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    ‘It’s a crisis’: US summer pools closed or cut back amid lifeguard shortage

    ‘It’s a crisis’: US summer pools closed or cut back amid lifeguard shortageOfficials say not enough lifeguards to open pools safely but critics say decision to cut services during Covid has had knock-on effect A nationwide shortage of lifeguards is forcing local pools across the US to close for the summer, according to reports.In major cities such as New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and elsewhere, public pools are reducing their hours of operation, or shutting down entirely amid an apparent shortage of lifeguards.A third of pools in the US will be affected by staff shortages, according to the American Lifeguard Association, the BBC reported. Experts estimate that the number of affected pools could increase to half by September.“The shortage is real,” lifeguard Motti Eliyahu said to BBC.“It is a crisis,” the director of health and safety at the American Lifeguard Association, Bernard Fisher, added.With shortages are already inhibiting summer swimming, cities are managing in different ways.Weekend warriors: why exercise doesn’t have to be regular to be good for youRead moreNew Orleans city officials said last month that the municipal government would only open five of its 15 season pools, with plans to open up three additional pools if the city managed to recruit more lifeguards, the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate reported.Even as temperatures in Chicago reached 100F (38C) last month, the city kept its pools shut down past the usual 24 June opening date, because it said it was not able to recruit sufficient lifeguards.City officials reassigned lifeguards from local beaches to open up some of the pools on 5 July, NBC Chicago reported.Some have also blamed the lifeguard shortage in Chicago on the mishandling of sexual assault and harassment complaints within the city’s lifeguard program, which led to an investigation and the resignation of several park district employees last year, according to Block Club City Chicago.New York officials announced on Wednesday that they would be increasing the starting pay for lifeguards and developing a training program to staff the city’s pools, which have been largely empty amid the staffing shortages, reported NBC New York. New York has roughly half the number of lifeguards than prior to the pandemic.Experts say that although concerns about a shortage of lifeguards have persisted for years, the Covid pandemic and issues in the labor market are exacerbating the existing problem.YMCA water safety expert Lindsay Mondick said a lack of available US student visas has worsened the shortage, because many lifeguards in the country are foreign students. The slow release of more visas is having only limited effect on the staffing shortages.“We have been concerned about this potential lifeguard shortage for a number of years now,” Mondick said to BBC. “But I would say that Covid and the current tight labor market has really exacerbated this issue.”Fisher, of the lifeguard association, also said simply increasing wages may not solve staffing issues because not enough people are training to be lifeguards.Fisher said he fears that if cities cannot find ways to recruit more trained lifeguards and open up local pools, people may seek out unmonitored and possibly more dangerous swimming options in order to taste relief from the summer heat.“It’s such a crisis that if we don’t start resolving it this year, it’s going to be even worse next year, which I just can’t imagine,” Fisher said to BBC.TopicsUS newsSwimmingFitnessUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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    ‘I will never be against the second amendment’: Run the Jewels’ Killer Mike on rap, racism and gun control

    Interview‘I will never be against the second amendment’: Run the Jewels’ Killer Mike on rap, racism and gun controlAmmar Kalia After almost a decade of working alongside El-P, the rapper is releasing a solo single. He talks about the chaos and loss that inspired it, his friendship with Bernie Sanders and the ‘racist’ twisting of lyrics‘I definitely lead a non-politician life; I smoke weed and I go to strip clubs with my wife,” the rapper Killer Mike says with a laugh. “But I care about people and I have a duty to my community. I am not an angry old man – I am a participator.” As if to demonstrate at least some of that, he lights a blunt.As a musician and an activist, Killer Mike has long balanced pleasure and responsibility. Now 47, he first came to the world’s attention in the early 2000s, when he featured on several tracks with the Atlanta hip-hop duo Outkast before launching a solo career.Since 2013, he has been half of Run the Jewels alongside the New York rapper El-P. Their music meanders between hedonism and social exposition, while their live shows are as notorious for their ecstatic mosh pits as they are for their lyrical reflections on police brutality, racism and social injustice.Michael Render, as he is legally known, is now releasing his first solo material in a decade, with the track Run testing the waters for a possible larger solo project. Over a fanfare of horns and a clattering mid-tempo beat, he entreats his Black listeners to persist amid the chaos. “All I know is keep going / you gotta run,” he raps, playing with the meanings of running from danger, running for office or simply moving forwards.