An Artist, A Mission and a Meaningful Moment

There are occasions in life that gift us serendipitously. Often they move us. Such was my experience when I met Russian born Alexey Neyman, an 83-year old Jewish artist whose work was sold at the Creative Connections Gallery in Ashburnham, Massachusetts recently in support of Ukraine.

 Neyman ‘s exhibition, “The Habitual Light of Memory,” was mounted to raise funds for Ukraine.  The works raised over $4,600 on the first day of the exhibit and the funds were immediately sent to the International Rescue Committee’s Ukrainian relief effort.

That’s because Neyman, who was born in Moscow and frequently visited Ukraine, lost his grandparents, one of whom was a rabbi, to Nazi cruelty in Ukraine during WWII. He still has family and friends in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and Poland. He and his daughter, son, and Polish son-in-law are actively supporting refugees and will soon bring family to the U.S.

But there is more to the artist’s story which involves his philosophy of art. “In this time of crisis in Ukraine,” the gentle artist with twinkling eyes and a ready smile says. “Artists can contribute to the efforts of humanitarian aid, which is why we are donating proceeds from the art show to help Ukraine. It’s also why I went to protest the war in Times Square right after the war broke out.”

Formally trained as an architect, Neyman still designs Russian Orthodox churches and supervises their construction. He also studied the art of painting with Valdimir Weisberg, a renowned Russian painter and art theorist, for ten years. He is dedicated to “the philosophy of art,” which is contemplative and includes understanding how colors work in various mediums. He believes as well that “color has a life of its own,” as Weisberg and Cezanne did. The result is subtle, evocative, soft works that draw the viewer into paintings that are often inspired by people Neyman knows and places he has lived or visited. “I like to immerse the viewer in a visual experience they might not get elsewhere because the qualities and properties in works of art require an awareness of the color as an instrument.”

 One painting that conveys that idea is a portrait of the artist’s long-time partner who is from Ukraine. In her portrait she wears the colors of the Ukrainian flag. “My heart is with the people of Ukraine, and with the people of Russia who are protesting the war, Neyman says. “Everyone will pay a price that is too high. Being genuine and straightforward in my work is the one thing I can do in response to all war crimes.”

Listening to the quietly powerful words Neyman spoke, which closely align with his artistic sensibilities, moved me mightily.  They were the words not only of an artist, but of a humanist, an activist, and a man of deep character. They were also wise words spoken softly by someone who helped me believe that there was still hope for the world.

There is another reason I was moved to know Alexey Neyman.  I too am Jewish, and my grandparents and parents were born in Ukraine.  They fled the Russian pogroms of the early 20th century and in doing so, unlike some of the artist’s family, survived the atrocities.  Another connection we share is that we both engage with the world creatively, me as writer and Neyman as artist, both addressing human rights and social justice. That too was part of our serendipitous meeting.

Painting for nearly sixty years, Neyman’s work has been widely exhibited in the US, Russia, and Europe,  as well as in private and state art collections including the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. But perhaps his greatest gift to others is his gentle, human words: “Ukraine can’t be explained by human language. Art helps.”

Neyman’s art has indeed helped, not only esthetically but practically. His work of expression and remembrance continues. So, too, does our friendship.

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Elayne Clift writes about art, politics, women and social justice.

The Act of Resistance Through Art

Goya did it in 1814 with his powerful painting “Third of May” which depicted the horror of war in the face of a screaming soldier being shot to death. So did Picasso in his iconic 1937 painting “Guernica,” a stunning indictment against the suffering of innocent people during the Spanish Civil War. Diego Rivera did it in his famous 1920s mural renderings in Mexico that attacked the ruling class, the church and capitalism.

Resistance art is a longstanding tradition that has grown larger over time as a form of political protest grounded in the mobilization and activism of people who wish to resist nonviolently. It has come to represent popular power and strength by offering activists something to rally behind, as art historian and critic Ruth Millington has pointed out. “Protest artwork can question, disturb, and even change the status quo,” she says, citing AIDS awareness campaigns in the 1980s and the more recent Guerilla Girls, a group of anonymous feminist advocates who got their start pushing for gallery representation of female artists. Now they protest, speak and perform, their identities concealed since they are working artists. Their humorous in-your-face posters, flyers, billboards and books are widely recognized and revered.

