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She Should Run empowers women beyond Election Day
Oct 09, 2024
Becvar is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and executive director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
As we gear up for one of the most pivotal elections in history, it’s clear that women are more politically inspired than ever. Following the announcement of Vice President Kamala Harris' candidacy, the percentage of women feeling politically inspired soared from 12 percent to 59 percent, according to a recent survey.
Yet, despite this surge in inspiration, the survey — conducted in June and September by She Should Run and CREDO Mobile — found that an astonishing 78 percent of women are still not considering running for office. This gap between inspiration and action is exactly what She Should Run’s latest initiative aims to address.
She Should Run is launching the “VOTE, AND” campaign to respond to the recent decline in women candidates, and aims to boost women’s political engagement beyond the ballot box. While women are tuning out of toxic political news, we know they continue to show up for their communities and themselves. She Should Run’s goal is to bridge the gap between the two and bring the political to the everyday. The campaign aims to inspire 10,000 women to take the first steps toward political leadership and connect the dots between their everyday actions and political ambitions in the future.
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VOTE, AND is launching with a diverse collection of digital resources to help women prepare for this election season and with an array of partners to connect women’s everyday actions with their political futures. Campaign activations include:
- VOTE, AND Walk To Run: In partnership with City Girls Who Walk DC, on Oct. 13, She Should Run will host a Walk to Run event to engage women in the power of their future.
- VOTE, AND Finish the Fight: Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Suffs will elevate tools from Vote, And with a one-of-a-kind social media content partnership with She Should Run throughout October.
- VOTE, AND Pantsuit Up: In a continuation M.M.LaFleur’s #ReadytoRun partnership, on Oct. 29, M.M.LaFleur Georgetown will host an in-store shopping event benefiting She Should Run to help women feel their best on Election Day and beyond.
- VOTE, AND Lovingkindness: On Oct. 30, She Should Run and Happier will host a joint Instagram Live meditation session led by world-renowned meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg to navigate election season with balanced heartfulness.
“This is a historic election, not only because we have the opportunity to see the first woman, the first Asian American, and only the second Black person to become president, but because of the profound impact it can have on the future of women’s political leadership. It is vital that we capitalize on the energy of this moment to motivate women beyond November,” said She Should Run founder and CEO Erin Loos Cutraro. “With VOTE, AND we can show women that their everyday actions are political, and meet them where they are on the topics and experiences they care about.”
While women are tuning out of toxic political news, we know they continue to show up for their communities and themselves. By combining core actions with education and curating examples of the many unexpected ways to engage women, She Should Run hopes to inspire a new generation of women leaders to take their first steps toward political leadership in the future.
Through digital resources, partnerships, and inspiring events, VOTE, AND brings women together and connects the dots between daily actions and potential political futures. From ballot evaluator tools to themed playlists, they offer engaging ways for women to explore their political potential. Women’s leadership is not just about breaking glass ceilings; it’s about using our collective power to make every community stronger.
With a historic election on the horizon, there’s no better time to show that women’s voices matter not just at the ballot box, but at every level of leadership. Let’s make sure that the energy of this election doesn’t end on Election Day. Let’s vote, and then let’s lead.
For more information, visit She Should Run.
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"We Are the World" united American on a common cause. Let's try to do that again.
Write your song for America
Oct 08, 2024
We have only four weeks until Election Day, but there’s still time for you to write your song for America.
This election is so close and we are so divided as a nation that half of us are going to be unhappy with the result of the presidential election. The Fulcrum wants to counter the rancor and divide, so we are offering our readers the chance to write a song — one that celebrates our common bonds. A song that calls out to every American to express their patriotism, no matter who wins, through positive action.
We want to hear what a better America means to you. How would you use music to encourage all of us to get off the sidelines?
One new song featured this summer, “This Country Tis of Thee,” performed by chart-topping international songwriter Candace Asher, expresses this message loud and clear:
We are a nation trying to heal herself
We’re a nation who is we.
We’re a nation who has to make tough choices now
To remain the land of the free
We all hear the call from sea to signing sea
But leave it up to someone else to lead the way
When in fact it is up to each and one of us.
That’s the real American way
So what will you do? - What will you say ?
Now it’s your turn to write a song for America. Not a musician? It doesn’t matter — write the lyrics and we’ll put the top three to music and publish them in The Fulcrum.
It’s time to celebrate America! Write your song for America.
And as a bonus, $100 will be awarded to each of the top five!
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Rules and details
- Must be original.
- No more than 450 words (including repeating refrains).
