66. Shared sacrifice

The term didn’t make the Oxford Dictionary’s most frequent list this year.

 

I was a little young to remember WW II as it happened; my earliest memory my Uncle Russell’s flag draped casket and a gun salute. Soon other uncles who’d survived the war came home. They didn’t talk about the war, but sometimes there’d be mild jabs about one service or another. Eventually I’d learn that my dad’s two brothers and two brothers-in-law were in Europe and North Africa; my mom’s brother Sid flew the Hump from India into China, and her brother Russell had been killed in the Pacific in the war’s last month when he was only 19. I knew too that my dad spent the war years in Utah putting radios in B-29s while my mom took up his job in the post office. The war touched everyone in our family. 

 

We learned in school or from adult talk about victory gardens and war bonds, but my first realization of sacrifice for war effort was when baseball hero Ted Williams got drafted in WW II and again for Korea—taking away prime years of a record-breaking career. Senators, Congressmen, and their sons all enlisted or were drafted during WWII and Korea. Things changed with and after Vietnam; in 1973 the military became all-volunteer.

 

Ironically, emphasis on volunteerism seems to have coincided with a nationwide move to libertarian economics, rapid growth in technology, and the huge concentration of wealth in the top 1 percent of Americans. Individualism grew—and the military, Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, court run CASA, and church and university programs promoted volunteerism in serving the country and its hungry, poor, sick, and others in need.

 

There are splits and fragmentations in America—and even within the many geographical, religious, trade, business, and ethnic groups in the country. Individual cities, healthcare districts, states, and federal agencies each deal with their coronavirus. There was competition for ventilators and masks, and now intense jockeying for “carve-outs” to keep businesses, churches, and schools open.

 

The notion that we are all in this together seems as remote as WW II. Shared sacrifice is what healthcare workers do. Many of us—whether from fear or sense of duty—do follow recommendations, wear masks, distance, stay home. But many figure ways in which we are different; it’s someone else’s war.

 

# # # 

65. Numb

The young nurse who posted her before and after coronavirus work shift photos online was interviewed on television on the Friday Newshour; the word she used was “numb.” She and her colleagues are concerned for a public that doesn’t believe that the illness is serious, concerned for their patients—and moving forward on numb.

 

The specifics are bad: over 1700 health care workers have died; most nurses working with Covid-19 patients are not being tested unless symptomatic (while the country and economy finds enough money for continuous testing of pro and college athletes); and there are just not enough health care workers nationally to deal with the rising numbers of covid patients in hospitals and intensive care units. Over 80,000 hospitalized Americans at last count.

 

During my two weeks of splendid isolation in quarantine I sometimes felt embarrassed at my good fortune. I had plenty of food and water, a good roof and warm bed away from any possibility of my infecting others. I got a daily call from the medical folks, and each day that symptoms did not show up was a small triumph I would take with me on a nice hike to the lakeshore or up a mountain trail.  

 

And I’d sometimes think about the people of the Navajo Nation who have no place to quarantine or enough health care workers to look after them. Or the Indians in South Dakota who tried to quarantine themselves with roadblocks, and were overrun by a governor who doesn’t believe the disease is serious—not serious enough to postpone the Sturgis motorcycle rally or a presidential rally at Mt. Rushmore. And how many sicknesses and deaths rolled out across the country from those two events, my troubled mind asks.

 

I grow tired of these reports—tired maybe my response to anger without outlet, tired with this whole coronavirus event. I’ve grown tired of the election campaign as well, and the endless lawsuits by people who do not trust the election system and won’t listen to rebukes by state government officials and judges.

 

Our fatigue can only end with Covid-19’s retreat—it won’t be an easy or complete victory, but the hope is that this virus will at least join measles and the flu as rare and/or manageable. Meanwhile we plug on, tired, but knowing that health workers can’t afford tired, and must rely on numb. 

 

# # # 

64. “Freedom"

 One day after quarantine  

I’m home again, had a nice steak dinner with my two grandsons, who’ve safely quarantined here while I was doing so at a friend’s cabin. The grandson who tested positive and set this whole thing in motion had a few days of mild symptoms, but is healthy now. We’ll have turkey on Thursday, quietly.