For all of history brave and creative people have fought oppression, injustice and inequality through various forms of art. They have stood for and led those who are without voice, marginalized because of their class, gender, age, disability, race, or social status. They have been the embodiment of the slogan “Power to the People” as they lead the way in acts of defiance that inspire connection and conviction.

Today protest art is even more important and possible thanks to the prolific possibilities of social media. It also takes numerous forms beyond paintings and poetry. But all of it, whether literature, drama, dance, puppetry, posters, or strobe lights on public buildings, it speaks volumes, encouraging public gatherings and passive resistance.

Music can also move people to action. Think Arlo Guthrie, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan.  Or YoYo Ma playing the Ukrainian national anthem on his cello in front of the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. Or just think of the beauty of the little girl with the golden voice who sang from a bunker in Ukraine and went viral.  Watch the Ukrainians singing their national anthem in front of Russian tanks.

Photography can also be social reform art.  The work of 1960s photographer Diane Arbus revealed the pain of poverty and otherness, while the work of Margaret Lange, whose “Migrant Mother” moved millions during the Depression and Dust Bowl days.  Social reformers like Jacob Riis used their social reform photography to bring evidence of their claims of injustice to viewers, conveying potent messages that engaged others. They communicate ideas that resonate across time, place, and context.

Such ideas are shared in the simple act of witnessing. Who would not be moved by the overwhelming crowds of protesters all over the world moving silently along the boulevards of their cities, placards in hand, as Ukrainians suffer? Who could not be mesmerized by the courageous woman fleeting across a live Russian state TV program with a placard that said simply, “Stop the War!” Who is not motivated to act in whatever why they can when we witness bombed babies and birthing mothers on Facebook and Twitter?

Whether it’s a universal image of a closed fist on a poster, a bit of graffiti on a building or bridge, an outrageous visual by the Guerilla Girls, or a simple rendition of the Ukrainian flag, powerful images like those of Iranian artist Shirin Neeshat, who advocates for women in Iran, call us to action because, as she says, “Art is our weapon.”

It is also a common thread among those of us who wish to be counted in the struggle against cruelty, injustice, and violence, and to those of us who want to bring about positive societal change. In light of all that this fragile world is confronting in these times, I am grateful for all forms of art that humanize and galvanize us, as they move us to resist when resistance is needed.

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River, Vt. 

The Mysterious Draw of Crime Drama During the Winter of Our Discontent

Winter 2022. Another season of isolation. Trips cancelled. Theater, museums, movies, restaurants now no-go zones. Closeted clothes. Manicures and make-up a thing of the past. Exercise more resolution than reality. Occasional beans on toast for supper. Panic attacks when a book stash is low. FaceTime with friends. House arrest that feels like life in solitary. (How do people survive that?)

On dark days I think of Hildegard von Bingen, who became a German Benedictine abbess, composer, philosopher, medical writer, and healer during the Middle Ages - once she overcame her years of solitude as an anchorite, one of many young girls sealed in secluded brick chambers in remote abbeys with only a straw bed, a bible, and if they were lucky, a tiny garden. Hildegard grew medicinal herbs in hers as she watched her chamber mate slowly go mad.  Occasionally she joined other veiled young women to sing to priests from behind a latticed wall, and somehow kept her wits about her. Having proved her intelligence and genius for healing, the abbot finally released to start her own convent where nuns were free to move about, read, write, study, garden, and engage in intellectual and social discourse.

Sometimes I think about all the women in the world whose entire universe consists of a lonely hut where daily life revolves around a husband, children, backbreaking chores, and subsistence gardening. I even recall poor Rapunzel alone in her castle. That’s when I thank God for good books, streaming platforms, and FaceTime friends.