- Eligibility: Contestants must be at least 18 years of age.
- Winners will be notified via email or phone.
- By entering, participants grant The Fulcrum permission to use their name likeness, and entry for publication or promotional purposes without compensation.
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Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger is among the many Republicans who have endorsed Kamala Harris.
Endorsements of presidential candidates speak volumes
Oct 08, 2024
Corbin is professor emeritus of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa.
There’s only a few weeks remaining before the 2024 presidential election comes to a close — that is, pending election certification, recounts, challenges and lawsuits. Ed Kilgore, political columnist for New York magazine since 2015, estimates that only 4 percent to 7 percent of the electorate is genuinely undecided.
However, there might be a bigger problem for both the Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz campaigns. That is, Pew Research Center’s analysis of the past three elections reveals 63 percent of Americans — an alarming number — are not dependable voters. Sometimes they vote and sometimes they don’t. These voters are referred to as irregular voters.
What might influence the undecided and irregular voters won’t be former President Donald Trump’s promises or Vice President Kamala Harris’ platitudes, per se, but rather endorsements by people of influence and/or by political loyalists announcing they are voting for a person from the “other side.”
Let’s explore what’s been happening along these lines.
The Trump side
In late August, Trump announced two former Democrats had been appointed to his transition team: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. Kennedy, a former Democrat, had been running for president as an independent before ending his campaign in August. Five months ago, Trump called Kennedy a “radical left lunatic.”
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Gabbard, who served Hawaii in the House of Representatives, left the Democratic Party in 2022. The Daily Beast reported that in 2023 she spoke at a “Russian Patriot” rally on Washington, D.C.’s National Mall along with former Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), Libertarian-leaning former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.
Two other Democrats have endorsed Trump: Ruben Diaz Sr., a former New York City councilmember and state senator, and Rod Blagojevich, former Illinois governor who was released from prison after Trump pardoned him and cut short his 14-year sentence related to political corruption.
Three current Democratic members of the House (Jared Golden of Maine, Josh Harder of California and Mary Peltola of Alaska) along with three Democrats running against GOP candidates (Lanon Baccam in Iowa, Adam Frisch in Colorado and Janelle Stelson in Pennsylvania) have not formally endorsed Harris. They may throw their support to Trump.
The Guardian reports more than 60 billionaires, technology titans and venture capitalists are backing Trump’s campaign.
The Harris side
CNBC News reported on Sept. 24 that 405 economists endorsed Harris over Trump.
In a Sept. 18 letter published by The New York Times, 111 Republicans — former staffers who served in the Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and/or Trump administrations and members of Congress — announced they are backing Harris. They wrote: “Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable.”
On Sept. 22, 741 former national security officials — made up of bipartisan senior leaders — endorsed Harris for president, calling Trump “impulsive and ill-informed.”
On Sept. 6, 88 corporate leaders signed a letter endorsing Harris. Signers included James Murdoch (an heir to the Murdoch family media empire, which includes Fox News and the Wall Street Journal), Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and more than a dozen who made their fortunes on Wall Street.
The Republicans for Harris website says “over 100,000 people have joined this campaign within a campaign.”
Thirty-six news agencies have endorsed Harris, compared to seven endorsing Trump’s candidacy.
Traditionally, endorsements have played a major role in giving one side or the other an advantage. With the Trump-Harris race extremely close, this may be the year party-switchers, billionaires, national security officers, presidential staffers and economists sway the undecided and irregular voters to determine who will be America’s 47th president.
A special plea to the irregular voters: Don’t sit out this election. Vote on Nov. 5, because the research makes clear the future of democracy is at stake.
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'There's nothing inevitable or permanent about democracy': A conversation with Robert Talisse
Oct 08, 2024
Berman is a distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, co-editor of Vital City, and co-author of "Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age." This is the 12th in a series of interviews titled "The Polarization Project."
Robert Talisse, a professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University, believes polarization is a problem that cannot be solved, only managed. He also believes the greatest threat to American democracy comes from within.
In Talisse’s diagnosis, American democracy suffers from a kind of autoimmune disorder. He makes the case that democracy can break down even when every participant in the process is operating in good faith to pursue their version of the common good. The reason this is so, Talisse argues over the course of a trilogy of books — “Overdoing Democracy,” “Sustaining Democracy” and “Civic Solitude” — is an occurrence that he calls “belief polarization.”
