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The Poem That Stopped Me Crying

Posted December 30th, 2016 by Lesley Hazleton

I hated the tears.  Hated the helplessness of them. Two weeks after the U.S. election, and they were still coming. And then a friend emailed me saying “I’d love to treat you to a poem just written by a brilliant young woman I know.”

It was signed only with initials: e.c.c.  I had no idea who e.c.c. was. But I knew the moment I saw the first lines that this what I needed. Enough with the tears. This spirited slam poem had me cheering. It’s what got me moving again.

REVENGE

Since you mention it, I think I will start that race war.

I could’ve swung either way, but now I’m definitely spending
the next 4 years converting your daughters to lesbianism;
I’m gonna eat all your guns. Swallow them lock stock and barrel
and spit bullet casings onto the dinner table;

I’ll give birth to an army of mixed-race babies
with fathers from every continent and genders to outnumber the stars
My legion of multiracial babies will be intersectional as fuck
and your swastikas will not be enough to save you,

because real talk, you didn’t stop the future from coming.
You just delayed our coronation.
We have the same deviant haircuts we had yesterday;
we are still getting gay-married like nobody’s business
because it’s still nobody’s business;
there’s a Muslim kid in Kansas who has already written the schematic
for the robot that will steal your job in manufacturing.
And that robot? Will also be gay, so get used to it:

we didn’t manifest the mountain by speaking its name,
the buildings here are not on your side just because
you make them spray-painted accomplices.
These walls do not have genders and they all think you suck.
Even the earth found common ground with us in the way
you bootstrap across us both.

Oh yeah: there will be signs, and rainbow-colored drum circles,
and folks arguing ideology until even I want to punch them
but I won’t, because they’re my family,
in that blood-of-the-covenant sense.
If you’ve never loved someone like that
you cannot outwaltz us, we have all the good dancers anyway.

I’ll confess I don’t know if I’m alive right now;
I haven’t heard my heart beat in days,
I keep holding my breath for the moment the plane goes down
and I have to save enough oxygen to get my friends through.
But I finally found the argument against suicide and it’s us.
We’re the effigies that haunt America’s nights harder
the longer they spend burning us,
we are scaring the shit out of people by spreading,
by refusing to die: what are we but a fire?
We know everything we do is so the kids after us
will be able to follow something towards safety;
what can I call us but lighthouse,

Of course I’m terrified. Of course I’m a shroud.
And of course it’s not fair but rest assured,
anxious America, you brought your fists to a glitter fight.
This is a taco truck rally and all you have is cole slaw.
You cannot deport our minds; we won’t
hold funerals for our potential. We have always been
what makes America great.

And who is e.c.c?  She’s Elisa Chavez, co-organizer of the Rain City Slam. Three weeks later, she’d bring down the house at Town Hall Seattle with her performance of this poem, doing for 900 others what she did for me. And yes, I post the poem here with her permission, in the hope that it does for you what it did for me as we move into the New Year: with spirit, with resolve, and dammit, with joy. — Lesley


 

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‘Healing’? No Way.

Posted November 10th, 2016 by Lesley Hazleton

What American voters did this week is obscene.

But no, it did not come as a surprise.  A shock, yes, to see it actually unfold.  But a surprise, no.  It’s not as though the short history of democracy has always favored the angels.  Or as though the human capacity for resentment, bigotry, and sheer dumbness is any less than it always has been.  Or as though people ever tell the truth to pollsters.

But still, we hoped that sanity would prevail.  And for now, that hope is shattered.

Here in Seattle, we’re a deep blue island on the edge of a vast ocean of red.  There’s a heavy silence in the air,  as though the whole city is in mourning.  And indeed that’s the word I keep hearing.  Take the time to mourn so that we can recover from the shock, we’re told.  Work our way through Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief.  “Heal.”

Humbug, more like it.  We’re being psycho-babbled into resignation.

Those five stages of grief?  They’re denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

But I am not in denial.  I will make no bargains with monstrosity.  I totally refuse the luxury of depression or despair.  And please just pull the plug on me if I ever accept this vile travesty of a human being as the 45th president of the United States.

That leaves anger.  And this is not a comfortable place to be.  Anger eats at you; it’s toxic.  But then that is the hallmark of the man who is now the president-elect.

I’ve felt that toxicity seeping into me over the past few months.  Felt my temper shortening;  my tolerance for disagreement diminishing;  my language  — as a writer! — reduced to spitting, spluttering outrage.

Sounds like I could do with some healing?  No.  Please don’t even think of telling me that this is the time for that.  Try telling it to the people who will now methodically dismantle every step towards progress made over the past eight years.  Go ahead, just try.  They’re laughing at you already.

Which leaves the option of… leaving.  We joked about that.  Canada, Costa Rica, Iceland, Malta, New Zealand?  We amused ourselves by toying with possibilities in after-dinner conversation, indulged in fantasy, knowing — or thinking we knew — that it would never come to that.

And it hasn’t.  Because I’m damned if I’ll leave.  Damned if I’ll give up.  Damned if I’ll be driven out by bigotry and stupidity.

I will stay.  We all will — all the plurality of voters who saw a Democrat win the popular vote but lose the election for the second time in twenty years.

We, the majority, will take this country back again.  And if the price to be paid is years of anger, I for one am willing to pay it.  Because while anger may be toxic, resignation is far more so.

Resignation only enables foulness.  And for those who give in to it, it erodes self-respect, and leads to the paralysis of helplessness, even of despair.   We can afford none of that.

The United States has elected bad presidents before, and we have paid the price in what is monstrously called “blood and treasure” — as have others.  But never has as god-awful a candidate as this one been elected.  So the very least we owe ourselves — and others —  is to dig our heels in, do our damnedest to limit the damage, and however long it takes, make sure it never happens again.

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Psychopath, Defined

Posted August 2nd, 2016 by Lesley Hazleton

dt

The word “psychopath” gets tossed around a lot.

So it occurred to me to check out how it’s defined in psychiatry.

I began with this piece in ‘Psychology Today,’ and went on to check out the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) and the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI).

Here are the chief 15 psychiatric symptoms, every one of which is markedly present in the Republican nominee for president of the United States:

1. Callousness

2. Absence of remorse or shame

3. Externalization of blame

4. Glibness

5. Conning others for personal profit or pleasure

6. Outlandish lying

7. Grandiose sense of self-worth

8. Boastfulness

9. Pathological egocentricity

10. Inability to modulate responses

11. Parasitic lifestyle

12. Low tolerance for frustration

13. High irritability

14. High aggressiveness

15. Indifference to plans

Here is what amazes me:  A presidential candidate displays every sign of psychopathy.  That is, of a severe and dangerous personality disorder.  Every single sign.  He is, in fact, a classic case.  And yet so far as I know, no psychiatrist has yet said this publicly.

President Obama just called Trump “unfit” to serve as president.  That’s a gentle word.  “Unfit” could mean simply unsuited, or not a good fit.  But what it really means, in  this case, is sick.

It’s rather like the emperor’s new clothes, isn’t it?  The Republican nominee shows every sign of being in dire need of psychiatric treatment.  And yet nobody says so.

 

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Hard-Wired? Really?

Posted March 22nd, 2016 by Lesley Hazleton

I once spent a summer as an apprentice to an auto mechanic because I wanted to know how cars worked. Harvey was a high-school dropout and a delight to work with, a curly-bearded and effervescent guide to what I’d seen as the mysteries of mechanics. He was under no illusion that a car was anything but an assembly of component parts, or that it had any resemblance at all to a human being. He worked on autos; he didn’t identify with them. And he saw nothing hard about the jumble of multi-colored wires snaking throughout the engine compartment and the chassis. “Just follow the spaghetti,” he said, and he was right: it was usually just a matter of a loose connection.

brainYet the idea of humans as being “hard-wired” persists. A headline in today’s Huffington Post reads “Experts say liberal and conservative brains are wired differently.” It could have said “think differently,” but then of course we’d see that it was merely stating the obvious. In fact a dismaying amount of psychological research appears to do just that, “proving” what we already know. So to make it feel “new” and “modern,” the HuffPo editors fell back on the “wired” meme, as though human minds were merely a network of automatic connections. Flip the switch, and off they go.

