In high school, Joel Shults’ friendship with the mayor’s son led to an offer from a local police officer: “‘Why don’t you come along for a ride?’ 

“I did a ride-along with a crusty old sergeant, and it was the most amazing, brilliant, beautiful thing that I’d ever seen,” says Mr. Shults, author of “The Badge and the Brain.” “I just got eaten up with wanting to be a police officer.”

He has since spent nearly five decades in law enforcement. Mr. Shults has served in roles from chief to chaplain. 

His squad car snapshot – grizzled sarge winking at the next generation – is part of America’s cultural consciousness. It’s a transferal of not just knowledge, but possibility and responsibility, says Mr. Shults, who now lives in Colorado: You will see some stuff. It could be beautiful. It probably will be ugly. But we’ll handle it. Seriously, we got this. 

Such willingness to lead when the chips are down – to even, in rare instances, run toward gunfire – is a big part of why Gallup consistently finds that Americans put more faith in police officers’ honesty and ethics, with 53% of the country saying they have a very high or high level of trust. (Nurses were first on the list, and political lobbyists came in last.)

A recent string of mass shootings has shown the best and the worst of American policing. While officers ran to help during a mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, on July Fourth, things were different in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24. There, 376 officers milled around a Texas elementary school for over an hour, while children called 911 on the other side of a classroom door. 

After-action reports in Texas are painting a picture of fumbled responsibility and failed leadership that go far beyond the actions of one small-town police chief – intensified and fueled by national debates over protocols, jurisdictions, and traditional hierarchies that have guided police responses to community emergencies. The report does not blame any individual officers for the delayed action, but rather systemic failures that day that spread across multiple agencies.

City of Uvalde Police Department/Reuters

Police deploy in a hallway after Salvador Ramos entered Robb Elementary School and ultimately killed 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, May 24, 2022, in a still image from police body camera video.

The events in Uvalde – from the desultory response to the shooting to subsequent attempts to downplay potential culpability – are fueling a fresh debate over how to inspire leadership among police officers amid profound disagreements about how to patrol a jittery nation.

“We are a divided nation, these shootings are on the rise, political violence is very present now, and ... policing is in collapse,” says former New York Police Department Officer Eugene O’Donnell. “Where is the forward-thinking plan? How do you do it affirmatively? It’s just elaborately fantastical that we’re going to pay [officers] $800 a week to be like the Navy SEALs and Mother Teresa.” 

Homicides in the United States rose by 44% between 2019 and 2021, while traffic fatalities rose by 18% in the same time frame. Looking longer term, fewer murders are getting solved, with the rate of successfully closed homicides dropping from about 90% in the 1970s to about 50% today. And, as with many professions that serve the public, officers are quitting and retiring at higher than usual rates.

Meanwhile, the pandemic took a psychological and physical toll that America is still dealing with: For one, life expectancy dropped at a rate not seen since 1943, the deadliest year for Americans in World War II. And gun deaths in 2020 rose to a record high of more than 45,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The rising crime and stress are coming at a time when the policing profession is at a fundamental crossroads over use-of-force protocols, proactive policing, and limited immunity laws that protect officers from consequences for mistakes made in the heat of action.

That all came to a head in the small South Texas town of Uvalde on May 24, a Texas House report concluded last week. 

“Nobody knew who was in charge”

“Systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” by hundreds of police officers on scene contributed to a gunman murdering 21 people, including 19 children, in the school. Police officers “failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety,” the 77-page report concluded. Officers from at least a half-dozen law enforcement agencies – including the Border Patrol and the Drug Enforcement Administration – responded during the attack.

“There were so many cops there that nobody knew who was in charge and everybody assumed somebody else was making decisions, so they ended up just kind of hanging out – that was the immediate failure,” says Dennis Kenney, a former Florida police officer. 

Calls for badges are reverberating in Texas. Authorities have begun probes into actions of individual officers. The police chief resigned from his newly elected position on the City Council. But two months later, no one involved in the response has been fired, nor have any officials with the school district. Shifting narratives from authorities have only undermined trust.

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

Erika Alonzo stands outside her family’s house in Uvalde, Texas, days after a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School on May 24. “The only thing [the victims' families and the community] want is answers, and even if answers have been given to them, they want accountability,” she says.

The community feels frozen, says Erika Alonzo, who is from the town and has sisters who are teachers there. But change can be difficult in small towns, she notes. The county judge has been in office for over 30 years, and there tends to be a lack of political engagement.

“In a small town you’d never be able to get away [from what happened], never be able to live it down,” says Ms. Alonzo. “So we are surprised [officers being fired] hasn’t happened.” 

A meeting scheduled last weekend to consider firing the local police chief was quickly canceled. On Monday night, the Uvalde school board unanimously voted to request that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott raise the age to legally purchase an assault-style rifle from 18 to 21. The City Council has a similar measure on the agenda tonight.

Over a month after the last funerals were held for victims of the massacre, the lack of consequences is prolonging the grieving process – and delaying conversations around reform.

“The only thing they want is answers, and even if answers have been given to them, they want accountability,” adds Ms. Alonzo, who lives in Austin. “Whether it was [police officers’] fault or not, something [terrible] happened and someone needs to be held accountable, for the families and for the community.”

America’s policing structure itself raises complications. Without a federal police force, training varies widely across jurisdictions. Smaller and rural departments are often at a marked disadvantage when it comes to training, equipment, and preparation. Struggles during the shooting ranged from who was in charge to communication failures to a lack of rifle-rated shields with which to confront a shooter wielding an assault-style rifle.

