Hussein Sayed/AP

Abdullah Abdullah, center, chairman of Afghanistan's High Council for National Reconciliation, attends the opening session of the peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, Saturday, Sept. 12, 2020.

At the negotiating table, days into landmark intra-Afghan talks to end decades of war, platitudes about the need for peace are interwoven with haggling over procedure.

But perhaps more tellingly, on Afghanistan’s weary battlefields, the killing continues, as if negotiation teams from the Afghan government and Taliban insurgents were not now meeting in Doha, Qatar.

On Thursday, the government in Kabul said at least 27 security personnel and 36 Taliban fighters had been killed in conflict across five provinces in the previous 24 hours.

One result of the continued violence is that a substantial trust deficit has grown even deeper, as each side seeks to delegitimize the other and maximize its gains in any new power-sharing arrangement, which could take months or even years to negotiate.

Even as talks began Sept. 12 – when a government call for an immediate cease-fire was rejected by the Taliban – the defense ministry counted Taliban attacks across 18 of the country’s 34 provinces.

“It would be a miscalculation to think that causing more casualties would make people more hopeful about peace,” warned Abdullah Abdullah, chair of Afghanistan’s High Council for National Reconciliation.

Yet Taliban spokesman Mohammad Naeem Wardak said an enduring cease-fire first required a broader negotiated deal. “It does not make sense to end 20 years of war in one hour,” he told ToloNews Wednesday.

At stake: Regime change

The stakes could not be higher amid a U.S.-engineered peace process designed to bring the jihadist Taliban back into the halls of power and pave the way for withdrawal from America’s longest-ever war.

Analysts say the highest risk in the negotiations is to the U.S.-backed democratic republic led by President Ashraf Ghani – and the Western-style freedoms it espouses – if the talks culminate in de facto “regime change.”

“The first big question is: Are they going to be able to reach a cease-fire anytime soon, in these next few weeks? And if not, what does a peace process look like with fighting at such high levels?” says Andrew Watkins, the senior Afghanistan analyst for the International Crisis Group.

“On both sides, this is about more than just a lack of trust,” says Mr. Watkins. Both sides “are actively seeking to deny legitimacy to the other side. ... Very coldly, the Taliban know that the Afghan government looks weak and ineffective every time it has security problems.”

And any cease-fire is a gift to Kabul, enabling it to address Afghans’ many other problems, if it is not preoccupied with the war.

“So on one level, why would the Taliban allow the government space to make itself more effective?” asks Mr. Watkins. “It’s terrible to think that the cost of that strategic maneuver is continuing to kill fellow Afghans, day after day.”

Hussein Sayed/AP

Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, bottom right, speaks at the opening session of the peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, Sept. 12, 2020.

U.S. withdrawal

These unprecedented intra-Afghan talks are the result of a deal signed last February between the United States and the Taliban ­– itself an agreement that required nearly a year of diplomacy – that the Taliban have trumpeted as “victory.” It called for complete withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO forces, in exchange for the Taliban not allowing Afghan soil to be used for attacks abroad.

The Pentagon says the remaining 8,600 American troops will be whittled down to 4,500 by November.

For the Taliban, this sense of triumph has exacerbated the trust deficit by raising expectations that it can achieve, with little compromise, its core demands of greater Islamic rule and renewed legitimacy inside a system where it has significant control.

“This is their [most] golden time in the last 20 years. ... They are coming with the attitude of the winners,” says Rahmatullah Amiri, a Kabul-based political analyst and expert on the Taliban, speaking of the arch-conservative group.

“You see [the Taliban] brought unity among their lines, they brought everyone on board with peace talks, they brought legitimacy to their side,” says Mr. Amiri. “They got more than what they expected in the last two years, both militarily and politically, so that’s a big boost to their morale when they come to the negotiating table.”

“Now it’s the Taliban’s turn”

The Taliban’s new chief negotiator, the influential religious scholar Mawlawi Abdul Hakim Haqqani, told both negotiating teams Tuesday night that the Taliban aimed to “make decisions together” to establish an “independent, Islamic system that is inclusive of all Afghans.”

But another senior Taliban negotiator told CBS, anonymously, that only the Taliban have a back-up plan if talks fail: “Our Plan A is a peaceful political solution, and Plan B, definitely a military takeover.”

The current government, kept afloat by U.S. and other donor aid, is “totally corrupt and incapable,” the senior Talib official said. Any coalition would be a “sinking ship [that would] drown the Taliban as well.”

“Now it’s the Taliban’s turn” to lead Afghanistan for three to five years, he said, during which the militant group would work with foreigners and “especially the U.S.,” to “prove that, as the Taliban was a hard enemy, in the future we will be a solid and trustworthy partner.”

The Kabul side aims to preserve the democratic status quo, which includes significant women’s rights, girls’ education, and media independence that have grown since the U.S. military ousted the Taliban in late 2001. But it has been plagued by corruption, crippled by political gridlock, and sapped by years of losing battles to the Taliban.

The militants, capitalizing on advances against American, NATO, and Afghan forces, have brought roughly half the country under their control and want back into the halls of power.

