1. A compilation, sometimes edited, of messages I wrote about our experience as it happened. My intent is not to elicit sympathy but (1) to let people know whom I haven’t had a chance to tell, and (2) to assemble what may be useful insights (sometimes repetitive for some readers) into aspects of our covid experience.
2. Thoughts about covid deniers, prompted by my covid brain in tandem with my ongoing efforts to understand the “logic” of Trump supporters, that may already be out there but I haven’t seen.

If you want to read some but not all of this, the document has a table of contents to indicate what topics I cover.

Critically thoughtful feedback is welcome.

To the degree that I mistrust the bandwagon effect among anti-science and reactionary zealots, I fear the worst, regardless.

Often in life, such an active minority can do limited damage (though to those damaged, it’s rarely limited). In the covid-19 case, that minority is significantly controlling the fate of the rest of the population. Their behavior constitutes assault and attempted murder. They keep the pandemic active and, especially now (and indefinitely), expanding.

The rest of us are hostages at their mercy as we (especially those of us who aren’t financially independent) navigate the exigencies of staying at home—or in numerous cases, going to jobs with dangerous and sometimes debilitating or even fatal conditions (like working in health centers or supermarkets—see, for example, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/albertsamaha/july-4th-barbecue-food-coronavirus).

Sufficiently stopping this population-wagging tail is probably impossible. But its power is enhanced by frequent failure (or fear?) of officials to enforce adherence to formally mandated behavior like wearing masks. And the waggers are often bullies whose threatening demeanor in public cows many of the rest of us when we see them practicing their bad behavior.

I don’t fail to notice how much less official vigor is paid to curbing them than to interfering with, for example, anti-racism protests (which, after all, are legal).

I have no practical answer to this problem, but I don’t think it’s waiting for enough of the bad guys to be bedridden or die as a result of their behavior. Nor, alas, is it our continuing to twirl and snap at that ever-elusive tail attached to us, with righteous outrage.

A partial though insufficient solution may mean that many of the good guys need to restrain ourselves from mingling in justified public protest of the wide range of outrages, which these days focus on racism (and about time!), we’ve been raging about especially strongly for 3 ½ years (many of these outrages, of course, existed before trumpism). Much as I support the protests, photos from them make me anxious about how much viral transmission is occurring at them; I suspect resolutions to practice social distancing easily get compromised in the heat of crowded, inspiring moments. (I don’t know because my wife and I are in the old-codgers’ high-risk locked-down group, where we expect to stay for a long time to come, so that we’re confined to cheering on virtuous actions from afar.) We need the good guys healthy…and alive.

Will a successful election of Biden turn this around? I don’t know. A boy can hope.

Barbara and I have been handling self-isolation together extremely well, but I’m finding that depression about what is going on beyond our front door is growing and increasingly paralyzing my ability to remain in good spirits. What I’m writing here relates, among other things, to actions we in the ACLU consider in the coming months. At some level, it’s also a request for wisdom about how to manage the growing anxiety I describe here. Just how alone am I in this thinking?

I’m very worried about what’s going to happen between now and next inauguration day. I don’t know if a November election will be allowed to take place. If it does, I don’t know if the results will be rigged. If somehow Biden is elected (not my favorite choice, but tons less bad than a continuing Trump administration—and I’m even a bit encouraged by Biden’s working with Bernie on the party platform), I’m not convinced he’ll be allowed to take office.

If any or all of these scenarios happen, presumably our legal system will fall to pieces and be manipulated to purge dissent. I’m skeptical that any ACLU actions would then do any good, since the Constitution will no longer be relevant (or relevant only in distorted ways dictated by “leaders” and judges). And I hope ACLU honchos are putting plans in place just in case the worst happens.

I know that none of what I fear may occur. And if any of it does, there are many possible mitigating factors and uncertainties, including what steps military leaders and law enforcement would take. Will governors call out the national guard? Will some governors cooperate with such a coup? What about the sprinkling of right-wing extremists within the military and law enforcement? And so on and on.

The failure to deal with the gun-toting terrorists who recently invaded the Michigan capitol building is not at all reassuring. And you can bete that these right-wing terrorists are discussing future strategies that may well include coordinated assassinations of key people who would resist a ruling dictatorship.

Until recently, the concerns I’m expressing were theoretical. I never imagined I’d be living in a country that has become as dangerous as ours, thanks not to Trump alone but to his enablers and supporters who, even if a minority, have intentions of encouraging tyranny of a minority. Though I’ve read a good deal about past plagues, I never imagined I’d be in the midst of, and vulnerable to, a pandemic like the current one. While I’ve had anxiety since the current administration took power, the pandemic has significantly upped that concern.

