Alex Poppe's Blog

Some of the slogans above are US Army recruitment slogans while others are gun manufacturer advertising taglines. Can you tell which is which? (We’ve listed them by category at the end of this post.) It’s hard. Individualism and machismo underlie them all.

The Uvalde mass shooting, just days after the Buffalo mass shooting and quickly followed by the Tulsa mass shooting, was a wake-up call to the amount of gun violence faced daily in the United States. We all want to believe we can keep our families and communities safe. We want to know that we can rely on ourselves in times of danger. So how did our schools, hospitals, and local grocery stores become battlefields? Why is there so much gun violence?

“Consider Your Man Card Reissued” — 2012 Bushmaster Gun Advertisement

Military culture is seen as masculine, emphasizing toughness and self-reliance. Two of the most popular military guns are the Glock semi-automatic pistol and the Colt M-16 lightweight rifle. The Glock semi-automatic pistol is used by national armed forces, security agencies, and police in 48 countries. The Colt M-16, originally known as Armalite Corporation’s AR-15, became the military’s standard service rifle in 1969. When Colt realized that the military market was saturated, it adapted the M-16 for civilian use, calling the rifle by its original name, the AR-15, to drive sales.

Gun executives noticed the popularity of military weapons and redirected advertising away from hunting to promote military-style weapons in the wake of 9/11. Based on the military pedigree of the AR-15, advertising focused on a gun or rifle’s “tactical coolness factor” to appeal to first-time young, white, male gun buyers, using militaristic language and images. For example, Remington, the manufacturer of the Bushmaster AR-15 rifle used in the Sandy Hook mass shooting, used taglines steeped in military culture and ideals such as “Bravery on Duty,” “Versatility on the Range or During Patrol,” “React with Proven Confidence,” “The Leaders Others Follow” and “Control Your Destiny” to woo men with gear that made them feel powerful, like the images we carry of soldiers or the police. By 2019, hunting-related ads in Guns magazine had fallen to 10% whereas from the 1960s to the late 1990s, they were the majority of gun advertising.

Rise in Military-Style Marketing = Rise in Active Shooters

The FBI defines an active shooter as an “individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined or populated area.” In 2021, active shooter incidents increased by more than 50%, and of the 61 active shooting incidents, 60 were carried out by males, ranging in age from 12 to 67. Between 2011 and 2022, AR-15 style rifles were used in the following mass shootings in the US:

•Boulder,

•Parkland,

•Las Vegas,

•Aurora,

•Newtown,

•Nashville,

•San Bernardino,

•Midland/Odessa,

•Poway,

•Sutherland Springs,

•Pittsburgh,

•Washington DC,

•Buffalo,

•Uvalde, and

•Tulsa.

Higher Gun Ownership = More Mass Shootings

The US has 4.4% of the world’s population but its people own 42% of the world’s guns. Research carried out by Dr. Adam Lankford at the University of Alabama found that a country’s rate of gun ownership corresponds to its number of mass shootings. The higher the rate of gun ownership, the more mass shootings. Conversely, gun control legislation reduced gun murders in a recent analysis of 130 studies across 10 countries.

Dr. Lankford controlled for homicide rates in his study, which suggests people’s access to guns drives mass shootings rather than one nationality being more violent than others. He also found that mental health did not correlate to mass shootings nor did crime.

Crimes committed in the US are more lethal because perpetrators usually have guns. For example, London and New York have roughly the same number of robberies and burglaries every year, yet those who commit robberies and burglaries kill 54 victims in New York City for every one victim in London. Dr. Lankford’s research showed that more gun ownership leads to more gun murders among developed countries, US states, US cities, and US towns when controlling for crime rates.

There were 5.4 million new gun owners in the US in 2021.

Weapons as US Economic Driver

The firearm and ammunition industry significantly impacts the US economy. Since the 2008 recession, it has created 375,000 new jobs and generated $70.52 billion in economic activity.

The US spent $801 billion on its military, which was 38% of total military spending worldwide, in 2021. The Department of Defense spent $718 billion, broken down in the following way:

● $286 billion was spent on operations and maintenance, which includes training and planning, equipment maintenance, and healthcare for military personnel.

● $173 billion was spent on military personnel’s pay and retirement benefits.

● $141 billion was spent on the procurement of weapons and systems.

● $106 billion was spent on the research and development of weapons and equipment.

● $10 billion was spent on the construction and maintenance of military facilities.

Military-issued Weapons in Civilian Hands

Over 1,900 military firearms were lost or stolen in the US during the 2010s. Pistols, machine guns, and automatic assault rifles were taken from armories, supply warehouses, warships, and firing ranges. Some of these firearms have been used in violent crimes.

The majority of gun owners buy weapons because they want to keep their communities and families safe. Gun manufacturers want to maximize their profits by using advertising steeped and grounded in military culture to sell guns. Segments of the US population want unregulated gun ownership despite people dying in mass shootings. Just as the military’s rules of engagement allows for civilian casualties in drone strikes, the gun manufacturers seem to have accepted the deaths of innocent people as a tradeoff for selling as many weapons as possible.

As the world around us becomes more chaotic, we long for control and a feeling of safety. Self-reliance is a cornerstone of the American cultural character, and responsible gun ownership allows us to defend ourselves. But we also need relationships, especially with those who hold opinions different from our own. Listening and allowing ourselves to be moved by what we hear is the only way to end gun violence.

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In The Dispossessed, John Washington explores how wealthy nations have gutted asylum protections for the world’s most vulnerable against historical, literary, and current political contexts. He observes that poverty is endemic to corruption, and the co-existence of both poverty and corruption leads to violence. When violence becomes so pervasive that it is inescapable, people flee, first within their home countries and then outside of them.

Recently, CBS News reported that 2021 is on pace to be the deadliest year in terms of gun violence in twenty years. Homicide rates have increased twenty-four percent in the first quarter of 2021compared to 2021. The Gun Violence Archive reports there have been 296 mass shooting in the US in 2021. 2020 followed a similar pattern. Patrick Sharkey, Princeton sociologist, author of Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, and the founder of American Violence Dog, a project to track and visualize violence in the US, reports that 4000 more people were murdered in 2020 than in 2019. Moreover, in 2020 relatively safe cities such as Portland experienced huge spikes in violence, rendering their rate of shootings comparable to much larger cities. Historically violent cities such as New York, Detroit, St. Louis, and Chicago saw gun violence sky rocket while overall crime dropped last year (Sharkey). Some have argued that the increase in gun violence in the US is a consequence of the desperation created by Covid lockdown measure. However, Democracy Now! reports that other wealthy nations implementing Covid lockdown procedures, some much more stringent than those implemented in the US, have not experienced an increase in gun violence or the crime rate in general, and as restrictions are lifted in the US, gun violence has not abated. Prior to 2020, the US had been experiencing one of its safest periods in decades.

In Uneasy Peace, Sharkey argues that how crimes rates are lowered is integral to sustaining a stable decrease in violence. If crime rates are lowered through a misuse of order maintenance policy, decreases in violence are unsustainable. Order maintenance policy is the policing of minor offenses as a means of addressing community problems and promoting the fair use of public space in order to prevent the decline of a neighborhood. However, David E. Thatcher, writing in The Oxford Handbook of Police and Policing argues that the rise of zero tolerance policies in policing has made order maintenance more aggressive and less focused on solving community problems. Because there is ambiguity and confusion surrounding order maintenance, police may abuse its authority to target and detain people. For example, in high poverty communities across the United States, residents are scared of the police because the residents, often Black and Latino men, are the targets of order maintenance policing (Sharkey). For example, Eric Garner was killed by a New York city police officer who alleges Garner was resisting arrest for selling loose tobacco cigarettes. Order maintenance policing did not address the underlying causes of poverty, which led Garner to sell loose cigarettes. Instead, it targeted a Black man, and the police involved ended up killing him, which made the members of Eric Garner’s community mistrustful of or have outright contempt for the police.

