The Supreme "Court explicitly took a constitutional right away from the American people"

 

Two years ago yesterday, on June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy. The vote was 6–3. 

The three justices appointed by former president Trump joined Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John Roberts to strip a constitutional right from the American people, a right we had enjoyed for almost 50 years, a right that is considered a fundamental human right in most liberal democracies, and a right they had indicated they would protect because it was settled law. For the first time in our history, rather than conveying rights, the court explicitly took a constitutional right away from the American people. 

Andy Kroll, Andrea Bernstein, and Ilya Marritz of ProPublica reported that the night before the decision came down, 70 or so partygoers, including two dozen state and federal judges, met to drink champagne and eat fine food at the Maine home of the man who had hatched and then executed a plan to stack the courts with extremist judges: Leonard Leo. It was Leo who had helped pick or confirm all six of the justices who would, the next day, announce to the world they were overturning Roe. 

In the decision, written by Alito, the court said that the right to determine abortion rights must be returned “to the people’s elected representatives” at the state level. This construction of American law is central to the right-wing project of dismantling the federal government which, under the Fourteenth Amendment, is charged with protecting equal rights in the states. 

Centering the states, which determine who can vote within them, enables a minority to dominate the majority. In this case, a strong majority of Americans has always backed abortion rights while only about 10% of Americans wanted a complete ban on the procedure.

In the late 1970s, presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan courted religious traditionalists who objected to women’s equality with the promise of ending abortion access. Indeed, in her first statement on abortion in January 1972, right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly focused not on fetuses but on women who wanted equal rights. 

“The ‘women’s lib[eration]’ movement is not an honest effort to secure better jobs for women who want or need to work outside the home,” she said. It “is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother, and on the family as the basic unit of society. 

Women’s libbers are trying to make wives and mothers unhappy with their career, make them feel that they are ‘second-class citizens’ and ‘abject slaves.’ Women’s libbers are promoting free sex instead of the “slavery” of marriage. They are promoting Federal ‘day-care centers’ for babies instead of homes. They are promoting abortions instead of families.”

Business leaders who wanted to slash taxes and government regulations led the Reagan coalition, but winning elections always depended on the votes of racists and the religious traditionalists who opposed women’s rights. But since a majority of Americans has always supported the protection of access to abortion, Republican leaders generally promised to end abortion without intending actually to do it. 

But the extremist religious judges Leo helped Trump put in place had their own agenda. As soon as the court overturned Roe v. Wade, Republican-dominated states began restricting abortion access. Now, two years later, 14 states ban abortion entirely. Seven others have restrictions that would have been unconstitutional two years ago. 

The overturning of Roe v. Wade upended American politics. The majority of Americans alive today have always lived in a country with abortion access recognized as a constitutional right, and had not thought they could lose it. 

Exactly what that loss means became clear just days after the Dobbs decision, when news broke that a ten-year-old rape victim had been unable to obtain an abortion in Ohio and had to cross state lines to Indiana, where the state attorney general, Todd Rokita, publicly attacked the doctor who treated the girl. Similar stories, as well as those of women who desperately needed abortions to save their lives or fertility, have driven support for abortion higher than it was before Dobbs. 

As state laws prohibiting abortion took effect, voters worked to protect abortion rights. In seven states, including Republican-dominated Kansas, Kentucky, and Ohio, voters have protected abortion rights when they were on the ballot. Pollster Tom Bonier today called abortion rights “the most powerful single issue in politics.” 

Bonier recalled looking at the Kansas vote and finding such a surprising statistic he thought he had miscalculated. After Dobbs, almost 70% of the people in that state registering to vote were women. He said he has “never seen a registration surge among any specific group like this before, and [doesn't] expect to again.” He went on to find substantial gender gaps in registration in states where access to abortion was at risk, but not in states where it seemed secure. 

In 2022, Bonier said, “[i]n states and races where abortion rights were perceived as at stake, Democrats overperformed massively,” including in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona, but in states like New York and California, where abortion rights are protected, “the election was as you would have expected in a ‘normal’ midterm.” Bonier added that abortion rights “is likely more salient now than it was in 2022.” 

