The Invisible Ism

Of all the vocabulary I’ve gathered and ability I’ve acquired to discuss systemic oppression, there are a couple of forms of oppression or discrimination that I’ve noticed receive less or almost no attention. By referring to them as invisible, I don’t mean that we can’t tell that they exist or that their effects are minor or inconsequential, but that they are easily overlooked or erased in discussions about combating injustice and in purportedly progressive spaces. Society collectively disregards the validity and experiences of people who are victimized by these isms, one of which I want to explore in this post: ableism.  

The definition of ableism that I’m working with is as follows: a form of structural oppression--the intertwining of prejudice and systems of power--that produces an entire system of thinking and acting that harms and discriminates against disabled people (as well as people presumed to have disabilities).  

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            Rereading old writing of mine is always a treacherously cringeworthy experience. Invariably, interspersed with the occasional nugget of surprising astute middle-school observations will be sentences, descriptions, or words that I wish I had had the sense not to use.

            I am conscious that my writing as it is now still probably doesn’t avoid ableist language, but it is particularly striking to me that as an eighth-grader, I was both aware and completely ignorant of the issues I was trying to discuss. I wrote a story that touched on characters with autism, mental illness, and other chronic illnesses in fairly heavy-handed or inconsiderate ways. I was not trying to be ableist--I didn’t even know what that meant--and would have said I was trying to be positive or respectful about people with disabilities, which clearly didn’t work out. Part of the problem was my ignorance of issues around disability, which led me to try to constantly “justify” my character’s depression and suicidality by making her an increasingly tragic figure experiencing every misfortune I could think of. And part of it was internalized societal ideas about disability that I had no idea I’d adopted.

It was especially unnerving because I wrote a character quite like myself into my story, and there’s a scene when she’s explaining her medical problems to another character, and the thing she emphasizes most emphatically is that she is not “handicapped,” and seems terrified of being perceived as such. This disavowal isn’t something I can recall ever doing myself--at least not so vociferously. I do have to wonder, though, just how much anti-disability sentiment percolated into my subconscious before I became aware of it.

To identify as a person with disabilities (mainly chronic autoimmune disorders) is something I struggle with--how to do it, whether to do it at all, whether my chronic illnesses “qualify” me as disabled enough. As a kid, I was shy and loathed attention, and tried my hardest to fit in with the people around me. I hated that the school nurse had to come to my classroom twice a day to check in with me, that I was often late to lunch or class and attracted attention by coming in late. I hated that I couldn’t eat what I wanted and sometimes couldn’t participate in activities or had to miss school. I understood that the media did not reflect or represent people like me, and clung to the few books that did, even in flawed or unrealistic ways. I tried to include characters with my experiences in the stories I wrote (and managed to problematically represent myself even so, apparently). I had some encounters with ableism--doctors convinced I would not be able to manage my medical conditions alone in middle school, other kids’ rude interrogations, adults’ deliberate misunderstanding, TSA officials at airport security harassing me over whether my medical devices were actually explosives. But internalized and other less obvious manifestations of ableism were whole different matters, ones that it took me a long time to grasp.

I began to think about ableism around the same time I started to think more deeply about the whole web of intertwined oppressions (racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, ageism, cissexism, etc.), but at first it was only another term in a list of Bad Things. It was when I attended a class on disability rights activism taught by Lydia Brown that a whole other dynamic of societal oppression came unhidden for me--the way “normally”-functioning bodies/minds are taken as the default, relegating all those who deviate from that quietly assumed normal to some sort of defective status. The simultaneous erasure and exploitation of disabled people--as sources of “inspiration,” as symbols of divine punishment or tribulation, as medical problems that can be fixed--came clear to me, like something that had always been all around me but which I’d never really examined.

The disability activism class was one of the most valuable two hours I have ever spent. I probably signed up out of a sense of activist duty--this was an area of oppression that I didn’t know too much about and should probably learn. I was thinking vaguely of myself as disabled at the time, but I shied away from the label still--afraid, perhaps, that it would seem like I was asking for pity or special treatment, afraid that I didn’t “count” as disabled, etc. Perhaps, shamefully, afraid of associating myself with the people our culture deems worthy of rejection, subjugation, erasure, and/or violence.

This concept of internalized as well as societal ableism is one that has stuck with me most strikingly. To want to distance myself from the “disabled” label, to want to prove I was no different than non-disabled peers--this is part of what Brown described to us as disability disavowal: even within the category of people with disabilities, there is an artificial hierarchy. In order to reclaim some of the power disabled people are not apportioned or allowed, we may console or raise up ourselves by thinking along the lines of, “Well, I may be ____, but at least I’m not ____.  I don’t want to be ____. At least I’m more normal than that.” This is what my  book character from middle school was doing--insisting that she’s not handicapped, god forbid anyone see her that way. God forbid she fit into any category but some throttling concept of normal. In order for her to “win,” to be accepted, to be normal, someone else has to lose--has to be lesser, “more disabled,” less valid as a real person, less respected, lower on the totem pole of people already cast into society’s reject pile.

The takeaway from that class was the conviction that what we need now is to move from rights to justice. Beyond changing whatever laws we’ve managed to change or institute, we must have a shift in mindset and cultural values and paradigms so that progressive laws have a chance of being enforced, and better ones made, so that our lives can be something not just legally protected, but culturally understood and appreciated.

