Category Archives: Health

When Will We Learn?

Leave a reply

Two cases in point.

Case One:

The Yale School of Public Health reports that

Some “non-menthol” cigarettes that are being marketed as a “fresh” alternative in states where traditional menthol cigarettes are banned use synthetic chemicals to mimic menthol’s distinct cooling sensations, researchers at Yale and Duke University have found.

The synthetic additives could undermine existing policies and a U.S. Food and Drug Administration ban on menthol cigarettes expected later this year that is intended to discourage new smokers and address the harmful health effects of tobacco use.

https://tinyurl.com/35r7t7wz

….

Hundreds of municipalities across the United States and some states – Massachusetts and California – have already restricted the sale of flavored tobacco products, including menthol cigarettes.

In a study published Oct. 9 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers from the Yale School of Public Health, the Center for Green Chemistry & Green Engineering at Yale, and Duke School of Medicine identified a synthetic flavoring agent known as WS-3 in the newly introduced “non-menthol” cigarettes that delivers similar, or stronger, cooling sensations as menthol but without the minty aroma or taste.

….

Flavored tobacco products such as menthol cigarettes tend to reduce tobacco’s harsh effects making them particularly popular among young people and those just starting to smoke. Historically, menthol cigarettes have also been aggressively marketed towards African Americans, with up to 90% of African Americans who smoke using menthol cigarettes.

It seems likely that this “gap” in the regulatory regime for death-dealing cigarettes results from the regulations being based on specific chemicals rather than on the effects of flavor-enhancing chemicals regardless of type. The lesson to be learned from this, yet again, is that industries looking to make money regardless of impacts on public health will always look for an escape route and finding such routes is always easier when the “thing to avoid” is named rather than relying on the effects of the danger factor or the way it influences behavior.

The historical conduct of the tobacco industry, among others, should be a lesson for governments at all levels that you have to think very deeply about what you’re trying to prevent and how such prevention may be avoided. This doesn’t seem that hard.

Case Two:

The Virginia Highway Use Fee (the “HUF”).

I only recently learned about this assessment even though we bought a highly fuel-efficient hybrid vehicle in late 2020. The fee is not a lot of money, but the purpose of the fee is offensive and counter to other goals, or what should be other goals, as we try to offset some of the worst environmental effects of our dependency on automobiles.

The fee is $25 a year. The Virginia law provides a way of saving, maybe, $5 of the fee but is very complicated and, in my judgment, not worth the effort that involves obtaining another “reader” for your windshield, taking and reporting readings, etc. No thanks. Not to save $5.

More troubling is the motivation for this fee.

According to the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles,

     You pay the HUF if you register a:

    • Fuel-efficient vehicle, which is a vehicle that has a combined fuel economy of 25 miles per gallon (MPG) or greater
    • Vehicle made in a year in which the average combined MPG rating for all vehicles produced in that year is 25 MPG or greater
    • Low Speed Vehicles, pay an annual $25 HUF

The highway use fee (HUF) helps make up for the fuel taxes that drivers with fuel-efficient and electric vehicles spend less on, because they’re not using as much fuel.

Among the vehicles exempted from the HUF are:

  • Vehicles with a combined MPG rating less than 25 MPG
  • Autocycles
  • Motorcycles
  • Mopeds

The HUF was started in 2020 but in July 2022,

the state launched an alternative program to let drivers pay the fee at a per-mile rate — a cost savings for those who drive less than the average amount, which officials peg at 11,600 miles annually. For drivers of battery-powered cars, that fee works out to a penny per mile. [https://tinyurl.com/yh4kt6tx]

In plain English, Virginia wants to penalize you for using a fuel-efficient vehicle (like a hybrid or fully electric, that, by the way, costs more than a regular gas-using vehicle) by forcing you to pay taxes based on gasoline consumption you don’t use, BUT you can potentially reduce the penalty slightly by signing up for the complex pay-per-mile program.

Or you can have what’s behind Curtain No. 1.

Seriously, this crazy scheme is a product of multiple conflicting forces, including Congress’s failure to increase gas taxes since 1993, the attraction of fuel-efficient vehicles and the inability of states to see the clear alternative of just taxing vehicles sufficiently to provide the revenue they need for road maintenance without depending on gasoline consumption. The current system must be beloved in the hallowed halls of the oil companies as it disincentivizes the purchase of fuel-efficient vehicles.

The more one looks at these systems of regulation, the more our government looks like something created by the Keystone Kops. If you don’t know what they are, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Cops

 

Guns In Schools – American Shame

4 Replies

If you haven’t seen it recently, or ever, you should watch the YouTube video of Jeff Daniels’ answer to a college sophomore’s question: why is America the greatest country in the world? It’s here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2HKbygLjJs, from a great TV show called The Newsroom, well worth watching in its entirety.

I don’t know whether the data Daniels cites in the excerpt is accurate today but in general terms it likely is. That’s a hard pill for many Americans to swallow. Fear and loathing are rampant throughout the country, especially in the so-called “red states,” where Republicans promote the decline of the United States for political gain but have no solutions to offer except blaming others for what are distinctly American failures.

No better example exists than the data on guns in schools. Guns are seized in U.S. schools each day. The numbers are soaring. https://tinyurl.com/55hxzkm5

More than 1,150 guns were seized in K-12 schools last year

Nationwide, 1 in 47 school-aged children attended a school where at least one gun was found and reported on by the media in the 2022-2023 school year.

One high school student described his school as a “war zone” following the discovery of two guns at school in the first five days of his junior year. Both pistols were loaded.

That student’s experience was typical of “students of every age in every state throughout the school year, a bleak reflection of a society awash in firearms.”

Last school year, more than six guns were seized each day, on average. Nationally, 1.1 million students attended a school where at least one gun was found and reported by the media. Data collection limitations, including the fact that many school districts don’t bother to track the information, make it clear that those figures grossly understate the true magnitude of the danger.

A Washington Post survey of 51 of the country’s largest school systems showed that 58 percent of seizures in those districts last academic year were never publicly reported by news organizations. Those same districts said the number of guns recovered on campus rose sharply in recent years, mirroring the growing prevalence of firearms in many other public places.

In some cases, quick action by other students and school administrators almost certainly prevented mass murders of students and teachers. But reports indicate that some school districts are more concerned about avoiding scrutiny and causing alarm than they are interested in protecting students and school staff.

Police in Golden Valley, Minn., complained in March that middle school officials waited five days to notify them of two boys who appeared to be posing for social media pictures while holding a gun in the school bathroom; a spokesperson for the Robbinsdale Area Public Schools district said officials have worked since then to improve the school-police partnership.

That sounds like, “we take our peoples’ security very seriously. Their safety is our top priority.” Those are probably the most common, and meaningless, clichés in modern American language.

In 51 of the 100 largest school districts, representing 6.3 million students, 515 guns were found during the last school year. Only 42 percent of those seizures were reported publicly. In DeKalb County, Ga., (includes Atlanta) with a 2020 population of 764,382, only two of the 24 guns were reported.

