Whatever Happened to Pay Equity?

Poor Lilly Ledbetter must be tearing her hair out.  She is the woman, you may recall, who “sought justice because equal pay for equal work is an American value” some years ago when she learned that she was earning significantly less money than men doing the same managerial work in the Alabama tire plant where she worked for nearly 20 years.

Her legal fight ultimately led her to the Supreme Court in 2007, where in a 5-4 decision, the Court “stood on the side of those who shortchanged my pay, my overtime and my retirement just because I [was] a woman,” she lamented, after the Court ruled that she didn’t report the inequity within the required six months, even though she didn’t discover the discrepancy for nearly two decades. “In the end,” she said, “I didn’t get a dime of the money I was shortchanged.”

What she did get, ultimately, was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, signed into law by President Barack Obama. The law allowed individuals who faced pay discrimination to seek rectification under federal anti-discrimination laws. It also clarified that wage discrimination based on age, religion, national origin, race, sex, and disability would “accrue” every time an employee received a paycheck deemed to be discriminatory. It was the first bill President Obama signed and it became one of several federal laws designed to protect worker's rights.

Prior to that, in 1963, the Equal Paycheck Act, signed by President John F. Kennedy, made it illegal for employers to pay women less for performing the same jobs as their male counterparts. However, it had several loopholes that needed to be addressed. Then Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sex.

The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 added to those prior acts by reversing the Supreme Court decision that upheld the short statute of limitations for wage discrimination claims that had killed Lilly Ledbetter’s case.

In 2014 the Paycheck Fairness Act was first introduced in the Senate by former Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), essentially as an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, but it failed to be adopted.

In January this year Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) introduced the Paycheck Fairness Act of 2021. It passed in the House in April. This bill addresses wage discrimination on the basis of sex, which includes pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics

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A requirement of the Paycheck Fairness Act is that employers must provide detailed information to the federal government that ensures the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Department of Labor have the necessary tools to enforce laws against pay discrimination, including employment-related data from employers analyzed by race, gender, and employees’ national origins.

The Paycheck Fairness Act also prevents retaliation for discussing salary with colleagues and prohibits employers from asking about a person’s salary history. In addition, it allows workers to participate in class action lawsuits that challenge systemic pay discrimination.

That’s all well and good, but why are women still earning 82 cents on the dollar (if they’re white) compared to men and what are the ramifications?

The first thing to understand is that the gender pay gap exists in every occupational category even when accounting for educational levels, skills, and worker’s choices. Assumptions like the ones men and managers often make are a big part of the problem.

For example, one assumption is that women choose lower level or lower paying work because they are mothers who bear the brunt of responsibility in meeting children’s needs. But as the Covid crisis revealed, the lack of childcare in this country leaves women little choice.

Such assumptions ignore the underlying causes of workplace discrimination and often lead to women being pushed out of their chosen career fields. Some of those underlying causes, in addition to not having affordable childcare, are the lack of adequate parental leave policies, flexible working conditions, paid family and medical leave, which most industrialized nations offer.

Importantly, advocates for equal pay underscore the fact that pay discrimination occurs in almost every field of work. Women, who are over-represented in the lowest paid industries, take the hardest hit. Collectively, women lose hundreds of thousands of dollars annually because of the pay gap driven by gender and race.

That loss has real-time, long-term consequences. Underpaid workers, primarily women, suffer lowered social security benefits, retirement pensions, and personal savings, which is why so many female elders find it difficult to survive with dignity in their later years.

The Biden administration understands this dilemma and has a committed focus on pay equity, a particular interest of Vice President Kamala Harris. Major corporations will soon be dealing with multi-million-dollar settlements in class action equal pay claims, and employers are likely to face big changes and a lot of scrutiny with regard to pay equity, not just around gender, but also around race. In addition to federal efforts, states are beginning to step up their equal pay laws too.

All that bodes well, but as we know, things move at a snail’s pace when it comes to enacting and enforcing legislation. Until there is true equality in wages and salaries, women are among many people who continue to wait for fairness in the workplace. For them, 82 cents on the dollar remains inadequate, and clearly insulting.

Staring at America's Dystopian Future

In 1940, Alice Duer Miller wrote a beautiful epic poem called “The White Cliffs.” An American who had married a British man just prior to World War I, she soon lost her husband serving a country that wasn’t hers. As she penned the poem, she faced the possibility of losing her son to World War II, again for a country not her own.  Yet, her last poetic lines are these: “I am American bred. I have seen much to hate here – much to forgive. But in a world where England is finished and dead, I do not wish to live.”

Imagine loving a country that is not your own so much.  Then consider not loving your own country anymore because it has dragged you into a very dark place, a place of fear and disillusion, a place growing more dystopian by the day.

In the space of just a few days, we have watched a Congressperson promise to shut down media organizations if they complied with legal subpoenas, we saw a state pass draconian laws that inhibit voting rights in dramatic, disturbing and undemocratic ways, and then we watched as that same state ignored the constitutional right to abortion granted to women in 1973. On top of that, the state, Texas, granted vigilante rights with financial incentives to any citizen who didn’t want to grant women that right.   

Just let the idea of private bounty hunters sink in. They might be husbands or boyfriends, angry neighbors, relatives, friends, pastors, people who think pregnancy by rape or incest is not so bad, folks who hate the idea of abortion but especially like the thought of a $10,000 reward. Some may be devout, but they are all devious and despicable. Over what ideologies might other states consider employing them?

Then came the most stunning blow of all in the form of the unbelievable and terrifying silence of an overwhelmingly conservative and politicized Supreme Court in the face of Texas’s deeply dangerous, and replicable law; a law so hideously and overtly fascist, a law wreaking with the stench of secret police in autocracies and dictatorships like those of Italy’s Mussolini, Romania’s Ceausescu, and today’s Vickor Orban in Hungary. How can any American not be sickened by that level of betrayal?

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of four dissenting justices, unleashed her fury and spoke for many of us in her minority opinion: “The court’s order is stunning,” she wrote. “Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand. The court has rewarded the state’s effort to delay federal review of a plainly unconstitutional statute, enacted in disregard of the court’s precedents, through procedural entanglements of the state’s own creation. The court should not be so content to ignore its constitutional obligations to protect not only the rights of women, but also the sanctity of its precedents and of the rule  of law.”

How, one must ask, does the court overrule fifty years of precedent – a value deeply held by conservatives - in its race to allow the invasion of women’s lives, a question former Representative Claire McCaskill asked in rage when commenting on MSNBC. How quickly will states rush to replicate this precedent?

In a statement that could have been more strongly supportive of women’s right to privacy and agency, President Biden warned that the nearly complete ban on abortion in Texas will cause “unconstitutional chaos.” It also begs the question, how will the Supreme Court rule on other cases that seek to curb abortion rights nationally?

While civil rights advocates sound alarm bells about worrisome implications for future laws, social justice and human rights opinion leaders like Michael Moore and others suggest the situation has reached crisis proportions such that terms like “conservative” and “evangelical” in reference to right wing radicals are no longer appropriate because they normalize groups that have essentially become America’s Taliban.

That term may be offensive to some, but in the face of an ever-growing political climate of oppression, exclusion and violence, and a Congress or Supreme Court that increasingly embraces ideas antithetical to democracy and proceeds to exercise the power to curb it, surely the time has come to recognize the imminent and very real threat before us.  That threat is nothing short of an undemocratic and dystopian future in which we join in the despair of so many others around the globe.

