Deseret Magazine - March 2022

THE NEXT GREAT MIGRATION

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PROLOGUE TO CATASTROPHE

BY TED KOPPPEL

MAY

CARLOS MARTINS THE WIZARD OF HOPE

GÉRALD CAUSSÉ ON HAVING

FAITH IN RESCUE

CHARLES KOCH HAS REGRETS

SCREENS ARE GOOD FOR KIDS?

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CONTENTS

36 THE GREAT CLIMATE MIGRATION MEGADROUGHTS. FLOODS. WILDFIRES. WHERE WILL WE GO WHEN WE CAN’T GO “HOME”? by benoít morenne

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46 PROLOGUE TO CATASTROPHE

THE WIZARD OF HOPE

CAN THE WEST’S CULTURE OF SELF-RELIANCE SHELTER US FROM A WORLD IN CRISIS?

THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF A BRAZILIAN BILLIONAIRE, AN AIRLINE MOGUL AND THE RESCUE OF 20,000 REFUGEES. by hal boyd

by ted koppel

66

OF MAPS & MEMORIES LITERARY TITANS — AND MY DAD — TOLD ME I’D FIND MYSELF IN THE WILDERNESS. I DIDN’T. by ethan bauer

AFTER THE LAST AMEN, WE WENT TO WORK

52

THE SUSTAINING POWER OF FAITH IN TIMES OF CRISIS. by gérald caussé

MARCH 2022

7

ELEVATING THE

NATIONAL

DISCOURSE. SALT LAKE CITY: 4,226

Journalism is so much more than clickbait headlines and one-sided finger pointing. At Deseret News, we’re committed to giving readers in Utah and across the nation an outlet for principled, illuminating journalism—where context matters and finding solutions is just as important as highlighting problems.

Join us as we examine the “why” behind today’s most important stories in our new expanded weekly edition, our online coverage, and our new monthly magazine.

CHICAGO: 577 LOS ANGELES: 305

WASHINGTON D.C.: 335

SAN FRANCISCO: 52

NEW YORK: 36

P R I N C I P L E D, I L L U M I N AT I N G , N E W S .

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CONTENTS

MAGAZINE

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

THE QUIET MAJORITY

32

Where have all the moderates gone? (Hint: They’re not on social media). by d . hunter schwarz

A LATENT THREAT

34

76

The alarming return of conspiracy theories and antisemitic violence. by mya jaradat

IDEAS

CHARLES KOCH LOOKS BACK

76

One of America’s most influential philanthropists bet big on partisanship. Now he’s trying to find common ground. by charles koch and brian hooks

THE WEST

MODERN FAMILY

SCREEN TIME

20

Inside the ever changing science on screens and teens. by jean m . twenge

THE NEXT TEEN EPIDEMIC

22

The pandemic’s mental health toll may be worse than we feared.

LEADERSHIP

by lois m . collins

NEVER STOP LEARNING

CULTURE

THE ART OF SLOWING DOWN

80

26

At 19, Grace McCallum already has an Olympic medal. And an ageless secret to success. by ethan bauer

The joy of treasured relics in the era of distraction.

THE VIEW FROM HERE

by gene weingarten

THE LAST WORD

OUR READERS RESPOND

1O 12 84

“I feel that women resonate in a stronger way with the living system that is agriculture.”

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BOOTS ON THE GROUND Move over, cowboy. by mary m c intyre

MARCH 2022

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THE VIEW FROM HERE

FOR THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH

I

n Ethiopia, the problem was water. That’s what three tribal chieftains told me as we sat on a bone-dry desert plain. The sun had done its work on them too — on their faces and their gnarled, callused hands.

These were men who lived their lives mostly outside. A hard life, close to the earth. Each year, they said, they had to go further and further for water. The eldest, nearing 70, said he was used to living with drought, but this was different. Something had changed. Now the rain came less and less, while the droughts lasted longer.

No matter where we live, we’ve all experienced something like this in recent years. In Miami, for example, the increasing ferocity of storms and the damage they wreak sent a friend of mine packing, moving his family north to metaphorical higher ground. Here in Utah, summer has always brought wildfires — I covered them as a young reporter — but now a blanket of smoke smothers the Salt Lake Valley every year, fed by fires burning hundreds of miles away. Last year, they were in Oregon. Or was it Tahoe? It’s hard to keep track anymore.

What I’ve seen as a journalist visiting the front lines of our changing planet, from the vanishing Amazon rainforest to Pacific islands obliterated by a tsunami, is alarming. A little terrifying, to be honest. The earth is a finely calibrated machine, and in our relentless pursuit of wealth and comfort, we’ve upset the balance. We’ve taken for granted how all the components of this planet work together. How sandstorms in the Sahara deliver millions of tons of nutrient-rich dust across the Atlantic, replenishing the soil of the rainforest. How deforestation in South America could cut snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains in half. And on and on.

There’s no avoiding this conclusion: We need to be better stewards.

This issue is dedicated to a planet in crisis. Staff writer Benoit Morrenne chronicles what might be the Earth’s next great migration, spurred

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by climate change (p. 36). He tells the story of a family from Sonoma, California, who nearly lost everything to wildfires not once, but twice, and eventually decided to leave their home for good.

We can’t all move, of course, and there’s no way to completely insulate ourselves from the storms of life. But we can prepare. In Prologue to Catastrophe (p. 46), veteran journalist Ted Koppel explores the culture of self-reliance in the West, in particular Salt Lake City, where he found an “extraordinary focus on the integration of self-sufficiency and charity.”

In a companion piece that begins on page 52 (After the Last Amen, We Went to Work), Gérald Caussé, presiding bishop of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, writes about his experiences leading massive humanitarian aid efforts in the wake of hurricanes and other disasters, including Hurricane Harvey in 2017. “It’s vitally important to help communities prepare for crises and to lend temporal assistance when disasters strike,” Causse writes. “But people of faith also understand that we cannot live on bread alone, and, in times of need, we need spiritual as well as temporal sustenance.”

In these times, Caussé writes, we need hope, something we’ve tried to infuse into this issue as well, from the beautiful photography and illustrations to delightful and surprising prose, like Gene Weingarten’s essay (p.

80) on the importance of slowing down and appreciating imperfection in a time when many of us are scurrying around like rats in a maze, oblivious to the beauty that surrounds us. Because with or without us, time will march on.

And we will too, through hurricanes and droughts, pandemics and earthquakes. Humans are resilient. But it’s on each of us to make the most of our time on this earth, and to honor its creation by caring for it, —JESSE HYDE as stewards of a wondrous, marvelous planet.

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THE BUZZ

OUR READERS RESPOND

F O R T H E D E C E M B E R /J A N U A R Y I S S U E , Deseret Magazine profiled the 20 leaders, artists and adventurers who

will change the West, highlighted by Ryan Smith, the founder of Qualtrics and owner of the Utah Jazz. The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch called the profile (“Ryan Smith Has a Pitch,” by McKay Coppins) one of the best pieces of journalism in 2021, and Clint Betts, of Silicon Slopes, said he’s optimistic about Smith’s bullish vision for Utah. The state’s governor, Spencer Cox, responded to the piece by saying Utah’s rapid growth clearly shows the state is doing something right.

Pamela Hawkes, who was picked as one of the West’s

change-makers (“Defender of the Unhoused”) for her groundbreaking work in Boise, Idaho, said she hoped her selection would bring more attention and understanding to the plight of the unhoused. “I truly feel that it is time for every city in America to start having real honest and problem-solving conversations, instead of sweeping it under the rug.” Reader Jason Meline praised the selection of entrepreneur Hamdi Ulukaya (“Yogurt Mogul”): “Ulukaya has been a model for how companies should grant equity to their workforce, view labor as an investment, and the key to their success as opposed to an expense.”

In response to “Bearers of Bad News,” a

Q&A with author Nikki Usher on the dependence of American journalism on the liberal elite, reader Scott Gallen wrote: “I suppose one way to make things better would be for liberal elites to acknowledge that middle America has valid viewpoints. Most people want the same things — clean air, water, good food and a better life for their kids. Liberal elites (the creative class) have the majority of the cultural power in America. They’ve won. It’s OK to invite Red America into the club. We may learn something from them … isn’t that the point of a cosmopolitan ethos?”

Historian Niall Ferguson went on Fox News’ “Brian Kilmeade Show” podcast

to discuss his essay on what we can learn about the present moment from past pandemics (“Doom Patrol,” November 2021), and Miles Taylor, the former Trump administration official who penned the infamous “Anonymous” op-ed in The New York Times in 2018, went on MSNBC’s “All in With Chris Hayes” to talk about his essay for Deseret Magazine on the GOP’s threats from within (“Inside the Fight Over the GOP’s Soul,” November 2021).

Executive Editor Hal Boyd’s interview with former national security adviser H.R.

McMaster on the Biden administration’s hasty retreat from Afghanistan (“The Lost War,” November 2021) also received widespread attention. It was tweeted by Stanford’s Hoover Institute, where McMaster is a fellow.

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Deseret Magazine, ISSN PP324 is published 10 times a year by Deseret News Publishing Co., with double issues in December/January and July/August.

The Deseret News’ principal office is 55 N. 300 West, Suite 500, Salt Lake City, Utah. Subscriptions are $29 a year. To subscribe visit pages.deseret.com/ subscribe. Copyright 2022, Deseret News Publishing Co. All rights reserved.

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DESERET proposed as a state in 1849, spanned from the Sierras in California to the Rockies in Colorado, and from the border of Mexico north to Oregon, Idaho and Wyoming.

Informed by our heritage and values, Deseret Magazine covers the people and culture of that territory and its intersection with the broader world.

CONTRIBUTORS

GÉRALD CAUSSÉ

TED KOPPEL

CAROLE HÉNAFF

JEAN M. TWENGE

The 15th presiding bishop of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Caussé was born in Bordeaux, France.

He is an accomplished pianist, served in the French air force and was the general manager of Pomona, France’s largest food distributor. Since the start of the pandemic, he has led the Latter-day Saint response to the COVID-19 pandemic, distributing food and other aid to 152 countries, detailed on p. 52, After the Last Amen, We Went to Work .

The British-born, American broadcast journalist has been a prominent force in the media industry, having served as anchor of “Nightline” for 25 years. The show reached 7.5 million viewers five years after its debut. He’s won nine Overseas Press Club awards, numerous Emmys and three George Foster Peabody awards. An excerpt of his book “Light’s Out,” featured on p.

46, explores the preparedness, or lack thereof, of everyday Americans.

The French illustrator and graphic designer is based in Barcelona, Spain. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Lion’s Roar, Barefoot Books, Elle Magazine France, and Les Echos, among others.

Her illustration work was has been recognized

by Communication Arts magazine in 2019 and featured in American Illustration in 2020. Hénaff ’s work is featured on p. 22, The Next Teen Epidemic.

Author, and professor of psychology at San Diego State University, Twenge is a prominent researcher whose work has been covered by “Fox and Friends,” The New York Times and National Public Radio. Author of “The Narcissism Epidemic” and “iGen,” Twenge is best known for being one of the first psychologists to sound the alarm on excessive screen time. She updates us on how some screen time may be good for kids in Screen Time, p. 20.

SÉAN ALONZO HARRIS

CHARLES KOCH

GENE WEINGARTEN

STEPHAN SCHMITZ

Father, husband and accomplished photographer, Harris’ clients include USA Today, J.P. Morgan Chase and Mother Jones. Focusing on environmental portraits, Harris has won several notable awards and currently teaches at Maine Media Workshops.

His work was recently featured in C0mmunication Arts magazine, and the 121st Maine Legislature issued a formal proclamation in recognition of his work, which is featured on p. 36 in The Great Climate Migration.

The Wichita, Kansas, native, consistently ranked among the wealthiest people in the world, is an active philanthropist and has been the chairman and CEO of Koch Industries since 1967.

One of America’s most influential conservatives, Koch explores whether exclusively backing GOP candidates from 2010 through 2016 added to our current era of bitter partisanship. In his essay, Charles Koch Looks Back , p. 76, Koch argues for finding common ground.

Former Washington Post columnist and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, Weingarten is one of America’s premier social critics. For his first published piece since leaving the Post in September, The Art of Slowing Down, p. 80, Weingarten delights in the joys of functional relics and wonders if our technological age is defiling culture, and whether our hectic, overscheduled lives are making us take for granted the beauty around us.

An award-winning, conceptual illustrator from Zurich, Switzerland, Schmitz studied at the Lucerne School of Art and Design.

A storyteller, he uses his medium to depict meaning in surprising and unique ways.

He was recognized by Lürzers Archive as one of the 200 best illustrators worldwide for 2016/17. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Time Out, Modus, and The Telegraph. His illustration is featured in The Great Climate Migration, p. 36.

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OPENING SHOT

COVID 2 YEARS IN UTAH NATIONAL GUARD SOLDIERS STAFF A COVID-19 TEST SITE AT THE FAIRPARK IN SALT LAKE CITY ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 2021

Even before the pandemic, health care workers were at twice the risk of burnout compared to the general population. But now, two years in, the toll of being on the front line is mounting, with 60 to 75 percent of clinicians reporting symptoms of exhaustion, depression, sleep disorders and PTSD. In January, Utah lawmakers in the House passed a bill that would enhance penalties for assaults against nurses and doctors. “We’ve got to do everything we can to recognize these heroes,” said the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Robert Spendlove, a Republican from Sandy.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY SPENSER HEAPS

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MARCH 2022

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MODERN FAMILY

SCREEN TIME ONE OF THE FIRST PSYCHOLOGISTS TO SOUND THE ALARM ABOUT SCREENS AND KIDS SAYS IT’S MORE COMPLICATED THAN WE THOUGHT

BY JE A N M . TW E N G E

B

eing a parent today comes with what seems like a never-ending challenge: Getting kids to put down their electronic devices.

As I write this, our two youngest children (ages 10 and 12) are playing Minecraft on their school-issued laptops. Our oldest, who is 15, is in her room, probably on her laptop as well. Even though none of them have their own smartphone or tablet, the draw of screens seems constant.

Screen technology is everywhere. The average American child gets their own smartphone by age 10, and many get their own tablet before that. Even if you hold back from getting children their own devices, they will often be issued one by their school, or will constantly ask to borrow yours. As a result, according to a 2019 study by Common Sense Media, kids ages eight to 12 spent more than five hours a day total with screen media, and teens 13 to 18 spent seven and a half hours.

This is not a good situation: Study after study has found that kids and teens who spend a large number of hours a day with screens suffer from negative outcomes including more depression, self-harm and obesity.

What’s a parent to do? Some experts have 20

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suggested that because technology is so pervasive, there is no point in fighting it — we should just let kids do what they want online.

Another group of parents advocates for the opposite, keeping their kids off screens nearly all the time. Too often, the discussion around screens and kids is all or nothing.

That’s unfortunate, because there is a third

SOME USE OF SCREENS MIGHT BE GOOD FOR KIDS, EVEN THOUGH TOO MUCH USE IS NOT GOOD. IN THIS PHILOSOPHY, SCREEN TIME HAS ITS TIME AND PLACE.

way: limited use of screens. This strategy is based on a startling fact: Some use of screens might be good for kids, even though too much use is not good. In this philosophy, screen time has its time and place. You use it for what it’s good for, and then go do something else.

I have researched the links between screen time and mental health in kids and teens for the last six years, combing large surveys and small experiments for insight into how much — and what kind — of screen time is healthy for children, and how much is not.

In dataset after dataset, a consistent pattern has emerged: The best-adjusted teens are not those who never used screens, but those who use screens a limited amount of time. There are also meaningful variations depending on what teens do on screens and when. Although most of these studies have looked at teens, some also inform how parents should regulate younger kids’ screen time as well.

Based on the latest research, here is my best advice for parents: 1. DON’T WORRY TOO MUCH ABOUT TV.

Surprisingly, teens who don’t watch TV at all are more likely to be unhappy than those who watch it excessively. TV watching between one and five hours a day is about the same in terms of happiness levels. As long as teens are getting their homework done, are hanging out with their friends sometimes, and are getting enough exercise, TV time is not a big factor for happiness.

3. IF YOU ALLOW SOCIAL MEDIA, HAVE CLEAR RULES.

2. ALLOW TEENS TO USE SCREENS TO COMMUNICATE WITH FRIENDS IN REAL TIME, IN MODERATION.

A teen who has no access to texting, video chat or gaming has few opportunities to communicate with their friends when they’re not face to face. This generation (whom I call iGen in my book of the same name) rarely talks on the phone. Even before the pandemic, they saw each other in person less.

Many teens now spend time with each other via gaming programs, and texting and video chat also allow real-time or near-real-time communication. This type of communication is not as essential for younger children, who ILLU STR ATION BY JA M E S ST E I N BE R G

are more often content to play with their friends at school or only in-person. But by middle school, keeping up friendships usually means some kind of electronic communication. That’s probably why teens who don’t game or text at all are more likely to be unhappy than those who engage in these activities a small to moderate amount.

They are best in limited amounts (up to about three hours a day), because heavy users (especially heavy gamers) are more unhappy than nonusers. Heavy use crowds out time for healthy activities like sleep and exercise and might replace more beneficial social interaction like in-person socializing.

Of the four activities, social media is the most strongly linked to unhappiness, especially for girls, with nearly each hour of use marching toward more unhappiness. Heavy users are almost twice as likely to be unhappy as light users. For boys there is little link to unhappiness until three to five hours a day, while for girls the uptick in unhappiness appears after an hour of social media use a day.

Teens do use social media to communicate with their friends, but most social media involves communicating with a group and not in real time. That gives it a performative aspect, with teens worrying about how many likes their posts will get and how many followers they have. Some platforms, such as Instagram, also have algorithms that expose teens to questionable content (such as pages encouraging unhealthy eating). In September 2021, internal company research leaked by a whistleblower showed that Instagram caused depression and body image issues among teen girls, causing in some cases a “grief spiral” of negative feelings. Instagram is, at base, a platform where teen girls and young women post pictures of their bodies and ask others to comment on them — not a good situation.

Thus, if you allow your teen to have social media, it should probably be a platform like Snapchat (where messages disappear, and more communication is among friends) instead of a platform like Instagram (where posts are curated, and there is more content from celebrities and influencers, which can lead to body image issues).

Moderation can be difficult for teens themselves to implement. The algorithms of social media sites are designed to be addictive, keeping users on the site as long as possible.

Thus, it’s probably a good idea to use the parental controls available on most devices to limit the amount of time your teen spends on social media apps. You can also consider not allowing social media at all, since there are other ways teens can communicate with their friends. This is the choice we’ve made for our 15-year-old, and an increasing number of iGeners themselves are advocating for teens postponing social media (like college student Emma Lembke, who founded a movement called Log Off).

As for kids 12 or younger, it’s simple: Kids are not allowed to have a social media page in CONTI NUED ON PAGE 83 their own MARCH 2022

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THE NEXT TEEN EPIDEMIC THE PANDEMIC’S MENTAL HEALTH IMPACT ON TEENS IS RAISING ALARM, BUT THERE ARE ANSWERS

BY LO I S M. CO L L I N S

A

mother finds a drawing of a tombstone among her son’s schoolwork. “Rest in Peace,” the caption reads.

“Maybe I’d be better off dead.”

The boy is 10 years old.

In terror, she turns to marriage and family therapist Laurie Singer. That a child so young struggles with mental health is no surprise to Singer — or to teachers, other mental health experts, physicians or a troubling share of parents who see the cauldron of anxiety and depression boiling in America. The crisis has bubbled for decades, and by 2019, one-third of high school students — half of females — reported feeling persistent sadness or hopelessness, a huge increase from 2009. The pandemic dumped grief and fear into the pot.

The mental health of millions of American youths has become so fragile that U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy issued an urgent public health advisory in December. “The pandemic era’s unfathomable number of deaths, pervasive sense of fear, economic instability, and forced physical distancing from loved ones, friends, and communities have exacerbated the unprecedented stresses young people already 22

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faced,” Murthy wrote. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, cases of depression and anxiety doubled among young people. Emergency room

“IT WOULD BE A TRAGEDY IF WE BEAT BACK ONE PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS ONLY TO ALLOW ANOTHER TO GROW IN ITS PLACE.”

visits for suspected suicide attempts were 51 percent higher for adolescent girls and 4 percent higher for adolescent boys compared to early 2019.

Then, just when some kids got a little used to doing school and life while cocooned at home, the doors flew open and they were ordered back into a world that doesn’t really seem any safer.

America’s mental health crisis isn’t ageist.

At her practice in Camarillo, California, Singer treats patients as young as 5 and as old as 80 who have anxiety, depression or both. But teens have been especially hard hit.

Sam Goldstein, psychologist and adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of Utah, specializes in treating youths with multiple, complicated mental health issues. He’s watched the numbers swell. In 2020, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that 21 percent of 16-17 year olds experienced a major depressive episode. Anxiety, depression, somatic disorders and teen suicide are known as “internalizing disorders” — conditions that are often nearly invisible to others, but cause great pain to those tormented by them. One of the harshest challenges that these disorders entail is that they tend to come back, warned Goldstein, author of “Tenacity in Children.”

“Once your body kindles that kind of an extreme response, under stress the body regresses to that again. So about 50 percent to 70 percent of teens who have a depressive episode before 18 will have another one before 18.

“And if you have two, then you’re in the

ILLU STR ATION BY C A R O LE H É N A FF

MARCH 2022

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club. You may not always be in the building, but you have a membership card. You’re going to cycle in and out of depressive episodes.”

W H Y THE IN C R E ASE in severe mental health problems among the young? Perhaps there is less stigma today, so more are seeking help. Or maybe mental health really is getting much worse. Undisputed, experts say, is that young America faces grave mental health challenges, growing up in a crucible of digital media, academic pressure, financial uncertainty, racism, gun violence, societal inequality and fear that the planet itself will die. Nor is the pain portioned equitably. Rural kids, LGBTQ kids, immigrants and those in poverty are among those facing the hardest path. Girls are more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety, depression or an eating disorder, while boys may show up with behavior problems and are more apt to die by suicide.

COVID-19 has decidedly ramped up stress and that impact isn’t theoretical, said Goldstein. Levels of cortisol — the main hormone produced by stress — have measurably increased as children and adults struggle to make sense of what they see, feel and hear. Cortisol spikes can cause depression and harm physical health, too. When Presidents Donald Trump and later Joe Biden assembled advisers for their pandemic responses, Goldstein wishes they’d taken a more holistic approach, incorporating educators and experts in dealing with substance abuse and family violence.

The virus has exacerbated those issues as surely as it’s filled hospitals and clinics. “We may have dramatically increased the numbers and the vulnerability in multiple other areas downstream.”

Goldstein thinks America needs to drastically alter its approach to mental illness. “In light of increased vulnerability we all have — not just being unhappy, but unhappiness that causes impairment — maybe we need to think about systemwide intervention like we’re doing in physical health,” he told Deseret.

Just as kindergartners are screened for school preparedness, children need to be screened for mental health, Goldstein says. He offers the example of a school district in Austin, Texas, where all students were screened as part of a study 30 years ago. Students who answered yes to a question were further screened. Of three questions, one — “Are you worried about school?” — was especially correlated with mental health problems, usually depression. The next logical step is teaching children about depression and how to spot it

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in themselves, with increased information and resources depending on the degree of identified risk.

“I’m not trying to pathologize and I’m certainly not trying to create business, because right now there aren’t enough professionals to go around,” he adds. Parents can do some screening, too, by considering if their child seems worried more about their capabilities than is warranted. Do they see the world in mud-colored glasses? Kids could ponder that, too. Self-diagnosis is fine as long as it’s not where people stop.

