague is with decency.” 

That was really all I was asking for when I read those chilling posts, and sounded a plea against disease driven xenophobia. Because yes, we are in this together.

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxton’s River, Vt. 

Can a Pandemic Restore Humanity?

When Albert Camus published his allegorical story The Plague in 1947 about a deadly plague sweeping the French city of Oran in 1849, he raised a number of questions about the nature of the human condition. “I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends,” one of his characters says. Later Camus reflects that “a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour …when all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.”

As we share the experience of a dystopian world of rapidly spreading disease, political despair and economic disaster, Camus’s words have renewed meaning. They help us remember what is truly important in a world in which we find ourselves increasingly isolated from each other, not only now in an abundance of caution, but because of growing isolation derived from social media in a computer age which fosters disconnection from each other.

That kind of solitude has meant a notable decline in courtesy, responsiveness, and compassion such that we no longer feel it necessary to respond to each other, to check on each other, to truly care about others. Our communities are now virtual to a large extent and loneliness has crept into the lives of many, especially those with limited mobility or age-related restrictions.

We have for too long been disinterested in others and disconnected from each other. Basic responsiveness and reciprocity have all but disappeared.  Now we find ourselves living on a planet spiraling out of control, its inhabitants pleading for a return to safety, and a return to communal well-being. It’s almost as if a higher order – some may call it God – is begging us to return to our fundamental humanity before it’s too late.

The earth itself seems to weep for what we’ve lost by casting upon us catastrophic floods, fires, and famine as we struggle to survive and now to cling to hope.

Of course, there are those among us who bear witness and who offer heart-based action. We donate money, share information, and volunteer while learning to grasp the lessons of isolation, among which are knowing how much we need each other for comfort and survival, practically and emotionally. We recognize our shared fragility and reach out to each other with virtual hugs.

In contrast there will always be those people who don’t look beyond themselves and who ignore and exploit others while remaining complacent, and even finding perverse pleasure in their ignorance and selfishness. We may never be able to expect more of them. As a Facebook post admonished, “Next time you want to judge boat people, refugees, migrants fleeing war-torn lands, remember that we fought over toilet paper.”

But the vast majority of us realize the urgency of compassionate, face-to-face interactive community. We often mourn the downside of computer-driven solitude and work-from-home opportunities, even though now our solitude and work are relieved by computer connection. Perhaps above all, we understand more than ever what can happen when our political leadership fails us and what we can do for each other in the face of such failure.

Still we carry on, and hopefully grow from the current experience of this shared, separative crisis. We offer virtual hugs and comfort, not in fear and despair so much as with the knowledge that our aloneness is no longer sufficient once we reach a new normal. We understand that we must actively and visibly renew our obligation to, and affection for one another. Perhaps  in that renewed knowing we can dare to steward ourselves toward a new world in which we shepherd each other back to a place where we can once again wrap our arms around each other in the knowledge that together, we can, as Winston Churchill once said, “brace ourselves … [and be able once again] to say, This was [our] finest hour.”

A despairing F. Scott Fitzgerald, quarantined in 1920 as a result of the Spanish flu, was able to write to a friend, “I weep for the damned eventualities this future brings. … And yet, … I focus on a single strain of light, calling me forth to believe in a better tomorrow.”

Even more inspiring is a poem by Lynn Ungar, a San Francisco poet, called Pandemic, circulating online, in which she writes, “Know that you are connected in ways that are terrifying and beautiful. Know that our lives are in one another’s hands. Reach out your hearts. Reach out your words. Reach out the tendrils of compassion that move, invisibly, where we cannot touch.  Promise this world your love – for better for for worse, in sickness and health, so long as we all shall live.”

Amen.

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River. Vt.  www.elayne-clift.com

The Female Face of Leadership Past, Present, Future

March is Women’s History Month. What better time to honor the women who influence the worlds in which they live(d), whether they are contemporary or not, familiar or unknown.

Even in ancient times examples abound. Cleopatra, the last Pharaoh of Egypt, was a favorite of Julius Caesar’s. Another Cleopatra was a Syrian queen who claimed power when her husband died. Hatshepsut also ruled Egypt as did Nefertiti.

The Vietnamese Trung sisters led the first national uprising against Chinese conquerors in 40 AD. Then there were the famed Amazon women, and later, women like Grace O'Malley, chieftain of the O Maille clan, who challenged 16th century politics in England and Ireland. And we all revere Joan of Arc for her role during the Hundred Years' War.

Not all heroic women have literally been warriors, queens or saints.  Mary Wollstonecraft was a symbolic warrior when she published The Vindication of the Rights of Women in England in 1792, asking that women have “power over themselves.” The Grimke sisters were warriors when they stomped for women’s suffrage and abolition of slavery in the mid-1800s, along with multitudes of other women including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

In 1872 America’s first female stockbroker, Victoria Woodhull, had the temerity to run for president.  Lawyer Belva Lockwood ran twice, in 1884 and 1888.  Ten years later social activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote her pioneering book Women and Economics, a scathing treatise about women’s dependence on men and marriage for survival and sexual legitimacy.

In the early 20th century Emmeline Pankhurst called for militant action to secure women’s suffrage in England, leading the way for Alice Paul, founder of the National Women’s Party and nemesis of Woodrow Wilson, as her “Sentinels of Liberty” picketed the White House for women’s right to vote. Many brave women were jailed, brutalized, force fed, and threatened with psychiatric incarceration. But they carried on, forcing Wilson to support suffrage when their treatment was publicized.

These women, foremothers of today’s female activists, advocates and educators had spoken truth to power. Their work led to vibrant and courageous female leadership across all sectors of society in the U.S. and elsewhere that continues today.

One example is Jacinda Kate Ardern, the world’s youngest female head of state when she became prime minister of New Zealand in 2017. Under her leadership New Zealand has focused on issues like child poverty, housing, and social inequality. Ardern was recognized globally in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque attack in 2019 that led to strict gun legislation.

Finland’s Sanna Marin, leader of the Social Democratic Party is 34 years old, younger than Ardern’s 37 when she became prime minister, making Marin the youngest sitting PM in the world. Formerly a transport minister, she now oversees a governing coalition of five parties, all headed by women under age 35.

Iceland also has a female prime minister, Katrin Jakobsdottir, a strong supporter of the country’s Left-Green Movement. At 41 years old she is the second woman to hold the position. Her priorities are the environment, health and education. She hopes to make Iceland carbon neutral by 2040.

Closer to home, it now seems that no matter who wins the November election, having a woman president in the U.S. is not in question. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar are top tier candidates. If not this year, perhaps one of the “Squad”– Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley or Rashida Tlaib - may find herself on a future ticket. And don’t rule out Stacy Abrams who nearly made Governor of Georgia and works tirelessly for voting rights. Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Omar and Tlaib are the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, and Pressley is the first black congresswoman to represent Massachusetts.

