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OPINION: United we stand … on some issues at least The Derby Informer
In early June, there was a stir among the Stanford circles I tend to find myself in. Stanford alum Ginevra Davis ’22 had published an article in Palladium magazine titled “Stanford’s War on Social Life,” and everyone was talking about it, from current students and professors to alumni who graduated in the 90s. It was the coalescence of rumblings I’d heard from older students (those pre-covid ones) about Stanford’s languishing social life — something I was seeing for myself as a transfer student who had just finished my first year.
This was surprising to me; after all, I had transferred to Stanford in 2021 from the school whose unofficial motto was the place where “fun goes to die.” Yet, in my first quarter at Stanford, I found myself missing the unique community hubs that so easily brought people together at the University of Chicago: the student run coffee shops, each with its own personality (the one for indie kids, the one for econ bros and their adjacents, the one for more edgy, subversive “alt” students, etc…), the student center, even the silent Harper Library, which was a place for me to hang with friends and meet new people. The school where fun goes to die was somehow doing a better job at facilitating a flourishing social scene than the school which I was promised was so much fun that it basically felt like summer camp.
When I was at UChicago, there was an active effort underway to make the school more appealing to the general high achieving high school student; essentially, to transfigure itself into more of an ivy league-type school. This involved embracing looser restrictions (at orientation, each dorm was told by residence staff that alcohol use was permitted in one’s room, which is evidenced through Residential Life Policy’s emphasis that consumption is only banned explicitly in common areas) and a new community-driven student life strategy. It seems to me that Stanford is heading in the opposite direction, embracing the “where fun goes to die” mantra that UChicago is trying so hard to shed.
I decided to apply to transfer during my freshman fall at UChicago in 2019. I wanted to be at a school that was “more fun.” Now, that’s, of course, an extreme oversimplification of my reasoning to apply out. I had faced an emotionally draining fall quarter at UChicago with the sudden loss of one of my first and closest college friends, Matt. After that, nothing seemed quite the same. I felt stuck in time and space like a beetle trapped in amber. My once exciting future at UChicago was so quickly obscured from view, and my past happy memories there were filled with images of Matt. What was left for me was this troubled present. I couldn’t sleep at night and couldn’t stay awake in class. The oppressive gray skies of January and February were little help in uplifting me. So yes, what I needed was some levity and a little more sun. I sent out applications right before the pandemic sent us all home.
When I was accepted to some schools, I faced a tough decision. Though I had a difficult fall, I had weathered through it and formed close friendships with people from different corners of campus. I would miss the Thursday wine nights and the late nights in the library with friends (our library was actually open late, and we could talk with friends without being glared at from across the room). I would miss the gothic architecture, the beauty of spring in Chicago’s south side, venturing into the city, jumping into the lake, and hosting bonfires. But what I didn’t realize I would miss until I had left for Stanford was how easy it was to meet new people. Even though UChicago is an urban campus where most upperclassmen live off campus, I had no trouble making friends across class years.
I expected an even more vibrant community at Stanford whose campus was much more contained than UChicago’s. I was excited to have an intensely fun social life at Stanford, as many alumni assured me they had experienced. It would be so unlike my many gray days at UChicago.
But, when I arrived at Stanford in the fall of 2021, I saw a dull and tired campus, one that had forgotten it was supposed to be the fun California school. Life here seemed sterile in a way, scrubbed of any imaginative inspiration. I spent much of my time working in my room, and I am someone that hates working in my room. But there were few social places to work on campus where you could meet new people. I felt awkward and unwelcome when I walked into the first floor of Green to absolute silence and stares from people as the squeak of my shoes seemed to fill the emptiness of the space.
The lack of central, social working spaces was just the tip of the iceberg. Stanford has been eroding away traditions (such as Full Moon on the Quad) and historical community hubs through the Neighborhood System. This was easy for them to do — there was an entire year of remote schooling in which traditions were not passed down to the incoming class, and so their demise was imminent. Though such traditions may seem frivolous, it is exactly these small, uniquely Stanford events that bring people together. Walking around campus, I felt that the cautious attitude of much of the administration had infected the student body, with few students trying to reclaim any sense of a normal college social life. Even the palm trees lining much of campus served as a taunting emblem of the broken promise of being the summer camp school.
