Open letter to the disability advocacy movement

I am writing here as one of the poster children of this movement, as a person who truly owes my chance at even the most basic education to the movement. In April 1977, when I was exactly one year old, a group of disability rights activists occupied the federal building in San Francisco for 26 days with minimal food and supplies (and what they had was donated by the Black Panther Party).

The direct result of that protest was the implementation of Section 504, the foundational document of civil rights for people with disabilities in the United States, including the right to attend public school which was not at all assured for blind students, like me, at the time. (See the documentary Crip Camp on Netflix for further info.)

I am writing to those who carry on that tradition in myriad capacities—activists, advocates, teachers, lobbyists, policy makers and everyone else still working hard for the civil rights and equity of people with all kinds of disabilities. I write with overwhelming love and gratitude. And I also write with concern and to raise a flag of caution.

Image of a camp fire and sunset from my solo backpacking trip in the blue mountains of eastern oregon - photo by arie farnam

We have come to a time in this movement where we must be very conscious of what we are doing and who we may inadvertently exclude or abandon. This movement was founded on ideals of radical equality. We are for all people with disabilities and no one is too disabled to be outside our concern.

When I entered school in 1982 in a tiny rural town in Eastern Oregon, I entered a school that had still never served a child with a visible disability, and they didn’t want any. It was a small rural school without great resources and this seemed like a lot of extra work.

But Section 504 was law by then and unwilling and unfriendly as the school administration might have been, I went to school. All through the ‘80s, I fought “the good fight.” And when I say I was a poster child, this is literal. There were several disability rights posters with a photo of me in a tie-dyed shirt and giant glasses peering avidly at a computer screen at a distance of one inch. I knew about them and I approved. I wanted to be included everywhere. I subscribed to the demand for universal integration and the belief that people with disabilities could do anything anywhere.

In 1990, the ADA opened up more opportunities for me and I pressed every advantage, went to college and graduated suma cum laude. I was determined to “show them” (i.e. those who hadn’t wanted me in elementary school and anyone else with an ableist tendency). I was loud and proud. I would just barely admit that I wasn’t going to be a pro-basketball player or a jet pilot, but that was about it for concessions. Instead, I decided to become an international newspaper correspondent and spent several years tramping around war zones while neglecting to mention to my employers that I was legally blind.

I have written incessantly on this blog about the social exclusion that people with disabilities so often face. And this month I started taking a course to help me become a more effective parent advocate for my kids, who both have developmental disabilities. From poster child to foot soldier, this is my movement.

But becoming the adoptive parent of kids with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum disorders has shaken some of the fundamental slogans of that movement for me, slogans like “integration first” and “dignity means the freedom to take risks” and “self-determination at all cost.”

Those things were important to me as a visually impaired student and dare-devil young adult. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that each disability affects a very specific part of a body. Mine affects my eyes. It is ableism then to restrict activities that rely on or can rely on other parts of my body. It would be unacceptable to restrict me from being a parent, because of fears that I might not “see” my toddler swallowing an object and choking. Blind parents keep their toddlers safe by both carefully cleaning and listening with specific attention. There is nothing that says parenting is primarily about seeing.

It’s a different matter though when it comes to driving. Driving does rely very heavily on seeing and so far we don’t have an alternative that makes it safe for a blind person. So, that is specifically and legally denied to us and that, in my view, isn’t ableism, even though I expect people with my level of vision impairment to exercise good judgement and stay the hell away from steering wheels without being legally forced to. So, essentially, I’m okay with that law.

Now, let’s take another example, Let’s say a person with ADD wants to be an air traffic controller and they have the training and otherwise qualify. There are some pretty hairy attention and focus acuity tests you have to pass to do that job. Should people with ADD be legally barred?

No, there’s already a test. Some people with ADD may not be able to focus in the way needed for air traffic control. Others may actually be better at spreading attention across the entire field and thus ensuring they don’t miss peripheral input that could be essential. They should take a test that simulates the actual requirements of the job, like everyone else, and be hired or not based on that, not based on their disability.

I’d even be willing to adopt this standard for vision and driving. What if you just had to take an exacting simulation driving test that included poor light situations, sketchy traffic and small children running out into the road, instead of being qualified or disqualified based on your ability to read a chart in an office? Maybe a good idea! (But I’m still going to flunk either way.)

Most disability advocates ought to be on the same page with me so far. But there are underlying assumptions in the disability rights movement that were so deeply engrained in my thinking that they took years and incredible pain to extract.

We often assume that only certain human faculties can be a legitimate disability. Everyone, regardless of disability, can strive and work hard. Everyone, regardless of disability, can make their own decisions and exercise self-determination. Everyone, regardless of disability, does better with more information and chances to learn. Even, everyone, regardless of disability, is better off when fully integrated with able-bodied peers.

I used to believe these things with fervor. I still wish they were true. But they are not true for everyone.

It’s relatively easy for people to understand that any part or capacity of our physical body can be disabled. But it’s harder for people to grasp the complexity of brain-based disabilities.

Most of us have learned that dyslexia is a very specific thing that affects a person’s ability to process written words. It often has a few other side effects, but we get that a person can be dyslexic and struggle terribly with reading and still be extremely smart and capable in other mental areas. My husband and my brother are both dyslexic and both are college grads and very possibly smarter than me.

ADD is harder for non-experts to grasp, but the diagnosis has become so prevalent that I’m betting you can accept that ADD and ADHD affect very specific parts of the brain that govern attention and focus. Again, different people may have a variety of side effects along with that central effect, but people with these brain differences actually score higher on average on standard intelligence tests than the norm. It’s a disability that is located in the brain but it does not make a person unintelligent any more than my vision impairment renders me completely physically incapable.

BUT (and this is a really tricky “but") brain science has progressed far enough for us to understand that there are specific parts of the brain and brain faculties for everything we do and for every human quality. Importantly in this case, there is a part of the brain governing what are called “executive functions.” This is essentially the control center of the brain and it is essential for making decisions, understanding logic, time, and cause and effect, regulating impulses, emotions, desires and everything else the brain does, and even driving the ability to get motivated, prioritize or cope with frustration.

We are used to thinking of these things as “moral” issues. A person either makes good decisions, shows up on time, controls their anger and momentary desires, makes an effort, shows motivation and swallows frustration or they just deserve what they’ve got coming, which is nothing good from us or from society.

A person with profound developmental disability may have some disability in making decisions but generally not beyond the rest of their mental abilities. As a result, even though they have difficulty making decisions, their general cognitive difficulties are obvious to themselves and others. Hopefully, we accommodate them and they are able to realize their limits and accept help with decisions (like whether or not to rent an expensive apartment), much the way I accept that I can’t drive.

You know who doesn’t have the kind of good judgement about whether or not they can make a decision without help that most developmentally disabled people have? Drunk people. Yup, that’s right. Alcohol attacks this very specific part of the brain, the center for executive functioning. More than any other drug, this is where it strikes.

Now, before you get up in arms about how drunks don’t deserve a level of social protection that would divide the disability rights movement, let me remind you that there is a group of people, a very large group in fact, that suffers from the disabling effects of alcohol permanently and without ever taking a drink—babies born to mothers who drank while their were pregnant.

It is no surprise really that, if alcohol disrupts inhibitions and decision making, lowers cognitive abilities, regulation, motivation and responsibility levels in a person who drinks it, it will also attack those same parts of the brain in a fetus. As we’ve all been told at some point, there is no safe amount of alcohol in pregnancy. While more alcohol generally creates worse effects, it depends on when exactly in the development of the fetus it happens and likely on many other factors.

To be clear, I am talking about just one specific disability. But it is a disability that according to neurologists affects 1 in 20 people in the United States. It is more common than autism and at least as disruptive to daily life. It is also much harder to correctly diagnose and accommodate.

Many people with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum disorders (FASDs) throughout history have been written off by their families, communities and society at large as unmotivated, lazy, uncaring and immoral, because society misunderstands that their lack of regulation and the disruption in basic logical concepts is a disability, not a choice.

An example came up in the disability advocacy class I’m taking. The instructor repeated our movement’s call for self-determination of all young adults with disabilities. Everyone deserves to make decisions for themselves and most decisions worth making involve a certain amount of risk. “The freedom to take risks” is a popular buzz term in disability advocacy.

Several parents, myself included, raised concerns, however, explaining that policies our movement is pushing at state and national levels are directly harming people with FASD because they do not take into account the diversity of needs. A one-slogan-fits-all approach will abandon these vulnerable members of our community to the prisons and homeless encampments where far too many FASD adults end up because our society judges their disability as moral failings or lack of effort.

When parents of teens with prenatal exposure raised this concerns in class, the instructors shot down each one, dismissing the concern as “overprotective.”

I know the scourge of overprotectiveness has hounded people with disabilities for far too long. Much of my success and independence as a legally blind person is the result of my parents’ very liberal parenting in a natural environment where I was allowed to “run wild” with sighted kids. It is also the result of all those years of “passing” for sighted as a young adult and thus avoiding many other potential protective barriers. I met other visually impaired kids at summer camps when I was a teenager and was shocked to find that many who could technically see better than me couldn’t walk on slightly uneven ground unaided or cross quiet streets or climb trees.

These are examples of risks that many parents want to protect a blind child from, fearing that we cannot see the dangers. But blind people with full executive functions know their own limits better than anyone else. It isn’t the seeing that is most important in this risk taking, it’s the assessment of limits and testing of cause and effect. I didn’t rush out and jump off a cliff when I was a kid, even though there were several handy. I explored at my own pace. I learned to throw pebbles ahead of me to test the ground, since using a stick on such uneven ground as our mountain backyard wasn’t feasible. I remembered keenly every rock and hollow and hole in the meadows and every tree and fallen log in the woods. That was how I ran free as a kid and it taught me skills that translated into adult independence.

