Walking needs no publicist. The simplest, most accessible form of exercise has been around since humans first foraged and traveled on the ground.

But today, walking seems to have entered its influencer era.

It’s the subject of countless viral videos, of people doing it silently, collectively, for their mental health, for their physical health, for “hot girl” reasons (lawsuit pending), and yes, even for their gastro needs.

There’s something more to these micro trends than fitness personalities looking to make a quick buck off of brand-name water bottles or $30 socks. A new wave of fitness personalities—many of them women of color, of a variety of body types—have been able to reach people who, due to numerous factors from safety to layers of systemic discrimination, have historically shied away from the activity. This is exemplified by the explosion of walking groups in the U.S. in recent years, with headline after headline chronicling the rise of these meet-ups across the country, which has encouraged hundreds of strangers to come together each week and exercise.

This isn’t the first time a diverse group of influencers has widened the scope for walking. In the 1870s and 1880s, an unlikely assemblage of Americans became some of the nation’s earliest celebrities with the rise of the pedestrianism movement.

These professional walkers traversed hundreds of miles, around tracks and across state lines, to compete in the nation’s first spectator sport. Though the craze was short-lived, it left behind a legacy that challenges the stereotypical face of fitness to this day.

American pedestrianism began with a fateful bet: In 1860, the door-to-door bookseller Edward Payson Weston wagered a friend that Abraham Lincoln would lose the upcoming presidential election. Were Lincoln to win, Weston declared, he would walk the 478 miles from his home in Boston to Washington, D.C., for the inauguration—and he would do so in under 10 days.

After Lincoln won, Weston set out to make good on his promise, publicizing his itinerary in local papers along the Eastern Seaboard. People waited for hours in the cold to watch him pass through their towns. A run-in with a debt collector left Weston four hours and 12 minutes short of his goal; Lincoln, who was following his progress along with the rest of the country, was still so impressed by the feat that he offered to pay the latecomer’s fare home. (The press-savvy Weston demurred, seemingly knowing that the refusal would only earn him more coverage.)

Following the Civil War, Weston took his walking show on the road. Thousands of spectators lined up to buy tickets and place bets on whether he could beat the clock. In a divided country, his walks were a unifying event. “He’s so apolitical, and I think that helped his popularity,” Matthew Algeo, the author of Pedestrianism, told me in an interview. “He could go anywhere and walk, and people wouldn’t object to it.”

Walking was not a popular form of exercise in the U.S. when Weston began staging his exhibitions, but he and the competitors who rose up to challenge him spread “pedestrian fever” among the public. “A Plea for Pedestrianism,” published in the New York Times in 1878, was a typical literary endorsement of leisure walking. The op-ed supplied readers with a sample walk they could do around Staten Island, recommended attire (“easy, yet, stout, laced boots with broad soles and low heels”), what to eat (“a sandwich and some hard-boiled eggs in your pocket”), and how to prepare (“Those not accustomed to much walking ought to practice it moderately during the week before marching a whole day in the country”).

Celebrity, long reserved for royals and political figures, was expanding—allowing pedestrians, or “peds,” to gain real influence as some of the country’s first mass-market stars. They used their platform to promote not just the sport, but also everything from shoe brands to trading cards. They even were the first to sell advertising space on their competition outfits.

One of the reasons pedestrianism resonated with so many, Algeo suggested, is that these athletes took an activity that was relatable—an “expression of the everyday”—and pushed it to the extreme. The result, he said, struck people as “personal,” “genuine,” and “real.”

Professional walkers reflected an array of Americans, too. Because these walking matches were largely unregulated, there were no clear rules excluding certain groups from competition. One of Weston’s greatest rivals was Daniel O’Leary, an Irish immigrant who became “Champion Pedestrian of the World” in 1875 after defeating Weston in a six-day race. O’Leary took multiple athletes under his wing, including Frank Hart (born Fred Hichborn), a Haitian immigrant. Hart became one of the sport’s great stars and winner of the second-ever O’Leary Belt in 1880, where he earned more than $21,000 total, the equivalent of two-thirds of a million in today’s dollars.

Women “pedestriennes” also made a significant impact on the sport. At a time when conventional science held that strenuous athletic activity did lasting harm to female bodies, wiping them of their “vital energies” and their ability to reproduce, athletes like the Englishwoman Ada Anderson rose up as powerful counterexamples, showing what sportswomen were capable of.

“It is good for women to see how much a woman can endure,” Anderson told the New York Sun in 1878.

But there was a dark side to women’s pedestrianism. The sport was largely promoted and organized by men (including one of P.T. Barnum’s own PR people). A majority of women came to professional walking out of desperation, to escape poverty or abusive relationships. Then they pushed their bodies to the limit. They did what men did—24-hour walks, 100-mile walks, six-day walks—but also attempted even more extreme stunts, like walking 3,000 quarter miles over the course of 3,000 quarter hours.

“This was a really tough life,” Harry Hall, author of The Pedestriennes, told me. Women walked in hard-soled shoes, he said, because saboteurs threw rocks, tacks, and glass on their track, hoping to fix race outcomes.

The same laissez-faire setup that had allowed the sport to evolve so organically also led to it becoming synonymous with exploitation and scandal. Pedestrianism saw race fixing, early steroid use, and an extortion attempt that ended with a manager’s suicide. With the rise of bicycle racing in the 1880s, the public moved on, leaving pedestrianism to fade into a historical footnote.

“There was no way pedestrianism was going to last forever,” said Algeo. “But it’s a shame it kind of killed itself.”

Today’s walking influencers have different aims and goals, not to mention more agency, than the stars of the sport a century and a half ago. But both walking waves can be seen as promoting “physical activity in spaces where they’re not traditionally or not as easily done in the past,” as Damon Swift, an exercise scholar at the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development, told me.

For those looking to hop on the trend today, but aren’t ready to commit to a 10,000 daily step count—let alone a trek from Boston to D.C.—you might find some wisdom in that 1878 Times trend story, which advised readers to “walk as long as [you] like.”

Do just that, it promised, and you’ll return home “healthier and happier.”

The post America’s Earliest Sports Stars Were … Professional Walkers? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

From the TV remote to the group text to the ghoulish glow of the tablet I should have stowed before curling into bed: The world’s abiding awfulness is always just a click away. It’s as omnipresent as the WiFi it rides like a jet stream. It leaps between fellow citizens—a furrowed brow here, passing comment there—like a pathogen, a mood.

You’re aware, I presume, of what constitutes this awfulness? Of the climate crisis, the democracy crisis, and the election that’ll put both on the line. Of rising income inequality and eroding reproductive rights. Of wars. Of everything that’s overwhelming. How it’s everywhere all at once.

How does one cope? There’s drinking (I’ve tried it) and meditation (sleep-inducing), activism (good, if exhausting) and full-on fetal surrender (that didn’t work in 2020). Lately, though, I’ve found a better treatment, something portable, something free: I think about the Earth’s geological timeline and my own tiny lifespan. I zoom out from the crises that define my era and linger on the cataclysms of the past: the dinosaur-annihilating asteroid, the reshuffling of the continents, the first human to speak.

