Roe's Reversal and the Authoritarian Wave
+ Join us for a conversation with progressive champion Ana Maria Archila + the election in the Philippines + Ella Baker and Michelle Yeoh + new jobs at Leadership for Social Justice
In this issue
We share reflections on the likely reversal of Roe v. Wade and highlight analyses that help us make meaning of this moment.
Please join us for an event featuring Ana Maria Archila, a fierce and brilliant progressive leader and community organizer who is running for Lt. Governor of New York. Ana Maria achieved national renown when she confronted Sen. Jeff Flake about Brett Kavanaugh in an elevator at the Capitol, sharing her own story about sexual assault. Ana Maria is exactly the kind of courageous, grounded, effective leader we need now to defend the rights of women, people of color, immigrants, workers, and LGBTQ communities. The fundraiser is co-hosted by Brian Kettenring, Gara LaMarche, Sara Cullinane, and Lorella Praeli, and you can register here. The minimum contribution is $100.
Watch an amazing conversation with Rep. Pramila Jayapal (speaking the day after the Roe draft decision was leaked and reflecting on what’s next), Chris Torres of MoveOn.org, Jen Disla of Detroit Action, and Lorella Praeli of Community Change about what it’s like to lead in tumultuous times. They explored the challenges facing individual leaders, organizations, and movements at a time of backlash to demands for racial justice, attacks on democracy, and escalating climate crises. It’s a profound conversation. You can watch here.
A moving note from a leading activist and colleague in the Philippines, Yeb Sano, reflecting on the meaning of the Marcos election.
The Leadership Institute for Democracy and Social Justice is hiring for three positions: a Career Empowerment Associate, a Program Operations Associate, and a part-time Communications Associate.
Two delights, featuring Ella Baker and Michelle Yeoh.
Roe's Reversal and the Authoritarian Wave
We usually think of authoritarianism as something that happens in politics. But political authoritarianism is nourished by domination in other spheres of society — at work, by police, in schools, and, foundationally, in patriarchal families. A male-dominated court exercising control over women’s bodies is apex authoritarianism. As Lynn Kanter aptly put it at a protest at Judge Kavanagh’s house in response to criticism that such protests were too aggressive
“I don’t think a bunch of neighbors walking by with candles is going to change Kavanaugh’s mind — or endanger him,” said Lynn Kanter, who walked five blocks from her house to join, carrying a small sign that read, “Keep your bans and your hands to yourself.”
“It’s absolutely hypocritical,” she said of the notion that the justices should be afforded an extra measure of privacy, “because the Supreme Court wants to have domain over women’s uteruses and yet the sidewalk in front of their homes is somehow sacred ground.”
Reinforcing patriarchy is a central theme in authoritarian movements around the world. As historian Federico Finchelstein put it in From Fascism to Populism in History,
The clear outcome of this extremely masculinist and antifeminist dimension of fascism, was, as historian Richard Evans suggests, “a state in which men would rule and women would be reduced to the functions of childbearing and childrearing.”
The pending Supreme Court decision to reverse Roe and the flood of anti-trans and “Don’t Say Gay” laws around the country are part of a movement to enforce patriarchal family norms. And similar attacks are unfolding in eastern Europe, Russia, India, Brazil, China, and everywhere authoritarianism is on the march.
The likely reversal of Roe also coincides with dramatic demographic changes in western countries, with aging populations and a shrinking ratio of workers to retirees. It’s no coincidence that Alito’s opinion highlights, in a breathtaking phrase, a shortage in the “domestic supply of infants.” There are other strategies one might pursue in response to this demographic challenge — like paying workers more or providing child care to attract more people into the labor market or welcoming immigrants. But pro-worker policies are inconsistent with the imperative of maximum profitability, and pro-immigrant policies contradict the noxious “great replacement” theory that is animating the right, a theory that posits that elites are plotting the demise of a white majority through mass immigration. Incredibly, one-third of Americans now believe that a great replacement plot is afoot to replace native-born Americans for electoral purposes. The politics of abortion are also the politics of capitalism and white supremacy.
