The Gray Matters issue

HUM NITIES NORTH DAKOTA MAGAZINE

09.21

the

GRAY MATTERS

issue

CONTENTS THE GRAY MATTERS ISSUE 02 WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT HOPE

by David Bjerklie

10 FRIGHTEN THEM AND THEY WILL BELIEVE IT: EMOTIONS INCREASE FALSE BELIEF

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by Sara Gorman

16 WHY THE CONSTITUTION MATTERS: THE FOUNDATION OF AMERICA

by David Adler

22 HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? CHAPTER 2, RISING OUT OF HATRED

by Eli Saslow

36 AT 79, MY MOTHER DECIDES TO PLANT TREES

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by Debra Marquart

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44 A SHORT COLLECTION OF POEMS

by Mark Vinz

48 BITTER TEARS

by Denise Lajimodiere

HUMANITIES NORTH DAKOTA MAGAZINE is published by Humanities North Dakota.

To subscribe, please contact us: 701.255.3360 info@humanitiesnd.org humanitiesnd.org

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this magazine do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or Humanities North Dakota.

The Humanities North Dakota Magazine has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.

BRENNA GERHARDT

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR The staff at Humanities North Dakota spent last winter writing our obituaries. It may sound like a morbid thing to do during a global pandemic, but we found it life-affirming. It was an exercise meant to help us live backward from our ultimate goals and find the time to focus on the things that matter to us, both at work and in our personal lives.

Our instructor in this endeavor was the author Donald Miller. He asked us to create a life theme, steeped in our core values, for this point in our journey. At first, I listed a bunch of lofty ideals, including justice and truth. Powerful words, but not ones that got to the heart of who I am. Much to my dismay, it turns out I’m not Batman or Bryan Stevenson. Miller told us that if you want to know your core values, think about what makes you mad. Your anger tells you that something fundamental to your principles is being trampled on. I get worked up pretty quickly when people are cruel, arrogant, and more interested in proving themselves right than having a meaningful conversation, so I guess my core values are kindness, humility, and good faith.

It might have taken me forty-one years to name my core values, but they were always there waiting to be discovered. That’s what I love about lifelong learning: there is always something more to uncover and create.

Our annual Gray Matters issue is an invitation to continue your lifelong journey along with some of the best thinkers in the nation. I hope you discover something new about yourself along the way, and if you do, please reach out and share your insights with me. I love hearing from our members! My email is director@humanitiesnd.org.

Much heart, Brenna Gerhardt Executive Director & Fellow Lifelong Learner

COVER ARTIST As a mixed-media artist and educator, LAURA YOUNGBIRD works in series to help her tell a story. She works in a variety of media: drawing, painting and printmaking. The dress is a constant symbol in her work, addressing social injustices such as the Native Boarding School experience and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People movement (MMIP).

The dress helps Laura tell her story, which is woven together with those of her sisters, her mother, and her grandmothers. Laura’s mother used to make dresses for her sisters and her; she remembers the stories, the smell of the sewing machine combined with oil, fabric, the heat of the light, and the sound of the motor as the stitches ticked away.

The dress is a simple garment and a powerful artifact. It represents a sorrowful saga that entwines, binds, and connects her grandmother, her mother, her sisters, and all her relatives with the power of the common thread.

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WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT

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... hope abides, no matter the storm. That just sounds so right.

by David Bjerklie

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can be easily persuaded that a perfect poetic image is also the last word on a subject. Take Emily Dickinson’s celebrated couplet, “Hope is the thing with feathers / that perches in the soul.”

For Dickinson, hope abides, no matter the storm. That just sounds so right. And it’s certainly a view supported by Keats, who wrote that “sweet Hope” could drive away “sad Despondency” and “Disappointment, parent of Despair” as “the morning frightens night.” Carl Sandburg took a spin on the idea with a long list of metaphors, beginning with “Hope is a tattered flag and a dream of time.” Sandburg ends the stanza with: “Hope is an echo, hope ties itself yonder, yonder.”

But then what to make of Emily Brontë, for whom “Hope was but a timid friend,” one who “was cruel in her fear,” like “a false guard, false watch keeping.” Of course, it shouldn’t be a surprise that poets don’t line up in agreement on the subject. The wider the net we cast, the more forms and fashions of hope we haul in.

The ancient Greeks were inclined to consider hope as the last resort of those who came up short in knowledge, preparation, and planning. It was certainly not, as Thucydides pointed out, a strategy to bet on when it came to war. The most famous Greek view on hope, however, is found in the myth of Pandora. After

Prometheus stole the secret of fire from the gods and handed it over to humankind, Zeus sought retribution by commissioning the creation of Pandora who was given, in addition to beauty, a jar packed full of assorted evils and miseries. Though told never to open the jar, Pandora did so, which unleashed the evils into the world.

Hope alone remained inside. Later versions of the myth tweaked various details, but philosophers ever since have debated whether having hope remain in the jar was a good thing, a curse, or a bit of both. As psychiatrist and philosopher Neel Burton notes, “All these interpretations and more are in the nature of hope, and so perhaps the ambiguity is deliberate.”

Plato warned against “gullible hope” but included “confidence and fear” as “mindless advisers” as well. His student Aristotle tried to put a finer point on the distinctions: “The coward, then, is a despairing sort of person; for he fears everything. The brave man, on the other hand, has the opposite disposition; for confidence is the mark of a hopeful disposition.” Nearly 2000 years later, Francis Bacon had the cautionary advice that, “Hope is a good breakfast, but a bad supper.” Philosopher Baruch Spinoza offered that “there is no hope without fear, and no fear without hope,” noting that “the two of them march in unison like a prisoner

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To hope, “is to confuse the desire that something should occur with the probability that it will.” and the escort he is handcuffed to. Fear keeps pace with hope. Nor does their so moving together surprise me; both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future.”

The challenge of hope is clearly a tough nut to crack. Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, observed that the question “For what may I hope?” was one of the three fundamental questions of philosophy, after “What can I know?” and “What should I do?” Arthur Schopenhauer believed that to hope “is to confuse the desire that something should occur with the probability that it will. Perhaps no man is free from this folly of the heart, which deranges the intellect’s correct estimation of probability to such a degree as to make him think the event quite possible, even if the chances are only a thousand to one.” It is a miscalculation with consequences, however, warns Schopenhauer, who observed that while “an unexpected misfortune” can be “like a speedy death-stroke,” holding onto “hope that is always frustrated, and yet springs into life again, is like death by slow torture.” Schopenhauer’s counsel: “He who has given up hope has also given up fear.”

The line of philosophers who have noted that hope can deepen our human torments is a long one. Writing in The Stone, a philosophically-minded opinion series in the New York Times, philosopher Simon Critchley asks: “Is hope always such a wonderful thing? Is it not rather a form of moral cowardice that allows us to escape from reality and prolong human suffering?”

If anything, the contemporary discussion over hope has both raised the stakes and broadened the field considerably. There are still plenty of folks in the Dickinson camp. Hope has a huge lobby, one that has launched a wide range of 4

cottage industries in TED talks, podcasts, positive psychology courses, and self-help books. In our modern era, hope is presented as a gift, a choice, a perspective, an approach, something learned but also something perhaps hardwired into our biological constitution. “A hopeful sense of the promise of the future may be as important to communities’ welfare as yeast to rising bread,” wrote anthropologist Lionel Tiger, in Optimism: The Biology of Hope. “I believe it is almost a psychological necessity—for a hunting/gathering primate—to think optimistically about the future.”

Or as philosophy blogger John Messerly succinctly puts it, “In short, we are the descendants of those who hoped.”

That doesn’t mean this inheritance is simple.

A huge amount of effort and argument has gone into teasing out what parts of our temperament are nature and what part nurture. It hasn’t been pretty.

“If by magic, I could make a single interminable debate disappear, I’d probably pick ‘nature versus nurture,’” wrote University of Syracuse professor of biology, H. Allen Orr, in the New York Review of Books. “The argument over the relative roles of genes and environment in human nature has been ceaselessly politicized, shows little sign of resolution, and has, in general, grown tiresome.”

But of course there are also reasons why the argument won’t go away. In fact, in an article in Daedalus titled “Why nature & nurture won’t go away,” Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker argued that our interest in the subject is basically unavoidable. “People’s beliefs about the relative importance of heredity and environment affect their opinions on an astonishing range of topics.” Sex, race, violence, and mental illness, just for starters. And while Pinker argues that it won’t do to dismiss every “attempt to disentangle heredity and environment as uncouth,” or to reflexively believe that “for every question about nature and nurture, the correct answer is ‘some of each,’” Orr counters that we also have plenty of reason to worry about being too easily seduced by simplistic Darwinian storytelling that reduces every human behavior to building blocks that might be evolutionarily adaptive.

| GRAY MATTERS ISSUE | Optimism is a case study. Back in 2011, a breathless university press release announced that “UCLA life scientists have identified for the first time a particular gene’s link to optimism, self-esteem and ‘mastery,’ the belief that one has control over one’s own life--three critical psychological resources for coping well with stress and depression.” The gene in question was one that produces oxytocin, often referred to as the “cuddle hormone,” which, in addition to being involved in labor and milk release, is involved in bonding between mother and infant, as well as romantic partners. In 2018, however, results from a research team in New Zealand threw a bucket of cold water directly on the UCLA finding. And of course that’s how science proceeds, but as we wait for further news, we are primed to believe that there is indeed “a gene for optimism” and that the hunt is on. The search for genetic links becomes the tail that wags the dog.

That doesn’t mean there are no genetic components to behavior. In a 2015 article published in The Journal of Positive Psychology, titled, “The Glass is Half Full and Half Empty,” researchers found “distinct genetic influences on optimism and pessimism” in their study of nearly 900 pairs of twins. But their results emphasized the underlying complexity of behavioral genetics.

Not only did they find that optimism could not be reduced to a single dimension of personality, let alone a single gene, they found evidence that optimism and pessimism are not opposite ends of a simple spectrum, but rather appear to be, at least to some degree, biologically distinct. But most significantly, they emphasized that “our understanding of the role of family environment, of genetics, and of unique life experiences in developing optimism and reducing pessimism is in its infancy.”

The bottom line is that there will be no way ever to perfectly distinguish between the influence of genes and their interaction with environment and experience. Even the timing of experience can be critical to how our capacities for optimism develop and change. So while quests to find cause-and-effect explanations for multidimensional

behaviors such as hope or optimism are doomed, ongoing research will certainly shed new light on the complexities of temperament and personality.

And the more we know about nature and origins of hope, the better we will be able to evaluate whether, when, where, and how to best cultivate it.

Easier said than done. Consider how wide the spectrum of hope can be. We can hope that a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer is wrong or we can hope to win the next Powerball; we can hope for peace on Earth, good will toward all or, more specifically, for peace in Syria, Myanmar, or the Congo; we can hope for the Vikings to finally win a Superbowl or that we never cross paths with an ex again; we can hope our crummy grades still get us into our stretch college or that the sun comes out after three days of rain; we can hope to grow two inches over the summer, lose 25 pounds, become a better person, or change our accent; we can hope an enemy will someday suffer or that a friend who died years ago didn’t suffer; we can hope for liberty, equality, and fraternity or for more (or less) restrictive local zoning laws; we can hope for a lenient sentence and probation; we can hope for salvation, or we can hope to just “get the hell out of Dodge,” whether Dodge is a small town, urban blight, or suffocating relationship.

We know that hope is not a single thing.

Imagine a set of Venn diagrams. And then try to visualize the overlap between hope and optimism, hope and faith, hope and belief. How about hope and motivation, hope and confidence, hope and courage, or hope and anxiety, uncertainty, or fear. It may be that hope falls into the category of “I know it when I see it,” as Potter Stewart famously put it, concerning the challenge of identifying what is and isn’t pornography.

But if we know hope when we see it, does that mean we can also spot its opposite? What distinctions do we see between the absence of hope and hopelessness? Or despair? What is the experience that Dante braces us for in his Inferno: how does it truly feel to “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!”

Definitions strive to be drawn with clear lines, though reality often begs to differ. Hope can seem 5

| GRAY MATTERS ISSUE | to be so many things: an emotion, a mood or attitude, a psychological vehicle, tactic or strategy.

Is hope always situational? Does it need an object?

How are hopes related to identity and dreams?

One of the pioneers in the psychological investigation of hope was C. R. Snyder, who introduced the model that has come to be called Hope Theory. Snyder and colleagues also devised an array of Hope Scales to measure and evaluate levels of hope, or its absence, among various populations, including children. In simple terms, hope is the journey to a desired goal, or destination, which requires a map and means of transportation.