Goldstein breaks action into big things and little things. Being proactive is big. The threshold leading to action should be low. If you’re concerned, do something about it, he said.

Pediatricians and family doctors offer a place to start, experts say. Many insurance carriers have access to an Employee Assistance Program with mental health professionals who can help

KIDS ARE ASKED TO BE RESILIENT, OFTEN WITHOUT TOOLS TO DO IT.

people to get care. Groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and mental health-focused nonprofits are among groups with reputable screening tools online.

Health systems and academic institutions are also pitching in. In New York, for example, the Montefiore Health System’s Pediatric Behavioral Health Integration Program uses telehealth technology to convene group therapy for teens with anxiety and depression. Psychologists and psychiatrists are based in primary care offices and refer children if mental health screening reveals cause for concern, said psychologist Teresa Hsu-Walklet, assistant director of the program. The program is focused on helping young people to understand mental disorders and learn coping strategies, in part by telling each other what worked for them. Telehealth is a growing resource for mental health treatment that is likely to persist beyond the pandemic, though

capacity is limited, and requires good Wi-Fi, Hsu-Walklet said. But the technology enables critical help when two people can’t be in the same place.

Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital created “Mightier” in 2016, an emotional health program for kids 6 to 12 that pairs video games with evidence-based strategies to help kids learn to regulate their emotions and build coping skills at home. Available by subscription at Mightier.com, it combines biofeedback with curated video games that kids already play. When biofeedback shows the player is getting anxious or frustrated, the player must self-calm or the game gets even harder. Emotional regulation becomes instinctive over time, and the kids learn that they can work through stress. Jason Kahn, a behavioral health researcher and Mightier’s chief scientific officer, said kids are asked to be resilient, often without tools to do it. “That’s a really big ask and we have to prioritize building the types of skills that will help them.”

Singer, the therapist and author of “You’re Not Crazy: Living With Anxiety, Obsessions and Fetishes,” combines cognitive behavioral therapy with behavior modification to help children temper depression and anxiety using color-coded “signaling” strategies and other tools. Though communities often lack enough professionals to meet local need, she said families mustn’t give up. Doctors, teachers and friends may know someone who can help.

Walls aren’t high enough nor locks strong enough to keep the world away from children, so Goldstein tells parents to have frank, age-appropriate discussions about whatever might confuse them, like why schools and businesses open and close and what’s risky and what isn’t. “If adults are confused, imagine how confused kids are,” he said.

Murthy’s suggestions are more prosaic: He said it’s important to ask for help, work on having healthy relationships, find ways to serve others, manage stress, get sleep, nurture body and mind and be “intentional” when using social media and technology. He points out that news is never all bad. Some kids have thrived during the pandemic: more sleep, more quality time with family, less academic stress, less bullying, a more flexible schedule. But the call to action on mental health is clearly urgent. Communities must guarantee access to good mental health care that’s affordable and culturally competent, he said. “It would be a tragedy if we beat back one public health crisis only to allow another to grow in its place.”

Building a Better Community Clyde Companies has been a leader in the construction industry throughout the Intermountain West and Great Plains for nearly 100 years. Through our family of sister companies, we offer the resources of a large company with the values of a local business. Because of those values, our most important goal is to serve the communities in which we operate by building a better community. We regularly support community organizations and educational institutions throughout the region with our time, money, and talents. When you partner with one of the Clyde Companies, you are partnering with an organization that is dedicated to doing the right thing. That’s who we are.

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LEADERSHIP

NEVER STOP LEARNING AT 19, AN OLYMPIC MEDALIST ALREADY KNOWS ONE OF LIFE’S MOST IMPORTANT LESSONS

BY E TH A N B AU E R

I

t all feels so familiar. The lights glaring down at the smoky stage. The thud and boing of gymnasts launched from springboards. The faint whiffs of fresh, yet somehow stale arena popcorn. Grace McCallum dips her right arm into a white plastic bin in search of chalk. She dusts every crevice of her fingers and her grip — a strip of leather that protects her palms from the shredding physics of friction on the uneven parallel bars. Yes, she’s been here before.

Many times. Most notably as a Team USA gymnast, helping Sunisa Lee and her fellow Americans claim silver last summer in Tokyo.

The tattoo on the outside of her right forearm — the Olympic rings, now powdered white — reminds everyone watching at home. But to hear her tell it, what’s happening at West Valley City’s Maverik Center on this January evening — the annual “Best of Utah” meet, and McCallum’s first college competition — is, in fact, new.

She’s competed all over the world, earning accolades that most little girls who yearn for gymnastics glory only reach in their daydreams. But to find success at the collegiate level, she knows she can’t rely only on past achievements. Success in a new environment is about adapting, learning, putting yourself in challenging situations over and over again, and never getting too comfortable — especially with Utah entering the season ranked fourth, hoping to claim its first national title since 1995 at the championship meet in April.

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Just listen to McCallum’s fellow freshman teammate Amelie Morgan, who competed for Great Britain in the Tokyo Games, explain it. “I’ve had a lot of people say to me, ‘You’ve competed at the Olympics, surely you’re not going to be nervous for this,’” she says. “But it’s a very different experience.”

At the highest levels of elite gymnastics, challenge and individuality reign. Even on Team USA, McCallum explains, packing as

“YES, I DID THOSE THINGS, BUT THAT DOESN’T DEFINE WHO I AM. IT’S SOMETHING I ACCOMPLISHED, BUT I’M JUST GRACE OUTSIDE OF THE GYM. MY PARENTS ALWAYS TOLD ME TO STAY HUMBLE ABOUT MY ACHIEVEMENTS AND MY SUCCESS, SO I THINK THAT’S KEPT ME VERY GROUNDED IN WHO I AM.”

much difficulty as possible into a routine and worrying about your score and your score only are the norm. “There’s still team events, because we have the team finals, and that’s where we won the silver (in the last Olympics). But it’s very much individualized,” she says. “It’s

almost like every man for themselves out there.” Not in college, where perfection and teamwork are prized. The routines just need to be executed well, all in the service of scoring the most points as a unit. It’s an adjustment.

It’s visible in McCallum as she begins her bars warmup in the Maverik Center. While performing a “stick” — where the gymnast goes vertical and points her toes toward the roof — she wants to go forward, but her body won’t let her. She contorts her frame, bends her spine, tries to bring her momentum where she wants it, but it’s no use. She falls backward and plops onto the mat below.

Although she’s now living in Salt Lake City, 19-year-old McCallum originally hails from Isanti, Minnesota. Her brush with gymnastics began by happenstance: She was a very energetic toddler, and her parents figured they could tucker her by enrolling her at the gym a mile from their home. By her early teenage years she’d outgrown it and switched over to Twin City Twisters, then the home of future two-time collegiate all-around champion Maggie Nichols. It challenged her in a way she’d never experienced, and even now, the tone of her voice indicates some upsetting memories. “At the time, I didn’t like it. I was really struggling with gymnastics, because the environment is so different. It was so much more intense,” she says. “But … I definitely wouldn’t be the athlete I am today without them.” Almost as soon as she made the switch as a 13-year-old, she shattered her elbow.

It happened in 2016, a week before her first Junior Olympic Nationals and two weeks before an elite qualifier, so her first thought was whether she’d still be able to compete. The answer was no. Her doctors only gave her a 5050 chance of ever competing again, matter of fact, though her parents kept that information from her to avoid discouragement. She made it back after nine months of physical therapy and continued her rise.

She “verbally committed” to Utah when she wasn’t yet 15 years old. A gym mate of hers from Minnesota — Abby Paulson — was already on her way, so she figured she’d have at least one friend. Plus she loved the campus and the people the first time she visited. The PHOTOGR AP H Y BY S PE N S E R H E A PS

climate was enough like Minnesota, she says, to feel homey and different at once. “And who wouldn’t love being in the mountains?” The Utah social climate was also a good fit, given her devout Catholicism. And although she missed almost three months of adjustment time during her first semester while on the 35-city, Simone Biles-led Gold Over America Tour, she excelled in her online academics and made it back in time to learn four routines and compete in the all-around. “She’s handling it like a champ. Those are fastballs and curveballs — she doesn’t know what’s coming at her,” says longtime Utah head coach Tom Farden.

Just look at her balance beam routine — the first of the night. She dazzles with her

refined skills: From a springboard near the center of the beam, she faces the opposite way. She vaults into the air as if attempting a backward somersault and grabs the beam with both arms. She hangs upside down, her feet arrow-straight toward the sky, the apparatus pressed against her chest. The balance beam, with a four-inch width, is the sport’s least forgiving event. The margin for error is miniscule. Stumbles are commonplace. But not for McCallum. She sticks her dismount and finishes with a 9.875, tied for second among the Utes. It’s the beginning of a long night; she’s the only Utah gymnast tabbed to compete in every event.

After a 9.85 floor routine and a team-leading 9.9 on the vault, McCallum finishes her first competition as a Ute on the bars. Farden, his arms crossed, looks on beside her. She tries to empty her head during routines and let her extensive muscle memory do the work; she ignores the crowd whenever possible, because she doesn’t want her performance to depend on anyone else’s enthusiasm. But this is the apparatus that befuddled her during warmups, so perhaps she’s thinking a little harder than she should be as she once more dusts her hands in the chalk bowl and bops her head along to “Party in the USA.” She starts on the shorter bar, then moves to the taller, then back to the shorter. Something is off. She stops her routine by stepping on the ground — a major deduction. Farden’s explanation for what went wrong would require a Ph.D.-level understanding of gymnastics, so I’ll spare you the specifics except to say that he offers some advice before McCallum gets back on and finishes. She exchanges a few courteous head nods and high-fives with teammates. Her body language tells a story of disappointment but not of devastation. She’s learned to regulate her emotions — and her identity — well over the years. “I always tell people, ‘Yes, I did those things, but that doesn’t define who I am.

It’s something I accomplished, but I’m just Grace outside of the gym.’ My parents always told me to stay humble about my achievements and my success, so I think that’s kept me very grounded in who I am.”

That approach should serve her well as she continues her collegiate career. “I think Grace is going to blossom,” says Farden, the key term being “going to.” Learning takes time. Though the new challenges and atmospheres, McCallum insists, are welcome ones. “It’s a really nice change,” she says. “I love it, having everybody’s support, and working toward one goal.”

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BOOTS ON THE GROUND STATISTICS SAY THAT WOMEN ARE BETTER STEWARDS OF THE LAND. KELSEY SCOTT IS HERE TO PROVE IT

BY M A RY M C I N TY R E

K

elsey ducheneaux scott has alert eyes that give telltale signs to what’s on her mind. That’s all right, though, as she has a habit of speaking candidly. “I don’t remember a time in my life where I didn’t anticipate being involved in the family operation,” Scott says. Before her, Scott’s great-grandfather, grandfather and father held the title of “ranch manager.” Today, she is the first woman in her family to claim it — overseeing daily operations on the 7,200-acre DX Ranch on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota.

Looking back, it was Scott’s Grandma Regina who made the biggest impact on her when she was growing up on the ranch. “Granny,” Scott fondly remembers, “always had a pot of coffee on, and no matter how long it had been since she’d been grocery shopping, you better believe that she was going to cook you a meal, even if you said you weren’t hungry.” The Lakota are one of several tribes making up the Sioux Nation, and in their culture, “matriarchs are really the rock and the center of the family,” she says.

Because of the example her Granny set, Scott embraces her role as a rancher and her identity as a woman — despite the lack of female representation in the ag sector. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s latest census, only 36 percent of U.S. farmers identify as female.

But this issue goes deeper than simple gender representation. Research indicates that when women manage land, they are more likely to employ conservation strategies and consider the long-term effects of agricultural practices such as human and soil health.

Historically, Native American women are responsible for inventing some of the most innovative practices and tools in Western ag28

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riculture. The latest research indicates that the number of women in agriculture at Native American operations hovers around 50 percent — much higher than in non-Native operations.

In these communities, there exists a nearly equal division of labor in food-producing activities — telling a vastly different story than the dominant narrative of white male ranchers in the West.

From Scott’s experience, being a woman on the ranch isn’t so much radical as a return to normal. “I feel that women resonate in a stronger way with the living system that is agriculture,” she says, “We have this unique heartstring

“I FEEL THAT WOMEN RESONATE IN A STRONGER WAY WITH THE LIVING SYSTEM THAT IS AGRICULTURE. WE HAVE THIS UNIQUE HEARTSTRING THAT GETS PULLED ON A LITTLE STRONGER.”

that gets pulled on a little stronger.” She is part of a groundswell, not only shifting how ranching happens on the prairies she is from, but also shifting who will come after her, and why.

HERE, IN T H E Missouri Valley of South Dakota, Scott’s ancestors lived along the river’s rich and abundant forested bottomlands and its tributaries. The people moved across the prairies alongside herds of bison, gathering herbs and plants. Today, the herds of bison are gone, but Scott is part of a growing movement to return the rangeland to its former regenera-

tive state, using cattle in place of bison. “We’re still stewarding the land, we just have to do it differently, because we’re place-bound,” she explains. Today, Scott’s holistic approach includes rotational grazing, prairie monitoring and the replanting of native grasses. She and her family learned to do it differently because history forced them to.

Her ancestors’ relocation to the Cheyenne River Reservation is the story of their entire tribe’s relocation: As the influx of white settlers onto traditionally native lands led to increasingly violent conflicts, Native American territory was whittled down to tiny inholdings throughout the Western states. From the 1850s through the 20th century, the federal government repeatedly reneged on promises and the federal policy of relegating Natives onto reservations spelled the end of the Sioux’s semi-nomadic lifestyle, their bison hunting days and much of their Indigenous culture.

However diminished, their tribe managed to retain a small portion of their original lands, bordered on the east by the Missouri River and on the south by the Cheyenne River. This is where you will find the Cheyenne River Reservation today.

Once confined to life on the reservation, Scott’s family had another obstacle to face. In the 1940s, an ill-conceived damming project on the upper Missouri River promising flood control, hydroelectric power, irrigation and water supply for municipal purposes flooded the Sioux’s most productive land and resources without tribal consultation or environmental assessment. Scott’s great-grandpa described the dam and the resulting Lake Oahe as the “gutting of our reservation.”

With the loss of quality farmland to grow crops, cattle ranching soon became the most

R A N CHI NG PRACTI CES AT THE DX RANCH ARE A P RODU C T OF T RADIT IONAL NAT IV E P RAC T IC E S AND MODE RN S C I E N C E .

dormant season.” Without rest, there wouldn’t be robust growth. Today Scott and her family have grown their operation into something sustainable — and aspirational.

promising economic venture, but even that required more land than most tribal members could obtain. Scott’s great-grandpa, Frank Ducheneaux, had his allotment relocated from the fertile (now flooded) valley to arid highlands, named “the Great American Desert” by Stephen Long, a government surveyor on an 1820s scientific expedition, due to its extreme temperatures, cyclical droughts and poor soil quality. Compensation rates for the land that was flooded were so low that Ducheneaux’s 1,400 acres of formerly verdant farmland bought only 160 acres in the parched highlands — the starting plot of the DX Ranch. occupies this land on a tribal lease, but it looks less arid than it did when Ducheneaux acquired it back in the 1960s. That’s because of years of implementing traditional Native practices with modern technology to bring the land to life. “I say I’m the fourth-generation rancher in my family, but I’m of the 125th generation to help steward the Great Plains,” Scott says. “Some of my ancestors helped to evolve this landscape to what it is now. We were a part of the ecosystem ourselves.”

It’s not perfect. The land is still arid and difficult to work. Tornadoes, hail the size of tennis balls, 110-degree days in the summer and minus-60-degree nights in the winter are

THE RANCH STILL

PHOTOGR AP H Y BY J E N N ZE LLE R

K E L S E Y S COT T, RANC H MANAGE R OF T H E 7,2 0 0 -AC RE DX RANC H .

just a handful of seasonal woes that can plague the land. “One thing you can count on: It’s always windy,” laughs Scott. But she’s quick to acknowledge that you can’t have one extreme without the other. “The only reason our Great Plains can be so productive is because of the

WH IL E S COT T DIP P E D her toes into solutions surrounding agricultural resource management issues in the academic world (she has a master’s degree in integrated resource management), she states that she wasn’t fully exposed to the boots-on-the-ground concepts of regenerative agriculture until she attended a Quivira Coalition Conference in 2017. Through the conservation organization, she connected with Nicole Masters, an agroecologist who studies the interrelationships of soil microbes, structure and plant health, to learn how to rebuild the fertility of grazing land. That led Scott to become a self-proclaimed “soil nerd.”

“Above ground is less than half of the picture,” she says. “The soil microbiome, the interconnectedness of the fungi, the nematodes, the microbes, the plant roots, the chemistry — that only exists because we have soil as the main host.” This has shifted what Scott’s idea of success on a ranch actually looks like. She focuses less on productivity — as is often discussed in agricultural circles — and more on the integrity of the ecosystem. Now, the soil is key to all operations at DX. “We use the land

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K E L SE Y S COTT AND HE R G R A N DMOTHER REGI NA.

as an indication of how we will continue to adapt our management.”

Riding through the grazing pastures, Scott takes notes with a simple clicker tied to her saddle. She clicks for each of the different plants she sees. “Over the course of time, it informs me that we’re trending positive, and biodiversity is increasing,” she says.

Fertilizing and replenishing the soil is also crucial: They cut hay for winter fodder from their own pastures and feed it back onto the same pastures so that leftover hay is incorporated into the nutrient cycle. Additionally, Scott has been able to reduce the negative impact of grazing cattle by increasing the number of the herd’s pastures from four to 18. This allows cows to mimic the grazing patterns of bison herds — never grazing the same pasture in the same season two years in a row— so the grasses can grow past the most delicate stages and build up soil nutrients before it’s grazed again. “Since we’ve been doing this, our pastures get green earlier and stay green longer.”

Scott has seen big benefits for her herds from these changes as well. To date, herd health and immunity have improved to the point that they don’t need the industry-standard two or three applications of oral drench, hormone injections, or broad-spectrum antibiotics that cattle typically receive each year. The calves are fluffy and clear-eyed, and the cows have sleek coats and robust figures. “I’m tasting a difference in our meat quality, that’s how I know that we’re getting an impact throughout the entirety of the system,” Scott says.

She’s looking to expand that impact through her community, too. For the past three years, Scott has operated a direct-to-consumer grassfed meat operation, DX Beef. And although the demand for grass-fed beef has doubled year after year, and tenderloin can fetch a price of $33 per pound at market, the driving force 30

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T H RE E Y E ARS AGO, S COT T F OU NDE D DX B E E F TO B RING QUAL IT Y F OOD B AC K TO H E R COMMU NIT Y.

behind starting the company wasn’t profit, but hunger. Eagle Butte, the town on the center of the reservation, is one of America’s poorest towns. The entire 4,267-square-mile reservation (about the same size as Connecticut) has only three or four grocery stores. Scott recognized the irony that although up to 80,000 head of high-quality beef cattle were grazing on the reservation at any given time, none of the meat actually made it onto local tables.

The mission of starting DX Beef was simple: provide nourishing, affordable food to the community. With direct-to-consumer sales, Scott aims to close the loop and cut out unnecessary fees. Selling the cattle at auction to wholesale meat buyers undervalued DX’s cattle and severed the connection between producer and consumer. Direct-to-consumer sales allowed DX Beef financial feasibility without added costs for consumers — a win-win that Scott hopes catches on around the West and the rest of the country. For that reason, she often shares her business “secrets” with other ranchers, “I’m always trying to train my competitors because, for me, it’s not about the

whole world eating DX beef. It’s about helping others to model after us. It’s about the whole world feeling empowered to go seek out other producers to feed their family.” to visit the ranch today in the bitter winter months, you might find Scott lost in myriad tasks: organizing beef for delivery, putting up hay with the tractor or working with a horse. Or you might find her with an ax in hand, breaking ice atop vital water sources on the mornings below freezing. The horses need hay, and mineral tubs must be checked.

“We also have to make sure the bulls are where they’re supposed to be, and not going to visit the neighbors,” she says. Mixed in with all this is her time spent on the land conducting rangeland inventory and soil sampling.

This might not sound like the typical ranch life you would expect to hear about in the American West, which has been painted by imaginings of swaggering cowboys and rodeos, of saloons and shootouts. Scott isn’t what you’d imagine a rancher of folktales past to be, because she’s what a rancher of today is.

IF YOU WERE

Meditate with God. Take five minutes to experience divine love in a whole new way.

MARCH 2022

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NATIONAL AFFAIRS

THE QUIET MAJORITY MOST AMERICANS ARE FAR MORE MODERATE THAN SOCIAL MEDIA MAKES IT SEEM

BY D. H U N TE R S C H WA R Z

I

f political talk online seems a bit extreme, it’s not just you. Social media is skewed to the furthest ends of the political spectrum, according to new polling by Pew Research Center, with the most conservative and liberal users more likely to post about politics.

Pew sorted U.S. adults into nine political typologies and found that those at the extremes, the “Progressive Left” and “Faith and Flag Conservatives,” were the most likely to show support for a political campaign or candidate on social media. People who were more in the middle — groups like the “Stressed Sideliners,” “Ambivalent Right” and “Outsider Left” — were less likely to do so. Those on the fringes were also more likely to have voted, donated to a candidate or political group or attended a campaign event in 2020.

“It’s always those small group activists and political junkies, they are way more likely to post their opinions,” says Jieun Shin, an assistant professor at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications who studies social media.

Add these politically active users’ posts to a newsfeed powered by engagement metrics and algorithms, and you have a recipe for overemphasizing the outliers. Meanwhile, those in the middle don’t post about politics as much, creating an aggregate image of politics that doesn’t always match public sentiments offline.

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Mainstream social networks are in a period of transition following a rocky year, from the deplatforming of then-President Donald Trump following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to growing bipartisan calls from lawmakers to rein them in and break them up. Americans are broadly dissatisfied with these companies, albeit for different reasons.

A November 2021 Washington Post-Schar

“THE FACEBOOK ALGORITHM, IN AN ATTEMPT TO DRIVE ENGAGEMENT, INDEXES THE FRINGE PAGES AND OPINIONS BECAUSE THOSE ARE THE ONES THAT ARE SENSATIONAL.”

School poll found a majority are distrustful of Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp and YouTube, and 64 percent want the government to exert more control over privacy issues at Internet companies, up from 38 percent in 2012. But it’s the nature of the mechanisms that determine what users see in their feeds that has experts worried about the spread of misinformation.

“The Facebook algorithm, in an attempt to drive engagement, they index the fringe pages and opinions because those are the ones that are sensational,” Shin says. “Those sensational and extreme views are more engaging. By nature it’s more entertaining and appealing.”

Last September, internal documents leaked to the Wall Street Journal revealed that Facebook was well aware of the social harms caused by its apps. The leaks showed the company shielded millions of high-profile users from enforcement of its rules, including users who shared misinformation, and that in internal chats, employees claimed the company favored right-wing publishers. As a test, Facebook researchers created a fictional account for a conservative mom in North Carolina whose politics were mainstream right and found that after a day, Facebook’s algorithms were recommending right-wing content.

Within five days, it was recommending pages affiliated with the QAnon conspiracy. Similar warped recommendations occurred for the account of a liberal user.

