Commentary

The Kingdom Centre building in Riyadh. Buen Viajero, via Flickr

An Endgame for Iran: A Saudi-Style Revolution from Above

Experiencing firsthand the dramatic reforms that Saudi Arabia has made in the two decades since I lived there gives me hope for another Muslim nation held in thrall by fundamentalists.

In Riyadh for a business trip, I found myself with a couple of hours to kill. I decided to wander around Al Olaya, the Saudi capital’s commercial core and upscale shopping district. In a gleaming shopping mall surrounding my hotel, I saw familiar brand logos on either side, a glitzy array of high-end storefronts much like those you’d find in any major Western city—except for the stylized Arabic lettering. Eventually, I came across the garish window display of a Victoria’s Secret. There I stopped, amazed.

Creative Commons logoI had actually lived in Riyadh two decades earlier, having come to Saudi Arabia to work as a physician. At the time, there were no Victoria’s Secret stores to be found. The company’s website was even blocked by the religious authorities. Women could buy lingerie, but they had to do so in a general store—and all the shops back then were staffed exclusively by male attendants (women were not allowed to work in most public spaces). All these prohibitions had made shopping for intimate apparel a singularly humiliating experience.

So much had changed in Saudi Arabia, and it wasn’t just about the overt femininity of a lingerie store. I walked into another familiar Western store, a Louis Vuitton boutique. The fall collection was being displayed—luxury scarves, elegant handbags—much the same as it would be in New York City. The mannequins wore shorts and dresses with bare plastic legs. But what captured my attention were their heads—molded plastic, with detailed facial features. Two decades ago, that depiction of the female form was forbidden. The mannequins back then would have been headless.

I must have looked ever so slightly lunatic in that store, gawking at the mannequins. Soon enough, a store clerk approached me, and we began talking about my impressions of the new Saudi Arabia. A group of attendants—all of them, notably, women—began to gather, curious about my excited chatter. I explained to them that when I lived in Riyadh, the mall had a designated floor just for women, the only place in this mall where we were allowed to shop. Even having that women-only space had been an advance at the time; other malls would only let women shop during restricted hours when men would not be present.

As I told the women about their country’s recent past, I felt like a time traveler speaking of unimaginable sights. All the store clerks were young—not surprising in a country where two-thirds of the population is under thirty. While some of them wore headscarves, others did not. They seemed to find my enthusiasm infectious, and they asked many questions. We ended our impromptu chat with the conclusion that, yes, this was Islam: the freedom for a woman to choose how to observe, to choose how to be.

Since I’ve returned from my trip, I’ve thought often about how much Saudi Arabia has changed—and whether another Muslim country, Iran, might take a similar path. For several months beginning in September, Iran was paralyzed by massive protests unlike any the country had seen since the 1979 revolution. The spark of this explosive rage was the suspicious death of Mahsa Jina Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who had been detained by police for “improperly” wearing her hijab.

Continue reading An Endgame for Iran: A Saudi-Style Revolution from Above

Qanta A. Ahmed, MD, is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum and a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The lone surviving "dragon pine" on the shore of Cape Iwai in Kesennuma.

Deep Scars

Cycling around Japan’s post-tsunami peninsulas, eleven years after March 11, 2011.

I had my first glimpse of the tsunami’s destruction three years ago, when I rode my bike along the northeastern coast of Japan’s main island. Below a snaking seawall was a wide swath of barren fields and muddy marshes. The raw landscape was punctuated by the gutted remains of a five-story residential building. On its side was a red line that marked the highest level reached by the tsunami’s floodwaters: 14.5 meters (48 feet).

Japan’s 2011 tsunami killed some 20,000 people and left thousands more to dig their way out of the mud. Triggered by one of the most powerful earthquakes recorded in modern times, the overpowering tidal wave devastated the country’s northeastern region of Tōhoku across three prefectures. It also caused the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, prompting the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of residents. Most of the deaths and damage occurred along the Sanriku Coast just to the north. When I first visited Rikuzentakata, one of Sanriku’s hardest-hit cities, I was shocked by how visible the scars still were.

