From Chattel to Child to Red-cloaked Mother

Throughout the ages it’s been true. Now, here we go again. Sexism and misogyny 3.0. With the second reign of Donald Trump women will continue to be ignored, excluded, trivialized, objectified, assaulted, shamed, and afraid.

In the truly old days women became chattel when nomadic societies ceased to be mobile and agrarian. Before yielding to land ownership, life meant that everyone in the family and community had respectable tasks. Men hunted, women planted, and no one was treated as a lesser being. When land was claimed and “owned,” everything changed. Men became warriors who fought each other for everything that was on the property, including livestock, tools, furnishings, and women, along with children, who were regarded as a husband’s personal property.

Fast forward to modern times and notice how women are still treated as chattel. Here’s a true example, shared by Catherine Allgor, Ph.D. at the National Museum of Women’s Art in 2012.  A woman applies for a mortgage to buy a house. She is older than her husband, is senior to him in their careers and earns more money. She has bought houses before, her spouse has not. Still, in the transaction, she is listed as “wife,” and as such she is subjected to the legal practice of coverture, a term that still exists since colonial times.

Based on English law, coverture meant that no female had a legal identity. A child was covered by her father’s identity, and a wife’s identity relied on her husband’s, which is why till relatively recently wives assumed her husband’s surname. Before that, wives were considered to be “feme covert,” a covered woman who did not exist legally. (Sound familiar?) Originally that meant that females couldn’t own anything, had no rights to their inheritances, or their children. They couldn’t work, enter a contract, or have bodily autonomy because husbands had the legal right to rape.

Coverture, Allgor explains, is why white women weren’t allowed to vote until 1920. They couldn’t serve on juries until the 1960s, and marital rape wasn’t a crime until the 1980s. In my personal experience during that decade, I was denied in-state tuition when I earned my master’s degree, because although I met every requirement for it, including being co-owner of a house, the college argued that I wasn’t legally a resident of Maryland because I didn’t earn half of our family income.  It took me seven years to win the case against them.

Women are still infantilized and treated as children. It occurs in the workplace, the marketplace, the academy, religious institutions, and in homes when others, often men in domestic settings, treat women as errant children. Infantilizing women is linked to objectification because it sets up an unequal power and control situation. Women in various settings threaten the androcentric paradigm that has us locked into various, unrelenting forms of patriarchy. Examples include using demeaning nicknames, suggesting that women don’t understand a topic, using physical gestures like a hug that they wouldn’t use to greet women vs. men All of these gestures and words are meant to convey to women that men have superiority over the person who is subjected to these differentiations.

In 2018 the Harvard Business Review published an article written by four female researchers that revealed that words used in the business sector choose different ways to describe women vs. men in significant ways. Their research found that even young females are often described as “bossy” while that term is not applied to boys. In adulthood being called “ambitious” is an insult for women but not for men. … “The problem is that the words used to evaluate women differ from those used to evaluate men which reinforces gender stereotyping,” say the authors. “Similarly, people are more likely to use [words] like “superb,” “outstanding,” “remarkable,” and “exceptional” to describe male job applicants. In recommending female applicants, people used fewer superlatives but less specificity.” Then fact is: Words matter.

The incoming president and his pals play all these cards in spades.  Name calling, put downs, sexual transgressions and more will not suddenly quiet down or disappear. The likelihood is they will be exacerbated by an overblown sense of superiority and adoration by Donald Trump’s second win. Every bit of misogyny and sexism women have had to endure in the past will be more pronounced and dangerous by this administration and its rightwing collaborators.

Consider the fact that women have been robbed of bodily autonomy, lifesaving reproductive healthcare, and policies that are geared to breeding rather than being. Already women are dying from preventable crises during pregnancy and miscarriage. That is nothing short of state sponsored femicide. Women, like words, matter, but not in the incoming administration.

 An article in The Brooklyn Rail published in 2017, shortly after the last election Donald Trump won, captures the shocking reality that links the political situation ahead of us to the chillingly relevant book The Handmaid’s Tale, which suggests “parallels between a fictional totalitarianism, and the policies and ideological proclivities of Donald Trump’s administration. In many ways, these comparisons make sense: the world of The Handmaid’s Tale contains the brutal objectification of women, widespread loss of civil rights, the manipulation of facts to control the political narrative, and an authoritarian state that fetishizes a return to religious or   traditional values.”

Is it any wonder that the red cape symbolizes what women have feared since Roe v. Wade was overturned? Will history prove to be prologue?

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.

Coming to Grips with Violence in America

Like so many others, I experienced huge relief when Vice President Kamala Harris emerged as the Democratic candidate for President in the forthcoming election. Watching her reveal her strengths as a competent politician, experienced leader, and likeable person lifted my hope for the future of this country, in both the short and long term.

My relief that we could return to political sanity, however, was tempered by the anxiety I’ve borne for months, fearing a reprise of violence once the election is over, no matter the results. I worry that we could see another insurrection at the Capital (or worse), and multiple acts of violence in a variety of other venues. It wouldn’t be the first time. The capital riots were stunning and terrifying but not all that surprising given the source. But the fact is our history is rife with political violence. The number of examples I found in researching the topic was stunning.

 One source revealed that the New York City draft riots of 1864 were the largest popular insurrection in American history. “Hundreds of young men poured into the streets to protest the federal draft lottery. The riots soon turned violent” and led to an uncontrolled mob burning homes, offices and other properties. The riots continued for four days until 4,000 federal troops ended the destruction and death.

And in 1898 2,000 armed white men spurred on by white supremacists rioted in Wilmington, North Carolina trashing the office of a Black newspaper, which resulted in dozens of Black people being killed. The mayor resigned along with several Black local leaders while thousands fled the city.

A hundred years later we saw political violence in the 1960s and 1970s, usually around social issues like civil rights, minorities, and abortion. And in the 21st century we actually experienced a nearly successful takeover of the United State government.

But America’s violent underbelly was present long before these kinds of acts. It was there from the beginning when we treated Native Americans so viciously, and it was there when we were wedded to slavery and lynching Black boys and men. Racist violence seems to be in our DNA. Just think about the brutal murders of everyone from Emmett Till to Martin Luther King, Jr. to George Floyd and all the others, male and female, in their homes, their cars, their beds, or just jogging down the street.

Violence in America also reveals itself in the form of sexual violence and abuse, whether in our local churches or in Hollywood, in bedrooms and workplaces, in department store changing rooms, schools, sports teams – the list is endless. The National Institutes of Health reveals that

“Family and domestic violence including child abuse, intimate partner abuse, and elder abuse is a common problem in the United States. Family and domestic health violence are estimated to affect 10 million people in the United States every year. It is a national public health problem, and virtually all healthcare professionals will at some point evaluate or treat a patient who is a victim of some form of domestic or family violence.”

Then there’s the epidemic of gun violence in America. Johns Hopkins University frames the problem as a public health emergency. “Firearm violence is a preventable public health tragedy affecting communities across the United States.” They reported that in 2022, over 48,000 people died by firearms in the U. S. That’s an average of one death every 11 minutes.  Almost 27,000 people died that year by firearm suicide and another nearly 20,000 died by firearm homicide. Then there were the unintentional gun injuries and deaths often caused by children or police.

There is violence in America’s prisons, violence against asylum seekers, continuing violence in the form of antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, racial profiling, and discriminations in everything from jobs, housing, restrooms and more. Each of these arenas of violence deserves legal, political, economic and human rights reform. 

There is another form of violence that is gender-based. It has been part of this country in largely invisible ways that often involve emotional vs. physical harm.  Take, for example, the fact that women did not get the right to vote until 1920, and that took a kind of activism that few could endure. Suffragists were tortured in prison for the right to have their voices heard and it took them decades to be granted that right – if they were white. 

In the 19th and 20th centuries women like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Clara Barton, and Jane Addams were considered ill, weak, hysterical or crazy and subjected to a brutalizing rest cure or incarcerated in mental asylums either by their husbands or by a male psychiatric establishment that killed them spiritually, and occasionally physically.

