Welcome to the Gilded Age

It’s déjà vu all over again. The robber barons are back. The wealthy have their cottages by the sea in the Hamptons, in international mansions, and at Mara Lago instead of Newport. Their yachts are shining and staffed while rivers of money flow from the coffers of billionaires who escape paying taxes and offer their obscene wealth in exchange for political favor and power. Clearly, we are once again a nation of prospering oligarchs and exploited paupers.

The glittering Gilded Age that reached its apex between 1880 and 1920 was a golden era of opulent architecture, extravagant fashion, expensive art, and expansive parties. Built on the economic growth that occurred following the Civil War and Reconstruction businessmen and bankers made out like bandits by investing in railroads, factories, and various industries that produced the raw materials needed for the development of innovative inventions that enabled mass production.

That led to “conspicuous consumption,” a term coined by a social critic at the time.  Mark Twain, who dubbed the era the “Gilden Age,” was among other critics troubled by the growing disparity between social classes.

While some in the monied class applied their wealth to building libraries, museums and public improvements in large cities (often prodded to do so by their wives), they overlooked the dark side of the needs of those who were on the other end of the social and economic spectrum. For example, they overlooked child labor, dangerous working conditions, and the exploitation of immigrant workers.

The Vanderbilts, Astors, and Carnegies looked the other way, ignoring life in the tenements of New York City and factories like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where the 1911 fire killed 146 trapped young women workers. Journalist and social reformer Jacob Riis brought the reality  of these travesties to light in stark photographs of slums, schools, factories, public health, and more in his photographic collection, How the Other Half lives housed at the Library of Congress.

Among today’s most recognized magnates and robber barons are three of the wealthiest and most morally corrupt men in America. Their enormous wealth and lack of social conscience makes their predecessors seem tame.

Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon and owns the Washington Post is heavily invested in Uber, AirBnB, and X has a net worth of US$ 236 billion, while Amazon employees earn about $15 an hour despite the physical demands of the job and expectations about productivity. Amazon also continues to ban unions and illegally fires workers for trying to organize them. He also has had workplaces patrolled for signs of unionizing activity.  It’s positively Dickensian.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, is heavily invested in SpaceX, and owns X (formerly Twitter). He has Bezos beat in terms of net worth. According to Forbes, which tracks this kind of thing, Musk is worth over $420 billion.

Mark Zuckerberg is the third wealthiest man in America with a net worth of nearly $218 billion. He became a billionaire at the age of 23.  Owner of Meta, formerly Facebook, his latest travesty is ending fact checking on his social media platforms and that’s not the worst of it.  

Billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk are faux philanthropists who donate minimally to various pet organizations.  No libraries or museums for them. Just space capsules, AI, and a seat at high tables.

As Lasa Liberator points out, “they are often held up by the media as shining examples of philanthropists, but the reality is none of them has a foundation or philanthropic organization. By donating limited amounts of immense wealth, their public relations people argue they are changing the world for the better. That’s what they would like you to believe. While this philanthropy may seem generous from the outside, it is more often than not a ploy for the world’s wealthiest to dodge taxes, [or a way to]boost their public image, and increase their net worth, all while rarely doing that much actual good “along the way.

These newly anointed oligarchs, and others like them, are wedded to power, prestige, and political influence. They will do anything to curry favor. That makes them dangerous in ways that their forerunners were not, especially in a time of autocracy, patronage, and a good deal of pathology.

In this Gilden Age we are led into a different kind of conspicuous consumption. It’s one that consumes lies and clings to false narratives while ignoring history, facts, and good governance. It overlooks social justice issues like child labor which has made a comeback, as well as exploitive unsafe working conditions, especially for immigrants who mange not to be deported.

It burns the budgets that could help provide adequate housing, better schools, accessible healthcare and vital safety nets. It allows food and water to be contaminated because the ruling class doesn’t have to eat or drink what the lower classes do. It returns women to the Victorian age of silence and servitude.

Today’s robber barons and their elite political allies not only steal dignity and hope; they put us at great risk and conspire against anything that is fair and forward thinking while serving their own selfish purposes.  As Eugene Debs put it during the last Gilded Age, “"The time has come to regenerate society [while] we are on the eve of universal change."

 # # # 

Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt. 

Health, Hunger, Housing: A Deadly Trifecta

As inauguration day approaches, trepidation and diverse emotions are running high.  In anticipation of what awaits us, given Donald Trump’s dubious appointments of unqualified sycophants, worries loom large about multiple possible dysfunctions. Among the sectors that are likely to be dramatically impacted are healthcare, hunger, and the housing crisis, each of which impacts the others.   