At the end of last year, I returned to Rikuzentakata for the Tour de Sanriku, a bicycle ride along the Hirota peninsula that the city has put on since the summer of 2011. Japan has plenty of cycle routes that are more scenic and in much more accessible locations, but like so many others, I wanted to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the March 11, 2011 tsunami—commonly referred to as “3.11”—and see how the recovery was going.

Continue reading Deep Scars

Cherise Fong is a bicycle traveler, writer, and journalist currently based in Japan.

 

Letting Dogs Lie

Recalling a life-and-death decision on a deserted road.

It was decades ago, but I still remember the German guy. He could have ignored the pups, left them to die in the brush, but he didn’t. Instead, he biked into town and found the local police, but they just blew him off. So he went back. It was the compassionate thing to do, but it left him with an impossible choice: either let the pups die, or kill them.

My girlfriend Mardena and I had come to Cancún, Mexico, from a winter deep-freeze in the United States. We were staying in a little hotel on a downtown side street, a mile inland from the city’s glitzy beachfront hotel zone. Every morning I’d head out for an early run to beat the heat, but it never worked. Even at dawn, the heat and humidity were already draining. I remember one evening when Mardena and I were on the bus heading back to our hotel after a day on the beach. I looked out the window and saw the sun sinking into the horizon like a giant orange beach ball. It was the end of December, on one of the shortest days of winter, and it was still hot as blazes.

One morning we took a boat from the mainland over to Isla Mujeres, a skinny island a few miles east of Cancún. We planned to bicycle around the island and cool off in the turquoise waters at its north end. The day was heating up fast, so we stopped at the first bike shop we found, rented clunky one-speeders at two dollars apiece, and started out along a coastal road.

Continue reading Letting Dogs Lie

Paul Michelson lives and writes in Davis, California.

The Alberta Cooperative Grocery in Portland, Oregon. Old White Truck, via Flickr

Pandemic-Proofing the Economy with Cooperatives

Cooperatives and other alternative enterprises can make economies more resilient to crises like Covid-19.

With customers staying at home during the pandemic, large numbers of businesses have shuttered permanently, unable to cover their payroll and rent. Emergency governmental assistance has sustained some businesses during this period of economic uncertainty, but the crisis has also stoked interest in a private sector remedy: cooperatives.

In Baltimore, a pizzeria that shut when the pandemic hit reopened as a worker cooperative, its ownership shared equally among its fourteen original employees. In Albuquerque, N.M., small farms pivoted from supporting restaurants and farmers markets, pooling their produce to sell directly to households. In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a program to help struggling businesses reopen as employee-owned businesses.

As Congress deliberates how to safeguard the country from future crises, policymakers should consider recent research that shows how so-called alternative enterprises can make local economies more resilient. Sociologist Marc Schneiberg finds that counties with more cooperatives, credit unions, community banks, nonprofit organizations, and universities experienced fewer job losses during the Great Recession and greater job growth in its aftermath. This path-breaking finding suggests that such organizations are better able than their shareholder-owned counterparts to retain workforces when the economy falters—and more willing to invest in their communities when markets pick up again. 

Continue reading Pandemic-Proofing the Economy with Cooperatives

Katherine K. Chen is an associate professor of sociology at the City College of New York and Graduate Center, CUNY. With Victor Tan Chen (no relation), she is the editor of the book Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities Through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy (Emerald Publishing, 2021).

Introvert, by Massimo Stefanoni, via Flickr

The Unbearable Lightness of Being at Home

When the lockdowns first began, I thought the introvert in me would thrive. Instead, I learned that, however bothersome, social interaction helps keep my personal demons at bay.