According to Talisse, this is “the phenomenon by which interactions among like-minded people tend to result in each person adopting more radical versions of their shared views.” Simply by engaging with others who share our beliefs, we end up becoming more extreme and less open to other viewpoints. Do this often enough — and for long enough — and you end up demonizing your adversaries. Ironically, it is our political allies and not our opponents who undermine our capacity to behave democratically.
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I spoke with Talisse about how belief polarization can erode democracy, what happens when our political affiliations become lifestyle choices and where our current depolarization interventions are going wrong.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Greg Berman: I know you’re not running for president, but I wanted to get your sense of the state of the nation. How worried should we be? How likely is it that we are going to tip over into chaos and political violence?
Robert Talisse: I think we should always be worried about the health and viability of democracy. I think it's dangerous for people to think that democracy is a set of institutions or practices and that once you've set them up, it is self-perpetuating and can keep going by itself. We need to remind ourselves that there's nothing inevitable or permanent about democracy or democracy's health, that it's something that has to be tended to.
I think the core of Donald Trump's strategy, and perhaps even the core of the MAGA worldview, is that only those people who vote for Donald Trump are properly American. And if you accept something like that premise, it follows that any election that he doesn't win is a fraudulent election. The idea that it's a necessary condition for being a proper citizen to vote for the Republicans generally, or Donald Trump in particular, just strikes me as deeply anti-democratic. There's no room for disagreement, or debate, or differences of political judgment. So, yeah, I think we should be worried.
GB: In “Overdoing Democracy,” you argue that it is possible to have too much democracy. Why isn't democracy an unalloyed good?
RT: Well, there's a strong tendency to think that more is always better. I mean, it's an intuitive thought: How could there be too much happiness? How could there be too much friendship?
I think that democracy can be overdone because the pursuit and practice of democracy can crowd out other things that are also unalloyed goods. And it turns out, by way of some pretty robust empirical data, that when democracy is all we ever do together, when our entire social worlds are structured around our political alliances and our political rivalries, other good things in life get crowded out and transformed into expressions of those allegiances and rivalries. We become really bad at doing democracy when democracy is all we ever do.
Democracy is a set of institutions, it's a set of practices, it's a style of political arrangement. Democracy is also the aspiration to create, and to work towards, a society of self-governing, political equals. Part of what democracy asks of us is not only to be active participants helping to direct our government, it also asks that we recognize our fellow citizens as our partners, as our social equals.
And it turns out that when politics comes to dominate our social lives such that everything we do is understood in terms of our partisan affiliations and rivalries, we erode. We begin to lose the kinds of cognitive and emotional capacities that are necessary in order to regard our fellow citizens, both our allies and our enemies alike, as our equals. We come to see our enemies as mere obstacles to be overcome, to be “owned,” as they say. And we come to see our allies as merely resources for achieving our political ends. In neither case do we see our fellow citizens as co-authors of a shared social world.
GB: This idea that politics has slipped its bounds and now infects our social life, helping to determine what teams we root for, what we eat and what we buy … that seems to map onto my experience of the world. But to play devil's advocate for a second, my sense is that a huge percentage of Americans, perhaps the majority of the population, are basically apolitical. Or at least they are low-engagement, plugging into politics only once every four years, if that. Is your diagnosis that politics is also seeping into every part of their lives?
RT: You are right that maybe some of these trends are more pronounced among highly engaged voters. And in fact, there's some empirical work that suggests that the dysfunctions of in-group conformity and out-group hostility are heightened among people who pay attention to politics.
However, what we've seen happen since the mid-'90s is that political affiliation has become more like a lifestyle than anything that we would call a collection of ideas about what the government should be doing and what would make society better. Politics has become more about lifestyle choices — what kinds of clothes you wear, what kind of car you drive, what occupation you're in, how many children you have, where you vacation, where you shop for groceries. These have become more reliable markers of political affiliation than your opinion about the tax rate. Our social worlds are now structured according to the political categories of the day. Low-engagement voters tend also to be very highly embedded within social worlds that are politically homogeneous.
And one further point about this: Intensely negative attitudes towards cross-partisan marriage have escalated beyond similarly negative attitudes towards interracial and interfaith marriages in this country. And so we live in a country where people would rather see their kid marry somebody who worships a false god than somebody who votes for the wrong candidate. Once you ascribe to yourself a political identity — once you identify yourself as Republican, Democrat, whatever — it is the most stable social identity that a person will have throughout their life. You're more likely in this country to change religions than parties.
Lastly, I would just say that wealthy conservatives in Oregon have more in common lifestyle-wise with poor conservatives in Georgia than they do with wealthy Oregonians who are liberals.
