Lily Salter's Blog, page 166

Trump’s push for new offshore drilling is likely to run aground in California

(Andrew Milligan / PA via AP) (Credit: AP)

The Trump administration’s effort to dramatically expand federal offshore oil production has reignited a battle with California that dates back nearly 50 years.

On January 28, 1969, a blowout from Union Oil’s Platform A spilled more than 3.2 million gallons of oil into the Santa Barbara Channel. The disaster was a seminal event that helped create the modern environmental movement, and it forever changed the political and legal landscape for offshore oil development in California. No new oil leases have been approved off the California coast since 1984.

Today a large majority of Californians believe that offshore oil development is not worth the risk. Opposition stands at 69 percent, including a majority of coastal Republicans. Based on my research, and years of experience working with passionate Californians as the executive director of the California Coastal Commission, I expect that there will be a long and protracted fight before any new oil development is authorized here.

Before the blowout

The first offshore oil wells were drilled in 1896 from wooden piers in Summerland, California. By 1906, some 400 wells had been drilled. The first true open-water well was drilled in 1938 in the Gulf of Mexico. In that same year, California created the State Lands Commission to better regulate leasing and production of offshore oil. As new technology enabled drilling in deeper waters, the commission began leasing tidelands near Huntington Beach and off of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

Early on, ownership of tidelands was unclear. In 1953 Congress gave states control over tidelands within 3 miles of shore and placed the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) — submerged lands beyond 3 miles — in federal hands.

These laws provided new certainty for offshore leasing. Starting in 1957, California approved construction of nearly a dozen platforms and six offshore islands (designed to camouflage drilling rigs) from Huntington Beach to Goleta. The federal government held five OCS lease sales between 1961 and 1968, leading to hundreds of exploratory wells and four production platforms off Carpinteria and Santa Barbara.

After the spill: Protests and reform

The Santa Barbara blowout lasted for days, spreading oil over hundreds of square miles and tarring more than 30 miles of beach. Thousands of birds, marine mammals and other seas creatures were killed. As the spill unfolded on national television, the State Lands Commission imposed a moratorium on offshore drilling.

The Interior Department also suspended federal activities, but following a regulatory review the Nixon administration tried to accelerate OCS oil development, especially when the 1973 OPEC oil embargo highlighted U.S. dependence on Middle East oil.

Congress, meanwhile, was passing keystone environmental laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act; major amendments to the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act; the Coastal Zone Management Act; the Marine Mammal Protection Act; the Ocean Dumping Act; and the Endangered Species Act. Californians passed the coastal protection initiative in 1972, and the legislature enacted the Coastal Act in 1976, creating a commission to regulate development in the coastal zone.

Nascent environmental groups now had new legal tools to take on polluting industries, including oil companies. Between 1972 and 1978, six lawsuits were filed against OCS lease sales, stymying federal efforts to increase offshore production.

Legal challenges to OCS leasing motivated Congress to reform the offshore oil program. In 1978 Congress amended the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, calling for “expeditious” development but also creating a phased decision process for planning, leasing, exploration and production. The law required comprehensive social, economic and environmental analysis, and provided opportunities for states to participate. Its supporters hoped that the new “rational” process would lead to accelerated, yet environmentally sound OCS oil development.

Deadlock offshore

The new law didn’t work. Beyond the Gulf of Mexico, where thousands of oil platforms were already operating, conflicts only worsened. Between 1978 and 1990 the Coastal Commission, other coastal states and environmental groups filed 19 lawsuits challenging the OCS leasing program. Californians were particularly incensed in 1981, when the new Interior Secretary James Watt reversed a prior decision against leasing offshore of central and northern California.

This decision triggered an explosion of litigation and protests. In one lawsuit the Coastal Commission argued that OCS leases directly affected the state’s coastal zone, and therefore should be reviewed by the commission. The Supreme Court disagreed in 1984, but eventually Congress changed the law to agree with the commission. Thousands of citizens protested at another lease sale hearing in Fort Bragg. Fifteen cities and counties from San Diego to Humboldt adopted ordinances that restricted siting of any onshore infrastructure for offshore oil.

Ultimately, 19 more platforms were approved off the California coast, mostly in the Santa Barbara Channel. But progress was slow, and the OCS leasing program began to unravel. Spurred by Watt’s aggressive approach, Congress started attaching leasing moratoria to appropriations bills. Between 1981 and 1994, these provisions expanded from protecting 0.7 million acres off California to 460 million acres off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Bering Sea.

In 1990, perhaps in an effort to get Congress to release other waters for exploration, President George H. W. Bush removed most federal waters off the Pacific coast, Florida and New England from the leasing program through 2000. President Bill Clinton later extended these moratoria through 2012, and in late 2016 President Barack Obama removed California from the federal leasing program until 2022. Environmental groups and the state had seemingly prevailed.

A permanent ban?

The Trump administration’s reversal of past policy has already sparked tremendous opposition in California. Nearly all other coastal states also are objecting.

In my view, offshore oil production in California now makes little sense. The U.S. no longer faces an oil crisis. Domestic production is at record levels, and California is actively working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change, including through renewable energy development. Though California is still the nation’s third-highest oil producer, there is strong political and public support for a forward-looking energy portfolio, rather than expanding offshore oil development — especially given its threat to the coast.

For Californians who want to pursue a progressive energy policy, more can be done at the state level. One pending bill would prohibit new pipelines in state waters to support new OCS production. The Coastal Act also could be amended to replace its outdated 1970s-era policy, which makes allowances for offshore production, with a policy stating that offshore oil and gas development is no longer in the state interest — except, perhaps, in a national security emergency. Renewable sources such as wind and wave energy could be supported instead.

Such actions would be symbolically important now, and could help California make headway towards what many protesters here are calling for: a permanent ban on offshore oil development.

Charles Lester, Researcher, Institute of Marine Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz

How Trump trauma is resurrecting the Jim Crow era

Jeff Sessions; Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Getty/Photo montage by Salon)

While Donald Trump’s behavior has inspired an endless amount of speculation about his mental health (or mental illness, depending on who’s talking), there has been less discussion about the impact of his presidency on our collective mental states. Even as Trump has seemed to wage a sort of psychic war on black and brown communities, America’s psychological organizations have largely remained silent about the potential mental consequences of those attacks.

Theopia Jackson, who heads up clinical psychology at Saybrook University in California, has spent more than three decades pushing the psychological field to recognize and address the ways our politics and mental health are intertwined. In late January, the Association of Black Psychologists, of which Jackson is president-elect, published an open letter titled “We Can No Longer Be Silent: Psychological Damage By President Trump.” The missive presented a cursory review of recent Trump insults to black and brown populations the world over, from the infamous “sh*thole” remark leveled against an entire continent to the implication that Puerto Rican hurricane survivors are lazy for requesting help, and arrived at the only reasonable conclusion.

“Not only do these statements denigrate the humanity of the citizens of these countries,” the organization noted, “they are psychological assaults to our sense of wholeness and wellbeing….While we fully recognize that President Trump does not have the courage or character to apologize for these inflammatory remarks, which is a behavioral stance similar to a psychopath, our continued silence would be enabling and complicit in the psychological damage historically associated with African dehumanization and destruction.”

Having worked in multiple areas of psychology, from private practice to pediatrics to academia, Theopia Jackson is an expert in trauma, how it impacts our lives and how we grapple with its long-term affects. I spoke with her about the trauma Trump creates, how people of color can push back and the role of cognitive dissonance in the last election.

Kali Holloway: Even before the election, during the campaign season, mental health workers and clinicians said they were seeing signs of politics-related trauma in clients. Did you witness how the election season took a toll on people, especially those in vulnerable communities?

