Just seems appropriate today – When I’m Sixty-Four (the Beatles)

Optimism

As anyone who knows me politically will tell you, I am an optimist.  It’s caught me sometimes, specifically when Al Gore and Hillary Clinton weren’t selected.  I wasn’t wrong about who “won” the popular vote even those times.  But I am a lot more careful today.  I take a closer look at the vagaries of the electoral system, and, frankly, I am much more concerned about disinformation and election tampering by foreign powers than I ever was before.

With all of that, still I am an optimistic Democrat.  I think the United States will elect Joe Biden as President, Kamala Harris as Vice President, and give the Democratic Party a majority in the Senate and House this November.  I think the nation is ready for an end to the turmoil of incessant tweets, hate, and division.  Joe Biden is not everything I asked for in the Democratic candidate, but he is absolutely the candidate of healing.  And that’s what America needs.

Get on the Bus

By the way, for my friends who were ardent supporters of other Democratic candidates, there’s a saying of a good friend of mine that comes to mind:  “you’re either on the bus, or you off the bus”.  You can’t stand on the sidewalk and lean in the door, the bus is leaving, and you need to get on board.   Your choice is now “binary” (that word still gives me flashbacks to Computer Programming 101 in 1974).  If you don’t choose Biden, you essentially support Trump.  Rather have Buttigieg, or Bernie, or Klobuchar or Yang?  Too bad, their bus never showed up.  And by the way, all of them are on the bus for Biden, so get on board too.

So once Joe wins the election, we will have more “fun and games” as we hold our breath for whatever “last stand in the Reichstag” McConnell and Trump will pull in December.  You hope that both would have lost their taste for action, that Trump will “retire” to Mara Lago early and play golf, and the McConnell will just go into his shell.  But it’s just as likely that they will try to pull every “shenanigan” they can to push forward their agenda, particularly in the Courts where they have full power and sway.  

January 20th

But come January the new Senate will end McConnell’s court packing project, and Inauguration Day will see Donald Trump removed from the White House.  I still bet he doesn’t even stick around for the ceremony.  That’s not unprecedented.  John and Abigail Adams were in a carriage on the way out of town when Thomas Jefferson swore the oath of office.  “Don’t let the door hit you on the butt on the way out”.  I bet Biden will even lend Trump the plane to leave.

Once Biden is in office he will have an enormous number of things to do, and perhaps just as importantly, undo.  But first things first:  here are the first three issues of the Biden Presidency.

On Day One

Number One:  he must address the COVID-19 pandemic.  He must have a national strategy, ready to go before he even gets to the first inaugural ball.  Whether there’s a functional vaccine or not, President Biden must present America with a plan that starts with, “Americans must work together to control and defeat this virus” and ends with “…we will overcome this crisis just as we have done with so many others, as Americans united in our ‘righteous might’ to act together”.

Number Two:  he must also have an economic plan for Congress to address the impact of COVID-19.  That includes the financial impact on the wages of workers, assistance for the unemployed, and helping small businesses survive.  And it also needs to include a re-evaluation of our healthcare system so that no one is left out, and no one is financially broken by injury or disease.

Number Three:  he must address the United States’ role in improving the environment.  As I write today, the West is on fire, fierce hurricanes are commonplace, and floods and droughts are numerous.  We have changed the world with our pollution.  It is our responsibility to repair that damage, and it’s just as much in our own self-interest as it is the worlds.  We have lost four more years of recovery in the Trump Administration, and in fact gone in “reverse”.  Day one – Biden must put us “in drive” again.

And that’s on day one: one thousand, four hundred-sixty to go.

Battle Lines

Anyone who knows me well enough to hear the music in the background while I write these essays probably can hear the harmonies of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young playing.  They are my “standard”; they have been since the early 1970’s when I wore out two complete vinyl versions of their live album, Four Way Street.   But recently I have spent some time listening to their predecessor bands:  The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield (sorry Graham not so much the Hollies).   

They evolved from the “pop” music, “…I lost my girl” sound of the mid-1960’s, to the psychedelic California valley sound of the later protest generation.  Into their music crept the crises of their time, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement.  And while amazing songs came from their efforts:  Four Dead in Ohio, Find the Cost of Freedom, Almost Cut My Hair, Wooden Ships and more; one song shot through from Buffalo Springfield, to CSNY, and even to last month’s Democratic Convention. Stephen Stills wrote For What It’s Worth, best known for it’s opening line, “There’s something’s happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear”.

What is clear to me is that the battle lines we are drawing today are as stark as those that I remember from the sixties.  As an historian, today seems as divisive and polarized as any in our nations’ past, perhaps even the pre-Civil War era.  As Stills explained:  “…Battle lines are being drawn, nobody’s right, if everybody’s wrong”.  

What’s Going Down

Many of us have considered ourselves part of “the Resistance” to the Trump Administration from the very beginning.  Some marched in Washington the day after the inauguration, many protested against the “Muslim Ban” and “Fine people on both sides” at Charlottesville.  The streets filled with demands to stop child separation at the border, and the deaths of Black people at the hands of the authorities. 

We look with almost frantic despair at the United States’ failure to address the environment:  today the West burns and another hurricane gains strength in the Gulf of Mexico.  The “one hundred year weather event” seems to be happening with annual frequency in all parts of our nation.  Who ever heard of a “derecho” until this decade?

And we do all this in the midst of a national pandemic crisis.  This morning’s “butcher’s bill”:  198,150 Americans dead, over twenty percent of the world’s total.  One side says we must regroup and deal with the disease, the other says it’s all “good”, and the death toll is the price we must pay to protect Wall Street and suburban jobs.  It has turned into a form of class warfare:  if you can afford it, you can avoid COVID-19.  If you can’t, you are an “essential worker” who must take “essential risks”.

We are in an existential crisis:  the very fate of the American experiment seems on the line.  Fifty days from now, we will begin the process of counting the votes to decide who will lead America.  And even that process has been brought into doubt:  one side is doing everything it can to make Americans question the veracity of the election outcome, if Donald Trump is not re-elected.

Everybody’s Wrong

But, my fellow Resistance members, my fellow Democrats, we should never forget this one thing.  We are fighting for the United States of America that WE believe in.  Do not let the “others” abscond with our nation, our symbols, and America’s virtue.  WE are the Patriots, working to fulfill the American dream.

There is an outcry against the idea of “American Exceptionalism”, pointing out the flaws and failures of our past to say that, “there’s nothing exceptional here”.  But the exceptional part of our history is the dream, even though many have tried to subvert that Dream for their own personal gain.  The Dream is the “arc” described by Dr. King, bending inexorably forward towards justice.

America is a nation founded on exceptional goals.  Yes, our founding fathers were full of flaws, the men of their times.  Do not let those flaws blind us to their dreams, and the extensions of those dreams to all peoples.  The American Dream includes Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights, gender equality, welcoming immigrants, and it includes saving the world from our own environmental transgressions. 

The American Flag is our flag.  Do not let it, or our national history and patriotism get subverted to some right-wing talking point.  We are fighting for the heart and soul of America, those exceptional goals represented by the Stars and Stripes.  And whether we stand to honor or kneel to demand it changes, it is symbolic of what we can be. 

What’s That Sound?

Fifty days to save America.   The choice is stark.  We have the opportunity to move towards a “more perfect union” (Mr. Madison, I so love that phrase) or continue towards more division and destruction.  Fifty days:  to determine what the reality of the American experiment will be: forward towards our “exceptional” dreams, or backwards towards our troubled past.  

For what it’s worth – sing songs, carry signs, and march with the flag towards justice:  OUR flag.

There’s so much happening in America. Today’s essay is not about the nineteenth anniversary of 9-11, it’s about a much more recent tragedy. But 9-11 remains important – here’s what I wrote a year ago Eighteen Years Ago. And this is one of my favorite posts from over three years ago – Shanksville.

Mom

My mother was British, born during some of the worst days of World War I and raised in the suburbs of London.  She was educated in the best English traditions, sent to boarding school near home and then to Belgium for “finishing school”.  When she returned to England (and for her, it was always England) she enrolled in the University of London to study British Literature.

Her twenty-first birthday party was in June of 1939, two months before World War II began.  Of the twenty boys who attended that party, all would be dead within two years:  most killed fighting in the Battle of Britain.  My mom, fluent in French from her Belgian schooling, looked to avenge their loss.  She joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s private spy organization.  She spent much of World War II behind enemy lines, taking the battle to Nazi-occupied Europe (More on her story – Mom’s War).

Mom was lucky.  Most members of the SOE didn’t survive the war.  Of the ninety in her particular unit, only six made it through to the end.  

The Table

While Mom married my Dad, a US Army Warrant Officer stationed in London, and came with him to the United States; she never gave up her British citizenship.  And at our dinner table, where discussions were wide ranging and invigorating, there were two topics not open for discussion.  One was religion:  Mom was an ex-communicated Catholic (for marrying my Jewish father) but still maintained her faith.  Others at the table could believe what they wanted, but it wasn’t a “topic” for debate. 

The other was the Royal Family of Great Britain.  Mom looked to King George VI for his solid leadership in World War II.  The Royal Family was as an example for all of the English people during the War, serving the nation with honor and sacrifice.  Perhaps it was made even more poignant, as King George was never supposed to be on the throne.  His brother, the popular Edward VIII, quit the job in 1936 to marry “the woman he loved”, a divorced American.  George was a man “buggering through” the greatest crisis his nation faced.  He, and his family, especially his daughter Queen Elizabeth II, weren’t open to criticism at our table.

Looking back, there was a third topic that no one even thought to broach.  Prime Minister Winston Churchill was only spoken of in revered tones.   Mom actually knew him, spent time in his War Rooms as part of her service.  While the Royal Family was an example of service and strength during the War, it was Churchill who was the glue that held Great Britain together.  

Leadership

Great leaders find a way to reach their followers.  While Franklin Roosevelt was born and raised in privilege, the tragedy of his paralysis to polio, and the courage of his return to national prominence, gave him empathy towards others who struggled.  That empathy came through during the Great Depression and onto the struggle of World War II.

Churchill was also the son of privilege.  And Churchill had tasted early success, and dramatic failures.  He was outcast from the government for almost a decade before World War II, another “failed” leader of the First World War.  So when he returned after the start of the Second War, it was a man who understood failure, and success.  He knew England was going to suffer.  Bombs would rain down, casualty lists mount, and invasion seemed inevitable.  He did not sugarcoat the danger, and after the miracle of the Dunkirk evacuation he spoke to the British people.  He told them the truth:

“…We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…”

And after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’ long awaited entry into the War, Churchill didn’t tell his staff to “stay calm”.  That was a poster on the wall.  What Churchill did say was “keep buggering on”.  And that’s what they all did, to the end of the war and final victory.

After the War the British wanted to move onto peace, and Churchill was dramatically voted out of office.  A few years later he returned to leadership once again, serving as Prime Minister in the early 1950’s.  But his service of leadership during World War II would be his “shining” moment; never forgotten.