It’s a world in which we may still have a choice: To deny what is happening with frightening speed, or to ignore what is bearing down upon us, only to find ourselves back in Plato’s allegorical cave, in which we all sit staring at a blank wall, our backs to the light, believing that is simply the way we must live.

As Alice Duer Miller might have said, in such a world, where freedom and hope are finished and dead, I do not wish to live.

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River, Vt. 

What is Title 42 and Why Should It Be Rescinded?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terrorist Plots and Truthful Testimonies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Broken Courts Mean Battered Lives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Do We Mean When We Talk About Human Rights?

What Do We Mean When We Talk About Human Rights?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Re-Victimization of Sexual Assault Survivors

The Re-victimization of Sexual Assault Survivors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Much Longer Before We End the Massacre of Innocents?

As I watched the flag-draped coffin of the late Billy Evans, the second Capital Police officer to lie in state, descend from the Capital steps, I wept – and wondered how much longer we would find ourselves living in a country that has become so violent.

As I saw the photograph of the deceased Duane Wright holding his one-year old child and heard the wails of his aggrieved aunt, I also wondered how much longer we will go on living in such a violent country.

As I heard witness after witness in the trial of Derek Chauvin, charged with killing George Floyd, I asked myself again:  How much longer must we live with the massacre of black people, mostly men, by aggressive, out of control, incipiently violent police?  

And when I read David Gray’s stunning Facebook post I wondered again how much longer such hideous racist behavior would prevail?

Gray’s post was about his day, one in which he would take all manner of precautions to ensure that he, his wife and his child would make it through another day without being shot by police.  He would, he said, not take public transport. He would not hang an air freshener in his car, and he would double check his car registration status. He would be sure his license plates were visible, he would carefully follow all traffic rules, keep the radio down, forgo stopping at a fast food restaurant, forego prayer, and simply hope to God that his car didn’t break down.

His wife would take another set of precautions when she picked their young child up from daycare. They would not play in a park or go for an ice cream. Once the child was in bed, neither of his parents would leave the house to run errands or jog. “We will just sit and try not to breathe and not to sleep,” Gray wrote. And in everything he and his wife would do or not do, there was a name attached: Lt. Caron Nazario, Philandro Castro, Sandra Bland, Rev. Clementa Pickney, Elijah McCain, Tamir Rice, Ahmaud Argery, Breonna Taylor, and many more because of what had happened to each one of them.

But it isn’t only police violence that makes the burning question linger in my brain and bruise my heart. How much longer, I ask myself over and over again, must we live with so much violence that results in the massacre of the innocents?

Several days before I wrote this commentary a woman in Virginia was killed by a stray bullet. The same day eight people were also wounded by gunfire in a separate shooting, and a mother of six was fatally wounded in North Carolina while on an anniversary trip with her husband, shot in the head in a drive-by shooting in an act of road rage.

How can it be that we live in a country so barbaric that you take your chances just going grocery shopping, attending school, showing up at work, being on vacation, having a night out for drinks or dinner, or standing in your own backyard? How much longer can we live like that?

How did we become a banana republic in which our own house of parliament could be stormed by insurrectionists calling for the death of elected officials and a state congresswoman could get arrested for gently knocking on the governor’s door as he welcomed Jim Crow home? How did we reach the point where Asian Americans are beaten on the streets of America and trans kids are denied health care?  

Gun violence is not only a physical threat. It’s a public health emergency that threatens our emotional well-being and fills us with anxiety. Some of us get emotionally crazy. I actually ask my adult children to text me when they get home from being on the road, walking in the dark, jogging in the park, or working late at night.

According to the Gun Violence Archive as reported by the Washington Post, in 2020, gun violence killed nearly 20,000 Americans, more than any other year in at least two decades. The U.S. experienced the highest one-year increase in homicides since it began keeping records last year, and large cities saw a 30 percent spike in gun violence. Gunshot injuries also rose dramatically, to nearly 40,000.

This year, following the January 6th attack on the Capital, over two million guns were sold in January alone. That’s an 80 percent increase in gun sales and the third highest monthly total on record. All of this while the outdated Second Amendment is invoked in the 21st century, hundreds of years since muskets went out fashion and military weapons became vogue.

Writer Mary McCarthy once said, “In violence, we forget who we are.”  America, it seems to me, need not remember who we are so much; that would reveal the “400 year lie” that current writers admonish us to remember. Instead, America desperately needs to think about what we have become. Only then can the country heal, reinvent itself, and emerge from the darkness that is rapidly enveloping us.  Let us begin with a question: How do we stop the massacre of the innocents?

Enablers, Collaborators, and a Mussolini Moment

It started with a ride down an escalator. And it’s been escalating ever since. From the first cries of rapists invading our country to dog whistles like “Stand back, stand by” Donald Trump’s dangerous delusions of power and control have brought this country to the brink of collapse, and everyone who has allowed that to happen is an enabler and a collaborator.

From White House cronies who share in Trump’s power fantasies and who are incapable of running a government especially  during a crisis, to his equally evil children, to Republicans in the Senate led by Mitch McConnell, to America’s attorney general, to the doctors at Walter Reed who agreed to lie for the president and to sign non-disclosure agreements thereby violating their Hippocratic oath, to the ICE bullies who separated infants and children from their parents and put them in concentration camps, to the heads of the CDC and FDA who caved after White House pressure, they are all responsible for the rise of autocracy, and increased violence.

They are also responsible for militias that now feel emboldened in their militarism and for bad cops who mercilessly shoot to death Black and Brown men and women. They are responsible for the resurgent KKK and they are responsible for federal courts being packed with ultra-conservative, lifetime judges, as well as for a Supreme Court that is eager to see the original Handmaid added to their ranks. In short, they are responsible for the destruction of democracy.

They are why we are on the edge of a truly great depression, and why America has lost its standing in the world. They are responsible for the disasters in our health, education, and infrastructure systems, for the filth in our water and the comeback of chemicals in our food. And they are responsible for the deaths of over 100,000 Americans who died needlessly because the Super Spreader in Chief just didn’t give a damn.

Indeed, they are responsible for the Mussolini Moment on the balcony of our dictator’s palace, and they, like him, bear some of the guilt for negligent homicide and crimes against humanity.

They are also examples of “the banality of evil” that philosopher Hannah Arendt warned us about when she reported on the trial of Adolph Eichmann after the Holocaust. Eichmann was, he said, simply following orders. 

So were the White House staff, the Secret Service men who vow to give their life for the president, but not in a hermetically sealed vehicle, the employees of government agencies who didn’t speak up or quit their jobs in order to save this country, the business moguls who didn’t end their major donations to a corrupt fraud, Fox News who wouldn’t stand up to a lunatic when he blamed everyone else for our disasters and incited violence. So too are the voters who inexplicably still stand with their man even though everything he does hurts them the most.

Every one of these people is the banality of evil personified. And every one of them became what Arendt called a “leaf blowing in the whirlwind of time.” Now every one of them bears responsibility for what lies ahead for us all.

Of course, some brave souls did stand up to the president. And everyone of them did it knowing that they would be punished mightily.  Think about Col. Vindman, and the others who gave testimony to Congress, the lawyers and doctors who wrote letters and petitions, and the activists who marched and were willing to suffer the consequences, including injury, arrest and jail time. They are our national heroes in this moment, the ones for whom new monuments should be built when this nightmare ends.

As for the rest of us, we must remember and own the fact that a great malignancy metastasized within our national body and many of us let it happen. We watched it ravish us and slowly terrorize us. We let it kill people we knew and loved. We looked the other way, always sure that it couldn’t get worse.

