Salon

The final straw came when a teacher accused Alicia, a high school sophomore, of treason.

Alicia (not her real name) hardly comes across as subversive. She’s not one of those kids who is intrigued by anti-American propaganda from ISIS, for example, nor is she one who has been duped by homegrown anti-government groups calling for a citizens’ rebellion. She’s pretty much an ordinary, intelligent teenager—interested in politics, current events and government, but hardly a fringe radical.

Her offense in the eyes of her homeroom teacher, however, was that she chose to sit out the Pledge of Allegiance. This act, for Alicia and countless other young Americans, has brought on the wrath of authority, with teachers and school administrators unleashing mean-spirited accusations and hostility toward students who dare to question the wisdom of a daily loyalty oath. We may be a free country, but any kid who chooses to sit out the collective exercise of exalting America runs a risk of official ostracization.

The U.S. dropped at least 23,144 bombs on six Muslim-majority countries in 2015 — Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

The government has not officially declared war in Syria, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia, but this hasn’t stopped it from bombing them, or from waging a secretive drone war in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia for more than a decade.

Yet it appears these wars are not enough. The Obama administration is “on the verge of taking action” against ISIS in Libya, Sen. Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Politico.

Last week, a 13-year-old male middle school student in Menifee, California named Austin Lacey was sent home from his school’s spirit day, where students were encouraged to wear Disney-themed costumes, because he dressed up as Elsafrom “Frozen.” Was he sent home because he was bullied? No. He told KTLA “his classmates loved the idea and asked him to pose for selfies.” But the school’s superintendent issued a statement declaring, “The Principal’s action was based upon the need to stop a general disruption to the school environment.”

Perhaps the best lesson I’ve ever gotten on the importance of gender identity came from a trans woman who explained, in perhaps the most understandable terms I’ve ever heard, why “misgendering” (that is, among other things, using the incorrect pronoun to identify a person) matters to all of us.

“Think about how upset people in, say, a store or over the phone, when someone incorrectly refers to them as ‘Miss’ or “Mister’ when they don’t identify that way,” she said to me. “That’s how it feels when someone labels you in a way that doesn’t match your gender identity.”

This might be the blackest version of Beyoncé we’ve twerked to yet. However, there are those who aren’t down with Beyoncé’s party — they’re ready to get in anti-Beyoncé protest formation. Coming off the heels of her Super Bowl performance, where she received harsh criticism from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Rep. Peter King, R-Long Island, for being “anti-police,” a #BoycottBeyoncé is brewing. NWA went there in 1988 with “Fuck Tha Police” and received backlash for it, but it’s 2016 — and this critique is just further proof that African-Americans can’t have anything or express ourselves fully without first considering if we’re “race-baiting” white America.

Gather round for the word of the day: metanarrative. Definitions vary but let’s say it’s one big narrative that connects the meaning of events to a belief thought to be an essential truth, the storytelling equivalent of the unified field theory in physics.

Now use it to define what’s being done to America today — our Big Story. Journalist and activist Naomi Klein did just that a couple of weeks ago when she and I talked at Finger Lakes Community College in upstate New York about the Koch brothers’ resistance to the reality of climate change.

“I know if I was a parent up there, I would be beside myself if my kids’ health could be at risk,” said President Obama on a recent trip to Michigan.  “Up there” was Flint, a rusting industrial city in the grip of a “water crisis” brought on by a government austerity scheme.  To save a couple of million dollars, that city switched its source of water from Lake Huron to the Flint River, a long-time industrial dumping ground for the toxic industries that had once made their home along its banks.  Now, the city is enveloped in a public health emergency, with elevated levels of lead in its water supply and in the blood of its children.

The price tag for replacing the lead pipes that contaminated its drinking water, thanks to the corrosive toxins found in the Flint River, is now estimated at up to $1.5 billion. No one knows where that money will come from or when it will arrive.  In the meantime, the cost to the children of Flint has been and will be incalculable.   As little as a few specks of lead in the water children drink or in flakes of paint that come off the walls of old houses and are ingested can change the course of a life. The amount of lead dust that covers a thumbnail is enough to send a child into a coma or into convulsions leading to death. It takes less than a tenth of that amount to cause IQ loss, hearing loss, or behavioral problems like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the government agency responsible for tracking and protecting the nation’s health, says simply, “No safe blood lead level in children has been identified.”

What is happiness? This might sound like a question you’d hear come out of Derek Zoolander’s mouth. But seriously, think about it. Is it a matter of perspective, your relationships, a neurological chemical imbalance, or career fulfillment? The more you try to pin down this elusive state of mind, the more achieving a measure for it seems out of reach. Take the movie Hector and the Search for Happiness (2014), in which Hector (Simon Pegg) travels the entire world trying to solve this philosophical quandary. By the time Hector sort of works it out, all we’re really left with is 120 minutes of our lives we’ll never get back.

Luckily, for the past 39 years, WIN/Gallup International (Worldwide Independent Network of Market Research) has been conducting a survey that claims to offer a quantitative measure of levels of happiness around the world. Last month it published its survey’s most recent findings taking into account “the outlook, expectations, views and beliefs of 66,040 people from 68 countries across the globe.”

The business practices of the pharmaceutical industry have recently come to light, as “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli fills the headlines. Hoping to make $1 billion, the 32-year-old pharmaceutical executive and former hedge fund manager increased the price of a drug used to treat life-threatening parasitic infections by more than 5,500 percent overnight, leading the media to dub him the “most hated man in America.”

Yet these kinds of practices go much deeper, and have persisted much longer in the industry. Shkreli’s company Turing Pharmaceuticals is just one among manythat have been accused of charging high prices.

Fifteen months after 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed by a Cleveland police officer and two months after a grand jury declined to indict the officer, the city has now filed a claim against the deceased child’s estate for the cost of his ambulance ride to the hospital that fatal day in 2014.