Month: July 2020

This is turning out to be a highly traumatic year for the world in general and for the U.S. in particular. We are grappling with a deadly pandemic, social unrest, economic distress, uncertainty, and an election all at the same. To say that 2020 is shaping up to be the most stressful year in my life is not an understatement. And while I’m anxious about the position we find ourselves in, I realize that this year gives us the opportunity to set a few new social rules for ourselves.

First among these new rules is that we are responsible for the health and well-being of one another. The majority of us finally realize that public health is our collective responsibility and not an individual endeavor. An individual’s “right” to not wear a mask in public because of a particular belief or preference is crumbling amid the spreading of this pandemic across the nation. We are watching in horror as more people get sick, more families are grieving the loss of family members, hospitals and healthcare workers are stretched to capacity, and economic disaster looms large. The need for a single payer healthcare system where the profit motive is removed from healthcare is now more evident than ever. And in the short term we will also pay for our individualistic ways with schools not being able to safely re-open this fall. Too many individuals were too late to understand that decisions to gather without masks and without social distancing spread the disease to dangerous levels.

Beyond the new rule that healthcare is a collective matter, is the movement toward anti-racism. The widely viewed cavalier murder of George Floyd drove home for many Americans why the term “Black Lives Matter” is not a statement against any other lives mattering. It is an acknowledgement that up until now, black lives have not mattered at all. The new rule is an examination and dismantling of a system that has devalued, stigmatized, and discriminated against people of color. A best selling book that helps white people grapple with the historical, social, and emotional mindset that keeps white supremacy in place to the detriment of people of color is “White Fragility” by Robin Diangelo, a white American woman speaking directly to white people about the issue. Corporations, educational systems, and others are quickly changing their names, policies, practices, procedures and operations to eliminate vestiges of blatant racism and white supremacy. The few who are trying to hold on to the status quo are being overruled.

Although there are plenty of other new rules, the one that required lightening speed for adjustment is the work from home rule. In my case, I abandoned my home office in favor of the dining room because the internet reception is better. With all the Zoom meetings and a huge reliance on the internet the entire day, this became a necessity. I’m productive and can get everything accomplished in service to the students, but it truly isn’t as fun. Even as an introvert, I miss in-person contact with my students and colleagues. It’s great that we can see each other on Zoom or Facetime, but it isn’t altogether the same. The one blessing is that I have only filled my gas tank once since February and right now my tank is still nearly full. I do have to remind myself to stand up and to even step outside a couple of times a day. But other than these two complaints, I can live with this new rule. Unlike the previous two rules, I hope this one is temporary.

The final new rule is more of an aspiration. I hope the nation has learned its lesson and that it will never again elect a president without moral character, without a sense of history, and without respect for human lives, science, the rule of law, and expertise. That is one new rule that we can collectively begin to enact this November. And it’s one I hope will be permanent.

With the passing of civil rights icon, Congressman John Lewis Friday night, I am reminded to be thankful that in 1965, people like me were finally afforded the right to vote because of efforts like his to convince white male lawmakers and then president Johnson that it was the right thing to do. Think about it. Lawmakers and presidents get to determine who gets which rights, which opportunities, when they get them and who doesn’t. These lawmakers get to determine the lifelong judges who then decide the legality of their decisions. This is why elections matter. And this November is the most consequential election of my adult life.

First, this election will likely determine who gets to appoint new federal judges but likely also a Supreme Court justice. While I admire the perseverance of Justice Ginsburg, I doubt that her body can persist much longer. This week’s hospitalization for an infection and the announcement of liver cancer shook me. It would be devastating to have Trump make another nomination and Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, has already announced that he would have confirmation hearings even though it is much closer to an election than when Obama nominated Merrick Garland and he blocked confirmation hearings. McConnell is precisely the reason we also need to flip the senate this November.

Imagine if we had a democratic president, House of Representatives, and Senate? We could move this country forward in terms of getting this pandemic under control, improving access to healthcare, protecting the environment, infrastructure, and passing reasonable gun control laws. We could finally protect Dreamers and pass comprehensive immigration reform and criminal justice reforms. These are all the issues the current Republican senate has blocked our country from making any progress on. Instead they have simply confirmed lifetime judges and protected a president whom they know is corrupt and a clear and present danger to our country.