Theopia Jackson: First and foremost, I want to clarify how I understand trauma, which is the thing that happens to us, not what’s wrong with us. The reality is, every human is exposed to trauma. We’re just in various places in terms of how we cope with it, based on a number of different factors, such as accessibility to resources, self-awareness about what’s happening, and more. When I think about how trauma played out during the campaign season, I would say many things were being activated in people. Some of [Trump’s] languaging reminded people of past trauma events. And of course, many of those folks were members of communities or groups who have already been targeted— LGBT people, particular religious groups, certain races and ethnicities.

I want to say, too, that many communities — in particular communities of color — have always maintained that issues of racism were still happening. Yet in our more dominant discourse, there was the idea that we were “post-racial” because of the election of President Barack Obama; that we were post all these issues, despite the fact that communities of color, particularly African Americans, along with our Hispanic brothers and sisters, kept saying, No, this still exists. But we couldn’t hear it. I think [Trump’s] campaign brought all of that to light. The timing of his campaign came on the heels of recent acknowledgements of police violence in communities of color. And again, people did not want to believe that some of those who are charged with being peacekeepers were actually operating from a racist ideology.

Let me be very clear: this is not true for all law enforcement. But it’s definitely true for too many. I think the heightened national and international awareness of police abuse, along with [Trump’s] rhetoric actually accelerated and exacerbated people’s discomfort. Folks could no longer ignore what was happening or pretend that things were cool.

KH: This makes me think of the discussion I’ve seen around Trump’s gaslighting of Americans. How he says one thing, then says he never said it, even though we just watched him say it five minutes ago and it’s on video. That’s a sort of collective gaslighting. For me, it’s very reminiscent of the gaslighting this country has been doing to folks of color and marginalized communities forever, essentially telling us that issues like racism are a mass delusion of some sort.

So an event like the election of Donald Trump definitively states: No, this is real. We’re not imagining it, or in some dream state. This is very real, and it’s part of the fabric of our country.

TJ: Absolutely.

KH: Did you personally see election-related trauma among people you were in contact with?

TJ: Absolutely. And it’s still going on now. For example, the way it would show up in my practice as a clinical psychologist is that I had many clients, particularly children, who were completely scared. They would share that they were fearful, that they felt like they couldn’t leave their homes anymore. Within the black community it’s sort of resurrecting the time of Jim Crow….

KH: For a whole new generation, right?

TJ: Exactly. And with the verbiage that [Trump] was putting forth about our immigrant brothers and sisters — I saw people deeply afraid that loved ones could literally disappear one day, and no one would know. I’ve seen children unable to sleep. Parents completely dysregulated, and overprotective, never wanting to let their children out of their sight. You have folks who are also much more impulsive, in the sense that they are reading everything through a lens of heightened racial tension because of everything that has been stirred up.

There was also a lot of dysregulation within the field. I’m on a number of different professional listservs and it was amazing to see colleagues struggling with meaning-making around this. There were those clearly coming from a social justice stance, who were remembering all the work they’d done for civil rights, being fearful for their clients, and for the future of our country, and trying to articulate those feelings. And then of course, there were colleagues who endorsed or supported Donald Trump’s candidacy, and watching the intensity of that discourse was unique. I’ve been practicing now for 30-plus years. I’ve gone through several different elections, and this type of debate has not shown up with such intensity within the field before.

I also find it quite striking that post-election, there were a number of different webinars in which my learned colleagues were trying to help parents talk to their children about the outcome of the election. The fact that clinicians felt they had to do that is unique to this campaign, for me at least.

KH: Did you feel there was a learning curve that had to be navigated by the psychological community because we hadn’t seen anything quite like this in our lifetimes? Was it extraordinary in terms of the disturbance it created, and the way clinicians had to think about treatment and the trauma people were experiencing?

TJ: In the psychological community, I would like to think there’s more room for growth. We have grown in our awareness of the role of psychology in terms of social justice, and interrogating the role of psychology in supporting health and healing from a much more transformative social stance, getting beyond simple symptom reduction to improving people’s quality of life.

I would submit that during this particular [presidential] campaign, my colleagues were drawing upon their newly acquired awareness about the global impact of these events on people’s psychological health and well-being. There was an intentionality to asking, “How do we help families talk to children about this?” Because we’re very clear that it has an impact on people’s sense of safety, which of course impacts their mental health and their physical health. I want to applaud my colleagues for doing this. And as I said, the discourse that happened on the listserv is evidence of our increased awareness and knowledge, and a good use of technology. In the past, there may have been events that would have brought this level of dysregulation and critical discourse, but they probably would have been happening in pockets, in relative isolation. But with the use of the internet, it’s a much more global, intense conversation, and a critical discourse.

My other theory is that following the election of President Barack Obama, and his reelection, people who were not happy may have felt silenced. There was such profound social acceptance, and a sense of hope, that if you really didn’t care for Barack Obama, you may have kept your comments to yourself, or felt dissatisfaction in not knowing where to go with them, or what to do with that. I just want to expand this human experience. It’s no surprise to me that the pendulum therefore swung in the complete opposite direction.

I think that with Barack Obama’s election, there was a false sense of hope. There was this sense that we had somehow become post-racial through something as simple as the election of someone with brown skin. I think we didn’t fully collectively appreciate the complexities which many communities of color have been trying to speak to for years.

KH: You were talking about how Trump brought up precise fears that created trauma; for example, in immigrant communities, the fear that a loved one could just disappear one day. That’s a precise fear that breeds trauma. But I also wonder if some of the trauma came from simply recognizing what Trump’s election said about this country. Trump is just the symptom of a larger problem.

TJ: Correct.

KH: His election was the country basically saying to women, We don’t care about sexual assault, or the fact that we’re putting an admitted ‘pussy grabber’ in office; we are down with voting for a president whose only real campaign promise was to make life harder for black folks and other people of color.

I wonder if some of this trauma comes from recognizing this overt hatred, from the top down, that has been rubber-stamped by 63 million people.

TJ: I really appreciate that question, and it’s very complex. First of all, I want to critically examine what we mean by “63 million people endorsed Trump.” I’m not sure 63 million people supported Trump. I’m not clear on how many of those people were simply not voting for Hillary. Because again, history tells us that people’s motivation for voting comes from several different places. It’s not always about the full endorsement of the candidate they’re going for. It could be such deep dis-ease with the other choice. And to be clear, many communities of color have been voting like that for years. Whoever is the least racist person up for an office may drive the decision, right?

KH: Right.

TJ: I just want to say that. And I want to be critical — I don’t want to lump 63 million of my fellow Americans as all being for Trump. I also want to state that many of them may have been misled and thought they were voting for something else. Many may not have realized, and may not realize even now, that Trump really was not looking out for them.

Late last year the American Psychological Association put out a study that shows that for the first time in many years, Americans are worried about the psychological and emotional health of America; even more so than money. I believe those results are a residual of this campaign outcome.

Getting back to your question, this is a great example of cognitive dissonance. I think that played a role. I want to ask myself, What is happening for my fellow women, who are educated and knowledgeable? How could they make peace with voting for a man who clearly demonstrated the sexist immorality [Trump] did? I would say that’s cognitive dissonance. Something got in the way, okay?

I would also say, part of the residual for me might be — and I say this all the time — when the KKK ended, they did not simply take off their robes and become different people. They took off their robes, and many of them put on suits and ties and golf shirts.

So that could be part of what was activated on that side of the street, if you will, as a residual effect of Barack Obama’s successful election and reelection. Trump said out loud, and publicly, what many white Americans and others have always thought, and may have not felt like they could socially say anymore. This is how complex all of this really is.

KH: This, for me, is key. Before the election, there was an ongoing conversation, certainly within the media, that seemed to be an attempt to absolve Trump voters of their votes. I’m talking specifically about folks who voted for Trump, people who saw him as their candidate, which was absolutely a vote for racism and misogyny. I feel like there was a real attempt to absolve them of that vote by playing up their pain. So again and again, we read about how desperate they were because of the loss of manufacturing jobs, the closing of coal mines, the opioid epidemic, and on and on.

