17. Can We Heal?

It struck me yesterday, after my obsessive first morning look at the Coronavirus world in graphs and news stories, that we have slowed the deaths just enough to allow the spread of the disease to remain rampant—or to grow. I saw the angry Texans taunting the mask wearer; they looked like they could eat him. There was a peaceful pic of San Diego tourists with a “wondering” caption—something about what is coming from Arizona. And the constant drumbeat of the many who want to get on with “opening things up.” Some forever Trumpsters follow his economic over coronavirus preaching religiously. But my gut feeling is that many of the young and healthy see no current or future personal threat in Covid-19.

There’s an irony for those my age, who remember a time when we were advised not to “trust anyone over 30.” We thought old people and their outdated ideas were in the way of new thinking on drugs, music, and war.

But the young started dying in Vietnam, and in a strange but now understandable echo of today, black and brown men were serving and dying in greater numbers than were white men. And when, because of a policy of one-year deployments, the draft deferments of young white men could no longer protect them, the old people came up with a draft lottery—the bouncing balls with birth dates on them determined who would go, and in some high numbers be wounded or killed, in Vietnam.

I think it was the women who rose then to defend their sons. I and many young people marched for peace, but there were growing numbers of moms, and soon their lawyer doctor legislator husbands were calling for peace.

Vietnam left 58,000 Americans and over a million Vietnamese dead, and a country fractured. It seemed the old and young never really got together to heal things.

Maybe this time.

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16.The Navajo Nation’s Coronavirus March

Officer Michael Lee of the Navajo Nation police department died of the coronavirus this week. He was 50 years old, not the first Navajo officer to be ill with it—there have been at least a dozen—but the first to die. The news appeared in two small Southwest papers when I Googled “Navajo and coronavirus.”

The BBC was there a week ago to chronicle the death of a 29 year-old Navajo woman who had once been a beauty pageant winner. I see by Google that CBS broadcast from Navajo in mid-June, and I know that the New York Times had a couple of stories from the Navajo Reservation before that. That’s when I started paying attention to it—and as far as I can tell, when the NYT stopped.

In a weird kind of addiction, I check the stats on US States daily, and Navajo Nation, which is, population wise, smaller than any state, gets its own line. They are at 350 deaths now, ticking away, 2-3-4 a day, climbing the ladder past the states, a week ago with 11 states below them in number of deaths, today 15. They are well past Oregon (202), Nebraska (267), and Kansas (270), and will undoubtedly soon pass New Hampshire and Oklahoma. Oregon is still up on Navajo with 8,094 total cases to 7,320—but the Navajo Nation’s total population is only 175,000!

Covid news has its own trajectory—Seattle started it; New York soon dominated with high numbers and astounding death tolls; Dr. Fauci, with Trump tagging along, caught our daily attention for a time. And then George Floyd and an almost simultaneous release of statistics about Covid Black deaths and Brown deaths  turned White America’s attention to Black Lives Matter. Latinos caught a bit of it, but now it’s Florida and Texas with the big numbers.

A few Indian tribes have had local attention; the Navajo had their day with the national news. The Navajo—and other tribes—will survive. They’ve been down this road many times.

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15. Two Minnesotas

I was born in small town Lutheran Minnesota in 1942, and lived there until I was ten. There were years of visits to favorite uncles, aunts, and lakes, and from that time on, from homes in California and Oregon, I have followed Minnesota, proud of her sports teams and historic and liberal support of the arts, proud of her acceptance of refugees from Vietnam and Somalia.

But…  as I began my own journey in American Indian history, another Minnesota appeared. Most dramatically, there was the 1862 Mankato Hanging of 38 Indians fighting for food and freedom. More systemically, I began to reflect and read about the Indians and their reservations near my hometown. I hadn’t known a Minnesota Indian by name. I read David Treuer, whose Ojibwa roots are on the nearby Leach Lake Reservation, and Louise Erdrich, further away on North Dakota’s Turtle Mountain Reservation. Their world—of boarding schools, allotments, Termination, and Relocation was and is not the Minnesota I knew.

