Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 906

The wonders of deep space: Scientists are on the hunt for alien molecules

Something strange was hiding in the Horsehead. The nebula, named for its stallionlike silhouette, is a towering cloud of dust and gas 1,500 light-years from Earth where new stars are continually born. It is one of the most recognizable celestial objects, and scientists have studied it intensely. But in 2011 astronomers from the Institute of Millimeter Radioastronomy (IRAM) and elsewhere probed it again. With IRAM’s 30-meter telescope in the Spanish Sierra Nevada, they homed in on two portions of the horse’s mane in radio light. They weren’t interested in taking more pictures of the Horsehead; instead, they were after spectra—readings of the light broken down into their constituent wavelengths, which reveal the chemical makeup of the nebula. Displayed on screen, the data looked like blips on a heart monitor; each wiggle indicated that some molecule in the nebula had emitted light of a particular wavelength. Every molecule in the universe makes its own characteristic wiggles based on the orientation of the protons, neutrons and electrons within it. Most of the wiggles in the Horsehead data were easily attributable to common chemicals such as carbon monoxide, formaldehyde and neutral carbon. But there was also a small, unidentified line at 89.957 gigahertz. This was a mystery—a molecule completely unknown to science. Immediately after seeing the data Evelyne Roueff of Paris Observatory and other chemists on the team started theorizing about what kind of molecule might create the signal. They concluded that the unknown species had to be a linear molecule—a compound whose atoms are arrayed in a straight chain. Only a certain type of linear molecule would produce the spectral pattern the chemists were seeing. After working through lists of likely molecules, they hit on C3H+, propynylidynium. This molecular ion had never been seen before. In fact there was no proof it existed at all. If it could form, it would be highly unstable. On Earth it would almost immediately react with something else to transform into a more settled species. But in space, where the pressure is low and molecules rarely run into anything else to bond with, C3H+ might just be able to survive. ASTRONOMERS OBSERVING THE HORSEHEAD NEBULA WITH A RADIO TELESCOPE IN SPAIN SAW THE CHEMICAL SIGNATURE OF A MYSTERY MOLECULE. THE TELESCOPE RETURNED SPECTROSCOPIC DATA—A LINE GRAPH REPRESENTING THE INTENSITY OF LIGHT COMING FROM THE NEBULA ACROSS A RANGE OF WAVELENGTHS. SHARP RISES IN THE LIGHT, SUCH AS THE FEATURE SHOWN HERE, INDICATE THE PRESENCE OF A SPECIFIC MOLECULE WHOSE CHEMICAL PROPERTIES ALLOW IT TO EMIT THAT PARTICULAR WAVELENGTH OF LIGHT. AFTER MUCH SLEUTHING RESEARCHERS WERE ABLE TO DETERMINE THAT THIS UNIDENTIFIED LINE FEATURE COMES FROM THE NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN COMPOUND C3H+, WHICH EXISTS ONLY IN SPACE.Roueff and her colleagues studied whether the Horsehead Nebula contained the right ingredients and conditions to form the molecule. In 2012 they published a paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics concluding that the wiggle they saw likely belonged to C3H+. “I was relatively confident myself,” Roueff says. “But it required about two to three years to convince everyone that we had the right identification.” At first, some skeptics contested the claim—if C3H+ had never been seen before, how could they be sure this was it? The clincher came last year, when researchers at the University of Cologne in Germany managed to create C3H+ very briefly in a laboratory. Not only did the feat prove that the molecule could exist, it also allowed scientists to measure the spectrum it produces when excited—the very same spectrum that showed up in the Horsehead. “It’s very rewarding to find a new molecule which we did not really think about before,” Roueff says. “When you are able to identify it through a chain of logic, it’s like being a detective.” One alien molecule down, many, many more to go. The Horsehead Nebula is no aberration. Almost everywhere in the universe astronomers look—if they peer closely enough—they see unidentified spectral lines. The compounds we humans are familiar with, the species responsible for the huge diversity of materials on this planet, are just a fraction of those nature has created. And finally, after decades of work developing theoretical models and computer simulation techniques, along with laboratory experiments to reproduce new molecules, astrochemists are putting names to many of those unidentified lines. Empty space As recently as the 1960s most scientists doubted molecules could exist in interstellar space at all—the radiation there was thought to be too harsh for anything much beyond atoms and a few basic free radicals to survive. In 1968 physicist Charles Townes of the University of California, Berkeley, decided to look for molecules in space anyway. “I got the feeling that most of the Berkeley astronomers thought my idea was a little wild,” Townes, a Nobel laureate who died earlier this year, recalled in a 2006 account for the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. But Townes forged ahead and built a new amplifier for the six-meter antenna at Hat Creek Radio Observatory in California, which revealed the presence of ammonia in the Sagittarius B2 cloud. “How easy, and how exciting!” he wrote. “The news media as well as scientists began buzzing us.” IN 1968 ASTRONOMERS DISCOVERED AMMONIA IN THE SAGITTARIUS B2 CLOUD. CREDIT: ESOIn the years since astronomers have found more than 200 types of molecules floating in space. Many are quite different from the species seen on the ground. “We usually do chemistry based on the conditions we have on Earth,” says Ryan Fortenberry, an astrochemist at Georgia Southern University. “When we get away from that paradigm, the chemicals that can be created are unbounded. If you can dream of a molecule, no matter how bizarre, there is a finite probability that over the eons of time and the immensity of space it has existed somewhere.” Space is literally an alien environment. Temperatures can be much, much hotter than on Earth (such as in the atmosphere of a star) and much, much colder (in relatively empty interstellar space). Likewise, the pressures (extremely high or low) are far from terrestrial. Consequently molecules can form in space that would never emerge on our planet—and then they can stick around, even if they are highly reactive. “A molecule can go years and years before it bounces into another molecule in interstellar space,” says Timothy Lee, an astrophysicist at NASA Ames Research Center. “It might be in a region where there’s no radiation, so even if it’s not that stable, it can exist for a long time.” These space molecules, once identified, could teach us a lot. Some of them might prove beneficial if scientists can create them in laboratories and learn to exploit their properties. Other molecules may help explain the origins of the organic compounds that gave rise to life on Earth. And all of them stand to expand the bounds of what is possible for chemistry in the universe. Game-changing telescopes In the past decade, as powerful new telescopes capable of observing faint spectral lines have come online, the search for alien molecules has accelerated. “It’s actually a heyday for astrochemistry right now,” says Susanna Widicus Weaver who leads an astrochemistry group at Emory University. The data available now, she says, are a huge improvement from just a decade ago when she completed her doctorate. NASA’s high-altitude Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), mounted on the side of a Boeing 747SP, began observing in infrared and microwave light in 2010 and the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory launched into orbit in 2009 to target the same wavelengths. THE ATACAMA LARGE MILLIMETER/SUBMILLIMETER ARRAY (ALMA) IN CHILE. CREDIT: NRAOThe real game-changer, however, is the multinational Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a constellation of 66 radio dishes inaugurated in 2013. At an altitude of about 5,200 meters on the Chajnantor Plateau, a Mars-like red expanse in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the driest place in the world, ALMA’s matching antennas swivel in unison as observers collect light from cosmic objects. Extremely dark and clear skies nearly devoid of image-blurring moisture give the telescope unprecedented sensitivity and precision in wavelengths from infrared to radio. ALMA creates both a visual picture and a spectrum for every pixel of its images, producing tens of thousands of spectral lines in every field of view it observes. “It’s amazing and it’s overwhelming at the same time,” Widicus Weaver says. “These data sets are so big that they often have to mail them to scientists on flash drives because they can’t download them.” The flood of data is providing a wealth of new spectral lines for astrochemists to mine. But like unidentified fingerprints at a crime scene, these lines are useless to scientists unless they can determine which molecules created them. Finding a link To match molecules to these lines, scientists can go in a few directions. As in the case of C3H+, astrochemists might start with theory, using clues from the spectrum to guess what molecule might be behind it. A technique called ab initio quantum chemistry (ab initio is Latin for “from the beginning”) allows scientists to start from pure quantum mechanics—the theory that describes the behavior of subatomic particles—to calculate a molecule’s properties based on the motions of the protons, neutrons and electrons in the atoms that comprise it. On a supercomputer, scientists can run repeated simulations of a molecule, each time slightly adjusting its structure and the arrangement of its particles, and watch the results to find the optimal geometry of a compound. “With quantum chemistry we’re not limited by what we can synthesize,” Fortenberry says. “We’re limited by the size of the molecules. We need large amounts of computational power to do the calculations.” Researchers can also look for hard evidence of new molecules by creating them in a laboratory and directly measuring their spectral features. A common technique is to start with a chamber of gas and run a current of electricity through it. An electron in the current might collide with a molecule of gas and break its chemical bond, giving rise to something new. Researchers keep the gas at very low pressure so that any chemicals that arise have a chance to hang out for a few moments before running into another molecule and reacting. Scientists will then shine various wavelengths of light through the chamber to measure the spectrum of whatever is inside. “You can get to the point where you’ve produced in the lab the same molecule that’s occurring in space but you don’t necessarily know what the molecule is,” says Michael McCarthy, a physicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “So then you have to try to infer the elemental composition from a combination of different laboratory experiments with different samples.” In 2006 McCarthy and his colleagues created the negatively charged molecule C6H– and measured its spectrum. Soon afterward they found the same spectral features in the interstellar Taurus Molecular Cloud around 430 light-years away. Previous searches for negative molecules in space had come up empty, so many scientists doubted whether they existed in significant numbers. “It led us to a whole set of discoveries in which we were able to detect related molecules in the lab and then in space,” McCarthy says. The team has now found C6H– in more than a dozen cosmic sources. THE TAURUS MOLECULAR CLOUD AS SEEN BY THE APEX (ATACAMA PATHFINDER EXPERIMENT) TELESCOPE IN CHILE. CREDIT: ESO/APEX (MPIFR/ESO/OSO)/A. HACAR ET AL./DIGITIZED SKY SURVEY 2. ACKNOWLEDGMENT: DAVIDE DE MARTINAnd in the 1980s scientists trying to make new chemicals produced the molecule argonium (36ArH+), a strange compound not normally found on Earth that combines hydrogen with the generally inert gas argon. In 2013 astronomers found argonium in space, first in the Crab Nebula and later in a distant galaxy via ALMA observations. Compounds based on noble gases form only under very specific circumstances; scientists think that in space, high-energy charged particles called cosmic rays slam into argon and knock electrons loose, enabling it to bond with hydrogen. For this reason, if scientists see argonium in a region of space, they can surmise that the place is flooded with cosmic rays. “It’s a very specific indictor of these circumstances which actually are very important in space,” says Holger Müller of the University of Cologne, leader of the team behind the ALMA discovery. A new world of molecules Many of the molecules lurking in stars and nebulae are foreign in the extreme. To ask what they would look or feel like if you could hold them in your hand is nonsensical, because you could never hold them—they would react immediately. If you did manage to make contact with them, they would almost certainly prove toxic and carcinogenic. Oddly, however, scientists have a rough idea of what some alien molecules would smell like: Many detected so far belong to a class of compounds called aromatics, which are derived from benzene (C6H6) and were originally named for their strong odors. Some new compounds reveal surprising atomic structures and share charge between atoms in unforeseen ways. Sometimes they challenge current theories of molecular bonding. A recent example is the molecule SiCSi, discovered in 2015 in a dying star, which is made of two silicon atoms and one carbon atom that are bonded in an unexpected way. The resulting molecule is somewhat floppy and produces a spectrum different from what simple theoretical models predict. And space molecules may help answer one of the universe’s most fundamental questions: How did life get started? Scientists do not know if amino acids, the building blocks of life, first arose on Earth or in space (and were then delivered to our planet by comets and meteorites). “The big question is, do they form in molecular clouds as a star is forming,” asks Widicus Weaver, “or do they form once you have a planet or some other chunk of rock where chemistry can occur on the surface?” The answer will determine whether it is likely that amino acids are plentiful in the universe and available to possibly seed life on the myriad exoplanets out there or whether the chemistry that sparked us was isolated to our own planetary cradle. Astrochemists have already spotted signs of amino acids in space as well as sequences of molecules that might have given rise to them. BUCKYBALLS, CONGLOMERATIONS OF 60 CARBON ATOMS, WERE FIRST CREATED IN LABS ON EARTH AND LATER DISCOVERED IN SPACE. CREDIT: NASA/JPL-CALTECH Finally, perhaps some rare species could prove useful if they can be created in great enough quantity and kept under controlled conditions. “The great hope of astrochemistry is that we can find molecules that have completely new properties and we can apply those to problems here on Earth,” Fortenberry says. An example is the soccer ball–shaped molecules “buckyballs.” These large conglomerations of 60 carbon atoms first showed up in a laboratory in 1985 (and won their discoverers a Nobel Prize). Almost a decade later astronomers saw spectral features in interstellar gas that looked consistent with positively charged versions of buckyballs, and the connection was confirmed this July when researchers matched those features to the spectrum of buckyballs created under spacelike conditions in the lab. “This molecule is now all over the galaxy and all over the universe,” says buckyball co-discoverer Harold Kroto, now a chemistry professor at The Florida State University. Lately buckyballs have turned out to be not just a quirk found in space but a practical tool for nanotechnology, useful for strengthening materials, improving solar cells and even in pharmaceuticals. At this point astrochemists are still testing the shallow waters in the great sea of molecules out there in space. The finds they have already turned up are a reminder that our own small corner of the cosmos is just that—an insignificant, and not necessarily representative, sample of what is possible. Perhaps the species we are familiar with on Earth are in fact the exotic ones, and the buckyballs, the Horsehead Nebula C3H+ and others still unknown are the ordinary stuff of the universe.

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New Year’s is a bad day to quit sniffing glue — or anything else: Make those resolutions, sure, but don’t dream of starting today