There, in the company of cosmic devastation, today’s headlines recede. Our global sauna cools when I picture woolly mammoths trudging across my driveway. I close my eyes a little longer, and a glacier glows in a living room where the TV speaks of war. I can even forget the faces of this nation’s villains by imagining the molten lava that once swirled across the Earth. They are ash, and I am ash, and our awful era floats away like smoke.

I like how I can access these worlds while buying groceries, commuting, or writing an email—channeling an apocalyptic Walter Mitty as I reimagine geologies where people disappear. It helps to have a reference for each scenario: Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, notes from an exhibit on fossils, a high school physics textbook. The latter led me to intergalactic finales, star systems collapsing like constellated Fourth of Julys.

Is this a by-product of an ostrich-like retreat into research, reading, and the mind? Perhaps. Let the record show, though, that I still volunteer and vote. As a poet who believes, as Whitman did before me, that poets should be their “age transfigured,” this is how I transfigure mine.

In my latest poetry collection, When the Earth Flies Into the Sun, I often linger on planetary upheavals, sussing out the solace and sublimity that such events allow. (The sublime, Rainer Maria Rilke tells us, is something so beautiful it threatens to destroy us.) Each poem, I hope, distills my peculiar treatment into a tincture. They’re aspirin. They’re escape.

That’s how I found myself imagining, in the book’s title poem, what happens when the Earth finally flies into the sun. The answer: “it will be morning every day.” Other scenarios followed on the page after a short audition in the mind. In a poem first published here at Zócalo Public Square, I write to the first human speaker. In a sequel, I address the last human on earth:

Your end in the end          will come before dawn:

the sun’s just a sun—       your shadow alone will know            that you’re gone.

In the undiscoverable history of human figuration, the sun, I like to think, precipitated our first metaphors. Our shadows, by the same logic, the first personification. As a writer always working to coin new metaphors, I take a perverse pleasure in imagining their extinction. The sun, once again, is “just a sun.” What else tells us that the Anthropocene has come to an end?

Imagination is an asset at such moments of crisis. There’s no hope without it, nor any social justice. Whoever endeavors to change the world must first imagine it anew. But it’s also a balm when those crises overwhelm. In 1942, as the magnitude of awfulness exceeded even our own, the poet Wallace Stevens described his vocation like so: “to help people to live their lives.” Poets achieved this by making their imagination “the light in the minds of others.”

In the oubliette of my insomnia or the shudder of another mass shooting, I try to do the same. I hunch over my desk; I scratch a few lines into my notebook. If I’m lucky, imagination fills a poem’s paper lantern, and—years later, revisions complete—it floats into the world. If I’m not, I can seek solace in one of the many poetry books scattered across the room.

I’m not alone in this second, readerly desire, as recent catastrophes attest. In the months following the attacks of 9/11, W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” attained a sort of pre-viral fame. It helped that the poem opened its lament where so many Americans ended their day: at a bar feeling “[u]ncertain and afraid / As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade.” The repugnant Muslim travel ban of 2017 returned many readers to Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus.” Putin’s invasion of Ukraine compelled me to recite Adam Zagajewski’s “To Go to Lvov” to my students.

These poems provide a necessary reassurance. That the world has broken before. That we’ve jigsawed it back into shape. Poetry’s marginality—roughly 12% of Americans read it—also suits it to moments of crisis. Now is the time for elevated speech, some part of the populace concedes, because we’ve already tried everything else. Devices, drink, distraction, debate: None provide, as poems do, the hand at the small of one’s back, the rain that cools in the fall.

I used to think that poets had superpowers. That they could lick a finger, hold it up to the wind, and tune into the suffering of the world. But I have come to believe that we’re all capable of registering the world’s suffering. The question that lingers is what to do next. For me, this entails imagining geological sweeps of rock and species, stars and shore. These provide me—and, I hope, whatever readers join me—a detached sort of peace.

The post When the World Seems Awful, I Submerge Myself in the Vastness of the Universe appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On August 15, 1947, my father George Mayer celebrated India’s freedom from 300 years of British colonial rule by flying kites with his friends off Howrah Bridge, over the Hooghly River in Kolkata.

Kites in India are made by delicately attaching colorful tissue paper to dry reeds using lehi, a glue made from boiled white flour. Thin kite strings are made with strong cotton fiber called manja, wrapped tightly around a decorated spindle reel or laddi. As kids taking part in a neighborhood kite fight, we would coat the first few yards of manja with powdered glass, making it easier to “cut” an enemy kite by slicing through their line. We’d send the vanquished kite floating across rooftops, chased by throngs of children.

Once a kite is airborne, flying it requires farsightedness and a complete disregard for the skin on your hands. I learned the art of kite flying alongside my sisters at the hands of our Chowrungee-born father. The skill lies in maintaining a delicate balance between tension and slack. When an enemy kite approaches, go taut to signal engagement and draw it in. Once your foe is in striking range, slack off to force an attack. Then pounce! Reel in the encrusted manja to slice the enemy’s string—a clean cut across its jugular.

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, former South Carolina governor and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, and U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna are Indian Americans at the top of American politics today. They fly different political kites—a mix of colorful stances cutting across the political aisle, engaged in different parts of our government. But they all are the children and grandchildren of people born under British colonial rule who fought for India’s freedom.

Their not-so-distant ancestors in all probability joined my father in flying kites on that August day in 1947. I would guess that they also joined him in passing along treasured lessons about maneuvering kites, steadfastness and drive, democracy and progressivism. This shared political heritage, imbibed from freedom fighter grandparents, inarguably shapes these Indian American political superstars’ visions for America today, even as they vary.

Kamala Harris has spoken of long morning walks on the beach in Chennai with her maternal grandfather, Painganadu Venkataraman “P. V.” Gopalan, “where he would discuss the importance of fighting for equality and fighting corruption.” They talked about principles of democracy, freedom, and equality. Those walks “really planted something in my mind and created a commitment in me,” she recalled in a recent post online. It “led me where I am today.”

Gopalan’s overt support shaped more than Harris’ politics. In the late 1950s, it would have been unheard of for a young Tamil woman to make her own way in the West, as Harris’ mother did when she emigrated to the United States to study medicine. Shyamala Gopalan Harris lived other taboos, too: marrying outside her caste, raising her daughters as a divorced mother. In that era, a father’s acceptance made all the difference—none of this would have been possible without it.

Gopalan was about 15 years older than my father. Both men would have been in the prime of their lives during the final throes of the British Empire. Gopalan was from Thulasendrapuram, a tiny village in the southern Indian rice-growing region of Thanjavur, a place that has witnessed political upheaval for millennia. Some of India’s most beautifully preserved ancient and medieval temples stand in this deeply spiritual place; many remain active sites of worship.