GB: If that is true, it suggests that you believe that the culture wars are real, correct?
RT: Yeah, the culture wars are real, if by that you mean that there is a social sorting phenomenon that goes along with the centering of partisan identity. In other words, as partisan political identity becomes the central thing that we understand about ourselves, then our social worlds become fractured in all kinds of ways. And I think that's bad for democracy. It becomes much easier to demonize millions of your fellow Americans when everybody you know is just like you.
GB: Staying in devil's advocate mode, walk me through what you would say to a trans person who says, "How am I to treat my opponent as a political equal when they would deny me my right to exist?"
RT: I’m not suggesting that anybody who understands themselves to be in a position of social vulnerability, like in the example that you mentioned, has to get out and form friendships with people that they view to be existential threats.
Look, maybe there can't be much done in the kind of case that you're envisioning, where you have a citizen with views that are fundamentally at odds with democracy. The trouble is that the social and cognitive dynamics that emerge when all we do together is politics lead us to overpopulate that category, people who are beyond the pale of democracy, with anybody who's not just like us. I think that's the problem. “Overdoing Democracy” is an argument about how social and cognitive dynamics lead us to regard all of those with whom we disagree as a monolith that represents the most extreme kind of opposing view.
The positive proposal I’m making is that we should find things to do together that are not political so that we can see other people display their virtues in ways that don’t so easily permit us to attribute their virtues to the fact that they're on the same political side that we're on.
GB: Turning to “Sustaining Democracy,” I think the part of that book that resonated the most for me was the way you unpacked how engaging in normal political activity with my allies — volunteering, participating in rallies and all the rest — can lead me to develop more extreme positions than I had at the start of that process. So let’s talk about what you call “belief polarization.”
RT: Let me start just with a quick distinction. People talk about “polarization.” They don't always say what they mean by it. It's almost always presented as if it's obviously something bad. I don't know that polarization is obviously bad. It might be bad when it reaches a certain intensity.
The first distinction that's worth keeping in mind is that oftentimes when people talk about polarization, they're talking about the pulling apart of two opposed political units. When they say we're a highly polarized country, commentators are usually saying that the common ground between the two sides has fallen out, and there's no common ground for compromise. That's what I call political polarization.
Political polarization can lead to deadlock and a lot of frustration in politics. However, political polarization is not all bad. When the two parties are polarized, that just makes it easy for voters to tell the parties apart. It means that there's a real difference and there's something at stake in an election. I think that can be a good thing. So political polarization is complicated, and I don't know that it's such a terrible thing for democracy.
GB: So that’s political polarization. What’s belief polarization, then?
RT: Belief polarization is about what goes on inside our heads when we surround ourselves with people with whom we agree. One of the most solidly established findings of social psychology in the history of the discipline is that the more you surround yourself with people who agree with you, the more radical you become in your thinking, the more convinced you become that you've got the right view, the less receptive you are to countervailing evidence, and the more inclined you are to see anyone who's not just like you as ignorant, uninformed and threatening.
Belief polarization is not a strictly political phenomenon. We've got all kinds of experimental data that suggests that if you get a bunch of people in a room together, all of whom agree that Denver, Colorado, is notable for being particularly high above sea level, the longer they talk about the elevation of Denver, Colorado, the higher they will say it is. In mock jury experiments, if you've got a mock jury who's agreed that the accused is guilty, and now they're talking about punishment, the longer those jury members talk about what the fitting punishment is, the more punitive they become. And in fact, they become more punitive than they report being willing to be before the jury deliberation started.
It's a piece of cognitive architecture that is deeply baked into us. Belief polarization impacts like-minded groups without regard for what the content of their like-mindedness is. It could be some banal fact like the elevation of Denver. But the crucial part is that when the dynamic is at work, it makes us more extreme. We come to think Denver is higher than it is.
When we surround ourselves with like-minded others, we not only shift into more radical versions of the things that we believe, we also become more confident in those more radical views. We think that more people agreeing with us means more evidence, even if those people are just saying the same thing. And we become more dismissive of anyone who doesn't agree. Our mind gets made up.
GB: It is easy to imagine how this would help fuel some pretty dangerous political dynamics.
RT: This has been tied to what's sometimes called the risky shift phenomenon. As we become more extreme, more confident and more dismissive of countervailing voices, we also become more willing to engage in risky behavior on behalf of our beliefs. We become more inclined to think that behavior that is risky is warranted.
