My mother sprang from the bed, hysterical, and somehow managed to scare the intruders away in a fit of panicked rage. When they finally got their bearings, my mother and father found that their phone line had been cut and several of their belongings were lined up on the floor of the living room —the TV, the stereo, and whatever else they had of value— staged by the front door, waiting to be hauled off. In the kitchen, evidence that one of them had helped himself to something from the fridge.

I don’t know if my father owned a gun then, or if perhaps that incident was what motivated him to look into purchasing a weapon — it certainly seems like the sort of reaction he would have had, given the fact that when I was in my twenties and living in Albuquerque, he advised me to carry a gun with me when I hiked alone in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. Though I did not grow up around guns, both of my parents had guns registered in their names, and I can recall in the very blurriest of early memories accompanying my parents to an indoor shooting range. It’s likely that it was just a hobby — just another activity my father unsuccessfully attempted to get my mother to enjoy, like hiking or boating, but in my mind the shooting range and the intruders always seemed to go together.

I remember complaining about and tugging at the too-big earmuffs over my ears, and taking them off in a fit of discomfort at precisely the same moment that my father or some other adjacent person fired his weapon at the  target silhouette. The succession of shots echoed in my unprotected ears and startled me so badly that I immediately began to cry. I remember touching the flesh behind my ears, thinking I’d just been shot in the head.

*

The first and last time I shot a gun was in college with my then boyfriend and future husband’s rifle — we were camping with friends on the edge of the Erie Canal, on his grandfather’s land in rural upstate New York. We’d cast some fishing lines into the water, put our case of beer into a mesh bag we had tied to the root of a fallen tree and dropped it into the canal to keep them cool. We wandered around the dense second-growth forest of his grandparents’ property, and pulled out all the camping chairs and rotten tables his family kept stored in an old abandoned school bus that had been dumped at the site — things his father and uncles used whenever they came down for hunting or fishing or cutting firewood.

I remember whooping with pride when I shot the empty beer can we had staged on a stump, the perfect aluminum void of where the bullet had entered the can, and the jagged, explosive opening of its exit through the other side. I kept that beer can as an artifact for a while, but it ultimately failed to survive a series of successive moves. Now what stays with me is the memory of shooting a gun next to a faded yellow bus.

*

The flag is being flown half-mast again, and yesterday, because of what happened in Parkland, Florida, I received a somber letter from my daughter’s school in the mail. It included information on lockdown drills and a fact sheet on How to Talk to Your Children About Mass Shootings.

I read the School Emergency Information Guide for Parents and Guardians, and lingered for a while on the part about Parent Responsibilities During a School Emergency and Reunification After a School Emergency — how we must resist our instinct to call the school or come and rescue our children if an intruder has penetrated the building. We should not rush in, it says. We should stay close to our phones and email, monitor radio and TV reports for updates and instructions.

So much restraint. Such ingrained restraint that this is really all we do even after it happens again and again and again.

*

I can recall tornado drills as a kid. We’d line up against the halls of our school, crouched down in child’s pose with our hands clasped behind our necks. We did this because we lived in the Midwest, and tornados were a fact of life, a threat beyond our control.

Now, a generation later, my children are doing drills to practice protecting themselves against a mass shooter. They do this because we live in America, and mass shootings are a fact of life, a threat beyond our control.

*

The NRA White House says: “When we declare our schools gun free zones it just puts our students in far more danger.” We need to “harden” schools as a deterrent, arm more teachers with guns.

Trump NRA vice president and CEO Wayne LaPierre says, “[W]e must immediately harden our schools every day. Every day young children are being dropped off at schools that are virtually wide-open soft targets for any one bent on mass murder.”

Soft targets? If we looked at the world the way the NRA would like us to look at the world, every place with people and the absence of guns might be renamed a soft target. As in, the kids ride the soft target to their soft target, and after they’re dismissed from their soft target, they walk over to the soft target for a snack and then go to the soft target to get a book for their research project. If we looked at the world the way the NRA would like us to look at the world, our fear would compel us to harden and arm all the places our children go: the school, the downtown deli, the library, the grocery store, the mall.