The 47 districts for which The Post was able to obtain five full school years of data saw a 79 percent increase in guns found on campuses over that time frame [past five years]. In many communities, the number of guns found has more than doubled, a trend that mirrors a precipitous rise in school shootings.

While many instances of guns in schools are the result of gross parental negligence, or worse, that is far from the whole story.

The gun brought to Rome High on the fourth day of school was stolen in Alabama. According to media reports, a gun stolen in Las Vegas found its way into the hands of a 16-year-old at a Lawrence, Mass., high school; another 16-year-old brought a gun stolen in Georgia to his Manchester, Conn., high school; in Columbus, Ohio, a high-schooler showed up with a gun stolen in Martin County, Fla.; and in Nashville, a 17-year-old came to school with two loaded pistols in his backpack, one of them stolen out of Madison, Ala. An 18-year-old was arrested at a high school in Ames, Iowa., for possession of a 9mm semiautomatic pistol that was stolen from the center console of a pickup truck in Cape Girardeau, Mo., according to a police report. The teen said he bought the gun from a stranger at a gas station in Missouri, seeking protection, the report said.

While it is tempting to blame the problem in large part on teenage “craziness,” the data indicates that many younger students are involved:

… authorities found guns on at least 31 students age 10 or younger during the 2022-2023 academic year …. As is the case in most school shootings, the majority of those guns were brought to campus by children who could not legally purchase a firearm on their own.

Common Threads

Several common themes leap out from the Washington Post and other reports about kids bringing guns to schools:

  • School administrators are often slow to act and slow to inform parents about incidents.
  • Administrators are sometimes more interested in protecting the school’s “image” than in protecting students and staff.
  • Administrators sometimes refuse to respond to legitimate questions about these incidents, despite their role as public officials with responsibility to protect students and staff.
  • Parents whose carelessness/indifference and/or active support for gun culture are usually not held accountable for the conduct of their children.
  • Kids who bring guns to schools are often sheltered from consequences because they are minors.

That last point raises a bigger question. American society generally is based on the view that minors are not fully accountable for their behavior. This policy is based on the science of brain development and a concern that “immature” behavior” attributed to individuals will haunt them later in life and that this is unfair.

Why, exactly, such accountability is unfair is unclear. Also unclear is why it is more appropriate to be concerned about the perpetrators than about their actual or potential victims, many of whom will be traumatized, possibly forever, by their encounter with a fellow student armed and prepared to kill.

There are other consequences too. Teacher shortages because teachers feel disrespected, unsupported, and endangered. Budget issues arising from lawsuits against school systems that failed to do the right, and difficult, thing when confronted with a gun situation. Distracted students wondering when the next threat will walk into their classroom when they should be paying attention to the lesson. And more.

I urge you to read the full Washington Post story that inspired these thoughts. https://tinyurl.com/55hxzkm5 Every American should be concerned that our submission to the prevailing gun culture has led us to a dark place where young school children must undergo training in case their school is the scene of a shooter. And to a place where school administrators are free to simply refuse to communicate about their failures and their self-interested conduct at the expense of students’ safety.

Teachers in dozens of communities raised similar concerns about school safety after gun incidents last school year. In Harper Woods, Mich., in June, the teachers union accused school officials of trying to cover up an incident in which a student with a gun escaped the school staff and evaded metal detectors; in April, the Massachusetts Teachers Association accused a superintendent of “total disregard for the safety of students and school personnel” after a student posted videos of himself on social media that showed him wielding a gun on campus. The Southbridge, Mass., school system disputed the union’s account and said it was working with police on lockdown drills and other safety procedures.

The WAPO story recounts how students evade security systems and why students are often wary of reporting what they see. Once it becomes clear that the school is more interested in its reputation than in preventing gun violence, most kids are not going to risk being called a “rat” when they report someone who is handled with kid gloves and often back in the school soon after.

The graph below tells the story as well as anything. It does not, of course, measure the trauma experienced by students and staff who managed, by luck or whatever, not to be killed or wounded. This is the price we pay for the American obsession with guns.

One of the comments submitted to the WAPO story argued that the data prove that the “fraction of criminal violators in school populations” is so low, we should stop “propagandizing” about the problem. One response posted said: “Gosh, when you put it that way the blood stains almost fade away…” But, of course, they don’t. Ever.

View from the 50th floor–Memories of New York City [CORRECTION]

Leave a reply

An astute follower has reported to me an error in the post below. She is correct. The sentence should read this way:

Protests & Celebrations – we attended many, walking for miles sometimes, in good weather and bad; the best was the day Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020 was announced, absolutely the best.

Has been corrected below. Apologies.

*******

As I work on a new writing project, I have revisited posts from my now-removed blog, AutumnInNewYork, covering the period from early 2018, very soon after we moved there, to late 2020 when we returned to the Washington DC area. I have been reminded of the many extraordinary experiences we had in New York, many of which I posted about, but all of which remain firmly and vividly etched in my memories of that glorious and horrific (the pandemic) time. The list is long. We miss it every day.

Continuum Contemporary/Ballet – seeing them at Bryant Park in the spring of 2018 converted me to a lover of classical ballet.

New York City Ballet & American Ballet Theater- extraordinary in every way

Alvin Ailey – the studio was a few blocks from our apartment; my wife took lessons there; you could, on some lucky days, stop by and look through the gaps in the window covers to watch the lessons, often attended by professionals whose grace and power marked them from the majority of amateurs there for the exercise; it was not uncommon to see a ballerina or male dancer on the street—they had a distinctive way of walking and were obviously in perfect physical condition.

Central Park – a ten-minute walk from our apartment; our salvation during the COVID horror and always uplifting and interesting; no better place for people watching. And for observing the mystery of the Mandarin Duck who left us too soon. And Barry the Barred Owl, may she rest in peace.

High Line – a public park built on a historic freight rail line elevated above the streets on Manhattan’s West Side, a lovely place to walk on a sunny day with flowers and other interesting displays.

World Trade Center – the new complex and accompanying memorials to 9/11 are a must-do, along with the Oculus; spectacular views from the top.

Jazz Clubs – New York City remains the epicenter of jazz music and culture in America. Some (Jazz Standard) were killed off by the pandemic, but the Village Vanguard, Dizzy’s Club, Smoke, Birdland, and Blue Note were regular visits for us.

Special Places – Nuyorican Poets Café, the ultimate in basic (folding chairs for the audience; get your own drinks; platform stage with a mike) but we had an amazing experience of slam poetry there one evening, highlighted by L.J. Hamilton who later posted on Facebook about our encounter that night:

The winning point for me was when an elderly White gentleman came up to me afterwards and shook my hand and said “You should be published. You have the most powerful voice and words I’ve ever heard.”

Being that my first piece was on racial profiling, racism, and injustice, and my second piece was on domestic violence, I definitely appreciate him actually acknowledging and appreciating my work.

A sample of Hamilton’s remarkable voice can be heard at https://tinyurl.com/2p9y4aus but buckle up first.

Street Fairs – entire avenues would be shut down to accommodate these massive affairs, often involving elaborate musical/dance performances along with seemingly endless booths of food, clothing, and random stuff.

