Winter is magical in southern Utah. Come hike Kanab’s snowy red rocks, tour Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, and enjoy a very warm welcome at Best Friends Roadhouse & Mercantile for both you and your pet. Don’t have a pet? We’re happy to arrange a sleepover with a Sanctuary dog, cat or bunny!
Book your stay at bestfriendsroadhouse.org or 435-644-3400.
Best of State Utah Awards
Best Motel, 2022 & 2023
Best of the Best in Hospitality, 2023
melissa kearney
ethan bauer
natalia galicza
“I was feeding my friends. They’re not homeless nobodies. They are people.”
Kearney is the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. Her research focuses on social policy, poverty and inequality. An excerpt from her book “Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind” is on page 38.
A Pulitzer Prize winner for commentary, Leonhardt is a senior writer at The New York Times. He has also been the newspaper’s Washington bureau chief, an op-ed columnist and founding editor of “The Upshot” newsletter. An excerpt from his new book “Ours Was The Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream” is on page 60.
An award-winning illustrator, Resmini works with Italian and international publishing houses, including La Nuova Frontiera and Topipittori. Among her clients are The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Cushman & Wakefield and the Youth Olympic Games – Lausanne 2020. Her work appears on page 16.
Vasconcelos is an illustrator and designer who lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His work appears in newspapers and magazines in Brazil as well as in publications in the United States, including Computer World, Popular Science, New Art, Drawger, DPI Magazine and El Cubista. His illustration can be seen on page 20.
Doar is president of the American Enterprise Institute, where he has worked since 2014. A past cochair of the National Commission on Hunger, he served in leadership positions over social service programs for New York state and New York City for more than 20 years. His essay on how the city addressed urban decay is on page 64.
A bestselling author and popular speaker, Eyre has been a guest on “Oprah,” “Today” and other national talk shows. He and his wife Linda are co-founders of Joy School and valuesparenting.com, and have co-authored more than two dozen books on parenting and family. His commentary on the power of changing our paradigm is on page 15.
MELISSA KEARNEY
ANNA RESMINI
DAVID LEONHARDT
RICHARD EYRE
ROBERT DOAR
WALTER VASCONCELOS
A PRAYER FOR PEACE
In the throes of World War II, Elisabeth Vincken and her 12-year-old son Fritz prepared a Christmas Eve meal in their wooded cottage as war reverberated around them. Near the Vinckens’ cabin, Allied forces sought to stave off a German sneak attack amid a severe snowstorm.
A knock came at the door.
The Vinckens encountered three soldiers, one severely wounded. According to Fritz Vinckens’ account, first published years later for Reader’s Digest, mother and son were both frozen with fear. These were Americans.
Aiding the enemy could mean death.
Elisabeth ushered them in and tended to the wounded soldier. They gathered more food when another knock came. This time, they found four German soldiers at the door.
Elisabeth set the ground rules: “It is the Holy Night and there will be no shooting here.” They too were welcomed in.
This is the season of peace — a season of healing.
And yet, there is heart-wrenching conflict, suffering and sickness. Bringing about peace and healing this season may start with understanding the needs around us more fully, and recommitting more deeply to ameliorate a broken world.
Staff writer Ethan Bauer traveled to Bullhead City, Arizona, to meet 78-year-old Norma Thornton, who was arrested for feeding the homeless in a city park without a permit (“For They Were Hungry,” page 28). As the plight of the unhoused has mushroomed in cities big and small, Thornton’s story has become a flashpoint in a debate over the best ways to help.
In a companion piece, Alap Davé, of the George W. Bush Presidential Center (“Shelter from the Storm,” page 68), writes about
an innovative solution to the nation’s housing crisis pioneered in Utah, and wonders if it could become a national model. In The Last Word, staff writer Lois M. Collins talks to Jillian Olmsted about lessons she’s learned running a hospice for the homeless in Salt Lake City (“Gentle Endings,” page 80).
This issue also features stories that warm the heart, including a remarkable tale of forgiveness from Dallas to the island of St. Lucia (“The Pursuit of Forgiveness,” page 44) and a surprising look at the legacy of Bing Crosby’s wartime hit “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” (“Where the Love Light Gleams,” page 54) — featuring local musical treasure Brandon Flowers.
And, as always, there are essays that nourish the mind and perhaps challenge our preconceived notions. Robert Doar, president of the American Enterprise Institute (“City of Fear,” page 64), questions our assumptions about how to help the state of our nation’s cities. David Leonhardt, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist, writes about George Romney and other CEOs of his generation of business executives who chose to spread the wealth, rather than simply keeping it all for themselves (“Noblesse Oblige,” page 60).
At the Vickens’ home on Christmas Eve 1944, American and German soldiers shared a meal.
One German soldier with a medical background tended to the wounded American. In the morning, the Germans helped point the Americans in the right direction to safety. The war hadn’t ended. The soldiers picked back up their weapons. And yet, in the midst of a global conflict and a broken world, the Vickens created an evening of peace and healing.
.
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Our OCTOBER cover story on the promise and perils of artificial intelligence (“The Future is Here”) revealed how AI has already changed our world and explored the question of whether we like what we have created. The reaction from readers reflected both worry over how technology can be abused and optimism for the potential good AI can bring to people’s lives. “It does provide a lot of promise, especially in fields where it may … highlight possibilities and discoveries that otherwise might be missed or overlooked. But a word of caution,” wrote Mark Goodwin. “A key area of research needs to be finding a way to anchor programs with a specific purpose in reality, lest they start giving utterly nonsensical data back.” In response to Yale professor John Durham Peters’ commentary on how technological advances test our own humanity (“Am I a Machine?”), Nathan Tyler wrote: “Just as those back-hoes and combines freed much of the world’s populace to pursue other careers besides farming; so, too, can AI free my mind to a much higher cause. That is what I hope anyway.” And Darby Checketts shared her strategy for passing the test Peters proffered: “I will survive the ongoing rollout of AI and most likely benefit from it. I need not be frightened of it or succumb to it, if I remember who and what I am.” Natalia Galicza told the story of how motion picture animation pioneer Pixar has fallen from its status as Hollywood’s golden goose and what that means for the genre of family-friendly films (“Neither Infinite, Nor Beyond”). The piece was described as “fantastic” by Shawn Robbins, chief analyst of Box Office Report, and “fascinating” by Gary Baum, a senior writer at The Hollywood Reporter. The story also generated an animated online discussion among readers who shared the view that Pixar’s troubles are of its own making and the studio has the ability to reverse its fortunes. “Make creative original movies that tell great stories. Don’t make movies that have to reflect some idealistic social construct … every time. No one likes them 90 percent of the time, including people that feel they want more inclusion and diversity.” Newsweek’s senior editor-at-large
Josh Hammer had a warning for GOP leaders in his essay (“A United Front”): Find compromise among the party’s warring factions over economic policy or risk losing in 2024 and beyond. “This is a fascinating article, much appreciated, and quite insightful. My criticism is that it assumes that we are primarily thinking creatures. The evidence is strong that we are primarily feeling/emotional creatures,” wrote Kerry Soelberg. “This means that we are prone to vote against our own interests and against our own values.”
And Chris Robison diagnosed the party’s problems this way: “The GOP has largely left their principles behind in favor of retaining power — that’s it. It’s not about conservative principles any more. It’s not about the power of the people. It’s about the party retaining control.”
“I will survive the ongoing rollout of AI and most likely benefit from it.”
PROVO RIVER TREES
PHOTOGRAPHY BY PAUL ADAMS
Samoa has the highest rate of rheumatic fever in the world. Our students and faculty partner with local health teams to screen thousands of children each year—saving lives in the spirit of love and service.
Learning by study, by faith, and by experience, we strive to be among the exceptional universities in the world and an essential university for the world.
BYU.EDU/FORTHEWORLD
HOW CHANGING COURSE CAN SAVE OUR RELATIONSHIPS, COMMUNITIES AND FAMILIES PARADIGM SHIFT
BY RICHARD EYRE
Acaptain navigating a large ship through dark stormy seas saw on his radar another vessel directly in his path. He radioed, “Change course, or we are going to collide.” The reply came back: “You change your course.” Angered, the captain answered, “I am a mega-tanker heading straight for you, MOVE.”
The next reply changed everything: “I am the lighthouse, you move.”
This often-told tale illustrates how a paradigm shift can change not only our perception of the drama but of everything within the drama. The whole story changed: The mega-tanker suddenly became relatively small and transitory and maneuverable — while the “other vessel” became ultimately fixed and the north star controlling all else. The ship captain transformed instantly from one giving directions to one taking them; the situation shifted from one of irritation and inconvenience to one of saving self and ship. The “seeing” of the larger reality changed everything. The paradigm shifted from the power-struggle of doing and winning to the teamwork of being and of saving life and vessel.
A paradigm is a worldview or a perspective; and with us mortals, those paradigms are often extremely limited and incomplete — so much so that it takes a metaphor or a story like the lighthouse versus the ship to grasp the pinhole narrowness of our view compared to the vastness of the universe.
As parents, grandparents, siblings and neighbors, we often need a paradigm shift of our own. We need to recognize the judgment
and petty division around us and move through it into love and unity.
We live today in a polarized, divided world. But the divisions are not just global or economic, and not only manifest by our media sources or political parties. They run deep and personal, pulling apart neighborhoods, churches and even families. We exist within silos of tribes, of comfort zones, and we want to listen to and live among those with whom we agree and to be separated from those who “don’t get it.”
The outgrowth of this win-lose, right-wrong paradigm is discord, division, dissension, dismissal and disrespect, all of which can limit or destroy the precious relationships that we should be doing all in our power to develop and preserve — with our families, our neighbors and our associates.
The divisions stem from limited perspectives on everything from politics to gender, and from vaccinations to climate, but perhaps the most poignant and painful ones involve what many would call their two highest priorities — faith and family.
I know two older couples who are each undergoing the same test. One son in each of the families has left the religion that is so dear to the parents.
The first couple is so obsessed with and so saddened by their son’s drop-out that they are blinded to all of his good points. He is a kind, thoughtful, good person, and I asked them which they would rather have, a son of wonderful character who didn’t attend church with them, or one who did but lacked those honorable personal traits. They took my point, but admitted that they couldn’t think about anything but trying to “bring him back” and that it was hard for them to view him as a full member of their family.
The other equally religiously devoted couple responded very differently when their eldest son pulled away from their faith. They expressed their gratitude for the wonderful, service-oriented life he is living, and his interest in and commitment to his younger siblings. This couple’s paradigm is simply that they love who their son is, and that love can’t be dented or diverted by anything he does.
How about changing our metaphorical view — whether over “leaving the church” or “following the wrong candidate or news channel” or “believing the wrong thing about vaccination or climate or gender” — from that of a dark abyss into which loved ones disappear forever to the brighter paradigm of a wonderful, beloved house that a loved one has chosen to walk out of, but remains right there on the veranda porch — completely in communication, available and able to walk back in through the front door and find himself in an atmosphere of ongoing, never changing, unconditional love?
Maybe those inside think the porch is a little chilly, but it is accessible — they can walk out onto it and be with him any time, learn from him and appreciate what he sees out there. That front door is always open, going both ways. RICHARD EYRE IS A BESTSELLING AUTHOR AND SPEAKER WHOSE LATEST BOOK IS “NO DIVISION AMONG YOU: CREATING UNITY IN A DIVERSE CHURCH.”
FASHION CRIMES
CHEAP CLOTHES EQUAL BIG PROBLEMS
fas T fas H i ON H as made it easier than ever to buy something fun to wear, but at what cost? Brands like Shein, Urban Outfitters and H&M pump out new products at unprecedented rates, bringing trends and runway knockoffs to market in weeks or even days. They offer unfathomable variety at very low prices, via Instagram ads and shopping malls. The sector is worth $120 billion globally — expected to reach $185 billion in five years — and employs 300 million people. But lurking behind this success story are negative impacts of similar scope, involving labor practices, environmental impact and the proliferation of intentionally poor-quality products.
– Natalia Galicza
15 DAYS TO MARKET
That was the meteoric design-to-distribution timeline for Zara when its first store opened in 1975. At a time when most apparel companies released four new collections a year — one for each season
— that speed helped the new company put haute couture concepts within reach for typical consumers. Zara is now owned by Inditex, along with several other brands in this sector, which calls this approach the “democratization of fashion.”
54% SYNTHETICS
This self-reported stat describes the inventory of Boohoo, another booming online brand that leads the industry in the percentage of clothing containing synthetic fibers. These fibers include polyester, a common
“ORIGINALLY, THE ZARA AND H&M FOLKS WERE CONSIDERED THE FASTEST BECAUSE THEY STARTED DELIVERING (NEW PRODUCTS) SIX THEN 12 THEN 18 THEN 24 DIFFERENT TIMES A YEAR. NOW WE’VE GOTTEN TO THE NEXT LEVEL WITH BOOHOO AND SHEIN INTRODUCING UP TO THOUSANDS OF STYLES A DAY.”
— FORMER TIMBERLAND CEO KENNETH PUCKER
type of plastic derived from petroleum that can contain toxic chemicals like PFC, which are harmful over time, especially for small children. These fabrics release polluting microplastics with every wash and won’t biodegrade for generations.
FIVE BUCKS A POP
Shein recently offered a plaid bolero jacket, a royal blue dress with ruffles and white polka dots, a beanie with a spider web graphic, or an emerald baseball cap with “LA” embroidered across the front, each for less than a rotisserie chicken from Costco. Based in China, Shein cycles up to
600,000 products at any given time through its online store, also visible through its app, the most downloaded shopping app in the world.
A TRUCKLOAD OF TRASH EACH SECOND
That’s how many fast-fashion discards end up in landfills and burn piles around the world, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. More than half of these garments are thrown out within a year. About 65,000 tons are shipped each year to a single port in northern Chile, destined to join a technicolor mountain of synthetic fabrics piling up in the Atacama Desert, overshadowing the red rock canyons in scale. This trash heap is clearly visible from space.
A LIVING WAGE FOR LESS THAN 2%
That’s the rate among more than 75 million fast-fashion factory workers worldwide. Many work up to 16 hours a day, seven days a week — including children. They are exposed to 8,000 different synthetic chemicals, some known to cause cancer. Companies save money shifting production to subcontractors in countries with minimal oversight, like Vietnam, India and Bangladesh — where workers for companies like Primark were among more than 1,100 dead and 2,500 injured when the nine-story Rana Plaza collapsed in 2013.
A QUARTER OF ALL EMISSIONS
By 2050, the global fashion industry is expected to produce 26 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, driven largely by fast fashion. That’s up from about 4 percent in 2018, enough to match all
OF ALL GLOBAL GREENHOUSE GASES ARE TIED TO FAST FASHION
emissions from France, Germany and the United Kingdom combined, contributing to extreme weather, wildfires, food shortage and smog. For comparison, the global transportation industry was responsible for just 3 percent of harmful emissions that year.
GEN Z’S CONUNDRUM
Pew Research Center has found that 69 percent of Gen Z and 59 percent of millennial users cite anxiety about climate change on social media. But these same demographic segments are fueling fast fashion. Consider #SheinHaul, a hashtag on TikTok where users post videos of themselves unboxing massive orders, which has garnered more than 13 billion views; and alternatives like #closetpurge or #wardrobepurge, with billions of their own.
“FAST FASHION’S REASON FOR BEING IS HIGH TURNOVER. IT’S ALMOST A GENRE OF ADDICTION. THEY’RE BEING FED SOME LOOKS BY BRANDS AND DESIGNERS AND MANUFACTURERS, THAT EVEN IF THEY DON’T PARTICULARLY LOVE IT, THERE’S ALMOST AN IMPERATIVE TO PARTICIPATE. PEOPLE ARE SHOCKED BY THEIR OWN CONSUMPTION AND THERE’S ALMOST SHAME, OR A DISGUST THAT SETS IN THAT THEY HAVE SO MUCH STUFF. AND THEN THEY HAVE TO INDULGE IN SOME KIND OF PURGING RITUAL.”
NANCY DEIHL, AUTHOR OF
“THE HISTORY OF MODERN FASHION”
AND
PROFESSOR AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
PAST ITS PRIME?
AMAZON’S BOOM AND BANE FOR SMALL BUSINESSES
MOVE OVER, SANTA. Amazon runs the holidays now. The dot-com behemoth captured two-thirds of online gift shoppers in 2022, nearly doubling up its closest competitor. More generally, the Seattle company controls nearly 38 percent of American e-commerce, leaving just 7 percent for second-place Walmart, and even beat out NATO, the CDC and the Supreme Court in a 2021 survey ranking the country’s most favorably-viewed institutions. But Amazon is also the target of a landmark antitrust lawsuit filed in September by the Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys, alleging monopolistic practices used to “inflate prices, degrade quality and stifle innovation.” And 56 percent of small business owners told Lendio surveyors they see Amazon as a threat. Is Jeffrey Bezos’ beloved e-tailer a friend or foe?
— ETHAN BAUER
A HEAVYWEIGHT PARTNER A BULLY IS A BULLY
Amazon is a boon for small businesses, retail partners that form the backbone of the company’s operation. While the company does sell directly to consumers, the idea that it is competing with retailers is largely a misconception. Unlike Walmart and the other big-box stores that decimated Main Streets across America, Amazon is not primarily a retailer but a platform for third-party sellers. In exchange for access fees and commissions, the company not only lets them access the largest customer base on Earth but also provides a range of services empowered by its massive economies of scale.
To put it simply: Amazon claims about 200 million members in its Prime program, which provides a streaming service as well as free shipping and returns on many products for a monthly subscription fee. That’s equivalent to more than half the population of the United States, all shoppers who can select for Prime-enabled products when they search — making the company a preferred resource for cost-conscious members. “If you’re on Amazon, a lot of people can easily find the products that you’re selling,” says Mark Jamison, business professor at the University of Florida and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Amazon can also handle the “grunt work” of retail, like returns and exchanges, or centralize customer service. Sellers can also enroll in “Fulfillment by Amazon” to piggyback on the company’s substantial warehouse space and shipping infrastructure, so when a customer orders from that seller, Amazon already has the product on hand and ready to ship. “For a company simply looking to start selling quickly and outsource a lot of the logistics involved in retail,” Marc Bain wrote for Quartz, “Amazon can be attractive.”
Since Amazon makes most of its money not by selling its own products, but by taking a cut of third-party sales, it wants to see those sellers succeed. “If that’s the core of your business, you want them to be successful, to be rewarded,” Jamison says. “The surveys that I have seen where small businesses say Amazon is a threat, it’s largely because they’re not using Amazon.”
The free market is fueled by healthy competition, as embodied by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” The economist used this metaphor to describe market forces fueled by rational self-interest that he argued would push businesses to the optimal intersections of supply and demand, cost and benefit. But in its own marketplace, Amazon behaves more like a fist, jabbing rivals until they are too weak to fight back.
The platform is not designed for businesses to develop brand recognition. Presented like a catalog, the site standardizes every detail but the company’s name. And sellers find themselves at the mercy of a provider that changes policies on a dime, charging sellers to appear among top search results or adding new fees, like one imposed earlier this year that seems to punish sellers who ship their own products. Amazon has also increased its cut of third-party sales, surpassing 50 percent on average in 2022. “It is prohibitively expensive for small businesses to do business there,” says Kennedy Smith, senior researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
Sellers also confront a marketplace that is not only saturated with nearly every imaginable version of each product, but itself produces knockoffs when products are successful. According to a 2020 report by the House antitrust subcommittee, Amazon harvests data on its bestselling items so that it can copy them and sell its own versions at lower prices under unfamiliar brand names — alongside independent knock-offs. “Amazon is first and foremost a data company,” one former employee told House investigators, “they just happen to use it to sell stuff.”
Adam Smith is often evoked to support opposition to government interference in the economy, but the father of modern capitalism also worried about a company accumulating too much power. When that company can distort the entire market for their advantage, we call it a monopoly.
“Amazon is so dominant a sales platform that the odds of a small business attracting sales to its own platform are miniscule,” says Kennedy Smith. “So their sales are going to be sort of truncated right out of the gate.”
UNDER AGE
THE DEBATE OVER SOCIAL MEDIA AGE RESTRICTIONS
BY LOIS M. COLLINS
When Kipp Sorensen and Aja
Kayser married 15 years ago, they agreed on a set of rules for their kids’ phones. No phones at the dinner table. No phones in bedrooms.
But those rules didn’t seem to be enough. Their two oldest kids were obsessed with their phones, glancing at them constantly mid-conversation. The couple worried that phones were warping their children’s attention span, making it hard for them to concentrate enough to even read a book.
So the Sandy, Utah couple decided to take even more drastic measures. Their third kid wouldn’t get a phone until he was 16.
“It backfired,” Sorensen says. Her son, now 19, secretly got his own phone that his parents couldn’t monitor.
A generation ago, parents might have listed their greatest concerns as drinking and driving or premarital sex. Today, according to a new survey, overuse of technology is the top concern, behind mental health.
Those findings are part of the ninth annual American Family Survey, a nationally representative look at American life through the lens of attitudes about relationships, finances, policies and current affairs. The survey is conducted by YouGov for the Deseret News and Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute.
According to the survey, which polled 3,000 adults in the U.S., roughly two-thirds of parents with teens 13-17 say they’re doing something to monitor their children’s social media, with about 40 percent saying they put content restrictions on social media. About a fourth restrict private messaging, private accounts, contacts and screen time. More than a third don’t do anything.
Jeremy C. Pope, professor of political science at BYU and one of the study authors,
“PARENT PIONEERS” HAVE BEEN PLACED IN CHARGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA’S CUSTODY AND CARE WITHOUT ANY TRAINING, UNDERSTANDING OF IT OR EXPERIENCE IN WHAT THEY’RE TRYING TO GUIDE.
says most parents are worried social media is causing harm to their children.
