A is For Absent: America's Teacher Shortage

 Her name was Shirley Myers, and she was a gift in my life when I needed one. I was in middle school and a loner, unlike most kids that age, because my mother suffered from depression that meant she was hospitalized for long stretches. Ms. Myers was a calm teacher and a gentle soul and somehow, I started going to her classroom after school to talk with her. It was quietly comforting to be with her, and we formed a bond that got me through those lonely times.

 She wasn’t my only good teacher. In high school, Desmond Jones, who scared everyone with his high standards and grim demeanor, taught me how to consider literature carefully and to write cogently about it in his English class. Vivienne Davenport gave me my love of language with her Word for the Day. They were delicious words like obsequious, sartorial, serendipity, and ubiquitous. We were required to learn their definition and to write a sentence using each day’s word. I think about her each time I use one of her many fine words. Doc Martin, slightly disheveled and occasionally distracted got me through Latin; later Spanish helped me become bi-lingual until I forgot how to conjugate.

 In college I had fine teachers who taught me about literature, art, religion, psychology, sociology, and other subjects that interested me.  And in graduate school I learned to do professional research, explore interdisciplinary methodologies in my chosen field, write for publication, and have confidence in my abilities. My advisor during that time is still a close friend.

 Later I became a teacher myself. I taught at high end colleges and universities and at community colleges, and I now teach in adult learning programs because I love teaching no matter where I do it. I know the joy of watching motivated students consider issues they’ve never contemplated before, the pleasure of seeing their thinking and writing skills grow, their openness to new ideas, their new sense of confidence.

 So I am deeply saddened, and worried by the loss of so many good teachers, at all levels, who are leaving their chosen, and often undervalued, profession. They are quitting for numerous reasons that are valid. They work under poor conditions, suffer high stress, heavy workloads and burnout, as well as insulting salaries and a lack of administrative support, and now more than 60 percent of them fear mass shootings at their schools according to a 2018 survey conducted by the National Education Association (NEA) and reported by CNN earlier this year. CNN also reported that “one in three teachers say they are likely to quit and find another job in the next two years, according to a recent survey by the EdWeek Research Center and Merrimack College.

 Briana Takhtani, a teacher who resigned and spoke to CNN, said she quit her “dream job” because of the pandemic and school shootings. “It just became too much for me to handle on a day-to-day basis and still feel sane,” she said. Her statement is reflective of those made by numerous other teachers.

 The loss of qualified teachers is alarming in many ways.  Some schools have had to cancel core classes, others are hiring people who lack professional teaching qualifications and, in some cases don’t even have a basic college degree. The impact is especially dramatic for children who need special education or bilingual teachers as well as those who live in rural areas.

 One superintendent told PBS at the start of the 2022 school year that “it really impacts the children because they’re not learning what they need to learn. “When you have these uncertified, emergency or inexperienced teachers, students are in classrooms where they’re not going to get the level of rigor and classroom experiences.” In other words, a generation of children are not being prepared adequately for what lies ahead for them, not only professionally but intellectually, culturally, and psycho-socially.

 As a story in The Atlantic revealed recently, “The education system is headed toward a cliff at a moment when it most needs to help students who fell behind during the pandemic. For nearly a decade, America’s students have been backsliding on the nation’s report card, which evaluates their command of math, science, U.S. history and reading.”

That’s a sobering reality. It makes me grieve for all the children who will never have a Shirley Myers, a Desmond Jones, or a Vivienne Davenport in their academic lives, and will never experience the difference they make. Teachers like those I was gifted with understood that as a Tibetan proverb says, “A child without education is like a bird without wings.”

I am ever grateful for having been educated in a time when they represented the finest members of the teaching profession and I fervently hope that children will fly again once the reasons for our educational crisis are adequately resolved.  

The Recovered Joy of Summer Travel

All my life I have disagreed with Henry David Henry: Unlike him, I think it is “worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.” That’s why inveterate travelers find the return to post-pandemic travel an exhilarating experience.

This spring my husband and I were excited to resurrect an aborted trip abroad that was planned almost four years ago. We were so excited you might have thought it was something we’d never done before.  The truth is travel is in our DNA so having to stay close to home for so long was hard.

