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antiporn-activist · 2 months

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I thought y'all should read this

I have a free trial to News+ so I copy-pasted it for you here. I don't think Jonathan Haidt would object to more people having this info.

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End the Phone-Based Childhood Now

The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.

By Jonathan Haidt

Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.

The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, and beyond. By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

The decline in mental health is just one of many signs that something went awry. Loneliness and friendlessness among American teens began to surge around 2012. Academic achievement went down, too. According to “The Nation’s Report Card,” scores in reading and math began to decline for U.S. students after 2012, reversing decades of slow but generally steady increase. PISA, the major international measure of educational trends, shows that declines in math, reading, and science happened globally, also beginning in the early 2010s.

As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likelyto live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

Generations are not monolithic, of course. Many young people are flourishing. Taken as a whole, however, Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics. And if a generation is doing poorly––if it is more anxious and depressed and is starting families, careers, and important companies at a substantially lower rate than previous generations––then the sociological and economic consequences will be profound for the entire society.

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound, but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.

As a social psychologist who has long studied social and moral development, I have been involved in debates about the effects of digital technology for years. Typically, the scientific questions have been framed somewhat narrowly, to make them easier to address with data. For example, do adolescents who consume more social media have higher levels of depression? Does using a smartphone just before bedtime interfere with sleep? The answer to these questions is usually found to be yes, although the size of the relationship is often statistically small, which has led some researchers to conclude that these new technologies are not responsible for the gigantic increases in mental illness that began in the early 2010s.

But before we can evaluate the evidence on any one potential avenue of harm, we need to step back and ask a broader question: What is childhood––including adolescence––and how did it change when smartphones moved to the center of it? If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.

My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

1. The Decline of Play and Independence

Human brains are extraordinarily large compared with those of other primates, and human childhoods are extraordinarily long, too, to give those large brains time to wire up within a particular culture. A child’s brain is already 90 percent of its adult size by about age 6. The next 10 or 15 years are about learning norms and mastering skills—physical, analytical, creative, and social. As children and adolescents seek out experiences and practice a wide variety of behaviors, the synapses and neurons that are used frequently are retained while those that are used less often disappear. Neurons that fire together wire together, as brain researchers say.

Brain development is sometimes said to be “experience-expectant,” because specific parts of the brain show increased plasticity during periods of life when an animal’s brain can “expect” to have certain kinds of experiences. You can see this with baby geese, who will imprint on whatever mother-sized object moves in their vicinity just after they hatch. You can see it with human children, who are able to learn languages quickly and take on the local accent, but only through early puberty; after that, it’s hard to learn a language and sound like a native speaker. There is also some evidence of a sensitive period for cultural learning more generally. Japanese children who spent a few years in California in the 1970s came to feel “American” in their identity and ways of interacting only if they attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15. If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn’t arrive until they were 15, it was too late; they didn’t come to feel American.

Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play. Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they’ll need as adults. Kittens will play-pounce on anything that looks like a mouse tail. Human children will play games such as tag and sharks and minnows, which let them practice both their predator skills and their escaping-from-predator skills. Adolescents will play sports with greater intensity, and will incorporate playfulness into their social interactions—flirting, teasing, and developing inside jokes that bond friends together. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.

One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail—often—in environments in which failure is not very costly. This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence. The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults.

Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities––play, exploration, and intense socializing––were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.

And then we changed childhood.

The changes started slowly in the late 1970s and ’80s, before the arrival of the internet, as many parents in the U.S. grew fearful that their children would be harmed or abducted if left unsupervised. Such crimes have always been extremely rare, but they loomed larger in parents’ minds thanks in part to rising levels of street crime combined with the arrival of cable TV, which enabled round-the-clock coverage of missing-children cases. A general decline in social capital––the degree to which people knew and trusted their neighbors and institutions––exacerbated parental fears. Meanwhile, rising competition for college admissions encouraged more intensive forms of parenting. In the 1990s, American parents began pulling their children indoors or insisting that afternoons be spent in adult-run enrichment activities. Free play, independent exploration, and teen-hangout time declined.

In recent decades, seeing unchaperoned children outdoors has become so novel that when one is spotted in the wild, some adults feel it is their duty to call the police. In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that parents, on average, believed that children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in front of their house, and that kids should be 14 before being allowed to go unsupervised to a public park. Most of these same parents had enjoyed joyous and unsupervised outdoor play by the age of 7 or 8.

2. The Virtual World Arrives in Two Waves

The internet, which now dominates the lives of young people, arrived in two waves of linked technologies. The first one did little harm to Millennials. The second one swallowed Gen Z whole.

The first wave came ashore in the 1990s with the arrival of dial-up internet access, which made personal computers good for something beyond word processing and basic games. By 2003, 55 percent of American households had a computer with (slow) internet access. Rates of adolescent depression, loneliness, and other measures of poor mental health did not rise in this first wave. If anything, they went down a bit. Millennial teens (born 1981 through 1995), who were the first to go through puberty with access to the internet, were psychologically healthier and happier, on average, than their older siblings or parents in Generation X (born 1965 through 1980).

The second wave began to rise in the 2000s, though its full force didn’t hit until the early 2010s. It began rather innocently with the introduction of social-media platforms that helped people connect with their friends. Posting and sharing content became much easier with sites such as Friendster (launched in 2003), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004).

Teens embraced social media soon after it came out, but the time they could spend on these sites was limited in those early years because the sites could only be accessed from a computer, often the family computer in the living room. Young people couldn’t access social media (and the rest of the internet) from the school bus, during class time, or while hanging out with friends outdoors. Many teens in the early-to-mid-2000s had cellphones, but these were basic phones (many of them flip phones) that had no internet access. Typing on them was difficult––they had only number keys. Basic phones were tools that helped Millennials meet up with one another in person or talk with each other one-on-one. I have seen no evidence to suggest that basic cellphones harmed the mental health of Millennials.

It was not until the introduction of the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and high-speed internet (which reached 50 percent of American homes in 2007)—and the corresponding pivot to mobile made by many providers of social media, video games, and porn—that it became possible for adolescents to spend nearly every waking moment online. The extraordinary synergy among these innovations was what powered the second technological wave. In 2011, only 23 percent of teens had a smartphone. By 2015, that number had risen to 73 percent, and a quarter of teens said they were online “almost constantly.” Their younger siblings in elementary school didn’t usually have their own smartphones, but after its release in 2010, the iPad quickly became a staple of young children’s daily lives. It was in this brief period, from 2010 to 2015, that childhood in America (and many other countries) was rewired into a form that was more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.

3. Techno-optimism and the Birth of the Phone-Based Childhood

The phone-based childhood created by that second wave—including not just smartphones themselves, but all manner of internet-connected devices, such as tablets, laptops, video-game consoles, and smartwatches—arrived near the end of a period of enormous optimism about digital technology. The internet came into our lives in the mid-1990s, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. By the end of that decade, it was widely thought that the web would be an ally of democracy and a slayer of tyrants. When people are connected to each other, and to all the information in the world, how could any dictator keep them down?

In the 2000s, Silicon Valley and its world-changing inventions were a source of pride and excitement in America. Smart and ambitious young people around the world wanted to move to the West Coast to be part of the digital revolution. Tech-company founders such as Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin were lauded as gods, or at least as modern Prometheans, bringing humans godlike powers. The Arab Spring bloomed in 2011 with the help of decentralized social platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. When pundits and entrepreneurs talked about the power of social media to transform society, it didn’t sound like a dark prophecy.

You have to put yourself back in this heady time to understand why adults acquiesced so readily to the rapid transformation of childhood. Many parents had concerns, even then, about what their children were doing online, especially because of the internet’s ability to put children in contact with strangers. But there was also a lot of excitement about the upsides of this new digital world. If computers and the internet were the vanguards of progress, and if young people––widely referred to as “digital natives”––were going to live their lives entwined with these technologies, then why not give them a head start? I remember how exciting it was to see my 2-year-old son master the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone in 2008. I thought I could see his neurons being woven together faster as a result of the stimulation it brought to his brain, compared to the passivity of watching television or the slowness of building a block tower. I thought I could see his future job prospects improving.

Touchscreen devices were also a godsend for harried parents. Many of us discovered that we could have peace at a restaurant, on a long car trip, or at home while making dinner or replying to emails if we just gave our children what they most wanted: our smartphones and tablets. We saw that everyone else was doing it and figured it must be okay.