Of course, I hope my fears are wrong, and I’ll be happy to look back at some point and have all of you ridicule me for having gone so far overboard in the midst of what for most of us (or at least most privileged white folk) is an unprecedented experience. But I’ve read enough history to see disturbing parallels between what is happening now and what has brought down other societies in the past. And the Holocaust has always presented me with the conundrum of what made some Jews and not others get out of Germany (or soon-to-be-German-occupied countries) in time.

If there is a political catastrophe, I’d like not to wake the next morning to a disastrous fait accompli and then run around in circles trying to figure out what to do. Clumsily, I am brainstorming and consulting about ways to be at least a bit prepared. Early thoughts range from having suicide pills stashed away to building a large stash of cash somewhere safe that could underwrite some kind of escape attempt and its aftermath. (In my worst fantasies, a fascistic government will freeze financial accounts of anyone it identifies as dissident.) Contemplating adjustments of a major move at our ages, a year or two either side of 80, isn’t easy, and while I would seriously consider leaving the country, Barbara won’t—and I’m going nowhere without her.

I do not believe that the country was in a wonderful place before Trump, and I do not believe in “going back” to some notion of where the country was. (Can you imagine trying to get a widely accepted definition of what that would look like?) I am very aware that as privileged (and white) people with a strong financial position, Barbara and I have been significantly buffered from most of the miseries of the COVID-19 lockdown. I am aware that people are getting sick and dying to serve our needs. I am aware that a disproportionate percentage of those people are non-white. I am aware that federal and local terrorist behavior towards people of color and immigrants has continued, presumably with even more deaths and general suffering. And I am aware that much of this was going on before the pandemic, and in many ways before Trump and his enablers took office.

That said, and no doubt because Barbara and I have NOT (so far) been personally (as operated to mentally) victimized to any serious extent by the political atrocities, I fervently do NOT want an overthrow of the country’s traditional, if often corrupted, constitutional framework (though I’m also worried about how that “tradition” will be interpreted by the growing number of Trumpian court appointees, and especially the Supreme Court for some time to come). I wish it were possible to leverage our experience with the pandemic and come out of it with much stronger social justice and environmental behavior, but I think that’s unlikely.

As it presumably troubles you, my jaw drops open at all the talk about balancing the “economy” (I’m less and less clear exactly what that is) and American deaths that result from “re-opening. I won’t even go into disregard for people in my age bracket.

While I am not (yet) fearful of anti-semitic attacks on Barbara and me personally, I am of course unhappy about the way Jews and other traditionally targeted groups have been increasingly attacked since the 2017 inauguration (indeed, I think the targeting started increasing during the 2016 campaign). My fellow-traveler parents raised their children as red-diaper Jews, and though I feel zero spiritual and little cultural connection with (but considerable alienation from) Judaism, it is the fact of the Holocaust that determined the bedrock of my progressive value system (and, at times, actions). So in some ironic way, it is my tenuous Jewish origins that have always driven my values. (I’ve started writing about that background—or perhaps more precisely, my rejection of most of it—on my blog, and if you’re curious, here’s a start on further explanation regarding this subject: wordpress/some-family-and-childhood-background/.)

Were it up to me, I’d be preparing to be ready to leave the country on short notice. But Barbara is not on board with that, and I’m not going anywhere without her. And there are, of course, numerous other factors we would have to consider, including leaving relatives to potentially awful fates.

If you interpret what I’m writing as the ravings of a paranoid maniac (and I hope that turns out to be the case), you’ll not want to waste time replying. But if you think you can offer me useful thoughts, please do share them.

First, the statistics are quite encouraging, though I suspect that some favorable answers resulted from a desire to appear more knowledgeable about, and observant of, COVID-19 guidelines than some individuals may have actually been. Still, even those answers would show a bias towards the right side of these issues.

Second, if these numbers are accurate and remain so (or get better), this raises the question of why it appears that news media are giving so much attention to “demonstrators” (really threateners) for personal freedom and against self-isolation. Of course, at some level this isn’t surprising: standard news organizations typically are reductionist about “sides” on a given issue, typically polarizing them as though only two sides merit attention. They also typically simplify those “sides.” But worse, they make it seem as though those (only) two “sides” have equal legitimacy and, worst of all, have roughly the same following. This happens all the time, but it has been especially concerning in recently years in treatment of the climate crisis, as though the 97% (or more) scientists who agree on the danger are equal to the 3% (or less) of scientists (often not climate specialists) who disagree (or at least who are funded by groups like fossil-fuel companies).

Third, although I’m not at all optimistic about this, to the extent we can trust these statistics, I would like to see wide pressure exerted to “restart” the country with the lessons we have serendipitously learned from our confrontation with COVID-19—on the one hand, the significant environmental benefits we’ve seen that go a long way toward supporting arguments in support of how to address human-caused climate change, on the other hand to acknowledge and remedy the ongoing social justice issues that this pandemic has highlighted.

We shouldn’t go back. Indeed, we can’t. Our world, and especially the world of our kids who will always have this as part of their youthful shaping, will never be the same.