Failure

Yesterday, President of the United States Donald Trump invoked Churchill and Roosevelt to defend his own lying to the American people about the danger of the COVID pandemic.  Mr. Trump said:

“As Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ We’re doing very well. As the British government advised the British people in the face of World War II, ‘Keep calm and carry on.’ That’s what I did…When Hitler was bombing London, Churchill, a great leader, would oftentimes go to a roof in London and speak. And he always spoke with calmness. He said we have to show calmness. No, we did it the right way. We’ve done a job like nobody.”

Churchill and Roosevelt were honest with their people.  Both spoke frankly about the dangers they faced.  They did not “pretend” that the Depression or the War would “go away”.  And they did not sow dissension in their own peoples:  they both worked to unify their nations in a common cause of sacrifice and purpose.  

Donald Trump knew that the pandemic would be “the greatest crisis of his Administration” in January of 2020.  He spent the next six weeks telling the American people that there wasn’t a problem.  It wasn’t a Churchillian “keep buggering on”, or even a poster slogan “keep calm”. And it wasn’t FDR’s “only thing to fear”.  It was pretend: pretend that the nation wasn’t facing an existential crisis.  That pretense cost thousands of American lives.

Mom and Dad

Leadership is not hiding problems, or pretending they will go away.  Leadership is preparing for the challenge, and raising the nation to respond to crisis.  It is exactly what Churchill and Roosevelt did.  And precisely what Donald Trump failed to do.

Mom and Dad passed away a few years ago.  But if we were all around the dining room table once again, with Dad at one end and Mom at the other, we would absolutely be discussing our national crisis.  But no one would dare put Winston Churchill and Donald Trump on the same level.  

If they did, the SOE Agent might rise up and strike again.

Bill Murray leads the chant in Meatballs – It Just Doesn’t Matter

This Week

Yesterday we heard tapes of Donald Trump talking to Washington Post columnist Bob Woodward. Back in January and February, we heard him tell Woodward how dangerous and contagious the COVID-19 virus was.  He understood how bad it would be, but he took no action.  He told the American people that it wasn’t a big deal.  And more importantly, he didn’t take scientific advise to get control of the virus.  He wanted to “play it down” so he didn’t “create a panic” (NBC).  

He let the pandemic get hold in America when he could have slowed it. How many folks died? Studies demonstrate that had we closed two weeks earlier, 54,000 fewer would have died. And that was in May, just as we reached 100,000 deaths. We will hit 200,000 deaths this week (NPR).

This week The Atlantic magazine ran an article outlining President Trump’s view of American soldiers as “losers and suckers”.  It was confirmed by multiple sources, now checked by several other media outlets including Fox News.  He was quoted as saying he didn’t want disabled veterans in a parade, “…no one wants to see that”.  And he stood with General John Kelly at Kelly’s own son’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery, and asked the grieving father, “I just don’t get it.  What was in it for him?”

Oh, and we also found out yesterday that the Attorney General of the United States is using the Justice Department to step into a lawsuit against the President, filed by a woman who claims he sexually assaulted her in 1996.  If Bill Barr is successful, the United States will pay for the President’s legal fees, and if he loses the civil suit, the United States will pay his penalties (NPR).

It just doesn’t matter.

Protests and Elections

When the President was frightened and scurried down to the Situation Room because of protests near the White House, he called out the National Guard.  And when he wanted to do a “photo op” outside of St. John’s Church on the other side of Lafayette Park a few days later, he sent those federal forces to “put down” a legal and peaceful protest with chemical weapons and horses.  

The President has stated that voting by mail will benefit his opponent in the 2020 election.  Therefore he is constantly, without any evidence, claiming that voting by mail will be fraudulent.  He is allowing his Postmaster General (who has his own ethical issues) to slow the mail, so that many Americans lose faith in the Postal Service.  And finally he is undermining American’s trust in an electoral result that isn’t “final” the night of the election. He knows that mail-in ballots will take longer than one night to count. 

We read the President’s words telling the President of Ukraine that he could have government aid, if Ukraine investigated the President’s likely opponent in the 2020 election.  It was in the transcript the White House itself issued. We didn’t even need Colonel Vindman:  the President’s own words said he did it.

It just doesn’t matter.

Threats

American constantly watched the President denigrate the American Intelligence agencies, even taking the “word” of Russian President Vladimir Putin over his own advisors.  When presented with evidence that Russian troops were paying bounties to the Taliban in Afghanistan for American deaths, Trump simply denied that it happened.  And when the Department of Homeland Security wanted to issue a report saying that Russia was the biggest foreign threat to the integrity American elections, the report was mysteriously “held” by the White House.

His administration made the conscious policy decision to take children from their parents at the border for the purpose of “deterring” future migrants. They then “lost” children in the bureaucracy of the American Government. Trump lied about it for months, and then reversed and allowed that it was the wrong thing to do.  But it didn’t end, and he asked to re-invigorate the program again.  One reason the United States is sanctioning members of the World Court in The Hague today, is that they may be considering charging the Administration with crimes against humanity.

It just doesn’t matter.

Laws and Lies

The President has lied to the American people more than 20,000 times (WAPO).  He and his children are profiting from the taxpayers, charging exorbitant fees to the government for the President’s own security.  The Secret Service has paid Trump properties more than $760000 in golf cart rental alone (Golfnewsnet.com).

His daughter and his son-in-law were unable to pass the security measures put in place to gain Top Secret access.  His own staff told him they shouldn’t get the clearances.  But the President ordered them to be granted access, against advice, and the Chief of Staff and the White House Counsel both wrote memos noting their objections (Atlantic).

And when the President decided to use the White House and the Rose Garden as part of the Republican National Convention, defying the Hatch Act, the law that forbids using government funds and property for political purposes, he did it anyway.

Guess what:  it just doesn’t matter.

Shooting on 5^th Avenue

It just doesn’t matter – Trump voters are going to vote for Trump no matter what he may do or say.  Then-candidate Trump was right:  he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and no one would care.  Well, at least partially right: his supporters wouldn’t care.  

Even today, after the Bob Woodward revelations and listening to Trump’s own voice acknowledging the lies he was telling the American people, I heard a former Republican Congressman intone that, “this might be the thing that shocks people into waking up and turning on the President”.  

Are you kidding?  They’ll listen to his voice, and still say it’s a lie. 

It just doesn’t matter.  The only thing that matters is that everyone else goes out and votes against Trump in November.  Then the United States will have a new President.

And what Trump thinks of that, well:

It just doesn’t matter.

Add to the List

It was just another ugly story of American politics.  Last year, E. Jean Carroll, a newspaper columnist and book author, accused Donald J. Trump of sexually assaulting her in a department store dressing room in 1996.  She took her place in line with the other twenty-five women who have accused him of sexual misconduct (Business Insider).

The statute of limitations for sexual assault in the state of New York is twenty years.  That’s put’s criminal charges off the table, and Carroll knew that when she revealed the incident in 2019 as part of her book on women in America.  As the New York Times noted at the time:

“She also thought of the women she had advised over the years to buck up, to speak up, to go to the police or “move everything out when he’s at work”.  “I felt like a fraud,” she said, because she had taken no such action herself. By the time she submitted her book proposal, in May 2018, she’d rethought it as part memoir, with the Trump allegation included.”

President Trump responded to her accusation in typical fashion.

I’ll say it with great respect: No. 1, she’s not my type. No. 2, it never happened. It never happened, OK?” Trump told the news outlet. When asked if he thought Carroll was lying, the president said she “totally” was. “I don’t know anything about her. I know nothing about this woman…She is—it’s just a terrible thing that people can make statements like that” (Daily Beast).

Defamation

With criminal charges unavailable, Ms. Carroll sued Mr. Trump for defamation of character because he called her a liar.  She showed real damage caused by the accusation, as she was fired from her job at Elle Magazine soon after.  She said when the case was filed November of 2019:

“I am filing this on behalf of every woman who has ever been harassed, assaulted, silenced, or spoken up only to be shamed, fired, ridiculed and belittled,” Carroll said in a statement. “No person in this country should be above the law — including the president”(WAPO).

The lawsuit was brought in New York State Courts.

Mr. Trump used his position as President to try to avoid the case. He claimed, as he has in the ongoing Manhattan District Attorney’s investigation, that he is immune from prosecution or civil suit while he remains President.  However, the United States Supreme Court recently reaffirmed their decision in Clinton v Jones that the President can still be sued in civil court and investigated while in office.

Federal Case

So Mr. Trump might have to answer in New York Court for calling Ms. Carroll a liar.  But there’s a new twist in the case. The United States Department of Justice filed to move the case to Federal Court, and to replace defendant Donald Trump with the United States of America.  You read that right, instead of a state case of Carroll v Trump, if the Justice Department is successful, the case will become a federal case of Carroll v United States.

The basis of the Justice argument is that the President was “acting in his official capacity” when he called her a liar. That makes the lawsuit against the President and the United States, rather than the individual Donald Trump.  If the Justice filing is successful it will make Carroll’s task near impossible, as the Federal Government is generally immune from defamation cases.  

And since the Department of Justice defends the United States in Court, the American taxpayer will foot the bill for the Defense, and even pay the fine if they lose. Not only would Donald Trump be “off the hook” legally, he’d be in the clear financially.

The Arguments

The “cold hand” of Attorney General Bill Barr is evident in the Justice Department move, acting again in his “unofficial capacity” as the President’s lawyer and defender.  The Federal reasoning is based on three issues.  First, since Donald Trump was in fact President when he called her a liar, it is an “act” of the United States.  On that basis, then when Clinton got together with Monica Lewinsky, the whole United States got…well, you get the drift.

The second “pillar”, and perhaps more realistic, is that but for being the President of the United States, Donald Trump wouldn’t be facing this lawsuit.  But Trump was sued many times before he ran for President.  In fact, Trump and his business has been sued more than 3,500 times.  Lawsuits are nothing new to the Trump’s, whether he’s the President or not.

And the third is another variation on the Constitutional question of whether a state lawsuit puts an “undue burden” on the President, preventing him from doing his job.  While this issue has been addressed by the Supreme Court now three times (Nixon v United States, Clinton v Jones, Trump v Vance), this variation is just different enough that the Justice Department will try, try again.

The Fixer

And there is a fourth, and perhaps most important result of the Justice filing.  With the entry of the Federal government in the case, all of these issues must be resolved in the Federal Court of the Southern District of New York before the case can proceed in the New York State Courts.  And of course, whatever SDNY decides can be appealed.  

So what Bill Barr provides his “client” the President is time.  Time to get past the election, and putting the burden of time and money on his accuser.  

It’s just another “fix” from the ultimate “fixer”, our Attorney General of the United States, Bill Barr.

I cannot write about Donald Trump today.  After his Labor Day “press conference” turned rant, there is nothing really new I can say.  If after watching him there, folks can still support him, then there is no persuading them.

But I can write about denial. 

Denial, Ohio

There is a great commercial about illegal drug use.  It features the town of “Denial, Ohio” where the kids would never surf the medicine cabinets for pharmaceuticals, or get high.  They are too “busy” doing “good things”.  The tag line is, don’t live in Denial.

America is now not just a land of two political parties, but of two sets of basic facts.  We cannot even agree on how many people have died from COVID-19.  There are a significant number of our citizens who believe that it is all a “hoax”; just as they believe that Trump’s cooperation with Russia was a “hoax”, and his recent comments about the military is a “hoax”.  