“What we’re talking about is a low-probability, high-risk situation – it’s not your everyday normal crime,” says Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum in Washington, D.C. “It’s a very rare phenomenon with huge policy implications if not executed properly.” 

Yet more broadly, policing experts say, the Uvalde failures are consequences of a tumultuous decade of policing scandals, murder indictments and convictions of officers, massive social justice protests, and recruiting and retention problems.

Warrior or guardian?

Some longtime officers also point to rethinking about what it means to serve and protect, saying that prioritizing guardians over warriors and an emphasis on community policing efforts over catching bad guys can lead to breakdowns like Uvalde.

“You can label this as political commentary, but [President Barack] Obama didn’t want warrior police officers; he wanted guardians,” says Mr. Shults, the former Colorado police chief. “Well, at Uvalde you had 400 guardians and a couple of warriors. The question is really for the American public: Do you want warriors, or do you want cops playing basketball in the ’hood?”

Other veterans argue that binary represents a false choice.

“It is a false dichotomy to say that it is warrior or guardian. There’s clearly an ampersand. We are guardians always and warriors when necessary,” says Sylvia Moir, a former police chief of Tempe, Arizona, who has spent three decades in law enforcement, including a decade as chief. “The warrior work and term ‘warrior’ has been so altered that it is seen as a militaristic perspective that goes in and lacks any kind of discernment, when really the warrior lifestyle is about developing your character, living a life of honor and integrity, and preparing oneself so that we are ready – spiritually, mentally, and physically – to fulfill our duty and protect people. ... Loss of life and loss of trust are equally high stakes in the environment which we operate in law enforcement across this nation.”

“Being asked to make this decision, are we guardians or warriors, that’s a trap,” continues Ms. Moir, who says she is looking forward to studying the Justice Department’s critical incident review of the Uvalde shooting. “It limits our thinking and the way we engage with people. After these significant events, we have to ask questions, and one of the primary questions that I have asked as a chief is, are the outcomes consistent with our values?”

To a large extent, the bulk of U.S. officers – some 700,000 spread over nearly 18,000 departments, half of which have 10 or fewer officers – are often too busy and sometimes undertrained to confront those questions by themselves.

Their work includes drug interdiction, homicides, traffic stops, domestic disturbances, sex crimes, and trespassing. Despite the often thankless work, it’s a job with a unique appeal – the ability to think quickly, make difficult decisions under pressure, and accept responsibility, to a point, for mistakes. 

Indeed, the willingness to risk their lives for others – the ultimate form of leadership – is perhaps the profession’s most defining dynamic.

“When I joined the NYPD, there’s a shooting and I had to totally improvise,” explains Mr. O’Donnell, now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “There’s no brass there. There are no politicians there. Nobody but me and my colleagues. Ninety-five percent of the time all is well that ends well. ...

“The thing that made policing valuable were the individuals who did it were willing to assume the risk; they were willing to work in the dark and the danger. That’s gone. Today, paralysis is the way. Do not get engaged.” 

Also, hundreds of officers opening fire without a clear plan could easily have resulted in chaos and perhaps even more loss of life. One officer that day had aimed at a running man wearing black: It later turned out he was a school coach.

That sense of “paralysis” may have become magnified in the hallways of Robb Elementary School.

Derek Gee/The Buffalo News/AP

Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia hugs Leah Holton-Pope, senior adviser to New York Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes, at a memorial outside a Topps grocery store prior to a ceremony honoring the shooting victims killed at the store two months earlier by a gunman in Buffalo, New York, July 14, 2022.

The evolution of leadership

The fact is, officers have no legal duty to intervene or interfere in an attack.

“You’re trained to breach in order to go in, but at the same time you’re not trained to commit suicide,” says Mr. Kenney, who is also a criminologist at John Jay in New York. “You can say that the officers who lacked courage to go in should quit. But what about the politicians ... who are fully prepared to have an environment where you’ve got military-grade weapons in circulation and you’re asking officers with 9 mm handguns to take care of it? All these things can be true at the same time. There does need to be a lot of soul-searching, but not just by the police.”

The question of safety – both for a department’s officers and for residents of the community they protect – is one that is never far from thought, says Ms. Moir.

“I also have this preeminent thought and concern of this dichotomy of caring for the welfare of the men and women in the police department that I lead, while simultaneously putting them at risk to accomplish the mission. That’s profoundly felt by arguably every law enforcement leader across this nation,” she says.

“One of my assistant chiefs once pulled me aside after somebody said, ‘Our goal is to go home every night,’ and I pushed back: Is it?” she recounts. “If our primary responsibility is to go home safely to our family every night, then we would not show up, we would not put on the uniform, we would not train, and we would not do the things that we [do] to respond, to safeguard people. There’s way too much risk.”

Police officers – from chiefs to beat cops – may have an important role to play in guiding the evolution of leadership.

“The defining issue is use of force – and that is what makes what the police do inevitably different from anyone else in society,” says Mr. Wexler. “On the one hand, we expect police ... to slow things down, to use time and distance to try to de-escalate situations. On the other hand are situations like Uvalde or Buffalo where time is of the essence, where acting immediately really is the difference between life and death.” 

In fact, the recent tragedies have shown more courageous acts of leadership than failures, says Mr. Wexler.

In Buffalo, Mr. Wexler notes, Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia spoke plainly about the racist motives of the man who killed 10 people in a supermarket: “This is someone who has hate in their heart, soul, and mind.” 