But I’m highly sceptical that we’ll go “forward” in any kind of meaningful way. I expect large numbers of people will be desperate to pretend that they can return to what was familiar, regardless of the blemishes. I expect they will want to “continue” their pre-existing attitudes, good or bad, towards the climate crisis. (Can you imagine much willingness to go on making major reductions in driving? Indeed, I suspect that with the “freedom” of going out again, even more driving will occur for awhile) And I expect they will for the most part believe that this pandemic is an aberration that will occur no more than every century or so.

And just in case you yourself might be tempted to get complacent (though I’m damned if I know actions to advise that have the prospect of making an impact), consider this recent Bloomberg report (and if it’s accurate, which I assume, imagine the impact during this or a later pandemic):

Like many others, I have sometimes been hornswoggled by outraged claims on the web or in e-mails. Of course, insufficiently documented or totally undocumented claims have always been an internet issue, along with _ad hominem_ repudiation of those who disagree. But the frequency of such antisocial behavior seems to have skyrocketed since the 2016 presidential campaign. So for the past three+ years, I have had to step up my wariness about what to trust even (especially?) from sources I don’t know but with whose values I identify. Sometimes these claims are messages from people I normally trust but who, like me, are not immune to being hoodwinked. Perhaps it’s my fussiness, but even from the good guys, basic principles of argumentation[1] seem decreasingly observed.

As so many have noted, COVID-19 has placed us in a time and mental state unprecedented in our personal experience. Even if we know some history of epidemics and their disastrous results (most of us have at least heard of the bubonic plague’s individual and social devastation, and by now plenty of people know something about the post-WWI flu epidemic), those events are in the dim past when people were much less savvy than us modern folk, right?

For most (all?) of us it’s incredibly disorienting to find ourselves actually in a pandemic. And of course, in the US and elsewhere, too many “leaders” and their enablers exacerbate our confusion. Given the rampant lying and enabling by members of this administration, perhaps we should be grateful that we had a full three years of its prolific training to mistrust anything it says, what its with routine buck-passing and false accusations against any disagreement, ranging from individual reporters to collective federal agencies.

Still, it is easy to get so constantly assaulted that we get numb to being cautious about what we believe or share.

From early on in this pandemic, we’ve been hearing numerous charges both in support of and against health professionals who, from my perspective, are taking on risks far beyond what any human being should have to do.[2] I have little doubt that many of the horror stories we’re hearing about treatment of health professionals are largely or entirely true, and I have read frequent disturbing discussions of how medical personnel and supplies are being managed (or mismanaged). So when I saw this essay posted, I was drawn (cautiously) to consider what sounded like an extravagant but possibly accurate attack.

After clicking the link, I found myself becoming increasingly uneasy about the writer’s tone and sweeping statements. After I had gotten a considerable way through the essay and saw I still had far to go, I shifted to skimming and finally skipping to the first several responses, which I found largely similar in tone to the essay itself (though one did seem to be intelligently challenging the writer’s claims).

I was especially curious about the basis for the (undocumented) sweeping attacks on the CDC and WHO, especially in the broader history of Trump administration attempts to dictate what federal agencies say (and the courageous rebuttals from a few of those agencies). Did I mention passing the buck?

I looked for on-line evaluations of the publishing site, Medium.com[3]—which I discovered currently has this disclaimer at the top of its web page: “Anyone can publish on Medium per our Policies, but we don’t fact-check every story.” That statement alone was a red flag. What I found elsewhere, though not definitive, deepened my hesitation to take the essay at face value.

Apparently, Medium posts a wide range of viewpoints, each one personal and (like the one cited here) commonly without supporting evidence. (When I read and skimmed the current essay, I watched for supporting references but saw none—nor did I see any footnotes.)

In that sense, they’re personal essays, like the one I’m writing right now. Okay. I get it. We all want people to pay attention to our thoughts, and we look around for ways to publish them. (I use this largely ignored blog.)

But what principles do we follow to reassure readers that we’re not just another voice angrily or deceptively crying into the wilderness? When it comes to pronouncing a “fact” (a concept we typically assume we know when we see it, but which on close examination can be quite slippery[4]), unless I independently know (or think I know) it, I look for evidence beyond hearsay. I hate that, because we DO need to ferret out and publicize social injustices, and “proving” them can easily get muddied by opposing vested interests with no scruples. For me, this has been a constant problem with outrages ascribed to Trump and his enablers; they are often justified, but I try not to be blind to lazy thinking among people with whom I politically identify. Especially for understandably angry reports in my various lefty e-mail services and on-line sites, how can I know what to trust?

So if the Medium essay is totally (or mostly) accurate, I’m actually angry that its writer hasn’t done a better job of presenting claims so that I am encouraged to trust them. To take any steps in response to charges like this, I need accurate information about just how bad things are and who is responsible.