But what’s so new or modern about the wired meme? It’s downright odd that one of the leading tech magazines in this wireless age is still called Wired. Can they not come up with a better name?

As linguist George Lakoff pointed out in his book Metaphors We Live By, metaphors aren’t just for poets: they’re built into the language we use daily, and thus shape the way we think. So if you think of humans as wired, you’re more likely to assume that we’re just a bunch of reflexes. Press a certain point on the knee, and presto: it jerks.

The knee-jerk reflex works on many levels, but especially that of jerk. The “hard-wired” argument has been used by sociobiologists to explain a lot about men in particular, from sleeping around (“spreading their genes”) to fighting to “protect” their genes in the form of women and children. This argument, made by men, apparently sees men as Iron-Age remnants. Presumably those who then murder women and children, let alone other men, simply have faulty wiring, which goes no way at all to understanding the astounding nihilism of terrorists (uppermost in my mind today in the wake of the Brussels attacks). And besides, what does all this make women? Soft-wired?

It’s an easy fallacy (most fallacies are, which is why they’re so common). Think of humans as matters of cause and effect, and you imagine you can indeed just follow the spaghetti of wiring in order to fix whatever’s wrong. Such reductive materialism takes no account of the complex of personal, educational, social, economic, and political experiences that enable some people to tolerate uncertainty and doubt (or, like me, to revel in it), while others flee into the steely arms of certainty and conviction.

I’m certainly no fan of Jeffrey Goldberg (okay, I think he’s a pompous ass), but once you get past his inflated sense of self-importance, his long profile of Obama in the April issue of The Atlantic reveals a presidential mind wary of seemingly easy solutions, and fully conscious of the complexities of unintended consequences and of the limitations of brute power. Whoever the next president will be, I will miss Obama’s subtlety. One way or another, I’m afraid we all will.

Because as Harvey taught me, there’s nothing subtle about wiring.

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Speaking Out

Posted December 18th, 2015 by Lesley Hazleton

Sometimes you have the privilege of getting to say the right thing at the right time, as with this nine-minute talk I gave the other night to a hugely supportive audience of Christians and Muslims at Trinity Lutheran Church in Lynnwood, WA.  The event was called “Love in a Time of Fear,” but I wasn’t afraid, I was angry, and I said so:

 

[youtube=https://youtu.be/RhKDsdIeeHo]

Full video of the evening is here, with special thanks to Terry Kyllo of Catacomb Churches and to Jeff Siddiqui for bringing it all together, and to the excellent work of Lutheran Community Services Northwest in support of Syrian refugees.

 

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File under: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, ugliness, US politics | Tagged: Tags: abortion, Black Lives Matter, Colorado Springs, Donald Trump, gay marriage, Hitler, Martin Niemoller, neo-fascism, New York Daily News, Planned Parenthood, Republican party, San Bernardino, Ted Cruz | 3 Comments
  1. Mary Johnson says:
    December 18, 2015 at 2:17 pm

    Thank you, Lesley. This is SO important, and so well said.

    You might be interested in this, from my sister Margaret, who converted to Islam before the birth of her first child and is trying to raise a Muslim family in the US: https://medium.com/@coexistmarge/this-time-it-s-different-c0c70fd2db3f#.yo8zgn6nj

    Hoping you are well. Thankful you are angry.

    Mary

    >

  2. Nuzhat says:
    December 18, 2015 at 8:17 pm

    Every voice raised is a step towards correction. There may be enough laid back listeners, but being a part of the vocal band is being more responsible, and important in awakening the sense of direction the listeners can take.
    You always hit the mark with even few words said, Lesley….
    well spoken!
    Nuzhat.

  3. Frederick Osman says:
    December 19, 2015 at 2:13 pm

    Thank you, Lesley. Wonderful, as usual.

A Hard Choice? Really?

Posted October 1st, 2015 by Lesley Hazleton

The right-wing is trying like hell to do a number on the minds of American women. You know that thing about abortion being the hardest choice a woman will ever have to make, or the one she most regrets? Bullshit.

90_percentIn fact 90% of all American women who’ve had an abortion are either glad or simply relieved they did (click here for the research.)  And for every woman I know who’s had an abortion (that’s half the women I know, and quite possibly half the women you know too), a safe, routine, minimally invasive procedure was far from the hardest decision of their lives. For many, like me, it was the simple, sane choice. The only hard part was finding the money to pay for it.

You want a hard decision? What about marriage? Or divorce? Taking on a mortgage? Choosing a cancer treatment? Allowing a terminally ill spouse to die with dignity? What about the multitude of hard decisions we all have to make in the course of our lives, men and women?

But right-wingers don’t think women capable of rational decision-making at all.  It’s apparently especially hard for us delicate souls, which is presumably why they think we agonize over it and decide wrong.  How very Victorian of them. They’re apparently white knights in shining armor, out to save every woman from her own distressingly poor judgment.  In their ideal world, no woman would be “allowed” to make a decision without prior permission from the Republican caucus.  Certainly not any woman with an income under a million a year.

But it’s not our decision-making that stinks, it’s theirs.  Because not only is it morally and ethically bankrupt, it’s full of lies — deliberate lies.

— Like Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina pretending to be near tears as she talked about watching a video that didn’t exist and never had.

— Or the head of the House Oversight Committee trying to play gotcha with the head of Planned Parenthood by using a bogus chart created by an anti-abortion group.

— Or abortion opponents pretending there’s no such thing as an embryo.  They’d have us think that every abortion is that of a full-term viable fetus, when none are.  The vast majority of abortions are embryonic, medically defined as up to eight weeks from conception.  But hey, you can’t see an embryo on a sonogram, let alone wave photographs of it in an attempt to guilt-trip women.  So lie, baby, lie — and screw the lives you mess up in the process.

It’s clear by now that nobody cares about facts in the fantasy world of today’s Republicans.  Real facts, that is, as opposed to imaginary ones.

Those of us who live in the real world know for a fact that imaginary facts are dangerous.  Remember those non-existent weapons of mass destruction used as the reason to invade Iraq?  Or those non-existent scientists asserting with great authority that there was no such thing as climate change?

Forget hard decisions for the moment.  Here’s an easy one:  A year from now, do all you can to make sure we send this gang of women-hating, war-mongering, planet-polluting liars back to whatever slime pit they crawled out of.

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File under: feminism, US politics, war, women | Tagged: Tags: abortion, Carly Fiorina, embryo, imaginary facts, Planned Parenthood, Republicans | 7 Comments
  1. Amna says:
    October 1, 2015 at 11:36 am

    Right on Lesley!
    But I am afraid that this whole country is blinded with madness and hatred and stepping away from humanity, humility and humanitarianism …The way things are going we could have the republican president representing this country next year and that will be the beginning of dark ages,once again… All my reasons for coming to this country in hope of finding equality, prosperity and freedom will be wiped away… there is less and less concern in this country for minorities, women and suffering of people in other parts of the world. America will turn the corner for worse and will never be the same….

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      October 1, 2015 at 12:00 pm

      Not the whole country, Amna. Nowhere near. But a warning that we can never take sanity and progress for granted. We always need to stand up and be counted, speak out, and call the bluff of ignorance and bigotry. Each in our own small way.
      Here’s Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.”

  2. jveeds says:
    October 1, 2015 at 5:42 pm

    Not to change the subject…well, OK, to change the subject…do you have any thoughts on the Pope’s personal audience with the Kentucky county clerk, Kim Davis? I read Andy Borowitz’s satire on it and thought he was making that part up. But it really happened. But the weird thing is, no one from the Pontiff’s team seems to be willing to say why the abominable Davis was invited, what they talked about and there’s even some speculation that the Heir to the Chair wasn’t entirely aware that the meeting was being set up. That’s pretty hard to believe and maybe by the time you get to pontificalizing on this yourself we’ll have more info.

