The Normalization of Fascism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What more do we need to wake up?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Supreme Court Takes Aim at Women

 In her memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence Rebecca Solnit writes, “To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways.” Nothing proves her point more powerfully than the debacle of the Supreme Court as it debated the likely demise of legal abortion in this country.

With stunning ignorance of and disregard for women’s lives, five men and one woman in black robes pontificated and danced around the real issue before them -- women’s bodily integrity, agency, and personhood.  Instead, they reprised the overwhelming oppression of females that has existed for millennia in fear of women’s autonomy, thereby joining the generations of (mostly) men who view women as nothing more than state-owned semen vessels.

The argument before the Court aimed at gutting 50 years of precedent in the matter of abortion reminded many women of the medieval practice of disappearing women into convents and monasteries and later into asylums where they were diminished, demoralized, and drugged into passivity.  

Imagine this: You are a woman with three children living in poverty when you have a contraceptive failure and are forced to carry the pregnancy to term.  You are a woman 19 weeks pregnant with a much-wanted child when you learn that anomalies render the fetus unviable and continuing the pregnancy could endanger your own life, but you are denied an abortion. You are a college student who has been awarded a scholarship for advanced study when you realize you are pregnant.  Denied a safe abortion, you schedule a clandestine, illegal one. You are a 13-year-old child who has been raped by her stepfather and is now told she must bear her rapist’s child.

Try to imagine living with the crippling fear these scenarios engender.

And yet the Supreme Court is trying mightily to hold women hostage because macho-male powerbrokers are so threatened by the idea of female agency that they must control women at all costs and condemn them for believing they are entitled to fully lived lives grounded in equality and human rights.

There is, of course, one woman among the six justices chomping at the bit to effect the demise of legally sanctioned abortion. She should have been able to relate to issues relevant to pregnancy, for she too has borne children, felt them wiggle in her belly, done the hard labor of delivering them into the world and loving them when they arrived. Yet she argued that women don’t need abortions because they can easily dump their newborn babies into adoption or foster care like so much detritus, while her male colleagues grappled with numbers, the vagaries of viability, and the rights of fetuses over living women.

The reckless and dangerous disregard for women’s lives and lived reality during the justices’ discourse was nothing short of staggering as it showcased America’s Taliban.

It was also shocking to hear Scott Stewart, lawyer for the state of Mississippi which seeks to limit abortion to 15 weeks as a gateway to overturing of Roe v. Wade. His responses to questions from the justices were befuddled, obfuscating, superficial, and just plain ridiculous. This is the man Donald Trump put in charge of immigrant detention centers without any qualifications for the job.  Still, he was kept busy keeping monthly updated logs of females’ menstrual cycles during their incarceration to prevent legal abortions from happening.

How draconian can you get?

The foundation of entrenched, continuing misogyny women face yet again is what women like Emmeline Pankhurst and Alice Paul fought for when they risked their lives for women’s’ suffrage, what Margaret Sanger sacrificed in her fight for contraception and sex education, what Second Wave feminists fought for when they marched in every country in the world before, during and after the UN Decade for Women.  It is what women like Virginia Woolf, Tillie Olson, Betty Friedan, Carol Gilligan, Carolyn Heilbrunn, Audrey Lorde, and the multitudes who preceded or followed them wrote about: The trivialization, objectification, marginalization and silencing of over half the population in this country and elsewhere.

None of us who have been in the trenches for years fighting for equality, autonomy, economic justice, reproductive health care (which includes abortion), privacy, choices, and other basic human rights – all of which are at risk with this Supreme Court -- thought we’d find ourselves back to Square One in this moment, living in fear, facing limited opportunities and the denial of our chosen paths. Never did we imagine that in the 21st century we would again live with the oppression of patriarchal power, such that sexism, racism, and violence prevail.

When Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked this question during the SCOTUS debate, “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” she was asking a question so vital that it could have an impact on the outcome of the case being considered.

That question also invoked the patriarchy and misogyny that once again prevails as a dominating force in women’s lives. Sadly, especially for our daughters and granddaughters, the stench of annihilation is likely to be with us far into the future.

The Arming of America

The verdict is in. The vigilantes are celebrating. Kyle Rittenhouse is free.  The postmortem predictions of what it will mean for us as a society begin, as does the fear for our future as we face a freefall into more violence while our country descends into the depths of depravity acted out on the streets.

It is now possible to kill someone in the name of self-defense and literally get away with murder. It’s a field day for open carry laws that make going to a public event or riding the subway or simply walking down the wrong street at the wrong time a determining factor in whether you live or die. It is a dark day in America.

Gun violence was bad enough before Kyle Rittenhouse killed two people and walked away a free man. But as a recent New York Times piece about the proliferation of “ghost guns” – untraceable guns that can be assembled from online purchases of components – has made clear, America’s gun problem has reached epidemic proportions. These lethal weapons are within easy reach of people legally barred from buying or owning guns which, as the Times article revealed, “helps explain why since 2016 about  25,000 privately made firearms have been confiscated by local federal law enforcement agencies nationwide.”

Earlier this year the Children’s Defense Fund issued a report about the epidemic of gun violence affecting children. It revealed, among other statistics, that gun violence has killed more than 200,000 children and teens since the 1960s. “That’s more than the number of soldiers killed in Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, and Iraq combined,” with black children suffering the highest gun death rates. In 2019, according to the report, they accounted for 43 percent of child and teen deaths even though they constituted just 14 percent of all children and teens that year.

Women are also among those most vulnerable to gun violence. According to the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence, “nearly 92 percent of all women killed by guns in high-income countries were American women, [who are] 21 times more likely to be shot and killed than women in other high-income countries.”  https://efsgv.org/ Further, “around one in four women in the United States have been threatened with a gun and nearly 1 million women have been shot or shot at by an intimate partner. Over half of all intimate partner homicides are committed with guns and a woman is five times more likely to be murdered when her abuser has access to a gun.”

According to www.everytownresearch.org, every month an average of 57 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner. Black, American Indian, and Hispanic women are disproportionately affected by gun violence, along with members of the LGBTQ community and people with disabilities. That’s why Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Ca.) has introduced a number of relevant bills including H.R. 1441, the No Guns for Abusers Act, designed to help states enforce existing laws against people who try to purchase firearms without the legal right to do so.

The epidemic gun violence affecting women and children are part of the entire fabric of gun violence in this country, a phenomenon that other “developed” countries simply cannot fathom. They, ghost guns, and now the exoneration of Kyle Rittenhouse are connected like the parts of a quilt, similar to those that have woven into them pieces of history.

One of the pieces of our history is the outdated Second Amendment, meant to arm militias in the 18th century. It’s an amendment no longer relevant, and a shield behind which gun enthusiasts hide. It’s an amendment that fuels the likes of open carry advocates, eager vigilantes, and people comfortable with and prone to violence all too eager to claim self-defense, often a defense rooted in racism. It’s an amendment that allowed Kyle Rittenhouse to be exonerated.

So far, according to a September CNN report, “2021 is likely to be the worst year for gun violence in decades.” What’s more, in October The New York Times revealed that a significant number of travelers have been stopped at U.S. airports trying to board planes with loaded guns.  Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers report stopping nearly 5,000 passengers from carrying firearms onto flights by October this year.https://www.tsa.gov/

Now comes the conservative Supreme Court which recently heard a gun rights case in which the majority could make it easier for people to carry firearms in public. According to Time Magazine, “justices could loosen or strike down a century-old provision in New York that requires people to prove they have a special need for self-protection if they want to carry a concealed handgun outside of their home. The challengers in the suit—backed by the NRA-affiliated New York State Rifle & Pistol Association—argue that the restriction violates the Second Amendment.”

As we await the SCOTUS decision, the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict has already added immeasurably to America’s growing gun violence epidemic. It has effectively declared open season on the gunning down of America. It fuels an unchecked impetus toward violence and vigilantes and increased an escape valve when gun violence occurs.

God help us all. 

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The Democratic Party Progresses Despite Postmortem Reviews

It took mere minutes for rumors of the Democratic Party’s demise to hit the airwaves, social media, and conservative print media following the predictable election – by just two points – of Glenn Youngkin as Virginia’s new governor.

Pundits delighted in spewing premature obituaries and declaring the Party out of touch with American voters and values as they called for their own visions of centrist right governance that is stubbornly backward-looking in the face of changing demographics, and a fragile future.

