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No border divides the pain caused by drugs from the pain brought about in Latin America by the drug business and the narcotraficantes.  It’s one big continent of pain–and in the last several years the narcos have begun selling drugs in earnest in their own countries, creating new cultures of addiction and misery.  

Many talk about legalizing drugs, and there’s something to be said for changing the economic arrangements. But what about reducing their use by developing and promoting more interesting and productive ways of dealing with suffering? Or even getting directly at the causes of that suffering?

Here in the United States, there’s no room for sadness, but there are plenty of drugs for it, and now when people feel sad, even many doctors think they should take drugs. We undergo losses and ordeals and live in circumstances that would make any sane person sad, and then we say: the fault was yours and if you feel sad, you’re crazy or sick and should be medicated. Of course, now ever more Americans are addicted to prescription drugs, and there’s always the old anesthetic of choice, alcohol, but there is one difference: the economics of those substances are not causing mass decapitations in Mexico.

We give you money and guns, lots and lots of money. You give us drugs. The guns destroy. The money destroys. The drugs destroy. The pain migrates, a phantom presence crossing the border the other way from the crossings we hear so much about.The drugs are supposed to numb people out, but that momentary numbing effect causes so much pain elsewhere. There’s a pain economy, a suffering economy, a fear economy, and drugs fuel all of them rather than making them go away.

We’ve had movements to get people to stop buying clothes and shoes made in sweatshops, grapes picked by exploited farmworkers, fish species that are endangered, but no one’s thought to start a similar movement to get people to stop consuming the drugs that cause so much destruction abroad.

I have been trying to imagine the export economy of pain. What does it look like? I think it might look like air-conditioning. This is how an air conditioner works: it sucks the heat out of the room and pumps it into the air outside. You could say that air-conditioners don’t really cool things down so much as they relocate the heat. The way the transnational drug economy works is a little like that: people in the U.S. are not reducing the amount of pain in the world; they’re exporting it to Mexico and the rest of Latin America as surely as those places are exporting drugs to us.

Mexico, I am sorry.  I want to see it all change, for your sake and ours. I want to call pain by name and numbness by name and fear by name. I want people to connect the dots from the junk in their brain to the bullet holes in others’ heads. I want people to find better strategies for responding to pain and sadness. I want them to rebel against those parts of their unhappiness that are political, not metaphysical, and not run in fear from the metaphysical parts either.

A hundred years ago, your dictatorial president Porfiro Díaz supposedly remarked, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States,” which nowadays could be revised to, “Painful Mexico, so far from peace and so close to the numbness of the United States.”

The systems and social media making teenagers sad, angry and afraid today were shaped in part by adults who grew up sad, angry and afraid themselves.

Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls reported in 2021 that they had seriously considered suicide

Teen girls reported the highest ever levels of sexual violence, sadness and hopelessnes

Rates of bullying were increasing in the state even in 2018, and researchers at Drake University found some forms of it significantly correlated with feeling sad or hopeless and attempting suicide.

One in 5 — nearly 53 million people — had a mental illness in 2020, ranging from anxiety to depression to bipolar disorder.

Yes, social media delivers concentrated, addictive stress to developing minds that were held captive by the pandemic. No, logging off TikTok and returning to school will not fix the problem — because each teen’s life ricochets off family, friends and neighbors with struggles of their own in a polity with troubles of its own.

“Increasing the sense among all students that they are cared for, supported, and belong at school” is one, as is growing access to mental health and substance use prevention services for kids and their families and health education classes to teach teens to manage their boundaries and emotions and to ask for help. These positive practices build resilience.

can we acknowledge the weight this puts on underpaid teachers and part-time counselors and nurses? People who, if they haven’t already burned out, are practicing active-shooter drills, catching students up on 18 months of lost learning and ensuring kids have enough food to concentrate in class.

A school’s four walls cannot hold back the trauma of society as well as, perhaps, the personal nightmare waiting for kids at home.

Which brings us to the adults

Solutions start with compassionate, radical honesty: American kids are unwell because American society is unwell.

Nearly 28 million adults had an alcohol use disorder.

As many as 3 in 100 people will have a psychotic episode in their lives

we, too, need a sense that we are cared for, supported and belong.

As kids, 61 percent of adults in the United States experienced abuse or neglect, grew up with poverty, hunger, violence or substance abuse, experienced gender-based discrimination and racism or lost a parent to divorce or death.

If not you, then someone you know is doing their best to stitch up those invisible wounds.

Here’s more hope: Brains wired by toxic stress, such as the sexual violence that 1 in 10 teen girls are facing today, have the ability to essentially heal when exposed to positive experiences.

Good nutrition, adequate sleep, mindfulness practices all help. Adults as well as children have neuroplasticity, and family resilience and connection are positive influences.

This sad Republican fate is deserved. It is the culmination, the fruition, of an absurdly simplistic anti-establishment attitude. The Trump campaign is what happens when you choose a presidential candidate without the taint of electoral experience — and all the past vetting that comes with it

Whatever the explanation, Trump achieved the worst possible outcome for the GOP. He was good enough with his base to avoid a generalized revolt, and bad enough with the rest of the country to continue his slide toward major defeat.

This kind of thing has been normalized in far-right discourse for decades. To the most partisan and polarized portion of the right, these excuses and accusations were familiar and appropriate.

It is what happens when you pick a candidate who has not engaged in serious public argument over a period in which his or her views and consistency can be tested. It is what happens when you embrace a candidate only on the basis of an outsider persona, who lacks actual political skills — like making a policy argument, empathizing with a voter or avoiding a constant stream of distracting gaffes.

This is what Republicans get for devaluing the calling of public service. When you have contempt for politics, you often get a politics worthy of contempt.

