Water

WUPR

Washington University Political Review

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

WATER NATIONAL

Theme Spread

Loderstedt

Reflections on Bottled Water Jordan Bradstreet

Theme Art Eric Kim

A Love Letter to Lake Michigan Celia Rattner

The River Caleb Cohen

Theme Art Ceci Deleon-Wilson

WET: Navigating Hook Up Culture Erin Ritter

Water is the Universal Weapon Jason Liu

Breathing Underwater for Dummies Matthew Boyd

Theme Art Mei Liu

In Fashion, Green Doesn’t Mean Clean Jessie Wills

Crashing Waves of Grief

Duran Garcia

Floodgates Gabriela Martínez

Theme Art Ben Eskenazi

Biden’s Student Debt Relief Plan Amrita Kulkarni

Peter Thiel’s New Right-Wing Acolytes Gabriel Squitieri

Vindication: Biden’s Theory of the Case Josh DeLuca

Hungary for Power: Orban in America Will Gunter

Infrastructure Week Should Be Every Week Lara Briggs

Life After Dobbs: A Socioeconomic Take William Yoo

on the Horizon Hannah Richardson

INTERNATIONAL

Syria: A Decade Later, the War Rages On Phillip Lisun

China’s COVID Crossroad Michael Qian

Beware the Danger of Economic Decoupling Zubin Rekhi

The Trump Trap: An Economic Race for Hegemony Leo Huang

The Beef Parasite of Questionable Existence Lawrence Hapeman

Letting it Rain in the UAE Jordana Kotler

Editors' Note

Executive Director

Sophie Conroy

Editors-in-Chief

Alaina Baumohl

Jaden Lanza

Design Director

Shonali Palacios

Staff Editors

Will Gunter

Tyler Quigley

Oliver Rosand

Evan Trabitz

Celia Rattner

Features Editors

Drew Rosenblum

Matthew Shepetin

Design Leads

Haejin An

Lea Despotis

Daniel Moroze

Jinny Park

Jordan Simmons

Web Editors

Adler Bowman

Jeremy Stiava

Social Media Editor

Will Pease

Podcast Editors

Lawrence Hapeman

Alexis Hyde

Erin Ritter

Programming Director

Harry Campbell

Treasurer

Larry Liu

Front Cover

Daniel Moroze

Theme Spread

Ethan Loderstedt

Back Cover

Asher Charno

Dear Reader,

We are excited to start off Fall 2022 strong and bring you the Water Issue. Themes each month are selected by vote within WUPR’s Executive Board, and we’re impressed by the insightful and diverse discussions this theme inspires. Notably, for Jaden and I, the very first WUPR issue of our freshman year had the theme of Fire. WUPR has been a huge part of both of our college experiences, and these serendipitously complementary themes make that journey come full-circle.

It has been a challenge to maintain community these past two years due to COVID-19 related restrictions. However, our small but mighty WUPR team has stayed tight-knit. It has been so rewarding to see our community together again and to welcome new editors, artists, writers, and readers back to a space that has been a source of growth, support, and inspiration for myself these past three years. I know that I can say on behalf of us both that we’re grateful for each and every one of you.

In this issue, Jordan Bradstreet reflects on the profoundness of bottled water and our disconnection from the natural world. In her article, Emily DuranGarcia explores the everlasting experience of grief and how we can learn to live alongside it. Celia Rattner shares “A Love Letter to Lake Michigan,” and Jordana Kotler discusses cloud seeding, a geo-engineering technology that could allow countries to “steal” rainwater from one another. National topics include critical analysis of Biden’s recent student debt relief plan by Amrita Kulkarni, as well as insight into hookup culture at Wash U and universities throughout the U.S. by Erin Ritter. Lawrence Hapeman tells a satirical tale about a questionable plan to fight climate change, and Zubin Rekhi touches on the dangers of economic decoupling in our international section.

Altogether, we think Water provokes so much in the imagination as both a source of symbolism and a site of fruitful political discussion. We had a lot of fun putting this issue together, and we hope you enjoy reading it just as much.

Yours truly,

Alaina Baumohl & Jaden Lanza Editors-in-Chief

Reflections on Bottled Water

Jordan Bradstreet Design by Eric Kim

Water: the elixir of life. Everyone and everything loves water. No one would take water to a candle lit dinner; it’s not that kind of love. It is a bond like the one some might have with their parents, a bond that is often taken for granted and given little thought. This attachment is so fundamen tal, and so secure for many of us, that we never think about it. We forget that without water our skin would shrivel, our sweat would cake our bodies in salt, and our minds would plunge into delirium as they dry out.

Love for water, though, is rarely unconditional. Not all water is friendly. The water of the ocean is cold and abrasive, and we’re constantly fight ing hurricanes, floods, and leaky roofs. Water doesn’t have any care for our love towards it. It does what it will, and sometimes it is an agent of destruction and death. We do a lot to ensure it will bring us life more often than death. We’ve funneled it into our homes, we’ve calmed it with dams, and we’ve harnessed it to power our cit ies. But what is the crown jewel of our triumphs? It is something mundane: bottled water.

Bottled water is incredible precisely because it is so mundane. It is the antithesis of the chaos of nature. Every bottle is a lifeless and sterile sea

— each entirely identical to its predecessors. It has transcended all of time and space. We don’t know where it comes from. They say it comes from a glacier, or a spring, or God’s tears, but all we know is what is said on the bottle. Maybe they actually filter and bottle up my own sew age and sell it back to me. Who could say? And it tastes fine, so who would care at the end of the day? There are no limits to the perfect equa nimity and uniformity of bottled water; it is truly the pinnacle of industrialism and man’s triumph over nature.

Grip. Twist, snap. Lift and lean back. Gulp gulp gulp gulp gulp.

The mild thirst that had been tugging at the edge of your mind is quenched, and your shoul ders relax as the water hits you with its sooth ing, cool relief. How convenient! How renewing! Truly what a gift! What great ease and control you have with bottled water — as long as you're strong enough to open the lid, that is.

It gets better: bottled water comes in different flavors. With tap water we don’t get to choose the taste. We balk at its subtle impurities. Who knows what’s in those pipes that deliver it to us? Do you really trust the government to give you

clean water? Fortunately there is bottled water for everyone. There is Dasani, Aquafina, Smart Water, and for those of a more aristocratic bent, Fiji Water — water straight from the heavens, untouched by man and his sins. Don’t forget that there is more to choosing a kind of bottled water than how it tastes. A small part of your identity is at stake. Your choice is just as much part of you as the clothes you wear or the kind of music you listen to.

All of this has brought a great turn inward. Our choice of water has more to do with our frivolous tastes and identities — more to do with ourselves — than the outside world it comes from. It is brought so far away from the untamed, constructive, and destructive force of water in nature that we never even think to consider its source and what it once was before reaching us. We don’t stop to picture the mighty Colorado River fizzling out before it reaches the sea, the aquifers under our communities pump ing out less than they did last year, or the factory gulping down oil to churn out thousands of bot tles every day. Why would any of that be on our minds? We don’t see any of it. For all we know, the things we consume came from Mars. And why should we care? Whatever problems exist out there are not our problems. They happen somewhere else to someone else or something else. We don’t even see that there is a problem most of the time, because no matter what hap pens out there in the world, the same sterile and tame water is always there when we go to the store. Everything is fine. Everything will be fine until it isn’t — and we might not see it until it happens.

Jordan Bradstreet ‘24 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at bradstreet.j@wustl. edu.

But what is the crown jewel of our triumphs? It is something mundane: bottled water.

Artwork by Eric Kim

A Love Letter to Lake Michigan

Celia Rattner, Staff Editor Artwork by Lea Despotis

When I think of home, I think of sprawl ing blue water, hazy horizon lines, and icy-cold currents. No, I’m not from the Bay or Nantucket. I am from America’s third coast: the shoreline of Lake Michigan.

To be specific, I grew up in Chicago’s northside neighborhood of Lakeview. And though the lake’s namesake takes from Illinois’ north eastern neighbor, Lake Michigan has long been embedded in my identity. The entire city of Chicago is built around it.

As a Chicagoan, you are taught at an early age that “the lake is always East” when learning to navigate the city. For 14 years, my commute to and from school took place on Lake Shore Drive. The athletic club my family frequented for over a decade was also named Lake Shore. Next to Lincoln, “lake” is probably the most common L-word you’ll find in the Windy City.

Simply put, I — like most other Chicagoans — love Lake Michigan. It is integral to the city’s identity, and, thus, integral to mine. My

summers would be incomplete without dips in the lake and my winters would probably be a lot more manageable were it not for Lake Michigan’s unforgiving wind.

And, to be frank, it’s strange to live in an area so removed from such a body of water. How do I know autumn is coming if I can’t observe the dwindling number of boats in Diversey Harbor, or prepare for spring without notice of the mountains of melting ice that pile along the lake’s edge?

It’s difficult to remember when I first became aware of climate change. But, I feel as though global warming has always been on my mind. The term “global warming” was first coined in 1975, but I must have always assumed Chicago gained immunity due to its inland nature. In the last decade, however, Lake Michigan’s water levels have risen nearly six feet, with a record 9.51 inches of rainfall in May 2020.

Let’s put that in context.

Chicago, like many major American cities, was built on swampland and gained prominence after the construction of a canal, which con nected the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River Basin. In 2013, Lake Michigan’s water levels hit a record low, but have since grown six feet, reaching record highs in 2020.

Chicago’s infamous weather cycles — heavy snows that lead to heavy rains which lead to summertime swells — aren’t helping either. Though Lake Michigan may appear indistin guishable from an ocean coastline, the Great Lakes behave more akin to rivers: they deposit

into one another and flow to the Atlantic via the St. Lawrence River.

These deposits are replaced by rain and snow, but climate change has exacerbated normal evaporation and precipitation cycles, causing the last five years to be the wettest in recorded history. Factor in the fact that the average air temperature in Chicago has risen 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1991 and it’s no wonder lake levels have risen as well.

I’ll spare you more details about the wind pat terns, ice levels, and the notorious Polar Vortex. The lake’s levels have decreased since 2020, but the trends are alarming nonetheless. All this to say: flooding has gotten worse, beaches have disappeared, and it is clear that the lake’s ebb and flow jeopardizes the city’s future.

I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the disparate impacts of such flooding. Many of the city's more impoverished south side neighbor hoods have been slammed by the recent flood ing, with the working-class neighborhood South Shore bearing the brunt of the lake’s force.

Though the city has requested federal funds to build a barrier along South Shore Drive and has concocted other plans to mitigate shoreline ero sion, the financial burden on individual residents has already added up. Yet, many have criticized the city’s response as neglectful toward south side residents.

To be frank, it all frightens me. Climate change is a slow process, but one that is clearly quick ening. In a public policy course I’m taking this semester, we discussed the ways governments

place dollar amounts on climate change. New reports are showing that the current levels we assign to carbon — $51 per ton — are far too low, and $185 per ton is a more accurate esti mate. These new figures forecast devastating consequences if action is delayed.

Scientific studies like this lead to questions: How long have we been undervaluing the effects of carbon emissions? Is it too late? As I sit writ ing this paper during a 99 degree day in late September, I fear the worst. Is there any hope of stopping climate change in its tracks? If not, how do we mourn something that still exists?

Celia Rattner ’25 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at crattner@wustl.edu.

Simply put, I — like most other Chicagoans — love Lake Michigan. It is integral to the city’s identity, and, thus, integral to mine.

The River

Caleb Cohen

The steel bleachers shook as the antic ipation grew. The spotlight poked center stage and everyone stood with the anticipation of something great. Bruce Springsteen walked out with the force of a giant. The hard strum on his worn-down, mustard-col ored guitar hit the strings with a fist full of power, and the crowd roared. Springsteen’s con certs are a marathon of music and story-telling, spanning almost four hours. There are not many moments I can point to and say changed my life. Bruce Springsteen’s 40th anniversary tour of “The River” was one of those moments.

The show was equal parts religious experience and political campaign rally. Springsteen asks his audience to take stock of their lives and the American dream as a whole. While Springsteen has lent his support to Democratic candidates over the years, he imbues his performance with themes that are small-d democrat — hard work, neighbors helping neighbors, and communities that leave no parts behind. He is the last of a generation of musicians that include Dylan, Lennon, and Cash to use the stage as a bully pulpit for political ideals.

Springsteen’s enduring appeal is that he is able to attract both sides of the political aisle — sometimes in the very same song. In argu ably his most famous album, “Born in the USA,” conservatives embrace the anthemic superfi cial title and wrap themselves in the flag that is showcased on the album’s cover. Whereas, liberals appreciate the lyrics of the song as n indictment of the Vietnam War. Springsteen has built a career honoring the hard work of the underpaid and under-appreciated, but is unafraid to hold people accountable, as he does to police officers on the song “American Skin.” That song was inspired by the 1999 shoot ing death of Amadou Diallo by New York City police officers. At the time, some police asso ciations called for the boycott of Springsteen’s shows. Where other artists may have caused more controversy with such a political song, Springsteen's life-long commitment to writing about the promise of America gives him the cover to touch on politics and move on.

Springsteen's albums have staying power because they reach beyond politics and into the daily struggles of the average American. In the 1970s, “Born to Run” explored the idea of free dom and the open road. On the album’s cover, Springsteen subtly touches on racial politics with a picture of him and his black friend and saxophonist Clarence Clemmons standing by his side. It was not insignificant to have a man of color standing center stage with a white man, Springsteen, during this time. In the 1980s, it was “Born in the USA,” and in 2000, “The Rising,” which was an answer to terrorist attacks on our country. It was a moving exchange of words that brought a country back together. It is filled with both mourning and resilience. It is a powerful look into the strength of America and its people. Like any political figure, people look towards Springsteen for inspiration. He is a steady voice that speaks for the country, and like a successful politician, captures your curios ity and attention through his words.

For me, Springsteen’s powerful tales of sorrow and triumph began with “The River.” On this album, the ideals of youthful freedoms are met with the responsibilities of growing up. It is a double album with 20 songs. About midway through the concert he arrived at the title track. It’s a classic Springsteen song about the story of a life in transition. Here Springsteen substi tutes the symbolic freedom of the open road and the westward railway for a winding body of water. Near the end of the song, he asks, “Is a dream a lie if it doesn't come true?” The ques tion is quintessential Springsteen. Once again, he is testing his audience’s faith in the American dream. In the hands of somebody else, this

might be an inherently political question. It is the kind of one-liner or soundbite a politician would use to get the attention of their audience. In the hands of Springsteen, it's not a question of politics. It's about the strength of chasing a dream when there are setbacks. It is the premise of most of his music that touches on the idea to never stop believing. Springsteen has the unique ability as an artist to make us think and feel at a concert and to restore for just a few hours the sense of a shared community.

Next year, Springsteen will embark on what will likely be his last tour. At 73 years old, he doesn’t have to tour, he doesn’t need the money, and he doesn’t have anything left to prove. I think it is his way of telling his fans that if you keep going down to the river, one day the dream will come true.

Caleb Cohen ‘25 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at c.b.cohen@wustl.edu.

Springsteen’s enduring appeal is that he is able to attract both sides of the political aisle — sometimes in the very same song.

Artwork by Ceci Deleon-Wilson

WET: Navigating Hook Up Culture

Erin Ritter, Podcast Editor

Photography by Jordan Simmons Modeled by Wladimir Alarcon

I’ll never forget my first hook-up experi ence: it was the first week of my fresh man year at Wash U. I met him through some mutual friends and we hit it off quickly. We chatted as we strolled through the unfamiliar campus scenery and made out behind the DUC (what an incredibly embarrassing freshman thing to do). One thing led to another, and he met me in my dorm room one night. Up until this point, it had felt a little like some cute 90’s comingof-age romantic comedy… until we realized neither of us knew what to do from there. Needless to say, it was awkward, and not just because he cried two days later when he found out I was also hooking up with his roommate (yet another embarrassing freshman thing to do). As weird as it felt at the time, my experience wasn’t all that uncommon. If I could go back to prevent myself from diving too soon and hitting my head on the metaphorical pool floor, I’d tell my naive freshman-self to read an article like this.