Now we need to understand that the “silence of one good man” can spell disaster for all good people. Each of us who remained passive as our impending disaster continued might have been the one “good man” who didn’t act, didn’t speak out, didn’t resist, while men like Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump insisted that infants be ripped from their mothers’ breasts. Men who didn’t care that innocent people were dying from gun violence, a plague, hunger, and violence, which they fostered. Men who didn’t care about pre-existing conditions or elders who rely on Social Security to survive. Men who didn’t care that women would be catapulted back to the Dark Ages.

Now the question is why didn’t we stop them sooner? Why didn’t we act in bigger, more effective, timely ways? Why did we let them continue for four devastating years, like the blind, chained inhabitants of Plato’s allegorical cave who were unable to escape their isolation because, trapped by ignorance and darkness, they couldn’t know the truth?

Can we now remove our blinders and see clearly the dawning truth in time to break our silence, reject the banality of evil, refuse to be a leaf blowing in the whirlwind of time?

What awaits us if not?

                                                            # # #

Standing Up to Sterilization, Eugenics, and the Abuse of Women

“Keep your hands off my uterus!” That’s an often-repeated placard and plea at women’s marches I’ve attended over the past forty years. In the U.S. and abroad, it’s a common, continuing refrain because government sanctioning of abuse of women’s bodies has been occurring since well before the Second Wave women’s movement exposed it in the 1970s.

I worked in the women’s health movement then alongside Our Bodies, Ourselves and other national organizations. One of the myriad issues we dealt with was the sterilization of poor, black and brown women.  We helped raise awareness of the medical abuse of Puerto Rican women that resulted in a third of women of reproductive age being sterilized for decades at clinics often funded by the U.S. government. In the 1960s women in Puerto Rico were also the subjects of birth control pill trials, without their consent. Those who became pregnant on placebos were offered no help, financial or otherwise, and were forced to carry resulting pregnancies to term.  

Another frequent abuse women of color faced was the lack of real informed consent. It can hardly be considered consent when you are asked to sign a paper in English and your only language is Spanish, or you are asked by the nice doctor if you’d like to stop having babies after you’ve just endured a long, arduous labor.

There is a long, ugly history of abusing and using women’s bodies by way of coercion and for experimentation. Dr. J. Marion Sims, know as the father of gynecology, practiced medicine in Alabama from 1835 to 1849. During that time, he conducted hideous experiments, without any anesthesia, on enslaved women he had purchased in the 1840s. At an annual convention of the American Public Health Association in the late 1970s his portrait was still on display – until enraged women demanded that it be taken down and never shown again.

Affluent white women were often subjected to having their ovaries removed in the second half of the 19th century if they were deemed to be overly sexual. This practice coincided with the belief that if women used their minds too eagerly, their uteruses would atrophy, denying them the God-given role of child bearers.

Medical abuse was further embraced in the early 20th century when eugenics was popular, with the growth of programs that coerced women to be sterilized if they did not willingly consent. As Alexandra Stern, author of Eugenic Nation, points out, sterilization was viewed as part of a “necessary public health intervention aimed at protecting society from deleterious genes…” This mindset prevailed late into the century. My friend’s daughter, who was mentally impaired, was subjected to sterilization in the 1970s as part of her care plan.

Some states, like California, passed laws that resulted in thousands of residents being sterilized for decades (including some men). Even as late as 2010 the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had sterilized 150 women in four years. Richard Nixon, a Californian, significantly increased Medicaid funding for sterilization of poor Americans with an emphasis on people of color.

Let us remember, medical historians remind us, that eugenics policies in the U.S. aimed at those considered too mentally defective to reproduce, are credited with becoming models for Nazi Germany.

One of the saddest stories of a black woman being sterilized during her childbearing years is that of civil rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer. She had a hysterectomy without her consent in 1961 while undergoing minor surgery for removal of a benign tumor. She spoke about her experience as a Black woman who had been subjected to what was known as a “Mississippi appendectomy,” when women were taken to local clinics and sterilized.

Now comes Dawn Wooten, a courageous nurse, who revealed that women in an ICE detention center in Georgia, run by a private prison company, had an outside doctor perform hysterectomies on them when they complained about non-threatening reproductive health issues. Many of the women who experienced major surgery awoke to find that they had had their reproductive organs all or partially removed without their prior knowledge or consent. Most were still of childbearing age and most had no idea why they had undergone the procedure.

Pauline Binam, 30, was one of them. She was being quickly deported by ICE to Cameroon, which she left at age two. Binam, now 30, was on the tarmac when members of Congress including Rep. Shirley Jackson Lee intervened to keep her in the U.S.  Binam's lawyer has said her client thought she was getting a routine procedure last year, but "when she woke up from surgery, the doctor informed her that he had to remove one of her fallopian tubes."

Imagine how hard it will be to find records of the 17 surgeries that have now been reported.  Think about how many abused women will be rushed onto airplanes and deported so they can’t bear witness. Then try to understand what it feels like to have undergone surgery that renders you unable to have a child because you are young, poor, and unwanted.

It boggles the mind, and makes you want to weep.

                                                                        # # #

Elayne Clift writes about women’s health from Saxtons River, Vt.  www.elayne-clift.com

“Keep your hands off my uterus!” That’s an often-repeated placard and plea at women’s marches I’ve attended over the past forty years. In the U.S. and abroad, it’s a common, continuing refrain because government sanctioning of abuse of women’s bodies has been occurring since well before the Second Wave women’s movement exposed it in the 1970s.

I worked in the women’s health movement then alongside Our Bodies, Ourselves and other national organizations. One of the myriad issues we dealt with was the sterilization of poor, black and brown women.  We helped raise awareness of the medical abuse of Puerto Rican women that resulted in a third of women of reproductive age being sterilized for decades at clinics often funded by the U.S. government. In the 1960s women in Puerto Rico were also the subjects of birth control pill trials, without their consent. Those who became pregnant on placebos were offered no help, financial or otherwise, and were forced to carry resulting pregnancies to term.  

Another frequent abuse women of color faced was the lack of real informed consent. It can hardly be considered consent when you are asked to sign a paper in English and your only language is Spanish, or you are asked by the nice doctor if you’d like to stop having babies after you’ve just endured a long, arduous labor.

There is a long, ugly history of abusing and using women’s bodies by way of coercion and for experimentation. Dr. J. Marion Sims, know as the father of gynecology, practiced medicine in Alabama from 1835 to 1849. During that time, he conducted hideous experiments, without any anesthesia, on enslaved women he had purchased in the 1840s. At an annual convention of the American Public Health Association in the late 1970s his portrait was still on display – until enraged women demanded that it be taken down and never shown again.

Affluent white women were often subjected to having their ovaries removed in the second half of the 19th century if they were deemed to be overly sexual. This practice coincided with the belief that if women used their minds too eagerly, their uteruses would atrophy, denying them the God-given role of child bearers.

Medical abuse was further embraced in the early 20th century when eugenics was popular, with the growth of programs that coerced women to be sterilized if they did not willingly consent. As Alexandra Stern, author of Eugenic Nation, points out, sterilization was viewed as part of a “necessary public health intervention aimed at protecting society from deleterious genes…” This mindset prevailed late into the century. My friend’s daughter, who was mentally impaired, was subjected to sterilization in the 1970s as part of her care plan.

Some states, like California, passed laws that resulted in thousands of residents being sterilized for decades (including some men). Even as late as 2010 the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had sterilized 150 women in four years. Richard Nixon, a Californian, significantly increased Medicaid funding for sterilization of poor Americans with an emphasis on people of color.