Hemant Kakkar, an assistant professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, says that when it comes to stopping the spread of misinformation online, social media companies have “a huge role to play here if they want to.” His recent research has found that the propensity to share false information is driven by a mix CO NTI NUED ON PAGE 82 of politics and

ILLU STR ATION BY A N D R É DA LO BA

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A LATENT THREAT ANTISEMITIC VIOLENCE AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES ARE MAKING A TERRIFYING COMEBACK

BY M YA JA R A DAT

O

ne morning in January, Dave Bateman typed an email that would change his life — and raise alarms across the country. “Stop the vaccination drive,” he argued, calling COVID-19 vaccines “a sadistic effort underway to euthanize the American people” and blaming a familiar target of conspiracy theorists: Jews.

Bateman, who was something of a star in Utah’s “Silicon Slopes” tech community, sent the email to about 50 business leaders and politicians, including the governor — many of whom quickly denounced his rant. By the end of the day, he was asked to resign as chairman of the board of Entrata, a software company he had co-founded in 2003. But the ideas he espoused won’t be so easy to eliminate, experts say, as antisemitism is deeply embedded in American culture.

Eleven days later, a gunman took a rabbi and Jewish worshippers hostage at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas. That situation turned out to be more complicated — the perpetrator, who was killed, was not American — but it echoed a deadly 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and reminded us all that American Jews live in a constant state of concern that their community could be targeted next. The threat is serious enough that the Jewish Federations of North America have 34

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started rolling out a multimillion-dollar security initiative in the last year.

For several years, news publications, think tanks and even President Joe Biden have taken turns proclaiming that antisemitism is on the rise, both around the world and in the United States. What once seemed unthinkable is now confirmed by both alarming anecdotes and data that shows antisemitic incidents that peaked in 2019 remained at historic levels through 2020, THE NUMBER OF ANTISEMITIC INCIDENTS AND HATE CRIMES IN THE U.S. HAS RISEN SINCE 2016 AND HATE CRIMES REACHED THEIR HIGHEST LEVEL IN A DECADE IN 2019.

the latest year for which data is available. It seems incongruous for a minority group that is deeply integrated into American society, on every level, but according to one scholar, that stems in part from society’s tendency to view the phenomenon as all or nothing.

“It’s better to think about a spectrum —

where have Jews been included and why and where have they been excluded and why,” says Britt Tevis, an American Jewish historian affiliated with Indiana University Bloomington’s Borns Jewish Studies Program. “Both are always happening at the same time.”

There are certain sectors that still seem particularly susceptible to stereotypes about Jews, among them the business world. “In many respects these accusations of Jewish dishonesty by leading business figures is nothing new,” Tevis says. She traces a long history of business seeing Jews as “shady and untrustworthy and participating in schemes to defraud their organizations,” back to at least the mid19th century. Credit agents routinely denied business loans to Jews based on assumptions about their character. Aetna instructed its agents not to insure Jews, convinced that they were born arsonists and would defraud the company. As late as the 1970s, Jews were excluded from some dental and bar associations.

By that time, however, norms had seemingly shifted in Jews’ favor — at least publicly.

“Antisemitism used to be quite open until after World War II,” says Helene Sinnreich, director of the University of Tennessee’s Fern and Manfred Steinfeld Program in Judaic Studies.

After the allied liberation of the concentration

SANDY H U FFAKE R /AF P VIA GE TTY IMAGE S BRYAN R. S MITH /A FP V IA G ET T Y IM AGES

E X E C UTI VE DI RECTOR RABBI YI SROEL GOL DST E IN, S E COND F ROM RIGH T, W H O WAS SHOT IN THE HANDS, HUGS A CONGREGANT AF T E R A P RE SS CONF E RE NC E OU TS IDE OF THE C HA B A D OF POWAY SYNAGOGUE ON APRI L 2 8 , 2 01 9, IN P OWAY, C AL IF ORNIA.

P O LIC E GATHE R AT THE SCENE OF A DECEMBER 10, 2 01 9, S H OOT ING AT A JE WIS H DE L I IN JE R SE Y C ITY, NEW J ERSEY. THE SHOOTERS WH O U NL E AS H E D A DE ADLY F IRE F IGH T DELI BERATELY TARGETED A KOS H E R GROC E RY.

camps, articulating anti-Jewish sentiments “becomes not OK because we are now on the side of the liberators and not the Germans.”

While the prejudice was driven underground, it didn’t disappear. Rather it is “engrained in many layers of our culture,” Sinnreich says. The Tree of Life shooting brought that into stark relief. For the country’s Jewish community, it “reopened this window into the idea that as much as Jews have progressed as a society there is still this under-

current of antisemitism.” The number of antisemitic incidents and hate crimes in the U.S. has risen since 2016, and hate crimes reached their highest level in a decade in 2019, according to The Associated Press, before receding somewhat in 2020.

But antisemitism can be expressed in less obvious ways like language, such as when someone refers to haggling over price as “Jewing” the other person down. Even philosemitism — a love of or admiration for Jews

— can also be a form of prejudice. “Philosemitism is predicated on stereotypes about Jews — it’s the other side of the same coin,” Sinnreich says. Some seemingly positive stereotypes, like Jews being good with money, are “underpinned by an (antisemitic) idea about Jews controlling world finances and being greedy and stingy.”

Any stereotype serves to delineate an “other,” says Amy Simon, Farber Family Chair in Holocaust Studies and European Jewish History at Michigan State University. Historically, in Europe, Jewish people were considered to be not just of a different religion but also of a different race — “the quintessential other.” The question that remains today, she adds, is, “How do you stop being that other?”

Because overt antisemitism is no longer acceptable in America today — as the reaction to Bateman’s email shows — it has become largely coded, Simon says. For example, many of the conspiracies embraced by QAnon believers are based on older antisemitic tropes, even if they don’t overtly reference Jews in this iteration. When reading excerpts of Bateman’s email, Simon heard echoes of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a century-old fake that pretends to “spell out the alleged secret plans of Jewish leaders seeking to attain world domination,” according to the Anti-Defamation League’s website. Similarly, Bateman’s email revolves around a conspiracy theory that the Jews are out to take over the world.

Tevis says it’s important to consider the broader political moment, in which conspiracy theories are rampant. “If you have come to accept all these other ideas — the idea of the election being stolen, the idea that (former President Donald) Trump was booted out of office because he was about to uncover this ring of child kidnapping that was being promoted by the Hollywood elite and George Soros — if you have accepted all these other ideas then the idea that Jews are promoting vaccines is not a leap,” she says.

Even so, incidents like Bateman’s email can be shocking, including for American Jews, who experience an element of denial when it comes to facing prejudice. “In the Jewish community, there’s been difficulty recognizing the consistency of antisemitism. We think of these things as individual events, as outliers,” Tevis says. Jewish people want to believe in the “Cinderella story … about Jewish success and of being slowly integrated” into American society and culture, Tevis adds, but “the waters are muddier than we often want to see.”

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AS THE NATURAL WORLD AROUND US CHANGES, SO WILL THE PLACES WE CALL “HOME”

BY BENOÎT MORENNE ILLUSTRATIONS BY STEPHAN SCHMITZ | PORTRAITS BY SÉAN ALONZO HARRIS MARCH 2022

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Dale Geist, Laura Hinerfeld and their son, Guthrie, in their new home in Portland, Maine.

LAURA HINERFELD AND HER HUSBAND DALE GEIST NEVER THOUGHT THEY’D LEAVE CALIFORNIA. But after the Complex fires of 2017 killed 24 people, ravaged 7,000 structures and crept too close to their house in Sonoma, they talked about it for the first time. Then came the amalgamation of other disasters, signaling to Hinerfeld and Geist that it’s time to go. The 100-degree heat. The rolling blackouts. The weeks of horrible air quality. The pandemic.

How do you re-create the camaraderie of a ceramics workshop on Zoom or the gargantuan meals they like to feast on at El Molino Central, their beloved tortilleria? It’s decided: You don’t.

New England is the obvious choice for a second start. Life there may not be as enchanting as in California, but they’d rather have to 38

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gear up for rising sea levels than wildfires.

Plus, this is where both Hinerfeld and Geist spent their early years. They settle on Portland, Maine, where they have plenty of college friends and some relatives. Bidding farewell to a tight-knit community isn’t easy, but leaving the dangers surrounding their home and their health is.

Hinerfeld and Geist are among millions of Americans bearing the brunt of climate change. In the West, punishing droughts make the fire season longer, and heat waves are turning the Pacific coastline into a cauldron.

The Midwest and Northeast are seeing record precipitation and flooding. Outbreaks of tornadoes, which might be related to climate change, have left a trail of destruction in the Southeast. It’s an apocalyptic bingo card.

According to a recent YouGov poll, 55 percent of Americans have had to contend with more extreme weather events in their region.

As a result, one in six of those Americans are now considering moving elsewhere. Almost half of those surveyed by the real estate bro-

is currently impracticable to separate them.”

But climate change today is an even greater contributor to extreme events than during Burton’s time, Chris Field, a climate scientist at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, tells me. “We are now seeing the effects of climate change make extremes of hot temperatures and heavy precipitation much more common, and we are sometimes seeing extremes that are totally outside the range of historical variation.”

More severe and unpredictable extreme weather events could create larger patterns of chosen or forced migration in the future. Just how large isn’t clear. Two decades ago, Norman Myers, a prominent British environmentalist, made a bold prediction. When climate change kicked into full gear, he said, we’d see as many as 200 million people globally driven out of their homes by droughts, diminishing crop yields and water shortages. There were, at the time, a little over 10 million global refugee — according to the United Nations — and Myers was suggesting this number could increase twentyfold. (The calculation, he later acknowledged, had required some “heroic extrapolations.”)

When he published his estimate, the

ker Redfin last year said natural disasters had played a role in their decision to move in 2022.

And that’s only counting those who participate in surveys and have the luxury of relocating by choice. On a global scale, sea-level rise, storm surges, diminished crop productivity and water shortages could internally displace more than 140 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America by mid-century if greenhouse gas emissions are not rapidly curbed, according to the World Bank.

Dizzying headlines like “How Russia Wins the Climate Crisis” and “Can Michigan Become a Climate Haven?” abound, raising questions and problems that scientists can’t seem to keep up with. Increasingly, people around the world — and in the U.S. — are facing a new reckoning over how long we can keep calling the places we inhabit “home.”

This could usher in an unprecedented exodus that would reshape the country in profound ways. “We haven’t really seen that in the North American context since the 1930s — the Dust Bowl years,” says Robert McLeman, a professor of geography and environmental studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario who has studied climate migration for close to three decades.

Aside from the pressures put on citizens, the prospect of climate migration raises a number of daunting challenges for policymakers and urban planners. Who will leave, and where will they go? How will municipalities deal with the loss and influx of residents? And what happens to those left behind?

— the result of fluctuations in the myriad ways the air and oceans interact — has been an environmental constant for thousands of years. And migration has been its anthropological counterpart. In ancient China, drought in the north and the appeal of a wetter and warmer climate in the south led to nomadic migration over a period of 2,000 years. Pastoralists in the West African Sahel have for generations shepherded cattle on an annual pilgrimage south to make up for a dearth in precipitation.

It’s now long been established that climate change messes with these natural variations — it “superimposes an anthropogenic change on top of a naturally changing phenomenon,” Ian Burton, a geographer, wrote in “The Environment as Hazard” in 1978, so much so that “it

A U.S. Forest Service firefighter crew arrives at the scene where flames from the Caldor Fire threaten to jump Highway 50 in Meyers, California, on August 31, 2021.

JOSH EDE LS ON /AF P VI A GE TT Y IM AG E S

CLIMATE VARIATION

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impact of climate change on migration was a topic few social scientists studied. “It was a very niche area back in the early 2000s,” says Oli Brown, an associate fellow with the environment and society program at Chatham House, a British think tank. Myers made the subject a headline-grabbing one. Since then, social scientists have come to see migration as one possible outcome that is born of a multitude of factors.

They draw a distinction between slow-onset changes (which include drought, sea-level rise and increasing temperatures) and sudden-onset events (like hurricanes, heat waves, tornadoes, floods, wildfires and extreme precipitation).

Some of these catastrophes, like drought in the West, are less likely to damage properties than say, Hurricane Harvey’s 60-inch rains near Houston in 2017. Property damage from a storm surge might not be enough to cause someone to move, but research shows that it can, if coupled with a government buyout program that directly pays individuals lump sums for agreeing to move. Factors like the proximity of friends and family one can rely on and having school-age children tend to make people want to stick around, experts say.

Migration also is informed by one’s perception of risk, which varies depending on the person.

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and jobs — which is already impacted by their economic and social situation — plays a large part.

To determine what role extreme weather events play in people’s decision to relocate, academics are looking at what risk levels people can tolerate, says Alex de Sherbinin, a senior research scientist at Columbia Climate School. “At what point do people decide that it really is worth pulling the plug on wherever they are and moving?” he tells me. “This is all very context-specific.”

Looking at past climate events — like the Dust Bowl — is helpful in understanding how tangled the picture can get. In the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of people left their homes when thick clouds of dust rolled over the southern Plains. The dust, combined with and exacerbated by drought, killed crops. But poor land stewardship, the Great Depression and ill-conceived public policies made a bad situation worse.

Decades of plowing the prairies where farmers grew their crops led to poor soil structure, creating fields so fragile that they turned into those dust clouds when drought and wind arrived. Then, when wheat prices sank, farmers hoping to plant new crops and break-even doubled down on their efforts, putting twice the workload on those already-overworked

Almost half of those surveyed by the real estate broker Redfin last year said natural disasters had played a role in their decision to move in 2022.

fields, feeding the dust storms. The cherry on top was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s farm policies, which provided incentives to leave land uncultivated to stabilize market prices. Landowners were eligible to receive this aid, but not tenants — which made the latter more likely to be evicted and leave for California. More than half a million people left the Plains, mostly for California. Whether the future brings large-scale migration, McLeman says, hinges in part on similarly complex circumstances.

lithographic printers Joseph Britton and Jacques Rey were commissioned in the early 1870s to depict the Buena Vista winery’s vaults in Sonoma, the work they produced showed vineyards crisscrossed by dirt roads, vignerons steering horse-drawn carts piled with wine barrels and a smattering of white adobe houses huddled near a plaza. Fewer than 20,000 people lived in Sonoma County then. This may explain why when three fires broke out in 1870, only a few remote ranches and their fences were damaged, and the only casualties were sheep.

UN IVE RSAL H ISTORY ARCH IVE /U IG VI A GE T TY IMAG ES

WHEN THE

By the time Hinerfeld moved to California in the late 1990s, warmer days and fire suppression tactics had started turning forests into dry fuel gobbled up by larger and larger wildfires. Visiting the Culinary Institute of America’s campus branch in St. Helena, where she had enrolled as a student, she was awed by the school’s hand-cut stone walls. She also was struck by how “unbelievably hot and dry” the whole valley seemed. But fire wasn’t the top concern among residents of a region sitting on seismic faults. “What you thought about were earthquakes,” says Hinerfeld, whose long gray hair and big brown eyes give her the air of a benevolent Pixar character.

Fires were relegated to the background of her new life. In 2005, she met Geist, a web developer who wore Panama hats and dabbled in country music, after she failed to nab tickets to an Elvis Costello concert he was selling on Craigslist. “Someone else got the ticket but I got the date with him,” she jokes. They moved in together that same year. There were more changes in Hinerfeld’s life — she quit her job as a pastry chef to become a nurse at Sutter Regional Hospital in Santa Rosa.

In 2014, the couple forked over $570,000 to acquire a 2,900-square-foot duplex, located

Dust storm in 1935. Conditions like these forced many farmers to abandon their land during the Great Depression.

10-minutes from Sonoma’s city center. Driving by, you wouldn’t see much of the property — only a wall of privet sprinkled with purple flowers. But behind the house, the backyard opened to a vineyard. Wide stone stairs wandered into a garden studded with apricot, plum, lemon and kumquat trees. It looked like a version of Eden.

In 2007 and 2010, the family welcomed two sons: Amos and Guthrie — who’s named after the renowned folk star, Woody Guthrie.

(In an ironic twist, Guthrie left Oklahoma for California because of the Dust Bowl). On weekends, the family toured the region in an old Volkswagen Vanagon. They were enjoying a love story with the Golden State.

So were millions of other transplants. Between 1990 and 2010, the state’s population grew by 25%, reaching 37 million people.

During that same period, half of all new housing was built in what the U.S. Fire Administration and FEMA call the wildland-urban interface, or WUI, where homes abut the kind of vegetation that flames relish. Tragically, only recently have we started to realize that these are the areas now most likely to burn, says Karen Chapple, a professor emerita of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley. “The awareness that the land that they are building on was in the WUI has only just come about in the last few years, as the rate of fire has increased dramatically,” she says. Today, 11.2 million people — more than a quarter of the state’s population — live in the WUI. Moving into hazardous areas, consciously or not, isn’t a uniquely Californian phenomenon. Coastal counties have seen their population almost triple since 1960, which means that 128 million people in the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, the Eastern seaboard and the West Coast are being exposed to hurricanes, floods, sea-level rise and soil erosion. In the West, regions prone to earthquakes and wildfires consistently rank among the fastest growing in the country. Utah, the fastest-growing state over the last decade, will likely see more frequent droughts and water shortages in the upcoming decades, according MARCH 2022

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to the Utah Rivers Council. Phoenix saw its population increase 11.2% between 2010 and 2020. Meanwhile, the severity of drought in the area is predicted to increase up to 629% by 2070.

The net result of denser metros, urban expansion and decreasing climate security in

real estate prospects in Portland for her family to move to — the Glass Fire was burning one acre every five seconds, filling the verdant Sonoma Valley with smoke and fire. Amos and Guthrie didn’t leave the house except to pick up the mail in quick dashes.

They bought a Cape Cod-style house on a tree-lined street for $422,000. Hinerfeld was well aware of how comfortable their situation was. They could buy a home without having to sell theirs first, and when they did sell it, it was for a little over a million dollars. With this cushy surplus, Hinerfeld’s family didn’t have to worry too much about her quitting her job, or about a costly cross-country move. “I don’t feel like we suffered,” she says.

public faces a daunting challenge: Figuring out whether they live in a safe location, and, if not, what exactly their risks are, or where they should go. It doesn’t help that climate projections — which often aren’t accessible to the public — use different sets of data to measure exactly what risks communities are exposed to, says Matt Hauer, an assistant professor of sociology at Florida State University and one of the leading experts on climate migration.

To help people make informed decisions, some private institutions are developing their own tools. For instance, the Yale Center for Environmental Communication founded Yale Climate Connections, a news site that publishes overviews of how climate change is expected to affect each U.S. region, interactive tools that enable visitors to look up how many hot days their city or a city near them could experience during future summers, and a map that shows what their city’s climate is likely to feel like in 60 years. “Ask Sara,” an advice column published on the website, is flooded with notes like: “I live in Tucson, Arizona. I’m not sure how many more years we will be able to continue to live here semi-comfortably … With the upward trend being what it is, by 2030 (or sooner?) I don’t know if it will be feasible to continue to live here. Is there a map or other reference we can use to identify other places in the U.S., Mexico, or Canada to move to that will be relatively sheltered from extreme heat or flooding? — C. in Tucson” And …

“I’ve lived in the Southeast most of my life

GET T Y IM AGES

THE GENERAL

A drone shot shows the devastation wrought by the Camp Fire, in Paradise, California, on November 8, 2018.

The fire was the deadliest and most destructive fire in California history.

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these areas is that in 2021, more than two in five Americans lived in a county hit by one or multiple extreme weather events, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal disaster declarations. Blazes are now even tearing through neighborhoods once deemed safe.

The December 2021 Marshall Fire near Boulder destroyed more than 1,000 homes and was described as the most destructive fire in Colorado’s history.

The home the Hinerfeld family bought in 2014 sat starkly in the WUI Chapple describes. Property records show it was built in 1991 in a zone Cal Fire deemed a high fire hazard severity zone in 2007. Highlighted in orange on maps, it spills over onto a large swath of the redwood-covered hills behind the house. It took the family a few years to realize just how close to danger they’d elected to live, and how the fires — without even burning a single possession — seared their lives into a misery they were determined to escape. At the end of 2020 — while Hinerfeld was visiting

and currently live in Nashville, Tennessee. Between the weather changing and getting older with reduced tolerance to heat, my wife and I are looking for a summertime retirement spot in Canada. … What are your thoughts? — G. in Nashville” Real estate companies are also building their own tools to answer these questions.

ClimateCheck.com, a website funded by Inman News, a real estate publication, allows users to type in their address into a search engine and be offered a “friendly perspective” of the potential effects climate change will bring to their front door, or their prospective one.

“Experiences in different metros are going to change. This is affecting long-term decision-making like buying a home. People who are affluent enough to make these choices are thinking about climate change and how it will change their daily experiences — can they grow a garden? — as well threats to property and life,” Dr. Skylar Olsen, ClimateCheck.com’s former principal economist, said at a recent industry conference.

But for Americans without savings, relocating under threat of flames or flood doesn’t begin with a visit to ClimateCheck.com. It starts with a maddened rush to grab family albums and important documents before sprinting out of a home that soon won’t be standing.

It takes you to a cramped shelter or your car or a relative’s couch. It has you scrambling to apply for federal disaster assistance or waiting for your insurance payout — if your insurance company doesn’t drop your policy, that is. If you rent your home, perhaps you don’t have insurance at all.

The burning of Paradise, California, has become a case study of the lingering effects a disaster can have on those who live near or below the poverty line. Prior to its obliteration by fires in 2018, the town had been known as an affordable place to live. In 2010, the median home price for homes with a mortgage was $227,500, compared to $456,000 in the rest of the state. It hosted 37 mobile park homes, where 17% of households lived. When the 27,000 displaced residents fanned out across Butte County after the Camp Fire of 2018, not all faced the same challenges.

Chico, California, about 15 miles west of Paradise, took on a swell of incoming residents. In the days after the fire, Mark Orme, the city manager, saw tens of thousands of people stream down the hills to find refuge in his city, which at the time had a little over 90,000 people. Officials had to rush to issue

temporary permits allowing people to rent out RVs and campers in their backyard. The homeless population grew. Sewers started choking. “We didn’t have the revenue to cover the cost and expense of those added bodies,” Orme tells me.

Jacquelyne Chase and Peter Hansen, two geographers at California State University, Chico, have closely followed the episode of displacement from Paradise to Chico. Parsing data from the United States Postal Service and surveys conducted by a local charity, among other sources, they found that a year after the fire, renters were overrepresented among those receiving public assistance and relying on charity for basic needs. That’s because compared to homeowners, “renters typically wouldn’t have enough insurance to kind of carry them through the months,” Chase tells me.

In the West, displaced renters also face a housing shortage. By burning entire subdivisions out of the housing supply, fires send rents soaring even higher. In Kentucky, the state’s deadliest tornadoes on record left about 2,000 low-income residents in Mayfield without a home. “I don’t even have a car to move. I have no money,” one 73-year-old resident of a leveled subsidized apartment complex told the Courier Journal. People who lost their home

in the Marshall Fire in Colorado found themselves scrambling to find backup plans in a tight housing market.

How crises make bad situations worse for low-income individuals is even more apparent when considering affordable housing. There are currently 140,000 subsidized units in the WUI in California, and their residents tend to have incomes 50% lower than single-family homeowners, which puts them at increased risk of displacement if fire strikes. In New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts, 4,744 affordable housing units are currently at risk of flooding, according to a recent study by Climate Central, a nonprofit news organization.

