Lisa Belkin

Chief National Correspondent

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Revenge of the Faceblockers: Social media abstainers aren't worried about their data

Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Getty Images (2), Dado Ruvic/Reuters.

As Facebook sends its promised updates this week, telling users whether or not they were one of the 87 million whose personal data may have been scraped by Cambridge Analytica to create and position online political advertising, Jody Podolsky won’t even need to look. She is certain none of her information was sold because she’s sure there was no information of hers out there to sell.

Of the two kinds of people in the world — those who embrace social media and those who shun it — she is of the group that has never really used platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. Of the estimated 280 million Americans over the age of 13, 213 million are on Facebook, leaving the rest to call their friends one at a time when they get a new puppy, or send postcards from vacation rather than posting photos.

And now, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress for two days about the data-mining operation, and the House Permanent Select Committee investigates whether Cambridge Analytica was working with the Kremlin, “shunners” like Podolsky are feeling vindicated.

“I wouldn’t say I’m feeling smug, it’s more complicated than that,” says Podolsky, an author, film producer and small business owner in Los Angeles. “Facebook traded on our identities, our privacy, with impunity,for their own gain. That was their business model, to sell our very selves to advertisers. I know that is genius. It’s even awesome. It’s also terrifying that it is awesome.”

The reasons non-users give for non-using are varied and nuanced. For Podolsky, it’s about the misappropriation of the concept of friendship. “I think initially what caught my aversion was Facebook’s co-option of the word ‘friend,’” she says. “I found it incrementally arrogant and intrusive to decide they could diminish the obligations and commitments of actual friendship. That’s where my personal antipathy started.”

For Rachel Bamberger, it was about the substitution of a virtual experience for a real one. “I try to find pleasure in real face time with my friends, or reading a book or listening to music,” says the high school senior. “I don’t read books online because I love the smell of real books and the feel of actually turning the pages in my hand. You lose all the sensory parts when you spend all that time staring at a screen.”

For others, the core reason was the fear of loss of privacy. “I’m even hesitant to talk to you,” said one office administrator in Florida who, nothing if not consistent, declined to be quoted by name. “I definitely wouldn’t want you to identify me in an article.”

She recalls passing an old-fashioned phone booth as part of a display and having to explain its purpose to her young children. “They asked, ‘What’s it for?’ and I had to say ‘There’d be a phone in there and you would close the door so you can talk,’” she recalls. “It used to be that phone calls were presumed to be private. Now it’s blah, blah, blah, hysterectomy, blah, blah, blah, my yeast infection, blah, blah, blah.”

She’s tried what she insists is “the Facebook fad” a few years ago when a group she’d joined that met up for agility training for dogs began using the site for scheduling. “I joined for my dog, and within half an hour of getting onto Facebook, a client who had sexually harassed me wanted to friend me, and right after him I got a request from a woman who I had worked with who I knew to be mentally ill. I just felt so exposed. I just closed my account,” and, as a result, stopped attending agility training sessions.

“I did lose out on that social interaction,” she says, “because I didn’t want this other element.”

Michael Gerstein, in turn, says he has stayed off social media because he’s long feared something much like the Cambridge Analytica news of the past few weeks. “It’s the Wild West,” he says, where “people are grabbing all sorts of information about you and you don’t know what they know or how they use it.” He works in corporate finance in Manhattan, responsible for budgeting and forecasting, and was originally put off by the fact that “Facebook has to be doing something like this because they have to make money, but I didn’t understand exactly what that something is, and I’m not comfortable with things I don’t understand.”

He has never used Twitter or Snapchat, he says. He does have a Facebook account, but “I have never posted. I have replied to posts, but I couldn’t even tell you how to post.” The reason he even opened the account in the first place, he says, is “because my wife wanted her profile to say she is ‘married’ and it won’t say that unless your spouse also has an account.” (His wife was mistaken.) Still, the account exists, and he has 62 Facebook friends. Any one of those might have answered the 2014 Cambridge Analytica survey that the company then used to access the information of everyone in that user’s friend list. Which means he may in fact have been part of the data sweep. “Even being careful doesn’t protect you from being vulnerable,” he says.

Ellen Fader, a Manhattan psychotherapist, believes she has been similarly victimized despite being careful. She joined LinkedIn in the the early days of the site and “apparently clicked the wrong thing by mistake.” As a result, “It sent a blast email to my entire contact list, including everyone’s name and email listed publicly. These were clients in my therapy practice and now everyone on the list could see everyone else. I could have lost my license professionally. That was my worst fear about technology, and it came true.”

All that is why she only used her fitness tracker for a very short while, she says. All she wanted to do was count her daily steps, but “you have to sign all these agreements in order to participate with them,” she says. It started her thinking: Someone out there is going to know my heart rate, my sleeping pattern, how many steps I take. Do I want all that data out there? Who knows what they are doing with your information? No, she says, she doesn’t think anyone actually cares how much she walks, but she didn’t think that anyone cared to sell Facebook friend lists to the Russians either.

Fader, who just turned 65 — and who was filling out Medicare forms online when reached by phone at her Manhattan apartment — emphasizes that it is not because of her age that she is resistant to new technology. “There’s the idea out there that older people don’t know how to use this and that’s why they stay away,” she says, but in fact she has a website for her business and spends much of her day on the computer. It is not that she is incapable of understanding the new ways, she says, but because she understands them too completely.

“In my mind, as a psychotherapist, the most important thing in this world is human connection,” she says, “and social media does foster a version of that, but it’s a version that has us relating to a device rather than a set of eyes that’s gazing at you. If we fast forward, what are people going to be like 100 years from now? Will they remember how to relate in real life at all? I think the implications and the ramifications are enormous.”

Sherry Hamby, a psychology professor at the University of the South who studies victimization of vulnerable communities in Appalachia, agrees that age is probably not the primary factor for those who shun social media, including some of the rural populations she studies. In her experience, few of the presumed reasons actually hold true. For instance, while it is assumed that individuals who live in Appalachia do not own the latest in technology because they can’t afford it, her research has found that “the deeper reason is a lot of skepticism about technology and a lot of consideration of the ways it changes life.”

Her research paper titled “Technology in Rural Appalachia: Cultural Strategies of Resistance and Navigation” was one of dozens about “Privacy at the Margins” included in a special issue of the International Journal of Communication this month. Each of the papers was about a discrete population — from aboriginal communities in Australia to disadvantaged urban communities in India to college sophomores at big universities in urban areas — and each concludes that the decisions about technology use are driven by how users feel about the effect of a particular technology on their private, offline life.

Hamby’s research was conducted before the 2016 elections, so she does not know how her subjects feel about their choices to limit their social media use in light of the Cambridge Analytica controversy. She says she hopes to go back and find out.

Podolsky, for one, insists she does not take any pleasure in her prescience.

“Do I feel smart? No,” she says. “Mark Zuckerberg is smart. He’s a genius. He created this interpersonal interplanetary connection and that is an outstanding accomplishment. Mine wasn’t a prophecy, it was just me trying as a human being to resist the forces of the marketplace on my identity.”

She may have succeeded in that she won’t be getting a message from Facebook this week telling her whether she was in fact a victim of the latest of those forces, but she acknowledges she pays a price for opting out of a medium that reaches a third of the world.

Podolsky, who is currently writing a book, says that “the first question publishers ask is, ‘What’s your social media presence, how many clicks do you get?’”

_____

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Republican women running for office find politics is all about Trump

Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Getty Images (2), Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

Meghan Milloy’s mission is to get more Republican women in office. As co-founder and executive director of Republican Women for Progress, she believes “Democracy works better when it represents everyone,” and to her that means gender parity in both parties.

But while it’s her job to recruit, train and fundraise for female Republican candidates she finds herself telling many women to not run — at least not this year.

“It’s a Catch-22 for us,” she explains. “A lot of good moderate Republican women who want to run for office, our advice is ‘You’re a good candidate, you would probably win in any other year, let’s wait’”.

Female Republican candidates are having a harder time than usual in 2018. With all the talk of the surge in women seeking elected office this year, and of all the benefits of being a woman candidate in the Age of Trump, what is less often noted is that nearly all that energy and advantage seems to be on one side of the aisle.

“It’s a tough year to be a Republican woman,” agrees Anne Moses, who founded the non-partisan group Ignite eight years ago to educate high school and college women to become the next generation of political leaders. “It’s always been hard, but this year all the reasons it’s been tough make it even tougher.”

According to the Center for American Women in Politics, the number of Democratic women running for House seats this year increased 146 percent over 2016 (to 351), while the number of Republican women running for the House increased just 35 percent (to 99); on the other side of the Capitol there are only 14 Republican women running for Senate compared to 27 Democratic women.

The non-partisan group VoteRunLead has seen a three-fold increase in the number of women completing their candidate training program last year — from just over 3000 to just under 10,000 – but the proportion of Republicans has shrunk from 1 in 5 to 1 in 9, according to Erin Vilardi, the group’s founder and CEO.

In part this is because there have always been fewer Republican women in high office than Democratic women. Although Republicans are the majority in Congress, three quarters of the 83 women in the House are Democrats. This is the result of several factors, chief among them the historical tendency of women to identify as Democrats and the more robust recruitment pipeline for Democratic women, all of which are even more pronounced this year than previously. And the reason for that, candidates and strategists say, is the reason for so many other phenomena in politics at the moment – Donald Trump.

“You either run as pro-Trump or anti-Trump,” Vilardi says. “There’s no other dynamic now. Women are expected to have a stand on Trump, on #MeToo, and men aren’t even asked the question. Republican women have a harder time with that question and the consequences are greater for them whichever their answer.”

Kelly Dittmar, a scholar with the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers agrees. “The reason it’s particularly challenging for Republican women is there is an expectation put on all women that they will call out and reject some of the more misogynistic behavior and rhetoric that this president has put forth,” she says. “That leave less room for nuance, saying ‘I’m not with him on this, but I am with him on something else.’ Whether it’s fair or not, voters are not necessarily looking to men to specifically answer on those issues.”

Jenifer Sarver learned that first hand. She was one of 18 candidates for the Republican nomination in Texas’s 21st congressional district, a seat that opened when the incumbent retired. Texas has not sent a freshman woman to Congress in 22 years, “meaning an entire generation of young Texans has never seen a woman elected” to that job, so while her gender got her a bit of attention, not all of it was good.

She was regularly asked “who are you working for” at candidate gatherings, and when she answered ‘I’m the candidate’ “It was a surprise,” she says. The follow-up was often “Oh, what  does your husband think of you running, what will you do with the kids if you go to Washington,” she recalls. “I would answer ‘I’m single, no kids,’ and they would say ‘oh, that’s good, this would be hard job to do with kids.’”

There were times when being a woman helped in the current climate, she says, such as the handful of doors she knocked to be told “Oh, you’re a female candidate, I’m only voting for females this year.” But there was at least one memorable and public moment when it hurt. During a candidate forum one of her male opponents asked if she had voted for Hillary Clinton and she said indeed she had. “When it came down to it, I couldn’t support candidate Trump,” she answered. “As a woman, I couldn’t do it. “

There were audible gasps in the room and, the Austin-American Statesman’s metro columnist Ken Herman wrote of the moment: “Just then, some of the dead animal heads on the walls turned toward Sarver with looks of shocked disbelief.” In the Texas primary a few weeks later she came in fifth with 5.6 percent of the vote.

Sarver is careful to say that she did not lose because she is a woman. But she also notes that she could not run as many Democratic candidates are doing, whether directly or obliquely – using the fact that they are women as a reason they should be elected.

The Republican Party, voters and candidates alike, has long been less accepting of what has become known as “identity politics.” “Democratic women are used to marrying their woman-ness to their reason for seeking office,” says Anne Moses, “in effect saying that there is an inherent good in electing more women, or women have first-hand understanding of certain issues, or lead differently than men, so ‘vote for me.’ Republicans reject that. It’s harder for a Republican woman to stand up and proclaim ‘I am a Republican woman and there is merit in having more of us in office.”

The result, Dittmar says, can sometimes be “verbal gymnastics.” She cites Carly Fiorina’s message during her presidential primary campaign. “It became ‘don’t just vote for Hillary Clinton because she’s a woman, that’s playing the woman card’ but at the same time ‘I’m the best person to compete against Hillary Clinton because I’m a woman.’”

This become additionally complicated in an era when in fact many first-time candidates in both parties are in fact running because they are women. “That’s been the surprise gift of this administration,” says Milloy. “Trump winning has empowered so many women who wouldn’t have stepped up and gotten involved. The irony is that as his policies put women back several years, he is also inspiring women to run.”

Republican women and their advisers are handling these intersections, contradictions and complications in varying ways.

Some are simply aligning themselves with the president on policy while projecting a slightly eye-rolling air when it comes to his personal characteristics.

“What are Republican women doing about Donald Trump?” asked Missy Shorey, Executive Director of Maggie’s List, established in 2010 to fund conservative women who are running for federal office. “By recognizing that we now have the best tax policy since the 80s, that we see a booming economy where businesses that we either own or that are families work for are thriving thanks to deregulation, that the military is strengthened rather than gutted… That’s what they’re doing about Donald Trump.

“Do we wish we’ve seen some better behavior?” she continues. “Yes. Do many of us roll our eyes when we see the daily tweets? Absolutely. He is not a perfect candidate but he certainly beats the alternative and at the end of the day we are getting much of what we wanted.”

Others are shape shifting a bit, in a way candidates of both parties often do for the primaries. “We have a few women who are very moderate, very much against Trump,” says Milloy, “but in order to compete in their primaries they need to be a little more to the right than they actually are. If they win then the hope is they can express their views more freely in the general.”

A few are playing something that looks very much like identity politics, but with a Republican twist. Back in February, for instance, when Sen. Bob Corker briefly reconsidered his decision to leave politics, Rep. Marsha Blackburn fought back. Corker, a Republican from Tennessee, has been an outspoken critic of Trump, and told friends he might get back into the race because he feared his seat might flip to a Democrat. Blackburn, who proudly aligns herself with the president, is considered the front-runner for the GOP nomination in that race, and she sent her staff to call Corker out.

“Anyone who thinks Marsha Blackburn can’t win a general election is just a plain sexist pig,” Blackburn’s campaign spokeswoman Andrea Bozek told the Washington Post. “We aren’t worried about these ego-driven, tired old men. Marsha has spent her whole life fighting people who told her she wasn’t good enough, and she will do it again.”

Many others, though, are waiting. “I think this is a year of rebuilding for Republican women,” Vilardi says. Those who go through the VoteRunLead program traditionally craft a five-year plan toward an electoral run, but since 2016, she says, “Democratic women have shortened that timeline to the next election, with 60 percent saying they wanted to run by 2020. Republican women though have slowed down” their expected timeline, waiting to see if the landscape shifts.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” says Larissa Martinez, a co-founder of the Women Influencers Network, yet another of the many groups that are forming to train and fund conservative women candidates. “The enthusiasm and the energy now is very much on the left side. It makes for a very hostile election cycle. I’ve gone to a number of women panels and the women on the left see right leaning women as walking contradictions. It’s an unusual time to know how to navigate so I can understand some Republican women wanting to take a break.”

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Trump isn't the first president to politicize the census

California is suing the Trump administration over its decision to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 U.S. Census. (Photo: Damian Dovarganes/AP)

A simple count of everyone in the country. What could be so hard about that?

In the 23 times that count has been done in the United States since the Constitution first required it in 1790, it’s become clear that there is almost nothing simple about the decennial census. The announcement this week that at least a dozen states would sue the Trump administration for adding a question about citizenship status to the 2020 census is but the most recent fight over what seems like should be a straightforward mathematical enumeration, but has almost always been an emotional and political one.

“Of course it’s political, it is the underpinning of the entire political system,” says Margo Anderson, distinguished professor of history and urban studies at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and author of The American Census: A Social History. “It is always controversial.”

But if the fact that the census regularly results in a political fight is news to you, Anderson is not surprised. “Issues of race and region, growth and decline, equity and justice, have been fought out in census politics over the centuries,” she writes in the introduction to her book, “though because decades may pass between flare-ups of particular issues, the participants are often unaware of relevant earlier debate.”

Mandated by Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, the census decides the population of each state, which in turn determines how much representation that state gets in the House of Representatives, how many votes each state has in the Electoral College, and what percentage of federal funds a state receives. A change in a state’s population, therefore, results directly in a gain or loss in that state’s political and economic clout.

In fact, the first political tussle over the census came during the writing of Article 1 in 1789. Southerners wanted slaves counted in their tally, as it would increase their numbers and their power, while Northerners wanted the opposite. The compromise was that slaves counted as 3/5 of a person, a choice that would haunt the nation well beyond the Civil War.

The Constitution only requires a population count, or “enumeration.” Which questions are asked during that count are decided by the census bureau, and over time form a snapshot of what issues felt important to the nation every 10 years. “The questions change with whatever is salient,” Anderson says.

In 1920, for instance, it felt time to take out the question about whether each household member had served in the Union or Confederate armed forces. That same year, questions were added that asked each U.S. resident when they naturalized, as well as for their own mother tongue and those of their parents.

The 2020 U.S. Census will add a question about citizenship status, a move that brought swift condemnation from many Democrats, who said it would intimidate immigrants and discourage them from participating. (Photo: Ross D. Franklin/AP)

By 1940, there were questions trying to gauge the impact of the Depression, asking about the need for housing, employment and unemployment, income and how often and where a family had moved in search of work.

In 2010, same-sex married couples were allowed for the first time to mark their spouse as “husband” or “wife” on a census form, and a box for “unmarried partner” was also available.

Sometimes the flare-ups over the census are caused by doubt about the results. Both George Washington and Alexander Hamilton thought the first census — which found that 3.9 million people lived in the young nation — was an undercount.

In 1840, an argument erupted over the accuracy of an apparent spike in “insanity” among the nation’s freed black population — at a rate of 1 in 162 in the North and 1 in 1,558 in the South. Advocates for slavery seized on those statistics to show that slaves went insane when freed; abolitionists countered that the data were simply wrong, the result of a confusing design of the census form that allowed elderly white members of a household to be counted in the column for “colored” and for some of those “insane” blacks to be attributed to families that had no black members. “The historical consensus is that the data were in fact wrong,” Anderson says.

In 1930, the fight was over unemployment, since the count took place so soon after the stock market crash. By the time the data was processed, the jobless figure was attacked as being too low by legislators who had hoped for higher numbers to justify a larger federal response. Congress in fact authorized a special 1931 census just to measure unemployment, and that number was much higher than it had been the year before.

Miscounts did not end with the modern era and its introduction of computer questionnaires in place of handwritten tallies by door-to-door enumerators. In 1990, for instance, 10 million Americans were somehow “lost” and 6 million were apparently counted twice. As most of those lived in poverty, the states where they resided could not qualify for the federal funds that might otherwise have been available for services.

Other controversies took place before the counting even began. In response to the 1990 miscount, the Clinton administration announced 10 years later that it would use data sampling to estimate the population rather than counting each individual. Republicans feared that this would result in an increased representation of minority groups, which would in turn result in election districts more favorable to Democrats. Newt Gingrich sued the Census Bureau, and a federal court struck down the sampling plan.

Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

And now there is the uproar over citizenship. The question has appeared periodically on census questionnaires over the years, but has not been included since 1950. The Department of Justice, which in January of this year asked for it to be added again, says that in order to enforce the Voting Rights Act, there must be a count of citizens who are old enough to vote. Those opposed to the addition argue that it will increase a trend toward individuals refusing to reply to all census questions for fear of exposing private information. A September 2017 memo written by bureau staff described “a recent increase in respondents spontaneously expressing concerns about confidentiality” in some pretest studies on the upcoming form, creating a “new phenomenon … particularly among immigrant respondents.”

If response rates are in fact depressed, history shows, the eventual count will be inaccurate, and in this case would increase the power of states with fewer undocumented immigrants.

Rather than remain a dry argument over the efficacy of sampling a wary population, however, the debate over the citizenship question has taken on some of the same emotional tones common to census arguments throughout history.

Since the Commerce Department confirmed Monday night that respondents in 2020 would be asked if they are citizens, state attorneys general began to fight back. Eric Schneiderman of New York called it a “reckless decision to suddenly abandon nearly 70 years of practice,” and warned the change would “create an environment of fear and distrust in immigrant communities that would make impossible both an accurate census and the fair distribution of federal tax dollars.”

The Trump/Pence campaign, in turn, sent out an email blast on Wednesday afternoon asking supporters to sign a petition to “Defend the President: 2020 Census Questions.”

“President Trump has officially mandated that the 2020 United States Census ask people living in America whether or not they are citizens,” the letter read. “And the sanctuary state of California is now SUING the Trump Administration to stop this commonsense order.

“We cannot let a few Hollywood special interests speak for the rest of our country,” it concluded. “It’s time to fight back. It’s time to once again reclaim our voice in America.”

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On gender, candidates in the Trump era negotiate a changed landscape

Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos; Getty Images (3), Luca Bruno/AP

In Wisconsin last week, Kelda Roys, a Democratic candidate for governor, appeared on camera while breastfeeding her daughter — and though that’s not what she set out to do (the 4-month-old got hungry while her mother was filming an ad about banning BPA in bottles), it seems fitting for the times.

Two states away in Missouri, meanwhile, on the other end of the masculine/feminine axis, Republican Senate hopeful Courtland Sykes has spent weeks not apologizing for his Facebook post describing feminists as “career-obsessed banshees” and declaring he expects his fiancée to fix him “a home-cooked dinner every night.” And while he insists he supports women’s rights, his particular way of doing so seems to reflect something about the moment as well.

Gender is back with a vengeance in political campaigns. Not that it ever went away completely, but as recently as the last midterm elections it had settled into somewhat of a background hum. The benefits and challenges of running as a man or a woman were studied and known; the candidates were oblique about using whatever advantages and weapons they might have; voters’ biases were more often of the unconscious or unspoken variety.

Not anymore.

“Since Trump and his appeal to toxic masculinity, and then the response to that in the form of #MeToo, there’s been a shift,” says Erin Cassese, an associate professor of political science at West Virginia University whose research focuses on gender in politics. “People feel more strongly about what men and women should and should not do. Prejudices that had gone underground, and/or were alluded to in coded language — it’s become more acceptable to express those things.”