Today women still struggle to be recognized as competent leaders and professionals, to earn equal pay, to secure childcare, to avoid domestic or elder abuse, to escape sexual harassment, and to live autonomous lives, which includes the right to control their own bodies. All of that is a form of violence, based on power and control, aimed at women.

Taken together, these examples of violence in America remind us that there is so much work to be done to end the scourge of various violent oppressions. The time to start is now.

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt. 

J:accuse: A Response to Israel's War

“Enough is enough!”  “Never Again!” “Not in My Name!” All fine phrases, but what have these hollow words achieved?  Gaza remains a killing field, the United States continues sending massive military and financial assistance to Israel, and embassies around the world have not withdrawn their ambassadors. The media isn’t demanding answers from the administration or individual politicians, nor does it reveal the daily atrocities as social media does.

I can no longer passively bear witness to the unspeakable atrocities taking place in that small strip of land that Israel has flattened. I no longer have words to express my sadness, rage, or my utter despair.  That’s why I am taking a risk in sharing my sense of helplessness

I know I will receive a heap of blowback, not just from rightwing zealots and Zionists, but also from friends and family whom I love and know to be caring and compassionate – until it comes to Israel. I can handle that. What I can’t quite accept is the fear that I could come to harm because I am a journalist and a Jew as well as an outspoken woman and a liberal activist.

Still, I can’t be silent because “all it takes for evil to prevail is the silence of one good [person]”. I don’t want to be that person.

I can’t be silent about the fact that a people who were incinerated in the millions are now ignoring the fact that Israel is killing thousands of people – babies, children, women, men, in schools, shelters, hospitals, homes – in another genocide.

I can’t be silent about children whose young bodies are riddled with shrapnel, kids who suffer amputations, mothers who weep over their dead children, women who couldn’t protect their daughters from rape, fathers who lost their entire nuclear and extended families. The psychological trauma that will be with these victims, should they survive the war crimes, is unimaginable.

I can’t be silent about the systematic starvation of innocent people, or the refusal to let them drink clean water or receive humanitarian aid, including the most basic medical assistance.

I can’t be silent about the bombing of hospitals, schools, and shelters, which violates international law, because of a claim that some Hamas leaders are operating there. Nor do I accept the claim by Israel that it tries to reduce “collateral damage” by which they mean dead bodies.

I can’t be silent about the crimes against humanity, the utter cruelty, taking place in Israeli prisons; cruelty that includes tortures like water-boarding, attack dogs, daily beatings, rape, stress positions, enforced sleeplessness, and the amputation of hands and feet due to prolonged shackling – all of which have been reported by survivors of the prisons.

Quite simply, I can’t be silent when I feel ashamed as an American and a Jew, let alone a human being.

How is it that the U.S. looks away when other developed, democratic countries publicly recognize the monstrosity of a nation so self-righteous that it is considered a pariah country by other governments? How can people who know that genocide is taking place look the other way, or worse, ignore or defend it? What will it take to hold Netanyahu and his radical, fascist colleagues, accountable?

It's important to know, as the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) points out, that Israeli violence against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank did not begin on October 7th. It just got worse when Israel sealed off Gaza after the Hamas attack, beginning with a “hermetic closure [that blocked] access to food, water, fuel, electricity, medical supplies, and other goods” needed for survival.

ASC also reminds us that last year was one of the most violent in Palestine in over a decade. That’s because Israel confiscated so much land, began mass arrests, and attacked Palestinian cities militarily. It also took control of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a deeply important religious site in Jerusalem. Since then, the handpicked Netanyahu government has increased its violent acts against Palestinian communities to resist any semblance of independence or equality for the Palestinian people, for whom the threat of violence has become a daily reality.

That perspective, and the long history of Israeli occupation and violence against Palestinians is deeply important to understand because context is the only way to recognize what is happening now. For example, few people realize that “Gaza has been under a violent blockade for almost two decades.” That means they live with travel restrictions, trade restrictions, restricted access to decent education, medical care, and jobs daily. According to ASC, “the effects have been brutal. Eighty percent of people in Gaza have been dependent on international assistance to survive.”

No wonder ordinary Palestinians feel abandoned while living in perpetual, devastating fear and destruction without hope? How many of us could be made to bury multitudes of shrouded family, or suffer slow starvation, continuous migration, and unrelenting abuse?

How can we witness such brutality in silence, which speaks volumes. Surely the time has come for our government’s silence to end and for each of us to break our silence. I am relieved to have broken mine.

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.

Your Vote is Your Voice: It Matters More Than Ever

A little while ago I became so frustrated by the need for an effective media campaign on the part of the Democratic administration and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) to ensure that Donald Trump isn’t elected again that I wrote to the White House communications director and the Chief of Staff. I pointed out that there is a difference between political messaging and behavior change communication grounded in a methodology that has proven to be successful. As a communications professional (see bio line) I knew from my training and experience that a media advocacy and social marketing campaign aimed at persuasion was called for.

That’s when I decided to mount my own campaign on social media, various blogs, and my listserv, asking anyone who saw my posts to share them widely.

My idea was grounded in some essential elements of a successful behavior change strategy which could be easily replicated as bumper stickers, lawn posters, T-shirts, whatever, in the attempt to make the message simple, succinct, relevant, repetitive, actionable, and targeted to various audiences, – all components of a behavior change effort.  I also used the essential elements of a consistent visual and a tag line which would vary slightly each time I released another banner.  

I began posting the banners recently; the first three are Vote for Democracy; Vote to Defeat Tyranny, and Vote for Freedom. The visual is a headshot of Joe Biden. Each month between now and the election I will be posting variations on the overall theme of the importance of voting in November.  The idea is that we must maintain our democratic form of government and defeat the insanity of a second Trump term, irrespective of our personal politics – (if you would like to receive the messages to share, please message me on my blog:  www.elayne-clift.com/blog )

To that end I researched the Republican document, Project 2025, because so few people realize its horrific implications should Trump be elected.

Project 2025 proposes overhauls to every federal agency and office.  These project plans circumvent Congress and the courts. Prepared by 34 authors including Ken Cuccinelli, Peter Navarro, and Ben Carson, along with 31 other hard right Trump devotees, the “Mandate” has 30 chapters and is over 900 pages.  The introduction offers a “Conservative Promise” as the opening salvo of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, launched by The Heritage Foundation and their many partners in 2022. Its chapters lay out copious clear, concrete, terrifying policies and rules for White House offices, Cabinet departments, Congress, agencies, commissions, and boards.

Here are the four guiding principles of the Plan articulated in the Introduction:.

1.  Family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.

2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.

3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.

4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.” the principles that by consensus guide the crafting of this document:

Numerous sections go on to share the mandate’s ambitions, goals and specific objectives. These include “Taking the Reins of Government,” beginning with pages and pages of details, including how the Executive branch of government, i.e., the White House staff and offices, and various commissions and councils would be established, staffed, and run.

Some of the agencies subject to terrifying changes, if not total obliteration, include the National Security Council, the National Economic Council, the Office of Science and Technology, and the National Space Council. Other sections pontificate on Gender Policy in ways that demean and diminish women and girls, Civil Rights and Liberties that are severely limiting and racist, Cyber Security and Intelligence agencies in which career civil servants with necessary expertise would be replaced by political appointees.  FEMA, Department of Defense, along with departments that establish public health, immigration and education policies would be dangerously revamped, while the media, foreign policy, and the climate crisis would be severely curtailed. We’ve already seen signs of threatening changes in all sectors. Each of these section and more, including the “General Welfare” section, offer shocking visions that should alarm every American.

As a BBC News report revealed in June, “Project 2025 calls for firing thousands of civil servants, expanding the power of the president, and dismantling [several] federal agencies.”  Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), who is launching a counter project to stop Project 2025 said in the report, “Project 2025is more than an idea, it’s a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state- separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates ”public will.”