It isn’t only female political leaders we should remember and recognize.  There are women in the sciences, education, technology, communications and other sectors worthy of note as well. From Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in America to receive an M.D. in 1849 to Cecilia Payne, the first person to earn a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard and the one who answered the question “What are stars made of?” in 1925, to Katherine Johnson of Hidden Women fame, and astronaut Sally Ride, women have been pioneers.

Women have also excelled as business leaders, experts in various trades, academic visionaries, media specialists, and more.

And now we see them emerging as social justice and human rights activists across the globe, from education advocate Malala Yousafzai, the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, climate change activist Greta Thunberg, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year, and Emma Gonzales, whose leadership in stopping gun violence, along with other Parkland High School youth leaders, put a measurable dent in the NRA.

Behind each of these young women are multitudes more all over the world, raising awareness about critical issues, educating policymakers, organizing effectively and mobilizing mightily for social change in their communities and countries. We should honor them all, along with their pioneering role models, who through the ages have had the courage, skill and tenacity to keep the world moving forward, even in its darkest days.

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

Why Democrats Need a Media Advocacy Campaign in 2020

When the late Dr. C. Everett Koop issued his first Surgeon General's report about the dangers of smoking in 1982 the media reported it widely. As a result, Dr. Koop realized that publicity and persuasion were effective tools in promoting healthier behavior. In 1984 he launched the Campaign for a Smoke-Free America by 2000 on the 20th anniversary of an earlier Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health, issued in 1964. That earlier report resulted in Congress requiring health warning labels on cigarette packages, and the 1970 ban on TV cigarette advertising. The multi-faceted anti-smoking campaign led to the percentage of Americans who smoked dropping by 33 percent over the course of Dr. Koop’s tenure.

When Koop positioned smoking as a public health issue, he was doing what media advocacy professionals call “framing.”  When he talked about how many people would die of smoking- related cancer, he didn’t just use big numbers. He added, “that’s the equivalent of [X number] of jumbo jets full of passengers crashing in a year.” That’s called “creative epidemiology.” And when he told a story about someone dying from smoking, he related it to a real person in the community where he was speaking, “juxtaposing” his message on a situation that audiences could relate to.

Koop didn’t change the culture of smoking by himself.  Many communication professionals contributed to the success of the anti-smoking campaign that led to behavior change and altered social norms nationally.  Working together, they mounted one of the most successful media advocacy efforts ever undertaken.  It’s now a case study of a methodology that changed health behavior, safety belt use, forest fire prevention, and more.

Media advocacy is the strategic use of mass media to advance public policy and address political issues that have important and harmful social consequences.  It’s rooted in community action and shifts attention from an individual’s attitudes and behavior to greater awareness and collective change, often relating to the political environment. Grounded in communication theory, it has proven to be an effective means of effecting change for everyone’s benefit.

Another method in behavior change communication is social marketing. It derives from a key question asked in the 1960s: “Why can’t you sell brotherhood like you sell soap?” That query led to a new communication objective: the “selling” of socially beneficial ideas and practices that could change behavior to improve all aspects of life, from protecting the environment, to making healthier lifestyle choices, to effecting policy. 

The first objective in social marketing and media advocacy is raising awareness about a problem. Persuading people that something must change follows, leading to individuals and communities taking action, whether its stopping smoking, joining a Green Movement, or voting out a bad president.

As we approach the election in the aftermath of Senate impeachment deliberations, and face continuing support for Donald Trump, voter suppression attempts, and likely cyber interference, Democrats urgently need a strategic, unified media campaign designed to counter Fox News and other sources of misinformation, as well as denial about what’s at stake in November.  

Unified media advocacy messages for TV talk show pundits, social media posts, blogs, opinion editorials, news stories and political ads all need to employ the same pithy soundbites, display the same effective visuals and use recognizable symbols and tag lines. They must offer solid facts, creative epidemiology, localized messaging, credible sources and charismatic, trusted spokespeople who put a human face on Trumpian tragedies.

A media advocacy campaign must focus solely on the threats the Trump administration presents. Candidates, whose policies don’t differ much, should stop repeating narrow, superficial one-liners on health policy, free education, and the economy. The spotlight must always be on the lies, illegalities and dangers of Donald Trump’s corrupt administration, told in human terms.

“More than 18,000 people are held at any one time by ICE. Over 12,000 of them are traumatized children, many separated from their parents, who will never recover emotionally. That’s equivalent to sixty jumbo jets full of asylum seekers. Here is just one of their stories.   ….”

“The fires that ravaged Australia and destroyed a part of that continent larger than Rhode Island signal irreversible environmental disaster if we don’t act immediately to address global warming.  Here’s what science tells us:…….”  And still the president denies climate change.

“Joe Smith died at age 34 because he couldn’t afford his insulin. The Trump administration should be ashamed, and held accountable.”

There are myriad issues like these from polluted waters, to food safety to plundered national parks, begging for heightened awareness and voter turnout. Raising that awareness and promoting action falls to Democratic messengers. If Democrats fail to provide strategic messages that hit home, voters won’t know what’s happening under the radar because of the Trump administration, and how it affects them.

Focused media campaigns expose neglected issues. They discredit opponents and humanize compelling facts.  They reveal lies. In today’s media environment where brevity is essential, a knockout sound bite -- pithy, memorable, and repeatable—can have a huge impact. So can one whopper of a photo.

Designing a media advocacy campaign calls for seasoned professionals.  Still, “Once you ‘get’ media advocacy, you have to do it or you have to live with the fact that you’re not doing everything you can to make a difference,” as one media advocate put it.  Those words couldn’t be more applicable as we face the great urgency of protecting democracy and ensuring a future grounded in the wisdom of our Constitution. Surely Democrats can identify their Dr. Koop in time. The question is, will they?

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Elayne Clift has a master’s degree in Communication and has worked internationally on numerous media campaigns.

The Urgency of Remembering the Holocaust

Last month saw the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and with it, numerous articles about Holocaust survivors who had gathered at the death camp to share painful memories, and to admonish those who cry “Never Again!” to mean it.  Most of the 200 survivors present were in their nineties, frail and infirm, but determined to bear witness.

Ninety-two year-old David Lenga was one of them. He survived Auschwitz and was liberated in 1945. One of only two family members to survive, he remembered where terrible things happened. “Everything left a deep scar on my soul,” he said. “I remember the inside of the barracks, smoke from the chimney, the place next to the wall where the shootings happened. I will never forget it.”

