From Chattel to Child to Red-cloaked Mother

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.

Beware the Return of Nuclear Power Planats

 As I sat down to craft a holiday commentary, I was distracted by the death knoll of the Fourth Estate, “the last firewall between democracy and autocracy,” as one commentator put it after the Washington Post and the LA Times announced they would not run their planned pre-election endorsement of a presidential candidate.  It was a stunning blow to the principle of a free press, guaranteed by the Constitution, violated now by billionaire bullies Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, and Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the LA Times because they were afraid to upset Donald Trump.

Then another worry gnawed at me. It also involved Jeff Bezos, one of many mega-moguls deeply committed to the re-emergence of nuclear power plants to support their own interests. Bezos is part of a group of investors who have invested in a Canadian company that supports nuclear fusion for start-ups and has raised about $20 million dollars. Microsoft founder Bill Gates is also invested in nuclear energy because like Bezos he wants to be sure he has sufficient electricity to power his mega-business.

According to Nucnet.org, pro-nuke researchers have claimed a “watershed moment” in the development of nuclear fusion technology after “a powerful magnet that [could] hold the key to future generations of unlimited energy” was tested. MIT researchers called it a record-breaking event that opens a clear path to fusion power, “hailed by some as ‘the holy grail of clean energy.’”

Let’s remember the three largest nuclear accidents that have occurred as nuclear energy is being positioned as a scientific miracle. The 1979 Three Mile Island accident at a power plant in Pennsylvania caused a cooling malfunction that  led to part of a reactor core melting down, releasing  radioactive gas.

The 1986 Chernobyl accident was the result of a flawed reactor design operated by inadequately trained personnel, according to World Nuclear.org, which tends to whitewash health and other effects of  nuclear disasters.  Steam explosions and fires ensued releasing radioactive material into the environment. Deposits of radioactive materials spread to many parts of Europe. Thirty people died within weeks of the event and 5000 cases of thyroid cancers were reported, while over 350,000 people were evacuated. It was the largest controlled radioactive release into the environment ever recorded for a civilian operation.

In 2011 the second-largest nuclear accident happened after Japan suffered an earthquake on its coast. A tsunami followed affecting the power supply and cooling capability of three reactors and several spent nuclear fuel storage pools. The result was the release of radioactive material into the air and water, with over 100,000 people being evacuated from their homes. A decade later several towns remained off limits and recently Japan has had to deal with radioactive contamination in wastewater.

Today the United States is the world’s largest producer of nuclear energy and accounts for over 30 percent of global nuclear electricity generation. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2022 the U.S. had 55 operating nuclear power plants working in 28 states. Since then, some have been closed because of safety concerns, and the one in California is slated to discontinue operating in 2025.

The U.S. National Regulation Commission (NRC) licenses plants for 40 years and plant owners can apply for renewal up to 20 years, but  there is no limit on the number of times a license can be renewed. The NRC has approved license renewals for more than 75 percent of U.S. reactors, many of which have been running for 40 years already. One plant in Florida is seeking renewal of a plant that’s already 60 years old.

According to a staff attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council ( NRDC) nuclear team, “These aging nuclear reactors cannot complete economically with other low carbon energy sources … or with investments in energy efficiency. … New nuclear power plant designs are not proven to be safe, reliable, or economically viable.)   

The NRDC also worries about nuclear proliferation due to renewed and new nuclear power projects. They point out that countries capable of enriching uranium and reprocessing plutonium can manufacture nuclear warheads. Several countries have already stored materials and equipment that could be diverted to secret nuclear weapons programs. It’s frightening to note that the U.S currently stores over 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste disposal.  Most of it is kept where it was generated with no permanent disposal solution. 

The NRDC also notes that “with sea levels rising and increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events, both operational and decommissioned nuclear plants that store nuclear waste on-site are at risk.”  Already, 55 of 61 U.S. cites are not designed to withstand flooding hazards, which could create a situation like Japan’s disaster.

Jeff Bezos and his billionaire friends don’t mind putting us in danger so that they can realize more obscene profits. They don’t need to worry that word will get out about looming problems with nuclear plants that could feed their need for massive electricity. They know how to ensure it never appears in the major newspapers.  Just buy them up and tear them down.

After all, what’s the worst that could happen?

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 Elayne Clift writes and worries from Brattleboro, Vt. 

Taking Stock of Election Shock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming to Grips with Violence in America

Like so many others, I experienced huge relief when Vice President Kamala Harris emerged as the Democratic candidate for President in the forthcoming election. Watching her reveal her strengths as a competent politician, experienced leader, and likeable person lifted my hope for the future of this country, in both the short and long term.

My relief that we could return to political sanity, however, was tempered by the anxiety I’ve borne for months, fearing a reprise of violence once the election is over, no matter the results. I worry that we could see another insurrection at the Capital (or worse), and multiple acts of violence in a variety of other venues. It wouldn’t be the first time. The capital riots were stunning and terrifying but not all that surprising given the source. But the fact is our history is rife with political violence. The number of examples I found in researching the topic was stunning.

 One source revealed that the New York City draft riots of 1864 were the largest popular insurrection in American history. “Hundreds of young men poured into the streets to protest the federal draft lottery. The riots soon turned violent” and led to an uncontrolled mob burning homes, offices and other properties. The riots continued for four days until 4,000 federal troops ended the destruction and death.

And in 1898 2,000 armed white men spurred on by white supremacists rioted in Wilmington, North Carolina trashing the office of a Black newspaper, which resulted in dozens of Black people being killed. The mayor resigned along with several Black local leaders while thousands fled the city.

A hundred years later we saw political violence in the 1960s and 1970s, usually around social issues like civil rights, minorities, and abortion. And in the 21st century we actually experienced a nearly successful takeover of the United State government.

