Fanning the Flames of Poverty

A child plays with a lighter in a three-story apartment building in Philadelphia resulting in a fire that kills twelve people, mostly children. A malfunctioning hallway door in a Bronx high-rise apartment building leads to the death of seventeen people, including eight children – all within one week. Both tragedies housed low-income people. Both speak to the need for compliance with coded housing safety measures.

In the case of the Bronx high-rise building a self-closing door malfunctioned, filling a staircase with rapidly spreading suffocating smoke. The building had no fire escapes and residents reported that the building had door problems for years. They also reported persistent heat and fire safety issues, including fire alarms that no one actually paid attention to because “they rang at all hours of the day.”

In 2018 a fire in a residential building in the Bronx killed another dozen people. At the time, Rep. Richie Torres (D-NY) was a Bronx City Council member. He co-sponsored a bill that mandated all residential buildings in the Bronx have self-closing doors by the middle of last year. Now he has announced a federal, state, and local task force to examine residential building fire safety hazards. “We have to ensure that the housing stock is brought to the 21st century when it comes to fire safety, and the Bronx is no stranger to deadly fire,” he told the local press.

According to the press report, the Bronx building, built in 1972 under New York’s affordable housing program, only had sprinklers in the basement because, as a spokesperson for the owners of the building said, “its ceilings and floors are poured concrete and its fire doors are sufficient to make the building qualify as “non-combustible.” It’s worth noting that the current building owners include the son of a for-profit affordable housing developer.

Safe, affordable housing is a critical issue that gets little attention until there is a tragedy. Profit over people is usually the name of the game among developers and building owners, and politicians often look the other way or just don’t find time to address the urgent problems inherent in housing for low-income residents. Those problems often create health as well as safety issues, yet they remain ignored or skirted around because they are part of a complex, failing infrastructure too long denied, not only because of the expense of ensuring safety, but because building tenants at risk are not a high priority group for many building owners or politicians.

Sometimes it’s a matter of benign neglect on the part of landlords, but more often than not in large cities like New York, corruption fuels code breaking. And no landlords are more corrupt than so-called “slum landlords” whose neglect is criminal.

Take, for example, Jared Kushner, whose abuse of tenants was documented in a film by Alex Gibney called “Dirty Money,” in which one person interviewed called Kushner a “tier one predator.” According to the documentary, Kushner’s properties “have received hundreds of health code violations, including the presence of lead paint, lung carcinogens, and fire safety hazards.” In many documented cases, “the New York City Housing authority had issued violations but never followed up on collecting fine payments” nor had they checked to see if Kushner’s company actually fixed any dangerous living conditions.

Not all landlords rise to the level of Kushner’s abuse, but there are enough bad players that one guy’s mission in life is to keep landlords out of trouble. He calls himself “the real estate solutions guy” on his website which warns building owners about twelve common code enforcement violations. They include missing or inoperable smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, plumbing, heating, and electrical deficiencies, insufficient ventilation and rodents and infestations. Some cities, he adds, separate priority and non-priority violations. On his list of non-priorities? Missing or non-functioning smoke detectors.

Jessie Singer, in her forthcoming book There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise in Injury and Disaster – Who Profits and Who Pays the Price, points out that “the term ‘accident’ itself protects those in power and leaves the most vulnerable in harm’s way, preventing investigations, pushing off debts, blaming the victims, diluting anger, and even sparking empathy for the perpetrators,” her publisher, Simon and Schuster, says, adding “As the rate of [all] accidental death skyrockets in America, the poor and people of color end up bearing the brunt of the violence and blame, while the powerful use the excuse of the ‘accident’ to avoid consequences for their actions.”

That insight gets to the heart of the matter when it comes not only to building codes and fire safety but to the fundamental human right to safe, adequate shelter, as expressed in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, Article 25, which begins with these words: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing …”

As Jessie Singer said on an Instagram post following the Bronx tragedy, “Seventeen people in the Bronx died in a fire for the same reason that many Americans die in a house fire in 2022, because the only housing accessible to them is housing that is unsafe.”

In 2022, that is not only a human tragedy. It is a national disgrace.

The Normalization of Fascism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What more do we need to wake up?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Supreme Court Takes Aim at Women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How draconian can you get?

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

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

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

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

The Democratic Party Progresses Despite Postmortem Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Whatever Happened to Pay Equity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hands That Rock the Cradle Need Help

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staring at America's Dystopian Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River, Vt. 

What is Title 42 and Why Should It Be Rescinded?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terrorist Plots and Truthful Testimonies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What Do We Mean When We Talk About Human Rights?