The threat to our democracy doesn’t get clearer than that. So although no one can be expected to plow through this deranged and dangerous document, it’s important to be aware of its specific plans and the impacts each American will be subjected to should Donald Trump win this election. Our fundamental freedoms, our ability to live in a country free of restrictions designed by the lunatic fringe, our safety – indeed our lives, our respect in the global community, and our hopes for peaceful resolution of conflicts that could avoid an unimaginable third world war are on the ballot this year. Our future, and that of our progeny, depends on each of us being fully informed and voting for a future of safety, sanity, and sustainability irrespective of party affiliation.

Please take the time to become familiar with what is at stake and share it widely.

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 Elayne Clift has a master’s degree in communication. She was Deputy Director of a global Health Communication project for five years, and taught Health Communications at the Yale School of Public Health.  She writes from Brattleboro, Vt. 

Were We the Lucky Ones?

A docudrama, We Were the Lucky Ones, streaming on Hulu recently inspired me to consider this question: Were Americans in my generation the lucky ones, post WWII? In the story a real family scattered across Europe during the pogroms against Jews in the war. Miraculously they managed to survive and to reunite with their loved ones.

Now I wonder if those of us who have lived in America since the 1940s may be the lucky ones. We have lived in a post-war period of democracy, freedom from fear, and peace for the most part, without the obscenity of war and dictatorship on our doorsteps. We have never had to experience the terror of autocratic regimes. Most of us can’t even imagine what that is like. We have been able to trust our families, friends, and neighbors, and to receive uncensored information free of propaganda, to travel freely across state lines and to other countries without being impeded or interrogated. We have never had a government that destroyed the basis of our republic in the document called the Constitution. Most of us were able to live decent lives and to sleep soundly at night.

Admittedly the “good old days” weren’t all good. They were rife with racism, antisemitism, sexism, discrimination, and fear of the Other. We lived in a time when America flirted seriously with fascism, schools were segregated, domestic violence and sexual abuse were hidden. We lived to see the development of nuclear weapons and suffered the threat of the Bay of Pigs, when Russian threatened us with missiles from Cuba. There were race riots and a war we never should have been in, political assassinations of some of our beloved leaders, terrorist attacks and later an insurrection, and so much more that never should have happened in “the land of the free and the brave.” 

But still we were mostly the lucky ones. We never headed to bomb shelters, most of us could feel safe in our homes, and we proceeded with our lives under the protection of the Constitution. It was safe to send our kids to school, to go to a café, a concert, a grocery store, and to worship in a variety of religious environments.

We could choose our politicians in free and fair elections and vote them out of office when we needed to.  When necessary, we protested what we believed was wrong in our local communities and nationally, peacefully and without fear of being silenced or arrested. We chose whether or when to start families, we read the books we wanted to. We trusted our friends and neighbors to look out for each other, and most of all we felt free.

Those freedoms could now become fading memories.  What looms large in November is a clarion call for civility, compassion, humanity, intelligent leadership, sound judgement, and continuing democracy.  Our country cannot afford to lose its standing in a global world or risk the hideous thought of a nuclear war because we have felons and fascists in charge who admire the likes of Mr. Putin and other autocrats and dictators.

Unless we act appropriately, the idea of American exceptionalism will be nothing more than a memory embedded in the jargon of despair. In the past, Americans have managed to come together in critical times in ways that revealed our character and upheld the principles of this country. We have demonstrated to the world our capacity for cohesion, compassion, sound judgement and right action. Now is the time to reclaim that spirit by making a commitment to disavow a dystopian future.

We stand now on the precipice of a giant sink hole that would take years to dig out of, if not generations. We owe it to our progeny to leave them a world in which we proved again our resilience and our love of freedom. 

We need to make sure that they too are the lucky ones who remain free of oppression and disaster,  the lucky ones who reunite with the spirit of this country in hard times, and the lucky ones who build a new and secure future together. That means doing the right thing in November for the loved ones in your life.

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.

The Desperate Need for Prison Reform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It's Time to Confront Violence Against Women

“Do you know how it feels to get smacked around?”

“He abused me psychologically to the point that I wasn’t able to talk or think by myself.”

“I was told I was worthless. Abuse made me feel I’m nothing.”

“I asked my mom why indigenous women were being murdered. I wanted to be a boy. No one should be scared to be an Indigenous girl or woman. Please don’t let it happen to me.”

Those are some of the heart-wrenching testimonies on the walls of two collaborative museum exhibits that commemorate missing and murdered Native American women and victims of domestic violence. The exhibits, Portraits in Red by artist Nayana LaFond, and Voices by Cat Del Buono are powerful and important.

LaFond’s work is deeply personal. She is a citizen of the Metis Nation of Ontario and a descendant of the Anishinaabe and other indigenous groups and she is a survivor of domestic violence. “In indigenous cultures art is medicine,” she explains. “I see the work I do as sacred.”   

LaFond began painting the portraits when she painted an Indigenous woman from Saskatchewan who had survived violence. The woman appears strong and powerful, despite a red handprint over her mouth, which became iconic. “Red is believed to be the only color spirits can see in most indigenous cultures so I paint them the way a spirit would see them,” the artist explains.

 Subsequently she posted a call on the website of a Pow Wow held annually to commemorate the Day of Remembrance for Missing and Murdered Indigenous People. It changed her life and launched the Portraits in Red project. Offering to create similar portraits for other indigenous women at no cost, she had thousands of hits in no time from native women all over North America. Her portrait work grew exponentially with the women she paints having one thing in common; each of the women shares a symbolic red hand over their mouths, symbolizing violence and silencing. The women range in age; many wearing traditional dress. All of them offer a stunning wakeup call.

“When you’ve experienced something like these women have you want to claim yourself again,” LaFond says. “You want to speak up and be heard in a safe way. That’s why I do this work. I am claiming my own experience and turning it into something positive. I hope I’m creating change.”

“Voices,” an ongoing project by social change filmmaker Cat Del Buono, is a video collection based on more than a hundred interviews she has conducted with survivors of domestic abuse since 2013.  In the videos one sees only the mouths of women speaking and thus becomes part of an intimate, deeply sad conversation as women share their stories. Their voices serve to humanize and expose the travesty of domestic violence while encouraging others in need of help.

“The immersive nature of the exhibit reveals the enormity and the pain of domestic violence,” Del Buono says. “It’s powerful. It helps viewers understand that domestic violence doesn’t discriminate, it affects all ages and social classes. It isn’t just ‘their’ problem. It’s a society problem that urgently needs to be addressed.”

These two collaborative exhibits break the silence that surrounds violence and abuse that women suffer in larger numbers than we think. To see them together is to witness the enormity of the domestic violence crisis that goes far beyond North America and is pervasive in all cultures, classes, and communities. The statistics are staggering.

 About 4 out of 5 Native women have experienced violence. They are twice as likely than most other women to experience violence and they face murder rates 11 times the national average. The murder rate for Native women is about three times more than that of most other women. 98% of Indigenous people experience violence in their lifetime.

 There is only a six percent prosecution rate. In 2016, there were 5,712 incidents of missing and murdered Native American and Alaskan Native women but only 116 cases were logged into the DOJ data base. Sixty percent of the number of cases between 2005 and 2009 involving sexual abuse in Native communities were never prosecute by U.S. attorneys. On some reservations 96 percent of sexual violence cases against Native women were committed by non-Natives. non-Natives.

 According to Cat Del Buono, the data on domestic violence is equally staggering. On average, nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the U.S. One in four women will be a victim of severe domestic violence in her lifetime; every nine seconds a woman is assaulted or beaten. Chillingly, one in five women in the U.S. has been raped in her lifetime, almost half of them by an acquaintance.

 Myths about domestic violence are untrue and pervasive, according to a YWCA “End the Silence” campaign in Spokane, Washington.  For example, “Domestic violence only happens to women.”  “Drugs alcohol, stress and mental illness cause DV.”  “Abusers are just out to control and need anger management.” “DV is always physical abuse.”  “If a victim doesn’t leave, it must not be that bad or they are ok with how they are being treated.”

