pandemic | The Casual Blog

January 1, 2022

Happy New Year! But there’s some bad news

Here are a few more shorebird pictures from our wonderful wedding celebration at Atlantic Beach, NC. Clark, our new daughter-in-law, exceeded all expectations! I also enjoyed spending time on the beach with the birds, and interpreting these images. As noted below, I, and probably you, can definitely use more of the beauty and peace of nature.

As we start a brand new year, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed with dire problems: the resurgent pandemic, mass shootings, fires, tornadoes, droughts, melting ice caps, and the list goes on. There’s a lot to deal with. As part of my meditation practice, I try to make some time every day for conscious gratitude and compassion, including self-compassion.

Given all our other problems, it’s obviously not a great time to discuss the possible end of American democracy. We’re already exhausted. But we need to buck up and find our second wind. Our system has been much weakened and may fail entirely. If we want to save it, we have to act soon.

Besides worry overload, another reason I hesitate to raise the subject is that there is so much wrong with American-style democracy. Its most valuable ideals – free elections, equality before the law, free speech and other civil liberties – have never been fully realized. Meanwhile, this system has given us extreme inequality, embedded racism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia.

We have the world’s largest rate of incarceration, and an endless war on drugs that keeps prisons full and sustains worldwide criminal organizations. Our military brings death and chaos to remote areas of the globe, while maintaining hair-trigger readiness to end civilization in a nuclear war. For many, there is not adequate food, housing, transportation, or medical care. For non-human beings, it’s even worse. In short, our political processes have not produced what we would reasonably expect of a wealthy, enlightened nation, and they’ve done a lot that we cannot be proud of.

But for all our shortcomings and failures, American democracy still provides one thing that is extremely valuable: the possibility of change. We have a tradition of fair elections and peaceful transitions of power. Our votes almost always get counted and determine the winner. Exceptions are vanishingly rare.

If the governing party loses, it peacefully concedes and allows the business of government to continue. The new government might improve things, and at any rate, it is generally agreed that it is entitled to take a shot. This has been true for a long time, and it’s hard to conceive that it could be otherwise. But it easily could.

Now, more than a year after the last presidential election, a substantial majority of Republicans have been persuaded that the election was stolen, and that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president. They reject the overwhelming weight of the authorities – court decisions, officials, scholars, and news media – that contradict that view.

Republican leaders at the national and state level, with very few exceptions, continue to support the big lie that the true winner in 2020 was Donald Trump, and to refuse to support or cooperate with investigations into the illegal attempts to nullify the victory of President Biden.

Republican legislators in some 19 states have already passed laws to make future Democratic victories less likely by making it more difficult for some groups to vote. Several Republican-dominated states are getting rid of their non-partisan election officials who refused to assist in overturning the last presidential election and installing supporters of the big lie.

In other words, many states are putting in place a system to stack the deck against Democrats and then, if that doesn’t work, nullify election results. In addition, dozens of states have enacted new laws criminalizing various acts of protests, including ones that would likely occur after a stolen election. Meanwhile, the courts have been stacked with Republican judges.

While all this is happening, repeating the big lie prepares the psychological ground. If enough people are convinced, wrongly, that election fraud is common, they may also be convinced that their own cheating isn’t so bad. Cynicism, apathy, and fear could be paralyzing, or at least keep many people from protesting.

These forces could in short order leave us with an authoritarian, neo-fascist system. That is, a system with all of our current problems, minus the machinery to allow for political change to address those problems, and minus long-standing institutional restraints on repressive violence and corruption.

I know this is no fun to think about, but fortunately, it’s not hard to understand intellectually. The challenge is to fix it. As to Republicans who understand the big lie and disapprove of it, they need to show some backbone, and tell the truth. Democrats who understand it need to get to work educating others on what’s happening. And they need to get involved, volunteering, making phone calls, watching the polls, and so forth – all the no-fun jobs that are part of free and fair elections.

Although I think saving our democracy will be tough, our ancestors have won long-odds fights for rights before. In the last century, women fought hard to win the right to vote, and African Americans won the right to be treated as full citizens. The forces that have brought us to this point – fear, hatred, ignorance, greed – are nothing new, and we already have the tools to counter them: kindness, compassion, and love. But hope alone won’t get the job done. We need to get to work.

March 14, 2021

Getting better

My week was more medical than usual, with checkups for my teeth and eyes, and a follow up on my spine surgery. There wasn’t a lot of drama, except that both my long-time dentist and my long-time optometrist had retired since my last checkups. I liked them, and will miss them. The new docs I tried seemed pleasant and competent, old enough, but not too old, and with newer equipment. I have high hopes that they’ll still be practicing after I have no further needs in their specialities.

As for my spine, Dr. K reviewed new X-rays and thought that his work on my thoracic spine seemed to be healing well. He was sorry that my tingling symptoms were still here, but said they might get better in a few months. I thought, but didn’t say, this is starting to sound like an overly interesting (for clinicians) diagnostic puzzle. It’s a reminder that I likely have a best-if-used-by date, which I do not enjoy thinking about.

I’m grateful to have survived the coronavirus pandemic long enough to get my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine, which I got yesterday over in Durham. It didn’t hurt to speak of — you should do it! What a turnaround in the pandemic we’ve had in just a few weeks, with vaccinations running way ahead of schedule.