*

Not that I don’t understand the impulse to protect. What happened to my parents has been knitted into my bones, so I find myself sympathetic to those who wish to use a gun in their home’s defense. And the meat on my husband’s childhood kitchen table was a result of a rifle in my father-in-law’s hand, so I understand the role that guns can have in keeping a family suitably fed.

For me, the cognitive dissonance around guns happens with shooting for sport — when one’s demand for military-grade weaponry to shoot for recreation makes it easy for another to access such firearms for less benign pursuits. And I bristle at the refusal of some to acknowledge the role that easy access has in this country’s epidemic of mass shootings and gun violence. Why is my children’s right to a gun-free school environment less important than another’s right to get an erection from the experience of blowing up prairie dogs with a semi-automatic rifle?

*

Last week, I commented on a thread about guns on a friend’s Facebook page. He is a self-proclaimed gun nut, a thoughtful, conservative guy whom I like and respect, but with whom I often disagree. He posted a message recently, in which he stated that he had several AR-15 lower receivers, and then proposed to smash them with a sledgehammer for $250 a piece, payment via Google wallet. (They had apparently been purchased in anticipation of a ban after the massacre at Sandy Hook. An investment, I suppose. Like blood diamonds. Oops, now I’m letting my bias show.)

I considered the offer briefly, but thought better of having my money potentially used toward the purchase of some other semi-automatic weapon. What I want right now is policy change, as in no more civilian access to military-grade automatic and semi-automatic rifles. I gave my money to Everytown for Gun Safety instead.

The failure of left-leaning acquaintances like myself to take him up on his offer bothered my friend, or maybe it delighted him — I couldn’t really tell. “My offer just makes hypocrites of all who advocate fewer guns but are unwilling to pay for it as a societal good,” he posted. “Gun owners value guns enough to pay for them. Liberals who want fewer guns don’t want to pay symmetrically to have fewer guns.”

To be fair, this person is a good person, a law-abiding gun owner who is supportive of some gun reform. Registration and background checks, perhaps, but probably not banning anything outright. To folks like him, it’s an economic argument, driven by one’s willingness-to-pay. How much am I willing to pay to compensate him for his property? How much will I pay to destroy this firearm so it will never be sold to some disgruntled person who has more ready access to guns and gun accessories than to affordable mental health care? How much am I willing to pay to prevent this device from getting into the wrong hands and sending bullets through adolescent flesh at more than 3,000 feet per second?

But what about ability-to-pay? Should one’s right to live without the oppressive fear of gun violence be dependent on their personal ability to pay for the removal of that threat? Doesn’t that sound a little like… extortion?

And what if you’re on a limited income, like a teacher’s salary?

*

Besides, haven’t we already paid enough?

 *

My friend who is a teacher tells me that during active shooter drills, she must quickly lock the classroom door and gather all the children down onto the floor and behind the desks into a tight corner of the room, and then she must take attendance and slip it into the hallway under the door to show the principal that she’s accounted for all her kids. Then, while they sit there in silence pretending to be hiding from a mass murderer, someone outside rattles the door to make sure that it’s actually locked and she sits with her students holding her breath, heart pounding, wondering about the kid who is stranded in the bathroom while the door shakes and shakes and shakes.

*

The students say, We are scared. We are the children, you are the adults. Do something to protect our lives. Please keep guns out of our schools.

Trump says, I don’t think I’ll be going up against them. I really think the NRA wants to do what’s right.

The NRA says, Schools must be the most hardened target in this country and evil must be confronted immediately with all necessary force to protect our kids.

The students say, Please keep guns out of our schools.

The NRA says, No. And to all the journalists and politicians and celebrities who dare stand up to us: Your time is running out. The clock starts now.