Rahmat Gul/AP

Afghan security personnel and municipal workers at the site of an explosion in Kabul, Sept. 9, 2020. Ten people were killed in the attack on the convoy of First Vice President Amrullah Saleh, who this week called the Taliban “small, ugly and violent.”

Afghan women

On the day the Taliban was toppled in 2001, and their strict brand of Islamic law lifted overnight, women danced in Kabul, removed their burkas to reveal their faces, and girls denied an education emerged from secret home schools.

“Now the time is over that the women of Afghanistan – Afghan girls in the bazaar or streets or stadiums – are whipped,” Gen. Asadullah Khalid, the acting defense minister, said Thursday, echoing the hopes of many Afghans as he called to “preserve all achievements” at the intra-Afghan talks.

“Afghan women in the past two decades became pilots, doctors, teachers, ministers, and deputies,” he said. “We don’t want a setback.”

The Taliban say they have now evolved, will welcome women to high posts, allow girls education, and say they want to work with foreign donors to rebuild the country.

The government also is seeking to delegitimize the Taliban as “terrorists” responsible for the vast majority of military and civilian deaths who don’t deserve recognition.

First Vice President Amrullah Saleh – whose convoy was targeted by an explosion on Sept. 9, killing 10 civilians – this week called the Taliban “small, ugly and violent” and said they would be integrated into Afghan society by melting in a “community furnace.”

Stonewalling on prisoners

The U.S-Taliban deal in February committed the Afghan government to release 5,000 captured Taliban fighters, in trade for the release of 1,000 members of the Afghan security forces. But the decision was made without the consent of the government, because the Taliban refused at the time to talk to what it called a “U.S. puppet” regime.

The prisoner releases, meant to build trust and take place within days, instead took six months to complete, due largely to government stonewalling. Since the February signing, Taliban attacks killed more than 3,500 members of the Afghan security forces and 775 civilians, President Ghani said in late July.

The U.S.-Taliban deal did require the Taliban to cease attacks on withdrawing American and other foreign forces. But for Afghans, the agreement stipulated, a “cease-fire” would only be an agenda item during intra-Afghan talks.

“This moment that we sit here, tens of young people are being martyred, women widowed, children orphaned,” the government’s chief negotiator Masoom Stanekzai told both sides Tuesday night. “The biggest and most important priority of our people is to stop the bloodshed in the country.”

But for the Taliban, continuing violence is their primary leverage, analysts say, and there is little reason for urgency.

“The Taliban is a body of logic; emotion doesn’t play much part,” says Mr. Amiri, the Kabul analyst. “Trust building wouldn’t have much impact. …

“They have a very firm sense of things that they discuss, and they are thinking and they want to achieve it,” says Mr. Amiri.

“There is going to be some sort of regime change, whether we like it or not,” he adds. “Because if you are talking about the future state, what is that, then?”

Issei Kato/Reuters/File

A liquefied natural gas tanker is tugged towards a thermal power station in Futtsu, east of Tokyo, Japan, on November 13, 2017. United States exports of LNG are expected to rise in coming years, and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has not taken a stance opposed to gas exports.

For more than a decade, Susan Jane Brown has been battling to stop a natural gas pipeline and export terminal from being built in the backcountry of Oregon. As an attorney at the nonprofit Western Environmental Law Center, she has repeatedly argued that the project’s environmental, social, and health costs are too high.

All that was before this month’s deadly wildfires in Oregon shrouded the skies above her home office in Portland. “It puts a fine point on it. These fossil fuel projects are contributing to global climate change,” she says. 

Jordan Cove, the $10-billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) project that Ms. Brown is trying to stop, has yet to break ground. But environmental lawsuits and permitting delays aren’t the only barriers. A calamitous crash in natural gas prices and a glut of LNG capacity have cast doubts over its commercial viability and, more broadly, the easy promise of converting abundant U.S. gas into a global commodity and geopolitical tool. 

“There’s too much oil. There’s too much gas. There's not enough demand,” says Clark Williams-Derry at the liberal-leaning Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

Still, even if projects like Jordan Cove are shelved, several other LNG terminals on the Gulf Coast already have all their permits and are waiting to secure financing. Their expansion over the next five years would make the U.S. the world’s largest LNG producer, creating jobs at home and opening new markets in energy-hungry Asia. 

Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/AP/File

Environmental protesters storm the Capitol in Salem, Ore., on November 21, 2019, to demand that the State reject proposals by Canadian energy giant Pembina for the Jordan Cove Energy Project which if approved would see the construction of a liquefied natural gas export terminal at the International Port of Coos Bay fed by an associated 229 mile Pacific Connector Gas Pipeline.

For a future Biden administration, that’s a wrinkle in any serious climate plan. Once built, these LNG plants would potentially lock in decades of heat-trapping emissions that are already hurling the planet toward a hotter, less stable future. “Once you build the infrastructure it’s there, and it gets run on a different economic basis than if it’s not there,” says Mr. Williams-Derry, who tracks the LNG industry. 

Proponents say natural gas is cleaner than the coal that it replaces both in the U.S., where it now produces around 40% of electricity, and in countries like India and China. That makes it a “bridge fuel” to a fully renewable energy future that hasn’t yet arrived, says Fred Hutchison, president and CEO of LNG Allies, an industry group. “Gas can continue to be part of a low-carbon energy system globally,” he says. 