Also amazing: this week President Biden signed into law a huge measure to address the effects of the pandemic, plus some long standing problems. The American Rescue Plan breaks new ground in getting some real help to people who are barely getting by. This idea of helping the less fortunate is not exactly new, but in the last half century our government has mainly been by and for the most fortunate, with a focus on giving them tax cuts and subsidies. It’s a little disorienting to see Congress pass legislation designed to help ordinary people, and especially poor people, with health care, education, food, child care, transportation, housing, and other needs.

As I discussed recently, Heather McGhee has a new book on how this old idea of a social safety net and basic public services was rejected in the U.S. out of fear of undermining the traditional racial caste system. But maybe we’re starting to turn the page on that sad chapter, and to reconstruct an America that’s less brutal and more caring. Here’s hoping!

Finally, I have a bit of musical good cheer to share. In my piano studies, I’ve been wading into the deeper waters of jazz harmony and creating some piquant bebop dissonances. This week, in a change of pace, I focused more on tropical rhythms and some of my favorite bossa nova tunes, like Antonio Carlos Jobim’s classic The Girl from Ipanema. That cheerful, loping rhythm turns out to be tricky to do as a solo pianist.

Anyhow, I also started working on Jobim’s song Wave, and came across a version that filled me with happiness. It’s a live performance, under three minutes, with Elis Regina singing with joy and harmonica virtuoso Toots Thielemans playing with humor. You can listen to it here. Enjoy!

I took these shots early at Shelley Lake this week when the geese, herons, and eagles were starting their day. I was hoping to get a shot of one of the eagles catching a fish, and did see one try, but he missed.

December 20, 2020

Still in the tunnel, trying to address pandemic denialism

On the news this week, there were a lot of shots of the first covid-19 shots, and it was surprisingly cheering. Nurses were sticking needles into shoulders. At first I flinched at the sight, but I got over that in short order. Developing safe and effective vaccines in record time was an extraordinary achievement, for which gratitude is in order. There seems to be a light at the end of the pandemic tunnel.

For the moment, though, the pandemic is still raging, and we’re still in the tunnel. Especially in the short days and long nights of the holiday season, it’s difficult. We miss getting together with friends and loved ones. Masks and social distancing are still no fun. Infection rates and death rates are still high, and we’re running low on good cheer.

There really doesn’t seem to be any reasonable choice except to press on with medically recommended safety measures, especially when it looks like there’s a good chance we’ll make it back to happier life. That’s why it keeps surprising me that a good many Trumpists choose to refuse masks as a political statement and continue holding get-togethers as though they think the pandemic is a gigantic hoax.

At first I thought this might be caused by pure ignorance, and surely there’s some of that. But for some, pandemic denialism seems to be tied to a fairly elaborate set of ideas that are woven into our culture. It might help to tease them out.

Part of pandemic denialist thinking involves taking the idea of individual freedom to a perverse, though also logical, conclusion. The extreme idea that personal freedom should be completely unrestrained sees mask requirements as un-American tyranny. The denialist feels that he or she is standing up for principle and resisting oppression.

Preferring to symbolically defend an exaggerated, idealized notion of freedom rather than to avoid serious illness or death is hard to understand. Denialist thinking must have some other drivers. For one, there’s the frustration, sadness, and boredom many of us are experiencing. Also, there’s economic pressure, including the urgent need to earn enough for gas, food, and rent, which are pressing problems for many, including some denialists. At some point, a reasonable person might well choose the possibility of death from covid-19 over actual hunger.

But for many mask opponents, there’s still food in the pantry, and starvation is not the issue. Their pandemic denialism is closely connected to other kinds of denialism, including denial of man-made climate change and of racial equality. These ideas all have in common a rejection of science and other expertise.

This mindset seems self-defeating — indeed, self-destructive — but it makes a strange kind of sense. Accepting the authority of science and consensus views of experts would make it impossible to maintain certain parts of the denialist world view.

For example, traditional views of racial hierarchies (with distinct races, and some understood to be inferior to others) are inconsistent with genetic research. Similarly, the traditional view of nature as limitless and existing solely to satisfy human appetites is undermined by ecology. Likewise, creationism can’t comfortably co-exist with evolution.

Even if pandemic denialists weren’t counter-science, they’d still be driven by polarization. Extreme denialists have dug in on the notion that liberals are dangerous and not to be trusted on anything. Denialists will be inclined to believe the opposite of whatever liberals say, simply because they think the source is not only wrong, but evil.

So how do you have a discussion on pandemic safety with a denialist, if you’re not one? Very carefully! We don’t want to get them even more upset, and logic and facts just won’t work. I’m still holding onto hope that respect and compassion, consistently applied, will eventually build understanding and trust. In the meantime, it’s a good idea to keep using masks and get in line as soon as possible for the vaccine.

I took the pictures here one morning last week at Shelley Lake in Raleigh.

August 29, 2020

The virus is still here, except in Trump’s fantasyland

Having watched almost the entire Democratic Convention, I wanted to give equal time to the Republicans, so I watched their Convention. Well, I should say, I tried, until I couldn’t take it anymore, and then I read about it the next day. My tolerance for the alternative reality and fear mongering in real time was generally about 20 minutes.

Though I don’t understand it, I accept that there are people who are going to vote for Trump, and I was hoping to get a better grasp of why. I assume a lot of Trump voters are decent and well meaning, with things in their life experience and psychology that net out to belief in MAGA.