But my disability was in seeing. My children’s disabilities are in exactly the tools needed to take measured risks. They cannot test cause and effect and gain from it. They cannot explore and then predict. They cannot remember past mistakes and avoid pitfalls the next time. They can improve a little in this with development, but not through “effort,” any more than I can try harder to see.

I’ve been criticized by disability advocates for saying things like this and accused of insulting my children. This is like saying it is an insult to a blind person to insist that it is not appropriate to hold up a printed sign they can’t see. My kids have all kinds of gifts—in social interaction, in athletics, in fashion sense, in just working hard at tasks others might find too boring. But just as I cannot receive information through sight very well as a legally blind person, there are channels that are disabled for them.

Those are partly sensory and partly cognitive, but they are precisely the channels our society leans on most heavily by forcing people to make hundreds of snap decisions each day, deal with contradictory stimuli intended to trick people into impulsive behavior, always consider the long-term effect of our actions and navigate attempts at manipulation and exploitation.

Upon moving to our small town two years ago, my son was picked out as “an easy mark” by a local drug gang within a few short months. The ringleader intuitively understood that this twelve-year-old couldn’t foresee consequences. He gave him candy and compliments, and then asked him to carry packages for the gang. My son was talked into taking hundreds of dollars in cash and distributing it to “friends” at school. He didn’t make decisions in order to end up in these situations. He responded to social interactions and the predictable dangers were not apparent to him. He could not look at the possible implications or resist the temptation of immediate inputs and his strong desire to be accepted. As hard as it may be for others to swallow, these faculties are the core of his disability.

When my children become young adults, the disability rights movement as it stands today would have them decide whether or not they want a parent or guardian involved in their decisions or whether or not they want medical care or developmental disability services. They respond to momentary feelings of comfort and discomfort, rather than long-range cause and effect and they cannot conceptualize either time or the implications of decisions. A young adult with FASD may have a true long-term desire to be employed and live independently, but when it comes time to leave for work, being able to recognize the time and overcome the momentary unpleasantness of getting up early both directly challenge their disability.

An adult with FASD can be misled, defrauded, exploited, made homeless and left with out health care far too easily in our society, especially when our movement insists that each person is able to make their own decisions and spur of the moment decisions are considered definitive.

At thirteen, my son is caught up in the disability services system, which by state regulation in Oregon, insists that he should have sole decision-making power with regards to his finances. At thirteen.

Okay, you may say that’s not so bad, since he doesn’t have a lot of money and I should be the one saving for his future. That’s fine. I’m not even concerned about some serious savings plan. But he talks regularly about wanting to buy a toy drone and fly fishing equipment. These are real interests. He saves his money and works hard to plan for these things. But when he enters a store with one of the disability workers who often take him places, the rules say he can buy whatever strikes his fancy and they have a card with his money on it. And because his disability affects impulsiveness, time sense, number sense and cause and effect, he cannot conceptualize the cost to his long-term goals of buying every shiny trinket or junk food marketed to tap into his impulses.

The rules say that the disability services worker can discuss the purchase with him and remind him of his plan to save, but they have to help him spend his saved money on impulse buys if he insists on it. And he generally does because his brain lives in the moment.

To be frank, I wouldn’t do this to ANY thirteen-year-old, but so much less to a thirteen-year-old with this type of disability, and yet this is one of the rules that the disability advocacy movement has “succeeded” in forcing into state regulations. While a parent has decision-making power when it comes to the finances of most youth, I have no say in my son’s case because his developmental disability puts him in a category where “self-determination at all cost” is the law.

Even more disturbing is the Oregon law that now states that children as young as fourteen can make their own medical decisions, including refusing medical care. At the age of sixteen, they can make all health care decisions for themselves and keep these secret from their parent or guardian. There is no accommodation for children with developmental disabilities in this law, and the disability advocacy movement continues to push for ever heavier burdens of decision-making to be placed on the most vulnerable children.

My daughter is approaching the age of fifteen. She has medication that helps her to function enough to attend school most of the time and to live in a family environment safely. But the effects of the medication take days or even weeks to differentiate. These time intervals are far beyond her grasp. She can only decide to take medication or undergo other medical care based on her momentary experience of it. And a lot of medical care isn’t fun in the moment.

My daughter doesn’t yet realize that it is possible to tell a doctor “no,” so we just do what doctors recommend. But like many individuals with FASD, she has a strong aversion to authority and particularly parental authority. Given the emphasis by the disability advocacy movement on educating developmentally disabled youth about their right to refuse parental authority, she will learn soon. Neither of my children will choose help from parents or guardians now or in the foreseeable future. And the decisions they make on the spur of the moment are not in their true interests or even their real desires. They are the symptoms of the disability.

I want my children to be able to be independent. I want them to make their own plans and have goals and dreams. They do have these, and as best I can, for the moment, I protect their clearly stated plans, goals and dreams from the impulsive symptoms of their disability and from the bewildering, manipulative and exploitative corners of society.

One of the things often said by medical experts in FASD is that if someone wants to help a person with FASD, they must provide “a surrogate frontal lobe.” And this is what I attempt to do. When I’m saving for necessities or long-held desires, and I see something attractive that I keenly wish I could buy, my brain’s executive functioning center says “no.” When I feel great reluctance to undergo dental work, my brain’s executive functioning center in the frontal lobe makes me do it anyway.

My children can’t and aren’t medically expected to be able to do that for themselves. It is no different from me not being able to see. To throw them to the wolves of our society where one’s executive functions are often the only protection, is no different than putting. me behind the wheel of a car on a six-lane freeway.

I’m not likely to be chosen to coin slogans for the disability advocacy movement But I hope that we can remember our roots in radical equity as envisioned by the pioneers of our movement in 1977. They embraced disability as a fact and an identity. They asked accessibility and to seen as more than just their disability. They did not ask for their specific disabilities to be ignored or dismissed as irrelevant. All of that still applies today, and neuroscience backs it up.

Disability can affect any part of the human body or brain. Each person with a disability is different and is still a person with value. We ask that our lives, health, safety, access, inclusion, freedom and prosperity be as important as anyone else’s. We ask that when society has set things up for a certain type of person and that set up threatens the life, health, safety, access, inclusion, freedom or property of an individual that society makes changes to protect the individual’s rights. That’s it in a nutshell, ins’t it.

We have differentiated between equality and equity in our movement. Equality is saying everyone is allowed to use the steps and come into the building. Equity is making sure everyone has realistic access. Equality is saying “every person should make their own decisions in a manipulative and exploitative world and they can choose to get help or not.” Equity would be saying, “every person should have the support they need to truly make their own decisions.”

Parents, guardians and helpers of people with FASD are not being “overprotective” when we say that these individuals need real and definitive help with decision-making and risk taking. We are recognizing their specific disabilities and attempting to honor the decisions, desires and goals they express at times when their disability is not being directly challenged by stimuli they can’t process. We need the disability advocacy movement to acknowledge this disability for what it is and stand with our children. Insisting on slogans that harm the most vulnerable, because they sound good and work for most of us has already caused harm and it will continue to, if we don’t change course.

A giant movement is like a massive ship. Turning something this big wont’t be easy. But we can adapt, as we always have, to ensure that none of us are sacrificed for rhetoric.

Taking action with what you've got

This post has turned out to be a kind of sequel to my July post about the limitations of taking action under adverse circumstances. I didn’t actually plan it this way, but here it is.

Having children pretty much always takes a lot of a person’s choices away—or at least it should. There are examples of parents who go off to do their own thing and voluntarily leave their children to be cared for by others, but barring that, parenting generally means a lot of restrictions on one’s own choices. Parenting kids with developmental disabilities multiplies that constraint many times over.

I did try to make my own choices within those boundaries while my kids were growing up, but the limited range of possible choices felt very restrictive at times. I couldn’t go to graduate school, travel or even work a solid job. I couldn’t choose what I was going to eat without the significant expense and time outlay of making separate meals. I couldn’t up and go someplace for a few days. On the vast majority of days, I couldn’t choose what I wanted to do beyond a few minutes early in the morning.

Night camp with the lights of the grande ronde valley - image by arie farnam

Events came and happened to me. Life got incrementally and sometimes suddenly harder. Any steps I wanted to take, even just to get help for my high-needs kids, were many times harder than they would have been alone. It was like slogging through knee deep mud while wearing chains. I rarely felt like I could take any particular action to change my life for the better. Now, that both of my kids are temporarily in other households, bits of my own agency have returned to me.

This return has dawned on me gradually. In the first weeks, it was all I could do to recover and put my home back together—as if after a hurricane. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in my special chair by the window, enjoying morning chai and the golden light on the tree outside after my meditation practice, and that part of my mind began pining for the mountains again.

This comes on me every few months. I spent a good part of my youth backpacking either in the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon or in other countries around the world where I travelled. I loved being in the mountains far from cars and crowds, especially in Eastern Oregon where the natural environment is so magical, wild and relatively clean. The yearning came back that morning with a vengeance, and I was so used to just sitting with it and accepting it as a longing which cannot be fulfilled, that I didn’t go beyond that for some time.

When my children were very small, backpacking wasn’t an option. Even before that, I found that my health difficulties were making it complicated. Whenever I went on a hike with friends, my body ached and my feet were so sore by the end of the day that I was in extreme pain and couldn’t enjoy camp life. I was always too slow for the rest of the group and the length of the hike was beyond what I could handle.

Once my kids were old enough, we did take them camping fairly often, but it was a grueling ordeal. Their disabilities made camp life even more arduous than it usually is and their hygiene even harder to keep up to a bare minimum. At least one of them refused any kind of hike, so we always had to car camp in crowded, noisy campgrounds. Again, for various reasons, it was mostly miserable.

