October 30, 2020
Dear Interested Readers,
It’s About Worthiness For Office, And Much More
I am so happy that election day is almost here. I have been averaging over fifty political ads a day in my email. Political ads fill all of the air time on television in mid-America. Many of our highways in rural America are lined with yard signs. President Trump’s supporters like to fly flags in their yards that say Trump 2020. Some even drive around with Trump flags on flag poles attached to their trucks and RVs. I was surprised and delighted to see a woman in a Walmart in Okmulgee, Oklahoma with a face mask that said “Biden/Harris.”
Before my trip across America I was not a Walmart customer, but Walmart is very hard to avoid in rural and small town America. The parking lots at Walmart are full, and the storefronts on Main Street are boarded up. Diesel fuel sells for more than 20 cents a gallon less at Walmart than at a regular truck stop or filling station. The other nail in the heart of the small town Main street merchant is Amazon. Amazon trucks with the “Prime” logos are as ubiquitous as the squirrels in my yard back in New Hampshire. I don’t know if the late Clay Christensen was thinking about Amazon and Walmart when he described “disruptive innovation,” but what I see as I walk the aisles of Walmart looking for DEF fluid for my diesel camper, while my wife is buying avocados for 68 cents a piece over in the grocery section, makes me think there is some connection between Christensen’s theories and what we see in the wild. No matter what the outcome of the election turns out to be, America is moving on to a future that has either the possibility for an abundant life for everyone, or for deepening divisions that will drive unnecessary collective loss. It’s time to turn away from what divides us and to elect leaders across the land that understand that “these truths” are a legacy for everyone who is here. If we fail in that objective, it is possible that the potential benefits of our abundance will eventually accrue to no one.
As I listen to NPR and watch CNN, the world they describe does not quite match the world I have seen as I have crossed America trying to avoid metropolitan centers. It is not obvious out here that Joe Biden will be elected. My hope is that what I hear about the polls is true. I am traveling through a mostly white America which is home to the people that Anne Case and Angus Deaton were talking about in their description of the “diseases of despair.” Reason does not easily explain the attitudes that exist in mid America where people often vote against their own best economic interest. In her wonderful book, Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of a 41 year old white man who died from his liver disease in Tennessee who would have been eligible for Medicaid as part of the ACA extension if he had lived in Kentucky. Before he died he said that he was proud that he was not the recipient of a “government handout.” Her point was that in the “red states” where legislatures were resistant to the ACA’s Medicaid extension because they were adamant that they did not want to provide government assistance to minorities, low income white Americans were disadvantaged by difference in population by about three to one, When that man died in Tennessee without access to healthcare there were 12,000 white deaths in the uninsured population versus 4,000 African American deaths. When we deny anyone basic rights and opportunity, or treat one segment of the population with unwarranted prejudice founded in centuries of unwarranted disdain, we threaten the future of everyone. As the demonstrations recently experienced in our cities suggest, the abusive use of power is eventually likely to be necessary to maintain order in a society where there is a lack of equality or a lack of concern for the rights, the health and the opportunity of everyone. We live in a strange world where second amendment rights and pro life attitudes can trump concerns about equity, the environment, public health, education, adequate housing, maternal/child health, and adequate nutrition. Go figure.
The pundits say the election will turn on the president’s management of the pandemic. I have no problem with that analysis. I am delighted with any rationale that leads a voter away from this very destructive narcissist, who is a wannabe autocrat, but on my long list of reasons for voting against him the number one reason is that he undermines the health of the nation. I do not need my political leaders to be paragons of virtuous behavior, but I do need them to be capable of genuine empathy for all of the people they lead. To get my vote a politician needs to demonstrate that he/she (they?) cares about all people and understands the necessity to remedy the inequities in our society. If that is true, if the politician really cares about people, and especially the health of every person, who is vulnerable, they will demonstrate that concern in the expression of their policies, and in the description of how they will approach their responsibilities. How can one imagine a positive outcome from a president who has no platform other than the empty assurance that we can trust him despite the thousands of lies he has already told us. This man with no sense of what honesty is tells us that we are rounding the corner and soon everything is going to “be better than anyone can believe.” At best he may make some people better off, but the number who will lose will far outnumber the “winners,” and we know how he feels about losers.
President Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic does not need further documentation, and would be reason enough to send him back to playing golf everyday. What has troubled me more, and worries me more for the future, is his total lack of demonstrated interest in the health of the nation, and in the health of each person living within the borders of the nation. I am terrified as I try to imagine the state of healthcare four years from now if this very disturbed man wins a second term. It will take us a generation to recover from what he has already done through his appointments to the Supreme Court.
As I listen to the political ads that are aired in mid America, I am astounded by the connections that are made between progressive politics and socialism, or horror of horrors, communism. It is hard for me to understand how, if we care about a better future, we can resist using some portion of the individual assets of those like me who have more than they need for the collective benefit of the community by helping those who are disadvantaged by centuries of inequality and undeserved disrespect. These attitudes are particularly loathsome when they come from a person who was born to tremendous economic advantage, and yet has no idea of what is “enough.”
I am not ashamed to say that I find comfort in the writing of the columnists of the New York Times and the Washington Post. My favorites are David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman, E. J. Dionne, Dana Milbank, and Jennifer Rubin. This week each of them has written an interesting piece.
E.J. Dionne pointed out the importance of rural America in his column entitled “Why winning rural areas should be a progressive priority.” An important observation that he made was:
The undemocratic nature of the Senate is maddening to all friends of genuine constitutional democracy. When the 68.5 million people in California and Texas have the same number of representatives as the 1.2 million people of Wyoming and Vermont, the idea of “one person, one vote” becomes an absurdity. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, nominated by a president who lost the popular vote, was confirmed by 52 senators representing 13.5 million fewer Americans than the 48 who opposed her.
Dana Milbank’s column on Wednesday was , “Republicans’ only way to win is to stop people from voting” was about the fragility of our election process. In the article he describes the origin of much of my current concern:
The once-proud Republican Party has determined, correctly, that its only way to prevail in this election is to keep people from voting. Republicans and their allies have devoted some $20 million to wage more than 300 court fights across the country either to strike down election rules that encourage higher voter turnout or to fight lawsuits aimed at easing voting, according to the Center for Public Integrity.
Jennifer Rubin’s column yesterday was entitled “Just imagine how different Biden’s immigration policy would be.” In the piece she says:
Trump is the president who enacted the child separation policy that inflicted trauma on thousands of families and has essentially orphaned more than 500 children. Biden, by contrast, has vowed in his first 100 days in office to “send to the United States Congress a pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented people. And all those so-called dreamers, those DACA kids, they’re going to be legally certified again, to be able to stay in this country, and put on a path to citizenship.” Biden also made clear he will end the Trump era policy requiring asylum-seekers to make their case outside the United States. One can imagine Biden would also end the cruel retraction of temporary protected status for those who fled natural disasters and political chaos, and the administration’s counterproductive assault on legal immigration, which is an engine of growth and innovation.
Trump’s immigration policy, perhaps more than any other of the many oppressive policies that he has enacted through executive decree, demonstrates his disrespect for human life, and his lack of empathy for those whose only crime is to be “other.” He is popular with many Americans for the sole reason that his immigration policies are a dog whistle affirmation of their own sense of white superiority and privilege. He has brazenly old us, as confirmation that he has his own brand of xenophobia, that we don’t need Mexican rapists or people from “s—hole” countries flocking to America. Whatever happened to so many Americans who grew up singing in Sunday School “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight” that they can imagine giving such a man their vote?
This week before the election, Paul Krugman wrote about the president’s failures with the pandemic in a piece entitled “Trump Tells Coronavirus, ‘I Surrender’:The president plays the climate-denial playbook on a pandemic. The bottom line from Krugman’s post was:
Was there ever a chance that Trump would take the pandemic seriously? Probably not. After all, he has always been a die-hard, conspiracy-theorizing denier of climate change, and his coronavirus response has come straight out of the climate-denier playbook.
In any case, we can predict with high accuracy what he will do if the polls are wrong, and he wins a second term. He will do nothing at all to fight the pandemic; he will, however, try to suppress the truth about what’s happening. And many, many more Americans will die.
If you are one of the voters who would give Trump a second term because he is good for the economy, remind yourself that Krugman won the Nobel Prize for Economics, and his opinion deserves consideration. Your economic status in this complex and interdependent world is more prone than ever to catastrophic events that are the result of rampant abuse of the environment, and a disregard for science. What does happen to your personal economic well being is an expression of many things other than the stock market, and nothing kills an economy, or frightens the stock market, like a viral pandemic that has been mismanaged.
