The Summer of Our Discontent?

The “Really?” moments are coming too often, fast, and too outlandishly. There is hardly time to ponder their implications before another one hits. In less than six months we have become a different America and it might be intentional.  Franklin warned us that keeping our Republic would not be easy. He was right.

A perfect storm of unexpected events hit us this year, disrupting our efforts to form a more perfect union. Two stand out. A novel virus has killed over a hundred and fifty thousand souls so far, and the murder of George Floyd’s by Milwaukee police officers, in full view of bystanders who recorded the event and sent it viral in minutes. Hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets across the nation, to tell the nation that enough is enough.

Millions of people ignored the nation’s healthcare experts, went to the beaches, and filled the bars, all without masks or social distancing. Some even termed the virus a hoax devised for political purposes.  The storm clouds wake us to a new reality as the thunder rolls across the country demanding change.

It started in New York, as many things do when the virus warranted a near-total shut down of a three-state area. Thousands caught the virus; some felt no symptoms and thousands of others filled the ICU beds. After reaching a scary peak of cases and deaths the trend line went nearly straight down as sharply as it had risen. There were thirty-two thousand deaths in NYC to date, but the rate is down to only a few per day. The state had followed the science and did what they were supposed to do to control the spread of the virus.

The virus doesn’t care if you or your state is red or blue, it doesn’t care if you are young or middle age. It is especially virulent among older people, which may be why I take offense when younger folks ignore the experts. In these national crises, in which over 153,000 people have died in less than six months,  national leadership is conspicuously absent.

There are recommendations about how we should behave, but no set of standards to follow nationwide. There is a lack of equipment and testing chemicals, and members of the administration contradict their own guidelines. This hot potato went to the governors to ferret out for themselves; just what the country needed, fifty-plus individuals making political decisions about a healthcare issue. What could go wrong?

To this day there is no mandate for wearing a mask in public. Those states that did not follow the science, that ignored normal protocols and that opened too quickly are now the hotbeds of virus breakouts. When we should have had a more stringent lockdown still in effect, they crumbled from the weight on non-scientists to open the beaches and the bars, and to the employers who were suffering from continued expenses with no income. As a result, it is likely we will have another month or a three-month lockdown, because of the high case count and the daily increase in deaths, the result of wobbly thinking and ignorance piled on top of selfishness. 

George Floyd’s death opened the floodgates of despair felt by marginalized people in our country. Evidently, police brutality was the norm in some neighborhoods, less than adequate school supplies, equipment, and instruction didn’t match expenditures in affluent white areas, sections of towns and cities were redlined for certain minority groups, and home mortgages were harder to get for those with a certain racial profile. The wounds had been festering long enough for some and they rose up.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, night after night and week after week, in city after city and town after town, they tore at the fabric of the velvet glove that hid the iron fist of truth.[i] The protestors were peaceful, except for those few who saw an opportunity to tear down, ruin, and loot. The marches highlighted the need for equal justice in the land, for equal treatment for citizens, for institutional change, and for an end to systemic abuse and diverse treatment by those in power.

The pandemic shed light on some of our imperfections, institutionalized over the years, in how we do things. Because of Covid-19 millions of people lost their jobs. Because they lost their jobs most lost their health insurance. When they lost their health insurance they lost their healthcare. Why are we, the richest country in the world not providing universal health care? Why is healthcare tied to employment? Too often, when we talk about affordable healthcare we really mean affordable health insurance.  It is time to stop arguing about “affordable healthcare” and start talking about available healthcare.