*

Fred Guttenberg, whose 14 year-old daughter was murdered in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, called on politicians to acknowledge the threatening tone of the NRA’s recent video campaigns. “They put a target on all of your backs,” he said during his March 7th testimony on Capitol Hill. “The NRA, a lobby that finances campaigns, that forces legislation, put out a video that basically says, ‘Your time is running out.’

“And here is Dana Loesch in the video, talking to legislators who don’t support her, members of the media who she calls out by name, members of the acting community and professional sports figures — telling everybody that if they don’t get behind the NRA, their time is running out. And she had an hourglass, and at the end of her talking she turns it over and she says, ‘Your time’s up.’”

Guttenberg is quaking with emotion at this point. “If this was put out by a terrorist organization, we would be raising the terror threat level in this country.”

Terrorism: noun. the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.

*

What will it take to stop mass shootings? Please. We all know what it will take, but we just can’t seem to summon political will. The half-mast flags aren’t working. Thoughts and prayers aren’t working, either. And what of the letters and phone calls to politicians, the parent testimony, and the press conferences with traumatized teens wiping their tears away as they plead for sensible gun control? The NRA will flex its arsenal and remind us of our soft target status until we fall back into line.

I think the aggressive gun culture in America right now echoes the racial terrorism this country endured during the Jim Crow-South — by which I mean obedience from the masses due to the threat of a punitive act. Back then, it took the gesture of a grieving mother —whose 14 year-old son Emmett was pulverized and shot and dumped into a river for allegedly whistling at a white woman in 1955 Mississippi— back then it took her insistence on an open casket to force the nation to confront its own brutality.

“I couldn’t bear the thought of people being horrified by the sight of my son,” she said. “But on the other hand, I felt that the alternative was even worse. After all, we had averted our eyes for far too long, turning away from the ugly reality facing us as a nation. Let the world see what I’ve seen.”

I try to imagine that courage, the courage it took for a mother to pull the curtain on the violence that was inflicted on her son.

Do you have the courage, America? Do you have the courage to witness, truly witness what a semiautomatic rifle does to a classroom of high school kids, to the flesh of an innocent child? Do you have the stomach to truly acknowledge the depth of their exit wounds?  Because America, I’m afraid this is what it’s going to take for you to stand up to the NRA. It’s gonna take the face of Emmett Till.

Photo credits:

School bus — Groundspeak, Inc. www.waymarking.com

Emmett Till — www.emmetttillsocialjustice.blogspot.com

The post Notes from a Soft Target appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

My search uncovered a standard array of petroleum spills from leaky underground storage tanks throughout the town, including a somewhat significant one at a gas station adjacent to my daughter’s school. Luckily, the flow of ground water appears to move away from the school’s building footprint; although the contamination appears to have migrated offsite through the utility corridor, and was bad enough at one point to have warranted concerns about vapor intrusion at neighboring properties. The state is still working on that.

I also learned about soil and ground water contamination beneath the former Standard Register facility, now occupied by Connor Homes, and how the Subway on Court Street used to be a dry cleaner. Yes, indeed a dry cleaner that had an historic release of chlorinated solvents. When the problem was discovered some 20 years ago, plumes of tetrachloroethylene (PCE) and its carcinogenic degradation products had already migrated offsite, spreading beneath the neighboring residential properties and heading toward the daycare center located immediately behind.

I remember feeling a jolt as I read through the site records, as one of the owners of the offending dry cleaner bore the same last name as mine, and perhaps even more jarring because I have friends whose young children are currently enrolled at that daycare.  But I also recall feeling grateful —as I often did when I worked in the regulatory field— for the foundation of regulations that enable problems such as these to be addressed. The investigation report I read indicated that contaminated soils had been removed, that indoor air monitoring had been conducted for the daycare and neighboring homes years ago, that exposure pathways for sensitive receptors had been evaluated — in short, that the problem hadn’t been ignored.

