“Words tend to be inadequate.”
~~~ Jenny Holzer quote being re-purposed because I can’t find the words to express my upset about the behavior of the US president at the debate last night.
Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesday! Find out how here: https://lindaghill.com/2020/09/30/one-liner-wednesday-the-lasting-consequences-of-sign-language/
This evening, while watching television, I happened to see the last part of the movie Moana followed by the beginning of Frozen.
When daughter E and granddaughter ABC lived with us before E’s spousal visa came through for their big move to London, ABC, at two, was just starting to be entranced with watching (parts of) movies. These were two of her favorites, which she called “Ocean” and “Snowman”.
Both movies celebrate love of family, intergenerationally in Moana and between sisters in Frozen. Seeing them tonight reminds me of how desperately I miss seeing E and ABC and how much I want to meet new granddaughter JG.
When E and ABC left for London almost a year ago, we had assumed that we would be able to visit several times a year. My spouse B, younger daughter T, and I did visit in December. (There are posts about the trip that you can find in the archive in late January into March. It took a long time to get the posts together.) We had hoped to visit again in the spring and then in the summer when the baby was due to arrive, but COVID intervened, so we haven’t seen them yet in 2020, other than on screen.
Most days, I can manage the distance, but, tonight, I could hear the echoes of ABC asking for Ocean or singing about building a snowman and I’m sad.
We do have a visit planned in November, beginning with two weeks in quarantine to be followed by two weeks for visiting under whatever the current UK restrictions are for group size. We are hoping that JG’s baptism will be able to take place while we are there.
Plans are in place, but I’m nervous that travel protocols might change and keep us from seeing them. Meanwhile, we are hoping that people in the US and the UK will be careful about following pandemic control measures so that virus rates stay down and our visit can go forward.
And, people in other countries, I hope you will stay safe, too.
I’ve been meaning to write a post all week, but couldn’t settle my mind enough to do it.
Now it’s Saturday and I probably still have not settled my mind enough, but am plunging in regardless.
I’ve written often about how disconcerting and bizarre it is to be living in the United States in 2020. The national government is dysfunctional, although I am fortunate to be living in New York State with a competent governor, Andrew Cuomo, so there is some sense of stability, despite the public health and economic fallout from the pandemic.
The sad news on the national pandemic front this week was surpassing seven millions known cases. This comes on the heels of passing 200,000 known COVID deaths, which means that the United States, with about 4% of the world’s population, has suffered about 20% of global deaths. This is a result of the incompetence of the president and his administration. The staggering news this week is that the administration is saying that they could overrule the Food and Drug Administration and grant an emergency approval of a coronavirus vaccine even if the FDA does not feel that there is enough data yet to show that the vaccine is safe and effective. The president has been hinting about having a vaccine approved before the November third election, even though phase three trials only began in the United States in July. (My spouse, daughter, and I are part of the Pfizer vaccine study. You can find my posts about it by using the search box here at Top of JC’s Mind.) This threat of political interference from the White House comes on top of recent revelations that political appointees have interfered with what the scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publish on their official website and the stunning statements by Olivia Troye, a national security specialist who until recently served on the staff of Vice-President Mike Pence and was assigned to the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
This week also saw the public memorials for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. There was a remembrance service at the Supreme Court to open two days of public viewing there, followed by a service and a day of lying in state at the Capitol building where Congress meets. She was the first woman and the first person of the Jewish faith to be so honored. Her burial will be at Arlington National Cemetery next week, after the conclusion of the High Holy Days. Meanwhile, the president and Republican senators are intent on rushing through a replacement even though the election is so close. This is against Justice Ginsburg’s dying wish that the president elected in November choose her successor and against the path that those same Republican senators took when Justice Scalia died in early 2016, when the election was much further away.
What has been most disheartening is that Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and others in the administration has increased their rhetoric about the unfairness of the election itself. Even though absentee voting by mail is a long-established, safe, and secure practice in the United States, they are trying to say it is a source of wide-spread fraud. It is not! The head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and state and local election officials have said over and over that they have procedures in place to verify ballots and that election fraud is exceedingly rare and small-scale when it has occurred.
There will likely be many, many more citizens voting by mail this year because the public health risk of crowded polling stations has led millions of people who would ordinarily have voted on election day to request absentee ballots. Because of state laws, most of these ballots that arrive by mail or by delivery to election boards will not be counted until after election day. This means that, absent a clear landslide victory, the winner won’t be known for some number of days after the election. People will need to be patient while votes are counted and certified.
Trump has seized on the delay, intimating that not knowing the outcome immediately means that there is fraud. What it really means is that each state is carefully following their rules to ensure a full and free count. The count could have proceeded more quickly if the Senate had passed and the president signed the House’s HEROES Act, which included money to help states with additional machinery, training, and staff to deal with the expected increase in mail-in ballots. Instead, the Trump administration further gummed up the system by slowing mail delivery, which caused problems in the primaries in some states by delaying election mail so much that ballots were thrown out for arriving too late.