“All that alcohol ruins your liver,” said a co-worker I called "the Fun Police" at a holiday soiree. During the years I partied, I rolled my eyes at prudes who made New Year’s resolutions to get healthier. They warned that smoking causes wrinkles and lung cancer, booze bloats your face, marijuana fries your brain, and too much candy destroys your teeth. I never listened, drinking, toking,  smoking and sugar-rushing all through high school, college and my graduate studies. Without quitting anything, I was able to get two degrees, marry, launch an exciting career. That seemed proof that my substance abuse wasn’t really a problem. But what was cute in my twenties wasn’t as adorable by my fourth decade. That’s when I had a full-blown midlife crisis, unhappy marriage, family issues, debt and debilitating job rejections. I needed help. “Your addictions are keeping you from getting everything you want in life,” said my substance abuse specialist. I was surprised that he blamed my employment and relationship failures on my habits. He seemed sure that my inability to be close to my husband, complete a long project, be financially solvent or get what I most wanted were all insidious byproducts of being addicted. Hearing horror stories of what over-imbibing did to your body or reading that higher percentages of middle-aged white Americans were dying of overdoses, I rationalized that I wasn’t shooting heroin or popping Oxycodone. I cited studies showing that a glass a day of wine was healthy and marijuana wasn’t addictive. Nobody told me that daily use of benign substances (like alcohol and pot) could actually mar your mind, creating a direct barrier to success – in work and love. My specialist explained his theory, that addicts depended on substances, not people. Instead of allowing myself to feel pain, discomfort, depression or awkwardness, I was sucking in smoke, sipping booze or eating my frustration and sadness away. “Underlying every substance problem I’ve ever seen is a deep depression that feels unbearable. But it’s not,” he said. Here’s how I stopped several damaging habits and what I recommend: NEW YEAR’S IS ACTUALLY A BAD DAY TO QUIT: In case you've already blown your resolutions, no problem. Resolving in a fervor  that everything will be different on a big national  holiday when you’re away from work, school and your routine might be setting yourself up for disappointment. “Beware all excitement because it takes you out of yourself and you always have to go back to yourself,” my addiction specialist warned. Most people who try to quit anything on January 1  fail, perhaps because vague, general promises to yourself  (like “I will lose weight”), without a solid plan already in effect, don’t work. When I was really ready to stop my 27-year smoking and drinking habits, I picked a more personal quitting date, Oct. 7, 2001, which stuck. SEE AN EXPERT: I never even knew  there were  addiction specialists until I’d stumbled on a brilliant Ph.D. with that expertise. I also didn’t know that with a “substance abuse” diagnosis, my health insurance would cover three times as many sessions. (A coworker confirms this is also true with his Obamacare.) Google to find social workers, psychologists and psychiatric  experts in your area. If you don’t have medical coverage, ask if they’ll use a sliding scale, since some practitioners will reduce their rate to as little as $20 a session. If you can’t afford that, there are free daily AA, NA and OA meetings (for alcoholics, narcotics abusers and overeaters) where you can find a sponsor, or online recovery groups where you don’t have to leave your house. If you hate meetings and therapy, ask a sober coworker or relative for  advice. I’ve been happy to help other addicts who’ve approached me by listening and sharing my techniques. One student emailed me every day to tell me her progress. DON’T JUST SWITCH ADDICTIONS: Since I’d smoked two packs a day and cigarettes were ridiculously expensive and banned almost everywhere, I decided to stop smoking  first. Without realizing it, I immediately started drinking more. When my addiction specialist insisted I monitor my liquor intake, I turned to Blow Pop lollipops incessantly. “If you gain 20 pounds you’ll use this as a reason you can’t quit smoking,” he said. I switched to chewing on cinnamon sticks instead (which have zero calories), watched my diet and exercised. I miraculously  lost 10 pounds while quitting. So that blew the “but I’ll gain weight” excuse. It’s fairly common for addicts to do the “substance shuffle.” But despite popular misconceptions, it’s entirely possible to drop weight while abstaining from cigarettes, drugs or alcohol, especially with an addiction expert to guide you. TRY INNOVATIVE TACTICS: Everyone responds differently to cessation methods. Take time to figure out what works for you. To  stop smoking, some people have success with hypnosis, acupuncture, laser therapy. Unfortunately, e-cigarettes are not a good  solution because they simulate sucking in smoke and only perpetuate the need for nicotine. I personally needed an all-out assault. My multi-tiered approach involved  seeing my specialist weekly, using the highest dose of the  nicotine patch for six months and exercising daily. My favorite of my doctor’s mandates was making my husband watch TV or a movie with me every night for one hour, holding each other with no talking, which  calmed all of my anxiety. After nine months, I was completely tobacco-free. Within a year, I’d quit alcohol and marijuana too. The more strategies you employ, the more likely you’ll win. HANG OUT WITH PEOPLE YOU WANT TO BE: I found that the most successful people I knew were into clean living, while fellow partiers complained about the kind of  problems I couldn’t solve. So I rearranged my social life. Instead of bars and parties, I went to readings and lectures (where nobody was eating, drinking or smoking). I asked colleagues I admired to take long walks with me, offering my company and  bottles of Evian. My friend Karen began leaving me the message “Hey, let’s get together and grab some water.” It was nearly impossible to spend time with chain smokers, drug users or drinkers while getting sober and smoke-free myself. Similarly, studies show if the buddies you’re with constantly overeat, you will too. Being around slim exercisers kept me thinner and in shape. DON’T APOLOGIZE FOR SETTING CLEAR BOUNDARIES: Put as many obstacles between yourself and your addictions as possible. For a while I  couldn’t have any cigarettes, liquor, drugs or junk food in my home. If somebody needed to smoke or drink alcohol, I led them to my roof. When I first quit, I noticed a pack of Marlboros in the purse of my part-time assistant, which made me want one. I asked her to leave them with my doorman downstairs. She was annoyed. But I was paying her to help me with social media, not screw up my willpower. My comrades soon learned never to bring me bottles of booze or candy or I’d thank them but immediately give their gift away. I fought with my husband over junk food he kept  in our kitchen. The solution: If he must have contraband in the house, he now keeps it in a separate little fridge in his den. I never see it and he doesn’t eat it in front of me. DON’T EXPECT INSTANT HAPPINESS: I admit, I had nine months of withdrawal hell. In tough moments, I  had to learn to journal, take a walk, call a friend, email my addiction doctor, meditate, do yoga – or sometimes  just let myself cry, scream or stay in a bad mood for a few hours. Yes, I became a control freak  who couldn’t go to restaurants, hang out in bars, and spontaneously party-hop like I used to. Yet the payoff was well worth it. I’ve been clean and smoke-free for 14 years now. While I’m no longer a people-pleaser rushing to every event I’m invited to, my marriage is warmer, my income has tripled, and I’ve published several books (a few on addiction.) I’ve been told I’m a much better, more empathetic teacher and have became closer to special relatives, friends and students. Here’s what I wish somebody would have told me sooner: When you give up a toxic substance, you create room for something better to take its place.“All that alcohol ruins your liver,” said a co-worker I called "the Fun Police" at a holiday soiree. During the years I partied, I rolled my eyes at prudes who made New Year’s resolutions to get healthier. They warned that smoking causes wrinkles and lung cancer, booze bloats your face, marijuana fries your brain, and too much candy destroys your teeth. I never listened, drinking, toking,  smoking and sugar-rushing all through high school, college and my graduate studies. Without quitting anything, I was able to get two degrees, marry, launch an exciting career. That seemed proof that my substance abuse wasn’t really a problem. But what was cute in my twenties wasn’t as adorable by my fourth decade. That’s when I had a full-blown midlife crisis, unhappy marriage, family issues, debt and debilitating job rejections. I needed help. “Your addictions are keeping you from getting everything you want in life,” said my substance abuse specialist. I was surprised that he blamed my employment and relationship failures on my habits. He seemed sure that my inability to be close to my husband, complete a long project, be financially solvent or get what I most wanted were all insidious byproducts of being addicted. Hearing horror stories of what over-imbibing did to your body or reading that higher percentages of middle-aged white Americans were dying of overdoses, I rationalized that I wasn’t shooting heroin or popping Oxycodone. I cited studies showing that a glass a day of wine was healthy and marijuana wasn’t addictive. Nobody told me that daily use of benign substances (like alcohol and pot) could actually mar your mind, creating a direct barrier to success – in work and love. My specialist explained his theory, that addicts depended on substances, not people. Instead of allowing myself to feel pain, discomfort, depression or awkwardness, I was sucking in smoke, sipping booze or eating my frustration and sadness away. “Underlying every substance problem I’ve ever seen is a deep depression that feels unbearable. But it’s not,” he said. Here’s how I stopped several damaging habits and what I recommend: NEW YEAR’S IS ACTUALLY A BAD DAY TO QUIT: In case you've already blown your resolutions, no problem. Resolving in a fervor  that everything will be different on a big national  holiday when you’re away from work, school and your routine might be setting yourself up for disappointment. “Beware all excitement because it takes you out of yourself and you always have to go back to yourself,” my addiction specialist warned. Most people who try to quit anything on January 1  fail, perhaps because vague, general promises to yourself  (like “I will lose weight”), without a solid plan already in effect, don’t work. When I was really ready to stop my 27-year smoking and drinking habits, I picked a more personal quitting date, Oct. 7, 2001, which stuck. SEE AN EXPERT: I never even knew  there were  addiction specialists until I’d stumbled on a brilliant Ph.D. with that expertise. I also didn’t know that with a “substance abuse” diagnosis, my health insurance would cover three times as many sessions. (A coworker confirms this is also true with his Obamacare.) Google to find social workers, psychologists and psychiatric  experts in your area. If you don’t have medical coverage, ask if they’ll use a sliding scale, since some practitioners will reduce their rate to as little as $20 a session. If you can’t afford that, there are free daily AA, NA and OA meetings (for alcoholics, narcotics abusers and overeaters) where you can find a sponsor, or online recovery groups where you don’t have to leave your house. If you hate meetings and therapy, ask a sober coworker or relative for  advice. I’ve been happy to help other addicts who’ve approached me by listening and sharing my techniques. One student emailed me every day to tell me her progress. DON’T JUST SWITCH ADDICTIONS: Since I’d smoked two packs a day and cigarettes were ridiculously expensive and banned almost everywhere, I decided to stop smoking  first. Without realizing it, I immediately started drinking more. When my addiction specialist insisted I monitor my liquor intake, I turned to Blow Pop lollipops incessantly. “If you gain 20 pounds you’ll use this as a reason you can’t quit smoking,” he said. I switched to chewing on cinnamon sticks instead (which have zero calories), watched my diet and exercised. I miraculously  lost 10 pounds while quitting. So that blew the “but I’ll gain weight” excuse. It’s fairly common for addicts to do the “substance shuffle.” But despite popular misconceptions, it’s entirely possible to drop weight while abstaining from cigarettes, drugs or alcohol, especially with an addiction expert to guide you. TRY INNOVATIVE TACTICS: Everyone responds differently to cessation methods. Take time to figure out what works for you. To  stop smoking, some people have success with hypnosis, acupuncture, laser therapy. Unfortunately, e-cigarettes are not a good  solution because they simulate sucking in smoke and only perpetuate the need for nicotine. I personally needed an all-out assault. My multi-tiered approach involved  seeing my specialist weekly, using the highest dose of the  nicotine patch for six months and exercising daily. My favorite of my doctor’s mandates was making my husband watch TV or a movie with me every night for one hour, holding each other with no talking, which  calmed all of my anxiety. After nine months, I was completely tobacco-free. Within a year, I’d quit alcohol and marijuana too. The more strategies you employ, the more likely you’ll win. HANG OUT WITH PEOPLE YOU WANT TO BE: I found that the most successful people I knew were into clean living, while fellow partiers complained about the kind of  problems I couldn’t solve. So I rearranged my social life. Instead of bars and parties, I went to readings and lectures (where nobody was eating, drinking or smoking). I asked colleagues I admired to take long walks with me, offering my company and  bottles of Evian. My friend Karen began leaving me the message “Hey, let’s get together and grab some water.” It was nearly impossible to spend time with chain smokers, drug users or drinkers while getting sober and smoke-free myself. Similarly, studies show if the buddies you’re with constantly overeat, you will too. Being around slim exercisers kept me thinner and in shape. DON’T APOLOGIZE FOR SETTING CLEAR BOUNDARIES: Put as many obstacles between yourself and your addictions as possible. For a while I  couldn’t have any cigarettes, liquor, drugs or junk food in my home. If somebody needed to smoke or drink alcohol, I led them to my roof. When I first quit, I noticed a pack of Marlboros in the purse of my part-time assistant, which made me want one. I asked her to leave them with my doorman downstairs. She was annoyed. But I was paying her to help me with social media, not screw up my willpower. My comrades soon learned never to bring me bottles of booze or candy or I’d thank them but immediately give their gift away. I fought with my husband over junk food he kept  in our kitchen. The solution: If he must have contraband in the house, he now keeps it in a separate little fridge in his den. I never see it and he doesn’t eat it in front of me. DON’T EXPECT INSTANT HAPPINESS: I admit, I had nine months of withdrawal hell. In tough moments, I  had to learn to journal, take a walk, call a friend, email my addiction doctor, meditate, do yoga – or sometimes  just let myself cry, scream or stay in a bad mood for a few hours. Yes, I became a control freak  who couldn’t go to restaurants, hang out in bars, and spontaneously party-hop like I used to. Yet the payoff was well worth it. I’ve been clean and smoke-free for 14 years now. While I’m no longer a people-pleaser rushing to every event I’m invited to, my marriage is warmer, my income has tripled, and I’ve published several books (a few on addiction.) I’ve been told I’m a much better, more empathetic teacher and have became closer to special relatives, friends and students. Here’s what I wish somebody would have told me sooner: When you give up a toxic substance, you create room for something better to take its place.“All that alcohol ruins your liver,” said a co-worker I called "the Fun Police" at a holiday soiree. During the years I partied, I rolled my eyes at prudes who made New Year’s resolutions to get healthier. They warned that smoking causes wrinkles and lung cancer, booze bloats your face, marijuana fries your brain, and too much candy destroys your teeth. I never listened, drinking, toking,  smoking and sugar-rushing all through high school, college and my graduate studies. Without quitting anything, I was able to get two degrees, marry, launch an exciting career. That seemed proof that my substance abuse wasn’t really a problem. But what was cute in my twenties wasn’t as adorable by my fourth decade. That’s when I had a full-blown midlife crisis, unhappy marriage, family issues, debt and debilitating job rejections. I needed help. “Your addictions are keeping you from getting everything you want in life,” said my substance abuse specialist. I was surprised that he blamed my employment and relationship failures on my habits. He seemed sure that my inability to be close to my husband, complete a long project, be financially solvent or get what I most wanted were all insidious byproducts of being addicted. Hearing horror stories of what over-imbibing did to your body or reading that higher percentages of middle-aged white Americans were dying of overdoses, I rationalized that I wasn’t shooting heroin or popping Oxycodone. I cited studies showing that a glass a day of wine was healthy and marijuana wasn’t addictive. Nobody told me that daily use of benign substances (like alcohol and pot) could actually mar your mind, creating a direct barrier to success – in work and love. My specialist explained his theory, that addicts depended on substances, not people. Instead of allowing myself to feel pain, discomfort, depression or awkwardness, I was sucking in smoke, sipping booze or eating my frustration and sadness away. “Underlying every substance problem I’ve ever seen is a deep depression that feels unbearable. But it’s not,” he said. Here’s how I stopped several damaging habits and what I recommend: NEW YEAR’S IS ACTUALLY A BAD DAY TO QUIT: In case you've already blown your resolutions, no problem. Resolving in a fervor  that everything will be different on a big national  holiday when you’re away from work, school and your routine might be setting yourself up for disappointment. “Beware all excitement because it takes you out of yourself and you always have to go back to yourself,” my addiction specialist warned. Most people who try to quit anything on January 1  fail, perhaps because vague, general promises to yourself  (like “I will lose weight”), without a solid plan already in effect, don’t work. When I was really ready to stop my 27-year smoking and drinking habits, I picked a more personal quitting date, Oct. 7, 2001, which stuck. SEE AN EXPERT: I never even knew  there were  addiction specialists until I’d stumbled on a brilliant Ph.D. with that expertise. I also didn’t know that with a “substance abuse” diagnosis, my health insurance would cover three times as many sessions. (A coworker confirms this is also true with his Obamacare.) Google to find social workers, psychologists and psychiatric  experts in your area. If you don’t have medical coverage, ask if they’ll use a sliding scale, since some practitioners will reduce their rate to as little as $20 a session. If you can’t afford that, there are free daily AA, NA and OA meetings (for alcoholics, narcotics abusers and overeaters) where you can find a sponsor, or online recovery groups where you don’t have to leave your house. If you hate meetings and therapy, ask a sober coworker or relative for  advice. I’ve been happy to help other addicts who’ve approached me by listening and sharing my techniques. One student emailed me every day to tell me her progress. DON’T JUST SWITCH ADDICTIONS: Since I’d smoked two packs a day and cigarettes were ridiculously expensive and banned almost everywhere, I decided to stop smoking  first. Without realizing it, I immediately started drinking more. When my addiction specialist insisted I monitor my liquor intake, I turned to Blow Pop lollipops incessantly. “If you gain 20 pounds you’ll use this as a reason you can’t quit smoking,” he said. I switched to chewing on cinnamon sticks instead (which have zero calories), watched my diet and exercised. I miraculously  lost 10 pounds while quitting. So that blew the “but I’ll gain weight” excuse. It’s fairly common for addicts to do the “substance shuffle.” But despite popular misconceptions, it’s entirely possible to drop weight while abstaining from cigarettes, drugs or alcohol, especially with an addiction expert to guide you. TRY INNOVATIVE TACTICS: Everyone responds differently to cessation methods. Take time to figure out what works for you. To  stop smoking, some people have success with hypnosis, acupuncture, laser therapy. Unfortunately, e-cigarettes are not a good  solution because they simulate sucking in smoke and only perpetuate the need for nicotine. I personally needed an all-out assault. My multi-tiered approach involved  seeing my specialist weekly, using the highest dose of the  nicotine patch for six months and exercising daily. My favorite of my doctor’s mandates was making my husband watch TV or a movie with me every night for one hour, holding each other with no talking, which  calmed all of my anxiety. After nine months, I was completely tobacco-free. Within a year, I’d quit alcohol and marijuana too. The more strategies you employ, the more likely you’ll win. HANG OUT WITH PEOPLE YOU WANT TO BE: I found that the most successful people I knew were into clean living, while fellow partiers complained about the kind of  problems I couldn’t solve. So I rearranged my social life. Instead of bars and parties, I went to readings and lectures (where nobody was eating, drinking or smoking). I asked colleagues I admired to take long walks with me, offering my company and  bottles of Evian. My friend Karen began leaving me the message “Hey, let’s get together and grab some water.” It was nearly impossible to spend time with chain smokers, drug users or drinkers while getting sober and smoke-free myself. Similarly, studies show if the buddies you’re with constantly overeat, you will too. Being around slim exercisers kept me thinner and in shape. DON’T APOLOGIZE FOR SETTING CLEAR BOUNDARIES: Put as many obstacles between yourself and your addictions as possible. For a while I  couldn’t have any cigarettes, liquor, drugs or junk food in my home. If somebody needed to smoke or drink alcohol, I led them to my roof. When I first quit, I noticed a pack of Marlboros in the purse of my part-time assistant, which made me want one. I asked her to leave them with my doorman downstairs. She was annoyed. But I was paying her to help me with social media, not screw up my willpower. My comrades soon learned never to bring me bottles of booze or candy or I’d thank them but immediately give their gift away. I fought with my husband over junk food he kept  in our kitchen. The solution: If he must have contraband in the house, he now keeps it in a separate little fridge in his den. I never see it and he doesn’t eat it in front of me. DON’T EXPECT INSTANT HAPPINESS: I admit, I had nine months of withdrawal hell. In tough moments, I  had to learn to journal, take a walk, call a friend, email my addiction doctor, meditate, do yoga – or sometimes  just let myself cry, scream or stay in a bad mood for a few hours. Yes, I became a control freak  who couldn’t go to restaurants, hang out in bars, and spontaneously party-hop like I used to. Yet the payoff was well worth it. I’ve been clean and smoke-free for 14 years now. While I’m no longer a people-pleaser rushing to every event I’m invited to, my marriage is warmer, my income has tripled, and I’ve published several books (a few on addiction.) I’ve been told I’m a much better, more empathetic teacher and have became closer to special relatives, friends and students. Here’s what I wish somebody would have told me sooner: When you give up a toxic substance, you create room for something better to take its place.