In my town, which tends to fancy itself progressive and liberal, there were attempts in elementary school to teach kids about disabilities. On the day when they taught about a condition I have, I skipped school, dreading being talked about, being regarded as irrevocably Different. I was very shy and touchy about discussing any of my medical problems, but at least the school was making an effort to increase kids’ awareness of the experiences of people around them. But I would have preferred it if disabilities could be more “normalized,” so to speak, rather than singled out for a day. Not to say that programs aimed at understanding should be replaced with erasure or avoidance of the subject, but discussions of ableism and such would be a good addition, rather than just spotlighting some sad differences that Other People have. Additionally, we have to build a general culture where disability isn’t something that’s stowed away in a corner, with disabled people at risk of erasure or far worse mistreatment.

A less harmful society is still far off, despite some efforts that have been made--awareness posters, attempts at inclusive language, attempts at accessibility accommodations. Backlash against “political correctness” and “oversensitivity” is also unfortunate and harmful, especially when it creates unsafe environments through mockery. Just the other day, one of my teachers went off on a bizarre, ableist-neurotypical rant about the fact that we have a therapy dog that visits the school once in a while. His diatribe went something along the lines of, “When Russia and China come to invade us, we’re not even going to fight, we’re going to be big squishy marshmallows with our therapy dogs, where everyone gets a trophy…” He went on, adopting a mock-baby voice. “Aw, your lives are so hard here, aren’t they? It’s just like a war zone here, isn’t it? Don’t you all have PTSD? Aw, I feel so bad for you!”

Yes, the town I live in is largely privileged and coddled, but disabilities do not discriminate by class or situation. Implying that any mental health issues we might have are trivial because our lives aren’t “hard” enough is an ableist effort to delegitimize those issues. Bringing in a puppy for students to spend time with, to give them a moment to decompress, to soothe stress--this is not an effort that warrants derision or scorn. What does deserve reproach is not that students in a privileged town may, apparently inconceivably, have hard lives or suffer from mental health problems, but that our schools are not safe places and may well contribute to anxiety, depression, and the like. Suffocation in the pressure-cooker of a privilege-sodden high school is not the equivalent of a war zone, but that doesn’t make our problems insignificant or worthy of scorn. Ironically, the stress of this teacher’s high-level class combined with the mocking of his students are exactly what can produce the problems that therapy dogs may help assuage.

In a way, this incident was born of the same misconception I had back in middle school, when I kept trying to “justify” my character’s suicide by making her life harder and harder, thinking that she couldn’t believably be struggling unless she was in the very worst situation possible--except this is worse, because here the ableism was coming from a teacher, in whom authority is vested, and whose job description is not supposed to include taking aim at his students or belittling them if they are struggling or really do benefit from therapy. Additionally, if our priorities truly were supporting mental health rather than fear-mongering around the Threat of China and Russia, why exactly would that be worthy of mockery? And just the fact that teachers can openly ridicule efforts to build support networks and healthier school atmospheres is demonstrative of the reality that we do not live in a society where everyone gets a trophy--in other words, an equal one. We live in one where there is still a clear lack of justice, understanding, and compassion.

As well as in schools, with their mixed records, there’s a dearth of consideration of this silent ism, ableism, in the domains of activism in general. At a screening of a documentary on climate change, a man asked me if there would be audio narration for the whole movie, since he was nearly blind and would not be able to see it. I had to tell him that I didn’t think there would be, and cringed during the times in the film when the narrative was carried only by pictures or words on the screen. At the same event, incidentally, a friend of mine worried that there would not be subtitles--and there weren’t--without which she had a hard time hearing the words, especially if she couldn’t lip-read the people speaking them. This was a screening hosted by an activist organization that strives for awareness and inclusiveness, and it dawned on me slowly how much ableism still pervades spaces that try to be intersectional and enlightened. At recent marches and rallies, I applauded the diversity in race, gender, and class of the speakers, and was impressed by the readily available Spanish translation, but noticed that disability was not at all taken into account. I have seen an ASL interpreter at a Jackson Browne concert, but not a political rally or conference. Many events involve stairs or walking long distances without accessibility options. And mental illness may be given even less consideration even in spaces that are supposed to be progressive or radical.

Ableism is often a quiet oppression, but it is not an absent one. It is not separate from other issues that we try to combat, and may both appear and be ignored in our well-intentioned activism. To treat mental illness as the root of gun violence has a flavor of ableism, for example. There are situations in which the phrase “man up” can be seen as both sexist and ableist. Classism affects the ability of people to get aid for health problems, including those stemming from disabilities. The fallout of catastrophic climate change will pose particular challenges for people like me who will not be able to survive without access to medical supplies. Gender identities and sexual orientations that break with the cisgender-and-straight pattern have been sometimes regarded as mental illnesses (and sometimes in declaring that they’re not, the LGBTQ community partakes in disability disavowal--“we’re queer but that doesn’t mean we’re disabled, at least,” without including or affirming the experiences of people who are both). Whatever our sphere of social justice activism, ableism is there playing a role, waiting to be brought to light, held accountable, and rejected.

Ableism creates artificial divisions and strata of society to hold differently-abled and “normal” people, and unless activists begin to address and rectify this oppression in our work, they reinforce those barriers, exactly as our discriminatory society would prefer.

The road to a better world, as always, is long. To change our mindsets, to change our actions, to alter how we think of normal and problematic, to destigmatize differences in ability, to shift our own language and thoughts as well as working to change others’, to engage with struggles against ableist incarceration or education or legal policies--none of this is easy. But no facet of activism is easy. Fighting to dismantle systems of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, etcetera has never been easy, but we work for it, and it is necessary.

We should not settle for any less with ableism.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Today is the first day of the rest of our lives/ Tomorrow is too late to pretend everything’s all right now… --“Church On Sunday,” Green Day

It’s been a long time since I thought I could feel a tangible transition between December 31st and January 1st, but as 2016 begins, I am very conscious of the time passing--of how little we have in the face of so much change we need to create, and of how little we are probably aware of it.

