That has me rather excited. Every time we hit a milestone, whether a serious one like a trans political candidate or one that appears frivolous on the surface like a trans Miss America contestant, this is good news. It means that our visibility is increasing, and that the mystique and unknowability of trans identities is being broken down. The public is being confronted with the reality that, well, we’re here, we’re trans, and they’d better get used to it. We are nothing to be afraid of.

The nonbinary community in particular has made huge strides when it comes to acceptance and public visibility, considering that nonbinary identities weren’t even considered in the public zeitgeist until relatively recently.

Yet, with the explosion of the trans generation, I also have a deep fear, and that’s what’s going to happen to this generation of pioneers as they age. Already, trans elders are at increased risk of elder abuse whether they live in residential facilities, rely on home aides, or don’t have any assistance at all. Many trans people live in poverty, particularly trans women, and that doesn’t exactly change with age; in fact, aging increases your chances of being poor and struggling, and can leave people at a profound social disadvantage thanks to the fact that older adults are treated as disposable in our society.

One the one hand, it seems like growing numbers of trans elders would result in safer conditions for them, a network of support, a reduction in elder abuse. This is a generation used to advocacy work, ferocious out-loud speaking, and not backing down from challenges, all traits that are critically necessary when fighting for human rights. Yet, like other older adults, they run the risk of being put out to pasture and forgotten by a new generation, which would leave them moldering in facilities and situations where they would be exposed to serious risk of abuse; and no evidence supports the idea that older adults in general aren’t targets for abuse and no one would do such a thing.

Elder abuse is a huge social problem across the United States, with numerous unscrupulous people taking advantage of older adults economically and socially as well as abusing them physically. Deaths in facilities dedicated to adults who need skilled nursing care or who don’t have a safe place to be and are forced into institutions are high, and they’re often cursorily investigated, if at all. Rape and other sex crimes also occur within the context of nursing home walls, and strike all older adults; unsurprisingly, the existing trans elder population tends to be at especially high risk for this kind of abuse.

And in the disability community, of course, nursing home abuse not just for elders but for all people trapped in institutions has been a documented issue for decades. The community has fought long and hard to free disabled people from these risky environments, to raise awareness, to fight for better protections, and it’s been largely ignored. The body of activism, discussion, and precedent on the abuse of older adults and disabled people suggests that trans elders, a vulnerable population now, will continue to be vulnerable even when they’re larger in number.

I worry about the fate of all elders, and about the lack of attention paid to conditions in elder ‘care’ facilities now, but this is another reason why there’s a compelling argument to get involved with activism to protect elders now, not when we ourselves are elderly and facing down the abusive aide, the neglectful nurse, the rapist in cleaner’s clothing. Standing with and behind elders, working in solidarity with them to improve conditions, tighten laws on elder abuse, force investigations into abuse, and take other actions to make it clear that we as a society will not tolerate the abuse of elders will make elders safer today…and tomorrow.

We often wait for activism until it strikes a cause close to us, something that personally affects us. And I understand why people do this. There’s so much wrong in the world, and there are so many things to advocate on, and it isn’t possible for one person to do it all; we need to pick and choose our advocacy work, to determine where our energies are best directed, to work efficiently and well and support related movements while we can. For many, elder abuse isn’t a priority, though that doesn’t mean they don’t care about it.

How can we integrate it more fully into larger social justice movements? How can we protect our elders today and into the future? How can we address the epidemic of abuse of trans elders that’s occurring right now, and will only get worse with time? These are the things I’m thinking about right now, because I desperately want us to take action before it’s too late, not just for ourselves, but for those who are suffering in facilities right now and need some visible sign that the outside society cares about them, is fighting for them, and wants to extricate them from situations of torture, abuse, and more.

Don’t write off our elders, not least because you’ll be one yourself someday (we hope).

Yet, many white people seem surprised to learn that these things are not in the past; they’re still going on in the present, and this is something that people need to be engaging with and talking about, because Native communities are fighting hard to preserve their culture from the constant assault of white US society. Making the mistake of believing that seizure of Native children lies in the past and never happens now thanks to the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978) means that people can divorce themselves of responsibility for following the current situation for Native children in the US.

Recently, the Rosebud and Oglala Sioux tribes filed suit in South Dakota to protest child welfare issues, particularly involving the removal of Native children from their homes in the wake of abuse allegations. Obviously, agencies charged with child welfare have a mandate and need to protect children, and accusations of abuse should be taken seriously, but in Indian country, the way the rules are applied appears to be highly unequal, and it’s very prejudiced against Native families.