What Do We Mean When We Talk About Human Rights?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Urgency of Saving Roe v. Wade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History as Prologue: The Shadow of a Continuing Crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Much Longer Before We End the Massacre of Innocents?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building Better Calls For Bold Change

“How Far Should Biden Go?”  a recent piece in The Atlantic asked. The answer, in my opinion, is as far as he and his administration can over the next several years, keeping in mind all that’s on their plate. Atlantic staff writer James Fallow rightly underscored the need for prioritization and triage in planning, quoting the head of Jimmy Carter’s transition team James Watson: “You have to separate what must be done, soon, from all the other things you might want to do later in the administration.”

I’d like to see a number of issues tackled once the Biden administration has dealt with Fallow’s suggested priorities including “reversing the corrosion of the executive branch,” and instituting investigations into the horribly mismanaged Covid crisis, along with border policies that resulted in children being ripped from their parents, and the “negligent destruction of the norms of government, especially “the electoral process.”

It’s the norms of government that concern me most because many of those norms have resided in trusted tradition rather than codified law. That needs to end. Laws must be written that ensure we never reach another breaking point in our democracy.

The electoral process tops the list. As activist Joan Mandle says in a blog, “The lifeblood of our democracy is under threat from big private money in politics. Cynicism about politics and government is rampant.” The Citizen’s United decision by the Supreme Court allowing corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on campaigns added to that cynicism along with a 2014 a Court decision that raised the limit of individual contributions to parties and candidates to a staggering $3 million, suggesting that “the Supreme Court has declared war on campaign finance reform”.

Pro-democracy movements have struggled to change the way election campaigns are financed in the U.S. for years. One model they look to is the UK’s financing of campaigns. http://www.loc.gov/law/help/campaign-finance/uk.php Since 1883 UK legislation has existed that prevents excessive spending by electoral candidates. Their system regulates campaign financing by focusing on limiting political parties’ expenditures and transparent reporting of donations received and election expenditures.

The Electoral College is another piece of the electoral process that needs revisiting. In short, it needs to be abolished. Designed to keep both small and large states happy in determining who became president, it also reflected racist and misogynist ideologies. Most importantly, it is arguably anti-democratic. We’ve lost two presidents who won the popular vote, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, making a mockery of the “one man [sic], one vote” theory. Perhaps more alarming is the fact that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes, yet he won the Electoral College by 74 votes and became president. According to the Brookings Institute, a majority of Americans have long opposed the College. This may be in part because income inequality and geographical disparities across states could mean the College over-represents the views of a small number of people because of its structure, as Brookings Vice President Darrell West points out.

Several other reforms are called for, including term limits for both Congress and the Supreme Court. Proponents of Congressional term limits argue that restricting the time a representative or senator may serve would prevent politicians from amassing too much power, thus become out of touch with their  constituents. Never was this more apparent than in the 116th Congress. (Opponents argue that elections are the way to limit terms but without campaign finance reform that is questionable.)

Advocates for term limits on the Supreme Court argue that the Court has become highly politicized along party lines, making a 5-4 or 6-3 Court dangerously partisan. A multitude of social justice and human rights decisions made by ideologues with lifetime appointments can spell disaster for key issues such as healthcare, reproductive rights, voting and civil rights, and more. Some analysts suggest well-defined 18-year terms as a way of restoring limits to what they call “the least accountable branch of government.” In September 2020 Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) introduced a bill establishing staggered 18-year terms for SCOTUS justices.

Presidential pardon power must also be checked. While that power can offer mercy, it has been abused, never more so than by Donald Trump. As Princeton professor Keith Whittington notes, “Future abuses could be remedied through a constitutional amendment that makes explicit a president cannot pardon himself, takes pardons of immediate family members off the table, requires that pardons be issues only after conviction, or that pardons cannot be issued during the lame-duck period after presidential election and before president-elect has been inaugurated.”

Finally, a series of codified laws, which have existed since 2000 B.C.E., the most famous example being the Code of Hammurabi written in 1700 B.C.E., which codified the belief in “an eye for an eye” https://study.com/academy/lesson/codified-law-definition-lesson.html, must replace our trust in tradition if democracy is to prevail and remain sustainable. As the last four years have demonstrated, bipartisan legislation is clearly required and urgently needed.

It’s a tall order, I know, but as James Fallows noted, there is a “never-ending mission of forming a more perfect union.” The time to begin that daunting mission is now.

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

Time to Recover and Safeguard Our Future

Finally, Donald Trump is gone from the White House. The time to hope that democracy can prevail is back, however challenging, in view of the shocking events that took place at the Capital. As we begin the hard work of moving forward and restoring faith in America, we can work toward a hopeful and secure future, despite the continuing pandemic and a plethora of political travesties, including possible widespread collusion that runs deep and wide.

The task of undoing the legacy of disasters we inherited after four years of ignorant, destructive, Draconian policies and actions, and an attempted coup, is Herculean. All that we have endured during the Trump administration was perpetrated by a monumentally corrupt administration devoid of human instincts and moral behavior. It will be hard to clean up the mess. In the words of a New York Times editorial last month, “Corruption and abuse of power are the most urgent issues in need of addressing.”