The reality is, we know that Trump voters make more than the American average, and that all socioeconomic levels of white folks cast ballots for Trump. But even if there were not an economic fabrication hidden in the theory, it would still be another example of the constant elevation of white pain over the pain of other folks.

TJ: You’re right. But even to get to that, even to have a conversation about white pain being privileged, is already too complex because those who are experiencing and operating from that dominant plane aren’t even willing to accept that that’s what they’re doing. So it’s sort of like we see something that they cannot see in themselves, which is the significant problem. It is the ultimate definition of oppression, because those who are most blind hold the most power.

This is also what gets triggered when I hear many good-intended white folks say, I don’t have any white privilege, I don’t know what that is. Because they don’t truly understand the complexities of that.

Two thoughts come to me right now. One is, I’m reminded of a family that I worked with where the daughter was multiracial. Her father was black and her mother was white, but she grew up mostly with her white family. She came to me distraught after an interaction with her white aunt, who was her favorite. The aunt had stated clearly that there’s no longer racism, and the child was trying to share her own experiences living in a predominantly white area, the ways in which she experienced racism. Her aunt couldn’t hear it. So now this teenager was struggling with her love for her favorite aunt, and the way in which [her aunt] can’t see her in this situation. That’s what I mean by the depth of the blindness that informs power. They too are being manipulated and let down.

Another good example is the issue of health care. Folks were so hell-bent on voting against Obamacare, they didn’t realize they were actually voting for someone who is going to compromise their own current health care. That’s how uninformed folks are. The power of systems of oppression and racism is that people are manipulated without realizing it. That’s what Trump and his phenomenally skilled folks did. There was lot of smoke and mirrors, and speaking to people’s fears. For those groups who have felt marginalized and disenfranchised by, say, reverse racism (which is, again, a myth), he benefited from speaking to their fears, and utilizing it for his own good, and for the good of a small group.

And now we’re sitting here with a president who can send us all into war in two seconds — all because someone didn’t say Hi to him!

KH: I want to talk a little bit about the future. I keep thinking about what it means to tell someone they’re from a shithole country. Or to tell immigrant kids that they are innately criminal and basically incapable of becoming Americans. Or when Trump suggested he wants fewer black folks coming into the country, but wants to up the number of Norwegians. I was texting with a friend when the news came out, and I wrote, “This is being hated.”

Whether or not he’s in office three or seven more years, I just wonder, in your vision, how will these traumas look for millions of people in the future?

TJ: First of all, I want to make one shift here, which is in the use of language. For me, it’s very important to say that I can be exposed to trauma, but I’m not going to let myself be traumatized to a point where my identity is compromised. Also, for communities of color, particularly those of African ancestry, the work we’re doing in black psychology is trying to raise consciousness about the fact that we still have self-determination in the space of this trauma. We have to move out of the victim stance — where there’s this idea that all of this is happening to us, and is therefore defining us — and move to the relational stance with the rest of America. We’re always somebody’s group to be saved. I don’t want to perpetuate the savior stance or the victim stance.

What I see as one of the outcomes of this election is that people have to put up or shut up. It is a huge wakeup call for all. No longer can we have good white Americans sitting silently on the sidelines, saying, Everything must be okay, because we fixed it all during the civil rights movement. They now must consciously decide to be either part of the problem or part of the solution. We have people of color, principally black folks, who have to clearly say, Wait a minute. There’s still this myth of black inferiority and white supremacy. I can no longer pretend there is equality here. How do I activate from that place to self-define?

That’s also speaking to the idea of intersectionality: who I am as a black person who may also happen to identify as LGBTQ, who may happen to identify as Muslim? All of those identities can be marginalized individually, and someone might accept me as each of those singular things. But who is looking at the collectiveness of who I am?

I say that because again, in our LGBT community, I think they have missed the implications of race and ethnicity within their own ranks.

I think that Black Lives Matter is a wonderful example of doing it right. The women [who cofounded the movement] were phenomenal for getting it started, particularly as they each come out of different ways of being. This is an opportunity for us to operate from a stronger social justice perspective, and a firmer sense of relationship and connectedness to one another, or we’re going to fall further into the divisiveness this leadership brings. It is going to be America’s demise.

I want to say this as many times as I possibly can. When I think about the comments that Ben Carson made about people of African ancestry coming across the waters with their own hopes and dreams, for me it was a clear example of what we mean by internalized oppression. Somehow this learned, educated brother bought into the hype, and forgot. Because as I see it, my people came here with nightmares. And they were nightmares they didn’t even have a consciousness for, because they couldn’t even conceive of what was about to happen to them.

This was also a wakeup call within our own black communities. Who the hell are we? Who’s defining us? And who do we want to be? That should be a model for all our communities of color. How do we bridge the differences? How do we, as black folks, help out our immigrant brothers and sisters, who may have a Hispanic public face, but who include black immigrants and white refugees. They are also a target of this immigrant threat approach. When Trump talks all that negativity about people from Haiti, somehow black folks in America think that’s not them. Make no mistake, he is targeting black people in general.

I truly hope an outcome of the insanity is that people reclaim their humanity and sanity and social justice. People have to arm themselves in multiple ways to do what’s right by themselves and others, and no longer sit on the sidelines, or be somebody’s spokesperson: Oh, I’m for diversity because I have this one black person here, or this one LGBT person here. That doesn’t work anymore. People have to critically examine what is going on.

Kali: What advice would you give to journalists who are completely fatigued by news about Trump at this point?

TJ: [Laughing.] Well, first of all, I would validate your normal reaction. You’re having a normal reaction to an abnormal situation, which is the ultimate definition of being exposed to trauma. What you just said is a shared experience for all of us, from various walks of life and disciplines, who are trying to effect change, and realizing the depth and breadth of the insanity, as well as the traumatized context in which we’re sitting.

I would say we need to continue to self-care, because none of us can be martyrs. There are a number of clinicians of color I’ve seen become more hopeless and helpless as a residual of our sociopolitical state of affairs. We have to find a way to sustain ourselves. What you’re doing now — the conversation we’re having now — is part of that. How do we continue to not only reach out to others who get it, but also temper how much we’re doing? Journalists have to turn it off for a minute and breathe. You have to pay attention to your own spiritual self-care and your own psychological and physical health, and step back for a minute, so someone else can take it up.

What I always say is, when you’re working from a trauma-informed care perspective, as long as we’re all not down at the same time, there’s still hope. I can rest for a bit knowing someone else is at the forefront. We don’t have to physically be in the same room. I just have to know they exist.

KH: Communities of color have traditionally been less on board with psychotherapy than whites — for a long list of reasons. Do you think the trauma of these last two years may change the conversation around therapy and mental health treatment in communities of color?

TJ: First and foremost, as a licensed clinical psychologist, I want to be absolutely clear in noting that I’m part of a profession that played an active role in the marginalization of black communities and many other communities of color. I need to be very clear about that. It’s what we call institutionalized oppression, and we have to examine that history. But I’m also taking an active role in trying to shape and change things so we do right by the people we need to do right by.

Western therapy was not designed or intended for people of color. That’s not a slight so much as it is a realization. If we look at the lives of Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung — that was not in their consciousness. They were preoccupied with, “So what’s going on in your mind right now, and how is that affecting you?” That’s a luxury.

This is clear if you look at the civil rights era. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. commended the American Psychological Association for documenting the trauma caused by Jim Crow on black Americans. But to my knowledge, there was no broad effort to establish interventions that fostered psychological liberation grounded in the culturally affirming nature of what it means to be black. In other words, however well-intentioned it might have been, that approach defined the black experience [solely] as a reaction to racism, perpetuating a victim stance, with someone else being the savior. That fails to interrogate the psychological impact of Jim Crow on white Americans who actively participated in or benefitted from those laws — or going further back, who benefited from the enslavement of blacks.

From a multigenerational perspective, what are the residuals for white America’s psyche and impact on today’s race relations? From a social justice perspective, we have not seen a national or global focus on the role of therapy in addressing those complexities, only small pockets of work. These are critical discourses that are only now emerging.