Most people in Thanjavur are Hindu Tamils, but they exist in relative harmony with neighbors sharing many religious traditions. The Church of Our Lady of Vailankanni, a Christian pilgrimage site renowned for miraculous feats of healing spanning hundreds of years, lies just 40 miles east of Gopalan’s village, toward the Bay of Bengal. The ancient Brihadeeshwara Temple also contains ancient Buddhist relics.  When I listen to Kamala Harris speak of her mother, “a brown woman with an accent,” I think about how Shyamala embarked on her “unlikely journey” from this place steeped in respect for different belief systems.

Nikki Haley’s life story is similarly familiar. Haley’s paternal grandfather served in the British colonial army, she writes in her autobiography, and her mother, Raj Randhawa, “lived in a large six-story house in the shadow of the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine in the Sikh religion,” in Amritsar, Punjab. Nearby was Jallianwala Bagh, a garden and popular gathering place with a deep, open well that quenched the thirst of locals, travelers, and pilgrims.

The garden is surrounded by high walls and densely packed housing tenements, with only one narrow passage for access. It was also the site of a notorious massacre on April 13, 1919. On that day, a crowd of around 10,000 gathered, some to protest a draconian British law criminalizing anti-government sentiment, many for the start of the spring festival of baisakhi. An overzealous British officer, nervous about the gathering, commanded his troops to seal the gate and open fire on the unarmed crowd. Hundreds were shot dead. Others perished when they jumped into the well to avoid the hail of bullets.

Gunshot marks on the walls of Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, India from the massacre on April 13, 1919. Photo by Moira Shourie.

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre was a grotesque event that marked a turning point in India’s struggle against the British. Laying bare the empire’s barbaric means of subjugation, it galvanized the freedom movement and inspired Mahatma Gandhi to launch the Non-Cooperation Movement that exhorted Indians to lay down their tools and not contribute to the economy in a universal labor strike.

I have stood in that garden and pushed my way through its narrow gate—as has Haley, who visited the grounds in 2014 to honor those who died. Despite pressures from hardline populists, Haley has been steadfast in removing symbols of Confederate power, perhaps because they echo the violence that plagued her own mother’s life in Amritsar. I wonder how else this ghastly episode of colonial violence might have shaped Haley’s views on democracy and how people rise up to fight for it.

India’s struggle for independence also molded Ro Khanna’s grandfather Amarnath Vidyalankar. Active in Gandhi’s Quit India Movement, which accelerated Britain’s formal retreat from India, Vidyalankar endured two stints in jail for his actions. He sought to uplift Harijans or untouchables—people at the bottom of the caste system—and founded schools in rural regions for farmers and their families.

He also went on to serve as personal secretary to Lala Lajpat Rai, a key architect of India’s independence who traveled to the U.S. to meet civil rights leaders in 1916. I grew up next door to Lajpat Bhawan, the headquarters of Rai’s Servants of the People Society, formed to instill a sense of public service through wellness and employment programs. My sisters and I went there to buy freshly ground spices, enjoy the street food stalls in the fairs or melas they hosted, and to watch daily outdoor yoga classes where retirees practiced laughter therapy.

Working in such close proximity to Lala Lajpat Rai, I can’t help but believe Khanna’s grandfather imbibed the notion that extreme wealth should benefit the larger community. Today, Khanna represents one of the nation’s wealthiest congressional districts—Silicon Valley, home to tech companies that have a combined market capitalization of over $14 trillion—but he also champions progressive causes like affordable childcare and free public college. Khanna’s politics are likely influenced by his grandfather’s ideals.

Freedom and democracy are not distant concepts to this generation of Indian American politicians, but a living legacy passed down by loved ones who sowed the seeds with their own hands. Harris, Haley, and Khanna understand that a striking kite stands out in a crowded sky. They also understand that a good kite flier must be sharp and ready to cut their losses, must be resilient and able to try and try again, must be able to maneuver around other kites, and must adapt to changing conditions. Much like a good politician.

Harris, Haley, and Khanna are an inter-generational string—manja—giving flight to their versions of these principles of democracy. They should fly their kite not only in celebration but as a banner of freedom, soaring through unknowable skies.

The post How the Shared Heritage of Harris, Haley, and Khanna Shapes Their Politics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Nǐ hǎo, jiāzhōu!

Hello, California!

We are the Golden State’s two giant pandas, the first to enter the United States in two decades. And while it’s only been a few months since we departed southwest China for the San Diego Zoo, we’ve already met the governor, celebrities, TV broadcasters who love puns (“Panda-monium”), and thousands of everyday people, some of whom pay $115 to enter the zoo in the early morning and walk around with us for an hour. We now feel so at home in California that we’re wondering how we might take on the responsibilities of citizenship. For example, we hear so many of the people visiting us talking about your November elections.

So, why don’t you let us vote in them, too?

In asking this, we want to reassure you that we are reluctant to get political. Why take sides when we’re more popular than the Padres? (We never strike out, and we’re cuter than Jackson Merrill). The two of us are laidback types; zookeepers describe Yun, a 5-year-old male, as “mild-mannered, gentle and lovable,” and Xin, a 4-year-old female, as a “gentle and witty introvert with a sweet round face and big ears.”

And like so many of our fellow Californians, we ignore the news. We prefer to spend our time sunbathing, sleeping, and consuming as much grass as we can get our paws on. To clarify, our grass of choice is bamboo—the zoo grows eight species of it because we are picky.

We also must walk a fine line as “envoys of friendship,” in the words of the Chinese government, which loans us out to overseas zoos for $1 million a year. That means we and our fellow panda migrants—including old Sichuan friends who will soon head to the National Zoo in D.C. and perhaps the San Francisco Zoo—are really diplomats. And we represent a difficult client state that bullies its neighbors and inspires retaliatory tariffs and hateful rhetoric from a former-and-perhaps-future American president whose team uses the term “panda hugger” as a pejorative. (Pro tip: even if you love China, it’s best not to hug us—we are real animals, not stuffed bears.)

There are other reasons we might be wise to stay out of the political arena. For one thing, we are non-humans now living in a country that ranks low in the global Animal Protection Index. For another, we are newcomers to an America so deeply infected by xenophobia that a majority of voters support mass deportation of immigrants and their families. (Before JD Vance starts spreading lies about what we eat, let’s be clear—we are herbivores.)

Yet, despite all the ways in which we count as outsiders, we pandas, by our very presence, offer Americans a chance to understand your real challenges.

Try looking at things from our perspective. After all, we, like you, are a vulnerable species trying to survive on an increasingly inhospitable planet (there are fewer than 3,000 giant pandas in the world). We are also living proof that—in this age of moral relativism and lie-based politics—some very important things remain black and white.

Like the fact that true democracy requires the representation and participation of all living things.

Including us.

Sure, your human media is full of phony accusations that foreigners are voting in this year’s elections. They aren’t, but why shouldn’t they be able to? It’s increasingly common around the world for jurisdictions to open up local elections to non-citizens. San Francisco has done so for school board contests, for instance.

