Speaker 1: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
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Speaker 2: Okay. Hello everyone, It's me James today and I'm joined
Speaker 2: by three guests or members of the Southeast Alaska Indigenous
Speaker 2: trans Boundary Commission. What we're talking about today is accepting
Speaker 2: indigenous leadership on issues of climate change and issues of
Speaker 2: more broadly ecological damage. And specifically we're discussing an emergency
Speaker 2: declaration that they recently released about the state of the
Speaker 2: Pacific salmon population. If I'm not mistaken, so I'm going
Speaker 2: to ask each of them to introduce themselves. If you
Speaker 2: could give us your name and any relevant affiliations that
Speaker 2: you think listeners should know, that would be one.
Speaker 3: Hello.
Speaker 4: My name is Kirby Muldeau. My ancestral name is Hopwellasa.
Speaker 4: I am from the jimsand people in what is now
Speaker 4: known as Northwest British Columbia, Canada. My mother is Jim Shann,
Speaker 4: my father is Gigxan, and I am from wilp we Get,
Speaker 4: which is the house of the Night Drummer from the
Speaker 4: Fireweed Plan. I am also an independent consultant and contractor
Speaker 4: and I look forward to our discussion today.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 5: Hi.
Speaker 6: I am Louis Wagner Junior from Metlakatla, Alaska, and I'm
Speaker 6: Cake Woody of the Brown Bear Plan from Cape Fox,
Speaker 6: sanw Kun.
Speaker 5: And I have.
Speaker 6: Lived in Metla Catla my whole life of seventy five years.
Speaker 6: And we're connected to the Unuch River through my grandmother
Speaker 6: and she was born at Cape Fox. And we've been
Speaker 6: on the Unich River ever since I was big enough
Speaker 6: to go with my older brother and so I've been
Speaker 6: up there since like nineteen sixty wow. And my brothers
Speaker 6: was up to close to twenty years before that. So,
Speaker 6: but our family has always been on the Unich River
Speaker 6: to harvest. Had the fish camp up there and and
Speaker 6: we'd fish the uligans, bring the uligans home to the
Speaker 6: to the people, and the catch can Saxsmon Metal Catline.
Speaker 6: Then people would send them out to the west coast,
Speaker 6: so we're very connected. We go up to the Unich
Speaker 6: in the spring for ooligan and the fall for hunting.
Speaker 6: Now they used to do the salmon up on the
Speaker 6: river with the fish camp. I served on our community
Speaker 6: council for from two thousand and two, but I think
Speaker 6: twenty fifteen in there, and now i'm their tribal rights
Speaker 6: representative for the community and I report back to our
Speaker 6: council after each of our meetings.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much. And Guy, would you like to
Speaker 2: induce yourself.
Speaker 7: Yes, my name is Guy Archibald. I'm the executive director
Speaker 7: of the Southeast Alaska Indigenous trans Boundary Commission. We were
Speaker 7: formed about nine years ago by a commission of fifteen
Speaker 7: sovereign tribes in Southeast Alaska reacting to you know, a
Speaker 7: huge amount of mind development and further potential mind development
Speaker 7: going on in the transound watersheds that drain from British
Speaker 7: Columbia to Alaska. I used to work at the mines.
Speaker 7: I'm an environmental chemist by trade. I helped tribes monitor
Speaker 7: their own environments and their food security through science. And yeah,
Speaker 7: I'm looking forward to this discussion as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a fantastic set for all of you, Thank
Speaker 2: you very much. So I think we should begin because
Speaker 2: maybe people may have missed the extent and the severity
Speaker 2: of the emergency with salmon populations and so preps. We
Speaker 2: could start up by explaining like how it was. It
Speaker 2: seems like Louis, you have a lot of experience there,
Speaker 2: and then what has caused things to be at a
Speaker 2: situation they're at now. Would that be a good way
Speaker 2: to go about it.
Speaker 5: Yes, that would be a good way.
Speaker 6: Where we are at now on the salmon is that
Speaker 6: Bruce Jack Mine started on the river and none of
Speaker 6: us knew about it until way late summers around the
Speaker 6: mid nineties, nineteen nineties and by two thousand, especially in
Speaker 6: the spring when we'd be up there, that oligans were
Speaker 6: starting to disappear, and then then the fall moose hunting,
Speaker 6: the salmon were disappearing, and there's a lot less bears
Speaker 6: in moose now where the river along the river bank
Speaker 6: would be full of the parts of the fish that
Speaker 6: bears didn't eat, there would be so many bears in
Speaker 6: fish and now you don't smell any of that.
Speaker 5: But and it's really affected the king salmon.
Speaker 6: They completely disappeared for at least six years that my
Speaker 6: son and I noticed they spawn up on the river there,
Speaker 6: and as we always pay attention, we check on the
Speaker 6: main spawning stream of Kingsbury where they spawn. And the
Speaker 6: last three years we've been starting to see some come back,
Speaker 6: and that bruce jack mine which fawned out later. They
Speaker 6: were putting their tailings into a lake up on the
Speaker 6: mountain there, and then you know, as they filled it
Speaker 6: up and the rain filled it up, the overflow came
Speaker 6: down into the river. And the river is so shallow,
Speaker 6: it's only a few inches deep, and it's it's not
Speaker 6: very wide. It's it's the smallest river out of the
Speaker 6: Stakeen and the Takou there, and so any pollution in
Speaker 6: that river will completely kill it off. The salmon runs
Speaker 6: their way down from what we've seen through the years.
Speaker 6: But you know, it's also the wildlife that's disappearing with it, because.
Speaker 5: There's the feet isn't there.
Speaker 6: There's not the amount of seagulls, a lot less seals
Speaker 6: and sea lions.
Speaker 5: It's effecting on the food chain everything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I spent a little bit of time in
Speaker 2: You're part of the world, just packcrafting and hiking and things,
Speaker 2: and certainly it's a it's a very beautiful place, but
Speaker 2: it's a very like a fragile one too. As you've
Speaker 2: explained that these mines can very quickly have this effect
Speaker 2: that cascades at the ecosystem. Could you explain a little
Speaker 2: bit of the role that salmon play not just in
Speaker 2: the in the provision of food for the for the
Speaker 2: animal life of the area, but also like the role
Speaker 2: they played traditionally in provisioning and feeding indigenous people.
Speaker 6: Well, yeah, we you know, we put up as much
Speaker 6: sock day as we can and then then king salmon
Speaker 6: then a lot of it we'll fish and get during
Speaker 6: the winter to eat, you know, and just get them
Speaker 6: fresh because they don't keep as well in the freezer.
Speaker 6: But as indigenous, you could, you know, look in our
Speaker 6: pantry and see we've lived the same life as I
Speaker 6: grew up with my parents and grandparents. Nothing has changed
Speaker 6: for us. We've taught our children the same way how.
Speaker 5: To harvest and take care of the fish.
Speaker 6: Back in the fifties, when his little kid in Mettle,
Speaker 6: cat Alaska, hardly anyone if.
Speaker 5: They even had a refrigerator.
Speaker 6: They didn't have freezers, so they had to smoke the
Speaker 6: fish really hard, and they put them in those things.
Speaker 6: They're like four gallon coffee cans too, with newspaper on
Speaker 6: the bottom and on top. Then they would keep through
Speaker 6: the winter, they wouldn't wouldn't get moldy. So that was
Speaker 6: the the main staple for the for the whole year.
Speaker 2: Is it the situation now that like people just can't
Speaker 2: rely on salmon as a staple food because of the
Speaker 2: mining tailings reducing the population.
Speaker 6: Yeah, without any hardy, any king salmon coming in. There's
Speaker 6: you know, a few from the hatchery out there, but
Speaker 6: they even in Ketchcan they've closed the King salmon derby
Speaker 6: for I think it's into its fourth year now.
Speaker 5: So it's just.
Speaker 6: That that other big mine goes in the river will
Speaker 6: be destroyed and it's going to flow all the way
Speaker 6: out into into the ocean here into Clarence Straits and
Speaker 6: Dicks and Entrance. There's been no avoiding it. It's got
Speaker 6: nowhere else to go with that comes straight out to
Speaker 6: the West Beam Canal and then East Beam Canal.
Speaker 5: Keb.
Speaker 2: I know you're you're not quite in exactly the same place,
Speaker 2: but can you explain the situation with the salmon population
Speaker 2: where you are.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and maybe I'll give a little more context to that.
Speaker 4: I live in Northern British Columbia, Northwest British Columbia on
Speaker 4: the on the in the Skina River watershed, and over
Speaker 4: the past probably thirty or forty years, we've seen an
Speaker 4: extreme decline in salmon, specifically sake and king salmon as
Speaker 4: you guys call it. We call them spring salmon over here.
Speaker 4: But we've seen an extreme decline in returns. And you know,
Speaker 4: we've we've stopped a lot of our commercial fisheries and
Speaker 4: our food fisheries until which time we feel that the
Speaker 4: the returns are sufficient enough so that we can continue
Speaker 4: to harvest. So we've got the Taii Test Fishery at
Speaker 4: the mouth of the Schena, and they do a count
Speaker 4: every year throughout, starting in the spring and throughout most
Speaker 4: of the summer. They do a test fishery and they
Speaker 4: estimate the amount of salmon that are returning. And we
Speaker 4: do not fish, as I said, commercially or for food
Speaker 4: until we feel that the numbers are sufficient that have
Speaker 4: gone past that fishery. There are many obstacles that face
Speaker 4: salmon today, most of which are a result of human activity. Logging, mining,
Speaker 4: commercial fishing, oil and gas, and we all have to
Speaker 4: take a little bit of responsibility for that because we
Speaker 4: all enjoy those resources and we use them. And I've
Speaker 4: always said to people that we can't mine our way
Speaker 4: out of this global warming and climate change. We have
Speaker 4: to learn how to we have to learn how to
Speaker 4: use less. And as I said, you know, mining, obviously
Speaker 4: it's it's a it's a big concern, but there's also logging,
Speaker 4: there's oil and gas, as well as commercial fishery. You know,
Speaker 4: there's a lot of things that happen out in open
Speaker 4: waters in the North Pacific that can be changed fairly easily.
Speaker 3: You know. They there's a fishery right now.
Speaker 4: I believe it's an area one oh four, a fishery
Speaker 4: that is targeting.
Speaker 3: Pink salmon.
Speaker 4: But by our estimation and by estimations from Alaska fisheries,
Speaker 4: they are the bycatch for Skina salmon. Skina sakey salmon
Speaker 4: that are returning to the Skina is about four hundred
Speaker 4: and seventy thousand. Now, these are sakey that are a bycatch.
Speaker 4: We're not asking this fishery to stop, We're asking this
Speaker 4: fishery to be more of a terminus fishery, which means
Speaker 4: that they better target the pink salmon. So right now
Speaker 4: they're fishing in open waters approximately half the fleet. From
Speaker 4: what I understand, we're not asking this fishery to stop.
Speaker 4: We're asking them to move inside so that skin and
Speaker 4: sawkey can go past this fishery. And right now we
Speaker 4: are just barely making our escapement every year that make
Speaker 4: it up into the headwaters where they can spawn. And so,
Speaker 4: you know, there's a lot of different ways we can
Speaker 4: address the issue of salmon declining in numbers. There's some
Speaker 4: low hanging fruit, there's a lot of other things that
Speaker 4: are going to take a lot of time to enforce.
Speaker 4: But I'm hoping as transboundary nations, we can come together
Speaker 4: to work towards making sure that salmon have a fighting chance.
Speaker 4: Salmon are very resilient. They're a keystone species, and they're
Speaker 4: a good indicator of the health of the environment and
Speaker 4: surrounding areas as well as the water.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's an excellent summary. Thank you, and
Speaker 2: preps guy, you have a little bit more experience on
Speaker 2: the industrial side of thing, I guess can you explain
Speaker 2: how it is that I'm on the Facebook because Louis
Speaker 2: was saying the tribal nations weren't aware that this mine
Speaker 2: in one case, with these certainly like these other practices, right,
Speaker 2: some of which are sort of very nebulous, like global warming,
Speaker 2: others which are specific like this socce bycatch and the
Speaker 2: forestry with the nations in question here, the people who's
Speaker 2: ancestral and current homeland this is happening on not consulted
Speaker 2: or was there insufficient explanation of the consequences when these
Speaker 2: with these mines and forestry operations were opened.
Speaker 7: Certainly, especially early on, you know, to this day and
Speaker 7: to this day, the right of free entry, which means
Speaker 7: somebody could be setting pretty much anywhere in the world,
Speaker 7: get on the internet and claim a mine claim without
Speaker 7: any kind of notification to the landowner or surface owner
Speaker 7: by swiping a credit card.
Speaker 8: Oh well, so there's no.
Speaker 7: Even requirement for notification on that. And you know, early on,
Speaker 7: the mining companies, you know, they do a investor press
Speaker 7: here's that they're doing in Las Vegas and New York
Speaker 7: and this and that, and then they attempt to come
Speaker 7: into the communities with that presentation, and what they might
Speaker 7: call meaningful engagement is actually one it's completely one sided.
Speaker 7: It's not respectful of the process within that tribe or
Speaker 7: that community, and it's completely tone deaf. And so what engagement,
Speaker 7: what consultation does happen is incredibly inadequate.
Speaker 8: To make matters.
Speaker 7: Worse, the South, the Alaskan tribes are landless communities. We
Speaker 7: don't have jurisdiction over a land area. And great work
Speaker 7: is being done, though we're not starting from zero here.
Speaker 7: First nations out on the land through landguardian programs and
Speaker 7: more doing great work. Southeast tribes monitoring. You know, they're
Speaker 7: ecosystems and food security and fish consumption and all that
Speaker 7: great science and information, but we do need to incorporate one.
Speaker 7: We need to recognize that we can't manage a complex
Speaker 7: organism such as a watershed by dividing it down the
Speaker 7: middle under two different jurisdictions. We have to I don't
Speaker 7: say move the border, we basically have to erase it.
Speaker 7: And we need to treat that ecosystem as a whole.
Speaker 7: Climate change is having a huge impact the chinook or
Speaker 7: the king salmon or the spring salmon. They're the largest,
Speaker 7: so they have the largest egg, they have the less
Speaker 7: surface area and the environment to absorb oxygen, so they're
Speaker 7: kind of an indicator of the first you have a problem,
Speaker 7: you're kind of red flag going up, you know, in
Speaker 7: your network, complex ecosystem and both Caribbean. Right, we're right,
Speaker 7: it's the crash of the entire network that we're seeing.
Speaker 7: Salmon is just an indicator of that. But we're seeing
Speaker 7: it across the board. And it's unfortunate because here, especially
Speaker 7: right now in southeast Alaska. I live in Juno, Alaska.
Speaker 7: Prior to European contact, there was probably five times the
Speaker 7: population living here than there is now. You look at
Speaker 7: maps of the old village there everywhere, and they've been
Speaker 7: there for tens of thousands of years. They managed to
Speaker 7: do it sustainably, do it with bounce, do it with
Speaker 7: effective you don't really call it in management, but in
Speaker 7: engagement with nature. And so here we are kind of
Speaker 7: on the front lines of it. And strangely enough, we
Speaker 7: have the solution and people who have within their oral
Speaker 7: history the stories of my grading due to climate change,
Speaker 7: of adjusting their life due to climate change. It's in
Speaker 7: the history or you know, the current oral history. And
Speaker 7: so when we're looking when we say unify here, there's
Speaker 7: a great voice and indigenous people too if there is,
Speaker 7: and it's hard to justify with mining, I'm just going
Speaker 7: to say that because it's an inherently extractive down to
Speaker 7: the last profitable dollar industry. It's not sustainable. It's it's
Speaker 7: reducible constantly as it operates, and now it's being used
Speaker 7: to justify climate change. Adjusting to climate change is now
Speaker 7: being used to justify more mining, which again, as usual,
Speaker 7: is going to fall on the backs of the local
Speaker 7: people and communities and indigenous people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's shocking. The similar to issues that we see
Speaker 2: where I live, which is at the other end of
Speaker 2: the United States too, on its southern border, where the
Speaker 2: Colorado River is a binational river, right, which is managed
Speaker 2: by two countries kind of in aggressive competition, and we're
Speaker 2: seeing the same thing here at the.
Speaker 8: Justification Front Staates.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, yea, yes, yes, and all of them have competing.
Speaker 2: I was rafting the Colorado River last year, and I
Speaker 2: have paddled the Colorado River. But they change in that
Speaker 2: river ecosystem that I've seen, and I've only lived in
Speaker 2: the US for fifteen years. It is remarkable and I
Speaker 2: can't imagine what it's like over seventy five years, and
Speaker 2: the same thing with mining. Actually we're seeing the justification
Speaker 2: of very damaging lithium mining rights and then being told
Speaker 2: that this is a solution to climate change and whilst
Speaker 2: also destroying these ecosystems. If people think it's just an
Speaker 2: issue that affects one group of people in one group
Speaker 2: of the part of the world, it's not. It's it's
Speaker 2: very universal. And that's just in the United States. We
Speaker 2: see the same thing places I've traveled for work in
Speaker 2: East Africa, South America. I wonder then if we could
Speaker 2: talk about the value of accepting indigenous leadership when it
Speaker 2: comes to addressing I think we began addressing that in
Speaker 2: Guy's comment very well, but perhaps one thing we could
Speaker 2: talk about when we talk about that is I think
Speaker 2: when people think about specifically British Columbia and Alaska, they
Speaker 2: people will use the term like frontier or wilderness a lot, right,
Speaker 2: which erases the fact that, as Guy mentioned and both
Speaker 2: of you have shared with us, that people have been
Speaker 2: living there for tens of thousands of years in a
Speaker 2: way that was sustainable, right, Like, these weren't places without
Speaker 2: human beings, It wasn't empty land, and it was just
Speaker 2: land that wasn't inhabited by people of European ancestry, and
Speaker 2: so when we talk about how to go forward with
Speaker 2: this land, why it's important to listen to the people
Speaker 2: who have always been there, you said, A good framework.
Speaker 6: All we have is our stories and how how we
Speaker 6: grew up with the old folks.
Speaker 5: And we're lucky to have a rowboat and.
Speaker 6: Pair of oars back in back in the fifties, still
Speaker 6: late fifties, some of the people started being able to
Speaker 6: get a little three horse Johnson something like that.
Speaker 5: And that was a lot of power. But we also
Speaker 5: the glaciers have.
Speaker 6: Melted away up on the Unich River there, so that
Speaker 6: really affects affecting the amount of water flowing. The level
Speaker 6: of the water very important to a lot of us.
Speaker 6: Yet to live live the way of life that we've
Speaker 6: always lived.
Speaker 5: Yeah, all the testimony that I have.
Speaker 6: Done as not serious because I don't have a college
Speaker 6: education like that.
Speaker 5: It's just that's that's what they want. I mean, the
Speaker 5: people they learn from school books.
Speaker 6: Now, but they've never lived a life and been on
Speaker 6: all these different areas, the beaches, you know, and we
Speaker 6: have all our seasons. Every season, we have something to
Speaker 6: look forward to it like right after I'll start with
Speaker 6: the spring on the uligans, and and then seaweed and
Speaker 6: king salmone is a big, big thing to go after.
Speaker 6: And then we have you know, the summer and then
Speaker 6: then to fall.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Also we have the greens called asparagus. While asparagus or
Speaker 6: or harvesting all the time we our our children that
Speaker 6: we've we have they all know how to do it,
Speaker 6: where to go. So we've been continued doing in our
Speaker 6: teaching on our our side, or just they don't want
Speaker 6: to take us serious, I guess anyway. So I've been,
Speaker 6: you know, been to a lot of meetings and talked
Speaker 6: about a lot of this stuff here, and it's just
Speaker 6: it's going to be a shame if we just keep
Speaker 6: losing everything. We're getting very close salmon and I are
Speaker 6: getting a lot less and a commercial fishing in my
Speaker 6: whole life. And and then later as the kids got older,
Speaker 6: we went into tenderings. We just had family aboard, and
Speaker 6: you know, we would get loads after loads through the
Speaker 6: seventies into the eighties in nineties, and then pretty soon
Speaker 6: you could see the Sainters are coming in with less
Speaker 6: and less fish and just ulligan alone and been fifteen
Speaker 6: years up there for the Ouligan in the spring and
Speaker 6: get out of school for a little while and to
Speaker 6: go up the river ours from Metal Catalan. The last
Speaker 6: got to up to the Unique River a little over
Speaker 6: one hundred miles, so we have a two hundred mile
Speaker 6: round trip to get up there and back. And there's
Speaker 6: no safe harbor there. It's wide open to the weather.
Speaker 6: So you have to really best to learn from somebody
Speaker 6: who's been up there a few times, and you know,
Speaker 6: they know where you can maybe duck out of for
Speaker 6: a safe spot and easy to get hurt on the
Speaker 6: river because they're so shallow.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we lost the fifteen.
Speaker 6: Years on the river, that's what it was due to
Speaker 6: weak runs and they disappeared for a while. They were
Speaker 6: going up to other streams to get clean water, even
Speaker 6: on like I'll reveal a good gato on Ketchgan Island.
Speaker 6: They went up there one year and there was really
Speaker 6: good run. But then they'll go through Beam Canal and
Speaker 6: the other streams when they have to. Oh, you know,
Speaker 6: they're pretty smart. They don't have to go back to
Speaker 6: the same river all the time. We'd have to go
Speaker 6: through the canal and check the other places where they
Speaker 6: might go up, but with the salmon, they need that
Speaker 6: clean river because they won't go up any other river,
Speaker 6: and their numbers really really have dropped. Used to see
Speaker 6: king salmon, you know, probably as far as I could reach,
Speaker 6: which is about six feet and spawners in the river,
Speaker 6: and three years ago they were maybe long as one arm.
Speaker 6: I couldn't find any real big ones in there. But
Speaker 6: it was good to see some of them coming back.
Speaker 6: But that won't last long things continue to go the
Speaker 6: way they are.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very sad to hear it like this. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this these changes you've seen. I suppose so preps you
Speaker 2: could explain to us, like there's this emergency declaration that's
Speaker 2: been made, right, and we've heard and Louis explain very eloquently,
Speaker 2: how this, how he's seen this decay over his life,
Speaker 2: and how can like accepting this leadership? Right, there's this
Speaker 2: emergency that's been declared. I guess, like it, is it possible?
Speaker 2: You said Simon were very resilient and said the Oligan
Speaker 2: were very smart. Can things return to the way they
Speaker 2: work and we at least stop things getting worse?
Speaker 4: And how Yeah, you know, I think our relationship with
Speaker 4: the environment is broken I'm a communications specialist. That's that's
Speaker 4: what I do. So I am all about relationships. Now
Speaker 4: when I talk about relationships, I'm just I'm not taughtking
Speaker 4: just about relationships with our fellow human beings. But I'm
Speaker 4: talking about relationships with the land, the water, the air,
Speaker 4: and I like to simplify it for people. I always
Speaker 4: tell people, you know, when you're in a relationship with
Speaker 4: a significant other or or a pet. You know, a
Speaker 4: lot of people have pets. It's it's a reciprocal relationship.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of give and take and there's a
Speaker 4: lot of compromise.
Speaker 9: And as as a young boy and growing up in
Speaker 9: in Gigxan Territory and in Jimsand Territory, I was always
Speaker 9: taught that you only took what you needed, and you
Speaker 9: didn't you didn't take any more, and you respected all
Speaker 9: living things.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 4: I don't mean to pick on anybody, but sport fishing
Speaker 4: is against our laws. You know, we don't play with fish.
Speaker 4: It's it's it's just something we do not do. And
Speaker 4: when I'm talking about our relationship with with all living things,
Speaker 4: you know, the land, the water, the swimmers, the two legged,
Speaker 4: the four leged, the ones fly. Our relationship with them
Speaker 4: is broken. You know, we used to harvest a lot
Speaker 4: more than we do now. You know, in the skin
Speaker 4: of watershed, you know, we used to harvest seals. We
Speaker 4: used to harvest, you know, a lot more things other
Speaker 4: than just salmon. And what we've done over the last
Speaker 4: fifty or so years has put so much pressure on
Speaker 4: salmon that they just can't sustain it.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: You know, I might not be very popular for saying this,
Speaker 4: but you know, we used to eat a lot more seals,
Speaker 4: and I think we should commercialize a seal hunt and
Speaker 4: sell those products so that people can make money and
Speaker 4: people can be fed. I'm not blaming the seals for
Speaker 4: or the decline in salmon. There's a lot of factors
Speaker 4: at play when it comes to the decline in salmon.