We live fast. We move fast. We think fast. We talk fast. And all around us, the volatile world changes fast. It’s up to us how that happens. Are we going to struggle for more victories, like the Iran Deal and the defeat of the Keystone XL pipeline? Are we going to fight corporate juggernauts like the TPP? Are we going to demand and curtail proxy wars and drone strikes, police brutality, Guantanamo Bay, secret surveillance programs? Are we going to ignore our rights and let them fade away? Are we going to pay attention to each other, to forge human connections, to live with empathy and respect and thoughtfulness? Are we going to give in to the voices of the media and each other, shouting be afraid, be very afraid? Are we going to sit back and watch climate change worsen, tipping points tick closer, business as usual keep rocketing on? Are we going to put ourselves in the line of fire? Are we going to stand up for those already there?

Our challenges mount every moment that we wait. Years like 2016 and 2017 were settings for dystopian futuristic books back when I was in middle school--and now we’re living them. Time won’t wait for us to stand up, to make our choices over how much we’ll sacrifice now and how much we’ll wait to have stripped away later. Time may not be on our side, but power still can be. The world we will live in, the world we will die in, the world our children and their children will live in will depend on the choices that we make now. This year. Today.

I have been conflicted over using the term ‘political’ too often--it is so often a turn-off to people my age, yet if we deny that everything, everything we do is political, we are simply giving ourselves another outlet for avoidance, for apathy. What we do now matters. How we act is political, because we don’t have time to live in a world where politics doesn’t overlay everything. If it helps to get through to someone about climate change by framing it as something other than a political issue, that can still be an important avenue to pursue--but there is no stepping out of politics. There is no way to terminate the contract we have bound ourselves into--with the planet, with each other. We are all in this together, and we will only get out of it if as many of us as possible fight as hard as we can for a world that we can live in safely, sustainably, equitably, joyfully.

I am quite honestly afraid. But I will be here, somewhere, standing up, fighting back. Whatever I can do, I will offer it. 2016 must not be a year to dawdle. We are waking up. We are looking around. And now we have to run. We have so much work to do. Today is too late to regret, and tomorrow is too late to pretend. We need to act. This isn’t a year we can throw away.

As we move deeper into 2016, where are we headed? Which yesterdays are we going to remember or repair? What kind of tomorrows are we going to build? 

The Paris Climate Agreement: Compromises, Failure--and the Resolve We Must Muster