 The fact is that all kinds of violence, against women especially, surrounds us and not enough attention is being paid to stopping it. We urgently need policy changes at every level of governance, serious and effective gun legislation, long overdue changes in the judicial system, educational programs that raise awareness of the epidemic of violence and abuse in all their forms, and sufficient resources at the community (and reservation) level aimed at prevention, identifying perpetrators, and sufficient resources to stop the scourge.

 As Cat Del Buono and Nayana LaFond know, “this is a societal problem that urgently needs to be addressed.” Their deeply important artistic work is a monument to those women who are alive and still waiting for an end to violence, and to their missing and murdered sisters. Let International Women’s Day remind us of that.

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Why I Write, with Thanks to George Orwell

Most years when we’re on the threshold of a new year, I don’t think about resolutions I probably can’t keep. But I do contemplate my life as a writer as I put aside prior works and enter a new ever changing writing landscape. I ask myself what I will write about and worry that I will not honor my annual resolution to return to revising my novel. I consider the fact that occasionally people are offended when I am being political in my commentaries, and I will likely continuing doing so.

This year I was inspired by George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984, to ask myself the question the renowned writer asked himself: Why do I write? Where does the compulsion I have to put words on paper originate? Do my words, thoughts, and ideas matter? I found some answers in Orwell’s notable personal essay, “Why I Write,” written at the end of his life.

Like Orwell, I knew from an early age that I loved writing, reading, and rolling words around in my mouth but I didn’t know until I was ten that I wanted to be a writer. At that tender age I went to the “Five and Dime” store to buy the biggest pad of lined writing paper I could find. When the saleswoman asked why I wanted it I said, “Please don’t laugh at me. I want to write a book.” She smiled so I told her I already had the plot in my mind. At thirteen I submitted a Christmas poem to The Saturday Evening Post magazine. It was rejected but I still think it was a good poem.

As I grew older my fantasy life involved story ideas including pot-boiler romances, poems of people and place, and serious thoughts about life as I observed and lived it. In high school I loved writing essays, and I loved words, thanks to some fine, challenging teachers. Words were music to my ear, and I took profound pleasure in picking the right ones to express myself.

I was a bit of a truth teller by then and I had a growing propensity for standing up to authority when I thought those in power were wrong. I built a case in my head, choosing my words carefully, delivering them verbally or in writing with visible effect. Then I described the events with meticulous accuracy and a dose of drama to my friends. Just as Orwell wrote in his essay, “I wanted to write detailed descriptions and arresting similes …in which words were used partly for the sake of their sound.” I also wanted my words to make a difference in how I, and others, were treated by authority figures.

Orwell believed that there were four main motives for writing: Egotism, Aesthetic enthusiasm (“the desire to share an experience one feels is valuable in words and their right arrangement”), Historical impulse (“the desire to see things as they are”), and political purpose (“the desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s ideas of the kind of society that they should strive for.”)

These four motives resonate mightily for me. I saw myself in all of them, including ego. Most writers want to be noticed, praised, and remembered posthumously. But it is Orwell’s other three motives that helped me know why I write. It’s because I believe I have something worthy to say, in my own voice, not only in commentaries and personal essays, but also via fiction, poetry, and memoir, all of which expose and grapple with human experience. The feedback readers share with me when they aren’t offended by my political perspective is a form of validation, and a gift that keeps me doing it, Also, I can’t not do it. It’s a way of being part of the human family, and it’s in my DNA. Like Orwell, my starting point is almost always “a sense of justice.” And like him, I “suffer the struggles of being a writer, driven by some demon which one can never resist.”

The writer Joan Didion also wrote about why she writes after reading Orwell’s essay. She famously said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” In short, she is saying “How do I know what I think until I see what I’ve written.” Like her, writing gives me clarity as well as enormous relief when I am struggling with daily reality or existential challenges.

Didion asked, “What do we do with knowledge that we cannot bear to live with? What do we do with the things we don’t want to know?” Photographers like Diane Arbus and Dorthea Lange answered that question visually. Like other writers who view the world through lenses of human frailty, foibles and promise, I write my way through the challenges they present, not only for myself, but for others too. I’m sure I will be compelled to do it to my dying day.

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Are We Facing the End of Free Speech?

CEOs from major businesses in the U.S. demand that Harvard University release the names of students from 30 student organizations who signed a letter casting blame on Israel for the attacks by Hamas. The business leaders further urged the university to provide names of the signatories with photographs so that students who signed the letter would not be hired once they leave Harvard. Students began immediately to take back their signatures, as Axios and The Guardian reported.

 A law firm withdraws its job offer to a New York York University law student, president of the Student Bar Association, who wrote in the Association’s bulletin, “This [Israeli] regime of state-sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary,” claiming that she made “inflammatory comments” that “profoundly conflict with [our] values.

 edish climate activist Greta Thunberg and 26 others are charged by British police in London for joining a protest outside an oil and gas conference. The charge? “Failing to comply with a condition imposed under section 14 of the Public Order Act,” according to the London Metropolitan police.

 In England police have made dozens of arrests after protests across the UK arose in the aftermath of Hamas terrorist attacks and Israel’s response. Many protesters are unsure whether they can now carry placards or wear symbols, or join in chants after

Suella Braverman, a member of the Conservative Party who became the UK Home Secretary in 2022, wrote to chief constables in England and Wales saying that waving a Palestinian flag or singing to advocate for Arab freedom might be a criminal offence. “I would encourage police to consider whether chants such as ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ should be understood as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world, and whether its use … may amount to a racially aggravated … public order offence,” she said

An increasing number of countries are resorting to force and legislation to crush protests, treating them as a threat rather than a right, as Amnesty International points out. “Peaceful protest is a right, not a privilege, and one that states have a duty to respect, protect and  facilitate.”

 In Washington, DC 49 Jewish demonstrators in front of the White House, including rabbis, were arrested urging President Biden to call for a ceasefire on his recent trip to Israel. Their charge? Crossing safety barriers and blocking entrances. And a recent post on social media revealed that the U.S. State Department has instructed ambassadors and other government officials not to use words like “de-escalation, ceasefire, end to violence, restoring calm and bloodshed.” The post has since been taken down.

 These are troubling signs that in this country the Constitution’s First Amendment is being ignored or violated. As a reminder, here is what the Amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” (emphasis mine).

Arresting protestors making their voices heard in peaceful ways is a dangerous travesty wherever it happens, but it is particularly egregious in a country that prides itself on “the rule of law.” In this time of terror and rapidly escalating international conflict America’s leadership and example could not be more urgent. Calls for a cease fire and an end to killing fields where both sides have become tragic victims is not an act of violence. Nor is it a display of national allegiance. It’s much bigger and more urgent than that. It is a call for restraint, human rights, and shared humanity in the face of unleashed rage and hopelessness.

That collective rage, fear and hopelessness threatens the future we wish for our progeny, whether we are American, Israeli or Palestinian.  We cannot move forward in a world in which a slaughter of innocents, no matter where they live, continues. We can’t make progress in the name of peace without allowing all of us to inhabit land we love because our roots are there. We can’t make peace if we are continually oppressed, and myopic in our views. And we cannot move forward if we cling to limited views of right and wrong, framed by the concept of winners and losers, power and weakness.

The struggles we face are not a matter of politics, persuasion, or power.  They are about people; ordinary people who all matter. In this time of conflict of biblical proportion, a time when history could lead us to the table of resolution, let us not seek to silence those calling out for – indeed begging for - compassion, intelligent discourse and wise decisions free of partisanship.

Let us remember that our voices are not weapons. They are instead our monuments and our roadmap to a sane future for all of us.  No one should be punished for raising them.