Not all goals are equal, of course, and so the challenge we face is to estimate our odds in reaching them. But these sorts of calculations, if they are conscious at all, are nearly always seat-ofthe-pants stuff. And yet we are constantly engaged in this mental math. As C. R. Snyder writes in The Psychology of Hope, “we are inherently goaloriented as we think about our futures. In the words of the noted psychotherapist Alfred Adler, ‘We cannot think, feel, will or act without the perception of a goal.’” In fact, adds Snyder, “It is simply unthinkable not to think about goals.” So hope, explains Snyder, is the process by which we navigate from point A to point B. It was the reason that Snyder subtitled The Psychology of Hope: “You Can Get There from Here.”

Believing that goals are indeed achievable, however, can be daunting. David Anderson, senior director of ADHD and Behavior Disorders at the Childmind Institute in New York sees this firsthand in how children cope with problems. We can’t assume that kids possess the ability to hope well or hope wisely. “Kids are influenced by so many factors. We all fall into behavioral patterns, ways we automatically think about things.”

These patterns can become the stories we tell ourselves about what we can and cannot do. The stories fuel our views about the value or futility of hope. “What we try to do is to help kids identify the patterns of thinking that lead to their feelings of hopelessness,” says Anderson. “We’re not trying to blame people for their thinking patterns. But 6

rather, to let them know that this doesn’t have to be the lens through which they see the world.”

The goal, says Anderson, is “to help them engage in thinking patterns that, over time, will lead to a sense of hope.” As Anderson points out, “We don’t diagnose anything based on hope and there’s no specifically hope-focused intervention, but much of what we do centers on building hope.”

None of the above, however, means that hope is categorically always a good thing. We may admire steadfastness in hope, but we can also recognize when hope is held out too long. Misplaced hope can undermine our ability to adjust or adapt.

But we so fear the terror of hopelessness that false hope can seem like the lesser of two evils.

For generations, for example, doctors routinely withheld from patients the news that their illness was incurable, untreatable, that there was nothing that medical science could offer, because the doctors assumed the resulting loss of hope would be too devastating to bear. It was paternalistic, sure, but we can nonetheless understand the impulse. And the fear. “Abandon all hope!” is damn tough news to deliver.

Who are we, after all, to judge one hope to be rational, valid, and defensible, and another to be misguided, mistaken, or patently false? What do hopes of the right size and shape look like? What are the criteria we should apply to that judgment?

Especially when many hopes can be moving targets in terms of why, when, and how they go from outlandish to reasonable.

But there are times when cross-examining hope is exactly what is called for. This can be true on a personal level, but also a societal one. The young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg challenges us to confront the nature and consequences of hope: Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’

But I don’t want your hope.

I don’t want you to be hopeful.

I want you to panic.

| GRAY MATTERS ISSUE | I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.

And then I want you to act.

I want you to act as you would in a crisis.

I want you to act as if our house is on fire.

Because it is.

Thunberg clearly isn’t suggesting a paralyzing despair, but she is also clearly intolerant of hope that lacks urgency and action. She could well be invoking Spinoza’s observation that “there is no hope without fear, and no fear without hope.” It is a perspective that is as critically relevant to the challenge of dismantling systemic racism as it is to fighting climate change. “Don’t just hope; do something!”

It doesn’t take much digging to uncover instances in which hope has been politically naive, cynical, or manipulative. On the other hand, there have been countless examples of oppressive political regimes and power structures that fueled their oppression by systematically crushing hope.

It’s easy to imagine some Orwellian dystopia in which The Ministry of Hope wields power through one strategy or the other, or more likely, both.

But we don’t need Netflix fantasies to be confronted by the complexities of encouraging or discouraging hope. We have all heard about the benefits of optimism–from healthier, more meaningful lives to more satisfying relationships.

And yet, for every dozen media stories, podcasts, TED talks, or self-help books about the benefits of optimism, there will be at least one or two contrarian views that will not just point out the dangers of optimism, but actually extoll the benefits of pessimism. Turns out everyone is right, at least in part.

There are essentially “two broad approaches to the relationship between optimism and success,” according to Lisa Bortolotti, of the University of Birmingham, in the U.K. The “traditional view,” which holds that the more realistic you are across the board, the better off you’re likely to be. The “trade-off view,” on the other hand, holds that embracing small distortions about reality can

Who are we, after all, to judge one hope to be rational, valid, and defensible, and another to be misguided, mistaken, or patently false? actually be good for you. Note the adjective, “small,” as in moderation. It’s ok to have a slightly rosier view of things than the facts seem to merit, but don’t get carried away. The nature of these distortions, explains Bortolotti, often falls into the category of “illusions of control,” in which “we believe that we can control independent external events,” and “illusions of superiority,” in which “we believe that we are better than average in a variety of domains, including attractiveness, intelligence, and even moral character.”

The “trade-off view” sounds like a good middleof-the-road position to take, but upon closer look, it’s not so simple. The size of the distortions don’t actually seem to be that important. Small distortions of reality don’t necessarily have any benefit and oversized distortions don’t necessarily backfire. What counts most when it comes to positive illusions, believes Bortolotti, is their ability to sustain our motivation and support our agency.

An illusion is still an illusion, however, and believing you can control external events is still an irrational belief.

According to Michael Milona of Ryerson University, in Toronto, ”As it turns out, we do have some control over the emergence of positive illusions. But whether we should cultivate them (or at least not interfere with existing beneficial illusions) is a delicate ethical question, since doing so would amount to supporting irrationality.”

It all depends. “Sometimes we can overcome a problem, or avoid a potential one, through perseverance and strategic thinking.” It certainly seems reasonable to cultivate “illusions of control” in these realms. “A tendency to think that we are in control creates patterns of thought of the form, ‘I can do this,’ which tends to lead to constructive 7

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“Hope constitutes a fragile mix of yearning for a desired outcome, a degree of confidence that this has some chance of occurring, and an anxiety that it will not.” behavior.” Furthermore, this heightened sense of control can be combined with the additional irrational belief “that one is superior and that things will turn out well.” But it’s important to keep in mind, adds Milona, that the focus is on increasing a person’s agency. Illusion “that functions only to enhance one’s mood and selfesteem,” on the other hand, “is likely to undermine well-being in the long run.”

The goal is to help people reach their goals, their desired destinations, not just to inflate their opinions about themselves. Imagine the wide range of possible scenarios in which a better understanding of the elements of hope and optimism could help facilitate resilience and recovery. It is a long-term project to be sure, one that poses many hard questions. Where, when, why, and to what extent is hope a desired end and justifiable social-service or public-health intervention? And that’s just a start.

There are and will continue to be a broad range of views on hope. But nearly everyone will acknowledge that hope or its absence is not a black-or-white proposition. Writing in the August 2015 issue of the Journal of Happiness, University of East London psychologists Tim Lomas and Itai Ivtzan explore the nature of dichotomies in psychology, pointing out that “many emotional states are ‘co-valenced,’ inherently involving complex, intertwined shades of light and dark.”

Understood in this context, “hope constitutes a fragile mix of yearning for a desired outcome, a degree of confidence that this has some chance of occurring, and an anxiety that it will not.”

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One of the great opening lines in all of literature is undoubtedly Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It is so compelling, in fact, that people have seen within it a general principle, “The Anna Karenina Principle,” one they then try to apply to a variety of situations, in which success demands all of a certain set of conditions be present, while failure can be due to any number of factors. It would certainly be satisfyingly neat to see some parallel in hope. But that would likely take more massaging than it merits. (And besides, even Tolstoy might have admitted that he was stretching a bit to reach a psychological truth.)

Milona and colleague Katie Stockdale, of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, recently wrote an article for the online magazine Psyche, in which they make the point that, in contrast with optimism, which is defined by confidence, “hope requires only possibility.” And this, in turn, of course, is why hope “makes us vulnerable to disappointment and failure.” But that, in fact, is its great underlying power, because in this way hope “also provides occasions to reflect on our values.” l

DAVID BJERKLIE grew up in Minot, North Dakota, and studied biology and anthropology at the University of North Dakota. Since 1984, he has reported on a wide range of science topics for TIME Magazine, TIME For Kids, and TIME Books. He was a 1989-90 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at M.I.T.; a 2013 and 2015 grant recipient at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings in Germany; and in 2014 traveled to Antarctica as a National Science Foundation Media Fellow. In 2015-16, he was a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow. He is currently working with Arctic researchers to develop a science-writing mentorship program.

HUMANITIES ND MEMBER PROFILE

DAVE AND KARLA EHLIS During the past year, Dave Ehlis, President & CEO at American Bank Center, soon to be Bravera, survived COVID, rode the wave of financial uncertainty for North Dakota banks and businesses, and was there for his wife Karla during the illness and death of her mother. And he did so with an unwavering gratitude for his family and the miracles that have unfolded during that same time.

Dave and Karla met at Ft. Hood in the late ‘80s while he was stationed there as an officer following his time at West Point. Karla’s sorority sister happened to be dating Dave’s roommate, and she decided to keep her company on the road trip to see him. A friendship between Dave and Karla began, but she was leaving soon to teach English in Taiwan. He was preparing to deploy to the first Gulf War. One day, Dave, not knowing how long he would be gone, decided to reach out to Karla to see if she would come back to see him before he deployed.

“This could be our last chance,” Dave thought, as he threw the Hail-Mary pass. Karla gave the trip some serious thought, but an incoming typhoon gave her no choice but to stay in Taiwan. It looked like they would not see each other before he left–that is, until he broke his leg in a car accident on post, and his departure was delayed just long enough for her to return when her teaching assignment was over.

It was then that they officially started dating. Dave would meet up with his unit in the Gulf after his leg healed. About a year later, they were married, and their family grew by two daughters over the next few years. “We’ve been married for twenty-nine years, at least!” said Karla as she and Dave tried to figure out the correct number of years.

Banking had always been Dave’s family business.

His dad was CEO of American Bank Center and worked hard for about twenty years to recruit Dave back to Bismarck. But it wasn’t until Dave and Karla were ready that they moved to North Dakota. “We were ready to settle down,” Karla said.

Dave enjoyed being back in Bismarck, and Karla

Dave Ehlis’s West Point connection caught Karla by surprise in the first few moments of their marriage. In the Army, it is tradition for the couple to walk through the line of raised sabers, stop, and as the groom gives his bride a kiss, the last soldier in line taps the bride on the butt with the saber and says, “Welcome to the Army, m’am!”

fell in love with North Dakota right away. Well, she fell in love with everything except the wind. They were excited about putting down deeper roots and being more established. For the first time in their married life, they could really invest in their community.

Lifelong learning is in their DNA. Growing up, Dave’s father was a farmer and very well read. “We had the Wall Street Journal and many other publications around the house.” As Dave traveled more and more, he realized just how little he knew. “I was constantly curious.” Karla, whose mom was Chinese and her dad American of German descent, had always felt caught between cultures. When she was younger, she identified with all the Amy Tan books. “Stinky lunches didn’t go over well at school,” Karla laughed. Her mom packed her sushi for lunch long before it became popular in America. This conflict intrigued her and peaked her curiosity as she grew up.

Dave and Karla’s curiosity, love of lifelong learning, and generous commitment to the North Dakota community led them to be sponsors and dear friends of Humanities North Dakota. “We love the mission of Humanities North Dakota,” Dave said. “We are curious people, and Humanities North Dakota promotes curiosity.” The Ehlises generously support the HND “We The People” civics education program. “It is so needed right now,” Dave said, “as a society and for our young people.”

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FRIGHTEN THEM AND THEY WILL BELIEVE IT: EMOTIONS INCREASE FALSE BELIEF ADOPTION

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alse information spreads faster than the truth on the internet, and false information about scientific topics is among the most rapidly spread categories. What makes us prone to believing something that is utterly or even mostly incorrect? Can anything be done to counteract our acceptance of incorrect scientific information?

Let’s start with the statement “vaccines overstimulate the immune system.” This statement is false; if we struck “over” from “stimulate” we would have a true statement. The

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by Sara Gorman

false statement, however, is rather unimposing and matter of fact. It also relies on a technical point about immune system biology. Perhaps if you saw it on Twitter or Facebook, you would glance but not commit it to memory. If you were the parent of a two-month-old infant and in the process of thinking about your child’s first immunizations, this bland statement might not influence you one way or the other.

Now let’s change the tone of the statement.

“Every time you give your child one of the hundreds of vaccines we are told they have to

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An impressive body of research shows that raising emotions, especially fear and anger, increases the chances that a false statement will be believed, remembered, and shared.

have, her immune system goes wild with attack antibodies ready to destroy your baby’s health.”

The substance of this new statement is largely the same as the first one—it asserts that somehow vaccines put the human immune system into overdrive. Yet it is now filled with many emotional words. There are now “hundreds” of vaccines that we are being “told” to give (i.e. “coerced” into giving) our children, and they make the immune system go “wild,” “attack,” and “destroy.” Perhaps this statement, unlike the first one, grabs your attention and makes you wonder if you want to vaccinate your baby at all.