The presidential election system in the US is complicated. The winner is not necessarily the one who wins the popular vote, but depends on the winner of each state and how many members of Congress they have. This gives more power to small states and was how Trump became president even though he lost the popular vote by three million. There are reports that Trump and Barr are looking at a scenario where they would file court cases to try to throw out absentee ballots and allow Republican-controlled state legislatures to choose Republican electors, even if Biden wins the vote within the state. The level of corruption involved is staggering.
Meanwhile, the president is giving away the plan by refusing to say there would be a peaceful transfer of power, intimating that “the ballots are a disaster.” Trump and the Republicans also seems to be in a hurry to have nine justices on the Supreme Court so that there wouldn’t be a tie if the election lands there as the 2000 Bush-Gore race did.
It seems that the president’s re-election strategy isn’t to convince the majority of citizens to vote for him but to find loopholes to stay in power even though the majority want Biden to become president. It’s especially terrifying because the president’s rhetoric has become even more disconnected from reality. He tells his supporters lies about Biden’s positions on issues. He encourages violence against those who disagree with him and says that he will give legal protection to those who are caught in wrongdoing on his behalf. And, by the way, Russia and other state actors are also throwing misinformation into the mix.
Almost five hundred national security experts endorsed Joe Biden this week, saying that the current president is not up to “the enormous responsibilities of his office.” It’s hard to conclude otherwise when I look at the millions of folks who are suffering from COVID impacts, injustice, hunger, and lack of livelihood. That there might be election shenanigans that continue the Trump presidency is more than I can bear to contemplate.
Happy first day of school, ABC!
*****
This personal one-liner for my granddaughter on her first day of nursery school is brought to you by Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays. Join us! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2020/09/23/one-liner-wednesday-a-backhanded-compliment/
Badge by Laura
The number of known COVID-19 deaths in the United States is over 200,000.
It’s hard for me to grasp the total, knowing that each of these was someone’s child, parent, sibling, co-worker, neighbor, friend.
A few days ago when I was working on this post, I needed to look up the population of Broome County, New York, where I live.
It’s about 190,000.
I am imagining the city of Binghamton empty, the University and all the other schools without students and staff, all the towns and villages without people, just the wild creatures and birds alive.
It’s sobering.
In reality, Broome County has lost 85 residents to COVID, each person a loss to their family and community. Somehow, though, my thought experiment in concentrating the loss to our country as the obliteration of our entire county has given me a sense of scale and of grief that the statistics alone did not elicit.
What does 200,000 deaths mean to you?
Last night, we received the sad news that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away at the age of 87 from complications of pancreatic cancer. She was an amazing woman with a remarkable record of achievements, overcoming the discrimination she faced as a woman, a mother, and a Jewish person. As a lawyer, she argued landmark sex discrimination cases before the Supreme Court, winning five of the six cases she presented. One of her keys to success was that some of those cases were brought on behalf of men who suffered lack of access to careers or benefits that were ascribed to women, for example, allowing men to study nursing. This was able to reach the all-male justices in a way that a case brought on behalf of women did not. It was a way in to address the injustices of sexism.
As a judge and then in 27 years as a justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a strong voice for equal justice under the Constitution, regardless of race or gender. As the Court became more and more conservative, she was well-known for her well-reasoned, cogent, and accessible dissents, many of which may be the basis for reversals over time, as we have seen with some infamous Supreme Court decisions in the past.
Millions of people around the country are sad, but also terrified. The terror is that Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be replaced this year by the current president, even though the election is only six weeks away. This totally flies in the face of what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell did in 2016, when conservative justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly ten months before the election and he refused to even have hearings to vote on Merrick Garland, who was nominated by President Obama. He said that the people should have a voice in the selection through their presidential choice. The Supreme Court had to operate for over 400 days with only eight justices. Even more scandalously, there was the threat that if Hillary Clinton had won, McConnell would still not have allowed a Court nominee to be voted on in the Senate. It’s such an abuse of power.
Which brings me to the “-tion” word that popped into my head, compunction. In the midst of the mourning that immediately followed the announcement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, McConnell announced that Trump’s nominee would receive a vote in the Senate. That he had no compunction in doing so is appalling. The level of hypocrisy and the naked abuse of power is off the charts.
I am hoping that a significant number of Republican senators will stand up and say that they will not vote on a nominee under these rushed and suspect circumstances. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said last night that she would not vote on a nominee, saying “fair is fair.”
I wish I could say that I am shocked that McConnell also had no compunction in releasing his statement on a replacement right after news of Justice Ginsburg’s death broke, but he acted similarly after Justice Scalia’s death. I hope that we can focus on RBG’s legacy and life in the coming days, not the political and partisan circus that McConnell has unleashed.
