Category: Politics - Page 4 - The Conversationalist

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Nearly seven months later, a case for why some healthcare providers in Nigeria are getting nervous.

Rose sits in the waiting room of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Isolo, Lagos, waiting to receive her prescription for oral contraceptives. While her husband supports her decision, her family does not, and she is here despite their insistence on her having more children before trying them, believing that they can take away her fertility. That she’s even able to get these contraceptives would have been unthinkable just a few years ago: Rose has never heard about Roe v. Wade, but she remembers when it was impossible to consider family planning at all, let alone have access to it, and fears returning to those times.

Before organizations like Planned Parenthood Federation Nigeria (PPFN), sexual and reproductive agency were impossible for most women in the country. “Many women who visit Planned Parenthood defy their husbands to get contraceptives, secretly making choices that save their lives despite facing consequences if they are ever found out,” says Zainab Mukhtar, Communications Officer for PPFN. "We advocate method by choice and exercising free will, not only for married women but sexual and reproductive health choices for young people."

In Nigeria, many women cannot access reproductive health services without spousal permission, and if unmarried, they are shunned for considering it. Even health workers cite God's omniscience when refusing care: While trying to obtain birth control, one unmarried woman recalls her male doctor condescendingly telling her, "Ah, madam, do you want to test God? Where is your husband? Go and bring [him]." This provider bias, where health workers lead with disapproval when consulted for reproductive and sexual health care, has only made it harder for many women in Nigeria to access the care they need—a bias that becomes far more severe when it comes to abortion.

This bias is likely to only get worse: Sani Mohammed, a sociologist, activist, and the executive director of the Bridge Connect Africa Initiative, says the repeal of Roe v. Wade last summer has had ripple effects beyond the U.S., and creates justification for more limits on women's rights worldwide, often detering advocacy efforts and slowing momentum behind progressive bills. “It sends a signal to anti-abortion advocates in Nigeria that if the U.S. can do it, why not us?” Mohammed says. “It will take longer for Nigeria to make abortion services open and legal because it sets a precedent and justification, rescinding all the work done today and making it harder to make a case in favor of sexual and reproductive rights.”

Sani was careful in choosing his words, so as not to risk the little progress made, adding that it took a long time to even get this far. Bridge Connect Africa Initiative focuses on women’s rights and reproductive health rights, pushing for policies and campaigns around gender-based violence, and access to education for young girls to help inspire more informed social and reproductive health choices, especially in northern Nigeria. But it’s been an uphill battle.

Except in situations where having the child puts the mother's life at risk, Nigeria is governed by two laws that criminalize abortion: the penal code in the north and the criminal code in the south. When discussing restrictive sexual and reproductive laws in Nigeria, people often think of the north, associating it with Sharia law and terrorism, but southern Nigeria is predominantly Christian, comprising of Catholics and evangelical Christians, and their stance toward abortion and sexual reproductive rights is similar to hardliners in America. In Enugu State, in southeastern Nigeria, for example, a coalition of civil society organizations claimed that the comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) in the public school curriculum equates to pornography and demanded to stop sex education in schools.

While abortion is a crime in Nigeria, it is also a cause of shame to be pregnant out of wedlock, regardless of the circumstances of the pregnancy. In northern Nigerian culture, a girl is considered old enough to be married and have children at 11 years old, but an 11-year-old girl is not allowed to seek out family planning methods. Young girls who get pregnant from rape still have to carry it to term, and to avoid scorn and ostracism, often find unsafe means to hide their shame. Without legal recourse, these girls either neglect the children after they are born or resort to unsafe abortions, regardless of the risks. Sani recalls witnessing two cases of hysterectomies performed on 14-year-old girls. "It is already difficult to have access to safe abortion, and other reproductive health devices that help girls as young as 12 to 14 stay safe and live healthy lives."

According to a report by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), about two million women and girls aged 15 to 45 have abortions in Nigeria every year—a staggeringly high number over three times the estimated number of abortions in the U.S. Of these women and girls, 6,000 die, and 500,000 live with complications from unsafe abortions, despite some doctors risking their licenses to provide off-record/off-book abortion care. It is also the fourth leading cause of death for lower and middle income women, according to the Academy for Health Development (AHEAD), a not-for-profit health research agency in Nigeria.

Organizations like PPFN—which is a member of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF)—are doing their best to combat this, but similar to America, misconceptions about their services abound. Like in the U.S., the majority of Planned Parenthood Nigeria’s services are preventive, especially against HIV/AIDS, cervical cancer, and malaria. They provide maternal and child care through malaria prevention and treatments, especially intermittent preventive treatment (IPT) for pregnancy malaria, which is a critical public health problem in Nigeria. Also like in the U.S., PPFN provides post-abortion care for women and girls having spontaneous abortions or miscarriages, and those who attempt incomplete abortions using crude objects to remove an unwanted pregnancy “by any means necessary.” Sometimes these objects are found still inside the women.

Would PPFN provide abortions in uncomplicated cases? Zainab, with a careful laugh, says they would, but that it’s “tricky.” They are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they don’t help, the patient could seek an unsafe abortion elsewhere that could lead to death; if they do, it could mean breaking the law. Nevertheless, PPFN will not turn away a patient in need, and will perform abortion services within legal exceptions—that is, when the birth of the child directly puts the life of the mother in mortal danger.

Perhaps if Nigerians were more open about abortion, it could inspire a legislative debate similar to the one in Ireland, and allow a platform to discuss the benefits of legalizing abortion, providing safer choices for women and girls through government funding and training for health care providers. But with the Nigerian health sector being one of the most underfunded in the world, it does not leave much hope.

While Zainab believes it is too early to say what the real effects of the overturning of Roe v. Wade will be on Africa, she predicts the heightening of fear and possibilities of regression. “It is difficult to work in this field in Nigeria; these things happening here have existed a long time but signaling from the U.S. can make things worse.” Shortly after the repeal of Roe v. Wade, the Lagos Government proposed new abortion guidelines on the safe termination of pregnancy. They were quickly rejected after the governor, Babajide Sanwo Olu, who is running for re-election, received backlash from Christian and Muslim religious organizations in the state.

But even before the overturning of Roe v. Wade, it’s been an especially difficult time. For more than 50 years, the United States has supported global family planning and reproductive health rights in Nigeria, but when countries like America, which have historically provided aid, start taking them away in their own countries, the idea of choice for women in oppressive societies is erased forever. Most notably, the global gag rule on abortion during the Trump years reduced reproductive health funding and setback the work being done independently on sexual health rights both locally and abroad.

There is progress, however, no matter how slow. Planned Parenthood Nigeria has a more comprehensive curriculum for sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR) education currently being piloted in private schools, where there is less national control of the curriculum. They also train health workers on sexual and reproductive health rights and how to identify provider bias. Bridge Connect Initiative has been able to get three northern states (Kano, Jigawa, and Bauchi) to recognize the Violence Against Person Prohibition Act (VAPP) and the child protection bill. They also provide psychosocial support to child brides and survivors of gender-based violence while helping many girls complete their education.

The durability of these successes lies in the allyship of progressive nations towards women’s health abroad. This is why the rescinding of Roe v. Wade is so dangerous on a global scale. Women are dying now. Nigerian women are deprived of contraception when they want it or forced by their husbands to take it when they don’t, and even that is considered progressive. What becomes the fate of a woman living in Nigeria when the government takes a more hardline stance on her agency without a powerful ally to help? With the right support from local organizations and international health rights networks, and a renewed interest in Africa from the U.S., hopefully, we never have to find out.

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January 17, 2023August 28, 2024

The Overturning of Roe v. Wade Didn’t Just Affect America

by Nelly Kalu

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Communities directly affected by a mass shooting don't just get to move on when there's another one.

I was a junior in high school when I first imagined dying in a mass shooting. It was 1999 and two young men had murdered 12 of their fellow students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, 1,500 miles from my hometown of Buffalo, New York. A few weeks after the slaughter, a schoolmate burst onstage at an assembly. He was wielding a Super Soaker and wearing a trench coat, the Columbine killers’ signature clothing item. He thought it was funny. Those of us who’d spent that spring mapping out escape routes in our heads were less amused.

On the eve of my 40th birthday, I’ve been thinking about that episode a lot. Columbine stood out in 1999 because it was then the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, the killers ending more than ten lives at once. Once a grim milestone, it now seems relatively small in scale. While roughly as common as they were in the 1990s, mass shootings have become deadlier and more prominent in the age of social media: Gunmen killed 60 people in Las Vegas in 2017; 49 at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub in 2016; 32 at Virginia Tech in 2007; and 26, including 20 first graders, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012. Back when I was in high school, these shootings didn’t seem so sickeningly normal.

I was sheltered enough then that I didn’t think about dying every day. Like lots of other kids, my anxiety spiked when I read about Columbine or heard about it on TV, but I didn’t really believe that something like that could happen where I lived or went to school. People frequently die of gun violence in Buffalo—a fact I was only dimly aware of as a teenager—but I invented all kinds of reasons why my classmates and I were exempt from the kind of random mass killing that had taken place at Columbine: New York has tougher gun laws than the rest of the country; my high school was small and close-knit; and, like most sheltered adolescents, I simply didn’t believe that people my age could die. As one high school friend put it, “I definitely didn’t internalize Columbine as a real risk for us. That was something crazy people in other places did.”

For a long time, it felt as if my friend was right. Our city was scarred by everyday violence, but for decades it escaped large mass shootings of the kind that happened at Columbine. Earlier this month, I was grabbing lunch at a diner in Providence, Rhode Island, when I overheard some customers chatting about a local shooting. “Not too many people get shot who haven’t put themselves in harm’s way,” one guy tut-tutted, expressing a belief many Americans still hold. It’s comforting to believe you can avoid violence by being smart and doing right, even when there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Buffalo’s luck ran out in May, when it became the latest American city to experience a deadly mass shooting, this time at a Tops grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Ten people were killed, victims of a targeted, anti-Black hate crime. No decent person would suggest that the victims had “put themselves in harm’s way” by shopping for groceries in the middle of the afternoon. But whether an act of violence feels random and haphazardly cruel or personal and targeted only really matters to those left behind. It makes no difference to the dead.

One of the cruelest aspects of the way we live now—always bracing for the next horrific headline, believing this kind of violence is inevitable because we are told over and over again that it is—is the way all of these massacres, no matter how shocking or deadly or racist or cruel, soon become old news to everyone but those most directly affected. Occasionally they reappear in headlines on anniversaries, or as benchmarks to help contextualize the latest mass shooting. Even the phrase “mass shooting” has acquired a leaden deadness; it’s become so common that it has lost the power to shock and horrify. Before those who lost children and parents and spouses and friends can even keep food down again, the rest of us have already moved on.

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

“5/14,” the date of the Tops massacre, has become the equivalent of “9/11” for Buffalonians—a grim shorthand for a community-altering event that few outside of Buffalo would immediately comprehend. When I first heard about the shooting, I cried for two days. My sister-in-law used to shop at that Tops; it’s a mile and a half from my parents’ place. There were vigils and rallies and fundraisers. President Biden showed up to denounce the “poison” of white supremacy. Then we tried to move on. We have come to believe that those not directly affected by a particular mass shooting have to move on; it’s the only way to grasp a few moments of peace before the next one.

The respite was short-lived. Ten days after the murders in Buffalo, an 18-year-old man killed 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. In both cases, the shooter was an 18-year-old man, the weapon of choice was a legally purchased AR-15-style rifle, and communities of color were the target. The killer in Buffalo was a young white man who targeted Black people; the killer in Uvalde was a young Latino man who targeted Latinos and was likely inspired by the massacre in Buffalo.

It’s impossible to stop thinking about something that never stops happening.

Six months on, residents of Buffalo and Uvalde are feuding over how much of the money raised by various victims' funds is going to which victims. Some Uvalde families believe that only those who lost children should be entitled to compensation. At a recent meeting in Buffalo, survivors of the Tops massacre made the opposite argument. Several argued that the people who died were at peace now, while they still had bills to pay and trauma-related symptoms that make it difficult or impossible to go back to work. Some former Tops employees shared stories of forcing themselves to return to their workplace, which now doubled as the scene of a shattering crime. Most couldn’t make it through an hour. Many of the children who watched their friends die in Uvalde have found it difficult or impossible to return to school. They suffer panic attacks, scare easily, and have trouble sleeping. Hundreds of U.S. parents have lost the power to give their children safe and normal childhoods.