The effects of years of corruption and abuse are hideous and potentially long lasting. Many of them are addressed in the Protecting Our Democracy Act introduced by House Democrats last September. A landmark, comprehensive package of reforms, the Act was designed to “Prevent Presidential Abuses, Restore Our System of Checks and Balances, Strengthen Accountability and Transparency, and Protect our elections.” It’s worth reading.

Among the damage we must now address are four troubling issues. The first involves two women, one brilliant, the other potentially vicious.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg was a legal genius. The victories she achieved while on the Supreme Court are legendary. She argued six critical cases before the Supreme Court, winning five of them.  On the Court she helped win landmark decisions that changed the face of America for the better.

Compared to RBG, Amy Coney Barrett is a lightweight, demure but deadly, given her proclivity for taking the country backwards. Her legal experience and history hardly qualify her for a seat on the Supreme Court. She has none of the experience that leads to the Court, and almost no experience practicing law.

The point of this comparison is that we stand to lose every advancement in civil society that RBG helped effect only to see our country returned to a time when racism and misogyny prevailed – unless we balance the Supreme Court by adding new appointees and end the flood of unqualified conservative judges to Federal benches.

The second abhorrent legacy of the Trump administration is the plight of children torn from their mothers, forever psychologically damaged by unspeakable evil. Who can bear to see the faces or hear their cries from abusive camps? How can we not weep for for what the Trump administration did in America’s name? What reparations will be sufficient for incarcerated children denied decent food, medical care, human touch, and a bed? What can be said of a boy who couldn’t stop crying and was mocked by guards laughing at distraught toddlers. What will soothe the parents of children who died in custody?

How do we repair this crime against humanity, this unbearable cruelty? How do we remove the stain of our country’s sin? Perhaps arresting the architect of this atrocity, Stephen Miller, former Attorney General Jeff Session, and other government officials who sanctioned ripping kids, including nursing infants, away from their parents would be a good start. Shutting down ICE is another.

Then, there is the stain of our extraordinary Covid crisis, a killer virus that was ignored, dismissed, and inflamed by our own Super Spreader, whose ignorance, contempt for science, lies, and politicization of a public health emergency led to the world’s worst infection rate and tens of thousands of excruciating, unnecessary deaths, massive family trauma, and a collapsed economy. I believe the Trump administration’s lack of an urgent response to the pandemic can legitimately be viewed as negligent homicide for which he and his enablers must be held accountable.

 Finally, and especially in view of recent events, underpinning everything else for which we must atone is the damage done to our democracy, which once offered a beacon of hope around the world, Gone, too, is the respect global leaders held for us as a nation, now mocked and reviled.  The blindfolded Lady Justice and the robed Roman goddess Libertas atop the Statue of Liberty must have wept for all that had been lost and must now, somehow, be restored. Will we again open our arms to “[the] tired, [the] poor”? Will we “lift [our] lamp beside the Golden door,” free of our national shame?

It will take years, perhaps decades and new generations, to bring us back from the brink, to serve justice, to commit to human rights for all, to embrace our common humanity, to behave responsibly, to reject the underbelly of a nation that showed itself to be undeniably racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic as well as so terrified of women that it tried desperately to control our bodies. 

Dare we hope that we can do the hard work required of us? Can we truly commit to never subjecting ourselves, our progeny, or our country to another national nightmare? Are we capable of changing our children’s legacy?

Can we agree that anything else is unthinkable?

                                                            # # #

                                                            # # #

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

Why Are Powerful Women So Frightening?

For First Lady Hillary Clinton it was wearing hairbands. Michelle Obama bared her arms, which (white) First ladies had done before her. First Lady Jill Biden, who earned two Masters degrees and a Ph.D. in Education was condemned by a Wall Street Journal writer whose sole academic achievement is an online Bachelor’s degree. He thought Dr. Biden presumptuous for being addressed as Dr. Biden, calling her “kiddo” and “Dr. Jill” instead.

As each of these women gained political legitimacy the insults escalated.  Clinton was called “messy, explosive, and politically clumsy” early in her political career by a pundit who conceded she was “formidable.” By the time she told the Chinese government that women’s rights were human rights at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, she’d been labeled “unlikeable” at home. Still, she proved herself an effective Senator and Secretary of State before winning the popular vote for president in 2016.

Michelle Obama, now arguably the most popular woman in America, suffered not only misogynist attacks, but racist ones as well. “Women endure these cuts in so many ways that we don’t even notice we’re cut,” she told an audience of young women after leaving office. “We are living with small, tiny cuts, and we are bleeding every single day. The shards that cut me the deepest were the ones that intended to cut,” she said, including being referred to as an ape.