If we could vote in San Diego elections, we might cast a ballot for anyone who could stop the constant noise of jets flying low over us here in Balboa Park, as they prepare to land at the airport. Our participation also might raise the question of why we live rent-free in the expanded Panda Ridge complex while the city tears down encampments of the unhoused and allows the loss of hundreds of shelter beds.

Your national constitution has no prohibition against non-citizens voting—states, like yours decide. Unfortunately, California, while claiming to be a democracy defender, has decided to disenfranchise one in six of its adults based on citizenship, even though such people pay taxes, abide by the laws, serve in the military, and raise children who are citizens. California could enfranchise 6 million people by letting non-citizen residents vote.

It also could bring people together across national boundaries and create a framework for global political solutions if it reached agreements of “reciprocal voting” to allow Californians and residents of other states and countries to vote in each other’s elections.

Such a reciprocal system would demonstrate human interdependence. But interdependence on this planet encompasses all living things. Humans are less than 1% of the world’s biomass but have 100% of the world’s democratic rights. Plants are more than 80% of the biomass and are unrepresented, even though humans couldn’t live without them.

Providing representation to us animals and plants is not a new idea. There are efforts around the world to imagine democratic systems for various beings, including the Multispecies Constitution Project at the L.A.-based Berggruen Institute, where this column’s usual author is a fellow.

That project asks questions like: “What sorts of institutions could speak with—rather than for—the trees, the birds, the microbes, and the diverse humans of this planet?” The idea is that by incorporating the intelligence, experiences, values, and interests of other living things into governance, you humans will save ecosystems—and maybe yourselves. Intriguingly, some non-human creatures, like whales, are beginning to converse with you.

If the two of us could talk with you directly, instead of through the imagination of a human journalist, we might chat about the struggles of starting a family in California. We are a couple facing expectations to breed. And yes, San Diego is a great place to mate, and not just for all the sun-kissed humans in the beach-themed bars.

In fact, Yun’s grandparents lived at the zoo in the 2000s and had five cubs together here, including his mother Zhen Zhen. It seems unlikely that we’ll be that fertile. And we can’t know how long we’ll get to stay here, given the conflict between our birth country and our new home country.

But for now, we are Californians. Shouldn’t we have the same rights and responsibilities as all of you?

The post Why California Should Let Pandas Vote appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Nine years ago, when I spotted blood in my ejaculate, I made an appointment to see my urologist. I quickly found myself to be the only woman in the waiting room. A handful of men surrounded me, and I could see the gears turning in their heads, wondering why a person who presented as and looked like a woman was waiting alongside them.

“Is your husband in there?” said the man two chairs to my right. As a transgender woman, passing as the gender I align with is one of the most joyous and validating feelings. For those of us who have gone through male puberty with masculinizing factors, aligning our external social presentation with our innermost core identity of gender requires both effort and luck.

If we were not in a doctor’s office, I would have remained sociable and continued the conversation. But here, I tried to avoid it, hoping to prolong the secret that the urology appointment was for me. “No,” I said with a polite smile.

The waiting room brought up all too familiar feelings: anxiety, uncertainty, and the fear of what the remaining men would say or think if I was outed. It also highlighted one of the core tensions in seeking quality health care as a trans person: We need providers to honor our gender identity beyond the simplistic frame of biology while being attentive to biological needs often linked to sex.

As I approached the front desk, a receptionist inquired if I was checking in on behalf of my husband. A second receptionist—the one I had spoken to on the phone to make the appointment—pulled the first to the side and whispered that the appointment was for me, and that I was a transgender woman.

The first receptionist stammered, apologized for the confusion, and handed me a clipboard to fill out my medical details. I sat back down, feeling incredibly self-conscious. Now the entire waiting room likely knew of my situation, that I—like all of them—had a prostate that needed to be examined.

The expectation of rejection and the cost of self-policing has profound effects on transgender lives. We are forced to live a life of vigilance, knowing our gender can shift in the eyes of the public at any moment. This is exhausting, and it can also have devastating health consequences. In a 2020 survey conducted by the Center for American Progress, 28% of transgender respondents said they had postponed or avoided necessary medical care in the past year out of fear of discrimination. Such fear inspires some trans people to cut off their history, drawing a clear line from the moment they transition and choosing to not look back on their “former” lives. But those lives also contain medical history that our bodies can’t discard.

Because of this, doctors’ visits often feel like a forced “outing,” where we have to disclose our history in order to receive an accurate diagnosis. Despite the legal and professional rules that govern medicine, medical professionals are still, in the end, human. Some are accepting and tolerant, others are indifferent and ignorant, and still others are just plain spiteful.

When I had my hip labrum cartilage repaired, I knew the bottom half of my body would be naked on the operating table, which meant my penis would be out in the open for all the doctor’s assistants to see.  The fact that I’d be under anesthesia and unconscious didn’t deter me from making an effort to boldly declare my womanhood while unclothed. I got a pedicure two days before my surgery and picked a bright fuchsia color—the same one I’ve used for over a decade—that I thought might help minimize the chances of being misgendered by the nursing staff as I waited for surgery.

But the day of the procedure, a snobbish blonde nurse looked me dead in the eye and called me “he” as she handed my medical chart over to my surgical coordinator. I made a polite attempt to correct her, but she kept referring to me as “him” and “he” to the other nurses. Finally, the surgical coordinator came to my side, rolled her eyes, and said with a nod: “I know, I know. Just ignore her. She’s just a bitch.”

Tragically, this experience is routine for trans people seeking health care. In a poll conducted by KFF and the Washington Post, 31% of trans adults reported that a health care provider had refused to acknowledge their gender identity, using instead their sex assigned at birth. Health care providers need to acknowledge our core identities even as we need to divulge our raw and tender histories. And precisely because this process can be so excruciating, it is critical for the transgender community—and the medical sectors that support us—to be consistent and precise with our language around gender, sex, and medicine. We must emphasize that being trans is about being seen for who we are as individuals rather than merely our biology, while also advocating for the quality, compassionate health care that our biology might necessitate.

Underlying all of this is the frustrating reality that doctors are fallible and sometimes misinformed, which means we must speak up for ourselves when the situation demands. Infuriatingly, the 2020 Center for American Progress survey found that one in three transgender respondents had to “teach their doctor about transgender people in order to receive appropriate care.” That was the case when I asked my general practitioner for a full panel of STD tests, only for him to ask if I had sex with men.  I was so afraid to come off as double queer—a transgender bisexual woman who had anal sex with men—that I lied and said I only dated women. “You don’t need the HIV panel if you don’t have sex with men,” he said. I was shocked at his ignorance, and to this day regret not speaking up to inform him that the spread of HIV isn’t restricted to anal male-on-male intercourse. I can’t help but wonder how many additional people he misinformed due to my reticence.

I remembered the cost of remaining silent while at a doctor’s visit last summer, when I needed an X-ray. “Are you pregnant?” the nurse asked.

“No,” I replied, “I can’t get pregnant.”

She looked at me with one raised eyebrow. “How old were you when you had your hysterectomy?”