Many are not allowed to hear the evidence against them, to cross-examine, and introduce their own evidence. Hearings are often so brief as to be effectively meaningless, even though they have a profound effect on the lives of children and families; when a child is seized from a home and placed in the foster care system, that sets of a chain reaction of events with massive repercussions. This is not a time to be making mistakes, and indeed, the US government claims that it wants to prioritise the health and safety of children during such hearings, but often doesn’t act in a manner consistent with that claim.

Tribal members argue (and statistics support them) that this is happening to Indian children much more than children of other races, clearly indicative of bias; Native kids are overrepresented in family court, which is suggestive of an abuse of state power. Once in the system, they can be trapped there for months or years, with families struggling to see their children at all, let alone regain custody. Meanwhile, those children are growing up, changing, and evolving outside the family unit and the tribal community, separated from their culture and heritage in a way that that the ICWA is allegedly supposed to prevent.

South Dakota in particular has a documented problem with this very issue. Despite the law, children seized from their families after short hearings and cursory investigations are being placed in nonNative, mostly white, group homes and residential placements, with hundreds in foster care every year separated from their families and communities. Rather than responding to concerns from Native welfare advocates both in and out of the state, South Dakota appears to be doubling down; the state just doesn’t seem to care when it comes to complying with the basics of the law. After all, why should it; significant violations of the ICWA have been documented in over 30 US states.

9 out of 10 Native foster children in South Dakota is placed in a white home. Even more revoltingly, when children report abuse, including molestation, to child welfare officials, the response is not to get those children out of a dangerous home environment and place them somewhere safe—like with a Native family, or back in their own homes—but to pressure those children in an attempt to get them to recant their complaints. Something is deeply, deeply wrong with this system. Native children can be seized at the drop of a hat from their own families when complaints are made, but when the complaints are against white people, suddenly no one’s interested?

Make no mistake; South Dakota and other states are still exercising white imperialism, and they’re attempting to stamp out Native culture and society. They may not be passing out smallpox-infected blankets, but they are forcibly removing Native children and enacting scores of policies that directly harm the Native community, and are largely structured to do just that. The crisis with Native foster care not just in South Dakota but in the US as a whole requires urgent, concerted action, not neglect and disinterest, just as the larger foster care system is in critical need of reform.

The days of seizing Native children from their homes, taking them far from their families, and placing them in white homes where they’re raised in a way that deprives them of cultural enrichment are not in the past. The idea of ‘killing the Indian’ is far from gone, and many states continue to actively endorse it as part of their official policy, no matter what the federal law might say, and no matter how hard tribal activists and indigenous rights group fight the removal of children, the abstraction of culture, the devastation of not just individual families but communities as a whole.

At first, these stories, suffused with magical realism, might not seem to be strongly connected. Then you take a step back, and you start to see all the little threads and themes drawing them together, the references from one spilling over into the next, and the next, and the next. Drawing heavily on mythology, Sedgwick explores stories of the Year King, sacrifices, and life on a remote island where everything is not as it seems, with mysterious artists, curious children, archaeologists, and more.

Time jumps radically in Midwinterblood, as do the perspectives the novel takes on. We see different slices of the island’s life through the lenses of the characters, each of whom knows something…but doesn’t know everything. Read together and in order, the stories paint a fascinating and compelling picture, but each one can also be successfully read as a standalone, and, what’s more, you can read them out of order if you please, thanks to the careful craft of the book. In essence, Midwinterblood is like a deck of cards that you can shuffle in endless configurations for new stories and new scenery, and each time you read it, something entirely new and different will crop up.

Sedgwick has a very stark but compelling writing voice which is well suited to the narrative, the structure, and the island itself. It is in many ways a cold, bleak sort of place, with secrets concealed deep within its crust and whispers that travel through the quiet nights; Sedgwick’s writing pulls you into that world and anchors you to it, even as you’re spinning around in confusion with the characters, with only the most limited understanding of what is happening and why. Bit by bit, the characters come to understand, and you follow along with them, eyes widening in something akin to horror, but not quite.

This is also a very melancholy sort of text. You watch two characters jump and bounce around each other repeatedly, time after time, in the setting of this novel where nothing ever seems to go quite as planned or declared. Each time you think they might be getting close, and could perhaps be finally putting a stop to the cycle that has the island in its bitter grip, the story twists back in on itself and you sigh with frustration and sympathy for the characters, who seem trapped in this inevitable dance that will keep on going until the end of time no matter what they do, and no matter how hard they try to make things come out differently.

There’s a mysterious plant, ghostly presences, a divide that seems more supernatural than geographical, and so much more embedded within Midwinterblood, which is part love story, part ghost story, part adaptation of history, part confrontation of humanity. I read it straight through in one sitting the first time I sat down with it because it was so compelling, and because I had to know what happened in the next story, if maybe things would change, if the introduction of a different setting and a shift in the characters would be the key that was needed for everyone to finally be happy. And then I read it again, bouncing around through different stories rather than reading in order, so see how different the narrative felt by following it in a roundabout way.