Republican senators have shown themselves to be complicit cowards who care more about preserving their political lives than improving the actual lives of the American people. With that preservation in mind, they are working with Trump and wealthy plutocrats to suppress the vote in their home states enough to be re-elected. They don’t want people of color, college students, and ex-cons to vote. They suppress these votes by starting lawsuits to severely limit access to mail-in ballots, requiring unreasonable voter ID, providing fewer polling places to vote in poorer districts to discourage voters by creating excessively long lines, and now prohibiting ex-cons from voting if they owe any legal fees. Their strategy is happening in plain sight and it should be evident to all of us that if someone has to prevent you from voting to be elected, they don’t represent you or your best interests.

The Republican lawmakers do not deserve re-election. They are complicit in the overturning of the rule of law, limiting our democracy, and even the lack of common sense when it comes to controlling this pandemic. Again, I think they see a perverse benefit in allowing the elderly and people of color die of COVID-19. Remember that these groups have a much higher mortality rate than the general public? These senators are fearful of the vocal bully in the White House who has managed to take over a few media outlets that conservatives watch and listen to. How is it that they are not savvy enough to join forces to oust the bully from their midst? Because of their willingness to protect a failed president, to suppress the right to vote, and to even endanger lives, they do not deserve our votes. And we must vote against them! We must support the candidates running against them with our money, our voices, and our votes.

Elections definitely have consequences, and this November we must all vote. If we excise our civic duty, we can rid our nation of this dangerous president and flip the senate. We can improve our nation. We need to vote like our lives depends on it. Because they actually do.

My husband rebels against any form of nagging. So, on Friday when he mentioned how it seemed strange to him to hear that elbow bumping was the recommended greeting over shaking hands, I immediately countered with an angry, “What part of social distancing allows for elbow bumping?” While I stay home, my husband is out there golfing and taking every opportunity to go to Costco or the grocery store. Each time, I remind him to wear his mask and keep his distance and to use the hand sanitizer. Each time, he counters angrily that he knows. But I was with him on a neighborhood walk when I stepped off the curb or crossed the street to avoid close contact with people coming towards us and he didn’t. We arrived home angry with each other and haven’t walked since.

And herein lies the problem. With so many mixed messages out there, people of good will are either making their own rules and are not taking the situation seriously enough. It shouldn’t be a surprise to any of us that under these conditions, COVID-19 is spreading like wildfire throughout our country. People are congregating, people are refusing to wear masks, people are being lax. As a result, people are getting infected and inadvertently infecting others. And some of those infected will die.

The biggest perpetrator of misinformation, mixed messages and confusion is the president of the United States, Donald Trump. He refuses to wear masks as an example to the nation. He lies that 99% of people will be okay after contracting the virus. He uses his megaphone to promote wishful, magical thinking as if his predictions outweigh science. He lies about the availability of testing and now wants to stop the testing altogether because it makes the him look bad. He lies about just about everything related to this virus. On top of that he villainizes Asians, the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and Dr. Fauci, whom he now claims has made many mistakes. America leads the world in infections and deaths and I lay this tragedy at the doorstep of President Trump who continues to mishandle or ignore the pandemic that is destroying the fabric of our health and economic lives. And now, in the middle of this pandemic, he is ordering K-12 schools to re-open in the fall and making policies that make it difficult for higher education to continue distance learning. I had to ask myself why he would do these things.

My answer was scary. I looked at who was dying from the disease and saw that the highest percentages were among black and brown people. We are people he devalues. We are not his base. We are not people who would vote for him. We are not the America his administration nor his supporters consider in his “Make America Great Again” strategy. We are the object of his distain and blatant racism. So, it seems that spreading the disease works as an indirect method of ethnic cleansing given our comparative lack of financial resources, poverty-related pre-existing health conditions, and reduced access to healthcare. True, white people will also get infected and some will also die, but not in the proportion as blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans. So, to help spread the notion among the general public that it’s okay to convene in large numbers without social distancing and masks, he will gladly sacrifice his ignorant supporters by holding a big rally here and there. His push to re-open public schools is a push to spread the disease even more. The others whom he will gladly rid the nation of are intellectuals and the elderly. So, open Universities and he’ll get rid of those pesky intellectual professors, the staff, and the parents of those students who likely oppose him. Keep the virus spreading and he will reduce the cost of Social Security and Medicare by letting the virus kill off retirees in great numbers. Is there another explanation for ignoring public health officials? I couldn’t find one. And even if I did, the outcome would be the same: greater numbers who oppose him or who are a “burden” to the economy will die.