Some might say these opinions are trivial. After all, a school’s purpose is foremost the education of its students. Yet, I would argue that classes are one of the least important things about Stanford and college in general. Of course, the ways of thinking you encounter are incredibly valuable, but the facts and pure knowledge are a means to an end in learning. I know that in a few years, I might remember about 10% of everything I learned from my classes here, and that is a generous number. Rather, what makes college so valuable is the relationships you make with others across wide and varying backgrounds. Ultimately, these interactions will shape our values and outlooks and even our selfhood. But we must have access to abundant social interactions and involvements for such meaningful growth to take place. So, I implore you, Stanford, to embrace “fun” again, revitalize our unique campus culture, not simply for the enjoyment of the student body but to allow your students to build themselves into complex and diverse beings.
I love that Chico’s city limits is small, about six miles from my home at the edge of the Green Line to Walmart and the mall, enough of a driving distance for an oldster who still wants to be independent.
I love that the short distances allows close proximity to my medical doctors, to the hospital, my downtown church, the library, several supermarkets, banks, stores and a variety of eateries to enjoy.
I love that several churches provide Safe Space winter shelters to the unhoused who don’t qualify for the city sponsored ones because they have pets or other problems.
I love that the university is downtown and its bookstore, concert halls and other facilities are open to the public. It’s fun and enjoyable to walk the lovely grounds,too.
I love Bidwell Park and the neighborhood parks that are quiet respites to enjoy alone or with groups.
I love the Saturday book sales at the Library where donated books in often pristine condition can be bought for low prices and children’s books very affordable so many can be available to anyone for a quarter and generous adults buy them in lots to give to the elementary schools and/or the Little Libraries that are ubiquitous in many neighborhoods.
I love the year-round Farmers Markets where fresh fruits and vegetables in season are available and allows small truck farmers to earn a decent living, reminding me of my immigrant dad who raised his large family similarly.
I love there is Reading Pals at the elementary schools so volunteers can help kids become proficient readers at grade level or beyond.
I love feeling safe walking alone in the neighborhood and in the local parks for exercise and enjoyment, and strangers will greet others with a “hi” or a wave accompanied with a smile.
I love that Chico is in the Pacific Flyway and each fall we can hear and see the Canada geese and ducks as they honk and fly in V-formation on their way to glean at the rice fields or winter at the Sacramento Wildlife Refuge.
And I especially love reading the Opinion pages of the local paper where several regulars write studied or humorous letters and sometimes rebutted, leading to lively discussions.
— Lily Loughlin
For too many people, especially in low-income areas and many communities of color, healthy food is not always available. Some call these areas “food deserts;” I call this “food apartheid.” These overlooked areas highlight the political and exclusionary policies that perpetuate food insecurity and disenfranchise communities.
However, our collective choices as consumers and as policy influencers can uplift equity in our local food system while championing the viability of local farmers.
As our Colorado history and culture prove, we can’t do it alone. It is through connection to our community, land, economy, culture, environment — and most importantly, to each other — that we can make agriculture accessible to all of us. More than ever, it takes a village.
We need solutions that are sustainable, affordable, and ensure everyone has the same access to local food – regardless of socio-economics and geography. In addition, I can say firsthand that we need to support our local farmers, so we also can eat and thrive.
This support involves customers choosing our Colorado Proud products and our labor of love. It also involves financial commitment from policymakers through beneficial grants like the Local Food Assistance Program, which will provide financial support to small retailers across Colorado’s rural communities who want to sell fresh, local food.
It is through collective relationships and shared ownership that we can restore and regenerate human communities and local food systems. Here’s how:
We need more local institutions like hospitals or schools to source their food from local producers.
Hospitals are committed to health and already purchase food for their patients; what if their ingredients came from farms in the communities they serve? This could help circulate more dollars in local economies to support young, beginning, farmers of color and small family farms. Hospitals can also dedicate green space on their campuses for vegetable gardens that provide produce for patients or their community members.
Schools are also important institutions with opportunities to provide food. While some have planted gardens for students to learn more about food and caring for our land, overflow fields on school property, especially in rural Colorado, could also be used by local farmers to co-op acreage to plant for their communities. In addition, schools could invest in cold storage that serves their cafeterias as well as their community.