A provocative, thinky novel, Midwinterblood still manages to be a fairly quick read, and like a book of short stories, it can be picked up and set down if you need to, although you may miss some of the book’s complexity and subtlety if you do that. If you can stand the suspense, I highly recommend reading one story each night before bed, drawing it out for yourself and seeing how that affects your interpretation of the overall narrative; at the very least, you should have fantastically strange and mysterious dreams brought about by immersing yourself in Sedgwick’s world, and that should count for something, right?

This definitely left me wanting to read more of his work; not because I want to read endless variations on the same book, but because I’m intrigued by his writing style, and he clearly has the ability to think outside the box a bit when it comes to narratives, structure, and storytelling. I’m so glad Midwinterblood was able to find a home so I could read it, because I know that somewhat eccentric novels can have a rough time of it in the market these days, and this is definitely a story that deserved wider exposure.

The first, of course, was the overall lack of representation; with a smaller pool of potential characters to choose from, there are limited opportunities for showing pregnant disabled people and disabled parents. An extension of that was the idea that disabled people are not sexual, so they would never be in a position to become pregnant or to pursue parenting (auxiliary to that is the outdated notion that there’s only one way to become a parent). And, of course, there’s the idea that being pregnant while disabled, or parenting while disabled, would be a horrible tragedy, and thus these kinds of plots are only really used in pop culture for the purpose of exoticising disability and making viewers feel sorry for disabled characters.

This has been especially notable on Private Practice, which, because of Dr. Addison Montgomery’s complex OB/GYN practice, naturally features a huge number of pregnant women and parents. The show has had a number of disability storylines including a pregnant teen with Down syndrome, a blind woman whose parental rights were contested, and a woman in a coma who’s raped by her husband (several characters refuse to categorise it as rape, instead referring to it as an act of love, as though a comatose woman can consent). In contrast, on Switched at Birth, Marlee Matlin and Sean Berdy play a Deaf mother and son, depicting another kind of familial relationship. A handful of other shows have explored the subject, usually badly.

When disabled characters get pregnant, this is often depicted as horrible. There is, of course, the implication that the child will be born with impairments, as though all impairments are genetic and being disabled is uniformly awful. And there are also bold statements about how disabled people can’t be parents, wouldn’t be able to cope with pregnancy, labour, and delivery, and can’t be expected to interact with the world like nondisabled people. Their children, it’s claimed, would be at a disadvantage and would do better in care; that was seen with the blind character on Private Practice, for example, where several characters argued that the child should be placed with a sighted family member.

At the same time that television is often reluctant to depict pregnancy at all among disabled characters, it often does so with a distressing lack of agency, and in a way that doesn’t fully interrogate that. The episode of Private Practice depicting a disabled woman in a coma was particularly stark in that regard; the framing of the episode was often ambiguous instead of very clear about the fact that if a woman is in a coma, she cannot consent to sex, and even if it’s her husband, it’s still rape, because marriage is not a permanent sex contract. In cases with intellectually disabled characters, on the other hand, the agency of the characters is flatly denied and it’s assumed that they must have been ‘taken advantage of’ or can’t make decisions for themselves because of their impairments, an attitude reflected in larger society.

People talk around these characters about ‘what should be done’ without deferring to them and considering their wishes, and they’re often presented as a huge burden. A pregnant teen with Down syndrome is depicted as totally unable to participate in the care for her child, and as someone who’s just created more work for her family. Now they have TWO children instead of one to take care of, and it’s all her fault because she was too stupid to know what the consequences of sex were; and she had the audacity to be both sexual and disabled, perhaps to enjoy her sexuality, to be in a sexual relationship with another person. The desexualised nature of disability in pop culture comes to the fore in conversations about pregnant disabled characters as people present pregnancy and disability as incompatible and even somewhat gross and unnerving.

When it comes to parenting, there’s a heavy emphasis on incompetence. We very rarely see disabled parents just doing their own thing, parenting in their own way, figuring things out—exactly like nondisabled parents do, because every parenting experience comes with individual challenges which actually aren’t dependent on the disability status of the parent. The depiction of Deaf parenting on Switched at Birth is one of the few cases of positive depictions, and it’s notable that Marlee Matlin plays the mother and works closely with the show’s producers, that many d/Deaf people don’t identify with the disability community, and that the show overall has been shown to be quite progressive when it comes to discussing d/Deafness and hearing impairments.