But America’s violent underbelly was present long before these kinds of acts. It was there from the beginning when we treated Native Americans so viciously, and it was there when we were wedded to slavery and lynching Black boys and men. Racist violence seems to be in our DNA. Just think about the brutal murders of everyone from Emmett Till to Martin Luther King, Jr. to George Floyd and all the others, male and female, in their homes, their cars, their beds, or just jogging down the street.

Violence in America also reveals itself in the form of sexual violence and abuse, whether in our local churches or in Hollywood, in bedrooms and workplaces, in department store changing rooms, schools, sports teams – the list is endless. The National Institutes of Health reveals that

“Family and domestic violence including child abuse, intimate partner abuse, and elder abuse is a common problem in the United States. Family and domestic health violence are estimated to affect 10 million people in the United States every year. It is a national public health problem, and virtually all healthcare professionals will at some point evaluate or treat a patient who is a victim of some form of domestic or family violence.”

Then there’s the epidemic of gun violence in America. Johns Hopkins University frames the problem as a public health emergency. “Firearm violence is a preventable public health tragedy affecting communities across the United States.” They reported that in 2022, over 48,000 people died by firearms in the U. S. That’s an average of one death every 11 minutes.  Almost 27,000 people died that year by firearm suicide and another nearly 20,000 died by firearm homicide. Then there were the unintentional gun injuries and deaths often caused by children or police.

There is violence in America’s prisons, violence against asylum seekers, continuing violence in the form of antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, racial profiling, and discriminations in everything from jobs, housing, restrooms and more. Each of these arenas of violence deserves legal, political, economic and human rights reform. 

There is another form of violence that is gender-based. It has been part of this country in largely invisible ways that often involve emotional vs. physical harm.  Take, for example, the fact that women did not get the right to vote until 1920, and that took a kind of activism that few could endure. Suffragists were tortured in prison for the right to have their voices heard and it took them decades to be granted that right – if they were white. 

In the 19th and 20th centuries women like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Clara Barton, and Jane Addams were considered ill, weak, hysterical or crazy and subjected to a brutalizing rest cure or incarcerated in mental asylums either by their husbands or by a male psychiatric establishment that killed them spiritually, and occasionally physically.

Today women still struggle to be recognized as competent leaders and professionals, to earn equal pay, to secure childcare, to avoid domestic or elder abuse, to escape sexual harassment, and to live autonomous lives, which includes the right to control their own bodies. All of that is a form of violence, based on power and control, aimed at women.

Taken together, these examples of violence in America remind us that there is so much work to be done to end the scourge of various violent oppressions. The time to start is now.

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt. 

Life in a Dysfunctional World

 Remember what it was like before our lives were ruled by algorithms, AI, autopay, QR codes, social media, virtual chats, usernames and passwords?

I remember when you could go to a store and a well-trained person was on hand to assist you if you couldn’t find what you were looking for. My dad owned a small haberdashery in a town where the customer was always right, the prices were fair, and the proprietor kept his patrons happy. It was a time when you paid your bills by check, queries were handled in person or by phone and disputes were quickly resolved, although they were infrequent.

By the time I went to college times were changing.  My father lost his business when box stores began appearing and being on your own took over. The chain stores quickly became ubiquitous, dotting the landscape with giant square buildings competing for customers.  

When I went to graduate school the Information Age with all its ramifications began taking shape. Precursors to cell phones excited folks even though giant computers were frustrating students who used them to do research that involved inserting stacks of cards into big machines.

Fast forward to the 21st century and you will understand the frustrations of living in an impersonal, stressful, infuriating new world. It’s one in which computers and corporations have taken over our lives and made artful obfuscation a new art. I experienced this in its highest form recently and my frustrated reaction makes Lady McBeth look relatively normal.

Here’s an example. When my husband and I traveled abroad I chose Air France to fly to Europe because I am terrified to set foot on a Boeing aircraft. Confirmation of our flights revealed in the fine print that our return flight was operated by Delta. That’s an American company I didn’t trust prior to Boeing planes scaring me out of the skies. I choose my Airlines carefully. It shouldn’t be up to the airline to decide which carrier I use.

When we boarded, we found ourselves ushered to Row 43, the last row in a huge jumbo jet, in front of the toilet. We had booked Row 22 and now there was no way to change seats. Why allow passengers to choose their seats if they can be arbitrarily changed?  The same thing happened on another internal Air France flight.

But the kicker was that our return flight was cancelled at the last minute, leaving us with a six-hour delay, and the need to overnight in a Boston hotel having missed our pre-paid bus to our car.

This was followed by numerous calls to Air France customer service, in which I encountered a stubborn virtual assistant. I persisted, voice raised, because by European Union law, we were entitled to a full refund for our return tickets.  It took threatening legal action before I finally received an email that the refund would be issued within 60 days. (It was).

Then I received my Verizon phone bill, which had overcharges of $220. To get credit, I talked to five agents over weeks, explaining that the international plan I’d purchased never worked. Additionally, despite not having signed up for the daily plan, my husband received twelve texts on his cell which shouldn’t have been there.

“Oh,” said the first agent, “he should have been on airplane mode.”  I explained that he hardly knows how to use a cell phone.  Each agent I spoke to read me the same script about customer care blah blah blah and assured, indeed promised, that those charges would be removed, and I’d be called back in a few days before my bill was due. None of them called.  It was all smoke, mirrors and lies. You’d think Donald Trump was the CEO.

When we moved house two years ago, Comcast gave us the wrong email addresses and landline number after I’d printed 500 business cards and alerted family and friends of our new contact information. We also went through hell trying to access everything from bank accounts to credit cards to companies who were paid by autopay because their websites wouldn’t recognize our usernames or passwords.  All this was followed by a hack that rendered me the “mad lady in the attic.”

