134. Resilience

Resilience

 

I used to be a night person, but that’s all changed in the last dozen years. Now I go to bed about 9, fall asleep easily and sleep until 12 or 1:00 am. Then back to sleep, maybe with help from the radio or a podcast on my phone; but this sleep is more troubled, often interrupted by dreams. Not horrible dreams, though two nights ago there was a volcano pouring out of Bonneville Mountain at the head of Wallowa Lake, and I went to higher ground on the school hill. 

 

On good mornings I wake lazily sometime after 4, and turn on the BBC, which takes me sleepily into Morning Edition on PBS. This morning the BBC had “mixed” quests, young men and women whose parents came to England from China, Guinea, the West Indies and East, and then married White Britishers or one another. This crowd, this morning, exulted in their mixed heritages, and I came awake slowly with a good feeling about the world.

 

Volcanoes—and the Covid—rage on in the world. Vaccine deniers trouble my mind, but the world is so much bigger, has seen horrible pandemics in the past, and those of us on the earth now are descendants of survivors of all of the earth’s past horrors.

 

There is an odd comfort in this, in knowing that there have always been volcanoes and always been deniers of pandemics—and that there have always been survivors. 

 

All of this fits right into the book I just finished reading, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas, by University of Oregon historian Jeffrey Ostler. Ostler follows the inexorable westward movement of the Euro-settlers, and the displacement of the original Americans, by threat and force, treaty and missionizing, and incessant European diseases. 

 

Ostler’s story is the miracle of survival, explained by the ways in which tribes fought, adopted and adapted to the relentless pressures of colonialism. One of the tricks they often performed was to adopt members of other tribes or adopt themselves into other, stronger tribes, reestablishing diminished populations time and again. 

 

Which brings me to the mixing that is going on in England—and in our own country. Yes, it’s an old story, held at times quietly, erupting at other times dramatically and violently. But it seems as inexorable as the volcanoes, and it goes to explain the diversity we show today, and foretells greater diversity we can expect tomorrow. 

 

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133. Letter to the Editor

To the editor and Wallowa County Friends,

 

This summer marks 50 years for me in Wallowa County. I came to spend a year—and I stayed. I stayed because the land is wonderful; I stayed because of people. In the fifty years countless tragedies—fires, accidents, and diseases—have hit Wallowa County families. And again and again neighbors, friends, and strangers have stepped up to comfort and help get people and families through hard times. We haven’t erased bad things, but we have dealt with them honestly and selflessly. We’ve not asked about religion or politics, wealth, or which end of the county the afflicted are from. We just help.

 

And now we have a crisis. Over 500 of us have had or have the coronavirus, and 11 have died as of September 11, according to the Oregon Health Authority. We’re getting 5-10 new cases each day, and our hospital is operating on the edge. Cases in Idaho, with one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country, are exploding. Umatilla and Union counties ditto. A Boise nurse says her overwhelmed staff has PTSD. We cannot send serious covid patients—or serious patients of any kind—to nearby hospitals. 

 

There is fear that our hospital and assisted living center will lose staff with the vaccination mandate. The Soroptimists and Rotary are rounding up volunteers to work at assisted living!

 

Our friends, neighbors, and relatives are in the hospital and nursing home right now. I am 78 and healthy—but I’m at risk. A good many of my friends and neighbors are at risk due to age, asthma, weak hearts or lungs, diabetes, etc.

 

I am asking all of you to put aside politics and religion, vitamins and health regimes, and embrace vaccinations and masks. If “mandates” bother you, remember that you complied with the state to get your driver’s license, to go to school until you were 16, and to go into the military when called. 

 

Your neighbor’s house is on fire and we’re all the volunteer fire department. I am not asking you to change your political or religious affiliation, or to donate blood or a kidney (which many of you have already done). Just a shot in the arm—yes, sometimes painful for a day or two, but overwhelmingly effective—and a mask on the face (when you have time, I’ll share my story of how a mask kept me safe from Covid).

 

Thank you, friends,

Rich Wandschneider  

132. Visible signs

When Smallpox ravished the earth, those who didn’t die were left with terrible pockmarks. English Queen Elizabeth’s came down with smallpox in 1562. She nearly died from the disease, and her skin was so scarred that she covered the pockmarks with heavy white makeup made of white lead and vinegar, which slowly poisoned her.

 

When polio stormed across the US in the 1950s, pictures of children in iron lungs were ubiquitous. And when August’s “dog days” hit in my northern Minnesota town, the bus no longer took us to the nearby lake to swim. 

 

We were afraid of polio, and the pressure to help those in the iron lungs and to find vaccines and cures impelled a national March of Dimes campaign. As a boy scout in Southern California, I and my fellow scouts solicited dimes from passersby and marched them up the curb along one of Oceanside’s main streets. Meanwhile, mothers went door to door in their March of Dimes. Defeating polio was not left to the scientists and doctors; we all participated. Nationwide empathy—as well as fear—raised money which contributed to the development of the vaccine. 

