101. Sores

This pandemic continues to expose long-standing sores on the body politic. It’s like a solvent that washes away the scab we call racism and exposes the sores born by Blacks, Asians, Indians—anyone away from the shrinking white male majority. 

 

The news yesterday said it was the day that working women will have earned as much—adding in their 2020 wages—as their male colleagues earned in all of 2020. The pandemic has taught us to look for such things, taught us that women are bearing more than their share of the child-rearing load—and getting laid off more frequently than their husbands and male colleagues.

 

The pandemic has scoured the gun violence scab in Atlanta and now Boulder. It exposes a ragged wound in many places across the country—in Connecticut, Nevada, and Virginia, Florida, Texas, and California, which have all grappled with mass killings in recent years. And there are personal scars in small places everywhere where guns have killed partners and storekeepers, been picked up and aimed in play by one child on another, or turned on their owners and handlers in suicide. Today’s news: although no major mass gun murders in the Covid year until Atlanta and Boulder, “daily gun crime” soared, with 4000 more 2020 murders than in 2019.

 

There has never been more talk—and awareness—of the notions of privilege and racism in our country than we’ve heard since the first days of the pandemic. We now know that people of color serve basic health needs as caregivers and nursing home workers in outsized numbers; that people of color are less likely to have jobs they can do remotely; that people of color are more likely to live in crowded and less healthy surroundings; we know that Indian reservations are often places of poverty and lack basic healthcare facilities and personnel. Somewhere deep inside we’ve learned that the “original sin” of slavery echoed historically and echoes today in exclusion laws targeting Asians, in Jim Crow and Indian Removal, in the subtle racism that we now name “unconscious” or “implicit” bias.  

 

With George Floyd and Brionna Taylor and Black Lives Matter becoming household words, and the turmoil of the Trump years and an election season mixed into the Pandemic stew, the sores—and shortcomings—in the body politic are given bright light. 

 

We grasp at old healing ideas and search for new: gun laws; Indian sovereignty; reparations; equal pay; universal health care access; criminal justice reform; communitarianism… The healing tasks are enormous. Hard not to get overwhelmed.

 

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100. New Heroes

Last night I explained to my grandsons that wealth had not always reigned supreme, and money had not always been the largest motivator in our society—or in the larger world. That there were times when fame was pursued, or glory in battle, or self-sufficiency on a homestead. There were times and places in history when religion was ascendent, when young men and women aspired to be Catholic and Shintu priests, Protestant reformers and Buddhist nuns. 

 

Thor Heyerdahl and his crew sailed a balsawood raft across an ocean to show another possible past; Lindberg and Earhart flew to show it could be done; Jackie Robinson endured taunts and threats to open a baseball way for his black brothers; Martin Luther King sensed his own death but kept on for a greater cause. 

 

Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio took time away from baseball careers to fight in a war—two wars for Williams, a fighter pilot who became an ACE in Korea in what might have been the golden years of his baseball career. In those days, in WWs I and II and into Korea, Congressmen watched their sons enlist or be drafted, and enlisted themselves. There was some sense of shared national responsibility that crumbled with Vietnam and the all-volunteer military. 

 

When I was young in small-town Minnesota the doctor didn’t have the biggest house or car; we knew he made house-calls and worked long hours, admired him for what he did. He carried more prestige than did the car dealer with a big boat and cabin at the lake.

 

I was blessed to come of age when John Kennedy was President and imagined a better world, imagined a “Peace Corps” of young Americans—men and women who would travel, help and learn. We got travel, training, and health care, an in-country “living allowance” ($50/month in my case), and $75 each month put away to “readjust,” or pay off student loans after we finished our two-year hitches. 

 

We weren’t smarter or better than young men and women today, and neither were Thor Heyerdahl or Ted Williams. Their times and ours did not have everything right—the troops were still segregated through WW II, and black soldiers came home to discrimination and lynchings; Japanese citizens were put in camps during that war; my own time and people still shoved women to the back, had them make the coffee. And although we marched for Civil Rights and against war, we literally did not see the American Indians in our midst, did not notice how we white Americans unconsciously elevated ourselves above Mexican and Asian Americans.

 

But sometime about 1980, with Ronald Reagan’s presidency, a confluence of anti-government sentiments from right and left (fewer regulations; “no more wars”), the influence of Ayn Rand’s blockbuster libertarian novels (Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged), and the thirst for “self” that busted Major League contracts and weakened unions—all conspired to make individual achievement—and pleasure—measured and facilitated by wealth, the new American gospel.