He says the survey, which he’s co-authored from its beginning, was created in part to look at policies that could address public needs and wants. “To be honest, I’m just a little bit skeptical that the public is going to be able to land on some kind of social media policy that they really like because
whatever the problems are with your kids and social media, they’re probably specific to your kids,” he says. “That’s not to say the problem is unheard of for other people, but your kids probably need a bespoke solution it is unlikely the government can provide.”
The bottom line: “People wish social media was a little bit better, but they don’t exactly know how to fix it,” Pope says.
BECAUSE UTAH WAS the first state to pass legislation limiting teens’ social media use, including consequences (effective next March), I asked some Utah parents what they are — or aren’t — doing to oversee their children’s social media.
Joanie Edgeworth says her 13-year-old son is not allowed to be on social media, while her daughter, 16, has chosen not to because she doesn’t want the anxiety that can come with it. “If at some point she chooses to get an account, we would set boundaries together,” says the Herriman mom, who notes their phones have down time and time limits.
Edgeworth says she and her husband Ben are wary of social media, partly because it can be used to interact with strangers and partly because of reported links to anxiety and depression. She said she feels lucky their son hasn’t pushed to use social media.
Erica and Lance Stewart made decisions about social media for their five kids and have talked about them with their older kids, 12 and 10. The Draper couple already broke the news to their son that he won’t get a smartphone until he’s old enough to drive. They won’t allow social media while their kids are minors, they decided. “When they’re older, they can choose it on their own,” Erica Stewart said.
The YouGov survey found that nearly 75 percent of parents worry about the type of content their kids will come across on social media channels. Two-thirds also worry about what their child might post. But the survey found that many parents aren’t doing much to address those concerns. “Intriguingly, about a third of parents are letting their children run wild on social media, which seems a little too free range to me,” Pope says. “And I assume these are good parents because I think most people try to be good parents and do due diligence. They probably just aren’t sure what would make a difference.”
Don Grant, a Los Angeles-area psychologist, author and researcher who specializes in tech’s impact on mental health, says today’s parents are the “parent pioneers,” encountering a challenge no previous generation of parents even faced, without any training or even understanding of the long-term effects of social media use. He counts himself among the “digitally dazed and confused” parent cohort.
Among survey findings:
• Ten percent of parents say they check their children’s social media activity daily, compared to 28.9 percent who check about weekly. Another 15.4 percent say they check less than once a month.
• Nearly a quarter — 23.3 percent – say they never check their child’s social media activity.
• Black and Hispanic parents are more apt to check daily, at 14.1 percent and 13.2 percent, compared to white parents at 8.8 percent.
Parents with minor teen children were
asked what apps their kids can access. Instagram was No. 1 (65.8 percent), followed by TikTok (62.7 percent), YouTube (61.2 percent), Facebook (57 percent), Snapchat (51 percent), X (formerly Twitter, 30.6 percent), Pinterest (15.9 percent) and BeReal (4.3 percent), while 3.5 percent say they aren’t sure.
Just over two-thirds of parents with teens say they follow them on social media. Black parents, those with at most a high school diploma and political independents were the most apt to follow their teens. Moderates (70.3 percent) and liberals (68.6 percent) were somewhat more likely to say they fol-
WHEN THE SURVEY ASKED ADULTS TO PICK UP TO THREE OF THE MOST CHALLENGING ISSUES TEENS FACE FROM A CURATED LIST, OVERUSE OF TECHNOLOGY WAS NO. 2 (39 PERCENT), BEHIND ONLY MENTAL HEALTH AND SUICIDALITY (40 PERCENT).
low their kids on social media than conservatives (62.9 percent). Pope thinks all the numbers might be inflated because parents don’t want to admit they don’t do much.
“I wholeheartedly believe that parents want to protect their kids from any online risks and are not just ‘lazily’ avoiding it all,” said Grant, who also chairs the American Psychological Association’s Device Management and Intelligence Committee. But navigating control of social media has for many been “a frustrating, futile and impossible task. So we just didn’t bother to really figure it all out, didn’t realize the risk and left the kids literally and figuratively to their own devices until the serious and real consequences of social media use began to emerge.”
Kayser and Sorensen have used tech itself to provide limits, giving their younger children Gabb phones and watches to call or text (Gabb phones have no access to social media). They don’t allow their kids to use TikTok and chose a private school in part because it doesn’t allow phones, so their kids don’t feel that pressure from classmates to use them.
They told me they may sound like “extreme parents” and they know their children may someday circumvent their rules, but they don’t want their kids to determine their self-worth based on likes.
By overwhelming margins, parents do talk to their kids about online safety — including all of the Utah parents I interviewed. In the survey, those numbers are above 90 percent whether you look by race, income, education attainment, religious involvement or political ideology. Most often they talk about online predators, followed by personal information and privacy, pornography, bullying and cybersecurity.
Melanie MacDonald and her husband Jeff have five kids and the family divides time between Midvale, Utah, and Edgewater, Florida. The kids came home from school in the pandemic and are still home-schooled. The oldest daughter has Instagram and TikTok. Her younger brother has Snapchat. MacDonald says her daughter chafed some at restrictions. “We’re kind of worried because as much as we’ve taught them, there might be a point where maybe they get into things to spite us,” she said. “But I do think my children have good heads on their shoulders and would know if they encountered a danger. I think they would talk to us.”
She has their phone access codes, but not app logins. Still, her children know she can go through their phone’s apps. And she’s serious about keeping her kids safe: She follows organizations that reveal how predators create profiles as if they are children. So while she doesn’t want to overstep and respects her children, “I am protective,” she adds.
Around half of those surveyed say they talk about inaccurate or misleading information and about the amount of time spent on social media. Just 37.2 percent say they address managing emotions related to social media. That’s not true of MacDonald, who worries primarily about how her kids feel about themselves in comparison to other kids. She’s convinced much of the anxiety and depression epidemic plaguing America’s youths comes from social media and smartphones.
“I think one of the biggest issues is the idea kids get from likes. It becomes a measuring tool of their value. That’s most damaging,” Sorensen says. “The system is built for kids to care so much … the repercussions are unknown. I think it’s going to be such an issue.”
He says he and his wife worried about how much time the kids wasted on their phones and what it stole from free play and other activities. Now they’re more worried their children will believe social media determines their value. Sorensen wonders if anyone, “craving 10,000 likes, will feel appreciated by one person in a real relationship.”
THE SURVEY ALSO asked about government regulation and if there should be the right to sue big tech for harm. The answers condense to “I’m not sure,” Pope says.
Big tech companies like Amazon, Google, Meta and others have banded together as an industry group, NetChoice, to square off in court against state regulatory attempts. NetChoice recently sued California to block the Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, calling it a First Amendment violation. A district judge granted a preliminary injunction while the case wends its way through the court.
“What the public wants is the sweet spot, the Aristotelian mean, just enough social media so that my kid is normal and happy, but not unhappy because of looking at the wrong things,” Pope says. “That’s just really hard to get.”
More than two-thirds of those surveyed at least partially support government regulations that require social media companies to enforce age restrictions, while 7.3 percent oppose it; the others are neutral. Only 38.4 percent say parents should be allowed to sue and claim damages against social media companies on behalf of children claiming they were harmed.
That seeming ambivalence was shared by the parents I interviewed. Joanie Edgeworth feels the platforms should provide ways for parents to monitor their kids online. But she doesn’t see how they can provide total control once a parent hands a kid a smartphone. That’s why “I choose to lock down,” she says, noting her kids can ask, but she’ll decide. “I choose to protect the innocence and growth mindset of my kids. Protecting them from being a slave to a phone is a goal of mine.”
Erica Stewart agrees making a lawsuit stick would be hard. “On one hand, that parent did provide the computer or phone or whatever. You could get down deep in the rabbit hole pointing fingers at each other and I don’t think it will work.”
To Sorensen, “The root of the problem is we outsource parenting to organizations and tech. It’s always someone else’s fault.”
Grant believes parents should “learn everything they can about the people, places, things and platforms with which their children are interacting online” and discuss any concerns. “You might be surprised to learn that many kids in fact have a love-hate — or even just hate-hate — relationship with it,” he says.
Perhaps contradictorily, Pope tells me if you ask if people approve of social media companies, “60-70 percent do. As someone who studies politics, that’s a pretty high number relative to many other institutions in public life.”
The good news, Pope adds, is most people’s kids are OK. Negative effects tend to be in subsets of people who “really kind of lose themselves in it.”
“WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS IS THE SWEET SPOT, THE ARISTOTELIAN MEAN, JUST ENOUGH SOCIAL MEDIA SO THAT MY KID IS NORMAL AND HAPPY, BUT NOT UNHAPPY BECAUSE OF LOOKING AT THE WRONG THINGS.”
OF CHURCH AND STATE
SHOULD A RELIGIOUS CHARTER SCHOOL GET PUBLIC FUNDING?
BY ERIC SCHULZKE
Earlier this summer, Oklahoma approved what would be the nation’s first religious charter school. The decision immediately was challenged by a lawsuit from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and in late October, Oklahoma’s attorney general also filed a suit to stop the school from opening.
The case may end up at the Supreme Court. If it does, it may become another in a line of recent cases that are reshaping assumptions about religious schools and public funding. Regardless of how the case is resolved, it will have sweeping implications for how American education and the U.S. Constitution both evolve.
Two decades ago, a religious state-funded charter school was an oxymoron. The “wall of separation between church and state” was seen as too high a hurdle. Now, it’s a very open question. The U.S. Supreme Court has changed, and with it some key precedents. Advocates on both sides now believe that the key issue will be not whether the state can fund religious schools, but whether charter schools are “state actors” — a murky question to which no one can offer a precise answer until the Supreme Court weighs in.
The stakes are high. The outcome could open charter schools nationwide to a dramatic expansion into the religious space.
But many fear that such a victory could lead to a political crisis that could wreck the charter school movement.
For now, support for charter schools remains strong, particularly among parents, in both red and blue states. A 2022 Harris poll of 5,000 parents found support in the high 70 percent and low 80 percent on questions of funding and expansion.
Charter schools remain especially popular among minorities in low-income urban areas. From 2010 to 2021, the percentage
THE OUTCOME
COULD
OPEN CHARTER SCHOOLS NATIONWIDE TO A DRAMATIC EXPANSION INTO THE RELIGIOUS SPACE. BUT MANY FEAR THAT SUCH A VICTORY COULD WRECK THE CHARTER SCHOOL MOVEMENT.
of public school students attending charters doubled, to nearly 8 percent. In New York City, that number is 14 percent.
But the charter coalition is both durable and fragile, leaning heavily for support from both free-market conservatives and low-income parents in communities of
color, the latter being a core Democratic constituency, one that had long found little promise in low-performing urban schools.
“Charter schools are public schools,” said Todd Ziebarth, a senior vice president at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, who opposes the Oklahoma charter school. The point is hard to dispute. Charters were sold as public schools when the movement began in the early 1990s. And publicness — though the meaning of that word is elusive — remains a key part of their broad support.
CHARTER SCHOOLS WERE born in 1991 in Minnesota — then, as now, a swing state, always more left than right. And for over 30 years, Democratic legislators, governors and presidents have been vocal proponents — often to the frustration of their staunch allies in the teachers unions. Charters were initially embraced as an alternative to school vouchers, which send tuition checks directly to parents, Ziebarth said.
That distinction once seemed clear enough. In a key 2002 case, the Supreme Court ruled that Ohio school vouchers used for religious school tuition does not risk establishing a religion because it “provides benefits directly to a wide spectrum of individuals, defined only by financial need and residence in a particular school district.”
Parents who choose to use those checks for private school tuition are not establishing a state religion, the court held.
Since 1991, U.S. education policy has fragmented in the face of evolving technology and parental choices. The lines between public and private are increasingly blurred with tuition vouchers, online charters, home-schooling and public charter schools run by for-profit entities.
Private schools often do get various kinds of public funding, and those schools do still have more autonomy than public schools or public charters.
Today, some school choice advocates argue that there is little real difference between a tuition check touching the hands of a parent, on the one hand, and a parent sending a child — and thus, indirectly, that child’s tuition — to a charter school.
This blurring of lines rankles traditional charter school advocates like Ziebarth. If the religious charters succeed, he fears, the charter school coalition may shatter. Supporters in blue states like Minnesota, New York and Wisconsin — all long-standing charter hotbeds — might simply walk away, resulting in an implosion of the movement.
The main push for religious charters is coming from Catholics, and it’s not too hard to see why. Catholic K-12 education has long played a key role for American education, says Andy Smarick, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and an expert on Catholic education in America.
The first Catholic school in America, Smarick notes, was founded in Florida in 1606, predating the Jamestown colony. By the late 19th century, Smarick says, waves of Irish, Italian and Polish immigrants were overwhelming the still nascent public school system.
“In 1881 in New York, 10,000 children were refused schooling because there were not enough seats,” Smarick said, “and in 1886 in Chicago there was room for only one-third of the students needing schooling.”
Catholic schools stepped up to fill that gap, Smarick says, but in doing so they also provided cultural and religious grounding
and rigorous standards for uprooted Catholic immigrants. Those schools later came to serve urban nonimmigrant populations of color, for decades filling at low cost the same gaps that charters would later fill at taxpayer expense.
Catholic school success peaked around 1965, and their decline has been steady since. Smarick lists several factors squeezing Catholic schools: a shortage of nuns and priests, who had previously provided quality instruction at cut rates; an exodus of Catholic families to the suburbs; a decline in anti-Catholic bias, symbolized by the election of a Catholic president in 1960;
“CONTROL OF GOVERNMENT MACHINERY BY FORCES THAT ARE IN SOME WAY ALIGNED WITH GOD, THAT MERGE THE IDEAS OF GOD AND FAITH AND RELIGION WITH THE IDEAS OF THE STATE HAS A DANGEROUS CHARACTER.”
and ultimately charter schools themselves, which can now provide, at state expense, respect and rigor, two hallmarks of Catholic schooling.
Call it coincidence or divine providence, but these existential threats to Catholic education have reached a crescendo at the very moment that changing Supreme Court precedents may point toward a historic opportunity for them.
Since 2020, Notre Dame University law professor Nicole Garnett, among others, has been doggedly making the once improbable argument that funding religious charter schools may be not an option, but rather a constitutional obligation.
Garnett relies on three recent Supreme Court decisions that broaden the First Amendment’s religious free exercise clause. In 2017, the court ruled that a state program
funding playground upgrades for private schools must be open to religious schools.
In 2020, the court held that “once a state decides” to subsidize private schools “it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.” A dissenting Justice Stephen Breyer in Espinoza asked: “What about charter schools?”
Then in 2022, the court held that “a state violates the Free Exercise Clause when it excludes religious observers from otherwise available public benefits.”
The upshot of these three cases seems to be that if a state funds private schools in any form and to any degree, then religious schools must be treated as equals with their secular counterparts.
Ira Lupu and Robert Tuttle, law professors at George Washington University, have called this “a radical shift from the longstanding paradigm of no direct state funding for religious experience to one that requires equal funding of such experience.”
Thirty-seven states, Lupu notes, have constitutional amendments that prohibit public funds from being used for religious schools. Are they, he asks, now all unconstitutional?
THE HISTORY OF those amendments is controversial. In the 19th century, as Catholics set out to build their own educational system and urged their people to send their kids to them, many states implemented amendments to make sure Catholic schools got no public assistance. Oregon, Smarick notes, went so far as to outlaw private schools altogether.
Catholics have not forgotten that most of these amendments were originally aimed at their ancestors. Collectively, these funding prohibitions are often referred to as “Blaine Amendments,” after Maine Republican Congressman James Blaine, who in 1875 proposed a national amendment to bar funding of religious schools.
These historic state policies were called out in 2022 in Carson v. Makin by Justice Clarence Thomas as a “shameful pedigree” and “born of bigotry” that “arose at a time of
pervasive hostility to the Catholic Church and to Catholics.”
George Washington law professor Ira Lupu objects to the term “Blaine Amendments.” The history of these rules is complex, he said, and their current intent is quite different from their past purpose.
Lupu is very critical of all three of the key cases now in play, culminating in Carson v. Makin. Their reasoning is out of kilter with existing precedent, he argues, and their effect will be to weaken vital guardrails that allow religion to serve as a check on political passion, without putting faith at the service of those passions.
“Control of government machinery by forces that are in some way aligned with God, that merge the ideas of God and faith and religion with the ideas of the state has a dangerous character,” Lupu said. “When I think about separation of church and state, I think of it as separation of powers.”
But Lupu says that you must play the cards you are dealt. And if we take recent Supreme Court rulings at face value, then it probably follows that government support to private religious schools must flow equally with support to secular private schools. That is, a state that funds schools with various worldviews cannot discriminate per se against a school with a religious point of view.
If so, the key question now is whether charter schools are private or public.
The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools believes it knows the answer. It’s in their name. Many legal scholars, Ira Lupu included, agree. Most state laws do declare charters to be public schools. And that consensus has, as noted, always been central to the coalition’s strength.
But Nicole Garnett at Notre Dame Law School begs to differ.
In 2020, Garnett argued that “in most states, charter schools ought not to be considered, for federal constitutional purposes, ‘state actors’ (which is to say that their actions are not reasonably attributable to the government).”
This is all understandably confusing. The key is to realize that the state can fund
an entity without making it a public entity. Public defenders are private actors. The question is whether charter schools are.
“Since they are not state actors,” Garnett continued, “they are effectively private schools and can be religious without running afoul of the Establishment Clause. And if they can be religious, states with charter schools must permit religious charter schools.”
In sum, if charters are private entities, akin to government contractors, then religious charters will likely be allowed or even required under the Free Exercise clause. But if they are “state actors,” more akin to government agencies, then religious charters would be barred under the Establishment Clause.
Critics dispute this doctrine on the merits, as Lupu does. But most agree where the current logic points. The key question, it now appears, is whether charter schools are “state actors.”
THE STORY OF “state action” begins in 1871. After the Civil War, defeated Confederate states fought on, attempting to subvert racial equality with every legal and political trick at hand. Congress fought back with the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which allowed any individual to sue any state actor for any constitutional or federal statute violation. This law is now known as Section 1983 of Title 42 of the U.S. Code.
Section 1983 remains a powerful weapon to bring janky “state actors” to heel.
But who is a state actor? The rules are as murky as the tool is powerful. Questions center on the functions being performed and the degree of financial and regulatory control exercised by the state. And the answers may vary from state to state.
The proposed St. Isidore of Seville School under Oklahoma law would not be a state actor, says Michael Moreland, a law professor at Villanova University, a Catholic college in Pennsylvania. The Oklahoma virtual charter system, he told me, is “already partnering with entities not directly controlled by the state. They’re contractors,
but government contractors don’t necessarily become state actors.”
State action doctrine is an infamous mess. In the 1960s, Yale Law professor Charles L. Black called state action a “conceptual disaster area,” a “paragon of unclarity,” and, most famously, “a torchless search for a way out of a damp echoing cave.” Little has changed since.
The Supreme Court has not yet decided if charter schools are state actors. And in 2022 it passed on the opportunity. In Peltier vs. Charter Day School, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a strict dress code of a North Carolina charter school that required girls to wear skirts, jumpers or “skorts.” The 4th Circuit held that the school was a “state actor” and that the dress code violated the equal protection clause, by which state actors are bound. The Supreme Court declined to take the case, leaving the question open.
In successfully urging the Supreme Court to not decide the Peltier case, the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the issue remains murky and that this is not the moment to resolve it. “Only two courts of appeals have ever addressed whether a charter school is a state actor for any purpose,” the ACLU wrote, “and they reached different results by applying the same legal standard to very different state law regimes.”
When Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond filed suit to stop St. Isidore from opening, he warned that if approved, the school could set a dangerous precedent.
“Today, Oklahomans are being compelled to fund Catholicism,” Drummond said, but “tomorrow we may be forced to fund radical Muslim teachings like Sharia law.” In his legal brief he warned that “the law will pave the way for a proliferation of the direct public funding of religious schools whose tenets are diametrically opposed by most Oklahomans.”
St. Isidore would not open sooner than the fall of 2024, offering online classes to about 500 students, from kindergarten to high school.
FOR THEY WERE HUNGRY
AN ARIZONA WOMAN AND THE BATTLE OVER WHO CAN HELP
BY ETHAN BAUER
The man said he just needed directions. He was a vagabond Norma Thornton had never seen before, but she saw that he also needed something that everyone who comes here, to Bullhead City Community Park in Bullhead City, Arizona, needs: a good, hot meal. She offered him a plate of food — the last portion of the day — and he accepted. Some of her regulars had once joked that there should be an 11th Commandment: “Thou shalt not waste Norma’s food.” They chatted over the plate of food, but were cut short when another man in a uniform approached.
This man was tall, with a thin, white mustache and a policeman’s badge. He was even wearing one of those large-brimmed hats similar to what the Canadian mounties wear. He had a partner with him, and together, they walked up to Thornton. They told her what she was doing — feeding the homeless and needy — was illegal in Bullhead City’s parks. It had been for almost a year; Ordinance 2021-01 was passed in February 2021 and enacted in May that same year. It forbids sharing prepared food with strangers in city-owned spaces. Thornton had heard about the law, but she didn’t fully understand it — and besides, she’d been defying it for quite a while by then. This
was in March 2022 — more than a year since the city council’s vote to adopt the ordinance. She’d continued her food distribution without incident since then; until now. Someone had reported her meal service in the park. “I’m gonna call my higher-ups,” one officer told her, “and figure out how we’re gonna handle this.” He retreated to his cruiser and called his superior, explaining the situation: He’d approached Thorn-
SOME OF HER REGULARS JOKED THAT THERE SHOULD BE AN 11TH COMMANDMENT: “THOU SHALT NOT WASTE NORMA’S FOOD.”
ton to ask what she was doing. She was feeding people: “They’re hungry.”