We can’t even agree (anymore) about the cause of the Civil War. A war that ended one hundred and fifty-five years ago is now an object of controversy.  Some now seem to believe that slavery wasn’t the issue.  They live in Denial.

Negotiate

As a local teacher’s union President, I learned about negotiations.  After months of talking, with neither side moving an inch, both sides would share the cost of hiring mediators.  These are professionals who would come in and take both negotiating “teams” through a series of exercises.  If they were good at their job, the “teams” would re-discover the many areas where they actually had common goals.  The mediators would work through those commonalities to reach small agreements.  They would build on those successes to finally deal with the “big” issues, usually time and money.

Sometimes it worked, and we would mediate our way to a contract.  Sometimes the battles prevented even those small agreements, and negotiations broke down.  Then a combination of factors broke the stalemate. Community pressure on one side and teacher concern for their jobs on the other would ultimately result in some kind of deal.  While there were times when we cleared our classrooms out and picketed the School Board, our local union never had to actually “go out” on strike.  

We are still a nation of commonalities that, for the moment, we are refusing to recognize.  Neither Red nor Blue has a monopoly on supporting the military, or even first responders.  But somehow one side has claimed it all for themselves, and the other side has allowed itself to be maneuvered into saying that the police are all bad?  No one on either side can reasonably believe those absolutes:  that all military is good no matter what, and all police are bad no matter what.  That’s just stupid.  But here we are.

We are a nation in need of mediation.  

Extremists

But back when I was in the local union leadership, I also understood that there would always be those who couldn’t be happy.  No matter how “good” a contract we managed to get, there was always the “rump caucus” of teachers who felt like the negotiating team “gave away” too much.  And there were also community members who felt that teachers were always “overpaid” and “under-worked”.  Those vocal extremes could make life miserable, but seldom contributed to solving problems.

And America is the same way.  There is a significant number of Americans, perhaps as much as twenty-percent, who have embraced a set of facts so far outside the norm that there is no commonality to work towards.  They will never be satisfied, and should Donald Trump lose, they will continue to make life miserable.

And on the other side, there are a significant number of Americans, many of them younger folks, who don’t believe that anyone working in “the political system” is honest, or acting in good faith.  They have no belief in the goodness of America, and don’t see the similarities that all Americans share.

Things in Common

So who are the mediators in a world in Denial?

Red or Blue, Trumper or Never, there is a commonality of Americans.  We want a good life, and a better life for our children.  A better life includes a climate that’s safe, a government that protects, and a wage that allows for more than just work.   We all want to worship, or not, as we choose, and not have someone else’s beliefs forced upon us.  Isn’t that a funny thought:  everyone wants religious freedom, but many want others to live by the tenets of “their” beliefs.

We need to leave “Denial” and get into mediation.  It’s the only way that America survives.  But that’s not happening until after November – so in the meantime, try to find the little successes in your circle of life.  Believe it or not, we all share some things in common; whether we wear a “MAGA” hat, or a “Resist” t-shirt.  

Don’t live in Denial.

Math Block

I was a social studies teacher, not a math teacher.  And, to be honest, math was never my strongest subject anyway.  I might blame my teachers – Mrs. Hibberd at Van Buren Junior High, who shoved me up against a locker for reading in her math class instead of doing homework, or that fateful junior year at Wyoming High School when the Algebra II teacher had a breakdown, and a series of substitutes left me with a ‘C’ in class and bereft of skills.  But really, I just wasn’t a math guy. 

So when I start calculating, it always deserves intense scrutiny and some skepticism.  There’s the fair warning.  But I have found some disturbing numbers, that don’t require skill in calculus to understand.  In our current era of fake news and obfuscations, statistics are being used to cloud a whole range of issues.  

Foggy Math

For example, the White House claims to have created the greatest number of jobs in American history.  And it might well be true.  In January of 2020, 132 million Americans had full-time employment.  In April during the “shutdown”, that number dipped to 114 million, a loss of 18 million jobs.  By August, 123 million Americans had full time jobs (Trading Economics).  So the White House can claim that nine million jobs have been “created” in just the past few months.  That’s as long as they don’t take any blame for the eighteen million lost.

But jobs numbers are always tricky; full time, part time, gig work, folks not working but still receiving pay, and on and on.  While figures may not be lying, they certainly can be twisted and misleading.

Butcher’s Bill

COVID numbers are also not as simple as they appear.  Today’s “butcher’s bill”:  6.46 million positive tests in the United States, and 193,253 deaths (Corona-Virus).  Just on that number alone, three percent of those diagnosed with COVID-19 die.

But we know that testing figures are low, and that the rate of infection is probably much higher.  So here’s where the “figuring and lying” comes in – but I think it still has validity.

Let’s say that the testing figure is off by an order of 3, meaning that at least 20 million Americans have been infected with COVID.  And while it’s likely that many more people have died of COVID than just the 193000 listed, let’s simplify that figure.  20 million infected to 200000 dead – or 1% of those infected have died.

Herd immunity is when enough of the population has been infected or immunized with a disease that it no longer spreads from person to person.  It assumes that you can get a disease once and then have immunity from that disease for a long time.  While full “herd immunity” is in the ninety percent plus range, generally gaining “herd immunity” for the COVID-19 virus is considered to be around sixty percent of the US population.  That’s roughly 200 million folks infected (or vaccinated if and when a vaccine arrives). 

If the policy of the United States of America is to get to “herd immunity”without a vaccine, then we have to let at least 200 million people become infected.  If the death rate remains at 1%, that means 2 million people will die from COVID-19.

Debate

As we approach 200,000 deaths in the next week or so, we need to have a discussion about what America wants to do.  We can “go back” to the “good old days” of just eight months ago, let COVID spread quickly, and suffer the consequences.  Or we can try to maintain control of the spread and hope that a vaccine will allow for a less fatal way of reaching some kind of “herd immunity”. 

It’s not just an academic debate topic. What the US should do about COVID is a real life decision, with moral and real life consequences.  It’s one that needs to be discussed in “the clear”, not quietly decided by a few advisors in the White House.  And it certainly shouldn’t be a result of incompetent governing.  If the US is going to allow the deaths of millions of its citizens, at least we ought to know it’s going to happen.

Track Coach

If you’ve read Trump World very often, you’ve read about the experiences of my life.  One of the great adventures and honors of my career was to be a high school track and cross country coach for forty years.  It’s not an unusual thing.  There are thousands of high schools, and thousands of coaches at those schools.  And I didn’t coach by myself.  I always worked alongside other wonderful coaches.  As coaches of young people, all of us took on a responsibility of leadership.

Our athletes looked to us to develop their abilities.  Sure they wanted to run faster, jump higher, and throw farther (citius, altius, fortius).  We had a duty to train them physically, and give them the physical and technical abilities to perform.  But that was just the basics.  As a coach, if you couldn’t do those things, the “Dummy’s Guide to Coaching” stuff, then you shouldn’t be out there.

Listen to Lead

But our athletes also looked to us to show them how to handle the much more difficult mental aspects of the sport.   It was the pole vaulter who lost his confidence, or the distance runner who wouldn’t risk winning.  Those were the athletes who needed more than just a workout or a technique guide:  they needed coaches to teach them about themselves.

It was knowing when to get a sprinter to relax (you run so much faster “loose” rather than “tight”) or how to fire up a shot putter to explode through the ball.  We had to listen to our charges, to hear what they were thinking and what they needed.  And the athletes would follow our lead.  If I lost my cool, they would lose theirs.  If I hung my head in defeat, they were done.  But if I took adversity in stride, and moved onto the next event, so would they. 

Leadership in our little world of coaching was apparent.  The coaches of other teams that were constantly looking to place blame, had teams that blamed each other.  And the coaches who asked their teams to sacrifice for each other, had teams that performed far above their “abilities”.   

Divide or Unite

The United States isn’t a high school track team.  But a lot of the same principles apply. The President of the United States has certain tasks that are basic to the job.  Upholding the Constitution, defending the nation, honoring those that have sacrificed:  are all part of the “Dummy’s Guide to the Presidency” stuff.  It is the level of basic competency, if the President cannot do that, then they shouldn’t be in office.

And the President, like that high school coach, leads by example.  When the President devalues a class of people, then those that follow him do the same.  And when he sees the nation as “his” country and “the other” country, he divides people so that there is no common purpose.  

Kenosha

President Trump went to Kenosha, Wisconsin on Tuesday. He emphasized his support for law enforcement, and his sympathy for those who lost their businesses.  Then he attacked protestors, making little distinction between those that protest and those that riot.  And he built a “strawman” argument of nefarious groups, financed by shadowy sources, who come in to create turmoil.   He ignored the reason why folks are protesting or rioting:  he failed to communicate with “that side” of the issue.

Joe Biden went to Kenosha on Thursday.  He spent most of his day listening rather than speaking.  Biden listened to victims and protestors.  He listened to business owners and government officials.  And he listened to law enforcement.  When he spoke, he talked about how they could get past this moment, and find ways to work together to begin to solve the core problems.

He made it clear he was against rioting, looting and destruction.  But he also recognized that the destruction was an outgrowth of racial inequities.  Begin to solve the inequalities, and the riots and looting will also be solved.

Which Team?

Just like those two high school track teams on the field, we have two examples of national leadership.  One “coach” is exhorting his team, telling them to beat the other team, and saying that the distance runners are weak and the sprinters are strong.  The other “coach” is challenging his team to perform their best, and asking the sprinters to cheer on the distance runners as they circle the track.  One “coach” is dividing his squad, playing favorites and creating scapegoats. The other is uniting all of his athletes to achieve greater goals for themselves, and the team. 

Which team do you want to be on?

Immunity

Vaccines

I grew up in the “heyday” of vaccines.  I have a smallpox scar on my arm.  Every American was vaccinated for smallpox until the early 1970’s.  By then the disease was so rare that unless you were travelling somewhere in the world where it was still prevalent, you didn’t get it.  Today, there is no “natural” smallpox in the world.  It requires human transmission, and so many people were vaccinated, there was no one left to transmit it.

There’s still some around, in the biological warfare centers, and at the Centers for Disease Control.  But the disease that ravaged the Revolutionary Army, the frontier, and scarred and killed so many of our forefathers, is gone.

And I was a “test dummy” for the oral polio vaccine, developed by Albert Sabin.  He lived just down the street, right across from Mom’s good friend Maggie Miller.  The first major US test of his oral vaccine was in the Cincinnati Public Schools. I remember stories of lining up at Sabin’s back door to get it – I was four at the time though, so that memory might not be exactly true.  

However, like most kids of my time, I got the measles, and scarlet fever, and mumps.  Those were “the risks” of growing up in those days.  Somehow I avoided the chicken pox until an eighth grader in my class managed to infect me . I won’t call him out, but he was a pole vaulter. I was thirty-one, but I managed to survive that and the rest without long-term impact.

Too Good?

Now we have vaccines for those diseases as well.  They are so effective, that the few outlier negative results from the vaccines are greater than damage from the actual diseases.  In our short-term memory society, we forget what those diseases did. Some focus only on the “dangers” of the vaccines.  We are close to wiping out polio (three nations still have “natural” outbreaks). But there are measles outbreaks, and mumps outbreaks are actually increasing in the United States after several years of only a few cases.