Speaker 4: But what I'm trying to explain is that our relationship
Speaker 4: with the environment is broken, and we need to fix it,
Speaker 4: and and it's out of balance right now, and we
Speaker 4: need to bring it back to balance, and we just
Speaker 4: need to consume less.
Speaker 2: Certainly, Yeah, and does that I'm curious that that sort
Speaker 2: of like heavy emphasis on salmon is that because it
Speaker 2: was very commercial, so people would be able to harvest
Speaker 2: just as salmon and sell it as opposed to harvesting
Speaker 2: these other animals that they were harvesting before.
Speaker 3: I think, I think salmon were very plentiful, right.
Speaker 4: You know, you hear stories about when when the Europeans
Speaker 4: first arrived, you know, they could I've heard stories of them,
Speaker 4: you know, putting a bucket into the water and pulling
Speaker 4: the bucket out and it would be just full of salmon. Right,
Speaker 4: So I thought, I think that, you know, there there
Speaker 4: was a mentality that, you know, the resource was infinite, right,
Speaker 4: it would last forever. I think that was the mentality.
Speaker 4: And so they just harvested it, harvested as much as
Speaker 4: they could, as fast as they could, and scent it
Speaker 4: around the world. And you know, if any of your
Speaker 4: listeners haven't tasted salmon, it's it's one of the most
Speaker 4: flavorful things you've ever you will ever taste. And it's
Speaker 4: it's the best meat in the world on the planet
Speaker 4: for you in terms of nutrients and and such, and
Speaker 4: you know, it's it's totally natural, and yeah, it's just
Speaker 4: all around good for the environment.
Speaker 3: You know, it.
Speaker 4: Feeds the birds, the two legs, the four legs. It
Speaker 4: even feeds plants, you know, and it's it's so resilient,
Speaker 4: and we just need to give salmon a chance and.
Speaker 3: Figure out a way forward where we.
Speaker 4: Can have a reciprocal relationship with salmon and the environment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and preps like a very conc creat steps. Like
Speaker 2: a lot of our listeners are not in the areas
Speaker 2: where you are, but they could be all over the world, right,
Speaker 2: But are there things they could do to show solidarity,
Speaker 2: to give you support? How can they help?
Speaker 7: Well, I would encourage encourage everybody to you know, visit
Speaker 7: our website and and kind of understand what we see
Speaker 7: as a pathway forward for remedying this. You know, it's
Speaker 7: it's you shouldn't come to the table to complain about
Speaker 7: a problem unless you have a remedy proposed here.
Speaker 8: And and that's what we're trying to do.
Speaker 7: We're trying to take that knowledge that it is in
Speaker 7: you know, Louis and just in the Unich and the
Speaker 7: knowledge in every little stream, even the knowledge within the genetics,
Speaker 7: that fine grain of every salmon that goes up every
Speaker 7: little stream, and get that incorporated into you know, the uh,
Speaker 7: you know, into an engagement proplem sys that ultimately the
Speaker 7: way we've been doing it is a failed experiment.
Speaker 8: We can call that now.
Speaker 7: Because these methods we put in to try to protect
Speaker 7: wild salmon, we've seen nothing but wild salmon decline. You
Speaker 7: asked if salmon are resilient, They very much are. They
Speaker 7: very much are resilient. There's reason there's five species of
Speaker 7: salmon here is because of all the upheaval, seismic upheaval
Speaker 7: living on the Pacific rim. They're very resilient to the
Speaker 7: occasional large impact. Just like you and me, though, we're
Speaker 7: very unresilient to constant pressure and stress. You know what
Speaker 7: it does to your digestive system, nervous system, everything, your
Speaker 7: family life. It's the same for these ecosystems. It's not
Speaker 7: the occasional huge impact, it's the continuous stress. And this
Speaker 7: area was not it's not really pristine. It was highly
Speaker 7: modified by the people and actively engaged with their environment.
Speaker 7: They enhance salmon streams and resting pools, They built clam gardens,
Speaker 7: They move trees and vegetation around, you know, enhance beaches,
Speaker 7: and it was very active. And we can incorporate that
Speaker 7: knowledge into how we move forward on a lot of
Speaker 7: these things.
Speaker 8: And we need to do that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, when people ask me what they can do, I
Speaker 4: respond by saying, what you can do is change your habits. Now,
Speaker 4: a lot of people think that this climate change problem,
Speaker 4: resource extraction, et cetera, it is too big.
Speaker 3: For us to tackle, but actually it's not.
Speaker 4: You know, if we all do a little bit and
Speaker 4: just change our habits, we can make huge change. You know,
Speaker 4: I always think about, you know, in British Columbia and
Speaker 4: in canadaa gosh about you know, forty years ago they
Speaker 4: brought in a law stating that everybody had to wear
Speaker 4: seat belts. There was huge backlash. Nobody wanted to wear
Speaker 4: a seat belt. They weren't used to it right, But
Speaker 4: after a while, you know, nobody, nobody even bothered to
Speaker 4: complain about it.
Speaker 3: We just do it.
Speaker 4: Whenever I get into my vehicle. Now it's second nature
Speaker 4: to put my seat belt on. I don't even think
Speaker 4: about it. It's done.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 4: If we can all just look at some of the
Speaker 4: habits that we have, whether it's you know, using too
Speaker 4: much water, maybe some wasteful practices, you know, driving when
Speaker 4: we don't need to drive. Maybe maybe we can walk
Speaker 4: a little more often, and maybe we can bike a
Speaker 4: little more often, just really look at what actions you're
Speaker 4: taking daily that maybe attributing to climate change and global
Speaker 4: warming and trying to change one habit, and when you've
Speaker 4: got that habit, change change another one. And you know,
Speaker 4: I think over time we can we can fix this.
Speaker 3: But it's going to.
Speaker 4: Take a concerned effort by everybody on this planet, and
Speaker 4: more so by some of us who are a little
Speaker 4: more privileged I guess, to be able to change our habits.
Speaker 3: Thanks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that was very very well said. And
Speaker 2: do you have anything to add.
Speaker 6: Louis, Yeah, I appreciate what Kirby said earlier on O.
Speaker 5: We're connected to the land.
Speaker 6: And everybody's grandmother was your grandmother when I was growing up.
Speaker 6: As long as you were, you know, you paid attention
Speaker 6: and you would help. I remember when in the fish camp,
Speaker 6: grandmother brought my friend and myself into the smokehouse and
Speaker 6: they had they had a fish that was just put in,
Speaker 6: the salmon that was in the middle, and the finished
Speaker 6: salmon that was ready to come out on the end.
Speaker 6: And you know, they would only tell you once. They said,
Speaker 6: you can eat all you want, but if you waste
Speaker 6: one piece. You were never welcomed in the smokehouses again,
Speaker 6: so they didn't waste time, and they told it would
Speaker 6: tell the children when they get too loud, your children
Speaker 6: are to be seen but not heard. And just like that,
Speaker 6: they never stopped teaching. It was I wish I could
Speaker 6: remember more from a long time ago, but I was
Speaker 6: lucky that they treated you know, whatever friend I had,
Speaker 6: their their grandparents were were mine that just learned how
Speaker 6: to get bark off the cedar tree, and so you
Speaker 6: don't kill the cedar tree from my friend's grandmother. I
Speaker 6: never forgotten. When my wife wanted to go out and
Speaker 6: get get some bark, she was surprised. I told her
Speaker 6: I know how to do it, and so we would.
Speaker 6: We went out and got it. But just things like
Speaker 6: that is.
Speaker 5: We just try not to.
Speaker 6: Leave a footprint when when we left our insights or
Speaker 6: any camp areas.
Speaker 5: I just wanted to add that thank.
Speaker 2: You, thank you. It's very insightful. So talking of leaving
Speaker 2: a footprint, I think perhaps the last thing I want
Speaker 2: to talk about is mind tailings and the way that
Speaker 2: because of some of these minds. So there are some
Speaker 2: I guess minds that people want to build. Some minds
Speaker 2: of people have already built, right I was reading on
Speaker 2: your website about tailing dam and what that is and
Speaker 2: what that does and what that might mean for protecting
Speaker 2: the ecosystem. So can you explain what a tailing stam
Speaker 2: is and what a tailing stamp failure is.
Speaker 6: I just I learned a little bit on a meeting
Speaker 6: up and Anchorage on the form on the Alaska Environment,
Speaker 6: and they had scientists there that we're speaking, and this
Speaker 6: is a few years ago now, and they talked about
Speaker 6: every mind that's in place is poisoning the rivers to
Speaker 6: this day and it will always poison because it doesn't
Speaker 6: stop bleeding out of there.
Speaker 5: Wherever they were mining.
Speaker 6: That was very interesting, and they had just started to
Speaker 6: do some water sampling and we were trying to do
Speaker 6: that and this year we were finally able to do
Speaker 6: something with that. We got to start with this guy
Speaker 6: there and looking forward to get water samples come fall
Speaker 6: at moose hunting time and we'll have to see how
Speaker 6: many he would like to have this time.
Speaker 5: I just know, no, it's not good. It's poisonous.
Speaker 6: The water used to be that beautiful bluish glacier water
Speaker 6: coming down through the river there and not seeing that anymore,
Speaker 6: so I want to get first water for coffee, I'll
Speaker 6: go to the side mountain where I know it's clean and.
Speaker 5: Come and coming off the mountain. Things like that we
Speaker 5: have to watch out for, you.
Speaker 7: Know, specifically to a tailings dawn. That's just the containment
Speaker 7: structure for a tailing's dump. They may columns, tailings disposal
Speaker 7: facilities or storage facilities, but they're never coming back for them.
Speaker 8: It's a dump.
Speaker 7: It's permitted, just as any municipal landfill would be. British
Speaker 7: Columbia tends to use what they call some aqueous tailings disposable.
Speaker 7: They need to keep oxygen from the tailings because otherwise
Speaker 7: they're going to oxidize. They're going to create acid mind drainage,
Speaker 7: dissolve all of these heavy metals into the salmon streams
Speaker 7: and basically a large risk, a large threat. We live
Speaker 7: in a rainforest, so that water beunce is very critical
Speaker 7: and it's almost impossible to do in a time of
Speaker 7: climate change. They're wanting to maintain three meters of water
Speaker 7: on top of these tailings in perpetituity. I mean, at
Speaker 7: what point in perpetituity does any certainty of your predictions
Speaker 7: completely break down? And they require massive amounts of water treatment.
Speaker 7: And it's not just the tailings, it's the waste rock
Speaker 7: in Louis's Unich River, it's not just the Bruce Jack.
Speaker 7: But now now they're permitting the Escape Creek, an open
Speaker 7: pit and already permitted but not yet built as the KSM,
Speaker 7: which would be one of the top five largest open
Speaker 7: pits in the world on a small water shed with
Speaker 7: incredibly low hardness of water, meaning it cannot absorb any
Speaker 7: kind of change of pH or acid and is home to,
Speaker 7: you know, the spawning and rearing grounds and genetic diversity
Speaker 7: of Pacific salmon, and in the long run, the only
Speaker 7: way we're going to keep salmon from extinction as well,
Speaker 7: as Kirby says, kind of help, you know, change our
Speaker 7: attitude with this world. But we have to maintain that
Speaker 7: genetic diversity that's spawn in all of those little tiny
Speaker 7: streams throughout the coast and far into British Columbia. We
Speaker 7: need that genetic versity. Salmon are incredibly resilient, but we
Speaker 7: also can't know completely ignore our part in disrupting the
Speaker 7: natural cycles here, and as they pointed out, they are
Speaker 7: incredibly disruptive. I did you know, I want to say that,
Speaker 7: you know, Louis mentioned how they're not listening. He's not
Speaker 7: listened to, and that story can be multiplied in every
Speaker 7: community and tribe throughout the Pacific Northwest and probably the
Speaker 7: entire United States about the world. But that's what we're
Speaker 7: trying to remedy here, trying to let's all get together.
Speaker 7: Let's ignore that border. We find out in these meetings
Speaker 7: like our summit, that were actually related, some of us
Speaker 7: were related to one another. And look at this in
Speaker 7: the big picture.
Speaker 8: Holistic way.
Speaker 7: You have to look at big things like climate change
Speaker 7: and natural ecosystems and complex mining that just gets bigger
Speaker 7: and bigger just due to economy of scale. They might
Speaker 7: the good stuff a long time ago. They took the
Speaker 7: chocolate chips out of the chocolate chip cookie. Now they're
Speaker 7: going after the baking soda, and that creates exponential moral waste.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, because there's less of the stuff they're looking
Speaker 2: for and more of the waste.
Speaker 8: Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I've certainly spent some time around some abandoned mines in Alaska,
Speaker 2: and it's it's wild to see this massive intrusion and
Speaker 2: then abandonment and just sort of complete sort of obligation
Speaker 2: of the responsibility for the damage that it's done.
Speaker 7: I look at the climax lived of a mine and Leadville, Colorado.
Speaker 8: It's a good example. Been there too, Yeah, maybe you've
Speaker 8: seen that.
Speaker 2: I've raced my bike up there a couple of times.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it has to work there.
Speaker 2: Oh well okay, yeah, yeah, wow, that is a and
Speaker 2: the impact that it's had on that town of the mining.
Speaker 2: It's all it's a process that hurts almost everyone above
Speaker 2: from the people who owned mining companies right, Like, it
Speaker 2: doesn't benefit as many as many people as it in
Speaker 2: the long run, it hurts.
Speaker 7: I think you're going towards benefits, and there should be
Speaker 7: equitable benefits. But the benefit, the first cut of the
Speaker 7: pie is the environment itself. They have it not only
Speaker 7: has to just be maintained and sustained, it has to
Speaker 7: actually benefit at this point if we're going to avoid
Speaker 7: large scale collapse and u But there's ways of doing that,
Speaker 7: and part of that is giving Indigenous people a strong
Speaker 7: save consent the new laws. You know, Canada ratified the
Speaker 7: United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. BC
Speaker 7: has implemented that through the Declaration on the Rights of
Speaker 7: People's Act, they're supposed to respect, you know, these traditional territories.
Speaker 7: Regardless of the land status of Alaska tribes, they certainly
Speaker 7: have an obligation to respect the First Nations and the
Speaker 7: ends heeded territories of the First Nation people in British Columbia.
Speaker 7: That's clear by law, and the Supreme Courts have expanded
Speaker 7: it to people that no longer live in Alaska if
Speaker 7: they still have that direct connection to their traditional territories
Speaker 7: within I'm sorry, British Columbia. And so we're going to
Speaker 7: use that to make sure that Louis and everybody is.
Speaker 8: Heard and.
Speaker 7: Get that knowledge as part of and not just the knowledge,
Speaker 7: but the act of participation. That's part of the benefit
Speaker 7: sharing if indeed anything happens. But at this point, we
Speaker 7: just need so much more restoration before we damage it further, quite.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, of course, So you spoke about this large
Speaker 2: open pit mind, and it's something people can do if
Speaker 2: they want to. I'm guessing it would be optimal for
Speaker 2: them not to open another massive open pit mind days
Speaker 2: of something people could do to help maybe make that
Speaker 2: a process that you know, where Indigenous people listen to
Speaker 2: and not just mining interests.
Speaker 8: Well, this indeed is for me, and I'll be quit.
Speaker 8: I think, you know.
Speaker 7: Unfortunately, the engaging with the process, with the recognition that
Speaker 7: the process is broken, but engaging it to the maximum
Speaker 7: extent you can to try to get your word out
Speaker 7: there and influence decision makers.
Speaker 8: You got to at least do that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm sure Kirby has stood the lines out there
Speaker 7: in British Columbia.
Speaker 8: I'm sure he can speak to it.
Speaker 2: Please, do you, Kob?
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, if you're If you or your listeners
Speaker 4: haven't heard of the term indigenous science, I would like
Speaker 4: to introduce that Indigenous science is a distinct, time tested
Speaker 4: and methodological knowledge system that can enhance and complement Western science.
Speaker 4: Now I've introduced this many times. It's by no means
Speaker 4: did I invent this at all, but I've been introduced
Speaker 4: to it about a year ago and I've been using
Speaker 4: it a lot now. In many instances, indigenous science is
Speaker 4: thousands of years old, whereas Western science. In some areas,
Speaker 4: such as British Columbia, Canada, where we've only you know,
Speaker 4: been in contact with European settlers for just over five
Speaker 4: hundred years, indigenous science is much much older.
Speaker 3: It's as I said earlier.
Speaker 4: It's it's time tested and the knowledge is immense, and
Speaker 4: you know that alone should give a lot of credence
Speaker 4: to to the knowledge and the science of Indigenous peoples.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's an excellent consideration. And we had
Speaker 2: an episode this week at you spoke of indigenous medical technologies,
Speaker 2: and I think it's important to recognize these things are
Speaker 2: on a par with like European Western medical technologies, right
Speaker 2: as opposed to be different from, but have them on
Speaker 2: the same level and the same with the science that
Speaker 2: you mentioned. I think that's an excellent point too.
Speaker 7: I have to chime in because I had that point
Speaker 7: of view. Sometimes I have to laugh because what is
Speaker 7: at least sixty five percent of all pharmaceuticals are derived
Speaker 7: from natural plants that the Indigenous people and full knowledge
Speaker 7: for a long time, and that information wasn't necessarily transferred
Speaker 7: in the nicest manner often, so I need to acknowledge that.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, every time we take an aspirin, we're benefiting from
Speaker 2: indigenous science, right, Indigenous medical technologies.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and those technologies are incredible the hell about because
Speaker 7: just a prime example, it's it's an incredible study in
Speaker 7: the morphology of the mouth of helibate, the habits of
Speaker 7: a helibate, and they can design the hook to target
Speaker 7: very specifically the size of the helibate, so they're not
Speaker 7: getting the big breeders and this and that, and just
Speaker 7: the amount of observation adjustment engineering that goes into a
Speaker 7: helibateocause in itself very credible. The Western people when they
Speaker 7: moved in and at least here on the coast, they
Speaker 7: looked at the way the clink at height and Shimshei
Speaker 7: and people were harvesting fish with beach traps and beach
Speaker 7: nets and whatnot, and they copied that fish wheels and
Speaker 7: they copied that technology. But then they took it to
Speaker 7: the massive extreme and just took everything out of the rivers.
Speaker 7: But they used indigenous technology to do it, ironically enough,
Speaker 7: so we can turn that around. You know, we can
Speaker 7: use that technology to turn this around. And there's no
Speaker 7: reason why we shouldn't this thanks point.
Speaker 2: Is there anything you each would like to leave our
Speaker 2: listeners with, maybe a place they can find you online,
Speaker 2: a way they can show support and something like that.
Speaker 6: A little bit that I didn't mention those I'm also
Speaker 6: I'm Simpson and Clinkett My grandfather and great grandfather. It
Speaker 6: came from Hartley Bay when Mettle Catla was built by
Speaker 6: them and eighteen eighty seven, I believe and their boat
Speaker 6: builders that they sold their rowboats up and down the coast.
Speaker 6: But yeah, I couldn't spend enough time with my grandfather.
Speaker 6: He was good to just you never stopped learning from
Speaker 6: all of our elders. I just wanted to throw that
Speaker 6: in there.
Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you so much. How about you, Kevy,
Speaker 2: anything you'd like to leave people with.
Speaker 3: I just want to leave people with it thought.
Speaker 4: You know, as I said earlier, look at look at
Speaker 4: the habits that you can change that are the low
Speaker 4: hanging fruit. And I'd also like them to, you know,
Speaker 4: think about how they can change. Think about holding your
Speaker 4: elected officials accountable. I'm not sure what it's like where
Speaker 4: you're from, but you know a lot of our elected
Speaker 4: officials they like to talk, but they don't like to
Speaker 4: do anything.
Speaker 3: So actions speak louder than words.
Speaker 4: Hold your elected officials accountable every time you see them,
Speaker 4: ask them what they're doing about protecting wild salmon.
Speaker 2: Thanks, thank you guy, and think from you.
Speaker 7: Okay, Yeah, Quickly along the lines of what Kirby was saying,
Speaker 7: I mean, recognize that the metals that are necessary to
Speaker 7: support our lifestyle are already there. They're in our walls,
Speaker 7: in our cars, in our computers. The idea that we
Speaker 7: need more of these metals in our lives is just
Speaker 7: the idea that we need more stuff in our lives,
Speaker 7: and that addiction is what's strangling this planet. And so
Speaker 7: Louis I mean sorry, Kirby's you know advice is you know,
Speaker 7: is very strong. But if you want to follow along,
Speaker 7: go to www. Dot s e I t C dot
Speaker 7: org o rg SO, Southeast Alaska Indigenous trans Boundary Commission
Speaker 7: s C I T S. We're just getting started and
Speaker 7: so there should be some incredible stories along the way.
Speaker 4: One last thing I'd like to say is that we
Speaker 4: really need to consider the circular economy right now. We
Speaker 4: live in a society where we throw oh way so
Speaker 4: many things.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: I think about vehicles that go to the junkyard and
Speaker 4: they're crushed, you know, like we should be taking those
Speaker 4: vehicles apart, using the parts that we can, instead of
Speaker 4: just crushing it into this big, massive rock that we're
Speaker 4: eventually going to need to dismantle again sometime in the future.
Speaker 4: We should be doing that now, and if there are
Speaker 4: any good parts in that vehicle, then they should be
Speaker 4: put back into circulation.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think that's an exa point.
Speaker 8: Yeah. They are elements after all.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well they're already broken down into the elements, right,
Speaker 4: and we're just crushing them back into a big rock again,
Speaker 4: and then we're gonna have to take them out into
Speaker 4: the elements again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when we run aft have to dig out of
Speaker 2: the ground. It's very sad to think that, like the
Speaker 2: same desire. A colleague and I spent some time reporting
Speaker 2: on the civil warm in Myanmar last year, and that's
Speaker 2: the same thing. It's people trying to extract rare earth metals,
Speaker 2: and then it's it's people dying in the environment being
Speaker 2: damage because of it. And it's I think Curve made
Speaker 2: excellent point that like if we don't you know, those
Speaker 2: things are already there, and guys said it, like in
Speaker 2: our walls and in our computers and things, and we
Speaker 2: could do so much better to use the ones we
Speaker 2: have rather than consistently damaging people on the planet to
Speaker 2: dig up more.
Speaker 8: Respectful. Yeah, be respectful.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much all of you for giving me
Speaker 2: some of your afternoon and sharing your time with our listeners.
Speaker 2: I know they would really appreciate it, and I do
Speaker 2: you too. Hello, Welcome to It could Happen here a
Speaker 2: podcast which only has one button, and it's edited by
Speaker 2: Danil using a ten year old Logitech Experts control. That's
Speaker 2: a submarine joke for those of you who have not
Speaker 2: been following h Today, I'm joined by Alex and Tom,
Speaker 2: both of them graduate students in the UC system, and
Speaker 2: we're talking about this this really obscene charge of assault
Speaker 2: that some graduate students are facing after they disrupted an
Speaker 2: alumni event in San Diego. Hi, Alex and Tom, if
Speaker 2: you had to introduce yourselves a little bit, as far
Speaker 2: as you feel comfortable.
Speaker 11: Hi, Jan Sure, thanks for having us back. My name
Speaker 11: is Alex. I'm a graduate student at University of California,
Speaker 11: San Diego. Some of you have been listening since November.
Speaker 11: My remember when I first came on the show to
Speaker 11: tell you about our strike. And I guess we're going
Speaker 11: to give some interesting updates since then.