There were many factors at play in the recent elections, from blatant propaganda and lies to insufficient legal action against insurrectionists and corrupt politicians, to historical trends in voting patterns. There were some really bad candidate options as well. Democrats were also up against two legislators in their own camp who seem to delight in obstructionism.

Even The New York Times spewed spurious views of the “political nightmare” that had occurred, calling for a “badly needed” conversation among Democratic leadership that return the party to “moderate policies and values” and issues like the economy (which appears to be doing quite well), inflation, and “restoring normalcy in schools.”

Congressional Democrats, the Times declared, “need to stop their left-center squabbling,” a stunning trivialization of a cogent progressive agenda that listens to what the majority of Americans want and understand – precisely because, as The New York Times got right, this is a moment in history that cannot be ignored because so much is at stake.

The fact is that centrists on both sides fail to recognize the two big elephants in the room or can’t risk acknowledging them lest they lose their power and privilege. Those two elephants are white supremacy, and the encroaching autocracy that is rapidly eroding the American experiment.

Left of center politicians – the dreaded “progressives” – understand the impact those two fundamental issues have on policy and on people’s lives.  They know, and some have suffered, the reality of legislation that is written by and fully supported by wealthy, white, primarily male powerbrokers in this country, the 1% who are terrified of women and people of color taking their rightful place in politics, the marketplace, America’s board rooms and decision-making bodies. 

Left leaning leaders understand that in the richest country in the world when there are working people paying taxes who can’t afford decent housing, nutritious food, basic healthcare, or childcare on a minimum wage, and who live in fear of guns and police brutality and so much more, our economic and social systems are broken. They also recognize that broken systems leave a nation especially vulnerable to dictatorial control.

To be clear, Democrats in leadership deserve and will need to quickly address the accusations being hurled at them, especially the chronic and mystifying lack of messaging talent.  Most people don’t know what the Biden Administration has achieved in the first year nor do they know what is in the two signature bills that seemed endlessly stalled in Congress, or how they will be paid for. That’s a terrible failure given that over 70 percent of voters want what’s in those bills, including paid parental leave, childcare, Medicare coverage for dental, hearing and eye care, and educational debt relief

But “building back better” also means turning a new page on Democratic policies and players. It’s time for old, white, centrist guys to stop being recycled as both party heads and advisors. Led by younger, more dynamic, and more visionary party leaders, the progressive agenda is overdue, urgent, and viable. Significant down ballot wins are another sure sign of what our political future looks like. Ideas wedded to fossil fuels, hugely pro-big business agendas, and tax breaks for billionaires, along with voter suppression and denying women agency over their lives, are old school and worn thin. Such skewered priorities ignore the elephants in the room, leaving proponents to rely on self- deception to protect their own profits and privileges.

Now is the time to listen to those in Democratic leadership who engage with and foster future leaders, who truly hear, respect, and understand their constituencies, and who mentor from the ground up. Howard Dean understood this when he was running for president, and so do many of the best talking heads and political analysts now. They understand that “centrist” calls for incremental change are hollow. Just ask women and people of color how that has worked for them.

In these threatening times when white supremacy and autocracy loom large, unredacted American history, CRT to critics, cannot be denied, ignored or buried.  If being progressive means being “woke” and being woke means being keenly aware of the incipient racism this country has always endured while understanding the threat of fascism through the lessons of history then we should all strive to wake up. The populist voice is important, intelligent, and informed and it is sounding an alarm: Our country is facing not only an imminent climate crisis, but an urgent political one.

We have precious little time left to correct course in either case.

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The Nightmare of Rationed Healthcare

A mother watches her seven-year-old child die in excruciating pain from a ruptured appendix in their car waiting for access to the emergency room.  A family member sees their 44-year-old relative succumb to a heart attack waiting for a bed in the Cardiac Care Unit. A woman suffering from high blood pressure during pregnancy awaits admission while in premature labor.

These actual examples underscore the reality of people unable to access crucial healthcare because of a crisis that has been exacerbated by people who refuse to be vaccinated. Not only are extremely ill patients dying in parking lots. Hospitals are also suffering shortages of beds, staff, and equipment, especially in ICUs, and flying patients out of state for care, while leaving others in need of urgent care literally out in the cold.

It’s an unimaginable, horrific scene to contemplate.

 A friend of the man waiting for cardiac care put it this way. “Car accidents happen. Heart attacks happen. Trauma happens and there may not be care for you in the hospital if we can’t do something to get this under control.” The fact is, it’s been getting harder to control.

It is not just a terrifying experience for people waiting for care. It’s also difficult to imagine what it must be like for exhausted doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals. What must it be like as a nurse holding the hand of a young patient who might be succumbing to Covid or setting up a Zoom call so someone on a ventilator can wheeze out a farewell to loved ones? Consider the emotional toll it takes being on a team that must declare one patient worthy of trying to save and another not quite so worthy. It’s a deeply depressing situation to ask anyone to endure.

The burnout rate among health workers since the Covid pandemic skyrocketed initially, and again with the Delta variant, has resulted in a significant number of nurses leaving or considering leaving the field.  A report issued by The Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation in June “found that 26% of health care workers in hospitals are angry and 29% have considered leaving the medical field. These are the warning signs of a smoldering epidemic of burnout among front-line medical professionals.”

In the midst of the current crisis, the idea of rationing healthcare, which several hospitals have been forced to do or to contemplate by triaging who will live and who will die, begs for attention. Rationing care, often applied during wartime, should not mean that people of any age living with a pandemic must have their lives cut short because others refuse to comply with lifesaving mandates or masking requirements and end up occupying all available beds.

We may never know exactly how many people in this country died from Covid-19 but many compounding variables must be considered, from lack of health insurance to increased vulnerability to poverty. It’s likely that deaths from rationed care will likely not be among them.  

In 2010, an Institute of Medicine committee defined the term “crisis standards of care,” calling it “a substantial change in usual healthcare operations and the level of care it is possible to deliver which is made necessary by a pervasive (e.g., pandemic) or catastrophic (e.g., earthquake) disaster. This change in the level of care delivered is justified by specific circumstances and is formally declared by a state government, in recognition that crisis operations will be in in effect for a sustained period. The formal declaration that crisis standards of care are in operation enables specific legal/regulatory powers and protections for healthcare providers in the necessary tasks of allocating and using scarce medical resources and implementing alternative care facility operations.”

I wonder if the crafters of that statement were thinking about rationed care during a pandemic resulting in numerous tragic deaths because some people behaved irresponsibly when they wrote that definition, given that they emphasized that “in order to ensure that patients receive the best possible care in a catastrophic event, the nation needs a robust system to guide the public, healthcare professionals and institutions, and governmental entities at all levels.”

To achieve that objective, the committee cited the important of “Fairness – standards that are …recognized as fair by all those affected by them…”, and “Equitable processes – processes and procedures for ensuring the decisions and implementation of standards are made equitability…”

The Hippocratic Oath, the basis for medical ethics, no longer required of graduating medical students by many medical schools, does not actually contain the phrase “First, do no harm.” Nevertheless, medical students, some of whom write their own Oaths, as well as doctors and other healthcare providers, are deeply dedicated to their commitment to providing compassionate care and healing practices for all those in need.

That’s why I believe 20 percent of hospital beds, ICU or otherwise, should be allocated to unvaccinated patients suffering from Covid, while 80 percent of all beds and resources be available to anyone requiring care at any level in order that their lives or health not be held hostage to those who have made choices that are not only deeply selfish but dramatically dangerous.

That seems more “fair and equitable” to me than people having to die in hospital parking lots. It also might just be the way to “get this under control.”

Whatever Happened to Pay Equity?

Poor Lilly Ledbetter must be tearing her hair out.  She is the woman, you may recall, who “sought justice because equal pay for equal work is an American value” some years ago when she learned that she was earning significantly less money than men doing the same managerial work in the Alabama tire plant where she worked for nearly 20 years.

Her legal fight ultimately led her to the Supreme Court in 2007, where in a 5-4 decision, the Court “stood on the side of those who shortchanged my pay, my overtime and my retirement just because I [was] a woman,” she lamented, after the Court ruled that she didn’t report the inequity within the required six months, even though she didn’t discover the discrepancy for nearly two decades. “In the end,” she said, “I didn’t get a dime of the money I was shortchanged.”

What she did get, ultimately, was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, signed into law by President Barack Obama. The law allowed individuals who faced pay discrimination to seek rectification under federal anti-discrimination laws. It also clarified that wage discrimination based on age, religion, national origin, race, sex, and disability would “accrue” every time an employee received a paycheck deemed to be discriminatory. It was the first bill President Obama signed and it became one of several federal laws designed to protect worker's rights.