Then George Floyd. And on a recent day on public radio a story about Calvin Griffith, who moved the Washington Senators to Minnesota and changed their name to the Twins because he found out there were “only 15,000 blacks [in Minneapolis-St. Paul]… We came here because you’ve got good, hardworking, white people here.”

There was another NPR story that same day about Hmong Chef Yia Vang, whose family came to Minnesota from a Thai refugee camp when he was a child, because Minnesotans were passionate sponsors of refugees. And there is news of the Minnesota Freedom Fund and herculean efforts to get rid of the bail system.

So now I see two Minnesotas from this Oregon distance—and maybe that’s not so odd. Maybe the Covid and BLM lenses are helping us all see more of worlds we thought we knew.

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14. The $1200 Divide—and the DOW

1. Those of us who used our $1200 checks to buy groceries or pay rent;

2.  Those who didn’t really “need” the $1200, got it and added it to an IRA, or used it to help others—in our town pooled $1200s to create a community help fund;

3.  Those who didn't get it and are OK with that;

4.  Those who didn’t get it and wouldn’t notice $1200 if they got it.

Protests are sweeping across America and the world. Police departments are staggering. State and federal lawmakers are scrambling, passing legislation they wouldn’t have looked at six months ago. Coronavirus deaths are down in the US, but cases and deaths are spiking in some states and other countries. The world is fighting COVID-19 hard, and measles and polio are being neglected—and might erupt again. We are officially in a recession with 21 million out of work…

And… the DOW bounces along up and down, mostly up after the first big shutdown hit, down last week as shareholders sold off and took profits, then a few up days, etc, etc.  It’s up about 7 % today from May 20, when I wrote about a guy who put $3 million in a trading account to “play” with. He made $210,000 if he indexed $3 million on that day and sold today. If he’d lost $210,000, he’d still have $790,000 to play with.

Most Americans agree that capitalism is a good way to organize the economy and provide opportunity. But we understand capitalism in terms of the investments and hoped for returns we and our friends make in homes, businesses, and bank accounts. We have no notion of the gyrations that allow a few to cash in on stock options; we don’t have millions—or thousands!—in E-trade accounts to play with, and we tend to our own and our neighbors’ needs gratefully with our $1200 checks.

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Pandemic 13--COVID Comes Close

Dr. Fauci told us something like this would happen, that rates of infection would go down in some of the hard-hit urban areas with masks, isolation, quarantine, tracking, etc., but then spike up in rural areas as the virus creeps across the country.

Oregon, which has been sitting well, is now one of 21 states with an upsurge in COVID cases, and our neighboring Union County, with 218 cases in the last two days, is the big reason for Oregon’s big spike.

We—Oregonians—were so good and careful for weeks, following Governor Brown’s orders, closing down classrooms, stores, churches, galleries and non-profits. We supported our restaurants with take-out orders and arranged alternative high school graduations. We waited on routine medical procedures while docs and administrators prepared for the worst.

And then we reopened. Of course there had been some in the church and business communities who thought we never should have shut down—those who thought the whole thing a hoax, and those who thought we should take the Swedish plan towards herd immunity.

This week’s flare-up in Union County owes at least in part to church services and/or a wedding in a church that defied the Governor’s orders re crowd size and distancing. And it—and any further contagion expansion—owes to parishioners and community members who thought “hoax” or “herd immunity”—or who believed this is all about old and sick people and not about me.

In a Zoom presentation yesterday at the Josephy Center where I work, Dr. Clay Josephy surmised that we, individually, will take COVID-19 seriously when someone we knows dies of it. Those who think hoax and Sweden, birthday and graduation parties, the church in Union County, and a Baker County Judge who argued that Governor Brown’s orders were illegal, might all be bringing us closer to that reality.

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Pandemic 12--Fountain of Praise Church

Once, a very long time ago, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference struggled to carry on the “Poor People’s Campaign” and Resurrection City grew on the soggy Washington D.C. Mall, I found myself in a Baptist Church listening to Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, and a large white woman from South Carolina. It was the kind of event that should have been captured in a diary or a saved church bulletin, but I was young and out to do good that day, with no notion of saving things so that I could think about them a half century later.