He predicts that LNG firms would be comfortable with a Biden presidency. “He’s got a great affinity for working people and labor, and labor is very much on board with regards to LNG,” he says. 

On the campaign trail, Mr. Biden has gotten heat over his support for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which left-leaning Democrats oppose but which is seen as important for winning Pennsylvania, a battleground state in November’s election. Far less attention has been paid to where the oil and gas goes, and whether support for LNG exports is compatible with Mr. Biden’s clean-energy agenda and plans for tackling climate change. 

“It’s not going to save the climate if we’re just exporting our emissions overseas,” says Collin Rees, a campaigner for Oil Change U.S., an environmental nonprofit. 

Moderates feeling the heat

If elected, Mr. Biden has vowed to stop new drilling for oil and gas on federal land and in federal waters and to rejoin the 2015 Paris climate accord that President Donald Trump gave notice of quitting. He would reinstate Obama-era regulations of greenhouse gas emissions, including methane, the largest component of natural gas. 

The Biden climate platform also states that all federal infrastructure investments and federal permits would need to be assessed for their climate impacts. Analysts say such a test could impede future LNG plants and pipelines, though not those that already have federal approval. 

Climate change activists who pushed for that language say much depends on who would have oversight of federal agencies that regulate the industry. Some are wary of Biden’s reliance on advice from Obama-era officials, including former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who is now on the board of Southern Company, a utility, and a former Obama environmental aide, Heather Zichal, who has served on the board of Cheniere Energy, an LNG exporter. 

Patrick Semansky/AP

Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden speaks about climate change and wildfires affecting western states, on Monday, Sept. 14, 2020, in Wilmington, Delaware. The Biden climate platform states that all federal infrastructure investments and federal permits would need to be assessed for their climate impacts. Analysts say such a test could impede future LNG plants and pipelines, depending on the implementation.

In a letter sent earlier this month, Mr. Rees and other signatories urged Mr. Biden to ban “all fossil fuel executives, lobbyists, and representatives” from any future administration. 

That Obama-era moderates are under fire over their climate bona fides is a measure of rising leftist clout in the Democratic coalition. It also reflects how the climate debate has shifted since Biden was in office, in response to extreme weather events and troubling scientific findings. This includes research into lifecycle emissions from natural gas production and methane leaks and flaring that muddies the argument that it’s a transition fuel to a carbon-free future. 

“We’ve gotten more proof on the science that switching to gas is not enough,” says Mr. Rees.  

The push for U.S. fuel exports

As vice president, Biden was part of an administration that pushed hard for global climate action while also promoting U.S. oil and gas exports to its allies and trading partners. As fracking boomed, Obama ended a 40-year ban on crude oil exports. In Europe, LNG was touted both as an alternative to coal and as strategic competition with Russian pipelines.  

That much, at least, continued with President Trump. Under Energy Secretary Rick Perry, the agency referred to liquified U.S. hydrocarbons as “freedom gas.” 

Mr. Trump has also championed the interests of coal, oil, and gas while denigrating the findings of government climate scientists. He rejected the Paris accord as unfair to the U.S. and detrimental to its economy, but has offered no alternative path to emissions cuts. 

Still, Trump’s foreign policy has not always served the LNG industry: Tariffs on foreign steel drove up pipeline costs, and a trade war with China stayed the hand of Chinese LNG importers wary of reliance on U.S. suppliers. 

Even his regulatory rollbacks could be a double-edged sword. By relaxing curbs last month on methane leaks, the U.S. has ceded ground to European regulators who are drafting emissions standards that LNG producers are watching closely. “That’s a precursor of fights that will be fought in all the rest of the developed world,” says Mr. Hutchison. 

Indeed, some oil-and-gas exporters had urged the Trump administration not to abandon the tougher rules, since they undercut their claim to offer a cleaner-burning way of producing heat and electricity. “U.S. LNG is not going to be able to compete in a world that’s focused on methane emissions and intensity,” says Erin Blanton, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. 

Stepping on the gas

In July, the Department of Energy issued an export license to Jordan Cove’s developer, Canada’s Pembina Pipeline Corp. In a statement, Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette said the project would provide “reliable, affordable, and cleaner-burning natural gas to our allies around the world.”

As a West Coast terminal, Jordan Cove offers a faster route to Asia where its capacity of 7.8 million tons of LNG a year could serve to heat more than 15 million homes. At its peak, its construction would also create 6,000 jobs, the company says, in a stagnant corner of Oregon. 

But the project still lacks multiple local and state permits, and its biggest asset – a Pacific port – has become its biggest handicap, says Ms. Blanton. “They are putting infrastructure in a state where there’s no political support for the pipeline or the terminal, unlike in Louisiana or Texas,” she says.  

Ms. Brown, the environmental lawyer, says she wants to see Jordan Cove buried, not just mothballed until natural gas prices recover. But she knows that it’s only one among many LNG projects and that others will likely get built, even if Biden is elected in November, despite growing evidence of the harm caused by methane emissions. 