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

From Designer Babies to Devalued Children

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Time for Bread and Roses is Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suffer the Little Children

They come from countries of unrelenting poverty, oppression, war, and violence. They come to escape all of that with parents, relatives, friends, or alone. They walk miles and miles, day after day, hungry, thirsty, afraid, exhausted. As a recent report in The New York Times revealed the number of migrant children crossing the U.S. border from the south has “soared” for several reasons, including declining situations in Latin American countries along with pandemic induced migration, and the election of President Biden. Last year the influx of migrant children rose to 130,000. That’s three times higher than five years ago.

 With this influx of unaccompanied children, child employment has reached Dickensian levels and conditions in most parts of the U.S. Another New York Times article illuminated the reality of this exploitation. One teenage worker “stuffed a sealed plastic bag of cereal into a passing carton. It could be dangerous work, with fast-moving pulleys and gears that had torn off fingers and ripped open a woman’s scalp.” That factory “was full of underage workers … spending late hours bent over hazardous machinery.”  In other places kids work in slaughterhouses, wood sawing businesses, or tend giant ovens making granola bars and other snack foods.

 According to the Times report, this kind of child labor is part of a “new economy of exploitation,” in which migrant youth constitute a “shadow work force that extends across industries in every state.” This new labor force has been growing, particularly in the last two years, and it’s all in violation of child labor laws. In addition to the work in plants and factories, children wash dishes and deliver meals in various venues. They help build vacation homes, harvest crops, and work as hotel maids, usually at night, after trying to stay awake in school during the day, if the families they stay with actually send them to school as mandated.

 Often these children are housed with adults they don’t know. These “sponsors” often exploit the kids, pressuring them to earn money to help with expenses, or payoff smugglers who have helped place the children with them. Oversight and monitoring of these housing situations are often ignored, even though they are mandated.  As one caseworker told the Times, “It’s getting to be a business for some of the sponsors.” Schools, businesses, workers in federal agencies, and law enforcement are guilty of “willful ignorance,” as the Times reporter put it.

 Child trafficking is another related issue. Anti-trafficking legislation exists in the U.S. but is inadequately adhered to, and made more difficult because of the growing number of children coming across the border, often with worrying debt to pay off. According to the Times report, concerns about unaccompanied minors at the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement began to grow two years ago when labor trafficking began growing, exacerbated by the inappropriately quick release of children from detention centers rather than maintaining a focus on preventing unsafe releases.

 Child marriage is also something we should be concerned about in this country. According to Equality Now, shocking as it may seem, here in the U.S. child marriage, which occurs when one or both parties to a marriage are under 18 years of age, is legal in 43 states, but 20 U.S. states do not require any minimum age for marriage, if there is parental consent or a judicial waiver.

 A human rights violation, “child marriage legitimizes abuse and denies girls’ autonomy. When young girls are forced to marry, they are essentially subject to state-sanctioned rape and are at risk of increased domestic violence, forced pregnancy, and negative health consequences, while being denied education and economic opportunity.” Equality Now explains. Yet, nearly 300,000 female children were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018, most of them to much older men. And in some states, child marriage is considered a valid defense to statutory rape.

 Child abuse doesn’t stop there in this country. It starts with our inability to end the continuing brutality of gun violence that is the biggest killer of children and teenagers in America. It begs the question, how much do we really care about children when rightwing politicians and the people who vote for them support so-called leaders’ refusal to fund daycare, food programs, and healthcare for children in need, or parental leave so that infants are safe and bonding with their parents? How can we claim to care about children of all ages and ethnicities when Republican legislators try to slash Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act, deny healthcare to trans kids and mess with the child tax credit program and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program known as SNAP? 

 It's abundantly clear that all children in this country are in serious trouble, physically and emotionally, and that a sizeable swath of Americans in high and not so high places don’t seem to care and are willing to put future generations in jeopardy – all of which raises the real question:

How is it we go on allowing children to suffer (and die), and still delude ourselves that our country is exceptional?

 Perhaps it is, but sadly in is so many wrong ways. Just ask the children.

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Where is Abigail Adams in Today''s Political Discourse?

In all the talk about encroaching autocracy in America and elsewhere, politicians, pundits, media personalities and others need to remember the words and wisdom of the revolutionary first First Lady, Abigail Adams, who admonished her husband to “remember the ladies.”

Another First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, echoed her predecessor in a recent CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour when she called out the absence of misogyny in various analyses of forces at work when countries descend into autocracies and dictatorships.

She was right to do that. In the growing discourse about various factors that prevail when democracies slide into autocracy, white supremacy, race, class and caste quickly rise to the surface as identifiable and frightening factors.  But not a word is uttered about the systemic oppression of women, which has been part of dictatorial regimes and cultures throughout history. 

Examples abound from ancient times to now, with women being treated like second class citizens in almost every country and culture. In ancient Greece women were thought to hinder democracy as the weaker sex. Considered property, they lived in seclusion without rights, valued only as the bearers of male progeny. In medieval times religious institutions kept women quiet and voiceless while the idea of women as property prevailed into more modern times as women were “owned” by their fathers and husbands by virtue of economic indenture and lack of agency in male dominated societies.

Fast forward to the 20th and 21st centuries and consider the fact that women were denied the vote in America until 1920, and dictators like Hitler and Ceausescu mandated childbearing, rendering women nothing more than semen vessels and property of the state, something we are seeing emerge in our own country. Women continue to have limited access to leadership positions, economic parity, and agency over their own lives – largely legislatively ignored and increasingly court ordered.

The question is why.  The answer? It is intentional, overtly or unconsciously, because in a world dominated largely by (white) men terrified of losing patriarchal power, woman are immensely threatening.  The fact is powerful men know that women have different priorities than they do, and that those priorities are grounded in a profound commitment to human rights and social justice, not in greed, moral and financial corruption, massive profits, or overwhelming power. They also know that women are deeply intelligent, strategic, capable people and that they are organizing as never before.

One has only to look at the brave women of Iran who are willing to face torture, rape and murder for “Women, Life, Freedom”, or to consider the courage of Kurdish women who fought on the battleground and Rohingya women standing up to their oppressors.  Or to remember the abuelas of Latin America who never gave up the fight to find their missing children, the women of Liberia and India whose work saved lives and changed policy, the French and Ghetto resistance movement women who helped win a war. Then there were the women who shared their personal stories about rape and sexual abuse at global conferences and with local newspapers, the million women who marched in Washington, DC the day after Donald Trump became president, the women artists, writers, musicians, photographers, organizers, the mothers demanding gun legislation, the lawyers who raised an army of volunteer lawyers overnight to litigate on behalf of immigrants at airports or helped a ten year old raped child escape forced childbearing.  The examples go on and on and on.

That is why male retaliation against women in Iran is so violent, why rape is increasingly a war crime, why the Supreme Court of the United States has rendered women property of the state, why domestic abuse and gun violence against women are on the rise, why books by and about women are banned in such high numbers, , why women are going to jail for having a miscarriage and more broadly why teachers can no long teach history or talk about gay marriage or use certain words, or encourage girls to play sports or to dream of becoming president and so much more.

It all paints a portrait of misogyny at its most extreme because powerful men simply cannot abide a world in which women too are powerful whether in their homes, communities, states, or countries. The very thought of sharing the podium or the parliament or a pay scale with females is completely abhorrent because deep down powerful men know that women bring skills and experience to bear on pressing issues of our time, so they resort o to further and deeper methods of domination, exclusion, and abuse.

And that is why we must include misogyny in the public and private discourse surrounding our deep concerns and increasing acknowledgement that our democracy, and democracy elsewhere, are indeed in a precarious and perishable place. It is why women are choosing, and working hard, to revolt against the evils of autocracy that could well render them “a leaf blowing in the whirlwind,” a destiny that political philosopher Hannah Arendt warned us all against.

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The Wandering Souls of Migration, Immigration, and Asylum Seeking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Maternal Mortality, Abortion, and Race: A Dangerous Trifecta

Much has been written in the literature of public health about America’s shocking maternal mortality rate. Occasionally media reports the alarming rate when there is a hook. Advocates concerned with women and health illuminate the problem in reports and at conferences. But in light of the SCOTUS Dobbs decision on abortion, new urgency arose in addressing U.S. maternal mortality and its causes because of the link between reproductive rights and the persistence of inherent racial issues in women’s healthcare.