That statement, says Mr. Wexler, showed an understanding of the community, a willingness to confront blatant racism, and the courage to lead. 

“Policing is one of the professions where you expect those from the responding officers at the initial level to the police chief at the command level to both exercise enormous leadership and courage,” says Mr. Wexler. That expectation becomes even more attenuated “in anxious times like these.”

The agreement between Russia and Ukraine to allow the safe export of up to 20 million tons of Ukrainian wheat and other grains offers hope of easing an acute global food crisis and comes as especially good news for people in the Horn of Africa.

From Ethiopia to Eritrea and Kenya, high food prices and staples shortages have contributed to several of the world’s most dire hunger hotspots. In recent years, Eritrea has relied on Ukraine for virtually all its wheat imports.

But the grain export deal – brokered by the United Nations and Turkey, and the first major accord between the two bitter antagonists since Russia’s invasion Feb. 24 – will only help stave off looming famine in Somalia, for example, if it is allowed to work as spelled out in the agreement, and relatively quickly, experts say.

On one hand, events suggest the deal reached Friday may be offering as much false hope as genuine relief from a crisis that experts say has left more than 800 million people in some state of food insecurity.

Indeed Saturday, within hours of signing the deal, Russia sent missiles crashing into the Black Sea port of Odesa, one of several Ukrainian ports that under the deal could resume safely shipping grains to global markets. On Monday Ukraine, citing the missile attacks, said it would seek additional security guarantees to pursue implementation of the agreement.

“Yes, if the deal pulls off exactly as described it will be helpful, but it won’t make the food crisis go away,” says Daniel Maxwell, professor in Food Security at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition.

Noting that world food prices were already at critically high levels last year, Dr. Maxwell says Russia’s war in Ukraine has combined with existing drought and conflict to create a perfect storm of food supply disruption. Returning the two breadbaskets to the global market would ease pressure on supplies and prices – but first the deal has to work.

And “as the … attacks on Odesa show,” he says, “it is unlikely to pull off exactly as described.”

At the same time, others say, the world should not lose sight of the hope the deal offers, not just for easing the global food crisis, but potentially for encouraging more diplomatic breakthroughs in the five-month-old war.

Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters

Ukrainian farmer Oleksandr Chubuk, with wheat being stored in a shed in the village of Zhurivka, Ukraine, July 23, 2022, as Russia's attack on Ukraine continues.

Despite the attack on Odesa’s port, which Russia justified as intended for a military target, Ukraine’s deputy minister for infrastructure, Yuriy Vaskov, told reporters Monday that within two weeks he expects all Black Sea ports to be consistently exporting agricultural products.

More broadly, implementation of the agreement is going to require continuing contacts among the deal’s four signatories, which some say at least opens the door to further cooperation and diplomacy.

“The most important thing, the channels of cooperation are now open,” says Waheguru Pal Sidhu, an expert in international relations and U.N. diplomatic efforts at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs.

“The process of implementation of this deal means that all four parties will have to remain engaged, and we know from experience that over time, such mechanisms can build cooperation and even respect,” he says. “So I wouldn’t say categorically that this is just a one off, because potentially it could expand into other conversations.”

“Beacon in the Black Sea”

Under the deal, Russia would lift its blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports for verified food shipments, while Ukraine would remove mines it placed in its waters to repel a Russian sea invasion. Ukraine grain shipments would resume by sea through Turkey, while the U.N. would assist Russia with its own grain and fertilizer shipments.

The deal was the first sign of diplomacy working in Russia’s war, with U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres calling it a “beacon in the Black Sea.”

But if weeks of negotiations involving Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Mr. Guterres finally succeeded, it was not so much because the two sides are ready for diplomacy to stop the fighting, analysts say, but because the deal gives each side things they desperately wanted.

Ukraine, which normally supplies about 12% of wheat on the global market, is anxious to empty its stuffed grain silos before spoilage sets in and the summer harvest swings into full gear.

Vadim Savitsky, Russian Defense Ministry Press Service/AP

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (right), and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres sit as Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu (top left), and Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar (top right), exchange documents at a signing ceremony in Istanbul, Turkey, July 22, 2022.

Russia wants to resume exporting grains and fertilizers as well, but it has another motivation, experts say: Sensitive to global perceptions, Moscow was keenly aware that the Western charge it was “weaponizing food” was taking root.

“This is important for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, he has consistently argued that Russia is a responsible player that is always willing to meet its obligations, as long as no obstacles are set up by its opponents,” says Andrei Kortunov, director of the Russian International Affairs Council, which is affiliated with the Foreign Ministry. “Russia has long been trying to convince the global community that this conflict is not the main cause of the food crisis. It may be a catalyst, but the crisis is much deeper.”

Yet the viability of the grain deal remains burdened by the still intense military conflict.

The United States has widely shared declassified intelligence and satellite imagery confirming the Russian Navy’s mining of the ports of Odesa and Ochakiv, while offering evidence that Russia mined the Dnipro River intending to cut off maritime trade. Last week Britain’s Foreign Office condemned what it said was Russia’s shelling of civilian infrastructure, including grain shipment facilities, aimed at halting grain exports and in turn laying waste to the next harvest.

For some analysts, Russia’s missile attacks on Odesa’s port were not so much aimed at jettisoning the deal, but at reminding Ukraine that deal or no deal, it remains capable of striking anywhere it chooses.