People who lost jobs can’t afford food and rent. Thousands line up every day, in cities across the country to get free food. They didn’t lose their jobs because of their performance, their behavior, or because they worked for companies with ancient products and processes. They lost their jobs because the government shut down the country. While the US put out a $1,200 payment to most Americans months ago and $600 extra in unemployment, other countries gave companies 75% of their payroll costs to keep people on the payroll or gave the unemployed $2,000 per month for six months so that they could afford to stay home. While expensive, most of Europe has beat down the virus because people had an incentive to stay home. In the US the benefits first provided ran out on August first. Those benefits included added unemployment, a per person stimulus of $1,200, and protection from eviction or loss of homes if people could not pay their rent or mortgage. Rather than deal with a plan to extend those benefits, the Senate adjourned for a summer break. Really?

The novel virus showed us how vulnerable our supply chain has become. All of our PPE supplies are produced in China and other countries that are not known to be our close friends. We have forced the hospitals to rely on “just in time” inventory practices, ostensibly to keep the cost down,  rather than “just in case” inventory stockpiling for emergencies. Really?

The murder of George Floyd made visible the inequities among people, especially people of color, in our country. The marches and protests highlighted the lack of job openings, school inequities, and even microaggressions. We saw how quickly a federal response could be mustered to put down a constitutionally sanctioned protest. We saw how quickly we could, conceivably, go from a democratic republic, formed with three equal branches, that supports people’s right to question authority to one that believes as Attorney General Barr does in the unitary executive power of the President that allows him unfettered authority. The Executive Branch showed how that worked in Portland, in Oregon.

The Russians had the NKVD, East Germany had the Stasi, the Third Reich had the Gestapo. When you search for the name of the US Secret Police you will come up blank because we are a democracy, a nation of laws, a nation with a constitution and culture that doesn’t allow something like that, we are not among the scores of countries who have them. That was true until this month when the executive used unfettered authority to send Secret Police to quell the protests in Portland.

Presidents obviously have great power, seldom used until recently. One of their jobs is to protect federal buildings. We have a Protective Service for that. If they can’t handle a situation they call for help from local or state police forces. In Portland, hooligans spray painted the federal courthouse and planned to do more damage. Let’s be clear, the destruction of property is a crime, and those who do that should be arrested and punished.

In Portland, however, a cadre of what looked like armed militia took to the streets and started kidnapping people and taking them away in unmarked vans. You have to assume they were vigilantes, because their camouflaged outfits had no nametags, no shields, and they carried heavy armor. One had to assume they were not real law enforcement folks, because America doesn’t have Secret Police of Storm Troopers. The President has announced that he is sending more Secret Police into American Cities to put an end to protests. The governors of many states and the mayors of many cities have asked the President not to send in the storm troopers because it escalates violence, because every US citizen has the right to protest. Some, however, have asked for help in solving crimes, help with reducing crimes, and assistance with needed gun control measures. That is a very different approach to the use of federal resources.

 It took over two-hundred years of trying to build a more perfect union, not always successfully and not always fairly, but with a general belief that we can work toward perfection. We know the work will never be finished, but we struggle on. We are fast becoming an oligarchy which always moves further and further toward dictatorship or at least a strong-man government.  Timothy Snyder reminds us that, “When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches, and pictures of a leader,, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.”[ii] We can’t give power to white nationalists carrying torches in the streets. We can’t have Brown Shirts destroying our cities and towns. We can’t let the federal government send storm troopers to our cities uninvited. That is not how America works.

Saul Alinsky, a well known and ambitious community organizer usually associated with the far left approach of bringing about change gets a lot of credit, maybe too much, for teaching people how to change society or culture. His Ten Rules[iii] include how to use the power you don’t have but people think you have, how to use chaos to keep people moving from one disruption to another. His methods laid out in ten chapters were meant for those who are left of center. Knowingly or not, the current administration’s leadership has created almost daily disruption and chaos. People are tired! Recent poll data[iv] shows that a large number of people listen to the President – if he doesn’t wear a mask, I won’t. If he doesn’t like Jeff, I don’t like him either. One of Alinsky’s rules was to tire people out, pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Really?