Now comes Vice President Kamala Harris, the first black and South Asian woman to be one breath away from the presidency. Called “too ambitious,” for demonstrating self-confidence in the ability to lead, she “rebukes news stories that treat her successes as evidence against her elevation,” as Megan Garber pointed out recently in The Atlantic. Harris has also been called “not loyal and very opportunistic,” “too charismatic,” “dominant,” and someone who “can rub people the wrong way.”

As a 2019 Huffington Post story noted, “Half the Men in the U.S. Are Uncomfortable with Female Political Leaders.” 

It’s not only in political spheres that women who exert their intelligence, agency, aspirations and innate power are trivialized, mocked and pilloried. A cursory look at women’s history reveals how endemic the fear of women has always been.

A fascinating theory of why women became objects of fear looks to an early agrarian time when men were warriors and women were gatherers and growers.  Their respective roles were honored equally.  But unlike men, women could bleed and not die. They could bring forth life. It was a mystery that became frightening as life became nomadic and men fought for land and commodities. One of those commodities was women, who were strangely powerful.

During the Industrial Revolution, as women became workers, began earning money, and sought to have fewer children, they started asserting themselves, leading to the historic question, “What are we going to do about the women?”

History is rife with examples of misogyny whenever men felt threatened by women. The popularity of midwives in the 19th century became threatening to the male medical establishment when doctors realized there was money to be made if they treated childbirth as a disease. The result was dramatically higher maternal mortality.  Nurses were recruited as lesser beings as an 1890s British manual reveals. “The best nursing girl is one who is tall, strong, and has a suppleness of movement. One who plays lawn-tennis, who can ride, skate and row, makes the best material. If she can dance, it is a great advantage …” A 1901 AMA statement added, “Nurses are often conceited and unconscious of the due subordination owed to the medical profession, of which she is a useful parasite.”

The male literary world’s fear of writing women was abetted by Freud who labeled their work a hysterical preoccupation with memory, thus a disease. A reviewer reacted to Vera Britton's wartime autobiography with this: "An autobiography! But I shouldn't have thought anything in your life worth recording!' And writer Gerald Manley Hopkins claimed that the pen was “a kind of male gift."

Then there were Rosie the Riveters in WWII. Provided with childcare and earning their own money, they were denied both when Johnny came marching home again.

Examples like these abound, Twenty-first century psychology articles still claim that pursuing power, especially in politics, “may signal an aggressive and selfish woman” who foregoes “prescribed feminine values of communality.”  In other words, a woman’s job is to stay home, stay quiet, and volunteer.

Geraldine Ferraro was onto this schtick when she ran for Vice President and was called “too bitchy” by George H.W. Bush’s press secretary. So are women like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who was called a “fucking bitch” by a House colleague on the Capital steps. “Our culture is so predicated on diminishing women and preying on our self-esteem, it’s a radical act to love yourself,” she proclaimed.

Women like Vice President Harris aren’t having it. After her nomination, she told a group of teenage girls to be ambitious without apology. The reaction of one of them was captured by Megan Garber in The Atlantic. Men “don’t fear Senator Harris for her ambitions,” she said. “They fear her because of a generation of Black girls who are watching and who will follow her example to pursue excellence.”

That’s one smart girl, and likely future politician.

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Elayne Clift is a writer in Saxtons River, Vt. She has taught Women’s and Gender Studies at various colleges in the US and abroad.  www.elayne-clift.com

Escaping the Other Pandemic

The sigh of relief was heard resoundingly worldwide. After almost a week of nail-biting anxiety a majority of Americans elected new leadership that we could trust to pull us back from the brink. Suddenly it no longer felt like the earth had rolled off its axis and was tilting dangerously to the right.

 As people gathered in front of the White House and in streets across the country, dancing, hooting, weeping, it became clear that individually and together we had not quite acknowledged to ourselves the depth of our despair, and our fear. Once the election was called, we realized what had been tamped down for four years. Like the liberation of Europe from a terrifying Nazi regime at the end of WWII, Americans understood that we had barely crawled out from under the boot of our own homegrown mad dictator.

 Sadly, others are not so lucky. Across the globe the earth continues tilting right as autocratic regimes rise. Many people are living in fear and deprivation with little hope. Their futures look bleak as dictators become entrenched or rise anew.

In the Philippines, for example, the maniacal dictator, Duterte, sends a chilling reminder of what total control by a madman looks like. He has established death squads in the name of fighting a drug war and he controls all of public administration leaving no checks and balances in place. The military, judicial and legislative branches of government are fully in his control and he recently shutdown the major media outlet, ABS-CBN, the largest and oldest broadcaster in south-east Asia, just when Filipinos need reliable information about COVID-19.  

