7 12 2020

We hope you have been enjoying this series, which, with each week’s Bonuses during this long, gray season, has featured about 70 stories, songs, art works, videos, photographs, radio shorts, excerpts or notes from Kopkind’s extended family across the country and the world. We hope you are safe and ready. And we ask that, if you can, please press the Donate button (above) on this site—because we’re also hoping to survive this thing, to flower again on the green grass of Vermont; and we could really use a little help from our friends. Thank you all.

Scenes From a Pandemic: 36

by Verandah Porche

A continuing series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe and experience it.

Portraits of a moment from Great River Terrace. (Lauren Watrous)

“Thanks Forgiving,” a Poem

Guilford, Vermont

Once the Lamplighter Inn, a motel that had fallen into disrepair on the edge of Brattleboro, Great River Terrace is a permanently affordable housing community of people who have experienced homelessness. It is a “housing first” residence, the first of its kind in Vermont. There is no obligation to be “clean and sober” to live there. Senator Bernie Sanders wrote at its opening that the residence “will allow Vermonters struggling with complex challenges to live with stability and dignity.” I have been visiting and writing with residents since the spring of 2019. As an “embedded writer,” I listen, encourage, write, collaborate, and share my own poems.

Our project “Faces of Home” began spontaneously when a resident saw a portrait painted by a local artist. She invited the artist and her friends to paint at Great River Terrace. Each week, while the artists painted, a resident would sit and talk with me in the common room. I typed in a rough shorthand, and in the weeks following we edited the text together.

I got here in September. I get choked up talking about it.
I got used to losing everything, and finally, I lost my hope.
After living in other people’s houses and sleeping outside,
I had a hard time saying, Meet at my apartment.
It seemed weird, awkward, unfamiliar.
It took practice. Come to my place.
It was like learning a new word: HOME.
–Joe S.

Covid-19 interrupted this project. Spring and summer, we stayed away. In September, we arranged to meet, masked, outside until the cold made it impossible to paint and type. 

My friends at Green River Terrace are striving to reinvent their lives after traumas that led to homelessness and their existence in survival mode, sometimes for years. We try to stay in touch, “liking” and commenting on Facebook memes and sorrows. Below, a drawing from the courtyard by Ralph DeAnna.

In the common
room, your portraits
bloom, alive and
warm.
 
Little did we know
how long the longing
would go
on.
 
Dry wind blew.
The garden
pulled through,
giving and
forgiving.
 
I landed on your
Timeline
to ask how you
were living.
 
In autumn,
masked, on the
patio,
the artists drew,
we spoke.
 
I memorized your
faces
and stories,
wreathed by
smoke.
 
             *
 
That regal tree on
the lawn
with a name
nobody knew
 
stays rooted here,
and strong
though her gold
leaves shook and
flew.
 
Be easy now,
belong.
Let her mom-arms
shelter you.

Verandah Porche is a poet and writing partner based in Guilford, just up the hill from Kopkind Road. She and singer Patty Carpenter, both longtime supporters of the project, have performed many times at Kopkind. The two have just launched a Patreon site to share their new songs and poems.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece originally appeared on The Nation‘s website on December 2, 2020. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and The Nation crew.

Bonus: ‘Trump’s Worst Crime’

Kurdish kids versus Turkish military (photo: Delil Souleiman/AFP/Getty)

Somehow, even some people on the left labor under the illusion that Donald Trump, terrible domestically, was not too bad a force in the world. On December 1 our friend Patrick Cockburn, the great war correspondent and author of War in the Age of Trump (Verso), published an article in CounterPunch reminding us of the horror the Trump administration visited upon the Syrian Kurds: first, in 2018, by countenancing the Turkish occupation of Afrin, where Kurds were displaced by Syrian Arab jihadis; then, in October 2019, by abandoning the US-Kurdish alliance and green-lighting Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria, leading to the murder, rape and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Kurdish inhabitants. “Tragedy on this scale blurs in people’s minds because they do not comprehend atrocities beyond their personal experience,” Patrick writes in “Trump’s Worst Crime Must Not Be Forgotten.” Here, an extract, condensed.

Rohilat Hawar, a 34-year-old Kurdish woman with three children, had worked as a mathematics teacher in Afrin City before the Turkish attack. She fled in February 2018 “because there were Turkish airstrikes every day,” but she was unable to reach the Kurdish-controlled autonomous region.

She returned to Afrin, where her house had been looted, where her former neighbors had been dispossessed, and where she is now trapped. She says that Turkish-backed Syrian jihadi militias shoot anybody trying to leave: “A friend of mine was killed with her 10-year-old child last year while trying to flee.” At the same time, the Kurds who stay are preyed upon.

She does not dare speak Kurdish in the street. The Turkish army, she says, considers all Kurds to be “terrorists”; the militiamen are even more dangerous, regarding “Kurds as pagans, disbelievers who should be killed on orders from God.”

Rohilat has had to put on a hijab, which Kurdish women normally do not wear. When going to the market earlier this week, she saw two Kurdish girls walking in the same direction. Two militiamen with guns on a motorcycle cruised slowly beside them. “Suddenly the motorcycle came close to the girls and the militiamen sitting on the back grabbed the breast of one of them.” The militiamen got off their motorcycle and started kissing them and fondling their breasts, leaving only when a crowd gathered and Rohilat took the girls to her home.

In the two formerly Kurdish zones in Syria, Arab militiamen, mostly jihadis from elsewhere in Syria, are the cutting edge of the Turkish occupation. The Kurds in Afrin were largely farmers, cultivating fruit and vegetables and, above all, olives. The new settlers, Rohilat says, “cut down the olive trees and sell them as firewood.” Foodstuffs have to be imported now and are sold at a higher price.

By turning over effective control of Kurdish-populated areas to anti-Kurdish Islamist gunmen, the Turkish government ensures ethnic cleansing, but without appearing to be directly responsible. Until recently, the militiamen were paid $100 a month by Turkey. They supplemented this by looting and confiscating Kurdish property. Since August the militiamen’s pay has been reduced, and Turkish army patrols are clamping down on looting. The aim here is to persuade the militiamen to volunteer to fight as Turkish proxies in Libya and against the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. Many have been killed.

Since August, the coronavirus has spread rapidly in Afrin. Rohilat herself tested positive at a Turkish medical facility, but says she and many others will not go to a military hospital for treatment because few people who do go return alive. Instead, they stay at home, taking paracetamol and eating lentil and onion soup. Rohalit cannot afford to buy face masks, and can buy bread only because her children do odd jobs in the market, and relatives in Turkey send her a little money every couple of months. Grim though life is, Rohilat is one of the survivors. Other Kurds live in unsanitary camps, have been killed, held for ransom or disappeared.

On this theme of downplaying the US violence policy over the past four years, Janine Jackson of FAIR, a Kopkind mentor in 2000, recently did an interesting interview on her show “CounterSpin” with journalist Murtaza Hussain on the “trail of civilians dead in Yemen” and the siege of Iran under the Trump administration. Listen here.


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Categories : Scenes from a Pandemic Series, The Nation

Scenes From a Pandemic: 32

9 11 2020

by Maria Margaronis

A continuing series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe and experience it.

A walk in the woods, and what have we here? (photos: Maria Margaronis)

A Walk in the Woods

London, Halloween

Secretive, indifferent, they erupt from the shadow world beneath our feet. They whisper risk; promise delight, delirium, or death. Their names are magical: crowded parchment, club-like tuning fork, hairy curtain crust. Candlesnuff, fragrant funnel, collared parachute, coral spot. Destroying angel. Dead man’s fingers. There’s respect in the stretch for connection in those names, that effort to domesticate without denying mystery.