Even for middle-class families, having no choice but to move can mean years dealing with mounting debts. For the Cadigan family, it started with the burning of a Hilton hotel during the Tubbs Fire.

2017, Ehrin Cadigan, 46, set out to make the 30-minute drive from his Sonoma home to Hilton Sonoma Wine Country in Santa Rosa, a 250 room-hotel where he’d been an assistant manager for close to two years. Things were looking good — he could

IN OCTOBER

Ehrin Cadigan and his wife, Brigitte, in their Connecticut home.

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Brigitte wouldn’t let go of cardboard boxes marked, in black Sharpie ink, “California.” The grief she was experiencing was similar to what she’d felt when her father died.

The Cadigan family, left, have resettled in Connecticut.

According to Brigitte, “We’re here for good, there’s no going back to California at this point.”

see himself becoming the general manager one day. But before he could get to his car, Ehrin got a call from his boss. He should check the news, his boss said. He and his wife Brigitte watched on TV as the Hilton crumbled to the ground in the Tubbs Fire’s flames.

Fires were advancing on Sonoma and the couple and their four young children had to evacuate. Their house didn’t burn, and they considered themselves lucky compared to those sleeping in their cars in the parking lot of Target and Walmart. But without Ehrin’s salary, their financial situation was deteriorating by the day. Hilton offered him a temporary position elsewhere, but it was a two-hour drive from Sonoma, and the long commute was taking a toll on the family.

He started looking for a different job, but it was a crowded market and he soon had to expand his search beyond California. Six months later, Ehrin was finally offered a position as director of food and beverage at a private golf course. There was only one catch: The job was in Connecticut, a state the family knew nothing about. “But we were really in dire straits,” Brigitte, 46, says, adding that they’d had to accept help from their local church to pay bills.

Ehrin said yes to the job.

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The family had been renters in Sonoma and didn’t have savings when they needed it the most. In the span of two years, they lived in four different rentals and slowly started getting out of debt. Along with their financial difficulties, the family mourned their past life — the picnics on the front lawn, the strolls by the Sonoma Plaza. Brigitte wouldn’t let go of cardboard boxes marked, in black Sharpie ink, “California.” The grief she was experiencing was similar to what she’d felt when her father died, she says.

But in December, the Cadigans closed on a house. “That tells you that we’re here for good,” Brigitte says. “There’s no going back to California at this point.”

realization that life as we know it will change in some parts of the country has started us on a quest to find a new paradise — a place where rain is abundant but not too plentiful, the sun shines but doesn’t blaze and we can have a home without any fear of Mother Nature taking it away. A place shielded from disasters, blessed with robust infrastructure,

THE GROW I NG

affordable housing, good-paying jobs and — if we’re really lucky — maybe a good view. The leaders of cities stuck in postindustrial limbo have jumped on the opportunity to promote their communities as these elusive safe-havens.

The mayor of Buffalo, New York, dubbed his city a “climate refuge city.” Duluth, Minnesota, is advertising itself as “Climate-proof Duluth.”

Urban planners and demographers say that large cities with the resources to protect themselves against the more severe effects of climate change, like New York or Portland, Oregon, are the ones most likely to become climate destinations. At a climate conference in Portland, Oregon, José-Miguel Guzmán, a former demographer at the United Nations Population Fund, was struck to find that engineers from Portland General Electric, the local utility company, had started gearing up for a tripling of the population.

While some metros are branding to appeal to those looking for their utopia, other municipalities are planning their escape — sometimes en masse. The Government Accountability Office has records of two municipalities that have successfully relocated. Newtok, an Indigenous community in southwestern Alaska, was relocated to Mertarvik — a new village just 25 minutes away and across the river that was flooding the village. Isle de Jean Charles, a Louisiana island disappearing into the Gulf of Mexico, has been relocated to The New Isle, 40 miles north of the flooding former village.

Entire municipalities having the ability to organize and effectively relocate is incredibly

rare, however. Alfredo Gomez, director of the Government Accountability Office’s Department of Natural Resources and Environment, sees two main reasons why municipal relocation isn’t a popular choice. The first one is that a number of municipalities are choosing to hunker down , assume the costs that come with greater exposure or rebuild, such as New York, which is erecting a $1.45 billion system of seawalls and floodgates, and Miami, which is planning to pump its way out of floods with mega stormwater pumps, The second reason is that communities that want to relocate have no one entity to turn to for help. No federal agency is entrusted by Congress with the authority to lead these efforts.

In its latest report on climate migration, the GAO recommended that the government launch a pilot program in an at-risk community, pooling resources under the aegis of an agency that could help plan relocations. But missing from the conversation, says Kelly Leilani Main, the executive director of Buy-In (a nonprofit that helps local governments implement home buy-outs), is the acknowledgement that people don’t move in a vacuum. “It’s going to be very difficult for people to relocate to safer parts of the country without jobs and housing that come along with that.” Unless the government gets actively involved with initiatives such as the GAO’s recommended pilot program, she says, private actors will be the ones steering the wheel, with profits in mind.

Already, insurance companies are jacking up rates in areas hit by ecological disasters or dropping policyholders altogether. Credit rating agencies like Moody’s have said they would downgrade cities and states that don’t adapt to the effects of climate change. Main says corporations and private investors will move to shift their resources to safer places, taking jobs and investments in real estate away with them.

“To simplify it dramatically, there are two opposing options for migration scenarios” Main says. It’s “managed retreat,” supported by the public sector, or an “unmanaged retreat,” which is a market-driven response.

In the first scenario, public investments and policies guide resilience efforts and help communities relocate as needed. In the second scenario, rocketing insurance rates and devalued housing stocks empty cities’ public coffers and leave some residents forced to move without assistance. Main believes that market signals will spark new conversations about what role the government should play in helping out communities. As of now, public intervention

comes largely in the form of FEMA grants, and she expects that the budget allocated to programs like Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities — a competitive grant that funds hazard mitigation projects like building retrofits and drainage improvement — will only increase in the coming years ($700 million was awarded last year).

When asked if he’s optimistic Capitol Hill will act on the aforementioned recommendations, Gomez laughs. “I can’t really speak to what Congress is going to do,” he says. He points to positive signals coming from Washington, D.C., though. Last year, the White House released a comprehensive report on climate change and migration, the first time any U.S. administration has done so.

The report, however, only looks at climate migration as a foreign issue — and how that issue could eventually lead to an influx of refugees in our borders. That’s because rich countries are only beginning to grapple with the question of internal displacement, says Alexandra Bilak, the director of the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, an initiative of the Norwegian Refugee Council in Geneva.

“The big unknown,” she says, “is who should be responsible for preventing and managing the multiple impacts it’s going to have on communities and economies?”

austere, overcast weekend in Portland, Maine, Laura Hinerfeld spends the afternoon foraging for mushrooms — bringing handfuls of chanterelles, lion’s mane and oyster mushrooms to the cluttered kitchen of her new home. She likes it here. Geist, who now works full time running an online magazine for LGBTQ country music fans, also has taken to the family’s new environment.

But the move has been hard on Amos. “I know a lot less people,” he says, sporting a white hoodie emblazoned with the logo of NASA. The fires “didn’t really affect us that much,” he ventures to say, his hands fidgeting.

“But it affected some people that we knew,” he concedes. His mother chimes in. “Your principal at your school,” whose house burned down.

Hinerfeld stays in constant communication with her friends from the West. They complain about the fires, and she’s reminded of the reasons they left. Scrolling through Facebook in the last days of 2021, she comes across a post by Scott Hinerfeld, a distant cousin.

The flames that roared through parched land in the suburbs of Denver in the Marshall Fire destroyed his home. In a cruel twist of irony, Scott had led efforts to clean up houses caked in mud after devastating floods struck Boulder in 2013.

Even the new home Hinerfeld and Geist are learning to love has the potential for hazard. Portland, Maine, experiences sunny-day floods and could see between 1.1 to 1.8 feet of sea-level rise by 2050, according to the Maine Climate Council. “There are not many places that are immune from natural disasters,” Geist says with a shake of his head. “Pick your poison.”

ON AN

Laura Hinerfeld and Dale Geist.

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PROLOGUE TO

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By Ted Koppel

Surviving The Next Imminent Disaster

CATASTROPHE Illustration By Robert Neubecker MARCH 2022

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For more than 40 years, most of them as host of ABC’s “Nightline,” TED KOPPEL

talked Americans through crisis after crisis. it’s 2014. whether the iran hostage fiasco, 9/11 or the war in Iraq, Koppel’s coolheaded, slightly detached delivery of bad news soothed viewers in ways that today’s anchors rarely can. Koppel was among the last of the broadcast consensus journalists, his authoritative baritone connoting a sturdy objectivity — a throwback to a time when Americans drew from the same set of facts, the same shared reality. A few years before the novel coronavirus turned life as we knew it upside down, Koppel penned “Lights Out: A Cyberattack, a Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath,” an eerily prescient warning that foreshadowed the systemic vulnerabilities exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. During the reporting of the book, Koppel visited Wyoming and Utah to get a sense of what he described as the “culture of self-reliance” in the rural West. He was particularly impressed by his visit to Salt Lake City and what he described as an “extraordinary focus on the integration of self-sufficiency and charity.” In the following excerpt, updated for 2022, Koppel introduces us to those on the front lines of disasters — and to what, even now, must be fixed if Americans are to endure the next one.

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and martin knapp is homeland security coordinator for Park County, Wyoming (a position he’ll hold until 2019). On the inside of the door of his office in Cody is a poster with the bold headline “HOMELAND SECURITY” above a photograph of four Native Americans holding rifles. Underneath the photograph is a slogan: “FIGHTING TERRORISM SINCE 1492.”

Knapp has a sense of humor with an edge that probably plays well in the Cowboy State.

As he pours us both a cup of coffee, I take photographs of a couple of other slogans on the walls of his office, these starting to crinkle with age: “SOME PEOPLE ARE ALIVE,” said one, “SIMPLY BECAUSE IT’S AGAINST THE LAW TO KILL THEM.” And this one: “POLITICIANS ARE THE ONLY PEOPLE IN THE WORLD WHO CREATE PROBLEMS AND THEN CAMPAIGN AGAINST THEM.”

Knapp is a transplant from Mansfield, Ohio; he can still recall his first day in Wyoming, back in 1971. “I drove up South Park, passed three cars going the other direction.

Two of them waved to me. Now, where I come from, if I waved to somebody going down the road, I’m likely to get flipped off, even if I know the person. Here, people are waving and

they don’t know me. But that’s the way people are around here.”

At the age of 18 Martin Knapp learned the skills of a horse wrangler while working for room and board. He and a group of more experienced cowboys would drive a herd into Grand Teton National Park, let them loose at night to graze and round them up again before they scattered at first light. He eventually acquired the tracking and hunting skills required to become a guide for a local outfitter. After well over 40 years in Wyoming, Knapp believes he’s almost accepted as a local.

Wyoming, clearly, is not New York or Ohio.

“They take care of themselves,” said Knapp, referring to the locals. “They’re out of power?

OK, I got my own generator, I got this, I got that. We’ll make do. We lived for hundreds of years without electricity. We can do it again.”

Which is why I’ve come to Wyoming. There is a culture of self-reliance in rural America.

People will use their Medicare benefits and cash their Social Security checks in Wyoming as readily as in New York or California, but in principle there is an antipathy to dependence and an inclination to keep government at arm’s length. Perhaps a more affirmative way of saying that is to suggest that people here will try to solve their own problems before turning to any government agency, local, state or federal.

Is such a state, I wonder, any better equipped to confront a crisis for which the federal government has no specific plan?

As homeland security coordinator for Park County, Knapp worried about what might happen on his turf, and what to do about it when it did. Knapp considered the prospect of an electric grid going down, but there’s been no guidance on the subject from Homeland Security in Washington. “In fact,” said Knapp, “that even goes as far down as the state level. When I’ve called or tried to say, ‘Hey, I’m working on something here if this happens.

What does the state recommend, or what are you going to do?’ They won’t tell me.”

“Won’t or can’t tell you?”

“Probably a little bit of both. They refuse to fill me in because they don’t want it to get out what we’re going to do — what they’re going to do. I’ll say, ‘I thought we’re on the same team here.’ But that’s, you know, it’s secret squirrel stuff.” Knapp doesn’t seem overly concerned about the lack of information from either state or federal government.

One committed and well-informed person can provide genuinely valuable information.

In a disaster, getting substantive help seems to

depend more on the luck of the draw, though, than on organization. Research assistant Rachel Baye tried a similar approach to solicit information from the Department of Homeland Security: UNKNOWN: “The Department of Homeland Security switchboard. How may I direct your call?”

RACHEL: “Hi, I was wondering if I could get some information about emergency preparedness?”

UNKNOWN: “Yeah, one moment.”

RECORDING: “You have reached the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Please hold for the next available agent.”

UNKNOWN: “FEMA operator.”

RACHEL: “Hi, I was looking for some information on emergency preparedness.”

UNKNOWN: “OK. Hold on for just a moment.”

RACHEL: “Thank you.” (Music for 20 seconds, then a recorded message) “… the following options. If you’re a member of the media and have an inquiry, press one. For general public affairs questions, please press two. If you’re with a state, local, or tribal government and would like to speak to someone in intergovernmental affairs, press three. To speak with someone in community relations, press four. For our office of international affairs, press five. If you’d like to speak with someone in our office of legislative affairs, press six. If you’ve been affected by a disaster and would like to register for assistance, or if you’ve already registered and have questions or would like to check on the status of your application, please hang up now and call 1-800-621-FEMA. That’s 1-800-621-FEMA. To speak with an operator, press 0 or simply stay on the line. Once again, thank you for calling FEMA’s office of external affairs.”

Rachel pressed four, hoping to speak with someone in community relations and got this recorded message: “Public 44 44 is not avail-

able. Record your message after the tone.

When you’ve finished. …” At this point, Rachel hung up. The thought struck me that anyone who has been “affected by a disaster and would like to register for assistance” may not make it through the first six prompts of that phone message.

The greater issue, though, is a lack of consistency. The search for guidance on disaster relief, when there is no crisis underway, no stress involved, cannot be dependent on the design of a more efficient phone tree. It cannot rely on the individual enthusiasm of a staffer or volunteer operator at the Red Cross or be undermined by the bored indifference of a government worker at the Department of Homeland Security. There is no guidance on guidance.

If not the Red Cross, Federal Emergency Management Agency or the Department of Homeland Security, where should the interested citizen turn? What is available online can be pathetically inadequate, boiling down to the customary recommendation for two to three days’ worth of food and water, warm clothing, a functioning battery-powered radio and extra batteries. Disaster preparation recommendations usually include a predetermined plan for where and how the family will meet. Beyond that, citizens are largely adrift, left to find their own solutions.

A few of them have. A lot of others are still searching.

F OR T H E MOST part, public reaction to the possibility of a cyberattack had not even risen to the level of apathy. Apathy suggests the awareness of a problem and the decision not to worry about it. We’re not there yet. To the degree that government and its disaster relief operations focus our attention at all, they direct it toward the familiar: natural disasters common to our region, or variations on terrorist attacks

Public reaction to the possibility of a massive cyberattack has not even risen to the level of apathy.

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We are inclined to be a reactive society.

We apply unimaginable amounts of money toward dealing with the aftermath of crises.

that have already occurred. Perhaps by definition, preparation for the unknown requires a generic approach.

There is, in any event, a growing movement around the country based on the assumption that neither government agencies nor private relief organizations can be relied upon in the event of any major disaster. A generation or two ago, they might have been called survivalists, but there was an extreme right-wing aura attached to that term, conjuring images of bunkers built to sustain life against aerial bombardment. While such groups continue to exist, they have been modified and largely displaced by a much larger group for whom ideology is less relevant. “Preppers,” perhaps most easily described as “those who prepare,” can be found across the political spectrum.

They are not necessarily prophets of doom, simply those who want to be ready for the worst. As such, they are accustomed to a measure of mockery; they are, after all, only rarely proved right. Dealing with daily life is complicated enough without trying to anticipate and prepare for the hypothetical, no matter how extreme the catastrophe, no matter how unimpeachable the evidence.

In that sense, at least, today’s preppers are direct descendants of one of the Old Testament’s most famous prophets. Indeed, it is not unusual for preppers to cite his example.

It may be unfashionable to link catastrophic disaster to God’s judgment, but how interesting it is that Genesis, that bare-bones account of the very earliest days of existence, has no sooner laid the foundation for our journey into history than it diverts into an account of total annihilation. If nothing else, the story of Noah provides evidence that mankind has always been troubled by an undercurrent of worry that what is at present cannot last.

Noah is an everlasting reproach to the cynics who mock the ark builders.

Our notions of time may differ from bib50

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lical accounts, but Genesis tells us that with only seven days notice of a flood that would cover the earth to the peaks of its highest mountains, Noah built an ark. Genesis is silent on the matter of where Noah acquired the tools, the wood and the vast quantities of tar with which he sealed the interior and exterior of his enormous ship. Where details are provided, they stagger the imagination.

Noah was 600 years old when God alerted him to the impending cataclysm (although this was, relatively speaking, the prime of life; his grandfather Methuselah died at the age of 969). The ark was to be 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high — 440 feet from bow to stern (significantly longer than a football field), more than 70 feet wide and well over 40 feet high. Even taking into account that he had three strapping sons to help him, construction would have been challenging. It was designed to accommodate not only Noah and his family but a virtually inconceivable menagerie of creatures great and small. Not, as my childhood memory misinformed me, merely two of each, but two each of the ritually unclean and seven pairs of all ritually clean creatures. (Those spares, some commentaries on the Old Testament suggest, were intended for the ritual sacrifices that Noah would perform in gratitude for God’s mercy once the waters receded.)

We are free to speculate on whether some of those spare, ritually clean animals might not have ended up as survival rations. After all, more than a year elapsed between the time the rains began and the day the floods had receded enough for disembarkation, and the Old Testament provides no details on how Noah accomplished the extraordinary task of provisioning his ship for that much time. Rashi, the 11th-century French rabbi, suggests that the task of building and provisioning the ark actually took 120 years — sufficient time for mankind to mend its

wicked ways. That resolves some practical issues while raising others best left to biblical scholars.

I offer the story of Noah simply as evidence that mankind has been struggling with the prospect of impending disaster since the beginning of recorded time and that genuine preparedness is a considerable, perhaps even existential, challenge. But preppers of every era have been outnumbered by the skeptics who tend to view their activities with a combination of fascination and amusement. Unless and until we are actually confronted by disaster, we have a tendency to view it primarily as remote, more applicable to others than to ourselves. Disaster viewed from an appropriate distance can even become entertainment.

Wrapped in the right packaging, doomsday scenarios remain a well-established genre within popular culture: “Blade Runner,” “The Hunger Games,” “Mad Max.” We have a deep-seated fascination with our own annihilation, as long as these postapocalyptic nightmares come with a predetermined running time — a limited experience in a darkened theater from which we can emerge, pulse racing, energized and relieved to be back in a familiar setting.

The fact remains, however, that absent any guidance from Congress or the executive branch of government, beyond broad recommendations for weathering the first 72 hours or so, individual Americans have been left to select their own approaches to the prospect of a lengthy, widespread disaster. Among those who have taken up the challenge, some are serious and well organized and know what they’re doing. Most don’t.

Even the most elaborate framework for disaster survival requires a solid foundation.

For members of the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, this means starting with families, who are encouraged to prepare, over time, for unspecified emergencies. They are urged to gradually set aside enough food, water, clothing and money to sustain themselves for three to 12 months.

Ezra Taft Benson, who served the Eisenhower administration as secretary of agriculture before becoming the church’s 13th president, framed the issue in thoroughly pragmatic terms. “Have you ever paused to realize what would happen to your community or nation,” he asked in 1980, “if transportation were paralyzed or if we had a war or depression? How would you and your neighbors obtain food?

How long would the corner grocery store — or supermarket — sustain the needs of the

community?” He recommended storing at least a year’s worth of supplies.

In Salt Lake City I met the Turleys. If Norman Rockwell had chosen to paint the all-American Latter-day Saint family, he could very easily have ended up with the Turleys. Kate and Trey Turley are wholesomely good-looking, and there is an impish quality about their three boys. Their pantry, which Kate estimated contains enough stored food to feed the family for about six months, looks well organized but less overwhelming than I had imagined a six-month supply would be.

(Big water containers!) That’s where Kate picked out the ingredients for our dinner that evening: chicken with pasta, frozen bread crisped in the oven, salad and nonalcoholic apple cider.

We sat down after dinner to talk about a few of the aspects of their lives that identify them as members of the Church of Jesus Christ.

Most of what they described would not seem unfamiliar in a conservative Christian, Jewish or Muslim home. Self-discipline and charity are high on the agenda.

Like many observant religious groups, practicing Latter-day Saints follow top-down instruction to maintain a set social structure, and almost all religions stress charitable giving. What distinguishes the Latter-day Saints is their extraordinary focus on the integration of self-sufficiency and charity. That carefully layered structure is what gives the Church of Jesus Christ its impact and efficiency.

In case the electricity is out and the normal phone system is no longer functional, satellite phones have been pre-positioned with regional leaders and a network of ham radio operators has been set up. If cars aren’t working or if gasoline is scarce, local bishops have plans to send messengers by bicycle or foot. A bishop knows who in his community is vulnerable and where he can find those with the particular skill sets to assist — those who can, for example, provide medical assistance or help with rudimentary repairs. According to Steven Peterson, then managing director of the church’s welfare services, a bishop’s recognized authority enables him to organize the community at the local level. Peterson expressed complete confidence in this “chain of authority,” declaring that “in the situation where communications are largely eliminated and it’s not possible to connect with other leaders, we firmly believe that the individual members who have storage and food and preparation in their homes, led by local bishops and stake presidents, would

immediately join together and figure out how they could best care for each other.”

The finely calibrated, professional operation this national network represents can, and has on occasion, outstripped Washington’s own disaster response machine. In a 2007 article for Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer recounted the Church of Jesus Christ’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It was, she wrote, “a performance that put the federal government to shame.” The New Orleans branch of the Church of Jesus Christ had evacuated all but seven of its approximately 2,500 congregants before the storm even hit, largely because the church had created an automated telephone emergency warning system that alerted all its members, instructing them to get out of town and telling them where to go.

“While FEMA was floundering,” Mencimer wrote, “the church dispatched 10 trucks full of tents, sleeping bags, tarps to cover wrecked roofs, bottled water, and 5-gallon drums of gas from its warehouses to New Orleans and other hard-hit areas. The supplies were distributed in an orderly fashion to people who desperately needed them.”

was convinced that at some point the government might need to provide emergency food supplies to, say, 30 million people for a year, it could, for $2,000 a head, provide the basics to keep them alive. Could this be part of a solution? The $60 billion cost is hardly prohibitive when you consider how many lives would be at stake. It would probably take the industry years to accumulate the necessary raw materials, but in theory, at least, it seems a viable option. What can be projected with some confidence is that any crisis that knocked out electricity for more than a couple of weeks over a multistate area would exhaust emergency food supplies in a matter of days.

There are individuals whose preparedness

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planning will get them through the initial days and even weeks when food runs out. FEMA, the National Guard and branches of the federal government are focused on finding a way to keep water flowing — enough, at least, to keep people alive and to dispose of their waste — but maintaining an adequate flow of food into the cities and keeping the very young, the elderly and the infirm alive will depend in some measure on the season. Winter, when there is no safe source of heat, would take a particularly heavy toll. In an environment of crowded, hungry, freezing people, each passing day would presumably elevate the potential for violence. It requires a degree of advance planning well beyond whatever exists to deal with the consequences of a natural disaster.