What is hook-up culture? The American Psychological Association defines hook-up culture as “the shift in openness and acceptance of uncommitted sex.” Studies show that 90% of college students believe that their campus demonstrates hook up culture, while an estimated 72% of college students participate in hook-up culture. According to the National College Health Assessment, only 20% of students hook up regularly and 35% don’t hook up at all. In short, no matter which side of the pool you’re on, you are not alone.

Regardless of your experience in the mat ter, we do need to clarify one thing before diving in the deep end: consent is a neces sary component of any sexual or romantic encounter, and it goes much deeper than a simple “yes.” In fact, consent is more

of an ongoing conversation. You and your partner might feel comfortable at first, but feelings are fluid; consent is reversible and needs to be discussed continually. Clear, open conversation is necessary as one can’t rely on assumptions, perceived gen der roles, or a lack of protest to guarantee consent. As always, but especially with a new partner, previous flirtation or conver sations hold no bearing on your current encounter. In addition, traditional gender roles often disregard the fact that women can be perpetrators as well, leaving men and masculine folks at risk. Finally, unless there’s a clear and enthusiastic “Yes!”, the answer is no.

What does this look like? Try dipping your toes in with this simple conversation starter: “What are you into?” Short and sweet, but highly effective. After estab lishing this, you can move on with, “What are you comfortable with? Do you want to [blank]?” The best part about constant conversation is that you don’t have to rely on previous sexual experience to impress your partner. As all good sex should be, you and your partner make it up as you go along! If you want a seriously hot way to keep the discussion up, use phrases like “Does this feel good? Should I keep going?” In general, it’s best to ask before doing: “Can I put my hand here?”

While consent is paramount in any circum stance, it’s important to acknowledge that the consent conversation that happens during a relationship can look a lot different during a hook-up. According to one study, almost 50% of respondents indicated that they had hooked up either during the first in-person meet up or within the first few weeks of meeting, and the other half indi cated they waited more than a few weeks. And while the time period is varied, you cannot guess at someone’s sexual comfort levels without asking them. In a relation ship, an element of trust has already been established. Hook-ups don’t have this; therefore, one of the most important parts of this conversation is maintaining aware ness of your partner’s demeanor as well as your own. Does your partner appear hesi tant? Are you both sober? If in doubt, play it safe by not continuing. It is always bet ter to be awkward than risk overstepping boundaries or hurting someone. Again, silence does not mean consent. Nerves can get in the way of your partner verbal izing their concerns; check in frequently. Sometimes even the most experienced folks lack the knowledge or confidence it

...consent is a necessary component of any sexual or romantic encounter, and it goes much deeper than a simple yes.

takes to breach the subject. And the truth is, no matter how many Canvas modules you complete or infographics you like on Instagram, having these conversations will still feel a little weird.

The good news is, if it feels a little awkward at first, you’re doing it right! Think of every sexual encounter you have witnessed in the media: hot, fast, and often wordless (but accompanied by plenty of noises.) Think Sex Life on Netflix, Fifty Shades of Grey, or Game of Thrones. Spoiler: sex doesn’t always look like that. At least, I hope it doesn’t. When actors film these scenes, they’re required to wear special padded underwear that prevents any sensation or contact. If that doesn’t have enough of a cold-shower-effect, there’s also a room full of directors and choreographers to advise. Not only are these examples often skewed in an idealistic light by being heteronorma tive, uninclusive, and just plain scripted, these scenes reinforce harmful ideas about what sex actually is. Rather, what it’s not. To put it bluntly, sex can actually be kind of gross. Think about it: various bodily flu ids, razor burn, back acne, and less-thanfresh smells. Certain sex acts often result in some unexpected consequences. Any vaginal penetration is usually accompanied by some sort of vaginal flatulence. Giving oral can be fun until you get a pube stuck in your throat, and receiving oral is awesome until you feel some teeth. Specks of toilet paper left over from the day’s toilet breaks can even make an appearance. And no matter what hole(s) you’re engaging with,

you’ll almost always end up with a suspi cious stain on the sheets. One can only wonder as to what Christian Grey would do if he found a mysterious brown spot on his red leather mattress.

At this point, I’ve probably convinced you that every passionate sex scene you’ve ever seen was incredibly unrealistic (it was) and that real-life hook ups will never live up to them. And if TV sex isn’t your thing, think back to any story you’ve ever heard from a peer and look at it through the lens of sex ual maturity. Chances are they didn’t men tion the inner struggle between leaving the socks on or taking them off, the awkward silence that came after the fart that wasn’t a fart, or the unsettling amount of sweat. Not to worry, my friends, there does exist a balance between hot and cringeworthy. The secret: embracing the weird! Now that you’ve established consent through contin uous conversation, you can use this com munication to put your partner at ease. Be

honest about your thoughts and feelings to empower your partner to do the same. Reassure them that the inner-sock-battle isn’t a big deal. Hook ups should be fun! Don’t be afraid to giggle every now and then.

So, we’ve got the hook-up itself figured out, but what about the aftermath? As I’ve demonstrated with my story, a conversa tion with your partner about boundaries would save you both (or at least one of you) some tears. Are you both interested in a hook up? Statistics show that people who regularly hook up are in the minority, this can’t always be assumed. Like water in a pool, some people’s comfort levels are deeper than others, and sexual activity can mean something different for everyone. Do you both have the emotional capacity for a hook up? (Read: are they okay with the fact that you’re also hooking up with their roommate?) While this discussion can be awkward as well, avoiding eye contact despite living on the same floor AND tak ing the same classes will always be worse. Even if you play it safe by only hooking up with people you don’t regularly associate with, clarifying expectations will make your experience more enjoyable for everyone.

When you think about it, sex is a lot like swimming: no one is born knowing how to do it, but if everyone is on the same page, it can be a lot of fun! And if you’re unpre pared, you’ll drown.

Erin Ritter '24 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at e.h.ritter@wustl.edu

It is always better to be awkward than risk overstepping boundaries or hurting someone.

is the Universal Weapon

Jason Liu, Featured Writer Design by Eric Kim and Sophia Lewis

It wasn’t until this declaration in 1999 that UN explicitly acknowledged water as a universal right.

Was this simply too obvious to be put into words before? It’s the opposite, actually. We may intuitively accept water to be a right, but it is also a resource. When it comes to such, we take for granted that the nation-state gets to decide how to use their resources within their jurisdiction, as they see fit, even if said use is inequitable across the globe. Just as Russia is not obligated to provide oil to Germany and the U.S. is not obligated to provide grain to Somalia, the UN has no power to enforce this non-binding resolution.

De facto, water is not a universal right. Instead, political institutions use their control over water as a tool of authority over populations both within and without. That is their right.

In that sense, water can be a weapon. And all too many have used it as such.

Flooding as a battlefield tactic is usually equal parts uncontrollable and ineffective. The Dutch have for centuries relied on the intentional destruction of dikes for defense, but neither the Spaniards in the Eighty Years’ War or the Germans in WWII were deterred (though efforts against the former left regions inundated for a century). In 1938, the Chinese Nationalists released the Yellow River against the invading Japanese, only to result in over 800,000 casualties and the fall of Wuhan anyways. However, there is a modern example

of a nation deliberately flooding as an effective territorial tool, despite their now defunct status as a state.

At its peak in early 2015, the Islamic State (IS) controlled large swathes of Syria and Northern Iraq — including many crucial dams along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. These dams became weapons in their hands; for example, in April 2014, IS closed the Falluja Dam flood gates, submerging the town of Abu Gharib and 200 square kilometers of farmland to repel upstream Iraqi forces. However, this wasn’t the worst that IS could have inflicted. The capture of the Mosul Dam in August 2014, though only held for a few days, gave IS the power to poten tially inundate the cities of Mosul and Baghdad. An estimated 500,000 people would have died.

Yet, IS’s tactics also reveal water's double-edged nature as a tool of governance. Consider the Tabqa Dam in Syria. Under IS administration, the water in the Lake Assad reservoir was diverted to occupied regions, while simultaneously squeezing the water supplies of downstream Al Rakka and Aleppo. The flip side of this coin was that IS also increased hydroelectric output. Under former Free Syrian Army (an umbrella name for various Syrian rebels) control, electric power was only produced for an hour a day. IS at one point provided power for all 24.

This policy created surreal contradictions in the dynamics of the Syrian Civil War. The Assad government,

IS’s sworn enemy, was forced to pay ransom to maintain power and pay the dam operators’ salaries. Regions under drought were supplied water by IS, while IS artificially created droughts elsewhere. However, these contradictions are part of the IS’s unique strategy among Islamist militant groups: to establish their legitimacy as a caliphate, as a political state, by effec tively demarcating between constituents and non-constituents for which they have a (non) responsibility to provide basic services.

That responsibility is as fickle as the borders that divide them — and not just for IS’s quasi-state. For example, throughout the Syrian Civil War, Aleppo has suffered from similar tactics at the hands of the Assad government and various rebel groups, who all have withheld water to lay siege to the city, depending on which was occu pying it at the time.

We don’t have to stay in the Middle East, either. Take, for example, Crimea. When Russia seized the territory in 2014, the Ukranian government ordered the construction of a makeshift dam to cut off the flow of water from the Dnieper River through the North Crimean Canal, which supplies 85% of the peninsula’s water. Even Ukraine’s top irrigation official protested the decision, warning of a “humanitarian catastro phe,” but the Geneva Convention actu ally takes a side here: provid

ing for basic services is the occupiers’ respon sibility. This was the crux of the Ukranian government’s dare: if you want to claim Crimea to be Russian, then take care of your own citi zens. That is, if you can.

And to Russia’s credit (as weird as it is to admit this), they spent tens of billions of dollars on var ious infrastructure projects, including a 12-mile bridge linked to the Russian mainland so that water could be trucked across the country and multi-million dollar aquifer projects. However, these solutions’ effectiveness are in question as the aquifers are increasingly tainted by salt without replenishment from the river. While shoddy pipelines burst and dead-on-arrival moonshot projects such as desalination plants and cloud-seeding planes were abandoned, agriculture was nearly wiped out and residents had to make do with what one described as “brandy-colored” water.

Many in the world — even the residents them selves — would still call them Ukrainian. But in the end, it was Kyiv that built that dam, and in the first days of the broader invasion, the Russian army that brought it down. In the eyes of a detached world, the difference between cit izens and non-citizens is the same as the differ ence between a tragedy and a means to an end.

This dissociation between the governing and the governed allows water to be wielded as a geopolitical weapon, rationalized by the for mer at the expense of the latter. For Crimea, it was the severing border that allowed Kyiv to abandon its social mandate. For the Bolivians shot and arrested by government troops in the Cochabamba Water War, that dissociation was shaped by capitalist globalism.

For much of Latin America, the 1980s was the “lost decade”, thrown into chaos by defaults on foreign debt and the resultant recessions. At the time, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and the U.S. Federal Reserve stepped in to renegotiate and ultimately arrange the forgiveness of much of these loans. The catch was “structural

adjustment”: indebted countries had to open up to foreign investment and the privatization of state firms. In the case of Bolivia’s state water system (SEMPA), only foreign investors would have the capital to improve utility infrastructure, and treating water as a monetizable good will incentivize sustainable consumption. So the argument went.

Eventually, in 1999, the Bolivian government acquiesced after the World Bank threatened to deny further debt relief, opening SEMPA up to privatization. The only contract bidder was Aguas del Tunari, a consortium of international firms led by Bechtel, an American construction company. An agreement was only reached with certain preconditions: Aguas del Tunari would hold a monopoly over water supply and service in Cochabamba, be guaranteed a 15% return on investment, and would work to finish construct ing the Misicuni Dam, local mayor Manfred Reyes Villa’s vanity project that the World Bank had actually written off as uneconomic.

Political institutions use their control over water as a tool of authority over populations both within and without. That is their right.

At this point, you can predict how this all turned out. Rates were raised by more than 100%, protests arose, martial law was declared, and innocents were shot. I will dwell on this later. What I want to call out now is, when the Bolivian government finally caved in, how quickly the various political actors distanced themselves. The Bolivian government terminated the con tract on the grounds of Aguas del Tunari having abandoned it when executives fled the violence.

Mayor Reyes Villa had already abandoned sup port for the project several weeks earlier. Aguas del Tunari demanded $25 million compensation, blaming Bolivia for

breaking the terms — it wasn’t until 2006 that trade courts ruled against paying a single penny.

As for the World Bank, let’s just note that when protests against similar policy arose in El Alto, a World Bank official blamed native Andean con sumption habits — implying that they weren’t consuming enough to fulfill investors’ bottom lines.

That’s what all of these examples come down to, don’t they? In the tumult left behind by tenuous international law, constantly shifting geopolitics and principal-agent relationships, the question of who is responsible for meeting people’s basic needs is muddled. This is not to make a moral equivalence between the polit ical actors mentioned in this piece. (Probably should leave a disclaimer now: no, I don’t think Zelensky should be judged as harshly as the Islamic State.)

Nonetheless, within this ambiguity, in an attempt to seize control of situations spiraling beyond it, political institutions and entities tend to focus on what they can control. Troop deploy ments. Utility outputs. Financials. Numbers. After all, as the apocryphally attributed but forever influential quote goes, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” Turns out you don’t have to be Stalin to fall into that line of thinking. You just have to have power over human lives to forget about them.

What convinced the Bolivian government to stand down wasn’t the effective hostage-tak ing in the form of debt dollars, or the exorbitant rates charged to their citizens, or the 50,000 people that rose in protest. It was the televised rifle of a Bolivian army captain, shooting seven teen-year-old Victor Hugo Daza in the face.

As citizens, when the very things that sus tain our lives are instead pointed against us as weapons by the political entities that manage them, we have to make that the world sees it as a tragedy. Not a statistic.

Jason Liu '23 studies in the Olin Business School. He can be reached at jliu1@wustl.edu.

Breathing Underwater for Dummies

Matthew Boyd, Staff Writer

When I was six or seven years old, I almost drowned and that is some thing I never got entirely over. It was so long ago that I can’t even begin to articulate every thought that seemed to flash through my head. It was an experience that I try hard not to remember, the only thing that I know was accu rately burned into my memory is the impossi bly slow fade to blackness that seemed to last for hours. Within that blackness fear took over and that fear was the only thing that I could focus on. I did not construct any plans about how to save myself, but instead a primal fear of something I couldn’t even comprehend began to invade me. Inside of that blackness, I didn’t quite get to my life flashing before my eyes but instead, I felt empty with a meek “is this it?” that could have either been due to being so young and having so few things to draw off of or a feel ing of helplessness in a current that consumed me. I was dragged out of the current in what was likely just a handful of minutes and I wish that fear had only consumed me in those brief, horri ble minutes but instead, the current had eroded who I was until just a compartmentalized ver sion remained.

A handful of years later, the Sandy Hook shoot ing happened. As a child freshly able to tie his shoes and having recently discovered frac tions, I watched news coverage about kids who looked just like me being subject to a random

act of violence. However, for an event that some remark as a turning point in American history, it all seemed so typical. More than that, I don’t remember feeling anything. Seeing the worst of what people can do and then watching as adults talk like enough was enough and a change had to be made was something I had become accus tomed to. Some might say I was just a jaded kid but then this exact type of thing happened six years later in Parkland, when I saw teenagers who looked like who I was then get caught in an act of violence. Then, this year in Uvalde, the cycle began anew.

In between these three events, more school shootings that weren’t deemed worthy of signif icant coverage and calls for reforms happened. Those reforms are still being mulled over right now and held up for reasons that feel drawn out of a hat. Still, knowing all of that, I think that feeling of apathy towards events so awful is something I can’t stop feeling ashamed of. I was too young to grasp it but it still grates on my soul and consciousness that I couldn’t muster any thing worthwhile to feel for those other kids that were just people on the TV to me. I also wanted to do something of note but that prospect and creating a tangible change felt entirely out of reach. I think that might be something a lot of other people who are reading this also feel.

After all those experiences stuck being submit ted to the worst of the world, I wish I could end with a perfect story about how I changed my mindset that then leads into an expertly con structed anecdote about how you can do the same. But I can’t do that. I still sometimes feel turned off to the bad and even horrific things that happen as a coping mechanism. But that is, after all, only some of the time. As I’ve got ten older, I have tried to work more on getting out and doing something, even if it seems like an infinitely small step. I had to learn how to be comfortable making these small steps with similarly slow, uneven progress. There was no light bulb moment but instead an ugly, labored process.