It is disturbing and illuminating to note the World Health Organization's maternal mortality rate rankings.  The U.S. is 55th in the list of industrialized nations at nearly 24 deaths per 100,000 live births. A 2022 study found that women in this country face the highest rates of preventable problems and mortality when compared with women in 10 other wealthy nations, and that rate continues to go up. The race disparity in maternal mortality is additionally alarming. Black women die at a rate of 55.3 deaths per 100,000 live births, more than 50 percent higher than white women.

That’s one reason Rep. Alma Adams (D-NC) and several colleagues in the House introduced a bill earlier this year to specifically address the high rate of stillbirths, which Black women and other women of color are twice as likely to experience as white women. Targeted legislative like that is critical to changing the public health landscape when it comes to pregnancy outcomes and the health of women and children.

So are campaigns like the “Hear Her” initiative at the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), designed to address the fact that women are often not heard, believed, or viewed as reliable when they present relevant histories or symptoms. That problem is worse for Black women too. Research shows that women of color are more likely to be described negatively in notes and reports and recent studies reveal that doctors are most likely to use “stigmatizing language” in their notes about patients of color, referring to them as “noncompliant, challenging or resisting,” as research at the University of  Chicago revealed.

That’s why the all-out attempt to end abortion nationally, ignoring 50 years of precedent regarding a woman’s right to privacy, reproductive healthcare and choice was such a travesty, exacerbating the already shameful maternal morbidity and mortality data which serves as an indicator of continuing racism in this country.   

Black women and their sisters of color are likely to suffer enormously from the consequences of state-ordered pregnancy in the states that cling to misogynistic, racist policies, and not only in terms of their health or possible survival. They will also be affected economically in dramatic ways. A Forbes report suggests they will be deprived of education that can lift them out of poverty, and they will be targets of aggressive invasions of privacy through data searches that enable the over-policing of their reproductive habits and practices. Depending on where they live, they may be subject to fertility and period-tracking apps used by police according to their zip code because they are deemed to reside in high .abortion areas.

In her monumental work resulting in the 1619 Project documenting the history of broad-reaching racism in this country, Nicole Hannah-Jones provides a historical perspective essential to understanding the confluence of maternal mortality, the abortion crisis we now face, and unrelenting racism. Her book provides vital context regarding the connection between those three issues.

The title of both the project and book derives from the origins of slavery in America, dating back to 1619 with much of the book’s relevance focusing on the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War, when a key question arose. What would white America do with black people post slavery? Where would formerly enslaved people fit in a paid workforce? How would former slaves be treated if they were free Americans? What would be done about their education or healthcare?

Southern Democrats resisted these considerations mightily, especially when reformers like Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first black woman doctor in America, laid bare the burdens of being black in a country unwilling to facilitate freedom for former slaves.

Because of that resistance, the National Medical Association formed by black doctors in 1895 called for a national health care system - which went nowhere until the idea became a states’ rights issue during WWII when President Truman called for an expanded hospital system that predictably led to segregation and the denial of healthcare for black people. Later, insurance-based healthcare presented a further hurdle, while medical schools excluded black physicians and medicine became a for-profit, unregulated system. All of this has led to present-day lack of equitable, affordable, accessible healthcare if you are black or poor.

In the midterm election, five states had abortion on the ballot and in all five, voters supported the right to choose. Three of them guaranteed the right to abortion in their constitutions.   That is a huge relief to women in the five states, but it remains to be seen how women of color will fare. 

In Nicole Hannah-Jones’ words, “…arguments about socialized medicine, equity and human rights…echo down to the present day.”  Her book reveals the connections that make women of color exceptionally vulnerable even in this moment, and reminds us that there is still work to be done.

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

The Life Force of Livid Women is at Work

In 1995 when activist, advocate and former Congresswoman Bella Abzug uttered these words at the 4th World Conference of Women in Beijing, thousands of women there and everywhere felt the force of her words: “Women will change the nature of power, power will not change the nature of women. Never underestimate the importance of what we are doing. Never give in and never give up!”

Recently, when I quoted those words to a group of adult learners in recounting United Nations conferences focusing on women that had occurred over 20 years between 1975 and the Beijing conference, some participants struggled to understand what Abzug meant about the nature of power as it relates to gender.  For several days I pondered their questions searching for clarity in how to respond. Then on October 3rd something happened that helped me articulate an answer.

That was the day Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first Black woman to be seated on the Supreme Court of the United States, and I realized that the three critical voices of dissent on the badly damaged highest court in our county would now be women’s voices. Their intelligent, impassioned collective legal analysis would still be in the Court’s minority, but having them there, “speak[ing] truth to nonsense” as legal journalist Dahlia Lithwick, author of the new book Lady Justice puts it, highlights a watershed moment in which the nature of power for both women and men is shifting, not symbolically but in real terms, representing a new understanding of how women are reshaping how we live.

Described as “a beacon to generations” in one account of her first day on the bench, it was not lost on legal scholars, and many women, that Justice Jackson has arrived at the Supreme Court at a critical and necessary time. Her effectiveness as a voice of dissent, reminiscent of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s, was apparent when with quiet authority she offered to “bring some enlightenment” to a provision in the Clean Water Act in her response to an attorney hoping to kill the Act.

The voices of women like Justice Jackson and Dahlia Lithwick, inside and out of courtrooms, speak volumes to multitudes of women and their advocates in a time when females are being dragged back to a full throttled misogyny so devoid of understanding, compassion, and justice and so deeply punitive and threatening it boggles the mind.

That’s why acts of resistance like the one Iran’s women are bravely mounting with global support have always existed, whether over female sexuality, the quest for freedom, need for voting rights and economic security, or egregious political acts of injustice. Women in vast numbers through the ages have had enough. They are tired of being silenced, rendered invisible, and metaphorically burned at the stake. They’ve had enough of being told to calm down when revealing their consciousness and attempts at social justice based on lived experience, whether in capitals, courtrooms or communities. They’re exhausted from abuses in the marketplace, the academy, the home, and the mine fields of micro-aggression. They are more ready than ever to self-advocate in the face of misogyny driven violence, abuse and poverty while rejecting discrimination, deprivation, and  unrealistic expectations.

In a recently published LitHub article about her new book Dahlia Lithwick captures this frustration while interviewing numerous women who worked within the legal system. One of them was Anita Hill, who shared this personal story about giving a presentation on Supreme Court decisions. “A young white man said, ‘Aren’t you being a little paranoid? You act as though the sky is falling.’” Hill replied, “Here’s a list [of examples]. You tell me when the sky is falling.” Later she realized “it wasn’t just that the sky was falling. It was because we don’t live under the same sky.” Lithwick adds, “I realized that much like the 6-3 conservative supermajority that now controls the court, they simply don’t live under the same sky.”

Therein, Hill and Lithwick capture a key problem. As Lithwick puts it, addressing charges of paranoia and hysteria, “The mirror image of telling a woman you believe her is telling her she is being hysterical. … That is the real problem when women’s pain is substituted for actual justice.” And as she points out, “our very presence is outrageous. The fact that we even say anything is a sign of resistance.”

It is that resistance to insults and dismissal that I think Bella Abzug was reaching for when she spoke of gendered power in 1995. She knew, of course, that not all the world’s women would be with her along with the thousands of women who came to Beijing, nor would they all welcome the change women so badly need. But she also understood that for millennia, power has been the purview and prerogative of men, a notion that has been considered a social norm, despite women having always been a profound presence seeking justice and human rights, rendering themselves a thorn in the side of patriarchal power.

Women’s voices and calls for justice are always fundamental to resisting imposed silence, so Bella’s clarion call to a fatigued sisterhood who needed to be infused with new energy and hope was deeply important in that moment. It’s also why Judge Jackson’s presence on the Supreme Court now, along with Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, is so very important. 