For hospitals and schools, we can create a hybrid, multi-purpose food system that prioritizes local and regional food while also sourcing from major supply chains. If we shift and focus on addressing land access, dignity and the viability of local farmers to build strong regional food systems – while partnering with institutions, community organizations and retailers whose procurement choices and operations provide a net benefit to people, animals, and planet – we will have farmers who are providing more food hyper-locally, while also creating more space for small farmers to grow on untapped acreage. And that’s good news for all of us.
Retailers are dealing with their own supply chain issues, so they might want to consider more local products, especially in low-income areas. Some regional food hubs, like East Denver Food Hub, Valley Roots Food Hub, Taproot Cooperative, High Plains Food Co-op and Mountain Roots Food Project, are helping local producers get their products to even the smallest retailers, keeping the footprint as small as possible and helping with access for all. Partnerships and retail collaboration are especially important for connecting fresh food and resources to every location, from food-insecure communities to major institutions.
Consumers are not just people who eat; they are also agents of power. They make a choice every time they purchase food, and choosing local food can make a difference for our farmers, economy, environment, and heritage. As consumers, we need to see ourselves as stewards of life and the land with responsibilities that impact our buying decisions. Look for locally-grown produce that’s labeled as Colorado Proud. Visit farmers markets. Use local ingredients. And engage in understanding the current policies that are addressing local agricultural issues.
The heart of the matter is how food can anchor our communities, with help and resources from institutions, retailers and consumers that make up our regional foodshed. The value of connection and relationships in agriculture — whether it’s farmer to farmer, consumer to farmer, or community to farmer — helps sustain people, the ag industry, and the Colorado economy.
It is through “village-wide” commitment to these relationships that we can create a shift with food access for our state.
The strike of tens of thousands of graduate student workers at the University of California points to an uncomfortable truth: For decades the state steadily cut funding to the university while expecting that it admit more students and charge them more along the way.
That has made it more difficult for UC to stay on par with the far-better-endowed private universities it is trying to compete with. At the same time, like those universities, UC must rely on — and adequately pay — its graduate students to carry out its essential functions.
The scale of the state’s disinvestment has been breathtaking. In 1980-81, 87% of the university’s core budget came from Sacramento. Four decades later, state funding had plummeted to merely 39% of the core budget. Making matters worse, much of the lost revenue has been replaced by income from student tuition and fees.
This is not a recent development. Over a decade ago then-UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau described his flagship campus as a federal university because it was receiving more money from federal research grants and student aid than it was from the state.
“The reality is that with the progressive disinvestment in higher education by the state, the state is becoming a tertiary player,” Birgeneau told me at the time.
Further putting pressure on the university is the state’s 60-year-old Master Plan for Higher Education. It decrees that the university enroll the top 12.5% of high school graduates.
That may have seemed reasonable at the time when the state population was around 16 million. But today the population is 40 million.
As a result, student enrollment has soared, more than doubling over the past four decades. Another factor is that an increasing proportion of the high school students are meeting the requirements for admission.
That is something to be celebrated. But it has also put more pressure on the university, which has opened only one new campus — UC Merced — over the last half century. With an enrollment still under 10,000, Merced has only partially addressed the overcrowding issue.
Complicating the university’s basic operational model is that UC enrolls proportionately far fewer graduate students than comparable private universities. As a result, it must draw on a smaller pool of graduate students to help with research and teach sections in ever-larger lecture classes.
All this is happening at a time when students are facing among the highest housing costs in the nation — at a university that has turned increasingly to students to pay a greater share of its core operating costs. That’s despite the 1868 charter establishing the university declaring that “admission and tuition shall be free to all residents of the state.”
One positive sign is that during his first term, Gov. Gavin Newsom departed from many of his predecessors by meaningfully calling for, and providing, greater investments in the university. But that was made possible by the record surpluses the state has enjoyed.
Now those surpluses are coming to an end. It would not be surprising if Sacramento reverted once again to trimming the state’s contribution to UC. This counterproductive dynamic must be reversed, however difficult that may be, if California still wants to have a world-class university system that can compete with private institutions.
