America’s Patchwork Pandemic Is Fraying Even Further: The coronavirus is coursing through different parts of the U.S. in different ways, making the crisis harder to predict, control, or understand.

Do read this entire piece that I found to be rather unnerving and deeply concerning for our country and the world.  It examines different scenarios of where this Pandemic is headed.  So many important takeaways here. This got my attention:

"Polls have also shown that pandemic partisanship is narrowing, with Democrats and Republicans more united in how seriously they view the threat. Beth Redbird, a sociologist at Northwestern University, has been surveying 200 people a day since mid-March, and “70 to 75 percent of people support most social-distancing measures,” she says. “Those are really large numbers in a society where 52 percent is often viewed as huge support. We rarely see that outside of authoritarian polling. Americans are by and large reading information in a very similar way.”"

While the coronavirus is waning in New York and New Jersey, it's on the increase in places like Texas and North Carolina.  According to experts, it will reach the suburbs. It's just a matter of time.  As we know from the distressing Covid story of Oldham, Texas, it's getting to the rural areas, as well.  It's just a matter of time.  

Thanks to Kenneth Bernstein for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela

America’s Patchwork Pandemic Is Fraying Even Further

The coronavirus is coursing through different parts of the U.S. in different ways, making the crisis harder to predict, control, or understand.

 by Ed Yong | The Atlantic    May 20, 2020

Editor’s Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here.

There was supposed to be a peak. But the stark turning point, when the number of daily COVID-19 cases in the U.S. finally crested and began descending sharply, never happened. Instead, America spent much of April on a disquieting plateau, with every day bringing about 30,000 new cases and about 2,000 new deaths. The graphs were more mesa than Matterhorn—flat-topped, not sharp-peaked. Only this month has the slope started gently heading downward.

This pattern exists because different states have experienced the coronavirus pandemic in very different ways. In the most severely pummeled places, like New York and New Jersey, COVID-19 is waning. In Texas and North Carolina, it is still taking off. In Oregon and South Carolina, it is holding steady. These trends average into a national plateau, but each state’s pattern is distinct. Currently, Hawaii’s looks like a child’s drawing of a mountain. Minnesota’s looks like the tip of a hockey stick. Maine’s looks like a (two-humped) camel. The U.S. is dealing with a patchwork pandemic.

The patchwork is not static. Next month’s hot spots will not be the same as last month’s. The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is already moving from the big coastal cities where it first made its mark into rural heartland areas that had previously gone unscathed. People who only heard about the disease secondhand through the news will start hearing about it firsthand from their family. “Nothing makes me think the suburbs will be spared—it’ll just get there more slowly,” says Ashish Jha, a public-health expert at Harvard.

Read: Georgia’s experiment in human sacrifice

Meanwhile, most states have begun lifting the social-distancing restrictions that had temporarily slowed the pace of the pandemic, creating more opportunities for the virus to spread. Its potential hosts are still plentiful: Even in the biggest hot spots, most people were not infected and remain susceptible. Further outbreaks are likely, although they might not happen immediately. The virus isn’t lying in a bush, waiting to pounce on those who reemerge from their house. It is, instead, lying within people. Its ability to jump between hosts depends on proximity, density, and mobility, and on people once again meeting, gathering, and moving. And people are: In the first week of May, 25 million more Americans ventured out of their home on any given day than over the prior six weeks.

I spoke with two dozen experts who agreed that in the absence of a vaccine, the patchwork will continue. Cities that thought the worst had passed may be hit anew. States that had lucky escapes may find themselves less lucky. The future is uncertain, but Americans should expect neither a swift return to normalcy nor a unified national experience, with an initial spring wave, a summer lull, and a fall resurgence. “The talk of a second wave as if we’ve exited the first doesn’t capture what’s really happening,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.  

What’s happening is not one crisis, but many interconnected ones. As we shall see, it will be harder to come to terms with such a crisis. It will be harder to bring it to heel. And it will be harder to grapple with the historical legacies that have shaped today’s patchwork.

2017 Was the Year I Learned About My White Privilege, by Max Boot

These kinds of testimonies are always helpful since the truth of privilege for the privileged is often more easily heard from a peer, if you will. I discovered this piece titled, "2017 Was the Year I Learned About My White Privilege" from Kenneth Bernstein's blog (aka teacherken).  

It is very encouraging to read this piece in the new year as it may signify a social awakening of a kind and to a degree. Indeed, recently, Christian Bale made just such a statement:  "We’d Be Better Off If ‘White Dudes’ Weren’t Running Everything.