Now that my husband and I have become Netflix junkies we try to vary our choices, but invariably when we can’t find a good movie, we resort to watching BBC mysteries and other fictional stories that revolve around crime. Apparently so do a good many other people.  

My research about why some people get hooked on true crime, or well-scripted fictional mysteries, wasn’t particularly enlightening, but one article in the New York Times tried to explain the phenomenon.  Writing in October, Stephen Graham Jones posited that “Horror can offer comfort, can offer solace. Not because it’s an accurate representation or dramatization of our turmoil…but because horror comes packaged…in stories that end. … For all of us who sense no end to our own daily horror stories, that’s what’s so “important.”

A Google search was totally useless because no matter what search terms I offered it revealed list upon list of why people watch copious true crime stories. But I never watch true crime because it’s so depressing. However, well-crafted, complex mystery stories like the ones Agatha Christie wrote and Hercule Poirot solved are worthy of attention even if they are a bit outdated.

Psychologists were the least helpful as I tried to answer the question of why so many of us are drawn to mystery dramas, but a few did offer some insight. Most of them agreed that we like stories that offer a battle between good and evil. We also, they say, like things to be resolved almost as much as we want to escape from the crises in our own lives. We seek respite from our anxieties, and in these days from our isolation, and we enjoy helping clever detectives solve fictional crime.

Not being satisfied with expert opinion I began to ponder a few other questions. For example, who dreams up such complex plots surrounded by numerous subplots? What makes these mysteries so compelling? Why do we care so much about the outcome? 

Being a writer helped me answer my own questions. I know that good drama must be grounded in strong plot lines, clever dialogue, brilliant acting, and credible, likeable characters. It helps if at least one character is attractive, even sexy.  Take the vicar in PBS’s” Grantchester.” Not only was he better at solving crimes than his best friend, Gordy, the detective; the actor James Norton was incredibly loveable as a sleuth, a guy conflicted about God, and a priest leading his flock.

Then there was “Astrid,” the Danish autistic savant who bested the pathologist in every episode by paying much deeper attention to corpses than the forensic guy did. Brilliantly acted by a young actress who captured Astrid’s autistic compulsions along with her astounding qualities emanating from her love of solving puzzles, the friendship she formed with the female detective who understood her was a heartwarming aspect of the weekly stories.

And how could I not recommend “Unforgotten,” a series about long unsolved crimes in which the British actress Nicola Walker portrays a compassionate detective so committed to solving challenging 20-year-old crimes that it gets her in trouble.  Like Astrid and her detective, Walker has great chemistry with her male deputy in a relationship of understanding and trust vs. sexual attraction.

All of this is the stuff of good drama and compelling mystery that, for whatever reason, serves up distraction, makes us feel we are in good company, and leads us to believe that trouble ends, and all will be well. That’s enough to make any dark night feel less threatening or lonely. After all, Hildegard went on to do great things, and Rapunzel was rescued from her castled solitude, proving that hope works in mysterious ways, even in Covid times.

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Elayne Clift is a writer. She has never written a mystery and seldom reads them but she watches lots of TV. 

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.

A View of the World Through a Gendered Lens

As a feminist writer I often refer to “the lens of gender,” a term that refers to looking at the world through metaphorical spectacles that allow one to view people and events via a special filter. That filter exposes women’s experiences, needs, and perceptions while revealing the realities, needs and perceptions of men in new ways too.  Our vision becomes refined, more acute, and more humane when we don these spectacles, allowing us to see things more clearly and compassionately. By becoming aware of context, we find new meaning in our own and others’ experiences. 

Looking at the world through the lens of gender allowed Jean Kilbourne, for example, to shine light on the world of advertising in a way that no one had done before her. She demonstrated through her writing and classic video series that women were being objectified and sexualized by advertising that seemed clever, until the gender lens revealed advertising’s alarming or violent subtext.