      When my email flooded with news that a climate agreement had been reached in Paris, the urge to celebrate was strong, even as I sifted through news that ranged from the euphoric to the downright cynical. To chalk this up as a victory is tempting, and celebrations are not entirely unwarranted. But we must do it without abandon, tempering our desire for triumph with the bittersweet--or just bitter--realities.
      At a 2000-person-strong Jobs, Justice and Climate rally in Boston the day the Paris Agreement was announced, I had already been getting a sense of misgiving over this agreement that had been anticipated with such bated breath. As a woman from the Penobscot tribe railed against the deal's betrayal of indigenous rights, I found myself ruffled, wanting to deny it before I even knew what she was saying was true. I, like so many activists, wanted the Paris Agreement to be good, a major and concrete step towards progress rather than a false victory or yet another stumbling block.
      The rally was powerful and inspiring, intersectional and energized. Several people from my school attended, and I felt hopeful that climate change may be an issue that can truly galvanize my peers, who usually register as lukewarm or apathetic.
      That hopefulness dimmed later, as I sorted through my email and began to get a sense of what the Paris Agreement had and had not accomplished. The response varied greatly from radicals to moderates, from Big Green groups to grassroots organizations. The most stunning--or appalling--reaction that I saw came from Avaaz, which lauded the deal as if it had been handed down from on high, stamped with God's seal--miracle included! It may make us feel proud and accomplished, but that kind of starry-eyed response is far more dangerous than a measured pros-and-cons limited critique or even a thoroughly disheartening dismissal of the deal as bullshit. The movements, the organizing, the activism, the mass people power, the demonstrations that arose before and during the Paris talks--all of that is heartening and significant to the struggle against corporate extractivism and complicit, indifferent politicians. There are real markers of tipping points building, the fossil fuel era ending, but it's coming from the people, not the corporatocracy and not the Paris talks. To allow us to feel that we have won, omitting a single criticism of the agreement, strips our sense of urgency by letting us believe that the future is safely in the hands of authority and we can all head home now. It allows us to end or put a brake on fierce, all-out activism that is exactly what we need much more, not less, of right now.
      And to understand the urgency of the fulcrum at which we are poised, we have to deconstruct the above-and-beyond rosy assessments of the Paris deal like those promoted by Avaaz.
      Their statement began, "World leaders at the UN climate talks have just set a landmark goal that can save everything we love!" and went on to call the deal "a brilliant and massive turning point in human history." And how I wish it was.
      Perhaps it could "save everything we love," if every country obeyed its voluntary emission-cut pledges and donated enough money to cleanly lift developing countries away from dirty energy. But since it's not enforceable and not very strong, it won't save everything we love. Additionally, this begs the question--who is "we" here? Were the deal obeyed down to the letter and every country did everything required or requested of it, a lot might be saved, but not everything. If "we" is first-world middle-class white people, then probably the deal could prevent a lot of damage and harm from befalling that subset of the world's population. But the agreement would not halt CO2 emissions at a level that would keep many island nations above water, and neither does it provide protections for indigenous, women's, or human rights. Are all of the people who these grievous oversights or omissions will affect excluded from the "we" here?
      Not only does this assessment of the Paris Agreement distort the extremely problematic outcome of the COP21 talks, Avaaz has also reframed history to add up to something far more successful and optimistic than the story reality tells. "Out of great crises, humanity has borne beautiful visions," the Avaaz statement declares. "World War II gave rise to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an enduring standard for our spirit and capacity as one people. The fall of Apartheid led South Africa to the single most bold and progressive constitution in the world."
      There are a few clear problems here. First, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a powerful and affecting piece of writing, but that's essentially all. It is symbolically significant, but to call it a standard is exactly right. It's an aspiration or an inspiration, but not an enforceable piece of policy. It's also frequently violated, remember?
      Second, South Africa's post-apartheid constitution may be impressive, but the cession of power by the white apartheid leaders in 1994 was never complete and the dreams of democracy and equality promoted by the African National Congress (ANC) were subverted from the start. They gained political power with the end of apartheid, but the economic reins remained in the hands of the previous white elites, whose machinations allowed neoliberal policies to continue devastating the country and sabotaging the ANC's efforts to reduce racial inequality and poverty (which actually increased after Nelson Mandela took power).
      Both of these glorified pieces of history--the Declaration of Human Rights and the South African constitution--were symbolic and powerful documents that failed to translate to real power and change in a concrete sense. That sounds like an accurate prognosis for the Paris Agreement.
      Yes, there were high points and admirable moments during the Paris talks: the High Ambition Coalition, for one, organized by the Marshall Islands and about 100 others, represented a hopeful dynamic of cooperation and demands for equity and justice-based plans to combat the climate crisis. But in the final hours of the talks, large wealthy countries (mostly the Global North) took control to stifle the voices of those representatives.
      Avaaz's statement continued, to say that "Everyone expected failure from the climate conference process" and that they kept being told that "people don't care about climate change." Well, we expected failure and we got it, in some absolute sense. There are parts of the deal that are important milestones in changing the discussion around climate change, and the deal produced impressive activism and moving statements from countries most threatened by environmental catastrophe. I don't believe that everything about the Paris talks was a waste. But if we wanted, as Avaaz says, a deal that would "save everything we love," it is a failure.
      Furthermore, the reason the agreement might have failed is not because supposedly "people don't care about climate change." Avaaz is right to say that that is untrue. However, what one could have said is, "Governments and corporations don't really care about combating climate change," and that is what caused the failure.
      If the victory here is over people who said that no one cares about climate change, then that may be a victory. Though still small-scale compared to the outrage and mobilization we ought to be experiencing, the activism spurred by and concentrated on the Paris talks was indeed remarkable, even in its limited state. That Avaaz has helped in some way to build or connect this movement I don't dispute. But I worry that too much of the movement, such as it is, will be deluded into sitting back and relaxing, now that the story delivered to our inboxes is declaring, essentially, that we have now clinched the battle for the planet, when in truth, there is no reason to stop fighting and many to keep going with even more intensity. It's a starting point to fight all the harder, realizing once and for all that we cannot rely on governments to protect our planet, our health, or our rights. The email from Avaaz itself declares "This gives us the platform we need to realize the dream of a safe future for generations," and regardless of the rosy language, they're right: this is a platform, nothing more. It's something useful that we can build on, whether or not it would amount to anything if left on its own. But we can use it.
      The Paris Agreement is a platform from which we must keep screaming, because we are being heard, from time to time and at various volumes, but we must not allow ourselves to be pacified. This deal is a pacifier and eager-to-be-pleased, eager-to-declare-victory Big Green groups are the easily quieted babies.
      It's a very shaky platform, however, so if we want the climate movement that we've seen glimpses of to strengthen and spread, we will need to work for that. We have seen the failures of our elected officials and of international negotiations. Change will come, we must know, only from massive demand, obstruction, and grassroots construction. There is no miracle and no deal that will come to save us. We are all we have, and we have a lot, if we use it well.
      And we will need to. Not only to insist on enforcement of the few important pieces of the Paris agreement, and not just to keep climate change on the public radar, but because of other threats that keep rising to confound us and imperil the planet. I was gratified to see banners protesting the Trans-Pacific Partnership at the Boston rally, since this is one of the great elephants in the room: none of the paltry victories of the Paris agreement will mean anything if the sort of trade agreements are implemented that guarantee the planet as a corporate playground, an extractivist and anti-democratic bonanza with nothing to stand in its way. The real fight was not in Paris, trusting our futures to the steamrollering power of wealthy first-world nations for whom the bottom line speaks louder than the below-2-degrees-of-warming limit. The real future is against the insidious "free-trade" juggernauts like the TPP, TTIP, and TiSA that promise not just business as usual, but business as worse than usual, and irreversible.
      I was explaining the physics and timetable of climate change to some friends today, and one of them commented that if we have fifteen years to get emissions under control, and the Paris agreement asks leaders to meet every five years, they will meet only three times before unstoppable tipping points are triggered under the current projections. This is deadly inertia, masquerading as global action. This is not the pace we need. The "solutions" concocted by world leaders are built for a different reality than the one we live in.
      However understandable the impulse to celebrate was, we have to look clearly and rationally at the world that lies before us now. To gloss over the ways in which this deal failed and to make us feel like we have won something truly remarkable--that is toxic. No matter what the outcome of COP21 had been, self-congratulatory-flavored complacency should never, ever have been an option for a post-Paris plan. That this deal is anywhere near perfect or even relieving is a dangerous fallacy, akin to telling a runner who is neck-and-neck with their adversary that they are ahead now and can slow their pace, since they will surely win. Since we aren't nearly that close as far as reining in climate catastrophe goes, we can even more ill afford to slow down. If this is a race against time and against destruction of our planet, we are in an all-out sprint, with a long way to go, a lot of distance to cover, and no promise of a safe or easy ending.