Until recently, it was presumed, by both critics and supporters, that the GOP was the party of traditional moral order. Under Trump, it seems much more like British conservatism at its worst — hate and mock the liberals, fear the outsiders, and put a topless woman on Page 3

The deep partisanship of Trump evangelicals — fighting for a team rather than standing for principles — is actually aiding the secularization of American politics. And so, it turns out, some are making a graven image — of a figure who deserves contempt.

One thinks, too, of Bill Clinton traveling to Oklahoma City after the bombing there of a federal building in 1995. Clinton, like Reagan, was at his best when he captured tangled emotions and gave meaning to deaths of some of our finest citizens. He not only consoled families in private but moved the nation when he mourned them publicly. As I recall, that's when presidents were first called "Mourners in Chief" -- a phrase that has been applied repeatedly to presidents since. (Not coincidentally, Clinton's speech of mourning in Oklahoma City is widely credited with resurrecting his presidency, then in the doldrums.)

Historians generally agree that Washington, Lincoln and FDR were our greatest presidents. All three are remembered for their empathy and steadfastness in caring for the lives of average Americans. They continue to set the standard.

Lincoln began his presidency during great uncertainty about his leadership. He won the election of 1860 with the smallest plurality ever (39%), and his military experience was virtually nil. But over time, he kindled a special relationship with Union soldiers, many of whom called him "Father Abraham." Historians say his homespun ways, common manner and kindly empathy converted them. In his re-election, soldiers were his greatest supporters.

Why has our current "Mourner in Chief" gone AWOL? God knows. But his flight from responsibility is yet another sadness among this week's tragic losses.

But the only thing this reflexive complaining does is divide the country further and make a coherent response to Islamic State more difficult.

There, I met Dale “Red” Robinson, a Pearl Harbor survivor and a staff sergeant in the infantry who was later part of the Normandy landing. He recalled the national unity of that war

“Nothing like this, these days. It’s sad, kind of sad, my friend.”

Robinson said he feels “sorry for all of the soldiers” serving today, let down by their political leaders.

That’s what Monday afternoon’s ceremony was about. A sailor rang a bell at 1:57 p.m. Eastern time, the moment 74 years earlier when Japanese planes struck

ater, while the band played “America the Beautiful,” the veterans, some wheeled, some walking with support, made a slow procession around the memorial’s pool to place wreaths

We live all of us today with the prosperity and the security built on the shoulders of these heroes,”

That’s our challenge — and we’re failing.

“The difference is the uncertainty of today, and it’s a big difference,”

“I thought they were more loyal, more concerned about the nation than their position,” he said.

Mays complained about the sharp partisan divisions in Congress. “How can we bring unity when you have that?”

Now, our representatives can’t even manage to come up with a resolution authorizing the use of military force against the Islamic State — and they’ve been at it for a year.

“just a half-hearted attempt to defend and distract from a failing policy.” Ryan said we are “one step behind our enemy.”

and the constant sniping at each other does nothing to defeat the Islamic State. As those old soldiers on the Mall taught us, victory comes from unity.

“Nothing in the West can compare with the role which aesthetics has played in Japanese life and history since the Heian period”; and “the miyabi spirit of refined sensibility is still very much in evidence” in modern aesthetic criticism.9

there has run through history the idea that the Japanese are, in terms of their original nature (that is, their nature before the introduction from the outside of such systems of thought and religion as Confucianism and Buddhism), essentially an emotional people. And in stressing the emotional side of human nature, the Japanese have always assigned high value to sincerity (makoto) as the ethic of the emotions.

If the life of the emotions thus had an ethic in makoto, the evolution of mono no aware in the Heian period provided it also with an aesthetic.

Tsurayuki said, in effect, that people are emotional entities and will intuitively and spontaneously respond in song and verse when they perceive things and are moved. The most basic sense of mono no aware is the capacity to be moved by things, whether they are the beauties of nature or the feelings of people,

One of the finest artistic achievements of the middle and late Heian period was the evolution of a native style of essentially secular painting that reached its apex in the narrative picture scrolls of the twelfth century. The products of this style of painting are called “Yamato [that is, Japanese] pictures” to distinguish them from works categorized as “Chinese pictures.”

The Fujiwara epoch, in literature as well as the visual arts, was soft, approachable, and “feminine.” By contrast, the earlier Jōgan epoch had been forbidding, secretive (esoteric), and “masculine.”

Despite the apparent lust of the samurai for armed combat and martial renown, much romanticized in later centuries, the underlying tone of the medieval age in Japan was from the beginning somber, pessimistic, and despairing. In The Tale of Genji the mood shifted from satisfaction with the perfections of Heian courtier society to uncertainty about this life and a craving for salvation in the next.

Despite political woes and territorial losses, the Sung was a time of great advancement in Chinese civilization. Some scholars, impressed by the extensive growth in cities, commerce, maritime trade, and governmental bureaucratization in the late T’ang and Sung, have even asserted that this was the age when China entered its “early modern” phase. The Sung was also a brilliant period culturally.

the fortuitous combination of desire on the part of the Sung to increase its foreign trade with Japan and the vigorous initiative taken in maritime activity by the Taira greatly speeded the process of transmission.

The Sung period in China, on the other hand, was an exceptional age for scholarship, most notably perhaps in history and in the compilation of encyclopedias and catalogs of art works. This scholarly activity was greatly facilitated by the development of printing, invented by the Chinese several centuries earlier.

In addition to reviving interest in Japanese poetry, the use of kana also made possible the evolution of a native prose literature.

peasantry, who formed the nucleus of what came to be known as the True Sect of Pure Land Buddhism. Through the centuries, this sect has attracted one of the largest followings among the Japanese, and its founder, Shinran, has been canonized as one of his country’s most original religious thinkers.