In Buffalo, survivors have complained of being promised substantial financial assistance from a $2.9 million victims’ fund, then fobbed off with gift cards and meal vouchers. Worse than the inadequate disbursement policies of a particular fund is the abandonment of a community by the institutions meant to serve and protect it. In Uvalde, where the cowardice and incompetence of local police and other law enforcement officers may have cost children their lives, Governor Greg Abbott announced the opening of a center meant to provide the community with long-term mental health services. The mother of a little girl who survived the massacre told The Washington Post that no staffers were there when she stopped by the center to request gas vouchers. “It’s so frustrating,” she said. “Like, I know how this system works. And as an educated person, I see how they’re trying to take advantage of all these families…I knew it was gonna happen. Resources here are so limited. They were limited prior to this. And it was obvious to me this morning that there was no one that could help when we needed it.”

Adding to their trauma is the fact that survivors are now pitted against one another in a Hunger Games-style competition for artificially meager resources. A state government that cares for its people would fully fund its schools and mental health services, ensure families have a basic income, and provide free therapy to traumatized children that parents don’t have to drive for miles to access. A responsibly run charity would seek guidance from the community it is ostensibly serving and be open and transparent about its resources and who can expect what.

Instead, the thousands of people in this country who have been traumatized by a mass shooting—who were there when it happened, who were shot but survived, who lost children and parents and spouses and friends—get thoughts and prayers. They get to talk to high-profile reporters for a few days or a week. Their kids get therapy every other week, sometimes for as little as 15 minutes per session. Maybe they get a couple of gift cards or a meal voucher. After every mass shooting, we vow to support the victims, yet more often than not, what they end up getting is staggeringly inadequate. Meanwhile, the rest of the country moves on. And all these communities are left with is the pain of being associated with the worst thing that ever happened there: “Buffalo” now evokes a brutal hate crime more than football or chicken wings or snow.

On December 14, the Sandy Hook parents, with the exception of those who couldn’t bear to go on living, will have survived a decade without their babies. November 14 marked six months since the Buffalo massacre. The six-month anniversary of the Uvalde shooting falls on Thanksgiving. This year, I am thankful for my friends and family, and the fact that we survived another year in a violent, fraying, heartless country ruled by people who would rather let children smear blood on themselves and play dead than ban assault rifles.

The day this essay was commissioned, there was a mass shooting at the University of Virginia that left three young men dead. Two other students were injured, one by a bullet that went through his back and lodged in his stomach. He is expected to survive, which in this country counts as luck. Two days after I submitted a draft, a 22-year-old man shot up an LGBTQ club in Colorado, killing at least five people and injuring 25 others. The morning after I submitted a final draft, a gunman killed six people and himself at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia.

What is a life worth? What about the lives of three people, or ten, or 12, or 60? We have reached a point where we can’t process the unique horror of any single massacre, let alone deal with the social fallout, before the next one comes along. And until we meaningfully restrict access to guns in the United States, there will always be a next one. That sense of inevitability has led to a pervasive hopelessness that compounds this uniquely American trauma. It is daunting to mourn each life lost, each family broken, each childhood marred, each marriage strained and severed. But that’s what we need to do, and we need to do it while fighting to dismantle the anti-democratic institutions preventing us from ending this carnage. We have to stop moving on from what those who lost loved ones, the use of limbs, or the will to live can never move on from. We have to confront the true cost of these killings: to victims, survivors, society, and every human being with a soul.

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November 24, 2022August 28, 2024

Buffalo and Uvalde, Six Months Later

by Raina Lipsitz

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Why the Duma's new restrictions against LGBTQ "propaganda" are both dangerous and unsurprising.

Nearly everyone who pursues an advanced degree in area studies without having ethnic or family ties to their chosen region has an unusual story about how they got into the field. In my case, the interest stemmed from two short-term evangelical youth mission trips to Russia in 1999 and 2000.

I had just graduated from high school at the time, and I was looking for something to help me contextualize a crisis of faith that had been troubling me for several years. I wanted to imagine a world beyond the stifling Midwestern conservative Christian enclave in which I’d grown up, and when I first stepped off the plane in Moscow, I was nervous but also thrilled to start getting a sense of what Russia was like. I was thus susceptible to certain romantic notions about the “Russian soul” and its depth of authenticity that supposedly contrasted with Western superficiality and calculation, and, after seeing the sights in Moscow and spending a couple of weeks getting to know young Russians in a rural summer camp environment, I was hooked. In that lingering post-Cold War moment of relative optimism, I developed a naive fascination with Russian language and culture that came to define my professional and intellectual life in the following years.

It’s embarrassing to me now that I ever engaged in missionary activities, but, while I quickly gave up on the desirability of converting (Orthodox) Christians to (Protestant) Christianity, the new friends and pen pals and an interest in the country itself remained. I began to study Russian in college, and from that point on, I traveled to Russia regularly until the end of 2015, by which time I had earned a PhD in modern Russian history from Stanford University and spent three years teaching at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), a school with which Stanford partnered at the time. But these days, I’m forced to wonder if I’ll ever go back.

Amid the coverage of Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine, which has dragged on now for nearly eight months, the Russian State Duma has been preparing to pass further restrictions against LGBTQ “propaganda” in an initiative that Deputy Alexander Khinshtein, chair of the committee on information policy, believes may pass as early as next week, according to reporting by the Russian news service Interfax. The new legislation, for which hefty fines will be demanded from violators, is quite comprehensive, banning any public representation of queer sexualities or gender identities, and making particular mention of banning “information that might cause children to wish to change their sex.” Thus far, this new legislation has received relatively little comment in the Western press. But there is no doubt that the legislation and the Russian discourse around it will generate yet more violence against a scapegoated minority as the government drives LGBTQ existence entirely underground.

“Sodomy” was illegal in the Soviet Union, and was only legalized in Russia in 1993. At that point, many observers believed that a democratizing post-Soviet state was on a trajectory toward greater acceptance of difference and greater integration into the international community. Sadly, and in retrospect unsurprisingly, the openness did not last.

From 2003 to 2004, in between finishing college at Ball State University and starting my postgraduate studies at Stanford, I worked as an English teacher at the American Home—a private English school and center of cultural exchange—in the provincial Russian city of Vladimir, in the region I’d traveled to as a youth missionary. In my advanced English classes at the American Home, I had students read and discuss newspaper articles about current events, and that year, the state of Massachusetts had legalized same-sex marriage. When we discussed the topic in class, by and large, the students voiced negative opinions. But whether it was acceptable that we were discussing homosexuality and LGBTQ rights in the classroom was never remotely in question.

Fast-forward to the 2012-2013 academic year, when, post-PhD, I taught humanities classes to both undergraduates and master’s students at RANEPA. One of the Russian students in my postgraduate course—the only liberal among the Russians in the class—gave a sympathetic presentation about Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” protest and its aftermath. She chose the topic entirely on her own, but I was admittedly enthusiastic. Her presentation gave way to a chaotic shouting match among the students, which I should have taken as a foreshadowing of things to come. Some weeks later, I got a frantic phone call from a RANEPA administrator demanding to know why I had “taught Pussy Riot lyrics” in my class. The conversation left me wondering if I was going to get fired. While I didn’t, I did learn to self-censor a bit in the classroom. Later that summer, the Russian State Duma passed its notorious anti-gay “propaganda” law banning the dissemination of any information about “non-traditional sexual relations” to minors. I was dismayed.

All of this has been on my mind in light of the Duma’s new anti-LGBTQ legislation—legislation that feels all the more potent given what is fueling it. Because while anti-queer sentiment has been brewing for years, with much encouragement from above, it is also quite clear that Moscow’s anti-queer obsession is connected with the war in Ukraine, both of which derive from an authoritarian ethos that elevates toxic masculinity, patriarchy, and “traditional values” as an ideal to be emulated, promising punishment for those who deviate. The legislation is of a piece with the war effort, which Russian Orthodox Church and state officials have cast in terms of “spiritual warfare” against the “satanic” West, specifically for its rejection of these same “traditional values.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has taken an increasingly right-wing populist line since 2011, a period when protests against corruption and election irregularities were a regular feature of life in Moscow. Meanwhile, since the Ukrainian protests of 2013, which centered on Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) and developed into what is now referred to as the Revolution of Dignity, right-wing Russian politicians and Russian Orthodox Christian leaders have fixated on Ukrainian aspirations for democracy and self-determination, denouncing these hopes as a Western conspiracy, Nazism, Satanism—and, of course, as the corrupting influence of “Gayropa.” The authoritarian desire of the Putin regime and Russian nationalists to control the future of Kyiv has thus been framed in terms of “Western decadence” vs. “traditional Slavic values,” a framing that, until Putin actually invaded Ukraine, generated a great deal of sympathy for the Russian autocrat on the American and European Right.

Here at home, of course, LGBTQ rights are also under intense attack by the Right, and certain states’ governors—those of Florida and Texas in particular—have so severely abused their respective state bureaucracies in their efforts to persecute transgender Americans and their supporters that many families with trans children have been forced to move out of state. This isn’t the post-Cold War world many of us once young, naïve idealists imagined. When I returned from Russia to take a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of South Florida in Tampa in 2015, I still thought I was going to a place where things were getting better and better for queer folks like myself. I was wrong.

In both Putin’s authoritarian Russia and Trump’s authoritarian America, it was (and has been) painful to watch people I thought were reasonable go all-in for the nationalist narratives that leave no room for those who are different from the straight Christian norm. Ironically, it was while living in Moscow, at age 33, that I finally came to recognize my own queerness, the source of feeling “different” and uncomfortable in my own skin that had marked my evangelical childhood and youth, and which that same evangelical socialization had left me ill-equipped to see or acknowledge. Once upon a time, I had held up Russia as a mirror to America, my vague young adult discontent and inability to feel comfortable in my Christian Right milieu fueling a need to broaden my horizons about human possibilities. Now, I see in both countries a sort of imperial provincialism, a post-Cold War hangover borne of “great power” nostalgia and a yawning abyss of insecurity papered over with jingoistic bravado, conspiracy theories, and approved categories of people to hate, while (in classic abuser mode) claiming to “love” them so much that you have to beat them into conformity with what is ultimately “best for them.” In both countries, there are many good people who resist these toxic impulses, but the impulses persist, leaving destruction in their wake.

The last time I was in Russia was December 2015, when RANEPA flew me to Moscow to sign a contract that supposedly had to be signed in person before I could get paid for the last semester of editorial work I had done remotely on one of the school’s academic journals. With not much to do other than wait for the paperwork, I visited friends, strolled down memory lane, and went ice skating with a colleague and an ex-girlfriend at the massive outdoor rink in Gorky Park. Amid New Year’s preparations, almost no work gets done in Russia in late December, and on the day I had to leave Moscow, there was still no contract for me to sign. “Don’t worry,” a young administrator told me. “We’ll just forge your signature on the contract.” I finally got paid in cash at an academic conference in the United States that took place nearly a year later.

That surreal goodbye to Russia is an apt coda to the years I spent at RANEPA, when Putin’s creeping authoritarianism started to become, well, much less creeping. In the first few years after 2015, I continued to assume I would return to Russia someday. But now, many Russians themselves, including some of my friends and colleagues, have had to flee the country for their own protection as conscientious objectors to the full-scale war that, back then, none of us anticipated. Some LGBTQ Russians have also fled in recent years, a trend that will no doubt continue as state persecution of the LGBTQ community intensifies. Just as Americans sometimes debate whether it’s ethical for people whose rights and safety are threatened to leave red states instead of staying and trying to change things for the better, the topic of leaving or remaining in Russia—which inevitably raises questions of privilege and survivors’ guilt—has been a contentious matter among the Russian intelligentsia in recent years. My own thinking is that no one who can find a way to leave—especially no marginalized person—is ever ethically obligated to remain in a place that denies them their rights and is unsafe for them. Sometimes, as you struggle to keep hope alive that someday things will be better, all you can do is bear witness.

[post_title] => Russia's New Anti-LGBTQ Legislation is Just More of the Same Authoritarianism [post_excerpt] => Why the Duma's new restrictions against LGBTQ "propaganda" are both dangerous and unsurprising. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => russia-duma-anti-lgbtq-propaganda-legislation-authoritarianism [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5317 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

November 18, 2022August 28, 2024

Russia’s New Anti-LGBTQ Legislation is Just More of the Same Authoritarianism

by Chrissy Stroop

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Why the protests in Iran are about more than just women's rights.

Zan. Zendegi. Azadi.

Woman. Life. Freedom.

This is the rallying cry on the streets of Iran as the people clamor not just for women’s rights and justice for Mahsa Amini, but for a different world order—for the right to live under conditions of their own making.

