Listening to the rhetoric of anti-abortionists in and outside of government, it sometimes takes an effort to remember that abortions have been happening for as long as there have been humans and the right to a safe abortion has been protected by the United States Constitution since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
But, this is Louisiana where even lost causes are never actually admitted to be lost. We talk in tongues, never saying in public what we mean in our hearts. Unless, of course, we slip and the bile in the form of hatred comes spewing out.
Louisiana's fetus fetish grew out of the same cultural cul-de-sac that venerates confederate leaders but ignores their barbarous acts. Anti-abortionism uses the fetus to bludgeon the rights of women. It was not until the 1970s in Louisiana that women got the right to borrow money on their own. The resentment against that has never died down.
Louisiana's restrictions on women's health options have much less to do with the alleged sacredness of life (the canard that is exposed every day in this state by a long litany of statistics ranging from high poverty rates, poor health outcomes, low levels of education, the highest rate of incarceration, etc.) than with the urgent desire of insecure men to maintain control over the lives of women.
Thus, you have the anti-regulatory legislature passing an increasingly arcane set of regulations on abortion clinics. You have legislators in a state with high teen pregnancy rates fighting to keep sex education out of schools. And you have legislators gutting funding for the Department of Children and Family Services on one day while trying to tighten abortion regulations the next.
We are a backwards state because our elected leaders consistently try to drag us back to a white male supremacy fantasy world of where everyone knew their place and Trey's son could get a job at a bank even it he couldn't count too well.
The confederate monuments fight has served two extremely useful purposes. The first is that it has forced us to examine our history. Those monuments had nothing to do with the Civil War but much more to do with trumpeting the rule of white supremacy harkened by the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The second thing it has accomplished is peel back the thin veneer of politeness and exposed the ugliness that lurks just below it in the bright light of day.
Women seeking abortions have seen this ugliness every time they have approached a clinic to exercise their right to a safe medical procedure. The people who protest and try to block them from exercising their right don't care about the women and they don't care about the fetus that the women want to abort. What they care about is attempting to exercise control over those women in a desperate attempt to cling to the illusion of a past that they can't allow themselves to comprehend.
What unites opponents of removing confederate monuments with anti-abortion activists is the fear and hatred that lies at the core of their beliefs, but which erupt from time to time in ways that are so stark and pronounced as to reveal their alleged higher purpose to be a scam.
Amy Irvin and I had a great conversation. I'm proud to be included as member of the New Orleans Abortion Fund board of directors.
Don Clausen and I have been friends for 40 years. We met at what was then USL at, appropriately enough, a protest over tuition hikes.
We fluctuated in and out of touch before reconnecting in the early years of this century here in Lafayette. By this time Don was well into his career as a social worker specializing in one form or another of addictive behaviors. Over the years we've had hundreds of conversations that have mixed social, cultural and political analysis with the insights he's gleaned through what are now the three decades of his work in the field.
He's been working on his Ph.D. in Social Work at Jackson State University in Mississippi. He's ABD — all but dissertation — at this point and the conversations have gotten richer as he's brought what he's learned from his research of the history of the field of addiction treatment to our ongoing conversations.
This is the third time Don's appeared on the podcast. This conversation covers some of the earliest days of the addiction as a disease model and, in it, Clausen discusses some of the moral and class biases that have shaped the field from its early days and which I would say distort it today.
Dr. Benjamin Rush shaped the field from its earliest days. He was the first to classify addiction as a disease. Later academicians and practitioners applied a moral judgment to the disease model and treatment programs based on that analysis have flourished for more than 150 years. What is clear is that the moral judgments were applied to the addictions (primarily alcohol) of the lower classes, while addictions of the upper classes (which included drugs) were written off as 'products of success.'
We talk about that where the moral judgments were and were not applied.
We also delve into the way society conditions us for addiction and abandons us by not providing us the tools to understand and address those itches we try to scratch or numb with substances of choice — some legal, some not.
The next time Don is on the show, he'll be a full Ph.D. and I'll have to defer to his knowledge. Until then, we'll rumble!
Angelina Iles draws out the best in people. She motivates them to accomplish more than they thought possible. She's been doing this for years in the Rapides Parish city of Pineville. Operating independently as Pineville Concerned Citizens or in concert with other organizations, she's been working to change the political culture in Central Louisiana by focusing on issues that affect the people that too many elected officials ignore — the working poor and lower middle class.
