Month: April 2018

ODE TO A HERO WHO JUST HAPPENS TO BE MY WIFE

Melissa Nelson is retiring this week as director of collective bargaining for The NewsGuild-CWA, the union representing media employees and other workers. In the infamous words of Joe Biden – as cleansed by the AP – that’s a big f—ing deal. So big, in fact, that this space is giving a temporary pass to the inanity and profanity of national politics, in order to pay tribute to a genuine hero.

So as to avoid being Sean Hannityized, let me disclose a potential conflict of interest: I have a spousal relationship with Melissa. But I also spent 31 years working for the same union, and copiously followed her amazing journey, drawing more and more awe with every step she took. In other words, I’m an expert witness. This is my testimony:

When I met her, Melissa was an advertising artist at the Hearst paper in Albany, NY. The labor movement really needs to build a monument to the Hearst Corporation. If that outfit hadn’t paid its women artists considerably less than their male counterparts, the NewsGuild would be without one of its greatest legends. Worse, I would still be single. Fortunately, the injustice of pay inequity ignited a passion in Melissa that propelled her into the calling of union activism. It was an all-consuming tour of duty that went from rank-and-file agitator, to local president, to full-time Guild staffer in Philadelphia, to directing the national union’s collective bargaining operation in Washington, DC.

That last sentence, particularly for those who don’t know her, is opaquely encyclopedic. Every union has activists and staff. What Melissa brought to the table was a unique package of style, substance, class, and grace, all served with a special sauce of forceful and respectful advocacy.

Melissa Nelson teaches new Guild leaders about collective bargaining.

To me, Melissa’s breakout moment came about 25 years ago. This is when I knew for sure that she was destined to play a key leadership role in the union. It started as an ordinary exchange at the bargaining table. She was making a pitch for one of our proposals. A boorish, over-testosteroned management guy, accustomed to the centuries-old rooster game of one-upmanship through interruption, tried to cut her off. Melissa was in mid-sentence when he flashed a sneering smirk and said, “Well, that isn’t true . . . “ Without skipping a beat, Melissa leaned across the table to face her adversary. In a quiet, calm-but stern voice, she said, “No, no, no. Do not interrupt me. I wasn’t finished. You need to listen to what I am saying, and then it will be your turn to talk.”

I braced myself for a major explosion. I had verbally dueled with this troll many times and knew he was not easily quieted. There was a momentary silence, the two of them leaning deeply into their respective sides of the table, just staring at each other. Finally, the management guy spoke, using a tone that reflected a meekness and contrition I’d have sworn was not in him: “I’m sorry, Melissa, please continue.” Damn! I later asked the troll about the exchange. He called it a “flashback to elementary school”, adding that he almost said, “Yes, teacher.” It was an amazing moment.

The anecdote perfectly captures Melissa and her rare and immensely effective communication style, one that is firm, assertive and honest, yet delivered totally free of threat or hostility. The volume is low, the tone pleasant, and the verbiage tight and succinct. The result is a message laced with respect, thus inviting respect in return. When it comes to managing conflict, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Melissa has spent decades using that style to make life better for so many people: victims of sexual harassment, unequal pay, unjust discipline, discrimination and mistreatment; employees in search of better pay and working conditions, dignity and respect. Her voice, so carefully crafted in her estimable manner, has carried with it all the voices of the workers she represents.

But that’s not all, not by a long shot. Melissa’s real gift – her legacy – to this union is her uncanny ability to connect with members, local leaders and staff in a way that amps them up, makes them stronger, better, more confident. She has spent years perpetually plugged into the lives of Guild activists from coast to coast. She knows their strengths and weaknesses, the content of their contracts, their management’s every quirk and idiosyncrasy. She also knows the names and ages of their children, their family vacation plans and how their parents are doing. To her, leadership is, at its core, relational.

Somehow, without the use of a single algorithm, Melissa has spent the past decade using all of that instinctively processed data to guide, mentor and advise an entire national union, one person at a time. We’re in the middle of dinner, and someone from Kenosha calls in a panic over contract negotiations. Or a bankruptcy in Boston. Or more massive layoffs in Denver. Or the sale of the paper in Akron. And in each case, I smile with wonder and pride as Melissa calmly and confidently listens, reassures, offers needed information and counsel, and then guides the caller to land the plane safely. Each time that happens, the union grows a little stronger because the folks on the other end of those phone calls are learning and building confidence, secure in the knowledge that they are not alone.

This has not happened without taking a toll on Melissa. The stress has been enormous, and its chief cause has been the exponential increase in the demand for help, and an insufficient number of hours in a day to provide it. As a result, her voicemail and email inboxes are perpetually jammed by cries for help. How do you triage all that? Is a layoff more critical than a bankruptcy? Which do you take first, the pay cuts call or the pension freeze? This has been her life. And despite the stress, it has brought her enormous satisfaction from knowing that she has made a difference.