Another kind of gender lens was more literal as photographers Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Diane Arbus and others revealed. Lange and Bourke-White were social realists whose visionary work revealed what Henry James referred to in literature as an “air of reality.”  Like James their work valued accurate representations of the psychological and material realities of life.

Lange achieved this reality by capturing historically important events, including the Dust Bowl and Depression-era days.  Committed to revealing the hardships visited upon poor migrants, she afforded her subjects dignity and respect, and by offering a literal gender lens, she also revealed what it looked like to be frightened, unbearably fatigued and marginalized.  Lange's images, like the iconic “Migrant Mother,” were often confrontational calls to conscience exposing the need to defend against a lack of interest or skepticism, especially among policymakers.

Margaret Bourke-White offered something new with her imagery of industrial America, 1930s Russia, and the horrors of World War II as no one else had. She also proved adept at capturing human moments in the lives of both the powerful and the poor in a body of work that ranged from the uncompromising to the personal. Women were often among the people she photographed to tie picture essays to real lives and individual experiences in a human way.

Diane Arbus once noted, “There are things nobody would see if [we] didn’t photograph them.”  Thankfully, she and other women photographers did view their work through a gender lens, for without that lens we would never have known so much of the world or the historical events that challenged everyone, including women and children. 

Martha Gellhorn was an intrepid journalist who covered several wars through a literary lens of gender. Leaving the news of bombs, battleships and martyred soldiers to the male press corps, she used her reporting to show the world what civilian women and children were suffering in war torn places By telling their stories she put a human face on the dreadful effects of conflict.

These innovative photographers and reporters, along with others, paved the way for women writers and photojournalists who were compelled to address social justice issues. Marion Palfi, for example, combined her art form with social research which resulted in her iconic images, including the 1940s photo “Wife of a Lynch Victim.” Social documentarian Mary Ellen Mark’s work explored homelessness, addiction, mental illness and teenage pregnancy, as seen from the inside.  (In 1976 she spent 36 days in the women’s maximum- security section of an Oregon mental institution.)

I can’t help thinking now about women like these as we contemplate the suffering occurring in the world in our own time. What might we learn in larger social justice terms if unflinching photographs of the vacant stares and skeletal bones of children starving in Yemen, Afghanistan and parts of Africa were in our minds, or we heard the stories of grieving mothers, themselves hungry and frail? Would we see the face of famine differently?

Would we more fully empathize with the pain of incarceration, wrongful or otherwise, or the unending grief of parents who bury their children because of gun violence? Would we view addiction or mental illness differently? Would we be less judgmental about those who live in family structures unlike our own? Would we understand more deeply what it is like to lose everything in a natural disaster, or to grow old alone?

If we saw the faces of hopelessness, terror, marginalization, solitude, and profound sadness might we be inspired to show up at the polls to vote for change, to advocate vociferously, to press for more humane legislation?

As feminists know, context is everything. When the world is viewed through the lens of gender, social change becomes a political imperative. Stories of real people who live punishing lives for various reasons become compelling through a visual medium that offers powerful testimony to the reality of lives lived outside our own spheres. 

In short, seeing is knowing. And knowing, we can no longer look away.

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 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.

Women Athletes Are Making Their Mark in Ways That Matter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                                        # # #

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

What is Title 42 and Why Should It Be Rescinded?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                            # # #

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

Terrorist Plots and Truthful Testimonies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Broken Courts Mean Battered Lives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Do We Mean When We Talk About Human Rights?

What Do We Mean When We Talk About Human Rights?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                            # # #

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

The Urgency of Saving Roe v. Wade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Re-Victimization of Sexual Assault Survivors

The Re-victimization of Sexual Assault Survivors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

Finding Their Voices: Black Women Writers and Literary Truthtellers

Finding Their Voices: Black Women Writers and Truthtellers

Last month was Black History Month and this one is Women’s History Month. What better time to honor women of color, who with other female writers, reveal the courage it takes to tell the truth about women’s lives through the written word?

