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Coachella, Underground

All illustrations by Kate Gavino

Gabriel Thompson | Longreads | April 2018 | 25 minutes (7,013 words)

This story was produced in partnership with The Investigative Fund, a project of The Nation Institute. Support the project, subscribe to the mailing list, or follow The Investigative Fund on Twitter and Facebook.

LEER EN ESPAÑOL

 
In the spring of 2016, as Trump was clinching the Republican nomination for president, I drove east into the Coachella Valley, looking for a 48-year-old farmworker named Roberto. My cell phone had died and I soon became lost, meandering along country roads where I rarely passed another vehicle. When I finally found Roberto, he was standing outside a single-wide trailer, waiting patiently in his cowboy hat, with an amused smile on his face.

To the north and west of his trailer were more trailers. To the south and east his yard opened into the desert, which gave way, in places, to lettuce fields and vineyards. This was the land Roberto had worked for the past 20 years, the kind of land that made you feel small but not insignificant. We stepped inside and sat at his kitchen table. The shades were drawn against the heat, and Roberto muted the television in the living room, where a newscaster spoke in Spanish about Trump’s proposed wall along the southern U.S. border. Roberto, who wore a faded gray t-shirt and jeans torn at the knees, was built thick, with broad shoulders and the hint of a gut. He took a swig of bottled water, placed his gnarled hands on the table, and began to talk.

As he spoke, it became clear that there were plenty of reasons for him to fear a Trump presidency. He was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, as was his wife, Leticia. (I’ve changed all the family names.) All three of their kids were born in Mexico. His youngest daughter was in eighth grade and also undocumented. His middle daughter was in college and protected by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, an Obama-era policy Trump had threatened to end. Only his oldest son, married to a U.S. citizen, was a legal resident. Trump was like a grenade that could land inside the family and explode, sending people flying in all directions. Roberto rarely uttered Trump’s name, instead referring to him as the disturbio, the disturbance.

But it wasn’t only Roberto — just about everyone he knew was in a similar situation. He lives in an unincorporated community called Thermal, which, according to the U.S. Census, is 99.9 percent Latino (all but three of its 2,396 people, to be exact). In nearby Mecca, another unincorporated region of nearly 9,000, Latinos also make up 99.9 percent of the population. The community of Oasis, several miles away, is 98.2 percent Latino. Coachella, the closest city, is 97.5 percent Latino. On this side of the desert, you hear Spanish peppered with English, not the other way around.

It was my first trip to the Eastern Coachella Valley, and I was collecting the oral histories of farmworkers. During those conversations, Trump was a frequent topic. He began to feel like a specter haunting the region, his threats blasted out on the radio and television. He was also something of a joke. At the time, no one I spoke with seriously considered the idea of a Trump presidency. Then he won. The candidate who had campaigned directly against the kind of people who lived in this valley was suddenly the most powerful person in the world. I had originally come to Coachella to learn what it was like to be a farmworker here. Now there was a new question: What was it like to live in a place where everyone felt under attack?

* * *

The Coachella Valley is a 45-mile stretch of scorching terrain that begins near Palm Springs and runs southeast to the Salton Sea. It is a land of impossible extremes, a place that doesn’t make sense but exists nonetheless, a testament to hubris and hard work and irrigation canals, and also to racism. Near Palm Springs, you are surrounded by golf courses, sprawling mansions, and country clubs with swimming pools and tennis courts; as you travel southeast through the valley, they are replaced, mirage-like, by agricultural fields and dusty trailer parks. In Palm Springs you can spend $1 million renting out a lush resort for two nights. On the east side, the land is dotted with illegal dumps and the drinking water is laced with arsenic.

If you’ve heard of Coachella, it’s almost certainly because of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, an annual bacchanalia that plays out on polo grounds about 10 miles from Roberto’s trailer. The 2017 festival, headlined by Kendrick Lamar, Lady Gaga, and Radiohead, brought in a record $114.6 million. VIP tickets went for $900 apiece, and couples looking to splurge could rent a modern yurt for the weekend for $7,500. But the festival has little bearing on the lives of people on the valley’s east side, except perhaps as a reminder of how easy it is to not see them.

The region can be strikingly beautiful, with dramatic mountains to the west and date trees that march to the hazy horizon. The land is rich, producing some $640 million in crops — table grapes, lemons, bell peppers, and much more — each year.

It’s also a hard place. In Thermal, about a third of the residents live below the poverty line, including nearly half of all children. Being a farmworker isn’t easy anywhere, but here it’s particularly grueling, with summertime highs that can top 120 degrees. Housing is so tight during the grape harvest that many migrant farmworkers sleep in their cars or on flattened cardboard boxes in parking lots. Some bathe in canals polluted by pesticide runoff.

But the festival has little bearing on the lives of people on the valley’s east side, except perhaps as a reminder of how easy it is to not see them.

Thermal’s largest community spot lies near the intersection of 66th Avenue and Tyler Street, home to three adjacent schools in the middle of otherwise empty fields: Las Palmitas Elementary School, Toro Canyon Middle School, and Desert Mirage High School. On a cloudless morning last April, I met up with Maria, a teacher’s assistant at Las Palmitas who is a member of the Purépecha, an indigenous group from the Mexican state of Michoacán that has a sizable presence in Thermal. School had just gotten out, and we sat at a long table in an empty cafeteria, watching children race around the playground. It was Maria’s birthday — she was now 21 — and kids had spent the day serenading her with multilingual renditions of “Happy Birthday.”

“I had my little cousin call me on election night,” Maria told me. “He said, ‘Have you voted already? I’m just really worried about my mom.’” The next day, he called in tears to ask if Maria had begun the process of fixing his mother’s immigration status so that she wouldn’t be deported, as if it were a simple matter of paperwork. “I could not respond to him,” Maria said softly. She paused, looking down at the table. “At the end, I told him, ‘Yes, I’m already doing that.’ Just to keep him calm.” She told me that her cousin was doing better now, because he thought his mother had become a legal resident. Many other parents, she said, had used the same strategy, hoping to protect their kids from worry.

On the morning after the election, students at Las Palmitas filed off the bus in a daze. Many were silent at first, but the questions eventually tumbled out. When I get home, will my mom still be there? Is the wall already built? Do they have special education classes in Mexico? Who will teach me to read? Some teachers put aside lesson plans and opened up class to a discussion about what was on everyone’s mind. “They usually come in with energy, joking around and chasing each other,” said Adam Santana, who teaches language arts at Toro Canyon. “That day they were silent. It was as if there had been a tragedy on campus. Finally, one of the students asked, ‘Are there really going to be deportations?’”

With the high school students, the fear was less on display. “The older students tend to internalize their stress a lot more,” said Karina Vega, who is one of just two full-time counselors for the almost 19,000 students in the Coachella Valley Unified School District. We met on a day when the air conditioning had gone out in her portable office, located at the district headquarters in Thermal, and her face was flushed and worried. Vega grew up in Mecca and is the daughter of farmworkers; stacked in the back of her office were boxes of dates from her father’s ranch. Her son Anzel was completing his senior year at Desert Mirage High School, which has a history of activism. In 2016, students walked out of class and marched nearly six miles to protest at the district office in support of higher salaries for their teachers. A couple of years before that, they marched out after the principal and vice principal were fired. “Our kids have hearts, big hearts,” Vega told me.

In some schools across the country, Trump inspired white kids to chant, “Build the wall!” at their Latino peers. That sort of thing wouldn’t happen here, because there aren’t any white kids. Santana, the middle school teacher, tries to prepare his kids for encounters like that in the world outside Thermal. “I tell them, when you go off to college, or if you move and get a job somewhere else, it’s going to be very different. Not everybody is going to have similar last names as you, or the same hair color. They’re not all going to speak Spanish.” The isolation has become a source of strength and comfort. One high school senior, a DACA recipient, told me that he first lived in Bloomington, in San Bernardino County, and was beaten and bullied by kids because he was still learning English. “We moved here when I was in second grade, and I would want to speak Spanish and English, and everyone was able to talk both. I was like, ‘Oh, so this is where I belong.’ They understand me and my struggles, and I understand them.”

Since the election, Vega has dealt with a surge of self-destructive behavior among the high school students. “With grief, we can figure it out,” she told me. “If someone dies, I know what to do with that.” But the general climate of fear, the threats of family separation, the fact that no one knows what’s coming next — these were existential problems that she told me “couldn’t be counseled.” She had recently attended a training that featured a speaker who described, during a particularly rough stretch of her life, drinking hot sauce. “When she would feel the fire going down her throat, she would be like, ‘Oh, there I am,’’ Vega said. “I feel like that’s where we are right now as a community. We need to feel. And I’m not saying that all of this wasn’t real under Obama, but now it’s a constant. It’s all you hear, it’s all they talk about.”

* * *

Undocumented immigrants were far from safe under Obama. During his administration, a record 2.8 million people were deported. He also oversaw the dramatic expansion of a program called Secure Communities, which allowed for information sharing between the Department of Homeland Security and local law enforcement agencies and led to the deportation of many individuals with infractions as minor as driving with a broken taillight. It was only during his final years in office, under pressure from activists, that Obama became less hawkish on immigration, creating the DACA program to protect young undocumented immigrants, and trying, unsuccessfully, to expand those protections to their parents. His legacy was, at best, mixed.

There was nothing mixed about Trump. During the campaign, Trump’s slander against Mexicans was repeated incessantly on Spanish-language news programs, sucking up the oxygen in living rooms across the Coachella Valley like a loud and unruly family member. Then he won and his threats started to mean something. In his first month in office, Trump signed an executive order that abandoned Obama’s tiered system, essentially making any undocumented immigrant a priority for deportation. That was followed by several weeks of stories about immigrants being swept up across the country, including 161 in the Los Angeles area. Similar actions had been carried out under Obama, but now they felt like the opening shot in a war. Under Trump, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were given new powers to pick up anyone they encountered, in what the agency termed “collateral arrests,” and apprehensions in the first year jumped 40 percent. Agents arrested defendants inside courthouses, homeless people seeking shelter at a church, and even a 23-year-old protected by DACA. “The crackdown on illegal criminals is merely the keeping of my campaign promise,” Trump tweeted on February 12, 2017. Here in Coachella, which is also home to a Border Patrol station, the message was clear: No one was safe.

Berta, who lives down the road from Roberto, was the first person to tell me about the raids in the Coachella Valley. (I’ve changed her name.) On February 15, 2017, she was home at work as a nanny, watching two young children when she got a call around 10 a.m. It was a friend, who heard from a neighbor that Border Patrol vans were parked in front of the local Cardenas, a grocery store chain that caters to Latinos. Then her brother-in-law called; he’d read a post on Facebook that raids were underway. Over the next hour, the calls kept coming — Berta lost count after 10 — and the scope of the operation expanded. Immigrants were being rounded up at Cardenas stores in two nearby cities, Cathedral City and Coachella, and at a Walmart and a Food 4 Less. Agents were demanding documents from anyone entering or leaving. Some attempted to flee, leaving behind carts filled with food. Others sheltered in place, refusing to exit. On the streets, Border Patrol agents set up checkpoints, sweeping up drivers who couldn’t prove their legal status. News of the raids soon leaped from social media to a local Spanish-language radio station.

As the calls kept coming, Berta veered into something close to a breakdown. Her husband, also undocumented, works in demolition and travels to construction sites across the Coachella Valley. When she reached him, he was at a jobsite not far from Cathedral City. He had already received numerous warning messages on Facebook.

Berta paced her small trailer, exchanging texts, shooting off Facebook messages, absorbing the panic and sending it back out. Her husband was 30 miles away; one wrong turn and he’d be sent back to Mexico. Finally, Berta called her sister-in-law, a U.S. citizen. Like everyone else, she had heard about the raids, and she volunteered to drive through the streets where Border Patrol checkpoints had reportedly been set up.

Berta’s sister-in-law drove for more than an hour and didn’t come across a single checkpoint. There were no agents at Cardenas, or Walmart, or Food 4 Less. There were, in fact, no raids or checkpoints in the Coachella Valley that day. When Berta got the news, she broke into tears of relief.

It was mid-April when we spoke, two months after the false rumors had terrorized the valley. As Berta described that day, her hands shook and she began to cry all over again. “I decided not to worry anymore,” she said, wiping her eyes. “It’s too stressful to think about all the possibilities.” She paused and thought about the possibilities. “What would happen if they got my husband?” she asked. “Or if they got me? What would happen to my kids?” Their oldest son, at 18, had just renewed his DACA permit; their youngest son, then 14, was too young to enroll.

Berta had just heard on the news that Trump’s new priority was to deport people who had overstayed their visas. Berta had overstayed her visa, and the government had the address of her brother-in-law, whom she had said they were visiting. “That’s the first place they’re going to look for us,” she said. She looked at her watch. It was 3:30 in the afternoon. We were seated in her trailer with the curtains pulled shut. Her husband wasn’t due to be home for several hours, but she was already beginning to worry.

* * *

Thermal’s Migrant and Seasonal Head Start center is located in a yellow one-story building across the street from Vega’s office. When I visited, several months after Trump took office, I met the director, Beatriz Machiche, a former farmworker. Down the hallway was an empty classroom with a sheet of paper taped to the door that read, Cerrado hasta nuevo aviso, Jan 2017. They had closed the classroom because they didn’t have enough kids. This time last year, they had a waiting list 200 kids long. Machiche told me she suspected parents no longer wanted to turn over their information to the federal government for fear of being deported. She and her staff had started making trips to the fields to spread the word about their services, but so far, people were reluctant. “Parents say they will come, but they don’t,” she said. In more than a decade at the office, she’d never seen anything like it.

This was one of the harshest consequences of the fear: Immigrants were staying away from the very institutions designed to sustain them and elevate their children. In California, several other agencies that provide Migrant and Seasonal Head Start care reported drops in enrollment last year of between 15 and 20 percent. One of the largest Migrant and Seasonal Head Start grantees in the country is the Texas Migrant Council, which operates in seven states; last year, the number of kids they served dropped 11 percent. In Texas, the number of students assisted through the federally funded Migrant Education Program, which provides assistance to children of migrant farmworkers who face special obstacles accessing education, dropped 22 percent from 2016 to 2017. In California, the drop was 7 percent.

The fear was also causing people to go hungry. After the false Cardenas rumors, Veronica Garcia, who works with Borrego Health, a nonprofit health care provider, was knocking on doors at a trailer park in Thermal. A woman in her 60s told Garcia that many of her neighbors had stopped shopping, convinced that immigration agents were staking out grocery stores. As their cabinets emptied out, she had begun to travel to local distribution sites to collect free food that she’d pass out to grateful families. As she spoke to Garcia, hungry kids walked by her home to pick up peanut butter sandwiches. By the end of the conversation, tears were streaming down the woman’s face.

“She was letting us know how bad it had gotten for everybody there,” said Garcia. “People were too scared to come out at all.” Garcia had previously worked at Coachella Valley’s food bank, Food in Need of Distribution, or FIND. She contacted them and explained the gravity of the situation, and several hours later a truck rolled into the trailer park. Within hours, nearly 200 people had been fed.

Chantel Schuering is the community relations director for FIND, and says that they typically sign up about 3,000 families a year for Medicaid and food stamps. After the election, their numbers dropped by more than half, a trend that lasted into the spring. Across the country, programs that feed the hungry have seen sharp drops in enrollment. In California, the number of participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, dropped 7 percent last year. In Florida, the decrease was even higher, at 9.6 percent. Texas participants were down 7.4 percent.

This was one of the harshest consequences of the fear: Immigrants were staying away from the very institutions designed to sustain them and elevate their children.