Listening to the service for George Floyd in the Fountain of Praise Church in Houston this week sent me back to that night, to another time when white Americans were caught up in the emotional truths of Black Americans’ struggles.

Last night I tried to explain the emotional surge—and truth—of singing “We Shall Overcome” in that church that night to my granddaughter. I remembered peace marches and civil rights gatherings, and Joan Baez marching arm in arm with MLK in Montgomery in 1965. I can hear her now singing—and hear myself singing—“We Shall Overcome some day…”

The white woman that night said that she knew that looking down on n….s was a way of keeping poor whites down, that she knew that she and her kin were the n….s now.

You can mount every rational argument about justice and equality, argue and negotiate your way to legislation, bring new textbooks to the classroom and body cams to the police forces, but in my book the hope for real transformation is in white Americans grasping once again the emotional truths of brown and black experiences.

George Floyd’s service in that black church in Houston brought that home.

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11. The County Joins In

The County Joins In

Last Friday night about 200 of us gathered at the courthouse in Enterprise to show our support for Black Lives and Brown Lives Matter. Our community—the 7000 who live in Wallowa County, is very white. But there are a few of color—and now we are proud to have Mexican and Thai and Chinese restaurants.

I was proud too to be part of the Friday gathering. There were other graybeards like me, who had marched in the 60s, when we were young and thought we could change the world. But there were young people too, people with babies and teenage kids, students who had graduated high school that very day. An American Indian who grew up here told his story, and I stood next to another Indian friend. A white woman in her 20s rallied the crowd—she and cohorts made sure there were signs for those of us who didn’t bring our own

There were police everywhere—city police, state police, and the incoming and outgoing sheriffs, who walked the crowd together smiling and chatting. The theater owner and his family pulled a wagon full of popcorn sacks through the crowd—and I think took some to the cops and few onlookers who leaned against walls across the street. A few of them had guns at their sides—“to protect the police from us,” the news reporter told me.

Two or three pickups drove by with fingers in the air, but more drivers pumped fists and honked horns—some even had signs.

This morning a post from Carlsbad and Oceanside, California, where I went to high school sixty years ago, showed thousands marching peacefully to meet between the cities. It’s not just Minneapolis and Portland, but Enterprise and Oceanside, and hundreds of places in between.

It felt like the 60s, when Joan Baez linked arms with Martin Luther King, and white people joined our black and brown brothers and sisters saying “we’re all in this together; let’s do something.”

Maybe George Floyd will change the world, as the preacher said.

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10. Privatization

Private prisons—and their lobby—are a big reason for high incarceration rates in the US, with higher rates still for people of color.

Privatization is the backdrop to the mistreatment of black and brown Americans, Americans whose roots go to Africa and those tied to southern neighbors, and, more than any to the misnamed original inhabitants of the Americas, the Indians.

Wars were fought and treaties made to gain Indian lands, but privatization is specifically written into the Homestead and Allotment acts, which divided common tribal lands into parcels sold cheaply to Euro-Americans.

It took a Civil War to break the country of laws that made African-Americans the private property of their slave-owners. It took legislation at local, state, and eventually at the national level to break the doctrine of coverture, under which a woman was legally considered the chattel of her husband.

Braceros from Mexico came to the US to work the fields during WW II, and then were sent home. There have been programs since, the “guest workers” commodities hired--and owned for a time--by private Americans, welcome and unwelcome at leaders’ whims.

Still, the country has often preached the common good.  African Americans and Indians eventually got citizenship and the vote; women got property rights and the vote. Roads became public, public parks developed, and public education—sometimes “separate but equal”—was gradually extended, until the recent era of public funding of private schools.

The last great surges toward public good were in the 30s. FDR’s answer to the Great Depression was to end individual American citizens’ agony through Social Security, bank insurance, the CCC and public works, artists painting post office murals, and writers writing state guidebooks.

