Community

Stories about building, finding, and becoming an active member of your community.

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    [post_date] => 2020-07-02 05:39:25
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    [post_content] => The inequities New Yorkers accept as a part of life are immediate, and sobering.

Returning to Brooklyn after two months of hiding from the pandemic in the suburbs, I had the discomfiting feeling that I’d been sold a bill of goods about the charms of this city—that maybe we all had. As the scenery changed from trees to close-packed single-family homes to bleak public high-rises, I was struck anew by the contortions of aesthetic impulse that had me finding beauty in tiny apartments, excitement in trash-strewn sidewalks and a sense of possibility in packed subway cars. I found myself making an inventory of the places I had lived over the last 15 years, and it was as if I had finally realized that that multi-geared thing in my hands was a kaleidoscope. The same pieces, turned askew, suddenly told a different story, and my narrative of constantly moving back to New York became a story of my constantly leaving. I realized that that story had been there all along.

As a child of the East Coast, New York felt like the only and obvious city to move to after college. It was the hub of culture, it was the fulfilment of suburban childhood fantasies shaped by romantic comedies, it was the place that seemed natural for a writer to cavort among other writers and stir up material. The city promised romance, new friendships, political activism, millions of strangers whose lives I could imagine, a whole new type of landscape to negotiate and ladders to climb.

It was also the city my parents grew up in, and which I had spent my life ruing their decision to leave.

From the vantage point of my childhood in a cookie-cutter subdivision outside Washington, D.C., I was sure they had made a horrible mistake, and that my brothers and I were the worse for it. Growing up, I found the green lawns and shopping centers of suburbia to be stultifying in their homogeneity, which to me seemed tragically matched by the lives of their owners. In college, living in close quarters with my peers, I read Jane Jacobs, fancied myself a committed urbanist, and decided to continue living closely with others. After moving to New York, I reveled in how much richer and more textured a simple run to the neighborhood bodega felt than a late-night drive to the suburban supermarket.

When I started traveling abroad in my mid-twenties, I saw that living in a diverse, international city with a vibrant cultural life didn’t have to mean compromising on quality of life. On vacation in Berlin, I found apartments that were cheap and spacious, freshwater swimming lakes right off the U-Bahn, and dedicated bike lanes. In Tel Aviv there were verdant boulevards designed for strolling, ubiquitous balconies, and more outdoor cafes than a person could visit in a lifetime. Paris had a refreshingly human sense of scale in its proportions, and even its grandeur felt calibrated to a person’s ability to take it in. Dublin was full of leafy neighborhoods and small shops, and its museums offered reduced entry fees for the unemployed.

The governments of the countries in which all these cities are located offer heavily subsidized childcare, education and eldercare, too. Sure, they each have their own brand of reprehensible politics, their own blind spots and injustices and intergenerational calamities, but today’s citizens can at least progress through life with a sense of security that comes from knowing there’s a social safety net, and that their government feels responsible for protecting its citizens. Those governments took proactive measures to protect their residents from the coronavirus, while the Trump Administration remains mired in anti-science hucksterism and denial, continues to turn U.S. citizens against one other and generally lets us fend for ourselves.

If you’ve got either wealth or American-dream style luck, New York, like the rest of America, can be an amazing playground full of career and educational opportunities, culture, food, entertainment. But without a financial cushion, the inequities we live with here are immediate, and sobering. It’s no coincidence that one of the city’s main strategies to offer decent affordable housing is called a lottery. You literally have to win the lottery to obtain an affordable apartment for the long term. With the exception of those lucky few, the available housing stock for all but the top tier is small, cramped and prohibitively expensive.

Our schools are grievously segregated. Homelessness is exploding. The quality of a public university or college is grossly inferior to that of the private universities, which charge annual tuition that is higher than the city’s median income. While real estate prices skyrocket, rat colonies are overtaking even Brooklyn’s most expensive neighborhoods, chewing through car wires and taking up residence beside cool engines. The city’s public transportation is frayed due to underfunding; meanwhile cyclists who avoid it get killed, and the cops ignore rampant motorist bike lane violations while overpolicing black neighborhoods.

For the millennials who migrated to the city after college, we can pretend all we want that New York is the city we want it to be, but in reality, it was always just the city it is, with its extremes of wealth and poverty and its uneven attempts at making it livable for all. In our twenties, my friends and I would strap towels and umbrellas to our backs and bike out to city beaches, battling traffic fumes and dodging collisions the whole way. By the time we got there and spread out our blankets, my heart would be racing more from adrenaline than from endorphins, but we’d pride ourselves on our grit and pretend we’d enjoyed it. On some level I did – who wouldn’t enjoy a survival tale that ends at the beach? But then of course, we’d have to face the return trip home.

This was all before the pandemic made New Yorkers with money flee like birds from a fire, while those without wondered how they could have so underestimated their neighbors’ wealth. For those of us who are privileged enough to think about moving our lives elsewhere but lack the wherewithal to do so easily, we find ourselves with actual decisions to make. For many in the middle class, living a good life in New York has always felt like a precarious balancing act that’s contingent on exactly the thing that Covid-19 has stripped away from us: comfort going out into the crowd. Without that, we are actually stuck inside apartments we only believed were as cozy and charming as the realtors promised back when we could leave them without fear.

As we drove into Brooklyn after our suburban retreat, we found ourselves in the middle of a BLM protest. My whorls of ambivalence about living in the city paused amid the chants. Being surrounded by marchers was exhilarating and encouraging and we tooted our horn in solidarity as they swarmed around us toward the Brooklyn Bridge. Every day since then has seen more demonstrations and masked young people, a striking number of them white, walking around the neighborhood with BLM posters made of cardboard delivery boxes. It’s reminded me why I do keep returning to New York, and why I still love the place in spite of its miseries.

But the truth is that right now I need the daily reminder. Maybe it’s political despair, or resignation. The racism of this country, the cruel pugilism of this political moment, the childish, criminal negligence of our leaders and all the systemic loopholes they’re exploiting in their self-serving campaigns – it all feels so much larger than us, so entrenched. And now that I have an infant to look after and provide a childhood for, I find myself focusing on attainable goals. Most are in the realm of the sensory: the air I want him to breathe, the landscapes I want him to explore, the feeling I want to have when I go about my day being his mother, the feeling I want him to have when he goes about his day being my son.

The problems are enormous, but the choices are individual. For my own little family it means cataloguing all the American cities out there and wondering if there’s another one we could imagine making a life in. It means ruminating on the small towns and rural areas I’ve loved and thinking through which are diverse and culturally rich enough to imagine wanting to live and raise a child in. It means wondering if we could feel at home in another country that offers the urban fabric we crave with the social safety net we desire.

How do you want life to feel? I asked my partner the other day on a masked walk to the park.

Not how do you want it to look, or what do you want to do. How do you want it to feel? At what point do we accept that the sensory is the level to focus on, that the rest is too far out of our control? And at what point do we shake up our lives in order to catch that feeling?
    [post_title] => The pandemic laid bare all the reasons I hate living in the city I love
    [post_excerpt] => New York can be an amazing playground full of career and educational opportunities, culture, food, entertainment. But without a financial cushion, the inequities we live with here are immediate, and sobering.
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The pandemic laid bare all the reasons I hate living in the city I love

by Ilana Sichel

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    [post_content] => By failing to invest in child care, the U.S. government is placing mothers in an impossible position.

Ashley Patrick was thrilled to land a full-time position at a prestigious publishing house in July 2016. The job came with smart, bookish colleagues, opportunities for advancement, a regular salary, and health insurance. For a Brooklyn-based writer and editor, it was a rare and valuable opportunity.

At the time she had two young sons, a husband who also worked full-time, and no flexibility. By the end of 2018, Patrick and her husband had three children. The combined monthly cost of full-time daycare for the baby and after-school programs for the boys was an unaffordable minimum of $3,250. In February 2019 she made the painful decision to leave her job.

“A big part of my decision to leave was the cost of child care,” Patrick told me in a recent phone conversation. “Which was a great disappointment because I was on an upward trajectory in the company.” She had been promoted shortly before the birth of her youngest and was on track for another promotion in the next year and a half. Getting that second promotion “would have made a big difference in terms of mobility from one publishing house to another.”

The kids are now nine, seven, and 18 months old. Patrick has managed to carve out a thriving freelance business, but, with schools and daycares closed due to the pandemic, she is now trying to work and supervise her boys’ online lessons from her small apartment. Her husband, who had been earning a good salary at a major company, was laid off eight months after she quit her own job—in part, Patrick suspects, because he took the family leave he was entitled to when their third child was born. She does not know what they’ll do when schools reopen—there is still no ideal option for the baby, and the boys attend schools in different neighborhoods with different start times, making pick-up and drop-off complicated and time-consuming.

Patrick and her family are hardly alone in finding the demands of child care and full-time employment increasingly unmanageable.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 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: New Zealand, the U.K., Australia, and the United States. In Korea, Austria, Greece, and Hungary, the average couple spends less than four percent of their income on child care. Mothers in Sweden, France, and Canada report being satisfied with the overall quality, availability, and cost of child care in those countries, all of which have government-run or heavily subsidized child care systems.

Erika Gubrium, a professor at Oslo Metropolitan University who has two sons, ages eight and 11, explained in response to questions sent by email that child care in Norway is offered through a mix of public and private day cares partially subsidized by the state. The cost of a full-time spot at a daycare in Oslo is approximately 3,100 Norwegian krone per month (around $302 USD). Some families pay reduced fees if they earn less and in some areas, day care is completely free for children of certain ages. In Gubrium’s words, “There is NO opposition to government funding of child care, as there is strong sentiment across the political board that the state should support measures that enable both parents to work full-time.”

When child care is consistent, affordable, and easy to access, more women work outside of the home. Quebec’s government-subsidized child care program led to a workforce participation rate of 85 percent for women ages 26 to 44—the highest in the world, according to University of Quebec at Montreal economist Pierre Fortin. The increased tax revenue covers more than 100 percent of what the government spends on child care. “In other words, it costs zero, or the cost is negative,” Fortin told CityLab in 2018. The program also saves money by reducing the number of families on public assistance.

Hannah Selinger, a freelance writer in East Hampton, New York, has two sons, ages three and one-and-a-half. Finding convenient child care for both, she said in a phone interview, has been a “nightmare.” She quit her well-paid job to be a stay-at-home mother when she became pregnant with her first child because her partner’s salary was double what she made. Since then her freelance writing career has taken off, requiring more of her time, but the logistics of child care are making that nearly impossible. The fee for her eldest son’s preschool is $12,000 per year for three half days per week, and it’s a 30-minute drive from her home, meaning she spends six hours per week driving him (and his little brother) there and back.

Carolina Gonzalez-Villar lives in California’s Bay Area with her husband and their four-year-old son. Her father, who is retired, took care of her son until he was 18 months old. Without her father, she said, her family would have had to bear the expense of a nanny. She and her husband decided they couldn’t afford another child, given that child care where they live costs up to $2,500 per month.

