I Won't Celebrate the Centennial of the 19th Amendment

This is 2020, the centennial of passage of the 19^th Amendment.  It should be one good thing to celebrate in a year with too few good things.  Despite the pandemic and chaos, numerous grand events are going on to celebrate the Amendment for giving women the right to vote.  The suggestion always underlying those words is all women.

Yet, the 19^th Amendment was no more universal suffrage for women than the 15^th Amendment was universal suffrage for men.  In context, the 19^th Amendment probably did less than the 15^th.  Because of the 15^th Amendment African American men actually gained voting rights for the period immediately following the Civil War.  Then came systematic denial of voting rights, the hallmark of Jim Crow, until at least 1965, with remnants continuing to this day.

In other words, by 1920, when the 19^th Amendment was added to the Constitution, voting rights for men of color had already been stolen, especially in the South.  And, for all intents and purposes, the 19^th Amendment was irrelevant for women of color, particularly in the South.

Also, the 19^th Amendment in 1920 came before the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act.  It is odd even to type that last fact.  All native-born Indigenous people were not recognized as U.S. citizens until 1924 and thereby were denied the right to vote until 1924.  By interpretation, Native Americans fell outside the reach of the 14^th Amendment, despite its clear language:  All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.

So, in its effect, the 19^th Amendment did not do what we commonly say it did and want to celebrate it for doing 100 years ago.

But what about its intent?  Was universal suffrage its intent?  We may try to comfort our privileged white selves into thinking the 19^th Amendment did not have racist intent.  The historical record, however, suggests otherwise.  To find this out, we must dig deep, beyond the whitewashed tales we call history.

Here is what I managed personally to dig up.

A year or more ago the Library of Congress called for volunteers to transcribe suffragist papers – letters, speeches, diaries, etc. – online.  Crowdsourcing the effort seemed to make sense, especially since the LOC could depend on free, largely female labor to do the work.

I signed up because I can type and thought the content would be interesting.  I could quench my interest in history and learn more about the suffragists from primary sources, their own words.  I did learn more, but not what I expected to learn.  As I recall, I got through no more than two letters.

Why did I stop?  The content was so thoroughly racist I would no longer contribute my time to the effort.  Within the confines of correspondence not written for public consumption, the racism was laid bare.

This presents an obvious conundrum.  Getting the racist underbelly of the women’s suffrage movement out in full display has real value because it has been so well hidden.  I agree that transparency is a good thing, sunshine is the best disinfectant.  But I could not in good conscience contribute any more of my time transcribing the racist words of my foremothers.  Frankly, it made me want to go take a shower.

So, dear readers and fellow members of the League of Women Voters, please forgive me if I cannot fully buy into your celebrations of the centennial of the 19^th Amendment.  Until the real history is told, I have nothing to celebrate.

No Child Should Be Sacrificed

On March 15, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci advised, “If it looks like you're overreacting, you're probably doing the right thing.”  His advice still rings true.

What is the right thing for K-12 schools?

No child, no teacher, no staff, no associated families should be put at risk.  Schools must not re-open, except virtually.

This is still being debated because all our actions and inactions to date have prioritized businesses – the ECONOMY – over schools, our children.  That must stop.  Now.

The President and his Secretary of Education are pressing hard for schools to be fully open in September.  It appears they have even beaten the Centers for Disease Control into line.  Why?  Never strong advocates of public education before, they are now hell-bent on forcing schools to open.  The explanation is obvious.  School children have been chosen as the lever to pry open the economy.

In recent months, we have been inundated with dogma:

·       People must go back to work to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads.  (Government could mitigate this for the pandemic’s duration, but it hasn’t.)

·       Businesses must open to survive and keep their workers employed.  (Government could mitigate this too.)

·       Children must go to school for education and social needs.  (Safety is notably absent from this equation.)

All these things are interconnected.  The single greatest impediment to parents returning to jobs are children at home.  Schools are being valued not for education, but for daycare.