Those on opposite sides of this unfortunate strike must settle their differences, and do so soon. But beyond the current conflict, Californians must also take responsibility for electing leaders who have all too frequently chosen, in successive bouts of shortsightedness, to disinvest from the university.
Louis Freedberg, a UC Berkeley-trained anthropologist and veteran education journalist, is former executive director of EdSource.
Imran Khan is a cornered tiger.
After surviving an assassination attempt on Nov. 3 while leading a protest march, Mr. Khan accused Shehbaz Sharif, who succeeded him as prime minister of Pakistan, Rana Sanaullah, the interior minister, and a third man of conspiring to assassinate him. In a significant breach in civil-military relations, Mr. Khan claimed that the third man was a major general in the Inter-Services Intelligence, the dreaded spy agency of Pakistan’s military, which supported his own rise to power.
The saga of Mr. Khan’s embrace of the military and his fallout and confrontation with the generals is a reminder of the limits of power exercised by civilian politicians in Pakistan, where the military has ruled directly for 33 years and always been the power behind the throne.
Mr. Khan took office as prime minister in August 2018 and was deposed by a no-confidence vote in Parliament in April of this year. Rakishly handsome, utterly vain and stubborn at 70, Mr. Khan hasn’t reconciled with his loss of power.
For several months now he has been discrediting the democratic process, blaming his ouster on an American-led foreign conspiracy and attacking Mr. Sharif’s government as an “imported government” full of “thieves.” He commenced on Oct. 28 an energetic roadshow across Pakistan demanding immediate national elections, which aren’t due for a year.
Mr. Khan’s own legend, the story of the cricket captain of steely determination who won his greatest sporting victory — the 1992 Cricket World Cup — with a team almost everybody wrote off, plays a big role in how he persists in politics. He had asked his team to play like a “cornered tiger,” and they ferociously fought their way to victory.
In politics, Mr. Khan’s legend and grit weren’t enough. He founded the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice), or the P.T.I., in 1996 and spent a decade and a half charging quixotically at electoral windmills, barely managing to win a single seat in Pakistan’s 342-member National Assembly.
Many Pakistani analysts believe the military saw that Mr. Khan’s rise would be beneficial in reducing the dominance of the two major political parties, which revolved in and out of power: former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (inherited by her widower and her son after her death) and the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz).
By the early 2010s, Mr. Khan aligned with Pakistan’s military and welcomed power brokers from older political parties into his. He reinvented himself into a populist rallying against corruption and misrule, promising a New Pakistan — a welfare state inspired by the early days of Islam. And he raged against American drone war in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, earlier known as the North-West Frontier Province, and the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
He emerged as a political force after the general elections of 2013. His party won the third largest number of seats, but Nawaz Sharif got the largest number of votes and formed the government. Three years later, in 2016, Nawaz Sharif — the older brother of the current prime minister — fell out with the military over national security policy and the military began to undermine him.
Since shortly after the birth of Pakistan in 1947, the generals have ensured the removal of intransigent politicians attempting to challenge the military either with a coup or with facilitating the election of obedient, chosen ones.
Mr. Khan played his role by ferociously accusing the older Mr. Sharif and his family of corruption and seeking his removal — not through elections but through judicial investigations and prosecution. After Mr. Sharif’s dismissal on corruption charges in 2017, a pliable judiciary disqualified him from holding public office and imprisoned him for hiding assets and not being “honest” despite no convincing evidence that he abused his office for personal gain.
In the 2018 elections, Mr. Khan’s party was seen as the military’s favorite. Independent press was gagged, and there were allegations of rigging and “copious evidence” that Pakistan’s military interfered to help Mr. Khan win. In his first three years in office, Mr. Khan spoke gleefully about being on the “same page” with the Pakistan Army chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, and helped him with a second three-year term as the army chief.
Mr. Khan’s tenure was defined by a disregard for civil liberties and independent press, the hounding of his opponents and ignoring procedures of parliamentary democracy. He failed to improve the economy, inflation rose and the International Monetary Fund halted funding after his government refused to stick to its commitments.
His foreign policy didn’t fare any better. Pakistan’s most important relations, with the United States, Saudi Arabia and China, remained icy during his tenure. President Biden didn’t even make a customary phone call to Mr. Khan after the start of his term. Projects in the multibillion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor remained more or less stalled.