This morning the radio news said that a million people each day are crowding into airports and airplanes going somewhere else for Thanksgiving. A piece in the Washington Post profiled a more conservative cross-section of Americans who are making accommodations—space heaters in patios, individual serving plates, zoom Thanksgivings. One woman said her husband would not be joining a smaller, masked group for the traditional dinner because he was “grumpy” that his presidential candidate had lost, and refused to agree to the precautions for the holiday meal.

My first thoughts were with the millions who are traveling, and then to the woman’s husband and the red-hatted people,who’ve become ubiquitous on TV with shouts for “freedom”: freedom to go on eating, drinking, and celebrating—and traveling—like they did in some idealized past. 

What do those freedoms have to do with the Martin Luther King, John Lewis, and the Freedom Marchers we watched on TV last night as I described the Civil Rights movement and the leaders I’d followed and idolized to my grandson! John Lewis wanted the freedom to vote, without having to correctly guess the number of jellybeans in a jar or reciting parts of the constitution. Nelson Mandela waited 27 years in prison for the freedom to participate in the life of his country without the walls of apartheid.

How do you measure those freedoms with the freedom to travel and crowd and breathe close and sing in choruses when solos are healthier and your own freedoms might infringe on the health and lives of others?

Say “freedom” once, twice, and the third time “Me and Bobby Maggee” rung in my ears. And freedom shrunk to a nostalgic hunger for something gone…

Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose

Nothin', that's all that Bobby left me, yeah

But, feelin' good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues

Hey, feelin' good was good enough for me, mm-hmm

Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee

# # #

63. Guns, Germs, and Steel

Day 14—My final day of quarantine

 

What a privilege, midst the pandemic and worry about upcoming holiday spread, to have time and space to think and write. Yesterday, a major worry slowed when granddaughter Oriana decided not to come home from Portland for Thanksgiving. It was a heartbreaker—and a heart-saver.

 

The election over, the disease has swelled across the headlines. I read and worry about Tribal people in the Dakotas and the Southwest, and admire the work they and others are doing to slow the pandemic. I cannot fathom Texas and South Dakota governors and their insistence on their own version of normalcy. Is it a comment on our times that studies showing that bars and social gatherings can be super spreaders while schools are not are routinely ignored? 

 

There’s at least some hope that history will save a bigger place for this pandemic than it has given to past outbreaks. My history classes, from elementary school through college, had little room for them. I remember something of the 14^th century Plague, but it was a footnote; I had no notion that it killed a third of Europe’s people. 

 

In early grades we learned Columbus and Washington and Jefferson—and maybe Squanto and Pocahontus—and when thought old enough to understand, Lincoln and the end of slavery. No one knew—or dared say—that diseases had killed 80 or 90 percent of the Native Americans. I’ve only learned details of the 1918 Influenza that killed 600,000 Americans this year, in he shadow of Covid-19.

 

My “long reading” these 14 days has been a rereading of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond sets out to explain why European civilizations were so successful—dominant—in the world, while other civilizations on other continents rose and fell, but never attained the global influence and power that those on the Eurasian continent have gained and still hold. Guns and steel have played their roles, but germs have often been the deciders. Most importantly, European diseases—smallpox, measles, typhoid and others—devastated American Indians and the civilizations they had grown. 

 

Pandemics don’t promote heroes and statues, and their deaths can’t be made into romance. They brought us witches and trials, strange religious practices, and the trick of hiding historically behind wars and conquests. 

 

This exercise is my own modest attempt to remember this one.

 

# # #

62. The Young

 Day 12 of quarantine

I talked on the phone with grandson Trey yesterday. His symptoms are gone, my quarantine is almost over, and we are making plans for a steak dinner on Monday night. 

 

The phone call was troubled. Trey’s 20, and, according to him, his cohort—classmates from his aborted first year of college—is not taking Covid-19 seriously, not concerned that the disease has anything to do with them—even when they are infected! I told him that there were 23 new cases in Union County one recent day, and wondered whether any of his classmates were among them. He didn’t know, but maybe.