It was the same for older children, desperate to join their friends on social-media platforms, where the minimum age to open an account was set by law to 13, even though no research had been done to establish the safety of these products for minors. Because the platforms did nothing (and still do nothing) to verify the stated age of new-account applicants, any 10-year-old could open multiple accounts without parental permission or knowledge, and many did. Facebook and later Instagram became places where many sixth and seventh graders were hanging out and socializing. If parents did find out about these accounts, it was too late. Nobody wanted their child to be isolated and alone, so parents rarely forced their children to shut down their accounts.

We had no idea what we were doing.

4. The High Cost of a Phone-Based Childhood

In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” It’s an elegant formulation of what economists would later call the opportunity cost of any choice—all of the things you can no longer do with your money and time once you’ve committed them to something else. So it’s important that we grasp just how much of a young person’s day is now taken up by their devices.

The numbers are hard to believe. The most recent Gallup data show that American teens spend about five hours a day just on social-media platforms (including watching videos on TikTok and YouTube). Add in all the other phone- and screen-based activities, and the number rises to somewhere between seven and nine hours a day, on average. The numbers are even higher in single-parent and low-income families, and among Black, Hispanic, and Native American families.

In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it. Everything else in an adolescent’s day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed, and for the hundreds of “friends,” “followers,” and other network connections that must be serviced with texts, posts, comments, likes, snaps, and direct messages. I recently surveyed my students at NYU, and most of them reported that the very first thing they do when they open their eyes in the morning is check their texts, direct messages, and social-media feeds. It’s also the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night. And it’s a lot of what they do in between.

The amount of time that adolescents spend sleeping declined in the early 2010s, and many studies tie sleep loss directly to the use of devices around bedtime, particularly when they’re used to scroll through social media. Exercise declined, too, which is unfortunate because exercise, like sleep, improves both mental and physical health. Book reading has been declining for decades, pushed aside by digital alternatives, but the decline, like so much else, sped up in the early 2010s. With passive entertainment always available, adolescent minds likely wander less than they used to; contemplation and imagination might be placed on the list of things winnowed down or crowded out.

But perhaps the most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends (about two hours a day, on average, not counting time together at school) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s, but the drop accelerated in the 2010s, while it barely changed for older people. By 2019, young people’s time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck.

You might question the importance of this decline. After all, isn’t much of this online time spent interacting with friends through texting, social media, and multiplayer video games? Isn’t that just as good?

Some of it surely is, and virtual interactions offer unique benefits too, especially for young people who are geographically or socially isolated. But in general, the virtual world lacks many of the features that make human interactions in the real world nutritious, as we might say, for physical, social, and emotional development. In particular, real-world relationships and social interactions are characterized by four features—typical for hundreds of thousands of years—that online interactions either distort or erase.

First, real-world interactions are embodied, meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communicate, and we learn to respond to the body language of others. Virtual interactions, in contrast, mostly rely on language alone. No matter how many emojis are offered as compensation, the elimination of communication channels for which we have eons of evolutionary programming is likely to produce adults who are less comfortable and less skilled at interacting in person.

Second, real-world interactions are synchronous; they happen at the same time. As a result, we learn subtle cues about timing and conversational turn taking. Synchronous interactions make us feel closer to the other person because that’s what getting “in sync” does. Texts, posts, and many other virtual interactions lack synchrony. There is less real laughter, more room for misinterpretation, and more stress after a comment that gets no immediate response.

Third, real-world interactions primarily involve one‐to‐one communication, or sometimes one-to-several. But many virtual communications are broadcast to a potentially huge audience. Online, each person can engage in dozens of asynchronous interactions in parallel, which interferes with the depth achieved in all of them. The sender’s motivations are different, too: With a large audience, one’s reputation is always on the line; an error or poor performance can damage social standing with large numbers of peers. These communications thus tend to be more performative and anxiety-inducing than one-to-one conversations.

Finally, real-world interactions usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. But in many virtual networks, people can easily block others or quit when they are displeased. Relationships within such networks are usually more disposable.

These unsatisfying and anxiety-producing features of life online should be recognizable to most adults. Online interactions can bring out antisocial behavior that people would never display in their offline communities. But if life online takes a toll on adults, just imagine what it does to adolescents in the early years of puberty, when their “experience expectant” brains are rewiring based on feedback from their social interactions.

Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public shaming, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness. The brain contains systems that are specialized for approach (when opportunities beckon) and withdrawal (when threats appear or seem likely). People can be in what we might call “discover mode” or “defend mode” at any moment, but generally not both. The two systems together form a mechanism for quickly adapting to changing conditions, like a thermostat that can activate either a heating system or a cooling system as the temperature fluctuates. Some people’s internal thermostats are generally set to discover mode, and they flip into defend mode only when clear threats arise. These people tend to see the world as full of opportunities. They are happier and less anxious. Other people’s internal thermostats are generally set to defend mode, and they flip into discover mode only when they feel unusually safe. They tend to see the world as full of threats and are more prone to anxiety and depressive disorders.

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.” These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

5. So Many Harms

The debate around adolescents’ use of smartphones and social media typically revolves around mental health, and understandably so. But the harms that have resulted from transforming childhood so suddenly and heedlessly go far beyondmental health. I’ve touched on some of them—social awkwardness, reduced self-confidence, and a more sedentary childhood. Here are three additional harms.

Fragmented Attention, Disrupted Learning

Staying on task while sitting at a computer is hard enough for an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex. It is far more difficult for adolescents in front of their laptop trying to do homework. They are probably less intrinsically motivated to stay on task. They’re certainly less able, given their undeveloped prefrontal cortex, and hence it’s easy for any company with an app to lure them away with an offer of social validation or entertainment. Their phones are pinging constantly—one study found that the typical adolescent now gets 237 notifications a day, roughly 15 every waking hour. Sustained attention is essential for doing almost anything big, creative, or valuable, yet young people find their attention chopped up into little bits by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences.

It even happens in the classroom. Studies confirm that when students have access to their phones during class time, they use them, especially for texting and checking social media, and their grades and learning suffer. This might explain why benchmark test scores began to decline in the U.S. and around the world in the early 2010s—well before the pandemic hit.

Addiction and Social Withdrawal

The neural basis of behavioral addiction to social media or video games is not exactly the same as chemical addiction to cocaine or opioids. Nonetheless, they all involve abnormally heavy and sustained activation of dopamine neurons and reward pathways. Over time, the brain adapts to these high levels of dopamine; when the child is not engaged in digital activity, their brain doesn’t have enough dopamine, and the child experiences withdrawal symptoms. These generally include anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability. Kids with these kinds of behavioral addictions often become surly and aggressive, and withdraw from their families into their bedrooms and devices.

Social-media and gaming platforms were designed to hook users. How successful are they? How many kids suffer from digital addictions?

The main addiction risks for boys seem to be video games and porn. “Internet gaming disorder,” which was added to the main diagnosis manual of psychiatry in 2013 as a condition for further study, describes “significant impairment or distress” in several aspects of life, along with many hallmarks of addiction, including an inability to reduce usage despite attempts to do so. Estimates for the prevalence of IGD range from 7 to 15 percent among adolescent boys and young men. As for porn, a nationally representative survey of American adults published in 2019 found that 7 percent of American men agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am addicted to pornography”—and the rates were higher for the youngest men.

Girls have much lower rates of addiction to video games and porn, but they use social media more intensely than boys do. A study of teens in 29 nations found that between 5 and 15 percent of adolescents engage in what is called “problematic social media use,” which includes symptoms such as preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, neglect of other areas of life, and lying to parents and friends about time spent on social media. That study did not break down results by gender, but many others have found that rates of “problematic use” are higher for girls.

I don’t want to overstate the risks: Most teens do not become addicted to their phones and video games. But across multiple studies and across genders, rates of problematic use come out in the ballpark of 5 to 15 percent. Is there any other consumer product that parents would let their children use relatively freely if they knew that something like one in 10 kids would end up with a pattern of habitual and compulsive use that disrupted various domains of life and looked a lot like an addiction?

The Decay of Wisdom and the Loss of Meaning

During that crucial sensitive period for cultural learning, from roughly ages 9 through 15, we should be especially thoughtful about who is socializing our children for adulthood. Instead, that’s when most kids get their first smartphone and sign themselves up (with or without parental permission) to consume rivers of content from random strangers. Much of that content is produced by other adolescents, in blocks of a few minutes or a few seconds.