I’ll be more explicit: the Association of Black Psychologists will be celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. It was born because a group of black psychologists and graduate students were at an American Psychological Association convention here in San Francisco, and they asked the American Psychological Association, How do we pay attention to issues of cultural differences? The way that we’re being trained, and the way that we’re being taught, leaves out a whole group of folks’ experiences. More importantly, we’re making them look sick when they’re not sick.

These scholars were pushing back on what’s known as the deficit mode, which compares blacks to whites and makes whites a standard of normalcy, and attributes differences to some limitation or fault in blacks. For many reasons beyond my comprehension, APA could not hear that and did not respond favorably. So that group walked away from APA and said, Wait a minute, now. How can we better understand what it means to be healthy and whole from a culturally centered perspective if we recognize that our psychological tools are literally driving black people crazy?

That’s how the Association of Black Psychology was born, and the inspiration for developing the field of black psychology.

I would also say, in partnership with our cultural allies who are still within APA and other black scholars, we have changed the field by increasing conversations around multiculturalism, increasing conversations around what it means to be human from a culturally centered perspective, and a person-centered perspective, as opposed to having someone define it externally. So we’re forcing our field to look at multiple realities instead of putting everybody in the same box.

We’re now being challenged to further integrate a social activist stance into the way we teach psychology, the way we train psychologists, and the way we do research. We’re looking at how our research studies can be more about the psychological liberation of the people we’re working with, versus simply being example of our expertise and our theory.

I would also add that not everything that’s therapeutic is therapy, and not every therapy is therapeutic. Many of us would admit that in some of our mental health systems, we are inadvertently socializing people to remain patients. But coming from a social justice perspective, we have a more critical eye to examine the blinders we’ve had in our field about the ways we have inadvertently added to the problem, or missed opportunities. Seeing the huge response of psychologists wanting to put together webinars about how to talk about these issues, the growing critical discourse around trauma being something contextual versus some problem inside a person, and seeing APA embracing more of that discourse can bring about some hope.

But it’s still not enough, because we are not doing this on a global level. I think that’s why the Association of Black Psychologists exists, and other ethnic psychological associations, because we must always keep trying to push health and healing from a culturally centered place, and learn how that may line up with what is talked about in APA, or the ways in which it doesn’t, and consider how to position ourselves in relationship to that. It’s a critical discourse that does not have a simple answer. The field of therapy should continue to change as we change, and be part of the societies in which we’re coming out of.

Freudian slip? Sessions remarks on “Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement”

Jeff Sessions (Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster)

In his speech to an audience of law enforcement officers, Attorney General Jeff Sessions made eyebrow-raising comments about the history and function of law enforcement in the United States, comments that seem to profess that the history of law enforcement is a means of reinforcing white supremacy.

As NBC reported on Monday:

“The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement. We must never erode this historic office. I know this, you know this, we want to be partners, we don’t want to be bosses, we want to strengthen you and help you be more effective in your work,” Sessions told the National Sheriffs’ Association.

Sessions is more accurate than he realizes. As Dr. Victor Kappeler, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University, writes, “The institution of slavery and the control of minorities, however, were two of the more formidable historic features of American society shaping early policing.” Kappeler continues:

 Slave patrols and Night Watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities. For example, New England settlers appointed Indian Constables to police Native Americans (National Constable Association, 1995), the St. Louis police were founded to protect residents from Native Americans in that frontier city, and many southern police departments began as slave patrols. In 1704, the colony of Carolina developed the nation’s first slave patrol. Slave patrols helped to maintain the economic order and to assist the wealthy landowners in recovering and punishing slaves who essentially were considered property.

After an initial outcry, the DOJ attempted to walk back Sessions’ comments late Monday in a statement to CNN. A spokesperson for the DOJ said that the term “Anglo-American law” is commonly used by legal scholars.

It seems probable that the Justice Department was aware of the potential for Sessions’ remarks to stir outrage. The evidence for that stems from the fact that the version of the speech that the Justice Department initially released on Monday redacted the words “Anglo American,” as NBC noted.

Trump and Sessions are playing “bad cop-good cop” in the drug war

Jeff Sessions: Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Getty/Photo Montage by Salon)

The omens are not good. In a pair of speeches this week, the president and his attorney general made some very menacing comments about drug policy. While their last-century drug warrior rhetoric has not, for the most part, translated into regressive, repressive drug policy prescriptions — yet — it’s probably not safe to assume that will continue to be the case.

At the same time, the Trump White House appears to be approaching key aspects of the country’s opioid crisis, which contributed mightily to a record 64,000 drug overdose deaths in 2016, with a mixture of indifference and incompetence.

Trump wants to drastically slash the budget of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP, the drug czar’s office), his White House opioid response is laughably led by pollster and counselor — not drug policy or addiction expert — Kellyanne Conway, and his budget proposals are for spending substantially less, not more money on treatment and prevention.

An Obama-era law that designated a billion dollars to help states fight opioids runs out of money this year, with no sign Trump intends to ask Congress to renew it, and Trump’s 2018 budget request has a $400 million cut to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the lead federal agency for treatment.

Instead of proactive responses aimed at ameliorating the crisis, Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions are falling back on drug war rhetoric that would have been at home in Nixon’s 1970s or Reagan’s 1980s.

Trump spent barely a minute talking about the opioid crisis in his State of the Union speech last week, and now he says he’s focused on law enforcement, not treatment and prevention.

In a speech this week in Cincinnati, Trump said the opioid epidemic “has never been worse. People form blue-ribbon committees. They do everything they can. And frankly, I have a different take on it. My take is you have to get really, really tough; really, really mean with the drug pushers and drug dealers.”

Attorney General Sessions, for his part, was on the same page this week. In a Tuesday night speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation for an event honoring Ronald Reagan’s birthday, Sessions could have been channeling The Gipper himself, blaming the media, not enough drug war, and “permissive rhetoric” for problems with drug use.

“We don’t think illegal drug use is recreation,” he said. “Lax enforcement, permissive rhetoric, and the media have undermined the essential need to say no to drug use. Don’t start. That’s what President Trump said to us the other day in a meeting. What did Nancy Reagan say? Just say no.”

Sessions reiterated his opposition to state-legal marijuana resorted to the discredited “gateway theory” to try to blame marijuana for the opioid epidemic.

“The DEA said that a huge percentage of heroin addictions starts with prescriptions. That may be an exaggerated number — they had it as high as 80 percent — we think a lot of this is starting with marijuana and other drugs,” Sessions ventured.

“We are not going to pretend that there is not a law against marijuana. There is a federal law against marijuana,” he said. “And we’re not going to pretend that marijuana is good for you, either. I don’t think it is.”

Drug war rhetoric is one thing; actual policy shifts is another. So far, despite the tough talk, about the only concrete action aimed at driving us back to the failed drug war policies of the past is Sessions’ move last May to reverse Obama-era policy of moving away from harsh mandatory minimum sentences in drug cases. Other than that, there’s been a lot of sound and fury, but little in the way of actual policy proposals. Still, the remarks this week from the president and his chief law enforcement officer ought to be setting off alarm bells.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders has a better idea. The independent Vermont senator and 2016 Democratic presidential contender on Wednesday announced a petition calling on Congress to “end the failed war on drugs.” “The criminal justice system is not the answer to drug abuse. Addiction is a health problem and we should start treating it that way,” Sanders wrote. “While communities all across the country lack adequate resources for treatment or prevention, we are spending approximately $50 billion a year on the war on drugs. That’s absurd. We need to get our priorities right.”

Shooting a Tesla into orbit: A slap in the face to real science

A Tesla roadster launched from the Falcon Heavy rocket with a dummy driver named "Starman" heads towards Mars. (Credit: Gett/SpaceX)

Every power-hungry titan in history has had dreams of immortality. This has never been practically achieved — only metaphorically. From the pharaohs to the numerous libraries funded by Andrew Carnegie to the many, many universities and hospitals named for their donors, it’s a general rule that when you reach a certain amount of wealth and power, the best way to ensure your name lives on in perpetuity is to slap it on a building, monument or foundation.