When it comes to growing fears about healthcare in a country already challenged by a broken system nothing speaks louder about how bad things could get than the lionization of Luigi Mangione, who killed the CEO of United Healthcare on a Manhattan street.

Three  New York Times columnists weighed in on what that event revealed about “the intense rage people feel toward insurance companies,” and what they said is important. As Zeynip Tufekci put it, “Dealing with health insurance companies when you’re vulnerable and knowing that a company is profiting off you is a visceral, enraging experience.” Tressie McMillan Cotton added, “every week there is a story about a well-informed, insured person fighting with their insurance company.” And Michelle Goldberg noted, “When you’re dealing with [insurance companies] you’re constantly reminded that decisions about your health and wellbeing are being made without any regard to your best interests. … It exemplifies the heartless precarity that underlies so much of American life.”

Add to this what Dr. Peter Hotez, Co-director for vaccine development at the Texas Children’s Hospital, said when asked what public health challenges the Trump administration will face on Day One.  “We’ve got some big-ticket concerns regarding infectious disease and pandemic threats. The new administration is not going to have the luxury of time to organize and think about it. They’re going to be confronted with this from the very beginning.”

Hotez cited concerns about avian flu, new strains of the Covid virus, and other potential outbreaks, like measles (and polio) if vaccines are no longer the norm. Juxtapose this with proposed cuts to Medicaid and Medicare, and the power of insurance companies to decide what gets covered. As Andrew Witty ,the new CEO of United Health Group said recently, “We will continue to guard against ”unnecessary care.”

All this is added to the fact that we have extremely high costs already while the U.S. scores badly on many key health measures like life expectance, suicide rates and infant and maternal mortality. People already face disparities in the quality of care and many risk bankruptcy in times of medical crises and debt.

Heath care and hunger are closely connected issues because as access to quality health care diminishes, and costs rise in a time of reduced insurance coverage, “a growing number of families in America struggle to put food on the table,” as a report from the Food Research & Action Center points out. “Without greater investments in anti-poverty and anti-hunger programs, hunger in this country will continue to climb.”

The FRAC report reveals some startling statistics.  In 2023 one in seven households in America experienced hunger, especially in Latinx and Black communities. Many families have had to choose between buying food and other basic necessities, especially if they live in a single-parent household headed by a woman. Thirty-three percent of households with incomes well below the poverty threshold lived with food insecurity in 2023.

Among the food insecurity programs in the U.S. aimed at addressing poverty is SNAP, which helps provide resources to participants of the program to purchase food. But several legislators want to cut nearly $30 billion in SNAP benefits, despite the increase in food insecurity. A travesty in a time when our military budget for 2023 was $916 billion.

Congress is unlikely now to reinstate the Healthy School Meals for All available to all students introduced during the Covid pandemic. (Eight states have such policies.) “Congress must also pass a permanent expanded and inclusive Child Tax Credit to create a more prosperous, nourished, and equitable society,” FRAC says. It must also “tackle the root causes and structural racism and other forms of discrimination that exacerbate hunger.” One way to do that is to ensure fair wages, and “improved access to affordable housing, health care, and disability benefits” to end the cycle of poverty and hunger.

Recognizing the interconnections between healthcare, hunger and housing couldn’t be more important, as a 2023 report by the New York Times indicated.  Being homeless affects  people differently and addressing the facts and myths surrounding homelessness must be understood.  For example, the stereotype that homeless people are dangerous, unpredictable or violent is a prevalent myth. It’s the homeless that experience violence or hate crimes for the most part. They also suffer poor health and are subject to injury and disease, as Tracy Kidder’s book Rough Sleepers, revealed so movingly.

As Pathway to Housing notes, “Homelessness is a general term that describes someone who doesn’t have a permanent residence … it is not just an issue in urban areas. … [it] happens nationwide.” It’s also false to assume that people who sleep on the streets refuse help or shelter, which Pathway to Housing says is “rooted in paternalism.” It’s also a false assumption that all homeless people are addicts. “Homelessness is not a choice that people could avoid if they got a job. That idea derives from the judgement that homelessness is a moral failing instead of a set of circumstances and structural issues,” notes Pathway.

There is much more to say about these three interconnected problems. (See, for example, how Finland solved the problem of homelessness .)  Each one deserves attention, political will, and humanity. Dare we hope to find it?