She and others who follow campaigns predict that the 2018 midterms will be the most direct use of gendered signals, tropes, stereotypes and attacks in decades.

“Gender matters to more voters this year,” she says, “but it matters in different ways to different voters, and candidates have to navigate that.”

The 2016 presidential campaign was like no other in terms of gender dynamics, and not only because it included the first woman nominee of a major party.

On one side, it featured a Republican man who “reinforced the most patriarchal norms of masculinity,” says Kelly Dittmar of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, which has just launched a project called “Gender Watch” to monitor the ways both men and women portray themselves in the midterms. “Donald Trump campaigned in a way that reinforced stereotypic ways of masculinity that we have not seen in more than a decade. He was successful. Voters responded positively in particular portions of the electorate.”

In facing that idea of masculinity, the Democratic woman showed that much of the accumulated conventional gender research is correct: Women will be subjected to greater scrutiny of their appearance, will be seen as shrill, will have ambition held against them. But there were also surprises. Male candidates have traditionally been warned that attacks on women backfire, for instance, but Trump attacked with apparent glee. Voters were thought to give women extra points for honesty, but Trump successfully portrayed Hillary Clinton as “crooked.”

What, then, does this mean for men and women running in 2018, particularly for higher state and national office?

For some the takeaway is that the Trump blueprint works, making it OK to call working women banshees and say your dinner should be on the table by six. Roy Moore believed that a similar tone would play well with Alabama voters (and it might have if not for the revelations about his past behavior with minors), and Rick Saccone, who lost a special Pennsylvania congressional election on Tuesday, had been boasting, “I was Trump before Trump was Trump,” and spoke in a similar macho tone.

The fact that the most forceful of the Trump imitators to face voters thus far have fallen short hints at the limits of that strategy and the fact that it does not account for a second legacy of Trump’s win — the pushback. Women in particular have responded with organized outrage of an intensity rarely seen in American politics, certainly not in the decades since the Clarence Thomas hearings led to the election of a record number of women to Congress in 1992. Anger at sexism during the campaign helped fuel the #MeToo movement and is responsible for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of women deciding to run for all levels of elected office for the first time.

They will run races in a new electoral landscape, one where the old campaign strategies may not apply but the new ones are not yet clear.

“All the focus on more women running can distract from the larger point,” Dittmar says. “The question of whether we will see stasis or change is not entirely about how many more women might win, but rather how much the candidates across genders will disrupt some of the norms of this masculine institution. Beyond the number of folks that are running, we need to look at how are they running? How are voters responding to their choices? How are men and women balancing the traits of masculinity and femininity?”

It is still the early days, but already there are examples of candidates feeling their way as they go. Roys’s breastfeeding ad, for example, which celebrates the candidate’s feminine credentials at the same time as her feminist ones. Or Sol Flores, seeking the Democratic nomination to Congress in Illinois’s Fourth District in a primary on Tuesday, who created a stir with a campaign spot discussing being sexually abused by a family friend when she was 11. There was a time when such vulnerability would be seen as weakness and women candidates were loath to appear weak; now it is an exhibition of strength.

Or look at the contrast between Martha McSally, a retired Air Force colonel and incumbent congresswoman currently seeking the Republican Senate nomination in Arizona, and Amy McGrath, a retired Marine combat pilot running as a Democrat for Kentucky’s Sixth District congressional seat. The old instinct would be to use those résumés to highlight strength, and McSally does exactly that, though with the very modern twist of telling the GOP to “grow a pair of ovaries” and discussing her fight with her commanding officers because she did not want to wear a traditional Muslim head covering while serving in Saudi Arabia. McGrath tweaks the formula in another way, “feminizing” her message by focusing not on her time as a warrior but rather her journey to the job, which required that she overcome the biases of men who did not believe women should serve in combat.

Women of color, who have long faced all the obstacles of white women candidates and then some, are beginning to challenge the formula. The idea of strength has long been particularly tricky for African-American women, says Wendy Smooth, a professor of political science at Ohio State University, who studies the intersection of race and gender in electoral politics. “Voters expect women to prove they are strong, and there is the trope associated with black womanhood that they are indeed strong, but that’s not necessarily a stepping stone,” she says. “If you remember the early days in which Michelle Obama’s strength and confidence were seen as political liabilities that the campaign went to great lengths to disappear.”

One example of new context, she says, might be the Georgia governor’s race, in which Democratic hopeful Stacey Abrams is “not changing the ways she experiences black womanhood in order to run for office. She has natural hair. This is her walk. This is who she is.” Abrams is also strategic in addressing the traditionally feminine areas of family and children. A single woman, she speaks often about the issue of kinship care and the fact that the definition of family should be broader than just blood or marriage.

So female candidates seem emboldened by a changed landscape. But what of male candidates? Theirs are the choices that most interest Dittmar. “When we look at masculinity and femininity, the burden to challenge the rules shouldn’t just fall to women,” she says. “For a long time there were women who felt they had to prove their masculinity to get the job, and one could argue that is no longer true. But the straight white cis men have to be able to present themselves in a way that doesn’t represent the traditional masculine norm for us to declare a sea change.”

Some men are also challenging the traditional expectations. Rich Madaleno, a white Democratic candidate for governor in Maryland, released an ad narrated by his African-American son, who introduces not only the candidate, whom the boy calls “Daddy,” but also Madaleno’s husband, whom the boy calls “Papa.” Madaleno is shown on camera being very much a state legislator, but also a hands-on parent.

For each race like that one, however, there is the possibility that there will be one like the West Virginia Senate race, where incumbent Joe Manchin is running for reelection. A Democrat in a heavily Republican state, Manchin’s likely takeaway from the 2016 campaign was to move to the more macho side. When Republican challenger Patrick Morrisey called for Manchin to resign from his position in the Senate Democratic leadership, Manchin told a local reporter on the record: “I don’t give a s***, you understand? I just don’t give a s***. Don’t care if I get elected, don’t care if I get defeated. How about that?”

And that, experts say, is the key to reconciling how two contradictory messages about masculinity and femininity can drive the post-2016 campaign messages at the same time. How candidates act is a direct response to how they believe voters want them to act. And voters are divided.

The latest report by the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which has studied women in politics for 20 years, is titled “Opportunity Knocks: Now Is the Time for Women Candidates.” It concludes that voters want women candidates who are “different,” not only from “the sea of male — mostly white — elected officials and candidates” but also from the “act like a man” version that women used to be.

Another study, though, by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, found that a subset of voters does not want that at all. When asked if they agreed that society was becoming “too soft and feminine” two-thirds of Trump supporters agreed, while 64 percent of Clinton voters disagreed. When the question asked was whether “these days society seems to punish men just for acting like men,” 41 percent of Trump supporters said yes, compared with 22 percent of Clinton supporters. And 50 percent of Trump supporters said “society is better off when men and women stick to the jobs and tasks they are naturally suited for” compared with 39 percent of Clinton supporters.

“We’re divided in terms of gender right now,” Cassese says. “There’s a polarization by geography and party. Candidates will try to meet voters where they perceive them to be,” meaning there is a different lesson from the 2016 race depending on which electorate you are courting.

Whether that lesson is to magnify gender-linked traits or blur them, each candidate will have to make a choice from the changed array of masculine and feminine options.

“You might want to believe that gender doesn’t play a role in a given race,” Dittmar says. “Maybe there’s two women running so you think that neutralizes gender. No. Gender is always at play. It’s been at play in male-only races for centuries. It’s not a question of whether gender is playing a role, it’s what role is gender playing.”

_____

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[lisabelkin-yahoonews]

The man who hid in a church, and the church that hid him: An immigrant story with an uncertain ending

Harry Pangemanan and his family were able to return home Sunday, Feb. 4. Clergy came with them to bless the house and welcome them home. (Photo: Alan Chin for Yahoo News)

Harry Pangemanan is back home – at least for now.

After Federal judge in New Jersey halted his deportation last week, he left the church where he and two other Indonesian immigrant families had taken refuge, and went back to his modest rented house a few blocks away.

The first thing he did was check the shattered front lock, which vandals had broken before ransacking both bedrooms, probably after news reports that he, his wife and their two teenaged children were all sleeping in converted classrooms at the Reformed Church of Highland Park. By now, days later, church volunteers had righted the upended furniture and put the clothing back in the drawers, but the new doorframe had not arrived that would hold a new deadbolt.

Harry led his family and two church elders through the off kilter doorway into his living room. Beneath a reproduction of The Last Supper, they all joined hands and said a prayer of blessing for the house and of thanksgiving that they had made their way back to it.

Then they prayed for others who were still in custody, or hiding in other churches around the country, or living in fear that they could be detained at any moment.

People like Syed Ahmed Jamal, a Bangledesh-born molecular biologist, living in Kansas for 30 years, arrested by immigration officials this week as he prepared to take his three children, all of them American citizens, to school; or Carmela Apolonio Hernandez, a Mexican immigrant seeking sanctuary in an Episcopal church in Philadelphia since late last year, who last week defied an immigration order and sent her three undocumented children to their public school, outside the protective walls of the Church of the Advocate.

And people whose names don’t make the news. Around the country 900,000 immigrants who had been granted “deportation stays” under previous administrations have seen those protections declared null and void by the Trump administration, which arrested 111,000 people in this category in 2017.

Harry Pangemanan and his family were able to return home in Highland Park, NJ. on Sunday, Feb. 4. (Photo: Alan Chin for Yahoo News)

That is what Harry and other undocumented Indonesian Christians in Central New Jersey are protected from for the moment – while a judge decides whether whether worsening violence against Christians like themselves in their predominantly Muslim homeland warrants a new amnesty hearing.

And so he waits. It is one more wait in an adult lifetime of waiting, of being at the mercy of bureaucrats and of shifting national priorities, of hiding while trying to build a life in America for his family. It is one more wait, too, for the Christian charity that came to his rescue in his darkest moments. It is one story out of hundreds of thousands, but it can stand for many.

*******

  Like so many other stories of this millennium, this one began on September 11, 2001. That was the day that Seth and Stephanie Kaper-Dale started work at the Reformed Church of Highland Park NJ. They were both 25 years old back then, married since their junior year Hope College in Holland, Mich., and just out of the Princeton Theological Seminary with Masters degrees in Divinity. The job was not their first choice; they had wanted to pastor in the inner city, and had applied to Hispanic and African-American churches in urban neighborhoods of New York and New Jersey. But those congregations took a look at the blond-haired, blue-eyed newbies and went in another direction. Which is how they landed in this relatively prosperous, largely Caucasian suburb, 1.8 square miles that was home to 15,000 people – only 60 of whom were members of this particular church, and only 35 of whom were healthy and mobile enough to actually make their way to Sunday services.

Rev. Seth Kaper-Dale in the church office with his staff. (Photo: Alan Chin for Yahoo News)

In fact the church had been targeted for closing but the denominational elders decided to take a chance on the Kaper-Dales in part because of the couple’s idealism and dynamism — but also because they came relatively cheap. “Seth-and-Steph” planned to split the job – sharing one salary and dividing their hours so that one of them could always be at home with their children.

They both came to work that first morning, though, walking into the office just as the first plane hit the first of the World Trade Center. The new pastors made a sign announcing “Everyone Welcome” and hung it from the church’s red brick tower.

Far more than 35 people came to the candlelight vigil for victims of the attack later that week, including members of the cluster congregations renting space in the underused building. It was a diverse roster – two Jewish minyans, a Buddhist prayer circle, and a group of 200 Indonesian Protestants who worshipped in the sanctuary from 4 to 6 every Sunday afternoon.

The Reformed Church of Highland Park in Highland Park, NJ. (Photo: Alan Chin for Yahoo News)

The relationship between the Kaper-Dales and the Indonesians was little more than this– landlord/tenant, plus an interfaith service on Thanksgiving and a yearly community potluck — until a year later, in the fall of 2002, when some of them began asking Pastor Seth for advice. As a part of its global war on terror, the Bush administration announced the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or NSEERS. A Muslim registry in everything but its name, it required men between 16 and 65 who were from countries that were predominantly Muslim to come forward and be fingerprinted, photographed and interviewed.

That was when Pastor Seth says he first realized that nearly all of the Indonesians who prayed in his church were undocumented. It was also the first he learned of the upheaval that led them to come to the US decades earlier. How in 1998 president Suharto was forced to resign from power and Muslim militants intimidated ethnic Chinese Christians, rioting across the island nation, beheading church leaders on their pulpits, and burning down churches.

Fleeing their villages and unable to find work in the cities because their identification cards identified them as Christian, the would-be refugees thronged the US embassy in Jakarta. The Clinton administration took the fastest route to help them – issuing five-year tourist visas with a wink and a nod. Back then overstaying a visa was effectively a misdemeanor, and undocumented foreigners were in demand as workers. Many clustered in central New Jersey, working factory jobs and filling the squat, ramshackle apartment complexes that lined the numbered highways. In 1997 there was just one Indonesian Christian church in that area; by 2006 there would be nine, with a combined membership of 1200.

Harry Pangemanan with fellow congregants at Sunday morning services at the Reformed Church of Highland Park on Feb. 4, 2018. (Photo: Alan Chin for Yahoo News)

By the fall of 2002, the new NSEERS regulations meant those who failed to register would be declared criminal fugitives. They would be pursued by the newly formed US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency – the first Pastor Seth had heard of ICE.

It was Harry Pangemanan, a member of the Indonesian congregation that rented the sanctuary on Sunday afternoons, who suggested asking for advice from the American pastor.

Harry, now 47, had come to the US in 1993 on a five-year tourist visa. Back in Indonesia he had helped support his extended family cleaning oil drums during the day and selling gas by the side of the road at night. His first stop was California, where he lived with an aunt and uncle who published an Indonesian language newspaper. He had a delivery route for the paper starting at 4 a.m., became the newsroom handyman, and sent most of his money back home. Three years later, needing to send money to repair the roof of his family’s home in Indonesia, he took a truck-driving job, and settled in New Jersey, where he worked in a warehouse for a national chain, rising to assistant manager, met and married another Indonesian immigrant who had fled riots in Jakarta. And he overstayed his visa.

He says his original plan had been to return home when the five years had ended, but by that time the Suharto regime had fallen and the news he was hearing from his father was troubling. So the question he brought to Pastor Seth in 2002 was whether registering with ICE would put him and the other members of his church on a path toward citizenship or toward deportation.

Harry Pangemanan prays with congregants at a Bahasa Indonesia language service of thanksgiving for being able to return home on Feb. 4 at the Reformed Church of Highland Park in Highland Park, NJ. (Photo: Alan Chin for Yahoo News)

Seth answered that he was not sure, but since not registering would effectively turn them into fugitives, it was better to comply with the law. In the end they not only registered, they did so with brio – arriving at their local ICE office at 970 Broad Street in Newark at 2 AM on the day the registry opened, so they would be the first in line. Their intended message to authorities: they were Christians who were also victims of Muslim militants; they were in solidarity with Americans, not a threat.

“We trusted in the good will of the government,” Harry says now. “We trusted the government back then.”

As it would turn out, that decision to register “brought them under ICE’s umbrella,” says Seth, who describes those in the registry as “the most documented undocumented people on the planet.

“I would give different advice now,” Seth says.

At the same time, Harry and his cohort also applied for asylum on the grounds that returning home would put them in danger. Most say that’s when they learned they no longer qualified. A 1997 rule change required immigrants seeking asylum to submit their application within 12 months of arrival, something Harry and scores of other Indonesian Christians say they either were not told or did not understand.

But although they were never eligible for asylum, their rejections did not come quickly. Over the next few years their applications inched through the system. Because so many from the same community had applied at the same time, they were on the same check-in schedule, often car-pooling to yearly appointments together. It also meant that they were all finally rejected at the same time – in the spring of 2006.

Meanwhile Pastors Seth and Stephanie were busy growing their own congregation, toward its current membership of 300, including Harry Pangemanan and a handful of other Indonesian immigrants who joined, in part, out of gratitude to Pastor Seth. Seth was interested in learning more about these new parishioners – he and Harry would meet at Dunkin Donuts before dawn sometimes for Harry to talk about his life in Indonesia — but the focus of the Kaper-Dales ministry was really housing, not immigration.

A banner in support of immigrants and refugees hangs outside of one of the Reformed Church of Highland Park buildings in Highland Park, NJ on Feb. 4, 2018. (Photo: Alan Chin for Yahoo News)

In early May of 2006 they had just completed an agreement to sell the air rights above the church’s office wing for $1 to a new non-profit, the Reformed Church of Highland Park-Affordable Housing Corporation, or RCHP-AHC, which was led by Seth. The mission of the new group was to build six apartments for young women who had aged out of foster care.

Still, “causes find you more than the other way around,” Seth says of the phone call that awakened him just before dawn on May 25, 2006. It was Harry, who was hiding beneath his bed with his pregnant wife and their four-year-old daughter.

The Pangemanan family had awoken to sounds of shouting in the hallways of their apartment complex at One Woodbine Ave in Avenel, NJ, about 30 minutes from Highland Park. Looking out the window they saw handcuffed neighbors being loaded into ICE buses while children watched from balconies and sobbed. The officers did not have search warrants, evidently, but any undocumented man who answered the banging on his door was taken – 35 in all, most of them parents of young children. Harry did not let the officers in, but he was so frightened that he could not bring himself to leave his apartment and meet Seth in the courtyard when he arrived and reported that the vans had gone.

Rumors spread that ICE was planning another raid, and residents began asking Harry whether his pastor would let them stay at the Reformed Church – not exactly the kind of housing that the Kaper-Dales thought would be their calling. Seth assumed that if he asked permission from the church’s governing committee, or consistory, he would be turned down. So he decided on his own to let ten families sleep in classrooms in the church’s school for two weeks.

Once he did inform the consistory, after the danger seemed to have passed and the families left, the members were concerned. The church was not zoned for residential use. It had no showers. There were fire-code issues. What was the potential liability for harboring fugitives? And what actually was RCHP’s stand on immigration?

A sign across the street from the Reformed Church of Highland Park in support of immigrants and refugess in Highland Park, New Jersey on Jan. 31, 2018. (Photo: Alan Chin for Yahoo News)

A history of the church compiled by Elizabeth Estes, who was a new member of the consistory at the time, quotes another member as saying: “I feel Seth’s action is unfair. So many people are waiting to come here legally. They are paying fees and following procedures. They don’t get to live here unless they receive prior approval. It just doesn’t seem right for us to help people who are skipping the line.”

Estes herself, who is still an elder of the church, remembers that her own response was to be “alarmed” by potential legal complications, but mostly put off because “immigration was not on my agenda.”

Her causes were changing the Sunday school schedule and “beginning a working group to draft a statement about the church being open and affirming of people who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender,” she wrote in the  congregational history, a draft of which she shared with Yahoo News.

“We hoped [the immigration issue] would just go away,” she adds today.

She says all this with regret for the arms-length attitude that prevailed back then.

“We didn’t even visit them,” she recalls of the 35 men who spent the next six weeks in the Middlesex County Jail before being deported. (Women were not taken mostly because they had not been required to register under NSEERS and therefore were not yet in any official ICE database.) Nearly all of them were fathers of young children, most of those American-born citizens. “We just watched it happen,” she says.

“I backed off the subject (of the immigrants) because it was making people here nervous,” Seth adds. “Over the next couple of years we’d periodically hear about people getting picked up but we didn’t do anything.”

In 2009, that changed.

“It got personal,” Seth says. “When Harry was picked up, that’s when we flew into action.”

******

  In the years after the 2006 raid, the Pangemanans were deeply involved in everything that happened at the Reformed Church of Highland Park. Harry’s younger daughter was baptized there, and attended the religious school. Harry’s wife was a leader of a group of Indonesian women who hosted fellowship and fundraising events. Like the Kaper-Dales, the Pangemanans also arranged their work lives so that they could share childcare. For them, it meant he worked the day shift at the warehouse and she worked all night.

For three years after the raid, Harry says, “it’s in our minds every minute that they will come for me sooner or later.” This was particularly hard on his children, he says, who, still living at the apartment complex that was raided, had friends all around them whose fathers were gone.

Harry Pangemanan led a Bahasa Indonesia language service of thanksgiving for being able to return home on Feb. 4, but spoke also about fellow Indonesians still detained. (Photo: Alan Chin for Yahoo News)

“My kids have to deal with the expectation every single day,” he says. “‘Is my papa okay? Is my mama okay? Will they be home when school is over?’” He was a tiny bit optimistic in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama, who had campaigned on immigration reform as one of his priorities, but only a tiny bit.

And, as if turned out, the rise of the Tea Party and Republican control of the House after 2010 meant the Obama administration would never achieve the promised immigration reform. Instead, deportations reached the highest level in history. “History shows that whenever a chance comes for immigration reform, presidents up their deportations to show they are not soft, as a negotiating strategy,” Seth says. “If that was the strategy, it failed.”

But even before then, when the new administration was but a few weeks old, Harry, leaving for work on a winter morning, was met near his car by ICE agents, who took him into custody. From the pulpit the next Sunday, Seth cried openly as he updated the worshippers. Immediately after the service a team was formed to support Harry’s family: raising money to pay rent now that they had lost one salary; taking turns sleeping in the Pangemanan’s home to watch the children; finding and paying a lawyer; travelling almost weekly to Washington to seek help from lawmakers and bureaucrats; visiting Harry regularly in the Elizabeth Detention Center — the same place that had earlier housed the 35 detainees, who received no visits from the congregation.

“We would hope to say all the world matters,” Seth says. “But it’s a lie to think that you respond equally to everybody. When your family is under threat you respond differently, and Harry was family. People who had been concerned, but not necessarily motivated, were now doing daily visits.”

This went on for 53 days until the morning that Harry called his wife to say that he was being put on an airplane. Fearing Harry was being sent back to Jakarta, Seth grabbed his clerical collar and drove to Newark airport, knowing only which airline Harry would be on.

There were no flights to Indonesia listed on the Continental departures board, but there was one to Seattle, and Seth knew from ICE press releases that the agency’s new policy was to fill rented 747s planes with deportees at the Seattle-Tacoma airport, then hop-scotch them across Asia, stopping in capital cities and dropping people off. There was one flight that day from Newark to Seattle, leaving soon.