Going through with that made it so I can under stand how a person might feel like what they do has no chance of making a lasting differ ence. Climate change can feel like an existen tial threat, the stripping of women’s rights can feel dystopic and often it might feel like no one with the power to change these things really cares. Those are entirely rightful things to feel but I just want to say that you can try to be the difference. You can feel all those things you feel and not have to stuff it down to survive. If you really feel strongly about something that upsets you, I promise you there are plenty of people who want to change the world in the same way and have a place for you to start. Getting to that point though requires you to keep moving which can feel like an insurmountable task. If no one is going to tell you today, I can tell you that you can help make a difference.

Matthew Boyd ‘24 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at bmatthew@wustl. edu.

"If you really feel strongly about something that upsets you, I promise you there are plenty of people who want to change the world in the same way and have a place for you to start."

Artwork by Mei Liu, Staff Artist

In Fashion, Green Doesn’t Mean Clean

Jessie Wills

When you buy a t-shirt, 713 gallons of water go down the drain. Now, multiply that by every t-shirt in your closet. Water is used at nearly every step of the garment production process. According to CNN, the fashion industry uses 21 trillion gal lons of water annually, which is enough water to fill 37 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. Crops like cotton require hundreds of gallons of water and use more insecticides and pesticides than any other crop in the world. In major man ufacturing cities like Savar, Bangladesh, water runs black with dye. The toxins in the water make it impotable and pose serious health challenges to the population living in the area. Additionally, textiles like polyester and nylon shed synthetic microplastics that end up in the ocean, where fish ingest the plastic. Then we eat those fish along with the microfibers of our old clothing inside them.

Fashion brands are starting to acknowledge their role in harming the environment and human health. This wake-up call is largely due to a growing consumer conscience for buying ethically and sustainably. Instead of attacking the problem at the beginning of the production cycle, however, many fashion brands are turning to greenwashing. As a marketing ploy, green washing falsely signals to buyers that a brand’s products are good for the environment, and it makes consumers believe they are doing more to help the environment than they actually are. In reality, the only thing that is getting cleaner is a consumer’s conscience.

Greenwashing has become such a customary business practice that it is hard to detect with the untrained eye. Even branding as simple as using green colors can make a customer believe that a company is concerned for the environ ment. Brands also use vague keywords like ‘sus tainable’ and ‘eco-friendly’ that are not backed up with any transparent information about the sourcing or production of the item. Take H&M for example, which released their “Conscious

Choice” collection with vague allusions to sustainability: the items must be made with “at least 50% of more sustainable materials.”

Nevermind that H&M is a fast fashion empire that churns out hundreds of other non-“sustain able” products weekly. Truly sustainable brands — and those that aspire to be — should be fully transparent about what their products contain.

Apart from the intentional vagueness surround ing a brand’s sustainability practices, green washing encourages consumers to buy more. Endless consumerism is antithetical to sustain able fashion because it encourages so much waste. Patagonia is a rare example of a brand that has encouraged its customers to not buy its products unless they actually need them. See their “Don’t Buy This Jacket” advertisement. Fast fashion brands that rotate through inven tory every two weeks encourage high levels of consumption by keeping trend-oriented cus tomers coming back for more. What happens to those clothes that you bought a year ago that are now completely out of style? They go in the trash, or to the thrift store if we are lucky. They are probably falling apart anyways; after all, most companies don’t produce clothes to last, they produce clothes to maximize profits.

As a society, we are becoming more aware of how our consumer practices are hastening envi ronmental decay. However, brands still manage to win us over with simple marketing schemes that are easy to poke holes through. When we see the word ‘sustainable,’ we feel like we can check that socially conscious box in our minds. But really this just makes our shopping habits

more palatable. Clothing cannot be split up into good and bad categories based on its environ mental impact. Yes, some textiles are worse for the environment than others, but they can all end up in landfills. For this reason, the real answer to sustainable fashion is buying less. When we buy less, we pollute less water and throw away less clothing. Buying less also means buying higher quality clothes that are built to last. Suddenly trends aren’t so import ant anymore.

Exiting the fashion consumer cycle is liberating. You can see the influence the fashion industry has on our behavior. It uses ever-evolving trends to make you think you always need something new. Then greenwashing comes in to make you feel okay about those purchases. This illu sion of care for the environment is dangerous and deceptive. Industry regulations on pro duction transparency and marketing need to be strengthened to encourage a more honest and truly sustainable industry. It is a dangerous game when consumers think they are solving fashion sustainability when, in reality, they con tinue to be part of the problem.

Jessie Wills ‘24 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at j.l.wills@wustl.edu.

When we see the word ‘sustainable,’ we feel like we can check that socially conscious box in our minds.

Emily Duran Garcia, Featured Writer Design by Eric Kim

I

t’s six in the morning when you receive the news. Groggily, you answer the unexpected phone call, frowning at the incessant and desperate buzzing. You sit up, rubbing at your eyes to chase the sleep away. All it takes is the single press of a button for your entire world to fall apart.

Perhaps that is not how you remember it. Maybe you were there to see it happen, or maybe someone gently grasped your hands and looked at you with teary eyes. But, you remem ber the pain, how grief slowly trickled into your chest until you could no longer breathe. It pulls you under, drowning you.

Grief is like water.

At first, it takes the form and strength of a tsu nami. It overwhelms the sky, taunting the last bits of peace you clutch onto tightly, until it suddenly crashes into the ground. It tears away at the foundations you’ve built and mercilessly wrenches you into its surging waters. You can not breathe; you cannot hear; you cannot see. All you know is that your arms and legs become numb to the cold that continues to pull you under. You start to wonder whether this is just a nightmare that you can’t seem to wake from.

You don’t know how long you’ve been underwa ter. Days? Weeks? Months? Even years?

You stare at the wall as you begin to drift deeper underwater. When was the last time you saw them? What did they say? Did you say “I love you” that time? Were they happy? Why weren’t you able to go see them? Why didn’t you take

that extra time to see them? Why didn’t you call them that night? Did they know that you wanted to see them again? Were they scared in those final moments? Were they loved?

You remember their smile and the way it used to warm you up. You remember the funny quirk they had that made you chuckle. You remember the texture of their hands that held you when you were frightened. You remember their voice that soothed your worries away. Your mind becomes a broken record of memories as it flits through all the joys they brought you. It must be a joke, albeit one in poor taste, you reason with yourself. They’re still here, sitting on the worn out couch, waiting for you to come home. They’re still humming their favorite song under their breath as they cook. They’re still tuning in every day to watch the old-timey show they’ve raved to you about. You want to stay there, in the delusion that they’re still here with you. You want to cry and scream, but you find yourself unable to lift a finger, much less get out of bed.

You are unaware of the hand that grows closer to your floating form underwater.

Heaving for air, you grasp at the hand that pulls you out. They do not let go as you continue to tremble. With shaky breaths, you sit in silence as they caress your head, murmuring prayers and condolences under their breath. They are your sister, your brother, your aunt, your pastor, or even your neighbor, but it doesn’t matter. You become painfully aware of the coarse cotton of their clothes underneath your clammy hands. “I’m so sorry,” they whisper. You remember their smile, now tight lipped, and their voice,

now silent, sealed and stuffed inside a lifeless box. The warmth of the delusion you were under drips away, leaving the cold reality to seep in. A familiar feeling starts to settle in your chest, and you scream.

Soon, it becomes like the tide. Some days, the tide is calm. You smile and laugh with the feel ing of water lingering behind you, until the water reaches out to you, much stronger than before. You freeze, wondering when the feeling would go away. People assure you that eventually, one fateful day in the far future, you will learn to let it go, but, as you stand in front of their grave, fingers tracing over the wooden carving that is their name, it starts to rain. You wipe away the droplet running down your cheek, and the tsu nami takes form once more.

Instead of being under the constant warmth of the sun, you remain surrounded by water. Some days it's like the tide; some days it’s like the tsunami; some days you are underwater. But, you learn how to swim as the water constantly changes and shifts. You learn to keep your head above water. But the water will remain clinging onto your form as days go by. You accept the reality that the promised fateful day in the far future will never come. You simply learn to fol low the crashing rhythm of the waves of grief.

In your heart, mind, and memories — it stays.

Emily Duran Garcia ‘24 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at durangarcia.e@ wustl.edu

Seventeen

The seventeen floodgates of the Bull Shoals Dam stand for flood control, hydroelectric power, and recreation. It took two-hundred and fifty-six feet of concrete and the loss of a local cemetery to build their imposing frame.

A feat of reason overtook the turbulent, dangerous river. The once-wild water moves neatly below a bridge while cars cruise smoothly to their next destination. Their tires trace the gray lines we drew over blue.

50th Anniversary of the Buffalo National River

There’s a body of water that remains unscathed by the desire to harness fluidity.

In the name of energy production, The Army Corps of Engineers proposed the construction of two dams on the Buffalo River.

It had been done before. It could be done again. And again. But not here, not on the waters that would become our first national river.

Let the River Run

The river doesn’t need our protection. Doesn’t need a title or our discretion. Doesn’t need us to see value in floatable depths or jumpable cliffs.

We don’t let the river do anything. We may have control over concrete and engineering, but we still lack control over water.

This summer, a man drowned in flood-stage waters.

When the river reaches such levels, things start to disappear roads, bridges, bodies, stories.

Artificial Rain

Clabber Creek knows the Buffalo River. And at the meeting point of rock-littered sand and Clabber’s peaceful creekwater, sits farmland. Acres lovingly populated with tomatoes, blackberries, green squash, corn, and zinnias. Farming happens in tandem with the water’s song, whose rhythm depends on how much it has rained.

When the creek runs high, you hear the liquid collisions with solid rock. The music is an invitation to swim and rest. On scorching hot Arkansan days, 4pm is Creek Time. You revel in the flow of water around your burning skin and thank whatever powers you believe in for this place.

When the creek runs low, it barely moves at all. You have to lean in to listen. Still, you strain to hear any water at all. The creek sits still and so does the sky. The clouds are empty and the grass is tired of waiting, turning yellow with impatient thirst.

Two summers ago, you never thought about rain. Now, you think about it every time you see the tomatoes shriveling and the indigo struggling to grow. You watch a man rotate garden sprinklers every fifteen minutes, getting up in the middle of dinner to shift the water from the corn to the hibiscus. It’s not enough. You need rain. There’s only so much a man and a sprinkler can do.

You ask the clouds to open their floodgates.

Gabriela Martínez ‘23 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at gabimartinez@wustl.edu.

Biden’s Student Debt Relief Plan

Amrita Kulkarni

In the last two decades, a combination of fac tors have pushed the student debt crisis to a critical point of unsustainability. Therefore, canceling student debt, while not perfect, is necessary to provide immediate relief to mil lions of Americans and buy policy makers time to enact legislation to truly solve the crisis.

During my senior year of high school, my inbox was perpetually clogged with notifications of scholarships and financial aid opportunities. Every hour, I would feel my phone buzzing with new messages, pulling me from my schoolwork. I was often annoyed at the constant barrage of emails, but then I would always remind myself that every dollar counts. And, when considering the amount of student debt in the United States, this phrase could not be more true. According to the most recent estimates from the Federal Reserve, U.S. student debt totals $1.75 trillion, which is higher than both medical and auto debt.

To address this crisis, on August 24, President Joe Biden announced his plan to provide stu dent loan relief by canceling debt for millions of Americans. Biden’s plan sent shockwaves around the country — some lauded it as a gift to the middle-class, while others criticized it for its recklessness. Given the widespread debate over debt cancellation and Biden’s proposal, a closer look into the student debt crisis is warranted.

Student debt in the U.S. was not always an emergency. Only within the past two decades has the cost of higher education exponen tially grown. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, between 2007 and 2020, student debt increased by 144% from $642 billion to $1.56 trillion. So, what is driving this massive growth?

A combination of factors have led to this point, the first being a lack of state funding towards public universities. Within the last decade, the responsibility for public university funding has

shifted away from the states and towards stu dents. According to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO), the average student contribution towards public four-year university revenues was 53.2%. While critics argue that state funding towards public institutions has increased in the past decade, per-student funding has decreased, leading to higher tuition costs for all.

Additionally, the 4.5% growth in university funding during the 2021 fiscal year was driven by federal stimulus money and is unlikely to continue in the long-run. According to SHEEO, if between 2020 and 2021 full-time student enrollment had not declined and federal stim ulus money had not been provided (in effect, if there was no pandemic or recession), total university funding would have decreased by 1%, suggesting that long-term growth is unlikely to occur. Thus, the lack of state funding in pub lic universities has led to students bearing the brunt of the financial burden.

The rise in student debt is also attributed to the high demand for elite university edu cation. According to the National Student Clearinghouse, during the pandemic, universi ties with less than 50% acceptance rates expe rienced growth in their class sizes, with public universities experiencing a 4.5% increase and private universities experiencing a 12% increase. These metrics indicate that the demand for elite universities is so high that even a recession can

not diminish it. As a result, institutions have lit tle incentive to lower their tuition, causing more students to take out loans.

The surge in popularity of for-profit universities has led to a dramatic increase in student debt. Unlike non-profit colleges which are required to invest their profits into the institution, forprofit colleges are under no such obligations. Consequently, these universities, such as DeVry University and the University of Phoenix, prior itize financial gain, often at the expense of their students. As a result, students who attend these institutions are more likely to have student debt and be ill-equipped to pay it off, causing total student debt in the U.S. to increase.

For example, a study published in the Journal of Financial Economics found that between 2000 and 2010 (during which for-profit enrollment was at an all-time high) student debt rose by 66%. According to the same report, in 2012, 39% of all federal student loan defaults were among those who graduated from for-profit universities. Moreover, according to the Student Borrower Protection Center, for-profit institu tions disproportionately target communities of color, exacerbating racial inequity. Thus, as more students get scammed into attending forprofit universities, student debt will increase.

Finally, the sheer number of people attending undergraduate and graduate schools means more people are taking out loans. According to the Education Data Initiative, between 1960 and 2022, the rate of college enrollment increased by 46.8%, meaning more students than ever are borrowing money.

So, how does Biden’s student debt relief plan factor into this situation? Biden’s plan has three main objectives: cancel federal student debt, make the student loan system more manage able, and reduce the cost of college.

Biden’s student debt relief plan is truly revolutionary – it extends the hand of government further into the economy than ever before.

Americans who will benefit from debt cancel lation include Pell Grant recipients, individuals who make less than $125,000 per year, and couples who make less than $250,000 per year. Pell Grant recipients will receive up to $20,000 in debt relief while other borrowers will receive up to $10,000 in relief. According to the Biden administration’s estimates, if all borrowers claim the relief to which they are entitled, 43 million families will see a portion of their stu dent debt canceled, while approximately 20 million will see their full balances eliminated.

To help borrowers pay off their student loans, the administration plans to cap monthly pay ments for undergraduate loans to 5% of a borrower’s discretionary income, as opposed to 10%. Additionally, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program will be revitalized, ensuring those who participate in public service receive credit towards loan forgiveness.

Probably the most overlooked section of the Biden administration’s plan is its provision to decrease the cost of higher education. Recently, the Department of Education “terminated col lege accreditors” that allowed universities (typ ically for-profit ones) to defraud their students and Biden has vowed to protect student bor rowers from high costs. However, beyond these steps, it is unclear how the administration plans to hold colleges accountable for raising their prices.

Despite the popularity of debt cancellation, Biden’s plan does not come without criti cism. One of the biggest critiques against the plan is the impact it could have on inflation. Republicans and some economists argue that canceling student debt will exacerbate inflation as borrowers will have more disposable income.

According to economists at Goldman Sachs, however, federal student debt cancellation will only have a marginal effect on inflation.

Unlike stimulus checks, which directly increase income, debt relief increases wealth, which is unlikely to spur spending in the same way. According to the Roosevelt Institute, during these past two years of recovery and uncer tainty, there has been little evidence to suggest that an increase in wealth leads to an increase in spending. Recent metrics from the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts also support these findings.

Additionally, under Biden’s plan, only 20 million Americans will have their student debt com pletely forgiven. The majority of borrowers will continue to have outstanding balances, which will offset any increase in inflation.