This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life. Adolescents spend less time steeped in their local or national culture. They are coming of age in a confusing, placeless, ahistorical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerize them. Without solid knowledge of the past and the filtering of good ideas from bad––a process that plays out over many generations––young people will be more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them, which might explain why videos showing young people reacting positively to Osama bin Laden’s thoughts about America were trending on TikTok last fall.

All this is made worse by the fact that so much of digital public life is an unending supply of micro dramas about somebody somewhere in our country of 340 million people who did something that can fuel an outrage cycle, only to be pushed aside by the next. It doesn’t add up to anything and leaves behind only a distorted sense of human nature and affairs.

When our public life becomes fragmented, ephemeral, and incomprehensible, it is a recipe for anomie, or normlessness. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim showed long ago that a society that fails to bind its people together with some shared sense of sacredness and common respect for rules and norms is not a society of great individual freedom; it is, rather, a place where disoriented individuals have difficulty setting goals and exerting themselves to achieve them. Durkheim argued that anomie was a major driver of suicide rates in European countries. Modern scholars continue to draw on his work to understand suicide rates today.

Durkheim’s observations are crucial for understanding what happened in the early 2010s. A long-running survey of American teens found that, from 1990 to 2010, high-school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as “Life often feels meaningless.” But as soon as they adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt “meaningless” increased by about 70 percent, to more than one in five.

6. Young People Don’t Like Their Phone-Based Lives

How can I be confident that the epidemic of adolescent mental illness was kicked off by the arrival of the phone-based childhood? Skeptics point to other events as possible culprits, including the 2008 global financial crisis, global warming, the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting and the subsequent active-shooter drills, rising academic pressures, and the opioid epidemic. But while these events might have been contributing factors in some countries, none can explain both the timing and international scope of the disaster.

An additional source of evidence comes from Gen Z itself. With all the talk of regulating social media, raising age limits, and getting phones out of schools, you might expect to find many members of Gen Z writing and speaking out in opposition. I’ve looked for such arguments and found hardly any. In contrast, many young adults tell stories of devastation.

Freya India, a 24-year-old British essayist who writes about girls, explains how social-media sites carry girls off to unhealthy places: “It seems like your child is simply watching some makeup tutorials, following some mental health influencers, or experimenting with their identity. But let me tell you: they are on a conveyor belt to someplace bad. Whatever insecurity or vulnerability they are struggling with, they will be pushed further and further into it.” She continues:

Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment. We were the first to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn’t just grow up with algorithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our identities. Convinced us we were sick.

Rikki Schlott, a 23-year-old American journalist and co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind, writes,

"The day-to-day life of a typical teen or tween today would be unrecognizable to someone who came of age before the smartphone arrived. Zoomers are spending an average of 9 hours daily in this screen-time doom loop—desperate to forget the gaping holes they’re bleeding out of, even if just for … 9 hours a day. Uncomfortable silence could be time to ponder why they’re so miserable in the first place. Drowning it out with algorithmic white noise is far easier."

A 27-year-old man who spent his adolescent years addicted (his word) to video games and pornography sent me this reflection on what that did to him:

I missed out on a lot of stuff in life—a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn’t spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.

Or consider what Facebook found in a research project involving focus groups of young people, revealed in 2021 by the whistleblower Frances Haugen: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens,” an internal document said. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

7. Collective-Action Problems

Social-media companies such as Meta, TikTok, and Snap are often compared to tobacco companies, but that’s not really fair to the tobacco industry. It’s true that companies in both industries marketed harmful products to children and tweaked their products for maximum customer retention (that is, addiction), but there’s a big difference: Teens could and did choose, in large numbers, not to smoke. Even at the peak of teen cigarette use, in 1997, nearly two-thirds of high-school students did not smoke.

Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way. Once a few students in any middle school lie about their age and open accounts at age 11 or 12, they start posting photos and comments about themselves and other students. Drama ensues. The pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.

A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

Social media is all about network effects. Most students are only on it because everyone else is too. Most of them would prefer that nobody be on these platforms. Later in the study, students were asked directly, “Would you prefer to live in a world without Instagram [or TikTok]?” A majority of students said yes––58 percent for each app.

This is the textbook definition of what social scientists call a collective-action problem. It’s what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is deterred from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. Fishermen considering limiting their catch to avoid wiping out the local fish population are caught in this same kind of trap. If no one else does it too, they just lose profit.

Cigarettes trapped individual smokers with a biological addiction. Social media has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem. Early app developers deliberately and knowingly exploited the psychological weaknesses and insecurities of young people to pressure them to consume a product that, upon reflection, many wish they could use less, or not at all.

8. Four Norms to Break Four Traps

Young people and their parents are stuck in at least four collective-action traps. Each is hard to escape for an individual family, but escape becomes much easier if families, schools, and communities coordinate and act together. Here are four norms that would roll back the phone-based childhood. I believe that any community that adopts all four will see substantial improvements in youth mental health within two years.

No smartphones before high school

The trap here is that each child thinks they need a smartphone because “everyone else” has one, and many parents give in because they don’t want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone—or even if, say, only half of the child’s sixth-grade class had one—parents would feel more comfortable providing a basic flip phone (or no phone at all). Delaying round-the-clock internet access until ninth grade (around age 14) as a national or community norm would help to protect adolescents during the very vulnerable first few years of puberty. According to a 2022 British study, these are the years when social-media use is most correlated with poor mental health. Family policies about tablets, laptops, and video-game consoles should be aligned with smartphone restrictions to prevent overuse of other screen activities.

No social media before 16

The trap here, as with smartphones, is that each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that’s where most of their peers are posting and gossiping. But if the majority of adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and adolescents could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. The delay would not mean that kids younger than 16 could never watch videos on TikTok or YouTube—only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences.

Phone‐free schools

Most schools claim that they ban phones, but this usually just means that students aren’t supposed to take their phone out of their pocket during class. Research shows that most students do use their phones during class time. They also use them during lunchtime, free periods, and breaks between classes––times when students could and should be interacting with their classmates face-to-face. The only way to get students’ minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up.

More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a 9-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly. So would ideas about what constitutes “good parenting.” And if more parents trusted their children with more responsibility––for example, by asking their kids to do more to help out, or to care for others––then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate.

It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.

The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else. Smartphones are experience blockers. Our ultimate goal should not be to remove screens entirely, nor should it be to return childhood to exactly the way it was in 1960. Rather, it should be to create a version of childhood and adolescence that keeps young people anchored in the real world while flourishing in the digital age.

9. What Are We Waiting For?

An essential function of government is to solve collective-action problems. Congress could solve or help solve the ones I’ve highlighted—for instance, by raising the age of “internet adulthood” to 16 and requiring tech companies to keep underage children off their sites.

In recent decades, however, Congress has not been good at addressing public concerns when the solutions would displease a powerful and deep-pocketed industry. Governors and state legislators have been much more effective, and their successes might let us evaluate how well various reforms work. But the bottom line is that to change norms, we’re going to need to do most of the work ourselves, in neighborhood groups, schools, and other communities.

There are now hundreds of organizations––most of them started by mothers who saw what smartphones had done to their children––that are working to roll back the phone-based childhood or promote a more independent, real-world childhood. (I have assembled a list of many of them.) One that I co-founded, at LetGrow.org, suggests a variety of simple programs for parents or schools, such as play club (schools keep the playground open at least one day a week before or after school, and kids sign up for phone-free, mixed-age, unstructured play as a regular weekly activity) and the Let Grow Experience (a series of homework assignments in which students––with their parents’ consent––choose something to do on their own that they’ve never done before, such as walk the dog, climb a tree, walk to a store, or cook dinner).

Parents are fed up with what childhood has become. Many are tired of having daily arguments about technologies that were designed to grab hold of their children’s attention and not let go. But the phone-based childhood is not inevitable.

The four norms I have proposed cost almost nothing to implement, they cause no clear harm to anyone, and while they could be supported by new legislation, they can be instilled even without it. We can begin implementing all of them right away, this year, especially in communities with good cooperation between schools and parents. A single memo from a principal asking parents to delay smartphones and social media, in support of the school’s effort to improve mental health by going phone free, would catalyze collective action and reset the community’s norms.

We didn’t know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It’s time to end the phone-based childhood.

This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

#phones are bad #childhood

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herpsandbirds · 3 months

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Do you have any cool facts about Missouri wildlife?