“I say that ‘the race for freedom ain’t won / you gotta run’,” he tells me, “because as Black people in America we have to be resilient. We have overcome and we shall continue to do so.”On a video call from his home in Atlanta, Georgia, Render is by turns eloquent and mischievous as he talks about his history of political activism. He has been close to the leftwing senator Bernie Sanders ever since they shared a meal at the Atlanta soul food restaurant Busy Bee Cafe in 2015, and he backed Sanders’ presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020. Their unlikely friendship has spawned hundreds of memes, with Sanders, for example, shaping his hands into the Run the Jewels symbol of a gun pointed at a closed fist, or asking Render if he should call him “Mike or Killer Mike?”. “It was just a conversation between two angry radical guys, one 74 and white, one 40 and Black, finding common ground,” Render has said of that first encounter.His emotive speeches at Sanders rallies are almost as famous as his music. Addressing the roaring crowd in North Carolina in 2019, he said: “When you go to that [voting] booth next year, I need you to carry the memory of this room. Black, white, straight, gay, male, female, we are together. We are united. We will not wait four more years.”His impassioned words in the wake of police killings in the US have also gone viral. In 2015, during a show in Ferguson, Missouri, a fan-filmed video showed Render raging at the grand jury who had acquitted the officer who had killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, then pleading for the safety of his four children, who range in age from 15 to 27. In the riots that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, he told the public to fortify their homes and to “plot, plan, strategise, mobilise and organise” to dismantle the systemic structures of racism. “It is time to beat up prosecutors you don’t like at the voting booth,” he said. “It is time to hold mayoral offices accountable, and chiefs and deputy chiefs.”It must be exhausting having to publicly advocate for basic rights year after year, I tell him. “It’s a continuation of the work,” he says calmly. “My grandmother did the work of taking care of our neighbours without publicity, and my grandfather did, too – he would go fishing and always give half of his catch to other people, for instance. I don’t see it as making me better. I don’t see it as being driven by celebrity guilt either. I was told by my elders to make sure that the people who are suffering in my community are relieved by me. These are the principles that I operate with.”He believes that Sanders shares his desire for social justice. “I will always speak to him because I believe he gives a fuck beyond his own personal chequebook. I honestly believe he is a continuation of great thinkers like [former slave and abolitionist] Frederick Douglass and [trade unionist] Eugene V Debs – a continuation of people who fought their ass off for the betterment of the salt-of-the-earth, everyday American.“Part of my responsibility is to make sure that people who are doing the work on a weekly and daily basis have a platform to push an agenda that’s helpful. No matter if you’re a Black person working a blue-collar job, or if you’re one of the educated elite bourgeoisie, you have a responsibility to push the line.”Sometimes, however, he pushes the line in a direction that many will find objectionable. In 2018, during nationwide protests after the deadliest high school shooting in US history, he gave an interview to the National Rifle Association supporting the second amendment right to bear arms. “You’re a lackey of the progressive movement,” he told leftwingers in favour of gun control, “because you’ve never disagreed with the people who tell you what to do.” He later apologised for the interview’s timing, but his stance on gun ownership remains unchanged. “I will never be against the second amendment,” he says. “There’s no way that someone who represents a community that are only 60-odd years out of an apartheid should be willing to give a weapon back to the government, as the police choke you to death in the street and people just watch and film.”The son of a policeman and a florist, Render is not without sympathy for the police. He has said his father told him and his five sisters not to follow in his footsteps because the job was “too dangerous”. Still, Render believes police reform is necessary and possible. “I have not seen a will to get rid of police as much as I’ve seen a want for police to be from the communities they’re policing and to be fair, rather than abusers of power,” he says. “We should be supporting the Police Athletic Leagues that deal with our young boys in particular before any trouble happens, more than we should be giving the police more rifles and bulletproof vests. The connection with the community is key.”These leagues are local organisations founded by precincts to mentor young people and hopefully keep them off the streets. Render wasn’t a member as he grew up in the majority-Black Adamsville neighbourhood of Atlanta, but he managed to find his own community connections. “All my heroes and villains were based on character, not colour, as everyone looked like me in my home town,” he says. “I grew up with a real sense of confidence that I could do well, that even if there’s a few more speed bumps for me, I cannot and will not be denied what’s due to me.”Render studied at the prestigious, historically Black Morehouse college before he was spotted rapping by the Outkast member Big Boi. He offered Render a collaboration on their 2000 track Snappin’ & Trappin’, launching his career and leading him to drop out of college after just one year. “Even though I won a Grammy, my grandma still complained that I didn’t bring her a degree,” Render says. “Dropping out is one of my biggest regrets, but I’ve been given everything I’ve ever wanted in terms of being able to have a rap career, so I need to make it better for the people around me and the people that come after me.”