*****
Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week was a word that ends with -tion. Join us! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2020/09/18/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-sept-19-2020/
2019-2020 SoCS Badge by Shelley!
Last week, I needed to bring one of our vehicles to a dealership for a recall. The one we usually use wasn’t certified to work on the electrical/battery system of our hybrid, so we made the appointment at another dealer in a neighboring county. We live near the county line, so it’s just a couple of towns to our west.
Tioga County is a rural county; Broome, where I live is a mix of rural, urban, and suburban, although Binghamton is a small city by most standards with a population of about 46,000. Broome County’s population is about 190,000 in 716 square miles; Tioga’s is 48,000 in 523 square miles.
Your geography trivia for the day!
So, I arrive at the service department of the dealership, wearing my mask. There is a sign on the door that face coverings are optional for customers but required for staff, which seemed a bit odd as New York State rules are to wear a mask whenever people are closer than six feet (2 meters). I was surprised to walk up to the service desk to find that there was no plexiglass barrier to protect the employee and he was not wearing a mask.
I tried to maintain distance as best I could. I checked in, walked past unmasked customers in line, and sat in the waiting area with unmasked customers while unmasked employees walked through several times. When the repair was complete, the employee doing checkout hastily put on a mask after the window that separated her desk from the hallway was opened.
The experience left me feeling not endangered, because I was masked and maintained social distance most of the time, but disrespected. While the business knew that its employees should be masked when in proximity to another employee or a customer, they were not complying.
As the designated shopper in our house, I’m used to visiting businesses which have implemented careful measures to keep their employees and customers as safe as possible. The result has been that our infection rate in the state has remained very low as we methodically re-open businesses and services. If I am ever in a similar situation that I have to use this car dealership, I’ll make arrangements to drop the car off the evening before so that I only need to go inside to do the final paperwork when it’s ready.
I hope that there won’t be any outbreaks from the disregard that I witnessed at the car dealership, which, presumably, was considered acceptable to others in that community. For me, it seemed a small taste of what I hear on the news from other states, that folks don’t believe that masks and distancing help prevent COVID infections or that masks infringe on their liberties or that COVID doesn’t exist, all of which contribute to the appalling rates of illness and death in the United States.
At least I know that no one there will have contracted COVID from me.
Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument.
—Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971)
*****
Please join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2020/09/16/one-liner-wednesday-pin-codes/
Badge by Laura
WordPress has helpfully reminded me that today is my seventh blogiversary!
Sending out a big THANK YOU to all my readers, including my 1,400 followers!
Okay, it’s time to calm down and not end every sentence with an exclamation point.
Over these past seven years, I have published 1,383 posts and had over 24,000 visitors from 119 countries. It boggles my mind. I hadn’t really thought about stats seven years ago when I started. Truth to tell, I don’t think about stats that often now, either, but I do appreciate sharing my thoughts with so many people around the world.
I also appreciate that I have been able to keep my blog eclectic. I knew starting out that the recommendation was to target a blog to a specific topic with a regular posting schedule and a plan to build followers, but I chose to take a path that fit my personality better. I have wide-ranging interests and like to be able to bring them up as they become “top of mind.” Circumstances have arisen that have had me writing more about my personal life than I had originally expected, but having an intentionally eclectic blog accommodated that.
For millions around the world, 2020 has been hard to navigate in terms of time. People’s schedules have been disrupted to such an extent that a week can simultaneously feel like forever and a flash. For me, most of the past seven years have been like that, as I’ve lived in a web of intergenerational health problems, moves, on-site and long-distance caretaking, and lots of unpredictability. I didn’t know seven years ago how important writing poetry would become in my life. I didn’t know that we would lose both my mother and mother-in-law. I didn’t know I’d now have two precious and faraway granddaughters.
Sometimes, in writing a post, I need to look back into my post archive to refresh my memory on when something occurred. In reading older posts, I am gratified to find that, in most cases, the writing has held up pretty well. You all have an open invitation to stroll through the posts from prior months and years. You might stumble across something that interests you.
I have never kept a diary or journal going for any length of time, so I am glad to have Top of JC’s Mind as a keepsake of these past seven years.
Which reminds me, I really need to figure out how to do a proper back-up…
Nineteen years ago today, terrorists, most of whom were from Saudi Arabia, attacked the United States, killing thousands of people and destroying airplanes and buildings in New York City, Arlington, Virginia, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. I remember those killed, the many who acted valiantly to try to save lives, often at the cost of their own, those who worked in the aftermath of the disaster, many of whom suffered illness as a result, and the many thousands, both military and civilian, who were impacted by the wars in Afghanistan and the rest of the Middle East that sprang from the 9/11 attacks.