At the Convention, there were many normal-looking, normal-sounding people singing the praises of Trump. Some told anecdotes about Trump’s being helpful to particular industries or being nice to particular people, some of which could have been true, though after four years of his nonstop lying, who knows?

I felt like I’d somehow wandered into an alternative universe, where the last four years hadn’t happened. Everything Trump had done was kind and good, while his cruelty, corruption, and incompetence had disappeared. It was disorienting, but somehow familiar. Then I realized where I actually was: the Fox News universe, a media bubble where Trump is a god-like being receiving unquestioning adoration, and his impulsiveness and crack pot ideas are lauded as genius.

Some of the character references could have been viewed as ordinary political puffery. But there were some claims and positions that were dangerous and so flagrantly false that it’s difficult to see how anyone could agree to say them, much less believe them.

A prime example is the Covid-19 pandemic, which Trump and other speakers spoke of in the past tense as having been successfully addressed by Trump. It pushes the limits of the human capacity for denial and delusion to think either that the pandemic is over or that Trump did a good job handling it.

As of this writing, the United States is seeing around 40,000 new cases per day, with a total of around 180,000 deaths so far. The US is the world leader in active cases and total deaths. Many of these deaths would not have happened under an ordinary, competent president, as shown by the lower infection and fatality rates in other countries. Trump still has no plan for handling the pandemic, other than trying to distract attention from it and promoting miracle cures, like ingesting bleach.

In fact, Trump continues to push in exactly the wrong direction by discouraging masks, modeling non-social distancing, and encouraging people to get back to work. For his speech at the White House on the final night, he showed his profound selfishness and recklessness by having thousands of worshippers crammed together, with no testing and almost no masks. They may have believed the lie that the pandemic was over. In any case, with the President’s encouragement, they effectively risked their lives. What kind of person would do that to his followers?

As with the pandemic, in other areas the Republican Convention challenged America: are you going to believe us, or your lying eyes? With millions unemployed and thousands of businesses shuttered, the Republicans praised Trump for a fantastically successful economy. He claimed to have kept every promise, and declared victory on health care, job creation, building the wall, foreign relations, building new infrastructure, and other areas in which he has accomplished almost nothing. He did not attempt to defend his support for Russian interference in our affairs, his energy rules that will worsen the climate crisis, his tax cuts for the wealthy, the criminal conduct of his close advisors, or his own corruption.

With police shootings continuing and Black Lives Matters protesters still calling for an end to racist police violence, Trump persuaded a few Black supporters to say he’s not a racist. But he continued to claim that Black people are threatening to burn down our cities and invade the suburbs if he loses. He did not explain his proposed solution to this imaginary problem, other than to keep repeating the phrase law and order. Based on his recent activity, this seems to be shorthand for meeting protesters with tear gas and bullets and locking them up.

All this was unsettling, especially when combined with fear mongering about liberals. Trump and his acolytes warned loudly and absurdly that Joe Biden and the Democrats embodied a dangerous alien ideology (such as communism or socialism) and would turn America into a hellhole. There were a few quick nods to non-white people, but no acknowledgement or apologies for Trump’s ongoing support of white supremacists, his tear gassing protesters to get a photo op, his Muslim ban, and his putting immigrant children in cages and then losing them. At least he didn’t threaten to lock up Joe and Kamala — yet.

How do we know what is reality? In general, we have a look at the people around us and try to figure out what they agree on. This usually works well enough for us to stay out of big trouble, but as the Republicans have shown, not always. Last month, Naomi Oreskes, a history professor at Harvard, wrote a short piece in Scientific American about the intellectual foundations of science, which I thought was so intriguing that I bought and read her new book, Why Trust Science?

In the SA piece, Oreskes noted that one common reason for rejecting scientific knowledge is that people don’t like information that conflicts with their existing beliefs. Thus there are many people who deny scientific consensus findings on climate change because they require responses that are inconsistent with their faith in markets and opposition to government, or just with their rosy picture of the world.

In her new book, Oreskes argues that what is distinctive about science is not that it is always correct (it isn’t), but that it involves a social methodology involving trained and specialized experts that in the usual course corrects errors and leads to improved understanding. She points out that when we need specialized knowledge to fix a problem, we turn to experts, whether they are plumbers, electricians, or doctors. Scientists are our experts on the natural world, and they assist and correct each other. Like all other experts, they sometimes get things wrong, but on the whole they do better than non-experts.

Anyhow, it isn’t surprising that Trumpists often don’t care to engage when scientists are trying to communicate unwelcome news. But that’s a big problem with the coronavirus pandemic. Many if not most of us know people who have been seriously ill or died from the virus. Adopting the Trump position that the pandemic is no longer of serious concern is a mistake of epic proportions that will lead to a lot more deaths. We’re at a new frontier in propaganda and politics: a presidential message that all those deaths are of no consequence, with a political party prepared to advance it.

August 15, 2020

On the Blue Ridge, our caste system, and Trump’s latest doozy

The Perseid meteor shower was at its peak this week, and I was looking forward to some shooting stars. I spent a day exploring different spots on the Blue Ridge Parkway, looking at the mountains and flowers. I stayed at the Pisgah Inn and saw a lovely sunset, with towering clouds that lit up with pink and orange. Around 1:00 a.m., I got up and walked outside. It was dark and quiet, but also, unfortunately, cloudy, so I saw no meteorites, Maybe next year.