Bullhead City Park rests on the bank of the Colorado River, right across from the southernmost point of Nevada. Dusty brown peaks stare down from across the border, feeling a world away from this spot, with its lush, green lawn and towering shade trees. The feeling of sanctuary
is what had brought her here for several years, most days of the week to serve lunch to those in need. In the middle of a desert community, this park was an oasis — for her and the people she served. But this day would be her last. The officer’s superior demanded that 78-year-old Norma Thornton be arrested. “I think this is a PR nightmare,” the on-site officer says over his radio, incredulous about what he must do. “But OK.” He returns and delivers on his promise. “Here’s the bad news,” he tells Thornton. “You’re under arrest.” The good news is that she won’t have to spend any time behind bars. The officer doesn’t even use handcuffs. He tells her he’ll have to take her in for fingerprinting, and that this will appear on her record as an official arrest, but he’ll bring her right back here when all’s said and done. “I don’t think you’re a hardened criminal,” he tells her as he places her in the back of his F-150. “I don’t think you’re out to hurt me.”
Thornton’s arrest is the latest battle in a decadeslong, nationwide effort to criminalize feeding the needy. Similar laws exist across America, from Florida to Texas, including many of the biggest cities in the West: Las Vegas, Denver, Albuquerque, Phoenix and Salt Lake City. A lawyer representing an
accused community meal group in Houston called “Food Not Bombs,” told a local NBC affiliate in May that the city’s law was “absurd,” that “it’s criminalizing the Samaritan for giving.” Thornton agrees, and because the optics of her particular case are so spectacular, her story has become a national flashpoint in the debate over whether feeding the homeless is an act of civic charity or a crime. Her case has appeared in The Washington Post, NPR , CBS and other national media outlets. The publicity helped attract the attention of the Institute for Justice, a Virginia-based public interest law firm that promised to help not only Thornton, but similar people across the country; people who want to help the needy and end up under arrest instead.
In Thornton’s case, the arrest was at least quick. But during her time at the station, she remembers one officer making her a promise. “Don’t do it anymore,” Thornton recalls him saying. “Because if you do that here in the park, you will be arrested and I will take you to Kingman” — the site of the county jail.
NORMA THORNTON MOVED to Bullhead City, Arizona, back in 2017 — not that she wanted to. “I came because I don’t believe in divorce,” she explains. By then, she’d spent the majority of her life in Alaska with her current husband, Shorty. She’d found refuge there after her previous husband died
“IF YOU HAVE A LOT, YOU SHOULD SHARE IT. AND I’VE ALWAYS FELT THAT I HAVE PLENTY BECAUSE I HAVE EVERYTHING I NEED.”
in a car accident. She worked odd jobs to make ends meet, including tending bar at a place called the Hunger Hut. That’s where she met Shorty. He spent decades working in oil fields and wanted to retire someplace warm. She followed him to Arizona, even though Alaska was where she wanted to be. For her last 20 years there, she ran a restaurant called The Lighthouse Inn out of
NORMA THORNTON HAS BECOME THE FACE OF A LEGAL MOVEMENT TO REPEAL STATE AND MUNICIPAL LAWS THAT MANY ARGUE IMPEDE THE ABILITY TO HELP AND FEED THE NEEDY.
a motel in Homer, and she loved it. It was hard work that wasn’t always stable, but it was enough.
She grew up in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, in a “two-room shanty” with her grandmother, who “never had anything but was always willing to share anything she did have.” That lesson was reinforced by Sunday School classes, where she learned about the parable of the sheep and the goats. In that story, Jesus explains what separates the righteous from the wicked in the face of divine judgment: The righteous, he says, will be those who fed him when he was hungry, and gave him a drink when he was thirsty. His followers don’t understand what he means; they don’t recall ever doing that for him. Jesus responds, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” That lesson has always resonated with Thornton, who can quote the scriptures nearly verbatim. “If you have a lot, you should share it,” she says. “And I’ve always felt that I have plenty because I have everything I need.”
At least for the most part. Before her second husband, Vern J. Sylvester, got into his fatal accident, he was in another accident in 1970 in their home of Oregon. He had a compound fracture in his leg that made working impossible. Thornton was pregnant with their eighth child at the time. She took in laundry to help out, but “without the help of other people,” she says, “it would have been really, really hard.” The same thing happened when he died in 1977. “I wasn’t able to work,” she says. “I was totally a wreck. And if people hadn’t helped, and brought food, and lent support emotionally, I’m not real sure where we would have been.”
Once she recovered, she remarried — to Shorty, who is her husband now of 38 years. After they made the move from Alaska to Arizona, she joined a nondenominational Christian congregation called the Little White Church of Oatman, about 40 minutes southeast of Bullhead City Community Park. A few years ago the pastor had a heart attack, and she visited him at the hospital. There, she spoke with a man named John, who helps in the church’s volunteer efforts. When he learned that she ran a restaurant in Alaska for decades, he asked if she’d be interested in filling in for him at a feeding service for the needy while he was out of town on business. She agreed and worked two Wednesdays that first month. At the time, many different groups fed the homeless at the park, and she gradually got more and more involved. When Covid hit, most of those groups stopped coming, but not Thornton. “It just seemed like it was more necessary then,” she says, “to do even more.”
Her two shifts a month quickly became six days a week, serving up spaghetti or chicken and rice casserole or whatever else she could think to make for lunch. Usually between 30 and 40 folks showed up for the meal, which became a steady tradition week after week and day after day.
By early 2021, news of her feeding program and others like it had reached the
chambers of the Bullhead City Council. The city said its proposal was meant to make public parks more accessible for residents, some of whom had complained for years about the problems associated with concentrating large groups of homeless folks there; namely leftover trash, human waste and general nuisance from people loitering in the park, which is one of a handful in the small town of around 42,000. “This isn’t an anti-homeless discussion,” City Manager
“I WAS FEEDING MY FRIENDS. THOSE PEOPLE ARE MY FRIENDS. THEY’RE NOT HOMELESS NOBODIES. THEY ARE PEOPLE.”
Toby Cotter said during the public discussion of the proposed ordinance. “It’s about utilization of public parks.” The city wanted to funnel the homeless population to the meal services at the local homeless shelter rather than continuing to host competing events on city property. It allowed such events to continue on private property, but if Thornton hoped to continue serving food in the park, she’d need an event permit,
evidence of compliance with county food regulations, a million-dollar liability insurance policy, and a refundable $250 deposit should the city need to provide cleaning services. “Those in favor said it was time to make a change after years of allowing people and groups to feed the homeless,” the city’s local newspaper reported, because the practice creates health and safety issues in the city’s parks.
However, most people in attendance were opposed to the new law. One speaker even brought out a PowerPoint presentation to make his case. “Access to food is a basic human right,” he said. “When the act of sharing food is limited and prohibited, the cities are violating that human right.” Nevertheless, the Council voted 5-2 to adopt the ordinance. No one at the meeting, or in the city, could’ve imagined that vote would lead to a federal civil rights lawsuit. Least of all, Norma Thornton.
IN JULY 2022, Bullhead City dropped the charges against Thornton. City Prosecutor Martin Rogers explained that he believed Thornton’s lack of knowledge of the ordinance was sincere, and because she now understood it, he’d chosen to dismiss her case “in the interest of justice.” But in October, Thornton chose to file a civil rights complaint with Arizona’s U.S. District Court. It rested on two separate arguments, both based on two clauses from the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
The first argument, according to attorney Diana Simpson, is that the city’s law only requires a permit if you’re sharing food with strangers; not if you’re sharing with family or friends. Thornton believes that should end any discussion of her liability right
THORNTON GREW UP IN A “TWOROOM SHANTY” IN OREGON WITH HER GRANDMOTHER, WHO “NEVER HAD ANYTHING BUT WAS ALWAYS WILLING TO SHARE ANYTHING SHE DID HAVE.”
in order to help others kind of breaks from that foundation and contradicts what this country is designed to do, and this country’s constitutional protections.”
City leaders maintain that they’re not against feeding the homeless; they just want it to be done in certain places, away from city parks. And that’s what most bothers Thornton about this whole situation. Public parks are supposed to be places for everyone to gather, whether they’re wealthy or homeless or have just fallen on hard times. “They have never been in a space where they have been hungry,” Thornton says. “They don’t know how desperate some people can be, or how easily — just how doggone easily — a person can find themselves going from a nice home, a good car, even a decent job and suddenly find themselves with nothing. They don’t realize how fragile it is. They just can’t comprehend. And I’m sad for them. I’m very very sad for them that they don’t understand how they can impact other people’s lives so harshly.”
She doesn’t have the answer for how to end homelessness. Neither does her legal there. “I was feeding my friends. Those people are my friends,” she says. “They’re not homeless nobodies. They are people.” And that’s pretty much what her lawyers will argue: It’s impossible to define a meaningful difference between strangers and friends in a situation like Thornton’s, which puts the ordinance in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Under that clause, the state cannot “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Since the law treats strangers and nonstrangers differently, Thornton’s legal team argues, it’s unconstitutional. Additionally, her lawyers plan to argue something even bigger: Aside from the specific language of this particular ordinance, any ordinance with similar goals should be unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause. “People have been helping others since time immemorial, and that charitable impulse is baked into the American ethos. It’s something that people have been doing since the beginning of this country,” Simpson says. “And so to require people to go through this rigmarole
team. “Homelessness is an intractable problem,” Simpson admits. “It’s very difficult to solve.” But criminalizing the people trying to help, she and Thornton agree, is not helpful — regardless of good or even cynical intentions. “There are all kinds of good-meaning and innovative people who are just trying to address some of society’s most intractable problems,” Simpson says. “And governments are starting to get in the way of that. And that just doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
WITH HER LAWSUIT pending — her team submitted a petition for summary judgment in early November and is still waiting to hear back — Thornton is back to doing what got her into trouble. “I’ve never stopped, no sir,” she says. “The very day I got out of court, I still served food.” But not at the park.
Instead, she visited nearby businesses, seeking one that would allow her to use its land to set up shop. After several rejections, a Jet Ski retailer gave her access to its lot — a small patch of asphalt and gravel just a few blocks from where her troubles began. Whatever happens with her lawsuit, she doesn’t plan to go back to the park. The city has since made renovations, removing the tables and trees. “It’s just open and barren,” Thornton says — hardly better than where she is now. But she doesn’t want to stay at the Jet Ski shop, either. Her new vision is bigger.
She may be 80 years old, and she may not understand her city’s — or anyone’s — impulse to criminalize people who want to help in the “wrong” way, but she hopes to find a property where she can expand her feeding program; where she can make it bigger than just herself. Almost like a refuge for like-minded people — and for people like that man who showed up preceding her arrest. If public parks can’t be a place for everyone, this will be. “And I know people would come and help and volunteer time,” she says, “because there are so many good people out there — people that want to help.”
DIABETES CAN BE A MONSTER
Living with diabetes can be scary. One of the biggest fears is the threat of losing a leg. In fact, diabetes is responsible for someone losing a limb every three minutes in the U.S.
Medical studies prove that up to 85% of diabetes-related amputations can be prevented.
YES / NO
Do your legs cramp while walking even a short distance?
Do your legs hurt at rest?
Do you have a sore that is not healing?
If you have answered “yes” to any of these questions, you may have PAD. Those living with Diabetes and PAD have an increased risk for amputation. The good news is the specialists at CiC are able to treat PAD and help reduce your risk.
Michael Switzer, MD (Arizona)
Grant Fankhauser, MD (Arizona)
Joel Rainwater, MD (Arizona & New Mexico)
Ryan O’Hara, MD (Utah)
Brian Evans, MD (Nevada)
JUSTICE TIED TOGETHER WITH CLOTHESLINES
THE PUSH FOR DADS TO STEP UP IN LATIN AMERICA
BY NATALIA GALICZA
In July 2021, more than 300 women and their children gathered under clotheslines strung across Oaxaca’s Santo Domingo Square, the threads weighed down with photographs of wanted men, plastered with accusations: “DEUDOR DE PENSIÓN ALIMENTICIA” (child support debtor). Some women penned their children’s father’s full name, job title and the amount of pesos they’d left outstanding.
Each poster represented a story of paternal absence enabled by a culture with few avenues to offer reprimand, a fact that fueled Diana Luz Vázquez to organize the “Debtors Clothesline” protest in the first place. “If justice doesn’t reach them, let shame do it,” says Luz Vázquez, who is herself a daughter and granddaughter of child support debtors. “Our grandmothers and mothers say ‘leave it to God’ or ‘leave it to karma’ and never take action. They don’t want to provoke scandal. But many moms have now realized that this is not normal and this is not OK.”
In Mexico, about 67 percent of households with single mothers don’t receive child support. Even though the right to receive
these payments is protected by federal law, the power to determine what’s owed and enforce those transactions falls on the nation’s court system. Discretion belongs to judges, unlike countries with government bodies solely dedicated to child support oversight like the United States’ Office of Child Support Enforcement. The backlog
“IF JUSTICE DOESN’T REACH THEM, LET SHAME DO IT.”
of cases and high costs of legal fees mean court proceedings often take too long and grow too expensive for many single-parent households to pursue. Debtors can regularly evade child support payments without consequence, which further enables a culture of shame, cyclical poverty and strict gender roles.
“There’s a real issue with men not recognizing their paternity. … And of course, there’s no economic commitment,” says Monse Torres, a single mother of two from Zacatecas, Mexico, who now volunteers for Frente Nacional de Mujeres Contra Deudores Alimentarios, an organization focused on uniting women against child support debtors. She says her son’s father does not recognize his 18-year-old child and has not paid his child support for 15 years. That lack of parental and financial involvement can cause children to perform poorly in school, suffer behavioral problems and hurt their self-esteem. “When I was a child, I always wondered why my father wasn’t with me,” says Torres’ son, Emilio. “Besides the money, what’s important is that a father shows love and willingness to meet their kids, to be with them, to support them and love them in other ways.”
The “Debtors Clothesline” protests and the larger movement they represent use these deep-set cultural norms in Mexico to create change. In 2021, a federal bill titled “Ley Sabina” (Sabina’s Law) was introduced to the Mexican Senate. It included a directive
“WHEN A MOTHER IS ALONE, THE CULTURE AROUND HER SAYS TO HER, ‘YOU CAN DO IT ALONE. YOU MUST BE STRONG, YOU DON’T NEED TO ASK FOR HELP.’”
for Mexico to create its first national registry of child support debtors — to function as a transparency tool women could reference before starting families with men who have a proven record of disappearance, as well as streamline the government’s ability to identify debtors and enforce harsher consequences. The first protest in Oaxaca was meant as a last-ditch effort to bring attention to that bill. It went viral. The movement has since spread to each of Mexico’s 31 states, the capital city and throughout Latin America. It has outed high-profile athletes, musicians and politicians as child support evaders. It placed a massive spotlight on the issue, and unprecedented pressure on the Mexican government to exact accountability.
In March, the Mexican government approved the creation of the national registry proposed in “Ley Sabina.” The registry is updated monthly and makes debtors’ identities public. Judges review the cases of the parents listed in the database to determine whether they ought to be barred from obtaining driver’s licenses and passports, as well as from running for public office or judicial positions at both the local and federal level.
Re-creations of the Oaxaca protest still echo across Latin America. A similar string of fliers and demands appeared in Paraguay’s capital this May; printed faces lined the exterior of Argentina’s Supreme Court in June. In Mexico, mothers like Luz Vázquez and Torres continue to push for more changes. Their proposals include laws to forbid debtors from receiving custody of their children, and for the government to impose credit score repercussions and deny consular IDs as further incentives to honor payments. Luz Vázquez is convinced it will take all the moral and financial encouragement possible to correct a culture of fatherlessness that spans generations. But she’s equally convinced that correction is more possible now than ever before.
MONSE TORRES WORKS overtime as an accountant assistant in Zacatecas, located in central Mexico. She can’t take family
vacations or request any time off in order to care for her four-year-old daughter and 18-year-old son. “When a mother is alone,” she says, “the culture around her says to her, ‘You can do it alone. You must be strong, you don’t need to ask for help.’” In the state where she lives, about 20 percent of residents experience moderate poverty and women make up only 39 percent of the workforce. The realities of parenthood are shaped by community and geography. In a patriarchal culture like Mexico’s, gender roles play a substantial role in what it means to be a mother or father.
Only about half of single mothers in Mexico are employed and make up to 20 percent less than their male counterparts. Single mothers who are informally employed — as domestic workers, for example — can’t access social security or health benefits. Yet when mothers speak out against the economic and cultural forces that bind them, they’re characterized as “scorned women,” demanding and difficult. Meanwhile, the men are yoked with the role of “provider.”
A study of single fathers from Mexico City in 2010 published in the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico’s quarterly academic journal, Papeles de Población, found that fatherhood is culturally defined as an obligation of men to fund a home. If a father is unable to afford child support, that can label him as a failure.
Luz Vázquez, who functions as the spokesperson of the international “Debtors Clothesline” movement, has faced her own critics. In February 2022, she received harsh scrutiny after she got into a minor car crash while intoxicated with her daughter in the passenger seat. Neither mother nor daughter was injured, but a video posted online made her a target for accusations of hypocrisy. The assumption was: How could she speak out against irresponsible fathers after this? How could anything she advocates for be trusted? She says her mistake is wrongly used as a way to discredit the movement, and that she still receives hateful comments across social media.
These societal expectations can mean
men and women are expected to act as caricatures of the masculine and feminine. Since women are idealized as caring, subservient and self-denying homemakers, they are also typified as the parent responsible for raising their children, while fatherhood is seen as a largely transactional and voluntary relationship. “Mexico has a very patriarchal culture, and that culture is the education that men get from their homes,” Emilio says. “These ideas are that the man has more privilege than the woman, that men are never responsible for when a man gets a woman pregnant. It is seen in Mexico as something funny, something to laugh at … and the woman is always the one who’s degraded.”
Civil codes from the 19th century established a man as a father only through marriage or if he chose to formally recognize his child either with public displays or financial support. Nara Milanich, a professor of Latin American history at Columbia University’s Barnard College, dissected this notion in her 2017 academic paper for the World Policy Institute, “Daddy Issues: Responsible Paternity as Public Policy in Latin America.”
“The protests seem to me part of a long history of contestation over the role of fathers and the responsibilities of fathers to children in Latin American societies,” Milanich says. “The large majority of children are born outside of formalized unions. Marriage is not a normative practice (in Latin America). But what that means, perhaps, is that we need other kinds of legal guardrails or assurances to ensure that whether or not parents are formally married, fathers still have responsibilities to their children.”
CHILDREN HAVEN’T ALWAYS been a priority of the Mexican government. The General Law for the Protection of Children and Adolescents, Mexico’s legal framework for addressing social issues involving minors, is less than a decade old. It only passed in December 2014 as a result of international treaty requirements. The law created the nation’s first federal agency to oversee policies that involve children’s and family
rights. Prior to its passing, a jumble of government bodies with a lack of structure caused child protection issues to go underreported and overlooked. This extended to issues involving child support, which, while legally required in Mexico, went frequently unenforced for generations.
But the creation of the national registry for child support debtors now means the government’s enforcement of these laws is more visible than ever. The database is publicly accessible and updated by a federal agency every month. A single parent who is owed child support payments can report the debtor to have them put into the system. The debtor will then have to provide the courts proof of payments to have
“BESIDES THE MONEY, WHAT’S IMPORTANT IS THAT A FATHER SHOWS LOVE AND WILLINGNESS TO MEET THEIR KIDS, TO BE WITH THEM, TO SUPPORT THEM AND LOVE THEM IN OTHER WAYS.”
their name removed. This gives single parents who don’t have the financial means to afford legal representation a chance to prove their case in court. For those who owe payments and possess the means to afford them, penalties like revoked travel documents and even difficulty acquiring real estate offer solutions. Rather than jail time, which is the traditional penalty in Mexico, financial repercussions motivate debtors to pay in a way that benefits the children who are owed support. Incarceration costs everyone through taxpayer dollars and prevents the debtor from being able to pay what they owe, but these new sanctions minimize harm by costing only the debtor. “What we really want is for mothers not to end up paying for the process of getting justice,” Luz Vázquez says.
Of the more than 37 million children in Mexico, UNICEF estimates that more than half live in poverty. That rate has steadily climbed over the last few years with an uptick in shuttered businesses and layoffs prompted by the Covid pandemic, a reality that’s hit working-class families the hardest. As poverty has worsened, so too have nutrition and school attendance among children. Though the burden of poverty on children isn’t unique to Mexico, it’s more relevant here than most anywhere else, as more single-mother households exist in Latin America than any other region in the world.
An academic study published this year by Rutgers University assistant professor Laura Cuesta in the Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy found the poverty rate for single-mother families is substantially higher than both two-parent families and single-father families in 36 of 37 surveyed nations because of factors like gender pay gaps and diminished social standing. Less than half of these households in Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Panama and Paraguay receive any child support.
Yet families have taken action into their own hands to change what’s possible for the next generation. “A positive outcome of the life I have lived is that I want to be present,” Emilio says. “I want to be the opposite of what my father was.” He’s accompanied his mother to the “Debtors Clothesline” protests for nearly three years. “He’s very passionate about the movement because he doesn’t want other children to go through what he has been through,” Torres says. “I owe some justice to Emilio. The tiny piece of the world that I’m leaving, … I want it to be a better place for when they’re older.”
This international movement simply started with a day of posters dangling from clothespins in Oaxaca two years ago. Today, Luz Vázquez is seeing it make real changes. As of last year, Sabina’s father began paying child support. “He said that had he known it’d come to this,” she says, “he’d have given me the money already.”
BY Melissa Kearney
How Americans stopped getting married and started falling behind
A FEW YE ARS AGO
I was in a cab in Boston and noticed a photo of a young girl that my driver had displayed on his dashboard.
“Is that your daughter?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said with joyful pride. “I have more pictures, want to see?” Of course I did. He handed me his phone and invited me to scroll through his photos. I oohed and aahed over how adorable his four-year-old girl was. We chatted. He told me she lived with her mom.
“You don’t live with them?” I asked.
“Nah,” he said.
