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.

Mothers, Children and a Menacing Virus

During the years when I worked internationally on MCH – Maternal and Child Health – our mission was to save the lives of mothers and children in the so-called developing world through several primary health care practices. The “twin engines” driving child survival were immunization and diarrheal disease control. Family planning was the start point for women’s health.

Today, MCH takes on new meaning: Maternal and Child Hell. Its driving engines are lack of childcare and mothers driven out of the workforce because of it.

The crisis in childcare is not new, but it is exacerbated by the pandemic. Even affluent families who can afford reliable childcare are feeling the effect.

The Child Care Is Essential Act introduced in the Senate in June would help, if Mitch McConnell and Republicans weren’t in the majority. Covid-driven, it provides for $50 billion in appropriations for a Child Care Stabilization Fund to award grants to childcare providers during the public health crisis. Without that Act many facilities will close.

If corporations, universities, and other workplaces don’t offer onsite daycare, who will fill the gap?  It’s a difficult question for people who work freelance or who are unemployed but looking for work, and of course for undocumented workers. 

According to the Department of Labor, 30 million people lost their jobs since Covid-19 appeared. For working moms, already struggling with the work/home balance, this could have long-term negative consequences, including lost opportunities, less upward mobility in the workplace, lower incomes (impacting Social Security and pensions), and difficulty getting back into the job market. 

A recent Wall Street Journal article highlighting how women’s careers could be derailed because of the pandemic noted that “juggling work and family life has never been easy.” For mothers, the pandemic makes coping especially exhausting as traditional gender roles and pay disparities re-emerge as issues. Without childcare, working moms are forfeiting or delaying careers because they are still prime caretakers of families and children.

As Joan Williams, head of the Center for Worklife Law at the University of California Hastings Center said in the WSJ article, “Opening economics without childcare is a recipe for a generational wipeout of mother’s careers.”

Women who try to maintain careers or jobs often face situations like a woman in San Diego did when she was fired because the firm said her young children were interrupting Zoom meetings.  She sued. At Florida State University things didn’t go that far. Following an email to all employees that the university would “return to normal policy and [would] no longer allow employees to care for children while working remotely,” the hue and cry forced FSU to back down and issue an apology.

Last March 2,000 mothers working for Amazon organized an advocacy campaign urging the company to provide a backup child care benefit as other big corporations, like Apple and other corporate giants do.  They are not the only ones to organize like this. In most cases the results are not yet clear.

What’s clear is that the child care system in this country is broken and has been ever since women became educated, rejected confining their role to marriage and motherhood, and joined the ranks of working women at all levels of a society that has never caught up with that sociological change. Nor has it realized its obligation and co-responsibility for raising children while committing to work/home balance for the good of American families.

There is an economic gain to seeing the light, however.  Child care allows parents to work and their working contributes to economic growth. According to the Center for American Progress, American businesses lose more than $12 billion annually because of challenges workers face in seeking childcare and the cost of lost earnings, productivity, and revenue due to the childcare crisis totals an estimated $57 billion each year.

Along with businesses and other employers, states clearly have a role to play in establishing family friendly benefits for every family, but especially for low income families and families of color. Federal action is also needed, and that action is supported by voters across the political landscape.

With half of Americans living in so-called “child care deserts,” long term policy changes are imperative. In addition to including families at all levels of society in the national conversation, government must move beyond relying on disparate organizations to plug the holes. There needs to be a substantial shift in corporate culture such that universal childcare is the norm. Without that the very nature of “family” will be made to shift in the direction of the affluent, as so much of American policy has done already. We need to understand and act on the relationships, or “intersectionality,” of race, gender, and economics, which are all part of the fabric of social justice.

Surely the time to value our children enough that we ensure their safety and healthy development is now. The time to recognize the contributions women make to the workplace and the economy as well as the family is also now. In short, the time to leave the desert is now.

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The Global Problem of Child Marriage

Imagine being 23-years old and a promising science student studying on scholarship in England. Then imagine that having lived in the UK for half your life you are being forced by the government to return to your country of origin because your father demands that you marry your older cousin. Imagine that if you refuse, you will likely be killed.

That is the horrific story unfolding today about an aspiring astrophysicist whose identity is being protected by The Independent, which told her story last month. It’s a story that is repeated regularly for countless women in many countries who have no place to run. In this case, officials in England claim there is insufficient evidence that this young woman is at risk, despite the fact that she has reported frequent physical and mental abuse by her father and asserted that she and her siblings along with their mother fled to the UK. Her story should not be unbelievable; one in five murders in her native Pakistan are attributed to honor killings committed by fathers and brothers.

Now imagine that you have been betrothed at the age of eight, and then married off to your abusive first cousin, aged 34, at the age of 13. That’s what happened to Naila Amin in New York state and it was completely legal. Today Naila, who runs the foundation that bears her name, fights to ban child marriages in New York, which often occur because of loopholes and exceptions in the law.

According to a report earlier this year by the Associated Press, the U.S. has approved thousands of requests by men to bring child adolescent brides into the country. The approvals are legal because the Immigration and Nationality Act doesn’t set minimum age requirements. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services goes by whether the marriage is legal in the home country and whether the marriage is legal in the state where the petitioner lives. Naila Amin, like the astrophysicist, was from Pakistan, and a victim of that system.

According to a UNICEF report, worldwide there are more than 700 million women alive today who were married before their 18th birthday. More than a third of them were married before the age of fifteen. USAID claims that in the developing world one in three girls are married before age eighteen. Some are as young as eight or nine years old.

The minimum age for marriage in most U.S. states is eighteen. But every state has exceptions, including “parental consent” and judicial approval. The founder of the nonprofit organization Unchained at Last, herself a child marriage victim, told the New York Times, “Shockingly, 91 percent of children married in New Jersey were [found to have been] married to older adults [in a study she conducted], often at ages or with age differences that could have triggered statutory rape charges, not a marriage license.”

The Tahirih Justice Center, a national organization that protects immigrant women and girls who find themselves in the United States in arranged and abusive marriages, provides legal services and advocacy in courts, communities and Congress. It points out that “there are very few laws and policies in the U.S. that are specifically designed to help forced marriage victims.”

The District of Columbia and some states have statutes that criminalize forcing someone into marriage in “certain circumstances” the center says, but “these laws seem designed for other purposes than to prevent parents from forcing marriage or to punish them for forcing their children into marriage. The majority of state criminal statutes arise in the context of laws against abduction, prostitution, and/or ‘defilement.’”

Unchained at Last estimates that “given the size of the various communities in the U.S. that are known to practice arranged or forced marriages, which include Orthodox Jewish, Muslim, Mormon, Sikh, Asian, African, Hmong and other communities, hundreds of thousands of women and girls in the U.S. are in arranged/forced marriages.”

The story of a woman named Syeda puts a human face on the plight of immigrant women in forced marriages living in the United States. Forced into marriage in Pakistan at the age of sixteen, she first lived with her parents while continuing her studies.  When she was twenty-five her family moved to Boston. Her husband joined her there, moving in with her family. She was immediately subjected to horrific physical and sexual abuse which she endured for months until her family threw her out of the house because she refused to return to Pakistan with her husband. Syeda fled to a women’s shelter and has since taken control of her life. She has earned a college degree, has a job and lives independently. With the help of Unchained she is getting a divorce.

Syeda was lucky. But for thousands more children, here and abroad, the nightmare of forced or arranged marriage continues. Clearly, states need to step up their efforts to save these children. All of us need to realize what is happening to them, and to advocate on their behalf.

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