“Law and Order” was the target last month, a pejorative for lets be tough on the minorities, a leftover from the Nixon days. "Mail-in ballots" is the theme this month. Make the first tweet of the morning nothing more than “Law and Order” and millions of people clammer for it, even if means sending in Secret Police to get those leftist protesters. Tell people that mail-in ballots, but not absentee ballots, will cause voting fraud and make the election unfair and millions will repeat the mantra, in spite of data that says the claim is a fraud and some states have been using mail-in ballots for years. I haven’t been to a polling place in twenty years. I always vote by mail.

In the middle of a national uprising against unequal treatment of minorities and poor people, the President tweeted that he was rescinding an affirmative action regulation that called for below-market housing in all parts of cities and towns. “I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low-income housing built in your neighborhood … Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!”   That’s not racist? Really?

We have a republic if we haven’t already lost it. We have wannabee dictators at national, state, and local levels who want to change the country, and we say nothing. It is time to say something. Representative John Lewis told us to get into some “good trouble.”  Some good trouble could include helping people register to vote, getting them to the polls, marching in the streets, or just talking to friends about your dreams for the country that your children and grandchildren will inherit.

America is a dream, an idea, a shining light for others. It isn’t perfect yet. It’s a work in progress. But we have instruction manuals,[v] the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They tell us what we should do: form a more perfect union, ensure domestic tranquility … We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal[vi] …

We cannot and should not let the storm clouds and the thunder of planned chaos keep us from our assigned tasks.

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[i] Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2015 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.

[ii] On Tyranny, Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century – Tom Snyder –Penguin Random House, 2017

[iii] Ten Rules for Radicals  - Saul Alinsky 1909-1982 –Random House, 1971

[iv] Axios July 2020

[v] Barack Obama – Eulogy for John Lewis – Atlanta Georgia July 30, 2020

[vi] Declaration of Impendence – In Congress July 4, 1776, That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed …

Stupid?

We teach our kids that calling someone stupid is impolite, that it demeans, that it doesn’t shine a bright light on the name-caller, but sometimes ….

The other day I was reminded of a line George Carlin used in his standup comedy routine: “Think of how stupid the average person is and then realize that half of them are stupider than that!”[i] He also suggested that we should not underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups. He was talking about Congress. Maybe things haven’t changed that much in twenty years. Is our life a comedy sketch or is there proof that half of us are below the mean? The evening news on the Fourth of July was evidence enough; the beaches were jammed, restaurants crowded, and the bars jumping. Not a mask in sight. Not terribly smart things to do.

The country is in the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic and it seems that nobody cares except the sick and the dying. The world is in the middle of a major pandemic and our government thinks this is a good time to exit the World Health Organization. States opened up too quickly and the contagion rate skyrocketed. Churches are demanding to be reopened, to gather people shoulder to shoulder, I suspect because weekly offerings are down.

The streets filled with protestors for weeks on end, many of whom will be sick in a couple of weeks and a percentage dead within weeks of that. They seem willing to take the risk for the cause. The President holds the only large gatherings in the nation, election rallies, and two weeks later the number of covid19 cases soar and people start to die. Governors refuse to implement the recommendations from the CDC to help stem the virus, and now seem surprised that the cases are mounting. The governors of Texas, Florida, Arkansas, Mississippi, and more are personally responsible for a large part of the virus outbreak in their states.

Hong Kong, a city of 7.5 million people just had a new flare-up, with 58 new cases. They shut down Disney Land. Florida, a state with 21.5 million people just had over 13,000 cases in one day and they opened Disney World. The Governor of Florida and the other states that opened too quickly will have to explain their actions to the families who take their loved ones to the hospital, never to see them again, left to die with a nurse holding their hand as they pass. I’m having a hard time finding the smarts.

Had these governors had even a scintilla of brass, they would have closed their states, insisted that people wear masks in public, limited store openings, and outlawed large gatherings. They would have fought a public health issue instead of taking a knee for their political leader. If Florida were an independent country, it would have the fourth largest outbreak in the world. I’m not seeing a lot of smarts!

