Category Archives: Political

Be a Voter, Save America

Posted on by
4

Despite knocking on doors, making phone calls, and donating for the mid-terms this past year, I won’t even be here for the election: My husband and I are leaving tonight for New Zealand, our ballots safely delivered to our county’s registrar last week.

Canvassing in CA-10 last month
Signed, sealed, delivered!

Since we’ll cross the international date line, I’ve been joking that we’ll be able to let people know on November 7 (Kiwi Time) if it’s safe to wake up, or whether everyone working so hard to turn red seats blue needs to drum up more votes while they still can (USA time).

But this election is no laughing matter. The Demagogue-in-Chief stokes fear and anger while his fans cheer his brutality and his Republican enablers stand by. Democratic enthusiasm is high, but voter suppression in red-dominated states is alive and well.

A couple of days ago I came across an essay by Ady Barkan that pierced through the rage, despair, numbness, and grim determination I’ve known too often in these past two years. Barkan is a progressive activist who was diagnosed at age 32 with ALS just a few weeks before the 2016 election.  As he puts it, ALS “ would rapidly destroy all the connections between my brain and my muscles, leading to complete paralysis and death, likely in three to four years. Three weeks later, our world was turned upside down a second time, when America elected a racist kleptocrat to the White House.”

Barkan describes the paradox posed by his medical condition and his life’s work:

Like many people suddenly confronted with agonizing loss, I looked for answers in Buddhism. Pema Chödrön teaches us that when the ground disappears beneath your feet, the solution is not to flail around in a desperate attempt to find a handhold; it is to accept the law of gravity and find peace despite your velocity. Leave the mode of doing and enter the mode of being. Accept things as they are, rather than yearning for them to be otherwise.

Such radical acceptance is in tension with my identity as a movement builder. Activism is precisely about not accepting the tragedies of this world, but rather on insisting that we can reduce pain and prolong life.

As Barkan rapidly loses his strength, his mobility, his ability to feed himself, and—soon—his speech, he has thrown himself even more vibrantly into the fight, traveling the country in his wheelchair, speaking to elected representatives and ordinary people, even getting arrested as he protests tax cuts for the wealthy and champions a radically humane vision of what America can be.

“Focusing on the moment and immersing myself in the task at hand has been my salvation over the past two years,” Barkan writes.

He’s encounterd much cynicism, but also much hope. Citing Rebecca Solnit, Barkan reminds us that “hope is not a lottery ticket that can deliver us out of despair, but a hammer for us to use in this national emergency—to break the glass, sound the alarm, and sprint into action.”

Barkan goes on to say that voting is not enough, that we must all be the organizers and heroes of the moment, for our communities and future generations. Few of us will be able to match his level of commitment. Yet every action matters.

November 6 is almost upon us, and voting is the necessary action right now. Make sure you vote, and that every person you know who is concerned about the national emergency brought into sharp focus by Trump’s election does, too. A great resource is Vote Save America.

November 6 is the date President Obama was re-elected. It is also the first birthday of my friend’s grandson, whose smiles and baby-deliciousness and cheerful oblivion have sustained all those who love him, inspiring them to work hard to make the world a better place. It’s an auspicious date.

Barkan, too, has a young son. Imagining the world Carl will inherit keeps him moving through the dark times of his own dwindling life and the threat to our beloved country:

I can transcend my dying body by hitching my future to yours . . . We peer into the future and hope that our children’s children will grow up in a more just and equitable society.

That is the country I wish to come home to from New Zealand, not one that deepens my horror and grief.

Let’s make this November 6 another hopeful and auspicious date.

Be a voter, save America.

 

 

 

 

Restoring the Obliterated Victim

Posted on by
2

Brett Kavanaugh’s disquieting ascent to the Supreme Court has made me think a lot about what happened 40 years ago. Not to me, but to another young girl.

A 12-year-old in my town told her mother that her father was molesting her. The mother believed her daughter, and went to the police. The father was charged and entered a plea that qualified him for a diversion program instead of jail. The family was shattered, but it seemed possible that they might all be on the long and difficult road to healing because truth, belief in the girl, and her father’s willingness to atone for his actions emerged from the wreckage.