Russian message to Africa

Others say the timing of Russia’s acceptance of the deal may not have been coincidental: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is currently on a visit to Africa, where he is able to show this deal as a practical demonstration to regional leaders that Russia is concerned about the food shortages and taking action to remedy the situation.

“Lavrov has many things to discuss with African leaders, but food is one of those issues that Russia can leverage to its advantage,” says Mr. Kortunov. “The timing of this deal is fortuitous, and the pieces fall together pretty well. Putin gets the deal, and Lavrov can emphasize it in his meetings in Africa.”

Like Professor Sidhu, some Russian experts cite the increasingly acrimonious information war, noting that Moscow cares very much what countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa think, if not the West.

“Being blamed for world starvation is not what Russia would like,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a leading Moscow-based foreign policy journal. “But Russian leaders seem to care less and less about accusations hurled against them by the West.”

Isaac Kasamani/Reuters

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, during their meeting in Entebbe, Uganda, July 26, 2022. The timing of the Ukraine grain deal allows Mr. Lavrov to show African leaders that Russia is concerned about the global food crisis.

In any case, many Russian analysts say they give the grain deal good odds of succeeding – because all parties have an interest in it, and despite the Odesa attack.

“To strike the port so soon after the deal was made, even if no grain facilities were touched” was “a bit strange,” says Mr. Lukyanov. “It’s either a brutal message that, deal or no deal, the war will continue as usual or, perhaps, just chaotic decision-making. Either way,” he adds, “it probably won’t derail the agreement. Everyone wants it to work.”

Diplomatic seed

Even so, few in Russia seem to think the grain deal suddenly portends bright days ahead for a broader diplomatic push to end the war. As many see it, the Kremlin still has key military objectives, such as completing the conquest of the Donbas region, before returning to negotiations.

Still, some say the grain deal may have planted a seed that could grow into something larger.

This deal “is just a small, incremental technical agreement [but] if it works, it will demonstrate that Russia and Ukraine can find ways to take necessary steps,” says Mr. Kortunov.

NYU’s Professor Sidhu notes that the grain deal is the second instance of U.N. involvement in negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, the first being talks that led to the release of civilians and fighters trapped at Mariupol’s devastated Azovstal steel works.

And he says the U.N. is likely to be part of any future negotiations between two parties that have no level of trust between them.

“Trust is still very much absent, so if anything is going to work it will require involvement of more than just the two, and it’s going to follow the old adage, ‘Mistrust, and verify,’” he says. “So verification is going to be key to this agreement, but eventually the verification process may lead the way to something larger.”

Michael A. McCoy/Reuters

Women's March activists attend a protest in front of the White House in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion decision, Washington, July 9, 2022.

This is the first time Brittney and Bobby Welinski have told their story to anyone other than close friends and family. In 2019, the parents of four were at their doctor’s office for a fetal anatomy scan. At that point in their lives, they were preparing for their fifth child – and fourth daughter.  

Ms. Welinski was 20 weeks along in her pregnancy. But during their checkup, the physician had heartbreaking news: Their daughter had a severe cleft affecting her brain and, very probably, her heart.

“They told us it was a condition incompatible with life,” Ms. Welinski remembers. 

The family was living in North Dakota at the time. They traveled to another physician in South Dakota for a second opinion, where the diagnosis was confirmed. Their options were limited to terminating the pregnancy or carrying it to full term and arranging palliative care, which would optimize the child’s quality of life before passing.  

“If we made it that far along,” Ms. Welinski adds. 

A 2013 North Dakota law banned abortions at her stage in pregnancy. The couple were then forced to travel, again, to South Dakota, where Ms. Welinski was induced into labor. Their health insurance didn’t cover the procedure. They were prepared to go into medical debt to do it.

The procedure – a medically induced abortion – meant that the premature child would survive only briefly, if at all, once born. They said goodbye on the day of the procedure.

Courtesy of Brittney Welinski

Brittney and Bobby Welinski say goodbye to their fifth child the day she was born.

Mr. Welinski’s conservative Catholic background hadn’t prepared him for their family’s loss. Growing up in small-town Minnesota, he hadn’t heard about the kind of tragedy that befell their family. The experience changed him: ideologically – he changed his voting affiliation from Republican to Democrat – and emotionally. Now politically engaged, he wants families to have the same options they did – without having to cross state lines – when navigating similar situations. 

The Welinskis’ story reveals not just the difficult decisions that many American households face over abortion. It also shows how these matters aren’t simply a “women’s issue,” but engage men as well – working in unity with their partners and thinking through their own questions on reproduction and birth control. And while women deal with both the mental and physical toll of abortion care, such family decisions weigh on men, too, says Bethany Everett, a professor of sociology at the University of Utah.

A national overview on a deeply personal issue

“The repeal of Roe is a big deal,” Dr. Everett adds. “It’s going to take years for us to really have a full understanding of the ways that this has potentially damaged people’s lives.” 

About 1 in 5 men have been involved in an abortion, according to research recently published in the medical journal Contraception. 

The stakes for them (as for women) are partly economic. Dr. Everett says that includes the decision’s impact on long-term earning and the pursuit of educational opportunities.

Many men support an abortion in the interest of better providing for their existing family – or better launching their careers before taking on the responsibilities of parenting.

To the many Americans who oppose abortion in most or all circumstances, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade, holds the promise of allowing state legislators and other elected officials to pass more laws aimed at preventing abortion. Thirteen states had “trigger laws” in place prior to the Dobbs ruling, to ban or sharply restrict abortion when Roe was overturned, and more are expected to follow. 