As the votes indicate, Dobbs has created a huge problem for Republicans, especially as Trump continues to boast that he is responsible for overturning Roe, a boast that the Biden campaign is highlighting. Voters eager to protect abortion rights are moving away from the party toward a more moderate and popular position on abortion.

It has also created a problem for the party on the hard right. Having lost the abortion issue as a way to turn out voters, leaders are whipping up the party’s base with ever-increasing extremism. In the realm of reproductive rights, that extremism has led MAGA Republicans to call for national bans on abortion, contraception, and in vitro fertilization (IVF). 

More generally, it has increasingly made them call for violence against their opponents. On June 21, for example, Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) posted on social media: “I do want to ‘ethnic cleanse’ by deporting white progressive Democrats—with a special bonus for rich ones with an Ivy League degree. I really do not like ‘those people.’”

Those extremists appear to be threatening Trump from the right, possibly considering a move to back Trump’s conspiracy theorist former national security advisor Michael Flynn at the July Republican National Convention. Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post reported Saturday that there has been a revolt against Trump in the Arizona delegation to the Republican National Convention, some of whom apparently worry that Trump has been captured by the “deep state” and is not extreme enough for them.

The promise to return decision making to the states has always been an attempt to enable a minority to impose its will on the majority, but the Dobbs decision revealed that minority to be so extremist it appears to have engaged, and enraged, people who before it were not paying much attention to politics. 

In the Dobbs decision, Alito wrote: “Our decision returns the issue of abortion to [state] legislative bodies, and it allows women on both sides of the abortion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office. Women are not without electoral or political power.”

Amen. 

—Heather Cox Richardson

Notes:

https://www.propublica.org/article/we-dont-talk-about-leonard-leo-supreme-court-supermajority

https://www.guttmacher.org/2023/12/state-policy-trends-2023-first-full-year-roe-fell-tumultuous-year-abortion-and-other

https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2016/02/02/whats-wrong-with-equal-rights-for-women-1972/\

​​

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/04/us/millennials-outnumber-boomers-trnd/index.html

https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/pdf/Faculty/Siegel_BeforeAndAfterRoeVWadeNewQuestionsAboutBacklash.pdf

https://apnorc.org/projects/most-americans-support-legal-abortion-with-some-restrictions-ap-norc/

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/13/1111285143/abortion-10-year-old-raped-ohio

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/support-for-abortion-rights-has-grown-in-spite-of-bans-and-restrictions-poll-shows

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/06/politics/kate-cox-texas-abortion/index.html

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/abortion-access-won-ballot-option-half-states-111346115

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/03/opinion/women-voters-roe-abortion-midterms.html

https://www.npr.org/2023/11/03/1210440222/indiana-abortion-todd-rokita-reprimand-caitlin-barnard

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/06/22/trump-convention-revolt-right-wing-arizona/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/opinion/trump-comstock-act-abortion.html

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Food Companies Intentionally Make Their Products Addictive, and It’s Leading to Chronic Diseases

Can’t stop eating that bag of chips until you’re licking the salt nestled in the corners of the empty package from your fingers? You’re not alone. And it’s not entirely your fault that the intended final handful of chips was not, indeed, your last for that snacking session. Many common snack foods have been expertly engineered to keep us addicted and almost constantly craving more of whatever falsely satisfying manufactured treat is in front of us.

“Humans have an inherited preference for energy-rich foods—like fats and sugars—and thus natural selection has predisposed us to foods high in sugar and fat,” explains Jennifer Kaplan, who taught the course, Introduction to Food Systems, at the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena, California.

 “Food scientists know this and create ingredients that are far higher in fat and sugar than occur in nature. The most common such sugar is high-fructose corn syrup and is, therefore, intrinsically addictive.” In fact, foods that weren’t sweet previously, like pasta sauce, are now artificially sweetened to keep consumers craving the product, with sugar levels that can rival those found in packaged desserts.

High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is found in everything from ketchup and salad dressing to cereal and bread—foods that aren’t necessarily perceived as sweet—and sometimes even in “healthier” alternatives, like light beer. In 2019, Anheuser-Busch, the St. Louis-based brewer of Bud Light, highlighted the fact that the popular beer didn’t contain HFCS during a controversial Super Bowl commercial. 