Speaker 12: I'm also graduate student you see, San Diego. I'm in
Speaker 12: pretty my program. I've been here for a while, change
Speaker 12: apart which very cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so I think to start out with we
Speaker 2: should just explain, Well, we'll explain what happened in detail
Speaker 2: at the event in a bit, but can you just
Speaker 2: explain what these charges that people are facing are and
Speaker 2: how they found out that they have been charged with
Speaker 2: assault after doing something which was not violent in the
Speaker 2: first place.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Absolutely, So, the most sort of recent thing that's happened
Speaker 11: is is and we'll talk about the details in the moment,
Speaker 11: but as James alluded to, we held a peaceful protest
Speaker 11: back in May related to a number of violations of
Speaker 11: our most recent collective bargaining agreement, which I'll also be
Speaker 11: happy to go into detail on, and in response to
Speaker 11: what was, by all accounts, by what I witnessed by
Speaker 11: everyone else that I've talked to, was a completely peaceful protest,
Speaker 11: the university has decided to allege that sixty seven graduate students,
Speaker 11: including by our account eighteen who were either not present
Speaker 11: or not involved, are going to be charged under the
Speaker 11: student conduct process with committing a physical assault, as well
Speaker 11: as charges for disruption and a vague assertion that we
Speaker 11: were threatening the health and safety of others. These are
Speaker 11: quite serious allegations. They do carry potential sanctions up to
Speaker 11: long term suspension. And expulsion from the university, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's I think people like the exposure for
Speaker 2: graduate students is so high, right, Like, if you are
Speaker 2: on the job market, you know that this could set
Speaker 2: back your progress. Already very challenging job market, its suspension
Speaker 2: or expulsion presumably could have long term consequences for your
Speaker 2: employability and something that like I think I spent the
Speaker 2: better part of eight years at UCSD. You've invested a
Speaker 2: lot of time, you get paid like shit, and if
Speaker 2: you then get nothing out of it, that is potentially devastating.
Speaker 12: For each individualness. This is absolutely devastating. These are careers
Speaker 12: I've invested, you know, a minimum of seven years at
Speaker 12: least Humanities Fund. There's so many of us more. But
Speaker 12: it's also never stating for the university itself because these
Speaker 12: students that are being charged by from virtually having program
Speaker 12: on fact that so many of them are working in
Speaker 12: very prestientious, high powered laboratories, have you know, fellowships and scholarships.
Speaker 12: So this is really a bad look for the university
Speaker 12: as well to you know, potentially have sixty seven graduate
Speaker 12: students under these charges.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally sixty seven.
Speaker 8: It's funny.
Speaker 2: I've been sixty eight, we could have. It's there's when
Speaker 2: I like, I don't know when I hay sixty obviously
Speaker 2: I think of like nineteen sixty eight. And it's remarkable.
Speaker 2: This is a university at one point somewhat self immolated,
Speaker 2: you see in Project Vietnam War, and now we are
Speaker 2: like I had a reputation for radicalism, and now here
Speaker 2: we are charging people for walking onto a stage and shouting.
Speaker 2: Do you want to talk about that they're walking onto
Speaker 2: a stage and shouting? Can you maybe give us an
Speaker 2: account of the events and then we'll talk about maybe
Speaker 2: how those have been represented in the process. That makes sense.
Speaker 11: Yeah, sure. So this particular protest took place at an
Speaker 11: awards ceremony, very sort of fancy, sort of annual event
Speaker 11: that the university hosts where they give awards to various
Speaker 11: alumni and kind of as a sort of fundraising opportunity
Speaker 11: as well. And what the protest to the form of
Speaker 11: was that a number of graduate student workers walked on
Speaker 11: stage uninvited and began giving speeches and holding signs demonstrating
Speaker 11: the ways in which and informing the audience of the
Speaker 11: ways in which that our contracts have not been upheld
Speaker 11: since we signed them in December. The ways in which
Speaker 11: the university is circumventing some of the raises that we
Speaker 11: were promised for our research and teaching, and the ways
Speaker 11: it is trying to sort of prevent those things from
Speaker 11: being resolved in the sort of normal channels that you
Speaker 11: go through with these sort of these sort of union
Speaker 11: and contract administration things. And that's been I'm gooing for
Speaker 11: i suppose six months now, with relatively little process. So
Speaker 11: that demonstration took place about up until the time that
Speaker 11: some local police officers arrived, and at that time the
Speaker 11: demonstration was fully compliant with those orders, and the police
Speaker 11: officers noted such and theirs, which I was able to
Speaker 11: retrieve from the city. And then after that the demonstration
Speaker 11: continued outside of the venue of the event, where people
Speaker 11: were still able to you know, make a decent amount
Speaker 11: of noise and raise their grievances despite the walls separating
Speaker 11: the group from the alumni inside. And it certainly did
Speaker 11: get some attention, since we were in touch after that
Speaker 11: with people who were sort of relatively high up in
Speaker 11: a number of university and alumni centric offices and who
Speaker 11: were surprised to hear of the things that we were
Speaker 11: alleging and wanted to hear more and be able to
Speaker 11: raise those issues further up into the university. So these
Speaker 11: charges certainly did sort of come as a shock, given
Speaker 11: that at first a lot of people at the event
Speaker 11: seemed receptive in a way, though certainly not all, but
Speaker 11: some were certainly receptive to our concerns and what we
Speaker 11: had to say.
Speaker 12: A couple of interesting details there. The first one of
Speaker 12: this that the immediate in participate in this event was
Speaker 12: actually the news that Chancellor Bridey Coles Law was in attendance,
Speaker 12: and this was only a week or two after they
Speaker 12: become public knowledge that he had received a five hundred
Speaker 12: thousand dollars arrays as an effort to keep him in
Speaker 12: the university, which raises a salary to more than a
Speaker 12: million dollars and I think makes him the fourth highest
Speaker 12: paid university chancellor or president or in the United States.
Speaker 12: So we presented him with an award for UCS these
Speaker 12: most overpaid workers, and that was sort of our rationale
Speaker 12: before doing this specific event. And the other thing is
Speaker 12: that when the police arrived, they actually gave no verbal
Speaker 12: orders for us to clear out. As soon as we
Speaker 12: saw them. We peacefully started to leave the stage, and
Speaker 12: they stood there as well. Their rests were made, now,
Speaker 12: interviews were orders were shouted. They remained on site for
Speaker 12: the duration as we stood outside picking. There were no reinforcements,
Speaker 12: There were no swat teams, and we're just one or
Speaker 12: two squad cars. The police typically are known for having
Speaker 12: outside responses to minor problems, but the fact that they
Speaker 12: did not have any kind of aggressive response to this
Speaker 12: indicate to us that they were was entirely peaceful events.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the dispatch looks don't show them having any
Speaker 2: concerns about violence or responding to to any like real violence,
Speaker 2: of them seeing any violence responding to it, right.
Speaker 11: Yeah, so I was able to grab those in the Yeah,
Speaker 11: it's difficult to say because it looks like maybe two
Speaker 11: people called nine on one, even though three.
Speaker 12: It was three.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we had no violence.
Speaker 11: Yeah, two said there was no violence. That third person
Speaker 11: said they had secondhand reports that we had pushed the
Speaker 11: chancellor off the stage, which we have video of that
Speaker 11: very definitely not happening. He stood next to the graduate
Speaker 11: students and then of his own initiative, turned and walked
Speaker 11: off the stage. So the only allegation that's documented in
Speaker 11: real time of any violence occurring was one admittedly secondhand,
Speaker 11: and two is disproven conclusively by the available video.
Speaker 2: Right, and that video is online right, like it's been posted. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's easy to find.
Speaker 11: There's that particular one that really easily disproves it. There's
Speaker 11: a video link for the union uploaded it, so I
Speaker 11: can we can drop that in the show notes second,
Speaker 11: send that too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, excellent, We'll make sure we do that. And likewise,
Speaker 2: the pra that this publicly available, folks could go see it.
Speaker 2: All Sandy pras are publicly available. We have like a
Speaker 2: lot of evidence that no one was finally assaulted. What
Speaker 2: is the university alleging that was done? And I guess
Speaker 2: that they claiming what do they claim the student workers did?
Speaker 5: Well?
Speaker 11: The closest thing that we can find so in a
Speaker 11: you know, in the documentation that each person was given
Speaker 11: about the charges that they face, the closest thing we
Speaker 11: can find to a description that seems to imply assault
Speaker 11: was that someone claimed to have seen the chancellor. The
Speaker 11: word they use was bumped, which doesn't even necessarily imply
Speaker 11: intentionality in my mind. And and really the way that
Speaker 11: I read that sentence is that, you know, possible the
Speaker 11: stage was a little crowded and someone might have bumped
Speaker 11: into him. But I don't even recall ever seeing that happen.
Speaker 11: I haven't talked to anyone who recalls seeing that happen,
Speaker 11: anyone who was in our group or not. But other
Speaker 11: than that, the rest of the report is really just
Speaker 11: full of descriptions of how they they I don't even
Speaker 11: think they talked to anyone who said they were scared
Speaker 11: of us. They just said people might have been scared
Speaker 11: of us. It's very strange.
Speaker 12: The report reads like a propaganda from the class for
Speaker 12: it's pearl clutching of the highest order. Some champagne glasses
Speaker 12: were broken.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 12: The event itself cost over one hundred thousand dollars to
Speaker 12: set up, with many different caterers and vendors, somebody who
Speaker 12: all the way from Switzerland where the event. And actually
Speaker 12: these aren't made up quotes from the report, you know.
Speaker 12: And during event itself, it's ironic because I was at
Speaker 12: the event as we, you know, indeterminate and out of
Speaker 12: other dual students, and we actually were assaulted by members
Speaker 12: of the crowd who would come up and put their
Speaker 12: arms on their hands on our shoulders and how us
Speaker 12: puss why people hate unions and you know, hey, I
Speaker 12: brought my nine year old grandmother to this and I
Speaker 12: have some you know, fifty million dollars ranch, and I'm
Speaker 12: being honored for this. People pumping my trust, people pumping
Speaker 12: other people's trusting fingers on our faces and telling us
Speaker 12: to really ruined their special night. And our response was,
Speaker 12: do you know, I think that our need to pay
Speaker 12: branch and our theater, ourselves is a little bit more
Speaker 12: important than your special night at the at the museum
Speaker 12: by the ocean with the glasses of champagne.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And it's not like it was even a
Speaker 2: All that was happening was that people who had given
Speaker 2: them money or the who they want them to, who
Speaker 2: do they want to get money from, were being made
Speaker 2: to feel special. It wasn't as if you even interrupted
Speaker 2: like a like a meeting or a function of the university.
Speaker 2: And unless we consider the function of the university these days,
Speaker 2: seems to be to get money and then distribute it
Speaker 2: to people in positions of power in the university. So
Speaker 2: given that right that this was an event, I guess
Speaker 2: which reinforced the people who have authority in the university.
Speaker 2: It's interest to what's not interesting. It's upsetting to look
Speaker 2: at the nature of the process that these sixty seven
Speaker 2: people are facing, because it's not that they're not being
Speaker 2: accused in a court of doing a crime. They're being
Speaker 2: accused by the university in the university of breaking the
Speaker 2: conduct rules of the university. So the university is like,
Speaker 2: it's all parties apart from the defendant. Right, it's a judge,
Speaker 2: it's a jury, it's a prosecuting lawyer and the executioner.
Speaker 2: So can you yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 12: And I'll just say something about that. You know that
Speaker 12: this was very much calculated on the part of the
Speaker 12: university to charge us as under the student crime Dutch
Speaker 12: violation because of they're charging us as students. They're not
Speaker 12: charging us as workers. If we have workers, we would
Speaker 12: have representation in our meetings that would be part of
Speaker 12: that litigation process. But as as students, the contexts of
Speaker 12: the labor five that is for the entire event is
Speaker 12: relevant that it can be divorced from that and treated
Speaker 12: the music coage. To charge undergraduates who are are drinking
Speaker 12: in their terms sexually harassing their peers from their classes
Speaker 12: is not something that is in my view appropriate at
Speaker 12: all to apply to a labor dispute, which is what
Speaker 12: this was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, I think the only time I've been party
Speaker 2: to these proceedings is when an undergraduate did physically assault
Speaker 2: someone who I was teaching with. But it's not a
Speaker 2: normal procedure by any means, and certainly to use against
Speaker 2: grad students are very clearly taking part in a labor action.
Speaker 2: I think it's very telling that the university is kind
Speaker 2: of using one system to circumvent the fair bargaining and
Speaker 2: the unfair labor practices and all the things that they
Speaker 2: seem really like, they seem almost like inexplicably committed to
Speaker 2: not sticking to the contract, even though they got a
Speaker 2: contract that was largely favorable to them and not as
Speaker 2: much as people had wanted at the start of the strike.
Speaker 2: So how does it work from here? Like, what does
Speaker 2: this process look like?
Speaker 11: Well, to start with, each of us has an individual
Speaker 11: meeting with a representative of the university, and at that meeting,
Speaker 11: we essentially have the response, the option to either accept
Speaker 11: responsibility for all the charges against us, or to say
Speaker 11: that we do not accept that responsibility and want to
Speaker 11: continue the process forward, at which point they will they
Speaker 11: will schedule or attempt to schedule a conduct review board
Speaker 11: meeting where I believe three representatives from who have been
Speaker 11: sort of predetermined to serve on these conduct review boards
Speaker 11: will judge the weight of the evident in a preponderance
Speaker 11: of the evidence standard, and at that point then the
Speaker 11: Office of Student Conduct, if you are found responsible, I
Speaker 11: believe that office is then what decides what the sanctions
Speaker 11: are that you will face. So this this is a
Speaker 11: bit of an unprecedented process, at least for us we actually,
Speaker 11: I believe, and I want to clarify some numbers. I
Speaker 11: think I said sixty seven graduate students earlier, they were
Speaker 11: actually fifty nine from this event who were charged, and
Speaker 11: that sixty seven comes from a to who were charged
Speaker 11: for a protest related to the university's attempt to fire
Speaker 11: workers for striking, which is still ongoing. That protest took
Speaker 11: place in January, and there that conduct process for those
Speaker 11: eight workers has not yet resolved as we speak today
Speaker 11: on June twentieth, So it's not clear how they are
Speaker 11: going to manage the logistics of trying to charge six
Speaker 11: fifty nine workers in a single case. It could, assuming
Speaker 11: they follow their entire procedures by the book, and don't
Speaker 11: dismiss any charges. It could take more than a year
Speaker 11: to resolve this situation, Jesus.
Speaker 2: And for people who have like they're either defending or
Speaker 2: advancing to candidacy or these are all things you can
Speaker 2: do within grad school people who aren't familiar where you
Speaker 2: sort of level up your grad student status.
Speaker 8: I guess.
Speaker 2: Are people able to do that?
Speaker 11: Yeah, Luckily this does not restrict your academic advancement. It
Speaker 11: can potentially if it goes from quarter to quarter, they
Speaker 11: can potentially put I believe, holds on registration. But I
Speaker 11: think that's only if you don't sort of carry out
Speaker 11: your sanctions, assuming your sanction is not suspension. I could
Speaker 11: be a time correct if I'm wrong on that. But
Speaker 11: what still could be the case is that you could
Speaker 11: you know, and could well be the case for me
Speaker 11: that I defend before the conclusion of this process, but
Speaker 11: it could still end up is something that would be
Speaker 11: on a contact record that could be released in certain
Speaker 11: employment situations. So even if you are able to escape
Speaker 11: the process, so to speak, it is not necessarily not
Speaker 11: going to follow you after that point.
Speaker 12: By all indicators from those who have already had their
Speaker 12: first meeting on asking you know, need accept responsibility and
Speaker 12: of course states that no, we die foundations against us.
Speaker 12: But it seems as if the Office of Student Conduct
Speaker 12: is quite over poles by this. People have been trying
Speaker 12: to schedule a meeting to have not gotten responses from
Speaker 12: the office.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 12: The office then gets back to them a week or
Speaker 12: two later with you know, openly one or two options.
Speaker 12: The really calculated evil of this it means charges dropped
Speaker 12: on the very last day of the quarter, which means
Speaker 12: that at least in the Arts and Humanities, most of
Speaker 12: us are going out of town or are conducting research
Speaker 12: or are on on fellowships, so we're not around to
Speaker 12: respond to these. And I think that that was a
Speaker 12: decision that was purposefully made, but you know, to to
Speaker 12: process this is the sheer number of students involved in
Speaker 12: this is stidering, and I think that the office offices
Speaker 12: are really struggling. The other thing that I will say
Speaker 12: is we have it from informal channels that this is
Speaker 12: something that is being directed from the very top, which
Speaker 12: is the same from the Chancellor's office, that this is
Speaker 12: not something that you know, in partial observers, you know,
Speaker 12: made of something that the chancellor himself is directing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense, giving a chance to with
Speaker 2: there it also like it just put me in mind
Speaker 2: of twenty ten when I don't think either of you
Speaker 2: were at UCSD, but for those of us who were,
Speaker 2: and there's a film about it actually called Dear White People,
Speaker 2: But there was a party where people wore blackface and
Speaker 2: this happened I think through a fraternity that was associated
Speaker 2: with the university, and getting the university to do anything
Speaker 2: disciplinary about that required hundreds off not thousands of people
Speaker 2: to go on strike, to march, to occupy the Chancellor's complex,
Speaker 2: and to like physically demand action for weeks and weeks
Speaker 2: if not months from the Chancellor's system, right like, and
Speaker 2: still it was extremely unsatisfactory process. The resolution was with
Speaker 2: extremely unsatisfactory. But I guess that there's.
Speaker 12: A contemporaneous incident happening right now. I don't know other depils,
Speaker 12: but impers individual was video or video fakes themselves progressing
Speaker 12: screen with his professor and making low comments and a
Speaker 12: whole variety of really massosionistic behavior. Apparently this is his
Speaker 12: story to restraining or that he's received. But as a
Speaker 12: univers is concerned, this is still the case that's that's
Speaker 12: moving through it. It doesn't pear have had any any sanctions.
Speaker 12: Stories of sexual assaults, as you said, of racist harassment
Speaker 12: that I really don't know, actually parted the student last
Speaker 12: summer for very threatening behavior and the very nuxt square
Speaker 12: he was in my class.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's yeah. The only thing that sort of
Speaker 2: they've jump to defend is capital, I guess, or in
Speaker 2: this case the sort of administrators of the university. And
Speaker 2: so this this could potentially play out for months. What's
Speaker 2: the and it seems like everyone has accepting responsibility such
Speaker 2: a strange word, because like, what's what happened is what's
Speaker 2: a question? Really not who's responsible for it? So much? Right,
Speaker 2: Like you can accept responsibility for doing what was a
Speaker 2: protected First Amendment activity, but like you obviously can't accept
Speaker 2: responsibility for assault if you didn't assault somebody. But given
Speaker 2: that no one.
Speaker 12: If sixty seven students had assaulted chance sort of.
Speaker 11: You would think that national Yeah, that would have been yeah,
Speaker 11: that would have been something I think.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's like a beat down. But that didn't happen.
Speaker 2: So what's the plan for defense, I guess is each case,
Speaker 2: like an individual case, can they mount. Can people mount
Speaker 2: a joint defense like the j twenty one people did
Speaker 2: in DC? Do we know yet? How does this work?
Speaker 11: I'm not sure we entirely know yet. I think the
Speaker 11: university can make the decision to consolidate cases that share evidence.
Speaker 11: I don't believe they've made that determination yet. I think
Speaker 11: what they are trying to do now, and this sort
Speaker 11: of leads into another part that I think represents a
Speaker 11: degree of sort of apathy, border on bordering on cruelty
Speaker 11: of this process is that we've identified at least eighteen
Speaker 11: graduate students who were either not physically present at all
Speaker 11: or had merely registered for the event without even knowing
Speaker 11: that this would take place, and those people have all
Speaker 11: been charged with the exact same things that everyone who
Speaker 11: was intentionally part of the protest has been. So we
Speaker 11: think that we're at the individual stage where they are
Speaker 11: trying to kind of they know that they they're well
Speaker 11: aware that they caught a bunch of people that had
Speaker 11: no involvement in this. But we think that we're using
Speaker 11: really these individual meetings to figure out who those people
Speaker 11: are to the best of their ability, and perhaps further
Speaker 11: down the line, they may decide to try to consolidate
Speaker 11: these cases to expedite the process. But it's it's hard
Speaker 11: to say for sure. The again, this the the important
Speaker 11: aspect of this process is the fact that almost every
Speaker 11: element of it, in every step and how that is
Speaker 11: carried out, is entirely at the discretion of a handful
Speaker 11: of university administrators. There's no real appeal outside of the system,
Speaker 11: there's no real accountability outside of the system, so they
Speaker 11: can simply implement these things, you know, as as they
Speaker 11: see fit.
Speaker 2: I mean this there was.
Speaker 11: When this eventually first broke there were some former graduate
Speaker 11: students who run on an old radical uc Twitter account
Speaker 11: who shared some write ups from cases of sit ins
Speaker 11: that were charged under the same process, I believe at
Speaker 11: Berkeley a couple of years ago, and in that one
Speaker 11: the administrators at the Berkeley campus actually went as far
Speaker 11: as to edit the code of conduct during the process.
Speaker 2: Surely you're not responsible for like x post facto edits
Speaker 2: of the code of conduct or were they.
Speaker 11: They were, Well, this was primarily in you know, in
Speaker 11: all fairness, if they deserve any of this was that
Speaker 11: particular incident was kind of a logistical thing. So it
Speaker 11: was it was whether or not certain aspects of the
Speaker 11: process could be waived or could be could be extended.
Speaker 11: The deadline could be extended, and someone who didn't have
Speaker 11: the authority to extend it did And when they were
Speaker 11: called on that, they edited the code of conduct after
Speaker 11: the fact to say that, Okay, a designee can extend
Speaker 11: the deadline for you know, how this process proceeds. So
Speaker 11: it wasn't that they invented a rule to charge someone
Speaker 11: under but they did edit their own due processes they
Speaker 11: went along.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, so you're you might be up against a
Speaker 2: moving target.
Speaker 8: So to speak.
Speaker 2: Did they identify everybody like did? Because I'm assuming people
Speaker 2: didn't use their legal names to register, Like, how were
Speaker 2: they able to identify some of the people to clearly
Speaker 2: the people who were just there as undergraduate alumni and
Speaker 2: happened to be graduate students probably did use their real names.
Speaker 2: But do you know how else said in five people.
Speaker 11: Well, I think they did. You know some people did?
Speaker 11: I I assume that I was taught you with my
Speaker 11: real name on the registration and that was simply because I,
Speaker 11: you know, some some people decided to use different names.
Speaker 11: I U decided, after weighing the frozen cons that I
Speaker 11: decided that it was. You know, I figured that there
Speaker 11: might be it might be a worse situation if that was,
Speaker 11: you know, unraveled, and I didn't think that. Obviously I
Speaker 11: had no plans of assaulting someone, and I did not
Speaker 11: assault anyone, So yeah, I had no reason to expect
Speaker 11: that perhaps I needed to take that level of precaution
Speaker 11: with this kind of a peaceful protest action. But we
Speaker 11: believe that they merrily got the names of who did
Speaker 11: who who they'd sided charge from simply registration lists. But
Speaker 11: again the fact and there was a sign in at
Speaker 11: this event where you picked up a name tag, and
Speaker 11: you know, it was kind of a gate. You couldn't
Speaker 11: really get in without doing that. But they still gave
Speaker 11: charges to people who actually, we know for a fact
Speaker 11: were not physically present and have been able to prove
Speaker 11: that they were not physically present. So it doesn't seem
Speaker 11: that they even bothered to consult, at least initially, the
Speaker 11: actual sign in list of people who actually showed up
Speaker 11: and checked in, which is also a bit strange. But yeah,
Speaker 11: it seems to be a very haphazard process so far.
Speaker 11: There are people who have been charged who weren't there.
Speaker 11: There are people who were there who haven't you know,
Speaker 11: necessarily been identified at this point in time. So it's
Speaker 11: it's it's a little bit of a mystery.
Speaker 12: Yeah, and we'd love to find out too, because you know,
Speaker 12: it's day for some for some reason, we're able to
Speaker 12: determine use seen union lists will be a massive.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And then already it seems like an unfair labor
Speaker 2: practice and a violation of like First Amendment rights and
Speaker 2: protected First Amendment speech, and jeez, it's yeah, it just
Speaker 2: seems that they're sort of half passing this thing which
Speaker 2: could have devastating consequences for some people, and they they've
Speaker 2: they've just kind of thrown a wide net and sort
Speaker 2: of I guess trying to work out after the fact
Speaker 2: what to do with this. Has it had like a
Speaker 2: chilling effect on on campus organizing on protesting their ongoing
Speaker 2: contract violations.