The President doesn’t like the fact that the number of cases is rising, so he suggests that we stop testing people so that there will be fewer cases. His recent re-tweet said this:  “The most outrageous lies are the ones about COVID-19. Everyone is lying. The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most that we are told to trust. I think it’s all about the election and keeping the economy from coming back, which is about the election. I’m sick of it.” The fact that the President wore a mask to visit a hospital, five months into the pandemic, made headlines in newspapers, on TV and radio shows. It should have been the least we would expect of a national leader. It should have been happening for months. I don’t see a lot of smarts.

The President, the Secretary of Education, and a lot of governors are insisting that schools open this fall, even as the virus is spreading like wildfire. Secretary DeVos on one of the “Sunday Shows” essentially said that schools must open full time and that hybrid programs were not acceptable, even in areas where the virus is growing. Parents want to get back to work, most are tired of home-schooling. They are even willing to admit that all of the problems their kids had in school were not the fault of the teachers. Parents also know that they are gambling the lives of their children if they let them go back into a full classroom of germ carriers, or send them to live in a fraternity house at college or in dorms. There are about 57 million kids in K-12 schools in the US. We know that the mortality rate for young children who contract the virus is low; about 0.002 percent. That is 114,000 kids, statistically, who might die if they are sent back to school before the pandemic is under control. Is it worth it? It’s only about statistics until it is your own child. Let’s use some smarts.

 Other advanced and not so developed nations brought the pandemic to its knees by following good public health measures. They can now open their schools because they have “flattened the curve.” We haven’t. Most European countries will not allow travelers from the US. They are trying to save their people from further infection by us. We, the US, are the laughingstock of the world when it comes to fighting the pandemic. We are exceptional for all the wrong reasons.

 One thing that is absent from a lot of the efforts to minimize the virus’s spread is people taking personal responsibility for their actions. Covid19 parties are held to see who can become sick first, and win a prize. Some of the attendees are dying. People are attending family birthday parties because they don’t think they can get the virus, for any number of reasons. People are refusing to wear a mask in public because “this is America and I can do what I want.” Where are the smarts? How about a different line: “This America and I wear a mask to help stop spread the covid19 virus so that businesses and schools can reopen, and people can get back to work. It’s the American thing to do.” Were all in this together, let’s play smart.

Well, I want the country to open up too, I want to go to a good restaurant, I want people to get back to work, I want kids to go back to school, safely. The public health folks have told us how to get it done quickly, and it is a simple set of guidelines. If 95% of Americans will wear a mask when they go outside they will save over 30,000 lives between now and October. If we all wear a mask outside, stay six feet apart and wash our hands often, the virus will be stunned into some form of submission. Why won’t people do that? They tell us to avoid bars, restaurants, and crowded beaches. Why won’t people do that? They tell us that the virus is not a hoax. Why don’t we believe that? Sometimes it is as simple as the fact that our leaders don’t model good behavior, criticize the healthcare experts, or just don’t have a real plan.

None of these ideas is new. They asked us to follow the simple guidance back in March but the President, a bunch of governors and the public refused to listen. Now we are at it again, essentially starting over.

They say you can’t fix stupid!

I think we ought to try to fix it! 

 

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[i] George Carlin – American Comedian – 1937 - 2008

 

The West Wing

The quarantine can wipe away the guilt.  Going on for years now, annually, I binge-watch all eight seasons of The West Wing, a popular TV series back in the late ‘80s and early ’90s; eight seasons of twenty or more episodes each. The title pretty much gives away the plot. That much time devoted to something so trivial would surely heighten my French-Canadian-Catholic guilt. It didn’t. Some said I had too much time on my hands. I didn’t, but now I do. The guilt is gone; during the last three and a half years I think I have watched it twice each year, and why not.

