March 11, 2022
Dear Interested Readers,
Our Concerns Multiply
“Beware the Ides of March!” was the soothsayer’s warning In Shakespeare’s play, Julius Ceaser. Looking back at 2020 and the explosion of COVID that occurred in mid-March, and becoming increasingly leary of what might happen overnight in Ukraine when I open my computer to read the news each passing day I am wondering what to expect this next week. Perhaps we should all be heeding the soothsayer’s warning. I remain quite anxious about the horrible events that I see each day coming from Ukraine. I am most anxious because like COVID this contagion has the possibility of mutating and spreading.
Anxieties are always worse when there is nothing that you personally can do to change an outcome. The events that I read about and witness in pictures and on videos from Ukraine make me more anxious than I was in March of 2020 as we all put on masks and started thinking about staying six feet apart. Back then we were afraid of something we could not see and did not understand. Now we may all become victims of Mr. Putin, a man who makes us wonder if he has lost his mind. No matter what the cause or motivation for his actions, he is a madman who is the most evil and dangerous man on the planet. It is within the realm of possibility for him in his madness to kill billions of us and make our concerns about pandemic viruses and global warming relatively insignificant. If the situation doesn’t make you concerned about the brave people of Ukraine and apprehensive about our collective future, you are not paying attention.
COVID was and will continue to be a threat, but there are actions one can take for protection from it. For most of the first year, we just hunkered at home. It was a relief to finally get vaccinated. My first dose was delivered to me by a National Guardsman through my car window in the parking lot of a nearby community college on March 5, 2021. it was almost exactly a year from the beginning of the nightmare. I felt very fortunate when got the second dose of my Pfizer vaccine on April 2, 2021, but I still felt at risk, but not at as much risk. We got our boosters at a local pharmacy on November 21, 2021. Even after the third dose, I was cautious. I had a good friend who was fully vaccinated but was extremely ill with Omicron. Nevertheless, there was a sense of relief and reassurance that accompanied each injection.
Our only trip that first year before we were vaccinated was to travel across country in an RV to see our grandsons. During the trip I imagined that we were traveling in a protective cocoon from which we rarely emerged. When we did encounter others it was usually in an outdoor environment and we kept our distance. As a measure of how crazy our world is, after our trip, we sold the RV through the consignment dealer who had sold it to us for $15,000 more than we had paid for it.
Our home and cars are littered with KN95 masks. There is at least one in every coat pocket. My point is that as bad as COVID has been, there were things that we could do to mitigate our risks. What can we do as an individual to manage the anxieties that Putin has created? Denial of what it might come to mean seems to be the most commonly used defense of the moment.
So far, six million human souls, inclucing almost a million Americans, have been lost to COVID. At this time in March of 2020, the number in America was in the low one hundreds, and worldwide there were only a few thousand COVID deaths. There have surely been several thousand deaths in Ukraine already when you count the deaths sustained by the Russian invaders, the Ukrainian defenders, and the non-combatant civilians. I am trying to set the stage to make the point that the invasion of Ukraine is a very different kind of tragedy and potentially a greater “public health” problem than COVID. An expansion of the war in Ukraine over the next weeks and months has the potential to kill and injure many more people than COVID has killed or will ever kill. It may also make the economic losses from COVID seem like pocket change. Just as the coronavirus quickly spread from being a problem in Hunan to a worldwide pandemic, war is a public health problem that has a tremendous potential to spread and become more destructive. There is no vaccine for war, and often isolation is not an effective protection from personal physical or financial injury. So I find myself both anxious and worried for myself and for everyone on the planet. The evil inherent in the psychopathology of Mr. Putin threatens all of us.
My plan for this week’s letter was to write about our obvious shortage of nurses that the pandemic has revealed, and the even more chronic and more difficult to correct shortage of doctors that has been with us for a long time, but was not so obvious to everyone before COVID. Our workforce shortages are more dangerous to each of us, and a greater economic problem for all of us, than most Americans recognize. We do complain about how hard it is to get an appointment with a doctor, and we do notice the inefficiencies and feel some of the vulnerability that is apparent when our nurse or the nurse that is caring for a loved one seems to have too much to do to provide the care we expect. Perhaps next week I will get around to discussing the critical workforce problems that we have allowed to develop in healthcare while we weren’t paying attention. Whether or not I ever get around to that discussion, I would recommend that you follow the two links above and read the articles that provide perspective on the professional workforce problems that are a threat to all of us. Ukraine seems to be all that I can think about now.