Yet even in the states with some form of trigger law, spanning swatches of the West and South, 54% of adults said abortion should be entirely legal or legal with a few restrictions, according to an Economist/YouGov poll conducted in May. That view, emphasizing women’s bodily autonomy, is shared by an even larger majority (62%) in states that are not imposing bans. 

That’s the national background for people like Mr. Welinski on a difficult and deeply personal issue.

It’s not black or white, Mr. Welinski says. “There’s more color to these decisions.”

Among those colors are the somber shades of difficult health decisions for families. Their nuance and weight have moved to the forefront of public thought since the nation’s highest court struck down the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling last month. Though the burdens are heaviest on women’s shoulders, some men are attempting to help carry the strain through empathy and the unity that comes from listening and sometimes speaking up in public at their partner’s side.

It’s about “being there to listen and understand the frustrations, the sadness,” Mr. Welinski says.

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

A man casts an early morning shadow while holding a sign saying "Keep Roe" as he protests in front of the U.S. Supreme Court a few days after the court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion decision with its ruling in the Dobbs case, in Washington, June 28, 2022.

Partnering: a matter of listening and acting

Ask most individuals in a long-term romantic relationship, and they’ll admit listening is sometimes easier said than done. To hear well requires a commitment to each other. Years will pass, as the springtime of a couple’s love churns its calendar into summer, and listening becomes a practice of hearing not just what’s said, but also what’s not yet said. 

For Ryan, who asked that his last name be omitted out of concern for professional security, he could hear the ticking anxieties of his wife’s heart before she’d even stepped out of bed on the morning the Supreme Court released the Dobbs decision.

Ryan was up first that morning in the couple’s New Orleans home when he heard the news. His mind immediately went to his wife – a sexual trauma survivor. He turned the TV off and waited. 

“When I heard her getting up, I told her, ‘You should probably stay in bed today,’” he says. 

The Dobbs decision was announced on a Friday. By the following Monday, Ryan’s wife had scheduled a hysterectomy. (Ryan already has a vasectomy, but they’re taking extra precautions.)

Ryan, who owns a software company, also announced to his employees that the small company would switch to full-time remote work. The New Orleans office would close. The decision was geared toward male and female employees alike.

“I can’t do anything in good conscience that makes an employee feel they need to stay in Louisiana,” Ryan says of his home state, where a trigger law, if it passes court review, will make abortion illegal. “I want to stay in Louisiana. But my role is to support my wife. If she’s not comfortable, we’re not going to be here. If we have to, we’ll move.”

Two states away, in Alabama, Jessey Stahl and her husband, Davante, find themselves grappling with the impact of similar decisions after their state enacted a near ban on abortion procedures.

Ms. Stahl has traveled across the state for abortion-rights rallies in the weeks since the Dobbs decision. Mr. Stahl joins her every opportunity he can. During the Fourth of July parade in their rural part of Alabama, they were two of only six in attendance at a rally in support of reproductive rights. Ms. Stahl says it’s just one example of her husband’s unwavering support.

In Mr. Stahl’s mind, there is no other choice – partly because of the danger to women’s health if their reproductive care doesn’t include access to abortion in a nation with a far higher maternal mortality rate than any other industrialized nation.

“I support anything she believes in,” Mr. Stahl says of their relationship. “Say, she gets pregnant. I could lose her and my child at the same time because she can’t get an abortion” in Alabama.

Even so, it’s difficult to speak out on reproductive rights issues in their conservative hometown, “especially as an interracial couple. They already look at us a certain type of way,” Mr. Stahl says. But it’s more difficult to not speak out, he says, especially when he thinks of the future for Ms. Stahl’s teenage daughter. 

A lot of folks are “too scared of what people might think to go out there and speak up,” he says. “For her to do that, she’s an extremely, extremely strong woman. It makes me proud to be hers.”

“I want people to see the other side”

After the Dobbs decision, the Welinski family continued to keep the story of their premature daughter’s passing mostly to themselves and their innermost social circle.

That didn’t mean it stung less emotionally when distant friends and family posted online in support of the Dobbs ruling. They’d never wish such a tragedy on another family, but still, they wished others could better understand the weight that came with their family’s decision.  

“I want people to see the other side of what they think is a simple decision,” Ms. Welinski says. 

Their family moved to Minnesota last year to be closer to Mr. Welinski’s family. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, has so far voiced his support for abortion rights. 

They consider themselves fortunate they had the opportunity to leave North Dakota. Even if their decision to relocate wasn’t guided by future indications of access to reproductive health care, to them it’s important that their three daughters grow up in a state that allows women a right to choose. 

Mr. Welinski understands that the recent weeks of debate over abortion access have weighed on his wife. 

“Going through life with her, you see things from a different angle,” Mr. Welinski says.

Ms. Welinski cuts in, lovingly.

“Then this happened,” she says, referring to the loss of their premature daughter in 2019.  

“I think it just kind of affirmed that,” Ms. Welinski adds. 

It’s all about listening, Mr. Welinski says again. 

“From listening to her, I’m educated through her.”

Adnan Abidi/Reuters

A market in Colombo, Sri Lanka, boasts ample displays of produce, July 23, 2022. In its emergency appeal for aid the World Food Program estimates that 3 in 10 Sri Lankan households are experiencing food insecurity amid an inflation rate of over 57%.