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2015: The Year in Trump Tweets Part I

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You’ll never drink again: Sex, race, science and the real story of Prohibition

Between 1880 and 1920 over twenty million men and women immigrated to the United States, drawn by the voracious appetite of manufacturers large and small for their labor. The largest flows of immigration took place between 1900 and World War I. In 1907 alone, over one million immigrants entered the country, the largest single year of the nation’s late nineteenth and early twentieth-century massive wave. Large-scale immigration reached its highpoint in 1910, when 14.9 percent of the population was foreign-born. During the earlier nineteenth century, beginning in the 1840s, immigrants hailed largely from northern European countries such as Germany, Ireland, and Sweden. Chinese immigrants, contracted for work to build the transcontinental railways in the wake of the Civil War, contributed another flow. A successful racist campaign to end “coolie” labor, however, cut off the Asian immigrant stream with the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. Supplementing the stream from Germany and Ireland, immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century increasingly hailed from southern and eastern Europe. Poles, Italians, Greeks, Bohemians, Russians, and Slovakians settled in unprecedented numbers in the nation’s cities, seemingly overnight. New York and Chicago, the nation’s premier cities, became not only incomprehensibly large but were filled with distinctly foreign sights, smells, and dialects. In 1910, 41 percent of the close to five million inhabitants of New York City were foreign-born. In Chicago, in 1920, two-thirds of the population were either foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents. The large population of immigrant laborers and their children settled in dense ethnic enclaves in East Coast and midwestern cities. A thick web of Catholic parishes, Jewish ethnic institutions and synagogues, Bohemian welfare organizations, and Italian social clubs transformed the built landscape. For many of these European immigrant communities, alcoholic drink was part of community life, family celebration, religious ritual, and relaxation. Diverse establishments—ranging from Boston’s “Birds-in-Hand” and Milwaukee’s socialist-oriented Doerfler’s Saloon to Chicago’s Workingmen’s Exchange—were just a few of the sites of working-class drinking. The number of saloons, broadly defined, tripled in the last third of the nineteenth century. The growth of saloons spiked beer consumption. Hard-liquor consumption declined sharply throughout the nineteenth century. It halved from 1830 to 1910, from over 5 gallons per capita annually to 2.3 gallons. With that decline many of the objective debilitating effects of excessive alcohol use eased. Beer consumption, however, rose from 2.3 gallons per capita annually in 1840 to 25.9 gallons in 1910, a rise of over 1,000 percent. Alcohol consumed per capita in the United States in the early twentieth century was in line with rates in industrializing Europe. Indeed, the amount of beer consumed lagged behind the heavy consumption rates of Germany and Britain. The exponential rise in beer consumption nonetheless was a visible, noisy, and for many Americans alarming harbinger of the immigrant makeover of American cities. The working-class drinking establishments became a lightning rod for cultural and class anxieties. The men who patronized these establishments, after all, were not only working-class, they were also largely foreign and heavily Catholic. Immigrant laborers, thus, not only altered the nation’s class composition but its religious and ethnic identity as well. Ethnic and religious divisions closely paralleled class cleavages in the United States. As a result, a potent alchemy of ethnic, religious, and class tensions fused in the battle over the saloon. Antiliquor crusaders attacked saloons in the nation’s small towns of the west and industrial cities of the east as “cankerous sores” and a “social menace,” a “foe of the wage-earner,” and a contributing factor to the “bleak conditions of urban tenements.” Undisciplined sexuality in the all-male saloon also raised the risk of social disease. “Respectable” women, either by proscription or custom, did not patronize saloons. Some saloons, however, had side entrances for women and private booths in back rooms, and were sites of sex trafficking. New York’s Committee of Fourteen, established in 1905, worked to eradicate saloon-linked prostitution. Saloons and liquor sales, vice fighters argued, were deeply implicated in that trade. In 1912 Progressive luminary Jane Addams publicized one scientist’s finding that alcohol was the “indispensable vehicle” of the “white slave traffic.” Ella Boole of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union proclaimed, in turn, “There would not be any social evil,” a euphemism for prostitution, “if there was no saloon evil.” For politically astute reformers, the drive to rein in the saloon was also linked to the saloons’ and urban proletarians’ role in politics. Ethnic working-class saloons were often informal political institutions, serving as the lowest rung and neighborhood hub of the local urban political party machinery. The saloonkeepers tended to be active in the local Democratic and Republican parties—and in industrial cities where socialism gained traction saloonkeepers were active in the Socialist Party as well. In Milwaukee’s vibrant center of “sewer socialism”—so named for its pragmatic brand of left politics focused on providing sewers, paved streets, and parks in working-class neighborhoods—saloons served as important havens for the party. Victor Berger, who served as an alderman in 1910 and who one year later was elected as a Socialist to Congress, dominated the lively discussions at John Doerfler’s establishment, where the local Socialist organization held its regular meetings. One former Milwaukee Socialist saloon owner later recalled that his place, for all intents and purposes, was an “educational institution.” It was, however, in cities with large Democratic and Republican machines that saloons served most importantly as the storefront for local partisan politics. There, ethnic ward bosses and party precinct captains kept in close personal touch with their constituents, providing much-needed services such as jobs, a rent payment, or a Thanksgiving basket in exchange for constituent loyalty on election day. In a world of anemic public provisioning, powerful municipal political machines, characterized by widespread corruption, solidified their working-class voting bases through these clientelist practices. Clientelism, the exchange of services for votes, characterized party politics in societies structured by deeply asymmetric power relations and vast income inequality, among them the United States and parts of Europe and Latin America. Antisaloon sentiment became a focal point of reformers who sought to rid cities of corrupt and “inefficient” political machines. The goal of “cleaning up” proletarian-based clientelist machines contributed to Progressive support for the saloon’s eradication. Historians of the United States have labeled the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the “Progressive Era,” after the energetic group of Protestant and largely elite men and women, self-identified as Progressives, and the reform wave they launched. These policy-oriented men and women were a diverse bunch. They included businessmen, social scientists, reform ministers, settlement-house workers, and labor advocates who sought to grapple with the problems wrought by urban industrialization. They worked to improve health, hygiene, and urban sanitation, to beautify their cities, and to provide social centers for immigrants. One central concern of these reformers was ending the municipal power of urban political machines. Meshed in networks of graft, kickbacks, and patronage, and providing routes for upward mobility for ethnic political brokers, this form of politics offended reformers’ sense of the civic public good. The eradication of saloons, then, was also a political question. For some Progressives, this effort was imbued with a deeply antidemocratic impulse: Frances Willard, founder of the WCTU, made the linkage explicit as early as 1890: “Alien illiterates rule our cities today; the saloon is their palace; the toddy stick their scepter.” Close to a quarter century later, congressman Richmond Hobson deployed these arguments in favor of constitutional prohibition: “It is the degenerate vote that has in the past overwhelmed the liberties of free people. And it is the degenerate vote in our big cities that is a menace to our institutions.” If the local political practices of those northeastern and midwestern working-class men who held the vote (many of the newest immigrants did not) and saloons as spaces for politics drove support for the war on alcohol in the north, a related but distinctive set of concerns inspired the antiliquor crusade in the south. Below the Mason-Dixon line, prohibitionist crusaders also attacked the saloons of “illiterate whites,” but their sharpest animus centered on “negro dives.” The specter of the collective gatherings of African-Americans, many recently disfranchised, in “colored only” saloons, beyond the eye of white surveillance, haunted white Southerners. Anywhere such saloons thrived, Prohibitionists warned, they posed a “deadly menace,” threatening the safety of women, of children, and of the home. Dance halls and “colored only” saloons, declared one Georgia reformer, were “veritable centers of vice, schools of iniquity, and hot-beds of crime.” Another Georgia commentator, in what became a common refrain across the south, averred that “the saloon was the ravager of the negro people. It plundered them at all points, robbed them of their wages,” and “fed their animalism.” In the aftermath of African-American disfranchisement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the contest for tight control over politically dispossessed populations heightened the drive for prohibition. Atlanta Baptist minister and antiliquor crusader John E. White in 1908 referred to the “feeling of insecurity” in the rural sections of the south that had become a “contagion” because of roaming “drunken negroes.” A host of selectively applied laws and ordinances for petty violations, from loitering to vagrancy, already policed and criminalized African-American leisure and coerced their labor. A wave of novel and unevenly enforced dry laws in the south layered on top of these ordinances served as an additional means to target and discipline African-American as well as poor white leisure. The “dives” of “illiterate whites,” claimed southern reformers, threatened at any time to light the tinderbox of racial and class animosities into violent “racial disorders.” Race riots, racial pogroms, and lynch terror were an endemic feature in this system of racial domination. By scapegoating the saloon, white southern reformers explained such violence as an aberrant characteristic that might be controlled through saloon eradication. “Race war,” White warned, “is a perilous possibility” in “any Southern community with a barroom.” Along with concerns over the destabilizing effects of intoxicating liquor on the South’s less civilized “dangerous” classes, a parallel alarm over the use of other narcotic substances snowballed at the same time. In southern states such as Tennessee and Georgia, state policing authorities between 1900 and 1914 warned of African-Americans “crazed by cocaine” who went on superhuman rampages of violence. “Many of the horrible crimes committed in Southern States by colored people can be traced directly to the cocaine habit,” charged Colonel J. W. Watson of Georgia in 1903. Such fantastical claims, including the rumor that the effects of cocaine shielded the user against gunshot wounds, fueled the adoption of state antinarcotics legislation and buttressed southern support for the first federal antidrug law in 1914. During these same decades, scientific discourse increasingly identified alcohol as a dangerous narcotic drug. At the 1909 meeting of the American Society for the Study of Alcohol and Other Narcotics, one researcher, Winfield S. Hall, professor of physiology at Northwestern University, concluded, “Alcohol is a narcotic in its drug action.” Another participant suggested that alcohol be classed “in the list of dangerous drugs along with morphine, cocaine and chloral.” Scientific experts emphasized its damaging “poisonous” physiological effects and its addictive qualities. Such testimonies clothed older moral antiliquor arguments with new authority, enabling them to gain wider traction. The American Society for the Study of Alcohol and Other Narcotic Drugs, the Boston-based Scientific Temperance Federation founded in 1906, the Scientific Temperance Quarterly, and the American Medical Association took pains to debunk conventional medical homilies that emphasized alcohol as a valuable remedy that could nourish and exert special effects on the nervous system. Antiliquor crusaders popularized and widely exaggerated these findings: the “protoplasmic poison,” warned Richmond Hobson, “even in the smallest quantities,” lessened the activity of the brain. It acted most strongly on the “most recently acquired facilities” to “annihilate those qualities built up through education and experience, the power of self-control and the sense of responsibility.” The new scientific “facts,” many of them presented to Congress, bolstered support for the war on alcohol. Antiliquor crusaders worked to educate the public about the dangers of alcohol through posters, pamphlets, graphs, and charts. Mary Hunt, director of Scientific Temperance Instruction, ensured that the nation’s school textbooks by the early twentieth century disseminated to the nation’s children the message of the dangers of the “seductive poison,” warning that even the most moderate amounts led to ruin. Such campaigns now spread among wider circles of reformers. Elizabeth Tilton, head of the Boston Associated Charities, warned of the dangers of alcohol through a poster campaign begun out of her home in 1912. Not content with dry scientific journals, the campaign borrowed tools from the new profession of advertising to counter the success of liquor advertising in poor neighborhoods. The drink custom, the posters warned, was a bane to the requirements of a modern, ordered world—a menace to health and the enemy of efficiency. “Liquor stands for waste,” proclaimed one poster. Success in a modern, mechanical age required “self-discipline, self-control, and respectability,” another announced. These secular messages no longer centered on the century-old concerns over “sin.” Instead, they adopted a modern, forward-looking ethos. Along with these concerns over alcohol’s negative effects on health and efficiency, antiliquor crusaders drove home its social costs. Alcohol, they insisted, was responsible for “a good portion of insanity,” a “large part of all crime,” a “considerable part of pauperism,” and “most of child misery.” Worst of all, it was “a staggering economic burden.” Elizabeth Tilton, speaking before the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, drove this “fact” home with frightening statistics: alcohol was “directly and indirectly responsible for 42 percent of broken homes, 45 percent of children cruelly deserted, 50 percent of crime, 25 percent of our poverty, not to mention feeble mindedness and insanity.” Bold and frightening posters, graphs, charts, and pamphlets distributed by prohibition forces linked alcohol, above all, to the bête noire of all progress-loving moderns: “degeneracy.” Late nineteenth-century popularizations of Darwin’s theories of evolution emphasized the application of natural selection to society. “Each generation must be an improvement over the previous generation if the nation is going to comply with the law of evolution,” cautioned Richmond Hobson. As the United States lurched onto the global imperial stage, anxieties over threats to the survival of the white race by the world’s “colored” populations permeated social purity campaigns, social hygiene, eugenics, and the war against alcohol. “Alcohol,” one scientist warned, “leads to race suicide.” Another antiliquor crusader decried the perilous “wave of degeneracy . . . sweeping the land . . . so appalling in magnitude that it staggers the mind and threatens to destroy this republic.” Abolishing the saloon was essential to combating that threat. Should they fail in this “mission,” warned E. W. Davis, the superintendent of the Chicago district of the Illinois Anti-Saloon League, “Anglo-Saxon civilization would ultimately disappear.” Excerpted from "The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State" by Lisa McGirr. Copyright © 2016 by Lisa McGirr. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Happy new year! Wait, really — why do we celebrate it on January 1?