Let us remember, medical historians remind us, that eugenics policies in the U.S. aimed at those considered too mentally defective to reproduce, are credited with becoming models for Nazi Germany.

One of the saddest stories of a black woman being sterilized during her childbearing years is that of civil rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer. She had a hysterectomy without her consent in 1961 while undergoing minor surgery for removal of a benign tumor. She spoke about her experience as a Black woman who had been subjected to what was known as a “Mississippi appendectomy,” when women were taken to local clinics and sterilized.

Now comes Dawn Wooten, a courageous nurse, who revealed that women in an ICE detention center in Georgia, run by a private prison company, had an outside doctor perform hysterectomies on them when they complained about non-threatening reproductive health issues. Many of the women who experienced major surgery awoke to find that they had had their reproductive organs all or partially removed without their prior knowledge or consent. Most were still of childbearing age and most had no idea why they had undergone the procedure.

Pauline Binam, 30, was one of them. She was being quickly deported by ICE to Cameroon, which she left at age two. Binam, now 30, was on the tarmac when members of Congress including Rep. Shirley Jackson Lee intervened to keep her in the U.S.  Binam's lawyer has said her client thought she was getting a routine procedure last year, but "when she woke up from surgery, the doctor informed her that he had to remove one of her fallopian tubes."

Imagine how hard it will be to find records of the 17 surgeries that have now been reported.  Think about how many abused women will be rushed onto airplanes and deported so they can’t bear witness. Then try to understand what it feels like to have undergone surgery that renders you unable to have a child because you are young, poor, and unwanted.

It boggles the mind, and makes you want to weep.

                                                                        # # #

Elayne Clift writes about women’s health from Saxtons River, Vt. 

"Where is the Poor People's Voice?"

That was a question put to a TV reporter by Rev. William J. Barber II after the Democratic National Convention last month. Barber, founder of the Moral Monday movement and now a notable political activist, is President of Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.  His is a voice and a vision to be reckoned with as he calls for concern grounded in morality for the poor and working poor.

 Why, Rev. Barber asks, are poor and low-income people never targeted in Democratic ads? Why are their issues never talked about, despite the fact that they are clearly a political force by virtue of the fact they represent an estimated 25 percent of people in this country?

 These were questions I also asked after the Democrat’s virtual convention. Why, I wondered, did we need to hear yet again from Bill Clinton, John Kerry and John Kasich?  Where was a real-life person of situational or generational poverty who could speak to the reality of their lives and their families’ struggles?

 Rev. Barber’s answer was that poor people are ignored because they don’t donate money to political campaigns, and they don’t vote. Why should they, Barber explains, when they feel invisible and not cared about? That’s a pretty damning statement about a party that claims to care about everyone, but can’t move beyond talking about the “middle class,” and (mainly) white working folks.

 It’s time for Dems to get it: When a quarter of Americans are poor or low-income workers who can’t make ends meet, can’t access healthcare or a decent education, and can’t make it through a pandemic it’s unacceptable to ignore or exclude them. We need to remember that poverty is not a dirty word. There is no reason to be afraid or ashamed of impoverished people as a constituency, no matter their race or ethnicity, but there is every reason to acknowledge that they exist as an underclass in one of the the world’s richest countries. As human beings they deserve the dignity and attention so readily proffered to other Americans.

 That calls for an increased awareness among political leaders, and the public, of the lives poor and low-income people live.

 Being poor and being in poverty are two different things, as Latonya Walker, a social worker in Detroit points out on her blog. While being poor is an economic state that involves dependency on a system of care, often for generations, poverty is a psychological mindset that derives from the situation one finds themselves in due to a life changing event. Divorce, illness, loss of work, or a death in the family can lead to homelessness, the need for government assistance, or generalized instability. If prolonged beyond one generation, it can be difficult to escape.

 The effects of generational poverty are chronic, resulting in continued low education levels, inadequate childcare, low workplace skills, health issues, high incarceration rates and high infant mortality rates. Homelessness and substance abuse also become chronic. It’s heartbreaking that a quarter of American children are living in low-income families that have at least one working parent who because of low hourly wages and few if any job benefits, like health insurance, paid sick or vacation leave, are unlikely to escape the effects of generational poverty.

 That’s why it’s important for political leaders to take a focused, holistic, and humane approach to well-funded public policies that address in practical and meaningful ways the need for improved, accessible education programs for both children and adults, universal healthcare, living wages, ending mass incarceration, and protecting voting rights. They could be helped in that effort by inviting the voices and the aspirations of poor people and people living in poverty to be heard and understood. In other words, they need to put a human face on the pressing issues of poverty so that they, and all Americans, can see those faces, learn from their experiences, appreciate the challenges of their lives, and act to relieve the constraints that keep them impoverished, afraid, and without hope for a better life. 

 The fact is, the poor and nearly poor are a formidable force and they are organizing to vote in this crucial election. They have the power to flip election results in more than a dozen states. It makes absolutely no sense to ignore them if the Democratic party is serious about economic security. If Democrats truly stand for morality and justice with the force and conviction that Rev. Barber does, they need to listen, and learn, from those who may inherit the earth in biblical terms, but who have precious little to be content with in these troubling times.

 As Rev. Barber says so eloquently, “Our deepest moral traditions point to equal protection under the law, the desire for peace within and among nations, the dignity of all people, and the responsibility to care for our common home.”

                                                            # # #

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

Will Burkhas Make a Comeback in Afghanistan or Can Women Prevail?

Last May, when militants in Afghanistan killed new mothers and their babies in a Kabul maternity hospital, the world’s women shuddered. Afghan women mourned, wept, and worried.  Women in Afghanistan have borne the brunt of that country’s brutality in ways few people can imagine. Now worries about what comes next in the face of an incomplete, drawn out peace agreement loom large for the females who live there.

 The U.S. and the notorious Taliban signed a preliminary peace agreement in February that aimed at ending two decades of war, but things have not gone smoothly. Insurgent activity added to problems related to power-sharing between the Afghan government and the Taliban, with the Taliban demanding release of thousands of prisoners as part of the deal.

 For women fears of what might happen emanate from memories of what life was like during the Taliban rule, when art, culture, education and women suffered from horrific repression. Now the Taliban is asserting again that girls’ education must end at sixth grade, with one leader stating, according to The New York Times, that “until an Islamic system is established our jihad will continue till doomsday.”

 It wasn’t always like this in Afghanistan. In the 1920s things looked hopeful for women there. The king and his wife worked hard to improve women’s lives, advocating against the veil and for greater freedom for females. Conservatives pushed back but things were relatively good. In 1964 the constitution gave women the right to vote and to enter politics.

 All that came to a halt when the Taliban gained power in 1996, enforcing the brutal oppression of women symbolized by blue burkhas and stoning deaths. While some rights for women were achieved after the Taliban defeat in 2001, Afghan women worry now that the peace talks will bargain away many of those rights, which included girls’ education and women’s right to work. Post-Taliban, a 2015 National Action Plan offered soothing rhetorical assurances that went nowhere given the commitment to “maintain cultural and religious codes.”

 As Guardian reporter Emma Graham-Harrison wrote last year, “A generation of women have grown up in Afghanistan since the Taliban were toppled.  But many of those who have guided the country through profound change . . . are haunted by memories of their brutal, misogynist rule.” Those groundbreaking women included educators, journalists and politicians, many of whom suffered hideous physical and emotional abuse.

