85. Calm, beauty, empathy

Yesterday, Inauguration Day, was a day of calm and beauty. The calm was intense because it contrasted with the January 6 insurrection and its chaos on the same Capitol steps, and because threats of further upheaval and violence there and in state capitols across the country were not realized. 

It was beautiful because there was a first public acknowledgement and mourning of the 400,000 Americans taken by the pandemic. The simple ceremony on the capital mall the night before cast a calm that carried to the inaugural event itself. President Biden’s words were fine, reaching across aisles and differences for common purpose; poet Amanda Gorman’s words and presence were beautiful. What poise and grace—a 22 year-old black woman imagining that she could imagine being the president, and finding herself reciting for a president on that day.

 

As the camera’s panned the faces of the dignitaries the poet addressed, I could see in their eyes an imagining and a conviction that a day might come when Amanda—a  “skinny black girl, the descendant of slaves raised by a single mother”—might indeed become president. 

 

At the conclusion of her book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, author Isabel Wilkinson lauds the Albert Einstein, the Jewish scientist escaped from Nazi German., teaching at Princeton. Einstein saw the huge disconnect in our national commitment to equality, spoke against racial inequality at every opportunity, and welcomed the black singer Marian Anderson into his home when Princeton hotels would not take her. Wilkerson sees in Einstein and the lives of many black and white civil rights leaders who put their lives on the line a radical empathy—and a way of the heart beyond racial hierarchies that trap us:

 

“These are people of personal courage and conviction, secure within themselves, willing to break convention, not reliant on the approval of others for their sense of self, people of deep and abiding empathy and conviction. They are what many of us might wish to be but not nearly enough of us are. Perhaps, once awakened, more of us will be.”

 

Amanda Gorman embodied that, and the enormous tasks of dealing with a still raging pandemic and calming a divided nation seemed somehow, in her moment, possible. The small but critical work of making more syringes and reaching out to neighbors of different colors, religions, and political parties seemed, somehow, doable. 

 

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84. MLK

 Martin Luther King’s Day is being overwhelmed in this Inaugural week. There are National Guard troops on the mall and surrounding the Capitol and at state capitols across the country. News reports tell us that President Trump will leave town before he’s ex-president Trump and incoming President Biden is sworn in. Trump’s still not conceding. Vice-president Pence is apparently minding the store, and will attend Wednesday’s Inaugural. Trump’s close advisors are—or are being accused of—taking payments to lobby for last minute pardons. There were last-minute federal executions, and there is fear of other last minute deals that will embed Trump loyalists in government agencies and weaken environmental regulations. Safety procedures and troops and more troops—and the fear of right-wingers among troops and police—dominate the news.

 

Biden’s team is putting out word of a million inoculations a day for ninety days—Dr. Fauci says we can do it. With unbounded ambition, Biden announces a ten-day program of executive actions and legislative proposals that will address the four crises greeting him on his presidential arrival: The Covid Crisis; the Economic Crisis; Climate Change; and Racial Justice. 

 

MLK has not been completely overlooked on his day. The incoming president and vice-president worked in food banks—service in honor of King—and King’s granddaughter was on NBC’s nightly news. A rerun of an interview with John Lewis about his relationship with King aired on Oregon Public Radio. 

 

The newsreel images of John Lewis and MLK, Andrew Young and Ralph Abernathy and Joan Baez arm in arm, confronting dogs and Billy clubs, are etched in my mind. And 1968, the assassination, and in its wake the continuation of the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington D.C. I was there—in a Baptist church with Coretta Scott King and Ralph Abernathy preaching and me and hundreds of others, arm in arm, singing We Shall Overcome… 

 

Two of Biden’s four crises—racial and economic action toward equality—were on King’s list 53 years ago. Biden’s bold plans and the images of today—armed troops bivouacked in the Capitol; flashing reruns of Trump’s inflammatory speech and the mob’s occupation of the Capitol; and of lonely Covid deaths and struggling medical teams—are hopeful and unsettling. 