We are inclined, as Tom Ridge, former homeland security secretary, once observed, to be a reactive society. We apply unimaginable amounts of money toward dealing with the aftermath of crises. The most conservative estimates put the financial cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at around $2 trillion.

The Transportation Security Administration, which came into being as a direct consequence of the 9/11 terror attacks, employs 65,000 people, with an annual budget in excess of $8 billion. Between 2001 and 2015, TSA was funded to the tune of somewhere between $90 billion and $100 billion of protection we didn’t know we needed before to 9/11. Nor, it seems, has the money been particularly well spent. In early June 2015, the Department of Homeland Security revealed that its teams of undercover investigators were able to smuggle dummy explosives and weapons through TSA checkpoints at airports around the country in 95 percent of cases.

We tend to come up with funding after disaster strikes.

F R O M T H E B O O K “ L I G H TS O U T: A C Y B E RAT TAC K , A NAT I O N U N P R E PA R E D, S U RV I V I N G T H E A F T E RM AT H ” BY T E D KO P P E L . C O PY R I G H T © 2 0 1 5 BY E DWA R D J. KO P P E L . P U B L I S H E D BY C R OW N, A N I M P R I N T O F RA N D O M H O U S E , A D I V I S I O N O F P E N G U I N RA N D O M H O U S E L L C . A L L R I G H TS R E S E RV E D.

In a disaster, getting substantive help seems to depend more on the luck of the draw than on organization.

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BY

GÉRALD CAUSSÉ

THE SUSTAINING POWER OF FAITH IN TIMES OF CRISIS

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,

AN TO NIO BO LFO/G E TTY IMAGE S

R E F UGE E S O F THE HA ITIA N E A R THQUAKE TA K E SHE LTE R ON JA N UA RY 1 9, 2010, AT THE C HUR CH OF JE SUS C HR IST OF L ATTE R - DAY SAI NTS’ M E E TIN G HO USE I N P O R T-AU- P R INCE, HA ITI. SAVE THE C HIL DR E N PA RTNERED W ITH THE C HURCH TO P R OVIDE CHI LDF R IE N D LY SPACES TO HE A L F R O M THE SUR R O UN DIN G LOSS A N D D E VASTATI ON.

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FOLLOWI NG HURRI CANE HARVEY I N 2017, PALLETS OF WATER AT THE BI SHOPS’ CENTRAL STOREHOUSE I N SALT LAKE CI TY ARE LOADED ONTO A TRUCK BOUND FOR HOUSTON.

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THE CH URCH O F JS E US CHRIST OF LATTE R-DAY SA IN TS

such as beans, pasta, cheese, potatoes — all packed onto gargantuan pallets.

It’s hard to picture something so vast, even for a person like me who spent a career in food distribution. But there it all was in warehouses, storage facilities and trucks, being mobilized to help people during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As needs continued, so, too, did the global response of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, spanning across 155 countries and eventually becoming the largest single humanitarian effort in the church’s history.

All told, the church has distributed more than 150 million pounds of food and commodities to people in need during the pandemic.

ANTO NIO B OLFO/GE TTY IMAGE S

At the core of true religion is a charge to care for others, to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry and to heal the sick. But for people of faith the response must not stop there.

Noted New York Times columnist David Brooks recently documented a number of concerning trends in the United States: automobile accidents are spiking due to irresponsible driving; reports of altercations on airplanes, in cities and even in schools are climbing; drug overdoses and substance abuse are increasing. According to Brooks, all this is happening as charitable giving and participation in civic and religious organizations continues to decline.

He concludes: “There must also be some spiritual or moral problem at the core of this.”

It’s vitally important to help communities prepare for crises and to lend temporal assistance when disasters strike. But people of faith also understand that we cannot live on bread alone, and, in times of need, we need spiritual as well as temporal sustenance.

In 2017, Hurricane Harvey took the lives of 107 people and caused an estimated $125 billion in property damage. Water levels rose so high in certain areas that boats were necessary to rescue residents. With emergency lines jammed, a group of Latter-day Saints and neighbors gathered at a nearby chapel with their boats to begin picking up distressed residents around Houston. By day two of the efforts, some 57 boats and over 800 volunteers were working out of the makeshift dispatch.

But that was only the beginning of the work.

When I arrived with other church leaders, water levels had subsided and cleanup efforts

P H OTO BY GE OR GE F R E Y/GE TTY IMAGE S

were underway. Before cleanup began on a Sunday morning, we worshipped together in the same chapel that had served as the impromptu boat dispatch. The chapel was full.

And so, too, were dozens of chapels across Texas and Louisiana. A total of some 16,000 Latter-day Saint volunteers converged on the region to participate in mucking and gutting properties to prevent mold and even greater damage. Flooded homes had to have everything wet removed, including carpeting, appliances, drywall and insulation. Estimates at the time for this kind of muck-and-gut work were as much as $20,000 per home.

We were all eager to get working on behalf of the residents who had already lost so much.

But on that Sunday morning, we first prayed, sang hymns and worshipped. Then, after the last “amen,” we went out and got to work. In total, these volunteers were able to muck and gut more than 16,000 homes, providing an estimated $320 million worth of labor.

What happened in Houston and its environs reminded me of the spiritual and tem-

poral response after another devastating flood that occurred a little over 45 years ago when a defect in Idaho’s Teton Dam caused a collapse. Two-thirds of the citizens living in Rexburg were suddenly left homeless from the ensuing flood. Ricks College — now Brigham Young University-Idaho — ended up supplying 400,000 meals with the assistance of the church. Thankfully, the school was not in session at the time, and college dorm rooms were converted into temporary living quarters for displaced families.

Soon after the disaster, the people of Rexburg began holding religious worship services again, even though they couldn’t congregate in houses of worship that had been flooded. When the governor of Idaho visited Rexburg, he told the citizens, “We have in the state of Idaho survived a massive disaster. And survival has been brought about, in my opinion, by the spiritual strength of the people of this valley.”

In moments of emergency, both big and small, food and shelter are critical, but so, too, is the sustaining power that comes from faith in God.

CONGRE GANTS OF T H E SAL E M U NIT E D ME T H ODIST C H U RC H WORK TO DIST RIB U T E F OOD AF T E R NOT IC ING A GAP IN COV E RAGE AT LOC AL F OOD PANT RIE S IN S H OE MAK E RSV IL L E , P E NNSY LVANIA, ON JU LY 1 5 , 2 02 0.

G EO RGE FRE Y/GE TT Y IM AG E S

MI R L E NE NAZ ARE AND H E R B ABY TWINS K E RV E NS AND KEVE RNS ON TAK E REF U GE AF T E R AN EAR T H QUAK E IN THE COU RT YARD OF A ME E T INGH OU S E OF T H E C H U RC H OF J ES U S C H RIST OF LATT E R- DAY SAINTS ON JANUARY 1 8 , 2 01 0, I N PORT AU P RINC E , HAIT I.

P RE S IDING B IS H OP GÉ RAL D C AU SS É AT T H E DE DIC AT ION OF T H E NE W L AT T E RDAY SAINT WE L FARE S E RV IC E S COMP L E X IN C E DAR C IT Y, U TAH .

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MEMBERS OF T H E BI RDSBORO NAZ ARE NE CHURCH FIX ING U P A HOUSE AS PART OF THEI R ANNUAL BUI LD EACH OT H E R UP MI SSI ON WORK I N AMI TY TOWNS H IP, PENNSYLVANIA, ON J ULY 22, 202 1 .

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BEN HAST Y/M EDIA NE WS GROU P/RE ADIN G E AG LE VI A GE T TY IMAG E S

B E ATA Z AW R Z E L/NU R P H OTO

S IST E RS C ANONE SS E S OF T H E H OLY S P IRIT DIST RIB U T E F OOD TO T H E P OOR AND H OME L E SS DU RING T H E CORONAV IRU S PANDE MIC IN K RAKOW, P OL AND, ON AP RIL 1 0, 2 02 0.

B E LOW: A C H U RC H OF JE S U S C H RIST S U NDAY MORNING SAC RAME NT ME E T IN G IN T H E H OU STON NORT H STAK E C E NTE R WIT H P RE S IDE NT M .

RU SS E L L B AL L ARD, AC T ING P RE S IDE NT OF T H E QU ORU M OF T H E T WE LV E AP OST L E S , C E NT E R L E F T, AND S IST E R C RIST INA B . F RANCO, C E NT E R RIGH T, OF T H E P RIMARY GE NE RAL P RE S IDE NCY.

GEO R GE FR E Y/GE TTY IMAGE S PRAWET PUE N GSAWANGPHO L/SO PA IM AGES/LIGHT RO CKET VIA GET T Y IM AGES

A WO MA N R E C E IVE S FOOD FROM A M ON K A MID THE CO R O N AVIR US C R ISIS I N AYUTTHAYA , T HA IL A N D, O N MAY 2, 2 020.

H AL IMA H ASSAN, OF S O M O LI A , S O R TS DONAT E D C LOT H E S TO B E S H I PPE D FR O M T H E H U MANITARIAN C E NT ER R U N BY T H E C H U R C H OF JE S U S C H RIST OF L ATT E R - DAY SA I N TS I N SALT L AK E C IT Y, U TAH .

We continue to face the effects of a global pandemic. Sustaining health, life and livelihoods is rightly our focus. But we also need to recognize, as Brooks suggests, the role faith plays in achieving those goals. Researchers have consistently found that trust in God and religious or spiritual practices tends to improve medical patient outcomes in a variety of contexts.

There are, thankfully, encouraging signs that faith is increasing for some during this pandemic. A study from Pew Research Center published last year found that nearly three in 10 Americans (28 percent) say their own faith was strengthened during the pandemic, and only 4 percent say it is now weaker. Renewed spiritual strength is necessary to rebuilding lives, families and communities long after temporal assistance efforts subside.

As the world was still recovering from one of the worst economic depressions in modern history, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt emphasized the role of spiritual vitality in rebuilding the nation. “No greater thing could

come to our land today than a revival of the spirit of religion — a revival that would sweep through the homes of the nation and stir the hearts of men and women of all faiths to a reassertion of their belief in God and their dedication to his will for themselves and for their world.” He concluded with a truth that remains as relevant amid a pandemic as it was during the troubled times of Roosevelt’s day: “I doubt if there is any problem — social, political or economic — that would not melt away before the fire of such a spiritual awakening.”

Millions of pounds of food fed hungry people. And there still remains much more to be provided in terms of food and supplies to meet the needs of a suffering world. But scriptures also teach us about a spiritual “bread of life,” of which we all yearn to taste. For people of faith, fighting the impacts of a pandemic will also mean providing the best of this bread to help heal a world in need.

G É RA L D C A U S S É I S T H E P R E S I D I N G B I S H O P O F T H E C H U R C H O F J E S U S C H R I ST O F L AT T E R- D AY S A I N TS.

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SECTION

TITLE THIS IS WHERE THE DEK WILL GO HOPEFULLY IT LOOKS NICE.

BY F I R ST L AST N A ME

T

his is the nice lead in text snowmaking crew is perfectly capable of covering the resort’s slopes with a blanket of light, dreamy powder, the practice is strictly forbidden. “If I catch my guys blowing powder, they’re in trouble,” Scott Enos, Deer Valley’s snowmaking manager, says. The reason: increasing the air pressure in the snowmaking system to blow such light snow dramatically increases electricity use. “That’s really expensive snow.”

Instead, the majority of snow they make is dense, lumpy stuff that creates a base layer capable of withstanding millions of scraping ski turns — and sticking around all season long.

“When you squeeze it into a snowball it should turn gray, shed drops of water and become extremely dense,” Enos says. In other words, it wouldn’t be fair in a snowball fight.

Knowing how to make ideal snow for a resort — and do it without wasting money or water — has taken Enos 30 years to perfect.

He’s got a toolbox of four or five types of snow guns, some more energy efficient, others better at high altitude, or in strong wind, or even at making snow at air temps above 32 degrees.

His most advanced units are fully automated: With a few clicks of a mouse, Enos and his crew can dial up the desired snow type on a one to 10 scale from base snow to powder.

“I can turn individual guns on or off from my phone driving home from work,” says Enos.

Deer Valley’s arsenal includes some 250 snow guns total, not to mention 40 miles of 58

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pipe and 1,150 hydrants. Workers operate the system 24 hours a day whenever temps are cold enough from October to January to coat some 725 acres — or approximately 76 percent of the resort’s 101 runs — with human-made snow. To make it, Deer Valley uses about 240 million gallons of water a season.

What Enos calls “Deer Valley’s insurance policy” is similar to snowmaking systems paying dividends at 11 of Utah’s 14 ski resorts.

Snowbasin has a 350-acre operation while

THIS IS FOR A PULL QUOTE THAT WAS TAKEN FROM THE COPY THAT IS GIVEN.

Park City’s blankets 500 acres. These days, a fair percentage of what Utah’s license plates boast is “the greatest snow on earth” comes from machines.

Most skiers would agree that human-made snow is better than no snow at all, and nearly everyone would agree that Utah’s ski industry provides cultural and health benefits that are at least as important as the billions of dollars in spending it provides the state. However, snowmaking comes with considerable costs,

in terms of water and electricity use. When considering the intertwined threats of climate change and drought, is it a practice Utah (and other Western states) can afford?

Utah resort managers know snowmaking is a lifeline, says Patrick Belmont, professor of watershed sciences at Utah State University and one of the authors of a recent study of the effects of climate change on Utah’s ski industry. “They know that the quality of their famously light snow is decreasing,” he says of the eight resort managers the authors interviewed for their July paper in the journal Mountain Research and Development. “They also realize that guests aren’t that picky. What’s most important to them is that throieghwoi odinere’s snow on the ground.”

The numbers bear this out. The 2017-2018 Utah ski season logged some of the lowest snow totals in 74 years, but ski visits were down just 10 percent from the year before. According to Ski Utah, the resorts’ marketing collective, the season still generated $1.32 billion in total skier and snowboarder spending inost lucrative year, thanks, undoubtedly, to snowmaking.

Lessi cusda con nonserrovid modi quo blabora voloratisit que velit, qui quidi blaboriam, ad ut la quia id qui ut millaboneculla borempo rerempores eum et que omnihitis molum quam digenderspis num nus.Libearum ad ut omnisim olectatem quiam audae dolor aute offictur soluptur? Ci inciduntio. Namee qui rempost optat. Vid mo cus de sitatur a sum ut volupient example stuff.

BY HAL BOY D

PH OTOS BY MAR K OWE N S

IN AN ERA OF PANDEMICS AND DISPLACEMENT, ONE OF BRAZIL’S RICHEST MEN IS HELPING REFUGEES FIND A HOME

ILLU STR ATION BY FI R ST LAST N A M E

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CARLOS

WIZARD

MARTINS AT R I G HT: DA ILY LIF E O F T H E VE N E ZUE LA N I N D I GE N O US G R O UP WA R AO AT JA N O KO IDA U. N .

S HE LT E R O N A P R IL 6 , 2 01 9 IN PAC A R A IMA , B R A ZIL. VE N E ZUE L A N REFUGEES ARE A L R EA DY THE M AJ OR ITY O F R E S I DE N TS IN THE B R A ZILIA N C ITY O F PAC A R A IMA O N T H E B O R DE R B E T WE E N B R A ZIL A N D VE N E ZUE L A .

ACCOR DIN G TO THE U. N. , MO R E THA N T HR E E M IL LIO N V EN E ZUE L A N S HAVE A L R EA DY L E F T THE CO U NTRY B E C AUSE O F T HE HUM A N ITA R IA N C R I S I S.

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wasn’t born a wizard. His curious middle name came later in life. And the story of precisely how is as improbable as his rags-toriches odyssey.

Sporting a trim leather jacket and a toothy grin, Carlos is quick to greet me with a COVID-19 friendly fist-bump. We’re meeting in the lobby of his brother’s double-decker auto body shop located along the main drag of Orem, Utah — “Family City USA.” Carlos and his wife, Vânia, now split time between Brazil, Utah and Florida, a migratory pattern designed around the locations of their six children and 19 grandchildren.

As we walk, I ask about the vanity plate on Carlos’ SUV parked outside. It reads: “ IMA WZRD.” Carlos, who has an otherwise understated personality, smiles and tells me about his other car — a Ferrari — with the vanity plate: “MR WIZZ.” The car, he explains, is an indulgence he enjoys only in the United States. Back in Brazil, the family compound has 24-hour armed security, and when he ventures beyond its walls, he

does so in nondescript bulletproof vehicles.

As one of Brazil’s 30-some-odd billionaires, certain precautions are necessary.

This is especially true recently. Carlos was asked to play a monthlong advisory role in assisting Brazil’s early pandemic response. The work quickly drew a level of political scrutiny (Carlos was covered by the likes of The New York Times) and a level of political ire (he was called to testify before Brazil’s parliamentary commission of inquiry), for which he was not accustomed or prepared.

Even still he was asked to be the secretariat under the minister responsible for the nation’s COVID-19 response but declined. He was happy to offer advice and help, he explains to me, but his maiden voyage into any kind of a political role, even an “informal” one, will almost certainly be his last.

But Carlos hasn’t come here today to discuss politics, or his compound or cars. He agreed to sit down with me in order to shine a light on the experiences of tens of thousands of Venezuelan refugees living in Boa Vista,

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CARLOS ADMITS THAT IF IT WASN’T FOR VÂNIA’S HEART, THEY WOULD HAVE REMAINED IN THEIR PALATIAL COMPOUND, NEVER COMING TO UNDERSTAND, LET ALONE CHAMPION, THE PLIGHT OF VENEZUELAN REFUGEES.

Brazil. For nearly two years before the pandemic, he and Vânia sought to assist these refugees in finding a better life in Brazil.

He wants to share this story. On one level, it’s a story about the power of face-to-face service. But, on another level, the story is also about how we choose to act and build lives when confronted with challenging and, in the case of the refugees, even dire life circumstances.

Carlos ushers me into a conference room on the north end of the building. He begins to recount why exactly he and Vânia left their comforts in Campinas (a city located an hour or so outside of São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city) to live in one of the most sparsely populated regions of Brazil. But before he goes further, he says, there’s some backstory he should share, including how exactly he got his middle name.

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE made Carlos a billionaire. Born the eldest of seven children, Carlos grew up in Curitiba, Brazil. His father, who is now 88 and lives in Orem, Utah, made his living driving trucks. The kids didn’t learn too much English growing up, but at age 12 Carlos’ family joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and that’s when Carlos started picking up bits and pieces of the language from church missionaries, many of whom came from the United States. This continued as Carlos served his own mission for the church at age 19 in Portugal. Later, while studying at Brigham Young University, Carlos

attained a mastery of the language that would prove life altering.

But that part almost didn’t happen.

Carlos struggled in school. It wasn’t until after he married, at age 22, that he finished the equivalent of a high school diploma. And at 26, after his first semester studying computer science at Brigham Young University, things weren’t going well. “My grades were bad, bad, bad,” he tells me. “I had this feeling that I was not qualified or prepared. It was an impossible dream, an illusion, I thought.”

So he decided to quit and go back home. Or, as the saying goes in Brazil — tirar o cavalinho da chuva — take the horse in from out of the rain. But Vânia wouldn’t have it. Inside their tiny basement apartment on 500 North in Provo, Utah, she made it clear that, regardless of his grades, the couple would not return to Brazil until Carlos finished what he’d started.

I ask Vânia what she remembers about that moment, and she recalls asking Carlos, “If you quit school early, what are the children going to say about their father?”

“I had no way out,” Carlos told me. “Except to graduate,” And so, he did.

After a stint working in Cincinnati, Ohio, the couple returned home. It was there, while Carlos was employed by an international paper company in Brazil, that a colleague asked for an English lesson. Soon word got around, and more students came inquiring.

Carlos was eventually making more from his side hustle than from his corporate gig. And so, at age 30, he took the leap and opened his own English school.

One location became two. Two became three, and so on.

By the time he sold his business in 2013 to the large British publishing group Pearson, the company included more than 2,600 franchise locations across 10 countries. Since then, the family’s investments have expanded into real estate, financial services, sports, education and, most recently, fast food — they are one of the largest fast-food franchisers in Brazil for American brands like Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC. But it all started teaching English. During the first two years of his business, an early franchisee approached Carlos with a demand: name yourself after the company, “Wizard.” Carlos named his school in honor of “The Wizard of Oz,” because he loved the movie’s message that everyone possesses a unique talent waiting to be found.

But Carlos dismissed the idea of changing his name to wizard. “What if it all goes bankrupt,” he chortles as he recounts the story.

“People would joke, ‘What kind of wizard are you? It was completely mad.”

But the franchisee wouldn’t budge. She questioned whether he truly believed in the brand. Of course, he insisted, but that doesn’t require a name change. She then pointed out that his two main competitors — Fisk and Yazigi — both named their schools after themselves. To compete, he needed to do it.

She concluded that if he wouldn’t name himself wizard, she would adopt the name herself. Carlos eventually relented, and the decision to legally add “Wizard” to his name proved a brilliant marketing stunt. SomeMARCH 2022

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time later the company formally honored this franchisee for coming up with the idea.

IF CARLOS STUMBLED into the business of teaching English, he also stumbled into the humanitarian work of aiding refugees. The story of how it happened, he says, began nearly twoand-a-half decades ago with a phone call that no parent ever wants to receive: his twin sons had been in a life-threatening car accident.

By the time Carlos arrived on the scene, he was told that one of his sons didn’t make it. He was speechless. Shocked with grief. He simply couldn’t fathom how he would break this news to Vânia.

The situation, however, changed completely at the hospital, when the couple, now together, was informed that in fact both boys were alive, but, tragically, a third passenger, their sons’ friend, had died. Carlos and Vânia were confused with a flood of conflicting emotions. Carlos even wondered if the doctors were simply trying to shield them from the truth.

But once it all sunk in that both their sons were still alive, they turned their attention to doing all they could to ascertain specifics on their health conditions. One son, Lincoln, had only minor injuries, but the other son, Charles, remained in critical condition.

They prayed and wept together. That night, unbeknownst to Carlos, Vânia made a promise to God: If he permitted their son to live, she would adopt a child in need of a loving home. When Vânia told Carlos the next morning about her promise, he said they will adopt two children: “You raise one, and I’ll raise the other.”

Their son survived.

And true to their promise, they filed paperwork with an adoption agency. Within a few years, they were able to successfully adopt two brothers, two-year-old Nicholas and threemonth-old Felipe. Within days of the adoption, however, it became clear that the oldest son had developmental challenges. When their girls, Thais Michelle and Priscila, tried to play ball with Nicholas, he didn’t respond.

They came to learn that he was on the autism spectrum and suffered from a lack of stimulation and attention during his infancy.

As these two boys grew older and finished their schooling, the younger son prepared to serve a church mission, following in the footsteps of his older brothers and parents. But given the older son’s condition, Carlos and Vânia worried he would not be able to serve for two years away from home.

As that reality sunk in, they struggled with how to help their son live out his dream of serving. That’s when Vânia had the inspiration once again. The two of them would leave on a service mission, and their son would simply come along with them. That idea triggered a series of events that eventually placed them in the northern reaches of Brazil, near the Venezuelan border, almost 3,000 miles from their home.

Carlos admits that if it wasn’t for Vânia’s heart, they would have remained in their palatial compound, never coming to understand, let alone champion, the plight of Venezuelan refugees. After a last hurrah trip to the 2018 World Cup in Russia, the three Martins arrived in Boa Vista, Brazil, where they encountered a camp of more than 100,000 Venezuelans, with thousands more living in the streets.