 One of the most pressing issues for women leaders in Afghanistan now is that women will not have a legitimate seat at the tables of decision-making, and that only selective women will be half-heartedly consulted. At a conference attended by 700 women in Kabul last year representing 34 provinces, fears were expressed about the Taliban being brought back into government, renewing the oppression of women and girls. Afghan’s first lady Rula Ghani urged the women to express their views publicly, but her husband’s speech didn’t address the issue of women’s rights under a new government.

 According to a report in Pass Blue, a blog offering independent coverage of the United Nations, “the participation of Afghan women without methodical, sustained and substantive engagement in a peace settlement has the potential to harm them, not help them.” As one Afghan woman put it, “we’ve seen firsthand how well-intentioned efforts sometimes promote progress for Afghan women while quietly failing them.”

 For example, a multi-year U.S.-funded program to teach computer programming to women in Afghan villages ended without funds and no real opportunities having been provided, confirming for village men that educating women was useless.

 Intra-Afghan peace talks a year ago included women and received accolades from international media, but Afghan women were not impressed. “It was mere tokenism,” a woman who participated said. “Women on the delegation were called two days beforehand, leaving women to appear unorganized and unprepared.”

 As Afghan journalist Mariam Atahi told Pass Blue, “There have been lots of conferences across Afghanistan to see what women wanted in rural and urban areas . . . Women have worked to form the narrative on women’s right, including efforts to change the interpretation of Islamic law implemented by the Taliban in rural areas they control, but these activists were sidelined from the peace negotiations.”

 Najia Nasim, Executive Director of Women for Afghan Women, the largest women’s rights organization in Afghanistan, told me recently that “Afghan women insist on an inclusive intra-Afghan process where we can meaningfully participate to address institutional mechanisms of peace and amplify the diverse voices of women from around the country.” Women’s omission from the peace process, she said, “inhibits our ability to convey our unique experiences, grievances, priorities, and hopes for Afghanistan’s future, and to shape post-conflict institutions and broader society.” 

 Afghan women need to be assured a seat at the table where they can participate substantively in political discourse, monitor problems and progress, and insure accountability on behalf of the country’s women. Nothing less than that is acceptable in an environment where the Taliban may well be at the table with them.

Who We Are, Who We Could Be

“This is not who we are.” “We are better than this.” 

I can’t bear to hear those platitudes from people who are blind, lazy, or have no sense of American history.

This is who we are, and who we have been since Columbus stood on American soil. Since then Native American peoples have been oppressed and the oppression continues.  Forced into soul-destroying reservations, the 17th to 20th century Indian Wars led to the Wounded Knee massacre where thousands of Native Americans were slaughtered. The Trail of Tears march that forced native people off their land killed more than 15,000 first Americans. Today Customs and Border Protection contractors tear through sacred tribal sites destroying archeological treasures that represent America’s history and culture to build a wall for keeping brown people out of this land.

This is who we are, and who we have been since lynching terrorized black Americans into submission and an inferior caste system. Post-Civil War to the 1950s, African Americans living in the south were subjected to unimaginable physical torture that usually ended with being hung and set on fire. Jim Crow laws legalized racial segregation to ensure African American’s couldn’t vote, hold decent jobs, or get a good education.

In 1921 black residents in Tulsa, Oklahoma were driven from their homes while their entire community was burnt to the ground. The crime was so effectively silenced that few people today know about it.

The infamous Tuskegee Study subjected black WWII airmen to syphilis without their consent so that researchers could conduct experimental treatments. None of the 399 men infected with syphilis received penicillin even though it proved to be an effective treatment.

This is who we still are, as police continue murdering black men and women and bludgeoning peaceful protesters standing up for justice in the names of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, and multitudes more.

But fragile though they are, there are signs of who we can be in the face of dictatorial repression. Mass protests, along with global solidarity from people of all ages, races, and economic strata willing to risk Covid in the name of justice, offer hope for another kind of “new normal” as we move forward in these deeply difficult, terribly troubling times.

Police taking a knee and line dancing with protesters gives me hope. Children, black and white, singing and chanting “No Justice, No Peace” gives me hope. Local leaders, like the mayor of Washington who painted the street with “Black Lives Matter” in defiance of a would-be monarch in her city give me hope, as do those who are calling racial injustice an emergency that requires ending police funding and forging new paths to saner, safer policing.

Organizations ranging from local theaters to community foundations to businesses publicly apologizing and pledging reform in hiring, training, and intolerance of racial injustice gives me hope. People learning about the history and violence of institutional racism gives me hope. Bad cops getting charged with felonies gives me hope. Whistleblowers and those willing to forfeit their careers in the name of justice give me hope. Political and military figures who say Enough is Enough! Give me hope. Rev. Al Sharpton’s eulogy of George Floyd gives me hope.

Recent polls like those conducted by Monmouth University and CBS News give me hope. The Monmouth poll showed that 76 percent, including 71 percent of white people, called racism and discrimination a “big problem” in the U.S., an increase of 26 percent since 2015.  Almost 60 percent of Americans see protesters’ anger as fully justified. And the CBS poll revealed that almost 60 percent of Americans believe police officers are more likely to treat black people unfairly than to mistreat whites.

I’m not saying the change we urgently need will be fast, easy or unanimous.  But we are at a bend in the road, because we are on the brink of disaster. We can no longer deny, disregard or ignore that reality. We know now that there is no justice, no peace without racial justice and that demands that we understand the connections between race, class, poverty, discrimination, i.e. “intersectionality.”  Black writers and leaders like James Baldwin and Angela Davis and Martin Luther King, Jr. understood that before many of us did. Today no one understand it better than African Americans who still can’t get a good education, a decent job, or a safe roof over their heads and who worry every day about driving, jogging, living while black.

“What’s really driving home for me right now, what this moment is teaching me, what the death of George Floyd and all the other losses teaches us is that there is no justice anywhere for anyone until there is racial justice. That’s the starting point, the nexus for change,” a friend wrote me.

Her comment reminded me of another crucial moment, and movement, that demanded sustained change. The women’s movement’s starting point, its nexus for change came with the realization that unless women had agency over their own bodies, there would be no justice, no equality, no self-determined future. The movement had measurable results and it’s not finished yet.

Still, we can hope that the hymn is right: “Once [we were] lost, but now [we’re] found, now we see.” As Rev. Sharpton said, the time has come.

The Pain of Feeling Other's Pain

More and more I avoid watching the news. I closed my Twitter account ages ago and I rarely visit Instagram, now more political than picturesque. I recoil at the thought of opening Facebook.

 Every day it’s one sad, upsetting, outrageous story after another. Innocent black youth murdered by police. Armed men with Nazi flags entering a state capital building. Newspaper headlines screaming “Syrian Children Freeze to Death. Bombs Rain Down,” while in an Afghan maternity hospital women and newborns are gunned down, and in America refugees seeking asylum are given a choice by ICE: Separate from your children or remain in detention indefinitely.

 All the cruelty makes me weep, and reflect that we can drown in the agonies and sorrows of our time - or we can choose to act.  I empathize with those who agonize, and I admire those who act.

 Recently a book inspired me to act. It is called The Book of Rosy: A Mother’s Story of Separation at the Border to be published this month. It’s a well-told tale by and about two remarkable women and how they connected with each other. It is also the story of an amazing grassroots organization and the Latin American women they have reunited with their children after being separated at the U.S. border. 