In experimental settings, people who, before long conversations with like-minded others, would say, "Under X and Y conditions of police brutality, there should be a protest. We should write op-eds. We should hold a candlelight vigil." And then, as they talk among their coalition about police brutality, they start saying things like, "We should set cop cars on fire." And so we become more invested or more willing to engage in risky behavior that we wouldn't otherwise have endorsed. I think January 6th is an example of this.
Our more extreme selves are also more conformist. That is, as we shift into more extreme beliefs, and become more confident in them, we become more and more invested in policing the border between our allies and our foes. And as we become more invested in policing that border, the litmus tests for allyship become more demanding.
So now it's not enough for you to agree with me on immigration policy for you to count as my ally. Now you also have to agree with me about fracking. Now you also have to agree with me about taxation. The demands for authentic allyship become more exacting. Members of like-minded groups that are belief-polarized begin dressing alike, they begin pronouncing certain words alike.
As conformity pressures escalate, our coalitions shrink and become more dysfunctional. But more importantly, they become less internally democratic. Homogeneous coalitions that are fixated on the authenticity of their members and policing the border between the in-group and the out-group start relying on high-profile members of the coalition to set the standards of authentic membership. This is how we get to the point where you're not really a Republican unless you wear a red MAGA hat. That strikes me as democratically dysfunctional.
The paradoxical thing is that all of this is the product of people doing what they should do as democratic citizens. It's an internal source of dysfunction in democracy. Democracies need citizens to get together in like-minded groups, to plan how they're going to advance their agenda, to talk about all the reasons why their agenda is better than their opponent's agenda. They need to do these things. But it turns out that there are hazards that come along with it that we need to be attuned to, or else, along the way of doing good democratic practice, we start to erode the capacities that enable us to engage in responsible democratic citizenship.
GB: In “Civic Solitude,” you argue that in order to be good democratic citizens, sometimes we need to retreat from the political fray. Are you suggesting that we all take time out of our lives to go to Walden Pond and contemplate deep thoughts, or do you have something else in mind?
RT: So there's a lot of democratic theory and practice that sort of accepts the broad diagnostic story that I've been telling you about political sorting being a problem. And a lot of energy is being spent on trying to figure out a way to intervene.
I think there's an error in thinking that because incivility is the dysfunction that we’re trying to address, the right response to that dysfunction is to create interventions where citizens can interact in the ways they should have been interacting all along. That is, I don't think the cultivation of civility is achieved by creating forums where people start behaving in the ways that they should have behaved all along.
It's an error that I call the curative fallacy, which mistakes a preventative measure, what we could have done in the past to prevent the problem, for a remedial measure, which is what we should do now that we've got the problem. I think that those are two different things. There are many cases in which the preventative measure is really as bad as the remedial measure. For example, if you have heart disease, it's true that had you been a rigorous exerciser for most of your life, you wouldn't have gotten heart disease. But it is very, very bad advice to suggest that now that you have heart disease, you should start jogging.
Now that we are a thoroughly sorted, belief-polarized population that finds it very, very difficult to describe in anything other than totally disparaging terms any fellow citizen who's politically not on our side, what are we going to do? I want to suggest that, given where we're at, given those dysfunctions, it is our responsibility as democratic citizens to find occasions where we can be alone with our thoughts and engage in a kind of reflection that is not pre-packaged in the idiom of our contemporary political divide.
GB: I buy the argument that some of this work must happen at the individual level, within each of our hearts and minds. But is there nothing that can be done at the collective level to help us lower the temperature of our political discourse?
RT: A lot of democracy practitioners think that depolarization has to do with bringing two sides together under a certain set of rules where they can hear one another and maybe see that the other side has a good point.
All this stuff is great. But what I want to suggest is that, if I'm right about the dynamics about how belief polarization works, those kinds of bridge-building exercises, although they're necessary, I don't think they're sufficient.
I think that you'll get a better depolarization effect if these curated interventions between political opponents are structured in a different way. What if we brought the gun control guy and the Second Amendment guy together and had the gun control guy ask the Second Amendment guy, "What do you think is the weakest part of my view? What's your best argument against my view?" And vice versa.
That kind of conversation doesn't require opponents to come in with the attitude that, "Hey, the other side might have a point." It's not a bad attitude to have, but I think we need depolarization interactions that don't rely on citizens having goodwill about the other side. I think that we need depolarization interventions that are fully consistent with my showing up to a conversation with you and saying, "I know Greg is 100 percent wrong. I want to find out how badly Greg understands my position so that I can formulate it in a way that counteracts his misperception." We've lost sight of the idea that even if you have all the right opinions, your articulation of them can always be improved.