                                                            # # #

Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt. 

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?

# # #

Elayne Clift writes 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.

Taking Care of the Caretakers

In 2017, when I researched and published an anthology about women caregivers, I neglected to reach out to the Domestic Workers Alliance which advocates for the more than two million women who work as nannies, housecleaners, and home care workers. I focused on women who told their personal stories of caregiving for spouses, children, parents and friends. It was a bad oversight that has troubled me since.

I was reminded of that in June when the Federal Domestic Worker Bill of Rights was reintroduced by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Sen. Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM). Introduced initially in July 2019, before the pandemic hit by (then)Sen. Kamala Harris and Rep. Jayapal. It was groundbreaking legislation aimed at ensuring workplace protections for domestic workers in the U.S. and it is still sorely needed.

An article published in Mother Jones Magazine in April pointed out that “domestic workers perform grueling work with few protections,” often providing care in isolated settings that render their work invisible, as feminists have known for decades as they fought for women’s caretaking in the home to be seen as actual labor. As the Mother Jones article also noted, in the U.S., such work has also been done by Black women who were systematically excluded from the New Deal’s labor agenda. Ever since then, they have struggled to achieve standards that are in place for others covered by labor laws.

According to the Domestic Workers Alliance, 84 percent of domestic workers don’t have a written agreement with their employer. Twenty-three percent don’t feel safe at work, and 81 percent receive no pay if their employer cancels the job with less than three days’ notice. Over a third of domestic workers don’t get a meal or rest break and if they do they aren’t given compensation for that time. If they are full-time employees, they are extremely unlikely to get paid sick leave or vacation, or any kind of insurance. The work could involve childcare, cooking and cleaning houses, or providing physical care for family members who are aging or have disabilities.  Yet their work is among the most undervalued in our society and the workers are among the most vulnerable people in the country.

The Alliance also points out that in the early  20th century, southern lawmakers prevented domestic workers from being included in federal labor laws because the majority of them were Black. It states that “to this day, the legacy of slavery continues to shape domestic work and domestic workers have limited protections under civil rights laws.” That reality means that domestic workers are exploited and are often subject to long work hours with low pay, sudden job loss, sexual harassment and abuse.

The movement for ensuring all labor rights to domestic workers is global. The International Domestic Workers Federation is a global membership organization that operates in every part of the world. It began establishing its network in 2006 with the objective of building a strong, democratic and united domestic/household workers global organization to protect and advance domestic workers rights everywhere. 

Here is just one story (edited for length) shared on their website. “Like many indigenous domestic workers in Mexico, Maria is an internal migrant; she travels from a small village to Mexico City daily. In the beginning she worked long hours, with no rest time, little food, and extremely low pay (US$7) for ten or more hours of work a day…. She felt she had to endure the conditions as a single mother of two daughters…she desperately needed the income. Years later, Maria moved to a new job, just before the pandemic hit. Fearing that she would infect the household her new employer asked her to live-in but she couldn’t because she had two children, leaving her without income until she learned about an organization that was providing emergency Covid-19 benefits to domestic workers. In addition to emergency relief, she learned about her rights, negotiating techniques, and realized that her work had value. She was able to return to work and now has a contract that insures her rights.”

It's a common story among domestic workers all over the world, and I should have sought their stories too.

In the preface to my anthology, Take Care: Tales, Tips, and Love from Women Caregivers, I wrote “Today being the main caregiver may be more vital to understand than ever”. As women have children later and elders live longer, women especially are challenged by competing demands and shrinking resources. Many of us have elderly parents in a time of growing dementia or increasing frailty or growing children who have their own challenges. We may have ailing partners, family members or friends. And no matter our age, we are there for them in caregiving roles, well before we may have expect to be there.

My own experience with caregiving began when I was young. My parents had married late, and both suffered from chronic conditions as they aged. By the time I was in high school I had to take on many of the demanding tasks of keeping  a home going. I understood early what it means to be a caregiver, although I did not have the usual challenges expressed in this essay.

Now, when changing demographics challenge the world, we need to realize that caregivers are a special group of people, usually women, but also men, who deserve to be respected, protected by labor laws, and free from isolation and fear. We are so fortunate to have them in our lives when we need them. Surely we can be their caregivers financially, fairly, and emotionally. 

                                                            # # #

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

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.

                                                             # # #

 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.

 *****************

 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.

                                                            # # #

Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.