“Making things better” includes fighting the use of rap in criminal trials, as US prosecutors have used lyrics by artists such as 6ix9ine, Drakeo the Ruler and Tay-K to try to show that defendants had violent interests or gang affiliations. Alongside Jay-Z and Kelly Rowland, Render recently supported the New York Senate rap music on trial bill, which aims to ban the practice.Having written an op-ed for the Vox website in 2015 about the police’s “well-documented history of antagonism towards rappers”, Render is now watching one of the artists featured on Run, Young Thug, fight racketeering charges alongside 27 others. Prosecutors claim that Young Thug’s rap collective, YSL, is a criminal gang with ties to the national Bloods organisation, and are attempting to use Thug’s lyrics and social media posts against him. “I can’t comment on the charges,” Render says, “but Thug is a victim of a policy being used in a racist way and all of our first amendment rights could be endangered if they attempt to use his words against him. Let Black art live, otherwise we’re going to see a proliferation of rappers no matter what sex, age or ethnicity dragged into the court.”As well as Young Thug, the extended version of Run contains an opening monologue from the comic Dave Chappelle. In his introduction, he compares the Black experience to the Normandy landings. “Ain’t no rhyme or reason why it’s not you on the ground, but as long as it’s not, you have to keep moving,” Chappelle says. “You’re just as heroic as those people who stormed the beach.”“Chaos abounds around you; the people that you know and love are often taken from you or left forever scarred,” Render agrees. “It creates bonds and camaraderie that last your entire life.” He seems untroubled by the furore over Chappelle’s jokes about transgender people, which led to Netflix employees walking out in protest at the company hosting his standup specials. For Render, freedom of expression trumps everything. “If comedians are not allowed to talk shit about everybody, freedom of speech is in trouble,” he says. “When they cannot express themselves, there’s going to be a real problem with everyone else being able to do so as well.”The last time Render spoke to the Guardian, just after the killing of George Floyd, he declared that Black people might feel that “nobody gives a shit” about them. Two years on, after the global protests for Black Lives Matter, does he feel more optimistic? “Not much has changed for Black people since 1619,” he says – the year that the first enslaved Africans arrived in North America. What progress there is has come “only because we push to get the rights and freedoms we deserve, or that have already been promised to us in the Bill of Rights or the United States constitution. If I work hard in making sure fairness and equity are given to my community and the communities that are like mine, only then can things get better. But the work doesn’t stop.”Might he one day go into politics full-time, instead of just supporting others? He briefly ran as an independent candidate in the 2015 elections for Georgia’s 55th district and says Chappelle recently tried to convince him to run for state governor.“I politely declined,” he adds. Later, maybe? “I will run for office the day that I’m unbribable. When I get rich for real, when no amount of money can corrupt me, maybe.”Killer Mike’s new solo single and video, Run, is out on 4 JulyTopicsRun the JewelsThe G2 interviewOutkastHip-hopGeorge FloydBernie SandersUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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    ‘Birthing while Black’ is a national crisis for the US. Here’s what Black lawmakers want to do about it

    ‘Birthing while Black’ is a national crisis for the US. Here’s what Black lawmakers want to do about it For Black women in Congress, maternal mortality hits close to home. The Black Maternal Health Caucus seeks changeWhen Alma Adams’s daughter complained of abdominal pain during a difficult pregnancy, her doctor overlooked her cries for help. The North Carolina congresswoman’s daughter had to undergo a last-minute caesarean section. She and her baby daughter, now 16, survived. “It could have gone another way. I could have been a mother who was grieving her daughter and granddaughter,” Adams told the Guardian, following a week in which the White House highlighted the crisis of pregnancy-related deaths among Black women. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Black women die at three times the rate of white women.For Adams and other Black women in Congress, who formed the Black Maternal Health Caucus, the issue hits close to home. Last week, during Black Maternal Health Week, they talked about how their experiences and the work of advocates had propelled legislation, known as the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2021, to fight a healthcare crisis that disproportionately affects Black women regardless of income.The US has the highest maternal mortality rate among industrialized countries. Since 2000, the maternal mortality rate has risen nearly 60%, making it worse now than it was decades earlier. More than half of these deaths are preventable.Health experts point to the fact that other industrialized countries have significantly different approaches to motherhood than the US, including paid maternity leave, access to comprehensive postpartum care and enough maternity care providers, especially midwives, to meet the needs of their populations. Policy advocates add that the crisis among Black women is a symptom of racism in the nation’s healthcare system – from who has access to care to attitudes toward Black people and their bodies.“It doesn’t matter what your socioeconomic status is. It doesn’t matter how much insurance you have, or how much education you have,” Adams said, adding that her daughter, Jeanelle Lindsay, had a master’s degree and health insurance. “Those things don’t matter. This could happen to anyone. Look at women like Beyoncé and Serena Williams, who had these near misses because the doctors really didn’t pay the kind of attention that they should have.”Black women in the House used the week of recognition to bring attention to several bills that are part of a sweeping Momnibus package to address the dangers of birthing while Black. Their efforts to elevate the longtime work of organizations such as the Black Mamas Matter Alliance showed the power of representation in putting issues affecting Black women on the congressional agenda, said Lauren Underwood, an Illinois congresswoman and registered nurse.“It takes women in these spaces to call out problems, set an agenda, and bring together a coalition of legislators, advocates, and community members to work toward comprehensive, evidence-based solutions that will save moms’ lives,” Underwood said in an email.In January 2019, after Underwood received her committee assignments, Adams met with her to see if she wanted to launch a caucus focused on Black maternal health. One of Underwood’s friends, an epidemiologist at the CDC, had died three weeks after she gave birth. “I was still grappling with her death when I came to Congress,” Underwood said.Three months later, they launched the caucus with 53 founding members, including Ayanna Pressley, Lucy McBath and Barbara Lee. Today, it has 115 members from both parties.After consulting with maternal health advocacy groups, Underwood and Adams introduced the Momnibus Act in March 2020, nine bills aimed at combating maternal health disparities through investment in community-based programs and other efforts to rectify social determinants of health – the conditions in which people live, work and grow up – that affect who lives and who dies in childbirth.Their legislative pursuit was timely, coming before a pandemic that would bring racial health disparities to the public’s attention. Between 2019 and 2020, the mortality rate for Black and Latina women and birthing people rose during the first year of the pandemic.Kamala Harris, the nation’s first Black and South Asian female vice-president, amplified the issue last week during a speech at the Century Foundation, a progressive thinktank based in Washington DC. Harris called for “building a future in which being Black and pregnant is a time filled with joy and hope rather than fear”.As a US senator from California, Harris was lead sponsor for the Senate version of the Momnibus Act in 2020, which stalled in committee. Underwood and Adams, along with Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, reintroduced the Momnibus bill in February 2021.Most of the proposals in the package are included in the Build Back Better Act, a social spending bill that is stuck in gridlock.“Were it not for Black women in the Congressional Black Caucus, there would not be a Black Maternal Health Caucus,” said the Massachusetts representative Ayanna Pressley. “When we say that we are the voice of Congress, we mean that.”Pressley lost her paternal grandmother, whom she never knew, when she died giving birth to Pressley’s uncle in the 1950s. “Decades later, the Black maternal mortality crisis continues to rob us of our loved ones and to destabilize families,” she said during the Century Foundation event.What explains the disparities in outcomes between Black and white mothers boils down to what Pressley called “policy violence”. It’s not just the discrimination that Black women and birthing people experience, but also the lack of access to quality healthcare and medical coverage.“These are the result of centuries of laws in a systematic, systematically racist health care system that too often discounts our pay, ignores our voices, disregards our lives,” Pressley said. “Birthing while Black should not be a death sentence.”In November 2021, Joe Biden signed into law one of the bills in the Momnibus package that invests $15m in maternity care for veterans. But other legislative efforts remain stalled in Congress. Eight bills that were part of the original Momnibus package are part of the Build Back Better Act, according to a tracker by The Century Foundation. They include awarding grants to community organizations to help pregnant people find affordable housing, documenting transportation barriers for pregnant and postpartum people, expanding food stamp eligibility and permanently expanding Medicaid coverage for mothers in every state for a year after childbirth.And on Friday, Booker and seven other lawmakers introduced Mamas First Act, which would expand Medicaid to cover services from doulas and midwives.