I hate meetings. Yes, everyone says that, but I am on the extreme end of the relevant bell curve here: I am introverted to such a degree that some people have confessed that they were unsure I had the ability to speak until months after we met. Therefore, in late March 2020, when stay-at-home orders began to go into force, schools began closing, and my workplace switched to telecommuting, my reaction was more sanguine than most. After all, introverts draw strength from within! Forced social interaction is what tires us most! With fewer meetings scheduled, surely my unpublished novel, a new personal best for pushups, and that foreign language I’d been meaning to learn would all be within my grasp.

Or so I thought.

There was one thing I had not factored into my calculations: depression. While these spells have been with me for much of my life, they increased in frequency after the pandemic began. After just a few weeks of staying at home, I began to notice that I was having more extreme reactions to even mild criticisms from my wife, from my colleagues, even from strangers on the internet. With fewer social interactions to distract me, I heard “I think you misunderstood the nature of this assignment,” “You didn’t use enough soap when you washed the dishes,” and “You might want to rethink your evaluation of this polling data” and understood “Your failure to accomplish small tasks means you are a failure in life and that you should stare at the ceiling.”

Continue reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being at Home

Rob York works for a think tank in Honolulu and still prefers communication by Post-it Notes.

"Drugs," by WithoutFins, via Flickr

Gateway Drug

When the pandemic hit, I started working at a head shop—and started getting into the heads of my customers.

Last March, I was working in Montana as a ski instructor at the Big Sky Resort. When the pandemic reached the United States and stores started shutting down, I remember meeting up with friends for a potluck dinner. We drank Coronas and joked about the toilet paper shortage.

Three days later, the resort closed—an unprecedented six weeks early—and we were all out of jobs. My friends and I threw an impromptu end-of-season party at the local dive bar. There was an edge to that evening, though. It seemed that no one could sit still or hold a calm conversation.

A week after the resort closed, my boyfriend, who lived in Tennessee, called. There were rumors that states were going to shut their borders to keep the virus from spreading. “I don’t want you to be stuck in Montana away from me,” he said.

“What do you think I should do?” I asked.

“I want to come get you and move you back to Tennessee with me.”

I had intended to move in with my boyfriend after the ski season ended, but this would be two months earlier than planned. With some hesitation, I agreed. I didn’t want to leave my friends in Montana, but I didn’t want to have to deal with a pandemic on my own, either.

Once we got back to Tennessee, though, our plans began to unravel. That summer I was supposed to return to my seasonal job as a whitewater kayak instructor on the Ocoee River, but the state lockdown shut down that possibility. Instead, I sat by myself on the couch, day-drinking and watching Netflix. My boyfriend worked alone from morning till dark on various projects around his unfinished house.

At a certain point, I found myself surrounded by beer cans, watching American Hoggers, and realizing that I needed to get off the couch and out of my boyfriend’s house. When a friend called and said their mom needed help at the family store, I jumped at the opportunity—not thinking much about the fact that the “family store” was a head shop, a place that sells paraphernalia for using drugs. I’d worked as a line cook in plenty of restaurants and as a guide at rafting companies, I told myself. What could be so different about working at a head shop?

Continue reading Gateway Drug

Lynn Barlow is a writer based in Asheville, North Carolina. When she’s not writing, she can be found skiing, whitewater kayaking, or playing fetch with her dog Urza. Instagram: @biggitygnar

Hans Lange and Kate Rosenberg outside New York City Hall on their wedding day, August 30, 1941.

Distance from Home

Before the pandemic, the distances separating me from my cross-continental family seemed so small. But this freedom was never a birthright, as previous generations of my family knew all too well.