Sunset from my balcony at the Pisgah Inn

After photographing the sunrise and hiking to a couple of waterfalls in Brevard County, I made my way to I-40 and headed east toward Raleigh. I turned on the radio, and caught Joe Biden and Kamala Harris giving their speeches announcing that Harris was Biden’s VP pick.

They were good speeches! No self-aggrandizing! No whining! Nothing fancy, but addressing the big issues, like climate change, police brutality against black people, the pandemic, education, health care. And of course, the disaster in progress known as Donald J. Trump.

Although Trump continues to trail in the polls, it’s safe to assume he is unconstrained by any sense of honor or morality and will do anything to win, so I’m not taking anything for granted. We watched a short Netflix documentary on him that was part of the series Dirty Money. The film is worth seeing if you’re unfamiliar with his history as a pathetic grifter who pretends to be a super successful businessman.

Pretending to be a businessman on TV for The Apprentice worked out much better for Trump than his various actual business ventures, which were almost all embarrassing failures, including Trump casinos, Trump Airlines, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump magazine, and Trump University.

At the time, I thought The Apprentice seemed bogus, but it was a big hit. There’s a fine article by Patrick Radden Keefe from the New Yorker about the making of The Apprentice, which explains how hard the producers had to work to make Trump seem reasonably sane and competent. Let’s just say the show was heavily edited.

Sunrise on the Blue Ridge

The Trump presidency closely resembles a reality TV show, with its hype and hoked up drama, but unfortunately, off camera, there are real people suffering. We’ve got huge unemployment, a health care crisis, a housing crisis, a pandemic, climate change bringing one weather disaster after another, and so on. So, true to form, rather than acknowledging our serious problems and trying to help fix them, Trump has once again played the race card.

Last week he tweeted that that “people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream” would “no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood.”

This is racism that barely pretends not to be; the racist dog whistle is more like a train whistle. For most of the 20th century, the United States prevented racial integration in housing through governmental programs, including discriminatory FHA loans. This appalling history is examined in some detail in Richard Rothstein’s important book, The Color of Law.

The subject of Trump’s racist train whistle was a program called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, or AFFH, which was instituted under Obama, and directed at getting municipalities to identify and address patterns of discriminatory segregation. Trump seems to think that there are a lot of white suburbanites fearful of invading black people, and he can exploit that fear and get their votes.

Once again, Trump is betting big, hoping that the shameful longings for sustaining white supremacy will be stronger than opposing feelings, like hope for justice and fairness. It probably won’t work. But as with other failed Trump experiments, the failure will teach us something about our beliefs on race, and also our concern for justice.

In Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, Caste, she argues that the American system of racial oppression is similar to other caste systems like those in India and Germany before WWII. She explained the idea on several podcasts this week, and I think she’s on to something.

As Wilkerson notes, an individual American may or may not have racial animus, but everyone of us is enmeshed in a system that involves distinguishing black from white and conferring certain benefits based on that distinction. Using the vocabulary of caste may help depersonalize the problem. Although the system has deep roots, recognizing it as a system (as opposed to simply an individual moral failing) may make it easier to change.

For a man with such a big mouth, Trump has been strangely quiet about the recent news of Russian aggression against the United States. When reports emerged of Russia giving bounties to fighters in Afghanistan who killed US and allied forces, he claimed to be unaware of it. More important, he didn’t propose doing anything about it. And weeks after the news became public, he is still taking the position he hadn’t been informed, and still not doing anything. In fact, he’d had a chat with Vladimir Putin, and admitted he hadn’t brought up the matter. This is appalling and disgusting.

If this were the only instance of Trump declining to oppose clear Russian aggression, I might chalk it up to his lack of interest in anything other than his own aggrandizement or progressive dementia. But this has been a pattern. When the Russians worked to defeat Hillary Clinton and help Trump, he refused to acknowledge their success, and also invited them to continue hacking. He seems indifferent or hostile to the many warnings that the Russians are again working to undermine fair US elections. He has little to say about Russian interference in other countries, and nothing but compliments for Putin.

I very much doubt that Trump is actually a paid Russian agent. Putin, though not necessarily a stable genius, is smart enough to recognize that Trump lacks anything like the discipline, drive, and intelligence to be a worthwhile spy. Trump doesn’t like taking orders, and he would have trouble remembering them. He’s also not very good at keeping secrets, other than his own financial shenanigans.

It’s much more likely that Trump fears Putin for personal or financial reasons, and understands that crossing Putin would put him in peril. Could Trump’s not-so-enormous fortune be dependent on Russian loans and money laundering? Of course it could. Think of how convenient it could be for Russian oligarchs to stash their ill-gotten gains in Trump high-rise condos, and how a salesman like Trump known mainly for lying would struggle otherwise to sell high-end property. Also, how likely is it that Trump could resist an offer of an attractive Russian prostitute with an advanced degree in political black mail?

Of course, I don’t personally know, and perhaps Trump somehow avoided his characteristic corruption and moral degradation with regard to the Russians. Maybe we could clear all this up if the President would quit concealing his tax returns and related financial records.

Even without them, it’s clear that Putin could hardly have been more successful in creating political chaos that threatens the continued existence of American democracy than if he had managed to get a Russian spy elected president. Trump has been Putin’s dream come true.