In this case, unfortunately, the only “step” I feel able to take is to remind us all to be careful about what we trust.

If readers have documented information one way or another on claims in this Medium essay, please share it with me and others.

________________

[1] Mildly embarrassed self-aggrandizing reminder for those who don’t know: As it happens, I have taught written and oral argumentation at the undergraduate and graduate levels, so I feel some legitimacy in addressing this issue—though as I admitted at the start, I myself have occasionally been sucked in by plausible-sounding claims.

Aside from trustworthy documentation, among the factors that affect my trust in a piece of writing are: who is passing on a particular screed, the original writer’s relevant background, tone, accuracy about what I happen already to know, etc., etc.

[2] In recent days, I posted about my general dismay with classist dynamics in who is or isn’t driven to take risks of contracting COVID-19 (wordpress/2020/04/03/class-discrimination-during-a-national-and-international-crisis-say-it-isnt-so/).

[3] One site was https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/medium/, which sounds reliable in its own right, but I don’t know for sure. This is so typical of checking out internet review sites—how do we know which critiques to trust? (Can you say “infinite regress”?)

[4] As I probably keep repeating on this blog—but it bears repeating in certain contexts—since completing my undergraduate philosophy degree, I have held the belief that “objectivity” in its traditional meaning is impossible. Conversation on that subject can be endless, but for me it hinges on the underpinning for this quote, from the late Berkeley Professor Paul Alpers, that has stayed with me since graduate school: “All criticism is autobiography.” (I should probably attach this quote to everything I write.)

I have noticed that occasionally, smart people post what seem to be calls for herd immunity. I encourage anyone with such thoughts to read this article, but if that feels too tedious, here’s a relevant paragraph from section II, “The Endgame,” that looks at three solution scenarios:

“The second is that the virus does what past flu pandemics have done: It burns through the world and leaves behind enough immune survivors that it eventually struggles to find viable hosts. This “herd immunity” scenario would be quick, and thus tempting. But it would also come at a terrible cost: SARS-CoV-2 is more transmissible and fatal than the flu, and it would likely leave behind many millions of corpses and a trail of devastated health systems. The United Kingdom initially seemed to consider this herd-immunity strategy, before backtracking when models revealed the dire consequences. The U.S. now seems to be considering it too.”

And since Barbara and I are in the old-farts’ high-risk group, we’d be likely to snuff it in a herd-immunity effort. For some reason, we don’t feel expendable.

Why am I not surprised at the overall disparities illustrated in this NY Times article? (I’m assuming that on the whole, it’s accurate.)

As a member of the privileged and relatively healthy population (albeit aging), from the start of this disaster I was aware of how much easier it was for Barbara and me than masses of other people to hunker down and get through this alive. (Our level of education for grasping the issues didn’t hurt, either.) I have feared that our economy and its enablers would at best go through motions (like the $2trillion Congressional bill) of caring for victims while making sure working people, and particularly poor workers, continued to serve the elite’s needs and wealth. I foam at the digital mouth as I try to express my rage at this and so many other dimensions of our health catastrophe.

Living in CT, I find it especially interesting to consider the first graph in the selection I captured from the Times’ article: of all the high-income groups in the major cities depicted here, the CT discrepancies look worst. (Bridgeport is a working-class city with the worst COVID-19 statistics in the State.) I also take notice of the significant spikes in movement among the “bottom 10%” as, I assume, many of them became desperate to provide basic care for themselves and those close to them.

I’m also intrigued that in NYC, the poorest people were only a bit more active than those they were serving—still with spikes, but (relatively) modest ones.

I assume the disparity depicted here is little better in most countries and far worse in many.

While I think this federal administration has handled the problem about as badly as possible and with no concern other than its own well-being and perpetuation, I doubt a Democratic government would have done too much better. Overall, it would likely have had more compassion for victims and paid far more attention to the advice of knowledgeable specialists, but it would still have been trying to calculate (and seek professional advice from) just how far its remedial measures could go without undermining the basis of our economic system and its many high-powered (though not necessarily socially important) businesses and those who benefit financially from them. In this case, lesser evil would have been a lot less bad, but let’s not deceive ourselves about who cares in what ways about whom.

As a reminder, though, that we privileged may be colluding in cutting our own throats, here’s a relevant quote from the Times article: “…public health experts cautioned that the nature of this virus means that inequality in health outcomes puts the entire population at greater risk. Pockets of people who are untested or who don’t get the appropriate medical treatment can quickly become new clusters.”

Am I about to put myself on the front lines of the pandemic with the workers who continue at their tasks at considerable risk to themselves? No, especially not with the heightened vulnerability of my age. Would I have done so if I were much younger? Maybe. When young, I did take certain risks in the cause of social justice. But as with so many speculative matters about what we might do in life, my mantra is that this is a context for which one can’t know what one would do without having actually facing such a choice.