True genre art, picturing all classes at work and play, did not appear in Japan until the sixteenth century. The oldest extant genre painting of the sixteenth century is a work, dating from about 1525, called “Views Inside and Outside Kyoto” (rakuchū-rakugai zu).

the aesthetic principles that were largely to dictate the tastes of the medieval era. We have just remarked the use of sabi. Another major term of the new medieval aesthetics was yūgen, which can be translated as “mystery and depth.” Let

One of the basic values in the Japanese aesthetic tradition—along with such things as perishability, naturalness, and simplicity—is suggestion. The Japanese have from earliest times shown a distinct preference for the subtleties of suggestion, intimation, and nuance, and have characteristically sought to achieve artistic effect by means of “resonances” (yojō).

Amidism was not established as a separate sect until the time of the evangelist Hōnen (1133–1212).

But even in Chōmei we can observe a tendency to transform what is supposed to be a mean hovel into something of beauty based on an aesthetic taste for “deprivation” (to be discussed later in this chapter) that evolved during medieval times.

Apart from the proponents of Pure Land Buddhism, the person who most forcefully propagated the idea of universal salvation through faith was Nichiren (1222–82).

Nichiren held that ultimate religious truth lay solely in the Lotus Sutra, the basic text of the Greater Vehicle of Buddhism in which Gautama had revealed that all beings possess the potentiality for buddhahood.

At the time of its founding in Japan by Saichō in the early ninth century, the Tendai sect had been based primarily on the Lotus Sutra; but, in the intervening centuries, Tendai had deviated from the Sutra’s teachings and had even spawned new sects, like those of Pure Land Buddhism, that encouraged practices entirely at variance with these teachings.

Declaring himself “the pillar of Japan, the eye of the nation, and the vessel of the country,”14 Nichiren seems even to have equated himself with Japan and its fate.

The kōan is especially favored by what the Japanese call the Rinzai sect of Zen, which is also known as the school of “sudden enlightenment” because of its belief that satori, if it is attained, will come to the individual in an instantaneous flash of insight or awareness. The other major sect of Zen, Sōtō, rejects this idea of sudden enlightenment and instead holds that satori is a gradual process to be attained primarily through seated meditation.

Fought largely in Kyoto and its environs, the Ōnin War dragged on for more than ten years, and after the last armies withdrew in 1477 the once lovely capital lay in ruins. There was no clear-cut victor in the Ōnin War. The daimyos had simply fought themselves into exhaustion,

Yoshimasa was perhaps even more noteworthy as a patron of the arts than his grandfather, Yoshimitsu. In any case, his name is just as inseparably linked with the flourishing of culture in the Higashiyama epoch (usually taken to mean approximately the last half of the fifteenth century) as Yoshimitsu’s is with that of Kitayama.

The tea room, as a variant of the shoin room, evolved primarily in the sixteenth century.

Shukō’s admonition about taking care to “harmonize Japanese and Chinese tastes” has traditionally been taken to mean that he stood, in the late fifteenth century, at a point of transition from the elegant and “aristocratic” kind of Higashiyama chanoyu just described, which featured imported Chinese articles, to a new, Japanese form of the ceremony that used native ceramics,

the new kind of tea ceremony originated by Shukō is called wabicha, or “tea based on wabi.” Developed primarily by Shukō’s successors during the sixteenth century, wabicha is a subject for the next chapter.

The Japanese, on the other hand, have never dealt with nature in their art in the universalistic sense of trying to discern any grand order or structure; much less have they tried to associate the ideal of order in human society with the harmonies of nature. Rather,

The Chinese Sung-style master may have admired a mountain, for example, for its enduring, fixed quality, but the typical Japanese artist (of the fifteenth century or any other age) has been more interested in a mountain for its changing aspects:

Zen culture of Muromachi Japan was essentially a secular culture. This seems to be strong evidence, in fact, of the degree to which medieval Zen had become secularized: its view of nature was pantheistic and its concern with man was largely psychological.

Nobunaga’s castle at Azuchi and Hideyoshi’s at Momoyama have given their names to the cultural epoch of the age of unification. The designation of this epoch as Azuchi-Momoyama (or, for the sake of convenience, simply Momoyama) is quite appropriate in view of the significance of castles—as represented by these two historically famous structures—in the general progress, cultural and otherwise, of these exciting years.

Along with architecture, painting was the art that most fully captured the vigorous and expansive spirit of the Momoyama epoch of domestic culture during the age of unification. It was a time when many styles of painting and groups of painters flourished. Of the latter, by far the best known and most successful were the Kanō,

Motonobu also made free use of the colorful Yamato style of native art that had evolved during the Heian period and had reached its pinnacle in the great narrative picture scrolls of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

what screen painting really called for was color, and it was this that the Kanō artists, drawing on the native Yamato tradition, added to their work with great gusto during the Momoyama epoch. The color that these artists particularly favored was gold, and compositions done in ink and rich pigments on gold-leaf backgrounds became the most characteristic works of Momoyama art.

there could hardly be a more striking contrast between the spirits of two ages than the one reflected in the transition from the subdued monochromatic art of Japan’s medieval era to the blazing use of color by Momoyama artists, who stood on the threshold of early modern times.

aware, which, as we saw in Chapter 3, connotes the capacity to be moved by things. In the period of the Shinkokinshū, when Saigyō lived, this sentiment was particularly linked with the aesthetic of sabi or “loneliness” (and, by association, sadness). The human condition was essentially one of loneliness;

During the sixteenth century the ceremony was further developed as wabicha, or tea (cha) based on the aesthetic of wabi. Haga Kōshirō defines wabi as comprising three kinds of beauty: a simple, unpretentious beauty; an imperfect, irregular beauty; and an austere, stark beauty.

The alternate attendance system also had important consequences in the cultural realm, contributing to the development for the first time of a truly national culture. Thus, for example, the daimyos and their followers from throughout the country who regularly visited Edo were the disseminators of what became a national dialect or “lingua franca” and, ultimately, the standard language of modern Japan.