The ad, which tried to push Bud Light as the more desirable light beer because of its lack of corn syrup (as opposed to its competitors), notably annoyed the Midwestern corn farmers, who are subsidized by the U.S. government to essentially keep pumping our processed foods with corn products.

These “multibillion-dollar government programs,” however, don’t reach the small farmers. “The largest 10 percent of farms receive nearly 80 percent of subsidies, primarily for commodity crops such as corn and soy—and entities downstream or upstream of the actual farmers earn most of the profits,” according to a 2023 opinion piece in the Kansas City Star.

High-Fructose Corn Syrup and Salts as Addictive as Drugs

So what’s so bad about HFCS, the ubiquitous ingredient so essential to the inner aisles of the American supermarket? A tablespoon of the super sweet stuff packs in roughly 53 calories, 14.4 grams of carbohydrates, and 5 grams of sugar, while an entire ear of corn has about 123 calories. It’s much easier to ingest extra, empty calories when they’re processed down to a sugary additive, which enhances the flavor of processed foods.

Lower-income households consume higher levels of ultra-processed food, given that it has a longer shelf life, is more accessible, and is strongly marketed. This leads to these households having more health issues like obesity and cardiometabolic disease.

As an ingredient, HFCS was shown in a 2013 study to be as addictive as drugs, like cocaine or heroin, with salt proven to have similarly addictive, opioid-like qualities. Australian neuroscientist Craig Smith has studied the effect of salt cravings in humans for years, concluding that eating excessive amounts of sodium makes people crave salt more, in his 2016 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study suggests that opioid-blocking drugs may inhibit our salt cravings.

“These findings open the way for us to study this salt-seeking circuit in humans using magnetic resonance imaging and other techniques, to then develop targeted drugs to inhibit salt craving and promote more healthy dietary choices,” said Smith, according to a November 2016 article in Cosmos magazine. “If processed food producers are slow to respond to the need to reduce salt in their products, this could be another way to lower deaths associated with high salt intake.”

Even if a particular food isn’t overly salty, it may be sneaked into packaged food more rampantly than expected. “In most cases, salt is used as a preservative to give food extended shelf life and keep food safe,” explains Nia Rennix, a clinical nutritionist who specializes in weight loss and blood sugar regulation. Salt can also be used to enhance a food’s color (such as making the crust of bread a more appealing golden brown), as well as a flavor enhancer in foods you may not associate with saltiness, like ketchup or bread.

You may not be tasting the salt in your mall pretzel or packaged condiments, but salt as an ingredient is keeping you hooked. “Salt is extremely addictive, just as much as sugar. The more you consume salt, the more you crave it, and manufacturers realize this,” says Rennix. “They continue to add salt to foods because they want you to continue to purchase [their products]. 

It doesn’t matter if the salt is white, pink, sea salt, or crystallized—it all has the same effect on one’s body.” Packaging may lead you to think that certain salts are healthier, but truly, they are all equally bad in excess.

The Adverse Health Effects of Too Much Salt and Sugar in Our Foods

Beyond overeating in general, eating too much salt is proven to have negative effects on human health. “Eating too much salt is not good for your health, because the extra water that you hold on to raises your blood pressure. The more salt you eat, the higher your blood pressure,” Rennix explains. “All of this can put a strain on your heart, kidneys, brain, and arteries, which could lead to a stroke, heart attack, or kidney disease.”

And yet, Americans remain casually addicted to the stuff—leading to the looming public health crises of obesity and related illnesses. Based on data from 2017 to March 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that nearly 42 percent of adult Americans are affected by obesity, a condition closely associated with heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, certain types of cancer, and premature death. Even armed with this knowledge, many Americans are regularly lured in by food that is designed to be hard to resist.

Excessive sugar and salt intake are also causing health issues among children, leading to a rising risk of obesity and effects on blood pressure in childhood. “One in six youth in the U.S. have obesity,” states a January 2024 Forbes article, providing data from the National Survey of Children’s Health. “In the past three decades, childhood obesity in the U.S. more than tripled in adolescents and more than doubled in children,” adds the article.