Today we also have a vaccine for versions of the “flu”.  But there’s a problem.  The “flu” isn’t one virus it’s multiple viruses.  So a “flu” shot might protect you from one version, but not another, and so folks say: “I got the shot, but I still got the flu”.  It doesn’t mean the vaccine didn’t work but it didn’t work for the version you got. 

But that has been the example that everyone uses to “prove” that “vaccines don’t work”.   And there is a growing number of folks who are “anti-vaxxers” who blame vaccines for all sorts of side effects.  There is little scientific evidence of that, but the seeds of doubt are sown.  Some parents are leaving their children unprotected, making the mumps, measles and chicken pox more prevalent childhood diseases again.  And while some vaccines do have side effects, the impacts of the diseases themselves can be much worse.

Rushing for COVID

Today there is a rush to develop a vaccine for COVID-19.  We are in a hurry; the disease is rampant and deadly for the vulnerable.  But there are all sorts of dangers of “hurrying” the vaccine, only one of which is that the first vaccines might be only fifty-percent effective.  That works for epidemiologists:  fifty-percent protection is a whole lot better than none.  But in a society that already questions the established vaccinations like polio and measles, a vaccine that will “fail” half the time isn’t likely to be accepted.

And there’s a second problem.  There’s a movement among some today saying that we should just allow COVID to “burn through” America.  Let everyone get sick, and those that get over it will be “done”.  It’s not unlike my childhood when we “all” got measles, mumps, and the rest.  But we are just learning the long-term impacts of COVID even on those who are “healthy”.  We don’t even know that having COVID once creates a long-term immunity.  Is it the measles, a one-time deal, or the flu? 

Herd Immunity

And if it does create a long-term immunity, then according to them, we will get “herd immunity” and we can go about our life.  Eventually there might be a ninety-nine percent effective vaccine, and that could protect the most at risk.  The big concern with this “attitude”:  to reach “herd immunity” it will require sixty percent of the population to be infected. That’s near 200 million.  With a fatality rate is just one percent (and the trend is closer to three) that would be two million dead.

The President’s newest science advisor, Dr. Scott Atlas, is an advocate of herd immunity.  And while there has been no “announcement”, changes in policy from the White House and the Centers for Disease Control seems to be moving towards that strategy as well.

The alternative to “herd immunity” is what most of our epidemiologists have advised:  masks, distancing, keep places where people gather to small numbers and avoid “mass spreader” events.  This keeps people from getting COVID, and puts America in a “new reality” until an effective vaccine is developed.  And since only a small percentage of Americans would actually get the disease, a much smaller number will die.  Instead of two million, if we followed the advise, we never would have gotten to the 185,000 today, or 200,000 in the next couple of weeks.

Sacrifice

It is a legitimate policy question.  Should we work for herd immunity to regain our national economy and “life”? Or should we keep the disease in check until a viable vaccine is available?  But we do need to call it out:  getting to herd immunity means a huge sacrifice of our elderly, and our sick, and our vulnerable.  Yes, the economy will continue, and little Johnny can play soccer or football or run races and everyone can come and watch.  But many will be sacrificed, including perhaps, even little Johnny.

Hope

I’ve written a lot about the Trump/Biden race in the past few weeks.  In fact, it seems like I’ve mostly rotated between the political campaigns, COVID and shootings.  And they all seem to get darker and darker.  The campaign, as we all know, just keeps on getting ugly. No matter where you stand on policing:  someone getting shot and paralyzed or killed, is just bad.  COVID is like a thick fog hanging over all of us, all the time.

And here I am again, getting dark and sad.

So today I am going to write about hope.  As dark as things seem at the moment, there is always light, because there is always hope.  And that hope is based on people.  Regardless of how folks feel about politics, or COVID, or what’s going on in the streets, there are still a lot of people of  “good heart”.

Find A Dog 

My wife Jennifer and I work with a group called Lost Pet Recovery.  This group is a bunch of folks who gain expertise, then go out and find lost dogs to return them to their owners.  While LPR takes donations, it’s actually all volunteer and the “recoveries” are at no fee.  Jenn’s really involved (I just help out with paperwork occasionally), and has spent many nights sitting in the pickup truck, waiting for a lost dog to find its way into her trap.  

It’s a high tech operation, with cameras, computer mapping and tracing:  but in the end it’s about people who want to get dogs back to their homes.  And it can be an emotional roller coaster.  Yesterday in the wee-dark-hours of the morning one dog they’d spent weeks tracking finally was trapped and returned to its owner.  But by mid-afternoon, another dog they tried to follow for two weeks was found twenty-five miles away from where he was lost, killed on the side of State Route 23.  

The “good hearted” people of Lost Pet Recovery will mourn for one dog and owner, and rejoice for the other.  And it doesn’t matter about politics or illness.  COVID is just one more problem to work around, as they relentlessly look for the next dog.  

Bosco

As I said, my involvement is much more casual than Jenn’s.  I’ll drive, and haul traps around, but I don’t have the patience to sit all night waiting for a dog to appear out of the woods or bushes.  But I did get involved in one case, closer to home.  There was a major accident on Interstate 70 one Friday afternoon, just a few miles from our house.  A big Yellow Lab bolted from one of the wrecked cars and managed to survive running across six lanes of rush hour traffic, vanishing into the woods alongside the highway.

The driver was beat up in the crash, but checked out OK and was sent home.  But his dog, Bosco, was still in the woods, and Jenn took on the job for LPR.  She tracked Bosco for two nights, while the owner commuted back and forth to his home in Dayton, trying to take care of all the problems caused by the wreck.  On Saturday evening Jenn, the owner and some of his family were sitting in a Big Sandy Superstore parking lot near the woods where Bosco was hiding, waiting to see if he’d go in the trap.

I decided we all needed dinner, and showed up in my Jeep with pizza.  As we were all eating from the back of the Jeep, the owner and family couldn’t help but notice the “Biden” sticker on the bumper.

Pizza not Politics

We really didn’t talk about politics as we munched Creno’s pepperoni pizza.  But they seemed surprised by a Democrat, and the conversation flirted all around the edges.  We all told our stories, about growing up, work and life.  In the end Biden or Trump didn’t matter.  We were all focused on a more important goal:  Bosco.  And we got help from all sorts of people who called in spotting’s of his location, and then stayed clear of the scene.

This story has a happy ending.  The owner was able to coax Bosco out of the woods, and with some quiet conversation, the dog realized that it was his “Dad”.  While the traps were there, they weren’t needed, and Bosco went home.

Good Hearts

Bosco didn’t care about the bumper sticker.  Neither did his “Dad”.  We weren’t Republicans or Democrats, we were folks on a common mission – reunite a family.

I have no idea about the politics of the rest of the LPR “volunteers”.  I don’t care, I know they are dedicated to a good task, and have good hearts. In our partisan world, it’s important to recognize that we don’t always have to be defined by the bumper sticker, or hat, or yard sign.  In the world of dog recovery, and a lot of the rest of day-to-day life, there are still folks with good hearts, regardless of their politics. 

That’s something we all should remember in the sixty-two days until Election Day.

Historic Loss

Deaths matter.  Over 100,000 American soldiers have died in battle since the end of World War II.  Over 100,000 American soldiers died in World War I.  In only two wars in United States history have more than 100,000 been killed:  the Civil War and World War II.  

We honor all of those deaths every year on Memorial Day.  We respect those that we have lost, and we expect that our leaders will be more than careful about putting our current soldiers in harms way.  They are our children, our parents, our brothers and sisters and our friends.  Their lives are important.

Sometime in the next couple of weeks, the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic will reach 200,000 American lives.  More Americans have died from COVID than died in every battle and war in the past seventy-five years since World War II.  More than Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq and all the rest combined.  They died in only eight months.  And, if it were a world contest, then the United States is “the big loser” in deaths.  We’re approaching 190,000 this week.  Brazil is in second with 121,000, and India in third with 65,000.  Even though no one believes that China and Russia’s numbers are accurate, this is NOT a statistics where having “the most” is a good thing.  

Politics and Life

Unfortunately for America, COVID-19, like much else in American life, is cloaked in politics.  The US response to COVID is the crucial issue of the 2020 Presidential election.  If you’re for Donald Trump, then China “gave” us the virus, and we responded as well as we could.  Now we should just get back to living our “regular” lives, be sad for the losses, and learn to deal with the virus and wait for “herd immunity” or a vaccine.

If you’re for Joe Biden, then the virus might well have been controlled from the outset.  The US might have responded in a way to restrict the infection rate.  Perhaps many of those two hundred thousand would be alive, and the US would be on the way to recovery like many of the European countries are today.  Biden would have us re-group, gain control of the disease, and then move forward.

The Calculus

Frankly both sides are vested in what happens to COVID.  The President is doing everything he can to convince America it’s all “OK”.  He’s reducing testing (so we don’t see increases)  and claiming a miracle cure (that the FDA had to walk back in the next couple of days). And this week the CDC released a report saying that people who are already weakened die from COVID (duh). 

 (On that report, it’s important to remember that people who get COVID often die from something else – pneumonia primarily – and that is listed as a “cause of death” along with COVID.  But without COVID there wouldn’t have been pneumonia, and the patient would be alive).

I don’t believe that the Biden side wants more deaths to continue to prove Trump’s incompetence.  They are calling for a more logical approach, a proven scientific method of controlling an epidemic virus.   Yes, it works into their political calculus as well. Aren’t they lucky?

Mourning the Dead

And while COVID is a critical issue, it isn’t the only one.  We as a nation are focused on whether Black lives are valued, and how to keep order in our streets.  Our divisions are so real that there are literal fights occurring between protestors and pickup truck drivers in Portland (full disclosure, I own a pickup truck too).  So, I hope both sides are worried about the state of our nation, so rancorous and divided. 

On September 11^th, there’s going to be the usual moments.  We will all be preparing for 9-11 remembrances, minutes of silence at times that planes struck, solemn bells rung at Ground Zero, flowers laid at the Monument in Shanksville, Pennsylvania and the Memorial at the Pentagon.  We will mourn the loss of the firemen, and the policemen, and the regular people working in the Towers and the Pentagon, or flying on the planes.  2,997 died that day, and we will rightfully observe the loss.

As Abraham Lincoln said about such ceremonies, “it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this”.   But while we are preparing for the nineteenth anniversary of 9-11, we should be mindful of the current milestone we will be reaching.  Somewhere around that date, the two hundred thousandth person will die from COVID-19 in the United States.

#Honor200000

Whether you are a Republican or Democrat, a Trumper, Never-Trumper, Biden fan or something else, we should all pause to recognize the loss WE as a nation, have had in our own lives in the past eight months.  We will pause at 8:46 and 9:03.  And we should pause again at 9:37 and 10:03.  Those deserved moments are the times when planes crashed into the buildings or courageous passengers flew one into the ground.  

But perhaps at noon on September 11^th, we should pause one more time, for those we’ve lost in this ongoing American tragedy.  It’s not about politics.  It’s to recognize our ongoing sacrifice, and our continuing grief.