 

I’m nervous and hopeful, as I guess I was in that Black Baptist Church in Washington D.C. all those years ago. Two fretful days until the inauguration…

 

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83. Waiting in line

Waiting in line

 

A few days ago Governor Brown opened the Oregon vaccination program up to all seniors over 65. On Wednesday at noon I heard that I should call the local health providers to get an appointment. I didn’t get to it until an email at 3:30 reminded me. I called and was told that I am on a wait list, with more drugs on the way. Last night we learned on TV news that Health Secretary Azar’s promise to release all vaccine reserves was a hollow pledge; the reserves had already been shipped. Today’s noon program on OPB says the state’s plan must retrench. Seniors get back in line.

 

Word of the local situation spread by email and word of mouth. The governor’s remarks also run out the public and private communications lines to health care providers, drugstores, and other pandemic response teams in a kind of gossip game fury, with teams A, B, and C wondering what it means for their hospitals, pharmacies, nursing homes, counties. 

 

This kind of disjointed set of messages and actions has been part of the vaccine rollout from day one. It’s easy to blame the Trump administration for the glitches that sabotaged the promised “20 million injections before the New Year,” and that have followed with every step of the Covid Crisis. But….

 

Fifty-five years ago I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in a small Turkish village. We had an impetigo outbreak and went to Turkish doctors to ask what we should do.

They loaded us up with purple medicine and sent us back to the village. Another time, my neighbor’s small son was kicked in the head by a donkey. Mom and I carried him to the main road and flagged a tractor pulling a wagonload of passengers. I held the boy as we bounced the 20 kilometers into the city, Diyarbakir, and then caught a horse drawn cab to the government hospital. The wound was swabbed with iodine, dusted with sulfa, and sewn with a staple. 

 

At some point in our dealings with local health authorities, a young doctor doing his military service lectured us on the differences between American health care and what he was doing. “I am responsible for the health of this city and state. We have to patch the wounds and prevent the spread of diseases as best we can with the whole community in mind,” he said. We don’t have the luxury of individualizing every outbreak and every procedure.”

 

There are times when individualism and competition are not the most efficient ways of getting a big job done.

 

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82. D.C. and Covid get personal

In the wake of the January 6 debacle at the Capitol, three Democratic members of Congress have tested positive for Covid-19. New Jersey Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman, a 75 year-old cancer survivor, Illinois Representative Brad Schneider, and Washington Representative Pramila Jayapal all announced positive tests after being warned by the Capitol physician that they might have been exposed during the lockdown. 

There might be—will surely be—others, as Republicans and Democrats huddled together in secure rooms for more than five hours while insurgents were cleared and Congressional chambers secured and cleaned. Nancy Pelosi had made masks a requirement for the House Floor, but the instinctive refusal of Covid seriousness and mask effectiveness was stronger for some Republican representatives than any collegial pleas that they wear them in hiding. 

 

Schneider and Jayapal both condemned the mask-less behavior. Schneider worried that he had then exposed family, and all three now must decide how to conduct Congressional business in the next important days. 

 

It is absolutely beyond me that “the mask” has become such a symbol of party and politics. But watching January 6 unfold on the TV screen was beyond me as well. And watching the continuing denial by many, largely along party lines, in the face of rising Covid numbers and deaths, is beyond me as well.

 

Pramila is not. She is my friend as well as a Congresswoman, and I watched her on NBC, hunkering below the seats in the House gallery as the melee downstairs roared. There was fear on her face, and on the face of many as they were led to safety. Contrasted with the absolute glee on the faces of painted and red-hatted people—mostly white and mostly male—vandalizing the Capitol, calling for Nancy Pelosi, shouting that Pence be hanged. 

 

That mob resembled the Iranians who “captured” Americans in our embassy in 1979, and imprisoned them for 444 days, the Hindu mobs beating Muslim neighbors and burning mosques in Delhi, India this past February, and the not too distant public executions known as lynchings in our own country. 