Speaker 12: No, you can't stare us with sticking the union. Ironically,
Speaker 12: as many listeners ably aware from listening to earlier episodes
Speaker 12: of your podcast, you know, they have a lot of
Speaker 12: tension on campus between the socials, ACI answers and the
Speaker 12: stand you know, getting back to the strike and even
Speaker 12: and they have actually gotten are substantially worse in the
Speaker 12: last couple of months based on the vacancy elections that
Speaker 12: are in Peopril. This ironically seems to be a huge
Speaker 12: miscalculation on the part of the university because a lot
Speaker 12: of those issues that they haven't gone away have been
Speaker 12: absolutely subsumed in the you know, the injury to one's
Speaker 12: an injury of mentality, so that there's a great amount
Speaker 12: of solidarity. But going into the summer, I don't think
Speaker 12: any work around campus really expected.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's excellent, that's great to hear. So talking of solidarity,
Speaker 2: I guess what can people do to help, Like it
Speaker 2: seems like do you have a legal defense fund? And
Speaker 2: if you're even allowed to have a lawyer? Is there
Speaker 2: something they can sign? Is there someone they can write
Speaker 2: to go ahead?
Speaker 12: Absolutely?
Speaker 8: So there is a.
Speaker 12: Petition around for a kind of students, faculty and community members.
Speaker 12: The address to that is bit dot l Y slash
Speaker 12: U c SB drop the charges.
Speaker 11: One word all lowercase, all our case, Yeah, anything else
Speaker 11: like you would you plan like marches and pigots and
Speaker 11: stuff as the process continues that people could join. Yeah, definitely,
Speaker 11: And and if if you sign that petition, that's one
Speaker 11: way where so the petition sort of has the dual
Speaker 11: goal of of sort of getting you know, demonstrating uh
Speaker 11: to the administration that there's a wide level of awareness
Speaker 11: of this issue and concern over this issue, but also
Speaker 11: to make sure that anyone who wants to be involved
Speaker 11: in any way that they're able to support us, will
Speaker 11: be able to be kept in the loops. So if
Speaker 11: you use an email the address that you actually read
Speaker 11: when you sign the petition, you will certainly hear about
Speaker 11: any actions that we have. We are still very much
Speaker 11: in the early planning stages. As as Tom alluded to earlier,
Speaker 11: there is you know, a certain as there appears to
Speaker 11: be a certain aspect of strategizing here where the charges
Speaker 11: were given right at the point where campus becomes the
Speaker 11: least populated potentially of any time throughout the whole year
Speaker 11: except perhaps Christmas. But you know, there's still plenty of
Speaker 11: graduate students here. They are all, you know, just as
Speaker 11: shocked as we are to see this unfolding. So I
Speaker 11: think we can definitely plan for, you know, some kind
Speaker 11: of actions to take place this summer.
Speaker 8: Nice.
Speaker 12: Yeah, and maybe we'll get some more student conduct.
Speaker 2: Violations, yeah, he be good. If alumni, if if people
Speaker 2: are alumni, Like I know a decent number of UC
Speaker 2: alumni listen, and they reached out when we talked about
Speaker 2: the strike that it would be great if those people
Speaker 2: could leverage that status because they U SEE goes hard
Speaker 2: on alumni for donations and they've stopped calling me now
Speaker 2: they know I'm poor. But I think those of you
Speaker 2: who the u SEE is still calling for the nations,
Speaker 2: you know, that would be a good time to raise
Speaker 2: this or you know, you can email or whatever, an
Speaker 2: email the alumni office. But yeah, it's this is obscene
Speaker 2: and ridiculous and obviously like a continuation of union busting
Speaker 2: and their fundamental refusal to acknowledge student workers as workers
Speaker 2: apparently and only see people as students. And so, is
Speaker 2: there anything else you want people to know about this?
Speaker 2: You anything else you'd like people to do to show
Speaker 2: solidarity before we wrap up?
Speaker 11: I think the big thing is just, you know, sign
Speaker 11: the petition that will help you, you know, kind of
Speaker 11: stay in the loop, especially if you're kind of in
Speaker 11: the local area and are able to join us in
Speaker 11: solidarity for any protests. Yeah. Again, if you're a UC
Speaker 11: alum of any kind, certainly make your thoughts known to
Speaker 11: UCSD because apart from I would say that the two people,
Speaker 11: the two groups of people who have the most power
Speaker 11: to act in decent numbers in the situation our professors
Speaker 11: in alumni and and so that would be Yeah, like
Speaker 11: what you said, that's a huge a huge would be
Speaker 11: a huge point of support. Other than that, I think
Speaker 11: just the way, you know, I've I've been here for
Speaker 11: almost six full years now, and you know I've four
Speaker 11: of those were without a union. I'm a student researcher,
Speaker 11: so our union is brand new, and you can go
Speaker 11: back to November episode to hear that whole story. But
Speaker 11: my point is that, you know, before we had this
Speaker 11: kind of network and this kind of collective organization to
Speaker 11: protect our rights, a lot of you know, I've seen
Speaker 11: a lot of friends who, through no fault of their own,
Speaker 11: ended up in some kind of you know, one sided
Speaker 11: process where it's them versus the bureaucracy, whether that's you know,
Speaker 11: they're a bad relationship with their professor or or you know,
Speaker 11: any number of things that might have come up along
Speaker 11: the way help issues leading to lower you know, not
Speaker 11: not finishing work on time and you know, getting on
Speaker 11: the bad side of advisors or anything like that. You know,
Speaker 11: it is very easy in the status quo of the
Speaker 11: way the large university works to fall through the cracks
Speaker 11: and to have a bureaucracy act in secrecy to just
Speaker 11: simply kind of remove you without anyone really saying a word.
Speaker 11: So I think the most important thing is to keep
Speaker 11: eyes on this, to make sure the university knows that
Speaker 11: people are watching. That they can try to bring this
Speaker 11: process against us, but it is not going to be
Speaker 11: a pleasant experience because you know, the public and and
Speaker 11: the the the workers here in the community here are
Speaker 11: going to be watching and they're going to be supporting us.
Speaker 11: So I think just just keep keep an eye on
Speaker 11: the situation if you can, if it's something that that
Speaker 11: you're interested in and able to do, and that that's
Speaker 11: really the biggest way I think to support us.
Speaker 12: I will also say that if you are a U
Speaker 12: see men in the state line and you see San Diego,
Speaker 12: the easiest way to prevent future alumni events from being
Speaker 12: disrupted actually out of the contract.
Speaker 2: Yes, that would be a fantastic idea. Yeah, I do
Speaker 2: know several professors listen, so it's time to do something. Hopefully, Yeah,
Speaker 2: hopefully they will do something in solidarity. But I know
Speaker 2: a few of them listen and have reached out before. Well,
Speaker 2: thank you very much. I'm sorry this shit is happening
Speaker 2: to you. We will keep people updated as the long
Speaker 2: process continues. But yeah, I hope, I hope you can
Speaker 2: enjoy your summer without teaching a little bit, without this
Speaker 2: hanging over you.
Speaker 11: We'll try it. That's kind of my motivation is they
Speaker 11: you know, they're using it as a little bit of
Speaker 11: a psychological warfare in terms of live organizing. So I
Speaker 11: will just simply choose not to let it bother me,
Speaker 11: at least as much as I can.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, thank you very much, Thanks James, thank you.
Speaker 10: Welcome to take It Happened Here, a podcast that now
Speaker 10: more than ever, is about things falling apart. It's been
Speaker 10: roughly one year since the DABS decision has annihilated what
Speaker 10: was left of the protection for legal abortions in this country,
Speaker 10: and things have gotten enormously worse in ways that most
Speaker 10: people are essentially attempting to ignore or hide from. There are, however,
Speaker 10: a lot of people who cannot essentially run from the
Speaker 10: absolute horror that has been unleashed in this country. And yeah,
Speaker 10: I'm going to be talking today and tomorrow with one
Speaker 10: of those people who is Crystals has the triple crown
Speaker 10: of abortion work of being an abortion worker, a union organizer,
Speaker 10: and on the on the board of an abortion fund. Yeah,
Speaker 10: welcome to the show, Crystal, and I'm sorry.
Speaker 13: You're sorry, thank you, thank you so much. Mea, it's
Speaker 13: really nice to be here again. I had a lot
Speaker 13: of fun last time, and it's nice to be talking
Speaker 13: to you again, even though I only have really horrible Yeah,
Speaker 13: thanks to say for the most part though, there are
Speaker 13: some good things, but it's mostly really awful.
Speaker 10: Yeah. So I guess, I guess that's where I want
Speaker 10: to start, is it's well, okay, I think I'm pretty
Speaker 10: sure that so the day this is coming out, it's
Speaker 10: going to be I think two days before the anniversary
Speaker 10: of Dobbs, and I wanted to, I guess first just
Speaker 10: ask what it's been like emotionally before we get to
Speaker 10: the sort of like more material consequences of it, if
Speaker 10: that's all right.
Speaker 13: Yeah, So, as abortion worker, this has been an incredibly
Speaker 13: difficult year. And that's that's with the context that things
Speaker 13: were not good before last June twenty fourth, twenty twenty two,
Speaker 13: things were not good before then, so you know, we
Speaker 13: were we were really running up against this this impending
Speaker 13: decision that we knew was going to happen, and then
Speaker 13: it ended up happening, and then it was really horrible.
Speaker 13: And honestly, it's been horrible every single day since, and
Speaker 13: it's just gets more horrible every single week. And that's
Speaker 13: you know, I sound so negative saying that, I know,
Speaker 13: but I just know that I'm saying that knowing that
Speaker 13: there's so many amazing people who are doing like abortion
Speaker 13: advocacy and abortion care work and offering abortion services and
Speaker 13: practical support for abortion, and it has just been an
Speaker 13: incredibly heavy year for us. We've seen, we've all witnessed
Speaker 13: a lot in the last year, and we're all carrying
Speaker 13: a lot, and it's it's it's just hard. And I'm
Speaker 13: really grateful for everyone that I work with and that
Speaker 13: I'm in community with, but it's it's been traumatizing. I
Speaker 13: know that, you know, it's really easy to say. I
Speaker 13: think like, oh, you know, this is traumatic, and that's traumatic,
Speaker 13: But I don't know what else, what other word to
Speaker 13: use to having to having had witnessed everything that we've
Speaker 13: witnessed in the last year and to know that there's
Speaker 13: no end in sight. It is incredibly traumatic. It's like
Speaker 13: a national trauma. We're all sharing it together.
Speaker 10: Yeah, okay, I guess we should get into sort of
Speaker 10: what the things that you've been seeing have looked like.
Speaker 10: And I think one of the best ways to do this,
Speaker 10: I think is by just talking about like what the
Speaker 10: process is like of trying to get someone in abortion,
Speaker 10: because it's gotten so much harder and so much more dangerous.
Speaker 8: Very rapidly.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Absolutely, the things have changed a lot in the last year,
Speaker 13: because you know, if we're if we're starting from when
Speaker 13: things really hit the fan June twenty fourth, twenty twenty two,
Speaker 13: even though things were getting worse before that, because you know,
Speaker 13: for example, there was the band in Texas that started
Speaker 13: on September first and in twenty twenty one, so that
Speaker 13: you know, things I saw a lot in my head.
Speaker 13: If I can point like when did I really know
Speaker 13: that we were we were fucked and we were going
Speaker 13: to like we were going to see the worst outcome,
Speaker 13: I would say on September first, twenty twenty one.
Speaker 5: But.
Speaker 13: We saw the initial trigger bands go into effect immediately
Speaker 13: after the Dobbs decision, So you know, like for example, Texas,
Speaker 13: the bands went into effect immediately. There were other states
Speaker 13: that it was a little bit more delayed, like for example, Ohio.
Speaker 13: And then there's also been a lot of back and
Speaker 13: forth because some states and which they're having bands now
Speaker 13: those are currently paused and they're being worked through the
Speaker 13: legal system, and o there are new bands. There's pretty
Speaker 13: much been a new band, it feels like pretty much
Speaker 13: every week, to the point where I know that I
Speaker 13: just named a couple of states just now, and just
Speaker 13: to be cautious, I just want to say that, you know, look,
Speaker 13: you can go to like abortionfinder dot org or I
Speaker 13: need ana dot Com and like look up your state
Speaker 13: to see, you know, if you have access in your state.
Speaker 13: It changes so frequently that you really do have to
Speaker 13: kind of rely on those reliable websites like abortion Finder
Speaker 13: and I need an a to really make sure that
Speaker 13: you're up to date. So you know, don't like if
Speaker 13: I mentioned a state, you know, just it might have
Speaker 13: been there might have been something in effect months ago
Speaker 13: and I'm just like alluding to it. So just definitely
Speaker 13: rely on those resources that exist to see what's up
Speaker 13: to date now. But yeah, things have been incredibly back
Speaker 13: and forth for a lot of states in the last year.
Speaker 13: And it's it's just there are holes in access, deserts
Speaker 13: and access that just keep widening and widening and widening.
Speaker 13: The most devastating being recently this This was just this
Speaker 13: was a really bad day for for me and and
Speaker 13: a lot of my coworkers when there was the vote
Speaker 13: in Florida, and and the Florida Band is not yet
Speaker 13: an effect, but we'll eventually be going into effect. And
Speaker 13: and that was really like one of the last places
Speaker 13: that you could access an abortion in the Southeast. So
Speaker 13: now when you look at a map, which I do
Speaker 13: a lot, I I now have to look at a
Speaker 13: map every single day for work and look at like
Speaker 13: you know, individual state maps, and like I'm on Google
Speaker 13: Maps constantly. But there there's there are places where you
Speaker 13: have no choice but to travel to get an abortion
Speaker 13: or access abortion services online if that is possible for you,
Speaker 13: and you know there there are resources available where if
Speaker 13: you as an individual need an abortion and you keep
Speaker 13: looking and you search and you reach out to people,
Speaker 13: those resources are out there, you know. So practical support
Speaker 13: groups exist, funding exists, Clinics and service providers will bend
Speaker 13: over backwards to get you to your appointment and help
Speaker 13: you access these services, so you know there is help
Speaker 13: out there, but it is it's really difficult, and it's
Speaker 13: it takes a lot of work to access an appointment.
Speaker 13: So everything's it takes longer to get to an appointment,
Speaker 13: it takes you have to travel further, you end up
Speaker 13: paying so much more money, Like everything is just so
Speaker 13: much more expensive than it was a year ago, because
Speaker 13: now you're not just paying, you know, for the procedure
Speaker 13: cost and then maybe like a little bit of gas
Speaker 13: money to the appointment. You're having to figure out plane tickets, hotels,
Speaker 13: ask money for whatever, like really long distances. I've seen
Speaker 13: patients driving twelve hours to get to an appointment. Yeah,
Speaker 13: And I can talk more about like what that process
Speaker 13: looks like too, but I guess I just wanted to
Speaker 13: give like a general overview of it's just getting harder
Speaker 13: to access, longer distances traveling, and and and more expensive.
Speaker 13: And luckily there is people. There are people there to
Speaker 13: help and there is support, but it requires a ton
Speaker 13: of work, a ton a ton of work in order
Speaker 13: to make sure that people are getting the health care
Speaker 13: that they need.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and I guess, well, Okay, two things. One, I
Speaker 10: want to I want to start the abortion fund plug
Speaker 10: like right here, because you know, yeah, yeah, as the
Speaker 10: cost of this increase is that means, you know, like
Speaker 10: abortion funds need more money in order to be able
Speaker 10: to keep doing this because every dollar of it they
Speaker 10: don't have is you know, potentially is like I'm not
Speaker 10: even touched, Like is another person who's not gonna be
Speaker 10: able to get an abortion?
Speaker 13: Yeah, every every dollar matters. Yeah, And and I know
Speaker 13: that I feel like a lot of leftists sometimes get
Speaker 13: a little tired of hearing about, oh, donate to your
Speaker 13: abortion foot, donate to an abortion fund, because like they're like, oh, this,
Speaker 13: this is not radical. But abortion funds are the only
Speaker 13: way in which abortions are happening right now because it costs,
Speaker 13: like you might have to spend like two thousand to
Speaker 13: three thousand dollars on a person sometimes in order to
Speaker 13: make sure that they get healthcare. And that's just one person.
Speaker 13: So the only reason that abortions are still happening is
Speaker 13: because one people are putting that work in and make
Speaker 13: sure that they happen, and like, you know, those people
Speaker 13: are amazing and also pay, like people seeking healthcare are amazing.
Speaker 13: They're incredibly brave to be doing what they're doing, to
Speaker 13: be working so hard to get healthcare, to be navigating
Speaker 13: all of these obstacles that you have to be like,
Speaker 13: that's what you have to be strong to do that.
Speaker 13: That's an incredibly brave thing to do, having to fly
Speaker 13: in an airplane if you've never flown before to access
Speaker 13: health care that you know you need. Like you're you're
Speaker 13: being really strong and you're being amazing, but you don't
Speaker 13: you shouldn't have to do that. And so it's a
Speaker 13: lot of money. So thank god that the money is there,
Speaker 13: because if the money wasn't there, then people would not
Speaker 13: be able to be helped. So I know that, like
Speaker 13: you know, oh, donate to abortion fund, don'tate to an
Speaker 13: abortion pun but really, like if you want people to
Speaker 13: continue to get abortions now, not just waiting until like
Speaker 13: November in an election, then you need to make sure
Speaker 13: that the money is there for people to do that
Speaker 13: because it is expensive.
Speaker 10: Yeah, we're talking to something like two or three thousand dollars, right,
Speaker 10: Can you person listening to this, could you right now
Speaker 10: spend three thousand dollars or something and be fine?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 10: And the answer is probably not, but and you know,
Speaker 10: and there's a there are like a lot of people
Speaker 10: in this country who need abortions, who are like way
Speaker 10: less well off than you are, Like that is a
Speaker 10: shit tone of like that that is a lot of
Speaker 10: money for me, like podcaster, that is, you know, a
Speaker 10: crippling amount of money for a lot of the people
Speaker 10: who need this. And I don't know, I mean, I
Speaker 10: think there's something really bleak about the where society is structured,
Speaker 10: where your freedom and your bodily autonomy are dependent on
Speaker 10: having money. But that's basically where we're at, right Like
Speaker 10: that's 'eah's that's the way the system works right now.
Speaker 13: And yeah, there's a part of me that like doesn't
Speaker 13: want to lean in and like I mean, like you know,
Speaker 13: I'm I'm a socialist. I don't want to be like, oh,
Speaker 13: you know, money, money, money, but like that is the
Speaker 13: only reason people are getting healthcare is because there is
Speaker 13: money available, and people are banding together to pool that
Speaker 13: money to make it available to people who need it.
Speaker 13: So I'm just like, thank god, I'm so glad because
Speaker 13: otherwise I would not be able to get people to
Speaker 13: their appointments. And I can like talk out that process too,
Speaker 13: like you know, what does it look like now?
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, let's yeah, let's actually go through this.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 13: I want to start off with like what I was
Speaker 13: when I started. So I've been working in abortion care
Speaker 13: for six years now, and when I started, I was
Speaker 13: working in a call center and I would schedule appointments.
Speaker 13: So I would get a call and I'd collect information
Speaker 13: and I would book the appointment and i'd say, you know,
Speaker 13: thank you for as you know, for reaching out to
Speaker 13: us for your services, and we will see you at
Speaker 13: your appointment. And you know, the calls were long because
Speaker 13: you know, we'd have to work out financial assistance. And
Speaker 13: then also abortion care is often just like a really
Speaker 13: intimate type of healthcare to be accessing, so there's a
Speaker 13: lot of factors sometimes to discuss with the person that
Speaker 13: was accessing services, and it could be really complicated with
Speaker 13: all of those factors. So you know, like it's always
Speaker 13: been pretty labor intensive to schedule someone sometimes, but it
Speaker 13: was it was fairly you know, fairly short phone call
Speaker 13: for the most part most of the time, and then
Speaker 13: you just get somebody scheduled and then you move on
Speaker 13: and you schedule someone else. And that was six years ago.
Speaker 13: For me. And I'm not saying that more difficult situations
Speaker 13: didn't come up, because of course abortion access was not
Speaker 13: good six years ago either, but the way in which
Speaker 13: it's changed is so marked, and I feel like there's
Speaker 13: so many people have witnesses where it went from from
Speaker 13: that to it taking weeks to work with one individual
Speaker 13: to get them to an appointment because there is no
Speaker 13: clinic within eight hours driving distance to them, and so
Speaker 13: the whole intake process and the whole just like getting
Speaker 13: the funds together, I guess I'll just walk you through
Speaker 13: it because I just I don't even know how else
Speaker 13: to relate. So let's say, just like hypothetically, you know,
Speaker 13: you're an individual who is living in a band state
Speaker 13: and they're the closest actual brick and mortar abortion clinic
Speaker 13: to is nine hours away, which is the situation for
Speaker 13: so many people that I talk to and that are
Speaker 13: living in the United States. And let's say you don't
Speaker 13: have a car, and you have children, and you don't
Speaker 13: want everybody to know your business, so you like, you
Speaker 13: don't want everybody in your family knowing that you need
Speaker 13: an abortion and that you're looking for that type of
Speaker 13: health care, so you're trying to do what you can
Speaker 13: by yourself, and you're googling, and you're looking at different resources.
Speaker 13: And what I witness a lot as a healthcare worker
Speaker 13: helping someone through this process is there's a lot of
Speaker 13: dead ends when people are trying to find someone that
Speaker 13: can provide them with those abortion services. They you know,
Speaker 13: they're looking at the clinics that are close to them,
Speaker 13: and they're seeing that they're nine hours away and they
Speaker 13: can't get to them. They're looking up fight tickets and
Speaker 13: they're seeing it's like eight hundred dollars for their and
Speaker 13: back and they can't afford that on top of the
Speaker 13: procedure cost. And let's just say hypothetically they're early in
Speaker 13: the pregnancy and the procedure might cost maybe four hundred,
Speaker 13: five hundred and six hundred dollars, which is still a
Speaker 13: lot of money. That's still a lot of money, So
Speaker 13: I don't want to pretend like that's not But on
Speaker 13: top of that, then there's also the plane tickets, trying
Speaker 13: to find a way to the airport and all of that,
Speaker 13: and they're just reaching a lot of dead ends like
Speaker 13: I can't possibly go here, and I can't possibly go here,
Speaker 13: and okay, like maybe I can go online and order
Speaker 13: some medication, but it might not arrive for several weeks,
Speaker 13: and what if it doesn't arrive? I mean, that's like
Speaker 13: a really scary thing to be doing, like knowing you
Speaker 13: need healthcare and knowing that you're relying on the mail
Speaker 13: and like hoping that you get your packet and that
Speaker 13: you can trust wherever you're purchasing the medication from. And
Speaker 13: if you can't even really like let's say that you're
Speaker 13: you're further along and you may be are like twenty weeks,
Speaker 13: and your options are incredibly more limited, and you're paying
Speaker 13: a lot more if you don't have insurance coverage with
Speaker 13: most people don't, so you're paying like maybe up to
Speaker 13: on like two thousand and three thousand, four thousand for
Speaker 13: a procedure. And you just need help, and you need
Speaker 13: to ask for help, which is already like a not
Speaker 13: a good spot to be in because you're accessing health
Speaker 13: care and you have no choice but to ask for
Speaker 13: help and you shouldn't have to.
Speaker 10: That's really fucking hard, right, Like I mean, I think
Speaker 10: on an intellectual level, I think everyone has an experience
Speaker 10: which is how hard it is to ask for help
Speaker 10: for stuff that's like incredibly minor, and then you're doing
Speaker 10: this for a really intimate, like healthcare decision, Yeah.
Speaker 13: Like super personal, like your decision might be based on
Speaker 13: like a bunch of factors that are just like really
Speaker 13: personal for you. And you wish you didn't have to
Speaker 13: tell people, or you wish you didn't have to talk
Speaker 13: to so many people about an appointment because you know,
Speaker 13: for most healthcare appointments, even though healthcare in general is
Speaker 13: not easy to access, you just call and you schedule
Speaker 13: the appointment and maybe you have to pay a copay
Speaker 13: and that's annoying, and then maybe the appoint is four
Speaker 13: months out and that's awful too, But you know, it's
Speaker 13: this just makes everything worse for the individual. So let's
Speaker 13: just say, like, you know, they keep trying, and they
Speaker 13: keep trying, and they keep looking, and you know, let's
Speaker 13: say they get to me, and I'm somebody who I do.