Many people I interviewed emphasized that they couldn’t definitively explain the drops in enrollment, but they believed that fear of deportation was a contributing factor. Sometimes, though, the link was direct. After a raid in February 2017 in Woodburn, Oregon, during which ICE picked up two vans of farmworkers, several local families responded by calling the Oregon Child Development Coalition, which provides Migrant and Seasonal Head Start services for the state, to demand that their names be expunged from the database. In Coachella, FIND received numerous calls from residents wanting to learn how to unenroll from food stamps and Medicaid. This February, those fears received confirmation: Reuters reported that the Trump administration was working on new rules to punish immigrants for enrolling their U.S.-born children in Head Start, food stamps, and other programs.

The fear also appears to be causing immigrants to hesitate before they report crimes. Last April, Houston’s police chief announced that the number of Hispanics who reported rape had dropped nearly 43 percent in the first three months, compared to the same period the previous year. During the first six months of the Trump administration, domestic violence reports among Latinos dropped 18 percent in San Francisco, 13 percent in San Diego, and 3.5 percent in Los Angeles. (There was virtually no change in reporting among non-Latinos.) Sarah Stillman, writing in the New Yorker, reported that in one Latino neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia, domestic violence reports dropped more than 85 percent in the first eight months of 2017, compared to the previous year, while rape and sexual complaints were down 75 percent.

In the months after the election, people in Coachella altered their daily routines, recalculating risks. Attendance at the largest Catholic Church in the Coachella Valley, Our Lady of Soledad, dipped between 10 to 15 percent. “People [once] felt pretty safe here,” said Father Guy Wilson. “In the new political climate, it’s like they’re going to go after everyone.”

Another woman told me that her husband, an undocumented immigrant, had stopped wearing political T-shirts, which amounted to a subtle erasing of his personality. Others eliminated trips to the movies or to local restaurants, because each journey increased the chance of being stopped by Border Patrol. One afternoon, I rode in the car with an undocumented woman who was picking up her son from a community college class. During the drive she gripped the steering wheel and repeatedly scanned her mirrors for the green-and-white truck of an agent. When we got back to her trailer we both collapsed on the sofa, relieved. This did not feel like a sustainable way to live.

Last April, the Desert Sun, the local newspaper, reported that medical clinics were seeing drops in the number of patient visits. Doug Morin directs Coachella Valley Volunteers in Medicine, a free clinic that serves individuals without health insurance, filling a gap in a region where the doctor-to-population ratio is more than four times federal recommendations. The clinic once did a brisk business. “Every month and every year, our numbers went up,” Morin told me. In January, when Trump took office, patient visits nose-dived. They had 171 patient visits that month, down from 429 in January of 2016. When we spoke in September, he said visits were down by 25 to 30 percent for the year.

Morin told me of one elderly woman who had come to the office complaining of abdominal pain. She had previously gone to the emergency room of a local hospital, where doctors discovered a mass on her uterus, but because she didn’t have insurance, she was sent on her way. At Morin’s clinic, a physician determined that the mass wasn’t fibroids, a common and treatable condition, but likely a cancerous tumor. As a staff member filled out paperwork to enroll the woman in Emergency Medi-Cal, which is available to undocumented immigrants, the woman’s daughter entered the office.

“She told us, ‘Delete everything!’” said Morin. “She didn’t want her mother’s name or address to be shared with anyone.” They tried to explain the severity of the condition, but the daughter grabbed the paperwork and marched her mother out. “She left so quickly that we weren’t even able to give her mother anything for her pain,” recalled Morin.


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Last year, as winter turned to spring, I stopped by Roberto’s trailer several times and always found him defiant and unafraid. More rumors of raids had swept through the valley, and Roberto’s supervisors had recommended that employees travel in small groups to avoid attracting attention from immigration officials. Roberto saw Border Patrol agents just about every day, sometimes idling behind his car at a red light, other times in line when getting coffee at a nearby market. When I asked him how he felt when he saw a Border Patrol truck in the rear mirror, he shrugged. They were doing their jobs and he was doing his.

He told me that he had lost his fear a decade ago, when his son, Angel, had nearly died. At the time, Angel was 16 and picking grapes near Bakersfield with him. The temperature hit 104 degrees, and Angel began to complain that he felt dizzy and too weak to work. After Roberto insisted that his son be taken to the hospital, the company put Angel in a truck, placed ice bags under his armpits, and brought him to a clinic.

Angel was dropped off at home that evening looking pale and weak. He couldn’t tell his father what kind of treatment — if any — he had received. He spent the night sweating and vomiting in the 14-foot-by-14-foot room that their family of five then shared in their employer’s primitive labor camp. It was only after an organizer with the United Farm Workers drove Angel to the hospital that doctors finally diagnosed him with sunstroke and discovered that he’d been exposed to the West Nile virus. The sunstroke weakened his immune system, likely causing the West Nile to develop into meningitis, an infection that inflames the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord. Angel went into a coma, and for a time it seemed he might not survive. When he regained consciousness, Roberto greeted his son in the hospital room. Then he stepped into the hallway and kneeled on the ground, overcome.

“That takes your fear away,” he told me. “What can anyone do to me now?” Before, he had been a hard but quiet worker. After Angel’s brush with death, Roberto traveled to Sacramento to share his story and speak out in support of heat protections for farmworkers, which were signed into law in 2005 by then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Roberto now stood up to supervisors who disrespected workers; he had also begun to take his phone into the fields, where he videotaped farmworkers speaking about their lives. His oldest daughter, Rosa, was majoring in journalism, and Roberto had become something of a farmworker-journalist himself, uploading the videos he took to Facebook. In one, he addressed Trump directly. “These are the people that the politicians don’t want, but while they sleep at this hour, all these people are working in the fields across California,” he said, as a crew harvested celery stalks in the background. “And a greeting to Donald Trump, who doesn’t want us. I invite him to come here and find out about our work. This here is celery, which gives flavor to this soup.”

It wasn’t hard to find fear in the Coachella Valley, but there was resistance as well. One evening, I visited Jorge Ortiz at his house in Coachella, where he lives with his wife, Ymelda, and their three sons. Their living room was filled with unpacked boxes — they had recently moved — and Ortiz sat on the couch, hunched over and exhausted. The 44-year-old had just arrived home from a long shift as a foreman at a landscaping company. He worked weekends as a caterer, and sometimes picked up the odd gardening or construction job. “I have the same story as everyone else: I was going to stay here two or three years and go back to Mexico,” he told me. That was 17 years ago. When he started to rise at the landscaping company, he sent for his wife and kids instead. Their two oldest kids have DACA, while their third son is a U.S. citizen. Jorge and Ymelda remain undocumented.

Because he refuses to hide his identity when giving media interviews, Ortiz has become one of the most recognizable immigrant activists in the area. One of his landscaping clients is a veterinarian who cares for dogs used by the Border Patrol; Ortiz greets the agents when they arrive. Last year, on May 1, he joined fellow activists at a protest in front of the local Border Patrol station. Just a week earlier, Ortiz and his family had been profiled in a widely watched video made by AJ+ that showcased his activism. “I would like to send a message to my Latino people: show your faces,” he told the camera. It was a stance that made the people around him nervous. At the May protest, another participant insisted Ortiz don a black hat and sunglasses to conceal his face; another walked alongside him to guard against any attempt by border agents to seize him.

Ortiz, I think, could sense that I was struggling to understand his lack of fear. He told me that he had got his start as an activist a decade ago with a group called the Council of Mexican Federations, or COFEM, which helped parents become leaders within Coachella schools. As he became more vocal, other undocumented immigrants starting calling him to ask for his advice, or simply to worry aloud about the future. Since Trump’s election, the calls had skyrocketed, and he had seen how fear could grow until the life you were living didn’t look much like a life at all.

‘I would like to send a message to my Latino people: show your faces,’ he told the camera.

Ortiz admitted that he did, of course, have fear. He didn’t want to be separated from his family, and he wanted his sons to be able to continue their studies in the United States. But he didn’t want to be ruled by fear. So his answer was to push the fear aside and charge forward. “If you call for fear, fear will come,” he told me. “But if you call for faith, faith will also come.”

* * *

On a Saturday in June, I pulled into the driveway of Roberto’s trailer. It was a few minutes past noon and the temperature was on its way to 106. Roberto was outside, in the shade of a carport he had recently built, next to a fence he had recently completed, adjacent to a shed he had cleaned out and converted into a small music studio. He liked to come home from a day in the fields and tinker around out back, as if he’d spent the shift bottled up in an air-conditioned office.

Today, though, he wasn’t working. An accordion was slung over his shoulders and he was squeezing out a melody. Several large jalapeño peppers rested on a nearby folding table, which he had risen before the sun to pick. Roberto often had a playful sparkle in his eye, but now he was positively beaming.

“Rosa graduates from college today,” he said. He put the accordion down, pulled up a stool, and offered me a chair. He would need to clean up soon and head into Los Angeles, but right now he was luxuriating in the moment. Rosa was why they had landed in the United States in the first place. Back in Mexicali, Roberto worked at a bread company called Bimbo, where he monitored a toasting line. When he asked to have a day off for Rosa’s baptism, his supervisor denied the request. Roberto, who had never missed a day of work, went anyway. How could he miss the baptism of his own daughter? For that, the supervisor suspended him for 15 days. Furious, Roberto walked out and never came back.

After that, he hadn’t found steady work, so the family came to the United States on a tourist visa and never went back. As a slight breeze tickled the sweat on my neck — Roberto didn’t sweat, as far as I could tell — he talked about Rosa’s future. He knew that she was a hard worker and had dreams of being a journalist, but he wasn’t sure of her plans after graduation. She moved in a different world already and was rising and happy. That was all he needed to know. “I told her, just because we helped you out, you don’t owe us anything,” he said. “You make your own path and don’t worry about us.”

After half an hour, I left Roberto so that he could go inside and shower. He had picked out a sparkling outfit for the big day: a sleek purple and blue dress shirt, black slacks, white cowboy boots and a matching white tejana, or cowboy hat. Despite the disturbio, his family was moving forward.

* * *

Jose Simo is a soft-spoken counselor at the College of the Desert, a community college in the Coachella Valley that serves as many young people’s path out of the fields. In 2008, he founded Alas Con Futuro, or Wings to the Future, a club to support undocumented students and connect them with scholarships and financial aid. On September 5, the club held its first meeting of the 2017-18 academic year, where they planned to introduce the group to new students. Several hours before they met, Trump announced that he was canceling DACA, and Simo’s phone started buzzing with texts. The meeting turned into a confessional, with students going around the table, sharing their fears, wiping away tears. “People were just devastated,” said Simo. “It was incredibly difficult. Yet I’m always amazed at how resilient the students are. The fifth of September was hard, and the sixth was hard, but by the seventh, they were just going to move forward.”

Several weeks later, Simo was in a meeting room at the college, where two-dozen people had gathered for a DACA clinic. At the front of the room stood Luz Gallegos with a group called TODEC Legal Center. She began the workshop with a story about her first activist campaign, in 1986. Gallegos, at age 7, traveled with her parents to Washington, D.C., to lobby members of Congress on immigration reform. While they had raised enough money for their airfare, they couldn’t afford lodging, so they spent their week in Washington sleeping under a bridge. Each morning they’d clean up at a local church and descend on the Capitol.

Her point was that victory was possible: President Ronald Reagan, a conservative Republican, had signed an immigration reform bill that legalized the status of nearly three million undocumented immigrants. I’d seen Gallegos in action before, and this was always her message: You could win if you fought. “You are not alone,” she told the students. “You don’t need to have fear, because that’s what they want you to feel. There are so many people behind you, supporting you. Don’t forget that you are the very best of the best, the crème de la crème.”

Trump had announced March 5, 2018, as the official end date for DACA, though recipients whose protections expired before then could apply for another two-year reprieve. The deadline to send in renewals was October 5, and Gallegos was scrambling to reach as many people as she could, giving upward of three workshops a day. She’d once told me that after the election her organization had instituted a policy of self-care to prevent burnout and help staff manage the emotional stress that came with working with a community in crisis. That was five months ago, and she didn’t look like she had taken many days off since. When I asked her about it, she just laughed. Time for rest would come later. She excused herself to help a DACA student fill out her paperwork.

When I swung by Roberto’s trailer, he was uncharacteristically quiet. “Do you think we made a mistake with Dolores?” he asked. In July, his youngest daughter had turned 15, which meant she was eligible to apply for DACA, but Roberto had been hesitant to turn over any more information to the federal government as long as Trump was president. Now even that limited protection was gone. And what about Rosa, whose life after college was just starting to unfold?

“We work, and maybe from the viewpoint of others we look happy,” he said. “But we are uncertain.” He was seated on the couch next to Leticia, who remained quiet throughout, as she often did. The couple looked exhausted. The season had shifted again, and they were now planting celery for $10.50 an hour, a task performed at night to protect the young seedlings from the daytime heat. “We don’t know what will happen tomorrow,” he said, his eyes turned to a soap opera on the television. “Sometimes we get off work at two or three in the morning and we could just be pulled over by immigration and that’s it.” For the first time, he hinted at the prospect of defeat. He spoke of getting older without any retirement savings, of a life without unemployment insurance or health care, of his parents in Mexico, who had both died without him being able to say a proper goodbye. Those were all sacrifices made for the benefit of his kids. Could everything really be wiped away in an instant?

Dolores hadn’t been around during earlier visits, but today she was home and came out of her room to chat. The high school sophomore has long black hair with bangs cut short across her forehead, framing a broad face and bright smile. She was 2 when the family moved to the United States, and except for trips to Bakersfield during the grape harvest, she’s spent her entire life in the trailer park. She told me that her playground was the surrounding desert, where she invented characters and talked to the palm trees. “I would make believe that I was a knight and I would be trying to save princesses,” she said with a laugh. “I’m pretty sure my parents thought I had a screw loose.”

Dolores seemed to be taking the news of DACA’s cancellation better than her father. At times she felt lost, and she worried about her sister Rosa, who was her best friend and mentor. Dolores had always dreamed of studying abroad, which now seemed impossible. But she still had the same goal in sight: to attend the University of California at Berkeley. “If I have to work twice as hard, three times as hard, there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m going to do it,” she said. “My sister tells me, ‘It’s not hard — it’s time consuming.’” The phrase has become something of a mantra for Dolores, who studies up to five hours a day, writing by hand because the family doesn’t own a computer. Her current class schedule includes AP world history, AP multicultural literature, AP Spanish, math honors, physics, and dance. “You try to get as many AP and honors classes as you can, ’cause they’re going to help you out,” she said, saying she was frustrated Desert Mirage didn’t offer more advanced courses than it did. She’s only ever received A’s.

Dolores told me that she wanted to be the first person in her family to graduate in a white gown, an honor reserved for the 10 best students in the school. She doesn’t yet know what she wants to study. What she knows is that she never wants to step foot in the fields, and that with a good job she can help support her parents. “They work extra hours and are paid so little,” she said. “I know they’re being yelled at. I remember my dad with all of his hands bruised and my mom’s knees aching. They come home so tired.” Behind Dolores, Roberto had fallen asleep on the couch and was snoring gently.

* * *

When I last visited Roberto, it was dusk on the day after Thanksgiving and the sky over Coachella had turned a gorgeous purple. Rosa was visiting from Bakersfield, where she had gotten a job advocating for immigrants, and we stood outside the trailer, enjoying the evening breeze as she described her work. She attended protests and wrote articles and would soon be traveling to Washington, D.C., in support of the Dream Act, which, if passed, would provide a path to citizenship for undocumented youth. Roberto stood next to her, smiling.

In the Coachella Valley, fear appeared to be in a moment of retreat. After rumors of raids and massive deportation forces, many people told me that things had entered a period of normalcy. Doug Morin, of Coachella Valley Volunteers in Medicine, said patient visits had rebounded. Enrollment at Migrant and Seasonal Head Start had also bounced back, thanks in part to the aggressive outreach of Beatriz Machiche and her staff. It wasn’t hard, though, to imagine how quickly everything could change. In the first few weeks of 2018, there was a visible increase in Border Patrol agents throughout the Coachella Valley, which led to fresh worries of an enforcement action (though, again, none materialized). In February, as part of a national crackdown on employers, ICE agents visited several local businesses to conduct audits. At one restaurant, a number of customers abruptly left after the ICE agents entered, only returning later in the afternoon to pay their bills. For undocumented families, fear can surface at a moment’s notice.