 

Covid is a trickier customer. For those who survive, it leaves no lasting marks—with the possible exception of the wasting bodies of some of the “long-haulers.” There are no pockmarks or limps to mark the survivors you encounter on the street, in schools, and the marketplace. 

 

I was talking with our smart, short-term cataloger, Charlotte, who has a degree in medical history, about the difficulties this poses. Maybe if the faces of survivors all turned bright red, or their head and body hair all fell out, vaccinations would be an easier sell.

 

The reinstatement of empathy is an even tougher task. We have watched TV screens show New York workers get bodies from homes and unload them into freezer truck temporary morgues. We’ve listened to exhausted doctors and healthcare workers describe their days and their patients. And still there are deniers, some of them working in health care. 

 

The way out of the current Covid crisis is still unclear, and the unintended consequences of the lengthening world-wide event are as unimaginable as the danger of lead poisoning must have been to Queen Elizabeth almost 500 years ago.

 

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131. Surrounded, held hostage

The Covid death count in Wallowa County has reached 12. This after weeks during which local health care workers tell us that they cannot release information on deaths. We no longer have a county public health agency, and for that reason the Oregon Health Authority is responsible for compiling and releasing our Covid information. 

 

According to news reports, one in 500 Americans has died during this pandemic. Wallowa County, with 7000 residents, is approaching that with more than one in 700. We’ll soon catch the national number—if we haven’t already, what with statistics trailing facts.

 

We do get daily infection numbers from the OHA—yesterday there were seven new cases in the County. We made it through the early days of Covid with ones and twos—and zeroes. Now the daily numbers hover near that seven. That’s one reason we are feeling squeezed, surrounded by a disease that seems to be closing in on us. 

 

Another reason is Idaho. With one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country, Idaho infections and hospitalizations are climbing rapidly; “triage” is now the order of the day across the state. In my understanding, that means that new patients—Covid and other—are continually evaluated for prospects of improvement, with treatment going to those with the best odds. 

 

And Idaho spills into Washington. Washington’s second largest hospital, Spokane’s 700-bed Providence Sacred Heart and Holy Family, has taken patients from northern Idaho, and is being pressured to take more. Most of the non-Oregon license plates on Joseph’s Main Street read Idaho and Washington. Another way we are feeling surrounded. 

 

Within our state, nearby Umatilla and Union counties have seen surges of Covid. Grand Ronde Hospital in La Grande sent out its numbers this week. I don’t have them in front of me, but the striking thing was that 100% of their cases, critical care cases, and patients on ventilators were unvaccinated.

 

Our small hospital is running at full and near full, with little chance of moving patients needing more extensive care—with Covid or anything else—to nearby hospitals in other counties and states.

 

Rumor has it that the governor’s mandate will cause resignations in our assisted living facility and even in our hospital. That—and the fact that some businesses stubbornly refuse to mask employees or require them of customers, is our final surround. 

 

Those of us vaccinated and promoting vaccinations in Wallowa County—the majority of us—feel surrounded and frustrated, held-hostage by Covid increases and the loud shouts of anti-vaxxers here and nearby. 

 

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129. Ayn Rand

Midst all the squabbling about “personal choice” and the “common good,” I’ve heard little about the role Ayn Rand plays in the debate. Those of us who remember Paul Ryan as House Speaker might remember that he required his staff to read Rand. And other prominent figures, going back to Allen Greenspan at the Fed, have had ties to or promoted the Russian émigré. 

 

Rand was the author of two big philosophically charged novels, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, but also wrote non-fiction, promoting her “objectivism” in essays and at a salon in New York, where Greenspan was a member. In simple terms, Rand believed that personal freedom is the highest good, and that it is our duty to pursue it. In her philosophical essays, the idea is carried to the edge of anarchism—the role of the state is reduced to protecting us from other states, and policing us so that we don’t kill each other. Everything else should be left to individualism and laissez faire capitalism. That might sound harsh, but I challenge you to read her and find other interpretations. She herself denounced heretics who diluted or amended her own objectivist dictums.

 

Rand died in 1982, discouraged, as I recall, by the “collectivism” of Johnson’s Great Society and socialist expansion in Europe, not aware or hopeful with the impacts of Ronald Reagan’s “Government is the problem” and David Stockton’s “trickle-down economics.” I don’t know whether Reagan and Stockton were fans, but they have helped propel us into the present, where libertarians rail against governmental promotion of common goods. Vaccine and mask mandates are the glaring current points of conflict.