Hopefully, this awareness spreads to all corners of our society and the world.  After all, it's a global issue and not just a North American one.

Angela Valenzuela

c/s

A terrific piece about white male privilege

By teacherken  

Thursday Dec 28, 2017 · 10:29 AM CST

308 Comments (308 New)

 

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written by Max Boot and appearing yesterday in Foreign Policy.  It is titled 2017 Was the Year I Learned About My White Privilege and has the subtitle “I used to be a smart-alecky conservative who scoffed at “political correctness.” The Trump era has opened my eyes.”

Boot is an immigrant of Jewish background from Russia, or to be more accurate, from what was then the Soviet Union. He was born in Moscow in 1969, and has been an adviser on foreign policy and similar topics to the likes of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Marco Rubio.  Unlike a lot of those on the Conservative side of our politics, he holds a number of views that might make him comfortable on the liberal side — pro-gay rights, pro-environment, pro-abortion and pro-immigration.   He is fiscally conservative and very much for an active role for the US militarily around the world.

He has been a significant voice as an author and adviser, and has increasingly appeared on MS-NBC as one of the more notable Never Trump conservative voices.

The new Foreign Policy piece is quite open in acknowledging things to which he has previously been oblivious, on matters of race and of gender.
As he write:

A quarter century is enough time to examine deeply held shibboleths and to see if they comport with reality. In my case, I have concluded that my beliefs were based more on faith than on a critical examination of the evidence. In the last few years, in particular, it has become impossible for me to deny the reality of discrimination, harassment, even violence that people of color and women continue to experience in modern-day America from a power structure that remains for the most part in the hands of straight, white males. People like me, in other words. Whether I realize it or not, I have benefitted from my skin color and my gender — and those of a different gender or sexuality or skin color have suffered because of it.
This sounds obvious, but it wasn’t clear to me until recently. I have had my consciousness raised. Seriously.

Boot provides many examples of how his consciousness has been raised. Let me offer a few of his very pointed comments.
We are seeing pushback by some Trumpistas on how white men are the real victims, to which Boot responds

It is even more pernicious to cling to the conceit, so popular among Donald Trump’s supporters, that straight white men are the “true” victims because their unquestioned position of privilege is now being challenged by uppity women, gay people, and people of color.

On how Police actions that are inappropriate and totally out of control disproportionally affect minorities he writes

I am ashamed to admit I did not realize what a serious and common problem this was until the videotaped evidence emerged. The iPhone may well have done more to expose racism in modern-day America than the NAACP.

He makes clear that the problems of racism are not limited to police, telling us of a friend, “a well-educated, well-paid, well-dressed woman”  who was unwilling to be carrying a pair of jeans she was planning to give to another friend late in the day in her purse when she went into a department store:

Why not? Because she was afraid that she would be accused of shoplifting! This is not something that would occur to me, simply because the same suspicion would not attach to a middle-aged, middle-class white man.

As to the impact of Trump’s election, including on how the police act, Boot offers the following parenthetical remark:

(Far from being concerned about police misconduct, which disproportionately targets people of color, Trump actively encourages it.)

He references the terrific piece in Atlantic by Adam Serwer on Trumpism (about which I wrote in this Daily Kos post) that examines the nature of Trump’s base, then tells us

That doesn’t mean that every Trump supporter is a racist; it does mean that Trump’s victory has revealed that racism and xenophobia are more widespread than I had previously realized.

As to his advantage to being male, he tells us that

As with the revelations of police brutality, so too with sexual harassment: I am embarrassed and ashamed that I did not understand how bad the problem is.

and admits

I now realize something I should have learned long ago: that feminist activists had a fair point when they denounced the “patriarchy” for oppressing women. Sadly, this oppression, while less severe than it used to be, remains a major problem in spite of the impressive strides the U.S. has taken toward greater gender equality.

He brings it home in a concluding paragraph, of which I will only offer the second half:

But I no longer think, as I once did, that “political correctness” is a bigger threat than the underlying racism and sexism that continue to disfigure our society decades after the civil rights and women’s rights movements. If the Trump era teaches us anything, it is how far we still have to go to realize the “unalienable Rights” of all Americans to enjoy “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” regardless of gender, sexuality, religion, or skin color.

I think this is a very thoughtful, very honest, and very powerful piece by Boot.
I urge people to read the entire piece.