    But in the meantime, I’d love to get your take on this. Maybe His Petership was calling her in to say “STFU,” albeit in more popely terms.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      October 2, 2015 at 9:40 am

      Oh yes, it’s a weird kind of fun to watch Vatican spokesmen trying to spin this! The rationalizations are fascinatingly torturous. Yesterday: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/us/pope-francis-kim-davis-kentucky-clerk-washington-same-sex-marriage.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0 and then today: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/world/europe/pope-francis-kim-davis-meeting.html
      Me? No pontif(f)icating for now. I’m just continually amazed at the screwed-up stance of orthodox religion on anything to do with sex (viz abortion, women clergy, gay marriage, contraception, priestly celibacy, pederasty).

  3. jveeds says:
    October 2, 2015 at 10:41 am

    Either way, I’d say this was a monumental failure of the Pope and his handlers, an epic miscue whereby either the Pope was under-informed, or misled, or simply had no conception of the political implications of having this notorious and divisive evangelical yahoo anywhere near his midst.

    It’s hard to believe that the papal PR machine allowed this to happen. In my view, it spoils much of the goodwill that the entire visit to America had gathered. So so sooooo stupid to let something this obviously misguided to happen.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      October 2, 2015 at 11:10 am

      Agreed. A ton of secular goodwill went out the door the moment Kim Davis entered it. Or maybe it was just a sudden jolt of reality.

  4. chakaoc says:
    October 9, 2015 at 5:34 pm

    Go, Lesley – morons and liars all. Their investigation into PP found nothing but there will be no exoneration because….well, it served their purpose. The slime pit beckons – hope they heed the call.

Who’s Really Pro-Life?

Posted September 10th, 2015 by Lesley Hazleton

How have we allowed this to happen? How have we allowed anti-abortion activists to call themselves pro-life? How have we not called them out, loud and clear, on this Orwellian double-speak?

Many of those against abortion are the same right-wingers who want to nuke the hell out of Iran or any other designated enemy of the day; who support the death penalty no matter how many death-row inmates have been proven innocent; who obstruct all attempts at gun control even when kindergarten kids are massacred; who see nothing wrong about cops shooting unarmed black men in the back. But a single fertilized egg inside a woman’s uterus? Suddenly, that’s sacred.

They’re not pro-life. I am. And Planned Parenthood is. And NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League, is. Because nobody here is advocating for abortion per se; what we’re for is the right to have one. For motherhood to be a matter of choice, not compulsion. And for a child’s right to come into the world wanted and welcomed. What we’re for, in short, is life. Not life in the abstract, but real life, as it is lived.

What we’re for is not more but fewer abortions. And the way to achieve that is clear: sex education in schools, and freely available contraception for women. Yet the anti-abortion crowd is against both. Which means that all they ensure is that there’ll be more abortions.

no-more-coat-hangersThe historical record is clear: women have always aborted pregnancies, whether with herbs, with knitting needles, or with wire coat-hangers in back-street abortions such as the one that nearly killed a close friend when I was a student. So now that abortion is safe – a minor medical procedure – the anti-abortion crowd are doing everything they can to make it dangerous again: to make the woman pay for having the gall to be sexual, and to make the unwanted child pay too.

If a woman chooses to carry a pregnancy to term and then give the child up for adoption, I totally support her choice. But it is cruel and punitive to force her to do so. It is downright obscene to insist that a rape victim carry her rapist’s child. And to make a woman give birth to a severely disabled child doomed to die in pain within hours, weeks, or months is nothing less than torture, of both mother and child.

This isn’t about the Bible or the Quran. It’s about punishment, about a basic attitude of life negation, of harshness and joylessness. It isn’t pro-life; it’s anti-life.

If its advocates weren’t causing so much misery and suffering, I might even find it in myself to feel sorry for them.

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File under: existence, feminism, US politics, women | Tagged: Tags: abortion, contraception, double-speak, Naral, Planned Parenthood, pro-life, sex education | 11 Comments
  1. iobserveall says:
    September 10, 2015 at 12:25 pm

    I agree with every word you wrote.

  2. avasterlingauthor says:
    September 10, 2015 at 12:50 pm

    I agree with some things you say, but you do use a pretty broad brush toward your opposition to further your point. ; )

  3. Mary Waechter says:
    September 10, 2015 at 11:31 pm

    Very well put. I agree 100%!

  4. Fran Love says:
    September 11, 2015 at 8:29 am

    Lesley, you’ve covered all the issues perfectly. I wish I could have said it as well as you did. Other than posting here at your blog, have you published this article anywhere else?

    I know I could send this to a few of my friends via Facebook, but it wouldn’t get the coverage it deserves. I also realize there will be plenty of opposition to your statements, but they have to be said. We have to keep speaking out, especially because of the opposition. Thank you.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      September 11, 2015 at 8:38 am

      Thanks, Fran — and of course share on FB, and urge others to share. That can be enormously effective in spreading ideas. — L.

  5. Amin Tan says:
    September 11, 2015 at 10:13 am

    Dear Lesley Hazleton,
    You have said it all. I concur absolutely. Some people are so dogmatic about opposing abortion regardless of undesirable circumstances like rape, poverty, young and immature age, broken or mistaken relationship and so on. One must have basic common sense in life.

  6. Justine says:
    September 13, 2015 at 3:41 pm

    Would you mind if I linked to this from an opposing viewpoint?

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      September 16, 2015 at 10:39 am

      The blog is in the public domain, Justine, so of course feel free to do so. I will read with interest.– L.

  7. Tea-mahm says:
    September 14, 2015 at 9:02 am

    Lesley, this is it. Lets get every news agency to carry your message.
    I’m cheering for your words. Thank you, Tamam

  8. Joan says:
    September 14, 2015 at 9:18 am

    Agreed on all points. And I’d like to add another. The same people who are anti-abortion want to drastically reduce the social support system that helps care for the children (and parents) they insist should follow through with unwanted pregnancies, including the organizations that help prevent those pregnancies in the first place (e.g., Planned Parenthood).

  9. Denise Kaufman says:
    September 15, 2015 at 12:12 am

    I’ve said for a long time that we’ve let the other side define the terms. How did we let them co-opt the term “pro-life”? At the very least, we are all pro-life. I personally think that proof of “pro-life” includes supporting universal health care and early childhood education for all children. Many people are pro-birth but anti-childhood? We are pro-choice and they are anti-choice. Some new terms are needed!!

My Abortion

Posted August 27th, 2015 by Lesley Hazleton

Planned_Parenthood_busNearly every woman I know has either had an abortion or helped another woman get one. I know this because as the Republican attack on Planned Parenthood ramps up, I’ve been asking. Old and young, black and white and brown, married and single, straight and gay, religious and irreligious – women have been telling me their abortion stories.

But I think we need to tell them publicly too. To break the weird veil of shame and secrecy that still hangs over the decision, even when abortion is legal. To stand up and say “Yes, sure, I had one.”

So here’s the story of mine.

I was 20 years old – young and dumb, as every 20-year-old has every right to be. Not that dumb, though, since I was using a diaphragm thanks to the Marie Stopes clinic, the one place in the whole of England at the time that would provide contraception to an unmarried 17-year-old.  And the diaphragm worked fine until my first summer in Jerusalem, when it didn’t. Not because of any fault in the device, but because I hadn’t put it in. Carried away, late in my menstrual cycle, I’d said “Come on, it’s okay.” And three weeks later, realized it wasn’t.

There was no doubt in my mind what I needed to do. The guy I was with was a no-goodnik, the result of a bad case of delayed teenage rebellion on my part. I had an undergraduate degree in psychology but no idea what I wanted to do next, only that since I could barely handle myself, no way could I handle a baby. But abortion was still illegal in Israel. And I was dead broke.