Then the father shot himself. He didn’t die right away, and the fragile circle of family and friends rallying around the girl regrouped instantly, taking up their posts at a death bed vigil. His daughter was among the many at his side. When he died a week later, the love and support diverted his way intensified as he was memorialized in the idealizing way that grief tends to bestow. It wasn’t exactly that the girl was blamed for her father’s death (she did a good enough job of that on her own). It was more that her experience was obliterated as all the attention shifted to his suffering. The blame set in a bit later. I imagine the girl wished she had never opened her mouth.

So it has gone with Dr. Blasey Ford and Judge Kavanaugh, though with a less intense level of trauma and in a setting to determine whether the latter deserved a lifetime Supreme Court appointment, not a criminal conviction for sexual assault. Like the girl in my town, Dr. Blasey Ford reluctantly came forward to tell what happened to her, risking upending her (and her abuser’s) life.  Nearly everyone who listened to Blasey Ford’s testimony, including the President and Fox News, found her credible. At least for a moment.

Then Kavanaugh and the Republicans, in a show of high dudgeon, erased Blasey Ford’s experience with their own aggrieved victimhood. The woman who had transfixed a nation into hoping that at last people might hear and believe what so many girls and women endure was not so much blamed at first as obliterated. The blame came later.

Forty years ago a father fired a shot that took his own life and devastated his daughter’s beyond the original trauma he perpetrated. He was no doubt driven by shame and desperation, but it was also one last hostile act against her. The Republicans’ latest shot across the bow devastates victims of assault with a similarly punishing rebuke. And we wonder why women stay silent.

The tragedy that unfolded 40 years ago in my town is over. The man who had the last word back then is dead. I don’t know what happened to his daughter, or his wife, but I know their lives continued one way or another. I hope they are well, able to integrate this trauma into lives that will always bear but also transcend the scars.

The Supreme Court hearings are also over for now; the Republicans have had the last word. At least for now. The mid-terms are coming on November 6. Channel your rage, fear, despair—and hope–into voting them out. We will continue, one way or another.

Make sure you and everyone you know is registered to vote and casts a ballot on or before November 6. Everything you need to know is at votesaveamerica.org:

Building the Blue Wave, Door by Door

Posted on by
Reply

Remember when the 2018 mid-terms were just a barely visible blip on a faraway horizon? When all we could do was write checks to the ACLU, encounter infinite busy signals on our representatives’ lines, and take to the streets (and airports)? Or, more likely, take to our beds with only Haagen Dazs and late-night comics for solace?

Well, now those mid-terms are just around the corner! We no longer need to pray that the Republican Congress will somehow grow a spine, or that Robert Mueller (and now Michael Cohen) will put the brakes on this crew. We can do it ourselves by voting.

That’s why I’ve been traveling since December once a month to my closest swing district to knock on doors. I live in a deep blue bubble, so I have to drive 75 miles each way to a congressional district where a current Republican House member hung onto his seat in a district Hillary Clinton won.

Two hours each way is worth it, though. Since 2008, I’ve done a lot of phone banking, which is a good thing to do, but I prefer door-to-door canvassing. For one thing, it’s like phone banking with exercise—gotta get those steps in somehow! It’s also fun to drive back and forth with friends. And it’s a whole lot better for my mental health than sitting around lamenting.

What I love most about canvassing, though, is talking face-to-face with people about what matters to them. Hint: it’s not the Russia investigation. Mostly it’s healthcare, traffic, and jobs. One conversation starter is to ask how people would rate things locally and nationally on a five-point scale of Terrible to Terrific.

“I don’t know, I don’t know, it depends on the day!” one 40-something woman exclaimed.

This was back in December, when Republicans were rushing through a tax bill that favored the rich and once again put the screws to the Affordable Care Act. The woman was a registered Republican, but she was really upset about assaults on healthcare and Medicare. By the end of our conversation, she had changed her registration to Democrat, taken a blank form so her elderly mother could do the same, and accepted an invitation to an event at the local Democratic Party headquarters.

I’ve had some other interesting (though less heartening) conversations as well: Three separate respondents rated things as “terrible.” However, this was cause not for voting but for celebration because it meant the End Times were near.

I’m not used to this in my usual life. Truth be told, I’m also not used to people opening their doors to strangers! But they do, and they’ve been unfailingly nice no matter what their political persuasion. Just the other weekend on a sweltering day, a nice Republican guy offered us ice water while we signed up his wife and daughter to vote for the Democrat. For the most part, people have been fair and thoughtful in trying to sort out the issues. We hear a lot about how Americans can no longer talk to one another if they have differing perspectives. Canvassing has helped me to listen and reach out to those who don’t share my world view.