 

We middle-aged and older Americans concerned about the strength and impact of this pandemic don’t talk much about the young. We wonder why our contemporaries continue to refuse masks, march in parades and go into or tend stores without them. We argue with preachers who demand full churches and wedding planners who want big crowds, and we laud the Navajo who are taking care of their elders and the health care professionals everywhere risking their lives to make the rest of us safe.  

 

We worry about the “economy” and parents struggling with online classes, but I hear little about the 15-20 year olds condemned to them. They should be traveling the world and trying things out; we’re asking them to stay home, go to high school and college online, and find work as grocery shelf stockers, gas station attendants, or Amazon warehouse workhorses. 

 

When the young do get sick, it’s no big deal. Young and healthy, the Covid slips by them with a few days of no smell and no appetite, and then is gone. They’re cavalier; we don’t give them a thought.

 

Seems to me a perfect opportunity to give them work with purpose, to enlist the young in actively fighting Covid-19 and addressing conditions that promote it. They could work drive-through test sites, haul water on a reservation. Instead of pizzas, they could deliver meals on wheels, groceries and mail to the frightened and shut-ins in their own communities. Or help in classrooms to spread elementary students into smaller pods.

 

We could ask them what they’d like to do to make the world they’re about to inherit better. We should at least be talking to them. 

 

# # #

61. Watching things climb

It’s scary, from here in my safe, quarantine mountain cabin, to watch the numbers of Covid-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths climb. Over 190,00 new cases and 2,000 deaths in the country yesterday, and at noon, PST, today, over 1,300 deaths—and Texas, which had over 200 on its own yesterday, not yet reporting. Texas, where governor and judges pretend to be old Texas Rangers, making their own laws for their own purposes as the people look for safety, not allowing local jurisdictions to set their own masking and distancing standards.

 

But North Dakota and its governor shove Texas-Covid today. A news-clip from Governor Doug Burgum said that “health care workers who test positive for the coronavirus but do not display symptoms could still report to work.” Nurses, worried about disease spread as they work double shifts and begin practicing triage, objected loudly. One told about dying Covid-19 patients who don’t believe they have Covid!

 

Beliefs are beliefs, and I respect them, but when governors’ proclamations and fake facts presented so often the dying lie to themselves, it is time for serious concern. 

 

I can make a good argument that facemasks saved my life. I spent three hours in a small car with my infected grandson (I did not know he was infected; if he was, he was asymptomatic). He did admit that he had been exposed—we facemasked, and drank milkshakes and cokes under our masks, and gulped McDonald’s burgers with the windows open. 

 

He tested positive early the next day, and friends whipped up a quarantine cabin for me at Wallowa Lake within hours. I’ve been here ever since, and Trey, who is as healthy as any young 20-year-old can be, had a couple of days of headaches and loss of taste and smell, but is now fine.

 

I read the news, look at the graphs, and I am afraid that the beliefs of some are now, promulgated often enough by people important enough, impacting the health of the many. I have some fear of coming down from my mountain retreat. 

 

So neighbors, wear a mask for me! And governors—and patients and politicians—listen to your nurses! And GSA, let the Biden Covid team talk with the Trump Covid team. I’ve got three more days of quarantine; it would be good to see medical communication go up and the numbers of patients, hospitalizations, and deaths go down before I get back to town.

 

# # #

59. Belief

 Day 10 of my quarantine

 

I’m sure that most of you reading this believe, like I do, that Covid-19 is serious business, and that wearing masks, distancing, and, when necessary, curtailing business and travel are all good. 

 

But stop for a minute and try to think about people who don’t believe like we do. There are the easy ones like the Texas Governor and President Trump, who believe that the cure—shutting down—is worse than the disease.  Maybe there is political calculation involved, but assume that they honestly believe what they say. 

 

Assume also that the person in your neighborhood who refuses to wear a mask, the store clerk who lets the mask slide below the nose, and the letter to the editor writer who claims that the whole thing is being blown out of proportion, believe as strongly as you and I do—that there beliefs are as deeply held as ours. 

 

* * *

 

In Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram X. Kendi says that beliefs precede actions; there would not have been chattel slavery in the United States without the 15^th and 16^th century European development of the idea of white supremacy in a tiered world. Once that belief was instituted across a society, slavery—and exclusion laws and land theft—became legitimate. 

