Susan Walsh/AP

President Joe Biden speaks about the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, a Senate proposal that would include major investments and incentives to promote clean energy, in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, July 28, 2022.

When Democratic lawmakers announced last week that they were a step closer to passing monumental climate change legislation, they gave new hope to activists who had been fretting that Congress was about to miss a key chance to fight global warming. 

But the new Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 – a hard-fought and sweeping spending package that also addresses health care, taxes, and deficit reduction – does more than offer a long-sought win to climate advocates. It also offers a playbook for how to forge cooperation on difficult policy, and lessons for how to make countrywide progress in addressing climate change.  

Advocates say the bill, with its $369 billion worth of investments in new green technologies and other initiatives, would be the largest federal climate action ever taken. It also reflects a careful balancing of ambition with political pragmatism: It balances economic needs with environmental achievement, spends more on incentives rather than imposing penalties, and focuses on optimism as opposed to ecological doom – attributes that many analysts say make it more palatable than some past climate efforts.  

“People will be employed by these provisions. People will save money. People will be able to move away from fossil fuels in their personal transportation,” says Daniel Bresette, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute in Washington, about the proposed law. “There is a way to do this where the future is better. We know what the future will be if we don’t do anything, and it’s unpleasant. A decarbonized, clean energy future represents an improvement. It’s not a sacrifice.”

“More politically durable, and therefore impactful”

The bill, which still needs to pass the Senate, is not yet a done deal. But many advocates say a climate package like the one proposed last week is more likely to pass, and to have staying power, than initiatives focused primarily around regulatory mandates and penalties. 

“The more politically durable, and therefore impactful, policy is the carrot,” says Ryan Fitzpatrick, director of the Climate and Energy Program at Third Way, a center-left think tank. 

This climate optimism came suddenly for Washington. 

As recently as last week, activists were worried that the United States would be unable to reach its internationally pledged greenhouse gas emission reduction numbers. As heat waves and extreme weather events battered much of the Northern Hemisphere, pundits talked about the U.S. government’s ineffectiveness to combat climate change – an issue that the vast majority of Americans now label as a concern, according to polls. 

Then the story changed. 

“The narrative that Congress doesn’t work – I think that doesn’t really hold together right now,” says Sasha Mackler, who directs the Energy Program at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “On climate and energy issues, when they’re framed appropriately ... we can make progress.”

He points to both the Energy Act of 2020 and last year’s trillion-dollar bipartisan infrastructure bill as other points of important climate progress.

Mary Altaffer/AP/File

Framed by the Manhattan skyline, electricians with IBEW Local 3 install solar panels on top of the Terminal B garage at LaGuardia Airport, Nov. 9, 2021, in the Queens borough of New York. A new Senate proposal would include billions of dollars for clean energy, from electric vehicles to tax credits for power plants that use solar panels and wind turbines.

Still, for months, advocates have fretted that Democrats would lose control of the Senate before making any additional headway combating climate change. West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin had been a thorn in the side of fellow Democrats trying to pass President Joe Biden’s climate priorities through a spending bill, saying as recently as last Tuesday that he would not support the climate package because of economic concerns. 

A wide-ranging bill

But last week, Senator Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York announced they had reached an agreement on a law that analysts say could transform the country’s energy system. Their proposed funding for climate action includes billions of dollars in tax credits for power plants that use zero-emissions technologies, such as solar panels and wind turbines. There are incentives for electric vehicles, such as a $7,500 tax credit for most individuals looking to buy EV sedans or trucks. Billions of dollars will go to climate-friendly agriculture and to support new technologies such as carbon capture, which, in theory, could lock away carbon emissions from power plants so the heat-trapping gases don’t enter the atmosphere.

Together, analysts say, the incentives put the U.S. on track to reduce its carbon emissions by 40% compared with 2005 numbers by the end of the decade – roughly the pace needed to reach its internationally pledged climate goals.

“It’s been a really big turnaround in 24 hours,” said Christina DeConcini, director of government affairs at the World Resources Institute, last week. “Its importance can’t be underestimated. If it passes, it’s going to be the most significant climate action the United States has ever taken.”