Plus, it’s effective. Research has shown that if minds are to be changed at all (a tall order, as research also shows), one of the best ways to do so is person-to-person engagement. Canvassing improves voting outcomes by 4 percent. In the town I’ve been visiting, there was a 75 percent increase in Democratic voter turnout between the 2014 and 2018 mid-term primaries, and even a 14 percent increase in this June’s primary showing over the 2016 presidential election turnout. In a country where more and more elections are being determined by razor-thin margins—and even the flip of a coin in one special election in Virginia!—that’s a huge difference.

Now that we’re entering the home stretch of canvassing, we’re focusing intensively on identifying the Democratic House candidate’s supporters and making sure they vote. In previous months, people were less informed and less interested, but now they’re jazzed. Even the ones who don’t care about politics and who don’t normally vote are perking up. At one house I visited, the wife who was on our list was not home.

“What about you?” I asked her husband, who answered the door with their young daughter in tow.

“Nah, I don’t vote, I’m not even registered,” he said. But he happened to mention that he was horrified by Trump and the Republicans in Congress.

“The best way right now to put the brakes on them is through flipping the House,” I replied. “Why not register and vote for at least that race?”

“OK,” he said, taking the voter registration form.

It felt like a pledge and not just a brush-off. My friends canvassing nearby reported similar conversations—a millennial non-voter who registered because something he learned about our candidate sparked his interest. A disenchanted Republican who was impressed we were volunteering our time walking around in the heat. Now that we’ve identified such people, we can follow up to let them know how important their votes are.

My handful of success stories may not mean much on their own. But multiply that by the tens of thousands of volunteers doing just what I’m doing in every corner of the country, and it begins to add up. Every door knocked on, every conversation, every newly registered voter, and every new volunteer seeds the magic of a grassroots movement. Supporters talk to their family, friends, and neighbors. An undecided voter may remember something about a visit from a friendly stranger who reached out and listened. And so it grows.

This is how we build the blue wave. This is how we take back the country.

*

There are so many ways to get involved. Of course, the most important and most basic thing anyone can do is vote. Make sure you’re registered, make sure you cast your ballot, and talk it up among friends and family! A cool new online resource is Vote Save America. You can check your registration status, register, and find out about ways to get involved wherever you live:

https://crooked.com/article/be-a-voter-save-america/

Here are two nationwide groups where you can get involved in your area to ensure electoral success:

Indivisible

Swing Left

Also, despite my snarky first paragraph, making donations to good causes and good candidates is hugely helpful. So are Haagen Dazs and late-night comics.

 

Welcome. Bienvenido. 欢迎. 환영. добро пожаловать.

Posted on by
3

Eleven hundred newly naturalized citizens and their loved ones streamed out of the Paramount Theater in Oakland last Thursday, and we were there to greet them:

“Welcome!”

“Congratulations!”

“We’re so glad you’re here!”

Also, “Would you like to register to vote?”

After all, that’s why I and dozens of compatriots were there: to empower our newest fellow Americans to speak out at the ballot box. A woman who heads up an activist group I phone bank with had told us that if we ever had a chance to participate in these registration drives, it was a really inspiring thing to do—especially in these dark days when immigrants face such hostility from the President himself. So I was on the lookout for the next opportunity, which happened to coincide with a long break in my work schedule on the one day of the week I’m in that neck of the woods.

I personally registered three of the nearly 300 who signed up that day: a man born in Mexico, another originally from South Korea, and a young woman whose parents brought her from Guatemala when she was two. By sheer coincidence, this last person happened to be the partner of my friends’ son—their whole family, as well as hers, were there to celebrate this last leg of her 28-year journey; it was wonderful to share in their joy.

I spoke with another woman who had been in this country for 30 years, since the age of 5, when her parents brought her from Mexico. One of the other volunteers had already registered her, but she was happy to chat while waiting in line to complete her passport application. She was excited to have finally become a citizen of the only country she had ever known. She was also excited to have a few hours away from work without any of her three young American-born kids clinging to her. We swapped stories about what a great treat it was to go to exotic places such as CVS and the grocery store unencumbered by little ones.