Shortly after Valentine’s Day, Roberto called with good news: Dolores was ranked eighth in her sophomore class of 516 students, which meant she was on track to graduate wearing white. She had also recently asked her parents to organize a fiesta de quinceañera, the coming-of-age celebration for girls when they turn 15. Dolores had turned 15 last July, but the summer had passed without a party because money had been tight. Money was still tight, of course. But Roberto told me “she has never asked for anything,” and so he and Leticia promised their daughter a big party, setting a date for May. They needed to hire musicians and a videographer, feed everyone, and rent out a space. Roberto estimated it would cost $7,000 to pull it off. He didn’t know where they’d get that kind of money, but he had no doubt that they would. He was nearly 50 years old, but he was a dreamer, too.
 

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, with support from the Puffin Foundation.

Gabriel Thompson is a journalist based in Oakland and mostly writes about immigration, labor, and organizing. His most recent book is Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture.

* * *

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact checker: Ethan Chiel
Translator: María Ítaka
Illustrator: Kate Gavino
Copy editor: Krista Stevens

As Innocuous as Plant No. 1

An employee of Tokyo Electric Power Company takes off his gloves as he holds a geiger counter to measure radiation at the Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Fukushima. (Behrouz Mehri/ /AFP/Getty Images)

William Vollmann | No Immediate Danger | Viking | April 2018 | 26 minutes (7,015 words)

The taxi driver said: “Nuclear power plants, I wish they would all be abandoned, because there was a safety miss. They promised nothing dangerous would happen, but then this accident clearly showed there was a miss…”

The new dosimeter read 4.7 microsieverts as we rolled out of central Iwaki, and the van’s interior radioactivity was a homelike 0.12 micros an hour — appropriate for Tokyo or San Francisco.

“The fact is, the government is trying to restart other nuclear power plants,” he said. “That move is unbelievable. With all these reactors turned off here, still electricity is not short at all. Renewable is better.”

It was a cloudy morning, promising rain to the west. The rice fields were stubbled green and brown, most of the crop having been harvested in mid-October. Occasionally a very few yellow-green shaggy fields awaited the gathering. Water was sparkling on young trees, and in several yards ripe persimmons glowed on the trees.

* The Union of Concerned Scientists asserted an official return date of 2022, although, as will be seen, different zones would actually be decontaminated at different times.

The driver’s notion was Okuma would be safe to live in after 60 or 70 years.* At 8:07 we entered the expressway, with the frisker reading nearly unchanged. With the driver now silent, I gazed down on rice fields and an occasional scarlet maple in the light and dark green of forest. At 8:16 we could see the twin thermal stacks of Hirono, the frisker showing 0.24 micros an hour. Naraha read comparably at first; the sun shone there on a small hillside cemetery in a clearing, so that the stones looked almost cheerful. The mountain forest remained mostly uncut except for the so-called “laydown areas” where green tarps overlined the black bags.

In the four minutes that it required for us to pass through Naraha, the frisker readings (on NORMAL) climbed from 0.23 to 0.6 micros per hour — with ups and downs, to be sure. Then we entered Tomioka. Just here a digital sign advised us that the radiation was 2.34 micros outside. Departing the expressway so that the interpreter could use the washroom, the driver parked a few steps from the toll taker, who wore white protective gear in his booth; and I took a one-minute timed walk to frisk birdsong and pine-smell: only 374 cpms, 1.26 micros an hour. Why the radiation level was so much lower here than it had been at the digital sign was one of life’s mysteries; one could blame the frisker, the digital sign or local variation.

We now took a certain forest road whose air dose by brown pools and tall sedges was 1.644. High over a reservoir I read a happier 0.356. It was 8:40 when we entered the city limits of greater Okuma, whose name means “Big Bear”; the dosimeter read 4.9. Continuing onward, we came to the sign which warned: NO GO ZONE AHEAD, and presently arrived at the Okuma Town office, whose anteroom a NORMAL frisk found to be a remarkably salubrious 0.22 micros—not out of place for Moscow if on the high side for Poza Rica, Mexico. We took off our shoes and went upstairs. Especially for me the two officials had prepared their daily weather report:

Situation map at the Okuma Town office

They said that in one spot in central Okuma where the radiation used to be 100 micros it was now only 40. When I asked about Tomioka, they replied that the downtown there was typically 0.3 micros, which was far lower than the pancake frisker indicated. Perhaps they meant the air dose. Anyhow, they were full of good news.

According to the regulations, they were to follow our taxi and ensure that we did not deviate from the route plan, which I had been required to propose and clear several months earlier, at which time there had been an additional implication that I might not be permitted to get out of the car. In fact, these two men were wonderful guides and hosts. They drove ahead, leading the taxi through the central downtown and to a temple, then to the ocean, a river, a shrine, a highly radioactive place and finally to a vantage point from which Plant No. 1 would be visible. Whenever I wished, I told the taxi driver to stop, then walked about and frisked to my heart’s content. We were all supposed to have dosimeters, including the taxi driver, so I had an extra one for him, but nobody cared about that. By the way, he was forbidden to get out of the car. Following the rules, I now supplied myself, the interpreter and the driver (who declined) with shoe covers, painter’s union suits and masks. Those items were all manufactured with pride in the United States of America, and they began to tear almost immediately. Duct taping my imperfections at crotch and thigh, shuffling about ludicrously in the flimsy, wrinkled shoe covers, I watched myself fall in the estimation of those dignified officials. Fortunately, years of disappointing and even disgusting the Japanese with my American gaucheries had made me an expert in looking ridiculous with extreme tranquility, so on that understanding, we went downstairs and set out down the road. It was 9:09, and the dosimeter had accrued 5.0 micros exactly. I felt quite happy.

Those items were all manufactured with pride in the United States of America, and they began to tear almost immediately.

Approaching the red zone almost at once, we reached a narrow vertical warning sign of red characters on white; ahead stood a sign whose red and blue characters were facing in three directions. There were three sentries. Each one clutched a bright orange baton in his white-gloved hand. Unlike in the small village of Iitate, the obstacle course of barriers they oversaw was of a merely suggestive character; anybody could have stepped over or driven through. Behind a tall tripod from which a dark lamp-bulb depended, a pale accordion gate, evidently for night hours, stood collapsed into irrelevance on the righthand side of the road. Stepping out of the taxi, I frisked the air, and was pleased to find the very moderate level of 1.54 micros an hour. One of the officers checked our permits, and my passport. Then they bowed us through. We entered the red zone at 9:21.

We were now in Ogawa Ward, where a one-minute frisk down the street captured 750 counts per minute, or 2.58 micros an hour — a bit “hot,” to be sure, but hardly exceptional for a red zone; even in the yellow parts of Tomioka it would have been in place. I remember another gate, and a lovely lane overgrown with the usual pampas grass and tall goldenrod, houses pleasantly secluded behind the trees. I saw two men in protective gear at an abandoned Esso station. Inside the taxi van, the radiation was already more than 2 micros. We drove on, and then I asked to stop again. The air dose by some pampas grass was 3.27. The officials waited patiently in their car.

There were places where weeds were just beginning to break through the asphalt of what had evidently once been magnificently maintained streets, while at the roadside a clamor of ivy, goldenrod, and other weeds almost obscured the houses behind them, with only a few roofs still showing, like the forecastles of sinking ships. A meter above one bit of weedy pavement I measured a cool 5.0 micros.

The officials wanted to show me their town hall. They proudly considered it to be “a model decontamination,” and I do admit without reservations that it read only 0.826 and 0.816 micros — 800 times “hotter” than Portland, Oregon. They said that cesium was now found “normally,” as they put it, at three to five centimeters down, but no further, “because the nature of it has a particular affinity for clay.” My little excavation. Shigihara’s land in Iitate had detected what must have been cesium at a greater depth than that — but then the radioactivity had obediently fallen off. Perhaps the clay ran shallower in Okuma. — The officials remarked that removing five centimeters of farmland was easy, but expensive here, due to the asphalt, but (I detected understated pride) they had persevered in this spot all the same, to a depth of two to three centimeters. To decontaminate a garden, which they had also accomplished, one must excavate it all by hand. They were still “just learning,” they modestly said. I cannot now remember whether I complimented them on their hard work; I hope that I did.

They showed me the former health center. This edifice I did assure them now looked very nice.

The more talkative of the two was named Mr. Suzuki Hisatomo; the interpreter remarked that he was “very cultured.” I asked him which accident had been worse, Fukushima or Chernobyl. He said that in terms of the amount of radiation released it was Chernobyl, by far. Neither one of them showed any worry about today’s excursion. They wore dark galoshes, perhaps to keep from tracking home radiocontaminants, and they put gloves on and off at will, but declined to trouble with masks; as the morning warmed up they rolled down their hazard suits to the waist, revealing the crisp municipal tunics beneath.

vollman

The Okuma air dose monitor was not grated off as Iitate’s had been, but likewise crowned with a slanting plane of solar panels. It appeared to be turned off, for its display showed four zeroes in microsieverts per hour; behind it, dead leaves huddled against the curb, weeds grew up out of the sidewalk, and the hedge hung shaggily over them. And why not? All 11,000 residents remained evacuated.

We drove on. In a certain long commercial street, which strange to say had one parked car every block or so (perhaps the owners had fled by other means), the rectilinear geometries of sunlight and shadow emphasized its forsakenness more than did the relatively few weeds and vines; the place was being cared for after a fashion; and the shards and flotsam of the earthquake had been raked to one side. The radiation was 2,060 counts per minute, which is to say 6.9 micros an hour, so that was getting up there; a year of it would make for 60.44 millis — well above the maximum for nuclear reactor workers. Like an eager puppy, I frisked about the central district’s shuttered shops. The almost immaculate pavement was cut by multiple jagged shadow-diagonals, and sometimes pierced by tall weeds. Broken pots lay on certain sidewalks. Fewer windows were broken than in Tomioka, perhaps because the higher radiation discouraged thieves. I sometimes saw tattered scraps of cloth hanging from abandoned facades, broken boards and bricks heaped on sidewalks here and there — but the streets were clean save for those weeds. (In one street, it is true, I discovered a sort of beach of broken tiles, all swept up against the curb but on the asphalt nonetheless.) From behind an air conditioner or space heater on blocks on the sidewalk grew one of those ivy-vines I was always seeing in Tomioka; it crept up the side of a shop, gripped a drainpipe to whose radioactive effluent it must have been partial, then insinuated itself through a door’s crack and behind some establishment’s dark window. What it did in there I cannot tell you. Ivy flourished over and through a barbershop’s barred gates. Other weeds bowed, spreading their many fingers over the asphalt. The air dose there was usually around 4 micros — 35 millis a year. We drove to another part of the same district, and here several windowpanes had gone; behind wrinkled curtains lay books, crates, rectangles of corrugated siding. In one place that reminded me of the retail block across from the garment shop in Tomioka, the lower part of the blinds had been twisted down at a 90-degree angle and then mostly torn away, so that in the dark cell just behind it I could see a table on which sat a teacup beside several closed laptop computers. What had happened there? Had the proprietor drunk a last cup of tea before he evacuated, and had he feared that his computers might be contaminated? How had the window gotten broken? Most lives are unfinished stories (suicide perhaps comprising our best chance to “complete” a life), so the red zone’s plethora of such scenes of interruption as this was in a way extremely ordinary…but to have all these lives so interrupted at once! — A crate lay beneath shuttered lattice windows. A great weed in full summer flourish rounded off that block, and then more closed doors and weeds decorated the next. It looked slightly tidier here than the neatest street of Tomioka.

Now proceeding to a more suburban-looking neighborhood, we came upon more hidden and thus more apparently similar interruptions, for here no windows had been shattered to reveal whatever wreckage, panic or quiet sadness lay within. As I paced the empty street, with a fresh-trimmed lawn giving way to pampas grass on the side of it, and a castle-like apartment tower rising behind everything, the air dose measured 2,060 counts per minute and 6.9 micros — almost as much as the interior of Mr. Shigihara’s dairy barn in Iitate. A power pole leaned over a parking lot. Over a weedy drainage grating by some decrepit apartments the level was 8.79.

Just before ten, we were at Ono Station, the only Japan Rail stop for Okuma; for some reason, there had not been an Okuma Station and might not be for a while now. Mr. Suzuki said the target reoccupation date for Okuma’s less contaminated areas was three years; here it would take 10.

* But there were sunnier ways to calculate those 23.2 micros. Magill’s Survey of Science, published in 1993, advised me that “those working with radiation are required to keep their dosage below 5 rems [= 50 millis] per year, which is…25 microsieverts…per hour for a 40-hour work week. No ill effects have been observed at several times this dosage.”

In the year previous to the reactor failures, Ono’s air dose had varied between 0.041 and 0.042 micros an hour. Above a grating in the street before the station I now measured 4.20 micros. Two steps away, another grating, frisked from about eight inches, read 23.2 micros, which in one hour would have given me what it took nearly a month to absorb back home. I was a little shocked; a year’s worth of that would be 203.3 millis.*—But when I raised the frisker slightly, to 10 inches, the count dropped to 21.9. At a foot and a half it fell to 11.52, which I considered spicy enough. Meanwhile the stairs within the earthquake-damaged station were only 1.604. I think that if I had to dwell in a red zone I would find a thick-walled place and keep within it as much as possible. In this connection I might note that during those three hours in the Okuma red zone my dosimeter accrued 9.1 micros of gamma radiation.† Call it 3 micros an hour. I should say we were in those two vehicles for at least half the time, so of course the “real” average dose one could expect to accrue in Okuma would have been significantly higher. But if one mostly lurked inside and managed on a budget of 3 hourly micros, which might not have been much worse than the working hours of an international airline stewardess, then 26.28 annual micros would be one’s portion.

† Between 9:21, when we passed through the gate, and 12:25, when we departed the red zone, the display altered from 5.0 to 14.1 micros.

The weeds around the overgrown tracks were 9 and 7 micros. Here they had truly been left to themselves, which encouraged my appreciation of the work which was being carried out against nature in the radioactive city; for in the long narrow zone of fenced-off tracks the pampas grass rose high above masses of whiskery weeds. As soon as I approached the fence to frisk it (about 10 micros), contaminated stickleburrs festooned the legs of my paper suit.

* Under the category “treatment of contaminated wastes,” the ftinistry of the Environment included “captured wild harmful animals,” for which the “executing agency,” Kyowa Kako Co., Ltd., stood ready to supply a “demonstration of the safe composting system for treatment of dead bodies of captured animals.”

Mr. Suzuki remarked that he saw wild boar around here every day; yesterday they had trapped three; I presume they killed them.*

At one corner where weeds were growing mightily from broken pots and from right out of the asphalt, a white hard hat lay in the street. I pointed it out to Mr. Suzuki. With a smile, he said that the crows had carried it there.

The officials had explained that “former resident families” could return 15 times a year for up to four hours each, but I never expected to see them. Not far past the station, however, the officials stopped their car to introduce us to an evacuee named Mr. Tazawa Norio, who had once been a colleague of theirs. (Later I learned that his wife was inside the house cleaning, but I never saw her.) He was all dressed up in a mask, gloves and a white hazard suit so that he could trim the weeds in front of his home. Something like a shower cap crowned his head with a mushroom slit. From a narrow stripe of exposed but shaded face his eyes squinted sadly at me, although when he attacked the weeds with his clippers (they were taller than he), his eyes widened as he gazed upward. His dosimeter, Japanese-made, hung from a lanyard around his neck. It was an odd sight to see him beside Mr. Suzuki, who was barefaced but for sunglasses and whose coveralls had been rolled neatly down to his hips. Since that latter person entered the red zone nearly every day, one would think that he would be less raffish about his exposure. But perhaps radiation damage is merely another harmful rumor.