Texas Hold‘em

Texas Hold’em Poker has become the game of choice for American casinos.  Players are dealt two “hole” cards only they can see.  Then a total of five “community” cards are placed up on the table.  Bets are placed after the hole cards, the first two community cards (called the “flop”), and then each of the last two community cards (the “turn” and the “river”).  That makes the stakes much higher.

At some point in the game, players determine when it’s time to bet their stake, their entire amount of cash.  They shove all of their chips into the pot.  It’s called going “all in”, and it’s the ultimate bet in poker.  “All in” means its win or go home.  “All in” might mean you think you have an unbeatable hand, but it might also mean you are bluffing to get enough money to get back in the game.  Win with the cards or win with the bluff, it’s about risking everything on one play.

Going to Kenosha

President Donald Trump announced that he is going to Kenosha, Wisconsin on Tuesday.  Kenosha is the town where Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by a police officer from point-blank range.  The policeman held the back of Blake’s shirt as he did it.   There have been protests in Kenosha every night since.  Last week, a seventeen-year old boy-vigilante came from out-of-state to “protect property”.  He was carrying a semi-automatic weapon, and killed two and wounded two more.  

Saturday night a man wearing the hat of a far-right protest group, “Patriot Pride”, was killed in Portland, Oregon.  This was after a night of clashes between Trump supporters and protestors against police violence, including assaults with trucks, protestors using pepper spray, and attacks with paint ball guns.

But President Trump will draw the focus to Kenosha.  He’s going there to “talk to law enforcement”.  

His presence in Kenosha will draw protestors from – everywhere.  The essence of the Trump position is that while there may be a few aberrant police officers, nothing is wrong with “the system”.  The alternative view:  there is acceptance in law enforcement of the arbitrary shooting of black men and women and somehow their lives are worth less than others.  And for proof of that theory – they offer a list of names of those killed by police that ranges back decades, and ends today at the shooting of Jacob Blake.  Tomorrow – it’s hard to say.

Gasoline on a Fire

So Donald Trump going into a city in crisis is likely to create trouble.  The Mayor of Kenosha and the Governor of Wisconsin, both Democrats, asked the President not to come.  The protestors against the police are already there, and Trump’s presence will bring more.  The Trump supporters are also there, and Trump’s arrival will bring many, many more.  It’s a law enforcement nightmare – whatever side of the crisis you support.  

It will be gasoline on a fire – and it will create a whole new crisis in a place already in turmoil.

As a twenty-year old Field Coordinator for the Carter/Mondale campaign in 1976, I was impressed with the number of federal agents that were mobilized for a visit by candidate Carter.  Not just the Secret Service detail travelling with Jimmy Carter, but dozens of local agents, and dozens more agents from other Federal agencies were part of the overall protective detail.  And when the sitting President, Gerald Ford came into town, those numbers doubled again.

Now forty-four years later, I’m sure those numbers have only increased.  

So a Presidential visit to Kenosha won’t cause a threat to Donald Trump.  The Secret Service won’t allow that to happen.  What they will do is put a cover of Federal protection on the fire for the time he is there.  But the Presidential presence is fuel is on the fire, and a Trump visit will draw gasoline from all sides to the streets of Kenosha.  While he’s there, the city will be locked down.  But when he leaves and the cover comes off:  it’s a recipe for disaster.

Place Your Bet

And maybe that’s exactly what the Trump Campaign needs.  No matter what they say, Americans recognize that their COVID-19 response has failed. The Administration even tried to mask the failure with a new CDC study showing that most of those who died of COVID had pre-existing conditions, as if to say the lives of 120,000,000 Americans are forfeit already, so get over it. 

The campaign that Trump wanted to run, based on a booming economy, has collapsed, regardless of the inflated Wall Street numbers.  The reality of COVID unemployment rates and losses in entertainment, travel, and other industries are still growing.  The sole strategy left for them is to try to convince Americans that only Donald Trump can control the violence in the streets, an echo of Richard Nixon’s “law and order” campaign of 1968.  

As ugly as it may seem, violence in the streets, in Portland, Kenosha and other American cities, is Donald Trump’s friend.  As his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said in Meet the Press, there isn’t violence in, “Donald Trump’s America,” just in “Democrat” America.  The Trump Campaign is “all-in” for violence in America’s cities.  They are betting it mobilizes the suburbs to come out for Trump.

Of course, he is running for President of the United States, not just “Donald Trump’s America”.  And he has been President of the United States for the past three and a half years.  But Trump fails to take any responsibility for “Democrat” cities.  They, and their large minority populations, aren’t a part of his America.  

And that’s the problem.

Labels Matter

Labels matter:  don’t accept the “Democrat” insult.  I am a member of the Democratic Party, and that makes me a Democrat.  But the right wing insult – “Democrat” Congress, “Democrat” cities, is just a way to denigrate the party.  It is a Democratic House of Representatives, and Democratic controlled cities.  The right doesn’t get to label us they way they want to.  We know our name.

A Mess

There are several definitions for the word, blivet – but the one I grew up with was simple: ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag.  The vision is clear – and it is descriptive of the Trump Administration’s actions in the past three and a half years.

President Trump is quick to say that he has accomplished more in his term of office than any other President in history.  In one way, he’s absolutely right.  There have been so many outrages, so many illegalities, and so many of the norms of American government shattered, that it’s hard to remember them all.  It has truly been a blivet – and one that has been overwhelming for the American people.

Dictators

We are sixty-five days from the most important Presidential election in American history.  It isn’t hyperbole to suggest that the future of the American experiment in government may well be at stake in this vote.  President Trump demonstrates time and time again that he is attracted to the powers of despotism. Look at his love for Putin, Bolsonaro, Erdogan and Kim. And Trump has surrounded himself with men who drink from the some autocratic cup.  In Trump’s own cabinet, Attorney General Bill Barr is the critical lynchpin in this alteration of American norms.  

As we approach the election, it is important to remember what Donald Trump and his henchmen have brought to the American story since the election of 2016.  There’s so much, it’s easy to overlook what happened six months ago (impeachment) much less three years ago (fine people, on both sides).  So let’s review.

Foreign Help

Even during the election campaign of 2016, Donald Trump was accepting political aid from a foreign power, Russia.  The Republican controlled Senate Intelligence committee confirmed that “old” story once again last week.  The Senate report underlined what the Mueller Report portrayed, despite its obscurity, in 448 pages.  The Russians were helping Trump; the campaign welcomed the help, members of the campaign worked with Russians to coordinate, and all worked to hide their own involvement.  But Roger Stone’s sentence was commuted, Michael Flynn’s case dismissed, and “poor, sad” Paul Manafort is serving his sentence from the comfort of his home and hearth.

President Trump has done nothing to disavow Russian aid, and nothing to discourage their help now in 2020.   And the Mueller Report did nothing to stop him from soliciting more help from foreign nations.  The facts of his extorting Ukraine are clear, with only the lack of Senate Republican courage allowing him to stay in office.  Who knows what other nation he’s pressing for political aid today.

Lies

Then there are the lies – the Washington Post lists more than 20,000 of them in the 1267 days that Trump has been in office.  He has lied so much that it’s hard to find the truth.  His lies are so profuse that we have stopped calling them lies.  They are now, as aide Kellyann Conway stated to the public “alternative facts”. She did it right after mentioning the mythical “Bowling Green Massacre”.

In a single speech, the one accepting the 2020 Republican nomination, done in Mussolini-style from the balcony of the White House, he lied at least twenty-five times.  He’s lied so much, that it’s become normal.  He’s lied so much, that we’ve come to expect all of our government officials to lie.  When Postmaster General DeJoy testified to Congress that he did not restrict overtime hours for the Postal Service, even when there was a written documentation to the contrary, no one called out his perjury.  He was just following his leader.

Trump has lied so much that even his supporters recognize him as a liar.  They simply say, “that all politicians lie”.  That rationalization allows them to reject any truth that is brought up.  They say that if it’s against what Trump said, it’s a lie.  The truth is obscured for all.

Immigrants

Donald Trump has altered the promise of our nation of immigrants, America:  “Give my your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” He has put up an old historic shingle, “Whites Only”.   How white?  How about getting immigrants from Norway:  that’s what he said. He started with the “Muslim Ban”, quickly declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.  It continued with “shithole” countries, and on into the “family separation” plan, where American’s used children, even babies, to try to deter folks from immigrating to our borders. (If you need a better reminder of what happened, check out Jacob Soboroff’s new book, Separated). 

He agreed to take children away from their parents. He did so by making a “ticket” worthy civil offense, crossing the US Border without permission, into a crime.  Then he could call the migrants criminals, and take their children away from them, thousands to vanish into a maze of bureaucratic regulation.  Bad enough some were put in cages that looked like large dog kennels.  But worse, some were so lost that they couldn’t reconnect with their parents, even when a Federal Court ordered them to be, even when their parents were freed, and even when the parents were sent back to their original countries.

White Supremacist

And while we are talking segregation:  don’t forget Charlottesville, when white supremacists marched to save the statue of Robert E. Lee. Torchlight parades were intentionally reminiscent of the Hitler Youth, chanting, “Jews will not replace us”.  And when counter-protestors clashed with them, and one racist from Ohio drove his car into a crowd, all the President could muster was, “there were good people, on both sides”.  

He has doubled down on that stand since then.  From protecting Confederate statues to disrespecting Black athletes, the President has consistently taken the stand to favor those who believe in white supremacy.  Is he a racist himself?  It’s more likely that he knows that those racists vote for him, and he doesn’t want to lose their votes.  He’s got the same attitude towards the Q-Anon conspirators, who he blatantly signals in his speeches.   Maya Angelou said, “If someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time”.  The President has shown us who he is, over and over again.

But Mr. Trump said that Black unemployment is the best it has ever been.  And that was true, before his incompetence in the face of a pandemic flattened the economy.  Now, Black unemployment is over 15%.   National unemployment is over 10%.  While we can argue how much credit he should get for the “booming numbers” of 2018-19, we can be sure that he’s earned total credit for the handling of the national pandemic.  Our nation is in a self-made crisis, one that the President himself allowed to happen. 

The Nation

He has ignored the Courts.   He has disrespected the Constitution.  Our government has spent millions on golf trips and at Trump hotels, as he enriches himself and family at the government trough.  And he would have left many Americans without health care, vulnerable to extreme costs for pre-existing conditions, but for one of the final acts of an American patriot, John McCain.  And for that, the President disrespected that hero, even in death.  Today, he is lying to us about his so-called health plan.  It was two months ago, then two weeks ago, that he was going to reveal to us his alternative to the Affordable Care Act.  But it’s not been shown yet.

John McCain showed us political decency.  As the Republican Presidential candidate of 2008, McCain took the microphone away from a questioner who claimed Barack Obama was an Arab.  He told her what was up until them an American axiom:  that both candidates for President were patriots, but had differing views on how to better the nation.  But Donald Trump doesn’t see that in himself, and so could never see patriotism in an opponent.  He can only win through division, so he divides our nation into segments to be pitted against each other.

Decency

Trump claims Biden is a dupe for socialist/communists.  He claims Biden is demented.  And he uses old racist tropes of the 1960’s to try to strike fear in the “suburban housewives” he so desperately wants to vote for him.  “Black Lives Matter and Antifa” will be at your doors, as Joe Biden destroys the suburbs.  It is nonsense on so many levels.  How disrespectful towards our citizens to think they would fall for such appalling lies.  Sadly, in our age of “bubbles” of information, some will.