Lenga worries that the apathy people exhibited then is being repeated, “especially with this rise in hatred in different places. The hatred is like a deadly virus. We cannot allow it to creep into our tomorrow,” he told the Jerusalem Post.

At 95, Erna de Vries, another survivor who remembers how hungry she was when she sees a piece of bread, shares his fear of reprise. She speaks to German school children and university students about the camps, inspired by the memory of her mother.  “Survive and tell everyone what they did to us,” she said before dying.

The concern that motivates David Lenga, Erna de Vries and others to tell their stories is understandable. There are very few survivors left, and who will tell their stories when they are gone, they worry.

It’s an important question given a recent report in The Guardian, which revealed, among other startling facts, that fewer than half of American adults know how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust and almost 69 percent of Americans thought the Holocaust happened sometime between 1930 and 1950.

Coupled with ignorance about the Holocaust and Holocaust deniers, the rise in anti-Semitism has become extremely troubling. According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents in the U.S. in 2018 were the third-highest total since the civil rights group began publishing data 40 years ago. A forthcoming report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University says antisemitic hate crimes in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago – the three largest cities in the US – are poised now to hit an 18-year peak. And anti-Semitism is already evident in geo-politics and among conservative leaders, including those in the White House.

That’s why Jewish organizations have been urging parliamentarians everywhere to toughen anti-Semitism laws and to promote Holocaust education.  As Piotr Cywinkski, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, told The New York Times, “We are becoming more and more indifferent, introverted, apathetic, and passive. Most were silent as the Syrians were drowning, we silently turned our backs on the Congolese and Rohingya people, and now the Uighurs. Our silence is our severe defeat.”

I was among the lucky ones. My extended family, persecuted out of Ukraine, emigrated to the U.S. early in the 20th century. Born during WWII, I would likely have perished if they had remained in Europe. But like all Jewish people, the history of the Holocaust is in my blood.  I felt it when, as a young woman, I gazed at picture postcards on the wall in Anne Frank’s attic bedroom. I felt it again when I wept at Yad Vashem at the sight of an enormous pile of children’s shoes. I feel it every time I read Holocaust literature and know that I could easily have been one of the characters. I felt it when I visited a Nazi work camp in Latvia not long ago and saw a photograph of children, many of whom would die of illness and starvation while their parents were worked to death. I feel it just thinking about whether I could cope with a visit to Auschwitz.

Once I wrote a poem about whether I’d have had the skill and guts to survive the Holocaust. Here is an excerpt:

March 13, 1943 flashes across the screen as "Schindler's Juden"

are choked out of the Kracow Ghetto. I feel my own breath

trapped in my chest as if I too were racing for a cellar,

a closet, a bedspring, anywhere they cannot find me.

A month later, it will happen again in Warsaw. And again.

the black saber of the Holocaust will disembowel European Jewry.

I read Anne Frank's diary when I was thirteen, and imagined myself,

budding writer, adolescent, believer in the human spirit,

in the attic gazing dreamily at the sky.  Would I have had

the courage, the cunning, the chutzpah, to survive?

Would I have lived in trees, eaten garbage, kept silent,

as Nazis thrust their filthy hands up my skirt?

I was born a Jew, one week after 3,000 people like me

perished in Kracow. I began to live one month before

Jewish lives ended in Warsaw, and but for an ocean,

I might have been among them. And so,

the date on the screen, March 13, 1943,

traps the breath in my chest as if I too were racing for a cellar,

a closet, a bedspring, anywhere they cannot find me.

                                                 *

 Never again. Never. Again.

The Challenging Failures of a Broken Health Care System

If there’s one issue on which there is consensus in this drawn out, drama-laden pre-election time it’s that our healthcare system is seriously broken.  Whether voters are for an incremental approach to reform, a course correction for the Affordable Care Act, or behind a magic bullet Medicare For All plan, they agree that the situation is a mess on many levels, often resulting in catastrophic outcomes or financial ruin.

We all have illuminating stories to tell. Mine is specific to the high cost of healthcare and a suspicion that Medicare is being seriously ripped off.

Not long ago I visited a specialist’s office to relieve a blocked ear that resulted from flying with a cold. A physician’s assistant looked in my ear, declared me free of fluid or infection, and bizarrely suggested I have an MRI to rule out a brain tumor. She then prescribed steroids.  I ignored her advice, tore up the prescription, and three days later my ear popped itself open. 

For that short visit I was billed $38. Medicare paid the remaining $305.

Astounded by a charge of $343 for a brief office visit with a PA, not the doctor I’d booked the appointment for, I called the billing office where I was seen to query the bill. I asked specifically who decided the billing codes, what the criteria were for coding, and why I was billed the same rate for a PA as for the MD I didn’t see. No one could answer my questions. I then called the physician’s office, which referred me back to the billing office.

I wrote to the billing office and soon received a troubling response from the Director of Customer Services, which I felt compelled to answer. My letter speaks for itself.

“Thank you for your response which attempted to explain your cost policies,” I wrote. “I do not wish to beat a dead horse, but I must reply for reasons which are obvious.

“You stated that ‘when it comes to pricing, rates are set by a board of directors annually.’ I fail to see how a hospital board can arbitrarily set prices, or codes, for services covered by Medicare, a federal program that establishes reimbursement standards for anyone whose primary insurer is Medicare.

“You also refer to ‘complexity levels based on the nature of your condition, paperwork, examination and counseling time.’ To be clear, my visit was hardly highly complex.  I had a blocked ear, not a perplexing condition. My visit required no paperwork beyond a chart note and a brief examination which simply involved looking in my ear. No sophisticated equipment or counseling was necessary. 

“You also stated that costs included “caregiver’s time, space where services were provided, equipment, supplies and medications used.” Let me be clear: No equipment, supplies or medications were used. My visit was a half-hour or less.  Am I to believe that my cost included a fee for using an examining room?  What’s next? An elevator fee? Restroom fee? Assessment for corridor or cafeteria space?

“You stated that yours is a ‘charitable healthcare organization’ that cares for people regardless of their ability to pay.  While that is admirable, I do not expect to be assessed a charitable giving fee.  I will decide, not your institution, how much and to whom my philanthropy goes!

“Equally, I do not expect to involuntarily subsidize ‘physician training’, ‘conduct of medical research,’ or ‘specialized services using the newest technology.’  If I wanted to support those goals, I would do so in the form of a dedicated donation. I am astounded that patients are unknowingly assessed fees for these things.

“How interesting that in listing your goals you state that you want to ‘have fair patient prices that enable [you] to advance health through research, education, clinical practice and community partnerships.’  Note the rank order of priorities in that list, and the absence of ‘quality patient care’ as the first priority.