Mr. Suzuki Hisatomo

Mr. Tazawa Norio

“Three years ago my house was almost new,” said Mr. Tazawa. “What I now have left is nothing but a mortgage.” He was trying to pay it off as quickly as he could, to avoid burdening his descendants. “Birds come here, and their feces contain seeds.”

While I talked with him, those obliging officials began pruning and weeding for him with their ungloved hands. That seemed very sweetly Japanese. I could not imagine some American ex-colleague of mine ever troubling to do the same for me.

He said: “I was a worker in public relations promotion of nuclear power.”

“And now?”

He looked up at the sky. “If you have this kind of accident, then…I wish there were any kind of renewable substitute for nuclear.”

In his baggy white suit, with his paper mask covering him from around his chin almost to his eyes and his headgear resembling a shower cap, Mr. Tazawa stood on the street by the white line, determinedly working his pruning shears while the weeds rubbed against his legs. When he took a step forward, he was in those weeds all the way to his armpits. The stone gateposts of his home were nearly sunken in vegetation.

Glancing down at my own so-called “protective gear,” I saw that my torn paper pants, like the interpreter’s, now bristled with radioactive stickleburrs (1 to 3 micros). I was glad to keep them away from my inner clothes.

Weeds and their perfect shadows were conquering the asphalt, guarding what must have been the entrance to an apartment building (no weeds yet grew upon its stairs). We got back into the taxi van, where the frisker read 1.7 and 1.9 micros per hour, then turned onto a narrow weed-lined road, the empty fields looking the same as before. At 10:16 our interior count began to increase: 3.8, 3.95, 4.16, 4.37, 4.76, 4.41, 5.60 NORMAL micros per hour — “since we are approaching Daiichi,” said the taxi driver when I told him. He smiled; he too was enjoying the adventure. Our next stop was a temple called Hen Jo, meaning unknown. The flight of entrance steps ascended a sort of inlet in the vegetation-crowned stone wall, some of whose bricks were disarrayed. Shrubs had begun to take over the steps, although someone had trimmed them partially back. At their summit were two character-engraven pillars, and then, set back within its flat yard, the red-roofed temple itself, whose white facade stood unevenly decomposed down to the inner wood. The place felt peculiar: abandoned and yet not exactly neglected; consider for instance the temple grounds, stripped down to sand, or perhaps stripped down and then sanded, by well-meaning decontaminators, with armies of goldenrod standing at attention in tall close-packed array just behind the wall. No weeds grew here, at least not for the moment. The decontaminators had aimed to make the tombs sufficiently safe for former residents to come and briefly pay their respects to the ancestors. Mr. Suzuki informed me that the air dose here had been 19 micros but after decontamination it became “officially 5.05 as of September.” A sign from September recorded a reading of 5.06, and today the frisker found even less to chirrup about: 3.9 micros an hour. Behind two metal- lipped incense wells, a stone statuette stood clasping together its palms and dreaming, with a tall tomb-slab at its back. Everything was as still as the folds of its stone robe. Close-eyed, serene and baby-bald, inhumanly patient, it waited for nothing that I could ever imagine. Bending down and extending the frisker toward that figure, I encountered the unpleasant value of 7.0 micros. Had I been condemned to stay here until I reached the nuclear worker’s five-year maximum of 50 millis, I would have served my sentence in no less than 10 months.

Hen Jo Temple (7.00 micros)

Now we drove past house-islands in the great rich sea of goldenrod. Some of the homes had been swept away to their foundations by the tsunami. Disobeying a do-not-enter sign, we descended a narrow asphalt road as goldenrods towered on either side, more and more of them. So we arrived at the ocean, about three and a half kilometers from Daiichi. It was 10:45. The air dose had become an almost benignly mild 1.374.

* “Inside the port,” of course, the levels read at monitoring stations were breaking records again: 1,900 and 1,400 Bq (their prior respective prize-winners had been 1,400 and 1,200)

How radioactive was the water? In May an unnamed site “outside the port” and three kilometers away (there was a fifty-fifty chance that it was right here) had measured 4.3 becquerels of tritium.* Remembering the difficulties that Eli had laid out before me when I asked to sample that very same contaminant, not least of them the fact that water is a neutron shield, I forebore to frisk the waves. Perhaps I could have scooped up some mud, waited for the water to evaporate, then measured what was left — but if H2O evaporated, why wouldn’t H3O? Wishing not to harm myself and others through ignorance, I abandoned that project.

The seashore at Okuma. Note the sheared-off crown of the pine tree.

The breakwater was wrecked, of course. A pine leaned toward the bright blue sea, its top pollarded by the tsunami. Birds flew up in flocks from the river’s mouth. Seeing a small dark beetle on the sleeve of my paper suit, I asked my usual question about whether the radiation was killing any creatures.

* In 2016, in Namie, whose radiation was supposedly “15 times the safe standard,” the internal organs of irradiated cows “so far have shown no significant abnormality particularly linked to radiation exposure,…but it’s too early to draw conclusions about thyroid cancer and leukemia.” Meanwhile, a Greenpeace study mentioned “DNA-damaged worms in highly contaminated areas.”

“I don’t know what your impression was,” said Mr. Suzuki, annoyed, “but no animals died.”*

The driver, wearing no protection at all, was happily wandering the seashore, which he had not seen since before the accident.†

† If you would like to envision the expression on his face, I refer you to the booklet “Atom Fukushima No. 86” (November 1990), in which a wide-eyed cartoon couple admires the ocean view at one of Tepco’s Fukushima plants, perhaps even Daiichi, the pigtailed girl clasping her hands to say: “Wow, beautiful!,” to which the boy brilliantly replies: “What a wonderful environment it is to have to nuclear plant here, isn’t it?,” after which a helpful old man remarks: “That’s right. All nuclear plants in Japan are located at the coast.”

I still remember the smooth grey rocks and pebbles of that beach, with here and there a paler stone, and a line of wet sticks and even a little kelp, and then the foam where those low slow waves of greenish-grey came in. Sometimes a jade wave was a little higher than its cousins, and spray leaped up from its shining white shoulder just before it struck. Even then the impression I got was one of gentleness. This looked to be a place to wade with small children. Perhaps it used to be. It was clean. The pancake frisker showed 4.16 micros an hour as I stood facing the ocean breeze, then rapidly went down to half a micro. To the land-ward, russet marsh grass struck an appropriately autumnal note on this magnificently clear day with the forest ridges very blue and distinct to the west. A raptor glided slowly above a broken tree. On a little rise a few steps from the shore, several other trees (pines, I believe, although I did not have time to go see them) seemed to flourish, never mind that their crowns had all been evenly sheared off; Mr. Suzuki explained that the tsunami had reached just so high, and as I gazed up at them, trying to imagine being right here and watching the approach of a wave of that height, some of the horror of March eleventh came back to me. The tidal wave had killed 11 people in Okuma; the 12th had not yet been found, and so there was an ugly mound of broken board, sheet metal, rags and other detritus on the beach where the bulldozers had gone corpse-hunting. Another of Fukushima’s incomplete stories was told by two dark sodden sneakers, and a single white shoe. What had happened to the other one, and was its owner alive or dead? Dark birds went swarming in a low flock over the blue lagoon. Among those mismatched shoes lay a woman’s purse, miserably sodden, and a framed photograph glittering with moisture; I had neither the heart nor the right to invade any of these in search of information. Clambering up what remained of the wrecked breakwater, I measured 5 micros and more in a puddle of rainwater or seawater on the steps. Angling the frisker up into the sea air as I neared the top, I encountered the dislikeable value of 10.14, and turned away. Mostly the levels there at the shore were less than a micro. I had asked to see a river, and so we all strolled to the mouth of the Kumakam. As we neared its wide bend in the marsh grass, myriad white birds arose, almost silently. Caught between my obligations to the frisker and to my companions, whose every remark must be tediously interpreted to and fro, I had not the time to make out what species they were. They ascended to no great height, then quickly settled back; evidently, our presence did not much disturb them. Mr. Suzuki said that this place was famous for salmon, and indeed in that shallow, grassy, gently curving river, which in my country we would have called a creek, oblong palenesses wriggled in the crinkling water: spawning time.

I was astonished to learn that people could sell some fish from here — but of course the bottom feeders remained off limits.

I strolled up beside the taxi driver, who was taking deep breaths of the sea air, looking out across the white sand at the lovely lagoon and the low blue mountains beyond it.

Returning to our vehicles, we proceeded inland, more or less following the river. Within the taxi van the frisker within three seconds went from 1 to 1.8 to 2 micros. On a bridge I asked to stop. We could see spawning salmon wearily swimming upstream, and often simply weaving in place against the current, like long dark windblown leaves attached to some invisible stalk; a few were dead and drifted down; one kept turning over and showing its bright belly. In one minute the frisker scintillated 1,286 times: 4.26 micros per hour.

Now for a brief distance, we retraced the route we had taken to the ocean. Along that immaculate empty road, on which a puddle vaguely reflected the clouds, and weeds were just beginning to rise up along the concrete blocks where cars had once parked, a glorious plain of goldenrod underlined the mountains, and in that yellow lake stood a few lonely white islets: abandoned houses. — How does one know that no one is at home? — When there is no way to it — Silver-white plumes of pampas grass reached higher than their roofs. One three-story white house with a fine balcony rose more distinctly from the goldenrod, in part because it was especially close to the road, and also because the tsunami must have hissed through here, for between the house’s wide-splayed legs was a dark cave where most of the ground floor had been carried away. When I walked up toward it, I began to see sky and pampas grass within the jaggedly peeling lips of that vacancy. Upstairs, one window-half was curtained, and the other dark; perhaps that darkness was the inside of the house. The frisker read between 5 and 6 micros. Less than one of my three allotted hours in this red zone remained. I had stopped too often. Approaching the roadside, I aimed the frisker at some goldenrod, and read 6.73 micros — only 112 times higher than my studio back home.

I took two steps into the goldenrod: 7.40 micros.

Tsunami-wrecked house (7.40 micros)

Hastening back to the taxi van, I asked that we drive a little more quickly, in order to see the reactors if we could, and we soon reached another checkpoint, with men in white protective gear bowing us through on either side of the road.

Everywhere the lovely weeds were more beautiful than anything humans could do.

Inside the taxi van as we rode up a low hill our radiation level climbed: 3, 4, 5 and all the way to 9.23 micros as we crested that hill. Now we were rolling through the lovely goldenrod wilderness of a former industrial park. To the right lay decrepit and sometimes broken building-cubes, and that pale blue ocean.

At 11:18 they showed me a tsunami-destroyed shrine: 2,551 counts per minute, 8.52 micros. Here was another of those places where the grass and flowering weeds massing along the edges had begun to creep onto the pavement itself. When I frisked the road, extending that pancake head at chest level, I found a patch that measured more than 20 micros, and I felt as I had when I first saw that gnawed-away house with the blue mountains showing through its missing first story. Mr. Suzuki, unimpressed, reminded me that the level used to exceed 100 micros at the time of the accident.

He pointed, and I got my first glimpse of those infamous blue and white tanks: Daiichi. There were grey tanks also. Grey meant bolted while blue meant welded, which leaked less; Tepco was trying to replace grey with blue.

At 11:25 we reached the former fish hatchery, or, to give it its due, the Fukushima Prefecture Aquaculture Association, where the air was 3,260 counts per minute and 10.86 micros. Once upon a time, the two officials had been quite proud of this establishment. Mr. Suzuki explained that the water used to be warmed for the hatchlings with waste heat from Plant No. 1. I agreed that that had been clever. Ruined houses grinned at me from the weeds.

The fish hatchery

Trolling the emptiness of the cracked pavement by the weedy buildings there where the land slanted down toward the seashore, I performed my usual involutions. The wounded half-cylinder of the hatchery gaped open high above the pampas grass. Sometimes the air dose was 6 micros and sometimes it was nearly 10. The pampas grass at the roadside read only 2 or 3 micros. I knelt down and frisked the air above the pavement: 29.5 micros. The white heads of pampas grass were shining beyond the bridge’s guardrail, which had been half pulled away like the top of a tin can. Wild thickets of pampas grass towered as high as the new trees, suffocating lost walls and foundations.

A grating by the fish hatchery (18.03 micros)

Over a well within a rusty grating I lowered the frisker from waist level to about three inches, and its count rose from 20 to 30 micros.

* You may remember from p. 308 that the maximum recorded radioactivity at any inhabited place in mid-April 2011 was 16,020 microsieverts accrued over 21 days, or an average of 31.79 micros an hour. — But here I must quote from the [August 22 of this or last year’s] blog of Mr. Yoshikawa—that is, my friend Aki from yesterday’s tour — so that you will see how the other half lives: Tepco had brought “Appreciate FUKUSHIMA Workers” out to Plant No. 1. At Reactors 4 and 5, “we did not need a mask or gloves. Several hundred workers were taking a rest…as if they were at an ordinary construction site. This is outdoors…In front of No. 4 reactor, the radiation level was about 50 micros [per hour] in the bus [my italics]. Ordinary people may find it tremendously high, but…I regard it [as] surprisingly low for a reactor that exploded. For your information, when I used to work at the site before the accident, it was not unusual at all to get 100 micros within a nuclear facility building.”

Not far from here I took my highest measurement in Japan: 41.5 micros. This very nearly reached the lower boundary of the radiation in outer space.*

On the bright side, by 1973 Okuma had achieved the highest per capita income in Fukushima Prefecture, all thanks to nuclear power! Wasn’t that worth a few gamma rays?

My highest measurement in Japan (41.5 micros)

Inside the taxi van at 11:36, heading straight toward Plant No. 1, I found our air dose to be fluctuating between 10 and 12 micros. The two officials had planned this tour superbly, for in four minutes we had arrived at my final requested point of interest: an overlook on Plant No. 1. This proved to be the grounds of an old age home, and here I finally lost one of my torn and wrinkled shoe covers. Consoling myself that I could hardly make a less dignified impression on my hosts than before, I resolved to keep that foot out of any vegetation for the duration.

In the three-quarters of an hour from the river bridge to the old age home, the dosimeter had accrued 4.6 micros. That calculated out to an unpleasant irradiation rate of 5.75 micros an hour. But thanks to dosimeter, frisker and this moving vehicle, I felt more or less in control of our exposure. Although the plant was merely 2.2 kilometers away, the air dose here rarely exceeded 2 or 3 micros an hour.

* I sometimes wondered whether a longer established radioactive community such as Chernobyl would show greater variety in its plants and animals. “As with all kinds of stress,” says my college ecology textbook, “reduction in species diversity is associated with radiation stress.” All the same, provided that the dose rate was less than obscene, it seemed plausible that plants, animals and some insects would adapt. Surely the trees would come back; if it were too “hot” for pines it might not be for oaks. — Or do you from the future for whom I write dwell mostly upon rolling plains of goldenrod? Were I a biologist I could tell you more; and you would surely rather read scientific observations which might somehow ease your predicament than my merely descriptive emotings. But when I was alive, those were what they paid me for.

In the courtyard, goldenrod grew higher than the windows, sometimes bending and leaning against the walls.* The grass was not wildly overgrown, so the place seemed almost cheerful. One window was open, and the white curtain pulled back to show off its darkness. Given 10 more minutes’ time I would have gone inside, but it was already the stated departure time. In the other windows, trees, weeds and sky reflected themselves. Some of the grass was golden. A tennis shoe lay in it, sideways. The seedheads and flowers of those tall weeds blocked the doorway, invading the parking lot and reaching up toward the dark window beneath a roof overhang that was vertically streaked with blackish grime and fallout. Proceeding to the road on the northern edge of the hill where the two officials waited, I read 2,200 counts per minute, or 7.38 hourly micros. Down below through the waving pampas grass I could see a horizon of ocean, cranes, tanks and low, wide buildings. They were guarded by a belt of dark green trees, which perhaps were those famous pines of the reddish trunks. Between the trees and our hill lay a few houses and some fields whose verdant yellow-green I suspected must be goldenrod. —Mr. Suzuki now very precisely gave me the lie of the land: “On the right is an exhaust tower; next is Reactor No. 4, and left of that, two pillars in, then below that is Reactor No. 3. The white building to the left with the blue pattern is No. 2, and to the left of that is No. 1.”