When you have a blivet, you’ve got a mess, five pounds of shit surrounding five pounds in the bag.  All you can do is get a shovel and throw it all away.  Sounds like a good place to start on November 3^rd.

Silence

When it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic, who to trust?  Do we trust the President, with the entire future of his administration riding on making the pandemic “disappear”?  Do we trust the scientists around him, beaten to a pulp by Presidential tweets and comments?  How about the ex-government scientists, the “formers” from the agencies?  They might be speaking for their silenced friends inside. But the message they send is so radically different than the “experts” on staff at HSS, FDA, NIH, or CDC.  Who can we trust?

It started with silence.  In the beginning, back in January and February, scientists outside of Washington were warning of a pending pandemic.  They were calling for national action, but their words were buried. The President assured us that everything was under control, and that the nation was safe.  Where was Dr. Fauci, or Dr. Birx, or all of the other Government “experts” ringing the alarm bells?  

We now know that they were banging those bells with hammers, but did not step outside of the administrative process.  Since those at the top didn’t want or agree with their warnings, the experts remained almost silent.  The scientists didn’t want this to happen, they warned the “top” that it would get as bad as we are now living. But they didn’t warn the people.  They spoke to the President, and when they were ignored and shouted down, they remained quiet.

Masks

In early March the COVID “toothpaste” was “out of the tube”. It could no longer be ignored, and those same government experts said that masks weren’t necessary for the public.  We now know they said that not because it was true, but because the shortage of masks for those who really needed them, the medical staffs soon to be overwhelmed with COVID patients, was extreme. The public couldn’t have masks; there weren’t enough to go around. 

But by publicly stating that general mask wearing was unnecessary, the “experts” set themselves up for questions. A month later they said it was NOW important to wear masks, in fact, it was crucial to reduce the spread of COVID. Everyone knew they “changed their minds”. Social media pummeled them with memes and videos of their flip-flopping. And while conserving the mask supply in March was crucial, the outcome of the “flip” in April was that distrust was created that can’t be undone.

You still see the social media posts, intentionally confusing the mask issue. “If you’re mask works, why do I need one?  If social distancing works, why wear a mask?” The answer is they all work some, and in combination of all, everyone masked, everyone social distancing; the spread of COVID is diminished.  But because we started from “we don’t need masks” from the experts, it’s easier to attack their use.

The “Plan”

The Centers for Disease Control came out with a strict step-by-step plan for states to reopen.  Two weeks at step-one, then move to step-two.  If statistics support lessened viral spread, maybe move to step-three.  But as soon as the CDC guidance came out, the President immediately attacked.  He pressured states to open without going through the “steps”.  He wanted the economy going again, and he couldn’t wait for control of the virus.  

So most Governors, even the ones who were trying to “do the right thing” like Mike DeWine here in Ohio, threw the CDC guidance out. States “re-opened” far too soon, and those in the government pressing for continued closures were silenced. Ask Ohio’s Director of Health, Amy Acton. On social media friends were lost, but more importantly, the short term benefits of a month of “closing down” were lost as well. But the public pretty much missed that fact, and still thinks today that we did “the best we could do”.

And the “experts” in Washington DC quietly let it happen. While they opined that it would have been better to stay closed longer, they allowed the shouted demands of politicians to overwhelm what they knew were the right answers. So America re-opened.

Schools

Everyone agrees that it would be better if public schools and universities were open, with kids going to classes and teachers doing their thing.  The American Academy of Pediatrics announced that in June, and those who are vested in regular school attendance have beaten us over the heads with it ever since.  And they aren’t wrong – take it from an old school teacher – lots of good things happen in school.  But the reality of today is that our schools haven’t had the resources to do much to prevent COVID transmission.  

They haven’t redone the ventilation systems, they have done little to create new classroom spaces, and, in the end, schools were crowded before and will only be a little less crowded now. But they also “changed the safety rules” to fit their financial reality. The six-foot “distancing” space that we see marked on the floor everywhere – well it’s three-foot in a classroom, measured from the center of one desk to the next. And yes, everyone will be wearing masks, and teachers will become masters of “Lysol-ing” their classrooms. But that’s about it.

So just like the states opening without regard to the CDC’s guidance, the schools are doing pretty much the same.  The outcome will be increased viral spread. We are seeing that now in many of the big universities; it’s preordained.

Tests

And now the CDC is telling us that we don’t need to test everyone, even those who might be exposed.  We just need to test those who exhibit symptoms, just like we said in March when there were hardly any tests around.  And why is this, after months of saying that we need to test and trace and quarantine?  Well there are two reasons I can think of.  The first is that the statistics created by tests are slowing production in the economy.  The President is on a “clock and a calendar” (thanks Congressman Collins).  He’s got to show that the country is getting back to normal, and it has to happen in time for early voting in October.  

President Trump has already stated that testing makes things look bad.  So if we stop testing, then things will look better – right?  It’s already working.  As testing slows, with fewer positive outcomes, other government agencies are quick to jump on and say we should “go back to (more) normal”.  Weekends and hurricanes are doing wonders for the testing statistics – a lot fewer people are testing positive.

And there’s the other point the CDC folks quietly make – we aren’t able to do the contact tracing and quarantining because we don’t have the resources to handle the numbers. So if we can’t get it done, then there’s not a great reason to test. And why don’t we have the resources? The same folks who want tests to go away failed to provide those resources.

Jaded

It’s really no surprise there’s so much doubt in America about COVID. Even though we demonstrably have the worst numbers in the world, with over six million infected and almost 185,000 dead, many Americans are still questioning what needs to be done. While Dr. Fauci and others have tried: they have been drowned out by politicians who need the economy booming to win re-election. And, we have to wonder if things might have been different if the Fauci’s and Birx’s of our government had resigned with purpose. That can be said of many who have been co-opted into supporting the President with the idea that they were “preventing harm”.

Confidence is an easy thing to lose, and a very difficult thing to win back. Even if the next President is Joe Biden, it won’t change the impact of the flips and flops of our scientists as well as our political leaders.

But it’s certainly worth the try.

The Congressman’s Office

In 1977 I was twenty years old and had the privilege of working for Congressman Thomas A. Luken of Cincinnati.  It started after finishing a three-month stint as a Carter/Mondale campaign Field Coordinator, the lowest level paid position in the successful Presidential campaign.  After the inauguration I went back to school, taking classes at American University in Washington, DC. I I also worked in the Luken Congressional Office part time as a paid intern. 

The job started with writing letters back to the constituents in Cincinnati.  On the major issues like abortion rights and taxes, there was a “form” letter that I personalized for each constituent.  This was before the days of office computers, but we did have typewriters that “remembered” a given letter.  It would stop at the appropriate times, and the operator would type in a name or location to personalize the document.  

But I also found that there were other issues with no office “policy”.  Then it was my job to research the issue, talk to relevant agencies or experts, and propose a response.  One of the best parts of my job was saying, “Hi, this is Martin Dahlman from Congressman Tom Luken’s office, could you…” on the phone.  Responses were usually quick and comprehensive.

Policy Counts

I created “micro-policy” for the Congressman on a variety of issues. Before any letter went out, it had to be approved by the Administrative Aide and the Congressman himself.  Tom Luken was a part of every decision, with an old Marine’s view of work.  Draft after draft of a letter would be “worked up”, but there would always be scribbled revisions to deal with before we reached a final version.

Eventually I worked my way to bigger tasks.  It was the year of the winter “energy shortage” that closed schools throughout Ohio, and I helped relay information about that. I began solving other problems for constituents as an outgrowth of the letters.  Then I got the chance to help write legislation for tax credits for energy efficient heating systems. And finally I got to author some minor Congressional speeches.  Somewhere buried deep in the Congressional Record, there is a Tom Luken speech that I wrote. Pretty exciting!

Later in the year, I came home to Cincinnati to work in the home office.  I served as the Congressman’s local scheduler.  My job was to build a schedule, then act as his staff for appointments and events while he was in town. I learned a lot working closely with him and I finished that summer with a true appreciation of his hard work.  I also felt like I was missing multiple body parts:  the Congressman had a Marine Corps skill of chewing his staff out.  Deserving or not, since I was usually nearby, I got it.

Politics and the Taxpayer

In the Carter Campaign getting the job done as quickly as possible was the goal.  Need signs:  we printed our own and stapled them to telephone poles in the middle of the night.  Need volunteers:  pickup the phone and call high school kids to come in and work – pizza usually did the trick.  The pressure of Election Day made everyday office procedures go out the window.

But in a Congressional office, the law placed a barrier between governing and campaigning.  The simplest way to understand it is the “franking privilege”.  By Congressional mandate, the United States Postal Service would (and still does) deliver mail with the Congressman’s signature on the envelope instead of a stamp.  All of those responses I answered with the automatic typewriters were “franked”.

But the Hatch Act, passed by Congress in 1939, specifies that campaign material cannot be “franked”.  In fact, campaign activities cannot occur in government offices, or by government employees on their paid time.  They had to be paid for by campaign funds, not taxpayer funds.  In fact back in Cincinnati there was the Congressman’s office in the Federal Building where I worked, and there was the Luken campaign office somewhere else.  Only the top aides interchanged between the two.

Hatch Act

As the Congressman’s scheduler, I would get requests from the “campaign” for time slots on his schedule.  That was usually as far as it went, though I did have the “honor” of driving Mr. Luken in the 1977 City of Cheviot Fourth of July parade.  It was my first experience driving a Jeep, and my goal was to shift smoothly so that the Congressman, standing and waving in the back, didn’t get knocked down.  I also wanted to avoid running over the little kids marching in front of us.  That “breaking news” would look bad in the Cincinnati Post the next day!  

But generally the Hatch Act restrictions were clear, and the office kept a distance from the “line”.  

Hubris

This week the President of the United States used the White House, Ft. McHenry, the United States Marines, and a United States citizenship ceremony as “props” for his version of the Republican Convention.  His Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, went even further, using his standing as the chief diplomat of the United States to make a speech supporting the President from the most famous hotel in Jerusalem, the King David.  

The carefully proscribed actions established by the Hatch Act to prevent the abuse of government property, resources, and the powers of incumbency, were thrown out the window.  It’s bad enough that Mr. Trump feels it’s appropriate to use Air Force One as the backdrop for his rallies, but now it’s the White House, and even the Marines.  And, to provide Mr. Pompeo with a brilliant backdrop, taxpayer funds were spent to fly him to Jerusalem and house him in the King David Hotel.

There seems to be no end to the “sins” of the Trump Administration.  The litmus test:  if Michelle Obama had addressed the 2012 Democratic Convention from the Rose Garden, the world would have ended.  But Donald Trump has erased all the legal norms.  He has pardoned his friends and prosecuted his enemies; employed his family members and personally profited from his government’s actions.     

As a twenty-year old budding politician learned, the law protects the taxpayers from paying for campaigns they might not support.  But what America has learned, is that Donald Trump sees himself as above this law, and many others.  There is only one-way to hold him accountable:  at the ballot box on November 3^rd.

