The Commonwealth April/May 2021

Inside: MICHAEL J. FOX ON THE PARKINSON’S FIGHT | THE FUTURE OF U.S. HISTORY EDUCATION | FNNCH | THE DAUGHTERS OF KOBANI

Commonwealth The

THE MAGAZINE OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB OF CALIFORNIA

APRIL/MAY 2021

JULIA GILLARD & NGOZI OKONJO-IWEALA:

Women and Leadership $5.00; free for members | commonwealthclub.org

On the Road to Freedom Understanding the Civil Rights Movement June 20-27, 2021

• Travel with a small group of Club members to Jackson, Little Rock, Memphis, Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery.

• Visit important sites of the movement, from Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge to Little Rock High School.

• Meet with many figures who were involved, such as 16th Street Baptist Church bombing survivor Dr. Rev. Carolyn McKinstry, Bloody Sunday foot soldier Annie Pearl Avery, and Little Rock Nine member Elizabeth Eckford.

• Experience the newly opened Memorial for Peace and Social Justice in Montgomery and the Civil Rights Museum in Jackson.

• Meet with members of the Equal Justice Initiative and learn about the work that is being done today to fight racial injustices in the legal system.

• Explore the Mississippi Delta, tour Malaco Records and the B.B. King Museum.

Cost: $3,995 per person, based on double occupancy. Limited to 10 travelers.

Details at commonwealthclub.org/travel

| 415.597.6720

|

travel@commonwealthclub.org CST: 2096889-40

Commonwealth The

FEATURES 8 Women in Power What confronts women in positions of political power, and what makes them successful?

16 Women and Firepower The first battlefield defeat was dealt to the Islamic State by Kurdish fighters, including dedicated female warriors.

30 The Future of the Past An expert panel discusses improvements to the teaching of American history.

“How in the world did one of the most far-reaching experiments in women’s equality come to be on the ashes of the fight against the Islamic State, created by women who truly fought ISIS room by room, house by house, street by street, town by town as America’s ground force for a half decade?”

—GAYLE TZEMACH LEMMON

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Michael J. Fox The actor, author and activist on his life since he was diagnosed at a young age with Parkinson’s, and

ON THE COVER: Former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and former Nigarian Finance Minister (now WTO Director-General) Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

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how he deals with its challenges.

Fnnch and the Honey Bears The what, why and— almost—who of the street artist behind a pandemic art treat.

DEPARTMENTS 4 5 52 54

Editor’s Desk

By John Zipperer The Commons Remembering George Shultz; plus programs Program Info The Big Picture

ON THIS PAGE: Kurdish warriors in northern Syria made military and social history with far-reaching gender policies. (Photo by KurdishStruggle.)

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Commonwealth The

April/May 2021 Volume 115, Number 2

EDITOR’S DESK

BUSINESS OFFICES

The Commonwealth, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105 feedback@commonwealthclub.org

VICE PRESIDENT, MEDIA & EDITORIAL

John Zipperer

FOLLOW US ONLINE facebook.com/thecommonwealthclub twitter.com/cwclub youtube.com/commonwealthclub commonwealthclub.org instagram.com/cwclub ADVERTISING INFORMATION John Zipperer, Vice President of Media & Editorial, (415) 597-6715, jzipperer@commonwealthclub.org The Commonwealth (ISSN 0010-3349) is published bimonthly (6 times a year) by The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105. Periodicals postage paid at San Francisco, CA. Subscription rate $34 per year included in annual membership dues. Copyright © 2021 The Commonwealth Club of California.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Commonwealth, The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105; (415) 597-6700; feedback@commonwealthclub.org EDITORIAL TRANSCRIPT POLICY The Commonwealth magazine covers a range of programs in each issue. Program transcripts and question-and-answer sessions are routinely condensed due to space limitations. Hear full-length recordings online at commonwealthclub. org/watch-listen, or via our free podcasts on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts or Spotify; watch videos at youtube.com/ commonwealthclub.

Published digitally via Issuu.com.

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Photo by James Meinerth

Reopening the Door

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ewspaper columnist Doug Larson one wrote, “Spring is when you feel like whistling, even with a shoe full of slush.” Spring usually brings an upswell of hope and renewal.

Spring 2020 was not generally filled with hope. There was a steady week-by-week buildup of bad news about a global health emergency, a rapidly deteriorating economy, social injustices, and a toxic political discourse.

Spring 2021 is shaping up quite differently.

Hopes for a better day are rising because of a vaccination campaign that is finally letting people envision getting back to the office, theaters, their favorite stores, and the homes of their friends and relatives. As Gustav Mahler said, “Spring won’t let me stay in this house any longer! I must get out and breathe the air deeply again.”

We recently surveyed members and guests about what they would like to see in the resumption of in-person programming at the Club. We wanted to hear what precautions and protocols would be necessary to make people comfortable about leaving their homes and gathering with others in our waterfront headquarters once again. We thank all of you who responded; we will use those responses to craft a reopening that is safe for everyone, and if you’re not yet ready to be here in-person, we’ll still have plenty of live-stream videos, archived videos, podcasts, and this magazine to keep you right in the middle of all the action.

Some of what we do as we reopen will differ from what came before. Things always

change, and major disruptions often accelerate changes. In March, Jessica Huseman, editorial director of VoteBeat, tweeted “my roomba took out my wifi.” Political commenter (and former Club speaker) Charlie Sykes told her that sentence wouldn’t even have made sense 20 years ago. WiFi? Roomba? What are they?

We already live in a world of automatic vacuum cleaners, wireless internet service, conversations with Siri/Alexa/Google, watches that tell us to exercise, and live video conversations with friends and family next door or around the globe.

As much as we are looking forward to returning to doing what we have done for 118 years—holding in-person programs—we will retain the best of what we learned over the past year and will continue to adopt new methods and technologies to explore important (and entertaining) topics and speakers.

It’s been a rough year for many people, and it is our sincere hope that the speakers we featured helped people understand the times and make good decisions and—perhaps most of all—have hope.

One last quote for you, which I found in an online search for spring-related quotes. The late evangelist Robert Schuller said, “Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods. Wait. Be patient. The storm will pass. The spring will come.”

JO H N Z IPPER ER VI C E PRESI DENT O F MEDI A & ED I T O RI AL

The Commons

Photo by Ed Ritger

TALK OF THE CLUB

George Shultz, 1920–2021

G

eorge P. Shultz had a long resume.

He was an economist, businessman, academic, and diplomat; he held four different cabinet positions (labor, budget, treasury and state); he was a prolific author and speaker; and he was a public advocate for ending the nuclear threat and responding to climate change. On February 6, 2021, this widely respected statesman passed away at the age of 100.

He was also a good friend of The Commonwealth Club of California, speaking on our stage numerous times over the years, as well as serving as a behind-the-scenes advocate for the Club and its public mission. He even made a strong endorsement of the organization at the groundbreaking ceremony for our new building on San Francisco’s waterfront, telling the gathered dignitaries and reporters, “This is an important moment not just for The Commonwealth Club and San Francisco, but this is an important moment in the history of democracy.”

Over the years he would take to our stage to discuss everything from war and peace to economics to racial justice. His first address to the Club was on February 20, 1970, when he discussed “Quality of Life at Work.”

Bay Area residents were also able to enjoy the more playful side of George Shultz and his wife, Charlotte Mailliard Shultz, who, in addition to serving as chief of protocol for the state of California and for San Francisco, is a member of the Club’s Board of Governors. The Shultzes could be found seemingly everywhere, from celebrating “Beach Blanket Babylon” to leading a pandemic-era citywide singalong with Tony

Bennett of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

We’ll miss you, Mr. Shultz.

Support for the AAPI Community

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ecent mass murders of Asian Americans and others in Atlanta and Boulder, Co., have highlighted a serious problem with hate speech and hate-fueled gun violence.

In late March, Club President and CEO Dr. Gloria Duffy issued a statement expressing “our condolences and support for the AAPI members of our staff, our board, our volunteers and our community, as well as to the communities in Atlanta and Boulder.

“The murders in Atlanta resulted from the toxic combination of unaddressed racial prejudice, mental illness and easy access to combat-style firearms, with many of the same factors behind the massacre in Boulder.”

For the complete statement, plus links to a selection of Club AAPI programs, visit commonwealthclub.org/supporting-aapi-voices.

Reopening Survey

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espite the challenges of 2020—or perhaps because of them—2021 is shaping up to be a transformative year. We’re hard at work planning for the time when our members and guests can gather in our auditoriums and rooftop terrace for programs and socializing.

As we make plans to return to in-person programs, we would like to hear your thoughts.

Please complete our short survey and help shape the successful reopening of your Club: surveymonkey.com/r/D3RWJNH

LEADERSHIP OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB David Spencer James Strother Hon. Tad Taube Marcel TenBerge Charles Travers Kimberly Twombly-Wu Don Wen Dr. Colleen B. Wilcox Brenda Wright Mark Zitter

CLUB OFFICERS Board Chair Evelyn Dilsaver Vice Chair Martha Ryan Secretary Dr. Jaleh Daie Treasurer John R. Farmer President & CEO Dr. Gloria C. Duffy BOARD OF GOVERNORS Robert E. Adams Willie Adams John F. Allen Scott Anderson Dan Ashley Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman Harry E. Blount John L. Boland Charles M. Collins Kevin Collins Mary B. Cranston LaDoris Cordell Susie Cranston Dr. Kerry P. Curtis Dorian Daley James Driscoll Joseph I. Epstein Jeffrey A. Farber Dr. Carol A. Fleming Leslie Saul Garvin Paul M. Ginsburg Hon. James C. Hormel Mary Huss Lata Krishnan John Leckrone Dr. Mary Marcy Lenny Mendonca Michelle Meow Anna W.M. Mok DJ Patil Donald J. Pierce Bruce Raabe Skip Rhodes Kausik Rajgopal Bill Ring Richard A. Rubin George M. Scalise Charlotte Mailliard Shultz Todd Silvia George D. Smith Jr.

PAST BOARD CHAIRS AND PRESIDENTS * Past Chair ** Past President Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman* J. Dennis Bonney** Maryles Casto* Hon. Ming Chin** Mary B. Cranston* Joseph I. Epstein** John Farmer* Dr. Joseph R. Fink** Rose Guilbault* Claude B. Hutchison Jr.** Anna W.M. Mok* Richard Otter** Joseph Perrelli** Toni Rembe** Victor J. Revenko** Skip Rhodes** Renée Rubin** Richard Rubin* Connie Shapiro** Nelson Weller** Judith Wilbur** Dennis Wu** ADVISORY BOARD Karin Helene Bauer Hon. William Bradley Dennise M. Carter Steven Falk Amy Gershoni Jacquelyn Hadley Heather Kitchen Amy McCombs Don J. McGrath Hon. William J. Perry Hon. Barbara Pivnicka Hon. Richard Pivnicka Nancy Thompson

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Upcoming Program Highlights New programs are added to The Commonwealth Club of California’s schedule every day. For the full list, event details, and to buy tickets, visit: commonwealthclub.org/events

TUE, APR 6 / 10:00 AM PDT TY MCCORMICK WITH JAMES FALLOWS: BEYOND THE SAND AND SEA

WED, APR 7 / 12:00 PM PDT HOW A REPUBLICAN SUPREME COURT IS RESHAPING AMERICA

TUE, APR 6 / 12:00 PM PDT SUNEEL GUPTA WITH DJ PATIL: CONVINCING OTHERS TO BACK YOUR DREAMS

THU, APR 8 / 10:00 AM PDT REOPENING MUSLIM MINDS

THU, APR 1 / 9:00 AM PDT MICHAEL PRITCHARD: THERE’S NO “I” IN TEAM

THU, APR 1 / 12:00 PM PDT HOW THE PANDEMIC TRIGGERED AN EXTREME EPISODE OF ALOPECIA AREATA TUE, APR 6 / 5:00 PM PDT READING CALIFORNIANS BOOK DISCUSSION: YOUR HOUSE WILL PAY

THU, APR 1 / 3:00 PM PDT SHANKAR VEDANTAM: USEFUL DELUSIONS

THU, APR 8 / 12:00 PM PDT ALICE GU: THE RAGS TO RICHES STORY OF THE DONUT KING

MON, APR 12 / 12:00 PM PDT REIMAGINING PUBLIC SAFETY

TUE, APR 6 / 6:00 PM PDT DR. CHANDA PRESCOD-WEINSTEIN: THE DISORDERED COSMOS

THU, APR 1 / 6:00 PM PDT ETHAN RUSSELL: ROCK AND ROLL PHOTOGRAPHY

TUE, APR 13 / 10:00 AM PDT NOAH GRIFFIN: A FLASH BACK TO OLD-TIME POPULAR RADIO SHOWS

WED, APR 7 / 9:00 AM PDT “I HEAR YOU”: TALKING AND LISTENING TO PEOPLE WITH ALZHEIMER’S

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TUE, APR 13 / 3:00 PM PDT NATIONAL POETRY MONTH

FRI, APR 16 / 12:00 PM PDT DR. MICHIO KAKU: THE GOD EQUATION

TUE, APR 13 / 6:00 PM PDT JASMIN DARZNIK: THE BOHEMIANS

TUE, APR 20 / 10:00 AM PDT SABINE HOSSENFELDER: LOST IN MATH

WED, APR 14 / 12:00 PM PDT DR. JOHN TORRES: GUIDE TO SURVIVING EVERYTHING

TUE, APR 20 / 12:00 PM PDT FORMER U.S. SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE JOHN BOEHNER

WED, APR 14 / 3:00 PM PDT BROOKE BALDWIN: HOW WOMEN UNLOCK THEIR COLLECTIVE POWER

TUE, APR 20 / 6:00 PM PDT YOUR TURN: HOW TO BE AN ADULT, WITH JULIE LYTHCOTT-HAIMS

THU, APR 15 / 3:00 PM PDT AMANDA TYLER WITH SOLEDAD O’BRIEN: THE LEGACY OF RUTH BADER GINSBURG

THU, APR 22 / 12:00 PM PDT HOLLYWOOD AND THE MAINSTREAMING OF ANTI-ASIAN RACISM

FRI, APR 16 / 9:30 AM PDT 23RD ANNUAL TRAVERS CONFERENCE ON ETHICS AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN GOVERNMENT

THU, APR 22 / 5:30 PM PDT FORMER CDC CHIEF DR. TOM FRIEDEN: PERSONAL FREEDOM VERSUS THE PANDEMIC

WED, APR 28 / 6:00 PM PDT DREAM FIRST, DETAILS LATER, WITH ELLEN BENNETT AND ANGELA DUCKWORTH

THU, APR 29 / 4:00 PM PDT MAKING WAVES: ANATOMY OF MICRONESIA’S SUCCESSFUL REGIONAL COLLABORATION

THU, MAY 6 / 9:30 AM PDT IRAN’S REGIONAL DYNAMICS IN THE NEAR EAST: A PIECEMEAL APPROACH

TUE, MAY 11 / 10:00 AM PDT METABOLICAL: THE LURE AND THE LIES OF PROCESSED FOOD, NUTRITION AND MODERN MEDICINE

THU, MAY 20 / 10:00 AM PDT FRAMERS: HUMAN ADVANTAGE IN AN AGE OF TECHNOLOGY AND TURMOIL

THU, MAY 27 / 10:00 AM PDT HEINO FALCKE: BLACK HOLES, THE UNIVERSE, AND US

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Women and Leadership FORMER AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER

Julia Gillard and Nigerian economist Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala come from different continents and different political worlds, but they join together to discuss the shared challenges faced by many women in public office. From the February 2, 2021, online program “Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: Women and Leadership.”

JULIA GILLARD, Former Prime Minister of Australia; Co-author, Women and Leadership: Real Lives, Real Lessons NGOZI OKONJO-IWEALA, Former Finance Minister of Nigeria, Coauthor, Women and Leadership: Real Lives, Real Lessons In Conversation with JENNIFER PALMIERI, Former White House Communications Director; Co-host, “The Circus” on Showtime; Author, She Proclaims: Our Declaration of Independence from a Man’s World

JENNIFER PALMIERI: Both Julia and Ngozi are trailblazers. Julia spent her time in office rebuilding the Australian economy, prioritizing national health initiatives. Ngozi served twice as Nigeria’s finance minister, where she successfully negotiated the cancellation of over $18 billion in Nigerian debt.

These women led and sought to create a better nation while simultaneously fighting public sexism and gender stereotypes.

I want to thank both of you, Julia and Ngozi for joining us. I spent a lot of time with Hillary Clinton, as you both know, in planes in 2015 and ’16, and she spoke really highly of both of you, the work that you have done and also just some of the great moments that she had with you at these international Photos, top right: Julia Gillard, as prime minister, greets new Australian citizens. (Photo by Nick-D.) Bottom right: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala arrives for a press conference. (Photo by Jay Louvion.)

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conferences where it seems like the women might get together and swap some stories and experiences. I understand that is where you two had the idea for writing this book.

What was it that you really wanted to convey? I just wrote a book that’s A Declaration of Independence from a Man’s World, and my sort of fundamental belief was I want women to understand why they have the doubts that they have about themselves so that they can move on, because I really believe in them.

Did you feel like sexism was too prevalent but people weren’t talking about it or that women were not seeing what they should see?

What was the underlying goal here?

JULIA GILLARD: Jennifer, thank you for your works, too; for both the Declaration of Independence and Dear Madam President.

You caused an incident on my local beach. I go walking on my local beach in Adelaide, Australia, listening to audio books and podcasts. And I was listening to Dear Madam President at one point and getting a little bit teary when you talked about your sister.

Someone came up to me on the beach and said, “Are you all right?” Which was very, very nice of them. I’m like, “Oh, I’m listening to this book.”

But for me, the motivation in writing our book together particularly was I certainly came out of my experience in politics with a lot of questions in my head about gender and politics. When you’re living it in the moment, you often don’t have time to analyze it, so you get more reflective afterwards. I was constantly asking myself the questions, How much of what I experienced was about that era in Australian politics? How much of it was about judgment calls the government I led made and I made? And how much of it was simply because I was the first woman to do the job?

That was bubbling in me. Then Ngozi and I increasingly got to know each other at international meetings. I am the chair of the Global Partnership for Education.

Ngozi then was the chair of the Global Vaccine Alliance. We served on an education commission together. So we were thrown together, and we started talking about these questions. There were so many big events happening in the world right then for women, including of course what we could see happening with Hillary and the very gendered nature of the campaigning against her. So increasingly we thought, We’ve got to do something about this. We’ve got to do something about this. What are we going to do about this? And the idea was born to write

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a book, which brought together the research and evidence about women and leadership, but to also put it in the context of the lived experience of eight great women leaders.

We wanted through that to sort of globalize and systematize the debate. It’s very hard for an individual woman to come out and say, “This happened to me,” because often people will say, “Oh, she’s just complaining about something that happened to her.” And it’s hard to get traction on these issues globally.

Australians might know about something that happened to me. Brits might know about something that happened to Theresa May, but you don’t often get the bringing together and the compare-and-contrast right around the world. So we wanted the book to do that, to give women permission to speak, because it wasn’t just them. And to make sure that this was a book that spoke across cultures and contexts.

PALMIERI: That’s really a smart way to approach it. . . . People are so sure that they’re not sexist, they’re blind to gender bias. So they just think it’s that woman that’s having the problem. Seeing these eight women, all world leaders—people like Hillary Clinton and Theresa May and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Jacinda Ardern—there really was a commonality that was interesting to me.