Parades – Labor Day parade of unions, Macy’s Thanksgiving, Christmas, Feast of San Gennaro, Chinese New Year.

Christmas Lights – often freezing with massive crowds, but oh so spectacular displays on department and specialty stores along the avenues.

Protests & Celebrations – we attended many, walking for miles sometimes, in good weather and bad; the best was the day Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020 was announced, absolutely the best.

Zoos & Gardens – Brooklyn Botanical Garden, Bronx Zoo, Central Park Zoo

Museums –9/11 Memorial, MOMA (Modern Art), Natural History, Moving Image, Guggenheim, Art, Pierpont Morgan Library, Whitney.

Broadway Shows – all the great ones.

Buildings – many reflective surfaces creating art within the skyscrapers; from our windows, the twin towers of Time Warner Center on one side, the Empire State Building on the other; and the Hudson River and … and ….

Restaurants – many unusual places (Mari Vanna – Eastern European/Russian), Bricco – great family-owned Italian place where the owner kissed all the women goodbye (inexplicably out of business one day); Kalustyan’s (food from dozens of countries), DeGrezia, lovely upscale Italian (killed by the pandemic); Grand Central Oyster Bar; New York hot dogs, Zabar’s (bagels and lox).

Sounds & Weather – rushing, traffic, ambulances, fire engines … always; weather changing every few blocks.

Special Experiences – Late Show w/Stephen Colbert, NBC Studios, NY Philharmonic Orchestra streaming.

New Yorkers – a special breed; but not what you think; impatient but not unhelpful; many instances of kindness shown.

Pandemic – unimaginable that literally thousands of people in the city were dying each day; we lived next door to Mt Sinai West Hospital; ambulances around the clock; death and despair everywhere; evenings participating in shouting out the windows/banging pots/applauding, displays of appreciation and affection for the hospital workers risking and often sacrificing their lives for everyone else; six weeks of lock down. With help, we survived.

The Music We Cannot Hear

Leave a reply

I have finally finished my slog through the third book by Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell (2022). You may know that Mukherjee won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for the extraordinary work, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

I say “slog,” because I understood only a fraction of what I read in this remarkable book and could only take it in small doses. Even then it was a challenge, not because of exposition issues but because I simply cannot understand how scientists know what they know. Much of the story of the cell, which is really a multitude of highly differentiated “things,” has been learned in fairly recent times, but that reality is one of the keys to what I did come to realize as I moved through the astonishing complexities of cell-level biology.

The realization was how most of what we think is known by those who know this stuff is the product of accumulated trial, and sometimes egregious error, by a vast array of people over extended periods of time. Typically, someone in a laboratory somewhere comes up with some idea, inspiration, theory, call it what you will. He (typically a “he,” but thankfully less so over time) works on it, sometimes for years and then, with or without a meaningful or useful conclusion, moves on to other pastures.

Then, and this is the key to the whole story, years, sometimes decades later, some other scientist in a lab somewhere else, or maybe just in a library, finds a paper about the earlier person’s work, decides to take it up for further exploration perhaps with the benefit of intervening developments in the science, expands the theory, tests it and … sometimes … makes a major new discovery. The old idea may be rejected entirely or merely extended with the use of new technologies.

This narrative occurs over and over and over again through time. One discovery or idea builds on another, then is added to by someone else, then another person or entire team takes it up and … discovery occurs. Truth emerges. Theory becomes practice. Concepts become medical solutions to previously unsolvable mysteries of illness. One thing builds on another. Along the way there are many false starts, mis-directions, failed experiments, misunderstandings.

Sometimes the “establishment” rejects out of hand a new idea that challenges the current orthodoxy. Reputations are ruined for some along the way. Some give up and just move on to other subjects until someone else, somewhere, picks up the trail, has a new insight, solves a seemingly unsolvable mystery.

Thus, are born immunotherapy and a multitude of medical “miracles” never conceived of. Transplants of organs become possible. Open heart surgeries. On and on. It’s never easy and there is often resistance to progress. When embryonic stem cells were being investigated,

…critics, mostly from the religious right, would have none of it. They argued that human embryos had been destroyed – defiled – during the production of these cells and that embryos constituted humans. That these IVF [in vitro fertilization]-produced embryos were yet to acquire sentience, had no organs, were no more than a ball of undifferentiated cells that would otherwise have been discarded anyway, hardly placated them; it was their potential to form future humans that made them currently human …. In 2001 President George W. Bush, pressured by opponents of ES cell research, passed a law restricting federal funding to research involving ES cells that had already been derived …; any attempts to make new ES cells could not be federally supported. In Germany and Italy, too, research on human ES cells was highly restricted and, in some cases, banned.

The book touches on other “cutting edge” dilemmas, as well, such as human enhancement through genetic engineering.

But for me, the main story was the way in which science moves forward. Working scientists separated by time and space find each other and each other’s work, building on it and bring humanity the most remarkable discoveries. Not least of these were the vaccines that brought an end, more or less, to the COVID pandemic. At least for now. The work will continue, just as the challenges will continue to come. And the song of the cell will expand into new rhythms, new stanzas, new understandings without end.

Our Burning World

1 Reply

[Note: This post has been in development for a long time. I was inspired to finally post it when I finished Lopez’s essays, discussed below, and then by the tragedy that has unfolded in Maui. The devastation of Hawaii’s island gem is just the latest example of the fate that awaits us if global action is not taken promptly to combat climate change. We’ve seen it in California and many other places in the United States and the world over. Time is running out.]

Reading the accomplishments of author/environmentalist Barry Lopez, author of the National Book Award-winning masterpiece, Arctic Dreams, is more than enough to give anyone a deep sense of inadequacy. https://tinyurl.com/4wpfch3a I recently finished his posthumous collection of essays, aptly titled Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World (2022).  I was stunned to learn that Lopez had died on Christmas Day 2020, shortly after my wife and I moved back to the Washington DC area (in DC itself for the first time), after having survived the pandemic in New York City.

Lopez wrote Of Wolves and Men a decade earlier than Arctic Dreams. According to Wikipedia, “López is a surname of Spanish origin. It was originally a patronymic, meaning “Son of Lope”, Lope itself being a Spanish given name deriving from Latin lupus, meaning “wolf”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%B3pez This is an interesting juxtaposition in light of Lopez’s interest in natural history. Of Wolves and Men was a National Book Award finalist. Of that book, Amazon.com accurately says that it,

reveals the uneasy interaction between wolves and civilization over the centuries, and the wolf’s prominence in our thoughts about wild creatures. Drawing on an astonishing array of literature, history, science, and mythology as well as considerable personal experience with captive and free-ranging wolves, Lopez argues for the necessity of the wolf’s preservation and envelops the reader in its sensory world, creating a compelling picture of the wolf both as real animal and as imagined by man. A scientist might perceive the wolf as defined by research data, while an Eskimo hunter sees a family provider much like himself. For many Native Americans the wolf is also a spiritual symbol, a respected animal that can make both the individual and the community stronger. With irresistible charm and elegance, Of Wolves and Men celebrates scientific fieldwork, dispels folklore that has enabled the Western mind to demonize wolves, explains myths, and honors indigenous traditions,

Lopez’s profound ability to think deeply about everything he observed and to connect his observations to larger principles was amazing. And he did it with prose so powerful that you stop to reread sentences and whole paragraphs just to be sure you understood every insight he was recording. Here are a few examples from his 2019 memoir, Horizon:

It is here, with these attempts to separate the fate of the human world from that of the nonhuman world that we come face-to-face with a biological reality that halts us in our tracks: nature will be fine without us. Our question is no longer how to exploit the natural world for human comfort and gain, but how we can cooperate with one another to ensure we will someday have a fitting, not a dominating, place in it.