This Interesting Stew of Fear, Manufactured and Real

Yesterday morning at school, a girl I'm friendly with began complaining about Hillary Clinton, which I might have nodded along to, but then she said, "Hillary wants to raise the number of Syrians we're taking in to 60,000 and I don't think it's a good idea. Is that even safe?" Then she said, "I mean, all these mass shootings we've been having lately, they've all been by Muslims."

I was pretty thrown, and I told her, "There was a shooting at Planned Parenthood in Colorado just recently by a white non-Muslim US man."

She ignored that and went on to say that it is "in their religion" for Muslims to commit violence.

"No, it's not," I said. I tried to explain the difference between Muslims and extremists like ISIS who are perverting Islam. I tried to explain some of the history in the region, our guilt and responsibilities. It's a long, complicated story to explain in ten minutes of homeroom, though.

I expected hysteria and fearmongering and prejudice as soon as news broke of the Paris and then San Bernardino attacks, but this was the first time I'd run into such Islamophobia. And my friend didn't come up with this herself--it's something she's been taught by dangerous narratives in our country right now. No wonder the emails that arrive in my inbox tell me that US support for war is high. What I heard from my friend is the rhetoric people are swallowing. This is the story presented as truth: we are under threat, Muslims are at fault, and we can't accept them into our country because they would endanger us.

Never mind that the refugees are fleeing the same people we're thirsting for war with; that they are victims, not aggressors. Never mind that to reject the refugees plays right into ISIS's hands and their story in which the West is the devil incarnate. Never mind that it was our military misadventures that caused the crucible of instability and brutality and devastation that spawned ISIS. Never mind that we bear heavy responsibility not to turn our backs on the refugees we created. Never mind that 60,000 isn't so much compared to the numbers that countries like Lebanon and Jordan are shouldering. Never mind that fear, ignorance, and the impulse to rush to military solutions first were what landed everyone in this lunatic blowback machine to begin with.

But no, never mind all that. (Actually, please do mind.) Because the official line is the same it always is: be afraid, be very afraid.

Fear is useful to the architects of war and other foreign policy. The fear that makes us malleable is a tool that will be used against us, to drum up support for wars. This is the fear that makes us accede to legislation that strips away our rights and laws--like the Patriot Act--and wars that drain money and human lives. This is the fear that spirals into apathy when our reaction is to batten down the hatches and seal ourselves off from what we may call terrorism.

Fear is inevitable in our volatile world, and it may well be justified. But that we are so willing to accept spoon-fed fear is scarier to me than the amorphous threat of Them, the terrorists, the newest enemy of the week, who are coming to get us.

One of the best antidotes to mindless, racist fear is knowledge. Awareness of the facts on the ground and the possible courses of action. What will cause the least damage and heal the most wounds that we have been gouging for so long. And the knowledge that this atmosphere of fear and instability and warmongering is a strategy, advancing the interests of the corporate and military elite. It has been done before and it will be done again. To quote a line from the punk rock band Anti-Flag in their song Anatomy of Your Enemy (10 Easy Steps to Create an Enemy and Start a War): "We need to see these tactics as a weapon against humanity and not as truth."

Unacceptable Trade Deals and Unconscionable Trade-Offs

In my Italian class last year, we were supposed to use the phrase “ho paura” to explain what we were afraid of. I racked my brain for fears and then wondered how on earth I was supposed to say “climate change, humans’ indifference, torture, slow degenerative diseases, and the future” in Italian.

I have another fear to add to the list: trade deals. It sounds almost laughable to write it--“one of my greatest fears is toxic global trade deals”--and I certainly can’t say it in Italian. But ever since the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was finally released to the public and jumped back into the public consciousness (or the very margins, at least), I have found myself terrified to imagine the condition of the world should we fail to stop this deal.

For most of the fight against Congress authorizing Fast Track legislation, I was getting emails from various groups all delineating the disastrous impact of one or another specific aspects of the TPP--food safety, environmental protection, internet freedom, and so on. Therefore I was able to amass knowledge about this juggernaut without contemplating as a whole its colossally alarming potential (and during the Fast Track fight, there was still a hope that maybe the whole deal could end right there, but now it’s even closer at hand). Lately, though, watching hashtags like #TPPworsethanwethought floating around Twitter and listening to conference calls packed with litanies of disastrous provisions, I’m getting overwhelmed. And honestly, quite scared.

Trade is one of those issues easily brushed under the rug. It sounds about as interesting as the federal budget or the ingredients in a piece of candy and has effects just as visceral, unrecognized, and potentially harmful. It also sounds benign--who could be opposed to trade? It has the connotation of exchange, of bartering and negotiation and equality, more or less. What it actually represents, much of the time, is a trade-off--of human rights, environmental and health and food protections, internet freedom, democracy.

I have trouble even explaining to people how much is at stake, because I have so little to offer on what we can do. Protest. Be aware. Spread the word. But when I’m explaining to my friends the procedures by which corporations can sue governments in secret courts, it’s hard to come up with a solution that seems commensurate to the danger I’m talking about.

As a high school student, I see our world--the world I am inheriting--standing on a catastrophic precipice, one that endangers the future of us all but especially of my generation and younger generations. We are faced with a drastic, devastating environmental crisis that demands the fastest, strongest action possible. We are also faced with a crisis of democracy, as power concentrates ever more in the hands of the corporatist elite, and global inequality deepens.

It’s all been said before, with most alarming detail and gravity in analyses by Public Citizen and Food & Water Watch, from which I draw heavily for my facts here, but I’ll say it again.