“Could I ask why not?” I continued. I knew this was nosy, so I quickly qualified it. “I’m an economist, and I study families, so I wonder about these kinds of things.”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “We talk about it. If we save up some money, we might get married.”
I couldn’t help myself, and I pressed further. “I don’t mean to pry,” I said slowly, “but if you guys get along and you both love your daughter, why don’t you live together as a family?”
He became flustered — not impatient or angry, but genuinely flustered. He missed the exit, looked over his shoulder to get a better look at me, and asked, “Did my mom send you or something?”
This encounter, and a million other domestic arrangements that it describes, prompt an important question: Has the social normalization of raising children outside of a two-parent arrangement led to more children being raised in a one-parent household? I suspect yes. And has this trend served the best interests of children? Based on the evidence, I would say, unequivocally, no.
The challenge for society, then, is to find ways to acknowledge the benefits of a two-parent family — including the important role that fathers play in their children’s lives — without coming across as shaming or blaming single mothers. By being honest about the benefits that a two-parent family home confers to children, we can break the pattern in which social agnosticism treats all households the same in terms of the benefits they deliver children.
CHILDREN HAVE NO say as to how they are brought into this world and raised. They have no say as to whether their parents live together or raise them together. I wonder how many children in one-parent homes would prefer that both of their parents lived with them.
As a child growing up in the 1980s, I remember being worried whenever my parents fought that they might get divorced. My parents might not have always gotten along with each other, but I was always happy to have them both there at home. I realize that’s not true for all families and some families would not be better off if the parents were together. But we are no longer in a situation where children raised by an unmarried or unpartnered parent happens only in rare or extenuating circumstances. Only 63 percent of U.S. children are being raised in a home with married parents. More than 1 in 5 children in the U.S. live with a mother who is neither married nor cohabitating. More than half of unpartnered mothers today have never been married.
Could it really be the case that so many children have fathers who would not be positive contributors to the family if they were part of their household? If that is even close to the reality for men in America today, then we really do have a terrible crisis.
The decline in the two-parent family relates in part to the struggles of men, which is in turn contributing to the struggles of boys. This cycle is in desperate need of interruption: The U.S. needs to raise boys who are fit to be reliable marriage partners and nurturing, supportive fathers. We need to foster a societal expectation that fathers be present in their children’s lives and support them, financially and emotionally.
I have no idea whether that Boston cab driver would be a good dad or husband or long- term cohabitating partner or co-parent. He seemed like a nice guy, and he seemed to really love his daughter and his daughter’s mom. Is that enough? No, far from it. But the point is that he and his daughter’s mom seemed to believe that the options of cohabitating or living apart were more or less equally good when it came to their daughter’s well-being. And that is just not what the data say.
PARENTING MEANS MORE than just having given birth to and loving a child. It means worrying because so much is out of our control. It means trying to protect, love and guide our children with the full force of whatever resources we have. Parenting means, in addition to loving one’s child, devoting time, money and energy to the raising of one’s child or children. Aside from love, there are limits to how much parents can provide.
The pouring of time, money and energy into children
can be described in economic terms: We invest resources and parenting inputs into our children in the hopes of producing healthy, happy, well-adjusted, successful adults. Success means different things to different people, but for most, it likely includes some level of educational attainment and economic security in adulthood. This isn’t to say that people only raise children to be adults. We also want to give them happy childhoods and enjoy time with them, and I don’t mean to discount any of that.
We need to foster a societal expectation that fathers be present in their children’s lives and support them, financially and emotionally.
Data confirm that having access to more resources enables parents to invest more in their children. More highly resourced parents tend to spend more money and time investing in their children. Why? The evidence suggests that it’s not because more and less resourced parents have different views about what their children need or different preferences about what they want to do for or with their children. Rather, a highly resourced couple has way more resources to draw on when it comes to raising children.
A lack of resources, meanwhile, makes it harder for low-income, single parents to do all they would like to do for their children. Some of this difficulty is about money (since one working adult tends to bring in less income than two working adults, especially if they have the same level of education), but some of it is about having another committed adult to split the workload with, to watch the kids while you’re working or doing something else, or to pick up the emotional load when you’re just too drained. In the same way that a child who lives in a one-parent home tends to have access to fewer parental resources, the inherent challenges of parenting make it such that children who grow up in single-mother households tend to experience lower levels of parental investments. This is not because single parents don’t want to provide their kids with the same types of advantages as kids from two-parent homes are often getting. Rather, it is because they are resource constrained: One parent tends to have fewer resources (of all kinds) to devote to parenting than two.
MUCH OF WHAT we know about spending on kids is based on the Consumer Expenditure Survey, a national household survey collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to determine how Americans are spending their money every year.
A pair of sociologists, using this data in a 2013 study, found not only that parents at the top of the income distribution spent much more on child investment than do lower-income parents, but also that the gap in spending has widened substantially since the 1970s. Parents in the
highest income decile increased their investment spending per child from $2,832 in the early 1970s to $5,551 in the early 1990s and to $6,573 per year in 2006-2007.
Some of the widening of this income gap in spending on kids reflects the widening of income inequality in recent decades, with the income of those at and near the top of the distribution taking off. But that’s not the full story. Between the 1970s and 1990s, high-income parents increased the share of their total household income that they devoted to child investment goods. This corresponds to a period when parenting, in general, became a more intensive activity.
The spending by high-income households on kids’ education and enrichment has pulled further and further away from what families in the middle and bottom of the distribution are spending — and likely what they’re able to spend. Among families in the middle of the distribution, per-child investment spending increased (in 2008 dollars) from $1,143 in the early 1970s to $1,548 in the early 1990s, to $1,421 in 2006-2007. The authors estimate that these amounts reflect spending shares of 4.2 percent, 6.5 percent and 5.2 percent of (equivalized) income, respectively. The real dollar amount that families in the lowest income decile spend on per-child investment has also been mostly steady across the three highlighted decades, at amounts of $607, $779 and $750, respectively.
Another way to look at the gaps in the experiences that more and less resourced parents can offer their children is to look at engagement in enrichment activities. Not surprisingly, children from more highly resourced homes are more likely to participate in a variety of extracurricular enrichment activities. A 2015 survey of parents conducted by Pew Research Center revealed large income gaps in the rate at which kids experience enrichment activities. Among parents with family income of more than $75,000, 84 percent report having a child who participated in sports or athletic activities in the past year, as compared to 69 percent of parents with family income between $30,000 and $74,999 and 59 percent of parents with family income below $30,000.
KIDS AREN’T JUST expensive, they are also time consuming. Any parent will tell you, sometimes even without you asking, that raising children takes a lot of time. Parents today spend way more time engaged in enriching activities with their children as compared to parents in previous generations. I am sure many of you have heard it said or remarked yourself — “Back in the day, our parents just sent us off to play in the street!”
The rise of intensive parenting is a real thing. We
know this from the American Time Use Survey data, a nationally representative data set collected by the U.S. Census Bureau from 2003 to 2019. The increase in parental time investment has not occurred evenly across the population — predictably, the shift toward more time spent with one’s children has been especially pronounced among more-educated, highly resourced parents.
By being honest about the benefits that a two-parent family home confers to children, we can break the pattern in which social agnosticism treats all households the same in terms of the benefits they deliver children.
In a 2008 paper that I co-authored with the economists Jonathan Guryan and Erik Hurst, we found that more highly educated mothers and fathers spend less time doing household production activities like cleaning and vacuuming; they also spend less time in leisure activities like sleeping, watching TV and hanging out with friends. What did they do with this time? They were spending more of it directly engaged with their children in so-called child care activities.
Like the discernible difference in child care time between more- and less-educated parents, there is a gap in child care time by marital status. Married mothers with at least one child under age 18 spend an average of 15.1 hours per week in dedicated child care, meaning that their primary activity is related to the child — dressing them, reading to them, driving them to an activity and the like. They also spend, on average, 45.4 hours with their child(ren), meaning that their child or at least one of their children is with them, even if their primary activity isn’t centered on the child. Unmarried mothers spend an average of 12.7 hours per week in dedicated child care and 37.8 hours with their child or at least one of their children. Some of this difference is attributable to the fact that unmarried mothers are more likely to work outside the home, leaving them with less time than married mothers to actively engage with their children. In the 2019 American Time Use Survey, 78 percent of unmarried mothers report working outside the home, as compared to 71 percent of married mothers. They also work more hours in paid labor, on average: 28.2 versus 23.5 hours per week. The luxury of being able to spend less time working and more time engaged with one’s child can be thought of in just that way — as a luxury that married mothers, on average, more often have because there is another adult in the household.
The gap in child care hours between married and unmarried mothers is observed across all mothers, regardless of education level. But within education groups, married mothers spend more time in child care activities and more time with their children, as compared to unmarried mothers with the same level of education. It is also the case that for all three levels of education, married mothers spend fewer hours in market work. The same pattern holds within racial and ethnic groups as well.
For white, Black, Hispanic and Asian mothers, married mothers spend more time in child care and with their children than do unmarried mothers.
What about dads? In the 2019 American Time Use survey, married dads reported an average of 8.0 hours in dedicated child care activities and 30 hours with their children per week. Unmarried dads reported 5.9 and 23.8 hours per week, respectively. As with moms, this marriage gap in time spent with children is observed for dads of all three education levels. Dads with four-year college degrees spend the most amount of time in child care, even though they also spend the most hours in paid work: 9.3 hours per week among married dads and 7.3 hours per week among unmarried dads. Dads without a high school degree spend the least amount of time in child care, even though they also work the fewest hours: 4.7 hours a week in child care activities among married dads and only 2.8 hours per week among unmarried dads.
THE CHILDREN OF more-educated, higher-income and married parents get more of all kinds of resources — more spending on educational and enrichment goods and activities, more parental time and more attentive parenting. The additional parental investments that these children receive from both their mothers and their fathers on a regular basis contribute to the relative advantages they enjoy in life and perpetuate class gaps in opportunities and outcomes.
Well-designed parenting interventions can potentially improve parenting practices in low-income and single-mother families. This evidence provides justification for philanthropic and public funding to scale up parenting programs with evidence of success. However, we should be clear in our expectations. Such programs can make a positive difference, and they should be supported on those grounds, but we cannot expect parenting interventions alone to close class gaps in children’s outcomes.
Spending less time working and more time with one’s child is a luxury that married mothers, on average, more often have because there is another adult in the household.
Even with community and government support, how can a parent who is raising her child or children without another parent figure in the home lavish the kind of spending, time and emotional bandwidth on her children that children in a highly resourced two-parent home are frequently being showered with?
To make progress closing class gaps in parenting resources — and childhood environments — will require strengthening families and bringing more fathers into the family fold. Doing so will require addressing the many economic challenges facing men today so that more men are “marriageable” — meaning, stably employed, reliable and dependable.
It will also require addressing the social changes that have fostered the normalization of the widespread separation of marriage from the act of raising children.
The decline in the share of U.S. children living in a two-parent family over the past 40 years has not been good — for children, for families or for the country. There has been a massive widening of the family gap, such that a two-parent family has become yet another advantage in life enjoyed disproportionately by the college educated class. The decline in the two-parent family among parents without a four-year college degree is a demographic trend that should concern anyone who cares about the well-being of children and about widespread economic opportunity, inequality and social mobility in America. The trend both reflects and exacerbates inequality. It has been driven by both economic and social forces and as such, reversing the trend will require major changes in both economic and social spheres.
If we do not reverse this trend — if millions of American children miss out on the benefits that come from a two-parent home and if the family gap continues to widen — then children will suffer, inequality will continue to widen and social mobility will erode. We will be a weaker, more fragmented, less prosperous nation as a result.
PHOTOGRAPHY
By Jelani Le’Bourne
STORY
By Ethan Bauer
PursuitThe of Forgiveness
After his brother was murdered in Dallas, an 18-year-old from the island of St. Lucia made a decision that shook the world — and tested the limits of mercy
Hiseyes
DART FROM SIDE TO SIDE THROUGH A PAIR OF THICK, BLACK FRAMES, AS IF HE DOESN’T KNOW WHERE TO LOOK. The camera’s lens watches him alone, so in the view of history, it’s impossible to say what he’s trying to see. Maybe the judge, stoic and perched to his left. Maybe his family, still reeling and raw and tear-stricken in the wooden pews of the Dallas courtroom, suddenly emptied with the verdict delivered. Or maybe he’s just looking for the right words, hoping they’ll come to him now, with every remaining observer focused on him and what he has to say.
Brandt Jean steadies his trim, athletic frame, scoots his chair toward the microphone and releases a deep exhale. In the world outside the four minutes that would make him famous, everyone already knows his family’s story. By the time he opens his mouth, everyone has already heard
everything they need to hear, on talk radio or cable news or even YouTube, already decided how to feel and how everyone else should feel, too. The trial that brought him here marked a rare moment of unity in a nation starved for it — a moment when Americans could rise together in certainty. In communal condemnation. “Mr. Jean,” an unseen lawyer tells the 18-year-old, “the floor is yours.”
For a moment, just a small moment, his eyes stare down at the accused, former police officer Amber Guyger. Then they stare straight ahead, as if what he’s about to say is not something between two people, but between him and God. “I don’t want to say twice, or for the hundredth time,” he begins, shaking his head from side to side, “what you’ve, or how much you’ve taken from us. I think you already know that. But I just” — his voice quavers. He pauses and sighs
and looks down toward the floor. He sits up in the black, leather chair. “If you truly are sorry, I know — I can speak for myself — I know I forgive you. And I know if you go to God and ask him, He will forgive you.”
Any shifting in the pews pauses. Sneezes and coughs get gulped down. The courtroom becomes silent, and still.
Brandt tugs at the collar of his purple, paisley dress shirt, right where his pink tie hangs just below his top button. His hand flops into his lap, as if he can’t stand to lift it anymore. “Again, I’m speaking for myself, not on behalf of my family,” he continues. “But I love you just like anyone else.” Soon, his voice cracks. He clicks his tongue twice, opening his mouth to speak without finding the words, until he does. He tells her she should give her life to Christ, then continues: “I love you as a person, and I don’t wish anything bad on you.” Brandt takes
one more deep breath through his nose. With his left hand, he wipes a tear from his eye. Now his gaze turns toward the judge. “I don’t know if this is possible,” he says, “but could I give her a hug, please?” He taps his hand against the top of the witness stand and sniffles. “Please?”
“Yes,” the judge says.
Brandt hops up from his seat. Guyger meets him in the middle of the courtroom. With the judge wiping away tears in the background, Amber Guyger and Brandt Jean sway together for 45 long seconds. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Guyger tells him. He doesn’t say anything. He just closes his eyes, nods his head and pats the back of his brother’s killer.
THERE ARE MOMENTS — fleeting and rare, but moments — when Brandt wonders about what he did. Usually it’s too painful to ponder even the most basic facts: his brother, an innocent, unarmed man, shot to death by a police officer in his own apartment, right next to his unfinished bowl of ice cream. But September marked five years since Brandt’s brother, 26-year-old Botham Jean, was killed, and four since Guyger’s trial. One weekday morning, around the time of the anniversaries, Brandt leans back in a rickety wooden chair at Petra’s Cafe, a beachside bungalow on the shores of the Caribbean Sea in his home country, the island nation of St. Lucia. Small waves lick the sandy shore of Vigie Beach, near the capital of Castries. Salt seasons the heavy breezes. Botham’s grave rests just a short walk away. In many ways, today’s Brandt Jean is not the Brandt Jean from the courtroom that day. At 22 years old, he’s no longer a wiry, clean-shaven teenager, but an aspiring bodybuilder with stretch marks spread like spider webs across his biceps and a patchy
beard on his well-defined chin. His thinking has evolved, too. “What I said,” Brandt admits now, “was not aligned with how I felt. At all.”
From the outside, watching the video of Brandt’s court speech on YouTube, became a kind of Rorschach test. Some saw in Brandt’s actions a Christ-like ideal worth striving for. “What an amazing young man. We can all learn from him,” wrote one commenter. Others saw nothing but ingratiation and naivete. “Imagine begging to give your brother’s murderer a hug,” wrote another viewer. The clip is even harder to watch when you know the full extent of Brandt’s relationship with Botham and the circumstances of his death. When you know exactly what Brandt had to weigh in his soul to find forgiveness, when so much of his soul was screaming at him to say something, anything, else. “It’s knowing what I had to say,” he explains, looking toward the foggy outline of Martinique on the horizon, “more than what I wanted to say.”
SOMEWHERE IN THE back roads of St. Lucia, where the graying asphalt winds through the tangled vines of the nation’s mountain jungles, you can probably still find tire skid marks left behind by Botham and Brandt. Botham was 10 years older than his little brother, so they didn’t always have much in common. Driving brought them together. Botham learned back in 2008, around the time he turned 17. Even though the driving age in St. Lucia is 18, he’d often sneak the keys to their dad’s Suzuki Grand Vitara and bring his little brother along. They’d zip through the canopy, zooming through turns where they could hardly see around the bend thanks to the wild grasses reaching into the road. Their father even taught Botham to drift, to slide through
turns, and when he did, Brandt might as well have been on a ride at Disneyland; the feeling was pure magic.
Their father wasn’t blind to their mischief. He’d often come home, place his hand on the hood of the car and feel the heat. He’d turn to Brandt first, and Brandt would lie. “You’re gonna lie for Botham?” his dad would say. “He never lies for you.” That was true. In fact, Brandt and his brother differed in many ways. Brandt was always sporty, always playing cricket or doing taekwondo. And when he wasn’t in the field or at the gym, he was alone. Botham was more academic, and much more outgoing. They clashed, and they learned from each other. Brandt, especially, from Botham.
For a while, Botham was involved with a rough crowd. One night, he came home from an outing with a friend visibly shaken. He and a friend, he soon admitted, had been targeted in a gang-related robbery. Brandt and Botham’s uncle was livid; he grabbed Botham by the shirt and marched him into the neighborhood until they found the culprits. “You see this face?” the uncle told the assailants. “Whenever you see this man, don’t touch him.” They got Botham’s stuff back, but the uncle wouldn’t quit. He talked about vengeance. It was Botham who had to calm him down; to assure him that the best thing to do, rather than to escalate, was to move on. To show mercy.
Botham left for college in 2011, opting to attend a Church of Christ-sponsored school in Arkansas called Harding University. The brothers started talking more around that time. They’d talk about sports, about video games, about women. Botham spoke about what it meant to be prepared for marriage. He’d interview married men, asking what it meant to them, and insisted on waiting until he was ready. “With him, preparation was not financial,” Brandt says. “The
The only way to fix the situation, Brandt reasoned at the time, was to retaliate. He planned to kill Amber Guyger.
preparation he was talking about was character.” That’s where most of their conversations eventually ended up. Botham wanted to instill in Brandt, more than anything, a sense of right and wrong. Of having leverage and not using it. Brandt admits he’s always been an angry person. He’s had to learn to manage his rage — at least in part because of his brother’s influence. Although he didn’t learn to forgive from him. No sir. Botham may have shown mercy time and again; he may have talked about and modeled character; but Botham did not easily forget when he’d been wronged. He did, however, know something about moving on.
After a bad car accident in 2018 — he flipped his mom’s sedan while his parents were on a cruise — Brandt’s guilt consumed him. “My mom was just happy that I was OK,” he says, “but I was just so sorry.” For months, he felt like there was nothing he could do to make it up to her. He rarely spoke with Botham by then; since 2016, Botham had lived in Dallas, working as a risk assurance associate at accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. But they did talk about this. “No matter how big anything seems,” Botham told Brandt, “we get through regardless.”
That was the last time Brandt remembers speaking with his brother.
AFTER A NEARLY 14-hour shift, Amber Guyger got off work around 9:30 on the evening of Sept. 6, 2018. Employed by the Dallas Police Department since 2013, without any disciplinary issues, Guyger, 30, was tall and trim, with pin-straight blonde hair and thin eyebrows. She spoke with her patrol partner over the phone as she steered through the parking garage of the South Side Flats apartment complex, a
Despite all his anger and grief, he remembered
she was a person.
forgettable, beige, four-story structure with a 7-Eleven next door and near the intersection of Interstate 30 and Interstate 35 East in central Dallas. Guyger parked just before 10 p.m. and made her way to the entrance to her building. She lived on the third floor, in Unit 1378.
She found the apartment’s front door unlocked, slightly ajar. She heard noises,
THE JEAN HOUSEHOLD IN ST. LUCIA IS FILLED WITH IMAGES OF BOTHAM JEAN AND WHAT WAS TAKEN FROM THE FAMILY.
A fellow human who, though she’d taken his brother’s life, had also doomed herself to a
lifetime of torment.
and since she lived alone, she assumed there was an intruder on the other side. She opened the door with her left arm and drew her Glock with her right, ignoring the taser and pepper spray on her belt. The apartment was dark. She saw a silhouette toward the back. “Let me see your hands!” she shouted. “Let me see your hands!” The figure moved toward her; she’d later tell a jury she felt “scared to death,” assuming that someone was in her apartment and planned to kill her. She fired twice. One round missed and pricked the far wall; the other struck Botham Jean in the chest.
As Guyger moved closer, she realized that while the apartment had the same layout as her own, the decor was different. At 9:59, she called 911. “Get up, man,” she says as the operator answers the call. “This is an off-duty officer. Can I get — I need EMS,” she explains. “I’m in number — I’m at — hold on.” The dread builds. She tells the operator that she needs police and medical. “I’m in Apartment 1478,” she finally says. Her inflection makes it sound more like a question; like she can’t believe it. “I’m in 1478,” she repeats, more sure this time.
“I thought I was in my apartment, and I shot a guy thinking he was — thinking it was my apartment.” She pauses. “Oh my God. I’m sorry.”
