73. The Calm

I imagine that the hospitals, doctors’ offices, nursing homes and assisted living facilities are still in a state of high urgency. And people on reservations, and in Black and Latinx neighborhoods that have been hard-hit by the Covid, are dealing with daily on-going crises. And in hundreds of thousands of families there is great grief and sense of loss for those who have died. 

 

But for most of the millions of Americans who have been able to keep our distance from the Covid—even some of us who’ve come very close—this is a time of calm, a reprieve from weeks, no months, of non-stop drama and trauma. The election is over. There are no longer hourly tweets from the president. The long string of lawsuits and rallies behind and in front of the lawsuits has subsided. Slowly, and often in less than dramatic fashion, with words still couched around some kind of presidential support, Republican Congressmen and Women and Senators are acknowledging Joe Biden’s election.

 

On his part Joe Biden has slowly and measuredly made cabinet and White House appointments. There’ve been occasional spurts of disappointment—“Obama 2,” Washington “insider”—and loud, happy exhales with Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico as Secretary of the Interior and Lloyd Austin as Secretary of Defense. An Indian woman running the Interior Department, which has all reservations as well as millions of acres of resource rich public lands under its purview, is frankly revolutionary; a black Secretary of Defense overseeing a United States military, in which 43 percent of the 1.3 million men and women on active duty are people of color, is long overdue. These things feel good. 

 

And there is the vaccine, the long-awaited tool in the Covid workbox that is sexier than masks and social distancing, and attended by high science and FedEx shipping technology. The huge majority of us know who should get vaccines first, and patiently wait our turns. More good.

 

The rest of Biden’s picks are a crayon box of colors and a mix of religions and places of origin, fulfilling a promise to make his staff look like America. Yes, people will try to sneak in the vaccine line and anti-vaxxers will demonstrate. Election denial and criticism will continue. But the feeling of what some are calling “normalcy” is palpable; the middle is pushing out the edges.

 

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72. Growing the Middle

Let the anti-vaxxers go!

 

That’s right. There will not be enough vaccine to cover the entire nation anytime soon, and we need about 70 percent of the population vaccinated to get to an effective herd immunity. The goal should be to get to that 70 percent as quickly and efficiently as possible. Trying to convince anti-vaxxers seems like an inefficient use of time and resources.

 

As the cases and deaths due Covid-19 mount, the rapid distribution of vaccines should make over 90 percent of those vaccinated immune, and people will notice. Health care workers will notice that their fellows are not dropping out to recover or quarantine; nursing home workers will not be getting infected—nor will their residents. Relatives of medical workers and people in nursing and assisted living facilities will notice.

 

Can we extend the metaphor? If we can grow into acceptance of vaccines, how might we grow the middle in other places so that the margins are not so strong and dangerous? There are plenty of examples from the past. It took time to make the truth about nicotine palatable—and erase the advertisements of doctors recommending it, but doubters now are few and/or silent. We’re still combative about abortion, but the middle—including a huge chunk of the American Catholic middle—has determined that birth control is healthy and responsible. 

 

Social Security, Workman’s Compensation, and Unemployment Insurance were once dangerously Socialist. No longer the case. In fact, President Roosevelt was a master at growing the middle, with social programs like those above and government bank deposit guarantees, Rural Electrification and Public Power, Public Works projects that built roads and dams, and Agricultural Adjustments that allowed the government to control surpluses by paying for fallow fields. FDR even had to carefully nurture the middle away from German sympathizers and America Firsters to begin sending arms to England, and then to enter the War.

 

When things are shown to work to the benefit of most Americans, they become institutionalized. Just try to take Social Security or Medicare away now from the most staunchly small government American!

 

So let’s not spend energy combatting the right’s fears of government intrusion or apologizing to the left for not embracing Medicare for All, and robustly concentrate on making government work and extending health care to all. 

 

Let’s grow the middle, beginning with the Covid Vaccine.

 

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71. Something to celebrate

There was a news note yesterday from the public television station in Spokane about coronavirus vaccines and tribes. In this time of political conflict and upheaval, it seems that some people in that complex and wonderful—at least to this outside observer it seems wonderful—group of government workers, private workers, and US Military in charge of developing and shipping vaccines, is putting Indians at the front of the queue!

 

“The federal government has designated an allocation of the first coronavirus vaccines to hard-hit Indian Country. Native Americans have long endured health care inequities, and they're four times as likely to be hospitalized by COVID-19.”

