144. Schools

I’ve been thinking. Years from now, when this pandemic is behind us or we are living in some kind of standoff with it, that we will look back and say that our biggest early mistake was in closing schools. We’ll say that we should have hired more teachers and raised the wages of teachers and counselors and teachers’ aides immediately, and paid engineers and architects and social workers, to design distance and masking programs. And then tested the hell out of everyone and kept kids in schools. 

 

The school tsar in New York kept kids in school during the great 1918 flu pandemic. He said that his students lived in crowded and poor conditions, and that school meant respite and food and some strength for the poorest. 

 

This current pandemic showed fractured lines between rich and poor right away. It meant less food for many students, and, we now know, left millions of students behind academically. My nephew, who teaches in Oakland, spent part of the early pandemic finding hot spots and lining at-home students up with digital access. Covid 19 did early and still does leave thousands of students depressed and some big number suicidal. Will they catch up?

 

Teachers too (and nurses, but that is another story) have become worried and exhausted. Would that we had hired more of them and supported the hell out of them, made their classes smaller and raised their salaries by 20 or 50 percent, and then made them first in line when the vaccines hit. I’m guessing that such early valuation of their importance would have led to wide-spread and eager vaccine takers. As it is, we are losing teachers—and bus drivers and school nurses and counselors. 

 

But, years from now, when Covid is subdued or a constant and controlled companion, we will look back at how hard this whole damned thing was on moms. Yes, dads have had to adjust, spend more time with children and help at home, but moms have carried the biggest burdens. They have become teachers and playmates and confidants of children away from peers. They’ve left jobs they loved and/or jobs they’ve needed to compensate for closed schools. Those who couldn’t quit have overworked and had to leave children on their own; those who’ve left work voluntarily—and often left the husband continue working—have sometimes spiraled into resentment and depression. 

 

Hindsight is easy. But there are lessons.

 

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141. Endemic

I’ve come to watch the Covid reports from the Oregon Health Authority like some watch the stock market. My moods, and not my wealth, rise and fall with the days’ accountings. And lately the ups and downs have moved like a yoyo. Last week Wallowa County had its first “zero day” in weeks, maybe months. I was hopeful that the end of the tourist season and the gradual increase in locals vaccinated—and the mounting numbers of those who had contracted the disease and thereby acquired at least some immunity—made for good winter prospects in the county.

 

This week it looks like I bought the wrong stock, put money on the wrong horse. Numbers bounced like a yoyo until we hit 9 again yesterday. Biggest number of new cases in a couple of weeks, with daily numbers bouncing from zero up over that recent hopeful time—was it just a week ago that I wrote about the good prospects for winter?

 

Well, tourist season has been replaced by hunting seasons, and we still have many stores, storekeepers and customers who don’t want to wear masks. And we now know that vaccinations do not protect completely—two friends from nearby Umatilla County, completely vaccinated, had recent bouts with the virus. Happy to say they are both healthy and full-functioning now.

 

So it occurs to me that this is what “endemic” looks like. Covid infections rise and fall. More are vaccinated, but some of the vaccinated get at a little sick; some small percentage get more than a little sick, emboldening those fighting against masks and mandates. And t she vaccinated who do get even mildly sick pass on the malady to the unvaccinated child, and….

 

And up and down we go. Hoping that a new variant is not more potent than the one we are dealing with today. Those of us in the “older” category jumping to get our boosters; many of us still wearing our masks—though we often let them droop below the nose.

 

A friend who has visited China many times says that masks are routine—due mostly to air pollution. Looks to me like I’ll be packing my mask for months to come, maybe forever. And getting boosters, and watching the OHA numbers bounce, hearing now and then about someone I know who has died. Endemic. New Normal…

 

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137. Random facts and thoughts

The Floridian running for governor in Texas says his wife was vaccinated; but he’s not. It’s a matter of personal choice. He’s now choosing to go to the hospital and take the antibodies plus ivermectin and hydro-whatever—the other drug that has not been found effective. The press release said that his wife tested positive too, but said nothing about her going to the hospital. 

 

A healthy, 67-year-old member of Idaho Lt Governor’s task force on educational indoctrination—formed to root out leftist teaching in Idaho schools, died of Covid, according to Boise papers. He told people he was “vaccinated in Christ...”

 

A reporter in Germany says wearing masks on trains and indoors is automatic, as is taking them off outdoors. In America, the left wears masks indoors and out; the right not at all.  

 

Some on my side of the vaccination divide ask that the unvaccinated not be allowed into hospitals when there’s a shortage of rooms. Some say not at all; “put them in their own tent outside,” said one. 

 

My grandson asks whether anyone has kept statistics on the numbers of Republicans and Democrats who have contracted Covid. How many Republicans have died? 