I live on the edge of a wild London park, so big that after a lifetime of wandering there I can still get lost in its woods. My housemate is a senior hound of stubborn habits and profound emotional intelligence. Together we walk every morning, rain or shine; this is my sanity in the long season of uncertainty. I alternate between looking up at the trees and down at the packed dirt paths and layers of fallen leaves. For years I’ve searched for shards of broken china—flashes of blue or pink against the grey, debris from Victorian middens used to fill the ground. Now I look for fungi too. As darkness presses hard against our flimsy human arrangements, I find their quiet persistence, their getting on with it, comforting.

Mostly they come in shades of white or beige or gray. Pale tentacles poke out of rotting stumps; dull frills edge fallen logs; white domes like flying saucers lurk under the grass. But today, in the woods, the dog and I discovered a spreading patch of amanita muscaria, or fly agaric—the bright red, white-spotted toadstools native to fairyland. They took my breath away: their unlikely brightness pushing up through dead leaves, the presence of something I’d associated only with the world of imagination.

Fly agaric, ready for its close-up

I’d also always thought that they were deadly poison—a loud scarlet warning. In fact, in measured quantities they are hallucinogenic. (They will also make you very, very sick.) The first mushroom known to produce visions in the West was not the fly agaric but psilocybe semilanceata, the common liberty cap, so named by Samuel Taylor Coleridge for its resemblance to the Phrygian cap worn by the sans-culottes of the French Revolution. But it was the flashier (and more dangerous) fly agaric, encountered in Kamchatka by a Polish traveler named Joseph Kopek around 1797, that penetrated European folklore and became the official mushroom of Victorian phantasmagoria, a parasol for elves and pixies in children’s picture books, the kitsch accoutrement of garden gnomes in the fantasyland of suburbia.

Illustration by Richard Doyle from his In Fairyland: A Series of Pictures from the Elf-World (1870)

The dog didn’t deign to sniff my fly agaric patch; probably just as well. But those toadstools spoke to me of things that seem especially precious on this weird Halloween, as the pandemic rages across Europe, and our incompetent, blustering, disconnected disaster of a prime minister announces a four-week lockdown too late to save thousands of lives: imagination, risk, rebellion, wildness, mystery; dangerous beauty erupting from the darkness underground.

Maria Margaronis is a writer and radio documentary maker. A member of Kopkind’s honorary board, our friend, summer neighbor, and a guest speaker in 2011, she was Andrew Kopkind’s first Nation intern, in 1983.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece originally appeared on The Nation‘s website on November 4, 2020. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and The Nation crew.

Bonus: Alicia Garza on Possibilities for Our Collective Future

detail, Satsuma porcelain bowl, late Edo period

Alicia Garza (then Schwartz) came to Kopkind as a young organizer in 2006. Seven years later she was a force behind Black Lives Matter. She has a new book out, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart. In this audio excerpt from her introduction, she mentions her childhood attraction to Satsuma porcelain “because it looked like broken pieces that had fused together to make something new,” and speaks of BLM in terms of the organizing that led up to it long before it emerged on the stage of history—the work that came together and broke apart and came together again, not as a hashtag but as people in motion. “My hope,” she writes at the end of the introduction, “is that this book leaves us thinking differently about the moment we’re in, how we got here, and where we can go, together—and what gets in the way.”


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Scenes From a Pandemic: 29

19 10 2020

by JoAnn Wypijewski

A continuing series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe and experience it.

(photo: JoAnn Wypijewski)

Sorrow

Buffalo, New York

In memory, my Aunt Dolor is a big woman. Big hair, big sunglasses, big jewelry, big bold colors, with geometric shapes in the 1960s and ’70s especially, when our families saw each other most. Her husband, my mother’s brother, called her Doll.

We buried her this week. She came to an ordinary end in this now-ordinary time: sick from Covid-19 in a nursing home, alone and aged, with a disintegrating mind, transferred to a hospital, dead within hours. We can’t know what she really knew of her circumstances or condition in the lead-up; whether she understood the peril of the time or recognized her youngest daughter waving from the car when she looked out her window; whether she registered, on her last day, that it was this daughter’s voice coming from the space-suited figure whose gloved hand held hers in the hospital as she expired.

Everyone has heard this story countless times since the pandemic descended. I have heard it countless times, usually without the gloved hand, the small mercy of this particular death, which came too late to be included in the latest Covid data reported by nursing homes to the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network: 58,481 residents dead as of September 27; 245,912 confirmed cases; 141,744 suspected cases. It becomes terribly familiar after seven full months, this raking of the old, the infirm, the enfeebled—about 8,354 nursing home deaths from the virus every month since March.

Naturally, perspective shifts when the number being contemplated is one.

Since my aunt’s death, I have thought about all the women whose work is not recognized, and who themselves are socially invisible in nursing homes, counted in bulk as “vulnerable populations” or “victims of the virus”—as if they had never labored to produce a generation, loved difficult men (or women), invented themselves when the space for that was narrow.

My aunt came of age when a woman’s ordinary destiny was marriage and children. And so she married, and so she had children. And moved to the suburbs, to a ranch house with a reinforced and well-equipped fallout shelter. The children had a collie and a big back yard, and then one of them died.

He was her youngest, her only son, 8 years old. They laid him out in a little white suit. His skull was fractured when a car plowed into the side of his father’s Buick, and the child’s head was dashed against the inside frame of the backseat. I think it was a Buick. My uncle and the oldest daughter were in the hospital in traction with broken femurs for months without proper healing. Then they had surgery and body casts, and lay for weeks in rented hospital beds set up facing each other in the family room.

And there was Aunt Dolor suddenly in charge, laden with grief and the needs of two who were incapacitated, striving to be cheerful for them, nursing them once home, cooking and cleaning and dreaming up treats, comforting the other child, the little girl who was scared and sad and who decades later would be with her as she ran out of breath. A child myself at the time, riveted by death and injury in the family, I didn’t fully appreciate all that this cost my aunt. She bore it with an often comic sense of fate, as she did her own multiplying health problems as the years progressed, reaching for joy in the service of love, making “a life of abundance every day,” as her granddaughter said—“Grandma Doll.”

Dolor, Dolores; the name means ‘sorrow.’

Since her death, I have thought about all the women whose work is not recognized in “Those We’ve Lost” newspaper features. Women who spent down their hours home-making, as it used to be called, and who themselves are socially invisible now that they are 80 or 90 or more, in nursing homes, counted in bulk as “vulnerable populations” or “victims of the virus”—as if they had never labored to produce a generation, loved difficult men (or women), cared for aged relatives, mourned a child lost or mutilated, invented recipes and entertainments, invented themselves when the space for that was narrow, had their hand on history’s wheel simply by being.

It isn’t death that’s so terrible; it’s the eclipse of the courage and creativity of living. “At least she didn’t suffer,” people have said, learning that my aunt died within hours of reaching the hospital. It’s what people often say about death, shortchanging the immense undertaking of life.

JoAnn Wypijewski is a co-founder and president of the board of Kopkind. Her book What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo: Essays on Sex, Authority & the Mess of Life was published earlier this year.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece originally appeared on October 14, 2020, on The Nation’s website. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and The Nation crew.

Bonus: If You’re Wondering About QAnon, Wonder No More

Jeff Sharlet, a terrific journalist and author who has been a mentor at Kopkind (2005), guest speaker, friend and supporter, has just published a riveting story in Vanity Fair about Trumpism’s transition to belief that pedophiliac cannibals are trying to control America. Below the beginning, excerpted.

