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Archives for January 2017

Trusting Your News Feed

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10 Investigative Reporting Outlets to Follow

January 13, 2017

This post first appeared on BillMoyers.com.

We’ve just started a new series highlighting some of the best, in-depth investigative journalism that is uncovering real news, revealing wrongdoing and fomenting change. As a compendium, here are 10 investigative reporting outlets that are worth following if they’re not already on your radar.

1. ProPublica — Founded 10 years ago by a former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica is a nonprofit investigative news site based in New York City. In 2010 ProPublica was the first online publication to win a Pulitzer Prize and has earned two more since, as well as a long list of other prestigious awards.

2. The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) — An early player in the nonprofit investigative space, CPI has been around for close to 30 years. Its reporters have won dozens of journalism awards, including a Pulitzer in 2014, for its investigations of money in politics, national security, health care reform, business and the environment.

3. The Center For Investigative Reporting (CIR) — Founded 40 years ago in the San Francisco Bay Area, CIR is a nonprofit that has partnered for years with other outlets to reach a wide audience in print, on television, on radio and online. It collaborates with PRX Radio to produce Reveal, the investigative radio program and podcast. The Reveal website is now home to all of CIRs investigative content.

4. Frontline — Launched more than 30 years ago, Frontline is television’s most consistent and respected investigative documentary program. Its documentaries are broadcast on PBS and are available online, along with original reporting.

5. Mother Jones — Mother Jones, founded in 1976, is a reader-supported, nonprofit news organization headquartered in San Francisco with bureaus in Washington, DC and New York City. The site includes investigative reporting as well as general reporting on topics including politics, climate change and education.

6. The Intercept — The Intercept is a news organization launched in 2014 by legal and political journalist Glenn Greenwald, investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras.

7. Real Clear Investigations — Real Clear Investigations, which launched last fall, is the new nonprofit, investigative arm of Real Clear Politics. It is mostly an aggregator of investigative reporting, but has also begun conducting original investigations.

8. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) — ICIJ is a nonprofit offshoot of the Center for Public Integrity that began 20 years ago. It is a global network of more than 190 investigative journalists in more than 65 countries who work together to investigate cross-border issues including crime, corruption and abuse of power.

9. Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) — IRE is a grass-roots, nonprofit, membership organization that has been providing tips, training and conferences for investigative reporters since 1975. Its blog, Extra! Extra! showcases a wide variety of watchdog journalism.

10. BuzzFeed — Whatever you think about its decision to release the Trump dossier earlier this week (journalists are divided in their opinions), BuzzFeed has a growing investigative team and body of work worth attention, but it’s not always easy to find on the site. If you want to know what the team is up to you can follow its editor, Mark Schoofs, @Schoofsfeed on Twitter.

2017 Isn’t ‘1984’

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2017 isn’t ‘1984’ – it’s stranger than Orwell imagined

John Broich, Case Western Reserve University

A week after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s “1984” is the best-selling book on Amazon.com.

The hearts of a thousand English teachers must be warmed as people flock to a novel published in 1949 for ways to think about their present moment.

Orwell set his story in Oceania, one of three blocs or mega-states fighting over the globe in 1984. There has been a nuclear exchange, and the blocs seem to have agreed to perpetual conventional war, probably because constant warfare serves their shared interests in domestic control.

Oceania demands total subservience. It is a police state, with helicopters monitoring people’s activities, even watching through their windows. But Orwell emphasizes it is the “ThinkPol,” the Thought Police, who really monitor the “Proles,” the lowest 85 percent of the population outside the party elite. The ThinkPol move invisibly among society seeking out, even encouraging, thoughtcrimes so they can make the perpetrators disappear for reprogramming.

The other main way the party elite, symbolized in the mustached figurehead Big Brother, encourage and police correct thought is through the technology of the Telescreen. These “metal plaques” transmit things like frightening video of enemy armies and of course the wisdom of Big Brother. But the Telescreen can see you, too. During mandatory morning exercise, the Telescreen not only shows a young, wiry trainer leading cardio, it can see if you are keeping up. Telescreens are everywhere: They are in every room of people’s homes. At the office, people use them to do their jobs.