Three other things seem clear in the wake of the news about Roe. First, this is the beginning not the end of challenges to rights that many have long taken for granted. Many useless pundits predicted smugly that Roe’s reversal would never come. The most chilling argument in Alito’s decision is that only rights “rooted in our history and tradition” are to be respected by the Court — a legal stance that throws every gain won by social movements over centuries into question. Some commentators, like The Atlantic's David French, have fallen for Alito’s claim that his opinion in Dobbs applies only to Roe and would never lead back to the bad old days of bans on same-sex marriage, contraception, interracial marriage, and “sodomy.” But Adam Liptak explains how Alito’s own careful words in the opinion leave ample room for rolling back other rights as well. And, in a must-listen roundtable discussion on Dahlia Lithwick’s Amicus podcast, NYU law professor Melissa Murray says of Altio’s purported promise not to go beyond repealing Roe,
That is absolutely nonsense. And he’s disingenuous to suggest it, and he knows he’s being disingenuous. You see, those same rights are all undergirded by this right to privacy. If you tug on privacy in [Roe v. Wade], you are tugging on all of them. And even Justice Alito has made clear in his own writings that these things are inextricably intertwined in the Hobby Lobby decision from 2014. He argued that certain forms of contraception like IUDs or the abortion pill . . . are abortifacients because they destroy potential life by preventing it from being implanted in the uterine wall. So . . . how can you distinguish between the abortion that destroys potential life when you’ve already said that these other forms of contraception also do the same thing? How can you distinguish between the unenumerated right of abortion and the unenumerated right to marry a person of the same sex? You can’t. And he knows that. So he’s saying this now. But in that opinion, there is an entire blueprint for eventually coming back to these other rights. And in fact, if you look at it, [Alito’s draft opinion] says that when legislatures make these decisions, reviewing courts have to accept them because they have to respect the judgment of state legislatures on issues of social significance and moral substance. What could he be talking about other than abortion, contraception, marriage? These are those issues of social significance and moral substance. And he knows that it.
Likewise, the rhetoric about how Alito’s Dobbs opinion settles the contentious issue of abortion by returning it to the states ignores the monomaniacal determination of the right to ban abortion everywhere. When asked if Republicans would pass a nationwide abortion ban if they control the presidency and both houses, Mitch McConnell, said “it’s possible.” We’d do well to listen to Black feminist icon Barbara Smith, quoted in the LA Times,
“Once Roe falls, it’ll be open season on all of those other rights that are not written in the Constitution — it’s the domino theory,” says Smith, 75, speaking by phone from her home in upstate New York.
“They’re trying to erase the work of a whole generation,” she says. “My generation.” . . .
“I wouldn’t put anything past them,” Smith says of the court’s conservative majority and its supporters in Congress and in statehouses across the country. “Gay marriage, they’re coming after that.... I wouldn’t be surprised if they come after civil rights for people of color, too.”
Second, reversing Roe would be the culmination of a 50-year strategy by savvy right-wing operatives and a persistent movement with a ruthless will to power. There is no such orientation to power in the Democratic Party. As Jerry Taylor, a longtime conservative leader who defected and became a Never Trumper, observed in “What Democrats Can Learn from Republicans About Political Power,”
Too many liberals seem to think that good ideas sell themselves, and that the political terrain is far more conducive to their agendas than it actually is. They assume political power the same way one might assume a can opener. . . .
This lack of seriousness about political strategy starkly manifests itself in agenda-setting. Regardless of what the campaign that brought them into office was about, conservatives invariably attend to policy initiatives designed to cripple Democratic power. Right-to-work statutes, public-employee contracts, campaign finance regulation, the promotion of conservative judges: all are top priorities for a right that understands the long-term political advantages that accrue from hobbling muscular Democratic constituencies and the future scope of liberal lawmaking.
Democrats, on the other hand, rarely spend political capital on these matters. And when they do, they lack the infrastructure to execute those operations.
Third, the fight for abortion rights is likely to be a long one and depends on the emergence of a mass movement that will inevitably be intertwined with the fight for democracy itself. As Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks put it in “Revenge of the Patriarchs: Why Autocrats Fear Women”
It is not a coincidence that women’s equality is being rolled back at the same time that authoritarianism is on the rise. Political scientists have long noted that women’s civil rights and democracy go hand in hand, but they have been slower to recognize that the former is a precondition for the latter. Aspiring autocrats and patriarchal authoritarians have good reason to fear women’s political participation: when women participate in mass movements, those movements are both more likely to succeed and more likely to lead to more egalitarian democracy. In other words, fully free, politically active women are a threat to authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning leaders—and so those leaders have a strategic reason to be sexist. . . .