In February 2019, Mr. Khan welcomed the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman on his first visit outside the Middle East after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. In September 2019, Mr. Khan announced plans to team up with Malaysia and Turkey — Prince Mohammed’s nemesis after the Khashoggi murder — to set up a television network to counter Islamophobia and hold a summit of leaders of Muslim countries in Malaysia in December. The plans soured the relationship with Saudi Arabia, a major financial backer, forcing Mr. Khan to pull out.
Apart from his failures of governance, in October 2021, Mr. Khan committed the cardinal sin of interfering in the military’s personnel decisions. He sought to prevent the appointment of a new chief for the I.S.I., as Mr. Khan reportedly favored the continuation of the incumbent spy chief, Lt. Gen. Faiz Hameed.
The military establishment zealously guards its prerogative to promote and post officers at every level. General Bajwa replaced General Hameed with a new spy chief. Mr. Khan, who as prime minister appointed the spy chief in consultation with the army chief, showed his displeasure by taking three long weeks before notifying the appointment.
Pakistani press was gripped with feverish speculation that Mr. Khan wanted to appoint General Hameed as the army chief after General Bajwa’s upcoming retirement in late November 2022. Mr. Khan denied the rumors, but the damage was done. Mr. Khan and the army chief were not on the same page anymore. In March, in the lead-up to the vote of no confidence, a spokesman for General Bajwa publicly declared that the army has “nothing to do with politics.”
Pakistan got the message: Mr. Khan might still be prime minister, but he was not under the protective canopy of the army and the intelligence services anymore. The coalition of opposition parties moved to oust him and Mr. Khan lost crucial allies and legislators of his own party. A vote of no confidence was moved in the national assembly.
In April, Mr. Khan tried to avoid the confidence vote — which decides the fate of a government — by dissolving the national assembly, but the Supreme Court declared his actions unconstitutional and ordered the vote be held. Mr. Khan didn’t have a majority in parliament and was ousted.
Mr. Sharif, the leader of the opposition coalition, took over as prime minister and moved briskly to repair long fractured ties with the military. And in a first, after Mr. Khan’s ouster, his supporters — urban youth and sections of the middle class — who have traditionally been strong supporters of Pakistan’s military, clashed with the police, vandalized property and tried to forcibly enter a military cantonment area.
Mr. Khan has resumed his cry for immediate elections with the halo of a martyr. But he is quickly conceding that the military will always dominate Pakistan’s politics and told the newspaper The Dawn that “using their constructive power can get this country out of institutional collapse.”
He has also dialed back his allegations of an American conspiracy behind his ouster, waking up to the importance the military attaches to its relationship with Washington. The new tack suggests that he is happy with military interference in politics as long as it is on his behalf.
On Thursday Prime Minister Sharif appointed Lt. Gen Syed Asim Munir as the new army chief, who will take over after Gen. Bajwa retires on Tuesday. General Munir had clashed with Mr. Khan during his tenure as the I.S.I. chief in 2019.
Yet Mr. Khan’s populist messaging is gaining wider traction. Pakistan’s economy is faltering. Inflation is higher than 25 percent. Recent floods have affected more than 30 million people, and caused damage and economic losses of around $30 billion. Pakistan needs stability and improved governance, but Mr. Khan’s ambitions are bound to increase political turmoil.
Abbas Nasir is a columnist and former editor of the newspaper The Dawn in Pakistan.
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Editor’s Note: David A. Andelman, a contributor to CNN, twice winner of the Deadline Club Award, is a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, author of “A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen” and blogs at Andelman Unleashed. He formerly was a correspondent for The New York Times and CBS News in Europe and Asia. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.
A truce now in the war in Ukraine would essentially spell victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Nine months in, Russian hopes of a swift seizure have been well and truly dashed, its army largely on the defensive across more than 600 miles of battle lines strung along the eastern and southern reaches of Ukraine.
Indeed a truce or negotiations may be the only path to victory possible at this moment for the Russian leader; his manpower exhausted and weapons supplies dwindling.
At the same time, there is a flagging will of the West that could prove equally toxic for Ukraine – and that Putin is almost certainly counting on.
