Jacinda Ardern of NZ in mourner’s hijab, following the mass shooting at a New Zealand mosque.
It’s sad that New Zealand’s amazing Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, is stepping down. I’ve been an admirer since she first came across my radar during her campaign to lead that country–and I remain one. She has been a competent, non-bloviating voice of reason and compassion, as well as an excellent role model who proves that at not-yet-40–she took office at 37 and is now 42–a progressive woman can be an effective shepherd of government, even during a term that encompassed multiple global and at least two national crises.
She is my favorite of the current crop of world leaders, in fact.
When I went looking for the photo to accompany this blog, I found this text. Like the photo, it is attributed only to “Appaloosa,” who appears to be a photographer in French Canada and was unlikely to have taken the picture. It sums up my feelings perfectly:
In the aftermath the Christchurch, NZ mosque shootings, the world witnessed what a real leader looks like in New Zealand’s Prime Minister #jacindaardern.
72 hours after the tragedy occurred, Prime Minister Ardern mourned at a vigil in full hijab attire, and promised the nation would not only cover the costs of 51 funerals, but would look after the families and their expenses for as long as it took.
This, after announcing the New Zealand government would ban assault rifles.
It takes courage to lead a country at any time. When you also have to navigate a global pandemic, a world economic mess, a massacre and a natural disaster in your home country, and a rising tide of totalitarian, racist so-called populists, it’s no wonder she feels her “tank is empty.” It also takes courage to know when it’s time to stop. My hat is off to her and I wish her the best in her next phase.
When I wrote this article back in 2014, it was published in three places. But it’s long enough ago that I can’t find it online. The message is too important to let slip away, so I’m reprinting it here–unchanged except for adding one sentence. –Shel Horowitz
I laugh whenever I hear that famous phrase, “failure is not an option.” It shows not only enormous ignorance of the real world and the human brain, but also enormous hubris.Let’s get real. Failure is always an option—with sufficient bad luck or timing, loss of motivation, key player defections, or inadequate funding. This doesn’t mean the task is impossible; it’s just that currently, for whatever reason, it doesn’t seem worth marshaling the necessary resources to finish the task. And when the stakes are high (brain surgery or piloting a fully loaded commercial jet, for example), failure is a terrible option with horrible consequences—but even that doesn’t guarantee success.
Sometimes, we can minimize the impact of choosing failure. Almost always, we can embrace it as a learning opportunity.
The trick is to fail cheaply and early—and maybe often, make your mistakes, and move on. See what can be salvaged, what can be reinvented, and what should be thrown in the trash. Thomas Edison took 10,000 steps to invent the light bulb. Most people would say he failed 9999 times. He saw it not as a failure but as a 10,000-step process. In other words, our failures teach us enough to achieve our successes.
I’ve had my share of failures. This spring, for example, I set up a telesummit involving 17 speakers, plus eight bonus calls from my archives for those who purchased the recording package. I spent some money and a considerable amount of time.
And it failed.
The business model is proven. I just got a mailing from the organizer of another telesummit, and she reported 2500 signups and a 5% conversion to the paid recording package. If I’d had those numbers, I would have made a profit even after paying 50% commissions to the speakers who brought in those buyers. But I was not able to motivate people to visit, sign up, and buy.
What did she do differently? First, she had a much broader-based subject appeal. There are a lot more people who want to succeed as book authors than in running a green business. Second, she had more speakers. And third, she motivated all her participants with leaderboards and contests and a general sense that things were really moving and we all would want to get on the bandwagon.
While I was expecting a revenue stream instead of a cost center, I learned enormously from this failure. Among other things, I learned not to count on your speakers promoting your event in a meaningful way. Some of the largest list owners never mailed, and thus my traffic was far lower than expected. Low enough that the sales were basically invisible.