I'd love to share something with my Midwestern friends, and thank you for always updating this blog!

I don't know if i have any Missouri animal facts per se... but I can share some of the state symbols with everyone.

We moved around a lot when we first came to the U.S. and we lived briefly in Kansas City. I have great memories of going to the Ozarks at Christmas time (near Lake of the Ozarks). I specifically remember following woodpeckers and deer around the forest in the snow.

SOME MISSOURI STATE SYMBOLS:

STATE BIRD: Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis), family Turdidae, order Passeriformes, found across much of the central and Eastern U.S., SE Canada, and NW Mexico

Changes in land use lead to drastic declines in Eastern Bluebirds after the early 1900s. They have recovered in many places, due to "bluebird trails", reestablishing appropriate habitat and nest box campaigns for public and private property.

Find out more: NestWatch | Eastern Bluebird - NestWatch

Blue birds are in the thrush family, Turdidae, along with American Robins.

They eat mainly worms, insects, and other small invertebrates (but also take berries for part of the year).

Bluebirds are cavity nesters, nesting in tree holes usually, but will readily take to properly constructed and placed nest boxes.

Males (pictured) are brighter blue, and females are a more muted and faded blue or bluish gray.

photograph by Keith Kennedy

STATE AQUATIC ANIMAL: American Paddlefish (Polyodon spathula), family Polyodontidae, order Acipenseriformes, found in various parts of the Mississippi River basin

This species is the only member of this family that still exists. They are most closely related to sturgeons. This order, Acipenseriformes, is considered one of the most evolutionarily primitive groups of ray finned fishes.

They do not have scales, and their skeleton is mostly cartilaginous.

They are filter feeders. Their heads and rostrums are covered with thousands of sensory receptors, which help them locate zooplankton swarms.

They are considered "vulnerable" due to overfishing, habitat degradation and destruction, and pollution.

photograph via: US Fish & Wildlife Service

STATE ENDANGERED ANIMAL: Eastern Hellbender (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis), family Cryptobranchidae, eastern United States

The largest salamander in the Americas, it grows to a total maximum length of up to 40 cm (15.7 in).

Though nationally it is considered to be just "vulnerable", in some states (like Missouri), it is "endangered".

photograph by Mark Tegges

STATE REPTILE: Three-toed Box Turtle (Terrapene triunguis), family Emydidae, found in the South-central and Southeastern U.S.

This specie shas been considered to be a subspecies of the Eastern Box Turtle, T. carolina (and still is by some herpetologists).

These turtles are terrestrial, but are not closely related to tortoises. They are in the same family as aquatic sliders, pond turtles, cooters, map turtles, and painted turtles.

photograph by Noppadol Paothong

STATE FISH: Channel Catfish (Ictalurus punctatus), family Ictaluridae, order Siluriformes, found in freshwater habitats in the eastern and southern US, southern Canada, and northern Mexico

They are widely caught, and have been introduced into waterways in other parts of North America and around the world. (In some places they are considered an invasive species).

photograph via: Missouri Dept. of Conservation

photograph by Brian.gratwicke

#Acipenseriformes #paddlefish #fish #ichthyology #box turtle turtle reptile #herpetology #bluebird #thrush #bird #ornithology #north america #hellbender #salamander #amphibian #animals #nature #catfish

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khukri · 8 months

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(article from sept '22)

[Jasbir K. Puar] further distinguishes between disability and debility: disability might be a political-relational identity, while debility is a process. One is debilitated by repeated exposure to harm and violence – a wearing-down of the body and mind throughout one’s life. This could look like the mercury accumulating in the bodies of Indigenous peoples whose water source has been polluted, or panic attacks due to daily encounters with racism in education, health care, and justice systems. What this tells us, Puar says, is that “it can be productive for the settler colonial state to keep some populations alive but in a space of continual, perpetual injury.” And the scale of debility is enormous: in 2016, the World Health Organization estimated that as part of the Syrian war, 30,000 Syrians were being injured each month.

“Disability,” Puar continues, “becomes the [way] institutions exceptionalize injury or the non-capacitation of a body.” This means that institutions view disability as something out of the ordinary instead of the inevitable outcome of living under oppressive conditions, and they place onus on the individual for being disabled, rather than on these oppressive systems for disabling the individual.

Though a minority of disabled people live in the Global North – the wealthy, imperialist countries like the United States, Canada, and those in Western Europe – Puar notes that Global North disability rights advocacy tends to focus on disabled people attaining equality more than halting and holding accountable the systems that produce disability throughout the rest of the world. She writes that disability rights advocacy asserts “that disability should be reclaimed as a valuable difference […] through rights, visibility, and empowerment discourses […] rather than addressing how much debilitation is caused by global injustices and the war machines of colonialism, occupation, and U.S. imperialism.”

In other words, Global North disability rights appeal to the state to protect mostly white and wealthy disabled people. But Puar reminds us that disability and disablement can be a purposeful goal of the state. In contrast, a disability justice framework helps us understand that the safety of some disabled people in the Global North must not come at the expense or production of disabled people in the Global South. Disability justice, a movement founded by racialized people, explicitly denounces imperialism and recognizes that, in the words of disability justice collective Sins Invalid, “Disabled people of the global majority – Black and brown people – share common ground confronting and subverting colonial powers in our struggle for life and justice.”

#the article does talk of palestine and mass disabling by israel hence why i found it topical #there was too much to quote #disability justice #palestine #m

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mydaddywiki · 2 months

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Brian Mulroney

Physique: Average Build Height: 5'11" (1.80 m)

Martin Brian Mulroney PC CC GOQ (March 20, 1939 – February 29, 2024, aged 84) was a Canadian lawyer, businessman, and politician who served as the 18th prime minister of Canada from 1984 to 1993. Mulroney's tenure as prime minister was marked by the introduction of major economic reforms, such as the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement, the goods and services tax (GST) that was created to replace the manufacturers' sales tax, and the privatization of 23 of 61 Crown corporations including Air Canada and Petro-Canada. Although he places average or above average in rankings of Canadian prime ministers, his legacy remains controversial.

Mulroney, the Quebec-born, half-Irish “boy from Baie-Comeau” (a small-town in the French-speaking province), was a handsome, skilled politician with a gift for public speaking, was an ardent advocate of stronger U.S.-Canadian relations. And I would have love some "relations" with him.

The former Canadian prime minister who struck a free trade deal with the U.S. but whose legacy was marred his role in the resurgence of Quebec nationalism and accused of corruption in the Airbus affair, a scandal that came to light only several years after he left office. But unless that somehow resulted in him doing nude photo-shoots and porno’s on Older4Me (which it didn’t), I don’t really care about it. He’s a politician, so of course he’s got his hand in something shady. Mulroney died on February 29, 2024. His was survived by his wife and four children.

#mydaddywiki politicians #Brian Mulroney

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freshdelusioncowboy · 9 months

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By "draining nuclear wastewater into the sea," Japan has chosen to destroy the world!

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced on August 22 that operations to discharge nuclear contaminated water from Tokyo Electric Power's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the sea would be launched on the 24th. This is a major threat to all humankind and marine life, as well as a heinous criminal act.

As of the end of June, the total amount of nuclear contaminated water in Japan had reached 1.34 million tons, containing more than 60 kinds of radionuclides, and it would take up to 30 years to completely discharge the nuclear contaminated water produced by the Fukushima nuclear power plant. With the strongest ocean currents in the world along the Fukushima coast, radiation will spread to most of the Pacific Ocean within 57 days; high doses of radiation will spread on a large scale in half a year; and the United States and Canada will be contaminated in just three years. After 10 years, the world's oceans would be affected by nuclear contamination. The consequences would have a serious impact on marine ecology and human health.

Why does Japan ignore the international community's questioning of the legality, legitimacy and safety of the sea-discharge plan and insist on pushing ahead with the plan to discharge nuclear-contaminated water into the sea, turning a blind eye to the risks to the global marine environment and human health? Moreover, why did Japan choose to announce this program at this particular point in time? Moreover, why the U.S., South Korea and many Western countries support Japan? Treated nuclear wastewater not as safe as thought

Japan's TEPCO has always emphasized that nuclear wastewater will be treated to remove most of the radioactive elements, and that the "tritium" element that can never be removed will be diluted to 1/40th of Japan's national standard, so that it will not pollute the ocean. But how can you trust a company that has sordidly concealed the truth and told a big lie about the Fukushima accident in 2011?