The United States Department of Agriculture in April 2024 decided to regulate school lunches for children and announced rules that will “limit added sugars” in these meals for the first time between the fall of 2025 and 2027, according to a USA Today article.

“Making items highly palatable is just the beginning,” explains chef and registered dietitian Jessica Swift, who holds an MSc in nutritional sciences. “Pumping food full of sugar to the person with the sweet tooth is what junk food companies strive for. Having that sugar could release dopamine, the feel-good hormone in the brain, which associates that food with pleasure—causing the body to crave more.”

That feel-good sensation will keep you hooked on certain foods, which will bring instant comfort when consumed. “Wanting to repeat that pleasure is natural, and this can lead to overconsumption of said food,” says Swift.

Self-soothing with food is a common, easy, and often cheap tactic for a quick fix, but seeking that comfort can even be less obvious, especially when you’re not necessarily feeling down. For example, smelling a dish outside a restaurant or at a supermarket can evoke pleasant memories that awaken cravings.

“Absolutely, smelling a warm apple pie could remind you of grandma’s Sunday dinners. Gingerbread could remind you of holidays with the family. [Scent can play a part in]… the emotional attachment to food,” says Swift. Associating food with pleasure keeps humans addicted even further to the foods engineered with excessive sugar, salt, and fat to keep you craving more. Sniffing Cinnabon at the mall is a scent that has been proven to entice customers toward consuming previously unwanted calories and sugars.

Moving Away From Highly Addictive Foods

While food addiction is often used colloquially, the Yale Food Addiction Scale has been developed as a measure to determine people’s level of substance dependence. Still, even if not clinically diagnosed, humans can be unhealthily hooked on junk food. So how do we stop it?

“Choose moderation for foods that you think could be highly addictive for you,” Swift recommends. “Make sure you are consuming a well-balanced diet and drinking plenty of fluids.” When grocery shopping for items to stock your pantry with, read nutrition labels and avoid foods with high sodium and sugar content. “Do not keep these foods within arm’s reach,” Swift says. “Typically, when you have to put in an effort to get an item, you are less likely to consume it.” At least in this case, laziness can help your health.

Beyond an individual level, the government needs to implement policies that promote healthy eating habits among people. Americans are getting the majority of their calories from highly processed foods—between 60 percent to 90 percent, leading to a “health crisis,” according to research from 2009-2010.

 “Agricultural subsidies from the U.S. Farm Bill, which primarily support the production of corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, sorghum, dairy, and livestock feed, may be playing a role in unhealthy food consumption patterns,” states a 2020 study published in the journal Nutrients.

Pourya Valizadeh, a research assistant professor in the department of agricultural economics at Texas A&M University, and Shu Wen Ng, a health economist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, point out the need for the government to move away from incentivizing these food products. 

In an article published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in April 2024, they wrote, “Levying national taxes on unhealthy ultra-processed foods/beverages and offering targeted subsidies for minimally processed foods/beverages could promote healthier food choices among low-income households.”

 

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Melissa Kravitz is a writer based in New York. She is a writing fellow at Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and a contributor to the Observatory.  Counterpunch

 

Using Stoic Philosophy Today

 

Some people obsessively monitor presidential election polls. Others ignore any political news like an overdue bill. And a few probably wish they could just press a button and fast-forward past this November.

Americans have devised all sorts of strategies to deal with the unrelenting stress of this year’s presidential race. The rematch between President Biden and former President Trump has been called “the most dreaded election in modern political history.” As the two rivals prepare to debate on Thursday, about six in 10 American adults say they are already worn out by campaign coverage.

But there’s another way to cope with anxiety about the future — by turning to the past. Mention the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, and it may conjure images of boring, bearded White men in togas who lived thousands of years ago. But sages like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius offer plenty of practical advice for today’s voters who are navigating the relentless grind of this year’s presidential election.

Stoic philosophy, which teaches that it is impossible to live a happy life without living virtuously, also talks a lot about confronting one’s worse fears. The definition of Stoicism varies, but bestselling author Ryan Holiday describes it as the a “tool in the pursuit of self-mastery, perseverance and wisdom.”