On November 15, 2012, I woke up to discover that my partner had died while we slept. He was forty. I was thirty-seven. Our kids were three and six. The cause would later be identified as an undiagnosed heart condition, but in the hours right after his death, I had no idea what had happened. I remember the seemingly endless procession of strangers who crowded into our small Brooklyn apartment that day. EMTs. Two incredibly young cops. A pair of detectives. The city’s medical examiner. All asked the same things. Later I realized that most of their queries were designed to clear me of any wrongdoing before they allowed me and my children to leave the apartment and decamp to my aunt and uncle’s home in the suburbs. But at the time I just couldn’t figure out why I had to keep repeating myself, and why—when I had called 911 at 7 a.m.—my children and I were required to remain in the apartment with my partner’s lifeless body still on our couch late into the afternoon.

Within thirty-six hours, my parents and my two brothers arrived from my hometown, Vancouver. Over the next few days, other family and friends showed up as well. I was shocked by the number of people who flew in from out of town for the funeral. “I can’t believe you’re here, that you came so far,” I kept saying.

A year and a half later, I was the one making a rushed trip across the continent. My mother had been diagnosed with cancer eight years earlier. After a period of remission, the cancer had returned, and my mother was dying. I booked a flight to see her one last time. Days later my father called to tell me her condition was deteriorating faster than expected, and I hurriedly bumped up the arrival date, changing my ticket to the next day. When my plane landed, I saw my father standing outside baggage claim, and I knew I was too late. At her funeral, I found myself uttering a familiar refrain to others who had traveled: “I can’t believe you’re here, that you came so far.”

That mobility—that ability to come from so far—was something I took for granted before the global pandemic closed borders and sheltered us in place. Continue reading Distance from Home

Ellen Friedrichs is a health educator and the author of Good Sexual Citizenship. Twitter | Instagram

Stanford University is one of eight schools where wealthy parents fraudulently secured spots for their children as part of a nationwide college admissions bribery scheme. HarshLight, via Flickr

Meritocracy’s Casualties

The individualist credo is exacerbating already steep inequality and driving elites to protect their privilege by any means—even criminal ones.

The college admissions scandal that implicated Hollywood stars and other wealthy parents produced its first convictions in September, with actor Felicity Huffman among the growing list of those sentenced to prison time for engaging in bribery and fraud to get their children into a selective college (though in Huffman’s case for a short term of fourteen days). The nature of this scandal—which involved FBI wiretaps, paid-off SAT proctors, and even doctored photos of students playing sports—turned an intense media spotlight on the spectacularly unethical behavior of certain well-off families. But the scandal is a symptom of a much deeper problem in modern American life: widening income inequality and the destructive competition it engenders across the class divide.

When income inequality rises, the stakes of the economic game rise. Where children end up along a steep gradient of academic achievement matters all the more for their chances later in life. For example, in 2018, edging your way into the top 5 percent of earners would have made your household $119,000 richer than one that had just made it into the top 20 percent; back in 1978, that difference was just $56,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars. Because every step up the ladder pays off more, parents feel greater pressure to do all they can to improve their kids’ prospects. The payoff for cheating grows, too—even elaborate frauds of the sort that William Rick Singer and his team allegedly perpetrated to get his high-profile clients’ kids into Stanford, Yale, the University of Southern California, and other schools. (Singer, who pleaded guilty to fraud and a host of other criminal charges in March, admitted to bribing university administrators and colluding with wealthy parents to secure admission for their children.)

Beyond the ranks of celebrities and the elite, economic anxieties abound. It has become commonplace to observe that children from middle-class families are less likely to achieve a better standard of living than their parents. And as those chances dwindle, a greater burden falls on children and their parents to ensure their future success.

Continue reading Meritocracy’s Casualties

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

A portrait of Kamal, a refugee from Darfur. Painting by Linnéa Spransy

I’ll Jump When I See Them

The travel bans have been in the headlines, but less reported are the other moves that the Trump administration has made to keep refugees out of the US. For families fleeing war in Sudan and other conflict zones, these policies have taken a toll.