While it is unlikely that canceling student debt will negatively impact inflation, it will take its toll on the national debt. The Biden administration has not released estimates on how much stu dent debt cancellation would cost the federal government. However, most economists agree that it would add between $300 billion to $600 billion to the national debt. The danger of accu mulating such a high amount of debt is that it increases the risk of a country defaulting — or failing to pay — its debt. While the chance of the U.S. defaulting on its debt is extremely low, the Government Accountability Office has warned that current levels of federal spending are unsustainable and jeopardize the financial health of the country.

However, these potentially negative economic consequences pale in comparison to the dra matic social impacts debt cancellation will have. Debt relief eliminates barriers to higher education, which provides low-income individu als the opportunity to break the cycle of poverty and achieve economic stability. Moreover, debt cancellation is a crucial step towards addressing systemic racism.

Long-standing and institutionalized racial dis crimination in education, housing, and prop erty seizures has left Black families with less wealth than white families. As a result, Black students are more dependent on student loans. According to the Education Data Initiative, Black college graduates owe an average of $25,000 more in student loans than white college grad uates and are more likely to struggle to pay off their loans, which perpetuates the racial wealth gap. Therefore, Biden’s student debt relief plan will disproportionately help Black borrowers and advance racial equity.

Biden’s student debt plan is truly revolutionary — it extends the hand of government further into the economy than ever before. While some politicians and economists worry about this overreach, the reality is, the student debt crisis can not be solved without sweeping govern ment intervention. The proposed student debt relief plan is in no way a permanent solution, but it buys policymakers time to enact legislation to truly solve the crisis.

While Biden’s plan does have its flaws, it cru cially delivers on providing borrowers immedi ate relief. For too long, Americans have been struggling to balance their budgets under their crippling debt, and Biden’s student debt relief plan is the first step to effectively address this crisis.

Amrita Kulkarni ‘26 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at a.kulkarni@wustl. edu.

Peter Thiel’s New Right-Wing Acolytes

Gabriel Squitieri

Peter Thiel: He’s the Elon Musk of the right. Such a designation is irrelevant now, considering the obsequious bil lionaire Musk has joined forces with the right as well. Nevertheless, I wish not to harp on Mr. Musk. Instead, I find it pertinent to recount and analyze the actions of Peter Thiel as long as we are living in this era. A relatively obscure figure when compared to his fellow tech tycoons, Mr. Thiel is somewhat of an enigma. The co-founder of PayPal does not post on Twitter and is sel dom in the news. Not only has that allowed him to go mostly unnoticed, but he has also been able to influence the American political land scape, making friends in the halls of Congress and funding his acolytes in key races with little noise.

Thiel’s start in politics began as an undergradu ate at Stanford University, where he founded a publication that placed himself and like-minded students in the intensifying culture war. As he rose in the technology sector to become a Silicon Valley tycoon, his political beliefs began to raise eyebrows. In a 2009 essay, arguing in favor of monopolies, he wrote that he “no longer believe[d] that capitalism and democracy are compatible.” Such views — at least the former — come into conflict with his newfound distaste for Big Tech.

While suspicion for Big Tech has become fash ionable among conservatives in recent years,

Thiel has been able to influence the American political landscape, making friends in the halls of Congress and funding his acolytes in key races with little noise.

few have harped on it as much as Thiel. Formerly a member of Facebook’s board of directors, Thiel left in 2019 and has since become increas ingly critical of Big Tech. “The consensus view is again, that it is about large centralization, Google, Google-like governments, that control all the world’s information, in this super central ized way,” Thiel said in a 2021 interview. “Silicon Valley is probably way too enamored of AI, not just for technological reasons, but also because it expresses this left-wing centralized zeitgeist.”

The roots of Theil’s vendetta can be traced back to 2007, when Gawker published an article with the headline “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.” While the article was a combination of disdain for venture capitalist culture that catered to straight white men and praise for Thiel’s suc cess in a sector of the economy that famously shied away from LGBT-run business ventures, the Silicon Valley magnate was furious that he had been outed. A decade later, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape was leaked, and the wrestler, funded by Thiel, filed a lawsuit that would bankrupt the publication. Thiel insisted that the suit was first and foremost a matter of an individual’s right to privacy. While such a view should not be dis missed without consideration, it is especially ironic that Thiel, who claims to be launching a war for free speech and privacy, has aligned himself with the most authoritarian elements of the Republican Party.

His most recent protégé (and former employee), the Trump-endorsed GOP nominee for Arizona’s Senate seat, Blake Masters, has received over $10 million from PACs backed by Thiel. Like his former boss, Masters is a critic of Big Tech, regularly lambasting platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google, claiming they are unfairly targeting conservative voices while catering to “the radical left”, and attacking free speech and privacy in the process. However, there is a blind spot in Masters’

outlook: he is no defender of these principles. In a tweet from May 7th, Masters all but stated that Griswold v. Connecticut — which estab lished the right to purchase and use contracep tion on the basis of privacy — was an overreach by the Supreme Court, which had, in his words, “made up a constitutional right to achieve a political outcome.”

While views such as this are finding newfound popularity on the right, they are not the primary stances that made the Thiel acolyte appealing to so many conservatives, including Donald Trump. Like many conservatives, Masters has made unsubstantiated claims of election fraud. “I think Trump won in 2020,” he stated in a YouTube video. He has embraced a range of explanations for why the former president lost, including ballot harvesting, last-minute changes to election laws in swing states, and Big Tech censorship. Each assertion has gained traction among right-wing circles since 2020.

What sets Masters apart from older Republicans is his attunement to the New Right. A burgeoning conservative movement with a large online presence, the New Right is rapidly gaining adherents among the GOP rank-andfile. The New Right, at least to some extent, chafes at the ideas embraced by so-called RINOs (“Republicans In Name Only”). Viewing figures like Mitt Romney and Mitch McConnell as part of a bygone era, its members somewhat eschew traditional conservative talking points such as free-market economics and govern ment downsizing, hoping instead to inflame the raging culture war. Their motivation to fight the latter is based on a combination of America’s glorified past and grievances pertaining to what they view as the country’s economic, social, and moral decay.

Masters’ campaign is a perfect microcosm of the movement he represents. Tall, slim, and just 35 years old, Masters bears little, if any,

The Thiel protégé’s plans for Social Security should concern every American, but pale in comparison to the assault on freedom that has become a crucial tenet of his campaign.

resemblance to the “Country Club Republicans” who used to make up the rank-and-file of the party and continue to comprise much of its donor base. An incessant poster on Twitter and Instagram, he has used the platforms to dissem inate his message, a combination of populist economic nationalism, extreme social conser vatism, and disdain for political correctness. His campaign announcement video laments glo balization, Big Tech, and Critical Race Theory, saying that “the country [he] grew up in was optimistic. People thought all you had to do was go to school and work hard. You’d be able to buy a house and raise a family, but it hasn’t worked out that way”.

Masters is right to criticize the political class for its inability to minimize the effects of glo balization, including deindustrialization, a decline in living standards, and rising wealth inequality. However, he has also demonstrated a willingness to attack the same downtrod den Americans he claims to represent. His plans to privatize water and Social Security, while extreme, do not deviate from Republican orthodoxy. In this sense, he is a standard GOP candidate.

Master’s plans for Social Security should con cern every American, but it pales in comparison to the assault on freedom that has become a crucial tenet of his campaign. Radically antichoice, Masters has gone further than most

“moderate” Republicans in his rhetoric. In addition to celebrating the overturning of Roe v. Wade, he has called abortion “demonic,” advocated for a national ban on abortion, lent his support to Arizona’s 15-week ban (with no exceptions for rape and incest), and backed a fetal personhood bill.

None of these views on a woman’s right to choose conform with the libertarianism to which Thiel and Masters formerly subscribed. Even more worryingly, Masters has flirted with the “Great Replacement Theory,” a far-right conspiracy theory that warns of forced demo graphic changes through mass immigration that will ultimately produce a majority-minority country. The theory’s proponents maintain that all of this will be brought about by cultural and political elites intent on destroying America and its way of life.

Granted, the version of the conspiracy theory Masters promotes is sanitized in that it contains fewer references to George Soros and the white race specifically, but it is nonetheless concern ing. Masters has accused the Democratic Party of trying to change the ethnic composition of the country as part of its larger plan to achieve a permanent hold on power. The alleged plan is simple: provide amnesty to illegal immigrants and use their votes to win elections.

While the most notable among his cohort, Masters is not the only GOP candidate hop ing to ride an anti-immigrant wave to victory. Ohio’s J.D. Vance, who is also Trump-endorsed and Thiel-funded, has used similar rhetoric in his race. In a television ad, Vance accused Joe Biden of implementing an open borders policy that allowed fentanyl and illegal immigrants, whom he referred to as “Democrat voters,” to pour into the country. In an interview with Gateway Pundit, Vance asked, “If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and

their kids with this deadly fentanyl?”

Vance’s rhetoric is less extreme than that of his Arizona counterpart, but the Thiel acolytes are both propagating the same idea: Unless some one stops Joe Biden and the left, they’ll use their power to bring about demographic changes and marginalize white Americans. Both candidates, as well as others funded by Thiel, are using a combination of economic populism and farright talking points on immigration to justify a brand of authoritarian politics that defines the New Right.

To understand this movement and the political hopefuls representing it, one must understand Thiel. Like those he is funding, Thiel’s public persona is that of a culture warrior launching a crusade against liberal bodies, namely cor porations and governing institutions, and the social and political agenda that they purvey. The image he and his acolytes have crafted of them selves, however, is a trojan horse for an agenda that combines the GOP’s traditional eagerness to dismantle popular government programs with reactionary and far-right positions on social issues as well as an increasingly obvious authoritarianism.

Gabriel Squitieri ‘23 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences and can be reached at gabriel.s@wustl.edu.

Vindication: Biden’s Theory of the Case

Josh DeLuca Design by Eric Kim

Though the candidates change, every election cycle the American people hear the same refrains: complaints about “gridlock” in Washington and promises to break through and deliver substantive changes. And yet, year after year, substantive legisla tion has largely eluded both presidents and Congress. However, after a string of legislative victories this summer, perhaps President Biden has developed a model for producing results: sincerely reach across the aisle, but if necessary, go at it alone and get things done.

Indeed, Biden articulated such a vision

throughout the 2020 campaign. As a candidate, more than anything else, and more than any singular policy initiative or legislative agenda, Joe Biden promised to “restore the soul of the nation.” Biden cast himself as a steady hand, righting the ship after four years of riding the rough seas. He also played up his centrist credentials, a Washington veteran looking to restore the era of gladhanding and dealmaking that had proved illusive in the age of increasing partisanship.

However, while this commitment to restore nor malcy to the presidency was unquestionably

the prevailing drive of the Biden campaign, it was far from the only promise Biden made as a candidate. Evoking FDR during his speech at the Democratic National Convention, Biden prom ised to pursue a litany of liberal policy goals from vastly expanding the social safety net and investing heavily in sustainable energy to stu dent loan forgiveness.

During the campaign, these dueling promises, centrist certainty and liberal reform, served candidate Biden well. Forming a coalition of pro gressives, independents, and some Republicans, Biden secured the presidency, earning the most

Biden’s theory has been vindicated: Work across the aisle whenever possible, but don’t be afraid of doing it alone.

votes ever by a presidential candidate. While these campaign commitments certainly broad ened Biden’s electoral appeal, they have made Biden’s job governing all the more difficult.

To progressives, Biden’s presidency was the best chance to enact meaningful, transformative change. Anything short would be squandering a great opportunity. To moderates and inde pendents, Biden’s election was not a mandate for transformative change, but rather a rebuke of the chaotic Trump years. As Representative Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) told the New York Times, “Nobody elected [Biden] to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”

Almost inevitably, every action he took would surely upset a portion of Biden’s electorate. As the first year of Biden’s presidency unfolded, the American people watched these compli cated dynamics play out in real-time. When Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan by a party-line vote, Republicans derided Biden as just another partisan Democrat. Later that year, when Biden appeared dead set on reaching a bipartisan deal on infrastructure investments, some Democrats grumbled that negotiating with Republicans was a fool's errand.

And yet, though it has taken time to come to fruition, perhaps Biden’s theory has been vin dicated: work in a bipartisan fashion whenever possible, but don’t be afraid of doing it alone. Over the past year and a half, Biden has walked this legislative tightrope on his way to a litany of legislative wins.

On the one hand, Biden has not shied away from encouraging Democratic colleagues to ram bills past unified Republican opposition. At Biden’s urging, Congressional Democrats passed The American Rescue Plan, delivering much-needed relief to struggling families. This summer,

Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, lowering the cost of prescription drugs, making the largest-ever investment in clean energy, and extending health insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. While, of course, progres sives wish that these bills had gone even further, they represent substantial moves forwarding the Democratic agenda.

Perhaps more impressive, however, has been Biden’s ability to work across the aisle and deliver Republican votes for substantial legislation. Last year, 17 Senate Republicans, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell joined Democrats in passing the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, an investment of a trillion dollars in improving our nation’s infrastructure. This summer, Biden’s bipartisan streak kicked into high gear. The most consequential gun safety bill in almost three decades. Funding that will invest in semi conductor chip manufacturing and help the U.S. compete with China. Expanding VA benefits to veterans exposed to burn pits. All of these bills passed with significant bipartisan support.

Of course, the President’s penchant for deal making should not come as a surprise. This President is a 36-year veteran of the Senate, who made a career forging friendships across the aisle. Indeed, he often reminisces, almost whimsically, about his Senate days when he’d “fight like hell” with segregationists, but then

go to lunch with them. As Vice President, Biden was often dispatched to Capitol Hill to bargain with McConnell, a task that President Obama seemed to loathe, but one that Biden relished. Needless to say, working across the aisle is truly at the core of Biden’s political identity, and as president, it has resulted in several victories for the American people.

While it may not be reflected in poll numbers or coverage of the administration, Biden deserves credit for doing what many deemed impossi ble: delivering big wins on Democratic priorities while working across the aisle to find common ground. Indeed, maybe just maybe, after nearly 50 years in Washington, President Biden knows a thing or two about how to get things done.

Josh DeLuca ‘23 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at joshdeluca@wustl. edu.

While these campaign commitments certainly broadened Biden’s electoral appeal, they made Biden’s job governing all the more difficult.

Hungary for Power: Orbán in America

Will Gunter, Staff Editor

As the latest Conservative Political Action Conference — the premier con ference for American conservatives — kicked off in early August, the crowd welcomed a seemingly unlikely guest. Before headliners such as Ted Cruz and Donald Trump took the stage in Dallas, Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán had the podium. Orbán’s invita tion to CPAC elicited widespread backlash. The Prime Minister’s 12-year rule has been associ ated with unfair elections, infringements on civil liberties, and open discrimination against LQBT and Roma communities. Why, then, would the Hungarian despot be welcomed at a conference of America’s most prominent conservatives?

Far from unforeseen, Orbán’s CPAC speech was the culmination of a mutual affinity brewing between the Prime Minister and the American right — a relationship that reveals the changing definition of what it means to be a conservative in the United States.

The conference in Dallas wasn’t the first meet ing between Orban and powerful American conservatives. The Hungarian leader has invited former Vice President Mike Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to conferences on conser vative values in his country, and hosted the firstever CPAC held outside of the United States in Budapest. Orbán has also collaborated with for mer Trump administration official Steve Bannon on strategy for the 2019 European Parliament Elections, and won a much-coveted invitation to meet with Trump at the White House that same year.

Orban’s popularity among the American right has permeated from the elite into the public. Tucker Carlson, the TV host whose primetime show on Fox News regularly garners more than 3 million viewers per night, routinely lauds the Prime Minister’s accomplishments. Carlson traveled to Hungary last year to interview Orbán and film a sympathetic documentary about the leader. Carlson’s adoring coverage has put the Hungarian leader firmly at the center of the

conservative imagination.

Since his return to power in 2010, Orbán’s gov ernment has delivered on several high-priority issues for the contemporary American right. Hungary has positioned itself as a bulwark against mass immigration, drawing the ire of European Union officials by refusing to com ply with Brussels’ liberal immigration policies. Orbán has presided over the construction of a border wall and has defied an EU court ruling that attempted to strike down Hungary’s policy of deporting migrants to Serbia. “We actually built that wall,” he proclaimed at his speech in Dallas, to a vigorous round of applause.