As good as it would have felt to continue to play along as a woman who was born female and had gone through puberty as one, I instead chose discomfort. When I told her I was transgender, she nodded, thanked me for my transparency, and proceeded to strap the lead vest on my chest.  As the X-ray machine began to whirl, I smiled. It took bravery to own that moment of authenticity. But being honest with my nurse translated into better care for myself—and maybe the next patient she works with, too.

The post For Trans People, a Doctor’s Visit Can Be a Dilemma appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Democracy is not in decline. The nation-state is.

Making that distinction—between democracy and the nation—is crucial to understanding what’s really going on when it comes to self-government on this planet.

It’s a distinction we rarely make. When people around the world talk about how democracy is doing, we talk about democracy almost exclusively at the national level.

We see this every year, when think tanks and NGOs issue reports and rankings on the state of democracy—that consider the national governments only.

Take International IDEA, a Sweden-based intergovernmental organization that supports elections and democracy worldwide. In its September 2024 Global State of Democracy Report, IDEA declared that democracy remained in decline because only 1 in 4 nations were becoming more democratic, while 4 in 9 nations were becoming less so. IDEA also noted that 1 in 5 national elections is now contested by the loser, and that the global average for electoral turnout declined by 10 percentage points (65.2 % to 55.5 %) in the last 15 years.

Similarly, Freedom House, based in Washington D.C., points to growing numbers of nation-states with problematic elections and armed conflict to declare that this is the 18th consecutive year of decline. And, in its 2024 report, Varieties of Democracy, a global think tank in Sweden, says that democracy has been in decline for 15 years in a row because the share of the population living in nations that are becoming more autocratic is higher than the share living in democratizing countries.

To be sure, these national-level trends are not good news. But they paint an incomplete and misleading picture of the state of democracy on this planet, for three big reasons.

The first is rather obvious. Democracy is self-government, the business of everyday people governing themselves. And most democracy on this planet takes place where most people experience the ins and outs of day-to-day existence—in local communities, rather than at the national level.

Second, these global rankings of democracy rest heavily on elections, which are only one democratic process. Yes, trust and participation in elections are declining. But other forms of democracy—in which people themselves make decisions, rather than delegating power to elected representatives—are growing.

Consider four of these forms.

Direct democracy, in which people vote to enact laws or amend constitutions through referenda, is now a part of governance in more than half of countries. But such procedures are mostly used at the local and sub-national levels, according to the new Global State of Direct Democracy report.

Participatory democracy, involving tools that allow residents of a neighborhood or other jurisdiction to formulate budgets or development plans themselves, has been expanding rapidly since the launch of one such tool in 1990 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. People Powered, a global hub for democracy and participation, reports that more than 7,000 budgets—mostly in cities and local schools—have been made through the participatory budgeting process.

Deliberative democracy has become so popular in recent years that practitioners speak of a “deliberative wave.”  The most popular forms of such democracy are citizens’ assemblies—bodies of everyday people, assembled using “sortition” or lotteries rather than through elections. At a recent global conference for the network Democracy R&D, panelists estimated that about 1,000 such assemblies have been held to deliberate on and find solutions to difficult challenges, most at the local level.

Digital democracy is being used worldwide, often locally, to allow ordinary citizens to make proposals, develop policies, and govern their own communities. Among the best-known digital democratic tools is Decidim, an open digital platform developed by the city of Barcelona and now used in hundreds of localities and institutions worldwide.

But beyond all this growth in local democratic practice, there’s a bigger reason why we are misunderstanding the state of democracy: Nation-states are in retreat, regardless of their systems of government. The signals so often interpreted as democratic decline are actually evidence of something larger and more fundamental.

Nation-states everywhere—be they more democratic or more authoritarian—are in crisis, with their rulers losing the ability to govern their own countries. The United States, as a nation, is in danger of breaking apart. So too is Russia, which is caught up in a war in Ukraine, and suffering long-term declines in the health and life spans of its people. Germany is losing its dynamism and cohesion, for sure, but so is China—struggling with a debt crisis, an aging population, profound corruption, and an increasingly isolated dictator in Xi Jinping.

Why is this happening?

“The most momentous development of our era, precisely, is the waning of the nation-state: its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance,” the British novelist and scholar Rana Dasgupta writes in his book After Nations. “National political authority is in decline, and, since we do not know any other sort, it feels like the end of the world.”

Nation-states simply can’t manage up or manage down in the 21st-century world. Looking up, nation-states have proven incapable of handling planetary forces and threats—climate change, finance and capital flows, technological advances, disease, religious-oriented terrorism. If anything, nation-states have made such problems worse, while ceding more and more power (and formerly national functions like surveillance) to multinational institutions like big tech companies from my home state of California.

Looking down, nation-states can no longer unify their peoples. Instead, national leaders routinely exploit divides to maintain power. Almost all wars are between groups of people inside nation-states that are breaking down. Many of these civil wars have been internationalized by other nation-states, seeking short-term advantage. The most awful example is the current civil war in Sudan, fueled by Russia and the United Arab Emirates, which has displaced millions, killed hundreds of thousands by starvation, and reduced the city of Khartoum to a ruin.

War is not the only tool that nation-states use to cling to their diminishing power. Leaders of nation-state democracies and autocracies alike have taken to scapegoating outsiders, especially migrants, and pledging to exert dictatorial power. But such authoritarian performances are really signs of desperation and weakness.

The void left by the decline of the nation-state is frightening, because of the potential for violence as our world’s governance infrastructure falls apart. But that same void is also an enormous opportunity for democracy and for those forms of democracy being practiced more often on the local level.

Tellingly, democracy is finding ways to grow even inside hostile and authoritarian nation-states. Turkey, with a religious autocrat as prime minister, has seen a wave of democratic participation in its cities, particularly Ankara and Izmir. Syria, ruled by a ruthless dictator, is the site of democratic cantons along its border with Turkey. Myanmar, in the midst of a crackdown by its military rulers, is sprouting new forms of local self-government.

Attacks on democracy also are redounding, to democracy’s favor. Ukraine, in the midst of Vladimir Putin’s invasion, is awash in ambitious local plans for rebuilding cities in more democratic and sustainable ways.

Around the world, alliances of cities are working together to address climate change, poverty, and other problems that the failing nation-states can’t solve and in fact are making worse. These alliances, which often combine democratic processes with technocratic expertise, point the way to a brighter future, in which stronger and more democratic local governments handle more of their own problems, together.

Visions of a local planetary replacement for the nation-state system might be dismissed as implausible, but the nation-state idea dates only to 1648, and the modern nation-state is less than a century old. It is obviously vulnerable.

And democracy—and particularly the people-driven forms of democracy now on the rise at the local level—is our best bet to replace that system.

The post Let the Nation-State Die So That Democracy May Thrive appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Several weeks ago, we convened a group of Muslims and Jews in our network to talk about the unrelenting pain we have been experiencing on, before, and after October 7, 2023, when everything that was already so broken in Israel-Palestine became exponentially broken.