What I long for is not car camping next to a bunch of drunk college kids. It isn’t even hiking 15 miles with a 30 pound pack at a pace that is swift enough that I have to keep my eyes glued to the trail to keep from tripping. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that what I yearn for is not that unreasonable, at least not in my current situation.

I am no longer a young girl, afraid to be alone. I enjoy solitude. I have the skills to deal with the mountains. And if I hiked five miles, instead of fifteen, I wouldn’t be miserable and I’d still get away from the noisiest campgrounds. I no longer have to take kids with me who refuse to go to natural places or who can’t stay safe in a camp situation—at least not every day of the week. And for the moment, my work is flexible enough that backpacking doesn’t have to be restricted only to weekends when I have kid duty.

It hit me like a sudden revelation. In this case, despite the many barriers and difficulties, I can do something to change my life in a way that will make me happy.

I realized that one other thing that has held me back with backpacking is always having crappy, second-hand gear. So, I researched and saved and pinched pennies. And I was able to buy not just a new sleeping bag and pad but the type I actually want—not the top of the line necessarily, but a pad that is rated for people with back problems. And my gear is light enough to carry without making those problems worse. I ordered an ultra-light tent for just one person. I’m not going to count on anyone else coming along.

But the tent hasn’t come and the warm season is nearly over for now, so I borrowed an old rickety tent with a busted pole and a makeshift rainfly and tested out the rest of my gear on top of Pumpkin Ridge. I was delighted to find that the specialized pad really is much better than the old, twentieth century gear I’m used to. I made tea and watched the lights in the valley while the sounds of the meadow rustled softly.

While I lay in the dark, coyotes howled off to the west—a sound I find comforting, though I’ve seen others panic at it. I know from experience that coyotes won’t mess with a camp. Around about 4:00 in the morning, I was awakened by the thud of hooves nearby in the meadow—several elk or deer passed through. And again, I could be confident they would keep their distance.

To be clear, I am arming myself with high-end pepper spray and hope to soon have a dog. Taking action on your own is not about being reckless. But there is a great deal to be said for finding a way to do what you want that is not reliant on others or on circumstances.

A big part of what has made this possible is the improvement of my health, but that too has been a matter of taking the metaphorical bull by the horns. I am nearing two years on a strict ketogenic diet modified for diabetics and the results have been astounding.

My doctor has taken to telling me “whatever you’re doing, just keep doing it.” Another doctor wants to claim the original diagnosis must have been wrong because “no one can beat diabetes like that.” But I know I haven’t actually beaten it. It will come back—not just eventually but within hours—if I fall off the wagon, which I’ve found out by making the occasional unintentional mistake.

As the sun peeked through the pines on the ridge, I heated water on my tiny, lightweight stove, added tea powder, MCT oil, butter and dehydrated coconut. It makes for a fortifying, healthy, ketogenic drink that keeps me running for hours in the morning. I did my exercises on the ridge top, balancing in various poses above the crackly leaves of mule’s ear and the spiky dry grasses. Then I shouldered my pack and hiked down again.

Since my child-care duties have been relieved a bit, I’ve started a daily exercise routine, primarily to strengthen core muscles. I go to acupuncture and the occasional massage to help the arthritis in my spine. I can’t guarantee I’ll always be able to backpack and it took two years of hard work to get even to this modest level of fitness again, but this is my version of taking charge of my life.

My next adventure will be to apply for the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Eastern Oregon University over the winter. It will take a minor miracle in financing, since there is only one scholarship for one student and I need to be the one chosen in order to make ends meet. It will also take my childcare supports staying put, which is by no means guaranteed. But by next summer, I hope to be a graduate student who occasionally gets to go hiking.

The morning rays of a new life have come and I’ve taken up the work of rediscovering my own agency. Sure, it’s tenuous and quite different from what I hoped and dreamed thirty years ago. But it has brought me back to the core elements of what my soul needs.

Words have power--to heal and to harm

The receptionist spoke in a hard voice. “Your son will be there, but you are not welcome at the appointment.”

“But he’s only twelve.”

“You can wait outside,” the desk worker stated without inflection

I felt my world shrinking, the walls of fear and ostracism closing in tighter around me. This wasn’t the first time I’d had this sort of reaction for no discernible reason. For years, reactions to me have become harsher and judgements of me more negative, even with strangers.

What had I done? I barely knew them. Sometimes it feels like there must be a sign emblazoned on my face, which I alone cannot see, declaring that I am a horrible person. My developmentally disabled child needed the medical therapy provided by this clinic, so I went ahead with it despite the humiliation and lack of clarity.

Creative commons by michael karrer

I took a deep breath and forced myself to stop thinking negatively, to focus on solutions rather than problems, to recognize that I’m doing what I have to for my kid with complex needs. I told myself it probably wasn’t me at all. Maybe they were having a bad day. I steeled my voice and words to remain courteous.

Afterward, I was careful not to dwell on the issue of being banned from my son’s medical appointment. I do meditations on gratitude, positive self-image and mental protection each morning without fail. I believe in that stuff—not slavishly—but I have seen that attitude counts for a lot and meditation provides vast reservoirs of self-mastery.

Yet, I suspect that it is the very laws of “positive thinking” that have been undermining me. There isn’t a sign on my forehead, but I have been absorbing a lot of negative energy—not by choice, but nonetheless.

I am, at the very least, living with kids who have undergone massive trauma which has caused significant psychiatric disturbance. A major symptom of that disturbance is that they spew insults and verbal abuse at the person in closest relationship to them (and that’s usually me). The children I adopted spent some time in Eastern European orphanages, and like many with that experience, they develop very conflicted responses to anyone who takes on the role of a parent.

The modern gurus of “manifesting one’s own reality” love to talk about how positive thinking can reshape even the hardest situations. They tell us to repeat affirmations three times every morning, in order to embody good qualities or to encourage good things to happen. If you repeat that you are loved and wealthy and successful, you will by virtue of “good vibes” attract a loving partner, make more money and have career opportunities showered upon you. Or at least you’ll have more of that sort of thing than you otherwise would have.

Both empirical scientific studies and a great deal of anecdotal evidence show that—mostly—it works. Whether you think positive thoughts, hear positive things from others or even listen to a recording of a stranger saying generalized nice things to you, there are dramatic health, social and sometimes even financial benefits.

Some people believe it works because of magic or “energy.” Others believe that a person with a positive self-image simply attracts positive reactions from others due to psychology. It’s science then… if subtle psychological science.

The weird, rejecting reactions I’m getting could be based on negative thinking. The proponents of manifesting reality say that people who think negative things create “self-fulfilling prophecies.” Maybe I am to blame after all in a round about sort of way. If positive thinking has real beneficial effects, then a person experiencing something negative probably just needs a more positive outlook.

Both scientists who study positive thinking and the affirmation gurus agree that negative thinking can cause detrimental health and social effects. If one is constantly pessimistic or under chronic stress, the immune system is suppressed, one is likely to appear less attractive or competent and one will have less motivation to do necessary things that promote physical, economic and social well-being.

The problem with this theory is that I have always been optimistic, motivated and self-confident. Early on, it might have been partly naiveté, but it was also enthusiasm and sheer belief. That positivity carried me through quite a few scrapes I had no right to glide through unscathed.

When I was a young journalist, I was dedicated and utterly convinced that if anyone could break into the Big Time of international newspaper reporting, I could. Physical setbacks and the industry-wide restructuring after 9/11 finally forced me to change my goals, but I managed not to take it as a personal failure.

When I wanted to have kids and the first warning signs of health problems arose, I sat in the waiting room at the fertility clinic overflowing with gratitude that I was only there briefly, that I wouldn’t have to suffer the long battles I saw so many of the other patients undergoing. When I failed to bear a child to term over a devastating six-year struggle nonetheless, I moved on to adoption with the unquenchable optimism of my fire sign. I knew that despite the perils, I would succeed here.

If solid belief in one’s capability and propensity for good fortune was truly the key to success, I should not have encountered so much hardship on my path. And when I did, instead of giving up or becoming bitter, I took up meditation and spirituality to carry me over troubled waters.

The thing no one wants to admit in positive thinking theory is the impact of negative statements from others. Just as listening to positive things said about you bolsters health and resilience, the reverse also holds true, especially with a lot of repetition.

We see that effect in advertising, which leads to poor body image and a host of health problems, even if one dislikes and distrusts advertising. And there the statements are subtle. It isn’t even saying explicitly, “You’re fat and ugly. Buy this if you want any hope of being worthy.” It merely implies that, and we have seen the social impact of that kind of psychological programming.

Still, it is rare that proponents of the theory of “thought created reality” acknowledge the influence of a consistently negative environment. It’s understandable that this is downplayed. After all, you can sell books and recordings with positive affirmations or even with warnings against negative thinking. You can’t sell a way to avoid a negative or abusive environment. But just as positive thoughts and words create reality, the constant drumbeat of denegration and ostracism can drive a person’s health and fortunes down.

And just as with those recordings of generalized affirmations from strangers, it doesn’t entirely matter if the negativity and verbal abuse comes from a credible source or not. One insult from someone deeply loved and respected could have a big negative impact. But even from a stranger, someone you don’t believe, or in my case, from a traumatized and immature source, a constant stream of insults takes a heavy toll.

A few months ago, someone did a straw poll in an international support group for caregivers of kids with similar disabilities, where verbal abuse of caregivers is one of the top symptoms, along with a need for constant supervision, rages and difficulty with empathy. Most of the parents and caregivers who had children with this type of disability for more than five years had developed serious chronic health problems that had not existed before.