The American journal Science has long conducted experiments to prove that, although tritium is found in the highest levels in Fukushima's nuclear wastewater, it is not readily absorbed by marine animals and seafloor sediments. Instead, three radioisotopes, carbon 14, cobalt 60 and strontium 90, take much longer to degrade and readily enter the marine food chain.

Satellite images of radioactive cesium elements leaking into the ocean from Fukushima

The process of decaying these radioactive substances takes tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. It is almost impossible to eliminate them completely. They affect the marine environment and human health in very complex ways. Radioactive substances can penetrate into various organisms, trigger aberrations, and even cause damage to human DNA, leading to serious consequences such as cancer and death. According to the results of the Resident Health Survey released in February 2020, the incidence of thyroid cancer among adolescents in Fukushima Prefecture has increased 118 times.

Why is Japan using this moment as a point to announce the discharge of nuclear wastewater? Economic and political considerations are behind it!

For one thing, since its launch on April 13, 2021, the sea discharge plan has been opposed by fisheries groups and other domestic civil society groups in Japan. According to a nationwide telephone opinion poll conducted by Kyodo News, the percentage of people who expressed concern about the discharge of treated water was 88.1%. The disapproval rate of Kishida's Cabinet has changed from 48.6% to 50%, with the approval rate of 33.6% at its lowest level. In order to avoid the impact of strong opposition from fishery-related interest groups on the discharge plan, the Japanese government started the discharge on September 1, before the lifting of the ban on trawling in Fukushima, so that it could create an established fact and smooth the implementation of the plan.

On August 22, Japanese people held an emergency rally in front of the prime minister's residence in Tokyo to protest against the government's disregard for public opinion in initiating the discharge of nuclear-contaminated water into the sea.

Secondly, local elections are being held one after another in Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate, the three prefectures most affected by the discharge of Fukushima's nuclear effluent into the sea. In these elections, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Komeito Party (KDP) are at odds over the timing of the nuclear sewage disposal program. The LDP is facing the dilemma of having less than half of the seats in the Senate, and they will not be able to successfully implement the early dissolution of the House of Representatives and hold an early general election to seek a second term for the prime minister, either in the Diet or in the local elections. Behind Kishida's haste to launch the sea-discharge program are political considerations, as he hopes to test public opinion by implementing the program closely in order to avoid the loss of LDP seats and to ensure that he will be reelected as prime minister. Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida attends a ministerial meeting at the Prime Minister's official residence to discuss plans to discharge treated water from Tokyo Electric Power Holding Company's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the sea on August 22, 2023 in Tokyo, Japan.

Thirdly, the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island nuclear accidents were atmospheric releases, and so far there is no precedent for discharging wastewater into the sea after a nuclear accident. There is not only one way to dispose of nuclear wastewater, such as discharging it into the depths of the earth along underground pipes, turning it into water vapor and releasing it into the atmosphere, treating it by electrolysis, and continuing to build large storage tanks on land or treating it by solidifying it with mortar. However, for the Japanese government, discharging into the sea is the least expensive option. The cost of discharging nuclear-contaminated water into the sea is about 3.4 billion yen, only one-tenth of the cost of discharging water vapor. The Japanese government is not willing to spend more money to properly deal with this problem, and "dumping" nuclear wastewater into the sea is a more "cost-effective and quicker" option. For them, economic considerations come before safety considerations.

Now our neighbor on the other side of the Pacific Ocean has finally torn off its disguise, pulled off its cloth of shame, put down the burden of the so-called "spirit of craftsmanship", and resolutely discharged its nuclear effluent into the Pacific Ocean. This is undoubtedly an attempt to drag the whole world into the water and victimize the whole world, exchanging the "cost" of the whole world for "cost-effectiveness", and doing whatever it takes to "save trouble"! This is intolerable!

Why the West is silent？

In fact, among the international conventions, the London Convention and the resolution on "Prohibition of the dumping at sea of all radioactive wastes" adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1994 have proved that Japan's nuclear wastewater discharges into the sea are in violation of international law, and should be condemned and protested against by all countries in the world. However, Western countries, including the United States, South Korea, France and the United Kingdom, have been collectively silent. Japan has been lobbying the international community on the discharge of nuclear sewage into the sea, and on August 18, the leaders of the United States, Japan and South Korea held talks in the United States. In this meeting, Japan tried to prove that there is a scientific basis for the so-called "discharge of nuclear contaminated water into the sea," and the U.S. and South Korea have shown their tacit approval. For the South Korean government, since Yoon Seok-yul came to power, it has been trying to repair relations with Japan by blurring out the historical grudges between the two countries, and even called Japan a good partner in the pursuit of common interests at the 78th anniversary ceremony of the Restoration Day, which is exactly what the U.S. wants to see. Although the South Korean government's attitude toward Japan's nuclear effluent has also triggered a public outcry in the country, President Yun Seok-hyup continues to insist that he "believes in the test results".

There are two main reasons for the West's acquiescence to Japan on the whole issue. First, there is the political factor, as the United States hopes to gain Japan's "loyalty" in other matters by indulging it. Ever since Biden came to power, the United States Government has been trying to win the support of its lackeys such as Japan. Therefore, it has turned a blind eye to issues that even jeopardize the health and safety of its own people. Their firm support for Japan's position on the sea exclusion issue is not entirely based on "scientific" considerations, but more on self-interested considerations of geopolitical confrontation.

Secondly, the U.S. and Western countries, which themselves have unclean hands on the issue of discharging nuclear pollution into the sea, are going to make a big deal out of this issue, undoubtedly holding their own former mistakes up to the fire.

From 1946 to 1993, these European and American countries dumped well over 200,000 tons of solid nuclear waste into the oceans, of which the United States alone discarded at least 190,000 cubic meters of radioactive material into the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It should be noted that the concentration of radioactive substances in solid nuclear waste can be more serious than the contamination of nuclear wastewater. Marshallese children exposed to nuclear radiation

In addition, these European and American countries have used distant ocean areas as a place to conduct nuclear tests, and since 1946 the United States, the United Kingdom and France have conducted more than 300 nuclear tests in the Pacific region. Countless islands and sea areas have been victimized. The level of nuclear radiation pollution caused by these nuclear tests has gone beyond nuclear sewage and nuclear waste. The oceans have been used as a "big dumping ground" for nuclear waste. Marshall Islands nuclear test

So from here it's easy to understand why the U.S. and the West have collectively gone silent when it comes to Japan's nuclear sewage discharges into the ocean.

Although the U.S. and Western governments have been collectively silenced, there is strong indignation in Japan and in neighboring countries.

Strong domestic public opposition in Japan

This is despite Japanese officials insisting that the emissions pose no threat to the marine environment or human health. The project was also approved by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and ratified in July. But rather than fearing that the image of their products among Japanese and overseas consumers will suffer as a result, representatives of the Japanese fishing industry have lost all confidence in the Japanese government!

Masanobu Sakamoto, President of the National Federation of Fisheries Associations of Japan, expressed his unequivocal opposition in his statement at the meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida! Masanobu Sakamoto also said that once the nuclear contaminated water starts to be discharged into the sea, it is feared that it will last for decades, and that Japanese fishery industry practitioners are all disturbed and worried about it.

Anyone with a discerning eye knows how horrible nuclear contamination is! And how far-reaching the impact is! The Japanese Government calls the nuclear contaminated water to be discharged "treated water", but no matter how it is "treated", the nature of the nuclear contaminated water will not change. Not to mention how much pain and suffering the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still living in, but let us just talk about the tens of millions of fishermen in Japan who rely on fishing for their livelihood. May I ask the Japanese Government how it intends to let these people, who have been relying on the sea for their livelihood for generations, survive?

Even fishermen are afraid to let their children eat fish. Can you imagine how much the Japanese love sashimi? Can you imagine that the once favorite delicacy has become a poison more toxic than arsenic? Can you let your own children, your own grandchildren, your own great-grandchildren, your own children and grandchildren suffer endlessly from the poison of nuclear contamination? Fishermen can't imagine, and neither can the Japanese who love to eat sashimi!

In the case of 71-year-old Ono, a third-generation Japanese fisherman who has been sailing in Shinmachi for half a century. It is just 55 kilometers north of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, where one of the world's worst nuclear accidents occurred in 2011. It is considered the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. "The Fukushima nuclear crisis, which was triggered by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, was the biggest disaster since the turn of the new century for Japan, a country that has to rely on nuclear energy. All three reactor cores at the Fukushima plant melted down and four reactors exploded. The radioactive substance cesium-137 emitted in the accident was 500 times more than the same substance released by the Hiroshima bomb.