What cataclysm, I often wonder, or better, what act of imagination will it finally require, for us to be able to speak meaningfully with one another about our cultural fate and about our shared biological fate?

         ….

The desire to know ourselves better, to understand especially the source and the nature of our dread, looms before us now like a specter in a half-lit world, a weird dawn breaking over a scene of carnage: unbreathable air, human diasporas, the Sixth Extinction, ungovernable political mobs.

And this:

It might have been useful once to identify and denounce enemy cultures, those that were seen as ruthless and exploitive, obsessed with wealth and indifferent to social justice at the highest levels; but … I feel that this time has passed. People in every country today can identify with the very same threats to their lives and to the lives of their progeny. And many know their governments, elected or self-appointed, are too cowardly, too compromised, or too mean-spirited, to help them.

One of Lopez’s great gifts was the ability to view and understand situations through the eyes of multiple cultures. It was as if he had multiple minds in one body. Lopez, ever the brilliant storyteller, related the life of Ranald MacDonald, the product of a mixed marriage – a Chinook mother and a white father – who was born in 1824, a time when, not unlike today in some respects, being of “mixed blood” was a huge obstacle to advancement.

MacDonald traveled and had many jobs, coming to have a deep connection to the indigenous people of the Pacific and believing that the Japanese were related to American Indians. He also thought that Western industrialization was an imminent threat to Japan, that had been virtually sealed off for over a hundred years from Western contact. MacDonald managed to get to Japan and during a brief period of acceptance by the Japanese taught 14 members of the shogun’s court to speak English in the hope that it would help them deal with the Western merchants and military he believed, correctly, were soon coming to Japan. MacDonald died in relative obscurity, but Lopez gave a moving tribute to his life as one of the many people of talent and inspiration who was limited by racist and cultural biases throughout his life.

Then, there is Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, that I have not read, and the sequel, Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow, that I am about to describe. As I understand it, the central story line of Sapiens was the emergence of humans as the dominant animal on the planet. These people are us — empowered by superior intelligence, opposable thumbs, tool-making ability, and all the rest — to reshape the earth in ways that were perceived as important to the survival and continued dominance of humankind over all other species on the planet. The supreme irony is that “homo sapiens” refers to the only surviving sub-tribe of Hominina and translates to “wise men.”Deus translates, of course, to “god” or “deity.” I will just leave that there. You get the idea.

Harari opens Homo Deus with the assertion that the primary historical scourges of mankind – famine, plague and war – have largely been conquered. As a result, he predicts man will now turn his main attentions to “a serious bid for immortality,” the arguably logical extension of the struggle against famine and disease. The first 70 pages of Homo Deus lay the foundation for what is to come. He argues that it was not the larger brains as such, with attendant superior (to other animals) intelligence, that enabled the planetary domination by humans. Instead, he says, it was the ability of homo sapiens to cooperate with strangers that was the key to it all.

Harari’s opening argument is obviously a very big idea and likely some people will take issue with it. So be it. The point is that these are “frontier concepts,” things most of us likely have not often thought about in depth but that have a lot to do with the future of our species. They were certainly subjects of little or no interest to Trump and his cabinet of policy makers and grifters. But Harari has thought about these issues profoundly. I won’t be around to see if he’s right but I am powerfully interested in understanding his provocative thinking.

His writing will not appeal to evangelical Christians or others similarly inclined. Harari leaves no doubt that he does not believe in the existence of souls, human or otherwise, pointing to, among other things, the absence of evidence. Above all else, Harari, a historian by trade, is an evidence guy. If no evidence appears after extensive investigation, the “thing” most likely does not exist and never did. Me too.

There is another aspect to this, one that I have touched on before. See, for example, the post entitled The Larger Meaning of “Hidden Figures.”  https://shiningseausa.com/?s=hidden+figures  We have in these two people – Lopez and Harari — examples of humans who, in slightly different circumstances, might well have been ostracized and prevented from reaching their potential as students and later as teachers for the rest of us. Lopez was as American as apple pie, but he bore a family name of Spanish origin. It is not hard to imagine that the Trump administration saw him as a target, because of his name and because he was a truth-teller who wrote and lectured about environmental policies that are anathema to Trump and the Republican Party. Imagine what will happen if Trump, armed with years of new grievances, regains power.

Harari is an even easier target. He was born and grew up in a secular Jewish family with Lebanese and Eastern European roots. That might not have been a problem for the Trump administration, given its attachment to the right-wing leadership of Israel, but there is more: Harari is openly gay and married to a man (in a civil ceremony in Toronto – those Canadians again!). They live in a kind of cooperative agricultural community of individual farms, some might call it a commune. Or socialism! OMG! People working together for the common good. Outrageous.

Reading the challenging and awe-inspiring ideas of these two people, I am reminded yet again of all the other “non-white” men and women whose race-based suppression has deprived all of us of the untold benefits of people capable of seeing things more deeply and thinking in frontier concepts that open our minds to new possibilities.

And to what end? What coherent mental process leads people like Stephen Miller and Donald Trump to the conclusion that some people, solely because of their ethnic heritage, are a danger to American society and should be removed from it? How does Miller rationalize his strident opposition to immigration in light of his mother’s Jewish parents having come here from Belarus in 1903?

We will never know but the point is that suppression of the “other” risks the loss for everyone of life-enhancing contributions to the improvement of society. We will never be able to “know” what we have lost, but it is certain that the loss has happened and continues. If, as is often speculated, this suppression is based on fear of displacement by the unknown, the leaders of the suppression should look at what is known. THAT is what they should be afraid of, the “scene of carnage” described by Lopez.

Some of Lopez’s last words in print are compelling:

Evidence of the failure to love is everywhere around us. To contemplate what it is to love today brings us up against reefs of darkness and walls of despair. If we are to manage the havoc – ocean acidification, corporate malfeasance and government corruption, endless war – we have to reimagine what it means to live lives that matter, or we will only continue to push on with the unwarranted hope that things will work out. We need to step into a deeper conversation about enchantment and agape, and to actively explore a greater capacity to love other humans. The old ideas – the crushing immorality of maintaining the nation-state, the life destroying belief that to care for others is to be weak and that to be generous is foolish – can have no future with us….

Only an ignoramus can imagine now that pollinating insects, migratory birds, and pelagic fish can depart our company and that we will survive because we know how to make tools. Only the misled can insist that heaven awaits the righteous while they watch the fires on Earth consume the only heaven we have ever known….