“Hey, come on, man,” she tells Botham as the operator continues to probe for information. She identifies herself, and the operator tells her that help is on the way. “I know,” she says between heavy breaths. “But I’m — I’m gonna lose my job.” She returns her attention to Botham. “Hey bud. Hey bud. Hey bud,” she says. “I thought it was my apartment,” she adds, her voice breaking. “Hey bud. Hey bud. They’re coming, bud. I’m sorry.” After a long pause, she starts talking to herself: “Oh my God, I’m
done. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to. I’m so sorry.”
She paces the hallway outside Botham’s apartment. Officers finally arrive. She leads them to Botham, who is on the floor in front of his couch. Beside him, visible in police body cam footage, an iron stands upright on an ironing board. A bowl of unfinished vanilla ice cream rests on his coffee table. “Where did you shoot him?” one responder asks. “Top left! Top left!” Guyger says. “Hey, can you hear me?” an officer asks Botham. “Can you hear me?” Botham says nothing. He’s still breathing, but unconscious. The officer kneels down and pumps Botham’s chest, bobbing up and down with each compression. “Talk to me! Hey! Talk to me!” Another officer switches off with the first. “C’mon chief. C’mon chief,” the new officer says. Botham is unresponsive. Blood spatters the white carpet. They continue for a few more minutes until paramedics arrive. By then, Botham has no pulse and isn’t breathing. They place him on a dark blue stretcher and haul him away. Fewer than 10 minutes have passed since the shots were fired. Guyger trails, offering advice on navigating the apartment’s layout.
Botham Jean never regained consciousness. He was pronounced dead later that night at Baylor Medical Center, weeks away from his 27th birthday.
Back in St. Lucia, Brandt’s mother was traveling for work. It was just Brandt and his dad at home. His mom called around 2 a.m. Brandt had stayed up watching YouTube videos, so he picked up. She asked only to speak to Brandt’s father. Brandt brought over the phone and stayed in the room for their conversation. His dad’s head dropped into his hands, and he didn’t speak for 10 minutes. When he did, he said only one word to Brandt: “Botham.” What?
“Botham,” he said again. “Botham. Somebody shot Botham.”
Soon, relatives descended upon their home to offer comfort. That’s when Brandt began to suspect the worst, but held hope that Botham had survived. He attended school the next day, just to get away from everything for a while, but at the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College, everyone else already seemed to know. “Bro,” one classmate asked, pushing a news story to his face, “that’s your brother on my phone?” Some offered hugs. In the courtyard, it felt like every single person was walking toward him at once.
He knows he left with his family for Dallas later that day, and arrived by the following morning. He doesn’t recall much about what happened in between. Remembering hurts. Time blurs. He knows that once in Dallas his mother kept him away from the autopsy report, which he still doesn’t appreciate. He knows he didn’t cry until one night in his hotel room, when the reality set in. “It made less and less sense the more details I heard,” he says. His brother, he realized, had been killed for no reason. “My mind is like, ‘OK, what do we do next? How do we solve this situation?’ But with this, there’s no solving the situation,” he says. “He’s just gone.
“And that’s where the anger came in.”
BOTHAM’S FUNERAL AT the towering, gray-stone Minor Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Castries, the capital of St. Lucia, became a national event. On an island of just 180,000 people, the news of one of their own, gunned down by a white police officer in the U.S., had made the final moments in the life of Botham Jean a countrywide obsession. Vendors
hawked water and popcorn as hundreds of St. Lucians streamed into the island’s largest church. Inside, Brandt sang Botham’s favorite church song, “Our God, He is Alive.” It’s something he felt like he had to do to honor his brother, but like everything else he had to do, it brought no relief. “At some point it got excessive, but my mom just made sure we stayed through everything,” he says. “Because we didn’t know what else to do.”
The three-hour service led up to the burial, where Brandt saw for the first time people who weren’t family members who actually knew Botham and missed him terribly. He saw the physical pain it inflicted upon them to see the casket lowered into the sandy ground. “It felt like the lower he was,” Brandt says, “the further away he was going.” Many cried, but not Brandt. Not until he got home and could be alone.
The only way to fix the situation, he reasoned at the time, was to retaliate. He planned to kill Amber Guyger. His friends would tell him to stop joking around when he discussed his ideas, but it was no joke to him. He dwelled on the how. And on another question suddenly simmering: “Am I crazy?” It proved difficult to answer. After all, he’d already punched holes in his bedroom door and put dents in his family’s drywall. “After several times losing it over this situation, you’re trying to figure out — I hope I’m still sane,” he says. “I hope I can still go back to normal life after this.” He exploded on people for trivial reasons. He couldn’t have genuine conversations without turning snide and rude. He also couldn’t sit down to eat dinner; he started eating standing up, pacing his family’s living room, unable to sit still with his dueling thoughts of vengeance and despair.
Every day, if he went anywhere, he’d get clobbered with images of Botham. With strangers wanting to talk about Botham. People even sent portraits — entire canvases! — of Botham to the family’s house. The only way Brandt could preserve his sanity, he reasoned, was to retreat into himself. “Am I right for making myself alone, just to keep the peace?” he’d wonder. “Or am I selfish for not grieving with the rest of my family?” He also wondered what Botham would do.
When the trial arrived in September 2019, he’d reached what he later recognized as the peak of his depression. He stopped cutting his hair. He stopped caring about anything. The rage was still there, “forever warm,” but with his family conferring with lawyers, pursuing murder charges, Brandt felt like “a lone soldier,” completely detached from their decisions.
The trial did, however, give him something to look forward to. He hoped it would finally answer a question he’d wondered about since the shooting first happened: Did Guyger have any malicious intent when she shot his brother? Did this happen for a reason — any reason at all?
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN Guyger’s guilt and innocence came down to a single word. To judge whether Amber Guyger was innocent under the law, the jury had to determine how a “reasonable” person would respond to the situation Guyger encountered that night. In his opening statement, her lawyer called the shooting “the perfect storm of innocent circumstances,” and implored the jury to ignore the media’s “click
bait” about the case; the only thing that mattered, he said, was using their common sense. If they did that, they’d find his client innocent. “Reason and common sense will show you that on Sept. 6, 2018, Amber Guyger firmly and reasonably believed she was in her own apartment.” (Guyger and her attorneys did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.)
Guyger took the stand in her own defense, and for over three hours, she didn’t do much to help her case. She said she drew her weapon as she opened the door, then saw a “silhouette figure standing in the back of the apartment by the window.” She ordered Botham to show her his hands, but he moved toward her screaming “Hey! Hey! Hey!” A lawyer asked why she fired. “I was scared. I was scared that this person was in my apartment,” she answered, barely able to speak through tears. “And I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.” Later, her attorneys asked how she felt about what she’d done. “I feel like a terrible person. I feel like a piece of crap. I hate it. I hate every — I hate that I have to live with this every single day of my life,” she answered. “I feel like I don’t deserve the chance to be with my family and friends. I wish he was the one with the gun and had killed me.” She added, later, “I never want anybody to ever have to go through or even imagine going through what I felt that night.”
“I never want anybody to ever have to go through or even imagine going through what I felt that night,” one of the prosecutors said to begin his closing argument, reading Guyger’s words verbatim off a sheet of paper. “That was one of the very last things the defendant said when she was on the stand. Are you kidding me?” he added, crumpling up the paper and tossing it aside. “That is garbage. Most of what she said was garbage.” The prosecution argued that, while Guyger did believe she was in her apartment, it was not a reasonable belief. They laid out the evidence: A red floor mat outside Botham’s apartment that she should have noticed. Her key flashing red in the electronic lock, but opening the door anyway because it wasn’t fully closed. An odor of marijuana so thick that investigators said it was still present a full two days after the shooting. “This case is all about
what is reasonable, and what is absurd,” the prosecutor said. Not noticing all those signs of her mistake, he argued, was not reasonable. Drawing her gun before even walking inside was not reasonable. And, surely, a man dying that way was absurd. It was the very definition of absurd. There needed to be consequences.
Brandt didn’t miss a moment. He didn’t take a single bathroom break. When the rest of his family left the courtroom to avoid watching the body cam footage of Botham bleeding out on his carpet, Brandt stayed. “It was like a show,” he says, “and the more I heard, the more glued I was to the show.” But the answers he sought were missing, even if some tried to fill them in anyway.
Because of the optics of the case — a white, off-duty police officer shooting an unarmed Black man in his home — Botham’s killing is often associated with other cases of racial injustice perpetrated by police officers. The prosecution even surfaced text messages where Guyger told her
partner that her Black colleagues “have a different way of working and it shows.” She also mocked the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in texts, saying that festivities in his honor would end “when MLK is dead … oh wait …” But Brandt didn’t buy the argument that racism played a factor in the killing. He wishes he did, because at least that would give him some kind of explanation. But as far as he could tell, the evidence of a racial motive was flimsy. He does wonder if maybe she was quicker to pull the trigger because his brother was Black. Maybe. But, by her own admission, she drew her weapon before she even opened the door. “(They’re) implying that she shot him specifically because he was Black,” Brandt says. “And that’s not what happened.” Like the prosecution, though, he doesn’t understand how she missed all the signs. The red mat. The key. The door number. The smell. He understands how she ended up there. He doesn’t understand why she had to shoot.
In his closing argument, the prosecutor
BRANDT VISITS
BOTHAM’S GRAVE
(ABOVE AND OPPOSITE) AT LEAST ONCE A WEEK.
Many viewed his actions as traitorous; as offensive to Botham’s legacy. “Imagine begging to give your brother’s murderer a hug,” wrote one YouTube viewer.
got confident, telling the jury that acquittal wasn’t even on the table. This was a question only of murder or manslaughter, “and it’s murder,” he said. When she drew her weapon, she intended to kill Botham Jean. It was not accidental, by her own admission. And her saying she felt threatened, he argued, was irrelevant. She never should have been in that situation to begin with. “It’s not a mistake. It’s a series of unreasonable decisions. She did not think that night,” he said. “This is about a reasonable person under the same circumstances” — not about the defendant and what she felt. “There’s got to be consequences for your actions,” he concluded. “Bo is dead because of her unreasonable choices.”
After about five hours of deliberation, the jury agreed, finding Guyger guilty of murder. “Praise be to God that we actually got justice — but still,” Brandt thought in that moment. “Still. He’s still gone.” And he still didn’t understand why, because there really wasn’t any reason. It was random. It was absurd. That made it even harder to accept. And no matter how good their small glimmer of justice felt, his family was going to have to learn how to live without Botham. “So all I’m thinking about,” Brandt says, “is, ‘How do we get better?’”
IN THE PURSUIT of justice for their son, the Jean family and their legal team had approached the trial like a war. They trained for different battles, and strategically decided who would contribute where. They decided that Botham’s friend would testify at a certain point; that his father would testify at another. The general was Brandt’s mother. “My mom really wanted the murder charge. That’s all she really cared about at that point,” Brandt says. “Because she felt
like that was the best she could have done for her son.” After the verdict, the family wasn’t allowed to react too loudly in the courtroom, so they saved it for the nearest elevator. Together, they screamed. Together, they cried tears of joy. But when they returned the following day, it was time for Brandt to fulfill his role.
The “victim impact statement” offers a chance for family and friends to address the condemned directly; to show her, and the jury, how her actions had impacted them. The responsibility fell to Brandt. Not that he wanted it. He’d been told about his role early on, but he’d refused. The rage and despair he felt could only hurt the mission, he thought, could only make things worse. He was sure that if he went up there, he’d go nuclear. He’d threaten Guyger’s life. He’d punch the witness stand. How could he possibly condense all of his emotions — all of his family’s emotions — into an impassioned, short, dignified speech? And how would it help anyone, including himself, if he did?
Despite his refusal, when the time came for the victim impact statement, everyone in the courtroom turned to him. “OK,” he told himself, “I guess I’m doing this.” He stood up, shaking, sweaty. The fabric of his shirt clung to his back. He had no idea what to say. He hadn’t rehearsed, hadn’t given it any thought. He had no plan at all, aside from letting his feelings take over.
Until his grandmother, sitting beside him, put her hand on his knee. “Remember,” she whispered to him, “it’s her soul that counts.”
Whether he felt that way or not, her words gave him focus. Had she told him the exact same thing the night before, he probably would have ignored it, but in that moment, he needed guidance. And he left
himself open to what came next. As he approached the stand, a lawyer stopped him for some last-second explanation: This was his chance, the lawyer explained, to tell Guyger how he felt. And how he really felt, even then, was like killing her. But instead of saying that, he nodded his head and pursed his lips, and said he forgave Guyger. She had been sentenced to 10 years in prison, but he said that he didn’t even want her to go to jail. “I was surprised just like the world was,” he says. “Because it didn’t line up with how I felt, and how I’d been acting.”
His grandma’s words had overshadowed his own feelings.
After he started saying what he said, he could feel the mood in the room change. They were soldiers no more. “My statement threw off the whole vibe,” he says.
Like everything else, the hug was of the moment. The idea came to him when he looked down at Guyger, looked at her eyes. He saw a woman beaten. A woman forever condemned to wander the ruins of her poor choices. The more he’d spoken, the more his emotions had improved, until finally, “I really felt sorry for her,” he says. She has a family; her mother and sister had just testified about her, and Brandt was paying attention through it all. In that moment, despite all his anger and grief, he remembered she was a person. A fellow human who, though she’d taken his brother’s life, had also doomed herself to a lifetime of torment. He chose, in the face of her suffering, to offer some kind of comfort. And the only kind he knew of was his faith — and a hug to forever remind her what faith looked like to him.
His decision unleashed a flood of public reaction, much of it positive. “That is TRUE forgiveness,” wrote a YouTube commenter. He appeared on CNN. He appeared on “Good Morning America.” He joined his
family for a televised sitdown with Dr. Phil. During media trips in New York, random people on the streets wanted selfies with him. Many more also reached out directly on social media. They always said the same thing: He helped them forgive the person who’d hurt them most — and, more importantly, helped them move on. “Even amongst all that positivity,” he says, “all I hear is, ‘My brother died.’”
That’s also what he heard from the torrent of criticism. Many viewed his actions as traitorous; as offensive to Botham’s legacy. Panelists on the influential “Rickey Smiley Morning Show” devoted a four-minute segment to Brandt’s baffling actions. “I just don’t understand that,” one said. He
understands their point of view. “I absolutely get it if vengeance is how you feel,” he says. Or justice. For goodness’ sake, his own sister has devoted much of her professional life since Botham’s death to justice. In a recent memoir, “After Botham,” even she called Brandt’s decision “perplexing.” But in their anger and indignation, however righteous, Brandt once more hears the same thing: His brother is dead, and no amount of vengeance or earthly justice would change that. Nor would forgiveness, but more than any alternative, it would help him move on. That, at least, was the hope. When he finished speaking, most people in the courtroom that day seemed pleased. Even moved. The judge retreated to her chambers
and, following Brandt’s lead, returned with a Bible for Guyger to study in prison. Then she offered a hug of her own. But Brandt wasn’t present for any of that. As soon as it was over, he withdrew to the solitude of an adjacent courtroom, where no one could see him. Where he could again be alone.
There, somewhere between his sister’s frustration and the judge’s embrace of his improvised sermon, Brandt punched another dent in the drywall.
NO ONE KNOWS about the letter. Not his mom. Not his dad. Not his sister. They could find it easily enough; it rests in an unassuming manila folder, atop a pile of papers in the family’s office. It always goes on top, wherever it is, like a Bible. “It’s sacred to me,” Brandt says. “It’s just — special.” More so than any of his other accolades, and there have been many.
One of the biggest was the 2019 Ethical Courage Award from the Institute for Law Enforcement Administration. “I can’t think of an act that was more courageous,” the institute’s director said of Brandt’s forgiveness. Brandt disagrees. It felt more natural than anything. But, aware of the controversy his remarks caused, he accepted the award and used the opportunity to clarify that his forgiveness is no substitute for accountability. “My brother was well aware of the danger posed to young Black men due to the misconceptions about color that seem particularly pronounced among the law enforcement community,” Brandt told the group during his acceptance. “I want you all to know I am not a threat, that young Black males are not inherently dangerous or criminal.”
Indeed, he’s grateful that Guyger was held accountable, and that a jury found her guilty. Killing someone for no reason, whether they felt threatened or not, should not go unpunished. But his disagreement in philosophy is as simple as this: There is no way to get justice for his brother. Not really. The only way to make the situation right would be to bring him back, and that’s outside the capacity of any legal system. Brandt enrolled at Harding in spring 2020. He completed four semesters, but he had to walk by a CONTINUED ON PAGE 78
WHERE THE LOVE LIGHT
From Bing Crosby to Brandon Flowers, the unlikely story behind a Christmas classic.
BY Natalia Galicza
ILLUSTRATION BY Nate Sweitzer
HE STUDENTS STIRRED IN THEIR SEATS. MOST DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THEMSELVES. AT NINE YEARS OLD, ANY UNEXPECTED DISPLAY OF EMOTION CAUSED THEM DISCOMFORT. AND IN A CLASSROOM TRAILER AT TAYLOR ELEMENTARY SCHOOL IN PAYSON, UTAH, A DISPLAY OF EMOTION IS EXACTLY WHAT GREETED THEM ON A BRISK DECEMBER MORNING IN 1990. BRANDON FLOWERS INCLUDED.
There’s much about the fourth grade that Flowers can recall with ease. He and his family had recently moved to Payson from a Las Vegas suburb, leaving behind his two friends. That year brought him his first crush, first fight, first rodeo and first white Christmas. But few memories remain as effortlessly vivid as that of his teacher, Ned Humphrey Hansen, singing Bing Crosby’s “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” to an audience of awkward adolescents. Flowers watched as his teacher gazed out of a window and faced westward, careful to dodge eye contact with his students. He performed the Christmas standard a cappella and grew teary-eyed, later disclosing to his pupils that it resonated with him as a Korean War veteran. Flowers’ classmates giggled nervously. But for Flowers, something shifted. It felt like a moment he’d experience
in church rather than at school. The performance was stuck on him. It still is.
Some 26 years later, after Flowers rose to fame as the frontman of The Killers, he recorded a cover of the carol for the rock band’s 2016 Christmas album, “Don’t Waste Your Wishes.” Out of the 11 songs on the record, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is the only cover. It includes a spoken-word history of Flowers’ fourth grade memory and is sung as a duet between himself and an 86-year-old Hansen. And somehow, the cover only seems to gain relevance. In the seven years since its release, families across the globe faced years of separation due to the Covid pandemic and now armed conflicts are intensifying in both Israel and Ukraine. Tensions have shattered any illusion of normalcy, just as they had when the original song debuted during World War II. Time and threats may change, but the appeal of nostalgia persists. Holiday music is one means of reaching for it.
A Berklee College of Music study from 2017 analyzed 78 of the most listened-to Christmas songs to parse what they had in common. It found that above all else, they shared a central theme of home. More than even love and faith, home is what listeners seek and what artists use as muse for the holiday season. That’s because music has the ability to flush brains with feel-good dopamine and elicit autobiographical memory, which places the listener back in an episode of their life associated with
the song. Since holiday songs, unlike most pop music, are intrinsically tied to specific calendar events, they more immediately summon memories. Especially if those memories are directly linked to the song that triggered them. “There was something about a longing for home,” Flowers says when he thinks back to the scene in fourth grade. “Whenever I hear that song around Christmas, it conjures up those feelings and that experience.”
While music can’t solve global strife, it can offer a means of coping and connecting. The many lives of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” — more than any tune in the yuletide songbook — are a testament to that. And it started with a rumble in the Pacific.
THE GRATING HUM of more than 350 plane propellers above the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu signaled the surprise military attack that would kill almost 2,500 Americans and, a day later, prompt the United States Congress to declare war on Japan, marking the nation’s full engagement in World War II. Millions of men and women were shipped off to serve, both stateside and beyond. Never before had so many American families been simultaneously separated with no guarantee of reunion.
And standing in the mud to offer reprieve during that uncoupling was Bing Crosby. The vocalist joined the USO, which traveled with soldiers across Europe and the Pacific throughout the 1940s in an effort to boost military morale. Tours and events brought actors, comedians, dancers, musicians and other entertainers overseas to perform along the warfront. Of the 7,300 who made the grueling journeys, Crosby was among the most high profile; he’d spent the previous decade as both a radio and Hollywood star, playing the leading role
MUSICIAN BRANDON FLOWERS
“I THINK THIS IS WHAT DRIVES PEOPLE LITERALLY CRAZY DURING THE HOLIDAYS, THIS NONSTOP PRESSURE TO BE HAPPY AND JOYFUL WHEN YOU MAY BE FEELING OTHER THINGS AROUND THE HOLIDAYS.”
in hits like “Pennies from Heaven.” But in spite of that success, the conditions he endured on tour were less than glamorous. Crosby ate the same food as the soldiers, wore the same uniforms, slept in the same foxholes and abided by the same military protocols. Some days he found himself atop handbuilt outdoor stages, hardly taller or more impressive than a soapbox. He’d stand to face a mass of military vehicles and an audience of troops in an otherwise desolate patch of forest. The soldiers sat in the dirt or stood to watch Crosby practically at eye level — often with helmets still on and rifles nearby, the grim reality of combat always within reach. And although Crosby performed a sampling of music from his discography, one song struck a particular chord with his audience.
When Crosby’s “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” was released in 1943, it resonated with troops for its accurate portrayal of the grief and loneliness that gripped households during wartime. The lyrics, written by Kim Gannon, are framed as a letter from the perspective of a soldier stationed overseas who is hopeful of returning home in time for Christmas. Though that wish, as reflected in the song’s final line, proved impossible for most. “I’ll be home for Christmas,” Crosby sings. “If only in my dreams.”
The ending became a source of great controversy when the song first hit airwaves. As part of a directive to limit sentimental music across radio stations in the United Kingdom, the British Broadcasting Corporation banned the single out of fear it would render troops too homesick and dispirited to fight. Though for Americans, it demonstrated the opposite effect. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” became the most requested piece of music at USO Christmas shows and the outstanding reason for Crosby’s reputation as the performer who contributed
more to military morale than any other.