 

It’s bigger than that, maybe in part because the sorry state of our national political, racial, and cultural affairs is causing many of us to look back to previous government actions—critically. The truth that American Indians were decimated by infectious diseases, to which they had no developed tolerances, from the day that Columbus’s boats landed, is now read and taught in our history books. Disease was a bigger killer than European arms. I am convinced that there is genetic memory of this—and lingering genetic vulnerability to viral diseases. I have not seen any studies of Indians and the 1918 epidemic, but hope that now we might.

 

When have we heard more and more frequently about the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment conducted by the US Public Health Service? This study of “Untreated Syphilis in the African American Male” allowed unknowing men to die slowly of the disease so that researchers could take notes? The experiment began in1932 with 600 poor black sharecroppers, and went on until uncovered by the big bad Press in 1972! The very rational mistrust of government is making the Covid-19 pandemic  worse among African-Americans. 

 

But today, the continuous public updating of Covid-19 statistics is telling the world that American Indians, Latinx, and Blacks are all disproportionately getting sick and dying. And, if the blurb on the KPBS newsfeed yesterday is true, the “deep state” that some fear, the career public health and military officials, along with civilian scientists working for drug companies making and testing vaccines, are all rising to the occasion, following science and the broadest health concerns of the nation in treating the pandemic that has radically altered everything in less than a year.

 

That’s cause for some celebration.

 

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70. When it’s over

There’s light—maybe—at the end of a long national tunnel of darkness. The election happened and, despite the ill-informed and sometimes outrageous efforts of many, appears to be taking hold. The numbers of people contracting, being hospitalized, and dying from Covid-19 shoot up dramatically by the day, but vaccines are in pipelines, and the relief they might provide to an overstressed health care system should be immediate. The rest of us can see to June—and by some miracle of mind will wear masks, distance, and carefully wash our hands until then. (Have others noticed as I have that sniffles and coughs, nose leaks and gut aches have declined with those holy three?)

 

When we rest easier in that faraway time, when we have our vaccinations and the weather is good enough to live outside again, when we’ve not given up our masks completely, but feel comfortable in smaller crowds and more open spaces—although we still might bump elbows rather than shake hands—then it will be time to put ourselves and our worlds together in some new way.

 

It won’t be the old way, because so many are gone and many more touched by the Covid. I hope it won’t be that we all know someone personally who has died, but think it might need to be that we each and all have brushed close enough to the disease to make it—almost—universally real. The analogy might be gay marriage, which until a short time ago was a damnable sin and abomination in the eyes of a majority of Americans, but slipped quietly but firmly through the hoops of the judiciary and many churches when voices were raised and we all recognized those voices as belonging to people we knew and maybe even loved. 

 

I say “almost” because in a big, bustling, and diverse country like ours there is rarely unanimity. Even WW II had its Nazi sympathizers and its conscientious objectors. But the consensus will have to be large enough that doubters will acquiesce. And we—those of us, who like the loudest gay chorister, have raised our voices on the side of masks, distancing, and vaccine, are comfortable in that new world, it will be up to us to NOT say “I told you so.” Knitting communities—and even families—together again will be delicate but necessary work.

 

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69. Wishing Ill on Others

My friend Terry posted on Facebook that she had seen someone wear a mask that said “This mask is as useless as our governor.” Her immediate thought:  “Uncharitably, I want some people to get sick.” 

How many of us have wished for severe consequences for those who don’t cooperate with Covid rules—and especially those who escape?

There is a long list of notables—including many in or near the White House—who have tested positive for Covid-19. A month ago it was five people in vice-president Pence’s “inner circle.” In spurts of news releases, we’ve heard that Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and HUD Secretary Ben Carson have been ill with it. Carson confessed to having been extremely ill, and credits the new antibody treatments for saving his life. 

Forbes Magazine, certainly no screaming leftist journal, counted over fifty of President Trump’s inner circle testing positive, beginning with the president and first lady, and including sons Don Jr. and Barron, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, and former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway. Two more recent high profile positives: Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis. Giuliani was mildly ill, and received the scarce antibody treatment that Secretary Carson and the president received.

Two additions that slipped quickly by in news accounts: over 100 Secret Service agents tested positive; as did over 90 members of Congress—70 percent were Republicans! Large and largely unmasked events—e.g., the reception for new Supreme Court Justice Amy Barrett and the Trump election eve party—are often linked to the positive tests, but the severity of any illnesses and the reentries into normal life are rarely noted in the press. 