Hungary’s dictatorial prime minister Viktor Orban saw the country’s rating downgraded to “partly free” due to “sustained attacks on the country’s democratic institutions,”  as one think tank put it. Over the past decade, the watchdog added, Orban’s party “has used its parliamentary supermajority to impose restrictions on or assert control over the opposition, the media, religious groups, academia, NGOs, the courts, asylum seekers, and the private sector.”

Another Eastern European country, Poland, is also seeing increasing autocratic leadership.  The presidential election in July was decided by a slim margin that split the country in two when incumbent President Andrzej Duda won a narrow victory for the 'Law and Justice' party. Duda is rabidly homophobic and misogynist. His campaign relied on religious animosities between the conservative Catholic Church and more liberal Catholics and secular Poles.  Recently Poland’s abortion laws, already some of the strictest in Europe, were further tightened making abortion virtually unattainable. Polish women made international news when they took to the streets forcing the government to delay implementing the court ruling.

Both Turkey and Egypt have experienced repressive regimes in recent years. Under emergency policies in Turkey promulgated by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, crackdowns on political opposition, academia, media and civil society occur regularly. In Egypt President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s autocratic style is reminiscent of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak. Under Sisi’s leadership security services crack down on all forms of dissent, detaining and torturing political opponents in large numbers. A new House of Representatives was seated in 2016 and promptly passed numerous laws restricting political activity and formalizing government control over protests, media, and certain organizations.

Brazil serves as an example of autocracy in South America. President Jair Bolsonaro has created a totally dystopian society. According to the Globe Post “Since taking office in 2016 he has done everything he can to undermine the Brazilian Republic as he carries out his mission to destroy everything he believes was built by the ‘left.’ He undermines, defunds, or simply closes down any public agency that has been constituted to control civic life and the norms that rule social life.”

Even in India, a longstanding democracy, the government has tried to stifle protests and preventive detention without trial is increasing  The state can now unilaterally declare someone a terrorist and imprison them. Some human rights activists have been incarcerated as terrorists and others have been warned to stop their activities. Muslim rights have been eroded despite a long history of peaceful co-existence with Hindus.

 For people living in countries like these the political pandemic is as dangerous and potentially deadly as the one we are facing in this public health crisis. As in the Covid pandemic, survival is more likely if citizens are educated and take adequate precautions to prevent contamination. In Covid we need to mask. To avoid autocracy we need to vote. 

 How lucky we are that Joe Biden’s victory signaled a new “Morning in America.”  But democracy is always fragile and we clearly have “miles to go before we sleep.”  The challenges before us, the hard work to be done, the healing and re-visioning of a humane and just future, will not be easy. The work will never be altogether finished. We are unlikely to achieve total unity.

 But in the dawning of a new day, we can breathe again. We can weep openly in gratitude, join hands in renewed hope, and be proud once more of who we are, individually and as an imperfect but ever-growing nation. “Oh, what a relief it is!”

Enablers, Collaborators, and a Mussolini Moment

It started with a ride down an escalator. And it’s been escalating ever since. From the first cries of rapists invading our country to dog whistles like “Stand back, stand by” Donald Trump’s dangerous delusions of power and control have brought this country to the brink of collapse, and everyone who has allowed that to happen is an enabler and a collaborator.

From White House cronies who share in Trump’s power fantasies and who are incapable of running a government especially  during a crisis, to his equally evil children, to Republicans in the Senate led by Mitch McConnell, to America’s attorney general, to the doctors at Walter Reed who agreed to lie for the president and to sign non-disclosure agreements thereby violating their Hippocratic oath, to the ICE bullies who separated infants and children from their parents and put them in concentration camps, to the heads of the CDC and FDA who caved after White House pressure, they are all responsible for the rise of autocracy, and increased violence.

They are also responsible for militias that now feel emboldened in their militarism and for bad cops who mercilessly shoot to death Black and Brown men and women. They are responsible for the resurgent KKK and they are responsible for federal courts being packed with ultra-conservative, lifetime judges, as well as for a Supreme Court that is eager to see the original Handmaid added to their ranks. In short, they are responsible for the destruction of democracy.

They are why we are on the edge of a truly great depression, and why America has lost its standing in the world. They are responsible for the disasters in our health, education, and infrastructure systems, for the filth in our water and the comeback of chemicals in our food. And they are responsible for the deaths of over 100,000 Americans who died needlessly because the Super Spreader in Chief just didn’t give a damn.

Indeed, they are responsible for the Mussolini Moment on the balcony of our dictator’s palace, and they, like him, bear some of the guilt for negligent homicide and crimes against humanity.

They are also examples of “the banality of evil” that philosopher Hannah Arendt warned us about when she reported on the trial of Adolph Eichmann after the Holocaust. Eichmann was, he said, simply following orders. 