It’s been more than two months since Fathima Rinoza bought a packet of milk powder for her three young children. Surging food prices have turned what was a household staple into a luxury. Nowadays, the family survives mostly on rice, lentils, vegetables, and plain tea, with poultry and other meats becoming entirely inaccessible.

“Till last year, I was able to provide my children nutritious food because it was affordable, but even though the cost of living has increased, my salary is still the same,” says Ms. Rinoza, who makes a little under $100 a month as a domestic helper. “Even buying eggs has become difficult.”

Ms. Rinoza’s story is not unusual. The United Nations estimates that around 5.7 million Sri Lankans, including 2.3 million children, require humanitarian assistance due to the spiraling cost of living. The ongoing crisis has left many hungry for change. Some would be content to repair the economy and restore the status quo, but an increasing number of Sri Lankans are calling for a deeper political transformation. 

Sri Lanka’s economic collapse comes after years of financial mismanagement by a handful of powerful families that have spent the past decade consolidating their political influence. A mass people’s movement succeeded in forcing the primary offender, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, to resign mid-July after months of demonstrations culminated in protesters storming the presidential residence. Within a week, Parliament elected his successor: the equally unpopular Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

The selection underscores a critical disconnect between the government and protesters. The former wants to restore stability and resume negotiations with the International Monetary Fund over a possible bailout package. The latter – with broad support across the country – has come to desire systemic, transformational change. In the current circumstances, Mr. Wickremesinghe may not be able to deliver either. 

Alan Keenan, senior consultant with the International Crisis Group, says Mr. Wickremesinghe is an “experienced and talented politician” who, unlike his predecessor, has coherent views on economics. “So in some ways, he is well-placed to conclude negotiations with the IMF, and has the ability to work with foreign governments to get Sri Lanka the much needed financial assistance,” he says.

Sri Lankan President's Media Office/Reuters

Ranil Wickremesinghe (center) is sworn in as new president of Sri Lanka by Chief Justice Jayantha Jayasuriya at Parliament, amid the country's economic crisis, in Colombo, Sri Lanka, July 21, 2022.

But Mr. Wickremesinghe’s close association with the Rajapaksa family and his crackdown on recent protests undermines his credibility as a democratic reformist, and “weakens his ability to win the popular support needed to implement the difficult economic reforms that the IMF is certain to insist on.”

Political stability

Sri Lanka’s road to bankruptcy began in November 2019, when the newly-elected – and at that point, extremely popular – Mr. Rajapaksa implemented massive tax cuts, eating into the country’s coffers. The COVID-19 pandemic also dealt a blow to Sri Lanka’s tourism industry and foreign exchange earnings. These challenges, along with other missteps by the Central Bank and widespread crop failure, triggered intense inflation starting in late 2021, and have since brought the economy to a near-standstill. 

Now in what is likely the tenth consecutive month of record-high inflation, Sri Lankans are spending hours if not days in lines for fuel, forgoing meals, and dealing with daily power cuts.

Sergi Lanau, deputy chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, believes that an agreement with the IMF could help the country correct course. Priorities include “reducing fiscal deficits to levels that can be financed safely, … drafting a monetary policy plan to reduce inflation, and of course resolving the debt default situation Sri Lanka is in,” he says. “These should suffice to return Sri Lanka to growth and acceptable living standards for the population.”

But the IMF has paused negotiations until the government can settle the sociopolitical turmoil racking the island, and the appointment of the six-time prime minister as the country’s new president on July 20 has done little to ease public outrage. 

Mr. Wickremesinghe’s win was seen by many as a “political deal” delivered by Mr. Rajapaksa’s Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna party, which holds 116 seats in the 225-member legislature. (Mr. Wickremesinghe’s United National Party holds just one seat.) Not only has Mr. Wickremesinghe ignored protesters’ calls to resign, but he’s also doubled down on aggressive anti-protest tactics. According to Amnesty International, more than 50 protesters were injured during an unannounced military raid at the peaceful Galle Face protest camp on Friday. 

Eranga Jayawardena/AP

Anti-government demonstrators rally against the July 22 military eviction of a protest camp from the Presidential Secretariat premises in Colombo, Sri Lanka, July 25, 2022. The camp was cleared following three months of demonstrations over the country’s economic meltdown.

Marisa de Silva, an activist based in Colombo who was part of the protest movement that sent Mr. Rajapaksa packing, insists there won’t be any peace or stability with Mr. Wickremesinghe in office.

“His appointment may be constitutionally accepted, but the truth is there are a lot of wheeler dealings in Parliament, so we have no confidence in it,” she says.

Aritha Wickramasinghe, an international lawyer, says that many view Mr. Wickremesinghe as an illegitimate president because he wasn’t elected by the people. “He has been temporarily entrusted with this position to guide the country out of economic collapse,” he says, adding that Mr. Wickremesinghe needs to show “restraint and sensitivity” in engaging with protesters.

Overcoming decades of mistrust

Some believe Sri Lanka cannot move forward until its leadership confronts lingering ethno-religious tensions. The Sinhalese Buddhist majority and Tamil populations have long mistrusted each other; that came to a head in the decadeslong civil war between the military and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam rebel group. The conflict killed an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 Sri Lankans between 1983 and 2009, with thousands more believed to have disappeared. 

Dr. Thusiyan Nandakumar, editor of Tamil Guardian, a news portal with a specific focus on Tamil affairs, says that Tamils have very little confidence in Mr. Wickremesinghe’s ability to address these old wounds. He points to a 2019 incident when the then-prime minister told families of the disappeared to “forget the past“ and that their relatives are “probably dead.”

