The Cost of Extremism: A Conversation with @JoJoFromJerz

As season 1 of The Cost of Extremism comes to a close, we have one last bonus episode for you. We’re here with @JoJoFromJerz for a deep-dive into three stories that we think are especially important to hear right now. 

First, we have Mia Tretta from episode one, ‘The Impact of Active Shooter Drills.’ In her episode, Mia told her story of surviving a school shooting and the death of her best friend, Dominic Blackwell. But what’s often untold in these stories is the medical impact these events have on victim’s lives. There isn't a quick fix to being shot and in some cases, physical healing can take years. 

Eli Erlick and Alejandra Carraballo from episode two,  ‘Anti-Trans Bills are Harming LGBTQ+ Youth,’ explain the impact that anti-trans legislation has had not only on gender affirming care for youth, but adults as well. 

And Monica Walker from episode four,  ‘The School Board Culture War,’ discusses the banning of teaching accurate American history and the danger that comes from ignoring our past. 

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Transcript

The Cost of Extremism - Episode 5 transcript

Jill: Extremists across the country are attacking our freedoms, and kids and families are paying the price. This is the cost of extremism. 

Mia: It's not fair, and there's no judging system of who gets shot and who doesn't, and who survives and who doesn't. 

Eli: They're taking away our healthcare based on... what's essentially unscientific political pressure.

Monica: Those who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it. How dare we not understand the history, not only of this country, but of the world.

Jill: Season One of The Cost of Extremism might be coming to a close, but we have one last bonus episode for you. During the 16 interviews we conducted over the course of these four episodes, I was constantly left amazed by the stories of these amazing women and what they're doing to fight for their communities. Not every story could be included, but we still think everyone needs to hear them. 

So today, we're here with Jo, also known as JoJo from Jerz, for a deep dive into these conversations. While we loved every interview, there are three stories that we think are especially important to hear right now. First up, we have Mia Treta from Episode 1, The Impact of Active Shooter Drills. In her episode, Mia told her story of surviving a school shooting and the death of her best friend, Dominic Blackwell, who is often untold in these stories as the medical impact these events have on victims' lives. There isn't a quick fix to being shot, and in some cases, physical healing can take years. 

Mia: A boy came up to me, telling me it's gonna be okay, and I said, “No, you don't understand. I was shot.”And that's when they started putting pressure on my stomach, and about 15 minutes later, the police came, and I was ambulanced to a nearby park and airlifted to Holy Cross Hospital, which is about 30 minutes away, and I went under multiple procedures to remove the bullet in my stomach, and it was that night I found out that Dominic and another girl, Gracie, passed away in the shooting, and that I was shot with a 45 caliber ghost gun. 

A lot of people ask me, like, “What did you think in the hospital about the shooter? What did you think about this?” But no one's thinking about that, and I, when they showed me a photo of who the shooter was, I had no idea who that was. Like, like you were putting someone on the street in front of me and saying, “Who is this” No idea. I had never seen him in my life. And, but honestly, the only thing you're able to think about in that moment is healing. I wasn't out of surgery until late that night, and it wasn't like I had time to think or process any of it. 

A lot of people think that you leave the hospital, and then you take some medicine, and then it gets better. And that's not at all how it happens. Like, I just two months ago had to get another procedure done because of this lasting effect on the physical side. Obviously, there's a mental toll that is a rollercoaster probably throughout most of our whole lives. But the physical side is very, very similar. A year and a half, two, I believe two years later, I had to get a surgery on my ear because there was a hole in my eardrum from acoustic blast damage. Things that you would never think about being related to this gunshot wound were happening. I had to get so many different procedures done even years later. I had to go on different medications, all because of the physical side. 

And it's not like, “oh, she has this sickness. This is how we treat this sickness.” If you get shot, you can meet someone who also got shot, but it's completely different. Because of the size of the bullet, the type of gun, the area, the millimeters away difference. If it was one millimeter in a different direction, I could not be here today. And it's so person-specific that it's not like you go to the hospital and you're handed a handbook saying, “Here's how you heal from this gunshot wound.” You kind of have to figure it out on your own and listen to your body and how you can kind of figure it out with obviously doctors' help, but on your own mostly. 