“I don't see this country turning off the natural gas spigot anytime soon and I don’t see a President Biden doing that either,” she says. But she does expect a decisive shift on climate policy that could eventually force a reckoning for the U.S. energy sector. 

“We can’t continue to pull fossil fuels out of the ground and put them in the air and expect to have a livable planet. It’s a nonstarter,” she says. 

American military leaders in Afghanistan first conceded a decade ago that the United States couldn’t kill its way out of an insurgency. By then, halfway through a war that next month will pass the 19-year mark, the Taliban’s strength and stubbornness had forced the generals to accept that ending the bloodshed would require compromise.

Earlier this year, American and Taliban officials signed a conditional peace accord, the first phase in a two-stage process to broker a permanent cease-fire. The second began last weekend as Afghan government and Taliban leaders convened in Qatar for negotiations that for years the Taliban vowed they would never consider.

The war has fractured the country’s public institutions and decimated the economy while claiming tens of thousands of lives, including Afghan civilians and military personnel, Taliban fighters, and more than 2,400 U.S. troops. Given the toll, any agreement that emerges from the ongoing talks will be imperfect, neither redressing all grievances nor fulfilling every demand of the parties involved.

For conciliation to succeed, both sides must offer concessions and search for mutual understanding, realizing that a refusal to give ground will ensure a future as violent and tragic as the recent past. They will need to cultivate peace in the mixed soil of cooperation.

Several thousand miles away, the same painful lessons and the same hard truths apply to another long, costly, and intractable conflict: the war on wildfire in the American West.

The region has sought to kill its way out of fire for more than a century, attempting to extinguish flames as soon as they ignite to protect communities, homeowners, and natural lands. The policy of suppression, if well-intentioned, has led to overgrown forests and grasslands that, combined with climate change, feed fires that burn bigger, faster, and hotter, inflicting ever more destruction and despair.

The West’s own forever war has wrought a summer of catastrophe. Thick layers of smoke and ash have coated the region’s skies for weeks as tens of thousands of firefighters battle hundreds of wildfires from California’s border with Mexico to Washington’s border with Canada. The infernos have scorched more than 5 million acres and killed at least 36 people since early August, ravaging entire towns and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.

The fallout illustrates the urgency for states to rethink approaches to fire suppression and prevention. Reaching a detente with wildfire will depend on various parties – firefighting agencies and environmental groups, loggers and foresters, elected officials and community residents – leaving their ideological bunkers to embrace collective strategies for managing fires and forests.

As with the Afghanistan peace talks, any potential resolution will fail to satisfy everyone. But resisting compromise in the war on wildfire will bring only more devastation, more summers of catastrophe.

Adapting to the era of megafires

I reported from Afghanistan for three years starting in 2011, when U.S. troop levels had peaked at 100,000. Since 2018, I’ve covered wildfires in the West, where each summer the ranks of firefighters swell as volunteers from other states and countries rush to aid their brothers and sisters on the fiery front lines. Throwing more bodies at the adversary has yielded as little progress here as there.

Patrick T. Fallon/Reuters

Elizabeth Wright of the U.S. Forest Service watches a helicopter as it makes a water drop in the Angeles National Forest during the Bobcat Fire in Los Angeles Sept. 16, 2020.

The era of megafires has dawned in the West during the past decade as temperatures rise. In California, an extended drought and a beetle infestation have killed 150 million trees, providing a vast stockpile of wildfire fuel. Some 3.3 million acres have burned already this year, and the state appears certain to double its record of 1.85 million acres set in 2018.

The state’s primary firefighting agency, known as Cal Fire, employs 9,700 full-time and seasonal firefighters and operates a fleet of 52 aircraft. In fiscal year 2018-19, the agency spent $635 million on extinguishing wildfires – another figure that could double in this ruinous fire season.

The state’s heavy reliance on suppression arises, in part, from a reluctance to manage land through prescribed burns, tree thinning, brush clearing, and other “treatments” that reduce wildfire fuels and fire risk. Cal Fire treats 20,000 to 50,000 acres a year and dedicates 150 personnel to the task.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council, who suggested that federal and state officials steer more resources to land management and fire prevention. The move would push firefighting agencies in the West to increase the attention and manpower devoted to fuel-reduction operations, a shift that could ease dependency on fire suppression over time.

A new initiative in California holds promise in that regard. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom last month announced an agreement between the state and the U.S. Forest Service to treat 1 million acres of wildlands a year by 2025.

At the same time, the pact reveals the long road ahead to reduce overgrowth in California’s forests and grasslands. One recent analysis by Stanford researchers estimated that the state would need to treat 20 million acres – almost one-fifth of California’s land area – to restore balance to its forests and lower the risk of cataclysmic wildfires.

The sobering numbers offer ample reason to nurture fire prevention efforts beyond those of state and federal land managers. The futility of fire suppression has renewed interest in the cultural burning practices of Native American tribes in Northern California and elsewhere. A similar reawakening has occurred in Australia, as I learned earlier this year while reporting on bushfires that destroyed a staggering 46 million acres.