How many of this large cohort of political people—mostly Republicans—got how sick? How much tracing has there been from super-spreader events—White House Receptions; Sturgis, SD? And what is the status of antibody treatments that worked well with Trump, Carson, and Giuliani?  Limited, we understand; so who gets them?

Many of us wondering these things have quietly wished that some of these people would get sick enough to get up from their beds screaming for masks. Thus far we have Rudy Giuliani gloating, as he is released from the hospital, that “you can overdo the masks.”

It’s good to ask and wonder, hard not to wish some people ill. Terry asks that we look at the moon, that “even when small… negates the idea there are us and them.”

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68. Playing by the Rules

The numbers keep going up—the national counts of new cases and Covid-19 deaths have now passed spring numbers, and they’re not concentrated in one or two big cities, but spread in cities, suburbs, and rural places across the country. In Oregon, urban counties still account for the biggest numbers, but some rural counties have seen big spikes and are on the governor’s watch lists.

 

We Oregonians were maybe smug that early moves to mask and distance worked. As in many places, it seemed that things were easing, that a corner was being turned, and a vaccine was just around that corner… But we’ve not been immune; and as with contagions across the country, crowds at weddings, church events, fraternity parties, and rural food processing plants have ignited and fanned Oregon flames. 

 

After a couple of small bumps—a bump anything more than one positive in a day, or positives three days running—Wallowa County seems settled at the low end of Covid. That’s some comfort, just as the big numbers all around us are discomforting. 

 

But it’s not personal fear—even after my mask-saved brush with it. I fear the country’s continuing tangle with it, fear that widespread misinformation and the people who gobble it up and pass it on are dangerous, and fear more the pervasiveness of the virus and the growing distrust among us.

 

The vaccine—the advertised ticket out of this, seems both more hopeful and iffier by the day. The difficulties of production and distribution are shown on the nightly news. I believe the military and the left overs from the Trump administration can mesh with Biden’s crew to handle things, but it will take time. How much time? A friend said she did not want to be the last case before the vaccine arrives. 

 

And where do you and I fit in the prioritizing for the vaccine? Do we have the patience to keep distancing and masking? Will enough people vaccinate? And what about counterfeit tests and vaccines? 

 

Most troubling of all, the concerns of Dr. Atul Gawande, a member to Biden’s Covid task force, that some Americans will jockey for position, try to nudge the rules or use outright bribes to get the vaccine early. Think about the rich who have bought children’s ways into the Ivy League, and elected officials breaking their own Covid rules. 

 

Can we agree on and play by the rules?

 

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67. Gifts

Moving to Wallowa County fifty years ago, meeting and getting to know Alvin Josephy, and then the Indian people who lived here once and still call this place home have all been great gifts to me. In times of uncertainty and even darkness in the past few years, the face and words of a Nez Perce elder have come to take my thoughts and mind to older things, better things. 

Even when the lessons are hard, there is something assuring in them. Bad presidents? You wanna start with Jackson? Covid-19? My grandmother talked of 1918. 

 

And in the quick words of many Indian friends and in the new history books I read, I know that viral diseases were the tidal waves that swept the European settlers into power across the continent. And when I hear news of Covid-19 in the Navajo Nation and on reservations here with the Nez Perce and their Plateau cousins, I know that there is generational memory of the first smallpox and measles and diphtheria that crept ahead of the white Europeans who brought them and devastated Indian peoples.

 

What’s the gift of that? It’s the knowledge of resiliency, of Indians now helping themselves in this pandemic, all the while reviving ancient languages and traditions, remembering deeper pasts, embracing land, water, and fish in a kind of national surge that has us—Whites and descendants of the unwilling immigrants from Africa, and newer immigrants from all continents and—paying attention to how to live in this land. 

 

There are the practical things: using fire and restoring waters so that plants, fish, birds and the rest of animate nature can thrive; learning to take what we need and give back, so that fish and forests and soil will come back. Patience: the fish will remember ancient ways when dams fail or are breached.

 

And the spiritual things: learning to be together on this planet instead of siloed in our competitive worlds. The governor of California and the Texas mayor who put individual and family pleasure above community health on this pandemic Thanksgiving should listen to their Indian citizens. 

 

While pandemic cases and deaths rise today, I know that the world will live beyond this one, and tell myself and ask you to listen to our Indian friends. Take care of the earth and each other.

 

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