Nine years ago, my area was suffering from a record flood of the Susquehanna River, brought on by the remnants of tropical storm Lee. What many people don’t realize is how long it takes to recover from such an event – and that some things aren’t recoverable. It took years to repair homes that could be and tear down those that couldn’t. There are neighborhoods with patches of grassland where homes once stood, interspersed with homes that managed to survive. Those neighborhoods have changed character, with fewer older folks in them as they were the most likely to move to higher ground or leave the area after the flood. Our own home was not flooded, but there was standing water three blocks away and significant basement flooding one block away. We had long carried flood insurance on our house, although it isn’t required by the (still outdated) flood maps; we will continue to do so, hoping that we never have to use it while realizing that the increased strength of weather systems and changes to the upper-level wind patterns brought on by global warming may someday send us another record-breaking flood that will reach our home.
Despite these prior events, September 11, 2020 feels even more fraught. The global pandemic has exacted a terrible toll on the United States. We are over six million cases and closing in on 200,000 fatalities. The economic impact, especially on those on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, has been severe, with rising rates of hunger and housing crisis. The pandemic also made more prominent existing problems with the health care system, racism, environmental degradation, education, infrastructure, jobs, wealth, taxation, and social programs. While some of the effects have been buffered by living in New York State, where Governor Andrew Cuomo has been leading an effective response to the crisis, I am appalled by the lack of leadership from the president and the callous intransigence of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, which are prolonging and deepening the suffering in the country as a whole. Because the Senate hasn’t passed the HEROES Act which the House passed in May, additional federal assistance to households, state and local governments, the post office, and the election system isn’t available. As a result of the national inaction, states are going to have to lay off front-line personnel and the vote count in November’s elections will take a long time.
To make matters worse, this week has seen new evidence that the president’s failure to address the pandemic was not due to lack of understanding the crisis. A just-released recorded interview on February 7 with Bob Woodward makes clear that the president knew that the virus was highly contagious, deadly, and spread through the air, yet he continued to intentionally downplay the threat rather than mount an effective and protective response. If the president had lead the nation in the kind of efforts that Governor Cuomo did in New York, there would have been millions fewer cases of the virus and thousands upon thousands fewer deaths. There would be widespread testing and contact tracing. The test positivity rate would be below one percent, as it has been in New York State for over a month. Businesses and schools would be thoughtfully and carefully re-opening, ready to re-adjust if cases start to rise. Instead, Dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, is telling the United States to “hunker down and get through this fall and winter, because it’s not going to be easy.” I only hope that people take the advice to heart in their own lives and at the state and local level, because Trump and McConnell are still not helping us mount a national response.
The Trump/Bob Woodward interview I mentioned above was just released because Woodward has a book coming out, part of a spate of books about Donald Trump being published with less than two months to go before the presidential election. These books reveal information that, while perhaps suspected, had not previously been confirmed about the president and his staff. The picture isn’t pretty. While there is some straight-up incompetence and inexperience at play, there is even more corruption, selfishness, greed, and disregard for the Constitution and laws, morals, ethics, and the common good.
Time for the pitch. Make a plan and vote! We need there to be a President Biden in January 2021 in order to have any hope of reclaiming our democracy.
Which brings me to another fear. While there is widespread and credible polling both nationally and in battleground states showing that Biden is leading Trump by several percentage points, the election process itself is under threat. The most frightening is that the Russians, along with several other countries, are once again attempting to interfere with election. This week, a whistleblower came forward with evidence that the administration is knowingly tamping down revealing the extent of the Russian interference, in particular. At the same time, the administration and the Republicans are filing lawsuits to disrupt mail-in voting. The postal service is slowing mail delivery, which could make ballots arrive too late to be counted. The president keeps saying that mail-in ballots lead to widespread fraud, which is absolutely a lie; states and local election boards have numerous, proven safeguards in place to prevent fraud. It is true that the final vote tally will take longer, especially in states that don’t count mail-in votes until days after Election Day. (Of course, some of the delays could have been averted if the Senate had acted on the HEROES Act which would have provided more training, machinery, and personnel to count ballots more quickly.) People need to be aware that we may not have final election results for a couple of weeks. This does not mean there is fraud; it means that election bureaus are diligently following their procedures to report an accurate tally.
Nineteen years ago, despite sorrow and shock, the people of the United States pulled together to help us get through the crisis. Nine years ago, our local community drew together to assist those impacted by the flood. Unfortunately, I don’t see that same sense of solidarity in the country as we face the pandemic, government corruption, and economic catastrophe, along with the long-standing problems of racism, lack of equal access to good-quality education and health care, environmental ruin, and other injustices. Granted, it’s a lot, but we can improve our lives and our nation if we act together. When we say in the Pledge of Allegiance “with liberty and justice for all”, we have to mean it.