Like so many culprits, they bore an unimpressive, even innocuous appearance. If I could only have gotten closer I would have seen the pipes, opened walls, rubble and crumpled latticework; and then, still unseen but conjectured, the liquefied and resolidified reactor cores, lumped and twisted around the reactors’ skeletons. And what a thrill it would have been to frisk Tepco’s underground trenches! Three days ago the poisoned cloaca beneath Reactor No. 1 measured at 161,000 becquerels of cesium, which once again made the highest reading ever. Tepco blamed the recent hurricane.

Since I had detained the two officials for an unscheduled half an hour, we now sped out of the red zone, passing a place where the taxi driver had seen wild boar four or five days ago, then a row of beautiful trees in red and yellow leaf, a plain of goldenrod with grey berms in the former rice fields, and to the right a cemetery surrounded by goldenrod; then we departed the last gate.

Plant No. 1, Reactors No. 1, 2 and 3

Reactors No. 3 and 4: Pacific Ocean on right*

* Left of Reactor No. 1 lay Reactors No. 5 and 6, which were screened from us by pines and pampas grass.

† You may recall that in Fukushima I found a fairly close correlation between counts per minute and 300 times microsieverts per hour. These officials’ factor was 558, not 300. In other words, my conversion of their 240 cpms would have been 0.8 micros instead of 0.43. On this subject let me note that the arithmetical average of the 92 readings I made in the Okuma red zone was 7.14 micros — 16.6 times higher than their 0.43 micros. Of course the frisker was measuring gamma waves in addition to alpha and beta particles; all these people presumably cared about was the particles, which could continue to do harm after being removed from the zone. Here I want to say that whenever I had a chance to com- pare my frisker’s reading with that of a Japanese government scintillation meter (as at Hen Jo, and in the 41.5-microsievert patch by the fish hatchery), the measurements closely agreed.

Mr. Suzuki and his colleague drove straight back to the office, but the interpreter and I must now undergo decontamination screening at a roadside checkpoint. With great pleasure, I tore off my coverall, mask and remaining shoe cover. Then they frisked me with their magic wands. They remarked that today’s surface contamination was 240 counts per minute, or 0.43 microsieverts per hour.† They measured me at a mere 230 cpms, which exempted me from abandoning any of my possessions or taking an immediate shower. The central government standard was 13,000 cpms for any object’s surface, not for the human body, which rated a flat 20 millis per year. (To me this sounded like apples-and-oranges obfuscation.) If a car was above 13,000 cpms, it must be washed or abandoned. Of course they did not inspect the taxi at all, nor even the driver.

“Yes, I never got out of the car,” the driver laughed.

Decontaminating the interpreter

Since the taxi driver was willing to earn more money (he cost me something like $700) and Tomioka, my metonym for Fukushima, lay so conveniently near, I proposed to take more measurements and photographs there — only in the yellow zone, of course; we lacked permission for the other. The ever agreeable interpreter acquiesced, and as soon we stopped she slipped her mask back on. That was when we got our laugh, to see that this time she’d worn it inside out! Some of those radioactive particles from Okuma which the mask had previously filtered out must now be in her lungs. Such are the amusements one finds in nuclear zones. As for me, wishing to emulate Aki, Mr. Kojima, Mr. Suzuki and Mr. Shigihara, I went maskless here as in Okuma; so it was an even bet whether she or I would get cancer first. Well, despite those harmful rumors there was no immediate danger.

* * *

From No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies by William T. Vollmann, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. © 2018 by William T. Vollmann.

When Sartre and Beauvoir Started a Magazine

(Photo: Getty)

Agnès Poirier | Excerpt adapted from Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50 | Henry Holt and Co. | February 2018 | 20 minutes 5,275 words)

In September 1945, together with their band of students and friends, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were working night and day finalizing the first issue of their journal Les Temps modernes. They had launched the idea at the end of 1944, choosing the title as a tribute to Chaplin’s Modern Times, and, apart from Camus who was too busy editing Combat, they could rely on almost everyone else to write for them — Communists, Catholics, Gaullists, and Socialists: their schoolmate and liberal philosopher friend Raymond Aron, the Marxist phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, the anthropologist and art critic Michel Leiris, the Gallimard supremo Jean Paulhan, and even Picasso, who had agreed to design the cover and logo, along with a new generation of writers who were submitting articles and ideas such as Jacques-Laurent Bost. The British writer Philip Toynbee would contribute a Letter from London, while novels and essays the committee particularly liked would be serialized prior to their publication or with a view to attracting a potential publisher. Les Temps modernes would be a laboratory of new ideas and a talent scout rolled into one. Simone de Beauvoir had personally approached the minister of information, the Gaullist and résistant Jacques Soustelle, to ask for an allocation of paper.

Gallimard had agreed to finance the journal and to give the team a little office where they could hold their editorial meetings. The first issue was planned for October 1, 1945. Jean-Paul Sartre was made the head of the publication, “Monsieur le Directeur,” and he thought it important to make himself available to everyone. This would be democracy and public debate in action. He committed to receiving anyone who asked to see him at the magazine’s office at 5 rue Sébastien Bottin every Tuesday and Friday afternoon between five thirty and seven thirty. This commitment was printed at the beginning of the magazine, along with the telephone number Littré 28-91, where they could be reached. Sartre had decided to dedicate the first issue of Les Temps modernes “To Dolorès,” in all simplicity. Simone did not blink an eye.

In the first issue, Sartre announced loud and clear what Les Temps modernes stood for. It was to be the megaphone that would carry their thoughts far and wide.

Every writer of bourgeois origin has known the temptation of irresponsibility. I personally hold Flaubert personally responsible for the repression that followed the Commune because he did not write a line to try to stop it. It was not his business, people will perhaps say. Was the Calas trial Voltaire’s business? Was Dreyfus’s condemnation Zola’s business? We at Les Temps modernes do not want to miss a beat on the times we live in. Our intention is to influence the society we live in. Les Temps modernes will take sides.

The tone was set, the thinking promised to be muscular and the writing fearless.
Read more…

A Certain Kind of Mammal

Illustration by Natalie Nelson

Meaghan O’Connell | And Now We Have Everything | Little, Brown and Company | April 2018 | 22 minutes (4,425 words)

When I was pregnant, every time someone asked me if I planned to breastfeed, I stammered and avoided eye contact. Of fucking course, what do you think I am, some kind of monster? I felt like the person had just asked me if I wanted to be a real writer someday. Obviously, I thought about it all the time but I didn’t want to jinx it by talking about it. Declaring my intentions felt too vulnerable, too potentially humiliating. The question was not whether I planned to breastfeed the future baby but whether I would physically be able to. What if the time came and the baby didn’t latch on or my body didn’t produce enough milk? What if my boobs couldn’t get it up?

The internet was full of stories about women struggling with just that. It was impressive but scary to read about them turning their lives upside down, willing to try or do anything if it meant they could check off this box. Take herbs, chug water, eat special cookies, go to meetings, buy a scale so they could weigh the baby after every feeding, hire expensive consultants, pump around the clock, give up dairy, give up gluten, get their infants’ tongues and gums “clipped” so they could open their mouths wider, spend an entire week in bed naked with their babies.

An outsider might find it easy to dismiss this as ridiculous, especially considering you can walk into any grocery store and buy a canister of formula. But, then, an outsider hasn’t lain in bed at night facing the harrowing uncertainty of motherhood, desperate to know she was giving her baby “the best start possible.” Read more…

Did Brian Easley Have to Die?

Calvin Easley holds a wallet-sized portrait of his brother, Brian. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Aaron Gell | Longreads | April 2018 | 37 minutes (9,230 words)

This feature is published in collaboration with Task & Purpose, whose team of veterans, military family members, and journalists tell the stories of the military and veterans communities.

The thing that everyone remembered about the man in the light gray sweatshirt was how composed he was, how polite and respectful. One morning this past summer, he quietly entered a Wells Fargo bank branch in the Atlanta suburbs in a desperate state. But he didn’t curse or even raise his voice. He just calmly relayed the litany of setbacks and obstacles that had led him to an extraordinarily reckless act.

Brian Easley, 33-years-old, standing 6 feet 2 inches with close-cropped hair and glasses, had woken up on the morning on July 7, 2017, in Room 252 of a $25-a-night hotel nearby, where he’d been living, scraping by on a small monthly disability check from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

A former lance corporal in the Marine Corps, he had served in Kuwait and Iraq as a supply clerk, separating with an honorable discharge in 2005. But his transition to civilian life had been fraught. Joining his mother in Jefferson, Georgia, he found himself suffering from backaches and mental illness. He met a cashier at the local Walmart, and soon they married had a daughter together, but he disappeared for long stretches as his symptoms worsened. After his mother died in 2011, he bounced around — alternating between relatives’ spare rooms, VA mental hospitals, and nonprofit housing facilities. During a few especially difficult periods, he slept in his car.

By the summer of 2017, Easley had lost even that option. His usual disability check from the VA had mysteriously failed to materialize, and the rent was due. If he couldn’t cover it, he’d be on the street, and the thought terrified him. In the first week of July,  Easley called the Veterans Crisis Line repeatedly to inquire about the status of his disability payment. When they hung up on him, he called back. On Monday, July 3, Easley made his way to the VA’s Regional Benefits Office in Atlanta. But after an argument with staffers there, he left in humiliation, his issue unresolved.

A few days later at around 9:30 a.m, the Marine veteran entered the Wells Fargo branch, a faux colonial building on Windy Hill Road, a six-lane commercial roadway, and claimed that the backpack slung over his shoulder contained C-4 explosive. He allowed several employees and customers to exit and informed the two remaining employees that they should lock the doors and stay put. Then he began making calls, dialing 911 to let the authorities know what was happening, and a local news station, WSB-TV, to explain his predicament. “They took everything,” he told the assignment editor who picked up the phone. “With my last little bit of money I got I’ve been able to hold up at a hotel, but I’m going to be out on the street and I’m going to have nothing. I’m not going to have any money for food or anything. I’m just going to be homeless, and I’m going to starve.”

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The Wells Fargo bank in Marietta, Georgia where Brian Easley took hostages during a three-hour standoff with police. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Easley spent nearly 38 minutes on the phone with the editor, relating his military history, his love for his young daughter, and his frustrations with the VA. At one point, he allowed her to speak with the hostages. One described her captor as “very respectful.”

Easley insisted he didn’t want to harm anyone. “I already told them if I detonate this bomb, I’ll let them go first,” he promised. “These ladies are very nice, and they’ve been very helpful and supportive.” He said he had no intention of robbing the bank, and though an employee had fled leaving piles of cash just sitting out at their workstation, he showed no interest in it. His focus was exclusively on his own money — that monthly disability payment from the VA.

“How much money are we talking about?” the editor asked.

“Not much,” Easley said. She pushed for a dollar figure.

“Eight hundred and ninety-two dollars,” he answered.

As Cobb County police deployed around the Wells Fargo, establishing an incident command center in the parking lot of the nearby Texaco gas station, two snipers, Officers Dennis Ponte and Brint Abernathy, took up positions at the edge of the bank’s rear parking lot. Chief Mike Register, who’d only recently taken over the department, arrived on the scene shortly thereafter. Easley, meanwhile, spent most of the morning on the phone.

In addition to WSB, he spoke to his wife, Jessica, and her cousin, Yolanda Usher. He fielded calls from random bank customers, politely informing them that there was an emergency underway and that they should call back later. He told his daughter, Jayla, then 8, that he loved her and to work hard in school. “Okay, Daddy,” she said. “I love you.” Through it all, he kept his cool, even indulging in some dark humor. He mused that he might be the “worst bank robber ever.” And when the WSB editor asked him for his Social Security number, he joked, “You’re not going to steal my money too, are you?”

As the three-hour ordeal unfolded, he remained unfailingly polite to his captives, allowing them to place calls to their loved ones and even maintain contact with police. “He just kept saying, ‘Ladies, I’m so sorry,’” one of the hostages told the Georgia Bureau of Investigation later. “And I was like, ‘I feel really bad. I understand. You’re in a hard spot.’ And he said, ‘Thank you. I appreciate that.’”

As reasonable and mild-mannered as he seemed, Easley did show some clear signs of mental illness. In his call with WSB, he explained that he was being followed and had been the victim of four kidnapping attempts, which he attributed to his halfbrother Calvin and a secret society. “I don’t know these people,” he said. “They seem to be able to track me wherever I go. They have my information.” During several difficult moments, he held his head in his hands and sobbed, muttering softly, “I just snapped.”

In an effort to understand the many factors that led to the Windy Hill Road incident, I spent seven months speaking to Easley’s family members and fellow Marines, officers of the Cobb County Police Department, Veterans Affairs officials, community activists, and experts in law enforcement, mental health, and military transition.

I found a story that was considerably more complex than it first appeared, involving the failure of the nation’s safety net; VA policies better designed to exploit former warriors than to assist them; a confused police response; and maybe an undercurrent of racial bias, one that the community liked to think it had outgrown long ago.

It was also the story of four former members of the U.S. armed forces, whose paths converged one morning in July on a busy suburban thoroughfare. Before the day was over, two would be recounting the incident to investigators, another would be facing the news media, trying to explain to the public just how it happened, and a fourth would lay dead on the floor of the bank, his head pierced by a single gunshot.

***

Born in 1983, Brian Easley was a mama’s boy as a child, his thumb rarely straying from his mouth. The youngest of eight kids, Easley lived with his siblings and parents, Barbara Easley and Bobby Lee Brown, in a ranch home in Williamstown, New Jersey. It was a tight fit — 10 of them in all, crammed into three bedrooms — but they made it work. Located south of Philly, it was a safe, quiet neighborhood with a small-town feel, notable mostly for the aroma of pizza sauce from the local cannery, which wafted across the local sports fields every afternoon.  Barbara was an indomitable woman, laboring tirelessly to make sure none of her children ever felt neglected despite their parents’ modest income. Brian was the baby, her very last, and she doted on him.

Easley had few friends growing up, but he was close with his brother James, the next oldest, joining him in PlayStation marathons that typically went on until there was no more game to play. Despite his height, he was soft-spoken and timid as a teenager. In school, he was painfully shy around girls, later confiding to his fellow Marines that he’d been a virgin when he signed up at 18.

Twelve weeks of basic training at Parris Island outwardly transformed him, precisely as the military intended. Watching him graduate in a ceremony at Camp Lejeune, his family members were dumbstruck. “I could not believe my eyes, how polished he was, how sharp, tall, strong,” said his brother Calvin, the oldest sibling. “I sat there in awe the whole entire time. He went in a little boy, and they turned him into a man.”

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Calvin Easley with a portrait of Brian from his service in the Marine Corps. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Assigned to the 2nd Marine Logistics Group, based at Camp Lejeune, the soft-spoken recruit fell into a circle of friends who each quickly took him under their wing. To them, Easley seemed less a warrior than a big goofy kid, more content to eat cereal and watch his favorite anime series than to hit the local bars or shoulder a rifle.

The group formed a tight bond, fortified during their deployment to Kuwait in 2003. Though Easley’s fellow Marines would roll their eyes at his devotion to Tolkien novels and compare him to Steve Urkel, the teasing was affectionate. His tranquil demeanor, generosity, and maddening compulsion to apologize for the smallest offense — and then apologize for doing so — earned him the nickname Easy. He mostly stayed out of the boisterous debates that often preoccupied his unit, only to pipe up seemingly out of nowhere with some deliberately inane assertion, like, “I hear Somalia has the world’s strongest navy,” and then hold a poker face as long as he could — which usually wasn’t long.