“We’ve made historic progress, from the enactment of the first bill in my Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act to the recent cabinet meeting Vice-President Harris led, the first-ever White House cabinet meeting convened to address maternal health disparities as a national priority,” Underwood said.Adams pointed to another piece of the legislation that feels very close to home: the Kira Johnson Act, named after a 39-year-old Black mother who, after complaining of abdominal pain, died in 2016 from a hemorrhage following a routine caesarean section. The bill would direct the health and human services department to send grants to community groups focused on improving the maternal health outcomes for Black, Latino and other marginalized communities and for training to reduce racial bias and discrimination among healthcare providers.The connection between Johnson’s and her daughter’s situations resonated with Adams. The pain they experienced was dismissed – a familiar form of racial bias that the Momnibus package attempts to address.“Either you have a mother, you are a mother, or you know women who are moms,” Adams said. “When we raise the tide for Black women, who are among the most marginalized and the most vulnerable, we ultimately raise the tide for all women.”TopicsUS CongressParents and parentingFamilyKamala HarrisAyanna PressleyHouse of RepresentativesUS SenatefeaturesReuse this content More

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    Kinky, us? Guardian readers can’t all be | Brief letters

    Kinky, us? Guardian readers can’t all beWe, us and our | The US republic | Unpoetic fan chants | It’s all good for the stockpot | Jacob Rees-Mogg I wish the Guardian would stop using “we” and “us” to mean “some people” (How Covid killed the one-night stand – and made us all kinkier, 27 January). The chances that we are all kinkier are nil, as many of us weren’t kinky in the first place and mostly, I imagine, still aren’t. Also, there’s a heading about “our obsession with fish oil”. I’m so obsessed with fish oil that I can’t recall when I last even thought about it; surely I’m not the only one.Mark MillerKendal, Cumbria Thomas Zimmer ignores the fact that the United States is a republic, not a democracy (The US Senate presents a long-term threat to US democracy, 24 January). Americans pledge allegiance to “this republic”, not to this democracy. The US Senate and the electoral college are bulwarks against being ruled by the guillotine of democracy – a fact made clear by French history.Richard Sherman Margate, Florida, US Adrian Chiles might write of poetic expressions to describe players from West Bromwich Albion (Let’s not say ‘pip pip’ to our most poetic expressions!, 27 January), but that same team beat my own beloved Peterborough United 3-0 last Saturday, leading to much self-flagellation and chants of “We’re so shit it’s unbelievable”.Toby Wood Peterborough My husband says his mother kept a perpetual stockpot on the stove for leftovers. He was startled to see her adding old marmalade tarts on one occasion (Letters, 25 January).Maureen Bell Birmingham The most apt title for Jacob Rees-Mogg would be minister for the age of entitlement (Letters, 24 January).Ron Clarke Malvern, Worcestershire TopicsSexBrief lettersUS politicsWest Bromwich AlbionPeterboroughFoodJacob Rees-MogglettersReuse this content More

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    Look around you. The way we live explains why we are increasingly polarized

    Look around you. The way we live explains why we are increasingly polarizedIn 2016, I set out to understand why a border wall appealed to so many. I realized Americans are increasingly boxing themselves in – with vast impacts on the way we see the world “The border’s like our back door,” a concrete salesman named Chris told me in January 2017. “You leave it open, and anyone can walk right in.” It was the day of Trump’s presidential inauguration, and we were chatting on the exhibition floor of a trade show in Las Vegas, called World of Concrete. Circular saws, cement mixers, gleaming new trucks – it was an unusual place to talk about the politics of immigration.But the simple promise of a concrete wall between the US and Mexico had flung a business tycoon into the White House, and I wanted to understand what this was about.Chris was a millennial from a small town in western Ohio. With a trim beard and short, sandy hair, he projected an air of casual self-sufficiency. “I don’t really like neighbors,” he quipped, speaking with a dose of wry humor about how far he chose to live from other people.I was struck by the mismatch between the salesman’s genial manner and his suspiciousness, his sense of anyone beyond his home or country as a potential threat. I wondered, as we talked amid a sea of construction equipment, what it would take to build genuine warmth and concern for outsiders, rather than such walls.For the last five years, I’ve crisscrossed the United States as an anthropologist, pursuing conversation and debate between the