A prescient look at American Fascism, by Kenneth Bernstein

Daily Kos blogger, Kenneth Bernstein, provides a sobering reflection on American fascism.
-Angela

A prescient look at American Fascism

By teacherken  

Saturday May 13, 2017 · 6:04 AM CDT

 

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• Fighting and Defeating the Neo Nazis

In 1944, the New York Times asked the sitting Vice President of the United States, Henry A. Wallace, to write a piece answering three questions:

1. What is a fascist?
2. How many fascists have we?
3. How dangerous are they?

The end result was a piece entitled The Danger of American Fascism.
Yesterday, Henry Scott Wallace, a lawyer and grandson of the Vice President, looked back at what his grandfather wrote in a New York Times piece titled American Fascism, in 1944 and Today.
I am devoting this post to exploring the piece by the latter, whom I know as Scott, because like me he was a music major in the Class of ‘73 at Haverford College before we both went on to other endeavors.
I think both pieces are well worth reading.  To make things clear, I will refer to the VP as Henry and the author of the current piece as Scott.
Quite obviously, given what we have seen of Donald Trump during the campaign, the transition,and since he took office, there is a great deal of speculation as to what we are seeing represents in any way fascism.  There is no doubt of authoritarian trends.
While Scott thinks that Henry clearly predicted the rise of Trump, he himself does not view Trump as truly fascist, at least not in the sense where the term is also applied to Hitler. Bt we should remember that Mussolin’s version was what might fairly consider corporatism, so Scott thinks his father’s observation apply to Trump:

My grandfather warned about hucksters spouting populist themes but manipulating people and institutions to achieve the opposite. They pretend to be on the side of ordinary working people — “paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare,” he wrote. But at the same time, they “distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity.”
They invariably put “money and power ahead of human beings,” he continued. “They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.” They also “claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.”
They bloviate about putting America first, but it’s just a cover. “They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism.”
They need scapegoats and harbor “an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations.”

If in reading those words you found yourself catching your breath as you considered how applicable those words are to our time and our current President, that is precisely the point.
Let me offer another sample.  Henry Wallace was very well aware of the rise of authoritarians in Europe, and how it was different from what might happen in America.   In thinking of authoritarians, consider:

The American breed doesn’t need violence. Lying to the people is so much easier.
They “poison the channels of public information,” he wrote. Their “problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public” into giving them more money or power.
In fact, they use lies strategically, to promote civic division, which then justifies authoritarian crackdowns. Through “deliberate perversion of truth and fact,” he said, “their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity.”

Think of all the attacks on journalists, of the repetition of the mantra of “fake news.”
Scott goes through many examples of the behavior by Trump he considers relevant, which in the unlikelihood of your having not noticed or forgotten them, he wants to repeat as the basis for then writing:

And what is the ultimate goal? “Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”
That sounds like Mussolini and his embrace of “corporatism” — the marriage of government and corporate power. And it also sounds like President Trump.

I am already pushing fair use.
Henry Wallace argued for the need for the “common man” and had already in a 1942 speech somewhat argued against the notion of American Exceptionalism in noting that Americans were no more a master race than were the Nazis.
Henry Wallace wanted to see a “century of the common man” which would have meant

ordinary people, standing up and fighting for their rights

rights that included unions, decent jobs, good public education, etc.
If this sounds like the platform of Resist, I do not think either Wallace would have objected.  In fact Scott, who received an award from Ourfuture.org as a Progressive Champion For The Common Person, is someone who strongly believes we have to take action and not depend upon institutions to protect themselves and us from the loss of our liberties.  He writes of his grandfather

Democracy, he said in his 1944 essay, must “put human beings first and dollars second.”

Scott’s conclusion is more than a reflection back on the words of his grandfather.   Here it is:

If there’s any comfort in his essay 73 years ago, it is that this struggle is not new. It wasn’t even new then. The main question today is how our democracy and our brash new generation of citizen activists deals with it.

citizen activists   Scott may talk about a a brash new generation which might seem to exclude those of us who are aging baby boomers, who had our own period of activism which helped with the Civil Rights Movement, which clearly helped power the opposition to Vietnam, the expansion of gay rights, and many other progressive advances.  But we are not excluded by age, and we must encourage, work with, and support that “brash new generation” if our country is going to survive Trumpism, however we may label it.
Read Scott’s op ed.  Then go read his grandfather’s 1944 piece.   You will be well served by doing so.
Peace?