Ngozi, did you approach it from a position of hope or optimism for women? You said that a lot of young women come to you, they look to you as a mentor, and there’s only so many women you can take on as projects and that this book is sort of a manual for them.

But are you optimistic about women’s future, and is that how you’re approaching the book?

NGOZI OKONJO-IWEALA: Yes. I’m optimistic about women’s future, but I’m also in a hurry. I think that if we continue at the pace we’re going, it will take us years and years. I think one of the things we wanted to see, based on the experience that we had— which was not always easy, even though I told people is a privileged to have been able to serve my country—you ask why political leadership, even business leadership, is so gendered? Why is it that only 57 countries out of the 193 United Nations members have had women leaders? Why is it that in any given year it’s like 13 or 14 leaders that we have? I mean, some people might say there is progress, because there were four in 2000, and now we have 13 or 14, but just look at the pace at which—only 57 countries—then you ask yourself, Why is it that only 6.6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women or 6 percent of the FTSE 100?

So these are the issues that we’re asking.

Why is leadership so gendered, and what is the experience? How can we help women leaders also put their experience in a broader context and see that they are not alone and their lived experience—as Julia put it—is the same? They can find similarities, even with women at the top. And the women don’t know it all—that’s the interesting thing.

PALMIERI: One of the lessons that you have in the book is, Don’t expect women [to have all the answers]. Women even at the highest levels—when Julia Gillard is the prime minister of Australia, it turns out she didn’t have exactly all of the answers.

I worked for Barack Obama; he didn’t have all the answers and he was president of the United States. But women feel like they have to. I feel like there’s such good practical advice in here for women. Let go of this notion that you’re going to always know exactly what to do. Did you have an experience like that, Ngozi?

I graduated from college in 1988, so I started working in the late eighties, and I found that the women’s rights movement was done. It moves over. It was solved. I thought I might have to work harder than the men, but that we would eventually catch up. Then about 20 years in, I just looked at the stats that you just named, and taunts about people like Hillary, like, We’re not getting there, we’re not making that kind of progress.

But what did you expect when you came into the workplace? You started from the financial side of governing; what did you expect your life was going to be like as a woman in that industry, and how did it play out? Is it similar to what Julia relays in her side of the book?

OKONJO-IWEALA: Well, a little bit different in the sense that I had no illusions that things were going to be all right and we were done. I didn’t feel that. But I thought that things would move a little faster than they have with respect to women in positions [of] leadership. Being the first female finance minister was a lot of pressure in the job. I was just focused on making sure—because this had never happened, and there were people who felt this is a powerful job, why is a woman in it?—I felt the pressure to make sure I delivered, because if I didn’t, then women would be done.

So there was a lot of that pressure. I felt we had to go faster. I absolutely have to show that women can deliver on this job and do it well.

I’m happy to say that in my country, after my service, we’ve had three female finance ministers since then. So it really did deliver in terms of showing that we can do it and

“Being the first female finance minister was a lot of pressure. . . . I felt the pressure to make sure I delivered, because if I didn’t, then women would be done.”

—NGOZI OKONJO-IWEALA there should be no reason why we shouldn’t be in that job.

PALMIERI: And then America with the secretary of state, because Madeline Albright was the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice was the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was the secretary of state. One of my colleagues from the Obama White House, their daughter said something about when John Kerry became secretary of state, “But I thought only women could be secretary of state; why are they letting boys do it?” Boys can do it, too.

OKONJO-IWEALA: Well, we are certainly ahead of the U.S. in Nigeria, because you’re just getting your first female finance minister in Janet Yellen, right?

PALMIERI: The first one, and we have our first female vice president. It was remarkable to see yesterday they had a meeting with Republican senators about a COVID relief bill. It was the first time I had seen our new vice president in sort of a relatively casual setting, which was sitting in the Oval Office.

You know how if you’re looking at the Oval Office, the president is in the chair on the right and the vice president is in the chair on the left. And there she is, our first Black woman biracial vice president doing her job.

It’s really exciting.

But Julia, there was a lot that I related to when you were describing your way up in politics. Because I sort of knew I needed to get along with men and I enjoy working with men and I had good male colleagues, but I was also sort of aware of, Am I playing the guy’s game too much? I think you said someone had to push you on this. Did you get to be prime minister by playing the boys’ game and playing it a little too well?

Can you talk about that, in real time, what it was like for you coming up and then at some point you had this reflection that, “Oh, I just thought it was the way the world was and then I realized what I’m doing is modeling myself after the men and trying to fit into their world?” That’s probably part of the reason why we keep hitting these glass ceilings.

GILLARD: Absolutely. I think this is an important question for us all to be talking about now, about how much we want to take current power structures and how much we want to change current power structures. For me, I’m sitting in my hometown of Adelaide, Australia. This is where I grew up. I went to school here. I got to go to university here.

That wasn’t a usual thing for the Gillard

family, so I thought it was a real privilege.

My journey into politics started at Adelaide University. I got involved in a campaign against government funding cutbacks, and then I got involved in the student union, and then got involved at the national level and on and on it went. Like you, I made the assumption kind of early on that, yes, life was still different for women, but it was changing fast. I could be part of that change and contribute to that change, but I would . . . spend most of my working life in a time when gender equality had happened.

So I’m of that generation of Labor [Party] women that fought for the affirmative action rule to bring more women into Parliament.

It made a huge difference. When we got the rule in the early 1990s, the number of women going into parliament from the Labor Party was like 14 percent. Now the national parliament, the state parliaments around the nation, the Labor team is generally around 50 percent. So things have changed, which is fantastic. And better than the other side of politics, which hasn’t gone for an affirmative action target. So it does show even in the Australian environment that it can make a big difference. But I certainly accepted political structures as I found them.

The essence of prospering in the Labor Party is there are factions. . . ; you’ve got to be able to work rooms, you’ve got to be able to work numbers. I did all of that. I got into what is a very adversarial political environment, the Parliament with our ritualized question time where everybody really has a go at it. You know obviously our Parliament is modeled on Westminster, modeled on the House of Commons in the U.K., but we’ve had British members of Parliament come and watch our question time and they’re like, “What on Earth was that?” Because it’s so fiery and so combative.

I set out to show that a woman could lead, could dominate in this very adversarial environment. I don’t regret doing that. I think it had to be done to show that this is an environment where women can prosper.

PALMIERI: They can do the job done the way it’s always been done, which means just the way a man has always done it, but she can do that. You felt the need to prove that.

GILLARD: Yes. In our politics you can’t come through for leadership unless you can hold your own in this very contested structure. So I had to show that I could do that. I didn’t have time or the space as the first woman to lead Australia to open up the next set of questions, which is, Do we have to do it like this?

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I really think about the contrast between where we are and where New Zealand is.

Jacinda Ardern is the third woman to lead her nation. No one in New Zealand, least of all Jacinda Ardern when she was thinking about politics and she said this clearly in her book, she never thought that “I can’t do this because I’m a woman.” She knew women could do this. She’d seen Helen Clark do it for a decade or more; that question had been answered. She was asking herself a set of questions about, Can I do this, the sort of individual I am? Can I do this?” But being the third to come to the job, she’s got the space to ask those next round of questions, which is, Can we have a political structure that works with kindness and empathy at the foreground, because that’s the kind of leader that I want to be. She’s made that the watch words of her leadership—kindness, empathy—but she’s very clear that that’s part of her as an individual, but also part of the political space she inherited because they’re beyond the question of, Can women do this?

And they’re asking those deeper questions about what’s the different way of doing this.

I think your work, Jennifer, causes us to look at those questions, those sort of secondround questions about how else can we do this and allow people in all sorts of styles to be leaders. I’ve often joked, I think “Well now, we’ve got to gender equality when a woman who presents for political office says, “You should elect me because I’m the hardest bitch in town and I get things done.” She can get elected and the man who comes forward and says, “You know what, what’s central to me is I like to be really kind and to have really high performing teams. And if I was your leader, then that’s the kind of leader I would be.” When we can mix it all up so no one is judging anyone through the prism of gender, that’s when we know that we’ve gotten to gender equality.

PALMIERI: With Hillary’s experience I feel like we had to prove that she could do the job the same way as it has always been done. Then you’re like, well, that’s how a man would do it. We had to put her on stage with Donald Trump to prove that she could hold her own there and not get flustered. Then people will come back at her and they say, “Well, why can’t she show any emotion?” That’s where you get to the next generation. A woman didn’t win the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, but we had a lot of candidates. It’s six candidates that were on the debate stage—six women—and they were doing it all their own way. And they were being judged differently. There was still

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sexism and gender coverage and all that, but it was much better.

Ngozi, Julia had mentioned you all put hypotheses in the book based off of the conversations that you had with these women leaders about things that might help them get a good start. Like, has a young girl been raised to believe that you could do anything? It’s interesting, that does seem to be a commonality. That was something that I know from talking with Hillary that she thought [about regarding] her parents.

Interestingly, she told me she has never felt insecure about her looks. Even though her wardrobe and her hair was constantly commented upon, to say the least—it bothered her that they weren’t talking about issues, but she was confident and secure in who she was and what she looked like, and didn’t really care because of that rearing as a young girl. Can you talk about why that’s important and what you found with these other women on empowering girls?

OKONJO-IWEALA: Jennifer, you set it out very well. One thing common to all the women was that in growing up, nobody ever told them they couldn’t do things boys could do.

PALMIERI: And was this true in your experience too, Ngozi?

OKONJO-I W E A L A: Absolutely my experience as well—and in Julia’s experience.

In my experience and my culture—well, I’m sure it’s in other cultures too—the first child is expected to be, I don’t want to say a leader, but to show a good example to all the others.

That means you have to be able to do so many things. In essence, I had parents that believed there should be no difference between the boys and girls. I actually thought they expected more of us; myself and my sister, we were expected to do a lot more than the boys. They got away with a lot more.

So I feel that if you look at the experiences of all the women—you look at [former Liberian President] Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who was fearless growing up; she felt she could do anything and everything that the boys could do. You look at [European Central Bank President] Christine Lagarde and you see her the first of, I think, three or four boys.

They were four, and she was expected to be in charge. If you look at each and every one of them, there wasn’t this questioning. You’ve mentioned Hillary already; there was actually the expectation that you could do this. We believe that the kind of nurturing that you get as you’re growing up, the environment you grew up in, matters a lot.

PALMIERI: It’s such a great piece of advice,

because that’s something any parent can do right now. No matter what else changes in society, if you empower your children, girls and boys both, to believe they can, that really does take hold and sort of inoculates these women against other obstacles they are going to encounter.

Another thing, Ngozi, your first year as a finance minister was sort of maybe not quite the situation, but talk about the glass cliff.

People have heard about glass ceilings; glass cliffs is sort of when a woman is like, “Sure, you can be in charge now that everything’s a mess.” [For example,] Mary Barra in the United States, who walked into GM when GM was not in great shape. This is something that we have seen repeated, particularly in business in the U.S. But I don’t think people really know that term. Tell us about that, and if you do feel like your experience as finance minister was for a trial run as a glass cliff?

OKONJO-IWEALA: Glass cliffs—exactly when things are not going so well, that’s when women are called in. If you look at our women leaders, they’ve had many glass cliff moments. My favorite one is when Christine Lagarde was a partner at Baker McKenzie and the firm was going through so many troubles, so none of the men wanted to touch it, and they came to her to try and pull it all together, and she foolishly accepted to do it. And she did it. So in my own career I’ve had quite a few glass cliff moments. Even as a fairly junior person at the World Bank, I remember one particular mission where it was a mess. Nobody wanted to lead it, and I got the chance.

But as the minister of finance, yes, in a sense you could call it a glass cliff moment in the sense that my president said he brought me there so we could get debt relief. We had $30 billion in debt, and debt service was about $2 billion a year, and it was getting very expensive. I had to figure out how to get around and get rid of that. I think the second thing was the economy was growing at about 2.3 percent. And with a population growth rate of about 2.5, we were having sort of negative per capita growth and that wasn’t good enough. So the other thing was, How do we lift the economy? So very, very tough issues, but putting together a good team with the backing of the president we were able to do it. We got debt relief—$30 billion wiped off, of which $18 billion was completely wiped off. And our economy tripled in growth, almost to 6 percent, during my time as finance minister.

So we met that glass cliff. But it was very tough going and there was always this feeling

that if I don’t do it, this is going to be a disaster not only just for me or the country, but for women.

PALMIERI: It can be an opportunity too, right? That’s what you’ve also said.

OKONJO-IWEALA: Absolutely. Julia puts it very well when she says that the other thing is that men feel they can get other opportunities so they will often walk away from a glass cliff, but women feel this may be my only chance and so they go for it. That’s another thing, and that is true. I joked elsewhere that perhaps the WTO I’m trying to get to will be the biggest glass cliff moment I ever have in my life. [On March 1, 2021, Okonjo-Iweala assumed her new position as director-general of the World Trade Organization; she is the first woman and the first African to hold that position. —Ed.] PALMIERI: When Theresa May becomes prime minister after Brexit falls apart and keeps falling apart, and then the conservatives in the U.K. are like “Yeah, you tried”—it’s like, “Oh, I didn’t know that was called a glass cliff, but I definitely understood what was happening in there.

GILLARD: Jennifer, I think it’s important just where this term comes from. It raises an important issue. It comes from research which was undertaken after the very established newspaper, The Times of London, had published a piece saying women CEOs cause low share prices. So they’d done a simple correlation: businesses with women CEOs, low share prices, women CEOs are the problem. And researchers came along and unpacked all of that and said, No, no, no, no, no; what’s happening here is low share prices, businesses in trouble, appoint women CEOs. So if a business is going well, you keep that male CEO. [When] you’ve got to get another CEO, you get one a lot like him, another man; if it’s going badly, then you say, “Ah, let’s try something completely new. I know, we’ve never had a woman.”

The reason it’s important to understand that is whilst many women step forward for a glass cliff moment, like Ngozi did or Christine Lagarde and make a success out of it, many women will step forward for a glass cliff moment and it’ll still be a big problem. The business won’t go well, or the politics won’t go well. People would say that looking at Theresa May, the politics of Brexit didn’t go well. And we’ve just got to be clear [about] cause and effect, otherwise people will walk away saying, “Ah, I knew she couldn’t do it.” And if she couldn’t do it, maybe women generally can’t do it. So we’ve got to be really clear that often women are

“When we can mix it all up so no one is judging anyone through the prism of gender, that’s when we know that we’ve gotten to gender equality.”

—JULIA GILLARD only given permission to lead when it’s pretty close to mission impossible.

PALMIERI: Yeah, which is why you should give women permission to lead. Which is why Kamala Harris is walking into a tough vice presidency, because things are harder in the U.S. right now, but that is not a glass cliff moment. That is handing the button of leadership to a woman that’s just ready to lead and be a good partner. But this is so great about this book and the practical advice in it; you’re shedding specific light on a specific problem with an action for what women should do about it; not all books accomplish that.

Julia, the hypothesis of “She’s a Bit of a Bitch”—this is one of the chapters, friends, I’m just saying—but you wrote that you thought as a first female prime minister, that you might encounter some sexism early on, but that would abate. Instead it got worse, and that was certainly my experience with Hillary. I think it’s because with her coverage, because reporters don’t want to be sexist, don’t think they’re sexist; I think that makes all of us—men, women, not just reporters—sort of blind to the gender biases that we all hold in our heads. What I found was her press coverage just compounded. It kept getting worse, because it was like they

were suspicious of her. Then they got more suspicious of her, and gender could never be part of it because then that would unravel all the work they had done previously.

But with you, my impression is that kind of coverage and sexist attacks sort of built up to the point where you gave what is known as the “Misogyny Speech.” I think most women in America are not familiar with this. So can you explain what was happening that drove you to give this speech? Tell us a little bit about it and the reaction. It’s really important for people to hear about this. I went back and re-read it today. It’s remarkably bold, direct, like all the things women are told not to do when they’re talking about sexism and gender. But you did it and it had such a big impact.

GILLARD: I’m happy to talk about that, but the foundation stone of all of this is me making an error in thinking that when I became prime minister, that everybody would be very focused on the fact that I was the first woman in the early days of my prime ministership from both positive and negative perspectives. I expected that there would be a lot of “That’s fantastic; we’ve got the first woman, this is incredibly meaningful for Australian women and girls,” and there was a lot of that. But I also expected the APRIL/MAY 2021

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maximum discomfort of people like, “Oh, I’m not sure, this hasn’t happened before.

Yeah, there’s something about her. I’m a bit uncomfortable.” I expected the maximum of that to be in the early period, and then time would pass. I’d just been doing the job and, we’ve talked about doing the job, hopefully succeeding in the job and people would just start concentrating on that.

So then the dialogue would move from “She’s the first woman” to “Oh, I really liked that health-care policy” or “I really hate that schools policy” or whatever it is, but sort of politics as usual. What I actually found was as I governed, you end up making decisions that some people find to be controversial. We particularly decided to enact an economy-wide emissions trading scheme here in Australia as a climate change policy, Australians and Americans by far being the most carbon-intensive people on the planet. So this was a big and controversial policy. As that political [issue] played out, . . . the gender insult became the go-to weapon.

They were people at rallies holding up signs, referring to me as a witch and a bitch and things like that.

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The frame that was put around me was “She’s ruthless, she’s ambitious. She doesn’t have kids. She doesn’t understand families.

How does she understand what impact all of this is going to have on ordinary family life?

Because she’s just a ruthless career woman, not a mother, not a nurturer, not a carer.” It all played out like that. And because in the early days of my prime ministership I had decided I wasn’t going to foreground gender, because everybody else was doing that and I thought it would fall away over time, when it got as contested as that, it was hard for me to start foregrounding gender at that moment.

And even if I had, people would have said, “Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she, because now she’s trying to distract from the fact that the government’s in controversial political times.”

What ended up happening with what’s come to be known as the “Misogyny Speech” is the question time that I spoke about before in Australian politics. Parliament used to sit about 20 weeks a year, four days a week.

Every parliamentary day, there’s an hourand-a-half where the opposition without notice can ask the government ministers and

prime minister any question, no notice given at all. And almost always overwhelmingly the questions go to the prime minister, maybe a few to other senior ministers. It’s an incredibly combative time. Actually president Obama once said to me that he envied the question time structure, because you could get your message out to the nation. To which I undiplomatically replied, “Are you mad?

This is a pretty crazy thing to wish for. This is a blood sport.”

PA LMIER I: He would love to take Republicans on directly, if he could argue [and] refute their arguments in real time.

That would have— GILLARD: He would have enjoyed it, I think. But gee, it’s tough. It’s really tough. So there was a political incident in Parliament where the man I had supported to become speaker of the house of representatives had been unmasked as having sent some dreadfully sexist text messages, not something I could have known at the time I supported him, but don’t let the facts get in the way of a good political story. So I walked into Parliament that day, thinking the opposition is going to use this question time to try and

skewer me as a hypocrite on the question of sexism, because I supported this man to be speaker.