Tom Friedman is always thoughtful and suffers no fools. It was true again this week when he wrote an amazing article entitled “When My President Sang ‘Amazing Grace:’ We’ve forgotten what it’s like to have a truth-teller and a healer in the White House.” I think his point was that a leader who can’t participate in our losses, and only thinks in terms of transactions, has no chance of leading us to success. He wrote:
Trump has so redefined decency down that we have forgotten what is normal, let alone optimal, in an American president. We have forgotten what it is like to have a truth-teller, a healer, in the White House, someone who starts his day with at least the inclination to unite the country and to project America at its best for the world — not someone who has lived every day in office aspiring to be president only of his base, while offering anyone at home or abroad looking to the United States for inspiration just one message: Show me the money.
I have saved the best, or rather my favorite, for last. David Brooks is a conservative intellectual with a soul. My sense is that he is really a progressive thinker who can remember what we once valued. In his piece entitled “The Floor of Decency: There was once a bare minimum standard of public behavior.” Here is the heart of his position:
Until four years ago, there was what you might call a Floor of Decency. This was the basic minimum standard of behavior to be an accepted member of society. Even when people did bad things, they at least tried to pretend that they were good, that they operated according to the basic values of society. You may or may not like the people in, say, the Obama or Bush administrations, you may think they made grave mistakes, but you have to admit they generally strove to meet this basic minimum.
He offers a defense of this position and then writes further:
With the floor gone, the assumption of legitimacy went too. Today, many Trump opponents look at the moral degradation Trump supporters tolerate, the bigotry they endorse or tolerate, and they conclude that such people are beyond the pale. Simultaneously, many Trump supporters conclude that Trump opponents have such viciously anti-American ideas, that they too lack legitimacy. We’ve long had polarization, but we now have in America a crisis of legitimacy, which is a different creature. It’s the obliteration of other citizens, an assumption that the institutions, like election systems, are fundamentally frauds and are rigged. This is what Trump is exploiting now.
Brooks’ analysis indicts me as much as it indicts the guy flying a Trump flag on the back of his RV. Both of us have drifted far from the mutual tolerance and interpersonal respect and acceptance necessary for a functioning democracy. If you are a regular reader of these notes you might read his words and realize how I cringed when I read them:
Even when justified, permanent indignation is not a healthy emotional state. We’ve become a little addicted to our own umbrage, addicted to that easy feeling of moral superiority, addicted to the easy affirmation bath we get when we repeat what we all believe. Trump-bashing has become a business model. Politics has become a way to define and signify your identity, and that is elevating politics to too central a place in life. He’s made life all about himself, and a lot of us too readily played along.
We all have a lot of work to do after this election. It is important that we give ourselves an opportunity for improvement, and cut our losses by electing a leader who understands and practices political decency, but even as that is necessary, it is insufficient. We had problems that went unaddressed before Trump was elected, and defeating him will not guarantee the emergence of the world we want. When the election is over, the work will begin. In healthcare, we must reexamine the six domains of quality and the Triple Aim, and ask ourselves why have we failed to be committed to making them a part of another set of unrealized objectives that we can lump together as “these truths.”
A Return to Memories
I don’t know if Richard Rodgers or Oscar Hammerstein ever visited Oklahoma but they sure got the weather right in their musical.
Oklahoma
Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain.
Where the waving wheat can sure smell sweet
When the wind comes right behind the rain.
I have spent the last two and a half days in Oklahoma visiting scenes from my childhood. Just to set the stage, let me give you some of my background. I was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1945 while my father was writing his doctoral thesis. He had planned that he would go to the University of Edinburgh after World War II for post graduate work after completing his degree at Southern Seminary, but when I arrived things changed. So in 1946 when he graduated, when I was a year old, and when he was only 26, he took the position as pastor of the First Baptist Church of Okmulgee, Oklahoma, the capital of the Muscogee (Creek) Indian Nation. In 1948 we moved to MIami, Oklahoma which sits on famous Route 66 in the northeast corner of the state, up near the Kansas and Missouri borders. Mickey Mantle grew up in an even smaller town, Commerce, a few miles up the road. In 1950 we moved to Shawnee which is forty miles east of Oklahoma City just off of I 40 which runs coast to coast from California to North Carolina.