I mean, it's so unfortunate that in this scenario, I am the lucky one, right? I am the one who got to survive and it's not fair and there's no judging system of who gets shot and who doesn't, who survives and who doesn't. Gun violence is non partisan. Gun violence doesn't care what race you are, what sexuality you are. It is going to hurt everyone at some point. 

Jo: So as moms, right, like that one, that one hits hard because we are moms of kids who now have to face a reality where we send our kids to school with this palpable fear that her story will be their story. And it's like, it makes me want to cry, but it makes me so angry at the same time. But what is so important about her story, these stories, is that this is the side of these catastrophes that are man made catastrophes. That gets lost in all of the noise and all of the news and that's how we get to a place where there's thoughts and prayers only in the wake of yet another mass shooting because they're not listening to stories like that. They don't spend the time to think about the layers of trauma and pain and emotional suffering and physical suffering that are there that exist with human beings that none of them would want to inflict upon anyone they love or even remotely care about. 

But if they can remove their connection to those truths, Then they can say, “Thoughts and prayers. We don't need to do anything to stop that from happening to someone else's child.” Because that is not a story that they know. And so they remove it from all of us. We have outrage over something and then it disappears in the flash of a second. Because we're not spending the time to hear these stories. And that's doing the whole entire country an obvious massive detriment. 

Jill: And the thing about Mia's story, that I think, that at least I know I haven't heard enough about, is the survivors of actual, of being shot. Like, she was actually shot. And so she's living with that physical pain, you know, having the multiple surgeries, she's living with whatever mental toll that's taking on her.

And then not only was she shot, but her best friend died. So, she's grieving her best friend, and like she said, living with thinking, I'm one of the lucky ones because I survived and he didn't. And so, it's... It doesn't just go away, like you said, yeah, like we hear about, we talk about it, and then we move on with our lives, and I find it very difficult, honestly, as a compassionate person who talks to people all the time, like you do, survivors of these shootings or grieving loved ones who weren't survivors of how to it's like we live with these stories. And it's like, we have to, because they're all of our stories. 

So, you know, like, for example, when I messaged you, when I went to my daughter's orientation for her freshman year of high school, we walked up a staircase and I literally had to stop and take a breath because I felt like I was almost having a panic attack because it looked like the scene of Fred Guttenberg's daughter where she was murdered in her high school. So we're all living with this. So I had to stop, take a breath, and keep moving forward. 

But then I had to process that later of, I'm sending my baby into school not knowing if she's gonna come back and if she does come back, what kind of trauma is she gonna have? If there is a shooting, or this episode which was about active shooter drills, what kind of trauma is that doing to our kids? And the fact that we have legislators that are like, no, let's go ahead and bring more guns into our schools. And let's pay more money in training our kids how to fight off shooters and how to, you know, use tourniquets to help each other if their classmate is bleeding. It's beyond wild. 

Jo: We have built an entire billion dollar industry around a reality that we don't have to accept. It's not like mass shooters fall from the sky on a rainy day. It's, it's, it's not just happening out of nowhere. There's obvious ways that we can actually stop these things from happening. And, and, and we don't even talk about extreme measures that need to be taken. But instead of us doing... something, anything, what we've done as a society is accommodate it as a reality and build all these systems in place, including traumatizing kids with these drills, which I've been on the inside of a school during many of them.

My daughter had a fake one that was real, a real one they thought was real that ended up being fake. She was incredibly traumatized because one of her fellow students wouldn't stop crying loudly and she thought that that child was going to get killed. She was nine at the time. So we are, and, and you and I as parents have to accept this reality that when we say goodbye to our kids in the morning to send them off to school that we may not get them back because they were shot to death.

I've told you guys this a thousand times ever since Sandy Hook, which it really blows my mind that Sandy Hook wasn't a moment where this changed, but it didn't, and when it didn't, it set up everything we've seen since, where it's not changing. But ever since Sandy Hook, I have memorized my kids' clothes every single day they leave for school. Because I remember hearing, after the Sandy Hook shooting, that those parents didn't have enough left of their children's bodies or faces to identify them. And the only way they could do so was by the clothing they were wearing. 

