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Hidden victims.

FYI , I’m currently home and recovering after minor surgery in this time of COVID-19 lockdown. The highlight of yesterday was a call from the hospital telling me that I had been exposed to someone who tested positive with the virus – presumably a staffer who interacted with me the previous week. I had been interacting cautiously with people since my release last Saturday, including a visit to another health care provider, so they needed to be notified. When I was in hospital, I had asked about getting tested, and they put me off. This is not working. They should be testing everybody, and they’re not even testing the most likely carriers.

What’s most concerning, though, is the toll this is very likely taking among the most vulnerable, particularly residents of nursing homes. I don’t know about how these homes are run in other communities. What I can say, based on personal experience, is that in my neck of the woods, people in nursing homes die all the time of respiratory illness. When my mom was in an institution, it seemed clear that the expectation was that she would just get ill and die one day, and that there wasn’t much they were going to do about it. The times my mom got seriously ill, we pulled her out and put her in the hospital for proper care, which she got. But other folks with less attentive families who would catch the viruses that regularly rip through those places like the angel of death would just expire in their rooms without fanfare. From what I could see, neither the required skills, nor technologies, nor effort would be put into saving them. One day, they would just be gone.

In the context of that reality, I just can’t imagine how many of these folks are being lost to COVID. Would we even know? Do they differentiate between the Coronavirus and other respiratory illnesses, once an elderly resident is dead? When this started showing up in residential facilities it struck me that there might be a great many silent victims of this pandemic, and thus far I haven’t seen convincing evidence that something like this isn’t happening. We are hearing about documented losses in various communities across the country, but this could be a dramatic under count. As of April 18, 3,400 nursing home residents in New York had died of COVID-19. They are perhaps making an extra effort to track these in certain communities, but I doubt that’s happening everywhere. When I picture my mother’s mean accommodations – a dorm-room size compartment, curtain down the middle to separate two beds, shared bathroom and closet space, very little social distance. That at the cost of $90,000 a year and up.

The cost of this pandemic is enormous. We could have prevented it if we had taken the threat seriously. We didn’t, thanks in large measure to the reality television star in the White House, but also thanks to flaccid protections prior to his tenure that were easily undone by legislators and administration hacks bent on deconstructing the administrative state. Accountability? We shall see.

luv u,

jp

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Political Rants

Berned.

It was a rainy Tuesday, and the revolution didn’t show up … again. Turns out revolutions are hard, even the electoral ones. As I said last week, these primaries are about proof of concept: if there’s a massive constituency for change, as Bernie Sanders has suggested, it should be mobilized enough to carry him into the presidency and to drive his agenda forward in the years that follow. There was no evidence of such a movement this week, and I don’t intend to denigrate the thousands of hard-working people who have powered Bernie’s campaign from the beginning – they have done remarkable work. But they are merely the vanguard – we need to hear from the masses. It is they who have the real power, and thus far they are not showing up.

Building a future, not just a campaign.

As someone who has been on the left all of my life, I am no stranger to political losses. Leftists tend not to be easily discouraged, and it’s a good thing. Make no mistake about the Sanders campaign – we are attempting to elevate to the presidency someone who has never taken part in the Nixon/Reagan conservative framing that has dominated our politics for decades. That is unprecedented in the modern era. It’s a heavy lift, and we should have no illusions about that. But as Bernie himself pointed out on Wednesday, his campaign represents majority positions within the Democratic party. It also reflects the priorities of a large majority of our young people – and by “young”, I mean 45 and younger. There is no question that that is where the party is going, not to some chewy center represented by people like Biden.

The fatal question for us as a society, though, is can we afford to wait another decade or more to see this new progressive majority emerge? I would say that the climate crisis has already answered that question. But I want to emphasize that the most important component of our response is in the organizing and the mobilization. Yes, Bernie Sanders is the only remaining candidate who, if elected president, would need little or no convincing to take on the enormous task of turning this fossil-fuel driven society around. But if we don’t achieve that maximal objective (and we should most definitely try to do so), we will still need the organizational institutions to push policy forward on whomever ends up in power next January. Short of Bernie, it would be better to have Biden than Trump; but either way we have to have mobilization. The Sanders campaign is like a progress indicator on the movement – the degree to which it succeeds is some rough indication of how well we’re doing on the ground. Yes, we’ve made progress over the past few years, but we have a long, long way to go.

My recommendation is simply this: don’t lose heart. We can still win this nomination. But even if we don’t, the effort is not wasted so long as we build on the foundation of this campaign.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Winning and losing.

I’ll start this post with some overly simplistic observations about human nature – here goes. My first thought is that, in general, modern-day Americans are encouraged to think that the sky’s the limit, but that that sky is about three inches over their heads. It’s a freakish hybrid of the power of positive thinking and terminal pessimism. This comes to mind as I consider what we as Americans are capable of vs. what we’re likely to even try to accomplish over the next few years. We have done enormous things before, no question. While the problems facing us are of an almost unprecedented scale, they are ultimately solvable if we have the political will to act. And yet, because we have been admonished for decades to “think small” when it comes to what we can ask of our government, it feels like we’re frozen in place, like a deer in the headlights. That, it seems to me, is problem number one.

Bernie and the also-rans.

My second observation is about Democrats – more specifically, people inclined to vote for Democrats. They (or I should say, we) are shell-shocked and obsessed with the project finding a presidential candidate that can win against Trump. We listen to talking heads and prognosticators who tell us the relative merits and risks associated with this candidate, that candidate, etc. But the risk of any Democratic presidential candidate, it seems clear, is that Democratic voters won’t show up for them in November. So this ends up being a kind of Dorothy/ruby slipper problem. We waste all of this time and effort on scarecrows, tin men, and cowardly lions, bowing to bogus wizards in hope of salvation when in fact we have had the power to save ourselves from the very beginning. Just pick the goddamn candidate you agree with, then whoever gets the nomination, fucking vote for that person in the general. If we all do that, we will prevail.

With the Nevada caucuses now underway, we need to focus on policy, not competitive politics. Let’s not obsess over which Democrat the never-Trumpers prefer as our nominee. And even more importantly, let’s not be swayed by the notion that we can’t get hard things done. We are faced with a series of hard problems – not in the sense that the solutions are obscure or unknowable, but rather that they require a heavy political lift that we as a nation are wholly unused to. That doesn’t mean we can’t do it. We lifted ourselves out of the Great Depression. We created Social Security and kept it running, despite the many attacks, for all these years. We achieved formal political rights for black people, women, even if those efforts remain works in progress. In short, we need a real sense of possibility if we’re going to accomplish any of these vital task before us.

I think Reverend William Barber said it best when he observed that Martin King wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if, say, at Selma he just said, “Oh, well …. we can’t win.” We can win, if we are willing to work toward it. In fact, that’s the only way.

luv u,

jp