“The only thing a premature truce does is it allows both parties to re-arm,” Michael Kofman, director of Russian studies at the CNA think tank and a leading expert on the Russian military, told me in an interview.
“And because Russia is the most disadvantaged now, it will benefit Russia the most and then renew the war. So all a truce buys you is a continuation of war. It wouldn’t resolve any of the underlying issues of the war,” he added.
Already, Russia is beginning to rearm, experts say. “Ammunition availability” was one of the “most determinative aspects of this war,” said Kofman. “If you burn through 9 million rounds, you cannot make them in a month. So the issue is what is the ammunition production rate and what can be mobilized?” he added.
Kofman cited available information showing that the manufacture of munitions – which have been the staples of the exchanges so far along Ukrainian front lines – has gone from two, and in some factories to three, shifts a day in Russia. This suggests that “they have the component parts or otherwise they wouldn’t be going to double and triple shifts,” he said.
Yet a truce and negotiations are what some senior American and western officials seem eager, or at least prepared, to press at the moment.
“When there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it. Seize the moment,” General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chief of Staff said recently.
But Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky isn’t buying it. “We will not allow Russia to wait out and build up its forces,” he told the G-20 meeting in Bali earlier this month.
As Ukrainians dig in for a brutal winter of Russian attacks on critical power infrastructure, little wonder they are wary of diplomatic wrangling.
“Please imagine how Ukrainians understand negotiations,” former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko told the Council on Foreign Relations on Monday. “You are sitting in your own house, the killer comes to your house and kills your wife, rapes your daughter, takes the second floor, then opens the door to the second floor and says, ‘OK come here. Let’s have a negotiation.’ What would be your reaction?”
The reality is that there is little real value to any truce, whether or not linked to negotiations. A truce gives Russia, its back increasingly to the wall militarily, vitally needed breathing room.
“As well as giving the Russians time to regroup and rearm, importantly it would relieve the pressure on their forces at the moment,” General Mick Ryan, a fellow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told me in an email exchange. “They have been at it hard for nine months. Their forces are exhausted.”
That sentiment was voiced last month by Jeremy Fleming, head of Britain’s top-secret electronic espionage agency GCHQ. “We know – and Russian commanders on the ground know – that their supplies and munitions are running out,” said Fleming.
Matters for the Russians have not improved since then. On Monday, the British Defense Ministry, which provides some of the most up-to-date and accurate intelligence on the Russian military in Ukraine, reported that, “Both Russian defensive and offensive capability continues to be hampered by severe shortages of munitions and skilled personnel.”
And the French newspaper Le Monde has undertaken a major analysis using on-the-ground video and satellite images showing “Russia’s arms and ammunition stockpiles have been severely dented by Ukrainian targeted attacks.”
The images showed that “in total, at least 52 Russian ammunition depots have been hit by the Ukrainian military since the end of March 2022.” It’s a good chunk of the 100 to 200 Russian depots that analysts believe are on the Ukrainian front, according to the report.
The problem is that the Russians have largely figured this threat out. “The Russians have seemingly adapted to the presence of HIMARs [American-supplied artillery] on the battlefield by pulling their big ammo depots back outside of the range,” Chris Dougherty, a senior fellow for the Defense Program and co-head of the Gaming Lab at the Center for New American Security in Washington, told me in an interview.
That’s “basically any big command post or ammo dump they pulled back beyond the 80-kilometer range,” he explained. And in many cases, just inside Russian territory – which Ukraine has given Washington assurances it would not target with rocket systems supplied by the US.
Dougherty and many other experts, however, believe that truce or no truce, the West needs to up the scale of Ukrainian capabilities.
“Otherwise, Russia will just wait it out,” said Dougherty. Now, after being pushed back in Ukraine’s Fall offensive, “they have a smaller front” to defend.
And, he added, the Russians are “willing to trade mobilized soldiers and artillery shells.” The Russians are expecting that “over time, NATO and the Western allies and Ukrainians won’t be willing to continue to make those trades. And eventually it’ll push them to negotiate. That, I totally believe, is Putin’s bet,” said Dougherty.