A shorter workweek would reduce both child care costs and parental stress. “We have doubled productivity since the 1960s; there is no reason we shouldn’t make the same money or better and work fewer hours,” said Erin Mahoney, who lives in Queens with her 2-year-old child. Mahoney described the search for child care as one of the most stressful parts of her pregnancy. “A month before my maternity leave ended, I was still trying to figure it out.”

The burden of navigating America’s patchwork child care system falls disproportionately on mothers. Ashley Patrick recently wrote on Facebook, in response to a comment about child care centers refusing to disclose their fees until parents have scheduled a tour, “The last thing I wanted to be doing while uncomfortably pregnant and frantically prepping at work for maternity leave and scheduling and attending a zillion doctor’s appointments was making still more phone calls and sending more emails to check tuition fees.”

Liz Grefath, a mother of two young sons who lives in Brooklyn, recently wrote on Facebook that “people use words like ‘challenge’ to describe [the search for adequate child care] but that is such a neutral word.” What most U.S. parents are really engaged in, she added, is “all-out scavenging, plotting, and survivalism.”Another problem with the U.S. system is that child care providers and preschool teachers are among the worst-paid workers in America. As of 2018, 58 percent of child care workers in California were paid so little that they qualified for public assistance. Some cannot afford to have children of their own.

“One thing I find really frustrating about child care is that it’s almost prohibitively expensive for parents yet the teachers are paid close to minimum wage,” Arielle Harrison recently wrote on Facebook. Harrison, who lives in Connecticut with her husband and their two young sons, continued: “I don’t see how the economics work without some form of government subsidy.”

The U.S. provides limited subsidies to low-income families, she acknowledged, but providers are still grossly underpaid.

Historically, the U.S. government has found the money for child care when it needed women to work. President Franklin Roosevelt used funds from a wartime infrastructure bill to establish a national network of child care centers for women who took factory jobs to support the war effort (remember Rosie the Riveter?). The centers were shut down under the Truman administration, despite a battle waged by mothers, social welfare groups, unions, early childhood educators and social workers to keep them open. That was the last time the United States offered universal child care.

In May 1971, two New York congresswomen—Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn and Bella Abzug of Manhattan—introduced a bill that would have set aside billions of dollars in federal funds for child care. A watered-down version eventually passed the House and the Senate, only to be vetoed by Nixon, on the advice of his special assistant Pat Buchanan. Nixon described the bill as “radical,” “family-weakening” and tantamount to endorsing “communal” childrearing as opposed to “the family-centered approach.”

Jen Sunderland, a child care provider and mother of a 14-year-old in New York City, pointed out in a phone conversation that the U.S.’s “family-centered approach” is the problem. Instead of acknowledging that the entire society benefits when children are well cared for, our system places “all of the burden of that work on individual families.”

For women, child care decisions are inextricably tied to stagnant wages and unequal pay. The majority of mothers who “choose” the work of childrearing over a paying job do so because they would earn less or only marginally more than they would have to spend on child care if they worked.

The situation is even more dire for single parents. Nearly a quarter of U.S. children live in single-parent households, the vast majority of which are headed by women. Single parents earning an average wage spend 52.7 percent of their income on child care, which surely contributes to the fact that 30 percent of single mothers live below the poverty line.

Child care was a campaign issue in the 2020 presidential election cycle for the first time since the 1970s. Elizabeth Warren was the first to unveil a plan; Bernie Sanders’ plan was the most comprehensive. Joe Biden has not presented one. Earlier in 2020, he told Fortune that, under a Biden administration, children will be able to attend “high-quality, universal prekindergarten at no cost” and parents “will get up to $8,000 in tax credits” to offset child care costs. In 2016 the Center for American Progress, which advised Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, recommended offering child care tax credits of up to $14,000 per child.

The pandemic has brought the U.S.’s deepening child care crisis into even sharper relief. Daycares are closed and many schools will not reopen until the fall. Millions of parents are now either seeking work or attempting to hold onto their jobs while caring full-time for young children. In states where businesses are reopening, many now face a choice between returning to work and leaving their kids who knows where, or staying at home with their kids and losing their jobs or part of their income.

In a 1981 op-ed headlined “Congress is Subsidizing Deterioration of Family,” Joe Biden argued against expanding a child care tax credit to include families with higher incomes and labeled day care centers and nursing homes “monuments to our growing unwillingness to accept personal responsibility for those to whom we owe the most.”A lot has changed since 1981. What hasn’t changed is the need for the government to treat child care as a social responsibility, not a personal one.

Whatever happens in November, the U.S. will almost certainly end up with either a President Trump, who has agreed to spend more on child care block grants for low-income families and doubled the federal child tax credit to $2,000, or a President Biden, who has talked about “making sure that every single solitary person needing child care gets an $8,000 tax credit.” The average American family spends nearly $15,000 a year on child care.“We dread the idea that our day care might not come back from [the pandemic],” Josef Szende, who grew up in Canada and lives in New York City with his wife and their 15-month-old son, told me via Zoom. “We don’t know what we would do…we’d move from that lucky whatever percent who somehow made it work in New York City into the majority for whom it’s not working.”

Congress voted to invest billions in child care nearly 50 years ago. It’s past time to make good on that promise.
    [post_title] => The United States cannot put its economy in order unless it invests in child care
    [post_excerpt] => The United States is one of only four countries in the world where couples earning an average wage spend more than 30 percent of their income on child care. Women are paying the highest price.
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The United States cannot put its economy in order unless it invests in child care

by Raina Lipsitz

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    [post_content] => “We built this country, and we can burn it down." — BLM protester in Washington D.C.

In my Black Lives (Don’t) Matter class, I teach students that the revolution BLM demands cannot be humanized. Rather, the movement asks us to burn down our ideologies as well as our structures—to burn them all the way down—in order to make a different society. Because the system isn’t broken; it was intentionally designed to exclude black persons from human recognitions and protections. And that system isn’t reducible to a nation-state built on slave labor and indigenous genocide.

It is a commonly accepted truth that black people built the infrastructures of what is now called the United States. Many also acknowledge that the exclusion of black people from our imagined community is what makes possible our superstructures—i.e., our culture, values, and power relations. We are less likely, however, to acknowledge that the entire enterprise of liberal humanism was built by black people, even or especially as they cannot participate in it.

Public officials in the Los Angeles judicial system routinely used the acronym NHI—short for “no humans involved”—to describe the black people who showed up to protest the Rodney King decision in 1992. The state’s response then, like its response to the BLM protests today, is to plow through what they perceive to be a black mass of flesh that is at once subhuman (like chattel) and superhuman—or, as ex-police officer Darren Wilson described Ferguson resident Michael Brown, like a “hulk.” Both messages serve to communicate that black persons are mindlessly and mercilessly aggressive and that the rest of us should fear for our lives.

The perception that black people are somehow bestial or not-quite-human serves but one purpose: to justify the innumerable ways in which nonblack people, including nonblack people of color like ex-NYPD officer Peter Liang, gratuitously police and kill back people—not just on the street, as George Floyd experienced, but also in the park, and even in their homes.

The American writer and activist Audre Lorde explained that “there is no rest” from anti-black violence. It “weaves through the daily tissues of [black] living—in the supermarket, in the classroom, in the elevator, in the clinic and the schoolyard, from the plumber, the baker, the saleswoman, the bus driver, the bank teller, the waitress who does not serve us.” Antiblackness, in other words, is atmospheric. It is the air that nonblack people need to breathe and which makes it impossible for black people to also breathe.

Rather than acknowledge the vulnerability that black people experience, nonblack people continue to treat them as an ongoing threat. According to this logic, black people must be taken out back and shot like a dog and then left on the street to die—in the case of Michael Brown, for four hours—like roadkill.

When Enlightenment thinkers like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant, and David Hume defined ‘the human,’ they could only ever arrive at a definition of what the human is not— i.e., the black African. They defined ‘the human’ as transcendent, of sound mind, in a state above nature, with the ability (and agility) to control the unruly instincts of his material body. In contrast, they imagined the black African as so irrational, so carnal—indeed, so bestial—that she could not pull herself out of a state of nature. She was unable to transcend the impulses of her flesh and climb the ladder of ‘the human,’ which is the ladder of whiteness. Hegel, Kant, and Hume suggest that this is also the ladder of civilization, modernity, progress, and history.

The racism expressed by these Enlightenment philosophers is not a thing of the past. Richard Spencer, the notorious alt-right spokesperson, argued in a November 2016 interview with African-American journalist Roland Martin that the black people who built the human world as we know it did not contribute to the making of human society—because they simply do not have access to the “genius” required to “create [human] systems.”

The fact that black lives don’t seem to matter is a problem not only for the settler colonial state in need of surplus labor—whether on the plantations of yore or the prison-industrial complex of today. It is also or primarily a problem for what the Jamaican critic and essayist Sylvia Wynter describes as the “genre of Man”—a racist and institutionalized standard of the human that (re)produces what feminist thinker bell hooks famously characterizes as “imperialist white supremacist capitalist (cis-hetero-) patriarchy.” The intersecting structures that hooks enumerates and which makes possible our modern world pivot on antiblackness.

The same genre of Man that denies the humanity of black people determines whether or how sex and gender minorities, persons with dis/abilities, and nonblack persons of color can access human recognitions and protections. Hooks’ inheritor, scholar Hortense Spillers argues that black lives are the “zero degree” of Man’s “social conceptualizations.” In other words, antiblackness is the foundation of the house of white, cis, able-bodied humans and makes possible everyone else’s exclusion from humanity. It is the genre of Man, Wynter and Spillers suggest, that we must burn down in order to make black lives—and thus all lives—matter.

It is no coincidence, then, that black people and those of us who stand with them take pleasure in the burning and looting of a human world that was built to ensure that black people die—for no other reason than, as Lorde painfully describes it, they are black. Those of us who are not black but who, indeed, embody difference know that we are next if we get too close to or approximate the non-human characteristics that white supremacist humanism has assigned to black people. Our pleasure is derived not from bloodlust for white or human death. This is about destroying the concept of whiteness as it informs the antiblack standard of human being.

The revolution espoused by Black Lives Matter cannot be humanized, because the white people who defined the human never intended to know black humanity, and because they can only ever contingently recognize the humanity of all of us other Others.

By excluding black people from human recognitions and protections, the prototypically white human produces other oppressions, too. The black person’s presumed sub-humanity locates them in a time before human time, as the furthest point away from the white, cis, able-bodied standard of the human that we inherit from the Enlightenment. If black people represent absolute difference—the “zero degree” or foundation of everyone else’s oppression—then the genre of Man that excludes them is also responsible for producing this world’s other “-isms”—e.g., sexism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and ableism.