And after everything I’d listened to about myself, the number of times I hadn’t replied, the number of times I’ve bitten my lip not to reply, what really welled up in me was cool anger and I was ready to take this on in question time. What actually happened was the opposition, instead of starting to ask questions, moved a motion to have an immediate parliamentary debate. So the “Misogyny Speech” is my off-the-cuff reply in that immediate parliamentary debate. I think you can see the calling at work as I sort of finally address all of the sexism and misogyny that I had had to put up with as prime minister. A lot of women look at that speech and say, “I could never do anything like that.” My responses were, one, Parliament’s a pretty stylized environment.

People don’t wander around workplaces, quite conducting themselves like that. So don’t mark yourself down because you’re not about to channel Australia in question time when you go to work or go to your local community group, or even your meeting of your political party locally.

But the other thing is I couldn’t have done that several years before, either. Standing and putting your case in the moment—that’s a honed craft. I had to hone it in Australian politics. Then I brought it to the fore in that moment. So I hope that that gives people some comfort that if they are going to start taking sexist arguments on, men and women, that the more you decide “I’m going to be upfront about this,” the easier it will become, the more you do it. These are ultimately not innate skills; they are learned skills. They’re things that people can get better at over time.

PALMIERI: And when you’re pushed and right is on your side in the moment, you’re going to be able to summon what it is that you really want to say. Because, I can’t believe that you did that off the cuff. Everyone has to go read it and watch it. It is amazing. I mean, you said that it’s gotten so much attention that you feel like it’s overshadowed some of the things that you have done. I know that with President Obama, maybe a sort of corollary experience was he didn’t talk a lot, particularly the first time, about race. And he would not usually talk about his own personal experience. And then after Trayvon Martin, a young Black teenager, was shot by sort of a vigilante, the guy was tried and was acquitted. It was just devastating to Black Americans. And President Obama went to the briefing room and for the first time [said], “This is what my life has been like as

a Black man in America.” And it’s just pretty devastating to hear from him.

It was not scripted. He just was like, “This is what I’m going to say.” And he went down the next day and did it, but very personal, which he normally didn’t do. I experienced this. People said this to me. I think that probably there are things that he maybe thought he was going to be remembered more for and that speech is one of the things, but how do you feel in retrospect now seven, eight years out about having done that speech and the sort of moment, how it is remembered in history?

GILLARD: It’s taken me a while to kind of be at peace with it. I was in Parliament for 15 years, I was deputy prime minister for three years, I was prime minister for three years. We did big things that really mattered to the Australian community. We had an impact internationally and it apparently all comes down to one speech, and I did feel a frustration with that. But I’d have to say the more I moved away from my immediate parliamentary career, the more I traveled and did things internationally, I would literally walk down a street in London or New York or wherever, and a woman would dive across the road to say, “Oh my God, Julia Gillard, I’ve watched your speech.”

It would be apparent after a few minutes conversation with them that that’s the only thing they knew about me. The only thing they knew about Australian politics and for most of them, other than the very basics— you know, koalas, big sharks, big spiders, snakes, the sorts of things people know about Australia, unfortunately, despite being a very beautiful, safe place, other than that, it was the only thing they knew about Australia.

That helped me settle with it. I thought, “Well, if in this quick look at Australia, this is one of the things they know about us, I’m happy with it.”

PALMIERI: Yeah. It’s better than focusing on spiders and sharks.

Ngozi, Julia says that she’s always been sort of a feminist. Julia describes herself as an analytical feminist early on, and that you feel more of the emotional tug of feminism.

Ngozi you described yourself as a womanist, which I know actually has an American origin, but talk about what that means.

You also talk about how networking with other women hadn’t been a priority for you in real time, but that you feel like being in community with women is important. Can you talk about those things?

OKONJO-IWEALA: Yeah. I think that the term womanist was coined [by] an American, Alice Walker, but it was magnified by my

very own aunt, an aunt who was a professor of English at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia.

She amplified that term. When I thought about it, I wanted to use it to describe myself in the sense that I never ceased to be amazed at how women managed to accomplish so many things. Whether it’s out here or in my own continent, everywhere. I just look at them and I am filled with awe. I’m a woman myself, but when I look at other women and what they can do, I just feel this feeling of empathy, pride, awe at what they can do. Juggling so many things at once while trying a career, sometimes a family, sometimes not. Having to cope in gendered environments. So it’s that feeling of being proud to be a woman, feeling what women feel and empathizing with them that makes me say I’m a womanist, because I really do relate to that.

PALMIERI: What about networking with other women? You wrote about that, too; maybe when you were working in finance, you’re one of the only few women, that’s not something that’s a priority, but why is it important?

OKONJO-I W E A L A : Well, I think networking is important. But for me, I think it’s networking both women and men. And we haven’t talked about men and we need to bring that to the fore that we can’t solve this gender gap, this gender issue, the gendered environment, unless we have men with us.

And one of my dreams about this book is to talk to an audience of only men.

PALMIERI: Yes. OKONJO-IWEALA: Because I think that they have a role to play. Networking is good, but encourage women not just to network with women, but network with men. And encourage men to feel that they really can do something about the environment in which they can call it out when they see a sexist gendered moment. They can mentor women. There are so many things that they themselves can do. So it doesn’t have to feel like this is all for women trying to solve women’s problems. When you talk about networking, that’s how I come about it.

But I think it’s something that women should not neglect, because men do it very, very well. That is why they also have an edge.

It may be golf; they’re playing golf, they’re networking. It may be a drink somewhere in some club, they are networking. Women don’t do that, and they don’t even have the time [to do it] most of the time. But we strongly encourage [women] not to get away from it because men do it. Just broaden the number of people and the type of environments in which you do it.

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GAYLE TZEMACH LEMMON TELLS

the extraordinary story of the Kurdish heroines who fought on the front lines alongside U.S. forces and helped defeat Islamic State in Syria. From the February 23, 2021, online Middle East Member-Led Forum program “Daughters of Kobani: Kurdish Women Warriors Against Islamic State.”

GAYLE TZEMACH LEMMON, Journalist; Adjunct Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations; Author, The Daughters of Kobani, Ashley’s War and The Dressmaker of Khair Khana EDDY SIMONIAN, Vice Chair, Middle East MemberLed Forum, The Commonwealth Club of California— Moderator

T

his is . . . the story of the women who handed the Islamic State its first defeat as part of a fighting force that stood up in the showdown of the town called Kobani on the border between Syria and Turkey.

Really and truly the thing that struck me the most when setting out to write this story was that it started with a question I couldn’t answer, which for me is a hallmark of a great story.

How in the world did one of the most far-reaching experiments in women’s equality come to be on the ashes of the fight against the Islamic State, created by women who truly fought ISIS room by room, house by house, street by street, town by town as America’s ground force for a half decade? It’s a military story about the special operations community in the United States and its quest to work with local partners on the ground who were willing to take the fight to ISIS at a time when ISIS had had not one defeat.

It’s a story of women, which is deeply relevant to our times, as it’s about women who rewrote the rules governing their lives and who really reshaped the way an entire generation thought about what women’s work is. It’s a politics story about America and its hunt for a policy when it came to the tragedy known as the Syrian Civil War. As ISIS surfaces, how are the Americans going to counter the rising forms of the Islamic State at a time when U.S. forces absolutely could not politically be deployed on the ground?

Then it is also a story of media, because the truth is that the reason why we know about the fight for Kobani, and the valiant stand of this David-versus-Goliath force that truly had women’s rights and women’s equality right at the heart of it—this story also happened because it happened right on the border with Turkey,

DAUGHTERS OF KOB

Photo by Voice of America

BANI: TAKING ON ISIS FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

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which meant that the world’s cameras could capture it in plain sight and catapult this story that was happening all around Syria.

Then-Deputy National Security Advisor [now U.S. Secretary of State] Tony Blinken said there were Kobanis going on all across Syria and Iraq all the time, but this one was captured by cameras.

I wanted to understand how these factors come together to put this very far-reaching experiment in grassroots participatory democracy with women’s equality right at the center onto the global stage, because those very same women—with women’s emancipation right at the heart of who they were—came right up against the men of the Islamic State, for whom buying and selling women was a central part of who they were and what they did. It is Shakespearean in its reach and its breadth.

It is a little personal for me; my family is from the region. So when I first heard that there were women leading in battle against the Islamic State and leading not just women but men also, and who also had the deep respect of U.S. special operations forces—men [who] would spend their entire adult lives at war on behalf of the United States—I thought not only is this story incredible, but it’s incredible it’s happening there. I just could not imagine the journey they would have taken, to . . . say to their families, “I’m going to decide my future, but also I’m going to take up arms so that you can decide your future, so that you will not live under the yoke of the Islamic State.”

The women you’ll meet are some of the most extraordinary people I’ve had the privilege of meeting anywhere in the world.

There’s Rojda, who ends up becoming the Americans’ interlocutor in the military campaign to route ISIS from its so-called capital of Raqqa. Rojda is someone who is very quiet, introverted, loves Brazilian soccer, loves Maradona, and loves books and ends up giving up her dreams of becoming a pharmacist to protect her neighborhoods when the Syrian Civil War starts.

As a girl, she dares to play soccer at her grandmother’s village; her uncle dresses up in a white sheet as a ghost to scare her and her cousins from doing something that is so shameful for their family as playing soccer out in the open in her grandmother’s village.

We follow her all the way to standing with U.S. special operations in Raqqa in the command centers figuring out who goes

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Photo by KurdishStruggle

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Photo by KurdishStruggle

where and commanding thousands of forces in the effort to stop ISIS’ territorial caliphate.

Then there’s Znarin. She’s so serene in her demeanor. As a teenager, her parents said “You can’t go to university, because that’s not okay for girls.” “You cannot marry who you love, because your uncle already has chosen for you.” Then we follow her by the time she comes to this all-women’s fighting force. She starts out as a driver for Nowruz,

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who’s one of the other leaders we’ll meet, and ends up leading forces to retake her hometown from ISIS—and having girls come up to her and looking at her as a role model and her uncles calling her for advice.

Then there’s Azeema, who is this swashbuckling character, very much larger than life, joke-cracking, chain-smoking, non-ISIS-fearing leader who always leads from the front. The thing that struck me about her is that ISIS [shot] her with a bullet,

they shot her and yet still, even with an ISIS bullet near her heart, she goes to Kobani to the press conference at the end of the battle for Kobani and says, “I want the world to know that women were part of handing this first-ever defeat to the Islamic State.”

Finally, there’s Nowruz, who is somebody who has this demeanor that’s incredibly reassuring when you first meet her. It’s almost hard to remember, if you meet her out of battle, what she faced in war. She

grew up with her mother, who never got to go to school, never got to be literate, who said, “Make sure her life isn’t like mine.”

Here, we follow her all the way on her own journey to becoming a leader who, when her forces in Kobani are low on food, low on weapons, low on ammunition, they have almost no training compared to the men of ISIS who’ve come to take yet another victory, but they have will. She gets on the walkietalkie to the women who are her front-line

commanders and says, “These men think you are worth nothing. Show them what you are made of, show them your value, and show them who you are and what women are capable of, so that even if this is our last breath your life will mean something.”

Those are the people that we get to spend time with along with the Americans who, from the military side and the policy side, are really desperate to make sure that ISIS is stopped. This is at a time when the fear

for the U.S. homeland was extreme, and no one knew who was going to put their lives on the line on the ground doing the terribly difficult fighting that ISIS forced its enemies to make. This was a fighting force from the Islamic State that mined every room, that kidnapped civilians, that has shown it was capable of everything.

I want to take a step back to remember where we were at the time of this war.

In 2011, the Syrian Civil War starts as a peaceful protest from young people, then morphs into a fight against extremism as groups from around the world come in and take advantage of the vacuum left by the Syrian Civil War and the atrocities of the Assad regime escalating day by day.

Into this, the Syrian Kurds, who are this ethnic minority that siezes on the openings provided by the Syrian Civil War to govern itself, for the first time to be able to publish in its own language, name its children what it would wish, celebrate its holidays without the Assad regime interfering, speak in schools the language it wishes to teach its children in without fear of retaliation.

All for the first time, this group of Kurds who follow Abdullah Öcalan—sitting in [a Turkish] prison, who raised a former communist to the left of Bernie Sanders in Vermont—they put together these ideas of governance, New England-style, town hall, participatory democracy, that will have women at its center and environmental awareness at its heart.

All of this unlikely story gets catapulted onto the world stage by the men of the Islamic State, who intersect with the Americans looking for a way to stop them, and it all comes to be in the town of Kobani in 2014 when ISIS is on a glittering string of victories and finally meets a Syrian Kurdish force that is not as proficient or as skilled or as armed as it is, but that has the heart to make a stand against it. That is when the Americans get involved. That’s really when our story starts.

Question and answer session with audience questions EDDY SIMONIAN: Gayle, thank you so much. I was raised in the Middle East, but it’s one of those stories that I really needed to experience firsthand and I really need to read. As trivial as this sounds, but I truly felt attached to Rojda when she starts, because of soccer and because of Maradona, FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

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the legend who passed away last year, but maybe it’s these small, trivial parts about someone’s life that truly connects people.

I’m sure when someone is reading it, they’re going to find something within the lives of these women that they’re going to say, “Oh! I feel connected to this person.”

I do want to start off by discussing Öcalan. It’s very interesting how he was influenced by a philosopher from Vermont. Can we talk a bit more about his background, his life and what really transformed him? It’s a bigger story in the Middle East as well, where I think it really needs to be brought to light about forced marriages and how it’s a catalyst for a lot of women to want to just break free, and the simplest thing of deciding who to love is not even an option for a lot of these women.

LEMMON: Yes. Abdullah Öcalan is a figure with the adjective “controversial” always attached to him. For NATO ally Turkey, he is considered Enemy Number One. He is sitting in a Turkish prison for co-founding the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which launched both a militant and then also later peaceful push for Kurdish self-rule. Once he is in prison, he starts reading the words of Murray Bookchin. Abdullah Öcalan—for people who have not been able to speak their language or celebrate their holidays—he recognizes citizens, [says people should] marry who they love, and the celebration that could be public in there with their music and their holidays, really moves people to follow his ideals and his ideas.

This group of Syrian Kurds, who happen to follow Abdullah Öcalan, is really folks who are the most organized when the Syrian Civil War begins.

The ideas that he’s been putting out over his decades in prison deeply influenced him. Öcalan goes from thinking about a Kurdish nation-state to really thinking about Kurdish self-rule and [lessons from] this philosopher, Murray Bookchin, who is not very popularly known, but certainly deeply known within certain communities.

[Bookchin] is a fascinating story of an immigrant from a Jewish family who grows up, really from [when he was] a child, taking care of his mother once his grandmother dies. He worked all kinds of jobs even as a boy to support his family.

He goes to his own intellectual journey from communism to really being more of an anarchist, then going to the idea of

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“Faisal Yousef said, ‘We’re building a lake in the desert. It doesn’t happen overnight, and we will not change 5,000 years [of cultural practice] in 7, but what we can do is start.’” social ecology. He moves from New York to Vermont. His former wife fights Bernie Sanders on a waterfront development project in Burlington.

Bookchin writes about . . . a world in which there is participatory democracy without hierarchy and with true care for the environment. He is talking about the environment decades before [others], really talking about the perils of technology decades before we were really contending with this, and talking about the importance of eco-consciousness where natural resources were shared among people very early.

His ideas, as Öcalan reads them in prison, intersects with Öcalan’s notion that the Kurds cannot be free until women are free. They get really put into place in a slice of northeastern Syria [with] these Kurdish forces and the armed wing in this called the People’s Protection Units and then later the Women’s Protection Units, which [included] the women that we will meet in this book. They are formed really with the ideas of Öcalan inspiring and giving them the spine of the ideology that they follow.

SIMONIAN: I also want touch base that this is very personal for you. You did mention how your family’s from the region, but maybe, in as much detail as you want to go into, can we discuss how you had your own battles as well with gender roles within your family?

LEMMON: My father used to joke that it was nature’s answer, it was the universe’s answer that he got me as the daughter.

The dedication [of my book] says, “To Eli, who taught me about pistachios, Marlboro Reds, backgammon and the proper taste of

watermelon,” because for those of you from the Middle Eastern families, my father was always complaining about American watermelon not having the sweetness that he grew up with even though he was a very, very proud Floridian to the end, very much loved South Florida and stayed there.

The introduction of the book is really about me trying to figure out [if I] could do justice to the story at a time when I had already written two books about the post-9/11 conflicts, and quite honestly was exhausted from trying to make Americans care about their wars. One of the things I thought was so fascinating was, how in the world did this experiment in women’s equality get created by women who fought men who bought and sold women in [this very]challenging region for women?

The Middle East is home to some of the strongest women I’ve ever met anywhere in the world. I think that is often too rarely understood, but the challenges they face—my grandmother was married as a girl. My father once, when I was giving a very hard time about the women in his family cooking more than the men— “Why couldn’t men do the cooking and cleaning?”—he looked at me and he said, “Do you really think men and women are equal?” He honestly didn’t mean it in a rude or insulting way at all. For him, it was as if I was telling him that reindeer dance on the moon at 9 p.m. every single night.

It was just unfathomable from the world that he was raised in. Mother was from Baghdad, father was from Kirkuk and lost his country as a boy because his family was the wrong faith.

I never even really talked about my father

in a book, but I did because I had just a fraction of an inkling of what these women would have faced. I think it absolutely made me even more curious to understand who they were and how in the world truly had this come to be.

SIMONIAN: You were on the ground over there with these women. You went there against the advice of many people. Could you discuss some moments that happened there that, even with war, even with the bloodshed, shows you the humanity of the people on the ground, and how these women were able to lead forces that were mainly comprised of men as well?

LEMMON: Just to back up a little bit— in 2013, the women had been part of organizing in their communities to stand up—at the beginning just to protect their neighborhoods. There was no Islamic State in 2011, 2012, but the footprints of it are beginning to form. By 2013, there are Al Qaeda-linked groups who are the predecessor to the Islamic State, and then comes ISIS officially declared in 2013. The women’s protection units are born in April 2013. I asked Rojda once, “Why in the world did you start the women’s protection units, because you already had equality according to your ideology? Öcalan [said] Kurds cannot be free until women are free, and you already were fighting alongside men in battle.”

She looked at me and said two things.

One is, “We couldn’t let stand a world in which the ideology that said women could be property would stand. Secondly, we just didn’t want men taking credit for our work.”

There is not one woman who is listening, not one woman born, who does not know that feeling from an instinctual, gut level.

Even in the most extreme form of fighting ISIS, it’s still the same sentiment. For me, anything I ever faced on the ground is a shadow of what the people I have the privilege of meeting and whose stories I have the privilege of telling faced.

I think it’s hard to imagine, but the reality is that these women are part of a governance structure that has actually built a truly real and very fragile stability on the ashes of the ISIS fight. What’s fascinating, and the book really talks about this, is that women are everywhere. In every town, there’s a cohead of a male and a female, so a man and a woman who run the civil council together.

There are women’s councils in every town.

There are women judges who helped handle

cases that are sensitive, involving women. In the founding document that is recognized by nobody outside of their [local] terrain but is governing there, women are mentioned 13 times. Women have equal rights, women have rights to economic means, no child marriage, yes to girls education, no to dowry, all of these things that would be far-reaching anywhere in the world. Women have a right to be represented in the political bodies.

They put women right at the center of all of this. For me, what was fascinating was to see women when you go get a security pass signed, or all the very mundane things you do when you report from a place like northeastern Syria. Get your letters signed; watch cable TV with the official who is signing it for you. There are women everywhere, which you just don’t see [elsewhere], and that struck me immediately.