On any given week it’s usually difficult to say what was the craziest, most disturbing thing Trump just did, but we certainly had a doozy this week. Trump indicated that he was withholding funds from the Postal Service so that they wouldn’t be able to deliver mail-in ballots for the presidential election. Meanwhile, the Postmaster General he just appointed is shaking up top staff, decommissioning sorting machines, and assuring that delivery is slowing to a crawl.

With the pandemic still raging, mail in ballots are looking like a great option for getting rid of Trump. Unless Trump can manage to keep them from being delivered! He seems to assume most of those inclined to use the mail to vote would vote against him. Maybe this is because he’s encouraged his supporters to ignore the pandemic, so they can (in the Trumpworld of alternative facts) vote in person without risking illness and death.

I’m still socially distancing and trying not to catch the coronavirus, so I sent in my request for an absentee ballot, and was feeling a little sick at the thought that Trump and his minions might prevent delivery. So I checked the NC voting procedures, and learned that I can personally deliver the completed ballot to the county board of elections. If you live in NC and certain other states, you can, too. Good luck!

July 19, 2020

Getting through the pandemic, no thanks to Trump

Sunflowers at Odom Farm in Goldsboro, NC

After several months of trying to avoid Covid-19 virus by minimizing human contact, I’m not quite myself, and I suspect that’s true of many others. I’m not a particularly social person, but it turns out I’m more social than I thought. I miss those little human contacts, even the ones that were never going anywhere, like the friendly smile of a stranger that will always be a stranger.

I’ve gotten to be a big believer in masks to slow the spread of the virus, but they are not fun. I don’t so much mind the personal discomfort, but I do mind not seeing the faces of others. We communicate a lot with our uncovered faces, and lose a lot when they’re covered. Perhaps we’ll eventually develop new capacities to distinguish people and their emotions from just their eyes, the way sightless people can do with sound. For the time being, it seems like we’re going blind with regard to other faces.

We’re now in uncharted psychological territory. I’m guessing that there’s more anxiety and depression across the land. There have been reports of more domestic violence and suicide. Though staying home may reduce anxieties for some, and even lead to new inner pathways.

In any case, it looks like we’re going to be here for a while. Whatever our current anxieties or anxiety solutions, they will likely be changing as time goes on, because that’s how things work — they change. I’d like to think they could only get better, but I see no good reason to be confident of that. Though they might.

It would be unfair to blame Trump and Trumpism for the pandemic. But it seems completely fair to note that T&T have made a bad situation a lot worse. By minimizing the seriousness of the health threat and discouraging sensible and practical responses, Trump and those who enable him have been responsible for many deaths, with more to come.

Most everyone now knows that Trump is thoroughly incompetent, unqualified not only to be president, but for even the most minor position of responsibility. No reasonable person would engage him to water their houseplants, because he would almost certainly let them die. Then he would blame their death on the family dog.

Most of us recognize that when we have a big problem, we need a smart expert to help. But not Trump. This week he and his minions conducted a mudslinging campaign against the leading expert on the pandemic in his administration, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Dr. F is the rarest of birds in Trumpland: a person who is qualified for his position and tells the truth. So why did the Trumpists try to discredit him? Dr. F declined to follow the T line of pretending the pandemic was a minor matter and well under control, and instead acknowledged the likelihood that it wasn’t just about to go away.

Trump’s ordinary playbook for dealing with a crisis involves various combinations of pretending there is no crisis, blaming someone else for it, and creating some other crisis to distract from the first one. He’s tried all of those with the pandemic, with predictable results (that is, persuading only those Fox News viewers who will believe anything). So of course, he blames Dr. Fauci.

As Trump’s poll numbers keep going down, he keeps trying his old playbook, including fear mongering directed against minorities, foreigners, and liberals. But I noted a new element this week. The Times reported that “tensions with China are rising,” with “some” thinking that a new cold war may be developing.

I wondered, who is feeling those tensions and doing this thinking? I’ll speak for myself: not I. I’m feeling no such tension. I do not feel directly threatened by China, and don’t observe any threats to my neighbors.

If I lived in Hong Kong or India, of course, it would be quite another matter. China has a brutal authoritarian government that has expansionist ambitions, so it behooves us to watch it closely and oppose it non-violently. But I’ve seen no evidence that China wishes to have a war with us.

Although I am not tense about China itself, I am somewhat tense because of the possibility that the Trumpists may think a conflict with China would be beneficial to the president, for the same reason that racism and xenophobia are beneficial: they distract from other problems.

The pandemic has demonstrated anew that Trump views the only point of his presidency as getting reelected. That is, he doesn’t think he has a duty to protect the public, the troops, or anyone, other than himself. He’s prepared to let vast numbers of people die from Covid-19 if it helps his reelection chances. So, although it would be disastrous, it would not be out of character for him to try to get reelected by staging a wag-the-dog war with China or someone else.

But I’m hopeful that if he starts down that path, the top generals and other officials will take their Constitutional oath seriously and decline to follow unlawful orders. We may survive, with Hurricane Trump moving out to sea. We soon may be able to start the hard work of cleaning up the damage and starting to address our real problems.

I visited these sunflowers last week at Odom Farming Company in Goldsboro, NC. They have a lot of lovely flowers, and are happy to have visitors, if you check ahead.