Deployed to Iraq in 2005, Easley was stationed at the Al-Taqaddum Air Base, known as TQ, where he served as a warehouse clerk with the 2nd Supply Battalion. Easley’s job was to fill requisition orders for Marine combat units operating throughout Al-Anbar province, where insurgents, including the nascent al-Qaeda in Iraq, were mounting a surprisingly fierce campaign to drive American forces from the Western Euphrates River Valley.

As the three-hour ordeal unfolded, Easley remained unfailingly polite to his captives, allowing them to place calls to their loved ones and even maintain contact with police

The work was arduous — up to 17 hours a day for months at a time without a break — contributing to the chronic back pain that would plague Easley when he eventually returned to civilian life. “The warehouse jobs are out in the rear, so I wasn’t on the front lines,” Easley told WSB. “I had one close call during a security detail, but that’s about it.” Nevertheless, according to James Dunlap, who served with him, mortar fire was a regular feature, often sending everyone scrambling for bunkers. “I’m thinking, ‘We’re in supply, we’re not going to see this type of action,’” he recalled. “But when they say ‘Every Marine is a rifleman,’ they mean it.”

Following his honorable discharge in 2005, Easley returned to his mother’s home in Jefferson. He met a woman, Jessica Tate, and they moved in together and eventually got married. Around Jessica, Brian seemed fine — strangely quiet maybe, but also devoted, sweet, and easygoing. To his family, though, it was clear that something was wrong. “We noticed a difference in him right away,” Calvin recalled. Diagnosed with PTSD, and suffering from schizophrenia and paranoia, Easley told relatives he was barred from reenlisting. He often set off on long walks by himself. On one occasion shortly after his discharge, he grew so upset at a sibling’s teasing that he flew into a rage that left the family shaken.

These symptoms are not uncommon. “After we got out, it got rough for everybody on the tour,” James Dunlap explained. “It’s easier to be in a war zone than live life out here. You’re not in the Marine Corps anymore, so what’s your purpose?”

***

In 2008, Jessica became pregnant. Both of Brian’s parents fell ill around the same time, and he found himself in New Jersey helping to help care for them, visiting Georgia only briefly for the birth of his daughter, Jayla, but vowing to come back soon.

“He never did come,” Jessica recalled. His phone rang and rang. Eventually, family members told her how he’d just stood up one day, announced he was going for a walk, and never returned. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I just had his baby and he disappeared. Is he leading a double life?’” she said. Fearing for his safety, she spent many nights crying herself to sleep. “I’m tearing up now just thinking about it.”  

It turned out Easley had checked himself into a VA mental hospital. Upon his release, he stayed with a brother in New Jersey. Aside from one trip to Georgia to meet Jayla when she was about 3, he mostly kept his distance. He explained to Jessica that people were after him — he wouldn’t say who — and he didn’t want to put his family in danger.

Just a week or so before Barbara Easley died, in 2011, Brian ley once again “up and walked off,” Calvin said. Voicemails and texts went unreturned. The funeral came and went with no sign of Brian, and years went by without a word. After calling every VA hospital in the directory, Jessica tried to move on.

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Brian with his daughter, Jayla, possibly around 2014. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

When he surfaced again around 2014, Easley moved in with Calvin in Georgia, taking his medication, keeping his VA appointments, and generally trying to get his life back on track.. He said he’d been in Orlando, enrolled in filmmaking classes. He made no mention to his brother about a brief spiritual detour, as a follower of the Black Israelites, a religious sect famous for preaching that African Americans are the true Jews. But perhaps it isn’t surprising that in his troubled state, Easley had gravitated toward a tight-knit community. “I think he wanted to belong to something larger than himself,” recalled Dunlap, who was in touch with Brian during this period. Eventually Easley “woke up,” Dunlap said, and was ejected from the group.

Easley didn’t spend much time in Georgia with Calvin and his wife, Anita—maybe a half year or so—before he was on the road again, moving to New Jersey to live with another brother. After several episodes, though, he returned to Marietta in early 2017, enrolling in computer classes at Lincoln College of Technology, a for-profit college located in a strip mall in Marietta. He had bought Jayla a phone and called regularly, helping her with homework and joining her in a prayer via Facetime nearly every night. Some of his money from the government went toward child support, and he wired more whenever Jayla needed it. Not long before Brian walked into the Wells Fargo, he had the idea to surprise Jayla with a dog. Jessica thinks the realization that he wouldn’t be able to follow through may be what set off the episode.

***

In the spring of 1971, 10-year-old Mike Register was walking through an affluent neighborhood of Macon, Georgia, when a pair of young men in a car waved him over with a proposition: How would he like to earn $5 helping out with some yard work? It was a tempting offer, but the situation seemed off. For one thing, Register was white, and the men in the car were black. Job offers like that just didn’t happen in Macon in those days. Register bolted toward the woods, but the men gave chase, abducted him, and later kept him captive in an abandoned house, demanding a $5,000 ransom from his family. His mother alerted the authorities and delivered the money as instructed.

All told, Register spent 20 hours as a prisoner, while the men debated whether to kill him. Eventually, they essentially let him go, threatening to slaughter his family if he said a word. The boy didn’t heed the warning. At some point, he’d managed to snag an ID belonging to the ringleader, 20-year-old John Plummer. After his release, Register presented the card to local police, resulting in Plummer’s arrest and eventual conviction. (The other two men were never identified.) At the trial, which drew charges of racial bias from the defense team, the all-white jury found Plummer guilty of kidnapping, then deliberated for just 10 minutes before suggesting a life sentence.

Surprisingly unguarded for a chief of police, now leading a department of more than 600 officers, Register is a voluble storyteller, recounting this traumatic chapter from a difficult childhood in an easygoing, buttery drawl without a hint of disquiet. Asked how the terrifying crime he experienced as a child may have affected his response to the Wells Fargo hostage-taking, he insisted it had no impact. “I certainly have empathy for anyone who is held against their will,” he said. “Certainly that’s a part of my life, and I’m very thankful that it turned out the way it did for me. But no matter what my life experience may have been, I certainly try to be objective with any situation.”

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Cobb County’s Chief of Police, Michael J. Register. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Register enlisted in the reserves in his early twenties, joining the 11th Special Forces Group and becoming what was then known as “SF baby,” jumping right into commando training without any prior military experience. He thrived in the reserves, taking time off from his work as a police officer with the Cobb County PD for intensive training and deployments to Germany, Haiti, and Belize, among other countries.

By 2002, when Brian Easley entered the Marine Corps, 40-year-old Register was in Afghanistan with the 20th Special Forces Group, serving on a mobile reconnaissance team. After retiring from active duty in 2005, the same year Easley left the service, Register worked for the Department of Defense, devising strategies to counter the insurgency’s devastating use of IEDs. In 2014, he returned to suburban Atlanta and eventually resumed his career in law enforcement, becoming chief of police for Clayton County, 20 miles south of Atlanta.

Register was recruited as chief of police for nearby Cobb, which includes the city of Marietta, just three weeks before Brian Easley walked into the Wells Fargo. Though both counties belong to the metropolitan Atlanta area, they pose distinct challenges for law enforcement. Whereas Clayton is economically depressed and predominantly black, Cobb County is a mostly white, affluent bedroom community that was represented in Congress by a former leader of the nativist John Birch Society for nearly a decade and was long known for its “legendary intolerance,” as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution put it.

Though an influx of recent transplants, mostly young professionals, has tilted Cobb’s politics left, the county retains its reputation as a stronghold of white conservatism. Despite the 2017 opening of a new stadium for the Atlanta Braves, Cobb had for years steadfastly refused to allow the construction of a rail link to Atlanta’s transit system, in part out of a longstanding desire to wall itself off from the so-called “black Mecca” across the Chattahoochee River. (Years ago, a county commissioner infamously declared he’d stock the river with piranha to block rapid transit.)

Although the violent crime rate is considerably higher in Clayton than in Cobb — with nearly eight times as many murders on a per capita basis in 2016 — Register’s new position is in some respects trickier to navigate, given Cobb’s fast-changing demographics and more fraught political atmosphere. As chief of police for Clayton County, Register was an advocate of transparency and community policing initiatives, and Cobb community activists viewed him as an ideal choice to take the helm of their department as it sought to transform itself from a hidebound reminder of the region’s troubled past into an exemplar of the bighearted cosmopolitan New South.

To judge by the stream of racially charged incidents that have made the news in the area in recent years, change was long overdue. In 2015, the county’s only black commissioner reported what appeared to be racial profiling by an undercover officer — a complaint that elicited a shrug from her fellow commissioners. A few months later, the same officer was involved in a disturbing encounter with a black driver that was captured on dashcam. (“Go to Fulton County,” he said. “I don’t care about your people”). Following a suspension, the officer resigned.

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The front desk of Cobb County Police Headquarters in Marietta, Georgia. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

The community’s negative perception of the department was confirmed last year in an independent report on police operations drawn up at the county’s behest by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Although the report did not find evidence of systematic bias, it identified “a concerning deficit of public trust in and among a portion of the population.” It also made 34 recommendations, many of which Register is now implementing. Among a host of other changes, he ordered that all members of his department receive additional training in crisis intervention, crime prevention, cultural diversity, and fairness in policing. The chief has also considered a proposal by the Cobb Coalition for Public Safety to ensure that mental health professionals be called upon on in crisis situations. Some departments mandate that specially trained teams be deployed whenever an incident involves a potential mental health emergency, but in Cobb County, such experts are only brought in at the request of the crisis negotiation team. In Easley’s case, no such request was ever made.

***

According to the Marshall Project, law enforcement is the third most common occupation for military veterans, after truck driving and management. In part, this is attributable to the preferential hiring encouraged by initiatives like the 2012 federal program Vets to Cops. A career in law enforcement has an additional appeal to veterans, offering, as few occupations do, the sense of fellowship, duty, and shared risk that they experienced in the military. “I think that everyone, no matter who you are, you want to belong to something,” Register said. “People that have served in the military understand that they are part of something that is great, admirable, honorable, and that is important.” A police force, he added, “is a natural transition”  — conferring membership in what Ken Vance, executive director of the Peace Officer Standards and Training Council of Georgia, termed a “blue brotherhood.”

A substantial percentage of CCPD officers are veterans — several of whom, like Chief Register, played key roles in the Wells Fargo incident. Sgt. Andre Bates, the lead negotiator, served in the Marine Corps, as did Officer Dennis Ponte, the sniper who took Easley’s life.

In his 2016 book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger advances a powerful case linking veterans’ struggles with PTSD largely to the difficulty of navigating the fraught transition from the tight-knit world of the armed forces to the more isolating and superficial existence of life on the homefront.

This certainly tracks with Brian Easley’s experience. Joining the Marine Corps at 18, the former wallflower quickly found the camaraderie, friendship and shared sense of purpose that had largely eluded him until that point. After his discharge, cut off from his social group, he found himself increasingly alienated and adrift — an experience that undoubtedly contributed to his mental illness. Soon, aside from his immediate family and Jessica, he was more or less on his own, so lonesome in those early years that in addition to his primary job at a Home Depot distribution center, he took a second gig at a Church’s Chicken, not for the money, he told Jessica, but “just to pass the time while you’re at work.”

A career in law enforcement has an additional appeal to veterans, offering, as few occupations do, the sense of fellowship, duty, and shared risk that they experienced in the military.

When I asked Register how he has dealt with his own traumatic experiences — the kidnapping as well as his later service in Afghanistan — he shrugged off the question, more comfortable speaking about the prevalence of PTSD in general. But as frightening as his childhood ordeal clearly was, his success in dealing with it is not surprising: After helping to foil his own abduction, he was hailed as a hero by the national news media. In recognition of his bravery and quick-wittedness, the local police department named the 11-year-old its honorary chief of detectives.

“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact, they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary,” Junger wrote in Tribe. “Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.” Register seems to have found his purpose and his community in law enforcement, as did Bates, Ponte, and the many other veteran members of the CCPD.

***

As Brian Easley told the editor at WSB, the two hostages, and the crisis negotiator — basically anyone who would listen — his monthly disability check from the Department of Veterans Affairs came to $892. The VA confirmed that his last payment, for that precise amount, was sent on June 1. So perhaps it’s no wonder that when July 1 came and went, and the expected funds were not in the account, Easley began to panic.

According to WSB investigative reporter Aaron Diamant, Easley called the VA’s Veterans Crisis Line eight or nine times that week, including twice on the morning of the incident, and he was “hung up on a few times.” (When contacted, a VA spokesperson declined to comment on Diamant’s reporting.) According to its mission statement, the VCL was established in 2007 to “provide 24/7, world class suicide prevention and crisis intervention services to veterans, service members, and their family members.” But as the demand for its services has surged, the program has been plagued with issues. A March 2017 report by the VA’s Office of Inspector General found a number of shortcomings with the VCL, including deficiencies in operations and quality assurance. In response, the VA issued a press release touting improvements; a few months after Brian Easley’s death, it announced plans to open a third call center to handle another spike in demand.

According to Lincoln Educational Services senior VP for student financial services Rajat Shah, Easley visited the school’s Marietta campus on June 30 to discuss the possibility that his money had been garnished due to a tuition issue. A counselor at the school called the VA directly, and Easley was given an appointment at the VA’s Regional Benefits Office on July 3. He “was extremely agitated and belligerent,” a VA spokesperson told me , and as a result was briefly placed him in handcuffs. “Once Easley calmed down,” the spokesperson said, “police removed the handcuffs and a VA benefits supervisor … explained to him that his compensation check was recouped due to a debt he had created by his failure to complete college courses.” Easley agreed to return on July 6 with the proper documentation to set up a payment plan “and left the regional office voluntarily.” He never returned.

Perhaps unwittingly, Easley had become caught in a financial squeeze involving what are known as overpayments — a common pitfall for recipients of Post 9-11 GI Bill tuition assistance. Government tuition payments are made in full directly to an academic institution, but if a veteran drops too many courses or fails to attend class, the VA will initiate a process to recover the money directly from the student. According to Shah, Easley last attended class in late November 2016. He would have had to miss just six days of his module to trigger a mandatory notice to the VA, though Shah said the school tries to contact a student before taking that step. Easley’s overpayment was $1,163, so after the $892 was deducted from his account, he owed a mere $271.

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Objects found in Brian Easley’s pockets after his standoff with the Cobb County police. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

If, in fact, Easley did miss some classes, it would hardly be a surprise. He was suffering from a severe mental illness, something the Department of Veterans Affairs, which was responsible for his care, certainly knew. Although the VA claims it sent Easley five letters informing him of the overpayment, his erratic housing situation meant he probably never received them.

“This happens literally all the time,” said Carrie Wofford, president of Veterans Education Success, a nonprofit watchdog and advocacy group focused on veterans education. A 2015 report by the General Accounting Office estimated that a quarter of all veterans receiving tuition assistance are billed for overpayments, many without ever fully understanding how the system works. “Because VA is not effectively communicating its program policies to veterans,” the report said, “some veterans may be incurring debts that they could have otherwise avoided.”

Although Shah said Lincoln staffers tried to help Easley with the VA, the school has drawn criticism in the past for an apparent indifference to the welfare of its students. “The programs are costly, more than twice as much as at local community colleges,” the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee the committee wrote in a 2012 report, “and Lincoln makes virtually no investment in student services despite enrolling the students most in need of these services.” The committee said student retention and loan repayment rates were among the worst it had seen, and the report concluded, “Although the majority of students leave the company’s schools with no degree or diploma, the company also receives increasing amounts of Federal taxpayer dollars and profit.”

***

Shortly after Easley spoke to the 911 operator that Friday morning in July, the Cobb County Police Department showed up in force. They closed Windy Hill Road to all civilian traffic. They made sure those sheltering inside the Popeye’s, the Waffle House, the Wendy’s, the Subway, and the Chick-fil-A all knew to keep clear of the windows in case a detonation shattered the glass. The fire department was dispatched to the scene, as was the bomb squad, SWAT team, crisis negotiators, and a K-9 unit. Officers of the Sheriff’s Department handled traffic duties. Representatives from the Marietta PD, the ATF, the FBI, and its state equivalent, the GBI, turned up as well.