In this trembling moment, with light armor under several flags rolling across northern Syria, with civilians beaten to death in the streets of Occupied Palestine, with fires roaring across the vineyards of California and forests being felled to ensure more space for development, with student loans from profiteers breaking the backs of the young, and with Niagaras of water falling into the oceans from every sector of Greenland, in this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?….

Change is coming fast, though, on multiple fronts. Most of us begin the day now uncertain of exactly where we are. Once, we banked on knowing how to respond to all the important questions. Once, we assumed we’d be able to pass on to the next generation the skill of staying poised in worrying times. To survive what’s headed our way – global climate disruption, a new pandemic, additional authoritarian governments – and to endure, we will have to stretch our imaginations. We will need to trust each other, because today, it’s as if every safe place has melted into the sameness of water. We are searching for the boats we forgot to build.

Rest in peace, Barry Lopez.

Why Are Doctors Not Allowed to Practice Everywhere?

Leave a reply

For reasons I don’t recall, I subscribe to the JAMA Network, which is a monthly medical journal published by the American Medical Association with a large variety of articles about the biomedical sciences. I’m reasonably sure my interest was driven by the pandemic. In any case, much of the contents are beyond my ability to understand. But every so often, I find something compelling either about some disease or, in the present case, about the manner and method by which medicine is practiced in our peculiar collection of regions we call “states.”

The present issue is how we have collectively prevented doctors from counseling patients across state lines into states where they are not “admitted to practice.”

As a retired lawyer, I certainly understand the reason we limit, with a notable exception, unadmitted lawyers from the practice of law in states in which they have not passed the state bar exam. That reason is that the laws of each state often vary significantly, particularly regarding the details of procedure but also in many substantive areas such as estate law. It would be problematic to permit lawyers with no knowledge of those laws and procedures to regularly give advice to clients in those states.

There is, as stated, a notable exception, which is that out-of-state lawyers may appear in trials and some other court proceedings if they associate with “local counsel,” an attorney who is admitted to practice in that jurisdiction. The “foreign” attorney may do all the work, but “local counsel” must sign off on it as assurance to the court that the foreign attorney is complying with local law and procedure.

Turning then to the issue of “foreign” doctors “practicing medicine” by, in modern times, counseling patients using technologies like Zoom for “televisits,” I have wondered for some time why the states restrict this activity. Laws and procedures differ from state to state, but is the science on which medical practice is based different from state to state? I am not aware that it is.

Yet, as reported in Jama Network, https://tinyurl.com/5dab4tcm, Providing Responsible Health Care for Out-of-State Patients:

while exceptions may have been made here and there during the pandemic, the states have returned to their prior position of barring “foreign” doctors from remotely advising patients:

…physicians have increasingly been told by lawyers and compliance officers that calling patients located in another state is a legal gray area and introduces a risk of sanctions. States have accelerated this concern. The New Jersey Attorney General’s Office recently warned out-of-state physicians that, without a New Jersey medical license, “any practice by way of telemedicine, will constitute the unlicensed practice of your profession, and may subject you to administrative and criminal action” (email communication, March 31, 2023). These restrictions are impeding other communications as well. When Virginia ended its temporary pandemic regulations around physician licensure, Johns Hopkins had to inform more than 1000 patients they were no longer eligible to utilize telehealth appointments with its providers.

Physicians given this advice are understandably frustrated because these restraints disrupt and reduce the quality of the care they provide. This is especially true for specialty physicians who serve a broad geographic area and physicians whose practice is near a state border. For example, many states lack any pediatric subspecialists and the majority of the population must travel more than 100 miles.

Notwithstanding the negative consequences for patients who may have a long-standing successful relationship with a doctor in another state where the patient, for example, once lived, state laws say such relationships must end. The law of Texas is typical:

Any “person who is physically located in another jurisdiction but who, through the use of any medium, including an electronic medium, performs an act that is part of a patient care service initiated in this state…that would affect the diagnosis or treatment of the patient, is considered to be engaged in the practice of medicine.

I didn’t know this, but the JAMA article notes that many telemedicine visits are now accomplished by persistent and/or desperate patients who “sit in cars or coffee shops on smartphones, searching for good WiFi and sharing tips about the best parking lots that are just across the state border.”

 These constraints severely inconvenience patients, especially those with serious illness, physical disabilities, or lower income and limited resources; threaten patient privacy; encourage discontinuity of care; and might force private health care conversations to take place in ineffective and public settings.

Have we lost our collective minds?

Not only is this bad for patients, but it places doctors in a precarious legal situation in which the “best” solution for them is simply to “fire the patient.” Every doctor these days carries medical malpractice insurance. Is continuing to advise an out-of-state patient malpractice under those policies? Or is the opposite true, that failing to continue giving needed advice is malpractice? What about the not-unusual situation where the patient cannot reach a local doctor and seeks out his former doctor in the prior state of residence? Should that doctor respond? Not respond? It’s a Hobson’s choice.

The authors of the JAMA article propose several common-sense solutions that, for example, allow for “any follow-up care after a relationship has been appropriately established through in-person or virtual means.” A “bigger” solution would be federal preemption of the field that would override state laws. Examples include expansion of the principles in the Sports Medicine Licensure Clarity Act in which reasonable exceptions for licensure are created to cover clinicians who travel with a sports team to another state and provide care, even if they are not licensed in the state in which the sporting event occurs.

Interestingly, the authors note that:

the delivery of medical care could be defined as being rendered where the physician is located, although that could potentially upend our existing system and impact state licensure authority. Although congressional action would mean the federal government supersedes, or preempts, existing state regulations, the advantage of either federal legislative approach is uniformity and clarity, rather than requiring physicians to navigate through 50 different approaches to the issue.

Indeed, such action would likely face a gauntlet of opposition from local doctors wanting to preserve their “monopoly” on access to local patients, present and future. Therein lies, I believe, the root of this problem. If someone can convince me that medical practice should vary from state to state in the manner of local law, I will confess error. Until then, I will assign “blame” for the present shameful situation on doctor protecting their turf.

If it was medically acceptable to do interstate televisits during the pandemic, then it must be true that there is no medical problem in the post-pandemic period to allow interstate doctor-patient communications as they choose.

This situation cries out for a federal solution. I understand that some states limit medical services such as assistance in death (known as Death with Dignity) which is forbidden in Virginia but allowed in many other states. A federal solution would leave responsibility for knowing such local restrictions to the doctors in question. Beyond that, let them practice their magnificent craft unimpeded by artificial state boundaries and licensure rules designed to protect doctors’ incomes rather than promote the welfare of all patients.

An Appalling Failure of a Great City

2 Replies

I just posted New York City is Back! https://shiningseausa.com/2023/06/03/new-york-city-is-back/ And it is.

But I remain astonished and appalled that New York City, whose history is bound so closely to the subway system used by millions of people to get around the vast city every year, has failed to address the problem of access for the elderly and physically limited traveler in any meaningful way after all these years.

The passenger-use data tells an interesting story – the subway system consists of more than 6,455 cars that collectively traveled about 331,000,000 miles in 2021 through 472 stations on 665 miles of track. https://tinyurl.com/muksdukt Too big to comprehend but not too big to fail. In 2021, the first year of post-pandemic recovery, about 760,000,000 people rode the rails. While that is an amazing figure, it is less than half the volume that rode in 2016 (nearly 1.8 billion)!