The old childhood adage goes “sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” But that turns out not to be as true as we would like. One word or two or even three certainly shouldn’t break the psyche of a healthy person. Positive thinking, meditation practice and other supports can all mitigate the stress of verbal abuse. But if they are relentless and constant, degrading words will wear away the most solid shield.

It isn’t all or nothing though. I had troubles before the verbal abuse began. Some of my difficulty in breaking into highly competitive field of international journalism stemmed from discrimination because of my disability and because I was a woman and because I wasn’t from a traditional publishing-industry family. But I was treated with respect and appreciation by most people, nonetheless.

My initial health problems were likely just a fluke of genetics. But there was a time when my adopted children were very young that some people close to me began to denigrate me with insults and prejudiced statements about my ability to parent with a vision impairment. This spread to others ridiculing anything I said about current events, because I was a mom with toddlers and no longer a somewhat successful journalist.

When my kids were little I was careful not to expose them to derogatory words, and that made it all the easier to tell when they repeated the words of those who derided me. And because of their trauma and developmental disabilities that pattern of verbal abuse grew and grew. It also grew because of the aura of negativity each successive wave of degradation wrapped around me.

Despite my fiercely positive attitude, this negativity wore away at my mental and spiritual defenses, until my health started to mysteriously deteriorate. Today, I can see the dramatic effects with complete strangers, like those at the clinic.

The automatic response of most people when I speak today is to discount and dismiss at the outset. It doesn’t help that my children’s attachment trauma affects only their closest relationships, and like many children with this kind of history, they put on an angelic mask around others. It is hard for outsiders to believe the verbal abuse is as extreme or as persistent as it is.

Several people working with my kids professionally have become staunch allies over time as they have seen the truth of the situation, through personal experience with us. And yet, there is something around me that picks up negativity, distrust and blame like lint in a dirty clothes drier.

I often feel the exhaustion and sickness creep over me late in the day and I berate myself for my thin skin. They’re just kids. It’s a symptom of disability. They don’t understand half the words they’re repeating. Neurologically, they can't imagine themselves in someone else’s place and understand how they would feel if these vulgar insults were hurled at them day after day.

And yet… it’s like affirmations, except in reverse. I can’t help but be affected.

In my positive thinking, I’m always trying to find some silver lining to bad situations, and throughout all this I have learned a lot. I’ve learned that words can be violence. Words truly can heal and words can harm. I feel powerless at times in the face of so much loss.

But it is worth remembering that words have power. As long as one can speak or write, that power cannot be entirely revoked.

Dismissal, excuses and faux neutrality are at the core of racism and ableism

We consider ourselves to be unbiased, color-blind, tolerant and accepting of all. And yet the accusations of racism and ableism against ordinary, good people in our society never cease.

It brings up defensiveness, anxiety and eventually anger. We don’t see the point.

So what if someone made a slip of the tongue? So what if a group of kids smirked in the general direction of a Native American elder?

Creative Commons image by Igor Spasic

"There are good reasons. The kids were provoked by a weird religious cult that was racist against white people! There you have it. It’s really all reverse discrimination, a bunch of losers whining because they don’t have what it takes to make it in direct competition, so they want affirmative action and cry ‘racism’ or ‘ableism’ at every turn.”

It is rarely said that coherently and in one breath, but it is what a lot of people think.

I know because I used to think essentially that, except for including ableism in it or resenting affirmative action. I was 18 at the time and I was and still am ninety percent blind. I was mildly, quietly resentful of the focus on racial justice at my university. There was almost no mention of ableism back then and I felt that discrimination against people with disabilities was given short shrift.

It was and often still is. But that did not mean that racism was any less of a problem than the students of color said it was. They were exhausted over the endless fight with it and they were far more tired of the topic than I could ever have been. That was the part I didn’t understand.

It took traveling and living in thirty different countries, listening to hundreds of people tell me their stories while I wrote about social justice issues as a journalist and becoming part of an ethnically mixed family to entirely change my views.

Today, I have to say that such dismissal, excuses and faux neutrality, which once had me duped, is not just the mild fringe of racism and ableism, but rather its heart and core.

Two days ago my third-grade daughter came home from school upset. Her hands were shaking while she told me that some boys had been drawing insulting pictures of Asians on the blackboard when the teacher wasn’t in the room. They were laughing and saying derogatory things about Asian people. A few Asian families have moved to our small town in the past few years. Most classes at the school now have an Asian kid or two in them. My daughter’s class doesn’t have an Asian kid, but it does have my daughter, the only person of color in the classroom.

My daughter, who is generally pretty timid, went up to the boys and asked them, “How would you like it if someone laughed at you that way?”

One of the boys turned to her and said, “You of all people had better shut up. You’re the most brown of any of us.”

My daughter went back to her friends. She was upset and one of her friends was sympathetic. My daughter was too afraid to do anything about it or report it. The classroom has an anonymous tip box for the teacher, where the kids can put a note if they have a problem they don’t want to talk to the teacher about personally but want to resolve. My daughter’s friend offered to write a note and put it in the box because my daughter was too afraid.

Then, in the evening I wrote a note to the teacher through the parent-teacher communication system. My daughter’s teacher has generally been wonderful and exceptionally kind.

I had done multicultural sensitivity workshops in the preschool but have since been overwhelmed with work, health problems and family troubles for the last few years. They had wanted me to come back but I just couldn’t do it. It takes several days to plan, gather materials and do the workshops, and I have to take the time off of work. There usually isn’t a budget for any materials, so I have to fund that myself. Obviously I’m doing it as a volunteer, not getting paid.

But I decided it was time to get back into it. I offered the teacher my help in doing some workshops for her class and told her what I had understood from my daughter’s description. I happily anticipated being able to solve the problem with the sympathetic and helpful teacher.

This evening I got the teacher’s reply, And it hit me like a sucker punch. The teacher didn’t dispute anything I said. She said that the note she got in the box completely agreed with the version I recounted. She said she doesn’t think it’s a problem that the boys draw pictures of Chinese people on the board because they draw pictures of the Simpsons as well. “They’re just having fun.”

She didn’t mention what the boy said to my daughter but she said that in general she doesn’t think the incident is important. She said she had heard the children laugh about “Chinese people“ and she doesn’t think that’s a problem. She said maybe I could do a writing workshop for her class.

I was concerned when my daughter told me about it. On the one hand, I wish my children would never have to be exposed to racism, either as a bystander or a target. But I am no longer the naive eighteen-year-old who used to think we lived in a post-racial world. It’s going to happen, and frankly, my concern was tempered by the small, relatively controlled environment of the third-grade classroom and my assumption of the teacher as an ally.

The teacher’s dismissal not only makes the situation many times worse, but it also shows me how much deeper the problem likely runs in the community. Hence my claim that dismissal and excuse aren’t some kind of benevolent mild fringe of prejudice but rather its fortifying center.

There is another scene that haunts me nearly daily from when my children were toddlers. Two family members had been making comments, saying they didn’t think I was “safe with kids” or “could be a safe parent” because of my vision impairment. I had never had a serious safety scare with my kids. My job involved teaching groups of preschool-age children. I had pulled a drowning child out of water four times and none of those was a child I was supposed to be watching at the moment.

I was very physically active and adept with many physical skills, and I was hurt by those comments. I was even more hurt by their practical implications, as I was prohibited from watching my nieces and nephews during my rare trans-Atlantic visits, it impacted my children’s ability to know their cousins.

One of the family members repeated the hurtful comments at the beginning of an extended family camping trip, and I could feel my whole world quaking. But I appealed to the rest of the family and asked for a family meeting. I was sure that with family consensus and the fact of my good track record on my side, I could be rid of these comments and the accompanying stigma.

My family has always been progressive and openly against all prejudice after all. My brothers and I were brought up to be independent and free-thinking. We always spoke out against racism and my vision impairment was rarely mentioned outside of medical necessities. We were the tolerant, accepting, progressive folks. And so I was sure I would be heard.

Instead I learned a bitter lesson.

The extended family meeting decided unanimously that I was overreacting. They agreed that there was no reason to doubt my safety with kids but also declared “neutrality” in the “argument” over it. “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion,” I was told.

My defense of my parenting bona fides was deemed “disruptive to the family,” whereas the prejudiced remarks and discriminatory actions of other members, which actively harmed children in the family, were deemed “a reasonable matter of opinion."

I felt as though I had been frozen inside a block of ice. A week later, I got on a flight back across the Atlantic and the incident was forgotten by most in the family. Water under the bridge.

This was how I learned how much greater harm dismissal does than even the initial prejudice. And I swore I would never again dismiss prejudice when I happened to land on the more privileged side of the equation, as is the case with racism.

That’s why I speak out against it and hold my ground. To truly feel you love people of all colors and shapes is not enough. Even to try to be unbiased and kind is not enough. We must learn to listen when someone says our actions or the actions of those connected to us have caused hurt or appear to come from prejudice.

Certainly, disingenuous accusations have been made somewhere in the world at some time, but believing the vulnerable party is always the better bet. Redress is rarely more than saying with open-hearted sincerity, “I am sorry my words or actions hurt you. What can I do to make sure prejudice isn’t perpetuated?”

Even sincere acknowledgement costs little. The cost of dismissal, on the other hand, is devastating.

ADHD, brain regulation and guided meditation: An actual parenting tip from Arie

I think my readers might tend to cringe, when I mention parenting. No one has told me they do. I’m just guessing because my posts about parenting tend to fall into three categories: 1. how blind people parent, 2. how not to parent and how miserable it can be, or 3. sarcasm and snark.

I really have read dozens of parenting books, actually implemented their methods, found them to work great with 90 percent of kids and occasionally to fail entirely. That has led to a lot of my cynicism.