If you are a parent of school-aged children like I am, you have no doubt encountered the locked doors and sign-in sheets at the front office of your child’s school. You may have submitted to the required background check before serving as a classroom volunteer, and have most likely provided documentation for your child’s receipt of the required vaccinations to attend their public school. These are just a few of the many protective layers that have been put into place to guard the health and safety of our kids, and many of them —like the heightened security and locked entrances, for instance— probably a reactionary procedure born from some tragic, preventable event.

It’s easy to forget the origins of such protective measures, especially when the threat is no longer visible. Easy for parents to forgo vaccinations for their children without the shadow of an iron lung looming overhead, because the regulations that were put into place have successfully kept our exposures at bay. But the threat is still present, and cracks in the armor of those protective measures invite the risk to come back in, as reminded by the few cases of whooping cough that cropped up at our school this year.

Having worked in the public sector, I am fully aware of the inefficiencies that plague the regulatory sphere. Improvements can always be made, I agree, but regulations are often there for a reason, their very purpose a storied affair. What would have happened, I wonder, if there were no rules? If the dry cleaner hadn’t been required to investigate and remediate its mess, if nobody even knew? What would the kids of the Mary Johnson Child Center be breathing into their lungs while they napped on mats along the floor?

I guess that’s why I’m so disgusted by the efforts of Trump and his supporters to usher in Cabinet members who seem so committed to the unraveling of protective regulations — everything from economic and education policies to environmental protection. It’s as if they’ve conveniently forgotten the critical events that have shaped the policies of the agencies for which they’ve been tapped to represent. And though it’s been nearly 30 years since Love Canal and the resulting Superfund legislation, it’s been less than a year since the lead-contamination tragedy in Flint, Michigan, and only 5 months since the PFOA crisis for the citizens of Hoosick Falls, NY.

If providing safe drinking water to our children isn’t a fundamental American value, then I don’t know what is.

Or maybe that’s just it. Maybe this incoming administration is just a timeline marker for the seismic shift of American values from a commitment to the preservation of health and human rights to something a little more… green.

Look, American industries have been complaining about regulation since the first regulations were ever passed. Cut the red tape, they say now, so we can be competitive with China.

Like this?

Or this?

That used to be us. I thought we already decided that wasn’t acceptable for our future generations. And remember child labor?

 Even that had to be regulated away.

But now I’m beginning to wonder if it ever really went away. Because the truth is, the burden we’re currently placing on the backs of our future generations might be the most brazen form of child labor that there is.

Photo credits:

Flint boy: npr.org

China air pollution: journal-neo.org

China water pollution: demilked.com

Addie Card, anemic little spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill: Lewis Hine

There is no Planet B: Inhabit.com

The post If There Were No Rules appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

I say ‘our’ as the collective, as in ‘our failure’ — though I certainly feel no loyalty to this demagogue as the leader of my country, because I feel the position was not earned within the accepted architecture of our democracy. Lies were told without accountability. Fear and hatred were exploited as diversion tactics. Worse yet, a foreign nation interfered, and now it appears that a Manchurian candidate has prevailed.

In the month since the election, Trump has given us reason to fear the worst. His cabinet, for instance: a collection of the least qualified, least educated individuals in modern American  history, two of whom (Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, chosen for Secretary of State, and Wilbur Ross, chosen for Secretary of Commerce) have close economic ties to Russia. The rest, filled with people whose principled ideals run counter to the missions of the very agencies they’ve been appointed to lead, most notably the anti-science climate-deniers appointed to the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency. Why? Because willful domestic ignorance is what the master plan requires.

If Trump’s team is any indication of his administration’s priority over the next four years, you can boil it down to one word: petroleum. Notwithstanding America’s own love affair with oil, it seems that Russian oil interests have turned this election on its head. This past year, while Americans argued over Trump’s tweets and Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, Vladimir Putin was positioning his chess pieces to support Russia’s increased Arctic drilling. Climate change is a good thing for him (and others with oil interests), at least in the short run, because melting polar ice caps will make fossil fuel extraction economically feasible in previously inaccessible areas.