And that's not a reality we should have to accept. These shooter drills and arming teachers and teaching kids how to tourniquet their classmates. That's not what we should be doing. That's not where the focus should be. The focus should be on stopping the shootings to begin with. 

Jill: For our next bonus clip, we have Eli Erlick and Alejandra Caraballo from Episode 2, Anti Trans Bills Are Harming LGBTQ Plus Youth. They explain the impact that anti trans legislation has had not only on gender affirming care for youth, but adults as well.

Eli: There's been so much disinformation about the trans community, so, just such a severe lack of education that it's easy to believe the first thing you hear. And unfortunately with many states banning basic education on queer and trans issues in schools, this decade is the first time many people are hearing about transgender people. It rallies up their base. It gets them loads of money from not just their voters, but also well funded foundations, local action committees, and other groups who normally might not fund certain politicians you would consider more moderate, but they're willing to when they demonize trans youth and try to legislate out our health care.

Being in academia and also being a trans activist, it's very concerning because at this time, I mean, you can publish anything in a peer reviewed journal no matter how factually inaccurate it is. One example I've seen is the decision to close the gender program at a hospital in Sweden. And that's often being cited in these anti trans laws as well. And the decision was entirely political. It was just based on concern for lawsuits coming from far right groups. And they posted this publicly. But the far right media was claiming that it was based on research and not this political pressure. And so this ends up being cited in I believe most of the states where these bills are being passed to limit our healthcare. And this ends up, of course, deeply harming trans people because they're taking away our healthcare based on what's essentially unscientific political pressure rather than, I mean, every single major medical organization which agrees that trans healthcare is healthcare. 

Alejandra: They're trying to impose their worldview on us. And we see groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council, Heritage Foundation all of the same players that have opposed LGBT people for decades are, are the ones really pushing this. “Alliance Defending Freedom.” You know, only freedom for white, straight, cis males, like it's, it's very much like clearly who, who they're for on that end. And, and they're pushing, you know, they're, they're pushing for cases to allow, to openly discriminate against trans people you know, all of this stuff.

And, and, and it's not just limited to trans youth. That's, that's been kind of the pretense that they've used for years now where they're really moving towards now as adults, as we've seen in Florida, it's basically impossible for trans adults to get gender affirming care right now. They cannot get hormones refilled because it is now a crime for nurse practitioners to treat patients with gender dysphoria. It is a misdemeanor crime to provide any treatment, for you as a nurse practitioner and to remind you, nurse practitioners, advanced practice nurse practitioners can treat cancer patients and provide and prescribe chemo. So they have very broad, vast prescribing authority and treatment, like, ability, right? And they're singling out trans people and, and right now primary care is moving to a model that is mostly provided by nurse practitioners. I've had a nurse practitioner as my primary care provider now for seven years. So by banning that, they essentially banned most access. They banned telehealth.

And so that's the next step and there's bills in Congress right now that would eliminate all federal funding for any provider that does gender affirming care and bans insurance tax credits and it's basically a mechanism to effectively eliminate gender affirming care entirely for everyone in this country. And, you know, and they'll say, well, “It's still technically legal. We just don't want the taxpayers to pay for it.” But when you consider that Medicaid programs fund nearly over half of what hospitals do, trans people are more likely to be lower income and can't afford it. And not only that, it removes tax credits and tax deductions for insurance that covers this care at all, it would effectively mandate that all care stop, like, all insurance coverage stop for, for gender affirming care nationwide. That would effectively eliminate care and the clinics would all shut down because if you don't have insurance coverage, you won't have patients. And if you don't have patients, you're going to close down a clinic. 

And, you know, it creates this whole cycle of what essentially happened in the eighties. So you know, they, they, they very much, you know, as Michael Knowles said, they, they, they want to eradicate trans people that this is, this is what they want to do. They want to eradicate us from, from society.