Barbara and I have done a very small thing: we are able to afford weekly housecleaning. We’ve told our cleaner not to come until further notice, but in the meantime we’re paying her. We can afford it—and we would have spent the money anyway.

Do I have answers for how to minimize dangers to the population (not the economy)? Only in very limited ways as modeled by some more pro-active leaders. But (as evidenced by the few countries that have done relatively well in their responses), some strategies already exist but are being ignored, and I strongly suspect that if they knew they could get full cooperation, the most creative of knowledgeable people could brainstorm even more promising strategies, starting with how to keep everyone fed with far less risk to those who provide the food (and maybe even sharing some of that risk among recipients not at highest risk).

1. Metaphysical explanations

As far back and as widely distributed around the globe as we have found written records, divine wrath has been just around the community corner for peoples so prone to angering their metaphysical potentates. Today is no different: I have done a google search for “coronavirus as divine punishment” and had 903,00 hits spanning world religious sects—and even climate activists. A major feature of such animadversions is the high frequency of competing organized religious groups devoutly painting the finger at rival groups, including within their own historical traditions.

It all makes me want to roll up my sleeves and write a multi-volume, carefully footnoted text on those arguments. (Since many may overlap, the actual number of separate claims is probably well under 100,000.[1]) All signs are that my self-isolation will continue long enough to complete such a work.

The troubling part in this tradition is that aside from punishing Jews, Moslems, LGBTQ, people of different colored skins, uppity women, and other peoples long established to merit censure and/or elimination (and hence by their very existence capable of triggering a divine punishment), members of those very same holy, finger-pointing chosen peoples seem simultaneously to be shuffling off to posthumous rewards.

Here, I shall set forth three possible mitigating factors, and I invite readers to add their own:

• A first model is provided by the precedent of the Exodus in the Hebrew Bible, where an entity called (in translation) “the  angel of death” is reported to have marked Jewish first-born sons for bypass during the imminent slaughter of first-born sons of elite (and apparently, via guilt by association, also ordinary) Egyptians (and presumably all non-Jewish, non-Egyptian first-born males as well, since the angel didn’t mark them).[2] So it may well be that the divinity/ies in existence today is/are using his/her/their power(s) to single out such people to be safe from the virus and those people just aren’t telling us.
• Secondly, it may be that members of whichever sect is right about divine punishment are included in the suffering to become honored martyrs, like early Christians thrown to lions.
• Of particular interest is whether divinity/ies of the Chosen sect expect worshippers to initiate massive self-examination followed by action to remove the pollution that is prompting the viral spread among them.[3]

Those who remain in a post-viral world shall have to see how all that shakes out when the True Divinity chooses to lift the current viral plague (if indeed humanity is ever adjudged worthy of such redemption).

2. Darwinism in action

Some years ago, a clever young fellow created the Darwin Awards for posthumous presentation to human beings whose reckless behavior removed them from the danger of reproducing—or as the site (https://darwinawards.com/) says, for “the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who accidentally remove themselves from it in a spectacular manner!”

With that context as a background, let us consider coronavirus victims in relation to their service to the human gene pool.

• Of those who die, neither the elderly (like your current author) nor immune-compromised folk will have any direct role in reproduction (though some might help raise children and influence their cultural behavior as they proceed through life, which in turn will harm or enhance reproductive fitness of said offspring).
• Among healthier folk who adhere to self-isolation and related principles (e.g., proper hand-washing, keeping distance from others), reproductive success rates should be relatively stable.
• Of those who may accept the reality of COVID-19 and its consequences but DON’T adhere to prescribed behavior, reproductive success should be significantly compromised.
• Of those who deny reality of the virus or its publicized effects, the most common repudiation of self-isolation and related principles appears to be[4] among the same religious people prone to see the virus as divine punishment (see topic 1). Moreover, they are presumably among those most likely to attend religious services in large, tightly packed numbers. ERGO: Their reproductive success should be significantly diminishing, as should the size of their congregations. ERGO: they should decreasingly collude in opposition to that social value of some repute that I’ll call “social justice.”[5]
• Depending on the brain genetics of who flouts and who honors prescribed precautions, the overall intellectual of the world’s population may be raised as well.[6]

________________

[1] To be critically thorough, I must acknowledge the highly unlikely possibility that Google missed some hits so that the actual number is much higher than 903,000. Still, as the hoi polloi say, beggars can’t be choosers.

[2] A parallel example would be the frequency throughout the history of war of the efficacy of prayer to the winning side’s divinity.

[3] This would help explain why gun stores are considered to be providing essential services in the increasingly great United States of America. (Is it the case that gun ownership and 2^nd-amendment acolytes tend to be towards the fundamentalist end of American religion?)

[4] Other groups, like young people who view themselves as immortal or at least sure to recover from any illness, don’t seem to be as frequent in such self-destructive behavior.