A friend of mine now in her 60s tells me she still vividly remembers the day decades before when she and her sister and their parents were sworn in as naturalized citizens at the Paramount Theater. They had come from Israel when my friend was eight. She can recall the excitement of the day, the outfit she wore (down to her shoes!). This friend, once s stranger in a strange land, has contributed so much to her family, her community, our country, and to me. She’s an inspiration.

I salute those who have just gone through their own journeys to this country, their own ceremonies at the Paramount, and know that they, too, will be an inspiration.

Congratulations! Welcome! And thanks. You are part of what makes America great.

Life and Death Matters

Posted on by
Reply

California’s End of Life Options Act, which allows doctors to write life-ending prescriptions for terminally ill adults who meet strict eligibility requirements, went into effect two years ago. In May, a judge halted the law on a technicality; an appeals court recently reversed that decision. As complicated and lengthy court processes continue to unfold, emotional and legal limbo remains.

“It is an American habit to turn complex moral problems into technical legal reasons,” writes Andrew Solomon in A Death of One’s Own (1995), about his mother’s decision to end her life rather than endure the final excruciating stages of ovarian cancer. Solomon weaves his personal story with an in-depth history of the euthanasia movement before aid-in-dying was legal anywhere in the United States. With unfailing empathy and candor, he explores every nuance of the issue, including how relegating it to the shadows compounds the difficulty. He describes the coded euphemisms his mother used with her doctors to secure what she needed. Solomon, his brother, and their father all whole-if-broken-heartedly supported her choice to die on her own terms at home, surrounded by loved ones. The necessity of secrecy heightened their intense isolation and sadness.

An unequivocal supporter of the right to choose, Solomon is also an unblinking chronicler of the ambivalence, sorrow, and potential risk such choice entails. “There is no question that if euthanasia is legalized it will be abused . . . The question is whether these abuses represent a greater crime against life than does keeping alive people who want to die.”

In the 23 years since A Death of One’s Own was published, much has changed. Seven states (including California) and the District of Columbia now allow some sort of physician-assisted dying. The terminology has also changed: “Death with Dignity” and similar monikers have largely replaced “assisted suicide” or “euthanasia.” Although there are still those who prefer the term “murder,” there is a growing consensus among proponents that existing laws are too narrow, excluding those with conditions such as Alzheimer’s and ALS from seeking legal relief.

What of those who suffer from unremitting psychic distress? Why are people with terminal cancer deemed to have good reason to end their suffering, but people afflicted with chronic depression are not? Here the slippery slope steepens.

Rachel Aviv delves deeply into this disquieting territory in The Death Treatment (2015), about Belgium’s law permitting euthanasia for those suffering from severe and unrelenting psychological distress.

Both Solomon and Aviv are beautiful and compelling writers. Each account illuminates the shadows we must explore to grapple with the awesome complexities of life and death decisions. As California’s End of Life Options Act continues on its topsy-turvy legal course, the imperative to bring into the light what it means to be alive and to die—and who gets to decide–continues.

*

What are your thoughts and experiences about this topic? What would you want for yourself?

*

(Originally published in the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy’s “Impulse”) 

Pre-existing Condition

Posted on by
2

I was in Kaiser’s waiting room, scrolling through my phone while listening for my name to be called. Out jumped the news that the Trump Administration was going after the Affordable Care Act again: The Justice Department declared that protecting people with pre-existing conditions from discrimination was unconstitutional.

I am one of the 52 million Americans at risk of losing my health coverage due to this latest assault; I’ve had cancer. I’m fine now, but my trip to Kaiser was for the CT scan I get every year to make sure I stay that way. I will need such follow-up care for the foreseeable future. It’s a similar story for anyone with heart disease, diabetes, depression, and a million other ailments, both major and minor. Before the ACA, my friend’s premature twins could never have gotten health insurance on their own as adults because of their early months in the neonatal intensive care unit. Another friend’s 20-something son was denied health insurance because he had been treated for mild acne as a teenager! Sooner or later, everybody ends up with a pre-existing condition. It’s called life.