 

Relinquishing beliefs is tough: how long for slavery? Or for the lifelong Catholic—or Episcopalian or Mormon—who relinquishes belief, or converts to another religion. You might know or be one.

 

But this is different, you say: it’s not religion or custom, but “science.” Tell Black Americans who know about the Tuskegee syphilis experiments about science. And talk with American Indians about epidemic diseases and Western belief systems. Look at contemporary public reactions to the 1918 Influenza. 

 

The believers on the other side of this one are not going to jump on our side with the waving of a science wand or the threat of jail or closure. This is serious business, and we need to be humble, and realize that the reasons for and strengths of beliefs vary. That it will be a combination of science, good sense, carrots, sticks and compassion that will see us through this very dangerous time. 

 

I hope--and think--steady Joe’s got the stuff to lead us through it.

60. To Pelosi and McConnell--Cut a Deal!

 Day 10 of my quarantine--#2

 

To: Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, 

 

Cut a deal!

 

Millions of Americans are sick, and thousands are dying as rapidly as any war has ever taken them. 

 

People are scared. Scared of getting sick or because they are sick, scared because they lost a job or might, scared because they’re hungry or without shelter or soon might be. People are isolated and alone, struggling to keep their kids in education programs, their marriages healthy, and their relationships with friends and family members alive. Many are at the end of a safety rope thrown to them months ago in your first Covid Relief package.

 

It’s not time to wait for January for another one, not time to weigh the implications of a deal now for the legacy of President Trump or the outcome of the Georgia runoff election. Instead of quibbling about the amount of money directed towards unemployment insurance, relief to hospitals and local governments and maintaining the airlines, get in that room of give and take and cut a deal. And stay in the room until you have one!

 

I believe that Joe Biden and a new administration can help us get through this pandemic in the long run, but it is the short run now, and Joe isn’t in the race. You are. 

 

Cut a deal!

 

# # #

 

58. Driving on the right side

Day 8 of my quarantine.

 

There are laws—and there are laws. We might quibble about speed limits—does Montana still do without them in its wide-open spaces?—but we don’t contest the law that says we drive on the right side of the road. We also generally obey stop signs and traffic lights, use our turn signals, drive sober, and make sure we have two headlights and that the stoplights work. We don’t want a ticket, but if we get one, nine times out of ten we admit we were in the wrong—that we’d broken the law—and we pay our fines. And even when we contest, I don’t hear anyone saying there should be no traffic laws at all.

 

We also read the signs in public and business restrooms with some comfort; “wash your hands; llave sus manos,” they say, and sometimes threaten to fire an employee caught disobeying. Most of us appreciate eating in clean places being run by people who wash their hands. And if we do get sick after eating at a restaurant we’re likely to file a complaint with the owner or manager. Or we drop it and don’t eat there anymore. And hope they go broke. We don’t question the need for food-handler laws.

 

We might bristle at some clean air and water laws, but my guess is that most of us have sympathy for the families with young children suffering because there was lead in their water. We assume that water comes out of our tap clean and fit to drink, and in this modern world, with a million chemicals that can threaten our health, we’ll trade our mayor’s freedom to set local rules for a more stringent authority. 

 

There are all kinds of laws that are “rules of the road,” that make our lives safer and easier. Not following these laws might make us feel powerful in the moment, like a drunk teenager roaring down the wrong side of a seemingly empty freeway in the middle of the night might feel—or it might kill us. 

 

Wearing a facemask is that kind of law. Not being able to fill the church or belly up to the bar in a pandemic is that kind of law. It’s about your health and mine. Let’s all stay in the right lane and use our turn signals.

 

# # # 

57. It’s Serious

The death counts for the coronavirus keep going up. Only two in Wallowa County, but now more than 70 total positive tests—and I can name seven of them! Our state’s new cases topped 1000 two days running, and Governor Brown has mandated a partial closedown. Nationally, they are remaking charts, as we are approaching 200,000 new cases each day. The American Covid-19 death toll will soon pass a quarter million. 