“My experience doesn’t meet all the standards of Medicare fraud and/or abuse as articulated by the federal government and healthcare watchdog groups, but it comes very close to two of them: “Charging excessively for services or supplies” and “upcoding” or incorrect billing.

“I’m sad to say that I don’t expect this letter to change anything with respect to billing at your facility, but I do hope you and your colleagues will reflect seriously about the issues it raises -- and that you will be “fair and balanced” as well as transparent, when addressing costs incurred by Medicare and the seniors served by that program.  It is telling that I received a 10% cut in my Social Security this year due to the increased costs of providing Medicare.  No surprise there now that I’ve seen your billing criteria.”

According to www.CMS.gov ,  a government agency dealing with healthcare fraud and abuse, “No precise measure of healthcare fraud exists, but  those who exploit Federal healthcare programs can cost taxpayers billions of dollars.” CMS defines abuse as “practices that may directly or indirectly result in unnecessary costs to the Medicare program.” Examples of abuse include “charging excessively for services or supplies and misusing codes, or “upcoding.”

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Never Again? The Rising Epidemic of AntiSemitism

A shooting in a Jersey City Jewish market. Memorials in remembrance of a massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Cries of “Jews will not replace us!” in Charlottesville. College campus offices, dorms and walls slathered with swastikas. Navy cadets flashing the sign of white supremacy. Cars, offices, homes, synagogues, schools defaced with slogans and swastikas in cities and towns across America. Donald Trump Jr.’s Facebook post of a cup for liberals to cry into covered in gold Stars of David. In France graves desecrated in an old Jewish cemetery and a Holocaust survivor murdered. German warnings that Jews shouldn’t wear yarmulkes or Stars of David in public.

In 2018 anti-Semitic attacks killed more Jews around the world than in any year in decades. Last year saw startling new numbers and acts of violence as well. Anti-Semitism is spiking in alarming ways and in numerous places while calls rise for stronger security measures and government action, but not the kind that Donald Trump promulgated in an Executive Order just before the end of 2019.

Using Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the president’s order withholds federal money from colleges and universities that fail to counter discrimination against Jews.  It is at best a misguided gesture, and at worst a threat to First Amendment rights. Aimed at silencing opposition to Israel’s overt oppression, violence, and denial of Palestinian people’s human rights, the order is an attempt to put an end to Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movements.

The BDS movement was started by Palestinians which accounts in part for why it is so abhorred by many Jews and Israeli sympathizers.  But BDS has evolved into a global strategy that uses economic measures to help end tragic discrimination and injustice, as it did successfully in South Africa under the Apartheid government. Its most prominent funder is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund which has provided over $1 million to BDS-supporting groups since 2013.

This thinly veiled measure by the president may look like a gesture of concern but realistically it doesn’t begin to address the real source of violent anti-Semitism in America. Stopping public debate on college campuses or threatening workers with dismissal if they openly support BDS does little to tackle the problem emanating from white supremacists and neo-Nazi groups, many of which find inspiration in the words and deeds of Adolf Hitler and his hideous henchmen.

Donald Trump has frequently demonstrated his own anti-Semitic tendencies, despite having a Jewish daughter, son-in-law, and three Jewish grandchildren. He has endorsed crude caricatures of Jews, especially when they include reference to money. He told the conservative Israeli American Council in a 2018 speech that a wealth tax would put Jews out of business. “A lot of you are in the real estate business,” he said. “I know you [and] you’re all brutal killers.” In a speech when the U.S. Embassy was moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Trump told Council members, “You have Jewish people…and they don’t love Israel enough.”

Now, to make his case against BDS movements, the president has gone so far as to posit that Judaism is a nationality, as well as a religion. That’s deeply upsetting to me and many other Jews. It has serious possible ramifications, one of them being a set-up for further immigration discrimination and rejection.

Trump signed the “Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism” in December at a White House Chanukah reception attended by evangelical pastor Robert Jeffress, who famously said in 2010, “You can’t be saved being a Jew.” The order drew praise from some Jewish organizations, and individuals like Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, as well as vociferous criticism from others. It also drew a vocal backlash from Palestinian activists who said it will chill legitimate free speech that criticizes the Israeli government, especially for its human rights abuses.

Some Jewish leaders worry about its implications for the Jewish community at large. Rabbi Hara Person, the chief executive of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, told The New York Times that the order feels dangerous. “I’ve heard people say this feels like the first step toward us wearing yellow stars.”

I was born a Jew, and I remain a secular Jew. That is my religion and my ethnic heritage. I feel deeply my connection to other Jewish people, and to our collective history and culture. At the same time, I am an American. That is my nationality by birth, although as Virginia Woolf said, “As a woman I have no nation. As a woman, I want no nation. As a woman the world is my nation.”

Judaism is neither a race nor a nationality. It is simply, and beautifully, one of the world’s great religions, nothing more, or less.

Everyone needs to understand and respect that, including the president of the United States. And everyone, most especially the president, needs to understand as well that the growing epidemic of global anti-Semitism, reinvigorated by the president’s words and actions, is a real and present danger that threatens the future for all of us. 

“Never again?” I don’t think so.  Here we are, and sadly, “again,” it seems, is now. 

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When Do I Get to Feel Good About My Heritage and My Home?

When I was a pre-teen growing up in small-town New Jersey I loved the fact that I was a first-generation American. My parents, with their families, had fled anti-Semitic pogroms in Russian Ukraine as small children, and all of them had built new lives in America. It seemed dramatic to have a family history of hardship and courage, a unique culture, special food, and a language I could neither speak nor understand except for a few words. I liked knowing that I had Russian roots, with its great writers, composers and ballerinas as well as a mysterious history.

But I was robbed of that sense of pride as a result of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who rabidly tried to destroy communism in 1950s America, even where it didn’t exist. McCarthy viciously accused politicians, actors, journalists, teachers and others of subversion or treason without evidence.  Ordinary people across the country began to fear him and what came to be called the Second Red Scare. My father was one of them.  “Don’t let on about Russia!” he warned. “Just keep quiet about it.” And so I never talked about my heritage again.

Some years later while in high school I went through a period when I was proudly Jewish. I read the Old Testament from cover to cover and fasted on Yom Kippur, holiest of days as we solemnly embraced the Jewish new year at the mournful sound of the Shofar being blown. I read Jewish writers and wept at Holocaust stories. The young rabbi in our small town was a lovely man who with his family represented modern Jewish life to me. He also understood my desire to celebrate my Jewish identity in the days before girls had bat mitzvahs, a coming of age ceremony at age 13, enjoyed by boys at their bar mitzvahs. And so, reading from the story of Esther, he devoted one March Friday evening to a confirmation service for me.