New York, Detroit, St. Louis, and Chicago are cities with extreme urban inequality. They are also cities where an over policing of the public space, mass incarceration and aggressive prosecution of crimes are the primary tools to deal with violence. Monica C. Bell, Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School, argues that the over policing of public space, mass incarceration and aggressive prosecution of crimes lead to legal estrangement, the feeling that segments of the community are not protected or served by the law, nor are these segments part of the citizenry. A system of legal estrangement cannot support a stable decrease in community violence, which may be one of the reasons that cities like Portland, historically non-violent, have experienced a spike in violence in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing by police office Derick Chauvin.

Sharkey argues that in order to understand why violence increased in the US over 2020 and continues to exacerbate in 2021, it is essential to understand how the social order in communities has changed. Core institutions which structure people’s lives, such as churches, community centers, schools, after school programs, and violence prevention programs shut down in the wake of Covid-19 or shut down as public funding dried up. At the same time, maintaining social order became more dependent on police dominating the public space, which has led to unarmed Black and brown people being killed by the police in non-violent situations. For example, Daunte Wright and Philando Castille were killed by police during nonviolent traffic stops, Rayshard Brooks fell asleep in his car, blocking the drive through lane of a fast-food restaurant and was killed by police, Tanisha Fonville and Daniel Prude were killed by police who were responding to mental health calls. Stephon Clark was holding a phone in the backyard of his grandmother’s house, Botham Jean was eating ice cream on his sofa, Breonna Taylor was asleep in her bed, and Atatiana Jefferson was at home with her front door open when all four of them were killed by police. Alton Sterling was killed when police confronted him outside a shop where he was selling CDs and DVDs. George Floyd was killed for allegedly passing a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. Neither Alton Sterling’s nor George Floyd’s behavior was violent, yet they were policed with disproportionate force. These acts of police violence furthered the feelings of legal estrangement in the communities where these unlawful killings occurred, especially when there was no accountability by the police.

Sharkey’s research reveals that communities which are resistant to violence, even if they are poor communities, share some key characteristics. First, the residents know each other or are connected to one another. Second, a core set of institutions such as religious institutions, after school programs, community health centers, homeless shelters, and addiction treatment centers are supported and sustained financially. Core institutions need funding comparable to what is given to policing and mass incarceration because, as the foundation for a community, they make sure no one falls through the cracks. They see people who cause harm as people in need of help. They build after school centers for teens and cooperative gardens instead of using mass incarceration to combat violence (Sharkey). Mariame Kaba, founder of Project NIA, which works to abolish the incarceration of children and young adults, agrees and champions “…investing in the things we know do keep safe — housing, healthcare, schooling…living wages.”

These core institutions also participate in violence disruption. For example, they send community representatives to see shooting victims in hospital to dissuade them from planning reprisal shootings. They make sure a community recreation center is open and well-maintained so children have a safe place to play instead of shooting hoops on a playground under the scrutinizing eye of an order-maintaining police officer.

Erica Ford, co-creator of New York City’s Crisis Management System and CEO/founder of LIFE Camp concurs with Sharkey’s findings. She believes the rise in gun violence is caused by a lack of resources in a community. When there is no safe place for children to play, no educational opportunities, and no job opportunities, violence increases. Community based anti-violence work involves people closest to the problem finding a holistic and comprehensive approach to solving the problem, such as the sixty organizations within Crisis Management System which co-produce public safety. They help both victims and shooters heal from the trauma of violence instead of relying on over policing or mass incarceration to secure the public space by focusing on response, recovery, mitigation, and prevention.

Dr. Philip Atiba Goff, Co-Founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, a research center which aims to ensure accountable and racially unbiased policing in the USA, sees the role of community organizations and non-profits as essential to mitigating violence. Communities are safest when they have the resources (homeless shelters, community health organizations, after school programs, violence prevention centers) to prevent the crises which result in 911 calls. Many 911 calls do not require law enforcement but rather public health or other community resources. Providing these resources is foundational to keeping communities safe. For example, sending law enforcement only to a respond to a 911 call that is only about housing does not make a community safer, but this is what happens, especially in areas of extreme urban inequality.

Goff observes how societies in the face of extreme urban inequality become more punitive. As a result, police dominate the public space instead of focusing on well-being and problem solving. Goff champions a new method for dealing with the challenges for which communities usually rely on the police. Consulting for Mayor Svante Myrick of Ithaca, the Center for Policing Equity has helped Ithaca create a Department of Public Safety to provide solutions for the city’s unique health and safety problems where the police are secondary responders. In this way, investment is made in community organizations which problem solve for the citizenry and are focused on the well-being of the community members instead of on dominating the public space with order maintenance policing.

Denver has been operating a similar program, Support Team Assisted Response (STAR), for almost one year. After answering over fourteen hundred 911 calls, STAR responders have never called for police backup, and no one has been arrested from these calls. In STAR, licensed mental health clinicians are paired with paramedics to respond to low risk, low acuity calls (in its pilot stage, police officers were paired with the clinicians). The clinicians respond from a nonjudgmental, trauma-informed standpoint, listen to an individual’s problem, and solve it in the moment. The solution may be as simple as driving a person to a shelter or urgent care clinic. The clinician connects the person in need to the appropriate resources, local treatment providers, or case managers for follow ups. The community member who placed the call gets a trauma-informed response. Eugene, Oregon operates a similar program, Cahoots, which pairs EMT basic responders with mental health workers to respond to its community’s needs.

Disruptions and breakdowns in a community’s social order create the conditions for violence to emerge because communities feel vulnerable. When a person grows up learning not to trust the police because the police mistreat him or people who look like him or the people around him, he thinks no one is going to protect him. He gets a gun. This is the effect of legal estrangement at play. Then, a set of causes ignite and lead to shootings. This spike in shootings builds upon itself with reprisal shootings. More people feel unsafe and purchase guns, which increases the number of guns on the streets. More people feel vulnerable as violence spikes, and they buy guns.

To eliminate the preconditions of violence, policy makers need to address the underlying causes that create extreme urban inequality, which leads to the breakdown of institutions and communities. To reduce violence, policy makers need to invest resources into community groups and non-profits which focus on a community’s well-being and solve its members’ problems instead of aggressively policing the public space.

Climate change does not care if a state is red or blue; it will wreck its havoc all the same. Climate change-fueled forest fires burned in California (blue), Oregon (blue), and Washington (blue) throughout September 2020 while Hurricane Sally pummeled the Georgia (red) and Alabama (red) coastlines and Tropical Storm Beta bashed the coast of Texas (red). Although climate change, which amplifies wildfires and hurricanes, is an equal opportunity offender, the federal response under the current administration does not appear to be color blind. A study from BMJ Global Health found that the federal response to Hurricane Irma (Florida, red) and Hurricane Harvey (Texas, red) was faster and more generous in terms of staff and funding than its response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. (Puerto Rico is not assigned electoral votes for the presidential election).