Orbán has also positioned himself as Europe’s premier warrior against “wokeness,” passing legislation targeted at progressive universities and LGBT rights. The Prime Minister dismantled gender studies programs at all Hungarian uni versities, and expelled the prestigious Central European University from the country due to its alleged promotion of “gender ideology.” His government has severely restricted education about gender and sexuality in public schools in a similar fashion to Governor Ron DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida. Orbán’s LGBT policies, however, go far beyond that. Same-sex couples are not allowed to marry or adopt chil dren, while transgender people are not legally recognized. Orbán has become popular among American conservatives through a number of achievements that closely mirror their priorities, but the full extent of his policies are much more draconian than what these Americans publicly support.

Orbán’s popularity among conservatives abroad is not sheer coincidence. His global profile is the result of a meticulous strategy to promote and soften his image. Orbán has positioned himself as an international leader and bene factor of conservatism, sponsoring fellowships in Budapest for right-wing intellectuals and funding conservative institutions across the

world. Perhaps his most ambitious project on this front is his donation of $1.7 billion of pub lic funds, equivalent to 1% of Hungary’s GDP, to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium: a private university constructing a new campus to attract conservative intellectuals and train a student population of 10,000. According to New York Times journalist Kenneth Vogel, “the effort’s main impact has been to bolster Mr. Orbán’s image as a conservative leader on the world stage — and to counter his reputation as an authoritarian nationalist who is cozying up to Russia and China.”

Courting the American right is a key diplomatic goal for Orbán. Garnering the support of promi nent political figures in the United States boosts Orban legitimacy on the international stage — an important task in the face of increasing pres sure from domestic opposition, the European Union, and pro-democracy non-governmental organizations raising concerns about his rule.

Orbán’s successful ploy to appeal to the American right is indicative of the shifting polit ical dynamics among conservatives in the U.S. and within the Republican Party. His political program is focused on forging and maintaining a conservative culture within his nation. In his speech at CPAC, he highlights his cultural com mitments, declaring, “politics, my friends, is not enough. This war is a culture war.” He couches all of his legislative accomplishments in cultural terms. Curbing freedom of expression for LGBT

Orbán’s CPAC speech was the culmination of a mutual affinity brewing between the Prime Minister and the American right.

people and intellectual freedom for academics are framed as measures to protect traditional Hungarian values against “progressive liberal hegemony.” Hungary’s strict immigration poli cies are designed not to protect the economic interests of Hungarian citizens, but to defend the nation in “the clash of civilizations.” Even the Hungarian tax regime, which provides tax breaks to mothers with many children, is jus tified by its effect on Hungarian culture rather than its economic impact.

This strategy of influencing culture through policy in Hungary mirrors the pivot away from economic issues within the Republican party. Formerly a party intensely committed to lower ing taxes, spending, regulation, and barriers to trade, the GOP has increasingly eschewed these commitments in favor of waging a full-scale cul ture war. Since the nomination of Donald Trump, Republicans have become economically ambig uous. Although Republicans cut taxes in 2017, the Trump administration raised tariffs and spending each year in its tenure. Furthermore, the victorious Trump distinguished himself within the 2016 Republican primary field by opposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Since Trump’s election, numerous politicians within the party have touted breaking up or banning corporations viewed as hostile to their interests, such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley’s “Break Up Big Tech” bill. In the modern GOP, as in Hungary, deficit reduction, deregula tion and other tenets of economic conservatism play second fiddle to the battle over cultural issues.

The conservative culture war issues in America are largely similar to the matters Orbán addresses thousands of miles away. “Wokeness” is the preeminent target, and right-wingers from Hungary to the United States view it as a loom ing threat to society as we know it. Under a massive electronic banner that read “Awake Not Woke,” Orbán described himself as “a leader of a country that is under the siege of progressive

liberals” to his CPAC audience. As the European bulwark against this siege, Orbán continued, “we have to be brave enough to address even the most sensitive questions: migration, gender and the clash of civilizations.” These issues typ ify the political priorities for the new American right. A brutally hard line on immigration pro

Although the Hungarian leader’s advice sounds cliché, his recommendation has frightening implications in the context of his term in office. Orbán has proudly dubbed his system of gov ernment an “illiberal democracy,” under which the will of the majority reigns supreme over minority protections and liberal rights. While thoroughly illiberal, Orbán’s Hungary may be losing its democracy. Through extreme ger rymandering, election procedures that favor the Orbán-supporting Hungarian diaspora, and nonsensical electoral mechanics, Orbán’s Fidesz party has been able to win a superma jority of seats with about half of the vote. This disproportionality was most severe in the 2014 and 2018 elections, where Fidesz retained its supermajority with only 44 and 47 percent of the popular vote, respectively.

pelled Donald Trump to the Republican pres idential nomination in 2016, and the years since in the U.S. have seen the emergence of an anti-trans moral panic and an increasingly contentious conflict between progressive and traditionalist values on matters such as race and abortion.

Hardly the only social conservative world leader today, what sets Orbán apart is his reputation as a fighter. When, as he views it, the world is under attack by progressive ideology, Orbán believes it is necessary to remove any barrier to protecting society against it. The Prime Minister has no qualms about putting contemporary cul tural issues in such apocalyptic terms. “Today's progressives try to separate western civilization from its Christian roots once again,” Orbán said at the Texas conference. “They are crossing a line that should never be crossed.”

Thus, Orbán proclaimed that he is left with no choice but to fight, saying, “the key to our success story is that when we fight, we give at least 100%... you cannot win half-heartedly. You either give everything you've got and win, or play it safe and lose.”

Parallels abound between the unrepresen tative electoral institutions in Hungary and Republican-controlled states in the U.S.. The antidemocratic streak of the American right has been vocalized and emboldened by Trump’s election denialism, but has been silently sup ported for decades. GOP legislatures have ger rymandered their states to devastating effect, creating minority rule in numerous states and occasionally nationwide. Systemic voter sup pression efforts in red states, meanwhile, mir ror Orbán’s self-serving manipulation of the franchise. Further, American institutions like the Electoral College and Senate illogically empower a rump conservative minority, as does the election system in Hungary. On both sides of the Atlantic, these antidemocratic practices are easily justified. With a progressive left ready to attack, conservatives must use any and all leverage to keep the threat at bay. Thus, the emerging affinity for Victor Orbán on the American right is not in spite of his illiberal and authoritarian rule, but because of it.

Will Gunter ‘25 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at gunter.w@wustl.edu.

Thus, the emerging affinity for Victor Orbán on the American right is not in spite of his illiberal and authoritarian rule, but because of it.

Every Week Should Be Infrastructure Week

Lara Briggs, Featured Writer

Artwork by Orquidea Campbell-Espinoza

In America, we generally expect that when you turn on your faucet, a) you will receive water, and b) it’ll be relatively clean. The processes of getting our tap water clean and to our homes is out of sight and out of mind, and the same can be said for most other infrastructure. We turn on our lights, we turn up the heat, we turn on the tap, and we expect it to work. Until it doesn’t.

A 2018 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that in 2015, over 21 million Americans were reliant on a water system that violated Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) health standards. Every so often, these failures are significant enough that they make the news. One of the most infamous cases of drinking water infrastruc tural and administrational failure happened in Flint, Michigan. A change in the city’s water source led to corrosion in lead pipes, exposing Flint residents to levels of lead far higher than allowed under EPA regula tions, along with their serious public health effects. Eight years on, the Flint crisis is still ongoing, and city residents are continuing to fight for clean water and compensation for lead poisoning.

Flint is far from alone. Across the board, most infrastructure is critically underfunded and dangerously close to failure. Drinking water is no exception. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ Infrastructure Report Card rated the nation’s drinking water a Cand stated that “[f]unding for drinking water

infrastructure has not kept pace with the growing need to address aging infrastruc ture systems, and current funding sources do not meet the total needs.” Adding to the problem is climate change, which is making extreme weather events occur more often and with greater intensity. More climate-re silient infrastructure won’t be built if existing infrastructure is chronically underfunded and out-of-date.

This summer, another city was hit with a water crisis. Jackson, Mississippi experienced a failure of its major water treatment plant following heavy rains and flooding, leaving the city of around 150,000 peo ple without clean drinking water. The catastrophic failure of water systems upended life for Jackson residents. USA News reported that the plant failure meant schools and businesses were forced to close. In addition to having to find water to drink, bathe, and cook, some residents were unable to go to work or find childcare. The city’s boil-water notice was recently lifted, but the crisis isn’t over yet, and pub lic trust in these basic services has dropped dramatically.

The catalyst for this failure was a major storm, but the city’s infrastructure had been on the decline far before the storm hit. Going back as far as the 1950s, white flight from Jackson began a cycle of underinvest ment. As wealthier white residents left the city, lower-income families remained, and the tax base of Jackson shifted. Most of Jackson’s residents, who are bearing the brunt of this water crisis and others, are Black. The deep roots of environmental rac ism and classism have continued to plague the city’s infrastructure. This latest crisis, while noteworthy, is one in a long line of water problems for the city. Another recent crisis in February 2021 led to a monthlong boil-water advisory.

Perhaps the worst part of the Jackson water crisis is that the city and its residents knew about the problems with the drinking water system before the catastrophe began. Mississippi’s government actively avoided the city’s requests for more funds to fix their water system. In 2021, the city requested $47 million in state funds to improve their water system, but the state only provided $3 million. Yet the state government has blamed the city’s management and under staffing as the cause of the crisis. The state’s leaders have expressed their disdain for the city in unsubtle ways; Mississippi governor Tate Reeves, a month into the crisis, quipped that “as always,” today was “a great day to not be in Jackson.”

No matter who’s to blame, more funding is essential to prevent another water crisis in Jackson or any other city in the nation. The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality grant program has $450 million from the American Rescue Plan available for drinking water, wastewater, and storm water projects. Yet in a press conference, Jackson mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba claimed that fixing Jackson’s water distri bution problems would cost at least $1 bil lion. At the national level, $50 billion of the $550 billion of the Biden Administration’s 2021 infrastructure package was devoted to drinking water, touted by the administration as “the largest investment in clean drink ing water and wastewater infrastructure in American history.” While this is laudable, estimates for what it would cost to totally fix this country’s water infrastructure range from $750 billion to over $1 trillion.

And it’s not just water that’s underfunded and failing. The February 2021 storm that caused Jackson’s boil-water advi sory also took down infrastructure further west, for many of the same reasons as the Jackson crisis — underfunding; aging,

non-climate-resilient infrastructure; failures of the government (mostly at the state level) to adequately prevent a crisis. This wasn’t a story primarily about water, but about electricity. This is the same storm that infa mously took down Texas’ power grid.

With Jackson, the water crisis can be traced back to at least the 1950s and 1960s, where the changing tax base of the city kickstarted a vicious cycle of underinvestment. In Texas, we can point to 1999 and the deregulation of the Texas grid, leaving it critically under funded, mismanaged, and vulnerable. A main component of Texas’ grid deregulation was that it made Texas its own standalone grid, separated from the other two national electricity grids. This culminated in key infrastructure freezing during the storm, and without the ability to draw electricity from other grids, millions were left without power, causing many people to lose heat and clean water. Over 200 people died because of the blackout.

As with water infrastructure, the Texas grid isn’t the only electricity system feel ing strained. Earlier this month, California narrowly avoided blackouts as heat waves lead to skyrocketing electricity demand. And even more recently than the Jackson crisis, Hurricane Fiona devastated Puerto Rico’s power grid, which was still extremely fragile after Hurricane Maria five years prior. The United States’ energy infrastructure

received a C-, the same grade as drinking water infrastructure, from the American Society of Civil Engineers, who also claim in their analysis that severe weather was the predominant cause of transmission outages from 2014-2018. The link between climate change and severe weather will only make these outages more likely.

The catastrophe in Texas might have been avoided, or the damage significantly reduced, had Texas heeded the advice of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) following a similar blackout almost exactly ten years prior in February 2011. In a report on that blackout, one of FERC’s key findings was that while the February 2011 storm was uncommon, it was not unprec edented and entirely unexpected. Previous winter storms had led to recommenda tions that Texas weatherize its grid — that is, make it more storm-resilient and able to operate in cold weather.

This might sound suspiciously like the dom inant talking point pushed by renewable energy opponents during the storm. The grid failed, goes the narrative, because wind turbines froze, and the turbine failures could not provide enough electricity to the grid. This is misleading at best. For one, wind turbines can operate perfectly in much colder climates than Texas; one only needs to look to the proliferation of wind power in Scandinavia to conclude as much. But it’s true — the wind turbines in Texas did freeze. So did everything else. A Texas Tribune arti cle in the wake of the grid failure estimated that wind power only made up about 7% of the state’s electricity mix, while around 80% came from natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy. A senior director for ERCOT, Texas’ grid regulators, shared with reporters that the main cause of the blackouts came from natural gas failures. And the state government, despite being warned of this exact

scenario at least ten years prior, did not take the actions necessary to prevent it from happening.

The rhetoric and finger-pointing that emerged in Texas last year and Jackson this year only underscore a bitter truth about American infrastructure: we’re not pay ing enough attention to it. Either we direct our attention to the infrastructure we can most easily see, like roads and bridges, which received $110 billion in the Biden Administration’s funding package that promised the record $50 billion to clean water. Or, more accurately, the people with the most power to fix the situation aren’t paying enough attention. Federal regulators were ringing the alarm about the Texas grid for over a decade, and Jackson has been facing water failure after water failure. Both calls went unheard by their respective state governments.

So, how do we move forward from here? The simple yet painful answer is that we need to boost infrastructure funding across the board. This isn’t what governments and taxpayers want to hear, at least for the short term — just look at Mayor Lumumba’s price tag for fixing Jackson’s water system. But taking a longer view, if we fail to address the cracks in the system, they’ll only grow. Jackson, Texas, and cities and states around the country shouldn’t have to cross their fin gers every time a storm hits and hope for the best. The longer we wait to fund infra structure projects, the more expensive their price tag becomes. Underinvestment adds up. How many crises will we experience before we take action?

Lara Briggs ‘24 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at b.lara@wustl.edu

So, how do we move forward from here? The simple yet painful answer is that we need to boost infrastructure funding across the board.

Life After Dobbs: A Socioeconomic Take

William Yoo

As the Dobbs v. Jackson decision looms and its consequences are feared yet not entirely known, the justifications made by the Supreme Court have become major points of contention in public discourse. While not as obvious as medicine or political science, economics — particularly socioeconomics — is an intrinsic facet of abortion that counters fun damental claims in the Dobbs decision. A socio economic view of the aftermath of Dobbs will pick up on existing and novel trends that would otherwise be overlooked when exclusively observing abortion medically or politically.

To understand the value of a socioeconomic perspective, the nature of the Court’s justifica tions must be understood. The Court pushed to unratify abortion as a constitutional right based on five factors that range in credibility. For example, the workability factor states that, as per Planned Parenthood v. Casey, consis tently and predictably differentiating between a permissible and unconstitutional abortion restriction proved to be impossible. This empir ically holds: Appellate courts have continually disagreed on the legality of parental notification rules, medical procedures, and other matters. On the other hand, the Court sees the broad impact of Roe v. Wade and Casey as an undue authority, encroaching on “unrelated legal doc trines.” While the Court argues this encroach ment violates its standards of practice, there are various counterarguments to be made, such as the intersectionality of abortion. Roe and Casey may have adopted a broad authority because they have clear applications beyond the med ical context. Alas, defining encroachment and validating its presence in Roe and Casey is not as clear as the conflicts among the appellate courts.

The fifth factor, reliance, is perhaps the least credible and most contentious. The follow ing quotation highlights the weakest point of this factor — "the alleged inability to measure the impact of abortion rights." The quotation

originates from a larger section of the Court’s majority opinion on reliance interests in Casey. Reliance is legally defined as a person’s depen dency on the statements or actions of another person or entity. The controlling opinion in Casey, however, could not assess reliance in its conventional sense, instead perceiving it more abstractly: the opinion states that intimate deci sions regarding relationships, personal views, and societal belonging have been made based on the availability of abortion; that control over reproductive processes has provided socioeco nomic equality for women. On reliance interests in Dobbs, the Court refutes:

When a concrete reliance interest is asserted, courts are equipped to evaluate the claim, but assessing the novel and intangible form of reliance endorsed by the Casey plural ity is another matter. That form of reliance depends on an empirical question that is hard for anyone — and in particular, for a court — to assess, namely, the effect of the abortion right on society and in particular on the lives of women.