Privatization has been the gospel since Reagan; this COVID exposes its failures—prisons, nursing homes, health insurance. We still have Social Security and Medicare, voices for their privatization now muted.
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9. Invisible Indians

A friend sent me a link to a video of Jingle Dancers and an Indian Drum at the George Floyd assassination site in Minneapolis. Indians rarely make the news, so this quite stunning event was not covered in any major news feeds I saw. And it is rarely and barely mentioned that Indians suffer discrimination and death at the hands of police as often or more often than do African-Americans.

The pandemic itself has hit Indians hard, but aside from the occasional story about the Navajo, we don’t get much news of it. I know from friends that this brings up generational memory of the impact of diseases on other reservations. 

This beautiful video reminds us that Indians are still here in their country.

 https://www.facebook.com/mahpiyazi/videos/2814001058727534/

8. Incarceration

The news and pictures after George Floyd’s death have been numbing: protests; riot-geared police swinging nightsticks; police kneeling and marching with protestors; white supremacist infiltrators; “anarchists”; Trump tweeting, hiding in the White House, holding a Bible aloft and preaching militarism; looting, burning, and peaceful protest in over 60 cities here and more abroad.

I’ve had a hard time finding an edge to hang onto in this—and more importantly, a good story for tomorrow. Then came Danielle Allen in yesterday’s Washington Post.  She’s Harvard, she’s black, and has her own sad family story. A cousin, incarcerated at 15, served an 11-year sentence for a failed carjacking and was killed by a man he’d met in prison.

Allen zeroes in on incarceration. And she has information that is new to me and I’m sure to most Americans. Our prisons, places we know incarcerate people of color at an inordinate rate and can turn petty wrong-doers into criminals, do not have to be this way. And they can be a key to unraveling the mess we’re in.

Allen suggests we “reduce our reliance on incarceration from 70 percent of the sanctions imposed in our criminal-justice system to 10 percent.” “This is not utopian,” she says. “The Netherlands uses incarceration at about this rate and Germany at [a] lower rate… If we pick this one goal and organize our energy around that, everything else will change — policing, drug policies, court processes, the depths of our despair, our health, our freedom, our economic opportunities. Everything.”

That’s bold, but a quick check says the US incarcerates 693 of 100,000 citizens; Germany 76; the Netherlands 69! Both use fines and other forms of community-based sentences and stress “normalization.”

Sens. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) have proposed a national commission tasked with “a comprehensive review of the criminal justice system.” Let them do it!


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7. “1967"

It feels like 1967, and CONTRA-19 feels like Vietnam. No sounds of choppers and gunfire, but the sirens of ambulances and the humming of refrigerated trucks holding dead bodies. The bodies are older, but the body count is higher.

I left the US for my Peace Corps tour in Turkey in July in 1965—a month before Watts blew up. There had been indications—“Freedom Summer” in ’63 in the South; the Kennedy assassination; a Vietnam teach-in I’d gone to at Northwestern in the fall of ’64; racial incidents in Eastern cities in that same year. But I left Peace Corps training at Portland State University in June with a pocketful of Kennedy half-dollars, a few hundred Turkish words and phrases, and the idealism of a 22 year-old convert to peace and the Peace Corps.

I came back to a radically different US in the summer of 1967. Vietnam had moved from the background to the headlines. There were daily body counts, of our dead and General Westmoreland’s precise if fabricated statistics of the North Vietnamese dead. Dr. King had linked the Civil Rights movement to Vietnam in an April speech.

I took a Peace Corps staff job and lived at DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C. Vietnam was on our minds as we focused our work lives on the rest of the world. The country was divided. “Hard hats” were the MAGA hats of the day. I and 100,000 others marched on the Pentagon in October.

The calendar turned. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April; D. C. erupted. We were curfewed as the city burned. In June Robert Kennedy was assassinated.

Today’s pandemic is the drumbeat of our lives, like Vietnam was in 1967. George Floyd’s killing and today’s riots feel like the spring of 1968.