Alabama, Texas, Georgia and Florida are red states or states with Republican governments, and they rely on tourism and their coastal regions, both of which could be destroyed by climate disasters, to power their economies. Yet, President Trump, the zeitgeist of the Republican Party, denies the science of climate change, “…our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice,” rendering climate change denial as part of the Republican identity. Under the Electoral College System, there is no political incentive for a Republican candidate to address climate change-caused coastal destruction in red states, which seems counterintuitive to maintaining the Gulf States’ fiscal health, because red states by definition typically vote Republican in presidential elections. Similarly, because California and New York (battered by Hurricane Sandy) are firmly blue, there is no political enticement for a presidential candidate to win over climate-concerned Republicans living there even though California is the most populous state and New York is the fourth most populous. According to the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of American adults think the federal government is doing too little to combat the negative effects of global climate change, including fifty-two percent of millennial and younger Republicans. The climate, environmental and fossil fuel policies enacted by the current administration do not reflect the views of the majority Americans. The current administration was elected by the Electoral College and not by popular vote.

Presidential candidates, seeing the states in terms of red or blue, focus on winning swing states’ electoral votes because the existence of the Electoral College incentivizes them to do so. It would be healthier for the country if national politicians stopped focusing on the Electoral College numbers game and built coalitions based on shared interests. If the president were chosen by popular vote instead of by the Electoral College, Republican candidates would need to court the large number of Republican voters in both red and blue states dramatically affected by climate change. Any candidate would need to move climate change to the forefront of policy agenda to woo millennial and Gen Z voters, who comprise almost 40% of the 2020 electorate and who rank climate change as one of their top concerns. Because renewable industries employ lots of people in red states, supporting renewable industries is less politically divisive. On a practical level, it would be healthier for the nation because national candidates would need to build consensus around issues rather than target certain voters in specific swing states. They would be accountable to voters for policies which reflect the will of a majority of voters. Climate change could be the issue which galvanizes a push to abolish the Electoral College.

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My phone pings with a flurry of messages. It is approaching midnight on a Thursday, and these messages are from my writing students as…

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Ode to WhatsApp

My phone pings with a flurry of messages. It is approaching midnight on a Thursday, and these messages are from my writing students as they struggle to upload their first major essay assignments to Turnitin, an internet-based plagiarism detection platform. Messages will ping-pong between our WhatsApp group chat, individual student accounts and me until I go to bed at 1am. I wake at 7am to more messages, for my students have yet to go to bed. I remove my mouth guard and voice message my replies, determined to outrun the rolling snowball of student anxiety threatening to avalanche me. This at-all-hours accessibility mocks traditional office hours.

I teach academic writing in the Academic Preparatory Program at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS), located in the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) was proactive in its response to COVID-19; it sealed its border with neighboring Iran and announced an end to on-campus university classes on February 25. The semester was two days old. I hadn’t had time to form bonds with my students, let alone learn their names. AUIS was the first university to go on-line in Iraq despite a country-wide lack of infrastructure (power cuts are a daily occurrence and many parts of the country have limited internet access), a non-existent culture of self-directed learning, and an absence of basic computer skills among the student population, a few of whom live in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps where living conditions are even more precarious. Add to that the odd earthquake, nightly curfews for students in the south, and Ramadan fasting, which leads students to sleep late and stay up all night. And… all the learning is happening in a second language.

What could go wrong?

In our scramble to get on-line, faculty looked to the heavy hitters in the developed world. What were Harvard and MIT and the University of Nebraska doing? We read articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education, took Zoom tutorials, and silently panicked as we translated engagement, content, teaching style, and a motivation to learn to a not-in-person delivery format. Although I appreciate the advice coming from American institutions and colleagues, higher education in the wake of COVID-19 is not a one-size-fits-all reality.

Enter WhatsApp.

At first, I was reluctant to use WhatsApp. I never give students my personal phone number, preferring to conduct communication face-to-face or via email. Cognizant of social dictates in the Middle East, I wasn’t sure how a western, female teacher calling a single, early-twenty-something male student might be perceived. I knew my academic preparatory program students would need a lot of support because the level of academic writing I teach is the level in which they learn what a thesis statement is and how to write it, what MLA citation is and how to do an in-text citation, and what an essay and its components are before they write a one. (Most high school students in the region have never written an essay in their native language, let alone in English, by the time they finish twelfth grade.) In addition, a study presented at TESOL Arabia a few years ago cited that students in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region see their academic success as dependent on their relationships with their teachers as opposed to students in the United States who see their academic success as the direct result of their own hard work. That is why I relented and ultimately joined the student WhatsApp group for most of the on-line portion of the semester.

There are some not-so-obvious advantages to using group chat as the primary feedback tool for on-line EFL education. The students are chatting with one another and with me in English throughout the day and night. If we had been in the classroom, their questions to each other would have been whispered under their breaths in Kurdish or Arabic or asked during student breaks in their native tongues. WhatsApp forces them to communicate and therefore think in English for extended periods of time. I was able to give one to one feedback for every major writing assignment through WhatsApp voice messaging, which provides them with extra listening practice. I used the recorded vocal messaging function to give line by line feedback as well as summative feedback concerning grammar, structure, citation and the quality of the arguments. The feedback was not only more detailed than it would have been if I had been writing it out, but it was more explanatory because I could lecture at greater length, giving multiple examples on the recording. I could also leave several recorded messages, resulting in a mini-tutorial session.

More important, becoming a member of a student group magicked group intimacy. Being a fly-on-the-Whatsapp-wall enabled me to judge their stress levels when the group chat dissolved into emoticons, especially a flurry of crying-with-tears faces or frogs (I have no idea why frogs.). It was the equivalent of a dorm study hall all-nighter, without the pajamas, junk food and cigarettes. In those moments, I could jump on the app and re-explain directions and key concepts or give examples for the students who couldn’t/hadn’t looked at the teaching content on our learning management system. Conversely, an absence of activity could also signal something was amiss, especially at night when they are awake and typically study. (During Ramadan, they sleep during the day because they fast. Also, the internet is more consistent at night.) Again, I would jump on the chat with an innocuous, “You’re really quiet. Everything OK?” and address student concerns in between brushing and flossing.

Video calling on WhatsApp was crucial in strengthening my relationships with my students because we hadn’t had much in-person time together. However, given the cultural dictates of the region, it has pushed both the students and me outside our comfort zones by dissolving the formality of a traditional student/teacher relationship, especially in the MENA region. When I video-called a student to teach her how to attach a word doc to an email via her computer, I saw her without her hijab, which never would have happened had we stayed in the classroom. Because I live in shared university housing and my roommate is a cancer survivor with a compromised immunity system, I work from my bedroom while my roommate works in the living room. The puppets on my bed have been visible in the corner of the video frame for most of my Zoom videos and live office hours.

My students have been virtually in my bedroom.

To be fair, I have been in their bedrooms, or in one student’s case, his mother’s bedroom, virtually, too. American higher ed institutions herald Zoom as the platform of choice for interaction, but students in the MENA region prefer WhatsApp. They know how to use it. They are relaxed on it, and most important, they interact through it. (Most of my students do not attend my live Zoom office hours.) They share jokes, memes, personal triumphs (one student shared a photo of Kulera, a type of bread, he learned to make in his training to be a baker). These insights into their personalities enable me to form bonds with them, which from their perspective, is essential to their learning.

The quality of the exchanges has become frankly personal. When I asked a non-participatory student why he wasn’t answering the live video call, he said plainly, “Miss, I don’t have any clothes on.”

“Good choice [not to answer],” I fumbled, quickly glancing down at my own sleeveless attire. This is the first semester in my almost five years of employment at AUIS that my students have seen my uncovered shoulders. On campus, my clothing is required to have sleeves.

Video calling has given me privy into aspects of my students’ lives that I would not have had otherwise. A student can write about the pain of her father leaving their family for a second wife, but my understanding of her life awakens when I see the bare walls of the cramped family room, hear her toddler brother wanting to play, say hello to her hijab-wearing, non-English speaking mother, who has insisted on meeting me, and watch the student hold her breath in anticipation of my judgment. To see the strained look on my student’s face as she measures my reaction to her mother’s religious blessings. To know, in that moment, my student has no idea of the high esteem in which I hold her.