There are still significant hurdles for the bill to become law. The bill needs all 50 Democrats in the Senate to support it, including Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who has declined so far to say she would vote for the bill, and who over the weekend suggested she might demand changes or allow procedural maneuverings that would make passage more difficult. Republicans have criticized the climate-related funding as irresponsible in the face of other economic stressors. And some progressives have also opposed parts of the legislation, saying some provisions, such as compromises in the bill that connect leases for oil and gas drilling on federal land to clean energy initiatives, are going to put disproportionate harm on front-line communities. 

“Legislation that supports measures to address the health of polluted communities on the one hand, while ramping up projects that increase pollution and unsafe practices on the lands of other frontline communities on the other ... is wrong,” said Bineshi Albert, co-executive director of the Climate Justice Alliance, in a statement last week. “Hard fought measures for Environmental Justice that support our communities are now being positioned alongside things that harm us, essentially holding us hostage to the needs of the fossil fuel industry. This will only harm us in the future.”

That position could impact a House vote, should the bill survive the Senate. 

A path with future promise?

But the fact that such substantial climate initiatives have moved forward at all is crucial, advocates say. 

“This bill represents an unprecedented investment in climate action,” says Lena Moffitt, chief of staff for Evergreen Action, a climate advocacy group. “It represents an important shift in climate policy. It’s not the bill we would have written, but it’s still essential and we need to get it passed. ... Will it solve the climate crisis full stop? No – we know that the fight goes on. But this [law] would be a clear indication that Congress takes this issue seriously.”

To Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina who is now executive director of RepublicEN, a conservative climate organization that supports a carbon tax with border adjustment for imports, the bill’s efforts to support American manufacturing dovetail with a point he’s been making for years. The best way to build a stable climate future, he argues, is to build a strong, 21st-century, American economy. Investments today in emergent technologies such as clean hydrogen could put the U.S. at the forefront of future industry. 

Indeed, he says, if many of the climate provisions in the bill stood alone, rather than wrapped up into the large package, he expects they would garner some Republican support. 

“The expansion of the wind and solar credits, the exciting expansion, or creation, of additional credits in green hydrogen, the inclusion of hydrogen cars in electric car credits, the extension of the electric car credits – all those things are good,’ he says. “And I think they would have a lot of support among conservatives.”

Many Republican lawmakers have already been supporting green incentives and investments at the state level.

The big question now, Mr. Inglis says, is the same as the one progressives have posed. 

“This is all great,” he says. “It’s not enough. The question now is, what do we do next?”

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg says there are situations in which it would be her religious duty to help a woman get an abortion.

And for her, as for many who follow the traditions of Judaism and other faiths, states that now ban or severely restrict access to abortion services are placing burdens on her own sincerely held religious beliefs and her ability to exercise her faith freely.

“Religious freedom is meant to be a shield to protect, not a sword to harm,” says Rabbi Ruttenberg, scholar-in-residence for the National Council of Jewish Women. “Abortion bans absolutely impose one theology onto the nation, on people who hold other theologies and on people who are not religious, in a way that is deeply problematic.”

It is a mitzvah, or religious duty in her tradition, she says, to preserve the life, health, and well-being of a pregnant woman, regardless of the timing. And even though every state law that currently bans abortion contains language allowing for exceptions when a woman’s life is endangered, many doctors have been uncertain about when, exactly, a woman’s life can be considered at risk – leading to medical complications. This not only does harm to women, the rabbi says, but it also constrains the free exercise of her religion when it comes to protecting women.

“For rabbis, this has become a very significant legal issue for us as we talk to our congregants and our community about the full breadth of their lives, including their reproductive lives,” Rabbi Ruttenberg says.  

When the Supreme Court in June overturned the constitutional right to abortion, however, its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health did not mention the word “religion” once. Rather, it dismantled the unenumerated right to privacy that had undergirded the right to abortion for almost 50 years and returned the legal question of abortion to each individual state.