Creative Commons image by Seattle Municipal Archive

It isn’t that the methods don’t work. If you are a frazzled parent and you don’t know about counting in an ominous tone, time outs, making everything out to be your kid’s choice when it actually means you are in charge, avoiding power struggles and teaching through your own example, by all means, go read the experts. I specifically recommend:

Parenting by Temperament,

Pick Up Your Socks,

Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline,

and depending on your circumstances Attachment in Adoption

However, my posts tend to assume you are like me—a parent who is obsessive enough to research and read books before the kid can even walk (or let’s be honest, before the kid is even born). That’s why I don’t generally go on about the methods in these books, which you should most definitely read and practice.

It’s the five percent of the time when they just plain don’t work that will kill you, cause premature hair loss and end your marriage or partnership. And I usually don’t have much beyond commiseration to offer those of you who have run into that wall with me.

But today I do actually have something worth sharing, a technique I have NOT found in any expert parenting book, which actually worked wonders on my out-of-control, neuro-diverse kid.

Bedtime is often a nightmare for parents of neuro-diverse kids. Some kids don’t run on the same schedule as the school bells or even the sun. Some kids can’t just tell their brains it’s time to calm down and go to sleep. Some kids don’t know what to do with exhaustion and instead of winding down, they amp up.

I have kept a very strict routine with my kids, ever since the day we brought them home. Routine helps. Like a train on rails, my daughter will often stumble from one part to another—with hissing steam and screeching noises but in the end shunted from the teeth-brushing track, to the pajamas track to the story track to the bed track. On a good night, the routine takes only an hour and a half, now that she’s ten.

But not every night is a good night. At age ten, my daughter still has frequent meltdowns and needs the kind of supervision usually reserved for the under-three crowd. By the end of the day, whoever has been dealing with her—and her load of homework assigned by the school in hopes of keeping her somewhere in the ballpark of grade level—is staggering on their feet.

There are nights when after all of it, after the hours of one-on-one attention and the lengthy, carefully designed bedtime routine, she won’t go to sleep. She is up and around the house after bedtime. She wants snacks and she shrieks in protest. Getting her into bed is a literal physical battle that we still win by main force but only just. And then nothing can hold her there and no one can sleep with the racket.

This strife goes on anywhere from one to two hours on those nights and they averaged about once a week, up until recently.

I want to be very clear here about what directly preceded this bit of creative parenting. That is I had two full days and two nights at home alone. My husband took the kids on a skiing trip, returning so drunk with exhaustion out of a snowy night that I shuddered to think of how he managed the two-and-a-half-hour drive.

I sent him straight to bed and prepared to do battle alone, well rested as I was.

I got both kids out of their tight, damp skiing clothes and fed them. My eight-year-old son was blinking and crying, he was so tired. I knew I couldn’t physically handle both, so I got his teeth brushed and let him fall into bed first. He was literally asleep within seconds.

Then I tackled the more difficult kid. My daughter was exhausted too, lashing out randomly and swinging wildly from glee to rage. Her entire body hummed with tension. I could feel it as I helped her undress and brush her teeth. I told her a brief story and settled her down with her audio book in hopes that physical exhaustion would do its magic.

But no such luck. Not that night.

Thirty minutes turned into 40 minutes beyond bedtime and even my two-day reserve of regenerated energy was starting to flag. She wouldn’t even stay in bed to listen to her story and when she was up, she was into everything, requiring constant supervision and making nerve-rattling shrieks every one to two seconds. A hand on her shoulder told me that her body still thrummed with pent-up energy.

On most nights, this would have been the point where I started laying down the law and rolling out consequences, “You can choose. Either you stay up and keep me up and you won’t be able to have audio book tomorrow night or you lay down and relax and go to sleep and you’ll still have audio book tomorrow.” And so forth. It only occasionally works anyway.

Many nights the chaos continues for another hour and finally ends in her being locked in her room until she wears herself out—not a stellar parenting performance.

One of the more helpful things I had recently gleaned from rereading a few of the expert books was to focus on the concept of addressing the child’s deeper need. Clearly, my daughter needed sleep. She was exhausted, but she had no idea how to calm her dis-regulated brain and win some peace.

As a high-strung creative person, I do know what it is like to be exhausted after a long day’s work and to lie in bed with nerves jangling, a thousand thoughts whirling around my brain. Prominent among those thoughts is often the desperate need to sleep, in order to be ready for the challenges and trials of the next day.

So, I asked myself, how I get to sleep when I’m in such a state?

“Badly,” came quickly to mind. But also “quietly.” On such nights, I often lie awake in silence after it is clear that no audio book is going to help. I do relaxation exercises, deep breathing and progressive muscle contraction and release, which make me feel virtuous but don’t make me sleep. And then, more than anything I descend into a childhood fantasy and rehash versions of the adventurous and purposeful life I once dreamed of.

And that usually does help.

With that thought and the understanding that much of my daughter’s difficulty comes from an inability to regulate her own brain and do such things for herself, I came and sat on the edge of her bed and began to make up the fantasy for her.

At first, she was too jittery even to listen or lie down. I had to grab her attention mercilessly. I know what she obsesses over after all—preteen YouTube celebrity girls with shopping infomercials and flaunting conspicuous wealth. There isn’t much beyond kinky sex and hard drugs I would less like my child to be delving into at this age but desperate times call for desperate measures.

“Imagine you’re at the most beautiful park you’ve ever seen with all your friends from school and Everly, Ava and Jojo Siwa are there too, just to see you…”

She stopped jerking around and actually settled back on her pillow, her eyes wide and staring. I could still feel her muscles pulsing with nervous energy through the blanket but at least she was in the actual bed.

“It’s your birthday party,” I continued, “and everyone is there to wish you a happy birthday and play with you in the warm sunshine. There are fun things to climb on and the most beautiful cake you can imagine.”

The way my words came out made me think of those relaxation exercises I had so little luck with. I was originally taught those by an eccentric French teacher in my tiny rural high school in Oregon. She had the five kids in her class, me and four ranch kids, lie on the floor of loose wooden boards and do relaxation exercises.

She had also done guided meditation, which the boys had interspersed with rude comments. I had been cooperative but more because I felt a bit sorry for the teacher than anything else. I never did like guided meditation. I encountered it again at a handful of workshops and events over the years.

It didn’t work for me because my brain is entirely capable of paying full attention to the audio meditation, doing the visualizations and thinking of one or two other complex things at the same time. It isn’t relaxing because it doesn’t overwhelm me enough. It is not that other thoughts intrude on the meditation. They simply occur in a different place and the meditation continues without a hitch.

I did eventually find a form of meditation that consumes enough of my consciousness to work as intended but it requires memorized recitation along with practiced movements. Once the words and movements became automatic to me, the meditation worked because it was difficult enough that it took all the excess brain activity with it.

My daughter’s brain is probably the opposite of mine. That has been a large part of our miscommunication. For me, directing my mental attention to something or doing several mental things at the same time is no problem. The only significant problem is prolonged lack of mental activity.

So, it occurred to me that while guided meditation might be boring and insufficient for me, it might be immensely relaxing and freeing to her. Released from the need to try to control her brain, she could coast to sleep on a ready-made fantasy.

I could tell right away that the fantasy I had constructed for her, while successfully capturing her attention was too exciting to induce sleep. Slowly I shifted the focus of the words, describing more the surrounding natural environment and less of the celebrities and then even gently removing the other people from the picture.

“Your friends step into little boats on the lake and start to drift away over the waves. They float slowly up and down, up and down. And they wave back to you calling, ‘Good bye! We love you! Have a good rest!' As they drift away you sit down under the big oak tree. You can feel the warm, smooth bark on your back. You slide down to feel the soft, dry moss under the tree and lay your head on a soft, moss-covered root.”

I could feel her miraculously relaxing. Even her breath was calming. I included some deep breaths in the story and almost magically she took deep breaths as suggested, something that is usually impossible for her

Finally, I concluded the story with my daughter drifting into sleep in the beautiful park by the lake. The entire guided meditation took only about eight minutes. When I stood up, she made one drowsy noise but subsided again. I left the room and didn’t hear from her for the rest of the night.

Since then I’ve used guided fantasy to calm her several times in situations where she used to be unable to calm. Certainly children are as diverse as different species of animals. Just as this type of meditation didn’t work for me, it may not help many children. But what is universal in the technique is the parenting tool of looking at what the child needs on a deeper level and designing something that fits the child’s specific temperament to reach that goal.

How you get the exhausted child to sleep or the frustrated child to calm enough to complete their homework is not that important. We get stuck on having a specific way that such things should be done. There is a standard way that works pretty well with most kids, but not with all neuro-diverse kids.

“Do what works,” a fellow disability rights activist used to tell me. “Just do what works, regardless of how it looks.”

I hope someday my daughter will be able to learn to use guided meditation tapes to steer her own brain and gain a sense of self mastery. I’ve gained a new respect for a technique I previously rejected as too simplistic and manipulative. We all need different things.

On parenting, as usual, don’t judge other parents and do what works.

How to be a good-enough parent

”This kid was whining, saying his mom’s name over an over again. She couldn’t even get him to stop.”

All it takes is one of those comments, usually about the bad behavior of kids or families with children getting in the way and a flood is unleashed. Whether the person making the original comment was judging the parent or not, most people jump to the conclusion that the child’s parent is to blame.

Parent shaming is more popular than fat shaming. It’s the most socially acceptable form of public shaming in our society.

If you’re like me and not made of dried rawhide, you probably want to avoid it pretty bad. Fortunately, I’ve read just about every parenting book on the market, and according to some flatterers, I have quite a few parenting tricks up my sleeve.

So here is my fool-proof guide to avoiding parent shame and winning the coveted twenty-first-century “good enough” parent medal.