So far, Congress and public officials have adopted temporary fixes, band aids for a pandemic.  We have seen one-time payments, temporary unemployment expansions for some (not all) workers, premature openings of nonessential businesses leading to resurgence of infections.  The country is bleeding through the band-aids.  Better solutions to ensure safety and security are possible while the pandemic rages, but Congress seems incapable of acting accordingly.

Other options having failed, the President wants to sacrifice our kids to restart the economy.  That’s code for enhancing his re-election chances, by the way.

He tells us, infections in kids are infrequent; serious complications in kids are uncommon; deaths in kids are exceedingly rare.  True enough.  Now, you choose.  Which kids are going to live with lifelong consequences from COVID-19?  Which kids are going to die?  You choose.

As a practical matter, no school or school district has the room, the staff, or the funding to accomplish a safe return to school buildings.  Years of experience on a local school board tell me it is just that simple.

In the spring, schools were forced to shift to distance learning without much notice or time to plan.  They did the best they could under the circumstances.  In the spring, that was the only possible response.  It is not a strategy, however, that anyone should willingly adopt for the fall.  Yet, that appears to be what is happening.  The summer has been squandered with dreams and plans to reopen “normally.”

That won’t be possible.  Repeat:  There will be no normal reopening.  The pandemic still rages in most states, uncontrollably in many.  With little time left, robust plans for distance learning must be developed.

What should that planning emphasize?

·       The highest, non-negotiable priority must be educating our most vulnerable students.  They cannot be allowed to fall through the cracks.  Period.

·       Distance learning must be extended to families without Internet access.  It can be done, with adequate funding.  Instead of spending Federal money on nonessentials (like roads), Federal dollars should be targeted to get our kids connected and keep them connected to their schools.

Tick tock.  Get creative.  The greatest deficits throughout the pandemic have been indecisiveness, impatience, and failures of imagination.  Delays and an abject unwillingness to accept how the virus behaves are a deadly combination.  Remember Dr. Fauci’s advice.

Instead, we act like children on a pandemic road trip.

Are we there yet?  Are we there yet?!

No, the end of the pandemic road is not just over the horizon.  That’s not reality.

Let’s accept where we are and adapt.  No life should be deliberately put at risk in any school building.  No teacher, no staff member, and especially no child should be sacrificed.

Let's Not Aspire to Normal

Credit to Artist:  Jennifer Wagner
Source:  Facebook post by Women of Appalachia, 4/22/2020

Governor Jim Justice of West Virginia, announcing the end of in-person instruction for the remainder of the school year but planning for students to return in the fall, remarked (Dominion-Post, 4/22/2020):

“This will be a memory in our rearview mirror.”

Really? Just a memory in the past?

Will the coronavirus epidemic mean so little?

My thoughts keep returning to the stories of World War II. We have all learned about shared sacrifice during WWII. Men and teenage boys went off to fight and die. Women left their homes and filled offices and factories to conduct business, run the government, and manufacture whatever was needed to supply the war machine. Rosie the Riveter, the iconic woman, was born. People bought war bonds, collected cans and newspapers. Those at home endured gas rationing, which limited travel. Imaginative cooks invented recipes to adapt to food rationing. Victory gardens to supply supplemental food were planted everywhere a patch of dirt could be found. Material for new clothes became unavailable, so skirts became shorter at the same time nylon stockings became luxuries available to few. Everyone chipped in.

I’ve never read a single account of anyone bemoaning the loss of a prom or a graduation ceremony due to the war. Perhaps this was aided by the run-up to the war: the Great Depression. Most people were accustomed to going without.

Perhaps that’s why I have so little understanding and, frankly, little tolerance for the loss many parents and students appear to be feeling and sharing today. I understand going without; that was my childhood. Knowing that I couldn’t have whatever I wanted was my normal. No doubt that colors my perspective today.