Still, for decades, those within the anti-abortion movement have been animated by the belief that life begins at the moment of conception, making abortion, in their view, both a sin and a crime. A central tenet of Roman Catholic teaching and a view held by a majority of evangelical Protestants, this belief has informed the political positions of many religious conservatives who dominate the Republican Party – and who made appointing conservative justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade a well-known priority.

Yet as the legal questions surrounding access to abortion return to the states, a growing number of abortion-rights advocates are now pressing the claim in state courts that abortion bans constitute both an establishment of religion and a violation of religious liberty.

“We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg of the court challenges to come,” said Rachel Rebouché, dean of Temple University’s Beasley School of Law in Philadelphia, in July. Abortion rights advocates have already filed a number of lawsuits in states with new bans, including Arizona, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

“Theocratic-based policymaking”?

In Kentucky, a state judge has blocked the state’s “trigger law” banning abortion. Part of the judge’s reasoning included an understanding of religious freedom in the Kentucky Constitution and the apparent theological underpinnings of the ban. Using the term “unborn human beings” in the law, he said, constituted “theocratic-based policymaking.”

“By taking this approach, the bans fail to account for the diverse religious views of many Kentuckians whose faith leads them to take very different views of when life begins,” wrote Jefferson County Circuit Judge Mitch Perry. The trigger ban violates the state’s constitution “by impermissibly establishing a distinctly Christian doctrine of the beginning of life, and by unduly interfering with the free exercise of other religions that do not share that belief.” 

Last month, a Jewish congregation in Florida, joined by Unitarian and Buddhist groups, also filed a challenge to the state’s new 15-week ban on abortion, arguing the law infringes on the religious liberty of its members.

“Both anti-abortion and pro-abortion advocates will be using the tools at their disposal to map out what the new legal landscape after Dobbs is going to look like,” says Dean Rebouché. “We already see it, but we should expect it to intensify, and it really tests this idea that [Justice Samuel] Alito had that Roe and Casey were unworkable, and created excessive litigation and hard-to-apply tests consistently. In just over three weeks, we’ve seen that what we have now is not going to be more workable.”

Just as with competing legal claims, the theological positions of many religious traditions are also wide-ranging and complicated – including within Judaism, says Lisa Fishbayn Joffe, director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. 

“There are several avenues through which Jewish communities are expressing concern about these developments about abortion,” she says, noting some of the diversity within Jewish traditions. But unlike Christian traditions, those of Judaism do not hold that life begins at conception.

Citing Exodus, she notes that the Torah teaches if a man accidentally strikes a woman and she dies, the offender must be put to death. But if the man accidentally hits a woman and she miscarries, he must only pay a fine to her husband.

A significant part of Jewish traditions also teach that a fetus can be considered a human life only after 40 days. But even then, she says, it could be considered a religious duty to abort when there is a threat to the life, health, or emotional well-being of a woman.

But Dr. Joffe, too, says some state laws that ban abortion might place a chill on religious counseling.

“Some of these laws raise concerns for me that even having a discussion about the Jewish texts regarding abortion, and the insights around termination of pregnancies in the Jewish tradition – that even just having that conversation, a clergy person advising a parishioner that Jewish law would permit or even require an abortion, that could be viewed as aiding or abetting someone to have an abortion,” Dr. Joffe says. 

The American principles of separation of church and state and religious liberty, however, have also been hotly contested over the past decade as a conservative Supreme Court has made these issues a priority.

And on a federal level, while the constitutional right to abortion had been grounded upon an unenumerated right to privacy, the question of abortion and religious liberty is not new, scholars say. 

“Even before Roe, there had been half a century of this kind of claim,” says Cary Franklin, professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles. “A lot of them got dismissed, or were moot. So we haven’t had a ton of case law, even though people have been filing this kind of suit. However I think more and more people will be arguing that their religious rights are being violated.”

In a closely divided decision in 1980, the Supreme Court ruled that the Hyde Amendment, an act of Congress that banned the use federal funds for abortion, did not constitute an establishment of religion. “The fact that the funding restrictions ... may coincide with the religious tenets of the Roman Catholic Church does not, without more, contravene that clause,” the majority wrote in a 5-4 decision in Harris v. McRae.   