The late poet Muriel Rukeyser once asked this now iconic question: “What would happen if just one woman told the truth about her life?”  Her answer was: “The world would split open.” Historically silenced and admonished to be “good girls and fine ladies,” women who took up the pen in past centuries and decades were ignored, trivialized and punished, but many of them bravely broke with convention. Among them were black women writers whose courage, conviction and talent made a difference in a world where words can become verbal monuments.

Nineteenth century poet Phyllis Wheatley was born a slave in West Africa and seized at age seven. Luckily her Boston mistress taught her to read and write. At age 13 she published a poem that made her famous.  By the age of 18 she’d written a poetry collection, published in London. In one poem she wrote, “Remember, Christians, Negroes black as Cain, May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.”

Zora Neale Hurston, a Harlem newcomer in 1925, “knew how to make an entrance.” Rising above poverty, she became the most successful, significant black woman writer of the early 20th century. Writing prolifically in various genre, she is remembered for her 1937 masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Sadly, she died in poverty in 1960, age 69, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Florida. Alice Walker placed a marker there, and then resurrected Hurston’s work.

Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and poet, Alice Walker, is best known for her 1982 novel, The Color Purple, which explored female African-American experience through the life of its central character, Celie. Walker also wrote about the taboo topic of female genital cutting in her novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy, a tribute to her courage as part of the black feminist movement.

Toni Morrison, who died in 2019, saw books as “a form of political action.”  Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, proved the point when it told the story of a young black girl obsessed with white standards of beauty. Her later novel, Beloved, based on a true slave narrative, won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing, through a woman’s life, the evils slavery wrought. In 1993, Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Fiction for “visionary force and poetic import, giving life to an essential aspect of American reality.”

In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou shared the story of being raped by her mother’s boyfriend at age seven. Reading black authors Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois aided her recovery and she became Hollywood’s first female black director. In the 1950s, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild meeting James Baldwin and others. She became a civil rights movement leader, using her pen to write about relevant issues. Later she was the first black woman to have a screenplay produced. She is remembered for writing and reading the inaugural poem “On the Pulse of Morning,” for President Clinton.

Audre Lorde was a self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” whose work dealt with the struggles of ordinary people. She championed women breaking their silence, never better than in The Cancer Journals when post-mastectomy, a nurse admonished her for not wearing a prosthesis to help other women’s morale. Who, demanded Lorde, identifying as a warrior against cancer, told Moshe Dayan to remove his eye patch to make people feel better?  She took on racism, sexism, classism and homophobia in her writing and her contributions to feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory addressed broad political issues. The iconic activist was the recipient of many awards and honors, and was New York’s poet laureate in 1991-2. She died of breast cancer shortly afterwards.

Gwendolyn Brooks, poet, author and teacher, dealt with personal celebrations and struggling people. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950 becoming the first African American to receive the Pulitzer. She was also the first black woman to be a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, and she served as poet laureate of Illinois. Her work was often political, especially in regard to civil rights. Like Phyllis Wheatley, she was 13 when she published her first poem and was publishing regularly by age 18. She died in 2000.

Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat and Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie deserve attention, among other non-American black women writers. Danticat writes about women’s relationships as well as issues of power, injustice, and poverty, and Adichie is said to be her generation’s Chinua Achebe, another noted Nigerian novelist. Purple Hibiscus, Adichie’s first novel won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book in 2005.

And now comes Amanda Gorman, who read her amazing inaugural poem at President Biden’s inauguration. Her first two books of poetry are already bestsellers before being in print.

That’s just a short list of black women writers. Imagine what else there is to discover in their work and that of other female truthtellers. And imagine what else is to come!

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Elayne Clift writes (and teaches) from Saxtons River, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com

A Mea Culpa to Women Artists

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts dedicates a floor to women’s art. An entire wing of the Brooklyn Museum exhibits feminist art only. At the Baltimore Museum of Art, a year-long program of exhibitions, programs, and acquisitions by female-identified artists is mounted. New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) showcases printmaker and found artist Betye Saar’s 1969 autobiographical work, “Black Girl’s Window.”