IN BOA VISTA, large refugee camps provided food

BY THE MARTINS’ COUNT, IN LESS THAN TWO YEARS AND WITH THE SUPPORT OF THE AIRLINES, GOVERNMENT ACTORS AND COUNTLESS OTHER NGOS AND FAITH-BASED PARTNERS, THEY WERE ABLE TO RELOCATE SOME 20,000 REFUGEES.

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and shelter. But Carlos quickly noted that the region’s economy was not equipped to absorb such a sizable influx of people without means to support themselves. The overwhelming majority of jobs in the region, he explains, are in government services.

“What possibility,” he wonders aloud, “does a foreigner have of working under these circumstances? Zero.”

With more refugees coming across each day, Carlos felt like Boa Vista was becoming a pressure cooker: “We needed to set up a plan to send people out to the south where there are companies and jobs.”

Carlos and Vânia began meeting with various government and nongovernmental organization actors to discuss solutions. If they could get permission to relocate the refugees, Carlos believed they would have a better shot at establishing themselves.

But there was the first problem of transportation. It’s a 60- to 70-hour car ride from Boa Vista to cities like São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro.

They would need to find them flights.

Carlos had an idea: call David Neeleman.

A fellow Latter-day Saint born in São Pau-

He arrived in Brazil with all he had left — his baby girl.

Carlos and Vânia, who had also learned that Eduarto was a member of their faith, feared for the safety of the baby. They had heard about gangs in the city that were known for kidnapping children from single parents and selling them. Vânia went to work making calls to see if there might be a suitable and safe place for this family of two. After calling around, Vânia connected with a friend who happened to know of an organization in the inland city of Jatai that was founded and run by a doctor and his wife specializing in helping people with disabilities.

A few more phone calls and it was arranged.

The doctor would not only take them in, but the day they landed, he would make arrangements for him to see an ophthalmologist. They also learned that Eduarto’s local church congregation was located only a block away from the host organization, adding another layer of critical support.

For Vânia and Carlos, it was already a miracle, but then they received this news: After a successful eye surgery, Eduarto was able to recover 50 percent of sight in one eye.

By the Martins’ count, in less than two years and with the support of the airlines, government actors and countless other NGOs and faith-based partners, they were able to relocate some 20,000 refugees. And although their work was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic, to this day refugees continue to take off on flights from Boa Vista to more hospitable locations throughout Brazil.

Their formal mission work has ended, but Carlos and Vânia feel like their heart is still there. He holds up his phone again and says he occasionally gets calls and texts because people have his number. While he’s no longer in Boa Vista, they still employ a man in Boa Vista to informally assist and coordinate some of the efforts they began.

Carlos tells me that he admires “The Wizard of Oz” for what the film teaches about recognizing people’s gifts and potential. But through this process he and Vânia have also discovered new abilities within themselves, including the capacity to help people with nothing feel hope that someday they, too, can say the words “there’s no place like home” and really mean them, even in a foreign land.

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NE LS ON A LM EIDA/AFP VIA G ET TY IM AGE S

lo, Neeleman became a noted business figure after founding JetBlue. What’s less known in the United States is that he also founded Azul, an airline with nearly a quarter of the market share of Brazil’s domestic flights.

Carlos describes his call with Neeleman by picking up his iPhone and pantomiming the conversation.

Carlos first outlined the situation to Neeleman, and then Neeleman asked if Carlos needed discounted airline tickets? “No,” Carlos responded delicately, “we’re hoping to secure free flights for the refugees.”

Then he made his case: “Every day there are flights out of Boa Vista with one or two or more empty seats. We’d like to simply fill those already empty seats for free.”

Neeleman agreed.

But then he issued a challenge: get the other two major airlines to participate as well. “OK David. You’re right,” Carlos responded. “But let’s start with your company and that will help get the others to follow.”

They had a deal. And, sure enough, the other airlines saw what Azul was doing and wanted in.

Properly resettling refugees takes more than just a flight, though. They needed to pair each refugee with a support system, whether it was family, a religious congregation or another NGO that could help provide for the refugee as they worked to rebuild their life in a strange, new land.

Arranging the logistics for each person or family sounds like solving an ever-evolving cipher. Each part must fit, but each part is also continually changing. Carlos and Vânia personally rented out three separate properties in Boa Vista that they used to provide transitory housing for refugees preparing for departure. They worked the phones to call in favors and build relationships with charitable organizations and local church congregations.

But some situations required a level of logistics beyond their own abilities, they explained.

And so, they turned heavenward for help.

This was the case with Eduarto Villanueva, a blind man who arrived at the refugee camp with only his one-year-old daughter and the clothes on his back. Eduarto said that his wife had died in a car accident and the state had deemed him incapable of caring for his two-year-old son.

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N

W

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OF MAPS & MEMORIES

By Ethan Bauer

Art by Brenna Vaterlaus

WHEN YOU’RE SEARCHING FOR SOMETHING INSCRUTABLE, WHAT ARE THE CHANCES YOU’LL FIND IT IN THE WILDERNESS?

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F

or many years, my dad’s phone background featured a picture of me — age 11 — hunched over a small pile of dry leaves and sticks, trying to start a fire. It was my first time camping. In the snapshot, you can’t really tell what’s happening; you can’t see the magnesium rod and the chunk of steel in my hands, nor the sparks created by rubbing them together. I always found it curious that he chose this picture rather than, say, the one of me presiding over the flames with thumbs-up.

My dad is the smartest person I’ve ever known. He’s open and compassionate. He’ll

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listen to what anyone has to say about anything. I’ve never been able to think as clearly as he does, and I’ve always envied him for that.

But more so, I’ve always been afraid of him losing it.

My grandpa had Alzheimer’s. His dementia appeared when I was very young. For years, I watched my dad agonize — trying to help his dad by doing all the things my grandpa could no longer do: driving, bathing, cutting his hair.

Now, every time my 69-year-old dad repeats something or forgets something or has an otherwise insignificant “senior moment,” a suppressed voice inside me wonders if it’s starting.

Nothing scares me more than dad forgetting everything, right down to my name. I’m sure nothing scares him more, either.

But that picture of me rubbing magnesium and steel together offers a reminder to my dad that I’m determined, persistent, appreciative of the simple things in the natural world. In other words, I’m like him in some ways. I suspect he saw a bit of himself living outside of himself, safe from what may be to come.

I’d been thinking about that picture a lot during Day 3 of my weeklong stay in late August at Boulder Outdoor Survival School (also known as BOSS), one of Utah’s and America’s many wilderness expedition programs, as we continued our backcountry slog. We’d followed a sandy ditch before taking refuge under a sandstone overhang. I recognized this place as soon as we arrived. It was the cave from another of my dad’s photos. A photo he took when he was here 37 years ago.

I look around again. The cave — with the open, sandy bottom and the cliff towering above — is without question the same. That’s why, during a much-needed break, I start hunting for footprints. Not the kind stomped so literally into the dust; the kind, rather, found in the imagination. I dip my bandana and fill my bottle in a nearby stream and wonder if dad did, too. But my imagination is interrupted as Steve, our course instructor, announces that it’s time to learn how to make fire. For me, this lesson is 15 years in the making.

Creating fire in the wilderness was the first thing my dad and I bonded over, back when

THE AUTHOR, ON HI S SURVI VAL COURSE, STANDI NG NEXT TO “THE BEAVER POND” I N THE DI XI E NATI ONAL FOREST.

0 01

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that picture was taken all those years ago. I still feel closest to him in the outdoors, and especially around a campfire. I came here to find out why. To venture into the wilderness for seven days, hoping to better understand what our shared fascination with the outdoors can teach me about him, about myself and about the American literary tradition that’s long promised outdoor living as a cure to modern ailments.

DAY 1 W E A P P E A R in the early morning darkness. All 11 of us shake hands and joke about our bucket hats and flannel button-downs in a parking lot while motorists thunder past on the nearby parkway. We’ve come to escape such noise, and eight-cylinder roars or not, our escape begins now.

We range in age from 18 to mid-50s. We’ve come from Hawaii and New York and in between. We’re Irish, Native American, Uruguayan; Brooklyn beat cops and an aspiring fitness trainer; people who will soon be united in suffering and, hopefully, deliverance. We board two white vans outside the Provo Days Inn and shuttle down Interstate 15, bound for the town of Boulder, Utah.

Boulder Outdoor Survival School boasts a reputation as one of America’s toughest outdoor education programs. There are many such programs, designed to teach both primitive and practical survival skills, but BOSS often tops the list. I’ve known about it for as long as I can remember, dating back to my dad wearing his alumni shirt when I was a kid.

In 1985, 11 years before my birth, he attended a two-week field course. He was slim and fit back then, with a full, short, dark head of hair. I never really knew that version of him; nowadays he shaves his head and his gut pushes out his shirt. We share the same blue eyes, the same incomplete sets of facial hair and the same aversion to conflict of any kind. We’re the same height — 5-foot-7 — but I’m already a bit heavier than he was during his course.

And my hair is long and blonde and (though I’m six years younger than he was in 1985) al-

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J OU RNAL E NT RY ­­— DAY 1

AT SUNSET, THE SUN SHINED ON THE LIPS OF THE CANYONS DOWN BELOW, ILLUMINATING THEM LIKE THE MOUTHS OF GODS. .

ready thinning. Nevertheless, I’m about to do what he did, though with the more affordable (and possible, for a novice like me) one-week course. The idea is to enter the wilderness with minimal equipment, food and water and come out having learned something about survival and self. Or so I’m told.

My dad is so confident I’ll complete the course that he sent me his alumni shirt ahead of time, on the condition that I only wear it once it’s done. I’m less certain. The course website warns about the physical rigors of hiking a dozen miles or more per day. My suburban lifestyle involves running a mile or two on a treadmill a handful of times per week. I don’t know whether that’ll be good enough.

Until now, my dad’s advice has consisted of how he thought about Coca-Cola amid the most trying moments of hunger and thirst.

But, recognizing my apprehension, he offers some hard-earned wisdom via text, as he often does during consequential moments. “Have a good time,” he writes. “Keep a positive attitude, pay attention, be careful, and try to experience everything fully. And if you don’t like something, just remember: This too shall pass.”

As we traverse Capitol Reef country and begin our climb over Boulder Mountain, smoke from wildfires clouds the valley views and lends a dreamlike fugue to the road. The van’s tires hum along over the smooth asphalt, and its potent air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror masks my nervous sweat.

All of us are here for different reasons. A fit, wispy-lipped teenager in search of a rite of passage into adulthood. A tall, gray-haired, wisecracking New Yorker looking for novelty post-divorce. A chatty blond named Ashley with a Bible verse tattooed on the side of her hand flat out says she’s in search of a “transformative experience.” I’m looking to learn what 70

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I can about my dad, about what our similar interests tell me about myself, and perspective. The kind that — to my knowledge and experience, at least — can’t be found in what desert bard Edward Abbey called “the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus.” For those privileged enough to pay $1,895 plus transportation, BOSS offers to take you into the desert for a week, hose off that filth and replace it with the more literal kind.

Thus bestowing a sort of serenity that, as prose tells, can be found only when man and nature become one.

That’s the thinking, anyway. BOSS executive director Eli Loomis, bearded and bushybrowed like so many of his colleagues, told me that what the school offers — when all the challenges and skills lessons are stripped away — is “the opportunity to get back to the bedrock experience of being a human.” He echoes Abbey. In “Desert Solitaire,” Abbey’s opus on living in the wilderness of Arches National Park, he sought “to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us.” And in so doing, to live in communion with “a great and unbounded world.” The world has changed since “Desert Solitaire” was published in 1968. Better technology has allowed steel skyscrapers and suburban sprawl to sprout like weeds, fueled by globalized communications and insatiable markets. Which is to say the forces that called Abbey to the desert are stronger than ever and continue to sing their siren song for the folks who find themselves here, cramped in a dingy white van. Once we arrive at the campus — a handful of scuffed white yurts and some huts crudely assembled with twigs and logs amid an otherwise wild landscape —the staff collects our phones, laptops and watches. They

S MIL E S OF RE L IE F F ROM T H E GROU P AF T E R OF F IC IAL LY “GRADUAT ING” F ROM T H E IR S U RV IVAL COU RS E .

inspect our gear, from non serrated knives to wool blankets. And they instruct us to go grab a small rock, no explanation given.

With everything packed and ready, we gather in a circle, seated atop tree stumps, to meet our guides. Steve, 51, has been here since 2001.

He’s bearded and thin, with a pair of leather sandals he made himself. He’s more comfortable sleeping outdoors than in a bed, he tells us, and has eaten far more mice than the average person. Mike, 51, is larger, built like a linebacker, but with a patient smile. “A gentle giant,” one group member observes. He sort of has to be, given his unenviable job of making sure no one gets left behind.

With the basic ground rules established — no nudity, no cussing and no pop-culture references, for starters — it’s time to begin.

We load up and head south in the van on one of the most scenic stretches of highway on Earth, overlooking the rose and ruby-colored canyons of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. We unload at the Escalante River Trailhead and head east (I think), past an ancient indigenous granary built into the cliffs, past the pink walls of a canyon sunset. We hike through shallow river water and, eventually, in darkness, single file, using “hoots” — like owls — to communicate. Finally, just outside a stand of cottonwood trees, Steve stops. “I think they’ve had enough for today,” he announces, and tells us to find a spot to sleep.

We’ve hiked, by my estimate, about two miles.

I stumble through the brush searching for a flat surface. For now, our only sleeping equipment is long underwear, a wool sweater, a wool jacket and a five-by-five-foot tablecloth used to wrap and carry everything — we won’t get wool blankets until later. But the ground is still warm, so tonight, I settle in the dirt and cover myself with the tablecloth. I gaze up at a night

sky like I’ve never seen. The only sign of civilization comes from the roar of passing planes. I fall asleep counting obedient satellites gliding through their orbits and shooting stars ripping across the sky, my mind as far from Coca-Cola as can be. A pleasant breeze tickles the sagebrush. I don’t even bother with a jacket, my mind buzzing with the possibilities of what I might discover about nature and self.

That is, until it gets cold.

DAY 2 BOSS H AS B E E N AROU ND since 1968, when a Brigham Young University professor named Larry Dean Olsen convinced the school to let him take a group of struggling students into the wilderness for 30 days to “test them physically and mentally and to give them the opportunity to reconnect, renew and recommit to their life’s path.” The course was a success, and from it, a class called “Youth Leadership 480” — aka the BYU survival course — was born. It continued under BYU’s umbrella until 1977, when it became an independent operation based in the hamlet of fewer than 300 known as Boulder. It’s since splintered further, with courses ranging from hunter-gatherer to wilderness navigation and ownership changing hands every few years until, in 2018, my instructor Steve became the last owner by making BOSS a nonprofit. But the core program is still the field course, offered in seven-, 14- and 28day increments. It hasn’t changed much since Olsen first started it, the school says, with a simulated survival experience still central.

Though some parts of it have had to change. In 2005, a woman named Lisa Tabb

fell while descending a slot canyon and broke her hip, leg and three ribs and dislocated her shoulder; she sued the school. (It has since updated its practices to avoid such mishaps.)

A year later, in July 2006, a 29-year-old field course participant from New Jersey named Dave Buschow started complaining of thirst just a few hours into a 28-day field course. His guides had water they could’ve given him, but about 24 hours in, they were mere feet from a water source, and they wanted him to reach it. Buschow didn’t make it. He collapsed and died. His family sued the school and reached a settlement. Once again, the school updated its practices to make water more central. During my field course, we drank from the Escalante River on the morning of Day 1 and were never in danger of running out of water. Our guides urged us to fill up at every opportunity. We even purified it with chlorine dioxide drops — another update from my dad’s days, when they drank straight from mossy puddles.

We find one such puddle in the early evening of Day 2. We haven’t had a refill since we left the riverside this morning, and we’ve since traversed miles of dry canyon country.

It’s rainwater, collected in a bowl of rock, full of green muck and some tadpoles. We fill our bottles — perhaps with a bit more particulate matter than before — and set off.

Finally, long after darkness falls, Steve stops us at a little flat patch of dirt and brush just high enough out of a floodplain. We’ve spent the day among cacti, so I ask him if we might accidentally lay down in some needles. “I’m not sure,” he says. I’m so relieved that I tumble into the clay regardless. I squeeze into my long underwear and military surplus jackets, and once more I drift to sleep looking to the stars.

I see far fewer moving objects tonight. My mind dwells on Coca-Cola and on the fools MARCH 2022

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who have written about these moments as if they were poetry.

DAY 3

J OUR N A L E N TRY — ­­ DAY 2

THE RED-AND-WHITE PATTERN IN THE ROCKS IS STARTING TO LOOK LIKE STRIPS OF BACON.

LAYI NG IN T H E S MAL L C AV E I recognize from my dad’s photos of his time here and thinking about that version of me from his phone background, I wonder if I’ll feel even closer to him after all this is over.

But I need wonder no more when Steve tells us to gather in a circle. He passes out a bounty of food — peanuts and raisins for snacks; oats, sugar and powdered milk for breakfast; lentils, quinoa, carrots, onions, potatoes, garlic, flour and vegetable bouillon for dinner — and announces it’s time to learn how to make fire.

Rather than flint and steel, we’ll be learning to make fire with a bow drill. The idea is to use friction to create heat and, eventually, a coal.

You dump the coal into a tinder bundle and blow on it until it ignites. It looks really simple when Steve does it. But it’s not simple, nor is it perfectly safe. “Someone started a forest fire that burned 1,400 acres and that we all had to run away from,” Steve says.

We gather dead branches and whittle “spatulas” — long, flat, tongue-shaped utensils — that remind me of the wooden spoon my dad still has from his course. Mine isn’t nearly as utensil-looking, but it’s good enough to stir and eat with. We chop our veggies, throw them into well-worn black pots and hang them over the fire Steve has made. For the first time in three nights we eat dinner. Steve even mixes up some flour, water and salt to make “ash cakes,” which look like little pancakes and cook right on the hissing coals. They’re a favorite of dad’s.

Before getting some sleep, I fall back to my wandering wonderings. Maybe, with that photo, dad also wanted to memorialize the hard part; the moment of doing rather than the afterglow of having done; the part of me — and him — that wants to partake in this world.

That, after all, is what this course is all about — or so I tell myself while bundling up. A light drizzle pops against the leaves.

DAY 4 TODAY WE ’RE L E ARNING navigation. Steve delivers a brief lesson about reading maps, then hands them over to us in well-worn plastic bags. As if on cue, the drizzle morphs into a spitting, whirling downpour.

Pretty much all of us have green or camouflage military surplus ponchos, which we drape

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over our wet bodies and blanket packs, giving all of us a hunchbacked soldier look. Mine is the same poncho my dad used in 1985. That’s a mistake. It hadn’t been tested under such miserable conditions, and the rain seeps through, soaking my chest and thighs and blanket pack.

The dry sand bed has turned to mud, but it’s still passable — until we hear a rumble from up ahead.

A stream of frothy orange liquid — like a wave of thick Tang — barrels toward us. Steve, in his characteristically calm voice, directs us to assemble on the left side of the coming river. It’s not a flash flood; it’s not sweeping away branches and trees. But Mike calls it a “miniflood,” and it’s not something you want to get caught in.

Soon, every clear path through the canyon gushes with muddy water. Renowned chronicler of the West Wallace Stegner once observed that when standing next to a mountain river, “it is impossible to believe that one will ever be tired or old.” This had the opposite effect. I wonder whether I’ll ever feel young and happy again.

We plod through stand after stand of willow, pushing the thin trunks out of our way, smacking each other with the backswing of wayward branches. Every time we think we’ve found a way to keep going, we hit another impassable orange river. The ground begins to give. Shoes and sandals start slipping and sliding into ankle-deep muck. Even a lone rattlesnake is no match for the atmospheric forces at work. It slithers helplessly past our group, swept up by the surging currents of a canyon alive with water.

We finally reach a spot to rest — a slab of gray stone that looks out of place against the surrounding orange, red and white. The rain has finally stopped, after — by my estimate — six hours or so. A patch of blue sky appears, with the sun not far away. For the next 20 minutes, we wait, hoping, praying, that the sun will break through. Just as Steve announces that it’s time to get moving, it does, blasting our oasis of solid ground with welcome warmth. A few folks cheer. I hold my arms up and close my eyes, savoring every photon. As we depart, I grab a piece of the gray rock to remember this place by. It crumbles in my hand.

Though the rain has ceased, the runoff continues to cut off route after route. So we hop a downed barbed-wire fence and follow something called the “Jeep Trail” toward our destination.

The sun is beginning to set when Steve tells us we’ve made it. I just about collapse.

Then Steve informs us that because of our many detours and our soaked clothes, we can’t cook dinner; there’s not enough time. We need to set up shelters right away or risk hypothermia.

I scribble a short rant in my notebook, my stomach too stunned and empty to muster a rumble.

DAY 5 as predicted: Miserable and cold. So the next morning, after finishing my “chores,” I do what I most wanted to do when I signed up for this excursion several months back: I find a boulder that’s sloped toward the sun, climb aboard, cross my legs and recline. An escape. The kind that the literary legends doted upon. There will be no buzz from a new text message or email; no call from my boss asking me to do a last-minute rewrite.

The only sound here is the lone caw of some bird too far off to identify.

It’s blissful — but also strange. Because the fact is, I have very little need — relatively, subjectively speaking — to escape from anything. As much as I complain about the drudgery and decadence of social media, the soulless growth of suburbia and the stupidest battlefront yet in the culture wars, these surely rank among the best “problems” to have in the history of mankind. Yet they’re the very same concerns — or at least new iterations of them — that have inspired centuries of Americans to wish for a tranquil, simple, self-reliant way of life free from all that noise. It’s true that the dreaded “cultural apparatus” can consume and depress in a way that makes a way of life

T HE N IGHT UN F O LDS

J OUR N A L E N TRY — ­­ DAY 4

THE CRICKETS ARE TUNING UP FOR THE EVENING SONG. I FEEL — AT THE END OF A VERY LONG DAY — CAPABLE. AND THAT’S A GOOD FEELING TO FALL ASLEEP TO.

that is unmoored by responsibility except to one’s survival and self seem desirable by comparison. It’s tempting indeed to get swept up by that wake — especially while lying out in the sun, without appointments or obligations or even a vague sense of time. But none of it is real. My ideas about finding the core of the human experience and shedding the distractions of modern life — the ones that my dad has held to so dearly — are starting to fray.

Steve, back at the campus, told us at the outset of this course that the archetypal trope of the Western mountain man is recently conjured nonsense; that primitive people never became “self-sufficient” alone, and that more recent depictions like those written by Abbey and Henry David Thoreau, or of characters like John Thornton and Jeremiah Johnson, are rarely worth considering without context. Abbey could do it because he was a notoriously poor and neglectful husband and father. Thoreau could do it because of his generous friend and benefactor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. But I still thought what I most wanted out of this experience was to simply unplug and search for the things my dad had found out here. It took me until this moment to realize my mistake.

My mind dwells not on solitude but on my wife, my parents, my friends. Community.

This loneliness isn’t about confronting problems head-on and having courage, I now re-

alize; it’s about running. From problems and people and all the rest of it. And while that exact temptation has galvanized generations, it no longer stirs anything positive within me.