In another 5-4 decision in 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that a law restricting abortion in Missouri, and which contained a preamble that stated that “the life of each human being begins at conception,” also did not violate the establishment clause. 

In Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, Chief Justice William Rehnquist dismissed the preamble as irrelevant to the substance of the law. “The court has emphasized that Roe implies no limitation on a state’s authority to make a value judgment favoring childbirth over abortion, and the preamble can be read simply to express that sort of value judgment,” he wrote.

Legal limits to religious liberty

Indeed, many legal scholars doubt that claims that abortion bans constitute an establishment of religion or a violation of religious freedom would carry much legal weight – at least on a federal level.

“I rely on the distinction that the Supreme Court has often made between religious belief, which is not subject to state control, religious advocacy, the rights to which are quite broad, and religious practice, which is considerably more restricted,” says John Vile, professor of political science at Middle Tennessee State University. 

Courts have long rejected such arguments when it comes to polygamy, and in the famous Supreme Court case Employment Division v. Smith, the conservative icon Justice Antonin Scalia rejected the free exercise claims of two Native American men who were fired for smoking peyote, a violation of state law, during a religious ceremony. If religion could be used to opt out of generally applicable laws, “such a system would be courting anarchy,” he wrote. 

The case drew criticism from both the left and right, and prompted Congress to pass the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. In the past decade, however, religious conservatives have continued to critique Justice Scalia’s reasoning as they fight for religious exemptions to LGBTQ civil rights protections.

State laws, however, often have more robust legal protections for such religious claims.  

Lawsuits such as the one filed by the Jewish congregation in Florida “further supports taking a closer look at state constitutions,” says Dean Rebouché. “And, frankly, the case law that has been developed in states [merits] thinking creatively about how those provisions might protect something like a right to abortion founded on religious beliefs.”

Sally Blood/Courtesy of Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, scholar-in-residence for the National Council of Jewish Women, says banning abortion services restricts her ability to freely exercise her faith.

Rabbi Ruttenberg says that she, like other religious minorities, has not felt included in the Supreme Court’s emphasis on religious liberty. Its cases this term and for over a decade have most reflected the interests of conservative evangelical Christians, including overturning Roe v. Wade. 

“This idea that we are making policy based on when life begins, that does not reflect Jewish or atheists’ or many other traditions as well,” she says. “We’re already marginalized, so there is a sense that if abortion bans are rooted in an idea of life beginning at conception, that is an imposition of theology into the legal code in a way that excludes other traditions.”

Biran Lawless/PA/Reuters

Former Post Office worker Deirdre Connolly is seen at the Clayton Hotel in Belfast, Northern Ireland, for the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, on May 18, 2022.

Britain is no stranger to public inquiries. From the phone hacking by British newspapers in 2011 to the ongoing inquiry into the death of 72 people in the fire at Grenfell Tower in London, successive British governments have regularly turned to such inquiries to examine particularly troubling injustices. 

Now, an inquiry is underway into the wrongful accusation of hundreds of British postal workers of theft, in what has been described in the media as Britain’s biggest miscarriage of justice in its history.

What is the postmaster scandal?

In 1999, the British Post Office introduced a new accounting system, Horizon, to tally transactions. Staff running local branches, known as subpostmasters and mistresses, soon noticed that the computer software did not match the amount of money they had manually recorded at the end of a working day. 

When the Post Office higher-ups became aware of the discrepancies, they began taking local staff straight to court, accusing them of theft, false accounting, and fraud. Many were sent to prison, with an average of 30 subpostmasters jailed every year between 2000 and 2014. A total of 736 subpostmasters were prosecuted. 

However, years later it came to light that the problem was not wrongdoing, but Horizon. The software contained faults that made it appear money was missing from Post Office branches, when all was in fact accounted for. 

Why did the faulty software go unrevealed for so long?

A complex web of staff loyalty to the company, unreciprocated trust by subpostmasters toward management, and a culture of blame all fed the situation. 