(photo: Gregory Halpern/Magnum Photos, detail)

She saw shadows. She always had. She was spiritual, not Christian—she’d left that behind when she’d left Waco, in her early 20s. She got into Wicca, “super witchy,” says a friend. “She was fun, happy, a little wild. Just a normal girl.” I’ll call her Evelyn, because she’s in a sense a hostage now, a captive of her beliefs. There are Evelyns everywhere. This Evelyn was in Austin. She worked when she could, sometimes she danced, stripped. She had a boyfriend who took care of her. She’d never had much luck holding on to a job. She’d bounce back and forth between her family in Waco and her friends in the city, right to left, red to blue. She was bright—a good listener, says one friend, a liberal lawyer whom Evelyn called “freedom fighter.” She was gullible, says another friend, the one who introduced Evelyn to QAnon not long into the pandemic, “for shits and giggles.”

Which is how Evelyn came to believe that the shadows she’d seen within Wicca as the nuances of life were actually the satanic forces that Q—thought by devotees to be a government insider “dropping” cryptic clues via chat forums about Donald Trump’s decades-old plan to destroy the deep state—believes control the Democratic Party. She “followed the white rabbit,” as QAnon believers put it, she “went down the rabbit hole.” 

Click here to read on: “How QAnon Crept Into the Mind of Donald Trump and Turned Conspiracy Into Reality”.


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Scenes From a Pandemic: 25

21 09 2020

by Aja Beech

A continuing series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe it.

In the distance, La Bella Taína mural by Tameartz; painted by the TNS Krew—Tameartz, Desil, Imse, Busta, and Bark—at Sunflower Philly Community Park. (photo: Aja Beech)

Thinking About Life, Art, the Water’s Edge, and Paul Robeson

Philadelphia

Philadelphia has always been my home. “Born and raised” is what we say.

I’d like to imagine that there is something about this area that has always acted as a magnet for cultural and social revolution. Our nation was partly born here. Over hundreds of years, there have been many moments of explosive clarity and solace in this city.

We are no strangers to armed revolt and violent government oppression. We also have more art and natural open space than most cities. Thousands of murals adorn walls, more than any city in the world, and two rivers run through it, the Schuylkill and the Delaware.

The area around the Delaware River is one of the largest estuaries in the United States, where many waters meet and funnel out into the sea—an environmental transition zone where, even now, there is sailing and shipbuilding along the waters.

The life of the city has changed during the pandemic. There are more murders; there are more overdoses; there is more death. There is also somehow more hope, more brotherly love, and sisterly affection.

It is dangerous to be near one another.

Yet still, we comfort those in need, we feed one another, we rely on one another. The importance of the connections we make every day anchor us to this place and to each other.

Philadelphia has always had its confines and places of refuge. Mine is the New Jersey shore. I know I’m luckier than most. Though we all live less than an hour’s drive from the beckoning shore of the Atlantic Ocean, some of my fellow Philadelphians will go their entire lives without setting foot on the beach.

In good years, I’ve gone to the ocean more than once. Floating in the saltwater, I am adrift, but at peace.

Once there was a time when boatloads of people came to our ports, looking upon this land after being out to sea for so long. That port became a destination of restaurants and newly designed piers. Now, some places are nearly abandoned while others thrive.

The same is true for the people. We must remake connection before any more get caught up in the currents and swept out to sea.

(photo: Aja Beech)

In the 1960s, Paul Robeson moved to Philadelphia. He was ill and came to live here in the care of his sister, Marian Forsythe, with whom he stayed in relative seclusion for the remainder of his life.

“Artists are the gatekeepers of truth.” Robeson once said. “We are civilization’s anchor. We are the compass for humanity and conscience.”

Last week, I was asked: What are you connected to? My answer was water, and the peace I feel floating.

Then I was asked: What is your anchor? I was not sure. Being held down with too much weight has never been enticing.

But I thought of Robeson’s meditation on art, and the words I use to set my place. And I thought of this city, the volatile fragility, the intense beauty. The place I have called home my entire life.

Stability has so often escaped me. Yet there is something that makes me feel as if, even in the depths, I have an anchor within me; as if I was always being prepared for where we all are right now, alone at sea, lighting up signals in the dark.

Aja Beech is an author and organizer. Her poetry, journalism, commentary, short stories, and other works can be found internationally. A mother of two, she currently works as the campaign coordinator for the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO Labor 2020 program. Beech attended the Kopkind Colony in 2011. Her current work featuring labor organizing can be found at unionhall.aflcio.org/pennsylvania-afl-cio..

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece originally appeared on thenation.com on September 16, 2020. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and The Nation crew.

Bonus: Portraits of Fire

Salmon-colored sun and smoke, Beaver Creek, Oregon (photo: Jeffrey St. Clair)

Our friend Jeffrey St. Clair, editor of CounterPunch, wrote a striking diary from Oregon last week of life in a time of fires, illustrated with many more haunting photos. An extract of it is below.

We awoke to choking smoke on Thursday. I visited the evacuation center at the local community college a couple of miles from us, bringing coffee and pastries, and was surprised to see more than 500 people camped out, along with their animals: dogs, cats, horses, llamas, alpaca, two cows, ducks, chickens and several pigs. I returned home with the news that we needed to be ready to leave at any moment. Kimberly, Zen and the enfant terrible, packed a week’s worth of clothes, diapers, food and left for Astoria on the Oregon coast at the mouth of the Columbia River, about 110 miles away. My mission was to find the missing half-feral cat, Graymalkin, capture her and drug her or drug her and capture her or entice her into the house. And to find some way to edit and post weekend edition using my one bar of cell coverage as a hotspot and write my column. I spent most of the night working, under a glowing sky, with bonewhite ashes drifting on the porch, like the fatal snows of Judgment Day. Around three in the morning, I heard the imploring pleas of the cat at the backdoor.

Smoke on the water, Tongue Point (photo: Jeffrey St. Clair)

For the full CounterPunch column, click here.


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Scenes From a Pandemic: 24

15 09 2020

by Nathan Schneider

A continuing series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe it.

University of Colorado urges students to “Be a Buff” and be safe, as mascot welcomes students back to school. (photo: CU Boulder Today)

The Wrong Lesson

Boulder, Colorado

The call to action my generation received, during our first moment of inflection, was to get back to business. I was in my last year of high school on September 11, 2001, when an airliner slammed into the Pentagon a few miles away. Later that month, while visiting O’Hare International Airport, President George W. Bush implored the American people to “do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida.”

Don’t soul-search or undertake shared sacrifice. Don’t learn Arabic or better under-stand the wider world. Take a picture with Mickey Mouse, where Jeb Bush was governor. To someone young and looking to find a calling and a purpose, such leadership was crushing. It was an invitation to waste the best energy of youth.

In 2006, as President Bush’s delusional wars in Afghanistan and Iraq raged on, he told us much the same thing: “I encourage you all to go shopping more.”

Back to shopping, back to school—we are there once again.

As after 9/11, another generation of youth at a moment of inflection is being encouraged to get back to business. We ought to be teaching a different lesson, one that addresses students as “moral beings rather than desiring consumers.”

I teach at the University of Colorado now, and my students are coming of age in another moment of inflection. They are entering adulthood during a pandemic, an economic collapse, and a historic uprising for justice. What calls to action have they received?

The virus, their president told them, is no cause for change: “It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” That was in February. He said everything would be back to normal by April. Trump’s delusions exceed those of his predecessor. But I don’t want to focus on presidents any more than they deserve, for they are not the only ones teaching the young.

I have had delusions of my own. Until the very last minute, I thought I could still make it to long-planned engagements in Europe in late February. I let myself believe the assurances that, somehow, our kids would be impervious to the virus at school. I keep imagining I can go back to business as usual.