Happy New Year! Little odd we are doing this now, right? A bit arbitrary really. Why did the West and then by extension the rest of the world agree that January 1 should be the first day of the year? The first New Year celebrations marked the beginning of planting season, a date normally associated with either the spring or autumnal equinox depending on local climates. This is why Rosh Hashanah is in late September and Nowruz (the Persian New Year) is in March. Originally, the Roman calendar followed this trend as well. Throughout the earliest parts of Roman history, the calendar year began on March 1, which was roughly the beginning of planting season. However, around the year 153 B.C.E., the date of the year’s inauguration was switched to January 1, the first day of the month dedicated to the goddess Janus. The two-faced Janus blessed new beginnings and so it makes sense that her month (added to the calendar roughly 600 years before by King Numa Pompilius) should commemorate the beginning of the year. More importantly, however, this move meant New Year’s Day now coincided with the beginning of the governmental year when the new consuls (from whom each year would take its name) would take office. But despite the certain kind of logic in this move, January 1 calendric supremacy was far from assured. In 46 B.C.E., Julius Caesar oversaw a drastic and decidedly necessary overhaul of the Roman calendar. The ancient Roman calendar was based on a lunar system that had become grossly inaccurate over the centuries, not the least because politicians frequently altered it in order to lengthen their own terms in office or shorten those of their opponents. Julius Caesar gave the new solar-based scheme his name and crowned January 1 as the first day of the year. As the calendar of the Mistress of the World, the Julian calendar enjoyed widespread use and influence, though January 1 seldom displaced local New Year observances. And after the Roman Empire’s conversion to Christianity, January’s association with the pagan Janus became suspect. So suspect, in fact, that in 567 A.D., the Council of Tours abolished January 1 as the New Year. This began the date’s exile from New Year’s Day glory. Throughout the Middle Ages, Christendom did not have a unified day to mark the beginning of the new year. The annual switch-over was variously celebrated on March 1 (the old, pre-Julian Roman New Year), March 25 (the Feast of the Annunciation), December 25 (Christmas Day), and even Easter. In the Byzantine East, September 1 marked the first day of the year. All throughout this time of New Year uncertainty, the cracks in the calendar system established by Julius Caesar were starting show, and the seasonal setting for Easter was varying a bit too much for some tastes year to year. And so in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII unveiled a slightly modified Julian calendar—a calendar that would become known as the Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian calendar lengthened the year ever so slightly, reconfigured the calculation of leap years and reintroduced January 1 as New Year’s Day. Europe’s Catholic countries adopted the new calendar almost immediately; however, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox countries did not. In some cases, as in the case of the Eastern Christian churches, the use of the Julian calendar (increasingly called the “old” calendar) became a point of pride and identity. Even today, many Eastern Christian confessions remain divided between so-called “Old” and “New” Calendarists and Greece did not adopted the Gregorian calendar as its civil timetable until 1921. And that’s not even mentioning all the places outside of Christianity’s sway and Rome’s shadow that had not been following along through all the Julius Caesar, pagan goddess, Easter handwringing. But as the colonial era and its subsequent boom in international trade (including the trans-Atlantic slave trade) began to take hold throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the need for a unified way of figuring out what day it is became more pressing. While in some places, such as Scotland, January 1 was crowned New Year’s Day before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, in many more, January 1st road into town on the coattails of Pope Greg’s calendar. As it did in 1752, when Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar and a January 1 New Year’s Day throughout all parts of its expanding realm, which included its American colonies. That means this is only the 264th time that Americans have rung in the New Year on January 1. Which is strangely hopeful when you think about it. A sort of New Year’s parable. A reminder that even time itself can be changed. The beginning can be whenever we want it to be.Happy New Year! Little odd we are doing this now, right? A bit arbitrary really. Why did the West and then by extension the rest of the world agree that January 1 should be the first day of the year? The first New Year celebrations marked the beginning of planting season, a date normally associated with either the spring or autumnal equinox depending on local climates. This is why Rosh Hashanah is in late September and Nowruz (the Persian New Year) is in March. Originally, the Roman calendar followed this trend as well. Throughout the earliest parts of Roman history, the calendar year began on March 1, which was roughly the beginning of planting season. However, around the year 153 B.C.E., the date of the year’s inauguration was switched to January 1, the first day of the month dedicated to the goddess Janus. The two-faced Janus blessed new beginnings and so it makes sense that her month (added to the calendar roughly 600 years before by King Numa Pompilius) should commemorate the beginning of the year. More importantly, however, this move meant New Year’s Day now coincided with the beginning of the governmental year when the new consuls (from whom each year would take its name) would take office. But despite the certain kind of logic in this move, January 1 calendric supremacy was far from assured. In 46 B.C.E., Julius Caesar oversaw a drastic and decidedly necessary overhaul of the Roman calendar. The ancient Roman calendar was based on a lunar system that had become grossly inaccurate over the centuries, not the least because politicians frequently altered it in order to lengthen their own terms in office or shorten those of their opponents. Julius Caesar gave the new solar-based scheme his name and crowned January 1 as the first day of the year. As the calendar of the Mistress of the World, the Julian calendar enjoyed widespread use and influence, though January 1 seldom displaced local New Year observances. And after the Roman Empire’s conversion to Christianity, January’s association with the pagan Janus became suspect. So suspect, in fact, that in 567 A.D., the Council of Tours abolished January 1 as the New Year. This began the date’s exile from New Year’s Day glory. Throughout the Middle Ages, Christendom did not have a unified day to mark the beginning of the new year. The annual switch-over was variously celebrated on March 1 (the old, pre-Julian Roman New Year), March 25 (the Feast of the Annunciation), December 25 (Christmas Day), and even Easter. In the Byzantine East, September 1 marked the first day of the year. All throughout this time of New Year uncertainty, the cracks in the calendar system established by Julius Caesar were starting show, and the seasonal setting for Easter was varying a bit too much for some tastes year to year. And so in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII unveiled a slightly modified Julian calendar—a calendar that would become known as the Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian calendar lengthened the year ever so slightly, reconfigured the calculation of leap years and reintroduced January 1 as New Year’s Day. Europe’s Catholic countries adopted the new calendar almost immediately; however, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox countries did not. In some cases, as in the case of the Eastern Christian churches, the use of the Julian calendar (increasingly called the “old” calendar) became a point of pride and identity. Even today, many Eastern Christian confessions remain divided between so-called “Old” and “New” Calendarists and Greece did not adopted the Gregorian calendar as its civil timetable until 1921. And that’s not even mentioning all the places outside of Christianity’s sway and Rome’s shadow that had not been following along through all the Julius Caesar, pagan goddess, Easter handwringing. But as the colonial era and its subsequent boom in international trade (including the trans-Atlantic slave trade) began to take hold throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the need for a unified way of figuring out what day it is became more pressing. While in some places, such as Scotland, January 1 was crowned New Year’s Day before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, in many more, January 1st road into town on the coattails of Pope Greg’s calendar. As it did in 1752, when Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar and a January 1 New Year’s Day throughout all parts of its expanding realm, which included its American colonies. That means this is only the 264th time that Americans have rung in the New Year on January 1. Which is strangely hopeful when you think about it. A sort of New Year’s parable. A reminder that even time itself can be changed. The beginning can be whenever we want it to be.

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I have given away my guns: I’m a Texan and a hunter, but I won’t be part of gun culture any more

I am a lifelong sportsman. I grew up in Texas, hunting with my dad. I’m not sure if I learned how to ride a bike or shoot a gun first, but it was close either way. In addition to creating lifelong memories shooting and hunting with my father, I was educated on gun safety from a very early age. I was taught well, and became a very responsible gun owner and enjoyed sport shooting and hunting into my adult years. But then something started to change. I don’t quite know what happened; it just seemed that firearms started becoming faster, more powerful and more plentiful. Mass shootings became more common and much deadlier. Then Sandy Hook happened. I had recently become a father, and like every other father I hugged my kid just a little tighter that night. Then I walked into the living room and started to cry. All those children, not much older than my daughter, murdered. Humans have a unique capacity for being truly awful to each other, but a more senseless tragedy cannot be imagined. That night, I called a few of my friends who I knew to be responsible gun owners and gave away the guns I owned. It's not that I’m opposed to gun ownership, or have become anti-gun; I just could not in good conscience be any part of an industry that refuses to take basic common-sense measures to address the problem we face today. Sadly, I’ve had to give up a few sports I truly enjoyed. But, in the end, if that makes any difference at all, it is worth it. It’s a sacrifice that I feel morally obligated to make. And, until we as a society can come together to pass common-sense gun legislation, it's a sacrifice I’ll happily continue to make. I don’t expect my choice or my position to change any minds. The gun debate stirs up deep emotions on both sides, and I imagine that people on both sides of this issue are pretty entrenched in their beliefs. However, the vast majority of Americans support common-sense gun controls. Yet, a very loud, very passionate and very well-funded minority is controlling both the debate and legislation, leaving us essentially paralyzed. By any measure, there have been far too many mass shootings since I gave up my guns. Now, a father of two, I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue. Like everyone else, it terrifies me as a parent to think of the possibility of my children being involved in the sort of senseless violence that sadly has become commonplace. However, it scares me even more to think that my children will grow up in a society that has accepted this violence as the new normal. I really don’t think I will win hearts and minds on the other side of the issue, but I will raise my voice, along with the majority of Americans, and demand that my elected officials take action beyond offering condolences. I will hold my elected officials accountable and make common-sense gun legislation my primary voting issue. It’s time we as a society stop voraciously debating what is a right and start talking about what is right. I’m not trying to advocate that we take guns away. In fact, I want my guns back. But I was raised to be a responsible gun owner and until we can pass common-sense gun laws, I just don’t feel responsible in owning a gun.I am a lifelong sportsman. I grew up in Texas, hunting with my dad. I’m not sure if I learned how to ride a bike or shoot a gun first, but it was close either way. In addition to creating lifelong memories shooting and hunting with my father, I was educated on gun safety from a very early age. I was taught well, and became a very responsible gun owner and enjoyed sport shooting and hunting into my adult years. But then something started to change. I don’t quite know what happened; it just seemed that firearms started becoming faster, more powerful and more plentiful. Mass shootings became more common and much deadlier. Then Sandy Hook happened. I had recently become a father, and like every other father I hugged my kid just a little tighter that night. Then I walked into the living room and started to cry. All those children, not much older than my daughter, murdered. Humans have a unique capacity for being truly awful to each other, but a more senseless tragedy cannot be imagined. That night, I called a few of my friends who I knew to be responsible gun owners and gave away the guns I owned. It's not that I’m opposed to gun ownership, or have become anti-gun; I just could not in good conscience be any part of an industry that refuses to take basic common-sense measures to address the problem we face today. Sadly, I’ve had to give up a few sports I truly enjoyed. But, in the end, if that makes any difference at all, it is worth it. It’s a sacrifice that I feel morally obligated to make. And, until we as a society can come together to pass common-sense gun legislation, it's a sacrifice I’ll happily continue to make. I don’t expect my choice or my position to change any minds. The gun debate stirs up deep emotions on both sides, and I imagine that people on both sides of this issue are pretty entrenched in their beliefs. However, the vast majority of Americans support common-sense gun controls. Yet, a very loud, very passionate and very well-funded minority is controlling both the debate and legislation, leaving us essentially paralyzed. By any measure, there have been far too many mass shootings since I gave up my guns. Now, a father of two, I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue. Like everyone else, it terrifies me as a parent to think of the possibility of my children being involved in the sort of senseless violence that sadly has become commonplace. However, it scares me even more to think that my children will grow up in a society that has accepted this violence as the new normal. I really don’t think I will win hearts and minds on the other side of the issue, but I will raise my voice, along with the majority of Americans, and demand that my elected officials take action beyond offering condolences. I will hold my elected officials accountable and make common-sense gun legislation my primary voting issue. It’s time we as a society stop voraciously debating what is a right and start talking about what is right. I’m not trying to advocate that we take guns away. In fact, I want my guns back. But I was raised to be a responsible gun owner and until we can pass common-sense gun laws, I just don’t feel responsible in owning a gun.

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“What a horrible mother”: How a call from a “good samaritan” derailed these mothers’ lives

We're re-running this story as part of a countdown of the year's best personal essays. To read all the entries in the series, click here. In the moments before the police and county prosecutors and child protective services took over her life, Monique was thinking about dinner. Specifically, she wanted a baked chicken. She had just left a birthday party and was driving home with her two daughters. By the time she pulled into the parking lot of a grocery store near their house, her younger daughter, then 4 years old, was taking a much needed nap. Monique hesitated. She didn’t want to wake her daughter to bring her into the store, where she was liable to be as cranky and difficult as anyone else who’d been prematurely awakened. On the other hand, Monique was hungry. “I’ll watch her,” said her older daughter. She was 8. She had an iPad she could text her mother from. It was January in Maryland. Mild, 45 degrees. A few minutes later, standing in the checkout line of the grocery store, Monique heard her name being paged, asking her to return to her car. When she got there she found three police officers surrounding it, asking if she was the mother of the children in the vehicle, shouting at her, “Do you know how dangerous this is?” The two male officers went about the lengthy business of finding an appropriate charge, while the female officer continued to berate Monique, who stood, stunned, next to the car, while her daughters cried. An hour later they were still there, waiting to be released, when one of the officers asked where Monique’s husband was. She told him they were separated. “Well,” he said, “you need to have him come pick up the kids so we can arrest you.” For Dawn, a young mother in New England, it was the same: a moment of convenience followed by one of shock. She had just picked up her daughter from daycare when she remembered she was out of toilet paper. Her daughter, worn out after the day, was strapped into her car seat and busily enjoying what was her first ever Happy Meal to boot. Dawn pulled up in front of a Rite Aid, locked the doors, and sprinted inside. By the time she returned to the vehicle, three minutes later, a woman was standing by the window, beside Dawn’s daughter, who was still waiting comfortably. “You’re disgusting,” the stranger said. “What a horrible mother. I’ve called the police on you. I have your license plate number. I’m waiting here to make sure they arrest you.” For Courtney, the decision to stop wasn’t spontaneous; for days she’d been meaning to get a gate to put in front of her fireplace, to keep away her 3-year-old daughter who’d been growing increasingly curious about it. She was driving home to New York after a weekend visiting her mother-in-law and knew she would be passing a store where she could get just that. Five minutes before she reached the place, her daughter fell asleep. “She had a little cold,” Courtney told me. “I just wanted to let her rest. It was 70 degrees, but I knew I’d only be a couple minutes.” She opened the windows and parked in the shade. She spent no more than 10 minutes in the store. She was on the way back to her car when she noticed something odd. A woman, a stranger, standing near the hood of her car, a store employee on either side of her, all of them staring and watching Courtney as she approached. She experienced a moment of dread. Had something happened to her daughter … but no, her daughter was fine. She was in the car seat, stirring a little, but fine. Courtney opened the back door, adjusted her little girl’s blanket. There was a shopping cart near her car and she pushed it a few feet into the stall. She unlocked the door, got in, checked her text messages. And all the while, the woman and employees stood watching her, saying nothing. “It was so odd,” Courtney later said. “I kept feeling like they were going to say something to me, but they never did.” That night, after she’d put her daughter to bed, she mentioned the incident to her husband. She asked him, “Is it not OK to let a kid wait in a car for a few minutes with the windows open while you run an errand?” He had no idea. It hardly seemed worth worrying about. Certainly no more worrisome than their daughter’s cold. A few days later, going down to the lobby of their building, Courtney’s husband was stopped by a New York police officer. The officer asked his name, if he was Courtney’s husband. He said yes. The officer said his wife needed to call the police about an incident in a parking lot. Courtney was baffled but did as instructed. “I just thought I needed to explain it,” she told me. “I thought that it was all a misunderstanding.” She and the officer spoke for about 30 minutes. The officer asked her to describe what had happened. She recounted to him the events of the afternoon, explained that she’d opened the windows, parked in the shade, explained that it had been raining and was overcast, that she’d only gone in to look for one item, had hurried back after just a few minutes. She could hear the officer typing as she spoke. He asked her to hold on a moment. Then he said, without emotion, “At this point, based on what you’ve told me, I’d say there’s a 90 percent chance you’re going to be arrested.” The cases against all three women remain open (names and some identifying details have been changed). The details, as they have been described to me, are harrowing and strange. Strange enough that three years ago, I might not have believed them. Back then, I was aware that children died after being forgotten or becoming trapped in hot cars, but these were rare and tragic instances that seemed more a matter of horrible forgetfulness than anything criminal. The idea that strangers might be watching for any suggestion of what they deemed to be neglect, and prepared to involve the authorities and provide stern, hurtful commentary on top of it, seemed absurd, an over-the-top parody mashup of modern parenting techniques and the East German Stasi. Then it happened to me. At the end of a trip home to see my parents, I let my then-4-year-old son wait by himself in a car while I ran into a store. He needed headphones to watch a video on our flight home. Someone filmed me leaving him, going into the store, coming out, and driving off, and promptly called the police. Ultimately I was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor – a charge most people associate with buying beer for underage teenagers – and, with the aid of lawyers I was only able to afford through family generosity, arranged to perform 100 hours of community service and take parenting lessons. In return, the county prosecutor decided not to pursue the matter any further. After I wrote a story about what happened, Monique, Dawn and Courtney all reached out to me individually through social media, looking for guidance as they navigated the particulars of their cases. The legal aspects. The social services. The staggering personal distress that comes from having a reasonable and informed decision turned into a condemnation of you as a parent by an utter stranger. These cases fly in the face of logic and statistics on actual dangers: A child is far more likely to be killed or injured in a moving vehicle than in a stationary one; if a child is going to be abducted, far more often the culprit is a family member, not a stranger. Yet parents continue to be harassed and arrested for allowing children to play in a park unsupervised, walk alone to a friend’s house, or wait in a car for a few minutes. The boogeyman of “stranger danger” that my generation grew up haunted by and that continues to loom darkly over the parenting landscape – “Unsolved Mysteries” mutates into “To Catch a Predator” – was never much of a threat to begin with. A news cycle overrun with statistically unlikely horror stories is bad enough for an exhausted mother or father, frayed nerves and all. What makes this current situation worse is the climate of judgment that seems to have permeated the national consciousness. There is a moral vigilantism about parenting that, as with all forms of vigilantism, veers far into paranoia. In the months that followed my ordeal, I struggled to see myself as that stranger had seen me—not a mother running an errand, making a judgment call, juggling demands, but a criminal, a threat to my own child’s safety, a social problem to be dealt with as quickly and as anonymously as possible. This distance between how I saw myself (an anxious, generally overprotective parent) and how this stranger had seen me (a threat to my child) was the most surreal aspect of the experience. I couldn’t bridge the gap, and even after my essay was published, I was still straddling it. A friend emailed me a mock congratulations after the essay began to spread. “Oh, Kim,” he wrote. “Do you realize how much you’ve done for kid-in-car stock photography?” I laughed when I read it, but it was an agonized laugh. He was right. We experience each other in thumbnails, in status updates and sound bites. In cases of genuine emotional distress, the actual pain – rather than the controversial facts – almost always goes unnoticed. I became very curious about this stranger: Who was this person who had meant to prevent pain but had only caused it? Last summer, I was interviewed by a television newsmagazine about my experience. (I was on right after the bit about getting hit by lightning inside your house). As a lead-in to my segment, the show produced a short feature where a baby doll was left alone in a car seat on a hot day. I think it made crying noises or made some other signal of distress. Passersby, on hidden camera, were filmed confronting the “mother,” telling her how wrong she was to leave her baby, how she couldn’t do that, how the police were being called, while the “mother” herself dismissed their concerns as a violation of her personal rights. Lately, I’ve become as interested in these people who call the police on women like myself as I am in the victims of this new type of harassment. And when I think about them, it’s not indignation I feel but sadness and regret at how little any of us know about each other’s lives. I see these good samaritans slowing down in a parking lot, resisting the anonymity of modern life, wanting to help but unsure of what to do, of how to reach out or engage. I see them grappling with this uncertainty for the briefest moment, then reaching for the phone. We’re raising our kids in a moment when it’s easier to call 911 than to have a conversation.