The joy of travel began when I was a child,nd the high point of summer was a family trip to Toronto to visit my father’s relatives.  On the eve of the journey my sister and I laid out new shorts, T-shirts, and sandals to be ready when the alarm rang at 6:00 a.m. Teeth brushed and hair combed, we skipped to the back of the black Buick and didn’t argue with our brother for the window seat.  We were too busy savoring breakfast at Howard Johnson’s, part of the annual ritual that always began our trip to another country.

Every year we took a different route to enjoy the scenery. Pre-interstate and Holiday Inns, we drove through Pennsylvania Dutch country or New England or New York State, where we visited Ithaca’s gorges, the 1,000 islands, and of course, Niagara Falls. Every night, we looked for AAA-approved cabins in which to sleep, with their worn linoleum floors, chenille bedspreads, and inevitable spiders.  We thought it was pure heaven (except for the spiders.)

Crossing the border was like going to a forbidden country. We had to answer questions about where we were going, why, and for how long, and reassure customs officials that we had nothing illegal with us. Once cleared to proceed we headed to the Falls to ride in the Maid of the Mist boat that went behind the Falls spraying us with water.

In Toronto we checked into the Royal York Hotel where a little man in a maroon uniform roamed the lobby every day calling out, “Call for Mr. Smith!” “Call for Mr. Jones!”  The next morning, before heading to my grandfather’s cottage, we ate breakfast in The Honeydew Restaurant.  Only then were we ready for the obligatory visits that lay ahead.

Later, in my early twenties, I took my first solo trip to Europe. I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven as I experienced Amsterdam, London, Paris, Rome, and the Swiss landscape, relying on travel books that promised you could do this kind of thing economically.  Relishing every moment and every conversation with fellow travelers from different cultures, I thought I’d go mad with the pleasure of it all.  I marveled at the sight of Michelangelo’s David, wept in San Marco Square, thrilled at the pageantry of the Changing of the Guard, sat in cafes on the Champs Elysee and smiled back at Mona Lisa.  I even fell in love twice.  More importantly I knew that my life had changed and that I would never stop traveling.

Luckily, I married a Brit who loves traveling as much as I do and with whom I was able to travel internationally because of his work, then mine. We even lived for a year in Thailand when I got a teaching gig there. We traveled like cockroaches then, scurrying around Southeast Asia, discovering new foods, new art and music, new friends, beautiful rituals, and other ways of living.

Travel also offers a diverse and sometimes dramatic education. History, art, literature, religious beliefs all come alive as we are exposed to other cultures, rituals, and norms. We become more curious, learn new ways of thinking or expressing ourselves, and grow in ways we never imagined.

Traveling also offers challenges. Before there was a single currency in Europe, I had to learn how to convert currencies, to communicate without a common language and to know the difference between the Alps and the Pyrenees. It was instructive and fun. I also had to develop bargaining skills and to know how to deal with dangerous situations. Luckily, in my experience, there is always someone to help.

Travel, if it’s possible, can be simply a pleasurable experience or a profound life-altering event. For me it was both, and I view it as a great blessing.

That’s why I continue to agree with Mark Twain who claimed that travel is enticing, not least because it is “fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.”   Like Twain, whose account of one trip gave us Innocents Abroad, I think “it would be well if such an excursion could be got up every year and the system regularly inaugurated.”

Traveling may have seemed a thing of the past during the pandemic. Now we may find ourselves changing venues because of the climate crisis or different opportunities. We may prefer more café crawls and fewer cathedral and museum visits along with more chatting with the locals. But I am among those travelers who are not ready to let a passport expire because I never know when I might have a fierce urge to weep again in Venice, to learn something new, to make new friends, or to count cats in Zanzibar.   

From Designer Babies to Devalued Children

A recent press release I received got me thinking about how much we really care about kids?  The press alert came from the Coalition to Stop Designer Babies, which is organizing internationally to oppose efforts by some scientists and would-be parents who want to overturn legal bans and prohibitions on Human Genetic Modification (HGM).

A so-called designer baby is defined as “an infant whose genes or other cellular components have been altered by practitioners at the embryo or pre-embryo stage, ostensibly for the purpose of avoiding passing on genetic diseases, or making babies that are smarter, taller, or stronger,” according to the Humane Biotech organization.