On September 16, 2022, 22-year-old Amini died in the custody of Iran’s “morality police,” who (allegedly) beat her to death for inappropriately wearing “hijab,” or the veil. In direct response, the Iranian people have taken to the streets to protest not just gender violence, but decades-long violences of empire that survive in Iran despite the Islamic Republic’s break with the West. While galvanized by Mahsa’s murder, these protests highlight accruing grievances against the Islamic regime, as well as an empire that birthed and underwrites the state’s terror tactics.

As those of us in the West begin to make sense of Iran’s senseless state violence, we must refrain from pathologizing Islam as the source of this violence, or the veil as a sign of oppression that revokes women’s agency. We must also be careful not to reproduce the colonialist logic whereby we task ourselves, as “good liberal subjects,” with “saving” these brown women from brown men, as cultural anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod warns.

This is not the first time that Iranian women have used the veil—in other words, gender politics—to mobilize a demand for the people. In 1979, at the height of what was then an anti-imperialist uprising, Iranian women donned the veil not because they wanted to give up their agency, but because they wanted to take it. These women had suffered for years at the hands of a puppet government that imposed Western standards of being and doing and knowing, including but not limited to mandatory unveiling—obscuring their lived experiences as a people who want to know themselves outside of the West’s phallic gaze.

As the handmaiden of empire, this gaze pretends to “know” the people it Others, making Iranians, in this case, the West’s antecedent and foil; a people in need of Western patronage and intervention in order to animate their political will. But the women of Iran are not awaiting our verb to make their demands known and felt. Neither are the Iranian children who sing about the possibility of “enghelab”—revolution—as they join their teachers to burn effigies of the Ayatollah.

Today, Iranians across gender, racial, ethnic, religious, and class lines are risking their lives in refusal of what iconic feminist scholar bell hooks describes as “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Even as the state’s violence is totalizing, these women and children and those who stand with them courageously and collectively dream of an Otherwise. And it isn’t the first time: Jalal Al-e Ahmad, whose writings galvanized the 1979 revolution, called the Iranian state’s obsession with emulating the West a disease, which he termed “Gharbzadegi,” or Westoxification. He implored Iranians to seek alternative modernities outside of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’s phallic, penetrating violence, so that they might make their own lives (and ours) matter. Indeed, the revolution that the Iranian people sought then and continue to seek today cannot be contained by a demand for gender justice alone.

I have often wondered, in the hour of bell hooks’ passing, what she might say about the uprisings in Iran. She argued that feminism is for everybody; in other words, that feminism helps us understand how society and its dis/contents function. In her final years, hooks expressed concern that feminism is dying in today’s society. As her friend and confidant, I would like to think that the protests in Iran today would give her hope, because Iranian women and their co-conspirators are strategically leveraging feminism, using a critique of patriarchy to challenge empire.

Shervin Hajipour’s song “Barayeh,” described by popular media as the “anthem” of Iran’s protests, enumerates many of these intersectional violences, and how they animate the Iranian government’s iron fist. The people are protesting, Hajipour writes, “for the child laborer and [for] his dreams”; he adds, rather poetically, that they are also protesting for a crumbling economy, for the imprisoned, for the polluted air, for the dying trees, for the extinction of Persian cheetahs, and for “the murdered and innocent forbidden street dogs.”

Interestingly, rather than get caught up in the humanist exceptionalism of Western empire, Iranians protesting on the streets today know that revolution for their people is impossible without a change in the valuation of life. Their demand is not that all lives matter, but rather, that all life—human and non-human—matters.

What’s happening in Iran today isn’t (just) the stuff of gender violence, which is a Western import, anyway. It is about survivance in the face of the imperialist white supremacist capitalist violence that remains in Iran. It is about poverty. It is about Western sanctions that make medical care impossible. It is about, as political theorist Michel Foucault wrote in a November 1978 article for the Italian daily Corriere della serra, “breaking away from…global hegemonies.” It is about a people who, “with bare hands who want to lift the fearful weight, the weight of the entire world that bears down on each of us, but more specifically on them, these oil workers and peasants at the frontiers of empire.”

In “Barayeh,” Hajipour goes on to describe the protests as a revolution for “the embarrassed fathers with empty hands,” for “the missing and murdered kids,” for “the students and their future,” for “the Afghan kids.” His list is long, because, as Foucault notes, Iranians are clamoring for all of us. While Iranian women and girls are certainly leading this charge, there has been no shortage of men who stand with them or, indeed, who follow their lead, understanding that the feminism these women employ to clamor against patriarchy will better their living conditions, too.

What we’re seeing today is a long history of Iranians demanding a freedom with empty hands, for the world that suffers, still, because—as hooks implores—imperialist white supremacist patriarchy devastates all of our living conditions.

Let us stand with Iranians now as they stand with us, as they bear this weight: the “fearful weight…of the entire world.”

This piece has been adapted from a speech given by M. Shadee Malaklou at a vigil hosted by the bell hooks center.

[post_title] => The Fight for an Otherwise [post_excerpt] => Why the protests in Iran are about more than just women's rights. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => iran-protests-mahsa-amini [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5246 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

October 18, 2022August 28, 2024

The Fight for an Otherwise

by M. Shadee Malaklou

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On hurricanes, power, and the people the Inflation Reduction Act leaves behind.

“LUMA pa’l carajo.”

On July 28, Puerto Rican reggaeton artist Bad Bunny’s message was heard by a record-setting audience of 18,749 at San Juan’s José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum and beyond, to all those watching on Telemundo, then countless others as the clip went viral on TikTok in the days following. It was the first of three sold-out concerts—and he was telling Puerto Rico’s only electric company to go to hell.

True to his ethos of representing the archipelago first and foremost, Bad Bunny was speaking of a very specific local problem. It has been five years since the category five Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico and its electricity system, yet most households still experience brief blackouts daily. In the same concert, the artist noted that it’s only in his own country that he must perform with fifteen generators to ensure the show goes on. And it wasn’t his first time speaking out on this issue: “El Apagón,” meaning “the blackout,” has been the break-out hit off the now global superstar’s latest album, Un Verano Sin Ti. The video for the song was released on September 16 and intersperses the usual music video party scenes with a documentary by independent journalist Bianca Graulau, talking of colonial displacement and gentrification. It also repeatedly calls LUMA out by name.

LUMA is a power monopoly, the only option for all residents of Puerto Rico, and was installed in June of 2020, replacing the public energy company PREPA (Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority). While LUMA was ostensibly hired to fix a faulty electric grid, Puerto Ricans have experienced rate increases over two years without broadly improved service. A nearly five-day blackout in April has seen LUMA sued by four food corporations for damages, and on July 20, there was a protest against their business that marched from the Capitol building to the governor’s mansion. “Fuera LUMA” is the call—LUMA Out. This hasn’t led to change. On August 7, Centro Médico, a main hospital, lost power for twenty hours and women were reportedly given Tylenol during cesarean procedures. When I started writing this, another complete blackout had befallen much of the San Juan metropolitan area; another large protest on August 25 saw police gassing crowds and assaulting a photojournalist; and now, Hurricane Fiona, which made landfall on September 18, has caused an archipelago-wide blackout once again.

I am a food writer, reliant on my stove and with a packed fridge. Being able to cook is survival for me in more ways than the obvious, and that means a gas stove is not a luxury but a necessity, especially during a blackout. Puerto Rico, officially a territory of the U.S. that functions more as a colony, pays more than double the average rate for energy than in the States: 33 cents per kilowatt hour versus 14 cents. Because of this, both in terms of cost and practicality, using gas isn’t just one option in Puerto Rico—for many, it’s the only option. The archipelago derives 97 percent of its energy from fossil fuels, leaving only 3 percent usage from renewable sources such as solar, wind, and water. Most believe LUMA (and, by extension, the U.S.) is largely to blame: It’s the Financial Oversight and Management Board, which the United States Congress created to oversee and approve Puerto Rico’s budget without any Puerto Rican voting representation, that has imposed austerity measures on education and public pensions while also imposing a privatized energy monopoly.

Yet this is the backdrop against which I have heard calls to “Electrify Everything,” calls that will get louder because of subsidies and tax incentives built into the new Inflation Reduction Act passed by the U.S. Congress and swiftly signed into law by President Joe Biden in August. The act provides homeowners who switch to appliances like induction stoves with $840, presenting the greening of this sector—now nationally 61 percent reliant on fossil fuels—as a problem to be solved by the market, not regulation or investment in public utilities.

Like most U.S. policies, it also leaves Puerto Ricans to fend for themselves. “City leaders, lawmakers, and climate activists pushing for all-electric policies argue that continuing to rely on fossil fuel-burning furnaces, water heaters, and cooking ranges is incompatible with plans to bring net carbon emissions to zero by mid-century or sooner,” writes Jonathan Mingle at Yale Environment 360. While these efforts already exist on city and state government scales, the greater push is toward consumer choice: Choosing an electric car, or an induction stove—choices, of course, most people in Puerto Rico do not have.

Fully placing the burden of switching to green energy sources onto those who both own their homes and have the spare $1000 or more to spend on a new stove, which might also require new cookware or even wiring, strikes me as means-testing—not to mention how it leaves renters like myself out of the equation. Scholars such as Sanya Carley and David M. Konisky in Nature Energy have written about how this “new” approach also only further reinforces old dichotomies, where it’s easy to see renters (and colonies) as the "losers": "The transition to lower-carbon sources of energy will inevitably produce and, in many cases, perpetuate pre-existing sets of winners and losers. The winners are those that will benefit from cleaner sources of energy, reduced emissions from the removal of fossil fuels, and the employment and innovation opportunities that accompany this transition. The losers are those that will bear the burdens, or lack access to the opportunities."

My personal stove in my rented Old San Juan apartment runs on tanks of propane gas that we have delivered, and as a recipe developer who also cooks at least eighteen meals per week, we go through one tank every two months. They cost $26 each time. Our last electricity bill from LUMA, without using electricity to cook, was around $284. Both of these energy sources are derived from fossil fuels, as my landlord hasn’t switched the house to solar power, and we are at their mercy on this. I do hope rebates make it more likely that this will happen, yet there is no timeline or further push to make this choice inevitable. I could purchase single induction burners for myself—would these be eligible for a tax credit?—but where would I put them in my small kitchen? They’d be useless in a blackout and only increase my already staggering electric bills.

While the archipelago is subject to U.S. laws and its economy is overseen by a Fiscal Control Board, it has no voting representation in Congress. It is thus rarely taken into consideration when it comes to legislation, and the Inflation Reduction Act is no exception. How can a colony with a higher poverty rate than any state benefit from tax credits for buying all new energy equipment for their homes? What does this act do to bring down energy costs that are double what they are in the States? How can Puerto Rico “Electrify Everything,” when it often can’t electrify anything?

Right now, solar power accounts for 2.5 percent of energy usage in Puerto Rico. Casa Pueblo, a nonprofit organization in Adjuntas, has been pushing for further reliance and has successfully brought solar to 400 homes and businesses in the city. Yet a broader, island-wide switch is elusive, as the New York Times has reported, because of cost: According to the website Solar Reviews, “As of Aug 2022, the average cost of solar panels in San Juan is $2.8 per watt making a typical 6000 watt (6 kW) solar system $12,437 after claiming the 26% federal solar tax credit now available.” Of Puerto Rico’s population of over 3.1 million, 43.4 percent live in poverty, and average per capita income is $13,318, per the 2020 Census.

The Puerto Rico Energy Public Policy Act, passed in 2019, says that the archipelago will be fossil fuel-free by 2050. In the meantime, the suggestion that we take responsibility for our appliances and install solar panels at home sounds like telling people not to use plastic straws while Taylor Swift flies in a private plane: an individualized solution that will benefit those with the money to do it, while everyone else is left to wonder if they’re not doing enough. Despite the promises of the Puerto Rico Energy Public Policy Act, all final say ultimately lies with the federal government; the Fiscal Control Board can decide on taxes for solar power, or refuse to let the local government fund initiatives. It was the U.S. Energy Department, FEMA, and HUD, after all, that allocated $12.8 billion to “revamp” the energy industry—and the U.S., after all, that gave us LUMA.

There are no guarantees around the availability or accessibility of gas to power stoves (or anything else), yet it provides security for the time being to those who have gone months without power after one storm, with another hurricane season always on the horizon, and without any real repairs to infrastructure. Puerto Rico is always an afterthought when it comes to U.S. policy, which has the effect of reinforcing its colonial status at every turn. While the Biden administration says that the new Inflation Reduction Act focuses on environmental justice for marginalized communities, Puerto Rico knows the truth: that it’s likely just another policy where we will be left behind, to cook on gas stoves, through another blackout, the words of Bad Bunny emblazoned on posters pasted all over the streets of San Juan.