 

And the Representatives and staffers you can see on video, clearly refusing to take masks offered them in their Capitol safe room, remind me of the often smug-faced on-lookers in those chilling photographs of mobs committing violence in Tehran and Delhi, and the sometimes sober-faced but oft-times laughing witnesses to lynchings in America.  

 

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81. Thanks to the R’s--and two big lies

I believe that Democrats—and all Americans—should thank the many Republicans serving as state governors, secretaries of state, and election officials who have consistently and sometimes with great difficulty conducted fair elections in Covid times, and then stood by the results of those fair elections when met with derision and lawsuits by President Trump and his followers. We must also thank the many Republican appointed jurists—many of them appointed by the Trump administration—who weighed lawsuits and dismissed them for lack of evidence.

 

In recent days a group of national Republicans rose to defend the nation against the incessant lies of a stolen election. Mitt Romney spoke early and eloquently against Republicans in the House and Senate who wanted to perpetuate the lie of a fraudulent election and Trump victory. 

 

Mitch McConnell, finally, came to accept and declare Biden’s victory, and, in a moment of true heroism, insisted that Congress proceed with the electoral ballot counting on the night on which the Capitol was stormed by Trump-inspired zealots intent on disrupting that count; some may have had an actual coup in mind. 

 

To his credit, Vice President Pence refused Trump’s call to override state electoral votes, and, after being whisked away to safety, returned to preside over the official toll of electoral votes by the states. He and Trump are apparently no longer talking.

 

The motley crew of January insurgents was driven by two major lies perpetrated by President Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and a (rapidly diminishing) number of close associates. The first lie was that the election was “stolen.” In case after case, state and federal courts have affirmed the results of the election declaring Biden-Harris its winner. 

 

The second lie was and is that Covid-19 is fake, or just another flu, or that the numbers and reportage of its toll across the country and the world are all part of some vast conspiracy against President Trump, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and others who have played down its deadly seriousness. 

 

The results of this lie will persist: the thousands of January 6 insurgents, and the Representatives, Senators, and staff members confined for hours as the Capitol was cleared and cleansed, might spread the disease; and millions of Americans, including many health care workers, who are refusing vaccination, will delay the day when the country is sufficiently immune to Covid-19 to stop its spread.

 

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80. The election is over; the pandemic is not

Last night ended it. The months of divisiveness and acrimony that led up to the November vote, two months of lawsuits on behalf of the president, and the political posturing by those chasing his flame and electoral base all came to a strange end. There were heroes—those who physically protected the Capitol and our legislators, and those, like Pence and McConnell, who rose to the occasion and steered congressional bodies and the country back to a road of normalcy.  

Yesterday’s most important outcome might be the coming together of public leaders and bodies to work towards righting the country and addressing current crises. The Election has been the constant noise in the wheel of the Covid-19 pandemic and its economic fallouts. And the election has prevented us dealing with the thorny issues of systemic racism, sexism, and economic inequality that the pandemic has so dramatically exposed. 

 

In 1918, the Armistice that ended the bloody and destructive World War that had decimated a generation of Europeans and thrust the US into world affairs also frustrated recovery from the Spanish Flu. A “first wave” of that pandemic had followed troops from Kansas to England and the European front, and spread its death viruses (which we didn’t know were viral at the time) across the world. It then came home with the troops, and, with its second and third waves reaching into 1919, killed over 675,000 Americans—in a population of 103 million. Over half of the 116,000 Americans who died in the War were victims of the flu. 

 

Tragically, the War and relief at its end sent the country into a strange kind of denial; the celebration at war’s end overwhelmed the flu’s continuing death march. People hugged and kissed and celebrated on the streets, threw away their facemasks, and in general forgot the flu and let it play out its own deadly progress. 

 

The election season that has warped our national response to the current Covid-19 pandemic is now over. The strange and violent day in the capitol and the reconvening of Congress and the careful enunciation of votes, state-by-state, brought a collective sigh of relief. A chastened Vice President Pence handled ballots in measured tones, and results were announced to a relived nation. Once “objecting” senators sat on their hands.