Associate Justice Samuel Alito, who delivered the majority opinion, says later that the Casey decision was an overstep of the Court’s consti tutionally afforded powers and was attempting to impose its social and economic beliefs onto legislative bodies.

Disregarding the non-inclusive use of “women” throughout the opinion, the claimed difficulty in assessing the social impacts of abortion access comes off as flagrant ignorance of the exten sive body of literature that suggests otherwise. Indeed, the academic literature on the right to abortion is diverse in discipline. One article explores sexism as an explanation for politi cal differences in abortion support — another rethinks the definition of abortion and its per missibility primarily through Islamic law. Others examine abortion as scholars of media stud ies, bioethics, computer science, international

politics, and socioeconomics.

While not obvious, analyzing the impacts of abortion socioeconomically is not novel. The Brookings Institution concurs in a report on the effect of abortion access on women’s lives: decades of economics research show a clear, causal link between abortion access and edu cation, earnings, careers, and life outcomes for the children of birthing parents. The research observes economics as the study of human decisions beyond the paltry perspective of markets and resource scarcity; then, socioeco nomics is the study of people’s decisions in shaping and being shaped by social processes. As exemplified by the deliberation on reliance interests, abortion concerns decisions beyond health needs and legal intricacies. It is a matter of forming long-term relationships and starting new lives; conferring socioeconomic equality and independence for demographics that have been historically suppressed in this regard — constructing environments for individuals, families, and communities to support their live lihoods independently. An economic perspec tive expands analysis through the literature, tools, and models of the discipline, providing a more holistic view of decisions and impacts related to abortion, post-Dobbs especially.

The current state of the abortion macroecon omy is fundamental in this analysis. Now out of the domain of the federal government, abortion rights are delegated to the states as per the Tenth Amendment. The New York Times shows that about half of the U.S. have, or are expected to, enact abortion bans or other gestational lim its. Some states are in a gray area as abortion remains legal in some states either because bans have been blocked or because a ban is coming. Despite the uncertainty in legislation, this split provides grounds for a more robust analysis. Changes will have a clear and common cause (Dobbs) which allows for impacts to be better understood, analyzed, and generalized for making predictions.

Given the broad, social implications of the issue at hand, it is likely that many impacts of abor tion bans will only take place over the long-term. As such, projections are necessary to track the impact of these bans. While some impacts may be entirely new phenomena (thus difficult to predict), others will almost certainly play out, particularly as trends reverse. These include the increase in education, labor force participation, occupational prestige, and earnings for women and especially Black women following abortion legalization — generational improvements in long-term outcomes for children in terms of poverty and educational attainment; and more.

One impact specific to Missouri is a preg nant person’s virtual inability to get divorced. According to the Revised Statutes of Missouri, Statute 452.310 (5) requires the pregnancy status of a “wife” to be included in a divorce petition. While temporary orders can be issued for matters such as property, Missouri judges typically choose not to finalize a divorce until birth or a pregnancy-ending event (e.g., mis carriage). To be clear, there are no laws that strictly prohibit a divorce from being finalized given these conditions, but that fact is argu ably worse: it is then a matter of shifting senti ments among judges rather than a simple policy change. With current bureaucratic processes in mind, this delay initially almost seems justified. Obviously, a child needs to exist for custody to be provisioned, hence the need to wait for the full pregnancy to see if there will be a child at all. Additionally, the divorce petition requires the

Social Security number of all parties involved, including each child. Other matters concern the child’s birthday, the school they attend, and pro spective medical needs. But is it necessary for a judge to delay the entire proceeding for these matters when child custody can already be modified post-divorce in Missouri? This matter is further complicated by the fact that Missouri has a full ban on abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest following Dobbs. In essence, pregnant people in Missouri are barred from getting divorced so long as they are carrying the child, all because of the apparatus of policies that allow judges to justify delaying the process.

An instance of this situation has already been reported by the Riverfront Times about Danielle Drake, an attorney based in the Lake of the Ozarks (Missouri). After finding out her hus band was having an affair, she filed for divorce but found out she was pregnant soon after. As a family attorney, Drake knew she had to file an amended petition and knew how her pregnancy would affect the divorce proceedings. Drake’s situation seems to be a first following Dobbs, but it certainly won’t be the last.

Given that divorce can give way to benefits such as greater personal happiness and better parent-child relationships, it is possible that divorces restricted by one partner’s pregnancy status in states with abortion bans will reverse these benefits. Improving parent-child relation ships, for example, may give way to a parent ing style similar to Annette Lareau’s concept

of concerted cultivation that allows children to have better interactions with institutions, awareness of their talents and skills, and more, leading to improved socioeconomic outcomes for them. As such, restrictive petitioning paired with reduced or no access to abortions could worsen parent-child relationships, gravely rein forcing single-parenthood as a determinant of a child’s future wages, education attainment, and health outcomes.

Regardless of the range of views on abortion, socioeconomic research has consistently shown abortion is directly linked to broad improve ments in the lives of birthing parents, divorced or otherwise, especially for non-white indi viduals. The choice of whether, when, and the circumstances under which an adult chooses to birth a child is what allows them to become more educated, earn more, and shape the lives of their children for the better. By claiming the social impacts of abortion to be difficult to mea sure, Justice Alito and his concurrents reject the decades of evidence proving otherwise. It has become imperative, now more than ever, for this evidence to be brought to greater attention and for the aftermath of the Dobbs decision to be critically analyzed as a socioeconomic matter.

William Yoo ‘25 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at williamyoo@wustl. edu.

Headlines on the Horizon

Hannah Richardson

Turning on the news these days is daunt ing. Waking up to see social media and news headlines telling of yet another tragedy or natural disaster. Videos of people losing their homes and loved ones seem to fill timelines weekly. From severe wildfires and heat waves to sudden flash floods, the climate crisis has begun making its presence known more and more in the past few years. This apocalyp tic weather may seem independent of current weather and climate patterns, but it is not going away anytime soon.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), there are many environmental rea sons behind the severity of these natural disas ters. Temperatures exponentially rising across the globe brings not only the risk of extreme droughts and forest fires, but also the threat of water evaporating into the atmosphere which increases the intensity of rapidly forming mega storms. This has been a serious issue for the U.S. and will only continue to be one moving forward. This is quite evident when looking at the recent catastrophes that unfolded this sum mer not only here in St. Louis, but also in Texas and Kentucky, where many people lost their lives due to extreme flash flooding and severe storms. 2020 and 2021 were recorded as some of the worst years in terms of climatic events, with 97 natural disasters taking place in 2021, and 2020 breaking records with 22 separate billion-dollar climate tragedies occurring across the country. These trends are not random, and the longer society continues to deny and demean the clear threats of climate change, the more these severe weather events will continue to become detrimental to humankind.

It is an understatement to say that the U.S. gov ernment and other governing bodies around the world have not taken adequate action to fight the effects of climate change, but with the recent passing of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), things may be beginning to move in the right direction. This bill includes a consider able climate package that “invests $369 billion in energy, climate, and justice over 20 years,” according to the Natural Resources and Defense

Council. With this much funding being put forth to help stop the effects of climate change and create new conservation methods, there is still hope for the environment and for the future of our planet. While this is definitely good news, there are still many people and leaders who do not see the dire importance of addressing the current climate crisis. The IRA was a huge step in the right direction for climate policy in the U.S., but the opposition it faced in congress by right-wing science deniers still landed a large blow to what could have been the potential for even more funding and legislative action. With this reckless ignorance comes a lack of action and a loss of momentum towards a greener tomorrow.

For years, researchers have been saying if our atmosphere warms more than 1.5 degrees Celsius then we have passed the turning point of preventing climatic catastrophe. At our current rate of emissions, society is scheduled to pass this mark within the next 10 years. While this is more than concerning for many economically well-developed countries, it is even grimmer for poorer countries that will be disproportionately affected due to their lack of natural disaster infrastructure, such as seawalls and storm bar riers. This should be further reason to pass leg islation and help fight climate change because our actions, or rather lack thereof, not only put Americans at risk, but the entire world.

Looking to the future, scientists are warning of a warmer atmosphere, increased temperatures and acidity in our oceans, rising sea levels, and continued drastic changes to current weather patterns. These are just the guaranteed effects

of climate change. There is so much uncertainty surrounding the future of the climate crisis. Even looking back at other periods of time in Earth’s history where there were similar climatic shifts occurring, because there were no man-made fossil fuels or extreme synthetic factors contrib uting to the situation, there is no way for scien tists and historians to accurately predict what is to come. Moving forward, it is so important that our elected officials be willing to fight for envi ronmental funding and packages, like the IRA, that are going to help push the U.S. in a more environmentally conservative direction. This is our responsibility. If we are unable to bring about change to our current climate negligence, then we will only continue to see these drastic and fatal effects day after day and week after week. If we don’t change now, news headlines will not only become graver, but they will also become more familiar as your own towns and loved ones are the ones being subjected to the horrors of climate change.

Hannah Richardson ‘23 studies in the College of Arts & Science. She can be reached at hrichardson@ wustl.edu.

This apocalyptic weather may seem independent of current weather and climate patterns, but it is not going away anytime soon.

Syria: A Decade Later, the War Rages On

Phillip Lisun

When the Arab Spring ignited the Middle East and North Africa in late 2010, people could only spec ulate about the kind of impact it would have. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria could only guess that the pro-democracy movement would knock on his door. Yet in 2011,that is just what happened. Following the detention and torture of a group of teenagers accused of political graf fiti, protests erupted and the country descended into unrest. In response, the Assad regime had one message: regime change was not an option.

be up to 600,000. The UN further estimates 6.7 million displaced persons internally and 6.6 mil lion refugees. To put this into perspective, the populations of Missouri and Illinois are 6.1 and 12.7 million respectively. More than half of the refugees have fled to neighboring Turkey, with Lebanon and Jordan hosting the next most refu gees. Europe and the United States have decried the Syrian refugee crisis, while hosting a tiny fraction of total refugees.

civilians of Syria have suffered the utmost.

Bashar al-Assad took power after his father, Hafez al-Assad, died in 2000. Initially suggest ing reforms after his ascension to the presi dency, Assad offered a new hope for Syria and the region. Those hopes, however, were not realized. Assad suffered immense political tur moil in Syria leading up to the civil war. Severe drought, economic chaos, and unrest spread throughout the country. The status quo was no longer enough for his regime to go unchallenged. But for Assad, the costs of stepping down were too great. Since his father took power, the Assad regime has worked to empower regime loyals while suppressing the 70% Sunni majority in Syria. If Assad were to step down, he would lose all his power within the nation. At worst, his dic tatorship could face harsh repercussions. Thus, Assad’s only way to guarantee his continued power and rule is to continue the civil war.

The Syrian people, rather than Assad, have faced most of the consequences related to war. The United Nations (UN) estimates 306,887 civilian deaths have occurred as of June 2022. Total deaths, however, have been estimated to

Though conventional weapons alone would be enough to leave a perpetual impact of the war, Assad’s regime's use of chemical weapons has done irreparable harm to Syria. In the summer of 2013, the use of sarin gas in the suburbs of the Ghouta region killed approximately 1,400 civilians. Despite the Assad regime’s insistence to the contrary, the use of these chemical weap ons has continued throughout the war. The impact of deaths and displacement will forever stain Syria’s history. Entire cities, communities, families, and individuals have been destroyed or uprooted. The war has slashed wounds that even time will not be able to heal.

The onset of the civil war involved several groups contributing to the fight. Among them were the Syrian Armed Forces, several rebel groups, Turkish forces, and extremist groups such as the Islamic State (IS). Soon after the onset of war, many of these groups were reported to be targeting civilians. Several extremist groups, including IS, emerged from the war. Foreign powers, too, were involved in the war in various ways: Notably, Russia and Iran backed Assad’s regime providing the Syrian military with weapons, combat support, and active involvement. The United States has also backed several rebel groups, with poor results. Eventually, Western support for anti-regime militias dwindled. Turkey launched an incursion into northern Syria, backing rebel groups and throwing the Kurd minority that lived there into a humanitarian crisis. No side has been without blame. The one fact that remains clear is the

This March, the war will enter its twelfth year. Though the war has continued in the background through occasional UN reports and news sto ries, it has faded from mainstream news cycles and popular attention. Yet the impact and the costs of war will not fade into the background as easily. The harsh reality faced by the Syrian pop ulation and the pall that has covered the nation is perpetual. The costs of war shook the world once again in 2022 with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Europe has yet again been reminded of the intangible darkness that war brings to a continent. Though many in the West may have forgotten about Syria, its impact will be felt for the remainder of this century and beyond.

We ought not treat the impact of the Syrian Civil War as mere statistics, but understand the grave reality of the darkness of war. Only then can we, as an international community, under stand the necessity to end wars and prevent them from starting.

Phillip Lisun ‘25 studies in the College of Arts & Science. He can be reached at l.phillip@wustl.edu.

The Assad regime had one message: regime change was not an option.

The harsh reality faced by the Syrian population and the pall that has covered the nation is perpetual.

China’s COVID Crossroad

Michael Qian

Turning on the news these days is daunt ing. Waking up to see social media and news headlines sharing yet another tragedy or natural disaster. Videos of people losing their homes and loved ones seem to fill timelines weekly. From severe wildfires and heat waves to sudden flash floods, the climate crisis has begun making its presence known more and more in the past few years. This apocalyp tic weather may seem independent of current weather and climate patterns, but it is not going away anytime soon.

The initial rounds of cheers for China’s effective COVID containment strategy have long qui eted down. With the steadily decreasing death rate of new variants and the ever-increasing toughness of lockdown policies, the unanimous front of support for government decisions has fractured into two opposing camps: “elimina tion” and “coexistence.” Whenever there is a new headline on regional outbreaks, debate ensues on Weibo, a Chinese online platform like Twitter, and in daily conversations. Autonomous as the Chinese government is, it has to consider people’s reactions and the underlying reality. Which side will prevail? Should China continue its path of prioritizing the fight against COVID19? To answer those questions, the current dis course provides three perspectives — economy, national health, and citizen rights in times of crisis.

Over the past six months, cities from metropo lises like Shanghai to towns like Dandong have experienced weeks or months of “silence peri ods.” With restaurants closed, people locked, and delivery routes blocked, resources are secluded in their respective realms, and cannot be combined for production.

GDP, as the most direct indicator of immedi ate economic impact, only grew 0.4% during the second quarter of 2022. While narrowly avoiding a contraction, it is much slower than the modest performance of the previous two quarters (4.8% for Q1 2022 and 4% for Q4 2021), making the official annual growth target of 5.5% difficult to achieve. As a result of lower

economic growth, the Chinese unemployment rate for the first half of 2022 spiked to 5.7%, 2% higher than the United States.

But aside from those descriptive data, the more essential concerns for ordinary people are changes happening to their daily life. Unable to undertake the burden of rents without business, stores closed one after another in shopping malls. Scared by the stunning youth unemploy ment rate, young people crammed civil service exams, choosing the safe bureaucratic path rather than the more ambitious route of entre preneurship. “Virus can’t kill us, but hunger does,” thus became a trending comment online to amplify the hardship of many that cannot be reflected by pure figures.

Short-term economic shocks are real, but they fade whenever restrictions are removed. Stores will reopen and traveling will resume. Long-term impacts, however, will stay, and their serious ness intensifies with the prolonging of today’s pain.

Even before the pandemic, foreign factories in China were considering relocating to Southeast Asian countries due to increasing Chinese labor costs. Current uncertainty over policies paus ing delivery and assembly lines accelerates this process. A series of announcements came out this summer from prominent manufacturers like Apple and Mazda about their decision to move part of their production investment to Vietnam or India. As their determination hardens along with the lockdown, worries come that the cur rent agenda is demolishing decades of achieve ment after reform and opening up.

While it is hard to grab onto one piece of bil lion-dollar investment, it is harder to control a billion individual minds. Brain drain of middle to upper-class families has occurred as a seri ous reality, symbolizing the end to years of increasing nationalistic identification. Phrases like “emigration to Canada” became the most popular keywords on Baidu during the lockdown in Shanghai earlier this year. The pessimistic clouds on studying abroad wither away in the education market, and the rush back to the domestic system in previous years has changed to the opposite direction. When the word “run (to foreign lands)” becomes an Internet slang, the pressure of the capital and labor outflow on the once-majestic dam can no longer be neglected.