Stated another way, if humanism is a country, then antiblackness is the border that makes its other exclusions possible. BLM protestors who are burning it down know that the country they must dismantle is the world as it was defined by white men. If we are to make all lives matter, then we must question and, where necessary, destroy the structures and ideologies of the genre of Man. And we must remember, always, that the revolution we seek cannot be humanized.
    [post_title] => The revolution will not be humanized
    [post_excerpt] => “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” — James Baldwin
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The revolution will not be humanized

by M. Shadee Malaklou

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    [post_content] => The search for home can sometimes clash with the need for security.

Like many Canadians, I grew up with my nose pressed to the window of American life.

This was especially true in my case, because my mother was born in New York City and her mother in Chicago; my great-grandfather was a Chicago developer who built one of the city’s first skyscrapers. My American cousins intimidated me: they included an ambassador, a Harvard archeologist, even a bullfighter. One of them was married to a woman who flew her own small aircraft.

I wanted to be like them — bold, adventurous, successful — and to understand what made them tick; I wanted to flee the quiet, polite country I was born and raised in, where ambition and strong opinions were frowned upon.

Canadian newsstands offered 80 percent American content and I knew the names of Buffalo’s suburbs, Lackawanna and Cheektowaga, because their television broadcasts reached Toronto. I caught deeper glimpses of American contradictions while attending University of Toronto, during a life-changing exchange week at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. We attended a black Baptist church service where the preacher inveighed against abortion and the ladies waved paper fans. We listened to a black UNC administrator describe his life there…and begin to weep.

As someone from a multicultural city, Toronto, and a country where abortion isn’t demonized, both were shocking. Nor had I before imagined the daily toll that racism could play. It all deepened my curiosity about the U.S. even further, making me more determined to find a way to live there.

At 25, I won a fellowship to Paris, traveling Europe for eight months, then was a newspaper reporter in Toronto and Montreal, where I fell in love with a McGill medical student from New Jersey, soon to graduate and return south for residency.

I was able to follow him to the United States, although we were not married, because I was the daughter of a U.S. citizen, applying for “better work opportunities.” After I had taken an AIDS test, undergone a security check and been fingerprinted, an official at the consulate in Montreal interviewed me. I wrote, for a column in the national daily, The Globe and Mail, in 1988:

“The vice-consul asked me surprisingly little. When she approved my visa, after a brief but lively conversation, her enthusiasm and warmth were infectious. Even the guard wished me luck. I felt I’d been invited to a terrific party. I was handed a brown envelope, stamped, signed and sealed. My future was in my hands.”

And so I left behind a perfectly good country, one with excellent and heavily subsidized university education, cradle-to-grave healthcare, a wide, deep social safety net, and a Constitution that promised “peace, order and good government” rather than “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

For years, Canadians had often guessed I was American, which is a veiled insult that means too bossy, too direct, too nakedly ambitious. I wanted faster decisions and a wider playing field, not the endless foot-shuffling of risk-averse fellow Canadians and a career limited to a handful of major cities.

I’d thought American was more egalitarian than it is, but that turned out to be silly idealism. When I dared suggest to someone at Dartmouth that I audit classes there, since we were in the middle of nowhere for the next four years, pre-Internet, the university administration refused. How about part-time study? Also no.

As I began to try to make sense of my new home, I read two seminal works of the early 1990s that explained the shadowed side of John Winthrop’s 1630 vision of America as a much-admired “city on a hill”: the first was Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here, about two boys growing up in a decrepit Chicago housing project during the 1980s; the second was Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, a study of two school districts, divided by wealth and class, which were allotted wildly unequal resources by the American way of funding education through housing taxes. This was a key difference between my experiences in Toronto and Montreal.

In Hanover, a local social worker told me about the grinding poverty she saw on muddy backroads, the battered trailers with plastic on the windows, while Dartmouth’s most privileged students raced their shiny sports cars through town and dropped enormous sums in its few stores. There is poverty in Canada; this is particularly true for the shamefully neglected Indigenous people. But the shocking inequality of the United States, where the three wealthiest Americans collectively own more wealth than the bottom half of the population (while the middle class struggles to pay for healthcare and university tuition), is absent; Canada has its billionaires and millionaires, but they tend to be more discreet about their good fortune.

First American lesson: Prove you’re rich! Income inequality be damned.

I wanted my career back, so we moved to suburban New York, where I’ve lived ever since. After two years of marriage, my husband left and I started my American life yet again, without children. I’d insisted on a pre-nuptial agreement, which enabled me to survive financially and keep my home.

Second American lesson: Know your legal rights and be ready to fight hard for them.


Third American lesson: A tough lawyer is often your new best friend.

Single and lonely, in 1998 I answered a personals ad in a local alternative weekly — which brought a convicted con man into my life, who wreaked emotional havoc and cost me several thousand dollars.

Fourth American lesson: In a country so diverse, re-invention is easier. In a huge and mobile country, less fussy about one’s origins, he simply traveled east and started victimizing anew.


Fifth American lesson: Some Americans are wildly impressed with self-confidence and happily defer to material signs of success; before he was caught in Chicago, the conman had posed as a doctor and as a lawyer.

In the decades since, I’ve often wondered about my “ghost life.” What if I’d stayed in Canada? When I visit, I find that I miss the civil conversation, the more generous public policies and, most of all, a national culture that is not poisoned by right-wing terrorism.

In 2002 and 2003, while researching my first book, I traveled to Ohio, New Orleans, Massachusetts and Texas to interview 104 men, women and teens about women and gun use, asking whether they owned a firearm or whether one had shattered their life. I spent three days learning how to fire a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol, which gave me the street cred to speak with suspicious gun owners; their first question to me was always the same: Do you believe in the Second Amendment?

Sixth American lesson: It’s as if the Constitution’s ink were still wet, so often is it cited. And every time I ask someone about their concomitant responsibility to the common good I might as well be speaking Greek, so hollow does the phrase ring in a nation addicted to the primacy of individual rights.

I survived the financial crash of 2008, thanks to my second husband’s secure job and my work in a part-time retail position for $11/hour, an experience that was the subject of my second book. In two-and-a-half years, while selling $600 ski jackets, my hourly wage was raised by only 30 cents. The store’s wealthy customers recoiled in shock if I replied to them in French or Spanish. They automatically assumed anyone working at a low-level job couldn’t possibly be as well educated or well-traveled as they.

Seventh American lesson: A low-wage job de facto signals low status. One customer tossed a quarter at us, barking: ‘Go to college!” Every one of our 15-member staff had done so, and two were military veterans. I saw firsthand what $11/ hour could buy. Almost nothing. With college costs so high, how could anyone flee? 


Eighth American lesson: The stunning cost of American post-secondary education breaks as many as it helps. Two of our friends in their early 30s, both from blue-collar families, are crippled by their college debts of $60,000 and $100,000. My annual tuition in mid-1970s Canada was $660 a year; today, it would be $6,000.

In a country professing such deep allegiance to “liberty,” American workers have no right to paid vacation, sick leave or paid maternity leave. Union membership is low, and the federal minimum wage has been stagnant for decades.

Since Donald Trump’s election, our Canadian friends have shifted from asking: “Will you come home?” to “When will you come home?”

I struggle to find a response, even as I realize that most of my reasons for staying are predicated on privilege. I am an educated white woman, in good health; I have work, savings in the bank, and a gainfully employed husband who is also in good health. If I were poor and lived in a rural area, Canada’s social safety net might appear much more appealing than it does from a pretty and prosperous town within easy distance of New York City.

Until we can afford to retire we need well-paid work, which, even in the worst of times, is more plentiful for us where we live now. My experience of trying to do business with Canadians has been frustrating: often they murmur encouragingly and then disappear, true to an aspect of the national character that places value on avoiding potential conflict.

The U.S. feels more foreign now than it did when I first made it my home, nearly 30 years ago. It is tainted by mass incarceration, racism and daily violence. Shooters armed with automatic weapons have massacred thousands and schoolchildren practice “active shooter drills.” In a nation that never shuts up about “productivity,” retailers sell us scented candles to relax. No one seems to notice the contradiction.

Soon, there will be more than 100,000 dead from COVID-19; meanwhile, the White House administration’s chaotic responses are a deadly roulette wheel.

I love our historic, lovely Hudson River town and its ready access to the pleasures of Manhattan --- although they are temporarily off limits during the pandemic. The fact remains; unless we move to a rural, isolated area with poor medical access, we can’t afford comparable Canadian housing and my home city, Toronto, has become both violent and expensive, with tiny teardown houses selling for $1 million.

I loathe Trump and fear four more years of this nightmare.

I enjoy our life here— while knowing how deeply its systems punish so many others.

It’s a moral thorn.

Stay?

Go?

I still don’t know.
    [post_title] => America is home but Canada is safer: after 30 years, and despite a fulfilling personal life, is it time to leave?
    [post_excerpt] => In the decades since, I’ve often wondered about my “ghost life.” What if I’d stayed in Canada? When I visit, I find that I miss the civil conversation, the more generous public policies and, most of all, a national culture that is not poisoned by right-wing terrorism.
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America is home but Canada is safer: after 30 years, and despite a fulfilling personal life, is it time to leave?

by Caitlin Kelly

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    [post_content] => The dynamics of gentrification among the middle class are complicated, but Covid-19 has brought some painful clarity.

On January 24, the day I went into labor, only two people in the U.S. had been diagnosed with the coronavirus that still had no name. That afternoon, I stumbled out of our Brooklyn apartment building under the watchful eyes of whichever neighbors happened to be in the courtyard or peering out their windows at that moment. In recent months, as I started growing more and more rotund, neighbors who had generally offered no more than a passing nod in the elevator or by the front gate began holding doors for me, inquiring about my pregnancy, and telling me tales of their own. I started to enjoy shifting my distinguishing characteristic in the building from my whiteness, which marked me as a gentrifier in a borough of gentrification, to my belly, which marked me as a beleaguered woman in a world of beleaguered women.

The demographics inside my 120-unit apartment building on the border of two Brooklyn neighborhoods—one already thoroughly gentrified, another well on its way—reflect the demographics on the street. In the building, longtime black residents get replaced, vacancy by vacancy, with mostly white, highly educated newcomers like myself, whose rent-stabilized apartments are still a bargain at twice the price many of the older families are paying.

The dynamics of gentrification among the middle class are complicated, particularly in a city like New York, where racial differences persistently track onto income levels and health outcomes, and whole communities get displaced by predatory developers. My also-white partner is an artist and I’m a graduate student. As far as annual income is concerned, many of the longtime residents are probably in better shape than we are. But as is playing out so blatantly during this crisis, social class isn’t just about income. This lesson has never been clearer than from where I write this, perched under a skylight at a friend’s childhood home in Connecticut, where we have been hiding out for the last six weeks.