There’s no end to this kind of dysfunction which holds us hostage in a dystopian tech world gone mad. Sadly, the future looks bleak given corporate power, lack of regulatory policies, and a frightening explosion of artificial intelligence.

I need all the strength I can muster to face the increasingly unfriendly world. But right now, I have to stop writing. Staples has finally called back to say my new laptop is ready.

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 Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt. 

Your Vote is Your Voice: It Matters More Than Ever

A little while ago I became so frustrated by the need for an effective media campaign on the part of the Democratic administration and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) to ensure that Donald Trump isn’t elected again that I wrote to the White House communications director and the Chief of Staff. I pointed out that there is a difference between political messaging and behavior change communication grounded in a methodology that has proven to be successful. As a communications professional (see bio line) I knew from my training and experience that a media advocacy and social marketing campaign aimed at persuasion was called for.

That’s when I decided to mount my own campaign on social media, various blogs, and my listserv, asking anyone who saw my posts to share them widely.

My idea was grounded in some essential elements of a successful behavior change strategy which could be easily replicated as bumper stickers, lawn posters, T-shirts, whatever, in the attempt to make the message simple, succinct, relevant, repetitive, actionable, and targeted to various audiences, – all components of a behavior change effort.  I also used the essential elements of a consistent visual and a tag line which would vary slightly each time I released another banner.  

I began posting the banners recently; the first three are Vote for Democracy; Vote to Defeat Tyranny, and Vote for Freedom. The visual is a headshot of Joe Biden. Each month between now and the election I will be posting variations on the overall theme of the importance of voting in November.  The idea is that we must maintain our democratic form of government and defeat the insanity of a second Trump term, irrespective of our personal politics – (if you would like to receive the messages to share, please message me on my blog:  www.elayne-clift.com/blog )

To that end I researched the Republican document, Project 2025, because so few people realize its horrific implications should Trump be elected.

Project 2025 proposes overhauls to every federal agency and office.  These project plans circumvent Congress and the courts. Prepared by 34 authors including Ken Cuccinelli, Peter Navarro, and Ben Carson, along with 31 other hard right Trump devotees, the “Mandate” has 30 chapters and is over 900 pages.  The introduction offers a “Conservative Promise” as the opening salvo of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, launched by The Heritage Foundation and their many partners in 2022. Its chapters lay out copious clear, concrete, terrifying policies and rules for White House offices, Cabinet departments, Congress, agencies, commissions, and boards.

Here are the four guiding principles of the Plan articulated in the Introduction:.

1.  Family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.

2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.

3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.

4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.” the principles that by consensus guide the crafting of this document:

Numerous sections go on to share the mandate’s ambitions, goals and specific objectives. These include “Taking the Reins of Government,” beginning with pages and pages of details, including how the Executive branch of government, i.e., the White House staff and offices, and various commissions and councils would be established, staffed, and run.

Some of the agencies subject to terrifying changes, if not total obliteration, include the National Security Council, the National Economic Council, the Office of Science and Technology, and the National Space Council. Other sections pontificate on Gender Policy in ways that demean and diminish women and girls, Civil Rights and Liberties that are severely limiting and racist, Cyber Security and Intelligence agencies in which career civil servants with necessary expertise would be replaced by political appointees.  FEMA, Department of Defense, along with departments that establish public health, immigration and education policies would be dangerously revamped, while the media, foreign policy, and the climate crisis would be severely curtailed. We’ve already seen signs of threatening changes in all sectors. Each of these section and more, including the “General Welfare” section, offer shocking visions that should alarm every American.

As a BBC News report revealed in June, “Project 2025 calls for firing thousands of civil servants, expanding the power of the president, and dismantling [several] federal agencies.”  Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), who is launching a counter project to stop Project 2025 said in the report, “Project 2025is more than an idea, it’s a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state- separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates ”public will.”

The threat to our democracy doesn’t get clearer than that. So although no one can be expected to plow through this deranged and dangerous document, it’s important to be aware of its specific plans and the impacts each American will be subjected to should Donald Trump win this election. Our fundamental freedoms, our ability to live in a country free of restrictions designed by the lunatic fringe, our safety – indeed our lives, our respect in the global community, and our hopes for peaceful resolution of conflicts that could avoid an unimaginable third world war are on the ballot this year. Our future, and that of our progeny, depends on each of us being fully informed and voting for a future of safety, sanity, and sustainability irrespective of party affiliation.

Please take the time to become familiar with what is at stake and share it widely.

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 Elayne Clift has a master’s degree in communication. She was Deputy Director of a global Health Communication project for five years, and taught Health Communications at the Yale School of Public Health.  She writes from Brattleboro, Vt. 

Were We the Lucky Ones?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.

Communal Living Makes a Comeback

Some years ago, when I turned fifty, I gathered with my BFFs (Best Female Friends) to celebrate the milestone that each of us would reach that year.  It was a joyous and somewhat raucous Croning Celebration at a beach house that led to many more such times over the years. At one of our meetups, we got the idea that when we were old, we should have a Crone cottage together, staffed by a cook, a housekeeper, and a gardener (who some suggested could double as a toy boy). We would each have our own room but share communal space and camaraderie. It was a great idea, and we thought it was an original one, but that proved not to be true.

We’d forgotten that convents had preceded us. In the Middle Ages life was tough for females and convent living was a way out. There was a kind of freedom there, intellectually, educationally, and even politically, at least within the church, and sometimes the wider community. According to the National Museum in Zurich, Medieval nuns were not all living a simple ascetic life. Catherine of Sienna (1347 – 1380) is an example of women who evaded marriage (and childbearing). She chose to enter a convent and became an important voice in matters of church policy.