The other thing I would say is I give them huge credit for the fact that your biggest opponent when you’re on the ground—of course, there is instability and fragility, but it’s almost complacency, because the one so important for U.S. folks to know is that you never see the Americans. The Americans are like the Oz-like presence they know exists somewhere, but you don’t see them except for occasionally on convoys on the road.

While, for me, it’s a lot of sitting on your backside, traveling from northern Iraq to the border, another four hours across the border into your town, then another 4–7 hours to go from city to city or town to town in northeastern Syria. I’ve had such a privilege of working with an amazing team, and really spending time with people who’ve seen so very much and were willing to share that with me.

SIMONIAN: I want to touch on what you mentioned about embedding women’s rights within the law of the land, you could say. Can we talk a bit more about some of the struggles that they face in the sense of outlawing polygamy, maybe going a bit deeper into that?

What I want to touch on as well is it’s easy to write laws, it’s tougher to enforce them, and it’s tougher to change the cultural mindset. Could you maybe discuss a bit of how things have changed in the villages, how things have changed on the ground? I understand that a lot of these fighters have some changes within their families, but has this affected other women? Has this affected

women that weren’t in battle, women that weren’t part of these forces?

LEMMON: Yes. You gave me a lot to answer.

By 2018, 2019, I was in the office of Faisal Yousef, one of the politicians. I said, “Wow, this is really hard what you’re trying to do.” She looked at me, she said, “Yes, we’re building a lake in the desert. It doesn’t happen overnight, and we will not change 5,000 years in seven, but what we can do is start.” They looked to the example of Tunisia, to say that women who were part of a revolution must stand up then for their rights.

I said, “Did men tell you this is too much too soon? You know, all the things we hear in the U.S. Too much too soon. Too fast, we’re not ready.”

“Of course they do,” she looked at me like, Come on, what a dumb question? “Of course they said that to us, but we didn’t care. If we don’t do it now, when will we do it?”

The fact [is] that women were fighting ISIS truly room by room. There’s a scene in the book where Rojda goes and puts her gun through wall and brushes up against the leg of an ISIS fighter. ISIS for them is not an abstraction. ISIS is the guy in the next room trying to kill them. Those military gains were only important to those women because of the political gains. As Nowruz once said to me, “We knew that if we show we could lead in battle, we could govern in peace.” That is what they were after.

When Faisal Yousef said, “Of course men don’t like it, so what?” I thought that is a fascinating thing, because maybe half a year later, nine months later, we were in Al-Hasakah in northeastern Syria and our car broke down. A group of women forces came and drove us back in their pickup trucks. Three young women across the front and from the back of the [rearview] mirror, where we sometimes see air fresheners in the U.S., they had a picture of another young woman who had been killed fighting Isis.

They were remembering their friends, driving with their friend’s memory, and they go through a Syrian regime checkpoint, because the regime is an uneasy coexistence with certain towns. They go through the regime checkpoint, nothing happens. They go through one of their checkpoints and they’re all high-fiving all the other young women and they’re all hugging. I’m the only one thinking, “This is like science fiction.

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When do we see this?” What struck me that night as I was trying to figure out what was different was that we have never seen women anywhere more comfortable with power and less apologetic about owning it. That stayed with me, and I really want readers to experience what that looks like and feels like.

SIMONIAN: One of my favorite poets is Nizar Qabbani, who was a Syrian poet, and was also on the forefront of women’s rights, and it happened because his sister committed suicide after she was forced to marry someone she didn’t love. Again, this is a theme [about] forced marriages.

Unfortunately, it is still prevailing within the region. It just exists. It gives me so much hope to read the story about these women and how they’re fighting this themselves.

In many cases they are doing this themselves, because what a lot of viewers are wondering and what we’re seeing is, did we—the United States government—just turn our backs on these women and walk away and leave them in between a rock and a hard place? We’re seeing a multi-fronted attack on them, and maybe we could discuss this a bit more.

LEMMON: I regularly say this, that there is much more hope in northeastern Syria than in northwest Washington. Even with all the setbacks, even with everything that happened with the Turkish-backed incursion in October 2019, what struck me when I was in northeastern Syria in December 2019 was how durable and enduring what they have built truly is.

I went into northeastern Syria really expecting the worst, and my teammate— who you’ll see in a photo in the book, Mustafa—I keep saying, “What about this checkpoint? What about that checkpoint?

What about this city? What about that city?” He was like, “Same deal. Same. It all looks the same.” I said, “Really?” He said, “Yeah.” I was like, “Great.”

No, I don’t want to minimize at all the displacement and the loss of life from that.

In fact, I spent time with young women from the Arab community who were in a camp for the displaced, who were from Tabiat in northeastern Syria. I interviewed this 14-year-old girl who said, “I don’t know when I’m going back to class. I lost my home, I lost my friends, I lost my family.” I don’t want to minimize that at all.

But what strikes you is that what

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they have built, even in Raqqa, which is nominally controlled now by the Russians and the Syrian regime, there is still the same civil councils, still the same women’s councils, which we’ll see at the opening of the Raqqa Women’s Council in the book.

All of this has lasted.

At the same time, there’s a moment where we see Rojda and she has been part of leading the campaign with U.S. special operations to retake Raqqa from ISIS, a brutal fight. She has dedicated every day of her life for four years to fighting ISIS not just for the region, but certainly for the United States, Europe and the rest of the world. We spent this evening with her; she is with this Yazidi woman who was enslaved by ISIS and shares her story and helps share what she learned for those who were fighting ISIS, so that they would understand who was where and what she knew. We watched her go back to the same town where she was part of helping this woman, who had been brutalized by ISIS, get her way back to her family in northern Iraq.

Now, she has to go back to the same town to fight against forces backed by a NATO ally. Now, she’s alone. I want readers to experience that moment, but I also want readers to understand this is about America’s national security.

President Biden this past few days said we were going to keep the pressure on ISIS. This is the force that took 10,000 losses in the fight against the Islamic State for the war, and women played a central part of that, and these women played a central part of that, and I hope you will be inspired by spending time with them in hearing their stories.

SIMONIAN: I think to myself as well, the courage of these women had—I don’t know if I could do what they had done.

LEMMON: It’s really scary. I will say, having been on the Raqqa frontlines, there’s a moment in the opening of the book in the prologue [with] Klara, one of the commanders who takes us to the frontline. I genuinely was nervous. We’re in Kevlar [protective covering], my whole team were in Kevlar, and Klara has a green paisley, green flowered Kurdish scarf. She’s walking around like she is just at the office for another day pointing at this car bomb that’s still smoking. “Can you believe they’re targeting us? Can you believe they do this every day?” My crew and I were like, “It’s

still smoking. Wow!” You realize that for them, this has become their daily job. That drive to the frontline has become their commute to work. It’s so important for readers to know they are not superhuman. They’re not any different from you and me, but they were called upon by the world to answer a threat that came to their doorstep, and for them, it was very important, it was clear that women were saying no more.

SIMONIAN: You [referred to] the dangers of being desensitized to this violence. Are these women or communities over there, are there any programs they’re doing or implementing right now to actually help people heal? It’s not easy, and we understand how in the United States, when our soldiers came back, [they deal with] PTSD, etc.

Especially right now, what’s happening in Syria? Is there anything on the ground that these committees are actually working on to help these people return and maybe come back to normal life eventually when [the civil war] subsides?

LEMMON: I’ve spent a lot of time in the military community, and also for this new second book I did, Ashley’s War, which is how this whole story started. It was a soldier from Ashley’s War who was working in Syria; he’s deployed to Syria. I will tell you the big difference is that in northeastern Syria, you cannot escape the war. There is a deep sense of community for those who are fighting. It is not some faraway war where the reality is that less than 1 percent of the United States has 100 percent of its wars for two decades with very few people really having their lives affected.

It’s very different in northeast Syria, and you drive down the road and from the lamp posts are smiling photos of young women and young men who were lost in battle defending the town. You never escape how much sacrifice was made for those towns.

I think that community spirit is what is deeply different, because in the U.S. spend time with folks who served this country and who sacrificed for this country, and often you see many people say, “Oh, thank you for your service,” and then they don’t want to ask anything else. They don’t really want to know anything else, and they certainly don’t want to engage with the wars that the U.S. is undertaking.

I think that a very large difference is that spirit of solidarity on people being in it together.

“Women were fighting ISIS room by room.

Rojda put her gun through a wall and brushed up against the leg of an ISIS fighter. ISIS for them is not an abstraction. ISIS is the guy in the next room trying to kill them.”

SIMONIAN: Within the region, there’s many different sects, many different religions within that. We hear a lot about the Kurdish fighters. Have these women influenced other religions to form their own groups and form their all-women groups to fight ISIS, to implement new norms within their own cultures as well?

LEMMON: Two things on that. There are women from across communities who are very much a part of the story, and that was very important both for me and for them. It’s crucial because I [interviewed] this young woman who has just spent the whole day fighting the Islamic State. It was hot. There are really like 15 young women with smiley face socks, fatigues, braids, some with Timex watches on their wrists and all of them with their AK-47 standing at attention against the wall for them to be ready at a moment’s notice.

I looked to her and she said, “We’re writing our own history now. We’re doing this not just for ourselves but for women across the region and across communities.”

I said, “Well, in the Middle East? Isn’t it a very hard place to start?” She looked like, Oh my gosh, you are a really dumb American.

What a question that you just asked me! “Of course.” She looked at me like, “What kind of question is that? Because of course it’s hard. We’re from here. We know how hard it is, but it wouldn’t be worth anything if it weren’t hard.”

I will tell you about a young woman from the Christian community that stayed with me and I thought about so often. I spent the day with her. ISIS had kidnapped

Christians in Khabur Valley, more than 200 people. You can’t quite imagine how terrifying [it is] for the men of the Islamic State to come in your house at night, round you up at gunpoint. You still have your cellphones; and just the terror that that inspires because of your faith. ISIS had come to the Christian community, this young woman had seen that, had watched this clip, and she said, “No, I’m going to be part of this Women’s Protection Force from the Christian community that’s going to defend our neighborhoods.”

Her parents say “No way. You’re smart, you have a promising future, no way. Go to school.” She said, “No, I really think this is important.” Then her parents go to church and people come up to them at church and say, “We’re so proud of your daughter and what she’s doing for our community.”

That starts to spread. Geena Davis and many others have talked frequently about the notion of “If you can see, you can be it.” The importance of seeing people who look like you. And that’s what happens.

Other young women see them come back to their neighborhoods, come back to their communities, and this is across neighborhoods.

One of the most powerful days of interviewing [involved] the young women from the Arab communities in Raqqa who lived under ISIS and who later joined the Women’s Protection Forces. I sat with Rojda one day on the river, and spent the day just asking them what that was like. I could have been there for days. Every one of these young women had a story. One

of them had read Egyptian poets only for three years, hadn’t left the house, but really spoke in paragraphs because that was her education. Another told me of being arrested by ISIS, because her wrist had [been visible] when she crossed the street.

ISIS arrested her and her father and said the only way she could be free is if she married one of the [ISIS fighters].

Then there was a woman who is in the book, who is somebody I think about nearly daily for her grace and her courage and her example. I was asking women what their stories were, and it turns out this was a woman whose brother joined ISIS and forced her to marry an ISIS fighter.

She tries to divorce him, she tries to leave him, her brother keeps sending her back to this man. She ends up escaping, finally, is brutalized by ISIS in the town of Idlib, and then she comes back. She has the U.S.-backed forces of whom the women in this story are a part say, “We’ll take you home. Where do you want to go?”

She said, “No, I want to join the Women’s Protection [Force].”

I couldn’t imagine the courage it took for her to do it, and so I asked her, “Why in the world? How do you have this courage to do this? Because I feel like I wouldn’t even move from that if I had endured all that you survived.”

She said, “Why should we let this go unanswered? This is my way of saying this should not happen.”

It was hearing this young woman say that that makes you realize this is not about communities and, in fact, the Americans used to say to me, “Oh, ask people outside Kurdish communities if this matters.” It’s not that everybody is singing “Kumbaya” and holding hands, it’s that women have an inherent sense of dignity wherever you are in the world regardless of community.

I would ask Arab women in Raqqa, “Is this a Kurdish project?” Or, “Is this an American experiment?” They would be so insulted by the question. “Who told you?

I’ve always been strong. I’ve always spoken up in my family, and my mother-in-law is the reason why I’m here today at the opening for the Raqqa Women’s Council.”

I think it’s so overstated that this is one community where women want to have their own voice and exercise her own agency. It is the universal quest for human dignity.

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On the Road to Freedom: Native American Voices Understanding the Civil North Dakota, South Dakota & Colorado Rights September 26 - October 4, 2021 With Discussion Leader Dakota Wind Goodhouse

Bismarck l Fort Yatesl Keystone l Denver l Del Norte l Ignacio

Discussion Leader Dakota Wind Goodhouse

Dakota is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and a Native American Studies instructor at the United Tribes Technical College, a Native American owned and operated college. He has his M.A in History from North Dakota State University and B.A. in Theology from the University of Mary. Dakota runs The First Scout blog which focuses on Lakota issues and traditional moon counts. Previously Dakota was an interpreter at the State Heritage Center and Museum in Bismarck. He is both Yanktonai and Húŋkphapȟa Lakȟóta, and was raised in Fort Yates on the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation.

What to Expect Please note that our itinerary involves some time driving from city to city, as well as, a fair amount of walking around the sites including some stairs and uneven terrain. Most days have an early-morning start and include a full day’s schedule of activities.

Participants must be in good health and able to keep up with an active group. Drive times average is between 3-4 hours per day, sometimes over winding roads. The longest day of driving is 7 hours total with stops for touring along the way. Temperatures in the region average in the 55-65’s (°F) during the day, and 35-45’s (°F) in the evenings. This program will be covering topics that include violence, and that may be difficult for children.

Therefore, we do not recommend this program for people under 16.

BISMARCK, NORTH DAKOTA

KEYSTONE, SOUTH DAKOTA

Independent arrivals into Bismarck. and to the Radisson Hotel Bismarck. Meet at 3:00 with our group to depart for an afternoon visit to the North Dakota Heritage Center and State Museum. Our discussion leader Dakota Wind Goodhouse will guides us through the museum. End the afternoon meeting with Danielle Ta’Sheena Finn, a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and an acclaimed activist and artist. Enjoy a welcome reception and dinner with fellow travelers.

Radisson Hotel D

Today begins with a visit to Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park. The reconstructed ‘On-ASlant Indian Village’ provides an excellent introduction to the earth-lodges of the Mandan Indians who occupied this site. Continue driving along Highway 1806, the Standing Rock National Native American Scenic Byway, an 86-mile route that climbs up and down the Missouri River, past buffalo herds and eagle’s nests. History comes alive on this journey where the great Lakota spiritual leader Sitting Bull lived and died.

Sunday, September 26

BISMARCK, NORTH DAKOTA Monday, September 27

Depart the hotel and drive to Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, a National Parks Service site, which preserves the historic and archaeological remnants of bands of Hidatsa, Northern Plains Indians.

This area was once a major trading and agricultural area. Continue on to the Double Ditch Indian Village, a large earth-lodge community inhabited by the Mandan Indians for nearly 300 years, and once a center of trade between the Mandans, their nomadic neighbors, and later, Euro-American traders.

End the afternoon meeting with Emma Doll, a Native American who set up the Five Nations Arts Organization, a resource to artists and collectors of Native American art in the region.

Also meeting the group will be Cheryl Kary, co-founder of the Sacred Pipe Resource Center (SPRC) which was founded by a group of residents of the Bismarck-Mandan area who are committed to the mission of maintaining a home-away-from-home for off-reservation Native Americans living in the area.

Radisson Hotel B,L,D

Tuesday, September 28

Enter the Standing Rock Reservation, home to the Lakota and Dakota people. Meet with Rev. John Floberg, who is deeply committed to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protests. With the endorsement of the national Episcopal Church, Floberg provided supplies to campers and hosted protestors in his church. Continue on to nearby Fort Yates, the main town of Standing Rock and enjoy a locally cooked lunch at the Community Center. After lunch, visit the original burial site of Sitting Bull who was assassinated on the western part of the reservation.

End the afternoon visiting the Standing Rock Tribal Council Offices which were designed following authentic Native American architectural elements. Drive about three hours to our Keystone hotel, tucked deep in the Black Hills. Dinner at our hotel.

K Bar S Lodge B,L,D

KEYSTONE, SOUTH DAKOTA Wednesday, September 29

This morning meet with Sequoia Crosswhite, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. He is an accomplished musician, grass dancer and historian, as well as an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe and a descendant of Chief War Eagle and Chief Swift Cloud.

Drive just over an hour to the inspiring Thunder Valley Community Center. A Lakota run grass roots center with goals to “create models of change that will overpower intergenerational poverty and build momentum towards regional equity.”

Head towards the town of Pine Ridge stop-

For additional information or to make a reservation, contact Commonwealth Club Travel Telephone: (415) 597-6720 — Email: Travel@commonwealthclub.org

ping at the site of the Massacre of Wounded Knee in 1890. The “battle” was actually a massacre where hundreds of unarmed Lakota women, children, and men, were shot and killed by U.S. troops.

Stop in at the Oglala Tribe Justice Center which houses courtrooms, a short term correctional holding facility, offices for law enforcement and justice officials. Funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the facility is the first of its kind to blend traditional tribal justice concepts with a technologically advanced design.

End the afternoon meeting with artist Joe Pulliam Buffalo Dreamer whose work is in the permanent collection of the National Museum of the American Indian. Pulliam has dedicated his art to preserving Lakota culture.

K Bar S Lodge B,L

DENVER, COLORADO Thursday, September 30

Accompanied by Sequoia Crosswhite spend the morning visiting the Badlands National Park and stopping at the Wind Cave National Park, an important spot in the Emergence Story.

Continue to Denver making a stop in Boulder to meet with the Native American Rights Fund (NARF). NARF has provided legal assistance to Indian tribes, organizations, and individuals who might otherwise have gone without adequate representation involving tribal sovereignty, treaty rights and natural resource protection. Continue to Denver and checkin to our hotel. Enjoy dinner on your own.

Downtown Renaissance Hotel B,L

DEL NORTE, COLORADO Friday, October 1

Depart the hotel and meet with Darius Smith director of the Denver Anti-Discrimination Office where he investigates, conducts administrative hearings and mediates civil rights discrimination complaints. Darius also serves as the American Indian Liaison to the Denver American Indian Commission that advocates for social and cultural awareness to promote economic and political equality.

After lunch, drive through spectacular landscapes stopping at the Great Sand Dunes National Park, home to the highest sand dunes in

North America. The mountains, forests, and dunes in the park are sacred to the Apache, Navajo, Ute, and Pueblo Indians. Drive on to Del Norte and the Windsor Hotel, one of Colorado’s oldest hotels.

Windsor Hotel B,L,D

IGNACIO, COLORADO Saturday, October 2

This morning drive about two hours to Chimney Rock, an intimate, off-the-beaten path archaeological site located at the southern edge of the San Juan Mountains. The site was home to the ancestors of the modern Pueblo Indians. Enjoy lunch nearby before driving to Durango and the Native American Center (NAC). The center provides academic, cultural, social, and transitional support for undergraduate Native American students.

