phoenixvoice
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It is very difficult to protect vulnerable populations from Covid. Why? Because they are intermingled with the general, low covid risk population and it is financially and socially impossible to separate the vulnerable from the low-risk populations without empowering individuals and families to make granular decisions on a case by case basis, and for the individuals to receive financial support (such as: per rules of pandemic unemployment insurance). And the elites don’t want to give that much financial power to “the little people.”
Case in point: A family with a father with a medical condition that affects immune system, mother, two elementary school age children. Father is able to work from home. Children are now doing remote school, and mother has taken on the full time job of caring for the children. Mother is no longer able to work outside the home. (Real-life case — I teach these kids piano through Zoom. Fortunately for this family, father’s income is sufficient. But what about families where income from one adult simply isn’t sufficient to keep the family afloat?)
Case in point: My parents came to live with myself, partner, children. All of our activities then need to be cautious so we don’t get/spread the virus. This affects how we work, how we shop, our recreational activities.
Case in point: Grandparents visit family regularly. Family does not take great care…family members get sick, and grandmother falls ill with covid.
Case in point: Teen girl has condition that makes her vulnerable to covid. 3 step-siblings live 50% in her home and 50% in another home. Now, both households need to take great care in how they work, shop, and recreational activities.
These are just situations that I am personally involved in — and I am just one person. “Lockdowns” don’t affect these situations — people will autonomously adjust their behavior (or not — and unwittingly spread covid), and that adjusted behavior (or covid spread) will be reflected economically. Many families are taking risks they should not take — sending kids to in-person school because they must work outside the home to support the family, even though they come in regular contact with vulnerable individuals.
The only compassionate way to respond is to let people choose their own level of risk, and then give them access to the means to support themselves financially. But our economic/political systems are not compassionate, and they do not operate in a way to empower individuals to make their own choices. Propagandizing and influencing is what our systems do well.
While surveys and polls have their uses, I try not to form my entire perspective around them, because their is large disparity in individuals and granular situations. And, surveys are never fully impartial, always influenced by the survey writers and interpreters.
Case in point: government responses to Covid-19 are causing widespread mental suffering.
First off, the *cause* of mental suffering is not so clear cut. For myself, government restrictions (like mask wearing) didn’t bother me at all. The general angst about getting and catching an unknown virus bothered me. Being in public with others not wearing masks, or having them not worn properly bothered me. The fact that when my mother, then my partner and then myself got Covid that I couldn’t find a doctor willing to prescribe HCQ (even tho it is legal in my state) bothered me. (We eventually found a willing doctor.) I miss church and its choir practice…but the decision to do no in-person activities for my church was decided by the church’s elected board, minister, and staff, and was not dictated by government.
Second, while there have been detrimental effects from the Pandemic, not all effects have been detrimental. A survey can be written in such a way to deliberately capture certain effects and to ignore others. For me, ever since the pandemic started I have gotten 7 to 9 hours of sleep nearly every night — simply because there are fewer expectations that I go places, and because I no longer need to ferry 3 kids to and from 3 different schools half of every week. My life is calmer. Transitioning some work to Zoom means that after an initial drop in income, my current income is right on track with what it was pre-pandemic. A friend who lives in a retirement community has been very bothered by that community’s response, has failed to get management to see his perspective…but rather than stew in it, he and his wife are simply moving out and are excited for the move
Yes, there are negative effects of the pandemic. And positive ones. But life is not static, never has been. What is more important to consider is resilience and whether or not individuals have access to the tools that help them to have resilience.
I understand the scientific analyses that cloth masks are too porous, and especially can’t stop aerosolized particles. However, in my state (Arizona) Covid cases were increasing week over week throughout May and June. The end of June mask laws were enacted in the most populous cities, and in cities with the most covid transmission. Exactly two weeks after the ban went into effect, the peak of infections was reached, and the numbers of new cases each day began decreasing. Deaths peaked about 4 weeks after the mask laws went into effect. Now…this doesn’t tell us that masks magically block covid, however, this happened in other states as well. I don’t know If it means that most covid particles are large enough to be blocked by masks, or that mask laws cause most people to be more cautious, or something else is at play that I haven’t thought of. However, if mask laws in areas where virus transmission is high helps contain the spread of covid (even if it isn’t the masks themselves, but changes in behavior as a result of the signal that “this is serious,”) then that is very valuable public policy. And, it is much more practical public policy that economic shut downs.
As a woman who was raised in a religious, politically conservative family, who left that religion and has migrated to the left, the Politico bit about Amy Barrett resonates. I, too, retain the belief from my youth that raising children is very important work. I have three. But my life has been very different. My ex was verbally and emotionally abusive and the marriage erupted in flames when the oldest kids were about 8 years due to my ex’s alcoholism, etc. For a very long time now, I have put my kids first and earning an income second. My kids know that they are loved…and the income I raise them on is well below the Federal Poverty Limit. I am resourceful and run my own business, which allows me to set my own hours and make a higher dollar per hour return on my time than I would working for someone else. The child support I receive is minimal (~$40/month) because my ex lies to everyone about his income (including the IRS) and the Commissioner was too lazy to look at the documentation of my ex’s income that I provided, too lazy to notice the many times my ex perjured himself in child support hearings.
I am curious how Judge Barrett would see women like me — sharing her values about family and children, but not as lucky in finding a partner that also embraced those values. (My ex turned out to be a fraud in that area — professing those values, but not putting them into practice.) Because it’s nice to say, sure, the ideal is an equal partnership to parent children, but how does a society in a strict constructionist view of the Constitution support parents of any gender who find themselves raising children alone or in an unequal partnership? Currently, such parents are given a bitter pill to swallow — skimp on parenting, skimp on money-earning, and/or submit to an abusive partnership. (There may be other variations of this as well, but these are the ones that most come to mind for me.)