Imagine a Goodwill tucked inside an elementary school, with the energy of a Cairo airport gate. That’s the scene, on busy days, at IRIS, the refugee resettlement agency where I work in New Haven. The downstairs donation space overflows with coats; lamps stand over stacks of pots, pans, and bassinets. Upstairs, refugees from the Middle East and Africa bustle about the hallway with cups of tea and paperwork. Along the walls are world maps and local bus routes, kids’ drawings of airplanes and stars, flashcards for the US citizenship exam.

Working with refugees is unsettling sometimes. Knowing who survived genocide only to get hit by a car, who has trouble eating when he thinks about his mom not having food back home, whose sister tried to get to Europe on a raft—it undoes you sometimes.

Over the last two years, refugee resettlement work has gotten tougher. In 2017, President Trump’s “travel ban” blocked visitors and migrants from a number of Muslim-majority countries and temporarily halted the admission of refugees altogether. The US refugee resettlement program is now operating again, but the Trump administration has taken other, less publicized steps to undermine it—most recently, setting a record-low cap on admissions of just 30,000 refugees for 2019, less than a third of the annual average since 1980.

Continue reading I’ll Jump When I See Them

Ashley Makar is the community liaison at Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS). Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Tablet, and Killing the Buddha.

 

Remembrance of Things Past

Eva Mozes Kor, an Auschwitz survivor, publicly forgave one of her former captors before he died last year—at the end, a convicted war criminal. On the seventy-fourth anniversary of the camp’s liberation, the long journey to bring one of its SS officers to justice raises questions about the power of forgiveness and the importance of historical memory.

Look at this picture: she is Eva Mozes Kor, an Auschwitz survivor, extending her hand to Oskar Gröning, a former SS officer in the camp. The setting: a district court in Lüneburg, Germany, where Gröning was accused of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews. Date: April 2015.

The picture is a conundrum: why would an Auschwitz survivor extend forgiveness to her former captor? Kor’s parents and two of her siblings had perished there. She and her twin sister Miriam had endured the deadly human experiments of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, known as the “Angel of Death.”

During his trial, Gröning accepted “responsibility in front of God” for what he did at Auschwitz, but he rejected any criminal responsibility. Perhaps so as not to implicate himself further, he refused to show remorse or apologize.

For this and other reasons, none of Kor’s fifty-two co-plaintiffs in the case against the former SS officer followed her lead in publicly forgiving him. Many condemned her for the act.

When I chanced upon the photograph, though, I knew right away why Kor had forgiven Gröning. For I had heard her explain, years earlier, why.

Continue reading Remembrance of Things Past

Jan Vihan is a contributing writer for In The Fray.

 

Back to the Wall

Along the US–Mexican border in Arizona, the drug trade persists, but the jobs have long gone. Would building a border wall change anything?

It’s noon during an Arizona July, the temperature upward of 115 degrees, and I’m in the middle of my shift at a neighborhood bar off I-10 in Marana, just north of Tucson. The screen door bangs, startling me. I look up from behind the counter, where I’m putting beers on ice, and see a man wearing cowboy boots, dirt-stained jeans, and a striped blue-and-white dress shirt. “Sorry!” he blurts out in Spanish—he hadn’t known the door would slam so violently behind him. Sweat is pouring down his face, running into his eyes.

Right away I know that he has been crossing the desert. I hand him napkins to wipe away the sweat and motion for him to head over to the bar. He settles onto a stool where he can easily catch the breeze from the fans and swamp cooler. Continue reading Back to the Wall

Anna Chan is a writer based in Florida.

Photo by Patrick Emerson, via Flickr

Failing Grades

I was torn about failing a fifth-grader. In a poor, predominantly black school, there were plenty of tests but few right answers.

“Man, I don’t know any of this stuff!”

It was Lamar, one of my fifth-grade students. He and his classmates were taking a reading assessment. Within minutes, Lamar had given up.

“Mister Schuma, I ain’t doing this!”

“Lamar, you need to be quiet while your classmates are testing,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll do fine if you give it a shot. No more talking.”

Continue reading Failing Grades