In retrospect, we know the public response to WWII was not all spontaneous and homegrown. It was aided by leadership. We were all in the fight together, everyone had a job to do, and everyone did it. And we could do it, successfully. Franklin Roosevelt, the messenger, made certain that message came through, loud and clear, with consistency. There was propaganda, indeed, but the propaganda was directed at unifying the people toward a common goal, not at elevating a single individual.

Did Franklin Roosevelt, or Harry Truman after him, ever say, soon this will be just a memory in our rearview mirror? Why would they?

No, once the war was over there was even more work to do: Millions of homes to construct, millions of returning GIs to educate and train, an interstate highway system to build, schools to expand to accommodate that post-war baby boom, diseases like polio to eradicate.

I don’t think anyone talked about “going back to normal.” Why would they? It belittles the effort that came before and reduces the incentives to undertake the efforts that need to come after.

I believe that the coronavirus epidemic has provided us with opportunity, along with all its death and economic destruction. Especially for those of us sheltering in place, one opportunity is the ability to take stock and assess what really matters in life. Our lives were so busy, so filled with stuff, we rarely had (or took) the time to do that before. I think families (kids and parents) bemoaning the loss of prom and graduation are missing out on supremely important lessons in their desire to “go back to normal.”

This is my opinion. Just an opinion. Understand that it is more reflection than judgment.

But, while you think I'm judging, let me be controversial here: It takes a lot of hubristic privilege to be concerned about proms and graduation ceremonies when literally surrounded by people dying by the tens of thousands, healthcare workers risking their lives during every shift, essential employees carrying on their essential and typically lowly functions despite the lethal risks to themselves and their families.

Now, back to reflection:

I’ve been told that prom and graduation (which in this conversation are symbols, let’s face it) are “rites of passage,” and that makes them important! Yes, rites of passage are important. But so is perspective.

In fact, we are smack-dab in the middle of the most extraordinary rite of passage of my entire lifetime and probably the lifetimes of most people alive today. And many of us are hellbent on ignoring its significance! Just letting it pass us by, in our eagerness to get back to normal.

Most of us alive now were born after the Great Depression and after WWII. Yet, the life-altering value of those events for the generations that experienced them is an established part of our cultural identity. What made those events life- and culture-altering? Possibly, a recognition of their importance for all of us, the shared experience, the weight of their impact.

Recently, I heard a different view, in one of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefings from New York. Following those briefings, I have never heard him talk about going back to normal. Instead, he cautions against it.

I have heard him talk quite openly and personally about not being able to visit with his elderly mother or his infected brother. I have heard him reveal publicly his own guilt about before, when he was too often too busy to visit Mom (he calls her “Mom”) when he could have. He considers this, then states as a simple matter of fact that not being able to do these things right now are necessary losses. I also have observed him light up the room as he talks about the unexpected gift of getting to spend time with his grown daughters who are staying-at-home and socially isolating with him. He willingly shares his reflections on his own experiences and circumstances, for our benefit.

And when he talks about what comes next, not now but when the time comes, he talks about rebuilding better, renewal. He talks about taking the lessons learned during the worst of the epidemic and the shutdown and using them for good. He treads on dangerously thin and frankly hallowed ice when he invokes memories of 9/11, before coronavirus, our most recent worst shared tragedy. After 9/11, he asserts, New York and even the United States came back better than before. He asserts that New York learned lessons from the devastation of Hurricane Sandy and rebuilt better.

Agree or not on the specific outcomes of 9/11 or Hurricane Sandy, he rejects the notion of going “back to normal.” Surely, he says, we can learn and do better. This is wholly unlike the mantra of make America [or New York] great again, which is, of course, just another way of saying let’s get back to normal.

This is our opportunity. We will face emergencies again, climate change is bearing down on us, we are inextricably linked globally, and we have uncovered flaws in our society, our economic, government, health care, and other systems that need fixing. We cannot and should not just go back. If we go through all this pain and suffering and inconvenience and desperation and learn exactly nothing, it would be shameful. If we learn but do not apply the lessons going forward, it would be worse than shameful.