It was days after the discovery of six Israeli hostages shot dead just before their captors fled. “I feel like I am mourning for Hersh [Goldberg-Polin]. I feel like I knew him,” said Ryan, who is Muslim. His grief was palpable. Deeply authentic. His words hung heavy in the air.

Then after a breath, he continued with equal weight, “And I can’t help wondering how many Palestinian Hershs have also been killed, along with all of the life and potential that lay ahead for them.”

With that breath, and what came before and after, Ryan modeled the full human compassion that has been counterintuitive for so many over the past 12 months:

Palestinian lives are grievable. Full stop.

Israeli lives are grievable. Full stop.

Full “Yes.” Full “And.”

In the words of Hersh’s mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, “The time has come to be human.” She was exhorting negotiators and national leaders on CNN, but this holds true for all of us. As scared, infuriated, and desperate as we may feel right now, we need to remember that our fates and interests are intertwined. If we cannot find one another’s humanity, we risk our collective future.

We have worked together over several decades at NewGround, a Los Angeles-based organization that empowers Muslims and Jews to bridge divides that threaten both our communities’ well-being and our fragile democracy. This past year, we and our staff have convened diverse groups of Angelenos around the most difficult questions of this moment—from “Does the phrase ‘From the River to the Sea’ mean the elimination of Israel—or of Jews?” to “Is Israel committing genocide of Palestinians?”—in a space where holding on to one another’s humanity is possible. Our network includes Jews, Muslims, and at times people from other faith communities, some with deep connections to Israel and Palestine, some without personal connections at all. We know that the conflict in Israel-Palestine is political and that there are always religious overtones to it, and we know that not all Palestinians are Muslim and that not all Israeli citizens are Jewish. Nevertheless, no one in the NewGround network has been left untouched by the impact of the violence there and the polarization here.

And the hardest part has been trying to help even our own people to resist the dehumanization of one group or another. Our brains are wired to homogenize people we perceive as outside our “tribe”—a tendency that increases dramatically in high conflict.

We see how hard it is for some Jews, Israelis, and others to imagine Palestinians as parents who love their children. And how demoralizing it is for Muslims and Palestinians to have to prove their humanity at this most basic level. Muslims find themselves asking questions like, “How can killing 200 Palestinians to rescue four Israelis be justified?”

We see how difficult it is for some Muslims, especially Palestinians, and others deeply concerned for them, to see individual Israelis as anything other than evil aggressors. Jews and Israelis find themselves wondering, “How can you not see mothers taken from children, children taken from parents, people who have been working toward peace killed in homes and fields?”

Interests coming from many directions have been working overtime to convince us that only one group or the other has humanity and value. This is especially difficult terrain to navigate for individuals who have direct personal experience and trauma connected to one side or the other.

In the conversations we convene at NewGround, we strive to create conditions that help people share their pain and perspectives authentically—giving them the resilience to witness the pain of others, who can then, in turn, soften and open themselves to a wider range of perspectives. We pose hard questions where we know there are big differences, then ask people to stand on a spectrum of agreement and disagreement before speaking to why they chose to stand where they did. Or we might do a fishbowl exercise, inviting Muslim and Jewish participants to create two concentric circles, both facing inward. The outer circle listens—not talking—as members of the inner circle—either Muslim or Jewish—speak one-by-one and in discussion, in response to a hot question. When the first conversation concludes, the circles switch places. Afterward, the whole group talks. Working with a heterogenous group of Jews and of Muslims, at times with other faith communities present, ensures that participants can better grasp all that is at stake, rather than remaining in binary thinking.

It takes discipline to process our own pain, create space for our tears to flow instead of suppressing them, and care for the pain of others. It takes humility, especially amidst deep vulnerability, to say, “I don’t always understand, but I know I need to.” We continue to rededicate ourselves to holding tight to values expressed in both traditions: Each life is an entire world, and kindness and justice must walk hand in hand. It’s beyond challenging and yet it is essential.

Truly rehumanizing one another’s people requires recognizing specific lives lived and lost, not merely speaking of a generalized “suffering” of one group. Knowing people’s names and who they might have become in the world. Describing the hell in which people are continuing to live. Understanding that neither of our communities are monoliths.

So we remember the death and life of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, whose final interview with CNN was broadcast, per his request, only after he was killed on December 7, 2023. In the interview, he described the feelings of despair as a parent powerless to protect his children. Unimaginable calculations such as: “How can you hug your child so as not to scare them with what might feel like a ‘farewell hug’?” “Should we sleep in the same room so that if we die, we die together, or divide into two rooms in case some of the family might survive?”

And we remember the death and life of Israeli peacemaker Vivian Silver, who was killed on October 7. Hiding in her home’s safe room on Kibbutz Be’eri, Vivian—angry at being forced to articulate a one-sided position—argued with a radio interviewer. “If I survive, then we will have a deep and complex conversation about two sides,” she told him. Her son, Yonatan Zeigen, is now engaged in peacebuilding full-time, and recently shared how moved he was to learn that a soup kitchen had been set up in Gaza in his mother’s name because of the relationships she forged with people there.

We are working hard, and against the grain, to expand the capacity for our people—and those beyond our network—to hold all this humanity and all this loss together. It takes courage and strength to look at someone else’s pain when you are in deep pain yourself. Especially when it feels threatening to do so because you know their pain is being used by others to delegitimize your own.

We learned from the late neuroscientist Emile Bruneau that dehumanization builds in the gap between excess empathy for one group, and lack of empathy for the other. His findings on empathy and conflict resolution have helped us understand so much about our work in perspective building and conflict transformation. Unfortunately, at this moment, as we look out into rhetoric and actions in our broader communities, we are seeing much of what was described in his studies bearing out between our larger communities, both in Israel-Palestine and here at home. We are seeing things like triumph and glee at pagers exploding in grocery stores, or calls for all Jews to “go back to Poland.”

We know that the only antidote to this kind of dehumanization is inviting people toward rehumanizing one another. This will not stop the violence right away. But it is part of the calculus of any permanent solution to the conflict. And one powerful form of rehumanization is to grieve all of our people together, as Palestinians and Israelis do every year at a joint memorial ceremony.

In a session earlier in the year, one of our Jewish members, Eli, reminded us of the philosopher Judith Butler’s concept of “grievability.” Butler asks us to be attentive to whose pain, whose humanity is grievable, and whose isn’t. Grievability can shift depending upon the context, but it tends to fall where forces of power are concentrated. Speaking very generally, in mainstream American politics and media, Israeli lives are grievable and Palestinian lives much less so. On “the street” (including lots of social media and alternative spaces), Palestinian lives are grievable and Israeli lives much less so (and there is also a kind of power here, of a different nature). In the 2017 study “The Enemy as Animal,” Bruneau and psychologist Nour Kteily found that even in asymmetrical conflicts, symmetrical dehumanization contributes to prolonging violence.

These critical insights, along with those of civil rights scholar john a. powell, who urges us to “be hard on structures and soft on people,” remind us to acknowledge and address power imbalances and to remember that pain is pain and must also be acknowledged and addressed for us to move forward together. 