Through it all, Melissa never once unplugged – not from her phone, her email, or any other form of engagement. She is constitutionally incapable of disconnecting. She knew that most of the people reaching out to her had workloads every bit as hectic as her own. They were counting on her. There is no way she wouldn’t be there for them. That’s because Melissa saw her work, not as a job, but as part of a movement. For the movement to succeed, leaders need to keep on moving. And that’s just what she did. As a result, she can retire now fully assured that the movement she nourished with every ounce of energy she had will keep right on moving. After all, those movers learned from the best.

ONE TOKE OVER THE RED LINE, SWEET SYRIA

If the first casualty of war is truth, surely the second must be moral clarity. In the case of Syria’s civil war, both Presidents Obama and Trump, men with wildly disparate world views, drew the same “red line” of morality. Here’s their shared ethical standard: Killing and maiming thousands of noncombatant men, women and children with guns, bombs and explosives is acceptable, but if chemical weapons are used to accomplish the same results, there will be hell to pay.

Three times now in recent years, we’ve gone through the to-bomb-or-not-to-bomb drama of responding to Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad’s decision to leap over that red line. The first was in 2013 when Obama pushed for a missile attack to punish Assad for using chemical weapons. Congress, however, declined to authorize the bombing. There were similar gas attacks in 2017 and earlier this month. On both occasions, Trump sent the bombs dropping on Syrian military facilities as a way of denouncing the regime’s “evil and despicable” use of chemical warfare. Both actions won him more bipartisan praise than anything he has done in office.

Most of the news coverage these past few days has focused on the narrow issue of whether Trump’s punitive air attacks were effective. The general consensus of military leaders is that Saturday’s bombing might have put a dent in Assad’s chemical arsenal, but is unlikely to hold the regime back from making and using new ones. Scant attention has been given to the broader matter of whether we are drawing the red line in the right place. In other words, do we really want a moral imperative that limits evil to one category of weapons? Is it a greater wrong to kill civilians with gas than it is to shoot or bomb them to death?

What started as anti-government protests seven years ago, quickly evolved into full scale civil war in Syria. There is no end in sight. More than a half million people have died, and the vast majority of them were civilians, including tens of thousands of young children. Yet, it’s only the chemical attacks that show up on Trump’s outrage meter or Twitter feed. In the most recent incident, 70 civilians died from Assad’s use of what is believed to have been sarin, a chemical nerve agent that can cause agonizing death in minutes.

Here’s what Trump said in justifying the retaliatory bombing: “The evil and the despicable attack left mothers and fathers, infants and children thrashing in pain and gasping for air. These are not the actions of a man. They are the crimes of a monster instead.” In calling Assad a monster, Trump was uncharacteristically without hyperbolae. Yet, the president’s moral offense was aimed at the specific method of the dictator’s mass murder, not the broader act of having spent seven years killing his own people.

There is, of course, a case to be made that chemical weapons are more evil than their conventional counterparts. As Obama noted in 2013, the weaponization of poisonous gases conjures up dark moments of thousands of American GIs dying from mustard gas in World War I and, of course, the Nazis’ use of gas in the Holocaust during World War II. The civilized countries of the world have agreed not to use chemical weapons. In arguing for a punitive strike after Assad’s 2013 chemical attack, Obama said such action would reinforce the taboo of chemical warfare.

Yet, in the context of this ongoing Syrian massacre, limiting our moral outrage to the relatively small number of deaths caused by chemical weapons is a de facto acceptance of the other 500,000 murders at the hands of weapons just as lethal and painful as gas. NPR reported that the regime has used crude but deadly barrel bombs almost exclusively on civilians. An international team of scientists found that 97 percent of the deaths from these devices have been noncombatants, mostly women and children. Another report found that at least 14,000 children have been killed in Syria by snipers, machine guns, missiles, grenades, roadside bombs and aerial bombs. Another 1,000 children have been executed and more than 100 have been tortured and then executed. None of those atrocities, however, are included in our government’s outrage and punitive air strike over Assad’s use of chemical weapons.

Leaving the battlefield for a moment, let’s apply the same moral relativism to a pair of terrorist attacks. In 1995, a religious cult used sarin to kill 12 people on the Tokyo subway. In 2005, terrorists set off bombs in the London subway, killing 52 and injuring more than 700. Are we really prepared to view the latter as more morally acceptable than the former? Steve Johnson, an academic expert on chemical weapons, says he “can understand why (chemical warfare) feels emotive to us – it is insidious, there is no shelter, it is particularly effective on the young, elderly, and frail, and can be a violent and excruciating death. When one breaks it down ethically, though, it seems impossible to say that it is more acceptable to kill 100 people with explosives than with nerve agent.”

This is much more than a mere intellectual exercise in moral philosophy. It’s about adopting a coherent and meaningful standard with respect to regimes that murder their own people. Trump’s Tweetstorm about the evil of killing children with chemical weapons, followed by tough talk and a quick act of cruise missile theater, does absolutely nothing to address the daily atrocities faced by the Syrian people. As George Washington University professor Stephen Briddle put it, “That’s not a Syria strategy. It’s a psychodrama.”