During this time, I felt enormously proud of Israel for creating a post-Holocaust oasis for Diaspora Jews, and giving all Jews a homeland and sense of national pride. But as I grew into adulthood while Israel’s politics were becoming ominous, and as I learned more about the country’s history and came to understand its punishing behavior toward the Palestinian people who share its land, that feeling of pride began to slip away from me. I wondered and worried about things I read or overheard in conversations, both pro-Israel and against. How, I wondered, could a people who had suffered so much, visit such suffering upon others?

Then I grew older and became more deeply familiar with American history and its treatment of indigenous peoples, its slavery and continuing racism, its homophobia, misogyny, despicable corruption, incipient violence, false alters to self-righteousness and sharply dangerous shifts right such that today we can actually cage dying children. Now I find that I’ve lost virtually all sense of national pride. The truth is it’s hard to feel proud when you’re anxious and afraid, and when you’re more likely to shudder than to sing a country’s falsely premised praises.

As I write these words, cognizant of the adoration of the almighty dollar while the planet gasps for life, I find the platitudes of our political rhetoric not only hollow, but deeply shameful, especially now that we are on the cusp of actually losing our democracy to dictatorship as we quite possibly enter an era when we may be called upon to witness and engage in the utter abrogation of any national decency.

Joe McCarthy eventually got his comeuppance, the Soviet Union disbanded, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Cold War took a long break - until now. The Vietnam War ended finally, although it will never leave our consciousness as we continue to trudge on endlessly conducting untoward military action that robs so many of so much and keeps the world in danger.

In the 1990s my husband and I visited Israel. It was a conflicted journey.  As a Jew, there is no denying that the concept of an Israeli state gets inside you, and you feel a connection to the country when you stand on its land. At the same time, as a feminist, I had a really hard time reconciling the misogyny inherent in Jewish orthodoxy and seeing it at play. Further, and ever more vigorously I find myself, once again, feeling a sense of shame for my heritage, because of Israel’s political behavior toward other human beings, and the lack of response to that behavior by so many other Jews. I experience deep sadness, because others more powerful than I have rendered it impossible for me to embrace my Jewishness with as much love and pride as I once did.

Now the question for me is will I be doomed to forfeit yet again any pride I might have felt for my country and my heritage? Will I be expected to be quiet, to behave like a proper Jew, to be a good citizen? Or dare I believe that the dangerous path on which I find myself (along with others) will not leave me (or others), scarred as we continue moving forward, healing, and hopefully into a more enlightened, safer, caring world?  

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

Judging the Judges: It's Not Just the White House We Vote For

The first time I was eligible to vote I would have cast an enthusiast vote for John F. Kennedy’s second term. In the intervening years between then and now I voted only once with full enthusiasm, for Barack Obama.  My votes have largely been by default to Democratic candidates. But each time I voted I thought beyond who would occupy the White House. I knew I was also voting for lifelong federal judges who would be appointed by the president, not without bias.

It has never been more important than it is now for all enfranchised Americans to vote, and to understand what is at stake, including who will sit on the nation’s most important courts for the rest of their lives, rendering deeply important decisions that will affect us for generations.

One look at how many judges Donald Trump has put on U.S. benches - a quarter of all circuit court judges, 43 appeals court judges and 99 district court judges at this writing- should be enough to make every voter rush to the polls in November. Since becoming president, as of November 2019, Trump had nominated 227 people to federal judgeships; 165 of them were confirmed by the Republican Senate. Over 100 vacancies remain in the federal judiciary.

Another term will likely give the president the opportunity to seat one or more conservative judges on the Supreme Court.

The latest confirmation of a judge seated on a U.S. District Court (in Missouri) is Sarah Pitlyk, who clerked for Brett Kavanaugh and is known for building her career on her anti-abortion and reproductive health litigation. She argues against in vitro fertilization and surrogacy and has said that birth control is rooted in eugenics. The American Bar Association (ABA) unanimously declared that she, like several other Trump appointees, is “not qualified” for the judgeship. Like many other conservatives making their way to the courts, she is young (remember, these are lifetime appointments), deeply conservative, and notably inexperienced.

Others like her include several judges now sitting on U.S. Courts of Appeal, the courts of last resort for almost 100 percent of cases in their respective regions. The cases they hear involve capital punishment, abortion, same-sex marriage, immigration and more. They decide about 50,000 cases a year; the Supreme Court resolves 100. The decisions these judges render will affect millions of people for generations.

Judge Leonard Grasz is one of them. Profiled along with others by HuffPo in November, he was unanimously deemed “not qualified” by the ABA and is said to be rude and connected to powerful politicians. He opposes LGBTQ and abortion rights and has been described as having trouble separating his role as an advocate from that of a judge.

Another U.S. Appeals Court judge declared “unqualified” is Jonathan Kobes, who couldn’t manage to provide sufficient writing samples to meet ABA standards. He also failed to demonstrate “an especially high degree of legal scholarship and excellent analytical and writing experience,” the ABA review revealed.

Then there’s Judge Neomi Rao who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. She has blamed women for date rape and published inflammatory articles on sexual assault, race and LBGTQ rights.  And Amy Coney Barrett, who thinks Roe v. Wade was “an erroneous decision” and that the Affordable Care Act’s birth control benefit is “an assault on religious liberty.” She’s on Trump’s short list for Supreme Court nominations.

There’s more, but let’s turn to the District Courts. Judge Matthew Kaesmaryk, who said it was a “grave mistake” to include protections for LGBTQ people in the Violence Against Women Act, and who criticized the Roe v. Wade decision, now sits on the bench overseeing the Northern District of Texas. In Louisiana Wendy Vitter, wife of former Senator David Vitter, has falsely claimed that abortion is linked to cancer, and that Planned Parenthood “kills over 150,000 babies a year.”

Judge Howard Nielson, Jr. of Utah has argued that a gay judge couldn’t possible be fair on a same-sex marriage case, and that sexual orientation is a choice. He also disputed evidence that LGBTQ discrimination leads to higher rates of depression and suicide.

A Tennessee judge, Mark Norris, has a record of Islamophobia, homophobia, and extreme anti-abortion views.  He fought against the removal of monuments glorifying Confederate leaders and established a website showing images of refugees next to ISIS terrorists.

And in Oklahoma, Judge Patrick Wyrick tried to make emergency contraception harder to get for minors and adults. He also filed an amicus brief in the 2014 Hobby Lobby case, arguing that the ACA’s contraceptive coverage mandate was unconstitutional because “religious faith is more than mere belief.”

With very few exceptions, all of these judges, and others, have received unanimous Republican confirmation in the Senate.