They also fostered the spread of customs, rules of etiquette, standards of taste, fashions, and the like that gave to Japanese everywhere a common lifestyle.

“[Tokugawa-period] statesmen thought highly of agriculture, but not of agriculturalists.”6 The life of the average peasant was one of much toil and little joy. Organized into villages that were largely self-governing, the peasants were obliged to render a substantial portion of their farming yields—on average, perhaps 50 percent or more—to the samurai, who provided few services in return. The resentment of peasants toward samurai grew steadily throughout the Tokugawa period and was manifested in countless peasant rebellions

Although in the long run the seclusion policy undeniably limited the economic growth of Tokugawa Japan by its severe restrictions both on foreign trade and on the inflow of technology from overseas, it also ensured a lasting peace that made possible a great upsurge in the domestic economy, especially during the first century of shogunate rule.

Both samurai and peasants were dependent almost solely on income from agriculture and constantly suffered declines in real income as the result of endemic inflation; only the townsmen, who as commercialists could adjust to price fluctuations, were in a position to profit significantly from the economic growth of the age.

We should not be surprised, therefore, to find this class giving rise to a lively and exuberant culture that reached its finest flowering in the Genroku epoch at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. The mainstays of Genroku culture were the theatre, painting (chiefly in the form of the woodblock print), and prose fiction,

The Japanese had, of course, absorbed Confucian thinking from the earliest centuries of contact with China, but for more than a millennium Buddhism had drawn most of their intellectual attention. Not until the Tokugawa period did they come to study Confucianism with any great zeal.

One of the most conspicuous features of the transition from medieval to early modern times in Japan was the precipitous decline in the vigor of Buddhism and the rise of a secular spirit.

The military potential and much of the remaining landed wealth of the medieval Buddhist sects had been destroyed during the advance toward unification in the late sixteenth century. And although Buddhism remained very much part of the daily lives of the people, it not only ceased to hold appeal for many Japanese intellectuals but indeed even drew the outright scorn and enmity of some.

it was the Buddhist church—and especially the Zen sect—that paved the way for the upsurge in Confucian studies during Tokugawa times. Japanese Zen priests had from at least the fourteenth century on assiduously investigated the tenets of Sung Neo-Confucianism, and in ensuing centuries had produced a corpus of research upon which the Neo-Confucian scholarship of the Tokugawa period was ultimately built.

Yamaga Sokō is generally credited as the formulator of the code of bushidō, or the “way of the warrior.”4 Certainly he was a pioneer in analyzing the role of the samurai as a member of a true ruling elite and not simply as a rough, and frequently illiterate, participant in the endless civil struggles of the medieval age.

The fundamental purpose of Neo-Confucian practice is to calm one’s turbid ki to allow one’s nature (ri) to shine forth. The person who achieves this purpose becomes a sage, his ri seen as one with the universal principle, known as the “supreme ultimate” (taikyoku), that governs all things.

Neo-Confucianism proposed two main courses to clarify ri, one objective and the other subjective.7 The objective course was through the acquisition of knowledge by means of the “investigation of things,” a phrase taken by Chu Hsi from the Chinese classic The Great Learning (Ta hsüeh). At the heart of things to investigate was history,

Quite apart from any practical guidance to good rulership it may have provided, this Neo-Confucian stress on historical research proved to be a tremendous spur to scholarship and learning in general during the Tokugawa period;8 and, as we will see in the next chapter, it also facilitated the development of other, heterodox lines of intellectual inquiry.

the subjective course appeared to have been taken almost directly from Buddhism, and in particular Zen. It was the course of “preserving one’s heart by holding fast to seriousness,” which called for the clarification of ri by means remarkably similar to Zen meditation.

The calendrical era of Genro ku lasted from 1688 until 1703, but the Genroku cultural epoch is usually taken to mean the span of approximately a half-century from, say, 1675 until 1725. Setting the stage for this rise of a townsman-oriented culture was nearly a century of peace and steady commercial growth.

places of diversion and assignation, these quarters were the famous “floating worlds” (ukiyo) of Tokugawa fact and legend. Ukiyo, although used specifically from about this time to designate such demimondes, meant in the broadest sense the insubstantial and ever-changing existence in which man is enmeshed.

ukiyo15 always carried the connotation that life is fundamentally sad; but, in Genroku times, the term was more commonly taken to mean a world that was pleasurable precisely because it was constantly changing, exciting, and up-to-date.

the Tokugawa period was not at all like the humanism that emerged in the West from the Renaissance on. Whereas modern Western humanism became absorbed with people as individuals, with all their personal peculiarities, feelings, and ways, Japanese humanism of the Tokugawa period scarcely conceived of the existence of true individuals at all; rather, it focused on “the people” and regarded them as comprising essentially types, such as samurai, farmers, and courtesans.

there is little in the literature as a whole of that quality—character development—that is probably the single most important feature of the modern Western novel.

Although shogunate authorities and Tokugawa-period intellectuals in general had relatively little interest in the purely metaphysical side of Chu Hsi’s teachings, they found his philosophy to be enormously useful in justifying or ideologically legitimizing the feudal structure of state and society that had emerged in Japan by the seventeenth century.

With its radical advocacy of violent irrationality—to the point of psychosis—Hagakure has shocked many people. But during Japan’s militarist years of the 1930s and World War II, soldiers and others hailed it as something of a bible of samurai behavior, and the postwar nationalist writer Mishima Yukio was even inspired to write a book in praise of its values.