Indeed, an impressive body of research shows that raising emotions, especially fear and anger, increases the chances that a false statement will be believed, remembered, and shared. As Portia puts it in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching: the brain may

devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree. . . .

This is something politicians figured out long ago—don’t just tell them that some people coming into your country may have committed crimes in the past; warn them that hordes of drug dealers, rapists, and terrorists are pouring over your borders ready to murder and pillage. If possible, find a single story of one such murderous immigrant and detail what happened to his victims in gory detail. When more sensible voices come by later and point out that the denominator for this phenomenon—the total number of people who have immigrated into your country—is far larger than the numerator— the number of immigrants who commit crimes—and that for the most part immigrants have a positive effect on your society and its economy, it is already too late. The original false, highly emotional message is now impervious to such corrective, data-filled recitations.

“People base their judgements of an activity or a

technology not only on what they think about it but also on how they feel about it; they use an affect heuristic,” writes Ohio State University Professor Ellen Peters, who studies the role of affect and emotions in decision making. For example, Peters explains, the terms “mad cow disease” and “bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE)” refer to the same neurodegenerative disease, but media use of the former term elicits more fear and reduces beef consumption more than the latter.

WHAT DETERMINES THE THINGS WE BELIEVE AND REMEMBER We are bombarded with many, many more statements, purporting to be factual than we can possibly incorporate into memory or on which we can base decisions. Many times, we see statements about issues or concerns that we have never considered before. Most likely, a young couple with a new baby did not spend much time thinking about vaccine safety until their own first baby approached two months old.

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| GRAY MATTERS ISSUE | What can we do to prevent the initial contact with misinformation that becomes a fixed belief and influences important health-related behaviors?

Whether we notice a new statement in the media or on the internet depends in part, of course, on its relevance. The young couple is less likely to pay attention to a statement like “to prevent dementia from getting worse, you should eat more vegetables” than to one about how to prevent sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

Another important factor that determines what we believe and remember seems to be the novelty of a new statement. If a statement seems boring and already passé, we will ignore it. How many times can we be told “get more exercise”? That statement is absolutely true and critical for improving health and well-being, but put that way it fails to capture much attention.

If the exercise statement is couched with something that seems novel, however, we might stop and consider it. “Exercise found in recent study to extend average life-span.” We already knew that exercise is beneficial (or at least we have already been told that a million times), but here we have a brand-new piece of research that tantalizes us with the possibility of living longer. Adding a bit of novelty, even to an old message, makes it noteworthy. By the way, we made that headline up: although exercise is great, whether it extends how long one lives is 12

dependent on a lot of factors.

So please don’t cite us and pass on a misstatement!

Perhaps the most important factor that determines how much impact a statement will make on decision-making is whether it evokes strong emotions when we first encounter it. In the simplified version of how our brains work, we have two systems, one fast and one slow. The fast one, which is based in the more primitive parts of the brain like the limbic cortex, uses shortcuts to make rapid decisions and is highly susceptible to basic emotions like fear, sadness, anger, disgust, and happiness. The slow one, which is based in the more sophisticated prefrontal cortex, uses reason and experience to make rational decisions based on data. These systems have the capacity to inhibit each other; when strong emotions are stirred, the limbic cortex can inhibit the prefrontal cortex and prevent us from using reason to make a decision. On the other hand, we have the capacity to muster the power of the prefrontal cortex to suppress our more primitive brain and assert reason over emotion.

This view of the brain is a well-worn story that of course obscures a huge amount of detail and nuance, but it

is useful in explaining why emotions are so important in reinforcing false beliefs.

When the new parents see the emotional statement about the alleged dangers of vaccines, we would hope that they would pause, ask themselves if this could possibly be true, and consider what sources might give them reliable information. We want them to ask their own pediatrician and consult the websites of reliable organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics or the CDC. In reality, however, this couple has a million things on its mind—there are constant recommendations about how to advance the baby’s diet, she’s outgrowing her newborn clothes, people at work have stopped honoring the idea of maternity/paternity leave, emails and texts are mounting up, and the rent still has to be paid. There just isn’t time to research vaccines.

But the terrifying statement about vaccines making the immune system go berserk has made its impression on the couple. It is not easy to ignore. So, they click on a few of the comments made in the Twitter feed or Facebook page where the statement is posted and see one comment after another that confirms the original scary message.

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Ten, twenty, thirty people jump into the conversation, each with some frightening tidbits of information about a child supposedly harmed by a vaccine or an easily graspable (albeit incorrect) explanation of how the immune system works and how vaccines harm it.

Perhaps after 15 or 30 minutes of this, the couple realizes they have other things they must do and break away, but the damage has been done.

They are emotionally aroused, scared, and a bit angry that it took a session on Twitter to find out things that the medical establishment and pharmaceutical industry are supposedly hiding from them.

In the worst-case scenario, this couple, who had previously entertained no fixed opinion about vaccinations, now decides to put off the baby’s first immunizations. Their child does not get her shots to prevent potentially catastrophic, communicable diseases like diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, H. flu type b, and polio. Moreover, after this point, even if the couple encounters correct information about vaccines, the mere mention of the word “vaccine” stimulates the original emotions they felt when they first saw that Twitter message, and the reasoning parts of their brains immediately shut down. Who knows if this child, subsequent children the couple may have, or some of the children of people in their

social network will ever get any vaccinations?

HOW TO COUNTERACT MISSTATEMENTS What can we do to prevent the initial contact with misinformation that becomes a fixed belief and influences important health-related behaviors? As individuals, we can be on guard so that whenever we see a statement that provokes an emotional reaction, we push pause and wait to calm down before evaluating it. Working on an individual level is important, but we also need to develop strategies with a broader reach.

One possibility is to make our corrective messages just as emotionally wrought as the misinformed ones. Instead of fact-based, unemotional explanations about how vaccinations work, why they are necessary, and how safe they are—the kind of messages that medical experts and scientists feel most comfortable giving— we might try showing pictures of babies wracked with whooping cough to the point that their ribs crack, dying from measles, or succumbing to H. flu meningitis.

A much discussed and very rigorously conducted study of this approach, however, yielded surprising findings that serve as a cautionary tale. In a randomized trial that varied the emotional content of correct information about vaccines, Dartmouth’s Brendan Nyhan and

colleagues found that pictures of children sick with measles actually increased subjects’ belief in the false link between vaccines and autism. The researchers, and many others since then, speculated that this “backfire effect” occurred for much the same reason as explained above: any evocation of emotion, regardless of its content, summons memory of the original belief rather than the newly presented correct one. From this study, many have decided that counteracting emotionally driven health misinformation with emotionally driven correct information is potentially dangerous.

Since the publication of this paper nearly six years ago, some studies have replicated the Nyhan et al finding, but others have not supported the “backfire effect.” Thus, whether fighting fire with fire (i.e. emotional misinformation with emotional correct information) is an effective or even safe intervention is going to require more research.

One way of counteracting false health and science information without risking a putative “backfire effect” might be to prevent it from being committed to permanent memory in the first place.

The literature is replete with warnings that merely counteracting false statements with facts is an ineffective approach and that people cannot be counted on to use 13

| GRAY MATTERS ISSUE | their analytical skills when confronted with misstatements.

Yet studies are increasingly showing that neither of these is absolutely the case and that people can be encouraged to use analytical thinking to make decisions, even with regard to controversial topics.

In fact, findings suggest that it is precisely leaving false statements uncorrected that leads to their being nearly impossible to dislodge later on. “Therefore, media and policymakers should ensure that the coverage of misinformation at no point presents itself without corrective information,” assert psychologists Man-pui Sally Chan, Christopher Jones, and Dolores Albarracin. “Uncorrected repetition of misinformation opens the opportunity to generate thoughts in agreement with it.”

THE ELEMENTS OF COUNTERACTING MISINFORMATION The critical elements to help ensure that corrective information works seem to involve at least three things.

First, corrections should be made as close in time as possible to misstatements.

Second, corrections should appear on the same platform as the misstatements. Third, corrections should be clear, understandable, and appeal to the values of the audience. We know from abundant basic and clinical neuroscience that shortterm memories are malleable 14

but become much less so when transferred to long-term memory storage. We also know that “place” plays an important part in memory—where we saw or experienced something is an important way in which memories are stored and retrieved. From this information, it seems probable—but still to be tested— that our first two assertions are accurate: to successfully counteract a misstatement, place the correct information close to it in both time and place. That means, therefore, we should try to get our scientific statements directly onto the Twitter feeds, Facebook group pages, and other social media platforms and websites as soon as misstatements appear on them.

The third proposed basic element for counteracting misinformation is less easily justified. The literature on the form that corrective information should take is too long to review here, but much of it is laboratory based and it is therefore unclear what will really work in the field. Although it is clear that strong emotion fosters memory, including memory of false statements, we will begin by steering clear of trying to evoke fear and anger in case the backfire effect is a real phenomenon. Rather, we hope to focus on people like our prototypical couple who have just read the frightening message about vaccine safety just as they are about to decide on whether to vaccinate their new child. With that couple in mind,

we will approach counteracting messages by trying to establish common interests, inquiring about what the people already know about the topic, and gently introducing facts in ways that are understandable but not overly simplified. Is it necessary to scare people in order to get them to shun false statements and adopt healthy behavior? Or does that backfire and make them even more recalcitrant to scientific consensus? We know quite a lot about this from laboratory studies.

Now, it’s time to find out what works on everyone’s favorite social media platform. l SARA GORMAN is a public health specialist and behavioral science expert. Her book, Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Science That Will Save Us came out in a revised edition from Oxford University Press in June 2021. The book explores the psychology behind science denial and belief in healthand science-related misinformation.

JAN 11, 2022, 7-8 PM CST Sara Gorman speaks virtually about her book Denying To The Grave, which explores risk theory and how people make decisions about what is best for them and their loved ones, in an effort to better understand how people think when faced with significant health decisions. humanitiesnd.org/events

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WHY THE CONSTITUTION MATTERS: THE FOUNDATION OF AMERICA

by David Gray Adler

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he ratification of the Constitution represented a crowning achievement in the long and storied struggle to create a republican form of government; marked the rejection of Old World monarchical values and regimes and the emergence of the New World and its proclamation of liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness. The historical significance of the American Constitution cannot be overstated. It provided more democratic government than the world had ever seen. It framed the way we live. It shaped what we may do. It empowered and constrained government.

In our time, the Constitution is central to the nation’s identity, politics and discourse, and our policies, programs and laws. The Constitution, it may be said, is all-Broadway, all the time. It assumed center-stage in 1787 and, unless and until it is replaced by a political system that is hostile to constitutional democracy, it provides a permanent governing mechanism. In a word, the Constitution matters. It is the foundation of America.

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The profound significance of the Constitution—for our daily lives, the life of the nation and governmental actions—invites exploration of its provisions, themes and allocation of powers. It encourages us to ask about the aims, purposes, and concerns of the framers of the Constitution: What were they thinking? At a minimum, it spurs thoughts about the grand goals of the Constitution; such thoughts can focus our attention on why the document—the law of the land—matters.

Nobody can read the Constitution without reaching the conclusion that delegates to the Constitutional Convention were convinced of the necessity of avoiding the concentration of power. The dispersal of governmental authority among three branches, reinforced by specific grants of power to the legislature, executive, and judiciary, reflects the great influence of the French scholar Montesquieu on James Madison, who reminded us in Federalist No. 47 that “the accumulation of all governmental power” in the hands of one department is the “very definition of tyranny.” That is precisely why, through the implementation of the doctrines of separation of powers, checks and balances. and federalism, that authority is shared between the federal and state governments and that, at the federal government, it is divided among

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three branches of government and hedged, curbed, and cabined at every turn.

There was, within the Philadelphia Convention, a pervasive and understandable fear of governmental power. The founders had chafed under monarchical assertions of authority and the passage of increasingly arbitrary parliamentary legislation which, for them, reinforced the lessons that they gleaned from their reading of history, which taught that power represented a constant threat to liberty. James Madison, justly known as the Father of the Constitution for his role as chief architect of the charter, observed that, all “power is of an encroaching nature, and that it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.” The mistrust of power that coursed its way through the discussions and debates in the Constitutional Convention is manifested in the text and structure of the Constitution.

As a consequence, powers are checked, shared, and blended so that they cannot be aggrandized by one department and exercised in arbitrary ways. The addition of the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791, provided further protection for liberty by limiting the authority of government to regulate particular activities of the people, such as freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion, among others.

In 1926, in Myers v. United States, Justice Louis Brandeis observed: “The doctrine of separation of powers was adopted by the Constitutional Convention of 1787, not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was, not to avoid friction, but, by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of the governmental powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy.”