Coalition spokesperson Dr. Daniel Papillon, a French scientist, notes that” There is no unmet medical need for this technology, but the risks are immense. … It would increase ableism and entrench social inequality.” Like other opponents of this technology, he notes that “HGM is the latest high-tech version of Eugenics,” the belief that the human race could be improved if reproduction was controlled and only those who were deemed worthy of being born or of reproducing should live or bear children. The movement advocated selective breeding and the elimination of those considered to be imperfect. Advocates ranged from Margaret Sanger to Adolf Hitler. Even Vermont practiced Eugenics.  Between 1931 and 1941, about 200 people, mostly women, were sterilized in the state.

The idea of designer babies and perfect progeny smacks not just of social control but of affluence and exclusion. It illuminates the deep chasm between privilege and poverty, both of which speak to the deprivation of lives that might have been lived. Let’s not forget that eugenics was at the core of slavery and is still a threat in a world of growing fascism.

The idea of designer babies versus impoverished, marginalized children made me think of all the ways children throughout history, and children now in this country, have been damaged, degraded, and devalued, despite the rightwing devotion to fetuses. There are deeply disturbing examples of the abuse children of all ages experience, physically, emotionally, sexually and via neglect and exploitation.

Take, for example, the revelation revealed by the Houston Chronicle that Texas state troopers were told to push immigrant kids, even babies, back into the Rio Grande as they tried to survive crossing the river alone or with others. Or the fact that thousands of children are at risk of separation, abuse and neglect at the Mexico-US border, and that documented major abuse takes place in retention centers on the US side. Kids trapped in Mexico are sleeping in the streets where they are exposed to violence and abuse, as Save the Children and other organizations have pointed out. And those who make it to U.S. Customs and Border Protection report physical and psychological abuse, unsanitary and inhuman living conditions, isolation from family, extended periods of detention, and denial of access to legal and medical services, reported in a University of Chicago Law School report five years ago.

Sadly, the National Children’s Alliance reports that more than 600,000 children are abused in the United States each year, with children in the first year of their lives being 15 percent of all victims; more than a quarter of child maltreatment victims are under two years old. Nationally, neglect is the most common form of abuse. What does that say about who we are as a country?

What does this say?  According to the Equal Justice Initiative eleven states have no minimum age for trying children as adults; some states allow children between ten and thirteen to be tried as adults, while children as young as eight have also been prosecuted as adults. Shockingly, the U.S. is the only country in the world where kids as young as thirteen have been sentenced to life in prison without parole, and until 2005 children were executed in the U.S.

Law enforcement and police brutality contribute to the abuse and criminalization of children ranging from kindergarteners to teenagers. Stories abound. In one state, an off-duty policeman placed his knee on a middle school child’s neck, while in another state, four

Black girls were arrested for not stopping young boys from fighting.

The stories are immensely disturbing. A child in kindergarten was arrested for picking a tulip at a bus stop. A12-year old was arrested for doodling at his desk.  A nine-year-old was arrested, pepper sprayed and handcuffed for “acting like a child” when police were called to her school. These and other stories like them have been exposed by the Legal Defense Fund.

Now comes the exploitation of kids in the workplace, courtesy of Republican legislators who are happy to ignore labor laws. Lawmakers in several states want to let children work in hazardous workplaces, and to work longer hours on school nights, including serving alcohol in bars and restaurants as young as fourteen. The Economic Policy Institute revealed that ten states in the last two years have tried loosening child labor laws, while the Department of Labor reported this year that child labor violations have increased by nearly 70 percent. It’s Dickensian!

These tragic tales are the tip of the iceberg. They speak volumes to the level of child neglect that is rapidly being normalized in America. The big question is what are we going to do about it? That’s a good question to ask anyone running for office next year. As for designer babies, that’s a question for the wealthy who are wedded to privilege and perfection.

The Time for Bread and Roses is Now

When I think about labor movements and unions, two favorite stories come to mind, and both are true. The first one is about a group of girls and young women known as the Lowell Factory Girls. They worked in the mills and factories of Lowell, Massachusetts in the 19th century. Little more than children who labored for long days doing dangerous and exhausting work, they revolted in 1836 when their dismal wages were cut while their factory-owner mandated living expenses went up.