Those comments “deeply hurt not just the family members who are still searching for their loved ones, but the Tamil people as a whole,” he says.

Mr. Wickremesinghe is “committed to administering a Sinhala Buddhist nationalist state – with little to offer Tamils and Muslims – and to playing the political game according to the entrenched, opaque, corrupt, and nondemocratic rules,” says Mr. Keenan, from the International Crisis Group. “His government seems unlikely to change the way politics is done in Sri Lanka or escape its dead ends.”

Almost overnight, the color started to disappear.

Bright red, hand-painted apples and watermelons on the juice stand; the torta, drawn to show each vibrant ingredient so realistically that the picture itself could make mouths water; and the grinning pink pig basking in a pot – one by one these paintings were cloaked in white.

In the Cuauhtémoc borough of Mexico City, a new initiative from local officials aims to create more order. Food and drink vendors are required to whitewash their stalls and allow the city to label them with the official crest and catchphrase “Cuauhtémoc is your home.” They also face fines for messy workspaces, and are required to keep boxes of ingredients or trash cans inside their small structures.

The government has declined to engage directly with a growing group of unhappy businesses and neighbors on the topic. But the decree has generated conversations in the tourist-heavy, gentrifying borough about history, art, and the effects of globalization: How should a city balance the need for a general sense of cleanliness and order with calls to preserve tradition and culture?

The new policy “is part of a much longer history of officials and elites feeling anxious about what a modern city should look like,” says Tiana Bakić Hayden, an assistant professor of urban studies at El Colegio de México who is researching similar campaigns across the city to modernize public fruit and vegetable markets. “It entails a large degree of aesthetic homogenization because of this idea that informality is, visually, a blight on the orderly, modern city that some aspire [to] for Mexico.” 

At face value, tidy sidewalks and businesses sound like a recipe for community improvement. But for vendors and rotulistas, the tradesmen who hand paint signage, the focus on “order and discipline” by the borough, also called a delegation, has meant a loss in business – and, in some cases, identity. What’s becoming apparent is that order can mean different things to different people.

“No power to speak up”

On a recent morning, Daniel Martínez Cariño slices juicy squares of watermelon off the rind, organizing them in a shallow bowl alongside jars of prepared guavas, nopal, and leafy purslane. The teenager started helping his dad sell fresh-cut fruit, juices, and frothy liquados during the pandemic, but the stall has been a family business for nearly 35 years.

The new uniformity of the neighborhood’s street stalls is an improvement, Daniel says. But it’s not the physical look he approves of: “Now that we have this municipal crest stamped on our stand, the delegation doesn’t bother us as much. Before we were constantly asked for our papers and permits,” he says.

Ginnette Riquelme/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Daniel Martínez Cariño (left) poses with his father, Joaquín Martínez Sánchez, at the stand where they sell natural fruit juices in Mexico City, June 20, 2022.

Joaquín Martínez Sánchez, Daniel’s father, says his stand used to be set up across the street. The city came and moved it – without warning – overnight about a decade ago, due to the construction of a new apartment building on his former corner. The delegation “can do what it likes, but I have no power to speak up, ask questions, or disagree,” he says.

A few blocks away, at La Esquina de Sabor (The Delicious Corner), Salvador Alexis Hernández is still reeling from what he sees as an injustice. He was blown away when he got word he would be given one week to comply with the new regulations. Only a month prior they’d hired a rotulista to paint a jungle scene on the back side of their food stall, because the chef (his mother) loves plants.

After he repainted it white, someone pasted a printed poster on the stall decrying the disappearance of the neighborhood’s rótulos, or hand-painted signs. It was a position he agreed with, but the flyer wasn’t his doing. He was told he’d have to paint over it.

“They aren’t attacking the Coca Colas, the Batmans, or the Apples,” says Aldo Solano Rojas, an art historian, referring to corporate advertisements still present across the city. “If they’d taken everything down at once, maybe it would feel like a different tone. But instead, they only attacked the most vulnerable.”

Ginnette Riquelme/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

This stand in the Cuauhtémoc borough of Mexico City sells tortas, a type of sandwich, and was able to keep its sign because it is located inside a place that sells food.

Public spaces in constant flux

This idea of order as an aspirational value for cities dates back to the Industrial Revolution, says urban anthropologist José Ignacio Lanzagorta. “It’s an old trope, this idea of a perfect and ordered city with wide, straight streets, a layout where water and air circulate easily, and where buildings are uniform,” he says. Mexico doubled down on this idea at the end of the 18th century, taking over largely indigenous neighborhoods on the outskirts of Mexico City and implementing a gridded street system to improve and modernize them.

But public spaces are, in many ways, living organisms. Urban improvement initiatives come and go, a natural result of the inherent tensions that emerge between government policies and the way communities actually use and tweak public spaces, he says.  

“The government and planners come with the ideas of the ways things ‘should’ be so that they work better or are safer. This often includes global ideas of efficiency and order,” he says. “But then there’s the construction of the space by the people who actually use it. They adapt to it and if it doesn’t work, they will add something that gives it a local touch,” Dr. Lanzagorta says. “That’s how identities of a city are generated.” 

He suspects it won’t be long until the rótulos return. 

For Jorge Trujillo, the unique design of each rótulo is actually the key to order in a megacity like this one.