Rev. Seth Kaper-Dale and Harry Pangemanan plan legal strategies at the Reformed Church of Highland Park on Jan. 31, 2018, ahead of the Feb. 2 judge’s order for a temporary stay of deportation. (Photo: Alan Chin for Yahoo News)

Somehow Seth talked his way through the TSA security checkpoint without a ticket, telling officers that he had a congregant who was being deported and he need to pray with him before he left. The departure doors had closed by the time he got to the gate, but he talked his way onto the plane, too, with the help of an Irish Catholic gate agent who saw him on his knees at the window, praying fervently, and assumed he was a priest. “Follow me, Father,” she said, and the plane door was opened from the inside.

As he came down the aisle to the last row where Harry was sitting between two armed immigration officers, one of the agents wondered aloud how this pastor had managed to appear. Harry remembers simply pointing one handcuffed hand heavenward in answer.

He was actually not being deported. He was being sent to the Tacoma detention center. Over the next three weeks Seth called “every number I could find of anyone in the (newly elected) Obama administration who could help,” including one night when he left messages on all 40 numbers on the ICE website. Only one of those calls was returned, he says – the one to Dora Schriro, a newly appointed special adviser to Janet Napolitano, the new Secretary of Homeland Security who had tasked Schriro with a review of immigration detention procedures.

She listened to Seth’s account. Soon after, without warning, Harry was driven to the airport, right up to a waiting plane on the tarmac. Immigration officers handed him an envelope and left. Harry didn’t know where he was headed until he opened the packet and found a ticket to Newark and paperwork saying he had been granted a two year “order of supervision,” during which time he could get a driver’s license and a work permit and could not be deported.

The “miracle” Pastor Seth was credited with performing led several dozen more Indonesians to join his church, which by now was filled with congregants from 44 different countries. In September, just after the start of the academic year in New Jersey, two Indonesian fathers were detained by ICE while dropping their children off at school, and Reformed Church parishioners – by now “hooked” on the cause of protecting immigrants, Estes says – sprung into action.

Banner in support of immigrants and refugees in the Reformed Church of Highland Park. (Photo: Alan Chin for Yahoo News)

Perhaps because he knew the ropes by now, Seth’s meeting with the ICE field officer in Newark, Scott Webber, led to an agreement: Seth would encourage the nearly 100 men in Central New Jersey with final deportation orders pending to come forward and Webber would grant them stays of removal like the one given to Harry. They would be under the supervision of the church, and, like Harry, they would be able to get documentation like drivers licenses and work permits. There would be two-year limit on the order, by which time, Webber said, he hoped immigration reform would pass and make the stays unnecessary.

As a show of good faith, Webber released not only the two men who had been arrested outside the school, but also five other Indonesian in ICE custody at the time. Believing in their pastor, nearly 80 Indonesian men came forward in 2009 under the agreement.

Then immigration reform never happened, and ICE deportations nationwide increased to 1000 a day. The two years passed, the local Indonesian’s orders of supervision expired, and in the fall of 2011 all those who had registered under the church’s program received a so called “cash and baggage” letter with an order to report to the ICE offices in Newark on December 10. They were to bring a one-way ticket back to Indonesia, and no more than 35 pounds of luggage. They were being deported.

Without hesitation this time, Seth publicly urged the Indonesians to defy the orders. The men did attend their December 10 ICE check-ins, accompanied by church members, but brought neither luggage or airline tickets. Most left with short term extensions of their stays – but nine, including Harry, were denied.

Unlike in 2002, by 2011 the consistory had already voted to become a sanctuary for as long as the immigrants needed a place to stay. They understood that it is technically legal for ICE to enter a house of worship (if a federal judge authorizes a warrant) but they counted on the government’s reluctance to take such a step.

“You lose the Evangelical vote when you enter a church,” Seth says.

Harry Pangemanan’s temporary bedroom at the Reformed Church of Highland Park. (Photo: Alan Chin for Yahoo News)

The nine sanctuary seekers spent 340 nights in the church. They slept on mattresses in religious school classrooms, which were propped out of the way against the walls during the day. The local fire inspector waived the rules to permit it, provided one congregant stayed awake all night on fire watch.

For the first two months those in residence created a make-shift bathtub using a garden hose and a kiddie pool in a downstairs public restroom. But when it became clear this would be a long stay Harry worked with plumbers and carpenters to build a shower. During the summer months, a volleyball net was set up in the social hall.

Eventually, everyone but the Pangemanans would sneak home at night, pretending to still be in sanctuary mostly when reporters came by. This was not without consequences. One morning the wife of one of the nine men lost her usual ride to her housecleaning job, so her husband drove her at 6 am. A few blocks away from their house they were stopped by an ICE officer and he was taken into custody. He was soon released, however — an hour after a local reporter called ICE to ask about the arrest.

Then, in late October of 2012, Superstorm Sandy made landfall in New Jersey, about 20 miles south of the church. The nine who had been living there turned it into a different kind of sanctuary, setting up generators, filling the social hall with cots, collecting donated supplies, cooking Indonesian meals for neighbors without power. Eventually Harry began to leave the building, too – driving vanloads of donated supplies down to the devastated towns of the Jersey shore, risking being detained again and deported.

Eventually this would become his full-time job. Using skills gained during all those months of keeping himself occupied at the church by doing repair work on the building’s heating, plumbing and electrical systems, he turned to rebuilding homes demolished by Sandy. Over the next few years he would work on more than 200 of those, paid by grants and donations to the church for hurricane relief.

Harry Pangemanan took on the job as repairman for the church. (Photo: Alan Chin for Yahoo News)

But first he had to get his freedom back. On Valentine’s Day, 2013, Seth, Estes and others were called to Washington to meet with the federal director of DHS’ Enforcement and Removal Operations, Gary Mead, who offered a deal. All nine of the men in “hiding” would be given stays. These were not amnesty, not a path to citizenship, but rather an open ended lifting of the threat of deportation.

The new stays were consistent with a memo written a year earlier, in 2011, by John Morton, the director of ICE. Known as the “Morton Memo on Prosecutorial Discretion”, it allowed ICE attorneys to take a list of mitigating factors into account when deciding whether to deport an undocumented immigrant, one of which was that the deportation of the non-citizen parent would harm American citizen children.

For the next five years no Indonesians in the area were detained by ICE. The Reformed Church of Highland Park turned its attention to other immigrant groups, helping to relocate refugees from Syria and the Congo and Pakistan. The congregation opened the Global Grace café in a large room outside the kitchen, staffed entirely by refugee chefs who create hearty meals from their homelands on a rotating menu. And the list of apartment buildings owned by the Affordable Housing Corporation, a subsidiary of the church grew to 11. After his work on the Jersey Shore was complete, Harry was hired full-time as the property manager of both the church building and the corporation’s.

Nadja Khudr, a Syrian refugee and immigrant who cooks once a week at the church-operated cafe at Reformed Church of Highland Park. (Photo: Alan Chin for Yahoo News)

********

  Pastor Seth says he knew the election of 2016 would change things for his undocumented parishioners. He was surprised, he says, that things changed so quickly.

“This is a whole new world,” he says.

An executive order issued a week after the inauguration effectively nullified all deportation stays except those protected under DACA (on which the clock would not run down for another year.) It also meant that any undocumented immigrant caught by ICE could be deported — whether they were on a registry or not, whether they were the intended target of a raid or just happened to be present, and even if hey had previously been granted stays for extenuating circumstances.

Mostly using information provided by the immigrants themselves, ICE began detaining and deporting at a record pace.

While the total number of deportations was higher in the last year of the Obama administration than in the first year of the current administration, that is mostly because the Obama deportations were predominantly of new arrivals caught crossing the border from Mexico, and the number of such people dropped sharply this year. In contrast, a Human Rights Watch report released in December found that the number of people detained within the United States – people like Harry who had been here for a while and had an established paper trail – increased by 42 percent in 2017. At the same time deportations of people with no criminal history, other than their initial overstay of their visa, tripled.

The man overseeing the enforcement of the new policies, ICE Acting Director Thomas Homan, rejected the idea that this stepped up enforcement was either excessive or cruel. “The constant story about us separating families,” he told CNN last summer, “when someone enters this country illegally, or someone overstays their visa, they know they’re in this country illegally. If they take it upon themselves to have a child in this country and becomes a US citizen by birth, he put his family in that position, not ICE, not Border Patrol. And to vilify the men and women of ICE as separating families is unfair.”

At the Reformed Church of Highland Park, those statistics had names and faces. In January a group of Indonesians who had been granted stays reported for their scheduled check-ins with ICE, and “no problem,” Seth says. “Then the first week in February, no problem.” But by the fourth week of that month, the four who kept their appointments were told to return in four months with their passports. When they did, they were detained and then deported. All four had been among the group that took sanctuary at the church in 2012.

Left to right: Arthur Jemmy, Harry Pangemanan and Johanes Tasik take refuge in the Reformed Church of Highland Park on Jan. 31, 2018. (Photo: Alan Chin for Yahoo News)

Arthur Jemmy — who fled to the US in 2000 after Muslim militants stormed a church service he was attending in his village of Poso, Indonesia, beheaded the preacher and then burned the church to the ground – was scheduled to report to ICE in September. But after the deportation of the others, Seth advised him not to go. His absence resulted in a letter requiring him to appear before ICE on October 9, but on that date he and his wife moved into the church instead.

He was joined there on January 12 by Johanes Tasik, who did keep his scheduled appointment and was given an ankle monitor and told to return for deportation. He went to the church, called ICE and said he was seeking sanctuary. Since they knew where he was, he said, he would be removing the monitor.

And finally, on January 24 of this year, Harry was about to drive his 15-year-old daughter to school when he noticed a black SUV with tinted windows idling nearby. He ran into his house, leaving his startled daughter in the car, then called her on her cell phone.

“Honey you need to walk,” he told her. “But first could you turn off the engine and bring the key back into the house?”

His next call was to Seth, who immediately picked up Harry at his home and brought him to join Jemmy and Tasik at the church. Once there they learned that two other Indonesian fathers had been taken into custody by ICE that morning while dropping their children off at school.

A week earlier Harry had been honored by the Highland Park Human Relations Commission with its 2018 Dr. Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award for the rebuilding work he did on the Jersey Shore. Now he huddled with Seth and consulted with ACLU lawyers who were drafting a class action suit on behalf of the 43 remaining Indonesians in Central New Jersey who had final orders of deportation issued against them by ICE.

Harry Pangemanan back home on Feb. 4, with his recently awarded ‘2018 Dr. Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award’ for the rebuilding work he did on the Jersey Shore after Hurricane Sandy. (Photo: Alan Chin for Yahoo News)

The suit was filed at 3:50 PM last Friday night, ten minutes before U.S. District Judge Esther Salas’ end of week deadline. To the surprise of counsel on both sides, Judge Salas scheduled a hearing that same evening, and immediately ordered a stay until she could issue a complete ruling on their claims that they had not had due process because their cases had never been heard by an amnesty judge, and that they deserved such a hearing because of worsening conditions for Christians in Indonesia.

The Pangemanans thought about moving back to their Highland Park house immediately after the decision, but their daughters were afraid of returning to where there had recently been a break-in. So the family eased into freedom gradually. On Saturday morning they attended a hastily scheduled service to celebrate the judge’s ruling – then Harry left the building to get a much needed haircut. On Sunday they prayed with both their American and Indonesian congregations, then made the five-block trip to bless the house.

As it turned dark that first night back, Harry created a barricade, in lieu of the broken lock, and the entire family went to bed. In the morning he would take his girls to school, then get to work replacing the entire front door.

Harry Pangemanan returns home on Feb. 4. The house had been broken into and documents stolen during his absence. (Photo: Alan Chin for Yahoo News)

_____

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In scandal's wake, Melania keeps her distance from Donald. Do we care?

First lady Melania Trump and President Donald Trump listen while receiving an update on Hurricane Harvey recovery efforts at the White House in Washington, Sept.1, 2017. (Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Melania Trump is not in Davos today. She was planning to go – her office had already announced that she would be there to “support the president” as he hob nobs with the global elites at the World Economic Forum. But the First Lady is staying in Washington for what her office opaquely calls “scheduling and logistical reasons.” What happened?

Well, one thing that happened was the disclosure that Donald Trump’s lawyer arranged a $130,000 payment to a porn star, reportedly to keep quiet about her decade-ago affair with Trump.

In the swirl of news over the last week, Melania’s defection – which was announced on the couple’s 13th wedding anniversary — didn’t get much public attention. (Yahoo News White House correspondent Hunter Walker asked the White House how the Trumps celebrated, but got no answer.) Of the many rules that Mrs. Trump’s husband has rewritten in the past two years, add one more – that the public seems to have lost interest in how a politician’s wife reacts to the news of his infidelities.

Until Trump changed everything, the public was insatiably interested in what the wronged spouse thinks. When Bill Clinton was accused of Oval Office dalliances, for instance, Hillary Clinton at first became his fiercest defender, blaming the charges on a “vast right wing conspiracy.” She also became the subject of endless speculation about whether she would stay in the marriage or leave. The photo of the couple walking forlornly toward the presidential helicopter, with Chelsea between them holding each of their hands, ran with countless stories about the tense state of their marriage.

When John Edwards was found to have fathered a child out of wedlock, attention also focused on his wife. Some publications were reluctant to cover the story at first, in part out of respect for Elizabeth Edwards, who was fighting cancer at the time. At first Elizabeth defended her husband, but then she announced she was separating from him.

President Clinton, his daughter Chelsea, center, and wife Hillary walk with Buddy Tuesday, Aug. 18, 1998, from the White House toward a helicopter as they depart for vacation enroute to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. (Photo: Roberto Borea/AP)

Ditto for Elliott Spitzer’s payments to prostitutes, when much of the coverage centered on why we expect wronged women, like his wife Silda, to stand publicly — and clearly miserably — by their husband’s side. Or Anthony Weiner’s lewd texting, when as much ink and energy was dedicated to why his wife, Huma Abedin, stayed with him (eventually they divorced) and what price she would pay in her own career for his behavior.

The meme of the wronged wife, and the public’s outrage on her behalf, became an entrenched part of popular culture. The TV show “The Good Wife” rode it for seven seasons.  In the musical Hamilton, the title character’s admission that he had an affair leads to brief glee from his political opponents, which abruptly ends with the words “his poor wife”.  That segues into a wrenching solo, and the rest of the play focuses more on her anger and eventual forgiveness than it does on the political price he paid.

There has been, to be sure, much speculation about the Trump marriage: The way he left her behind when the couple arrived at the White House on Inauguration Day;  how her smile turned to a frown during the ceremony  ; how she didn’t move to the White House for months, and swatted his hand away when he reached for on a tarmac, and, most recently, how the photo she chose to tweet on the first anniversary of his taking office was of herself not with her husband but with the military escort who accompanied her to her seat.

Melania Trump posted this photo on the first anniversary of Trump’s presidency, Jan. 20, 2018. (Photo: Melania Trump via Twitter)

But the public reaction to the news that weeks before Election Day Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, set up a shell corporation to pay Daniels shows the fundamental rulebook for public reaction to sex scandals no longer applies.  (Cohen has denied that Trump and Daniels had an affair, but has not denied the payment nor said what it was for.)

There was no “stand by your man” statement, no public display of support (while Melania did travel to Florida with her husband immediately after the allegations were first published in the Wall Street Journal, she did not attend any events with him there that weekend.) The closest she came to signaling her feelings was cancelling her trip to Davos, and while it appeared to speak volumes it was not accompanied by the headlines and speculation that would previously have been du rigueur in such circumstances.

Perhaps it’s because this is the second time the Trumps have been through this particular type of news cycle. In October of 2016, when the Access Hollywood tape surfaced, Melania did a version of the traditional public wife walk, telling Anderson Cooper that Trump’s boasting about grabbing women was “boy talk, and he was led on — like, egged on — from the host to say dirty and bad stuff.”

Or perhaps it’s because this First Lady is so opaque, and those who might be inclined to speculate or empathize have been given no window into how she might be feeling. Other wives weathering scandals had friends who would dish – articles about the Clinton and Weiner marriages, for instance, were filled with anonymous quotes from friends of the couple, who served as conduits for their pain. But Melania Trump’s public facing world seems to be only herself, her parents and her son, Barron.  Who are her close friends?

Perhaps because the man who is accused of cheating on her does not seem to pay a political price for his actions and because his actions do not “stick” to him, the usual public embrace does not envelop her. Yes, polls show she is the most popular member of the Trump family, but still her approval numbers are lower than her disapproval numbers.

President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump return to the White House following a weekend trip to Mar-a-Lago, on the South Lawn of the White House on Jan. 15, 2018 in Washington. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch-Pool/Getty Images)

And so, one of the many lessons of this presidency may be that when every day brings an accusation or misstep that might have brought down a previous president, it leads to a numbing lack of surprise that translates into a lack of sympathy for his wife. With a news cycle in hyperdrive, there is no time nor inclination to wonder what Melania is thinking.

_____

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[lisabelkin-yahoonews]

The women who marched in 2018

Marchers passing the Trump International Hotel. (Photo: Jackson Freiman)

The marchers stretched for 30 city blocks along Central Park West, from its starting point in from of the Trump International Hotel at 59th Street all the way back to the Museum of Natural History, at 86th. The crowd filled the side streets along that stretch, too. They stood shoulder to shoulder on 71st and 75th, waiting for the police to remove the barricades and join the sea of people.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office estimated the crowd size as 120,000 people.

The result was a stretch of bright pink hats and largely hand-drawn signs, supporting a swath of causes. The atmosphere was that of a New Orleans funeral — a mix of high spirits and deep mourning, interspersed with marching bands and a smattering of costumes. Down Central Park West it wound, onto Sixth Avenue, ending at Bryant Park in Midtown.

Diane Carlson holding her sign and Roseanne Ryan. (Photo: Lisa Belkin/Yahoo News)

Diane Carlson and Roseanne Ryan took a train from Stony Brook University at 7:40 a.m. and headed for the hotel room they booked in Manhattan tonight. They had been at last year’s march in Washington, and anticipating similar crowds here, they decided to stay overnight rather than fight traffic going home.

They put their signs together at the hotel. “Make America Kind Again,” it read. There would have been pictures too — of the Statue of Liberty kicking Donald Trump with her boot — but they forgot to pack them, and once at the march they decided that was for the best. “It wasn’t the kindest image,” Carlson said. “Now this is a completely kind sign.”

Jonni Lane. (Photo: Lisa Belkin/Yahoo News)

Other sign makers were not as considered with being kind. Using the president’s “own language,” flight attendant Jonni Lane drew a picture of Trump with the poop emoji spewing from his mouth. “Shithole-In-Chief”, it read, and was one of hundreds of curse-filled signs held by marchers. “It’s been a rough year,” Lane said of her reasons for marching. “I’m here to protest, to make my voice heard, to vent. A little shouting never hurt anyone.”

Evy Lieberman, right, and Nancy Gillon. (Photo: Lisa Belkin/Yahoo News)

More complicated but on the same theme was the “Dump Trump” sign carried by Evy Lieberman and her friend Nancy Gillon, who had driven in from Tenafly, N.J. Attached to the sign was an actual roll of toilet paper, each sheet of which carried a picture of the president.

“I’m here because she marched last year and said it was an incredible experience surrounded by all those determined people,” Gillon said, pointing to Lieberman. “I needed to experience some of that energy.”

“And I needed to get it back,” Lieberman said. “I’m here because I’ve been miserable.”

Yisel Fernandez. (Photo: Lisa Belkin/Yahoo News)

Officially, march organizers are describing the events taking place in cities around the country and the world as “marches” rather than “protests” — and they stress that the purpose is to encourage voter participation in the 2018 midterm election and beyond.

In that spirit, Yisel Fernandez carried a sign that said “I’m Hispanic, I’m a Mother and I Vote.” She was marching for her 2-year-old daughter, she said, who she was going to bring but decided to leave at home because, despite the unseasonably warm high of 51 degrees, it was still “really cold” for a toddler.

Loveena Rajanayakam. (Photo: Kadia Aretha Tubman/Yahoo News)

Loveena Rajanayakam was also marching for her young daughters, and she brought them along, bundled up in matching purple winter coats. Together they held signs that read “ReSISTER” and “I Love Naps But I Stay Woke.”

“It’s very important for them to understand that they can do anything, shouldn’t take anything for granted and have a voice that needs to be heard,” she said.

Amanda Hambrick with 1-year-old Skylar. (Photo: Kadia Aretha Tubman/Yahoo News)

And Amanda Hambrick, was marching with 1-year-old Skylar, who was almost kind of marching for herself. The toddler did her best to toddle along with her mother, a sign around her neck that read “I marched before I could walk.”

Asked why she was marching Hambrick said, “We’ve got to show up for each other. There’s too much at stake.”

Small part of the 100 members of an Asian-American coalition marching to increase voter registration. (Photo: Lisa Belkin/Yahoo News)

In a marvel of logistics, large groups of marchers managed to meet up on a variety of street corners and march together. A group of 100 Asian-Americans did so on Broadway and 69th Street, representing a collection of advocacy groups, including the Asian Woman’s network, the Korean American Service Center, and Asian Women United.

“Power to the polls, that’s our cause,” said Joyce Samoa, one of the marchers. “We want Asian-American women to start voting. We are the poorest group in New York City and we are underrepresented on the voter rolls and in public office.”

Marc Allen, Barbara Spitzer, Ann Marie Morris. (Photo: Lisa Belkin/Yahoo News)

Ann Marie Morris, Barbara Spitzer and Marc Allen stopped on their way toward the march to shop. They already had their signs. “Truth, We Miss You,” Allen’s read, “Build A Wall Around Trump, I’ll Pay For It,” read Morris’s.

But they added messages from one of the many button vendors lining the sidewalks. “Go Fact Yourself,” was one purchase. “Michelle Obama 2020” was another.

“He’s a disgrace, he’s an embarrassment,” Morris said of why she was marching. “We wouldn’t accept this behavior from a CEO, a Hollywood actor, no one else is allowed to act like this.”