The Desperate Need for Prison Reform

 In February this year, Texas executed a man named Ivan Cantu for murder despite the fact that evidence had raised serious questions about his guilt, persuading jurors from his first trial to ask the courts to reconsider his case. A campaign supported by thousands of Texans pushed to pause the execution and faith leaders called for a closer look at the case because of recanted testimony from a key witness, and claims that another witness lied on the stand. There were copious reasons to doubt Cantu was the perpetrator of the crime, but he was denied a delay. Just before he was executed, he stated again that he was innocent.

In April, Oklahoma executed Michael Smith, who claimed to the end that he was innocent. And in April, Missouri executed Brian Dorsey, despite pleas against it by 70 prison guards and a retired warden. Between the time of this writing and the end of the year, seven more executions are scheduled, two in Ohio and in five other states.  Between 2025 and 2027 Ohio alone has 12 executions scheduled.

Marcellus Williams is facing execution in Missouri, despite DNA evidence supporting his innocence.

Another man, Toforest Johnson has spent over 25 Years on Alabama’s Death Row. Now the prosecutor is calling for a new trial because Mr. Johnson’s conviction relies on the words of a witness who was paid for her testimony. Alabama continues to seek his execution.

These prison executions beg the question: What civilized, developed nation justifies executing anyone in the name of the state, (irrespective of whether they committed a heinous crime)?

Once in decline, executions in the U.S. have begun increasing in the last few decades. Hard line prosecutors, tough-on-crime governors, and the Supreme Court have played a role in the increase, according to a January Politico post on Instagram, which stated that SCOTUS is “more likely to push an execution forward than to intervene to stop it,” including in cases where doubt exists, or the means of execution could result in severe suffering.

Numerous states appear to be “jumping onboard,” the Politico post said. Alabama, South Carolina, Utah, and Florida are among the states restarting or scheduling executions. In Utah executions can be by firing squad, and in Alabama nitrogen gas is being used. In Florida, where last year six death warrants were signed by the governor, a unanimous jury requirement no longer applies.

According to the Sentencing Project the U.S. is the world leader in incarceration. There are two million people in the nation’s prisons and jails—a 500% increase over the last four decades. “Changes in sentencing law and policy, not changes in crime rates, explain most of this increase. These trends have resulted in prison overcrowding and fiscal burdens on states to accommodate a rapidly expanding penal system, despite increasing evidence that large-scale incarceration is not an effective means of achieving public safety.”

Further, according to the National Institute of Justice,  analysis by the Pew Center some years ago showed that “more than one in every 100 adults at the time was behind bars, “with incarceration heavily concentrated among men, racial and ethnic minorities, and 20-and 30-year olds. Among men the highest rate is with black males aged 20–34. Among women it's with black females aged 35–39.” Thankfully, the Innocence project has helped free or exonerate hundreds of wrongfully convicted people since 1992. Many have been convicted because of eyewitness misidentification, misapplication of forensic science, false confessions, coerced pleas, and official misconduct.  

Part of the problem with mass incarceration relates to the “Prison Industrial Complex,” a term that describes “the overlapping interested of government and industry that critics point out uses surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social, and political problems,” Tufts University asserts. Their Prison Divestment project indicates that over two million people incarcerated in U.S. jails are subject to being part of the partnership between parties with vested interests in mass incarceration.

Prison labor comes cheap. It is based on exploitation that serves corporations, governments, and correctional facilities. I personally know a wrongfully committed woman who was paid 12 cents an hour for her work in the prison before her sentence was commuted. And a recent report on Democracy Now revealed that an Associated Press investigation traced a “hidden prison labor web” where former Southern slave plantations are being used as “work release” sites for incarcerated people. The people working at the plantations are disproportionately Black. Their labor makes it possible for agricultural products to keep flowing to major supermarket chains where prices keep increasing while workers remain paid in pennies and badly treated. That forced labor is legal, it seems, because of the 13th amendment exception on enslavement as punishment for a crime.

But enough about facts and data that expose a dreadful situation. It’s time to put a human face on the idea of slave labor and to humanize people languishing in prison and on death row. Imagine waiting to be tied to a table and killed. Consider the condition of incarcerated women and girls routinely abused and raped, many of whom languish in jail for decades, perhaps without hope of parole, because they finally had the courage to resist the violence perpetrated against them at home and revisited in prison.

It's clear that a civilized nation must do better, starting here, starting now.

                                                # # #

Just How Broken is Our Healthcare System?