 

Ayn Rand is with us still, directly and indirectly influencing the lives and beliefs of many. She’s helped by a vigorous Ayn Rand Society and offshoots—Ayn Rand Institute, The Atlas Society, Freeobjectivistbooks.org, et al—promoting her through outright donations of millions of her books to schools and libraries. The Ayn Rand Society boasts that

 

“Ayn Rand’s dramatic and thought-provoking novels appeal strongly to young readers. Thanks to the generous support of our donors, we provide free physical and digital copies of Rand’s novels, along with guides and lesson plans, to educators in the United States and Canada (including homeschool teachers). To date, 4,500,000 free books have been provided to more than 65,000 teachers!”

 

Those of us who oppose radical libertarianism have nothing to match this.

 

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130. Service

“Surgeries to remove brain tumors have been postponed. Patients are backed up in the emergency room. Nurses are working brutal shifts. But at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane, Wash., the calls keep coming: Can Idaho send another patient across the border?” (NYT 9/14) There are 29 patients from sparsely vaccinated Idaho (40%) in Sacred Heart rooms (Washington is at 61%). 

Idaho Governor Brad Little, meanwhile, is contemplating his next moves against federal vaccination mandates. He’s not alone; California police—or at least big globs of them—are suing over mandates, some in Los Angeles “alleging that the department has created a ‘hostile work environment’ for the unvaccinated and that the mandate violates employees’ privacy and civil rights.” (The Guardian 9/14)

I wonder if any of these people tuned in CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday night. The entire program was devoted to 9/11 and the New York firemen who fought to save people in the towers. They saved thousands, and over 300 from the NYFD lost their lives in the battle. More impressively, over 60 current firemen and women in the department are sons and daughters of those who died.

One dramatic portrayal—and I am sorry I do not remember the name—is of a leading officer who cleared a path for hundreds in the South Tower and made it out himself before it collapsed, and ran right into the North Tower to help extricate more before it too collapsed. Surviving firemen agreed that he knew he was going to his own death.

The examples are extreme, but the idea that someone who enters into public service as a police officer or a governor would fight against personal vaccination on the basis of “privacy and civil rights” is absurd. 

All of us, I believe, owe to our friends, family members, and neighbors. And although we cannot all become biblical good Samaritans, we generally do not consciously endanger the health and well-being of the stranger along the road. But those who choose public service as a career, whether it be as a medical, police, or fire worker or a governor, are, I believe, obligated to put the health and safety of their constituents at least at the level of their own health and safety. 

The selfishness of the time is astounding. And if this ego-centrism cannot be broken by common sense, let the screams of the dying unvaccinated wake the resisters. 

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128. “No Shirt..."

 To paraphrase my son, Matt:

“No shirt, no shoes, no service.” (We don’t want your stinky feet)

“But please don’t wear a mask.” (We’ll take your virus-laden coughs and sputters)

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127. The Great Divide Widens

With this wave of the covid—is it the third or fourth? —the divisions between those who believe that Masking, Distancing, and Vaccinations are effective deterrents against it, and those who label one or more of M, D, and V as “hoax,” “fake,” “untested,” and/or some sinister plot to take away personal freedom, have widened. 

Most doctors and scientists—and politicians and media leaders—implore us to get vaccinated, put our masks back on, and practice some measure of social distancing. A few with medical credentials, more politicians, and some who preach one form or another of religion, wellness, or politics, tell those of us in the MDV believer camp that we are deceived. That something nefarious is afoot. 

While sources I believe reliable count the number of covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths as primarily occurring among the unvaccinated, the dying—who sometimes call for their children and grandchildren to please, please, get vaccinated—often assert their rights to personal choice to the very end. Personal choice at its extreme. 

A thousand gathered in Seattle yesterday in the name of personal freedom. The courthouse here in Enterprise had its own crowd of anti’s. 

Common sense and courtesy are diminishing as the divide widens. Yesterday I heard two new stories: Bill Gates has inserted something in the vaccine that will, given time, kill those of us who get vaccinated, thus promoting Gates’ primary goal of reducing world population in the cause of fighting climate change. The second new story I heard was that wearing masks might result in Black Lung disease—this far away from any coal mine. I admit that these stories probably come from the fringe; most anti’s are people who have sincere religious beliefs and health concerns. But it demonstrates the depth of the chasm, as do callers from “my side” who advocate not insuring or admitting the unvaccinated to hospitals, wishing severe illness or even death on them.

Humbly, I wear my mask at work at the Josephy Center, where we ask everyone who works and visits to do so. I’ve stopped going into stores that don’t. These things I can control. 

What worries me most—the health of our health care systems—I have no control over. And our hospital and clinics, like most across the state, are operating at full, at the edge of triaging patients. And here too the health care workers are divided, with some small minority insisting that they will not be vaccinated. 

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