 

In today’s New York Times, two prominent Republicans call for moderation and common sense, for a new collation of Centrist Democrats, Independents and moderate Republicans to make sure that those in control of the Republican party are defeated in the short run, and a stronger, moderate Republican party emerges in the future. They are backing Liz Cheney, who has a challenger endorsed by the former president. I wonder how Covid and Trump will work in her primary campaign.

 

Masks—what’s so hard about them? Last winter I didn’t get a cough or sneeze; friends and doctors remarked on the same. But Masks have become a symbol, divorced from their purposes or even the ease or unease of using them.

 

When I was young—before 21—we found it easier to buy beer at 7-11 stores than most others. Occasionally, the San Diego paper would say that a fine of $100 or $500 had been levied against a 7-11 store. We chuckled at that, computing the amount of beer sold to minors that it would take to pay the modest fine. When I walk into the local grocery or hardware store and see that all workers and most customers are maskless, it makes me wonder…

 

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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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126. True Believers

In San Angelo, Texas, anti-mask movement leader Caleb Wallace became infected with the coronavirus and has been in intensive care for the past three weeks, according to his wife, Jessica. They’ve done all they could, and he’s being moved into hospice. Jessica, pregnant with their fourth child, has been masking, and plans to get vaccinated after the birth. She still agrees with her husband about the right of the individual to decide on masking and vaccination. 

 

Caleb’s father, Russell Wallace, also came down with the virus and was in the hospital with his son for 13 days. He’s improved enough to go home. But, according to the New York Times, “Despite his own illness and his son’s dire condition, Mr. Wallace said he still firmly believes that masks are ineffective and that the government should not mandate masks or vaccinations. He himself, however, has decided to ‘look into’ getting the shots.”

 

At Embers restaurant in Joseph last night, I sat talking with friends, and mentioned that I had just come from the Joseph Market, where no one was wearing a mask. My tablemates all had stories of being in local stores and seeing the same thing—although it seemed like masks are making a comeback in our biggest store, Safeway. 

 

The family at the next table got up to leave, and the man of the family paused to say that we probably didn’t know that the whole coronavirus thing was politics, promoted by “you know which party.” Any attempts to engage in conversation were trumped by politics and comparisons to abortion, where he imagined our table respected the rights of women to make that decision. The fact that the one issue—Covid 19, was about the health of neighbors, family members, and friends, while the abortion issue centers on the health of two, mother and fetus, was raised but not accepted. 

 

The man said that he would have to get vaccinated for his job. 

 

I struggle for the lessons here. Some people believe that personal choice is an absolute right that trumps all others (in which case one could argue for the right of the mother to end a pregnancy—but that’s another road). The impacts on family members and others, the fact that health care systems are being overwhelmed, and that medical needs of non-covid patients are threatened—people might in fact die—does not phase true believers. 

 

On the other hand, mandates—by employers, insurance companies, schools, states, and stores—might work, and save some of the rest of us.

 

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124. Seasons

Yesterday felt like fall—and it’s only mid-August. But the last days of June saw 100 degrees, and felt like a hot August.

 

I don’t know what it’s like to live along that imaginary equatorial line, where the length of days and the warmth of the sun doesn’t change with any calendar. But a few score miles off the line, seasons of dry and wet seem to be normal; and further away, in what we call “temperate” zones north and south, the length of sunlight each day grows and wains, and the earth’s rotations and distances from sun make for seasons. We count four: spring, summer, fall, winter. 

 

Covid and climate change seem to be radically disturbing our calendars—and our seasons. Hot in spring and now it cools down—for a day or two. It looks like summer is coming back. Will we have a fall? 

 

Fire season across the West has grown, until California counts no season at all. They are on the pyretic equator. Tornados, hurricanes, and torrential floods are blurring their traditional seasons in the Southeast. Droughts in Africa, the Middle East, and Central America are mixing with leadership failure and war and causing mass hunger and migration. 

 

And even the Covid seems to be defying its expected seasons. We had been warned of a fall or winter spike; it’s happening now. Unless this isn’t yet the spike! Wallowa County, which almost completely escaped the first wave and a few since, now sees 6 and 10 new cases daily.

 

All of this has created great confusion in schools. It took decades to come to the “school year” shared by most American towns and cities. We were mostly agricultural, and the school year become gradually longer with fewer farmers, but we’ve held onto late spring to early fall—in our county irrigation to harvest—as summer vacation.

 

And sports have become attached to seasons: summer to baseball with better weather; basketball to indoor winter; and football to the fall. A little rain, mud, or snow didn’t stop a football game. Seemed—until artificial turf and indoor stadiums, to define the sport. 