[post_title] => "Electrify Everything" Doesn't Work in Puerto Rico [post_excerpt] => On hurricanes, power, and the people the Inflation Reduction Act leaves behind. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => puerto-rico-blackout-luma-hurricane-fiona-maria-inflation-reduction-act [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5118 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 27, 2022August 28, 2024

“Electrify Everything” Doesn’t Work in Puerto Rico

by Alicia Kennedy

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Everything you need to know about the treaty protecting environmental defenders in Latin America.

In 1988, three days before Christmas, Francisco “Chico” Alves Mendes Filho went to take a shower in his yard when he was assassinated by local cattle ranchers with a .22 rifle.

Mendes had been a Brazilian leader of the rubber tapper workers’ union, who advocated for Indigenous people’s rights and defended the Amazon rainforest against exploitation. The cattle ranchers who’d killed him were rural landowners, hoping to continue deforesting it. This wasn’t the first killing of an environmental defender in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and it wouldn’t be the last. In 2016, almost 30 years after Chico Mendes's murder, Berta Cáceres, a Honduran Indigenous environmental defender, was killed by sicarios for her opposition to the construction of a dam in the Gualcarque River. Two different causes, two different countries, and two different times, but one motivation: to silence those who fought and defended the environment in Latin America.

Environmental defenders have contributed to halting 11% of environmentally damaging projects across the planet. However, the role comes with a high cost to their safety: Constant threats, violence, and hundreds of assassinations make their work incredibly dangerous. These attacks are mainly related to land disputes and environmental damage, and 70% are for defending forests.

Chico Mendes and his wife, Ilsamar, in 1988. Courtesy of Miranda Smith / Wikimedia.

The UN defines environmental human rights defenders as “individuals and groups who, in their personal or professional capacity and in a peaceful manner, strive to protect and promote human rights relating to the environment, including water, air, land, flora and fauna.” They use non-violent methods to protect the environment, contributing to preserving biodiversity and Indigenous rights. In 2000, the Human Rights Commission established the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, which included promoting environmental defenders' protection within their mandate. In 2019, the UN General Assembly recognized the contribution of environmental defenders to ecological protection and sustainable development, urging states to develop and appropriately fund protection initiatives for human rights defenders.

But this has proven tricky in Latin America. According to a 2021 Global Witness report titled “Last Line of Defence,” 165 environmental defenders were killed in LAC in 2020, a frightening number that illustrates how vulnerable activists are in the region. In addition, these attacks made up 73% of all attacks against environmental defenders in the world, making Latin America an especially hazardous area to protect the environment. The reason behind the frequency of these attacks is closely related to the region’s long history with extractive industries as a means of economic development. LAC is largely made up of developing countries, and many have opted to prioritize economic growth over environmental regulation. Vulnerable populations, such as Indigenous communities and poor local communities, have suffered the impacts of this the most, and in parallel, also act as the last line of defense when it comes to protecting the environment.

The regional response for protecting environmental defenders: The Escazú Agreement

Even though environmental regulations in Latin American countries have progressed in recent years, activists are still being murdered and attacked, and regional cooperation is required to ensure their protection. In 2012, a collective of LAC nations decided to draft an agreement implementing Principle 10 of the UN’s Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, with the goal of creating the LAC version of the Aarhus Convention. The agreement was adopted on March 4, 2018, in Escazú, Costa Rica—giving the treaty its name: the Escazú Agreement, or Acuerdo de Escazú. On April 22, 2021, nearly a decade after discussions first began, the Escazú Agreement went into effect, becoming the first environmental treaty in LAC.

The primary purpose of the treaty is to improve and guarantee the procedural human rights of access to information, public participation, and justice. Latin America is a region with severe economic inequalities that directly affect the political participation of the most vulnerable populations, excluding them from most decision-making processes. The Escazú Agreement, acknowledging this exclusionary situation and the numerous socio-environmental conflicts across the continents, sets new human rights standards, guaranteeing the most vulnerable communities are involved in environmental decision-making.

Concerning environmental defenders, the Escazú Agreement also seeks to change the dangerous circumstances they suffer across Latin America. First, the treaty states in Article 9 that “each [signing] party shall guarantee a safe and enabling environment for persons, groups and organizations that promote and defend human rights in environmental matters ” In practice, this allows environmental defenders to act freely and safely, without fear of threat or harm.

The treaty also indicates that signing countries “shall take adequate and effective measures to recognize, protect and promote” the human rights of environmental defenders. This clause focuses on civil and political rights, reinforcing their right to life, freedom of opinion, freedom of movement, personal integrity, and peaceful assembly, among others. In addition, due to the historical impunity of the criminals who have perpetrated crimes against environmental defenders, the treaty reinforces due process for preventing and punishing attacks or threats made against them.

To further effectively protect environmental defenders, in April, the first Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Escazú Agreement established an ad hoc working group to create an action plan to be presented at the next COP. According to the initial COP, this working group would allow for significant public participation, “endeavouring to include persons or groups in vulnerable situations,” especially Indigenous people and local communities. This could mean that environmental defenders who have experienced attacks or threats themselves can now be a part of creating the action plan to prevent more attacks from happening in the future.

The purpose of all these rules is to protect the legitimate political work of environmental activists across Latin America. This progress is essential for making LAC more democratic and ecological; and indeed, defending those who risk their lives to protect the environment is vital for continually improving our democracies.

The problem, however, has been getting signatories to ratify it.

The vital need to adopt the treaty

Twenty-five countries have signed the Escazú Agreement so far, but only 13 have ratified it. Some have resisted signing it based on reasons of sovereignty or the vagueness of the treaty’s obligations. For instance, before Chilean president Gabriel Boric ratified the treaty, the former government of Sebastian Piñera decided to not sign it because he believed specifically protecting environmental activists would affect equality before the law.

Colombia, however, might be the most notable country to have not yet ratified the treaty, despite having the world's highest number of murdered environmental defenders (65) in 2020. Hopefully, the newly elected President, Gustavo Petro, will ratify Escazú, complying with his campaign promise to do so; because as long as countries continue not to honor it, the murders will continue to happen. Months ago in Brazil—another country that has not ratified the treaty—two environmental defenders were murdered in the Javari Valley: Dom Phillips, a British journalist, and Bruno Pereira, a Brazilian Indigenous rights defender. Since Jair Bolsonaro was elected in 2019, environmental regulations have diminished in the country, as the Brazilian president continuously opens Indigenous reserves for commercial purposes, triggering environmental conflicts and putting defenders at risk. In addition, Bolsonaro's government legitimized armed land grabbers dedicated to attacking Indigenous and local communities and deforesting the Amazon by weakening all the environmental institutions focused on protecting the environment and Indigenous rights. As a result, the biggest country of LAC has aligned itself with extractive interests over human ones.

Although the situation with environmental defenders in LAC is critical, right-wing political parties and economic groups see Escazú as an obstacle to economic development. For decades, they have rejected increasing protective measures for those who oppose extractivist expansion. Political negotiations and effective treaty implementation by state parties are crucial elements for incorporating more nations into Escazú. One way to help do this is by increasing awareness of the treaty’s existence, and the goals it hopes to accomplish.

Courtesy of Camilo Freedman / APHOTOGRAFIA / Getty Images.

The Escazú Agreement: An example of defending the defenders

Following the Escazú Agreement's example, the interest in strengthening protections for environmental defenders is expanding to other continents. For example, Asia and Africa do not have any regional treaties to protect environmental defenders, but have organized cooperative networks to defend the defenders on the ground. In Africa, Natural Justice is supporting a powerful initiative, African Environmental Defenders, which aims to protect environmental defenders though an “emergency fund” to support their work. In Europe, environmental defenders are also taking priority. In 2021, the EU Parliament called its member states to take action to protect environmental defenders' human rights, showing that the threats and attacks on these activists are not only happening in the Global South.

As we face the ever-growing climate crisis, protecting the environment and our delicate ecosystems is crucial. Globally, the role of environmental defenders has been vital to stopping the ecological degradation of the planet. However, their silent and voluntary work is not recognized, despite risking their own lives to preserve the environment for the benefit of present and future generations. Therefore, it is fair and necessary to protect them and stop the impunity of those who abuse and attack activists for exploiting the environment to make a profit. By establishing the Escazú Agreement, Latin America contributed to showing an institutionalized path for protecting environmental defenders, a priority that every government should have—not only to protect the environment, but also democracy itself.

Additional fact checking by Sophia Cleary.

You Should Give a Sh*t About is an ongoing column highlighting local stories with a global impact.

[post_title] => You Should Give a Sh*t About: The Escazú Agreement [post_excerpt] => Everything you need to know about the treaty protecting environmental defenders in Latin America. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => escazu-agreement-explainer-latin-america-environmental-treaty [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=4815 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 22, 2022August 28, 2024

You Should Give a Sh*t About: The Escazú Agreement

by Pedro Cisterna Gaete

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A round table with a few members of the Abolitionist Library Association.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by then-police officer and now-convicted killer Derek Chauvin in 2020, a large swath of people who’d never paid attention to systemic, anti-Black racism began, for the first time, to acknowledge its existence. Something shifted. Folks who had never spoken out chose to engage; to actually do something. While the Black Lives Matter movement had existed for nearly seven years before Floyd’s death—and abolitionism for many years before that—the widespread protests of 2020 seemed to give these movements new momentum. At the height of a raging pandemic, during a time of mass isolation and fear, hundreds of thousands of people across the world took to the streets, standing up against racist police violence and the prison-industrial complex it fuels.

In the two years since, the greater outrage has waned. Those privileged enough to not have paid attention before largely went back to not paying attention; while the people who had already been doing the work continued to do the work. But that initial uprising—that newfound awareness, and solidarity, and, in some cases, radicalization—was nonetheless significant, and provided necessary support for longtime activists to realize long-held needs, giving community spaces and organizations more resources to work towards collective liberation and even, perhaps, some policy change.

One of those spaces was the library.

I feel like maybe [Alison] put out a call on Twitter or something along those lines. I don't remember exactly. But I remember that we all ended up on Zoom.

Jen W.

I think we called it a town hall, to discuss the Medium article, because it had gotten a lot of attention. And there was clearly a need for a space to talk about it.

Lawrence M.

Megan R.

I mean, this idea of community self determination and working towards liberation is really important. And what goes hand in hand with that for me is rethinking what we mean by public safety in public places. Obviously not just for patrons, but for workers.

Thinking on the recent news, I don't know if you saw that there was a retired cop that shot and killed a library—what do they call them—a special library police officer, in the DC Public Library during a training yesterday. And I was just seeing so many comments on Twitter, like, Wait, there are cops in libraries? Why are there cops with guns in libraries? And I think it's one of those things that's not even flown under the radar, it's just that, in the United States, the presence of police officers goes so unremarked upon, that trying to foreground the “Abolitionist” in the Abolitionist Library Association is really important in even just becoming aware of the ways in which the carceral has intruded into public space, or shaped public space.

Jen W.

On a practical level, just to give a general overview of some of what the work has looked like: There were a couple of divestment campaigns that really got off the ground in 2020. And as a group, we were able to support those campaigns throughout the country. And then we also have some specific working groups, [which] will have their own meetings and their own agendas. We have a special collections working group that is very active—you might have seen the Ivy+ divestment statement that came out from there. And then we also have our working group focused on information access for incarcerated people. That group was born out of a specific attempt to ban one of Mariame Kaba's books in Washington, but has since become a place for people who are doing work to make information accessible, to come together and talk about the challenges that they're facing.

I think the exciting thing about libraries is that we do have the possibility of being liberatory spaces in a way that many spaces don't. But we aren't inherently liberatory spaces. Because we are state institutions under capitalism, we replicate the same oppressive dynamics as other institutions. But having the space where we can come together, and be real about that, and find other people who have the political goal of abolition, to talk about like, Okay, we're doing this work at my library, how do I do it through this lens? I think especially with prison library work, it can be hard, because you're often doing it through the state library, partnering with the state Department of Corrections. And it's like, how do you do that work in a way that is abolitionist?

Les D.

Speaking to what Jen was saying as far as sharing notes, and that sense of community and support—it especially meant a lot to me when I was in my last position, in western Kentucky. You kind of feel alone out there, and this is a space that I could turn to to get the feedback I was looking for and build some strategies and carry through and such. From my rural organizing background, [I] definitely see the importance of decentralized social spaces on the internet. We have people involved with AbLA who are from all over, and being able to exchange notes has been really crucial. Those of us who've become friends through the work, as well, that's just as important. Because not only are we achieving and winning battles, and pushing for these wins, but we're also supporting one another.

Megan R.

