July 17, 2020
Dear Interested Readers,
Finding Hope In Strange Times
Can things get more bizarre in our deeply troubled and widely divided nation? Facing a pandemic that remains poorly understood and totally unpredictable, but might have stolen life from over 200,000 Americans by November, would be enough to constitute a monumental national challenge, but we all know there is more.
Our troubles seem to feed on each other. If there is great uncertainty about what will happen next to us from the pandemic, there is even more concern on the part of many of our leaders about what will happen to our economy. Some politicians may never be willing to spend tax dollars on education and job creation, but they are willing to spend “lives” to preserve businesses and the freedom to sit in a crowd at a bar. The pandemic presents us with choices between unacceptable alternatives, and the result of the combination of an unwillingness to give up personal freedoms in a moment of crisis with inept and uninspiring leadership is chaos and compounded losses.
Our miseries are compounded by our inability to cooperate with one another in our own defense. This inability to comply with a strategy is graphically demonstrated by a map published in The New York Times that shows compliance with face mask use by location. We all will suffer economically because of our lack of leadership and our collective inability to overcome our divided opinion about when personal freedom is trumped by collective jeopardy. For some the disaster will be disease and death. For the majority of us the disaster will be the associated blows to the economy that are derivative of our non compliance with thoughtful strategies to block the spread of the virus. We have made it a reality that the pandemic will wreck the lives of many people who will never have a fever or a cough.
Surely, the pandemic and associated downturn in the economy would be enough to constitute one of the most remarkable moments in our nation’s history, but we all know that there is more, much more, that troubles us in this moment. The murder of George Floyd demonstrated in a dramatic and undeniable way the heavier burden that Black Americans carry every day. Black Americans are demanding equity and respect, and simultaneously white Americans are divided into two groups. One group is aligned with their Black neighbors and are joining the movement to assert that “Black Lives Matter.” Many white Americans are deeply troubled by the realization that they, and many of their forebears, have been silently complicit in the systematic denial of opportunity and respect for their Black neighbors. The other group either wants to continue to ignore the reality that at a minimum there has been an effective systematic oppression of Black Americans, or at worse a collective complicity with a minority that has carried on a systematic program of domestic terror against Black Americans for most of the last 150 years. For white Americans the question has been called by the Floyd video and by the data that has emerged from the pandemic that demonstrates without a doubt that Black Americans, Latinex Americans, and other minorities have suffered more from the pandemic and its economic aftermath than the majority of white Americans.
The pandemic, the economy, and the racial tensions impact us all, but most of us are left with nothing that we can do except wear a mask, practice social distancing, show up at demonstrations to demonstrate solidarity with those who live with inequality and a greater threat from dysfunctional policing, and endure the disruption of the normal flows of work and life. It helps a little bit to realize that everyone lives under the same burdens even if the burdens are heavier on minority members of our society.
It is interesting to contemplate what the response of our government to the pandemic would have been like had the pandemic occurred at any moment prior to 2017. How would have Barack Obama managed the moment? For that matter how would either of the Bush presidents or Ronald Reagan have responded? What would have been the response of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton? My bias is that every president before this one, including Richard Nixon, would have been a more effective leader. Some might note that Reagan was slow to respond to the AIDS epidemic, but that problem had its own special considerations and was not as obvious a threat to the entire population. George W. Bush did respond to the threat of AIDS. None of these leaders consistently denied “facts” or contradicted science and the advice of experts in ways as dramatic as our current president has demonstrated.
Last week the Washington Post published the jaw dropping fact that the president has made 20,000 false or misleading statements or claims since his inauguration in January 2017. It took him 827 days to produce his first 10,000 “false or misleading statements or claims.” Largely because of the crescendo of disinformation since the pandemic began, it took only 440 days to log the next 10,000 “false or misleading statements or claims.” That total was tallied before his Rose Garden campaign event this week that was disguised as a press conference. (Click for the YouTube presentation of this latest inappropriate performance in its entirety.)
I watched the Rose Garden event. It was interesting that the longer it went on the more the president’s ramblings became a nonsensical “word salad.” It is easy to make fun of him, but he is the president. He is under great stress. His responsibilities exceed his capabilities. And we know how anxiety provoking it can be to have a responsibility for which you are not prepared. I wish that those who are close to him and care about him, and are willing to sacrifice there personal integrity to follow him, might find a way to get him to change course. What has happened recently before and after the Rose Garden is further distressing.
First, there are the embarrassing “Goya” events. If you are not familiar with the story, I offer you the explanatory report from Vox. The high points are that recently the president had another event in the Rose Garden where the CEO of Goya Foods, Robert Unanue, said that the country was blessed to have him as president at this time. The response from progressives was to call for a boycott of Goya products. Julian Castro tweeted:
Free speech works both ways.