I was forcefully reminded of this on our Memorial Day weekend trip, when, already worn out, we approached the 30thStreet Station in Astoria to find an elevated platform. The only observable means of getting to the train platform was to climb not one but two flights of stairs. I did it but I cannot imagine that many people my age or with other physical limitations could do so.

The 30th Street Station in Astoria is not the only such problem site. Only 98 of the 472 stations (covering all boroughs but not counting the Staten Island Railway) are ADA-accessible. https://new.mta.info/document/25961 Many stations counted as ADA-accessible meet that test in only one direction, or only for some subway lines or only at some times of day.

I understand that adding escalators and elevators would be very costly and, given the physical constraints, could result in reducing stairwell access in some cases. Given the substantial reduction in ridership since 2016, there is no better time to fix this problem than now. I am astounded that the people of New York City put up with this situation for so long and that New York politicians have been able to escape accountability for their failure to require the MTA to act.

I have read that a Judge Approves MTA Deal to Make Subways 95% ADA-Compliant by 2055 as part of a class action settlement [https://tinyurl.com/yc5398d2] but, seriously, by 2055? No doubt this was a victory of sorts, but that deadline, even if met, is 32 years away. The number of New York City residents with some form of disability is close to one million and more than 15 percent are 65 or over. It is unconscionable that their transportation needs have been ignored for so long and still are.

Let’s Hear It For the Women

Leave a reply

Any society that stagnates or retrogresses is unlikely to survive in a digitally unified world. Societies that are moving backward toward what is perceived as “better times back then” are almost certainly doomed in the long run. Cultural and ethnic diversification is a force that may be delayed for a while, even reversed, but not indefinitely. As it happens, one of the moving forces in this country, perhaps the only one that can save it in the long run, is the women. The women who marched for women’s rights, the women who went to work doing “men’s labor” during the last world war. Many of them never went back, mentally, to the “role that women are supposed to occupy.” While some men have not adapted to the new reality of equality, they face an unhappy and unproductive future. The tide of history cannot be stopped. The love affair of white men with male dominance is a mirage. Loss of status hurts. Get over it. Move on. Think of how exciting it is to know intelligent, thoughtful women who believe in themselves and what they can contribute. There is no going back.

Yesterday established that women will not be suppressed. Voters in all five states where there were ballot measures on abortion rights, the right of women to control their own bodies and health decisions, opted for freedom for women. The women have spoken, Republicans. Good for them. Good for all of us.

The Root of All Evil

Leave a reply

A Biblical quotation worked its way into the popular vernacular a long time ago: the love of money is the root of all evil. The quote is often abbreviated to “money is the root of all evil.”  I have no idea whether the attribution to Apostle Paul is correct, but I also don’t care. I don’t believe either version of it is true.

The love of money, like the love of many other things, both physical and otherwise, can certainly lead to problematic outcomes. But the opposite of love can equally lead to problematic outcomes. There are just too many problematic outcomes to assign all the blame on love of money or just on money. When I think about this, I am reminded of the wonderful Robert Frost poem, Fire and Ice:

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

In my view, ignorance is the real root of all evil. Donald Trump once said, “I love the poorly educated!” He knew something that had apparently escaped the notice of even experienced political analysts. It’s not that the “poorly educated” are unintelligent. Many of them are quite intelligent and can perform many tasks effectively. They can be successful in many lines of commerce and in life generally.

On the other hand, the “poorly educated” may be susceptible to believing misinformation/false information because they have not been exposed to the discipline of education and have not undertaken to study on their own. But they are not alone in that, so being poorly educated is neither explanation nor excuse, despite Trump’s claimed admiration for them. During the height of the pandemic, we saw nurses and doctors embrace conspiracy theories, promote quack remedies for COVID and resist vaccination. And many members of Congress who support insane conspiracy theories and engage in traitorous and illegal activities are highly educated.

The problem is more complicated than the simple explanation that the “poorly educated” mistakenly thought Trump as president would be good for them. In trying to understand this, I have read numerous books, articles, theories, and studies. Most recently I discovered Strangers in Their Own Land, by Arlie Russell Hochschild, professor emeritum of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of many notable books. The book was a 2016 Finalist for the National Book Award. This work is based on her personal research conducted in post-Katrina, post-Deepwater Horizon coastal Louisiana. The date of publication, 2016, was just before Trump was elected president and all that ensued. The book nevertheless seems wholly predictive of everything that followed.

Hochschild defined her mission at the outset as an effort to explore feelings, the “emotion in politics.” Strangers at 15. Some of those feelings were disturbing – she notes that “reminders of the racial divide were everywhere.” Strangers at 20. She did not draw much on that fact of coastal Louisiana life but indirectly seemed to acknowledge its abiding and broad influence on political life there.

Strangers focuses on what Hochschild calls the Great Paradox, stated roughly as the massive disconnect between the economic and life interests of the local people and their devotion to the Tea Party which was in full flower in the period covered. The locals were adamantly opposed to regulation, especially federal regulation, that might help restore the opportunity to continue the livelihoods they had pursued for generations in fishing/hunting/farming the abundant natural resources of coastal Louisiana.

One of the Tea Party’s darlings was Bobby Jindal. As Hochschild notes at the end of the book, Louisiana was left a “shambles” after eight years of Tea Party-style leadership by Governor Jindal. Yet his support among locals never waned. They bought into the capitalism mythology completely. Such devotion also led to support for Republican congressman David Vitter who opposed all federal environmental intervention, voted to terminate the Environmental Protection Agency and more. Strangers at 48.

The author said she was struck by what political candidates avoided in their pitches to voters: “that the state ranks 49th out of 50 on an index of human development, that Louisiana is the second poorest state, that 44 percent of its budget comes from the federal government – the Great Paradox.” Strangers at 59. People with little to begin with worried more about what others were getting (“non-working, non-deserving people”) than about destruction of the environment or years lost to bad health conditions.  Somehow this was seen as a loss of “honor” and that was more important than more tangible issues. Strangers at 60-61.

They knew that Big Oil and Big Chemical had undeniably wrecked the local environment, but they adhered to the mythology that the companies also brought jobs and other economic benefits that could not be secured under any form of regulation. They concluded that the honorable thing was to muddle through, accepting their fate while continuing to assert their” principles.”

Hochschild notes three paths by which Tea Party believers arrived at their profound dislike for the federal government:

their religious faith (the government curtailed the church, they felt),

hatred of taxes (which they saw as too high and too progressive), and

the government’s impact on their loss of honor …. [Strangers at 35]

They bought into the belief that taxes went to lazy welfare cheats and “government workers in cushy jobs.” Id. They thought climate change was bogus science. They resented what they perceived to be bias against the “little guy,” meaning mainly the little white guy, and interference with the role of God in overseeing humanity. Strangers at 52. Those are easy myths for resentful people to embrace without having to make the effort to understand complex systems and ideas. Indeed, for many, the outcome was in the hands of their God and humans thus had little responsibility for outcomes.

