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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77. The Island

A friend who lives in two places—here and in the Willamette Valley—writes from Corvallis that everyone there is wearing masks. He remembers that many here were/are not. 

First, I’d say that most of us in Wallowa County are wearing masks when we are inside at a store or school or even walking into a restaurant. There are the occasional defiant ones, who must get some pleasure from stepping into the post office or walking the aisles of Safeway mask-less. But the banks and vet clinic don’t even open their doors; you use the drive-thru or call from the parking lot where the masked vet or an assistant comes to see your dog, cat, or horse, and, if necessary, take the animal inside while you wait outside. 

 

Second, we truly are blessed to live parts or most of our lives outside. I walk and ride my bike every day, swim in the summer. And a lot of my neighbors are out walking, biking, hiking, skiing and snowmobiling. Many work outside on farms, ranches, logging and highway crews, and construction sites. One of the reasons most of us live here is to live a good portion of our lives outside.

 

Third, when we are inside, the waiting rooms, market aisles, and church pews are just not as crowded as they are in the city and suburbia. There are no mega churches, cineplexes, or malls; you have to stop outside to go from one store to the next.

 

So far, Wallowa County has been remarkably clear of the coronavirus. We cannot quite count on fingers and toes, but we’ve not hit 100. A truck driver friend thinks he picked it up at a Umatilla County truck stop. Umatilla has food processing plants, and field crews that crowd into crummies to and from work. 

 

Schools here are in session, and when a local student picked up the virus at a party in nearby Union County, the school shut down, his immediate classmates quarantined, they scrubbed the school, and are now happily back in session. And my grandson unwittingly brought it back from Portland, but saw no one else here before being tested and quarantined.  Our health system jumps on these things.

 

The trick here is steady as she goes—that most of us keep wearing our masks and living outside as much as we can, and then line up for our vaccinations. I don’t know what to say about Corvallis or Portland. 

 

# # #

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.

 

# # # 

74+ Brilliant, nasty, and totally narcissistic (dec 23)

It hit me like a baseball bat this morning; Donald Trump’s video, released last night, attacking the Congressionally hashed out Covid Relief legislation, is all of above.  

There is pork and garbage in most bills voted on in Congress. Most of us—probably most Senators and Representatives—never see the pork and garbage. If anything we wink at it and concentrate on the meat, the primary provisions and purposes of the proposed legislation. Trump chose, at a minute so final that he can pocket veto it into the new Congress, to expose the legislation’s innards.

 

And he floated a big, fat, $2000 out there in front of everyone—Democrats and citizens who want it; and cost-conscious Republicans for whom even the $600 was a hard compromise. 

 

Senators and Representatives, many already gone home for the Christmas break, must quickly scurry and filter a dozen different scenarios to find one that will allow the legislation to pass. They’ll all—even McConnell—wince at the garbage, and Republicans will have to decide whether to defy Trump and stand up for it, or cave once again to his narcissistic demands.

 

Trump is back in the headlines, watching his minions sweat, weighing signing, vetoing, or pocket-vetoing in his own puffed up mind. Which will excite the most obsequious behavior? How many toadies can he count? 

 

Where’s there a thought for anyone else?

 

# # #

75.The Best and the Worst

From the halls of government to the streets of Portland, Covid and Christmas have teamed to bring out the best and the worst in us. In a word, the best is selfless giving—and the worst is selfishness. You might have other definitions, but this one seems clear to me today. 

On Christmas Eve my granddaughter’s car was stolen. She had her hard had and work boots, rain gear, and hundreds of dollars of Christmas presents in it, had made a brief, 45 minute stop at a salon, and came out to find it gone. She did all the right things: called the police; contacted insurance; posted photos, license number, time and place, and police case number on Facebook. It’s now almost 30 hours, and no word on any of it. 

 

The perpetrators of this heist are selfish; they lack empathy; they see the Christmas gifts—maybe even the boots and hardhats—and the money they can make stripping and selling Honda parts as more important to them than the car and its contents are to my granddaughter.  

 

It’s not unlike the current squabbles in government. Legislators and administration officials have spent months crafting a bill that will offer economic relief and speed Covid-vaccination programs across the country. The best impulses have been aimed at the plight of millions of Americans out of work, food, and housing. The worst have considered the negotiations and bill’s passage as how they will make me and my team look. To hell with your Christmas presents—and rent payments; I’ll take mine. 

 

Meanwhile, millions of people across the country are working long shifts in Covid wards, manning food banks, delivering meals on wheels, ringing Salvation Army bells, and in one way and another playing St. Nicholas in a harsh world in troubled times. Some of those legislators are missing meals and gnashing teeth.

 

This cuts past Christmas and religion. There are nominal Buddhists, Moslems, Hindus and atheists on both sides of this world of “self” and “other,” “mine” and empathy. There are atheists in foxholes—and Moslems, Christians, etc. But when military psychologists wondered why some fought harder and longer, they found that your buddy in the foxhole—selflessness, empathy—is more important than religion and all the evils that can be painted on the enemy. 

 

There are other crimes—e.g., of revenge, neglect, anger, and passion—but the crime of selfishness transcends class, politics, wealth and religion. And in the narcissistic car thief and political showman’s eyes is no crime at all.

 

# # #

74. Crazy times

It’s of course been a hard and sometimes crazy year, with things we’d never dreamed coming to be—and things we had dreamed getting left behind. So it seems natural now for the end of it to have its own craziness. 

I’ve steered clear of straight-up politics in these Pandemic posts, but the strange frenzies reported from the White House are just too mad—as in hatter—to ignore. Sydney Powell, the woman who came up with the idea that the election had been hacked by the long-dead Venezuelan dictator, Hugo Chavez; Michael Flynn, the pardoned former national security advisor now advising martial law in some blue states; and Rudy Guiliani, the once proud and popular mayor of New York City, sweating and dripping hair dye down his cheek on national TV while promoting electoral conspiracy theories…

 

And the staunch conservatives now abandoning the ship—or being thrown off: Secretary of State Pompeo, disagreeing with the boss on who was behind the recent cyber hack of major companies and government agencies; and Attorney General Barr, the man liberals have loathed, dismissed by the president in the final month of his term.

 

The West is not immune to the craziness. Ammon Bundy, one of the Malheur occupation leaders a few years ago, surfaced with a band of anti-maskers in the Idaho capitol as the de facto leader of a “health freedom” movement, chanting, breaking glass, demanding freedom from government ordered coronavirus protection measures like masking. 

 

And the streets of Portland, which friends tell me are a shambles after weeks of confrontations among BLM marchers, Proud Boys, and police. 

 

Meanwhile, drumbeats of record contagion and death numbers across the nation, and angel vaccines spinning on production lines on the evening news shows, packed in steaming dry ice, loaded and shipped to somewhere near us. What does 90 degrees below zero centigrade even mean!

 

“Normal” and “normalcy” the most oft-used words of our days, the white flags signifying that we are done with craziness—and crave peace, that we’ll trade nightmares and extravagant dreams for simple rest