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6. The Covid Lens

The coronavirus pandemic is a health and financial crisis, but it’s also a lens shining light on much more:

The gaps between rich and poor—We watched and listened as the rich fled New York and Los Angeles for homes in the Hamptons and Sun Valley, leaving the crowded cities to the disease and health workers. We’ve been introduced to harsh low-end emergency and home care workers. Unemployment rates have soared while the stock market danced off its immediate drop and continues to dance, as the wealthy play their games.

The Color gaps—Everyone who reads or listens knows that the disease is hitting hardest among African Americans, Latinx, and American Indians. We get daily percentages comparing the black population of Georgia or Louisiana or Michigan with the always higher percentages of sick and dying.

American Indians—Who knew that the Navajo lack good water? (and that it might have something to do with fifty year-old power plant deals and coal slurries). And how many had forgotten that Indians still exist? We now get—although only occasionally—national reporters talking to us from New Mexico and Dakota reservations.

The costs of education—students, especially poorer students, on work-study are struggling, sometimes staying in dorms while attending classes online. Internships on the way to jobs are scarce. Private universities are dipping into endowments and public ones pleading for more government help. The lack of full-tuition paying foreign students hurts. The real crux of it, the decades-long disengagement of government from funding college education, shines a harsh light on current costs—and benefits—of education.

The meatpacking industry—Working conditions, and the reliance on immigrant labor—sometimes undocumented—are exposed.

Nursing Homes—Regulations; worker and patient conditions; importance of.

Child Care—Ditto.

5. Immigrants

I follow immigration issues regularly, but the COVID lens is shining new light on things. This is not about immigration policy, but immigrants, the people who now show up regularly on our TV screens.  

The most notable have been health care workers—doctors and nurses peer from behind masks and guards, oftentimes exhausted after a hard shift or a difficult death, their names and faces labeling them sub-Saharan African, Indian, Pakistani, Central European, or South American. Send them back?

The most tragic have been meatpacking plant workers. Cheek by jowl in factories, crowding out of the places as the virus stalks them, back into the factories as the president deems them essential and tells the plants to reopen. In Fast Food Nation, in 2001, journalist Eric Schlosser followed the conversion of meatpacking from a semi-skilled job that paid enough to a factory assembly line that paid little—and put workers on the line with limited, dangerous tasks to perform in limited time to produce maximum profits.

When one moving part in the line breaks down, there are others to replace it—no training required. New immigrants, especially undocumented ones, make perfect workers. Without English, it’s harder to complain of sickness or injury. Without citizenship papers or a green card it’s harder.

But when a virus gets loose, and dozens of worker-pieces are damaged, the machine breaks down. The Washington Post said yesterday that over 11,000 workers in over 30 closed plants have been sick. Today a local rancher told me how hard it is to move cattle through this restricted system, and had heard rumors of new breakdowns at restarted plants. Hard on growers—and meat eaters.

And as half of all agricultural workers in the US are new immigrants, we might watch what we say about the people who are keeping us fed—and healthy.

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4. Dystopia in a Time of Pandemic

John Rember wrote the small essays neatly bundled in 10 chapters of 10, in his new book, “a hundred little pieces on the end of the world,” before we knew of COVID-19. When he doesn’t imagine the world’s end with rising seas and temperatures, unbridled wildfires and vicious weather, Rember remembers his grade-school duck and cover exercises, and Jonathan Schell’s 1982 book about nuclear annihilation, “The Fate of the Earth.” (Now add COVID.)

Rember’s central argument is that unbridled capitalism and its concomitant radical individualism will lead to the world’s end—if nuclear explosions do not. It’s a matter of time—and he isn’t optimistic about the half-measures that people advocate to stave off catastrophe. He sees the fulcrum at which our current civilization took its final downward turn at the 1963 killing of John Kennedy. I’ve always seen the Vietnam War—which I didn’t directly participate in—as the pivot point in my own life, and to some extent in the life of our nation. Like Rember, I’ve seen the regimes of Thatcher and Reagan and the visions of Ayn Rand as stopping points on paths to destruction.