One day an 11-year-old worker named Harriet Hanson, decided enough was enough. She walked out “with childish bravado,” as she wrote in her 1898 memoir, declaring that she would go alone if she had to. That wasn’t necessary. A long line of girls followed her and thus began a strike that led to an organized labor movement launched by women, and the establishment of an early U.S. union.

The second story is less well known. It involves a labor leader and activist, Esther Peterson, who was born into a conservative family in Utah. Esther, who was much older than me, eventually came to New York where she taught wealthy girls by day and the daughters of their household maids at night.  Working at home, the young girls sewed pockets onto Hoover aprons if they were old enough, alongside their mothers. The pockets were squares until management decided heart-shaped pockets were nicer. The work was piecemeal, and hearts took longer than squares. Esther was outraged that they weren’t paid more.

“Why don’t you do something about it,” her husband asked. “Organize a strike!” Esther, who grew up thinking unions led to danger and violence, resisted. But she decided to advocate for the children, so she organized the “Heartbreaker Strike,” inviting her wealthy day students’ mothers to go on picket lines since the police would never brutalize them as they would the poor mothers. It worked, and Esther was on her way to becoming a beloved labor leader.   

I think of the Factory Girls and Esther now, when so many large-scale strikes loom large, and for good reason.  It’s no coincidence that workers at UPS and in Teamsters unions, Amazon warehouses across the country, Starbucks, and Hollywood writers and actors are striking or contemplating striking for better wages, benefits, and working conditions. American Airlines cabin crews may soon be joining them as I write this commentary.

That’s a wide, diverse swath of American workers and a huge number of jobs, goods, and services at stake. The implications are alarming. A short time ago the threat of a railroad strike was enough to make economists shudder and that’s only one sector that could have wrought havoc throughout the country.

Leaders of unions that represent large numbers of people working in companies trying to deny them their right to unionize act as though union organizing was something new and egregiously difficult. The fact is that huge, organized strikes are nothing new in this country. We’ve had labor unions forever, inspired originally by the 18th century Industrial Revolution in Europe. Shorter work days, livable minimum wages, and rational benefits have always been a bit part of union organizing. For example, poor pay and working conditions led to strikes by the Pullman Railroad Workers and the United Mine Workers in the late 19th century.

Over the years unions grew across many sectors and by 1979 there were 21 million union members in America. Today union membership is growing again after a slump, thanks in part to the pandemic and a rapidly changing labor market.  Young workers are unionizing across various sectors now because of tech-driven jobs. They are joining farmers, factory workers, food handlers, and others as they seek safe and equitable employment, just as factory girls and children sewing apron pockets did before them.  

For UPS drivers, Amazon workers, Starbucks baristas and others, companies that refuse to bargain are enraging. Labor leaders and workers have had enough. They are tired of corporate leaders who make phenomenal amounts of money a year, own mansions and yachts, and still continue reneging on workers’ rights.  Amazon, for example, has engaged in dozens of unfair labor practices, Including terminating the entire unit of newly organized workers.  Starbucks “has become the most aggressive union-busting company in America,” according to a staffer for Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and more than 200 workers have been fired for taking part in organizing activities.

I’m not trying to put a Pollyanna spin on unions. I know there is a troubling history of corruption and criminal intent in some organized labor movements and unions, and that is not something to be overlooked.  But I agree with John F. Kennedy that, “Labor unions are not narrow, self-seeking groups. They have raised wages, shortened hours, and provided supplemental benefits. … They have brought justice and democracy to the shop floor.”

More to the point perhaps in these troubling political times, labor leader Delores Huerta was right when she put the point this way: “If we don’t have workers organizing into labor unions, we’re in great danger of losing our democracy.”

My friend Esther would agree with her old boss, JFK , and with Delores Huerta, with whom  she worked on labor rights for women and children.

The Twin Engines Driving Climate Disasters

 It’s been over 90 degrees where I live in Vermont for days on end. We can’t take evening walks, plant our gardens, or breath all that well since the Canadian wildfires first compromised our air so badly that some of us have experienced respiratory issues. We’re halfway through the summer and we have yet to spend time on the deck with friends. And all that happened before biblical floods started after record monsoon rains that just wouldn’t quit. 