That said, history shows any kind of truce with Putin off the back of negotiations would prove meaningless. As Poroshenko observed: “From my personal experience communicating with Putin: Point number one, please don’t trust Putin.” Certainly not to adhere to any agreement if it does not suit his ultimate end of seizing control of Ukraine.
The reality is that the US and the western alliance must be looking as far into the future as Putin and those in the Kremlin who could succeed him. The key question here is: How long will the commitment to the fight persist?
The Russians’ thinking, Dougherty observes, is: “We can stabilize the front and we’ll wait out Ukrainians. We’ll wait out NATO, we’ll wait out the United States.”
But at some point, they’ll also get tired of this war, he added. And the Russian mindset may become “we may not have everything we wanted. But we’ll have a big chunk of the Donbas and will annex that into Russia and we’ll hold onto Crimea. And I think that’s kind of their bet right now.”
At the same time, a truce would also allow the West to rebuild rapidly depleting arsenals that have been drained by materiel sent to Ukraine, even upgrade what’s been supplied.
But were the war to resume months or years from now, there’s a real question as to whether the US and its allies would be prepared to return to a conflict that many are beginning to wish was already over.
Editor’s Note: Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and author of the book “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind.” Follow her on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely her own. View more opinion on CNN.
Once upon a time, Rebecca Solnit wrote in a lyrical column: “There was a man who was in charge of stories. He decided that some stories would be born, expensive, glamorous stories that cost more than a hundred minimum-wage earners might make in a hundred years, filmy stories with the skill of more hundreds expended so that they would slip in like dreams to the minds of millions and make money, and he made money and the money gave him more power over more stories.”
She continued: “There were other stories he decided must die. Those were the stories women might tell about what he had done to them, and he determined that no one must hear them, or if they heard them they must not believe them or if they believed them it must not matter.”
The stories about America’s most famous story killer have now been told, and told again. Since the New York Times and The New Yorker broke the news of Harvey Weinstein’s serial acts of assault and harassment, the list of men publicly indicted for mistreating women has ballooned beyond memory.
#MeToo remains a movement in progress, albeit one that has slowed. And two new films, “She Said” and “Women Talking,” provide important capstones to what has been a very vocal, if incomplete, revolution. Both are stories about the power of women speaking out, and, importantly, both are stories brought to the silver screen by women, who are retelling the stories female journalists first told, which other women told to them.
These are movies women built. And they are an inversion of what made men like Weinstein so noxious: Weinstein wasn’t just a powerful man, he was a man who, as Solnit writes, held the power to tell us stories about ourselves, to determine which stories mattered, which narratives would be definitional, universal, valuable.
His misogyny wasn’t just an interpersonal failing; it meant something that a man who treated women with violence, coercion and contempt was also a man who shaped the cultural products that help us to metabolize our histories, refine our principles and understand ourselves.
And Weinstein wasn’t alone. The list of men in media, publishing, entertainment, and politics who were accused in #MeToo includes names from the world’s top newspapers, magazines, and television stations – men who were shaping our understanding of men, women, American politics and what it means to be human.
“In hearing these individual tales, we’re not only learning about individual trespasses but for the first time getting a view of the matrix in which we’ve all been living,” journalist Rebecca Traister wrote for New York magazine’s The Cut in 2017. “We see that the men who have had the power to abuse women’s bodies and psyches throughout their careers are in many cases also the ones in charge of our political and cultural stories.” How gratifying, then, to see at least some of those stories grabbed back.
“She said” tells a now-familiar tale, but with the drama and urgency of any great journalism film (think “All the President’s Men” or “Spotlight”). Directed by Maria Schrader, it dramatizes the peeling-back of the Weinstein story by New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, played by Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan. And importantly, the film emphasizes the bravery of the women who spoke with Kantor and Twohey as much as it does the doggedness of the two journalists.
“Women Talking” is a stunning, haunting film based on the best-selling 2018 novel by Miriam Toews, itself inspired by a 2013 story by journalist Jean Friedman-Rudovsky in Vice, who reported on a string of “ghost rapes” in a Mennonite community in Bolivia – how the rapes felt impossible to comprehend in the insular and patriarchal community in which they happened; how that same insular and patriarchal community, with its taboos around sex and sexual violence and its requirement of female obedience, allowed the attacks to go on for years and left women and girls suffering in silence; how women and children were ordered to forgive and move on.