Now is the worst possible time for a trade deal such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Despite the Obama administration’s bleating assurances, this deal is a death sentence for our rights, health, safety, and future. Giveaways to pharmaceutical corporations will ensure that prices for drugs are completely contingent on a company’s whims, and the extension of patent terms to 12 years will make it harder and harder to obtain cheaper, generic forms of medications, especially for low-income people and those in underdeveloped countries. As someone who relies on medications to treat chronic illnesses, this prospect leaves me furious and frightened. Meanwhile, I would have an increasingly hard time paying for those medications if I happened to enter a field of work that, under the TPP, will be competing with 60-cent wages in Vietnam and 13-year-old workers in Malaysia. Brunei does not even have a minimum wage, and the TPP requires only that it establish one, which could be as low as Brunei wishes. 1 million or more jobs were lost in the US due to NAFTA; this time, with 40% of the world’s trade involved, the losses are likely to be even worse. Will one of those eliminated jobs be mine?

The countries whose labor standards will precipitate a race to the bottom are also countries with whom we ought not to be doing business in any case, given their abysmal human rights records. Brunei maintains the death penalty for vulnerable groups like LGBTQ people and unwed mothers. Vietnam practices mass-scale persecution of dissidents. Malaysia’s appalling record on failing to address human trafficking for sex and labor gave them one of the world’s worst human rights records--at least until the US raised that rating to a higher level so as to make it legally and morally permissible to trade with Malaysia. The trouble is, that higher rating was not accompanied by any material change in Malaysia’s behavior; in fact, two mass graves have since been discovered there. Reuters reports that the rating change was for “geopolitical” reasons. Therefore, no shift in behavior was necessary for Malaysia to receive this higher rating, thereby stripping them of any incentive to improve their policies. The US is no paragon of morality and unerring respect for human rights, but to make trade deals with countries so notorious for perpetuating brutality with impunity is to condone such paradigms.

Another issue the TPP fails--“epically,” one could say--to address is the environment and climate change. Nowhere in the entire deal is climate change mentioned, and the language, employing words like “discourage” or “it is suggested,” used to supposedly establish environment protections is appallingly toothless. In a time when all our energies must be focused on stopping climate change and rearranging our reliance of finite fuel sources, the TPP could not be a worse proposal. It will expedite and increase exports of liquidated natural gas (LNG), which comes from fracked wells. Japan is already the top importer of LNG, and the TPP will further increase such exports. It’s a good boon to oil and gas corporations, while prices are low, as it will accelerate fracking even while public opposition to it grows.

Such opposition may be rendered meaningless, furthermore, because of the Investor-State Dispute Settlement clause (ISDS), which establishes that corporations can sue governments in secret tribunals over future lost profits due to regulations (more corporations than are already allowed to do this, anyway). If safeguards against chemicals or fraud or such are deemed “expropriation” against the easy flow of business, corporations can sue, allegedly in protection of their “anticipated earnings.” There is also nothing that forbids a judge on one of these secret tribunals to play a dual role and also have ties to the corporations bringing the suit. Already, Quebec’s moratorium on fracking has come under fire in such arbitration procedures. The cost of defending local laws may be too high for officials to bother trying make such laws to protect people.

It is said that the TPP would render meaningless and essentially undo any progress to be made on climate frameworks at the upcoming Paris climate talks. This possibility terrifies me, and the irony is staggering that Obama and his supporters on this deal can possibly speak of his positive climate legacy and claim to be working to preserve the earth for rising generations--like mine--while promoting deals like this one.

The one positive thing the TPP takes any enforceable stand on is an effort to fight the illegal rhino horn trade. But there is no mention of or mechanism for curtailing or punishing illegal whaling, a major problem in TPP countries like Japan and Singapore. There are no protections against tuna bycatch problems or the illegal wildlife trade. It is suggested that countries “undertake as appropriate” steps to combat these issues. Such language renders supposedly progressive or “strict” regulations completely toothless and unenforceable. In the past, even where enforceable provisions did exist, our government shied away from actually using them to bring challenges in situations like the import of possibly treaty-violating illegally logged timber from Peru. So this deal may change little in terms of what may actually happen, but this time there will not even be the option of enforcing environmental, health, or labor regulations, for they do not exist.

Meanwhile, though those protections are nonexistent or nonbinding, the protections of commercial interests are very binding. The TPP is worse than FTAs from late in the Bush administration--and are also worse than was even required under Fast Track. The TPP promotes ease of trade and profits at every possible opportunity, instead of health and safety for consumers, workers, and people in general. As well as environmental and labor, food safety laws are also eviscerated: TPP countries could challenge the US when our inspectors stop shipments at our borders in order to check for safety. This effective second-guessing of our safety inspections encourages fewer of them and promotes the shifting of such oversight to a private certification system, not independent or even government-run. This exposes us to huge food risks--we already import 2 billion pounds of seafood from TPP countries, food which may come from industrial farming systems with overcrowding, bad water, and harmful or unapproved chemicals. Currently, such shipments can be blocked, but with TPP, they could not be.

The trouble with trade deals--or with fighting them, since the trouble with the deals themselves is what I’ve spent a good several hundred words laying out--is that they don’t sound bad. Or they sound bad, but not too bad. Like, they could be made better. Like, we should reject this version of the TPP but then go back to the drawing board and try to fix it later instead of scrapping the whole thing.

I’ve had this conversation with people perfectly rational and well-versed in environmental activism and other fields, and many of them are still reluctant to denounce the TPP totally. In sort of a don’t-throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater mentality, they want to believe there is something worth saving in the TPP--if you apparently missed every nuance of the climate chapter and think the environmental protections are actually laudable, like David Shribman in the Jewish World Review, or if you’re Jeffrey Sachs, who acknowledges that the deal is too toxic to be passed, but believes that a better version is possible. Given Sachs’s record (no matter how reformed he may seem) on neoliberal policies and blind-eye turning towards the disastrous effects of such, I suppose it’s a marker of serious alarm that Sachs opposes it at all. In many cases, perhaps, a gradient response is a good thing, to pick out and acknowledge both the heinous and the decent. But as for the TPP, this baby deserves to drown.