It’s ironic, but it seems that the bravery and the effective resistance of the Ukrainian people have created a problem for all of us because of their impact on Putin’s ego. The process so far suggests that he is not the genius that Trump declared him to be. He seems to have painted all of us, himself included, into a corner from which there is no obvious escape. On Tuesday Ezra Klein interviewed Fiona Hill on his weekly podcast. They discussed how Vladimir Putin might ultimately react to the unexpected situation of the effective resistance of the Ukrainians. You may remember Dr. Hill as the Senior Director For Europe and Russia of the National Security Council. Most of us first met her when she testified during Trump’s first impeachment which was precipitated by his attempt to extort the Ukrainians into an investigation of Joe Biden and his son. In the introduction to the discussion Klein got a head start by saying:
If there is to be an off ramp in Ukraine, a deal, something to stop the fighting here, it’s going to need to be something that Putin, Zelensky, and the West can all agree on. And as hard as that kind of deal was to imagine a month ago, it is harder now, because — think about how all of the actors and factors here have changed. Vladimir Putin, he had a very optimistic view of how this was going to go.
He thought he was going to roll in, and Ukraine would be full of people with ethnic Russian heritage, with Russian fellow feeling. They’re going to welcome the Russians as liberators. That is not how they welcomed the Russians. So now, Putin fears the thing he fears most, which is humiliation. [I bolded this point, and I would add Putin also fears for his life since assassination and “regime change” are potential solutions to our problem.] He’s trying to secure not just Ukraine, but now his regime survival, and his very place in history. The stakes of this war have completely changed for him.
The Ukrainian people have united under President Zelensky’s remarkable leadership. Their sense of national identity, their sense of who they are and where they belong in the world is completely different now. They are not going to allow themselves to be mere pawns in games of great power politics. The idea that this could just be carved up between Russia and the U.S. and Europe, that’s a fantasy.
And on that, the meaning of Ukraine, the stakes of Ukraine, they’ve changed for the United States and Europe too. To the extent the West thought much about Ukraine, they thought about it in terms of Russia, or just a troubling geopolitical conundrum. But now, Ukraine represents the values of the West, or at least the values West claims to hold, made manifest. And values, values are a lot harder to compromise on.
I am sorry to say that the conversation between Hill and Klein enhanced my sense of our collective vulnerability to some catastrophic outcome from the combination of Putin’s personality disorder and his miscalculations about the Ukrainian people. What Klein was saying was that it is a sad reality that if President Zalensky had fled the country and if the Ukrainian people had just folded under the massive Russian invasion, the world could have just picked up the pieces and moved on with a few symbolic sanctions like we did after Putin rolled into Crimea in 2014. The Ukrainians taught us all a lesson about what is really important, and now we must continue on a path that supports the values and desire for freedom that they demonstrate with their bravery.
When I was an adolescent in Texas I would hear about older teenagers who had cars and played a deadly game they called “chicken.” The two contenders would drive to some desolate country road where they would face off against each other. Initially, they were several hundred yards apart. Both players would gun their engines and take off like they were in a drag race but headed directly at one another and a possible head-on collision. The “winner” was the one who did not veer to avoid the inevitable collision. The loser had to contend with his own loss of self-esteem and the lost face he suffered from the jeering of his peers. When there were two “winners” there were really two losers. “Chicken” was a lethally stupid manifestation of a perverted sense of what misguided teenagers thought it meant to be a man. I fear that we are playing chicken with a man who has a yearning for respect and is confused about what really defines greatness. He wants a place in history and he is going about finding that place in a way that puts us all in jeopardy as we play a huge game of chicken with him.
Earlier this week, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote about our collective vulnerability to Putin’s psychopathology and the danger that his rash miscalculations have created for our leaders to try to manage in a piece entitled “Putin Has No Good Way Out, and That Really Scares Me.” The opening paragraph grabs your attention and doesn’t let go.
If you’re hoping that the instability that Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has wreaked on global markets and geopolitics has peaked, your hope is in vain. We haven’t seen anything yet. Wait until Putin fully grasps that his only choices left in Ukraine are how to lose — early and small and a little humiliated or late and big and deeply humiliated.
Friedman continues by pointing out that through history Russia has not been kind to its leaders when their military adventures fail. Building his position on Russian history Friedman continues:
In the coming weeks it will become more and more obvious that our biggest problem with Putin in Ukraine is that he will refuse to lose early and small, and the only other outcome is that he will lose big and late. But because this is solely his war and he cannot admit defeat, he could keep doubling down in Ukraine… until he contemplates using a nuclear weapon.
His explanation and justification for this conclusion are very similar to much of the conversation between Ezra Klein and Dr. Fiona Hill. His column continues:
Why do I say that defeat in Ukraine is Putin’s only option, that only the timing and size are in question? Because the easy, low-cost invasion he envisioned and the welcome party from Ukrainians he imagined were total fantasies — and everything flows from that.
Putin completely underestimated Ukraine’s will to be independent and become part of the West. He completely underestimated the will of many Ukrainians to fight, even if it meant dying, for those two goals. He completely overestimated his own armed forces. He completely underestimated President Biden’s ability to galvanize a global economic and military coalition to enable Ukrainians to stand and fight and to devastate Russia at home — the most effective U.S. coalition-building effort since George H.W. Bush made Saddam Hussein pay for his folly of seizing Kuwait. And he completely underestimated the ability of companies and individuals all over the world to participate in, and amplify, economic sanctions on Russia — far beyond anything governments initiated or mandated.