Many subpostmasters had served as Post Office employees for much of their careers, or had opened up postal branches with family members, particularly among many migrants of Ugandan-Indian origin who had relocated to Britain in the 1970s. Postmasters say they felt a deep loyalty toward the community-centric role played by the Post Office – so much so, that some topped up company accounts with their own money to shore up discrepancies on the computer system. 

Such loyalty was not reciprocated by senior management, who focused on closing branches in sweeping cost-cutting measures influenced by what was widely seen as the Post Office’s profit-driven culture, which was introduced at the same time as Horizon. 

In addition, the Post Office held all the information and, crucially, was the entity that investigated and then brought the prosecutions against employees, rather than the police. Testimonies from the inquiry have shown big problems with the way Post Office investigators treated postmasters. 

Tony Edwards, one of Britain’s most senior criminal lawyers, says the Post Office should have followed police best practices. 

Post Office “investigators either didn’t know or chose not to observe the rules about making it clear that people were not obliged to do anything [when questioned]. They were free to go,” he says. 

Those prosecuted say they were bullied into believing that they were the only ones complaining of a corrupt computer system. “There must have been a point, very early on, when Post Office investigators knew it was not true,” adds Mr. Edwards.

What has been the human impact of the scandal?

It has been devastating. Former postal worker Baljit Sethi said on the first day of the inquiry he considered taking his own life after Horizon showed a £17,000 ($20,900) shortfall in a branch he operated, but stopped short because of his family. One woman, jailed while pregnant for “stealing” £57,000, said she resisted suicide for her unborn child. Others said they faced bankruptcy, addiction, chronic illness, and depression.

“Lives were ruined, families were torn apart, families were made homeless and destitute. People who were important, respected, and integral part of the local communities that they served were in some cases shunned,” said Jason Beer QC, counsel to the public inquiry.

Victim testimonies recount the toll taken on personal relationships and health, with divorces, miscarriage of births, and social isolation also commonplace. 

Some had died before the state publicly recognized that they were wrongly convicted. Eighty-one people have so far had their convictions quashed by the government.

As a kid, Alan Simpson watched the tar-paper shacks shoot up in the prairie nearby, as the government hastily constructed a camp after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. The signs around town went up equally fast, as 14,000 Japanese Americans, uprooted from their lives on the West Coast, were detained in the shadow of Heart Mountain, one of 10 such camps. 

“This is for their own good,” he recalls one sign saying. Others used ethnic slurs to make clear the newcomers – some of whom worked in town – were not welcome at certain establishments. Meanwhile, Gov. Nels Smith criticized California for using Wyoming as a “dumping ground” for a distrusted population. 

Among the newcomers was Norman Mineta, a kid from San Jose who loved baseball but had his bat taken away by authorities. So he would sneak through the fence to the river to fish and hunt magpies, like the local boys, Mr. Simpson recalls. But Mr. Simpson might never have learned that had it not been for Glenn Livingston, his Boy Scout troop leader in nearby Cody, Wyoming.

“There are three Boy Scout troops out there and they’re all American, just like you,” Mr. Simpson remembers him saying. “We’re going to go out there for a jamboree.”

Under the guard towers manned by soldiers and searchlights, 11-year-old Al and Norm practiced tying knots, shared a tent, and built a moat around it, directing the runoff to a bully’s tent down the hill, which sent them into fits of laughter. Three decades later, Mr. Simpson was serving in the Wyoming state legislature when he learned that his old chum had also entered politics, becoming the first Japanese American mayor of a major city – San Jose, California.  

“Do you remember the fat kid who cackled and tied knots?” Mr. Simpson wrote in a letter to Mr. Mineta, describing himself. The young mayor sure did. 

That unlikely boyhood friendship, forged amid fear and hatred, grew into a bipartisan force to be reckoned with after Mr. Mineta was elected a Democratic representative to Congress and Mr. Simpson became a Republican senator. They worked their respective sides of the aisle to secure reparations for Japanese Americans, and were each respected by the other side for their bipartisan spirit. President George W. Bush appointed Mr. Mineta to his Cabinet, and President Barack Obama tasked Mr. Simpson in 2010 with co-chairing the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor

The Interpretive Center at Heart Mountain in Powell, Wyoming, details the wartime relocation and confinement of Japanese Americans here during World War II. The building, which opened in 2011, is modeled after the original barracks.

