Postcards from the Rogue Valley

When my older son, Carl, was eight, he drew a picture of his brain, divided it into regions, then labelled them (“what’s on my mind”)—starting with the Red Sox, followed by geography, and ending with school. There were eleven sections in all. I pinned his diagram to my bulletin board at work. It always made me smile.

A scan of my own brain, in this summer of discontent, leaves no smiles. As Wordsworth put it mildly, “The world is too much with us.” 

You won’t find the Red Sox or a list of state capitols occupying too much real estate in my brain, but you will find regions like these.

Dystopia
We all remember the headline, “Trump suggests injection of disinfectant to beat coronavirus.” If only it stopped there.

And then there were the chaotic scenes in Portland, as camouflaged federal agents fired tear gas as largely peaceful protesters, including Moms, and pulled a few into unmarked vans. It fulfilled Trump’s dark vision of Portland (and other Democratic cities) as lawless places filled with “anarchists” who “hate our country,” a law-and-order message for his re-election campaign. 

Meanwhile, conservative armed civilians have surged into public view—marching on statehouses, challenging Black Lives Matter protests, chasing Internet rumors—and bringing lethal force to local politics. Standing outside his house with a .45 caliber Remington handgun on his belt, a member of a group that calls itself “peacekeepers” told a NY Times reporter: “We’re the silent majority. It’s time to act.”

Dystopia, political scientists tell us, is not a real place but a warning about something bad the government is doing or something good it is failing to do. Actual dystopias are fictional, they say. Today’s American dystopia seems painfully real.

Broken
The coronavirus didn’t break America, it uncovered what was already broken. “We Are Living in a Failed State,” a June 2020 article in The Atlantic explains:

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. 

The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message. Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.

When George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police ignited protests on streets across the country, it laid bare another serious underlying condition: the cruelty, reach and depth of racism in America. Its symptoms: an education system that fails black Americans, substandard health care that makes them more vulnerable to death and disease, an economy that leaves millions without access to a living wage, “tough on crime” sentencing policies that have ballooned the Black prison population, torn apart families, and left millions of children to grow up in single-parent homes.

In the June 20^th New York Times Magazine, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nicole Hannah-Jones and creator of The 1619 Project wrote a brilliant essay about the devastation and hopes of Black Americans. She ends with a call for reparations:

If black lives are to truly matter, this nation must move beyond slogans and symbolism. Citizens don’t inherit just the glory of their nation, but its wrongs too. A truly great country does not ignore or excuse its sins. It confronts them and then works to make them right. If we are to be redeemed, if we are to live up to the magnificent ideals upon which we were founded, we must do what is just.

It is time for this country to pay its debt. It is time for reparations.

Dilemmas
A dilemma, by definition, is a situation requiring a choice between equally undesirable alternatives. 

Coronavirus testing across the country remains outrageously limited, but the supply of dilemmas stirred up by the virus is ample.

• As hospitalizations surged in New York City in March and strained intensive-care beds and ventilators, the unthinkable suddenly became thinkable: how do you prioritize? Only one ventilator is left. Who gets it? Do you pull one patient with a limited chance of survival off a ventilator to give it to another with better odds? If two patients have equal medical need and likelihood of recovery, do you pick the youngest? Or the one with the greatest number of dependents? 

• If you work in a facility that has become a hot spot for COVID-19, but your family depends on your income, do you go to work or stay home? (Reportedly, more than 36,000 meat processing and farm workers, for example, have tested positive for the virus and at least 116 have died. As outbreaks emerged at meat processing plants nationwide, Donald Trump signed an executive order forcing the facilities to remain open.)

• Which businesses are “essential” in a lockdown? Hospitals, pharmacies, supermarkets, banks, gas stations, yes, but what about liquor stores, cannabis dispensaries, and gun stores? (Most states allowed these to stay open.) And which “businesses” should re-open first and under what conditions? Last week the Supreme Court rejected a request from a church in Nevada to block state restrictions on attendance at religious services, which limited church gatherings to 50 worshipers while allowing bars, restaurants, casinos and indoor amusement parks to operate at 50 percent capacity.