***

Courtney was one of the first to reach out to me, through a Facebook message in late August. “I found much needed comfort in your article,” she wrote, “as I’m going through a very similar matter. It is an unbelievable process. I willingly turned myself in yesterday (the first time I was asked to, three weeks after the incident) only to find out I must have the soonest possible court date. It's been a nightmare.” A few days after the officer interviewed her by phone, her lawyer informed her that she was being charged with felony child endangerment and that she would need to return to New Jersey to self-report. In a small room she was electronically fingerprinted and photographed by a police officer. Then she was issued a court date only a few days later, on Labor Day. She knew her lawyer would be unavailable then, told the officer as much and asked why the date was so soon. That was when Courtney learned she’d been classified as a violent family offender. All of this was eerily familiar to me. My experience had also progressed in the manner of bad dreams, without logic, without the clear relationship of cause and effect we expect in waking life. Courtney’s new court date was set on her daughter’s first day of preschool. “That was one of the hardest parts,” she said. “Missing her first day of school to go to court and prove I wasn’t a neglectful mother.” She hired a baby sitter, asked a close friend to go with her, and went back across state lines to appear before a judge. The case wasn’t heard that day, or the next time she appeared. It dragged on for several months. Ultimately, Courtney was given one year of probation with supervision, a year during which she’d need to drive a hundred miles each month to meet with an officer. She expected these meetings to be fairly routine, with questions about her daughter, her home life, maybe a drug test. She was surprised at the first meeting when the female officer seemed very eager to dig deep into her case. “She asked me what I did for a living,” Courtney said, “and seemed put off when I told her I was a stay-at-home mom. That was when she got nasty. She asked me how my husband felt about all this, if he was OK with me abandoning our infant in a hot car while he worked to support me.” Courtney explained to her that this wasn’t what happened, that her daughter was not an infant but 3 years old, that she had not been abandoned but left for a few minutes with the windows open. The officer shook her head, tightened her lips, looked Courtney firmly in the eye. “I would never do that,” she said. “Ever.” Courtney left the building shaking, feeling as though she’d endured a second trial. “She’d made up her mind about the sort of person who lets a kid wait in car,” she told me. “There was nothing I could say to change it.” I wish I could say this rush to judgment surprised me. Parents have always seen their children as a form of self-expression, but lately the parent-child branding has become louder and more incessant. What we let our children do or eat or where they learn or what they watch is, often purposefully, a comment about what we think of ourselves as much as it is about our children. Or rather, what we want others to think of us. A friend recently told me about a Facebook acquaintance who posted a picture of her kids reading chapter books on a road trip. “Eight hours of screen-free time together!” the caption read. “Except for mom,” someone posted in the comments. The post was deleted a few minutes later. This is not to say that there is not an abiding sense of love and protection in today’s parenting. But the near ceaseless public scrutiny we put ourselves in creates this kind of message-scroll existence. Whether they mean to or not, parents today are always shilling to sell you on the superiority of what used to be private, individual choices. And with shilling, comes backlash. There are conflicting viewpoints and ideological scrums. Debates on breast-feeding and junk food can unleash fist-fighting levels of hostility. And there are some people who just don’t like you, and armed with the same tools of attention, are all too eager to make that known. But where does that leave us when we see a kind of parenting behavior that strikes us as wrong-headed? Is there a middle ground between scorn and denial? On vacation this past winter I watched a deeply tanned man with close-cropped hair grab hold of his son, no older than 8, and say, “No more of your stupid talk.” He had his hand around his son’s arm and the boy winced, tried pulling away, while a young girl padded around at their feet, shaking water from her ears. I would have liked to do something at this moment, to intervene, tell him that I’d seen what he’d just done and found it deeply upsetting, tell him that a child should never be pinched or spoken to like that, humiliated in public. But how does one say such a thing to a stranger? How does one enter into what is essentially a private relationship between parent and child in a helpful or constructive way? How would he respond if I did? Surely he’d be offended, offer some insult in return, tell me to mind my own business. Perhaps he’d feel humiliated and take out his anger on the child. Was I going to find out his name, the state or country he came from, contact the authorities there? Of course I wasn’t. I didn’t know him or his children. We were nothing to each other. I turned my attention back to my own daughter, because I made a split-second decision that the cost of doing anything would be too high. The solitude of raising kids outside of strong communities can be crushing; and left to ourselves, we all become worse parents than we hoped to be. *** The last time I spoke with Courtney, she’d been released from the supervision component of her probation, had succeeded in having her daughter’s case closed with CPS, and seemed to have made peace with both herself and the woman who called the police on her. Still, she feels like she’s a more nervous mother than before. Her daughter will refuse to wear her gloves on a cold day, and she feels like people are watching and judging her for it. And recently, she grew nervous when her family went to visit a friend for the weekend and they set up an air mattress for her daughter in the corridor between the bedroom and the walk-in closet. Her daughter loved this and yelled with delight, “I get to sleep in the closet!” Courtney felt her whole body tense when she heard her, and warned her not to say that at school. “I guess I worry more about what people will think,” she told me. And also, she, like me, worries about raising her daughter in a world so often lacking in human decency. She described to me how, just the other day, she took her daughter to a restaurant for lunch. She tries not to give her too much restaurant food and had brought a peanut butter sandwich and some cut-up vegetables. Her daughter was happily eating when a woman at a nearby table approached, pointed at the sandwich. “You know this is a peanut-free restaurant,” she said. Courtney apologized, asked if the woman was allergic, said she’d move to another table. “I’m not allergic,” the woman answered. “I just thought you should know.” A moment later, a waiter was sent to throw the offending sandwich in the garbage as the girl began to weep. Courtney told me all this and I couldn’t tell if she was crying or laughing, which is the place I find myself most days. “I mean, what’s wrong with people?” she asked. “Has everyone in the world gone insane?” Probably, I thought. And yet, there are these rare moments where I feel hopeful, where it seems we haven’t entirely forgotten how to interact with other human beings, or talk to strangers from a place of openness and curiosity, rather than fear. Not long after I first wrote about my experience, I took my daughter back to a different branch of the store where my own mess began. When I’d finished shopping, we made our way toward the registers. We’d been waiting a few minutes when I noticed a woman at the front of the next line struggling with her children. She had three of them. She was wearing an infant in a baby sling and pushing the other two in her big red cart when the baby began to cry and the twins began to bicker. Prepare for triple meltdown, I thought, and remembered what a friend had told me recently, that in the middle of her daughter’s grocery store tantrum, a stranger had taken out a phone and begun recording it—apparently this was its own genre of entertainment on You Tube: other people’s kids crying. The screaming grew louder. The line grew longer. Confronted with the spectacle, I did what everyone else in line was doing; I pretended not to see them, scanned the other aisles for a shorter line, silently wished I’d just ordered the items I needed on Amazon, and obsessively checked the time on my phone. I was about to move into another line when another woman, shopping by herself, stepped up to the mother’s cart. I (and probably everyone within earshot) expected the worst: the recording phone, the nasty comment or piece of unsolicited parenting advice. It was as uncomfortable as it was inevitable. We are, after all, all wandering judges. But instead the woman without children smiled and asked, quite casually, if she could help, then without waiting for an answer, began unloading the woman’s cart, playing peek-a-boo with the toddler. The mother began to thank her, but she wouldn’t hear of it. “Really, it’s nothing,” she said, and smiled. “You’ve got your hands full.”We're re-running this story as part of a countdown of the year's best personal essays. To read all the entries in the series, click here. In the moments before the police and county prosecutors and child protective services took over her life, Monique was thinking about dinner. Specifically, she wanted a baked chicken. She had just left a birthday party and was driving home with her two daughters. By the time she pulled into the parking lot of a grocery store near their house, her younger daughter, then 4 years old, was taking a much needed nap. Monique hesitated. She didn’t want to wake her daughter to bring her into the store, where she was liable to be as cranky and difficult as anyone else who’d been prematurely awakened. On the other hand, Monique was hungry. “I’ll watch her,” said her older daughter. She was 8. She had an iPad she could text her mother from. It was January in Maryland. Mild, 45 degrees. A few minutes later, standing in the checkout line of the grocery store, Monique heard her name being paged, asking her to return to her car. When she got there she found three police officers surrounding it, asking if she was the mother of the children in the vehicle, shouting at her, “Do you know how dangerous this is?” The two male officers went about the lengthy business of finding an appropriate charge, while the female officer continued to berate Monique, who stood, stunned, next to the car, while her daughters cried. An hour later they were still there, waiting to be released, when one of the officers asked where Monique’s husband was. She told him they were separated. “Well,” he said, “you need to have him come pick up the kids so we can arrest you.” For Dawn, a young mother in New England, it was the same: a moment of convenience followed by one of shock. She had just picked up her daughter from daycare when she remembered she was out of toilet paper. Her daughter, worn out after the day, was strapped into her car seat and busily enjoying what was her first ever Happy Meal to boot. Dawn pulled up in front of a Rite Aid, locked the doors, and sprinted inside. By the time she returned to the vehicle, three minutes later, a woman was standing by the window, beside Dawn’s daughter, who was still waiting comfortably. “You’re disgusting,” the stranger said. “What a horrible mother. I’ve called the police on you. I have your license plate number. I’m waiting here to make sure they arrest you.” For Courtney, the decision to stop wasn’t spontaneous; for days she’d been meaning to get a gate to put in front of her fireplace, to keep away her 3-year-old daughter who’d been growing increasingly curious about it. She was driving home to New York after a weekend visiting her mother-in-law and knew she would be passing a store where she could get just that. Five minutes before she reached the place, her daughter fell asleep. “She had a little cold,” Courtney told me. “I just wanted to let her rest. It was 70 degrees, but I knew I’d only be a couple minutes.” She opened the windows and parked in the shade. She spent no more than 10 minutes in the store. She was on the way back to her car when she noticed something odd. A woman, a stranger, standing near the hood of her car, a store employee on either side of her, all of them staring and watching Courtney as she approached. She experienced a moment of dread. Had something happened to her daughter … but no, her daughter was fine. She was in the car seat, stirring a little, but fine. Courtney opened the back door, adjusted her little girl’s blanket. There was a shopping cart near her car and she pushed it a few feet into the stall. She unlocked the door, got in, checked her text messages. And all the while, the woman and employees stood watching her, saying nothing. “It was so odd,” Courtney later said. “I kept feeling like they were going to say something to me, but they never did.” That night, after she’d put her daughter to bed, she mentioned the incident to her husband. She asked him, “Is it not OK to let a kid wait in a car for a few minutes with the windows open while you run an errand?” He had no idea. It hardly seemed worth worrying about. Certainly no more worrisome than their daughter’s cold. A few days later, going down to the lobby of their building, Courtney’s husband was stopped by a New York police officer. The officer asked his name, if he was Courtney’s husband. He said yes. The officer said his wife needed to call the police about an incident in a parking lot. Courtney was baffled but did as instructed. “I just thought I needed to explain it,” she told me. “I thought that it was all a misunderstanding.” She and the officer spoke for about 30 minutes. The officer asked her to describe what had happened. She recounted to him the events of the afternoon, explained that she’d opened the windows, parked in the shade, explained that it had been raining and was overcast, that she’d only gone in to look for one item, had hurried back after just a few minutes. She could hear the officer typing as she spoke. He asked her to hold on a moment. Then he said, without emotion, “At this point, based on what you’ve told me, I’d say there’s a 90 percent chance you’re going to be arrested.” The cases against all three women remain open (names and some identifying details have been changed). The details, as they have been described to me, are harrowing and strange. Strange enough that three years ago, I might not have believed them. Back then, I was aware that children died after being forgotten or becoming trapped in hot cars, but these were rare and tragic instances that seemed more a matter of horrible forgetfulness than anything criminal. The idea that strangers might be watching for any suggestion of what they deemed to be neglect, and prepared to involve the authorities and provide stern, hurtful commentary on top of it, seemed absurd, an over-the-top parody mashup of modern parenting techniques and the East German Stasi. Then it happened to me. At the end of a trip home to see my parents, I let my then-4-year-old son wait by himself in a car while I ran into a store. He needed headphones to watch a video on our flight home. Someone filmed me leaving him, going into the store, coming out, and driving off, and promptly called the police. Ultimately I was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor – a charge most people associate with buying beer for underage teenagers – and, with the aid of lawyers I was only able to afford through family generosity, arranged to perform 100 hours of community service and take parenting lessons. In return, the county prosecutor decided not to pursue the matter any further. After I wrote a story about what happened, Monique, Dawn and Courtney all reached out to me individually through social media, looking for guidance as they navigated the particulars of their cases. The legal aspects. The social services. The staggering personal distress that comes from having a reasonable and informed decision turned into a condemnation of you as a parent by an utter stranger. These cases fly in the face of logic and statistics on actual dangers: A child is far more likely to be killed or injured in a moving vehicle than in a stationary one; if a child is going to be abducted, far more often the culprit is a family member, not a stranger. Yet parents continue to be harassed and arrested for allowing children to play in a park unsupervised, walk alone to a friend’s house, or wait in a car for a few minutes. The boogeyman of “stranger danger” that my generation grew up haunted by and that continues to loom darkly over the parenting landscape – “Unsolved Mysteries” mutates into “To Catch a Predator” – was never much of a threat to begin with. A news cycle overrun with statistically unlikely horror stories is bad enough for an exhausted mother or father, frayed nerves and all. What makes this current situation worse is the climate of judgment that seems to have permeated the national consciousness. There is a moral vigilantism about parenting that, as with all forms of vigilantism, veers far into paranoia. In the months that followed my ordeal, I struggled to see myself as that stranger had seen me—not a mother running an errand, making a judgment call, juggling demands, but a criminal, a threat to my own child’s safety, a social problem to be dealt with as quickly and as anonymously as possible. This distance between how I saw myself (an anxious, generally overprotective parent) and how this stranger had seen me (a threat to my child) was the most surreal aspect of the experience. I couldn’t bridge the gap, and even after my essay was published, I was still straddling it. A friend emailed me a mock congratulations after the essay began to spread. “Oh, Kim,” he wrote. “Do you realize how much you’ve done for kid-in-car stock photography?” I laughed when I read it, but it was an agonized laugh. He was right. We experience each other in thumbnails, in status updates and sound bites. In cases of genuine emotional distress, the actual pain – rather than the controversial facts – almost always goes unnoticed. I became very curious about this stranger: Who was this person who had meant to prevent pain but had only caused it? Last summer, I was interviewed by a television newsmagazine about my experience. (I was on right after the bit about getting hit by lightning inside your house). As a lead-in to my segment, the show produced a short feature where a baby doll was left alone in a car seat on a hot day. I think it made crying noises or made some other signal of distress. Passersby, on hidden camera, were filmed confronting the “mother,” telling her how wrong she was to leave her baby, how she couldn’t do that, how the police were being called, while the “mother” herself dismissed their concerns as a violation of her personal rights. Lately, I’ve become as interested in these people who call the police on women like myself as I am in the victims of this new type of harassment. And when I think about them, it’s not indignation I feel but sadness and regret at how little any of us know about each other’s lives. I see these good samaritans slowing down in a parking lot, resisting the anonymity of modern life, wanting to help but unsure of what to do, of how to reach out or engage. I see them grappling with this uncertainty for the briefest moment, then reaching for the phone. We’re raising our kids in a moment when it’s easier to call 911 than to have a conversation.