[5] Any offspring that manages to result, or already has resulted, would be less likely to be raised with the kind of values such parents embrace and thereby would weaken long-term embrace of any retrograde values.

[6] I say this with the acknowledgement that measuring “intelligence” varies widely and can itself be used in service of discrimination against one undesirable group or another.

Over the decades since then, this polarity has gradually reversed. Today, what people like to call red states (which include many southern states), often with governors who support trump and his approach to whatever reality he perceives or chooses to encourage about anything, are generally in favor of federal management of controversial social matters. At the moment, they often prescribe various levels of laxity in response to the COVID-19 crisis, while the rest of us (including the many residents of those “red” states who don’t trust what trump says and are helpless to avoid the consequences) are insisting on “states’ rights.”

This is human psychology, this is politics: fear change, grope around for the argument (even “philosophy”) that will further your case, and have no reference to history other than to cite precedents that seem to support your viewpoint. In short, critical thinking gets in the way of what we emotionally want to think and so is not the first line of defense for many people (probably to a great extent because it’s not well taught or valued in large parts of our education system).

The truth, of course, is that at any given moment those in power will seek to exercise their will and rationalize it in ways that too many people will gratefully embrace—and all too often, opponents act similarly.

I don’t know what to do about this except call it out and side with the angels (in this case, the people and governing folk who are trusting the bulk of what medical science is recommending). Can those angels make mistakes? Of course, but would we rather take our chances on them than on people who are acting from and trusting the authenticity of their gut with no “facts”?*

As it’s always done, this problem is going to keep coming up in dealing with social justice. It will do so even when we get rid of trumpite rulers. But right now, it is especially important as we face who knows how long a pandemic, likely future pandemics, and the possibility that the current Washington regime will take steps to stay in power indefinitely. (Imagine the wartime election cry of “Don’t change horses in midstream,” for example. Or an executive coup d’état.)

Is it possible on a vast scale for us collectively to learn to bypass cliché appeals and examine issues on their separate merits? Individually, of course that’s already happening on a significant scale, but is it likely to occur collectively enough to make a difference? Jaded as I am by nearly eight decades of living, I doubt it. Nonetheless, I will keep paying attention to what I deem to be the minds most likely to be accurately assessing problems and proposing solutions. And I will keep validating those who do the same while attempting to put forth information that doubters might pay attention to.

I repeat a point I often make in public posts—that this exact conundrum will continue to exist in tackling the even more deadly threat of the climate crisis. My frail hope is that our current experience in hunkering down against a dire threat (and, for those who survive, re-building a functional economy—though it is likely just to recapture or worsen what previously existed) will change at least some thinking about what can and should be listened to and done.

_______________

*I put “facts” in quote because especially in controversial matters, such frameworks typically have their own problems of exactitude and general agreement.

In recent days, I made a long, angry post condemning the federal government’s response to the coronavirus. I noted at the start that the post wasn’t meant for trumpites, but very shortly (and not surprisingly), right-wing complaints poured in, charging me with being “inappropriate” within site rules. (Of course right-wingers had had no hesitation about making political comments when it suited them, but frankly, I didn’t care or have a need to report them–I’m not a believer in free speech for nothing.) I then posted the second statement below, which addresses the difficulty of defining key terms like “inappropriate.”

The complainers went to some head office and had me suspended pending my agreement to obey the rules (which I’m not about to give). So far as I can tell, there’s no way of appealing or challenging this summary judgment; I suspect the rules are enforced according to personal, perhaps conservative, standards, without concern for nuances or hearing what an accused has to say.

So far as I can tell, there’s no appeal. As you’ll see in my second of two posts below, before being jettisoned I addressed the problem of defining key terms, which I suspect was more of an intellectual exercise than judges wanted to (or could) handle.

I should note that a fair number of people from the site have made supportive and sympathetic responses to a variety of my posts critical of the government.

I know that intolerance and bullying come with the territory of speaking out, and I accept that part of it; I had announced that I wasn’t going to reply to such attacks. But I have to say that the personal experience of the attacks–invective laced with blanket, general praise of trump (bereft of any argumentative basis)–was unsettling, especially in having me come face-to-face, so to speak, with how these bullies operate.

POST 1: THE TRUMP VIRUS, THE PRIMACY OF MONEY, AND ONGOING US GOVERNMENT TERRORISM

[ALERT: If you think Trump can do no wrong (or no serious wrong), don’t waste your time reading or replying to this rage-driven message. You’ll only be annoyed. No, wait—DO read this, and reply ad nauseum. Assume my response each time is: “Fascinating and insightful! You have converted me! Tell me more.”]

The new, maniacal mantra, “we mustn’t make the cure worse than the disease,” is the latest terror tool of this administration and its privileged allies (as opposed to so many supporters who have no privilege). Only to those who value economic flourishing above all else are the isolation and other economy-compromising cures worse than the endurance of the pandemic. Carpe diem and all that.