We spent the first four weeks of my son’s life in the normal self-isolation of new parenthood. The news about the spread of the virus was ominous, but felt distant. Family visited, friends brought food. The only visitors we restricted were my aunt and uncle, who had returned in mid-February from a cruise in the Far East. All others were welcome, as was the friendly up-close cooing of our neighbors. When I was finally able to move around again after a few weeks of what is euphemistically referred to as postpartum “discomfort,” I delightedly walked down the block to my favorite coffee shop and down a couple more to another, just because I could.

But soon the three of us came down with a cold and again began receding from the world. It was just as well, because days later, on March 4, a Covid-19 cluster surfaced just north of the city. As we monitored our temperatures and the baby’s cough—which is one of the saddest and scariest sounds I have ever heard—and gradually nursed ourselves back to health, the city got sicker and sicker all around us.

A neighbor posted to the building’s invite-only Facebook page, which is populated almost exclusively by the building’s gentrifiers, expressing concern for elderly residents and for the woman who cleans the hallways and takes out the trash. Ideas were circulated about how to help: sign-up sheets, phone calls, pros, cons.

At the same time, discarded latex gloves started littering the streets and sidewalks like a dystopian second autumn. At first we spotted just one or two each time we took the dog out for a walk, but soon there were scores of them clustering in slow-moving eddies.

Headlines forecasting calamities bled into each other across all our devices, the drumbeat growing louder and closer, and the warm exchanges we had been having with neighbors gradually fizzled into a mutually fearful, distanced dance when negotiating doorways in common spaces. The streets began feeling empty. Normally coveted parking spots opened up as people with means packed up and drove away. At the same time, the building’s Facebook page went curiously quiet. Had the other gentrifiers left the premises?

Since we had no country house to flee to nor the means to indefinitely rent one, we figured we would just stay put. We signed up for new internet service that week; if we were going to stay, we were going to do it with high-speed broadband.

But what might have been even more contagious than the virus so many were fleeing was the panic it induced. When close friends also with a newborn and also without a country house announced their decision to flee the city, we finally accepted that the postpartum back-to-work routine we had so meticulously planned and were started to look forward to implementing had become obsolete. So had the need for a new internet provider. The elevator, which we needed to ride up and down twice a day with our 12-year-old dog, started to feel like a death trap. High-touch zones like the front doorknobs seemed to glow, radioactive. The day Governor Cuomo finally announced the closure of public schools, I started feeling desperate. We tapped into our networks, learned that a friend’s parents had left behind an empty house in the suburbs when they decamped months earlier to the Virgin Islands, and that they would let us have it. Two days later, we made our first of several car trips to the midcentury house on a wooded road which would become our temporary home.

After hearing that we were leaving, friends in our building who had been planning to ride it out decided that they would follow suit. As they wheeled their suitcases packed with dried beans and all-season clothing through the lobby, a young black resident standing with a friend by the elevator muttered after them: “Have fun in the Poconos.”

Our friends, who are also white, weren’t going to the Poconos, and we weren’t going to the Virgin Islands. But what difference does it make? Whether their family’s empty suburban condo or our friend’s empty suburban house, we have options because the people in our communities have options. And the fact that neither we nor our friends are even paying for our temporary housing only underscores the inequality of our opportunities.

Packing up the car in front of the same neighbors who saw us off to the hospital just two months earlier is not an experience I will soon forget. As we crossed one bridge out of the city and then another, leaving the dimmed skyline behind, we found ourselves arguing about the dynamics of our departure. Ethically speaking, by most accounts, fleeing to an empty house with two weeks’ worth of groceries was the best thing to do. Three fewer people in the building means three fewer disease vectors, and three fewer hospital beds to take up if we fell ill. Our presence helped no one and was only a risk, and a potential resource drain.

And yet. Leaving behind the neighbors whose outpricing our presence only accelerated felt like a betrayal. Not that anyone seemed sorry to see us go. Maybe, just maybe, some felt a certain satisfaction at being right: that we might be friendly, we might move secondhand furniture ourselves out of our 15-year-old Honda, and we might hold doors whenever there isn’t a pandemic, but at the end of the day, we have choices, and many of them do not. The virus itself might be equal opportunity, but the crowded conditions and impossibility of remote working are not.

Maybe in the end it’s just as well the Facebook group never really integrated. If our good intentions didn’t bear fruit, at least their transience could go largely unnoticed. Except, that is, by those of us who spoke and then fell silent.
    [post_title] => Escaping pandemic Brooklyn? You're probably white, even if you have less money than your Black neighbors
    [post_excerpt] => As we crossed one bridge out of the city and then another, leaving the dimmed skyline behind, we found ourselves arguing about the dynamics of our departure.
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Escaping pandemic Brooklyn? You’re probably white, even if you have less money than your Black neighbors

by Ilana Sichel

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    [post_date] => 2020-05-08 03:51:34
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    [post_content] => Want to stop a conversation cold? Tell someone you haven’t spoken to your mother in a decade. Then tell them you’re her only child.

The annual Mother’s Day frenzy culminates with the actual celebration this Sunday, with a sentimental blizzard of flowers and cards that included, in pre-pandemic times, restaurant tables often filled with happy mothers and daughters celebrating their love for one another.

On social media, there will be endless tributes to mothers who have died, recently or decades ago, still much missed and deeply mourned.

That won’t be me.

My mother died suddenly this year, at 85, sitting in her nursing home armchair watching television—in a city a seven-hour, cross-country international flight from me.

I hadn’t seen her in years nor tried to re-connect. I knew better, even though others repeatedly urged me to, including my father, 50 years divorced from her but lately back in touch.

“You’ll regret it!”

“What if she dies?”

“Just go!”

“You never know…”

But they didn’t know the full story.

Every year I sent her a Christmas card filled with the past year’s news, but never received a reply, not even in 2018, the year of my early-stage breast cancer, surgery and radiation. When she had had a mastectomy decades before, I’d flown from New York to Vancouver to get her back home and re-settled.

A few years ago, she told my best friend, a local who went to visit, to tell me to stay away.

How does one end up so estranged?

More easily than you’d think.

Yet no other relationship carries as much emotional freight as the mother-daughter bond.

The very word, mother, is a verb as well as a noun, implying loving attention, an open heart and arms, a ready ear. A welcoming place to run back to whenever you need comfort and solace.

But that’s just not everyone’s experience.

She left my father when I was seven. I was sent to boarding school, and every summer to camp, my battered blue trunk shuttling between them. I shared rooms for years with four to six other girls, summers in a raw wooden bunk, winters in a brown metal bed.

At school, we were shouted at routinely by ancient housemothers, women who’d been widowed or never married, old enough to be our grandparents, to whom we were nothing more than a name on a checklist and someone to discipline, but never to hug or console.

I saw my mother on weekends and holidays. She did throw great, lavish birthday parties for me, with cakes and sparklers and lots of my pals.

There were adult years when she and I got along well, and even traveled together, with adventures in Fiji, Peru, Costa Rica and Colombia as I flew in to visit her, mid-journey. She had inherited enough money to travel as long as she liked and lived frugally. Later, I visited her home in British Columbia a few times.

But her alcoholism worsened, and her bipolar illness blitzed my life repeatedly, usually without warning. That meant hospitalizations, worldwide, and I learned to dread the inevitable phone call detailing the latest mayhem – when, manic and acting out wildly in public, she landed in foreign jails and hospitals or trashed her rental apartment, sometimes many time zones distant.

At 19, living alone and attending university full-time in downtown Toronto, I had no idea what to do. You really can’t turn to someone in your Chaucer seminar and ask for that kind of help. My father, also away traveling the world with his soon-to-be second wife, showed no interest.

And talking about any of it, rough enough for me to handle privately, felt like telling tales out of school. Who could possibly understand, sympathize or help? She would just keep doing whatever she pleased anyway, consequences be damned.

The worst moment for me was when she ended up in a locked London psychiatric ward. I had just finished the happiest year of my life, on a Paris-based journalism fellowship. Her illness, a trio of frosty English doctors told me, could be inherited, while offering me no advice or comfort. I was a young, ambitious journalist with a growing career, now terrified my mind was potentially as susceptible. In a small, highly competitive industry, I couldn’t risk anyone wondering if I would be next.­­

Her weary friends gave up.

Her three American cousins, living many miles away, fed up with her late-night calls and wild-eyed visits, gave up.

No one really knew what was going on but me.

I had fled her care after a terrifying manic breakdown that occurred when I was 14, when we lived in Mexico. She drove a van carrying me and two others down a major highway with the headlights turned off, ending up crashed in a ditch at midnight in a city we’d never seen before. For two weeks it fell on me to care for a friend who’d just arrived from Canada to visit.

A few weeks later, I returned to Canada and moved in with my father and his girlfriend. I never lived with my mother again.

No one ever discussed her illness with me, or offered me tools to cope with it, even though I knew the name of her psychiatrist. Later in life, I intellectually accepted that mental illness is an illness, but at 14, I was too scared and angry at having been so endangered. Nor was this the first time I’d been subjected to a manic breakdown; she had one when I was 12 when we stayed at a friend’s house. I awoke to find a massive potted plant spread at the bottom of the stairs --- but remember nothing after that. I have some gaps in my memory, likely protective.)

Yet, for decades, like a broken robot, I did keep visiting her, hoping, naively and childishly, for the kind of mother so many others took for granted – healthy, loving, reliable, attentive. Too often, I endured another drunken rage.

So, I too, gave up.

Only in the weeks after her death, that little flickering pilot light of hope for eventual reconciliation finally extinguished, did I realize that I’d won more than I’d lost.

Without her, I’ve created and navigated a successful life, living and working in five cities and three countries. A life filled with loving friends, a strong marriage and a successful writing career.

No one taught me how to dress or apply make-up or cook or any of the skills mothers traditionally pass on to their daughters, let alone how to handle finances, work or relationships. I learned, even as a teenager, to rely on a few others, happy to help me out when needed.

The more I figured stuff out, most of the time successfully, the more self-confidence I gained. I didn’t need a lot of direction or advice.

I learned to challenge authority – or, more crucially – not genuflect to it in the first place. Would my mother disapprove of my choices? She’d never even notice. That itself offered  substantial freedom when I see so many women miserably buckling, sometimes deep into middle age, under the weight of their mothers’ disapproval --- of their bodies, their partners, their work or their parenting.

And I learned to celebrate my own triumphs.

When I graduated university, all of which she’d missed while traveling, she refused to attend my graduation, even in a huge hall with thousands of others, because I’d also invited my father. So, I asked him to stay home; when I called her back, she’d already committed to the graduation of a friend’s daughter instead.

So, friends became my closest family.

The Christmas Eve my mother threw her gifts around my living room in a drunken rage, I fled the next day to a friend’s home in Pennsylvania, racing from my New York home down the highway to a place I knew for sure — never having met his parents — would be calm and kind. As usual, the homes of others were my refuge.

When I married for the second time, a friend stood in as my witness and helped me with  the last-minute primping every bride craves before heading down the aisle. For decades a friend 10 years my senior welcomed me into her home, year after year, whether I was single, divorced, re-married.