Speaker 13: I do scheduling now for patients who need to travel,
Speaker 13: and I help them get financial assistance for the cost
Speaker 13: of travel and for their appointment. So a lot of
Speaker 13: times when I get in touch with someone, they've already
Speaker 13: encountered so many dead ends. And when I am not
Speaker 13: the dead end. They're filled with so much relief that
Speaker 13: a lot of times this happens almost every day now,
Speaker 13: someone will get in touch with me and they'll just
Speaker 13: start crying when I tell them that I can help them.
Speaker 13: And that is not a good feeling, because I feel
Speaker 13: like maybe in like other types of work, or maybe
Speaker 13: even like before, like maybe years ago, like when somebody
Speaker 13: was like great, it might feel good, like, oh, I'm
Speaker 13: so glad I can help them. But when someone who
Speaker 13: is like a caregiver, a worker, somebody who needs health
Speaker 13: care and they're scared and they're crying out of relief,
Speaker 13: it does not feel good. It makes me feel really
Speaker 13: horrible because they have already been robbed of their dignity
Speaker 13: by the time that I talk to them, and I
Speaker 13: hate that. It's just it's disgusting that they've already been
Speaker 13: put in this situation that is dehumanizing, and I just
Speaker 13: it doesn't feel good when they cry in relief. It
Speaker 13: just does not feel good. So, just continuing this the
Speaker 13: tale of you know, this patient accessing an appointment. So
Speaker 13: so let's say you know they can get an appointment
Speaker 13: in a clinic, it's not in their state because there's
Speaker 13: no it's not legal to provide an abortion in their state,
Speaker 13: so they have to travel two states away and get
Speaker 13: to the clinic. So the flight tickets are eight hundred
Speaker 13: dollars and the cost of the appointment is four hundred.
Speaker 13: So already that's twelve hundred dollars, which luckily, I am
Speaker 13: so grateful and glad that I have the ability to
Speaker 13: arrange financial assistance for that, and I can work with
Speaker 13: individuals to do that. Thank thank the Lord, like they honestly,
Speaker 13: I shouldn't, no, not thank the Lord, thank the people
Speaker 13: the Lord. Yeah, yeah, like thank these people so much.
Speaker 13: I'm just like so glad they exist and they're there
Speaker 13: and that they're such hard workers. Oh my god. But yeah,
Speaker 13: So that's twelve hundred dollars that we can that we
Speaker 13: can look into covering so that way the person pays
Speaker 13: whatever they are capable of paying, even if that's nothing,
Speaker 13: because you know, some of these people like like they're
Speaker 13: living paycheck to paycheck because they're taking care of their
Speaker 13: children and like their family is coming first. That is
Speaker 13: what is happening, is they are taking care of their
Speaker 13: family and they are being a good caregiver. So the
Speaker 13: you know, the money is going to food on the tape.
Speaker 13: So that's that's like twelve hundred dollars. But then there's
Speaker 13: a couple other things you have to factor in, is
Speaker 13: like does this person need a hotel because that can
Speaker 13: be an additional what like one hundred and two hundred
Speaker 13: depending And does this person have a car? Can they
Speaker 13: pay for the gas money, especially if they're driving, because
Speaker 13: like let's say they can get to an airport, but
Speaker 13: the airport is still two hours away. You still need
Speaker 13: gas money. You still have to park at the airport.
Speaker 13: You gotta pay for airport parking. And then you get
Speaker 13: on the air You get on the airplane and you
Speaker 13: fly over to the state where your appointment is. You
Speaker 13: get off the airplane, and then there is surge pricing
Speaker 13: for Lyft and Uber and let's say the Uber, it
Speaker 13: can be anywhere from like maybe fifty dollars or one
Speaker 13: hundred dollars depending on what's going on. And that is
Speaker 13: just more money that needs to be spent.
Speaker 10: The fact, the fact that they're going to hit by
Speaker 10: fucking Uber surge prices is so monstrous.
Speaker 13: Yeah, And like airports in general, like like getting out
Speaker 13: out of an airport using a ride shair is pretty terrible,
Speaker 13: but yeah, you got to pay the surge pricing, so
Speaker 13: and then you get to the clinic and then you
Speaker 13: have your services, which is just really like when you're
Speaker 13: accessing healthcare. I mean, we're all we all access healthcare.
Speaker 13: We're all human beings who need health care. Like, you
Speaker 13: really want to be able to focus on that appointment
Speaker 13: and the care you're getting, But at this point, they've
Speaker 13: already traveled, like they've been on a journey. So they
Speaker 13: arrived to the appointment and get the health care that
Speaker 13: really should have been what they should have been able
Speaker 13: to focus on, and then they got to go back,
Speaker 13: so then they got to do the whole thing. They
Speaker 13: got through, go through airport security, get back, get the
Speaker 13: uber from the airport, and then let's say they have
Speaker 13: a two hour flight back, and that's I mean, that
Speaker 13: could be done all than one day, but sometimes it
Speaker 13: can't be, Like sometimes it's just not possible to do
Speaker 13: all that in one day. And that's like another obstacle
Speaker 13: that I come across is that a lot a lot.
Speaker 13: I would say, most of the patients I talk to
Speaker 13: are already parents, so they're like, I have to be
Speaker 13: back that evening because I don't have childcare overnight, Like
Speaker 13: I don't have overnight childcare. So then I'm like trying
Speaker 13: to get them back the same evening because because they're
Speaker 13: a parent, and then like, can you imagine just like
Speaker 13: you know, just like imagine your own parents, like your
Speaker 13: own like mom just like zipping away for one day
Speaker 13: to go get like a really simple health care procedure,
Speaker 13: and then they have to like rush back and you're
Speaker 13: already in bed, and it's just so stressful. It's so
Speaker 13: stressful for the for the parent, for any any family
Speaker 13: members that might be like kind of like sharing this
Speaker 13: whole stressful experience with them, any friends, any loved ones.
Speaker 13: And it's just you have.
Speaker 10: To find time off too.
Speaker 13: Oh yeah, I didn't even get into that. Yeah, so
Speaker 13: I don't know, like I just I said a lot
Speaker 13: of numbers just now, so I know, I started off
Speaker 13: with twelve hundred, and then I tacked on a a
Speaker 13: bunch of extra things. Oh and I didn't mention that
Speaker 13: you're gonna have to eat that day, you know, like, yeah,
Speaker 13: you're in another state and you have to get food.
Speaker 13: So like it easily for one person starts racking up
Speaker 13: until like over two thousand and that's why abortion ones
Speaker 13: are really important. But that's also that's a lot. That's
Speaker 13: a lot, and that's a lot on top of like
Speaker 13: an intimate healthcare appointment. And you know, just just outlining
Speaker 13: how much someone has to do to get to an appointment,
Speaker 13: there's even a couple other factors to consider too, because
Speaker 13: a lot of these people who are having to fly
Speaker 13: or drive these long distances to their appointment, they would
Speaker 13: have never been in that situation otherwise. So you know,
Speaker 13: these are individuals who have never flown on a plane before,
Speaker 13: maybe because like they've just never been in a situation
Speaker 13: in which they needed to fly on a plane. They've
Speaker 13: always been able to drive to like vacations and everything,
Speaker 13: like you know, like oh, family vacation, you drive maybe
Speaker 13: like four hours and you know, you have fun, and
Speaker 13: you just don't want to go on a plane. It
Speaker 13: makes you nervous. That's a lot of people live like that.
Speaker 13: So all of a sudden, these people have no choice, like, oh,
Speaker 13: you have to get on a plane and otherwise you're
Speaker 13: gonna have to drive twelve thirteen hours. So they get
Speaker 13: on a plane and they're scared because they've never done
Speaker 13: it before. Because they're already stressed out that they're going
Speaker 13: to a doctor's appointment, They're already stressed out that they're
Speaker 13: relying on basically strangers to get them there, which is
Speaker 13: that's like a whole other topic is like you have
Speaker 13: to rely on strangers, and that's you know, people shouldn't
Speaker 13: have to do that. And then also you have to
Speaker 13: navigate an airport. So a lot of my job has
Speaker 13: become looking at maps, Like I'm looking at a map,
Speaker 13: like how far away is this someone from a clinic?
Speaker 13: How far away are they from an airport? You know,
Speaker 13: can they go here? Can they go here? But I'm
Speaker 13: also on the phone with people kind of describing how
Speaker 13: airports work, like here's what airport security looks like. People
Speaker 13: are afraid of TSA, and I don't blame them. I
Speaker 13: fucking hate TSA. They're always passholes. Fuck them. They make
Speaker 13: everything worse. You got to go through TSA and you
Speaker 13: gotta yeah, I gotta know how to get your tickets,
Speaker 13: and you got to know how to where, you know,
Speaker 13: to get to a terminal. A lot of people don't
Speaker 13: like if you've never flown before, they might not know
Speaker 13: that they're supposed to get on that little training you know,
Speaker 13: you know what I'm talking about, Like you will train,
Speaker 13: you go to your terminal, and like a lot of
Speaker 13: people don't know that, and all of a sudden they
Speaker 13: have to find out really fast and I have to
Speaker 13: explain it. And that's part of their abortion care. Part
Speaker 13: of people's abortion care is now talking them through an airport,
Speaker 13: and that that has sucks. That's become like the daily experience.
Speaker 13: That's become the daily experience where it's like, yeah, six
Speaker 13: years ago, these used to be like, Okay, I'm gonna
Speaker 13: bookr appointment. You're going to come in. Your appointment's going
Speaker 13: to be maybe like I don't know, five hours, and
Speaker 13: then you and then you leave and you drive home
Speaker 13: and maybe you're only driving like thirty minutes, maybe an hour,
Speaker 13: maybe two hours. And now we're having people who you know,
Speaker 13: flights or it's a twelve hour drive, who are a
Speaker 13: flight there, who are a flight back. The flight lands
Speaker 13: at like midnight, you know, like and then your kids
Speaker 13: are in bed, and it's like it's so much and
Speaker 13: you can see why people give up, and people are
Speaker 13: giving up. In fact, the numbers are the numbers are
Speaker 13: hard to hear. I know that there was a study
Speaker 13: that showed that in the first six months after the
Speaker 13: DABS decision, thirty six thousand people who wanted an abortion
Speaker 13: couldn't get one, and that is only in the first
Speaker 13: six months, So I'm sure that that number is much
Speaker 13: I'm like dreading seeing new numbers, but I'm sure the
Speaker 13: number is much higher now. So when you're faced with
Speaker 13: all of this, people do give up because it is
Speaker 13: too much, which is the whole point of all of
Speaker 13: the bands and everything that's happened. The point was to
Speaker 13: make people give up. And I think that a lot
Speaker 13: of leftists maybe don't want to acknowledge that people are
Speaker 13: giving up. They want to believe that people will keep
Speaker 13: trying and they'll find those resources and they will get
Speaker 13: to the appointments because help is available, but not everyone
Speaker 13: finds the help that is out there, and not everyone
Speaker 13: can make it work. Like there's a lot of reasons
Speaker 13: why people can't do this ridiculous thing I just described.
Speaker 2: And.
Speaker 13: Then as abortion care workers, we see them give up.
Speaker 13: And I think that's kind of been the biggest one
Speaker 13: of the biggest changes for me is just how often
Speaker 13: I see people give up and just having to witness
Speaker 13: that because it's like, well, what does it mean when
Speaker 13: someone gives up? What does it mean when someone stops
Speaker 13: trying to get the healthcare that they're looking for? They're
Speaker 13: changing their entire plans, like you know, because like everyone,
Speaker 13: not everyone, but a lot of people have like ideas
Speaker 13: of what they're doing with their life, and they're like,
Speaker 13: I want to have this many kids, I want to
Speaker 13: have them at these times, and I want to be
Speaker 13: with this person, or I don't want to be with anyone,
Speaker 13: and I want to work this job and go to
Speaker 13: the school or whatever. You know, you're making plans and
Speaker 13: then all of a sudden, because of this situation, you
Speaker 13: have to change your plans. And there's even worse things
Speaker 13: happening than that. But I think that that's bad enough,
Speaker 13: is that you can't get what you need and you
Speaker 13: just have to just change your life and accept defeat
Speaker 13: and take a path that you did not want to take.
Speaker 13: And it's fucking sad. And it's more than sad sad
Speaker 13: as an understatement, I don't know what word it is.
Speaker 13: It's horrible because this has been taken from them, The
Speaker 13: choice has been taken from them completely, and that's that
Speaker 13: is going to have effects that we are going to
Speaker 13: see for decades to come, and that's kind of hard
Speaker 13: to wrap your brain around, like what does it mean
Speaker 13: for that and tens of thousands of people to not
Speaker 13: have had the health care that they need. It means
Speaker 13: that we're going to see like the negative health effects
Speaker 13: for years to come because that is a lot of people.
Speaker 13: That is a lot of that's a lot of people,
Speaker 13: and that's going to impact people in really long term
Speaker 13: ways for a really long time. And knowing that is
Speaker 13: really I don't know, words are kind of failing me. Yeah,
Speaker 13: it's like it's like beyond traumatic, beyond Yeah, I'm sure
Speaker 13: there will be studies in years from now, I'm sure,
Speaker 13: but like it's been a year and I can say,
Speaker 13: like it's those it's gonna the data is going to
Speaker 13: be really bad. The data is going to be really
Speaker 13: bad based on everything that I've already seen.
Speaker 10: So suffering is not something you can quantify. And you know,
Speaker 10: the amount of human suffering that's been unleashed by this is, yeah,
Speaker 10: like one of the worst crimes that's happened in the century,
Speaker 10: full of like unspeakable crimes.
Speaker 13: And this looks different for each individual, you know, because
Speaker 13: it's just the whole the whole. It's autonomy. You're losing
Speaker 13: control over your life and your body, and your family
Speaker 13: and your and there's just so many things, and it
Speaker 13: looks different for each person. So for some people it's
Speaker 13: like you have to just fucking change everything that you're
Speaker 13: fucking doing. You can't control your life or your body.
Speaker 13: And then for other people it can be even worse
Speaker 13: than that. Where where you are, you're risking death because
Speaker 13: pregnancy is incredibly dangerous. So there are people who who
Speaker 13: are putting themselves in really dangerous situations with their pregnancies,
Speaker 13: and they're being denied the care that they need. So
Speaker 13: you see people who are being forced to risk their
Speaker 13: life because they can't get the care they need, and
Speaker 13: people are losing their body parts and their fertility. Because
Speaker 13: recently I read a story and then there's these horror
Speaker 13: stories every day, which I like, I read them because
Speaker 13: I want to know everything that's happening, but I also
Speaker 13: am so resentful that like every day there's like a
Speaker 13: new like horror story about these services. But recently there
Speaker 13: was someone there was somebody who wasn't able to get
Speaker 13: timely abortion care it had to continue pregnancy, ended up
Speaker 13: losing her uterus, even though she did not she wanted
Speaker 13: to have more kids. She like wanted to continue having children.
Speaker 13: So all of a sudden, because she couldn't get an abortion,
Speaker 13: she couldn't continue to expand her family in the way
Speaker 13: that she wanted.
Speaker 10: She sterilized effectively, Yeah, exactly, like by the state.
Speaker 13: Which yeah, so it's the suffering is is so different
Speaker 13: for each individual and so intimate to them there, and
Speaker 13: it's it's going all the way up to like just
Speaker 13: like state mandated, just like body horror basically, and and
Speaker 13: it's deadly. It's really deadly, which is hard to talk about.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean, you know, just having said that, should
Speaker 10: we talk a little bit about Gabriela Gonzalez and how
Speaker 10: you know, the other thing about abortion care is that
Speaker 10: it's not just that pregnancy is dangerous physically, it's that pregnancy,
Speaker 10: like pregnancy is really dangerous socially because you know, we
Speaker 10: live in an incredibly patriarchal society, and that means patriarchal
Speaker 10: violence is a real threat.
Speaker 13: Yeah, and this is always this Unfortunately, one component of
Speaker 13: abortion care is it often involves interpersonal violence or more
Speaker 13: you know, a lot of people say domestic violence and
Speaker 13: it's because a lot of partners will try to control
Speaker 13: someone through through pregnancy and it's a tactic of abuse
Speaker 13: that that does come up. And if somebody does get
Speaker 13: pregnant while they are in that kind of relationship, and
Speaker 13: that's that's a big thing. You know, a lot of
Speaker 13: times they it makes sense that if they're trying to
Speaker 13: get away from someone that you know, they don't want
Speaker 13: to continue the pregnancy. So and then that might be
Speaker 13: something that the partner might be intimately involved in where
Speaker 13: either they know about it or they don't know about it,
Speaker 13: and if they know about it, they could be pressuring
Speaker 13: the individual. It's unfortunately something that is often a component
Speaker 13: of this healthcare is that that is a factor that
Speaker 13: the person seeking healthcare is dealing with. So in terms
Speaker 13: of and all of this is I'm like, this is
Speaker 13: all really really triggering stuff too, and so trigger warning.
Speaker 13: But with Gabrielle A Gonzalez, that was something that happened.
Speaker 13: I think it was in it was in May. I
Speaker 13: remember it was in mid May. Because the news hit
Speaker 13: it hit hard for us for like a lot of
Speaker 13: abortion care workers and practical support you know, advocates, because
Speaker 13: it's the thing that we we try so hard to
Speaker 13: keep our patients safe. When they disclose things to us,
Speaker 13: you know they we the patient safety is the number
Speaker 13: one priority. And the fact of the matter is these
Speaker 13: bands make it harder for people to access the services safely.
Speaker 13: So in the case of Gabriella Gonzalez, I just want
Speaker 13: to say her name. She was a mother of three children.
Speaker 13: She was twenty six years old when she was murdered
Speaker 13: by her ex partner after she accessed an abortion in
Speaker 13: another state. So she was located in Texas, she had
Speaker 13: to travel to Colorado to get an abortion, and when
Speaker 13: she came back, unfortunately, she was murdered by her ex.
Speaker 13: And just like a couple, just like a couple of
Speaker 13: things on that is. It's just if you are trying
Speaker 13: to be discreet and you're trying to take care of
Speaker 13: your health care, it's hard to keep things private if
Speaker 13: you have to fly to another or drive to another state.
Speaker 13: It's just this situation is is just so much more
Speaker 13: complicated than it would be if you could access those
Speaker 13: services at home or near where you are. It's easier
Speaker 13: to keep that information private, it's easier to handle that
Speaker 13: situation in a timely way. So I feel like I mean,
Speaker 13: our country is failing everyone pretty much. But I'm torn
Speaker 13: apart and devastated and this was this news hit so
Speaker 13: hard to learn about Gabriella Gonzalez and what happened to her,
Speaker 13: and knowing that, you know, we try so hard to
Speaker 13: keep our patients safe and being careful about communications, being
Speaker 13: careful about what we hand patients, even like there are
Speaker 13: sometimes like it's like, well, I cannot give you any handouts,
Speaker 13: So here's how we're going to provide you the information,
Speaker 13: because it's you know, people can't even have that information
Speaker 13: on their phone or or in their purse on their person,
Speaker 13: and trying so hard and then just having like the
Speaker 13: state defy you in every way, and and it's just
Speaker 13: really it's trapping people in the in this these violent
Speaker 13: situations that you say, I mean, these situations have always existed,
Speaker 13: but ever since these abortion bands went into effect, it
Speaker 13: is made them even even more dangerous.
Speaker 10: Yeah, And I mean, you know, and I think in
Speaker 10: terms of just sort of getting at what the people
Speaker 10: who support this stuff believe, like they know about this,
Speaker 10: like this is this is what they want to happen, right,
Speaker 10: Like this is you know, this is this is what
Speaker 10: this is what this is what it actually means to
Speaker 10: have an ideology that's based on patriarchal control. Is this
Speaker 10: ship yep, it's this like this is this this violence
Speaker 10: and that like this kind of coercion is what they want.
Speaker 10: These are also you know, like again these are there's
Speaker 10: a reason. These are also people who want to end
Speaker 10: out fall divorce, right, like they like their entire ideology
Speaker 10: is based on men being able to and flip violence, yep.
Speaker 13: And and you know, and these are what pro life people.
Speaker 13: And you know, gabriel A Gonzalez was a mother of
Speaker 13: three children. She was a mother and her children needed
Speaker 13: her and now she's gone. And and I feel like
Speaker 13: the abortion bands and the like the demolition of abortion
Speaker 13: services in the United States has led to this situation
Speaker 13: and will continue to lead to more situations like this.
Speaker 13: And they're all devastating and and I hate it. I
Speaker 13: just it's fucking awful. It's so fucking bad. And I
Speaker 13: know that, like, like where do I go from there
Speaker 13: after saying like the worst in.
Speaker 10: The world, and then yeah, I don't know, I mean,
Speaker 10: I guess I guess the thing I can say after that,
Speaker 10: right is like, if you want to live in a
Speaker 10: world that is not just utterly controlled by the most
Speaker 10: evil people who've ever lived by, you know, that is
Speaker 10: defined by enormous entries of human suffering. Like these people
Speaker 10: their politics, to logistical support networks, their parties, like the
Speaker 10: entire political apparatus that is doing it needs to be
Speaker 10: completely destroyed, like like raised to the ground in a
Speaker 10: way that it like literally can never recover. And that
Speaker 10: is the thing that is possible, right it is, it
Speaker 10: is possible to completely destroy political movements. It is possible
Speaker 10: to just drive them so far underground that people forget
Speaker 10: they even existed. And you know, and then that has
Speaker 10: happened to movements before that were you know, as powerful
Speaker 10: as this one. So it can be done. It's just
Speaker 10: it requires, you know, I mean, it requires a level
Speaker 10: of political will that most that you know, a politicians
Speaker 10: don't give a shit about because this is not something
Speaker 10: that affects them.
Speaker 13: Speaking of politicians, it's not giving a shit. Going back
Speaker 13: to like, you know, the initial reflection on like, you know,
Speaker 13: it's it's been a year since Roe v. Way was
Speaker 13: overturned in the Dobbs decision, and what has happened, Like
Speaker 13: what have the politicians done to alleviate all of this
Speaker 13: suffering that you know, I've been talking about, and it's
Speaker 13: it's very little. Like the biggest win that we've had
Speaker 13: is mif a pristone not being banned, which is horrible
Speaker 13: because like, oh and then that was that whole yeah thing,
Speaker 13: that whole step, but that's like a whole other thing.
Speaker 13: But that is such a blique win, especially since it's
Speaker 13: not even gone and we're going to see this issue
Speaker 13: come back with mif a pristone. And and that's another
Speaker 13: thing too, because if that does happen, like misapristal is amazing,
Speaker 13: and misa prostal is very effective, and taking mesaprostal only
Speaker 13: for abortion is effective, but it's also more symptomatic and
Speaker 13: given just like you know, like we were talking about
Speaker 13: people like just people being exposed to violence, people having
Speaker 13: to act doing just like moving mountains and having to
Speaker 13: cross mountains and go on a journey to get these
Speaker 13: abortion services and literally what can be often a thirty
Speaker 13: minute to an hour appointment if you're you know, lucky.
Speaker 13: It's not always like that, but anyways, like these services
Speaker 13: aren't complicated, like you know, like it's not like a
Speaker 13: like these y, yeah, we have the technology, Like like
Speaker 13: to get medication, you just go and you get the medication.
Speaker 13: They tell you how to take the medication, and they
Speaker 13: make sure they can prescribe you the medication. You get it.
Speaker 13: It's not like that can be like a fifteen minute appointment.
Speaker 13: And then if you're if you're like under a certain
Speaker 13: gestational age, a first time master abortion can be only
Speaker 13: like five minutes. Like this, This is not complicated healthcare.
