May 2020

I consider myself the luckiest guy on the face on earth in this pandemic*

 

 

 

 

 

Eleanor and I left for our long-delayed four-week trip to Fiji, Australia (Melbourne, Tasmania, Sydney) and New Zealand on February 24, before almost anyone knew any of this was going to happen. We wound up staying nine weeks, traveling all over Australia. (New Zealand shut its borders the day before we had tickets to go.)  We completely avoided the first hardships of the COVID-19 quarantine and the disastrous way it was handled in the US.  We returned to Chicago on April 20 and are now riding it out isolated on her farm in Kentucky with minimal exposure to humans and a luscious blooming spring environment. 

So, yeah…really lucky timing to have had the trip of our lives and to feel as healthy as we have in years.

*Paraphrasing Lou Gehrig’s dying farewell at Yankee Stadium July 4, 1939.

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MAYDAY!

When I was in kindergarten, my brother John and I went to a school on a working farm, about seven miles from our North Shore Chicago suburban home. It was “in the country,” surrounded by cornfields (now malls).

The Farm School was K-8 with about 100 students. Each class was assigned to tend to a particular group of animals.  We were the Zippers (Kindergarten and first grade).  Our daily chore was to feed and clean up the pens of the sheep (~8-10 of them).

May 1 was the highlight of the school year.  The whole school, our parents and the community gathered in an open area by the barns and had a celebration of spring with food and drink.  The highlight was a maypole.  It looked something like this:

Everyone picked and wore flowers.  We’d each take a strand of a long bright ribbon and dance around the pole until they were all interwoven, wrapped around the pole. 

I googled it and found out the maypole dance was historically a pre-Christian ritual, a European tradition, possibly dating back to ancient tribal times, celebrating fertility and rebirth.  For us, it was a tribal gathering that, at least for me, meant that school would finally be over soon.  I quit Farm School when it was time for first grade and went to nearby public schools from then on, walking or riding my bike, rather than sitting on a smelly school bus for half an hour each way.

May Day is an international celebration of working people, dating to the Chicago Haymarket “riot” in 1886 when a bomb interrupted a peaceful labor protest in downtown Chicago.  Eight policemen and at least one demonstrator died.  An undetermined number of civilians were seriously injured, many shot by police.  Eight demonstrators, mostly immigrants and several of whom weren’t present, were found guilty of conspiracy and four were hanged to death.

The Chicago strikes and May Day demonstrations of the 1880s are often regarded as responsible for securing the 40-hour workweek and the beginning of the end of exploitative child labor in the U.S.

In most European countries, May Day is a national holiday.  It’s a longstanding focus of public gatherings, especially in Socialist and Communist countries.

May Day generally goes unnoticed in this country.

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But M’aidez…

From the French and pronounced “MAY-day” is the distress signal for ships at sea.  M’aidez…HELP ME! has a new meaning these days in the global pandemic.   

So many Americans need help, medically and financially.  That’s what TV News and mainstream media focus on: America.  We have it bad.  The dire consequences for our families, prosperity and way of life are already happening.  The ongoing effects and the ramifications of our federal ignorance and negligence can’t be predicted yet, any more than any what’s happening now could have been predicted even ten weeks ago.

Ultimately, we and the rich countries of the world can and will likely find ways to deal and mostly survive eventually.   It’s the poor countries that are and will be suffering the most…as always.  Nicholas Kristof in the NYTimes is almost always ahead of the curve providing perspectives on global humanitarian matters. Last Sunday he focused on how to contribute to those in most need. 

The week before, he wrote succinctly about the absolutely disastrous effects of COVID-19 on the poorest countries in the world where it will certainly get worse in the coming days and months. Billions of people can’t wash their hands because they have no running water in their homes. There are zero ventilators in many countries. Kristof quoted Arif Husain of the World Food Programme:

“COVID-19 is potentially catastrophic for millions who are already hanging by a thread.” 

Kristof’s enlightened and scary column is here. 

In four months, 240,000 COVID-19 deaths worldwide is horrible.  It’s already seven times the number of gun deaths in the US in all of 2019, but hasn’t approached the estimated 50 million deaths in the 1918 Flu pandemic.

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This Month’s Quiz

Who is/was this:

You will get a prize in the unlikely event you can identify her.

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The Magical Land of Oz

We absolutely loved Australia, its scenic beauty, all the contrasts and especially the people.  Without exception, in two months+, we didn’t come across anyone grouchy or not helpful or hostile in any way.  And this, in the time of the pandemic, when it could have gotten sticky. 