When I was teaching Women’s Studies to undergraduates, many of whom were facing their first vote, I always underscored the importance of their vote with regard to the judiciary. I told them I’d be sitting on their shoulders when they went to the polls and I hoped they’d do the right thing. Now I find myself wanting to sit on the shoulder of every single person who hopefully votes. I hope with all my heart they too will do the right thing. So very much is riding on it.

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

www.elayne-clift.com

Environmental Disasters Loom Large But Remain Unnoticed

These are hard and exhausting times. Impeachment issues and the president’s continual bombardment of lies and insults that call for correction are wearing us out, remaining front and center both in the media and our minds. As a result of our fatigue and alarm, and because media is abrogating its duty to report essential news outside of Trump’s tantrums, it’s not surprising that disastrous decisions by the president, and their consequences, have gone unnoticed. None of the actions and policy changes of the current administration is more urgently in need of increased awareness, and resistance, than those that relate to environmental degradation and destruction posing serious threats to our health and safety.

Among the most egregious decisions of the Trump administration is the recent “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” proposal promulgated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This terribly dangerous idea would require scientists to disclose all their raw data, including confidential medical records, before the EPA would consider academic studies as valid. Scientific and medical research would be severely limited leading to Draconian public health regulations as well as environmental crises. EPA officials call the plan a step toward transparency, but it is clearly designed to limit important scientific information that should drive policy related to clean air and water, among other health-related environmental impacts.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump pledged to roll back government regulations as part of his pro-business “America First Energy Plan.” Once in the White House he immediately signed executive orders approving two controversial oil pipelines and a federal review of the Clean Water Rule and Clean Power Plan. Shortly thereafter, the Clean Water Rule was repealed.

The administration is allowing drilling in national parks and other treasured venues and opening up more federal land for energy development while the Department of the Interior plans to allow drilling in nearly all U.S. waters, opening up the largest expansion of offshore oil and gas leasing ever proposed. This year the administration completed plans for allowing the entire coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to be made available for oil and gas drilling as well.

You have only to look at who Mr. Trump turned to or appointed to head key agencies that deal with energy and environmental policy. For example, three of four members of a transition team mandated to come up with proposals guiding Native American policies had links to the oil industry and his first head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, challenged EPA regulations in court more than a dozen times. Pruitt also hired a disgraced banker with no experience with environmental issues to head the Superfund program, responsible for cleaning up the nation’s most contaminated land.

Other departmental gems include Andrew Wheeler, who replaced Pruitt. He was a coal industry lobbyist and a critic of limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Then there’s Rick Perry who was tasked with developing more efficient energy sources and improving energy education. At Interior, Ryan Zinke who didn’t last long. He was followed by an attorney and oil industry lobbyist who put his personal energy into deregulation and increased fossil fuel sales on public lands. At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a scientific agency that warns of dangerous weather, monitors atmospheric changes, oceans, and more, Trump’s guy was a lawyer and businessman who had advocated against NOAA.

In August, Mr. Trump instructed Sonny Perdue, Agricultural Secretary, to exempt Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest intact temperate rain forest, from logging restrictions and mining projects. The president had already told the Department of the Interior to review more than two dozen monuments with a view to reducing the size of Bears Ears National Monument and other sacred land.

National Geographic has been tracking how the administration’s decisions influence air, water, and wildlife. Here are just some of the ways environmental policies have changed since Trump became president. The U.S. has pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, loosened regulations on toxic air pollution, rolled back the Clean Power Act, revoked flood standards accounting for sea-level rise, green-lighted seismic air guns for oil and gas drilling that disorient marine mammals and kill plankton, and altered the Endangered Species Act.

A recent New York Times analysis counts more than 80 environmental rules and regulations “on the way out under Mr. Trump.” So far 53 rollbacks have been completed and 32 are in progress. The Trump strategy, the Times points out, relies on a “one-two punch” in which rules are first delayed, then overridden by final substantive rules. It packs a big punch any way you look at it.

Not long ago I visited Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts where the philosopher, writer and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau lived for two years in a solitary cabin in the mid-19th century. Often credited with starting the environmental movement, he articulated a philosophy based on environmental and social responsibility, resource efficiency, and living simply. He believed fervently that we must keep the wild intact. “What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” he asked.

It’s a question we should all contemplate in the runup to November 2020.

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

A Growing Epidemic of Violence Threatens Black Transgender Women

Last month being LGBT History Month, it seems timely to think about what is happening to primarily Black transgender women across the country. It’s not simply timely, it’s urgent given the growing number of mostly Black trans women being murdered.

In 2018 at least 26 murders of transgender people occurred in the U.S. The majority were Black trans women. The year before that the number killed was 29. So far this year at least 26 transgender people, largely Black trans women, have been killed by acquaintances, partners and strangers. The numbers recorded for any year may be low due to under-reporting by victim families and law enforcement. These killings align with other significant factors that render trans people more prone to violent death, such as poverty, homelessness, healthcare barriers, depression, homophobia, racism and sexism.

These tragedies demand a human face. Baily Reeves, 17, was fatally shot in Baltimore, Maryland in September. Little is known about the circumstances surrounding her death.  Jordan Cofer, 22, who was out only to close friends and used male pronouns on social media, was among the nine victims killed in a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio in August. A friend told the media he was “one of the sweetest people you’d ever meet, a true saint, but he was scared constantly.” Dana Martin, 31, “beloved by everybody,” was fatally shot in Montgomery, Alabama and found in a roadside ditch in her car. Claire Legato, 21, “full of life,” died of a gunshot wound to her head in Cleveland, Ohio. There are 22 more stories like this so far this year.

Two troubling cases remain unresolved. A 25-year old woman named Medina, denied treatment for a severe health problem in an ICE facility, died at a Texas hospital hours after being released by ICE. Another woman, Polanco, died in a cell at the notorious Riker’s Island prison in New York.

According to GLAAD.org, the American Medical Association has declared the killing of trans women and other trans people an “epidemic” exacerbated by a variety of social issues, including the fact that transgender people face high levels of discrimination and poverty. According to one national survey of transgender people, their level of unemployment is twice the rate of the general population. Transgender people are four times more likely to live in poverty, and 90 percent of them report experiencing harassment, mistreatment, or discrimination on the job. Access to healthcare is extremely limited for transgender people, in part because until recently private insurers have treated transition-related medical care as if it were cosmetic. Some procedures are still not covered, and it continues to be difficult to find a provider who is knowledgeable about transgender healthcare.  Sadly, 41 percent of transgender people reported attempting suicide in one large study.

“We are the most afraid we’ve ever been,” Mariah Moore of the Transgender Law Center, says. Kayla Gore, a transgender advocate in New Orleans, adds that the threat of violence is “always forefront in our minds, when we’re leaving home, going to work, going to school.”