Last February, Russian officials presented a revised claim of Arctic Territory to the United Nations, arguing that the country’s continental shelf extends well into the Arctic Ocean, including an area under the North Pole. If granted, Russia’s claim to the seabed would include mineral rights in the area — hundreds of billions of dollars in crude oil, currently unclaimed and untouched.

Now the only things standing in the way of Putin and Exxon Mobil’s development of these resources are 1) U.S. sanctions against Russia as punishment for their occupation of Crimea and crimes against Ukraine, and 2) U.S. policies restricting fossil fuel development in light of climate change.

If only there were people inside the White House who were sympathetic to their cause…

*

Last week, the Washington Post published an article about climate scientists in federal agencies scrambling to copy and archive as much federal climate data as possible before Trump is sworn into office. The fear, of course, is that Trump’s administration will order the destruction of the scientific evidence — a fear heightened by his transition team’s memo to the Department of Energy, asking agency officials for the names of employees and contractors who have participated in climate talks, conferences, and development of climate-based regulatory policy.

In the women’s domestic violence shelter where I volunteer, we call this kind of activity safety planning — preparations for survival under the threat of abuse. This kind of intimidation — the threat of retaliation, the threat of destroying one’s livelihood, or one’s property and professional work — is really not so different from the domestic abuse tactics we see before the escalation of physical violence. In these circumstances, we might help someone gather their supplies, make copies of the essential documents they need. Help them go into hiding if they feel their existence is at stake.

I shared the article on Facebook, posting: “Science, going into hiding like Anne Frank.”

*

Much has already been written about the parallels between the current political climate and the rise of Fascism in the 1930s. The patterns are recognizable, even with the limited history that I know: the xenophobic rhetoric, the racial superiority, the nationalism, the nostalgia for ‘better days of old.’  I sense danger in my body, my cells registering some kind of implicit knowledge, like the fight-or-flight impulse triggered by a predatory gaze.

I struggle to explain this history, this feeling to my kids — as much as I want to shield them from these things, it seems important for them to know an age-appropriate version of the truth. So I bought my oldest daughter a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank. I can’t remember how old I was when I first read the book, but my daughter is the same age that Anne Frank was when she began documenting her family’s life in hiding: just thirteen years old.

When I was thirteen, I believed in the nobility of my country. Freedom and democracy, justice for all. I believed in the history book lessons we were told about the land of opportunity, the inscription on our Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…

Fact: in 1941, Anne Frank and her family were denied entry as refugees to the United States. I did not learn this part of the story until I was an adult. Despite her father’s business connections in the U.S. and the presence of family in Boston, the Frank family’s applications for visas came too late, at a time when U.S. attitudes and policies concerning immigration were increasingly suspicious. It seems that America turned Jewish refugees away during the Holocaust because, among other things, we were worried about them being spies. (Does this sound familiar?)

Anne Frank died in a concentration camp at age fifteen. Turns out, her blood was also on our hands.

*

I know what you’re thinking. What does this have to do with that?

Do you see it now? A bouquet of words; they complement one another.

*

I wonder sometimes about the other diaries-in-hiding that could emerge when all of this is done. What stories will they tell? How bad will it really get? Will our children read about some Muslim girl hiding with her family in the attic of someone’s house? Or will it be more ‘civil,’ like the Japanese internment camps of the 1940s? Who else will be detained?  Dissenters? Journalists? Scientists?

It’s crazy, this line of thinking, I know. Unimaginable. Except that in many ways, the unimaginable has already happened — the data are already there. The votes have already been counted.

Maybe this is the diary they’ll find: a climate scientist’s records showing what we really knew all along.