The other attitude I run into, again with people who want to find some avenue in which the TPP is less reprehensible, ask me why Obama supports it. If this deal is truly so terrible, why does our so-called liberal president, with all his talk of protecting the environment and middle class, defend it so vociferously? If he’s such a staunch advocate, it really can’t be as bad as it seems, right?

I’ve been rolling out my arguments on this point for a while now--Obama wants to get this passed as a final crowning achievement to prove his presidency can accomplish things, or Obama appreciates the TPP’s potential to hamper China’s growth and reduce their “threat” potential since they’ll be kept out of this major trade pact. These are valid reasons, I believe, but there’s something more basic, too: the TPP is pro-business to the extreme; it is a distillation of every tenet of unfettered capitalism, and for every piece of liberal-esque rhetoric Obama has ever so enticingly offered us, this virulent strain of profits-first, people-as-afterthought free-marketism has never been something he has fought against. The TPP is a corporate Christmas-come-early served on a silver platter, and Obama and his administration--though not to say that he is the first or worst of this kind--are predictably happy to deliver it. Obama and his halo of wholesomeness persist, but this image must be challenged. It is not so hard to understand why so many politicians support deals like the TPP.

The TPP is simple. It is 2700 pages of rules written by the corporations, for the corporations, and against the people. There is nothing important to our safety and standards of living that this pact does not put at risk. It is a shameful deal. And shameful--not to mention deceitful or downright delusional--is anyone who lauds it as positive, progressive, necessary, or even benign. It will be anything but, unspeakably so. Those who know must not be paralyzed or give up; those who straddle the fence and want to believe in markets as a force for good must choose their sides. This fight is not a wholly doomed one, but it had better be fierce and it had better be now. I am terrified of what trade deals like this promise us, of the even more corporatized world they promise, but I am also afraid that in the end it will be less that they have succeeded than that we have failed. I am terrified to think that we will be waiting until we experience every deleterious effect firsthand before we realize the plank we have walked.

A Volatile Moment, a Moment of Hope

The habit of cynicism dies hard, and it's often difficult to remember, when faced with a world of war and bloodshed and suffering and apathy and looming disaster, that there is always something hopeful to see, if you know where to look.

I've been feeling pretty bleak lately, terrified of everything from trade deals to climate change, and some days it feels like I'm walking with this weight dragging at my thoughts, reminding me of how vast and horrible and devastating our world is. This afternoon, I wasn't sure I was in any shape for attending a protest rally, but activism demands, well, action, and I thought I'd feel worse staying home.

The rally was in protest of Governor Baker's announcement, a few days ago, that Massachusetts would not be accepting Syrian refugees (he has since backtracked). That proclamation, though, was part of exactly the trend that I feared after the Paris attacks: a rise in the vicious rhetoric and actions of xenophobia, of racism, of fear. And after last week's rally against the war on Yemen, I was leery of counterprotestors shouting No one cares, unsure if I could take that again.

But this rally was thoroughly different--estimated at a thousand people present, it was the largest demonstration I've been to in Boston since the Black Lives Matter marches and protests of last year. The speakers were clear, forceful, and emotionally resonant, from various sponsoring organizations but also with an open mic for anyone of Syrian heritage who wanted to say something. The crowd swelled and stayed attentive, especially towards the beginning, echoing chants and cheering wildly. I was astounded to see so many people--I'd been expecting a medium-sized candlelight vigil on the plaza near the train stop, which is what I attended a couple of years ago, the last time the US was toying with the idea of war with Syria (that time, Obama abstained; this time, we're far gone already and the theme this time was fallout, refugees, not prevention).

I also noticed how easily speakers holding forth on the plight of refugees shifted to condemning capitalism, to urging system change and solidarity. This socialist-infused language is not something I've seen outside of quite leftist echo chambers, and I was wary of how the crowd would react at first. But they seemed receptive, and I was enormously gratified--to stand in a sea of a thousand people who chose to come out on a cold Friday night and demand better treatment of people suffering far away, that is a powerful thing. In my city well-entrenched in its indifference and divisions, here was a mass of people who care, who can cheer in response to soliloquies on anything from capitalism to personal stories to connections with Palestine. While I was being cynical, people are waking up. I want to believe that.

The scope of the rally was also impressively broad, despite its purported theme as being support of taking in Syrian refugees. It was also genuinely diverse and intersectional, and instead of platitudes and saviorism, there were comprehensive, hard-hitting analyses of history and how the current Middle East conflict developed, concrete actions for people to take, wrenching personal stories, connections to movements from Black Lives Matter to Palestine to the anti-Boston-2024 Olympics campaign. People spoke about how instead of expecting Muslims to apologize for the actions of extremists claiming to share their religion, it is white Christian society who ought to apologize for the violence done in their name--and the crowd cheered in support of that. This was not a rally of saccharine sympathy and moderation--it is the grassroots speaking out, the stirrings of a better world. Even the issues raised at the rally I went to last week, the one protested by people yelling No one cares, made an appearance--criticism of the US relationship with the brutal Saudi Arabian regime and its war on Yemen.