In honor of their example, the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation broke ground this weekend on the Mineta-Simpson Institute, which will be located adjacent to an existing interpretative center and provide a forum for talks, workshops, and other events to address today’s resurgent tribalism.

“The friendship of Norm and Al really represents what this nation can be, and what this nation should be,” said Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, whose first exposure to campaigning was crisscrossing the state with her father, Dick Cheney, and Mr. Simpson in 1978 when they were running for the House and Senate, respectively. In her remarks at the groundbreaking ceremony, she added that their friendship “demonstrated what can be accomplished when we come together and we put the good of our country ahead of any politics or partisanship.”

The idea for the Mineta-Simpson Institute was driven by former incarcerees serving on the foundation’s board who saw present-day echoes of the politics of fear that had led to their community’s detention. They see a redemptive value in bringing the lessons of their experience to bear on the challenges of today, and providing an example of how national division and distrust can be overcome.

The foundation has raised $7.1 million of their $8.25 million goal and plans to open the institute’s doors next summer. They hope to eventually draw members of state legislatures or even Congress, where a coarsening partisanship has caused that institution to largely grind to a halt – both reflecting and fueling the national divides over everything from abortion to voting rights. 

“It’s exhausting to have to feel so much anger toward each other,” says Aura Sunada Newlin, interim executive director of the foundation.

“There are tremendous museums in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles and Seattle. But there’s something different when you come and set foot on a place where people were actually incarcerated on the basis of race,” adds Ms. Newlin, a great-granddaughter of Heart Mountain incarcerees. Plus, the expansiveness and barren beauty of the landscape create a unique environment for contemplation, adds the fourth-generation Wyomingite. “I feel like it’s so important for people to come and feel that – to feel uncomfortable, to feel small and vulnerable in the face of this huge sky. And to imagine what it must have felt like to arrive in this place.”

Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor

Cobblestones leading to the entrance of the Interpretative Center at Heart Mountain pay tribute to the thousands of Japanese Americans who endured their detainment here during World War II with grit and resilience.

Moving forward without bitterness

When Sam Mihara arrived as a fourth grader from San Francisco, he and his parents and brother were assigned a 20-foot square barrack room with four military cots, no electricity, and no water. They used communal toilets with no partitions and were served bread and potatoes with pickled vegetables. His father went blind and his grandfather died due to medical mistreatment, he says in a phone interview. 

While many of the older generation felt it their duty to remain loyal to the United States, he watched young Japanese Americans gather after dinner to discuss resisting the draft. Among them was Takashi Hoshizaki, who went to jail instead of serving in the military, and received an apology from the government only decades later – along with $20,000 in reparations, thanks to the legislation Representative Mineta and Senator Simpson advanced.

For a long time, Mr. Mihara felt bitter about his experience and wouldn’t set foot in Wyoming. 

“I had a lot of hate,” he says. “Finally, it dawned on me – it doesn’t do much good to be bitter. ... The best thing I can do is to educate, so that future leaders don’t make the same mistake.”

Over the past 10 years, he has spoken to more than 90,000 students of all ages across the country, from Columbia Law School to Heart Mountain, where he serves on the foundation’s board.

“When I give talks, sometimes I get the question – ‘Do you still believe in America?’” he says. “The answer is yes,” he adds, noting that in many countries it wouldn’t have been possible to criticize the government the way he has. “As long as we are free to address the mistakes that we’ve made and do our best to correct them, I think we’ll be OK.”

Edward O. Eisenhand/AP/File

Workers build a reservoir in July 1942 at the Heart Mountain camp, where more than 14,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly detained during World War II. The incarcerees, some of whom had prospered as farmers in California, worked the dusty, barren land during their detention.

Likewise, Mr. Hoshizaki, the draft resister and a fellow board member, says he feels no bitterness – only a desire to help secure civil rights for all, including through the Mineta-Simpson Institute. “I’m going to push hard to make sure that on a constitutional level the denial of civil rights will not happen to other groups,” he says. 