Later I learned about Beguines. They were part of lay religious groups for women in northern Europe during the Middle Ages. They led spiritual lives but didn’t join religious orders. The first group, comprised of upper-class women, started living communally in the late 12th century. They engaged in social and economic problems and supported themselves by nursing, sewing, and lace-making.While promising chastity while living with other similarly dedicated women they were free to return to the wider community and to marry, which would end their affiliation. Some claim, perhaps glibly, that these women were “the world’s oldest women’s movement.” Several of these women’s groups still exist in Europe, some of which are UNESCO World Heritage sites.

More recently, given housing costs and the cost of elder care, along with the challenges of finding one-floor living and the growing problem of homelessness, isolation and the need for support and friendship, the idea of group housing is becoming attractive again, especially for women.

In the UK, co-housing communities exclusively for women are becoming popular. An article in The Guardian last year revealed that a group of women in their fifties to nineties had set up such a community near a theatre, a patisserie, and other amenities in a suburb of London. As one of the women told the reporter, brothers, sons and lovers were welcome as visitors, “but they can’t live here!”

Many of these women, who live in individual apartments, work, volunteer, or remain active in the larger community in various ways. As the reporter noted upon visiting the women, “No one here bears any resemblance to the stereotypes of senior citizens.” Added a resident, “You can’t define us as old!”

These women fiercely reject the notion that they are a commune. They simple refer to their living arrangement as co-housing among a group of women who are “fiercely opposed to ageism and paternalism.”

A friend of mine lived happily with seven other professional women in two large houses for several years. Their ages varied but they could all relate to the various reasons for co-housing.  Last year they’d had enough of American life given the political situation, so they moved to France, where they now live in two houses again. Each is well-traveled, unafraid of new adventures, and clever about reinventing themselves. The have found or developed ways to work there – one is fluent in French and the others get by -- and they enjoy exploring their new country and making new friends. This model is unusual because it means adjusting to a different culture, and not everyone over fifty would find that inviting or viable, but it speaks to the array of ways to live in a shared-housing community.

My Crone group is now well past fifty and our Crone cottage hasn’t happened. It’s no longer likely to become a reality, but we still think about it so who knows?

One thing is certain: It’s an idea that is growing and it makes a lot of sense. As one woman who has managed co-housing settings told The Guardian, “People who are attracted to co-housing usually want purposeful closeness to their neighbors as a big part of their lives. It’s not just about alleviating loneliness – it allows people to become part of an ecosystem of families and individuals.”

Almost two years ago my husband and I moved from a rural setting to a smaller home closer to town and we really got lucky. The street we now live on feels like a co-housing community.  The individual little houses that we and others inhabit all make living on one floor possible, we are all in the same age group, and our neighbors are wonderful people who all look out for each other. I sometimes refer to it as a geriatric hippy commune (we’re all liberals), but really, it’s simply a great way to be in community as well as a participant in an ecosystem of families.

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It's Time to Confront Violence Against Women

“Do you know how it feels to get smacked around?”

“He abused me psychologically to the point that I wasn’t able to talk or think by myself.”

“I was told I was worthless. Abuse made me feel I’m nothing.”

“I asked my mom why indigenous women were being murdered. I wanted to be a boy. No one should be scared to be an Indigenous girl or woman. Please don’t let it happen to me.”

Those are some of the heart-wrenching testimonies on the walls of two collaborative museum exhibits that commemorate missing and murdered Native American women and victims of domestic violence. The exhibits, Portraits in Red by artist Nayana LaFond, and Voices by Cat Del Buono are powerful and important.

LaFond’s work is deeply personal. She is a citizen of the Metis Nation of Ontario and a descendant of the Anishinaabe and other indigenous groups and she is a survivor of domestic violence. “In indigenous cultures art is medicine,” she explains. “I see the work I do as sacred.”   

LaFond began painting the portraits when she painted an Indigenous woman from Saskatchewan who had survived violence. The woman appears strong and powerful, despite a red handprint over her mouth, which became iconic. “Red is believed to be the only color spirits can see in most indigenous cultures so I paint them the way a spirit would see them,” the artist explains.

 Subsequently she posted a call on the website of a Pow Wow held annually to commemorate the Day of Remembrance for Missing and Murdered Indigenous People. It changed her life and launched the Portraits in Red project. Offering to create similar portraits for other indigenous women at no cost, she had thousands of hits in no time from native women all over North America. Her portrait work grew exponentially with the women she paints having one thing in common; each of the women shares a symbolic red hand over their mouths, symbolizing violence and silencing. The women range in age; many wearing traditional dress. All of them offer a stunning wakeup call.

“When you’ve experienced something like these women have you want to claim yourself again,” LaFond says. “You want to speak up and be heard in a safe way. That’s why I do this work. I am claiming my own experience and turning it into something positive. I hope I’m creating change.”

“Voices,” an ongoing project by social change filmmaker Cat Del Buono, is a video collection based on more than a hundred interviews she has conducted with survivors of domestic abuse since 2013.  In the videos one sees only the mouths of women speaking and thus becomes part of an intimate, deeply sad conversation as women share their stories. Their voices serve to humanize and expose the travesty of domestic violence while encouraging others in need of help.

“The immersive nature of the exhibit reveals the enormity and the pain of domestic violence,” Del Buono says. “It’s powerful. It helps viewers understand that domestic violence doesn’t discriminate, it affects all ages and social classes. It isn’t just ‘their’ problem. It’s a society problem that urgently needs to be addressed.”