 

It’s had its 40 years, and this gospel too is weakening, as did the religious fervor that drove Christians to missionize in Africa and on Indian reservations here, the rush to glory that drove troops to our bloodiest—and Civil—war, the solemn collective volunteerism that showed lines of men each week in the Wallowa County Chieftain as they reported for duty, ready to ship to Europe or the Pacific, unaware really of where “over there” really was in 1918 or 1942. 

 

I hope wealth’s run its course. I have nothing against money or wealth; they’ve done good work from time to time, are today if you count Bill and Melinda Gates’ work with polio, the ongoing work of Carnegie and Rockefeller endowments. I know that there will always be some with more, others with less. But money and wealth can’t hold a candle to fairness and justice, health and wellness. They’re no guarantee against illness and heartbreak—and in the end there is always death. 

 

The pandemic and Black Lives Matter—and now the Atlanta killings—have laid things bare. Can we use their lessons to chart new courses, choose new values, define new dreams, find new heroes?  

 

For heroes I’ll take the great peacemakers—Gandhi, King, Mandela—and those who paved the way, and their acolytes who tried to carry on—Jackie Robinson, John Lewis, and the South African Springboks rugby team. I’ll take the songwriters and poets of peace, the unknowns who fashioned “We Shall Overcome,” and Johnny Cash’s “Ballad of Ira Hayes.” The three-initialed—and flawed—presidents, FDR, JFK, and LBJ, who visioned a shared and just humanity.  

 

I’ll take pandemic nurses and Dr. Fauci, Lebron James and his bicycles for Akron, and A’ja Wilson, the young black Las Vegas basketball star, who said of her South Carolina college: “My grandmother couldn't even walk on this campus; she had to walk around [it]. If she was here today to see her granddaughter has a statue where she once could not walk ... it goes to show how you just plant seeds, and that's what it's all about.”

 

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99. A whimper

A year ago, yesterday’s 785 Covid deaths would have startled. In a few days, in March of 2020, we would see 1000 deaths, and within weeks 2000 daily deaths. Now, it feels like we are on a downward slope, wrapped up in discussions fragmented by time, place, and community about vaccines and their efficacy, school openings, the need for masks and distancing, and concerns about weather, water, and power.

 

News stories about the Covid toll on health care workers, teenage anxieties, and rising rates of domestic violence flitter across the pages and screens—a shout here; a gasp there. I’m reminded of my own year-ago reading about the 1918 Influenza—and by a story in yesterday’s paper—how the history of that earlier pandemic got lost in the ending of WW I. Soldiers were welcomed home with parades; monuments and memorial cemeteries were built; a national holiday asserted. Those who died of the influenza were quietly mourned in scattered homes and towns across the country. The influenza quietly slipped from national consciousness. 

 

I feel that happening now, even as I write this. No bell rang this morning; I felt no urge to note the extraordinary sacrifices of doctors and nurses, to recount a sad story of isolation and depression. 

 

It feels instead like a huge national whimper that is infecting me as it is the governors of Texas and Mississippi who are “opening” their states, the white Republicans who are refusing to be vaccinated, and the thousands of “long-haulers” who are trading vitamin and physical therapy recipes among themselves, wanting desperately to be over it. I got my second shot; I told you about that last week.

 

My One Minute musings over the last several months is a diary. Will I pick it up and try to make sense of my own journey this pandemic year? I don’t know. Will I continue to find things to write about the pandemic? Not sure.

 

Right now, it’s a whimper…

 

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98. Vaccinated

Yes, I received my second Covid shot on Tuesday, and there is some feeling of relief. But there are other strong emotions that kick in with my vaccination victory.

 

Worry—about the two grandsons, 20 and 23, living with me now. They have not been vaccinated, and the 20-year-old had the coronavirus and is still experiencing after-effects. We don’t know when the vaccines will reach them, but he knows that his having had it once offers no sure immunity in the future. 

 

I worry about my granddaughter living in Portland; she’s trying to go to school while working as a flagger. Essential worker, I’d say, as she worked a couple of 90-hour weeks when PGE crashed and was in the turmoil of repairing electric lines. But she has not been vaccinated. 

 

Concern—for the families I know who have been affected directly. For my grandson, and for Representative Pramila Jayapal and her husband, Steve. Steve and Pramila are good friends as well as public servants. Their contact might have been on that awful January 6 when Pramila huddled with other elected Representatives and staffers in a Capitol basement where some deniers refused to wear masks. Maddening.