Just as ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle theorized that catharsis can offer emotional release, modern science has found that sad music has the ability to produce chemicals in the brain like oxytocin to counteract feelings of pain and loss. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” offered that outlet for listeners who related to the number. “In general, popular Christmas songs do tend to be uniformly positive and happy,” says Craig Griffeath, a musician and retired music scholar of 25 years at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University. “But (those songs) make for a less interesting emotional landscape.” “Winter Wonderland” and “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,” for example, offer bouncy melodies and lilting intonations, with little room for challenging truths. “There’s nothing wrong with happy music, but it’s sort of confining. … You don’t want to turn off your authentic emotional responses,” Griffeath says. “I think this is what drives people literally crazy during the holidays, this nonstop pressure to be happy and joyful when you may be feeling other things around the holidays.”
More than a song of substance, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and its lyrics also became shorthand for troops connecting with their families stateside, the words showing up on postcards home. “People tended to measure their war by how many Christmases they were away,” says Jonathan Vance, a professor of military history and social memory at the University of Western Ontario. “The longer they’re away, it becomes ‘I hope I’ll be home for the next Christmas.’ And then ‘I will be home for next Christmas …’ It’s almost like scratching lines on a prison cell wall. They use Christmas as a way to gauge how long they’ve been away from home and how soon they’re likely to return.” That application, one of marking
time and communicating longing, persisted even long after the war ended and the postcards ceased.
FRANK BORMAN AND James Lovell peered out at the stars. The astronauts had spent two weeks together crammed aboard the Gemini 7 spacecraft, a cone-shaped vehicle with as much room as the front seats of an old Volkswagen Beetle. From as high as 203 miles above Earth, they’d looked down at the tops of sand dunes in the Sahara Desert, which appeared like copper rivulets. They’d seen the highways that bind South Florida glint like thin threads of silver. But in December 1965, on the final day of what was then the longest spaceflight in history, they stared out into the infinite black and imagined home.
These men would later earn international recognition for their extraterrestrial contributions — Borman for leading the first
ASTRONAUTS FRANK BORMAN, LEFT, AND JAMES LOVELL REQUESTED THAT “I’LL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS” BE PLAYED DURING THEIR DESCENT ON THE 1965 GEMINI 7 MISSION.
THE BBC BANNED THE SONG OUT OF FEAR IT WOULD RENDER BRITISH TROOPS TOO HOMESICK AND DISPIRITED TO FIGHT. FOR AMERICANS, IT DEMONSTRATED THE OPPOSITE EFFECT.
team of American astronauts to circle the moon, Lovell for becoming the first man to journey there twice. On the Gemini 7, their mission was to complete the first successful space rendezvous, a maneuver where two spacecraft meet mere feet apart to prepare for docking. The future of space exploration depended on the rendezvous, an essential antecedent to the creation of the International Space Station and to landing people on the moon. It had already been delayed by months due to failed launches and exploded ships, so program managers feared the Gemini 7 mission was next to impossible. Yet, in the early afternoon on Dec. 15, as Borman and Lovell drifted along in their orbit, their sister ship Gemini 6-A made contact. The two spacecraft soared around the Earth for five hours, at times just six inches apart. Their dance symbolized the precise moment the United States pulled ahead of the Soviet Union in the space race.
The two crafts only spent a day together before Gemini 6-A returned to Earth, leaving Borman and Lovell alone for another two days. And those days proved the most arduous. The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum later reported that Borman and Lovell spent that time in a mental funk. The two weeks baking in an overheated cabin with electricity that threatened to fail took a toll on the astronauts. As they hovered above everything and everyone they knew, Borman likely thought of his wife waiting for his return, and Lovell of his wife and three children, both astronauts longing to be on terra firma again.
So much so, when the final day came, and NASA communications personnel asked what music they wanted to serenade them on their descent, only one song was up to the task.
As Borman and Lovell began their reentry, hurtling toward home at some 17,000
miles per hour, they could hear the sound of Crosby’s voice. “Christmas Eve will find me,” he sang. “Where the love light gleams.”
MERE DAYS AFTER the first Christmas of the Covid pandemic — one that coincided with incessant airline cancellations and quarantine restrictions — the song appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, coming in at No. 50. And for however fleeting of a moment, a 77-year-old carol released by a wartime crooner outranked more modern artists like Cardi B, Eminem and Justin Bieber. That trend will likely continue. Holiday songs from past generations tend to outrank more modern renditions. Two-thirds of the songs that have lingered on Billboard’s Holiday 100 chart for more than a decade were released before 1980. So-called Christmas standards have informed how the holidays are now celebrated and understood. They’re foundational, which grants them more longevity than most other musical canons. “The appeal to longevity ties into a nostalgic vein that also exists with Christmas,” says Michael Foley, a professor of patristics at Baylor University and author of a book on Christmas traditions. He argues songs like “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” from the 1940s placed newfound emphasis on seasonal values of family and home. “I think it contributed to a trend that already began, which was the domestication of Christmas and the trend to make it more innocent and sentimental.” Vance, the military history and social memory professor, agrees. “In the ’20s and ’30s and before the First World War, I wouldn’t say that Christmas was as big a deal as it became in wartime,” he says. “In the 1940s … it became idealized as the perfect extended family experience of togetherness and harmony.”
But the impulse to listen to Christmas
music is one that extends beyond Crosby’s carol, and beyond Christmas itself. Every major religion significantly incorporates music. People across cultures have crafted tools like trumpets made of ram horns called shofars and organs forged of metal to bridge both song and worship. And while there’s no clear evolutionary reason as to why humans are so drawn to man-made melodies, music is estimated to have existed as long as our species has. Objects thought to be early flutes chiseled from bone date back tens of thousands of years; fossil records show our ancestors have had the anatomical ability to sing for hundreds of thousands.
On radio stations and playlists, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” remains a reliable holiday staple every year. It’s been featured in the “Looney Tunes,” “Gilmore Girls” and “Star Trek” universes; it’s been covered by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Michael Bublé. Sometimes, it even finds itself in unexpected places, like a classroom trailer in Payson, Utah.
When Brandon Flowers thinks back to the first time “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” stirred him, he thinks of Ned Humphrey Hansen, who died in 2021. He thinks of his teacher’s tears, his first December snowfall, his home old and new. And he thinks of the many lives the song has lived. “It still stands out to me as this time where music moved me,” he says. “It’s … deeper having that twist of the connection to the military and to the sacrifice that these people are making.” Though now he can also reflect on his own addition to its legacy. Despite all the stories assigned to it over the last eight decades, and all the new associations to follow with every additional play, the track remains somehow both timely and timeless. Though perhaps that says more about the listener than the song.
NOBLESSE OBLIGE
GEORGE ROMNEY AND THE GIFT OF TAKING LESS
BY DAVID LEONHARDT
With Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower’s ascension to the presidency in 1952, American business finally had a chance to undo two decades of Democratic New Deal policies. The Depression and World War II had ended, bolstering the argument for a return to an economy without high tax rates, heavy regulation and government support for labor unions. But once Eisenhower took office, he and the corporate executives who ran his administration validated the post-Depression changes to the domestic economy instead of reversing them.
As Time magazine wrote in 1956, “By conserving and enlarging the social programs inherited from the New and Fair Deals, the Eisenhower Administration helped set a course for the new conservative.” Eisenhower did move economic policy to the right, cutting federal spending and reducing some taxes, and he offered rhetorical paeans to small government and free enterprise. But the actual shift was modest. The top marginal tax rate was 92 percent in 1952, which meant that individuals kept only eight cents of each dollar of taxable income beyond $200,000. Under Eisenhower, the rate fell by a single percentage point, to 91 percent. Labor unions grew at roughly the same pace as the workforce did. Eisenhower’s main labor policy consisted of lobbying behind the scenes to persuade
businesses and workers to compromise with each other and sign contracts without costly strikes. His strategy largely worked. Wages continued to rise, and strikes happened less frequently than during the Truman administration.
The more conservative elements of Eisenhower’s coalition were bitterly disappointed. “We cannot see what purpose was served by Republicans fighting the New Deal for 20 years if they were going to wind up by embracing the New Deal,” the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune wrote. The
MANY EXECUTIVES DID NOT TRY TO GRAB EVERY LAST POSSIBLE DOLLAR DURING THE POSTWAR DECADES.
John Birch Society, a far-right group, spread the lie that Eisenhower was a secret communist. Eisenhower’s most conservative brother, Edgar, told him that his administration was validating unconstitutional expansions of government and that Edgar’s friends wondered whether the president was even a Republican. Dwight Eisenhower had some fun in the letter he wrote Edgar in
response, pointing out that he was the president and, as such, defined what it meant to be a Republican. It meant accepting the cultural shift among corporate executives and in the American economy.
The purest sign of the shift could be seen in the compensation that top business executives received.
THE MARKET FOR executive salaries has long been a clubby one. Officially, a board of directors, with a fiduciary duty to represent the interests of a company’s shareholders, determines how much money a chief executive receives. In practice, a CEO helps choose the members of the board, some of whom are friends or former colleagues. Many board members are themselves executives at other companies and so are willing to err on the side of overpaying a peer. CEO pay, as a result, tends to be influenced as much by the culture of corporate America at any given time as by market forces.
One executive who rose through corporate America during its post-Depression period of moderation was George Romney. An extrovert who had honed his confidence during his time as a young missionary in London, Romney moved to Washington in the late 1920s and became a lobbyist for the aluminum industry. The leaders of the auto industry noticed Romney and hired him to lobby for them. He spent World
HUMAN BEINGS HAD NOT BECOME ANY GREEDIER THAN IN GENERATIONS PAST. INSTEAD, “THE AVENUES TO EXPRESS GREED HAVE GROWN ENORMOUSLY.”
War II helping the industry work with the federal government to manufacture military equipment. In 1948, the chairman of one of the carmakers Romney represented, the Nash-Kelvinator Corporation, recruited him to become a top executive at the company.
Romney was soon a star. He pioneered a new kind of vehicle, the compact car. It was part of the burst of consumer goods introduced in the years after the war. Nash-Kelvinator marketed this car, the Rambler, as stylish and affordable, and many families were drawn to the idea of owning a smaller vehicle, especially as a second car. Romney enjoyed mocking Detroit’s larger cars as dinosaurs, a reference to both their size and their supposed future extinction. Company advertisements asked, “Is your car a dinosaur to park?” Sales of the Rambler surged in the late 1950s, as did the company’s profits and stock price. By this point, Romney was running the company.
As pleased as he was with its success, Romney also started to grow uncomfortable with all the money flowing into the company. He worried that executives might become distracted by what he called “the temptations of success” rather than focusing on the business’ long-term health. To avoid that problem, he went to the board of directors with a suggestion: The company should establish an annual cap on pay of $225,000 for any executive. That seemed like plenty of money. It was roughly 40 times as much as a typical American household was earning at the time. The board — which included Romney’s close friend J. Willard Marriott, a restaurant entrepreneur who had recently opened his first hotel — agreed to the cap.
But the board soon found itself with a dilemma. Romney’s original contract called for him to receive a $100,000 bonus if the company reached certain financial benchmarks, and, because of how well the Rambler was selling, the company had done so. The bonus would have put Romney over the cap. To him, the solution was obvious: He forfeited the bonus. As the company continued to thrive in the early 1960s, new
bonuses kicked in, and Romney asked the board to cancel them as well. Over a five-year period, he refused $268,000 in pay.
He was not the only executive to turn down higher pay during these years. John Ekblom, who ran the Hupp Corporation, an appliance manufacturer, turned down a $110,000 bonus in 1959. The sum, he said, “far exceeds my needs and appetite.” Ekblom explained that he was refusing the money partly to call attention to low-level corporate managers who had been crucial to the economy’s success yet did not earn enough money to save for retirement. The decisions by Romney and Ekblom were sufficiently unusual to receive press coverage at the time, but they were also consistent with a larger trend: Many executives did not try to grab every last possible dollar during the postwar decades.
The pay of the typical CEO of a large company rose only modestly from the 1940s through the 1970s, according to corporate records later analyzed by the economists Carola Frydman and Raven Molloy. CEO pay rose faster than inflation, meaning that the executives were receiving real raises, but these raises tended to be modest. Stock prices, the gross domestic product and the median family income all rose more quickly. As a result, the gap between CEO pay and everybody else’s pay shrank during these years. Executives accepted this situation without much complaint. They also accepted a top marginal tax rate that was above 90 percent in the 1950s. They did not start think tanks or advocacy groups whose mission was to argue that increasing the incentives for standout corporate performance would benefit the entire American economy.
Why not? The answer cannot have involved only pure economics. No doubt Romney, Ekblom and their fellow CEOs could have found enjoyable ways to spend more money. They could have set aside great sums for their heirs or given a sizable donation to their alma mater, perhaps getting their name on a building. To anybody who believes that human beings naturally maximize their own income and living standards, these titans of capitalism were acting
irrationally. Yet it did not seem irrational to them. They were acting in accordance with the culture, rejecting the ostentation that could have caused their fellow executives and citizens to lose respect for them. As Adam Smith argued, respect and pride are powerful drivers of human behavior.
Executives like Romney viewed themselves as a benevolent elite who rejected the Darwinian business conservatism of the early 20th century for a more paternalistic and patriotic capitalism. They were part of a shared project to overcome existential threats to the United States — first the Great Depression, then World War II, and finally the Cold War. To do so, the executives moderated their self-interest. They still often fought with labor unions and government bureaucrats, but the different sides came to see their opponents as loyal opposition, ultimately interested in the same goal of creating a prosperous America to lead the world.
IN HINDSIGHT, IT can be seductive to treat these midcentury leaders as more virtuous than their successors. It would also be a mistake. The CEOs of the postwar decades were deeply flawed. They presided over an economy that excluded the great majority of the population — women, people of color, Jews and openly gay Americans — from many positions of authority. Few corporate leaders used their own influence to fight injustices like the Red Scare and racial segregation. What the executives did do was help to create an economy that reduced inequality and lifted living standards for virtually every group of Americans. That was no small thing. It reflected not the individual virtues of the executives but the prevailing culture of their era.
The Romney family underscores this point. George’s youngest child was named Willard, after George’s close friend J. Willard Marriott. The boy, born in 1947, went by his middle name, Mitt. He would grow up to be remarkably similar to his father. Each became a leader in their church. Each first had a successful business career and then entered Republican politics, serving
as a governor (George in Michigan, Mitt in Massachusetts) and running unsuccessfully for president. Each displayed an unusual willingness to buck his own political party, George by overseeing a redistricting process in Michigan that reduced the advantages for rural areas and Mitt by being the only Republican to vote to convict Donald Trump in both of his impeachment trials. Each Romney showed more interest in alleviating poverty than most Republican politicians, with George helping to open child care centers in Detroit and Mitt pioneering an expansion of health insurance in Massachusetts. Both Romneys displayed a mix of conservatism, heterodoxy and principle.
Yet there was also a glaring difference between their business careers. The elder Romney capped his annual salary at $225,000 in the early 1960s — the equivalent of about $2 million in today’s terms. The younger Romney earned many multiples of that in the 1980s and 1990s as an executive at Bain & Company, a consulting firm where he helped start a spinoff private equity firm. The firm had a habit of buying a company, laying off some workers, reducing the pensions of other workers, and then selling the company at a profit. After decades at Bain, Mitt Romney’s net worth approached $250 million. Unlike his father, he showed little concern about being corrupted by the “temptations of success.” It would have been unusual if he had. By the time he was running Bain, the culture of corporate America had shifted again. Other CEOs and private equity investors were making similarly huge sums.
Alan Greenspan, the longtime chairman of the Federal Reserve, later explained the shift by saying that human beings had not become any greedier than in generations past. Instead, Greenspan said, “the avenues to express greed have grown enormously.” It was true of the Romneys. Mitt was not inherently more selfish than George. They were both products of their times.
GEORGE ROMNEY WORRIED THAT EXECUTIVES MIGHT BECOME DISTRACTED BY WHAT HE CALLED “THE TEMPTATIONS OF SUCCESS” RATHER THAN FOCUSING ON THE BUSINESS’ LONGTERM HEALTH.
CITY OF FEAR
NEW YORK AND AMERICA’S URBAN FREE FALL
BY ROBERT DOAR
Given New York Today, Could Anyone Lead It?” a 1991 New York Times headline bemoaned after decades of failure and futility. Crime was endemic, schools were failing, poverty was pervasive and the economy stagnated. From John Lindsay to David Dinkins, mayor after mayor had tried to tackle these problems. They had all failed. After three decades of policy futility, New Yorkers were giving up. In 1991, surveys indicated that more than half of New Yorkers wanted to leave. Political leadership had come to regard the city’s ills as intractable pathologies. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then New York senator, said at one public hearing on juvenile violence in 1993, “There is nothing you’ll do of any consequence, except start the process of change. Don’t expect it to take less than 30 years.”
Surveying the United States today, there are lessons from New York City’s past that should inform ongoing debates about America’s big cities. From Seattle and San Francisco to Chicago and New York, commercial real estate vacancies mixed with soft-on-crime mayors and high taxes are creating a new vicious cycle of urban flight. New York City once overcame this. And it didn’t take 30 years.
The specific personalities which helped
lead to New York City’s resurgence are perhaps less important than the policies they choose to implement. From the mid-’90s through the first decade of the 2000s, through Michael Bloomberg’s three terms, with a strong assist from Gov. George Pataki who served from 1994-2006, New York’s leaders transformed the city from a nearly bankrupt basket case, a cautionary tale, into an engine of opportunity and a model of urban governance.
BY EMBRACING THE POWER OF INDIVIDUAL OPPORTUNITY, MARKET-BASED SOLUTIONS AND RIGOROUS ACCOUNTABILITY, NEW YORK CITY DID THE SEEMINGLY IMPOSSIBLE.
What happened? How had the “ungovernable city” turned itself around?
I had a front-row seat to this remarkable change. Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s, I witnessed the depths of the crisis. And, while leading welfare and social services programs for the state and city in the
’90s and 2000s, I got to be part of the solution. What changed was the city’s governing philosophy. Previous mayors had favored an urban liberalism rooted in the policies of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. They put their faith in expert planning and generous social spending. They believed it was the government’s job to correct the “structural inequities that drove societal ills.” Government, not individuals, businesses or civil society, was the engine of progress.
But “mugged by the reality” of failure, many New Yorkers began to reexamine their assumptions. Where the Great Society looked to government, the new reformers looked to individuals to revitalize the city. The key was for government to empower individuals and businesses with the space and the tools to succeed. By embracing these ideas — the power of individual opportunity, market-based solutions and rigorous accountability — New York City did the seemingly impossible.
AS A KID, I saw crime explode and quality of life decline as the city government abandoned law and order. The crime I witnessed was indulged by a governing philosophy that excused criminals as victims of larger social forces and treated effective law enforcement as inherently racist. John
Lindsay derided calls for law and order as calls for the “official terror of the state.” By treating crime as a mere manifestation of poverty, Lindsay viewed police as powerless to fix what really ailed the city: “Peace
cannot be imposed on our cities by force of arms, nor can people be converted at the point of a gun.” Only ever-more social spending could fix the problems, and in the meantime, New York’s citizens would
just have to accept high crime as the price of avoiding explosive riots. Since Lindsay did not want police maintaining order, they instead became a reactive force. Officers would respond to individual crimes but did nothing to treat problems systematically. As the city’s fiscal crisis, driven by over-generous social spending, forced cuts to the force, police officers ceased to be a constant presence on the city’s streets.
The effects of this reactive indulgence were disastrous. Both petty and violent crime exploded. In the Lindsay years alone, from 1966 to 1973, violent crime increased 117 percent, with murders more than doubling, while robberies increased 168 percent, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. Lindsay’s crime wave became the new normal for the city as these elevated rates continued through the 1970s and 1980s. Fear threatened the city’s trademark vibrancy.
Beyond the direct victims, crime’s toll on the city was immense. The disorder hollowed out communities and drove away businesses. For those that stayed, criminal activity cost the city’s small firms an estimated $1 billion a year, according to a 1989 study by the New York think tank Interface.
Fed up, New Yorkers refused to accept this status quo. In 1993, voters rejected incumbent David Dinkins and elected Rudy Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney, on a promise that crime could and would be brought under control. Unlike his predecessors in the mayor’s office, he refused to regard crime as the untreatable symptom of societal ills. “The criminal act is about individual responsibility, and the building of the respect for the law and ethics is also a matter of individual responsibility,” he declared in a 1994 speech.
To hold criminals accountable, police commissioner Bill Bratton would return police to their traditional role of unapologetically maintaining order. Giuliani and Bratton’s approach was a real world application of the “broken windows” theory developed by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. Wilson and Kelling argued that tolerating low-level disorder, like “broken windows,” undermined
communities’ ability to police themselves and created conditions that bred more serious crime.
Bratton redeployed officers to the streets, embedded in and patrolling neighborhoods as symbols of order. Officers aggressively policed minor offenses that impacted quality of life. Public spaces, like Times Square, the subway and parks, were reclaimed from drug users, pickpockets and panhandlers. But Bratton’s effectiveness was not simply a matter of changing deployment strategies; as much as police now held criminals accountable, the city’s leadership began to hold the police accountable. Under Dinkins, Bratton recalled, “they weren’t being held accountable for crime because it was believed that crime was beyond their power to control.” NYPD ’s new CompStat program allowed police to track and understand criminal activity across the city, while providing hard data on law enforcement effectiveness.
The results were dramatic. Across the board, crime fell almost 50 percent. Murders decreased from 2,420 in 1993 to 960 in 2001. By attacking crime at its source in disorder, and holding police officers “ruthlessly accountable” through a pragmatic, data-driven strategy, New York became livable again.