As a rebuttal to growing anxiety over economic prospects, the meeting on stabilizing the econ omy organized by the State Council in May pointed out that temporary difficulties could be solved with the aid of government adjust ments. Fiscal spending on infrastructure was reintroduced alongside renewed incentives for real estate purchases and lower interest rates for small-sized enterprises. But in a time of lock downs when neither consumers nor entrepre neurs are brave enough to spend, none of those policies can perform to their fullest potential. How to boost people’s confidence? The answer is not to be found in the narrative of “not only containing COVID-19 but also boosting the economy.”

The necessity of protecting the health of all cit izens has been the core argument for maintain ing a “zero COVID” environment. Despite the low death rate of coronavirus, its high infectivity combined with China's large population would still lead to many deaths when restrictions were to be lifted, according to Hu Xijin, former chief editor of state media outlet Global Times. Then, the large number of severe cases would overload the healthcare system, depriving the less privileged of treatment. Hence, the current policy guidelines embody the socialist spirit of caring for the vulnerable, the genuine practice of securing human rights.

While it is hard to grab onto one piece of billiondollar investment, it is harder to control a billion pieces of individual minds.

Nonetheless, car accidents also kill many; why are cars not canceled, but the economy is? As the public image of coronavirus has degraded from ventilators and ICUs to asymptomatic patients dancing and playing cards, the demand for the government to reconsider the balance has grown. The first balance, as aforemen tioned, is between COVID and the economy. The second balance is between COVID and other diseases.

With massive government spending on test ing and mobile cabin hospitals, depletion of funds from healthcare insurance come to be an impending possibility. Many provinces in 2022 increased the minimum payment years for pub lic health insurance. Guangdong now requires the standard to be lifted to 30 years for male employees by 2030, double the current require ment. If this drastic change reflects the burden undertaken during the past three years, then how will the government respond to lockdowns for years to come? The concern that the price of surgery and medication for serious illnesses will go up with decreased government funds in the near future thus becomes reasonable, though not yet provable.

Despite repeated announcements of the State Council requiring local governments not to restrict people from going to the hospital under lockdown, the fear of losing their positions pushes officials at provincial, municipal, and district levels to each add on new constraints. For instance, in Daqing, residents in areas of

risk must have three consecutive negative test results in 24-hour intervals before they can visit the hospital. At the height of the outbreak in Shanghai, ambulances were deployed to deliver COVID patients, meanwhile people with other medical emergencies waited for days to be transported. Under Weibo’s COVID-related hashtags, webpages were filled with tragic sto ries about those grounded patients — hanging, jumping to death, miscarriage. Some of those stories are true, others were declared by officials to be rumors, but the general message is clear: the harm brought by restrictions on national health has exceeded its benefits. In other words, “should COVID be the only disease?”

When the pandemic first started, Chinese peo ple willingly agreed to compromise on some of their citizen rights. From the health code collect ing people’s everyday locations to the require ment to stay in the neighborhood, the policies were considered to be legitimate uses of gov ernment power to protect the general welfare in a time of crisis. Nevertheless, if such an exten sion of power is not regulated, it can soon break the boundary of laws and seek self-interests.

“Silence periods” are times when the people’s appeals are the most urgent. But just as the name suggests, they are also times when gov ernment repression is the easiest. With the justification of “disrupting public order” during lockdowns, a person in Changchun was arrested after organizing a movement of striking bowls to demand basic supplies from the government, and one in Jining was detained because of their call in a group chat for everyone to plead in CCTV’s online newsroom. Almost in every case, the legal basis for police action is weak even without taking the constitutional guarantee for free speech into account. A wave of doubts has risen, arguing for the rule of law. Executive agencies rarely respond. They hope for the dilu tion of memory over time. But public suspicion deepens with the repetition of similar events.

A red health code means the holders are infected with or exposed to COVID-19, and holders of red codes will be grounded and transported to

isolation centers. Hence, it opens the door for the government to cover all kinds of evil with the pretext of virus containment. When four village banks in Henan Province closed their checking service, and 40 billion RMB could not be withdrawn, officials in the municipal COVID Prevention Department changed the health codes of savers to red to prevent them from protesting or appealing. Though the wide spread outcry over this incident forced the local government to conduct investigations and announce punishment for related officials, the terror that it arouse was hard to be pacified. Many realize that health codes are now “certifi cations of obedient citizens,” and the overreach of government power is difficult to be halted once the invitation was sent.

The 20th National Congress of the CCP is going to be held this coming October. Speculation has spread that an end will be put to the cur rent COVID policy. Nevertheless, a good deci sion can only be made based on accurate and comprehensive information. While the eco nomic data cannot be hidden, members of the Politburo may be blinded from the other prob lems and public sentiments associated with the contemporary agenda, seeking to achieve an unrealistic goal like that of the Great Leap Forward. This article thus hopes to link popu lar opinions, well-known incidents, and official stances to provide an overview of Chinese soci ety in 2022, and more importantly, to call for a return to normal life with regard to the three perspectives.

Michael Qian ‘26 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at mankang@wustl.edu.

Many realize that health codes are now “certifications of obedient citizens,” and the overreach of public power is difficult to be halted once the invitation was sent.

Beware the Danger of Economic Decoupling

Zubin Rekhi

In June of this year, Apple announced that they would move part of their pro duction of iPads out of China for the first time. At the end of the day, it wasn’t worker suicides and reports of abuse that caused Apple to question its commitment to China, nor was it concern that impeding censorship would make business impossi ble. Rather, it was the growing geopoliti cal tension between China and the United States and brutal COVID lockdowns threat ening to stall production at factories that brought the tech behemoth to heel.

But Apple hasn’t been alone in its desire to ensure supply chain resilience in an increasingly uncertain world by diversify ing its manufacturing out of China. It has joined leagues of other American com panies – worried about the sustainability of using China as a manufacturing hub, declining Chinese consumer demand, and the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) increasingly restrictionary statist policies making business impossible — that are now in search of friendlier shores. While this development has been extensively covered by various media sources, a ques tion that remains to be explored is whether a supply chain fissure between China and the United States will bring more aggres sive rhetoric in both countries against the other.

It is important to understand that economic decoupling is ongoing and has just recently begun, so there has not been enough con crete evidence established to definitively prove the existence of this phenomenon. Rather, I aim to paint a picture of the future impact of a complete supply chain decou pling by using theories that connect events and trends that have already occurred.

As I will argue in this piece, a supply chain fissure will in fact bring harsher rhetoric on

both sides through three mechanisms. First, when politicians on both sides announce measures that curtail trade between both countries, they often deploy isolationist rhetoric as a justification. Second, because, especially in China’s case, an economic backsliding caused by deglobalization will force the CCP to deploy anti-American nationalist rhetoric to distract its people from economic woes. And third, because to compensate for losing trade with the United States, China will need to increase its trade ties with African countries, which are predicated on anti-Western solidarity.

To start off with the first mechanism, pro nouncements of economic deglobalization are already often accompanied by xeno phobic or otherwise aggressive rhetoric, either as tools for explaining deglobal izing policies or for raising political sup port for such policies. For example, when Trump pushed tariffs on China, perhaps the first sign that our world is deglobaliz ing, he explicitly stated that he was putting “America First” to build popularity among

voters. As deglobalization continues, we can only expect more of such xenophobic justifications in the future.

The second mechanism is more interest ing because it is based on the idea that China’s economy is no longer a growing behemoth, as it was perceived for over 30 years. Particularly for China’s export-based economy, ensuing economic decoupling equates with economic stagnation or even decline. China’s economy is already suf fering from a shock in consumer demand because of a property crisis. China’s prop erty market was so overheated — and so much of Chinese consumers assets were in the form of property — that consum ers have seemingly permanently stopped spending. Add to this toxic mix increasing economic deglobalization in the future — which will prey on the majority of Chinese middle class jobs created through global ization — and disaster will ensue.

To understand why this is and will continue to terrify Beijing, look at China’s current state from the perspective of someone who came of age when China just started to grow rapidly. Imagine being part of the greatest economic miracle in history, find ing a solid middle class job at the behest of globalization and investing all your savings into property, only to watch all you have worked for disappear into thin air. Further, imagine your anger at an abusive govern ment which you tolerated only because it gave you a stable income and home, only to let everything you worked for get taken away from you.

Indeed, for the first time since Tiananmen Square, the Chinese people’s bargain with the CCP — to sacrifice all their political rights in exchange for economic growth and a higher standard of living — seems imperiled. And it will only grow more

Introduce America in this system as an easy target for placing blame and distracting Chinese citizens from their own problems and one can easily understand why paranoid CCP elites prioritizes rule by “patriots” as a supposed bulwark against “foreign influence”.

fragile as lackluster economic statistics continue to pile up. Chinese political elites will be terrified at a loss of political legit imacy so they will increasingly find exter nal factors or enemies to blame for their problems. However slight the chance with Beijing’s increasing repression of its popu lation, the very idea of losing a grip on their power will terrify CCP elites who know that the complete loss of political legitimacy in an authoritarian system will entail per sonal costs for them.

Introduce America in this system as an easy target for placing blame and distract ing Chinese citizens from their own prob lems and one can easily understand why paranoid CCP elites have already started to prioritize rule by “patriots” as a supposed bulwark against “foreign influence."

But is there more concrete evidence of this?

The third mechanism involves Chinese ties with Africa that have rested and will con tinue to rely on anti-Western solidarity. In China’s desire to wave imperial restoration as a distraction for its people, in the midst of its economic problems caused by deglo balization, Chinese leaders may double down on commitments to the developing world as a symbolic method of expand ing Chinese influence at the expense of American hegemony. And at a time when the U.S. will increasingly uncouple with China, Chinese leaders may look to Africa as an alternative market for their goods. China-Africa trade already reached an alltime high of $254 billion in 2021 and China is set to become the largest trading part ner of African countries by 2030, poten tially outnumbering Africa’s trade with the entire European Union.

In building economic and political alliances

with African countries, China projects itself as an anti-Western alternative that was trampled upon by Western powers, with the complicity of the United States, just as many of its African partners were. When economic decoupling reaches a peak, we can only expect China to double down on this rhetoric to expand its relations with African countries further.

To see where China has invoked this rhet oric in the past, look at the 2015 World Economic Forum. As cited in this paper, at the 2015 forum, China and African coun tries often associated their traumatized past — as subjects of colonialism and racism by the west — with their current beliefs that they can “go at it alone.” Such appeals rested explicitly on the idea that Africa was a “damaged other” that suf fered harms at the hands of the west that could be repeated today. The implication is that China, unlike the United States, was not in league with the colonial powers of the 19th century which plundered Africa; rather, China, since Mao, has repeatedly helped African countries since they first fought their western oppressors, by build ing infrastructure and monetarily support ing anti-colonial rebels, and still aims to do so today.

Thus, when attempting to create common ground with African countries, China will inevitably exploit anti-American rhetoric. So when China attempts to multiply its alli ances in the African continent to counter balance its economic drift away from the United States, Chinese leaders’ anti-Amer ican rhetoric will multiply as well.

So, to answer my initial question: yes, eco nomic decoupling will probably lead to harsher rhetoric on both sides (but espe cially China). This will occur because the very pronouncements of economic tariffs

and other harsh economic stances are accompanied by harsh rhetoric, because Beijing will need to distract its people with enemies in the midst of economic stagna tion, and because Chinese leaders will have to use more of the same harsh anti-Amer ican rhetoric to strengthen their alliances with African countries.

The greater implication of this phenom enon is that economic decoupling and harsher rhetoric are cyclically linked to each other. The more China and the United States decouple their supply chains from each other, the harsher the rhetoric on both sides will become, which will lead to more economic decoupling, going on until both countries approach the brink of war.

That's a terrifying implication, but it’s also a prudent one. As harsher rhetoric escalates on both sides, reinforced by this cycle, leaders (especially Chinese lead ers) will increasingly find their hands tied. President Xi is already finding that after delivering so much nationalist rhetoric, his hardline nationalist supporters’ tolerance for his jingoism is declining, as seen from the disappointment among many national ist commentators in China over his “weak” response to Taiwan after Speaker Pelosi’s visit. Similarly, President Biden’s China policy is increasingly mirroring Trump’s despite his initial restraint and anti-right wing populist platform. At some point, for their own credibility, leaders on both sides will inevitably make good on their harsh rhetoric through action and when that hap pens, there’s no telling how the conflict will escalate.

Zubin Rekhi ‘26 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at r.zubin@wustl.edu.

Artwork by Ben Eskenazi, Staff Artist

The Trump Trap: An Economic Race for Hegemony

Leo Huang

Rising from the ashes and rubbles of World War II, the United States has indisputably served as the hegemon for the last 70 years. This power lasted through challengers like the Soviet Union and tumultu ous events like the Cuban Missile Crisis. With the U.S.’s worldwide dominance, it has projected this widespread perception that military force prevails over everything else. After a recent standoff near the island of Taiwan that involved unprecedented military exercises by the Chinese military, it seems Beijing is now ready to defend its sovereignty from all foreign inter vention, including the iron fist of Washington. Despite the resurfacing of tensions over issues such as Taiwan and the South China Sea, they have not escalated to the military level — not even skirmishes have occurred between China and the United States.

In fact, if we look at recent trends, the current situation should not be surprising at all. Until 2021, China’s military spending as a percent of its GDP has been consistently declining since the 1980s. This reality renders the U.S.’s stra tegic blueprint in East Asia — one still based on military presence — rather outdated. After a series of proxy wars and political turmoil that saw the collapse of the USSR and the stabiliza tion of the unipolar (solely one dominant coun try) world order, the race for world domination in the 21st Century is bound to be different and take place in a new realm. China has long been pursuing success in the economic field, and it is steadily coming to fruition. With China’s massive increase in financial and human capi tal, it begs the question of whether the country presents a genuine challenge to U.S. hegemony. While arms races still exist, the Thucydides trap — the idea that challenger will engage in warfare

with the standing hegemon — is slowly fading; rather, it is paramount to examine how China and the U.S.’s economic policies, specifically on foreign aid and trade, will rewrite (or maintain) the balance of power in a modern world.

Since 1945, the U.S. has long believed in impos ing neoliberal policies on other countries to spread the “American” way of living and gov erning. From the Marshall Plan that drastically reduced interstate barriers to trade in exchange for U.S. foreign aid, to International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans that forced developing coun tries to liberalize, the U.S. has a long history of adding stipulations to foreign aid investments. These policies have been nothing but contro versial. Studies have found that the conditions of U.S. foreign aid make it impossible for devel oping countries to reach long-term economic goals such as reducing poverty and allowing local small businesses to prosper, and that the U.S.-led IMF was idle for the most part towards poorer nations during financial crises simply because they did not meet the liberalization goals set by the U.S.

Unsurprisingly, these policies have not fared well with alliance-building. Countries who are the U.S.’s “allies” on paper frequently go against the U.S. in international institutions such as the UN. America also has not succeeded in planting a positive image of itself in the minds of peo ple in the developing world. A 2014 study found that a whopping 54% of the developing world population have unfavorable opinions towards the US, and that figure is predictably even higher now after the Trump Administration’s diplomatic disengagement with most devel oping nations and his harmful rhetoric that deemed them “s**thole countries”.

China’s approach to foreign aid, on the other hand, has been a breath of fresh air to the developing world. Dating back to 1961, when China provided thousands of tons of food aid to Albania even while Chinese citizens were

starving at home themselves, the unconditional nature of China’s generous policies in compari son to their U.S. counterparts has instantly won the approval of governments and the hearts of ordinary people in developing nations. While the more novel Belt and Road Initiative includes punitive policies to sanction countries that do not pay loans back, China is essentially build ing infrastructure for dozens of countries in exchange for extracting raw materials. It is no surprise, then, that China’s presence and influ ence has been skyrocketing in Africa and Latin America in comparison to the U.S.

In creating a global image for itself, China has been able to use the aforementioned hostility toward America to its advantage. And while Chinese workers have had their fair share of xenophobia abroad, it is nowhere near the level of anti-American resentment in the world, especially during a time where populists and demagogues manipulate these emotions to gain power globally. A major factor that fueled Victor Orbán’s recent populist movement in Hungary was his anti-American rhetoric. Despite decades of using foreign aid to expand America’s sphere of influence, the conditions added to their loans have caused these efforts to have not been very successful. On the other hand, China’s much less stringent loan pro gram is gaining momentum with President Xi’s regime that aims to restore the imperial glory of ancient China.