 

Outrage—Yesterday I could not contain myself with a good friend, a woman who is a strong liberal—and a strong anti-vaxxer. I have other friends who remain vaccine skeptics, and when I’ve asked for evidence of the deaths and diseases caused by the vaccines, I get silence. Or notions that evidence is suppressed in this country. Yesterday, almost yelling at my friend, I said that thousands of people are still dying each day; if the vaccines were killing people on anywhere near that scale, who could suppress that news and how would they do it? I brought up polio and George Washington inoculating his troops at Valley Forge with live smallpox virus; I said that if a few people did die, it might make life safer for the living. I vented.

 

Hope—I’m hopeful with the new administration and with Biden’s Pandemic Relief Bill. Vaccination rates are rising and new cases and deaths are falling. This bill—with all of its liberal flowers not directly related to Covid, is revolutionary, because it targets the lower 85 percent of Americans. It might lead to the biggest expansion of the middle class in America since the post-WW-2 G.I. Bill. Only this time African Americans and American Indians and Asians and Latinos will not be omitted by fancy rhetoric and official indifference. Hope.

 

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97. Aftershocks

My grandson came back from a few months in Portland carrying the coronavirus in November. He tested positive the first day back, I quarantined for 14 days, and no one else was touched by what he carried. His symptoms were mild: loss of taste and smell, some headaches and muscle aches. 

 

It’s now been four months since his infection—and he’s having some aftershocks. For those who think that we should just let the Covid roam among the young and healthy, here’s a caution. He’s big and strong and healthy as an ox; 6’1” and 180-190 pounds; plays with 40-pound dumbbells like they’re soup cans, and can probably curl my weight. 

 

But on and off over the last weeks, he’s run out of gas, been extremely tired even after a full sleep, had the occasional headache, and sometimes his favorite foods don’t taste that way. Yesterday he told the doctor that some days he can do a full weight workout with great energy—and find it difficult to lift the weights he did three sets with one day once the next day. The doctor says she thinks this is all related to his Covid, says that he can expect these lingering effects for a few more months, maybe a year!

 

His mood is good. He works the night shift at Safeway and comes home to eat, sleep, and work out. With the Covid and his own personal experience with it, there is great caution about any kind of social life. He says friends from his college year in La Grande are paying little attention to the pandemic, but he’s not even talked about making the short 70-mile trip to join them. He dreams instead of some short community college program that will put him in line for good work at a reasonable wage. 

 

Dreams of a college football career are a whisp; the idea that he might try rugby or boxing while going to community college grows dimmer. 

 

He’s one 20-year-old among millions who’ve had their lives disrupted by Covid. We’ve all—even those who don’t believe in it—had lives disrupted. Life courses have been changed, relationships ruptured, and imagined futures clouded. 

 

But there is something tragic about this time for the young. And we, the parents and grandparents of today, are not unlike the parents and grandparents of 1972—or 1942—watching the young go off to war, or return from war. Changed forever by the events of their youth.

 

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96. March: the In-Between time

Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of the first Covid-19 case in Oregon. There are now three vaccines, and herculean efforts at production, distribution, and administration of vaccine shots into arms of the vulnerable—in the U.S., more than 75,000 have received at least one shot—might make it seem like some corner has been turned.

But in “in-between times” corners aren’t trustworthy and the future is always uncertain. And March is a tricky month. We’ve made it through this much winter and have enough wood to make heat for 2 or 3 or maybe even 4 months. But we don’t know how wet or cold these months will be. We don’t know how hot or fiery—or damp—the summer will be. We have averages and we have projections—but who predicted the 300,000 Oregonians left without electricity in February, the storms and cold and loss of water in Texas? 

I got my first Covid shot on February 9, and am due for number 2 on March 19. So, I am in-betweener—as are many of the 75,000. Between me and that vaccination stand production and distribution hurdles, government policy, and March weather. The days are longer—but not yet long. Some days are sunnier and warm, but not all days. There’s a foot of snow on the ground, which sunshine and 40 degrees today turned sticky and then slushy in places. “Slush” is the in-between state of water and snow; the sound of the word is the sound of in-between.

The tantalizing prospect of declining infections and, eventually, immunity, is almost too much for many. Mask wearing at the local Safeway is slipping. A teacher in one of our open schools tested positive and some students are quarantined. Bend high school students, excited to get back to school, had a party and passed the Covid around; school opening delayed. It reminds me of taking off my jacket and overshoes and stuffing them under a porch on my way to fourth grade school in northern Minnesota—mothers insisted and we insisted not. It reminds me of another fourth grade no-no—skating on soft ice.

But at least we skated together and hid our coats and shoes together. Today, in-between students and parents and seniors are on small patches of soft ice, each alone, or in small “pods” (we had to adapt a word) that will melt or freeze again until March makes up its mind. 

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