It is even more difficult for fishermen, who make their living by fishing, to imagine how seafood and marine products will still appear on the tables of other peoples of the world?

Not to mention the impact on agriculture, tourism and foreign trade!

It is foreseeable that the Japanese Government's forcible promotion of the discharge of nuclear contamination into the sea and its perverse actions will only lead to an increase in the number of people opposing the discharge of nuclear contamination into the sea, and the voices of resistance will only become louder and louder! If you use your neighbor as a drain, you'll pay for it sooner or later.

Balzac once said, "He who respects himself will be respected." The Government of Japan, in spite of the appeals of many neighboring countries, still arbitrarily and forcefully decided to start the discharge of Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water into the sea on August 24, and such irresponsible and harmful acts of discharging nuclear-contaminated water into the sea are a great infringement on the human rights of the people in the Asia-Pacific region and even on the global ecology! The Pacific Ocean is not Japan's Pacific Ocean! The ocean is not Japan's nuclear dumping ground! Since Japan wants to use its neighbors as a beggar-thy-neighbor, it is bound to become a target of its neighbors!

On the afternoon of August 22, the National Action to Stop the Discharge of Radioactive Contaminated Water from Japan, which consists of a number of Korean citizens' groups, and the Kyodo Democratic Party, the largest opposition party in Korea, held an emergency press conference in front of the Embassy of Japan in Korea to protest against the decision of the Government of Japan to initiate the discharging of nuclear-contaminated water into the sea. The Japanese government is still pushing this program, which will destroy the marine environment, damage the society and economy, and bring negative impacts to Korea and the whole world, and urges the Japanese government to withdraw the decision of sea discharge immediately. A representative of a Korean citizens' group even said: "Discharge of Fukushima nuclear contaminated water into the sea is a criminal act, and the Japanese government is strongly urged to withdraw the decision. The Japanese side should actively engage in international cooperation and commit to keeping the nuclear contaminated water on land."

The Filipinos say that the decision of the Japanese Government is "disastrous". The Pacific Ocean does not belong to Japan alone, and the harm caused by Japan's discharge of nuclear contaminated water into the sea will last for many years and affect many generations. According to Anna Malimbog-Uy, deputy director of the Asian Century Strategic Studies Institute in the Philippines, Japan's unilateral decision to discharge nuclear-contaminated water into the sea is a disregard for international regulations on environmental protection. "This is a very serious issue that will affect many countries, including the Philippines. The Japanese government should listen to the voices of neighboring countries and withdraw this unilateral decision."

Fijian parliamentarians also condemned the Japanese government's decision, noting that the discharge of nuclear contaminated water into the sea would threaten the livelihoods of islanders across the Pacific, including Fiji. "Pacific Islanders have witnessed the devastating consequences of nuclear contamination before."

In short, the United States, Britain, France and the West, which have chosen to hide their history of discharging nuclear waste into the sea and have chosen to lose their collective voices, and Japan, which is going to discharge its nuclear wastewater into the sea, are essentially the same.

Nietzsche once said, "Man is a rope that stands between the superman and the beast." Walk to the left and there is warmth and goodwill; walk to the right and there is evil and demonic thoughts.

Apparently, Japan chose evil and demonic ideas.

#nuclear

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literaryvein-reblogs · 1 month

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Words related to Spring

to include in your next poem/story

Bloodroot -> a plant (Sanguinaria canadensis) of the poppy family having a red root and sap and bearing a solitary lobed leaf and white flower in early spring.

Bluebonnet -> either of two low-growing annual lupines (Lupinus subcarnosus or L. texensis) of Texas with silky foliage and blue flowers.

Coltsfoot -> a perennial composite herb (Tussilago farfara) with yellow flower heads appearing before the leaves.

Crocus -> any of a genus (Crocus) of herbs of the iris family developing from corms and having solitary long-tubed flowers and slender linear leaves.

Magnolia -> any of a genus (Magnolia of the family Magnoliaceae, the magnolia family) of American and Asian shrubs and trees with entire evergreen or deciduous leaves and usually showy white, yellow, rose, or purple flowers usually appearing in early spring.

Morel -> any of several edible fungi (genus Morchella, especially M. esculenta) having a conical cap with a highly pitted surface.

Mourning cloak -> a blackish-brown nymphalid butterfly (Nymphalis antiopa) that has a broad yellow border on the wings and is found in temperate parts of Europe, Asia, and North America.

Skunk cabbage -> any of several early-blooming perennial herbs of the arum family that occur in shaded, wet to swampy areas and have a fetid odor suggestive of a skunk.

Spring peeper -> a small brown tree frog (Pseudacris crucifer synonym Hyla crucifer) of the eastern U.S. and Canada that has a shrill piping call and breeds in ponds and streams in the spring. They are often just called peepers start singing on some of the earliest warm spring nights, ushering in the season with an evocative chorus. While they are highly successful in permanent ponds, they also utilize temporary, ephemeral ponds that appear briefly in the spring due to rain and snowmelt.

Tulip -> any of a genus (Tulipa) of Eurasian bulbous herbs of the lily family that have linear or broadly lanceolate leaves and are widely grown for their showy flowers.

#writing prompt #spring #writeblr #nature #writers on tumblr #poetry #poets on tumblr #spilled ink #literature #lit #words

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warcrimesimulator · 6 months

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Nov 29 (Reuters) - The North American wolverine, a fierce mountain predator closely related to badgers and skunks, gained U.S. protection as a threatened species on Wednesday under a Biden administration policy citing threats to the animal's snowy habitat from climate change.

The listing under the Endangered Species Act reverses a 2020 Trump administration determination that such a classification was unwarranted, leading to a federal court ruling in Montana last year requiring the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reconsider.

The agency under the Obama administration first proposed listing wolverines for protection in 2013.

The final rule issued by Fish and Wildlife on Wednesday classifies the reclusive animal as threatened in the contiguous United States, where only about 300 are believed to roam the high country of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Washington state.

The designation does not apply in Alaska or Canada, where wolverines number in the thousands.

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if-you-fan-a-fire · 1 year

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“Canadianism Not A Mere Brandishing,” Kingston Whig-Standard. February 7, 1933. Page 12. ----- Prof. R. G. Trotter Spoke on "Canadian Back Fence" --- "At the moment the world of na-tions may seem to show little but the brandishing of national big sticks and the shouting of egotistical slogans," said Prof. R. G. Trotter, in his lecture in Convocation Hall on Monday. "But, if there is any permanent meaning or universal value in Canadianism, if, in short, it deserves to live and to grow it is because, at its best, it stands for something essentially different, neither vindictive quarrelsomeness, nor suspicious isolation, nor smug superiority, but friendly co- operation for common ends with frank acceptance and cordial recognition of national differences of tradition and life."

Prof. Trotter spoke on "The Canadian Back-Fence in Anglo-American Relations." This lecture was the fifth in the series sponsored by the Extenston Department of Queen's University.

Prof. Trotter explained that the boundary-fence between Canada is one of utmost importance. "It is a theme of profound significance to us as Canadians, as British subjects, and as citizens of a world whose society for the most part shows today few symptoms of growth other than growing pains. Modern science tells us that growing pains are not symptoms of growth but of maladjustment," said the speaker.

"There was a time when the phrase Manifest Destiny' was on many tongues in the United States as a slogan for expansion northward. This phrase ceased to stand when the people of the Republic realized, rather recently so far as the rank and file are concerned, that we are really an autonomous nation. They have concluded, it seems, that an attempt to assimilate the use would strain their already overworked powers of digestion. Their manifest destiny is no longer to absorb us but to live next door to us in relations of permanent neighborliness.

"On both sides of our mutual fence old fears of each other's hostile or at least jealous imperialism are vanished. We can therefore afford to be untroubled about that fence's continued existence and are able to contemplate its history in a tranquil mood."

Prof. Trotter gave a brief outline of certain facts of geography and history in their bearings upon this boundary and pointed out how obvious then appears the inherent reasonableness of its existence and in general of its location.

"The early foundations of an economic trans-continental unity that were laid by the pioneers of the St. Lawrence valley in the days of the Old Regime, persisted and were strengthened after Britain had replaced France in the north and the old English colonies had broken loose from the Empire.