Prior to that, in 1963, the Equal Paycheck Act, signed by President John F. Kennedy, made it illegal for employers to pay women less for performing the same jobs as their male counterparts. However, it had several loopholes that needed to be addressed. Then Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sex.

The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 added to those prior acts by reversing the Supreme Court decision that upheld the short statute of limitations for wage discrimination claims that had killed Lilly Ledbetter’s case.

In 2014 the Paycheck Fairness Act was first introduced in the Senate by former Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), essentially as an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, but it failed to be adopted.

In January this year Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) introduced the Paycheck Fairness Act of 2021. It passed in the House in April. This bill addresses wage discrimination on the basis of sex, which includes pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics

.

A requirement of the Paycheck Fairness Act is that employers must provide detailed information to the federal government that ensures the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Department of Labor have the necessary tools to enforce laws against pay discrimination, including employment-related data from employers analyzed by race, gender, and employees’ national origins.

The Paycheck Fairness Act also prevents retaliation for discussing salary with colleagues and prohibits employers from asking about a person’s salary history. In addition, it allows workers to participate in class action lawsuits that challenge systemic pay discrimination.

That’s all well and good, but why are women still earning 82 cents on the dollar (if they’re white) compared to men and what are the ramifications?

The first thing to understand is that the gender pay gap exists in every occupational category even when accounting for educational levels, skills, and worker’s choices. Assumptions like the ones men and managers often make are a big part of the problem.

For example, one assumption is that women choose lower level or lower paying work because they are mothers who bear the brunt of responsibility in meeting children’s needs. But as the Covid crisis revealed, the lack of childcare in this country leaves women little choice.

Such assumptions ignore the underlying causes of workplace discrimination and often lead to women being pushed out of their chosen career fields. Some of those underlying causes, in addition to not having affordable childcare, are the lack of adequate parental leave policies, flexible working conditions, paid family and medical leave, which most industrialized nations offer.

Importantly, advocates for equal pay underscore the fact that pay discrimination occurs in almost every field of work. Women, who are over-represented in the lowest paid industries, take the hardest hit. Collectively, women lose hundreds of thousands of dollars annually because of the pay gap driven by gender and race.

That loss has real-time, long-term consequences. Underpaid workers, primarily women, suffer lowered social security benefits, retirement pensions, and personal savings, which is why so many female elders find it difficult to survive with dignity in their later years.

The Biden administration understands this dilemma and has a committed focus on pay equity, a particular interest of Vice President Kamala Harris. Major corporations will soon be dealing with multi-million-dollar settlements in class action equal pay claims, and employers are likely to face big changes and a lot of scrutiny with regard to pay equity, not just around gender, but also around race. In addition to federal efforts, states are beginning to step up their equal pay laws too.

All that bodes well, but as we know, things move at a snail’s pace when it comes to enacting and enforcing legislation. Until there is true equality in wages and salaries, women are among many people who continue to wait for fairness in the workplace. For them, 82 cents on the dollar remains inadequate, and clearly insulting.

The Hands That Rock the Cradle Need Help

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staring at America's Dystopian Future

In 1940, Alice Duer Miller wrote a beautiful epic poem called “The White Cliffs.” An American who had married a British man just prior to World War I, she soon lost her husband serving a country that wasn’t hers. As she penned the poem, she faced the possibility of losing her son to World War II, again for a country not her own.  Yet, her last poetic lines are these: “I am American bred. I have seen much to hate here – much to forgive. But in a world where England is finished and dead, I do not wish to live.”

Imagine loving a country that is not your own so much.  Then consider not loving your own country anymore because it has dragged you into a very dark place, a place of fear and disillusion, a place growing more dystopian by the day.

In the space of just a few days, we have watched a Congressperson promise to shut down media organizations if they complied with legal subpoenas, we saw a state pass draconian laws that inhibit voting rights in dramatic, disturbing and undemocratic ways, and then we watched as that same state ignored the constitutional right to abortion granted to women in 1973. On top of that, the state, Texas, granted vigilante rights with financial incentives to any citizen who didn’t want to grant women that right.   

Just let the idea of private bounty hunters sink in. They might be husbands or boyfriends, angry neighbors, relatives, friends, pastors, people who think pregnancy by rape or incest is not so bad, folks who hate the idea of abortion but especially like the thought of a $10,000 reward. Some may be devout, but they are all devious and despicable. Over what ideologies might other states consider employing them?

Then came the most stunning blow of all in the form of the unbelievable and terrifying silence of an overwhelmingly conservative and politicized Supreme Court in the face of Texas’s deeply dangerous, and replicable law; a law so hideously and overtly fascist, a law wreaking with the stench of secret police in autocracies and dictatorships like those of Italy’s Mussolini, Romania’s Ceausescu, and today’s Vickor Orban in Hungary. How can any American not be sickened by that level of betrayal?

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of four dissenting justices, unleashed her fury and spoke for many of us in her minority opinion: “The court’s order is stunning,” she wrote. “Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand. The court has rewarded the state’s effort to delay federal review of a plainly unconstitutional statute, enacted in disregard of the court’s precedents, through procedural entanglements of the state’s own creation. The court should not be so content to ignore its constitutional obligations to protect not only the rights of women, but also the sanctity of its precedents and of the rule  of law.”

How, one must ask, does the court overrule fifty years of precedent – a value deeply held by conservatives - in its race to allow the invasion of women’s lives, a question former Representative Claire McCaskill asked in rage when commenting on MSNBC. How quickly will states rush to replicate this precedent?

In a statement that could have been more strongly supportive of women’s right to privacy and agency, President Biden warned that the nearly complete ban on abortion in Texas will cause “unconstitutional chaos.” It also begs the question, how will the Supreme Court rule on other cases that seek to curb abortion rights nationally?

While civil rights advocates sound alarm bells about worrisome implications for future laws, social justice and human rights opinion leaders like Michael Moore and others suggest the situation has reached crisis proportions such that terms like “conservative” and “evangelical” in reference to right wing radicals are no longer appropriate because they normalize groups that have essentially become America’s Taliban.

That term may be offensive to some, but in the face of an ever-growing political climate of oppression, exclusion and violence, and a Congress or Supreme Court that increasingly embraces ideas antithetical to democracy and proceeds to exercise the power to curb it, surely the time has come to recognize the imminent and very real threat before us.  That threat is nothing short of an undemocratic and dystopian future in which we join in the despair of so many others around the globe.

It’s a world in which we may still have a choice: To deny what is happening with frightening speed, or to ignore what is bearing down upon us, only to find ourselves back in Plato’s allegorical cave, in which we all sit staring at a blank wall, our backs to the light, believing that is simply the way we must live.

As Alice Duer Miller might have said, in such a world, where freedom and hope are finished and dead, I do not wish to live.

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River, Vt. 

Women Athletes Are Making Their Mark in Ways That Matter

I grew up never thinking about, observing, or participating in sports. I hated gym class, couldn’t play tennis, never imagined skiing, and didn’t learn to swim until I was an adult. Such activities were never fostered in my immigrant Jewish culture. Academics were the only thing that required excellence.

Consequently, I’ve never paid much attention to athletes or the Olympics. But this year, along came Naomi Osaka, Simone Biles, Suni Lee, Yusra Mardini, and the women who traded in their required G-strings for shorts or long leotards. That caught my feminist attention.

This year’s female athletes join tennis firsts Serena Williams and Billie Jean King, track and field Olympic champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and the great Babe Didrikson-Zaharias who excelled in golf, basketball, baseball, track and field, winning a gold in the 1932 Olympics. These women didn’t just demonstrate what women athletes could achieve. Each in their own way stood up to pressure, sexism, and misogyny just as today’s stellar female athletes are doing.

Naomi Osaka, who dropped out of the French Open tennis tournament earlier this year, explained why, in a recent TIME Magazine article. Anxious about press events she said, “It’s okay to not be okay, and it’s okay to talk about it. I wanted to skip press conferences to exercise self-care and preservation of my mental health. I stand by that. Athletes are human.”

For that decision, she was fined $15,000 for not doing media events, affecting the profit margins of companies that supported her.

Simone Biles, four-time gold medalist in the 2016 Olympics, caused a lot of sponsors and fans to become hysterical and verbally abusive over her decision to withdraw from several events this year. With 19 gold medals to her credit, the expectations had become unbearable for the 24-year old athlete, who along with other Olympic gymnasts, was sexually assaulted by Larry Nassar, the doctor for the American gymnastic team now serving a life sentence for sexual abuse.