For those of us who survive:

   Never forget.

   Go forward.

   Do better.

   Do good

Let’s make this time mean something.

Rationing of Health Care

Suddenly, rationing of health care has become real to Americans because of the COVID-19 epidemic.  I want to cry.  I also feel the urge to laugh, hysterically.

Rationing has always been real to some Americans.  It’s the American way:

For the uninsured part-time worker who puts off going to the doctor because the sign in reception says, “fee is payable at the time of visit.”

For the full-time worker with or without insurance who cannot take time off for fear of losing their low-wage job.

For the Medicaid or Medicare beneficiary who cannot find a provider in their community who will accept public insurance.

For the single parent who sets aside their own health needs and instead puts every resource, however meager, into keeping their children healthy.

For the underinsured with high co-pays and/or deductibles who must choose between health care and rent or food.

For the folks living in the rural areas chronically underserved by the health care system.

For the impoverished who lack transportation to doctor appointments.

For those living so distant from a health care facility that seeking care, even in an emergency, is impractical or impossible.

For those navigating poverty who accepted illness without medical intervention before and bravely hope that their family member will be lucky again this time.

For anyone who is uninsured and therefore faces the highest prices, because it takes insurance to benefit from negotiated discounts.

For someone simply denied access to care because they lack proof of insurance or ability to pay.

I could go on … and on.

Rationing, which has always been real to some Americans, is now becoming real to all Americans, even privileged Americans.  Privilege includes those who have never experienced rationing American-style, but also those who have never understood that others experience it.  Every day, every year.

I Trained for This

Just imagine:  The average American rolls out of bed one random morning, slips on shorts and sneakers, and sets out to run a marathon.  With no training.  That’s the task facing at least a third of the U.S. population (the fraction grows daily) who have been asked (or told) to stay-at-home to avoid catching or transferring the coronavirus.  People are inevitably impatient and anxious.  We are abandoning normal, busy lives to run a race, with most of us forced to run in place.  Are we making progress?  How do we tell?  Are we at mile 1 or 5 or 10?  There are no mile markers.  We can be certain only that we are nowhere near mile 26.  Yet, we yearn to reach the end where we can return to normal, but normal in our future may be nothing more than a mirage.

The novel coronavirus did not exist in humans when I was growing up in rural West Virginia in the 1960s.  But lessons learned from that time long-ago serve me well today, as I live under a stay-at-home order, recognizing that I am in that higher risk population of individuals over the age of 60.

Back then, outside of the school term, my family and I—Mother, Daddy, and I—spent a lot of time socially distanced from others.  We lived well outside of a small town.  We had no neighbors nearby.  Not having an automobile, we went to town “for essential services,” as we now say.  Grocery shopping, say, once a month.  Much of our food came from the garden my folks grew every summer.

Of course, my childhood preceded the invention of the Internet, and most definitely before the invention of social media, and my family didn’t even have a telephone, that social media instrument of the time.  There was no cable television.  Instead, we watched the local news on the one national broadcast channel that we usually got.  We weren’t completely cut off from the world.  Dinner table conversation often revolved around current events.

I had no friends who lived nearby and, again, the lack of transportation kept us socially isolated.  During the months of summer vacation when I would literally never see friends from school, we would write letters that would be speedily delivered back and forth by the reliable Postal Service.  Stamps must have been cheap back then because even my family could afford them.  Of course, there was no email.

For entertainment, I had occasional visits to the local public library, which was never crowded.  That library served the one high school in the county but stayed open in the summer because it served the community too.  I spent my summers reading nearly everything in my small-town library’s collection about World War II and the Great Depression.