Rember’s meditations are more organized, rigorously developed—and darker than I dare let mine become. But they are also beautifully conceived and written, and, even if my mind or your mind doesn’t want to travel the entire Rember road towards apocalypse, there are nuggets of recognition and joy. I don’t think it is giving away too much to say that love, kindness, and empathy are continuing chords in the work.

On reflection, I can see it all as a love letter to his wife Julie, the woman who arrived at the right time in the right way to share a unique life journey.

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3. Graduates--What’s Next?

I watched the Lebron James-Barack Obama graduation ceremony. It was good, and the students themselves, from schools across the country, were impressive: the first generation valedictorian, the young man who spoke in his native Spanish, the singers….

And now these folks have to figure out what to do next—and how to do it. Some are admitted to college but don’t know whether it will be online, like the last half of their senior year was; some think they will defer admission, wait for things to settle, find a job if they can; others weren’t there, and are maybe stewing in their parent’s homes, wondering what the H is next!

I’ve read that students who enter the job market in a down time never catch up, that the 2008-09 high school and college graduates will, at least on the average, have less satisfying jobs and make less money than students who had the good fortune to be born at the right time and go to work when the economy was booming.

The federal government and some state governments are working hard right now to keep parents and families afloat. One can argue with how the money is being spent, but we can all agree that the sums are substantial.

So what if some of those substantial amounts went to hiring new graduates and keeping a bunch of the rest in school? If we need 300,000 contact tracers, why don’t we hire 20,000 or 30,000 new college grads to train and supervise 300,000 new high school grads to do the work? A CCC program for the time.

And why not make this the time to change k-12 education (which was once 1-8, and then 1-12 before it was k-12) to k-14 education and just make two years of community college free to all who qualify!

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2. The Stock Market

I bought into the market once, in 1987—right before the “Black Monday” crash of October 19. The $3,000 I took out of a slow-growing insurance policy suddenly became less than $2,000.

I’ve never had the excess cash or felt the need to play the game again—but since then it has seemed to me more like a casino than a legitimate business. My brother the economist assures me that the market has a legitimate purpose—in raising capital for business development…. But he also admits that he tells students that it’s a horse race, that you bet on good safe horses, or take fliers on long-shots; that sometimes the good horses break a leg, and sometimes the long-shots win. Some know more about horses than others.

Now that I have an I-phone, I can see what’s happening to the Dow Jones anytime. And it’s been quite a ride with COVID-19. The big dip in the beginning has given way to zig-zag ups and downs, not reaching previous highs, not going deeper in the tank.

My simple-minded understanding: there’s money that has to go someplace. Confirmed by John Cassidy in the New Yorker, who found that E-Trade and TD Ameritrade more than tripled transactions this April over April, 2019.

A Cassidy friend suggested that casinos are closed and there are no sports to bet on. Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, confirmed that. He said that “Sports ended, and this was something that… I could do during the day.” Portnoy put three million dollars in an E-Trade account “to play around with.”

Some are out of work; many are grateful for the $1200 government checks. And some are playing the *&^%) stock market—at least until the tracks open and some kind of football season happens.

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1. The Great Depression

Newscasters and pundits are quick to compare the current high rate of unemployment to The Great Depression, but I have yet to hear them say that in 1929-30-31 there was no unemployment insurance, no social security, no government insurance on bank accounts. There were NO safety nets for the 25 percent unemployed, and Republicans and Democrats did not join together with huge government spending programs for businesses and cash payments to individuals. For the 25 %, hope came with the CCC program and a trip to some faraway place like Wallowa County to build roads and ranger houses, water troughs and bridges—meals, lodging, and medical care provided, and $30 a month. Over three million men worked in CCC camps; some 8,500 women in She-She-She camps (brainchild of Eleanor Roosevelt). Other WPA programs hired 10,000 artists who painted in post offices and taught in 100 art centers—one in La Grande; 6,600 writers who published 270 books; and 11 photographers, who gave us our iconic images of the Great Depression. No comparisons.

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