Continue on to Ignacio and the Sky Ute Casino Resort, located on the Southern Ute Reservation. The oldest continuous residents of Colorado are the Ute Indians. End the afternoon with a discussion focusing on the social and economic impact of Indian gaming. Gaming has had a significant positive economic impact on the Native American community, yet is not without its detractors. We’ll hear from tribal experts on the economic and political realities.

Sky Ute Casino Resort B,L

IGNACIO, COLORADO Sunday, October 3

This morning visit the Southern Ute Cultural Center and meet with Linda Baker, director of the Southern Ute Cultural Center. Owned and operated by the Southern Ute Indian Tribe to preserve and promote Ute culture. Here we will also meet with Edward Box III, Culture Director of the Preservation Department.

Price Per Person: $4,895 Single Supplement: $880 Based on minimum of 15 travelers Maximum 24 travelers, not including staff.

Tour Price includes: • Accommodations and meals as per itinerary • All sightseeing in an air-conditioned coach • Bottled water on the bus • All entrances and events as listed • Discussion Leader to accompany the group • Pre-departure materials and reading list • The services of a professional tour manager to accompany the group • Gratuities

Does not include: • Airfare to Bismarck and back from Ignacio/Durango • Alcoholic beverages except for wine and beer at welcome and farewell events • Excess luggage charges • Trip Insurance • Items of a purely personal nature

Meet with the staff at the Southern Ute Drum, the tribe’s biweekly community newspaper.

Enjoy a farewell dinner this evening.

Sky Ute Casino Resort B,L,D

DEPART

Monday, October 4

Independently transfer to the Durango– La Plata County Airport for flights home.

B

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Native American Voices North Dakota, South Dakota & Colorado

Phone: (415) 597-6720 Fax: (415) 597-6729

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TH FUTUR AMERICAN HISTO DEBATES OVER THE

best ways to teach American history—what to teach, what to emphasize, how to communicate it—grew even more pronounced after a year of a pandemic, focus on racial justice, and the final year of the Trump administration.

We assembled an expert panel to discuss the issues at hand, particularly for K–12 students. From the January 6, 2021, online program “The Future of American History Education: What Now?” JANE KAMENSKY, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University IAN ROWE, Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute MICHELLE HERCZOG, History-Social Science, Coordinator III for the Los Angeles County Office of Education YONI APPELBAUM, Senior Editor of The Atlantic—Moderator

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YONI APPELBAUM: Today, I’m joining you from Washington, D.C., and there probably couldn’t be a better place or time to discuss these questions. As I speak to you, straight down 16th Street there is a rally at the White House. Congress will be sitting at one o’clock to count the electoral votes.

Meanwhile, election returns are still rolling in from the state of Georgia, where it appears that the pastor of Martin Luther King’s old church has just won election to the United States Senate, and Democrats appear poised to, with 50 seats, control the Senate going forward.

These are historic times, and we’re not quite sure what history will make of them, but it’s a good time for all of us to meet today and think about what we make of history. There is anger in the streets here in D.C., and there is passion and excitement and engagement. Among the many questions that we ask today are, What does this mean for the education of America’s students—particularly around history and the foundational principles of our democracy?

Over the past year, the president has pushed an effort around patriotic education and American ideals. In part, in the pushback to The New York Times’ 1619 Project but also well beyond that, he launched a 1776 Commission to promote study of America’s founding principles, as he sees them. Today’s discussion will focus on these issues and the road ahead for American history education.

I want to begin by turning to Professor Kamensky, and asking her thoughts on how to think about these issues, particularly at this moment.

JANE KAMENSKY: I come from higher ed, and a pretty rarefied corner of higher ed at that. I teach the American Revolution at Harvard, offering the first lecture course on the subject in decades, which is a story in itself. In that class, I aim to share cuttingedge scholarship, much of it on the violence of the Revolutionary War, which was our first civil war, and on the ways that the American founding was shot through with the histories of slavery and dispossession.

But I also mean for students to take up the work of the American Revolution as a fragile and ongoing project for which their generation bears ultimate responsibility. In many ways, it’s that work and the sense that higher ed needs fresh thinking about its responsibilities to primary and secondary ed that brought me to Educating for American Democracy, along with Michelle [Herczog].

As a scholar, I’m interested in what we might call the civic humanities—deeply researched, complex and verifiably true stories told with a lot of why with explicit civic purpose.

We need to acknowledge, as Yoni said, that we hold this discussion at a moment of both peril and possibility. I think the possibility might be harder for us to see, so I want to just highlight that at the outset here. We’ve seen tremendous citizen engagement in the course of the long vicious 2020 election

HE RE OF ORY EDUCATION season. That’s a very good thing. That engagement is not always informed and it too rarely foregrounds the common good or the sense that Americans are one people who can disagree constructively rather than existentially, and those are bad things.

We’ve seen grassroots groups and social media groups—from the New Georgia Project, which seems poised for triumph, to Michelle Obama’s When We All Vote— undertake tremendous civic activation efforts at massive scale. That’s a good thing, but they’re playing catch up educating generations of adults who haven’t effectively learned history and civics in schools and who are too belatedly being given the keys to the country.

So we have work to do in schools from pre–K through grade 20 and beyond. If the Educating for American Democracy approach takes root in primary, secondary and post-secondary ed, I like to think that we could create a virtuous circle, where more students graduate from high school wanting to learn still more about history and government in their post-secondary lives, creating for me more history or government majors, and then where more history and government majors want to be K–12 teachers and see that as the glorious civic work that it is.

From my very fortunate perch at Harvard, I can’t think of anything that I’d like to have my classroom see and do more.

APPELBAUM: Ian, Jane has given us a

reason for optimism and a reason to think of this moment as one of opportunity. How does that match your mood as you survey the landscape of history education?

IAN ROWE: It really does feel like we are living in history. My context is that for the last 10 years, I ran a network of public charter schools in the heart of the South Bronx and lower East Side of Manhattan. Two thousand students, almost all low-income students, black and brown students who were all in search of a better life. Like my own family, who came to this country in the ’60s. My parents certainly understood the country’s history of racial oppression and that their own children might face challenges based on race and other factors. Yet they knew that there was an essence of this country, that there were a set of core values around family, faith, hard work, entrepreneurship, that if embraced, could create a pathway from persecution to prosperity.

I think, with all the flaws that do exist in our country, that’s something that has always struck me as so important, that these principles are worth fighting for. One of the challenges of creating a sense of possibility in young people is to ensure that they actually have a deep and full understanding of the country that they live in, that they come to understand, even after learning all of the flaws, all of the abuses, that we live in a good if not great country, a country that isn’t necessarily hostile to their dreams.

That’s something that we spend a lot of

time on, certainly in the schools that I run, ensuring that young people understand the pathways to success that are within their grasp, that have been achieved by millions of Americans by embracing these founding principles. You mentioned The New York Times’ 1619 Project. One of the reasons I think that that created such a stir was that the 1619 Project went at the core of these founding principles—the founding principles were false when they were written, that America has anti-Black racism running in the very DNA of the country.

Imagine if you’re a Black kid in the heart of the South Bronx; you’re nine or 10 years old, or in Buffalo, or Newark, or Chicago, or some of these worst performing school districts in the country, where that curriculum has been embraced, and that’s the message that you’re hearing about the United States. A group of black scholars—we’ve called ourselves the 1776 Unites group, a function of The Woodson Center—came together and said we think that that’s actually a biased and somewhat distorted view of the country, and actually almost a cherry-picked history that paints the country as being permanently in the state of oppressor and oppressed.

We need to ensure all of our kids have a full and complete understanding of everything that has transpired in the United States.

We’ve even gone to the level of creating a curriculum, a 1776 Unites curriculum, that seeks to tell, again, a more complete story. For example, the Rosenwald Schools, APRIL/MAY 2021

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“We underestimate bringing some of these complexities to young children, and that’s the key—digging into the complexities.”

—MICHELLE HERCZOG which many educators aren’t aware of. In the early 1900s, Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald—at the time, the CEO of the Sears company, which was the largest retailer—Booker T. Washington had a vision for exemplary education in a time of segregation. They partnered together to build more than 5,000 schools in the South exclusively for Black students. The demonstrated record of increased literacy [and] community involvement is just extraordinary, one of the most empowering stories about Black self-determination under incredibly adverse conditions, and yet, [there’s] not a single mention of the Rosenwald Schools in the 1619 Project.

Our curriculum is seeking to tell all of those stories, so that we understand, warts and all, what America has represented and what should be part of a history curriculum for all students.

Let me just close by saying, in chapter 13 of the Tocqueville’s [Democracy in] America, he said, “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” I’ve always found that quote really empowering. because it accepts that America has a flawed history, and yet it has a foundation of principles that allows it to bravely and courageously confront those flaws, and continue to move toward this idea of a more perfect union.

APPELBAUM: Michelle, I want to come to you now. We’ve gotten Ian’s view of the landscape from New York. I’m curious—you work with a tremendously diverse student population and the educators who serve them. How do these questions look to you in Los Angeles?

MICHELLE HERCZOG: It’s a great question. For me, working with classroom teachers from kindergarten all the way through grade 12, particularly in history and social studies, we’re confronted with a number of issues. I’m particularly interested in, not just what is taught, but even more specifically, how it is taught. How do we entertain these questions and move toward an inquiry-driven approach to teach history in ways that’s going to spark more inquiry

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among students? We want them to leave with almost more questions than we give them answers to, right? That sort of shifts a whole different pedagogy around teaching.

I started my career actually as an elementary teacher and reading specialist and found that quite fascinating, because we often overlook the capacity of very young children to entertain very complex issues and events and ideals. If you’ve ever been around a 5- or a 6-year-old or a 4-year-old, they know very clearly what’s right and wrong, right?

What’s fair and not fair.

I often tease that my daughter’s first two words out of her mouth were “no fair,” because her brother got something she didn’t. They understand that. I think we underestimate bringing some of these complexities to young children, and that’s the key—what my colleagues are alluding to here is digging into the complexities.

Traditionally, I think many of us were taught history as just a basic timeline series of events.

This happened, then this happened, then this happened, and never really digging into the reasons why, the different responses to the pushback, the support. What we want to do is present opportunities for them to really dig into those issues and complexities.

When I got my history degree at UCLA, it opened my eyes to thinking about history in very different ways than what traditionally I was taught, that it wasn’t just a series of events. There were questions raised, there were stories revealed that were never in the textbooks, that were never in the classroom.

That brought a sense of, “Wow, how do I bring that to classrooms?” Now, in my current role in working with teachers of all grade levels K–12, how can I help them surface those different stories, nuances, perspectives, but in ways that are, I wouldn’t say balanced, but that provide a full picture?

We talk about revealing the warts, but how do you teach history in a way that it’s not all warts or no warts? How do you create that sense of, in spite of the difficulties and challenges and missteps and mistakes, that there are glimmers of hope, there were people who worked toward a better society, who worked for a greater cause? And how

do you highlight them in a way that doesn’t neglect or overshadow some of the sacrifices very deeply felt by too many groups at too many times? That’s kind of where I work with teachers and try to help them move to thinking about history in those ways and building their sense of understanding, expanding their knowledge base so that they can teach it.

I talk in many states, and when I was president of National Council for the Social Studies, I was able to meet with teachers across the country and found very common issues. The vast not just depth but huge breadth that they are expected to cover. I mean, it’s a race through time. Can you imagine teaching a group of 10-year-olds, fifth graders, everything from the age of exploration all the way through pre-Civil War in one year? To do it well, it’s virtually impossible, especially at a time when social studies is marginalized in the elementary grades.

They’re running a race against time to cover everything, but then helping them to do it well is the big challenge, and giving them the background and confidence to do it with the tools and abilities and background knowledge themselves to feel confident in doing so. It’s a big challenge.

APPELBAUM: I want to seize on one of the terrific insights you’ve just given us all.

These conversations often revolve around what should be in the curriculum. You’ve just oriented us to think as well about how that should be taught. There was a popular Broadway show a number of years ago, which defined history—and I think I’ll have to clean this up because we’re recording—as “just one damn thing after another,” which is not a bad definition perhaps of what happens in some classrooms.

We’ll come to the question of what we should be teaching in a moment, but I just want to get our panelists to engage with this question of whether there are ways to improve how history is taught, that perhaps we’ll reframe the conversation around what should be taught and allow us to slice through some of the thornier problems there, if history is not simply about conveying a body of facts

“It’s very easy to judge history based on living in a present where all the answers from that point forward are known. They weren’t known at the time.”

—IAN ROWE and beliefs, but rather about maybe teaching a certain way of thinking or asking questions.

K AMENSKY: I’d love to jump in if I could. Michelle, I was flashing during your remarks onto my utter conviction, graduating from high school sometime the end of the last century, of all the things I might do in the world, taking another American history course in my whole life was surely not one of them because of the coverage, the exclusively coverage approach of my textbook, American Pageant, which was the textbook of generations that kids had then. We memorized the height and weight of every president. Taft at 304 pounds, the heaviest. Efforts to reform history and civics ed, I think have often foundered on that.

The death of the national history standards effort in 1992–93 was we couldn’t calibrate the number of George Washingtons per Sojourner Truth that would thread its way across the partisan spectrum. What

Educating for American Democracy is trying to do is balance the what, the how, and the why, with an inquiry framework and civic purpose that allows sort of deep core sampling in places that particularly reveal not only the happenings of the past, but the workings of American constitutional democracy.

I guess the other thing, Michelle, that chimed with me from your remarks was your repeated use of the word digging. I think these active gerunds—digging, sifting, evaluating, wrestling, and ultimately coming out with a humbleness before the past, but also a sense, as Ian was saying, of radical hope about what ordinary people can do in the present and future—to me, is the purpose of that kind of active inquiry, which brings what’s done, even in a pre-K classroom, closer to what gets historians like all of us excited in our own work.

ROWE: Yeah. I would definitely concur

with that, and also just this idea of not looking at historical events solely through a contemporary lens. So often we don’t take into account the actual context. That’s why reading original documents is so important, because you see founders and other people from history and how they were grappling in their context, whatever the factors were, because it’s very easy to say, “Well, I’m looking at that through the lens of now in 2021, I would have never done that.” But challenge kids to say, “Well, here’s what this person was actually facing.”

Imagine 200 years from now, someone looking back might say, “Look at all these people, they had waters on their desks and plastic bottles. Didn’t they realize they were destroying the world? They must have been evil. How could they possibly have made these decisions?” It’s very easy to judge history based on living in a present where all the answers from that point forward are known.

APRIL/MAY 2021

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“It’s crucial that [American students of U.S. history] know something about the founding history and principles of the country.”

—JANE KAMENSKY They weren’t known at the time. I think that’s something that’s always really, really important when looking at historical events.

APPELBAUM: Let me seize on that and pose a challenging question. If you take this approach to history education, if what you’re doing is presenting students with primary sources, with analytic essays, asking them to dig, asking them to think critically about what they’re encountering, does the curriculum matter? If you’re a high school educator—and I know you’re not particularly a fan of the 1619 Project, Ian—but if you took that as a set of sources and placed it before students and fleshed it out with primary materials, and ask them to engage with it, and to engage with it the way they would engage with any set of historical assets and sources—that is, finding the things in there that resonate being critical of the way sources are presented—would that work as well as any other curriculum?

Does the curriculum matter at all? Or can we simply place our faith in better and more engaged methods of historical inquiry in the classroom?

ROW E: Well, the material certainly matters. I don’t know if you’re suggesting it’s completely random. No, you need, in my view, a coherent cumulative curriculum, which does outline what has transpired in terms of American history. The reason I am particularly focused on original documents is that there, you’re seeing the actual history lived out by the people that you’re studying.

Too often, there are interpretations such as the 1619 Project that, again, apply currentday ideology to past events, and the two things could be completely disconnected from each other.

APPELBAUM: Michelle, let me come to you with a question one of our viewers has posed.

They’re in Texas, and they’re wondering that the fights in Texas tend to revolve around curricular standards. They’re wondering whether the focus on the curriculum crowds out the possibility of project-based learning, whether the effort to get everything into a single year in the survey from first encounters all the way through to the Civil War or the present ends up requiring a certain kind of

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pedagogic approach. Is that something you’ve wrestled with at all?

HERCZOG: Oh, absolutely. It’s a great question. A lot of it, unfortunately, is driven by assessments that are required in certain states and schools. If there is an assessment required at the end of the school year that’s going to cover content from this vast breadth, teachers are really challenged to cover all that, because let’s face it, let’s say you’re required to cover 100 years of history during a school year, and it’s on U.S. history in the 1800s, you could spend all year just on the Civil War and still not cover it as adequately as you would like, right?

You can do it and do it really well, but you have neglected covering those other content areas that might be touched on, on the test that students may not be able to perform. So there’s that pressure to just go quickly through that kind of thing.

That’s the challenge. Often they’re right, we’ll crowd out project-based learning or inquiry-driven instruction or deep analysis of primary and secondary sources. There is a real tension there. What I have found in some areas is, going back to local control, in some schools and states you’ve got strong leadership at the site or the district level who say, “Hey, we’re not as concerned about the bottom line test result, particularly if it’s a standardized test. We want kids to think, we want them to learn, we want them to take away an understanding of how history was complicated then, and how life is complicated now.”

But that takes some really strong leadership at different levels, and to convince your school community how much does the test matter? Because the reality is it does matter a lot in a lot of areas. So that’s a tough question.

In California, they dropped the assessment for social studies. That’s a double-edged sword for us. Because if it isn’t tested, the subject gets marginalized, we get less support, pretty soon it’s less and less taught. Then it’s be careful what you wish for, because if you get a multiple choice test that’s just going to assess factoids and dates, and how much Taft weighed, you’re not going to get to that deep historical thinking that we’re all inspiring

teachers and students to come away with.

KAMENSKY: The discipline is almost unique at the K–12 level in its allegiance to breadth as the reigning concept. Pressures from both the Left and the Right have perpetuated that sense of what the discipline does. From the Left, a version of inclusiveness that has resulted in creative standards. Add another group whose history has to be mastered without taking anything away, without adding degrees of focus.

I wonder, in the Wikipedia world where anybody can learn quite well-verified content about anything at the click of a button and where our five-year-olds can do it more adeptly than we can, what we might learn from the STEM disciplines, which don’t have this concept of breadth, but have a concept of foundation and activatable knowledge that is experimental and phenomenological at the very earliest stages, but that also has borderline axioms and truths that things don’t fall up.

What we’re trying for in Educating for American Democracy is inquiry-based learning that is not content neutral or content free, but that doesn’t depend on mastering the history of every moment and every group, rather giving the tools that a citizen learner can take into all the other realms of our lives. We’re hoping, especially at the K–5 grade level, for real partnership from English, language arts and STEM teaching, because maybe that’s the age where the disciplines are less set in their ways.

APPELBAUM: But how far can you push that? Could you do a history education which is solely based in America in the 20th century and rely on students to go on Wikipedia to find out that there was a revolution? Are there limits to that kind of pedagogic approach?

ROWE: Well, you can have culminating projec t s t hat requ i re t hat k i nd of interdisciplinary analysis. Yeah, I think you can. As Michelle said, a lot of this has to be coordinated, similar to what it sounds like you experienced in California. In New York in 2010, the state and the regions decided to eliminate the social studies exam. Literally, you can see, over the last 10 years, the amount of time in the average school day, where a kid

was getting five days of social studies and history, great substantive content, now on average is only between one to two days; that other time has been replaced by content-free material, which is all about finding the main idea without actually adding substantively the body of knowledge that kids need to function in our society. I do think there’s a way to get there. There has to be coordinated agreement, though, that assessments in addition to curriculum and standards are all working in line with each other, as opposed to actually working in opposition, because that’s what we’ve been getting through these assessments.