I’m reminded of the dictum, paraphrased by many, that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it (you would have thought the world history of health disasters along with contemporary lessons from places like China and Italy would have been sufficient warnings). I’m also reminded of Lenin’s contention that capitalism is so profit-oriented that it would sell the rope to hang itself.

I like to think I’m a cynic, but I’ve been blown away by some of the post-2016 election federal terrorist attacks on people and culture. And I never supposed that despite their moral repugnancy, otherwise supposedly literate people running the government would join hands with a compulsive liar of limited intelligence (or is it dementia?) in creating a hell on earth that promises to engulf them, too.*

You don’t have to be anti-capitalist to recognize what is wrong with prematurely undoing draconian rules for ending the pandemic—you just have to acknowledge what you don’t know and then, when seeking rational understanding, consider the credentials of those giving out advice. Do they have the scientific background and practical experience to provide a high likelihood (nothing is perfect) of knowing what they’re talking about, or are they pretty uninformed, gut-driven, money-centered people who typically (coincidentally, of course) have wealth and power your can maximize their own protection and healing regardless of what goes on around them.?

As medical personnel become decreasingly available, as hospitals become overwhelmed, and as ventilators and other key medical equipment become unavailable to handle the out-of-control spread of the virus, the wealthy and powerful will have their own reassuring resources as they tut-tut over the o-so-sad sight of the rest of us falling into a health and social abyss that they may even characterize as of our own making. A few of them may perish from the pandemic, but the rest will accept that in the spirit of omelets and egg-breaking, some martyrdom of their own kind may have to occur.

I almost feel sorry for the non-wealthy, non-powerful lemmings who continue to cling to the fantasy that this president and his acolytes represent a moral second coming—at least figuratively and, in some cases I fear, quite literally. (How many evangelicals are rooting for the end of days?) But unfortunately, even were I able to cheer for their punishment-fitting-the-crime fate (I don’t—I’m not a believer in the death penalty for even the most egregious actions), I’m afraid that as they blindly and gleefully leap to doom, they will be clutching the hands of many of the rest of us.

Behind this new mantra are self-serving ideas like: “Many of us are going to get this disease anyway. ‘Only’ a small percentage of coronavirus sufferers will die or be permanently debilitated.” “Many of the victims are drags on our system anyway.” “Like soldiers, let the dead be honored for their ultimate sacrifice on behalf of resurrecting a ‘Great America’ that we should all value above anything else and to hell with those who don’t.” You can add your own conscious and unconscious meanderings of the beneficiaries of any Return-to-Normalcy** action.

I suppose we could view this imminent policy sabotage as creating a version of a draft lottery for us ordinary folk. And a strategic path to full employment for a diminished work population.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this way of thinking has an extremely high probability (if you believe the experts) of producing premeditated mass murder under the guise of economic necessity. Indeed, most of the federal “strategy” until now has been furthering that result and should be the basis for International Court trials of the villains.

Ahead of us may be destructive riots and military control as large numbers of desperate people, like so often in the human past, decide they have nothing left to lose.

Other than to continue holing up at home for some indefinite period, I have no power over the fate of what’s going on around me, near and far. Writing a short essay like this helps vent my rage and impotence, but I know it’s not going to have the effect we need.

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*Why should I be surprised? The same self-interest, non-empirical argumentation, and general denialism here has already been routinely used by those who avert their attention from the overwhelming evidence that a climate crisis has been upon us for some time now and that ignoring it threatens to destroy life, biologically and culturally, as we know it.

**I deliberately use “normalcy,” a made-up word by an under-educated Warren Harding who, as I understand, died of a heart attack in the wake of frequent predatory sexual behavior.

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POST 2: REFLECTION ON THE MEANING OF “INAPPROPRIATE”

Not sleeping well with my enormous anxiety, presumably shared with others, about what the coronavirus is doing and going do to myself and other human beings (or how this pandemic may be predictive of the future as climate problems accelerate), I slept til noon and then saw multiple email references, often including the word “inappropriate,” to criticisms of my post yesterday about the Trump Virus. My guess is that when I look, I won’t reply to any. In any event, I’m writing this without prejudice of knowing details about any specific attack someone may have made.

Like yesterday’s post, this is intended for an audience that even in disagreement can reflect on the content. Reminder: I am not writing for anyone who will reject my words out of hand (though I don’t think they do need to keep being reminded that people like me are out there and active).