It stands out precisely because their relationship isn’t viewed as unusual or freakish, in contrast with so many disabled parents on television, who are reduced to their impairments and made small and worthless by the characters around them. Especially on medical dramas, where disability is viewed as a failure, disabled parenting is considered a tragedy, something that children need to be rescued from; even if those children are clearly healthy and happy, and their parents are fully capable of caring for them. This reflects larger and more dangerous attitudes about parenting and disability: we live in a society where disability alone can be grounds for seizing a child and placing her in the foster care system.

Why are television creators so disinterested in showing not just authentic depictions of disability on screen, but specifically depictions of disabled parenting?

In the myriad of discussions this year about rape and sexuality, there have been constant reminders that the problem with rape lies not with victims, but with rapists. If we want to stop rape, we need to focus on the people who are doing it, not the people who are being raped; which means that we need to understand why it is that so many people are so poorly educated about rape, and so unwilling to put any checks on their own behaviour when it comes to, you know, not raping.

Statistically, men are much more likely to be rapists, and culturally, that reflects a larger culture of misogyny. In a community where women are viewed as objects of power and subjugation, rape becomes another way of exerting authority and reminding women of who is in charge. In a culture where women are deemed without value, sex crimes are barely worthy of investigation and comment, let alone serious prosecution; we live in a society where girls can be gangraped and adults cover it up, where long-term molestation of children is known about and never discussed, where women who dare to report their rapes are promptly blamed for being raped in the first place, and then ruining the lives of the accused by having the audacity to talk about it.

Many have argued that in order to stop rape, we need to be raising boys not to rape (and, I would argue, teaching children of other genders not to rape as well—though a statistical minority, they are still a presence). I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment, but I also wonder how many adults could use some anti-rape education as well, including, dare I say it, ‘progressives’ who assure each other that they would never do that kind of thing, that they are always respectful and loving with partners, that they would never force themselves on someone.

Some progressives at least mostly understand what many people do not, which is that most rapes involve people known to the victim, and then many of these involve intimate relationships. I don’t fear a rapist in a dark alley; statistically, I’m highly unlikely to be assaulted in that setting. I fear the people I know, and while it may make the people I know uncomfortable to hear that, it’s a simple fact. I certainly am not perturbed when the people I know share my fear, knowing full well that close relationships can result in rape, and that these rapes are not as neatly tied up in a bow as the rape of the popular imagination, not as sharp and clearly defined.

When we talk about teaching people not to rape, there’s a focus in many progressive communities on what’s known as ‘enthusiastic consent,’ the idea that people engaged in sexual activity should both be enthusiastic about it, should both be having a good time, should both be comfortable with what is going on. Critics seem to envision this as a checklist that must be gone through at every stage of a sexual encounter, or some sort of carefully negotiated contract that happens before anyone takes anything off, when the reality of enthusiastic consent is much more complicated; it involves an intimate knowledge of a partner, a read for body language, sensitivity, and awareness. It is something individually defined and negotiated.

Much like rape, enthusiastic consent is complicated, and it does not always adhere to hard boundaries. When pushes across boundaries occur they are not always easy to identify, or to put a stop to; something that was okay one day might not be the next, someone might feel obliged to please a partner but not that engaged, someone might be reluctant to protest but could still appear enthusiastic, and the markers of these things can be extremely subtle. Pushing enthusiastic consent alone, in other words, is not enough to prevent rape, though obviously clear, open communication is key and should be an important part of sexuality and relationships.

Recognising that each of us has a capacity to push too far, and probing that ability within yourself, is important if you’re going to be sexually active. Because if you truly do want to be respectful of your partners, not raping them is rather key to that, and ‘not raping’ is not always a simple, clear, easy act; you have to start by acknowledging that you have the capacity to override another person’s consent, and that your intentions in the encounter don’t matter when it comes to the outcome. If your desire was to have a mutually enjoyable fun time and your partner did not have fun, perhaps felt pressured or uncomfortable, it may not necessarily have been rape, depending on how your partner felt, but it definitely wasn’t what you set out to accomplish.

The idea that anyone can be a rapist seems terrifying enough to many people when it’s applied to the world at large and they come to understand that sexuality is not as simple as they want it to be. To take that to a logical extension, that you yourself can be a rapist, can be even more traumatic: but that doesn’t mean this is a conversation that shouldn’t be had.

Berkeleyites embraced urban farming, backyard gardens, and all the rest before they were even really a trend in the rest of the nation. Alice Waters was sourcing local food and regional specialties before they became a huge hit. Elementary school students on up were participating in environmental curricula, including after-school activities, as part of their educations long before schools in other parts of the country were putting serious thought to integrating environmental responsibility into their curricula.