As tensions mounted, Biles dramatically difficult routine became dangerous, so she decided to withdraw. She was then accused of being weak, unable to take the pressure, and more by would-be jocks who likely found it difficult to bend over to tie their shoes. Biles also ended her sponsorship with Nike this year to go with a smaller, less demanding and more supportive brand. “It wasn’t about my achievements, it’s what I stood for and how they would help me use my voice for females and kids,” she said.

Biles’s withdrawal opened the way for 18-year old Suni Lee, the first Hmong-American Olympian to win the gold and two other medals this year, a feat she accomplished after being out of action for two months last year due to injuries, the death of two relatives from Covid, and the accident that paralyzed her father in an accident. Stunned by her magnificent win, she said proudly, “I'm super proud of myself for sticking with it and believing in myself.”

Yusra Mardini is not as well known as Biles or Lee, but her story is equally compelling. She fled the Syrian war as a teenager, swam for three hours in the sea while steering her sinking boat to safety, and saved every passenger onboard. Then she walked from Greece to Germany. This year, she competed in the 100-meter Butterfly swim at the Olympics, revealing that even without winning a medal, women like these athletes are strong, self-respecting, and determined.

They were joined by Olympic women who refused to accept the sexualization in gymnastics by rejecting bikini cut underwear that likely induced the world’s worst wedgie with the required “close fit and cut on an upward angle toward the top of the leg.” Punishment time again: Team Germany earned their $1500 Euro fine from the International Handball Association for wearing shorts, which men’s teams wear.

The blogosphere went viral as women protested that kind of misogynistic nonsense. As one of them posted, “Biles set aside her dreams in order to do the right thing for her teammates and her country. I see a lot of dudes who look like they’d break a sweat opening a bag of Doritos mocking Biles for being ‘weak’. She could crack their spines with her calves and do a full floor routine afterwards [but] she’s too good a person to challenge them to a fight.”

Another said, “It’s hard to not feel feminist. It’s hard not to be angry and disgusted. Society refuses to acknowledge a woman’s worth. The system continues to fail women, even ones as outstanding as these. It’s time to get mad.”

Even if the women in this year’s Olympics never compete or win another medal again, they will remain gold star champions to every woman who has ever cleared her own hurdles and landed on her feet, hands in the air, the smile of achievement on her face. No longer will competent, strong women give their bodies to male titillation and sexual fantasy, or to corporations who view them as simply commodities, or to imposed pregnancies. Along with women who have aspired us anew, sisters in sport, we are reclaiming our power and our legitimacy in every arena. 

That makes every one of these astounding athletes, and all women, winners.

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

What is Title 42 and Why Should It Be Rescinded?

“A lot of girls cry. They have thoughts of cutting themselves,” a 14-year old Guatemalan girl told a Reuters reporter in June.  “I feel asphyxiated having so many people around me. There’s no one here I can talk to about my case, or when I’m feeling sad. I just talk to God and cry,” said another teenage girl from Honduras who was held in the Dallas convention center with 2600 other kids.

 It gets worse when you read press reports written over the summer. Kids in custody reported spoiled food, no clean clothes, sleeping on cots under glaring lights, drinking spoiled milk when there isn’t water. According to The New York Times a military base in El Paso detained youth who said they’d gone days without showering while in Erie, Pa, lice were rampant. In June roughly 4,000 unaccompanied children were being held by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), a step up from ICE detention, but still in facilities where press is not permitted.

 No one denies that growing numbers of immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S. present a difficult problem. The Biden administration understands and has worked to alleviate the suffering.  Still, the incarceration of children is inhumane. As Leecia Welch, a lawyer at the National Center for Youth Law, told The New York Times in June, “Thousands of traumatized children are lingering in massive detention sites on military bases or convention centers, many relegated to unsafe, unsanitary conditions.”

 That’s why there is growing outrage about the continuation of Title 42 as a deportation mechanism, used to keep immigrants out of the country by Donald Trump. President Biden promised to end it but is now allowing it to remain in place indefinitely.

  In a letter to the White House over 100 groups urged the president to rescind Title 42 expulsions charging that it violates U.S. refuge law and treaties and endangers people seeking protection at the U.S.- Mexican border  According to Border Report in Texas, the expulsions are not based on science and expose people being held to violence in Mexico.  

 Title 42 is one of 50 titles within the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations established in 1944 to move quarantine authority to the public health sector, but it was sometimes used to control immigration using public health as a rationale. Well before the Covid pandemic, Donald Trump’s advisor, Stephen Miller, suggested applying the Code to close the border to asylum seekers despite being told by lawyers they lacked the legal authority. Human Rights Watch (HRW) argues that “the expulsion policy is illegal and violates human rights,” and adds that “U.S. law gives asylum seekers the right to seek asylum upon arrival in the United States, even if seekers arrive without inspection prior authorization. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is legally required to conduct screenings to ensure they do not expel people who need protection.”

 Yet since March 2020, CBP has carried out almost 643,000 expulsions using Title 42, without conducting required screenings, thus committing illegal “turnbacks”. In November a federal district court blocked use of Title 42 in the case of unaccompanied minors, but by the time the Biden administration vowed to end it over 13,000 kids had been expelled.

 Here’s the rub. These kids aren’t entering the U.S. with Covid.  They get it once they are held in detention because of overcrowding and unhygienic conditions in HHS and CBP facilities. Some children have died in detention.

 Along with children, pregnant women, some in labor, have been expelled along with LGBT people, who are particularly vulnerable to violence, even since President Biden took office, according to Human Rights Watch.

 HRW also states that “The Convention against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which the U.S. is a party, prohibit expulsions or returns in circumstances where people would face a substantial risk of torture or exposure to other ill-treatment. Also, under U.S. law and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refuges, to which the U.S. is party, the United States may not return asylum seekers to face threats to their lives or freedom without affording them an opportunity to apply for asylum and conducting a full and fair examination of that claim.” Nevertheless, by February this year CBP had carried out more than 520,000 expulsions, according to the American Immigration Council.

 Let’s be clear. No one risks their lives or suffers the unimaginable hardships of migration without compelling reasons that include crushing poverty, criminal gangs that kill people and abduct their children, devastating violence, hopelessness and more. (If you want to know what the journey is really like, read Disquiet by Zulfu Livaneli, or The Mediterranean Wall by Louis-Philippe Dalembert.)

 The United Nations holds that asylum-seeking children should never be detained. And still they come by the hundreds of thousands. That’s why the ACLU is moving forward with a lawsuit that seeks to lift the public health order for migrant families and unaccompanied children. As Lee Gelernt, ACLU’s lead lawyer says, “Time is up” for dealing with this human rights catastrophe.

 The kids cutting themselves as they weep couldn’t agree more.

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

Terrorist Plots and Truthful Testimonies

 They came to the Capital on January 6th bearing weapons as lethal as stones, spears, sprays, racist epithets, and yes, guns. They came with hatred and treasonous purpose. They perpetrated unspeakable violence against law enforcement officers, including beating them viciously, trying to blind them and bashing their heads in. They murdered one of them.

In compelling testimony before Congressional Committee members and those who witnessed the televised hearing on July 27th, four courageous Capital police officers shared what it felt like to believe they were about to die. They were officers who refused to stand down, to give up, to stop doing all they could to stop a likely massacre. They spoke eloquently and with conviction about the need to protect our democracy. Committee members were moved to tears as they thanked the witnesses and pledged to seek the truth about what had happened on that awful day. Those of us watching at home wept with them.

Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, did not.  He’d already made his position and those of Republican deniers clear before the hearing began. Attacking the Committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), House Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and a number of other House members, he declared vehemently that the purpose of the Committee hearing should be on making sure such an event never happened again by being more prepared.

Republican Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and others, who marched in protest of the hearing, joined the fray, with Rep. Stefanik blaming Rep. Pelosi for “the tragedy that occurred on that day” – a day that will be part of American history forever.

But here’s the thing. The four witnesses in the hearing that took place on July 27th also brought weapons to Capitol Hill. 

Their words and witnessing were the weapons of truth telling. They were words that built monuments to accountability and transparency. They reminded committee members that overriding political machinations and power grabs is an urgent priority, and the true purpose of the Committee. They gave us all a moment in American history that will remind us forever how close we came to the demise of our democracy.

In building their word monuments, they warned us that without getting to “the hit man” and who hired him, we are still at risk.  They demanded, politely, articulately, and with deep conviction, that Congress do what only it can do, which is to get not just to the bottom of what happened, but to the top of how it happened.  They said what many others in Congress won’t: Donald Trump was responsible for the so-called insurrection.