The semester is ending. Because the students have a respite before their final tomorrow, I have not had any messages for five hours (as I am writing this, a WhatsApp alert winks from my phone). They have finished iftar, the meal to break the Ramadan fast, and are probably relaxing with family within the confines of COVID. Tonight, before I go to bed, as I have many nights this term, I will check our group WhatsApp for last minute concerns and wish them a good night.

The passport depends on the checkpoint. If it’s a Kurdish checkpoint, he uses the one with “Omar” as the first name. If it’s an Iraqi checkpoint, he uses the one with “Ali”. It’s a death wish to be an “Omar” or “Othman” or a “Bakar” in his home town of Basra[i], Iraq, and the rest of the majority Shia country. Omar is a Sunni. In Basra, a Shi’ite dominated city where Sunnis are targets of sectarian cleansing, Omar might as well be dead.

I met Omar at the American University of Sulaimani where he studies English as a Second Language (ESL). He was my student for one term. This is my second time teaching in northern Iraq, and fifth in the Middle East. Students everywhere are great, but the inherent loveableness of Kurdish and Iraqi students draws me back. No matter what horror they have experienced, their humor, compassion and generosity triumph. Omar is no exception. Tall, medium built, with close cropped hair and five-day growth sideburns which connect to his goatee, he could model for a luxury car ad if he traded his hoodie in for a suit. He enjoys watching movies, going to the gym, photography. He loves car racing. Maybe it’s the speed. Maybe it’s the adrenaline rush. Maybe it’s the danger. He has never told me. Omar has fled for his life three times.

Before the war, Basra was a diverse and culturally vibrant city. No one talked about sectarian divides, women went to school, and few women wore hijabs or burkas in public. “You could do anything,” according to Omar.

Basra was the first city to fall to the coalition forces. Following the collapse of the Iraqi government, a number of Shi’ite Islamist groups including the Sadrist Trend led by Muqtada al-Sadr expanded influence in Basra and solidified its stand in the 2005 elections. At the height of its power in 2005, the Sadrist Trend was strong enough to influence local government through its link with the National Independent Cadres and Elite Party and was especially popular among the police forces. Basra became a center of smuggling activity including cigarettes, Afghan opium which transits Iran, oil, gas, and weapons. Violence increased as different Shi’ite groups vied for power.

Muqtada, who has historically had close ties to Iran[ii], created the Mahdi Army, which spearheaded the first major military confrontation against the US led forces in Iraq from the Shia community. The Mahdi Army frequently carried out atrocities against Sunnis and were accused of operating death squads. The army was disbanded in 2008 but remobilized in 2014 to fight ISIS. The Mahdi army enforced strict Islamic rule in Basra, threatening women who wore makeup and punishing individuals who listened to Western secular music.

Omar says Iranian flags fly everywhere in Basra. Pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini decorate hospitals and police stations. Women are covered, and no one is on the streets after 6p.m. “Iranian militias look for Sunnis everywhere.” According to a January 2016 article in The Independent, the redeployment of security forces from the south to fight ISIS left a vacuum that has been filled by Shia militias and gangs. Shia militias drive around in cars with tinted windows and no plates. “The lack of police, in-fighting over government posts and the growing influence of Shia militias have exacerbated the violence.”[iii]

*

It’s the 2003 invasion. British and U.S. forces enter Iraq from Kuwait approaching Basra on the “Highway of Death”, so named during the Gulf War. The U.S. predicts that the Shi’ite population of Basra will welcome the coalition forces and rise up against Saddam, but they are met with unexpected resistance.[iv] Perhaps the local population remembers the betrayal by the US government when support for their 1991 uprising against Saddam didn’t materialize. The US forces move north, leaving the British to siege Basra. Sectarian violence flares in Basra. Eight-year-old Omar watches as his father and uncles point shotguns out the windows to defend their home from a Shia militia. They exchange fire.

Hearing shooting, British soldiers on patrol in a tank enter their street. The soldiers tell everyone to drop their weapons or they will shoot. The British force seize the weapons, put them in a car, run over the car with the tank, and take the Shia militia into custody. Omar’s father and uncles are spared when his father explains he is a doctor in the Iraqi army and shows his badge. At that time, the US army is creating the new Iraqi army in Baghdad, so the British army arranges for Omar’s father to join the new force. Although Omar’s father is fluent in English and Arabic, has medical expertise and military training, this seems strange to me, but when I question Omar he has no other information. Joining the force and relocating his family takes Omar’s father about a year and a half.

Omar is ten when his father, mother cousin, brother and he move to Baghdad. For two years, the family lives in Aljehad, a place Saddam had built for officers. Trouble follows them as sectarian violence flares. Once again, it’s bad to be an “Omar”, and the streets are filled with gunshots.

It’s 2006 and Omar is almost twelve. In July, in the mixed religious neighborhood of Jihad, masked gunman allegedly from the Mahdi Army, set up a roadblock, check identification card and murder anyone with a Sunni name[v]. This kind of violence is endemic in Baghdad. One day, a Sunni neighbor married to a Shia woman jumps over the wall separating their houses to warn Omar and his family. The Mahdi Army is coming.

What would you grab if you had five minutes to leave your life?

The whole family grab gold, money, passports and clothes and get into a car headed for Syria. Dad will join them later. Omar’s last image of Baghdad is a rocket landing a few houses down from his.

In Syria, the family settles in Bloudan, which is near Madaya, (a city that has been in recent news because its citizens are starving to death due to a government blockade of aid). However, in 2006 Bloudan is a major tourist destination for Arabs. It boasts cool-summer temperatures, parks and springs. Omar spent five years in Syria and describes this time as beautiful.

“The people are beautiful,” he says. “There was no problem with Shia and Sunni and Iraqi.”

Omar’s father is still a doctor but stays with the Iraqi army. According to Omar, the family has enough money for a good life. However, he can’t buy a car because if you’re not Syrian, you can’t buy a house or a car.

When Omar reflects on life in Syria, he shakes his head. ‘Now Syria has nothing,’ he says.

In 2011, conflict flares in Syria. Omar’s cousin is grabbed by the Syrian army for driving a car with Damascus plates. “You’re Iraqi. How do you have this car?” Omar tells me his cousin rented the car, which happened to have a loud speaker system and siren. The police believed this car to be linked to incidents that instigated civil unrest. They beat him with the butt of a rifle, smashing up his face. Omar’s father, still in Iraq with the U.S. army, organizes two cars for the family to flee. Again, Omar, his mother, brother and cousin pack up their lives in minutes. Again, they are forced to run.

The family settle in Sulaymaniyah (Suly) in northern Iraq. In Suly, Omar doesn’t have to worry about being Sunni because here he is Arab and in his experience Kurds hate Arabs. He is quick to point out not all Kurds, but “in five years of being here, my neighbors have never said ‘“hello”’ to me.” It doesn’t help that the family car has Baghdad tags.

The Kurd-Arab conflict has its roots in the Saddam reign. Saddam tried to exterminate the Kurds with the chemical attacks in Halabja in 1988 and other acts of violence throughout his rule. Kurdish animosity towards Arabs has increased since economic stagnation hit Kurdistan in 2013. Contributing factors include the influx of refugees from Syria and southern Iraq, the encroachment of ISIS, the declining price of oil and the ongoing feud between the central government in Baghdad and the regional government in Erbil. The arrival of refugees in Suly has driven up the price of housing, increased traffic and pollution, and squeezed the already limited number of vacant spots in public high schools and universities. As a Kurdish student wrote in an essay “I wish the refugees would all leave and go back to home.”