***

Courtney was one of the first to reach out to me, through a Facebook message in late August. “I found much needed comfort in your article,” she wrote, “as I’m going through a very similar matter. It is an unbelievable process. I willingly turned myself in yesterday (the first time I was asked to, three weeks after the incident) only to find out I must have the soonest possible court date. It's been a nightmare.” A few days after the officer interviewed her by phone, her lawyer informed her that she was being charged with felony child endangerment and that she would need to return to New Jersey to self-report. In a small room she was electronically fingerprinted and photographed by a police officer. Then she was issued a court date only a few days later, on Labor Day. She knew her lawyer would be unavailable then, told the officer as much and asked why the date was so soon. That was when Courtney learned she’d been classified as a violent family offender. All of this was eerily familiar to me. My experience had also progressed in the manner of bad dreams, without logic, without the clear relationship of cause and effect we expect in waking life. Courtney’s new court date was set on her daughter’s first day of preschool. “That was one of the hardest parts,” she said. “Missing her first day of school to go to court and prove I wasn’t a neglectful mother.” She hired a baby sitter, asked a close friend to go with her, and went back across state lines to appear before a judge. The case wasn’t heard that day, or the next time she appeared. It dragged on for several months. Ultimately, Courtney was given one year of probation with supervision, a year during which she’d need to drive a hundred miles each month to meet with an officer. She expected these meetings to be fairly routine, with questions about her daughter, her home life, maybe a drug test. She was surprised at the first meeting when the female officer seemed very eager to dig deep into her case. “She asked me what I did for a living,” Courtney said, “and seemed put off when I told her I was a stay-at-home mom. That was when she got nasty. She asked me how my husband felt about all this, if he was OK with me abandoning our infant in a hot car while he worked to support me.” Courtney explained to her that this wasn’t what happened, that her daughter was not an infant but 3 years old, that she had not been abandoned but left for a few minutes with the windows open. The officer shook her head, tightened her lips, looked Courtney firmly in the eye. “I would never do that,” she said. “Ever.” Courtney left the building shaking, feeling as though she’d endured a second trial. “She’d made up her mind about the sort of person who lets a kid wait in car,” she told me. “There was nothing I could say to change it.” I wish I could say this rush to judgment surprised me. Parents have always seen their children as a form of self-expression, but lately the parent-child branding has become louder and more incessant. What we let our children do or eat or where they learn or what they watch is, often purposefully, a comment about what we think of ourselves as much as it is about our children. Or rather, what we want others to think of us. A friend recently told me about a Facebook acquaintance who posted a picture of her kids reading chapter books on a road trip. “Eight hours of screen-free time together!” the caption read. “Except for mom,” someone posted in the comments. The post was deleted a few minutes later. This is not to say that there is not an abiding sense of love and protection in today’s parenting. But the near ceaseless public scrutiny we put ourselves in creates this kind of message-scroll existence. Whether they mean to or not, parents today are always shilling to sell you on the superiority of what used to be private, individual choices. And with shilling, comes backlash. There are conflicting viewpoints and ideological scrums. Debates on breast-feeding and junk food can unleash fist-fighting levels of hostility. And there are some people who just don’t like you, and armed with the same tools of attention, are all too eager to make that known. But where does that leave us when we see a kind of parenting behavior that strikes us as wrong-headed? Is there a middle ground between scorn and denial? On vacation this past winter I watched a deeply tanned man with close-cropped hair grab hold of his son, no older than 8, and say, “No more of your stupid talk.” He had his hand around his son’s arm and the boy winced, tried pulling away, while a young girl padded around at their feet, shaking water from her ears. I would have liked to do something at this moment, to intervene, tell him that I’d seen what he’d just done and found it deeply upsetting, tell him that a child should never be pinched or spoken to like that, humiliated in public. But how does one say such a thing to a stranger? How does one enter into what is essentially a private relationship between parent and child in a helpful or constructive way? How would he respond if I did? Surely he’d be offended, offer some insult in return, tell me to mind my own business. Perhaps he’d feel humiliated and take out his anger on the child. Was I going to find out his name, the state or country he came from, contact the authorities there? Of course I wasn’t. I didn’t know him or his children. We were nothing to each other. I turned my attention back to my own daughter, because I made a split-second decision that the cost of doing anything would be too high. The solitude of raising kids outside of strong communities can be crushing; and left to ourselves, we all become worse parents than we hoped to be. *** The last time I spoke with Courtney, she’d been released from the supervision component of her probation, had succeeded in having her daughter’s case closed with CPS, and seemed to have made peace with both herself and the woman who called the police on her. Still, she feels like she’s a more nervous mother than before. Her daughter will refuse to wear her gloves on a cold day, and she feels like people are watching and judging her for it. And recently, she grew nervous when her family went to visit a friend for the weekend and they set up an air mattress for her daughter in the corridor between the bedroom and the walk-in closet. Her daughter loved this and yelled with delight, “I get to sleep in the closet!” Courtney felt her whole body tense when she heard her, and warned her not to say that at school. “I guess I worry more about what people will think,” she told me. And also, she, like me, worries about raising her daughter in a world so often lacking in human decency. She described to me how, just the other day, she took her daughter to a restaurant for lunch. She tries not to give her too much restaurant food and had brought a peanut butter sandwich and some cut-up vegetables. Her daughter was happily eating when a woman at a nearby table approached, pointed at the sandwich. “You know this is a peanut-free restaurant,” she said. Courtney apologized, asked if the woman was allergic, said she’d move to another table. “I’m not allergic,” the woman answered. “I just thought you should know.” A moment later, a waiter was sent to throw the offending sandwich in the garbage as the girl began to weep. Courtney told me all this and I couldn’t tell if she was crying or laughing, which is the place I find myself most days. “I mean, what’s wrong with people?” she asked. “Has everyone in the world gone insane?” Probably, I thought. And yet, there are these rare moments where I feel hopeful, where it seems we haven’t entirely forgotten how to interact with other human beings, or talk to strangers from a place of openness and curiosity, rather than fear. Not long after I first wrote about my experience, I took my daughter back to a different branch of the store where my own mess began. When I’d finished shopping, we made our way toward the registers. We’d been waiting a few minutes when I noticed a woman at the front of the next line struggling with her children. She had three of them. She was wearing an infant in a baby sling and pushing the other two in her big red cart when the baby began to cry and the twins began to bicker. Prepare for triple meltdown, I thought, and remembered what a friend had told me recently, that in the middle of her daughter’s grocery store tantrum, a stranger had taken out a phone and begun recording it—apparently this was its own genre of entertainment on You Tube: other people’s kids crying. The screaming grew louder. The line grew longer. Confronted with the spectacle, I did what everyone else in line was doing; I pretended not to see them, scanned the other aisles for a shorter line, silently wished I’d just ordered the items I needed on Amazon, and obsessively checked the time on my phone. I was about to move into another line when another woman, shopping by herself, stepped up to the mother’s cart. I (and probably everyone within earshot) expected the worst: the recording phone, the nasty comment or piece of unsolicited parenting advice. It was as uncomfortable as it was inevitable. We are, after all, all wandering judges. But instead the woman without children smiled and asked, quite casually, if she could help, then without waiting for an answer, began unloading the woman’s cart, playing peek-a-boo with the toddler. The mother began to thank her, but she wouldn’t hear of it. “Really, it’s nothing,” she said, and smiled. “You’ve got your hands full.”

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I’m tired of suppressing myself to get along with white people

We're re-running this story as part of a countdown of the year's best personal essays. To read all the entries in the series, click here.

I met my new roommates on Craigslist. Two white, one Chinese. Together we represented Portland, Florida, China and (with me) D.C., and as we moved into our apartment in Bed-Stuy last fall, I was excited for the potential of cross-cultural exchange. We had a get-to-know you powwow on the rooftop. We talked about ourselves, what brought us to New York. It was a warm evening in September, a couple of weeks after Michael Brown was shot, and somewhere in the mix I brought up Ferguson, hoping to spark a “conscious conversation.” Then it happened. The nightmarish response. “What’s happening in Ferguson?” one of my white roommates asked. “I heard some kid got shot or something like that.” The words clamored in my ears. How could he not know? Weren’t his Twitter, Instagram and Facebook feeds flooded with opinions and hashtags? I’m sure he meant nothing by his statement. We’re all ill-informed from time to time. But as I stood there, awkwardly not saying a word — while hundreds of words ran through my head — it was a reminder of how much I would have to suppress in order to get along with my white male roommates in our tiny four-bedroom apartment. This place I would call my home for a year. It hasn’t always been like this for me. I’m a girl with a fro, raised in the place once known as “Chocolate City.” I grew up part of a black nuclear family, was home-schooled, then became part of of the mini-Historic Black College Experience at Temple University. After arriving in New York, I became an intern at Essence, a magazine so safe I likened my boss to an aunt. Those settings were as comfortable as my grandma’s cooking on any given Sunday. I longed to crawl back to my tiny black universe. A place where I could create a sense of peace, identity and acceptance, a place where I could sit there, trying to untangle my fro and make sense of what it means to be an African-American woman in this country, rehashing our history while facing present pain. But life happens, and most of us can’t stay in our own utopias forever. Now I faced a new reality. The brief conversation on the roof that hot September night lasted much longer in my head. I sent myself into a 200-year-old tizzy, reckoning with outdated ideas on race, tampering with prejudice and stereotypes. I became enslaved by my emotions. I started to worry about all the other things I might have to explain: My hair, the food I eat, why I like Miles Davis, Nina Simone and Marvin Gaye. Maybe I should have considered it a teaching opportunity. But I wasn’t feeling generous. I was all twisted up inside, ablaze over racial dynamics and anxious what other minefields my roommate might stumble upon. I hoped he wouldn’t say something really ignorant, causing me to just snap and go off on an angry rant. Then I’d have to make my living situation salvageable by pocketing my black rage, putting on my best smile and telling him, it’s all love. I wanted my home to be a refuge, a place where I could be wretched when I wanted, walk around in my bonnet, fry chicken and sing real loud to Aretha Franklin’s R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Suppressing my blackness every day is exhausting. Back at Essence, we used “sister girl language,” but since then, I’d faced tougher environments. I briefly worked at a (now-defunct) women’s fashion website, where I was one of the only black people. I would pitch ideas that mattered to me, like how to do natural hair, only to see them ignored, shuffled to the side or diluted like apple juice in order to be made palatable to mainstream “whiteness.” I was tired of catering to everyone else’s comforts. How much of my day-to-day experiences as a black woman do I have to filter? I replace “hey girl” with boring hellos. I eat my leftover fried chicken outside the office. In order to have some common point of identifiable communication, I pretend to care about Taylor Swift, or white movie stars on their I’ve-lost-count remarriages and those other white pop stars I could not care less about. “Oh yeah, she’s cute,” I tell them. “Yeah, that’s cool.” As summer turned to fall and then winter, I continued to be dumbfounded at the way, for some white people, the killing of Michael Brown just didn’t resonate. They didn’t feel the need to pay attention. I guess some white people do act “real vanilla” and only understand the realities of their own universe. Like running around drunk in Santa costumes in the name of SantaCon while “The Millions March NYC” launches in response to the non-indictment verdicts. That’s real. In December, when the Eric Garner verdict came out, I became loaded down with more emotional baggage than I could conceal. I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t care if I wasn’t mixing with others. I found my little black planet at work. I went over to my black boss and talked real low and real brief about how disturbing this all was. I grabbed one of my home girls I work with. We took to the streets to protest right outside my job. I hoped no one would see me and think something misguided. Walking home that night, I unleashed all my tears. I wanted to reach out and hug a black man. Before I arrived at my apartment, I dried off my face as though nothing happened. My white male roommate asked me about the protest; I gave him a non-detailed response. I said something like, “I’m really upset, but it was a good way for me to get those feelings out.” I couldn’t handle revealing too much; I wanted to avoid a loaded conversation. I took a deep breath and exhaled, closed my bedroom door, picked up the phone, and spoke in whispers about how racist these non-indictments were to my parents, and to my socially conscious white and black friends. These non-indictments reiterated what I'm up against every single day: the unintentional ignorance of white people. But I was also aware of my willingness to put away my justified “black rage” in order to ensure that my interactions with white people remain comfortable. And the more I hid it, the more crazed I became. By the time my birthday rolled around, in December, I was cooped up in my bed, without an appetite, my fro needing a good deep conditioner. I was making myself sick. I know this needs to change. I understand that for my own growth, and in order to forge honest relationships with white people I meet — whether it’s my roommates, or my co-workers, or anyone else — I need to reveal myself more. I need to start sharing about my history and my culture and how it plays out in my everyday life as an African American woman.  I don’t want this rage to fester into bitterness, or infect the very close white friendships I already have. I don’t want to ignore my rage, but I don’t want to be controlled by it either. Concealing my emotions has made me feel like a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off. Things are calm right now at the apartment. I don’t bring up these sorts of conversations. I don’t talk about what happens every 28 hours -- a black person is killed. My white male roommate and I, we just don’t go there. It makes things easier. Instead, our conversations shuffle between our day-to-day experiences at work, dating and the nuances of the city. I keep those “forbidden” conversations behind closed doors, and even when I’m alone I speak in code. I don’t say “white.” I use “they” instead. But I want to stop tiptoeing around race. My blackness is not a secret I have to keep. I want to be able to publicly express my honest admiration for being black, outside of my little black planet. I don’t want to feel marginalized, like I can’t speak hard truths about myself. Having honest and challenging conversations with people of another race will hopefully disrupt other people’s ignorance. But it will also help me. I need to stop with my mental temper tantrums. I want to get free.

We're re-running this story as part of a countdown of the year's best personal essays. To read all the entries in the series, click here.