The framers’ philosophical concerns about the exercise—and abuse—of power 17

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The framers were committed to the distinctly American conception of a “constitution,” which declared it superior to government and written in express terms. reflect centuries-old fears, penetrate the core of the Humanities and plumb the depths of historical writings since the days of Plato and Aristotle. Tolstoy, the brilliant Russian writer, captured the concern: “In order to gain possession of power, and to retain it, one must have a love for it, and the love of power is incompatible with goodness; it accords with the opposite qualities of pride, duplicity, and cruelty.”

The founders’ widespread fears about the abuse, aggrandizement and exploitation of power were aired throughout the country—in taverns, coffee houses, newspapers, pamphlets, leaflets, tracts, and books. Thomas Jefferson, for example, feared the greedy expansiveness of power and found protection for the nation in the magistracy of the law: “It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power.” He added, “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

Fear of the abuse of power, however, could not be permitted to render the government impotent in the performance of its duties and responsibilities.

Government, as Madison pointed out in Federalist No. 51, must govern: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; 18

and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”

That was the great challenge in 1787, and it has remained an enduring challenge ever since. Madison’s prescriptions for controlling government, beyond a “dependence on the people,” included the separation of powers and checks and balances, but also the scheme of enumeration of powers, a doctrinal technique for limiting the exercise of power that students of the Constitution will readily grasp upon an examination of the document.

The text of the Constitution matters if we are to achieve the goal of limited, lawful government.

Governmental powers are enumerated, an approach that informs the citizenry about which powers are granted to which branches of government. Congress, for example, is vested with the authority to make laws, issue appropriations, and declare war. The president has the duty to “faithfully” execute the laws and the authority to grant pardons. The judiciary sits to hear “cases and controversies.” The enumeration of powers reflects, as explained

by James Iredell, an astute constitutional theorist and member of the first Supreme Court, “choices” made by the people at the time of the writing and ratification of the Constitution— choices about the particular allocation of powers, the particular division of responsibilities and the particular assignment of duties to governmental departments. The additional advantage of the enumeration doctrine is that it empowers Americans to hold government accountable by scrutinizing official acts to determine whether the constitutional allocation of powers has been followed, or whether one department is aggrandizing or usurping the authority of another. In this manner, Americans are acting, and performing, as “Madisonian Monitors.”

The empowerment of the citizenry, through the enumeration-of-powers principle, to closely scrutinize governmental actions to ensure adherence to the Constitution, is a manifestation of the premise, promise, and energy of a republic. A republic, as Madison emphasized in Federalist No. 51, cannot bet its existence

| GRAY MATTERS ISSUE | on the alleged good faith of those in office for, as the founders learned at the knee of the insightful English scholar, Lord Acton, “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The future of the republic, Madison believed, must rely on the spirit and commitment of “We the People” to the preservation of constitutional principles and democratic values. Who, after all, has a greater interest in protecting American Constitutionalism than the citizens themselves?

The founding generation’s belief that the primary goal of the Constitution was to protect liberty reflects their general indebtedness to English writers and yet another voice of the French Enlightenment, in this case, the voice of Voltaire. He had observed, in advance of the American Revolution that “Liberty consists of dependence on nothing but law.” Voltaire wrote that he went to England “to enjoy in a free country the greatest benefit I know, and humanity’s most glorious right, which is to depend only on men’s laws and not their whims.” His articulation of the evolving principle of the rule of law, a pillar of constitutional jurisprudence that was rising at the time in English political theory and American circles and practice, would reach its apex in the 18th century in the Constitutional Convention, which understood the doctrine to mean, precisely, the subordination of the executive to the rule of law. Voltaire’s focus on “men’s laws and not their whims,” captured for him, as it did for our founders in their conception of the Constitution—and, it may be said, as it should for us— that “law, born of justice and reason, is the basis of a civilised society.”

The framers were committed to the distinctly American conception of a “constitution,” which declared it superior to government and written in express terms. As such, they broke dramatically from the English version of what constituted a “constitution,” which was a loose assemblage of governmental practices, statutes, norms and traditions, and only partly written. Although not a delegate to the Convention, Jefferson, kept well informed of its proceedings through correspondence with Madison, once more ably explained the framers’ preference: “Our peculiar security,” he wrote, “is the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not

make it a blank paper by construction.” In order to protect the Constitution from becoming mere parchment and thus incapable of preserving cherished liberties, the written Constitution represented the epitome of the rule of law.

Governmental officials—agents of the citizenry— would recognize the constitutional limitations on their powers and would be accountable to both the Constitution and the people. Once those limits were established, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in 1803 in Marbury v. Madison, they might not “be passed at pleasure.” It was because constitutions were bulwarks against oppression that “written constitutions have been regarded with so much reverence.”

The subordination of government to the Constitution requires officials to trace the premises of their acts to the document from which they derive their authority. This obligation makes the Constitution a living document and burnishes its standing among the public as a stout charter—the law of the land—that truly matters for its daily operation in the lives of Americans and the governance of our nation.

In this way, the rule of law is not merely a useful fiction, or an exercise in genteel lawn-tennis language, for politely reminding government to obey the Constitution. The obligation of officials to ground their actions in the Constitution is what literally gives the document its life, power, and purpose. It is an emphatic declaration of the principle of the rule of law. The Supreme Court, at least since McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), and on numerous subsequent occasions, has given expression to this principle by declaring that the government is “a creature of Constitution” and has only “those powers granted to by the Constitution.” And lest it be forgotten, this sole source of governmental authority represents the fundamental choices of the American people who ratified the original Constitution and 27 amendments since the founding. Thus, those government officials who blithely ignore the limits on their powers, imposed by a written Constitution “of, by and for the people,” as Abraham Lincoln stated, are striking at the very 19

| GRAY MATTERS ISSUE | roots of American democracy.

Of course, government officials have no authority to ignore, let alone disobey, the provisions of the Constitution. Alexander Hamilton wrote that no official “can new-model his commission,” that is, add to or somehow change the scope of authority conferred by the Constitution and applicable statutes. Madison, it will be recalled, stated that all power “is of an encroaching nature,” and must be “restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.” Alteration of one’s “commission,” whether for benevolent purposes or purported acts of wisdom by recipients of power, would destroy even the pretense of limited powers.

It is little wonder, then, that Madison and the founders conceived of governmental adherence to the Constitution as the crucial problem confronting American Constitutionalism. The framers provided mechanisms for obliging government to obey the Constitution, among them separation of powers, enumeration of powers, checks and balances, and the role of citizens policing governmental activity, a duty that we have named “Madisonian Monitors.”

In addition, the framers added the further requirement that officials, in varying ways, swear an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. As Chief Justice Earl Warren noted, “We are oath-bound to defend the Constitution.”

In Federalist No. 78, Hamilton emphasized the oath-bound duty of judges to “serve as bulwarks of a limited Constitution against legislative encroachments.” The presidential oath of office to “preserve and defend” the Constitution is bulked by the duty of the president to “take care” that the laws are “faithfully executed.” The significance of an oath of office is illuminated by the fact that government officials, who swear an oath to support the Constitution and the laws of the United States, cannot, at the same time, claim a right to ignore or violate the Constitution and the laws. Professor Alexander Bickel justly stated that There is a moral duty, and there ought to be, for those to whom it is applicable—most often officers of government—to obey the manifest constitution, unless and until it is altered by the 20

amendment process it, itself, provides for, a duty analogous to the duty to obey final judicial decrees. No president may decide to stay in office for a term of six years rather than four, or, since the Twenty-second Amendment, to run for a third term. There is an absolute duty to obey; to disobey is to deny the idea of constitutionalism, that special kind of law which establishes a set of pre-existing rules within which society works out all its other rules from time to time. To deny this idea is in the most fundamental sense to deny the idea of law itself.

Our Constitution thus forbids acts that would ignore, violate, or otherwise circumvent constitutional limitations. Assertions of absolute or unlimited presidential power, uncurbed by any constitutional or statutory restraints, would thus represent an existential threat to our Constitution. Richard Nixon’s false— and infamous—assertion, that “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal,” was a proposition that might have destroyed the very conception of a constitutionally limited presidency. If his scheme had been implemented, and if it had received acquiescence by other departments of government and the American citizenry, it would have laid waste to our constitutional system. The Nixon Doctrine would have reduced the trumpet sound of the rule of law to the sound of tinkling crystal. But Nixon’s bizarre and dangerous claim did not survive, because the Constitution truly does matter in the life of our nation and because governmental officials and ordinary citizens rallied to its defense to prevent Nixon’s theory from taking root.

The perpetuation of our constitutional union, its sustainability, to borrow a useful word from critically important discussions in other realms, requires not only good men and women at the helm, but a knowledgeable citizenry, willing, even eager, to rise to the defense of it. There are things that the citizenry should know. Civic education—civic literacy—requires familiarity with

| GRAY MATTERS ISSUE | basic themes of the Constitution, the grand goals of the Constitutional Convention, fundamentally important historical events that shaped the development of our nation, including those that make us proud to be Americans and those that cause us to wince and vow to do better as a nation.

We also need a citizenry engaged in tracking governmental acts for the purpose, at a minimum, of ensuring governmental adherence to the Constitution. In the end, there really is in a republic no substitute for a well-informed citizenry, zealously defending our Constitution. Nor is there, as history amply demonstrates, a substitute for the role of reason, which was trumpeted by our founders, who inherited that learning from Enlightenment thinkers that shaped their own conception of constitutionalism and the rule of law. The Spanish artist Goya portrayed the consequences of the end of reason in one of his etchings: “The sleep of reason brings forth monsters.”

The historian, Charles Howard McIlwain, writing on the eve of World War II, when liberal democracies and their core values of constitutionalism and the rule of law were imperiled by the threat of fascism, reminded readers that the preservation of our principal values was not so much a choice, but rather an imperative: “The two fundamental correlative elements of constitutionalism for which all lovers of liberty must yet fight are the legal limits to arbitrary power and a complete responsibility of government to the governed.” McIlwain’s call to the defense of our Constitution—our rights, liberties, and freedoms— seems especially relevant in our time, at this critical juncture in our history, as our nation faces severe threats—foreign and domestic—to our constitutional principles and democratic values. We are reminded at this very moment of Benjamin Franklin’s immortal words, an answer to a question posed to him as he left the Constitutional Convention upon its adjournment on September 17, 1787: “‘Tell us, Dr. Franklin,’ a woman asked, ‘What kind of government have you given us—a monarchy or a republic?’

Franklin replied: ‘A republic, madam—if you can keep it.’” The choice is ours. l

We need a citizenry engaged in tracking governmental acts for the purpose, at a minimum, of ensuring governmental adherence to the Constitution.

DAVID GRAY ADLER is President of The Alturas Institute, a non-profit organization created to promote the Constitution, gender equality, and civic education.

A recipient of teaching, writing, and civic awards, Adler has lectured nationally and internationally, and published widely on the Constitution, presidential power, and the Bill of Rights. He is the author of six books, including, most recently, The War Power in an Age of Terrorism, as well as more than 100 scholarly articles in the leading journals of his field.

His latest book on the landmark Supreme Court decision in Reed v. Reed had its origins in Idaho and transformed the law for American women. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the foreword to the book, the research and writing of which was supported by a research fellowship from the Idaho Humanities Council.

NOV 9, 7-8 PM CST CRITICAL ISSUES FACING OUR DEMOCRACY POINT AND COUNTERPOINT A virtual point and counterpoint discussion about some of the many critical issues facing our democracy today featuring two of today’s leading thought leaders Dr. David Adler and Peter Wehner. humanitiesnd.org/events 21

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“HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?” CHAPTER 2 RISING OUT OF HATRED

by Eli Saslow

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D

erek packed everything he could fit into his used PT Cruiser in the summer of 2010 and drove across the state alone. His parents had purchased the car for his move and offered to

drive him to college, but he liked the idea of traveling by himself. He’d always enjoyed road trips; earlier in the summer, he’d driven 10,000 miles coast-to-coast without an itinerary, sometimes staying with strangers he met online through chat rooms on Stormfront. Now he let his mind wander as he listened to country music and drove by Lake Okeechobee, passing through the farming towns of Central Florida that were ripe with sugarcane fields and orange groves, until suddenly he realized he was lost. He’d made a wrong turn somewhere near New College and ended up a few blocks away from the scheduled orientation. He was already more than an hour late. The driving directions on his GPS kept leading him to the wrong building. And now there was another car pulling over alongside Derek’s, with another transfer student in the front seat who looked just as confused.

Juan Elias, 20, rolled down his window and explained that he was also looking for the New College orientation. He spoke with a Peruvian accent, and he had long sideburns and a wispy beard. Like Derek, he was a community college transfer student from across the state. They were strangers in this place, so they agreed to find the orientation together.