Ms. Quinn-Davidson works with communities, ranch owners, and farmers to conduct prescribed burns that can forestall wildfires from exploding into developed areas. “We need public agencies, communities, Native American tribes, private landowners – everybody has to be involved,” she told me. “We really need to aspire to get to that place where there isn’t this division between experts and the public, where we’re all kind of one fire-adapted culture.”

California could further pursue more state-federal alliances for sustainable forestry in the mold of the Tahoe-Central Sierra Initiative. The coalition of environmental and timber industry groups, formed in 2017, has set out to restore 2.4 million acres of federal forestland in the Sierra Nevada through prescribed burns, thinning, and limited logging.

As one scientist involved with the project explained to me last year, “We have to make a cultural shift away from both the Smokey Bear days of putting every fire out and from the anti-logging days of saying the removal of any tree is bad. That’s giving us bigger and bigger fires.”

“Our” is the key word

Wildfires at once incinerate the order of life and puncture the West’s mythos of rugged individualism. The infernos roaring through communities in California, Oregon, and Washington expose our shared vulnerability as we turn to emergency officials, aid workers, and public agencies for relief.

The communal hardship, in turn, reveals the cost of our aversion to fire prevention methods – more prescribed burning, restricted wildland development, stronger building codes – that can reduce our wildfire risk.

“Our” is the key word. Nobody living in the West can claim full immunity from either the direct or indirect impact of megafires. In that light, each of us owns a stake in improving fire prevention because “we all end up paying for the destruction,” Max Moritz told me in 2018, the previous “worst-ever” year for fires in the Golden State.

A wildfire expert with the University of California, Santa Barbara, Mr. Moritz added, “We also publicly fund all the fire suppression, the fire agencies, the disaster support systems. So there’s a place for saying that we need a more science-based approach to land management that could reduce the amount of damage.”

Fire researchers estimate that at least 4.4 million acres burned each year in California before 1800. Between 1950 and 1999, as a result of the state’s unrelenting fire suppression, the annual average plummeted to 250,000 acres. The collision of dense forests with climate change has ignited a crisis two decades later that requires us to accept the responsibility we bear for our universal plight.

The Stanford study found that opposition from local residents and officials to prescribed burning – along with liability concerns if a fire escapes its handlers – deters public and private land managers from the practice.

But as a Cal Fire official pointed out to me last year, if we allow more prescribed burning, fire crews can create more fuel breaks – areas cleared of most smaller trees and shrubs – that slow or stop a wildfire’s advance. The tactic can prevent wildfires from erupting into megafires and, over time, resuscitate forest health as mature trees regain the space they need to survive.

In other words, when we weigh the destruction of this year’s infernos against the strictly monitored loss of habitat that occurs with prescribed fire, we might want to reconsider complaining about, say, smoke from a controlled burn. Or as Ms. Quinn-Davidson told me, “If we’re not protecting the resources we care about and we’re not taking action, then we will continue to lose them to big fires.”

Our fondness for building homes in wildlands deserves similar reevaluation. Eleven million people live in areas designated as fire-prone in California, and from 2000 to 2013, three-quarters of the homes destroyed by wildfire fell within those zones.

The state could take a cue from Washington, where five years ago, two communities 40 miles apart pooled resources to forge a joint land-use plan that restricts growth in wildlands to reduce the threat from wildfires. Another example of enlightened planning has taken root in Paradise, a Northern California town of 27,000 people nestled among towering pines in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

Two years after the deadliest and most destructive fire in the state’s history leveled the city, local officials are creating a buffer zone on its outskirts, acquiring vacant property that will remain undeveloped to serve as a massive fuel break.

The strategies illuminate what wildfire researchers describe as “living with fire,” an ethos that parallels the realization of U.S. military leaders in Afghanistan a decade ago. Here as there, brute force has shown its limits, and after long years of war, the time has come for compromise. For peace.

In the first few months of the Broadway season this year, Elizabeth Ward Land was experiencing what she calls a “late-career surge.” 

A veteran Broadway performer, she had just begun rehearsals for a prominent role in the musical “Memphis” at a regional theater in Raleigh, North Carolina, reprising a character she played in New York a decade ago. She also had a late-summer gig booked in Nashville, singing in a new production celebrating the struggle for women’s suffrage in 1920. 

The biggest thrill came in March, when her own show, “Still Within the Sound of My Voice,” a cabaret-style homage to the music of Linda Ronstadt, won a Bistro Award for best tribute show. Venues were beginning to contact her about booking performances. 

But nearly overnight, after accepting her award in Manhattan, her surging career experienced a reversal of fortune as dramatic as any of those in the musicals she’s performed. “I mean, all of these very fun and exciting things were happening, and then it just felt like I hit a wall. Everything was canceled,” Ms. Land says.

“Showbiz has always been a very difficult career to navigate, but it’s never been that my profession didn’t exist,” she continues. “Right now, it just doesn’t exist, and that’s just been kind of a hard concept to grasp.”

It’s been six months since the coronavirus turned Broadway stages dark, twisting the plot lines of Broadway’s once promising 2020 season and shuttering all at once an industry that generates $2 billion a year in ticket sales – a figure that outstrips the combined total of every professional sports team in the New York and New Jersey metropolitan area.