This tangent about philanthropy is more relevant to Elon Musk’s recent car-launching stunt than it might seem. The Mark Zuckerbergs and Bill Gateses of the world achieve existential immortality by hoodwinking us with their faux-charity, attaching their names to nonprofit institutions or scholarship funds. This in turn gives them fuel to avoid taxation and hide their money — after all, if they’re “doing good” in other ways, they must be good people and therefore don’t deserve to get taxed.

In the same manner, Musk has achieved a comparable kind of immortality: the record-book feat of sending a luxury car into space, to orbit the sun for eternity. Long after Tesla stock collapses, long after SpaceX is nationalized out of existence, long after the “Zuckerberg” in Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital is displaced by another trillionaire donor’s name, the Tesla will keep on circling the sun.

Yet the true hubris of the car-launching stunt lies in how little respect it shows for real science and science education.  Sending something into orbit is a phenomenally expensive ordeal; even sending equipment to low-Earth orbit — barely above the mesosphere  — hovers between $9,000 per pound and $43,000 per pound, according to one estimate. Sending cargo further out — say, scientific instruments —  is far more expensive; as such, the cost of sending a satellite of comparable weight into the orbit Musk’s Tesla now occupies would be in the eight- to nine-figure range. Many astronomers spend years submitting proposals to get their 10-pound instrument attached to a probe, and often get denied again and again.

“This is basically the criticism a lot of scientists have” of the Tesla launch, said Jill Scudder, a physics professor at Oberlin College who publishes a science outreach blog called Astroquizzical. “Why not send a whole fleet of CubeSats [small cubical satellites] or something?”

Musk could have reached out to the scientific community to put something of scientific or educational value on the Falcon Heavy rocket, but didn’t. NASA confirmed as much in a comment to a GeekWire reporter. Or Musk and company could have sent a few kids’ science experiments along in the passenger seat; they sent an advertisement for a union-busting billionaire’s car company instead. 

There is another, more intriguing question swirling around SpaceX’s launch, one that speaks to a deeper enmity towards science: Was the Tesla sterilized prior to launch? Spreading living organisms around the solar system unintentionally is a huge risk that every space agency on Earth attempts to avoid at all costs. Both Scudder and Jason Davis (writing in the Planetary Society’s blog) have expressed concerns about this. “That worries me about the car,” Scudder told Salon.

She added that she hadn’t seen any confirmation that the car was sterilized prior to launch; I could find no evidence of that either. Indeed, the car seats didn’t look melted, as they likely would if it had been sterilized the normal way satellites are, via heat. (Salon reached out to SpaceX for comment, and did not receive a response prior to publication.) “Planetary protection policies say you should bake your spacecraft to stave off bacteria,” Scudder said, “in case it crashes into something that maybe has the capacity for life, or something that could end up somewhere with the capacity for life.”

Scudder was particularly concerned with contingencies. The launch was successful and Musk’s Tesla satellite is now in an orbit that’s unlikely to crash it into Mars, but there were no guarantees of that in advance. If something had gone wrong with the launch, the car could easily have contaminated a body in the solar system with pesky Earth microbes, a result that would have infuriated actual scientists. In the battle between billionaire hubris and international scientific protocol, the former seems to have won out.

Indeed, we now seem to have entered a strange new era in space travel, where space is no longer a sacred realm where humans trespass only cautiously, and only on the basis that whoever does so acts on behalf of our entire species. Writing in The Atlantic, Marina Koren marvels at how Carl Sagan and a group of scientists labored over the import of what to put on Voyager’s “Golden Record.” In comparison, the Tesla in space feels trite. Space is no longer romantic, and far less a symbol for collective human achievement and human possibility.

Scudder was comparably skeptical about the symbolism of the Tesla launch. It did not “feel like a great symbol of humanity,” she told Salon. “I don’t think of cars as symbolizing humanity … I think it’s a symbol of SpaceX and a symbol of Elon Musk. He made the Tesla happen, he made the company happen, he made the launch happen.” She continued, “It’s very self-contained in that way. This is not really a symbol of accessible space travel.”

I agree. Musk sending a Tesla into space is an exercise in frivolity. Just as Dwight Eisenhower once suggested we view military spending as a theft from the poor, I see random, self-promotional space junk as a theft from humanity. Compared to the important scientific tasks space travel has enabled, from planet-detection to gravity-wave observation to infrared telescopes, the $100,000 luxury car floating in the void is nothing more than a wasteful monument to billionaire stupidity. Or perhaps it’s a harbinger of a new era, in which space is now normalized as a rich man’s playground rather than a scientific commons. In other words, it’s not even a small step for man — it’s just a huge leap for Musk’s already vast ego.

Humanizing the border: Francisco Cantú’s “The Line Becomes a River”

A child standing at the border wall observes the "Not Walls" demonstration by activists in the US in front of the wall that divides Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, from Sunland Park, New Mexico, on October 23, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / HERIKA MARTINEZ (Photo credit should read HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP/Getty Images) (Credit: Getty/Herika Martinez)

How and why people come to the United States, what they do and how they are treated once they get here, and who they are allowed to become, is a cornerstone of the American story. Throughout the first year of Donald Trump’s administration, part of that national story has been playing out through ICE raids, deportations and round-ups, and heated political standoffs over the fate of undocumented immigrants brought here as children. And since Trump began campaigning for president on the promise that he would build a wall along parts of the border between the U.S. and Mexico — and make Mexico pay for it — in order to more tightly control crossings between the two countries, the boundary line itself, walled or open, has become a hotly-debated point of interest throughout the country. Trump’s now see-through wall makes the metaphor concrete: The U.S. needs to carefully control who crosses, while still keeping an eye on who is on the other side. And yet, border crossing fatalities rose in 2017, even as the number of migrants making the journey decreased, suggesting that official deterrence in the borderlands could be working only on those not desperate enough to risk the most dangerous routes or methods.

Boundaries are political and logistical constructs, but to each person who crosses, the border and their relationship to it is personal. Writer Francisco Cantú, author of the new narrative nonfiction book, “The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border” (Riverhead Books, out now), grows up with one level of intimate knowledge of the border: his mother, the daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raises him in the national parks of the Southwest, where she worked as a ranger. Seeking a different level of understanding than he could gain through academics and observation, Cantú joins the border patrol, where he tracks, arrests, processes and sometimes saves the lives of the people attempting to cross into the U.S. through unauthorized entry points and without proper paperwork.

Told in lyric prose that brings the uncompromising dangers of the mountains and deserts of the border states to hard, glittering light, “The Line Becomes a River” weaves together research on the history and current state of the border and the forces within Mexico that drive migration with an account of Cantú’s time working as an agent in Arizona and Texas, from training to field patrol and then intelligence work. With his degree in international relations, as his mother points out, joining the border patrol is an unlikely career move for a guy like Cantú, who received the prestigious Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to complete this book. “You can tell whoever asks that I’m tired of studying,” he tells her, “I’m tired of reading about the border in books.”

“I want to be on the ground, out in the field, I want to see the realities of the border day in and day out. I know it might be ugly, I know it might be dangerous, but I don’t see any better way to truly understand the place,” he writes.

She remains unconvinced that a job in law enforcement is necessary to fully comprehend an oppressive system and concerned about what effect his involvement in such an institution might have on her son’s humanity. And in the beginning of the book, the reader might have reservations about his enterprise. His mother’s voice provides a welcome and necessary ongoing critical counterpoint to his willingness to do this work, and as such provides an emotional touchstone for the reader, too. In the hands of a different writer, “The Line Becomes a River” could have become a longform piece of adrenaline journalism from which the writer is lucky to emerge alive, and which offers confident assessments about the efficacy of our immigration and enforcement system from an outsider’s cool perspective. Instead, Cantú has written a poetic and empathetic work whose message — the border is built on an imaginary line, but its impact on the people who cross it, or can’t, is real — feels more urgent this year than ever.