Nevertheless, there were a few speakers I winced at--a man who seemed to suggest that the Us's principle reason for accepting refugees is or should be that performing this basic service for human rights would help repair our reputation in the world and would allow us to stop playing "second fiddle" to European countries like Germany already stepping up to the task. This hits me as unsettling, missing the point: to take in refugees is not an act of self-aggrandizement, a self-righteous stance to make you look and feel superior. When the damage and terror being wreaked from Lebanon to France is blowback from wars and instability we caused, it is a moral responsbility to offer asylum to the people whose homes we have made unsafe. It is not a way to try to make up for the damage done to our image by our barbaric, profiteering, vicious wars.

It is true that our policies harm our reputation; I am ashamed of my country, but I cannot stomach the idea of taking in refugees chiefly as a PR move--I don't want the wars fought in our name, but neither do I want acts of false or questionably-intentioned goodwill performed in my name, too little, too late, and too insincere.

A woman also said, which I found cringeworthy, that to show our solidarity against racism and scapegoating, we should go up to a Muslim person or person of color and tell them "I support you!" I have only experienced this odd type of "solidarity" from the perspective of a queer person, but I don't quite know what's so affirming about a stranger assuring you that they support you. Support what? Your right to exist? The fact that you happen to be Muslim or nonwhite? It sounds like congratulations, like they applaud a decision or position you have taken, and that sits wrong with me. Tokenizing or patronizing displays of support are neither necessary nor helpful. We can express solidarity without walking up to a member of a marginalized group and declaring our support for their living the only life they have.

Still, this was one of the most poignant displays of hopeful action that I have seen lately. Something is rising, whatever it is--dissent, revolution, awareness, anger, change. Something is shifting, in our dialogue and our conviction. Something is stirring, stretching its limbs, prying at my cynicism and insisting that no, it isn't too late for a mass uprising of conscious, justice-minded global citizens with so much to lose and so much to gain.

One of the people at the rally was holding a sign that read, "The odds are never in their favor." But maybe the display of solidarity and power last night suggests the beginnings of a movement to change that.

Tragedy and Blowback, Friday the 13th

After school today, I and two friends headed for a rally and a talk about the US-backed war on Yemen and the US relationship with Saudi Arabia. Besides being freezing cold and sparsely populated, our rally was interrupted by frequent shouts from people I can less call counterprotestors than just agitators. "Bomb them!" they shouted while we talked about Yemen. We already are, I wanted to say. Then the cry gave way to "No one cares!" which I found distinctly disturbing. Perhaps these people yelling were just doing it to let off steam, to aggravate someone, to express real annoyance that we were talking about an issue so seemingly irrelevant to them, but at all the protest and rallies and demonstrations I've been to, never have the counterprotestors shouted "No one cares."

I was asked to speak at the rally, and I hadn't wanted to--speeches I can do, when I have time to write something up ahead of time. Shouting into a microphone for all of the surrounding city to hear is not something I thought I'd do. But as I stood at the side, getting colder and listening to the chants of "No one cares," I decided I had to say something. When the event organizers ambled by again and asked if I had anything to say yet, I said yes.

It's been a long time coming that I can open my mouth and trust the words that fall out. But I took the microphone and spoke--about the danger of ignorance, about the privilege of not knowing or caring, about blowback and how our indifference will come back to bite us.

The irony was bitter, therefore, when a couple of hours later my friend got a Twitter alert informing her that there had been mass shootings in Paris. The death toll so far was about 30 people, but only minutes later, we watched it climb to 60, then 118. At the time I write this, it is estimated at 120 to 150, depending on the souce, though it may rise higher still. Details are fuzzy and reports are garbled, but one account claims one of the shooters said this was in retaliation for French involvement in Syria, which makes it reminiscent of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris and the Boston Marathon bombing more than a year ago. Both of these were acts of violence ostensibly in response to Western intervention in and brutal mistreatment of Muslim countries, and therefore both were examples of blowback. While I was talking about the importance of caring about the world even when ignoring sounds better, and people around me were shouting "No one cares, bomb them," another dose of blowback was being cooked up.

Even now, before the dust has even settled, what I am afraid of is the aftermath. The response. The further blowback it may engender.

When I got home, my family was discussing the attacks, anguished and dismal. My brother called it a lose-lose situation--if we bomb the terrorists, we create more, but if we don't, then they think they've won, he said. "What about non-military solutions?" I said, incredulous. What about negotiations and humanitarian aid? To dichotomize our response options as to bomb or not to bomb narrows as well the possible outcomes: more chaos and instability. War is not the answer. We've tried it and tried it, and had it been the answer to our problems, we wouldn't be dealing with the fallout of our militaristic choices now. But it wasn't. And we are. And as I was trying to warn at the rally tonight, it's only so long until not just France but we as well experience drastic, large-scale blowback from the choices we have made.

But for now, I anticipate a response in the pattern of our habitual militarism. It took only three people dead after the Boston Marathon bombing to shut down the city, send in the SWAT teams, and conduct a massive manhunt. What kind of reaction will as many as 150 deaths spark? Already, French president Hollande has declared, "We will lead the fight… It will be merciless." The US promises to stand by France's response to the attacks, as does the UK. Meanwhile, US cities have also ramped up police vigilance and wiretaps/surveillance data analysis. The NYPD has deployed heavily armed teams to "sensitive French sites in the city," according to Time magazine, although "there is no credible or specific intelligence about threats to the United States."

No, there was no evidence that we were under threat, because this time the attack wasn't aimed at us--though it is our policies that the assailants were supposedly reacting to (the same geopolitical, militaristic, profiteering, imperialist, American-exceptionalist policies that we employ around the world, from Yemen to Afghanistan to Libya and onward, which have caused so much damage and may yet cause more, if they comprise our response to these bombings)--but next time it could be us in the crossfire. One day it will be, if we do not alter our reckless, deadly course.

I don't think we'll be saying "No one cares" then.