When Omar arrived in Suly, there were still places in public high schools for Arab kids. He tells me he had good scores in high school, but as an Arab, he says he was given bad final marks on a compulsory, standardized test given to all graduating high school seniors. When Omar went to the Ministry of Education to dispute his scores, he was told he had waited too long. Omar challenged the government official.

“I told him that even if I had come right away, you wouldn’t have helped me.” Omar says, “The official told me, ‘No, I wouldn’t.’”

Receiving bad marks bars Omar from attending public university here.[vi] He says the same is true for his most of his other Arab friends. He has two or three Arab friends who attend public university, but they have connections. For example, one has a Kurdish father who serves in the Peshmerga. He says the Ministry of Education intentionally gives poor marks to Arabs to force them to leave Kurdistan. Now, his only hope for a public university education is to study abroad. (There are some private universities such as AUIS that admit Arab students to its undergraduate program, but they are very expensive whereas public university tuition is nominal.) That is why he takes English classes. He hopes to score well on the Test of English as a Foreign Language and study in Turkey. He says his friends in Syria who stayed are doctors and engineers now. He says he feels ashamed. “Look at me,” he says. “I am nothing.”

Omar is one of many of his generation without hope. He told me he had heard a U.S. army officer say back in 2008 or 2009, ‘We gave Iraq on a plate of gold to Iran.’ Omar doesn’t tell me if he thinks this is true or not. He also doesn’t know if the 2003 invasion was good or bad because he doesn’t know what Saddam would have done. All he knows is that if he can go abroad, he is going abroad.

“After what happened in Basra and Baghdad, I don’t care anymore,” he says. “Everyone tries to kill me if I leave Kurdistan for Iraq. In Kurdistan, I am Arab. In Iraq, I am Sunni. Ramadi, Fallujah and Mosul used to be safe for Sunnis, but that changed with ISIS. Now Iraqi people are hated by the whole world. The war of Iraq makes Iraqi people like Palestine.”

I taught in the West Bank in 2012 and understand what Omar means. He can’t stay where he is, but he has nowhere to go. ISIS has carved out a big portion of the north while the Shia control the south. According to another student of mine and his father who was the Anbar coordinator reporting on humanitarian conditions for the United Nations, Hashad Shahby, a Shia militia fighting ISIS, guards Baghdad. The final entry point into Baghdad from the west is called Bzebz, and it is controlled by a smaller militia from Hashad Shahby called Hez Ballah (Party of God). Members of Hashad Shahby sometimes extort money, sexual favors from women, or take cars from the Sunni refugees fleeing ISIS. Other times, they deny them entrance into Baghdad and the refugees disappear. The Kurdish region has taken in 1.5 million Arabs, but its resources are stretched thin because the Kurdistan Regional government (KRG) claims to be broke. Watching the fences go up in Europe while listening to the hate rhetoric spouted by certain Republican presidential candidates, I wonder. Where can someone like Omar go?

On September 1, Omar will turn twenty-two.

[i] Basra is now held by Shiites and secured by Shia militias. In the years following the collapse of the Iraqi government, sectarian violence flared, especially in places like Baghdad and Basra. Omar is a typical Sunni name.

[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_Companies.

[iii] Salaheddin, S. (2016, January 10). Ira: Crime soars in Basra as army leaves to fight ISIS. The Independent, Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iraq-crime-soars-in-basra-as-army-leaves-to-fight-isis-a6804506.html

[iv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Basra_(2003)

[v] Skeers, J. (2006, July 19). Sectarian violence escalates in Iraq.. World Socialist Web Site. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/07/iraq-j19.html. Retrieved from website.

[vi] The American University of Sulaimani is an expensive, private university.

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The Monster by the Lake

Eleven-year-old Hamza sits facing a wall. Alongside him are his two older brothers, father, uncles and grandfather all in a row, like birds on a clothes line. The song of insects trails in through the open front door. They bump into the strange sounds being uttered by a man in a US military uniform. A translator sitting next to Hamza magics the foreign words into a question. ‘What do you know about the bombs on the street?’ No one has the answer. The translator doesn’t need to interpret Uniform Man’s punches. Violence is the same in any language.

“Shut up, you fat kid,” the US soldier yells as he takes a crying Hamza into another part of the house to be interrogated. Again, the soldier asks him what he knows about the bomb that was planted on a street one hundred meters from Hamza’s house in Heet, northwest of Ramadi.

Hamza thinks this is the moment to be brave. “If you want info, come get it yourself.”

Smothering a smile, the translator turns Hamza’s words into something else.

The US officer threatens him with prison if he doesn’t tell.

“If you do that,” Hamza reasons, “you will be the terrorist.”

I met Hamza at the American University of Sulaimani where he studies Business Administration. He was a student in my critical reading and writing course, where the class reader included Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife. Nothing beats explaining the madonna/whore complex or the infamy of John and Lorena Bobbitt to bond with a student.

This is my second time teaching in northern Iraq, and fifth in the Middle East. Students everywhere are great, but the inherent loveableness of Kurdish and Iraqi students draws me back. No matter what horror they have experienced, their humor and generosity triumph. Hamza is no exception. Built like a quarterback, with his mirrored sunglasses and short spiked hair and high fade, he looks like a college football player. Faculty members often comment that he doesn’t seem like he comes from “here”.

Heet is a small, Sunni city with blooming fields and orchards entwined with canals on the banks of the Euphrates River in the Sunni Triangle (1) of Anbar Province. Before the invasion, daily life had its predictable rhythm. Hamza’s life centered on school: studying, eating, sleeping. Friday afternoons were special because the government showed a movie on television. Maybe that’s where his love for cinema began.

In March 2003, the US launched an airstrike on the Presidential Palace in Baghdad. The following day, coalition forces entered the Basra Province from their massing point close to the Iraq-Kuwait border. The Anbar province saw little fighting in the initial invasion. But then in late April, 2003, US soldiers killed seventeen Iraqis in Fallujah at an anti-American demonstration, igniting violence in the region. By the time the US forces reached Heet, resistance supporters had gathered in strength and number (2). Conditions in the Anbar Province favored the resistance: the area is predominantly Sunni, and in a post-Saddam Iraq, Sunnis were a religious minority without power. Saddam had been more popular in Anbar than anywhere else in Iraq and much of the Iraqi weapons industry was located in Anbar. After the fall of Saddam, the resistance looted most of the known ninety-six munitions sites as well as armories and weapon stockpiles (3). The resistance and foreign fighters also used the Euphrates River Valley as an infiltration route to move fighters from the Syrian border to Baghdad, Ramadi and Fallujah (4). These routes would again be used when ISIS made its move a decade later.

One man’s resistance is another man’s terror.

Hamza recalls the American forces entering Heet with toys, footballs, books and food. They set up in Al Asad Airbase, the Lion’s Base. Meanwhile the resistance planted bombs at night for the coalition forces and collected them at dawn so the public wouldn’t get hurt. The resistance beheaded or shot anyone who worked with the Americans. They would videotape their operations and leave them on discs around the city for people to see. Some mornings Hamza awoke to streets littered with discs, other mornings to streets scattered with dead bodies.

As resistance fighters filled the city, guns became available on the black market for as little as ten dollars. Once, an American convoy of four Humvees and a tank stopped at an intersection forty meters from Hamza’s school. Now you see it; now you don’t. Half the tank is gone; half lies in a ditch. The Humvees started shooting. The resistance fighters yelled at the teachers to pull the students inside. One long minute stretched, the soldier’s minute. The resistance fighters returned fire with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). The next day, the students found hands, brains, and helmets around the school yard. Hamza and his friends would gather the stray bullets from the streets, crack them open to collect their powder and light it on fire. At twelve years old, this became his pastime.