Speaker 13: This is very simple healthcare. And you're adding all these
Speaker 13: extra factors in so when you're when you have to
Speaker 13: prescribe someone in medication that is more symptomatic, which is
Speaker 13: just adding like it's just one more complication. And the
Speaker 13: attack on abortion services has always been death by a
Speaker 13: thousand cuts, and this is just like one more cut
Speaker 13: that we really really do not need. So but that
Speaker 13: was a win and and and it's like that is
Speaker 13: such a shitty win. And then you have some states
Speaker 13: that are becoming like sanctuary states where they're like, you
Speaker 13: know where I hate I hate saying that word. I'm
Speaker 13: so sorry. I didn't mean to say sanctuary states because
Speaker 13: it's really not that, but they're saying like we're a
Speaker 13: safe place for you to get an abortion and we're
Speaker 13: never we're always gonna have abortion services. And it's like,
Speaker 13: what does that mean if you have so many patients
Speaker 13: traveling from other states that you're booking five weeks A.
Speaker 14: Yeah, well they won't and it's like they won't fucking
Speaker 14: fund it, right, Like, yes, this is the thing that
Speaker 14: like I'm just like unbelievably fucking angry about, right is it,
Speaker 14: like you know, daubs in terms of just the raw
Speaker 14: sort of politics of it, right, in terms of pure
Speaker 14: getting votes, this is the best thing that's ever fucking
Speaker 14: happened in the DEM Party.
Speaker 10: Right, they have been reaping the fucking electoral rewards for this.
Speaker 10: And what have they been fucking doing for fifty goddamn years,
Speaker 10: like nothing? Right, and this and this is something that like, Okay,
Speaker 10: you know, if if if you look at the way
Speaker 10: the right has been like fucking dealing with this, right,
Speaker 10: it's at every single step, right, you know, they they're
Speaker 10: constantly involved in lawsuits, they they're they're constantly pushing the
Speaker 10: boundaries and doing literally whatever they can within the within
Speaker 10: and without the bounds.
Speaker 2: Of the law.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 10: I mean, we've talked about the sort of vigilante campaigns, right,
Speaker 10: but like you know, they're like doing things like like
Speaker 10: like you know, I mean the one of the classic
Speaker 10: ones is requiring like facilities that do abortions to have
Speaker 10: like a specific length of hallway or like like with
Speaker 10: a different Yeah, and like they've been doing all this
Speaker 10: fucking legal bullshit to make it as hard as as
Speaker 10: humanly possible. Right, is there a Democrat version of this?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 10: No, they fucking they came to the height of min
Speaker 10: Like even even the states that have the ship, it's
Speaker 10: like they're they're not fucking funding it, right, It's like
Speaker 10: they're not they're not fucking paying like they they they're
Speaker 10: ship that they could be doing, and they just they
Speaker 10: don't care because this is this is a you know,
Speaker 10: this is a very seeing They can trot out in
Speaker 10: their fucking fundraising meetings and they can get people to
Speaker 10: vote for them, but they're not gonna they're not gonna
Speaker 10: wage this kind of campaign that the Republicans have been like,
Speaker 10: they're not gonna wage a pro access campaign on the
Speaker 10: scale at all, Right, but they're not gonna not gonna
Speaker 10: wage on the scale the Republicans have been doing to
Speaker 10: like make sure that you fucking can't get these services.
Speaker 13: Yeah, it's like these blue states they're not safe, and
Speaker 13: there's like the ridiculous there was like stockpiling mesapostal or
Speaker 13: whatever some states were saying they were doing. And it's like,
Speaker 13: if you're really looking out for people and you're really
Speaker 13: trying to defy these awful human rights violating laws, then
Speaker 13: send the medication to band states.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean I help patients.
Speaker 13: In band states, like don't abandon Texas, don't abandon Louisiana
Speaker 13: and Mississippi, like help them because like where are they going.
Speaker 13: They're going to blue states. Like there's like there's like
Speaker 13: a ripple effect. And I feel like I talked about
Speaker 13: this last time when I was on talking to you,
Speaker 13: where Okay, you can't get these healthcare services near you,
Speaker 13: so you go somewhere else, and the people locally can't
Speaker 13: get those services, so then they have to travel further
Speaker 13: and there's like this ripple effect to the point where
Speaker 13: like I'm sure that like blue states are seeing more
Speaker 13: appointments than ever. And I know for a fact like
Speaker 13: here in Pennsylvania, here in Pittsburgh, where literally we're seeing
Speaker 13: we're always seeing people in Ohio just because they'll even
Speaker 13: though abortion is legal in Ohio. It's just there's a
Speaker 13: lot of restrictions there, so it's a little tricky. But
Speaker 13: then there's like West Virginia and like Kentucky and Tennessee,
Speaker 13: and you're seeing so many more patients so you're booking
Speaker 13: out further. And it's like if you're let's say you're
Speaker 13: eight weeks and you find out, so if you're eight
Speaker 13: weeks pregnant, then you're you've only missed your period like
Speaker 13: for like a couple of weeks. It's really like, you know,
Speaker 13: you can find out you're eight weeks, right, You're like,
Speaker 13: you just found out, really, and you call somewhere near
Speaker 13: you to get an appointment, but the appointment is five
Speaker 13: weeks away, so all of a sudden, you go from
Speaker 13: eight weeks to thirteen weeks. It's like, what the heck.
Speaker 13: It's like yeah, like it's totally different options, like and
Speaker 13: that's happening in blue states, and it's like, so this
Speaker 13: is impacting literally everyone, but no politicians or even like
Speaker 13: big talking heads are really doing anything about it because
Speaker 13: it just gets worse. There's just more bands constantly.
Speaker 10: And I want to talk a bit about this the
Speaker 10: sanctuary bullshit too, because I like this is like a
Speaker 10: third fucking issue that we've seen politicians be like, oh,
Speaker 10: we're a sanctuary state. It's like, yeah, okay, Like I
Speaker 10: remember when I was doing fucking anti ice raids stuff, right,
Speaker 10: do you know? Do you do you know how much
Speaker 10: how much time we fucking spent trying to stop raids
Speaker 10: like ice raids in saying in quote unquote sanctuary states,
Speaker 10: Like it's bullshit. It's always been fucking bullshit. They don't
Speaker 10: mean it, and you know, all of the fucking like
Speaker 10: this is the sanctuary state thing is just like a
Speaker 10: thing that they fucking say so that they can you know,
Speaker 10: just sort of like like rally the based support and
Speaker 10: like build towards whatever presidential run they're going to do
Speaker 10: in twenty like thirty two whatever. And it doesn't. It's
Speaker 10: not it's not helping people and it's just not going to.
Speaker 13: Yeah, it's not. It's it's not a strategy that works.
Speaker 13: And I mean it's just entirely selfish. It's it's it's
Speaker 13: it's rage inducing because it's you know, how do I
Speaker 13: feel as an abortion worker. You know, it's been a
Speaker 13: year since Robi Way was overturned, and I have to
Speaker 13: witness all of this needless suffering and trauma and people's
Speaker 13: safety being compromised and people being hurt and people giving
Speaker 13: up and and then these politicians are not doing anything.
Speaker 13: I am so I'm full of so much anger that
Speaker 13: it's it's sometimes numbing, Like sometimes I'm just so angry
Speaker 13: that I kind of feel nothing like it kind of
Speaker 13: like it's like it's so far down the spectrum that
Speaker 13: I like just it just turns into like a non
Speaker 13: emotion basically, like so much anger that it's blinding and
Speaker 13: feels like nothing, And I don't even know what. I
Speaker 13: don't even know what to do with it other than
Speaker 13: focus into just like continuing to provide healthcare where it's like, oh,
Speaker 13: I'm so angry and I'm so mad and I feel
Speaker 13: so terrible. I Am going to make sure that this
Speaker 13: person gets an abortion. Like that's what I can do.
Speaker 13: I can I can get people to an appointment, and
Speaker 13: I don't I want to do more. I want to
Speaker 13: go and and just like raise everything to the ground
Speaker 13: and be like, like you were saying, but I can't
Speaker 13: be the only one doing that, Like we all have
Speaker 13: to do yeah, like we all have to raise everything
Speaker 13: in the ground because this is so untenable and so
Speaker 13: unfair and and is creating such a huge ripple of
Speaker 13: suffering that we're all going to be experiencing for decades.
Speaker 13: And I'm really bitter about it. I'm super angry and
Speaker 13: super bitter, and and it's not going to get better too,
Speaker 13: it's not I have to be honest about that, because
Speaker 13: if I'm not, then I'm not going to be prepared.
Speaker 13: But we're going to continue to see these bands, They're
Speaker 13: not going away right now. Then if a person issue
Speaker 13: is going to come back and we're going to keep
Speaker 13: seeing it and it's spreading, and you know, I know
Speaker 13: that that's like a whole other topic too, but the
Speaker 13: ripple effects are really immense. And every time someone is hurt,
Speaker 13: well every individual, like when I heard that thirty six
Speaker 13: thousand number, that really hurt, yeah, because you know, I
Speaker 13: know how many patients I've seen in the last year,
Speaker 13: and it is it's less than thirty six thousand. So like,
Speaker 13: every time I help someone, I'm so happy and I'm like, yes,
Speaker 13: you know, I helped this person get healthcare, I'm really happy.
Speaker 13: And then I look at that thirty six thousand number
Speaker 13: and I'm like, oh my god, there are so many
Speaker 13: other people who were not able to find help. And
Speaker 13: I'm and I don't like, like I said, like, I
Speaker 13: don't even feel good when someone is like thanking me
Speaker 13: and they oftentimes people will say, people will say to me,
Speaker 13: I hear this almost every day. You have no idea
Speaker 13: how grateful and thankful I am. And it's like, I
Speaker 13: really don't. I don't know because I'm not in your shoes.
Speaker 13: And I feel I'm and I'm sorry that I that
Speaker 13: you had to come to me like this, like I'm sorry,
Speaker 13: I feel I'm so sad in like such a deep
Speaker 13: visceral way that when someone is saying like you'll never
Speaker 13: know know how thankful I am that they just weren't
Speaker 13: able to go to their local doctor's office or even
Speaker 13: have the medication mail to them and and have it
Speaker 13: like come in like two days and just take it
Speaker 13: and follow up with the doctor on the phone if needed,
Speaker 13: you know, something super simple which would make sense. And
Speaker 13: I am just I'm I just I hate it. I
Speaker 13: fucking hate it. I just keep coming to that. I'm like,
Speaker 13: this is so bad, this is so bad. I'm gonna
Speaker 13: keep doing it, but it sucks.
Speaker 10: Yeah, we're gonna talk more about this next episode, and
Speaker 10: also how the things that we're seeing in abortion care
Speaker 10: have been spiraling out and spreading to other sectors of
Speaker 10: the healthcare system, including trends healthcare. But in the meantime,
Speaker 10: we have an enormous number of links to different abortion
Speaker 10: funds and various abortioned worker groups who also need your support,
Speaker 10: So yeah, please support them, and yeah, so that that's
Speaker 10: gonna be the next episode is because again again like
Speaker 10: this this isn't a you know, once you have like
Speaker 10: an evil like this has been unleashed into the world,
Speaker 10: it doesn't just stay in one place, right, It keeps moving,
Speaker 10: It keeps going after different people, it keeps expanding, and
Speaker 10: it keeps just rippling through the world. And so we're
Speaker 10: goen we talking about that, We're gonna be talking about yeah,
Speaker 10: you know, I mean, the fights that abortion workers have
Speaker 10: been having, and then we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 10: give you a brief bit of hope at the end
Speaker 10: of what you can do, because like, fuck it, the
Speaker 10: world does not need to be like this, Like this
Speaker 10: is not you know, I mean, there's there's the old
Speaker 10: David Graber lines like that is the ultimate hidden truth
Speaker 10: of this world is that it is something that we
Speaker 10: make and could just as easily make differently.
Speaker 13: Let's do it. Let's make it different.
Speaker 10: Yeah, let's fucking do that. It's not let's not let's
Speaker 10: not make a fucking immense engine of human suffering. Yeah,
Speaker 10: before we go for this episode, Uh, do you have
Speaker 10: stuff that you want to plug in terms of like
Speaker 10: abortion fund links, in terms of resources.
Speaker 13: Yeah, absolutely, so, I know that I was talking about
Speaker 13: just abortion funds in general. So find your local abortion fund,
Speaker 13: go to abortion funds dot org, and you know whatever
Speaker 13: your local abortion fund, support it. And if you feel
Speaker 13: like you you know your local abortion fund, like you've
Speaker 13: been supporting them or they get a lot of support
Speaker 13: and you want to support maybe like funds elsewhere that
Speaker 13: are doing doing the good work, then I would recommend
Speaker 13: the Texas Equal Access Fund, the T Fund in Texas.
Speaker 13: They are being so amazing and I love them. And
Speaker 13: also I know that the Chicago Abortion Fund is a
Speaker 13: huge fund, but I just I love them so much,
Speaker 13: so I just they can't have enough money. Just go
Speaker 13: donate too, They're so amazing. So Texas Equal Access Fund,
Speaker 13: the T Fund, the Chicago Abortion Fund, they're doing such
Speaker 13: important work. So you know, if you if you're looking
Speaker 13: for someone outside of your local abortion fund which you
Speaker 13: should be supporting, then also check them out as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 10: So, Crystal, thank you so much for joining us. We
Speaker 10: will be back tomorrow. We will be talking more about this.
Speaker 10: We'll be talking about what you can do. And yeah,
Speaker 10: until then, donate to your abortion funds and yeah, make
Speaker 10: make make the lives of the people who did this
Speaker 10: fucking miserable and destroy their political power. Yes, welcome, Dick,
Speaker 10: it happened here. The podcast for the situation continues to worsen.
Speaker 10: The thing that is worstening today is the rights war
Speaker 10: and abortion, which they are winning and are continuing to win,
Speaker 10: is not contained to simply abortion. It has been spreading.
Speaker 10: It has been getting worse. And yeah, with me to
Speaker 10: talk about it is Crystal, who once again is an
Speaker 10: abortion worker and abortion union organizer and on the on
Speaker 10: the on the board of a bail fund, not bail fund,
Speaker 10: Jesus Rist. Sorry, I'm getting my I'm getting my getting
Speaker 10: my funds crossed in my mind on the board of
Speaker 10: a of a of a Jesus Christ.
Speaker 13: Yeah, okay, sorry, sorry, I probably shouldn't have said that.
Speaker 10: No, no, no, no, this is this is entirely my fault
Speaker 10: because we've been doing so much bail fun stuff that.
Speaker 13: I mean, they're both good.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's like when my brain thinks fund, it just
Speaker 10: goes to it just goes to bail fund.
Speaker 13: Now all things that are good.
Speaker 10: Yeah, abortion funds that one. You know, we could just
Speaker 10: leave that and screw it, you know.
Speaker 8: It, Well, we'll leave We'll.
Speaker 10: Leave me doing that in we'll do it live rip
Speaker 10: and hell.
Speaker 8: Guy who said that.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Crystal, welcome back. Yeah, glad to be
Speaker 10: talking to you again.
Speaker 13: Love suffering. I love talking about pain and suffering and
Speaker 13: also the good work that we are doing to mitigate it,
Speaker 13: but also pain and suffering.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, so I guess yeah, I think we should
Speaker 10: start with sort of I don't know what frame it
Speaker 10: as a contagion is the right way to do it.
Speaker 10: I think it's probably not. But the way that the
Speaker 10: sort of the ripple like where where where are the
Speaker 10: sort of ripples of uh of of the sort of
Speaker 10: anti portion movements advance have been going.
Speaker 13: Yeah, because you know, if we're talking about you know,
Speaker 13: it's been a year since the jobs decision and Roe
Speaker 13: v Way was overturned. You know what does that mean?
Speaker 13: What does that imply? What would have been the what
Speaker 13: has been in kind of like the aftermath of that.
Speaker 13: The one thing is that, you know, the strategies to
Speaker 13: get to that point worked. And I really hate saying
Speaker 13: like in terms of like they won or we lost,
Speaker 13: because we're all we're in America, we're all losing. We're
Speaker 13: all losing here except for the fascists.
Speaker 5: But so.
Speaker 13: We we have we're seeing a lot of bad things
Speaker 13: happening because of the job's decision. And that's those strategies
Speaker 13: worked in our current political environment to get us to
Speaker 13: that point. And and I mentioned before you know it's
Speaker 13: death by a thousand cuts is kind of like one
Speaker 13: of the ways in which you can describe the strategies
Speaker 13: like NonStop bands, NonStop restrictions just a constant onslaught. Basically
Speaker 13: bands that are their copycat legislation. You know, they're they're
Speaker 13: being pumped out. People can just like literally plug in
Speaker 13: the templates and share them and it can be applied
Speaker 13: to a number of different things in different states and
Speaker 13: and copy copycat legislation. So it worked, and where we're
Speaker 13: we are because that strategy worked and did not get
Speaker 13: enough resistance, not enough was done to combat that strategy
Speaker 13: on the left with Democrats, and it immediately spread to
Speaker 13: the next autonomy based issue because and not saying that
Speaker 13: it didn't start before that, because you know, these fascists
Speaker 13: have been going after all kinds of issues of autonomy
Speaker 13: for decades, abortion being one of them, you know, prison,
Speaker 13: prison abolition being one of them, and then also trans
Speaker 13: healthcare and just you know LGBT in general, but like
Speaker 13: specifically trans healthcare that we have been seeing, we are
Speaker 13: seeing a lot of the same restrictions and bands UH
Speaker 13: spreading to that very quickly, like faster than I. I mean,
Speaker 13: like I knew things were bad. You would think that
Speaker 13: I would just like you know, expect the worst. But
Speaker 13: like I, I didn't think that we would see the
Speaker 13: legislation for the anti trans health UH healthcare and gender
Speaker 13: firming services legislation move as fast as it has, like
Speaker 13: I should have and I didn't, And it's been incredibly fast,
Speaker 13: and it feels so similar and I should I don't
Speaker 13: even want to say it feel similar. It is. It's
Speaker 13: when I when I'm seeing it happen, I'm like, this
Speaker 13: is the same thing. They're using trap laws, which are
Speaker 13: laws that so uh, target actual providers. I mean, I
Speaker 13: guess you can't really call them trap laws because abortion
Speaker 13: providers in that.
Speaker 10: But there's the whole trap thing which not going to
Speaker 10: get in WITHO.
Speaker 13: Yeah yeah, abortion services, but yeah. But uh, it's the
Speaker 13: same like type of restrictions and bands, and we're seeing
Speaker 13: them spread to those kinds of health care services, so
Speaker 13: it's impacting other types of health care services. And it's
Speaker 13: I and I'm seeing a lot of the same legal
Speaker 13: back and forth where it's like, oh, this law went
Speaker 13: into effectively, for example in Florida, and oh now it's
Speaker 13: being challenged in court, so it's it's not being it's
Speaker 13: not enforced right now, so it kind of go back
Speaker 13: goes back to the way it does before, which I mean,
Speaker 13: it's always good to see a restriction temporarily paused in
Speaker 13: a band temporarily paused because that relief is needed. I
Speaker 13: see that in abortion care. Like when when there is
Speaker 13: a band that is temporarily reversed by the courts, it
Speaker 13: is like, thank thank god, I'm so happy, you know,
Speaker 13: we get some really we can we can see people
Speaker 13: for their healthcare services tomorrow. However, that back and forth
Speaker 13: is incredibly confusing and creates confusion and chaos on a
Speaker 13: like on a mass scale, because it's like can I
Speaker 13: access these services? Can I not access these services? Can
Speaker 13: I get these services in the stage where I have
Speaker 13: to travel out of state? It's more than like the
Speaker 13: individual can keep up with and confusion is the point.
Speaker 13: So like when I'm seeing some of these bands related
Speaker 13: to trans health services, I'm like, Okay, you know, I'm
Speaker 13: glad that I'm pretty sure. I have to admit I
Speaker 13: have not read the news in the last couple of days,
Speaker 13: so I don't know if this has been walked back,
Speaker 13: but it seems like Florida has some relief right now.
Speaker 13: But I just know what that mass confusion looks like
Speaker 13: for individuals, And I'm like, this is so similar. Oh
Speaker 13: my god, this is this is the same type of fight.
Speaker 13: This is the same fight.
Speaker 10: And and I think, you know, because like this is
Speaker 10: also another thing with the media is just just like
Speaker 10: act of accomplices, Like this is this is a kind
Speaker 10: of thing where like it is really easy to look
Speaker 10: at this and go like they're doing this on purpose
Speaker 10: so they can generate fucking horror stories, which I don't
Speaker 10: think is why they're doing it. I think they're doing
Speaker 10: it because they're transphobed. But you know, like one of
Speaker 10: the one of the things is very that's just fucking
Speaker 10: awful about this stuff is that like the people who
Speaker 10: are reporting on this don't understand how these laws work.
Speaker 10: And so you know, like I mean, like I this
Speaker 10: is my job, right, Like I cover this for a living,
Speaker 10: and I will read a report about something and I
Speaker 10: can't tell what the law does because the person writing
Speaker 10: the fucking there's the stupid ass journalists who they've hired
Speaker 10: who like have never talked to a transperson in their life,
Speaker 10: and like are only tangentially aware of what the law is,
Speaker 10: like like the concept of the law is something they
Speaker 10: were introduced to two years ago. Like they don't fuck
Speaker 10: they don't fucking know what these bills do, right, so
Speaker 10: you have to like go actually read the bill, But
Speaker 10: that doesn't help because you know this this is yeah,
Speaker 10: this is like this is I think a very similar
Speaker 10: strategy of like there's there's this way in which like
Speaker 10: constant onslaught constant sort of confusion, constant terror. And also
Speaker 10: you know and the way that the strategy right now
Speaker 10: that that is being sort of relied on the stop
Speaker 10: this stuff is to the courts that that is very
Speaker 10: similar to what the entire struggle over abortion wies look like.
Speaker 10: And you know, we know how that ended it. It
Speaker 10: doesn't It didn't work, and it's not going to work
Speaker 10: with with with transpertes either, and like it, and and
Speaker 10: you know, and I think something that like we're we're
Speaker 10: going to see more of as you know, because like
Speaker 10: a water some of these bands will be struck down,
Speaker 10: but you know you're gonna get the abortion thing where
Speaker 10: it's like okay, so you like one bag gets struck down,
Speaker 10: so they pass another one. Then you just keep passing
Speaker 10: them until they can find one that their fucking judges
Speaker 10: will make.
Speaker 13: Yeah, and they like reintroduce bills that are like practically
Speaker 13: the same thing but like slightly different, and they just
Speaker 13: like retry stuff after doing like political shenanigans and and
Speaker 13: and we're still we're still doing the legal back and
Speaker 13: forth approach. And abortion care like it's still the same thing,
Speaker 13: like it hasn't changed. And seeing that also happen, it's like, well,
Speaker 13: people need health care now, like with abortion care and
Speaker 13: trans healthcare, it's like you need that health care when
Speaker 13: you need it, like right now today tomorrow, and when
Speaker 13: there is confusion and this back like the because the
Speaker 13: courts take forever like it, it's and it changes a lot,
Speaker 13: and it's confusing when you see the news stories like
Speaker 13: you were saying, So it's interfering and lowering the quality
Speaker 13: of accessing like lowering the quality of that healthcare and
Speaker 13: accessing that health care like the experience of accessing that
Speaker 13: health care now like today. And it's it's cumulative because
Speaker 13: like you, you lose the ability to keep track of
Speaker 13: what you have the right to do and what you
Speaker 13: don't and and these are these are the same, like
Speaker 13: they are issues of controlling your life and your body
Speaker 13: and of privacy is well, you know, your ability, it's
Speaker 13: like your business. It's your body, and the state is
Speaker 13: getting in the way. And and it hurts so much
Speaker 13: to see this happening to even more people, because it's
Speaker 13: it's hard enough watching what happens to people who need
Speaker 13: abortions and seeing what they go through, and then having
Speaker 13: to see even more people who are also trying to
Speaker 13: access healthcare to help them have control over their lives
Speaker 13: and their bodies also having that, you know, having that
Speaker 13: impeded and and and and taken away from them too
Speaker 13: with a different type of health care, and seeing like
Speaker 13: that is just like, oh my god, Like not only
Speaker 13: were we able, we were not able to maintain these
Speaker 13: services in this country, and we're also seeing it happened
Speaker 13: to another type of health care. And and another thing
Speaker 13: too is like abortion providers are also trans healthcare providers.
Speaker 13: Like yeah, it's it's like body stuff. It's like you know,
Speaker 13: like it's they're they're like often the same building.