Lois Hoffmann and the family and friends who helped her cross “attend women’s march” off her bucket list. (Photo: Lisa Belkin/Yahoo News)

Lois Hofemann turned 80 this year and the Woman’s March was “on my bucket list,” she says. So her daughters invited her down from her New Hampshire home and brought her to protest.

“There is no force more powerful than a woman determined” read her sign, which she held while her daughter Catherine Sorenson pushed her wheelchair.

“Not this Grandma’s President” read Janet Mehan’s as she walked beside.

Ruth Rosar was born before women could vote nationwide. (Photo: Lisa Belkin/Yahoo News)

There was no one keeping track, but odds are that Ruth Rosar was the oldest marcher present in New York City. She was born on March 3, 2016, she said, making her 102 years old.

Her mother was a suffragette, marching for the women’s vote, and now Rosar was decked all in red, wearing a button that said, “Another Nasty Woman Against Trump,” and attracting a crowd.

“I have been watching Donald Trump and the 68 million people who voted for him tear down our nation agency by agency. I can’t really march,” she said, pointing to her walker and explaining that she would spend the day on a quieter sidewalk greeting passersby. “But I can be here.”

Ana Lombardo. (Photo: Lisa Belkin/Yahoo News)

Women like Rosar were on Ana Lombardo’s mind as she marched. “Grateful to the Women Before Me Who Fought For My Rights,” her sign read.

Others were on her mind as well. On one side of her handle she’s pasted a photo of her friend Christine, who died of breast cancer three years ago, and “who would have absolutely been here,” Lombardo said.

And on the other side was a photo of her friend Sal, who died of AIDS less than a year ago. Sal was too sick to attend the 2017 march with Lombardo, but she carried his photo there as well. “And he made me promise that if I went this year, I would take him with me in spirit again,” she said.

Shawn Gutcheff. (Photo: Kadia Aretha Tubman/Yahoo News)

A different woman was in Shawn Gutcheff’s mind — and on her sign. She brought a poster of Oprah Winfrey with her from Salt Lake City, Utah because, she said: “I’m marching for Oprah. For everything that is the antithesis of Donald Trump.”

Mya Stein, Ally Dolmanisth, Haley Prisloe, Kate Gregory, Sophie Dolmanisth. (Photo: Lisa Belkin/Yahoo News)

Mya Stein, Ally Dolmanisth, Haley Prisloe and Kate Gregory are all 17 years old and will all vote for the first time this year. They take that responsibility seriously, they say, and came to march so that others would register.

“I think our generations needs to experience these things so that we can build our own future,” said Dolmanisth’s 15-year-old sister Sophie. So the group put sparkly facepaint on their cheeks and used bright colors on their signs.

“Without Hermione Harry Would Have Died in Book 1,” read Stein’s.

“Girls Just Want to Have FUNdamental Rights,” read Dolmanisth’s.

Susan Ferziger. (Photo: Lisa Belkin/Yahoo News)

Many of the marchers were second-timers, having participated in the 2017 march in New York or elsewhere.

Susan Ferziger was one of those, and now she was back carrying a sign that said “Last Year I Was Scared, This Year I Am Angry.”

“It’s worse than I’d feared,” she said, listing more than a dozen administration actions with which she disagreed. “So I’m back.”

Nina, Charise and Lauren Fisher. (Photo: Kadia Aretha Tubman/Yahoo News)

It was also not Charise Fisher’s first march. When she was 12, her mother brought her to a protest against South African apartheid and she says, “I will never forget the day Nelson Mandela got out of jail.” To carry on the legacy of protest she brought her daughters, 7-year-old Nina and 9-year-old Lauren along today.

“As black women we stand on the legacy of the people who marched before,” she said. “So this generation has to continue marching.”

Clarissa Rodriguez, left, and Eliza Mendel. (Photo: Lisa Belkin/Yahoo News)

All along the route there were political conversations, and one of the more common themes was exactly what these large gatherings of protesters actually accomplished.

Clarissa Rodriguez and Eliza Mendel, both classmates from SUNY Purchase in Westchester, said they were marching because they believed in the power of hundreds of thousands of voices.

“People said last year that the women’s march wasn’t going to do anything, it wouldn’t change anything” Rodriguez said. “But it created real action — the #MeToo movement, the voter registration drives, all those women running for office.”

Ellie Engstram. (Photo: Kadia Aretha Tubman/Yahoo News)

Ellie Engstram, who travelled to the march from Ohio, also agreed there was value in the gathering. If nothing else, she said, being together in one place was reinforcing for those who participated.

“It’s important to get together to have our voices heard and to have conversations rather than just tweeting,” she said, carrying a sign that read “Liberty is a Lady for A Reason.”

John Cadue. (Photo: Lisa Belkin/Yahoo News)

John Cadue was dressed head to toe in rainbows, carrying a sign that said “Only Love Can Drive Out Hate.”

When asked why he was marching, he swept his hand down the length of his multi-color clad body and said: “Doesn’t this speak for itself? Activism is alive and well.”

Doria Bachenheimer. (Photo: Lisa Belkin/Yahoo News)

Cheryl Snow wasn’t sure what sign she would carry today. Then she woke up to the morning news and was certain.

1/2017 Trump Inaugurated, 1/20/18 Fed Gov Shutdown,” she wrote in red marker on white poster board. “Trump said that he would run America like his businesses.”

Her friend Doria Bachenheimer, who carried that sign, said she and Snow were marching for many reasons — “for human rights, for basic human decency, for democracy…”

Monica Martino. (Photo: Lisa Belkin/Yahoo News)

Artist Monica Martino realizes she has made a nice living off of Donald Trump. A year ago, the Atlanta native painted a poster showing a ripe orange peach topped with a shock of blonde hair and the message “ImPeach.” She put it on her website and has sold quite a few.

This year, her poster had a picture of the Statue of Liberty and the message “Girl, Hold My Earrings,” as Lady Liberty prepared for a fight. She put her web address on the poster and figures she will sell a number of these images, too.

“It’s good for business by terrible for my morale,” she said of the current administration. “I want to put myself out of business. I want to go back to drawing animals and other cute stuff.”

Cochan Yves and his brand new bride Veleama Virginie pass the march on their way to take wedding photos in Central Park. (Photo: Lisa Belkin/Yahoo News)

On the sidewalk along Central Park South, as a stream of marchers passed by, Valeama Virginie and her brand new husband Cochan Yves stood confused.

She was in her white gown, he was in his brown suit, and they were headed for Central Park to take wedding photos immediately after their ceremony when they encountered quite a crowd.

From a French island off the coast of Madagascar, they had come 20,000 kilometers to be married in New York, but had not heard there would be another big event happening.

“What is this for?” Virginie asked. “It’s against Trump,” a passerby told her. Bride and groom smiled and pumped their fists.

Candy Fitts, right, and Barbara Posner. (Photo: Lisa Belkin/Yahoo News)

Two hours after the march first began to move, with no sign of its end in sight, Candy Fitts and Barbara Posner, both from Connecticut, stood watching from the sidewalk wearing the ubiquitous pink pussy hats and holding a sign that read “We’re Still Here! 2018.”

They were already thinking of next Jan. 20, and wondering whether there would be a need to march again. They were fairly sure there would — that the march represented a real change in the political landscape and the those who were marching, once emboldened, would not go quietly to their former lives.

“Our message is that we’re not going away, nobody’s giving up,” Posner said. “This will continue until we’re heard.”

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[lisabelkin-yahoonews]

The 'Sisterhood of the Van,' one year after the Women's March

These 12 women, friends of friends of friends, drove on Inauguration Day from Louisville, Ky., to be in Washington for the Women’s March on January 21, 2017. Front row: Kaitlin U’Sellis, Blair Wilson, Kelsey Westbrook, Bridget Pitcock, Meg Hancock; Second row:Maddie Dalton, Julie Peyton, Lisa Belkin, Linda Wilhelms, Amber Browning, Kelly Grey, Jocelyn Duke. (Photo: Lisa Belkin/Yahoo News)

Jocelyn Duke treats her memory of that day as a talisman, taking it out when the actual moment feels distant, turning it this way and that in her mind.

“I sit and reflect that I was there, I was part of that,” says Duke, an artist and teaching assistant in Louisville, Ky.“I remind myself how it felt to be part of something that will go down in history as pivotal and powerful.”

Meg Hancock does the same, summoning images of the seemingly endless crowd to push back against bouts of despair in the months since then.

“2017 was an absolutely exhausting year,” says Hancock, a University of Louisville assistant professor of sports administration. “The energy from the march carried me through, made me keep going when I might otherwise have been wrung out.”

This weekend will mark the first anniversary of the Women’s March on Washington — an event that included more than just women and happened in more than just Washington. An estimated 3 million people attended events on every continent of the globe, perhaps the largest single-day protest gathering in history.

The year that followed was a big one for women’s issues: the #MeToo movement, the fight over health insurance and reproductive rights, the surge in female candidates for all levels of office. The year was also a big one for protests — against racism, against climate change denial, against police brutality, in support of immigrants, in support of white power.

But the first of those, the largest and, in many ways, the spark for the rest, was the Women’s March. And on its anniversary one group of 10 women from Louisville, who rented a van and drove 12 hours to the nation’s capital, are looking back on how that journey did and did not change them in the year that followed.

Protesters walk during the Women’s March on Washington on January 21, 2017. (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)

“It was life-altering,” says Julie Peyton, a visiting nurse. “My year didn’t start on Jan. 1, 2017, it started the weekend of Jan. 20-21. It’s been a crazy freaking year.”

Duke says that attending the march influenced her artwork. She spent the year creating T-shirts with such messages as “Shhhhh, Your privilege is showing,” “Just because a problem isn’t yours, doesn’t mean it’s not a problem” and “Stop clinging to stereotypes that have been passed down to you.” It also led her to take a full-time job as a teaching assistant at a Louisville middle school.

“I have felt an increasing sense of urgency to be a role model this year, particularly for young women of color,” she says of what she describes as her “calling” to the position. “I am only the second black teacher in the building. They just want to see someone who looks like them.”

Others from what they’ve nicknamed the Sisterhood of the Van have also reevaluated their life’s work this year.  Hancock and Bridget Pitcock, who have been married for four years, together applied for the Emerge America Program, which trains Democratic women to run for office. But they both eventually decided that the timing is not right and they can better advance progressive causes in other ways.

For Pitcock that means going back to school for her master’s degree in nursing so she can transition from a managed care case manager to a hands-on nurse practitioner. “It’s the best way I can think of to address the health disparities within LGBT community,” she says, “since many of those stem from patients not feeling safe with practitioners.”

For Hancock, it means seeing her classroom as a place to introduce a wide swath of ideas to “the 18-22 year-olds who might not otherwise encounter them,” she says. “It’s my responsibility as an educator to get them to think more critically about their place in society — not necessarily to tell them what that is, but to help them figure it out for themselves.”

Peyton, in turn, didn’t change the work she does, but she did upend the place she does it. Nine days after the march, she moved — temporarily, she thought — for a months-long nursing position in Seattle. When that contract was up, she signed a longer-term one because she found she relished the “freedom” of living in a “blue state” surrounded by more people who share her political views.

“It’s a stifling feeling being in Louisville compared to being out here,” she says. “I love Kentucky, I love my state, but I hesitate to go back to feeling stifled.” Language she learned at the march is a regular part of conversation in her new hometown, she says: “Words like marginalized, intersectionality…”

And Linda Wilhelms says the ways she has changed since the march don’t involve any external changes, but rather “profound internal ones.” No stranger to protests — now 71, she began with those against the Vietnam War — she says that the one last January “empowered me in ways I’d never experienced before.”

“I thought I had been speaking up my whole life, but now I see that maybe I haven’t,” she says. By way of example, she describes a trip to her local Dollar Store where she heard the manager confront a 10-year-old African-American boy who was there shopping with his grandmother, telling the child,  “I’ve got my eyes on you.” Outraged — and thinking particularly of the young African-American teen in the “We Are With You” T-shirt that she met at the march — she pushed back. “You wouldn’t say that to my grandson,” she told the manager, leaving the store without buying anything.

Her 20-year-old granddaughter, Blair Wilson, feels similarly transformed. While her “Nana” is a protest veteran, Wilson, a nursing student, was a first-timer last January and was nervous at the start. She says she’s not nervous anymore.

“Before the march, I had always been a very quiet and shy person,” she says. “I didn’t like making a scene or making a big deal out of things. But standing in the middle of that crowd, I realized that if I wanted to make a difference I couldn’t hide in my safe neighborhood, in my safe life. I had to go where the problems were. I had to get over my own insecurities and speak up.”

In the past year she has done so, offering rides to clients of the Social Security office, paying for a families groceries when their public assistance was not enough to cover their total at checkout, and holding supportive signs outside the only clinic in Kentucky where abortions are still available.

Nearly all the women from the van say they have marched, often, since the Women’s March. “I’ve done more marches in the past year than I have in the past decade,” Wilhelm says. She and Wilson have marched for reproductive rights and against ending the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. Kaitlin U’Sellis, a health care analyst, marched in support of refugees and immigrants, and visited the office of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to express her support for Obamacare.

Pitcock and Hancock, who have long been regulars on the LGBT protest circuit, expanded their list of causes and attended marches in support of Black Lives Matter, immigrant rights and the removal of Confederate statues. Pitcock helped organize a fundraiser for the ACLU that raised $3,450. And although Wilson says she has found a new voice, Pitcock and Hancock say their lesson from the march was to use theirs less. “One of the speakers in Washington said something like, ‘You don’t need to be a voice for the voiceless, people aren’tvoiceless — you just need to pass the mic.’ So that’s our takeaway, to show up and support others, and then let them speak.”

Though all the women are certain that the Women’s March changed them, they are not as sure that it changed the country.

“I think it definitely had an effect,” says Maddie Dalton, now a college freshman, who was invited along on the van ride by women who knew her by reputation — a transgender teen, she forced the bathroom question in Louisville’s public schools and won. “But I’m not sure its momentum carried on as much as we had hoped.”

On the one hand there were ripple effects, with more women running for office, more women speaking out against sexual harassment and assault, and the derailment of much of the new administration’s agenda. On the other hand, Pitcock says, “I also feel there was major blowback from the other side. The white supremacist movement got stronger and more vocal. I think a lot of people on that side saw all these women come together and hated it.”

So will they be marching again this weekend, at one of the hundreds of anniversary events, of varying sizes, scheduled to take place around the country and the world?

Dalton will not. “I’m gonna have a ton of homework,” she says, adding that “as a leftist I think the only answer is violent revolution which most of these marches don’t support.” Duke will not march either, because a trip to Lexington, the closest official march site, is not in her teaching assistant/struggling artist budget.

But Pitcock and Hancock will be there, possibly renting another van for the trip. Wilson and Wilhelms will be there, too, carrying the same signs they brought to Washington last year, ones that read “Respect our existence or expect resistance” and “Kentucky Women Stronger Together.” Peyton will march in Seattle, attending with new “vegan friends, because that’s Seattle” and wearing the pink “pussy hat” someone handed her in D.C.

The posters that Blair Wilson and Linda Wilhelms will be marching with at the 2018 Women’s March. (Photo: Blair Wilson.

U’Sellis hopes to find an event closer to home in Louisville, one she can attend with her 4-month-old son, whose story is already entwined with the cause. U’Sellis miscarried twins in 2016, and Jan. 20, 2017 would have been their due date. Instead she spent that day in a van, keeping to herself the news that she had just taken a positive pregnancy test.

Thomas was born in September, and his mother wants to bring him to what will effectively be his second Women’s March. “I’m behind on his baby book, but I want to make him one to make sure he knows he got to go to Washington,” she says. “He was there.  I want to make sure he knows that.”

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Women speaking out changed 2017. Will it be a permanent shift?

Time magazine dubbed 2017 the year of the silence breakers, as powerful men who misused their power were brought down by the women they’d wronged.

But while it’s true that 47 men have been forced out of prominent positions this calendar year, with another 26 suspended, on leave or under investigation, this cultural comeuppance arguably began the year before, on July 6, 2016. That’s when newly fired Fox News host Gretchen Carlson filed suit against then-Fox News chief Roger Ailes, accusing him of retaliating against her when she refused his sexual demands. At first she was a lone voice, but over the weeks other women came forward with similar stories, and on July 21 of that year, Ailes resigned.

Looking back — and forward — from this vantage point, Carlson recently spoke with Yahoo News about the stunning domino effect of the past few months, why the so-called national reckoning had taken hold at this particular moment, whether the apparent cultural shift was permanent and what the next year might bring.

Carlson herself stresses that credit really belongs to Anita Hill, who testified before Congress in 1991 about how then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her when she was his employee at both the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Oklahoma University law professor Anita Hill testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington on Oct. 11, 1991. Hill’s explosive allegations about sexual harassment by Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas included graphic language and were carried live by many media outlets around the nation. (Photo: Greg Gibson/AP)

Hill’s testimony was the first news story Carlson covered as a TV reporter at WRIC-TV in Virginia. It was also “the first national conversation about sexual harassment ever,” Carlson says, and while historic and a good start, the conversation’s impact only went so far. While anger at the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee being condescending to Hill did spur a record number of women to run for Congress and win, it did not keep Thomas off the court. And while it did lead corporate America to create rules about unacceptable behavior in the workplace, many of those rules proved to be ineffective at best and harmful at worst for later generations of women.

“A lot of companies put into effect sexual harassment training and thought the problem was solved — it would just go away,” Carlson says.

In particular, arbitration clauses became common for settling sexual harassment accusations in many workplaces, coupled with nondisclosure agreements barring women from speaking about their allegations as a condition of receiving a settlement. The result, Carlson says, “was a secret chamber of arbitration, which is why we haven’t heard about many of the cases that were settled over the years. It silences women.”

There was such a clause in Carlson’s Fox News contract, saying all lawsuits against the company must be heard by an arbitrator. Carlson’s legal team circumvented that restriction by suing Ailes directly. “That was a strategy my lawyers came up with that happened to work in New York because there was a law on the books that facilitated that. It was not the case in every state.”

At first, Ailes’s allies rallied publicly to his defense. “It was the most excruciating choice of my life and a very lonely experience,” Carlson says. Then five women came forward to New York magazine with stories similar to hers, and eventually the mogul was forced to step down — albeit with a reported $40 million severance package.

From left, former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson — accompanied by Rep. Cheri Bustos, D-Illinois., Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. — speaks at a news conference during which members of Congress introduced legislation to curb sexual harassment in the workplace on Dec. 6, 2017, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)

In the weeks and months after she came forward, Carlson says, she “heard from women throughout the country — first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands. They were from every socioeconomic level, every line of work. Teachers, police officers, oil rig operators, members of our military, waitresses, assistants, flight attendants.” She keeps listing and listing the professions. “That made me realize this was everywhere.”

“Everywhere” would soon include an “Access Hollywood” bus and an audiotape of a man who would be elected president of the United States — despite the 17 women who went public with sexual misconduct allegations against Donald Trump. On the one hand, Carlson says, Trump’s election in spite of all those allegations felt like a step backward from the progress her lawsuit had promised. On the other, though, she believes that everything that has happened this year was made possible by the anger many women felt last year as they watched an accused sexual predator reach the White House.

Ailes’s resignation “showed it was possible to be believed and to bring down a powerful man,” she says. Trump’s election, on the other hand, “showed that women still are not always believed.”

In that disconnect there was outrage. And many of those who accused Harvey Weinstein of rape, assault and harassment — telling their stories in the New York Times and the New Yorker in October this year — were spurred by that outrage. As Janice Min, former head of the Hollywood Reporter, told Bill Maher just after Weinstein was forced to resign from his company, the “feeding frenzy” over Weinstein was, in her opinion “all just sublimated anger towards Donald Trump.”

So it went through so many of the industries that Carlson had heard from the year before: restaurants, newsrooms, statehouses, fashion, finance, tech. The #MeToo hashtag brought out countless stories from women about their harassment and abuse. Then came another Election Day, Dec. 12, in Alabama, and this time a candidate accused of a history of sexual misconduct with underage girls was not voted into the Senate.

Beverly Young Nelson, an accuser of Alabama Republican Roy Moore, reads her statement at a news conference in New York on Nov. 13, 2017. Nelson says she was a 16-year-old high school student working at a restaurant when Moore, a regular, groped and touched her in his car. (Photo: Richard Drew/AP)

What, then, will happen next year? Was this swelling of voices a permanent change in the definition of what is acceptable behavior between men in power and women who work with them? Or was it just a blip, a noteworthy moment that will be looked back on as an incomplete promise, as was the case with Anita Hill?

Already there are signs of a backlash, an attempt to recast the outpouring of stories as an overreaction, an overreach. Last week, Rupert Murdoch dismissed as “nonsense” the charges that led to the payment of millions in sexual harassment settlements and the resignations of three of his most visible staffers.  “That was largely political, because we are conservative,” said Murdoch, whose media empire includes Fox News.

And two days later Matt Damon caused an uproar when he tried to explain that not all harassment is equally bad. “There’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right?” he said in an interview. Former co-stars quickly pointed out that nothing about #MeToo was equating these things and that to suggest otherwise was to dismiss the ubiquity of misbehavior of all kinds.

“Most men … simply cannot understand what abuse is like on a daily level,”  said actress Minnie Driver, a former co-star and former romantic partner of Damon’s.

There is also increasing concern that the problem will be perceived as one of rich and famous men behaving badly, and will be seen as solved when enough such men are replaced. Rebecca Traister, a columnist at New York magazine, wrote of having to do a kind of triage as women contact her daily “ready to finally out their repellent bosses. To many of them I must say that their guy isn’t well-known enough, that the stories are now so plentiful that offenders must meet a certain bar of notoriety, or power, or villainy, before they’re considered newsworthy.”

Actress Rose McGowan speaks at the inaugural Women’s Convention in Detroit on Oct. 27, 2017. Shortly before, McGowan gone public with her allegation that film company co-founder and Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein raped her. (Photo: Paul Sancya/AP)

Carlson also fears that because attention is de facto skewed to offenders in high-profile industries, the victims of less famous men will remain overlooked and powerless. She is somewhat heartened by recent articles such as the one in the Washington Post about harassment in the hospitality industry and in the New York Times about a decades-long pattern at the Ford Motor Company. And she regularly finds herself telling women in less visible fields, “Please go to your local media — in Topeka, in Tuscaloosa. If there ever was a moment when people are interested in telling your story, it would be now.”