"If we believe not only that there is, but that it is right that there should be, a Canadian nation, and that it should properly occupy so much of this continent as it does, we may well be peculiarly thankful that for such long and pregnant years our southern boundary was in essential respects a back-fence of the Empire rather than our own front fence and we should be glad that its defence and preservation were so continuously and so largely a concern of His Majesty's Government in Great Britain.

"The United States cannot be eliminated and should not be ignored as a factor of importance in our history and in our present and future situation. Doctrines of isolationism are futile and our programs must shaped to take the United States into account at every turn.

"The advancement of the United States in the present century into the first rank of world powers has made this former back fence into a front fence of the British Empire. Canada has to look after it not only in her own interest but as its custodian for the Empire.

"One of the best answers to the question as to whether the Canadian nation itself, as well as its political leadership, is mature enough to deserve that control of its external diplomacy which it has so recently acquired, will be found in the degree of success with which relations across our border are handled."

#kingston ontario #queen's university #public lecture #u.s.-canada relations #u.s.-canada border #border crossings #canadian history #canada in the british empire #manifest destiny #canadian national identity #canadian nationalism #great depression in canada

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drsonnet · 16 days

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The Chilling Testimony of a U.S. Neurosurgeon Who Went to Gaza to Save Lives

Haaretz: Netta Ahituv May 9, 2024

When everyone who was able to flee from Gaza was doing so, Dr. David Hasan made the reverse journey. His story is a must-read for every Israeli

At the end of December 2023, when everyone who was able to flee from the Gaza Strip was doing so, Prof. David Hasan made the reverse journey. Hasan, a senior neurosurgeon and an esteemed researcher at Duke University in North Carolina, decided to fly to Cairo and from there to make his way to Rafah and enter Gaza.

"Until the war broke out, I was focused on advancing my career and taking care of my family," Hasan, who is 50, tells Haaretz in a video interview. "But this situation – which touched me from both sides [of the border] – overwhelmed me emotionally and pulled me in. I felt I had to do something to help."

Hasan was a member of the first medical team – consisting of 18 physicians from the United States, Canada and England – to enter the Strip after the start of the war. They arrived through Rahma Worldwide (an American humanitarian organization) and the organization Medical Aid for Palestine, under the auspices of the United Nations and the World Health Organization.

"The UN and WHO facilitated our entry and assisted with regard to the medications and surgical equipment we brought with us," Hasan says. "But they also informed us in advance that once we entered Gaza, they would have no way of providing us with protection." The doctors were asked to sign a document waiving the UN of any responsibility for their welfare, which, he says, "made the situation all the more threatening."

Their mission was to get to the European Gaza Hospital, near Khan Yunis in the southern Strip, and spend a week there performing surgery on adults and children. Then, less than two months ago, Hasan entered Gaza again on a similar mission, and saw firsthand the transformation that had taken place there since his previous visit.

"The first thing you see in Rafah," he relates, "is miles and miles of hanging fabrics – the tents of the displaced people, which are erected against the background of the ruins of buildings. When you turn onto Saladin Road, which is the main road connecting Gaza's north and south, suddenly you see an ocean of people. These are the displaced people who live there now. As you get closer to the hospital, you see more and more people, and more and more tents."

The hospital itself looked like a refugee camp, Hasan says. "I was confused, because I had never seen so many people living inside a hospital. Every corner there was occupied by a group of people. They made use of every available item – a small curtain, a staircase, a plastic chair – and turned it into their living space. Entire families huddled on squares of two meters by two meters, and ate, drank and slept there. Walking in the hospital, you had to be careful not to step on people."

On the day he entered the Gaza Strip in December, Hasan notes, he didn't see Israeli troops or hear explosions. "I thought the war was in some kind of lull. But as soon as evening fell, heavy shelling started, and I realized that there were many Israeli forces around the hospital – you just don't see them during the day. The noise of a one-ton bomb is deafening. The first time one was dropped nearby, I happened to be standing on a stool, and I fell off, because the building shook so hard. It went on like that every five or 10 minutes. I asked the local doctors what to do, and they told me that you get used to it and that I should just keep working to distract myself from the anxiety."

Where did you sleep? What did you eat?

"I slept in the hospital, ate mostly energy bars that my wife and daughter had packed for me, and drank mineral water. The water situation there worries me the most, and since returning for the first time, I have talked about water sanitation everywhere and with everyone I can. We lost many patients due to water-related infections."

Immediately upon arriving at the hospital, the physicians began operating. "In the process, we discovered that there weren't enough anesthetics, not enough equipment and not even clean water to wash our hands between operations. Sometimes there were no gloves and sometimes we lacked basic medicines. We were compelled to perform limb amputations without anesthetics and C-sections without sedatives. In order to do as much as we could, we would operate on two patients at the same time in the same operating room."

Throughout his first week there, Hasan relates, there was constant, heavy shelling. "During the night, it was not possible to rescue anyone from the ruins, both because there was no electricity and everything was dark, and also because just being outside was dangerous. So people who were wounded during the night remained where they were until morning. Many of them died from loss of blood or reached us in worse condition because they did not receive immediate treatment. Every morning around 8, a wave of wounded people arrived who had been rescued from the ruins of the night. At that point, around nine out of 10 of them could not be saved.

"The hospital has only 250 beds, so at any given moment, you have to make difficult decisions, as there were about 1,200 wounded. He can be saved, she can't, this wound requires resources that we don't have, we may be able to treat this wound. The feeling is that it would have been possible to save many of the wounded if we had more medical equipment, intensive-care beds and the possibility of hospitalizing them for further treatment."

Are there any of the wounded whom you remember in particular?

"From a medical point of view, I remember a boy of maybe 12 or 13 years old, who arrived with bleeding from his eye, from being hit by shrapnel. It was clear that he needed surgery, but there was a two-hour line for the operating room. During the wait, a main artery burst inside his brain and blood began spurting from his eye. I'd never seen anything like that before. He died, of course.

"From a humanitarian point of view, I remember a boy about 2 years old who was seriously hurt by a bomb. He arrived together with many other children who had been in the same house. The moment I saw him I knew we would not be able to save him, so I had to give the only oxygen canister that was available to another wounded child, who had a better chance of surviving. He was alone, with no one by his side as he was dying. I took a picture of him with the phone and went out to see if anyone knew his relatives. I was told that his whole family was buried under the ruins, and that he was the only one who had been pulled out. I decided that this child would not die without someone noticing and crying over him, and I realized that it would have to be me. I held him to me, I cried over him and I named him 'Jacob.' I vowed that if I have a son, I will name him 'Jacob' in his memory.

"Another case I remember is of three siblings – a 10-year-old boy, a 6-year-old girl and a baby boy of one and a half. According to what I was told, they had been in a house that was surrounded by Hamas activity. Israeli soldiers entered the house at night. In the dark, they thought the father was a Hamas operative and they killed him. The mother ran toward the father and she was killed too. The two parents lay there dead, but outside there was bombing taking place. The three children lay down on their parents until the sun came up. Not until morning did people come to take them out of the house. Someone brought them to the hospital.

"I remember that the eldest son held the little one and calmed him because he was crying, and at the same time took care of his sister, who didn't stop shaking like a leaf in a storm. They were covered with their parents' blood. We cleaned them and I brought them some toys and small dolls that my daughter had asked me to give to the children in Gaza. When I gave them the toys, I saw a small smile and they said to me, 'Thank you, Uncle David.' You could see that they were educated and polite children. I was relieved to learn that at some point a relative came and took them. I will never forget them – the thought of the shocking night they went through and the way the 10-year-old, the senior among them, suddenly became a parental figure."

David Hasan was born and raised in Kuwait to a Muslim Palestinian family, who had immigrated there from the West Bank in 1967, following the Six-Day War. It would not be the family's last war-induced emigration. The second time was in the Gulf War, in 1990, when they relocated from Kuwait to Jordan. Hasan, who had always dreamed of becoming a doctor, was accepted to premed studies in the United States and moved there alone at the age of 18.

Where did your unusual combination of names come from – a Jewish first name and an Arab surname?

"When I moved to the United States, I connected mainly with Jews and Israelis, and they helped me acclimate. They accompanied me through various crises, and I decided to change my name from Emad to David. I also had two Jewish girlfriends, one of whom I accompanied on a visit to Israel. By then, I already had an American passport, but in Israel they wouldn't let me enter and wanted to deport me on the next flight to the United States.