You're [raising] a good point of not just [providing] mutual support for one another, but the idea of joy and play and friendship in this work, as well, because so much of it is really heavy. And a lot of it is done on our own time, as volunteer work—like those of us who do reference by mail for incarcerated people, that's usually volunteer work with PLSN [Prison Library Support Network]. Just being able to—the work itself isn't necessarily fun all the time, but that you can find joy as a result of it.

Gina M.

It’s really interesting to hear you talk about the community aspect of it, which feels so essential—being able to be in community with each other, both on the abolitionist side, and on the library work side. Especially because, all of you keep bringing up this idea of the promise of the public space versus the reality of the public space. Lawrence, I think you were saying, traditionally, libraries were not actually that inclusive at all. You could argue a lot of library spaces still aren't, to unhoused people, and to Black and brown and Indigenous people. And in spaces where the work is very heavy and very difficult, there is—to your point, Megan—value in having people who are in the boat with you, and to feeling like you aren't alone in the work. Has that been a driving force for AbLA?

Les D.

I was going to add to that. Like, some of us have pushed back in ways that did put our jobs at risk. I mean, we are fighting for abolition under capitalism, and health care is tied to employment. So we are building power in this formation to be able to push for things, while still balancing [the fact that] we work for the state. And there's a tension there, right? And it's dangerous at times. So to varying levels, there is some risk, and being able to be in relationship with one another in that strategy and building that strategy accordingly has been really powerful.

Megan R.

Yeah, I think this idea of tension is a really important one, too, because that's working on a lot of different levels. Especially these days, with the current political climate around libraries, and the very real possibility of physical danger, not just job security. Les mentioned the decentralized formation that we use for AbLA. But at the same time, because we have a name now, it validates us [and] our work in a way, in that we have been cited in some academic pieces, or at conferences and things like that. So [there’s] this tension between being a formal organization, but then at the same time, at least for me, this resistance to this formalizing and institutionalizing of the work that's being done.

Jen W.

I want to piggyback off of that. Because we have built a network, we were able to mobilize to support Amy Dodson, [for example]. She had to go before her library board for a hearing to determine whether or not she was going to lose her job, and we wrote a letter that was presented to the board. And, you know, I don't want to give AbLA too much credit here, but we did a lot to really make sure that there was public outcry and that it was very clear that she had a lot of support, and not just in her county or her state, but nationally. Having been able to have that kind of collective influence was very valuable, and we've been able to replicate that a couple of times. Recently, we had some of our members who put together a statement pushing back on the Michigan Department of Corrections' decision to censor language learning books, and not allow Spanish or Swahili language books to be sent to their prisons. And again, I can't necessarily credit AbLA for reversing it. But I think that we did help to make sure that there was a lot of public attention, and that people across the country saw what they were doing and thought it was bad. Thankfully, the Michigan DOC has also walked back the policy.

Gina M.

What’s next for AbLA? How do you want to see it grow? What’s the ideal for you of what AbLA can do and what it can become?

Lawrence M.

Ideally, our way of seeing the political structures that reinforce the library becomes the norm, right? Just in my work alone, I'm seeing more and more people who are new to the field, realizing the same shit we've known. And [I want] AbLA to continue to be a space for new library workers to feel welcomed into. But also, I'm going to do what I always do and quote Fred Moten, because once you get rid of the police, you have to take care of policy, because all the police are is just an embodiment of policy. So in terms of growth, that's what I would like: I would like for more and more people to just be like, No, AbLA is the fucking standard. You're getting into this field. You're committed to making things better for everybody except cops and capitalists and fascists.

Megan R.

I agree with what Lawrence's saying. Even thinking about policy, within the library world—Emily Drabinski winning the election for ALA president is really exciting. Because she's somebody that I know has done reference work with incarcerated people. She's really strong on labor, which, I feel like you can't really talk about safety and library work without also talking about the labor aspect of it. And I don't know, I feel like a lot of AbLA people—not necessarily in the context of AbLA—were involved in [that] campaign. It's hard to say how that's gonna turn out because ALA is such a large organization and pretty conservative, but building power is important however we can do it right now.

In terms of where I'd like to see AbLA go, it feels like a lot of people's energy has become focused on their working groups, which is really good, because when we first started having regular meetings, I think people were really fired up and ready to go, but it becomes an issue of sustainability and burnout. And it seems like it's settling more into a place where people have a better understanding of their own capacities, with the work that they can do in a way that is going to keep the work going. For myself, really just focusing more on the information access for incarcerated people working group has felt really sustainable for me, and encouraging other folks to participate in ways that feel sustainable to them is the best way that I would like to see it grow.

Les D.

Yeah, the sustainable engagement is really important, especially to longevity of the movement and actually making sustainable change. That's how it's looked for me, as well. Also doing some research on deescalation tactics in libraries, in order to avoid calling the police—that's something I've been working on. But knowing everyone's out there doing the work, and that solidarity there, is pretty powerful. Having the support and the tools to do that work is really important. More skill sharing, as we have been doing all along, is a key concept, I think.

Jen W.

Les D.

I got into library work because it was a part-time summer job, and I fell in love with it, took a break to do community organizing for a bit, got burnout. I did a political campaign in western Kentucky, and that was rough. Working in community organizing nonprofits was like, I'll fight like hell, but it just never ends. The burnout was not manageable. So I ended up coming back to libraries. I ended up in outreach, and I realized I could fight like hell but more subversively, especially being able to call shots on how resources are allocated. One of my favorite projects that I was able to push through with grant funding was our reentry toolkits. It was an expansion on our digital toolkits program, [where] people could check out hotspots and laptops that we reworked to meet the specific needs of people who were coming out of jail. We added a phone, added a resource booklet. And it was mostly just a way to respond to needs in our community, and build up that relationship with folks who were impacted by the carceral state. Even though it's a nightmare at times, especially how entrenched neoliberalism's veins are—it's a good lane to fight in. As Lawrence mentioned, [it’s] the very tangible daily ways that people get their needs met: We can keep them out of ICE's claws, get them fed, get them housing, all those daily things. Just little needs met by the community or for the community really keeps me in the game, and is why I fell in love with it.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

*The Footnotes

Editor’s Note: At The Conversationalist, we understand that no story exists in a vacuum, and every story is built on the work of others before us, whether in ways big or small. We are likewise dedicated to spotlighting the voices of those who have been or continue to be oppressed, disregarded, and/or otherwise silenced, in an effort to reverse centuries of often intentional erasure. Because of this, we have opted to include “footnotes” on certain stories to give readers additional context and reading material where it feels relevant and beneficial.

Additional Reading: Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis and We Do This Until We Free Us by Mariame Kaba
Additional Listening: A two-part episode of Millennials Are Killing Capitalism, Part 1 and Part 2

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September 1, 2022August 28, 2024

Four Abolitionist Library Workers Walk Into a Bar

by Gina Mei

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Pregnancy and parenting will never "just work out” for everybody.

Nine years ago, I told my mother that the man I was seeing didn’t want children. I wasn’t yet sure what I wanted, and at the time his certainty was both comforting and concerning: I appreciated that he knew his own mind but wanted to keep my options open. “Oh, well,” my mom said. “Sometimes certain people meet, and someone gets pregnant, and—BOOM!—everybody's happy.” She was sort of joking, and sort of not. I knew she hoped that he, and I, would change our minds about becoming parents. Nine years later, for a variety of reasons, we haven’t.

Despite her Catholic education, my mother is fervently pro-choice. Having suffered a difficult miscarriage and carried three pregnancies to term, she is not cavalier about the toll pregnancy and labor take on the body and soul. She recognizes what most people—including anti-abortion activists, who get abortions when they need them—intuitively know: that forcing someone to remain pregnant and give birth is an act of brutality.

Yet, like many Americans, my mother also wants to believe that even unexpected pregnancies can sometimes turn out for the best, especially when those involved are ready, willing, and able to become parents.

It’s not wrong to wish this were always the case. It would certainly be better if it were impossible to make a baby unless you were ready and willing to parent, and always possible when you were; if every pregnancy and delivery were complication-free; and if every baby were painlessly ushered into a stable and functional family unit at birth. But that’s not the world we live in, and pregnancy is not the peaceful, glowing, rose-tinted fantasy so many want to believe it is.

Even under the best of circumstances, pregnancy can be grueling. Some people, including celebrities like the comedian Amy Schumer and Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton, experience hyperemesis gravidarum, or extreme, persistent nausea and vomiting. In 2019, Schumer, then in her second trimester, estimated that she’d vomited around 980 times since becoming pregnant. The Duchess, meanwhile, described her own experience with the condition as “utterly rotten.” And while hyperemesis gravidarum is relatively rare, around 70% of pregnant people still experience nausea and vomiting.

Pregnancy can also lead to a host of other debilitating symptoms, including depression, insomnia, and/or difficulty concentrating. “My body was heavy, tired from the insomnia that kept me awake from three until seven in the morning, exhausted from the constant vomiting, and bloated from all the eating, which fended off the unrelenting nausea,” writer Miriam Foley wrote in an essay for Parents.com. “I felt sick all day and woke up to be sick or eat during the night. I vomited in public on street corners, at roundabouts, beside parked cars, in the bin, in basins, in the toilet, in the sink…emotionally I was even worse; delicate, jumpy, tearful.”

This was Foley’s second pregnancy, one she and her husband had “very much wanted.” Imagine dealing with those symptoms when you don’t want or aren’t ready to be pregnant, give birth, or raise a child.

In the U.S., we force those who undergo childbirth to choose between solvency and recovery. Because the overwhelming majority of people who become pregnant and give birth are women, and we take women’s pain and suffering for granted, we have largely failed to ease it via public policy. Many see pain and danger as inescapable conditions of women’s lives, particularly Black and brown women, as demonstrated by our maternal mortality rates. In 2015, I wrote a column about the shocking number of U.S. women who return to work just two weeks after giving birth, a decades-long problem we lack the political will to solve. I’ll never forget the stories I heard. Two weeks after giving birth, one mom told me, she still looked six months pregnant and felt like her vagina was “inside out.” A then 34-year-old mother of two said her first baby tore her perineum, anus, and sphincter muscles “badly"; it was 10 days before she could even walk. Her legs and feet were so swollen she thought her skin was going to split open, and she developed mastitis in her left breast, which felt like the “jaws of life” were ripping her chest apart. Pregnancy and childbirth may always involve some degree of discomfort. But they could certainly be easier to endure and recover from than they are in the U.S.

The everyday agonies people who choose to be pregnant are expected to tolerate become a form of torture when those who had no choice are forced to endure them, too. A surprising number of well-meaning but clueless Americans join the right-wing religious fanatics in proffering adoption as a seamless alternative to abortion, despite the fact that the former is far riskier, costlier, and more physically and psychologically painful than the latter. As was true before Roe, and will keep happening in the wake of its repeal, many birth parents in states where abortion is illegal are forced to carry pregnancies to term and undergo childbirth against their will—a trauma with potentially life-long consequences for birth parents, babies, and adoptive families.

Even those who want and consciously decide to become parents know how hard it is to raise kids in an atomized, every-family-for-itself country with no universal health or child care, no paid family leave, and no guaranteed income. They suffer near-constant levels of stress, anxiety, and fear, both about big-picture existential threats and everyday survival. There are only four countries in the world where couples with young children who earn the average wage spend more than 30 percent of their salary on child care, and the United States is one of them—along with New Zealand, the U.K., and Australia. (By contrast, the average couple in Austria, Greece, Hungary, and Korea spends less than four percent.)

The same Republican officials who worked so tirelessly to overturn Roe have also fought tooth and nail against providing basic public goods and services to ease the considerable burdens the U.S. imposes on women and families. The states most hostile to abortion rights have no paid family leave and some of the worst maternal mortality rates in the nation. All except Louisiana are run by anti-abortion Republicans; meanwhile, Louisiana’s legislature is Republican-dominated, and its governor, a nominal Democrat, is staunchly anti-abortion, in defiance of his party’s platform. Earlier this year, the state’s lawmakers tried to classify abortion as homicide under state law and allow prosecutors to criminally charge patients. If anti-abortion legislators wanted to make it safer, easier, and more inviting to raise a family, they would have done so. Instead, they’re busy trying to figure out how to jail pregnant people.

When even the willing feel ensnared by the increasingly unmanageable demands of pregnancy and parenting, no one is free. Not every accident is a happy one, nor can it always be made so through sheer force of will. If individuals and families were not buried, alone, under the crushing burdens of pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing, more Americans might choose to start families. And others still wouldn’t. As New York Magazine reporter Sarah Jones recently wrote, “I am childless because that’s what I’ve chosen for myself...Congress could pass Medicare for All tomorrow, and paid family leave, and all the other policies I support, and if I became pregnant right now I would still have an abortion.”