It is significant that many of the leading prose writers, poets, and critics of the most prominent journal of Japanese romanticism, Bungakukai (The Literary World, published from 1893 until 1898), were either converts to or strongly influenced by Protestant Christianity, the only creed in late Meiji Japan that gave primacy to the freedom and spiritual independence of the individual. The absolutism embodied in the Meiji Constitution demanded strict subordination of the interests of the individual to those of the state;

The feeling of frustration engendered by a society that placed such preponderant stress upon obedience to the group, especially in the form of filial piety toward one’s parents and loyalty to the state, no doubt accounts for much of the sense of alienation observable in the works of so many modern Japanese writers.

These writers have been absorbed to an unusual degree with the individual, the world of his personal psychology, and his essential loneliness. In line with this preoccupation, novelists have perennially turned to the diary-like, confessional tale—the so-called I-novel—as their preferred medium of expression.

In intellectual and emotional terms, the military came increasingly to be viewed as the highest repository of the traditional Japanese spirit that was the sole hope for unifying the nation to act in a time of dire emergency.

The enemy that had led the people astray was identified as those sociopolitical doctrines and ideologies that had been introduced to Japan from the West during the preceding half-century or so along with the material tools of modernization.

If there is a central theme to this book, it is that the Japanese, within the context of a history of abundant cultural borrowing from China in premodern times and the West in the modern age, have nevertheless retained a hard core of native social, ethical, and cultural values by means of which they have almost invariably molded and adapted foreign borrowing to suit their own tastes and purposes.

"You know, we tried to get it moved quickly 'cause we'd like to help DACA. I think everybody in this room wants to help with DACA, but the Supreme Court just ruled that it has to go through the normal channels, so it's going back in," Trump told a group of state governors at the White House. "There won't be any surprise. I mean, it's really sad when every single case filed against us -- this is in the 9th Circuit -- we lose, we lose, we lose, and then we do fine in the Supreme Court. But what does that tell you about our court system? It's a very, very sad thing. So DACA's going back, and we'll see what happens from there."<img alt="Sen. Durbin tells story of Chloe Kim " class="media__image" src="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/180214095613-dick-durbin-2-13-large-169.jpg">JUST WATCHEDSen. Durbin tells story of Chloe Kim ReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCHtheoplayer-texttra

"While we were hopeful for a different outcome, the Supreme Court very rarely grants certiorari before judgment, though in our view, it was warranted for the extraordinary injunction requiring the Department of Homeland Security to maintain DACA," O'Malley said. "We will continue to defend DHS's lawful authority to wind down DACA in an orderly manner."

You might be lucky and be among the very few who are released from immigration jail and allowed to live in our country while your asylum application is pending. This won’t mean that your immigration case will be over though. Your immigration case will not be solved for years, and even though you have a case for staying in this country, the government will make you wait for years before you get a final answer.

Then, something unexpected will happen. You will get sick or you will get very depressed. Maybe you will be sad because you miss your family. Because of how sick or sad you were, you will sleep in one day, miss a shift at work, and you will be fired. You will run out of money and while looking for jobs, one day you will jump the turnstile to get on a train for a job interview. To you, it was worth the risk, but you miscalculated.

You will get arrested and charged with a crime for the first time in your life. You will swear never to make a mistake again but it will be too late.

But let’s say you don’t get deported. If for some reason, and against all the odds, you find an immigration judge that listens to your story and understands your life is at risk if you return to your country, you will be granted permission to stay here. Then, you finally may feel that something good came your way.

I know you have heard so many wonderful things about this place. I am sure that you heard that we were a “nation of immigrants,” correct? Well, that’s a thing of the past. We even changed the mission of the government agency handling asylum applications so it is clear to you. We are now “committed to protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.” What values, you ask? Well, whatever we pick to justify that you are not welcome here.

I know. I know you will come because I am a refugee living in the United States and I know what it means to escape death. I am so ashamed that we will do this to you and I am angry because my new country has betrayed me and every other person who believed in it. This place is not what it used to be. Just know that.

anxiety is rising in the U.S. over the climate. Sixty-two percent of people surveyed said they were at least “somewhat” worried about the climate, up from 49 percent in 2010. The rate of those who described themselves as “very” worried was 21 percent, about double the rate of a similar study in 2015. Only 6 percent said humans can and will reduce global warming.

it’s not just a science abstraction anymore. I’m increasingly seeing people who are in despair, and even panic. “

Good Grief offers a 10-step program to help people deal with collective grief — issues that affect a whole society, like racism, mass shootings and climate grief.

The steps encourage participants to confront their climate fears and sadness and acknowledge that they are part of the problem as polluters in a carbon-fueled system, but also find the motivation and strength to be part of the solution.

Bill McKibben, a climate activist for over 30 years who runs the climate advocacy organization 350.org, said groups like Good Grief can be an effective way to deal with climate grief.

We can’t just be individuals, we need to join together and be a movement," he said in an interview. "It makes you less grief-stricken. The best antidote to feeling powerless is activism. It doesn’t make you less sad, but adds hope, solidarity and love."

Even though the latest U.N. report was a "kick in the stomach" for him, he cautioned that those experiencing existential grief over climate change are not its main victims. “It’s poor communities with flimsy homes that are washing away,”

Almost all of the young people interviewed for this article said they were struggling with the ethical implications of having children.

“I’m definitely not having kids,” said Marcela Mulholland, 21, a student at the University of Florida in Orlando and a participant in the Uplift session. “I don’t have hope that we will avoid climate catastrophe.

ordan said she used to talk with her kids about becoming parents someday. “I’d say, ‘You’ll be such a good dad.’ Now, it feels wrong. They don’t talk about it anymore either,”

“It’s culturally acceptable to talk about all kinds of anxieties, but not the climate,” said Van Susteren, the climate psychiatrist. “People need to talk about their grief. When you do nothing, it just gets worse.”

The Yale survey found that 65 percent of those surveyed discuss global warming “never” or “rarely.”