So were the White House staff, the Secret Service men who vow to give their life for the president, but not in a hermetically sealed vehicle, the employees of government agencies who didn’t speak up or quit their jobs in order to save this country, the business moguls who didn’t end their major donations to a corrupt fraud, Fox News who wouldn’t stand up to a lunatic when he blamed everyone else for our disasters and incited violence. So too are the voters who inexplicably still stand with their man even though everything he does hurts them the most.

Every one of these people is the banality of evil personified. And every one of them became what Arendt called a “leaf blowing in the whirlwind of time.” Now every one of them bears responsibility for what lies ahead for us all.

Of course, some brave souls did stand up to the president. And everyone of them did it knowing that they would be punished mightily.  Think about Col. Vindman, and the others who gave testimony to Congress, the lawyers and doctors who wrote letters and petitions, and the activists who marched and were willing to suffer the consequences, including injury, arrest and jail time. They are our national heroes in this moment, the ones for whom new monuments should be built when this nightmare ends.

As for the rest of us, we must remember and own the fact that a great malignancy metastasized within our national body and many of us let it happen. We watched it ravish us and slowly terrorize us. We let it kill people we knew and loved. We looked the other way, always sure that it couldn’t get worse.

Now we need to understand that the “silence of one good man” can spell disaster for all good people. Each of us who remained passive as our impending disaster continued might have been the one “good man” who didn’t act, didn’t speak out, didn’t resist, while men like Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump insisted that infants be ripped from their mothers’ breasts. Men who didn’t care that innocent people were dying from gun violence, a plague, hunger, and violence, which they fostered. Men who didn’t care about pre-existing conditions or elders who rely on Social Security to survive. Men who didn’t care that women would be catapulted back to the Dark Ages.

Now the question is why didn’t we stop them sooner? Why didn’t we act in bigger, more effective, timely ways? Why did we let them continue for four devastating years, like the blind, chained inhabitants of Plato’s allegorical cave who were unable to escape their isolation because, trapped by ignorance and darkness, they couldn’t know the truth?

Can we now remove our blinders and see clearly the dawning truth in time to break our silence, reject the banality of evil, refuse to be a leaf blowing in the whirlwind of time?

What awaits us if not?

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Standing Up to Sterilization, Eugenics, and the Abuse of Women

“Keep your hands off my uterus!” That’s an often-repeated placard and plea at women’s marches I’ve attended over the past forty years. In the U.S. and abroad, it’s a common, continuing refrain because government sanctioning of abuse of women’s bodies has been occurring since well before the Second Wave women’s movement exposed it in the 1970s.

I worked in the women’s health movement then alongside Our Bodies, Ourselves and other national organizations. One of the myriad issues we dealt with was the sterilization of poor, black and brown women.  We helped raise awareness of the medical abuse of Puerto Rican women that resulted in a third of women of reproductive age being sterilized for decades at clinics often funded by the U.S. government. In the 1960s women in Puerto Rico were also the subjects of birth control pill trials, without their consent. Those who became pregnant on placebos were offered no help, financial or otherwise, and were forced to carry resulting pregnancies to term.  

Another frequent abuse women of color faced was the lack of real informed consent. It can hardly be considered consent when you are asked to sign a paper in English and your only language is Spanish, or you are asked by the nice doctor if you’d like to stop having babies after you’ve just endured a long, arduous labor.

There is a long, ugly history of abusing and using women’s bodies by way of coercion and for experimentation. Dr. J. Marion Sims, know as the father of gynecology, practiced medicine in Alabama from 1835 to 1849. During that time, he conducted hideous experiments, without any anesthesia, on enslaved women he had purchased in the 1840s. At an annual convention of the American Public Health Association in the late 1970s his portrait was still on display – until enraged women demanded that it be taken down and never shown again.

Affluent white women were often subjected to having their ovaries removed in the second half of the 19th century if they were deemed to be overly sexual. This practice coincided with the belief that if women used their minds too eagerly, their uteruses would atrophy, denying them the God-given role of child bearers.

Medical abuse was further embraced in the early 20th century when eugenics was popular, with the growth of programs that coerced women to be sterilized if they did not willingly consent. As Alexandra Stern, author of Eugenic Nation, points out, sterilization was viewed as part of a “necessary public health intervention aimed at protecting society from deleterious genes…” This mindset prevailed late into the century. My friend’s daughter, who was mentally impaired, was subjected to sterilization in the 1970s as part of her care plan.

Some states, like California, passed laws that resulted in thousands of residents being sterilized for decades (including some men). Even as late as 2010 the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had sterilized 150 women in four years. Richard Nixon, a Californian, significantly increased Medicaid funding for sterilization of poor Americans with an emphasis on people of color.

Let us remember, medical historians remind us, that eugenics policies in the U.S. aimed at those considered too mentally defective to reproduce, are credited with becoming models for Nazi Germany.