Those summers were 50+ years ago.  Yet, I still carry one vivid memory of history as told in Dwight D. Eisenhower’s brick of a memoir.  He began his personal story of WWII by listing the specific numbers of weapons, ships, airplanes, and other essential war materiale in existence for the U.S. armed forces before Pearl Harbor.  And then he told the story of how the production capacity of the United States of America ramped up from such meager beginnings into supplying history’s most fearsome and successful allied forces in order to defeat the original Axis of Evil—Japan, Italy, and Nazi Germany—in a mere 4 years.  The opposite of beating swords into plowshares, it required converting virtually all production of consumer goods—washing machines and automobiles and radios and refrigerators—into military production for the defense of the U.S. and the civilized world.

This memory returns to me today when our health care system is desperate for the most basic supplies to protect health care workers and care for COVID-19 patients.  It is one more reminder that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  But I digress.

In our social isolation, my family also did family stuff.  When I didn't have my nose in a book (as my Mother would say), we played cards, dominoes (a great way to learn arithmetic), watched TV.

We lived beside a little river and Daddy loved to fish, so he and I would often go out in our old, semi-leaky john boat, he in one end and I in the other, at least six feet apart.  In the stern, I paddled the boat.  In the bow, Daddy cast and reeled in the colorful lures designed for bass and whatever other fish might be attracted by the plop-plops and pop-pops the lures made as they hit and traveled through the water.  Unlike Daddy, I found fishing kind of boring—it is impossible to read a book and paddle a boat at the same time—and unproductive.  Usually, there was a lot more fishing than catching going on.  I never fully understood Daddy’s pure contentment with fishing, a contentment that never seemed to vary whether we had fish for dinner or not.  In retrospect, I realize the best part of these fishing excursions for me was spending time with Daddy, who alternated between castigating me for paddling too fast past the good spots and praising me for my superior paddling ability.

Those were good times.  That was also my experience with social isolation in the age of rural poverty, circa 1960s.  Rather idyllic.  Except for the poverty part, of course.

It’s not like that anymore, in the age of coronavirus.

I am retired and I live alone with a little dog and two kitties.  I love living alone, but now I wonder more than usual about what would happen if I got sick.  Mitigating those fears is the fact that I now live in a town with a University medical school, a fine medical center, and extraordinary healthcare access compared with where I used to live.  I have established relationships with providers even though I have lived here less than two years.

All the libraries are closed, but I can download books for free in digital form.  I can’t imagine living without broadband, but I also recognize that many people in rural America still lack any Internet access.  I keep in touch with local friends and those clear across the continent by social media and various communication apps.  Long distance, which used to be a luxury paid for by the minute, is now gloriously free.  I am a voracious consumer of news, which the Internet and cable TV bring me in mind-blowing quantities 24/7.

I still carry Depression mentality behaviors.  My cupboard is stocked to the gills with non-perishables, but that is no change from the days before the stay-at-home order.  The fridge and freezer stock is renewed perhaps twice a month.  I have a car.  I do make an explicit risk-benefit calculation for myself before any trip for “essential services.”

I marvel at the impatience I observe from others about how long this stay-at-home order and social distancing thing might last.  By nature, I am an impatient person, but I am not particularly impatient about this.

Initially, I found myself becoming impatient with the impatience I was observing in others (mostly on social media).  “Why are they so impatient?” I wondered.  “Get over it!” I thought.  And then, I stepped back to reflect on what I could control and I asked myself, “Why am I not so impatient when others are?”

Upon reflection, I realize I have it better than many.  That is a privilege.  My dog and kitties supply cuddly companionship every single day and night.  For once, being retired and living on a fixed income is a positive.  I am not an essential worker who has to put my life on the line every day to work in a grocery store or provide health care services.  I am not a first responder or any type of essential worker.  I am not a displaced worker who has lost a job and income but still have to pay rent and feed a family.  I can stay at home and still cover my expenses and feed my family.  Let me emphasize, that is a privilege.

All that is so, but it still seemed to be an incomplete answer.  Then, in my solitude, the answer came.  In addition to the benefits I enjoy, I am simply well equipped to run this marathon.  This is not unfamiliar territory for me.  I trained for this.