“Think about it, do you always understand what is really bothering you deep down?” she said. “The constant barrage of news that the world is ending takes a toll.”

Cindy Chung, 17, of Bayonne, New Jersey, is an activist with iMatter, a network of high school students who advocate for environmental measures on a local level. She struggles to understand how people, especially adults, can continue with business as usual.

“It wasn’t our choice to be born into a doomed world,” she said. “All this terrible stuff can happen by 2030, and I won’t even be 30 years old. It’s so frightening.”

Speaking to reporters after the closed-door vote, Representative Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the committee, said it has been a “sad day” for the committee and that Republicans had voted “to politicize the intelligence process

The memo, which was made available to all members of the House, is said to contend that officials from the two agencies were not forthcoming to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that the memo reveals that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, a top Trump appointee, signed off an application to extend the surveillance of Mr. Page shortly after taking office last spring. The renewal shows that the Justice Department under Mr. Trump saw reason to believe that Mr. Page was acting as a Russian agent.

The inclusion of Mr. Rosenstein’s action in the memo could expose him to a torrent of criticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from conservatives in the media who have seized on the surveillance to argue that the Russia investigation may have been tainted from the start.

There is no known precedent for the Republicans’ action. Though House rules allow the Intelligence Committee to vote to disclose classified information if it is deemed to be in the public interest, the rule is not thought to have ever been used.

Stephen E. Boyd, an assistant attorney general, said it would be “extraordinarily reckless” to release a memo drawing on classified information without official review. He said the department is “unaware of any wrongdoing related to the FISA process.”

Democrats responded to the committee’s actions with outrage.

By the end, we had a number of people feeling like, ‘I voted for Trump, but maybe I made a mistake.’

“They were energized all the way up until the inauguration,” she said. “After inauguration, the days began to pass and [Trump] began with one executive order after another and one cause of chaos and instability after another, and the Republicans became less energized. They’d say, ‘Oh my, what did we do?’ By the end, we had a number of people feeling like, ‘I voted for Trump, but maybe I made a mistake.’” Hansen said she consciously worked to make room for those voters in her tent. “In my speeches, I welcomed people who wanted to have second thoughts,” she said. “They are still of the mindset they have to go out and vote. They just may not vote for the Republican this time.”

this approach to emotional development neglects the full, complicated range of unhappy feelings that are just as valid a part of human life as happiness is — from sadness to frustration, from anger to fear, from guilt to disappointment, boredom or disgust.

Much research on well-being makes clear that Americans’ typical approaches to the pursuit of happiness is far from helpful to our kids. Anxiety and mental health problems in children and teens have been steadily increasing

In fact, the more we teach our kids to stay positive, at the expense of helping them accept occasional difficult feelings, the less we equip them with tools to manage such feelings when life inevitably gets hard

We tend to have a similar disdain for negative thoughts. Americans like to believe that our thoughts define us: that we need to control that running commentary, shape it and aggressively avoid the “bad” thoughts that supposedly doom us to unhappiness

Research into mindfulness and acceptance and commitment therapy reveals that it’s not negative thoughts that cause depression, anxiety, amotivation or any other mental rut we’re afraid of. It is when negative thoughts become sticky that we are more prone to those problems.

The more we fight with our thoughts, the more we give them the power to stick.

Being fixated on having only the “right” kind of thoughts breeds the cognitive rigidity that creates tunnel vision, locks us into unhelpful patterns, increases our risk of rumination, obsessions and compulsions, and decreases our ability to adapt to setbacks.

Commit to teaching and practicing the pause.

forced happiness, happiness as a sole goal without a deeper sense of meaning or purpose, or the pretense of happiness that stems from the expectation that anything less is toxic, can turn such “happiness” harmful in its own right.

If you can help your child develop meta-cognition — the ability to think about their thoughts and keep from getting stuck within them — and mindfulness, which helps them become a gentle, nonjudgmental observer of their thoughts and feelings, attuned in the moment to their experience, then you are giving them psychological tools to help them for a lifetime.

ADEncourage turning anxious thought patterns into characters.

Teach your kids that their thoughts don’t define them. Encourage your children to observe their thoughts with curiosity rather than fear, in a nonjudgmental way rather than with shame.

Encourage labeling distressing thoughts like “I’m having the thought no one likes me” rather than “No one likes me,” which helps your child separate from them.

a child with social anxiety may call their negative self-talk “The Stage-Fright Bully” and decide that it has nothing important to say — and that the show can go on.

Take the stance that feelings, even big ones, are always okay.

Emphasize that it’s how we handle emotions that matters most, and we can choose those actions mindfully

What better time to begin teaching our kids that unhappiness has a rightful place in a full and — yes — truly happy life? It is often the difficult emotions that have the most to teach us about ourselves, and that give us the opportunity to find meaning and connect with others.

teach them that the anger is okay, but we must think through our actions carefully, noticing our thoughts and bodily sensations without launching into autopilot.

Every time they fully engage with a feeling and choose functional behavior, they strengthen their emotional intelligence and make it more likely that that feeling won’t impel them toward unhealthy habits in the future.

Enlarge your vocabulary about emotions

From “I” statements (“I was sad when you said that to me” rather than “You are being mean!”) to encouraging your kids to write or draw their feelings in a journal, research shows that the mere act of labeling a feeling can help us feel more in control and allow it to pass more quickly.

Observe and adjust your own habits of talking about feelings.

Pay particular attention to the times you invalidate your child’s emotions or try to force a different internal reaction: “You’re okay,”

Instead, choose empathy: “Sounds like that’s really upsetting; let’s think about how we can work through this.”

Talk about true happiness as more than just pleasure or ease.

We all want our kids to be happy. But what they absorb about what that means is crucial. By opening them up to the idea of a sense of purpose, finding meaning in their life, or defining the values important to them, they will have a better understanding of how even challenging, difficult times can cultivate happiness.