The patriarchal backlash has played out across the full spectrum of authoritarian regimes, from totalitarian dictatorships to party-led autocracies to illiberal democracies headed by aspiring strongmen. In China, Xi Jinping has crushed feminist movements, silenced women who have accused powerful men of sexual assault, and excluded women from the Politburo’s powerful Standing Committee. In Russia, Vladimir Putin is rolling back reproductive rights and promoting traditional gender roles that limit women’s participation in public life. In North Korea, Kim Jong Un has spurred women to seek refuge abroad at roughly three times the rate of men, and in Egypt, President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi recently introduced a bill reasserting men’s paternity rights, their right to practice polygamy, and their right to influence whom their female relatives marry. In Saudi Arabia, women still cannot marry or obtain health care without a man’s approval. And in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s victory has erased 20 years of progress on women’s access to education and representation in public office and the workforce.
The wave of patriarchal authoritarianism is also pushing some established democracies in an illiberal direction. Countries with authoritarian-leaning leaders, such as Brazil, Hungary, and Poland, have seen the rise of far-right movements that promote traditional gender roles as patriotic while railing against “gender ideology”—a boogeyman term that Human Rights Watch describes as meaning “nothing and everything.” . . .
Understanding the relationship between sexism and democratic backsliding is vital for those who wish to fight back against both. Established autocrats and right-wing nationalist leaders in contested democracies are united in their use of hierarchical gender relations to shore up nationalist, top-down, male-dominated rule. Having long fought against social hierarchies that consolidate power in the hands of the few, feminist movements are a powerful weapon against authoritarianism. Those who wish to reverse the global democratic decline cannot afford to ignore them. . . .
It turns out that frontline participation by women is a significant advantage, both in terms of a movement’s immediate success and in terms of securing longer-term democratic change. Mass movements in which women participated extensively on the frontlines have been much more likely to succeed than campaigns that marginalized or excluded women. Women have been much more likely to participate in nonviolent mass movements than in violent ones, and they have participated in much greater numbers in nonviolent than in violent campaigns. . .
The movements for women’s rights and for multi-racial democracy will be inextricably linked in the years to come.
Smart Takes on Roe
The remarkable podcast “The Last Abortion Clinic in Mississippi” features patients, providers, and staff at the only clinic providing services in the state. It makes the stakes of the abortion bans clear, including by telling the story of a working-class woman who drove all night from Texas, where abortion has been banned.
In her New Yorker essay “How Black Feminists Defined Abortion Rights,” Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor writes,
The chasm between middle-class white women’s demands and aspirations and those of poor and working-class women of color began to be addressed by the emergence of Black feminists in the late sixties. These women, who included Toni Cade Bambara, Frances Beal, Alice Walker, and Barbara Smith, argued that real equality could be achieved only by expanding the parameters of what constituted “reproductive justice” to include the entire context within which decisions about having or not having children were made. Organizations like NOW [the National Organization for Women] mobilized predominately white women to fight for abortion rights, but they often ignored or minimized the glaring issue of coerced or forced sterilizations, which was critical to women of color. According to a national study conducted by Princeton University in 1970, twenty-one per cent of married Black women had been sterilized. As the legal scholar Dorothy Roberts has observed, “The dominant women’s movement has focussed myopically on abortion rights at the expense of other aspects of reproductive freedom, including the right to bear children, and has misunderstood criticism of coercive birth-control policies.” . . .
For Beal, a single mother of two children, and other Black feminists, reproductive freedom, including access to birth control and abortion and the right to have children on their terms, was the most basic element of self-determination in a society where their choices were heavily circumscribed by racism, gender, and class position. As a result, Black women activists not only took up the immediate questions concerning reproduction but they also raised issues about child care, employment, welfare, and the other material necessities that could help women take care of their children and choose to bring them into the world. By focussing on the plight of poor women, they made it easier to see that the struggle for abortion and reproductive freedom was about equality, not just privacy or even “choice.” Their insights into the ways that poverty and other forms of oppression limited their life chances compelled them to demand reproductive justice—which also involved the right to raise children in healthy environments where their and their parents’ basic needs could be met. It is a standard that certainly was not achieved with Roe, but is needed now more than ever.