“The delegation’s idea of order and cleanliness was to paint everything the same,” he says. “But now, you see a stand and you don’t know what they sell. Is it tortas? Tacos? There’s no rótulo to tell you, no detail to help explain to a friend where it was you had that fantastic bite to eat,” Mr. Trujillo says.

Ginnette Riquelme /Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Jorge Trujillo pauses in front of his sign-painting shop in Mexico City, July 22, 2022. Besides having his profession affected by the whitewashing requirements in the Cuauhtémoc borough, Mr. Trujillo says that the order and clarity that used to come from knowing what vendors sold, based on their unique stall signs, is now gone.

A sign painter by trade, he is keenly aware of how demand for hand-painted signs has fallen off in a computer age. That’s part of what angered so many with this policy – rótulos already felt at risk, without a campaign to erase them.  

In the public markets where she’s conducting research, Dr. Bakić Hayden has seen similar policies unfold. Recently the Mercado San Pedro de Los Pinos underwent a “process of modernization,” which included putting plywood on the stalls and requiring signage to be in a “black hipster font,” as Dr. Bakić Hayden describes it. “The vendors don’t love it, but the architects have this idea that’s reflective of larger trends you see in ‘modernizing’ and ‘cleaning up’ cities as this processes of homogenization. Actors doing things differently are threatening to this ‘clean city’ image.” 

In a video clip from the first day of the initiative in Cuauhtémoc, Mayor Sandra Cuevas explains, “for us it’s very important that neighbors can walk freely down their ordered streets, clean streets.” Behind her in the video, a group of more than 10 city officials in matching white hats and blue vests unroll white tablecloths and awnings to hand out to street vendors selling their food and drinks from folding tables or baskets on the back of their bikes. Mayor Cuevas and her team declined multiple requests for interviews. 

“For all the problems in this city – trees with plagues, trash collection, millions of electric cables tangled up – rótulos aren’t generally seen as one of them,” says Mr. Solano Rojas, a member of the grassroots organization ReChida, which is trying to map and document images of erased rótulos, and advocate for the preservation of this part of Mexican culture. 

There are 16 boroughs in Mexico City, and the extent of their political power is quite limited, says Dr. Lanzagorta. “They don’t have much political margin, so these policies [to paint over rótulos] are low-budget, visible ways to show people, ‘Look! I brought order, I brought discipline.’”

Mr. Trujillo, the sign painter, concedes not all rótulos are masterpieces, but they are works of art. Even a cockeyed painting of a taco or a crooked letter in a sign declaring a “Torta Gigante” plays an important role in how people navigate and interact with their surroundings.

“Now everything is just standard. But we need something to differentiate what and who we are. If you take down a sign, you take down a history. It’s made everyone a little lost,” he says.

“Where’s the order in that?” 

Jason Hoekema/Valley Morning Star via AP

Wind turbines loom behind a farm at harvest time in Rio Hondo, Texas.

There is never a time when farmers don’t worry about crop yields and bushel prices. But for wheat farmers in southwestern Kansas, Russia’s war in Ukraine has added a new moral burden. An abnormally dry summer has cut their harvests in half at a time of acute global grain shortages. “That’s honestly what’s weighing on me more than anything,” one grower, David Schemm, told The New Yorker.

Mr. Schemm’s sense of responsibility for humanity’s welfare reflects an increasingly shared truth in a world of changing weather patterns. While climate change may be the reason for more intense droughts and forest fires, many of the solutions are practical – like ending war or opening shipping channels. They are based on a commitment to the common good.

“By focusing too much on climate change, it really takes the responsibility, but also the agency, away to address these local drivers of disasters such as high poverty rates, missing infrastructure, investment, missing healthcare system,” Friederike Otto, a climate change professor at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, told The Guardian recently. The overestimation of climate change “is not very helpful for actually dealing [with] and for actually improving resilience to these threats.”

That lesson applies to the growing current of human migration. The World Bank estimates that 140 million people will be displaced by climate change by 2050. That prediction anticipates increasingly severe problems at both ends of migration corridors, like hunger, natural disasters, and overwhelmed cities. But that is not inevitable. In countries like Honduras and El Salvador, for example, simple adaptation strategies like new crop varieties and even seaweed cultivation are enabling more families to decide not to leave.

On the destination side, climate-related migration is already driving creative new research on urban design, infrastructure, and ecology that sees new arrivals as beneficial rather than burdensome. “The shift from perceiving climate migration as ‘shock’ toward seeing it as a process [can] help communities receiving migrants adjust socially, making migrants a more welcome force for positive change,” said Soledad Patiño, an Argentine architect at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in a recent article on the school’s website.

Similar shifts in thinking are underway in the United States at the state and local level. A clean energy bill sitting on Gov. Charlie Baker’s desk in Massachusetts, for example, shows what is possible when political divisions about climate change are replaced by encouragement, consensus, and inclusivity. While greening the state’s grid, the new law would provide tax incentives for business, environmental protection for fisheries, and technical training programs for high schoolers. On the social side, it encourages investment in minority- and women-owned small businesses.

From California to North Carolina, lawmakers and community leaders are finding that partisan differences give way when stakeholders emphasize unity and collective uplift. Rural people, in particular, “feel the finger’s pointing at them for not making the change,” said Matt Houser, an environmental science professor and co-author of a new study by Indiana University. “We need to find ways to ... enable people to live out their values while also taking action on climate change.”

After decades of divisive debate, a new conversation about climate change is unlocking innovation and progress.