Yet, Berkeley is also a rather affluent and sheltered place, in many ways. Go off the main drag, with dense student housing and an accumulation of colourful businesses intended to entice students with parentally sponsored credit cards, and you’ll find stately old neighbourhoods with nice Craftsman houses, beautiful old trees, elegant gardens. Many of these homes have been chopped up into apartments to suit a vigorous housing market, but not all, especially as you creep up into the hills, where the wealthier residents tend to settle to take advantage of the view and the Berkeley address. They are the generation of people who think of themselves as progressive, but have become very entrenched in middle class lives and values, with a very specific vision of what their world should look like.

Which creates a fascinating collision that can be seen as Berkeley struggles with subjects like urban planning, balancing the city’s urgent need for expansion with the obstructionism from the old guard. The fact that Berkeley needs more housing units and amenities is clear, and they’re going to happen either way, even if it takes time. The question isn’t whether these things are going to happen, but how. There are sustainable options, with long-term environmental issues in mind, and there are unsustainable ones, that will not benefit the city or the environment in general in the long term.

Here is the thing about sustainable urban development: It’s not necessarily ‘in character’ with the Berkeley look and feel. Dense development is the best thing for the environment, because it limits sprawl, and that means tall buildings designed around a central core, with an easily walkable area providing the services most residents will need. It involves an expansion of bus service to make it possible to live without a car (something many people in Berkeley already do thanks to the expense of maintaining one there—they rely on car shares and generous friends when they need vehicles for specific tasks), and it involves the creation of districts that don’t necessarily look ‘pretty.’

You can’t have nice Craftsman homes set back on lots with room for gardens. While these look very pretty, they are not efficient uses of space, even if they are designed to conceal multiple apartments. The footprint is large and the payoff is small; though these older homes are lovely in older districts of Berkeley, and I wouldn’t advocate tearing down functional housing, I also wouldn’t advocate trying to replicate that look and feel. Density, density, density is the order of the day; with environmental features like rooftop and wall gardens, efficient construction, and other measures to reduce the environmental impact of the structures as proposed.

Yet, proposals for developments of this nature have been staunchly opposed by many Berkeley residents, because they aren’t ‘nice’ like the rest of the city is. Even when it could be possible to reclaim empty or underutilised land, to expand affordable housing in the city, to revitalise neighbourhoods, people are opposed to it because, quite simply, they don’t want it in their backyards. They’re all for sustainable urban growth as an idea and in principle, but in actuality? When it involves, say, a tall residential tower obstructing their view of the bay, or more buses going past their homes? Suddenly they’re much less interested, because this requires a personal cost.

Abstract environmentalism, the kind that doesn’t require any meaningful sacrifice, is very popular in California. The situation in Berkeley really embodies that; people are more than happy to do things that don’t undermine their own quality of life, and to lecture people on what they should be doing to save the planet, but when it comes to promoting more efficient and sustainable urban development, they’re suddenly silent. Or they’re actively arguing the other side.

Berkeley is going to need to deal with its skyrocketing housing prices, homelessness, and other internal pressures, and it is going to need to do so quickly. Developers approaching the City with plans for sustainable developments that include not just density but a number of innovative environmental measures are absolutely doing the right thing, blending a mix of the need for housing with the need for sustainability and, of course, their own desire for profits. Several such proposals have been approved or have made it far through the planning stages before being soundly smacked down by the people with money, power, and a refusal to accept their share of social responsibility.

These contradictions, the Prius owners proudly proclaiming how environmentally conscious they are and then marching into a planning commission meeting to oppose a sustainable development, are patently ridiculous. Yet, the City seems reluctant to challenge them.

Sarah Jaffe astutely noted that the hyperfocus on the glass ceiling leaves out a lot of women workers, not just those on the corporate track but working-class women, who represent the bulk of employed women at the moment. The economic ‘recovery’ is heavily based in low-wage work with few employment protections, and this is the kind of work more and more women are being forced into. Without support for unionisation and workplace protections, these women are being left behind.

This is an important conversation to be having, because the erasure of domestic work, low-wage work, and service work from discussions about women and labour is an indicator of larger problems in the mainstream feminist movement. But it’s also worth taking a closer look at the issue of what defines a ‘female-friendly company,’ since the subject comes up a lot lately, and some writers have been criticised for harping on female CEOs to the exclusion of others, with the implication that we’re holding women to an unfair standard just because they’re women, or we’re not holding male CEOs accountable for the biased working conditions at their own companies.