Creative Commons image via Pixabay

Before you start

• One of the main reasons parents are shamed is because of overpopulation. Before you start, consider whether or not you should. Our world is suffering from population explosion and ecological collapse. It could be argued… and in practice will be argued that you are selfish for insisting on procreating your own special genes.

• The easiest way to avoid parent shaming is not to become a parent. Sure, we need to have a next generation to keep the economy going while those virtuous adults who choose not to burden the earth with their off-spring get old, but you might want to leave that up to someone else.

• Another way to avoid the overpopulation and ecology shamers and still be a parent is to adopt. But you’ll be shamed for adopting too. There are stories about adoptive parents exploiting poor people in other countries and buying children. Even though you personally might not have done that, you can be sure that every time the subject of how you adopted kids is brought up, this issue will be rehashed and you’ll be publicly shamed about it.

• If you either already have kids or still think you can have kids and avoid shame too, read on.

The loving foundation

• Most people at least claim that they believe the most important part of parenting is love. It all starts with love and the worst shame any parent can have is to be accused of not loving their kid enough, or heaven forbid, loving one kid more than another. There should be nothing your kid could do that would cause you to stop loving him or her. Well, a school shooting, yeah, then you should stop loving them but other than that. Be unconditionally, unendingly, inexhaustably loving.

• But not too loving. Don’t smother. Don’t be biased in favor of your kid at public events. Lots of shame comes to those parents who cheer too much or protect their kid from criticism or favor their kid over others.

• Be loving but know precisely when your child doesn’t want to be kissed or hugged anymore. Physical affection is essential. Just because your child pulls away or shouts obscenities at you doesn’t mean they’ve grown out of the hugging phase. They still need loving hugs, up until the point that they don’t. You have to know where that invisible line is. Stop hugging too early and you’re cold and creating needy sociopathic monsters. Too late and you’re a pathetic cliche.

• Be loving from a distance when they decide they don’t want to have anything to do with you as young adults. Be loving but have no emotions. Love but don’t expect love back. Be immune to screaming, hateful diatribes. Accept them with equanimity.

Balancing parenting and career

• Provide for all of your child’s physical and emotional needs. Make sure you have a job that pays well, so that your child never has to be exposed to black mold, a leaky roof, a dangerous neighborhood, cheap and unhealthy food, bully-target clothing or unsafe, cheap toys. Financially poor parents are among the first to be shamed everywhere. If you didn’t have good job prospects, you never should have had the off-spring, so buck up and make money.

• Moms, be especially sure to have a prestigious job, Set a good example for your daughters. It is unforgivable to give girls the impression that their options are limited. And boys need to see women as powerful and prestigious providers too. Feminists are great at shaming moms who break ranks and don’t get a career. Half-time and place-holding jobs don’t cut it. You’re sending a message that women are limited by their biological childbearing function.

• Not only must your job be prestigious and keep you out of poverty, it must guarantee a stimulating environment for your child, including expensive educational toys and legos, toddler foreign language and music classes, memberships to sports, arts and crafts clubs and courses, and vacations to exciting places. If your child lags in academics, you clearly missed some of these requirements and it’s all your fault.

• At the same time, you must be present and attentive to your kids pretty much all the time. If doing this while satisfying the points above requires breaking the space-time continuum, tough beans. Nannies are a lazy-parent trick. Parents who rely on nannies for more than emergencies deserve the shaming they routinely get.

• Make sure you are home with your kids for at least the first three years of their lives and that you are there when they leave for school and when they get home. In fact, while exercise is good, not driving your kids to school is shame-worthy if you live within a 200-mile radius of any historical child-kidnapping incident, which defines every inhabited place on the planet, except maybe some remote cabins in Greenland.

• What your kids need more than anything is your constant, reassuring and playful presence. It is the single most important factor in the development of their self-confidence and their educational success. Of course, their day at school needs to be as short as possible and not lengthened by after-school programs, so that you can selfishly work longer hours. They are just children after all and their growing brains cannot handle long days the way adults can. You know who those whispers at pick-up time are about.

Tackling the housework

• If you were thinking that you can game the previous section by working from home or running a business out of your home, this point is specifically for you.

• Embrace the mess. Kids are naturally messy and it is unnatural and harmful to deny them the right to be messy or to force them to live in too sterile an environment (defined as spaces in which more than 50 percent of the floor area is walkable). When social workers enter a home on a child-abuse tip, a too-clean home is one of the red flags they are looking for. Shame on those clean-freak parents!

• Also cleaning does not count as being present and attentive. You need to be playing with your kids, engaging in child-led activities (such as being the evil queen, lady’s made, monster or bad guy running from miniature cops). Cleaning must be kept to a minimum and done only when the kids are asleep, which rules out most home businesses.

• Ensure a hygienic and stimulating environment for your child. Those same social workers are also looking for cluttered and dirty homes. That goes right on the form. Parents who are slobs and have clearly not washed their floor since it was puked on and who have clutter covering a lot of grime will certainly get shamed.

• Also clutter doesn’t count as a stimulating environment. If your kids can’t find their educational toys or the pieces to all those games or the wheels of their lego sets, they won’t get the advantages those toys provide.

The care and feeding of littles

• Ensure that your kids get good nutrition. Processed and prepackaged foods are the worst. Restaurant foods are also highly salted and sugared and full of harmful GMOs, white flour and trans fats. The harm these foods do to a child’s body and brain is truly horrific, including the development of allergies, neurological disorders, obesity, immune disorders and lifelong risks for diabetes and heart disease. (In fact, if your child already has any of those conditions or autism or ADHD, you are pretty much sunk on avoiding parent shame. You will inevitably be told that all they need is a better diet.)

• You really need to cook from scratch. Bake whole-grain breads, but make sure you test for gluten sensitivities and learn to bake the gluten-free kind, if necessary. Note that cooking, like cleaning, doesn’t count as being present and you’ll need to do it while the kids are asleep or at school.

• You’ll also have to satisfy both the vegetarian shamers and the “kids need a lot of protein to grow” shamers, but I’ll leave that one up to you.

• Always keep in mind that sugar and nutrient deficient simple carbohydrates like rice, white bread, noodles and fries must be kept to a minimum. Did I mention that ketchup is mostly sugar? A lot of bad parents around you will be feeding their kids pretty much only these foods—right in front of your kids unless you keep them locked away from society. Because these foods are specifically designed to be attractive and biologically our bodies crave simple carbohydrates, your kids will beg for them. The shame is so easy to slide into.

• And the most important rule about food is that you must never ever force your kids to eat something. You must provide healthy food, while they watch other kids both in person and on TV consume junk food and fast food. But forcing your kids to eat is one of the easiest things to shame parents about.

• Food can never become a point of controversy in your home, or you will be “creating eating disorders.”

Fostering education and self-confidence

• Children are the future and even people who don’t have children will rely on your children’s economic activity when our generation is old, so education is a hugely important part of parenting—the most important part according to many. You must ensure not just adequate but excellent education for your child, if he or she is to have any hope of surviving in the competitive economy these days.

• As a preschooler, your child needs bright, fun, educational classes in foreign languages, brain development, music and art, and you should be present or right outside the door at all times.

• You should carefully choose your child’s school. The only consideration allowed when looking at cost or transportation times is the child’s comfort, not yours or your selfish work schedule. You must get your child into a high-quality school or all the rest is your fault.

• Teachers will expect you to devote several hours to your child’s education every evening, to keep all records and projects in perfect order, to go through backpacks and school materials and replace anything lost in the classroom jumble and to ensure that homework is completed and that the child actually understands what he or she is doing, rather than just parroting answers you gave.

• Remember while average academic success on an assignment gets a C, which implies that most kids will get that kind of grade, you must make sure your kid isn’t one of them. C students can’t expect professional or academic success and parents of C students are lazy slouchers.

• Oh, and never pressure your child about academics. The most important thing you can do for your child’s academic success is to boost his or her self-confidence with lots of praise. Praise your child’s every effort and reward good grades but not to the extent that any other child who is not so successful will suffer low self-confidence. Excessive praise would be as unforgivable as pressuring your child to succeed.

• If they don’t succeed academically, it is your shame, not theirs.

Screen time, consumerism and socialization

• If a child has social problems at school, it is the parent’s fault. Usually the parent has not provided the right kind of or new enough clothing, school supplies, accessories or toys. That or the parent is extreme and doesn’t allow the child to watch the popular entertainment of the day or play the current video games. Such a child cannot keep up with what the other kids are interested in. Kids will often be unpopular or even experience bullying when they come from extreme households that don’t allow these modern influences.

• But of course you shouldn’t allow your child to be indoctrinated by consumerism either. There is nothing worse than a whiny, consumerist brat, constantly demanding this and that and thinking only of themselves. You need to identify the exact amount of toys, clothes and consumer items your kids need to survive socially and yet not become spoiled brats. It’s up to you and shame on you if you miss the mark!

• You’ve no doubt seen the studies about the harmful effects of too much screen time on kids. You must carefully limit your child’s exposure to television, movies, video games and social media. Fifteen to thirty minutes per day might not be harmful but you have got to shut it off after that.

• Also make sure the experience of shutting off the screens isn’t traumatizing to your child. That’s another reason parents get shamed.

• And make sure that the denial of this forbidden fruit doesn’t result in your child being obsessed with screen-based entertainment. One more reason.

Morality without forced religion

• Instead of consumerism and entertainment, make sure your child has a spiritual grounding and a healthy desire to help others. Involve your child in groups and communities which are focused on spiritual values. And above all teach your child right from wrong. This is one of many areas that parents are shamed for neglecting when their children get into trouble.