These two collaborative exhibits break the silence that surrounds violence and abuse that women suffer in larger numbers than we think. To see them together is to witness the enormity of the domestic violence crisis that goes far beyond North America and is pervasive in all cultures, classes, and communities. The statistics are staggering.

 About 4 out of 5 Native women have experienced violence. They are twice as likely than most other women to experience violence and they face murder rates 11 times the national average. The murder rate for Native women is about three times more than that of most other women. 98% of Indigenous people experience violence in their lifetime.

 There is only a six percent prosecution rate. In 2016, there were 5,712 incidents of missing and murdered Native American and Alaskan Native women but only 116 cases were logged into the DOJ data base. Sixty percent of the number of cases between 2005 and 2009 involving sexual abuse in Native communities were never prosecute by U.S. attorneys. On some reservations 96 percent of sexual violence cases against Native women were committed by non-Natives. non-Natives.

 According to Cat Del Buono, the data on domestic violence is equally staggering. On average, nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the U.S. One in four women will be a victim of severe domestic violence in her lifetime; every nine seconds a woman is assaulted or beaten. Chillingly, one in five women in the U.S. has been raped in her lifetime, almost half of them by an acquaintance.

 Myths about domestic violence are untrue and pervasive, according to a YWCA “End the Silence” campaign in Spokane, Washington.  For example, “Domestic violence only happens to women.”  “Drugs alcohol, stress and mental illness cause DV.”  “Abusers are just out to control and need anger management.” “DV is always physical abuse.”  “If a victim doesn’t leave, it must not be that bad or they are ok with how they are being treated.”

 The fact is that all kinds of violence, against women especially, surrounds us and not enough attention is being paid to stopping it. We urgently need policy changes at every level of governance, serious and effective gun legislation, long overdue changes in the judicial system, educational programs that raise awareness of the epidemic of violence and abuse in all their forms, and sufficient resources at the community (and reservation) level aimed at prevention, identifying perpetrators, and sufficient resources to stop the scourge.

 As Cat Del Buono and Nayana LaFond know, “this is a societal problem that urgently needs to be addressed.” Their deeply important artistic work is a monument to those women who are alive and still waiting for an end to violence, and to their missing and murdered sisters. Let International Women’s Day remind us of that.

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A Marriage Survives Culture, Religion, and Time

Not long ago, my husband and I celebrated our 50th anniversary. What’s more impressive in this time of division is that we are of different cultures – my husband is British – and religions: I’m Jewish and he was raised in the Church of England. That means we beat the odds that something would go awry, but we got lucky.

 As bi-relationships go, our situation might seem unremarkable. Neither of us is bisexual, nor is ours a biracial marriage. Even the bicultural aspect of our marriage is not as difficult as it might be if, say,  I were from Bosnia and my husband was from Bhutan. Still, our marriage has been more challenging than many people might suppose.

 The first signs of our cultural differences began appearing early in our relationship. My husband worked at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. back then and we lived the diplomatic life that dominates that city. Our social scene was formal and obligatory, with dinner parties comprised of colleagues and their spouses, carefully balanced by gender so that seating arrangements alternated males and females.

 For a few years after we married, I was happy with that sort of thing. About twice a month we entertained, if not lavishly, at least with panache. Our candlelit table was set with flowers, fine china, and inherited silver, and salad followed the main course European style. In the early days I kept a guest book, though I shudder to confess it. But I drew the line at “hotting the plates” – a tradition in England so that hot food isn’t placed on cold dishes. Similarly, one heats the teapot before brewing tea, and “bring the pot to the kettle.”

 Eventually I drew the line at living in Washington. Once we escaped the diplomatic scene my husband began to accept American informality. We hosted picnics and barbeques, but there were still challenges, one of them being my cardinal sin; I used  paper plates and plastic utensils at picnics. “It’s tacky,” my beloved said. “It’s a picnic!” I responded. “You’re supposed to use disposables at a picnic. Otherwise, it’s a dinner party on grass!”

 Food rituals were not our only point of contention. There were honor codes and language issues, humor, and personal habits to be reconciled. My husband once nearly threatened divorce because he thought I had tried to cheat British Rail when the conductor neglected to collect my ticket on a trip back to London from Devon. “Look!” I said. “The conductor didn’t take my ticket. We can get the money back!” I felt like I’d  won at Ascot. His take was different. “Absolutely not,” he exclaimed. In his best British accent, he chastised me and said I was being dishonest. Filled with guilt I felt like a true miscreant.

 As for language, I can’t recount the number of times I had to translate for our children when they were young. The boot, the biscuit, and the bypass all had to be interpreted. Bangers and mash needed explaining. “Taking the mickey” and “a piss up in a brewery” begged for deconstruction. No wonder our offspring took pride in their linguistic capabilities, my daughter claiming to be bilingual at the age of five. “I speak two languages,” she boasted proudly. “English and American.”

 On the issue of humor (humour), suffice to say that my life partner still doubles over with mirth when he watches John Cleese reruns of Faulty Towers. He finds Mr. Bean and Monty Python hilarious, leaving me to marvel at how puerile he can be. In his defense, however, he can quote Shakespeare, Wordsworth and the War Poets. I don’t know one American who can do all that.

 Over the years, we have evolved nicely. He no longer worries when I ask guests to pour their own drinks and I’ve become used to the soiled handkerchief he tucks under his pillow every night. He finds potluck suppers fun now and when I cheat the system occasionally, he applauds so long as I’ve done it out of sense of justice. For the most part we now speak the same lingo and laugh at the same jokes. We celebrate Chanukah, Christmas and Passover with equal ecumenical and cultural enthusiasm.

 I seldom “get my knickers in a twist” over little things and I love being called “Darling.”  I wouldn’t dream of Sunday nights without Masterpiece Theatre. I adore scones and my hubby swoons over a good hamburger.