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

Actions Have Consequences: The Supreme Court Should Know That

It was like standing alone on a nuclear landscape. Like being in the center of a dystopian nightmare. Like being on a sinking ship without a life vest. At least that’s how it felt to me as the Supreme Court’s decisions were handed down, one after the other in their recent session.

Stunned and frightened like so many others were, I wondered whether the faux Christian, conservative justices on the Court had any idea what the consequences of their hideous decisions would be as they ended a term in which civil rights in America were systematically ended. Did they willfully ignore what would happen because of their Draconian decisions, did they not have a clue, or did they simply not care?

Was this the legacy they wanted to leave their children and grandchildren, let alone the rest of us? Did they have any sense of the consequences, intended or otherwise, for American citizens, and the planet? Do they grasp the context of our Constitution, or the concept of democracy? Do they really hate women and others unlike them this much?

As these questions roiled in my head, I thought about some of the consequences the justices’ rightwing agenda presented, beginning with what would befall women and girls who no longer have agency over their bodies and lives, or access to reproductive health care.

Among them is a ten-year old child pregnant by paternal rape being denied an abortion in Ohio,  women with pre-eclampsia – high blood pressure that can be fatal to mother and baby when not treated urgently, women with gestational diabetes, a condition that can be harmful to mother and baby, women with ectopic pregnancies in which a fertilized egg attaches to the Fallopian tube instead of the uterus, an emergency situation requiring immediate care to prevent a fatal rupture, women whose lives are at risk because of  drastic fetal anomalies.

 Now women with these urgent or other reproductive healthcare needs are too frightened to seek timely reproductive care while providers are increasingly unwilling to offer it, both for fear of being prosecuted. These examples offer a small glimpse into what will happen to women and girls because of the Court’s decision to end Roe v. Wade, but this much we know: Many of them will die. So will women who elect to have an illegal or self-induced abortion for any reason.

I also thought about the death knell being sounded for the fragile, struggling planet on which we live due to environmental degradation and the global warming crisis. Just these staggering statistics are enough to send chills down my spine: “Every hour, 1,692 acres of productive dry land become desert. We are using up 50 more natural resources than the Earth can provide.” What’s more, “We have a garbage island floating in our ocean, mostly comprised of plastics - the size of India, Europe and Mexico combined!” 

Further, “The effects of human-caused global warming are happening now, are irreversible on the timescale of people alive today, and will worsen in the decades to come,” according to NASA. “Glaciers have shrunk, ice on rivers and lakes is breaking up earlier, plant and animal ranges have shifted, and trees are flowering sooner,” while “effects that scientists had predicted in the past would result from global climate change are now occurring: loss of sea ice, accelerated sea level rise and longer, more intense heat waves.”

Against these chilling facts, six Supreme Court justices saw to it that the Environmental Protection Agency would now have limited ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants “making it nearly impossible to cut greenhouse as emissions any time soon.” In their dissenting opinion three justices said the majority had stripped the E.P.A. of “the power to respond to the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.”

When it comes to separation of church and state the conservative majority outdid themselves. Recent decisions included a ruling in favor of a Christian group’s plea to allow a flag with a cross on it to fly over Boston’s city hall. Another decision allowed for taxpayer money to cover tuition for students attending religious high schools, while the six Supremes decided in favor of a high school football coach who led Christian prayers on the playing field  after games.

Then there’s states’ rights. Again, the Scotus-6 opined against New York State's concealed carry law requiring state residents to have a permit to carry a gun in public.  That law’s requirements for a permit were specific and in the public interest but when two guys who wanted to carry guns publicly were denied permits, they appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled the state law violated the 14th and Second Amendments. The decision proffered that the Second Amendment protects the public carry of firearms and set up a new test for courts to determine whether a law violates the Second Amendment.  New York's law was struck down, and other laws like New York's are likely to be struck down now.

Is it any wonder these frightening, tip-of-the-iceberg rulings made me feel like we’re approaching nuclear winter?  Bundle up. The Supreme Court is just getting started.

Feminism Isn't Dead, It's Exhausted

Just days before the horrific Supreme Court decision that killed Roe v. Wade, a grievous act that rendered women and girls property of the state and subjected them to forced childbearing, a spate of opinion pieces appeared bemoaning the fact that feminism was all but gone in the face of massive backlash. Feminists I admire wrote disheartening columns that included expert opinion, research findings and personal analysis.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote that “As the backlash gains steam, a lot of feminism feels enervated. There had been a desperate hope, among reproductive rights activists and Democratic strategists alike, that the end of Roe v. Wade would lead to an explosive feminist mobilization, that people committed to women’s equality would take to the streets and recommit themselves to politics. But after the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, it’s far from clear whether a political groundswell will materialize.”

Susan Faludi’s New York Times piece argued that pop culture, celebrity, rampant consumerism along with fierce individualism has fueled not just a backlash but a subtle generational divide in which younger feminists can be said to fight against “practical impediments to equality,” while second wave feminists (like myself) were “old-fashioned shoe-leather organizers” who were “oblivious to race and class.” In making her argument against generational conflict she asks for “a reckoning with feminism” that “goes beyond generational indictments. It’s an admirable goal that has merit but her language seems to fuel the divide.”

What these two essays have in common is a focus on millennial feminism and their collective analysis should be taken seriously, But what troubles me is the notion that feminism, in all its variations and iterations, has spawned a powerful backlash and become divisive to the point of annihilation. As a second wave feminist I reject that idea having worked, marched, protested with and mentored millennial women. The feminism of my generation, flawed though it has been, is not dead; it is exhausted. In the words of the beloved civil rights leader Fanny Lou Hamer, we are simply “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Our fight has been long and arduous and unless you’ve been through it it’s impossible to grasp what it took to keep on keeping on, and how punishing it could be – which leads me to some thoughts on younger feminists.

First, with due respect to millennial women who never experienced a pregnancy scare in pre-Roe v. Wade times, times when women couldn’t get credit without a male guarantor, could be fired for being pregnant, couldn’t earn anything like what men doing the same work did, had no recourse to domestic violence, and more, there are lessons to be learned from those feminists – their mothers and grandmothers - who preceded and fought for them. Sadly, they are about to find out what it’s like and what it takes to begin again from the ground up. When they do find out their elders will be marching, protesting, voting, lobbying and more by their side. There will be no false dichotomy because we are all women who have been there or find ourselves there now. In that sense, context, as older feminists know, is everything; and “the personal [really] is political” because what happens to one of us can happen to all of us when male power presides over our lives.

In that context I urge young women to educate themselves fully about women’s history and courageous fights for equality, full personhood, social justice and human rights in this country. Our battles cross every sector of society and we have fought them well so that our daughters and granddaughters could lead better lives than many of my generation did.

As I tell my young friends, there is a qualitative difference between pussy hats and T-shirt slogans, and social media is not the same as showing up in big numbers, which takes organizing on a scale that can feel overwhelming. (Just ask Stacy Abrams.) Also, it’s deeply important to understand the politics of power, and the power of politics in order to think and act sufficiently strategically so that change becomes a new reality.

I’m not arguing against a new, different feminism; as the wise Greek philosopher Heraclitus knew, “The Only Constant in Life Is Change.” I’m making a case for a hybrid feminism that doesn’t fall prey to conflict among its constituents for lack of context, depth, and experience.

As for the disastrous decisions of a Supreme Court run amok, Rebecca Traister offered this call for hope: Noting that the situation is “wretched and plain” and will get worse,” she wrote in The Cut, “the task for those who are stunned by the baldness of the horror, paralyzed by the bleakness of the view, is to figure out how to move forward anyway. … because while it is incumbent on us to digest the scope and breadth of the badness, it is equally our responsibility not to despair.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Tina Smith agree. Writing in a New York Times op ed., they noted that this is a “dark moment” that “will require a long, hard fight.” As second wave feminists, they know what they’re talking about. “The two of us lived in an America without Roe v. Wade, and we are not going back. Not now. Not ever.” I’m with them.