This article succinctly represents CRT’s strengths and flaws: https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/on-the-use-and-abuse-of-critical
Joel Fisher is incorrect. Trump wrote a book called “The America We Deserve” in 2000. I read it many years ago. In it, he was outlining platform for his own presidential bid. I read it because In was metamorposizing from conservatively liberal at the time. I don’t remember a lot of specifics, but I believe he was supporting some flavor of Medicare for All at the time.
I appreciate reference to the article growing-numbers-of-us-attorneys-general-are-out-to-undermine-the-law. I had heard the name Bill Ayers, but didn’t really know who he is. I looked him up. What a remarkable life, spent trying to improve the lot of others, full of personal setbacks and successes, and growth and dedication to pacifism and admirable ideals. The article is a perfect example of “right-baiting” — an article of fact nuggets woven together with confabulation designed to inflame the emotions of the reader against a particular group of people. There are those on the Left engaged in the exact same thing, engaging in left-baiting, screaming RussiaRussia and so forth.
I am all too familiar with the fallout that this type of writing causes. In my own life my ex’s attorney used these tactics two years ago, smearing me in legal pleadings, and attempting to remove our three children from me completely. There was no truth to the allegations, and with the help of friends, family, and unwitting credit card issuers I won the case.
Perhaps this is why I have a hard time reading this type of writing — long before there was any evidence that RussiaRussia was false, I didn’t believe a shred of it.
And so I find myself asking the question…to heal this fractured nations others need to calm their inflamed emotions and speak with those whom their media has branded as “the enemy”…and how may this happen?
I always wonder when folks rail against mail in ballots if these same folks have ever voted by mail in ballot and know how that system works. In Arizona I’ve been on the permanent mail in voter list for more than a decade…because as a work at home mother, going to the polls on a specific day just isn’t always feasible.
In AZ, mail in ballots are identical to the usual ballots, must be completed in black pen, are read optically and can be checked by a real person visually. The ballot is placed in a provided envelope, and on the back of the envelope is a place for the voter to sign. This way, the voter’s signature can be verified against the signature in the registry, but the ballot is not directly tied to the signature, just as would be with in-person voting.
Like any system, if we think about it long enough, we can come up with a way to corrupt it. I worked one year in AZ as a poll worker…and the in-person voting system also may be corrupted. Possibility of corruption doesn’t mean corruption is happening or not. There were stories of corruption around in-person voting locally around the 2016 election. Probably no system is incorruptible, but we can make our systems more difficult to corrupt — but we have to balance the desire for incorruptibility with the purpose of the system, which is to be broadly available to the public. Without easy access to all eligible voters, our system has failed in its purpose from the get-go. If our system is not perfect, we can erect checks to help test for corruption (such as exit polls), and that can trigger, for example, manual recounts, and ensure we have ballots that can actually be recounted (i.e. with no possibility of “dangling chads.”)
I live in Phoenix, AZ. I know six people personally who have been positively diagnosed with covid-19. I am aware of several others who tested positive that are known by people I know. My attorney is one if them — her illness delayed a deadline in my case for a month. Her entire office came down with it. She is in her 40s, healthy, and survived. She already survived cancer and told me that being sick with covid-19 was worse than cancer treatments.
I do not yet know anyone personally who has died from covid-19, but I have many friends who are the age of my parents and older, so I expect that to happen. I do know people personally who know people who have died.
My children live half-time with their father, his girlfriend, and her daughter who is immunocompromised. Myself, my partner, and my children are trying to minimize our risk of getting the virus so that we don’t pass it onto that girl (she gets hospitalized from colds and would be unlikely to survive covid-19.) It is very frustrating to go to the grocery or hardware store and be faced with people who wear masks carelessly or loosely, allowing their breath in every direction. I don’t want the girl to die; I don’t want my children to have to deal with the emotional fallout from bringing the virus to her.
As a people we need to face the fact that we actually know very little about this virus. Yes, most people will survive it — but we do not yet know at what cost — we do not know what the long-term effects may be. We do not know if antibodies to covid-19 can be maintained by the human body over a long period of time. We don’t like to have so many unknowns — as a people we are unaccustomed to having such large unknowns. We live in an age of science where computers aid us in perfect calculations and help us to assess risk, where disease causes and cures can be targeted with great accuracy, where a GPS helps guide us to an unfamiliar address. This virus defies our expectations, and places us back into a world with risks we cannot accurately measure. This is very uncomfortable.
We don’t like the discomfort, and so to dispel it we tend to jump into one camp or another: “This is terrifying! Stay home! See no one! Wait for a vaccine!” Or: “This is not materially different from the flu! Get over it already! Masks are for sissies!” We tend to fall into polarized camps, and send nasty thoughts to those in the opposite camps.
But reality is not black or white, and neither camp has a full picture of the truth…because we are like the blind men (humans) in the room with an elephant…is the elephant like a snake or like a tree? The seeing (hu)man knows that all of the assessments by the blind are true, but none of their assertions paint an accurate picture of reality. We are the blind when it comes to covid-19. We don’t even have full assessments yet to even begin drawing an accurate picture of covid-19. We accomplish nothing useful when we argue for one view or another of covid-19 based on one set of data while ignoring other sets of data. Seeming contradictions of data on the virus will eventually be collated and help us to better understand what we face. We honor each other as humans when we listen to each other, let the scientists and others do their jobs to collect and collate the data, and learn from our disparate assessments, rather than arguing. We can also respect each other’s fears and do what we can to accommodate these fears in an uncertain time — wearing a mask correctly, honoring quarantine, etc. We do not know what challenges others face — and we cannot measure the value of a grandparent to a grandchild, or the value of an immunocompromised teen to those who know and love her.