Our real concern, the logic goes, should be for younger people who have their whole lives ahead of them and are sacrificing their economic futures to lockdowns. This collapse of the inter-generational compact has been far more effective at killing them off than any death panel dreamed up in Sarah Palin’s fevered imagination.

Similarly, ethnic and racial minorities including African Americans, Latinos/Hispanics, and Native Americans have all been disproportionately affected by COVID-19

Farm and food processing workers—dominated by Latino and other immigrant workers—are another population that has disproportionately been affected by COVID-19.

That social reciprocity has broken down to this degree ought to be an embarrassment and shame to us all.

Last are the millions of Americans behind bars. Per statistics from the Marshall Project, there have been more than 121,000 COVID-19 cases reported among prisoners and more than a thousand deaths.

Adding to the misery of COVID-vulnerable populations is an unfortunate, and very human, tendency to find reasons to blame disadvantaged groups for their illness.

Reviewing the data and history pandemic discrimination, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the majority of America has concluded that these groups—the poor, the minority, the imprisoned, and the elderly—are the “acceptable” losses.

Were the situation reversed and the white, middle aged, and middle/upper classes the primary victims of the pandemic—one of the features of the 1918 influenza—COVID-19 would be a true national emergency and there would be far less complaining about disrupted schools, work, and social life brought about by social distancing requirements and economic shutdowns

Heavily agricultural regions like California’s Central Valleyand Washington State’s Yakima Valley have seen huge COVID spikes. In response, the U.S. Department of Labor has so far levied just $29,000 in fines against two companies, Smithfield and JBS, who have combined sales of $65 billion per year.

The message seems to be that Americans have abandoned e pluribus unum (out of many, one) for “everyone—or at least every group—for themselves.”

Pro-lifers have for decades protested American indifference to the deaths of millions of unborn children (another invisible and voiceless minority), and they have been right to do so. Where are these champions of human life when other weak and vulnerable populations are dying at the rate of a thousand a week or more?

He retweeted tweets asserting that Nancy Pelosi might be planning “a coup” against him. He asserted that law enforcement was “watching” Nevada’s governor for potential voter fraud.

After the FBI thwarted a kidnap attempt by right-wing militia against Michigan Gretchen Whitmer, he labeled her “the lockup queen”—a reference to her life-saving public-safety directives to stave off the pandemic. He complained that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had not yet released Hillary Clinton’s emails, exhuming his demented obsession from 2016.

All this in but a few hours.

Obviously, Trump has long since has become an unacceptable danger to the country he is sworn to protect—not only to our spirit, but to our safety, security, and the conduct of our democracy

Until now, only in feverish political potboilers do lunatic presidents propose to jail the opposing candidate. No man this unmoored should be permitted to hold—and abuse—such power.

What might that be? One cannot help but remember that John F. Kennedy’s coolheaded judgment during the Cuban missile crisis helped save the Western hemisphere from a nuclear catastrophe. One simply cannot know, and America should not risk, what Trump may do when his psychic thermometer passes the boiling point.

For his own sake, and that of others, a president possessed of minimal self-awareness and empathy would refrain from debating in person—or demanding the presence of others.

Not Trump. “I’m back because I’m a perfect physical specimen and I’m extremely young,” announced our ill-conditioned, 74-year-old president

That this man has already threatened the peaceful transition of power—and clearly means it—is reason enough to remove him from office.

So is the worry that Trump will abuse our military power—potentially provoking an incendiary geopolitical crisis—in a reckless attempt to reverse his failing electoral fortunes. This need not involve that terrifying conceit of apocalyptic political fiction: the unhinged president reaching for the nuclear button. But whatever dangers Trump may pose, one cannot dismiss the deranged verbiage he used yesterday with Rush Limbaugh to threaten Iran

The language itself shows a president who has exceeded his limited capacities for self-control, rhetorical and behavioral. “If you fuck around with us,” he informed the Iranians, “if you do something bad to us, we’re gonna do things to you that have never been done before.”

But he does, and so we watch the spectacle of his unraveling

He has a pre-existing condition which made him a danger to our country since his first day in office: an ineradicable personality disorder which fatally compromises the ability to perceive anything outside his own stunted inner landscape. The only reality he has grasped, in his frighteningly feral way, is that Joe Biden is going to beat him—and it is making him more dangerous than ever.

Was it also because she had been bullied at school? “Yeah, to some extent.” I ask if she literally stopped talking. “I spoke to my parents, my sister and a bit to my teacher,” she says. Why did she stop? “I don’t know. I just couldn’t.”

The only aspiration he had for Greta back then was for her to get better. As for himself, he knew little about the climate crisis, wasn’t convinced by what he did know and just wanted to get a nice big car – an SUV or pick-up truck. Over time, Greta changed his mind.

“The way she got us interested was a bit by force. She hijacked us. She started turning off lights. She cut the electricity bill in half.” He laughs. “She’d say, ‘Why have you got the lights on in this room, you’re not even in here?’ and I’d say, ‘Because we live in a country where it’s dark all the time and it makes me feel nice’ and she’d say, ‘Why? It doesn’t make any sense.’ Of course, she was right.”

Did he get pissed off with her? “Oh hell, yeah. She can be very, very, very annoying. But because we were in this crisis we had to react, so we became aware and began to do stuff for the environment, but not because we wanted to save the environment; we did it to save our child.”

By the time she was ready to return to school (initially a specialist autism school, then grammar school), she had been diagnosed with Asperger’s, obsessive compulsive disorder and selective mutism. Thunberg says the diagnosis came as a relief. “When I felt the most sad, I didn’t know that I had autism. I just thought, I don’t want to be like this. The diagnosis was almost only positive for me. It helped me get the support I needed and made me understand why I was like this.”