DAY 6 beside what Steve calls the beaver pond. It’s in an area very different from the red rock canyons — proof of how far we’ve traveled. Green grasses and yellow flowers surround us. Mountain peaks jut into the sky in every direction. We spent the day navigating here, by ourselves. We cooked dinner and are now awaiting Steve and Mike’s arrival. Tonight is supposed to be our last night, and our “final test” looms. A storm thunders nearby, blanketing the nearest ridge.

Finally, Steve hoots at us from up on a nearby hill. When we reach him, he tells us we’re going to be hiking just a few miles before settling down for the night. The hike inclines without end, every step bringing us higher and higher. The land here opens up behind us, revealing the pink-and-orange maze of the canyon below. Someone asks which route we took, but it’s impossible to explain; there are just too many passages, too much vastness.

We continue our climb and reach a yellow

WE ’RE S E AT E D

meadow near something we haven’t seen in a week: An asphalt road with cars. “Are we going home, Steve?” asks Greg, a young, knowledgeable middle school teacher from Denver. I’ll admit, I thought the same. Maybe the final test was the walk up here? But no — that’s too easy. “It can always get harder,” I tell myself, recalling the apocalyptic-feeling day of floods.

I’m seated atop a boulder, staring at cows munching on grass. A rainbow scars the sky to the east, while the setting sun outlines Boulder Mountain in bright orange to the west.

We’ll be camping in a nearby aspen forest tonight, among the wet ground left behind by a rainstorm, at an elevation of about 11,000 feet. Even in what’s left of the light, it’s already frigid. But Steve tells us not to worry: We won’t be here long.

I don’t bother with lying down in the swampy leaves. Instead, I cover my shoulders with my wool blanket and sit atop a log, using an aspen trunk as a chair back. The shivering starts right away. For all of us, including my neighbor for the night, an Irishman who lives in Washington, D.C., named James Joyce (yes, really). He’s having trouble sleeping, too, as passing cars shine their high beams into the forest, unaware of the frozen campers. “It’s a beautiful metaphor,” James observes from behind chattering teeth. Indeed.

DAY 7 and revs up to our little piece of forest, and Steve hoots us over. I’ve been drifting in and out of sleep, and after a week of deprivation, I have no idea what time it is. Steve tells us to put all our gear in the truck bed, save for our sweaters and a cup, and clomp toward the road. Cows holler a few dozen feet from us, as if sensing an impending roundup.

Our final test is a ritual I agreed to keep a secret to maintain the mystery. All I’ll say is that it’s at once beautiful, trippy and exhausting, and it ends with us back at the campus, sitting on the same logs and stumps we started at. It’s still dark, but Steve and Mike have a campfire set up. We gather around as quickly as we arrive, all of us seated in silence, aside from the crackle of burning logs.

I wonder how dad felt when his course ended. I know he said it was difficult while it was happening, and that he often cursed himself for signing up — until it was over. And at that point, I imagine he felt relief. Personally, I’m not in a very uplifted mood. A middle-aged Hawaiian named Mike, who was the only person among us to successfully use the bow

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J OU RNAL E NT RY ­­— DAY 6

THIS MAY BE THE CLOSEST I’VE EVER FELT TO SERENE.

drill, labeled this place the “Boulder Outdoor School of Suffering,” and following the final challenge, I don’t disagree. The school’s reputation is well earned. Yet seated around the campfire, with our time almost at an end, I do recall dad’s advice: “If you don’t like something, just remember: This too shall pass.”

And it has. For all my bellyaching over whether I’d be good enough, I finished — with or without some new skills.

But this place, I’m convinced, isn’t really about skills. I recall Eli Loomis, and his assertion that programs like this are about “the opportunity to get back to the bedrock experience of being a human.” There’s a certain irony to the fact that commodifying experiences in nature, as BOSS does, runs reverse to the ideas postulated by Abbey, who would surely recoil at the thought of paying someone to facilitate such an experience, certain that the only way to really reap the benefits offered by nature — to become fully human again — is to go entirely on your own. But the key to understanding what Loomis means comes not from the part about “being a human,” which is where I first looked. Being a human isn’t about carrying blanket packs or carving wood or sleeping on the ground. Instead, I focus on the part that comes before — “the bedrock experience.”

This place strips away all the ornaments of modernity. There’s no 3 p.m. meeting to discuss the acquisition of the new account, nor is there the need to pick up a bucket of KFC on the way home. There is, however, the need to work as a team to solve problems and cook food each night — just in a more elemental way, free from luxuries. That makes you more connected to each decision; more deliberate; more present. And, ultimately, more aware than ever that this program is a simulation.

This is not a more “real” or “human” way to live. I’m convinced that, in fact, this is the antithetical rendition of the human experience.

I’m imagining eons-worth of generations striving to create comfort — warmth, the promise of enough nutrition, safe water, structures for living, communities, medicine, choices — so surviving could become easy enough for us to have the brain space to consider whether or not our new trappings were what catapulted us forward or held us back. Having the choice to go out and “strip away” to a desired (and safe) level of difficulty demonstrates the fickleness of the farce itself.

Now, I guess, comes the part where I don’t worry about the “bedrock experience” that Abbey trapped so many into grappling with.

Instead, it seems more beneficial to focus on how I can stay decisive, deliberate and present in my human experience, when there are much more complex worries and much more distraction than whether it’ll rain this afternoon.

With my blistered feet propped up near the fire, I decide that when I’m back, I’ll put these thoughts to the test in a conversation with the smartest person I know. But I won’t ask him about the real definition of the human experience until after I get that Coca-Cola, put on his thread-bare alumni shirt and tell him I made it. After the conversation is over, hopefully, once more, he’ll see a bit of himself in me.

Our last task at camp is to take our small rock — the one we chose on Day 1 — and place it back among its brethren. I take mine down to a crystalline stream. It’s been with me through all of it, from sweaty midday slogs up mountainsides to cold nights contemplating my dad’s mortality. I’m tempted to save it as a keepsake; as another symbol of determination and memory. I want to remember this.

But then I’m reminded of the gray rock where we took refuge from the canyon rivers, and the pieces of stone crumbling in my hands. This should be instructive rather than memorable; something that is rather than was.

I toss my pebble into the water.

Anne-Marie Barton CLASSICAL ROOTS MODERN EXPRESSION

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IDEAS

CHARLES KOCH LOOKS BACK ONE OF AMERICA’S MOST INFLUENTIAL CONSERVATIVES ON THE MISTAKE OF BETTING ON ONE PARTY — AND WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM IT

BY C HA RL E S KO C H A N D B R I A N H O O KS

T

he Declaration of Independence articulates America’s vision of a just government: one that secures to all the inalienable rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Government at its best fosters the rules of just conduct that enable individual success and societal well-being. To realize this vision, government upholds the rule of law and gives other institutions (such as community, education and business) the space they need to fulfill their roles while fostering a system of mutual benefit. This provides people with an environment in which to flourish, enabling everyone to discover, develop and apply their gifts. Insofar as America has pursued this vision, our country has made incredible progress.

Without a beneficial government, individual and societal success is impossible.

Yet beneficial government is not what our country has. A recent Pew survey found a mere 24 percent trust government to do what’s right. Overwhelming majorities of Republicans, Democrats and independents hold these views. How did we get to a place where close to everyone agrees that government is broken?

The issue isn’t government by itself, but rather what we as a society expect it to accomplish. When we see a problem, our first impulse is typically to ask government to solve it.

Rather than finding cooperative solutions, we separate into camps to fight over how government can best address our problems. Instead of starting from a point of unity, we start from a place of division.

Welcome to the crisis of partisanship.

More than 200 years ago, George Washington declared that political parties are likely “to become potent engines by which cunning, am76

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bitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”

Time has proven our first president correct.

Whether at the local, state or federal level, politics is almost always divided between two warring sides, both of which constantly try to damage and defeat the other. They try to arrange policy and politics to their maximum advantage, and to their opponents’ maximum disadvantage. The focus is not on public policies that empower people and improve their lives; it’s on political victory at any cost.

I HAVE TESTED THE PROPOSITION THAT PARTISAN POLITICS CAN CURE WHAT AILS SOCIETY. MY CONCLUSION: PARTISANSHIP DOESN’T WORK.

Partisanship is a form of tribalism, which is exactly what it sounds like: different tribes duking it out for supremacy. Where once the tribes used weapons of war, now they use television ads and microtargeting. The motivation remains the same, however: to ensure that your tribe comes out on top — and, equally important, that the other comes out on the bottom.

This isn’t just zero-sum, it’s negative-sum, and it makes it very difficult to get good things done in government. It shifts attention from policy to politics, from empowering people through good policy to beating up the other side. Instead of working together, people and parties focus on staying in control, propping up allies and punishing or scapegoating opponents. The political incentive is to let problems worsen, lest a solution hurt them or help their opponent.

Is it any wonder that America’s biggest problems keep getting worse?

On foreign policy, the country is embroiled in endless war, costing thousands of promising young lives, wasting trillions of dollars and making America less safe and the world more chaotic.

On health care, people are getting priced out of the treatments they need, while quality care keeps getting harder to find, despite decades of policies meant to solve these problems.

Government spending continues to set records. Thanks to spending sprees by both parties, the national debt is already more than $30 trillion and growing by more than a trillion dollars a year.

Corporate welfare is growing in size and destructiveness. The economy is more rigged by the day. And on immigration, a broken system stays broken, condemning people who want to come to America and contribute.

The list of worsening problems goes on, and whatever the issue, the us-versus-them mentality that dominates politics all but assures that nothing positive will happen. What’s good for the parties today is usually the opposite of what’s good for Americans.

ILLU STR ATION BY J O R D I FE R R Á N D I Z

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Worse, partisanship is pushing the parties toward extremes and convincing people to hate their fellow Americans. More than a fifth of each party views the other as “evil.” Can America survive as a country if our citizens despise each other?

For me, this question is far from academic. I have tested the proposition that partisan politics can cure what ails society. My conclusion: Partisanship doesn’t work.

I avoided two-party politics like the plague from the 1960s to the 2010 election cycle. The “Congress Critters” and presidential candidates who often came calling seemed like nice enough people — some of the time — but I didn’t see the point of engaging with them.

Koch Industries has never been in the business of asking for favors, and outside of the company my focus was mostly on education.

With time, however, it became clear that helping people required more than educational efforts in schools, universities and think tanks. We also needed to change the policies holding millions back. So the philanthropic community that I founded got involved in electoral politics. We bet on the “team” that seemed to have more policies that would enable people to improve their lives. You only get two choices in our system, so we chose the red team.

We should have recognized right from the start that this was far too limiting. The “team approach” means that to get the policies that you think will help the country, you have to take all the other policies your team is offering, even if you disagree with many (or most) of them.

Your options winnow further once your team tries to make the other team look bad.

You oppose the other party’s policies, no matter how good or bad they are, simply on the grounds that they’re the other party’s policies.

Even if your team wins the election and gains power, it’s usually not a victory from a policy perspective. You’ve already narrowed the list of things that are possible. With the other team still fighting you at every step, many of those policies are pushed out of reach.

By that point, you’ve spent so long fighting the other team that the idea of collaboration seems like a sick joke.

Meaningful achievements — policies that enable more people to flourish — become difficult and rare in this environment. Your team has an incentive to build barriers instead of knocking them down. The whole system pushes beneficial government out of reach.

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The quick version is that partisan politics prevented us from achieving the thing that motivated us to get involved in politics in the first place — helping people by removing barriers. I was slow to react to this fact, letting us head down the wrong road for the better part of a decade.

Boy, did we screw up. What a mess!

Once this became clear, we changed our approach. Far from withdrawing from politics, our philanthropic community decided to get more involved. But instead of picking a team and figuring out who would work with us to get good policy passed, we decided to skip the first step and do a better job of the second. We now work with people on the red team, the blue team or no team at all! We now go issue by issue and work with anyone, regardless of political party.

THE LIE OF PARTISAN TRIBALISM IS THAT YOUR GAIN MUST COME AT MY POLITICAL EXPENSE. IT IS INHERENTLY EXCLUSIONARY, A PROJECT OF DIVISION. PARTNERSHIP,

BY CONTRAST, IS NATURALLY INCLUSIVE.

In short, we abandoned partisanship and chose partnership instead. This simple distinction has made all the difference.

At its most basic level, partnership is what Frederick Douglass meant when he said, “I would unite with anybody to do right and nobody to do wrong.” It means adopting an attitude of mutual benefit and working with others to achieve policies that will empower people. You may disagree with someone on 99 percent of issues, but that 1 percent offers you the chance to join forces. Instead of demanding all or nothing, partnership treats people with the respect they deserve and recognizes that, whatever our differences, we always have things in common.

The hardcore partisan will tell you that partnership is impossible — a feel-good, naïve pipe dream. Their argument boils down to a

simple assertion: help their preferred party win and society’s problems can be fixed. No cooperation necessary. Yet decades of evidence prove this doesn’t work. Albert Einstein had a word for this: insanity! You should ask those who advocate for business as usual in politics: Why should we expect things to be different after the next election?

The lie of partisan tribalism is that your gain must come at my political expense. It is inherently exclusionary, a project of division.

Partnership, by contrast, is naturally inclusive, encompassing more and more people from different backgrounds. It’s a project of addition. It means we can all win together — and the bigger the “we,” the bigger the win.

I’ve seen it happen. I have participated in these kinds of bottom-up movements, achieving policy victories that once seemed impossible.

In 2018, Republicans and Democrats worked together to pass a historic bill that eliminated some of the worst injustices in the federal criminal justice system. The First Step Act makes it possible for thousands of deserving people with criminal records to rejoin society and start to realize their potential. It was a remarkable achievement because, for the previous three-plus decades, the two parties refused to work together to fix the criminal justice system. Instead, they preferred to accuse each other of being “soft on crime,” while enacting “tough on crime” policies that locked away more people for longer times. There are few better recent examples of partisanship making big problems worse.

The federal reform marked the culmination of a yearslong process. It began when small groups of people realized they shared similar views, despite their differences on other issues.

They wanted to move beyond the false choice of tough-versus-soft on crime — and instead show the benefits of being smart on crime.

The coalition that began to form included people who had no reason to work together under the tribal mentality — prosecutors and public defenders, small-government conservatives and progressive activists, religious groups from many faiths, and many others. Together, we made the case for change. And we also committed to watch each other’s backs when the politics of tribalism came after any one of us.

The first signs of progress occurred at the state level. Both Republican and Democrat lawmakers saw the diverse coalition and began to abandon the tribal mentality, and from the mid2000s to the mid-2010s, 35 states passed empowerment-based reforms of one kind or another.

It worked. Over that same decade, state incarceration rates fell by 6.5 percent, and the federal rate by 8.3 percent. America experienced double-digit declines in both violent and property crime, demonstrating that less incarceration does not mean less public safety. Another benefit was the money it saved taxpayers.

Best of all, people who had been locked away got second chances.

The movement grew larger and louder, until Congress couldn’t ignore it. The First Step Act passed in late 2018 by overwhelming majorities of both parties, with a vote of 87 to 12 in the U.S. Senate during a time that has been described as one of the most divisive in our country’s political history. People said it couldn’t be done just days before the law passed. They were wrong. Partnership turned criminal justice reform from an impossibility to an inevitability.

That same year, America saw similar progress on other important issues.

Veterans health care is one. In the mid2010s, the Department of Veterans Affairs health care system was overrun with scandal.

The government-run hospitals were found to have secret lists meant to cover up how long veterans waited for care. In 2015 more than 200 veterans died on waitlists in Phoenix alone. Across the whole VA system, more than 100,000 veterans were forced to wait too long for treatment. It was later found that, between 2010 and 2014, as many as 49,000 veterans may have died before the VA processed their applications for medical treatment.

The crisis was real, but tribalism pushed a solution out of reach. Republicans and Democrats attacked each other instead of uniting to give veterans the care they had earned. But while the politicians did nothing, regular people and veterans demanded better. Folks from across the political spectrum began working together to make transformative change a reality.

It worked. As more people demanded change, politicians put aside their differences to make it happen. Two major pieces of legislation passed with bipartisan support. The first brought accountability to the VA, allowing for the quicker firing of staff who mistreat veterans. The second brought real choice to veterans health care. America’s veterans are now empowered to choose the health care provider that’s best for them, public or private. Partnership, not partisanship, made these achievements possible.

The same is true with another health care policy: Right to Try. Most people will never hear about this issue,

but for some, it’s a matter of life and death.

Imagine your spouse or one of your children is diagnosed with a terminal illness. There’s no known cure. But there may be another option: treatments that showed promise during clinical trials but are still years or even decades away from final approval. For someone with only months to live, that’s too long. And yet the law prevented them from accessing what could be their last hope.

About 70 percent of Americans agree that terminally ill patients should have the freedom to try these experimental treatments that could save their life. Even so, for many years partisanship prevented action. Democrats didn’t want to give Republicans a policy win, and Republicans benefitted from the gridlock.

That changed once the American people got involved. One way they did was through the story of a man named Matt Bellina, a U.S. Navy pilot with a young family. He was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, which gradually robbed him of his ability to move, eat, speak and breathe. His only chance to survive and stay with his family beyond a few years was to get access to promising treatments still under development. Our philanthropic community helped tell Matt’s story.

As more Americans learned of the issue and spoke up, politicians took note. The groundswell of support pushed long-stalled legislation across the finish line in mid-2018, and the final law bore Matt’s name.

Look closely at these three examples — criminal justice reform, veterans health care reform, and Right to Try — and you’ll see a roadmap to overcoming partisanship and transforming government from the bottom up.

First, find people who share your passion and are willing to work with you, even if you disagree on other issues. Have their backs when the partisans attack and ask them to have yours. If you choose your partners based on the “R” or “D” next to their name, you’re limiting your chances of success. Remember Frederick Douglass’ wise advice to “unite with anybody to do right.”

Second, celebrate success. Partnership unites people who, under a tribal mentality, would be enemies instead of allies. This is progress by itself. Highlighting how your differences don’t prevent you from uniting will inspire others to do the same. They see that they can work together even with those they greatly disagree with on other issues.

Finally, topple the barriers. The more people get involved, the more others will want to

get involved, and the more politicians will rise to the occasion. Elected officials in both parties will realize that voters want results, not more partisan wrangling, and that doing the right thing will help them politically. When good policy becomes good politics, we can expect politicians to finally do the right thing and empower people instead of holding them back.

Every policy victory that comes from partnership will help shift the parties themselves.

Right now, the parties are inclined toward ever-worse extremism and tribalism. They will continue down that path until enough people demand a different approach on more and more societal problems.

Is there a destructive policy that motivates you? A wrong you want to right, people you want to help? You can try to do so by pulling others down in a tribal, partisan way, even though that approach is already tearing America apart. Or you can give partnership a go.

You’ll be amazed at the allies you attract, what you accomplish, the people you empower.

And, like me, you’ll wish you’d taken this path all along.

In the buildup to criminal justice reform, my philanthropic community worked with a man named Van Jones. A former political appointee under President Barack Obama, Van once organized a protest outside of a conference I hosted. He disagreed — and still does — with many of the causes I support. I’m critical of his point of view on a number of issues.

Yet as we came to see, none of our disagreements were as important as the area where we agreed. We shared a desire to remove the injustices in the criminal justice system. Once we realized this, we began working together. After the First Step Act passed, Van recorded a video to share the story of our work together, in which he said: “You got awesome people, and beautiful people, on both sides who don’t know what to do together, and if we start working on that, a lot of this stuff is going to get better.”

Then he said words I will never forget: “We started working together to get some other people free, but the reality is, those of us who worked on this, we got some freedom.” That freedom, he says, should enable us all “to see the country differently and do more good.”

Van’s words ring true. I intend to keep following this wisdom. For the sake of America, I hope you do, too.

F R O M “ B E L I E V E I N P E O P L E : B O T T O M - U P S O LU T I O N S F O R A T O P- D OW N WO R L D ” BY C H A R L E S KO C H A N D B R I A N H O O KS. C O PY R I G H T © 2 0 2 0 BY T H E AU T H O R A N D R E P R I N T E D BY P E R M I S S I O N O F ST. M A RT I N ’S P U B L I S H I N G G R O U P.

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THE ART OF SLOWING DOWN IN OUR HECTIC, OVERSCHEDULED LIVES, ARE WE SCURRYING PAST THE BEAUTY THAT SURROUNDS US?

BY G E N E W E I N G A RTE N

I

just shaved. As is my custom, I did it with a vintage straight razor, the cutthroat kind that Sweeney Todd, the demon barber, used on his human meat-pies-to-be.

My razor looks to be from the Sputnik era.

It is personalized: The handle is engraved in Cyrillic script, reading, in Russian, “Anatoly’s birthday, from Nina.”

To prep my face I used a soap manufactured in Turkey by a company that has been obstinately making its product from the same main ingredient for a half-century.

Most modern foam-from-acan shaving creams are made of triethanolamine, lanolin, saponified vegetable oil and polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate, a synthetic wax.

My cylinder of hard shaving soap is rendered from mutton fat.

Eight of the nine clocks in my house were manufactured before 1920 and must be wound by hand. The oldest was made in Connecticut in 1859, when James Buchanan was president, and it is far more competent at its job than he was

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at his: It still keeps time to a minute a month.

Another clock, from the early 1900s, advertises on its dial a company that produces the “Worlds Best Ham’s and Bacon.” I bought it because I fell in love with the apostrophic illiteracy. The clock run’s splendidly.

Unlike 95 percent of all American adults, I drive a stick-shift car. Among the many virtues of these fun but cumbrous vehicles is that they’re seldom stolen, because 17-year-old thieves have no idea what to do with that stupid second brake pedal.

In my dining room is an old wind-up turn-of-the-century Victrola “talking machine” from the early 1900s. It is an enormous oaken edifice, overlarge and overengineered to accomplish its only task, playing a 78 rpm record, which it does with all the fidelity of a philanderer. You do manage to hear most of the words and music through the crackles and crepitations of aged shellac (this is earlier than vinyl). There is no dial to modulate the volume; to do that, you have to fling open, or

crack open, or firmly shut a pair of wooden doors that muffle or unmuffle the unvarying 90-decibel sound of the brass, ear trumpet-type speaker behind them. The Victrola is entirely mechanical, primitively so, but will be delivering annoying music to me in my bunker long after the nuclear holocaust that has wiped out all electric grids on Earth.

I’m not a Luddite, or an apocalyptic alarmist.

I write on a computer. I use an iPhone. Alexa is my roommate. I listen to relatively modern music on relatively modern machines. I’ve even begun to understand how to employ those postage-stamp squiggle squares to download a restaurant menu onto my phone and upload my order. I know what “download” and “upload” mean, and mostly use them correctly. Like all loyal Americans, I am so hegemonized by GPS that I retain no ability to get from Place A to Place B on my own. (Humans no longer see our world from high above, as we did in olden times, via maps. Rats in mazes is what we have become — and, willingly, I am one.)

Mostly, I like modernity and its ingenious conveniences. But I have also surrounded my-

The coffee table in my living room is from 1925 or thereabouts. It is handcrafted from ancient pine, thick slats cobbled together with nails. The wood oozes its age. The luster is magnificent. Stenciled on the front of it in black paint is “Sanitary Do’Nut Machine, Seattle Washington.” It has a “lot #” stenciled on one side.

My coffee table was evidently the packing crate in which an industrial machine was shipped to ma and pa stores around the country that sold hot, ready-made donuts, products that are today mostly the province of chains like Dunkin’ and Krispy Kreme.