Register arrived within the hour, taking up a position at the makeshift command post. Solidly built, with a tree-trunk physique and wispy brown hair fading to gray, Register was viewed by community leaders as a reformer. The incident at Windy Hill Road would be his first test.

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Michael Register was recruited as chief of police for Cobb County just three weeks before Brian Easley walked into the Wells Fargo. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Meanwhile, inside the bank, Easley was getting a crash course in how TV news gets made. WSB-TV boasts one of the top local news organizations in the country: In the June ratings period, the station had attracted nearly two-thirds of TV news viewers in the metropolitan Atlanta area. Now, the staff had landed an incredible scoop simply by picking up the phone, and they knew it. On an audio recording of the call turned over to the GBI, one can hear the assignment editor’s colleagues scrambling to press their advantage. As she works to nail down what to Easley must have sounded like trivial details (“You said you had lived in Marietta previously, when did you live in Marietta?”), it seemed to dawn on him that her interest lay less in solving his problem than in working the story. “Okay, ma’am, I’m sorry,” he finally said, “but I’m about to wrap this up.”

As the call ended, two of the editor’s colleagues could be heard discussing how to proceed. “What can I report?” one asks. The exuberant reply: “Everything!”

Sometime after 11 a.m., Sgt. Andre Bates, the incident’s lead crisis negotiator, settled into a black Ford Taurus at the Texaco. He took a deep breath and dialed the number given to him by the 911 operator. Bates — who, like Easley, is black — established a rapport with the hostage taker almost instantly based on their shared military background. “I’m going through it with Veterans Affairs myself, so I know it can be difficult when they drag their feet,” he said.

Their status as former Marines further cemented the bond. “Semper Fi, sir. I’m a West Coaster, MCRD San Diego,” Bates said. “What can we do to resolve this, sir, and help you out? From one Marine to the other?” Although only Sgt. Bates’s side of the conversation is audible on the recording, his skills as a negotiator are evident. He gets Easley talking about his back injury and mentions his own knee and ankle issues. He assures Easley nobody is going to get hurt: “That’s my responsibility — to make sure you stay alive.” He compares the police force to the Marine Corps and engages Easley as a fellow enlisted man. “I have three of my chiefs that are personally here … guys walking around with stars just like it is in the Marine Corps . . . they’re not happy,” he said. “Just asking from one Marine to the next — to show that you and I are communicating and we’re on the same program — could you release one of those ladies, please?” And he appeals to Easley’s personal dignity, reminding him, “Your honor is worth more than the $892 the VA owes you, sir.”

Around noon, Easley agreed to a deal: A pack of Newports in exchange for one of the hostages. He seemed to mean it. As soon as he got off the call, Easley turned to his two captives and invited them to decide which one would leave. They told him they couldn’t choose. “Well, you’re just the teller,” he told one, “so I’ll let you go, and I’ll keep the branch manager here so they won’t blow my head off.”

The deal marked a significant breakthrough. They were working together now. A resolution seemed well in hand. In a brief interview, Sgt. Bates expressed absolute confidence that Easley would have honored his side of the bargain. “We were brothers who had bonded with each other,” he said. “I felt that me and him had connected as men, as Marines, and as family men.”

Bates hustled over to brief his superiors in the mobile command center, a large RV parked nearby. Among them were Register and the incident commander, Maj. Jeff Adcock. Reporting to him were Lt. Joel Preston, another Marine veteran, who commanded the tactical team, and Lt. Jorge Mestre, the crisis team commander.

It was a formidable group, with decades of experience. Mestre was a key figure in a 1999 incident in which he was wounded after trying to reason with a local man who was reportedly suffering from paranoid delusions. After opening fire on the officer, the man barricaded himself inside the house with his aging mother, and later killed two members of the Cobb County SWAT team after they stormed the family home. The tragedy is viewed as a critical lesson among tactical-policing experts, who blamed the incident on poor intelligence and inadequate staffing, revising standard procedures accordingly. For some members of the Cobb County PD, the killing may have carried an additional lesson: In a barricaded subject situation, avoid unnecessary risks.

The negotiator tried to appeal to Easley’s personal dignity. ‘Your honor is worth more than the $892 the VA owes you, sir.’

As Adcock and the other commanders quickly began hammering out a plan to deliver the cigarettes without endangering their officers, they had good reason for optimism. According to Chris Grollnek, a former SWAT officer who now provides training in dealing with active-shooter situations, “Ninety-nine percent of the time, when a negotiator is making a deal for one thing for another, the incident ends peacefully.”

Around the same time, another opportunity to end the standoff safely presented itself. One of the hostages who’d been on the phone with the police throughout much of the morning reported to Officer Christopher Few, Bates’s colleague on the crisis negotiation team, that Easley had gone to the bathroom. He was in there for more than a minute, it seemed, long enough for both hostages to potentially run out the doors. Once Few understood what was happening, he began to walk the hostage through an escape plan. But seconds later, Easley returned. “He’s out,” she said quietly.

Meanwhile, along the wood line, the snipers lay on the ground, squinting through scopes at the action inside the bank. One of them, Officer Ponte, had also served in the Marine Corps, working as a helicopter crew chief before his discharge in 1992. On assessing the situation, he’d selected a Lapua .338, a $5,000 semiautomatic rifle billed as “The Long Arm of the Free World,” and loaded it with Sierra MatchKing .338 250 grain ammunition, a combination he felt certain would have the power to penetrate the two glass doors and still maintain its trajectory. Then he’d aimed his laser at the building and noted a range of approximately 66 yards. Every once in awhile, as he peered through the scope, he got a good visual of the man in the gray sweatshirt. He radioed Lt. Benjamin Cohen, the assistant SWAT commander, and advised him that he had a clean shot. Should he engage the threat, he asked. Word came back: “Not at this time.” The rest of the tactical team was not yet in position. Stand by.

Minutes passed. On the SWAT team’s radio frequency, Ponte heard indications that a hostage might be released, but from what he could see, he later told the GBI, “There was no effort or energy being put forth toward releasing somebody.” Then Ponte made a fateful decision.

Around 12:15 p.m. on July 7, a single shot rang out on Windy Hill Road, ending the three-hour ordeal in the Wells Fargo and adding Easley’s name to the list of 236 mentally ill people killed by police in 2017.

***

Not only were Sgt. Bates and the various commanders caught off guard by Ponte’s action, his own fellow SWAT team members were as well. In a well-planned operation, the tactical team would have reacted instantly to the gunshot. Instead, nine long seconds ticked by before an officer put the CCPD’s BearCat armored vehicle in drive and began barrelling toward the door of the bank, inadvertently endangering the hostages, who were just then preparing to dash out in the opposite direction. After the BearCat struck a column and backed up, its hood covered with broken bricks, the hostages escaped, and members of the SWAT team hustled them into the back of the vehicle, which quickly reversed away from the bank.

The standoff was over. But exactly what happened to Brian Easley — and who made the decision to kill him — would remain a mystery for months. Addressing the news media shortly after 1:30 p.m., Register incorrectly framed the incident as an extraction operation gone awry. “We had a SWAT team, tactical team, move up on the bank to help get the hostages out,” he said. “During the extraction process, contact was made with the suspect, and it appears the subject is deceased.” The explanation seemed to imply that Easley had been shot during some kind of confrontation with the entry team rather than by a sniper hidden in the woods. No mention was made to the public of Bates’s negotiations with Easley to release one of the women for a pack of smokes. Although the entire command team knew of the arrangement — as did the two hostages and other members of the CCPD — it is only being made public now as a result of an open records request.

Barricaded-subject incidents, especially those involving hostages, are among the most difficult circumstances police officers face. Typically, attempting to negotiate a peaceful resolution is the preferred approach, with a tactical assault reserved as a last resort. But the balance between crisis negotiators and SWAT elements is a delicate one. Negotiators are trained to strike up a rapport with a suspect, calm them down, appeal to their sense of reason. Tactical officers, increasingly outfitted with military-style gear, are primed to take swift, decisive action.

The Cobb County Police Department’s internal Policy Manual states that in a hostage situation like the one at the Wells Fargo, a tactical solution must only be initiated “should communication with the subject fail to resolve the incident,” and that “the ultimate decision [on how to respond] will be made by the On-Scene Commander.” In the case of Brian Easley, communication was making genuine progress, and the On-Scene Commander, Major Adcock, had decided to let the negotiations play out. According to Ponte’s own testimony, he made the ultimate decision himself, an apparent violation of both policies. He cited no particular action on Easley’s part — an erratic movement or aggressive gesture, for instance — that might have indicated an elevated risk. When I reached him for comment, Ponte declined to speak except to say that his side of the story would be told “at the appropriate time.”

The standoff was over. But exactly what happened to Brian Easley — and who made the decision to kill him — would remain a mystery for months.

Sgt. Bates, the crisis negotiator, refused to criticize the actions of a colleague and fellow Marine. But asked whether he’d been sincere when he’d promised Easley that nobody would hurt him if he cooperated, Bates told me, “I meant that from the bottom of my heart. I’m out there to do a job. I’m pretty good at what I do, and the things I’m telling him are coming from the heart, one human being to the next. My job is to protect everyone so we can all walk out of there and play out whatever happened in court. That is the win for me.”

All of the experts I contacted were careful to emphasize they lacked a complete picture of what happened, and they expressed reluctance to second-guess CCPD’s handling of a dangerous and chaotic situation. They agreed, however, that the decision to shift away from a negotiating posture and initiate a tactical operation is not typically made lightly or based on the judgment of an individual officer, and that the situation on Windy Hill Road might well have concluded peacefully had negotiations been given more time.

Easley “articulated he’s not going to do anything to harm the hostages, so that’s a great sign,” said Randall Rogan, a crisis negotiation expert and co-interim dean of communications at Wake Forest University. “If a suspect is emotionally calm at the beginning of a siege or incident, that is the most critical moment.” He added that Easley’s demands were extraordinarily modest. “He’s not asking for a helicopter and $2 million dollars and taking two hostages on a plane.”

“Easley was very calm, he indicated wasn’t looking to hurt anybody, and he demonstrated a willingness to cooperate,” noted Jack Cambria, a 33-year veteran of the New York City Police Department who spent more than a decade in tactical operations and, later, as commander of the NYPD’s crisis negotiation squad, responded to more than 4,000 incidents. “Tactical assault is reserved for the last option, when it becomes absolutely necessary.”

Following a grand jury hearing, Ponte was cleared of any wrongdoing in connection with Easley’s death. District Attorney Vic Reynolds told WSB that the officers “followed the law and did what they were supposed to do.” According to the policy manual, “ability, opportunity and jeopardy” must all be present for a shooting to be justified. As far as anyone knew, Easley had the ability to cause harm to the hostages with a backpack full of explosives. He had the opportunity to do so. And the hostages were plainly in jeopardy.

Cambria, who trains law enforcement agencies around the country in crisis and hostage negotiation, agreed that Ponte likely acted within the law. Nonetheless, he pointed out, “Just because an action might be lawful doesn’t mean it was necessary.”

The operation appears to have been flawed in several additional respects. Given Ponte’s testimony that the hostages were not in sight when he opened fire, he ran the risk that one might have been injured by debris or a wayward bullet. A poorly aimed round might have set off the explosives Easley claimed to have in the backpack, mere inches from where the shot made contact. And there was one more possibility to consider: “When there are people alive near the subject, you very rarely will take a shot to neutralize him in the event that God forbid, he has a dead-man’s switch,” Grollnek said, referring to a detonator wired to explode if a trigger is released. Such devices, which work like a hand grenade, are simple to engineer. Had Easley been using one, Ponte’s shot could well have caused the deaths of the hostages. Finally, the haphazard extraction of the two captives also indicated that the decision to act may have been taken too hastily.

As the hostages were whisked to safety, a robot entered the bank and retrieved Easley’s backpack, placing it in a “total containment vessel.” It was eventually deemed harmless, and inside investigators found a Bible, some papers, and a small machete, among other incidentals. (Easley had never taken out the knife or mentioned having it, and Calvin later suggested he may have been carrying it for protection.) On his body, they found a wallet, a broken cross pendant, and an electronic device one hostage had assumed was a switch to detonate a bomb. In fact, it was a tool for detecting hidden listening devices, perhaps a prudent purchase for a man suffering from the paranoid delusion that he might be kidnapped at any time.

Before long, patrons of the nearby establishments, who’d been on lockdown all day, were finally allowed to go about their business. After being interviewed by police and GBI agents, the two hostages went home to their worried families. The local news teams packed up their gear. Easley’s body taken to the Cobb County’s Medical Examiner in Marietta. Chief Register addressed the media and then headed back to headquarters. Traffic on Windy Hill Road resumed in both directions.

***

The killing of Brian Easley was just the first of several crises to engulf the Cobb County Police Department in the early months of Register’s tenure. In late August, WSB aired bodycam footage from November 2016 in which Officer James Caleb Elliot is seen firing multiple shots at the back of an unarmed teenager as he flees through a residential neighborhood, striking him in the leg. A grand jury declined to recommend charges against Elliot, and DA Reynolds noted that officers pursuing a fleeing suspect in a “violent, forcible felony” are allowed to use lethal force. The fact that the teenager was not actually involved in a carjacking was viewed as immaterial, since the officer merely had to believe he was.

The new chief, for his part, indicated that legalities aside, the shooting endangered the public, and he used the release of the video as an opportunity to initiate additional use-of-force training. He also noted that the department recently purchased a new simulator to better prepare officers to handle such situations. Elliot left the force three weeks after the shooting, and a lawyer for the victim announced plans to file a federal lawsuit.

Then on August 31, Channel 2 released another dashcam video, this one from the summer of 2016. In it Lt. Greg Abbott, who is white, is heard remarking to a white motorist, “Remember, we only kill black people.” Though many observers pointed out the officer’s sarcastic tone, the starkness of his statement at a time of heightened concern over police shootings of African Americans (the killing of Philando Castile outside St. Paul, Minnesota, had happened just four days before the traffic stop) seemed emblematic. The video went viral. National outlets picked up the story. Representatives for Al Sharpton’s National Action Network told Register a protest march was being organized. Register’s office was bombarded by media calls from as far away as the United Kingdom. This time, Register moved swiftly, announcing that the process to terminate Abbott had begun.

“It’s been one of those weeks in Cobb County,” Register told me with a sigh not long after. The decision, he said, had not been easy. But Register was unmoved by the argument that Abbott had been trying to gain the motorist’s compliance by creating a casual rapport, calling the statements “inexcusable and inappropriate” and “not indicative of the values and the facts that surround the Cobb County Police Department and this county in general.”

A vocal contingent within the CCPD expressed unhappiness that he hadn’t defended Abbott. “They took it as me not supporting them,” Register said. After a local talk radio jock went after him — taking care to inform listeners that the police chief’s wife is African American and even noting her place of work — white nationalists went on the offensive, sending Register hate mail in which they called him “a disgrace to the white race.”

Following the decision, Register scheduled a set of mandatory staff meetings in which he laid out his rationale for demanding Abbott’s ouster. The radio station apologized. Eventually, the controversy seemed to die down. Still, it was clear the job was weighing on him. “I’ve got to tell you,” he admitted, “sometimes I’m like, ‘Damn, maybe I should have stayed in Clayton County.’”  

***

The tendency of police departments to close ranks in an effort to shield their actions from public scrutiny is well established and perhaps unsurprising. The same “blue brotherhood” that bonds law enforcement officers can easily slip into a form of tribalism when a member of the team is under threat. The commitment to one another that keeps officers alive in dangerous situations also seems to discourage self-reflection when things go wrong. Initially, after I asked Register about the killing of Easley, he mounted a strong defense of Ponte. “He saw this thing unfolding and felt that this might be the only chance to immobilize the suspect and save the two women, and he took it,” Register said. “If we would have waited five more minutes, and he had detonated explosives and killed himself and the two hostages, then we may have been having a conversation — ‘Now, why did we wait so long?’”