I found my way to the Jerusalem branch of an aid organization for Brits – a single room with a single occupant, who took one look at me as I stood miserably in the doorway and before I could open my mouth said “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”

I nodded yes.

“And you need an abortion.”

Another nod.

“And you don‘t know where to go.”

Again, a nod.

“And you don’t have any money.”

At the final nod, she said “Sit down,” and made three phone calls: one for an appointment with a leading gynecologist who didn’t believe in forcing women to have children; one to her HQ to get approval for a loan to pay his fee; and one to a publishing house to get me a job as a copy-editor so that I could pay back the loan.

We have been firm friends ever since.

The procedure itself was a non-event. (The doctor gave me a prescription for the pill and said he hoped to never see me again, though in fact he did, but not with me as the patient – he ran a maternity clinic, and was the obstetrician for three of my friends as I helped with their labor.) I parted ways with the no-goodnik, and set about the never-ending process of growing up.

And now, almost half a century later? No regrets. Quite the contrary, since I suspect this was the one rational decision I made the whole of that year. In short: thank god I had an abortion.

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File under: feminism, US politics, women | Tagged: Tags: abortion rights, contraception, Marie Stopes, Planned Parenthood | 31 Comments
  1. rachel Cowan says:
    August 27, 2015 at 12:52 pm

    I agree Lesley that we should be telling these stories. AS you say, we all, myself included, have had one or have helped a friend, or both. But where to tell them? How to publicize them in some impactful way? The impact of undocumented young people telling there stories was important in opening up the immigration debate. Does anybody know somebody who is organizing this?

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      August 27, 2015 at 1:10 pm

      Looks like I’m organizing an event at Town Hall in Seattle, with thirty women speaking two minutes each, telling their own stories. Alas not until January.
      Wouldn’t it be great if there was a “speak-out day” nationwide with women doing the same?!

      • rachel Cowan says:
        August 27, 2015 at 1:17 pm

        That is great Lesley. Have you posted this on FB? Want me to as well?

        • Lesley Hazleton says:
          August 27, 2015 at 1:46 pm

          Want to get a firm date first, but after that — surely!

          • Lesley Hazleton says:
            August 27, 2015 at 1:47 pm

            But re a “speak-out day” — go right ahead! Thanks.

      • Athena Nation says:
        September 2, 2015 at 3:09 am

        Count me in.
        I’ll tell my story.
        And, well, I’m already in Seattle.

        athenanation1308@gmail.com

  2. Nancy McClelland says:
    August 27, 2015 at 1:23 pm

    Incredibly touching story, and thank goodness those adults were there to provide help in your otherwise isolating situation. I also love that they got you a job to pay back the loan. And how wonderful to hear that you’re still friends with the counselor, and that you had continued interaction with the OB after that. Thank you so much for sharing.

  3. Justine says:
    August 27, 2015 at 1:29 pm

    I’m sorry to hear your stories, I am a different kind of person, I urged someone very close to me not to get an abortion, to instead consider adoption. Thank goodness she didn’t go through with it. I can’t imagine the emotional turmoil that would take place if you were truly honest about what sort of ‘procedure’ you and your friends are so nonchalantly discussing.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      August 27, 2015 at 1:51 pm

      Nothing at all nonchalant about it, Justine. And you’re making unwarranted assumptions. Some women do go through emotional turmoil; some, like me, don’t.
      Further, I don’t know how many adoptees you know, but those I know are haunted by the idea that they were “given up” at birth. Maybe it’s you who are being nonchalant.

      • Justine says:
        August 27, 2015 at 8:24 pm

        I didn’t mean to misread your tone. I do realize that many people have been adopted have questions throughout their life, but I would ask you if you feel that the possibility that a child or grown adult may feel ‘abandoned’ at times is reason enough to not give them a chance at life.

        • Lesley Hazleton says:
          August 28, 2015 at 9:24 am

          I hear you, Justine, but would ask you to consider what it’s like to come into the world unwanted. And what it’s like to carry a child to term and then let it go. The emotional damage I have seen done to both mother and child is enormous.
          I truly cannot imagine the pain of knowing that if I had not had that abortion and had opted instead for adoption, my child would have been a stranger among strangers, and would have asked all his or her life why I had abandoned him or her. Or to live my own life with no idea whether the child had been delivered to a good home or, as too often happens, a bad one.
          We’re talking here about a very private decision that has been cynically politicized for electoral purposes, and because making your private life public is a hard thing to do for those unused to being in the public eye, I have enormous respect for those women willing to do it.

          • Justine says:
            August 29, 2015 at 10:10 pm

            I guess I just don’t understand why the best alternative to any of the POSSIBLE outcomes that you might perceive as being negative to the child is the death of the child before it has a chance to experience life. I think the most innocent beings in our society need to be protected. And there are great options, like open adoption, where the baby wouldn’t have to be a stranger. Thanks for hearing me out!

          • Lesley Hazleton says:
            August 30, 2015 at 5:56 pm

            I know I can’t convince you, Justine; you are deeply committed to your stance. But your comments do make me think further on this subject, to the effect that this divide between pro-choice and pro-life is an entirely artificial one — a meme dreamed up by dogmatists. I am pro-choice precisely because I am pro-life. That is, pro-choice IS pro-life. I’ll write a post on this in the coming week, and thank you for prompting me to do so. — L.

  4. caitlin says:
    August 27, 2015 at 6:30 pm

    Thank you for sharing your story. We need a world where people feel comfortable sharing such stories, rather than shamed for making the best decision for themselves.

  5. nasir khanzada says:
    August 27, 2015 at 9:23 pm

    The Torah and the Quran strictly forbids this. We shud discourage rather than encourage and publisize this!

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      August 28, 2015 at 9:06 am

      “We”? Speak for yourself, please, not for everyone else.

    • Jafar Siddiqui says:
      September 2, 2015 at 1:51 pm

      Would you please cite the actual verses where abortion is strictly forbidden in the Quran? I need some enlightenment.

      • Lesley Hazleton says:
        September 2, 2015 at 2:03 pm

        I’m curious as to where it could possibly be in the Torah, also.

  6. amin tan says:
    August 28, 2015 at 3:41 am

    Dear Lesley Hazleton,
    Your story is a lesson that must be broadcasted world wide for the benefits of unwed mothers and those in similar predicament. This is the universal problem encountered by young people in a relationship. We need sensible solution to a potentially devastating turmoil in the life of a young person. Thank you for sharing your life experience with us, even though it was very personal and a long time ago involving ‘nogoodnik’.

    amin tan

  7. lynnrosengiordano says:
    August 29, 2015 at 1:25 am

    Leslie,
    Anything against sharing this with my local Planned Parenthood Director, Linda McCarthy? She’s a mensch who would be so behind a “speak out” date and there are many others I know of who feel that this would make a dent. We’ve often spoken of it in exactly these terms. It would be smart to co-ordinate events.
    I know I’m being a political engineer here, but your story is so many’s and they all need to be “packaged” for the greater good. This nonsense has to stop.
    Love you – really.
    Lynn

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      August 29, 2015 at 11:10 am

      Of course share, Lynn! Thank you. Happy to pool efforts. — L.

  8. jveeds says:
    August 31, 2015 at 11:04 am

    I’m becoming more and more inclined to get rid of the loaded terms “pro-choice” (or “choice”) and “pro-life”(as Lesley perhaps begins to hint at). I understand that there is a cultural context in which the terms arose but I believe they are ready to be retired as being no longer of any descriptive or argumentative value — they’re simply dog-whistle terms for staking out a position. “Pro-life” is particularly galling since it would seem to be all-inclusive. If you’re really pro-life you should be against all wars and all guns as well as capital punishment…and not just against “some” wars or instances of what some would call justifiable homicide like an armed home intrusion. If you’re really “pro-life” then all life should be sanctified beyond quibbling about exceptions. Unfortunately, that leaves us with the somewhat distasteful (to some) but accurate term: “abortion.” Of course, “pro-choice” does not exactly equate to “pro-abortion” so there’s at least a semblance of rationality to that term. No one’s across-the-board in favor of abortion in all situations; it’s really a question of having the choice. But presumably we couldn’t leave pro-choice alone and ban pro-life…so both have to go.