[Cantú will be featured live tomorrow, Feb. 13, on “Salon Talks,” SalonTV‘s live video interview series. Join the live conversation at 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT on Facebook and Periscope.]

As Cantú’s mother suspects, the job does exact an emotional and psychological toll. The first two-thirds of the book reflect a psyche constantly under attack by what he witnesses: dead bodies in the desert; survivors found, half-mad of thirst and desperation, wandering the unforgiving terrain, knowing that when they are sent back, they will attempt the treacherous crossing again and again until they succeed or don’t; the inexorable threat of cartel violence; the systematic dehumanization of vulnerable people. The stress of trying to maintain and practice humanity inside such an adversarial role leaves him grinding his teeth at night, when he is haunted by dreams of the landscape and the dangers that lurk in it.

Much of the current rhetoric around law enforcement is broken into two camps: the unquestioning assumption of ingrained heroism on one side and the suspicion of unchecked power in an authoritarian arm of state enforcement on the other. Cantú’s accounting dwells instead in the ambiguities of the job and its mission. In one scene, his fellow agents destroy a couple of backpacks full of supplies abandoned by drug smugglers, a routine they follow when they encounter such caches, the idea being that when the migrants “regroup and return to find their stockpiles ransacked and stripped, they’ll realize . . . that it’s hopeless to continue, and they’ll quit right then and there, they’ll save themselves . . .” And yet his supervisor also says “Hell no” to trying to track down the people who left the backpacks and the drugs behind, wary of the load of paperwork that a smuggling arrest, rather than a simple load of confiscated contraband, would bring. Cantú’s eye for the emotionally significant detail never closes: inside one of the backpacks, a prayer card for St. Jude, patron of lost causes and desperate situations.

The latter third of the memoir recounts his time after he leaves the job and experiences the system from the other side, as he advocates for an undocumented friend — a family man, active in his church, beloved at work, raising three kids — who is apprehended while returning from visiting his gravely ill mother in Mexico. The book up to this point is Cantú’s story — how the work affected him, what he learned and realized, how he grew in his understandings, both emotional and logistical, of the border. The story of José — one individual, a friend instead of a different set of strangers every day — is where the stakes of the book become manifest.

Despite his decades of undocumented status, José is unmistakably a good American — in every emotional, if not official, sense of the word. He works hard, he pays his bills, he contributes to his community. He risks his family’s stability to see his mother before she dies, and he is caught. Can Cantú, with his intimate understanding of the process and bureaucracy, put his hard-earned knowledge to work to save one man’s family and future? Anyone with a heart can see how this story should end, and that José, though he is the dynamic and loving individual we come to know through Cantú’s account, is not exceptional in that regard, but rather closer to the norm than those ordering ICE raids, and those cheering them on, would like to admit.

Why long stretches of “alone time” can be dangerous

(Credit: Shutterstock)

Lots of people are afraid of driving past massive tractor trailers on the highway — perhaps for more reasons than they know. In one study, a truck driver described “traveling down a flat, straight stretch of roadway in the middle of the night in clear weather. Suddenly he ‘saw’ a calf standing in the road ahead. He swerved his vehicle sharply to the left, and it overturned in the roadway.” The driver admitted that in the past he had seen “things that are not there.” The driver wrote off the hallucinations to being very sleepy. But there’s another explanation: he was lonely.

There have been stories about truck drivers at the wheel when they’re tired, or drugged, or delusional from methamphetamines. But there’s a rarely recognized danger of being alone.

We hear similar stories of British and US Air Force pilots experiencing disorientation, anxiety, and a feeling of “detachment from reality” after flying for extended periods without other human contact. The disorientation was more likely to happen when flying at high altitudes, not because of the thinness of the atmosphere, but because pilots could not see the ground. In short, they were suffering from sensory deprivation.

We have learned more in the last decade about sensory deprivation thanks to the use of various forms of solitary confinement against people captured, imprisoned, tortured, and “extraordinarily rendered” as part of the so-called war on terror. U.S. prisons, too, have radically increased the number of prisoners subjected to solitary confinement, often for extended periods of time.

To explore causality—the ways we explain the world and how to do it better—we need to dispense with generic models of the human mind and recognize the way it actually operates. The experiences of people in isolation strip away some of our assumptions. For starters, we call humans rational individuals when really we’re neither. We’re not individuals because when we’re taken out of the company of other people, even for relatively brief periods, we fall apart. We’re not rational because our rationales are shaped by where we see ourselves in the social world, where our ancestors were in the natural order, and what social concepts we adopt to understand everything around us. It’s clear that we don’t think like some idealized computer. Like the trucker who hallucinated the calf, we see things that aren’t there. Like the pilots in the stratosphere, we lose sight of things that really do exist. Our vision is selective and creative, and how we make sense of it all depends on what we learn from the social web of people around us. Isolation distorts our perception of the world, and we need to be more alert to its appearance than we are.

* * *

We understand physical torture more viscerally than the torture of isolation. Certainly, most of us imagine that physical torture must be far worse than being left alone. But the horrors of solitary confinement are as unparalleled as they are unexpected. U.S. Senator John McCain, who spent two years in solitary confinement after being shot down while bombing Hanoi as a Navy pilot in the Vietnam War, described solitary in unequivocal terms: “It’s an awful thing, solitary. It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” This assessment is from a man whose escape from his crippled plane broke his right arm in three places, his knee, and his left arm, who then had his shoulder broken from a blow from a rifle butt, and was stabbed in the ankle and groin with a bayonet. His injuries were left unset and largely untreated for five years while he was a prisoner of war, where he suffered years of dysentery that reduced him to one hundred pounds, and was regularly subjected to physical torture to the point of losing consciousness. If solitary confinement is worse than that physical agony, then we must reevaluate how our minds really work.

McCain’s description of how crushing solitary is shows us something about the brain we’re working with. First and foremost, it’s deeply social. Alone, the mind loses its resolve, loses its identity, and doesn’t even know what it knows. We think in particular ways. (It would be impossible for us to think in every possible way.) The fact that social context influences what we know, that we notice social explanations and disregard others, gives us a preview into what we overemphasize and what we overlook.

The underappreciated effects of solitary confinement demonstrate how harmful the mistaken image of ourselves as rational individuals has been—not just to prisoners, but to everyday people from truck drivers to anyone who has been lonely in a crowd, and to the economic models (and Robinson Crusoe stories) we mistakenly think will predict how people will act. First we need a sharper sense of how being alone affects us.

Solitary confinement is used extensively in U.S. prisons, in part because federal courts rarely acknowledge that it is torture. (Courts have said they will intervene only in cases of physical injury, not mental torture.) This classification grossly underestimates the damage solitary confinement does to the human psyche. One prisoner who had a long history of offenses was sentenced to five years in solitary confinement when he was recaptured after escaping from prison. When he was brought into the thirteen-by-eight-foot cell, he thought, “This is going to be a piece of cake.” He would have a radio and television and could read. But within a few months, he was pacing back and forth compulsively, then began having panic attacks and screaming for help. He hallucinated and became enraged by routine sounds, like the shutting of a nearby door. Soon he heard voices speaking directly from the television, which he hid under his bed.

Solitary confinement can induce a predictable and terrifying array of symptoms. Examining a hundred years of research, journalist Brandon Keim found that:

Consistent patterns emerge, centering around . . . extreme anxiety, anger, hallucinations, mood swings and flatness, and loss of impulse control. In the absence of stimuli, prisoners may also become hypersensitive to any stimuli at all. Often they obsess uncontrollably, as if their minds didn’t belong to them, over tiny details or personal grievances. Panic attacks are routine, as is depression and loss of memory and cognitive function.