Putin is very much like the adolescent with a need to win who playing chicken at sixty miles an hour. Summing up all the reasons Putin will lose and the impact that a loss will have on all his fantasies of greatness, Friedman writes:
…the inescapable humiliation would surely be intolerable for this man obsessed with restoring the dignity and unity of what he sees as the Russian motherland…There is simply no pathway that I see for Putin to win in Ukraine in any sustainable way because it simply is not the country he thought it was…
So, if Putin can’t win, and the bravery and resolve of the Ukrainian people won’t let them lose. What is Friedman’s dark view of the possibe?
…there is only one thing worse than a strong Russia under Putin — and that’s a weak, humiliated, disorderly Russia that could fracture or be in a prolonged internal leadership turmoil, with different factions wrestling for power and with all of those nuclear warheads, cybercriminals and oil and gas wells lying around.
Putin’s Russia is not too big to fail. It is, however, too big to fail in a way that won’t shake the whole rest of the world.
I rest my case. We live in a world of uncertianty, and every one of our uncertainties will impact the future of healthcare. It was wonderful when we were able to rationalize that the anxieties of the cold world were behind us. It seemed that concerns about zoonosis and global warming were enough to keep us awake at night. We thought that our need to be concerned about a nuclear holocaust was an issue of the past. It has taken us less than two weeks to realize that we were wrong. What is most anxiety-provoking is that the current situation seems at this time to be a problem with no obvious pathway toward a solution, but we seem to have many roads to further pain and loss. When you are walking in the dark it pays to take small steps and pray until in time you get to someplace where there is light. It is good for us to pray for our leaders who are walking in the dark of a difficult moment as they search for a solution that can’t be seen at the moment but that we all hope will emerge in time. The ability to exercise patience in the form of forbearance is not a long term solution, but it may be the best we can do for now as we work to find a solution that simultaneously ends the conflict, protects the rights and territory of the Ukrainian people while preventing Putin from following his instincts that will make everything worse.
Spring May Be Coming Too Soon
In New Hampshire and in most of small-town/ rural New England to get to the joys of summer we have to live through mud season and the annual visitation of black flies. In past years I anticipated these events to occur in sequence with mud season beginning in mid-April and the flies arriving later in May and hanging around until June, but global warming is changing the timing of things and I am beginning to think that we will have an “early” mud season this year.
Mud season comes along in close proximity to “ice-out.” There are various definitions for ice-out, but in my mind, it is the day I wake up and can’t see any ice on the lake. Ice-out on my lake is usually a mid-April event and closely coincides with the beginning of mud season, but the recent trend has been for it to be earlier and earlier. In 2016, the hottest year on record in New Hampshire, ice-out was in the third week of March. The way things are going I am wondering if that record will be broken this year.
As you can see from today’s header which shows the scene on Tuesday morning near the public boat launch and the spillway which controls the water level on my lake, we have melting ice in early March. Granted, where the water is moving fast near the spillway, the ice is always thinnest, but I think that we are ahead of the usual thawing schedule. The weather has been quite warm. On Monday, we were in the fifties with moderately heavy rain throughout the day and evening. On Tuesday we still had snow, but there were many bare patches, and just a few miles south well before you get to Concord there was no snow to be seen along the highway. What is crazy is that about once a week it has been snowing. On Wednesday, the day after I took the picture, we were cold again and had three more inches of snow. Yesterday, the temp went right back up to an ice-melting fifties. We are expecting snow again tomorrow, but the long-range forecast for next week shows the temp to be in the fifties on many days and the possibility of hitting sixty by next Friday. As they say, it is what it is.
In Richard III, Shakespeare wrote a famous opening line that is part of a long soliloquy by the young Richard who was then the Duke of Gloucester. [I can’t believe that I have referenced Shakespeare twice in this note.] The first line of the play is:
Now is the winter of our discontent
John Steinbeck lifted the line to use as the title of his controversial 1961 novel about the moral decline in America during the 50s, The Winter of Our Discontent. It seems to me that the phrase might be appropriate for this winter of war and disease against a background of global warming, political uncertainty, and the return of anxieties about nuclear war. I can’t be certain about whether or not COVID will come back again. I don’t know how long it will take global warming to put many waterfront properties underwater. I can only hope that something intervenes to prevent Putin from starting World War III as an act of desperation in a crazy attempt to save face. I do know that the ice will melt, and that mud and flies will follow. In a strange way, it feels good to be certain about something.
Pray for our leaders that they might have the wisdom to find the solution that we can’t see now, and for the patience not to err while waiting. Until we can make it better we should be careful not to make it worse. We can’t afford unforced errors. Putin has made enough of those errors to put us all in harm’s way.
Be well,
Gene