The first Stoic school was founded in Athens by a philosopher named Zeno of Citium around the beginning of the 3rd century BC. Zeno, who lost his entire fortune in a shipwreck, found consolation in philosophy. He later quipped, “My most profitable journey began on the day I was shipwrecked and lost my entire fortune.”

We too can begin such a journey, Holiday says. He says that like us, the Stoics also knew something about dealing with loss, political instability and living in a time when many people felt politically powerless. He cites Aurelius, a Stoic follower who became one of Rome’s greatest emperors. He led Rome during a global pandemic that killed at least 10 million people and grappled constantly with war and murderous political divisions.

“Aurelius experienced this devastating global pandemic that ravaged society,” says Holiday, who just released “Right Thing, Right Now,” the third installment in his bestselling book series on Stoic virtues.  “But he would have also seen what it [the pandemic] did to people: the tribalism, the fear, the anger along with the flights of fancy. He saw everything that we just saw over the last couple of years.”

CNN talked to Holiday and Massimo Pigliucci, author of “How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life.” Both authors, through books, videos and podcasts, are two of the most popular modern-day interpreters of Stoicism. They offered three pieces of Stoic advice for handling the anxiety of this year’s election.

Don’t let the future destroy the present.

It pays to look ahead in the world of politics. Pollsters predict trends. Pundits gauge the potential impact of political gaffes. Party leaders assess the implications of court decisions. Worry about the future is constant.

That type of worry, though, spreads like a contagion to voters. People obsess about what will happen to them if the wrong candidate is elected. Some fixate on nightmare scenarios about the country descending into civil war. This grinding anxiety echoes Shakespeare’s famous line from “Julius Caesar”: “A coward dies a thousand times, a hero dies but once.”

Stoics only die once, though, because they reject fixating on the future. Stoicism teaches people to separate what they can control from what they cannot. Their advice: don’t become engulfed by nightmare political scenarios that may or may not come to pass. “The Stoics say that he who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary,” Holiday says. “The idea that you should wake up every day in miserable anticipation of a thing that may or may not happen is to punish yourself on top of whatever the pain that will come from that thing actually happening,” Holiday says.

Pigliucci says Stoics coped with the political turbulence of their day by focusing on what they could control: their emotions. He cites the Serenity Prayer, which is often recited at 12-step programs. The prayer is attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, a towering Christian theologian from the 20th century, and asks God to “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

“Seems like excellent advice for the upcoming presidential elections,” Pigliucci says. “Have the courage to do your duty as a citizen; vote, maybe send money or volunteer for a campaign; then accept the outcome because it will be what it will be.”

Don’t be too cynical to get involved.

Maybe you’ve met this type of person. They don’t vote because they say it won’t make a difference.  You might hear them in a barbershop or perched on a barstool, griping. All politicians are corrupt. The Illuminati control everything. Pass me a beer.

Some people deal with the anxiety of the election by checking out of politics altogether. The ancient Athenians had a word for citizens that refused to exercise their right to vote. They called them “idiotai,” from which the word “idiot” is derived.

Many Stoic leaders would never be labeled as “idiotai.” They were passionately involved in politics and the pursuit of justice. That may surprise people. Stoics get a bad rap because of the way the way the word is defined: someone “indifferent to pain or pleasure,” not showing “passion or feeling.” But ancient Stoic leaders would have been at home jousting on Sunday morning political talk shows or marching in a Black Lives Matter protest.

Holiday says Aurelius wrote constantly about justice in his classic book, “Meditations.” “He talks about the common good more than 80 times in ‘Meditations,”  Holiday says. “He talks about it more than just about anything. He actually says the whole purpose of life is good character and acts for the common good.”

The stereotype of the dispassionate, uninvolved Stoic is “as wrong as it could possibly be,” Holiday says. “If you look at the actual lives of Stoics, these are people who got married, had families, ran for public office and fought for causes,” Holiday says. “There was a generation of Stoics that were such a perpetual thorn in the side of emperors that they were known as the Stoic Opposition. At one point, all of them are kicked out of Rome because they won’t go along to get along.”