coasts and heartland. I set out in 2016 to grasp the appeal of the border wall, the fantasy of sealing off the country with a stark, symbolic barrier. What I learned is that such barricades appeal to many Americans because they resonate with familiar boundaries in their daily lives.What I learned from an unlikely friendship with an anti-maskerRead moreWhile Trump’s presidency has passed, the defensive thinking that drove his ascent remains a pervasive and powerful force. I think of the Gen Xer with a bushy beard and colorful tattoos down the length of his arms, whom I saw hawking a motion sensor lighting system with these words of advice: “I know it sounds cold, but you want to keep people away as best you can.” Or this motto and promise from the home security company ADT: “a line in the sand between your family and an uncertain world.” Time and again, I’ve heard such ideas expressed by Americans I’ve met and spoken with around the country in my job as an anthropologist: businessmen and truck drivers, police officers and media personalities.The give and take of neighbors has long been a foundation for our democracy, philosopher Nancy Rosenblum writes. But cultural and economic forces have worked stark distinctions – insider v outsider, familiar v stranger, safety v threat – deep into the texture of our daily lives. These hard lines and everyday divides fuel our political troubles in ways we don’t always realize.To get to this gated community on Florida’s Treasure Coast, you have to drive through a continuous stretch of walled compounds, everything inside hidden from view by towering hedges and palms. I show my credentials at the guardhouse, and the railway gate swings open. As I drive with the security director past sprawling homes and unnervingly empty streets, Timothy tells me about a residential population – wealthy, mostly white – primed for disaster and desperate for repose.One out of every six American houses in a residential community is secured now by such community walls or fences, and I met Timothy to try to understand why.Residents who live here are mostly seeking psychological assurance, he admitted: “They like us smiling and waving at them.”Contemporary gated communities build on a century of intentional segregation and suburban white flight. Suburban interiors were designed as “escape capsules to enable their independence from the outside world”, architectural historian Andrea Vesentini has shown, built as shelters from the unpredictability of urban life. The pandemic has magnified the appeal of such distance and defense, with more features like security cameras, video doorbells and HEPA air filters built into new houses than ever before.These histories have profoundly reshaped how Americans live in relation to each other, as much as where. So much of everyday life and leisure now takes place in secluded spaces. The front porch sessions with neighbors and passersby that once epitomized American social life have given way to more private gatherings on the backyard deck, or time with the television and other screens indoors. These changes lessen the chance for happenstance conversation with neighbors and strangers.A realtor in Fargo, North Dakota, helped me understand the significance of these shifts. A fit man in his early 60s, Paul had worked in the Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan real estate market for more than 20 years. He took me one morning to a compact new house in a middle-class subdivision, the smell of fresh paint lingering in the cool air inside.Standing in the living room and looking to the front, I felt enclosed in the space, almost hemmed in: the house was fronted by a three-stall garage and one narrow window on to the street and sidewalk. Turn to the back though, and you were flooded with light from every direction, the rear of the house framed with big panes of glass instead of walls.“Doesn’t it bother people that there aren’t many windows in the front?” I asked Paul. “You can hardly see what’s happening on the street.”“The inside is what they care about,” he replied. “And,” he added, pointing out the sunroom at the rear of the house and the back patio beyond, “living on the back. This is where we engage socially with our neighbors.”The small patio was lodged between other private decks and yards, a place to socialize with others by choice rather than necessity. “This is my space, I’ll engage with who I want, when I want,” the realtor explained. “It’s a bit selfish,” he acknowledged.Whether it comes to the climate emergency or systemic racism, the migrant crisis or the ongoing pandemic, so much turns on whether we can acknowledge and accept the intertwining of our separate lives. But it’s not just our homes that are styled now like defensive fortresses.Over the last decade, imposing vehicles like SUVs and trucks have come to dominate the American car market, far outpacing smaller sedans in sales. These are automobiles designed with aggressive profiles and built as defensive steel cocoons, often marketed as ways to survive an uncertain and even hostile world. As an automotive designer in Los Angeles told me, such vehicles appeal in a society that is “suffering a case of insecurity”.There is a political side to such choices: researchers have found that cities with more sedans than pickup trucks will probably vote Democratic in a presidential election, while those with more pickup trucks will probably vote Republican. But