And that is her right, whether or not a stranger or a state legislator or a Democratic governor approves it.

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September 1, 2022August 28, 2024

“Happy” Accidents

by Raina Lipsitz

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How McDonald's, KFC, and other American eateries spread around the world.

Even before the war, Aban Pestonjee’s business was doing rather well.

In the 1970s, Swedish and American home appliances were the kind of thing that lots of people in Sri Lanka wanted, but hardly anyone knew how to get. In response to a series of economic shocks, the government largely barred imports, including luxury goods like washing machines and dryers. But Pestonjee had an idea. She bought used appliances at embassy auctions and sold them at a markup out of a corner shop in the capital city, Colombo. Even with the economy largely restricted, business was good on the Indian Ocean island. But when Sri Lanka descended into civil war in the 1980s, it exploded.

Pestonjee started importing appliances from Korea and offering environmental cleanup services. Later, she expanded into tourism and property. Her three children joined the business, making her family a dynasty and her company, the Abans Group, one of the most powerful in Sri Lanka. In 1998, with the war mostly relegated to the north and east of the country, Colombo slipped into an eerie calm, and at the urging of one of her sons, Pestonjee made her biggest move yet.

She opened the first McDonald’s in Sri Lanka.

It’s easy to forget when looking at it through the nostalgic lens that often filters our view of the era, but American fast food was also born in the aftermath of war. When Richard and Maurice McDonald built their namesake restaurant chain in the Southern California desert in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the area was the frontline of a profound economic disruption. The industrial economy that had ended the Great Depression and closed out the Second World War had turned inwards, building prefabricated homes and four-door sedans instead of tanks and planes. In short order, this inverted war economy had also transformed American agriculture: When chemical manufacturers stopped making munitions and started making fertilizer, they supercharged corn production, setting off a livestock explosion which has never abated. As a business that sold meat to car-bound customers in new suburbs, McDonald’s and the industry it launched were ideally positioned to get ahead in an era of chaos.

As the same systems which made it thrive in the United States spread internationally, fast food rushed headlong for the rest of the world. In 1996, the New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman argued the industry’s global nature pointed to a deeper trend about the state of the world. As he summarized it, “No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.” Friedman said his idea was “tongue in cheek,” and as a hard-and-fast rule, it was always a little shaky, before coming apart entirely with Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. But as an observation about the conditions necessary for capitalism, not an axiom of world affairs, Friedman’s “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” pointed to a real correlation between a nation’s international fast food offerings and its stability. If a country was at peace (at least in its urban centers, like Colombo in the late 1990s), was prosperous enough to sustain a consumer class, and was integrated with the world economy, it was likely ready to host a McDonald’s or some other global fast food chain. Seen the other way around, fast food was evidence of a country’s stability.

The last few years have made that observation especially relevant, as the global fast food boom has reached countries which were at war in living memory. You can find Burger King in Côte d’Ivoire, Dairy Queen in Cambodia, and KFC in Sudan, a country that was heavily sanctioned as recently as 2017 for committing acts of genocide in Darfur. In these and other nations, fast food’s arrival is nothing if not an indication of peace and a rejoining of the international order.

Yet even as fast food continues to evidence stability, its global expansion has depended on entrepreneurs—like Aban Pestonjee—who sharpened their business acumen in chaotic times, including times of war and occupation.

If you know much about the business of fast food, you’ve likely heard about the franchise system. Since McDonald’s’ early days in the Southern California desert, fast food has depended on independent businesses and entrepreneurs, or “franchisees,” to buy into their system. For a fee and a cut of the revenues, a fast food company (i.e., McDonald’s Corporation, or CKE Restaurants, owners of the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s brands) gives the franchisee a regional monopoly, allowing them to use its likeness and adopt its methods of doing business. In the industry’s early days in the 1950s and 1960s, franchising allowed fast food companies to expand wildly across the United States on the backs of countless smaller, independent businesses—all with only marginal investments of their own capital. As they’ve plotted expansions around the world, fast food companies have found additional benefits to franchisees, as these local entrepreneurs typically bring local contacts and knowledge to the endeavor which their corporate overlords generally lack.

As an entrepreneur who made her fortune in war, Pestonjee was perfectly suited for the role. She had grown up as a child of an immigrant family and a member of Sri Lanka’s tiny Parsi community. In a war that pitted the nation’s two biggest ethnic groups against each other, she was an outsider. Conflict was little more than minor disruption and background noise as she grew her business.

“You get used to it,” she told a researcher many years after her business first took off. “Knowing that one bomb has gone off here, then everything goes down, business gets slack for a month or two, people forget it and then again it starts.”

Den Fujita, the Japanese entrepreneur who brought McDonald’s to Japan, similarly navigated a messy period in history to amass a fortune. Fujita’s father was an engineer for a British company, and he had picked up some English at home. He studied English in high school, and, at the end of the Second World War, with much of the country leveled and his father and two sisters having been killed in American bombing raids, Fujita left home to translate for the former enemy at the seat of their occupation, the General Headquarters, or GHQ, in Tokyo.

Soon after, Fujita started an importation company. It was a simple business model: He figured out what the American occupiers wanted, and then he figured out how to get it to them. As the Americans left, he expanded his business, importing luxury goods for the Japanese themselves. When McDonald’s first began laying plans for an overseas expansion two decades later, Japan looked difficult, if not impossible, to enter. The bureaucracy was dense, the culture was perplexing. But Fujita was the perfect partner in a country fraught with risk—a bridge between those American corporate executives and the Japanese people, whom they knew nothing about. In 1971, his company, Fujita & Co, became McDonald’s’ first franchisee in Japan. Before long, its first location, in the Ginza district in Tokyo, became the world’s busiest McDonald’s.

There are stories in the rubble of every conflict of shrewd entrepreneurs building a fortune as the nation rebuilds itself. In the early 1990s, as Cambodia recovered from years under Khmer Rouge rule, a refugee named Kith Meng returned from his adopted Australia to take the reins at his family’s company and tap some of the billions of dollars in international aid then flowing into the country. Kith’s Royal Group became a source of basic provisions for UNTAC, the United Nations’ body managing Cambodia while the national government assembled itself. Crucially, for the sprawling, multilingual force inundated with paperwork, Royal also imported copy machines.

As UNTAC packed its bags and left in 1993, Royal invested in a slew of other money-making ventures, some of which, such as a cellular network, a bank, and some TV stations, proved useful to a country getting on its feet, and some of which, such as a casino and a lottery, mostly served to line the budding tycoon’s pockets. Meng’s many ventures put him at the center of a vast network of his own creation, making him an ideal middleman for foreign companies looking to break into Cambodia. In the early 2000s, one of those companies was a Malaysian KFC franchisee. Soon after, Royal founded a separate company with it to bring KFC to Cambodia. The first location opened in 2008.

So, what does war have to do with running an international fast food chain? No matter when or where they take place, wars are times of creation as much as they are times of destruction. When war-ravaged people find that the commercial networks which once supported their purchasing habits have collapsed—because of sanctions, a shifting frontline, or because a manufacturing base was obliterated the night before—their usual consumer preferences evaporate. They don’t care who they bought from in the past. They’ll just go to whoever can navigate the tumult to deliver the goods, now.

When opening in developing countries, fast food’s corporate giants are similarly lackadaisical, if only because they have to be. In countries where industrial-scale beef and poultry production (let alone french fry-ready potatoes) don’t exist, they can’t work within existing systems to meet them, even if they would prefer to. Instead, they have to build new systems, and to do that, they need locals who understand these places intimately. Often, entrepreneurs who cut their teeth in war have exactly the skills they’re looking for.

War has another effect: It reveals the artificiality of old social hierarchies. Meng, Pestonjee, and Fujita were all ambitious and hungry for opportunity. But they were also outsiders—Pestonjee because she was a Parsi; Fujita, because his mother was a Christian and the Japanese he spoke was actually a dialect of his native Osaka; Meng, because he had spent most of his youth abroad. In an era of peace and stability, determination might have only led to modest success. But the social-leveling effects of war and occupation offered chances that would have never existed otherwise.

It’s fitting, then, that after the bombs and gunfire went quiet in their countries, all three would gravitate to fast food. Even though they promote their goods as luxuries in developing countries, fast food brands still retain the welcoming spirit of undiscerning capitalists wherever they operate. Through their doors, the old hierarchies have no place. Everyone is welcome, just as long as they have the money to pay.

Additional fact checking by Apoorva Tadepalli.

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September 1, 2022August 28, 2024

The Wartime Roots of the Global Fast Food Boom

by Alex Park

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A survey of 12-year-olds to early 20-somethings in the US.

This article is a companion piece. If you’re curious to learn how older people feel about the state of the world, click here.

We’re more than two years deep into a pandemic, and if it feels like we’re moving backwards, it’s because in many ways, we are.

In 2022 alone, there have been over 300 mass shootings in the US. Earlier this summer, in a historic decision, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, immediately impacting the reproductive rights of millions. Meanwhile, global temperatures have reached dangerous, record-breaking highs, and if we squint into the horizon, all signs point to an imminent recession, where young people seeking employment will undoubtedly be among those hit the hardest.

Oh, and did we mention we’re still living amid a deadly virus that continues to take lives each day?

The Conversationalist asked young people from various parts of the country their thoughts on the state of the world right now. Which issues are overwhelming them the most? What kinds of discussions are they having with their friends? How do they feel about the future? Is it all doom and gloom?

Here’s what they had to say, in their own words.

“Turning on the news and seeing the violence in this world is not a surprise anymore. It's not even sad because I expect it. What scares me now is going to places where I can't find the nearest exit if I need to flee quickly. My home city of Chicago is now looked down upon by America as crime central. When I tell people I live in the suburbs of Chicago they gasp as if I'm in danger.

I remember flinching at school when I heard a student squeeze open their chip bag, resulting in a loud popping noise. My heart skipped a beat and my mind immediately thought of the worst. Within seconds I was asking myself, Where is the noise coming from? Is it safe to stay where I am? How did the intruder get into the school? All from a kid’s chip bag making a loud popping noise. I shouldn't be thinking that way. It shouldn't be a habit for me, a 17-year-old, to look for the nearest exit in every public place I go to.

I just want to be shocked when I turn on the news channels again.”

—Amanda, 17, suburbs of Chicago

“Not only is there more fear in the world with monkeypox currently, specifically in New York, climate change is also only giving us about eight more years before there is no turning back. This is extremely worrisome because Americans aren’t doing anything about this and we only have so much time before our ecosystems become more fragile than ever.

Overall, as someone within the generation that has to suffer most from these current issues, this is very concerning for not only our well-being but our physical health. We need to take the appropriate measures to prevent further conflict.”

—Juliette, 15, New York, NY

“I’m finishing up my senior year in the fall at Penn State University. From my vantage point, the recent Dobbs decision has stirred up an immense amount of emotion from all sides of the spectrum and both sides of the coin, so to speak. College-aged women and female students that I interact with are overwhelmingly disturbed and frightened—they are fired up and want to help right the ship to protect abortion access for themselves and, in the case of the few pro-life women, for others. I work in local political organizing and one way to communicate with pro-life women in particular is to remind them that while they may not choose to have an abortion, their friends may face situations where they need one—and bringing the hot-button issue to a hyper-personal level really helps some people understand that they should not be so anti-choice.

For men, a general sense of confusion and passive worrisome behavior is the vibe that I’m getting. My guy friends in particular tend NOT to be split among party lines with abortion—a lot of them think it’s stupid to tell women they can’t do something, while others are afraid that their female partners may not have the birth control/contraceptives they need to continue a sexual relationship.

My fear is that despite the level of concern and anger at this decision, people my age will not care enough to vote in the large numbers that we need to actually change things. [We] can’t change SCOTUS, but can sure as hell change our state legislatures and Congress. That’s why I’m getting as involved as I can to spread the word to students and folks my age that this election is undeniably the most important of our lifetimes, and that at the very least you need to vote.”

—Josh, 21, State College, PA

“With everything happening in our political climate, the one word that can't escape my mind is 'division.’ With all of the constant discord going about through the media, it's hard to ignore.

I've noticed that the in-person conversations I've shared with people of differing views from me have been much more productive than online ones, whether it be in my classes or at group hangouts. I believe a considerable problem our generation is facing is a lack of personal connection stemming from social media playing a much more significant role in our day-to-day lives. The more that I've realized the adverse side effects of social media, the more attempts I've made to stray away from it. I've deleted Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook with the goal of doing away with it entirely. It's too stressful and time-consuming, and I've also found my mental health to be better in my time away from it.

I can't help but have my worries about our society's collapse. It's very taxing on me to see so much nonstop negative news.”

—Tommy, 18, Worthington, OH

“I’m feeling a bit agitated with how we talk about mental health on the internet and social media lately. I’m not saying that mental health awareness is bad. I just think that with anything that becomes mainstream, it loses any much-needed nuance and seriousness. And that’s what has happened with mental health awareness. You can see it happening in so many forms, whether it’s brands trying to capitalize off of it, down to those stupid ‘Little Miss Whatever’ memes, or any other insert-yourself-here gimmick. All of it totally downplays how serious mental health is and buries any useful resources, turning mental health awareness into another throwaway talking point.”

—Margot, 19, Boston, MA

“I live in Jacksonville, Florida but attend school in Ohio. I’m pursuing a degree in fashion and am thankful that most opportunities in fashion do take place in more blue states like New York and California. However, that doesn’t take away my fear of what the future holds.

While New York, specifically NYC, and California are states that I believe do well in protecting the rights of their citizens, they are also some of the most expensive places to live. Fashion is not one of the best industries in terms of high salaries and affordable wages––at least compared to the cost of living in the places where the industry is best established.

But even more than that, reproductive rights are a major concern for me. The mere thought of me unintentionally getting pregnant and not even having the option to decide how I want to go about my health has me petrified and runs through my mind constantly. I’m truly at the point where I don’t think I’m even going to consider looking into jobs and companies that are located in red states. To make matters worse, we’re living in a system ruled by a Supreme Court that just took a major blow to combating the climate crisis and agreed to hear a case that heavily impacts voting rights, which would just be another major step in the seemingly decline of democracy.

I’m very worried about the future, which really sucks because I feel like this is the time that I should be looking forward to it the most.”

—Janelle, 21, Jacksonville, FL

“Over the past few years, the world has felt pretty bad and it’s not getting much better. The government is corrupt; politicians are bad. I’m just resigned to it. I don’t really know how I could change anything. All politicians suck (sorry). It feels like things have been bad forever.”

—Charlotte, 12, Los Angeles, CA

“Everything and everyone right now is so polarized. Most people are arguing for or against things that they don’t know the half about. We are being served all of our information through the media and most of it is altered and incorrect. People form opinions on misinformation and stick to them while being blind to any opposing information. We have to be more open to hearing others' ideas in order to function as a united front.”

—Kate, 18, East Lyme, CT

“It's pretty easy to feel despair about the big national issues as it really seems like there is nothing we can do to stem the flow of environmental and human rights catastrophes coming down from a federal and corporate level. That said, I feel hopeful about local politics.

I hear a lot of talk about urban issues in my peer groups, mainly how to deal with cars-as-default politics in urban planning and policy while promoting alternatives for local transport. While this also feels futile sometimes, there are always silver linings and improvements being made to help bring American cities up to snuff, which in turn seems like a way to help the battle against climate change AND improve quality of life across the board.”

—Nicholas, 21, Memphis, TN

“After the events of the last few months I have really felt a crushing fear settle under my skin, wherever I am––at a parade, my school, or the grocery store. It has become harder and harder to listen to the news, to force myself to feel the reality of the crushing headlines, both afraid of the state of the country and afraid of becoming numb to it.

Being a teen right now is a minefield of double edged swords; between finding comfort in social media and absorbing yourself in saddening discussions, and learning how to become an adult while having massive gaps in the teen experience from the pandemic. I feel young and afraid to grow up in a world where my rights are in question and where there is not a path in sight leading to true freedom. I am as helpless as our elected president, sadly tweeting about what I wish I could fix about our country.”

—Carley, 17, Romeoville, IL

“I feel like the world is moving forwards and backwards in different ways. Some things are being improved such as tech and medicine, and some things may be struggling to improve such as plastic in the ocean or people littering. [But] I believe that people should still take precautions with COVID.”

—Spencer, 13, New York, NY

“I think it’s impossible not to feel somewhat hopeless at the moment, especially if you’re an activist or politically ‘in-the-know’ circle. I work in education consultancy and research and have done so since I was 15, so I am no stranger to a challenge. Kentucky was not exactly the most conducive environment to the work I was attempting to do. So I guess today's current state of affairs does not strike me as too abnormal.

I understand this is not the prevailing view amongst my peers, especially in California. But I honed my chops in this work when Kentucky had a governor who openly wondered about drowning teachers, who loosened gun restrictions, and who attempted to gut our teacher pension system. Today's battles are not any different from yesterday’s; they are just as severe and not any more severe. But that assumes you were fighting yesterday’s battles and a lot of my peers weren’t. A lot of them gained political and social consciousness relatively recently and have nothing to compare today's climate to. I would never blame them for that, and I do not think that lessens the importance of their voices. But it does mean these activists need to take a step back from their work to frame it in historical context.

The Civil Rights Movement, the LGBTQ movement, the fight for Roe; these movements led to large scale social changes in the face of unprecedented challenges. We should be taking strategic guidance from these movements to provide us with that roadmap to social change. It’s like if we were playing chess and constantly losing to the same guy, yet when we stopped and looked at the table next to us, we see the same guy losing to someone else. By taking that step back, we are able to observe a successful strategy to counter that would not have come out of our frustration. If we just keep attempting the same strategies over and over to create social change, without drawing from successful historical examples, we are destined to lose.

This is why I have hope in the midst of such despair. Because I understand much of our despair has to do not with the particular situation we find ourselves in and more with our outlook on this situation.”

—Will, 21, Somerset, KY

[post_title] => How Do Younger People Feel About the State of the World? [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => how-do-younger-people-feel-about-the-state-of-the-world [to_ping] => [pinged] => https://conversationalist.org/2022/08/31/how-do-older-people-feel-about-the-state-of-the-world/ [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=4811 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 31, 2022August 28, 2024

How Do Younger People Feel About the State of the World?

by Taylor Trudon

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A survey of late 60-somethings to 80-somethings in the US (mostly).

This article is a companion piece. If you're curious to learn how younger people feel about the state of the world, click here.

Every day is an exhausting day of dealing with unprecedented events. From multiple pandemics, out-of-control gun violence, the rollback and continued endangerment of human rights and bodily autonomy, and the aggressive creep of fascism, it is valid to feel overwhelmed and hopeless. These issues are enormous and wicked problems. And as a younger generation learns to grapple with them and find a way forward, there is also a growing understanding that these issues are not new, and are built upon the decisions and actions of the generations before us.

In consideration of this, The Conversationalist spoke to numerous people around or over the age of 70 about their hopes, concerns, and feelings regarding the current state of the world. What became apparent is that our collective experience of feeling overwhelmed by unprecedented times is not a new or unique one; and that historical texts and teachings are often a neatly organized version of events that can flatten the truth of living through them.

The conversations didn’t necessarily provide solutions— but they did offer a sense of meaningful and gritty hope. The kind of hope that suggests a hard push and insistent effort can elicit change over time. Not only of policies, but also of communities and people.

Here’s what they had to say, in their own words.

“Being a kid in the ‘50s, we had duck and cover. We were learning how to duck and cover [in case] a nuclear bomb goes off. [But] even as a kid, I [remember thinking], I don't think that's going to help. When [my family] was first looking for a house, a lot of homes had bomb shelters. I remember being eight or nine years old, some bomb shelter[s] had arsenic in [them], so that if all else failed, you wouldn't suffer. I mean, it's just a weird way to grow up and weird things to think about at that age. Now kids are, you know, learning what to do when there's an active shooter.

I'm hopeful. Otherwise, the alternative is too horrible. I've seen huge changes in my life, so I feel like change is possible. I just look at it like this: my mother was really homophobic. And then I came out and got a divorce, and had to go through this horrible custody battle and almost lose my kids. It took a few years, she was devastated, [it] was awful. [But] I saw her make these amazing changes. As freaked out as she was when I came out to her, and when my next brother came out, years later, and then my other brother came out, you know, she started to come around. Three out of four of us are gay and she went from being very homophobic and upset to being like a three-star general in PFLAG and she was on the speaker's bureau. I think, because of that, it helps me be more optimistic, because I really do think people can change in drastic ways that you would never imagine. I mean, I would never ever have imagined that I would have a relationship with her and I became very close to her. So that makes me optimistic.”

—Allison Akana, 71, Half Moon Bay, California

“As far as the political climate, [it] was actually much worse in the late 60s and 70s. [In] the 60s, you had [John F.] Kennedy's assassination. You had his brother, [Robert F. Kennedy’s] assassination. You had Martin Luther King's assassination. We had the Mỹ Lai massacre. Nixon was in Cambodia and Laos and wasn't supposed to be there. John Mitchell, the Attorney General of the United States, the chief law enforcement officer was in federal prison. It's really nothing new. There's more information [now]. It's available faster. [But] human behavior hasn't changed at all.

And I would think for young people, they're worse [off] now. I graduated from high school in 1971. In the Detroit area, you could go to work at Ford's Chrysler or GM after you graduated from high school and you could make as much money as your dad. Now, how many kids can do that now? No one, no one.

[I] used to work the first two weeks of the month, seven days, 10 hours a day. [For] the last two weeks of the month, I would work five days, eight hours a day. Because [I] made so much money in the first two weeks, I couldn't spend it all. My rent was $200 a month, which I split with my friend. I think our electric bill was maybe 12 bucks. My car payment was $190 per month, because I put no money down. The last time I bought gas in high school was 19 cents a gallon. So tell me, who’s got it worse?”

—Robert T., 68, Las Vegas, Nevada

“When you go [get] medicinal herbs, you pick a little piece from the east side, pick some from the south side, the west side, the north side, and you say a prayer, you say thank you. With what you've given me, I will get well—that's respect. And what I have seen in the world that we now live in, there is no respect. There is no sense of providing dignity to the things all around us. We don't care about the pollutants that we're putting into the rivers. All we're interested in is how we're going to make additional money, make more profits. I’m now seeing, like in California, all the wildfires are happening. And the water is drying up in Lake Mead and Lake Powell. That's because we did not pay attention. The larger world, the larger society has just totally knocked everything off balance. And now we're sitting with all of these fires that are raging, we have all these polluted waters. We have people that are talking about running a pipeline from Canada down to New Orleans, for this dirty oil that's going to be coming down from up there. And people go, Oh, but they'll provide jobs. They'll give them an income. You can't eat money. You know, and that pipeline is going through a very important aquifer for the Cheyenne and the Lakota people up in North and South Dakota. If that pipeline bursts it is going to pollute that aquifer. And what are they going to drink? They can't drink oil.

What we have been saying for years as Indian people, the outside world [is] finally realizing our relationship as human beings, to the worlds that we live in. We’ve been talking about polluting energy sources for a long time. [The outside world] should have listened to us 100 years ago. They could learn something from us. But we were ‘savages.’

But, you know, there is hope. That's my nature. We have all of these negative things that are happening, but there are little flashes of brilliance out there. That's why I'm working where I'm working. I am working with the elderly. I'm one myself. But I look at the elderly as a walking encyclopedia. The elderly still know our language, they know the history, the culture, traditions, customs, the ceremonies, all that keeps us in balance.

Those elderly people are precious to me. They are the hope for the next generation.”

—Larry Curley*, 73, Navajo Nation/Albuquerque, New Mexico

“You know, everything I'm seeing, it's just stuff that has happened before. I was a young adult during the Vietnam crisis and now we’ve got the Russian/Ukraine crisis. Every day, you're seeing bombings and body counts, and the news is covering it. [It’s] the same with that civil rights stuff. I mean, it's all the same kind of stuff we were dealing with then. So it'll pass, I guess, eventually. I'll do what I can. But I don't know if I have any power to do anything except vote on November 8, you know? You can go and join marches and protests and write letters and do all that. But I think voting is where people might have some power.

In a representative democracy, voting is the only thing that you can do. Because if you don't vote, you're just throwing up your hands and saying, ‘What the hell, nothing's gonna change.’ But I think it can change, and I think it will change, but you have to have an informed public and you have to have people willing to vote.”

—Barbara Walters, 77, Punta Gorda, Florida

“I remember getting the talk about pandemics and infectious diseases. It may have been kindergarten or first grade, and we all went to the school gym and we got the [polio] shot. It was during World War Two when penicillin came along and antibiotics. And it was kind of this miracle age where all these infectious diseases and dreaded pandemic diseases of childhood and beyond, were kind of behind us.

The 70s were the sexual revolution. It was a time of a lot of sexual freedom, which we hadn't had before. You know, straight people had got it wrong for so long and told us [gay people] all this crap about what we could do, and what we couldn't do, and how we were bad people, and what we did was perverted. [There was] a kind of release, which I think led to a lot of happy, free sex all the time. So when AIDS came in, it really put a damper on things, and shut a lot of people down—it shut me down a lot.