In her New York magazine essay “The Limits of Privilege,” Rebecca Traister writes,
[A]s we teeter on the threshold of the post-Roe world, it’s worth considering that the message that privileged women will be just fine is inaccurate and that its repetition, while well meaning, is counterproductive to the task of readying an unprepared public for massive and terrifying shifts on the horizon. It’s worth pointing out that it is simply not true that the reproductive options of white, middle-class, and even wealthy people are going to remain the same. Because while circumstances will certainly be graver and more perilous for the already vulnerable, the reality is that everything is about to change, for everyone, in one way or another, and to muffle that alarm is an error, factually, practically, and politically. . .
Today, unlike in the early 1970s, we have mifepristone and misoprostol, pills that are available by mail and are safe and effective in inducing abortions, which are then indistinguishable from miscarriages. Lots of people in lots of places can end their pregnancies in medically safe ways that do not entail dirty coat hangers. However, now that there are widespread means of delivering abortifacients, anti-abortion crusaders are intent on criminalizing their use. Which means the frightening new questions are not simply about access but about whether people who take these pills, or the people who provide them, will be prosecuted, fined, and put in jail for doing so. In any criminal-justice context, it is true that people of color and poor people will still suffer more, but do not underestimate anger at abortion seekers of all races — including white women of privilege — who attempt to assert independence and reproductive autonomy. . . .
Those who live in states with fewer restrictions, even in states that have wisely strengthened protections in recent years, will certainly have an easier time. But their circumstances will be changed too, by the influx of patients from other parts of the country. Wait times and, with them, pressures on viability limits will increase. Moreover, resting easy on the idea of a patchwork of safer states assumes Republicans will not find a way to enact a federal legislative ban. For years, I’ve been told that will never happen. For years, I’d also been told that Roe would never fall.
In time, abortion’s illegality is going to affect everyone: you, your friends, your loved ones, your community, your kids, and your parents. It’s going to affect you if you or someone you know wants an abortion, and it’s frankly going to affect you even if you don’t.
And however well intentioned or important it is to acknowledge the decades of disproportionate and destructive damage abortion restrictions under Roe have done to poor families of color, the recent mainstream emphasis on the notion that some Americans will come out of the end of Roe unscathed is a strategic mistake.
If these past years with COVID have taught us anything, it’s that if you tell middle-class white people that they will be fine, they will not give a rat’s ass about anyone else. And so this message, intended to engender empathy and provoke action and commitment, may instead have been an anesthetizing one. It may have permitted middle-class white people, with their significant political clout, to sleepwalk comfortably — as they have through all of Roe’s existence — into the waiting jaws of illegality.
On Dahlia Lithwick’s Amicus podcast, Melissa Murray addressed an issue that will be of immense importance to activists in the coming months and years — how repealing Roe, far from “settling the issue,” will create many new battlefronts. From a strategic perspective, it’s crucial to view these not as places we might lose but as opportunities to recruit, mobilize, and organize more people, women and men, in the fight for women’s freedom.
[Dahlia Lithwick:] Melissa, I do want to turn to you with another tricky legal question, which is just this. It seems that Justice Alito’s opinion, in what may or may not become the final Dobbs opinion, is [at] pains to say we’re just returning this to the states, and that’s as far as it goes. This is very, very solicitous of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concerns that he voiced at oral argument when he kept saying this is the neutral principled thing to do, we’ll return it to the political process in the states. But more and more we’re hearing that, in fact, states are not just going to ban abortion, but that we are going to see a creeping criminalization, not just of abortion, but of some of the things that [Jessica Bruder] just walked us through, including popping pills in the mail. So I wonder if you could just help our listeners and our viewers understand that this is not quite as neutral or anodyne an action as simply returning it to the states. We may be looking down the barrel, and by the way, we’re seeing cases all over the country. They show up in [Jessica Bruder’s Atlantic article “The Future of Abortion in a Post-Roe America”], where women already are being prosecuted for miscarriages or for obtaining pills for their kids.