 It's beginning to seem like we’ve been witnessing the final stages of our own well-crafted horror movie for a long time now and the credits are about to roll. Among them are extreme heat and massive fires, along with our prolonged denial of global warming and the urgency of acting to decelerate it.

 We’ve seen otherworldly orange skies, orange fires that resemble the surface of the sun, erupting volcanoes, cars, homes, and debris tossed around like toys in tornadoes, or floating away in immensely powerful rivers. On the news people are beginning to wander around looking like stunned zombies because they’ve lost everything and have no idea what to do next because things will never be normal again. We all know that there is more to come and our resources, financial and emotional, are running low.

 There are those who will say this is too doomsday a scenario to talk about, but we all know it’s going to happen again, and worse. We know that because climate change is rapidly driving unprecedented heatwaves that fuel wildfires -- the two engines hovering over us faster than we thought. We ignore it at our own peril.

 Here’s the reality. As the climate continues to warm, heatwaves will get worse – everywhere. It’s happening in Europe, China, India, the U.S. and pretty much everywhere. Temperatures are already soaring above 110 degrees Fahrenheit and towns in several countries are being forced to evacuate, including in Italy and Greece. Florida could be next. This is not hyperbole. Scientists have been warning us about a global pattern of rising temperatures largely due to human activity and too many of us chose to look away. Now even Pope Francis has called on world leaders to heed the Earth’s “chorus of cries of anguish.”

 “Every heatwave that we are experiencing today has been made hotter and more frequent because of climate change,” says climate scientist Friederike Otto, co-leader of a World Weather Attribution research collaboration.

 Scientists agree that manmade greenhouse gas emissions have rapidly heated the planet and further speculation and theories have led to hundreds of studies conducted for decades, especially   involving situations where heat, floods, and drought have occurred. The important thing is that the situation is getting worse and fast.  Heat events that happened once every ten years before are now three times more frequent, according to Zurich-based climate scientist Sonia Seneviratne.

 Hot, dry conditions help fires spread rapidly, burn longer, and rage more intensely. Heat also means less moisture is retained for vegetation so that it turns to dry fuel for fires. Kim Cobb, director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, noted in June that treacherous heat and fire had burned a large area of the U.S. that month killing more than a dozen people. She said the events embodied the “multiple stressors linked to man-made climate change” that the United Nations has warned about through its scientific panel on global warming. “If ever there was a moment to stop and re-evaluate our fossil fuel emissions trajectory, that moment is now,” she said.

 In his recent book, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, writer Jeff Goodell says “global warming” sound too soothing, like we can just turn up the AC and all will be well. But, he says, the planet is burning and we’re running out of time, citing dying fish, melted asphalt, and melting glaciers.”  “When it gets too hot, things die,” he says simply.

 Noted environmentalist Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, is another truthteller. “We can’t stop global warming at this point,” he told Democracy Now during a June 7th interview. “All we can do is try to stop it short of the places where it cuts civilizations off at the knees.” He calls on politicians and ordinary people to cut into the status quo. “This is the last of these moments we’re going to have when the world is summoned to action by events and when there’s still time to make at least some difference.”

I’m with him. The time is now to turn off the horror movie we have produced and get to work on saving our planet, ourselves, and our kids’ future. Maybe then we can go back to the backyard deck with our friends, no longer complacent, and ready to do what it takes.

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Balfour's Big Blunder and Today's Israel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We must not reap what we sow in silence.

Are We Ready for Another Pandemic?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choosing Freedom: A Political Imperative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Horror of Healthcare Financing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Growing Older in Challenging Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To that I say, L’chaim!”  To life!

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

Turbulent Times Six Miles High and On the Tarmac

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suffer the Little Children

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Where is Artificial Intelligence Leading Us?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Remembering the World's Women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signals from the Sea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choosing Political Promise Over Continuing Chaos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Wandering Souls of Migration, Immigration, and Asylum Seeking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Maternal Mortality, Abortion, and Race: A Dangerous Trifecta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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