So our ask is very simple, yet extremely difficult: Seek out, listen to, and grieve one another’s stories. Even—and especially—when it is the hardest. Resist the way your anger and despair might pull you away from another’s humanity. Even righteous anger has an insatiable appetite; it can rob you of your own humanity and impact the way you become with others, including your loved ones. Re-member one another, and please remember for yourself: A key to stopping the violence permanently is to see beyond the exclusive, “us or them” view the world prefers, and expand our lens to a larger scope of dignity, security, and justice for all.   

The post Why Can’t We Grieve for All the Dead? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Hija, you have to go. You’re going to miss the wedding,” said my mom, weak but urgent. My husband and I would be hosting my niece’s wedding in our home that April afternoon. My son Michael was setting up chairs in the backyard; my husband Ian, a judge, was getting ready to perform the ceremony.

Mom and I were in the county hospital ER, where we’d been for over 24 hours since she’d fallen outside her home.

I didn’t want to leave. But then two of my tias—my 90-year-old mother’s cousins, themselves in their 70s and 80s but always in and out of her apartment to offer help and company—swept in. They turned the eerie quiet of a Saturday afternoon ER into a familial space, sitting by her bedside, handing her water she couldn’t readily reach, adjusting her pillows and blankets. Go on, they said, assuring me they’d call and put me on speakerphone should the doctor come by.

On the surface, the gathering that was about to begin in our backyard and the scene at the hospital had little in common. But maybe they’re not that different. Weddings and hospitals are both about showing up for people you love. Weddings are about standing witness to someone’s love, showing that you will be the community they can turn to in times of joy and times of sorrow. A hospital is a place of sorrow, where the people you love hopefully bring moments of joy through sharing stories, photos, comfort.

In my familia, we understand that family and true friends don’t only show up for the good times. They visit the hospital or the jail, and they don’t miss your funeral. My family is originally from the Mexican state of Nayarit, but since settling in Los Angeles they have grown into an ever-widening circle of kin—literal and fictive. My tias showed up for mom and me that day, but they also provided me solace in knowing that our community will stand by her, physically and emotionally, as she navigates the challenges of aging, sharing joy in each other’s company no matter what the occasion.

Weddings and hospitals, for our family, are also about food. When someone gets married, we eat beef, chicken, fish, or pasta dishes at the reception. But the meal we all anticipate is the posole or tamales we eat together the next day at the recalentado. In Spanish, recalentado means “reheated,” though in these cases it’s a specially prepared meal; only the gossip is a rehash from the day before as we reminisce about the good times. Others take the opportunity to nurse hangovers, a spoonful of posole at a time. When someone is sick, my aunts prepare hearty guisados—stewed meats—wrapped in flour tortillas as burritos or folded into corn tortillas as taquitos. We brought tacos to my Tia Chayo in the hospital that we ended up sharing with her roommate, too, only to discover the roommate was on a restricted diet. The contraband tacos didn’t do any harm, but the roommate’s family grilled her on where she got them while we sat mum, stuffing our bags and coolers under my tia’s hospital bed.

Hospitals, like weddings, can grow our circles and strengthen our bonds. When hospitals limit patients to two visitors at a time, the rest of us sit in the waiting room. There, where Spanish speakers can feel like outsiders, on unequal footing with doctors wielding authority, fellow Latinos bring comfort and community, and people to ask their questions to, even if they can’t get definitive medical answers. There, they compare experiences, share stories about their loved ones, discuss how the hospital staff and doctors are treating them.

When my uncle passed after a fall and a stay in the ICU this past January, we couldn’t all be with my tia, his wife of 54 years, because we were in consultation with the doctors. On our hardest day, it was the señora she met in the waiting room who sat with her, holding her hand, offering comfort as only a comadre could. Theirs was a bond forged not through sacraments like baptism or communion, but through the shared experience of life’s passages. This time, it was the sacrament of saying farewell. It was a profound connection in an unlikely place.

Two images from the day of my niece’s wedding are intertwined in my mind. Standing in the sunlight, my niece is radiant in her short white dress with a flared A-line skirt, long sleeves, and embroidered collar, her shiny waist-length black hair vivid against the bright white tulle. My mom, 90 years old, lies in a paper-thin gown under harsh fluorescent lights, her neck supported by a brace. On the surface, the scenes have little in common.

But maybe they’re not that different. The reception was in full swing when I arrived home from the hospital. I dashed upstairs to throw on a dress and as I changed, I could hear the laughter wafting up from the backyard. Just then, I got a text from my cousin Karla, younger than my tias by decades. She was at the hospital. I hadn’t asked her help, but there she was. “The whole gang is here,” she wrote. “There are five of us! We’re trying to keep the laughter down so that they don’t kick us out!” The message flooded me with gratitude, though I knew my family didn’t need it. For us, whether in a hospital, at home, or at a party, being together is reason enough for celebration.

The post How Weddings and Hospitals Forge <i>Familia</i> appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Lock up your tents, California!

Toss out your old camping gear!

Hide your pillows and blankets where the cops will never find them!

Because the people who run California have finally seen clearly that the greatest scourge in today’s Golden State is not climate change and not crime, not COVID and not corruption, not the rising cost of living nor grinding poverty.

No, what most threatens our way of life is people who camp.

And so, in this the year 2024, the great state of California has gone to war against campers and their encampments.

This war effort is unlike anything seen here in generations. The wheels of 21st-century California government move painfully slowly. It takes state and local agencies days to respond to a police call, a minimum of six months to permit a coffee shop, five years to add a carpool lane on a highway, and three decades (and counting) to construct a promised high-speed rail line.

But the war on encampments is proceeding with a shocking speed, a real blitzkrieg. This summer Gov. Gavin Newsom, known more for issuing plans than following through on them, didn’t merely order state agencies to take down encampments on land they control. He donned gloves and work clothes to throw away the tents and trash of the unhoused himself.

Newsom also issued guidance on removing encampments to cities and counties. Local governments usually do their best to ignore state orders, but not this time. Cities from Arcata to Vista have ripped down encampments with alacrity and vigor. CalMatters counted at least 14 cities, from San Francisco to Long Beach, that have either passed new laws to prohibit camping or updated old ones; at least four cities revived camping bans they previously didn’t enforce.

San Diego, a leader in the anti-encampment war, has made “No Camping” signs as ubiquitous as fish tacos and shut down the massive “island” encampment—surrounded by water—under the I-5 freeway. Meanwhile, once-progressive paradise Santa Monica toughened its anti-camping ordinance, too. Possession of cannabis may be legal, but possession of pillows and blankets can get you locked up. (Don’t let the grown-ups see your blankie, kids!)

One great thing about the anti-encampment war is that it’s unifying, an example of the enduring power of bipartisan consensus. Sure, California’s exclusively Democratic leaders have fought bitterly against the U.S. Supreme Court when it strips away gun laws or the rights of women or immigrants. But in this war, the Golden State’s top progressive leaders are making common cause with the six conservative justices and their recent decision to allow cities to prohibit people from sleeping on the streets.