Register also emphasized that Ponte — who was cleared by a grand jury following another fatal shooting in 2016 — had struggled in the aftermath of the Wells Fargo incident. “One reason why it’s been so hard on this young man who took the shot,” he said, “is that he is a veteran himself and a Marine. It’s very hard on him. It makes you want to cry.” (Although Register repeatedly spoke of his officer as a “young man,” records indicate that Ponte was born in 1966.)

A month later, when I pressed Register about the revelations contained in the GBI report, which he indicated he had not yet seen, he reconsidered his position. While reiterating that the shot was legal, he said, “I do call into question the timeliness of it.” He also said he’d be looking into the apparent breakdown in command and control, explaining that he would “dig deeper and ensure that if there were any issues that created the dysnchronization between the negotiating team and the tactical team that we address that and we fix that. Certainly, as the event was unfolding, I don’t know if the communication was transpiring as quickly as it possibly should have.”

If we waited five more minutes, and he had detonated explosives and killed himself and the two hostages, then we may have been having a conversation — ‘Now, why did we wait so long?’

The next morning, Register called back. He mentioned an additional change he’d implemented a few months before, a monthly training session with his incident commanders to do “tabletop exercises,” reviewing some of the scenarios they might face in the field. He added that he’d been up half the night digging into the reports on the Easley shooting, and he’d scheduled a weekly meeting with his leadership staff to talk about developing a procedure for identifying mistakes so they won’t be repeated. “We have to take some time to look at what the findings were and come back for after-action reviews,” he said. “That’s the only way we were going to be better.”

***

Whatever mistakes may or may not have been made on Windy Hill Road on July 7, there’s one issue about which everyone seems to agree: Brian Easley himself bears a good portion of the blame. Even when one takes into account his mental illness and the other formidable struggles he was facing, the fact remains that Easley alone made the choice to enter the bank, claimed he had a bomb, and hold two women against their will.

“I’m sorry for what happened,” Calvin Easley told me when I visited him and his wife, Anita, in their tidy home in the Atlanta suburbs. “I’m sorry he went in there and took hostages. I’m very sorry for that. He was not in his right mind. But they didn’t have to kill him. He just wanted to get his story out.”

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On a phone call from the Wells Fargo, Easley told his daughter Jayla that he loved her and to work hard in school. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

That story is one that many veterans can relate to. The same military experience that helped make him a man left him anxious, troubled, and eventually unable to work. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he discovered a sense of brotherhood and meaning in the Marine Corps, one he was unable to replicate once he returned home.

But Easley did what he could. He cared for his daughter, calling her every day and sending gifts when finances allowed. He battled the VA for years to receive the benefits he’d earned through his service. He sought an education, hoping to start a career, support his family, and make a new life, only to find himself in a trap that has ensnared thousands of his fellow veterans.

Then, one morning in July, he woke up to find that the money he counted on to make it through simply wasn’t there. And just like the Marine Corps had taught him, he took initiative. He called the hotline. When they hung up, he called again and again. Finally, he walked into the benefits office to plead his case in person. But instead of recognizing a veteran in crisis and working out a plan, or perhaps directing him across the street to the hospital, writing a prescription, and getting him back on track, they sent him away in search of paperwork.

“The problem was bigger than the Cobb County Police Department and Mr. Easley,” Bates told me. “The problem is the system — how they treat retired veterans. You should get more than ‘I appreciate your service.’ The VA owes these guys more. They’re willing to put their life on the line for their country, and when they separate from military they deserve better.” In particular, he criticized the VA’s decision to handcuff Brian Easley rather than help him. “That’s where the whole thing went bad, I believe,” he said.

He was not in his right mind. But they didn’t have to kill him. He just wanted to get his story out.

“I’m just baffled about what is so hard to negotiate,” said John Delorme, a Marine who served with Easley. “This isn’t a terrorist. This is a guy who fought against terrorism. As a veteran it makes me feel smaller than a grain of sand, the way he was treated.”

“I just don’t want his little girl to grow up to think her dad was a bad person,” said Ian Emmett, another battle buddy. “He was a good person.”

Alecia Miller, who dated Easley for two years when he was in the military, agreed. “I hate for him to be painted as this crazy deranged person,” she said. “This is someone who the system failed, and because of that, a decision was made out of desperation, and someone has lost their life because of it.”

“You go over there and you fight a war for our country and everybody’s out to kill you,” Calvin Easley told me. “You don’t know nobody. You’re in a foreign land. But the real sharks? The real sharks are back at home. There’s no reintegration. You don’t get support from the country that you fought for.”

It was late. Anita stood behind him as he spoke, patting his back. “I’m livid,” he went on, fighting back tears. “He was a hero. He was not some psycho on the corner. He was not. He was a gentle giant until you pushed him. If you pushed him to the max, then you’d see a different person. But it took an awful lot. It took a lot.”

“I know this,” he said. “He was my brother.”

***

Aaron Gell is the features editor of Task & Purpose and an adjunct instructor at NYU’s Prison Education Program. He has contributed to numerous publications, including New York magazine, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair,

This article was published in collaboration with the editorial team at Task & Purpose. 

***

Editor: Michelle Legro
Photographs: Hector René Membreno-Canales

Fact checker: Matthew Giles
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

The Myth of Kevin Williamson

Kevin Williamson (via YouTube/The Cato Institute)

After a week or so of mostly women questioning The Atlantic’s hiring of Kevin Williamson, a conservative columnist who has advocated for hanging women who have had abortions, the magazine’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg announced Williamson is no longer in his employ.

Goldberg had justified hiring Williamson on the grounds that he’s a talented writer, and his assertion that women who have abortions should be hanged was an errant tweet, not to be taken seriously. But Media Matters dug up a 2014 podcast for the National Review in which Williamson talked at length about how much he likes this idea. “I’m kind of squishy about capital punishment in general, but I’ve got a soft spot for hanging as a form of capital punishment.” Read more…

Where Have You Hidden the Cholera?

getty images

Rowan Moore Gerety | Excerpt adapted from Go Tell the Crocodiles: Chasing Prosperity in Mozambique | The New Press | February 2018| 19 minutes (5,070 words)

 

Stones and brickbats were thrown at the premises, several windows were broken, even in the room where the woman, now in a dying state, was lying, and the medical gentleman who was attending her was obliged to seek safety in flight. Several individuals were pursued and attacked by the mob and some hurt. The park constables were apparently panic struck, and incapable of acting.

— Liverpool Chronicle, June 2, 1832

Rioting and social unrest in response to cholera was not entirely confined to Britain. Civil disturbances arose in Russia in 1830, and were followed elsewhere in mainland Europe in 1831. In Hungary, castles were attacked and nobles murdered by mobs who believed the upper classes were responsible for cholera deaths.

— Gill, Burrell, and Brown, “Fear and Frustration”

It was a story of bicycles.

— Domingos Napueto

In October 2010, a government laboratory in Port-au-Prince confirmed Haiti’s first cholera case in nearly a century. The Ministry of Health quickly flooded the airwaves with spots urging residents to wash their hands and treat their water. International observers who were surprised that cholera would resurface after such a long absence reacted skeptically at first, but the disease’s path of devastation quickly proved them wrong. The outbreak tore through the central plateau and up and down the coast of the Gulf of Gonâve, the bay that forms the hollow middle of Haiti’s horseshoe-shaped map. Four thousand five hundred people died, and nearly three hundred thousand fell ill.

Cholera was a second, shattering blow to a country already crippled by an earthquake that had struck earlier that year, destroying much of the capital and leaving more than a hundred thousand people dead. Where had the disease come from? Had the jostling of tectonic plates during the earthquake unleashed cholera-carrying waters in the Gulf of Mexico? Had benign strains of the cholera bacterium already present in Haiti somehow morphed and become virulent? Suspicions quickly fell on a contingent of Nepalese soldiers with the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH, whose camp was in Mirebalais, near the outbreak’s start, and where sewage was said to have leaked into a tributary of the Artibonite River. Cholera outbreaks occur in South Asia every single year, and it was presumed that UN soldiers had unwittingly carried the pathogen with them to Haiti.
Read more…

Sharp Women Writers: An Interview With Michelle Dean

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Natalie Daher | Longreads | April 2018 | 15 minutes (4,014 words)

The subjects of cultural critic Michelle Dean’s new book Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion — including Dorothy Parker, Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion and Nora Ephron — have appeared in Dean’s writing and interviews again and again over the years. It’s not difficult to see how Dean would develop a fascination with opinionated women — she is one herself. Lawyer-turned-crime reporter, literary critic, and Gawker alumnus, Michelle Dean’s has had her own “sharp” opinions on topics ranging from fashion to politics, from #MeToo to the Amityville Horror.

The book is more than just a series of biographical sketches. Dean is fascinated by the connections between these literary women — their real-life relationships, their debates, and the ways they were pitted against each other in a male-dominated field.

We spoke by phone between New York and Los Angeles and discussed writing about famous writers, the media, editors, and feminism.
Read more…

Before We All Teach Someone a Lesson

Students dressed as the video game Tetris, shaking hands cooperatively
Students dressed as Tetris blocks shake hands with their team. (Photo by Andrew Hancock / Icon Sport Media via Getty Images)

“Trashing is insidious. It can damage its subject for life, personally and professionally. Whether or not people sympathize, the damage has been done.”

— Laurie Penny, Who Does She Think She Is?

In the right context, moral outrage can be justified and effective. When marginalized or less-empowered voices leverage a moral megaphone to remedy systemic injustice — when hate suffers consequences — those social repercussions help bend the arc of the moral universe in the right direction. In communities where we can all see each other in person, correcting bad behavior in judicious, measured proportion serves everyone in the long run.

Yet even justified social consequences can get out of hand quickly when they’re exacted by waves of anonymous online strangers. Constructive criticism tips over into merciless abuse that undermines whether transgressors can learn any semblance of an appropriate lesson.

In Mosaic, Gaia Vince examines how our first impulse offline is usually to be generous and kind to each other, but those instinctual wires get crossed online depending on how a social network is set up. Even just one bad experience with a jerk can set a formative precedent that leads to less cooperative behavior.

“You might think that there is a minority of sociopaths online, which we call trolls, who are doing all this harm,” says Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, at Cornell University’s Department of Information Science. “What we actually find in our work is that ordinary people, just like you and me, can engage in such antisocial behaviour. For a specific period of time, you can actually become a troll.”

The good news is that this also works the other way around: well-timed, well-meaning interventions can encourage us to bring more of our evolved prosocial habits from offline communities into our online discourse.

Here, Vince visits Yale University’s Human Cooperation Lab to explore how we can redesign social networks in ways that help “further our extraordinary impulse to be nice to others even at our own expense.”

“If you take carbon atoms and you assemble them one way, they become graphite, which is soft and dark. Take the same carbon atoms and assemble them a different way, and it becomes diamond, which is hard and clear. These properties of hardness and clearness aren’t properties of the carbon atoms – they’re properties of the collection of carbon atoms and depend on how you connect the carbon atoms to each other,” [Nicholas Christakis, director of Yale’s Human Nature Lab] says. “And it’s the same with human groups.”

“By engineering their interactions one way, I can make them really sweet to each other, work well together, and they are healthy and happy and they cooperate. Or you take the same people and connect them a different way and they’re mean jerks to each other and they don’t cooperate and they don’t share information and they are not kind to each other.”

In one experiment, he randomly assigned strangers to play the public goods game with each other. In the beginning, he says, about two-thirds of people were cooperative. “But some of the people they interact with will take advantage of them and, because their only option is either to be kind and cooperative or to be a defector, they choose to defect because they’re stuck with these people taking advantage of them. And by the end of the experiment everyone is a jerk to everyone else.”

Christakis turned this around simply by giving each person a little bit of control over who they were connected to after each round. “They had to make two decisions: am I kind to my neighbours or am I not; and do I stick with this neighbour or do I not.” The only thing each player knew about their neighbours was whether each had cooperated or defected in the round before. “What we were able to show is that people cut ties to defectors and form ties to cooperators, and the network rewired itself and converted itself into a diamond-like structure instead of a graphite-like structure.” In other words, a cooperative prosocial structure instead of an uncooperative structure.

But as I’m watching the game I just played unfold, Christakis reveals that three of these players are actually planted bots. “We call them ‘dumb AI’,” he says.
His team is not interested in inventing super-smart AI to replace human cognition. Instead, the plan is to infiltrate a population of smart humans with dumb-bots to help the humans help themselves.

“We wanted to see if we could use the dumb-bots to get the people unstuck so they can cooperate and coordinate a little bit more – so that their native capacity to perform well can be revealed by a little assistance,” Christakis says.

Much antisocial behaviour online stems from the anonymity of internet interactions – the reputational costs of being mean are much lower than offline. Here, bots may also offer a solution. One experiment found that the level of racist abuse tweeted at black users could be dramatically slashed by using bot accounts with white profile images to respond to racist tweeters. A typical bot response to a racist tweet would be: “Hey man, just remember that there are real people who are hurt when you harass them with that kind of language.” Simply cultivating a little empathy in such tweeters reduced their racist tweets almost to zero for weeks afterwards.

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The Religion No One Talks About: My Search For Answers in an Old Caribbean Faith

Illustration by Missy Chimovitz

Sarah Betancourt | Longreads | March 2018 | 23 minutes (5,704 words)

 

There are things in life a Puerto Rican doesn’t talk about. One is the mesa blanca, or white table, in the laundry room, with statues of St. Michael, St. Lazarus, and others whose names you might not know. For years, I assumed leaving coffee in front of those other statues, trading out stale bread with new, and listening to nine days of prayers (la novena) after a death was just normal American life. Catholicism was for Sundays; Espiritismo was the rest of the time. By the time I was 9, I realized there was a reason my parents locked the laundry room door when white people came to our house.

***

The last thing I packed when I left Manhattan for Florida on September 12, 2015, was an old plastic rosary, worn and smelling of incense embedded in the yellowing nylon between each of the 60 beads. Seven hours later, I changed into a pink t-shirt in a dingy airport stall. My abuela loved pink. Twenty minutes after that, I was standing in front of a hospice, hating how bright the sunlight was, wishing away the flowers.

I didn’t recognize her on the bed until I saw the familiar grey blue of her eyes. I was hoping that in her mind, she was on a beach somewhere, maybe dipping her feet into the sands by her hometown in Puerto Rico, not here, in this bed, in this 50-pound body. My godfather puffed up his chest and said, “She’s been traveling this week. Seeing people.”

She should have been dead days earlier. Everyone said, “She waited for you. She needs to speak with you.” Her last words (“estoy cansada,” “I’m tired”) were spoken a week before. Alone in the room, I pulled over a chair, and touched her arms. She lay completely still, her drifting right eye trying to focus. I dipped a Q-tip in water to wet her hard tongue, brushed her hair as it fell like snowflakes on my hands, pulled out my Chapstick to give her lips relief. No reaction.

Catholicism was for Sundays; Espiritismo was the rest of the time.

I had forgotten that her solace couldn’t be found in the physical. Santa Betancourt had been a spiritual woman for every single one of her 94 years. As a trained healer in the faith of Espiritismo, she had people asking her to fix them, to solve their problems. Every time I saw her, I would greet her with un beso (a kiss) and “la bendicion,” not knowing for many years that it was more than a phrase of recognition, but a request for her blessing. I had never seen her ask anyone but God to heal her own pains. She hated going to the doctor.

I pulled out the tiny blue book she had given me, hoping that the complex religious words would make some sense. I placed the rosary in her hand and asked her if she wanted me to pray. I mentioned it wouldn’t be great — I had been agnostic for 10 years, and didn’t know what to believe. Her eye stopped swimming, and her finger moved. I pulled up the rosary on my phone, lay my head next to hers, and began.

Read more…