That donut machine manufacturer — the Oscar Lucks Co. of Seattle, Wash. — still exists, though the web tells me it has diversified through partnership with at least one other company, a company called DecoPac; according to its ads, this modest conglomerate offers a “one-stop shop for all your cake decorating needs.” Today, products like these are shipped with reinforced cardboard, bubble cushioning and Styrofoam peanuts — which, in combination, work just fine. No need for wood, which is fiscally unjustifiable.

Yes, my Victrola claws savagely at the ea drums, but the 78s it plays — I buy them, when IS MODERN TECHNOLOGY MAKI NG US L IK E A RAT IN A C AGE , SE E K ING A QUI CK DOPAMI NE HI T FROM TH E NE X T T E X T, E MAIL OR DM?

self with ancient, obsolete technologies, and I only recently came to understand why. It’s a dispiriting reason, actually.

Many years ago I set up a stunt for a story in The Washington Post Magazine. I persuaded the renowned violinist Joshua Bell to busk, incognito, outside a D.C. Metro station at rush hour. For three-quarters of an hour he played Bach, Massenet and Schubert on his priceless Stradivarius, with a violin case open beseechingly at his feet. Most people hurried by, barely listening, as though the fiddler in the subway was a nuisance to be avoided. Only one person recognized him. He made all of $32, some of it in dimes and quarters. I wrote the story as a lamentation for our hectic, overscheduled lives. How many other things of beauty are we heedlessly hurrying past?

My emails detonated. They came from thousands of people, many of whom — roughly one in 10 — claimed that they were weeping as they wrote. I didn’t know what to make of that, at first; after all, I hadn’t misted up when reporting it or writing it. What eventually became clear is that whatever their age or background or politics or social standing, whatever ILLU STR ATIONS BY DAV I D H A BBE N

their musical sophistication, these people had something in common: a sense that we are defiling our culture — that technology has beguiled us but also benumbed us to elegance and beauty — and that, combined with overwork, we have become utilitarians at the expense of our souls. Or something like that.

In fact, gifts of jewelry to loved ones are losing pace to gifts of soundcore bluetooth speakers, mini-drones with stable connectivity, wireless charging pads, spiffy cordless epilators. We live our lives in a headlong rush of plastic buying plastic.

TECHNOLOGY HAS BEGUILED US, BUT ALSO BENUMBED US TO ELEGANCE AND BEAUTY. WE HAVE BECOME UTILITARIANS AT THE EXPENSE OF OUR SOULS.

be a new variation on an old phenomenon. A poem by W. H. Davies, a Welsh hobo from the early 20th century, begins: What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare?

I am staring at this poem now. I included these lines in my article about Joshua Bell, and many of the weepers cited it in their emails.

Slow down, Davies was urging us. Don’t just look hungrily forward — look hungrily all around, and hungrily backward, too. Take a moment. Think.

I can—tell stories that are mostly unavailable elsewhere, oftentimes for good reason. Have you ever heard Stephen Foster’s mournful ballad “Massa’s in De Cold, Cold Ground”? Its central thesis, sung with condescendingly poor grammar, is that the simpleton slaves in the antebellum South loved their kindly masters. It is ironically instructive in ways no modern treatise on racism can be — a song by a white man, sung by a white person to reassure an audience of white people that they are not complicit in evil.

I also have “Mr. Wilson, Won’t You Say a

THI S AP P E ARS TO

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Word for Ireland?” sung around 1919 in an unconvincing brogue by a vaudevillian named Irving Kaufman. It is frozen in time — written at a certain moment, for that certain moment, and is otherwise almost indecipherable. At the time, the sitting president was arranging a trip to Paris to help carve up the postwar world and negotiate what the victorious countries hoped would be a lasting peace. For the sake of Irish American lads who’d fought bravely in the Great War, Kaufman plaintively implored Wilson to 1) show some political gumption and 2) make the case to the world for Irish independence. (Beholden to his British allies, Wilson didn’t, and didn’t).

The only electric clock I own — that ninth one in my home — was made around 1932, a novelty item created in support of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first candidacy for president.

It is built from cheap bronze, featuring FDR standing (many campaign items posed him upright, an understandable imprecision to combat a whispered calumny that he lacked the vigor needed for leadership.). The bronze Roosevelt is resolutely manning the tiller of a ship over the slogan “F.D.R. The Man of the Hour.”

I grew up in a house that worshiped Roosevelt — a portrait of him was the only artwork on the walls. But that is not the main reason I bought this clock. It has early electric-clock technology, with early eccentricities. For example, once you plug it in, to get it started you have to crank it like an old Stutz Bearcat. If you accidentally crank it counterclockwise, the clock runs backward. The manufacturer no doubt saw this as a flaw to be fixed in later models, and not as a delightful feature to be cherished, as you and I, in our joyful iconoclasm, absolutely know that it is. old story out there, almost certainly apocryphal. Supposedly, in the 1960s, American engineers at NASA — famous for their precision designs of spacecraft — decided to taunt Swiss engineers, famous for their precision designs of mechanical watches. It was to be a battle of technologies, old versus new, elegant versus functional. The Americans are said to have sent the Swiss several gold strips that were so narrow in width that it would take 10,000 of them, aligned side by side, width to width, to be an inch long. The Swiss, it is said, returned the strips with holes drilled in them. This probably never happened, but the conversation it prompts is still instructive.

Finding and buying and fixing Old Things That Do Things often involves accommodations with oneself — a trade of practicality for charm. These old things can be corny and im-

THERE IS AN

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perfect. But they can deliver something of value that, depending on your viewpoint, transcends.

For her birthday, I recently resolved to give my girlfriend a watch. Rachel is difficult to buy jewelry for; she doesn’t like the pampering and ostentation it implies.

Modern watches are miracles of technology; almost all of them rely on the same timekeeping device, a quartz movement mass manufactured in India or China or Switzerland, and priced at next to nothing. You are likely to find a nearly identical movement in a stainless steel $20 watch as you will in a gold $1,000 watch. The design can’t really be improved upon. These watches are astoundingly accurate. Many automatically reset their times daily to that of Global Coordinated Universal Time, including adjustments for leap seconds.

Some of these modern watches are solar powered. Some adjust dates by the number of days in the month, automatically, and factor in leap years. Most of these watches are plastic and do not rely on moving parts. You can fling them against the wall and no damage will be done.

You cannot do that with the watch I gave Rachel. It would shatter. Gears would sproing across the room. The watch was manufactured in Switzerland in 1917 or so, and merely tells the time. It is unhandsome, made of pot metal. The strap is old canvas, a little stained. The dial is displayed behind a sturdy metal cage, the bars partially blocking your view of the face. To tell time, you have to peer around them, like the original pillars in old baseball stadiums, ones that required cut-rate “partially obstructed“ seats.

The cage was necessary because these watches were manufactured for sale to the military in America and other countries, to be distributed to soldiers, specifically soldiers fighting the Germans and Ottomans in the Great War. During combat, with sudden incoming shelling, in trenches, the young men had to dive for cover, and sometimes their watch crystals shattered, and the watch was crushed beneath it. Was there a way to fix this?

The Swiss, officially neutral as always but possibly not without preference, obliged. Rachel wears this watch indomitably, navigating around the dial-pillars with joy.

That’s where I am going here. There is dignity in age, and also something less tangible, an emotion that technology can’t adequately provide.

Ask Anatoly and Nina.

G E N E W E I N G A RT E N I S A T WO -T I M E W I N N E R O F T H E P U L I T Z E R P R I Z E F O R F E AT U R E W R I T I N G. H E I S T H E FO R M E R S Y N D I C AT E D H U M O R C O LU M N I S T F O R T H E WAS H I N GT O N P O S T.

low on conscientiousness — or the tendency to follow rules and delay gratification — and high on the desire to create chaos are most likely to do so, and not conservatives at large.

Because social networks have data on users’ personality and politics, he believes they could do more to stop the spread of misinformation by homing in on these users.

“People, once they start seeing the same kind of news, even if it’s fake, it’s false, it’s inaccurate, it’s shared by many people in their group. You start thinking it’s true because you follow similar people,” he said. “If (social media companies) really want to curb this spread of fake news, they can be preemptive about it.”

Most people simply don’t share political content online. Seventy percent of Americans say they post about political or social issues “rarely” or “never,” and Pew found that those with moderate views were less likely to post about politics on social media than those with more conservative or liberal views.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Some respondents told Pew they don’t pay close attention or don’t have anything to add. Others are worried they’ll offend others or be attacked for their views. A third of those who rarely or never post about politics said they don’t want the things they share used against them.

America’s center doesn’t necessarily see itself reflected on social media, nor does it fit neatly into the current two-party system.

“Stressed Sideliners” are defined by a mix of conservative and liberal views and low political engagement. The largest group in the Democratic Party is “Democratic Mainstays” who lean to the center on some issues, while the “Outsider Left” is very liberal and frustrated with the Democratic Party. The “Ambivalent Right” is the youngest and least conservative Republican group, and they’re also post-Trump, mostly preferring the former president not continue as a major political figure. These groups sound as if they’re experiencing a degree of political homelessness, just don’t expect them to share a status update about it.

Social media is home to America’s most partisan and politically engaged, and it’s impossible to understand political culture today without acknowledging the role it plays. Still, it’s not the full story. If you ever log on and feel as though your political beliefs aren’t shared, just know that others like you are probably just lurking.

The true silent majority is the people who aren’t posting.

MODERN FAMILY CO NTINU ED F R OM PAG E 21

name until they turn 13. (That’s under a children’s privacy law known as COPPA, though kids routinely lie about their age and the age minimum is only unevenly enforced by the platforms). Having an age minimum makes sense, given both the content and the addictive nature of social media. Even 13 is likely too young, as it comes during the fraught years of middle school when social pressures are already running high. Lawmakers may eventually raise the age for social media to 16 or even 18. Until then, it’s up to parents to decide whether their younger teens are ready for social media.

4. NO SCREENS IN THE BEDROOM AFTER LIGHTS OUT.

Although some use of screens during the day can be good, having electronic devices in the bedroom during sleep time should be nonnegotiable for kids and teens: They have to go. When phones and tablets are within reach during sleep time, sleep quality and length both suffer. If you want to implement just one piece of advice on screens, it should be this one: No devices in the bedroom after lights out.

If you want to take it a step further, eliminate screens in the hour before bedtime.

Digital activities are both psychologically stimulating (Did my crush text me back? Did anyone like my Instagram post?) and physiologically stimulating (the blue light from devices tricks our brains into thinking it’s still daytime). If you replace device time with TV time, which is not as psychologically stimulating, take steps to filter its blue light. This can be done by wearing orange safety glasses and setting the tablet screen to warmer tones (on Apple devices, it’s called Night Shift).

Overall, the research on screen time and mental health is actually good news. The research doesn’t suggest kids and teens give up using devices completely — just that they use them in moderation, and cut back or eliminate certain activities more than others. Our kids can enjoy what screens have to offer, and then put them away and enjoy the real world as well. Maybe they will even go outside. Well, a mom can dream.

J E A N M . T W E N G E I S A P R O F E S S O R O F PS YC H O L O GY AT S A N D I E G O STAT E U N I V E R S I T Y A N D T H E AU T H O R O F “ I G E N: W H Y TO DAY ’S S U P E R- C O N N E C T E D K I D S A R E G R OW I N G U P L E S S R E B E L L I O U S, M O R E T O L E RA N T, L E S S H A P PY — A N D C O M P L ET E LY U NP R E PA R E D FO R A D U LT H O O D.”

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of digital media, apps, video games and TV series made specifically for kids have taken off in recent years. “Sesame Street” song videos on YouTube rack up tens of millions of views, and entertainment companies like Montreal-based Budge Studios produce dozens of apps inspired

by Hello Kitty and the Transformers franchise. To help parents navigate this landscape, Deseret Magazine has selected apps, video games, TV series and YouTube channels kids can safely have fun with and learn from. once a subject

PLAYFULLY PRIMARY I N STAGRA M, AGE 3 +

This Instagram account run by a former Montessori teacher offers educational materials for preschoolers that parents can download and print, including scissor strips, counting frames and coloring sheets.

tions and bedtime stories. Series like Daytime Explorers and Busy Bodies aim to introduce young listeners to their feelings and help them become more resilient. The app is free and available on the Apple Store and Google Play.

ROBLOX VIDEO GA ME, AGE 13+

SCISHOW KIDS YO UT UB E, AGE 3 +

Alongside their mouse mascot Squeaks, this YouTube show’s two hosts take on common science-related questions — “Why is fire hot?” — and guide children through easy experiments. In short videos replete with colorful animations, kids will learn how to make slime, build paper helicopters or make their own compass.

This virtual platform allows players to create their own video games, from obstacle courses to personalized takes on hide-and-seek. In games like Bird Simulator and Vet Simulator, users get to fly around as a bald eagle or care for sick animals. But the platform also hosts more dubious content and parents should make sure to keep an eye out. Available on the Apple Store and Google Play.

TOEM

#BOOKTOK

VIDEO GA ME, AGE 5+

T I KTO K , AGE 13 +

In this exploration game, children control a small creature exploring a black-and-white world of woodlands and sunny beaches. They meet endearing characters and help them out by completing photographic challenges, learning the virtues of empathy and perseverance along the way.

In this subgenre of TikTok videos, users — mostly young women — share recommendations for books ranging from blockbuster young adult novels like E. Lockhart’s “We Were Liars” to classic works like Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women.”

KINZOO MESSENGER A PP, AGE 6+

This ad-free messaging app was designed for communications between kids and their families. It allows parents to approve kids profiles and contacts, and maintains user privacy by making profiles nonsearchable. Children can play games and send drawings and stickers.

Available on the Apple Store and Google Play.

KINDERLING KIDS RADIO A PP, AGE 2 +

This podcast app for kids ages 2 and older features 22 shows including singalongs, medita-

WOLFBOY AND THE EVERYTHING FACTORY T V SERIES, AGE 8+

This Apple TV+ animated series about a boy who discovers a secret, magical world while attending boarding school encourages children to embrace their singularity.

THINKROLLS APP

This logic and problem-solving app features over 1,000 puzzles and brain games and allows kids to create their own puzzles. Available on the Apple Store.

—BENOÎT MORENNE MARCH 2022

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THE LAST WORD

EMBRACING TWO CULTURES ACTIVIST SUSI FELTCH-MALOHIFO’OU ON LIFE BETWEEN TONGA AND UTAH

BY LO I S M. CO L L I N S

S

usi feltch-malohifo’ou experienced an identity crisis of sorts when she encountered Pacific Islanders in college in San Francisco in 1981. She was Polynesian, too, but raised in a white family. She was 3 years old in 1966 when a couple working in Tonga for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints adopted her and brought her to the United States, where she lived what she calls a privileged life. Her dad was a judge in Vernal and her grandfather was a Utah legislator.

Her folks cocooned her from concepts like racism, she says. She didn’t wonder if she belonged or question her place in the world. Later, when she learned about racism, she saw new meaning in comments that as child she’d just chalked up as “weird.” Her ethnic community treated her as “fia palangi,” which translates as “wannabe white.” Wondering where she fit in, Feltch-Malohifo’ou got somewhat lost as a young adult. She was arrested for auto theft in Texas in 2000 and convicted of a reduced felony charge, theft of services. Looking back, she thinks there are no mistakes unless you never learn from them. She’s used her missteps as building blocks to craft a fulfilling career, focused on accepting and meeting others where they are.

In 2015 she co-founded Pacific Island Knowledge 2 Action Resources, a nonprofit focused on violence prevention and education, economic impact, and preserving and celebrating Pacific Island arts and culture.

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community, connecting Utah business owners and entrepreneurs, convening a national violence prevention conference, and even launching its own film festival. During the first year of COVID-19, she co-chaired the Community Health Workers Section for the Utah Public Health Association, helping her hard-hit community navigate the pandemic. In 2021, Forbes

OUR ANCESTORS NAVIGATED THE OCEANS WIDE. OUR JOB NOW IS TO LEARN AND NAVIGATE SYSTEMS FOR OURSELVES, OUR FAMILIES, OUR COMMUNITIES.

Magazine included Feltch-Malohifo’ou, 58, on its 50 Over 50 Impact List. And in 2018, she won the FBI’s Director’s Community Leadership Award for Utah — “a bit of redemption for an ex-felon to say that people can change,” she says.

Deseret talked to her about why cultural sensitivity matters in lifting communities, where leaders miss the mark by ignoring cul-

ture differences and “code-switching,” where people alter their identities in exchange for fair treatment and opportunity.

HOW HARD IS IT TO NAVIGATE TWO CULTURES?

Salt Lake City is the first place I’ve ever lived where there are a lot of Pacific Islanders, and I didn’t fit in at first. I was invited to sit on the board of an ethnic Tongan nonprofit and — wow, that was a learning experience. I learned to stop discounting myself as a Pacific Islander, because the blood that runs through my veins is 100 percent Tongan and it’s OK that I’m not typical.

WHAT LED YOU TO THE NONPROFIT FIELD?

After a couple years of college in California, I came back to Utah and became a victim of domestic violence and sexual assault. That took me down a path of healing, learning and self-reflection. I started volunteering at shelters and it made me feel good; corporate work was not so fulfilling. At the same time, I had gotten a felony, so I could no longer keep the job that I had. So I became an entrepreneur out of necessity. I was trying to figure out how to make money and survive but also do what felt right. So I started to volunteer with nonprofits and recognized that they weren’t run like a business. That was a problem in my mind. That’s the reason they’re not surviving and don’t ever have any money.

YOU’VE SAID THAT OUTSIDE ORGANIZATIONS OFTEN FAIL TO HELP ETHNIC COMMUNITIES. WHY?

There was a lot of education, but not culturally relevant education that empowered people to move themselves forward. Unless people find the answers within themselves, it doesn’t stick. You can’t change lives for good by just filling a room and paying somebody per head to teach certain concepts. Once, some Polynesian young men asked me for advice on running their small businesses. I recommended a counselor, who met with them and said they had a great session. But the young men told me, “We didn’t understand a word.” Did they even go to the same meeting? He couldn’t make his material relevant to them, but their culture taught them it was disrespectful to ask elders questions, so they couldn’t let him know. I recognized that what we were missing was cultural translation. It’s something I could see because I’d spent a lifetime code-switching — changing who I was to fit into two cultures.

WHAT’S LOST WHEN PEOPLE DON’T UNDERSTAND CULTURAL DIFFERENCES OR HOW TO ADDRESS RACE?

What if we let people bring their whole selves to the table? Do you understand what they go through every day? Can you see through their eyes? When COVID-19 hit, no one in the Pacific Islander community understood the words being used to talk about it. The messaging was not right. We needed infographics. To this day, the COVID numbers in our community have not improved. We are No. 1 or 2 in deaths and hospitalizations.

TELL US ABOUT THE ANTI-VIOLENCE PROGRAM YOUR HUSBAND, SIMI POTEKI, STARTED.

Nothing had been done about domestic violence in my ethnic community in the 30 years since I was assaulted. How could that be? I took my husband to a national conference on domestic violence in San Francisco. He came back to our hotel room and said, “I’m going to start talking to Tongan men about violence in our community. The reason that this is still an issue is because the men are not holding each other accountable.” He came back to Utah and started KAVA Talks. KAVA stands for Knowledge Above Violence Always. He got seven Tongan men certified as domestic violence advocates and off they went. Then women started calling, so we started a women’s empowerment group.

And we — my husband, me and an intern at that time — launched Pacific Island Knowledge 2 ILLU STR ATION BY KY LE H I LTO N

Action Resources to inform people where they could go for help.

WHAT ARE THE ORGANIZATION’S PRIORITIES?

First, eliminate violence. Second, increase income for Pacific Islander homes through business creation and support. Third, help people to stay grounded in their positive Pacific Island roots. When I visit high schools, if I ask kids what makes you Tongan, what makes you Hawaiian, they often have nothing good to say about themselves that is concrete. It’s always things like, “we’re funny” or “we’re good athletes.”

We have similar talks in our women’s empowerment group. You can look like you’re white. You can dress like you’re white. You can live in neighborhoods that are white. The truth is, you’re not. What’s wrong with being proud of who you are? Our ancestors navigated the oceans wide. Our job now is to learn and navigate systems for ourselves, our families, our communities and others that need it. Everyone when they come to this country needs the same things: a roof overhead, food, a job.

At the same time, our organization is multicultural. We have served as many white people and Hispanics as we have Pacific Islanders.

We believe you meet people where they are, give them dignity and hope, and empower them with education and the resources they need to prosper. You become their cheerleader. They’re going to move forward as they see fit.

OUR KIDS ARE GROWING UP IN A WHITE SOCIETY, TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OF THE TRADITIONAL CULTURE THAT MOM AND DAD ARE KEEPING. THEY’RE EXPECTED TO BE ONE WAY AT HOME AND ANOTHER WHEN THEY GO OUT. HOW DO KIDS SURVIVE THAT? I FEEL LIKE I DIDN’T SURVIVE THAT MYSELF.

WHY START A FILM FESTIVAL?

This comes back to my own background, and that idea of identity. And I didn’t see us on film.

Our kids, do they see themselves and identify?

They’re growing up in a white society, trying to make sense of their own traditional culture that mom and dad are keeping, expected to be one way at home and another when they go out.

How do kids survive that? I feel like I didn’t survive that myself, and I didn’t want them to walk the path that I did. Representation helps. Film is the easiest way to have rich conversations about ideas that challenge culture without hitting people over the head with it. I was talking to a young man who was a filmmaker and said, why don’t we show all Pacific Island films?

ANY LAST WORDS?

Please join me in working together so everyone feels valued and responsible for what happens in our communities. Everyone plays a crucial role in our holistic wellness.

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D ESERET NEWS ARCHIVES

“We have an end in sight, and it’s not like this is forever.”

“ MY FEET HURT,” SAI D DENI SE BEGAYE, AN X- RAY T E C H NIC IAN WIT H T H E MONU ME NT VAL L E Y H E ALT H C E NT E R , AS SHE SAT ON A CURB AND TOOK A BREAK FR OM COV ID-1 9 T E ST ING OU TS IDE OF T H E C E NT E R IN OL JATO- MONU MEN T VA LLE Y IN SA N J UAN COUNTY, UTAH, ON THURSDAY, AP RIL 1 6 , 2 02 0. T H E MOB IL E T E ST ING T E AM T E ST E D 5 8 1 P E OP L E T HAT DAY.

THE LEFT BEHIND IN AN ERA OF WIDENING ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, THE PANDEMIC ALSO EXPOSED THE GAP BETWEEN THE HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS

P H OTO GRAP H Y BY KRISTIN M URP H Y

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DESERET MAGAZINE

The Navajo Nation in Utah, Arizona and New Mexico was one of the hardest hit areas of the country, but testing, tracking and monitoring for the coronavirus were complicated by myriad jurisdictional issues that often left the 8,000 tribal members who live on the reservation inside Utah boundaries feeling like an afterthought to those with the power to help them. As Amy Donaldson reported for the Deseret News in April 2020, Denise Begaye, an X-ray tech at the Monument Valley Clinic, volunteered to suit up to help administer Covid tests as part of a mobile testing unit sent to Monument Valley by the Utah Department of Health. Before the mobile unit arrived, only 60 tests had been given at clinics on the reservation inside Utah because there weren’t enough tests to meet demand, a stark reminder of the global disparity that has marked the pandemic from the start, from access to tests to vaccines.

“It actually makes my heart hurt,” said Kelly Carnahan, emergency response manager for the state’s public health laboratory. “So being able to be here and provide this testing, it’s just good humanity.”

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