With order restored, it was possible to tackle the city’s poverty crisis. Much like crime, poverty had become entrenched because of a retreat from individual responsibility. Faced with appalling urban poverty and violent racial unrest in the 1960s, liberals took on what Moynihan called “a near-obsessive concern to locate the blame for poverty … on forces and institutions outside the community concerned.” If structural inequities rendered individuals and communities powerless, only government action could end poverty. And Johnson’s Great Society proposed to do just that by increasing government spending on welfare. In New York, Lindsay embraced Johnson’s liberal agenda
and took the lead expanding the city’s welfare rolls.
In practice, the city’s programs became no-strings-attached cash assistance. This amounted to a vast transfer of responsibility from individuals to the government — creating what Fred Siegel called “dependent individualism.” Without any incentives to find employment, welfare recipients dropped out of the workforce.
Skyrocketing drug abuse, teenage pregnancy and family breakdown followed. And poverty deepened. In 1969, New York’s poverty rate was 14.5 percent, but it had increased to over 25 percent by the mid-’80s.
FROM SEATTLE TO CHICAGO, COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE VACANCIES MIXED WITH SOFTON-CRIME MAYORS AND HIGH TAXES ARE CREATING A NEW VICIOUS CYCLE OF URBAN FLIGHT.
THE PERSISTENT FAILURE of the city’s reigning liberalism provided an opportunity for change. Giuliani’s welfare commissioner, Jason Turner, turned the city’s welfare programs into an engine of individual opportunity by combining aggressive enforcement of work requirements with increased government investment in job training and placement for welfare recipients. Able-bodied recipients that did not find work were no longer entitled to the city’s support.
Giuliani and Turner’s efforts were part of a larger revolution on the local, state and federal levels in the 1990s that transformed welfare policy by embracing work and opportunity. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidency promising to “end welfare as we know it and break the cycle of dependency,” and in 1996 he signed a welfare
reform compromise forged with Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act reflected the new, bipartisan, national consensus that combined strict work requirements with generous benefits, and the bill provided block grants to states to reform their welfare programs along these lines. In 1997, Pataki embraced the opportunity, passing his own welfare reform bill. Together, these efforts significantly expanded the city’s resources to use work to move recipients off welfare.
Working for Pataki in the state’s lead social services agency, and serving as commissioner of New York City’s largest social services provider during Bloomberg’s second and third terms, I saw firsthand how these reforms transformed welfare and poverty in New York City. From 1995 through 2013, the city’s cash-welfare caseload shrunk from 1.1 million to 347,000 recipients.
Effective administration and a commitment to work turned welfare in New York City into a genuine pathway out of poverty. The results were dramatic. Data produced by Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Opportunity showed that for the state as a whole, child poverty declined during the period from 31.6 percent to 18.3 percent, a reduction driven by the unprecedented progress in the state’s largest city. But while requiring work and subsidizing wages played a large role in these gains, one of the most important things I learned working in the city’s welfare system was how essential a strong economy was to reducing poverty. This was another lesson lost on the city’s liberal mayors during the city’s bad times.
Across the ’60s and ’70s, the city government’s philosophy of urban liberalism had hollowed out the city’s economy. Lindsay’s ambition to use government to rectify the city’s societal ills was expensive. “The budget is large, but the needs of the city are great,” Lindsay declared in his inaugural
budget, and by the end of his first term, spending on welfare and social services had doubled. Lindsay’s commitment to the poor and the resulting growth of the city’s government far outstripped the city’s ability to pay, but progressive moral urgency trumped economic sense: after all, as he explained to one voter, “we have 300 years of neglect to pay for.” To cover the city’s deficits, Lindsay took on increasing amounts of debt while raising taxes on individuals and businesses far beyond any other U.S. city.
Lindsay’s tax and spend policies sent the city spiraling into a vicious cycle. As taxes increased, businesses and individuals fled the city. Between 1969 and 1977, the city lost almost 600,000 jobs, especially among manufacturing and high-income white-collar sectors like finance and real estate. As the city’s tax base evaporated, the city was forced to squeeze those who remained even harder. A proposed tax on financial transactions almost caused the New York Stock Exchange to leave, as NYSE’s president bemoaned the “deterioration of the climate for business, especially in the realm of taxes.” Ultimately, only a federal bailout with harsh conditions was able to stave off total bankruptcy. But the cost of avoiding bankruptcy was economic stagnation.
Imposed cuts on city services like police deepened the city’s quality of life crisis. Rampant disorder only deepened the city’s unattractiveness to businesses. As a result, New York City’s economy lagged behind the nation’s for most of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.
The crime-fighting efforts of the 1990s were an important first step in bringing the city’s economy back. But taking office in the midst of a recession and inheriting a $2.3 billion deficit, new leaders recognized that the city and its finances needed a fundamentally new vision. The city could not “tax its way out of recession,” Giuliani announced in his 1994 State of the City address. Quite the opposite — it would harness the power of the market with tax
cuts. Giuliani combined a supply-side approach to the city’s tax policy with fiscal management that kept the city living within its means. Choice and competition would be introduced into city services to lower costs and improve delivery. Lower taxes and improved public services would bring business back to the city.
This vision required cooperation from the state government, and thankfully the city had a partner in Pataki, equally committed to improving the state’s economic climate. Together with Albany, New York City managed to reform or eliminate the com-
SURVEYING THE UNITED STATES TODAY, THERE ARE LESSONS FROM NEW YORK CITY’S PAST THAT SHOULD INFORM ONGOING DEBATES ABOUT AMERICA’S BIG CITIES.
mercial rent tax, the hotel occupancy tax, the sales tax, the unincorporated business tax and the personal income tax. Overall, Giuliani cut some $2.2 billion from the city’s annual tax burden by the end of his tenure.
Economist Robert P. Inman estimated that one out of every four jobs created in the city since 1993 could be attributed to these cuts. And Pataki’s statewide Income Tax Reduction Act in 1994 supercharged Giuliani’s efforts by reducing most New Yorkers’ tax liability by 25%.
By emphasizing growth and harnessing opportunity, the city’s economy rebounded from the recession of the early 1990s. New York benefitted from the explosive growth in financial and tech sectors in the 1990s, and Giuliani’s hotel occupancy tax cuts cleared the way for the hospitality and tourism sectors to become pillars of the city’s economy. And most tellingly, after
decades of population decline and stagnation, the city’s population increased to over 8 million people by the end of the 1990s. Bloomberg consolidated Giuliani’s successful economic policies, especially by opening up much of the city to redevelopment by breaking down nonsensical zoning restrictions. Hudson Yards, The High Line and One World Trade Center all symbolized the city’s economic renewal. And when recession returned in 2008, rather than being the sick man of the American economy, New York’s economy recovered much faster than the rest of the country.
“NEW YORK CITY has never been stronger than it is today, and I think it’s fair to say our future has never been brighter,” Bloomberg declared upon leaving office at the end of 2013. But he warned, “The progress we’ve made over the past 12 years, thanks to the work of so many dedicated people, has been incredible — but it has not been inevitable. Success can never be taken for granted.”
New York today is not what it was when Bloomberg left office, but it is still much safer and more prosperous than the city I grew up in. The city’s improvements between 1994 and 2014 did not happen by accident. It took a concerted effort by political and civic reformers, fighting against the entrenched power of the city’s liberal consensus, to transform the city with accountability, choice and opportunity. We unleashed the power of the city’s residents and businesses to end the disorder, dependence and decline that had brought New York to its knees. But the succeeding administrations, and numerous big city mayors across the country, have shown little interest in this history. And the social fabric in America’s urban core is starting to fray again. If the leaders of America’s cities want to avoid the fate of their predecessors, they’d do well to remember these lessons.
ROBERT DOAR IS PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE.
SHELTER FROM THE STORM
THE CONSERVATIVE FIX TO THE HOUSING CRISIS
BY ALAP DAVÉ
The United States is facing one of the most severe housing crises in its history. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, not a single state has an adequate supply of affordable homes for renters in the lowest income bracket. Nationwide, an estimated 7.3 million more affordable homes are needed. The shortfall has resulted in alarming levels of homelessness across the United States. Between 2020 and 2022, homelessness in Phoenix, Arizona, rose by 22 percent; in Austin, Texas, by 26 percent; and in Sacramento, California, by a staggering 68 percent. On any given night, almost 600,000 Americans are living unhoused.
This problem has grown dramatically since the 1980s, when cuts in federal funding led to a decadeslong decline in the quantity and quality of public housing. During the pandemic, the Biden administration approved $47 billion in emergency rental assistance for struggling homeowners. This measure, in conjunction with moratoriums on evictions, temporarily mitigated the problem. But as concern over the pandemic faded, so did federal relief. As help and protections have been withdrawn, and as housing prices have risen, more and more Americans have found themselves on the street.
As all these details show, the United States desperately needs a comprehensive solution to its housing crisis. The good news is that such a solution exists and has been battle-tested. Indeed, a few places — most notably, Utah — have already implemented it for the chronically homeless. But doing so required them to reframe their understanding of the homelessness problem.
WHAT IF THE GOVERNMENT SIMPLY GAVE HOMES TO THOSE IN NEED AND WORRIED ABOUT SERVICES AFTERWARD?
While some leaders and voters remain reluctant to do so, it’s high time for legislators elsewhere to focus on what actually works — and to make it happen.
CHRONICALLY HOMELESS INDIVIDUALS are classified as people with a disability who have lived in shelters or places not meant for human habitation for at least 12 months total over the course of three
years. Although the chronically homeless represent just 22 percent of the unhoused population in the United States, they use emergency services significantly more than the situationally and episodically homeless and therefore consume a disproportionate share of taxpayer dollars. But reducing that expenditure is but one reason for governments to prioritize helping this smaller segment of the homeless population; others include basic human values and the need to reduce the burden on shelters and emergency services.
In the early 2000s, a handful of state governments attempted to do so by using a new method known as Housing First, a model that grew out of clinical work conducted by the psychologist Sam Tsemberis. While working at Bellevue Hospital in New York City during the 1980s, Tsemberis would often find that his patients lived on the streets. The frequency of this overlap between mental health problems and homelessness had a profound effect on Tsemberis’ understanding of the issues. As he recounted to me, his patients would frequently ask him, “Can’t you tell I need a place to live?” Such conversations taught Tsemberis that helping these struggling individuals requires more than clinical
solutions. What they needed most of all was housing.
At the time, most programs focused on resolving homelessness required potential clients to establish that they were already in treatment or sober; as a consequence, these programs had largely failed. So Tsemberis began to wonder, what if the government simply gave homes to those in need and worried about services afterward? Once at-risk individuals were stably housed, they would be provided wraparound support services like treatment for mental illness and substance abuse, as well as vocational training. These services would both address the needs of the chronic homeless and help them reintegrate into their communities.
To that end, in 1992, Tsemberis developed the Consumer Preference Independent Living Model, a housing program for unhoused people with disabilities that also provided clinical support. The program was revolutionary at the time, and the results of its early trials were astonishing: Participants enjoyed higher housing retention, improved health, and reduced substance abuse. It wasn’t long before Tsemberis’ model became the standard for approaching this problem. In 2004, the George W. Bush administration adopted the program, now known as Housing First, as part of its national policy to end homelessness.
ALTHOUGH THE INITIAL calls to address chronic homelessness in the early 2000s came from the White House, in Utah, the cause was first championed by a rather unlikely private citizen. Lloyd Pendleton was raised on a desert ranch with the values he’s described as “rugged individualism and pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” He worked as an executive for Ford Motor Co. and for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints revamping its welfare services. At both jobs, he was well known for his management skills, which led the church to loan him to Utah’s state government to help reform the shelter system.
In 2003, Pendleton attended a conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, on the subject of homelessness, where he met Tsemberis and learned about the Housing First approach. At first, Pendleton was skeptical. His conservative beliefs made him suspicious of what sounded like a handout, but it was hard to argue with Tsemberis’ data. Pendleton soon embraced the model. After a couple years working closely with shelters, in 2006, the now-retired businessman was tapped by then-Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. to become the director of Utah’s Homeless Task Force. Shortly thereafter, Pendleton formed the Salt Lake Valley Coalition to End Homelessness.
THE COSTEFFECTIVENESS OF THE HOUSING FIRST APPROACH ATTRACTED CONSERVATIVES, WHILE THE MORAL VALUE OF PROVIDING HOMES FOR THE UNHOUSED RESONATED WITH LIBERALS.
Pendleton pushed the Housing First method hard during his tenure as Utah’s homelessness czar, and the methodology soon earned strong support in Utah’s Legislature, as well. Indeed, the approach became one of the few policies at the time that garnered backing across the political spectrum. The cost-effectiveness of the Housing First approach attracted conservatives, while the moral value of providing homes for the unhoused resonated with liberals. This bipartisan approval proved key to the program’s success. Elected leaders came to see Housing First as a humane and cost-effective solution backed by data, and not a partisan issue.
Pendleton also helped by developing a strong partnership between the public and private sectors, convening leaders from faith groups, governor’s office, state
Legislature, and the business, nonprofit and philanthropic worlds. Michelle Flynn, executive director of The Road Home, the largest nonprofit in Salt Lake City focused on homelessness, described to me how this coalition collaborated to build the foundation for Housing First in the state. She explained that they “decided the Salt Lake City Housing Authority was going to develop the first (housing) project, the Salt Lake County Housing Authority was going to develop the second, and (The Road Home) was going to develop the third.” Those projects opened on schedule and added over 1,200 new housing units.
Flynn, like Pendleton, emphasized that their approach was grounded in data. The key shelter provider, the health care providers and the street outreach lead brought together their databases and cross-referenced lists to prioritize who was going to be housed first. The value of collaboration between the public and private sectors and various interest groups cannot be overstated. Janice Kimball, the CEO of Housing Connect, the housing authority for Salt Lake County, told me that “the LDS Church played an instrumental role … they provided beds, furnishings, tables, and chairs for the first two properties. In addition, they provided the volunteers to set it all up.”
As a direct result of these efforts, Utah saw a 72 percent reduction in chronic homelessness between 2005 and 2015; Kimball told me that Utah got “a couple hundred units away from functional zero” chronically homeless individuals by 2015, meaning that at that point, it almost had fewer homeless people than beds in shelters. In 2014, the state estimated that the community saved approximately $8,000 per chronically homeless person housed through the program. Together, those savings amounted to a 40 percent reduction in total money spent on the unhoused. The state’s success was heralded by news media around the world — although reports didn’t always draw the distinction between the chronically homeless and the overall population of unhoused people along the urban Wasatch Front.
DESPITE THIS OVERWHELMING success, however, beginning in 2015, support for Housing First in Utah’s government began to unravel. Ignoring the data, certain business leaders and voters looked at anecdotal evidence — such as the persistence of some people camping on certain streets — and concluded that the homelessness problem was worse than ever. In 2017, newly elected leaders responded to their constituents’ complaints by shifting funds away from the Housing First programs. A new program called “Operation Rio Grande” was launched; it used law enforcement, which put an emphasis on arrests, to address the unhoused. The state closed its largest shelter, which was located in the downtown Rio Grande neighborhood, and replaced it with three smaller shelters on the outskirts of town.
This shift, Kimball told me, “tripled costs and reduced capacity from 1,100 to 800 beds.” Kimball said the new shelters “do better in some regards, but don’t (permanently) get people off the street.” That makes sense; shelters are meant to be a temporary solution. As a consequence, in the years since the state abandoned Housing First, Utah’s chronically homeless population has grown consistently.
Operation Rio Grande had another major flaw: It asked developers to create public housing. The problem, as Wayne Niederhauser — Utah’s current homeless coordinator and a former state Senate president and real estate developer — explained to me, is that truly affordable housing simply does not “pencil out financially” for the private market. Housing the most economically disadvantaged people is never going to be a profitable endeavor and requires public subsidy.
The reality is that homelessness is a complicated problem. As rent prices climb and income growth is undone by inflation, the number of unhoused Americans will continue to rise. Thousands are forced out of housing every year as a result of misguided housing policy. The evidence shows that cities urgently need more investment in affordable housing. Housing First alone
is not a definitive solution but rather a crucial first step. Housing the chronically homeless minority broadens capacity for the shelter system to meet the needs of the majority — the temporarily and episodically homeless. Given enough time and sustained investment, this program will create the ideal conditions for the unhoused to be reintegrated into society.
Critics of Housing First claim that the recent increase in chronic homelessness, rising costs and a paucity of employed tenants are evidence of the program’s shortcomings.
But such claims not only disregard the damage done by Utah’s shift to Operation
“THE THREE C’S” TO SUCCESS: CHAMPIONS, COLLABORATION AND COMPASSION. AND SALT LAKE CITY’S RECENT REGRESSION SUGGESTS A FOURTH: CONSISTENCY.
Rio Grande in 2017, they also ignore the data. In 2020, a review of 26 studies confirmed that the Housing First approach decreases homelessness by 88 percent, increases housing stability by 41 percent and improves quality of life for the unhoused relative to traditional approaches. The data also proves that the economic benefits of Housing First outweigh the costs: For every dollar invested in the program, Housing First saves $1.44.
Other cities in the United States have taken note of Utah’s success and implemented their own versions of Housing First. Houston, Texas, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, are two prominent examples. By following the lead of Salt Lake City, Houston reduced homelessness by 63 percent between 2011 and 2022, and Milwaukee has reduced it by 92 percent since 2015.
The fact that Utah leaned on a church and its significant resources to help implement
its Housing First program has led some skeptics to question whether other states that lack such an affluent and committed nongovernmental institution could follow Utah’s example. But the success of Houston and Milwaukee shows that states don’t need a financial behemoth behind them to successfully apply the program. There’s no single pathway to success; one community might lean heavily on government funding while another might rely more on civil society and philanthropy.
WHEN PENDLETON, WHO died in 2019, was asked to provide recommendations to other cities and states hoping to replicate Utah’s success, he frequently cited “the three C’s” he deemed critical to success: champions, collaboration and compassion. And Salt Lake City’s recent regression suggests a fourth: consistency.
In order to have a meaningful effect on homelessness, communities need people at the legislative, civil society and philanthropic levels who are deeply committed to the cause: in other words, champions. Utah, Houston and Milwaukee also succeeded because of collaborations. The coalitions they built behind Housing First were strong and held together over time. Pendleton’s final C, compassion, is also vital. Many elected leaders and commentators in the United States villainize the unhoused. Rather than see them as people who may have lost a job or suffered debilitating medical expenses, they view them as people who just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
The best thing about Housing First, however, is that it’s compassionate and pragmatic. It is grounded in the recognition that housing is a basic human need, but it is also the most efficient and cost-effective approach to the problem. If anything can unite the country behind a comprehensive attempt to solve homelessness, it should be that combination.
ALAP DAVÉ IS AN ASSOCIATE WITH THE BUSH INSTITUTE-SMU ECONOMIC GROWTH INITIATIVE. THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN THE CATALYST: A JOURNAL OF IDEAS FROM THE BUSH INSTITUTE. READ MORE AT WWW.BUSHCENTER.ORG/CATALYST.
GAME THEORY
THE SURPRISING CASE FOR VIDEO GAMES AS LITERATURE
BY CLAY GRUBBS
The windows are dark and my alarm clock, tucked behind a skateboard rack on the wall of my bedroom, reads 4:47 a.m. I ignore it, swiping unkempt hair from my eyes to focus on the screen. As my fingers flick at the controller, my character — an armored cyborg — moves through the interior of a massive spaceship. A headset envelops me in a cloud of sound and chatter from the friends who are with me on this raid, a challenge far more engaging than school, which starts in three hours. But before we can make it out safely, my father opens the door.
He’s naturally upset, but not surprised. It’s 2018. I’m 16 years old, a junior at Hightstown High School near Princeton, New Jersey, and this has been our routine for years. Diagnosed with ADHD and hearing loss when I was a small child, I never fit into the classroom environment. If I could hear what the teacher was saying, I struggled to care. If I applied myself, I could do well at most subjects, but it all felt like a waste of effort, and I couldn’t see it leading to anything. So why try?
Not that I didn’t wish things were different. My parents prioritized working with passion, and in our family, that generally
revolves around storytelling. My father is a painter and filmmaker, my sister started acting and writing plays as soon as she could, and even my mother uses narrative as a motivational tool in her personal training business. Conversations about which art form could best tell stories were common fare at the dinner table. I loved stories
A NOTICE LIES ON MY DESK AMONG THE CLUTTER OF UNFINISHED ASSIGNMENTS: I’M FAILING ENGLISH, SO I’VE BEEN KICKED OFF THE ROBOTICS TEAM. NEARBY, THE XBOX MONITOR FLICKERS.
too, but I never had anything to argue for because I hadn’t found my “thing.”
I felt adrift, and video games were my refuge. Their virtual worlds felt more real to me, the accomplishment of beating a final boss more palpable than anything school could offer. Like so many other nights, my father interrogates me. Why am I awake? Why haven’t I done my homework?
Sleepless, I struggle to follow. All I know is I can’t put the games down. Years later, with a bachelor’s degree in game development under my belt, I still don’t have the answers, but I think I know where to find them: the English department. Hear me out.
VIDEO GAMES HAVE become unavoidable. More than three billion people play them; that’s about one player in 74 percent of American households. Almost anyone I meet had at least one gaming console in their home growing up. Games are not a universal good. They can become dark places for some people. But innocuous fun like dancing or playing tennis on consoles like the Wii, which reads body movements to guide on-screen actions, was a formative experience for Generation Z. So was building worlds in Minecraft, playing army with friends in Halo, or engaging a robust narrative in The Legend of Zelda.
Of course, consoles weren’t always that capable. One of the first video games ever developed was Tennis for Two, in 1958. Built with a physics simulator for a science exhibit at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, the game consisted of a two-dimensional “court,” with
lines as rackets and a block-shaped “ball” sent back and forth by clicking a single button. When a California company called Atari converted this concept into an arcade game named Pong in 1972, it was exciting enough to sell more than 8,000 units and eventually found its way into our living rooms, along with the first console.