it isn’t simply a matter of signaling partisan affiliation through automotive choice. Vehicles say a lot about what people care most about.Consider an exchange I had one morning in Los Angeles with the driver of a Cadillac Escalade, a few years ago. He was an Asian American dad, like me, and we’d run into each other on the driveway of a cheery and progressive nursery school on the Westside. I’d walked my daughter there that morning; his daughter was buckled into one of the Escalade’s seats. I was struck by how tiny the child looked inside the three-ton vehicle, how challenging it would be for her to clamber down to the ground outside.The hulking white automobile was brand new, still without license plates. Why an Escalade? I asked. “It’s perceived to be safe,” he replied. “You know, more mass.”More mass. The phrase kept playing on my mind as I walked back home. Whose safety was secured by all the vehicular mass hurtling down American roads, and at whose expense?The rise of the SUV in global automotive markets is the second largest cause of increasing carbon emissions over the last decade, more significant than shipping, aviation and heavy industry. And at an everyday scale, there are serious consequences for those who encounter them in collisions.Because of their rigid and heavy frames, SUVs and trucks are far more dangerous than conventional sedans for the pedestrians, cyclists and children at play who share American streets with automobiles. Pedestrian deaths on roadways in the United States have soared by more than 50% over the last decade.Someone in an armored cockpit, someone else on their own two feet: this too is a polarized encounter. Low-income Americans and people of color are much more likely to be struck and killed while walking, which brings home another difficult truth in these developments.Indifference is a privilege. Some can afford to seal themselves off from the world beyond, while those left outside must fend for themselves as best they can.The fortress mindset thrives on suspicion, and the urge to protect oneself can make shared spaces and resources seem more dangerous than they are. Take that necessity for life itself, the water we drink. American consumers now buy an astounding 75 billion disposable bottles of water each year, each a tiny enclosure of an essential resource, a shelter made for one. The bottled water industry has capitalized on widespread unease about the quality of public water supplies in the United States. Meanwhile, as interest and investment in shared public infrastructure lags, people are left with polluted and contaminated water, forced to rely on bottled alternatives.Two years before the pandemic began, I attended a bottled water trade show in Texas. Most everyone walked around with a small disposable bottle in hand, always closed, the little caps screwed back on after every sip. “I don’t drink public water,” people would avow, wrinkling their noses in distaste at the very idea of a drinking fountain. “Someone else’s mouth is on it and over it.”Water fountains were switched off across the country in 2020 when the pandemic struck. But they’d already been disappearing for years, and how many will return remains uncertain. Bottled water is regulated so loosely that its quality is difficult to judge. Yet many Americans have come to believe again in the purity of a resource untouched by the wrong people, a dark contemporary echo of the segregated fountains of the Jim Crow era.At the bottled water trade show, I spoke with a middle-aged white man in a brown suit who worked for a water conditioning company in west Texas. I noticed his habit of crumpling up each disposable bottle into a little ball when it was empty, and I asked him about this gesture.“I like to put things away,” he told me, describing how he’d throw these crinkled balls of plastic into the back of his SUV while he was driving. I imagined them piling up in heaps, a travelling signpost for the mountain of waste that all of us are building together.There’s a curious resonance between this faith in a sealed bottle, and a culture that celebrates the invulnerable body. Americans are often encouraged to imagine their own bodies as armored enclosures, to seal off against the outside world. Think of bottled sports drinks like BodyArmor or BioSteel. “Your body, your fortress,” their taglines read.The coronavirus pandemic has supercharged such ideas, setting off a boom in personal disinfectant products and touchless technology, making it easier to deny the truth that we depend on each other for our wellbeing. The deep resistance to face masks and vaccination in the United States also relies, quite often, on a highly individualized sense of bodily autonomy.I think of a middle-aged white businessman from Michigan with whom I’ve debated the pandemic for many months. A staunch libertarian, he considers compulsory public health precautions as tantamount to slavery. They deny, he says, “my feelings, my rights, my personal body”.Regular exposure to different points of view could complicate such diehard convictions. But our fractured media have deepened the existing fissures of American society.Walls at home and on the road, shielding the body from exposure and the mind from uncomfortable ideas: these interlocking divides make it more difficult to take unfamiliar people and perspectives seriously; harder to acknowledge the needs of strangers, to trust their motives and empathize with