Jo: I just, I mean, I love them and I love, love, love Alejandra. And I got chills just now, because I've, I've watched this video. What I just thought of, you know, like, it just hit me like a Mack truck, is that what we just saw in those two clips is following the thread of the evolution of this agenda from its inception in the disinformation and the fake studies and all of that other stuff that we see like, you know, them pushing this disinformation out there, following it through to the cost to the. impact it's having on human beings, which is fulfilling, again, that agenda that Alejandra just described, which is to eradicate trans people.

I mean, when you think about it, I mean, it blows your mind, because it starts as someone's idea to go after an already marginalized segment of the population, and then you follow the thread through, and we have children and trans adults who are going to die because of this. 

Jill: And the way that it starts off with is what's something that everybody can agree on. And it's protecting children. I feel like almost everybody can agree on, we want to protect children. So like, they were saying, it starts with the trans youth, and it starts with that misinformation, like Eli talked about. So if you hear these things, you're like, “Well that sounds horrible. I don't, I don't want that to happen to youth.” But that's not even true. So it already starts festering that anger and fear in people. And so if they don't know what, like, social transitioning actually is, if they don't understand what's happening here, then that fear and rage will be in them, and that's going to be with them when they go to the voting polls. 

Jo: And we see that echoing in so many different areas of society and all the different prongs of sort of this idea about, of stripping rights away from people. And we see it again, always sort of on this fake, you know, idea of parents rights, protecting kids, when so often, almost all the time, that's actually completely counterintuitive to what they're trying to accomplish. Because every expert doctor, medical, you know medical expert, everyone says that denying trans people trans care… it imperils them. It literally puts them at risk. 

The thing I keep thinking about all the time, we talk about this a lot, I really do feel like there's one segment of the American population that just wants to suppress everyone and everything that isn't, in their mind, like them. Othering, you know demonizing, vilifying, whole groups of people, painting them all with one brushstroke. And we've seen this throughout history as a powerful tool for control, to grasp on to power. It's that fear mongering and othering of communities that people don't know much about, maybe because they aren't in their immediate circle. 

But what we can do is we can, you know, break down those barriers by opening the world of information up, but that's a threat. Information and the truth are a threat to those who are seeking to suppress groups of people that don't look like them. And, and, and so they will go to these extreme measures to eradicate them. Michael Knowles did say that, out loud. To great applause, by the way. But if you were to ask anyone in that audience who was clapping, what has a trans person ever done to you? What, what, what bag of M& Ms with a rainbow on it, you know, made your child want to change genders? Can you think of one? They would say “Well, no, and I don't actually know any, you know, transgender people, but, you know, they want to harm our kids. They want to groom them. They want to indoctrinate them. And so does that M&Ms bag.”

Jill: For our final clip, Monica Walker from Episode 4, The School Board Culture War, discusses the banning of teaching accurate American history and the danger that comes from ignoring our past. 

Monica: We have a very problematic history in this country that has been long defined by a racial the divides that I've spoken of. And I think that we're living in the potential for generations of children right now to, to direct us out of that, to help heal that. And I think the most dangerous thing that we're doing right now is that you, you can't, we say in the work that I do, you can't fix a problem that you can't see. The banning of books and the study of so many things that give kids an understanding of where we are as a, as a people to, to be the, the banning of those books are a threat to that.

One of the books that's being banned is a book by Ruby Bridges. And what happened in that situation, I mean, who would do that? And they say that the, the, the mantra has been that, that talking about history in its truest manifestations is intimidating and painful to some people. 

And I just love it because the thing that most have been saying is, is that if Ruby Bridges could live through it… I got to meet her in person. And Ruby Bridges tells the story. She said that somebody asked her, how did you survive that? How did you get through it? She said, I lived in New Orleans. She said, in New Orleans, we celebrate Mardi Gras. She said, and when the throng of people were out protesting against me in all of the, the sordid nature of what they were doing, she said, I thought they were throwing a parade for me. Isn't that something a six year old, she said, I thought they were celebrating me. I didn't understand what was being done. 