  9. Lesley Hazleton says:
    September 2, 2015 at 11:44 am

    Great, Athena! Plans are afoot. Will keep you in the loop. — L.
    (and congrats on your return to writing — gutsy and good.)

  10. jafar siddiqui says:
    September 2, 2015 at 2:01 pm

    Nobody has the right to dictate what a person (man or woman) may do with their body, especially not in forcing a woman to have child she does not want. “Adoption not Abortion” has a good marketing ring to it but it ignores the fact that the woman is being forced to nine months of unwanted pregnancy, limiting or destroying her career and a lifelong guilt of having and then giving up a baby that is now “out there”.
    To be sure, there are many people who were adopted and who turned out to be wonderful people, but that argument is tangantial and irrelevant; it is STILL the woman’s choice to make and only hers. — Penjihad.wordpress.com

  11. Marissa says:
    September 21, 2015 at 3:32 pm

    I’m in Seattle, and will gladly tell my story of both of my abortions.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      September 28, 2015 at 10:30 am

      Thanks Marissa — we’ll be moving ahead in October, and will let you know when and where as soon as we have it finalized. — L.

  12. Shelly says:
    September 21, 2015 at 5:57 pm

    My story is probably not the “type” of story you are looking for, but I still feel it is an important story to tell. I was pressured into an abortion by my partner and it was a very traumatic experience. I still haven’t gotten over the anger I feel for not standing up for myself and my feelings. That being said, I still support all women making the choice for themselves. This is a deeply personal choice that can’t be made by anyone other than the pregnant women.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      September 28, 2015 at 10:28 am

      Thank you Shelly — and I totally agree that yours is as important a story to tell as all the others. This is what we need: women refusing to be cowed and intimidated, and making their own choices. I deeply regret your regret, and as deeply appreciate your support of all women having the freedom and the self-respect to choose for themselves.

  13. Carolyne Wright says:
    October 11, 2015 at 3:53 am

    Please let me know about the Seattle event for this. Thanks so much!

  14. npear says:
    January 18, 2016 at 2:25 am

    Thankyou for writing about this. Although I admit I was disheartened the way your story ended. Not at all because I disapprove, but why is it that of all the (few) stories that women share about their abortion experience it typically ends with a “yes it was the right decision and I’m glad I did it”. Well what if its not the right decision? What if, you thought you were ready for a family but you’re marriage imploded at the same time that you found out you were pregnant, like I did three years ago?
    And while there was a such a strong and powerful feeling that you could do this on your own and you loved this child enough to see it through, you were overcome by the sudden, terrifying notion you were going to be a single mum and you couldn’t bear that the man that helped you conceive would be the father. For many, many reasons I didn’t / couldn’t live with this. So I had an abortion and I regret it. There I said it. One year of therapy and I still regret, feel tremendous guilt and sadness over my decision. Maybe one year was not enough or maybe its just something that I just have to learn to live with and accept.

    So can we please open up the conversation to all women and all experiences? I’ve considered whether the weight of my guilt is in part because of how I might be perceived for having done what I did and for feeling what I feel. Surely I am not the only women in the entirety of human history that has been through this and feels this same way? It would be nice to know that I’m not! And perhaps through sharing stories if will take some of the fear and loneliness out of such experiences.

    Thankyou again for sharing your story Lesley. People like you and the books you write restore my faith and love for humanity.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      January 18, 2016 at 11:33 am

      And thank you for your story too, which must have been very difficult to write. The sadness I totally understand, even if I experienced none myself; but as I see it, you have nothing to be guilty about. You sound as though as you are still grieving, and if this is so, then it seems to me that you are grieving less for the child that might have been than for the marriage that broke up — the marriage that you hoped for, that might and should have been, and that was not. Here’s what I wish for you, then: to begin looking forward instead of back, towards a good, committed, loving partner with whom you will become pregnant again, and fully share in parenthood. In hope — Lesley

The Book American Jews Most Want to Read

Posted February 19th, 2014 by Lesley Hazleton

“It’s almost laughable,” says M. J. Rosenberg of Media Matters. “The organized Jewish community, which claims to be worried about young Jews defecting in droves, just cannot help itself from doing things that drive Jews (not just young ones) away. Between supporting Netanyahu, advocating for war with Iran and maintaining the occupation, and keeping silent as Israel evolves into a theocracy, it is also in the business of preventing debate on all these things and more.”

judisThe case in point?  New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, which describes itself somewhat oxymoronically as “a living memorial to the Holocaust,” first scheduled and then turned around and canceled a talk by New Republic senior editor John Judis, author of the newly published Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict.

As this review in the Boston Globe points out, Judis’ book is no polemic, but a serious historical study.  So why the cancellation?  The book challenges the conventional Zionist wisdom about President Truman’s recognition of Israel in 1948, showing him as a hard-nosed politician trailing in the polls in May of an election year, and being heavily lobbied by American Zionists who then helped ensure his reelection.

Judis quotes this from Truman: “I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism; I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”

Such were the folkways of American politics: squeaky wheels getting the oil. And with American Arabs and Muslims still generally reluctant to take an active organized part in national politics, such they remain.

As for the irony of a museum banning historical discussion, this is quite the trend among elderly American Jewish poohbahs when it comes to Israel.  When Peter Beinart’s book The Crisis of Zionism came out last year, Jewish community centers, under pressure from wealthy donors, seem to have all but blackballed him. “Pretty soon,” says Rosenberg, “any institution under any kind of Jewish auspices will have to abide by speech limits set by the Jewish 1%. The 92nd Street Y already does (it will not allow any Palestinian to speak unless ‘balanced’ by a Jew). Brandeis University wouldn’t permit President Carter to speak [on his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid] without a simultaneous rebuttal by Alan Dershowitz. Pretty soon, Mount Sinai hospital will check what books patients are sneaking into their sick rooms.”

Or maybe not. Controversy over the museum’s about-face on Judis’ book is sparking exactly the public debate its donors sought to avoid — and far beyond the presumably hallowed halls of the museum itself. As with the conservative Indian attack on Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus, which I posted on here, the desire to squelch consideration of Judis’ book is fated to achieve the precise opposite of what it intended. Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism became a bestseller, and now Judis’ Genesis looks set to do the same.

As I post this, it’s #2 on Amazon’s list of books about Israel and the Middle East. By the time you read this post, it may well be #1.

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File under: absurd, Judaism, Middle East, US politics | Tagged: Tags: American Jews, Genesis, Harry Truman, Israel, John Judis, M J Rosenberg, Museum of Jewish Heritage, Peter Beinart, Zionism | Be the First to leave a comment

Kludgeocracy!

Posted October 28th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

This morning, Paul Krugman introduced me to a new word.

“The fact remains that Obamacare is an immense kludge — a clumsy, ugly structure that more or less deals with a problem, but in an inefficient way…. As Steven Teles of Johns Hopkins University put it, we’ve become a ‘kludgeocracy.'”

Entranced by the associative power of the word — klutz and sludge mashed together in a bureaucratic muddle — I thought it had to be a new coinage.  But no, as the computer-literate among you will know, it already exists (and is even better as an adjective:  kludgey).

Here’s how Teles himself explained it in his analysis for the New America Foundation :

The dictionary tells us that a kludge is “an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose…a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem.” The term comes out of the world of computer programming, where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to be backward compatible with the rest of a system. When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program, one that is hard to understand and subject to crashes. In other words, Windows.

“Clumsy but temporarily effective” also describes much of American public policy. For any particular problem, we have arrived at the most gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response. From the mind-numbing complexity of the health care system (which has only gotten more complicated, if also more just, after the passage of Obamacare), our Byzantine system of funding higher education, and our bewildering federal-state system of governing everything from the welfare state to environmental regulation, America has chosen more indirect and incoherent policy mechanisms than any comparable country.