Republicans can obfuscate and try to steer their remaining followers away from that truth, but if the Committee does what it promised as it reacted emotionally to the four witnesses, they cannot avoid getting to the totality of what occurred on January 6th and holding all those who colluded and cooperated accountable.

As Chairman Bennie Thompson noted in his opening statement, “A violent mob was pointed toward the Capitol and told to win a trial by combat. Some descended on this city with clear plans to disrupt our democracy. One rioter said, ‘We were just there to overthrow the government.’”

Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), one of only two conservative Republicans who agreed to be on the Committee, added that she was “obligated to rise above politics” by participating. “We cannot leave the violence of January 6th and its causes un-investigated. We must also know what happened every minute of that day in the White House – every phone call, every conversation, every meeting leading up to, during, and after the attack.”

The four witnesses, and all who heard their testimony and watched, yet again, traumatizing video clips during the Committee hearing, couldn’t agree more.

But perhaps it is the simple words of Harry Dunn, a black officer who suffered racist slurs and violence during that fateful day, that resonate most powerfully: “I want you to get to the bottom of it,” he said when asked what he wanted the Committee to do.  Or maybe it was when Michael Fanone, a DC Metropolitan Police officer who was beaten unconscious and tased to the point of suffering a heart attack, slammed his fist on the table as he called the violence “disgraceful.”

Whatever those of us remember most about the Committee’s hearing, for me it comes down to something Harry Dunn said. “There was a hit man. I want you to get to the bottom of that.”

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Broken Courts Mean Battered Lives

She is a 76-year old woman, a cancer survivor, and caretaker for her 94-year old mother. She spent 16 years in prison for distributing heroin before being released to house arrest last year. Her name is Gwen Levi, and she was doing well – until she didn’t answer a phone call from her parole officer because she was in a computer class she hoped would lead to employment. Now she’s back in jail because she didn’t take the call, considered a violation of parole by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Brett Jones was 15 when he fatally stabbed his grandfather during an argument in 2004. He was sentenced to life without parole. Jones recently argued before the Supreme Court that on the basis of two prior Supreme Court decisions, the sentencing judge in his case should have found that he was incapable of rehabilitation before imposing life without parole. But in April, the Supreme Court, with Justice Kavanaugh writing the majority opinion, ruled 6-3 that a defendant can be sentenced to life without parole for a homicide committed as a juvenile without a separate finding of permanent incorrigibility.

There are more than 2,000 child offenders serving life without parole sentences in U.S. prisons for crimes committed before the age of 18, and a few kids are on death row. We are one of only a few countries in the world that permit children who commit crimes to be sentenced to prison forever, without any possibility of release.

 Robert DuBoise is among the lucky few who are finally released on the basis of DNA evidence. He served 37 years for a rape and murder that he did not commit. Many others like him spend years of their lives behind bars and on  death row.

According to the ACLU more than 3200 people are serving serious time for nonviolent offenses like stealing a jacket or serving as middleman in the sale of $10 of marijuana. An estimated 65% of them are Black. Many of them struggled with mental illness, drug dependency or financial desperation when committing their crimes. Others languish in jail, unindicted, for lack of bail money.

From the lowest courts to federal courts to the Supreme Court, the legal system and its courts seem to be more criminal than just when it comes to “criminal justice,” a system allegedly designed to deliver “justice for all.” The system encompasses law enforcement, courts, and corrections, including the juvenile justice system. But that system is clearly broken, and a huge number of lives are affected by flaws in the system in profound and disturbing ways.

The justice system can’t be reformed without understanding that this is a political as well as an institutional problem. For starters, during the Trump presidency, three conservative justices were seated on the Supreme Court. The senators who confirmed them represented less than half of the national electorate, and let us remember, the president who appointed them was impeached twice. Over the last four-plus decades Democrats held the presidency for half that time during which they appointed four justices to SCOTUS. Republicans have held the presidency for slightly longer and have appointed 11 justices.

This isn’t just about our judiciary systems and their flaws. It’s about a real crisis that threatens our democracy. It’s not the first time we’ve faced that existential threat. Scholars point out that as early as the 1790s and into the 19th century as well as the 20th, fears about the demise of our democracy led to political action, for better or worse, as Thomas Keck wrote in the Washington  Post.

Now the Supreme Court’s new Voting Rights Act “could gut civil rights protections,” Keck said, pointing out that “throughout U.S. history…the court itself has been perceived as a barrier to democratic preservation and renewal.”  That is clear now given the gerrymandering, voter suppression, and filibuster arguments we face.

Among state legislatures posing threats to our democracy, none is more egregious than Arizona, which made it harder for minorities to vote, weakening the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The worst of it is that the conservative Supreme Court upheld the Arizona law, causing Justice Elena Kagan to write, “What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute designed to bring about ‘the end of discrimination in voting’”.

Thankfully, President Biden has appointed a presidential commission on Supreme Court reform. It will consider calls for term limits, expanding the number of justices on the court, and removing some issues from the court’s purview.

A commission report regarding the Supreme Court won’t cure all the injustices in our legal systems, but we can hope they will signal a start to meaningful reform.  Otherwise, the blindfolded lady with the scales of justice on her shoulders might as well step off her pedestal. The rest of us can do little more than advocate, educate and vote smart in hopes that we can right the wrongs of a so-called “criminal justice system’. It’s the least we can do for incarcerated children and innocents on death row.

What Do We Mean When We Talk About Human Rights?

What Do We Mean When We Talk About Human Rights?

“Human Rights.” It’s a term tossed around all too easily, a hollow piece of rhetoric practiced in the breach, a faux cliché uttered in fragile times. It’s a mantra lacking moral conviction and humane behavior, a way to cover the shame of failed promises, a salve without resolve spread by self-righteous, glib politicians at podiums and to the media. It’s a hollow claim that enables us to believe we are an “exceptional” country. It’s a lie in the face of multiple human tragedies in which we are complicit. These are tragedies that we fuel, facilitate, ignore, without asking ourselves how committed we are as a nation to the imperative of human rights.

I come to this awareness when I ask how it is that we condemn Russia’s or China’s or Myanmar’s human rights abuses against their people while continuing to sanction Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinian people among them.

I come to it when I think about how we abandoned the people of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia who helped us during that dreadful war, and then tried to do the same thing to the Afghan people who worked at the American Embassy or for American contractors and the American military, lessened in its shameful practice, but not eliminated only because of public outcries.

I came to it when we were silent about what Saudi Arabia has done in Yemen, and in its embassy in Turkey, and when our silence did not help end the atrocities in Syria. Of course, I understand the politics of non-action no matter where it occurs, but when politics trumps humanity I shudder.

I come to it when a kid is tased by cops for going through some bushes to see his girlfriend, and when black men are shot in the back and black women are shot in bed.

I come to it when women are denied agency over their own bodies and jailed for “infanticide” when they miscarry.

I come to it when we fail to make the connections between poverty, policy and practices, whether in schools, courtrooms, jails, or other institutions, for surely housing, food security, safety from judicial harm, appropriate quality healthcare, a decent and equal education, and a livable planet are all basic human rights.

Surely there is something inhumane about the Bezos and Zuckerbergs of the world accumulating billions of dollars of wealth while paying no taxes and the poohbahs of parliaments think earning a livable wage is too much to sanction and legislate.

The fact that almost seven million people in the world live in abject poverty according to World Vision-- often situational, generational or geographic -- while wealthy nations like ours look the other way, illuminates the hollow rhetoric of “human rights.” It is also shameful that the United States has the fourth highest poverty rate in the world– nearly 18 percent – and the largest income inequality gap in the world according to the Brookings Institution.

According to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a milestone document in the history of human rights, there are two kinds of human right violations: those committed overtly by the state, and those in which the state fails to protect against human rights violations. These violations can be civil, political, economic, cultural, or social in nature.  Civil rights include the right to life, safety, and equality before the law while political rights include the right to a fair trial and the right to vote.

Economic, social and cultural rights include the right to work, the right to education, and the right to physical and mental health. These rights relate to things like clean water, adequate housing, appropriate healthcare, non-discrimination at work, maternity leave, fair wages, and more.

Just take a look at that list of human rights and then try convincing me that we haven’t violated, and that we don’t continue to violate each and every one of them, all the while claiming that we champion “human rights.”

Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr. are often quoted on the issue of human rights, reminding us of our failures to protect these rights. Mandela asked that we remember that “To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.”  Martin Luther King, Jr. admonished us to never forget that “A right delayed is a right denied.”

Mary Robinson, Ireland’s first woman president, asked us never to forget that “today’s human rights violations are the causes of tomorrow’s conflicts.”

Wise words, all. But how sad that we need to hear them over and over again, and that we still fail to instill them in our hearts and our policies.

For me, the words of Eleanor Roosevelt resonate most: “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?” she asked. Her answer: “In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world ... Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.”

Would that we take to heart what she said at every level of our private and public lives.

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

The Urgency of Saving Roe v. Wade

She is sixteen years old and pregnant. Still in school and devoid of job skills, she would not qualify to adopt a child, yet she could be forced to carry the fetus to term.

 She is a mother who wants another child, but in the third term of her pregnancy she learns her fetus has severe organ anomalies and will die soon after birth, but she is denied a late term abortion.

 She is a victim of rape who suffers post-traumatic stress that renders her unable to work, but she will be forced to give birth.

 She has been sexually abused by her uncle for years and is now pregnant by him, but she cannot have an abortion.

 Each of these women represent many others. They are the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about as the United States moves ever closer to draconian restrictions on abortion, and ultimately the death of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution protects a woman's liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. 

 Ever since the Supreme Court’s decision a growing number of states have worked hard to promulgate laws and regulations that limit whether and when a woman can obtain an abortion. Restrictions aimed at reducing abortions are designed to challenge to Roe v. Wade in the hope it will be reversed.  They include such measures as mandating unnecessary physician and hospital requirements, setting gestational limits, preventing so-called “partial birth” (late term) abortion, promulgating funding restrictions, and insisting on state-mandated counseling, waiting periods, and parental involvement.

 But never have we seen abortion restrictions like those that now exist in 45 states, making 2021 a “year that is well on its way to being defined as the worst one in abortion rights history,” as the Guttmacher Institute notes.

 Various state laws from Arizona to Arkansas are a Handmaid’s Tale nightmare, but none are as staggering as the laws in Texas. Beginning in January this year, patients are required to receive state-directed counseling including information designed to discourage abortion, coupled with mandated wait times. There are constraints on various insurance policies including those included in the Affordable Care Act. Parental consent is required, and patients must undergo an ultrasound at least 24 hours before obtaining an abortion while the provide shows and describes the fetal image to the patient.  

 Further, in May, Texas governor Greg Abbott signed a fetal heartbeat abortion bill that bans abortion as early as six weeks, well before most women know they’re pregnant. That bill is scheduled to go into effect in September, although it and many other proposed laws are being challenged in the courts.

 No wonder Texan Paxton Smith, graduating valedictorian of her high school class, found her graduation speech going viral.  With enormous courage, she ‘aborted’ her approved speech and spoke eloquently, noting at the start that the six-week “Heartbeat Act” had just been introduced.

 “I cannot give up this platform to promote complacency and peace when there is a war on my body and on my rights. A war on the rights of your mothers, a war on the rights of your sisters, a war on the rights of your daughters. We cannot stay silent,” she told the crowd, noting that medical authorities have said the fetal heartbeat argument is misleading.

 Shortly after Smith gave her speech, a Spokane, WA newspaper revealed that several months earlier a woman who suffered a miscarriage in a Spokane hotel had been investigated by police who found it suspicious that she did not meet them at the hospital as they had instructed. A search warrant followed because the cops thought she might be guilty of criminal mistreatment of a child. Ultimately the investigation was closed.  But women are actually in jail here and in other countries, charged with feticide following a miscarriage. 

 It doesn’t have to be this way.  There are many models we can look to in which women’s right to exercise control over their bodies is not in the hands of the state. The Netherlands is one such country. Abortion is free on demand there and yet they have the lowest abortion rate in the world, while complications and deaths from abortion are rare. Contraception is widely available and free, and abortion is covered by the national health insurance plan. Sex education starts early, and Dutch teenagers have less frequent sex starting at an older age than American teens; their pregnancy rate is six times lower than ours.

 Why, then, but for Paxton Smith, do we never hear media reports about the critical issue of abortion, which male powerbrokers embrace with the force of institutionalized misogyny? Why does the current administration remain silent on an issue of this import when three quarters of Americans want Roe v. Wade to remain in place, citing it as a key issue affecting who will get their vote? Why is the American public so ready to give up on a fundamental human right that can touch all of us?

 Why, Ms. Smith might well ask, do we stay silent?

The Re-Victimization of Sexual Assault Survivors

The Re-victimization of Sexual Assault Survivors

She was 24 years old when she unintentionally killed her stepfather as he attempted to rape her. She had been sexually assaulted by this man from the age of seven. If she told anyone, her abuser said, he would kill her mother.

Her name is Teresa Paulinkonis and she was 57 years old when she walked out of a state prison in California in March, her sentence of 25 years to life having been commuted by the governor.

Charged with premeditated murder, she spent 30 years of her life as a prisoner. During that time, she earned an Associate’s degree, wrote a memoir, taught classes, counseled others and successfully advocated for incarcerated women, including teenage women sentenced to life without parole for killing their abusers. In effect, she became a self-taught “prison lawyer” as women like her are known for helping gain the release of other incarcerated women. Prison staff have attested to her contributions as a model prisoner.

It has been a long journey for this woman of faith who is smart, compassionate, skilled in advocacy and trauma recovery, and perhaps most of all, patient. I know this because I have journeyed with her all those years, first as a correspondent, then as a friend and later as her liaison with dozens of women in her international support group. Although my friend and I have yet to meet face-to-face, I know the facts of her case and the makeup of her character.

I also know how she has been treated by the both the legal system and the prison system, both of which re-victimized her repeatedly in various ways.  I know how she persevered as she was denied parole three times, refused an appropriate retrial because perjury was committed during the first trial, by a judge who labeled her a “sociopath” because she told her story calmly. “Too practiced,” he said. “I don’t believe her.” It had taken her almost 25 years to be able to do that as she grew from victim to survivor. I know how strong and resilient she has had to be, and I know how broken and punishing the systems and institutions are that she has had to experience.

As she began the next phase of her life in which she hopes to be of service to other incarcerated women, she was once again re-victimized, this time by the media who reported on her commuted sentence.  Without seriously researching the facts of her case and relying solely on the language of the governor’s commutation and old court records, various press reported her release in a way that made her seem monstrous. 

She was described as a woman “convicted of bludgeoning her stepfather to death” as he watched TV. Relying on records of her trial in which a hostile relative committed perjury, to which he later confessed, she is said to have poisoned her stepfather, “according to authorities.” That never happened. Quoting the governor’s commutation statement which made no reference to sexual abuse, the media referenced “clemency that does not minimize or forgive her conduct or the harm it caused.” Not one word about the context of the crime. Not one word about her contributions in prison. Not one word about how many people have praised her character and fought so long and hard for her release.

For the advocates and lawyers working tirelessly to address sexual assault issues, prison deprivations and punishment (including sexual assault), and powerbrokers in the courts, prisons and other seats of power and misogyny, where largely white, privileged, uninformed male powerbrokers, who have absolutely no idea about women’s lives reign, it is sad, and maddening, to witness media adding to the re-victimization of abused women.

Those in a position to pass judgment, make assumptions, toss around unempirical psychological jargon, or do sloppy work make “bad trouble” as the late John Lewis might say. Whether lawyers, judges, doctors, jailers or reporters, most of them know little to nothing about the realities of sexual abuse, its prevalence, or its resultant lifelong trauma, and they show little inclination to learn. The fact is, sadly, they are often among the abusers women fear, and fight back against in order to survive.

For incarcerated women survivors of sexual assault like my friend, who are released from long years in prison for killing their abusers, walking out of prison does not always mean walking free. For my friend and many other women like her, the journey continues.

(A full--length feature of this commentary first appeared on Salon,com)

Just published! A 21st Century Plague: Poetry from a Pandemic

Like the Covid-19 virus, poetry related to the pandemic has flourished. This anthology, which I am proud to have conceived and edited, adds to the literature of the pandemic in unique ways, capturing some of the best poetry on the topic in a moving, diverse and empathetic collection that includes noted writers and award-winning poets.

 Contributors are wide-ranging. From well-known writer Marge Piercy to an Irish Franciscan brother, a prison inmate, an Indian poet, a geriatric care nurse, artists and educators, the poetry speaks to challenging times in which we must find our strengths and forgive our foibles.