APPELBAUM: This is not a simple needle to thread, right? On the one hand, if you’ve got the tests, you risk the forced march through the content, and if you chuck the tests— ROWE: But that’s test design.

HERCZOG: We’ve advocated a lot for performance-based assessments in history that can really measure some of the deep critical thinking we want to see.

I don’t mean to paint such a grim picture, but if you look outside of history instruction, the way STEM is taught, the way math is taught now, even English, especially if you’re a state that’s adopted the Common Core approach, it’s about problem solving, critical thinking, going beyond the Wikipedia approach to teaching. If the other disciplines are moving in that direction, why not history?

That’s our rationale. Think about it. Your students are not in their third-period history class all day long. From you, they go to math, they go to English, they go to these other subjects that are taught through an inquirydriven approach. Why aren’t we being consistent in approaching history education that same way? This is sort of the marketing technique we’re trying to use to help teachers move in this direction. That it’s not just the march through time; that we want kids to use that same pedagogical approach when teaching history and social studies.

KAMENSKY: I want to stand up for the olden days though, for a minute. Yoni gave us the provocation: Could we imagine only staying in the 20th century? I’ll plant two flags. First, teaching American history to the students of America in the United States.

It’s crucial that they know something about the founding history and principles of the country, and it’s crucial too, I think, sort of humanistically and philosophically, as kids orient themselves in the world, that they learn something about deep time and moments when people live. As Ian was saying before, people lived our past facing forward to their future.

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APRIL/MAY 2021

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“What’s happened now in a politically divided culture is there are lots of people competing to say what is the most important element of American history.”

—IAN ROWE That’s a really important takeaway from history that I still am teaching to graduate students. It’s not easy. I think [being able to understand] the different complexities and contexts of our past as a people is vital.

Whether we could cover the past by doing something that’s much closer in approach and in content to a case study method than I would say the “olden days” are important, but the revolution is more important than the War of 1812. The Industrial Revolution is maybe as important as the Mexican War though, the Mexican War may be more important to students in California and Texas than it is to students in New England and the upper Midwest. So maybe post holes rather than the sort of whole-cloth method could serve us.

ROWE: To Jane’s point, I think the act of prioritizing what is most important is something that we have to do. What’s happened now in sort of a politically divided culture is that there are lots of people competing to say what is the most important element of American history. That divisiveness, in my view, is actually leading to people saying they just don’t want to engage so let’s not even teach this stuff in the first place. The only people who suffer in that approach are our kids. We’re not getting a sense of our country.

HERCZOG: We talk a lot about, Do you want to teach well—and slow down and teach well—or do you want to teach fast?

These are the conundrums that teachers are faced with all the time. Where can I slow down and go deep, dig into a topic that we feel is most important, like the ones you were alluding to? But there’s a cost of going fast in other areas too, if there’s some local interest in those areas. The big question for us, and if you have children of your own around the dinner table, it’s, Why do I have to know this stuff? Why is this important? It’s a bunch of stuff that happened a long time ago.

But what I love to see most is when teachers connect that past to what’s happening today.

The lessons of the past will remain in the past if we don’t connect the dots to events and people and things that are happening

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in today’s world, if we’re not learning from it and moving forward. You talk about [how] the revolution today needs to continue. Yes, we’re standing on the shoulders of all of the past events and people of our American past.

How do we build on that? How do we learn from that? I think that’s a piece that’s been largely missing. When we talk about civic learning, that’s where it leads, right to civics.

How do we engage and make history today by learning about what works, what doesn’t work, and building on our own knowledge to create a better society for all?

APPELBAUM: The question I want to pose, Jane, [is] there is a certain tension that I’m hearing, where on the one hand, Ian tells us that the danger of many contemporary history curricula is that they see the past through the lens of the present. Michelle reminds us that students need to understand that these are foundational pieces of knowledge that they’re going to require in order to interpret the present, and if they’re not making those connections, they won’t be engaged. Is that not a false tension? Is there a way to thread that?

KAMENSKY: No, I think part of our sense of that tension comes from the fact that first higher ed, and then PTA’s, and K–12 evacuated these spaces in the last moment of partisan collapse in the late 1960s. We waded out of this territory because it seemed too fraught with tension between the immediate relevance of the present and the sort of stable content of the past. I’m interested in how we can be true to the past and teach the ability to evaluate closer to objective truth and farther from objective truth—that’s clearly needed in our society—but also empower teachers and their parents’ communities to be courageous about wading into subjects about which there is disagreement in order to teach those evidence-sifting skills that will allow us to disagree better, more civically, and more productively.

Ian and Michelle, with their K–12 experience in different ways, have a much better sense than I do about how to empower not just the great teacher but the average teacher to be skillful and fearless. So not just

good rather than fast, but also courageous, and yet supportive. How do you do that?

APPELBAUM: Ian, we’ve got a high school teacher in our comments who says that they increasingly feel like they are walking on eggshells in the classroom. What would you say to that teacher?

ROWE: Thank you for doing your job on a day-to-day basis. I empathize with that. One thing I’ll say, in defense of the 1619 Project, is that they clearly have unearthed a desire for teachers like your questioner to grapple with these questions with their kids. America has a very complicated history, and so teachers are yearning for materials to tell that story. With the group that we launched, 1776 Unites, we created this curriculum because we thought that the 1619 Project is so cherry-picked to fill in this narrative of an irredeemably racist country.

We said, You know what? Let’s use a strategy of storytelling. Let’s create great materials that teachers that are interested in teaching this can feel more confident that they can have these discussions. For example, Biddy Mason, who was a woman born a slave and ultimately died a millionaire and a philanthropist, an incredible story; we now have a whole curriculum unit on Biddy Mason that goes through the life that she led, the struggles that she had to overcome, all of the abuses, and yet, she was able to embrace these principles around faith, family. She was a great entrepreneur.

Those are the ways in which we’re trying to connect the past to the present, because at the end of each unit, we want to ask the kids, What did you see in Biddy Mason’s story that you think can resonate with your own? And how do you think you can now apply this in your own contemporary life?

We think helping teachers by providing these kinds of materials that we think tell a more complete story, that’s not running away from the negative aspects of our country, but also highlighting those stories about average individuals who were able to overcome by embracing principles that are as available to you today as they were 200 years ago.

Thank you to that teacher. Take a look

at our 1776unites.com website. There’s a curriculum there that hopefully can help you have those kinds of conversations without walking on eggshells.

HERCZOG: Yeah, I think that’s a great example, because of stories like that are empowering to young people today, but you have to do it with wide-eyed empowerment.

Understanding that wasn’t so easy for Biddy Mason. She faced a lot of threats and discrimination, and so where do you draw the line? But I’m really glad the teacher raised that issue, because that’s something we need to focus on. Kids are watching the news today, just like we are. Unfortunately, most of them are watching it through social media so they’re getting all kinds of different points of view of that. But they’re concerned, they’re hearing, they’re watching, they’re very attuned.

They want to come to school and talk about these issues, but we’re finding more and more this issue of fear in the classroom, because these things have become so politically motivated, so politicized that teachers are very nervous and rightfully so to bring up some of these topics in the classroom, because kids are coming with those political ideologies as well. They’re bringing them from home. We’re finding, unfortunately, even though this is a prime time to have discussions in classrooms about these controversial issues, unfortunately,

we’re finding more teachers fearful of doing so because things are so politicized now. But it’s more important than ever.

This is where civics plays a very, very important role. There are approaches and strategies that teachers can find on how to facilitate these conversations about controversial issues. Dr. Diana Hess at University of Wisconsin–Madison is our primary go-to. She’s a leader in this on the national front. Structured Academic Controversy, Socratic seminars, Philosophical Chairs, Constitutional Rights Foundation—a lot of these civic ed organizations have great materials to help facilitate those conversations. They need to occur in classrooms, because that’s how we’re going to prepare young people to address and discuss issues in ways that are respectful, that are civil.

Unfortunately, [it’s] not being modeled so much in our political landscape today, but if we can teach young people today how to discuss something that is controversial with people with different views, in ways that are respectful and civil, that’s how we strengthen our democracy. There are many who feel that the lack of civic learning in several years past—we talk about the marginalization of history, but marginalization of civics has even been worse. When we don’t provide those opportunities, many feel that a lack of that over the last years has led to where

we are today.

KAMENSKY: When I hear the walking on eggshells question, I’m aware that it means different things to the Left and to the Right.

But I think across the political spectrum it does testify correctly to a brittleness in our current civic culture and to the extent to which we see competing absolutisms, and a sense of, in some young people, including my two young Robespierre sons who are home from college downstairs, a sense that they’re not groping toward a more perfect union— they have the perfect answer, right? You bring competing absolutisms to a conversation in a classroom over a difficult issue, and you have a disaster.

I share Michelle’s sense that more nuanced historical and civic education braided together will equip young people to do better, to bring a less brittle texture to our political culture in the future. I will confess that I share that sense of walking on eggshells when I come to my own incredibly privileged classroom and teach issues around race, gender, sexuality. Part of the empathy and humility that our core historical skills can help students to do better to be more—not prissy civil with each other, not sort of fakey-fakey clutch-my-pearls or don’t-clutchmy-pearls civility, but a kind of generosity and willingness to build coalition and to think about where compromise can be constructive.

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MICHAEL J. FOX No Time Like the Future

ELIZABETH CARNEY: Michael, we’re delighted to have you here. Thanks for coming to The Commonwealth Club Business and Leadership Forum.

I want to introduce Michael J. Fox a little bit. He’s written a new memoir about his recent life after he was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s disease back in 1991, when he was 29. If you don’t know, Parkinson’s is a progressive neurological disorder, which results in tremors, muscle spasms, balance

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coordination problems, diminishment of movement and can also affect speech, mood, sleep, and lead to fatigue. Over 5 million people have Parkinson’s.

Michael J. Fox became famous in his 20s before Parkinson’s for his role on the hit sitcom “Family Ties.” In the middle of its run in 1985, Michael starred in the international hit Back to the Future. He’s also founded the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, which has raised over

$1 billion—that’s with a B—for research and is celebrating its 20th year. His memoir is called No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality.

Welcome, Michael J. Fox. I’m curious, you write a new book, and just when it is finished, COVID comes. You went back to writing an epilogue. In light of this pause, how did you respond?

MICHAEL J. FOX: Well, it was really interesting to be in something so navel-gazing.

AN EARLY DIAGNOSIS OF PARKINSON’S

disease changed the life of Michael J. Fox and his family. He joins us to explain how he met the challenge and how he continues to deal with it. From the March 2, 2021, Business & Leadership MLF online program “Michael J. Fox: An Optimist Considers Mortality.” Produced in association with the Michael J. Fox Foundation; part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.

MICHAEL J. FOX, Actor; Advocate; Author, No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality ELIZABETH CARNEY, Entrepreneur and Business Leader; Chair, Business and Leadership Forum, The Commonwealth Club—Moderator

“[I wrote] a very personal memoir of a period of time in my life when I had some challenges. Meanwhile, the whole world is challenged by this virus.”

Left: Actor, author, activist Michael J. Fox. (Photo by Mark Seliger.)

It’s a very personal, very tight little memoir of a period of time in my life when I had some challenges. Meanwhile, the whole world is challenged by this virus. I don’t type, because my hands don’t work well, and I don’t write because it’s illegible, although I can read my notes. So I have a partner, Nelle Fortenberry, who has been my producing partner for years on television, and she patiently sits and I dictate to her, and she types it out. What was challenging about being in quarantine was I

was in quarantine in Quogue, Long Island, with my family, and she was in Sag Harbor, Long Island, just a little ways away—but she couldn’t get out and come to me. So we did it via FaceTime. It was really interesting, because we were so tight, and we’re set on dictating stuff and getting my story out and she’s getting it down. Then I excused myself to leave the room for a second and get a glass of water, and I bring two back because it just felt like she was there. It was so personal and

the dynamic between us was so tight.

Then in the rest of my life I was quarantining every day. My whole family was there except my son, who’s in LA. But my daughters, and Tracy, and a friend of ours was there, and we were quarantined in the house and it was lovely. We did jigsaw puzzles, and Tracy made great meals, and we had great conversations. I was so impressed with these young people talking about social justice and the ramifications of the virus. Yet at the same APRIL/MAY 2021

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time we were aware of the utter agony that was going on in the rest of the world and the pain that people were going through, people dying in corridors in want of a ventilator. It’s just all this awful stuff.

But that was that flavor that I was writing.

I felt compelled to write that epilogue to just kind of put it in perspective, to say that as I wrote this personal story, I was aware of the greater drama going on.

CARNEY: That’s a lovely silver lining for your own personal experience of COVID. How about in the book tour? How has it been being virtual?

FOX: It’s really amazing. I don’t think I’ve

always recognized in yourself. Maybe you could share that with some of the audience that hasn’t read it yet.

FOX: The book takes a lot of detours and goes to a lot of different places; it’s more about mood or tone. It’s not linear. So the story of the book is I’ve had Parkinson’s for 30 years, so I have established kind of détente with it; I have an understanding with it. It takes up its space, and I take up my space, and it’s always infringing, and always moving in. But I’m aware of it, I can hand-check it, and I can keep it at bay. But then I got this thing, this spinal tumor, a benign tumor on my spine, and it was threatening me. I already had gait

damage that had already been done. But he could stop it in its tracks, which he did, and subsequent MRIs proved that out.

It was an intense experience, and I couldn’t walk afterwards. He assured me that it was temporary, and I had to do all these walking exercises; I had to literally learn to walk again.

You hear people say that; it always sounds hyperbolic and self-dramatic, but it’s true. You have to learn to walk again, you have to learn to transfer weight and to recognize when the pressure’s going off your heel to the middle of your foot to your toes. My tendency is to want to get on my toes, and I fall forward.

And it takes all I can [do] to live in my butt

“Who wants to be the doctor who paralyzes Michael J. Fox?” worn a pair of anything but sweatpants in years, it feels like. But it was a great experience. Certainly I like being spared the travel. It was nice not to have to go to Oxnard, someplace way off the map. And to just be immediate and to go some days one conversation to another conversation, and about the same thing, coming at it from different angles. I was talking to Jimmy Fallon and Marc Maron on the same day, and you get a different spin on it, and it was a really good experience. People, fortunately, really like the book, and so they asked interesting questions that made me think about it. They found the material compelling, so the conversation was compelling to me.

CARNEY: And always fresh. Tell us a story about the book. There’s a significant story that you recount about your own brokenness, and your challenge to optimism that you’ve

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and walking difficulties from Parkinson’s, but it was making my legs weak, and it paralyzed me in short order.

So I went to a series of doctors to see what they could do about it, and most wanted nothing to do with it. Then I found this doctor at Johns Hopkins, Nick Theodore, who was fantastic. Brilliant surgeon. I said, “What about all these doctors that won’t touch it?” And he said, “Well, it’s a horrible tumor, and it really is infringing on the spinal cord, so it’s very dangerous. So who wants to be the doctor who paralyzes Michael J. Fox?” That was the funniest thing I ever heard. And I thought if he has the guts to say that to me, he’s got guts. So we had him do the surgery, and he did a wonderful job. He arrested the gradually worsening symptoms, which was what his hope was—to arrest the progress of those. He couldn’t do anything to reverse the

and my heels.

So there was all that stuff going on, and I had 10 days of intensive rehab in Baltimore, and then I had another couple months of intensive rehab in New York, at Mount Sinai.

Finally, I was in this place and I had all these wonderful trainers and medical daycare caregivers and doctors, and my family was so supportive and so great. I just didn’t want to do anything to let them down. I loved that they were proud of my progress, and my son would show up at rehab and cheer me on, and Tracy was fantastic.

And then I got cocky, and I thought I was doing better than I was doing. I was going to New York; I was in Martha’s Vineyard on vacation with my family that summer. August 12, I left the Vineyard to go back to the city to do a cameo in a Spike Lee movie, and I was all excited about it. My daughter came back

with me from the Vineyard, but I wouldn’t let her stay at the apartment. I had to get up the next morning and go to work; she said, “Let me stay and get you ready, and get you out the door.” And I said, “No, I don’t need any help. I’m all right.” So I sent her home.

I woke up the next morning and started to make my way to the kitchen to have some breakfast, and as soon as I got in the kitchen I took a turn and slipped on the tile floor, and shattered my left arm. I broke my humerus all the way down; it was twisted, messed up.

I didn’t know the extent of it yet, but I knew it was bad, and I knew there was no one there. I crawled over to the wall, and got my

Then I started thinking, Is my optimism finite? Has it reached the end? Is this the end of my ability to accept? It’s all gone. I lived on that. I lived on my acceptance, and on my optimism, and my ability to see past the current situation. I thought, Had I let down the Parkinson’s community? Had I let down all the people [to whom] I said, “Go ahead, chin up, be positive. Good things will happen”? Had I been lying to them? Had I been deceiving them? Had I been putting up optimism as a panacea, commodified hope?

I just had all these questions, and it became an intense time for me. And it was funny, because Parkinson’s is obviously a very serious

no longer find a silver lining in this. It was a great journey, and I reflected on travels I made in my life, and how they informed my point of view, and relationships, and television, and all kinds of stuff.

CARNEY: The thing that stands out for me is that somehow in the writing of that book, you transcend your former self, and you bring a level of authenticity, a deeper sense of trust for all of us that there’s a way that you hold hardship and loss in a way that is also possible at the same time. It makes me think maybe vulnerability is the new superpower.

FOX: Honesty certainly is the superpower.

[Author and UC Berkeley journalism

“Is my optimism finite?

Has it reached the end?

Had I been putting up optimism as a panacea?” cell phone, and called my assistant. I couldn’t call Tracy, because she was on the Vineyard, and that would just freak her out. I couldn’t call my daughter, because it would be cruel to her to call her up and say that I had hurt myself, because she had wanted to be with me. So I call my assistant, and she called the ambulance.

As I sat there on the tile floor, leaning against the wall with my arm out of commission, I just thought about what a bad guy I’d been. I had taken all these peoples’ love and support for granted, and just disrespected it. I felt I’d let down all these people, and I thought, How do I put a happy face on this? How do I translate this into Michael Fox positivity? There’s none of that, this is garbage. This is nothing but pain and regret. This is not good; I mean, how can I be optimistic about this?

situation, and life altering, but it snuck up on me. It was unbidden. I didn’t do anything to have it happen; nothing. And the tumor, same thing. It just kind of snuck up on me. It was there, and had to be dealt with.

It took time. All this stuff happened over time. The broken arm was like that; it just entered my life, and I had to go back to rehab, and I knew what it meant. It meant a lot of pain. It’s one thing to have a shattered arm, and have difficulty walking because of a tumor on your spine, and have Parkinson’s.

It just was—I didn’t know how to sell that. I was out of happy-face stickers to put on it. I said to myself, Making lemons . . . I’m out of the lemonade business. Can’t do it anymore.