Now my university is opening again, behind plastic shields and face masks. Students are repopulating the dorms and roving around town in partially masked flocks. Since we receive only an infinitesimal part of our budget from the state, we’re told, institutional survival requires business as usual. I am refreshing an old syllabus. Vast bureaucratic expertise has gone into establishing the fiction that such a thing is reasonable, that we can continue to provide the experience that students and their families are paying so much for. Perhaps, if we taught a different lesson, we could.

Earlier in the summer, a group of my colleagues published an open letter arguing that the return to campus would be not only a medical danger but also poor pedagogy. “It is the responsibility of the leadership to tell them,” these professors wrote, “to put public health first, and not to make false promises about a meaningful on-campus experience, when health and lives are on the line.” I didn’t sign. I was still waiting and seeing.

NYU anthropologist Angela Zito has diagnosed higher education’s failure of imagination especially pointedly:

Colleges missed the chance to directly address our students as moral beings rather than desiring consumers, and invite them to join us in a time of grieving perseverance in order to save ourselves together. Will never get over that. Intend to teach that way myself.

She reminds me of two lines from a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson. At some old colleges, these lines are carved into monuments to students killed in the Great War (and, surely, the concurrent influenza pandemic):

’Tis man’s perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die.

As a student at Brown University, I walked by those words almost daily, hearing their call to sacrifice in grating opposition to what President Bush was asking of us at the time. The words themselves invert Angela Zito’s lament: “man” rather than all of us together; an adventure of death as opposed to the struggle for collective safety. Yet Zito and Emerson are united in their embrace of a morality that embraces non-normal times, that invites the young to take history upon themselves and act in it—not merely for the sake of approximating their earlier expectations but in order to raise their expectations and live lives that mean something.

Can we teachers “address our students as moral beings” behind the institutional pretense (and masks and screens) of normal education delivery? As Zito says, we need to grieve. Then we can get down to the non-normal work of reshaping our world out of this cataclysm.

I hope my students will hear the call to put their best selves into this moment. It’s their time. Those who most want to rush back to normal are probably those who most fear the opportunity for change that the young now have before them.

Nathan Schneider is a journalist and assistant professor in media studies. He is the author, most recently of Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy. His current project is an exploration of models for democratic ownership and governance for online platforms and protocols. He is founder of the Media Enterprise Design Lab. In 2012 he helped organize Kopkind’s camp focused on the aftermath of Occupy.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece originally appeared on thenation.com on September 9, 2020. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and The Nation crew.

Bonus: Grief in Philadelphia

(photo: Aja Beech)

Before writing her dispatch for “Scenes From a Pandemic,” Aja Beech walked her neighborhood of Philadelphia, taking pictures. This one was among the many she sent our way. Her piece will appear at The Nation on Wednesday and here next week.


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Scenes From a Pandemic: 23

7 09 2020

by Laura Flanders

A continuing series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe it.

The author interviews a local farmer using a social distancing selfie stick. (photo: Sabrina Artel)

Covid Country Diary

Sullivan County, New York

It’s a myth that people in small-town America know one another. I’ve had a cabin in this place for 30 years and never knew that a foie gras factory sits high above Ferndale, a hamlet I’ve driven through hundreds of times. I found out one sunny Sunday this spring, when 40 flag-festooned cars filed up to La Belle Farm past blooming forsythia and a white-picket-fenced farmhouse, part of an appreciation drive for farm and factory workers.

The drive kicked off at Murray’s Chickens, a packing plant 15 minutes away in South Fallsburg, and weaved through a housing project where workers and their kids smiled and waved, sprawling out onto concrete stoops in the spring warmth as we honked our horns.

No one waved in Ferndale. Not a soul could be seen. Only row after row of workers’ trailers, exposed on a hilltop, perpendicular to an enormous, low, windowless barn. When New York City banned the sale of foie gras, a few years ago, no one stopped this place or nearby Hudson Valley Foie Gras from force-feeding and slaughtering enough ducks, ducklings, and geese to make these the nation’s premier producers of the sickening pâté. Who knew?

* * *

We left Manhattan and drove up here in March. A pocket of hanging-on farms, scrubby woods, and defunct hotels, Sullivan Valley is neither Hudson Valley rich nor Delaware Valley airy. From its heyday as the Catskills’ famous Borscht Belt in the 1950s, it is home now to 75,000 souls in winter. Social distance comes with the territory. As the snow fell late and wet, and lines at the supermarket got better organized, it was possible to imagine that nothing new was coming, not spring or Covid-19.

The novel coronavirus came quietly to the country, prowling the backroads of poor health, poor health care, lack of attention and clout. Facts took time to come into focus, as inconspicuous places with tucked-away poultry plants started showing up in county statistics, followed by obscure villages fronting off-road meat packers and down-by-the river dairy processors.

By late April, people were realizing that, just like the city, their patch of country was powered by a pool of poorly paid, poorly documented, mostly latinx and black workers. Some were dead, and more were falling sick.

Thirty-eight-year-old Luz (not her real name) worked in a cold, crowded factory wrapping luncheon meat around cheese sticks for sale at deli counters around the country. Twenty-five workers toiled bunched up at three tables, and ate together at mealtimes. She learned about the virus through the Internet, then on Facebook, and didn’t believe it posed a threat here. All spring, Luz kept working. Still, she’d undress as soon as she returned home and shower before greeting her children.

“She went nowhere, just from her job to home; home to Walmart or ShopRite to get what we needed; then home again,” explained teenage Marisol, speaking on Zoom from the home her mother forbade her to leave.

Then a co-worker died. Luz left work that day and hasn’t been back: “How could they do such a thing, to not tell us what’s happening?”

* * *

Two months into the lockdown in Manhattan, Sullivan County had the highest positive test rate, and the most new cases per capita, in New York State.

Ad from Sullivan County’s Silver Age (1890-1915) of therapeutic tourism. (image: John Conway/The River Reporter)

The county’s public health director, Nancy McGraw, raised concerns about farm and factory workers at her weekly briefings, which were face-timed on a press officer’s cell phone. Local media picked up the story, and with bad broadband and little elbow room, activists got busy.

By early May, Rotary clubs were delivering food to essential workers, piling station wagons full of Monticello’s famous bagels in the morning and cooked meals from grateful restaurants at night. At the entrance to the senior care center in Liberty, nurses put on superhero costumes to greet a rain-drenched solidarity drive-by. Nurses thanking drivers, drivers thanking nurses, everyone getting wet.

Meanwhile, Juanita Sarmiento and members of the Rural and Migrant Ministry set up signs at the entrance to Murray’s Chickens: FREE MASKS. Across from the bank and the kosher butchers, they handed out boxloads of protective masks to blue-apron-clad workers at shift change.

“We could have seen it coming. I saw it coming,” says Sarmiento, a former biology student.

“What’s coming into its own is new leadership,” purrs Sandy Oxford through a red chili-pepper face mask. Director of the Hudson Valley Area Labor Federation, Oxford joined Sarmiento at Murray’s one Friday to support workers and berate the bosses: “If the workers have all the masks they need, why are they rushing over here to get more?”

* * *

Crowds rallied for black lives in June: half a dozen on the bridge in Narrowsburg; several hundred in Monticello, demanding release of prisoners from the town’s ancient jail.

Notice for June 21 Black Lives Matter rally in Roscoe.

In Roscoe, at the foot of Catskill State Park, the Black Lives Matter rally took place on Railway Avenue, a broad, empty block, home of the Trout Town Inn.

Organizer Ashlee Perez straddled a wooden ranch fence to be seen. “Yes, we have racism here in Roscoe,” she told the mostly white, mostly young group of protesters. Along with half a dozen other African Americans, she told her neighbors about their town—about school bullies, bureaucratic bigots, absurd arrests, and too-many-to-count traffic stops, about silence and threats.