Here are some of my other takeaways: 1. Learn when to work with off-the-shelf products and when to go custom. I could have done 90 percent of what I wanted to with an off-the-shelf software package called Instant Teleseminar. But their model involves paying every month, forever—so instead, I just hired someone to build the functionality I was looking for. That decision led to some serious cost overruns, and I still didn’t achieve all the functionality I wanted. If the summit had succeeded and I did a new one every six or 12 months, developing the in-house solution still would have been the right decision, because it would probably pay for itself around the fourth summit. But since I doubt I’ll organize another series like this one—though I might very well reuse the content I created and rerun the series at some point—I should have just bought the product. 2. Keep it simple! The website is beautiful, but it’s too hard to use. I think it scared people off. I should have really improved the usability before I let it go live. 3. Identify an audience of buyers. The woman who achieved that big telesummit success could draw from tens of millions of people who want to be successful published authors. While there are hundreds of thousands who want to run successful green businesses, maybe that isn’t a critical mass, especially since I didn’t have a direct channel to reach them. 4. Keep the content focused. I think my series split its energy between being about marketing, generally, and being about green business success. This may not have been wise. Maybe I needed to push more of the marketing experts to speak specifically about applying their techniques in the green world.
We’ve all heard toxic, disempowering, dream-stomping clichés like
“You can’t fight City Hall”
“We’ve always done it this other way”
“That’s impossible”
“You’ll always be a failure”
“We call B.S.!”
That’s the appropriate response, made famous by X Gonzales, at the time an 18-year-old survivor of the mass murder at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida just three days earlier. That same year, they co-organized (and spoke at) a huge national march on Washington and helped to shepherd through the first meaningful gun safety law in gun-loving Florida in this century.
And we all have to “call B.S.” when anyone tries to destroy our self-esteem, our calling, and our power.
18-year-old X Gonzales (center) gives the “Call B.S.” speech in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, February 17, 2018. Photo by Barry Stock, via Wikipedia.
Like Gonzales, we must embrace our ability to make change and join with others, nonviolently, to achieve that change.
For some, including me, becoming an activist is a way to do that. For others, the path takes different forms, such as being a parent or teacher or health care professional—or, for that matter, an accountant, manufacturer, or prison administrator—and carrying out those duties in ways that build up others, help them achieve those dreams, and help THEM build up others—to build a community, and a planet, based on the worth of every individual. Because to focus only on building yourself up is narcissism, even sociopathic.
This post was inspired by a private note admiring my activism but saying the writer got too depressed to do this kind of work. Here’s s my response, exactly as I wrote it, except I broke it up into more paragraphs and added more specific locations:
I’m sure you make the world better in other ways. Not everyone is cut out to be an activist–it’s a path where 90 percent or more of your efforts seem to be for naught (though often, change IS happening but not visible in the moment).
Because I focus on the positive, I’m able to find the strength to continue. I keep in mind that when I was born in December, 1956, half of the US was still officially segregated and racism still ruled most of the rest. Women and people of color had very few career opportunities. White women were mostly teachers and nurses while people of color were channeled into laborer, domestic, sanitation worker.
Male-on-female domestic violence and casual sexual harassment were considered normal and acceptable. People were still getting fired or even imprisoned for being in a same-sex or interracial relationship. There was close to zero awareness of pollution, climate change and making our ecosystems more resilient. Decent food was very difficult to find. And the last well-known nonviolent revolution had been in India almost a decade earlier.
Except that OFFICIAL segregation had ended, most of that was still true on October 15, 1969, when one casual comment within a speech at the first Vietnam peace demonstration I ever attended set me on a lifetime path of activism. Yet, in 53 years–a nanosecond in geologic time or even in human history–all of that has shifted. So things ARE getting better because of activism.
The other thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that MY OWN ACTIONS have made a difference several times.
Here are my top three: 1) I founded Save the Mountain, the group that kept a particularly offensive luxury housing development off the Mount Holyoke Range [Hadley and South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA] a mile and a half from my house. Even experts within the environmental movement locally had given up hope. I went in with the attitude that we would win–but even I thought it would take us five years. We did it in just 13 months–because all of us worked on different pieces where we had expertise, and because we had mass support from area residents.