Life is what I’ve continued to enjoy thanks to my excellent doctors and post-cancer scans. Normally I’m not anxious as I glide through the CT machine. I feel relieved and grateful to make sure I’m still cancer-free, or if not, to catch and treat it early. As I lie on my back, a soothing voice instructs me when to hold my breath, when to breathe. Normally my intake and release are as relaxed as they are at the end of a yoga class. But not today. After the news, I am hyperventilating. I don’t fear cancer nearly as much as I fear the determination of this President and his Republican enablers to take away my health care.

Since their several dozen failed attempts at repealing the Affordable Care Act, Republicans in Congress and the White House have waged a relentless sabotage campaign. In a cruel and cynical ploy, Republican legislators repealed the mandate–the least popular aspect of the ACA–in last year’s hastily passed tax bill. The mandate’s undoing is now the rationale for eliminating the highly popular provision that prohibits excluding or jacking up the rates of people with pre-existing conditions.

The DOJ’s move will take a while to reverberate through the courts, but the uncertainty it creates will drive up premiums even more, furthering Trump’s goal of imploding the law he hates largely because it’s his predecessor’s signature domestic achievement.

Will this risky gambit work for the Republicans? Maybe not. It turns out people like having access to treatment if it’s not called “Obamacare.” Protecting healthcare has been the #1 issue on voters’ minds across the country, and this has translated into Democratic victories.

So rather than hyperventilating, I’m going to work hard to elect people who want to make America well again. I’m voting as if my life depends on it. Because it does.

Starbucks: Teachable Moment

Posted on by
4

Many years ago, back when the corporate coffee giants started to swallow up neighborhood cafes, I saw a bumper sticker that said, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drink Starbucks.” A similar sentiment was resurrected recently with #BoycottStarbucks. The hashtag went viral after a Philadelphia Starbucks manager called the police when two black men in the store asked to use the restroom without buying anything.  The call led to the men’s arrest, which led to national outrage.

I don’t usually go to Starbucks, because I sip my daily café au lait while reading the paper at my local café. But I’ve always had a soft spot for Starbucks, preferring their milky brew over the stronger stuff my friends like. I made one such friend blanch when I told her my favorite nightcap is a mix of 1% milk, water, and a spoonful of instant decaf thrown into the microwave. When it comes to coffee, I am more Philistine than aficionado.

But my affection for Starbucks runs deeper than taste, or lack thereof. As I’ve written before, I like that the company offers a decent wage, healthcare, and some education benefits to its employees. I even liked their widely mocked initiative a few years back to start conversations about race by having baristas scrawl “Race Together” on their cups. Better a clumsy attempt to engage on difficult terrain rather than no engagement at all. As a white woman, I know just how easy it is to steer clear of the topic altogether.

Nonetheless, I ventured into this avoided territory a few days ago. Coming back from my morning walk, I passed a black man who was standing on the side of the road, shaking his head at a super-sized SUV blocking a driveway and extending into the street.

“Man, who would park like this?” he said. “They’re gonna get a ticket, particularly in this neighborhood.”

We were in perhaps the most exclusive town in one of California’s most affluent counties. The blocked driveway led to a leafy estate behind a stone wall.

“Oh, is this your neighborhood?” the man added. “Do you like it here?”

I assured him it wasn’t my neighborhood,  that I was only walking through. (I failed to mention that I live in the next town over, where the houses go for a mere $1-5 million.) I hastened to add that although it was pretty here, I didn’t like how the residents walled themselves off from everyone else while using all the other towns’ services.

The man continued to speculate about how long it would take before somebody called the police and the SUV was ticketed.

“Actually,” I began, and this is where I ventured more deeply into my own clumsy conversation about race. “I bet you have more chance of being ticketed as a black man than this car does.”

He threw back his head in laughter. Then he asked my opinion about the Starbucks incident, saying he thought the company’s response and pledge of training was a good thing.

“I don’t like that Starbucks has been scapegoated,” I said. “This is not a Starbucks thing, That lets white people like me off the hook. It’s a societal problem that happens everywhere.”

“Happens to me all the time,” the man said. “Remember Rodney King? Same thing happened to me long before, only there were no video cameras back then.” He was stopped in Tennessee for driving while black by police, who shot him when he reached for something.

I said something about how terrible that was, how it was a good thing all these police abuses were being captured on smartphones now.

“Yeah, but we sued that police department and won because of course there was no gun!”

I expressed surprise that he was old enough to drive long before Rodney King; he looked so young.