Speaker 10: Yeah, like plant planned parenthood does both. Yeah, people who
Speaker 10: get runs through your planned parenthood.
Speaker 13: Because and a lot of independent clinics to a lot
Speaker 13: of independent abortion providers also provide trans healthcare as well.
Speaker 13: And gender hormones, uh, gender hormone. I keep saying gender hormone,
Speaker 13: even though that doesn't make any hormone therapy services and
Speaker 13: gender for me, I feel like I'm like combining those together.
Speaker 13: But they offer both.
Speaker 10: Yeah, But but that also means that like if you
Speaker 10: if if you knock out a clinic for like for
Speaker 10: one of the reasons, you've also knocked out the services
Speaker 10: for everyone else too, righte. So like it's you know,
Speaker 10: and I think this is something that's very important about
Speaker 10: the way the right seas is that the right seas
Speaker 10: this has the same fight very clearly, and that I
Speaker 10: don't know. I mean, I think I think in terms
Speaker 10: of the people who actually do organizing, I think it's
Speaker 10: it like it's understood that it is the same fight,
Speaker 10: but I don't think it is as much in the
Speaker 10: general republic, even though the like for the people you're
Speaker 10: fighting against, they are you know, incredibly like viscerally and
Speaker 10: disturbingly clear about like what they want to do and
Speaker 10: about the fact that you know, like destroying people's autonomies
Speaker 10: and using the state to take control of me just
Speaker 10: like literally physically take control of their bodies and define
Speaker 10: what they are, which is something they do, like you
Speaker 10: know what I mean, then this is this is this
Speaker 10: is the thing that's been happening in these anti transpils too,
Speaker 10: is like they've been like like legally defining what a
Speaker 10: woman is by like reproductive apparatuses and stuff like that.
Speaker 13: Yeah, and that that's disgusting and and and it makes
Speaker 13: me feel just like disgusted as like just like seeing
Speaker 13: that because like I feel like I don't even like
Speaker 13: fit some of the criteria that no as a says woman.
Speaker 13: I feel like it like and I'm just like oh
Speaker 13: my god. And we're also like we're punishing people for
Speaker 13: not having like perfect health and like perfect pregnancies and
Speaker 13: being born into the body that you know what I mean,
Speaker 13: Like people are being punished for not being the ideal
Speaker 13: cause like and I've asked, I've like stupidly asked this
Speaker 13: out loud, where I'm like, you know, I've asked out loud,
Speaker 13: like why are these bands so restrictive where people who
Speaker 13: are pregnant and you know, like they're just not having
Speaker 13: a perfect pregnancy, like there are complications like which which happened,
Speaker 13: and they're like being punished for not having the perfect
Speaker 13: pregnancy by these laws, like these abortion restrictions. And I'm
Speaker 13: like why would they do that, Like why like how
Speaker 13: can you not know that pregnancies go wrong? And how
Speaker 13: would you not know that? And then somebody said to
Speaker 13: me they were like, well, you know, like E've was
Speaker 13: punished with the ability with dangerous pregnancies, like if you
Speaker 13: look at their religion, like it was a punishment. So
Speaker 13: I'm like, yeah, like they're they just believe we should
Speaker 13: be like punished for not being born in the right body,
Speaker 13: not having the perfect pregnancy, not wanting a pregnancy, you know,
Speaker 13: like you're being punished for not and having the ideal
Speaker 13: because they believe that it is a it's a punishment
Speaker 13: just like in I guess I'm trying to think of
Speaker 13: the word like naturally intrinsically or something. I don't know,
Speaker 13: and I don't subscribe to that ideology, but it's being
Speaker 13: forced on us.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, And I mean I think there's this way
Speaker 10: in which people have people have this tendency to conceive
Speaker 10: of like neoliberalism, right specifically as this thing that's about
Speaker 10: like the retreat, the retreat of state power, and that's
Speaker 10: never been what it is, right what Like you know,
Speaker 10: if you if you look at what neoliberalism actually looks like,
Speaker 10: it's fucking abortion bands, right, Like the people who are
Speaker 10: pushing that are the people who push Reagan into office.
Speaker 10: The actual point of the state in neoliberalism and this
Speaker 10: and you know, and this is one that's incredibly compatible
Speaker 10: with the sort of like with the sort of religious
Speaker 10: fascists that they allied themselves with in order to come
Speaker 10: into power. Right, the way that's actually manifested is is
Speaker 10: just through the state directly taking control of your body.
Speaker 10: Because you know, like people, people aren't actually fucking natural
Speaker 10: market subjects. They're not Like a woman is not as
Speaker 10: as these like stupid assholes always insist is like, oh,
Speaker 10: someone who gives birth, Like no, that's just like not true.
Speaker 10: That's not true. It's not and so and because it's
Speaker 10: not right. But people, because that's the image that they
Speaker 10: have to like force you into. The only way they
Speaker 10: can do that is by using state violence to physically
Speaker 10: take control as your body and shape you into the
Speaker 10: thing that they think you are.
Speaker 13: Yep, yep. And and they're like none of this stuff
Speaker 13: is siloed, like you know, like pregnancy is related to abortion,
Speaker 13: care is related to just like trans care is like
Speaker 13: embedded in all of that as well. Uh, trans people
Speaker 13: get pregnant and have abortions. And also in terms of
Speaker 13: hormone therapy more like you know, like people besides trans
Speaker 13: people need hormone therapy as well. Like, like none of
Speaker 13: these things are a silo by themselves. They're all kind
Speaker 13: of embedded together, and the effect of that is that
Speaker 13: it's kind of become impossible to be a doctor and
Speaker 13: a healthcare provider for a lot of these services because
Speaker 13: they're so entwined and because like you know, we all
Speaker 13: we have our bodies, and like our bodies aren't in
Speaker 13: separate like can take our body parts, aren't in separate containers,
Speaker 13: Like they're all like we're like all connected, Like it's
Speaker 13: all connected, and you can't really have one without the other.
Speaker 13: And now we're seeing doctors who can't safely do there
Speaker 13: what they have to do, like provide like the healthcare
Speaker 13: to like appropriate medical standards within these laws that exist.
Speaker 13: So you see doctors who are like, wow, I can't
Speaker 13: actually perform the healthcare that I need to perform without
Speaker 13: potentially losing my license, so I'm just going to leave
Speaker 13: the state. So you see a lot of doctors. Uh,
Speaker 13: there's been a lot of news stories about doctors, particularly
Speaker 13: the ones that I've seen. I'm sure that there's other
Speaker 13: types of doctors too, but like you know, obstetricians and
Speaker 13: obgyns who are leaving states because they cannot safely practice
Speaker 13: the medicine as it's as you know, as science and
Speaker 13: medicine wants them to, you know that without risking losing
Speaker 13: their license. So they're just leaving and these are states
Speaker 13: that need those doctors. I mean, there's a lot that
Speaker 13: can be said about maternal and infomortality rates in the
Speaker 13: United States. So the fact that you have obg i
Speaker 13: ns like fleeing states, and I'm sure these are states
Speaker 13: that need those doctors and have low standard like low
Speaker 13: or have just like low quality outcomes or like bad
Speaker 13: outcomes when it comes to maternal and infomortality. And you're
Speaker 13: seeing this and it's like, well, this is just making
Speaker 13: all kinds of health care worse, Like it's becoming less
Speaker 13: safe to just be pregnant in general, even if you
Speaker 13: are caring and delivering a pregnancy in these states. And
Speaker 13: I'm sure that you're going to see this also happen
Speaker 13: because of these trans healthcare bands and say you're going
Speaker 13: to see doctors fleeing in areas in which those doctors
Speaker 13: are needed because they are risk of losing their license
Speaker 13: and not being able to practice.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 10: And another thing I think that's very similar between these
Speaker 10: two things is like there's just not that you know,
Speaker 10: we've we've talked about this more broadly, like in a
Speaker 10: lot of the and and a lot of the comforts
Speaker 10: are like I've done on the show about labor stuff,
Speaker 10: my healthcare. Labor is that like just everywhere, even even
Speaker 10: in even in sectors where like there's no there's no
Speaker 10: sort of legal threat, right, there's They're just massive labor
Speaker 10: shortages because these these for these for profit healthcare companies
Speaker 10: are you know, don't want to fucking bring in another
Speaker 10: person on a shift because that costing more money and
Speaker 10: that's less money than they can pocket. And you know,
Speaker 10: and yeah, and and and and but and both both
Speaker 10: abortion services and trans healthcare are fields. I mean there
Speaker 10: are just there's just not that many people. Like they're
Speaker 10: just like the the the numbers are so small that
Speaker 10: like like I can I can ask my friends and
Speaker 10: they know like every provider in the city.
Speaker 13: Yep, oh yeah, and it's like two providers, yeah, like
Speaker 13: like two places to get hormones.
Speaker 14: It's like and and this and and again this isn't
Speaker 14: like I live in Chicago, right, this is a place
Speaker 14: where it's like it's pretty easy to get hormones, right
Speaker 14: compared to I mean this is this is like one
Speaker 14: narratively yeah, well but I mean like genuiney like this
Speaker 14: is a this is the thing we you know, this
Speaker 14: is like if you want to get like look at
Speaker 14: other parallels. Right, this is like Chicago has always been
Speaker 14: I mean not always, but for I mean like half
Speaker 14: a century, probably longer than that, has been a place
Speaker 14: where people like trans people from around the country, particularly
Speaker 14: from the South, have like uprooted their lives and fled
Speaker 14: to because it was a place where you could actually
Speaker 14: get care and you know, but like but even here,
Speaker 14: it's fucking hard as ship.
Speaker 13: Like yeah, it's really.
Speaker 10: Hard, and you know, and and a lot like the
Speaker 10: like like my one of one of the local clinics
Speaker 10: has been on strike for months and months and months
Speaker 10: because they're the place that they work for, like slash
Speaker 10: a bunch of services, and so in this like this
Speaker 10: this kind of struggle is you know, like this is
Speaker 10: this is the thing that's happening in places where it's
Speaker 10: even where it's legal, and then suddenly the state bans it,
Speaker 10: and suddenly, you know, people are leaving the field, people
Speaker 10: are leaving states. Becomes even harder, the services that already
Speaker 10: exist just even more over tax and it's just like
Speaker 10: it's the exact same like collapse just like rippling through
Speaker 10: the entire sector.
Speaker 13: And none of these jobs pay a lot either, Like yeah,
Speaker 13: like I just in general, like I'm sure, like I'm
Speaker 13: not citing a specific job, but I'm sure that's there
Speaker 13: are abortion providers like who are like medical assistants and
Speaker 13: hormone therapy like medical assistants that are making like fifteen
Speaker 13: bucks an hour, which is ridiculous considering you're also being
Speaker 13: threatened with violence. You're also having to deal with patients
Speaker 13: who who are also experiencing the same national health crisis
Speaker 13: that you are, Like you're experiencing it together, Like this
Speaker 13: is something like it's not like, oh, I'm suffering by
Speaker 13: myself as a worker, or oh, these patients are suffering
Speaker 13: as individual I mean they are suffering into visual but
Speaker 13: you know, like they're not suffering alone as individuals. They're
Speaker 13: experiencing like the same sort of like grief is like
Speaker 13: a lot of the other people who are accessing the
Speaker 13: same services as them. And it's like, while we are
Speaker 13: all in this sinking boat together, and and it's so
Speaker 13: hard to recruit into these roles, so like we need
Speaker 13: more more abortion care and trans health providers, and it's
Speaker 13: hard to get people to commit to that when you
Speaker 13: you can't live on that and you can't sustain that,
Speaker 13: like you can't stay in that job and keep doing
Speaker 13: it for years when you're literally being like you're you're
Speaker 13: you're being traumatized, you're experiencing suffering, You're witnessing suffering.
Speaker 10: No, I mean that I'm killed like that, that's a
Speaker 10: real thing that happens to threatened. Yeah, like.
Speaker 13: Just like like violent threats are something that both types
Speaker 13: of health services have in common now, which is so depressing,
Speaker 13: but uh, it's we're all we're all being threatened by
Speaker 13: by the right and by fascists. Like I try to
Speaker 13: like sometimes it's like the right conservatives, I'm like, they're fascists.
Speaker 13: They're there, it's fascism.
Speaker 10: There's literally like a lot of these people like to
Speaker 10: show up to this stuff. It's it's like it's literally
Speaker 10: the same groups as proud boys who show up to
Speaker 10: like different things over and over again, and they get
Speaker 10: relabeled by the media as like concerned parents or like
Speaker 10: the Christian outreach groups, depending on like what thing they're at.
Speaker 10: It's like, okay, these no, like these are fascists who
Speaker 10: tried to overthrow the governments and seize power like this,
Speaker 10: this is this, this is three years ago.
Speaker 13: Like come on, yeah, like these are people who are
Speaker 13: actually they are ruining the lives of my loved ones
Speaker 13: and people in my community, like my neighbors like they
Speaker 13: are ruining my and my neighbors' lives like actively in
Speaker 13: ways that are just getting worse. So it is one
Speaker 13: fight I really want everyone to realize that. I feel
Speaker 13: like it is being realized more and more now. But
Speaker 13: you know, the more people who learn it, the better
Speaker 13: and the ways in which just I just feel like
Speaker 13: the DABS decision and the overturn of Robi Wade meant
Speaker 13: more than just people couldn't get abortions. I think it's
Speaker 13: just the destruction of healthcare in general in this country
Speaker 13: and it turned it into like just like a mad
Speaker 13: dash to do the exact same thing to health services
Speaker 13: that trans people need.
Speaker 10: Yeah, so fun another one of the parts of this fight,
Speaker 10: and I think the part of this fight that is
Speaker 10: the least popular in terms of like who will actually
Speaker 10: back you, which is both like healthcare workers both doing
Speaker 10: abortion care and who during trans healthcare fighting what is
Speaker 10: essentially like a three way war where they are they
Speaker 10: are under assault from the right and from the state
Speaker 10: who are trying to criminalize the healthcare that they provide
Speaker 10: and you know, directly target them through trap laws and
Speaker 10: through that. I don't we need to figure out what
Speaker 10: their name for the version of the anti translorts. But
Speaker 10: you know, so they're being specifically targeted by the state,
Speaker 10: and then they're also fighting a conflict with their own
Speaker 10: employers and whether that's whether that's private healthcare providers or
Speaker 10: that's NGOs who are you know, don't want to pay
Speaker 10: them shit, you know, our funnel are funneling all of
Speaker 10: this fucking money into paying somebody's fucking dipshit cousin like
Speaker 10: three hundred thousand dollars a year to be like the
Speaker 10: device executive director of like policy marketing or something. And yeah,
Speaker 10: and and and the way, the way in which you
Speaker 10: know this this is this has turned into a union
Speaker 10: struggle that is deeply like it kind of in a
Speaker 10: lot of ways, deeply unpopular among liberals because they just
Speaker 10: don't they don't see like healthcare providers as workers.
Speaker 13: Yeah, it has been such a strange experience union organizing
Speaker 13: and and and contract negotiating during a national health crisis.
Speaker 13: And after the fall up Ruby Wait, it was so like,
Speaker 13: you know, ruby Wait is overturned and we got to
Speaker 13: go to the barging table, and that's where money and
Speaker 13: it's it's it's definitely it's it's it's really hard because
Speaker 13: this stress is so compounded for all of the workers.
Speaker 13: And I know I've had uh peers in the kemmunity
Speaker 13: and the abortion providing and abortion advocacy community say things like,
Speaker 13: you know, you expect a snake to be a snake,
Speaker 13: Like you know that the right is going to attack
Speaker 13: you and the fascists are going to do whatever they
Speaker 13: can to take away your right to autonomy and privacy.
Speaker 13: But it hurts a lot more. Like personally, I think
Speaker 13: it hurts so much more. And it's been so painful
Speaker 13: in the last year to see the ways in which
Speaker 13: the people on our side, the people who have the
Speaker 13: same goals as us, ultimately like of like, you know,
Speaker 13: we want people to have abortions and we want people
Speaker 13: to access health care, and they are to have them
Speaker 13: hurt you, yeah, because yeah, because like they're not supposed
Speaker 13: to be snakes, And it hurts. It hurts a lot more.
Speaker 13: And a lot of the same people don't. I feel
Speaker 13: like they're the same kind of folks who didn't understand
Speaker 13: the immediacy of needing to protect because so you know, LGBT,
Speaker 13: I feel like we should have gone harder for the tea,
Speaker 13: you know, like all these years, like how long has
Speaker 13: we have we had the acronym lgbt and like, and
Speaker 13: it's like this whole time, it's like we like we
Speaker 13: could have seen this coming. We shouldn't. It was like
Speaker 13: it clearly was like the same with Roe v wa
Speaker 13: where it's like they are coming for Roe v Wade,
Speaker 13: this is coming. We could have done so much more
Speaker 13: to prepare. And I feel like in the a lot
Speaker 13: of the same way, the same people who are like
Speaker 13: devaluing the labor who didn't do enough to protect abortion
Speaker 13: services are the same people who didn't do enough to
Speaker 13: protect just like trans people in general.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and I think there's like there's I think there's
Speaker 10: definitely a sort of expendability thing there too, right, I
Speaker 10: mean this is something that it's like very explicitly in
Speaker 10: the two thousands, like the sort of I don't know
Speaker 10: what the technical term for them is, but like big.
Speaker 13: Gay, like you know, the big big abortion and big gay.
Speaker 10: Yeah, well the big the big sort of like LGBTQ
Speaker 10: like NGOs. Right, You're like human rights campaign like groups
Speaker 10: like that very explicitly made a decision in the two
Speaker 10: thousands where they were like, Okay, we're gonna drop our
Speaker 10: demands for stuff like trans healthcare and trans recognition in
Speaker 10: order to sort of build a broader base to get
Speaker 10: like gay marriage and shit. And that that was a
Speaker 10: very expos decision that they made, and you know, and
Speaker 10: it worked for them, right, Like yeah, like we got
Speaker 10: gay marriage, right.
Speaker 8: Well we didn't.
Speaker 13: Well we didn't.
Speaker 10: Actually we got through the fucking courts, not through like
Speaker 10: the legal process, right, and it took ages too, but
Speaker 10: like yeah, but like that was you know, and like
Speaker 10: they they eventually sort of came back around him, were like,
Speaker 10: we're trans allies. But then you know, all of the
Speaker 10: shit was happening. I mean, so this has been going
Speaker 10: on since like twenty like twenty sixteen, right is like
Speaker 10: the first like the first bathroom bills start, and you know,
Speaker 10: I mean it was over half a decade where things
Speaker 10: could have been done and they just weren't. And you know,
Speaker 10: like it's it's the it's the same thing, like like
Speaker 10: people just get used as like people's health just gets
Speaker 10: in their bodies get used as bargaining chips.
Speaker 11: Yep.
Speaker 13: And I feel like in these all of these situations
Speaker 13: that we're talking about, it's not looking out for the
Speaker 13: most vulnerable because so if you're talking about you know,
Speaker 13: healthcare and I don't want to say women's rights. I
Speaker 13: mean it used to be women's rights, and then now
Speaker 13: it's just like you know, like abortion access and you're
Speaker 13: not looking like who needs this the most, and you're
Speaker 13: not looking out for the most vulnerable. And part of
Speaker 13: that part of it in terms of abortion services is
Speaker 13: the compromising, you know, compromising on bands like, oh, a
Speaker 13: fifteen week abortion ban is reasonable. No it's not. No
Speaker 13: abortion of ban is reasonable. But so that's what abortion services.
Speaker 13: And then with the fight for queer liberation, you know,
Speaker 13: who's the most vulnerable will trans people have been the
Speaker 13: most vulnerable and not looking out for them? And then
Speaker 13: the frontline workers, Like who's the most vulnerable when it
Speaker 13: comes to people doing this work providing these services? The
Speaker 13: frontline workers, the people who don't who don't make much
Speaker 13: who you know, the people who aren't managers or CEOs
Speaker 13: and I mean like you know, senior management and CEOs
Speaker 13: and things like that, are are They're in different situations
Speaker 13: than the people who are answering the phone and scheduling
Speaker 13: and talking to the patients and taking their blood pressure
Speaker 13: and giving them their medication. And yeah, it's just not
Speaker 13: looking out for the people in the most vulnerable situations.
Speaker 13: It's killing us. It's literally killing us.
Speaker 8: You have to.
Speaker 13: It's just so much focus on the wrong things when
Speaker 13: we really should be focused on the most vulnerable all
Speaker 13: around it.
Speaker 10: And I think also like the extent to which all
Speaker 10: of these struggles are labor struggles, right, I mean, this
Speaker 10: is one of the things about trans healthcare as we
Speaker 10: talked about it that much, is that, like I think
Speaker 10: this is sort of a product of like the kinds
Speaker 10: of trans people who get representation. But you like, I
Speaker 10: think there's a lot of people who think that, like
Speaker 10: the average transperson is like a fucking tech worker in California,
Speaker 10: And it's like no, like the like the the the
Speaker 10: the the actual like median trans person like works at
Speaker 10: a works at a EPs warehouse or you know, it's
Speaker 10: like a vet tech or like you know, does all
Speaker 10: of this shit that you know works like just really
Speaker 10: shitty service jobs and like you know, the stuff for
Speaker 10: like like I mean struggles like we're not even having
Speaker 10: because we're we've been like kicked all the way back
Speaker 10: down to like can we legally exist? But like you know,
Speaker 10: things like like people getting housing right, like that that
Speaker 10: kind of stuff, like those are labor struggles. The struggle
Speaker 10: for abortion is is also labor struggle because like again,
Speaker 10: like you can't fucking have abortions without workers who do
Speaker 10: the abortions. Like they don't, they don't just magically spring
Speaker 10: fully formed from like the mind of an ngo.
Speaker 13: Like and also like I mean you need you need
Speaker 13: labor protections in order to access healthcare. It's just a fact. Yeah,
Speaker 13: like you know, because that's just yet another obstacle that
Speaker 13: patients are experiencing, is getting off work. Like yeah, you
Speaker 13: got kids and you got to like fly to like
Speaker 13: across the country to access healthcare services, and you got
Speaker 13: to recover from those healthcare services, and it's like you
Speaker 13: got to have PTO and like how many people don't
Speaker 13: have that?
Speaker 10: Yeah, And it works the other way too, right, where
Speaker 10: like like this is the thing we've been seeing with Starbucks.
Speaker 10: We've been seeing this as at Google too, people trying
Speaker 10: to unionize. Is like having healthcare is a is a
Speaker 10: thing that your your work uses and like hangs over
Speaker 10: your head like to control you. And this has been
Speaker 10: an explicit thing. Like Starbucks specifically did this thing where
Speaker 10: they're like, well, if you try to unionize, like we
Speaker 10: can't guarantee you're gonna have like we're gonna like get
Speaker 10: ready your trans healthcare.
Speaker 13: Oh jesus.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and like you know, like this kind of like
Speaker 10: you know that that's like them just like dropping the
Speaker 10: mask and saying the quiet part loud, but like you know,
Speaker 10: like people's people's access to healthcare is an enormous and
Speaker 10: busting tactic. So it's it's literally just like on both
Speaker 10: sides of the struggle like it is.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 10: It is just at all levels of labor struggle, and
Speaker 10: it's not thought of like that.
Speaker 13: Yeah, and again, like I know, I brought up silos
Speaker 13: before in terms of like types of healthcare, but the
Speaker 13: same silos. It's kind of like a liberal it's like
Speaker 13: liberal siloing where you're separating the issues and you can't.
Speaker 13: They're all connected. Abortion care, pregnancy care, raising your families,
Speaker 13: police violence, prison abolition, trans healthcare, labor rights, unionizing, they're
Speaker 13: all connected, and we don't connect the dots enough. I
Speaker 13: think in this country, at least the people who have
Speaker 13: power don't. And I think the separation of these issues
Speaker 13: has has really hurt us. And we're stronger together, you know,
Speaker 13: safety and solidarity and all that. So if we if
Speaker 13: every abortion care worker and abortion volunteer, abortion advocate, and
Speaker 13: you know, a queer liberation advocate, trans health advocate, just
Speaker 13: transliberation advocate, union organizer, no union member, even if you're
Speaker 13: like working for if you're a plumber. You know, if
Speaker 13: we all can identify that we have are it's all
Speaker 13: one fight and it's all connected, will be better off
Speaker 13: for it.