Juan had driven to New College from Miami, the city Derek once referred to on the radio as the “front lines of the third-world invasion.”

Juan had graduated from a high school of 3,500 students – 94 percent of them Hispanic, 4 percent black, and 2 percent “other.”

Nearly half of the school’s students were immigrants, including Juan, who had moved to Miami from Peru just after he turned 10. At his

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small house in Little Havana, Juan had lived out the “nightmare for America” that Derek once described to other white nationalists – “a day when we will walk out of our houses and see barely a single white person, a whole country of outsiders.”

To Juan, it was Derek who looked like the outsider on that first day, with his long hair, his country accent, and his heavy black hat shading him from the Florida afternoon sun.

Derek said he was from West Palm Beach, and that he’d first heard about New College from a community college German professor. He mentioned nothing else about his background.

Even if he thought people who looked like Juan were ruining the country, he also believed that in one-on-one interaction it was always best to be polite and kind. “Just a down-to-earth, eccentric kind of guy,” Juan remembered thinking. Derek had rarely spent time with anyone Hispanic; Juan had seldom befriended someone white.

But they navigated together to orientation, where by coincidence they were assigned to the same small group for transfer students.

They compared class schedules and discovered they shared two. They went to the dorms and found their rooms located in the same building, separated only by a small courtyard. Derek took out his guitar and played country songs. Juan sat with him, listening to Derek play while other students unpacked and moved into their rooms.

During the last few months, Juan had been thinking back to the other major move in his life, a decade earlier when he left Peru for the United States. He was born in the midst of a communist uprising in the late 1980s, in a country besieged from within by public executions, shootings and car bombs. His mother went into labor just as a terrorist group sabotaged dozens of electrical towers across Lima. Doctors performed an emergency cesarean, and Juan arrived in the blackout of a terrorist revolution. A few years later, some of those terrorists murdered his uncle as punishment for working as a community organizer, and Juan’s mother decided right then 24

that she wouldn’t raise her son in Peru. She left him with his grandmother when he was 7 and traveled to the United States on a legal visa. She found a job waiting tables and a small house in the cheapest part of Miami. After three years, she finally saved enough money to send for Juan, but by then he didn’t want to go. He spoke only a few words of English. All he knew was his life in Peru. He loved his grandmother and refused to leave her. So instead his mother told him that he was coming for a short vacation to Disney World. He flew in with a tourist visa and enough clothes to last a week. Only once he arrived at the airport did she tell him the truth: that he wasn’t going back to Peru; that he was starting sixth grade in Miami; that, because of visa travel restrictions, he couldn’t legally visit his grandmother in Peru for at least five years.

Juan experienced the move less as a transition than as a trauma. Somehow, he managed to survive middle school – to learn English in a year, Americanize his wardrobe, memorize all of the NBA basketball teams, move into honors classes and eventually earn his green card – but he still felt cut off from one country and isolated in another. He traveled back to Lima in high school, but by then Peru felt foreign, too. So instead he began filling out the paperwork to apply for his U.S. citizenship.

He finished community college and decided to move again, this time to New College, which he hoped would become the place that felt his own.

“For me, the whole point of going to college was letting go of all my hang-ups and assumptions and just meeting people who were different,” Juan said.

The sun dipped down over the bay that first night, and Juan and Derek went with other students from their dorm to explore more of the campus. They walked alongside the Sarasota Bay, past the pink gothic College Hall where Charles Ringling once lived, and down a promenade of palm trees toward the center of campus. Some upper year students ran by them, streaking naked on their way to the outdoor

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Maybe the only way to feel at home in a community was to let go, and trust. swimming pool, and several of the new students began to follow behind. The pool was officially closed for the night, but the air was still humid and a few of the first year students began jumping over the gate toward the pool to go skinny-dipping.

They stripped off their clothes and leapt into the water – first just a handful of students and then several dozen; men and women, straight and gay, white and brown; all of them shedding inhibition and self-doubt until the pool was crowded with naked strangers from across Florida.

Craziness, Juan thought, as he stood next to Derek and watched the chaos unfolding in front of them. But maybe the only way to feel at home in a community was to let go, and to trust. Juan took off his shirt and jumped into the pool. Derek walked away in his clothes and went back toward his dorm.

Even in the rare moments when Derek closed his door and walled himself off in his room, there was no avoiding the culture of New College. It came directly into his email inbox, several dozen messages arriving each day from the all-student email group known as the forum. It was the social epicenter of New College, a place where one student could broadcast whatever he or she liked to the other 800, and where everyone else could speak back. Each message included the sender’s name, which kept the conversation civil; professors couldn’t access to the board, which kept the conversation honest and intimate. Each day brought dozens of new messages. On many of those days, the emphasis remained on social justice.

“How can we fight white-male domination?” one student wrote.

“It is way beyond time for us to talk about white privilege.”

“Not all people of color are trespassing just because they’re on campus. Some of us actually go here.”

Like almost every other first year student, Derek devoured the forum those first weeks, paying particular attention as always to vocabulary. For him, New College was an introduction to another new language, in which upper years tried to educate new students on social issues. On the forum, micro-aggressions were never tolerated and trigger warnings were used to protect peers from potentially upsetting content. Here was a place that strived for the ideals of universal equality and human respect.

Students used the forum to plan a conference on civil disobedience and a protest in support of immigrant tomato pickers. They wrote that race was a social construct, but that white privilege was structured into every part of American society. On the forum, identity was fluid, the right to self-expression was paramount, and a straight man was, in fact, a person whose chosen gender identity happened to match the sex he was assigned at birth – or, for short, a cis hetero male, a position of inherent privilege in the American patriarchy.

At New College, political correctness could sometimes become a contest of oneupsmanship, and there was social cachet to be won by pointing out prejudice in its smallest manifestations. One student admitted that he liked to wear glasses despite having 20-20 25

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He knew that if his views were discovered at New College, he would be vilified on the forum and ostracized on campus. vision, and then another student said that was “ableist,” because he was appropriating the legitimate struggle of disabled people. “Maybe so,” countered another student, but in fact there was no such thing as “disabled people,” and that phrase was a micro-aggression against “people with disabilities.”

And then there was Derek, the white nationalist prodigy living anonymously in his dorm room, helping to moderate the world’s largest white pride website and calling into his own political radio show five mornings each week. On the air, he repeatedly theorized about “the criminal nature of blacks” and the “inferior natural intelligence of blacks and Hispanics.” He said President Obama was “anti-white culture,” “a radical black activist,” and “inherently unAmerican.” There was nothing micro about Derek’s aggressions. He knew that if his views were discovered at New College, he would be vilified on the forum and ostracized on campus.

So he decided that semester to be a white activist on the radio and an anonymous college student in Sarasota. In the mornings while his classmates slept, he walked alone to a patch of grass outside the dorm and called into his show to join his father on the air, and together they railed against the minority takeover. Whenever his classmates asked, Derek explained his morning ritual as a daily catch-up call with his unusually close family. Then he hung up the phone, returned to the center of campus, and befriended whoever walked by.

I.M. Pei had designed the student housing at New College in the 1960s as a series of small dormitories connected by covered bridges and 26

red brick courtyards, and Derek spent much of his time outside. He sat in the courtyard and did homework with Juan and two of Juan’s roommates, both of whom were gay. He played acoustic Willie Nelson songs on his guitar, and one day a student wearing a yarmulke sat down to listen. His name was Matthew Stevenson, and he was the only orthodox Jew on campus.

“Jews are NOT white,” Derek had written once on Stormfront, a few years earlier. But Matthew knew the lyrics to most of the country songs Derek liked to play, and he started joining Derek every few evenings to sing along with enthusiasm if not with pitch. Derek thought Matthew was funny and bright, with a sarcastic sense of humor and an interest in early world history that rivaled Derek’s own, and they agreed to share a study guide for a medieval history class they were taking together. One night, Derek invited Matthew and Juan over to his dorm to watch a zombie movie, and they crowded together to sit on his bed and binged on candy from the student cafeteria. Maybe they were usurpers, as his father often said, but Derek also liked them, and gradually he went from keeping his political convictions quiet on campus to actively disguising them. Once, during lunch in the student center, another classmate mentioned to Derek that he had been reading about the racial implications of “Lord of the Rings” on a website called Stormfront. Derek had created that section of the website a few years earlier, hoping to convert fans of the popular fantasy novels into avowed white nationalists, but now he pretended he’d never heard of it.

“What’s Stormfront?” he asked.

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He was beginning to feel at home in this place, where he could blend in with his blackbrimmed hat because there were other eccentric students who wore kilts, or capes, or no shoes.

His German professor wrote that he was impressed by Derek’s “graduate level work.” The student body president offered to take Derek and some of his friends sailing on the Sarasota Bay. He filmed a medieval reenactment with his classmates, forged his own armor and dressed as a knight for Halloween. A young woman who lived in the dorm room upstairs began coming down to the courtyard more often to hear Derek play guitar, until one day he asked if there were any songs he could play for her.

Her name was Rose, and they had met for the first time at the New College orientation party during their first weekend on campus.

As a homeschooled student, Derek had never been to a dance party, and he was sitting awkwardly against the wall when Rose came over to ask what was wrong. Derek said that he didn’t know how to dance. Rose said neither did anyone else, and then she sat down next to him. She said she had known someone named Derek Black at her high school in Northwest Arkansas, and Derek misunderstood her and thought she knew something about him or his beliefs. Rose’s hometown was not far from the private compound where Derek had once spent several weeks staying with Thomas Robb and his Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He had attended Robb’s conference, dated his granddaughter, and broadcasted a live radio show from one of the group’s weekly cross-lighting ceremonies.

Maybe Rose had somehow seen him there, he thought, or maybe she was discreetly trying to signal to him that she shared some of his beliefs. They went back together to the party and danced to a song by Depeche Mode. Derek thought Rose was smart, thoughtful, and kind.

He liked her, and after several weeks he told her as much. She appreciated his directness and how he always seemed eager to ask about her life, even as he revealed little of his own. They

started circling around the possibility of dating, their talks stretching late into the night, and then in one of those talks she mentioned something offhand about a synagogue, and how the high holidays were coming up.

The conversation continued even as Derek’s mind stayed locked in place: She was Jewish.

He had spent dozens of hours debating what people on Stormfront referred to as “the Jewish Question,” a litmus test among white nationalists.

Should Jews be considered whites or outsiders?

Did they have a place in a European ethno state that white nationalists hoped to build, or would they be forcibly deported from the United States along with all other minorities? The white nationalist movement had a long history of anti-Semitism – of synagogue bombings and “Sieg Heil!” salutes – but lately a rift had begun to develop as influential white nationalists like American Renaissance publisher Jared Taylor wrote admiring pieces about Israel and courted Jews as conference speakers.

Derek made his own conclusions public while still in his teens. “Jews are the cause of all the world’s strife and misery,” he wrote on Stormfront in 2008. “Their motivation comes from the destabilization of the White race.”

It was the kind of thinking Derek’s father and godfather had helped popularize on Stormfront: that Jews were not just another minority but an insidious enemy – the one race capable of undermining white Europeans. David Duke wrote a book called “Jewish Supremacism,” and Don and Derek helped promote it on Stormfront radio. In the chat rooms of Stormfront, blacks and most other minorities were typically considered both morally and intellectually inferior to whites, too addled by their “third-world nature” to pose any real threat to white superiority if left on their own. But Derek wrote that Jews were smart, calculating, and “possibly evil,” and he thought they had orchestrated a brilliant plot to weaken the white race by promoting multiculturalism.

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Even though Jews already had their own ethnostate in Israel, they had pushed for greater control in the United States by supporting more lenient immigration policies and more wars to protect Israel’s interests in the Middle East.

Their singular purpose was a “constant effort to undermine homogeneous white nationhood and culture” through “media monopolization and government control,” Derek wrote. He had directed other white nationalists to the website Jewhoo, a roll call of prominent American Jews, where the enemy was listed in plain sight. “Their every action in America and the western world has been as outsiders constantly trying to hurt us,” he wrote.

And then there was Rose: sweet, unassuming, returning downstairs to Derek’s room in the Pei dorm so they could study together for their money and banking class. Derek disliked math, and he’d often been able to avoid it in his homeschooled curriculum, so Rose patiently walked him through formulas and taught him how to efficiently read a math textbook. He’d never spent so much time with someone Jewish – or with anyone whom white nationalists considered an outsider. And since there was so much Derek wasn’t yet ready to reveal about his own life, he began asking more and more about hers.