In portents of things to come, Hochschild notes that at the Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana meeting,

I heard a great deal about freedom in the sense of freedom to – to talk on your cellphone as you drove a car, to pick up a drive-in daiquiri with straw on the side, to walk about with a loaded gun. But there was almost no talk about freedom from such things as gun violence, car accidents, or toxic pollution. [Strangers at 71]

The perplexing reality is that people living with more pollution are more likely to believe in less regulation and more likely to be Republicans. Strangers at 79. This mental orientation set them up for manipulation and exploitation.

The initial tip to the problem of the book’s analysis comes at the beginning. Hochschild observes that the reason for population shifts in the United States had changed: people moved less to find better jobs, housing or (she didn’t mention this) education but rather to align more closely with people of similar political views. The sharpening of political division is, she says, attributable to the ‘right moving right.’ Strangers at 6-7. She recounts the dire economic conditions afflicting the southern states, Louisiana being among the worst of the worst:

Given such an array of challenges, one might expect people to welcome federal help. In truth, a very large proportion of the yearly budgets of red states – in the case of Louisiana, 44 percent – do come from federal funds. $2,400 is given by the federal government per Louisianan per year.

But Mike S_____ doesn’t welcome that federal money and doubts the science of climate change. “I’ll worry about global warming in fifty years,” he says. Mike loves his state, and he loves the outdoor life. But instead of looking to government, like others in the Tea Party, he turns to the free market. [Strangers at 9]

He turns to the same “free market” exploited by Big Oil and others to wreak havoc on the state that Mike purported to love so much. Thus, again, the Great Paradox.

The other major theme in the book is the Deep Story, the myths by which social groups, or tribes, are developed and sustained. Strangers at 135. Here perhaps is the core principle at work. In coastal Louisiana the Tea Party promoted, and locals accepted, the idea that undeserving people were cutting into the line ahead of hard-working “true Americans.” While their perceptions of race are complex, older whites interviewed by Hochschild saw Blacks especially as a problematic class afflicted by special issues not shared by most white people.

Economic class distinctions tracked race and distinguished between “makers” and “takers,” with the latter being the “line-cutters” supported by the federal government, those people unfairly getting ahead of everyone else. This grievance was at the root of many white Louisianans’ attitudes unrelated to the reality of local social and economic standing. Strangers at Ch. 9, and at 157-159.

Despite noting the data showing that “the higher the exposure to environmental pollution the less worried the individual was about it” [Strangers at 253], Hochschild concludes that the continuation of the Great Paradox is not the result of ignorance. [Id.] But that view is remarkable because it’s not supported by most of the data cited in the book. One of dozens of examples is the belief that 40 percent of all U.S. workers are employed by the federal government. The actual figure at the time was 1.9 percent. Strangers at 161.

Such ignorance of economic reality was at the root of many local people’s vigorous resistance to all forms of regulation. Such interventions could have helped to restore the balance of nature and, along with it, the jobs and environment they claimed to cherish. Yet, by and large, they wanted none of it. Hochschild was aware of this because data in Appendix C to the book was often interspersed in the text to illustrate how the real facts refuted the central myths on which the resistance depended. Peoples’ explanations of their views were rife with classical political myths and massively wrong factual beliefs.

Locals that Hochschild interviewed appeared to believe that a woman’s role was to be completely subordinate to her husband. Strangers at 174. This attitude is consistent with the analysis of “what makes a Republican” in George Lakoff’s 1996 Moral Politics that, controversially, applies principles of cognitive science to politics. As summarized in Wikipedia:

Lakoff argues that the differences in opinions between liberals and conservatives follow from the fact that they subscribe with different strength to two different central metaphors about the relationship of the state to its citizens. Both, he claims, see governance through metaphors of the family.

Conspiratorial thinking was also rampant among Hochschild’s subjects. Few people believed science had made the case for global warming. Strangers at e.g., 183. They did not understand what the lives of the seriously poor were like, rejected much historical truth, adopted phantasmagorical solutions dependent upon the “free market” and adopted what has come to be known more recently as “replacement theory.” Strangers at Ch. 14.

In the end, it seemed to me that the author was profoundly fooled by the mannered façade she experienced in her research with the locals whose “good-hearted acceptance” of her, their “great personal warmth and famous Southern hospitality,” misled her to conclude that

in human terms, the [empathy] wall can easily come down. And issue by issue, there is possibility for practical cooperation. [Strangers at 233]

There is nothing in the buildup to the end of the book or in the data set out throughout it that would support such a conclusion. And, of course, the history under Trump’s presidency is the most profound refutation of the “we can all just get along” thesis. The author’s starry-eyed belief in future harmony and progress was, I believe, a grievous error by a researcher whose approach to her study was primarily based on just talking with locals, eating meals with them, and looking at the surrounding conditions that determine their lives and livelihoods.

The book confirms my suspicions in its treatment of the rise of Trump as a political power.

Three elements had come together. Since 1980, virtually all those I talked with felt on shaky economic ground, a fact that made them brace at the very idea of “redistribution.” The also felt culturally marginalized: their views about abortion, gay marriage, gender roles, race, guns, and the Confederate flag all were held up to ridicule in the national media as backward. And they felt part of a demographic decline; “there are fewer and fewer white Christians like us….”        [Strangers at 221]

Economically, culturally, demographically, politically, you are suddenly a stranger in your own land. The whole context of Louisiana – its companies, its government, its church and media – reinforces that deep story. [Strangersat 222]

Trump, consciously or otherwise, fed this sense of disaffection and loss.

His supporters have been in mourning for a lost way of life Many have become discouraged, others depressed. They yearn to feel pride but instead have felt shame. Their land no longer feels their own. Joined together with others like themselves, they now feel hopeful, joyous, elated … in a state of rapture… no longer strangers in their own land. [Strangers at 225]

Rapture indeed. This degree of magical thinking is beyond imagining: a Pew Research Center 2010 study reported that “41 percent of all Americans believe the Second Coming “probably” or “definitely” will happen by the year 2050.” Strangers at 125. Hochschild labels them “victims without a language of victimhood.” Strangers at 131, a missing element that Donald Trump readily supplied.

My overall conclusion about this book is that the people it discusses suffer from a central fatal flaw: they mistakenly believed that the land belonged to them in the sense that the whole of it was their natural right. Anything that challenged that idea was alien, undermining their sense of “our land.” This, I think, is about as un-American a concept as you will find. It ignores history, economic reality, and the nature of democracy. The root concept that “this land is ours then, now and always,” meaning us God-fearing white people who have an entitlement that others are unjustly trying to steal, fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the country, its origins, and its development.

This issue may be connected to education, but I suspect it’s much deeper than that. The possessory and superiority components of these cultural beliefs leave these people vulnerable to the “it’s ok to hate” message from a demagogue like Donald Trump who lacks any core value system of principles except greed. These people have less to fear from interlopers than from their own ignorance.