Neither “Women Talking” the novel nor “Women Talking” the film is about the journalist’s role, and both are fictionalized accounts of a true story. But both try to do the same work that Friedman-Rudovsky did in her initial reporting: Tell the story through the eyes and experiences of the women who lived through it. And that means emphasizing that the power of this story is not in the horrific attacks, but in what came after, when women got together, spoke out and collectively decided that they were not the crazy ones – and something had to change.
Sound familiar?
Already, too many casual observers are seeing the less-than-blockbuster reception to “She Said,” which made just $2.2 million in its opening weekend after $30 million in production costs, as evidence of… something. The death knell of #MeToo? A backlash against feminism? Boredom with these now well-trod tales of bad men and vulnerable women turned victorious?
Even Weinstein himself got in on it. His spokesperson, Juda Engelmayer, told Variety that this story “has been told over and over again these past five years and it is clear that there was little worth paying to see it here. Harvey, the film producer and distributor, would have known that.”
But Harvey, the film producer and distributor, is currently sitting in jail. And the real story of “She Said,” “Women Talking,” and other films where women take hold of the narrative and are the central characters – the victims, the heroes, sometimes the villains – isn’t whether every single one of them must be overwhelmingly popular in order to signal something important.
It’s that these stories see the light of day, that they are told and told again as many times and in as many formats as the issues they portray shape women’s real lives. It’s that women’s experiences are increasingly being considered fodder for dramas and told through a female gaze, with women shaping the plots and setting the scenes.
It’s that, hopefully someday, the stories women tell about our lives won’t be sequestered off as some special-interest topic, with a single film’s success or lack thereof assumed to make or break a genre, but rather treated like men’s lives: Captured in all their knottiness, the magnificent parts and the monstrous, told not simply as “women’s stories,” but as essential and universal human ones.
For many of us, this may be the first Thanksgiving on which we’ve gathered with relatives in several years; 12 months ago COVID still threatened to turn family gatherings into super-spreader events.
This year the outlook appears safer, though the virus continues to linger like an unwelcome party guest who refuses to leave.
Then there’s the average price of gasoline statewide, projected to be around $3.33 per gallon.
Or fears among many of us that the talk at the dinner table might take an unfortunate turn. (Turkey and dressing served with side dishes of politics rarely goes down very easily.)
All that aside, we hope everyone will be able to share the holiday with someone they appreciate — and someone who shares in the appreciation of our blessings.
In America, we’ve become accustomed to a certain standard of living; for this alone we should feel grateful. Even in times of financial stress, most of us can afford food on the table and roofs over our heads.
Not all of us can, however. We need to be mindful of that.
Let’s be mindful as well that, for all the work yet to be done to make ours a more perfect union, we remain a very fortunate nation in so many ways.
In that spirit, we share some of our favorite reflections on Thanksgiving:
It becomes us to set apart a day for gratefully acknowledging the divine goodness and celebrating the important event which we owe to His benign Interposition.
— George Washington
We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.
Intoxicated with unbroken success we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.
It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.
— Abraham Lincoln
Let us remember that, as much has been given us, much will be expected from us, and that true homage comes from the heart as well as from the lips, and shows itself in deeds.
— Theodore Roosevelt
Searching our hearts, we should ask what we can do as individuals to demonstrate our gratitude to God for all He has done. Such reflection can only add to the significance of this precious day of remembrance.
Let us recommit ourselves to that devotion to God and family that has played such an important role in making this a great Nation, and which will be needed as a source of strength if we are to remain a great people.
— Ronald Reagan
I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.
— Henry David Thoreau
If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.
— Meister Eckhart
This food is the gift of the whole universe — the earth, the sky, and much hard work. May we live in a way that makes us worthy to receive it.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
If you are really thankful, what do you do? You share.
— W. Clement Stone
Over the river and through the wood
To grandfather’s house we go.
The horse knows the way
To carry the sleigh
Through the white and drifted snow.
Over the river and through the wood,
Now grandmother’s cap I spy.
Hurrah for the fun!
Is the pudding done?
Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!
— Lydia Maria Child