Our trip across the southwest has been quite windy. We drove into a storm on Sunday as we pulled into Santa Rosa, New Mexico. On Monday, we took advantage of a momentary break in the weather to continue on toward Amarillo. We got there just before the storm intensified, and forced us to come off of the road for two nights. It was bitterly cold, but by Wednesday we decided to take our chances with the wind and snow and head into Oklahoma. The header for today is a shot of the landscape about forty miles west of Oklahoma City. Ice and snow has bent and broken many of the trees that dotted the prairie along the highway.
By yesterday the storm had faded, The sun was coming through the clouds, but the ice and wind had taken down a lot of trees, and we found that we could not easily get diesel fuel because many of the service stations had no electric power to run their pumps. Nevertheless, we continued east toward Shawnee. Shawnee has changed since 1953. Now, there are two casinos. Many of the stores on Main Streets are boarded up, but much was as I remembered it. We lived in two different parsonages. The first one at 601 N. Broadway was sold by the church while we lived there so that a supermarket could be built. The second home at 1802 N. Broadway still stands, as does the Woodrow Wilson School where I attended the third grade. Jefferson School where I attended the first and second grades is also still serving the community. Both schools have had additions since I attended, but the main buildings are as I remember them. The Ritz Theater on Main Street is still in use long after I saw “The Greatest Show on Earth,” “Alice in Wonderland,” and “The Will Rogers Story.”
I left Okmulgee when I was three and it is hard to know if I really have memories or just the memories of family photos, but I did have a vague sense of geography when we drove through. The church has been remodeled to a 1970s awful architecture, but the Victorian home where we lived is unchanged. The oak tree is still in the backyard, and there is still a white picket fence. The first one was constructed, as I was told by my mother, to “fence me in” because I was a roamer. “Don’t Fence Me In” (click to hear the Cole Porter masterpiece sung by Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters), was a favorite song of my childhood. I will be visiting Miami before beginning the final 1600 miles trough Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and Vermont before crossing the Connecticut River back into New Hampshire.
We have a beautiful country, but many of its little towns like Newport and Claremont, New Hampshire in my neighborhood are tired and have many people who have a difficult future ahead. I have been struck by the poverty of rural and small town America. We can’t blame all that I see on Trump. It made him possible. Shawnee, Oklahoma looks a lot like Claremont, New Hampshire, Lincolnton, North Carolina, Elko, Nevada, and Sayre, Pennsylvania. We are connected by efficient Interstate highways that allow us to travel without knowing the extent of the deterioration that exists not far from the truck stops and shopping centers that line those highways. There are many ways to divide America: rich and poor, urban and rural, Bud Lite and craft beers, pickup trucks and Teslas, Walmart and boutique shops, double wides in trailer parks and McMansions in gated communities. We must find ways to minimize our divisions while we better distribute the benefits that we have collectively created. No one in this country should be expendable.
I can’t help but feel that the divisions are deeper than they need to be. We need a way to bridge the divides. We need someone who can relate to both sides of the divide and will measure success by how close we can bring the upscale neighborhood of Shaker Heights, the neighborhood around the Presidio, Westchester County, and the Western suburbs of Boston to the trailer parks of rural North Carolina, New Mexico and Oklahoma. What we don’t need is someone who sees opportunity in his ability to enhance the divide that exists already. I think that rural America is a land of opportunity, but to harvest that opportunity we need to understand the culture and invest in a future that reverses what we call the diseases of despair. Rural America needs housing, healthcare, new sources of employment, and a rebooted infrastructure. America is a very big country with plenty of room for everyone who is already here, and room to invite many more. There is no reason that we can’t imagine a future for our country where “these truths” moves from being an aspiration to a reality. The recurrent “bridge” in Oklahoma is:
We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!
All of America is a “grand land” with great possibilities, and I am so delighted to have renewed my relationship with what lies between the coasts. If you have not yet voted, please do it on Tuesday or before, if that is a possibility. Let’s not move any further away from a better future where the Triple Aim is only a small part of the possibilities.
Be well! Enjoy the fall. When you are out and about, wear your mask and practice social distancing as best you can. Look for opportunities to be a good neighbor. Let me hear from you. I would love to know how you are managing the uncertainties of our times,
Gene