 

After all these years, football is my favorite season, though I watch little of it on TV, and can’t tell you who won the last super bowl—in basketball season! I can remember the coastal dew and smell of the grass at Oceanside High School in 1950s California, the warm and slanted light Saturday afternoons at UC Riverside in the early sixties. I don’t have much memory of specific games or of personal achievements, but remember teammates, 3-a-day practices, bus rides, and the band playing on Friday nights. I think I could still sing the alma mater.

 

In all, I only played six or seven years of football, deciding as a senior in college that rugby was a better sport. But watching son Matt and Joseph High play and lose to arch-rival Enterprise on a snow-covered field in Joseph, and him leave it all on the field in a near win against the same team the next year; and watching grandson Trey’s crushing tackles and an impossible fingertip touchdown catch in a state 6-man championship game which he and his proud teammates won, ginned up my own old dreams of fall.

 

But Covid gave us football in March and basketball in April this last school year, with track squeezed in on the ends. And now Covid is peaking out of its season, and what with Covid masks and smoke blowing in from California’s extended fire season, there might not be a high school football season this fall.

 

“Season” seems to be losing its meanings. 

 

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123. Déjà vu all over again

I just reread the San Francisco pages in Alfred Crosby’s America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918. It was first published in 1976, a second edition in 2003, the year that SARS-CoV-1 was identified.

San Francisco had an aggressive chief of their Board of Public Health, Doctor William Hassler, who organized the city’s health care systems into districts; established one hospital to isolate and deal with flu patients; closed schools and churches; recruited medical, dental, and nursing students and some teachers to care for patients; used quarantines and promulgated a city-wide mask mandate with punishment for violators. 

Waves of the flu passed—I think there were three major waves in 1918; we are in the middle of a third or fifth wave of our pandemic now—and history and commerce went on. Stores and churches reopened, masks were thrown aside, and crowds gathered to celebrate the Armistice on November 11, 1918, and, even as flu cases began to rise again, to shop for and celebrate Christmas and the New Year. 

Efforts to rein in the new surge with masks and anti-crowding measures failed miserably as the citizenry had had enough of restrictions and fought to retain their now-new freedoms. Merchants wanted to make up for lost sales with a robust holiday shopping season. Christian Scientists and Civil Libertarians claimed that masking was “subversive of personal liberty and constitutional rights.” Ninety percent of San Franciscans ignored the new mask mandate. 

The wave subsided in San Francisco and across the nation. Crosby says, in his preface to the 2003 edition, when AIDs was circling the globe and SARS 1 had newly emerged, that we don’t know entirely why, and that “we don’t know yet what made the 1918 virus so dangerous.”

He also says that in a world with three times the population clustered in ever larger cites, with faster travel, a “population of the animals with which we exchange flu viruses… vastly larger than they were in 1918,” history is likely to repeat:

“There is a bitter pill of a joke currently circulating among infectious disease experts. The nineteenth century was followed by the twentieth century, which was followed by the . . . nineteenth century.”

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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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76. Depths--and hope

This Christmas Holiday, some crazy in Nashville set off a huge explosion that rocked the city and the region—there’s speculation that his mad was for AT&T. The president, still fuming about the election, has refused to sign a bill that would  extended unemployment benefits to 14 million Americans for a few months—enough to get millions a bridge beyond Covid-times. In California they are running out of Covid ER beds.

 

And my granddaughter’s car, stolen on Christmas Eve in Portland, holding work clothes, presents, and a paycheck, has not been found. 

 

It’s hard not to focus on the meanness in the hearts of so many, the total lack of empathy and the black holes in their hearts, as we finish what has been a very hard year.

 

Calendars are just measuring sticks, but their days and numbers have meaning. There are paydays, workdays, holy days, schooldays, and the days that have been marked to memorialize the birth of a holy person, the end of a war, and right now, the end of a year. 

 

Years—the days that it takes for the earth to circle our sun, could start at any point along that circle, but in the distant past someone decided to start a few days after the shortest one, as the daylight—at least in our hemisphere—again grows longer.  

 

I have never heard so many say that they are ready for one year to end and another to begin. I too am counting down to the Wallowa Lake Plunge on New Years Day, the January days to inauguration of a new president, the days to the slowing of this pandemic and days to my own Covid-vaccination.

 

* * *

It’s hard not to wish ill towards offenders: to want the people who refuse to wear masks to get sick; to want the Trump empire to fold and his family to be overwhelmed with a cascade of the legal tangles that have made them money and hurt others; to want the car thieves to drive off a bridge. 

 

It’s more reasonable to ask that all of the above be subjected to the law.

 

Small chance, big hope, that the president will turn magnanimous and sign the bill, and that the thieves will see the look on some poor child’s face, give her one of the presents, and drop the car off at a local church or shopping mall.

 

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