I met my new roommates on Craigslist. Two white, one Chinese. Together we represented Portland, Florida, China and (with me) D.C., and as we moved into our apartment in Bed-Stuy last fall, I was excited for the potential of cross-cultural exchange. We had a get-to-know you powwow on the rooftop. We talked about ourselves, what brought us to New York. It was a warm evening in September, a couple of weeks after Michael Brown was shot, and somewhere in the mix I brought up Ferguson, hoping to spark a “conscious conversation.” Then it happened. The nightmarish response. “What’s happening in Ferguson?” one of my white roommates asked. “I heard some kid got shot or something like that.” The words clamored in my ears. How could he not know? Weren’t his Twitter, Instagram and Facebook feeds flooded with opinions and hashtags? I’m sure he meant nothing by his statement. We’re all ill-informed from time to time. But as I stood there, awkwardly not saying a word — while hundreds of words ran through my head — it was a reminder of how much I would have to suppress in order to get along with my white male roommates in our tiny four-bedroom apartment. This place I would call my home for a year. It hasn’t always been like this for me. I’m a girl with a fro, raised in the place once known as “Chocolate City.” I grew up part of a black nuclear family, was home-schooled, then became part of of the mini-Historic Black College Experience at Temple University. After arriving in New York, I became an intern at Essence, a magazine so safe I likened my boss to an aunt. Those settings were as comfortable as my grandma’s cooking on any given Sunday. I longed to crawl back to my tiny black universe. A place where I could create a sense of peace, identity and acceptance, a place where I could sit there, trying to untangle my fro and make sense of what it means to be an African-American woman in this country, rehashing our history while facing present pain. But life happens, and most of us can’t stay in our own utopias forever. Now I faced a new reality. The brief conversation on the roof that hot September night lasted much longer in my head. I sent myself into a 200-year-old tizzy, reckoning with outdated ideas on race, tampering with prejudice and stereotypes. I became enslaved by my emotions. I started to worry about all the other things I might have to explain: My hair, the food I eat, why I like Miles Davis, Nina Simone and Marvin Gaye. Maybe I should have considered it a teaching opportunity. But I wasn’t feeling generous. I was all twisted up inside, ablaze over racial dynamics and anxious what other minefields my roommate might stumble upon. I hoped he wouldn’t say something really ignorant, causing me to just snap and go off on an angry rant. Then I’d have to make my living situation salvageable by pocketing my black rage, putting on my best smile and telling him, it’s all love. I wanted my home to be a refuge, a place where I could be wretched when I wanted, walk around in my bonnet, fry chicken and sing real loud to Aretha Franklin’s R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Suppressing my blackness every day is exhausting. Back at Essence, we used “sister girl language,” but since then, I’d faced tougher environments. I briefly worked at a (now-defunct) women’s fashion website, where I was one of the only black people. I would pitch ideas that mattered to me, like how to do natural hair, only to see them ignored, shuffled to the side or diluted like apple juice in order to be made palatable to mainstream “whiteness.” I was tired of catering to everyone else’s comforts. How much of my day-to-day experiences as a black woman do I have to filter? I replace “hey girl” with boring hellos. I eat my leftover fried chicken outside the office. In order to have some common point of identifiable communication, I pretend to care about Taylor Swift, or white movie stars on their I’ve-lost-count remarriages and those other white pop stars I could not care less about. “Oh yeah, she’s cute,” I tell them. “Yeah, that’s cool.” As summer turned to fall and then winter, I continued to be dumbfounded at the way, for some white people, the killing of Michael Brown just didn’t resonate. They didn’t feel the need to pay attention. I guess some white people do act “real vanilla” and only understand the realities of their own universe. Like running around drunk in Santa costumes in the name of SantaCon while “The Millions March NYC” launches in response to the non-indictment verdicts. That’s real. In December, when the Eric Garner verdict came out, I became loaded down with more emotional baggage than I could conceal. I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t care if I wasn’t mixing with others. I found my little black planet at work. I went over to my black boss and talked real low and real brief about how disturbing this all was. I grabbed one of my home girls I work with. We took to the streets to protest right outside my job. I hoped no one would see me and think something misguided. Walking home that night, I unleashed all my tears. I wanted to reach out and hug a black man. Before I arrived at my apartment, I dried off my face as though nothing happened. My white male roommate asked me about the protest; I gave him a non-detailed response. I said something like, “I’m really upset, but it was a good way for me to get those feelings out.” I couldn’t handle revealing too much; I wanted to avoid a loaded conversation. I took a deep breath and exhaled, closed my bedroom door, picked up the phone, and spoke in whispers about how racist these non-indictments were to my parents, and to my socially conscious white and black friends. These non-indictments reiterated what I'm up against every single day: the unintentional ignorance of white people. But I was also aware of my willingness to put away my justified “black rage” in order to ensure that my interactions with white people remain comfortable. And the more I hid it, the more crazed I became. By the time my birthday rolled around, in December, I was cooped up in my bed, without an appetite, my fro needing a good deep conditioner. I was making myself sick. I know this needs to change. I understand that for my own growth, and in order to forge honest relationships with white people I meet — whether it’s my roommates, or my co-workers, or anyone else — I need to reveal myself more. I need to start sharing about my history and my culture and how it plays out in my everyday life as an African American woman.  I don’t want this rage to fester into bitterness, or infect the very close white friendships I already have. I don’t want to ignore my rage, but I don’t want to be controlled by it either. Concealing my emotions has made me feel like a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off. Things are calm right now at the apartment. I don’t bring up these sorts of conversations. I don’t talk about what happens every 28 hours -- a black person is killed. My white male roommate and I, we just don’t go there. It makes things easier. Instead, our conversations shuffle between our day-to-day experiences at work, dating and the nuances of the city. I keep those “forbidden” conversations behind closed doors, and even when I’m alone I speak in code. I don’t say “white.” I use “they” instead. But I want to stop tiptoeing around race. My blackness is not a secret I have to keep. I want to be able to publicly express my honest admiration for being black, outside of my little black planet. I don’t want to feel marginalized, like I can’t speak hard truths about myself. Having honest and challenging conversations with people of another race will hopefully disrupt other people’s ignorance. But it will also help me. I need to stop with my mental temper tantrums. I want to get free.

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Why observing “Dry January” might help you cut back on drinking down the line

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 percent of New Year’s resolutions fail. Gyms get more and more empty as the year winds on, the lure of social media grows increasingly harder to resist, and travel plans get delayed day-by-day until it’s suddenly been a year again. But if you can stick to one particular common resolution -- to cut out drinking for a bit -- it may have dividends that pay off down the line. That’s the finding of a study out of the University of Sussex in England, where researchers decided to see how giving up drinking for a month -- the 31-day period popularly known as “Dry January” -- affected participants’ tendencies for imbibing later on. They found that those who successfully abstained for the duration of the month continued to drink less even once drinking resumed. Additionally, at points both one and six months later, those participants reported they were better able to resist the urge to drink in “social settings when others are drinking, for emotion regulation, and opportunistic drinking.” Put simply, there was an impressive reduction in drunkeness in their lives in general after the month was over. The study involved 857 volunteers. Of those, 64.1 percent made it through the entire month of January without drinking. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a fairly good predictor of the ability to remain dry throughout the period was the regularity with which participants normally drank -- more moderate drinkers fared better than their more boozy peers. Having a partner in not drinking -- using the “buddy system,” so to speak -- seemed to have little impact on success. Interestingly, in addition to curbing drinking for those who successfully completed Dry January, even those who merely attempted the challenge also saw drinking drop off. In other words, failing the initial mission still resulted in benefits. Researchers admit that since the volunteers were a self-selected group, and there was no control group, there are limits to deductions that can be made about the findings. In any case, the results suggest “that successful completion of one month of abstinence may have lasting effects on drinking behavior and beliefs, and that increases in [the ability to refuse drinks] arising from abstinence attempts may be an important influence on subsequent patterns of alcohol use.” Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 percent of New Year’s resolutions fail. Gyms get more and more empty as the year winds on, the lure of social media grows increasingly harder to resist, and travel plans get delayed day-by-day until it’s suddenly been a year again. But if you can stick to one particular common resolution -- to cut out drinking for a bit -- it may have dividends that pay off down the line. That’s the finding of a study out of the University of Sussex in England, where researchers decided to see how giving up drinking for a month -- the 31-day period popularly known as “Dry January” -- affected participants’ tendencies for imbibing later on. They found that those who successfully abstained for the duration of the month continued to drink less even once drinking resumed. Additionally, at points both one and six months later, those participants reported they were better able to resist the urge to drink in “social settings when others are drinking, for emotion regulation, and opportunistic drinking.” Put simply, there was an impressive reduction in drunkeness in their lives in general after the month was over. The study involved 857 volunteers. Of those, 64.1 percent made it through the entire month of January without drinking. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a fairly good predictor of the ability to remain dry throughout the period was the regularity with which participants normally drank -- more moderate drinkers fared better than their more boozy peers. Having a partner in not drinking -- using the “buddy system,” so to speak -- seemed to have little impact on success. Interestingly, in addition to curbing drinking for those who successfully completed Dry January, even those who merely attempted the challenge also saw drinking drop off. In other words, failing the initial mission still resulted in benefits. Researchers admit that since the volunteers were a self-selected group, and there was no control group, there are limits to deductions that can be made about the findings. In any case, the results suggest “that successful completion of one month of abstinence may have lasting effects on drinking behavior and beliefs, and that increases in [the ability to refuse drinks] arising from abstinence attempts may be an important influence on subsequent patterns of alcohol use.” Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

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We weren’t ready for a black president: Race, hate, Donald Trump, guns, Fox News, terror and our tragic American condition