their struggles. In an atomized society, others become phantoms all too easily, grist for the mill of resentment and mistrust.There’s a deep and pernicious history at work here. Longstanding patterns of neighborhood racial segregation have inflamed the prejudice against outgroups, bolstering stereotypes, as the political scientist Ryan Enos and others have shown. When such divisions are reproduced at an everyday scale, the gulf between self and other widens even further, and everyone becomes a potential outsider.But this isn’t all that is happening, or could yet happen.Around the country in 2020, the pandemic spurred a return to socializing with neighbors on front yards and porches. Cities and towns have carved out new places for walking, biking and outdoor life, new ways of sharing public space with people, known and unknown. It remains to be seen whether these are temporary adjustments or more enduring experiments.Movements for mutual aid, racial justice and cultural solidarity have also brought Americans together, spurring more radical commitments to collective care-taking, redrawing the line between stranger and kin. The vitality of such movements depends on adequate space and support. Calls abound to redesign our personal and public spaces for conviviality rather than isolation. Commons, parks and open streetscapes; living quarters and resources arranged to encourage social awareness, not solipsism; communication platforms that nurture contrary lines of thought: these spaces can nurture the capacity to live and thrive alongside others unlike oneself, working against the tendency to reject and retreat.Our feelings for others are structural realities as much as personal qualities. In a society built on walls of indifference, empathy will remain an elusive hope. For “the death of the heart” is one of the most tragic consequences of segregation, as James Baldwin observed: “You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall.”TopicsLife and styleTrump administrationVaccines and immunisationUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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    ‘Let’s go Brandon’ Santa Tracker caller insists he meant no disrespect to Biden

    ‘Let’s go Brandon’ Santa Tracker caller insists he meant no disrespect to BidenJared Schmeck, 35, tells Oregonian he has ‘nothing against’ president to whom he repeated ‘Fuck Joe Biden’ rightwing meme The caller who ended a conversation with Joe Biden with the rightwing meme “Let’s go Brandon” – which means “fuck Joe Biden” – has insisted he was joking and meant no disrespect to the president.Caller tells Joe Biden ‘Let’s go Brandon’ during White House Christmas eventRead more“At the end of the day I have nothing against Mr Biden,” Jared Schmeck, 35, told the Oregonian newspaper. “But I am frustrated because I think he can be doing a better job. I mean no disrespect to him.”Schmeck, from Central Point, also said he was not a “Trumper” but rather a “free-thinking American and follower of Jesus Christ”.On Christmas Eve, the president and his wife, Dr Jill Biden, took calls to the North American Aerospace Defense Command Santa Tracker, which each year purports to follow the progress of Santa and his reindeer.A traditional duty for American presidents, in 2018 it was nearly upended when Donald Trump told a seven-year-old belief in Santa Claus was “marginal” at that age.Biden and Schmeck discussed presents Schmeck’s four children were hoping to receive, and how one, Hunter, shared a name with the president’s son and grandson. Schmeck said he was hoping for a “quiet night”.Biden sad: “Lots of luck, dad.”All on the call laughed.At the end of the call, Schmeck said: “Merry Christmas and Let’s go Brandon.”“Let’s go Brandon, I agree,” Biden said, as his wife winced.Biden also said: “By the way are you in Oregon? Where’s your home?”But the call was disconnected.“Let’s go Brandon” originated in an interview with a racing car driver by a TV reporter who may have misheard a crowd’s obscene chant.It has flourished in rightwing and pro-Trump circles – even being promoted by Republican congressmen and the Texas senator Ted Cruz.Schmeck and his wife promoted the remark on social media. But they met with a tide of opprobrium, including a tweet in which the California congressman Eric Swalwell pointed to Biden’s painful personal history.“I refuse to believe we are this indecent as people,” the Democrat wrote. “Not on Christmas Eve. And not to a person who lost his wife and daughter at Christmastime. We are better than this. Be kind and Merry Christmas.”Biden commemorates 49th anniversary of crash that killed his first wifeRead moreSchmeck, a former police officer, told the Oregonian he was “being attacked for utilising my freedom of speech”.He also said he had received some potentially threatening phone calls of his own.“I understand there is a vulgar meaning to ‘Lets go Brandon’ but I’m not that simple-minded, no matter how I feel about him,” Schmeck said.“[Biden] seems likes he’s a cordial guy. There’s no animosity or anything like that. It was merely just an innocent jest to also express my God-given right to express my frustrations in a joking manner.”Schmeck said subjects stoking those frustrations with Biden included vaccine mandates and supply chain problems.He also insisted: “I love him just like I love any other brother or sister.”TopicsJoe BidenChristmasUS politicsOregonnewsReuse this content More