So it was a difficult time, but what it forced me to do was to reinvestigate all those places in me that used to manufacture optimism and find out what was missing, why I could

professor] Michael Pollan, who we both know, is my brother-in-law and is a great support and a great resource when I’m writing. After the fact, it was very positive. He loved this book and was very supportive of it. He said it was very concise. It’s concision was the strength.

He always says to me, “velocity and truth,” and it had velocity, and it had truth.

So it was a really interesting book to write, because I remember being really specific when I was writing, and as I said, my process is dictation. I would hear the words that I [spoke], and it’s funny, because if you’re timing a joke, for example, it’s really different to do it on the page than it is to do it in person. I can create the timing spaces, but if it’s written, you’re creating the timing spaces when you read it. My challenge then becomes, How do I write it so that you’ll read it the way I want you to hear it?

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“Whatever [happens], I can’t control it. I can’t undo it. But I can meet it.”

What happened was when I was writing, that just happened. It’s a spoken book. It isn’t a lot of “and the curtain rippled in the wind, and it was colored by the translucent pool of light.” You’re just like, “There was a window.

There was a window and I went through it.”

Just the facts.

CARNEY: You wrote in your book about your father-in-law, and how you used to talk to him about different challenges that you had. It made me wonder if sometimes his spoken word also came through in your writing. He had some good advice for you, I recall.

FOX: Yeah, he was terrific. He was such a nice man, such a good man, a wise man. I wrote about a couple of encounters we had.

We had kind of a tragic-comedy one toward the end of his life. But at one point, he would sit at the table in Connecticut, the country house, and he had a sweater on, a button-up shirt, a hat, and a few days of grizzle. And he’d be reading the Times, so that was always the time office hours were open, you could go and visit him. So I sat down in front of him. At the time I was thinking about the wedding vows, and Tracy having agreed to “in sickness and in health.” I didn’t know I’d have to cash that check. I didn’t know I’d have to ask her to redeem that.

So I said to Steve, “I don’t know if she signed up for this. In sickness and in health, and she has to deal with my sickness.” He said, “Well, you did okay on the ‘for richer, for poorer part.’” He went on to say, “That’s not about money.” That’s when he made the

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jump. He said, “That’s not about money.

That’s about: it is a rich life. You have a rich life, and you have to recognize that, and accept the other stuff. Accept it, understand it, process it, but move on from it, and live your life.” He was all about acceptance, and he was all about gratitude.

And that gratitude, as I wind my way through this journey, was the ultimate redemption. It’s in gratitude that, whatever you go through, whatever you experience, whether it’s a pandemic or a f lat tire, there’s something to be grateful for. There’s something in there to be grateful for. That flat tire may have saved you from an accident.

The pandemic may force you inside with your family, and you form bonds with them that you didn’t have. Always something.

What I puzzled that out to mean was, if you can find that gratitude, then optimism is sustainable.

CARNEY: Optimism is sustainable.

FOX: With gratitude, optimism is sustainable.

CARNEY: Beautiful. Yeah, when COVID started for me, I was on my exercise bike, and I dislocated me knee, and somehow it felt like I had a turtle sitting on my knee sending me a message, and that message was “Slow down and listen.” So that’s my little silver lining for COVID. But I think that there might have been a turtle that has been a thread through your life, and I was hoping maybe you’d share that a little bit.

FOX: In the late ’90s—in fact, New Year’s Eve going into the year 2000—we were down in the Caribbean with the family, and having

vacation. I was in the middle of the dilemma.

I was trying to figure out whether to stay with the show, with “Spin City.” The show was doing really well, and it was a success, and I loved doing it. But my symptoms were becoming too great. I had already gone public with it, and people knew I had Parkinson’s, but it was becoming a strain. And I wanted to get going on this foundation. I wanted to create a foundation that would realize the promise of the science, that it was really looking good. I kept hearing this idea that the science was ahead of the money, and if we get that money to catch up with the science, we’d get stuff done.

So I was thinking like that, and I was thinking, Am I better having the show and having a high-profile platform? Or should I just start the foundation? So with this in mind, I went for a swim, my last swim of the year in this little bay. I came upon a turtle very shortly into my swim. He was a really rough-looking character; he had a bite taken out of his fin, he had a scar on his beak. And he kind of tolerated me; he just kind of looked at me, took me in, and kept going slowly on his way through the weeds at the edge of the reef. I followed him for about 20 minutes to a half an hour. Then I got out, and I walked up on the beach, and I went toward where Tracy was sitting. I picked up a towel and I started toweling myself off. And I said, “I’m leaving the show. I’m going to start the foundation.”

Then when I was going through all this stuff this past couple years, I just kept thinking about that turtle, and I kept

Michael J. Fox was interviewed by Elizabeth Carney, chair of The Commonwealth Club’s Business & Leadership Member-Led Forum.

thinking, “That turtle’s going to get me through this like he got me through the other thing.” So as a reminder of it, much to my wife’s chagrin, I documented it on my arm.

[Displays his turtle tattoo.]

CARNEY: Oh, look, there he is.

FOX: The artist put the five rings to signify the five decades of my life; I’m now on the eve of 60. It was nice. And every time I see it, it makes me think.

CARNEY: And you have the right to go where you want.

FOX: Yeah. And wherever it takes me. Not even as much where I want. Where I want is not always good. Where life takes me always presents me with an opportunity for gratitude. Whatever [happens], I can’t control it. I can’t undo it. But I can meet it, and accept it in order to understand it, and go in another direction.

I didn’t put this in the book, but it was a driving-force idea behind the book when I started it, but I view life as a series of choices and circumstances. You had a circumstance, you made a choice, moves you to another circumstance, you make a choice, moves [you to another circumstance again]. And you stake and ladder your way up to whatever your destiny is. But each one of those choices you made, and each of those consequences of those choices formed who you are, or formed who I am, formed all of us. Being too rigid, if we really overthink our choices, we get compromised circumstances.

CARNEY: Right. And that turtle with his raggedy self helped to lead you in that particular direction.

FOX: Turtle’s just a turtle. Turtle is a turtle is a turtle is a turtle; but he goes places, and he gets in currents. A couple years ago, just before the virus, we got back from Vietnam and Cambodia on this family trip—we go with a couple other families; we went to Africa one year. We were on this island down in the south of Vietnam, and they were releasing turtles. It was New Year’s Day, and they were releasing baby turtles. I kept thinking, I realized there’s birds and other predators. It’s a very serious trip from where the nests are to getting to the water, and the odds against them making it are huge. So the odds of him getting to a place where he’s swimming in the reef, and he’s all chewed up, but he’s there, he’s doing it—that guy’s been through some stuff.

It made me think of something Chris Carter, the football player, said. He was talking about his drug issues when he was a younger man, and he said, “I don’t know a good man who hasn’t been through something.” And it’s true. We’ve all been through something.

CARNEY: Yeah, and it helps us to earn the choice to go in a certain new direction. Maybe for a moment we ought to also acknowledge Gus, who is your dog and probably helps you go in certain directions all the time.

FOX: He’s ailing right now. He’s older. I talked about it a little bit at the end of the book, the unfairness of a dog’s short life. And he’s struggling. He had a bunch of issues this summer. He had a splenectomy, because he had a thing in his spleen. His stomach flipped over because he’s a big dog, he’s part Great Dane, and he’s older. But he’s so sanguine.

He’s so chill, which is great. He’s always been a great dog. He’s huge, but he’s always been sweet, and gentle, and approachable. Loves kids, loves little dogs. My son had gone to college, and I had my three daughters and my wife in the house with me. And we had a small dog name Daisy, female dog. I was drowning in a sea of estrogen, it was just too much, and I missed my son, and I missed that male presence, and that buddy.

We went to Martha’s Vineyard and we saw a thing on a bulletin board outside the Chilmark [General] Store—you get piano lessons and gardeners and babysitters and fishing guides. And then they had a thing about this dog, Astro; they called him at that time, soon to be Gus. They described him as being a big, Great Dane/Lab mix. It turned out he had no Lab in him. But I was really interested in the dog. I got home, and Tracy said, “I saw this thing at Chilmark Store on my bike trip today.” I said, “Was it about Astro?” She said, “Yeah.” And I said, “We got to go see this dog.”

So, we met him. That was at a stage of my Parkinson’s when the foundation was going well, and everything was going good in my life, except this absence of my son. I needed somebody to spur me on to walk and to exercise and to get out. Taking this big dog, who people would see us and say, “Why don’t you get a saddle for that?” But we would just go around the neighborhood, and we’d walk three, four miles every day. He got me to do that. He got me to interact with people, because he was a magnet for people, and people would come up and talk to him, and APRIL/MAY 2021

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to me. Tracey would say, “They just want to talk to you.” I said, “No, I’m invisible next to this dog.”

CARNEY: It’s the dog.

FOX: But yeah, it was a great bonus in my life to have Gus. CARNEY: Well, it’s been a really amazing thing that you’ve created, what you’ve done on the foundation side, too. I don’t want to let this opportunity to go by to talk about the foundation, because the way that it might’ve been envisioned when you first started and the richness of all that you’ve done to innovate since then has been pretty big—wow. I mean, I have so many different questions that are from my own life. My mom was diagnosed with Parkinson’s when she was 60, and she lived 20-some more years. But it was before you started the foundation, and we could see how much it was needed when you did start it.

First was founding it so you could have some research that would support your process, and that makes me ask about the growth of the whole thing. So maybe you could talk to us about some of what you discovered, because it was at the beginning of the internet. You had to discover that you could actually find other patients like you on the internet. Tell us a little bit about that journey.

FOX: When I decided to go public and let people know I had Parkinson’s, I had had it for seven years before I decided to tell people about it other than my family and close friends. As you say, [it was] before the internet, the easiest way to get something out before the internet, you tell Barbara Walters or People magazine. So I told Barbara Walters, and everybody knew. But there was a little bit of internet actually, it was AOL. And when I first disclosed it, a lot of the tabloids went crazy with it, and they made it this pitiful, sorrowful thing, and I really rejected that. I thought maybe I’d made a mistake in going public, because I was getting this reaction.

But people in the Parkinson’s community had a completely different reaction. People in general were eager to get the information and were curious in a good way about what my situation was, and what it meant, and what the disease was. They always thought it was an old person’s disease, and the fact that someone 29 years old was diagnosed with it was really new to them. Then I got on the internet, and I started hearing the patient community. I said, “Wow, this is a thing. I’m being presented an opportunity here to do something.” This was my negotiations with

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myself that led to the turtle. But I thought, “This is a real opportunity, and you don’t get these often.” In life, you have to recognize when they come.

So I started the foundation, and Nelle Fortenberry, the same person that I dictate to and my producing partner for years, she was in on the ground floor. She was our first board member, and she helped me find Debbie Brooks, who is our co-founder and just an amazing person. Debbie Brooks is just a force of nature. She was a young person who had great success on Wall Street with the world’s biggest bank. So she came on board and very quickly got our execs lined up. Early on we got a grant out to a couple of researchers, small grants, $300,000, $400,000 from initial donations that we had, and I’d done my first book and that went to the foundation. So we put together enough money to get a small grant program together, and then it just grew very quickly. Our motto was that the science is ahead of the money, so we wanted to catch up with that, and we started seeing what the challenge was. We thought we’d go for low-hanging fruit; we didn’t realize that low-hanging fruit was planted in the middle of a moat that you had to climb down to climb out of, to get to that low-hanging fruit.

We realized we got into a broken system that wasn’t designed for success, so we had to remodel that, remake it, and create it for ourselves, a vacuum tube to get the money to where it needed to go. I also very early on nixed the idea of having an endowment.

I didn’t want to have an endowment, I didn’t want to have money sitting around, I didn’t want to invest money. I wanted to invest money in research, and we started doing innovative things like pay gigantic, multibillion-dollar pharma companies to target our compounds, and say, “We’ll pay for the initial research. We’ll cover that, and if it hits, just promise to carry it on.” We have several relationships like that that paid off; they did exactly that. And we got a few drugs through to the FDA, and it’s been a success on that level.

We have programs like a big biomarker initiative that is about finding common biomarkers in people with Parkinson’s so that we can actually recognize that biomarker before symptoms are evident and treat it prophylactically.

CARNEY: There’s a few different kinds of Parkinson’s, so that must already be pretty interesting. You’ve got a cluster, and look at patterns.

FOX: Everybody’s got their own version.

We’re trying to find the genetic links, and what proteins do, like alpha synuclein, and how it folds the cells in the brain, and it’s all that stuff. I’m not a scientist, but I’m amazed by that. But the cool thing that happens with the foundation, separate apart from its scientific mission, was it became a magnet for people with Parkinson’s and their families.

We were able to create programs. We’ve created, on the fundraising side of things, Team Fox, where people run marathons and climb mountains and have bike races, and sold lemonade and did whatever they did and raised money. And then we have, more important probably, got the patient involved on a research level. We created Fox Insight, a place where patients could share their anecdotal experience and create a living journal of what they go through, what their needs are, and their state of mind.

We get patient councils. It just became this great thing where it was much bigger than me swimming with the turtle; it was a big convening of people with concerns.

CARNEY: The thing that shows up in all of these different pieces that you’ve done is that the unintended consequence maybe has been creating community, and finding each other, and knowing that you’re not the only one out there; there’s all these other people that are bringing their courage to this.

FOX: Creating community, I think, is recognized with treatment, and allowing space for that community to feel in their own space, to claim their space.

CARNEY: We know you’re a guy who takes risks, that’s been true ever since you held onto the back of the car and skateboarded or whatever it was [in Back to the Future]. But I remember in the early days of the research foundation that you’d go fund a small study in China on green tea, and you’d do things that were really out of the box.

FOX: You have to include that in the mix. You have to include opportunities for surprises, and things that you don’t expect, because we don’t have a cure yet.

We put $1 billion into it, but we don’t have a cure yet. It’s elusive, and it’s not going to be right there where we expect to find it. So we do the traditional research, but we allow for studies on green tea, studies on— CARNEY: Microbiome, and— FOX: Everything. Nothing is shut down.

CARNEY: The environmental and toxicity issues, have you also looked at that as veterans have been especially impacted by Parkinson’s?

FOX: One of the things we discovered early on was that we all agree that the genetics loaded the gun, but environment pulled the trigger.

“Our motto was that the science is ahead of the money, so we wanted to catch up with that.”

So you can have predisposition to Parkinson’s but never find that triggering agent that sets it off. But what was that triggering agent? It could be anything. It could be pesticides, it could be metal exposure, it could be head injury. Those things are all still open questions. It could be all of those things, and therefore the differences that you’ve alluded to in peoples’ Parkinsonian profile, there’s so many things that it could be. Usually, if you can find cause, you can find a cure. But we think we can find a cure before we can find a cause, and backstep it and find the cause and eliminate it.

CARNEY: Are there root causes that you think are particularly likely to be the bad actors?

FOX: Definitely pesticides and pollutions and man-made contaminants. And naturally existing contaminants in some cases, perhaps.

CARNEY: So part of it is we’re poisoning ourselves.

FOX: Well, we could be. We don’t know. You have to pick which ones you put the big thrust behind. What we’re trying to find is this commonality of symptoms, and you alluded to it before, whether it’s constipation, lack of sleep, lack of taste, inability to smell, to gait and muscle reactions. And everybody gets a sampling of it, but if we can boil it down to the genetic makeup of the people who have all these symptoms, and take this cohort of 100,000 people, let’s say, then we whittle them down to 15, to 10, to 5, and there’s our answer. Whatever they have going on. And then we’re doing other stuff like supporting the creation of ability to image the inside of

the brain, and see exactly what’s going on.

So there’s no one path. I can’t say, “This is our goal, and this is the path we’re going.”

It seems kind of scattershot, it seems like throwing spaghetti against the wall, but it’s not. There’s a method behind it, which Debbie and Todd Sherer, our CEO, are investigating every day.

CARNEY: You have surrounded yourself in working relationships with strong women. It’s so great to see that as a pattern and cluster in your life. I mean, Tracy, she’s amazing, but also your partner at the foundation, Debbie Brooks, and your producing partner, Nelle [Fortenberry], and your three daughters, and your assistant, and Nancy— FOX: And a mother and a grandmother who convinced everybody that I was for real.

All the adults in my world when I was little thought I was a flaky kid who was too little and too crazy to amount to anything, and she would say, “No.” She had a lot of weight that she [dealt with]; her two sons were missing in action in World War II and presumed dead, and she kept saying, “They’re alive, they’re fine.” It turned out they were at a prisoner of war camp in Germany and were eventually released. So she had a lot of credit. During this [time when] scrutiny and doubt was cast on my future, she said, “He’s going to be famous. He’s going to be famous all over the world. Don’t worry about him.” And that came to pass, and I think that her influence as a woman on me, as a carrier of wisdom and a carrier of our family history, I just had a huge respect for her.

Then my mother, I saw the same qualities

in her. My mother was always a positive force in my life, and so it always occurred to me to do whatever I dreamed of doing. And I had three sisters that were really important to me.

I actually have good relationships with male mentors in my life, but there’s always women.

And as a hirer, I have to admit to a bias. I just relate more to the vision and the spirit that a lot of women bring to big projects. . . .

Tracy is amazing, and as I flounder around, and flail, and bump into furniture and stuff, she’s a steady hand and an encouragement and also calls me out, like, “You don’t get a pass just because you have Parkinson’s. Without your symptoms you’d screw up and do stupid things and be called to the carpet for it.” She’s great at that.

And my daughters are so amazing. My youngest, Esme—and I talk about this in the epilogue—was supposed to go to college.

She was supposed to start in university last September, but she saw what was happening, and she had a gap year and pushed it off. So she starts this year. Because she was in the class of 2020 high school, because of the circumstance, there was no prom. But she took it in stride. All her friends that we’ve met, talked to her peers, [they] all kind of say, “It’s a shame we lost all that, but look at what other people lost.” I just was so struck by that attitude. I thought back again about my parents, and thought about how they had been born into the Great Depression and had come of age in World War II, and Esme had been born just a couple months after 9/11, and come of age during the coronavirus. So it’s interesting how life works.

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46 THE COMMO

FNNCH AND THE HONEY BEARS MEET FNNCH, THE ELUSIVE

artist behind the honey bear. Wearing a mask— he likes to keep his identity secret—fnnch (pronounced “finch”) discusses public art, the pandemic and helping others. From the February 25, 2021, “Michelle Meow Show” online program “Fnnch and the Honey Bears: Street Art for All.” FNNCH, Street Artist

MICHELLE MEOW, Producer and Host, “The Michelle Meow Show,” KBCW/KPIX TV and Podcast; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors—Co-Host

Photo courtesy fnnch.

JOHN ZIPPERER, Producer and Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable; Vice President of Media & Editorial, The Commonwealth Club—Co-Host MICHELLE MEOW: He’s the anonymous artist behind the honey bears that you may have seen in San Francisco. Our guest today is fnnch, who creates street art and murals using multilayered stencils and spray paint.

He calls his work contemporary pop art depicting objects from both nature and everyday life.

So the little that we’ve uncovered from just basic Googling, I know that you came to San Francisco back in 2011 from St. Louis. Is that where you actually grew up?

FNNCH: Yeah, I was there from birth till 18.

MEOW: Tell us a bit about your journey to become a street artist. Were you into art as a kid? Did you always want to do this form of expression? How APRIL/MAY 2021

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“I feel like everybody is an artist when they’re a kid, and you get convinced that you’re not by society.”

—fnnch did that come about?