Let me start with this thought experiment:

• Pause and think about an atrocity in which you feel a personal interest—for example, rape or discriminating against members of a particular group now or in past history (Italians, Irish, Arabs, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Armenians, people of varying colors, etc., etc.).
• Now, with details as possible, imagine a scene or scenes when those people were most alarmingly targeted with discrimination in areas like employment, emotional or physical assault, tarring and feathering, being gunned down, lynching, even made the victims of genocide. (If you’ve been such a victim, recall how you felt and maybe still feel.)
• Would you deem it “inappropriate” to speak out, strongly, against such treatment? Would you call for moderation and some abstract notion of civility (a concept I generally like, but which has its own culturally conflicting meanings)? Would you argue that nothing can be fixed overnight and we all need to be patient? Would you ask for tolerance and respect for leaders or other rabble-rousers who encourage this treatment? Would you say that maintaining (or returning to) an economic status quo (remember, for example, that proponents of American slavery argued the US economy couldn’t afford emancipation?) was more important than radical measures to combat those injustices? Would you say the whole issue was “just” political, as though morality and politics have no intersection?

It was in response to what I (and numerous others) perceive as equivalent atrocities in response to COVID-19 and its inseparability from the past 3+ years of our federal administration that I carefully chose tone and diction which to me felt “appropriate” to the subject. No—the critical nature and resistance to intelligent guidance on the subject DEMANDED my tone and diction.*

Generally in life, I have long since recognized that it’s fruitless to argue with anyone if you don’t share basic assumptions about the topic. (Simple example: if you believe/assume/have faith in some deity or divine realm and I have core faith to the contrary, we have no basis for building agreement, though if we’re curious and thoughtful, we might both gain interesting understanding about why we differ.) However, that doesn’t give anyone, including me, the right to demand that anyone stop talking. Free speech and all that.** We can always choose to ignore what we don’t like. (I shall not here go into the incredibly difficult issue of what constitutes crying in a crowded theater or how to define a line crossed from speech to violence, some or many subtleties of which I probably don’t know.)

A related principle: Often, our basic assumptions are built into the very words we use: we assume we’re using a word in the same way when, if we checked, we’d learn isn’t true. On any controversial subject, it can be vital to define terms.

I am aware that I can alienate people just because I sound highly educated—just as others may, equally unfairly, be experienced as alienation for (apparent) lack of education. One of my fears about our current national inability to heal enough to get past these traumatic years is what feels like a growing empathy gulf between various educational levels, rural and urban and suburban cultures, ways of making a living, anti-constitutional and constitutional forces, gun acolytes and efforts to protect us from gun crazies, and so on.

On my end, I try to be hyper-aware of my positions of economic and cultural privilege and not let them frame my attitude towards those with different backgrounds and places in life.^† I chastise peers (including the occasional puffed-up former professor) who condescend towards those of less knowledge, make chauvinistic remarks, and all those other ugly, all-too-common human heritages that prompt us to elevate ourselves over others. I am conscious that numerous smart people never went to college, and that huge numbers of people, regardless of educational or other handicaps our culture foisted on them, have fashioned lives, however unfairly forced to do so, that make the best they can for themselves, their families, and their neighbors.*** And I am well aware of that I lack a vast, unknown amount of knowledge and skills that others have.)

HOWEVER: While acknowledging that there’s far more I don’t know than I do, I will NOT apologize for my own achievements in life. I would like to think that the skills of all sorts of other people contribute to my daily well-being in all the abundant walks of life on which I depend but don’t (and often can’t) take care of myself, so I can offer others (and have offered) benefits from the kind of thinking I’ve been trained to do and keep expanding no matter how old I’ve grown.

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*Several years ago, I read a fine scholarly book on the evolution of diseases of recent centuries and how they were often manipulated for nefarious gain (as 14^th-century warring armies catapulted into enemy lines the bodies of bubonic plague victims, or when European-Americans gave indigenes blankets deliberately laced with smallpox). The author shared an ethnic heritage with some of the victims and did not hide his anger. Embedding such emotion within the best scholarly research was new for me, but I quickly realized how “appropriate” it was—indeed, how crucially it deepened my understanding of the interplay between “facts” (a slippery idea in their own right) and feelings.

**Those of you who know about the 1978 anti-semitic “March on Skokie” may be interested that I have always stood what the ACLU defense of the constitutional right to demonstrate of those haters. I have always believed that shutting up one kind of speech will gradually lead to justifying shutting up ones I consider important.

***One of my own core beliefs is that the rest of us owe the marginalized rapid corrective measures. And to be clear: I marched against retrograde policies of pre-trump administrations of any party. I expected to be resisting some of Hillary’s policies if she had been elected (or rather, if majority rule had prevailed). I am not thrilled with the prospect of Biden; however reluctantly, I will certainly vote for him, but I will also be prepared to work against unacceptable policies that may ensue. But like so many others, I feel that the current administration is a quantum leap beyond any civilized or rational pale.

^†I grew up on a tiny chicken farm on in my late teens my parents had to file for bankruptcy, through 3^rd grade I attended a one-room schoolhouse with outdoor privvies, during some of my childhood I was targeted with anti-semitism, and I try never to forget where I came from.