Beyond prisoners, pilots, and truck drivers, who else might exhibit those symptoms—extreme anger, hallucinations, mood swings, hypersensitivity, panic attacks, depression, and loss of memory and cognitive function? Security guards? Cowboys? Suburban housewives? Kids stuck on social media? Video game junkies? Elderly people living alone? In a society where we take our rationality and individuality for granted, and make few explicit accommodations for our needs as social beings, the effects of solitary are more common than we acknowledge. These symptoms identify the outer bounds of how far humans can be from other people.

The changes brought on by solitary can be rapid. Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian, a former professor at Harvard Medical School, is one of the foremost experts in solitary confinement. At the outset of his research, he expected to conclude that the prisoners’ claims of mental distress were self-serving exaggerations. But he found that the effects were far more severe than he imagined. Grassian noted that, “even a few days of solitary confinement will predictably shift the electroencephalogram (EEG) pattern toward an abnormal pattern characteristic of stupor and delirium.” Victims often describe falling into a “fog” in which they cannot remain alert or concentrate. They are simultaneously deprived of external stimuli and unable to process what little stimuli they may experience, causing them to be hypersensitive to small noises or irritation by slight physical sensations.

In 2009, three Americans were hiking on the border between Iraq and Iran when they were taken into custody by Iranian guards, and ultimately brought to the notorious Evin prison in Tehran. Unlike Iranian prisoners, they were kept in individual cells, and were not beaten like the inmates whose screams they could hear through the doors. But this diplomatic treatment turned out to be its own torture. Even though they saw their interrogator almost daily, got outside twice a day, saw the guards who brought them meals, and occasionally even whispered to a prisoner in the hall or a nearby cell, Josh Fattal, Sarah Shourd, and Shane Bauer began experiencing the effects of solitary confinement after just a few days.

Josh Fattal became so hypersensitive to the whirring sound of the fan in his cell that he hid in his bathroom, under the sink, to avoid the noise. More symptoms, like depression and loss of cognitive function, followed: “In the cell,” Fattal wrote in the account all three contributed to, “the blankness is my enemy. I don’t have a better word for it, but it’s dulling my mind. It’s a world where I can only reference myself in circular loops, where nothing makes sense.” His mind could no longer assemble logical explanations: hearing a helicopter, he became sure he was about to be rescued, and fixated on the thirtieth day of their captivity, certain that that arbitrary and insignificant date would bring about their release.

People in solitary confinement are often haunted by hyper-violent fantasies in response to tiny perceived slights from other people. Josh imagined he’d find a particular guard one day on the street: “I’ll push him into an alleyway, get him on the ground, and kick him and watch him bleed amidst garbage and rats.” What atrocity had the guard committed? “Bystanders will try to stop my rage,” Josh went on, “then I’ll explain to them that this guy took my books when I was in prison, and they’ll cheer me on as I continue kicking him.”

From his experiences, Shane Bauer described solitary confinement as “the slow erasure of who you thought you were.” Each of them tried all sorts of mental gymnastics—working out endlessly, remembering the details of their life in sequence, singing songs, reading when they could get books, writing when they could find a contraband pen, but they felt themselves breaking apart.

Sarah Shourd’s isolation was longer and more complete, so her individuals are not rational symptoms became proportionally more extreme. Many days, Sarah wrote, she fumed for every waking hour over the thought that Josh and Shane were able to speak to each other while she was still alone. Hypersensitivity and hallucinations consumed her as her concentration deteriorated. Sarah wrote later, “Like an animal, I spend hours crouched by the slot at the bottom of my door listening for sounds. Sometimes I hear footsteps coming down the hall, race to the door, and realize they were imagined . . . These symptoms scare me. I’m certain solitary confinement is having an effect on my brain.” She couldn’t focus to read and became hyperpossessive about her stuff. She had violent fantasies, like Josh: “I will run up to the first man in a suit that I see and I will wrap my hands around his neck and I will squeeze. I will squeeze his neck and look into his eyes as he tries to scream.” She heard screaming down the hall, and only when a group of guards rushed in did she realize it was she who was screaming, and that the wall was smeared with blood from her beating her fists against the wall. “I’m going crazy in here,” she told a guard soon after, “I am not safe!” Mirroring the thinking of U.S. prison guards, this guard didn’t understand what the problem was: “We gave you a TV—doesn’t that help?”

This quick descent into madness, triggered by nothing—triggered, in fact, by the absence of any trigger—tells us something important about ourselves. Once we realize that humans are so social that being alone, even briefly, is unnatural to the point of being dangerous, we see that being a lone individual is fundamentally at odds with being human.

Researchers now know that solitary confinement reprograms the brain. Research suggests solitary produces significant changes, like a smaller hippocampus region and impaired brain development.10 The damage is often permanent. In the most extreme cases, people may experience psychosis and be permanently debilitated. At minimum, individuals who have been subjected to solitary confinement are often unable to socialize, have trouble speaking, suffer from panic, and fail to reintegrate into the social world.

Few of us think of spending time alone as torture; many of us fantasize about taking just such a break. Probably because being solitary seems, to the uninitiated, so unobjectionable, research on the effects of solitary confinement tends to follow a predictable cycle of revelation, abhorrence, and collective amnesia: First, a powerful institution in society, typically government, will experiment with solitary confinement, imagining it will be harmless, even therapeutic, certainly not painful. After accounts of its true ferocity come to light, it is banished. After about fifty years, however, the culture has forgotten the effects of the last round of solitary, and the cycle begins again.

That cycle dates back to 1829 in the United States, when the Philadelphia Prison (or Eastern State Penitentiary) opened. It sought to be more humane and effective than earlier, intentionally punitive prisons. Eastern State aimed to be meditative, reforming, and enlightened. Prisoners would remain in solitary cells—in isolation from bad influences and distractions—where they could begin reflecting on their lives and reforming their ways.

The problem was that prisoners did not reform but went mad. Charles Dickens visited the prison in 1842, and reported in horror how one man “gazed about him and in the act of doing so fell into a strange state as if he had forgotten something . . . In another cell was a German,  .  .  . a more dejected, broken-hearted, wretch creature, it would be difficult to imagine.” Dickens saw yet another man “stare at his hands and pick the flesh open, upon the fingers.” Eventually researchers concluded that “[i]t was unnatural . . . to leave men in solitary, day after day, year after year; indeed, it was so unnatural that it bred insanity.”

In 1890 a landmark Supreme Court case demonstrated how damaging the justices recognized solitary confinement to be. Colorado had passed a law requiring condemned prisoners be kept in solitary for a month before execution. A man murdered his wife before the law took effect, but was still sentenced to solitary. The court found that the month he was to be isolated before his execution was so severe that it constituted an additional punishment beyond what could be imposed. They let him go. As the court wrote,

This matter of solitary confinement is not . . . a mere unimportant regulation as to the safe-keeping of the prisoner . . . experience [with the penitentiary system of solitary confinement] demonstrated that there were serious objections to it. A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others, still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.

After the 1890 decision, solitary confinement fell out of favor for some time. Research was resurrected in the 1950s and ’60s by the U.S. military, stirred by the fears of “brainwashing”—the concern that U.S. servicemen captured in Korea and other wars could be converted to communism through the use of solitary confinement during their incarceration as prisoners of war. In some of that research, college students and other participants in psychological tests were subjected to solitary confinement. Though projects often anticipated subjecting people to such conditions for over a month, their rapid deterioration often led to

the research being curtailed after just a week. That research on solitary confinement served as a warning, not an instruction manual, until it was blithely ignored by the Bush administration, which, half a century later, sought to use solitary confinement and other forms of torture against people picked up in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere who were presumed to be terrorists.

Our conception of human beings as individuals runs counter to the reality of our existence. The model of the “rational individual” is fundamentally flawed at its most basic assumption: Individuals are not rational. Individuals are not even individual. We are social, and we need social contact nearly as frequently as we need water to survive. If there is any human rationality, it is socially produced, not individually exercised. Where did we get this utterly inaccurate fiction that we could survive on our own?