[Melissa Murray:] So I think it’s a really important question, Dahlia. And when this was mentioned and floated in oral argument in December, I remember thinking like, wow, this is incredibly naive. And to be fair to Justice Kavanaugh, he seemed to be suggesting that this had become so contested and contestable that there was no way to settle it in a reasonable way beyond moving it back to the states, which he viewed as, as you say, a neutral settlement that would return this to the political process where each state could make a decision for itself about what was appropriate for its constituents, reflecting the preferences of those constituents rather than the preferences of nine unelected judges. And I understand the appeal of that. But it also seems hopelessly naive — like we’ve already seen states like Missouri suggesting that they’re not content to simply restrict abortion within their own borders. They’re actually interested in influencing what other sister states may do. So Missouri has proposed making it unlawful for individuals to leave the state to get an abortion, and, more importantly, making it unlawful for anyone to help them leave the state to do so, which, you know, I think raises a flood of constitutional questions about the right to travel, the dormant commerce clause, perhaps even First Amendment challenges, if, in fact, assistance is donating to an abortion fund in another state that transports people outside of the jurisdiction to seek abortion care. So the idea that this would settle conflict, it actually, I think, will accelerate. It’ll just be a set of new conflicts that we have not really seen before in our jurisdictional conflicts. And Rachel [Rebouché] David Cohen and Greer Donnelly have a fantastic paper coming out in the Columbia Law Review [“The New Abortion Battleground”] that outlines what these kinds of inter-jurisdictional challenges might look like. But the real question, I think, is the acceleration of the mood or the tone. It’s one thing to have civil restrictions on abortion like waiting periods and the requirement of an ultrasound. It is quite another thing to make it either a criminal penalty or some quite meaty civil penalty to provide an abortion or to assist someone in doing so. And so I think we’re going to see an acceleration of what the tenor of regulation looks like, and that too will be significant. A lot has been said about the fact of trigger laws. So there are, I think, about 13 states currently that have on their legislative books draft laws that will go into effect that criminalize abortion as soon as the court says Roe versus Wade is overruled. Some of those states have [hedged, so] Oklahoma just last week was talking about like they would have a trigger law but they would amend it so that even if the court did not completely overrule Roe versus Wade, the trigger law would still go into effect. So even a partial overruling would set that in motion. And then there are a number of states like Michigan that have what I call zombie laws on the books. So in 1973, when Roe was announced, not all states repealed their abortion laws. They just sort of sat on the books in a sort of state of [desuetude], unenforced, but still there. And if Roe is overturned, they, like zombies, become revivified and can be used against individuals in those states, whether it’s pregnant persons or doctors. But now I think we’re going to see a lot of challenges. Doctors are going to have licensing issues. . . . There’s going to be criminalization, litigation, legislation around that. And then the whole question of what it means to assist someone in doing so. So this settles nothing. To say so I think is really fatuous and disingenuous.
[Dahlia Lithwick:] And let’s add one layer to that, Melissa, which I think is implicit in what you just said and I think actually baked into the Missouri law. But also in addition to these new criminal penalties, we’re seeing this uptick in citizen bounty conscripting citizens to become part of the law enforcement regime. So we’re not simply talking about new criminal laws. We’re talking about telling on your neighbor sometimes for money. And that becomes a part of the legal regime that’s used to enforce this.
[Melissa Murray:] Elena Kagan referred to the architects of this Texas bounty scheme as “some geniuses.” It’s incredibly devilish. It’s managed to stymie any hope of challenging the Texas law in federal court. But I actually think there’s a longer game if there is national legislation prohibiting abortion. And the conservatives have already indicated that this is not going to be a state-by-state settlement. They’re going to push for a national solution. If you have recalcitrant blue states who are like, “Yeah, it’s on the books, but our people just aren’t enforcing it.” Now, you have deputized all of these watching neighbors. I mean, I think actually that is the sort of hidden aspect of this that we haven’t even contemplated. It’s not simply that in red states you have all of these watchers doing this, and it’s for the purpose of avoiding federal court litigation that would shut this down. It has this after effect where if there is some broader national scale, we’ve actually deputized and created an enforcement force of citizens, even if states are more reluctant to do so.
Delights and Provocations
We were deeply moved by Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker, a documentary about the legendary civil rights organizer. (Fundi is a Swahili word for someone who teaches a craft to others).