But if all these stories are not accompanied by structural and cultural change, she says, the moment will be lost. This is why she is lobbying for passage of a bill just introduced in Congress that would eliminate forced arbitration clauses as a condition of employment. And she is working with the group All in Together to hold three-day workshops around the country for women in blue-collar, hourly-wage professions to train them about ways to fight back against domestic violence and sexual harassment.

She created that program, she says, “because when people first asked me, ‘How do you help the single mom working three jobs who does not have a voice?’ I did not have an answer. Now I hope I do.”

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School shooting survivors united by a chain of grief – and hard lessons passed on

It was five years ago that a young man invaded Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and shot and killed 20 young children and six staff members, a tragedy that indelibly scarred that small city and lives on in the collective national memory. But school shootings didn’t begin, or end, with Sandy Hook. Yahoo News looks at the aftermath of four of these tragedies and the lives they changed. In other stories, we examine how 20 years on, Jonesboro, Ark., is still traumatized by an attack carried out by two middle-school boys — and how survivors deal with the knowledge that the killers are now grown men and free from prison; at the lessons from Sandy Hook that may have helped save lives at a California school just last month; and at how the parents of a girl killed in Newtown are coping with their loss.

Holly Bailey, Dylan Stableford, Beth Greenfield and Jason Sickles contributed to this report.

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It happens soon after the shooting stops, often before the victims are buried and the crime tape is taken away, certainly while the parents and students and teachers are still numb, still reeling from their loss. Sometime during those raw, wrenching moments comes the first talk of healing.

“Faith, hope, love … healing,” read the banner at the memorial service in Jonesboro, Ark., for the five killed and 10 injured when an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old classmate pulled a fire alarm and picked off their victims as they marched out of their middle school in 1998.

“Healing Begins,” read the headline of the Denver Post the day after two students gunned down 14 classmates and a teacher, injuring 23 more, at Columbine High School in 1999. A month later, President Bill Clinton addressed thousands at a memorial service. “There has to be healing,” he said.

After 32 were killed and 23 were injured by a student on a rampage at Virginia Tech, President George W. Bush promised healing too. “Although it does not seem possible right now,” he said, “a day will come when Virginia Tech will return to normal.”

And hours after an intruder killed 20 first graders and staff members in Newtown, Conn., a school aide who’d witnessed the carnage told a television reporter: “We’re going to stick together and in time, we’re going to heal.”

A woman touches a printout of messages of support and shared grief from teenagers around the United States at a memorial for the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., Dec. 18, 2012. (Photo: Joshua Lott/Reuters)

Today is the fifth anniversary of that day, the fifth anniversary of that declaration. And the question thrumming beneath today’s memories and tributes is twofold: not just “Has Newtown healed?” but also “How does a community heal after this increasingly frequent kind of a loss?”

The roots of these questions are generations deep, back to a time well before Newtown, arguably before the American Revolution, when four Lenape tribe members entered the Enoch Brown schoolhouse in Pennsylvania in 1764, shooting and killing the schoolmaster, then murdering all but two of the children in the building.

And they are questions that stretch into the future, to a time well after Newtown, through the at least 104 times that shots have been fired at students and teachers since Dec. 14, 2012.

Finally, they are questions that ripple out beyond these communities, particularly as screens and cameras now bring the anguish to the nation as a whole, allowing strangers to mourn for, though not actually with, those who have suffered.

It’s not only schools where communities are ripped to shreds and left to knit the pieces back together. The lessons of the schools are also the lessons of the military bases at Fort Hood and the Washington Navy Yard, the movie theater in Aurora, Colo., the churches in Charleston, S.C., and Sutherland Springs, Texas, and the concert in Las Vegas.

But there is something singular and searing about the schools — an invasion of what is assumed to be a safe space, where the victims form a literal community, where families not only know each other, but also expect their lives to be entwined as their children grow.

And unlike many other kinds of spaces, school communities remain together, to nurse their collective wound, after the cameras have gone, after the politicians have gone to their ideological corners (“guns,” “mental health”) then departed, after the public has moved on, wearied by the seemingly constant march of death, and jaded by the gridlock and dysfunction that prevent any real change.

Nearly two dozen protesters showed up in front of the National Shooting Sports Foundation in Newtown, Conn., for a candlelight vigil to remember the victims of the Orlando mass shooting, which took place June 12, 2016. (Photo: Peter Casolino/Hartford Courant/TNS via Getty Images)

That’s when residents are left to figure out what healing means, and to navigate their way toward it. Their only real map is the cobbled-together wisdom of others who came before. It’s critically injured Jonesboro teacher Lynette Thetford receiving a letter from the mother of a girl who had been killed a few months earlier in a school shooting in West Paducah, Ky. It’s Columbine principal Frank DeAngelis getting a phone call from his Paducah counterpart, Bill Bond, who told him: “You don’t even know what you need right now. I was there. Take my number. When you need to talk, give me a call.” It’s Newtown helping Troutdale helping Marysville helping Roseburg helping Rancho Tehama helping Aztec. Together all these form a time-lapse of the healing process, each at a different point on a metaphorical journey, the totality of which extends across the nation and the decades.

Newtown is five years into this process. Have residents healed? If so, how? If not, when? And what lessons have they learned from others who’ve traveled the same increasingly familiar path?

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  A Heath High School student screams at the scene of a shooting at the school, Dec. 1, 1997, which left three students dead and five wounded. (Photo: Steve Nagy/The Paducah Sun/AP)

Just before 8 a.m. on Dec. 1, 1997, 14-year-old Michael Carneal walked into Heath High School in West Paducah, Ky., with several shotguns in his backpack. With a Ruger MK II .22-caliber pistol, he fired eight rounds at a group of classmates gathered in the lobby for the regular morning prayer circle. Three were killed. Five were wounded, one of them paralyzed by a bullet to the chest. Then, with one bullet still left in the chamber, Carneal put his weapon on the ground, slumped to the floor and told the approaching principal, Bill Bond: “Kill me, please kill me. I can’t believe I did that.”

With that, Paducah became the first name on the contemporary roll call of mass shootings at schools. The first of what would turn into an onslaught. The town that will always be 15 years ahead of Newtown in the healing process.

Survivors, family and community members attend a ribbon cutting ceremony Dec. 1, 2017, at the new location of a memorial for the victims of the Heath High School shooting. (Photo: Ryan Hermens/The Sun)

There had been a handful of others in the months beforehand — that February two had been killed and two wounded at Bethel Regional High School in Alaska; that October, three had been killed and seven wounded at Pearl High School

in Mississippi — but it was Paducah that raised the specter of a trend, a sign that something was new and very wrong.

“In my whole life, it had never crossed my mind” that someone would shoot up a school, Bond told the local NBC affiliate during an interview on the 20th anniversary earlier this month. “Now, there’s not a high school principal in the nation that … it doesn’t flick in his mind sometime every day.”

So much else that happened in Paducah would eventually become familiar pieces in the response to shootings. There were lawsuits. The parents of the victims sued the parents of the shooter, eventually settling for $42 million — money that, practically, they will never receive. Lawsuits against the manufacturers of violent and pornographic video games, movies and websites were less successful, and were eventually dismissed.

There were broken families. After 15-year-old Kayce Steger died, her parents dealt with their grief in different ways, leading them to divorce.

There was PTSD. Kayce’s mother, a nurse, could not walk into the ER of the hospital in which she works. And eventually there was the rift between those in the community who felt it was time to move on and those who felt they were being told to forget. Former students became outraged recently when they realized the memorial to their murdered classmates had been locked behind a gate rather than in a place any student could visit and reflect. Access has been restored.

There were some who forgave — most notably Missy Jenkins, who was paralyzed from the waist down that day, and who got married, had two children and is now a day treatment counselor at a nearby school. She visited her assailant in prison (he was sentenced to 25 years to life) and, she said, “I did not forgive him to make him feel better. I forgave him to make me feel better, to help me move on.”

Missy Jenkins Smith, who was shot during the Heath High School shooting in 1997 and paralyzed from the chest down, talks to her sons, Carter Smith, 7, and Logan Smith, 9, about the shooting. (Photo: Ryan Hermens/The Paducah Sun via AP)

There are others who can’t quite forgive themselves. Bond still wonders which lives he might have saved “if it had only taken eight” rather than “12 seconds” for him “to get that gun.” He stayed at Heath until the last of the survivors graduated, then crafted a career as a consultant on middle school safety. He just retired from that role, and says his last interview on the subject was the one he gave to the local news on the 20th anniversary.

He has visited 15 schools in the immediate aftermath of a shooting incident, he said, jumping on a plane sometimes within hours of the news because “I needed to go help those people. I know how bad I needed help and there wasn’t anybody who had been through it. There wasn’t anybody coming.”

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  Emergency personnel rush an unidentified injured student to an ambulance at Westside Middle School near Jonesboro, Ark., March 24, 1998. (Photo: Curt Hodges/Jonesboro Sun/AP)

The chain of grief that originated in Paducah next appeared less than 200 miles away in Jonesboro, Ark. Karen Curtner, the 35-year-old founding principal of the two-year-old Westside Middle School, knew about the shootings the year before, but still, she first thought that the wailing alarm she was responding to on the morning of March 24, 1998, was either a malfunction or a prank.

Some of her teachers already suspected it wasn’t actually a fire; someone had seen a sixth grader, Andrew Golden, pull that alarm and dash outside. But “when the fire alarm goes off, you know what the rule is,” she recalled recently in an interview with Yahoo News. “Everybody leaves.”

Everybody did. Students and teachers were gathering on the lawn when Curtner stepped out of the building and heard the next sound. “My parents, everybody I’ve ever been around, have always been hunters,” she says. “So I knew what it was.”

Karen Curtner was the principal at Westside Middle School at the time of the Jonesboro shooting. (Photo: Eric Thayer/Yahoo News)

What she means is that she knew it was the sound of rifle fire. What she didn’t yet realize, because it was so unthinkable, was that 11-year-old Golden had pulled the alarm in order to lure the entire school outside and that he and his 13-year-old schoolmate Mitchell Johnson were now standing in the woods and shooting guns they’d stolen from Golden’s grandfather.

Four students and a teacher were killed that day, and 10 others were wounded, many severely. While there was press coverage of Paducah, it was nothing like what happened in Jonesboro — the first time the satellite trucks descended in such numbers that there appeared to be more journalists than residents. At least one who said he was a journalist turned out to be a stalker — police found piles of newspapers in his car with Curtner’s photo circled in most of them.

With the press came national attention, some of it welcome (victims of the Oklahoma City bombing sent piles of teddy bears to comfort the students), much of it not. (There were threats against both staff and teachers from many, including one letter purportedly from the Unabomber, praising the shooters.) There were almost too many letters to read, but when the one from the mother of one of the girls killed in Paducah made its way to Thetford, “I remember just holding onto it and crying,” she says. Hearing “from someone that I felt actually understood what we were going through meant more than words could ever say.”

Garth Brooks contacted Curtner about performing a benefit concert, and Tiger Woods wanted to hold a golf tournament to raise money for the victims. Curtner said no to both because her focus was on getting her school “back to normal.” Like Paducah, “normal” for this community would prove to be a hazy and moving target. Marriages ended. Families moved. Lawsuits were filed.

Depression and survivors’ guilt settled like a fog. Brandi Varner later told a reporter that she’d spent much of her little sister’s funeral wishing she’d tried harder to get Britthney to skip school the day of the shooting, since they’d both stayed up so late watching the Oscars on TV the night before.  Thetford, a social studies teacher nearly killed by a bullet to her abdomen, spent much of her time thinking about her friend Shannon Wright, the one teacher who was killed. Wright was younger than Thetford; her child was younger than Thetford’s. Why did Wright die but Thetford live? Then one day Thetford found herself saying to her mother, “I don’t understand why Shannon got to die and I had to stay here.” That’s when she sought counseling.

Lynette Thetford was wounded in the shooting at Westside Middle School. (Photo: Eric Thayer for Yahoo News)

Life changes were made. Some of those were a response to triggers — Thetford, for one, found herself crying while searching for a video to accompany a lesson on trench warfare during WW I. She decided in that moment that she had to stop teaching social studies, because so much of the curriculum was about violence.

Some were a response to grief — Britthney’s mother and stepfather divorced, because, her mother would say later, she withdrew her love from her husband for fear of ever losing someone she loved again. Older sister Brandi, in turn, went “buck-ass crazy,” as she described it to reporter David Peisner 15 years after the shooting, by which she meant she started drinking, smoking pot and having sex. She was expelled from high school, but turned into a “super-protective” parent of her two children. When her youngest child, a daughter who looked a lot like Britthney, started school, Brandi insisted she attend the smallest possible magnet school to make it easier for her to keep track of how all the other parents stored their guns.

Students of Westside School bow their heads in prayer at the burial service for teacher Shannon Wright, March 28, 1998. Wright was killed while using her body to shield students from gunfire. (Photo: John Kuntz/Reuters)

And some of the changes were a response to fear. Like Paducah, Jonesboro is unusual in that the shooters lived. Unlike Paducah, or any other place where there was a school shooting, these shooters were released on their 21st birthdays — Johnson in 2005, Golden in 2007. Johnson was soon re-imprisoned for carrying an unregistered gun, but has since been released and is living in Texas; Golden now lives in Missouri and has been married at least once. He changed his name to Drew Grant, and used that name to apply for a permit to carry a concealed weapon; he was denied after a standard fingerprint search.

This leaves many in Jonesboro afraid one or both will come back to finish the job. One teacher told BuzzFeed News that she’d gone so far as to move to a new house with a different phone number and change her appearance, including losing 100 pounds, so that she would be unrecognizable to her former student.

With so many feeling this much, it was almost inevitable that they would collide over time with those who felt it was time to move on. Thetford, for instance, gave interviews after many other victims had stopped, because, she said, she wanted to share the renewed faith in God that she had found in her near-death experience. Then one day she opened a letter accusing her of grandstanding and “enjoying the notoriety.” It warned her to “SHUT UP.”

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  Students exit Columbine High School after two gunmen went on a shooting spree, killing 15 including themselves, on April 20, 1999, in Littleton, Colo. (Photo: Steve Starr/Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)

Karen Curtner first heard when a reporter called, asking for comment. “Oh, God, not again,” she said, turning on the television in her Westside Middle School office on April 20, 1999, to watch what was unfolding at Columbine High School, three states and 1,000 miles away.

Lynette Thetford, in turn, who had not yet stopped teaching social studies, was in her classroom that day, with its view of the playground where she’d been shot just over a year earlier. As other teachers came to warn her, they formed a circle, held hands, and began to pray.

There had been seven school shootings and 15 fatalities since the one in Jonesboro. Now this one, in Littleton, Colo., was being carried live on national TV. Two students went on a rampage through the building, killing 12 classmates, one teacher and then themselves.

Investigators tag evidence at Columbine High School. (Photo: Dennis Schroeder/Polaris)

The aftermath — the lawsuits, the failed marriages, the fights over donated money, the desire by some to just get over it already — was familiar. But Columbine caught hold of the nation’s attention like none that had come before, both because of the number of victims (at the time it was the largest school shooting in the United States) and the new 24/7 news cycle. (The Columbine graduation a month later was also carried live, by CNN.) Columbine was also the tipping point. Following Paducah, Jonesboro and others, the idea of a teenager shooting his classmates looked like a grim trend, an evil infecting America’s children. “The Monsters Next Door” read the cover of Time magazine. Newsweek asked, “Why Did They Do It?”

Gradually the spotlight dimmed, leaving the community to piece itself back together in the new shadow. Much of that fell to Frank DeAngelis, the principal of Columbine, who was still suffering the personal aftershocks of facing down the student killers. As he walked out of his office moments after the shooting began, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were marching toward him, long guns blazing. One bullet hit a glass wall directly behind DeAngelis’s head, he said in an interview with Yahoo News. Seeing the girls’ volleyball team heading up the hallway toward the shooters, DeAngelis diverted them into a nearby closet, probably saving their lives.

The lives he didn’t save haunted him, however, and through the summer, while planning for the reopening of the school (students finished the academic year in space shared with another district high school), he was also trying not to fall apart. He kept seeing the shooters coming toward him, the killers they were juxtaposed with the boys he thought he knew — middle schoolers in their soccer uniforms, missing teeth; seemingly happy seniors, high-fiving him at the prom two weeks earlier.

He spent nights alone in his basement “with a stiff drink and my golden retriever,” unable to unsee the school’s library, where most of the victims died, with FBI markers and blood still on the floor. When he managed to sleep, it was fitful, and he often woke by 3 a.m. and went to sit in the local church until dawn.

Thrice-weekly counseling and a feeling of responsibility got him through that summer. “There wasn’t a template for rebuilding a school and holding a community together,” Bond said. “Frank built that template.”

Frank DeAngelis, the principal of Columbine when the shootings occurred, photographed at the school in Dec. 2017. (Photo: Carl Bower for Yahoo News)

Bond called DeAngelis to offer his support. Thetford went to Littleton during Jonesboro’s summer break to tell residents, “It won’t ever be OK, but it will get better.”

Frank Ochberg made regular visits too. A clinical professor of psychiatry at Michigan State University and a member of the team that first formulated the PTSD diagnosis, Ochberg was developing a sad subspecialty in healing after mass shootings. The students would likely do better than the adults, he counseled, because more resources and care would inevitably be focused on them and because they are more resilient.

With advice from all corners, Columbine High School reopened in August 1999. A phalanx of parents formed a line by the entrance, welcoming the students back with a show of emotional support, and physically shielding them from the press. The library was closed, though not yet torn down and rebuilt. The walls were repainted in shades that psychologists had advised were soothing. A new aquarium was there for the same reason.

Copious attention had been paid to the fire alarms. Those alarms had wailed for the entire five hours it took police officers to rescue students from their hiding places in April, and one thing learned in Jonesboro was that the sound of any alarm, but particularly that same alarm, would trigger emotional tsunamis in those who had been there that day.

DeAngelis had spent hours in meetings with alarm companies “coming up with sounds that were different to what we had used prior.” All around the country, schools had started responding to the wave of shootings by initiating lockdown drills, but those were a fraught subject at Columbine.

The New Hope Memorial Columbine Library at Columbine High School in 2004. The original library, where a majority of students were killed, was torn down. (Photo: Ed Andrieski/AP)

“We couldn’t just say we don’t have to do drills,” DeAngelis recalled. “So we did them in baby steps.” First there was a version where teachers quietly told students to stand where they would if they were evacuating for a fire. The next step was to add the sound of the alarm only after everyone had taken their places outside the building. Eventually DeAngelis would give advance warning that there would be a fire drill the next day — some parents chose to keep their children home — and would count down on the PA system to the moment the alarm went off so it wouldn’t take anyone by surprise.

For months, then years, DeAngelis found himself trying to balance the needs of those who wanted to move on with those who could not.

“There were those who felt the sooner I stop talking about it, the sooner they could heal,” he said. “A lot of people felt that if we could just get back to doing what we were doing we will be OK. I respectfully disagreed. To think you are going to forget about what happened that day just because you go back to resuming your daily activities? It’s not going to happen.”

He pledged to stay in the job until 2002, when the last class who’d been present that day had graduated. (Eventually he expanded that pledge to any student who had been in a preschool feeder school, and didn’t retire until 2014.) As happened at Paducah, Jonesboro and others, though, his staff began to leave.

Former Columbine principal DeAngelis chats with students at the school in April 2014. (Photo: RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

“Bill Bonds warned me early on that ‘within four years 75 percent of your staff members will be gone,’” he recalled. “I said, ‘Bill, that’s not going to happen.’ What I didn’t anticipate is the impact of walking into the building each day. People who during summer break seemed to be doing well … walked back in and their blood pressure went up.” Attrition increased dramatically, and by the time DeAngelis retired, only 10 percent of the original staff was left.

Also as predicted, he said, the students did prove to be resilient. The Columbine classes of 1999 through 2002 — the students who were in the building on the day of the shooting — are still unusually close-knit, several members say.

“We get together for barbeques, we play fantasy football, most of us have kids,” Patrick Ireland, who still carries shrapnel in his brain and who had to relearn how to do practically everything, told Yahoo News. The owner of a wealth management business near Denver, his children are now 7 and 3, and “things are great,” he said. He still gets a flood of supportive texts and phone calls every April 20, “saying, ‘I’m thinking of you,’” he said. But during most ordinary days, he believes “this was one event, this was something that happened — something that we want to acknowledge and understand, but it’s not going to be the thing that defines me as a person.”

Columbine shooting victim Patrick Ireland in December 2017. (Photo: Carl Bower for Yahoo News)

DeAngelis says the class he still worries about most is the Columbine Class of 1999 — students who graduated on May 22, a month and two days after the shooting, then dispersed to college and work. “There wasn’t support for them,” he said. “The kids and staff who returned, it was tough, but we had each other. The ones who left, they would be sitting in class and the fire alarm went off and they found themselves having a meltdown and they weren’t sure why. Or they’d be doing well and five years down the line they would lose it and the help is not there.”

In the same way, he said, he worries about mass attack victims who do not have a community — those who randomly happened to be watching “Batman” in Aurora, or a concert in Las Vegas, or even working in various offices in the World Trade Center.

Visiting Virginia Tech for the first anniversary of the shooting there, he told faculty and students, “The difference for you compared with Columbine or Paducah or Jonesboro is you had kids coming from everywhere — different states, different countries — then going back there. For Columbine, the people lived in our community; we had a sense of community. At first that creates a bigger wound, but I also think it helps with the healing.”

The Columbine Memorial in Littleton, Colo. (Photo: Carl Bower for Yahoo News)

Watching the students heal helped DeAngelis too. Over time, he said, “I got to the point where when I was coming out of my office, I wasn’t seeing the gunmen coming. Instead I saw Lauren Townsend playing volleyball, I saw Isaiah Shoals high-fiving me, I saw Rachel Scott on the stage performing, I envisioned Danny Mauser and Kelly Fleming down at church. I saw these kids not dying in our school, but living in our school.”