The problem, however, is that someone so ignorant is usually unaware of his ignorance and simply feels put upon by the forces of change. He just wants what he thought he had before, notwithstanding that the oil-based economy was a complete fraud on coastal Louisiana society, wrecking the environment while failing to deliver the economic benefits that locals were sure existed. It’s also often true that the ignorant are unwilling to learn; they lack empathy and see others’ gains mainly as their losses.

I don’t want to be told I’m a bad person if I don’t feel sorry for that [sick African child on TV with Christiane Amanpour]” Strangers at 128.

But even those who fancy ourselves as “not ignorant” are capable of delusional thinking. I have confessed multiple times to having fundamentally misunderstood the degree of disfunction in the country. I thought the election of Barack Obama was a sign that, overall, the country had changed. That was wrong.

The essential proof is that despite his record of lies, incompetence and corruption, Trump received 74 million votes in 2020. Joe Biden received many more, of course, but the thinnest of margins remains in both houses of Congress. People with short term concerns about things like inflation, and no or limited understanding of its causes, may drive the country back into an abyss from which democracy may not re-emerge. It can happen here. Only the voters can prevent it.

I heard recently from a reliable source that many young people, in their 20’s and 30’s, may not feel they are much affected by what is happening in politics. That absence of perceived impact often makes them indifferent to the outcome of critical issues. If that is true, we are in even more trouble than I imagined.

Republicans are highly motivated by their grievances and can be expected to turn out in large numbers in the 2022 mid-terms. If Democrats stay home, it’s game over. You have been warned.

The Faces

2 Replies

Yesterday the reckoning began. In marches, rallies, and gatherings across the country, tens of thousands of Americans came together to declare war. The target is the death-mongers who value guns over human life, guns over children, guns over the elderly, guns over everything. The unique problem of Americans and guns has reached the breaking point. Mass shootings are almost as routine as car accidents. Death by gun in schools, places of worship, grocery stores, shopping malls, the streets. Only in America.

Yesterday you could see in the faces and the signs. Sadness, fear, anger.

The rally in Washington, DC attracted an estimated 40,000 people. An extraordinary turnout considering the foul weather. Sadness – why don’t more Americans care about us? Fear – am I or one of my loved ones the next to die by gunfire? Anger – the killing must stop; we cannot continue to live like this. Why do so many Americans care more about their guns than they do about their children and their parents and grandparents?

The crowd was very large, spread over the north side of the Washington Monument grounds.

One of the speakers lost his mother to gunfire a short time ago. She had lived 86 years, only to be gunned down while shopping for groceries. The average age of the people slaughtered in Buffalo was 62. Shopping for groceries. Slaughtered by an 18-year-old racist with a history of violence and mental health issues, none of which prevented him from legally buying assault weapons and armor plating. He live-streamed his deadly assault which he had been planning for months. He shot four people outside the store, a security guard inside, then eight more inside (six of whom died). When police arrived, he surrendered without resistance.

The faces of the people listening to speeches like that were grim but determined. They have had enough of Republican thoughts-and-prayers, the rote response to the uniquely American tragedy facilitated by legal systems that allow people with the maturity level of children buy assault weapons intended to kill as many people as quickly as possible.

Aside from the power of the speeches there were two moments of “drama” that we observed. The first involved a jerk who arrived in the middle of the presentations with a large poster on poles that said “Guns-Bacon” on one side (no idea what it meant) and Gun Control with a slash mark on the other.

When he set up in the middle of the crowd listening to the speeches, his sign blocked the view of the jumbo screens. Only a few seconds passed before two women rushed up behind him to block his signs and within a minute a multitude joined them.

The jerk was surrounded and engulfed in anti-gun signs. His face was covered the entire time. After a while security arrived and escorted him off the grounds trailed by comments from the crowd that are a bit too raw for a family-oriented blog.

The other excitement occurred during a moment of silence called for by one of the late speakers. Someone in the crowd yelled either “I have a gun” or “I am God,” according to reports. This sparked a very short-lived panic that subsided within seconds. Pay no attention to any news reports otherwise. We were at the back of the crowd when this happened and witnessed the entire thing. Nothing there but stupidity. We believe the fool was arrested, as he should have been.

As indicated, many of the speeches were hard to hear, coming from people who had directly experienced the horror of losing family and friends to gun violence. Some were in the schools when they were attacked (David Hogg, for example, at Stoneman Douglas High School). They remind us that children in grammar school are being subjected to active shooter drills.

Can you imagine the affect that is having on those kids? When I attended grammar school in the 1950s, we did nuclear attack drills, practicing hiding under desks as if that could protect us from the annihilation of a nuclear strike. It seemed unreal and had little impact. But active shooter drills when mass shootings occur almost every day and the kids are aware. The children subjected to this may be scarred for life. It seems like another form of grooming, making them afraid all the time that their lives or those of their friends could be snuffed out by a total stranger for no reason at all.

While preparing this post, I read in the Washington Post https://wapo.st/3zyYihF  that,

A bipartisan group of Senate negotiators announced Sunday that it had reached a tentative agreement on legislation that would pair modest new gun restrictions with significant new mental health and school security investments — a deal that could put Congress on a path to enacting the most significant national response in decades to acts of mass gun violence.

A group of 20 senators — 10 Democrats and 10 Republicans — signed a statement announcing the framework deal. That indicated that the agreement could have enough GOP support to defeat a filibuster, the Senate supermajority rule that has impeded prior gun legislation.

I call B.S. on this. The bolded portions of the report explain why:

Under the tentative deal, a federal grant program would encourage states to establish “red flag” laws that allow authorities to keep guns away from people found by a judge to represent a potential threat to themselves or others, while federal criminal background checks for gun buyers under 21 would include a mandatory search of juvenile justice records for the first time.

It does not include a provision … that would raise the minimum age for the purchase of at least some rifles from 18 to 21. Handguns are already subject to a federal 21-and-over age limit.

Other provisions could funnel billions of new federal dollars into mental health care and school security programs, funding new campus infrastructure and armed officers. Several senators last week said they expected one cornerstone of the deal would be … to establish a nationwide network of “community behavioral health clinics.”

Those are nice things to have but they fall grossly short of what is required to address gun violence in a meaningful way. We need to be careful we don’t embrace the first simplistic glossy object thrown at us to “show progress” when the real effect is to further deflect substantive progress because Republicans do not intend to give real ground on these issues and thereby disappoint their arms industry funders.

The real solution, promoted by several speakers at the March for Our Lives, is “VOTE THEM OUT.” Unless and until that happens, Republicans will continue obstructing real progress to stop or even seriously mitigate the wave of gun violence that makes the United States stand out among all nations as the most dangerous in so many ways. VOTE THEM OUT is the only real answer and the opportunity to start is coming soon in the mid-term elections.

If you agree that the time is past for meaningful action on gun violence prepare to VOTE THEM OUT. In addition to voting, work the polls, offer transportation and money and other help to elect Democrats up and down the ticket.

Don’t forget that a majority of Republicans around the country still believe Trump was unlawfully defeated and are working very hard to take over the electoral machinery in the states. The sole purpose is to prepare Republicans to invalidate elections they lose and simply install Republican candidates as winners. The only way to stop this is with overwhelming Democratic majorities. Make it so. Make it so.