It’s important to understand what “transgender” – and sexual orientation” – mean, among other terms, if violence born of fear and prejudice is to be adequately addressed. According to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, a transgender person is someone whose sex assigned at birth is different from who they know themselves to be on the inside. It includes people who have medically transitioned and people who have not.  Sexual orientation refers to emotional, romantic, sexual and relational attraction to someone else, whether you’re gay, lesbian, bisexual, straight or use another word to accurately describe identity. “Gender identity” is one’s internal concept of self as male, female, a blend of both, or neither.  “Transition” is a process that some transgender people undergo when they decide to live as the gender with which they identify. They are not “becoming” a man or a woman; they are starting to live openly as their true gender. Transitioning is a difficult and private decision. People who make that decision deserve respect.

Th reality of living a transgender life makes LGBT History Month an important time for increasing awareness, acceptance, and safety for trans people. Started in 1994 by a Missouri high school teacher to educate schools, religious institutions, and communities about LGBTQ people, it led to LGBTQ Pride Month, celebrated in June to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan. It has grown from a day of Gay Pride to a month of events.

All the activity surrounding LBGTQ history and life is important. So is the need for lawmakers to strengthen hate crime legislation and for law enforcement and media to do a better job of addressing relevant issues.  As Sarah McBride of the Human Rights Campaign puts it, “the prejudices don’t add upon one another, they multiply upon one another.”  They lead to the murder of innocent human beings, largely women of color, who simply want to live their lives free of fear.

Surely that is not asking too much.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health, and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com

Watch Out World! Here Come the Youth and They're Full of Promise

When Greta Thunberg stood before the United Nations recently, stared diplomats in the face with determination, and said emphatically, “How Dare You!” the world watched, gasping, and feeling that things might just be on the brink of changing for the better.

When Malala Yousafzai survived an assassination attempt because she challenged her country and the world to educate girls around the globe, people saw a glimmer of hope for half the world’s population.

When students like Emma Gonzales and David Hogg from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida spoke eloquently about the urgency of gun control, the world dared to hope that America would end its killing fields.

Greta Thunberg started a school strike for climate change outside the Swedish parliament in 2018. She hasn’t stopped advocating to save the planet since. Today over 100,000 school children are part of her movement, Fridays for Future. Her plenary speeches before the United Nations went viral and a performance this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and again when she faced the UN in New York daring them to take action for the sake of the world’s youth were extraordinary.

Malala, the youngest Nobel Prize laureate in history, was eleven years old when she blogged on the BBC abut her life under the Taliban in Pakistan and starred in a New York Times documentary about life in the middle of military occupation. Always an activist, she  established the Malala Education Foundation to help poor girls go to school. Her near death when she was shot on a school bus sparked an international movement that flourishes today as she studies at Oxford University in England.

The “Parkland kids,” led by Emma Gonzales, David Hogg and others, rocked the world when they stood up to the National Rifle Association, and a government in thrall to the gun lobby. Refusing “thoughts and prayers” and calling for political action they woke up the country in a way that even the Newtown Massacre hadn’t.  When Gonzales “call[ed] BS” on the hollow words of politicians, and when Hogg and others took to social media, the country saw what real activism looks like. Today the energy of the Parkland students, many of whom have graduated and can now vote, is focused on registering youth to vote, and ensuring that they do.

Youth activism isn’t confined to a few well-known faces. The world is full of young activists and social changemakers offering genuine hope for a future world that can clean up its moral, economic and environmental act on a fragile but sustainable planet.

Payla Jangid is one of them. After escaping child slavery in India, she became a children’s rights advocate and is currently the leader of her village’s Child Parliament, which meets to discuss “various issues like lack of separate toilets for girls in schools and the need to stop child marriage,” she says. Like Malala, she advocates for girls’ education going door to door to explain to parents that children need support to grow.

Kelvin was just six years old when the violent civil war in Sierra Leone ended. Despite his youth and lack of education he quickly became one of the country’s leading technological inventors. At 11, he made electronics from trash. At 13, he made batteries with found materials and build a generator to power a community radio station. In 2012 he went to MIT to present his inventions to students there. Today he is an Honorary Board member of EMERGENCY USA, working to provide medical and surgical care to victims of war and poverty.

Sisters Melati and Isabel who live in Bali started their own company there when they were 10 and 12 years old.  Bye Bye Plastic Bags was inspired by Rwanda, which had banned polyethylene bags in 2008. Nelson Mandela, Lady Diana, and Mahatma Gandhi also inspired the sisters to “be the change [they] wanted to see.” Following beach cleanups, petitions and government help, their organization now employs 25 people and has teams in 15 countries. Bali has been declared plastic bag free, and the Indonesian government is banning all plastic bags by 2021.

Closer to home, when the water crisis in Flint, Michigan became acute, eight-year old Mari Copeny wrote to President Obama in 2016.  He called her to say he was coming to Flint and wanted to meet her. Her actions have spearheaded a charity movement that donates school backpacks to area students.

Recently in North Carolina, high school senior David Ledbetter, founder of a local organization, Imagine This, handed out sample ballots and voter registration forms to people standing in line outside a Charlotte Popeye, making national news.

Whether advocates, activists, entrepreneurs, scientists or community organizers, these children and young adults are seizing the moment, acting to save their communities, their countries and the planet. Their energy, intelligence, and compassion give us hope for the future. We need to acknowledge them as emerging adults who will lead us before long, to thank them, and to keep on an eye on them, and what they can teach us.

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The Growing Threat of an Epidemic at the Border

The year was 1918. A virus that some experts think was an avian flu spread so rapidly that in a short time it became the most severe pandemic in recent history. Worldwide during 1918 and 1919 it infected an estimated 500 million people. That’s a third of the world’s population. At least 50 million died from the devastating flu globally. Close to 700,000 of those deaths occurred in the United States. Many of them were under the age of five, although midlife and older adults were also killed by the disease. Last year marked the 100th anniversary of that global pandemic.

There have been other major flu epidemics since the one in 1918. I suffered an avian flu in the 1960s and I’ve never felt sicker in my life. More recently a flu epidemic in 2017-2018 killed about 80,000 people.

According to the CDC an influenza pandemic is a global outbreak of a new influenza A virus. Pandemics happen when new influenza A viruses emerge which are able to infect people easily and spread from person to person in an efficient and sustained way. (The flu is airborne and thus highly contagious.) WHO notes the threat of pandemic influenza is ever-present and a pandemic can arise whenever a new influenza outbreak spreads. “We can never be certain when or from where the next pandemic will arise but another influenza pandemic is inevitable,” WHO says.

The question now is: Are we headed for another pandemic because of the recklessly cruel incarceration of a growing number of children and adults in the confined spaces of detention centers at our border?