• But never ever force a religion or spiritual beliefs on your child. Spiritual abuse is real and often turns kids away from spirituality entirely, which is also the parent’s fault. You can take them to a place of worship a couple of times, but don’t force them to go once they are old enough to wish to play video games instead. They will have to develop altruism and ethics without the structures that every previous generation of humanity relied upon for their spiritual development, and it’s your job to make sure they do (without the help of clergy).

The big one: Behavior and discipline

• When it comes to separating right from wrong, it is important that you understand the difference between discipline and punishment. You must ensure that your child is disciplined but never punished. Punishment destroys self-confidence and thus higher brain functions.

• You must teach your child how to behave well, or you will certainly be shamed. But you must never be harsh or punitive. You’ll not only be shamed. You could even be investigated by the authorities, the ultimate shame.

• There are truck-loads of parenting books about how to ensure respectful and responsible behavior without harsh measures. They all rely on the idea that if you approach your child properly, they will inevitably respond reasonably and logically. Any childish lack of logic or other abnormality that causes your child to misbehave despite the expert strategies. reward charts and carefully phrased respectful reminders is probably your fault too, possibly something you did during pregnancy.

• You may remind your children of the rules, ask them to sit in “time out” if they become too upset, ask them to ‘do over” whatever they did with poor behavior and provide positive reinforcement when they do behave well.

• You will be held personally, legally and morally responsible for each and every one of your child’s misdeeds, but you are never allowed to punish them for it. You must be consistent with your rules and guarantee their sanctity, but you must never physically force or confine your child. You can gently remind them of the benefits of following your hard-and-fast, but punitively revoking privileges is no different from punishment.

• You must at all times treat your child with the same respect you accord to well-behaved adults, even while your child is screaming insults, throwing food in your face and poking his or her siblings in the eye for fun. Respect, say the parenting rules of logic and reason, begets respect, and if it doesn’t, you must have done it wrong.

• Don’t be a helicopter parent. Allow your child to take risks, so that they understand natural consequences. Natural consequences are the key part of non-punitive discipline. Instead of your punishments, your child should incur the natural consequences of their actions.

• Of course, you should not allow your child to incur any of the consequences on the following list, or you are a criminally neglectful parent: physical harm, cold, dangerous heat, sunburn, tooth decay, malnutrition, allergic reactions, exposure to dangerous organisms, illness, exposure to dangerous substances, consumption of unhealthy food and its long-term health effects, sleep deprivation, educational failure, social ostracism, emotional trauma or public shame and disgrace. The public shame must be all yours when you fail at parenting. You must protect your child from all of the real consequences while not punishing and not helicoptering.

• When your child does something even mildly annoying in public, you will be shamed. You need to ensure that your child does not annoy others. After all, you cannot impose your life choices to have a child on those who chose not to have children, even if they are counting on the next generation to keep the Social Security system ticking when they’re old. If your child whines, repeats annoying words, pesters you for attention, fidgets, taps things or otherwise is seen or heard in an annoying fashion, it is clearly because you failed at the point on discipline. You must be attentive and stop the annoying behavior one way or another immediately. However, you must remember to never be punitive or harsh. Otherwise you will not only be publicly shamed but reported to the authorities.

Keeping it all together

• If doing all this, while working a sufficiently lucrative job, cooking from scratch and making sure your kids’ homework gets done, sounds tough, have no fear. Today people also shame parents for not doing self-care and taking time for their marriages.

• You must take time for yourself. Go away for at least a couple of days per month with your spouse to ensure your family is rock solid. If your marriage falls apart, your kids will suffer and you’ll never live down the parent shame. (While planning this mandatory self-care, remember what happens to parents who hire nannies and sitters.)

• If you’re stressed out, harried and gray-haired as a parent, your tone of voice will not be loving enough. Get enough sleep after the kids are in bed, the cleaning and cooking that you can’t do when they’re awake is done and the bills are paid. That’s the only way to avoid the shame of being willfully sleep deprived. You’ll need to use your skills with physics to stretch time in order to make time for reading novels, massage and other quality me-time activities. Remember there’s no excuse for not taking care of yourself, so you can be a good-enough parent.

My best tip is that the next time someone parent-shames you, make them read this.

Good luck! You’ll need it.

You don't have to forgive

I’ve been staring at photos of Jemel Roberson for almost two weeks now. Every violent death of innocent people—there have been so many lately—is a tragedy. Every time the police in the US kill a black person for no conceivable reason, other than prejudice and disregard for their lives, it’s an outrage.

But there is something about Roberson that has me by the throat. It grabbed me even before I saw the pictures of him with his nine-month-old baby. It’s the context. He saved people from a mass shooting, yet another one. He did what all those who oppose sensible gun regulations keep saying some good guy with a gun must do. And then they shot him dead.

And I watch black men and women speak about it—calmly, with dignity, with tightly controlled emotions. I don’t think I could talk about it in person without getting upset. Writing has always been easier for me that way.

But of course, I’m not black. I haven’t been forcibly taught to control my emotions or hide outrage to such an extreme. I respect that dignified control. I try to emulate it without much success. Today it makes me think of an incident that happened at my house, which was a lesson on self-control, manners and forgiveness.

My daughter bursts in the front door, breathless and wide-eyed. “They called her “black face!’” she gasps.

Creatuve Commons image via pixabay

My husband just drove up with my daughter and her Nigerian friend from the city, age 8, in the car.

“Who?” I spin around. Our little town is very, very white, something my slightly brown children are all too aware of.

Still gasping out each word, my daughter points out to the road. She says both my son and a boy visiting us from across town ran up to my daughter’s friend when she got out of the car and started taunting her, calling her “black face” and a the local term for “African,” which isn’t supposed to be derogatory but lots of things depend on tone.

I run out the door and find the little girl on the front porch alone. I bring her inside and ask for her take on the story. She is mostly silent, answering with shrugs, nods and shakes of the head with her lips pressed together.

“Is it okay to call you that?” I asked.

Shrug.

“Do kids at school call you that?” I know she goes to school in a mostly white area as well.

Nod.

“Do you like it when they do?”

Shake.

The girl is only eight and we’re on the leading edge of Eastern Europe. We don’t exactly get consciousness raising here, so I can’t assume much. I explain that it isn’t okay for people to call her things she doesn’t like or to make fun of how she looks. As I explain, she slowly relaxes. This is only the second time she’s been away from home over night with white people and she barely got out of the car when this happened.

Justice will wait a moment in favor of therapy. I spend a good long time reassuring her that this is not okay and I won’t let anyone say those things in my house, no matter what. I reassure her that she is beautiful—and she is objectively stunning for an eight-year-old as it so happens. She nods but looks unconvinced.

I do get confirmation that it was my son as well as his friend calling names and I try not to show that this not only deeply embarrasses me but fills me with rage. She doesn’t need my emotions. but my kids are adopted from a racially marginalized group here in Eastern Europe and they have been called “black face” themselves, although they are many shades lighter than the Nigerian girl.

That my son would participate in this… There are no words.

I give her my own apology and send both girls upstairs to play and go out to slay demons.

When I corner the boys outside, they are initially unrepentant—silly, stumbling and giggling. This almost, but not quite, breaks my cool. I want nothing more than to rip them to shreds.

I ask for their side of the story. They attempt to say they were just playing, just kidding, but admit to using the words. The visiting boy admits fairly easily. He isn’t entirely sure these are bad words. My son knows better and it takes longer to get the truth out of him.

I need to cool off to keep from doing something illegal, so I put my son behind one door and the other boy alone on the porch for a time-out. After awhile, my son is more open to talking and he tells all.

The other little boy is frightened and crying. I know that his father just left definitively a couple of weeks ago and that his mother cleans houses. I note with quiet irony that the Nigerian girl’s mother cleans for a living too.

When children do really bad or dangerous things, things parents want to stop in their tracks, there is a conundrum. It isn’t garden-variety naughtiness and with rambunctious kids like mine, they have already seen every acceptable disciplinary strategy in more than a dozen parenting books. Giving them regular discipline (time-out, apologize, revoke video game privileges) seems woefully inadequate and I want to make this eminently memorable.

I talk to my son alone, keeping my fury in check.

“Why did you call her that?”

“It was funny.”

“Has anyone ever called you that?”

Negative head shake.

“Well, actually I happen to know that they did when you were in kindergarten. Lots. It was a big problem. That one teacher…”

Shrug.

I had to bite my tongue. Unlike the kids and some parents, the teacher had not called him “black” or “gypsy” but she had said “those people have trouble in school” and “it’s about the genes, you know.” In the spring she had insisted that he had a contagious skin disease and would be banned from kindergarten for the several weeks it would take to be completely screened by dermatologists. Fortunately, the pediatrician stood up to her. It was ant bites. But all Marik knew was that he had to go to the doctor and the teacher was upset and the doctor said it was silly. As a mother you protect six-year-olds from some of the world’s worst truths, but kids and parents had said those things to him.

“Do you like it when people call you something like that?” I pressed.

Head shake.

Sigh. “Do you think you can give her a really really good apology?”

Nod.

I am far from satisfied, but I go out to talk to the other boy. He’s wiping his tears on his sleeve. This is even harder, though less personally humiliating, since he isn’t my son.

“Have you ever seen an African person before?” We essentially don’t have any local people of African origin here, so this is more or less how I phrase it.

“No.”

Much as I thought. “Why did you call her those words and laugh at her?”

Shrug. “I don’t know.”

“Have you heard other people use those words about African people or other people with brown skin?”

“Yeah.”

“I understand that you heard older kids and grownups use those words. That still doesn’t mean they are okay. It is not okay to call people names and I will never allow those kinds of words at my house. Even outside my house, if you use them, you won’t be welcome at my house. Do you understand me?”

Slight nod.