The story revolves around Winston Smith and Julia, who try to resist their government’s overwhelming control over facts. Their act of rebellion? Trying to discover “unofficial” truth about the past, and recording unauthorized information in a diary. Winston works at the colossal Ministry of Truth, on which is emblazoned IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. His job is to erase politically inconvenient data from the public record. A party member falls out of favor? She never existed. Big Brother made a promise he could not fulfill? It never happened.

Because his job calls on him to research old newspapers and other records for the facts he has to “unfact,” Winston is especially adept at “doublethink.” Winston calls it being “conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies… consciously to induce unconsciousness.”

Oceania: The product of Orwell’s experience

Orwell’s setting in “1984” is inspired by the way he foresaw the Cold War – a phrase he coined in 1945 – playing out. He wrote it just a few years after watching Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin carve up the world at the Tehran and Yalta conferences. The book is remarkably prescient about aspects of the Stalinist Soviet Union, East Germany and Maoist China.

Orwell was a socialist. “1984” in part describes his fear that the democratic socialism in which he believed would be hijacked by authoritarian Stalinism. The novel grew out of his sharp observations of his world and the fact that Stalinists tried to kill him.

In 1936, a fascist-supported military coup threatened the democratically elected socialist majority in Spain. Orwell and other committed socialists from around the world, including Ernest Hemingway, volunteered to fight against the rightist rebels. Meanwhile, Hitler lent the rightists his air power while Stalin tried to take over the leftist Republican resistance. When Orwell and other volunteers defied these Stalinists, they moved to crush the opposition. Hunted, Orwell and his wife had to flee for their lives from Spain in 1937.

George Orwell at the BBC.

Back in London during World War II, Orwell saw for himself how a liberal democracy and individuals committed to freedom could find themselves on a path toward Big Brother. He worked for the BBC writing what can only be described as “propaganda” aimed at an Indian audience. What he wrote was not exactly doublethink, but it was news and commentary with a slant to serve a political purpose. Orwell sought to convince Indians that their sons and resources were serving the greater good in the war. Having written things he believed were untrue, he quit the job after two years, disgusted with himself.

Imperialism itself disgusted him. As a young man in the 1920s, Orwell had served as a colonial police officer in Burma. In a distant foreshadowing of Big Brother’s world, Orwell reviled the arbitrary and brutish role he took on in a colonial system. “I hated it bitterly,” he wrote. “In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the gray, cowed faces of the long-term convicts…”

Oceania was a prescient product of a particular biography and particular moment when the Cold War was beginning. Naturally, then, today’s world of “alternative facts” is quite different in ways that Orwell could not have imagined.

Big Brother not required

Orwell described a single-party system in which a tiny core of oligarchs, Oceania’s “inner party,” control all information. This is their chief means of controlling power. In the U.S. today, information is wide open to those who can access the internet, at least 84 percent of Americans. And while the U.S. arguably might be an oligarchy, power exists somewhere in a scrum including the electorate, constitution, the courts, bureaucracies and, inevitably, money. In other words, unlike in Oceania, both information and power are diffuse in 2017 America.

Those who study the decline in standards of evidence and reasoning in the U.S. electorate chiefly blame politicians’ concerted efforts from the 1970s to discredit expertise, degrade trust in Congress and its members, even question the legitimacy of government itself. With those leaders, institutions and expertise delegitimized, the strategy has been to replace them with alternative authorities and realities.

In 2004, a senior White House adviser suggested a reporter belonged to the “reality-based community,” a sort of quaint minority of people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.… That’s not the way the world really works anymore.”

Orwell could not have imagined the internet and its role in distributing alternative facts, nor that people would carry around Telescreens in their pockets in the form of smartphones. There is no Ministry of Truth distributing and policing information, and in a way everyone is Big Brother.

It seems less a situation that people are incapable of seeing through Big Brother’s big lies, than they embrace “alternative facts.” Some researchers have found that when some people begin with a certain worldview – for example, that scientific experts and public officials are untrustworthy – they believe their misperceptions more strongly when given accurate conflicting information. In other words, arguing with facts can backfire. Having already decided what is more essentially true than the facts reported by experts or journalists, they seek confirmation in alternative facts and distribute them themselves via Facebook, no Big Brother required.

In Orwell’s Oceania, there is no freedom to speak facts except those that are official. In 2017 America, at least among many of the powerful minority who selected its president, the more official the fact, the more dubious. For Winston, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” For this powerful minority, freedom is the freedom to say two plus two make five.