The group clustered around two vintage train carriages, a perky red caboose, and a long, sea green “trout car,” reminders of the railway platform that once occupied this block. One hundred years ago, people in long dresses and high hats, mostly white, mostly Christian, spilled off the trains of the O & W line, drawn by Roscoe’s fish and fresh air. Only the train cars and the trout remain.

The future will look different, says Perez. Demographics demand it. “But right now, people like me aren’t going to want to stay here.” Waving her arms for balance, Perez seemed to gesture down the invisible tracks. “This place is going to have to change.”

* * *

I have seen every day of spring and summer here for the first time. I’ve discovered that those trout, millions of them, were city transplants, shipped from Long Island hatcheries in the 1880s and ’90s. They rode the rails as people did. From the crowded city, many people came with tuberculosis, seeking fresh air, a cure, relief.

For 30 years, Sullivan County boomed. That was its Silver Age. It ended in the 1920s, when people began to understand that human contact could spread disease.

One red hot Saturday in July, strolling down a long former track, now a wheelchair-accessible walkway, with county historian John Conway, I learned more. TB killed the passenger trains, an entire network of spidery rail lines that had brought generations of city-dwellers north. But TB also brought a Jewish immigrant and his family here, seeking escape from city smog and anti-Semitism. The Grossingers bought a failing farm at a bargain price and helped usher in Sullivan County’s next big boom, its Golden Age. Grossingers Catskill Resort Hotel had 35 buildings, its own airport, and a post office until it closed, in 1986.

Ruins of Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)

What’s coming next? Connection or contagion? Coming together or coming apart? History surprises, but it doesn’t predict.

Laura Flanders was a Kopkind mentor in 2018 and 2019. She is the host of The Laura Flanders Show, a TV and radio program which for years has covered the people and places other media miss. As of September 6, The Laura Flanders Show is broadcast every Sunday at 11:30 AM ET on the World Channel and on more than 90 PBS stations across the week. Check local listings. If your station isn’t airing The Laura Flanders Show, contact them! For information: lauraflanders.org.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece originally appeared on thenation.com on September 2, 2020. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and The Nation crew.

Bonus: Remembrance of Summer Past

Behind the waterfall at Green River in Guilford, Taté Walker (Kopkind 2015) and JoAnn Wypijewski. Taté, a writer, photographer and activist, contributed ‘Scenes From a Pandemic: 6’ in May. (photo: Taté Walker)

We look forward to the return of Kopkind summer in 2021.


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Categories : Scenes from a Pandemic Series, The Nation

Scenes From a Pandemic: 21

24 08 2020

by Aaron Talley

A continuing series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe it.

The author’s new middle school classroom (photo: Aaron Talley)

This Is What Dystopia Looks Like

Chicago
Jamila had never officially been my student.

I’ll call her Jamila. In September 2017, she had marched into my classroom because she wanted to meet “the new black English teacher,” a rarity at my school, where the staff is predominately white, despite being on the South Side of Chicago in one of its “toughest” neighborhoods.

In my mind, she was ready for college. At the age of 16, she was already adept at making jokes about “toxic masculinity,” and already had a catalogue of her favorite black feminist poets. Over the course of the next three years, she and I held several discussions about family, her future, race, gender, and writing.

She was intentional about performing her existence as an act of defiance. She opted for bold short haircuts, wore oversize thrift store clothes, and was popular in school for her slam poetry. She was the type of student who gave you hope for the future. She was charming and bombastic, with a voice that you could hear long before you saw her.

And it’s beautiful to see a child grow via her relationship to art. In the 10th grade, she just wanted to share her poetry. Now in her senior year, she talked about the intention of her poems. These intentions began to bleed into her own decision making. Decisions like choosing to stay at home for college rather than going away. Or choosing whether to accept her mom’s discomfort with her gender performance. Once an angsty teenager full of complaints, she was growing into an assertive adult who made adult decisions. Like many teachers, I wanted to see her growth as a reflection of my own energy and attention as well. I felt that seeing her walk across the stage would be a culminating moment.

I didn’t imagine my last time seeing her would be as it was in June of 2020—she, riding alongside her mom in a small, bare brown car; me, masked, distant on the sidewalk alongside other teachers cheering at the car-parade graduation. Covid had led to Chicago Public Schools officially closing in mid-March, so it had been approximately three months since I had last heard from her, and in a rush of excitement I ran toward the car, thinking to myself that an “air high five” would be the best I could offer at that moment.

As I got midway to the car, her mother’s smiling face dissolved into a frown, and sense swarmed back into my brain. Why would you run toward the car during Covid? Of course, Mom doesn’t know you were just gonna give an air high five. I halted and threw my palms in the air, in a gesture that was now equal parts high five and surrender. Jamila threw hers up as well and smiled. I retreated to the sidewalk to continue cheering on the other graduating students. The brown car moved on.

This is what dystopia looks like. Nothing is clear-cut. No one has the answers. There are no real endings or beginnings, just a procession of limbos… It’s back-to-school, and remote learning.

It was gorgeous outside. It was the type of sunny that makes you aware of the silhouettes of the trees against the concrete. Despite being prepared to be sad, I found the car graduation to be a beautiful moment of innovation. Cars in procession, most accented with maroon and gold balloons and paint, or Class of 2020, or my students’ names spiraling along the windows. Amid the noise of celebration, my students looked out from the car windows, popped up through sunroofs, rode on the back of pickup trucks. What I had thought would be a bland substitute was a rather regal event. My students had turned their cars into chariots. Some soaked the moment in fully, with their shoulders erect, their hair flapping in the wind.

I left the graduation early. My car was parked on a crowded street, and I didn’t want to be trapped when the procession finished. Inwardly I was embarrassed for my earlier impulse, since there’s no room to be impulsive during a pandemic. When everything stops rather than finishes, you have no choice but to be intentional.

This month, Chicago Public Schools rolled back its idea of a “hybrid” model of schooling, a concept that had been initially announced with a tone of certainty that anyone actually working within CPS knew not to trust. In that model, students would’ve spent part of their time in remote learning and part of their time at school, with parents able to opt out of in-person learning altogether. I wonder about what exactly would have been hybridized, since this model would’ve had my time split between a computer screen and an ill-ventilated building, with students split six feet apart, with split resources, and split investment. And despite CPS’s deciding to go fully remote beginning September 8, because of the lack of clear direction I still feel split, like I’m still alone midway in that street between a frowning face and cheering.

I start every year teaching a unit on dystopia, where the joy is meant to be found in realizing how dystopic our society really is. The irony is palpable in this moment. In fictional dystopias, however, clarity is abundant. There is a clear social ill that plagues society, a clear sense of past and present, a clear enemy; and it’s clear when the revolution needs to happen. There is a beginning and an end. In a real-life dystopia, no one really has the answers, so there are no real endings or beginnings. Just a procession of limbos. In a real-life dystopia, apocalypse still hits, and sometimes it comes in a familiar form: an explosion, a natural disaster, or a revolution. Sometimes, the apocalypse is just an air high five instead of a hug. Nevertheless, you have to keep going.

I set up my new makeshift workspace in the corner of my living room. It consists of a small circular table sitting by the largest windows in the house. I prepare for the year. I think of my students. I reflect on what I want to do differently. I flirt with the idea of starting a YouTube channel. I brainstorm how to teach a novel over the computer. I groan at work e-mails. I worry, and then I don’t. And when I remember, I take a deep breath.