A young woman dies in childbirth for lack of proper perinatal care. An elderly man can’t afford meds to control his chronic conditions, so he rations them. A child is misdiagnosed in the emergency room. A patient waits months to see her doctor about a troublesome symptom.

Stories like these abound. They are shared by patients, parents, partners, good healthcare providers and others who’ve had enough of medical runarounds, cost issues, access problems, diagnostic and treatment errors, insufficient time with providers, and more, to contend with. Reports of major issues in healthcare by medical professionals as well as patients and politicians with a conscience are increasingly sounding alarms.

In a recent Instagram post, for example, Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) was outraged to learn that drug companies charge as little as $7.00 for an inhaler outside the U.S. while here the price gouging rises to as much as $380 depending on what type of inhaler is needed. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is among several Democratic senators, and The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, that have demanded information about asthma inhaler patents and prices from four major manufacturers accused of “manipulating the patent system.”

One of the four companies was cited for charging $645 for an inhaler it sells in the UK for $49. Another company was called out for charging $286 on the U.S. market for an inhaler that costs $9.00 in Germany. According to another Instagram post in February, “Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly reported over two billion dollars in profit in the last three months of last year alone. This massive number comes from hiking prices of vital drugs for American seniors and other patients”.

Dr. Ashish Jha, Dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University wrote in a Washington Post editorial in January expressing his concern that some doctors are selling their practices to private equity firms because running a medical practice has become a management nightmare. “The number of private equity firms in health care has exploded in recent years,” Dr Jha lamented. “It’s a trend that should have everyone’s attention, from politicians to patients, because it can significantly increase costs, reduce access, and threaten patient safety.”

In an article published in the New York Times in November last year, Dr. Amol Navathe, co-director of the Healthcare Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, worried that non-profit hospitals were focusing more on dollars than patients.  He wrote that nonprofit hospitals are “hounding poor patients for money, cutting nursing staffing too aggressively, and giving preferential treatment to the rich.” It’s gotten so bad, he says, that nurses and other healthcare workers are resorting to strikes to improve workplace safety at several hospitals during an “acquisition spree” that is making healthcare less affordable.

Nursing homes and assisted living facilities are taking a hit too. According to the New York Times these profitable facilities charge $5,000 per month or more topped up by fees for such things as a blood pressure check, $50 for an injection (more for insulin), almost $100 a month for medication orders from external pharmacies, and over $300 a month for daily help with an overpriced inhaler. There can be extra charges for help in toileting, dining room fees, or a daily check in by staff.

There are currently 31,000 assisted living facilities nationwide. Four out of five of them are for profit businesses. Most of them cater to affluent white elders, although minority groups are a quarter of the population older than 65 in the U.S. According to the New York Times piece, assisted living is “part of a broader affordability crisis in long term-care for the swelling population of older Americans.” Aside from cost issues, there are reports of serious care problems reported by watch groups, ranging from staffing shortages, growing infection rates, and lower vaccination rates in assisted living facilities.

Another area of healthcare feeling a looming crisis is mental health, including addiction.  Daniel Bergner, author of the book My Brother’s Story, the Science of Our Brains, and the Search for Our Psyches, points out that while housing, additional psych wards, and community-based treatment facilities are traditionally identified remedies, budgetary and logistical problems are ignored. “These fundamental changes often involve the involuntary nature of care,  and the flawed antipsychotic medications that are the mainstay of treatment for people dealing with the symptoms of  psychosis,” he says.

Bergner reveals that existing laws in almost all states allow for mandatory care that can rely on court-ordered treatment, including the use of antipsychotic drugs. “Imagine,” he asks us, “being hauled off to an emergency room, forcibly injected with a powerful drug…and held in a locked ward until being dispatched into a compulsory outpatient program.” He points out that is likely to add to a patient’s trauma, isolation, and lack of agency, rather than their recovery. “Compulsory care is deeply problematic…made more so by the medications at its core. … Drugs shouldn’t be the required linchpin of treatment.”

This is just a sampling of the issues confronting our failing healthcare systems. Our disgraceful maternal and infant mortality rates are often linked to racial discrimination. Shrinking Medicaid payments to clinics for the poor dramatically affects healthcare for the poor. And reproductive healthcare is on a rapid road to crises that smack of sexism -- all among the reasons our voices and votes need to be heard this year.

                                                            # # #

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.