This kludginess, as Krugman points out, is not inevitable.  In health care, it’s the result of the Republican ideological assault on the very idea of single-payer insurance:  i.e. Medicare.  The Republican ideology “is fundamentally hostile to the notion of the government helping people, and tries to make whatever help is given as limited and indirect as possible, restricting its scope and running it through private corporations.  And that ideology, at a fundamental level — more fundamental, even, than vested interests — is why Obamacare ended up being a big kludge.”

And it’s why the distinctly un-kludgey decal on the rear window of my car is this:

Medicare for all

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File under: US politics | Tagged: Tags: Affordable Health Act, kludgeocracy, Medicare For All, Obamacare, Paul Krugman, public policy, Steven Teles | 4 Comments
  1. Jerry M says:
    October 30, 2013 at 12:02 pm

    It is impossible to fix the healthcare system while doing nothing to change what is wrong with it. The change in the last generation from non-profit to profit seeking institutions and the mass marketing of medications are all things we need to lose if we wish to make it affordable. So, the ACA , which is mostly an effort to get everyone to pitch in to pay for unbillable hospital care, is really a joke. It is not affordable for many people who have variable income which is not easily verified.

    We need to move to a single payer system (medicare for all). We need to bargain with the bandits who set the prices for medications.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      November 18, 2013 at 11:25 am

      And maybe we need to stop taking so many of their medications! See this story today on the mad over-prescription of statins: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/18/health/risk-calculator-for-cholesterol-appears-flawed.html?hp

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      November 18, 2013 at 2:03 pm

      And maybe many of us need to stop taking their medications! See this story today on the mad over-prescription of statins: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/18/health/risk-calculator-for-cholesterol-appears-flawed.html?hp

  2. mudrake says:
    November 24, 2013 at 9:33 am

    Hurrah for bring up the absurdity of those anti-Affordable Health Care Act dolts. Our nation is #1 in healthcare costs in the world but #26 in longevity. So how does that all work out, Republicans?

American Influence?

Posted October 26th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

rohdeThe road to hell may be paved with good intentions, as the saying goes, but there’s a lot of understandable suspicion out there about exactly how good American intentions even are when it comes to the Middle East.  That’s the theme of David Rohde’s book ‘Beyond War:  Reimagining American Influence in the Middle East.’

The first step I’d suggest:  do some major reimagining of images, and forget Orientalist stereotypes like the camel-rider on  the cover.  The second step:  question the whole concept of influence.

The Catholic weekly America asked me to review the book, and here’s what I wrote:

When the Egyptian military seized power in June, American pundits instantly rushed to preach about democracy.  This took some hubris considering that two recent American elections – 2000 and 2004 – are still considered by many to be of questionable legality, and that redistricting is rapidly ensuring the minority status of Democratic strongholds throughout the south.

Is the US even in a position to preach democracy?  Especially since as with national elections, so too with foreign policy:  democracy is subject to money, and how it’s spent.

This is the hard-headed reality behind two-time Pulitzer prize-winner and former Taliban captive David Rohde’s new book, which focuses on how the US government spends money abroad, specifically in the Middle East.  It’s an argument for small-scale economic rather than large-scale military aid, and as such is immensely welcome in principle. The question is how to do it in practice.

As Rohde writes, “Washington’s archaic foreign policy apparatus” and its weakened civilian agencies mean that “in the decades since the end of the Cold War, the ability of the White House, State Department, and Congress to devise and carry out sophisticated political and development efforts overseas has withered.”

Whether Rohde is aware of it or not, the problem might be encapsulated in the subtitle of his own book, which assumes not only the existence of American influence, but also its necessity. Many of his sources are well-informed and palpably frustrated employees of the Agency for International Development (USAID) who are basically in conflict with both the State Department and Congress.  Yet the stated goals of USAID are clear:  they include providing “economic, development and humanitarian assistance around the world in support of the foreign policy goals of the US.” [my italics].

For all the talk about the need for humanitarian aid and intervention (most recently in Syria), the reality is purely political.  What’s presented as humanitarian aid is always a matter of foreign policy.  And American foreign policy is still intensely focused on George W. Bush’s GWOT – the “global war on terror.”

The principle is that US aid should act as a stabilizing force against militant Islamic extremism.  But the very idea of the US as a stabilizing force has been thoroughly undermined by the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even the best-considered foreign aid has now been rendered suspect in many parts of the Middle East, especially when there’s “a widespread perception of the American government as a finely tuned, nefarious machine, not an unwieldy cacophony of viewpoints,” and when authoritarian control fosters an intense rumor mill, with conspiracy theories rampant (most recently, for instance, Malala Yousufzai as a CIA plant, or American-backed ‘Zionists’ as the instigators of the new regime in Egypt).  In Egypt in particular, Rohde notes, “Washington faces an extraordinary public-policy conundrum.  Decades of support for Mubarak will not be forgotten overnight.”

Rohde details the conundrum in a series of country-by-country chapters, some intensively well-reported (particularly on civilian contractors’ takeover of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and on the use of drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan), while others (on Turkey, Libya, and Tunisia) seem more perfunctory by comparison.  But in the light of the June military coup, the chapter on American dollars-for-peace financing and the Egyptian army’s vast business empire is particularly fascinating and uncomfortably prescient.

Oddly, though, there is no chapter on Israel, the largest recipient of American aid.  This seems to me tantamount to ignoring the elephant in the room, since the intense investment in an Israel that seems willing only to prolong and intensify the conflict with Palestine undermines US efforts elsewhere in the region.  In fact you could make a pretty strong argument that American support of Israel, driven by domestic electoral politics, runs directly counter to its own foreign policy interests.  Inevitably, the US is perceived elsewhere in the Middle East as at least tolerating if not encouraging Israel’s land grab in the Palestinian territories;  if its funds do not literally finance the expansionist project, they certainly free up funds that do.

Even assuming the best American intentions, then, they’re all too often interpreted as the worst.  But what exactly are those best intentions?

At root, this book is, or could have been, about America’s perception of itself.  Are we the world’s greatest do-gooders, distributing our largesse (and our arms) where most urgently needed?  Or are we acting to secure a blinkered and out-dated conception of our own interests?

Either way, as Rohde wrote in a New York Times op-ed back in May, “We should stop thinking we can transform societies overnight…  Nations must transform themselves.  We should scale back our ambitions and concentrate on long-term economics.”  His economic recommendations are accordingly small-scale (sometimes to the level of pathos, as in his enthusiasm for an Egyptian version of ‘The Apprentice’).  Yet his emphasis on entrepreneurship may actually undercut his argument that trying to force Western models on other countries will backfire.  And this is the argument that matters.

Like Ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya, says Rohde, American officials need to listen rather than try to muscle their way in, whether economically or militarily.  A little respect, that is.   Preach less, listen more.  That may not be much of a “reimagining,” but it’s the really important message of this book.

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File under: Middle East, US politics | Tagged: Tags: 'America' magazine, 'Beyond War', Afghanistan, David Rohde, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Pakistan, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, USAID | 2 Comments
  1. fatmakalkan says:
    October 26, 2013 at 2:13 pm

    I agree with you Lesley. In reality after Eygptian over throw of Moursi next one was Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. Turkey has much older democracy than Israel in Middle East but it is not in the interest of west to have strong Turkey with strong leader. West wants Soudi type regimes that will obey. Gezi park demonstrations at Istanbul in reality was an unsuccessful cue attempt of west. Thanks God it was unsuccessful. It would destabilize Turkey politically and economically and make Turkey again slave of west. Why West and Israil gov. Wants to get rid of Erdogan? Is he radical Islamist? No. Is he planing to bring sharia law back to Turkey ? No. If Turkey was a Christian state they would allow it to became another France or Germany but it is Muslim state very mellow understanding of Islam no treat to anybody but still even that much of Islam is not OK. There fore Turkey must remain as a third world country for western Judeo- Christian politicians.