The world, I learned, is full of other mothers.
    [post_title] => On Mother's Day, I feel no desire to pay tribute to my mother
    [post_excerpt] => The very word, mother, is a verb as well as a noun, implying loving attention, an open heart and arms, a ready ear. A welcoming place to run back to whenever you need comfort and solace. But that’s just not everyone’s experience.
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On Mother’s Day, I feel no desire to pay tribute to my mother

by Caitlin Kelly

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    [post_content] => How to explain the Christian Right's unshakable loyalty for Donald Trump, a twice-divorced man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by numerous women? 

White evangelicals have consistently been Donald Trump’s most supportive demographic since his 2016 victory. Even as the president’s overall approval numbers decline after the initial “rally ‘round the flag” effect from the COVID-19 pandemic that he is egregiously (and arguably criminally) mishandling, white evangelicals remain steadfastly by his side. The pandemic has itself become a site of the culture wars that the anti-democratic U.S. Christian Right has been waging relentlessly for four decades as it attempts to hold back the progress of civil rights and equality in America. And Trump, who has demonstrated his willingness to pursue their culture wars agenda, can count on unwavering support from white evangelicals in the upcoming presidential election. Our analytical focus should be on why and how authoritarian evangelicals have managed to gain so much power and what can be done to fight back, as opposed to hand wringing over their willingness to partner with an impious strongman.

Pundits who do not understand right-wing evangelical subculture have over the last few years frequently suggested that certain tipping points might shake evangelicals’ loyalty to Trump. Early on, many naively believed that shaming evangelicals over their hypocrisy in supporting a thrice-married man credibly accused of sexual assault by numerous women would be an effective means of peeling some of them away. More recently, some commentators claimed hopefully that outgoing Christianity Today editor Mark Galli’s December 19, 2019 op-ed, “Trump Should be Removed from Office,” was evidence of significant dissent over support for the president within the evangelical camp.

Trump did initially seem concerned about Galli’s op-ed, tweeting angry responses and launching an “Evangelicals for Trump” initiative. He needn’t have been. His evangelical base remains unwavering in its support for one simple reason: Trump gives authoritarian Christians practically everything they want. He validates their worst culture warring impulses and pursues the Christian Right’s agenda more comprehensively and vigorously than any previous president, including George W. Bush. Not only has Trump been stacking the federal courts and the federal bureaucracy with young far right ideologues; he also moved the United States Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to play to evangelicals “end times” beliefs.

Far from revealing that there is significant division among white evangelicals over Trump, the responses to Galli’s op-ed showed that Christianity Today, while certainly a conservative publication, is no longer the evangelical flagship magazine. Instead, the periodical that Billy Graham, “America’s Pastor,” founded in 1956 is now out of step with an increasingly radicalized white evangelical demographic, one in which the racial animosity that has always been a part of this kind of Christianity is now closer to the surface than many of the “genteel” readers of Christianity Today might wish.

Meanwhile, the prominent Southern Baptist leader Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., who was once critical of Trump and refused to vote for him in 2016, now says he regrets that decision and will vote for him in 2020. In his statement, Mohler bragged that he thinks Trump may see an even higher share of the white evangelical vote this time around than the 80 percent he got in 2016, and he may well be right. The case for any shift of evangelicals away from Trump thus further crumbles.

To be sure, a small minority of white evangelicals remains critical of Trump, but only 16 percent of the white evangelical vote went to Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the current polling data does not show  Joe Biden gaining a greater share. The realities of American polarization have become so stark that the coveted swing voter is now essentially a thing of the past, at least according to the analysis of political scientist Rachel Bitecofer, which I find convincing. National elections thus become a contest of turning out the base, and white evangelicals vote disproportionately to their numbers. Although they are down to 16 percent of the U.S. population, they still made up 25 percent of the electorate in the 2018 midterms.

And Trump continues to deliver for them. Most recently, he pulled money from the World Health Organization, the kind of international institution right-wing authoritarians despise for their “elitism” and “globalism,” and redistributed some of it to the evangelical missionary organization Samaritan’s Purse, which has somehow been allowed to set up a 68-bed field hospital in New York City’s Central Park despite legitimate concerns about its ability to provide an equal standard of care to all patients.

Samaritan’s Purse is headed by rabid homophobe and Islamophobe Franklin Graham—Billy Graham’s son; the organization requires staff to sign a statement of faith that reads in part, “we believe that marriage is exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female.” In addition to Samaritan’s Purse, Graham also heads the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which is deliberately seeking to capitalize on people’s fears of the novel coronavirus in order to drum up conversions. Graham has, naturally, been one of Trump’s most outspoken prominent evangelical supporters since 2016.

But it’s not all bad news for those of us who support democracy and human rights. Trump’s supporters do have some reasons to worry about the president’s reelection prospects. The economy has historically played a decisive role in American presidential elections, and the staggering unemployment numbers caused by quarantine during the pandemic would normally sink any incumbent’s prospects. This may be one key motivation of the recent protests calling for an end to quarantine restrictions on economic activity. (By the way, the phrase “reopen the economy” is a partisan right-wing talking point, and journalists should avoid using it as a supposedly neutral descriptor for these actions.)

As some states such as Georgia move to ease quarantine restrictions and allow certain businesses to reopen, Trump continues to talk out of both sides of his mouth—for example, rebuking Georgia’s governor for planning to ease restrictions too early after tweeting a demand to “LIBERATE” other states where anti-quarantine protests had taken place. Meanwhile the anti-lockdown protestors direct their anger at Dr. Anthony Fauci rather than at Trump.

While it would be wrong to dismiss these protests as mere “astroturf” campaigns, they do have backing and funding from a wealthy and well-connected right-wing network that includes billionaire Robert Mercer and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. But if those of us who value democracy and equality choose to ignore the protests, labeling them as top-down initiatives with no deep grassroots support, we risk missing their potential political impact. A number of commentators made the same mistake with the appearance of the Tea Party, which was backed by many of the same members of the donor class. Another mistake was to view the Tea Party as distinct from the Christian Right, which it is not. We must avoid repeating that mistake.

Indeed, the cab of a semi used in the protest in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on April 20, was emblazoned with the phrase “Jesus is my vaccine,” rhetoric similar to that used by pastors who defiantly continue to hold in-person church services despite shutdown orders meant to contain the pandemic. Although there is no legal precedent for the exemption of churches from quarantine, a number of right-wing organizations have now taken up the cause under the rallying cry of “religious freedom” that they have effectively employed in recent years to impose a theocratic agenda with respect to matters such as abortion, birth control, and same-sex marriage. Meanwhile, new conspiracy theories are being spread via social media, including the apocalyptic assertion that the coronavirus vaccine will be the “Mark of the Beast” associated with the “end times,” literally damning those who receive it.

Such beliefs are harmful to both democracy and public health, and, while it remains to be seen what impact they might have on the 2020 election, it is worth remembering that in 2013 a full 20 percent of Republicans believed with certainty that Barack Obama was the Antichrist. The Electoral College, as well as America’s problems with gerrymandering and voter suppression, favor the Right, but at the same time, the spectacle of Christians behaving badly in the face of the coronavirus pandemic will most likely have a negative impact on evangelicals’ reputation, and, by extension, Trump’s.

In any case, with the Christian Right and the GOP desperate to cling to their disproportionate power, we can expect a bumpy ride to November. Democrats will need to make every effort to turn out their base in order to defeat the GOP.
    [post_title] => “Jesus is my vaccine”: Culture wars, coronavirus, and the 2020 election
    [post_excerpt] => The Trump supporters who protested the pandemic lockdown have support from billionaires like Robert Mercer and Betsy DeVos. But if we label them as top-down initiatives with no deep grassroots support, we risk missing their potential political impact.
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“Jesus is my vaccine”: Culture wars, coronavirus, and the 2020 election

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_content] => Even with ridership down by 90 percent and fare collection suspended, public transportation is considered an essential service.

In recent weeks, the coronavirus pandemic has forced transit systems worldwide to suspend fare collection to keep workers and riders safe. These changes were implemented to protect the public in a crisis, but the idea that urban areas should provide at least some free public transit is not new—roughly 200 cities around the world already do. Most of those cities are in Europe, but even in the United States, cities as disparate as Baltimore, Boston, Denver, Miami, Oakland, Olympia, and Pittsburgh have made some public transit fare-free for some or all riders.

According to An Van hamme, a spokeswoman for the Brussels Intercommunal Transport Company (STIB), public transit ridership in Brussels, Belgium, has fallen to about 15 percent of its normal level. “Price setting…is the prerogative of the Brussels government,” Van hamme responded to questions in an email. “There haven’t been any changes in the price setting since the coronavirus crisis began.” STIB has, however, taken steps to protect staff and riders, including banning payment aboard vehicles and implementing a “protection zone” around drivers, prohibiting the use of cash in STIB ticket sales, and taking extra measures to clean every tram, bus, metro, and terminal.

Verena Löw and Elke Krokowski, two spokeswomen for the transport association that serves Germany’s Berlin/Brandenburg metropolitan region (VBB), said in an email that they estimate a very sharp decline in the use of public transit since the onset of the coronavirus crisis, “between 50% and 90% depending on the line and mode of transport.” Despite this drop in ridership, they wrote, “public transit is rightly considered to be systemically relevant” and the region’s transit operators are committed to keeping it “up and running for those who need it.”

The front parts of buses in Berlin and Brandenburg are now closed to passengers to protect workers, and direct contact between riders and workers is strongly discouraged. All doors open automatically. Passengers must still buy a ticket before boarding a train, but they can no longer purchase tickets directly from transit staff (they are encouraged to use vending machines or apps instead). According to Löw and Krokowski, public transit is running “as much and often as possible in order to be able to offer lots of space for the passengers who do use it.”

Compare these measures to the situation in New York City, where ridership has declined by 87 percent on subways and more than 70 percent on buses. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) announced that it would reduce subway service by at least 25 percent. At least 59 MTA employees have died, over 6,000 have fallen ill or self-quarantined, and nearly 1,900 of the agency’s 72,000 workers have tested positive for the coronavirus, including the agency’s chairman, Patrick J. Foye.

Foye recently told The New York Times that the MTA has provided workers with 460,000 masks, “thousands” of face shields, and 2.5 million pairs of gloves; that they disinfect train cars and buses every three days; and have eliminated cash transactions between booth clerks and riders. According to workers, the agency did not implement many aspects of its own pandemic response plan, which was adopted in 2012, until nearly a month after the virus hit New York.

Ridership has declined throughout the city, but it has dropped by significantly less in areas like the Bronx, where most residents are black and Latino. Many hold jobs in health care, social services, retail, or food service, and few have the option of working from home. As The New York Times recently reported, many “say they have no choice but to pile onto trains with strangers, potentially exposing themselves to the virus” and the MTA’s service reductions have led to crowded conditions, “making it impossible to maintain the social distancing that public health experts recommend.”