• How do we ever reopen schools in a way that keeps kids, educators, staff and their families safe from Covid-19? How do we not open them without other harms, including setting children back academically and socially and forcing parents to choose between losing their jobs or leaving their unsupervised—aware, too, that the risks are borne disproportionately by low-income communities and people of color, for whom online learning is a pipe dream and school breakfast and lunch a necessity.

We’ve heard the argument: young children are mostly spared by the coronavirus and don’t seem to spread it to others, at least not very often. But a new study introduced an unwelcome snag in this narrative. Infected children have at least as much of the coronavirus in their noses and throats (maybe 100 times as much) as infected adults, according to the research. 

(See “I’m Sorry, But It’s a Fantasy,” from a superintendent trying to reopen his schools safely.)

Gratitude
Gratitude turns what we have into enough. Some have even described gratitude as “social glue” that fortifies relationships—between friends, family, and romantic partners—and serves as the backbone of human society. 

For several years now, I’ve been trying to grow the gratitude region in my brain. Health experts from Deepak Chopra to the Mayo Clinic tout practicing gratitude as one way to counteract the emotional toll of the coronavirus pandemic. 

While my day is only half over, my gratitude cup is more than half full.

Early this morning, before the sun set our valley ablaze (it’s been over 90 degrees here for weeks), Tony headed to our favorite trail: a 4.8 mile hike through redwood forests, meadows with wildflowers, bare trees left standing from an old fire, and scree to the top Grizzly Peak (6,000 feet), where the Rogue Valley unfolds below and Mt. Shasta dots the horizon. For the first hour and half, Tony and I had the trail to ourselves, accompanied by woodpeckers and bees. On the way down, we met a handful of unmasked hikers and wished each other a good day, delighting at the friendly human exchange in these days of social distancing.  

(In the woods behind our house where we hike most days, mask wearing is de rigeur, along with stepping off the trail and turning your back to approaching hikers. Believing the chances of catching or spreading COVID during these fleeting outdoor encounters are remote, Tony and I travel mask-less. We’ve been chided for this, reminding us of the pandemic side effects that we were hiking to forget, however briefly.)

On our way back from Grizzly Peak to Ashland, I received a text from my Brooklyn daughter-in-law, Kidist. Five days earlier, we worried that Lucas (almost six) had COVID, although we couldn’t figure out how in the dickens he’d gotten sick. This morning’s news was good: his test was negative. Kidist included a video of Lucas in high spirits, with 10-month-old Timmy sitting in a laundry basket and Lucas pretending they were on a train and he was the conductor, assisted by a teddy bear.

When Tony and I returned home, my friend Kathy arrived with a sack full of frozen smoothie ingredients left behind by a vegan friend who just moved to Minneapolis. Later, I talked with Sophia, filled with life, about whom I wrote a blog post two months ago, “Running with the Wolves: My Friend Sophia.” She’d had emergency surgery three weeks ago for ovarian cancer, but miraculously the cancer hadn’t spread. On the heels of her 77^th birthday, she was already back on her feet.

Hope
I have a habit of putting on optimism with my socks each morning, and the hopeful region of my brain lives alongside today’s dystopian one. The best hopes are calloused, I believe, and a bleak recognition of all the ways we have failed as a nation—and have been failing for decades—may provide the necessary overture to fixing our country.

If my son Carl, now 38, were to ask me what I see ahead, I might tell him this.

Trump’s depravity will end his rule, though he no doubt will go down in flames. A new, diverse and smart government will push a more courageous agenda, one that includes a plan for affordable and equitable healthcare for all Americans. Today’s unprecedented national conversation about racism will set a course that better honors the scope of the wounds and the opportunities that will make a difference. Our collective experience with the COVID pandemic will spark preparations for the climate change pandemic that will inevitably follow.

“Dreamers,” whether illegal offspring dreaming of college or migrants escaping poverty and violence, will find a measured welcome. Young voices for change will matter. 

A few weeks before John Lewis died, he sent a short essay to the New York Times, addressed to today’s activists struggling to upend racial justice and to create a nation built on human dignity and compassion. He asked that it be published on the day of his funeral. 

“Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe,” the legendary Lewis said. “In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.”

Like every parent today, I worry about the world my children and grandchildren are inheriting. In a summer where major league baseball is playing to fans cut from cardboard, I am growing a new region in my brain: generativity.

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