 After 50 years I treasure the traditions we’ve built, inspired by the best that both sides of the Atlantic have to offer. As I look back over our time together I’m reminded of an epic poem called “The White Cliffs” by Alice Duer Miller, an American woman who married a Brit just before World War I. “I am American bred,” she wrote. “I have seen much to hate [in England], much to forgive. But in a world in which there is no England, I do not wish to live.”

 Nor would I have wanted to live my life in a world without a certain Englishman, because marriage is hard enough. At least I’ve had my share of life with someone who “has the good manners of educated Englishmen,” as American writer Margaret Halsey wrote. “It’s all so heroic,” she said. It’s also, despite the challenges of any long term relationship, warm and wonderful, and with very few exceptions, jolly good fun.

Are We Facing the End of Free Speech?

CEOs from major businesses in the U.S. demand that Harvard University release the names of students from 30 student organizations who signed a letter casting blame on Israel for the attacks by Hamas. The business leaders further urged the university to provide names of the signatories with photographs so that students who signed the letter would not be hired once they leave Harvard. Students began immediately to take back their signatures, as Axios and The Guardian reported.

 A law firm withdraws its job offer to a New York York University law student, president of the Student Bar Association, who wrote in the Association’s bulletin, “This [Israeli] regime of state-sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary,” claiming that she made “inflammatory comments” that “profoundly conflict with [our] values.

 edish climate activist Greta Thunberg and 26 others are charged by British police in London for joining a protest outside an oil and gas conference. The charge? “Failing to comply with a condition imposed under section 14 of the Public Order Act,” according to the London Metropolitan police.

 In England police have made dozens of arrests after protests across the UK arose in the aftermath of Hamas terrorist attacks and Israel’s response. Many protesters are unsure whether they can now carry placards or wear symbols, or join in chants after

Suella Braverman, a member of the Conservative Party who became the UK Home Secretary in 2022, wrote to chief constables in England and Wales saying that waving a Palestinian flag or singing to advocate for Arab freedom might be a criminal offence. “I would encourage police to consider whether chants such as ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ should be understood as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world, and whether its use … may amount to a racially aggravated … public order offence,” she said

An increasing number of countries are resorting to force and legislation to crush protests, treating them as a threat rather than a right, as Amnesty International points out. “Peaceful protest is a right, not a privilege, and one that states have a duty to respect, protect and  facilitate.”

 In Washington, DC 49 Jewish demonstrators in front of the White House, including rabbis, were arrested urging President Biden to call for a ceasefire on his recent trip to Israel. Their charge? Crossing safety barriers and blocking entrances. And a recent post on social media revealed that the U.S. State Department has instructed ambassadors and other government officials not to use words like “de-escalation, ceasefire, end to violence, restoring calm and bloodshed.” The post has since been taken down.

 These are troubling signs that in this country the Constitution’s First Amendment is being ignored or violated. As a reminder, here is what the Amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” (emphasis mine).

Arresting protestors making their voices heard in peaceful ways is a dangerous travesty wherever it happens, but it is particularly egregious in a country that prides itself on “the rule of law.” In this time of terror and rapidly escalating international conflict America’s leadership and example could not be more urgent. Calls for a cease fire and an end to killing fields where both sides have become tragic victims is not an act of violence. Nor is it a display of national allegiance. It’s much bigger and more urgent than that. It is a call for restraint, human rights, and shared humanity in the face of unleashed rage and hopelessness.

That collective rage, fear and hopelessness threatens the future we wish for our progeny, whether we are American, Israeli or Palestinian.  We cannot move forward in a world in which a slaughter of innocents, no matter where they live, continues. We can’t make progress in the name of peace without allowing all of us to inhabit land we love because our roots are there. We can’t make peace if we are continually oppressed, and myopic in our views. And we cannot move forward if we cling to limited views of right and wrong, framed by the concept of winners and losers, power and weakness.

The struggles we face are not a matter of politics, persuasion, or power.  They are about people; ordinary people who all matter. In this time of conflict of biblical proportion, a time when history could lead us to the table of resolution, let us not seek to silence those calling out for – indeed begging for - compassion, intelligent discourse and wise decisions free of partisanship.

Let us remember that our voices are not weapons. They are instead our monuments and our roadmap to a sane future for all of us.  No one should be punished for raising them.

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, VT. www.elayne-clift.com

Why is Holocaust Denial Growing?

This month Jews everywhere marked the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur to welcome our New Year. They are solemn days and a time for renewal shared with family and friends every year, even by the most secular Jewish people.

As a child I was moved by those days when I stood with my parents and siblings in our small synagogue and listened to the Hebrew prayers being chanted. I loved hearing the Shofar blown on Rosh Hashana and the time for reflection and hope at Yom Kippur, a day of atonement when we forgive ourselves for the past year’s transgressions and promise to do better in the coming year. I crafted a poem about these annual rituals some years ago as I remembered years gone by.

In that poem called “Kol Nidre” – the mournful prayer that marks Yom Kippur - I wrote this (edited) verse: “Kol Nidre  and I am bound to every Jew, in every place, at every time…and in every corner of the globe [where] a Jew is standing, swaying, weeping, praying…I stand beside the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, and in the camps, and I am with the Jews of pogroms,… Kol Nidre, and I am everywhere and in every time there is a Jew to remember.”

Later I wrote another poem. It was inspired by my learning that I was born in the same month as the fall of the Krakow Ghetto. A month later the Warsaw Ghetto collapsed. “It happened over and over again, until the black saber of the Holocaust disemboweled European Jewry,” I wrote, imagining myself in Anne Frank’s attic, and wondered “if I would have had the courage, the cunning, the chutzpah to survive?” I imagined what it must have been like in Kracow and Waraw and Auschwitz “because I was born a Jew.” “I might have been among them, racing for a cellar, a closet, a bed cover. Anywhere where they could not, will not find me.”