 

The numbers are slippery, but somewhere between 100 and 130 Secret Service officers and agents tested positive or are quarantined due to contact—this after accompanying the campaigning president around the country in the weeks before the election. The crowds were largely unmasked, as they were at the White House election eve party that has become a “super-spreader.” 

 

There is no doubt in my mind that the president and his staff were banking on electioneering to highlight his personal vigor and victory over Covid—and to portray Biden as a sissy resorting to masks, campaigning “from the basement.” They bet that the numbers would not go up until after the election. They won that part of the bet!

 

So how do we now, with all numbers in all states spiraling upward, convince those who have not taken Covid-19 seriously to realize that this is real, that masks work, and that any real economic recovery must look for a time when we are all safe together. How do we depoliticize masks and social distancing, help churchgoers intent on crowded indoor services realize that waiting and caring for a few weeks is going to be better for them and their churches tomorrow. How do we convince college students that parties that spread disease are not cool, that if they want to be able to party next year they’d do well to drop party from this year’s vocabulary. How do we convince deniers that people get very sick and die from this coronavirus? 

 

I’m over 70 and I’ve been exposed. Quarantining now but feeling find. If it’s the same next week it will be because I had a mask on at the time of exposure. That mask, and the one that my infected grandson wore, might have saved my life. 

 

Let’s save more lives, wear our masks and remind others to wear theirs, keep our distances, support our restaurants buying takeout, Zoom our Rotary meetings and make the contributions we can to those most impacted by this very serious disease. It’s not politics; it’s health.

 

# # # 

56. Facemasks

A morning editorial in the Washington Post reminds us that “geometric progression,” will put daily Covid-19 cases over 400,000 by Inauguration Day. Even with rapidly improving medical responses, our death count will grow to 1918 Influenza numbers, and our health care system will be severely stretched. 

As many of you know, I spent three hours in a car with my grandson on Sunday, and he tested positive on Monday. My friends rallied around, and I am hunkered down in a cabin at the head of Wallowa Lake. This place, which bustles with summer homes and visitors from across the world in July, is silent now. There are no cars, trucks, mowers, snow-blowers, or laughing children. I’ve not heard a dog bark; the deer are silent browsers on plants that stick out above a foot of snow. 

 

My two grandsons are quarantined at my house in Joseph. Trey seems to be doing fine, although he scared me with a call about not feeling well yesterday. He later said that food and drink helped. He’s healthy, and strong as the proverbial ox. I believe he has Covid—or had it, and that he is young and fit enough to get through it. For me at 78, it is more problematic. I study the virus and its implications.

 

According to the Post editorial:

 

“Multiple epidemiological studies have shown that gatherings of more than 10 persons, close contact in confined spaces, prolonged contact and contact without face masks pose the highest risk.”

 

The editors bypass the Trump administration, suggesting that President-elect Biden use bully pulpit to engage state and local governments and the public, nation-wide, in efforts to stop the geometric advance of the disease. In regions where case counts top 20 per 100,000 per day, they would:  

 

“1) restrict all indoor gatherings of adults to no more than 10 people; 

“2) close indoor restaurants, bars and clubs; and 

“3) mandate universal mask-wearing in public.

 

It’s now day 4 for me since exposure. Trey and I both wore facemasks during our three-hour car ride. We also wore masks in the house as we unpacked, made and ate dinner, and settled down Sunday night. And again Monday morning through breakfast and our car trip to testing. 

 

I know my quarantine is 14 days, but each day I feel good gives me more confidence, and makes me thankful for that sometimes inconvenient use of facemasks. 

55. Covid comes to my house

The virus has been circling around Wallowa County and hit friends directly and indirectly for weeks, but yesterday it came to my house. Grandson Trey, who has been living with his mother in Portland for the past 3 months, unwittingly brought it home. There had been exposure in his mom’s house, but she and two boys had tested negative—she said she couldn’t get Trey tested. No problem; I could get him tested here. I picked him up at the Pilot station at milepost 188 on Sunday, brought him home to join me and Aidan, another grandson whose hurried trip from Ohio brought him to Joseph a couple of weeks ago. 

 

We ate a good beef stir-fry Sunday evening, and I took Trey in for curbside testing Monday morning; he tested positive. We scrambled, got better masks, sanitized, talked about dividing bathrooms and spaces in the house. The medical people said I should wait before testing—either on symptoms or in 4 or 5 days, when the nasty virus has had time to work.