In 2004, the house to house searches began in Heet. At first, Hamza remembers, the soldiers were friendly: they spoke English with Hamza’s father, took pictures with family members, removed their gloves to shake hands.

After Saddam Hussein was deposed, Coalition Provisional Authority Chief Paul Bremer disbanded the military apparatus of Iraq. As the security situation deteriorated and the resistance grew, the US military set up and trained a new security force, the National Guard of Iraq, to help the US army fight the resistance (5). The National Guard and the US army would search houses together. One night, Hamza and his family heard the neighbors screaming as the search unit kicked in their door. Hamza’s father opened his door and waited.

Would you go to bed at night with your door unlocked or ajar? This became a habit in Heet.

During a house search, women and children were locked in a room together. The men were gathered in the yard of the biggest house to be interrogated. They were herded into the courtyard as the search began. It was cold and Hamza froze in his T-shirt.

No one found the resistance disks hidden in the sofa, but Hamza’s father’s army rifle was discovered along with its license. The soldiers hit the men, tall and small, in the courtyard. Hamza reassures me, ‘Pain is temporary. Something else will take its place.’

Hamza is a wise philosopher inside a teddy bear of a young man.

When I ask him how he doesn’t hate Americans, Hamza says, ‘They’re not the main reason for the destruction of Iraq. The people didn’t stand together.’ Hamza is referring to the spiral of sectarian violence that began in 2006 when Al-Qaeda in Iraq bombed the Al-Aksari Shrine in Samarra, one of the holiest sites for Shia Islam. This set off a wave of Shia reprisals towards Sunnis, which led to Sunni counterattacks (6). Hamza says that when the US army invaded, the Shia flourished and started executing anyone named Omar (Omar is a typical Sunni name). In 2006, when Hamza’s brother went to university in Baghdad, he had two identification cards: one Sunni, one Shia. Hamza tells me, ‘You get used to going around and maybe being blown up. You don’t give up details about family. You learn to lie. You learn to be Shiite with strangers.’

Kids, especially in this part of the world, are resilient. After 2003, Hamza tells me the “internet came in” and, like teens across the globe, he gorged on MTV, American films and TV shows. Listening to music and memorizing lyrics helped him learn English. He tells me he has always wanted to try a prime rib steak with a glass of red wine. He must have gotten that image from some American film.

While in high school, Hamza was accepted into the Iraqi Young Leaders Exchange Program (IYLEP) and traveled to the US for four weeks. He tells me how much he likes my adopted home of New York City, where he bought his snow globes of Manhattan. After high school, he was accepted to the American University of Iraq in 2014. Like many college freshman, he was to live in a dormitory on campus and packed accordingly. In the family compound he left his flat screen TV with its massive DVD collection and his cherished snow globes.

It’s October, 2014, when ISIS enters Heet. ISIS takes over police stations and demands that people surrender or they will be killed and left in the street. Outside the police station, a guard exits, holding his rifle above his head in surrender when a sniper protecting the building shoots the guard. ISIS storms the building, killing everyone. They throw the sniper alive from the top of the building. ISIS approaches another police station with a tractor shovel. They order the police to remove the concrete blocks and to surrender. When they don’t, ISIS opens fire until the police run out of ammunition. Then, ISIS bulldozes the concrete blocks and slays all the policemen. Again the slain are denied burial. This public brutality coerces the local population into submission. Within two weeks, Heet is under complete ISIS control (7).

Hamza’s dad and brother are living in Heet when ISIS takes control. Post invasion, Hamza’s father worked with the UN as the Anbar coordinator reporting on humanitarian conditions in the area. As a result, he now risks public execution. Father and brother flee to Baghdad, which compared to Heet, is a safe haven.

Imagine leaving a family compound it took you thirteen years to build. Imagine leaving the second home you had recently completed, an apartment, three retail spaces and a few empty lots — everything you had worked for. This is the price of freedom. ‘Come back or we take all your property” is the ISIS ultimatum. Sometimes Hamza wonders who is sleeping in his bed, watching his DVDs on his flat screen TV, admiring his snow globes. Hamza’s mother’s words come back to him, ‘Son, don’t save anything anymore. Live for the moment.’

When they flee, Hamza’s dad and brother take only money and jewelry, which can be easily hidden, because they can’t look like they are leaving. At the checkpoint, Hamza’s father shows his teacher ID and is allowed to continue on to Baghdad. This is 2014, when it was easier to sneak out of Heet. Now, ISIS has sealed Heet to use civilians as a human shield. ISIS militants travel with women or children to exploit the US rules of engagement, which try to avoid collateral damage (8). ISIS leaders also embed themselves in civilian communities so they cannot be targeted in drone strikes.

The 2003 invasion brought knives, guns and bullets to the streets. ISIS has brought a lion in a cage. If you break the rules, your punishment is to go in the cage. This new era of violence has spawned another resistance. Spies from the resistance plant devices to read the heat signature of bodies in places where ISIS gathers. The Iraqi army, trained by the Americans, sees the heat signatures and targets those places.

Nowadays, people pay smugglers to get them out of ISIS controlled territories. If you’re Sunni, it’s risky to go to Baghdad because the Shia militia controls it. Hamza reports there is no Sunni militia. ‘People think all Sunni are ISIS. Sunnis run away from ISIS and run into Shia, who execute them.’

Today Hamza and his father live in Sulaimania in the Kurdish region of Iraq. Hamza is grateful to his adopted city. He tells me that 1.5 million Iraqi refugees live in Kurdistan while Baghdad doesn’t let refugees in from the Anbar province. Hashad Shahby, a Shia militia fighting ISIS, guards Baghdad. The final entry point into Baghdad from the west is called Bzebz, and it is controlled by a smaller militia from Hashad Shahby called Hez Ballah (Party of God) (9). Members of Hashad Shahby sometimes extort money from refugees fleeing ISIS. When a family drives a car to the checkpoint, sometimes the militia takes their car and forces the family to walk across the border. If the family is coming from Anbar and there is a woman in the car, the guards sometimes demand to have sex with her before the fleeing family can enter the city. Refugees sleep around the checkpoint, hoping to gain entry. Some are kidnapped and ransomed. Some die in interrogation. Some disappear.

Beyond the checkpoint, the Tigris River calls them.

Originally published at www.matadorreview.com .

Lots of blues and greens. Mostly dresses, organized by color, then by designer, crowded onto a three-foot rod, jammed into a three-foot closet, inside an eight-foot bedroom, inside a tiny bedroom on the island of Manhattan. Spring cleaning. A ritual familiar to all those self-aggrandized lives shoved into small spaces. A hairball of dust along the floor molding distracted me. Retrieved a broom and dustpan and dumped it into the dustbin.

Entering the Catherine Maladrino dress section, which paralleled a period of relative prosperity and emotional security, I spotted one of my would-be wedding dresses. The attached silk scarf of the viridian halter gown felt cool against my cheek. I didn’t wear it to my own wedding, but I wore it to my friend Jenny’s more than ten years ago. I haven’t worn it since, nor have I seen much of Jenny.

I pulled at the skirt of an indigo MoMo FaLana gown. The MoMo brand peaked at the height of Sex and the City, as did I. It was also a halter dress, which I wore to my student Katya’s wedding, and I don’t see much of her, either.

Carrie Bradshaw in MoMo FaLana

Opened the fridge, looking for answers. It was empty. I distracted myself with an Oreo cookie lunch. I double-ate and returned to the closet. Its contents reproached me. “This is why you rent an eight-foot room in someone else’s apartment. This is why you don’t have a graduate degree.” But underneath the reprimand I heard something else. “You bought me when you were falling in love with Joe and wanted to be pretty for him. Don’t give me away.” My closet was not only a road map of financial decline but a hope chest of great loves lost. Silence rushed my ears. How do we decide whom to keep and whom to give away?