@GoyaFoods CEO is free to support a bigoted president who said an American judge can’t do his job because he’s “Mexican”, who treats Puerto Rico like trash, and who tries to deport Dreamers.
We’re free to leave his products on the shelves. #Goyaway
The statements by the CEO of Goya and the subsequent boycott of Goya has resulted in a controversy. Mr Unanue was exercising his right to free speech. There are articles by legal authorities that have confirmed that a “boycott” is also free speech protected by the first amendment. What has followed the controversy over the boycott and Mr. Unanue’s right to express his gratitude for the president’s leadership is even more bizarre. Ivanka Trump, who is a federal employee, as a senior advisor to the president, posted an endorsement of Goya on Instagram. For a member of the administration, a federal employee, to make an endorsement of a commercial product is considered by many to be an ethics violation. Not to be outdone by his daughter in a show of support for Goya, the president then had his picture taken for his Instagram account as he sat smiling at the “Resolute Desk” in the Oval Office behind a wide variety of Goya products. Anderson Cooper presented an analysis of the event, as well as the president’s attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci, in a somber nine minute editorial on his CNN program.
The second bizarre and concerning event of the week has been the president’s insinuations about Dr. Fauci that culminated in an op-ed piece in USA Today entitled “Anthony Fauci has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on: Peter Navarro.” The president has distanced himself from Navarro’s statement, saying that he had nothing to do with it, and didn’t know it was going to be published. He also said that Navarro is a “good person” whom he likes. He says the same thing about Dr. Fauci, but it has been two months since his administration has allowed Dr. Fauci to be seen on television. I occasionally read USA Today when it is offered free at a hotel, but I did not know until Navarro’s op-ed was published that USA Today is the most widely circulated newspaper in the country. Check out the circulation of USA Today versus The New York Times and other sources of “fake news.” It is a major source of information for many Americans. Dr. Fauci did defend himself this week in an interview with The Atlantic. The piece delivers its message in its long title: Fauci: ‘Bizarre’ White House Behavior Only Hurts the President: The nation’s top public-health expert tells The Atlantic that he isn’t going anywhere, despite the Trump administration’s newest attempts to undercut him.
These events underline the likely anxiety and uncertainty that the president is experiencing as he sees his chances of reelection apparently slipping away. Does he have the emotional strength to survive the next four months? The events of this last week coupled with other recent bizarre occurrences like the picture session with the Bible a few weeks ago at the height of the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter demonstrations raise questions in my mind about his emotional stability. Contrary to his self assessment, he gives little evidence that he is “a very stable genius.” His behavior and performance are a concern for all of us who are not members of his unquestioning “base.”
Against the background of the president’s possible melt down, the worsening pandemic in many parts of the country now associated with the likelihood of the reclosing of many businesses that were unwisely opened before the pandemic was controlled, and the continuing uncertainty about what to do about schools and colleges, it was a real pleasure this week to read a hopeful analysis of this moment by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. It’s an excellent piece entitled “We Interrupt This Gloom to Offer … Hope: Yes, America is suffering needlessly. That may save us.” It’s a long article, but there is an audio version that is worth an investment of eighteen minutes.
Kristof begins by saying that all of our current pain and suffering may be a prelude to something better!
Just one in six Americans in a poll last month was “proud” of the state of the country, and about two out of three were actually “fearful” about it. So let me introduce a new thought: “hope.”
Yes, our nation is a mess, but overlapping catastrophes have also created conditions that may finally let us extricate ourselves from the mire. The grim awareness of national failures — on the coronavirus, racism, health care and jobs — may be a necessary prelude to fixing our country.
Kristof proceeds to make his case with an in depth review of how we created our current mess through the last four decades of dysfunctional behavior. He also reviews our past successes and compares this moment to the depression and the election of FDR which initiated almost forty years of progressive improvement of our infrastructure and the derivative benefits for many Americans as we became the unquestioned leaders of the free world.