Although it is about a fictitious president, a fictitious staff, a fictitious family, and the constant battle of ideas between political parties, it paints a picture of how it could be, how grace and knowledge could rule the day, how competing ideas could, for the common good, come together to form a more perfect union. We could be like that again!

The last episode of the last season dramatizes the last day in the office for one president and the first for a new one. The inauguration itself pictures the new president taking the oath of office. It is an oath taken by everyone upon ascending to Head of State, “… faithfully execute the Office of President … and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Wishing for a life that once was is a fool’s errand, when it seems national leaders, by commission or omission, try to be more faithful to their party, to their donors, or to the super-Pacs that try to control the country. They don’t take an oath to do that.  They don’t take an oath to defend religion. They don’t take an oath to defend “a way of life!” They don’t take an oath to defend a language. They take an oath to defend the Constitution. America is the Constitution. Would that more could hit the mark. The blame lies not just at the feet of a President, but also to members of Congress, state governors and legislators and local leaders as well.

A Washington Post columnist suggested recently that a lot of the blame rests with us. We elect those who don’t work for the common good. We elect those who trivialize the words of the document that defines our exceptionalism. We listen to the blistering campaign rhetoric, the shouting, the taunting, the demagoguery, and then we vote if they let us.

The West Wing is fiction, based on the mores of a different time, a time when there was more civility in our discourse, less harshness in our disagreements about strongly held beliefs. There is a yen for the days of President Reagan and Speaker Tip O’Neil, who could fulminate about policy and politics all day, and then enjoy a good scotch together with an occasional game of poker.

Sometime a while back, when we weren’t paying attention, disagreement turned to dislike, and then dislike to hate, then hating to outright derision for our fellow citizens who walk the same soil with us. Politics should not be a zero-sum game, but a quest for the best solutions, a willingness to hear out the other side, to resist letting perfection be the enemy of good.

Robert Conquest a noted historian, poet, and specialist in 1930s Russia observed, “The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”  One party is on a daily mission to wipe out the “deep state” in the Executive branch, and the other party is on a daily quest to identify those who try to expunge the professionals in our government. Both sides believe they are the true patriots, those called to preserve the national ethos. Neither is doing us any favors when they aren’t willing to do the common good, to bind the wounds, to make us better. 

Our nation has seen less than adequate presidents, many who were not so smart, some who just didn’t get it, but in the end, they and the legislators came together to improve the union. We only have to look back at the Civil Rights Act to see how groups at extreme distances from the center can become one when necessity calls. And they did it with dignity, they did it through well thought out discourse, they did it with the practical pressure of protest applied as needed.

It was a far cry from today’s approach. Belittling is the weapon of choice against political rivals. Neither side chooses to govern anymore because they are unwilling to give in on even the most minuscule of issues. It’s all or nothing. 

We are led by a group of older people beyond their expected usefulness, each trying to etch their legacy into the tablets of history before it is too late, unwilling to give an inch, even for the sake of the country. We are not who we were seventy years ago and we won't be who we are now in fifty years. The younger crowd coming up is unwilling to cower before these elders and is moving the country in a new direction. They do it, not always with style, but with sincere discourse, with serious questioning of the status quo, and with a willingness to express ideas in a way that is meaningful to their age cohorts. They will bring change, it will be uncomfortable for many but if they do it with civility it can be for the better.

The binge-watch is finished for the first half of the year, the script of each episode mostly memorized, so we face the question of what to do now. Start over with Season 1, Episode one? Maybe not for a while, but surely before the end of the year, maybe to coincide with the November elections, because the state of the state could use an exposition of civility, of good thinking, maybe even some good speech-writing, and some compassion for those on the edges.

While The West Wing plies a different time to which we can’t return, and shouldn’t, we must expect and hope to change in big ways, to progress, to become more perfect, to polish the shinning light on a hill. But we can ask the changers, the chargers, the makers of tomorrow to do it with some class, some sophistication, and with some civility.