The list of projects she's led and/or worked on in the five years I've known her is longer that the life's work of many others. Defending the state workers at Huey P. Long Hospital against Bobby Jindal and from the ineffectiveness of their public employee union. Rallying Central Louisiana around Medicaid expansion even as Jindal vowed to keep hundreds of thousands of Louisiana residents uninsured. Working to revitalize the state and local Democratic Party organizations that have conspicuously failed at party building at both levels.
She's now working with Indivisible in Central Louisiana on issues ranging from healthcare to pay equity to full citizenship for women. She's working across party lines to improve the plight of the people around her.
Angelina was born in Lafayette. She attended Holy Rosary Institute for a time before moving to Rapides Parish. She was a cafeteria worker for years and a member of the Rapides Federation of Teachers. She raised a good family. She cared for her stroke paralyzed brother at the same time she was battling for the rights of others.
She brings a pragmatic touch to idealistic battles. She wins even when others say she lost. She is relentless in her efforts on behalf of others. She knows that "No" is the bureaucratic response to see if you'll go away.
Angelina Iles is a leader in the truest sense of the word. Ask the people who have encountered her. She is fierce but it is not done in pursuit of personal gain or advantage.
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Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC's Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment.
A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake
Here's a clip of her in action:
Liam Doyle has been had mobility issues since he was born. He used a walker to get around in elementary school, but shifted to a chair in middle school because the campus was larger and he had to get around to classes.
He graduated from Lafayette High, one of the largest high schools in the state that operates on a campus built 50 years ago to accommodate a student body about half the size of the one there now.
He's 28 now, working on an associate degree in History at South Louisiana Community College and plans to attend UL Lafayette when he finishes up his last class in the next semester. He's just passed the battery of tests needed to show he has the capacity to drive a car.
And he's got his hands full working with Lafayette Consolidated Government to improve physical access to public spaces and businesses in the City of Lafayette. He chairs the Mayor-President's Awareness Committee for Citizens with Disabilities, so is pretty officially in the business of removing barriers to access.
Even though LCG is the parish government here, because of we have semi-consolidated government here LCG has no authority in the small municipalities that remain in the parish after Lafayette lost its mayor and council to the parish. It's a complicated yet subtle form of discrimination against city residents who provide much of the funding for the parish.
In the podcast of our conversation, Doyle says he's found his voice and maybe his calling in the role of advocate for the disabled in Lafayette. It was the role that thrust him into the public spotlight just over two years ago and it's a role he's developed a comfort with in dealing with public and private entities as he has gone about the work of making Lafayette accessible for all of us.
He's got a great story! We get to a good bit of it in this interview.
The podcast also includes a segment about recent developments in connection with the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority's Coastal Master Plan. It was recorded before St. John the Baptist Parish became the sixth parish to file suit against oil and gas companies for damage they did to wetlands by way of exploration activities in the Coastal Zone of that parish.
If oil and gas won't pay, we can't stay in South Louisiana.
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Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC's Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment.
A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake
I interviewed Dawn DeDeaux in 2016. The exhibit at MassMOCA she describes here is about to open. The signs of the climate crisis that propels her art are becoming more apparent. Sea level rise on the east coast is producing sunny day, tidal flooding in cities from Miami to Boston.
The great south Louisiana floods of August 2016 were the product of warming water in the Gulf of Mexico and warming air temperatures which fed each other in a vicious cycle for about 72 hours that flooded tens of thousands of homes and businesses, only some of which have recovered from that impact. Temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico this year are already high.
The artist Dawn DeDeaux on the Island Road in Terrebonne Parish, 2016.
DeDeaux's art is informed by an observation from Steven Hawking that he believed humans had about 100 years left to figure out how to prevent the climate here from becoming hostile to our survival.
DeDeaux's Mothership series is about leaving here, destination unknown.
The Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum has a current set of exhibits that loosely and directly provide a perspective of art created in the wake of disasters. A recent panel discussion there in connection with those exhibits focused on how disasters displace people and how the impact of those displacements found expression in the art of the affected people. DeDeaux says her art was changed by the post Katrina flooding of New Orleans. Her art since then could be characterized as art in the face of the disaster that is coming.
Climate change is what would drive us out. A recent article published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies captured in a single phrase the nature of climate change and the reason why it is so hard to mobilize communities, states, nations to address it.
That term is "creeping catastrophe."