One of the saddest stories of a black woman being sterilized during her childbearing years is that of civil rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer. She had a hysterectomy without her consent in 1961 while undergoing minor surgery for removal of a benign tumor. She spoke about her experience as a Black woman who had been subjected to what was known as a “Mississippi appendectomy,” when women were taken to local clinics and sterilized.

Now comes Dawn Wooten, a courageous nurse, who revealed that women in an ICE detention center in Georgia, run by a private prison company, had an outside doctor perform hysterectomies on them when they complained about non-threatening reproductive health issues. Many of the women who experienced major surgery awoke to find that they had had their reproductive organs all or partially removed without their prior knowledge or consent. Most were still of childbearing age and most had no idea why they had undergone the procedure.

Pauline Binam, 30, was one of them. She was being quickly deported by ICE to Cameroon, which she left at age two. Binam, now 30, was on the tarmac when members of Congress including Rep. Shirley Jackson Lee intervened to keep her in the U.S.  Binam's lawyer has said her client thought she was getting a routine procedure last year, but "when she woke up from surgery, the doctor informed her that he had to remove one of her fallopian tubes."

Imagine how hard it will be to find records of the 17 surgeries that have now been reported.  Think about how many abused women will be rushed onto airplanes and deported so they can’t bear witness. Then try to understand what it feels like to have undergone surgery that renders you unable to have a child because you are young, poor, and unwanted.

It boggles the mind, and makes you want to weep.

                                                                        # # #

Elayne Clift writes about women’s health from Saxtons River, Vt.  www.elayne-clift.com

“Keep your hands off my uterus!” That’s an often-repeated placard and plea at women’s marches I’ve attended over the past forty years. In the U.S. and abroad, it’s a common, continuing refrain because government sanctioning of abuse of women’s bodies has been occurring since well before the Second Wave women’s movement exposed it in the 1970s.

I worked in the women’s health movement then alongside Our Bodies, Ourselves and other national organizations. One of the myriad issues we dealt with was the sterilization of poor, black and brown women.  We helped raise awareness of the medical abuse of Puerto Rican women that resulted in a third of women of reproductive age being sterilized for decades at clinics often funded by the U.S. government. In the 1960s women in Puerto Rico were also the subjects of birth control pill trials, without their consent. Those who became pregnant on placebos were offered no help, financial or otherwise, and were forced to carry resulting pregnancies to term.  

Another frequent abuse women of color faced was the lack of real informed consent. It can hardly be considered consent when you are asked to sign a paper in English and your only language is Spanish, or you are asked by the nice doctor if you’d like to stop having babies after you’ve just endured a long, arduous labor.

There is a long, ugly history of abusing and using women’s bodies by way of coercion and for experimentation. Dr. J. Marion Sims, know as the father of gynecology, practiced medicine in Alabama from 1835 to 1849. During that time, he conducted hideous experiments, without any anesthesia, on enslaved women he had purchased in the 1840s. At an annual convention of the American Public Health Association in the late 1970s his portrait was still on display – until enraged women demanded that it be taken down and never shown again.

Affluent white women were often subjected to having their ovaries removed in the second half of the 19th century if they were deemed to be overly sexual. This practice coincided with the belief that if women used their minds too eagerly, their uteruses would atrophy, denying them the God-given role of child bearers.

Medical abuse was further embraced in the early 20th century when eugenics was popular, with the growth of programs that coerced women to be sterilized if they did not willingly consent. As Alexandra Stern, author of Eugenic Nation, points out, sterilization was viewed as part of a “necessary public health intervention aimed at protecting society from deleterious genes…” This mindset prevailed late into the century. My friend’s daughter, who was mentally impaired, was subjected to sterilization in the 1970s as part of her care plan.

Some states, like California, passed laws that resulted in thousands of residents being sterilized for decades (including some men). Even as late as 2010 the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had sterilized 150 women in four years. Richard Nixon, a Californian, significantly increased Medicaid funding for sterilization of poor Americans with an emphasis on people of color.

Let us remember, medical historians remind us, that eugenics policies in the U.S. aimed at those considered too mentally defective to reproduce, are credited with becoming models for Nazi Germany.

One of the saddest stories of a black woman being sterilized during her childbearing years is that of civil rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer. She had a hysterectomy without her consent in 1961 while undergoing minor surgery for removal of a benign tumor. She spoke about her experience as a Black woman who had been subjected to what was known as a “Mississippi appendectomy,” when women were taken to local clinics and sterilized.

Now comes Dawn Wooten, a courageous nurse, who revealed that women in an ICE detention center in Georgia, run by a private prison company, had an outside doctor perform hysterectomies on them when they complained about non-threatening reproductive health issues. Many of the women who experienced major surgery awoke to find that they had had their reproductive organs all or partially removed without their prior knowledge or consent. Most were still of childbearing age and most had no idea why they had undergone the procedure.