And in what a civilized way they (and New Zealand) handled COVID-19.

The government leaders acted immediately, listened to the scientists and did the sensible thing.  The priorities were on limiting cases and the welfare of everyone. Prime Minister Scott Morrison, though one of Trump’s biggest international supporters, rose to the occasion to serve and lead with sensible priorities about public health and support of all the states.  Australia has had fewer than 7,000 cases and 93 deaths from COVID-19 in a population of more than 25 million.

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Travel Note

We wound up spending about a month in the tropical north along the Great Barrier Reef.  Stunning in many ways, but contrary to the exaggerated rumors of its death, the coral is still beautiful and alive in lots of places we snorkeled and saw.  In fact, I’ve seen dozens of reefs around the world and the coral near Fitzroy Island is the most overwhelmingly colorful and vital as any I’ve ever seen.  Without a doubt, we’re on a collision course of climate change – but there are some fantastic natural spots still around.

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America from Afar

I’ve never been outside the United States for as long as we were in February, March and April.  It was an opportunity to see what goes on here from a distance.  It was devastating and undeniable how screwed-up this country’s priorities and values are in the plague of 2020.

My dear friend Michael Prussian sent this piece by Fintan O’Toole.  It reflects the view of the US from Ireland in the Irish Times.

THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S.
NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.

As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted … like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”

…Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.

…It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.

It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.

…But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.   [Note: this is a sad but true example of “Media Burn”…more on that when my book is done. TW]

…Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.

As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.

Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

So sad, but so true.

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The Business of America…

I studied economics in college (when I had time) and got an MBA degree back in the dark ages.  One business fundamental is the same as it was in 1968: risk must be part of the equation of investing, owning or operating any kind of enterprise, including nonprofits like Media Burn.

Financial/business risks that have been inconceivable during my whole life are now visited on all of us in the USA and in varying ways around the world.  Nearly half of Americans work for “small businesses,” with fewer than ten employees.  About half the GNP is generated by entities with fewer than 500 employees, even though the power, concentration and control of global corporations and national chains continue to grow all the time.

What’s going on now is not leading to just a “recession.” It’s a fundamental realignment of jobs, resources, debt, financial security and societal-wide change. Huge numbers of small businesses will disappear/fail. The average is close to half in “normal” times. 

The U.S. government is borrowing unprecedented trillions to keep at least some of the underlying structures alive.  When will that come back to haunt us?  And how is it possible that the stock market had bigger gains in April 2020 than in any month in decades? (30% increase from the low point in March.)

And whose interests are being served?

Consumers and “regular folks” have lost their jobs and income.  They aren’t going to be solvent for a long time.  All this stuff about “opening up” and “getting to the new normal” obfuscate the reality of how much time it will take to get in balance. 

One other piece is that the WAY we get stuff done has changed forever.  Information-based rather than transportation-requiring work has been forced.  Nobody knew Zoom until a couple months ago.  So many more FaceTime convos are happening.  All that is disruptive technology.  It’s also frustrating for those of us who struggle with our technology for too long every day.  We’re not like the millions of gamers who’ve been living in virtual worlds for years.

The effects of the current Malthusian plague will be visited on and likely eliminate thousands of enterprises and therefore the livelihood of millions of jobs.  Prominently, it will be those that are dependent on cash flow from discretionary public spending  (like restaurants, retail of all sizes, arts and entertainment venues, manufacturing and the support structures that generate all of their goods and supply chains.)  This is made all the worse because so many companies of every size are dependent on debt and loans they will have little or no way to pay.  So then banks and insurance companies will take them over.  And we all know how dysfunctional and top-heavy these institutions are.   

We’re in the midst of crisis.  Crises inevitably lead to change.  I have to wonder when the change will bring down the current unsustainable gaps between the 1% and the 99%.  And how that will be accomplished in the only country in the history of the world with more guns than people.

We’ll have to stick around long enough to find out.

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One piece of the puzzle that sustains us all is hope.  Even in times of such fear and uncertainty, the life-force of our kids/grandkids generates hope for the future.  Like our four and all of yours, I’m sure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They keep each other busy in these days of family hunkering

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It feels as if this edition has run longish, but I have so much to share after the experiences of the last few months.

May the challenges and love you and yours continue to bring joy, despite the weird, difficult times we’re all going through.

Stay well and try new stuff,