Source: The Boston Globe
MAY 16-17, 2020
Dear Friends and Family,
A friend from college died this month. It wasn’t COVID-19; he was killed by a heart attack. Does that make it different? I don’t know. But I know I will never see him again.
Death is all around us, but how are we supposed to mourn when we are all wrapped in our own self-isolating cocoons? Reading obits is a place to start. “Telling the stories of the dead, ” Casey Cep, in The New Yorker, reminds us, “is essential work.”
“To some extent,” writes Cep, “obituaries are popular now for the same reasons they have always been popular: a curiosity about lives both everyday and extraordinary, plus a certain actuarial self-interest. But they are also serving as a kind of admonishment, a record of the dead that doubles as a warning for the living. Look, the dead say from their obituaries, we are not numbers; we were real people, like you and those you love.”
What can we do to help avoid so many needless deaths? At a minimum, we have to continue to practice social distancing, including wearing a mask when we go out. It's the right thing to do for everyone, as David Graham points out in a myth-busting article in The Atlantic.
“It’s no accident that the iconic images of anti-lockdown protests feature not a beat-up old Accord or Taurus, but a gleaming, late-model Dodge truck,” Graham notes. “Putting that together with the polling, what emerges is a picture of a revolt against social-distancing guidelines that is mostly composed of wealthier Republicans who have been less directly affected by the economic fallout of the closures. Trump has described Americans who are ready to go back to work as ‘warriors.’ If so, the war they’re fighting seems not to be against the virus, but against the working class.”
We also can try to bring that “war” to an end as soon as possible. One way is to support an effort to speed the development of a vaccine through an organization known as 1day sooner.
Another way is to replace the generals who have so badly bungled the response to the pandemic.
You’ve probably seen Steve Schmidt, the former John McCain adviser who is ubiquitous on MSNBC and elsewhere. Still, it is bracing to listen to him lash into Donald Trump as the worst president in American history.
Bad as things are now, they would be far worse if Trump wins re-election. In the Washington Post, Rob Berschinski of Human Rights First warns that we already have a scary model for what a Trump second term would look like in countries like Hungary and Poland, where the rule of law has eroded and fair elections have been corrupted.
“Summarized as a slow roll of subversion,” Berschinski writes, “elected autocrats chip away at democracy’s foundations in the courts, media and civil service with the grudging (or sometimes energetic) support of their political allies.”
Trump’s most important accomplice in that task is his Attorney General, Bill Barr. “Barr has won. Trump has won,” argues David Rohde in The New Yorker. “And the post-Watergate reforms that were intended to stop Presidents, Attorneys General, and spy chiefs from using law-enforcement and intelligence agencies for political purposes have been obliterated.”
With six months to go before the election, we’re still trying to answer the question: why did Trump win? Take your choice of explanations (based on my own experience with people I know who voted for Trump, hatred of Hillary Clinton is among the top contenders), but perhaps the best overall answers to that question lie in Ezra Klein’s pre-pandemic book, Why We’re Polarized.
But it takes a while to get to Klein’s bottom line, which is why I recommend a brilliant new critique in New York magazine by Eric Levitz, who has been amazingly prolific in recent weeks. “By the time they finish Why We’re Polarized,’’ Levitz argues, “his most attentive readers will recognize it as an indictment of the conservative movement — albeit one camouflaged behind a critique of Americans’ unifying affinity for identity-based divisiveness.”
We’ve all read about how the Obama administration left behind a pandemic playbook that Trump’s team promptly ignored. But we lost much more when Obama left office, as he reminded us on Saturday when he appeared on camera to deliver a couple of commencement addresses to graduating students that stood in stark contrast to Trump’s daily utterances.
If you’re like me, you experienced your first Zoom meeting during the pandemic. But even if too many of your sessions have gone awry in all-too-familiar ways, I bet none of them were as amusing as this one.
Stay safe,
Tom
May 19, 2020
Dear Friends and Family,
My mother, Ruth Redburn, died early this morning, of congestive heart failure. She was 90. Lisa and I were able to spend time with her yesterday, comforting her and touching her in her apartment at her nearby retirement home, which allowed us to walk over and visit even though it is on lockdown and normally closed to visitors. We were very grateful for that last visit, something that is not available to all too many families at this time.
I'm going to take a few days off from writing these notes. I hope to resume as soon as I can.
Stay safe,
Tom
May 23-24, 2020
Dear Friends and Family,
First, thanks to all of you who responded with your condolences for the death of my mother. I’m very grateful. She was born in 1929, the year the Depression started and lived to see another one begin. Let’s hope we’ve learned enough since then that will limit the damage and shorten the length of this one.
But is Washington prepared to spend the money necessary to cope with our
once-in-a-century affliction? I’m worried the White House and Republicans in Congress are already turning their backs on the problem, hoping that taking away the public health restrictions (and reopening churches!) will somehow restore the economy to health. It won’t. In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson lays out the scale of the necessary remedy.