“How old do you think I am?” he had me guess. I was way under.

“I’m fifty!” the man exulted. “You’ve heard that expression, ‘Blacks don’t crack?” Except for President Obama, he cracked, they put him through so much.”

We commiserated over how much we missed Obama.

“I’m JT,” he stuck out his hand. “I’m the foreman on the work crew here.”

I introduced myself, we shook hands, and said maybe we’d see each other again. I looked for him today on my walk. No JT. No blocked driveways. A lot of wealthy white people living in mansions where black and brown people labor. A lot of wealthy white women walking by. Still, JT and I both enjoyed our conversation.

I’ve had more conversations since, with white friends. How we are never questioned when using the restroom, at Starbucks or anywhere else. How we are emerging from the oblivion our privilege provides, horrified to see the extent of racial injustice.  How Starbucks isn’t the problem: we are.

It’s not much. But it’s something.

*

Thoughts on what happened at Starbucks?

 

 

 

Here We Are Again: Guns and Mental Illness

Posted on by
Reply

It’s an ordinary school day. Kids and teachers go in and out of the office, phones ring. Then a young man with an assault weapon walks in.

That’s how “DeKalb Elementary,” an Oscar nominee based on a 2013 Georgia incident, begins. As I watched, I thought what a wonderful counselor the office worker would make at the crisis hotline where I consult. Remaining calm and empathetic to the gunman throughout, she defuses a dangerous situation without anyone being harmed.

The day after I saw the film, a young man with an AR-15 walked into a Florida high school and killed 17 people.

We cannot rely on words to stop guns any more than we can rely on armed “good guys.” I juxtapose the two events and my work with at-risk people not to apportion credit or blame, but to illustrate different facets of the debate about mental illness that invariably arises whenever these tragedies occur.

We absolutely need more funding for mental health. Yet what’s often proposed after mass shootings is counterproductive. Donald Trump suggests bringing back institutions to contain the threat. Less inflammatory mental health “solutions” aim to identify and remove “monstrous” people—not their guns–from circulation. Mental health professionals already must report those at imminent risk of hurting themselves or others. Stigmatizing mental illness and enlisting clinicians as wide-net detainers makes people less, not more, likely to seek treatment. Blaming gun violence on the mentally ill overlooks the fact that they account for a tiny fraction of gun homicides and are far more likely to be the victims rather than the perpetrators of violence. It also ignores the biggest threat: guns.

Two days after seeing “DeKalb Elementary,” and the day after the Parkland massacre, I consulted at the crisis hotline. I told the staff how much the film reminded me of them and the unsung, heroic work they do. Counselors listen, assess for risk, and, like the office worker in the film, connect calmly and empathetically to enlist that aspect of the person’s ambivalence that leans toward safety rather than destruction. Outside resources are utilized when there is imminent danger, but usually the internal resources of human connection and compassion are enough to defuse a volatile situation.

Mass shootings and the fear they evoke can cloud assessment and intervention.  Callers are often hostile, distraught, vaguely menacing. Violence is notoriously difficult to predict; thoughts, feelings, and fantasies are not the same as action. Parkland illustrates not only the importance of being vigilant about danger, but the vigilance of making sure we are not overreacting from anxiety to enact ineffectual preventive detention.

Mental health interventions are most effective early on. Guns in the picture indicate that the window for optimal engagement has already closed. A culture that promotes more guns as the solution, not the problem, suggests collective, not individual, pathology.

*

This piece originally appeared in “Impulse,” an online publication of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

 

Enough

Posted on by
Reply

It’s surprising how affecting a pair of shoes can be. Particularly when they’re empty, and when they’re one of 17 pairs representing the students and faculty killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine’s Day.

These empty shoes, bereft of those who normally wore them, were on the steps of my town’s high school as part of a student-led nationwide walkout to protest Congress’s failure to do anything to stop gun violence.

There have been 17 shootings on school grounds in the United States so far in 2018, 208 since Columbine. Including that initial 1999 rampage, which shocked the nation and defined the country today’s teenagers know, more than 200 have been killed. This does not count the additional 29 assailants who died, all but two of whom turned their guns on themselves. Far more have been injured and traumatized.