 

The election is finally over, but not the work. Pence and Congress can look after the 25^th amendment and assess impeachment. Biden and a new team—and the rest of us—must now put the Pandemic behind us.

 

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79. The Willing

Scott Gottlieb is a physician, medical entrepreneur, Republican, former Commissioner—under Trump—of the Food and Drug Administration, and a frequent news show guest on Covid-19 and the vaccines. This morning the conservative talk show regular hit my liberal nerve with a call to vaccinate the “willing.”

 

It has seemed to me for some time that a primary public health task right now is to get as many people as possible vaccinated. Yes, it’s nice to have priorities, nice especially to get health care providers who are in the midst of the fight, vaccinated first. I think that the priority lists are still fine, but that little time should be spent trying to convince the anti-vaxxer nurse or the doctor who is still doubting the testing and waiting on more definitive results. 

 

Roll out those vaccines; get them to states and hospitals, and then into the arms of the willing. If the science is good—and I am not a science always has the right answers guy—the checks and balances, the accounts across national and private/public agency lines, all indicate that we’ve got a good chance of pulling off another Salk-Sabin-Polio win. 

 

Joe Biden has a plan to vaccinate 100 million in the first hundred days of his administration. He’s proposing money for states, money for a propaganda campaign to convince the public that vaccination is safe and efficacious. 

 

But the most important thing that he has already done is get himself and VP Harris publically vaccinated. Now our job is to follow the very public Biden-Harris model, and line up to get the shots. Docs and nurses first—if they want it; nursing home staff and patients—the volunteers; and then folks like me, over 65 or 75 or whatever number they want to pick—the wiling. 

 

I’ll be in that line. Hope you—or your parents, uncles, and grandmothers will be there with me. With longer days and the sunshine of a new health team and attitude at the top, we might just make 100 million by tax day in April.

 

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78. New Year's Day Plunge

About 10 or 12 years ago a friend talked three of us into taking a New Year’s Day plunge into cold Wallowa Lake. Four became nine or ten the next year, and progressed to over seventy last year. It’s become a local tradition, with farmers, ranchers, government workers, shopkeepers and college students home for the holidays all gathering to greet each other and celebrate the calendar’s turn.

 

As I’m one of a couple who’ve made it every year, I get calls about it from the newspaper, and from others who can’t remember the time we jump, or whether the event is even on again in 2015 or 2018 or today. 

 

Last year’s seventy-plus was a big gaggle of plungers, towel holders, and onlookers on the boat ramp waiting for the countdown, diving in with screams and shouts, and drying and hugging, congratulating and Happy New Year’ing afterwards. When people started asking this year, with Covid on their minds and mine, we decided to stagger it. I quickly divided the alphabet by four and suggested a 10 a.m. start, and then 15-minute intervals for the rest. The newspaper and Chamber website picked that up—and off we went!

 

The first group was the largest—some people didn’t get the word, and there were a few alphabet cheaters—but the 25 or 30 in that group implicitly understood Covid and the crowd and acted accordingly. They went in small family and friend groups, separated from each other and the next group by recommended distances without saying it, shouting Happy New Year and Good Bye to 2020 to the sky, and then hustled to warm cars.

 

The fifteen-minute intervals were too long—they could have been five—but the idea was solid, and groups two, three and four, with 10-12 in each, made their runs. 

 

And it occurred to me that this was exactly the way to begin 2021. Not with midnight music and too much to drink, crowded dance floor or arm-in-arm Auld Lang Syne, but with an outdoor event with friends, neighbors, and visitors talking and laughing across distance, doing something together, holding the health of others and wishes for a better 2021 in common. 

 

And if the few dozen of us at Wallowa Lake this morning can continue such good-natured contagion for the weeks and months ahead, we’ll be doing our part to still this pandemic.

 

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