                                                                        # # #

The Power of Hope and the Promise of the Parkland Generation

 Ever since David Hogg, Emma Gonzales, and other high school student leaders began organizing against gun violence when their Florida school experienced a massacre in 2018 that killed 17 people and injured 17 more, I’ve clung to the belief that if we could get to the Parkland generation as political leaders, we just might save our country. I believe that now more than ever.

David Hogg is 23 now and a student at Harvard. It should come as no surprise that he has reached a new level of political advocacy. Working with Kevin Lata, Rep. Maxwell Frost’s (D-FL) campaign manager in 2022, the two activists have launched a new organization that seeks to put more young people in elected office at the state level and in Congress.

Leaders We Deserve has a PAC to coordinate with selected campaigns and a super PAC to raise funds for those campaigns. The organization has a diverse advisory group that includes Reps. Root, Swalwell (D-Calif.), Justin Jones (D-TN) and Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.). It plans to hire staff going forward.

“A big part of this,” Lata told NBC’s Meet the Press, “is electing young people that have the values of our generation [which] understands the anxiety of not knowing if you’re going to be able to survive math class.”

Hogg, who cofounded March for Our Lives, put it this way to CBS: “There are so many charismatic, brilliant young people that have come from March for Our Lives, and have now started running for office, like Maxwell, and there’s so many more that I think can come. That’s why I’m doing this, it’s to help build that pathway.”

Both Hogg and Lata take a long view of the work they have begun.  They know it’s more than an ideology-driven effort. It requires organizational skills, political savvy, resources, an experienced staff and viable candidates. That’s why they are starting with a plan that includes raising money, connecting 15 to 30 candidates at the state level to media, and supporting them in the “mechanics of a campaign.” Their goal is to help young people gain and remain in elected office with a view to running for higher office when the time is right. They are starting in states like Texas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. As Hogg told NBC, the aim is to “make inroads and start building the bench now.”

They have notable role models to look to as their work progresses. Maxwell Frost was the first Gen Z member of Congress and he’s made a name for himself as he serves on the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, asking astute questions while standing up to Republican extremists who work hard to politicize committee work in Congress. He also represents a progressive view unfamiliar to many in Congress who are out of touch with youth, Black, and Latino constituents.

It's worth noting that Frost, a former organizer, activist, and special needs teacher, was inspired to activism when he was 15 years old because of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. He also witnessed and survived gun violence himself in Orlando in 2016.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is another example of effective leadership from younger members in Congress. She worked in the 2016 presidential election as a volunteer organizer for Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT.) Inspired by demonstrations led by indigenous communities in South Dakota who opposed a new pipeline, she joined them, resolving after that experience to commit to public service. Shortly afterwards, she launched her first campaign for Congress, and won against a long-time incumbent.

She became the youngest woman and youngest Latina to serve in Congress in 2019 and she quickly got to work. During her first term she introduced 23 pieces of legislation, one of which was the Green New Deal resolution, which envisioned a 10-year plan inspired by FDR’s New Deal. It was designed to open work opportunities in construction and restoring infrastructure, reduce air and water pollution, and fight economic, social, racial and climate crises. She was also recognized for her skill as a questioner in committee hearings, effectively standing up to Big Pharma, defense contractors, and other power players.

Leaders like Frost and Ocasio-Cortez reveal the possibilities inherent in the purpose of Leaders We Deserve. Along with Hogg et al. they offer an important and timely new vision of effective leadership at a time when we are worried about the aging of some current, long-time legislators and leaders, many of whom have no real connection to or understanding of their constituencies or other Americans.   

According to a Tufts University study an estimated 8.3 million newly eligible voters emerged in the 2022 midterm elections, including White, Latino, Asian, Native American, and Black youth. In the current Congress, 52 members of the House are Millennials, aged 27 to 42, up from 31 in the last Congress. They represent 10 percent of all current voting House members and are divided equally between Democrats and  Republicans. In next year’s election those numbers are likely to grow.

David Hogg sees this as “a second step for our generation and the people in power. We’re not just voting, we’re also running.”

Activist Ariana Jasmine.agrees. “Young people are the future. They are showing that they are fed up, and they are showing up even if they aren’t old enough to vote. They understand that the direction we’re going in is completely unsustainable.”

                                                              # # #

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.

A is For Absent: America's Teacher Shortage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Designer Babies to Devalued Children

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Time for Bread and Roses is Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 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.

                                                             # # #

The Wandering Souls of Migration, Immigration, and Asylum Seeking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                                        # # #

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.' ...

                                                           # # #

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.