“And if we really do open next March – and that’s when we’re hoping we do open – New York City alone will have already lost the economic impact of almost $15 billion,” says Charlotte St. Martin, president of the Broadway League, the trade association representing 41 Broadway theaters and a nationwide network of regional venues. 

Ann Hermes/Staff

The theater district in New York City is unusually quiet on Sept. 16, 2020. Broadway shows have been suspended since the beginning of the pandemic.

The theater district’s glittering marquees account for some 97,000 jobs in the city, says Ms. St. Martin, noting these include workers in the now-dormant restaurants, hotels, and retail shops that depend on the millions of tourists drawn to 42nd Street each year.

But as Broadway performers and others flee New York as traditional backup jobs like bartending and restaurant service dry up, many have headed back to their hometowns.

As a result, many of the industry’s regional theaters have found topnotch talent at their disposal. That’s true for both the streaming performances that have become the new normal for venues trying to scrape by with a fraction of the audiences they’re used to, or as big-name instructors for theaters’ acting schools.

“As the stages across the country go dark, a number of performers have returned to their hometowns, and they have been eager to see what they can do at their hometown theaters,” says Vincent VanVleet, managing director of The Phoenix Theatre Company in Arizona. “And a lot of these folks have been so gracious with their time and doing virtual benefit concerts for us and talking online with our audiences.”

The Academy of Musical Theater in Pittsburgh was able to expand its offerings during the summer, including those for its New Horizons programs, which helps train students with disabilities. 

“We had to shift about 200 classes to online learning within four days of the shutdown,” says Mark Fleischer, executive producer of Pittsburgh CLO, the academy's parent company. “We were able to use a lot of our alumni who became Broadway performers, local artists who we’ve had relationships with early on in their careers and who now teach classes for our students.”

From Broadway veteran to struggling artist

“July is when it dawned on me that it was time to stop expecting things to return to normal anytime soon,” says Matt Castle, a Broadway veteran who has appeared in productions of “Oliver!”, “Camelot,” and others. “It just stopped feeling realistic and it stopped offering any kind of solace.”

Just two days after March’s Bistro Awards, he had been excited to attend an event at the New York Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, where five of the New York cast members of “Company” planned to have a reunion and fundraiser. In 2006, Mr. Castle starred as the character Peter in his Broadway debut.

Six months later, he is now once again a proverbial struggling artist along with his husband, Frank Galgano, in their home in West Orange, New Jersey. 

“I know I’m in the same boat as pretty much everybody else, whether they’re performing artists or mail delivery people or [people] who work in restaurants,” Mr. Castle says. “But now I’m just wondering, wow, what kind of place for me is there in the world? I’ve been working as a professional musician since I was in high school, and I really have no other professional skills – yet for the first time I am totally willing to look into another line of work.”

Both Mr. Castle and Ms. Land have been among those who have found an outlet in performing on platforms like Zoom – a radically different kind of medium demanding different kinds of skills, they say. 

Ann Hermes/Staff

Matt Castle, a Broadway veteran, has performed with Elizabeth Ward Land at the Paper Mill in Millburn, New Jersey.

“On a creative level, a lot of us started experimenting with what I call these ‘pandemic videos,’” says Ms. Land, who produced both a live video version of “Still Within the Sound of My Voice” as well as a Zoom-style version. Musicians in her show laid down tracks separately with individual videos and sent them to a producer, who then provided a combined version for her to provide the songs’ lyrics. 

Mr. Castle and Mr. Galgano were also able to continue to work with a cruise line and work online with other actors and musicians to start planning a series of Broadway musical selections for cruises scheduled for late 2021. 

Live tonight ... via Zoom

The pandemic has also revealed the inherent dramatic irony in trying to fit an art form defined by live performance on Zoom. 

“The very premise of our art form is the gathering together as community to share in a story told onstage, live,” says Joe Haj, artistic director at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. “That’s what connects us to our 2,500-year-old Western drama past.”

Trained performers passed on a given culture’s oral traditions for centuries before written records and generated the kind of shared emotional experiences that served to bond communal ties necessary for survival, scholars say.

“Community building is at the heart of what we do,” says Hillary Hart, executive director of Theatre Under the Stars in Houston, which has postponed all of its live performances until at least May 2021.

“It is about that community building and that exchange of energy. It’s no accident that studies show people’s heart rates sync up inside a theater as they share that time together,” Ms. Hart says. “Even though we understand that there are social service needs, health care needs, making sure people have what they need in order to just literally survive, there is a role for the arts in that conversation. Especially in this day and time, we can be a place for healing.” 

Ann Hermes/Staff

A socially distanced audience listens to performer Nicholas Rodriguez at a cabaret night event in a makeshift outdoor performance space at Paper Mill Playhouse on Sept. 16, 2020.

Cabaret night at the Paper Mill

Both Ms. Land and Mr. Castle experienced a measure of healing themselves when Paper Mill Playhouse, a local theater near their homes in New Jersey, asked them to perform at a socially-distanced cabaret night at a makeshift outdoor venue on the theater's property.

“It’s a way to keep us present, offer something for our patrons, and also something to be able to employ some local artists and give them a modest paycheck,” says Michael Stotts, managing director of the Paper Mill. “But it’s only 80 or 90 seats, compared to our 1,200-seat main venue.”

Mr. Castle says he had fallen into a really bad funk before the venue reached out to him, but he was thrilled to have a chance to perform for the first time with Ms. Land, with whom he’s been friends for years. 

“I said, ‘Yes, I’ll take any dates you’ve got,’” he says. “I don’t even care about the money at this point. It’s like, hey, I need to be singing and playing. I need to be seeing other people.”

Normally eight musicians play with Ms. Land during performances. At the Paper Mill, there can only be two or three performers on stage, so Mr. Castle has accompanied her on piano as they perform selections from her cabaret show. 

“Collaborating with Matt at the Paper Mill, it forced me to reinvent it, and that’s been a real positive,” she says of her tribute show. “We’re all just kind of just trying to stay in the moment, because looking at the long haul – is just way too daunting.”

The same has been true for Mr. Castle, who has been struggling with the current uncertainty of his career. 

“I’m just trying to practice gratitude, practice being in the present, and not worrying about the future,” he says. “And it’s still important to be generous with other people – I feel that’s the best any of us can do.”

Shadia and Imran Nakueira rented the space for a restaurant in the dreamy, lakeside town of Jinja, Uganda, before they knew exactly what they were going to do with it. 

They knew one thing though: They wanted to work alongside people with disabilities. 

This resolve had a lot to do with their first meeting. The couple, now married for three years, met at a sporting event at a primary school for children with learning disabilities in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, in July 2013. 

Imran had driven his sister to the event. Shadia, who had just finished her MBA in the United States, was dishing up ice cream for students and guests. 

“She was busy that day and she was selling to many people,” Imran says, with Shadia leaning against him. There was no time for flirting, so he had to get creative. “The story [we told her] was ‘We have a party somewhere. Can you supply ice cream? Can we have your number?’”

Four years later, Shadia closed up her ice cream business in Kampala to join her new husband in Jinja, where he worked in human resources for a forestry company.

Long before they met, though, she’d hoped to help open opportunities for people with disabilities. She’d grown up just on the other side of the fence from the school where they met. “The teacher used to come ... and tutor us at home,” Shadia says in her usual bubbly tone, fond with memory. “And then on weekends we would go to school to study there as well.”

Katumba Badru/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Rashida Namale, a waitress who is deaf, serves tea to a customers at Sikia Cafe in Jinja, Uganda.

Shortly after the couple acquired the space, in 2018, an idea came along at the market. 

“There was this very nice gentleman who I started buying things from. He used to sell lemons and he was deaf,” she says. But she noticed other people mostly avoided him – never knowing, for example, how good he was with money. Was there a way, she wondered, to highlight other deaf people’s skills, and break down those barriers?

That was the birth of Sikia Cafe, staffed by deaf waiters, which opened last August – ice cream section first. The name is derived from Swahili, and means “hear” or “listen.” 

Listening happens in so many ways beyond sound, Shadia says: body language, emotion, watching. 

On the job

In Jinja, Sikia is famous for its colorful ice cream flavors, displayed at the entrance – Shadia’s touch. To order, customers consult an infographic on the menu, which teaches how to sign words for menu items and phrases like “thank you,” “takeaway,” and “eat here,” or scribble their selections on paper.

One of the four deaf people serving up desserts is Mark Kato, who often flashes a smile. The job has been instrumental to his own development, he says. In addition to learning job skills, for example, he’s learned to write.

Like many students with disabilities, Mr. Kato wasn’t able to complete secondary school. Overall, 12.5% of Uganda’s total population is living with a disability. Yet only about 2% of enrolled students are disabled, which analysts suggest indicates the difficulty they face accessing education. 

Before Sikia, Mr. Kato held a job as a waiter at a hotel in Kampala, an environment he describes as hostile and less accommodating. 

“There was a lot of pressure because the other waiters were not deaf, and language was a barrier too,” he says, using British Sign Language. 

Yet Sikia hasn’t always been a bed of roses either. 

“When customers come in and I give them a book to write in, most of them give me a bad attitude,” Mr. Kato says. “It makes me feel bad sometimes, but I understand because not all of them know I am deaf” right away.

Katumba Badru/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Waitress Rashida Namale, who is deaf, talks with regular customer Ssentongo Rogers, who is slowly learning how to sign.

It’s that kind of widespread prejudice that Sikia hopes to combat. More than a million people who are deaf or hard of hearing live in Uganda, according to the most recent census data, and discrimination is common. In one of the local languages, Luganda, the word for deaf is “kasilu,” which Shadia and Imran say translates as “stupid” and “violent.”

“That stigma is very [present],” says Shadia, who teaches customers to use the word “kigala”: someone who doesn’t speak or hear.

Aisha Kauma, another deaf waiter at Sikia, says she has had a similar experience. Some customers, especially new ones, like to request the cafe manager, who can speak and hear. 

Unlike Mr. Kato, Ms. Kauma wasn’t born deaf. She continued to go to a regular school while her ability to hear declined, and it was not until she turned 13 that she completely lost her hearing. 

“I was OK with it,” she says wearing her signature wide smile. “I felt normal.”

If she weren’t deaf, however, Ms. Kauma would have been a nurse – not “having to deal with customers!” she says, laughing. 

Many employees, Shadia notes, have grown more confident. In September of last year, the cafe organized a talent show for Deaf Awareness Month. 

“It became a deaf space,” says Imran. “Ninety percent of the people in this courtyard were deaf.” During business hours, many deaf people visit Sikia as customers, too. Most of them come from Kampala, Shadia says – a 2-hour drive away.

Katumba Badru/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Waitresses Rashida Namale, Aisha Kauma, and Aidah Nambi (from left to right) arrange tables and chairs to start the workday at Sikia Cafe in Jinja, Uganda.

‘The bigger picture’

For Shadia, Imran, and the rest of the staff, watching people’s perceptions and attitudes change in the community has been rewarding. 

“What makes it different is that to our staff, the job is not just a job; it’s kind of a form of acceptance into society,” Imran says. 

“You come here and you see children and clients who have never interacted with a deaf person before, interacting with our staff. The fact that it’s a business that is transforming society, even if by one small step every day, it kind of makes you feel, what more can I do?”

Ssentongo Rogers has been visiting Sikia nearly every week since March, after he read about the cafe on a local blog. It’s also his workstation sometimes when he doesn’t go to the office. 

Mr. Ssentongo works for a multinational brewery in Jinja and says he enjoys Sikia for many reasons, but mainly for the mind shift it’s given him about disability. In his eyes, patronizing Sikia is a social responsibility.

“That’s the bigger picture and that’s why I am always here,” says Mr. Ssentongo, who is slowly learning to sign.

Katumba Badru/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Waitress Aisha Kauma, who is deaf, prepares to serve ice cream to a customer at Sikia Cafe.

Wanting to do more but not having the means is a major obstacle, Imran says, especially as the cafe struggles to break even.

“You want to be transformative, but the resources may not allow you to do it,” he says. 

For him and Shadia, though, the biggest transformations might be how the cafe has changed them personally.

Before Sikia opened, Shadia had to enroll in an official class to learn British Sign Language, and Imran has used YouTube to improve his skills as well. But she’s learned more than language skills from her employees, and refers to one instance in particular.

“When we interviewed Aisha, she didn’t even know whether she had passed or not but she asked, ‘Can I bring my friend to interview as well?’ which is not something that would normally happen,” she says. 

“And before I knew it, it was happening in every interview. They are all wanting to bring their friends. You realize that in their world, it’s intertwined. They are a team, they help each other.”

AP

Mail-in primary election ballots are processed in West Chester, Pa., last May.

Since the early 20th century, the United States has defended and promoted democracy around the world. It has emphasized free and fair elections as necessary to economic development and legitimate government. Now the U.S. faces its own questions of legitimacy just weeks before voters head to the polls to elect a new Congress and decide who will occupy the Oval Office.

President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden have both expressed doubts that the election will be fair. Intelligence assessments indicate Russia, China, and Iran might be sowing doubts about the voting process. And the pandemic has created an unprecedented need for alternatives to in-person voting.

These concerns have registered with many Americans. Their doubts are reflected in how they would perceive a negative result for their preferred candidate. Polls conducted by two groups, the Campaign Legal Center and Protect Democracy, found that 2 in 5 Republicans planning to vote for Mr. Trump said if Mr. Biden wins it will be because the vote was somehow rigged. Among Democrats planning to vote for Mr. Biden, 2 in 3 say a Trump win would be because of vote suppression and/or foreign meddling.

But here’s how those worries can translate into action: A majority of voters on both sides say state and local governments should allocate more money to ensure the ballot process is credible. Without broad acceptance of the ballot count, elected leaders will find it harder to govern.

There are reasons for calm. According to Jess Marsden, a specialist in election law at Protect Democracy, the average level of experience among election officials nationwide is seven elections.

“These people aren’t partisan hacks,” he told The Atlantic. “They’re serious professionals working at the state and local level. If they say the results are legitimate, that means a lot.”

More than 900,000 poll workers helped out in the 2016 presidential election. In a 2018 survey of local election officials by the Democracy Fund, most said it has become easier for people to register and vote, and easier to administer the registration and voting process.

The U.S. can build on this high level of civic neutrality by those involved in the voting process. This nonpartisan service has a long history.

This week, Pennsylvania, a swing state, set a new standard of credibility by mandating that all votes must be counted regardless of how they were cast or how long it takes. That follows a 2019 state law enabling voters to vote by mail without conditions. This is progress in a year when millions more Americans are expected to cast ballots by mail.

One of the best safeguards for free and fair voting, however, may already be in place. This summer, young voting-age Americans demonstrated the most vigorous civic activism in half a century. They are deeply engaged on issues, left and right, through social media. They are watching how states conduct the election. In the 2018 midterm elections, their participation surged at the ballot box. That political activism coincides with recent activism in many other places around the world, such as Belarus, India, Hong Kong, and Chile.

America’s best defense of democracy is by ensuring its own citizens can vote and that their vote is counted. The most available antidote to public doubt is the exercise of individual agency – registering to vote and following through by voting. And by supporting the integrity of local polling, a people who are "created equal" can have more confidence in the equality of the ballot box and voting from home.