Cynicism can be masked cowardice — some cynics are afraid of the risks that come with getting involved. But the Stoic leaders were known for their courage in standing up to political tyrants. Pigliucci tells a famous story about political courage that centers on  Helvidius Priscus, a Stoic philosopher.

When the Roman emperor Vespasian threatened Priscus, the Stoic philosopher, with execution for speaking out against political tyranny, Priscus responded by saying: “Well, when have I ever claimed to you that I’m immortal? You fulfill your role, and I’ll fulfill mine. It is yours to have me killed, and mine to die without a tremor; it is yours to send me into exile, and mine to depart without a qualm.”

Be kind, even to your political enemies.

It’s hard not to be cynical when it comes to US presidential politics. Candidates brazenly lie on the campaign trail. Partisan websites and social media platforms spread so much disinformation that’s hard to know what to believe. Politicians who once loudly opposed certain candidates now bend the knee to curry their favor.

It’s easy for our dislike for our political opponents to morph into hatred. But Holiday suggests we consider how Aurelius dealt with political treachery in his time.  Aurelius survived an attempted coup from his most trusted general. He had unlimited power and could have devised an array of sadistic measures to torment or kill his traitor.  But he refused to do so.

“In fact, he wept when he was deprived of the chance to grant clemency to his former enemy,” Holiday writes in an essay on Aurelius. “The best revenge, Marcus would write “is to not be like that.”

When family or friends insult you or stop talking to you because of a political disagreement, it’s easy to respond in kind. The Stoics, though, have two words of advice, Holiday says: Be kind. That may sound naïve when personal attacks have become the norm in modern-day politics and this year’s presidential race. But Epictetus said that “Any person capable of angering you becomes your master.”

“The Stoics said we should try to see every person we meet as an opportunity for kindness,” Holiday writes in his new book. Holiday says that when Aurelius was on his deathbed, he had one regret: He was still chastising himself over the times he had had lost his temper and been unkind to others.

Holiday says he’s had to apply that Stoic advice to his own personal life. He has risen in prominence in part because he’s sold a reported 6 million books on Stoicism. He’s also built a mini-empire around Stoicism that includes YouTube videos, an Instagram feed and a Stoic newsletter.

His elevated public profile has led to some personal challenges. He says he and his family have been constantly harassed because they have taken stands against book banning, in support of women’s rights, and for the removal of Confederate monuments. A friend betrayed him.

Holiday says a younger version of himself would have “wanted blood” for those who have tried to hurt him. Instead he considered the actions of Stoic leaders like Aurelius, drawing a direct link between the “dark energy” that the Stoic leaders faced in their time and what he sees in the 2024 presidential election cycle.

“There is this energy across all societies that is driven by hatred, fear, and that wants to protect what it has and prevent other people from getting their piece of it,” Holiday tells CNN. “And that energy was certainly there in Roman times. “

But solutions to that dark energy are there, too. Stoic leaders may seem like distant figures encased in marble, but we can learn from them, Holiday says. They wrestled with and ultimately defeated the same dark energy that drove the political tribalization of their day. So can we.

John Blake is a CNN senior writer and author of the award-winning memoir, “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”

Twenty-Five Seconds Per Life: The Story of an Heroic Rescue

 

Volumes have been said about Shavarsh Karapetyan’s selfless act of heroism: he has been featured in a myriad of articles, several films and a book. His rescue of 20 people from drowning, which cost the world champion in fin-swimming his health and further achievements in a brilliant athletic career, was so impressive that an asteroid was named after him. But Shavarsh himself doesn’t like to remember that day.
 
In and out through broken glass
 
The exact cause of the accident involving one of Yerevan’s trolleybuses on the chilly morning of September 16, 1976 remains unknown. Some said one of the passengers attacked the driver after a heated verbal exchange, causing him to lose control of the vehicle. Others claimed the driver had a heart attack.
 
As it entered a bridge in central Yerevan, the trolleybus veered off course and rolled downhill into a water reservoir, known as Yerevan Lake. The noise of the crash drew the attention of athletes practicing nearby, 23-year-old finswimming champion Shavarash Karapetyan among them. 