   There are 53 poets and 70 poems in this collection. Works range from the poignant to the practical. Ginny Lowe Connors writes in “Her Eyes,” about seeing her patients, “Above the mask, behind the face shield, eyes huge, red-rimmed, gritty, glassy.” Brian Daldorph considers “Love in the Time of Plague,” as a couple “sit on the beach together” although “they’ve been told not to do it, to keep distant, to wear protective clothing.” Scholar Rai d’Honore contemplates prior plagues, including “The Black Death … As nasty a death as can be…” Burt Rashbaum remembers being virus exhausted: “The simplest things: do I really need celery, how much dog food is left, is that a dry cough or do I just need a glass of water.”

  The works in this collection bear witness and give universal meaning to shared experience. They help us remember, reflect, reconcile, and rejoice in small pleasures and new insights. They are each a story in verse, carefully composed, to create word monuments that quiet and comfort. In that way, they become gracefully therapeutic and healing while recording for future generations what it was like during a 21st century pandemic.

 “These poems, varied in form and content, beautifully capture the global experience of this pandemic as well as the individual emotions and struggles that are, at the same time, unique and universal: fear, defiance, longing, grief, anger, loneliness, gratitude for time and respite, hope―and often, joy in life's small, continuing gifts. Editor Elayne Clift has gathered a community of poets whose words are haunting, moving, charming, surprising and, finally, comforting.  Reading this anthology, you might find yourself saying, Yes, yes, I understand― I've felt that way too. I'm not alone.”

Cortney Davis, nurse practitioner; author of "I Hear Their Voices Singing: Poems New

Women and War: A Memorial Day Tribute

They were nurses, soldiers, code-breakers, factory workers, resistance fighters, POWs, victims. We should remember them on Memorial Day.

 Women have been warriors throughout history. During the Civil War, they assumed male aliases, wore men’s uniforms, and charged into battle on both sides. Harriet Tubman was a spy then and the first woman to lead a battalion into battle.

 Marge Piercy’s 1980 novel, Gone to Soldiers, revealed many tasks undertaken by women during WWII. Some ferried planes for the Air Force. Others, symbolized by Rosie the Riveter, worked in factories producing war goods. Women served as intelligence officers in Europe and others were social workers helping returning soldiers and their families.

 Nearly 800 women were sent to European warehouses to sort mail addressed to U.S. servicemen.  Major Fannie Griffin McClendon, who joined the Army’s only all black, female WWII battalion, the Six Triple Eight, was one of them, helping to boost morale among service members. She was honored at the Library of Congress in 2019 at the age of 99 when she was featured in the documentary “Six Triple Eight.”

 Many French women, courageous resistance fighters, were sent to concentration camps if caught. One, a young musician, played her violin outside a Nazi camp to sooth captured friends.Some were couriers or took food to Jews in hiding. Others blew up German trains and troops.

 In her book Code Girls, Liza Mundy tells the story of America’s women cryptographers who cracked difficult communication systems. More than 10,000 women were selected for this work. After Pearl Harbor, the military built its intelligence operation by bringing women college graduates in math and science to Washington, D.C. for training. They went on to break codes from merchant ships in the Pacific supplying Japanese troops so the Navy could sink them, and they gave Germans false information about where the Allied landing on D-Day would happen.

 Minnie Vautrin was an American missionary in China during the infamous 1937 Rape of Nanking, when an estimated 80,000 women were brutally violated by Japanese soldiers.  Minnie saved hundreds of girls and women, facing down bayonets at the college she headed. After helping women find their husbands and sons at the war’s end, she returned home where she committed suicide in 1941.

 So called “comfort women,” most of whom were Korean women and girls, were taken as sexual slaves by the Japanese. The horror was an early use of what we now acknowledge as a war crime and it affected 200,000 women and girls.

 In Europe, as Hitler’s “final solution” gained momentum, there were many women who deserve to be memorialized. Among them was Etty Hillesum, often called the mature Anne Frank. Like Anne, she was born in Holland, a Jew and a diarist. She went to Auschwitz because she volunteered to accompany arrested Jews in 1943. She threw a postcard from the train that read “We left the [holding] camp singing.” She died three months later at age 27.

 Back in Asia, Japanese invasions accelerated as people struggled to survive. Among them was Helen Colijn, author of Song of Survival: Women Interned, which became the film Paradise Road. She and other European women trying to get home became prisoners of war on Sumatra. Most of the women died before liberation, including Margaret Dryburgh, who formed the prison choir that kept morale up despite starvation, disease and brutality.

 Another group of amazing women prisoners in the Pacific were 99 Army and Navy nurses later known as “the angels of Bataan and Corregidor.” They were the first unit of American women sent into battle and the only group of American women imprisoned by an enemy. They’d helped build and staff hospitals and pioneer triage nursing in a stifling jungle. At the end of their three-year incarceration, they survived by eating weeds cooked in coldcream. Their story is told in We Band of Angels.  Sadly, they were not fully recognized by the military until 1986.

 The nurses in Vietnam were another “band of angels.” All volunteers, they too were not fully recognized when they came home. One of them, Lily Jean Adams, was 22 when she volunteered.  An ICU nurse, she remembered comforting dying soldiers. “They would say ‘don’t leave me,’ and I wouldn’t.  I sensed it was just as important as taking care of the living.”

 Women in the Gulags of Siberia also struggled to survive as political prisoners during the Soviet Stalinist Era post WWII. Some received 25-year sentences in unbearable conditions. Their stories are told in the book Dressed for A Dance in the Snow.

 Women war journalists have been equally brave and important.  Vera Brittain, Nellie Bly, Margaret Bourke-White and Martha Gellhorn were among them.  They wrote about the trauma of war, especially for women and children, rather than tactical questions and policy disputes, as male journalists did. Theirs were stories of ordinary civilians desperate to survive.

 Today women comprise about 20 percent of America’s military. They are graduating in increasing numbers from our military academies. As Frank Moore wrote in 1866, “The story of the war will never be fully written or understood if the achievements and contributions of women are unrecognized.”

 How right he was.

History as Prologue: The Shadow of a Continuing Crisis

It will come as no surprise that Liz Cheney is not on my short list of politicians I admire or wish to see in Congress. But she has done the right thing in calling out the “big lie” and promising to do all she can to keep Donald Trump away from the White House, literally or in terms of his influence over a terribly broken party. She is a canary in the coal mine. Would that others had the courage to follow suite.  

Most sentient beings on the planet breathed a huge sigh of relief last November when Joe Biden won the presidential election. We were even happier when he and his administration immediately began acting robustly on myriad issues. First came the well-chosen appointments, the flurry of executive orders reversing Trump’s perversities, then the big bills aimed at healthcare, infrastructure, economic recovery, climate change, income inequality, childcare, and more – all of which made Republicans in Congress and their Q-anon conspiracists cringe – and jump into action. 

A majority of states immediately flew into action to bring back Jim Crow with hideous voting rights restrictions. Protesters began to be arrested. Gun violence and hate crimes grew by startling percentages while white supremacist cops kept killing blacks. Arizona decided to hold yet another recount of the election results there, barring journalists from the hanger where counters tried mightily to spot bamboo in the ballots. (Proof that the party has gone crazy.) 

Republicans in Congress began their urgent campaign, articulated by Mitch McConnell, to stop any legislation proposed by the White House or Democrats in the House of Representatives. Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, Josh Hawley, and other deranged congressmen went on various rants grounded in lies and nonsense. Rand Paul accosted public health expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, accusing him of funding dangerous research in China (more proof of crazy). Vaccine conspiracies and anti-masking activists got really crazy.

All of this occurred post-January 6th when the unimaginable happened and an insurrection at the Capital that day sent America a clear message:  This country is not out of danger.

The fact is the real and growing possibility of living through the destruction of American democracy is not going away, it is growing. Donald Trump is now viewed as the head of the Republican party as he holds the feet of elected officials to the fire with his fierce, alarming grip on their futures. A significant number of regular Republicans continue to embrace the lies, mantras, and inconceivable theories spewed out daily by Fox News. Insurrectionists crawl out from under their rocks in droves. The Supreme Court is now a quasi-political body with a 6-3 conservative majority.

All this is terrifying in its implications. Like many others now, I grow more and more anxious by the day – so much so that I actually inquired about getting a British passport, which my husband and children hold.  I know that what happened in countries like Turkey, Egypt, Poland, Hungary, and others can happen here.

We are not immune from autocrats and dictatorship and we are not protected by our Constitution if it no long holds meaning for those in power. Our future is riding on the midterm elections next year, and the 2024 presidential election.