It is sad and disgusting to suggest that COVID-19 has become a biological weapon in the hands of Trump and his administration, but it appears that it may very well be that. Whether it is true or not, this nation cannot afford to give this dangerous and utterly corrupt person another term in office. To do so would be at our collective peril.

Yesterday, Independence Day, I laid in bed from about 4am to 6am listening to a variety of Americans answer whether or not they were proud to be an American. Apparently, a recent Gallop poll revealed that the percentage of Americans claiming to be very proud or proud had slipped. As I listened carefully to the responses, I realized that C-Span was asking the wrong question. They should have been asking whether we love our country, not if we are proud to be American. To be proud of someone or something indicates approval and acceptance of what that person or entity has achieved or stands for. It was evident that those who see the trouble in our streets and problems with our government or who are grabbling with the racist history of the nation more often struggled to say they were proud Americans. However, the least educated seemed to be gushing with pride. For this, I blame our K-12 educational system and the history books that were designed to engender a sense of pride and patriotism by omitting or downplaying the warts, failures, and misdeeds of the country.

I was taking an American history class in college when I got my first glimpse of the true history of America. And what I learned wasn’t at all the rosy picture that was painted for me in K-12 where Christopher Columbus discovered America; where indigenous people gladly moved into missions and onto reservations; where cheerful African slaves picked cotton for their caring planation owners and then were freed by Abraham Lincoln because white Americans came to believe slavery was wrong because of a book called, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. The Civil War was about succession and states’ rights, not about slavery and both sides were to be respected and honored. Women were given the right to vote because the country evolved. Nothing was ever mentioned about the immigration policies and legal discrimination that shaped the demographic and economic structure of the country in a way that privileged whiteness. The heroes of the nation who fought and died in our wars were all white males. The classic books were by white authors. The museums were packed with art from white people and even today only 1.2% of the art in our national museums are by black artists. It is likely even fewer are from other minority groups.

The seeds of the cognitive dissonance between what I was programmed to believe about America and the reality I was living needed further explanation. Our school system was created to turn out patriotic adults who believe that America is the best place in the world “with liberty and justice for all”. The rich and powerful need ordinary Americans to be proud enough of their country to willingly pay taxes and to die for it so they can maintain their place. But knowing the actual history puts that blind patriotism in jeopardy. In my gut, I knew something was wrong. The narrative and the reality didn’t match up. And so, I began to read. I read a lot. One of the first books to provide me with a much clearer understanding of U.S. history was, “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong” by James W. Loewen. There were others, but notably, “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson helped me better understand my family’s journey from Mississippi to Detroit, to California. And finally, “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn.

Granted, the actual history of the U.S. does not make one overly proud. So, it is not surprising that as Trump inadvertently exposes this dark history by scheduling a rally during Juneteenth close to the site of the 1921 Black Wall Street massacre near Tulsa, Oklahoma, the nation as a whole is exposed to a horrifying piece of American history that has been locked away from view. And Friday, yet another episode of American horror stories was revealed when he held his rally at Mt. Rushmore amid protests from the Lakota Sioux Indians who claim that land as sacred and we learn how it had been stolen from them-a ruling upheld by the Supreme Court in 1980. His current actions also reveal that monuments to traitors and slave perpetrators standing in public places in the south were erected in order to proclaim white supremacy during the time of Jim Crowe. I’m grateful that his inadvertent exposure is helping to destroy a collective false pride and invigorate the need for change.

While I don’t claim to be a proud American, I do claim to be a patriotic American who loves my country and will work hard to see her reach her full potential of her promise. I actually think that loving America is better than being blindly patriotic based on a sense of pride predicated upon a mythology and ugly hidden truths. As a nation, I think it’s like we are learning for the first time that our parents are not perfect. But like children, once the shock wears off, they realize that they love their parents none the less and will protect them at all costs based not on their perfection, but on love and devotion to them. So on this Independence Day weekend, I can say with confidence that I love America. And one day, maybe I will be proud of her, too.