 

I mentioned the day’s events in an unrelated phone call to friend Rick yesterday--Monday.  An hour later he called back to say that he and others had decided that the house was too small for the three of us, and as I am the 78 year-old, I needed to get the hell out. He had already made arrangements with another friend for a summer rental house at Wallowa Lake.

 

It’s quiet here—no dogs barking or cars screeching, as they do even in the small town of Joseph. Quiet snow fell this morning on trees already heavy with it. I checked with the boys by phone. They’re fine, although Trey says he doesn’t have much energy. I wonder if he unconsciously knew he had it all along, and his gut had told him to come home. Trey changes the subject, tells me that I don’t have any excuses—I have to write my book.

 

I’ll try. Meanwhile, I read the papers and find a new explosion of positives out of the White House. My hunch, that the Trump campaign had raced against Covid with personal appearances in the last days before the election, betting that any outbreaks would not happen until after November 3, becomes conviction.

 

The cavalier attitude towards Covid-19 pisses me off. Wear your masks; keep your distance; limit your travel. And don’t bet against the virus.

 

# # #

54. The Explosion

On this day, November 7, when the Election has been called for Biden and Harris by AP—but not yet official by Electoral College vote—and partisans are dancing in the streets or girding for judicial challenges, Covid-19 is absolutely exploding. Yesterday, there were over 132,000 new cases and 1200 deaths across the country; at midday today, we’re over half on both counts, Oregon has upped its daily record to 844, and total US deaths have passed 240,000.

 

In the face of a serious pandemic, the country has for months been politically divided over an issue of public health. The largest of the large events promoted by Covid-19 minimizers was the Sturgis motorcycle rally. South Dakota’s governor embraced it, city officials reluctantly okayed it, and 460,000 bikers from every state poured into it. Covid-19 fanned out from Sturgis, but following the threads—contact tracing—has been virtually impossible. Similarly, there is little hope of contact tracing the thousands who have showed up for political rallies.

 

In the White House, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who has eschewed masks and asked aides not to disclose, has tested positive. Meadows, who appeared without mask at the president’s early Wednesday morning briefing, has been at the center of a strategy that downplayed the disease’s seriousness and up-played the president’s quick recovery and personal “victory” over Covid-19. Add known dispersion from the White House Amy Barrett event—e.g. Notre Dame President Reverend John Jenkins, and other known White House positives, including the recent disclosure of five Pence aides, and the understanding of the current explosion comes into clearer focus. 

 

One possibility is that administration officials knew the risks, but believed—rightly—that the election itself would be over before a post-election explosion. They would deal with it in the new political year.

 

Another possibility is that wittingly and knowingly, or unwittingly and with disdain for health officials’ warnings, a large chunk of the population seriously believes that the disease is not that serious, and/or that it will soon be under the control of herd immunity and vaccine. 

 

It is left for the Trump administration in its closing days, and for the incoming administration as it gears for arrival, to assess the current situation honestly, and advise the public cohesively. 

 

It is left for us all, individually and personally, to mind our manners—and our masks!

 

# #  #

 

53. Surge

Yesterday, Election Day, there were 108,000 new Covid-19 cases and 1201 deaths recorded in the United States. Oregon numbers continued to climb—near 600 cases again, and rural counties, long quiet in this pandemic, are showing upticks. Wallowa County recorded three new cases yesterday. The Wallowa School is still half shut down due to at least one official and more unofficial cases.

 

Why? Is this a normal uptick with colder weather and more indoor activity? Are immune systems compromised with fall colds and flus partially to blame? Is back to college—and back to school—responsible for moving it around? Could all of the close gatherings around electioneering and the election have contributed? 

 

I will remind people that in 1918, when the Spanish Flu, or Influenza, was circling the globe and the Great War was coming to its awful conclusion, war’s end in the fall of that year sparked a huge wave of disease and death in this country and across the world. The virus, which had baffled health experts on all sides of the war and in non-combatant countries, gathered strength in fall, worked its destruction in league with pneumonia and other diseases, and exploded with the celebrations of war’s end. 