He is serious about the fact that we have sunk so low with overlapping catastrophes that the only plausible progression is improvement. His analysis reminds me of a family story. My father used to tell stories about me. Apparently, after I began to read I became fascinated with license tags. Every year our family made a long pilgrimage from Oklahoma or Texas to visit family in the Carolinas. These trips were a great source of adventure and learning for me. I would keep a running total of how many times I had crossed the Mississippi River. There were three places we crossed the great river in those days. We would cross from Arkansas to Tennessee over the bridge at Memphis, from Louisiana to Mississippi over the bridge at Vicksburg, or my favorite way which was by ferry somewhere between the two big bridges. In the late forties and early fifties all of the states along the Mississippi River, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee looked pretty poor compared to my home in Oklahoma or Texas. On one of our trips through Arkansas, which would have been before I was eight, I asked my father why the license tags in Arkansas said, “Land of opportunity.” He pondered my question for a moment and then said, “Son, if you are in Arkansas, the only way you can go is up.” That seems to be Kristof’s assessment of this moment in our history. He sees, based on our history and his assessment of our character, that the only possible trajectory from where we are is up. In his words:
This hope is not Pollyannaish. It rests on a tragic toll of Covid-19 deaths, and it requires a thousand caveats. Trump might win in November. If Biden wins, a Republican Senate might stymie his proposals and block his nominees. Deficits are now so enormous that politics may become a dispiriting fight about which programs to cut, not which dreams to finance. Veteran liberals are scarred by memories of unfulfilled hope that followed Barack Obama’s election in 2008, Bill Clinton’s in 1992, Jimmy Carter’s in 1976: Hope is the engine oil of campaigns, but it burns up in the heat of governing.
And yet.
“Hope right now in America is bloodied and battered, but this is the kind of hope that is successful,” said Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey. “It’s hope that has lost its naïveté.”
Besieged as we are by plague and crisis, a dollop of this “calloused hope,” as Booker calls it, offers an incentive to persevere. If in the depths of the Great Depression we could claw a path out and forge a better country, “calloused hope” can guide us once more to a better place.
I’ll vote for hope. I can hardly wait for the struggle for a better “new normal.” I want to believe that like Arkansas in my childhood, the only way we can go is up. I’m with Kristof, I hope that America can be a land of opportunity and equity. There is a lot of work to be done, especially in healthcare, but we do have a new perspective. It could be that a new day is dawning.
It’s A New Day Everyday
One night last week my wife had trouble sleeping so she got up at first light and captured the sunrise over the lake where we live. The deck on the back of the house is just a few yards from the water. Our living room, kitchen, and dining room all occupy one open area that is separated from the deck and the lake by three sliders that keep the lake in your visual field with no more than a slight turn of the head no matter where you are sitting or standing. As she left the bedroom and was coming into the living area where we spend most our mornings, she saw, then photographed, the spectacular sunrise that is today’s header.
Whenever I think of a sunrise, I hear Cat Stevens, now Yusuf Islamin, singing “Morning Has Broken” in my head. You may be surprised to learn that it is an old hymn written in 1931 by the English author Eleanor Farjeon, an award winning author of children’s books. The melody is from an even older Scottish hymn. Stevens and the pianist Rick Wakeman did create the arrangement that Stevens put out on his 1971 album, “Teaser and Firecat.” Here are Farejeon’s words that Stevens presented so beautifully that they can live in my head for almost fifty years.
Morning has broken like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird
Praise for the singing
Praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the Word
Sweet the rain’s new fall, sunlit from heaven
Like the first dew fall on the first grass
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden
Sprung in completeness where His feet pass
Mine is the sunlight
Mine is the morning
Born of the One Light Eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God’s recreation of the new day
Morning has broken like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird
Praise for the singing
Praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the Word
I don’t know what the song says to you, but for me it is the announcement of the freshness and hope of each new morning. Much of my life has been in search of the chance for a “do over.” In dreams, I return to childhood, to highschool, to college, and to medical school. Ironically in my dreams things don’t go quite as well as they did in real life. Second chances and new days dawning seem closely connected. Each new day represents a chance for renewal.
I am now six and a half years into retirement and have recently passed the milestone of my seventy fifth birthday. It takes a while to figure out what to do with life in retirement, but the pandemic has helped me focus on the fact that you can do worse than stay in one place and watch the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons, and the progress of the years from the perspective of one view that is constantly changing. That is what is happening at any hour, on any day, in any season, and for the last six years as we look out at the lake to see what is happening in our world. The rest of the world comes to us in print in newspapers, magazines, and books, or by video from the television and the Internet. In essence, there is a changing new form of normal everyday. Not to get too sappy, but now in retirement and with travel curtailed by the pandemic, I better understand what Thoreau was trying to say when he commented, “Much have I traveled in Concord.”
Our fascination with the loons is an example of how each new day can hold a surprise that is a poetic representation of hope. A recent guest actually captured a shot of the baby loon out of the water under the watchful eye of one of its parents. The picture below was lifted from a video that shows the little fella as he does his “business” on shore and then waddles back into the water. Who knew? Every new day can present a surprise!
Be well! Still stay home if you can. Wear your mask and practice social distancing as best you can if you must go out, even if the numbers are getting better for the moment where you live. Think about the America you want for yourself and others. Demand leadership that is empathetic, thoughtful, truthful, capable, and inclusive. Look for opportunities to be a good neighbor. Let me hear from you. I would love to know how you are experiencing these very unusual times!
Gene