When the question is asked near the beginning—"Is America ready for its first black president?"— it needs to be answered near the end. And as Barack Obama comes into the homestretch of his term in 2016 the answer, sadly, is no. If nothing else, 2015 offered a rolling reminder of the first year of Barack Obama's presidency with its numerous parallel events and template-setting episodes that have now come to a full head of hateful steam in the emergent American Serbia of the mind, if not deed. The embodiment is Donald Trump, presidential candidate, notorious birther, resident American fascist and bomb-thrower. If hope and change were the Obama buzzwords in 2009, the lesson of 2015 is that a bunch of overstimulated, hopelessly right-wing pseudo statesmen haven't changed, grown up, dropped the sub rosa race-bait narrative—even as Obama delivered on his fair share of what he promised way back when. Don't ask me why Obama's race is still an issue; ask Lou Dobbs. The immigrant-bashing news anchor blabbed to the Fox masses about how Obama only became president because he played the "race card," a curiously timed outburst given that Dobbs made it just two weeks ago. One suspects the true motive for the race-card redux politics has to do with an inevitable pivot to the gender card embodied by Hillary Clinton. To beat Clinton, goes the takedown logic, you must first lynch Obama all over again. Having failed its first black president, is America ready for its first woman president? Not if Trump has anything to do with it, as the GOP frontrunner's sick and weird comments about Clinton's bathroom break during a Democratic debate would indicate. Trump's obsession with genitals was one of the more telling developments as the year wound down and the GOP establishment continued to grapple with a Trump beast of its own unleashing. Trump's fallback position when it comes to women is to be grossed out by simple bodily functions, and his emergence as a legitimate candidate for president in 2015, as party standard-bearer at 39 percent in the polls and rising, signals the arrival of an acceptably visceral politics of disgust, disgrace and demeaning language—with all the wink-nod whiffs of malice and conjecture about that Kenyan socialist dictator ever at the ready, because it's all his fault. The conflation of Islamophobia and Obamaphobia is the persistent backdrop that defines a reactionary and highly personalized politics around Obama, and that dynamic really took off this year in the aftermath of the Paris and San Bernardino terror attacks. When Trump says that Hillary got "schlonged" by Obama as he did last week, he is invoking the racial slander of the Old South, in which accusations of black men raping white women were used to justify lynchings. Trump is not alone in vowing a phallocentric outburst of ISIS carpet-bombing to settle the score. But why is that anything new? The first year of Obama's presidency was dominated by efforts to hold off the collapse of the American economy and undo the damage wrought by the smirking failure who previously occupied the White House. As he rolls into his last year as president, Obama appears to have largely succeeded on that front, but you'd never know it. Then as now, Obama and his accomplishments are drowned out by the pugnacity, the sneers, the lies and the anger that regularly emits from so-called victims of Obama's presidency and their enablers in the political-media establishment—blue-collar workers of the white persuasion left in a new-economy wilderness of shifting demographics. They are content to gloat about their anti-intellectualism as those voters continue to cling to the guns and religion that made them hate Obama in the first place. The most recent outburst from the ramparts of dumbed-down America came in the form of a classroom lesson, a Virginia school and a teacher who had offered a lesson in calligraphy late in 2015 that utilized Arabic text. Parents were outraged, they were disgusted, and they were scared, and a compliant mainstream media gobbled up an all-too-familiar set piece that gives credence to the foolish vagaries of spittle politics. In 2009, Obama thought it would be a good idea to tape a pep talk for kids headed back to school that September, and made available a speech for schools to show students if they chose to do so. Many did not, as fearful white parents freaked out at the idea and demanded that their children not be exposed to the half-white, non-legitimate menace. There's a timeless quote from a Colorado parent that made the rounds back then that continues to resonate, six years later: "Thinking about my kids in school having to listen to that just really upsets me," Shanneen Barron told CNN. "I'm an American. They are Americans, and I don't feel that's OK. I feel very scared to be in this country with our leadership right now." That all sounds familiar, and the subtext was obvious: Maybe those people's kids need to hear that garbage from Obama, but not mine. And when the feared socialist-indoctrination speech turned out to be some pretty wholesome stuff about staying in school and doing your homework, the fear-lovers and schlong-mongers of the right just blew it off and moved to the next available outrage—over whether the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting was an act of terrorism and why didn't Obama say as much, even though he did say as much. This obsession over that word, and its deployment, was in full force late this year, which found some of the media at its absolute desperate worst following the San Bernardino shootings. The Los Angeles Times flagrantly champed at the "Is it terrorism?" bit for days as it reported on San Bernardino, until such time as it was able to offer fear-jacking teasers like this: "Follow the Times' latest coverage of the worst terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001." The implication was obvious, even if the fact patterns couldn't have been more starkly different. In one attack, a coordinated group of fanatical Saudi Arabians hijacked four jet airplanes, killed 2,996 people and brought down some of the most iconic buildings in the world. In the other, 14 people were murdered at a holiday party. If that's the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9-11, then someone's doing a pretty good job at limiting these sorts of things. But no, the shrieking narrative that followed was that Obama has totally failed to keep Americans safe for the past seven years. And yet when last spotted on Twitter in 2013, Barron was selling Napa wines in her home state of Colorado and appeared to have survived Obama and his regime of terror. Twenty fifteen was also the year that Black Lives Matter emerged as a much-needed movement against a segregationist criminal-justice system. It was no surprise that the reaction to BLM was furiously reactive. The blacks are getting militant, Bill O'Reilly just wet his pants in fear, and don't you know it but all lives matter. My favorite Internet meme of 2015 addressed this idiocy by noting that just because you want to save the rainforest doesn't mean to hell with all those other trees. But the sort of over-Tweeted, table-turning, first-thought, worst-thought reactions that met the BLM movement served only to distract from the real menace: the mean-season undertone held Black Lives Matter as a bunch of thugs, possibly of the Muslim persuasion, who should shut up and get back to work at McDonald's. Therefore, Obama was consorting with Muslim thugs and he hates cops. If you don't want to get shot, comply. That particular cake was also baked in 2009, during the infamous Henry Louis Gates arrest, and its aftermath. Gates, an esteemed and elderly Harvard professor, who happens to be black, was arrested on disorderly conduct charges after getting uppity with a white police officer who had detained him, or tried to, in Gates' own home—the officer had followed up on a call that someone had broken into the house. Obama tried to diffuse the situation and leverage the "teachable moment" by calling for a beer summit with the men at the White House, which sounded like a good idea. But everybody made fun of his meaningless good-will gesture, and six years later, the right still can't get past the fact that Obama used the word "stupid" in connection with the officer's actions—as it repeatedly offered apologia after apologia for cop-on-black crimes in 2015, while citing the Gates incident as all the evidence you need that Obama is no friend of the police. A committee convened to study the Gates incident recommended that moving forward, police forces around the country should offer training to their officers in de-escalation techniques, when the officers are not at risk of injury. Six years later, a white police officer in South Carolina de-escalated a nonthreatening situation by shooting a fleeing black man in the back—and then casually planted evidence to cover up his crime. That was just one of numerous videotaped encounters between (mostly) white police and black citizens that characterized 2015 as the year of the damning video. Those videos had the moral authority of authenticity, whereas another set of videos—those infamously altered Planned Parenthood sting videos that made headlines in 2015—also harked back to anti-choice rhetorical excesses from 2009. That year, physician George Tiller was executed by an anti-abortion extremist in his office. Tiller was killed after having been ritualistically eviscerated by Bill O'Reilly, who effectively issued a media fatwa on him through over two-dozen TV segments devoted to "Tiller the Baby Killer." What did you expect, went the post-execution narrative, when this country has just elected a "hardcore abortionist president," as one group put it. The reproductive-rights narrative got even more explicitly racist in later years as right-wingers warned "the community" that Obama was coming for their babies. And here we are again. Robert Dear shot up a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado in November after being driven nuts by, as he put it, all those "body parts" that anti-abortion extremists had toted out in their years-long quest to drive Planned Parenthood out of existence. Around the same time Tiller was murdered in 2009, a nutty old anti-Semitic white supremacist attacked the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in all likelihood because Obama had just visited Buchenwald, and this Jew-hating Holocaust denier couldn't deal with it. Fast-forward to 2015, and those people are now at the core of Trump's support base, while the candidate himself has said or done exactly nothing to try and address the rampant anti-Semitism among his legions of Stormfront supporters. Indeed, Trump instead played into cheap-Jew stereotypes when, during a December talk he gave to a Republican Jewish organization, he observed that "I'm a negotiator, like you folks." That speech was widely panned for its barely concealed anti-Semitic chutzpah, but Trump quickly pivoted to a Yiddishism focused on Obama's schlong, which didn't so much address the issue of Jew-hating, but did highlight Trump's obsessive need to be the biggest swinging dick in the room. Which brings us to Sean Hannity, one of the more ferociously pathetic Obama-haters of the conservative entertainment establishment. Hannity was at the center of the first serious scandal of the Obama Administration, when he exposed, in May 2009, what has come to be known as the Great Dijon Mustard, Emasculate-Obama Scandal. Hannity thought it was disgraceful that the president, who had just taken his first out-of-office lunch break at a popular Washington, D.C., burger joint, would dress his burger with an un-American, and definitely French, smear of mustard. The good Catholic commentator Laura Ingraham chimed in that it wasn't manly to eschew ketchup—it was weak! The segment was supposed to be kind of funny, and libtards who took offense were told to lighten up and get over their so-called political correctness. But it was a joke dressed in menace, and here we see a direct corollary in some of Trump's outbursts, which his supporters would also like everyone to believe are just jokes. Like that one joke Trump told a crowd recently, about how he "hates" some of the reporters covering him but doesn't think they should be murdered—or maybe he does—but not really. The context was a sort-of endorsement from Vladimir Putin that Trump willfully misinterpreted as an outright endorsement. A reporter subsequently asked him if, like Putin, Trump supported the execution of journalists. Instead of just saying, "No, that's ridiculous," Trump had to go there, before a crowd of eager supplicants whose heads spun in unison as the crass candidate finger-pointed at the hated journalists at the back of a meeting hall. "Well, maybe. . ." Threats delivered as jokes highlight a metastasized set of "politically correct" right-wing viewpoints, even as the candidate's supporters think dick jokes and pee-pee humor are Trump's way of addressing a PC left that has run rampant over their right to hate Obama, Mexicans, Muslims, reporters and Hillary Clinton's vagina. There's an old joke about how "politically correct" is so overused that it doesn't mean anything except "I don't agree with you, so therefore you are PC"—but there is a baseline definition of the phenomenon where legitimate points of view are stifled through social shaming. A politically correct right-wing maintains to the bitter end that any attempt to talk about race, especially in relation to Obama, has to turn the tables back on the person doing the talking, because it's probably a liberal. So when Dylann Roof clutched a Confederate flag and then shot up a black church in Charleston in 2015, the right-wing political correctness police insisted that the only orthodox way to talk about Roof's racist shooting spree was to note that if the low-information voters of this country didn't elect Obama in the first place, none of this would have happened. As 2015 came to a close, a whole new set of videos started to pop up that exemplified the politically correct culture of the right—Islamophobia by way of Obamaphobia being the core, driving principle. In December, a woman who works for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, took it upon herself to verbally harass and throw coffee at some Muslims praying in a Castro Valley park. The justification was Paris and San Bernardino, and the woman proved her politically correct right-wing bona fides when she screamed at the men, "You have nothing but hate!" She was subsequently charged with a hate crime. Whoops. There was also a very hostile, and very politically correct right-wing man in Virginia who made the video-outrage circuit late in 2015, during a local planning commission meeting that took up the subject of a proposed new mosque in the area. As an American Muslim and civil engineer described the project, all the Ugly American energy of the past six years was brought to bear by a bulky white dude—complete with the Trumpian finger-point at the hated Other. "This is evil. You are a terrorist. Everyone of you are terrorists, I don't care what you say. Every Muslim is a terrorist. Shut your mouth. I don't want to hear your mouth." Do we have the audacity to hope for a better 2016? This piece originally appeared on Bohemian.com When the question is asked near the beginning—"Is America ready for its first black president?"— it needs to be answered near the end. And as Barack Obama comes into the homestretch of his term in 2016 the answer, sadly, is no. If nothing else, 2015 offered a rolling reminder of the first year of Barack Obama's presidency with its numerous parallel events and template-setting episodes that have now come to a full head of hateful steam in the emergent American Serbia of the mind, if not deed. The embodiment is Donald Trump, presidential candidate, notorious birther, resident American fascist and bomb-thrower. If hope and change were the Obama buzzwords in 2009, the lesson of 2015 is that a bunch of overstimulated, hopelessly right-wing pseudo statesmen haven't changed, grown up, dropped the sub rosa race-bait narrative—even as Obama delivered on his fair share of what he promised way back when. Don't ask me why Obama's race is still an issue; ask Lou Dobbs. The immigrant-bashing news anchor blabbed to the Fox masses about how Obama only became president because he played the "race card," a curiously timed outburst given that Dobbs made it just two weeks ago. One suspects the true motive for the race-card redux politics has to do with an inevitable pivot to the gender card embodied by Hillary Clinton. To beat Clinton, goes the takedown logic, you must first lynch Obama all over again. Having failed its first black president, is America ready for its first woman president? Not if Trump has anything to do with it, as the GOP frontrunner's sick and weird comments about Clinton's bathroom break during a Democratic debate would indicate. Trump's obsession with genitals was one of the more telling developments as the year wound down and the GOP establishment continued to grapple with a Trump beast of its own unleashing. Trump's fallback position when it comes to women is to be grossed out by simple bodily functions, and his emergence as a legitimate candidate for president in 2015, as party standard-bearer at 39 percent in the polls and rising, signals the arrival of an acceptably visceral politics of disgust, disgrace and demeaning language—with all the wink-nod whiffs of malice and conjecture about that Kenyan socialist dictator ever at the ready, because it's all his fault. The conflation of Islamophobia and Obamaphobia is the persistent backdrop that defines a reactionary and highly personalized politics around Obama, and that dynamic really took off this year in the aftermath of the Paris and San Bernardino terror attacks. When Trump says that Hillary got "schlonged" by Obama as he did last week, he is invoking the racial slander of the Old South, in which accusations of black men raping white women were used to justify lynchings. Trump is not alone in vowing a phallocentric outburst of ISIS carpet-bombing to settle the score. But why is that anything new? The first year of Obama's presidency was dominated by efforts to hold off the collapse of the American economy and undo the damage wrought by the smirking failure who previously occupied the White House. As he rolls into his last year as president, Obama appears to have largely succeeded on that front, but you'd never know it. Then as now, Obama and his accomplishments are drowned out by the pugnacity, the sneers, the lies and the anger that regularly emits from so-called victims of Obama's presidency and their enablers in the political-media establishment—blue-collar workers of the white persuasion left in a new-economy wilderness of shifting demographics. They are content to gloat about their anti-intellectualism as those voters continue to cling to the guns and religion that made them hate Obama in the first place. The most recent outburst from the ramparts of dumbed-down America came in the form of a classroom lesson, a Virginia school and a teacher who had offered a lesson in calligraphy late in 2015 that utilized Arabic text. Parents were outraged, they were disgusted, and they were scared, and a compliant mainstream media gobbled up an all-too-familiar set piece that gives credence to the foolish vagaries of spittle politics. In 2009, Obama thought it would be a good idea to tape a pep talk for kids headed back to school that September, and made available a speech for schools to show students if they chose to do so. Many did not, as fearful white parents freaked out at the idea and demanded that their children not be exposed to the half-white, non-legitimate menace. There's a timeless quote from a Colorado parent that made the rounds back then that continues to resonate, six years later: "Thinking about my kids in school having to listen to that just really upsets me," Shanneen Barron told CNN. "I'm an American. They are Americans, and I don't feel that's OK. I feel very scared to be in this country with our leadership right now." That all sounds familiar, and the subtext was obvious: Maybe those people's kids need to hear that garbage from Obama, but not mine. And when the feared socialist-indoctrination speech turned out to be some pretty wholesome stuff about staying in school and doing your homework, the fear-lovers and schlong-mongers of the right just blew it off and moved to the next available outrage—over whether the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting was an act of terrorism and why didn't Obama say as much, even though he did say as much. This obsession over that word, and its deployment, was in full force late this year, which found some of the media at its absolute desperate worst following the San Bernardino shootings. The Los Angeles Times flagrantly champed at the "Is it terrorism?" bit for days as it reported on San Bernardino, until such time as it was able to offer fear-jacking teasers like this: "Follow the Times' latest coverage of the worst terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001." The implication was obvious, even if the fact patterns couldn't have been more starkly different. In one attack, a coordinated group of fanatical Saudi Arabians hijacked four jet airplanes, killed 2,996 people and brought down some of the most iconic buildings in the world. In the other, 14 people were murdered at a holiday party. If that's the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9-11, then someone's doing a pretty good job at limiting these sorts of things. But no, the shrieking narrative that followed was that Obama has totally failed to keep Americans safe for the past seven years. And yet when last spotted on Twitter in 2013, Barron was selling Napa wines in her home state of Colorado and appeared to have survived Obama and his regime of terror. Twenty fifteen was also the year that Black Lives Matter emerged as a much-needed movement against a segregationist criminal-justice system. It was no surprise that the reaction to BLM was furiously reactive. The blacks are getting militant, Bill O'Reilly just wet his pants in fear, and don't you know it but all lives matter. My favorite Internet meme of 2015 addressed this idiocy by noting that just because you want to save the rainforest doesn't mean to hell with all those other trees. But the sort of over-Tweeted, table-turning, first-thought, worst-thought reactions that met the BLM movement served only to distract from the real menace: the mean-season undertone held Black Lives Matter as a bunch of thugs, possibly of the Muslim persuasion, who should shut up and get back to work at McDonald's. Therefore, Obama was consorting with Muslim thugs and he hates cops. If you don't want to get shot, comply. That particular cake was also baked in 2009, during the infamous Henry Louis Gates arrest, and its aftermath. Gates, an esteemed and elderly Harvard professor, who happens to be black, was arrested on disorderly conduct charges after getting uppity with a white police officer who had detained him, or tried to, in Gates' own home—the officer had followed up on a call that someone had broken into the house. Obama tried to diffuse the situation and leverage the "teachable moment" by calling for a beer summit with the men at the White House, which sounded like a good idea. But everybody made fun of his meaningless good-will gesture, and six years later, the right still can't get past the fact that Obama used the word "stupid" in connection with the officer's actions—as it repeatedly offered apologia after apologia for cop-on-black crimes in 2015, while citing the Gates incident as all the evidence you need that Obama is no friend of the police. A committee convened to study the Gates incident recommended that moving forward, police forces around the country should offer training to their officers in de-escalation techniques, when the officers are not at risk of injury. Six years later, a white police officer in South Carolina de-escalated a nonthreatening situation by shooting a fleeing black man in the back—and then casually planted evidence to cover up his crime. That was just one of numerous videotaped encounters between (mostly) white police and black citizens that characterized 2015 as the year of the damning video. Those videos had the moral authority of authenticity, whereas another set of videos—those infamously altered Planned Parenthood sting videos that made headlines in 2015—also harked back to anti-choice rhetorical excesses from 2009. That year, physician George Tiller was executed by an anti-abortion extremist in his office. Tiller was killed after having been ritualistically eviscerated by Bill O'Reilly, who effectively issued a media fatwa on him through over two-dozen TV segments devoted to "Tiller the Baby Killer." What did you expect, went the post-execution narrative, when this country has just elected a "hardcore abortionist president," as one group put it. The reproductive-rights narrative got even more explicitly racist in later years as right-wingers warned "the community" that Obama was coming for their babies. And here we are again. Robert Dear shot up a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado in November after being driven nuts by, as he put it, all those "body parts" that anti-abortion extremists had toted out in their years-long quest to drive Planned Parenthood out of existence. Around the same time Tiller was murdered in 2009, a nutty old anti-Semitic white supremacist attacked the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in all likelihood because Obama had just visited Buchenwald, and this Jew-hating Holocaust denier couldn't deal with it. Fast-forward to 2015, and those people are now at the core of Trump's support base, while the candidate himself has said or done exactly nothing to try and address the rampant anti-Semitism among his legions of Stormfront supporters. Indeed, Trump instead played into cheap-Jew stereotypes when, during a December talk he gave to a Republican Jewish organization, he observed that "I'm a negotiator, like you folks." That speech was widely panned for its barely concealed anti-Semitic chutzpah, but Trump quickly pivoted to a Yiddishism focused on Obama's schlong, which didn't so much address the issue of Jew-hating, but did highlight Trump's obsessive need to be the biggest swinging dick in the room. Which brings us to Sean Hannity, one of the more ferociously pathetic Obama-haters of the conservative entertainment establishment. Hannity was at the center of the first serious scandal of the Obama Administration, when he exposed, in May 2009, what has come to be known as the Great Dijon Mustard, Emasculate-Obama Scandal. Hannity thought it was disgraceful that the president, who had just taken his first out-of-office lunch break at a popular Washington, D.C., burger joint, would dress his burger with an un-American, and definitely French, smear of mustard. The good Catholic commentator Laura Ingraham chimed in that it wasn't manly to eschew ketchup—it was weak! The segment was supposed to be kind of funny, and libtards who took offense were told to lighten up and get over their so-called political correctness. But it was a joke dressed in menace, and here we see a direct corollary in some of Trump's outbursts, which his supporters would also like everyone to believe are just jokes. Like that one joke Trump told a crowd recently, about how he "hates" some of the reporters covering him but doesn't think they should be murdered—or maybe he does—but not really. The context was a sort-of endorsement from Vladimir Putin that Trump willfully misinterpreted as an outright endorsement. A reporter subsequently asked him if, like Putin, Trump supported the execution of journalists. Instead of just saying, "No, that's ridiculous," Trump had to go there, before a crowd of eager supplicants whose heads spun in unison as the crass candidate finger-pointed at the hated journalists at the back of a meeting hall. "Well, maybe. . ." Threats delivered as jokes highlight a metastasized set of "politically correct" right-wing viewpoints, even as the candidate's supporters think dick jokes and pee-pee humor are Trump's way of addressing a PC left that has run rampant over their right to hate Obama, Mexicans, Muslims, reporters and Hillary Clinton's vagina. There's an old joke about how "politically correct" is so overused that it doesn't mean anything except "I don't agree with you, so therefore you are PC"—but there is a baseline definition of the phenomenon where legitimate points of view are stifled through social shaming. A politically correct right-wing maintains to the bitter end that any attempt to talk about race, especially in relation to Obama, has to turn the tables back on the person doing the talking, because it's probably a liberal. So when Dylann Roof clutched a Confederate flag and then shot up a black church in Charleston in 2015, the right-wing political correctness police insisted that the only orthodox way to talk about Roof's racist shooting spree was to note that if the low-information voters of this country didn't elect Obama in the first place, none of this would have happened. As 2015 came to a close, a whole new set of videos started to pop up that exemplified the politically correct culture of the right—Islamophobia by way of Obamaphobia being the core, driving principle. In December, a woman who works for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, took it upon herself to verbally harass and throw coffee at some Muslims praying in a Castro Valley park. The justification was Paris and San Bernardino, and the woman proved her politically correct right-wing bona fides when she screamed at the men, "You have nothing but hate!" She was subsequently charged with a hate crime. Whoops. There was also a very hostile, and very politically correct right-wing man in Virginia who made the video-outrage circuit late in 2015, during a local planning commission meeting that took up the subject of a proposed new mosque in the area. As an American Muslim and civil engineer described the project, all the Ugly American energy of the past six years was brought to bear by a bulky white dude—complete with the Trumpian finger-point at the hated Other. "This is evil. You are a terrorist. Everyone of you are terrorists, I don't care what you say. Every Muslim is a terrorist. Shut your mouth. I don't want to hear your mouth." Do we have the audacity to hope for a better 2016? This piece originally appeared on Bohemian.com

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