Speaker 10: So yeah, if we can. Yeah, And I think something
Speaker 10: that's also is really important is that like I mean
Speaker 10: this is historically, like you know, if you want to
Speaker 10: look at how working classic wents are defeated, it's you
Speaker 10: pick people off by finding something that you know, like
Speaker 10: for example, like like one of one of the ways
Speaker 10: you can sort of beat a worker's movement is by
Speaker 10: like that movement not dealing with the sort of rapid
Speaker 10: patriarchy and the movements. And you know, you can radicalize
Speaker 10: people to the right by just sort of like by
Speaker 10: like doing sort of missagist politics, or you can do
Speaker 10: the thing that like the you know this is this
Speaker 10: is the sort of the Christian democratic strategy in uh,
Speaker 10: like in Europe was you know, they they they recognize
Speaker 10: that the workers roupments like weren't really like organizing women
Speaker 10: in any substantive way, and so they you know, they
Speaker 10: were able to create this massive sort of anti communist
Speaker 10: like like center right bulwark against like organized labor by
Speaker 10: like actually organizing women, right, and you know, and this
Speaker 10: is this is something that they sort of do everywhere,
Speaker 10: which is like yeah, like if if if, if you,
Speaker 10: if you aren't fighting all of these things at the
Speaker 10: same time and conceptualizing you at the same time, like
Speaker 10: you will get you will get picked apart one by
Speaker 10: one in your individual struggle and movement will collapse and die.
Speaker 10: And that's really hard. And you know, like the deck
Speaker 10: has been stacked against us, but that that's that's the
Speaker 10: cards that we have, and yeah, we have to deal
Speaker 10: with them.
Speaker 13: And to to like be a little bit to look
Speaker 13: more like on the positive side, because like you know,
Speaker 13: it's like, yeah, we've had our asses kicked and we've
Speaker 13: lost so much. We have lost so much, We've lost
Speaker 13: so many of our basic human rights in this country.
Speaker 13: But like abortions are still happening, and TRANSHLTH is still
Speaker 13: being provided, and there are communities looking out for people
Speaker 13: who are in need of these services and in need
Speaker 13: of safety because like it's not just about the basic
Speaker 13: health services, but you know, you have to be safe. Well,
Speaker 13: you know, if you're pregnant and you need healthcare, you
Speaker 13: want to be safe. And then also if you're like
Speaker 13: a trans individual and you don't feel safe, it's helpful
Speaker 13: to have those organizations there. Yeah, exactly, That's totally what
Speaker 13: I have in mind. And on the right side, like
Speaker 13: that is like those are still being like the healthcare
Speaker 13: is still being provided even if it has been decimated
Speaker 13: and people are having to move mountains in order to
Speaker 13: get there. You know, abortions are happening, and every day
Speaker 13: I'm still do and I'm still getting people abortions. There
Speaker 13: are workers who are helping people get the health care
Speaker 13: that they need, the hormones that they need, and there
Speaker 13: are people like you know, teaching defense and security and
Speaker 13: working together. And we need to continue to do this
Speaker 13: because I you know, I am really angry and I
Speaker 13: am really just fucked in the head now because of
Speaker 13: everything that I've experienced and had to witness, and it's
Speaker 13: soul crushing, but I just keep doing it because that
Speaker 13: it just needs to happen.
Speaker 8: Like this.
Speaker 13: People need this healthcare, people need this information. People need
Speaker 13: to be connected safety and solidarity, and I just you know,
Speaker 13: we have to keep going, like you know, so we
Speaker 13: have to defend the workers providing these services. We have
Speaker 13: to defend people accessing these services, whether it's abortion or
Speaker 13: trans health, and we need to just keep doing it
Speaker 13: no matter how awful we feel. And you know, this
Speaker 13: has been an incredibly hard year and I have had
Speaker 13: conversations that I never would have wanted to have ever
Speaker 13: and that are hard to carry with me. And I'm
Speaker 13: going to carry these conversations. You know, these memories are
Speaker 13: like in my head now and then I have them
Speaker 13: for the rest of my life maybe, and they're they're
Speaker 13: in my head, you know, they're there. I've it's happened.
Speaker 13: And I'm just really grateful for the other people doing
Speaker 13: this work and that they're there and that I'm not
Speaker 13: the only one feeling this way, and that we have
Speaker 13: each other's backs and that we we do have the
Speaker 13: same fight. Like knowing that we have the same fight,
Speaker 13: I'm like, you know that solidarity means means everything right now,
Speaker 13: because it's more than just like winning or losing, Like, yeah,
Speaker 13: we've we've lost a lot, and we're continuing to lose
Speaker 13: a lot, but we're all still here and we all
Speaker 13: still need. We still need, like we need to just
Speaker 13: take care of ourselves and each other still. So I'm
Speaker 13: going to keep doing this work. I know that other
Speaker 13: people are going to keep doing this work, and I
Speaker 13: know that there will always be help available. Whether you know,
Speaker 13: finding it is one thing, but I know that it
Speaker 13: will always be there, and I try to take solace
Speaker 13: in that because this is this is a collective trauma
Speaker 13: that our generation is going to see out for the
Speaker 13: rest of our lives, and it's going to bleed into
Speaker 13: the next generation. And there's a lot I hope for,
Speaker 13: you know, before I die, there's a lot I hope
Speaker 13: to see. So I hope that I see it to
Speaker 13: end this on a positive note because I know at
Speaker 13: the very beginning, I know, like when we first started
Speaker 13: talking Mia, I saw we wanted to end in a
Speaker 13: positive note. So that involves me sharing like the thing
Speaker 13: that cheers me up the most and that like pushes
Speaker 13: all the right buttons for me. But there have been
Speaker 13: some good things terms of like abortion access in the
Speaker 13: last six months, So I want to share that it
Speaker 13: all starts. It starts with partners Clinic uh. They Partner's
Speaker 13: Clinic is an ull trimester clinic in in Maryland and
Speaker 13: they opened this year and they were doing fundraising, and
Speaker 13: first of all, they're amazing. They're an amazing team of workers,
Speaker 13: amazing abortion providers. I love Partners Clinic there. I just
Speaker 13: I could not, I cannot praise them enough. And they
Speaker 13: they were fundraising to open their clinic and have everything
Speaker 13: that they need and you know, you know, have money
Speaker 13: for staff and everything. And it was picked up by
Speaker 13: prison Culture, uh more commonly that's like her online handle.
Speaker 13: A lot of people like know her as prison Culture,
Speaker 13: but Mariamikaba and she started fundraising for them, and she
Speaker 13: was a to help so much that they surpass their
Speaker 13: goal and they opened and now we have another all
Speaker 13: trimester abortion clinic in the United States, staffed by the
Speaker 13: most compassionate, amazing, hardworking individuals. And that cheered me up
Speaker 13: so much because I obviously love Mary Amacaba and prison abolition.
Speaker 13: I know, I'm a prison abolitionist, so seeing her like
Speaker 13: seeing her see how the issues are connected that they're
Speaker 13: like that, you know, they go together, and organizing for
Speaker 13: that on top of the work that she is already
Speaker 13: doing for abolition. I was just like so happy to
Speaker 13: see that. And on the topic of all trimester abortion clinics,
Speaker 13: there is another one opening up as well, and this
Speaker 13: cheers me up immensely as well. They are called the
Speaker 13: Valley Abortion Group. They're not open yet, they're currently unraising.
Speaker 13: I could probably send you the link to post maybe. Yeah,
Speaker 13: so they're not open yet, but you know, they're getting there.
Speaker 13: And they're called the Value Abortion Group. They're gonna be
Speaker 13: another ultrimester clinic and they're going to be located in
Speaker 13: New Mexico and they're I just want to point out
Speaker 13: that their acronym is VAGE, which I just I think
Speaker 13: is really important to point out.
Speaker 5: Hell.
Speaker 13: Yeah, so you know, we saw Partners open and that
Speaker 13: was amazing, and now we're going to have another one
Speaker 13: opening up and that's amazing. So, you know, love and
Speaker 13: support for Value Abortion Group because honestly, the more we
Speaker 13: need a abortion clinics period, like we need more of them,
Speaker 13: but especially all trimester, especially now that these bands have
Speaker 13: been pushing people further and further along into the pregnancy
Speaker 13: before they can access these services. It's so important for
Speaker 13: them to exist. And on this topic, I also want
Speaker 13: to bring up that you know, there are stories out
Speaker 13: there of people who it takes them six months to
Speaker 13: get an abortion appointment. Six months, Chris, I just want
Speaker 13: to bring that up because that's happening. Because I know
Speaker 13: that I've said like five weeks a lot while we're talking,
Speaker 13: but like it takes some people six months. So it's
Speaker 13: really important for these ultrimester abortion clinics to exist and
Speaker 13: for us and the communities that we're part of to
Speaker 13: welcome them with open arms and like big love. And
Speaker 13: also on the same topic of good news things that
Speaker 13: cheer me up, prison abolition, abortion access, all of these
Speaker 13: good good topics, prison culture Mary Macaba is now fundraising
Speaker 13: for another abortion practical support group, and I have to
Speaker 13: mention this up because mention this because this fundraising is
Speaker 13: happening right now. So if you go to prison Cultures Twitter,
Speaker 13: she's like fundraising for it every single day, but she
Speaker 13: is fundraising for the Online Abortion Resource Squad, So Online
Speaker 13: Abortion Resource Squad or OARS for short. What they are
Speaker 13: is they are a entirely volunteer organization, which is why
Speaker 13: they need to pay them for their labor. This is
Speaker 13: really important work that monitors, moderates, and provides quality posts
Speaker 13: on our abortion was our slash abortion. How should I
Speaker 13: read that? So basically our slash abortion. So the reddit
Speaker 13: the subreddit for just abortion on Reddit, which I think
Speaker 13: that like when I immediately say that, some people might
Speaker 13: not realize how important that is. But as these bands
Speaker 13: have just spread and gotten worse and the abortion access
Speaker 13: doesorts have widened, it is so important for people to
Speaker 13: be able to access quality information, and a lot of
Speaker 13: people go to Reddit, Like so many people go to
Speaker 13: Reddit to find out information. So like the daily page
Speaker 13: hits for our slash abortion is just up and up
Speaker 13: and up and up. And there's a group of volunteers
Speaker 13: that you know, like donate their their their hours, their
Speaker 13: free time, you know, their energy to to give people
Speaker 13: the answers that they're looking for and to like walk
Speaker 13: them through a process. Because a lot of people, you know,
Speaker 13: they want to help, so they post links. So they're like, oh,
Speaker 13: you you're in a band state and you can't access services,
Speaker 13: so they just post a link to I don't know,
Speaker 13: like aid access. But it's more than it's not that easy,
Speaker 13: Like you can't just like give somebody a link to
Speaker 13: aid access and be like here's your abortion. No, like
Speaker 13: you need to ask questions. You need somebody to assist
Speaker 13: you follow up questions if something doesn't work, like oh
Speaker 13: my god, the payment's not working, like you need help?
Speaker 13: And or is the online Abortion Resource Squad. They go
Speaker 13: into our abortion every single day and they make sure
Speaker 13: that people get help. And they've been doing this labor
Speaker 13: for free, and now prison culture is helping them basically
Speaker 13: get them, get them paid, get them money, get them,
Speaker 13: get them make it so that way they can do that,
Speaker 13: like you know, they don't have to, you know, find
Speaker 13: different options for employment. You know, they don't have to
Speaker 13: struggle to get by like they they there's money sustaining them.
Speaker 13: So that way they can make sure that people have
Speaker 13: their questions answered all day and that is so important.
Speaker 13: Like I just like, I just I never thought, like
Speaker 13: if you had asked me, like like seven years ago,
Speaker 13: if I thought people posting on Reddit would be life saving,
Speaker 13: I would have totally like just not taken that seriously.
Speaker 13: But now I'm like, I'm like, oh my god, people
Speaker 13: are flocking to Reddit every day to try to find
Speaker 13: out how to get an abortion, and there are people
Speaker 13: volunteering their time to get them quality answers and make
Speaker 13: sure that they get the care that they're looking for.
Speaker 13: And I love that. I love that an abolitionist, like
Speaker 13: a prison abolition police in prison abolitionists, has identified that
Speaker 13: this is a significant need that people in these different
Speaker 13: communities that are typically like a little bit siloed are
Speaker 13: supporting each other's causes. I think that abolition and abortion
Speaker 13: go hand in hand. And this just cheers me up immensely.
Speaker 13: And the fact that like there are resource hubs online
Speaker 13: that are that are like that are coming to bat
Speaker 13: you know, like, oh, this horrible thing has happened. Roe
Speaker 13: v Wade has been overturned, and what are we gonna do?
Speaker 13: And it's like, well, go go answer people's questions on Reddit,
Speaker 13: and yeah, so I wanted to share that because I
Speaker 13: said a lot of sad stuff about how horrifying and
Speaker 13: traumatic and this all is and how there's so much
Speaker 13: human suffering. So it's just because of that, I just
Speaker 13: I also wanted to to take time to say, like, hey,
Speaker 13: there are people making sure that people get care. There
Speaker 13: are amazing people you know working to get people paid
Speaker 13: and get people funding and make it so that way
Speaker 13: this work is sustainable, because like sustainability is its own thing,
Speaker 13: Like yeah, who like it? Is hard to fight against fascism,
Speaker 13: Like it's we're being we're having our are basic human
Speaker 13: rights violated on a daily basis, and we are being dehumanized,
Speaker 13: and that is incredibly difficult to fight constantly on top
Speaker 13: of having to pay your bills and you know, like
Speaker 13: deal with whatever the heck's going on in your life.
Speaker 13: So I'm just like, I'm really grateful for Mary Micaba
Speaker 13: and everyone who has helped her. I'm really grateful for
Speaker 13: Partners and Value Abortion Group BADGE, and I am really
Speaker 13: grateful for the Online Abortion Resource squad Ors and all
Speaker 13: of their amazing volunteers. And I hope that like, if
Speaker 13: somebody is feeling helpless and and like feeling like they
Speaker 13: don't know what to do in these really scary times,
Speaker 13: they can look toward, like look to to these examples
Speaker 13: and be like, well, I can I can provide good
Speaker 13: information to people. I can share donation opportunities or donate myself,
Speaker 13: and I can uplift this stuff and recognize how valuable
Speaker 13: even posting online can be sometimes because I posting online
Speaker 13: usually not a good thing. But you know, if you
Speaker 13: are helping somebody get healthcare and you're utilizing like you know,
Speaker 13: a popular platform to spread that information. You're you're you're
Speaker 13: doing a great job, and you deserve all the shout outs.
Speaker 13: So yeah, so yeah, those are some really those that's
Speaker 13: what's cheering me up in the year twenty twenty three.
Speaker 13: As I approach like June twenty fourth, the anniversary, I'm like,
Speaker 13: oh my god, everything's really awful, but this, this is
Speaker 13: what's cheering me up.
Speaker 10: So yeah, I don't know. Well, okay, I guess I
Speaker 10: do know why this is spontaneously leapt to my head
Speaker 10: when the thing that I the thing that I always
Speaker 10: think about is that there's a Zappatista slogan that goes
Speaker 10: to pot of lives. The struggle continues, and yeah, I mean,
Speaker 10: I don't have anything else. It's you know, but I
Speaker 10: mean that struggle. Look like the thing about this right
Speaker 10: like there there's a reason that it's a like they
Speaker 10: have to spend all of this effort on it because
Speaker 10: there is actually a struggle, and the fact that they
Speaker 10: have to they spend so much effort, so much resources,
Speaker 10: so much of their time, and so much of their
Speaker 10: power on this, like is also proof of their weakness,
Speaker 10: that this is not something that they can do just
Speaker 10: sort of neutrally right, and it's it's something that can
Speaker 10: be stopped, it can be rolled back. And yeah, I
Speaker 10: mean the the fact that it is a struggle like
Speaker 10: in and of itself like implies that they're wrong in
Speaker 10: in and of itself, demonstrates that we are also still fighting,
Speaker 10: and we are going to continue fighting and one day
Speaker 10: we are going to beat these fuckers.
Speaker 13: Yep, I believe it. I mean, like, yeah, I'm like
Speaker 13: talking openly and honestly about the toll of the human suffering.
Speaker 13: But I believe that we can stop this if we
Speaker 13: if we keep going, and I I hope I see
Speaker 13: that in my lifetime. And I uh, and I think
Speaker 13: it's it's a sada shakuri. I think where is where
Speaker 13: there's oppression, there is resistance that that that makes me
Speaker 13: feel better, you know, like because which ah, God, God,
Speaker 13: just like I know is speaking of liberals, there's I
Speaker 13: just don't understand the take where it's like, oh, these
Speaker 13: red states are getting what they deserve. Texas is getting
Speaker 13: what the deserves, Florida is getting with what they deserve,
Speaker 13: and it's like no, like they they're being oppressed and
Speaker 13: they are fighting their oppression. And I love people in
Speaker 13: those states, and I love the people fighting, and I
Speaker 13: I just I don't know how you can look at
Speaker 13: that and not be filled with like love and awe,
Speaker 13: just like in the way that I'm filled with like
Speaker 13: love and awe when I see like how hard people
Speaker 13: are working to navigate these barriers and to access the
Speaker 13: health care that they need. Like, I'm just like, you
Speaker 13: are being so brave, you are You're so strong to
Speaker 13: do this, and like not everyone is seeing it, you know,
Speaker 13: because like these are like you know, private like journeys
Speaker 13: to get healthcare, but like I'm seeing it, and I'm like, God,
Speaker 13: these people are so amazing, and people are fighting so
Speaker 13: hard and they are continuing to struggle and they're not
Speaker 13: giving I mean, some people are giving up because like
Speaker 13: the state is like forcing it on them, but like
Speaker 13: a lot of people aren't giving up. And I am
Speaker 13: I'm constantly in awe about that because yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 13: a lot of witnessing human suffering and people suffer, but
Speaker 13: also it's witnessing a lot of people be really strong
Speaker 13: and really fight and for what they deserve. And I'm
Speaker 13: so glad I get to witness that too, even though
Speaker 13: I wish you no I didn't have to see all
Speaker 13: the suffering, but you know, I'm really grateful to see
Speaker 13: the struggle too. I love human beings and I'm just
Speaker 13: we're awesome, like we I mean, a lot of us aren't,
Speaker 13: but the rest of us are oks putting up a
Speaker 13: good fight. So I think we can win. I think
Speaker 13: we can win.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah, So I know we've talked about a few links.
Speaker 10: Do you have anything else that, any other links that
Speaker 10: you want to talk about to send people to?
Speaker 8: So yeah, Jesus.
Speaker 10: Christ, do you have anything else you want to send
Speaker 10: people to so that they can help support the struggles
Speaker 10: that are going on.
Speaker 13: I don't think I have any additional ones I want
Speaker 13: to give right now. I think that the ones that
Speaker 13: I've brought up like deserve all of the attention right now.
Speaker 13: So I'm just gonna like say him again. So I
Speaker 13: know previously I mentioned the Texas Equal Access Fund the
Speaker 13: T Fund, and Texas is doing a lot right now,
Speaker 13: and honestly, the other Texas funds are too. Was just
Speaker 13: like the one that I see the most. Chicago Abortion
Speaker 13: Fund is doing amazing work right now. Partners Clinic, which
Speaker 13: is located in Maryland, like shout out to their team.
Speaker 13: I love them so much. They are they they are
Speaker 13: like the light in the darkness. Right now, Valley Abortion
Speaker 13: group Badge, which will hopefully be opening I don't know
Speaker 13: when they're opening, but I'm looking forward to them opening
Speaker 13: so much in New Mexico. And and then the online
Speaker 13: Abortion Resource squad Ors, the Saints of our Slash Abortion,
Speaker 13: Like I just I want to like shout them out
Speaker 13: with this like platform that I have right now, So
Speaker 13: Google all them, check them out, click the links, and
Speaker 13: then of course, you know, again your local abortion fund,
Speaker 13: like it just just don't get tired of hearing donate
Speaker 13: to your local abortion fund, just like say it again,
Speaker 13: just like right out on the back of your eyeballs.
Speaker 13: It's that. That's that's what we getting. That's what's getting
Speaker 13: people health care right now, people who can't wait. So yeah,
Speaker 13: I just like uplifting all those things again. Like I'm
Speaker 13: sure like there are there are a lot of amazing
Speaker 13: groups doing work. I could probably like take like an
Speaker 13: hour listing all of them, but uh, like right now,
Speaker 13: those are the ones where I'm like, hell, yeah, this
Speaker 13: is amazing.
Speaker 10: So yeah, yeah, thank you, thank you again so much
Speaker 10: for for coming and talking with us.
Speaker 8: About this.
Speaker 13: Yeah. I love talking about all of the pain and suffering.
Speaker 13: And you know, catch me outside screaming at the sky
Speaker 13: and shaking my fist and drinking a lot of mimosas.
Speaker 10: Yeah, in the next couple of weeks.
Speaker 13: This is a rough This is rough month. This is
Speaker 13: a rough month. I'm not happy to be here, but
Speaker 13: I'm happy about some things. Just this is not It's
Speaker 13: been a hard year. It's been a really hard year.
Speaker 13: But I'm happy to be on this podcast.
Speaker 10: Yeah, And I hope all of you, in literally whatever
Speaker 10: way you can, like do something to make this better,
Speaker 10: because we all owe it to each other, and we
Speaker 10: owe it to everyone who has to live under the
Speaker 10: system that you know, like hasn't built in our name
Speaker 10: to do something and not to just sort of sit
Speaker 10: back and let this just let the engine to suffering
Speaker 10: keep rolling over more people.
Speaker 13: And even small things are valuable too. I feel like
Speaker 13: a lot of I've known a lot of people who
Speaker 13: are like, you know, like, oh, you know, I got
Speaker 13: a lot going on and I can't I don't know
Speaker 13: how to. I just can't help that much. And it's
Speaker 13: like even the little things you do are meaningful, Like
Speaker 13: even like ten dollars is like like somebody who's traveling's lunch,
Speaker 13: you know, Like that's a big deal. So don't don't
Speaker 13: undersell the little things that you can do. Even little
Speaker 13: things are really meaningful right now, like what you have
Speaker 13: the capacity for. No one's gonna I'm not gonna shake
Speaker 13: a stick at it. I think any contribution is incredibly valuable,
Speaker 13: no matter how small.
Speaker 10: So unless you're rich, Yeah, unless you're rich, which can unless.
Speaker 13: You're rich, than what are you doing? Like why So
Speaker 13: there are some people I'm like, why are they like,
Speaker 13: oh oh oh, while I'm here, while I'm actually speaking
Speaker 13: of rich while I'm on a podcast, and we can
Speaker 13: talk about things like people who can help, like I'm
Speaker 13: thinking about like Taylor Swift right now, Like Taylor Swift
Speaker 13: can probably donate so much money to abortion funds right
Speaker 13: because like she's touring right now, and she's she's having
Speaker 13: all these concerts and various parts of the world, and
Speaker 13: those hotel prices are going up like crazy. So like
Speaker 13: I know that she had a concert in Chicago recently,
Speaker 13: and there the Chicago Abortion Fund was like trying to
Speaker 13: book hotels for traveling abortion patients. So patients who are
Speaker 13: traveling from band States to get abortion services in Chicago,
Speaker 13: and they were paying like way more for the hotel
Speaker 13: hotel costs because of the local Taylor Swift concert. And
Speaker 13: it's like, Taylor Swift, donate to abortion funds. What are
Speaker 13: you doing? You're driving out hotel prices for patients. Just donate,
Speaker 13: donate to abortion funds, Taylor Swift. So that's what I
Speaker 13: just wanted to add that, or any artists who's driving
Speaker 13: up hotel praces. Come on, people need health care. What
Speaker 13: are you doing?
Speaker 10: What wonderful system that we live in. Wonderful opportunity in
Speaker 10: this generation to make it not be like that?
Speaker 13: I know, right, Like I resent having to ask, but
Speaker 13: still ye.
Speaker 10: Yeah, so I guess that's that's my that's my closing message.
Speaker 10: Go out into the world and make the world not
Speaker 10: fucking like this.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, can we not?
Speaker 10: Yeah?
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