Aaron Talley, a writer, activist, facilitator, and educator, teaches middle school on Chicago’s South Side. His writing has been featured in various news outlets, including Colorlines, the Feminist Wire, The Advocate, Education Post, and Chicago South Side Weekly. An alumni of the Voices of Our Nations Arts Fellowship (VONA), he is currently pitching a speculative fiction novel for young adults. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram: @Talley_Marked and read more of his work on his blog Newer Negroes. Aaron was a participant in Kopkind’s 2015 political camp.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece originally appeared on August 19, 2020, on The Nation‘s website. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and The Nation crew.

Bonus: Remembering Andy & His Birthday

Andy and John Scagliotti, his life partner and the administrator of Kopkind (photo: Gregg DeChirico)

Andy Kopkind would have been 85 today, August 24. Andy contained multitudes: an extraordinary writer and thinker, with a radical politics, a gay sensibility, a perfect style, a seemingly boundless store of knowledge (and curiosity about what wasn’t known), he was also a consummate cook and gardener, a source of puns and fun. To anyone who experienced the joy of Andy’s birthday at Tree Frog Farm, the occasion is unforgettable—the convergence of people who came to celebrate, stayed for days, cooked great food (or just ate it), swam and danced, and talked about all things under the sun and stars.

So, a treat! A memento of Andy from a long-ago summer in Guilford, Vermont, when he played the Duchess in a community performance of Alice in Wonderland. Also featured in clips from this rough vintage home movie are John as the Brown Mouse, Verandah Porche (our neighbor and a Kopkind advisor) as the Caterpillar, our longtime friend Will Wilkins, and other members of the Monteverdi Players. (With thanks to our friend and Kopkind alum Christopher Dawes for editing this little montage.)

Please click on image above to watch video.

The convergences that marked Andy’s birthday inspired the Kopkind Colony. Covid-19 has prevented us from holding what would have been our 21st year of seminar/retreats, weeklong sessions in which political journalists and activists or documentary filmmakers share ideas and insights, eat well, revel in nature—think and breathe and recharge for the work ahead. For 21 weeks now, members of the extended Kopkind family have, instead, been sharing stories of this long suspended season. Scroll down through the Scenes and the Bonuses. Share this site with your friends. And, brother, sister, if you can spare a dime, please click on DONATE at the top of the page or click here. Thank you!


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Categories : Scenes from a Pandemic Series, The Nation

Scenes From a Pandemic: 19

10 08 2020

by Judith Levine

A continuing series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe it.

Unconstrained by mask requirements, customers may pick up a handgun or a case of Covid-19. (photo: Judith Levine)

‘History Makes Us, Not Age’

Hardwick, Vermont

Like a lot of people my age—pushing 68—I don’t usually feel old. Now it turns out I am. Among the ways my body is aging is its decreased production of “fresh naïve T cells” (or, probably, fresh naive anything). This makes me more susceptible to contracting Covid-19, and if I do, to dying.

This fact sensitizes me to the uneven, and politicized, state of mask wearing in my town. In the food co-op, the scoops for bulk foods—grains, granola, nuts—are used once and collected in a box. No such precautions at Rite Way Sports, where customers are free to pick up a container of night crawlers, a Beretta M9 semiautomatic handgun, or a case of Covid-19.

To many around here, the virus is an abstraction. Caledonia County, among the most rural in the state, has had 26 cases—less than one in 100,000—and no deaths. In all of Vermont, just over 1,450 people have sickened and 58 died. As elsewhere, the dying are old. Only four have been under 60.

Sidelined by rural isolation and elderly caution, I watch videos of the Black Lives Matter uprisings and police brutality and federal military invasions and feel my emotions swinging between radical hope and apocalyptic terror. Hope inspired by the diversity and militancy of the protesters; terror, by the flash-bangs and teargas and an awareness of the future these young folks face. I note they almost all wear masks, acknowledgement of their outsize vulnerability as black and brown people, but also, to my eyes, of concern for their elders. Tenderness overwhelms me.

Then I switch to videos of maskless twentysomethings crowding beaches and bars, and I seethe. The phrase Kids these days springs uninvited to mind.

We rarely list age among intersectional oppressions. But deep in the genocidal US pandemic, there it is. Age is a defining feature of Covid fatalities in prisons and jails. Senior workers are being slammed as hard as the youngest cohort in the economic shutdown. Age discrimination means most elders won’t work again. “People who are middle-class workers now will be poor or near-poor retirees for the rest of their lives.”

Such mixed feelings are not rare among my contemporaries; the rigidly disapproving oldster is a caricature. Yet how easily we can be caricatured. Here is the usually nuanced political analyst, labor and health care historian Gabriel Winant, in “Coronavirus and Chronopolitics,” in n+1:

There is a great contradiction embodied in the facts that the virus is fundamentally a threat to the old; that this threat has been magnified enormously by the incompetence and malice of the ruling regime; and that the old are the primary mass political constituency of that regime. The coincidence in time of the outbreak of coronavirus in the United States and the crushing of Bernie Sanders’s bid to democratize our health system and face the related crisis of climate change—a defeat inflicted through extreme generational polarization—intensifies this contradiction further. The young are trying to save the old, as well as themselves; the old are trying to kill the young, as well as themselves.

Emphasis mine, as in, WTF, Gabe?

Winant quotes sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen, coiner of chronopolitics: “As the necessity of financial cuts mounts, the need for trade-offs mounts.”

What “necessity” for cuts and trade-offs? You mean austerity?

Adds Winant: “The old have formed into battalions to mount a defense of the predatory and destructive capitalism we have known.”

What battalions? The AARP?

In fact, as older Americans drop dead from the coronavirus, the economic shutdown is slamming senior workers as hard as the youngest cohort. Age discrimination means most elders won’t work again. Drawing down savings or going into debt, “people who are middle-class workers now will be poor or near-poor retirees for the rest of their lives,” says economist Teresa Ghilareducci.

“Entitlements” don’t go far. In 2019, a third of Social Security recipients relied solely, or almost solely, on that benefit, which averaged $1,461 a month. Medicare, deducted from a person’s Social Security but increasingly privatized, costs more and covers less. Out-of-pocket bills consume, on average, 40 cents of each dollar of recipients’ income; by age 85, the portion rises to three-quarters. A 2013 analysis predicted that the ranks of the homeless old would swell by a third between 2010 and 2020. What now?

We rarely list age among intersectional oppressions. But deep in the genocidal US pandemic, there it is. Why are 48 of the top 50 Covid clusters prisons and jails? It’s not only racial health disparities and overcrowding, says the Marshall Project. Because of ever-longer sentences, inmates over 55 make up a larger share of state prison populations than those 24 and under. Chronic illnesses render them easy marks for Covid-19.

History makes us, not age.

“The young are not interested in reducing old-age benefits but rather increasing other ones,” says Winant. But who are ‘the young’? Paul Ryan, elected to Congress at 29, spent his career trying to feed the poor and the old into the jaws of Republican swamp creatures. Neil Gorsuch, corporate proxy on the Supreme Court, is a Gen-Xer.

Alicia Garza is the same age as Jared Kushner, 39. Angela Davis is two years older than Mitch McConnell. The young people crowding the beaches are not the young people being gassed in the streets.

Winant concludes with a call to solidarity: “Our survival depends upon resolving the antagonisms that have separated us and joining together against the regime of capital accumulation that has brought us to this precipice.” Yet having condemned his elders for starting the fight, he doesn’t absolve them.

Similarly, Vermont’s governor, amid paeans to protecting “our” elders, declares the state’s aging population a “crisis.” Voters are never told why an older populace—that is, increasingly, themselves—is the problem, especially given that in the coming de-pression their Social Security checks may be the one reliable source of state revenues.

I come not to praise, or plead for, my generation. But, younger comrades, don’t blame us for the policies that will bury us—or you. History makes us, not age. No generation holds greater claim to justice or greater responsibility for attaining it.