As he started to heal, he also started making phone calls.  “You’re not going to remember anything we talk about today,” he would say when he got a shaken community leader on the line, “but please take down my number and call me if you ever need anything.”

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  Two Connecticut State Police officers accompany a class of students and two adults out of Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012, in Newtown, Conn. (Photo: Shannon Hicks/Newtown Bee/Polaris)

As news poured forth from Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012 — 151 shots fired in five minutes; 26 dead, including 20 first graders and six of their teachers at the Sandy Hook Elementary School — Coni Sanders received a call from her mother, Linda.

William “Dave” Sanders, who was Coni’s father and Linda’s husband, was the one teacher killed at Columbine, and in the 13 years since, Linda had not moved past her grief. Still living in the home near the high school, keeping the house “like a shrine” to the day her husband left it for the last time, Linda was now sobbing and shrieking in pain.

“’It’s Christmas, it’s Christmas,’” Coni, who became a forensic psychologist working with violent offenders, remembers her mother saying. “’Those babies, those babies, those babies.’”

Said Coni: “I seriously thought I was going to lose my mom.”

A few blocks away, hours to days later, Frank DeAngelis was also “having a meltdown” during a phone call. He’d been offering a shoulder to someone in Newtown when he began shaking and sweating. He grasped the medals he’s worn around his neck since 1999 — a crucifix, the Blessed Virgin — and rubbed them rhythmically to calm down. Then he continued pacing, stroking, talking.

Coni Sanders looks at a photo of her father, William “Dave” Sanders, who was killed in the Columbine shooting. (Photo: Carl Bower for Yahoo News)

There had been 92 school shootings between Columbine and Newtown, and with each, particularly the larger and more publicized ones, those who came before watched as those who came after became part of the “club that no one wants to join,” as DeAngelis calls it.

Jonesboro sent teddy bears to the children of Newtown — more than 6,000 of them filling two 18-wheelers — just as Oklahoma City victims had done for Westside students, some of whom still had theirs 13 years later.

A three-car caravan of former students drove to Connecticut from Red Lake, Minn., because when a 16-year-old student killed 10 and injured seven at Red Lake High School in 2005, several Columbine survivors had driven out to see them.

Those with personal experiences of school violence joined with those who had not, and soon the entire country seemed to be sending stuff to Newtown. Eventually the town assessor would recruit 580 volunteers over the months to work in a donated warehouse sorting and cataloging it all: a total of 63,780 teddy bears, 636 boxes of toys, more than 2,200 boxes of school supplies and a stunning number of boxes of tissues.

President Barack Obama came, later calling Newtown the toughest day of his presidency, and telling a packed and tearful interfaith vigil, “I am very mindful that mere words cannot match the depths of your sorrow, nor can they heal your wounded hearts.”

The names of victims from the Sandy Hook shooting are attached to teddy bears, part of a memorial in Sandy Hook Village two days after the shooting. (Photo: Adrees Latif/Reuters)

Vice President Joe Biden came after that, meeting privately with grieving parents, recalling the loss of his own wife and young daughter in a car crash decades earlier. Nicole Hockley, whose son Dylan was among those killed, remembers Biden’s advice to keep a daily journal, ranking each day from one to 10, “where one is the worst and a 10 is the best.”

His message, Hockley said, was “You may never have a 10 again, but over time you’re going to see that you’re getting into the fives and the sixes and sevens, and then you’re going to go backwards again and be at the low numbers, and then you’re going to move forward again. And then that’s something useful to look back over time to say, ‘I made it through.’ ”

To the earlier waves of survivors watching from afar, everything about Newtown was familiar, but also bigger. Where Paducah turned away celebrities’ offers to help, Newtown was flooded with them: Giants receiver Victor Cruz visited the family of one little boy who had been buried in the player’s jersey; Harry Connick Jr. visited the family of another victim, whose father had played in Connick’s band. James Taylor gave a concert for family members of the dead at the local church and sang “Sweet Baby James” — to a family whose son had carried that name.

Where a few parents of earlier shootings had become crusaders — Suzann Wilson lobbied for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence after Britthney died in Jonesboro, and Tom Mauser, literally wearing the shoes of his murdered son Daniel, lobbied for local and national gun control after Columbine — Newtown raised the participation and the stakes. Obama sent Air Force One to bring families to Washington, where they walked the halls of Congress with photographs of their dead 6- and 7-year olds, lobbying for expanded background checks on firearms.

And when the measure failed, disillusionment came with a new forcefulness too. “Why wasn’t Sandy Hook the mass shooting that changed everything?” Vice News asked in a headline. Then reporter Matt Taylor answered that question: “Mass shootings are increasingly accepted — by about three quarters of us — as an essential part of American life, like fourth of July barbecues and binging on Netflix. We simply don’t see a way out, and don’t have much or any confidence that our leaders will craft one.”

Tom Mauser holds up a pair of shoes belonging to his late son, Daniel, who was killed in the Columbine shooting, during a rally at the capitol in Denver, April 11, 2000. Mauser placed the shoes with over 4,000 other pairs, representing children killed by handguns in one year. (Photo: Ed Andrieski/AP)

The frustration, layered as it was upon recent grief, turned things ugly for a while in Newtown — another way that the community followed the same path as other places, but more so. Feelings, so close to the surface, were easily shattered. As New York magazine writer Lisa Miller wrote on the first anniversary: “There were 4,000 free tickets to a July Yankees game, an amazing boon, but 4,000 is less than a fifth of the town. NASCAR memorialized the Sandy Hook victims with a special car at the Daytona 500, and the fire chief who had stayed outside Sandy Hook Elementary that morning had the honor of unveiling it, not the police chief, who had entered the school.”

Just as stuff was becoming a surrogate for sympathy, so was money. More than $20 million was sent to Newtown from around the country, divided among 70 charities, the largest of which was the $11 million collected by the United Way. There were months of arguments between the families of those killed, the families of children who had witnessed horror and escaped, and the administrators of the United Way over whether the donations had been sent to help the victims directly or to help heal the town in general.

The fighting, in turn, spurred a backlash from those who felt the families should grieve more quietly, or more tastefully, or just move on already.

“With every shooting we’ve taken this process and we’ve fast-forwarded it,” Coni Sanders said. “We do it very quickly. Columbine stayed closed for months. The bodies weren’t removed for days. In Las Vegas it was business as usual the next night.

“I think a lot of that is by design,” she continued, speaking as a psychologist as well as a victim. “People not directly affected are overwhelmed by the number of tragedies, the number of deaths. I sometimes feel guilty because when Columbine happened there was such an outpouring. They canceled sporting events — well, except for the gun show, that went on. But stores closed. There was a special post office for all the mail we were getting. There was recognition that this wasn’t just an event, it was a change in how we existed.”

People attend an open house at the new Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in July 2016. Students attended the first day of classes there on Aug. 29, 2016. (Photo: Mark Lennihan/AP)

Now communities are left relatively unmoored to navigate the aftermath on their own. Those who have been there warn that at only five years in, Newtown still has a long way to go. Dave Cullen, whose seminal book, “Columbine,” came out 10 years after that shooting, and who still keeps in close contact with many survivors, noted that “those who were going to be OK were OK by 8 years or so. But lots are still not OK.”

Anniversaries, they warn, will continue to be hard. “That first year was just a constant trying to make it through, wondering how much more could you take,” Curtner said. The second year brought the realization that time did not heal quickly, and by now, with the 20th anniversary looming in March, she said, “it’s not so much today like it was the first five years or so,” but “it never goes away. It gets better, but it never goes away.

Memories, they say, will continue to be triggered by all the senses. For Thetford it’s unseasonable warmth, because the weather that day in March when she was shot felt like May. This past February the thermometer reached 70, and she left the school where she now works and drove over to Westside, just to be there.

Nicole Hockley, founder and managing director of Sandy Hook Promise, shares a photograph of her son Dylan at a Harvest Magnet Middle School assembly in Napa, Calif., in March 2017. (Photo: Napa Valley Register via Zuma Wire)

For Coni Sanders it’s springtime noise. “One night I said to my husband ‘Oh, my God, what’s with those helicopters? Why are there so many around?’ And he said, ‘They’re always there; you just notice them in April.’”

The parents of Newtown say they are coming to understand all this — that five years is not long enough, that grieving is not binary or linear.

“There’s not going to be a point where we can put an ‘ed’ on the word ‘recover,’” said Michele Gay, mother of Josephine, who, with Alissa Parker, mother of Emilie, formed Safe and Sound: A Sandy Hook Initiative to promote safety in schools. “It’s always going to be an ‘ing,’” she said in an interview with Yahoo News. “We’re always going to be in process with this.”

Some of the most jarring reminders have been removed. The building where the shooting happened was completely torn down — after construction crews signed nondisclosure agreements that no photos of the interior or bits and pieces of the school ever be made public or sold. The $50 million, fresh-start of a structure that replaced it was opened to students in August of last year, filled with the latest in whimsy (indoor treehouses) and security features (bulletproof windows, doors that automatically lock from inside when closed).

But when you’ve lost a child, the parents have learned, everything becomes a reminder.

One night earlier this month, Mark Barden, whose son Daniel died at Newtown, was driving his daughter Natalie to her piano lesson when the Christmas lights along the route made him remember another ride to Natalie’s piano lesson, this one with Daniel along for the ride.

Jackie and Mark Barden, seen here in 2014, lost their son, Daniel, in the Sandy Hook shooting. (Photo: Enid Alvarez/NY Daily News via Getty Images)

“We played Christmas music in the car with Natalie and Daniel, and I noticed Daniel was crying as we listened to one of the songs because it touched him so deeply,” Mark said. With a jolt he realized that what he was remembered had happened five years ago to the day, on Dec. 6, 2012, a week before Daniel would die.

Some families have moved away, but most have stayed. Daniel’s parents considered leaving. “Jackie was ready to be away from everything and anything that reminded her of the tragedy,” Barden said – but then they asked their surviving preteens, James and Natalie, if they wanted to move. “They were both like, ‘Why would we want to go anywhere else?’ Everything we know and love is here.’”

Dylan Hockley’s parents discussed leaving town too, but chose to stay, in part, to be near others who shared their grief. “I don’t think you can run away from your problems,” Nicole Hockley says. “There’s always going to be Christmas lights, there’s always going to be 12/14, and I think here, there is a fantastic network of support and a community that has felt the varying degrees of tragedy, and there’s an understanding here that can’t be found elsewhere. This is where we choose to live.”

Many also choose to do as others did for them, to pay it forward as others join their tearful club.

After 26 were killed during a Sunday church service in Sutherland Springs, Texas, Hockley tweeted a note of condolence to the families of the victims on behalf of Sandy Hook Promise. “Twenty-six might seem like an arbitrary number, until it’s your community,” she wrote. “When your son is one of the 26, the number will take on new meaning. When your wife is one of the 26, the number will take on new meaning. These aren’t just numbers — they are people.”

Painted handprints with names of teachers and students are on a playground bench at the new Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. (Photo: Mark Lennihan/AP)

And after two students were shot by an intruder posing as a student in Aztec, N.M., last week, Sandy Hook Promise reached out to those parents as well.

Near the end of that day, while police were still inside Aztec High School, Mayor Sally Burbridge released a statement: “There will be a Prayer and Candlelight Vigil this evening … in Minium Park. Please join us in beginning the healing process for our community.”

[lisabelkin-yahoonews]

Resilient, or just numb? As atrocities mount, Americans become adept at moving on

Items are seen left at a memorial near the site of the shooting at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs in Sutherland Springs, Texas, Nov. 7, 2017. (Photo: Jonathan Bachman/Reuters)

There is a melody to national tragedy, to national grieving.  It starts with shock, segues to fear and anger, crescendos with memorials and tributes, then codas into vows to never forget. The notes are similar from one rendition to the next, but the tempo, the distance from beginning to end, is never exactly the same. And it’s the rhythm, the speed, that’s the true measure of a country’s psyche.

Lately Americans have been playing a quickened, shortened tune.

We were transfixed for months after Oklahoma City and 9/11, for weeks after the Boston Marathon, more like days after San Bernadino. We watched the Columbine memorial services live, knew the faces of the Newtown children, but probably can’t name the victims of Sutherland Springs. The nation paid the family of each 9/11 victim $3.1 million; those injured in Orlando and Las Vegas started GoFundMe accounts and many struggle to pay their medical bills.

“It’s like it never happened,” wrote Amanda Getchell in the Washington Post  last week, of her life after she fled the fusillade of bullets from the Mandalay Hotel. “My phone stopped ringing with concerned calls and text messages…The mourning lasted a day, and then everyone forgot about what happened in Las Vegas.

And in lower Manhattan, not far from the 9/11 Memorial, the Guardian described the scene on Halloween this way: “Within hours of Tuesday’s Home Depot truck attack more than a million New Yorkers poured back on to the streets for the annual Halloween parade, and countless thousands of other kids and their parent-minders were out trick-or-treating in their neighborhoods. By Wednesday morning, nearby schools that had been in lockdown during the attack were open for business…”

Heavily armed police guard as revelers march during the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, Tuesday, Oct. 31, 2017, in New York. New York City’s always-surreal Halloween parade marched on Tuesday evening under the shadow of real fear, hours after a truck attack killed several people on a busy city bike path in what authorities called an act of terror. (Photo: Andres Kudacki/AP)

The popular word for this insta-back-to-normal is “resilience”, and it is used with pride. “This was a cowardly act of terror,” New York mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted less than 24 hours after the attack. “It was intended to break our spirit. But New Yorkers are resilient. We will be undeterred.”

Resilience, though, is a symptom: a muscle that develops with over-use, a coping mechanism that hews close to various degrees of resignation.

“Resilience requires being able to contain certain emotions that would otherwise overpower you,” explains clinical psychologist Alon Gratch, “and denial involves exactly the same thing.”

Gratch has been musing on this duality a lot lately. Israeli-born but working in New York for 38 years, he wrote a book called “The Israeli Mind,” and he sees Americans following the mental path that Israelis started down decades ago.

During the two waves of Infitada roughly from 1987 to 2005, there were periods of daily terrorist attacks. “There was just no way to cope with other than to just go on living,” Gratch says. “You clean up the blood and go on.” Israelis took pride in the fact that a café targeted by a suicide bomb in the morning would be back in business by nightfall, and that people continued to ride the bus in the face of frequent attacks.

In part, Gratch says, Israelis coped by off-loading the role of honoring and memorializing the dead to the government. In his book he calls this the “grief industrial complex”, the hero-worship of victims by officialdom “which allows people in day to day life to ignore it and move on.” By quickly transforming events into history, and treating the dead as part of a national narrative, violent loss becomes “oddly normalized, a story of sacrifice for a cause that feels like a story.”

And so it is in the US as well. The news alerts bing, the cable coverage begins, there is speculation as to motive, and interviews with partisans who declare either that that immigration restrictions would not have prevented this or it is too soon to talk about guns, depending on the emerging portrait of the killer. There are vignettes about the dead, hashtags — #bostonstrong #vegasstrong – and a candlelight vigil. A celebrity organizes a concert. The motions become familiar.

The U.S. Capitol dome backdrops flags at half-staff in honor of the victims killed in the Las Vegas shooting as the sun rises on Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2017, at the foot of the Washington Monument on the National Mall in Washington. (Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

“Congress is already doing what it sees as its part,” Congressman Steve Israel wrote in a New York Times op-ed last month, after the Las Vegas shooting spree that left 58 dead.  “Flags have been lowered, thoughts and prayers tweeted, and sometime this week it will perform the latest episode in the longest-running drama on C-Span: the moment of silence. It’s how they responded to other mass shootings in Columbine, Herkimer, Tucson, Santa Monica, Hialeah, Terrell, Alturas, Killeen, Isla Vista, Marysville, Chapel Hill, Tyrone, Waco, Charleston, Chattanooga, Lafayette, Roanoke, Roseburg, Colorado Springs, San Bernardino, Birmingham, Fort Hood and Aurora, at Virginia Tech, the Washington Navy Yard, and the congressional baseball game practice, to name too many.”

Somewhere in this cycle a prominent public official declares, despite all past evidence to the contrary, that the nation will always remember. “They were mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers,” Donald Trump said in Las Vegas. “They were husbands and wives, and sons and daughters. They will be dearly missed, and they will never be forgotten.”

For individuals, Gratch says, this way of coping is a good thing. “It’s necessary to face it and then move on,” he says,. “Otherwise you become paralyzed and then paranoid. You amplify the dangers and overreact to them.”

He tells of a colleague who closed an office above Grand Central Terminal after 9/11, believing it was a next logical terrorist target. Gratch, in turn, remained in his space near Grand Central, feeling it was important for both him and his patients to face down the fear. “The best treatment for anxiety is exposure, small steady doses of what you are afraid of so you can increase your tolerance,” he says, and  in that way the rash of public violence in the United States in recent years has been a perverse national experiment in cognitive behavioral therapy.

But this treatment works because it creates the feeling of taking back control, and that element seems lacking in the current national tableau. Instead, legislators and advocates describe being reminded with each attack of how ineffective attempts at change have been over the years. Choose your reason: a hopelessly polarized society, a political system shackled by special interests, leaders who choose party over country… Whatever the cause, the result is a growing realization that grief and outrage do not lead to change. Those who see the solution as fewer guns, recall assault bans that did not pass after Sandy Hook and the bill to ban ‘bump stocks’ that has been stalled in Congress Those who think stricter control of the borders is the answer note that their promised wall has not been built and courts have blocked all attempts at a virtual “extreme vetting” version.

Dozens of people attend a vigil remembering the 59 people killed in Sunday’s shooting in Las Vegas and calling for action against guns on Oct. 4, 2017 in Newtown, Connecticut. The vigil, organized by the Newtown Action Alliance, was held outside the National Shooting Sport Foundation and looked to draw attention to gun violence in America. Twenty school children were killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown on December 14, 2012. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Is the result a resignation that accounts for the quickened pace of moving on from tragedy? Is what looks like resilience really helplessness mixed with depression? And if so, what is the cost long-term to the national psyche?

“The paralysis you feel right now – the impotent helplessness that washes over you as news of another mass slaughter scrolls across the television screen,”

is how Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy described the phenomenon after Sutherland Springs. Its effect, he warned, is to make the fight exhausting and futile, to numb citizens into dropping their demands for gun control.

“We are suffering from combat fatigue,” agrees Nikki Stern, an essayist and author who was executive director of Families of 9/11 and who says her cause is now gun control. “We’re being pummeled into accepting this as normal. We must fight that.” But, she adds, she is not exactly sure how.

“If I could figure out how to get through, I’d probably have a peace prize to put on my shelf,” she says.

A panoramic of the quickly built Healing Garden in the Arts District of Las Vegas as a memorial for victims of the recent Las Vegas mass shooting on October 8, 2017, in Vas Vegas, NV. The garden was built in four days in response to the mass shooting that killed 59 people and injured more than 500 at the Route 91 Harvest Festival near Mandalay Bay on October 1, 2017, in Las Vegas, NV. (Photo: Doug Kranz/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

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Read more from Yahoo News:

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‘Are you kidding me?’: Terror expert reacts to president’s Gitmo idea

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Photos: Deadly mass shooting at Sutherland Springs, Texas, church

[lisabelkin-yahoonews]

Will Weinstein’s disgrace change anything for women?

(L to R) Bill Cosby, Donald Trump, Bill O’Reilly, Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Clarence Thomas. (Photo Illustration: Yahoo News; photos: AP [6], Getty images)

After the Clarence Thomas hearings, everything was going to change.

“The hearings certainly brought this issue into the public eye, and people started being willing to say, ‘This happened to me,’ ” University of Colorado Law Professor Melissa Hart said in 2011 of that moment in 1991 when the Supreme by a woman who worked under him at the U.S. Department of Education, Anita Hill.

It was also all going to change after Bill Cosby’s accusers stepped forward.

“Cosby rape allegations changing the conversations about sexual assault” predicted the headline on a Chicago Tribune editorial in 2014, after a series of accusations from women who said he drugged and assaulted them.

Two years later, it was the firing of Roger Ailes that would certainly be the moment we’ve all been waiting for, after a lawsuit by anchor Gretchen Carlson resulted in numerous Fox employees coming forward.

“This story is a huge turning point,” Betsy West, former correspondent at CBS and ABC and professor at Columbia, told NPR at the time. “It’s a signal that men, even the most powerful of men, will be held accountable for their behavior. And I think, despite the fact that Roger Ailes is walking away with a giant golden parachute, he lost his job. And that’s a big deal.”

Enter Bill O’Reilly. “I feel like when this story broke…there were women, and men too, who said ‘No. This isn’t how we treat women. And we’re not going to stand for it, ‘” said Emily Steel, the reporter who broke the story in the Times,  said in an interview.

And then, of course there was Donald Trump. The Access Hollywood tape was not only going to end his chance at the Presidency but also stop powerful men from preying on women once and for all.

Which brings us to Harvey Weinstein.

Years of whispered gossip exploded onto the public arena this week, first on the front page of the New York Times, and then in the pages of the New Yorker. As with O’Reilly and Ailes before him, it was not the facts of his actions that led to Weinstein’s downfall – for years their companies had been paying out settlements to their accusers – but rather the critical mass of publicity after famous faces spoke out.

And one major thread in the post-revelation commentary is that the reason so many were willing to speak on the record to Jodi Kantor and Rachel Abrams, who wrote the expose in the Times, and Ronan Farrow, author of the New Yorker article, was that all the previous scandals had changed the context.

“It takes one brave whistleblower and then two to get the ball rolling and give the shattered sharers of the same story permission to speak out,” wrote Tina Brown, who partnered with Weinstein years ago in the creation of the now defunct Talk magazine. “Harvey is an intimidating and ferocious man. Crossing him, even now, is scary. But it’s a different era now. Cosby. AIles. O’Reilly. Weinstein. It’s over, except for one – the serial sexual harasser in the White House.”

We’ll get to the “one” in a moment, but first let’s explore whether it truly is over.  What exactly would constitute a victory over sexual predation?

Is it that more women are willing to speak out? In part, yes, but that alone assumes that the responsibility to stop men from acting like criminals lies with women. That assumption, in fact, is reflected in the questioning over the past few days of why Weinstein’s accusers didn’t step forward sooner, why some female stars who knew of his reputation continued to work with him, why a certain female presidential candidate took five days to condemn him. Condemning women for not fighting back against someone who hurt them is not exactly progress.