 

US citizens danced in the streets after the November 11, 1918—some irony in the date—signing of a peace treaty. Soldiers came home, loved ones went to meet, and the virus danced the people towards 600,000 American deaths. Masks, quarantines, and other measures that had been carefully put in place to slow the disease in its earlier days were abandoned with relief from a greater evil—or so the people thought. 

 

What do we do? Common sense and the experts tell us to: ONE, wear masks; TWO, keep our distances; and THREE, restrict our travel. For the next three weeks, citizens in Greece will have to announce intentions by cell phone before leaving their homes! Let’s not go there. 

 

But let’s do the obvious, and now that the election is over, can we take all of the politics out of it?

 

# # #

  

52. The Election and Covid-19

I write this on Wednesday morning, with Biden ahead of Trump 238-213 in the Electoral vote and seven states still not declared for either side. Four of the seven are leaning Trump; three leaning Biden, but the light reds and light blues have shifted back and forth for hours, and might well do so again today—and tomorrow—before they move to bright red or bright blue. The popular vote—Biden up by 2,300,000—is tucked away for another day and discussions of electoral reform. 

 

One thing is certain: millions of Americans have decided that the Covid-19 threat is less important than the economy, or that it is overblown. Last night, as the vote counts spilled across the TV screen, commentators commented on the president’s whirlwind appearances in the last week, and the enthusiasm of his crowds. “The economy” was cited by many voters. 

 

There was little talk last night of Covid-19, no talk that I heard of the spread of the virus from polling places or rallies. No fears in voting lines—although most seemed masked and distanced. And the newspaper and radio pundits I’ve heard this morning make no or little mention of the disease. It’s as if the election took our minds away from something that has been with us for too long.

 

Millions of Americans have explicitly or implicitly decided that Covid-19 is not as serious a disease as advertised, or that it is not a personal threat because of their age or station, or that if they happen to contract it, they will bounce back as the president has, or that a herd immunity and the imminent arrival of a vaccine will soon reduce Covid-19 to a historical footnote.

 

Meanwhile, the disease is raging again in many countries as experts quibble over a second or third wave, and 1199 Americans died of it yesterday. There were 94,463 new cases announced, with our largest yet hospitalization census—50,176.

 

# # # 

51. Election Day

The headliners are still hustling for the last votes. Pundits and partisans are comparing the “vitality” of the candidates; it’s an endurance race, and all candidates will collapse sometime tomorrow night. 

The pundits other favorite issue is fraud or no fraud, and its corollary, acceptance or no acceptance. An old friend recently emailed me about his concerns with mail ballots. He claimed that in some states, including Oregon, the number of ballots mailed in some counties was greater than the number of legal voters living in the same counties. I searched and found nothing—from left or right, D or R, that indicated any concern about this in Oregon, and wrote back to tell him so, and ask him to please let me know where he found the information. No word back.

 

I also reminded him of a previous election controversy that provided more opportunity for fraud and outright theft. As I recall it, several states were moving to all touchscreen voting—without paper backup. The systems, they said, were foolproof. At which point a computer whiz from MIT showed how easy it would be to hijack the system and redo the vote count. 

 

Those systems are mostly, quietly, gone. Georgia still has old touchscreens, but a new, complicated, paper backup system has been added. There has been no public concern about this kind of fraud, and no mention of the long-ago “perfect system” being easily hacked for demonstration purposes. We’re concentrated on drop boxes, mail votes, and the integrity of the Postal Service.  

 

This might be puzzling, unless we remember the overall acceptance of even the most controversial election results in our past. Popular vote winners have lost the presidency in the Electoral College. There is brief outrage, and then acceptance. Kennedy, the outsider, the Irish Catholic who inspired fear in protestant pulpits, won in a very close election, but there was an undercurrent that said that Mayor Daily of Chicago was managing the last precincts in Kennedy’s favor. Yet Nixon conceded.

 

I think most historians and political practitioners purposefully do not bring up the voting machines. Dr. Dennis Strong, a history professor of mine 57 years ago, told us that the most important factor in American political stability and success over centuries is orderly succession. 

 

We are being tested this year, the first time in my 56 years of voting.

 

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