Co-author Rosayra Pablo Cruz crossed the border with her two sons because she had survived an attempt on her life and her older son was subsequently threatened.  Separated from her sons upon arriving in the U.S, she was sent to detention in Arizona while her sons were put in foster care in New York. With the help of a grassroots organization called Immigrant Families Together, Rosy, who now lives in New York, was finally reunited with her sons months later. In February she was granted asylum.

Julie Schwietert Collazo, a bi-lingual writer, editor and translator is the founder of the organization that helped Rosy. Dedicated to reuniting and supporting immigrant families separated at the US/Mexico border, the organization’s story is extraordinary.

It began with Yeni Gonzalez, an immigrant mother from Guatemala whose three children were transported by ICE agents to New York. When she was unable to pay a $7,500 bond, a group of American mothers led by Julie, who heard Yeni’s story on NPR, quickly mobilized to raise the bond money. Then they arranged to transport Yeni safely, state by state, to New York. There she was reunited with her children and Immigrant Families Together (IFT) was born. To date it has raised over a million dollars and paid over 100 bonds.

 Rosy’s story is stunningly moving as she describes the magnitude and the impact of the human tragedy taking place still. She shares the horrific journey north this way: “The trip is long enough for your stomach to struggle to accept food and water when you finally have access to them again. … The journey is long enough for you to make choices that, when you think about them later, fill you with disgust, like eating mangoes full of worms or drinking dirty water from a creek where cattle stand to cool off. You grip the mango with both hands… and you’re so ravenous, you don’t even avoid the worms.”

 Of the agony of detention, she writes, “In my short time here, I have seen women go crazy with hysteria. They curl up on their bunks and refuse to leave their cells. They cry without ceasing, as if their hoodies are bottomless wells of tears. I have seen them shut down, becoming shells of who they once were. I have seen them lose their will to fight, their will to go on. … I ache for my two boys, of course, but if I let my tears flow, I will become one of those women, hanging on the edge of her own being, and then, what will I be able to do to get my boys, who have been taken from me, back into my arms?”

 Her description of the icebox detention cells is as chilling as the cells themselves. “Months from now, Rosy writes, “when there are news stories about children dying in the icebox I won’t be surprised.”

 Concluding her story, Rosy says, “This is the immigrant experience I wish people could see, not because it’s my experience, but because it’s the story of so many of us, coming to the United States to escape violence and to build lives in which we will contribute to society. … We want to be part of your American dream. We want to help you realize it. We want to share it with you.”

 Rosy’s story is particularly compelling because Donald Trump, on advice of his revered advisor Stephen Miller, has closed the border with Mexico indefinitely, using Covid-19 as the excuse, when it’s really meant to end immigration altogether.

 I’ve been wanting to go to the border to help for a long time, so pre-Covid I contacted Julie. She led me to organizations that still need volunteers. I don’t know when, but I hope to go after the pandemic ends. The detention centers will still be full, despite Covid deaths and deportations.

 How could I not choose to act after reading Rosy’s story and knowing the vital work of Immigrant Families Together?  

Imagining a New Normal

What will it be like, I wonder, when this terrible pandemic ends? Sure, we will never take toilet paper, pasta, or flour for granted again. We may feel less guilty about binge watching TV. Maybe we’ll even say “I love you” more often. But how will we be changed personally, professionally, culturally?  What lifestyle changes will we choose to make? What will “community” look like? Where will we work and how will we play?

No one knows for sure how we will be irrevocably altered by what has happened, but sociologists, psychologists, writers, and homespun “experts” are beginning to suggest answers to those questions, and to speculate on, or idealize, a remodeled future. Some of these people were invited to weigh in on a “new normal” in a recent article in Politico.

Communications professor Deborah Tannen thinks that having been so vulnerable to calamity will change us forever such that we will become compulsive hand washers who distance ourselves from others. Some analysts counter with the idea that we’ll be drawn together in real and virtual communities that we may not have considered joining or building before we experienced the loneliness of isolation. I agree with their assessment. I think we’ll become closer to family and friends, some of whom we’ve already re-connected with as a result of the pandemic.

Peter Coleman, a psychology professor, suggests that the shock of Covid-19 could put an end to the “escalating political and cultural polarization we’ve been trapped in, and could help us to change course toward greater national solidarity and functionality.” Sociologist Eric Klineberg adds that market-based models for social organization will fail. “When this ends,” he posits, “we will reorient our politics and make substantial new investments in public goods, especially for health and public services.” Given the blatant flaws in our health care system that have been exposed during the current crisis Americans will surely demand urgently needed healthcare reform, whether we call it Medicare for All or universal health care.

The digital lifestyle will likely take on new meaning and new tasks, as Sherry Turkle of MIT says. Whether it’s watching a performance, taking yoga or meditation classes, communicating with legislators, staying connected to long-distance friends and family, or telecommuting to work there are measurable benefits (and some drawbacks) that accompany such a change. One of the benefits is a cleaner environment, as demonstrated by the unpolluted air over cities like Beijing and Sao Paulo, Venetian canals no longer smelling like sewers, rivers running clean again, and the earth’s surface quieting down, which all attest to the benefits of living less frenetic lives and appreciating nature’s healing gifts.  

Two things that will make a comeback in the new normal are a renewed respect for science, and the realization that good governance along with ethical institutions are essential to a functioning democracy, writer Michiko Kakutani suggests. Applying lessons learned from the Trump administration’s failures, he believes people will realize that “government institutions need to be staffed with experts, and decisions need to be made through a reasoned policy process predicated on evidence-based science and geopolitical knowledge.  … We need to remember that public trust is crucial to governance, and that trust depends on telling the truth.”

Consistent with the urgency of good governance in this country is the recognition that we live in a globalized world.  Participation in international organizations, cooperation with other nations, and empathy for multitudes of people who live in conditions we cannot imagine, whether in shanty towns, refugee camps, detention centers, or on the streets has become essential. We can no longer avert our eyes when it comes to human frailty and suffering. 

In the U.S. we also can no longer live with the stark divide between an insanely wealthy one percent world while the 99 percent struggle to survive. As one pundit put it, change is inevitable and social justice actions will make the Occupy Wall Street movement look like child’s play.

There is another change that hasn’t received sufficient attention: More women are likely to be in leadership positions given their proven expertise in handling the pandemic and modeling leadership at all levels. Whether mayors, governors, community organizers, or prime ministers, women have proven their political and practical skills.

For example, New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s early actions, including shutting down tourism and imposing an immediate month-long lockdown, limited the spread of Covid-19 and the death toll dramatically. So did the actions of Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s president, who ordered all planes arriving from Wuhan to be inspected as soon as the outbreak there was identified.  She also opened an epidemic command center and ramped up production of personal protective equipment resulting in a stunningly low number of Covid-19 cases and deaths. These two examples help illustrate that women have proven their decision-making and managerial skills, especially in a crisis.

Julio Gambuto, writing for Cognoscenti, noted that “this is our chance to define a new version of normal, to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes us truly proud. …We can do it in our communities, in what organizations we support, what truths we tell. We can do it nationally by considering “to whom we give power.”

We need only look to New Zealand and Taiwan for models.

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

A Time to Mourn, A Time to March

In 1969, the largest antiwar protest in the United States took place in Washington, D.C. when an estimated half a million people gathered in the nation’s capital to plead for an end to the Vietnam War.  Demonstrations were held in other cities and towns across the country in the months that followed. I was at the one in New York City, where so many people participated it was impossible to duck into a storefront for relief from the crush of people who’d had enough. It was an amazing way to experience people power up close.