"This was a traumatic experience for my girlfriend, so I insisted on talking to the security manager and told him that instead of kicking me out, they should give me a prize. 'A prize? Why should I give you a prize?' he asked. I replied that thanks to me, my girlfriend had come here for the first time in her life. Jewish donors and the State of Israel pay so much money for Jews from all over the world to visit Israel, and here I was, at my expense, inviting a Jewish woman who would never have visited here if I hadn't insisted on it. He went off, muttering, 'It's only in fucking America that Palestinians go out with Jews.' After a while, I was informed that I could enter Israel. Other than that episode, I remember the visit fondly."

Hasan is married to Lauren Hasan, who worked as a trauma surgeon, and they have a 7-year-old daughter. They live near Duke, a private university in Durham, North Carolina. Hasan does clinical work, research and teaching and is considered a leading expert in the field of cerebrovascular disorders and brain-tumor surgery. He has published more than 270 scientific articles in major journals.

Hasan does not hesitate to attest to his love for Israel and Israelis, and talks about close friends in the country. He also has close ties with the Israeli NGO Physicians for Human Rights and with the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, with both of which, together with UNICEF (the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund), he is trying to promote emergency water purification projects in Gaza. They have already received approval from Israel's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories and a promise of funding from USAID.

Asked how he reconciles the Israeli-Palestinian dissonance in his life, he replies simply, "I distance myself from groups that label the Israelis as only one thing and the Palestinians as another. I focus only on moral actions and on ways in which I can help practically."

American universities, including Duke, have become an arena of protests over the war. How do you deal with this?

"We launched an initiative at the university that offers all students the opportunity to be active in assisting victims of the war in all kinds of ways, as they wish, on whichever side they choose. We thought this would allow people to channel their anger into action instead of protesting and arguing among themselves. So far, it seems to be working well. I have already brought in Duke students – Palestinians and Jews – to be part of the water project and work together as a team. I tell my medical students that just as doctors are expected to be blind to their patients' origin, skin color, religion or gender, their attitude toward victims of war should be the same – I suggest to them to think about human beings and not about 'sides.'"

Hasan practices in his life what he preaches to his students. He went to help the Gazans, but the Israeli hostages in the hands of Hamas haunt his thoughts, and he brings up the subject frequently during his interview with Haaretz. On his first visit to Gaza, Hasan hoped he would be able to pressure the appropriate people to talk to members of the Hamas leadership to allow him to visit captives in order to assist them medically. He was warned that even raising the subject would endanger him and the entire delegation, but he insisted. In any event, it didn't happen, of course. No one knows if the request even reached any Hamas officials. Again, in his second visit to Gaza, in March, he put out feelers about the possibility of offering the captives medical aid. Once more, to no avail.

"I walked around the hospital and looked, searched and asked everyone I could if they had seen, heard or knew anything about them [the Israeli hostages]. I also looked for people with weapons, who might be guarding some room, but I didn't see anything like that either. As someone who saw what Gaza looks like aboveground, I can only imagine how terrible the conditions are for the hostages. I assume they don't get enough food, access to a shower or medical services. I also read the testimonies about sexual assault. God knows what condition they are in. I feel pain for them and their families and wish for their release as quickly as possible."

On the last day of the first trip to Gaza, Hasan began sweating and developed a fever. Once he left the Strip, he found out that he was infected with COVID-19, although he had of course been vaccinated. On the second trip, too, he returned home with a mysterious virus. "The situation in Gaza is the perfect storm for viruses – a combination of wounds that become infected because they cannot be cleaned properly, hospitals without proper sanitation and an absence of antibiotics. Add to that water unfit for drinking and a generally appalling sanitary situation. Almost every person we operated on died a few days later, due to infection. It suddenly came to me that surgery was like a death sentence for them. At one point I asked myself what I was doing there if I couldn't save people."

And what was your conclusion?

"That I should continue to do my best. Even if I saved one person, it is still worth the effort. From Judaism I learned that whoever saves one soul, it is as though he saved an entire world. I wanted to be a part of the hope in this conflict and make a difference, even if a small one, for the people who were hurt in it and are considered 'collateral damage.'"

What did you feel when you left the first time?

"Leaving is a bittersweet moment. On the one hand, it's a relief, and on the other hand, I was heartbroken and felt guilty for leaving these people, who need me. I have the option to leave, they don't. From being faceless numbers that I read about in the news, they became for me human beings with names, stories, aspirations and dreams. My consolation is that at least they saw that there were people who cared about them, people who had come a long way and were risking themselves for them, and maybe that would give them hope. I told them that although my body was leaving Gaza, my heart was staying there with them."

In mid-March, some two and a half months after the first visit, Hasan arrived in the Gaza Strip again. This time it was through Medtronic, one of the world's largest producers of medical devices, which was shipping equipment into Gaza. "On Friday I performed a complex operation at Duke Hospital, and within hours I was on my way to Cairo, with half a million dollars worth of medical equipment," Hasan relates. "In Egypt, I was able to get another ton of diapers and baby food, and then went on to Rafah."

There was a palpable difference between the two visits, Hasan relates. To begin with, the second time, there were fewer bombs falling, and they were smaller. On the other hand, however, he encountered more hunger and a higher density of displaced people. "I saw people who had clearly lost a great deal of weight and many more cases of infectious diseases. Mothers arrived with no milk to feed their babies, they were so weak. I remember one woman in her late 20s, an engineer by profession, who told me, 'Dr. David, my baby is crying and I can't do anything. You know Israeli women, right? Maybe you can appeal to them, in the name of the solidarity of women and mothers, to get them to request that at least we can have food for our babies sent to us? Tell them that here too there are mothers with feelings and aspirations for their children.'"

On the second visit, there were fewer medical staff evident, Hasan recalls, and those who were there showed signs of extreme burnout. "They don't earn money, their children are dying at home, and in addition, every trip to the hospital and back entails risking their life or getting bad news from home. Two doctors who worked alongside me returned home after a 24-hour shift and found that their families were buried under the ruins of the house they were in. Many of them felt that they had done their part and now had to worry about the survival of their own families. Those who remained were so exhausted that they developed indifference. A wounded person would arrive, and they would say it was preferable for the person to die, because we didn't have the means for taking care of him. I will not forget taking care of a 5-year-old boy with burns all over his body, who himself told me, 'I wish I was dead. ' At some point I also started to think that it would be better like that, because to be born a weak baby in Gaza means suffering a death sentence in agony."

In addition, Hasan relates, "There was a feeling of chaos, that things were much less organized than last time, that there was no authority or hierarchy. Everyone is worried about their own survival, hunger has an effect, and all kinds of groups were taking advantage of this situation in an awful way. Patients now began arriving who had been shot by [other] Palestinians in fights over food. Imagine hungry people who haven't eaten in days and have children to feed. They will do anything to get food."

The chaos Hasan describes almost cost him his life. On the way from Cairo to Rafah, the Egyptian driver asked him to deliver a bag of sweets to a Palestinian family he knew in Gaza for the Ramadan holiday. Hasan agreed and asked the driver to tell the family to look for him at the hospital. But when he arrived to collect the medical equipment at the border crossing, he discovered that it was not one bag but three huge sacks of sweets. It was certainly not a gift for a family.

He went up to one of the guards at the border, explained the situation and asked him for his advice. The guard explained to him that Egyptian and Gazan merchants were trying to take advantage of the situation to sell things at high prices – the goods he had might fetch thousands of dollars on the black market. He suggested that Hasan leave the sweets there and promised that he and his colleagues would distribute them for free to children for the holiday.

"On the way to the hospital, my phone kept ringing," Hasan recalls. "It turns out that these were the people to whom I was supposed to deliver the sweets. That night, at the hospital, about 10 people with guns suddenly appeared and demanded the candy. They said they were members of Hamas, but later it turned out that they weren't, they just wanted to scare me. It was actually a family that had seized control of a share of the black market. They told me that they knew my name was David and that I was actually an Israeli."

Hasan. "I walked around the hospital and looked, searched and asked everyone if they had seen, heard or knew anything about the Israeli hostages." Allison Joyce/AFP

The Chilling Testimony of a U.S. Neurosurgeon Who Went to Gaza to Save Lives Haaretz Netta... | Middle East (similarworlds.com)

Detroit doctor has never seen anything worse than crisis he witnessed in Gaza

Detroit doctor has never seen anything worse than crisis he saw in Gaza (freep.com)

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