2) I was one of the 1414 people arrested on the construction site of the Seabrook [New Hampshire, USA] nuclear power plant in 1977. By the time the last of us was released two weeks later, a national safe energy movement had been born, most of it adopting the nonviolent resistance techniques and consensus decision making that we used in Clamshell Alliance here in New England. Here’s a link to an article I wrote about the lasting shifts in the culture that movement created: https://greenandprofitable.com/40-years-ago-today-we-changed-the-world-part-4-shifts-in-the-culture/. And while we ultimately lost the battle to keep Seabrook from being built, we basically put a halt to the development of new nukes (unfortunately, we have to fight that battle again–but keeping these unsafe and unnecessary monsters off the drawing boards and out of the power grids for nearly 40 years is a pretty good outcome. And this time, I have great confidence that we will win.)
3) My work in local electoral politics [Hampshire County, Massachusetts] has helped to bring about a lasting progressive majority and a series of four progressive mayors in a row in Northampton, and this April took back the Hadley Select Board again after losing to a Trumpian majority in 2021 when we couldn’t find anyone willing to run. I think we’ve taken control of the board three times. Two for sure.
Again, I recognize that my path of activism isn’t for everyone. Neither is my parallel path of working within the business community to spread the message that solving our biggest problems, like hunger, poverty, racism, othering, and even catastrophic climate change and war, can be a profit path for business.
But each and every one of us can find our personal way to make a difference, to brighten the light for all of us, and to help bring into being the planet we want to pass on to subsequent generations.
If this post inspires you, please post a comment about what you’re already doing, or what you will start doing.
I just came across a query letter I wrote in 2020. It raises a lot of questions that are still very much worth asking—and attempting to answer.
How some people view the world—Opportunity for businesses that genuinely care
In many ways, these questions were easier to answer back then. Unfortunately, as a society, we missed the window to create those kinds of sweeping changes when the active threat of Covid made them easier—but we can still make the effort. We can still transform society, our relationship with other beings, and the planet in our own lifetime. It’ll just take more effort.
Here’s the relevant section of what I wrote back then (I’ve removed a long paragraph with my credentials, as well as my closing.)—and I’d love to get your comments:
Hi, there,
As an experienced journalist and award-winning, best-selling ten-book author with several books on social enterprise as a profit center, I propose an article, Leveraging the Great Pivot: How COVID-19 Creates Long-Term Post-Pandemic Opportunities for Racial Justice, Economic Advancement, and Environmental Healing. Probably in the 1500-2500 word range.
The premise: For decades, activists have been told we can’t fix the crushing problems of our time, like hunger, poverty, racism, war, catastrophic climate change, etc. Yet, starting in early 2020, the entire world pivoted and everything changed. As education, many types of business, and even cultural events shifted online or reinvented themselves, we learned how resilient, adaptable, and creative we are. And that process created opportunities that could never have happened in the pre-pandemic world.
These massive global, national, regional, and local shifts prove we can reinvent the world as the place we really want to live in–and we can replicate the shift in other areas. As a society, we have to do this pivot strategically, and it has to involve many sectors: government, nonprofits, activists, community organizations, academia—and the business community.
Just look at how the massive expansion of the racial justice movement since May has changed perceptions around the US and around the world. And that’s one small piece of a big multi-issue cauldron of solution-driven thinking and activism; a lot of good work is going into solving those big crises, as well as protecting our fragile democracy. The question is: pivot to what?
Could health care coverage be shifted away from employers so the next time an emergency shuts hundreds of thousands of businesses, their laid-off employees don’t lose their safety net? Could this be the US’s chance to adopt the single-payer model most of the rest of the world uses? And to shift from treating the sick’s symptoms to maintaining wellness across the population so fewer people get sick in the first place? Can this be the moment to finally get away from fossil and nuclear, to combine clean renewable energy with massive systemic conservation so we’re no longer squandering our children’s heritage polluting and carbonizing our planet while depleting scarce resources? Is it time for decent affordable housing to be seen as a right? What are the best ways to create more housing that also protect the environment, create pleasant yet affordable neighborhoods, and avoid negative consequences like urban sprawl?