Basic Rights

I’m not a Communist.  I’m not even a socialist, really.  I believe that America can be a caring nation, one based on a foundation of basic rights:  life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  The Declaration of Independence is not the sole possession of one political party or the other. The American people own it.  

The definition of life is simple:  the right to live and be healthy.  This is particularly relevant in our current COVID era.  In our modern society, it means that every person in America needs to have access to health care.  It shouldn’t be based on how much that person earns, or can afford.  Health care is a basic human right, one that we need to guarantee.  

And from a practical standpoint, we do guarantee some level of health care to everyone.  But we do it in the most expensive way possible, pushing the impoverished to use Emergency Departments for routine health maintenance.  And don’t think that those costs “go away”.  Nothing is “free”. The high price of all of our medical care includes the cost of caring for those who cannot pay.

National Health

A national policy that provides for everyone to have access to health care would reduce costs for everyone.  That’s not the same as “free” health care.  We all realize that someone has to pay. Whatever you want to call it, from universal health care to Medicaid to an expanded Affordable Care Act:  any of these will make health care LESS expensive, and fulfill America’s responsibility to care for everyone.  Everyone includes undocumented immigrants:  we can’t let them die in the streets either.  And, regardless of Republican talking points, we don’t let that happen now.  

That isn’t communism or socialism.  It’s the mandate that our Founding Fathers gave us. It’s what every industrialized nation in the world does now, except the US.  And it’s what we should do as decent human beings.

Liberty

Liberty means that we can do what we want, within the limits of not hurting others.  A national health care mandate would grant us that liberty, instead of the outdated and ridiculous concept of tying health care to employment.  American capitalism should include the freedom to take a chance on a new business, without giving up basic health care protections.  No one should be locked into a job just to keep health care.

Liberty and the “American Dream” means that people should be able to advance based on, as Dr. King said (and Senator Tim Scott quoted), “the content of their character”.  But that isn’t happening right now.  For black men and women it is as basic as being treated fairly by a common symbol of our government, the police.  It doesn’t take much digging to see that “black lives don’t matter” in far too many cases.  We are being asked by some to pretend that this isn’t an issue, that the “Dream” is available to all.  That’s simply not true.

This isn’t communism or socialism.  It’s basic fairness, rooted in the Declaration and the Bill of Rights.  

Happiness

Thomas Jefferson was a careful author.  He used language like an artist, describing his thoughts with precision.  John Locke was one of Jefferson’s philosophical predecessors and described the “natural rights of man” as life, liberty and property.  Jefferson adapted those terms to his own thinking. He added a “Creator” (…endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights) and changing the term property to happiness.  It wasn’t an abstract error, nor was it just a euphemism to avoid discussing slavery.

Jefferson saw beyond just having enumerated possessions as the key to “happiness”.  He looked to his own life, where he followed his passions, in science, in government, and in agriculture among others.  What made Jefferson happy was inquiry, and he saw the pursuit of knowledge as an inalienable right.  

In our world, financial well being and established position in society does make some happy.  But the Declaration of Independence, unlike Locke’s Natural Rights of Man, does not circumscribe happiness as only ownership.  In a nation where everyone has the right to find happiness, then obvious differences like race or gender shouldn’t restrict that quest.  Neither should the incredibly wide financial inequity of our nation, where the few own most, and the many own little.

If that sounds socialist or communist, then blame Jefferson.  He was a member of the landed class, and yet he saw that there was more to achieve than just possessions.  And so should we.

Education

In a nation where we are dedicated to human equality, and making sure everyone has the basis for life, then it is incumbent on the government to provide and protect for that equality and basis.  As part of the process of making “A more perfect union”, we have historically included more groups into our “circle” of equality.  It is time to recognize that there are still some “outside” the circle, and take definitive action to bring them in.  

Education has always been a key to the American dream.  Yet the financing of our public schools is often based on the wealth of those living in the school’s district.  So, in education, as in some many other facets of our nation, the rich get the best education that “money can buy”, while the poor are denied the resources. 

Here in Ohio twenty years ago, we came to the precipice of leveling the field and providing equal funding for education regardless of the financial status of the district.  In the DeRolph Case, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled for financial equity.  But the pressure brought to bear by the wealthy soon caused the Court to step back from its own decision, and the inequity drags on.  The rich continue to get richer and the poor are left to suffer.   Instead of solving the problem, some offer a solution:  let the poor buy a private education, with some government help.  They call it “school choice”, but it sounds suspiciously like “let them eat cake”.

Expand the Dream

It we are truly a nation defined by our Founding Fathers, then we must move past the old arguments of the 1950’s.  No political party is offering Communism or even Socialism as a choice in the 2020 election.  One party is offering a way to expand the American Dream to include more of our citizens.  And one is saying, “stay the course”, and let the chasm in wealth grow wider.  

It’s clear what Jefferson would want.

Constitutional Mandate

Why should the Postal Service be a financially “break even” operation?  Of all of the powers vested in the Constitution, (Article 1, Section 8, clause 7), why is this one power somehow expected to make money?  

The USPS is running a $20 billion deficit. That includes the total cost of anticipated health care of current employees for their entire retirement.  No reasonable company pays upfront for retirement insurance coverage costs, but the Postal Service does, by law.   And $20 billion, which sounds like a lot of money, is nothing compared to the $686 billion Defense budget, or even Education with $68 billion (and not mentioned in the Constitution).  Neither Defense nor Education turns a profit, nor raises revenue at all.

I question the entire premise that somehow the Postal Service should be making money.  The Postal Service is just that, a public service provided by the government.  It shouldn’t be a money making deal.  That’s not what government is supposed to be.

Public Service

The Postal Service has a function: to help unite America with communication.  That’s what the Founding Fathers intended when they specifically provided for Post Offices and Post roads.   Even though the means of communicating has dramatically changed since 1786, that function still exists.  

The Postal Service employs over 600,000 people.  If it were a private employer (it’s not) it would be the second largest in the United States, just ahead of Amazon.  And somehow, even in this era of electronic communication, those 600,000 workers still have a lot to do.  In fact they are so important, that changes made in the Postal Service procedures that disrupt deliveries creat a huge uproar.  Despite email and Amazon, people still depend on the Postal Service.

I listened to the testimony of Postmaster General DeJoy to both the Senate and the House of Representatives.  DeJoy, a private logistics industry executive appointed to the role, is directly responsible for postal delays in July and August.  They are a part of his economic reforms of the Postal Service.  DeJoy sees his responsibility as making sure the Postal Service is financially solvent.  He might not have a political agenda, despite Democratic legislators’ suggestions.  While he is a major Trump fundraiser, what he seems like to me is a man on a mission. 

Run on Time 

His mission is to cut costs.  His mission is to make the “trucks run on time”.  The problem is, his mission isn’t getting the mail through.  How else can he explain that he has trucks moving from one sorting facility to another, empty?  How else can we understand that personnel are sent home while thousands of pieces of mail remain unsorted?  And what conclusion can we draw from the removal of high-speed sorting machines, other than he does not want to pay personnel to run those machines?

All a stammering DeJoy could say to that was,  “…the plan was for the trucks to run on time”.  But the mail wasn’t on the trucks.  Democratic Congressman Connolly made the point that maybe this was all done “innocently”, not as some nefarious plot to disrupt mail service before the election. Either way, disruption happened.

Votes in Question

The reasons aren’t important. These actions are impacting the election of 2020.  The US Postal Service may return to ontime delivery before the elections, but the damage is done.  DeJoy’s actions have dovetails with the President’s ongoing message. The President reiterated that yesterday in North Carolina.  Trump said the 2020 election will be fraudulent; mail-in voting (unless in Florida) will be be cheated; and we can’t depend on the Postal Service to get our votes through. 

But there is a larger point, when it comes to voting.  Americans are concerned with our disaster in handling the COVID crisis.  They are so concerned that most will risk exposure to the virus and vote.  Americans will still vote absentee (by mail) but many more will don all the HAZMAT protection they can find and go stand in line.  They know that this is a critical election, so critical that it will be worth the unnecessary loss of life from COVID infection.  And make no mistake about this, lives will be lost on November 3^rd (Reuters). People are afraid their voices won’t be heard if they send a ballot by mail, thanks to the President, and to General DeJoy. So they will risk their lives and vote in person.

Future of the Nation

We should start over.  We should go back to the Post Office, a constitutionally mandated organization with a mission to unite America.  It shouldn’t be about some unrealistic bottom line, or Rand Paul’s fever dream of privatization.

But as far as this election is concerned, the undermining of public confidence in the Postal Service is done, another “box checked” on the list of Trump’s transgressions against US democracy.  The future of the democracy will be determined November. It will be loud and clear from the American people, whether they vote in person or by mail.  And that answer will determine the fate of our Republic.

The Trump Show

This is the week of the Republican National Convention. In a “normal” year, it would be a week of crowded convention floors in Charlotte, with funny hats and folks who spent last night (or even early this morning) “partying with the party”.  But it’s not normal times. America is in the middle of a pandemic, and even the Republican Party has been forced to recognize it.  So far in the United States, a little over 3% of those infected with the disease die.  That’s really the statistic that matters, one of the only “facts” of COVID that seems to have held true since the beginning.

So it’s the Republican turn to put on a “pandemic” convention.  The Democrats set a high bar with their “show” last week, and we’ll see what the response will be.  But there is one major difference. The Democratic Party held a convention, and they featured their nominee, Joe Biden.  The Republican Party of 2020 is not a political party sponsoring a candidate. It is the candidate himself.  We are watching the Donald Trump Show this week, with the President scheduled to speak every night, along with most of his immediate family (though clearly his sister and niece aren’t invited anymore).

Incompetence

We are in a polarized environment, when even the simple act of putting a political sign in your front yard has become an act of “aggression” against your neighbors.  Both political parties indulge in hyperbole:  like a buffet menu, you can choose the issue that energizes you.  And I certainly expect we will hear even more this week from Mr. Trump.  In fact it started yesterday, before the convention even began.  The President called an “emergency” media conference on Sunday evening, to tell about a miraculous advance in the treatment of COVID. 

The President announced that “convalescent plasma” (plasma derived from patients recovered from COVID) has a 35% cure rate, and that HE, the President, has ordered it administered nationwide.  The problem is that it’s already being used nationwide, and the best studies show that it’s helpful in about 3% of the cases.  But it was a great way to start out Convention Week.

And Donald Trump is absolutely right about one thing:  COVID is his greatest weakness.  The Biden Campaign would do well to hammer Trump’s incompetence; it’s something every American confronts every day.

Myths

We will hear a series of themes this week.  Joe Biden is weak a puppet. That he has been “radicalized” by the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez-Socialist wing of the Party.  That Black Lives Matters means burning cites, and it’s coming to your town, your suburb, and your middle class white housewife neighborhood.   

So let’s bust some myths.  Let’s start with the one we’re likely to hear the most about: DEFUNDING THE POLICE.  There will be no police at all, and, to quote the Trump ad already running, there will be a five-day waiting line for 9-11 calls.  Joe Biden, Kamal Harris, and a host of Democratic leaders have disavowed the term, DEFUNDING. But they have not disavowed repurposing.