The Conversation

John Broich, Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Shoe Room: A Visit to the U.S. Holocaust Museum

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Today, January 27, is Holocaust memorial Day. An appropriate day to re-post this bit about my visit to the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. a few years ago. Let’s read and remember and understand that by the time the bad guys (of any stripe) start the expulsions, legalize the executions, and dig the mass graves,  it’s too late to fix the problem through legislative means. We believe ourselves to be better than that. Let’s not allow it to get to that point.

***

I was all right until I saw the shoe room.

My wife and I spent the weekend in Washington, D.C. She had business to take care of, I had research to do at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. We had plans to leave Monday afternoon so Monday morning we decided to visit the U.S. Holocaust Museum. We’re not religious Jews, neither of our families dealt much with the Holocaust directly but we figured for a day, we could afford to put our noses up to the window of history and embrace the horror.

I’m not going to describe the whole thing (I mean, hey, why ruin the ending, right? /sarcasm) but the Power of Nazi  Propaganda exhibit was an awesome display of just how to get ordinary people to consistently behave like madmen. That was our first stop, it took about an hour to go through the whole thing.

We had to wait a while for the permanent exhibit: a grand tour of the most horrific years in twentieth century history.  We joked as we got on line, because, well, you sort of have to. Mel Brooks was absolutely right: you have to laugh or you never stop crying.

The museum was packed: I’m told it generally is. Parents bring their kids, grandparents bring their kids. There’s a waiting area near the door and the children, especially the young ones act like themselves. They run, they jump around, they hang on the furniture and get scolded by attentive parents. I must have heard ten different languages and seen folks of every color and creed walk by while we waited for the permanent exhibit to open up, which was strangely comforting. It’s one thing to be told that WE MUST NEVER FORGET and another thing entirely to see families with no roots in European Jewry whatsoever making an effort to live up to that advice.

All that stops when they go into the elevator and go up to the fourth floor. Up there it’s nothing but hushed whispers and wide eyes.

The first thing you hear is a voice over a speaker in the elevator, ostensibly a bewildered American GI, saying “We’ve found something here and we’re not sure what it is, exactly. Some kind of prison. There are people wandering around, starving, dying.” The doors open and you’re face to face with a wall-sized photo of those same American GIs standing over a mass grave filled with burnt, mangled corpses, obviously at a loss for understanding.

There are three floors of that sort of thing placed in chronological order. The tour is self-guided, so you proceed ar your own pace. The fourth floor deals with the rise of the Nazis to real power in 1933, and then consolidating that power at the expense of those they considered inferiors. The third floor shows the war itself and the American reaction. The second floor shows the details of the Final Solution and the post war years.

There was little on display that I hadn’t encountered before. I was used to it. My father, my brother, and I were all World War II buffs. I had a grand-uncle who parachuted into Normandy with the 82nd Airborne. And we were Jewish, so we had to learn all this other stuff on top of it. Names of concentration camps. The Warsaw Ghetto. The Ghetto uprising. The gas chambers, the crematoria, the rise of Zionism to a fever pitch after the war ended. The fact that the American government had other things on its mind even as the newspapers screamed about what was going on in Europe. Cantor Bydner, who taught me my Bar Mitzvah haftorah, was a Holocaust survivor. Those of us who didn’t have a survivor in their family, knew friends who had. It was part of our lives. Walking through the displays caused a lot of stress, but no surprises.

In a grotesque way, all this was old hat: Jewish American kids in the 1970s learned about those events the way we learned about English grammar and chemistry: I before E except after C. Water is H2O. The Germans wiped out six million of us, and the crazy Arabs would finish the job in a minute if they could, so Israel is the center of the world. Got that? Good. Let’s eat. The possibility that it wasn’t that simple never occurred to us.

On the second floor as you walk through a glass corridor, several panes etched with the names of scores of towns that were wiped out, you enter a darkened room that is filled with shoes.

That’s the display: Shoes. Old shoes. New shoes. Worn shoes. Badly repaired shoes. Some were withered with use. Some were scuffed from extensive use. Black leather shoes. Brown cloth shoes. Men’s shoes. Women’s shoes. Wide shoes. Narrow shoes.

Baby shoes.