I kept my boyfriend Kostya. He wasn’t the most handsome or the funniest. He was that go-to dress you pull out of the closet, knowing it will fit, even on those fat-and-ugly-and-nobody-will-ever-love-you days. That kind of dress wears over time, needs to be replaced. Or you wake up one day and no longer like it. Who knows why? Why did I no longer like bacon when I had enjoyed it throughout my youth? Kostya was my partner until he wasn’t. Maybe I was his bacon.

Into the vintage section. Sucked in my breath at the remembrance of a lacy frock’s price. Why had I needed it six hundred dollars badly? Why had I fallen in love? If it still makes me swoon, I’ll know it was real, and I will keep it. Otherwise, into the discard bin with its recriminations.

I stood back to survey my effort. The rod was mostly full, a testimony to my fidelity. Some of the gowns in the discard bin still had their tags. I had known they were wrong choices as I made them. Whose wrong choice was I? Did he know as he made me? I want to climb out of the discard bin.

Alex Poppe is a teacher and creative instigator. A former actor/business consultant, she has worked in Poland, Turkey, Ukraine, Northern Iraq, The West Bank, Germany, and The United States. These places and their people inspire her work. When she is not being thrown from the back of food aid trucks or dining with pistol packing Kurdish hit men, she writes.

Images: Sex and the City

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Originally published at bust.com .

Light reflects off Dad’s glasses onto my Skype screen. He looks worried. “You’re almost 50,” he reminds me. “You need to think about where you want to be living in the next 20 years.”

Twenty years! It strikes me that at 83, he probably won’t be alive in twenty years. Will I?

Recently, the New York Times published an article examining life expectancy and income levels in the United States. According to their report, the top one percent of American men and women live fifteen (men) and ten (women) years longer than the poorest one percent. As the income gap has grown, so has longevity.

The situation is grimmer for single women than for married women and for all men. According to a recent CNBC article, women are 80% more likely than men to be impoverished at age 65 or older. The 79 cents on the dollar that women generally earn compared to men really adds up. Not only do women earn less and therefore are unable to maximize retirement savings plans as men do, but they also live longer and face higher retirement expenses. The cherry on top? Women 65 and older receive an income that is 25% lower than what men receive. Single gals suffer the most: They lack the financial security of a dual-earner household, dual social security benefits and spouse retirement benefits.

I am a single teacher working in northern Iraq making $28,800 per year. Can I afford to grow old in the United States?

My stats: Upon graduating, I worked for Mobil Oil Corporation for two years, quit to become an actor for fourteen years, became a teacher and have been working abroad for most of the last ten years. I have never made more than $45,000 a year (in the heyday of New York City wine bars), have no health insurance, no assets, no debt, no pension, a stunted IRA, a master’s degree and no children.

“Your mother and I have a combined income from social security of $3,000 a month. You won’t have that because you haven’t been contributing to social security.” His voice sounds gruff, but that’s just his way. The lines on his forehead disappear into the top of his scalp. “We live off that and our savings.”

I don’t have much savings.

He reaches for his five o’clock gin and tonic. His throat must be sore from the spirited comments he’s just made concerning my desire to work in Colombia after my contract in Iraq finishes. After living in seven different countries, my wanderlust has not abated. I’m fifty, going on twenty. Just last week, my Aunt Jodie said, “Your generation sure does get around,” after relating her grandkids’ latest work/study abroad adventures. I don’t point out that I’m old enough to be her grandchildren’s mother.

The clatter of pans floats in from the kitchen where Mom is making dinner.

I can’t cook either.

“Don’t you want to come home?” He seems genuinely puzzled. Dad is a social studies urban legend come to life. He came to the United States in 1947, a World War Two refugee from Berlin, without education or language, and by sheer hard work, learned English at night school while working as a plumbers apprentice, earned a business degree from Northwestern University and made a comfortable, middle-class living for himself. Does he look at me and see disappointment?

Can I afford to grow old in the United States?

I’ve tried to come home — twice. Both times, I couldn’t find gainful employment even though I had been valedictorian of the business school at Marquette University and had a varied skill set. I barely cobbled together an income working two jobs. Working abroad affords me the opportunity to travel, dine with pistol-packing Kurdish hitmen, hangout with Assyrian sheiks, map refugee camps with local NGOs — really live. How can I explain to Dad that coming home to find a job with health insurance and benefits feels like a death sentence?

My jaw locks. I recently chipped a molar grinding my teeth in my sleep. As Dad sips his gin and tonic, I try not to stare. I don’t have the solace of alcohol. “Come home to what? The only jobs I’ll be able to find are as adjuncts and they don’t offer benefits. You still have to run around and work multiple jobs to scrape by.” In summer 2008, I returned to the United States, to New York City, which is home to me even though Mom and Dad live in Chicago. I commuted almost two hours each way from my sublet, five times a week to be an adjunct instructor at Brooklyn College and then 45 minutes each way three time a week to teach at Sunnyside Community Center. No health insurance or retirement savings plan included.

“You’ll be paying into Social Security at least.” His ice cubes tinkle in the glass.

Would it matter? At this late stage, what kind of quality of life could I expect to have were I to retire in the United States?

According to CNN Money, I would need assets fourteen to sixteen times my salary if I want to retire when I am sixty, or a boat load of money in the bank. The Washington Monthly says that only one in five Americans think they will be able to support themselves comfortably in old age. It also finds the state of American retirement security is “approaching crisis proportions.”

Even if I did return to the States permanently, there is no guarantee I would find employment with a company that offered an employer-sponsored retirement savings plan such as a 401(k) like Dad had. One in three Americans lack access to these kinds of savings plans. Setting up somewhere in the States would eat up a huge part of my meager savings: I would need a car, a bed, health insurance, appliances, not to mention a place to live. Besides what I have with me in Iraq, my worldly possessions share the closet with Mom’s overflow of clothing in the spare bedroom of their condominium. A friend in Connecticut has a few boxes of my books.

The weight of things.

I asked the other teachers at work if they plan to return to the United States for retirement. Most said no. Teachers in their twenties, thirties and forties all thought they would not have enough money to live in the United States when they are old. All are looking to settle permanently abroad. Is the United States headed the way of other oligarchic countries — citizens are either very rich or the very poor with not a lot in between?

Lifehack reports that the average fifty-year-old has $43,797 in savings, which is not a lot to retire on. However, that money can go much farther abroad, depending on which country you pick. I don’t tell Dad that Colombia is on Lifehack’s list of “10 Amazing Places You Can Afford to Retire Abroad.”

Mom comes out of the kitchen carrying her scotch on the rocks. “The pot’s on.” She must be making sauce. Mom’s convinced Dad is as healthy as he is because she gives him three square meals a day. She settles next to my father, both of them shrunken into the frame of the screen. Dad’s shoulders are hunched inward; Mom’s eyes look tired. They seem fragile.

“I’ll be home to visit in August when my contract is over.” There’s a lump pushing up my throat, making it hard to talk. When these two old people are gone, there’ll be one less place to call home.

Alex Poppe is a teacher and creative instigator. A former actor/business consultant, she has worked in Poland, Turkey, Ukraine, Northern Iraq, The West Bank, Germany, and The United States. These places and their people inspire her work. When she is not being thrown from the back of food aid trucks or dining with pistol packing Kurdish hit men, she writes.

Top photo: American Advisors Group/Flickr

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“All together now, one, two, three…penis!”