As situations go, this one is a bit complex; I tend to focus on female CEOs because the mainstream feminist movement does, and because I want to point out that just being a woman doesn’t mean you promote women’s causes or welfare for female workers. As seen with Meyer’s policies, which disproportionately impact women workers, for example, some female CEOs seem to demonstrate a need to make themselves ‘one of the boys,’ to come down even harder on their female employees in the hopes of making themselves stand out as effective corporate leaders. To see such women heralded as feminist triumphs or victories for feminism is appalling—not least because, as Jaffe points out, the vast majority of women labourers are never going to be in those kinds of positions, and celebrating primarily the most wealthy and powerful women just reinforces class stratification and the erasure of working class labour.

But this doesn’t mean that male CEOs are exempt from criticism either, and they are criticised for the same kinds of effectively anti-woman policies that some of their female counterparts endorse. Companies with limited family and medical leave, policies limiting time spent working from home, and other measures that act to punish female employees and make it hard to advance up the corporate ladder should be openly evaluated and discussed no matter the gender of the CEO; but if you’re arguing that the gender of the CEO is worthy of special notice, then we’re going to need to talk about who the CEO is and how her gender affects the policies she institutes at her workplace. In other words, if you think we’re being unfair and picking on female CEOs, stop telling us they’re special just because they’re women.

There is, of course, much talk of women ‘having it all’ in an era when a very small and very privileged group of women is in a position to have a debate about whether it’s possible to ‘have it all.’ Few women are faced with the option of ascending the corporate ladder and promoting a capitalist system versus having a family. They shouldn’t necessarily be applauded for this achievement as though it’s a remarkable victory; inasmuch as capitalism is friendly to women, female CEOs are not necessarily going to represent better working conditions not just for their personnel, but for the scores of low-wage labourers who support the operations of their companies.

For most women, the question is not whether you can have it all but whether you can have anything at all; whether you can find a job that pays enough to survive, scrabble together the funds to access health care, make sure your children are safe and clothed and fed and happy. Activists and organisers working on the ground with low-wage workers get limited support from mainstream feminism, which prefers to focus on topics like the gender distribution of top CEOs over paid sick days, immigration reform, protections for domestic workers, and other issues of more pressing concern to a much larger group of women.

Gender parity and equality are the ultimate goal of feminism and many other social justice movements share these goals, but you can’t use a simplistic measure like the gender of the world’s CEOs as a yardstick. Feminism shouldn’t be about how many women are in charge, but what women are doing with that power, and what conditions are like for the women who are not in charge. Do I love to see more women in the halls of power? Yes, of course, just as I love to see people of colour, nonwhite people, disabled people, and other marginalised groups getting more representation.

But I’m also not fooled into thinking that power alone is the solution, for power does not necessarily equate to fair treatment and respect for everyone. If we had an even 50/50 split of male and female CEOs, would that mean that conditions at all companies were fair for women? More importantly, would it mean that working class women experienced safe, comfortable working conditions and living wages?

And this is a bubble many people are not aware of, because they are not in touch with the rural regions of the United States and the agricultural industry.

In the last 20 years, the United States has lost significant chunks of its arable farmland to development. There are a number of reasons for this; part of it has to do with the shrinking numbers of family farms, with people selling off their land as they leave farming altogether. Small farmers are being pushed out by the rise of industrial agriculture, which makes it extremely difficult to compete, and fewer members of the younger generation are interested in putting in the time, energy, sweat and labour required to start farming.

While some of that land winds up in the hands of big agriculture, a lot of it has ended up with developers, who use it to establish housing developments, many complete with cutesy rustic country names. Urban sprawl stretches its tentacles into rural areas, and people are encouraged to establish rural vacation homes or consider retiring to communities with names like ‘Blueberry Hill Farm’ even though there are no blueberries, or farms, in sight because they were bulldozed under long ago for construction.

There is a tragedy on a number of levels; one, unsustainable development is intolerable, and it’s a crisis spreading across the United States. These developments are not designed efficiently, and they certainly don’t promote density and preservation of natural spaces. For another, they involve chewing up good farmland; prime land that has been carefully managed and handled for generations to produce crops. Small farmers used to producing with composting and other natural means have spent years building up their soil, and housing developments trash it, making it useless for farming and, of course, covering it in houses, roads, in-ground swimming pools, and all the other accouterments of ‘luxury living.’

The loss of farmland also represents a tremendous loss of heritage, which is sad in and of itself. Particularly with rising concerns about food security, it’s troubling to think that small farms, which focus on sustainable farming, crop diversity, and other means that tend to promote food security, are dwindling in number. Industrial agriculture focuses on high production at all costs, even if that means monocropping, the heavy use of chemicals, and the destruction of soil and water. For every small farm that dies out, opportunities are lost, and this country loses a little piece of itself.