Judith Levine’s latest book, with Erica Meiners, is The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence (Verso). Judith was a special guest at Kopkind in 2006.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece originally appeared on August 5, 2020 on The Nation‘s website. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and The Nation crew.

Bonus: With Love From Chicago/Cuba

From Chicago, Alex Halkin sent us another short film made with Cuban artists.

Alex and Ivette Avila, the film’s soundtrack editor (and, with Ramiro Zardoya, a central figure in the Cuban collaborative), write:

The Cuban animation series Creation Collective in Quarantine (Creación Colectiva en Cuarentena) arose, as its name suggests, amid isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic. The mostly Cuban artists who have collaborated—musicians, plastic artists, dancers, filmmakers, and children—aim to document the moods, the creativity in confinement, nightmares . . . in short, what people are feeling and experiencing in these times of pain, uncertainty, reimagining, and—why not?—hopes of change To date, the group has produced six animated shorts.

Once upon a time in Chicago/Erase una vez en Chicago starts with footage shot by Alexandra Halkin of the dysfunctional and half-empty city in quarantine. The animations fill the video with lyricism, poetry, new insights, and meanings. This is the second animated collaboration Alexandra has done with the group. The first one, Ojos/Eyes, released last April (and posted on Kopkind’s site on May 4), was about a dream Alexandra had about a four eyed dog: https://vimeo.com/406941038.

Alexandra Halkin, a US documentary filmmaker, participated in the Kopkind/Center for Independent Documentary film camp in 2014. In 2010, she founded the Americas Media Initiative (AMI), a nonprofit that produces, distributes, and screens film and video made in the Americas by community media organizations and independent filmmakers, particularly Cubans living in Cuba. Her own films have been shown at film and video festivals worldwide. For more on AMI’s Cuban film catalogue, click here.


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Scenes From a Pandemic: 18

3 08 2020

by Najla Said

A continuing series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe it.

Mural on the apartheid wall in Occupied Palestine. (photo: Abeer Salman)

Diary of a Never-Ending Crisis

New York City

March. I remember Beirut in 2005, after a car bomb went off, trying not to go near parked cars, and stopping, hyperventilating, catching my breath, and drilling into my brain: “Keep walking, keep going; you can’t control it; you have to keep going.” I need to do this now, here.

Having spent my childhood between Beirut during two wars and NYC in the 1970s–’80s, I have learned to be prepared. I tell myself, “I fear nothing and live for human solidarity.”

Half my Pilates clients are away, some are over 70 and canceled out of fear, and the rest just don’t think it’s a good idea right now. I am officially income-less. My production of Palestine in Chicago will be pushed back at least two to three weeks as of now. I have waited 10 years for a theater to want to do my play again. Now I’m pretty sure it ain’t happening.

I’m making a pink glittery unicorn T-shirt for my niece. I have no problem staying busy. I don’t feel like I have ADHD anymore, because without the confines of other people’s structure, I can do things at my own rhythm.

My shrink says that many traumas will be reactivated during this crisis and asks me how I am doing.

“This is kind of like Beirut, but easier.”

“Oh right. Well, for you it’ll be easier, then.”

I predict the return of telephone calls. I hope no one calls me. I’m an introvert; I hate the phone.

In the store the guy behind me has a cart filled with bottled water. “You must be Lebanese,” I say.

He laughs. “How can you tell?”

“The bottled water.”

There is no need to stock up on water in New York, but that is what Lebanese people do.

I tell people that niqabs (veils over the mouth and nose) were originally worn in the desert to keep sand out of people’s faces, just as masks now are supposed to keep the virus out of our mouth and nose. I explain that Arabs invented soap and the word “quarantine.” No one cares.

There were 6,000 911 calls in the city yesterday. In Beirut, I would hear bombs and artillery fire, and then the sirens. Here it is just sirens. Which is eerie, more unsettling.

Diary of a crisis: nothing is happening; everything is happen-ing. Month after month. I am income-less. I keep busy. I fear nothing, and many things. I feel I am living in a Beckett play.

April. My birthday. My cousins organized a Zoom call for me, and people rang me on the phone. I made a cake. I sang “Miss Mary Mack” with my niece, talked to my nephew, and virtually jumped on a trampoline with my goddaughter. Expect nothing, do nothing, no pressure—perfection.

I’ve knit five scarves. I make pudding, even though I don’t eat pudding.

CNN keeps saying that other countries have more beds in ICU and better medical systems to respond to the virus: “Why? It’s a long story.”

I want to scream, “Socialized medicine! Duh!”

Easter is soon. Maybe Jesus will come back and fix this mess.

For many Americans feeling unsafe is too much. But the whole world lives this way all the time. American exceptionalism needs to die and stay dead.

Meanwhile, I am living in a Beckett play, making up things to do and say so that I exist. There is something satisfying about that.

May. George Floyd is dead.

“Mama, Mama…”

My heart shatters.

My nephew changes his Instagram profile pic to one of John Carlos with his fist in the air, and shares a photo of the George Floyd mural on the wall in Palestine. The kids are alright.

I think about the importance of breath, and breadth. I worry about all that gets left out in our politics. I seem to be out of place. I’m Palestinian and Lebanese; I’m a New Yorker. I tell myself, ‘Keep walking, keep going.’

June. Between the virus and George Floyd’s death, I think about the importance of breath.

I make connections with Palestine, explaining that the IDF trains our cops, that the move used to kill Mr. Floyd is from Krav Maga. I’ve been told that expressing Palestinian solidarity is “co-opting” the black struggle. I should be quiet.

Cornel West keeps mentioning Edward Said on TV. I’m grateful, because no one seems to know that my father’s work helped us get to this point.

I’m glad people are getting radicalized, but I worry about all that gets left out. I worry about the inability to make connections.

I wonder where I fit in this new BIPOC acronym. I just got chased down the street by a nutjob who screamed that I’m a stupid white bitch who doesn’t care about Black lives.

“I’m Palestinian!” I yell, for all the Upper West Side to hear.

“Yeah, bitch, and I’m Cherokee.”

What. The. Fuck.

I am not Black. Or Indigenous. Am I POC? I never seem to have a place here.

A nice gay boy asks if I’m OK.

Happy Pride.

July. Extroverts text and call too much; they need to call other extroverts.

Outside New York, no one wants to wear a mask. Almost everywhere else in the world, people value community. Here it’s the individual, who always seems to be complaining.

We have another family Zoom call—relatives in Beirut, New York, South Carolina, Connecticut, London, Dallas, San Francisco, Seattle—my mom’s generation, my generation, the kids.

My cousin, on his way to Beirut, stops at different ATMS to bring cash and medicine to family members. Lebanon is in free fall for other reasons, but still they test everyone on the plane before and after the flight; anyone who tests positive is sent to a hotel for two weeks. That seems like the proper way to do things.

I kind of loved lockdown at the beginning. Now some days the silence is too much and I just cry.

Nothing is happening; everything is happening.

I am invisible. I am exhausted.

“You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

Najla Said is an actor and playwright, and the author of Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (Riverhead Books). In 2010, Kopkind presented a staged reading of her one-woman play, Palestine.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece originally appeared on July 29, 2020, on The Nation‘s website. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and The Nation crew.

Bonus: A Song by and for Nurses

A nurse on a Covid ward in Teheran. (photo: Mohammad Ghadamali/AP Photo)

In New York the 7 pm clapping for nurses and other health care workers stopped months ago. It was always more a ritual for the benefit of those in lock-down; it told us we weren’t alone. Nursing has become symbolic, but let’s honor the work. The WHO, the International Council of Nurses (INC), and Nursing Now recently reported that worldwide there is a shortage of six million nurses–especially affecting the Global South–and deep income disparities. The INC has made a music video in recognition of the work and the people everywhere who do it. In Kopkind’s immediate family, one of those people is Dave Hall, our longtime operations manager and cook, John Scagliotti’s partner, our brother, and a psychiatric nurse in Vermont. For Dave and all nurses of the world: “I Am a Nurse.”