Hundreds of them. Arranged in a heap ten or twelve inches deep covering the two hundred square foot floor except for a narrow path that you walk through to go the next room.

Shoes.

Obviously, there are other artifacts on display, both out in the open and behind plexiglass. Some are necessarily more personal than others: Striped pajamas from the camps. Eating utensils. Bowls, plates, cutlery. Doors. Keys. A massive black iron casting of the front gate of Auschwitz (the original is in Poland). Scale models of the Killing Centers* including a massive crowd of two-inch tall figurines being herded into gas chambers. A preserved gas chamber door. Empty poison gas canisters. Prisoners’ wooden bunks. Thousands of photographs, several miles of archival film. The shoe room breaks everyone, even if it’s just a little bit.

Shoes.

On reflection, I know why the shoe room works. Shoes are intensely personal items that we use to define ourselves as people. Think about it: is there any item of human manufacture that speaks to civilization and our place in it more than footwear? Even simple ones like sandals, even cut strips of bark wrapped around the foot with vines. Shoes are a mark of  western civilization, evidence of progress, a standard of normal life among cities. Our rules of daily routine require them. Going barefoot is permissible to very young children but that’s it. “I cried because I had no shoes …”** The only time we take our shoes off is to sleep. Even when we bury our dead, someone puts a pair of shoes on the deceased before the body is lowered into the grave. We discard shoes only when we’ve destroyed them. Or, in this case, destroyed the people in them.

Shoes.

The problem with exhibits like this one–graphic presentations created by curators and the processional historians they work with to try to illustrate and perhaps explain immense, insane things to otherwise well-informed visitors–is that after a certain point, people tend to turn off. It quickly becomes to much to process. Something like the Holocaust is too big to grasp, even if like me and five million other American Jews, we’ve been steeped in this history most of our lives. Additionally, this is for all intents and purposes, a pretty tame exhibit. The really frightening stuff is living over at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Living beneath that Sword of Damocles is now part of growing up Jewish. We all asked the same question of our teachers in Hebrew School:  Why them? Why us? How did something like this ever happen? There were no answers except for the obvious platitudes: “Because they hate us.” “Because they were crazy.” “Because that’s what people who hate do.” The real answer, however, was always the same: the haunted look in our elders’ eyes when they told us these things. That look said: we have no idea. We don’t know why it happened, but then we don’t know why water is H2O, either. It just is. And that terrified them. It didn’t do us kids any good, either.

But anyone can understand a room full of discarded shoes.

This is probably wishful thinking at work but for the first time in my life, I think I have an idea of why Holocaust deniers stick to their stories.*** People who insist that the big event never happened or happened on an infinitely smaller scale aren’t like Bob in Accounting who swears up and down that he paid back that five-spot that he borrowed from you last month when he didn’t–that guy is just being a putz. You don’t loan him money again. Fine.

They also aren’t like pundits, politicians, and corporate excs who insist that there’s no such thing as man-made global warming, or if there is, it’s either not their fault or not as bad as the media says it is. That’t mere greed in action: if  it’s real, and they caused it, then they’re responsible for fixing it which would cost them their jobs. Obnoxious but understandable.

People who deny the facts of the Holocaust are coming from a much darker place. It has less to do with hate and more to do with fear. Raw, unbridled, fear of it having happened, because if it’s real, then it really did happen, and if  it happened once to the Jews, then it can happen again, to them.  That’s a decidedly sane reaction. It’s a good thing to be afraid of for the simple reason that there are always people willing and able to capitalize on fear and hate to gain and maintain power. But instead of dealing with the fear, these folks twist it, turn it into something outside reality, and blame the victims. Perversely ensuring that the next time something like it does happen, they won’t see it. Problem solved!

None of the visitors in my group stayed in the Shoe Room for very long. We glanced around and hurried past. That’s simple self-preservation at work; anyone with a fragment of imagination who lingered in the Shoe Room walked out in tears. There are giant posters placed throughout the museum, ordering visitors to THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU HAVE SEEN, but compared to the Shoe Room, they fall flat.

The final rooms cover the aftermath years: 1945-1949, covering the gathering of the survivors, the effort to push Great Britain to release control of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel. There are flags to denote the countries where sympathizers rescued Jews from the Nazis, and the names of thousands of Jewish resistors. It’s heartening to see, if only because no-one likes to think of their people as the ones who went to their doom without a fight. None of it made up for the Shoe Room.  I don’t think anything can.