FNNCH: I feel like everybody is an artist when they’re a kid, and you get convinced that you’re not by society. I didn’t think I was going to be an artist, but there’s this famous quote from Steve Jobs. He said that you can’t connect the dots going forward; you can only connect the dots going back. So when I look at my life, I was like, “Oh, I kind of was an artsy kid.” My grade school had a competition where the St. Louis Symphony would put out a piece of music and then school children would have to interpret that. Then the school would send one person to the art museum in St. Louis. I went from my class for two years, which didn’t really mean much to me at the time, but maybe shows [I was] a little bit more artistic than somebody else.

I really was convinced like many other people that I wasn’t a very good artist, because I couldn’t draw very well. I still can’t draw very well. There were other kids in my class who could do better Spider-Man and Batman and whatnot. But I ended up getting back into it around the age of 14, because I had a friend that was sort of volunteering on a video game as a software engineer and I wanted to volunteer. I [said], “Well, what do you need?”

They needed art. So I ended up getting into digital illustration.

The work I’m doing today is really the same work I was doing then, in some sense; it’s the same tools and the same general approach to illustration. I worked from photographs and things. Those skills were just built over that time, and they continue to be here. I’m just using them in a different way now.

MEOW: Take us to the first honey bear, the inspiration behind the first one. Where was the first honey bear located?

FNNCH: People think the honey bear was the first thing that [I] did. I think it’s the first thing that you heard of that I did. I was doing work for maybe six months, maybe a year before then. The very first work I did in the public space was in Dolores Park, and the city has painted these dog-walker stencils to show where your dogs are unleashed. I just

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took the dog and I swapped it out. They had like a lumpy German shepherd and I stuck in a poodle and thought it was funny. I ended up doing all the dogs in the park. I thought I would be “the dog guy.” So I started looking around for other dog walkers and other parks, and I just couldn’t find any, so then had to sort of branch out into other things and the honey bear came out. I wish there was a more lightning bolt-type moment.

I saw one; I found the image to be compelling. At that point, I was kind of just following whatever interested me. I didn’t have any aspirations of being a professional artist.

Certainly it was just trying to engage in this form of expression in a way that I thought I could bring something to street art and bring something to San Francisco that I wasn’t really seeing. So I just painted it. The very first one was on a park wall in Noe Valley—I think it’s Elizabeth and 24th. It was a record for me.

It was painted over by the city in three days, which was the fastest I’ve ever had anything painted over. As far as I know, I’m the only person I probably can tell who has done work illegally in a public park and had it be permitted to stay for many years.

I think the city sometimes thinks that I was commissioned to do these things or whoever’s maintaining the parks. It’s a testament to the fact that the work is not destructive, it’s intended to be additive. But Noe Valley likes to keep its neighborhood extremely clean.

But in those three days there was a such a tremendous response to the work. I’d kind of walk by and just watch people. People were really engaged by it in a way that they hadn’t been maybe in my previous works. So then I was like, okay, maybe I should paint another one of these—sort of pulling that string. And then here we are, ZIPPERER: It’s kind of interesting. It sounds like it was almost a random choice of an image to do. And yet it’s one that people like.

It makes them feel good. I don’t think people are looking at and thinking, “Oh, vandalism.”

They look at that and they might think, “What does it mean?” or something; but it’s

also a happy symbol of something.

FNNCH: Yeah. I say that my art practice has two core tenets that I go for. One of them is to bring art to 95 percent of people that don’t go to art museums. The other is to change people’s perceptions of public space. Because the honey bear is an image that people will like, I can then use it as a tool to get you to question things or accept things. You’re not saying this is vandalism on this mailbox and it should go away and there should be nothing on the mailbox. What you actually say is, “Oh, I like that. Well, why is it on a mailbox? Could a mailbox be canvas for art?” Maybe you should have a program with the postal service.

There are mailboxes, utility boxes, or on our garages—you know, whatever. Oftentimes the medium is what I’m experimenting with, trying to put art into new places and get people to view public space in a different way. So having such a happy, positive image is just a tool to accomplish that.

MEOW: I too struggled with this thought, just coming across the honey bears, but then doing some more research about you. There’s a difference between vandalism and art. I was trying to even have that argument with myself, but you did bring up the fact that San Francisco has or had a pretty strict policy around street art or what you could do in terms of public space, private space. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and what you brought up in your campaign to say what we can do in public, in private spaces when it comes to art?

FNNCH: Yeah. I think that there was the big backlash against graffiti, and they threw out the baby with the bath water to some degree.

I’m not a big fan of most graffiti; I think some people who do graffiti are trying to make art, and I would just call them street artists, even if they call themselves graffiti writers. But I think other people are just trying to destroy things, and they make the community worse to be in. So in an effort to clamp down on that, [the city] really got serious about there not being anything anywhere. To me, the difference between street art and graffiti is

one of intentionality. If you think that you are making art, if you are trying to make art, if you’re thinking about what the person who is observing this is feeling and thinking—as far as I’m concerned, you’re a street artist.

There’s lots of places where this manifests.

They paint over all the utility boxes every single day, or at least they used to. And so if something goes up at midnight, then it’s gone by noon the next day. San Francisco has special language in its definition of graffiti that is different from California as a whole.

Certainly America. [It] says that graffiti [is] a mark that is drawn or painted or edged or inscribed. Then there’s also this language that is affixed or applied.

All of a sudden [it] starts to cover wheat paste, which is a very nondisruptive form of street art, where you basically apply artwork on paper, but with wheat paste. And it counts stickers, which is artwork potentially that is held on with an adhesive. All of a sudden now you’ve taken something from an infraction— or you get a ticket if you’re caught doing it—to a misdemeanor, and damages are great enough—it takes it to a felony and just seems completely absurd to me. Sticker art is one of the many forms of culture that I appreciate. I feel like it will be okay if the poles that hold up the no parking signs—like, you can just let those go. It’s going to be fine. Like you’re going to put stickers on them, they’ll pile up.

You know, society is not going to crumble.

It’s going to actually allow people to come into art and into public art in this really accessible way.

I’m not painting murals that are 50 feet tall; not everyone has the capability to do that, can get together the funds to do that, can get permission to do that. But really anybody, even a very young child, can take a little sticker and draw something with a Sharpie and put it up in a public space. And I think that is something we should encourage.

ZIPPERER: In all of your projects or each time you’ve gone out and done this, have you ever been stopped? Have you ever almost been stopped, been caught, ever been fined?

FNNCH: No, I’ve never been detained, arrested. I’ve occasionally had conversations with residents while I’m doing work, mostly positive in nature.

Maybe this is just a fun story to tell. I used to go out super-late at night, like four in the morning, to do the work. I don’t like being up that late. So I was like, okay, I’ll start [doing it earlier]. At one point—this is still when I was doing the dog-walker pieces—I had this idea of doing a Picasso dog. Picasso did the series of one-line paintings, or one stroke.

I have a spotter at this point, who’s kind of watching out. I’m painting. My spotter’s like “Somebody’s coming.” At this point, I’m sort of committed. I’ve come too far. I had all these trash bags I’d lay out to make sure I didn’t over-spray the sample. I was like, 30 seconds,

I was like, paint, paint, paint, paint, paint, 15 seconds, pull [up the bags]. I pop up. And this person is right in front of me. I’ve been fearing this moment for a while. I’m thinking they’re going to tackle me and call for citizens arrest, and hold me down while some other neighbor calls the cops. I didn’t know what to do. I just said “Picasso.” And the guy was like, “Awesome!” And then he just walked around me and walked away.

This is this moment that I’ve been building in my head; the reality of it is that people by and large like the work that I do and people by and large want to live in a city that has street art. People don’t want to live in a city where people are wanting me to destroy private and public property. People don’t want to run a city where things are being defaced. But people do live in a city where arts and culture kind of exists in these fringy spaces. I think that’s part of the cool of a city like San Francisco and people don’t want to lose that. So there’s a lot more public support for this.

I think people, even though I define street art as being illegal public art, I think it’s a mural or some other form of expression if it is permitted. The work I do is of that variety. I think we think of San Francisco, [and] we’ll be sad if there weren’t people who are going out and doing that kind of work.

MEOW: I liked what you said in an interview, which is part of the work that you do is to let people know that it’s okay to be happy. For I APRIL/MAY 2021

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guess the last few years that I’d been in San Francisco, even if you felt happy, you felt anguish for a lot of reasons, maybe political reasons, maybe all this stuff that we were going through. But I admit seeing the honey bears or seeing your [other] artwork really did make me happy.

Let’s segue to you being anonymous and the decision to do so. You were telling the story about someone potentially turning you in. Why be anonymous? Is it because youre using public spaces?

FNNCH: When I started, every single piece was illegal. All 2013, all 2014 or 2015.

Signing my legal name to it just didn’t seem like a reasonable idea. Some people do that. There’s an artist named Jeremy Novy who’s sort of famous for the koi fish on the sidewalk. He’s sort of like the godfather of San Francisco street art. He signs it with his name. I think that’s bold and brave and cool.

But I kinda want to keep my head down.

What ends up happening is it’s just pathdependent at that point. You can only take the mask off once; once there’s one photo on the internet, then that’s it. Now I like it for option value. I didn’t think I’d get back and do street art in San Francisco, and then I did last year in a really major way. So here I am,

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again doing work that’s not legal.

Also, you know, there are people who both really liked my work and people who really don’t like my work and I don’t necessarily want to be randomly interacting with either of those camps, if I can be honest. I’m happy to interact with people through social media or through email or art shows. But there’s times when I kind of want to putz around and do my thing, nor do I want someone who doesn’t like my work to come up to me and express that in their own way.

So it seems like it’s working for now; I don’t think it’s going to work forever. More reasons as to why will emerge in the arc of time, but at some point it’s not gonna work anymore and then that’ll be that.

ZIPPERER: One of our viewers writes, “The honey bears have made my year.” You talked about doing these on the boardedup buildings. I suppose in cities across the country this [has] happened, but San Francisco being such a dense city where a lot of your life is lived outside of your tiny apartment, you’re seeing your commercial corridors, your downtown just within a matter of a couple of weeks [go] from looking like normal places to [looking like] they’re protections against riots or something. Of

course you, you did one on the front of The Commonwealth Club. [See photo above— Ed.] We had already contracted with another painter to do a BLM image, which he has covered it up with. So our apologies, but we took photos of it because we thought it was really cool. But it’s been neat to see that some of these businesses have put plexiglass over your honey bears to protect them. That’s got to make you feel good.

How long does it take you to do one? Not one of the giant ones, but one of these oneoffs in front of a business.

FNNCH: When I got started, all the work I was doing was stencil-based. It was all spray painted, and that was really quite labor-intensive. I spent all of 2015 painting them on mailboxes, and I did develop many techniques and tricks to not get caught doing it, but I’d go out for about three hours; I do about five of them. I would pass the same location multiple times [to] add all the layers.

I had come up in Los Angeles; there’s a lot more of a culture there of street art, so people are much more likely to pass information between each other. We’ve definitely seen a really big resurgence in San Francisco, so this is much more prevalent now; but back in 2013, there weren’t a lot of people doing

“The flexibility of the bear as an image makes it actually really ideal for this sort of work. I believe I have a better opportunity than most to do this sort of [philanthropic] work.”

Photo by Alex Hernandez.

—fnnch work necessarily.

So I didn’t even know about wheat paste really until I think I started doing it maybe two years ago. Now that I know about it, [some of] those go up in about 45 seconds.

They’re made in advance on paper and you just take this wallpaper paste and paste it on the wall. You put a thing up, you paste over it, you smooth it out to [remove] all the bubbles and then you’re gone. That really allowed me to take this work much broader. And I was sort of in a position when the pandemic hit, where there’s some amount of work to prep.

[I might in advance make] 50 of them. And then three times a week, I would go out, just boom, boom, boom—I put them up. So I was sort of in the right position, with where my work was, sort of develop enough to do something compelling and prepared enough to take advantage of the explosion of canvas that we had.

MEOW: Speaking of the pandemic, in San Francisco—and all of our cities around the country—the restaurants have suffered greatly, closing people out of work or our nightlife, our culture, definitely very negatively impacted. But the honey bears did do something during the pandemic to help a little bit. Can we talk about that?

FNNCH: I started doing those bears in those masks and I didn’t think anyone was going to want to remember this time.

I thought I’ll have like a collection like we have the before times and the after times, we don’t talk about the in-between. But people started asking me, “Hey, can I buy one?”

How I make a living is I paint paintings, typically onto wood. I’m like, well, it just wouldn’t feel at all good to sell them and not somehow use this as an opportunity to raise money for good causes. That was part of it.

The other part of that were these masks. I have a collaborator named Stockhausen. I go into the studio early on and he’s selling masks.

This is back when you couldn’t get masks.

And if he could get them, they certainly were not attractive. He has a background

in fashion design and was making what I thought were very comfortable, fashionable, and actually quite effective masks. [Indicates the mask he is wearing.] This one has a removable filter. This was when it was illegal to buy an N 95. There’s all this research going on about folding towels and sewing them and all these engineers trying to figure out, well, how do we do global things? So I was like, Hey, if I just put honey bear fabric on that, could we sell them for charity? And so that was the first fundraiser I did.

The [sales] went a hundred percent to charity and then the paintings, half of all the sales I did went to charity. I did the [50–50 split] because I have employees to support and payroll and rent and all these things. So that feels like a sustainable number and that was way better than I could have expected. I think the very first fundraiser I donated over $100,000. In my mind, I still don’t really know how to understand it, because only 1 percent of artists actually earn $100,000 in a year. So to donate that much became an amount where I was like, “Holy smokes!”

So that first fundraiser will be targeted to different nonprofits, both highly focused on local, what’s called the safety net fund, just doing direct cash transfers to artists and performance artists out of work.

[We payed] restaurants to make food and then giving that [food] through community groups to those in need. So that supports the restaurants and it supports those in need and also put the community groups in position to do what they do best, which is try to figure how to help their community. I had done philanthropic work in previous years; I did a Smokey Bear raising funds for victims of the wildfires. I did the pink hat bear for Planned Parenthood when Trump cut their budget some number of years ago. But really this is a different kind of a scale.

So I ended up being like, “Well, that works.” I ended up doing like a sequel to that, and then I ended up targeting other fundraising—Black Lives Matter causes,

and I did one for the LGBT Center. I did one for St Anthony’s, which serves up 2,500 meals a day to those in need. So, yeah, this is becoming a really core part of my practice.

I’m having conversations with different people right now, trying to figure out how to do this to the best of my ability. It’s very challenging in some ways; the more you give, the more people come to you asking for things, and [I’m] trying to balance my own priorities and my studio. I feel like the flexibility of the bear as an image makes it actually really ideal for this sort of work, much more ideal than a lot of other artists’ work might be. So I’m in this sort of unusual position. I believe I have a better opportunity than most to do this sort of work. Therefore I don’t want to reject that as a proposition.

Stay tuned for more fundraisers. I have the next one planned.

ZIPPERER: One of our audience members asks, “How can we buy more honey bear face masks?” Are they still available? And if so, where would people go?

FNNCH: Unfortunately not. It turns out that sewing masks is not core to what I want to do with my life. We ended up doing a second release, and actually one of the really cool things is somebody wore one on the Florida town hall with Joe Biden. So it was on national TV and now our president has seen a honey bear, at least from a distance.

We hired an out-of-work artist to sew, and she kind of worked full-time on it for a month or two. And she had schoolwork to get back to and our interest just wasn’t there, honestly, running a cut-and-sew facility in the middle of San Francisco. It was just not what I wanted to do.

We didn’t make that many in total. I think we made maybe 300, 400. But all the money went to charity, and in the second batch we paid for her wages and the materials and then all the rest to the charity. We were selling them for over $100, because I’m like, this is really a donation you’re making and we’re giving you a mask as a thank you.

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MEMBER-LED FORUMS Volunteer-driven programs that focus on particular fields. Most evening programs include a wine networking reception.

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the East Bay. Standard programs are typically one hour long and frequently include panel discussions or speeches followed by a question and answer session. Many evening programs include receptions with wine.

Watch Club programs on KAXT and KTLN TV every weekend, and monthly on KRCB TV 22 on Comcast. Select Commonwealth Club programs air on Marin TV’s Education Channel (Comcast Channel 30, U-Verse Channel 99), C-SPAN, and on CreaTV in San Jose (Channel 30). View hundreds of streaming videos of Club programs at youtube.com/commonwealthclub

CreaTV

KAXT/KTLN TV

HARD OF HEARING?

To request an assistive listening device, please e-mail Mark Kirchner seven working days before the event at mkirchner@commonwealthclub.org.

PODCASTS

Subscribe to our free podcast service on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify to automatically receive new programs: commonwealthclub.org/ podcast-subscribe

Hear Club programs on more than 230 public and commercial radio stations throughout the United States (commonwealthclub.org/watch-listen/radio). For the latest schedule, visit commonwealthclub.org/broadcast.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, tune in to: KQED (88.5 FM) Fridays at 8 p.m. and Saturdays at 2 a.m.

KALW (91.7 FM) Inforum programs select Tuesdays at 7 p.m.

KNBR (680 and 1050 AM) Sundays at 5 a.m.

KRCB Radio (91.1 FM in Rohnert Park) Thursdays at 7 p.m.

KFOG (104.5 and 97.7 FM) Sundays at 5 a.m.

KSAN (107.7 FM) Sundays at 5 a.m.

TuneIn.com Fridays at 4 p.m.

MICHELLE MEOW SHOW Talks with LGBTQ thought leaders from a wide range of fields of expertise.

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/MMS

WEEK TO WEEK Political roundtable paired with a preprogram members social (open to all attendees).

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/W2W

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THE COMMONWEALTH

TICKETS Prepayment is required. Unless otherwise indicated, all events—including “Members Free” events—require tickets. In-person programs often sell out, so we strongly encourage you to purchase tickets in advance. Due to heavy call volume, we urge you to purchase tickets online at commonwealthclub.org; or call (415) 597-6705.

Please note: All ticket sales are final. Please arrive at least 10 minutes prior to any program. Select events include premium seating, which refers to the first several rows of seating. Pricing is subject to change.

SPREAD THE WORD —and the videos and the podcasts

When you share a social media post about a Commonwealth Club video, audio podcast, or even just a message about an upcoming program, you help introduce others in your social media network to the work that the Club does.

It’s a great way to show that you’re in the know about the latest ideas and speakers and thought leaders. facebook.com/thecommonwealthclub youtube.com/commonwealthclub instagram.com/cwclub twitter.com/cwclub

THE BIG PICTURE Photo by James Meinerth.

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THE COMMONWEALTH

MACHU PICCHU TO THE GALAPAGOS

AUGUST 24 – SEPTEMBER 8, 2021 Encounter two of South America’s greatest treasures on this 16-day journey to Peru and Ecuador. Explore Machu Picchu’s enigmatic Inca ruins and discover the fascinating wonders of the Galapagos Islands on a 4-night adventure. Further discoveries await in Lima, the Sacred Valley, Cuzco and Quito. Experience the Amazon rainforest with a 4-day/4-night optional pre-tour extension.

Cost: $9,293 per person (in double occupancy) including all internal flights and international flights from SFO. Other gateway cities are available.)

Brochure at commonwealthclub.org/travel

| 415.597.6720

|

travel@commonwealthclub.org CST: 2096889-40