The coronavirus crisis is proving that governments can always find alternative ways of funding essential services when they must. I asked the VBB spokeswomen how the agency plans to compensate for the sharp decline in revenue and how it has been able to continue offering high-quality service at a time when so few riders are paying to use it.

“That’s indeed the challenge many sectors are facing right now,” Löw replied via email. “In general, the financing of public transit is quite complex in Germany. Local public transit is financed roughly 50:50 through passenger fares and state subsidies.” The German government, she added, “has set up funds for companies facing financial difficulties due to the current crisis,” and the VBB is working with transport operators and the federal states of Berlin and Brandenburg on various financing schemes as well.

In the U.S., Congress recently passed a $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill which included $25 billion in federal funding for public transportation systems. The money is intended to fund daily operations, make up for lost revenue, and sustain transit workers’ jobs. Similarly, in Canada, transit experts concerned that a steep decline in ridership could cost the country's transit authorities millions of dollars are calling on Ottawa for federal support.

Fare collection is itself a waste of time and money. It’s expensive to purchase and install state-of-the-art ticket machines. It’s expensive to pay and ensure the safety of workers tasked with collecting individual fares. Most frustrating of all to the average city dweller, it causes delays

Criminalizing fare evasion and enforcing laws against it contributes to growing inequality. In 2015, the New York City Police Department arrested more New Yorkers for fare evasion than for any other offense. Of the 29,000 people arrested for fare evasion, 94 percent were people of color. From October 2017 to June 2019, black and Hispanic people—who account for slightly more than half of New York City’s population—made up nearly 73 percent of those ticketed for fare evasion and more than 90 percent of those who were arrested, rather than issued a ticket.

Peter Harrison, who is challenging long-time incumbent Rep. Carolyn Maloney in New York’s 12th congressional district, has put forth the “Freedom of Movement in America Plan,” which would require the federal government to invest $1.7 trillion in public transportation over the next decade and provide $17 billion in federal funding to cover fare revenue and make transit fare-free throughout the country. He recently told City Limits that his plan’s name was the result of his desire to start a conversation about what “freedom” means.

“I don’t think you’re free if you can’t walk down the stairs to get on the subway to go to a doctor’s appointment,” he said. “I don’t think you’re free if you’re one flat tire or missed car payment from losing your car, triggering losing your job and losing your house, and that’s the reality for a lot of people in New York City and for a lot of people in America.”

If fare-free transit is the goal—for the safety of riders and workers alike, for a freer and fairer society, for more efficient mass transit—where do we find the funding? Harrison and other proponents of free transit believe the money is already there.

“We spent $6 trillion on 20 years of endless wars…and we have spent a trillion dollars annually on deficits for taxes,” he told Town & Village in February. “Republicans have shown that we have enough resources in the federal government to pay for the types of infrastructure investments that we want. Putting money into our sustainable transportation system will unleash an immense amount of economic growth.”

“During a pandemic,” Harrison told me in a recent phone interview, “the least we can do is make subways and buses free and reduce touchpoints to make [mass transit] safer for the people operating and using it.” But in order to achieve fare-free transit throughout the United States, he acknowledged, we need to have a “deeper conversation” about restructuring our entire society. Our freedom of movement depends on it.
    [post_title] => The global pandemic shows that cities can afford to make public transport free of charge
    [post_excerpt] => If fare-free transit is the goal—for the safety of riders and workers alike, for a freer and fairer society, for more efficient mass transit—where do we find the funding?
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The global pandemic shows that cities can afford to make public transport free of charge

by Raina Lipsitz

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    [post_content] => In northern British Columbia, a female chef draws on her native heritage and introduces diners to local, pre-European cuisine.

Generations ago, Indigenous communities living in harsh environments found comfort and sustenance in a basic bread recipe. 

For many remote First Nations communities throughout North America, flour wasn’t available, so bread was made with ground-up roots, bear fat and berries to sweeten, it was then cooked in an open fire or wrapped around a stick to bake.

This bread, called bannock, changed over the years incorporating ingredients like flour, fat, and sugar that were rationed to people after the government forcibly removed them from their land. It was then fried and became an important staple at powwows. Indigenous people took the scraps of oppression and made something delicious with it.

Powwows are a meeting, a chance for Indigenous people to get together and showcase dancing, singing, artisan creations and spend time in cultural appreciation and celebration. They have also served as an act of powerful resistance against continuous attempts to destroy, legislate and remove Indigenous culture. They are a demonstration of pride.

Sharon Bond, who is from the Nooaitch Indian Band in Merritt, British Columbia, has made her “bannock and butter” from bringing this ancient food to modern diners and the public can’t get enough.

“Bannock was a survival bread that really brought communities together through celebrations and gatherings. And it was one of the roots of keeping people alive,” she says.

Bond owns Kekuli Cafe, which has become the first Indigenous-owned restaurant franchise in Canada. With two locations and a third set to open in the near future, Bond’s long-held desire to run her own restaurant has come to fruition. But it doesn’t stop there; by offering franchising opportunities, Bond is helping to empower another generation of Indigenous entrepreneurs to taste success with bannock too.

“Indigenous youth can be supported from the time they are in high school. We need to bring entrepreneurs and business people into schools to teach and inspire youth, to bring out their ideas and to be creative and know that they can make their dream into a business. Mentors are needed,” she says.

She herself guides and empowers youth and aspiring business owners through an initiative called Futurpreneur and through monthly Indigenous Women Networking Sessions. She also sees mentorship as a cycle and continues to benefit from her own mentor, a successful restaurant owner, who she can talk to about any industry-specific questions she may have.

Her journey to becoming a restaurant owner was a long process, in part because she wanted the endeavor to be a success and took her time to design a winning product.

“It took a few years to do the business plan, we took our time to make sure that everything was going to be just right, the colors, the logo, the slogan. We just wanted to have a very strong business. It took time to get to that point and then when we finally opened our doors people thought we were a franchise which was pretty cool. So, I said, Well, we're not, but we will be now!”

One of the decisions she grappled with was the name for the cafe, she eventually found the word “Kekuli” in a book by James Teit, a Scottish anthropologist who wrote extensively about the people of the Interior Salish First Nations.

It’s the name for a winter dwelling, found across the Okanagan region, a house built into the ground to provide shelter and warmth. Pronounced ke-koo-lee, it seemed like the perfect moniker for the type of space she wanted to create, she registered the business name the very same day.

Even though the process of launching the business was a slow burn, Bond has been interested in cooking since she was a child, when she was making a mess in her mom’s kitchen and watching her bake cinnamon buns and bread. She remembers enjoying the smell of spices and recently found an old recipe book with a missing cover, the pages of which were decorated with her childish doodles and colorings.

One of her mom’s regular recipes was chili, which also features on Kekuli Cafe’s menu, although Bond says its quite a different recipe. A staple offered at powwows; chili is traditionally served atop a piece of bannock to catch all of the meaty juices.

Bread forms a part of almost every human culinary culture across the globe and Bond has often been told that her bannock reminds customers of other fry bread that they remember from their childhood, whether that was in China, Scotland or anywhere else across the world.

Different Indigenous communities across North America make their bannock to their own unique recipes, in fact, at Kekuli they have their own ancient and secret recipe.

Bannock fans will find that the familiar frybread taste replicated perfectly at Kekuli Cafe with regulars often praising the softness of the bannock. But you can also find a number of innovative menu items like dessert topped bannocks, BLTs and bannock-wich sandwiches.

“Time has evolved so now we've got flour and oil and cast iron pans and fryers. It’s bannock with a twist, you know a little bit more contemporary bannock,” she says.

That contemporary bannock topped with sweet treats remains very popular but the traditional bannock is favored by purists as are some of the sweet yet naturally Canadian flavors from the land like Saskatoon Berry, Maple Glaze, and Maple Walnut.

The restaurant’s slogan “Don’t Panic... We Have Bannock!” came about from one of the first customers who ran up to the counter worried that they may have sold out. Sharon reassured them by stating the now-famous line and they all broke into laughter.

Bond is an incredibly warm person who makes people feel at ease, no doubt due to her genuine care and concern for how others are feeling. One of the philosophies that Kekuli Cafe is built upon is that all her customers should feel acknowledged when they arrive.

“I wanted to open a restaurant for 20 years and I always thought ‘Oh I'm going to do this with my restaurant,’ I'm going to make sure everyone smiles and is acknowledged, you're not just someone who comes in and orders and sits down and that's it. You know, I engage with all my customers and I really felt that there wasn't enough compassion or empathy, it's important to make someone's day,” she says.

Bond is also humble and credits her success to the whole team. In fact, she was recently awarded the Indigenous Woman-Business Award of Excellence from The National Aboriginal Capital Corporation but was almost too shy to tell me. She admitted that she sometimes finds it difficult to enjoy her success without feeling like she’s bragging.

Where she excels, however, is in empowering other women to proudly and confidently promote themselves. A culture she is trying to develop in her local community through her Indigenous Women Networking Sessions. 

“I can see it becoming a very important networking group. I've been to other networking groups for women and sometimes I just feel out of place,  it doesn't seem to be me, I'm not a high heel wearing type person and everyone's all decked right out and I am more of a Doc Martens person!” she says.

Through mentorship, encouragement, and plenty of bannock, Bond is building a culture of shared success.
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In Canada, a female Indigenous chef popularizes local, pre-European cuisine

by Fiona Tapp

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    [post_content] => For the Christian Right, religious freedom means their right to discriminate against people who don't share their beliefs. 

In Bible class at my evangelical high school, I was taught that pluralism is “heresy” and must be rejected. This was a more formal way of conveying what I had already learned as a small child— that it was the task of all Christians to convert everyone to Christianity, and that the world would be a much better place if everyone were Christian.

A person who is committed to the liberal democratic project will probably be appalled at the idea of teaching children to desire a world in which everyone follows the same religion. Many, however, do not share that reaction—and that is because Christian hegemony is so smoothly woven into the fabric of American life that they fail to recognize it. Christian privilege and Christian supremacism are very real; if we are ever going to see the United States live up to the democratic potential contained in the higher ideals of the founding fathers, however much they failed to realize those ideals, we must be as committed to its dismantling as we are to that of white supremacism.

Pluralism: What’s at stake

Pluralism, of course, refers to people of diverse and conflicting beliefs coexisting peaceably, linked by their adherence to a shared social contract which commits members of different groups to treating others fairly and accommodating them equally in the public square. Outside academic settings, however, pluralism is little discussed these days—except by right-wing Christians. That’s a problem: failing to articulate a liberal understanding of pluralism will allow the authoritarian Christian Right, already advantaged in what I recently argued in Playboy Magazine is our de facto Christian public sphere, to drag the country ever further rightward.