May 3, 2020

Missing Florida, processing some photos, and picturing hell

Osprey at Jordan Lake

I’d planned to be in Florida this past week photographing the big birds there, like egrets, wood storks, and roseate spoonbills. With the coronavirus pandemic still in full force, that wasn’t possible, but I did get to spend some time at our area parks, including Shelley Lake and Jordan Lake. It was good to be outside with our local birds.

Although I didn’t capture any images that were singular, I was happy to practice getting better exposures. I also enjoyed experimenting with the raw images in Lightroom, Photoshop, and other apps, with a view to improving my processing skills. Here are some of the results using bird shots I took this week, as well experiments with Sally’s orchids. The white one lost its flowers a few days after the last shot of it. Hope it will come back next year.

These days there’s a lot of background fear and worry, and no simple solution to all our ills. But I’m finding it helpful to spend some time focusing on moments of beauty and peace, and also spending more time meditating. I discovered some good new (to me) resources on YouTube, including some guided meditations by Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield. I don’t think I’m anywhere near nirvana, but I’m happier and more peaceful.

Tufted titmouse at Shelley Lake

I used to worry about the possibility of going to hell. In the religious tradition I grew up in, hell was a real place, ruled by Satan, where sinners were sent after death to be tortured forever. I eventually came to think that the likelihood of there being such a place was close to zero, and that worrying about it was a waste of time. But it’s interesting that the concept of hell has had such a long life, and continues to terrify people today.

I learned more about hell in an interview with Bart Ehrman on Fresh Air a few weeks ago, and just finished his new book, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife. Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at University of North Carolina, contends that the notions held by most Christians of the afterlife are not found in the Bible. Rather they were made up by various early Christian writers to support religious theories and emotional needs.

It’s good to know that the horrifying idea that God set up a massive system for never ending torture is not universal, and is actually a relatively recent (around 1,800-year-old) invention. Christian ideas of hell have varied with respect to the brutality and intensity of the torture, including some with extremes of sadism. But even the milder versions are peculiar. Our experience is that we get accustomed to almost any pain or misery, and nothing lasts forever. The oddity, and impossibility, of unending, unstoppable agony does not seem to have struck many people.

In the interview on Fresh Air, Ehrman mentioned that he was confident that hell did not exist. He seemed to think people suffered unnecessarily because of the concept, and that they’d be happier without it. I think that, too.

On the other hand, I’ve been re-reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s book on the meat industry, Eating Animals, which depicts a truly hellish reality. Every year, billions of sentient creatures — cows, pigs, chickens, and others — are brought into existence by humans who treat them with unspeakable cruelty. Humans inflict suffering on these animals on a scale that truly defies comprehension. Then they kill them and eat them.

The horror of the meat industry is most apparent in its cruelty to billions of individual animals, but it also produces a lot of suffering less directly. It is one of the largest contributors of the greenhouse gases that account for global warming. It introduces steroids, antibiotics, bacteria, and viruses into the human food chain that account for a lot of sickness and death.

The meat industry is also a place of misery for the workers who kill and cut up the animals. Slaughter houses are some of the most dangerous workplaces in America. Many of the workers are immigrants who are too desperate and powerless to demand safe conditions and reasonable pay.

It was therefore not a huge surprise that there have been serious Covid-19 outbreaks in industrial meat operations. But the reaction of President Trump was surprising, and even for him, perverse. He issued a declaration that the meat industry was essential infrastructure under the Defense Production Act and must therefore remain open. He didn’t say how this was to be accomplished if the workers in large numbers got sick and died.

So is the meat industry, with its enormous profits based on cruelty and lies, essential? It’s hard to see how that could possibly be. We can certainly survive without meat, and hundreds of millions of people do so every day. In fact, eating a healthy plant-based diet is a lot better for the human body. I’ve been doing it for twenty-some years, and I’m here to tell you, it’s been good.

Perhaps, along with a lot of death, Covid-19 will cause more people willingly or unwilling to eat less meat and more plants. Once we factor in all the health gains from less meat-related disease and reduced greenhouse gas emissions, we might have a net gain in the survival rate. There could be a win-win — less animal cruelty, less human suffering, and more health and happiness.

April 26, 2020

Happy 50th Earth Day, and calling out the plutocrats

Great blue herons at Jordan Lake

I went out to Jordan Lake a couple of mornings last week, including on Wednesday, which was the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day. I managed to get my photography gear down the loose rocks to the river side, set up the tripod, tested exposures, and waited to see what would happen. I enjoyed watching the birds, and especially the ospreys and the great blue herons.

The GBHs are really good at catching fish! It happens so fast that you can barely even see the catch. Looking at the pictures afterward, I felt sad for the unfortunate fish, but still happy for the birds. They aren’t cruel; they fish out of necessity.

On the drive, I listened to more of the Scene on Radio podcast, which I’ve found very thought-provoking. The producers and scholars discussed libertarian ideas, including the notion that all government is bad and individual wealth is the highest good, and explored how those ideas relate to race and politics.

As the podcast noted, what drives the hard-right plutocrats is not just pure greed, but also a kind of twisted idealism. They believe that the individual is supremely important, and individual success is the highest good. There is no point to social organizations or communities other than as a platform for high achievers. Wealth is a sign of virtue, and poverty a sign of vice. Greed is good, and only the wealthy matter.