“Do you think you can say you’re sorry in a really nice way?”

“She’s black. It’s true.”

I’m momentarily at a loss for words. He’s only seven. I didn’t expect much resistance, though I didn’t have any great hopes of making a lasting impression on him either.

I again have to leave in order to avoid coming down like a ton of bricks on someone else’s kid.

I leave the boys in separate confinement for awhile yet. Then I bring them both out to the porch. I tell them that they need to apologize extremely well or my son’s friend will have to go home immediately. I know his single mother is looking forward to a day of rest with him here, but that’s just tough. He will go home if he is recalcitrant on this one.

Before I’m finished the two have started giggling again but I reiterate the consequences and they start to get serious, when they realize I mean it. I have my phone out, ready to make the call.

They start crying and we discuss more. My son’s friend unexpectedly states that kids at school do call my son those names. My son argues that it is mostly only one kid. Obviously he wasn’t telling the full truth before. I discuss with them the ridiculous nature of calling someone with slightly tan skin “black” and point out that the Nigerian girl is also not technically black in color, but more like dark brown. I reiterate that these differences don’t matter and it it is not okay to laugh at someone’s appearance anyway.

Slowly they both appear a bit more genuinely contrite. Finally, I leave them to plan their profuse apology and go upstairs to see the girls again.

I ask the Nigerian girl if she would come down, when she isn’t busy. Overly polite child that she is, she jumps up immediately to go downstairs. I ask her if she would be willing to listen to the boys’ apology. She agrees.

We join the boys outside, and I reiterate for everyone that it isn’t okay to call people names or laugh at anyone’s appearance or background. The boys actually do a pretty good job of apologizing and I almost ask, “Do you forgive them?” But I bite my tongue again.

She’s standing there with her head high, looking down on them from the top step of the porch, while they stand on the grass in the deepening dusk. I think on the fact that white people have probably never apologized to her for racism before. It will be a rarity in her future as well, if she ever gets another such apology, and the racism isn’t going to stop.

The handling of this moment is as crucial as any other step I’ve taken in resolving this deceptively childish conflict.

“You don’t have to forgive them,” I tell her. “They can handle it themselves. But you can forgive them if it makes you feel any better.”

She takes a moment more to look down on them and then says with the most impeccable manners I could wish my kids had, “I forgive you. Thank you for your apology.”

Then she turns and goes back to playing upstairs.

I let the boys come in the house and mostly things continue well, except that I discover that it is the Nigerian girl’s birthday. They don’t do birthday parties in her family, so no one mentioned it when we invited her. I decide this is a perfect opportunity to make the rest of the day all about her.

The boys have to work off a bit of their naughtiness by cleaning the floor. I whip together the world’s fastest chocolate cake and make the boys wrap a gift. The birthday girl is wide-eyed and stunned when she comes downstairs again to our impromptu decorations and party. She says she’s seen birthday parties on TV and she does everything just like in the movies, closing her eyes and putting on a dramatic show of making a wish and blowing out the candles.

In the middle of eating the cake, the seven-year-old who had never seen a black person up close before blurts, “At least you don’t have to worry about getting chocolate on your face, since…”:

I growl his name and fix him with a death-glare across the table. He gulps and wisely shuts up.

She doesn’t appear to notice.

By the time I tuck all four kids into bed, I am aching and exhausted. I feel like I have been literally fighting a war. I don’t know if I’ve won anything this day and I am sure that tomorrow and every single day we’ll still be fighting it.

How does this relate to the case of Jemel Roberson exactly? Well, it isn’t just that case of course. But I would say to all the black people who hurt inside or out because of this lethal and crushing racism we are living with, “Thank you for your calm and your manners and your endless attempts to live in peace with us. You do not have to forgive white people, even when we apologize. We can live with not being forgiven. What we need is to learn and remember and do better in the future.”

The first reason for outrage: Living with climate change

Your grown children scrape at the rock-hard ground with salvaged hand tools, trying to turn the baked mud. They have realized their dreams and they have professional careers but today—in 2050—everyone has to keep a garden to supplement the limited food they can buy at exorbitant prices.

A torrential flood came through last winter and took away what was left of the homes built in better times. But the water didn’t stay.

When the three-day storm was spent, all that was left was stinking mud on everything—tainted with the bodies of people and animals and with chemical spills. Now the drought has returned with a vengeance. It hasn’t rained in weeks and early spring looks like late summer used to look, at least in the sky.

Creative Commons by Asia Development Bank

There are no trees left. Those were cut long ago for fires and to build makeshift shelters when houses were destroyed by winter floods and summer brush fires. What is left are mostly the hardier sort of weeds. Even if they can plant the seeds they have left, your children won’t see much of a harvest. Just like last year, the insects are the only life that is flourishing and they swarm in clouds that can make breathing difficult on some days.

Even with their career jobs, they need this garden. Your youngest grandchildren—which you may well not be alive to meet, if you were in your twenties in 2018—sit listlessly in the dust beside the garden. The low-nutrient diet and grinding stress of survival takes its toll on both mind and body, especially for the youngest ones. They can barely muster the energy to cry, let alone play. They are wracked by sicknesses that your generation believed banished from your wealthy country forever.

They are still better off than the wretches your children see along the road outside, refugees from the south. Long lines of refugees were something you saw on the news. They are now something your children and grandchildren see on their doorstep and all along the high fences your children built to protect their scrubby garden.

The lines of people trudging by never end and they look like walking skeletons. They don’t beg as much as they used to. By now they know that your children don’t have enough for their own and they go on, hoping against all the facts to find a place with some rain… but not too much rain.

This is what famine and drought look like and it’s what life will likely resemble in 2050 in the US Midwest and Southern Europe, if carbon emissions from coal, gas or oil burning and factory farming continue apace. According to the recent report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this is the kind of impact we can expect from a 2°C rise in global average temperature, a level we’ll reach by around 2050 if we continue as we are and by 2100 even if we implement the more widely accepted agreements on emissions reduction.

Creative Commons image by Tim J. Keegan

A 2°C temperature rise doesn’t sound bad to many people in northern climates. The problem is that it is an average and it isn’t equally distributed. It also is a lot more drastic than it sounds for the earth’s climate. Even such a small-sounding temperature change would mean widespread drought.

Extreme weather events would hit temperate areas the way they are now hitting desert areas such as the Middle East. The areas hit today will become uninhabitable.

Still many people don’t register the realities of such impacts. Scientists often call out people who predict the collapse of civilization due to climate change. A 2°C temperature rise may be bad but it would probably not mean the complete destruction of modern industrial and consumer society. And most people in wealthy countries will still live, just poorer and shorter lives.

Scientists deal in probabilities and theories. They aren't supposed to look at impacts personally or allow emotion in. That prevents them from extrapolating out what their data would actually mean for their own family as I have done here. And even so, many climate scientists are suffering from clinical levels of anxiety and depression due to their understanding of what is coming and the lack of response from the wider population or the outright denial of many in positions with the power to change it.

If you are over thirty and your children are already half grown, this may be the fate in store for your grandchildren and great grandchildren instead. But he fact still remains, that this is the life we are creating. On paper the predictions don’t sound that bad for people in temperate climates. Most predictions focus on the fact that some more vulnerable areas which are already very hot will become uninhabitable either by flooding or extreme drought. Many people in the equatorial countries may die outright.

But those countries are far from the English-speaking world. And the predictions scientists put forward about us sound dry and theoretical. “Decreases in crop yields, increases in pest infestations and extreme weather events, increases in disease, spreading drought in certain areas and increases in coastal flooding.”

If you have never been bothered by any of these things and do not currently raise food from the land, it all sounds distant and like someone else’s problem. Many people assume it will simply mean that food is more expensive. But I have spent a fair amount of time in countries where this type of weather is common today, the countries likely to be hit hardest and earliest by climate change, such as Bangladesh. The weather that scientists predict for much of the American west and the Midwest and for large parts of Central Europe is the weather these vulnerable places already have and their dismal economic realities may be a crystal ball in which we can see our own future.

Creative Commons image by Tavis Ford

Food is likely to become so expensive that many more people will have to be engaged in growing or attempting to grow food, even if it is only to supplement what they can buy.

The lackadaisical view of climate change so common in society today isn’t really surprising. On the one hand, we have dry predictions which give little indication of the wrenching realities they factually describe.

On the other hand, there are the more fictionalized predictions of the collapse of civilization as we know it and the death of whole swaths of the population.

One sounds incremental and abstract. The other is easy to dismiss as unrealistic and if it were actually likely, many people would decide it’s better to live with all comforts now than struggle to be one of the few miserable survivors in such a world. Better to die quickly is the trendy, distanced logic, so why try to fight it if we’re doomed anyway?

But neither of these is a real depiction of what climate change means for us and our families. The reality isn’t total annihilation and neither is it merely a matter of higher prices. It means a lot of real hardship and heartbreak. Life will go on unless global average temperatures reach the 4°-5°C-above-pre-industrial-temperatures range. But it will be a much harder life than it needs to be.

Climate change is currently the umpteenth reason for outrage. Many of us are so exhausted by poverty, discrimination, racism, sexual assault, war, ableism, denial of health care, general bullying and immediate environmental pollution that climate change gets put on the back burner or at least low on the activist’s list of grievances.

It should be the first reason for outrage and the rallying cry. Climate change effects everyone and it is the thing that across all underprivileged groups we have contributed to least but which harms us most. It is caused only slightly by individual actions and more by corporations and heavy industry. It is the most essential injustice and those who will suffer most from it are those who have no voice at all—small children and those not yet born.

At the new moon, I will paint another word picture about climate change—this time about the sort of effort and lifestyle it would take to prevent this level of climate change. Outrage is necessary and so is hope.