A recent article in the New York Times noted that the key ingredients for an infectious disease outbreak like the flu include the presence of people crammed together in small spaces with others who have weakened immune systems, often caused by poor nutrition and stress, and the absence of good hygiene and basic health care. That explains why diseases like cholera, dysentery, and tuberculosis thrive in refugee camps and prisons.

Now we can add detention centers to the list of vulnerable settings, where communicable diseases are on the rise. Scabies, shingles, lice, mumps, chickenpox and flu are known to exist in these overcrowded, dirty centers where nutritious food is absent, clean water to drink or wash in is hard to find, and people try sleeping on crowded cold floors.  

According to one recent report 88 people were crammed into a room meant for 41 at one facility and detainees were forced to go for months without a shower or change of clothes. Young children were left “covered in filth for weeks.” Seven children died from communicable diseases in facilities in the past two years. A least three of those deaths were flu-related.

Immigration authorities are refusing to vaccinate detainees as the flu season approaches and the lack of soap, toothbrushes, and safe sleeping conditions remain. All of this is particularly outrageous since children are most susceptible to diseases like flu.

Any outbreak of flu will mean that not only the incarcerated become ill and may die.  With the rapid intake and slow release of detainees, and the coming-and-going of staff and others, the chance of a rapid spread of flu and other illnesses, first throughout local communities and then beyond, increases exponentially.  The situation is a recipe for a pandemic.

Flu is not expensive to prevent, and prevention is much easier and more cost-saving than treatment. Yet US Customs and Border Protection insists that a vaccination program in the detention centers is neither feasible nor necessary since they say stays are meant to be short.

Prophylaxis aside, the inhumanity and irresponsibility of not acting to protect detainees and others boggles the mind. It is not beyond the pale to suggest that we could see something like the 1918 flu pandemic, or the epidemic of 2018 in no time. The tragedy of such an event would be compounded by the blame-the-victim mentality now so prevalent in this administration. Denying migrants and asylum seekers basic medical care and then blaming them for bringing disease into the country would be incredibly cruel.

And the cruelty of the Trump administration knows no bounds.  There are reports that immigrants and refugees found to be HIV-positive or who have cancer will be deported immediately. It seems airplanes have become America’s cattle cars which in another time and place carried people to certain death.

As for the rest of the detainees, the Department of Homeland Security plans to hold them indefinitely - with no access to legal counsel. Indefinitely. As in forever.

The violation of human rights is staggering.  It should have the U.S. before an international criminal court.  Instead we can’t even get a formal impeachment inquiry started.

Albert Einstein once said, “the world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.” I want to see an end to the evil. Waiting till 2021 seems too much to ask in these dark days. I desperately hope we are not called upon to wait till then.

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America's Continuing Trail of Tears

"There are little kids here who have no one to take care of them, not even a big brother or sister. Some kids are only two or three years old."

"I started taking care of [a 5-year-old girl] in the Ice Box after they separated her from her father. She was very upset. The workers did nothing to try to comfort her. I tried to comfort her and she has been with me ever since. We spend all day every day in a room with no activities, only crying."

"They took us away from our grandmother and now we are all alone. They have not given us to our mother. We have been here for a long time. I have to take care of my little sister. She is very sad because she misses our mother and grandmother very much.”

Those recent testimonials are from caged immigrant children aged eight, 11, and 15, victims of one of the worst humanitarian tragedies ever seen in this country.  But there are others.

Slave narratives gathered in the 1930s by the Federal Writers’ Project give compelling testimony to the reality of slavery in our national history.

John Fields recalled that “the greater part of the plantation owners were very harsh if we were caught trying to learn or write. We were never allowed to go to town and it wasn’t till after I ran away that I knew they sold anything but slaves, tobacco and whiskey. Our ignorance was the greatest hold the South had on us.” Charity Anderson, 100 when she was interviewed, was a house slave but she saw slaves “torn up by dogs and whipped unmercifully.” Mary Reynolds remembered seeing “brutal beatings.” Another reality of slavery, let us recall, was that black children were cruelly separated from their parents.

And let’s not forget what happened to Native Americans. At the beginning of the 1830s, nearly 125,000 of them lived on millions of acres of ancestral land in the U.S. But by the end of the decade, the federal government had forced them to leave their western homelands and walk thousands of miles to a specially designated “Indian territory” across the Mississippi River.

In the winter of 1831, the Choctaw became the first nation to be expelled from its land. They made the journey on foot, some “bound in chains and marched double file.” Many people died along the way. A Choctaw leader called it a “trail of tears and death.” In 1836, the federal government drove the Creeks from their land: 3,500 of the 15,000 Creeks who set out for Oklahoma did not survive. Historians estimate that more than 5,000 Cherokee didn’t survive.

 But it didn’t stop there. In 1879, a U.S. cavalry captain opened a government-backed institution that forcibly separated Native American children from their parents in order to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Over the next several decades, nearly 150 such boarding schools opened where staff forced indigenous students to cut their hair and use Anglo-American names. They forbid children from speaking their Native language and observing their cultural practices. Once they returned home, if they ever did, children struggled to relate to their families.

 Then there was Manzanar and the racial prejudice and fear of Japanese Americans. In 1942, President Roosevelt signed an Executive Order  authorizing the establishment of Military Areas and the removal from those areas of anyone who might threaten the war effort. Without due process, the government gave everyone of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast only days to decide what to do with their houses, farms, businesses, and other possessions. They didn’t know where they were going or for how long. Each family was assigned an identification number and loaded into cars, buses, trucks, and trains, taking only what they could carry. Japanese Americans were transported under military guard to 17 temporary assembly centers before being moved to one of 10 hastily built relocation centers, surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers with searchlights. Rosie Kakuuchi recalls that “one of the hardest things to endure was the communal latrines, with no partitions; and showers with no stalls.”

Many of the abuses that occurred in American history have become sadly familiar now. Today we are experiencing yet another episode in our continuing national disgrace, one that bequeaths to us a contemporary “trail of tears.”

We weep for the innocent children and their families incarcerated and maltreated by an administration that lacks morality, ethics, and humanity. And increasingly cognizant of sad events long past in our own country, we are also aware of, and frightened by, the memory of times not so far back when the world was in grave danger, threatened by a fascism that seemed likely to overtake the world. Those memories are aligned with recent alarming events globally that seem to be racing toward reprise.

In a country where MAGA hats are the new KKK hoods, and “Trump” is the new swastika, as some have noted, such thoughts are not irrational. They are grounded in the swift replay of onerous events and political decisions that leave a wide berth for asking “Never again?”

One can but wonder what history books will record when the realities of our time are written.