Does she feel guilty about stymying her mother’s career? She seems surprised by the question. “It was her choice. I didn’t make her do anything. I just provided her with the information to base her decision on.” At times like this you can see how unyielding she is – while it’s the source of her strength, you can imagine just how tough it may have been for her parents. “Of course, you could argue one person’s career is not more important than the climate, but to her it was a very big thing,” she says.

She describes her autism as her superpower. I ask why. “A lot of people with autism have a special interest that they can sit and do for an eternity without getting bored. It’s a very useful thing sometimes. Autism can be something that holds you back, but if you get to the right circumstance, if you are around the right people, if you get the adaptations that you need and you feel you have a purpose, then it can be something you can use for good. And I think that I’m doing that now.”

she says, she’s got loads of hobbies. “I also do a lot of jigsaw puzzles. The biggest was 3,000 pieces, but that didn’t fit on the table so it was very complicated to finish. And I also spend time with my two dogs [a golden retriever and black labrador] and talk lots to friends. We are very silly. Maybe people have an idea that climate activists are serious, but that’s not the case.” She hiccups another giggle.

Do you really speak to your climate activist friends every day? “Yes, many times a day.” Do you have parties? “Since we are spread all over the world it’s hard to do that, but we have Zoom calls and movie nights online and lots of chats where we just spam each other.”

She says she can’t think of a single politician who has impressed her. “Nobody has surprised me.” What about, say, New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, who said that the climate crisis was a matter of “life or death” at the June launch of her new roadmap to control global heating? She looks sceptical. “It’s funny that people believe Jacinda Ardern and people like that are climate leaders. That just tells you how little people know about the climate crisis.” Why? “Obviously the emissions haven’t fallen. It goes without saying that these people are not doing anything.” In April, it was revealed that New Zealand’s greenhouse-gas emissions had increased by 2% in 2019.

When she didn’t have friends, did she want them? “I think I did, but I didn’t have the courage to get friends,” she says. “Now, when I have got many friends, I really see the value of friendship. Apart from the climate, almost nothing else matters. In your life, fame and your career don’t matter at all when you compare them with friendship.”

She believes the reason that so many autistic people have become climate activists is because they cannot avert their gaze – they have a compulsion to tell the truth as they see it. “I know lots of people who have been depressed, and then they have joined the climate movement or Fridays for Future and have found a purpose in life and found friendship and a community that they are welcome in.”

So the best thing that has come out of your activism has been friendship? “Yes,” she says. And now there is no mistaking her smile. “Definitely. I am very happy now.”

The big picture for both sexes is clear: A serious deterioration in the mental health of young people in 2019 to 2023 compared with the baseline of 1993 to 2018.

why? Blanchflower said the mental health of 20-somethings began to deteriorate noticeably around 2011. That made some sense because the United States was in a jobless recovery; the high unemployment rate made it hard for young people to find good jobs — or any jobs

He said he doesn’t fully understand why things continued to worsen as the job market strengthened. But he said, confirming others’ research, that the Covid lockdown was a fresh blow to young people’s mental health. Immersion in social media is another popular explanation,

this is like if Russell Moore came out and said that, on the whole, Christianity turns out to be a bad thing. It’s that big of a deal.

Thompson’s case centers around constraints and supply, particularly as they apply to content creation.

In the pre-internet days, creating and distributing content was relatively expensive, which placed content publishers—be they newspapers, or TV stations, or movie studios—high on the value chain.

The internet reduced distribution costs to zero and this shifted value away from publishers and over to aggregators: Suddenly it was more important to aggregate an audience—a la Google and Facebook—than to be a content creator.

Hellscape

What has alarmed Thompson is that AI has now reduced the cost of creating content to zero.

what does the world look like when both the creation and distribution of content are zero?

We’re headed to a place where content is artificially created and distributed in such a way as to be tailored to a given user’s preferences. Which will be the equivalent of living in a hall of mirrors.

At the other end of the spectrum, independent journalists should be okay. A lone reporter running a focused Substack who only needs four digits’ worth of subscribers to sustain them.

What does that mean for news? Nothing good.

It doesn’t really make sense to talk about “news media” because there are fundamental differences between publication models that are driven by scale.

So the challenges the New York Times face will be different than the challenges that NPR or your local paper face.

Two big takeaways:

(1) Ad-supported publications will not survive

Zero-cost for content creation combined with zero-cost distribution means an infinite supply of content. The more content you have, the more ad space exists—the lower ad prices go.

Actually, some ad-supported publications will survive. They just won’t be news. What will survive will be content mills that exist to serve ads specifically matched to targeted audiences.

(2) Size is determinative.

The New York Times has a moat by dint of its size. It will see the utility of its soft “news” sections decline in value, because AI is going to be better at creating cooking and style content than breaking hard news. But still, the NYT will be okay because it has pivoted hard into being a subscription-based service over the last decade.

Audiences were valuable; content was commoditized.

But everything in between? That’s a crapshoot.

Technology writers sometimes talk about the contrast between “builders” and “conservers” — roughly speaking, between those who are most animated by what we stand to gain from technology and those animated by what we stand to lose.

in our moment the builder and conserver types are proving quite mercurial. On issues ranging from Big Tech to medicine, human enhancement to technologies of governance, the politics of technology are in upheaval.

Dispositions are supposed to be basically fixed. So who would have thought that deep blue cities that yesterday were hotbeds of vaccine skepticism would today become pioneers of vaccine passports? Or that outlets that yesterday reported on science and tech developments in reverent tones would today make it their mission to unmask “tech bros”?

One way to understand this churn is that the builder and the conserver types each speak to real, contrasting features within human nature. Another way is that these types each pick out real, contrasting features of technology. Focusing strictly on one set of features or the other eventually becomes unstable, forcing the other back into view.