Liberals do not feel comfortable discussing the place of religion in the public sphere, says Jeremy Forest Price, assistant professor of education and chair of the Jewish Faculty and Staff Council at Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis. Avoiding the topic, however,  has unintended consequences. “It allows those who seek to push their own religious agendas, particularly evangelical Christians, Christian dominionists*, and Christian nationalists, to [convince the public] not only to support their beliefs and practices over others, but to make the public sphere itself mirror their beliefs and practices.”

Because they reflexively support the separation of church and state, and therefore may not feel an innate sense of urgency to articulate its value, liberals and progressives run the risk of ceding the national discourse on pluralism to the Right.

Fortunately, there is an increasingly visible broad-based movement, including both believers and non-believers, who oppose the Christian nationalism that is ascendant in the Trump era. They are working actively to reclaim the meaning of religious freedom from those who would define it as the right to discriminate against members of othered groups on the basis of “sincerely held religious beliefs,” even at the expense of equal accommodation in the public square. I contend that we need similarly to reclaim the liberal value of pluralism.

Paul Rosenberg, a writer and activist who has documented and championed this movement, says that pluralism requires an openness that religious fundamentalists lack, and when it comes to building and participating in a functional democratic society, what people do is more important than their espoused beliefs. “It is in doing the work that we discover what we have in common,” he said, noting that the work itself leads to an appreciation of our differences.

I asked other stakeholders to comment on what pluralism means to them in theory and practice, hoping to encourage further discussion of this critical civic concept among those of us who reject the Republican Party’s authoritarianism. To understand the stakes, we need to take a brief look at the state of the discourse around pluralism on the Christian Right.

According to reactionary Catholic scholar Brad Gregory, “hyper-pluralism” is to blame for everything that ails the modern West, and the solution would seem to be a return to some sort of imagined Catholic unity. This would undoubtedly entail many horrors for non-Christians, women, and members of the LGBTQ community.

Russell Moore , the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, is among those conservative Christians who dismiss pluralism as “heresy.” Sohrab Ahmari, the radical Catholic writer, unabashedly argues that conservative Christians should “enforce our order and our orthodoxy.” Attorney General William Barr seems to share this view: in a speech he delivered at Notre Dame University this past October, Barr decried “militant secularists” who were supposedly “behind a campaign to destroy the traditional moral order.” C. Colt Anderson, a Catholic theologian and professor of religion at Fordham University, was so appalled by the extremism in Barr’s remarks that he called him “a threat to American democracy.”

There are other conservative Christian commentators, however—people like evangelical historian John Fea and David French, a frequent contributor to The National Review—who embrace a concept of pluralism very much of a piece with the Christian Right’s understanding of “religious liberty” as their liberty to discriminate against others, including Christians with whom they disagree. Fea and French are public figures who enjoy a degree of respectability; it is dangerous to cede our contemporary understanding of pluralism exclusively to them and to those even further to the right. The Christian Right already dominates sex education in our public schools and has effectively ended abortion in numerous states. Christian hospitals regularly deny women and queer people life-saving healthcare on the basis of strictly religious views that many of their patients do not share. Deregulated homeschooling, pushed above all by conservative Christians, allows abuse and fundamentalist indoctrination to flourish. If liberals will not argue the meaning of pluralism and religious freedom precisely as liberal values, the Christian Right will only subject more and more of American life to its harmful theocratic agenda.

So what might a liberal pluralism predicated on robust separation of church and state and equal accommodation in the public square look like? And how might we navigate the tensions not just between representatives of different confessions, but also between believers and non-believers?

Liberal pluralism in theory and practice

Non-religious voters now make up the single largest defined bloc within the Democratic Party. But a large and significant part of the party’s base is composed of Christians—especially African-American Christians. It is self-evidently necessary for progressive atheists and agnostics to build coalitions with progressive believers and to work together toward the common good. Loud voices in the visible atheist community, like the prominent neuroscientist Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and author, often alienate not only religious believers, but also women and people of color with remarks that are Islamophobic, racist, and misogynist. Progressive atheists who are interested in coalition building must work to repair the bridges that these men and their trollish online fans have damaged.

Tom Van Denburgh, communications director for American Atheists, acknowledged that “people within the atheist community sometimes engage in anti-religious rhetoric,” but attributes this anger in most cases to their having been harmed by religion. But he agrees that justifiable anger at religious privilege, which in the United States primarily pertains to Christians, must not become an excuse to dehumanize all religious people. “While there’s still a lot of work to do, the atheist community has become increasingly inclusive and more concerned about how religious privilege impacts different groups in disparate ways. And that means advocating for women, LGBTQ people, members of minority faith communities, and people of color.” He added: “Integral to [our] work is building bridges with religious allies when we find common ground.”

American Atheists can point to practical achievements in this regard, notably the launch of BlitzWatch Coalition, a project dedicated to opposing the Christian nationalist agenda of Project Blitz, which seeks to impose hardline Christian values on every aspect of American political and civil society. Van Denburgh sees the work involved in BlitzWatch Coalition as authentic pluralism in practice, and BlitzWatch Coalition’s member organizations include the Interfaith Alliance and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC).

For Rev. Dr. Cari Jackson, RCRC’s Director of Spiritual Care and Activism, pluralism is associated above all with compassion. “To be compassionate requires decentering or stepping outside one’s own experiences in order to give priority to the experiences of others,” Jackson said. This task is more challenging, she added, for those who “are part of any privileged hegemony” because of “a limitation of experience and exposure.”

Christianity represents one of these hegemonies, said Jackson. “For interfaith dialogues to be healthy and viable, now is a critical time for atheist perspectives to be included,” she said, adding: “The path to social harmony and national unity is paved by compassion for and a genuine valuing of the stranger, those whose beliefs, practices, and so on, are different from those in the social, religious or political majority.”

Jeremy Forest Price, who is involved in interfaith work, agrees with Jackson on the importance of clear-eyed honesty regarding power dynamics and the importance of representation. “An emphasis on pluralism will help open up the discussion around religion (and worldviews, spiritualities, and the absence of religion) so that we can trace the ways that specific religious ideologies influence our shared public spaces,” he said.

Such tracing must include facing the impact of Christian supremacism in the United States, which means breaking the social taboo on criticizing any large Christian group. The focus of much of my own work in recent years has been on facilitating the collective visibility of ex-evangelicals and others who have left fundamentalist religion, and on advocating for us to be heard in our national discussions of religion and politics. Efforts to halt America’s lurch into authoritarianism will fail unless we shift the national discourse on Christianity.

I believe that by devoting some serious thought and effort to pluralism, both theory and practice, those of us who support democracy and human rights might succeed in nudging the American public sphere toward the kind of discourse that will aid us in the the realization of this country’s democratic potential.

* While there are a number of specific fundamentalist Christian ideologies whose adherents refer to themselves as Dominionists (for example, Seven Mountains Dominionism), broadly defined, Christian dominionism simply refers to the beliefs and politics of Christians who pursue social domination over members of other groups by enshrining their religious beliefs in coercive law.
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The only way to save democracy from the Christian Right is by fighting for pluralism

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_content] => Two decades after her breakout memoir was published, a writer once dismissed as a narcissist died a literary heroine.

When Elizabeth Wurtzel published Prozac Nation in 1994, she seemed all too eager to regale the public with her struggles. Raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, she was the gifted daughter of a prosperous family who attended private schools and graduated from Harvard. In her memoirs, however, Wurtzel luridly described her depression: snorting coke to kick her lithium dependence, curling up on bathroom floors sweating and sobbing, and falling into bed with the wrong man at every turn. Yet, she looked gorgeous as she lived this self-destructive life. Posing on the cover of a magazine with a come-hither stare and a crop top, Wurtzel embodied the dark and angsty glamour of the 1990s—a literary Courtney Love or Tracey Emin. The memoir sat atop best-seller lists and was made into a movie starring Christina Ricci. Critics, however, were split. Was this the second coming of Sylvia Plath (had she survived a suicide attempt to promote The Bell Jar on MTV); or, was she merely a raving narcissist who, in Wurtzel’s own words, “didn’t even come across as sad any longer, just obnoxious”?  

Elizabeth Wurtzel died last week, and she died young—if not as young as she once predicted. (“I’m starting to wonder if I might not be one of those people like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath who are just better off dead…Perhaps, I, too, will die young and sad, a corpse with her head in the oven.”) She was 52 when she died of breast cancer. 

By the time of her passing Wurtzel had cleaned up and, in defiance of her erstwhile Gen X slacker image, had graduated from Yale Law School, joined a white-shoe firm, and even—GASP!—married. Parsing her legacy, however, is more complex than simply caring about whether or not she “grew up,” as the New York Times obituary writer suggested. Wurtzel laid herself bare, but we did not know her. It’s a profound compliment to her writing that her readers—detractors and admirers alike—assumed that they did. Confessional writing as a genre can have great value, transforming both the lives of individuals and the cultural discourse. Wurtzel’s impact, though inextricably bound up in her celebrity, lies in the role she carved out for herself—and in everyone else who has since played the same part.  

Prozac Nation inspired a robust national conversation at the time it was published. Although many dismissed Wurtzler as a whiny egomaniac—no less a critic than Walter Kirn called the book “a work of singular self-absorption”—she kicked off a trend. The publishing market suddenly made room for confessional memoirs meant to make the reader at once cringe and relate, from Dani Shapiro’s Slow Motion (raised in a traditional suburban Jewish home, she dropped out of college and became the kept woman of a wealthy married man) to Susan Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted (recollections of leaving a mental institution; Angelina Jolie starred in the film version and won an Oscar for her performance). What critic Nathan Rabin deemed “the Manic Pixie Dream Girl” came to define an archetype of the 1990s; the educated-woman-as-hot-mess trope can be traced directly down the line to more recent cultural fare, including Lena Dunham’s television series Girls, as Meghan Daum asserted in The New Yorker. 

A friend of Wurtzel’s hit upon the importance of her legacy in an interview for her New York Times obituary, 

“Lizzie’s literary genius rests not just in her acres of quotable one-liners...but in her invention of what was really a new form, which has more or less replaced literary fiction—the memoir by a young person no one has ever heard of before. It was a form that Lizzie fashioned in her own image, because she always needed to be both the character and the author.” 

This runs deeper than genre or medium. Allow me to explain it in the context of what you are reading right now: at some point in this essay, I will tell you something about myself. Why? Because I have to; that’s what writers do now. Last week, Geraldine Brooks wrote an excellent opinion piece to contextualize Iranian perceptions of American aggression. It wasn’t enough for her simply to mention in her bio blurb that she used to report from Iran for the Wall Street Journal; she also incorporated information about her background anecdotally into her argument, as though to prove she had the right to her opinion. Writing no longer exists on its own: it is a given that the author is a character, with their own motivations for writing. It’s almost as though they have a duty to contextualize a piece of writing within the greater timeline of their lives. 