Mr. Mineta, as secretary of Transportation under President George W. Bush, was responsible for grounding all air traffic on 9/11 and later helped ensure that Muslim Americans were not singled out by the government the way his community had been after Pearl Harbor. His memorial service in Washington this spring – held just two days after the Jan. 6 committee started hearings on one of the most divisive days in modern history – drew hundreds of people, including Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and former Bush chief of staff Andrew Card. They each gave tributes, along with Mr. Mineta’s boyhood friend from Wyoming.

“I was a beneficiary of a giant man,” said Senator Simpson, whose eulogy drew the heartiest applause.  

In an interview with the Monitor several weeks earlier, sitting in a sunny room of the Heart Mountain interpretative center with his wife, Ann, overlooking the grassland where thousands of barracks once held his friend and thousands of others, he said that a center where people could come together to discuss racism, hysteria, hate, and partisanship “would be the fondest hope of my life or his.”

“Creating a new future”

The Mineta-Simpson Institute’s programming got underway this summer with workshops for 72 educators from around the country on how to take these lessons of history and apply it to their teaching of the Constitution and civil rights, a weeklong program supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. They also plan to pilot leadership workshops for next year on how to break through tribalism to find practical solutions – an initiative that will likely start with local leaders and expand to include state legislators as well as leaders from corporate, nonprofit, and community organizations. 

Other initiatives include an artist series, private retreats, events for the public to support an engaged citizenry, and a lecture series named after Maurice Walk, a government lawyer who resigned his post in protest of the treatment of Japanese Americans. While many of the institute’s activities will harness the power of place at Heart Mountain, the foundation also plans to expand its reach through online programming.

“We’re not just talking about history, but making it relevant, taking the lessons of the past and using them to help people find common ground again,” says Deni Hirsh, the foundation’s membership and development manager.  

Her big dream is that someday they can host the freshman class of representatives in Congress. 

Dakota Russell, former executive director and a member of the advisory board, says the idea is that “before that tribal mindset sets in, that we capture them then and really offer a viable alternative.” And they have proof that it works in a relationship that started right here, despite the barbed wire that divided their communities. 

“In the model of Mineta and Simpson, we have the example of two men who are on opposite sides of the aisle, but loved each other so much,” says Ms. Newlin, who rejects the cynical view that their example of civility is outmoded today, or represents a Pollyannish desire to return to some idyllic but impractical past.  

“It’s not about going backwards,” she says. “It’s about creating a new future.”

The puppeteers from Rajasthan set up their tents on an unused piece of land in India’s capital in the 1970s, an area that became known as the Kathputli Colony – kathputli means “puppet” in Hindi. Over time, the makeshift settlement became a hotbed of artists, including not only puppeteers but also musicians, singers, dancers, acrobats, jugglers, percussionists, sculptors, painters, magicians, and snake charmers. More than 4,000 families from all over India lived there. 

The conditions were far from ideal, but for decades this settlement was home and its residents more than endured. They brought it to life with creativity and art. That spirit of joy and perseverance continues to carry them through the hardships and uncertainty of government-forced relocation.

Fifteen years ago, the Delhi Development Authority decided that the Kathputli Colony would be the first area to be redeveloped under what it called an “in situ rehabilitation” plan. This meant temporarily relocating the inhabitants, who were told they would eventually return to their neighborhood to live in new, high-rise housing.

The developer’s plan included construction of the tallest building in the city, with luxury apartments and a heliport on the roof, plus a shopping mall. Today, the area is considered one of the most central and well-connected areas of the Indian capital, and the artists are facing increasing gentrification of their neighborhood. 

All has not gone according to plan. Only 2,800 families were eligible for housing under the rehabilitation program. Five hundred families moved directly into new apartments, while the rest were shifted to a transitional camp, and eight years later they are still awaiting new homes. Many have lost hope of returning to the colony and are forced to live in 40-by-40-foot prefabricated houses, with no kitchen or bathroom, which were designed to be occupied for only two years. They face deteriorating conditions and sanitation problems.

