I’ve taken the advice of many and made my pushback to Trump and the GOP a part of my daily routine, calling my Reps every day (5 Calls App), organizing with my local Dems, marching, online petitions and whatnot. I feel the knowledge I gain from journalists is the foundation of these activities. Even when I roll my eyes at our male-dominated political media I know they are essential. I’m a mom with 3 kids and a busy life, not a lot of free time. How can I effectively raise three responsible citizens if they don’t see the actions I take outside the home matching what I say inside it? How can I take all the info out there and translate it into real knowledge for them? For these reasons and basic personal curiosity, reading up on the events of the world is like breathing air or taking a shower to me.
Sometimes amidst all the news and analysis I scroll through, read and listen to each day, one article or tweet or comment sticks out. It is likely a few words that makes me think about something in a new way, challenges my assumptions or simply hits me in the feels. It could be a simple factoid that sticks in my brain or a photo that brings up some strong feelings or even just a quote or anecdote. But it comes back, floating through the random thoughts of dinner or laundry, again and again. This is the real power of good journalism I guess. Changing and expanding our minds.
Yesterday it was this piece in the New Yorker by Rachel Aviv: The Trauma of Facing Deportation. I’ve been a New Yorker reader since I was in high school 20 years ago. My HS English teacher printed out a really , really long piece about the history of the school district in East St Louis, including what the current conditions were like at the time (1990’s) and had us read it and then break it down talking as a group. Quite an eye-opener for a bunch of white kids from a rural town in WI enjoying a pretty decent K-12 education. It was a real lesson in non fiction.
Please read the entire thing...it is about hundreds of refugee children who have fallen unconscious, lost the will to live, after they find out they will be deported from Sweden. It is a very well researched and thoughtful take on the Refugee Crisis, on the challenges faced by liberal free societies and the ways different cultures experience and handle mental health. Here are some excerpts I thought that DK readers may find interesting:
Sweden has been a haven for refugees since the seventies, accepting more asylum seekers per capita than any other European nation, but the country’s definition of political refugees had recently narrowed. Families fleeing countries that were not at war were often denied asylum.
In an open letter to the Swedish minister of migration, forty-two psychiatrists asserted that the new restrictions on asylum seekers and the time it took the Migration Board to process their applications—children could be in limbo for years—were causing the disease. They accused the government of “systematic public child abuse.” Opinion within the medical community converged on the theory that the illness was a reaction to two traumas: harassment in the children’s home country, and the dread, after acclimating to Swedish society, of returning.
A hundred and sixty thousand Swedes signed a petition to stop the deportations of apathetic children and other asylum seekers. Five of Sweden’s seven political parties demanded amnesty for apathetic patients. On the television program “Mission Investigate,” Gellert Tamas, one of the country’s best-known journalists, reported, “The issue is only a few hours from bringing down the government.” The Swedish Parliament passed a temporary act that gave thirty thousand people whose deportations were pending the right to have the Migration Board review their applications again.
She spends her days driving long distances through central Sweden, providing medical exams to refugees for free. She believes that people cannot be truly healthy unless they have trygghet, a word that in English translates as “security” but which has a broader meaning in Swedish: trust, a sense of belonging, freedom from danger, anxiety, and fear. The modern Swedish welfare state was built on the idea that it must safeguard trygghet for its citizens, minimizing the risks to which they are exposed. “Security is the most basic foundation of the individual,” the Swedish minister of social affairs explained, in 1967. “Nothing good has ever come out of insecurity.”
Hacking argues that it is irrelevant to ask, “Is it real?” The better question is: “What makes it possible, in such and such a civilization, for this to be a way to be mad?”
No country has responded to refugees, arguably the moral crisis of our era, with greater diligence and conscientiousness than Sweden. The apathetic children embody the country’s worst fantasy of what will become of the most vulnerable if Sweden abandons its values. The children are embedded in a moral and political debate that is central to the country’s identity, complete with heroes (doctors), victims (patients), and villains (those who doubt the victims’ suffering). In an article about the illness that appeared in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, Karin Johannisson, a Swedish historian, wrote, “Never had the ethics of compassion had such power, fed by vague historical guilt. This was about the whole image of Sweden—a country dripping with wealth but prepared to deport the most defenseless.”