We can ask similar questions in every sector: criminal justice, job creation, transportation and shipping (moving both people and things), replacing armed conflict with peaceful conflict resolution, ensuring a pluralistic society that honors both its majorities and minorities, etc.
After four years of Trump and a year of COVID, it won’t be enough to go back to the “normal” of 2019, or even of 2015. But with the pandemic comes the luxury and responsibility of critically examining every aspect of society. We need to figure out what the goal of every institution is–and how to achieve or surpass that goal as we rebuild. Just as many developing countries skipped landlines and clunky desktop computers and went straight to smartphones, we need to ask questions like:
What are we *really* trying to accomplish?
Is this the best way to meet that goal?
How could we improve it?
How could we make it more inclusive?
Then we brainstorm with these ends in mind, using a seven-step process that opens up new thinking and lets us implement new solutions. To make this concrete, think about spending millions of R&D dollars to create a pen that can write in zero-gravity. But the real goal isn’t to have a pen that can write in space—that’s a means to an end. The real goal is to be able to write in space. And suddenly, with that framing, the solution is obvious: use pencils—or computers! Maybe you create a pencil lead that can make a darker, easier to read impression, create a Velcro mount for your device so it doesn’t go flying across the cabin, or make other little tweaks—but you’ve accomplished the basic goal, with resources you already have. Business has a vested interest in reinventing itself, as dozens of industries were rendered obsolete, as supply chain issues showed up unexpectedly, and as those sectors that strengthened and grew had to adapt. Small businesses can survive and even thrive, but not as it was in 2019. Whether a manufacturer switches from making luxury goods to PPE or a retailer learns how to blend online and (protected) in-person approaches, pretty much everyone has to pivot. Why not seize the opportunity to have that reinvention foster racial, gender, and class equity…green the planet while creating jobs…match product introduction and production not to advertising-created materialism but to solving real needs and getting paid for it? In the activist world, meetings that might have had 10 local people in a room can now draw 500 from around the world—and provide digital tools to mobilize action, such as Spoke, a texting platform that can allow volunteers to send 1000 or more text messages an hour and respond individually and personally when someone replies. In my own professional development this year, from the comfort of my own home, I’ve attended dozens of far-away events. Some had hundreds or thousands of attendees from dozens of countries (among them a worldwide UN conference, multiple 50th-anniversary celebrations of Earth Day, and gatherings on more niched topics such as the special situation of Jews of color). I could not have afforded the time and money to go to so many conferences, and several times, they’ve overlapped. But I was able to participate in more than one at a time, or listen to what I’d missed on replay. I’ve also participated in some thinking and brainstorming calls from widely scattered groups of thinkers and researchers working on global solutions to these and other problems. As somewhat more exciting examples, local cultural performers with no previous broader following are finding global audiences—and the sound technicians who can replace awful-sounding Zoom calls with concert-quality production are keeping busy.
Even on the personal side, some of the restrictions can be reframed as empowerment—just as we can think of a wheelchair user not as “confined to a wheelchair,” but “liberated with a wheelchair,” because it allows that user to go places that would otherwise be off-limits. My wife and I hosted a Passover Seder with family and friends from three generations and 9 different states from Massachusetts to California–most of whom would never have come in person.
A cynical friend responded, “Sometimes…none of this is true.” And I replied,
But all of it is, sometimes. Sometimes is the anchor word here, that allows us to play with our perceptions. All of it is true once in a while, but all of it is not true often enough that the inability to go there feels normative to you. As someone who has spent some big chunks of my life on the margins for various reasons, I can assure you that the narrow, normative, conformist version of reality isn’t real for a big percentage of the population—but who’s in and who’s out might vary over time.
My “margins” experience is both direct and indirect. Directly, I’ve been treated as marginal—”othered”—for living in poverty in my younger years…for not being into sports, hypermasculinity, or TV celebrity culture…for being Jewish…for being bisexual…for being a Northerner in Georgia and an Easterner in Southwest Ohio…And I’ve confronted ageism against both the young and the old—which started when I was very young and has continued now that people are beginning to think of me as old.
But I’ve also worked with a lot of groups that were marginalized in ways outside of my own direct experience of it. In college in the 1970s—long before same-sex couples were socially acceptable—I ran the campus Gay Center and started two more in cities where I had college co-op jobs and went to my first same-sex wedding in 1978 or ’79. I did community organizing around the environment and safe energy all the way back to 1971, when I was a 14-year-old high school junior—and that consciousness didn’t really become mainstream until THIS century. I worked as a paid organizer for an elders’ rights organization at 22 and 23. I had my consciousness raised about a whole bunch of disability rights and minority rights issues during the six years in the 1990s when I served on my city’s official disability access committee (helping public spaces like theaters and restaurants meet accessibility codes) and simultaneously on the District Attorney’s Civil Rights Advisory Board (sensitizing lawyers, cops, and criminal justice workers to the needs of marginalized communities). I worked for 15 years in that city and 24 years in the neighboring small town where I live now on opening up the electoral process and city/town government to disenfranchised voices. And for more than three years, I’ve been deeply involved with immigration/refugee justice work, including an extended visit to the US-Mexico border where we visited a huge refugee camp daily and heard the stories of some of the most marginalized people in the world.
This diversity of experience may seem very random—but certain common threads hold it all together into a larger whole that feels coherent and meaningful to me. A few examples:
All of this work is about empowering people who have felt powerless
All of it embraces the same construct that the poet presents: that just because something is a certain way doesn’t at all mean it’s impossible to change it (I even did a TEDx talk on this called “‘Impossible’ Is A Dare” (it’s 15 minutes long, riffs on a quote by Muhammad Ali that I misattributed at the time, and discusses how socially and environmentally conscious businesses can change the world—to watch, click the link and then click again on “event videos”)
All of it works on the theory that change happens faster and more fully when it becomes a movement—while acknowledging that acting alone can still make a significant difference. (I’m very proud of my one-person, three-day demonstration against the US bombing of Libya that drew middle fingers and jeers on the first day, but supportive honks and waves on the third day, as well as many individual conversations with people who thought differently, sometimes reaching common ground and always de-demonizing each other—but I’m even prouder of the broad-based movement I founded that saved an endangered local mountain.)
It all recognizes that change happens both internally, inside your own heart and brain, and externally, as the actions of one person or a movement ripple out into the wider world–and as these movements find common ground and begin to work together, discovering their intersectionality: their common struggle.
A whole bag of usable produce thrown away. Photo credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dumpster-a-plenty.jpg
I have a moral problem with food waste when others are going hungry. In the developed world, our hunger crisis has nothing to do with insufficient supply–and everything to do with throwing out vast quantities of usable food, and the people who need it being unable to get it. 30 to 40 percent of all food grown in the US is tossed. Some gets thrown away because it spoils–but 1) a whole lot of perfectly good food goes to the landfill, and 2) if one area has gone bad (like mold one side of a block of cheese), in many cases, the item can be trimmed and most of it saved. Smell, taste, and appearance can help you decide what can be salvaged and what should go in the compost.
Where it does food waste come from? To name a few: Restaurants cooking more than they sell. Uninformed consumers who think food has to be dumped once it passes its sell-by date. Produce wholesalers who reject fruits and vegetables because of non-uniform appearance. Commercial processors who are not set up to capture and process every bit.
Grocery stores need similar programs. One step in the right direction is services like Imperfect Foods and Misfits Market, both of which sell reject produce direct-to-consumers.
On the consumer side, the biggest results will come from education. We need trainings that demonstrate:
What foods really aren’t safe past their expiration dates, and which are perfectly fine (in general, meat products should be used or frozen before their expiry dates, opened refrigerated dairy is typically good for at least three days beyond, and unopened often for a week or two, while many processed foods are shelf-stable for years)
How to preserve various foods
Where to donate if you have too much food that’s still good
How buying locally grown organic foods minimizes waste (including the huge environmental burden of transporting foods across oceans and continents
What makes sense for your size household to buy in bulk, and what’s much better to just buy as much as you need inn the near future
How to use smell, appearance, and small tastes to determine whether food is still ok
When it makes sense to trim bad parts off, and when to discard the whole thing
How to use leftovers without getting bored with them
Environmentally friendly options for disposing of spoiled food (compost, slops for animals, etc.)
A popular music festival in Atlanta, founded back in 1996, will not be taking place in Piedmont Park (or anywhere else) this September as scheduled. The organizers cancelled it, apparently because of Georgia’s ever-more-skewed laws that give gun owners the right to carry weapons at massive public events. Apparently, this right is stronger in Georgia (and elsewhere) than the rights of people who might not care to be shot at while enjoying a concert. The event was actively targeted by gun worshippers who informed the festival organizers that they’d be sued if they tried to block access to ticket holders bearing firearms, even though contracts with artists mandated a no-gun policy.
Which is really a shame. I hope the organizers find the courage to say, “Georgia legislators, YOU and your guns-without-limits laws are the reason we had to cancel. You’ve cost Atlanta hospitality business owners (restaurants, hotels, etc.) millions in lost revenue because you do not allow us a way to keep our artists and patrons safe.”
Because THAT kind of messaging is how we will eventually, finally, turn back the culture of gun-rights-matter-more-than-human-rights. All the deaths of little kids and innocent bystanders haven’t mattered despite Sandy Hook, Columbine, Tree of Life, Las Vegas, Texas, and all the other horrific mass shootings.
And if businesses, conference organizers and others start boycotting states with obscenely pro-gun policies, the change will come faster.
I’ve had a blog post percolating for several weeks about the Supreme Court and what we can do to rein them in. I had not started writing it and then I came across this from YES magazine, which says most of what I would have said. So I will let Chris Winters say it for me. As he notes, nonviolent resistance including general strikes is a powerful force for change. It has brought down some pretty repressive governments (examples: Arab Spring, the overthrow of South African apartheid and , the collapse of the Soviet Union) and forced others–even Nazi Germany–to soften their stance.
Robert Hubbell’s Today’s Edition politics newsletter (which I read daily) quoted a reader who suggested that Democrats label the Republican platform for 2022 as “The Big Steal.” Here is his suggestion, with edits and additions by me:
Vote Republican, and you vote for the “Big Steal”:
Your Social Security will be stolen.
Your Medicare will be stolen.
Your prescription drugs will be stolen.
Your affordable health care will be stolen.
Your right to privacy will be stolen.
Your control over reproductive choices will be stolen.
Your voting rights will be stolen.
Your right to elect leaders will be stolen.
Our democracy will be stolen.
It’s not perfect, but you get the idea. Iterations are endless. Republicans want to take things away (The Big Steal), including personal liberties and equal protection under law. Democrats want to provide Americans the things they need to lead safe, healthy, productive lives—including personal liberties and equal protection under the law. Somewhere in there is a winning message.
Republicans doing The Big Steal is half of the messaging. Yes, absolutely, we need to show that corrupt and greedy party for what it is. But we also need another half, maybe call it The Big Payoff. And the second part will subdivide into two as well.
The first part will be what the Democrats have actively accomplished. They have created jobs in a terrible economy. They have restored us leadership in the world sphere. They have taken some action to mitigate climate change. They have stood up for integrity of the political process and showed that insurrections and coup attempts will not be tolerated here. They have supported Ukraine against Putin’s barbaric war. And they have restored dignity and mission to a corrupt and twisted executive branch.
The second part is the wish list: things Biden and the Democrats tried to do but were blocked by filibusters, judicial opinions, or just plain refusal to cooperate from the Republican side. This would include Build Back Better, protecting the right to vote, protecting women’s right to control their own bodies, meaningful progress on the biggest issues like climate change and immigration reform, and of course, the right of regulatory bodies to regulate. Not only have Republican judges forced the CDC–which stands for, let us remind them, Centers for Disease Control–to give up protecting the public in transit facilities, but other decisions will threaten such rights as environmental protection and labor protection, using that very bad precedent to attack EPA and OSHA. Let’s also talk about the right not to be sitting next to someone who is carrying a concealed weapon. The right to love and marry whom you choose as long as they are above the age of consent. Etc, etc, etc
Our rights are under attack! Photo by Wojciech Ner.