Down in Austin

We’re likely to hear about Austin, Texas and the city council that has become the “poster child” for the DEFUNDING movement.  You’ll hear that Austin City Council CUT $150 million from the police budget.  That’s really not quite true, and it is a great example for understanding what the defunding/repurposing movement really is about.

Austin had a $420 million annual police budget.  Austin city council cut their police budget by $31 million, mostly advanced license plate readers and a cadet class. They then took $120 million for police activities that weren’t direct policing functions, and moved them out of the police department.  Those activities will still continue, but not as part of the policing role.  And that’s what “DEFUNDING THE POLICE” is about.  Like public education, society has thrown more and more of its “ills” on the police department, from drug addiction to suicide prevention.  But those don’t have to be primarily police responsibilities, just as public health and nutrition don’t have to be public education responsibilities.  The jobs are still done, just repurposed to folks not wearing “blue”.

Stealing Insurance

We are going to hear about socialized medicine, and how Democrats want to take away your health insurance and make you pay for some freeloader.  And that’s not true either.  Joe Biden wants to expand the Affordable Care Act, and he would like to include a “public option”.  That means a government insurance that is purchasable by regular folks, rather than just the private insurance available on the “market place” today.  Public option insurance would increase competition in the insurance marketplace, driving costs down, especially in those places where few private insurance policies are available.

But Biden is not Bernie Sanders, and even Bernie is behind Biden’s health insurance plan.  Of course Bernie wants fully nationalized insurance, but his plan is NOT the Democratic plan in 2020.  Conflating the two is the goal of the Trump campaign, but it’s simply not true.  And by the way, you ARE paying for the “freeloader” without health insurance. You’re paying for them by increased costs of medical care, every time you pay a bill.  

The “Bad” Child

And finally, we’re likely to hear a lot about Hunter Biden, Joe’s son.  We are going to hear vague conspiracies about Joe protecting Hunter from prosecution in Ukraine, and about Hunter’s checkered past:  cocaine use, a Navy discharge, and high salaried board memberships.  President Trump’s own National Security Council has warned about Russia planting stories about Hunter and Joe Biden, but we will hear them anyway.  For a President who employed Paul Manafort and was a party animal himself, sometimes with Jeffrey Epstein, it will be a lot of “the pot calling the kettle black”.  

So it’s going to be a week of Donald Trump.  He’s going to speak every night.  And when it’s not the President, it’ll be the kid with the MAGA hat from Covington, or the couple with the guns from St. Louis.  

Maybe the conventioneers are right.  We should start drinking early.

Cash

Yep, that’s six trillion dollars, a six with twelve zeros behind it.  Need a visual:  if you laid dollar bills end to end at the equator, you would wrap around the world almost 23,000 times.  End to end you could go to Mars and back, eight times.  It’s almost one third of the total annual output of the United States, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP – $20.54 trillion in 2018).  Six trillion dollars is greater than the entire annual budget of the United State government up until 2018 and greater than the entire US debt until 2001. Bottom line – it’s a whole lot of money.  

And six trillion is the amount of money that the United States has spent so far this year to prop up the economy during the COVID crisis.  The Congress and the President spent three trillion directly in COVID relief:  programs like the payroll protection program (PPP) and direct aid to states, hospitals, and other institutions.  $1300 was directly sent to many individual Americans, and $600 in supplemental income was available each week to many who were on unemployment.

COVID Relief

It wasn’t just a safety net for individuals who lost their jobs.  All of that money went in with the idea that it would be spent, and continue to stimulate the economy.  Businesses were propped up so that folks would stay employed, but also so they would continue to produce and buy products and services, and keep “America Going”.  

And, for a brief month or two, it was to help Americans fulfill their “duty” to stay home, and stop the spread of COVID.  Other industrialized nations committed to long-term financial support for their citizenry.  They recognized that COVID wasn’t going to go away, and that money would be well spent to protect society until a vaccine was available.  The United States committed to a brief halt, and then tried to return to full life.  Who was right?  The statistics for national infection and death “tell the tale”:  the United States leads by far in both.

But direct aid programs are only half of what the United States is doing to prop the economy.

The Fed

The Federal Reserve is the “Bank of the United States”.  The “Fed” controls the circulation of money in the nation, and while they don’t actually print money (that’s the job of the Treasury Department) they do control how much money is in supply.  An increase in money available to banks, large businesses, and investors is like fuel for a fire.  Put more fuel on the fire, and it burns hotter and brighter.

So the “Fed” has reduced the interest rates to their best customers to ¼ of 1 percent.  They want banks and investment institutions to borrow the money, and put it in the investment markets.  And so far, it’s worked.  The Standard and Poor’s Index (S&P) hit a new high in the past few weeks, and the more familiar Dow Jones is near 28,000, almost fully recovered from the COVID crash.

It’s not just the “Fed” money that’s propping up the market.  COVID has been good for some industries.  Amazon, Apple, UPS, and all of the other companies that bring things to their customers homes are doing great.  Even the Postal Service staged a small financial comeback in the early summer, with COVID deliveries improving the bottom line.  

But the Federal Reserve and an additional three trillion dollars is the main pillar holding up Wall Street.  And with all the financial legerdemain the “Fed” can pull, ultimately there are limits to what they can do. Even they will run out of money.  And there has never been a clearer gap between Wall Street and Main Street.  As markets hit record levels, US unemployment is over 10%.  That divergence isn’t sustainable for long. 

Choices

So what are America’s choices?  

We can follow our current course, virtually ignoring the COVID pandemic, and try to go back to “normal”.  That will improve our economy, but the price will be continued infections, and increasing deaths.  It’s the “cold” moral choice that Americans are making now, the same one that Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick clearly outlined in April.

“… There are more important things than living. And that’s saving this country for my children and my grandchildren and saving this country for all of us. I don’t want to die, nobody wants to die, but man we’ve got to take some risks and get back in the game and get this country back up and running.”

Americans were horrified at that statement at the time.  Now, for many, it’s the “logical” choice, and America’s de facto national plan.

Or we can recognize that COVID is the problem, not the economy, and deal with it.  If that means closing things down again to gain control of the infection, than sooner is better than later.  The resources to prop up both Wall Street and Main Street are limited and are already being used.  If the goal is to keep things going and save lives until a COVID solution is available, then we need to do a lot better job of it than we are now.

It’s not just politics.  And it’s not just an economic choice.  It’s a moral choice, and a life and death decision for all Americans.

Soften the Target

While I was in high school, I became fascinated with the assassination of President Kennedy.  I found books about the “grassy knoll”, the difficulty of firing Oswald’s bolt-action rifle quickly and accurately, and all of the failures of the Secret Service leading up to the shootings.  I read parts of the Warren Commission report, itself controversial.  And I marveled at the “magic bullet”, found whole and pristine on the stretcher beside the President’s body.  And ultimately I saw the Zapruder film, with the motions of the tragically targeted President so discordant with the described attack.

How could one crazed man change the world?  How could Lee Harvey Oswald so dramatically divert our history?  And later, in 1968, James Earl Ray and Sirhan B. Sirhan would each do the same, pushing our nation away from “good” and into disorder.  Shouldn’t it take more than just one man to deflect the world?  There must be some conspiracy, some greater force behind these crimes, isn’t there?

Plausible “Facts”

I became a conspiracy theorist.  I looked for phantoms behind the grassy knoll.  It didn’t help that a couple of years after I graduated, the US House of Representatives established a committee to re-investigate the shooting.  They heard a fourth shot on an open police radio mike, “proving” that Oswald couldn’t have been a lone gunman.  I went down the rabbit hole: was it the Mafia, Lyndon Johnson himself, the FBI, the CIA, the Defense industry, the Cubans?  I looked forward to 2014 when “all” the information would be released – and then we would finally know.

Well “all” the information wasn’t released a few years ago, and we still don’t know.  But I’ve found that once you enter the contorted world of conspiracies it’s easy to slip farther into the trap.  “Facts” become fiction, theories evolve into “facts”. But, in the end, all of great “construct” of explanations are based in sand.  A single wave, and it’s all washed away.

There are other great historic conspiracies.  Did Franklin Roosevelt “allow” Pearl Harbor to be attacked?  What about Unidentified Flying Objects?  They all sound compelling, with just enough circumstantial evidence to make them seem real.

September 11

But after 9-11, a more insidious conspiracy theory crept into American life.  I think we were shocked that our nation was so vulnerable to terrorists with box cutters willing to die.   So we searched from some other alternative.  How could such great buildings, the twin towers, fall so quickly?  How could a single plane do such damage to the Pentagon?  Why didn’t our air defenses protect us from our own passenger airliners?

The answers were in the clear.  The buildings fell, because their design did not include a fully fueled plane striking them in the middle.  The nation’s air defense did not include a passenger airliner scenario, in spite of the Tom Clancy novel outlining that exact attack strategy on the Capitol Building.  We got caught, wide open and vulnerable.

After 9-11, there was a growing list of conspiracy theorists, all claiming some darker insidious force behind the attacks beyond Bin Laden.  And unlike my Kennedy obsession, you didn’t have to go to the library to find alternative explanations.  There was a new force, the Internet. It brought compelling theories into your home. Grainy video was enlarged, slowed, and perhaps altered, to demonstrate why “the theory” was really fact.  And you could watch them at your leisure, over and over again.

The 9-11 conspiracies became a business.  Advertising was linked to the presentations, and even more elaborate constructs were available by “just one more click”.  While most Americans continue to believe that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda attacked us, a growing segment grew to doubt what they saw with their own eyes on that sunny morning in September.  They believed that their government was lying to them, was corrupted by the “unseen” forces for financial gain.

In Your Pocket

“Information” is now omnipresent.  We can access it at any given moment.  We stand in line and view it on our phones, see it on Netflix, hear it on podcasts.  Our main method of learning about the world has unlimited bandwidth, and is filled with what Kelly Ann Conway would call “alternative facts”.  It’s fed to us twenty-four seven.  And all of those “sources” are so sure, so “factual”, that it’s difficult to find the “real truth”.  

There is a natural desire to find an overarching “theory of everything” to describe the disparate things that happen in the world. Conspiracies “answer them all”, and simplify the complex nature of current events.  The Q-anon Conspiracy Theory has all of those answers, knitting child molestation with money and political power.  How convenient that Jeffrey Epstein “plugs right in”, and managed to die before his actions could be investigated.  

Coincidence

We don’t like coincidences (Gibbs’ rule 39:  there is no such thing as a coincidence). We want clear and clean answers, from the Creation Story to 9-11.  But with the omnipresence of Internet information, and the growing skepticism about “accepted fact”; minds have been “softened”.   They have been prepared to accept all sorts of fundamentally unfounded ideas that fit a “theory of everything”.   Our minds have become fertile fields for the growth of those ideas.

That growth creates a cynicism in many.  If there are dark unseen forces controlling events, then a single vote cannot matter.  If Donald Trump is leading a crusade against wealthy child molesters, whatever actions he takes must be justified.  After all, he’s protecting children. 

Perhaps there’s an even greater conspiracy here.  Maybe Q-anon is a product of Russian intelligence, or the Trump campaign?  Perhaps Les Wexner created it with Epstein. Maybe there’s another island.

I’ll create a new website, or maybe even a Joe Rogan podcast, for that one.