It is the slow, steady, relentless nature of climate change that makes it so difficult for us to address. It tends to fade into the background of the daily drama of news reports that focus on attacks, wars, shootings, political crisis, etc., that erupt onto our screens in a flash, then fade or are pushed into the background by some newer, more urgent crisis.
Meanwhile, in the background, temperatures are rising. Glaciers are melting. Sea levels are rising. Land is sinking. Daily. 24/7/365. While your awake and while you sleep.
The Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority recently approved the 2017 version of its Coastal Master Plan. The purpose of the plan is to serve as a blue print for saving south Louisiana from the impact of the creeping catastrophe of climate change — the very thing inspiring DeDeaux's work. Yet, in public testimony over the past two weeks, CPRA leaders have been very frank about not having the money to pay for even the low-ball estimated cost of the plan which is officially $50 billion over the next 50 years.
That is the same price tag attached to the 2012 plan, which Mark Davis of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy says was low by about $40 billion then. Davis says that between the lack of funding and the costs not included in the plan, Louisiana is about $70 billion short to accomplish the task that was at hand then. Things have changed so rapidly since 2012 that the best case scenario in the 2012 Master Plan is considered the worst case scenario in the 2017 version.
Johnny Bradberry who runs the CPRA told legislators that the state can only count on about $19 billion to implement the plan. Other sources are not known at this time, although there is some hope that the federal government might help with the effort. The Edwards administration is joining Coastal Zone parishes in law suits to bring the oil and gas industry to the table to pay for their contribution to the destruction of our wetlands — something state political leaders have acknowledged as fact for at least 40 years.
The prospects of Louisiana developing the discipline and commitment to meet the threat that most of our business and political class still deny exists are not good. After all, we're still building houses on at-grad slabs in what everyone knows are flood plains here (the August 2016 floods rendered the FEMA flood plain maps irrelevant).
Failing that, a lot of people are going to have to move. At some point between now and then, the people who are going to have to move are going to recognize the true cost of climate change denial, of refusing to hold the oil and gas industry accountable for their damage to our wetlands, of basing our economic development strategy over the past eight years on a game of climate change chicken by targeting greenhouse gas spewing industries.
But, unless there's a Mothership around, we're likely to be too busy packing and lamenting our fate to think about those issues.
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Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC's Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment.
A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake
Harold Schoeffler is a Louisiana treasure. He has more first-hand knowledge of the Atchafalaya Basin, the river that feeds it and the coast than any other single person around today.
He has skillfully used the courts to enforce laws and change Louisiana for the better on issues ranging from shell dredging (as it scraping away protective barrier islands to be used for driveways) to protecting the Black Bear.
Schoeffler continues to be a force to be reckoned with on environmental issues in Louisiana based on his instinctual sense of right and wrong which he has used time and again to convince lawyers of the righteousness of his causes who have in turn convinced judges of the righteousness of Harold’s convictions.
Schoeffler is old enough to remember the Basin before oil & gas and flood control pushed the natural characteristics of America’s last great swamp into the background to serve what were argued to be higher interests. He remembers catching tarpon in the Basin above Morgan City. He understands that slow moving, meandering bayous are orders of magnitude better for protecting our wetlands than are box-type canals favored by oil and gas interests.
All of this has been discounted by ‘experts’ in industry who have come to own our state government.
Yet, as we have come to know early in the 21st Century, the Basin is the driver of our ecological wellbeing in south central Louisiana, just as surely as the coast itself is the driver of Louisiana’s wellbeing from Texas to Mississippi.
He has heard the fancy language and seen the pretty pictures painted by those who have no interest other than exploiting the Basin and the coast, no matter the cost. He’s gone through his life with his eyes wide open. He’s seen water quality projects used to wreck bayous and streams. He’s seen hazardous waste dumped in ditches by companies who hid behind the law to justify it. He’s watched as state government leaders have pushed restoration plans that will primarily benefit contractors while turning the Basin and the coast into artificial remnants of their greater selves.
Harold Schoeffler knows that we have spent more than half a century destroying our wetlands and the Atchafalaya Basin in a quest to save it. He knows that time is running out; that the forces that we have unleashed endanger the Basin now as never before.
With three successive governors having the state to spending $50 billion to try to preserve some of our coast, Harold Schoeffler wants those planning the effort to look a little closer at how we got here. Maybe, he figures, if they did that, they wouldn’t make things worse while they try to make things better.
Harold Schoeffler on the Atchafalaya Basin and the bogus process that wants to give Lafayette what it does not want – an elevated roadway through the heart of the city.
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Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC's Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment.
A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake