Bryce Dubee traces his drift toward the Democratic Party to his first Army tour in Iraq in 2004. A year earlier, only weeks after U.S. forces invaded, then-President George W. Bush gave his “mission accomplished” speech. Mr. Dubee realized soon after arriving that the upbeat rhetoric of military and political leaders back home downplayed the reality on the ground.

“It was already grim when we got there,” says Mr. Dubee, who had supported Mr. Bush as the Republican nominee for president in 2000. “And as things went along, I remember thinking, ‘Maybe this is bad.’”

A public affairs officer, he deployed twice to Iraq and once to Afghanistan during a 12-year Army career that ended in 2016, and by then, he had switched political parties. As early voting began two weeks ago in Texas, where he lives in an Austin suburb, the former staff sergeant cast his ballot for Joe Biden. Mr. Dubee favors the Democratic candidate over President Donald Trump, who he asserts has exploited the military at home and damaged its reputation abroad as commander in chief.

“This administration has used the military as a prop for patriotism and ignored our foreign partners,” he says. A Biden presidency “would bring back some of the normalcy and stability that’s been missing the past few years.”

His vote appears remarkable only in the context of a popular assumption – one as outdated as it is enduring – that troops and veterans represent a monolith of white conservatives.

The aggressive efforts of the Biden and Trump campaigns to win over current and former service members suggest a deeper awareness of their political diversity. Recent polls show the race for the military vote tightening, and in Arizona, Florida, and other swing states with large military and veteran populations, capturing that support could prove crucial to each candidate’s national fortunes.

A Morning Consult poll last month found Mr. Trump with a 10-point lead among former service members on the strength of support from white veterans and those over age 45. Mr. Biden holds a 35-point lead with nonwhite veterans and a 1-point edge with veterans under age 45.

Service members and veterans lean Republican overall, explains Jeremy Teigen, a political science professor at Ramapo College of New Jersey who studies military and veteran voting patterns. “But it’s wrong to see them as a single voting bloc,” he says. “There are more nuances to their voting preferences than we tend to think. They’re not all alike.”

Evolving perceptions

Some 20 million veterans live in the United States, making up about 6% of the country’s population, and the military’s 1.3 million active-duty personnel account for less than 1%. As a result, most Americans have sporadic contact with current or former service members in everyday life, creating a civilian-military divide rife with misperceptions.

The chance to educate civilians about the varied politics of military households motivates Carla Thornton as a member of the Moreno Valley City Council in Southern California. The 20-year Air Force veteran, who retired with the rank of master sergeant in 2017, faces a different sort of implicit bias as a registered Republican and Trump voter in one of the country’s bluest states.

“I’m a native Californian, a Black woman, a single parent, a social worker, and a professor at a university,” she says. “So I’m put in a box as a liberal and a Democrat.” Ms. Thornton, an assistant professor of social work at California Baptist University in Riverside, won election to the council two years ago. She views the support that the military and veterans receive across party lines as an opening for her to forge bipartisan alliances at a time of extreme polarization.

“I’ve had Republicans call me a Black unicorn,” she says, laughing. “I see my role as one of trying to mend some of our political divisions, and I think that, as a veteran, people on the left are a little more willing to hear me out than they would be otherwise.”

Former service members account for an estimated 13% of the voting population, and almost 60% identify as Republican, a conservative tilt that has persisted since the 1980s. Yet the dominant image of veterans as aging white men from the World War II and Vietnam eras has started to fade, eclipsed by a younger cohort with more women and minorities. 

The growing numbers of female troops and veterans could reshape the military vote in coming years. In the 2018 midterm elections, polls showed that 60% of military women favored Democrats, aiding the party’s mission to reclaim Congress.

Tom Brenner/Reuters

A World War II veteran salutes during President Donald Trump's campaign rally at The Villages Polo Club in The Villages, Florida, Oct. 23, 2020. Some polls show Mr. Trump retaining his edge with military veterans overall – especially among those over age 45.

The Democratic race for president further magnified the generational shift with the campaigns of Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. The presence in the field of two candidates under age 40 who served in Afghanistan and Iraq – coupled with his status as a married gay man and her Hindu faith – defied military and veteran stereotypes.

“Perceptions are slowly evolving,” says Seth Lynn, executive director of Veterans Campaign, a nonprofit group that prepares former service members to run for office. He mentions the national profiles of two Republicans in Congress, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas, who both fought in America’s 21st-century wars. “There’s an uptick in public awareness about younger veterans getting involved in the political process.”

Nearly two-thirds of the 181 veterans running for office this year – 121 Republicans, 60 Democrats – served after 2000. For Alec Gillis, who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as an Army intelligence analyst, the candidacies of post-9/11 veterans signal his military generation’s electoral potential.

“We have an opportunity to use our voice,” says Mr. Gillis, a New York native who lives in the Bronx and plans to vote for Mr. Biden. “We’re going to be heard at the polls.”

A changing mood

Military leaders seek to avert partisanship in the ranks by preaching that troops “bleed green.” During his 13 years in the Army, Mr. Gillis recalls, he sensed little political tension while serving under former Presidents Bush and Barack Obama, his Democratic successor.

“I was around plenty of conservatives,” says Mr. Gillis, who finished his military career as a staff sergeant in 2016. “Nobody really made a big deal about politics.”  

The mood has changed under Mr. Trump, whose polarizing effect has frayed the bond of service that unites troops and veterans. Reports of more political rancor in the armed forces mirror accounts of greater animosity among veterans who served together.

The president has clashed with top military officials and feuded with families of soldiers killed in action. This summer he deployed federal troops against peaceful demonstrators blocks from the White House and sent tactical teams to other cities to quell racial justice protests. Mr. Trump denied a recent report that he has referred to America’s war dead as “losers” and “suckers,” and he drew criticism earlier this month after suggesting that he contracted the COVID-19 virus while meeting with Gold Star families.

Mr. Gillis, who is Black, severed contact with some members of his old Army unit after they praised the president on social media for condemning the Black Lives Matter movement. “These are people I went to war with, brothers and sisters in arms,” he says. “We trusted each other with our lives, and now that’s gone.”

The domestic upheaval during Mr. Trump’s term and his strained relations with the country’s longtime foreign allies have elicited bipartisan censure from 780 national security officials, who signed an open letter endorsing Mr. Biden for president. The list includes dozens of retired generals and admirals, more than 100 former ambassadors, and five former Defense secretaries.

The fraught political climate could enable Mr. Biden to siphon military support from Mr. Trump, who won the veteran vote by almost two to one over Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 – a margin largely delivered by older white men, his core constituency. In campaign speeches, the former vice president talks about the military service of his late son, Beau Biden, who deployed to Iraq with the Army National Guard and died from brain cancer in 2015.

“That’s something that can resonate with military voters,” says Mr. Teigen, the author of “Why Veterans Run: Military Service in American Presidential Elections, 1789-2016.” “It’s shorthand for patriotism, for country before self, for a willingness to sacrifice.”

The message has failed to move Jason Hair, who deployed to Iraq with the Marine Reserves in 2005. He voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 – a choice he describes as “more anti-Hillary than pro-Trump” – and backs him again this year.

Mr. Hair, who lives in the Northern California city of Oroville, credits the president for bringing home thousands of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and for prodding NATO member countries to boost defense spending.

“I do think America has been the world’s 911 for too long,” says Mr. Hair, who lost his home two years ago when the deadliest wildfire in state history destroyed the nearby town of Paradise. “We’ve been doing more than we should. It’s time for other countries to step up.”

Mr. Hair wishes Mr. Trump would refrain from tweeting at all hours. But he disregards the alleged “losers” and “suckers” comments, pointing out that the story relied on anonymous sources, and he contends that America needs four more years of the president’s particular brand of candor.

“A lot of what Trump has done is very refreshing,” he says. “He’s the first major political figure who doesn’t care what he says or how he says it. That’s not what you get with Joe Biden.”

John Rudoff/Sipa USA/AP

Dressed and armed like soldiers, ICE and Border Patrol SWAT teams charged demonstrators in Portland, Oregon, Sept. 18, 2020. The public and politicians increasingly ask if militarization of law enforcement creates more danger than it eliminates.

On a September morning in 2008, Brian Wood made a distraught retreat from a heated dispute with his wife and sat down with a gun in his truck in the driveway of his suburban Salt Lake City home. The part-time firefighter was having a mental health crisis, and he fired two warning shots when police arrived at the beginning of a 12-hour standoff.  

Wood’s father-in-law, William “Dub” Lawrence – a former local sheriff who founded the Davis County Sheriff Department’s SWAT team in 1975 – stood behind the official cordon and watched the standoff escalate with horror and regret. More than 100 law enforcement officers, including 46 SWAT members swarmed to the scene, armed and clothed in fatigues like combat soldiers, militarizing a mental health problem.

Wood eventually was forced from his truck by tear gas and pepper spray, hit with rubber bullets and pepper balls, tasered, and then fatally shot.

The escalation of that situation, says Mr. Lawrence who now advocates against the militarization of police, is evidence of a paramilitary mindset pervading American policing.“As a nation we’ve become more tolerant and acceptable of killing people,” says Mr. Lawrence. “To us it would have been a complete failure if either an officer or a civilian got hurt in a standoff situation.”

That paramilitary mindset has grown in recent decades to define much of American policing.

But Breonna Taylor’s killing earlier this year by Louisville, Kentucky, police officers during a botched drug raid has triggered powerful momentum for change. The incident broadened and amplified a belief among lawmakers and policy advocates – across the ideological spectrum – that militarized policing bends, if not breaks, constitutional norms and needs to be reined in.

The Constitution “is very intentional about the use of the military and the types of controls on it that need to exist,” says Sarah Turberville, director of the Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight. “Militarization of local police really begins to bend that.”

“We’ve seen broader support than any other year” from the public and politicians to change that, she adds.

Military equipment and tactics can be used appropriately, such as responding to active shooter and hostage situations, but they have increasingly been wielded in more proactive circumstances like drug raids and mental health crises, endangering rather than supporting the law enforcement mission of ensuring public safety and basic rights. Civilians killed and severely injured include a paraplegic woman in her 80s and a 19-month-old baby.

Breonna Taylor, an emergency room technician in her mid 20s, was asleep when police, executing a late-night search warrant related to a drug investigation of a former boyfriend, broke through her front door last March. At least 20 shots were exchanged between the three officers and Kenneth Walker, Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend at the time, including five shots that killed her.

The three officers involved were not part of a SWAT team, but their late-night “dynamic entry” raid was the same aggressive, special-forces-inspired tactic SWAT units have been using with increasing frequency around the nation since the war on drugs began in the 1970s.  

There were about 3,000 SWAT deployments per year in the early 1980s, and 30,000 per year by the 1990s, according to Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University and an expert in police militarization. And now there are about 60,000 deployments per year – an increase, he says, due to “a paradigm shift,” not because there are more situations requiring a SWAT response.

“The bulk of their responsibilities [became] going out into the community and doing forced entries, dynamic entries into people’s houses,” often to execute drug-related search warrants, he adds.

Maryland tracked such data from 2011 to 2014, learning that there were about 4.5 SWAT raids per day in the state, the majority for what the FBI classifies as “misdemeanors and non-serious felonies.” 

Surplus “toys”

The Clinton administration’s 1033 Program expanded domestic law enforcement access to cheap or no-cost surplus U.S. Department of Defense equipment ranging from sleeping bags and canteens to grenade launchers, bayonets, and weaponized drones. Over $7.4 billion worth of property has been transferred to law enforcement since the program began, according to the Pentagon’s Law Enforcement Support Office.

The equipment, says former St. Louis Metropolitan Police Sgt. Heather Taylor, is like “toys” in a “male-dominated” police culture. “That’s how they‘re thinking, and that’s part of the problem,” she adds.

The 1033 Program is where reform seems to be gaining traction. In a 90-10 vote in July, the U.S. Senate approved some restrictions on the program, such as barring the transfer of weaponized drones and combat vehicles and requiring departments that receive equipment to also get de-escalation training.

But restricting – even eliminating – the 1033 Program “would not rein in police militarization one iota,” says Dr. Kraska. 

Militarization goes beyond just weaponry, he and others argue, to the use of military battle dress, military training, and a culture of aggression and fear of the communities police serve.

In one survey in the 1990s, Dr. Kraska found that 43% of SWAT teams reported receiving training from active duty military special operations personnel. That “had a dramatic influence on police culture,” he says

“It puts the police in a highly aggressive posture and mindset towards the people they’re serving,” he adds. “It runs against everything that we stand for in a democratic society.”  

Necessity vs. overkill

“SWAT is necessary in some circumstances, with extreme levels of violence,” says Ms. Taylor, the recently retired St. Louis homicide sergeant, who is now spokesperson for the Ethical Society of Police, a local police union. 

She remembers vividly the night she had to call SWAT a few years ago when a man shot and killed someone in a car, then took other people in the car hostage and drove them to a house. 

“I knew this guy was heavily armed. And I didn’t want anyone to go in there, but we had to get someone into this house,” she recalls.

“But Breonna Taylor’s case,” Ms. Taylor says, “a [no-knock] search warrant for drugs and packages? It was not necessary.”

And the consequences of violent militarized policing go beyond the direct physical injuries and deaths from these encounters.

The collective mental health effects of police killings of Black Americans in that community is almost as large as the mental health burden associated with diabetes, suggests one 2018 study that found Black adults in the U.S. experience 55 million additional poor-mental-health days per year because of police killings.

Even low-level contacts with law enforcement that don’t result in arrests or citations can increase trauma and anxiety, a 2014 survey of people searched under New York City’s controversial “stop-and-frisk” policy found.

“Police violence is associated with mental health concerns that goes beyond the individual. [It] is experienced at the community level,” says Denise Herd, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health, who is researching the public health effects of the criminal justice system..

In Texas, Charley Wilkison – executive director of the Combined Law Enforcement Association of Texas, a statewide law enforcement union – says that officers “are going to have to be prepared to see a lot of changes, because the public is going to want to see law enforcement doing things differently.”

But, he adds, “the answers nationally are going to come from the people who do the hard work to get past the rhetoric and into the operations.” Those answers, he says, are “going to have to come from the elected officials.”

Data on things like the number and purpose of SWAT deployments would be helpful in framing the debate, says Mr. Wilkison. A Maryland law requiring such data to be reported revealed the 4.5 SWAT raids per day in the state statistic. Utah passed a similar law in 2014.

For Mr. Lawrence, the former Utah sheriff, police militarization and police accountability are intertwined. As the accountability diminishes, the militarization can expand, meaning police can traumatize, injure, and kill with impunity.

“Nobody should be above the law,” he says, including police.

“That’s what made America different, the dream of having everybody equal under the law,” he adds. “We’re supposed to be equal under the law, and we’re not.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify that Denise Herd is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health.

Debate over, the motorcade sped back to Nashville International Airport and discharged the most powerful man in the world. 

“Mr. President, Mr. President!” reporters called out, as he and the first lady strode past us from a distance, on their way to Air Force One. President Donald Trump stopped, looked toward the press pool gathered under the wing, and pointed toward the back of the plane. 

We knew what that meant: President Trump was probably going to come back, mid-flight, and talk to us – the small group of reporters traveling with him in the plane’s aft cabin – on the way back to Washington. 

And indeed he did. The nearly half-hour visit was mostly off the record, which means I can’t report what he said, except for the on-the-record portion – about his intention to vote in person in Florida last Saturday (which he did). But as I wrote in my “pool report” to the larger press corps, the president was “chatty, even ebullient” during our time with him late last Thursday night. 

Mr. Trump’s post-debate tweets explained the happy mood. One, from the conservative site The Blaze, had him winning the debate 96% to 4%. Another thanked former Fox News commentator Megyn Kelly for saying “Trump won this debate, handily.” 

Remember, Mr. Trump had attacked Ms. Kelly for her performance as a debate moderator in 2015, leading to outrage by some conservatives. But that was so five years ago. 

Now, eight days until Election Day, the end of one weird presidential campaign is in sight. Vice President Mike Pence’s office is now the epicenter of a new wave of COVID-19 diagnoses at the White House, yet the vice president is still holding rallies, “in consultation with the White House Medical Unit,” his spokesman says. 

In addition, the White House is planning a ceremony this evening to swear in Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, following her expected confirmation. The event will recall her Rose Garden introduction last month as the nominee, after which several participants were diagnosed with the coronavirus – including the president himself.  

Mr. Trump is continuing to campaign around the country at a break-neck pace, while Democratic nominee Joe Biden – leading in the polls – plays it more cautiously. 

Former President Barack Obama, breaking precedent with past ex-presidents who typically lie low in campaigns, has hit the trail on behalf of his former vice president. But instead of recalling the large, adoring crowds he used to summon when he ran for himself, he’s presiding over “car rallies,” with honks replacing cheers.

And despite rising virus case loads across the country, the White House continues to mock the former vice president for wearing a mask. 

“The only person waving a white flag [on the virus] along with his white mask is Joe Biden,” White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told reporters Monday.

Mr. Meadows was responding to questions about a remarkable statement he had made over the weekend to CNN’s Jake Tapper – that “we’re not going to control the pandemic.” On Monday, Mr. Meadows elaborated: “We’re going to defeat the virus; we’re not going to control it,” he said, adding that “we need to make sure that we have therapeutics and vaccines.” 

At least Mr. Meadows isn’t press shy, as some chiefs of staff can be. Last Thursday, on Air Force One, he came back to the press cabin for a quick hello – wearing a mask, we were pleased to see. After we landed in Nashville, a maskless Mr. Meadows sought out the pool to tell us that Mr. Trump had tested negative for COVID-19 during the flight, a welcome bit of news. Mr. Trump has yet to say if he was tested for the virus the day of the first debate, Sept. 29. 

The oddest moment of all last Thursday came while the press pool was cooling its heels in a hotel conference room, while Mr. Trump was meeting with supporters. 

Word came that Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller was going to bring one of the president’s debate guests to talk to the pool. It was Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner of Mr. Biden’s son Hunter. He had emerged as a figure in the ongoing saga of Hunter Biden’s supposedly abandoned laptop, and the effort by the Trump campaign to portray the Biden family – including the former vice president himself – as corrupt. 

At the appointed hour, Mr. Bobulinski entered the room, placed three cell phones on a chair in front of him, and read from a prepared statement. His core allegation was that Joe Biden was lying about his knowledge of his son’s business venture in China, and he had evidence to prove it (contained in the phones). But Mr. Bobulinski would not take questions, saying he was about to present his evidence to the FBI and to key senators. 

Joe Biden has denied any involvement in his son’s business and has released two decades of tax returns with detailed financial information. And the mainstream media have been leery of the story, questioning the authenticity of the evidence.

In the waning days of this weirdest of campaigns, it may not matter. The dominant story is the pandemic and its economic impact.

Armenians huddle in a basement as Azerbaijani rockets rain down upon the city of Stepanakert. Armenian forces strike back and refugees flee as fighting envelops the region. Cease-fires collapse almost before they’ve begun. A war fueled by the contest for influence between Turkey and Russia in the oil-rich Caucasus threatens to spill across boundaries.

Those are the sort of headlines emerging today from Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed region over which Armenia and Azerbaijan have gone to war. But in fact they are eerily similar to the reports I filed from there to The Christian Science Monitor nearly 30 years ago.

Watching current events in the Caucasus, I am struck by a sense of déjà vu. A war that I covered quite closely for several years has picked up from where I left it, almost without a change. The two sides, and the international community, failed to resolve the conflict and a new generation is paying the price.

When I arrived in Moscow in 1990, my attention, and that of the world, was focused on the fate of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist effort to save the Soviet Union’s 70-year experiment with communism. But very soon I realized that another massive structure was also facing an existential challenge – the sprawling Russian Empire, which the Bolsheviks had re-created as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

I traveled to all but one of those republics, stretching from the Muslim lands of Central Asia to the trio of European nations in the Baltics. Everywhere I found the same thing: Mr. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness, had unleashed long-suppressed movements of national identity and independence.

The first such outbreak came in Armenia with the formation in 1988 of the Karabakh Committee. A mass movement sought redress for a long-held, and passionately felt, grievance over Josef Stalin’s incorporation of Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh into the territory of the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.

Behind the Karabakh movement lay the deep historical conflict between Armenians, in one of the oldest Christian nations in the world, and Turks, the ethnic brethren of the Azeris. The Turkish Ottoman Empire had conquered much of the territory of Armenia and in 1915 carried out a brutal genocide of the Armenian population within its borders. The Russians acted as protectors of what remained of Armenia, within their empire.

Aziz Karimov/AP

Azerbaijan's national flag flies over destroyed houses in Ganja, Azerbaijan's second largest city, near the border with Armenia. Heavy fighting with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh is continuing, raising the threat of Turkey and Russia being drawn into the conflict.

When trouble began brewing in the early 1990s the Azeris enjoyed the backing of Turkey, which was boiling with nationalist fervor for a new pan-Turkic sphere that would unite the Turkish peoples of the former Soviet Union extending into Central Asia. The Russians were eager to defend their traditional power in the region but unable to exert much authority amidst post-Soviet turbulence.

On my first visit to Karabakh in March 1992, the local Armenians were fighting a desperate war for survival, with the backing of the newly independent Armenian republic. Only a slender air bridge connected them, and the regional capital, Stepanakert, was without electricity and short of food and medicine. I took refuge in the basement of a sturdy stone building as rockets rained down, fired from Soviet launchers in the heights above.

Armenia proper, meanwhile, was completely isolated, its supply routes through neighboring Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Georgia cut off. During a cruel winter, the capital of Yerevan had, I wrote, “regressed to a village. Under daily snowfall, the city's 2 million people huddle in icy apartments without heat or running water. Electricity runs two hours a day, if at all. Industry has ground to a halt. Two-thirds of the work force, by one estimate, is unemployed.”

Determined Armenian fighters, backed by funding and volunteers from the large Armenian diaspora, eventually turned the tide. By 1993 they had connected Nagorno-Karabakh to the Armenian republic through a narrow corridor, and taken control of almost all the enclave.

In the fall of 1993, the Azeris launched a counterattack, using thousands of Afghan Islamist fighters recruited to try to reverse their fortunes. (I was the first Western reporter to find hard evidence, in captured documents, of their presence.) Then the Armenians invaded Azerbaijan, seizing a strategic swath of territory that gave them a buffer.

The conflict forced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in bouts of ethnic cleansing on both sides. I visited the captured Azeri city of Agdam in December 1993 and wrote:

“Ripe apples and persimmons hang heavily from the branches of trees in the garden of No. 18 Hycjev Street. But only the sparrows and crows are here to enjoy the harvest.

The residents of this merchant's home, like all the others in this once-wealthy center of Azerbaijan's grape-growing region, fled last July in front of an Armenian attack. In the aftermath, their houses were looted and burned; the window glass melted, and the tin roofs collapsed from the heat of the blaze.”

Eventually the outside world woke up to the conflict. Mediators from Russia, France and the U.S. secured a cease-fire, but they could not push the warring parties into a diplomatic settlement. Little has moved in the quarter century since.

Now Azerbaijan appears intent on recapturing land that Armenia took during the war but has not settled, hoping to use it as a chip to trade for recognition of Nagorno-Karabakh’s right to self-determination.

The current fighting, which began late in September, is by far the worst since the war I witnessed in the early 1990s. The Azeris have used their oil wealth to purchase weapons, including modern drones and rockets, from Russia, Turkey, and Israel, and they are using them to good effect. As was the case 30 years ago, civilians on both sides are the primary victims of this war; casualties are in the hundreds and rising fast.

Turkey, under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has stepped in boldly, training Azeri troops, sending advisors, and – in a striking echo of the past - dispatching thousands of Islamist fighters from Syria. With the Trump administration largely out of action, only Russia is really able to counter the Turks and while the Russians have brokered shaky cease-fires, they are cautiously trying to play both sides in the conflict.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, many observers remarked on the peaceful nature of its dissolution. What they ignored were the small wars that flared in the ruins of empire, from Chechnya to Crimea. The conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh is one of those wars; sadly for me, it was never resolved. Now the region and its people are feeling the sting in the long tail of that failure.

Daniel Sneider is a lecturer in international policy and East Asian studies at Stanford University. A selection of his dispatches from Nagorno-Karabakh can be found through the following links:

https://www.csmonitor.com/1992/0317/17061.html

https://www.csmonitor.com/1992/0316/16061.html

https://www.csmonitor.com/1993/1116/16071.html

https://www.csmonitor.com/1993/1206/06041.html

Rosa Febo and her daughter, Melanie Bergos, are used to traveling for school. After they moved into a Queens homeless shelter in 2018, it would take 90 minutes to get to Melanie’s school in Harlem – two buses and two trains. They’d wake at 5:30 a.m. and get home about 9 at night, shortly before curfew. They eventually got a studio apartment in Harlem, only 20 minutes to school. Unlike at the shelter, this apartment had a table where Melanie could do homework.

But then March hit, and Melanie’s school closed along with almost 2,000 other public schools in New York City, the largest school district in the United States. Now the 2020-21 school year is in session, and parents, teachers, and students are concerned.

Currently in seventh grade, Melanie is joining almost half of public school students who are logging on for school every day rather than attending in person. Or at least she’s trying to log on. Links often don’t connect, and city-issued iPads don’t easily mesh with school programs. Some days Melanie has just two hours of school instruction – sometimes live, sometimes by recorded video. “She gets frustrated. Everything is so messed up,” says Ms. Febo. “What can you possibly learn in two hours?”

Long before the pandemic closed schools in March, homeless students faced roadblocks their classmates couldn’t imagine. Scant connectivity meant doing homework on iPhones. Overcrowding and lack of quiet space made it hard to concentrate. Bureaucracy led to persistent school absences. Round trips could take three hours.

New York City schools are among a growing number of the nation’s largest districts to resume, or attempt to resume, at least some in-person learning, with classes once or more a week for its approximately 1.1 million pupils. Part of the reason the city is forging ahead: its 114,000 homeless students. That’s more people than the population of Green Bay, Wisconsin. For these students, school provides consistency, structure, social services, food, socialization, continuity of care, relationship building, and security.

“COVID further exposed a fragile safety net and the inability for the system to provide comprehensive services and care to the most vulnerable,” says Eric Weingartner, CEO of the Broome Street Academy, a charter high school where many students are homeless or have vulnerable housing situations. “COVID made access harder, eliminated access to many services, and further fractured a decentralized system.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Eric Weingartner, CEO of the Broome Street Academy, stands by a mural, Oct. 5, 2020, in New York. The Broome Street Academy is a tuition-free public charter high school with an admissions policy that gives preference to students who are homeless, in foster care, or from low-performing schools.

About 13,500 school-age children sleep in shelters each night, according to the city’s Department of Homeless Services. The rest crowd in with friends or relatives, like Ms. Febo and Melanie first had done.

Of those families in shelters, about one-third have a parent who works. While getting parents back to work is a big reason the city is proceeding with in-person classes, the city’s schooling options are putting many of those parents in a bind. Basically, city parents have two options: Have their children go 100% remote and take Zoom classes or other video instruction at home, like Melanie. Or the children can go to the school building from one to three days per week (depending on the school) and learn online the rest of the time. Under the best of circumstances, just about every New York City schoolchild will be online for class at least twice a week.

Technology troubles

Though the city has distributed 345,000 internet-enabled iPads since March and schools another 500,000 Wi-Fi enabled laptops or tablets, many shelters have dead zones that render them useless. For children living doubled or tripled up with family or friends, Wi-Fi networks are quickly overburdened when several children are online simultaneously. Even when devices can connect, there are problems.

Melanie has two iPads from the city, but they don’t work well with her school’s system. So she works on her brother’s laptop and gets the internet via cable. Ms. Febo owes the cable company $400 and worries about how Melanie will go online if her service is cut. Cell reception in her apartment is so poor, Ms. Febo takes phone calls in the hall outside.

The nonprofit Win runs 11 family shelters across New York City, more than any other private group. It has provided iPads, laptops, and hot spots to children. The group also has hired in-house tech support to help children with city-issued devices that don’t work as they should.

“It’s past time for the city to step up and provide homeless students, at a minimum, with reliable IT support ... social workers, paraprofessionals, and functioning technology,” says Christine Quinn, president and CEO of Win. “At Win, we’ve been working tirelessly to ensure that our students can succeed as long as schools remain closed. ... We shouldn’t have to do this alone.”

Initiatives afoot

Observers note that the city’s Department of Education is trying: providing grab-and-go meals around New York for children whose primary meal is at school, allowing schools to tweak their models based on student needs, employing support staff in shelters and schools, loaning devices, and assigning a dedicated technology person at each school.

Typical shelter policies forbid children from being on-site without the parent, so the city also is funding Learning Bridges, a child care program where pre-K through eighth grade children in the hybrid model (some in-person learning, some remote) can go when they’re not in school. There are about 30,000 Learning Bridges seats now, with 100,000 spots planned by December. Homeless children have priority, but so do other groups.

Given the rule that no one under age 18 can be in a shelter without parental supervision, advocates are calling for policy changes or an off-site program for high schoolers. The Department of Homeless Services says decisions regarding unaccompanied high schoolers studying solo in shelters will be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

Though the best way to help homeless students is to find them homes, advocates say less expensive remedies could help in the meantime, such as extra bilingual support for parents, a dedicated IT person at each shelter, and common space where students can work. Extra social and emotional support for these students, given their lack of stable homes, has also been called for.

Touting tutors

Additional educational support could help narrow the gap as well, says Robert Mascali, former deputy commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services and former vice president of supportive housing at Win. He suggests the Department of Education bring in City University of New York tutors, many of whom come from low-income families and could become role models.

“People have been pushing these programs for years. [They’re] going to pay dividends. This is the future homeless population if we don’t get the [children] educated now,” Mr. Mascali says. While he agrees that such programs will be expensive in a time of tight budgets and will require a change in procedure, “if it takes three, six, nine months, or a year, every journey starts with one step.”

With so many students and a situation so exceptional, face-to-face reopening was bound to be difficult. In September, for example, the city delayed school openings. Unknowns and last-minute changes are hard for everyone, but they’re incredibly hard on homeless families, says Jacquelyn Simone, policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless.

“Not everyone comes up in ‘ideal circumstances,’” says Bronx middle school teacher Rosanna Perch, in a text message. “Some kids have issues, and none of these are their fault. I am not going to blame their families, either. Each child that I teach is a valuable part of our community; each one of them has so much promise.”

Reuters

People queue to vote early at a polling station in New York City, Oct. 25.

When asked by California to help it prevent Russian interference in the Nov. 3 elections, the Rand think tank didn’t focus too much on ways to block Russia’s attempts to use online falsehoods to divide Americans and push them to extremes.

Rather, in a study released in October, Rand’s national security experts gave this advice: Convince Americans “they have more in common with those who are different from them than they may believe at first glance.”

The best antidote to anyone trying to manufacture conflict between people (which includes far more than Russia) is to help people “reach a consensus – a bedrock of American democracy,” the Rand report stated.

California need not look too far for nonpartisan initiatives already helping people find common ground through “principles that bring us together,” as one group puts it. They include Braver Angels, the Hidden Common Ground 2020 initiative, America Amplified, the Bridge Alliance, and the National Issues Forums.

Such groups share a belief that a divided society is not inevitable. They already have much going for them. More than two-thirds of Americans believe people in the United States “have more in common with each other than many people think,” according to a 2020 survey by Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

The latest example of this trend is One Small Step, a project of public radio’s StoryCorps. It is bringing together strangers on opposite sides of the political spectrum and recording the conversation. The purpose is to help them past the dehumanization – or the “culture of contempt” – in American discourse and equip people to better deal with authentic disagreements.

A leading group in this emerging activism is More in Common, a nonprofit research group that conducts polls and offers tips on how to talk with people who disagree with you. It finds about 80% of Americans say that being pitted against each other is a threat to democracy. Perhaps that explains why the share of Americans who feel they live in a divided society has fallen from 87% to 48%, according to More in Common. The key to this political resiliency lies in local communities: Sixty-eight percent of Americans say they trust their local officials to do what is right while 57% say people in their community with different views treat each other with respect.

“With Americans feeling so divided at the national level, it is the local level, in communities and neighborhoods, where there is the greatest opportunity to build confidence in the integrity of our election,” concludes More in Common.

As political temperatures rise before the election – along with fears of foreign interference and postelection violence – these groups are showing that U.S. society is stronger and more unified than many headlines depict. Americans enjoy their shared experiment in self-government. When reminded, they want to keep it.