When it comes to men accused of sexual misconduct, Trump gets defensive

Steve Wynn and Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Joe Cavaretta)

As the #MeToo movement has continued taking down powerful people who have been credibly accused of sexual misconduct, President Donald Trump seems to think it’s not such a great idea.

Unlike many other Republicans who gleefully promoted some of the many allegations against disgraced former movie producer and Democratic donor Harvey Weinstein, the president was unusually restrained in his reaction. Trump’s only public comment on Weinstein was to say that he was “not at all surprised” by the accusations. He has said nothing at all about allegations that actor Kevin Spacey harassed male colleagues.

That’s not exactly a surprise, considering that at least 15 women have accused him of various non-consensual groping or kissing, in addition to his own boasts about walking into women’s dressing rooms and grasping women by their genitalia.

The president has been much less shy about defending men he likes who have been accused of misconduct. He’s stood up for Fox News Channel founder Roger Ailes, former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, Christian supremacist Roy Moore, and most recently, his former White House staff secretary, Rob Porter, who has been credibly accused of beating his ex-wives.

In a Saturday tweet, Trump indirectly admitted that he sees himself in such instances.

Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused – life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 10, 2018

It is true that false allegations can be destructive, but Trump himself is proof that even open admissions of sexual misconduct will not necessarily harm a politician. (He also could have used the court system to dispose of the allegations against him if he were truly interested in “Due Process.”)

It’s also worth considering that, as the Washington Post demonstrated when it took down far-right activist James O’Keefe after he tried to promote a false allegation against Moore, credible accusations are usually what destroys careers, not made-up ones.

Trump’s public and private defenses of political allies accused of sexual misconduct have become so numerous that his own staff members can’t seem to keep them all straight. During a Fox News interview, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said that he thought Trump was referring to Steve Wynn, the former Republican National Committee finance chairman who recently resigned from his company after he was accused of forcing himself sexually upon employees.

“When I saw the tweet — I know Rob Porter wasn’t mentioned — I wondered if the President was talking about his friend Steve Wynn, who has been accused and essentially condemned without any due process,” Mulvaney said.

On Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tried to show the president was still behind women who were standing up, however.

Sarah Sanders: "Above all, the president supports victims of domestic violence"

Reporter: Why haven't heard the president say that?

Sarah Sanders: "I spoke with the president and those are actually directly his words…it's my job to speak on behalf of the president" pic.twitter.com/rlXYRpT8TM

— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) February 12, 2018

Amazon to shed hundreds of corporate employees in “rare” job cuts move: report

FILE - In this June 18, 2014 file photo, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos introduces the new Amazon Fire Phone in Seattle. The eight individuals who own as much as half of the rest of the planet are all men, and have largely made their fortunes in technology. The founder and CEO of Amazon.com helped revolutionize the retail industry by popularizing online shopping. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File) (Credit: AP)

Despite recent years of substantial growth for the company, Amazon is reportedly shedding hundreds of corporate employees — though it has promised to hire aggressively in other areas.

The move will mainly impact several hundred corporate employees at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, but cuts will also reach hundreds “elsewhere in Amazon’s global operations,” the Seattle Times reported, citing multiple sources familiar with the matter.

Amazon still had 566,000 employees worldwide, as of last December, an astonishing 66 percent increase from last year. Seattle itself is home to 40,000 of those employees. As of Monday, the company still had 12,500 job openings and is currently in the process of finding a city for its second headquarters. Afterwards, Amazon plans to hire 50,000 more workers, the Times reported.

But the move is still being seen as unusual, especially for the second-largest corporate business in the United States.

The Times elaborated:

According to several employees, the rapid growth of the last two years left some units over budget and some teams with too much staff for their work. Amazon had implemented hiring freezes in recent months across several groups, a move that reduced the company’s open job listings in Seattle to their lowest level in years.

[…]

Some employees have already been informed of the elimination of their roles, and layoffs are expected to be completed in the next few weeks, one of the people said.

Recent layoffs at Amazon units outside Seattle suggest the company is consolidating established retail businesses.

In a statement, Amazon defended itself and said it was making “headcount adjustments in other countries,” but still planned for “aggressive hiring” in other areas, the Times noted.

The statement added, “For affected employees, we work to find roles in the areas where we are hiring.”

There has also been fear among some Seattle employees, who were informed “that [Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos and the Amazon brass wanted to put more pressure on managers to weed out lower performers and enforce spending discipline after the rapid growth of recent years,” the Times reported, citing one managerial source.

“People are in terrible shape,” the source said. “There is so much stress on campus.”

One former employee said he’s seen people “managed out” in the same way, as improvement plans could “trim the size of teams without resorting to layoffs,” the Times reported.

Recently, President Donald Trump has bragged about (the few) American companies that have issued $1,000 bonuses to employees, supposedly as a result of the new GOP tax plan. Yet many of those companies, such as Walmart, have also laid off hundreds if not thousands of employees as well. It is unclear if Amazon’s decisions are connected to the tax plan, but they certainly speak to mixed economic news, as opposed to the president’s sunny economic pronouncements.

 

Here are the right-wing media figures using the Nunes memo to attack Rosenstein and Mueller

Devin Nunes (Credit: Getty/Win McNamee)

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee voted on January 31 to release a memo, written by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), which they claim shows partisan abuse of power on the part of the FBI to obtain a FISA warrant. The full four page text of the memo was released on February 2 and, led primarily by Fox News host Sean Hannity, right-wing media figures have used its contents to slam, discredit, and call for the firing of both special counsel Robert Mueller and U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Fox host Sean Hannity claimed that Mueller “never should have been appointed based on what we know tonight” and that “he needs to go, yesterday.” He also called the investigation “a witch-hunt from the very beginning” and called for charges against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn “to be dropped.” Hannity also declared the investigation an attempted “coup” and “an attempt to unseat an elected president” based on the memo.

Right-wing author Ann Coulter tweeted, “Rosenstein should be fired for opposing the release of the memo.”

Conservative radio host and frequent Fox guest Dan Bongino tweeted that Rosenstein “STILL” has a government job despite being one of the “central figures in the most significant political spying scandal in US history.”

Tea Party Patriots tweeted, “It’s time for DAG Rod Rosenstein to do his job or resign!”

Former Trump aide and Fox News national security strategist Sebastian Gorka tweeted, “Rosenstein should be suspended from his position immeidately.”

Frequent Fox News guest Ben Stein said Rosenstein should be “fired without question.”

Tom Fitton, frequent Fox guest and president of Judicial Watch, said Rosenstein “has some explaining to do” and that “it’s fair to ask whether he’d be fired.” Fitton also told Fox host Harris Faulkner that the probe is subject to “being called off now by the Justice Department.”

Fox legal analyst Gregg Jarrett tweeted that a “source” told him Rosenstein in a meeting with Nunes “threatened to subpoena the texts and emails of Congress,” and called for Rosenstein to “resign or be fired” if true.

Fox News host Todd Pirro asked former Trump aide Corey Lewandowski if “it’s time for Rod Rosenstein to go.” Lewandowski responded that Rosenstein’s involvement with the FISA application “should give people in the Justice Department grave concern … and Rod needs to answer for those questions.”

Conservative radio host, Townhall columnist, and birther Jeff Crouere wrote, the memo showed Mueller is “investigating the wrong administration” and claimed Mueller was “compromised from the very beginning of his probe.” Crouere went on to call for an end to this “witch hunt” after the release of the “bombshell memo.”

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh alleged that the memo means Mueller is investigating the wrong people “on purpose,” and called the FBI’s activities a “Democrat-run operation.”

Conservative radio host Mark Simone tweeted that Rosenstein is on the same “team” as former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Far-right blog The Gateway Pundit claimed Rosenstein “threatened” Nunes and House Intelligence Committee members.