Pauline Binam, 30, was one of them. She was being quickly deported by ICE to Cameroon, which she left at age two. Binam, now 30, was on the tarmac when members of Congress including Rep. Shirley Jackson Lee intervened to keep her in the U.S.  Binam's lawyer has said her client thought she was getting a routine procedure last year, but "when she woke up from surgery, the doctor informed her that he had to remove one of her fallopian tubes."

Imagine how hard it will be to find records of the 17 surgeries that have now been reported.  Think about how many abused women will be rushed onto airplanes and deported so they can’t bear witness. Then try to understand what it feels like to have undergone surgery that renders you unable to have a child because you are young, poor, and unwanted.

It boggles the mind, and makes you want to weep.

                                                                        # # #

Elayne Clift writes about women’s health from Saxtons River, Vt. 

Guns, Voting Rights, an Election and Cognitive Dissonance

Over the July 4the weekend, 160 people died from gun violence in America. One was a six-year old in Philadelphia, another was an eight-year old in Atlanta, and a third was a 15-year old in New York. Chicago saw the worst of it with 17 people fatally shot including two children. Sixty-three others were wounded. And that’s just the count for the holiday weekend. 

Research conducted recently by the University of California/Davis revealed a link between the rise in violence in the country and a surge in gun-buying since Covid-19 began, with over two million more guns sold in a three-month period this spring.

Given the continuing lack of gun safety legislation, and the increasingly public displays of white supremacy, the increase in gun sales shouldn’t come as a surprise. Violence of all kinds is on the rise.  The question is, Why haven’t more Americans been proactive on the issue of community gun violence as we face a November election? How is it that post Columbine, Newtown, Pulse and all the rest, we haven’t taken to the streets as we did for #BLM?

As Elizabeth Warren wrote in her 2015 book A Fighting Chance, “If a mysterious virus started killing eight children every day [as gun violence does], America would mobilize teams of doctors and public health officials. We’d move heaven and earth until we found a way to protect our children. But not with gun violence.” (It was an eerily prescient analogy.)

The death of civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis reminds us of another problem that plagues us as we draw closer to the most critical election in our lives. Remember that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 eliminated legal barriers at state and local levels that kept African Americans from voting. But in 2013 the Supreme Court, headed by Chief Justice Roberts, effectively struck down the Voting Rights Act in a decision that allowed Republican states to enact voter ID laws, roll back early voting, and purge voter registration lists. Last year the Roberts court also barred challenges in federal court to partisan gerrymandering. Why in this now fragile democracy aren’t we repeating the brave and bold actions of the Civil Rights Movement to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to cast their ballot?

With secret government “police” being deployed to U.S. cities to kidnap and arrest journalists and citizens exercising their constitutional right to free speech, and with a runaway pandemic raging, which is nothing short of negligent homicide on the part of the president, why are we not in the streets demanding that Donald Trump resign (as Russians are now doing to oust Putin)?

As one friend put it, “You wouldn’t stay married to a serial killer, so why are so many Americans still putting up with Trump?”

The answer may lie in the concept of cognitive dissonance, defined by psychologists as “having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.”

Cognitive dissonance includes feeling discomfort when a behavior or attitude is in conflict with one’s values and beliefs, or when new information is contrary to those beliefs. A sign of the phenomenon is ignoring facts and therefore making irrational decisions, according to experts, which goes a long way in explaining why so many people aren’t wearing masks – or still insist on thinking that Trump is an effective leader.

Interestingly, when people experience an inconsistency between what they believe and how they behave, they often take actions, or don’t take them, to help reduce growing discomfort. So, for example, they may reject, explain away, or avoid information, even when that information is vital to their health and safety, or saving the country. They may grow angry at forced compliance (masks), avoid learning (fact-finding), and find decisions hard to make, but once a decision is made, it is justified as the best available option.

Donald Trump is clearly experiencing cognitive dissonance in the extreme, along with his other psychological disorders. His thought processes are deeply damaged (and limited to begin with), he is totally irrational, and his paranoia and narcissism only add to the dangerous mix.

Although I’m not a psychologist, I suspect that other Republicans who cannot stand up to Trump despite knowing he is dangerously delusional struggle privately with their own cognitive dissonance. As for mask refusing, fact denying, irrational decision-makers, it’s a possible explanation for their strange and troubling behavior.

The rest of us are understandably fatigued, frightened, and feeling fragile, which makes marching in the streets at the risk of being picked up by gun toting government goons less than appealing. Still, we must act to protect ourselves from the overt fascism that is coming straight at us, and we must overwhelmingly Vote Blue in November or our current nightmare will not end.

We would do well to remember the words of the late John Lewis: “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. … [And] Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

Whatever form it takes, and psychology aside, the time for trouble that we create is now.

                                                            # # #

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