And, of course, the sales of farmland are spurring a rampant speculative bubble in real estate in these regions. Suddenly, farmland is worth much, much more than it once was. A number of farmers are taking advantage of that with land sales, chopping their farms into pieces to get funds, and people are willing to pay large amounts of money for a chunk of farmland. As prices are driven artificially high by developers and industrial agriculture, they don’t just climb out of reach for small farmers interested in acquiring land to start out; they also reach bubble status, and bubbles tend to pop.

The problem is compounded by massive farm loans drawing on the land as collateral. As long as the land remains valuable, farmers taking out multimillion dollar loans are in a comfortable position, and they can use the funds to acquire new land, improve their existing land, and invest in farm equipment. But as soon as that bubble starts to pop and those loans come due, farmers will be underwater. That’s already starting to happen in some regions of the Midwest, where farmers are declaring bankruptcy as they realise they can’t afford the service fees on their loans.

If any of this sounds familiar to you, it should; it’s basically exactly what happened with the speculative bubble that crushed with spectacular results in 2008. The stakes are equally high this time, as financial derivatives based on farmland and farm loans, speculation in farming futures, and related financial instruments are being happily and readily traded. And behind the financial bubble comes a huge backwash of incalculable damage to US farmland and the ability to produce food independently and sustainably; what happens when all those developments on prime farmland are abandoned, sitting empty, on land that cannot be reclaimed? What happens when small farmers are so limited in number that it’s difficult to preserve the knowledge of sustainable but still practical on a large scale farming techniques?

Even as people in the cities revel in their backyard gardens and urban farms, the fact is that farmland is critically needed everywhere, and destruction of farmland with the simultaneous creation of a financial bubble is a potentially devastating combination. More people in urban areas should be thinking about rural land speculation, because it’s going to affect them whether or not they’re witnessing it first hand, and we need to be talking about how to stop it before it’s too late.

School closures represent a closure of opportunities for students, making it harder for them to succeed and reducing the chances that they’ll be able to become active participating members of the economy; which is, allegedly, the goal for education and economic recovery. If you’re depriving children of educational resources, making it harder for them to get into college, and forcing them to go further afield just to get to class every day, you’re effectively writing them off as people with potential and the possibility to do something with their lives. They’re going to have to fight much, much harder to succeed.

And school closures inevitably reek of class war, because on any school closure list, there are a number of key things to note, but the most important thing is that the schools most prone to closure are those in lower and working class neighbourhoods, as well as communities of colour (which are often the same). Public schools in white wealthy communities are less prone to being targeted for closure; not for these students a displacement to a new school or district, a wrenching from the familiar, or a radical change in environment. These students will continue enjoying the amenities they’ve always had, underscoring the class divide between rich and poor in US cities.

I was struck recently by the conditions at a school I visited for an event; the school itself is listed as a distinguished school and one of the top performing in the state, and it’s in one of the wealthiest communities in California. The grounds were impeccable, the classrooms bright and well-designed, the buildings all in top condition, the theatre where the event was held large, spacious, and well-equipped. These conditions are glorious and beautiful, and it’s no wonder students there tend to perform well, because they’re provided with every advantage.

They don’t just have the advantage of an outstanding school facility courtesy of the high tax bracket in the surrounding area, which ensures that the school can hire the best teachers, get the best equipment, and maintain flawless facilities. They have the advantage of parents who can be fully engaged in their education, who participate in school events, who provide opportunities for enrichment and educational advancement outside the home. They have the benefit of supportive agreements with neighboring educational institutions for extra credit classes and other opportunities, and the benefit of homes where the presence of food, electricity, and other basic needs is never in doubt.

I want the same thing for all students in the United States; all schools should be as beautiful and compelling as this one was, and all students should have access to these kinds of conditions. But they don’t. Many schools have aging facilities, some of which are actively dangerous. They have crowded classrooms and no extracurricular opportunities let alone spaces to hold them in, no lavish theatres and fancy scientific equipment for biology, outdated textbooks and harried staff who don’t have time to give students individualised attention. They have parents who are too busy working multiple jobs to be engaged with their education, and they’re trapped in communities that are stereotyped, hated, and feared; they can’t, for example, take classes at a relatively nearby college or university because the bus service creates an active disincentive to enter the town the institution is located in, unless students want to ride the bus for two hours to get somewhere that could be driven to in twenty minutes.

School closures target schools in these communities, making students even more marginalised. This might be justified on the grounds that it would be ludicrous and shameful to shut down wealthy schools with nice facilities when closing an unsafe school makes more sense, and on the grounds that wealthier communities have less of a budget shortfall, but the decision to close schools in low-income neighbourhoods predominantly inhabited by people of colour and nonwhite people has a lot to do with the fact that these students are viewed as disposable and so are their schools. If inhibiting their opportunities to advance socially will allow the nicer schools to remain open, so be it.