 

* “Killing Center” is the museum’s term for it, and that is how it’s used in the explanation placards. I find the phrase accurate but sterile. “Death Camp” is the term I was raised to remember. It’s not technically correct–there were many more forced labor camps than death camps per se– but it’s got a bit more oomph, don’t you think?

** ” . . . until I met a man who had no feet.”

***As opposed to mere anti-semites who are all about the hate.

Renewing an Oath

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Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall educate people, answer any question, and read to children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my reference desk. I am the candle in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the shield that guards the knowledge of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Library, for this night and all the nights to come.

—The Library Oath

Reader’s Advisory: The Handmaid’s Tale

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The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is an old favorite of those who would make unpleasant books go away, and was listed 37th on the American Library Association’s list of 100 Most Banned Books from 1990 to 1999. It was challenged in 2001 in Dripping Springs, Texas by a group of parents who declared it anti-Christian and pornographic. Also quite recently, the Judson School District Board in San Antonio, TX overturned a ban of The Handmaid’s Tale by the superintendent. Ed Lyman had ordered the book taken out of the advanced placement English curriculum when a parent complained it contained sexual and anti-Christian content. A committee comprised of teachers, students, and a parent had recommended the book remain in the class, but Lyman said he felt it did not fit in with the standards of the community.

To be fair: violence, certainly. Sex, absolutely. Anti-Christian, perhaps, if you happen to believe that Jesus was all about wielding obscene levels of wealth and power against the meek. Pornographic, no. There is nothing arousing about the situations found in this book.

The world of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a grim one. Women are second-class citizens in the recently formed Republic of Gilead. Women may not own property or carry money. All dresses and hats come with veils. They may not read, write, or (occasionally) speak unless spoken to.  Older women are often pressed into service as domestic Marthas, ruled over by Wives. Because of falling fertility rates in Gilead the younger and hopefully more fertile women are sometimes assigned as Handmaids, expected to produce children for the elite rulers of Gilead. Early in the book, it’s suggested that the suicide rate among Handmaids is quite high.

Meanwhile, older women, barren women, homosexuals and criminals are declared Unwomen and sent to colonies to enjoy hard labor cleaning up environmental disasters, toxic chemical spills, or other similar work. Secret police, known as Eyes, are everywhere.

All this is told to the reader through the eyes and voice of Offred, a Handmaid who’s assigned to an older military officer (the Commander.) Her job is to produce a child for the couple, which is unlikely, as the Wife believes that her husband is actually sterile—a dangerous thought, as Gileadan law says that only women can be sterile. Desperate to manage the situation, the Commander’s Wife arranges for Offred to sleep with Nick, her husband’s driver, in an effort to get her pregnant. Nick and Offred become attached to each other. Eventually, Nick tells her that he can get her out of the country if she’s willing to trust him. The book ends with an assumed contact of Nick’s leading her into an unmarked van, although whether she’s being saved or led to her doom by Eyes is left unsaid.

You don’t read a lot about the men in this society directly, since Offred’s dealings with them are sharply limited by the rules she lives by. Men are either in charge, as the Commander is; or they serve those in charge, as Nick, his driver, does; or they populate the military and police forces that maintain order. The pecking order is rigid and there is no escape. Men conform or die, their bodies to be hung in a public square as a testament to the Gileadan manner of justice. Simple.

The most frequently cited reasons for banning this book are the description of Christianity found in its pages. However, the fundamentalist government depicted in the book merely uses certain images found in Christianity as a tool to maintain militarily enforced rules of society. For an environment supposedly espousing Christian values, Christ himself–who commanded his followers to love the poor, tend the sick, comfort those in prison, and abhor excessive wealth–is nowhere to be found.

That said, the folks who complain about the sheer brutality of the book’s worldview may have a point: violence is the center of the Handmaid’s world. Society at some point in the not too distance past was disrupted when a cabal of fundamentalist-minded military officers executed the civilian government and declared themselves rulers over God’s kingdom. Wars against the infidel are endemic; a news show described by Offred mentions the execution of Quaker and Baptist rebels, and the forcible uprooting of “Children of Ham” (i.e., Blacks) to North Dakota. Jews are given a choice: convert or leave for Zion. There’s some question as to how many of those put on the boats ever arrive at their destination.