Is victory measured by the price paid by the men who have been shown to be abusers? It would be, if the price were indeed high. Clarence Thomas was approved to the Supreme Court. Cosby finally faced a trial, which resulted in a hung jury. Ailes did lose his job, but it didn’t cost him his $40 million severance package. Bill O’Reilly is now on some kind of a comeback tour. And the “one” exception that Brown spoke of is indeed in the White House.

Perhaps, then, these metrics are too broad, too optimistic, unrealistic for the times. The effects may be more incremental than that. Everything doesn’t change all at once.

Meryl Streep suggested as much yesterday when she spoke out against Weinstein’s actions. “The behavior is inexcusable, but the abuse of power is familiar,” she said. “Each brave voice that is raised, heard and credited by our watchdog media will ultimately change the game.”

While incremental is better than nothing, while some progress is always welcome, this is not the sea change that optimistic observers have been detecting for decades.  Because true victory, after all, is not when more women speak out forcing more men to lose their jobs, but when they no longer need to speak out because the behavior they have been subjected to for generations has finally stopped.

And while it is tempting to think that Weinstein’s abject humiliation this week might cause other abusers to think twice, the more likely lesson of his story is that it only happened after 20 years of rumors, amounting to an open secret. If Weinstein didn’t stop after Thomas and Cosby and Ailes and O’Reilly, why should we expect others to stop because of Weinstein? If movie stars were afraid to stand up to a sexual predator, how much can we demand from an Army private? How does Weinstein’s fall help the entry-level assistant working for the not so famous corporate executive?

In other words, how many increments must it take? The endless of women and abusers, followed by different women and different abusers, gives added irony to the fact that Bill Cosby quoted Gloria Steinem of all people last year saying “The truth shall set you free, but first it might piss you off.”

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Read more from Yahoo News:

64 hours in October: How one weekend blew up the rules of American politics

Powerless Puerto Ricans huddle around their generators

New details about Las Vegas shooting raise questions about police response

In Congress, time — again — for soul searching over abortion

Photos: Deadly wildfires ravage Northern California, threaten wine country

[lisabelkin-yahoonews]

Fish it out, dry it out, throw it out — how one family is coping with the Houston flood

This is the first in a series of articles that will follow the Koser family as it rebuilds after Hurricane Harvey.

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The house on Turf Valley Drive in the Bear Creek neighborhood of Houston had never flooded before — not once in the 26 years since Larry and Brenda Koser had moved in, not once in the 41 years since the subdivision was built. So although the couple and two of their grown children, Matthew and Micah — had packed bug-out bags just in case, they didn’t think they would use them as Hurricane Harvey arrived.

And, at first, they didn’t. The night of Sunday, Aug. 27, was rainy, Monday morning more so. Then, by 4 in the afternoon the water was knee deep on the front lawn of the single-story home, making it impossible to use any of the cars that were parked uselessly in the driveway. So the Kosers grabbed their bags and left through their backyard, cutting a hole in their fence and wading to a nearby community center that was serving as a makeshift shelter.

Larry Koser Jr., left, speaks on his phone as he and his father, Larry Koser Sr., look for important papers and heirlooms inside the family home, which flooded on Aug. 29. (Photo: Erich Schlegel/Getty Images)

Two hours later, though, the water was threatening the shelter, too, and they moved to the home of friends, and then on Tuesday morning moved again to the home of their oldest son, 44-year-old Larry Jr., who made his way to them in his truck, taking more than two hours for what is normally a 30-minute drive from his home in the town of Katy.

As wrenching as it was to flee their home, it was worse to return. On Tuesday afternoon, Larry and Larry Jr. borrowed kayaks and paddled back to Bear Creek, where water nearly covered the mailboxes and almost lapped the roofs of cars. Reaching the house on Turf Valley Drive, they floated through the front door on three and a half feet of water. When they returned the next day it was almost a foot higher, owing to the controlled release from a nearby dam by the Army Corp of Engineers.

The Kosers’ son Larry Jr. and their grandson Matthew look for important papers and heirlooms in the flooded house. (Photo: Erich Schlegel/Getty Images)

The house beneath all that water had long been “the heart of everything” for the family, Larry Jr. said. “This is where everybody gets together. Now you come here in a kayak and you’re floating around in a house, and all your belongings are just kind of floating around. To see everything like that, it’s surreal. It’s just sad.”

Photographer Erich Schlegel was paddling by as the Kosers first entered and came back again during the next few days as the water began to recede. He plans to return regularly over the months to chronicle what it takes to rebuild the lives of one of the thousands of families upended by Harvey. This is the first installment of what will likely be a yearlong project for Schlegel — chronicling the story of one typical family among thousands. No one story can stand for all, however. “There are people who have it a lot better, and there are people who have it a lot worse,” Larry Jr. says.

Larry Koser Sr. and Larry Jr. cleaning up on Sept. 7. (Photo: Erich Schlegel for Yahoo News)

In the early visits, he says, the goal was to “salvage a few little treasures for each person,” necessarily small and light because that was all the kayak could carry. Photo albums. Passports. Documents from the safe. The purse that 19-year-old Micah had left on her bed, and some of the most recent canvases she had painted, which she had propped atop a tall dresser.

At one point a pocketknife floated by, and Larry Sr. felt something that was almost happiness. “My son had given that to me on my retirement,” he says. (His career had been as a speech pathologist.) He’d lost it soon after, and “I had turned that freaking couch over, I don’t know how many times, trying to find it because I knew it was in here. I knew it was in the house, I just couldn’t find it, and I couldn’t bear to tell him that I had lost the knife.” Harvey had found it for him.

Once it became possible to drive up to the house, the real work began — hauling out furniture and belongings, creating a pile 8 feet high on the front lawn. Yanking out the Sheetrock down to the studs. Bringing in fans and dehumidifiers. Treating everything with peroxide to fight mold.

Larry Koser Jr. helps clean up on Sept. 7. (Photo: Erich Schlegel for Yahoo News)

They are all bunking at Jr.’s three-bedroom, two-bath, 2,100-square-foot home in Katy. The youngest son, 22-year-old Matthew, takes the couch. Their biggest challenge is getting around the sprawl of Houston without any of their four cars, which were all destroyed in their driveway. All four were paid for, and they carried only liability insurance, so the adjuster has offered them just $900 total. For the moment they are borrowing from family and friends.

The insurance on the house was also insufficient. The house too is paid for, and they had flood insurance, but only up to $100,000 for the building and $40,000 for the contents, far short of what it will take to replace. And even were they to bring the house back to livable condition, Larry Sr. says he is not certain he would want to move back in.

“I’m not sure what we’re going to do with regards to living in it,” he says. “Maybe we will rent it or sell it, assuming I can do either of those, but I don’t know whether I want to go back there.”

Larry Sr. and Brenda Koser at work on Sept. 7. (Photo: Erich Schlegel for Yahoo News)

He fears that by returning he risks re-losing it all, should the impossible happen twice. “It’s disheartening to see all the contents of your life lying ruined in a pile outside,” he says. “I can’t go through that again.”

For the moment he is trying to focus on what he has — the photographs taken gingerly from their albums, wiped off with antiseptic and dried on the floor; the few pairs of underwear, pants and shorts that he carried in his bug-out bags; the gifts of more clothing from church groups and friends; and his good fortune in having a bedroom to sleep in.

“We’ll get through this,” he says. “We’ll be a stronger family.” He reminds himself that there are others who are struggling more than he is, saying “I was blessed I had someplace to go.”

Cookie jars are seen at the Koser home on Sept. 7. (Photo: Erich Schlegel for Yahoo News)

And in about a month there will be something to celebrate — Larry Jr. is getting married. His father sees that as both a blessing and a looming complication. “We don’t want to upset the newlyweds,” he says. “You want to have some kind of privacy when you are just married. I’m not sure where we’re going to go after the wedding.”

His son assumes they will stay. “It’s not a new relationship, we’ve been dating for 12 years,” says Larry Jr. “We really don’t need the privacy. Family comes first.”

“He’ll probably try to move out and we’ll try to keep him there as long as we can. I can’t imagine what it feels like for him, to be recently retired and then to watch everything you built, everything you had, just completely gone.”

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Houston’s historic Alley Theater is flooded but unbowed

The Alley Theater at the peak of Hurricane Harvey’s rain fall in Houston, Texas, Aug. 28, 2017. (Photo: courtesy of Alley Theater)

It was a clear decision – even before the ten feet of water receded from the historic Alley Theater in the flooded Houston arts district downtown; even before space was found on a recently emptied office floor so actors could rehearse; even before 70 years of priceless accumulated props – thousands of pieces of china, and furnishings, and chandeliers, and dolls and set knick knacks — were catalogued for insurance and then trashed; even before the search began for temporary space on which to stage a world premiere just two weeks from the day Harvey dumped the most water ever on this Bayou City.

Even before they rolled up their sleeves or began to grieve, before they helped co-workers haul Sheetrock from their ruined homes, or worry over the cats that another had to leave behind in the flood — even before some of them actually saw the damage first hand — those who run the Alley were determined that the show would go on.

“We are about producing theater, and that has been our contribution to this community for 70 years,” said Dean Gladden, the Alley’s managing director. “We think the best thing we can do to show that we can overcome all these obstacles is to produce theater and celebrate that we can do that.”

The Alley is more than just a theater to Houston. Established 68 years ago, and nearly destroyed once in the floods after Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, it has long embodied the city’s cultural ambitions. Houston has built bigger, flashier halls since the Alley’s creation in the 1940s – literally in an alley – but it developed a reputation for presenting original and daring works by such writers as Tony Kushner and Paula Vogel, and quickly became the place American actors and writers wanted their regional-theater debuts. It was Houston’s first claim on sophistication, proof it was more than the oil-and-cattle hick town outsiders imagined. Eventually there would also be the world famous Menil Collection, and a sprawling Museum of Fine Arts campus designed by Mies van der Rohe, Isamu Noguchi and Rafael Moneo, and newly refurbished parks designed by a glossary of nationally known landscape artists. But the Alley was always proudly ahead of the pack.

And of all Houston’s cultural institutions, the Alley was the one most damaged when 51 inches of water fell between August 26 and 29. The damage was all the more disheartening because it came a year after the completion of a $46.5 million renovation project. To look at what it has taken to repair the Alley so far, and at what it will take in the months even years to come, is to look not just at this one theater but an entire city – and, perhaps, foreshadow the choices being faced in other cities that will have to decide what is worth rebuilding, and why.

*****

Rajiv Joseph was the first to actually see the literal depths of the problem. The playwright’s latest work, “Describe the Night” was scheduled to premiere at the Alley on Sept. 15 and he was in town from New York to prepare. Rehearsals had continued as Harvey approached, but paused as the rains began in force.

Alley Theatre general manager Ten Eyck Swackhamer shines his flashlight on the high water mark from Tropical Allison painted on a wall in the lower section of the theater that was flooded by Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas on Sept. 8, 2017. The high water mark from Hurricane Harvey was about two feet above that. (Photo: Erich Schlegel for Yahoo News)

During a break in the deluge on Saturday night Aug 26, he walked from his hotel, which was blocks from the theater, but was stopped just short on Texas Avenue, because the street had turned into a river that would reach a depth of eight feet. Beneath the banner heralding his coming play, water lapped halfway up the staircase to the entrance. The building houses two stages, one upstairs and one below. Joseph’s was to go in the 300-seat one downstairs.

“I assumed it was over,” he said.

Joseph took a video of the scene on his phone and uploaded it onto the private Facebook page set up so the Alley’s staff of 180 could communicate after their email stopped working. But that was all anyone saw until Monday, when Gladden and General Manager Ten Eyck Swackhamer reached the theater in a truck by way of side streets and led a small group into the building. Wearing clothes they expected to throw away later, they found the staircase to the lower theater completely underwater. They could see the tops of seats poke through the muck.

Walking in another direction, where the water had already receded, they found the bright yellow line that had been painted on the wall to mark where the water had reached after Tropical Storm Allison. That was about 8 feet from the floor, and the smudges of mud that were Harvey’s calling card showed this flood had gone about 18 inches higher still.

Yes, they had put in precautions after Allison. There were submarine doors, and they had worked, holding even as the water pushed from outside. But this deluge had come up through the floors, with such force that it literally moved the walls. The electrical vault room is separated from the rest of the basement by a cinderblock wall, reinforced with concrete and rebar, designed with withstand a full on fire for three hours. The space filled with water and the wall crumbled into the room.

“Water is unforgiving and it is unrelenting,” Swackhamer says “It’s a primal force and you have to respect that.”

Much of what was underwater was newly built in the most recent renovation – prop storage, dressing rooms, bathrooms, a wig room, laundry. Gladden estimates that there is at least $15 million in damage, but only $3 million in insurance on the building and $4 million on the contents.

Ruined chairs from the Neuhaus Theater in the Alley Theater, Houston, Texas, Sept.1, 2017.( Photo: courtesy of Alley Theater)In Houston’s historic Alley Theater, flooded by Harvey, the show will go on

By Wednesday the pump-out had begun and as the water left the reality—illuminated by generator powered lamps because the electricity was predicted to be out for weeks—set in. Chunks of ceilings had plopped onto the floors. Mold was beginning to grow on the upholstered seats. The stench was a mix of kerosene, rotting playbills, sewage, and swamp water. There was a slippery coating everywhere, a mix of laundry detergent and oil. “Now I know why they have open casket funerals,” said Properties Master Karin Rabe. “I know how terrible that sounds, but this was like death and seeing it made it real.”

Most poignant she says, were not the things that were upended – heavy machinery, a piano – but those that remained upright. A champagne glass standing upright, filled with water, as if waiting for a toast. The books from the set of Freud’s Last Session still lined up on a shelf. A soup tureen lying on a blanket where it had come to rest.

“Hi Penguin!” she says as she walks from room to room, spotting a statue of a tuxedoed bird that played a role in The Man Who Came to Dinner. “Oooh, there’s our soldier,” she said, of one of the central plot point statues from And Then There Were None, which (secret tradition alert) the props department found a way to hide in the set of every other mystery production since then.

She was moved to tears by the sight of a doll, made of plastic but designed to resemble porcelain, wearing a delicate silk Victorian era dress. The Alley’s signature production is the yearly reprise of A Christmas Carol, and in their version Scrooge visits three shop owners demanding payment of a debt and when they do not have the money he grabs merchandise instead. Later each item of those items transforms into a visiting spirit; this doll becomes the Ghost of Christmas Past. And now it lay on a shelf, ruined by sludge, seemingly sleeping.

A doll from “A Christmas Carol,” ruined in the flood at the Alley Theater in Houston, Texas, Sept. 1, 2017, Sept. 1, 2017. (Photo: courtesy of Alley Theater)

******

Payroll Manager Stan Irish wasn’t focused on the Alley on Saturday night into Sunday. He was in his home of 36 years which is a few blocks away from Braes Bayou near the Astrodome, a home that weathered the worst of Houston’s storms – Allison, Alecia – and “never once had water even close to the front door” he said.

An app on his phone tracked the water levels in the Bayou and when he went to sleep Saturday night the water was 2.48 inches over the banks. When he woke and checked at 2 AM it was 6 inches and at 4 AM it was 16. An hour later he walked to the kitchen barefoot and in the dark when he stepped in something wet. At first he thought one of his two elderly cats, frightened by the storm, had vomited, but then realized that the dampness was not just below his foot, but above it.

Turning on the light he saw water coming through the floorboards.

Within 30  minutes the water was up to mid-calf, and by 9 AM it reached his knees. “And I am 6’1”, he says.

The power soon went out, and when the 911 operator could only promise to “put us on a list,” Irish and his partner, Jeffrey, decided they had to save their own lives. They filled plastic bags with necessities and put those in a plastic-lined backpack and made the “wrenching” decision to leave their cats Cinco and Ike (named because Irish found him in the backyard after that hurricane.) “Where would we balance a 17-pound cat when you are chest deep in flood waters?” he says, still feeling guilt over his choice.

Their destination was the St. Luke’s Presbyterian church seven blocks away. “My late mother was sitting on my shoulder,” says Irish, who is 65 years old. “She told me when I was a boy that ‘if anything happens and I’m not there you can always go to the church, the church is a safe place’.”

They almost didn’t make it. The water was swirling and one misstep would have likely meant they would have gone under, Irish recalls. “I was born on Galveston Island and I know what a riptide is, I know how currents work. This is unlike anything I have ever felt. This was a pull and a suck.”

They passed a playground on a small rise and saw, like an apparition, a young couple blithely sitting on swings. The pair (their names are Missy and Kyle; Irish wishes he’d gotten their last names) took the heavy backpacks and waded with them the rest of the way to the church.

Strong currents from Braes Bayou caused by heavy rain during Hurricane Harvey in Meyerland, Houston, Texas on August 26, 201. (Photo: George Wong/ZUMA Wire/ZUMAPRESS.com)

Soon a Red Cross helicopter landed in the parking lot and flew the gathered group of about two dozen to the shelter at the George R. Brown Convention Center. Once checked in and dried off, Irish found that all he wanted was news of his cats, news of the Alley and a pair of warm socks. The first was impossible to get. The second was on the Alley staff’s Facebook page, the video posted by Rajiv Joseph. And the socks? All that was left on the donation table was a pair of women’s, in a size ten, “so I stretched them and made them fit my man-size triple wide size 10.5 feet.”  Then he took a photo and posted it to Facebook.

The next morning he woke up on his cot to find that the wife of one of his employees had driven to the Convention Center “through rain that was still blowing sideways” to bring him two pair of her husband’s socks, one white and one mismatched white and blue, because they were the only ones that were clean. They made him “as happy as anything I have ever worn,” he says.  The day after that, friends offered him and his partner use of their spare room, where they would live for more than a week.

As soon as his app showed the bayou waters had receded, Irish headed back home, opened the door, and called for his cats. “They’re alive, they’re alive,” he shouted to his partner, as the animals came running. “Cats are incredible animals,” he says. “They know how to climb high and stay high.”

Photo Stan Irish took of his feet and posted on facebook. (Photo: courtesy of Stan Irish)

One thing he could not do was his job. Every Thursday Irish has made sure that paychecks were deposited in employees’ accounts, in accordance with Equity rules that say actors must be paid weekly. Because there was no electricity at the office, a member of the IT department carried the server out and the president of the board of directors drove it to the IT director’s house where he set it up in his bedroom. Then he located the payment file, changed the date and uploaded it to local banks.

“By golly I checked my account and there was my money, as scheduled,” Irish says. “No one missed being paid.”

******

Where to put the staff? The stuff? The play itself?

Those were the questions facing the Alley’s leaders once the water was pumped out. The theater building would be unusable for several months. The office building next door – dry because it was built above a parking garage but without electricity because the power company’s electrical vault was in the basement and would not be functional for weeks.

Rehearsals for the Alley Theatre production of “Cleo” happening on the 55th floor of an empty office space in downtown Houston, Texas on Sept. 8, 2017. The lower levels of the Alley Theatre were flooded by Hurricane Harvey and are undergoing repairs. (Photo: Erich Schlegel for Yahoo News)l

First step was to find rehearsal space. Rehearsals were not only underway for Describe the Night, which was scheduled to open on Sept. 15, but also for Cleo, a new play by Pulitzer prize winning Texas journalist Lawrence Wright. That play, about the scandalous affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton while making the movie Cleopatra, was scheduled to begin previews on Sept. 29.  For a few days the casts used conference rooms in a nearby hotel to practice. Then a board member who had just moved his oil shipping company out of a 55th floor penthouse in a downtown office building offered up that empty space. Rehearsals continued against a backdrop of expansive views. “I feel like some downtown oil executive,” Wright jokes. “It’s a new feeling.”

Office staff, meanwhile, was moved to separate space donated by a local non-profit. And the scenery shop relocated to a warehouse outside of town. To get all the computers, costumes, office supplies and scenery into new locations meant scheduling departments in shifts all day Friday – with employees walking up and down the stairs carrying everything to waiting trucks.

During all this, both Wright and Joseph kept expecting to hear that their shows would be cancelled. “I assumed they would conclude they just couldn’t stage a production two weeks after this immense catastrophe and I would soon be on a plane back home,” Joseph said.

Instead, Gladden and Swackhamer told Joseph that they had found space at a black box theater at the University of Houston, where the Alley had relocated two years ago during the now ruined renovations. It was not a perfect set up. There were only 185 seats, while tickets had been sold for 300 at the Alley. The sets would have to be completely redesigned, because the original location was a theater-in-the-round which would not be possible in this space. But the play, which Joseph describes as “the most ambitious thing I’ve written, a very big step for me and my playwriting” would be seen.

For Wright, the news was more complicated. All the other theaters in the city were either booked or damaged. Loath to wait a full season to stage Cleo – that would feel like defeat, they said —  Gladden and Swackhamer moved around the spring schedule, and created a window for the show. As a result the Alley will aim to stage five mainstage productions between Christmas and the summer. “That’s a lot of work to cram into six months,” Swackhamer said. “The fight against Harvey will continue for our production crews for the rest of the season.”

Wigs for the Alley Theatre productions of “Cleo” and “Describe the Night” being made on the 55th floor of an empty office space in downtown Houston, Texas on Sept. 8, 2017. The lower levels of the Alley Theater were flooded by Hurricane Harvey and are undergoing repairs. (Photo: Erich Schlegel for Yahoo News)

Speaking of Christmas, the audience favorite A Christmas Carol will include its iconic Doll of Christmas Past.  Fearing she would wind up in the trash bin as the staff ruthlessly purged anything that had been touched by flood waters, Gladden rescued her and brought her to his home. “I wanted to save her as a symbolic survivor of the hurricane and display her for posterity,” he says. “She is now dried out and has a smile on her face.”

*****

Why is it so important to put on a play? Why rebuild in a spot that has now flooded twice? Why raise millions for a theater when property damage estimates throughout the city are $75 billion? Why this determination – this desperation – that the show go on?

“I had the same question,” Joseph says. “When they told me they had a space, I was elated, but there was a moment where I thought the devastation here is so extreme and so many people are worrying about their own survival, should we be doing this? But I took the lead of the Alley. They said ‘we need to get back to work, this is what we do, we put on plays’.