If forcing these students to travel extended distances to stay in school is necessary, well, that’s all right; even though those students will arrive at new schools only to find more of the same. Overcrowded classrooms, teachers struggling with students at different skill levels, dangerous facilities, and the same conditions they endured at their old schools. This is the ‘acceptable tradeoff’ made with school closures: it’s a calculated act of class warfare, cementing the gap between rich and poor, reiterating the idea that members of the working class are without value and primarily here on sufferance. Good enough to clean toilets and make beds and serve food, but not good enough to have access to an education and opportunities beyond service.

While working class communities may fight to retain their schools, it’s a difficult battle when organisers have trouble coming up with time, and when they’re opposed by wealthy people who don’t want anything to affect the conditions at their schools. There’s opposition to maintaining enough funding to keep schools open, let alone equalising funding so that all students have the same chances within the educational system; and yet, people pretend that the United States has no class barriers.

It’s 1986, and Eleanor is the new girl, riding the bus every day and being mocked for her hair, her clothes, and her very manner of moving. She’s an outcast and a misfit because of her poverty. When she sinks onto a bus seat next to Park, who ignores her at first, she feels more isolated than ever, until gradually, they establish a friendship over comics and music; a friendship that ultimately pushes Park away from some of his more popular friends as he and Eleanor begin an orbit around each other that, for a while, excludes the outside world.

One of the problems I (and others) often note with contemporary YA is that the characters mysteriously love all the music that was popular when the author was a teen, as though no new music has been released since then; it’s jarring to have, say, ’90s bands referenced in a novel set in the present day, and illustrates a lack of research and engagement with youth on the author’s part. One of the things I love about Eleanor & Park is that the use of music is important to the plot, but not in a way that’s disorienting, because the story itself is set in 1986; Eleanor and Park listen to the music of the time, the music sets the stage, and the characters interact with the devices of the 1980s in a way that reinforces the setting.

The Walkman becomes an important symbol of their relationship, of how they listen to music, of music as a shared experience. And I think that might be one reason the novel is proving so popular with adults of a certain age range, because it’s a reminder of our own youths. Eleanor & Park is a novel about experiences many of us had not just as kids growing up and navigating the world but also specifically as kids during a certain era; granted, I wasn’t in high school in 1986 or really engaging with society on a meaningful level, but I note that a lot of folks who do fit those criteria are in love with Eleanor & Park and can’t talk this novel up enough, not just because it’s good, but because it has a high nostalgia factor.

This is also, of course, a book about star-crossed love. For once, there’s not a love triangle to be seen, which is delightfully refreshing, and the focus is on a relationship that is doomed by external factors. It’s the kind of book where you keep waiting for the other shoe to drop because you know it’s coming, and Rowell keeps the reader in a constant state of agitation and tension. I suspect I’m not the only reader who had trouble putting it down because I was worried about the characters and I had to see what happened next, even though I knew that there was no way the story could end well.

Eleanor’s stepfather is abusive, and her mother is trapped in a relationship with him that she has difficulty extricating herself from. Eleanor & Park doesn’t flinch away from the realities of multiple children living in an abusive household in a community where people generally turn the other cheek instead of intervening, or the reality of why women don’t leave abusive partners, even when there’s clear evidence that their partners are terrorising not just them, but their whole families. As the plot builds to a crescendo, Eleanor’s relationship with her stepfather becomes more and more tense, and while part of you wants to scream at Eleanor’s mother for allowing this to happen, the other part of you understands exactly why it’s happening, and how these situations are complicated.

Park, who’s lived with his father’s disappointment but in an otherwise fairly safe and sheltered environment, takes time to come to grips with the world Eleanor lives in, and with the shame that Eleanor experiences over the daily indignities of being poor. A single shared bedroom that she sleeps in with all her siblings, a house with no phone, a pantry that’s often empty. For Park, their relationship is a learning experience, but one he struggles with at the same time, because he gives up a lot to be with Eleanor; he goes from being generally liked and respected to becoming an outcast, and must find himself even as he tries to come up with a way to save his girlfriend.

As a sharp, incisive coming of age novel, Eleanor & Park offers a lot of commentary on growing up when you don’t fit in, growing up poor, growing up in a home environment that’s abusive, and struggling to find out who you are even as everyone around you is pressuring you to become the person they want you to be. It’s also brilliantly crafted and elegantly written, with the kind of prose that pulls you under in a determined tide that won’t let you up until the very last page, when, trust me, you’ll be ranting and shaking your fists at the indignity of the world.