Without giving it much thought, Shavarsh jumped into the water, ordering his brother Kamo, another swimming champion, to help him from the shore. “It was scary at first. It was so loud, as if a bomb went off. I almost drowned several times. I could imagine the agony of those 92 people and I knew how they would die,” Shavarsh told Pravmir.ru.
 
At a depth of 33 feet, the passengers were trapped in an iron sarcophagus. Shavarsh first had to break a window to give people the chance to escape. He hit the glass as hard as he could, knocking it out. There was a high chance that drowning people would instinctively cling to their rescuer and drag him down, but being a professional fin-swimmer Shavarsh knew that it would be best to let them submerge him: at some point, the drowning person would reflexively let go and try to swim up. That’s when he would catch and pull the victim out of the water. “In difficult moments like this, your love for fellow humans grows even stronger,” Shavarsh said in the documentary "Swimmer." 
 
He dove into the cold murky waters of Yerevan Lake some 40 times, going in and out through broken glass, forced to feel around for people in the dark. Each plunge took about 25 seconds. On his last dive, on the verge of fainting, he emerged clutching a seat cushion instead of a victim. “I had nightmares about that cushion for a long time. I could have saved someone else’s life,” Savarsh told Russia's Channel One.

Savarsh pulled 37 people out of the lake, and nine others escaped on their own through the broken window. The rescue operation was set up in a matter of minutes. Doctors who arrived from a nearby hospital treated the victims right on the shore. Unfortunately, only 20 of those Shavarsh rescued could be saved. 
 
One last hooray 
 
Karapetyan was hospitalized along with victims of the accident. Septic fever, double-sided pneumonia and nervous prostration had doctors fighting for his life for over a month. When he was finally discharged, Shavarsh went right back to practice, but swimming underwater echoed painfully in his lungs. Yet the athlete refused to retire without one more medal. 

 
During the next championship he swam in a haze as his brother Kamo ran along the pool, ready to jump in should Shavarsh suddenly lose consciousness. But Shavarsh came in first and set another world record, without realizing it at the time.
 
In the end, the swimmer had to quit the sport – he could no longer bear to be underwater. It made him nauseous.The man who was once called a “goldfish” and an “amphibian” tried coaching, but after just two months he went on to work at an electronics manufacturing plant.
 
The story of the heroic rescue, passed from one person to another, became an urban legend in Yerevan even though the Soviet press kept such accounts of accidents under wraps. Karapetyan’s audacious, self-sacrificing rescue was publicized only six years later, when the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily published an article by journalist Gennady Bocharov with no mention of the death toll. After the publication, tens of thousands of letters from all over the Soviet Union came pouring in for Shavarsh, many of them simply addressed to “The Armenian Republic, Yerevan, Shavarsh Karapetyan.”

 
What makes you human
 
Unlikely as it sounds, the trolleybus rescue was not the first time Shavarsh Karapetyan saved lives. In 1974 the young athlete prevented an accident involving a bus that carried 30 people. The driver had parked the bus to check on some mechanical issue, but left the engine running. Suddenly, the bus began rolling down an incline toward a mountain gorge. Karapetyan, who was on the bus, broke down the partition that separated the driver’s compartment, grabbed the wheel and steered the vehicle away from the abyss.
 
Neither was the trolleybus rescue Shavarsh’s last. In 1985 he happened to be near Yerevan’s Sports and Concert Arena when a fire broke out in the building. Shavarsh was one of the first people rushing to help the firefighters, getting burned and injured in the process. “Anyone can find himself in a place where somebody needs help, and more than once, too,” he said. “The main thing is to remember what makes you human.”
 

Today Shavarsh Karapetyan coaches his son Tigran in hopes that the latter will continue his legacy of athletic achievement. He also heads the Shavarsh Karapetyan Foundation, which organizes competitions for the new generation of swimmers. “Our whole lives, we all owe everything to each other,” is something Savarsh tells young people at every meeting. 
 
The outstanding swimmer’s athletic career was cut short when he was in top form. Karapetyan was forced to retire from major athletics at the age of 24, having set 11 world records and holding 17 world championship titles, 13 European championship titles and seven Soviet championship titles in underwater swimming. 