Although Trump boasted that his response to Assad’s chemical weaponry reflected his “concern for humanity,” that concern is no larger than a pin prick. By the end of Obama’s presidency, the U.S. welcomed 15,479 refugees from Syria into the country. These were men, women and children, literally fleeing for their lives. Under Trump’s travel ban, however, the door slammed shut for Syrian refugees. So much for humanity. A moral code that rejects chemical weapons but gives a dictator a pass at killing by any other means – and offers no safe shelter to his victims – is anything but moral.

SAVING OUR DEMOCRACY THROUGH TRUMP OBSESSION

In case you haven’t noticed, we are obsessed with Donald Trump. He gets far more news coverage than any of his predecessors. We incessantly talk, tweet, post and blog about him. Late night and early morning talk shows digest the Donald’s every move. Four films at this year’s Sundance Festival were about Trump. Psychotherapists are treating patients for “Trump Anxiety Disorder”. Drained by the antics of our 45th president, people are unplugging from social media just to clear their heads.

So, in the vernacular of Brokeback Mountain, why can’t we quit him? What sense does it make to fixate on someone we know will fill our hearts with angst, agony and anger? Why not go on a lean Trump diet of a morsel or two every now and then?

The answer is that Donald J. Trump poses a lethal threat to the core principles of our 242-year-old democracy. Ignoring the elephant in the room doesn’t mean he’s not there. We have every reason to be anxious and angry. Yet, our deliverance from this morass will come from continued vigilance, not escapist denial. And come it must, for our very way of life is at stake.

If you think that last sentence was mere hyperbole, then consider what this president said Monday night in response to a warrant authorizing the search of his attorney’s office: “It’s an attack on our country . . . ; it’s an attack on what we all stand for.” Of course, “what we all stand for” is a nation of laws. The search warrant was sought through those very laws, by top U.S. Justice Department officials appointed by Trump. It was also authorized by a federal judge, representing a separate branch of government. It was as American as apple pie. Yet the president of the United States saw the search as treason simply because it might have adverse consequences for him. Only in an autocracy ruled by a strongman tyrant would that premise make sense.

Therein lies the problem. Trump approaches the presidency as if our constitutional democracy doesn’t exist. He may think he has a bigger nuclear button than his North Korean counterpart, but what the Donald really wants is Kim Jong-il’s title: Supreme Leader. Trump is perpetually mystified and profoundly frustrated with the parliamentary ways of Congress. And he has no time whatsoever for the annoying intrusion of a judiciary he can’t control. As he has said so many times, “I alone” can fix the country’s problems. If only he could find a way to rule the kingdom by himself.

And that is precisely why it is so important for us not to turn our backs on this presidency. Two Harvard professors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, wrote a book called How Democracies Die. They cited four markers, all of which have Trump written all over them: They are:

1. Rejecting or showing weak commitment to democratic rule.
2. Denying the legitimacy of political opponents.
3. Encouraging or tolerating violence.
4. A readiness to stifle or limit civil liberties of opponents, including media.

Hanna Arendt, a noted political philosopher of the Twentieth Century, wrote about the characteristics of totalitarianism more than 80 years ago. The ideal subject for totalitarian rule, Arendt wrote, “is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exists.” According to the Washington Post fact checker, Trump made more than 2,000 false or misleading statements during his first 355 days in office. He has relentlessly gone after the news media, insisting that everything they publish or broadcast is “fake news.” Polls show that a substantial portion of his base believes him.

If Donald Trump ruled this country in the authoritarian style he craves, there would be a total Muslim ban, a complete rollback of LGBTQ rights, a wall around Mexico, eviction from the country of 800,000 young immigrants brought here as children, deportation of millions more, all without due process. To one extent or another, those objectives have either been scaled back or blocked by the courts, or by the actions or inactions of Congress. So far, our democracy is holding, even against the will of a man determined to undermine it.

Yes, the news media has covered Trump more extensively than any other president. And, yes, most of the coverage has been negative. But it’s negative in the same sense that a story about a devastating hurricane is negative. By definition, news is an aberration, something unexpected or contrary to custom and tradition. When Trump, on almost a daily basis, issues statements that are patently false, that’s news. When the president calls impoverished African countries “shitholes”, that’s news. When he says one thing and then does the complete opposite, that’s news. When he repeatedly demeans and insults other governmental leaders, including members of his own cabinet, that’s news.

At this very moment, according to news reports, we are on the verge of a constitutional crisis. Trump wants to fire Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and other Justice Department officials in an attempt to shut down the Russian election interference investigation. So far, his own advisors and other Republican leaders have held him back. But, as we know, Trump doesn’t take kindly to advice that runs contrary to his impulse.

Clearly, our democracy is facing more peril than it has in at least 50 years. Now is the time for more Trump news, not less. Now is the time, for us to tune in, not out. A recent poll showed that one in five Americans have participated in protests against Trump. That’s just the vigilance we need to protect our democracy. After all, that is really, in the president’s words, “what we all stand for”.