I am a teacher at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani. The city, Sulaimania, is a study in contrasts: The phallic, shiny blue Grand Millennium Hotel is a beacon of modernity in a place where the average citizen has electricity for only a few hours a day. Last September, I walked into an undergraduate critical reading and writing class armed with The Handmaid’s Tale and The World’s Wife, and a determination to expand the way students think.

The Handmaid’s Tale is Margaret Atwood’s dystopian, feminist novel that takes on patriarchy, totalitarianism and theocracy. Iran is just a stone’s throw away.

The World’s Wife, Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry collection, takes well-known, male-centered stories, histories and myths and re-envisions them from a female perspective. In Duffy’s world, girls rule. Here, women are marginalized.

I took over the class from feminist poet Dr. Choman Hardi after she was promoted to Head of English. Dr. Hardi is a literary/political activist rock star. The students size me up. I need to win their trust and confidence if they’re going to learn anything from me.

The students are a few weeks into The Handmaid’s Tale at the time of my first lecture. I don’t even know their names as I explain Ceremony Night from the novel. During Ceremony Night, The Handmaid, Offred, has sex with the Commander while she lies in a cradle of Serena Joy’s legs. Serena Joy is the Commander’s Wife.

Above me, towards the head of the bed, Serena Joy is arranged, outspread. Her legs are apart, I lie between them, my head on her stomach, her pubic bone under the base of my skull, her thighs on either side of me. She too is fully clothed.

My arms are raised; she holds my hands, each of mine in each of hers…

My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body…

I remember Queen Victoria’s advice to her daughter. Close your eyes and think of England! But this is not England. I wish he would hurry up.

Serena Joy grips my hands as if it is she, not I, who’s being fucked.

I draw a name from an envelope. “Hana?”

Hana is small, fragile girl wearing a hijab.

“Can you describe the Ceremony Night?”

“Who’s in the room?” I prompt.

“Serena Joy, Offred and The Commander.” She is so soft-spoken, I have to stand right next to her to hear her. I hope by semester’s end, she will have found her voice.

“How are they arranged?”

Hana looks at me with abject terror.

“Who is Offred lying on?”

“Serena Joy.” The two words are a whisper.

“Where is Offred’s head?”

Crickets.

“Do I need to draw this on the board?”

A stick figure threesome. My cheeks rust.

“What makes the act bearable? Sawen?” Sawen is a baby feminist and voracious reader.

“The Commander and Offred don’t kiss. And she keeps her eyes closed.”

“In the novel, there are several references to women keeping their eyes closed during sex. Why?”

No one gives me eye contact.

“You know,” I stall to mentally weigh options. Given where I am, how much cultural context should I explain in order for the students to appreciate the nuances of this book? There’s a tiny garden gnome jumping up and down on my shoulder, warning me to stop.

“Before second wave feminism, in Western cultural stereotypes, women, especially ‘nice girls,’ weren’t supposed to enjoy sex. The purpose of sex was procreation, just like in The Gilead Republic of Atwood’s novel. That’s what the ‘Close your eyes and think of England’ line refers to.” Heat rises from behind my ears. I am so glad I chose a cotton blend dress to hide the hamburger stains forming under my armpits. “But second wave feminism said, wait, no, women can have sex for pleasure, just like men do. That sex isn’t just about having children, and women deserved to be satisfied by the sexual experience, and they are not bad or shameful for wanting so.”

I am in a full face blush and Hana won’t look in my direction. However, I have woken up the male engineers in the back row who take this class because Lit 102 is required.

I sit on the front corner of my desk to be closer to the students. “Look, I know I’m blushing. Can we all agree we might talk about some things that will make us uncomfortable? I’m embarrassed. You’re embarrassed. Let’s get over ourselves and accept we’re going to be embarrassed sometimes.”

In the months to come, every lesson will have moments of awkwardness as we discuss gender, sexuality and patriarchy. In service of the novel, I will explain the Madonna-whore complex, especially as it relates to the empowerment of female sexuality, Playboy bunnies, menstruation, masturbation, orgasms, faking orgasms and pornography.

“So the line about keeping her eyes closed is mocking the pre-feminist notion that women should ‘do their duty’ and let men have them in order to make babies. Even my language is patriarchal, although not as colorful as Atwood’s. Men have women. Why don’t women have men?”

“Because men have all the power,” offers Hamza, a teddy bear of a young man.

“How can you change that? How many of your mothers are university educated?” A few hands go up. “Look at you guys. You’re here, taking this class, reading this book, in this city. You can change it. It’s just like the theme of ignoring versus ignorance that runs throughout the novel. Ignoring is complicity. You can choose to ignore or you can choose to see, bear witness and change what you don’t like.”

The next lesson I show a TED Talk clip with Sarah Jones performing part of her one woman show, Sell/Buy/Date. “What are male sluts called?” one of the characters asks. “Right. Male sluts are called men.” We discuss the sexual double standards that exist in their lives.

I relate everything I can from the novel to the world around them: patriarchy, gender violence, totalitarianism, environmental degradation, media bias/media manufactured news. I tell them they don’t have to share my opinions but they do have to defend their own. The students debate Iran’s meddling in Iraq, the US occupation, ISIS, ISIS and Yazidis women, and women’s rights. And then on Friday, October 2, 2015, a father shoots his daughter in a local park for some perceived shame she had brought upon the family.

Women’s control over their own bodies is the next lecture’s theme. The students don’t want to discuss the honor killing, but the event reverberates in their debates about arranged marriages, child brides, restrictions on unescorted female movement in their city, childbearing as it relates to female worth, and prostitution. They leave the classroom seeing their world a bit differently.

Daughter, wife, mother — prescribing roles for women keeps them from finding out who they are. The poems in The World’s Wife pluck women out of the supporting roles and thrust them center stage. These women tell different sides to well-known stories, illuminating different truths. It’s better to marry a beast than a prince, (“Mrs. Beast”), women don’t pine away waiting for men (“Penelope”) and women don’t always want to be saved (“Eurydice”).

Some boys in the class hate the collection; they dismiss the poems because Ms. Duffy is a lesbian, which prompts a spirited discussion about author and reader bias through a filter of homophobia. The boys in class look a bit scared: Women in this collection seduce, kill, manipulate, consolidate power, find artistic fulfillment — in other words, they act like men. On campus I hear students complain, “Dr. Choman hates my penis,” or, “Miss Alex, what are you having the students read?” I reply with a Mona Lisa smile.

Male classroom discomfort reaches an all-time high when I unpack “Mrs. Aesop.” Drawing on John and Lorena Bobbit, Carol Ann Duffy re-envisions Aesop’s Fables from the perspective of Mrs. Aesop, who wants less clichéd stories and more passion in her marriage. She threatens to castrate her husband by cutting off his tail, his metaphorical manhood, to bring an end to his tales. To explain the poem, I need to explain the infamy of the Bobbits. Every time I say “penis” (nine counts by the end of the class), someone snickers. My face is a tomato. Explaining “cut off his tail to stop his tale” elicits boy groans and girl giggles. “Ok, let’s own it,” I’m giggling a bit too. “Come on. All together now, one, two three…penis!”

I taught these students for ten of their thirteen week semester. Hana never did find her voice, but Mohammed, a quiet student who became “the man of his house” upon his parents’ divorce told me, “Now, when I hear peoples’ stories, I wonder what their experiences are. I want to know their perspectives.” That’s what I want too.

Alex Poppe is a teacher and creative instigator. A former actor/business consultant, she has worked in Poland, Turkey, Ukraine, Northern Iraq, The West Bank, Germany, and The United States. These places and their people inspire her work. When she is not being thrown from the back of food aid trucks or dining with pistol packing Kurdish hit men, she writes.

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Tags: BUST True Story , personal essay , feminist literature

Originally published at bust.com .