These are just a few museums in the U.S. committed to correcting past omissions in terms of acquiring, exhibiting, and honoring women artists. Each was opened last year and each fell victim to anticipated large scale viewing because of shut downs in the face of Covid-19.

They were joined by other excited institutions, galleries, and university-based arts venues across the country who worked collaboratively with the Feminist Art Coalition, a grassroots organization, to present a series of concurrent events including exhibitions, performances, and lectures to ensure that women are recognized at the museum level.

Internationally, museums including Madrid’s Prado, were also slated to be recognized as they commemorated women’s achievement in art. The historical inequality pervasive in the male-dominated art world was obvious for years at the Prado, but for its 200th anniversary the museum featured two overlooked 16th century female painters. Elsewhere in Europe, last year saw major exhibits of women’s art.

All that activity reflected progress, but there are still issues to be addressed when it comes to women in the arts. Just two years ago 96 percent of artwork sold at auction was by male artists and only 30 percent of artists represented by commercial galleries in the U.S. were women. A survey of permanent collections in 18 major art museums in America conducted at the same time found that out of over 10,000 artists, 87 percent were male and 85 percent were white. Only 27 women out of 318 artists are represented in the 9th edition of Janson’s Basic History of Western Art, up from zero in the 1980s.

Against that backdrop, the work of the Boston Museums of Fine Art (MFA) in recognizing women’s overlooked place in art, and its public mea culpa, was significant. Its extensive third-floor exhibition of women’s art, “Women Take the Floor,” offered a stellar showcase of women’s art that sought to “acknowledge and remedy the systemic gender discrimination found in museums, galleries, the academy and the marketplace, including the MFA’s inconsistent history in supporting women’s art.”

The various exhibit spaces included paintings, sculpture, prints, photography, jewelry, textiles, ceramics and furniture, all created by women artists, some recognized and others whose work has been obscured.  Exhibits themes ranged from Women Depicting Women, Women on the Move: Art and Design, Beyond the Loom: Fiber as Sculpture, Women Publish Women: The Print Boom, and Women of Action.

“Our goal was to celebrate the strength and diversity of work by women artists while also shining a light on the ongoing struggle that many continue to face today. This is a first step,” Nonie Gadsden, a senior curator who led a cross-departmental team of curators in organizing “Women Take the Floor,” said.

Also noteworthy was the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) exhibitions, programs and acquisitions by female-identifying artists that took place throughout 2020 in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in America. “2020 Vision” encompassed 16 solo exhibitions and seven thematic shows. The “2020 Vision” project was part of the museum’s ongoing commitment to addressing race and gender diversity gaps within the museum field, and to represent fully and deeply the spectrum of individuals that have shaped the trajectory of art. 

The recognition of women artists didn’t take place in a vacuum.  Advocates, activists and feminist art critics worked for decades to make it happen. None is more respected than the late Linda Nochlin whose pioneering essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Female Artists?” published in 1971 was groundbreaking.

Then there are the Guerilla Girls, a group of feminist activist artists who wear gorilla masks and remain anonymous as they work internationally mounting street projects, postering and stickering wherever they find discrimination, gender and ethnic bias, and corruption.  Last year, with help from Art in Ad Places, they placed a poster on a phone booth in front of MoMA in New York calling out the museum for its ties to sex offender the late Jeffrey Epstein and other big donors. They’ve also reframed Linda Nochlin’s critical question. “Why haven’t more women been considered great artists throughout western history?”

Susan Fisher Sterling, director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, DC, founded more than 30 years ago, may have the answer. “Museums, in general, mirror the power structures in our society, structures that in the arts privilege the history of white men’s accomplishments.” NMWA is the only major museum in the world solely dedicated to celebrating the achievements of women in the visual, performing, and literary arts. The museum honors women artists of the past, promotes women artists in the present, and assures the place of women artists in the future.

Let’s hope that these important exhibitions can be viewed and appreciated post pandemic. Surely, women artists have been invisible far too long to be brought down by a nasty virus.

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?

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