America has a long record of marches that changed history. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s African Americans, joined by many white activists, mobilized for a difficult and unprecedented journey to equality and human rights that continues today. It started with the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott after Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a while man and was followed by several marches and other actions, culminating with the 1963 March on Washington. That was the largest political rally for human rights ever seen in the U.S. with approximately 300,000 people converging on the Mall to protest for African Americans’ freedom. It was there that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. The event led to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Five years later, the Poor People’s Campaign, a multicultural movement, led to Resurrection City where tents were set up along the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. A major march occurred there called a Solidarity Day Rally for Jobs, Peace, and Freedom. It happened on June 19, 1968.

At about this time the women’s movement was coalescing and mobilizing to act for women’s rights and full equality, as their foremothers had done for the right to vote.  The suffragettes had stopped at nothing, suffering forced feedings and other brutality in jail. It paid off when the 19th amendment was passed by Congress in 1919, a 100th anniversary being observed as I write.

Fifty years later activists organized a Women’s Strike for Equality in New York. Over 50,000 women attended and over 100,000 demonstrated in solidarity in 42 states. Later, marches on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment began – and continued across the country. (Congress still has not ratified the ERA, but we’re getting close.)

After the ERA, women marched again for abortion rights and reproductive health and privacy with massive demonstrations taking place in Washington in 1986 and 1989. I was there in 1989 as an activist and journalist, proud to join the crowds that equaled or surpassed protest marches that had taken place against the Vietnam War. Then, of course, came January 21, 2017, when hundreds of thousands of women gathered in Washington after Donald Trump became president.

Today, people in places as diverse as Romania, Venezuela, and Hong Kong are marching against their governments to demand equality, freedom, justice and human rights. Representing all ages, genders, abilities and classes, and defying everything from bad weather to police brutality they are fighting together against corruption, greed, and autocracy.

The common denominator in all these historical moments and current events is that people have gathered together to mourn what they were losing, or never had, and then they marched.  They took to the streets and marched in solidarity until governments listened and they changed history – sometimes incrementally but always dramatically.

I wonder why that isn’t happening now, here, again.  Why aren’t Americans, the majority of whom dislike or despise what the Trump administration has wrought, and robbed us of, mobilized like we once were around monumental issues and threats to our security and wellbeing? Why is our collective outrage not on display in such powerful ways that there is no ignoring our refusal to collude?

When children are ripped from their parents and caged in cold jails indefinitely and made ill physically and emotionally; when youth are murdered because of their skin color, when adults die for lack of access to medical care, when gun violence takes innocent lives every day, when women have no control over their own bodies, when the president has a total lack of morality because of personal gain and massive ego, when we know he is guilty of violating the Constitution and of committing impeachable offenses, when he surrounds himself with unqualified and often cruel acolytes, what is keeping us from marching and marching and marching – and perhaps even camping out on the Mall indefinitely– in defense of democracy and human rights?

Why, I must ask, haven’t we called for and enacted a National Day of Mourning, and Marching?

As one activist of the 1980s put it, “No matter what they are called, perhaps the single most powerful, peaceful way to bring about social chance is for people to stand together publicly on behalf of an important cause.”  In a more current context, that’s what protesters in Hong Kong did As one of them noted recently, “All we can do as citizens is keep going, protest peacefully and let the government and regime know our demands.”

Are we ready, America?

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.

Women Pay the Price in More Ways Than One

It isn’t just the crisis surrounding Draconian measures aimed at controlling our reproductive health, privacy, autonomy, and indeed our lives, that threatens women everywhere. Globally, women continue paying the price of hideous policies and actions devised and implemented by dictatorial men, whose devaluation of women and the human rights for which they advocate, is stunning.

The injury to women activists in a great many countries is often invisible, especially outside their own nations, despite torture, imprisonment, and death. Women suffer atrocities simply because they have had the courage to confront injustices perpetrated by powerful men threatened by women’s voices and acts.  These women need to be recognized and honored for their bravery and sacrifice.

Among them is Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, recently sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes. Sotoudeh has advocated on behalf of Iranian women prosecuted for removing their hijabs in public. In 2010, she was convicted of conspiring to harm state security and served half of a six-year sentence. Last June she was rearrested on an array of dubious charges and tried in secret. Charged with seven crimes and given the maximum sentence for all of them, with five additional years added from a 2016 conviction in absentia, the sentence was severe even by Iranian standards.

More recently, Mena Mangal, an Afghan journalist, was killed on her way to work in Kabul because of her work on behalf of women’s rights, and in May a promising Russian feminist journalist, Margarita Virova, 25, died after “falling” from an eighth-floor apartment window which Moscow Times reported as not suspicious.

After the Saudi Arabian government jailed several prominent female activists, many of whom had fought for women’s right to drive, media reports revealed that the incarcerated women had been subjected to torture, including electrocution and flogging, as well as sexual abuse in detention. One woman was made to hang from the ceiling. Another tried to commit suicide.

Joining Saudi Arabia, Sudan has threatened the death penalty against women who resist their own oppression. Last year, Sudanese prosecutors sought the death penalty for Noura Hussein, a teenager in a forced marriage who killed her abusive husband after multiple rapes. Saudi Arabia wants to execute Israa al-Ghomgham, an activist who sought equal rights for Shiite Muslims.

In Iran, Atena Daemi, a human rights activist, has been targeted by authorities for her anti-death penalty position. First arrested in 2014, she is currently serving a seven-year sentence for criticizing executions and human rights violations on social media.

There are many more stories of women who survive the discrimination and violence they live with daily because of their activism. But many women do not survive. Among them was Mariello Franco, a leading voice for poor people living in Rio de Janeiro before she died at the age of 38. Gay and black, she was serving a term on the city council when she and her driver were killed. No arrests were ever made.

Elisa Badayos, a human rights activist who worked on behalf of poor people in Cebu, Philippines trying to find disappeared family members, was murdered along with two colleagues in 2017. She is survived by four children. Again, no arrests were made.

Guadalupe Campanur Tapia, a Mexican activist who worked on environmental issues and the rights of indigenous people, was 32-years old when her body was found on the roadside. In a similar story, Juana Raymundo, a 25-year old Guatemalan nurse who also worked for indigenous rights was tortured before being murdered.

In Iraq, Su’ad al-Ali, president of a human rights organization focused on women and children, was leading a protest in Basra focusing on rising unemployment and corruption when she was shot in the head getting into her car. She was 46 and left behind four young children.

And who can forget the image of Razan al-Najjar, 21, the Palestinian volunteer medic in white shot dead last June when she ran toward a border fence in Gaza to help an injured person? Her last Facebook post read, “I am returning and not retreating.  Hit me with your bullets, I am not afraid.”

All these remembrances represent only a few of the tragic stories of women around the world who have been grievously harmed, or have given their lives, in the name of human rights and social justice. It is good and necessary to honor them and their sacrifices on behalf of multitudes of others.

But it is not enough. It is not enough to lay wreathes on their graves, or to say their names. It is not enough to allow such extraordinary women to remain invisible. It is not enough when the world continues to ignore the issues for which they fought. It is not enough, so long as men still have sufficient power to harm women and girls and to withhold from them their human rights. It is not enough when men can continue to harness female energy and action and silence female voices. It is not enough when men decide who among them shall live and who shall die. It will never be enough until every woman everywhere has the guaranteed right to decide her own course and to live her life freely and unafraid.

Why Harriet Tubman Belongs on the $20 Bill

The lengths this administration will go to in order to erase decisions made by the Obama administration or insult Blacks while signaling white supremacists are nothing short of stunning.