Osprey with fish

These people generally admire the work of Ayn Rand, a third-rate writer and pseudo philosopher whose awkward and sad novels idealize grotesquely rugged individuals. Admiring Rand is more than a sign of poor literary taste; it indicates moral immaturity. In the Randian libertarian view, it is not just understandable, but desirable, to cultivate indifference to the welfare of others. The poor are by definition unworthy, and deserve whatever misfortune strikes them.

Preventing minorities from voting is an important political objective for the libertarian right. The plutocratic leadership expects to always be a minority working to benefit itself, and so an actual democracy where everyone is allowed and encouraged to vote would not work for them.

If there were a level playing field and an informed electorate, the majority would never vote for such a system, since it doesn’t serve the best interests of most people. But of course, we do not have those things. Instead, we have massively-funded disinformation campaigns, gerrymandered electoral districts, and laws discouraging the non-rich from voting. And if that is not sufficient, they cheat. This could all be viewed as wrong, but they view it as well justified, since they believe (or at least some part of them believes) that all that matters is their own welfare and success.

It is hard to believe how pervasive these libertarian, anti-government ideas have become, especially given how much they conflict with traditional American norms of fairness, equality, and representative democracy. This helps explain why we in the US lack some of the basic attributes of advanced democracies in Europe, such as a health care system that works for people other than the rich and safety net programs for ordinary people. Such programs would involve government action. And in this extreme libertarian view, government action is always bad. The same for taxes.

This is one of the rays of hope of the coronavirus pandemic: it exposes the narrowness and moral degeneracy of these ideas. It could hardly be more obvious that government action is needed to address the pandemic, and it seems crazy to argue otherwise. To be sure, some still do. Some are so in love with their ideas, or desperate for income and food, that they have been marching in protest against business closures, at the risk of their lives. But others are not so fanatical, and are moderating their views to accommodate reality, and survive.

Perhaps we’ll emerge from this crisis with a more realistic view of the importance of government, and more compassion for those less fortunate. We might rediscover the significance of the natural world, and cultivate more appreciation for animals other than humans and the fascinating interrelationships of living things. If we can get started down that road, there’s still hope that we won’ t ravage the planet completely before Earth Day 100.

April 19, 2020

Big birds, pandemic masks, non-dairy cheese, factory farms, and the war on climate change

Bald eagle at Shelley Lake

I managed to get up early three mornings this week to spend some time with the birds of our area, including these bald eagles, great blue herons, and ospreys. The birds weren’t doing anything special — just living their lives. But it was especially heartening in this perilous time to get their orientation — intense, with all the senses open, and prepared for the next opportunity.

This week Sally got me a coronavirus mask that had been sewn by the tailor at our dry cleaners. It’s green and looks, well, strange. I’m starting to wonder whether we’ll be getting used to not seeing much of each other’s faces.

As the pandemic and the stay-at-home order continue, we’re trying to make the best of things. One good thing is finding time and energy to try new projects. This week I finally got around to one I’d been meaning to do for a while: making non-dairy cheese.

I’ve known for some time that dairy products involve heart-breaking cruelty to cows. Like other mammals, mother cows feel intense attachment to their young. The reason they make milk is to feed their babies. Factory dairy farms get them to make more milk by a cycle of artificial impregnation and stealing their calves immediately after birth.

The mothers cry out for their missing calves and grieve. Confined in small spaces, they are fed unhealthy diets that often include hormones and steroids. Their natural life span is around 20 years, but on factory farms they are too exhausted, sick, or injured to keep going after 5 years. So they are killed to make hamburgers.

Great blue heron in early morning fog at Jordan Lake

Some time back, Sally and I started finding good plant-based substitutes for milk — soy, cashew, almonds, oats. Quitting ice cream was challenging, for obvious reasons, but we’ve recently discovered some delicious non-dairy substitutes — Ben & Jerry’s, So Delicious, and Nada Moo. But it’s been hard to give up the deliciousness of cheese. We’ve had good plant-based cheese substitutes in restaurants, but haven’t seen them in our grocery stores. If you’re looking for a business opportunity, there’s a business idea, which you’re welcome to steal.

In the meantime, I tried a friend’s recipe for non-dairy brie, the main ingredient of which was cashews. It took some work, and I nearly burned out the blender motor, but the result was pretty good. I used fresh herbs — rosemary, sage, and chives. It tasted a lot like brie, but the consistency was more like a dip. I may have done too much blending. Anyhow, I’m planning to give it another shot soon.

I just finished reading Jonathan Saffron Foer’s recent book, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast. It’s a book about the relationship of factory farming to climate change and to us. Foer reviews the facts, including the fact that animal farms are a major contributor to global warming. He thinks that we need to take whatever action we can as individuals to combat the developing catastrophe of climate change. Recognizing how deeply habituated we are to eating meat, he proposes that if we can’t quit entirely, we try eating it only at dinner.

Foer is a fine writer, and I was heartened by his good sense and good-heartedness. But I agreed in part with Mark Bittman, the NY Times reviewer, who said that hoping to save the planet by giving people good reasons to change their habits is probably not going to work. Old habits die hard, especially when they’re constantly reinforced by the advertising of agribusiness fighting for its accustomed profits.