The violence that Offred experiences is more psychological than physical, although she says at one point the Wives are allowed to beat Handmaids as long as they use bare hands, since “there’s scriptural precedent.” Handmaids have no names except for those assigned (Offred, Ofglen, Ofwarren, etc.) by the management. Money has been replaced by pictograph tokens they can use to buy food at the local grocery; even the store signs have been replaced by wordless logos. The ostensible reason for this—the reason the Handmaids are told during their training as state-sponsored breeders—is that it’s for their own protection. Women are too valuable, they’re told, to have to deal with such types of stress.

So here we are. 2017 and Handmaid’s Tale is every bit as creepy as it was when first published in 1985. In a way it’s worse now. The Commander’s Wife, a genteel lady named Serena Joy, was, in her prime, a televangelist who railed against the horrors of modern life and worked tirelessly to bring about the world she now lives in, a world directed by “Christian” values and enforces “traditional” family life. One imagines that she’s resigned to being the head of a household rather than a self-directing individual in a world of business, power, wealth, and religion. One expects that she’d imagined herself being rather more free and/or powerful than she is allowed to be by the leaders she helped bring to power.

As we head into a new presidential administration, it’s worth remembering that this book was meant to be a cautionary tale of a dystopian reality. But…there are those who would use it as a handbook to create a future they very much want to see.

Let’s do better than Gilead did.

The Smartest Ones in the Room: A Review of Hidden Figures

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In 1961, America was all about the mission. A directive that sounds simple was but was anything but. The Space Race between the USA and the USSR was on. Both sides were engaged in a game of technological Can You Top This? and the Russians were winning. Cold War America was held in the grip of a simple fear. The Russians had already proved five years earlier that they could built a rocket capable of pushing an artificial satellite into orbit. The logic from there told us a simple story: If a satellite could be pushed that far that fast, then what was to prevent them from putting a nuclear bomb on the top of that rocket and flying it over to the US? World War II was only a decade and a half into history and the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fresh in American minds.

Into this setting we meet Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson (played by Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae respectively), three black women who work as “computers” at NASA, calculating the trajectories for Project Mercury. They are part of the West Area Computers Group at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Despite their clear experience, talent, and proficiency with the work–and the ambition to improve their skills and experience–1961 Virginia is not an encouraging place. Despite making use of her skills, Johnson’s supervisor won’t allow her to put her name on the report she writes or attend briefings on mission updates. The local librarian would rather throw Vaughan out of the building than allow her to borrow a book on FORTRAN so she can learn about the newly installed IBM mainframe. And while she contributes to figuring out how to improve the quality of the Mercury capsule’s heat shield, Jackson can’t be trained or hired as an engineer without taking the advanced classes that are only available at a whites-only institution.

Hidden Figures is a movie about achievement and racism. History, until relatively recently, has tended to forget or ignore the stories of individuals who contributed significantly to our national success if they didn’t fit the narrative. It makes its point without being high-handed or manufacturing drama for the sake of a conflict. The setting provides conflict enough. 1961 Virginia was was a time and place where segregation was considered utterly normal, even banal. We’re shown this in a series of small but essential scenes on the NASA campus: Johnson’s most annoying problem isn’t her work load or her co-workers, it’s the fact to just going to the toilet entails a 40 minute trip from her office to the colored-only rest room on the other end of the compound. It’s not until her boss is made aware of this that he realizes just how insane the law is. His solution is to tear down the white-only signs from the building. Segregation doesn’t fit the Mission, so out it goes. Time is precious. Get back to work.

That’s really the point of the film: segregation doesn’t fit the national mission. It’s an archaic, emotional reaction to a shallow need to feel superior to those around us based on superficial differences. The decision to do away with it is one we never really made.

On that note, we could do worse than to encourage women and girls to get involved in determining our national mission.

So, be the smartest one in the room.

Be essential to the mission.

Demonstrate your ability, skill, and competence to the world.

And if the existing mission is detrimental to the country, then let’s create a new mission that isn’t.

In the meantime, make noise. Make them notice you. Make it clear to those who don’t value you that you must be valued. More importantly, show them why. Show them what you have done. Demonstrate your vision to anyone who will listen. Do it now.

Happy MLK Day. Go see this movie. Now.