And if you need to see an amazing working-class woman of color heroine bend the laws of space and time to save the universe (and everybody needs to see that!), we can’t recommend highly enough Everything Everywhere All at Once with the incomparable Michelle Yeoh.
Finally, here is a message from Yeb Sano, Executive Director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia, bout the recent elections in the Philippines:
Dear friends,
As I write this, we are crying, hearts broken. It really breaks my heart to see my own children sobbing as we watch the results of the national elections in the Philippines. My parents were jailed and tortured in the 1970s under the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship and the return of this family into power feels truly deflating and tragic. Today, Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. is winning the elections, apparently by a massive landslide, and in the morning we will be waking up to the reality that Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. will be the next president of this country. Sara Duterte, the daughter of incumbent president Rodrigo Duterte is also winning by a similarly big margin. (They are running as a ticket, but in the Philippines, the president and vice-president are both popularly elected separately and not as a pair).
This has been an electoral exercise where it was very difficult for us in Greenpeace here in the Philippines to be truly non-partisan. This was not just about standing up to a tyrant, or to a rotten politician, or a right-wing monster. This was about preventing history from being erased. It is also important to stress that the return of Marcos is also a consequence of neo-liberal economics dramatically failing our people since the ouster of the old dictator 36 years ago through the original People Power Revolution.
As it happens, Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos, Jr. will be getting an unprecedented mandate (notwithstanding the potential credibility issues hounding the electronic vote counting system), possibly garnering more than 35 million votes (55% of the vote), with the progressive Leni Robredo (the current incumbent Vice President) only getting 15 million (~26%). It is factual to assert that dirty politicians resorted to heavy vote-buying (offering between US$10 to US$500 to get a person's vote or to attend a campaign rally). It is likewise true that tremendous black propaganda was pervasive in this elections. It is also reported that the frontrunner engaged the notorious Cambridge Analytica group. It is also alarming how disinformation was the backbone of this elections.
I would be remiss if I do not mention that the Robredo campaign inspired a vast multitude of people, with its platform for honest government and uplifting the lives of the people and sparking a movement like no other. It was based on the notion that it is "more radical to love." Indeed, it is more radical to love a country that is so broken. Indeed, it is more radical to think of hope when democracy is failing. It is radical to love your country when it is not radical to be a thieving politician, when corruption is normalized, when fascism and violence is abetted, when history is rewritten by fake news and dirty propaganda.
What does this mean for us here in the Philippines? Dark times call for extraordinary courage, activism, and solidarity. This is not just a defeat in a partisan political contest. This is a defeat for truth, a tragedy for democracy, and a sobering reminder that changing power dynamics and shifting mindsets is a long game, neither a 3-month campaign nor a 1-year project. The same goes with dismantling the outmoded fossil fuel apparatus and changing the system. A Marcos win will also mean the things we (or my parents' generation) stood up against will be revived - corruption, facsist rule, military supremacy over civilian rule, extreme influence of oligarchs, ravaging of the environment, nuclear electric power, anti-people policies, perhaps more shoes for Imelda Marcos, and many many more.
This election result also comes at the heels of the landmark ruling of the Commission on Human Rights on the Climate Justice and Human Rights case that petitioners from the local climate justice movement instrumentally brought forward. The work is really just beginning. Climate justice cannot be pursued in isolation of social justice and campaigning for genuine transformation.
Suffice it to say, sadly, that the Philippines is not unique in this context. Many countries in Southeast Asia suffer from the same malady, as it is in the Americas, Africa, Europe, Oceania, and the rest of Asia.
On another note, I have always found the name of my country problematic - it is possibly one of the very few remaining countries to maintain the name of the colonizer. The Philippines was named after Philip II, who was king of Spain during the Spanish colonization of the archipelago in the 16th century. The country was under Spanish rule for over 300 years, and under U.S. rule for over 50 years. In my younger activist days, we would underscore the litany of impacts that such colonization and and further neo-colonization has inflicted on our politics, on our sociological context, on our identity as a people, on the economy, on the environment. What I am saying is that this whole problem goes way back, and unless we pursue decolonization - from outside and from within - we will never get out of this vicious cycle.
There is so much more to say, as we are feeling very heavy right now. But for now, we console ourselves with the knowledge and conviction that we will continue to spread light in the darkness, hope for the future, and peace despite violence.
Peace,
Yeb