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] …
[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 …