If you think I am needlessly hyperventilating, consider this: In 1923 Hitler mounted a failed coup. When he failed, his effort was treated leniently. A decade later he was Germany’s dictator. In 2021 Donald Trump inspired a failed coup. It too has been treated leniently by those who say we “need to move on.” Will he, or his appointed alter ego, be our dictator in less than a decade?

Ece Temelkuran, a noted Turkish journalist, wrote a book in 2019 in which she explains how Turkey’s President Erdogan came to rule that country. The book is called How to Lose a Country: Seven Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship. In the first chapter she writes, “Watching a disaster occur has a sedating effect. As our sense of helplessness grows along with the calamity, [we begin to feel that] there is no longer anything you can do. … global news channels jump in [for] the denouement It has been a long and exhausting [time], unbearably painful. It began with a populist coming to town. … A bleak dawn breaks.”

She goes on to draw comparisons between Turkey and what’s happening in the U.S. and elsewhere that are chilling: “It doesn’t matter if Trump or Erdogan or [the UK’s] Nigel Farage is brought down. Millions of people are fired up by their message and will be ready to act upon the orders of a similar figure. … These minions will find you, even in your own personal space, armed with their own set of values and ready to hunt down anyone who doesn’t resemble themselves.”

Temelkuran points out that this is not something imposed top down or by “the Kremlin. It also arises from the grassroot,” and she says wisely, “it is time to recognize that what is occurring affects us all.”

It is time, indeed, for America to realize what is occurring – and that it will affect us all.

How Much Longer Before We End the Massacre of Innocents?

As I watched the flag-draped coffin of the late Billy Evans, the second Capital Police officer to lie in state, descend from the Capital steps, I wept – and wondered how much longer we would find ourselves living in a country that has become so violent.

As I saw the photograph of the deceased Duane Wright holding his one-year old child and heard the wails of his aggrieved aunt, I also wondered how much longer we will go on living in such a violent country.

As I heard witness after witness in the trial of Derek Chauvin, charged with killing George Floyd, I asked myself again:  How much longer must we live with the massacre of black people, mostly men, by aggressive, out of control, incipiently violent police?  

And when I read David Gray’s stunning Facebook post I wondered again how much longer such hideous racist behavior would prevail?

Gray’s post was about his day, one in which he would take all manner of precautions to ensure that he, his wife and his child would make it through another day without being shot by police.  He would, he said, not take public transport. He would not hang an air freshener in his car, and he would double check his car registration status. He would be sure his license plates were visible, he would carefully follow all traffic rules, keep the radio down, forgo stopping at a fast food restaurant, forego prayer, and simply hope to God that his car didn’t break down.

His wife would take another set of precautions when she picked their young child up from daycare. They would not play in a park or go for an ice cream. Once the child was in bed, neither of his parents would leave the house to run errands or jog. “We will just sit and try not to breathe and not to sleep,” Gray wrote. And in everything he and his wife would do or not do, there was a name attached: Lt. Caron Nazario, Philandro Castro, Sandra Bland, Rev. Clementa Pickney, Elijah McCain, Tamir Rice, Ahmaud Argery, Breonna Taylor, and many more because of what had happened to each one of them.

But it isn’t only police violence that makes the burning question linger in my brain and bruise my heart. How much longer, I ask myself over and over again, must we live with so much violence that results in the massacre of the innocents?

Several days before I wrote this commentary a woman in Virginia was killed by a stray bullet. The same day eight people were also wounded by gunfire in a separate shooting, and a mother of six was fatally wounded in North Carolina while on an anniversary trip with her husband, shot in the head in a drive-by shooting in an act of road rage.

How can it be that we live in a country so barbaric that you take your chances just going grocery shopping, attending school, showing up at work, being on vacation, having a night out for drinks or dinner, or standing in your own backyard? How much longer can we live like that?

How did we become a banana republic in which our own house of parliament could be stormed by insurrectionists calling for the death of elected officials and a state congresswoman could get arrested for gently knocking on the governor’s door as he welcomed Jim Crow home? How did we reach the point where Asian Americans are beaten on the streets of America and trans kids are denied health care?  

Gun violence is not only a physical threat. It’s a public health emergency that threatens our emotional well-being and fills us with anxiety. Some of us get emotionally crazy. I actually ask my adult children to text me when they get home from being on the road, walking in the dark, jogging in the park, or working late at night.

According to the Gun Violence Archive as reported by the Washington Post, in 2020, gun violence killed nearly 20,000 Americans, more than any other year in at least two decades. The U.S. experienced the highest one-year increase in homicides since it began keeping records last year, and large cities saw a 30 percent spike in gun violence. Gunshot injuries also rose dramatically, to nearly 40,000.

This year, following the January 6th attack on the Capital, over two million guns were sold in January alone. That’s an 80 percent increase in gun sales and the third highest monthly total on record. All of this while the outdated Second Amendment is invoked in the 21st century, hundreds of years since muskets went out fashion and military weapons became vogue.

Writer Mary McCarthy once said, “In violence, we forget who we are.”  America, it seems to me, need not remember who we are so much; that would reveal the “400 year lie” that current writers admonish us to remember. Instead, America desperately needs to think about what we have become. Only then can the country heal, reinvent itself, and emerge from the darkness that is rapidly enveloping us.  Let us begin with a question: How do we stop the massacre of the innocents?

The Importance of Story in Covid Time

It is one year now since Covid first invaded our countries and our bodies. Since then, we have longed for the touch of loved ones, fought off anxiety and despair, adjusted as much as possible to the stunning effects of prolonged isolation, and watched as the numbers of deaths mounted, week by week, state by state, country by country. It was, we agreed, the worst thing we’ve gone through in one hundred years.

To mark this dark anniversary, we have seen pictures of those we’ve lost, and heard about them as people and not statistics.  The media has brought many of them into our homes and hearts, respectfully and with feeling.  But it is not often that we’ve heard real stories about the victims of this insidious virus, or their families; the kind of stories drawn from memory that make us laugh, weep, empathize, share sadness, become better people ourselves.  Perhaps stories like that which set a scene, have characters, dialogue, plot lines, and ultimately universal meaning have yet to emerge. I hope they do, because we all have stories to tell, and we all need to stories to hear.

That’s because storytelling is primal. It’s the way we come to understand the world around us. Story give us wholeness. It allows us to recover something vital and true in our lives and the lives of others. Stories, as writer Sue Monk Kidd knows, are “the life of the soul.”

Telling and hearing stories of how we got through this dreadful pandemic is how we say what happened, with empathy, so that future generations will know what it was like to live in isolation for a year or more, to feel afraid while trying to be brave, to cope, and even to grow because of the shared experience.

Storytelling is an essential act of remembrance in which our words build monuments to a time when our lives called upon us to carry on and to endure, to know what really matters, to know what to cling to and what to let go.

All of us have a natural instinct toward narratives that reveal the greater truth of what happens on our individual and collective journeys.  Words carefully crafted change our experience and help us arrive at greater truths.  In our tales of Covid time and an adjusted normal all of what we share happened, all of it was true, and all of it matters.

In making much of the mundane, we experience our epiphanies, our AHA Moments. We become “gardeners of the spirit who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth,” as May Sarton put it. We are brave in our contemplative experience, and dare “to deal with our bag of fears,” as Eudora Welty said we must.

Here is some of my story about Covid, the third in a trilogy of poems that appear in the forthcoming anthology, “A 21st Century Plague: Poetry from a Pandemic.”

“In the beginning, while in survival mode, we masked, distanced, and washed our hands

Like mad Lady MacBeth, hoping the virus would bypass us, lucky ones, untouched, safe, exempt. Then, as the weeks wore on, we found ourselves frayed and frightened,

Anxious and depressed, while the beast grew bolder. Entering crisis mode,

Tempers flared, tears flowed, trips for groceries became a call for celebration,

Haircuts a miraculous event, Release from house arrest.

Precious family and friends, risked distant contact at outdoor lunch.

We Zoomed, FaceTimed, Skyped, vowing to carry on in Covid solitude,

As we awaited the darkness of winter.”

Stories are medicine. They give us the power to be soothed and to soothe others. Together we overcome adversity through our transformative experience. In fact, there is no culture on earth that doesn’t tell stories.  Storytelling is as old as humankind. It’s embedded in our genes, often as a survival technique. We are simply hardwired to tell stories and to listen to them. Tell yours, and listen with thanks to the stories of others. You’ll be surprised at how much better you’ll feel.