  2. Jerry M says:
    October 28, 2013 at 10:57 am

    I can understand why the author left Israel out. I may not like our policy in Israel but it is a very different problem than what is happening in the Muslim world. In the case of the Obama administration, I don’t think they have a clue as to what they want to accomplish. Their lack of real preparation has led to them to keeping the mistakes of the Bush administration in effect long after they have left town. For example the spying on Germany has been going on for 10 years.

    Obama is a good administrator when he has a clear goal, but without ideas and without good advisors he is only a little better than an amateur.

Sign Here, Syria (and Israel, and Egypt)

Posted September 9th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

In the whole debate on whether to deploy a missile strike against Syria for the use of sarin gas, my mind has been (appropriately?) like the many-handed Hindu goddess of darkness and death, Kali.

— On the one hand, what exactly would a US missile strike achieve, especially since President Obama has so carefully described it as limited in scope and intent?

— But then am I really so callous as to say we should not move when chemical weapons are deployed, especially against sleeping civilians?

— Then again, the level of the debate has sickened me (all the talk about maintaining America’s credibility, for example, as though that were more important that what’s actually happening in Syria — or the talk about how we can’t let Assad “get away with it,” as though he were merely a schoolboy who’d broken the rules).

— But does that really mean we just sit back and do nothing?

— Though that’s exactly what we’ve been doing as an average of 5,000 Syrians have been killed each month.

— But is military action really the only option?

—  And isn’t the idea of a surgical strike another of those military oxymorons created for armchair warriors thrilling to missile-mounted cameras as though war were a video game?

—  And shouldn’t the US have intervened to prevent chemical weapons being used, instead of as a gesture of disapproval after their use?

All this, and I haven’t even gotten to the question of who would actually gain from such a strike.  And without even mentioning Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and…

Kali needs more than eight hands.

But today’s diplomatic developments seem to me immensely hopeful.

All I know at this moment is what you do:  Russia has publicly proposed that Syria give up its stockpiles of chemical weapons.  And since Russia has so openly supported the Assad regime (and been a major supplier of the ingredients for those weapons), and since Assad has so publicly claimed his regime did not use chemical weapons (all evidence to the contrary), the demand that he give them up to avoid a US-led missile strike may be an excellent example of his bluff being expertly called.

So I have a modest proposal that might sweeten the deal — for all of the Middle East.  It’s as follows:

Seven countries have held out on the international treaty against the use and manufacture of chemical weapons, aka the Chemical Weapons Convention.  Those countries are Syria, Israel, Egypt, Angola, Myanmar, South Sudan, and North Korea.  (Two of these — Israel and Myanmar — have signed, but so far, have not yet ratified it.)

So if we’re really serious about banning chemical weapons, and if we’re really serious about the search for some nascent form of Middle East peace (two big ‘ifs,’ but bear with me), we should demand not only that Syria give up its chemical weapons and sign and ratify the treaty, but that at least Israel and Egypt both step up to the plate too.

We should seize the moment and say “Sign here, Mssrs Assad, Netanyahu, and Sisi.”

And we should do it right now.  Before we forget about chemical weapons until the next time they’re used.  Before we leave Assad to keep killing Syrians with conventional weapons.  And before the American public again retreats into its normal state of apathy about anything that happens in countries where the majority are not apple-pie white and Christian.

At least let something good come out of all this horror.

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File under: Middle East, US politics, war | Tagged: Tags: chemical weapons, Egypt, Israel, Russia, Syria, treaty, United States | 6 Comments
  1. Irene says:
    September 9, 2013 at 11:15 pm

    Thanks Lesley!!!!! This is the best I have read and heard on this topic so far. I am with you. Completely.

  2. Dora Hasen says:
    September 9, 2013 at 11:26 pm

    By jove, I think you have got it! The time is definitely now and I appreciate your truthful comment about American public.

  3. nuzhat fakih says:
    September 10, 2013 at 12:01 am

    how TRUE Lesley……on every word said here….oh, what a disgruntled feel it is, to be a helpless observer to this insolent crime being flaunted for the rest of humanity to see…..misguidedly in the name of religion or politics or power.
    Our hearts and prayers remain with each innocent sufferer of this holocaust.
    had been waiting for your comment on this issue from you, and was expectedly rewarded with these enlightened views.

    Nuzhat.

  4. Chad says:
    September 10, 2013 at 4:31 am

    Me Like!

  5. Lesley Hazleton says:
    September 11, 2013 at 10:37 am

    But how? Per today’s NYT, finding let alone destroying Syria’s chemical arsenal may be all but impossible:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/world/middleeast/Syria-Chemical-Disarmament.html?hp

  6. Adil Rasheed says:
    September 19, 2013 at 7:00 am

    Lezley, I would like to bring to your kind attention that it is not only Sisi, Netanyahu and Assad who need to sign and ratify the treaty but even the US and Russia should be told to observe the CWC which required them to destroy their stockpile of chemical weapons before a final deadline required by the CWC, which elapsed in April 2012. So much for those who like drawing red lines.

Stereotype Buster

Posted May 30th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

This video got a big grin from me.  I suspect it’ll do the same for everyone who’s often asked “where are you from?” because it’s a perfect debunking of the assumptions and condescension lurking behind that question:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/DWynJkN5HbQ]

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File under: absurd, existence, sanity, US politics | Tagged: Tags: video, where are you from? | 1 Comment
  1. dajudges says:
    May 31, 2013 at 9:33 am

    That’s so funny I must remember that the next time someone asks me where I am from. As a White British Muslim who wears hijab both in Saudi and in Britain it’s the most constantly ask question. I don’t fit the stereotype

“For The Greater Good”

Posted May 18th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

This came in as a comment from someone called Bob.  It seems to be a response primarily to my previous post, Guilt By Drone, and the earlier Armed to the Eyeballs.  I’m running it as a separate post with a kind of wondering bemusement at its rather low level of literacy and humanity, and its rather high one of piety and righteousness.  Am particularly intrigued by his saying “too many guns and killing of children by drones, and all I see are complaints,” and by the almost delightful non sequitur of his concluding with “thank you and God bless.”

I read some of the posts like guilty by drone and armed to the eyeballs and I thought, wow are these people serious, to much of an military to many guns and the killing of children by drones and all I saw we’re complaints. Well if your not happy with the free, great country America than why don’t you leave I mean come on your lucky to have such a dedicated military like ours and truly I don’t know if you’ve realized this but the only way to gain peace is through war I’m sorry but that’s basically how no doubt about it. Our military keeps this country safe and under our lord and savior and keeps us the nation we are. No ones perfect and we can’t make everyone happy in this world sorry, and what are we just gonna sit back and watch our country get attacked like 9/11 saying o please don’t hurt us let’s make peace well wake up not everyone wants that and the reason we send drones and kids die is because unfortunately that’s how it has to be why I don’t know and neither do you but each decision we make has a impact and is for the greater good so give thanks to who we are and how great of a military we have and how much you and I have. Thank you and God bless

————————————————————

Later:  novelist Michael Gruber posted a brief but cogent analysis of Bob’s thinking on my Facebook page.  Here it is:

“The statement arises naturally from the characterization of 9/11 (which we owe to Mr Bush) as an act of existential evil, rather than as a political act with its own logic. The man’s premises are that the USA is an exceptional nation under the special protection of Christ, and thus any attack against it is not a political act but a move in a cosmic contest, in which an apocalyptic response by the American military is not only justified, but required.

“The logic moves from the legitimate desire to punish the organizers of the attack, to the desire to punish those who are “like” the attackers, which results in killing those associated with those who are like the attackers, to, ultimately, the punishment of the societies who produce those who are like the attackers.