She had lived in Texas, Minneapolis, and Mexico before spending most of her childhood in Northwest Arkansas, on the Baptist Bible Belt. The University of Arkansas had offered her father a tenured position as a professor, and their family joined the only synagogue in town. It was a reform congregation, liberal and inclusive, where a few dozen families could meet each Friday night in a rented house to hear a rotating guest rabbi welcome in Shabbat. The services were explicitly interfaith. The potlucks leaned heavily on barbecue. The mission of the congregation was not to plot some great, multicultural takeover of the white race, but simply to “serve as a focal point of Jewish life in our small corner of the world,” and that was 28

challenge enough. The Jewish population in Arkansas had dropped dramatically over the last decades to only about 1,700 people – or 0.056 percent of the population – which meant that Judaism had become Rose’s primary identity, whether she wanted that or not. In a high school where the board meetings began with a Baptist prayer and the official calendar celebrated “Christmas Break,” her nickname had become“The Jew.” She needed a note from a rabbi to clarify for her principal that yes, Yom Kippur was a real holiday. She was teased for killing Jesus, for choosing to go to Hell and for attending a “strange church.” She had written one of her college essays about that experience – about what it felt like to be a Jew in Arkansas, where even if she had never felt explicitly threatened, she had often been made to feel exotic, alien, and weird.

Derek made her feel none of those things. He listened. He asked insightful follow-up questions about her family. He pointed out stereotypes about men being good in math and how that was sexist. He wrote her longhand letters about oceanic science, medieval religion, and fossil beds. He made mix CDs with songs she liked, and he used the correct “they” pronoun when asking about one of Rose’s transgender friends.

Most of her other first year classmates at New College were 18 years old, like Rose, and they were largely interested in drinking and going to parties, which Rose liked, too. But Derek was 21, a transfer student who had already spent two years in community college, and Rose thought he was confident and mature. He rarely drank aside from the occasional beer, and he preferred intimate conversations to loud parties. “He was intense and respectful in an almost formal way,” she remembered. “He had a sense of care that he put into everything. He wasn’t just doing random stuff the way it felt like a lot of us were doing. He wanted to know about people’s experiences and how they differed from his own.

I was intrigued, and I wanted more. But he could be hot and then cold. Some days it was like he

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It was the first of many tortured bargains Derek would make with his convictions. was pursuing me. Other times he seemed to be really indifferent.”

What Rose didn’t know was that Derek was constantly trying to quiet his own feelings and telling himself to back away. His two most serious former girlfriends had both been committed white nationalists, a daughter and a granddaughter of major leaders within the movement, people whose beliefs mirrored his own. It was one thing to befriend an outsider; his father and David Duke had both done plenty of that, and sometimes it could even be useful. But dating a Jew felt to Derek like a double betrayal – first and foremost of his own beliefs, and then also of Rose, who had no idea about his history or his racial convictions. He had publicly written that, “Jews are NOT White.” He had said that race mixing was not only a bad idea but also a traitorous act. White Europeans needed to date white Europeans; anything else risked polluting the gene pool and accelerating the ongoing white genocide, he often said. Just one year earlier, on Stormfront, another white nationalist had come to the message board asking for advice about a new relationship. “I’ve started dating a woman who’s really smart, pretty, funny, and cool. All is well…except she mentioned that some great, great relative was Native American.

Her whole family looks textbook white. Am I being overly critical?”

Like most others on the message board, Derek’s advice had been unequivocal: “Yes, this does make you a bastard,” he had written. “You need to be decisive. It does you good, and her too.”

It was easy to be certain and firm when the enemy remained impersonal and the issue was

purely abstract, but now the issue was Rose. She was the only classmate who went off campus to hear Derek perform at an open-mic night.

Once, sensing that Derek was feeling homesick on a weekend night, she left a party and went with him to a diner at 2 a.m. He liked her. He trusted her. He wanted to date her. She seemed nothing like the outsiders Derek had so often warned about on his radio show. As fall semester neared its end, Derek came up with an idea for a solution and then proposed it to Rose. He was leaving New College in the winter to study abroad for a semester in Ireland and Germany before returning to New College the following fall. What if his departure acted as an enforced end date to their relationship? They could date for two weeks without chancing anything serious, a harmless experiment before going their separate ways.

It was the first of many tortured bargains Derek would make with his convictions, and Rose thought it sounded strange. Why did their courtship need to have an enforced end date?

But he had always been mysterious to her, and that was part of his appeal. She told him that she’d think about it, and then a few days later she agreed.

Derek began to feel during that next month as if he was occupying two lives: breakfast at New College with Rose and one of her transgender friends and then Thanksgiving dinner with Don, Chloe, and a few former skinheads in West Palm Beach; overnight talks edging toward dawn with his Jewish girlfriend and then early mornings spent by himself in the courtyard outside, calling 29

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White nationalism wasn’t just a fringe racist movement but something much more forceful and dangerous. into his white nationalist radio show as Rose continued to sleep, laughing along as his cohost mimicked a Jew by whining about Israel in a nasal, high-pitched voice. Once, Rose asked him for a ride to her early morning doctor’s visit, and the appointment ran long. They were just beginning to drive back to New College at 9 a.m., when the cue-in music to “I’m a White Boy” began playing on the radio in West Palm Beach. Derek’s co-hosts and his audience were depending on him. He couldn’t miss the show.

He lied to Rose and told her that he needed to make a phone call home, but instead he dialed into his radio show. He spent the next 10 minutes broadcasting live on the air, making innocuous small talk to his white nationalist audience about the Florida weather while Rose sat oblivious in the passenger seat. She could only hear his side of the conversation, and she believed he was on a routine call with his parents.

Derek had been cultivating separate identities ever since he was about 10, when he built two websites in the same week. On one, Derekblack. com, he shared photos of Spiderman, Alan Jackson, and his baby niece “A.K.A. The Cutest Baby in the World!!!” The other, kids.stormfront. org, was aimed at “white people across the globe,” and it had links to white-pride songs and David Duke’s website. Children could play a white-pride version of the video game Doom, shooting watermelons at villains who had black faces, talked in gangster slang, and wore big golden chains. Or visitors could cast a ballot in the fake presidential campaign Derek created, listing Don Black and Robert E. Lee as a candidates for president and Adolf Hitler as a possible running mate. “Now is the time for white 30

people to take back our freedom and win so all can see our heritage in its greatest glory,” he had written.

Derek’s personal webpage generated a few thousand hits; his Stormfront page surpassed 400,000 visits within a few years. For almost a decade, Derek updated both pages, maintaining both a public and a private life, and there was always room for both. But now at New College it felt to him as if both identities were eating up ever more space – his fame expanding within the movement, his private relationships deepening – and a conflict between them seemed inevitable. Every day he waited to be unmasked, the tension exploding within him in waves of anxiety and guilt. Either his New College friends would learn about his political activism and shun him. Or, much worse, white nationalists would discover that he had befriended a Peruvian immigrant and begun dating a Jewish woman, and he would become an embarrassment to his family and a discredit to the cause.

If ever he needed a reminder of his core beliefs, it was waiting for him on his bookshelf in the biography of Thomas Jefferson that he’d brought with him to school. Derek hated the suggestion that he’d simply been indoctrinated with his family’s racial convictions; no idea was more insulting to him. His father had never forced him to participate in anything. As a child, whenever Derek did media interviews, Don made sure to walk out of the room so that Derek could feel free to say whatever he liked. Instead of just regurgitating family talking points, Derek sought out facts and information and followed the leads to what he called the “absolute, hidden

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truth about race,” and one of those leads began with Thomas Jefferson.

In elementary school, Derek learned the version of Jefferson commonly taught in American history: his great egalitarianism, his famous phrasing in the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal.”

In his school textbook, Derek and his classmates read perhaps Jefferson’s most famous quote about black slaves, one which had been chiseled onto his monument in Washington, helping to inspire the Civil Rights Movement: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free,” Jefferson famously said. But Don encouraged Derek to do a bit more digging about that statement, and eventually Derek found the rest of Jefferson’s quotation buried in an old white nationalist newsletter: “Nor is it any less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.

It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation peaceably.”

In later years, white nationalists would sometimes describe racial awareness as a choice between swallowing a blue pill or a red pill, an analogy that came from the movie, The Matrix. The blue pill offered blissful ignorance, a make-believe story about racial equality fed to the masses. The red pill was the revelation of a thorny, hidden truth buried within America’s founding, and the more Derek dug into American history, the more red pills he found. There was the popular effort to repatriate slaves back to Liberia in the early 1800s. There was Monrovia, the capital city of Liberia, which had been named after U.S. president and proud white nationalist, James Monroe. There was Abraham Lincoln, the great abolitionist, speaking at a ceremony after the Civil War about blacks as an “alien, inferior race,” and then asserting: “There is no room for two distinct races of white men in American, much less for two distinct races of whites and blacks. I can conceive of no greater calamity

than the assimilation of the negro into our social and political life as our equal.”

It felt to Derek as if he was being let in on a secret. White nationalism wasn’t just a fringe racist movement but something much more forceful and dangerous: a foundational concept embedded into the American DNA. So of course the cause must be somehow noble, even patriotic. Of course the movement would rise again once white people felt threatened.

It was easy for whites to be generous and egalitarian so long as it wasn’t costing them anything – so long as the American economy kept booming and whites continued to enjoy a vastly disproportionate share of the country’s rising power and wealth. But what would happen when Spanish began to overtake English? Or when America’s culture and identity started to fundamentally change? Derek believed the answer was written into the country’s history: America had always defined itself as white, and when pressed it would do so again. That knowledge had been Derek’s secret, a certainty that motivated him, until he arrived at New College and welcomed in so many other secrets, too many to bear.

He couldn’t stand the anxiety of waiting to be exposed on campus. Every day that went by, he felt like he was building relationships that would inevitably implode once classmates discovered what he believed. He wanted it to be done already. He wanted to tell someone, but whom?

Juan, with his Peruvian accent? Matthew, with his yarmulke, singing along with him in the courtyard to Willie Nelson? Rose? No, he would never have the courage to do it, so instead Derek decided he would set up an anonymous email account so he could send a tip to the student forum about his identity. But there was so much that he liked about his happy life, and he kept putting the task off for another day. He was always starting an email in his mind that he could never bring himself to finish.

So instead, as his first semester at New College ended in December of 2010, he grabbed 31

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a copy of a magazine from his room and carried it to the school gymnasium. Juan was already on his way home to Miami to spend Christmas with his mother and his grandmother, who had just moved to the U.S. from Peru. Rose was headed back to Arkansas after a tearful goodbye with Derek. In a few days, Derek would leave to visit David Duke at his home in the European Alps before continuing on to work at an organic farm in Ireland and then attend an immersive language school in Germany. But first he went into the gymnasium with a 2009 issue of Details Magazine, with Bradley Cooper’s blue eyes staring out from the cover. Inside the magazine there was a gigantic picture of Derek spread across two glossy pages under the headline: “Derek Black: The Great White Hope.” In the photo, he wore his usual black-brimmed hat, which the author had described as “the sort of gear one might wear on horseback while herding minorities out of the country.” It wasn’t a perfect profile story, Derek thought, but it accurately reflected his views and his rising profile in the white nationalist movement. It would expose him on campus. It was force him to fuse his two identities and live out his white nationalist beliefs.

helped publicize new polling data that showed more than 40 percent of whites believed they experienced more racism than minorities.

“People are finally waking up!” Derek said one day, and meanwhile he was also logging into his New College email account to read the student forum and writing to Rose, with one foot still planted in both worlds.

“I read the forum so much more than I did when I was there in person,” he wrote to Rose that winter. “I actually checked it from a Starbucks in Leicester Square in London while I was laid over. It’s my anchor so I don’t lose touch.”

Rose was still his anchor, too, even if they were no longer dating, and he continued to mail her CDs and write to her every few days.

He had turned his semester abroad into a series of adventures – farming in Ireland, studying German, hiking in the Alps, surfing a man-made wave in a river, ridesharing with strangers across Europe, playing as a street musician in southwestern Germany. Rose read his updates and marveled at how he could be so independent and adventurous. “Keep telling me about your life,” she wrote to him, and so he began emailing her a regular series of travelogues.

He placed it at the front of the magazine rack, hiding in plain sight near the treadmills and elliptical machines, and then walked out of the gym.

Nothing in December. Nothing in January or February, and after a while Derek began to think a custodian had thrown out the Details Magazine while the students were away during winter break. Maybe that was the end of it, he thought. And, since he was buffeted from the pressures of New College in Europe, he returned to the familiar patterns of his double life. He called into his radio show each day in West Palm Beach, delighting in the spread of the white genocide concept onto conservative radio and then onto Glenn Beck’s show on Fox News. He

“Ireland is all the best things you can imagine about it. The Irish are welcoming and the landscape is rugged and beautiful. I walked down to the ocean yesterday and old ladies walked their dogs on the beach while waves crashed high against the rocks on the outer edges of the bay.”

“I’m studying German at the Goethe Institute in Göttingen, where I’m maybe the youngest of 50 students and only the second American.