Photo credit: Will Rose, Afghan refugees floating on the Mediterranean Sea, from qns.com

The post Science is a Refugee appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

After visits with my relative and meetings with the facility staff, we sat in the hotel room to debrief, trying to ignore the muted television in the corner — the nodding heads, furrowed brows, and moving mouths of CNN political pundits. We made tentative plans to meet again in the near future, said our goodbyes, and then I drove home through 5 hours of pouring rain. By the time I reached my home in Vermont, my shoulders had migrated up to my ears and my neck was so tense that I could barely turn my head from side to side.

I could chalk it up to the drive, I suppose, or the emotional challenge of why we were there in the first place — the contemplation of mortality and the indignities that often proceed it: adult diapers, depression, round-the-clock medical care. But if I’m honest with myself, I will admit that it was our silence, and my guilt about our historic silence around these matters and more that made me tighten into stone. There are so many difficult things to talk about in my family, so by default we usually don’t. Except when we are forced to; then we do it out of love.

After the last presidential debate, I posted a comment on Facebook about Donald Trump’s terrible debate performance, specifically his refusal to state that he would accept the results of the election if he didn’t win. After all the people that Trump has thrown under the bus during the course of his campaign, it enraged me to hear him incite some kind of conspiracy theory to cast doubt on his own independent failure to earn the trust of American voters. So I said something.

My comment got pushback from a friend (a conservative, but not a Trump supporter), who suggested that my crowing seemed a bit narrow-minded, unsportsmanlike, perhaps — that it’s easy to say these things when your candidate is winning, but that it’s harder to get into the minds of some of the really good people who happen to be Trump supporters. In other words, consider all of those nice folks with Trump signs in their yards. Most of them are legitimately disenfranchised with their government. Trump may not be ‘good people,’ but they are, and right now Trump is all they’ve got. In other words, be quiet.

We are both products of Ohio, this friend and I. Like him, I have conservative friends and family who lean right in their political views, and probably more than I care to know who have even donated to, or wear merchandise from the Trump/Pence “Make America Great Again” campaign. I have a history with these people. I care about these people; I even love most of them. Why do I keep insisting on stirring the pot? Don’t I care about how they feel?

I can tell you that I have spent most of my adult life with a buttoned lip and a careful eye on ‘caring about how they feel’ — and the only thing I can be sure that my silence successfully accomplished was the sustenance of an unhealthy environment, and a cultivation of a toxicity that served neither myself nor the people with whom I lived. It’s not that I don’t empathize with the struggles of Trump supporters; it’s that I take issue with the racist, misogynist, and xenophobic scapegoating that has been taking place inside that camp, and the general sociopathic traits of the person whom they have identified as their desired leader. To be blunt, I resent the expectation of my silence about all of the above, just because the people with Trump signs in their yards might be good people, friends or former neighbors, or even members of my own family. I have stumbled along this earth long enough to have at least figured out that love should not require silence, and that silence is not the same as love.

Much has been written this year about the “call-out culture” in our society — the act of publicly identifying individuals who have made offensive comments or taken actions of a discriminatory nature — and the pitfalls around the practice of progressive shaming. And while I agree that the reflexive pouncing that often occurs on social media can be counter-productive, I can’t help but be amused by the irony of people whose sensitivities are suddenly aroused once they have been scolded for their insensitivities.

But at least a dialogue is happening, right? Which is to say that although it may be messy, this is all an imperative conversation. We need to sit with our discomfort and acknowledge the pervasive rape culture that hovers over our girls. We need to talk about why using the term “Bad Hombres” during a presidential debate is right-to-the-bone offensive. We need to dissect the incongruities between “All Lives Matter” and “Black Lives Matter.” We need to face the tension between our country’s freedom of religion and our population’s fear of certain ones. Because the civil discourse in our country has been ailing for a while now, and it’s time we start thinking about its long-term care. We may not agree on how to avoid the demoralized, shit-filled bedpan state we’re currently headed toward, but we have got to figure this out. Our dignity as human beings is at stake. We’ve got to do this out of love.

Photo Credit: Huffington Post

The post Love Does Not Equal Silence appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.