“When you add it all up—the $3 trillion already spent, the $3 trillion now required, and trillions more to accelerate the U.S. recovery—the total price tag for averting another Great Depression could be about $10 trillion,” Thompson writes.
“That number is a stunner, but so is the crisis. The U.S. economy is $22 trillion—or at least it was before the crisis. If the federal government spends $10 trillion over the next, say, four years, that would mean a fiscal shot of about 10 percent of total economic activity over that period. In an economy where one in five Americans are out of work and several industries have no clear path to normalcy, it’s not ludicrous to think that the appropriate fiscal medicine for an unprecedented crisis will amount to a tenth of GDP over several years.”
We were clearly not prepared for the outbreak of the pandemic that has caused so much death and pushed the economy over the cliff. Will we learn from this experience enough to help limit the damage from the next one?
I’ve missed a lot in my few days away from writing this note, so this will be pretty scattershot. There are clear signs of improvement, but, if anything, the situation seems more confusing than ever.
“The more we learn about COVID-19 and the best practices with which to combat it,” writes Benjamin Wallace-Wells in New York magazine, “the clearer it is that we are living still in a valley of pandemic ignorance. We are suffering and dying at historic rates but the laws governing the ebb and flow of the virus remain maddeningly inscrutable. Even when the news is good — with case rates stabilizing even through a period of “reopening,” for instance — we don’t really know how to explain it.”
But there are some rules to live by as we gradually emerge from isolation that can help us cope with all this uncertainty. Atul Gawande, in The New Yorker, suggests that the experience of health care workers provides some useful guidance.
“The Boston area has been a covid-19 hotspot,” Gawande says. “Yet the staff members of my hospital system here, Mass General Brigham, have been at work throughout the pandemic. We have seventy-five thousand employees—more people than in seventy-five per cent of U.S. counties. In April, two-thirds of us were working on site. Yet we’ve had few workplace transmissions. Not zero: we’ve been on a learning curve, to be sure, and we have no way to stop our health-care workers from getting infected in the community. But, in the face of enormous risks, American hospitals have learned how to avoid becoming sites of spread. When the time is right to lighten up on the lockdown and bring people back to work, there are wider lessons to be learned from places that never locked down in the first place.”
It’s not just hospital workers who are trying to protect us from the ravages of the coronavirus. The New York Times offers a video on the experience of a health care aide that should remind us of our duty, once we have new leadership in Washington, to start overcoming the persistent inequality and injustice that the pandemic has helped bring to the surface.
The headline: “They look after our most vulnerable. They make around $16,200 a year. Are we ok with that?”
Even as I'm dealing with my mother's death, I don’t want to let despair take over my life. The Times offers some guidance on that front, too, with 14 ways we're finding joy.
“These are not, on the surface, joyful times,” notes Anya Strzemien. “Not in the slightest. Which is why you deserve some relief. We asked 14 writers what’s bringing them joy right now; their answers are below. And despite the over-the-top abbreviations we’ve used to denote them, no one has gone especially wild (yet). As our world shrinks to the size of our homes, the more joyful the simple pleasures can feel. Joy is joy any way you slice it (or photograph it, cook it or watch it). We hope you’re finding some wherever you are.”
One thing that brought me a little joy was this short video of kids being given a special treat while playing with their toy trucks.
And lots of people also seem to be enjoying a 20-minute escape by watching the solving of the already famed "miracle" sudoku!
Stay safe,
Tom
May 25, 2020
Dear Friends and Family,
Today is Memorial Day and we’re remembering not just the millions who lost their lives in wartime but the 100,000 Americans and many more around the world who have died so far from COVID-19.
The Times called it an “incalculable loss,” and sought to convey both the scale of the disaster and the individual suffering through its stunning front page on Sunday. Here’s the back story on how it came about.
My dad, who died in 2014, was a veteran of World War II, flying cargo planes over the Hump from Burma into China. We were fortunate that he was able to pass away at home after his wife and family were able to say goodbye. For dozens of veterans living at the Soldiers Home in western Massachusetts (and their families), their fate was far worse.
As for President Trump, Memorial Day weekend was for playing golf. He refused to even acknowledge the toll, choosing instead to make baseless murder allegations and amplify messages from a racist and sexist Twitter account.
Trump, as always, refuses to accept any responsibility or admit any mistakes. As a result, it looks like his re-election strategy, other than attempting to smear Joe Biden, will be to run against his own government.
Meanwhile, even as the rest of the world is consumed by the pandemic, China is using the moment to crack down on Hong Kong and throw its weight around with its neighbors. Trump falsely wants to paint Biden as somehow beholden to Beijing, but his own approach is dangerous and incoherent.
This is a sad day, but I’d like to end with remembering a saner, happier past. On her way out of the White House, Michelle Obama sat down with Stephen Colbert. It’s a reminder that our leaders don’t have to be this way.
Stay safe,
Tom