The lifeblood of democracy is that we disagree. That's why we need democracy. Totally sincere, competent citizens aren't ever going to converge on a single political idea. There's such a thing as good faith political disagreement, even about things that are really, really important. You and I can disagree about something, but ideally, I should still see you as entitled to an equal say, despite how wrong I think you are about environmental policy or whatever. Unfortunately, the capacity to see each other as co-equals atrophies very, very quickly under the kind of conditions we’re experiencing right now.
This article originally appeared on HFG.org and has been republished with permission.
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A woman evacuating from Pokrovsk, Ukraine, in August looks out from a train car to say goodbye.
Oleksandr Magula/Suspilne Ukraine/JSC "UA:PBC"/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
On Ageism Awareness Day, consider the impact of war on older people.
Oct 08, 2024
Kilaberia is an assistant professor at New York University’s Silver School of Social Work and a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project.
We know the toll that war has on youth, but older adults are suffering displacement, too.
We have talked about age-friendly cities, age-friendly health care systems, age-friendly universities, age-friendly workplaces dementia-friendly communities. We are not talking about age-friendly or dementia-friendly humanitarian responses.
Tomorrow is Ageism Awareness Day and it offers us the opportunity to draw attention to the impact of ageism, particularly in the many war zones around the world.
The United Nations and its partners set up play centers for children transitioning from place to place while fleeing Ukraine, for respite and a little joy. Volunteers left baby carriages, prams and strollers for fleeing Ukrainian mothers at the border. But I did not come across news about a respite center for older people fleeing. Or volunteers leaving walkers, canes and wheelchairs for older refugees at the border — at least not as ubiquitously as for youth.
Before Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, there were Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. And other wars before that. In all of them, older people were displaced.
Larissa Andreeva, 76, fled Ukraine with her family but then got separated, ending up in a village in Moldova. From there, she was forced to move to a transitional refugee shelter in the capital. Alone and isolated, she did not always share a language with other refugees who came and went. After seeking permission from the shelter director, Andreeva cordoned off her bed with fabric dividers for some “privacy” as weeks turned into months and months into one and a half years during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Dementia did not make things easier: One day, Andreeva walked out of the refugee shelter, got lost and was not able to say who she was or where she lived when asked. She was safely brought back and did not dare venture out again. Then the refugee shelter closed. She was moved to what seemed like a group home. Younger residents there shunned her because she was old and confused.
In 2024, a family friend helped her relocate to Georgia (the country) where her own family, temporarily living in the Czech Republic, was able to place her in a nursing home. Andreeva had already been an internally displaced person in Georgia three decades prior, suffering bodily harm and lifelong health consequences.
Risks from displacement can be cumulative. Older people in the United States have shared that they feel invisible in stores, restaurants, theaters and elsewhere in peacetime. Public health professionals may recall the decision-making around catastrophe medicine in Italy during the pandemic that prioritizes saving younger people over older people based on limited resources. Ageism is potent in its power to obscure the intersectionality of old age and refugeehood in wartime.
Forced displacement increases risk of abuse and neglect, especially of older women, persons with disabilities and older LGBTI persons, according to the UN Refugee Agency.
A cab driver taking Andreeva to the refugee shelter overcharged her manyfold, and what she had in her purse was all that she had in the world. She worked as a yard hand in the Moldovan village where she was first sheltered to earn her keep. Nobody may have made physical labor an explicit condition of her stay, but nobody told her she did not need to work.
I am not old, but I lived in a retirement community as a young person, and learned about older people directly from them. I am safe now, but I was displaced in an armed conflict in Georgia and suffered the loss of family and friends who were murdered. I not only grew up with displaced older people, I’ve worked with older refugees in a refugee resettlement program. I have focused on age-friendly health systems and elder mistreatment in my work.
Somehow, the neglect of older refugees seems flagrantly age-unfriendly, and translates to elder abuse, except there is no clear agent perpetrating the abuse. It’s the war. It’s the politicians and their decision-making. It’s the separation from the family. It’s the refugee shelter that closed.
Older refugees with dementia and other health issues are no less vulnerable than children. As women’s rights advocate and social worker Ollie Randall noted six decades ago, “old persons in need of help are not apt to be naturally appealing, as is a helpless child … In the field of social action, we have tended to place our hopes—and our dollars—on youth.”
People 65 or older are expected to rise to 17 percent of the world population by 2050. Given internal and cross-border displacements in past, ongoing and likely future regional wars, older refugees should be everyone’s concern.
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