To run from water is to run from reality, Swackhamer says. “We’ve had a 500-year-flood and a 1000-year floor within 15 years,” he says. “We are going to see water in the city of Houston, it’s just going to happen. We’ll build against it, but there are just no guarantees.”

There is only one thing they CAN control, he and his colleagues say, so they are seizing that.

“I think it’s important to show the city and the nation that arts are resilient, arts matter, people care about what we do,” Swackhamer says. “They will be able to go and see a play and start having some normalcy in their lives.” The weekend after Harvey, he notes, the Astros played two games that were sold out. “Over 30,000 people came, even though transportation was down, even though it was tough sledding. People wanted something normal.”

Demolition of the Neuhaus Theater space inside the Alley Theater that was flooded by Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas, Sept. 8, 2017. (Photo: Erich Schlegel for Yahoo News)

Back at his desk, albeit in a temporary one in an unfamiliar building, Irish agrees. Perhaps the worst hit of the entire staff – two completely lost their homes, dozens more lost cars and scores are still repairing partial damage — he cries as he describes what it has meant to him to get back to work, to produce the payroll, as usual, this week.

One co-worker “wrote me a check for a sum of money that staggered me,” he says. “People gave me gift cards, I found a bag of clothes at my desk one day. Today someone left me ten pairs of socks.

“I am going to survive through the grace of the fates, the strength of my partner, the will that was inborn in me from my mother… and, truly, my Alley family,” he says. And the reason he is working to make the show go on is because he wants to somehow give to an audience a little piece of what that work-family has given to him.

“The show must go on because that’s what we love, that’s what we do,” he says. “Water is a pretty strong force and it goes pretty much where it wants to. But there isn’t anything like a group of theater people who want to put on a show, because stand out of the way, they’ll make it happen.”

_____

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Congressional committee deals setback to ‘death with dignity’

The District of Columbia’s Death with Dignity Act was dealt a surprise Congressional setback late Thursday night, when the House Appropriations Committee voted not only to defund the implementation of the bill, which had been expected by proponents, but to rescind the new law completely.

The law, passed by the DC City Council by an 11-2 vote last fall, would allow terminally ill patients to receive a life-ending prescription from a physician who determines they have less than six months to live.

Congress has oversight authority over all DC laws, which means it can vote to nullify an action of the City Council within 30 legislative days after the law in question is signed. A Senate resolution to do so did not make it out of committee early this year, and while a House resolution was passed in committee, it never made it to a floor vote. Hence the DC legislation became law on Feb. 18, when the 30-day window closed.

But in what proponents of the measure call an “end run”, Congressman Andy Harris, R-MD, who is a physician, proposed an amendment to the current House Appropriations bill that would void the DC law completely.

In introducing his amendment  Harris said that Congress has “the ability to judge anything the District of Columbia does that is bad policy. This is bad policy.” He went on to say that one-quarter of patients who would seek help under the act would do so out of depression, and “I went to medical school. The treatment for depression was not death.”

Kim Callinan, chief program officer of Compassion & Choices, which supports “death with dignity” legislation throughout the country, said that Harris’ interpretation of the bill is wrong. Callinan said Harris called the bill a “physician assisted suicide act,” and spoke about doctors directly injecting patients with lethal drugs, when in fact the bill requires that a patient be able to ingest any medication on their own. “The physician doesn’t act, the patient does. [Harris] doesn’t realize how this works,” she said.

In response to Harris’ assertion that patients seeking death would be depressed, Callinan cited the requirement that patients undergo a psychological screening. She said a similar provision has worked well in Oregon, where medical aid in dying has been allowed since 1997.

She added that the bill does not facilitate “suicide,” which she defines as a person ending their life “when they otherwise would not have died.” Medical Aid in Dying, she said, is when disease makes the end of life inevitable and a patient chooses to make that end less painful.

Mary Klein, a DC resident who has terminal ovarian cancer, agrees. “Death with dignity is not suicide,” she said after the amendment was passed. “It’s the cancer that is slowly killing me. Suicide is when a person who is not terminally ill takes his or her own life.”

Klein has been following the fate of the DC bill closely, as she sees it as tied to her own. In a profile by Yahoo News last month she described her decision to eventually make use of the DC Act.  “This was horrible news,” she said of last night’s Appropriations Committee’s 28-24 vote, which was essentially along party lines. “The committee voted to impose their will and beliefs on me and take away the most personal choices – how to die.”

Callinan takes issue with the timing of the amendment. “It was an abuse of power,” she says. “The opportunity for them to repeal that law was in February when they were going through the 30 day review. That failed. And to do it now is to misuse the appropriations process to do what opponents of medical aid in dying could not openly do before. This end run is shameful, it’s wrong and now D.C. residents who are dying are being deprived of the peace of mind that this law brings.”

The measure still faces a vote in the full House and must also be passed by the Senate. Callinan says proponents will be appealing to the 77 members of Congress and 12 senators from states where death

similar legislation is in effect, because “this would send a Federal message that those state laws are also in jeopardy from Congress.”

_____

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Women who work for Trump face calls to speak out against him

“He will adapt and he will learn,” Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao said Thursday, excusing Donald Trump’s latest nasty tweet as the forgivable misstep of a newbie.

Her remarks brought outrage. Not as high decibel as Trump’s original comment that TV host Mika Brzezinski was “bleeding badly from a face-lift,” but a particular kind of outrage that raises it’s own set of questions about whether women in politics have an added responsibility toward other women.

There were many public appeals to Chao, one of only two women in Trump’s Cabinet, and also to other women in his administration “All the women collecting paychecks from the U.S. taxpayers — Dina Powell, Kellyanne Conway, Elaine Chao, Betsy DeVos — you should all go on the record and condemn your boss’ comments,” Nicolle Wallace, a former communications director for George W. Bush and now a host on MSNBC, said on her show. “And you should work behind the scenes to educate him just how offensive they are.”

Joe Scarborough, Brzezinski’s co-host and fiancée, agreed during a segment this morning to respond to Trump’s tweets: “Someone like Elaine Chao needs to speak out.”

Dee Dee Myers, White House press secretary in the Bill Clinton administration and author of “Why Women Should Rule the World,” agrees with this expectation that women have a particular obligation to call out sexism, even – especially – in their boss. “I think there’s a certain responsibility on behalf of women,” she told Yahoo News. “Any woman who has been on the receiving end of sexism — and that is pretty much every woman in some context — owes it to other women to speak out.”

There is, she recognizes, an inherent complexity to this expectation – in that it is arguably its own form of sexism. Earlier this month House Speaker Paul Ryan said much the same thing about Trump as Chao did yesterday – “He’s just new to this,” Ryan said, excusing Trump’s actions before the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Yes, Ryan was criticized by many for that statement, but not with the added layer that he was betraying his gender by standing by the president.

It is a conundrum felt by all women in government, says Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for the Study of Women and American Politics at Rutgers University. Women new to office often tell researchers there that they are reluctant to be defined by “women’s issues” such as childcare, she says but that “no one else was going to bring it up if they didn’t.” So they did.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily completely fair,” Dittmar says. “But I think it explains some of our discomfort when women don’t call out perceived sexism. We feel ‘this affects you directly in a way that doesn’t affect Sean Spicer, doesn’t affect Steve Bannon.”

To be sure, there was widespread bipartisan criticism of the tweets in question, from men and women. And there were also calls specifically for push back against the expectation that this was mostly the task of the women in this administration.

“Morning Joe says Elaine Chao needs to speak up against mistreatment of women by POTUS,” tweeted Lauren Katzenberg, cofounder of a newsletter for military families. “Why not call on me in White House to do the same?”

Agreed Myers during an interview: “The goal is to get to a place where everyone is equally outraged. But we are not there yet.”

[lisabelkin-yahoonews]

Will Congress let Mary Klein decide how to die?

Mary Klein hopes the government will hurry up and let her die.

It’s not that she wants her life to end. To the contrary, she says, she is doing absolutely everything she can to live. That includes surgery to cut the cancer out of her ovaries, uterus, colon, diaphragm and stomach lining, followed by five separate months-long rounds of chemotherapy. But, she says, these life-extending options will stop working one day, and when they do she wants to be able to use a life-ending one, to die on her own terms and by her own hand.

Klein, 69, is a resident of Washington, D.C., the latest locus of the growing debate over laws allowing terminally ill patients to decide when to die. Last year, the district became the seventh jurisdiction in the United States to legalize what here was called Death With Dignity — joining Washington state, Montana, Vermont, California, Colorado and Oregon.

But D.C. is not a state, and here Congress can override laws passed by the local city government. In the months since the D.C. act was passed, national legislators have been aiming to do exactly that, trying first to vote to nullify it, and, when that failed, attempting to defund it. That puts patients like Klein in the position of fighting not only against their disease and for their cause but also, unexpectedly, for the rights of their hometown to govern itself.

Mary Klein and her dog Adina in 2015. (Photo: Courtesy of Mary Klein)

The result is a race literally to the death. City officials including the mayor and the director of public health have said they are determined to implement the law before Congress can cut off the funding to do so.

“They are scrambling to get this done,” Klein says. “I just hope they do that in time.”

  *****

When the first of these laws went into effect in Oregon in 1997, the commonly used term for a doctor’s legally writing a prescription for a fatal dose of medication was “physician-assisted suicide.” In the two decades since, proponents have taken to using the term “medical aid in dying” to emphasize their arguments that it is the patient who acts, not the doctor, and that the act is not actually suicide.c

“This has nothing to do with suicide,” says Kim Callinan, chief program officer for Compassion and Choices, which was originally called the Hemlock Society when it was founded in 1980 and is now the largest group in the U.S. to advocate for end of life choices. “Suicide is a person ending their life when they otherwise would not have died. This is a person who is dying from a disease; the disease is taking their life, and this is a compassionate way toward that inevitable end.”

The Oregon law, which is the model for the five that came after, has stringent requirements for deciding who qualifies for such assistance. Patients must be older than 18, diagnosed with a terminal condition and have six months or less to live. They must make three separate requests (one written, two oral), prove they are a resident, and have three doctors agree that they are terminal and not making the requests because they are depressed. And they must be able to take the medication on their own, without assistance.

In the decade after Oregon made all of that legal, it was the only state in the nation to do so. Then, in 2008 Washington state voters approved medical aid in dying on a ballot initiative, in 2009 a Montana court declared there was nothing in state law that would make it illegal, and in 2013 the Vermont legislature passed what it called a Death With Dignity Act.

But it wasn’t until 2014 that the issue jumped back into the national spotlight, where it really hadn’t been since Dr. Jack Kevorkian infamously took it upon himself to build a euthanasia machine back in the early 1990s. The face of the latest version of the debate was not an eccentric graying doctor but a vibrant young woman, 29-year-old Brittany Maynard, who moved from her home state of California to Oregon when she was diagnosed with incurable brain cancer, so she could legally end her own life.

Working with Compassion and Choices, she chronicled her decision in a series of Internet videos, and she got the public’s attention. When she died in November of 2014, a YouGov poll found that 39 percent of Americans knew her story. She also appears to have changed some minds: A Gallup poll from May of last year found that nearly 70 percent of Americans agree that terminally ill patients should be allowed prescriptions that would end their lives, a 10 percent increase over 2015.

Maynard’s husband, Dan Diaz, had promised her he would keep lobbying for an Oregon-like law in California, and one was passed there soon after her death. Similar legislation has been introduced in 26 other states over the past two years, nearly all of which are still pending. Colorado was the first of those to pass a law. Next up was Washington, D.C.

Debbie Ziegler, mother of Brittany Maynard, after the passage of legislation that would allow terminally ill patients to legally end their lives, at the state Capitol, in Sacramento, Calif., September 11, 2015. (Photo: Carl Costas/AP)

Mary Cheh, a D.C. councilwoman who is also a constitutional law professor, sponsored the D.C. bill with Maynard on her mind. She had thought of introducing assisted-death legislation as far back as 2011, she said in an interview, but decided the timing wasn’t right — the council was tackling other major social issues, like same-sex marriage and legalization of marijuana, “and there’s only so much change you can push through at any one time.”

But as an increasing list of states began to consider the subject, and she continued to hear from constituents who “wanted to die with dignity, with control,” Cheh drafted legislation, which she introduced in January of 2016.

She expected it would be controversial, and it was.

The Archdiocese of Washington issued a statement saying that “assisted suicide” violated the “sanctity of life.” The president of the Patient Rights Action Fund worried that insurance companies would see assisted death as a more economical option than paying for treatment, and encourage patients, directly or indirectly, to make use of the option. At least one group of physicians protested that “assisted suicide … goes against everything we are as doctors,” and advocates for the mentally ill expressed fears that the bill would lead to “doctor shopping” for a physician willing to declare a depressed patient to be terminal.

There were equally passionate voices in favor of the legislation. At a July hearing, 70 D.C. residents signed up to speak, and the event lasted nine hours. Among those heard that night were an elderly couple who vowed they would help each other die one day, two reverends who supported the bill, a breast cancer patient who was stable at the moment but wanted to have the option to act should that fight become futile, and a well-known D.C. restaurant owner with a rare and painful connective tissue disorder, who said he had considered moving to either Oregon or Washington state in order one day to do as Maynard did.

“I am fully prepared for the inevitable death that comes to us all,” said restaurateur Bill Warrell. “If I know mine is coming, and I believe it will be painful and prolonged, I want to be able to ask my doctor for an aid-in-dying prescription. What I really want to know is that I will be able to do that right here in D.C., in this beautiful and ugly city that I love.”

  *****

Mary Klein was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in October of 2014, before the D.C. hearings began, before Cheh had even introduced the bill, and about a week before Maynard was on the cover of People magazine.

Until that diagnosis, her world was “basically perfect,” she said during an interview in her comfortable northwest D.C. home, on a leafy street abutting Rock Creek Park, a house filled with dog gates, mud mats and family photos. By way of illustration, she passed her hand around the living room where she sat, pointing first toward Stella Dawson, 63, her partner of 37 years, and then to her two German shepherds, 6-year-old Adina and 7-month-old Eiger, both of whom Klein trains for agility and obedience competitions.

Mary Klein, right, with her partner, Stella Dawson. (Photo: Brian Prowse- Gany/Yahoo News)

“My life has been one adventure after another,” she said. “I’ve loved my life.”

“Fun,” Dawson said, holding her hand as they spoke.

“Fun, great fun,” Klein said.

“It’s not past tense,” Dawson said.

“No, not yet,” Klein said. “When I’m not terribly sick, and even actually when I am, we laugh a lot together. I am very grateful for that. I have not been afraid to take risks, because what propels me forward is believing in what I do.”

Much of their life together has been about standing up for their beliefs, Klein and Dawson say, beginning with the way they met — sharing a house with other staff members at the feminist news collective where they worked in the early 1980s. After that they lived around the country and the world — Chicago, Providence, New York, outside of Frankfurt and London — while Dawson worked as a reporter for Reuters and Klein as an artist, photographer and journalist. In 2004 they happened to be visiting relatives in Massachusetts on the day same-sex marriage became legal, so they got themselves a license and became the 13th same-sex couple to be wed in that state.

“Now we’re on the frontier again,” Dawson says of the fight for the D.C. law.

“There’s better frontiers to be at,” Klein says.

  They are here after two rough years of treatment, during which it became clear that remission was not a possibility. Klein often lacked the energy to work on her art. She was regularly hospitalized with complications from the chemotherapy. She suffered nerve damage that made her less stable on her feet, and she had to change the competitions for which she trained the shepherds to ones that were less strenuous for both dog and owner. And there was almost always pain. “If I made it through a weekend without having to go to the emergency room, that was a really successful weekend,” she says.

Mary Klein (Photo: Brian Prowse-Gany/Yahoo News)

As her options became fewer, she says, her determination increased. She had read of Maynard, and the state laws that followed, and when she heard that similar legislation was under consideration by the D.C. City Council, she told Dawson that she planned to use her limited energy to support the cause.

“I was not surprised at all,” Dawson says of her wife’s wish to die on her own terms. “Mary was always a very strong, very courageous, very independent person. I knew that she would want things on her own terms.”

Klein did not attend the nine-hour meeting on the bill last July, because she was undergoing her third round of chemotherapy “and my focus was on just getting through it.” By October of last year, though, she was on vacation off the coast of Virginia with Dawson when she read there was to be a first committee vote on the legislation. Cutting their trip short, they returned to D.C. and walked door to door from one council office to the next, telling Klein’s story.

“The word got out that there was a terminally ill woman…” Klein says.

“… just prowling the halls,” Dawson finishes her sentence.

“Every member, or their staff, took a meeting with us,” Klein finishes.

Her message in each office was the same: “I’m doing everything I can to extend my life, but when I have a short period of time left and am in intolerable pain, which is very likely, then I want the option to take medication and have a dignified and comfortable death. I don’t want to die totally drugged up, hallucinating, or in a coma unable to say goodbye. Everyone should have the right to decide how they want to die. Whatever their choice is, I respect that, and I only ask that they respect mine.”

  *****

With each hearing, each meeting, each conversation, Cheh tinkered with the text of her proposed bill, D.C. Act 21-577.

When the director of the D.C. Department of Health, Dr. LaQuandra Nesbitt, questioned whether people would be allowed “to carry out their deaths in public areas … to view the sunset over the Lincoln Memorial while taking their last breath,” Cheh added wording that would prohibit patients from taking their final dose of medicine in public.

When Councilwoman Anita Bonds asked for a provision recommending that patients of faith might consult a religious adviser before choosing the aid-in-dying path, Cheh added that, too. “Might help, can’t hurt,” Cheh says.

All those changes helped the bill get through the council’s health committee, although Klein’s door-to-door lobbying seems to have provided the final push. David Grosso, an at-large independent member of the council, had been undecided until the Oct. 5 committee vote. He became the deciding vote in the 3-2 tally after some intense conversations with Klein.

“As a matter of principle, I believe that adults should be able to make choices about their own lives and bodies,” he said on the night of the committee vote. “It is hard for me to imagine telling a person in the final months of her life that she must continue to fight if she prefers to end things on her own terms.”

The vote of the full council a month later was similarly emotional. At one point during that Nov. 1 meeting, Councilman Kenyan McDuffie, who called this “my toughest vote in four and a half years in this body,” began to talk about his own father’s death. “My family had to watch him suffer. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody else,” he said, so overcome with tears that he had to leave the room.

The measure passed by a vote of 11-2. It was signed into law by D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser on Dec. 3, 2016.

  *****

The federal Home Rule Act of 1973 allows Congress to oversee what the D.C. government does. When Congress disapproves, the act provides two routes by which to undo the city council’s actions — voting to override the bill or to cut off its funding.

Nearly all every time Congress has exercised this power it has been on controversial social issues — abortion, needle exchange programs, rights of same-sex couples, decriminalization of marijuana.

Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., talks with House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah. (Photo: Matt McClain/Washington Post via Getty Images)

The Home Rule Act says Congress must vote to override within 30 days after the law in question is signed, and many in Congress tried to do that with Death With Dignity. In the Senate that effort was led by Sen. James Lankford, but his disapproval resolution didn’t made it out of committee. The House Oversight Committee, chaired by Jason Chaffetz, did vote, 22-14, to overturn the law. “Rather than facilitate suicides, the government’s role should be to prevent them,” Chaffetz wrote in a joint opinion piece with former Sen. Jim DeMint. “We should not now or ever take steps to help facilitate, encourage or tacitly accept measures that prematurely end lives.”

But that House bill never made it to a floor vote, and when the 30-day window closed on Feb. 18 of this year, the D.C. legislation became law.

That was not, however, the end of the fight between Congress and the council. In response to requests from several congressmen, the Trump administration’s proposed budget specifically prohibits the district from spending any funds to implement the new law. The cost of implementation is minimal, local officials say — basically it includes new software for the Department of Health computer system to track requests from patients and count prescriptions from doctors. And since estimates are that only 10 patients each year will request such prescriptions, it is not expected to be an overwhelming bureaucratic burden.

However small the numbers might be, though, the result is a direct confrontation between the two government bodies located in D.C.

“The hypocrisy is extraordinary,” says Cheh. “These politicians who preach local control, states as workshops of experimentation, want to tell our local government what to do.”

Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s nonvoting representative in Congress, agrees, while also hoping that on this issue momentum is on the district’s side.

“Why didn’t it get a floor vote?” she asked in an interview. “Because this is a rolling stone as more and more Americans are understanding this issue. There are now 24 House Republicans, two of them in the leadership, who are from states where Death With Dignity is the law. To vote against it in D.C. means voting against what their constituents believe in at home. I am optimistic, which is a very difficult and rare word for me to say. We have to fight like the world is coming to an end for each and every thing we’ve saved, but I think we might be able to save this.”

Protesters in favor of Washington, D.C.’s assisted suicide law gather outside congressional office buildings on Feb. 13. (Photo: Martin Austermuhle/WAMU)

Call it cautious optimism. In case the funding restrictions do pass, Mayor Bowser and Health Director Nesbitt have assured the council that they are scrambling to beat the clock and to fund the necessary implementation before the next budget takes effect on Sept. 30.

For Klein, though, that date feels very far away.

It might surprise some, but she is not at all sure she will actually exercise the right she is fighting so hard to have. “I can’t tell you with 100 percent certainty that if I had the medication I would take it,” she says. “But I do know that it would bring great comfort to me to know this is a possibility.”

Statistically, many others feel the same way. In the 20 years medical aid in dying has been legal in Oregon, 1,327 patients have been granted prescriptions but only 859 have actually used them. Some quickly became too ill to act on their own, but for many, just knowing the choice was theirs was the reassurance they needed.

Before she makes that choice, Klein is making others — all of which add up to a resolution to live life as completely as she can for as long as she can.  She and Stella are planning to head back to the beach where their vacation was interrupted last summer. There she will work on training their new puppy, a rambunctious energetic dynamo who seems blessedly unaware that his human is not as steady on her feet as she once was, not as able to roughhouse back.

Why get a new dog when you might soon be too fragile to even walk him?

“So I can live my life exactly as I want, until I decide to stop,” Klein says.

_____

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