Released in 1977, the Atari 2600 was a simple, 8-bit device that could play games stored on cartridges — something like 8-track tapes. Soon kids across the country were gathering at that one friend’s house to play games like Combat or Space Invaders. The corresponding financial boom gave designers room to experiment with more complex projects. Atari Adventure introduced a narrative: good vs. evil. And Pac-Man added cutscenes, animated segments that advanced the storyline between the game’s iconic maze levels.
Still, the industry faced pitfalls of its own. By the early 1980s, new consoles were flooding the market. Game play became repetitive while quality was inconsistent. Looking to stand out, companies started adapting blockbuster movies like “E.T.,” the story of a boy who bonds with a benign alien. But the game was rushed to market despite major problems, becoming a frustrating disaster emblematic of an industry on the brink. There didn’t seem to be a way back until the Nintendo Entertainment System was released in 1985.
The Japanese parent company behind the NES soon reshaped gaming. By limiting who was allowed to produce cartridges for its console, Nintendo ensured fewer games and higher quality. It focused on a younger audience with series like Super Mario Bros. and Zelda, incorporating stories with greater emotional depth. As that approach took hold, developers began to study other media, like film, to learn how to tell stories better. Cutscenes started generating suspense or laying out complex plots that gameplay could not yet cover — though that
would change as technology caught up to creators’ visions.
Development evolved, too, with independent studios taking more creative risks. In 2013, Naughty Dog released The Last of Us, which blended action sequences into narrative progression and player engagement, telling the story of an anti-hero and a plucky teenage girl navigating a zombie apocalypse. That tale resurfaced this year as HBO’s hit “The Last of Us,” starring Pedro Pascal, a landmark for this powerful new medium.
IT WAS LIKE REAL LIFE, WHERE I WAS JUST GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS WITHOUT BELIEVING I COULD MAKE A DIFFERENCE. I DIDN’T REALIZE IT WAS TEACHING ME SOMETHING.
Academics today are exploring the finer details that separate games from theater, poetry or film. But games don’t just tell stories; they tell them through us, a unique way to find something within ourselves.
A FEW MONTHS later, a notice lies on my desk among the clutter of unfinished assignments: I’m failing English, so I’ve been kicked off the Hightstown High robotics team. Nearby, the Xbox monitor flickers. I know that if I hand in my late work along with a sufficient apology, I’ll be fine. And I’ve stopped taking ADHD meds, so my motivation is inert. So I scroll through the titles, landing on Dark Souls III, famous for its difficulty. Even so, I’m shocked when the first boss pummels my avatar into the dirt without giving me time to react. Frustrated but a little excited, I try again. And again.
The game occurs in a dying and hopeless world, where the character is simply
trying to stay alive. I’m caught up in the general sense of aimlessness. The game resets every time my character dies or I take a break. No matter how well I do, nothing changes. Any progress is strictly internal; I can’t change the world around me. It was like real life, where I was just going through the motions without believing I could make a difference. I didn’t realize it was teaching me something.
To make the game, lead developer Hidetaka Miyazaki defied his bosses at FromSoftware, a Japanese video game company, and ignored industry norms that typically let players prevail with minimal or manageable friction. Instead, he built a game about pain for pain’s sake — and a genre-defining cult classic. It provides a rigid set of challenges and doesn’t extend a hand to make them easier. Even the narrative is frustrating, as the player’s actions mean nothing to the broader story. It’s pure adversity, and that’s the charm.
Writing for CNET, critic Andrew Gebhart argued that Dark Souls “served as a genuine catalyst for entering adulthood.” Its strict, consistent difficulty helped him to learn personal responsibility. The player had to find meaning in his own struggles. In a perhaps inadvertent echo of “Night,” the classic memoir by holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, the player’s only power was how he dealt with it. The outcome never changed. All that mattered was the effort. That lesson filtered into Gebhart’s life, as he pivoted toward “the pleasure of pursuing the experience and knowing the most memorable moments were ones that I made for myself.”
After slamming my head into this first boss enough times to finally beat it, I feel oddly proud. I didn’t win in a skillful way, and I was an inch away from death, but I had white-knuckled my way through the encounter and that felt great. Glancing away from the screen, my eyes fall on the pile of homework. I put down the controller and
pick up a pencil. By semester’s end, an A in English gets me back on robotics.
MY HAIR IS short now and my vision is clear. It’s 2022 and my desk is still messy, but the assignments are done, my grades solid. On the screen, I move across a glistening desert — or my character does. A mountain looms in the distance, not unlike the ridgelines of the Wasatch Front outside my apartment window. I’m a senior at the University of Utah majoring in games, so this is homework now. Everything I encounter seems to be nudging me toward that mountain, even a second character that appears next to mine. So we team up and head that way. I came here to study game design, a newer field that incorporates classic design and psychology with a focus on the rules at work in video games. But I’m most interested in how these things tell stories, so I’m also taking an English class that compares games to movies and literature. Tonight’s assignment: Journey, released in 2012 for the PlayStation 3. The title references the hero’s journey, an archetypal plot structure derived from common themes in world mythologies as compiled by Joseph Campbell, a prominent thinker and literature professor at Sarah Lawrence College who died in 1987.
Many beloved stories, as varied as “The Odyssey” by Homer and the original “Star Wars” movie, follow this arc of a central hero who must leave his ordinary world in order to resolve some problem or challenge. From the Call to Adventure (Luke Skywalker is given his father’s lightsaber) to the Belly of the Beast (Luke helps infiltrate the Death Star) and Apotheosis (using the Force, Luke destroys the Death Star and saves the galaxy), this classic framework lets the hero advance both physically and mentally or even spiritually. Journey follows along, almost exactly.
The game also taught me something unique. This was a story of movement, the player’s ability to walk and fly. The only
characters or plot were implicit, baked into the experience of traversing this world. This is an experimental project that pushed the bounds of the medium. Today, indie developers can access the same technology as major brands, through websites like itch.io and Steam. Anyone can be a “game dev” now — like Salt Lake City resident David Payne, who builds craft cabinet games for his Gallery of Fine Hyper-Art, or “GOFHA,” a specialized arcade housed in a converted school bus. And games can now be anything they want to be, including literature. But games can do things books cannot, like bringing two strangers together. As I struggle toward the snowy peak in Journey, my ad-hoc partner, who can only communicate through chirps, moves next to me, warms me up, and we find that the game lets us move faster when we’re together. “The players exist to enable each other’s journey to the top of the mountain,” explains my professor, Alf Seegert, “and the mountain exists to bring the two players together.” We know that reading novels fosters empathy, but this is another level. When our avatars finally reach the summit and the screen fades to white, I take off my headphones and realize I’ve been crying. The feeling is profound and familiar, but also something that for me only a video game could evoke in this way. Immediately I need to understand why and share it with others. I feel motivated in a way I’d never felt before.
During a recent visit home to New Jersey, my father and I get to talking about art. I’m in a gap year, hoping to get accepted to my school’s graduate English program to study video games as literature. Utah is at the vanguard, hiring people to research and teach these new ideas within the context of classic fiction. So I remind him of our old dinner table conversations, and make a case that experiencing narrative through game play is as potent as any form of storytelling. And he agrees. I finally found my “thing.” Turns out it was with me all along.
I TAKE OFF MY HEADPHONES AND REALIZE I’VE BEEN CRYING. THE FEELING IS PROFOUND AND FAMILIAR, BUT ALSO SOMETHING ONLY A VIDEO GAME COULD EVOKE IN THIS WAY.
AN ODE TO DIY ORNAMENTS
WHY
THE BEST GIFTS OFTEN COST NOTHING AT ALL
BY JENNIFER GRAHAM
I’m not sure when decorating for Christmas became a competitive sport, but I’m here for it, which is to say, I’m grateful for everyone who has the resources and vision to turn their homes and yards into twinkling wonderlands every December, albeit with the help of professionals.
At first, I worried a bit when holiday lighting installed by professionals became a thing. It seemed that this trend was creating a new class of haves and have-nots, the wealth gap on full display in brightly lit shrubs. But as more and more people have hired companies to do their decorating, I’ve grown to appreciate the egalitarian nature of these displays since they exist for all of us to enjoy. As Debby Boone would say, “you light up my life,” and I mean that sincerely.
Also, it’s hard to be jealous of my neighbors’ perfectly decorated homes when I have something even better inside my house, nestled in a USPS Priority Mail envelope, waiting to be hung on our Christmas tree.
It is the pièce de résistance of Christmas decorating: a wrinkled, slightly stained, sort of torn and alarmingly flimsy homemade angel bearing the face of a 7-year-old boy.
That boy is my son, who is now a 30-year-old man who got married this year.
and a silver pipe cleaner, has more value than the finest Christopher Radko ornaments in our collection. For one thing, it won’t break like the expensive glass bulbs are wont to do when the cat inevitably tries to climb the tree.
But it’s also valuable because, let’s be honest, it’s kind of ridiculous, and as such, traditions have risen around the ornament, such as the whistling of the Twentieth Century Fox trumpet fanfare when it is hung.
Such pleasure. Such fun. Such are the peculiar traditions that arise over time in any family that loves Christmas as much as mine does.
SUCH PLEASURE. SUCH FUN. SUCH ARE THE PECULIAR TRADITIONS THAT ARISE OVER TIME IN ANY FAMILY.
The passage of time has conferred incalculable value on this ornament, which was scissored-and-glued together in the second grade by my son — likely with a lot of help from his teacher. Regrettably, I don’t remember the name of the teacher who was responsible for shepherding this family heirloom into being, which is the equivalent of not knowing who painted the “Mona Lisa.” If I did, I would write her a thank-you note every year for this gift, which is a material reminder that the humblest things can be the most precious of all.
This homemade ornament, made of foil, ribbon, tissue paper
The “Mencken Angel,” as it is known (my son is named after H.L. Mencken) even inspired a new generation of foil-and-tissue-paper angels, because there came a time when it seemed unfair that his siblings weren’t similarly represented on the Christmas tree, and so I made replicas featuring my other children’s faces at similar ages. They will never be the Mencken Angel — that is the homemade ornament for the ages — but each has its own homely glory. They are a fitting tribute, I think, to a Child put to bed in a manger.
Not every one, of course, will be a home run like the Mencken Angel was. There are more than a few stars made with glitter and Popsicle sticks that might get hung on the tree, or might not, depending on how big the tree is that year, and who happens to be there helping to decorate it.
But in a world where Christmas decorating is getting more sophisticated every year, where lights are hung by certified professionals and people pay $250 for a single Waterford ornament that the cat might break, for my money, the homemade ornament is the best Christmas decoration of all.
bronze-cast memorial of Botham just to get to the cafeteria. Fellow students wanted to talk to him for papers, or interview him for student media outlets. “People knew of me before they knew me,” he says. He decided to return to St. Lucia — not that the reminders are any less prevalent there. Just about every room in his family’s burnt-orange home in the Carellie neighborhood of Castries features a portrait of Botham. Some are black-and-white; some are photographs; some are more abstract. All of them ensure Botham’s memory is not forgotten — for better and worse. For the rest of his life, Brandt will have to confront that reality, and as the years have passed, it’s gotten easier. People have stopped asking for selfies, or approaching him in public at all, so that helps. And he recently removed the bedroom door he punched holes in out of anger — although it now rests beneath the family’s kitchen, in a cement overhang favored by a big-headed rottweiler named Mister. He likes to keep it around, as a reminder of how far he’s come. As a reminder of how his decision to forgive could help heal. He keeps the letter around for the same reason.
It came from Guyger, who hasn’t spoken publicly since the trial. But she did write to a member of Brandt’s church from his time in Arkansas, and the member sent a copy of the letter to Brandt. It’s dated Jan. 20, 2020 — almost three years before the Supreme Court would deny her final appeal. Even though she was still fighting to overturn her conviction, she wrote that she did read the Bible the judge had given her, and that she had deepened her faith. She also said she had no way of contacting Botham’s family, but to “let them know I love and care about them. That will never change.” And finally, she addressed Brandt’s act of forgiveness directly. “I am also proud of Brandt,” she said. “I look up to him and if he or his family ever needed anything I would be there for them.” She signed off with a heart.
When he received the letter and read it
for the first time, Brandt rushed to the local library to have it laminated. It’s a great treasure; a reminder of who he aspires to be. He was moved by Guyger’s commitment to the Bible — lately he had been crediting Jesus for inspiring his own act of mercy — and warmed to hear that his speech had affected her so deeply. “It’s an honor to have that kind of impact,” he explains. He hasn’t shown anyone in his family because he doesn’t want to hurt them. He fears they might not be ready. But he refers back to it sometimes, randomly, whenever he’s struggling and needs to have his moral compass realigned. And when that isn’t enough, he turns to something else no one knows about.
BOTHAM JEAN’S BODY rests in a narrow strip of graves called the Choc Cemetery, bracketed by the Caribbean Sea on one side and the George F.L. Charles Regional Airport on the other. At any given moment, the gentle churn of the waves against the coastline can be interrupted by the roar of a private jet, but for the most part, it is a tranquil place. Coconut palms rustle. Sea birds chirp. The grave itself is as big as a refrigerator and is painted dark blue, with a portrait of Botham on the tombstone alongside the words “A life so beautifully lived; A heart so deeply loved; A memory so richly treasured; Jewel who is missed beyond measure!” It might be the most well-trafficked gravesite in St. Lucia. For his birthday, and for the other anniversaries, mourners descend — but not Brandt. He prefers to visit his brother alone. Even recently, for the five-year anniversary of Botham’s death, Brandt maintained his distance from the others. “I hope they understood,” he says of his family, but he’s tired of having to perform his grief. The only way he feels like he can really connect with his brother, and really accept his absence, is to visit the grave by himself. “The only way I’ve ever dealt with any form of negative emotion,” he explains, “is loneliness.” He estimates
he goes about once every week; the guys who maintain the cemetery know him and his car as soon as he pulls up. He hasn’t told anyone because he doesn’t want them to probe him for answers. He just wants to heal in the way that feels most natural, without judgment.
Healing these days means confronting difficult feelings, like knowing his brother may not have agreed with his decision. In media interviews he had said that he’d probably done what Botham wanted, that he would have wanted him to forgive Guyger. But he doesn’t know. Not really. “I can’t say I’m so sure,” he admits. And he’s certain that his brother would have hated the hug. “I don’t think he would’ve wanted me to hug her,” Brandt says. “I think he would’ve been mad.” Between wondering about what Botham would’ve thought and worrying about what his family thinks of how he’s handled everything, his conscience can become a burden. Even more so when he’s constantly measuring himself against his courtroom speech, a moment that defined his life when he was just 18. He often compares himself to the person he was then, and wonders why he can’t be that person again. Which is why he recommends people act on their forgiving instincts whenever the mood strikes. That openness, he has learned, can be fleeting. “If you get the opportunity, I think it’s a gift,” he says. “Because you’re not always going to be in a frame of mind where it’s going to seem easy.”
Outside his visits to his brother’s grave, Brandt has much to look forward to. He’s hoping to enroll at Florida International University in Miami next year to resume his studies; right now he works as an engineering assistant, but with his degree, he hopes to become a certified engineer. He’s also taken up bodybuilding and personal training, and his family just acquired a tract of farmland, so he’s hoping to take up animal husbandry, too. Wherever the coming years take him, though, he’s sure to keep finding his way back to this tombstone beside the ocean, alone, caught somewhere between forgiving Amber Guyger and forgiving himself.
GENTLE ENDINGS
LESSONS FROM A HOSPICE FOR THE HOMELESS
BY LOIS M. COLLINS
Jillian Olmsted was intrigued by a news story in 2015 about attempts to open a small residential hospice for the homeless in Salt Lake City, where she lives. The INN Between would offer a home for people who were unsheltered so they could be fed and cared for, in beds and out of the cold. But she was also floored by the hue and cry of neighbors who didn’t want them around — even though they were terribly medically frail. Her dad was fighting cancer, and she had just helped care for her mom and stepfather, who died a month apart. Both “had insurance and a nice home and family to take care of them.” Why begrudge someone shelter, care and comfort in such dire circumstances?
When the program opened, she volunteered. Hospitals aren’t built to provide weeks- or monthslong solutions, while homeless shelters can’t provide medical care and often have rules that won’t even let someone spend the day inside. But hospices offer a low-cost and compassionate approach for supporting people who are near their end. The INN Between had a handful of employees, 16 beds and no regulations to guide its unique effort. They learned as they went. Olmsted had
to work around home-schooling her two sons, and as the gig turned into a job, she’d bring them to events she managed for the fragile residents, whom her boys loved.
Her sons are now 18 and 20 years old, and Olmsted, married to a linguist retired from the Air Force, has been executive director of The INN Between since 2022. The program has grown, including
YES, THEY’RE STAYING HERE FOR FREE. YES, THAT’S BETTER THAN SLEEPING BEHIND THE DUMPSTER. BUT THEY DESERVE HIGH-QUALITY CARE AND TO BE TREATED EQUITABLY.
a dramatic change in 2018 when the organization found a much larger home. In the new space, they can provide both recuperative and hospice care for up to 50 homeless individuals.
Deseret talked to Olmsted, 40, about unmet needs, the people they serve and tender moments.
VOLUNTEERING IS ONE THING, BUT HOW DID YOU PREPARE AS THE JOB GREW?
One thing I started doing when I came on was the Utah Nonprofits Association credential program — nine different areas, taught by subject matter experts. They also give you tools to implement what you learn at your organization. So it’s practical and specific. It helped, because we didn’t have a proper volunteer program or an employee handbook or procedures that would help us stay out of legal trouble. Now we do. We will be among a handful of nonprofits in Utah that earned all nine credentials.
WHAT DOES THE INN BETWEEN NEED MOST?
People giving time and money are our biggest needs. There’s also our wish list. We can always use things like bread, eggs, milk, toiletries. But unrestricted funding is what nonprofits need most. We do have overhead and administrative costs; we can’t do it without it. Unfortunately, many funders have certain regulations, and they want you to have no or low administrative and fundraising costs, as though you don’t need to have an accountant and HR and building costs and all those things. Major
JILLIAN OLMSTED
gifts are a big deal. So is someone going to the website and donating $5 a month. This year one of our food grants was used up so soon, but we served 35 percent more people last year and prices have jumped. Every dollar determines how many people we can help.
HAVE YOU EVER TURNED SOMEONE AWAY BECAUSE OF MONEY?
No, but we probably should have. I think we get really close to burning out our staff when we are operating at full capacity.
WHAT ARE HOLIDAYS LIKE AT THE INN BETWEEN?
We let the residents decide. There was more controlling before and we’d keep holidays to a minimum, worried some people might have related trauma. Now we’ve just decided we’re going to go for it. We’re going to let residents decorate and decide what to do. If there’s a Santa Claus and some people don’t want to participate, they can stay in their rooms. There will be an inclusive, diverse range of holidays and residents can choose what they participate in, rather than us putting residents in a bubble. I mean, if you go to any store, there’s Christmas stuff all over the place. You don’t escape it.
HOW HAVE RESIDENTS RESPONDED?
Last year for Halloween we let everybody write down what they wanted to be, with no guarantee, but we said we’re gonna try and go to Deseret Industries so that you guys can be whatever. We had a resident named Liz. She was over 50. And Liz wanted to be a scarecrow. Her family wouldn’t let her dress up or go trick-or-treating, so this was her first and last Halloween before passing at the facility. She was just so stinking happy. This cute-as-a-button scarecrow went all out just to have lunch in the dining room.
HOW ARE RESIDENT DECISIONS MADE?
We’re required to have a resident council; the state regulates that for the assisted living side. And they have such a big voice in so many things. Yes, they’re staying here for free. Yes, that’s better than sleeping behind the dumpster. But they deserve high-quality care and to be treated equitably. So it’s been awesome to see. We have to police people so much less when they’re given the authority to police each other: This is your home, so you get to call some shots on how you want your home to be.
WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED ABOUT LIFE FROM BEING AT THE INN?
I’ve learned that if you wait to plan for your death, then it probably isn’t going to be as peaceful for you or the people around you. And if you wait to tell your family or friends or anyone your wishes, you might get to a point where you can no longer advocate for yourself, which will lead to a tumultuous ending. But I’ve also learned that we can’t take it personally when people are upset. We focused a lot on those behaviors early on. The thought was, they should be happy that this is better than the alternatives. Yeah, but they’re having to swallow that giant pill of being in a hospice for the homeless. And chances are, this is the last place they’re going to be. Being on the streets for so long, being treated poorly by some people, it can just be rough. People are coming to terms with all that. I love it when they are sweet, kind and thankful, but I also know they’re angry at life or themselves or their circumstances. We have to have compassion for their feelings.
ARE THERE TENDER MOMENTS?
We don’t care if you’re mad, we don’t care if you’re grumpy, no matter what, no strings attached, we’re always going
to be there. I’ve had a few residents say, “I just wanted to tell you that no one has ever treated me this kindly in my entire life.” It’s sad because I don’t feel like we’re being overly kind. We’re just being human. It’s tragic to think that someone’s gone through their whole life and it just took someone letting them stay in a bed and making meals for them. What was their childhood like? That just makes you wonder if they ever really experienced love. When I give tours, it feels like a movie set. I wonder if people think that we’re setting stuff up, like one resident pushing another’s wheelchair or helping someone to fill a hummingbird feeder. We have “Pleasantville” moments that you couldn’t even script. And some stuff you have to let be, like with kids. You could focus on preventing your kid from picking his nose at age two. Or you could just make sure he doesn’t run out into traffic.
WHAT IF PEOPLE ARE AFRAID TO VOLUNTEER?
Come visit. There’s no commitment. People can come and spend some time and figure out what’s the best fit for them. If they’re not sure about being in the facility, they can help with stuff outside — yardwork and other needs. And we need people to drive our residents to and from appointments or to chaperone activities.
ANY LAST WORD?
We have to put ourselves in the situation of the people we’re seeing. Few are homeless by choice, most are homeless because of a medical crisis, or they lost their job and home. That could happen to any one of us. How would you want to be treated?