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Categories : Scenes from a Pandemic Series, The Nation

Scenes From a Pandemic: 16

19 07 2020

by Renee Bracey Sherman

A continuing series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe it.

We Testify abortion storytellers rally at Supreme Court for June Medical Services v. Russo oral arguments, March 2020.  (photo: We Testify)

What Kind of Nation Prosecutes People for Health Care?

Washington, D.C.

Last November, I drove more than 12 hours for an abortion. It wasn’t mine (I had mine in 2005); I picked up a young woman in rural Pennsylvania whom I’ll call Raquel. She needed a ride to a clinic in Maryland to get some pills that she would take back at her home to have a medication abortion. As we drove to the clinic, I told Raquel about what to expect during the appointment; after I finished I paused and said, “As much as I love getting to know you on this drive, did you know you could safely do this at home but the government won’t let you?” She was surprised. Like many people, she knew about limitations on abortion but didn’t know that very safe and basic methods are being restricted because of outdated FDA regulations on how they can be dispensed. The drive bonded us—we still keep in touch, and she approved the inclusion of her story here—but it was an unnecessary exercise, one that antiabortion politicians created to make yet another constitutional right as inaccessible as possible. The cruelty of the barricades along the journey is the point.

Since Covid-19 hit, I’ve thought a lot about that drive with Raquel, particularly as people have reached out needing abortions. States have limited travel, issued stay-at-home orders, and required people to quarantine for at least two weeks. While several states declared abortion an essential service, others exploited the pandemic to shutter clinics. The future we have worried about was upon us in an instant. Patients had appointments canceled. Those who could afford it, or who knew about abortion funds, were able to travel to other states for care. The moment was both unprecedented and familiar. The uselessness of our nation’s health care system was showing, and became even more burdensome on abortion patients.

In a just society, Raquel (or anyone wanting an abortion but anxious about contracting Covid-19) could have ordered the necessary pills via telemedicine, online, or at a pharmacy, and completed the abortion at home. That’s the way many people around the world do abortion, because it’s incredibly safe and simple. That’s how Americans once did it. Concoctions were advertised in newspapers and shipped through the mail, or herbs such as pennyroyal and black cohosh root were made into teas. But since the late 1800s, abortion has been deeply criminalized, and if Raquel had ordered the pills online, she and the person who sent them would have risked prosecution and jail.

Covid-19 has brought a taste of what life would be like if abortions were illegal, but then it always has been, in some form… What kind of nation allows people to be prosecuted for health care?

Recently, Polish abortion activists reminded me that all of our laws governing abortion actually promote criminalization. (To be sure, those are different from medical practice regulations that ensure procedures are performed correctly.) Rules dictate how, when, where, and why someone can have an abortion, and mandate a series of physical and legal barriers one must cross. Wait too long because you can’t afford the procedure? You can be criminalized. Take pills at home with a parent because you couldn’t afford a procedure? You both can be criminalized. Have a miscarriage, but a doctor thinks you self-managed an abortion? You can be criminalized. It doesn’t matter whether the rules are medically necessary or just, and of course, enforcement and punishment are significantly more severe with overpoliced communities of color and those who live in poverty.

What kind of nation allows people to be prosecuted for health care?

On July 13, just as this article was nearing publication, a federal judge issued an injunction on in-person requirements for dispensing pills necessary for a medication abortion, saying they create a “substantial obstacle” for patients, and may be an unconstitutional undue burden during a pandemic. The ruling allows providers to mail or deliver the pills to patients—an important step, however temporary, in juris-prudence and in people’s lives.

But this moment has radicalized me. I’ve never supported restrictions—I’ve ex-perienced the panic they create when I was unsure if I could afford an abortion—but I’ve realized that it’s time for us to push for decriminalization of abortion and the abolition of all abortion restrictions. There is no medical necessity for any of these laws restricting abortion. They just create a tightrope for people to fall from and then invite the police into the experience.

As Black Lives Matter protests have swept our country, we are having a national dialogue about the spaces and places police hang around to control black and brown people—schools, hospitals, grocery stores, coffee shops, and our homes. Police are heavily involved in our inability to exercise reproductive freedom; they brutalize us while pregnant; spray us with tear gas, which can affect our fertility; arrest people who choose to terminate a pregnancy outside of the narrow confines of the law; shoot our children; and shackle us during labor. We deserve police-free pregnancies. This is why the fight for reproductive justice is critical. It addresses systemic issues that have long prevented families of color from thriving on our own terms. It’s worth recalling that antiabortion white supremacists pivoted from rallying for school segregation to protesting abortion; they want to control our futures.

If we are serious about protecting abortion access, we have to become serious about the fight to abolish abortion laws. Our ancestors worked hard to ensure we had access to abortion to space our pregnancies, save our lives, and free us from the rape and violence of chattel slavery. It is in their tradition that we must continue to make abortion free and available, whenever and wherever someone needs it.

Covid-19 brought a taste of what life would be like if abortion were illegal again, but it always has been in some form through the criminalization of black and brown bodies. I hope that more people will realize that to have reproductive justice, we have to take extreme efforts to decriminalize our health care, defund the police, and create communities that love people who have abortions, unapologetically.

Renee Bracey Sherman is a reproductive justice activist, abortion storyteller, strategist, and writer. She is the founder and executive director of We Testify, an organization dedicated to the leadership and representation of people who have abortions and share their stories at the intersection of race, class, and gender identity. She is also executive producer of Ours to Tell, an award-winning documentary elevating the voices of people who’ve had abortions. She was a participant in Kopkind’s 2015 political camp.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece originally appeared on July 15, 2020, on The Nation‘s website. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and The Nation crew.

Bonus: ‘I Know the Price of Life’, a Radio Short From Gdansk

Maria Margaronis writes from London, with another in her series of shorts about women making masks; a slightly different version of this radio piece was broadcast on Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4, on May 14.

Khedi Alieva (l) and her sister Amina (r) in Poland, amid the forsythia. (photo: Dorota Jaworska)

I spoke to Khedi Alieva this spring with the help of translator Joanna Dabrowska, and also to her friend, psychologist Dorota Jaworska. Khedi is a Chechen refugee in Poland. She and her sister Amina are members of Fundacja Kobiety Wedrowne, which roughly translates as Foundation for Women on the Road. Khedi and Amina were welcomed to Gdansk by Pawel Adamowicz, the city’s mayor for 20 years, who was fatally stabbed on January 13, 2019, while speaking at a charity event. Adamowicz’s support for migrant, minority and lgbt+ rights ran directly counter to the policies of Poland’s increasingly reactionary Law and Justice Party, which squeaked back to power this month on the back of a nasty campaign in which President Andrzej Duda attacked gay people, Jews, and liberals, who he says are undermining Poland’s security and traditions. 

Khedi, “making masks to slow down death.” (photo: Anna Rezulak / KFP)

But Khedi and her sisters are all about solidarity, gratitude, joy, and life. When the pandemic hit, they began sewing face masks and scrubs to protect their Polish friends, taking breaks to dance to the wild rhythms of Chechen music, a sampling of which Khedi chose for this piece. “The most important thing in life is just life.”

Maria Margaronis, a writer and radio maker, is a longtime neighbor and member of the Kopkind family. She is part of Kopkind’s honorary board. Click here to listen to her documentary about the Singer sewing machine. 


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Categories : Scenes from a Pandemic Series, The Nation

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