The Death of Stare Decisis and the Demise of the 4th Amendment

I was out of the country in May when news of the SCOTUS leak in which Justice Samuel Alito’s policy statement went viral.  I hadn’t watched TV for a week and barely signed onto social media but when I did, I read astute and deeply troubling reactions to the document designed to overturn Roe v. Wade, which has been considered established law for 50 years.

The document Justice Alito wrote was supported by four of his Court colleagues, revealing unsurprisingly that a majority of the Court concurred with ending women’s right to abortion. The timing of the leak was significant; it occurred when the Court was scheduled to rule on the constitutionality of a Mississippi abortion law which prohibits abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

If the Court finds that the Mississippi law stands, it will have sanctioned ending Roe v. Wade, allowing states to make their own laws regarding abortion. Some states have already established Draconian laws that include charging women with murder if they miscarry or have an abortion. Some have ruled that physicians who perform abortions can be charged with a felony crime and some have set up vigilante laws that could affect anyone who helps a woman get an abortion.

Essentially the demise of the constitutional right to abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy will end women’s right to abortion in over half the states in this country. The implications are huge, not only for American women but for the future of the country, and they are abundantly clear.

Many analysts and pundits have written cogently and urgently about the legal, physical, economic and emotional consequences for women and others in this country, and for all of us with respect to our civil and human rights. As a women’s health educator and advocate I am all too familiar with those consequences. I have heard women’s testimonials, read their memoirs, listened to their stories.  I have helped them access abortion care and as a doula I have helped them give birth to much wanted babies.

After the Alito document was revealed (and during the last confirmation hearings) I thought about the great legal minds of the past who had served on the Supreme Court, Justices like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg among them. Now I mourn what has become of that institution, where several judges lied under oath to Congress regarding precedent, and where many are willing to ignore the Constitution’s 4th amendment right of Americans to be “secure in their persons” and to “not be violated or subjected to “unreasonable searches and seizures.”  

It pains and frightens me that faulty - some might say puerile logic - superficial, antiquated, cliched justifications, overt sexism, and religious ideology are blatantly on display. (It is worth noting that seven of the current justices are Catholic and no Protestants are on the bench).

Couple that with the less than stellar records and legal experience of several justices, the alleged sexual harassment conduct of two justices, the conflict of interest on the part of a justice whose wife actively supported the insurrection, along with the majority’s willing abrogation of civil and human rights and one can question where “liberty and justice for all” has gone.

How, I ask myself in these traumatic judgment days, has this largely trusted American institution so quickly deteriorated into depravity? How did its majority come to rely on bumper sticker taglines, social media tropes, and arguments so weak and sloppy that they wouldn’t pass muster in a law school? Where has compassionate consideration in difficult matters gone? Why have context, untoward consequences, and the reality of people’s lives disappeared?

The fact is the Supreme Court has become a political organization with its own dark agenda and its reputation will forever be tarnished, all because four men and one woman who should know better, appointed by a far right, self-serving autocrat, are now seated for life on the highest court in the land, along with several hundred inappropriate federal judges.

The price we’ll all pay for judicial travesties, individually and together, grows ever clearer and more threatening. If Roe v. Wade is overturned women’s lives will be destroyed. Precedent in other matters (gay and interracial marriage, LGBTG rights and more) will no longer be valid, and revision of laws that wreak havoc because of ignorance and a taste for punishment will return. 

It is no stretch to say that we will become an even more divided and dangerous nation, two-tiered and binary in ways that we can’t yet imagine. Violence is likely to flourish along with racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and increased marginalization. The elderly, young, disabled, and ill will suffer even more profoundly.  Murder charges, incarcerations and suicides will become commonplace. Poverty will prevail for those in the 99 percent, while corporations and billionaires flourish. Family structures will be deeply and sadly impacted. The earth will be at risk sooner than predicted. 

This is not solely about women’s rights, and it is not hyperbole. It’s a harbinger of what is to come because of laws we must live with, who makes and enforces those laws, who adjudicates disputes, what national priorities are established and by whom. It is about the future, which now is in the hands of the Supreme Court – a court plunged into decline that endangers us all. 

It’s a court that is beyond disappointing, a court with extraordinary power to shape our lives, and it grows ever more dangerous.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health, politics and social issues. www.elayne-clift.com

Another Day, Another Newtown: The Obscenity of Gun Violence

When news of another school slaughter broke, this time again in Texas, the bile that rose in my throat was as bitter as the memory of Columbine, Newtown, Parkland – and the other grievous incidents of gun violence in schools – all 554 of them since Columbine, as NPR has reported.

From the Carolinas to California, 27 school shootings are among the 200 mass shootings this year alone in America, and it’s only May.   But this is not a time for numbers. It is a time for unprecedented action borne of rage about what is happening in our country. It is also time to answer burning questions: why is it happening, and what are we going to do about it? It is a time to shout our disgust and dismay, to demand gun legislation now, and to take action to end the slaughter of innocent children.

Here is what I believe must happen NOW. All living presidents (with the exception of Donald Trump) should stand together before Congress and declare that we are done with thoughts and prayers. We are done with the platitudes that surround grief and loss. We are done with inaction, and with turning the other way because political power is more important than loving our babies, especially among those who champion fetuses but ignore the needs of living children.

Go on strike because that is what it will take – teachers, clergy, workers, moms, women and men alike. Call for and participate in a national strike against violence and the insanity of mass murder. Bring down the economy as well as the evil that prevails on Capital Hill if that’s what it takes to stop the killing.

Call it what it is: a public health epidemic, not a gun violence or mental health issue.  We can and must learn the lessons of pioneering health communication campaigns, including, against all odds, the successful fight against the tobacco industry, which saved the lives of hundreds of thousands and demonstrated that people are capable of change.

It is vital for Americans to vote, this year and in 2024, with all the energy a soul can muster.  Stand in line for days if that’s what it takes to be counted among the family of humankind, and the families who must now endure unimaginable and unending sadness.

Most importantly, Americans who want the massacres of innocents to stop must demand an end to the filibuster and lobby for killing the Second Amendment -- the only way to halt the madness we’ve grown used to. Forget appeasing the irresponsible, vicious right wing with calls for limited legislation; go for the one thing that can stop gun violence faster and more conclusively than anything else -- an end to an irrelevant and antiquated amendment written before bullets and rifles that tear bodies apart in seconds were invented.

I believe that what lies at the heart of the tragic problem that is ours alone among developed countries is this: We are a nation wedded to violence and we always have been.

From the time white men first set foot on American soil guns have been used in genocides to eliminate non-white Native American peoples. During slavery guns were a way (along with physical punishment) to ensure forced labor and to instill terror among human beings who were bought and sold. Throughout our entire history guns have been part of our increasingly lethal war arsenals and today the sale of weapons in the U.S. is higher than it has ever been, while the people least likely to be killed by a bullet are made exceedingly rich.

Killing, it appears, is in our DNA. Mass murder has come to define us, whether through war, incarceration, racist law enforcement, the consequences of ignoring poverty while clamoring for personal and financial power, and random gun violence. All of it results in deep-seated human pain in a nation that is “exceptional” in all the wrong ways. We must end our killing fields if we are ever to have pride in a country that asks us to pledge our allegiance.

We have become a country in which the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, appears at NRA’s convention, held in Texas, three days after 19 children were brutally shot to death there, a country where a former president who tried to overthrow an election, and a Senator from Texas who thinks we need more guns, join the governor. It is a country that exposes the personification of evil and reminds us how often scum rises to the top.

So I say this to Governor Abbott: Have you, at long last, no decency? And to Ted Cruz I say: You are not sorry. You are guilty. You have colluded with mass murderers. May the words spoken to me by a 4-year old child ring in your adult ears for all eternity: “Sometimes sorry is not good enough.”  As for Donald Trump, there are no words.

To all the others akin to these monsters, I say only this: We condemn your evil. We will inscribe your names and your deeds and your selfishness in the world’s history books, and we will celebrate the end of your cruelty for all our days.