It’s hard to imagine what else he could have accomplished had he been able to continue. But Shavarsh calls himself a “happy man,” and believes the lives that he saved are the biggest achievement of his life.
 
“Indifference is a very mercurial phenomenon. It depends on the well-being of society,” he says. According to him, there are plenty of examples of humanism to be found today, as long as one looks closely enough: “Kindness is nurtured by love. We have to teach our children to love each other from the very beginning.”
 
-Aurora Humanitarian Initiative

It's Bloody Hot!

 

While April and May are usually the hottest months in many countries in Southeast Asia, hundreds of millions of people are now suffering in South Asia from an exceptionally intense heat wave that has killed hundreds. One expert has already called it the most extreme heat event in history. Record-breaking temperatures above 122º F were reported in the Indian capital of New Delhi and temperatures sizzled to an unheard of 127º F  in parts of India and Pakistan.

Nor was the blazing heat limited to Asia. Heat waves of exceptional severity and duration are now occurring simultaneously in many areas of the world. Mexico and parts of the United States, notably Miami and Phoenix, have recently been in the grip of intense heat events. 

In southern Mexico, endangered howler monkeys in several states have been falling dead from trees in their tropical forests due to heat stroke and dehydration. Below-average rainfall throughout Mexico has led to water shortages in Mexico City and elsewhere. In some places, birds and bats, not to speak of humans, are also dying from the heat.

All of this is no coincidence. The hot and heavy hand of climate change is now upon us. Last year was the hottest on Earth in 125,000 years, and the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere was the highest in four million years and still climbing at an ever-increasing rate. Meanwhile, global sea surface temperatures also reached a peak, causing severe massive coral bleaching in all three major ocean basins.

The World Bank is projecting that, by 2050, there will be more than 200 million climate refugees, 20 times the 10 million refugees that have already destabilized Europe. Climate change is also putting an increasingly heavy burden on our social safety net, which could ultimately cause social order to begin to break down, generating chaos.

Nobel Prize-winning former Energy Secretary Steven Chu now claims it’s no longer possible to keep the global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C above the historical average, as the 195-nation signatories to the 2015 Paris climate agreement had hoped. In fact, he projects that the target of 2°C will also be broken and that, by 2050 the global temperature will have risen above 3°C. Nor is his pessimism unique. 

Hundreds of other scientists have recently forecast a strong possibility of hitting 2.5°C, which should hardly be surprising since, for well over 30 years now, global leaders have failed to heed the warnings of climate scientists by moving decisively to phase out fossil fuels and their heat-trapping gases.

What to make of such dire forecasts?

It could hardly be clearer that the world is already in the throes of a climate catastrophe. That means it’s high time for the U.S. to declare a national climate emergency to help focus us all on the disaster at hand. (Or as famed English poet Samuel Johnson put it centuries ago, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”)

Such a declaration of a climate emergency is long overdue. Some 40 other nations have already done so, including 2,356 jurisdictions and local governments representing more than a billion people. Of course, a declaration alone will hardly be enough. 

As the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation, and the one that historically has contributed the most legacy greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the U.S. needs to develop a coherent exit strategy from the stranglehold of fossil fuels, a strategy that could serve as an international example of a swift and thorough clean-energy transition. 

But at the moment, of course, this country remains the world’s largest producer and consumer of oil and natural gas and the third largest producer of coal — and should Donald Trump win in November, you can kiss any possible reductions in those figures goodbye for the foreseeable future. Sadly enough, however, though the Biden administration’s rhetoric of climate concern has been strong, in practice, this country has continued to cede true climate leadership to others.

Despite the laudable examples of smaller nations like Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Paraguay, and Costa Rica that are already at, or within a percentage point or two, of being 100% powered by clean, renewable energy, the world sorely needs the U.S. as a global role model. To make a rapid, far-reaching, and unrelenting break with our fossil-fuel dependency — 79% of the nation’s energy is now drawn from fossil fuels — a national mobilization would be needed, and it would have to be a genuine all-of-society effort...     

-John J. Berger, CounterPunch

It's Bloody Hot! - CounterPunch.org