Ever since the upcoming decision overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked, I’ve been stewing on it. Tomorrow, I am going to my second rally to uphold women’s reproductive rights. It shouldn’t be necessary, but it is. If we can prevent Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale from moving from a dystopian novel to a description of life in 2020s America, it’s our obligation to do so. I don’t know about you, but I do not want to live in anyplace resembling the theocratic dictatorship of Gilead that she describes.
I will not address the valid question of when does a fetus’s life take precedence over the mother’s because I don’t have the medical qualifications to give an answer that is based on fact. But let me raise a personal liberty argument: I will bring up the extension of the upcoming court decision to other areas, because we know that is coming–and because it personally affects my family. One former National Review editor actually posted on social media, “Next stop Brown vs. Board!” That was the decision that outlawed segregation in 1954. Here’s a screenshot of that post (NOTE: the blog that shows the post is a foul-mouthed screed–but you can see a picture of the post and learn some useful information about the person who wrote that post).
Alito has a long history of speaking out against same-sex marriage and cannot be trusted not to use the same twisted reasoning to go after it. He also authored the Hobby Lobby case, which could be seen as a wedge decision that could eventually be used to eliminate legal contraception. In both of these probable attacks on our rights, it gets personal for me.
My younger child identifies as nonbinary, uses they-them pronouns, and is five years into a beautiful relationship with someone who has the same types of body parts and chromosomes but a very different cultural and religious upbringing. I fully support them, their choice of identity, and their wonderful life-partner.
My older one married another lovely guy from a different cultural and religious upbringing–who is the product of a White father and a Latina mom who clearly has indigenous ancestry. He is an excellent life partner for my daughter. My wife and I love both of our kids’ partners.
My mother, raised in a super-observant Orthodox Jewish family, divorced my father and married a Japanese man who was raised Buddhist. She also did some pretty intense civil rights work, including serving as a tester for the Urban League to determine if those apartments declined to Black families were really “already rented.”
I identify as bi and have had relationships before my marriage with both men and women. And I have slept with people who were not the same color as me. If I were my kids’ age, I might well have chosen to identify as nonbinary. While I am now very comfortable in my maleness, I was very UNcomfortable with it in my teens and 20s.
I am a survivor of rape by a grown male stranger who literally grabbed me off the street when I was 10 or 11. Fortunately, becoming pregnant was not an issue–but what if I’d been a 15-year-old girl, and had been forced to bear a child whose every moment would remind me of the violence done to me–a violence that was extremely traumatic even without a pregnancy?
Let’s also put this into a wider context: this is the same Supreme Court that recently decided that the Centers for Disease Control does not have the right to control disease by mandating masks in public conveyances–so you could be sitting next to a superspreader on a six-hour flight with no protection other than your own voluntary mask, and a coughing fit on a rush-hour subway car could expose dozens.
In fact, two people I’m very close to, who bought plane tickets before the mask mandate was overturned but flew later, have come down with COVID. I am flying next month, and I’m not happy about it. But my 91-year-old dad no longer travels and it’s important to see him when we can.
Even before that inane ruling, it was necessary to fight for my right to protect myself and the people I pod with. I refused to sit next to someone on a plane who would not mask (while that ruling was still in effect), and he was eventually taken off the plane. And at our official Town Meeting last week, I had to call a Point of Order to demand that the inadequate separation of masked and unmasked on opposite sides of an aisle be enforced, after asking someone to either put on a mask or go sit in the no-mask section. You would think the anti-vax crowd would actually be in favor of masks in public indoor spaces, since they would have lower risk of getting a bad case of COVID–but no. I still don’t understand the way these basic public health measures have been weaponized, even after many prominent mask critics contracted fatal cases. After all, we have seat belt laws, motorcycle helmet laws, and requirements that school children receive various other vaccines.
When I wrote this article back in 2014, it was published in three places. But it’s long enough ago that I can’t find it online. The message is too important to let slip away, so I’m reprinting it here–unchanged except for adding one sentence.