I share those excerpts because both of my parents had fled pogroms in Ukraine with their families when they were children early in the 20th century, simply because they were Jewish. I share them because the pogroms and the Holocaust are part of my history and my heritage. I share them because I’ve read Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankl and copious other writers who wrote true Holocaust stories. I share them because I’ve been to Yad Vashem and Holocaust museums and memorials here and in Europe, and I share them this year because for the first time I was afraid to attend High Holy Days services given the increase in anti-Semitism and the increasing denial of the Holocaust.

An April program on PBS’s News Hour reported that “antisemitism rose in the U.S. last year and shows little sign of abating worldwide,” according to researchers. Last year a similar study reported that “2021 set a new high for antisemitic incidents, and in some countries, most alarmingly the United States, it intensified.” Additionally, the Anti Defamation League (ADL) reported that the number of antisemitic incidents in the U.S. increased by more than 35 percent in the past year.

A survey reported in The Atlantic titled “The World Is Full of Holocaust Deniers,” almost ten years ago found that only 54 percent of the world’s population had heard of the Holocaust. Let that sink in: 54 percent, in 2014.  Only a third of the world’s world population at that time believed the genocide had been accurately described in historical counts and 30 percent of survey respondents thought that “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.”

Today the problem is exacerbated by social media and the Internet where misinformation, memes, and hate-filled posts that perpetuate antisemitism and Holocaust denial are proliferating.  Most sites have done little to end this travesty in the name of free speech and debate. For example, Facebook and Twitter enacted weak policies prohibiting Holocaust denials a few years ago but as of this year, they continue to allow dangerous content on their sites. And they are not the only ones.

In 2022 the United Nations approved a resolution stating that genocide “will be forever a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice.”  Israel’s ambassador to the UN at the time went a bit further. A grandson of Holocaust victims, he said “the world lives in an era in which fiction is now becoming fact and the Holocaust is becoming a distant memory. Holocaust denial has spread like a cancer, and it has spread under our watch.”

The resolution and the rhetoric of politicians and diplomats seems to have had little impact. Holocaust denial and distortions are growing, and they are stunning, while antisemitism has risen in many countries. The Netherlands is one of them.

A government minister there made this statement at a cabinet meeting in July this year: “Denial of these kinds of heinous crimes against humanity is commonplace. …This … should not be left unaddressed, as the lesson of the Holocaust is not just a history lesson. It affects the here and now. … It is about good and evil.

He’s right of course. But we need more than words and resolutions to stop the scourge that has so many Jews frightened. We need to bear witness as the few remaining survivors of Auschwitz and other death camps give testimony. We need to read the books of Holocaust writers and to look at the photos and write poems. We need political action and responsible information platforms. And we need it all now so that we can feel safe - simply because we are Jewish.

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.

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. 

The Horror of Healthcare Financing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Suffer the Little Children

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Will the U.S. Have Post Election Buyer's Remorse?

After Great Britain formally withdrew from the European Union nearly two years ago, a move known as Brexit, it didn’t take long for those who voted for withdrawal from the economic agreement among European nations to regret their decision. Similarly, it took only six weeks for the British electorate to regret having voted for Liz Truss as Prime Minister, a post she was forced to leave after just six weeks in office.  Both the Brexit decision and the appointment of Truss were achieved by Britain’s conservative party and its leadership, both of which will likely fall to the labor party in the next election if not sooner.

With U.S. midterm elections upon us, one can’t help wondering if we too will experience buyer’s remorse in the months to come if our now dangerous and dystopian conservative party wins a majority in either or both Congressional chambers, and/or state and local offices.

How that could happen is incredible to those of us among the majority of American voters, not all of whom are radically left leaning, given what we know is at stake. How, we ask ourselves, can people vote against their own interests? How could they not realize what will happen if the Republican party succeeds in promulgating hideous legislation that blatantly favors the wealthy and the white, while punishing workers and women, as well as multitudes of others? How could they prioritize gas prices over fascism?

It isn’t just America’s elderly, poor, black and brown people, disabled citizens, and children who will suffer most. It’s females whose bodies will be owned by the state. It’s the LBGTQ community who will not be able to marry the person they love. It’s increasing gun violence and domestic terrorism. It’s banned and burned books, control of school curricula, inaccessible quality healthcare in a time of unending pandemics. It’s the continuation of a failing infrastructure that could cost lives, and threats to the planet on which we all live.

The answer to the question “how could that happen here?” is that the demise of democracy as we know it at risk because white supremacy and institutionalized racism –fascism’s core – has existed since America was founded. It’s the foundation of privilege built by orchestrated fear of, control over, and willful punishment directed at immigrants, indigenous people, people of color and other cultures, and those who disagree with dangerously selfish and destructive power grabs by narcissistic maniacs and their acolytes who want a share of wealth and power. At its worst it condemns, attacks, imprisons, deports, and one way or another eliminates “the Other.”

Should Republicans come into power legislators like Rick Scott of Florida will work to promote his “Rescue America” plan which sound great, but really means that Social Security and Medicare would be renegotiated every five years and could ultimately be so diminished that our elders will be doomed to live in poverty and possibly die from lack of needed healthcare.

South Carolina’s Lindsay Graham and other Republicans want to see “entitlement reform” which means steep cuts to Social Security along with a raised retirement age. Medicare, Medicaid, and badly needed prescription drug reform, including the right to negotiate prices with Big Pharma and cap insulin cost would be compromised at best. Meanwhile Marco Rubio is waiting to repeal President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that among other things caps prescription costs for Medicare beneficiaries.