It has the pleasant air of a home for people whose German brains have collapsed. Classes go about five hours a day. The city is small, ancient, and entirely walkable, and there’s an awesome forest across the street with miles of

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trails. My room is near the top of the stone tower.

Everything’s super comfortable here in the manor.”

“I felt very nervous about playing music on the street on Saturday for the first time. It took me hours to get up the nerve. Then I did it and I got people who stopped and clapped, got to see hundreds of people walk by, and I made 30 Euros in two hours.”

Derek always included a favorite song lyric at the end of each note, in keeping with a tradition he and Rose had started the previous semester.

They both found meaning in music, so even though Derek’s letters tended to be happy and light, Rose began focusing on his lyrics, which were often tormented, searching, and mysterious. The lyrics read to her like the clues to a puzzle. He was still such an enigma to her.

If she could just make sense of the lyrics, maybe she could figure him out.

“This is the life I know is true. It’s all a falling through and so I reach for you.”

college students were often out drinking and speaking in English, but Derek rarely drank, and he was serious about perfecting his German.

He went out with a classmate for bratwursts and German conversation, and then he came back alone to his room, which he sometimes referred to with fondness as “the cell.” He watched German movies, emailed Rose, listened to American folk music on his computer, and regularly checked in on the New College forum, where one night in April he noticed a flurry of new messages. He scrolled to the top of the message thread and opened the first email, from a senior whose name he didn’t recognize.

The message had been sent to all New College students at 1:56 a.m.

“Have you seen this man?” it read, and beneath those words was a picture that was unmistakable. That black cowboy hat. That long red hair.

“Derek Black,” the email read. “White supremacist, radio host…New College student???” l

“Born to be a solider boy. Born to be a soldier boy.”

“He said, ‘Will you defeat them, your demons, and all the non-believers, the plans that they have made?’”

“Beneath the sheets of paper lies my truth. I have to go.”

“Don’t it make you feel bad? When you’re trying to find your way home and you don’t know which way to go?”

If he was trying to tell her something, she wasn’t getting it. So Derek kept on writing her travelogues from his room in a place called “student city.” It was a giant tower filled with foreign exchange students, and he had a tiny room on the first of the building’s 20 floors.

Every room was identical: A cot. A window. A bathroom. A desk. A bike. Most of the other

OCT 14, 2-4:15 PM SANCTUARY EVENTS CENTER, FARGO Pulitzer prize winning journalist Eli Saslow speaks about his book Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of A Former White Nationalist. humanitiesnd.org/events 33

SENSE OF PLACE EVENT September 12, 2021 3-4 pm CST

Join us for a virtual gathering of North Dakota’s most beloved writers, Pulitzer-Prize

winning author LOUISE ERDRICH, author/poet DEBRA MARQUART, and their mentor and poet MARK VINZ, in conversation about connection, friendship, writing, and so much more!

Following this webinar, from 4:15-5 pm, we will host an HND member-only Q&A with the authors.

For more information on becoming a Humanities ND member visit humanitiesnd.org/donate.

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Caricatures by Trygve Olson.

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A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they can never hope to sit.

—Greek Proverb

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father yelling from the living room, already watching his favorite show. She’ll eat when she’s hungry.

They were not giants outside of time, I will learn later—my father, barely fivefoot-six; my mother, five-two. Sister Paula, our principal, just under five feet. The little generals of my childhood. By the time of this photo, they’ve baptized me unwittingly, initiated me into confession and penance, and now brought me through communion. They’ve broken the bad news in increments.

Second grade, and even the pope agrees, I have reached the age of reason. I am coming to realize the snare of mortality—to be born into life without consent and with no good alternative for how to exit. None of this is reasonable.

They are all gone now, except my mother, eroded off the edge of a disappearing hillside. The nuns to nunretirement and nun-nursing homes where we would learn, one-by-one, the news of their deaths. No one, not even Jesus, to save them.

And my father, gone off the edge of a cliff, never to be heard from again.

Watercolor art by Thomas Rice.

T

hey loom over us like sequoias, our parents. In my first holy communion photos, they flank me, grave and unsmiling in formal black clothes—my father’s wool suit, my mother’s boucle skirt, long gloves, and short jacket. Her lips a bright smear of red. Nuns surround me in the other photos—Sister Jacinta, Sister Paula, my prison guards—their white coifs pulled tight around foreheads, dark tunics heavy and flowing to the floor, drawn tight at the waist by rosary beads.

I am the sapling between them in a white dress, white tights, shoes, and a lace veil with a chaplet of flowers crowning my head. My face looks thin and drawn, stricken even. Dark circles under my eyes, the celebrant not celebrating. Have I drunk too deeply of the communion wine?

No, by this age I have sampled Grandpa’s rhubarb wine and wedding whiskey. I know the swirl.

Have I misunderstood the lessons of transubstantiation, taken too seriously the metaphor of eating the body of Christ?

I hate meat. Our dairy cows and their calves are my friends, as are the dogs, cats, and chickens. Sitting too long at the kitchen table has become my nightly ritual, moving steak around on the plate, obscuring it under mashed potatoes and green beans. My mother’s despairing calls from the kitchen that I am too frail. My

AT 79, MY MOTHER DECIDES TO PLANT TREES

by Debra Marquart The following is an excerpt from Debra Marquart’s new book The Night We Landed on the Moon: Essays Between Exile and Belonging.

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How could she have lived all these years without the cool swaying of trees?

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Goodbye, goodbye. Despite the dirty trick you played on me. Thank you. I love you.

I have a friend who says, times change; people do not. But that hasn’t been my observation. Take my mother, for example—aside from a brief splash of turquoise on her kitchen walls in 1966, my mother remained faithful to taupe and green: olive side chairs, mossy drapes, avocado shag. Then at seventy, she visited my sister in Montana and came home in mad love with the color pink. And not just pastel pink, but hot fuchsia, throbbing magenta.

What happened? During the trip, my sister’s friend Jennifer gave my mother a pair of hot pink sneakers with hand-appliqued sparkles. And that was enough. She was pinked.

Once home, she painted her bedroom walls a shade somewhere between bubblegum and polka dot pink, requiring new pink sheets, comforters, and pajamas.

Who knew change could be so easy? After that, pink earrings, sweaters, and scarves followed. My father had died a few years earlier, and it seems for the first time in her adult life my mother had time to consider what colors she preferred.

This was all good news. Because what can you possibly buy to entertain and delight your seventyyear-old mother each year for Christmas, birthdays, and Mother’s Day. How many crystalline angels, La-Z-Boy recliners, and yearly subscriptions to Netflix does one mother need? She once begged me to stop buying her coffee makers.

Three years in a row I sent her singlebrew systems because she’d once murmured the slightest interest under her breath while watching a Keurig commercial (Well, that’s interesting).

And she doesn’t even like coffee.

So now it’s pink necklaces and handbags, pink bath towels, and shoes with more pink glittery handappliqued stars on them. One year, we siblings went together on a pink PT Cruiser step-through bike with whitewall tires, a little bell, and a pink woven basket mounted on the handlebars. I doubt she’s ever dared to ride it around the block for fear of falling and breaking a hip, but still, it was pink!

Maybe it’s just Montana, because at age seventy-nine, once again my mother went to Bozeman to visit my oldest sister (on the Greyhound this time because she now refuses to fly) and while there she goes to dinner at the home of Jennifer and Jack. That Jennifer—what is it about her? She’s a master landscaper. After dinner, they sit in the backyard in the shadow of Bridger Bowl, under the canopy of Jennifer’s trees listening to cicadas as the light goes down. And perhaps under the influence of some sweet pink wine, my mother develops this intense craving for trees.

How could she have lived all these years without the cool swaying of trees?

She and my dad moved from the farm to the brand-new house on a corner lot in town, kitty-corner from the Catholic Church in 1981, and it has not occurred to her before this moment how much she misses her

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trees: the tall cottonwoods, the orchard rows that Great-Grandpa planted, the chokecherries, the conifers we watered as kids.

Then and there, she makes up her mind—she needs to go home and plant some trees!

Which is not as easy as you might imagine.

She tells me all this when I call to catch up. Not weekly, sometimes barely monthly. Although we both have phone plans with unlimited minutes, we still practice the 1960s protocol of not making a long-distance call unless the barn burns down or someone gets decapitated in an automobile accident. Because, think of the expense!

But in the few minutes we have on the phone, she tells me about her remembered love for trees and her mission to find exactly the right kind of trees to plant in her front yard.

She knows the decision to plant a tree should not be taken lightly, so she studies the yards around town to see what everyone else is growing.

It turns out that Mrs. Schnable, down the street, has a tree that Mom could imagine in her yard. Full wide branches. Pink blossoms in the spring. Imagine.

Pink blossoms.

My mother waits to catch Mrs. Schnable out in the yard weeding her garden to ask, “What kind of tree is that.”

“A cherry tree,” Mrs. Schnable says.

“I really like it,” my mother says. “Where did you buy it?”

“I didn’t buy it,” Mrs. Schnable says, “I started it from seed.”

Then Mrs. Schnable proceeds to tell my mother the most incredible story about how every year she took a cherry pit outside—one cherry pit—and dropped it into a hole and covered it with dirt, then waited through the summer, fall, winter, and spring to see if a sapling emerged.

I mean, who does that?

For quite a few years, nothing happened, Mrs. Schnable explains. But then after about seven or eight years of trying, finally one cherry pit took root. And now, my mother reports, Mrs. Schnable’s cherry tree is luxurious, wide and tall.

“Who stays in one place year after year watching to see if one cherry pit takes root?” I ask.

“I know,” she says, “I don’t have that kind of time. I’m 79.”

My mother has outlived everyone from her childhood now and almost everyone from her early adulthood, so talk of mortality doesn’t make her uncomfortable. One Christmas when I called to say I couldn’t brave another snowstorm to get home to North Dakota for the holidays, she warned me, “Well, you better visit soon. Because we’re all dropping like flies up here.”

So instead of going with the cherry-pit-inthe-hole method, my mother visits the Earl May Nursery in Bismarck. She no longer drives her own car to Bismarck—because of the stop lights and the traffic congestion and all—so she takes the Senior’s Community Bus that goes around to all the small towns and transports people to the big city of Bismarck for shopping and doctor’s appointments. My mother gets dropped off at Earl May and chooses two fledging trees, and our family friend, Mike Gibson, is dispatched to Bismarck with Dad’s old pickup later that week to pick up the saplings.

Next time I talk to her, the trees have already been planted, and my mother is telling me how she loves to set the hose in the soil near the trunk and watch the water go down and down and down into the roots. They are very thirsty.

“What kind of trees did you get?” I ask.

“Oh, just wait,” she says, searching for the tag from the nursery. “Ash,” she reads, after a few seconds, “Green Ash.” A strange flutter starts up in my stomach.

“Fast growers,” she says. “They told me they grow fast.”

Why? Why? I stay silent on the other end of the line.

I live in Iowa, but I spend my summers in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a few hours away from Canton, near Detroit, identified as ground-zero for the first sighting of the emerald ash borer 39

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in 2002. This invasive beetle, believed to have traveled to North America in wood pallets from China, has spread in a shotgun blast perimeter out from eastern Michigan in all directions across many miles and states.

A tiny metallic green pest—about 1/2” long and 1/8” wide—with a bright red upper abdomen that can be seen when its wings spread, the emerald ash borer has been surprisingly destructive.

Because ash trees were planted en masse precisely for their fast-growing quality when elms succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease in the ’50s and ’60s, it’s no exaggeration to say that North America is now like a Chinese take-out buffet for the EAB. A few summers earlier in my Michigan backyard as I was eyeing my tree line to see if I had ash trees, I began to talk with my next-door neighbors about the first house they bought as newlyweds near Detroit. They told me how they’d visited the house with the realtor and fallen in love with it, largely because of the neighborhood’s old canopies of shade trees overarching the streets.

They put in the offer and got the house, and when they returned three months later to move in, the entire neighborhood had been stripped bare of trees—all ashes, all cut down because they were infected with emerald ash borer.

Since 2002, the emerald ash borer has killed tens of millions of trees and spread across twentyfive states and two Canadian provinces. The USDA has employed meticulous efforts to slow or stop its progress—sacrificing corridors of healthy ashes, creating buffer zones, policing natural barriers like the Mississippi River to keep the EAB from jumping, and enforcing the transportation of firewood across state lines. Despite these efforts, the ash borer has defied containment.

Both the adults and the larvae of the Emerald Ash Borer feed on parts of the ash, but the larvae— flat, creamy white, legless worms—do the real damage to the cambium under the bark, leaving the trunks with curving pathways of scars knowns as “pipelines,” that look like meandering oxbows of 40

rivers running up and down the length of the trunk.

They kill the tree by disrupting and robbing it of the flow of nutrients.