“A similar progression characterized WW2, in which the world was shocked when the fascist nations bombed cities, after which it was considered legitimate to bomb the cities of the fascists into rubble. This at least had the amoral logic of tit for tat. But in the present situation, some militants kill their own people in pursuit of sectarian triumph, and we drone kill the militants and their kin, so that . . . And here we lose the last scraps of logical policy. At some level we [I’m assuming he means US policy-makers — LH] sort of agree with this bozo.”

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File under: absurd, Christianity, US politics, war | Tagged: Tags: drones, God, gun control, Michael Gruber, US military | 6 Comments
  1. Abdulrazak Ibrahim says:
    May 18, 2013 at 2:17 pm

    Wow! What could make a person think and write like this?

  2. sohail says:
    May 18, 2013 at 6:51 pm

    It is really sad that Bob has a vote in the American elections.

  3. zummard. says:
    May 19, 2013 at 5:16 am

    A little too drunk and no ‘speech writers’ on hand. I am glad some important people from the past read your posts too. It reminds me of what Shakespeare said so well.
    “LIFE IS A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT, FULL OF SOUND AND FURY, SIGNIFYING NOTHING.”
    I am left with the thought – everyone in the world needs education, not just those on the other side of the fence. Let’s start from ‘home’. Keep up your mission, Lesley.

  4. Nasir Khan says:
    May 19, 2013 at 7:31 am

    Ah, what to say! Suffice it may be that the 9/11 was an inside job. Buildings dont come down like that and debris dont melt away and vanish, unless there is an inside job…

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      May 19, 2013 at 12:33 pm

      Any New Yorker who detests Bush, Rove, Rumsfeld etc far more than you do can tell you that this is just conspiracy-theory nonsense. Kindly keep it off this blog.

  5. Gustav Hellthaler says:
    May 19, 2013 at 12:42 pm

    And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
    The way to dusty death

    Mr Khan,
    Take a cubic foot of molten aluminum and pour it into a cubic foot of water as Alcoa did many years ago, and watch your laboratory disappear. Take an hundred tons of molten aluminum and have it flow down stairwells to where the sprinklers are working and watch several floors disappear with a lot of intact building above. The impact of the falling upper floor would make the base structure buckle. No conspiracy necessary.

    Gus Hellthaler

Guilt By Drone

Posted May 16th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

drones1Unless you have the misfortune to live under their flight paths, it’s easy to push drones to the back of your mind.  That’s what’s so perfect from a US military point of view:  remote-control warfare, with the emphasis on ‘remote.’  See no evil, know no evil. What does an operator sitting in a bunker in Nevada know of what’s happening on the ground in Pakistan?

What do you?

Drone3While you might have registered the fact that US drone use in Pakistan quintupled in the Obama years from the Bush years, you’ve probably avoided dwelling on it.  You almost certainly haven’t thought through the personal and political havoc these drones are wreaking.  And you probably don’t want to even consider reading Living Under Drones, a 165-page report by the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Center at Stanford and the Global Justice Clinic at NYU (that mouthful of authorship is off-putting enough).

Enter Mohsin Hamid, the Pakistani writer whose deliciously wicked novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist touched the raw edge of western anxiety, and whose newly published satire How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia is a well-deserved best-seller.  Hamid has the novelist’s ability to bring you inside experience that otherwise remains… remote.  So it was a savvy move when the New York Review of Books asked him to review the Stanford/NYU report, even if they then published his piece under the almost perversely understated headline ‘Why Drones Don’t Help.’  If you don’t read the report itself (there’s a summary here, and the full report is downloadable), at least read Hamid’s review of it.

Here’s an excerpt:

If there is any misconception that the drone strikes are primarily counter-terrorist in nature, aimed at key leaders of international terror networks, this can be dispensed with [….]  The elimination of ‘high-value’ targets — al-Qaeda or ‘militant’ leaders — has been exceedingly rare:  fewer than 50 people, or about 2% of all drone deaths.  Rather, ‘low-level insurgents’ have been the main targets [….]

In the media, the term ‘militant’ is often used in describing drone casualties.  The report makes clear that this blurs together two legally very different groups of people.  A ‘militant’ who is a member of the Taliban, planning to attack US troops, is not the same as a ‘militant’ who normally herds livestock, carries a rifle, and today is sitting with other members of his clan to discuss a threat top his isolated village from a neighboring clan.

Furthermore, according to the report, the ‘current administration’s apparent definition’ holds that any male of military age who is killed in an area where militants are thought to operate (and where, therefore, drones operate) will be counted as a militant if killed.

In other words, if you’re killed by a drone, the Obama administration says that this makes you by definition a militant.  Your death in a drone strike is all the proof that’s needed of your guilt, and thus of the right to have killed you.

Neither Orwell nor Kafka could have dreamed up better.

Hamid continues:

This has allowed administration officials to make wildly unrealistic claims, disputed by even the most conservative analysts of drone casualties, that civilian deaths are ‘extremely rare’ or have been in ‘single digits’ since President Obama took office.

If you disregard this novel definition and then try to ascertain what category of person was actually killed, you will arrive instead at an estimate that some 411 to 884 civilians have died in US drone strikes in Pakistan, including 168 to 197 children.

This includes so-called ‘signature strikes’ which attack unknown people for gathering in groups or otherwise “behaving like militants” as well as people trying to bring aid to injured victims of strikes.

Hamid goes on to look closer at the harrowing experience of those affected, and at the widespread Pakistani revulsion at the use of drones.  And with the US now intensifying its drone campaign elsewhere, as in Yemen, he cogently makes the case that their use only weakens already weak governments and thus severely undermines America’s own foreign-policy interests.

In other words, this isn’t counter-terrorist; it’s counter-effective.  What’s touted as “clean” technology (for the man in the bunker) is in fact as dirty as ever.  And the depressing conclusion is that the Obama administration is as stuck as its predecessor in the self-defeating meme of a military “war on terrorism.”

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File under: technology, US politics, war | Tagged: Tags: Bush, drone warfare, fatalities, Living Under Drones, Mohsin Hamid, NYU, Obama, Pakistan, Stanford, Yemen | 3 Comments
  1. Guy de la Rupelle says:
    May 16, 2013 at 4:34 pm

    Interesting but not hugely surprising given the US government’s methods of counting “enemy kills”. The line in the 7th paragraph (“In other words, if you’re killed by a drone, the Obama administration says that this makes you by definition a militant.”) is very much similar in nature to the line of thinking of those same people at the top of the governmental pyramid in the late 1960s in Vietnam, whereby if you were running and wearing black clothing and therefore killed by helicopter gunships and/or ground troops, you were most likely VC or a communist sympathizer.
    I’m at the moment reading an excellent book called “Kill anything that moves” (by Nick Turse) about what what took place during the Vietnam war by US forces. The difference I suppose that today this “mistakes” claiming the lives of innocent civilians are done from the comfort of a Herman Miller armchair somewhere on a DOD base in the US instead of a helicopter as close quarters, and that makes it more justifiable and cleaner. The problem, similar to that of Vietnam, is that local customs – gatherings of bearded men in salvar kameez, lamb-skin vests, turbans or pakool hats – makes them in the “eyes” of a drone, militants. Often, however, these are just social gatherings or weddings (some weddings have been fired on with women and children as casualties by drone attacks). And in November 2011 a drone attack mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani military near the Afghan border resulting in serious diplomatic outrage from the Pakistani government. Not a good way to make friends and keep allies…

  2. tamam Kahn says:
    May 16, 2013 at 4:49 pm

    This is heartbreaking. That photo of the child should be sent far and wide. Hello. Wake up!

  3. Meezan says:
    May 17, 2013 at 12:39 am

    Another huge draw back of the drones is they promote even more hate. Before the drone strikes in Pakistan, there were no Pakistani Taliban and no suicide bombings targeting Pakistani civilians and establishment. Drone strikes created hate for Pakistan among the tribal people who saw Pakistan as an equal party in this mass murder and out of revenge they joined the taliban terrorists that previously were foreign to them.

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