OSCAR ESPINOSA

The Kathputli Colony families who are eligible to return to the rehabilitated neighborhood will be rehoused in high-rise buildings like this one.

Hundreds of stories of perseverance make up this amalgam of artists, who are still struggling to return to their neighborhood. Recently, 1,200 families were dropped from the housing eligibility list because of a change in policy. They are preparing a new appeal in the courts. The artists hope their unique contributions to Indian culture will at last be recognized. 

OSCAR ESPINOSA

Jagdish Amra Bhatt is a seventh-generation puppeteer. He started traveling with his father at the age of 9 to perform shows.

OSCAR ESPINOSA

After 15 years of redevelopment, what was once an itinerant artists’ colony is today a gentrifying neighborhood in a central area of Delhi.

OSCAR ESPINOSA

Lala Bhatt, who has toured Europe with his traditional Rajasthani puppet shows, lives with his wife and their four children in the 40-by-40-foot dwelling they have been allocated in the temporary camp.

OSCAR ESPINOSA

Dancer Meena Bhatt comes from a family of nomadic artists from Rajasthan. She is the first generation to be born in Kathputli Colony where her family settled 50 years ago.

OSCAR ESPINOSA

The artists often air their puppets on cots in front of their prefabricated dwellings, as there are many humidity problems in the temporary camp shelters.

Reuters

A worker walks at a Chinese-invested railway project in Bentong, Malaysia, part of Beijing's "Belt and Road Initiative" with emerging economies.

The departure today of the first grain ship from Ukraine since the start of Russia’s invasion signals more than relief for countries facing acute food shortages. Lifting the blockade on the Black Sea shows that Moscow has felt compelled at some level to acknowledge concerns for a global humanitarian crisis.

Could a similar recognition of universal values be emerging from Beijing? On Saturday a committee of international creditors chaired by France and China agreed to provide debt relief to the southern African country of Zambia. The deal may indicate that China, now the world’s largest lender to poor countries, is moving toward greater cooperation on debt refinancing at a time when scores of nations are near default.

“The composition of the debts of developing countries has shifted dramatically over the past 10 years toward China and the private sector,” David Malpass, president of the World Bank, told the Financial Times. “China recognizes that [engaging with Zambia’s other creditors] is an important way to work with the global community. It’s an important step in that China is recognizing its role in debt restructurings.”

Zambia was the first African country to default during the pandemic. Out of $17 billion in external debt, it owes $6 billion to creditors in China. The deal to restructure Zambia’s debt was brokered through a process that unites China with other major international lending nations. The so-called Common Framework was established in late 2020 in response to the pandemic’s fiscal impact on the world’s poorest countries. It is designed to coordinate debt restructuring among governmental as well as institutional and private-sector lenders.

Roughly two-thirds of 73 countries eligible to apply for financial relief under the framework face debt crises, according to the International Monetary Fund. Chad, Ethiopia, and Zambia are the first of 16 countries that have engaged in the process so far. Details of the Zambian deal have yet to be disclosed. But it included support for a $1.4 billion IMF bailout to help stabilize the country’s economy. World Bank and IMF officials say the deal may provide a road map for highly indebted countries not on the eligibility list, such as Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

More than a third of the $35 billion due in debt service payments by the world’s poorest countries is owed to Chinese public and private entities. Hard financial data about those loans is difficult to obtain. China often attaches nondisclosure agreements to loan packages. It prefers to structure lending terms one-on-one with recipient countries to maintain maximum leverage.

Even within China, that tactic is questioned. “If every people pursues merely the interests of its own state, then we might have a universal value, but it will be a value of exclusion and conflict,” wrote He Huaihong, a philosopher at Peking University, in a 2015 book, “Social Ethics in a Changing China: Moral Decay or Ethical Awakening?”

Like Russia’s war in Ukraine, China’s overextension of debt to poor countries may check its ambitions to reshape the global order. Certain values, such as the right to food or the dignity of self-determination, are beyond the cold pursuit of national gain.