A dispassionate account of these incidents, most of which never rise to the level of national attention, makes for sobering reading. Most of the victims are young, but so are most of the attackers—too young to even be called gunmen (almost all are male). One six-year-old boy fatally shot his six-year-old classmate. So many of the incidents arise out of arguments, and have nothing to do with the usual false narratives of lone nuts, terrorists, and other bad guys. It’s easily accessible guns—not mental illness or monsters–that turn mundane hot-headedness deadly.

School shootings account for a tiny fraction of the 33,000+ (and rising) annual gun deaths in the United States, and schools remain among the safest places to be. Too many kids have more to fear in dangerous neighborhoods and volatile homes or, if they’re young men of color, from police. All mass shootings, including highly publicized tragedies in nightclubs, workplaces, churches, concerts, and Congressional ballgames and meet-and-greets, account for only two percent of firearm fatalities. Almost two-thirds of all gun deaths are suicides. Research by the Harvard School of Public Health and Everytown for Gun Safety consistently shows that guns in the home are far more likely to increase the risk of injury, especially but not exclusively when domestic abuse occurs. States that have more guns (and less restrictive gun laws) tend to have more gun injuries and deaths than states that don’t. Whether we’re talking about suicide, homicide, or accident, limiting access to guns saves lives,

When we widen the scope of gun violence beyond the school shootings that understandably horrify us, we see, if we care to, the grotesque number of casualties—38,658 gun deaths in 2016, the last year for which CDC data are available. That’s a lot of pairs of empty shoes.

But it is those kids in schools—the post-Columbine generation—whose grief and rage now galvanize a nation. They are not activists for arming teachers, turning schools into prisons, or rounding up the mentally ill. They want politicians to stop cowering before the NRA and commonsense gun safety regulations, and they won’t stop until they get them.

“We are only 24 percent of the population, but we are 100 percent of the future!” The girl leading the walkout I attended exclaimed through her tears.

Her fellow classmate urged everyone to vote. The students paid tribute to the lives that would never be lived, the contributions that will never be made by students just like them. Too many empty shoes. But the kids still here are stepping in and stepping up. It is our sacred duty to step, walk, march, run, speak out—and vote—alongside them.

Does Love Trump Hate?

Posted on by
4

Love trumps hate. It’s a nice sentiment, but is it true? Arguably, fear and anger are stronger motivators, and bipartisan to boot: Trump capitalized on those passions to propel himself to electoral college victory, and fear and anger are also fueling the strong opposition that’s emerged since his election.

So what’s love got to do with it? Listening, connecting, empathy—the small and steady force that goes to work on hearts and minds like water on rock. That’s the spirit behind the canvassing I’m doing each month with Swing Left. We travel outside our deep blue bubble to engage with people in the nearest swing district to try to turn a red House seat blue. Door-to-door canvassing is like phone banking with exercise—moving down the list of people who mostly don’t answer. But when they do, something small and miraculous happens: listening, connecting, caring about the other person.

We ask people about their local concerns, how they’re feeling about the direction of the country. Talking to people helps me curb my own tendencies toward writing off those with different viewpoints. Of course we are trying to identify votes for Democrats in the mid-terms. But we also seek to understand what matters to people. I can assure you, it is not the Russians, or Trump’s tweets, or shutting down the government (a move that generally generates disgust, not kudos).  Mostly, people are concerned with traffic, healthcare costs, jobs. Danica Roem, the Democrat who unseated a long-term Republican in Virginia’s House of Delegates last fall, understood this. She may have won a place in history by being an out transwoman, but she won her campaign by focusing on fixing the congestion on Route 28.

She also won because of voter turnout: the highest statewide in 20 years for an off-year race, with the youth vote doubling in less than a decade.

Which brings us back to love and hate. Love’s opposite is not hate but indifference. We hear it all the time: “It doesn’t matter.” “Both parties are the same.” “My vote doesn’t count.” “Nothing will change.” Political demoralization is rampant across party lines, and it’s easy to understand why people who feel that politicians are indifferent to them are indifferent to voting.

The silver lining to the 2016 election is that many people who have never before participated in politics now see that elections have consequences, the outcomes are not the same, and that their involvement matters very much.

A sign I saw at this year’s San Francisco Women’s March sums it up:

This past election was not determined by Trump voters.

It was not determined by Democrats.

It was determined by non-voters.

Love won’t trump Trump and his GOP enablers. Voting will.