I'm saying all of this to say that whatever was painful for the throngs of people that that that understood a divide that said we couldn't be schooled together. We couldn't learn together. We couldn't eat together. We couldn't commune together. That was painful and people survived it. And now for those who say that we can't survive learning about that history, you know, there's a saying, and I sometimes want to say it's biblical, but then I don't want to misrepresent the Bible, but says that those who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it.

How dare we not understand the history, not only of this country, but of the world? I don't know all religions, but don’t most religions that fundamentally say, love thy neighbor as thyself, that we should be moving in a way of coming together and across those things that divide us? And how do you do that in the absence of really leaning in and studying, you know, history and giving that gift of that understanding to our children? 

Jo: There is a, there is a current that connects all of these stories while they may seem so different. And that is that knowledge and information are the most powerful weapons human beings have in their arsenal. And throughout every one of these different themes, denying people information, access to information is again, denying them an opportunity to see the world for the vast, you know, myriad and tapestry of other people that it is. But denying people access to accurate history is disguised as a way to protect them from being offended by the sins of the past. It's a, it's a Trojan horse. It's a completely false and backward premise and she says it right there, you know, those who ignore their own history are doomed to repeat it because that is the truth. And that is, that's again, part of the agenda. If you remove access to accurate history, to the truth, you take away an opportunity to empower yourself.

Jill: I just think of one time we had a conversation and we were talking to one of our organizers and she talked about how some people view life through a straw. And I think of that image a lot because I do think that's a little bit of how I grew up. And when I think about even the history I was taught growing up in a small town in Indiana, it was, it, it was very much like looking through a straw. But then when you remove that straw, then you realize there's such a bigger world out there. And it actually makes it way more interesting and gives you the ability to move forward and progress and progress. 

So I think about that when we're talking about the, you know, teaching this accurate history and then also as a mom of two white children. I want my kids to learn this. I don't want my kids to be centered at every single story that they hear, of every book that they read. I want them to understand other perspectives and I want them to know what the actual history of our country is because they can handle it. They're not that fragile. And, from what I gather from my kids and their friends and going to school board meetings when lots of students show up, students want that. When I started learning more in my adulthood, I was like, angry, to be honest. I was like, why didn't I learn about this when I was younger? I wish I knew. But now that I know better, I'm just going to keep trying to do better. 

Jo: I mean, by our nature, human beings are curious, right? Like that's, that's just one of the things that is true about us. And in kids in particular, you know how it is when you say you can't have this book, this video, this thing, this app, you know, how kids are, they're like, okay, sure, I'm going to go out and find it anyway, because there's the thing. It exists. And as much as people want to try and deny that things exist, deny that accurate history took place, deny that the sky is blue and up is down, as much as they want to do all of that stuff, at the end of the day, the truth is still out there. The world is still diverse. 

And, and, and if you try to shield your children from what is actually out there in the world, they're going to find it and they're not going to be equipped to handle it because you didn't give them the tools early on. But that's also by design, right? So it's this idea that there's this oppression, again, almost on the human spirit but to deny sort of the evolution, the cultural and societal evolution of, of the world, particularly as it's happening right here in the United States. But this idea that you can suppress that or stop it or push it back or push it down and really be met with anything but resistance, which is what's happening now, because the world has changed since the day it first started being the world, you know, and that change is part of. our existence, it's part of reality and, and it's going to continue to happen until, you know, the sun swallows the earth whole or Keith Richards dies, whichever happens first, I don't know. You can't fundamentally, you cannot succeed in trying to squelch that change. You just can't. And this is a fight in futility. 

And it's, it's really messy now. And we've gone through very, very messy periods in the past, and those struggles have been horrible and bloody and painful. And we're looking at a lot of them coming back around and they're going to do that. But we are ultimately, I truly believe, we are going to prevail. The truth and facts will prevail. I have to believe that. And I think that with voices like these, with conversations like these, with stories like these, that's how we get there.

Jill: That's all we have for Season 1 of The Cost of Extremism, but don't forget to subscribe, because we'll see you right back here for Season 2, coming soon. And be sure to rate and review this podcast, especially if you liked it. The Cost of Extremism is hosted and narrated by Jill Jonason, produced by Abigael Martin and Ashley Hufford, and written and edited by Abigael Martin.