Memoir may well be the narcissist’s playground, but the exhilarating rides the reader shows up for are not the high points. Wurtzel knew well that darkness was the draw. Whereas in 1994 readers perceived her style of memoir as wallowing, a 2020 reader might see plenty of space for a very contemporary word: empathy. Wurtzel spoke fearlessly about her problems. Depression, addiction, family dysfunction, and self-harm were all dragged out into broad daylight. She didn’t worry about what was in good taste: she told her truth, no matter who called her a poor little rich girl or a “brat”—as the writer of an unusually spicy Kirkus review opined. In 2020, therapy and mental health are talked about openly. 

Confessional writing played a part in this sea change, allowing for a more intimate glimpse into pain. And for those who contend Wurtzel looked too chic as she profited handsomely from her suffering, her own cancer advocacy offers a riposte. Although she failed to have herself tested for the BRCA gene, she campaigned for wider testing in the wake of her diagnosis. “I could have had a mastectomy with reconstruction and skipped the part where I got cancer,” she wrote. “I feel like the biggest idiot for not doing so.”

In creating a space to speak about her own problems, Wurtzel made a niche for other writers to inhabit, too—those who aren’t white or rich or Ivy League-educated. Prozac Nation was certainly not the first confessional memoir, but it pioneered something far more particular. Maya Angelou and James Baldwin wrote memoirs, but they did so in order to shine a light on the plight of a larger group of people—i.e., black people in the United States. Wurtzel’s motives were not quite so high-minded: she was unsparing in her depiction of her own individual privilege. Sylvia Plath certainly covered a lot of the same ground as Wurtzel, but she veiled it as fiction and, because The Bell Jar was published shortly before she killed herself, the book reads like a suicide note—an explanation of the writer’s absence rather than a plea for her presence. Although she was derided for self-pity, Wurtzel notably did not ask for sympathy. 

Arguably, Wurtzel ripped herself open so effectively that it has taken a couple of decades to see the precedent she set and its value as literature. The wounded, weird, yet compellingly charismatic individual is now a literary trope in memoirs written by a broad spectrum of writers. It is a space as suited to Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation as it is to Saeed Jones’ How We Fight For Our Lives, about growing up black and queer in a small Texas town, or to Roxane Gay’s Hunger, in which the author describes her struggles with sexual trauma, obesity, and her own identity. 

Perhaps we don’t like the idea that Wurtzel—wealthy, white, Harvard-educated—created this space, but the access those qualities granted her created a more accepting landscape for others. We cannot know if this was her intent, but it is the effect of her writing. What Gloria Steinem’s looks were to second-wave feminism, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s were to a platform capable of accommodating almost anyone brave enough—or exhibitionistic enough—to inhabit it. 

What does the reader gain from coming in contact with all of this? The confessional memoir opens a window onto the aspects of human nature that we tend to hide, mostly out of shame. It allows us to see and accept that we are messy, complex, and multifaceted human beings. It’s a genre with a natural intersectionality about it, like a soapbox on which anyone can stand. And you, the reader, don’t need to love any of these authors to appreciate that by putting themselves out there, they make more space for the rest of us, not only to be messy but to understand one another. On the one hand, we can see ourselves in the problems we share; we are less alone, validated. As someone with cancer in the family (and, just like that, I told you something about myself!!), I know the nerve Anne Boyer’s The Undying hits all too well. On the other hand, I will never be a queer man of color from rural Texas; reading Saeed Jones allows me to step inside an experience that isn’t mine, but also to appreciate our shared realities—and maybe even weigh the social and political ties that bind us. There is a great deal of courage in the kind of vulnerability that begets those bigger conversations.  

This kind of discourse is vital to any pluralistic society and to any democracy. We must understand one another to truly value one another, and there isn’t enough space for that transaction in a tweet. This kind of understanding can never be credited to a single confessional memoir, but rather to the aggregate effect they have had on how we treat one another and accommodate one another’s needs. As we continue to fight for various civil rights in a precarious political moment—an election year, no less—we should remember that, even if there is not a direct line between Prozac Nation and gender-neutral bathrooms, there is certainly a direct correlation between how the culture allows us to express ourselves and what arguments the body politic is capable of understanding and integrating. 

As a teenager reading Prozac Nation a few years after it came out, I wondered if I needed to be a bigger mess to succeed as a writer. Perhaps I was a Millennial rolling her eyes at Gen X. I asked myself if we really needed to know that Wurtzel’s “mouth was getting tired and chapped from giving so many blowjobs” to appreciate gems like, “If you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all.” The answer is no. No, we did not. But we also don’t need to like someone to admire them. More importantly, any exercise in empathy is a chance at community building, both an opportunity to feel less alone in this world and to see more of it from a perspective that glories in its lack of varnish. Confessional memoirs—even in their most profound self-absorption—are just that: a chance to be let in on something other than ourselves. 

 
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The personal (even on Prozac) is political: Elizabeth Wurtzel’s literary legacy

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

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    [post_content] => There is a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in.
 — Leonard Cohen

I’m writing these words from a yoga center in the snow-covered Berkshires, in an atmosphere of extreme serenity that is both deeply comforting and somewhat intimidating. On the second day of my little retreat, during a silent meditation walk in the snowy woods, the woman leading the group had us stop at a particularly idyllic spot and stand still, listening to the quiet. Tree branches creaked gently in the wind, a stream of water bubbled over rocks, a woodpecker tapped on a tree, and someone (it might have been me) struggled to control her jagged breathing (it was a steep climb!). Gazing up at the treetops, the instructor asked us to describe what we heard during the silent walk. Reader, I was honest: during the meditation walk, all I could hear was the cacophony in my head — and it sounded like a super highway at rush hour. 

Most of us walk around with a head full of noisy thoughts. Meditation is supposed to help quiet the mind, but sitting still (or walking in deliberate silence) while thinking about nothing is incredibly difficult. Still, I don’t think I am alone in feeling that the normal roar inside my head has become much louder and shriller in recent months. When I mentioned to a friend, a journalist who covers the Christian and white nationalist right in the United States, that I was feeling overwhelmed by an unending stream of worried thoughts, she said, without missing a beat: “It’s the fascism.”

For those of us who are concerned about the state of civil society and democracy, 2019 was a disquieting year. Authoritarianism continues to rise and spread, while once robust democracies falter as the pillars of supporting institutions — the judiciary, the independent media, and the legislative branch — are weakened. Around the United States, in New Zealand and in Europe, we have seen a notable uptick in violent racist and antisemitic incidents. Perhaps most worrying of all, governments continue to dither over the climate crisis, even as scientists issue dire warnings about the consequences of a failure to implement policy changes. 

The news is so bad, and the sense of hopelessness so pervasive, that there’s a constant temptation to withdraw and focus inward rather than fight back. This is especially true when the exigencies of daily life — working, raising children, worrying about money, and trying to find a little time for oneself — are so all consuming. Where do people who don’t have any experience of struggling for their rights, because they took them for granted, find the inner resources to fight back? 

The story of this yoga retreat center provides some insight and inspiration on the matter of fighting for what is important. For many years, it was an ashram led by a guru. His devotees and disciples lived on the property in a communal lifestyle that involved providing a lot of free labor, from teaching yoga classes to cooking meals and cleaning rooms for paying guests. In return, the devotees received all the emotional benefits of being part of a nurturing, close-knit, spiritual community. In the mid-1990s, however, the guru was discovered to have “abused his power” — i.e., preyed sexually on some of the devotees. For the community, this was a devastating betrayal. Many had lived at the ashram for years; they had taken on new names bestowed by the guru; their friends, community, and identity were all tied up with the ashram and its spiritual leader.

Twenty-five years later, the ashram is a thriving, non-profit educational center, which provides a nurturing, peaceful place for people who need some time to take care of their bodies and their spirits. 

The center provides scholarships to grassroots community leaders interested in learning how to broker and teach non-violent conflict resolution in challenging environments, and to people who want to use yoga as a means of enriching their professional practice — as healthcare providers, teachers, or corporate wellness consultants. The people who clean and cook are no longer volunteer religious devotees, but staff who are paid and treated well — many of them refugees, or people who live with physical or intellectual limitations. The instructors have stripped the yoga classes of Sanskrit chanting, except for the occasional “om” or “namaste.” Instead, they emphasize that yoga is a science and a practice that promotes physical well being, but not a religion. Slowly, some of the disillusioned devotees who moved away after the guru’s betrayal are drifting back to spend time at the ashram-turned-yoga center. They’ve reconnected with old friends, and rejoined a changed community. 

Nothing about this trajectory was obvious in 1994, shortly after the guru was exposed and ousted. I remember, because I happened to visit at the time and saw how crushed and unmoored the devotees were. They could easily have closed up shop and dispersed into a fog of bitterness and loneliness, but they decided that the place had too much to give and teach, and that it must be salvaged. And so they set to work, and after a few years they realized that they hadn’t needed a guru, after all.

I am inspired by people who are willing to face and overcome emotional devastation.

Over the past year, as I mourned the decline of democracy and civil society and tried to fight my way through the spiritual malaise that is caused by fear and a perception of helplessness, I saw some thought provoking inspiration around the world. 

In a Moscow courtroom, a 21 year-old university student named Yegor Zhukov was tried for “extremism,” after he was arrested for posting YouTube videos in which he extolled the virtues of nonviolent protest, criticized Vladimir Putin, and discussed his campaign for a seat on the Moscow City Council. Masha Gessen translated the moving and powerful speech Zhukov gave at his court hearing, after which he was sentenced to only three years of probation. In Putin’s repressive Russia, this was a surprisingly light sentence. The explanation, Gessen writes, lies in Zhukov’s speech, the response it elicited from the public — and the fact that several Russian media outlets “dared” to publish it.

Globally, the number of grassroots movements challenging corrupt and/or authoritarian governments with sustained protests is breathtaking. In Chile, protestors have faced down police using live ammunition and mass arrests as they continue to protest the social and economic inequality in their country. In Lebanon and Iraq, protestors have joined forces across sectarian lines to challenge the corrupt and ineffective governing systems in their countries. In Hong Kong, the sustained pro-democracy demonstrations are entering their eighth month. The Chinese government issued dire threats and even indicated it was prepared to intervene militarily, but has so far done nothing. 

In India, just this week, a stunning number of ordinary citizens flooded the streets of major cities to protest the controversial new citizenship act that discriminates against Muslims. 

And last October, just steps from my home in Montreal, an estimated 500,000 people gathered to cheer for Greta Thunberg, the 16 year-old Swedish girl who single handedly inspired a global movement to raise awareness of the climate crisis. 

The power of authoritarians can and must be challenged. The temptation to check out and turn inward must be fought. Giving up is not an option. 

I think I’ll adopt those thoughts as my meditation mantras. Meanwhile, The Conversationalist will continue to publish insightful, knowledgeable, thought provoking articles about the urgent issues that we all care about so deeply. I don’t know if 2020 will be better than 2019, but let’s get ready to meet its challenges. 

 
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Lessons in resistance at a former yoga ashram

by Lisa Goldman

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