As Republicans and Democrats join forces in favor of this righteous war, a few apologists for the status quo remain. Some dead-end liberals are prone to quoting the 1894 novel Red Lily, by the Frenchman Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

But France is easily dismissed these days. He was a practitioner of irony—which has been outlawed across this formerly self-aware country—and of critical and independent journalism—which is being killed off by the bipartisan consensus that we shouldn’t have to listen to uncomfortable truths that offend our partisan biases.

Now, you might think California’s intellectuals would challenge the encampment bans. Instead, our state’s scholars are leading their own anti-encampment campaign.

The University of California and California State University systems have announced strict new bans against encampments anywhere on their campuses or properties. Their goal is to prevent a recurrence of the protests of the previous academic year that produced antisemitism, Islamophobia, and violence—including when some universities called in the police to bust up the encampments.

In announcing this oh-so-principled policy, the universities are not just saying that opposition to the scourge of encampments is more important than the First Amendment. They are also eliminating a potential on-campus housing solution—tents—when thousands of their students are unhoused.

But ignore the lonely critics out there. The logic of the universities, and the state and its cities, and the nation’s highest court, is inarguable:

Californians shouldn’t have to sleep outside.

The only way to make sure we don’t have to sleep outside is to arrest or relocate those of us who sleep outside.

And such enforcement will solve the problem because someone else, under intolerable pressure, will step in and provide shelter to those displaced by encampment crackdowns.

Who is that someone? The state points to local governments, which have money and authority to build housing. The local governments point back to the state, which could change laws that make it too easy for opponents to block housing for the unhoused.

Don’t worry. I’m sure they’ll sort it out soon. Please don’t lose any sleep over it.

The post California’s Greatest Scourge? Camping appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Days start early in the garden. As the sun rises over the Santa Clara Valley’s Diablo Range, we’ve already gathered and prepared seed beds for planting. The smell of damp soil fills the air as we carefully place fava beans into the dark earth. The soil under our fingernails and caked onto our knees doesn’t bother us—it reminds us of where our food comes from. We fill our bellies with warm coffee and pan dulce as we plant and discuss what the day will bring.

Silicon Valley might seem like a strange place for a gardening movement to flourish. Our plantings are hidden amid the palm tree-lined technology campuses of companies like Google, Cisco, and Apple, buried under the sounds of busy freeways, and packed neatly into an urban center where millions of people live. Yet the ways these gardens have found a home here can teach us a lot. By cultivating physical spaces to grow food in the margins of modernity—in the places ecologists call “ecotones,” where habitats, or worlds, collide and the unexpected emerges—we are also nourishing political spaces to live 21st-century life.

In 2012, while researching urban agriculture in Silicon Valley, I met the director of La Mesa Verde, an organization that teaches gardening and food literacy in the low-income communities of San Jose. She gave me a neighborhood tour, and then invited me to participate in a community action research project that would change my life.

For over a decade, I have been learning from, planting alongside, and writing about the home gardeners of La Mesa Verde. They live in parts—Alma, Alum Rock, Campbell, Willow Glen, Spartan Keyes, and East San Jose—where their options for fresh, healthy, and culturally relevant foods are limited. Most of the families in the program are Spanish-speaking, but it is a multi-ethnic, multilingual group of gardeners. With the help of the UC Master Gardener Program and the extensive farming and gardening knowledge of many of its members, gardeners who participate in La Mesa Verde are more than successful growers; they are advocates for community transformation. They share surpluses to challenge market logics. Their collective efforts promote their right to food and challenge their marginality by bringing together people who might otherwise not come together. They celebrate life by centering dignity in their efforts to transform their food system.

Countless nonprofits have popped up across the country to help alleviate the lack of access to quality food in many low-income communities. The belief is that state-sponsored intervention such as food pantries or the strategic placement of farmers markets are the best way to bring food into the community. There is an assumption that people living in these communities are too poor, busy, or ignorant to fix the issues they face related to food access themselves.

These communities are not naturally occurring empty “food deserts,” but rather they are products of food apartheid, or a food landscape that has been engineered in ways that benefit some and harm others. Ironically, even well-intentioned nonprofits seeking to “fix” low food access in underserved areas can end up prolonging it because their food charity interventions address the symptoms of hunger rather than the root causes of social inequality.

As I have gotten to know these Silicon Valley neighborhoods and the people who call them home, I’ve learned that community members address issues of food access in ways that do not fit the mold these initiatives promote. Food emerges from the neighborhoods’ lost, forgotten, and marginalized places. There are orange, lemon, lime, and pomegranate trees towering over houses; pinto and green beans climbing up chain-link fences; and yerba buena, epazote, and verdolagas propagating around foundations.

In fall 2013, I met a gardener in his early 80s originally from the outskirts of Mexico City. He and his wife lived in half of a two-bedroom duplex, with his daughter and her two kids next door. The best thing, he told me, was that while they had separate living areas, they shared a backyard, which was large enough for him to grow food and his grandkids to explore.

Gardening had played a central role in his life—as a kid he grew corn, beans, and squash in his family’s huerta (vegetable garden)—but what stood out the most from that conversation was how he explained the act of gardening as a reciprocal relationship between people and places. “Ser un jardínero,” he said, “es estar en comunicación. Comunicación con la comida, familia, comunidad, y tierra.” (“To be a gardener is to be in communication. Communication with food, family, community, land.”)

That afternoon, I watched him tend to his heirloom corn, summer squash, pinto beans, and jalapeno peppers. He moved through the garden as if in sync with its rhythms. It became evident that for him, gardening was less about food production, and more about cultivating relationships with his food through his labor—something most of us have lost touch with in recent years.

Labor is the source of value in these gardens, but not in the classical economic sense of how much things cost. Rather, value manifests in what gardens can restore. Most of us living under capitalism work for a living, and the more energy and time we invest in earning money, the less time we have for ourselves. Many of the gardeners I have interacted with hold part-time, low-wage jobs—sometimes two or three—that take them away from their families and communities. They are caretakers, food service workers, housekeepers, landscapers, and retail employees. But when they garden, their labor contributes to the social and cultural reproduction of their communities and cultures. Their simple acts of gardening challenge the capitalist ideal of individualism over all else because gardening does not separate people from community; it roots them in community. As a gardener told me one afternoon, “Tener un jardín es contra este sistema.” (“To have a garden is against this system.”)

Another La Mesa Verde gardener once told me, “When I go into my garden, I greet life.” He was doing more than referring to the ways growing food supports his physical health. By growing and sharing food, home gardens allow people to root themselves, regain control over their agricultural production, re-envision communal organization, and remind themselves—and us—how to be human again.

When we grow food, we work toward a reciprocal partnership with the human and non-human communities around us: We hope to support them as we rely on them to support us in turn. Gardening regenerates healthy soils, communities, peoples, and cultures. Silicon Valley’s home gardeners are growing food to feed the physical and spiritual needs of their communities—and they’re doing it at the epicenter of modernity and technology, in one of the most expensive and alienating places to live in America today.

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