And then there’s human error: one Michigan camper was stopped on an Iowa highway in 2007 with 24 bundles of firewood strapped to the top of his camper. Why transport firewood across state lines? Firewood is $4 a bundle no matter where you are, and the minimum fine for violating the firewood quarantine in Illinois is $500. Just, why?

Scientists estimate the EAB has the potential to wipe out the entire Fraxinus genus of elms in North America, an estimated 8.7 billion trees.

I mention none of this to my mother. Each time I talk on the phone with her, I say, Uh huh, and Wow, and Oh my goodness as she tells me about her two baby ash trees. How the saplings are growing fast. How they made it through the first winter just fine. The tiny green buds and shoots of leaves are sprouting. How she can already imagine the shade they will soon be making.

And, in those conversations, even though I have not yet been home to experience the beauty of these young ash trees, I fall in love with them a little, too. This is the way that beauty convinces us to love it, to protect it, to duplicate and perpetuate it.

Beauty “gives us a moment of instruction,” Elaine Scarry writes in On Beauty and Being Just. “Something you did not hold to be beautiful suddenly turns up in your arms arrayed in full beauty.” Scarry offers her own experience as she came to appreciate a single palm tree: I had ruled out palm trees as objects of beauty and then one day discovered I had made a mistake. Suddenly I am on a balcony and its huge swaying leaves are before me at eye level, arcing, arching, waving, creating and breaking in the soft air, throwing the yellow sunlight up over itself and catching it on the other side.

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This is how beauty convinces us—not with plural trees, but with one tree—in a way that is singular.

Scarry writes: “When I used to say the sentence (softly and to myself) ‘I hate palms’ or ‘Palms are not beautiful; possibly they are not even trees,’ it was a composite palm that I had somehow succeeded in making without even ever having seen, close up, many particular instances.”

But now when she says, “I love palms,” she knows that she is thinking of that particular palm, that one convincing palm tree that spoke to her for the entire genus with “its leaves barely moving, just opening and closing slightly as though breathing.”

Over the years, I have practiced a strict need-to-know protocol when offering any information to my parents—a holdover from my teenage years that has transferred to adulthood. So I wonder how long my mother could have gone on blissfully unaware of the Emerald Ash Borer, that miniature winged juggernaut that’s swarming toward her baby ash trees?

Here’s my thinking: North Dakota is far north and remote enough that it might take years before the county extension agents alert the public strenuously enough to reach her attention. My mother watches CNN, NBC, and FOX, but environmental warnings are not the sort of thing that news networks report on. My mother forages content online, but mostly for jokes, recipes, and funny pet videos.

No one on her Facebook feed is

likely to post articles about invasive species infestation.

In the end, it was my secondoldest sister who lives in Minnesota who broke the news: You know, Mom, there’s an insect that feeds on the kinds of trees that are in your front yard.

Dammit, full disclosure. Dammit, the unerring honesty of siblings.

The EAB, my sister reported to my mother, was only one state away— already in Minnesota.

Why do I find this so distressing?

I’m a champion of small things in nature—rabbits, moles, voles, raccoons and opossum, along with ants and bees, the true heroes of the planet.

But in my mind, trees are in another protected class, like nobility.

I mean, just look at them. “Able to make oxygen, sequester carbon, fix nitrogen, distill water, accrue solar energy as fuel, make complex sugars into food, build soil, change with the seasons, create microclimates and self-replicate,” the environmental architect, William McDonough writes.

They are an ecosystem unto themselves. McDonough argues that, to survive, humans must invent ways to biomimic all the sustainable strategies that trees and plants employ.

German scientist, Peter Wohlleben, the author of The Hidden Life of Trees, similarly reports his awe of trees from twenty years of working in forest ecology. No tree stands alone, Wohlleben writes. They live in interdependent communities, protecting their weakest members for

No tree stands alone.

They live in interdependent communities, protecting their weakest members for their own collective protection.

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their own collective protection.

Groves are connected, he reports, by complex interlacing root systems capable of shuttling water and nutrients from one tree to a neighboring tree in need. And they are further connected by a subterranean underworld of super-delicate mycorrhizal fungi attached to the roots that create vast subsoil neurological networks spreading chemical information up to hundreds or even thousands of times the length of the roots.

What humans see on the surface is such a small part of the story of trees. For example, some trees will release bitter toxic tannins from their leaves to discourage chewing insects and some can send chemical signals like ethylene, a warning gas, in the air to alert neighboring trees about coming pestilence. Other trees send sweet smells into the air to attract pollinators.

Equally amazing, Wohlleben reports in The Hidden Life of Trees, that adult beech trees employ a “pedagogical strategy” of depriving their young of sunlight, limiting their growth under tall adult canopies for decades, restricting their light exposure to around 3 percent, which is barely enough photosynthesis to keep their bodies from dying.

As a result, the inner woody cells of the young beech tree grow tiny and almost devoid of oxygen, which makes the branches flexible and resilient, resistant to breaking in storms, impervious to fungi because they have the ability to compartmentalize their wounds. This harsh parental upbringing insures a long healthy life to the young beeches.

In the foreword to Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, Tim Flannery posits that one of the reasons we fail to comprehend the complexity of trees is that they live on a far different time scale than humans: “One of the oldest trees on Earth, a spruce in Sweden, is more than 9,500 years old.

That’s 115 times longer than the average human lifetime.”

My mother’s ash trees are not likely to have 42

such longevity, but she was pretty sanguine about their imminent demise when she learned of the march of the emerald ash borer.

“We’ll see,” she says. “We’ll deal with it when it reaches us.”

My mother is ninety-two now. She’s witnessed the complete disappearance of the two generations above her—her parents and grandparents. She’s lost my father and her entire generation of friends, all of whom have passed from this earth. She’s experienced the death of one child, my sister Judy, an unexpected loss, like a sandy foundation giving way under our feet.

But look at her. Still climbing ladders to clean the cobwebs out of corners. Adopting a homeless cat named Von Trapp with an orange coat and matching golden eyes from a pet shelter, and not bothering to change his name to Baby or SnookUms, but calling him Trapper, for short.

Through her windows kitty-korner from the church, she looks after the neighborhood kids with their loud yippy dogs and their bikes strewn in the yard. She’s finally given up her job cleaning the Catholic church, but she continues to do clothing alterations—hemming prom dresses and repairing the endless streams of torn work shirts and jeans of the people in my hometown who leave their garments in plastic bags on the desk outside her front door, right next to the plaster statue of Jesus.

And all of this with her hair still jet black. How does she do it?

I acknowledge now that it’s a rare gift to have a mother, seemingly indestructible, who lives to old age. To come to know this version of my mother— as friend and companion, no longer mother as disciplinarian or supervisor, as looming sequoia— has made the world so much sweeter. Her faith in these ash trees has given me the latest lesson of many that I have received from knowing her: the fragile world calls us to love it—for its beauty, for its need to be protected, for the company and

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shelter it offers.

And as long as we are able, we are obligated to love it back.

The ash trees are thirteen years old now. The last time I visited my mother, she stood on her front lawn under their lush canopies while I packed my car.

She put her hand on the solid bark, the trunks wide enough now that I would not be able to span them with my fingers. “Do you believe this,” she marveled. “I never thought I’d live long enough to sit in the shade of these trees.”

An eerie ringing sets off in my ears when she says this—my mother, quoting the ancient wisdom of Greeks without ever having read the ancient Greeks.

If you get lucky in life, my mother has taught me, there will be the shade of trees and people you love to sit with you in that shade. To worry about too much else is pointless. l

DEBRA MARQUART is a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University and Iowa’s Poet Laureate. She is the Senior Editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment. A memoirist, poet, and performing musician, Marquart is the author of six books including an environmental memoir of place, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere and a collection of poems, Small Buried Things: Poems. A singer/songwriter, Marquart continues to perform music solo and with her jazz-poetry performance project, The Bone People, with whom she has recorded two CDs. Marquart teaches in ISU’s interdisciplinary MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment and in the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. Her next two books, Gratitude with Dogs Under Stars: New & Collected Poems and The Night We Landed on the Moon: Essays of Exile & Belonging, are forthcoming in 2021.

I acknowledge now that it’s a rare gift to have a mother, seemingly indestructible who lives to old age.

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A SHORT COLLECTION OF POEMS

by Mark Vinz The following are excerpts from Mark Vinz’s collection of poems The Trouble with Daydreams.

THE MEMORY OF WATER

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RED RIVER BLUES

Here where the Sheyenne joins the Red— upstream, the Bois de Sioux, and down, the Buffalo—imagination finds its way in swirls of white stirred by the prairie winds.

Tonight the news of drought sweeps in on western winds— topsoil laced with smoke and snow.

Nothing can stop that message here.

These are the places towns were built, water flowing underneath snow-covered ice laced with tracks of skis and snowmobiles and creatures rarely glimpsed by passersby.

The empty rain gauge chants the last faint summer dreams; around the house the earth has sunk another inch this week.

Today I’m home from a desert visit, where a week of rain had finally broken— arroyos carried everything away except for pools on asphalt roads.

Even flat land falls away: this is the place where all directions cease.

Just past town is the only hill— the overpass for the Interstate.

How inevitably it all flows off and disappears— water and what it has been named for— here, in this glacial lakebed where I live, still dreaming of the great herds passing.

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LOVE POEM ROADSIDE ATTRACTION You can tell right off what’s happening from the fresh pine boards across the windows.

Even the old gas pump is gone, sold last week to a man who owns a restaurant— thinks he’ll make a big fishbowl of it.

It’ll be cute, he says, a real attention getter when you walk in the front door.

Wouldn’t you know, somebody stopped for gas the very next day, lost from the Interstate.

We sold him some chewing gum and then he looked kind of sad.

Real interesting place you’ve got here, he said, I’ll have to stop again sometime I’m passing through.

Nothing much left inside now— just some shoelaces and lamp wicks, the canned goods that never sold.

Maybe we should turn the place into a bar— drive to Fargo and get back that gas pump.

A real attention getter is what the man said.

We could use one of those.

for Betsy Once, as we were driving home along the Platte in early March, we stopped, breathless, to watch as skies filled up with flocks of Sandhill Cranes, resting here as always on their long flight north— wave upon wave, their formations blanketing the stubble fields in precise gray rows— a kind of love poem, I suppose, and like all love poems, something to remind us what we’ll never really understand, nor need to.

MARK VINZ was born in Rugby, North Dakota, grew up in Minneapolis and the Kansas City area, and attended the universities of Kansas (BA in English 1964, MA in English, 1966, and New Mexico (two additional years of graduate study in English).

He is now Professor Emeritus at Minnesota State University Moorhead, where he taught in the English department for 39 years and also served as the first (1995-98) coordinator of MSUM’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. His poems, prose poems, stories, and essays, have appeared in over 200 magazines and anthologies and several book-length collections.

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2021 PULITZER prize For Fiction

THE NIGHT WATCHMAN by

Louise Erdrich Louise Erdrich is the author of sixteen novels, volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her fiction has won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award (twice), and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa, lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

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Mixed-media art by Laura Youngbird. (Artist bio, page 1.)

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BITTER TEARS

by Denise K. Lajimodiere

The school’s maintenance man drove me to the cemetery, unlocked the sagging gate beneath a wrought iron arch, stark letters, Chemawa Cemetery 1886.

Ancient fir trees tower above the graves, weeds and wild flowers cover the small flat plaques. Offering tobacco prayers I gently sweep aside the weeds to read the names and years they died.

What did they die of? Loneliness?

Worked to death in the barn and fields?

Pneumonia? A beating from the gauntlet?

Suicide on the tracks in front of the school?

I count twenty one plaques in a row with the date 1918, the year of the flu epidemic. I find plaques stamped with the years my father was a student there.

Did he know this boy? That one? Were they friends?

As a carpenter apprentice, was he ordered to hammer together the casket they were buried in?

Was there a funeral? How were their parents told?

Sap weeps down a fir tree’s trunk, bitter tears. I brace against the tree and grieve for the children, for the parents left behind, for my father who lived, who didn’t live.

DENISE LAJIMODIERE is a poet, scholar, children’s book author, Jingle dress dancer, and birch bark artist. Lajimodiere is retired and lives in a Cozy Cottage by a lake on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation in North Dakota.

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RISING OUT OF HATRED: THE AWAKENING OF A FORMER WHITE NATIONALIST H U M A N I T I E S N O RT H DA KOTA P R E S E N TS

A BRAVE CONVERSATION WITH ELI SASLOW Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist

ELI SASLOW will speak about his experience interviewing former White Nationalist Derek Black, David Duke’s godson and former leader of the youth White Nationalist Movement. Through compassion and education Black renounced his involvement in the movement risking his life and walking away from the family and community he grew up in. This event will explore the rise of white nationalism and political polarization in contemporary America and point toward overcoming divisions and hatred.

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