Bittman recommended a piece by Bill McKibben that was in the New Republic in 2016 titled A World at War — We’re Under Attack from Climate Change, and Our Only Hope Is to Mobilize Like We Did in WWII

The war metaphor is not a new one, but it is still apt. McKibben points out that if Hitler had been wreaking havoc on our cities with firestorms, hurricanes, droughts, and floods, we would have seen the necessity of mobilizing to fight back. As McKibben recounts, in WWII the US mobilized in just weeks and months to make bombers, ships, tanks, and other weapons under the direction of the federal government. He argues that we’re going to need that sort of leadership to head off complete disaster.

Osprey at Jordan Lake

One benefit of the pandemic is that it is helping us get a new understanding of what a real crisis is, and how we can’t just do nothing. That may help us understand the need for government leadership on climate change. The idea that markets alone will solve our current problems is not going to work, and the political leadership now in place is not going to work.

The TImes reported this week on new research on the threat of climate change to animals. The scientists found that the risk of mass extinction is much closer than previously thought, with thousands of species at risk beginning in the next decade. The study emphasized that this is not inevitable, if we take dramatic action soon.

At the same time, the pandemic has brought into focus the precarious situation of working people. With businesses shut down, no jobs, and no savings, having food and housing is no longer a given. Pending getting new leaders and a compassionate safety-net system, we’ve been trying to do some extra giving for food and other necessities.

The latest: Sally discovered the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which is raising money for domestic workers who have no other resources. It’s a great time to help workers whose job is helping others and who can’t work from home.

April 13, 2020

Wildflowers, back problems, conspiracy theories, and hope

Wild geraniums at Swift Creek Bluffs in Cary

There were a lot of wildflowers in bloom this week. One morning I went to Swift Creek Bluffs and took some pictures. For these, I got down in the dirt, trying to stay clear of poison ivy, ticks, and snakes. At times a light breeze was blowing, moving the flowers slightly, and I waited for a while for the wind to pause. It took some work, but it was also cheering to be close to the wild geraniums and lilies. Especially in this difficult time, I found these images soothing, and I hope they are for you as well.

The next day, I somehow managed to pull a muscle in my back. I think it was when I was practicing juggling with my three bean bags. Juggling can look frantic, but for me it’s usually calming. But I probably should have done a little stretching before working on under-the-leg throws. There was no sudden violent pain, but over the next several hours it got harder and harder to move.

Atamasco lilies

So I’m struggling physically. But otherwise, things are OK. Actually, I’m feeling surprisingly cheerful and energetic. It’s been a great time to try new photographic processes (both with the camera and with software). I’ve learned a lot about Lightroom, Photoshop, Topaz, and Nik applications from knowledgeable and generous people who’ve put up instructional videos on YouTube.

I’ve also been trying new musical experiments on the piano, including working on some Liszt flourishes and the blues. I cooked a crock pot full of Jocelyn’s famous vegetarian chili. I’ve made progress on my German and Italian with Rosetta Stone lessons. My sketching is improving. And I’m getting better at juggling, though that is on hold for the moment.

We were starting to get a bit worried about running out of toilet paper. Anxiety and panic buying is understandable, but still, it’s odd, and kind of disturbing, that people are hoarding TP. Fortunately, our neighborhood pharmacy/convenience store on Glenwood Avenue got a shipment just in time.

The tenuousness of our relationship with reality is also in view with some bizarre new conspiracy theories. Max Boot in the NY Times wrote a piece describing some of these. Some are self evident nonsense, like the idea that cellphone networks cause the virus, or that the pandemic was engineered by Bill Gates on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry. Some are not absurd, but are unsupported and unlikely, like the idea that the virus is a bioweapon from China, or else the United States.

Why do people gravitate to conspiracies? According to Boot’s sources, people are especially likely to latch onto conspiracy ideas when they are feeling overwhelmed, confused and helpless. By providing explanations, the conspiracy theories provide a degree of comfort, giving people a sense of power and control. The more bizarre theories may give a greater sense of agency, in that the believer has secret and therefore especially valuable knowledge. Sharing such theories provides a tenuous sense of community and significance.

Whatever psychological needs such ideas satisfy, there are major downsides. They lead some people to disregard the recommendations of the most knowledgeable experts, and, say, refuse to adopt social distancing. People have attacked cell phone towers and relied on unsafe cures.

There is also a dangerous feedback loop. As people get more accustomed to disregarding experts that oppose their conspiracy ideas, they’re more prone to adopt more conspiracies and disregard more actual experts.

Jack Krugman, Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist, had an interesting column recently related to this problem. He pointed out that trickle down economics and climate change denialism both rely for their survival on disregarding informed scientists and experts. The habit of disdain for science and expertise seems to have carried over to the pandemic.

Krugman also noted that for those who think all government should be done away with, it’s a particularly difficult time. For the less ideologically committed, it seems obvious that pure market forces aren’t going to get the job done in this pandemic, and we need effective government. Right wingers may worry that if people see that government is saving lives, their central creed that government is bad may be unveiled as a sham.

The Times had a very good essay proposing that this moment of crisis is also a moment of opportunity. The editorial board observed that the pandemic is casting new light on some of our system’s worst failures, including shameful inequality and indifference to the suffering of those less fortunate. Our systems for healthcare, housing, and the social safety net are costing many lives. The essay points out that at earlier times of national crisis, Americans have achieved a greater measure of compassion and fairness. It is possible that this crisis will as well.

Tag: pandemic