Kevin McCarthy, who would be Speaker of the House should Republicans win, is threatening to hold the U.S. debt limit hostage to policy changes, even though it was Republicans who added massively to the national debt because of their tax cuts to corporations and obscenely wealthy individuals.

Basically, Republicans simply want to reverse, nullify, limit, or kill all the achievements of the Biden Administration, US citizens be damned.

America as we’ve known it is truly at risk in a way that most of us have never known or acknowledged in our lifetimes, despite the fact that racism and white supremacy have always been part of our life and legacy. It is time now, before it’s too late for generations to come, that we recognize the underbelly of our country in order to save it and make it whole, and that we ensure common cause so that we can grow and thrive as a free and feeling nation.

Politically, we have two kinds of needs. The first is practical. The second is strategic. Right now, voting is a practical need that is immediate, easy to do with quick results. It’s not as controversial as strategic needs which include long term work and social change, like giving women the right to vote. Strategic needs are aimed at equity, freedom, and democracy. We have to address them too, but they will not be easy or quick.

Our task now is to embrace voting to save what we value. That right and responsibility has never been more urgent. But our responsibility doesn’t end with voting. It begins there and leads to doing the hard work of defending, perpetuating, and securing democracy. Only then can we recover from our present trauma and begin to rebuild a stronger, better nation that is sustainable, inclusive, equitable, and empathetic than the one we find ourselves in at this crucial moment.

The Life Force of Livid Women is at Work

In 1995 when activist, advocate and former Congresswoman Bella Abzug uttered these words at the 4th World Conference of Women in Beijing, thousands of women there and everywhere felt the force of her words: “Women will change the nature of power, power will not change the nature of women. Never underestimate the importance of what we are doing. Never give in and never give up!”

Recently, when I quoted those words to a group of adult learners in recounting United Nations conferences focusing on women that had occurred over 20 years between 1975 and the Beijing conference, some participants struggled to understand what Abzug meant about the nature of power as it relates to gender.  For several days I pondered their questions searching for clarity in how to respond. Then on October 3rd something happened that helped me articulate an answer.

That was the day Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first Black woman to be seated on the Supreme Court of the United States, and I realized that the three critical voices of dissent on the badly damaged highest court in our county would now be women’s voices. Their intelligent, impassioned collective legal analysis would still be in the Court’s minority, but having them there, “speak[ing] truth to nonsense” as legal journalist Dahlia Lithwick, author of the new book Lady Justice puts it, highlights a watershed moment in which the nature of power for both women and men is shifting, not symbolically but in real terms, representing a new understanding of how women are reshaping how we live.

Described as “a beacon to generations” in one account of her first day on the bench, it was not lost on legal scholars, and many women, that Justice Jackson has arrived at the Supreme Court at a critical and necessary time. Her effectiveness as a voice of dissent, reminiscent of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s, was apparent when with quiet authority she offered to “bring some enlightenment” to a provision in the Clean Water Act in her response to an attorney hoping to kill the Act.

The voices of women like Justice Jackson and Dahlia Lithwick, inside and out of courtrooms, speak volumes to multitudes of women and their advocates in a time when females are being dragged back to a full throttled misogyny so devoid of understanding, compassion, and justice and so deeply punitive and threatening it boggles the mind.

That’s why acts of resistance like the one Iran’s women are bravely mounting with global support have always existed, whether over female sexuality, the quest for freedom, need for voting rights and economic security, or egregious political acts of injustice. Women in vast numbers through the ages have had enough. They are tired of being silenced, rendered invisible, and metaphorically burned at the stake. They’ve had enough of being told to calm down when revealing their consciousness and attempts at social justice based on lived experience, whether in capitals, courtrooms or communities. They’re exhausted from abuses in the marketplace, the academy, the home, and the mine fields of micro-aggression. They are more ready than ever to self-advocate in the face of misogyny driven violence, abuse and poverty while rejecting discrimination, deprivation, and  unrealistic expectations.

In a recently published LitHub article about her new book Dahlia Lithwick captures this frustration while interviewing numerous women who worked within the legal system. One of them was Anita Hill, who shared this personal story about giving a presentation on Supreme Court decisions. “A young white man said, ‘Aren’t you being a little paranoid? You act as though the sky is falling.’” Hill replied, “Here’s a list [of examples]. You tell me when the sky is falling.” Later she realized “it wasn’t just that the sky was falling. It was because we don’t live under the same sky.” Lithwick adds, “I realized that much like the 6-3 conservative supermajority that now controls the court, they simply don’t live under the same sky.”

Therein, Hill and Lithwick capture a key problem. As Lithwick puts it, addressing charges of paranoia and hysteria, “The mirror image of telling a woman you believe her is telling her she is being hysterical. … That is the real problem when women’s pain is substituted for actual justice.” And as she points out, “our very presence is outrageous. The fact that we even say anything is a sign of resistance.”

It is that resistance to insults and dismissal that I think Bella Abzug was reaching for when she spoke of gendered power in 1995. She knew, of course, that not all the world’s women would be with her along with the thousands of women who came to Beijing, nor would they all welcome the change women so badly need. But she also understood that for millennia, power has been the purview and prerogative of men, a notion that has been considered a social norm, despite women having always been a profound presence seeking justice and human rights, rendering themselves a thorn in the side of patriarchal power.

Women’s voices and calls for justice are always fundamental to resisting imposed silence, so Bella’s clarion call to a fatigued sisterhood who needed to be infused with new energy and hope was deeply important in that moment. It’s also why Judge Jackson’s presence on the Supreme Court now, along with Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, is so very important. 

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Elayne Clift writes about women, politics and social justice from Brattleboro, Vt.