You’ve lived through Polio, AIDS, and now COVID and Monkeypox. What’s been the experience of living through those moments?

My reaction has been what [is the government] waiting for? Why is it taking so long? There have been many points when it could have been contained. They've been dragging their feet and when will they ever learn? So I find that very discouraging.

[Overall,] I'm very pessimistic. I mean, there’s always been these fascist elements. I remember the George Wallace campaign, which was quite strong, but it never felt overreaching. The Trump election was a major thing. I guess maybe I was naive. I remember when Obama ran, and I couldn't decide whether I wanted to support him or not, because I didn't think he was progressive enough. Of course, I voted for him and when he got elected I remember the whole thing on TV and crying. I remember thinking, well maybe it’s not as progressive as I like but at least we’re going to get past some of this racial shit, finally. And now I think back at how stupid and naive I was to think that, because it really had the opposite effect and there was a huge reaction to it. I mean, you know, when I was very young, I heard the stories of how it happened in Germany and how it could never happen here in this country. But it's happening.”

—David Lebe*, 74, Upstate New York

“[When I was teaching,] I worked with boys with severe emotional and behavioral problems, they taught me more than I ever could teach them. [Eventually,] I ended up getting a doctorate in technology, studying media and informational technology. And I see a real connection between all the changes, big changes in history, they're very much related to how we communicate. The Protestant Reformation—which was a great movement—started with the printing press when people started learning that they could read these scriptures rather than just look at the pictures in the cathedral. [By reading it] for themselves, [they started] making decisions for themselves. That was all traumatic for the church and the aristocracy at the time because they were in control of everything. Anyway, that's been repeated over and over with the Enlightenment and all this other stuff. Today with the internet, mainly, I think it's the biggest [form of] digital communication. [We’re] learning how to use this new way of democracy and communicating with one another. But we got a lot of learning to do. As we’ve had to do time and time again. I'm very hopeful. The more you give individuals responsibility for their life and for the life of their community, the better things happen.

—Daniel O’Donnell, 77, Chicago, Illinois

“I think the main thing that's different is that for the early part of my life a lot of us got our news from the same places. We watched ABC, CBS, and NBC. And we watched people like Walter Cronkite, or [The Huntley–Brinkley Report]. So we got kind of a similar perspective on what was going on in the United States and the world. And that's good and bad, and probably white supremacy shaped some of those messages. But on the other hand, it was easier to feel like you were part of one fabric of a nation.

Around the time that Newt Gingrich was elected and became Speaker of the House, and Karl Rove started to shape this slash and burn style of politics that has become the norm, the country bec[a]me increasingly polarized into red and blue silos. Folks just don't trust those that live in the other camp or have any other label, and often self sort themselves so that they don't spend much time with people that are different from them. I think that's the most dangerous thing going on. I'm hopeful that part of what's going on right now is the oppressive system[s] that I grew up with—white supremacy, or patriarchy, or, you know, whatever you want to call it, the status quo—that basically, enough liberation movements have happened that [it’s] kind of in its death throes. And what we're seeing could be considered kind of a death rattle.

I'd like to believe that liberty and justice and equity are going to prevail, but I don't believe that's automatic. I think we have to make that happen by our choices and by our actions [and] by living responsibly. So I'm hopeful that a more inclusive vision for how to live [and] a more compassionate set of social policies will prevail.

When I was young, I felt a lot of fear. I can remember when I was in seminary, I got anonymous mail from the Ku Klux Klan because I had volunteered with an LGBT organization, and they had a P.O. box. When I picked up the mail, there was a letter from the KKK letting me know that they were watching me and that they knew our organization existed and that they were organizing in our area. And then, when I came out during seminary, a story about me wound up on the first page of the [newspaper] in 1988. I was worried that someone might shoot me because there really was a lot of hate and hostility out there in the world.

What I've seen has made me perhaps more hopeful than when I was younger. Not only have I changed, but I've also seen things [change]. Legal discrimination [has] become illegal now. I couldn't legally marry when I was younger, I can legally marry now. Black people were having to pay poll taxes and guess how many jelly beans were in a jar [to vote] when I was a child and that's illegal now. Not that [the government] hasn't found [an] incredible number of ways to discriminate against African Americans still. But my own resilience and the things that I've seen change—we've had some wins over the years, some things have happened that are important and good and that at least move[d] the needle somewhat in the right direction.”

—J-Mo*, 68, St.Louis, Missouri

“There's going to be climate integration. For sure. The number of refugees from Ukraine right now is over 5 million. Can you believe that? That's more than 10% of the population; 15% have already left. Certainly, the wars in the Middle East created millions of refugees. These are just the tip of the iceberg. My understanding—or my belief, is that the Biden Administration is following the lead of the Trump Administration in drastically cutting back the immigration from Central and South America, and looking for technically competent immigrants from South and East Asia and Europe.

It's heartbreaking. It's a crucifixion, because I feel more and more guilty about being a poster boy [of refugees and immigrants] while people who managed to get into this country are working with leaf blowers at $5 an hour.

There are all kinds of things we could do as a country if we had the will to do [it]. And we certainly have the wherewithal to absorb a lot more people. This is still an underpopulated country by almost any standards. And we don't have quite—although Florida will be underwater the day after tomorrow—we certainly don't have the same immediate climate problem. Although we are without any doubt the worst climate criminals in the world.

It’s extremely complicated. I vote in every election, I show up for jury duty. I just returned to the United States, so I have an American passport. I believe that if I accept the citizenship I have certain obligations. But it's terribly confusing.

In terms of the context of this conversation, it’s important to mention that I survived the Holocaust. As a five- and six-year-old boy, this is profound childhood trauma. It's probably helpful for people to understand you as you're talking to somebody who has very severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

[But] I now have, at the age of 84, a four-month-old grandson. He's beautiful. He's gorgeous. One-fourth of him is made of me. As long as there are people there is hope. It's not good to get cynical or bitter. It doesn't help anyone, whatsoever, ever. That's a statement from a very old man who was delighted to have his first grandchild come into the world.”

—Joseph B. Juhász*, 84, Boulder, Colorado

“I have a lot of concerns about how expensive it is to live. That's like a big, big one. That was one of the differences in the 70s, and even the 80s, we weren’t putting all our money towards rent, and all of these gadgets and all this stuff. Towards the end of my teaching—I left Portland in 2006 for Salt Spring Island, and was able to retire with some benefits—I could feel the pressures the students are under with having to work full time, or even work part-time and being so economically challenged, that they wouldn't be able to be as prepared. I don't know how a lot of people do it. And the tendency not to read. I feel like reading is not as valued. And that's a problem. I mean, reading is just, it's one of the life forces for me, and not having to teach has given me a lot of freedom to read. I have some younger friends, [who are a] range of ages and some people have kids—which I don’t have—and they have to devote a lot of time to earning money. That's pretty antithetical to being able to have a lot of time to do other kinds of organizing and community involvement. But I think that people are always going to find ways to do that.”

—Wendy Judith Cutler*, 70, Salt Spring Island British Columbia, Canada

“See, I had seen the police do terrible things. Okay. In the neighborhood [in Philly], I had seen them beat up a playmate of mine, just to beat him up. And then [they] jumped away and said, ‘We beat the wrong n-word.’ I couldn't believe that. To see this and I'm a kid. He's a kid. He had to be about a year or two older than me. We were all kids. So I didn't like the police.

The oligarchs of America do not care about people, or the welfare of common people. Do you understand? [In the 60s,] we were tearing this country apart. And I don't necessarily even mean just physically, you know.

We had Black people, just courageous Black people, who said you know what, these laws are not good for us. They're not even good for the poor working whites. They're not good for any working person in this country. So we aren't going to obey the laws, we're not going to do it, we’re gonna patrol our own communities. And so what would happen? There would be standoffs with the police, shootouts with the police, and people were willing to give their lives, go to jail, or whatever so that we can move forward as a people. And we did. So what I see now is a hesitancy. Now, there are certainly demonstrations of sorts going on now, we know that. But I don't see the kind of strategic cohesiveness that I would like to see, as an extension of what we did in the 1960s.

I know America is a criminal country. You got to understand that. I was exposed to the despotism of America for so long, that the protests, and the young Black girl filming George Floyd being killed [right] before our fucking eyes—I said, Okay. I'm sorry George was killed that way. But I also knew something like that needed to happen, because the youngsters are too complacent with the crimes of America. When I saw the protests, I watched, and I knew that it was going to be different from what it had been previously. I knew that it would spark, I'll call it a revolutionary thrust, that had not been there before. This is what I knew. And you see this country, it's very good at masquerade and camouflage. It's excellent. We want to spread democracy around [the world]. Really? With all of the homeless that are strewn across this country? But you're spreading democracy? With the inequality that regular Americans are facing?”

—Dr. Regina Jennings*, 72, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

*The Footnotes

Larry Curley is currently the Executive Director of the National Indian Council on Aging and has worked for the Navajo Nation, of which he is a member, for most of his life.
David Lebe is a photographer known for his experimental representations of the gay experience and living with AIDS. His monograph is Long Light: Photographs by David Lebe.
J-Mo was the first openly lesbian elected official at the state level in Missouri, where ze served as Missouri House Representative.
Joseph B. Juhász is a Professor Emeritus of Architecture and Environmental Design at the University of Colorado. He is a survivor of the Holocaust and was a refugee to the United States at 13 years old.
Wendy Judith Cutler is a teacher, writer, and lesbian feminist who has been involved in feminist, leftist, social justice, and queer politics, community-building, and culture for many decades. She co-authored Writing Alone Together: Journaling in a Circle of Women for Creativity, as well as the play An UnDutiful Daughter.
Dr. Regina Jennings is a former member of the original Black Panther Party, as well as a poet and academic who has written several books including Panther Poems: Poetry of a Sister Panther, Poetry and the Black Panther Party: From Ancestral Memory, Morphogenetic Fields to Hip Hop, and Malcolm X and the Poetics of Haki Madhubuti.

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August 31, 2022August 28, 2024

How Do Older People Feel About the State of the World?

by Daniel Sanchez Torres

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A non-exhaustive list of cruel, corrupt, and extreme actions taken by Republicans of late.



With so many overlapping global crises happening at once, and Democrats in charge of the Presidency and Congress, it's especially hard to keep track of all the ways the US GOP continues to radicalize. This is partly by design. The cascade of oppressive laws and disinformation from Republican legislators and media is meant confuse and overwhelm. The following is a list of GOP and related far right news worth your attention.




Jamelle Bouie, Ezra Klein, Jane Coaston and Lulu Garcia-Navarro discuss how the GOP fringe took over American politics for the New York Times.



Gabriel Rosenberg, Duke Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, wrote a Twitter thread about how the latest "groomer" panic is categorically different and more violent than what we've seen before.



Writer Jude Doyle does a deep dive into the growing connections between anti-trans feminists and the far right. “It’s a grim irony that, by insisting on a ‘feminism’ without any trans women in it, TERFs have wound up constructing the tool by which fascists aim to destroy feminism altogether.”



Roxanna Asgarian writes in NY Mag about how Texas became the most virulently anti-trans state in America, including directing the state’s child-welfare agency to conduct abuse investigations of parents who provide their children gender-affirming care.



For the Editorial Board, Mia Brett writes about how Republicans are close to legalizing child marriage in Tennessee. 



Also in the Editorial Board, John Stoehr speaks with NYU Law Professor Melissa Murray about Ginni and Clarence Thomas and how their relationship affects perceptions about the Supreme Court's legitimacy. 



The editorial board of the Boston Globe wants the January 6 Committee to subpoena Ginni Thomas already.



Elie Mystal argues in The Nation that post-Roe, Republicans are coming for marriage equality next.



Gerren Keith Gaynor interviews Preston Mitchum about the harm to Black LGBTQ youth of the "Don't Say Gay" Laws.



The Oregon GOP is running three QAnon and Proud Boy candidates. 



Trump admitted to speaking to key Republican figures at the time of the riot on 1/6. Greg Sargent argues that Merrick Garland should use this admission to launch a full investigation into Trump's communications that day.



Speaking of which, there are 7 hours missing from Trump's phone records that day. Historian Tim Naftali writes in The Atlantic that Trump can't just erase history like Nixon did.



On the bright side, the DOJ plans to investigate the boxes of records Trump illegally brought with him to Mar a Lago.



The Child Tax Credit expiring is pushing voters towards the GOP. Meanwhile the GOP plus Joe Manchin are why it expired in the first place.


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April 8, 2022August 28, 2024

What has the radicalized GOP been up to?

by Anna Lind-Guzik

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