Those can be the only reasons that Treasury Secretary Steven Minuchin announced to a House Financial Services Committee meeting in May that the Obama administration’s 2016 decision to substitute Harriet Tubman for Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill would “not be an issue that comes up until most likely 2026.”

Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the U.S. who was elected in 1828, owned about 300 slaves. He is connected to the Trail of Tears, the forced relocations of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to areas usually west of the Mississippi River designated as Indian Territory. He was impeached for attempting to dismiss his Secretary of War, narrowly escaping conviction by the Senate.  Ironically, he opposed both the idea of a National Bank and paper money, yet his face still appears on America’s currency.

Compare Jackson to Harriet Tubman, the extraordinary woman who was born a slave and became the abolitionist and activist most well known for rescuing slaves, family and friends via at least a dozen trips on the network of safe houses known as the “Underground Railroad.”

Tubman, born into slavery in Maryland in 1820 or 1821, once said of her own journey to freedom, “I had crossed the line, I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land.”  But she saw to it that others, whose tears she had seen and whose sighs and groans she had heard, as she put it, found welcome on their difficult and dangerous journeys, because she had vowed to “give every drop in my veins to free them.”

In 1850, having escaped slavery, she returned to Maryland after learning that her niece was about to be auctioned off.  Leading her to safety, she went on to rescue more than 70 other slaves at that time, continuing her mercy missions until the Civil War broke out. She is thought to have saved as many as 3,000 slaves and she never failed in a single rescue, earning the name “Moses.”

Tubman, who was illiterate, often used disguises, sometimes pretending to read a newspaper or dressing like a field hand with chickens in tow. She also used spirituals and other songs as code for her followers. She managed to avoid police, dogs, mobs, and slave catchers, and often slept in swamps, moving on only at night. Known as the “black ghost,” the bounty on her head was about $12,000 or $330,000 in today’s terms.

During the Civil War she served as an army nurse on the Union side, and scouted or spied behind enemy lines. On one famous mission in South Carolina, she helped free 700 slaves in one go. Having worked for the army for three years, she applied for veteran’s compensation when the war ended. It took 34 years for her to get it after President Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward intervened. She was 78 years old at the time.

Although impoverished after the War, Tubman became active in the women’s suffrage movement, traveling to New York and Washington to give speeches despite having occasional seizures resulting from a childhood injury.  In the 1890s she underwent brain surgery to alleviate lifelong headaches, refusing anesthesia for the operation as she had seen soldiers do.

Harriet Tubman’s life came to an end in 1913 in Auburn, NY in a home for the aged that she had founded. She was 91 years old and was buried with military honors not far from the grave of William Seward. She had lived an amazing life, especially for an African American woman at that time.

This is the woman the Trump administration refuses to honor on the $20 bill.

New Yorker Dano Wall, an artist who's been working with 3D printers since 2012, has created a stamp that allows users to superimpose Tubman's face over Jackson's on the $20 note. Previously available online as an act of civil disobedience, it has quickly sold out since the delay was announced by Minuchin. Wall reported in May, shortly after the announcement, that he’d received over 2,000 requests for more stamps.  Apparently, the notes with the Tubman stamp have been used successfully in vending machines, although shops and banks may not recognize them as legal tender – yet.

Still, if $20 Tubman bills keep turning up, it’s enough to send a signal to the Treasury Department and the Oval Office. Who knows? It might even make the racist Andrew Jackson turn over in his grave. Holy Moses!

Girls and Young Women Will Suffer Most from Anti-abortion Madness

Reading Facebook posts these days has become an exercise in masochism for many of us. Daily horrific posts reveal various forms of violence against the least powerful among us.

Among the victims of such violence are young women and “emerging adult” females. A recent post referenced an eleven-year old girl in Ohio pregnant by rape. Given Ohio’s newly proposed anti-abortion legislation, she could be forced to carry the fetus to term. That’s nothing short of state-sanctioned child abuse. State after state, the same kind of cruelty could be repeated.

We have heard little about the full impact of Draconian measures aimed at overturning Roe v. Wade on women’s mental and physical health, but of this you can be sure: The impact will be more drastic the younger the girl or woman subjected to such measures.

It should be noted that research reveals having a safe, legal abortion does not pose mental health problems for women. According to Lucy Leriche, Vice President of Public Policy, Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, “over 95 percent of women who have had an abortion report feeling relief that outweighs any negative emotion they might have, even years later.”

In contrast, a statement last month by the Activism Caucus of the Association for Women in Psychology (AWP) makes clear the psychological damage that will be inflicted on girls (and women) from restrictions on their reproductive rights, none more so than the hideous laws Alabama and other states want to impose.

“Growing girls learn that in crucial, life-altering ways, the government has more control over their bodies than they do. This is important for many reasons, one of which is that a sense of control has been shown repeatedly in psychological research to be important to mental health and well-being,” write psychologists Paula J. Caplan and Joan Chrisler on behalf of the AWP. “Rape and incest are examples of extreme loss of control, and at least in some cases, making the decision to have an abortion after rape and incest are important parts of healing, which the Alabama law prohibits.”

Like domestic abuse and sexual assault, current proposed and passed laws are about power and control, and men’s fear of losing that power and control. The laws aim to remove any sense of agency from women, over their bodies and their lives. In their worst form, they are a manifestation of terrorism in which a women’s body is owned by the state, as it was in the chilling novel, The Handmaids Tale. Laws that attempt to incarcerate a woman for crossing state lines to have an abortion, laws that can send her or her physician to jail for life, laws that in the extreme could result in executing a woman for having an abortion reveal the pure evil underpinning these laws.

Let’s remember that the same men (and yes, some women) who want to torture girls and women in these ways are the same men (and women) who legislate against ensuring the health, safety, education, and well-being of the babies born of this unspeakable coercion, and who rabidly support capital punishment.

Even if these reactionary attempts to challenge women reproductive and human rights were to fail, “the blaming and shaming of girls and women who choose to use birth control measures or who choose to have abortions causes fear, self-doubt, low self-confidence, feelings of being unsafe, and beliefs that others consider [women and girls] unable to make major, or ethical decisions,” the AWP points out.

The truly heartbreaking thing is that once shamed, fearful, self-doubting, and depressed, it is almost impossible to regain a sense of personhood or control over one’s life. That kind of despair, in which it seems impossible to envision a way out, especially prevalent in the young, can easily lead to self-destructive behavior, including suicide.

Some years ago, when I worked in Romania on reproductive rights, I saw the damage done to girls, women, and children during the time of the dictator Ceausescu. His regime required all girls graduating from high school to undergo a pelvic exam to determine if she was pregnant. Every working woman was also subjected to monthly pelvic exams in their workplaces. These cruel practices were enforced to ensure that all pregnancies were carried to term. I saw the results of that grotesque policy in the Casa Copii – orphanages where unwanted babies were dumped. Many of the children were visibly impaired, physically and mentally. Others suffered in ways that can only be imagined. Very few of them, I’m certain, had any vision of a happy future. It was worse than Dickensian and it broke my heart.

What is happening in this country now is not far removed from the tragedies that have occurred because of pronatalist policies elsewhere. The lack of humanity, morality, and ethics inherent in such policies is stunning. It leaves one speechless. Incredulous. Furious. Grieving.

But it must not leave us silent.

We must march in unity, speak out vociferously, resist mightily, vote, and support the #SexStrike movement together. Most of all, we must refuse to sacrifice our young and our females on the alters of misogyny and in the chambers of violence. Our survival as sentient beings depends upon it.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health and social justice issues from Saxtons River, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com