China’s success in expanding in influence through foreign aid is a sign of what might be coming in the global race to the top. Additionally, on the quest to find more allies, the two super powers inevitably have to interact with each other. In the case of such an interaction, tradi tional realist international theory would defer to the Thucydides Trap, a term named after the famed Greek general. The Thucydides Trap the orizes that a military conflict is likely to ensue after an emerging power challenges an existing power (75% chance of war historically). For

The glorious days of unipolar domination are approaching twilight...

instance, when Sparta feared the rise of the Athenian city-state, it launched a war and left Athens and the rest of Greece in ruins. However, this concept may no longer hold true in 2022. Wars between major countries, even proxy wars, are scarce in the modern global land scape, while economic issues are at the crux of great power competition.

The trade war between the U.S. and China during the Trump administration is emblem atic of this new trend. Trump treated the rise of China as a threat to the U.S.’s status in the world and waged economic warfare in response, but the tariffs and other stipulations applied by the Trump administration were met with fiery tac tics. From cutting agricultural imports to impos ing tariffs of their own, Beijing’s countermoves have produced results that have left the U.S. devastated.

Not only did the U.S. fail to fulfill its goal of moving manufacturing jobs back domestically, but the economic losses suffered by American farmers potentially cost Trump the 2020 elec tion. The trade war inflicted much more severe economic losses on the U.S. compared to China, especially wreaking havoc on the stock mar ket. The prolonged turbulence exacerbated an already stagnated economy, while the Chinese economy continued to grow. One can even argue that the conflict served as the fuse for a resurgence in extreme Chinese nationalism, such as Xi’s recent assumption of “Wolf warrior diplomacy.” Gaining the advantage in the U.S.China trade war has emboldened Beijing to act aggressively abroad and pose challenges to U.S. supremacy, as seen in the case of Taiwan and its continuous usage of aggressive rhetoric.

Economic domination involves winning on all fronts. With the saturated strategic alignments of Europe and East Asia, the next crucial step towards hegemony is the ability to secure financial ties with developing nations. Thus, the stark differences in foreign aid policies of

the two countries also play a critical role in the U.S.-China race for hegemony. With the U.S. clinging onto demanding globalization policies, it is rapidly losing its control over the develop ing world. Conversely, China’s lofty loans are increasing Beijing’s influence over those coun tries. Combined with its economic leverage over the U.S. in the trade war, China may become the global hegemon in the near future, despite polit ical shortcomings.

With the development of advanced nuclear warheads and the possibility of robot soldiers, the high cost of mutually assured destruction means warfare between powerhouse nations is becoming less likely day by day. Leaders also have to take into account the increasing politi cal costs of initiating war in the modern world, which is why the odds of physical clashes are extremely low. For these reasons, I coin the term the Trump Trap, as a replacement for the archaic theory of the Thucydides Trap. The Trump Trap argues that an economic, not military, conflict will follow as a rising power confronts the hege mon, and its gears are about to start turning with the non-violent clashes between China and the U.S.

There are limitations to the Trump Trap, as small-scale military operations could be involved in an economic war. Because Taiwan is the largest semiconductor exporting coun try in the world and it has a strong tech supply chain with the U.S., targeted strikes that aim to

destroy the chip industry would be disastrous to the U.S. economy. What further nuances the theory is that any confrontation results in zerosum (perhaps negative-sum) game between China and the US. An all-out economic conflict between the two countries may inflict heavy losses on both sides because of the intercon nectedness of their economies. So just like the Thucydides Trap, the Trump Trap is not 100% bound to be triggered.

With the Trump trap in mind, it seems obvious that China has the potential to take over as the new global leader. In a world where soft power triumphs, the outlook for hegemony requires multi-dimensional economic policy. Not only is it important for a hegemon to build alliances through effective foreign aid, but it is also nec essary for a country to succeed in commercial disputes against its rival.

For the U.S., this means that their time as world hegemon is dwindling. The glorious days of unipolar domination are approaching their end unless she can take a commanding lead in the still ongoing trade war against China and use investment to win over allies. But one fact is definitely reassuring. Since military might is no longer equated with absolute power, the con sequences of the Trump Trap are much tamer than that of the Thucydides Trap. While the U.S. may lose some of its cultural influence around the world, Washington will certainly not be destroyed like Athens was thousands of years ago.

Nevertheless, what manifests for the rest of the world may not be ideal. One only needs to look to the early days of the Cold War to deter mine how chaotic the international community would become in a bipolar world. To avoid such a catastrophe, the U.S. needs to act now and radically alter its economic policies.

Leo Huang ‘26 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at h.yuliu@wustl.edu.

Wars between major countries, even proxy wars, are scarce in the modern global landscape, while economic issues are at the crux of great power competition.

The Beef Parasite of Questionable Existence

Lawrence Hapeman, Podcast Editor Artwork by Ceci Deleon-Wilson

People love to engage in discourse about climate change. Especially when ‘engaging in discourse’ really means talking to a wall, except the wall responds with the most ignorant counterpoint possible, and you end up wishing this was a wall that couldn’t talk because at least you could trick yourself into thinking you were doing something effec tive. Most of Gen Z and many millenials have been exposed to torrents of ‘stay informed’ posts on Instagram, skit after skit from late night comedy about the end of the world, and bleak international declarations about our impending demise. In the eloquent prose of Timothée Chalamet, “Societal collapse is in the air. It smells like it.” Our world’s youngest gen erations are as well equipped as, if not more so, our newscasters to give us the rundown on cli mate change news.

Despite being so well-informed, we lack the power to make the changes we know need to happen. That is, unless we adopt a morally objectionable, logistically nightmarish, and painfully uncomfortable plan that might not even work. But it might work.

This is a story about what could happen if we — or rather, the U.S. government — decided to combat climate change by lying about it.

Dolion, a mid-level CIA employee, woke up on May 9th, 2026 with a glorious idea. An idea to take advantage of everything he hated about political discourse, every ignorant comment he’d heard from corporate talking heads, all the sleepless nights he’d had considering his com placency with inaction against an existential threat: Dolion could redirect all those things that frustrated him into an operation that would save the world. His idea wasn’t entirely truthful — in fact, it may have come about because of a sudden departure from his instinct to be honest — but it could be effective. People were dying, and fewer people would die if he lied. Didn’t that

justify the lie? Dolion wasn’t entirely sure how to answer the question, so he pushed it from his head and continued with the idea.

The first meeting Dolion had was with his imme diate superior, a member of the leadership team in the Office of Public Affairs. The Public Affairs team dealt with matters of public opinion, mak ing recommendations to the rest of the agency about messaging and public records manage ment. Dolion didn’t particularly like his job, and he especially hated working on projects that felt shallow, even inconsequential. The artificiality of it all was infuriating to him. Nonetheless, his supervisor looked intrigued when Dolion pulled out a small folder of handwritten notes and printed documents and placed it on the table in front of him. He actually looked excited about this project, which isn’t a word his supervisor would have used to describe him since his first day. The tired-looking-but-determined federal employee began to explain his idea, pointing out specific graphs and tables on his papers as they became relevant. His explanation was steady, logically consistent, and extensively planned. His supervisor was nodding along at the begin ning, but her entire face eventually froze up. She listened, and she understood. She realized

the idea’s potential, and thanked Dolion before making a series of calls that would set the plan in motion.

A couple hours later, Dolion was in a conference room with the CIA director, the president, half of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the military, and a rushed handful of a dozen others from federal department leadership. They all listened intently to what the young staffer had to say, their faces showing a range of emotion from intrigue, admiration, and exhaustion. Dolion’s idea was popular, but everyone in that conference room wanted to make sure they could make it work before attempting such a long con — err, no, ‘con; doesn’t sound quite right, too cruel, maybe a ‘project’, that’d be more marketable — before attempting such an extensive project (Dolion emphasized the word ‘project,’ looking quite pleased with himself). Looking around at his now-captive audience, Dolion suggested that they focus on just one environmental issue as a trial run. The government agencies could practice with a smear campaign on red meat consumption, for example, to make sure the country would respond how they wanted them to. Yeah, red meat, that sounds good. We can focus specifically on beef. This seems feasible. Why yes, this is a new suit, thank you for ask ing. God, we’re so fashionable. Pretty standard bureaucratic talk.

The group in the conference room agreed beef would be a good initial subject of the project. If it worked, the country would make great strides against disastrous climate change. Red meat, as Dolion had explained in his powerpoint, was arguably the most environmentally harm ful food produced in the world. Producing one pound of beef required 1,847 gallons of water, and total beef production released 27 times its weight in CO2 emissions. These facts were what had encouraged Dolion to create the plan in the first place. They didn’t need to lie about every thing, and the writing on the wall resembled the

inside of a slaughterhouse. If they had to exag gerate to make sure the public responded at all, wouldn’t that be worth it? There was little dis cussion about what would happen to the meat lobbyists in the US, who would no doubt suffer from a sharp turn in public opinion against red meat. A lobbyist for Tyson Foods had been in the room since the beginning — they had their people everywhere — and she seemed lessthan-pleased about the direction the rest of the group had been careening towards. After the meeting, Dolion noticed the lobbyist speaking animatedly with the Secretary of the Treasury in a corner. He couldn’t quite discern what they were saying, but the lobbyist left looking satis fied. The Treasury Department would do what it had to for this project, and the public wouldn’t need to know the details.

Within a few days, Operation Bovine Ruse (OBR) was underway. The public didn’t know about that name of course; POTUS had announced the Special Committee Against Parasites (SCAP) just a few hours after the CDC’s announce ment of a deadly parasite spreading through

Brazil’s cow population. Every cable news show was hosting six-person panels to discuss the Brazilian steak parasite. The CDC had been initially reluctant to manufacture studies with apparent proof of the parasite, but the Treasury Secretary stepped in once again. Budget cuts are an astonishing motivator for government employees. Outside of the government, there were even more details falling into place than Dolion could have predicted. Brazil, it had turned out, was a good choice for the operation’s coun try-of-target for more reasons than they had expected. Right-wingers, who had been quick to dismiss anything medical from the U.S. gov ernment since COVID-19, quickly accepted the parasite’s prevalence as gospel, citing the ‘failed socialists of South America’ as the primary rea son for the parasite.

The government had more complex ways of convincing people of the parasite, too. Plenty of people on death row were more than willing to be filmed having their limbs falling off in return for a commuted sentence. The lucky prisoners who had been offered the deal (Dolion thought of them as lucky, at least; it made more sense that way) were often staged in crowded pub lic areas before pulling off the stunt. The limbs themselves had already been cut off by the time the actor was in public; at that point, they were simply waiting for the right time to spill their body parts onto the pavement. The first few public limb-droppings were more minor: fingers mostly, except for one particularly artistic per former who insisted on having his left ear cut off. As the CIA’s production team grew more confident, so did they become bolder with their choices of limbs to fall. The viral — and care fully manufactured — propaganda eventually depicted arms, legs, and genitals falling off of poor ‘parasite victims.’ In one case, all three at once. Upon hearing about the parasite’s limb-losing capabilities, Joe Rogan recorded three podcasts devoted entirely to discussing the steak parasite. Besides their contribution to

the public’s general sense of fear, the episodes had also produced golden soundbites that flooded social media: ‘Nobody’s talking about how a goddamn worm is gonna make all our d***s fall off!’ ‘Jamie, can you pull up that clip of the cows stuck in the slaughterhouse? Man, wild stuff.’ ‘It’s entirely possible that the parasite could be, could be in our freakin’ domes already, and the government is just, ya know, waiting to switch that s*** on.’

People had been looking for something, any thing, to happen that might make their politics mean something; they collectively found it in a parasite living in cows in Brazil, which served as the perfect scapegoat for everyone to rally against. In the months following the govern ment’s initial announcement, everything was to blame for the parasite — capitalism, social ism, ‘the immigrants,’ poor people, rich people, Brazilian farmers — but only one solution bub bled to the surface of the conversation: Stop eating red meat.

Who knows where else the parasite might be by now? It was too horrible, too perfect, too manu factured to be true.

Lawrence Hapeman ‘25 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at hapeman.l@ wustl.edu.

Letting it Rain in the UAE

Jordana Kotler

As extreme droughts continue to plague the planet, countries are racing for a solution. The United Nations (UN) now identifies Arab countries as some of the most water scarce states on the globe. With cli mate change and overpopulation culminating to create the perfect storm of water scarcity, new technology may be the solution.

Since the 1940s, cloud seeding has been devel oped and practiced. This new technology is essentially the creation of increased rainfall. Ground based generators are used to produce crystalized silver iodine. Following this process, aircraft carriers release the crystals into cloud formations. After this release, it’s simply a wait ing game for the rain to begin falling.

As the nation with the fourth largest demand for water in the world, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been utilizing cloud seeding as a potential source of water. With the average citi zen in the UAE consuming roughly 550 liters of water daily, researchers are scrambling to keep up with the high demand. Thus, both desalina tion and cloud seeding have become consider ations. Desalination is the process of removing salt from saltwater. In its most basic form, the desalination of ocean waters can provide a pos sible source of water for irrigation and possibly drinking. However, each desalination plant costs approximately $1 billion to construct and oper ate. On the contrary, cloud seeding technology can be up to 30 times cheaper to create and utilize.

While cloud seeding seems to be a perfect solution to water scarcity, the complexity of the atmosphere above the UAE makes it far from ideal. Cloud formations are extremely rare and fast-moving. Thus, pilots must be in the air ready to release the silver iodine within 30 to 45 minutes of a cloud spotting. Moreover, the arid climate creates atmospheric conditions that are not always conducive to the chemical reaction that silver iodine creates. This has prompted researchers in the UAE to produce nanotech nology that is perhaps a better match to the cli mate. And while the nanotechnology could fix

With the average citizen of the UAE consuming roughly 550 liters of water daily, researchers are scrambling to keep up with the high demand.

the aforementioned issues, there are two major issues that remain.

First is the uncertainty of cloud seeding. Scientists across the globe remain skeptical that cloud seeding works. According to lan Robock, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University, it is difficult to tell if the cloud that was seeded would have produced rain anyway. Following the release of chemicals into the atmosphere, current research cannot explain what happens to the cloud. This is true because of a lack of control in this atmospheric experi ment. Friedrich reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that cloud seeding experiments in Idaho have enlarged snowflakes significantly enough for them to fall to the ground. This groundbreaking research is a possible indication of the effectiveness of the technology. Despite this, the effects of cloud seeding on the type and size of precipi tation released is uncontrollable by scientists. The consequences of this uncertainty were felt by the residents of Dubai when seeding in the atmosphere created intense rainfall that flooded residential neighborhoods. This cautionary tale indicates the dangers of altering natural processes.

Second, jurisdiction regarding the atmosphere above the country is just as convoluted as the jurisdiction of the land below it. Questions regarding where countries can seed clouds and how rainfall should be allocated between coun tries remain. Cloud seeding has the potential to drain the moisture out of clouds which results in even less rainfall for neighboring nations down stream. Moreover, clouds remain free-flowing

formations that can be seeded in one country but release precipitation in another. The worst possible result of this is a water war.

Historically, the Middle East and North Africa region has been plagued by droughts and lack of rainfall. These dire situations have led to water wars. With greater divisions affecting the region, water has been used as grounds for conflict that truly began with deeper issues. In total, there have been roughly 500 conflicts over water worldwide in the last 50 years. If the UAE is perceived to have depleted the water of other nations through cloud seeding, conflict could flare up again.

Despite flaws with cloud seeding technology, it is a vital step towards solving water shortages. Given the historical challenges surrounding water allocation in the Middle East, the UAE must tread lightly. Defining clear boundaries regarding where clouds can be seeded would provide a good start. Moreover, if the lack of rainfall in neighboring countries is a concern, the UAE should take steps to create an agree ment regarding either the quantity or frequency that they can seed. Considering the fact that clouds typically travel west to east, Omar and the UAE must work together to maintain peace in this time of need. The lack of water must take precedence over issues surrounding cloud seed ing. Thus, the best course of action moving for ward is to let it rain.

Jordana Kotler '26 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at j.kotler@wustl.edu.

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