Can a Pandemic Restore Humanity?

When Albert Camus published his allegorical story The Plague in 1947 about a deadly plague sweeping the French city of Oran in 1849, he raised a number of questions about the nature of the human condition. “I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends,” one of his characters says. Later Camus reflects that “a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour …when all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.”

As we share the experience of a dystopian world of rapidly spreading disease, political despair and economic disaster, Camus’s words have renewed meaning. They help us remember what is truly important in a world in which we find ourselves increasingly isolated from each other, not only now in an abundance of caution, but because of growing isolation derived from social media in a computer age which fosters disconnection from each other.

That kind of solitude has meant a notable decline in courtesy, responsiveness, and compassion such that we no longer feel it necessary to respond to each other, to check on each other, to truly care about others. Our communities are now virtual to a large extent and loneliness has crept into the lives of many, especially those with limited mobility or age-related restrictions.

We have for too long been disinterested in others and disconnected from each other. Basic responsiveness and reciprocity have all but disappeared.  Now we find ourselves living on a planet spiraling out of control, its inhabitants pleading for a return to safety, and a return to communal well-being. It’s almost as if a higher order – some may call it God – is begging us to return to our fundamental humanity before it’s too late.

The earth itself seems to weep for what we’ve lost by casting upon us catastrophic floods, fires, and famine as we struggle to survive and now to cling to hope.

Of course, there are those among us who bear witness and who offer heart-based action. We donate money, share information, and volunteer while learning to grasp the lessons of isolation, among which are knowing how much we need each other for comfort and survival, practically and emotionally. We recognize our shared fragility and reach out to each other with virtual hugs.

In contrast there will always be those people who don’t look beyond themselves and who ignore and exploit others while remaining complacent, and even finding perverse pleasure in their ignorance and selfishness. We may never be able to expect more of them. As a Facebook post admonished, “Next time you want to judge boat people, refugees, migrants fleeing war-torn lands, remember that we fought over toilet paper.”

But the vast majority of us realize the urgency of compassionate, face-to-face interactive community. We often mourn the downside of computer-driven solitude and work-from-home opportunities, even though now our solitude and work are relieved by computer connection. Perhaps above all, we understand more than ever what can happen when our political leadership fails us and what we can do for each other in the face of such failure.

Still we carry on, and hopefully grow from the current experience of this shared, separative crisis. We offer virtual hugs and comfort, not in fear and despair so much as with the knowledge that our aloneness is no longer sufficient once we reach a new normal. We understand that we must actively and visibly renew our obligation to, and affection for one another. Perhaps  in that renewed knowing we can dare to steward ourselves toward a new world in which we shepherd each other back to a place where we can once again wrap our arms around each other in the knowledge that together, we can, as Winston Churchill once said, “brace ourselves … [and be able once again] to say, This was [our] finest hour.”

A despairing F. Scott Fitzgerald, quarantined in 1920 as a result of the Spanish flu, was able to write to a friend, “I weep for the damned eventualities this future brings. … And yet, … I focus on a single strain of light, calling me forth to believe in a better tomorrow.”

Even more inspiring is a poem by Lynn Ungar, a San Francisco poet, called Pandemic, circulating online, in which she writes, “Know that you are connected in ways that are terrifying and beautiful. Know that our lives are in one another’s hands. Reach out your hearts. Reach out your words. Reach out the tendrils of compassion that move, invisibly, where we cannot touch.  Promise this world your love – for better for for worse, in sickness and health, so long as we all shall live.”

Amen.

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River. Vt.  www.elayne-clift.com

Environmental Disasters Loom Large But Remain Unnoticed

These are hard and exhausting times. Impeachment issues and the president’s continual bombardment of lies and insults that call for correction are wearing us out, remaining front and center both in the media and our minds. As a result of our fatigue and alarm, and because media is abrogating its duty to report essential news outside of Trump’s tantrums, it’s not surprising that disastrous decisions by the president, and their consequences, have gone unnoticed. None of the actions and policy changes of the current administration is more urgently in need of increased awareness, and resistance, than those that relate to environmental degradation and destruction posing serious threats to our health and safety.

Among the most egregious decisions of the Trump administration is the recent “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” proposal promulgated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This terribly dangerous idea would require scientists to disclose all their raw data, including confidential medical records, before the EPA would consider academic studies as valid. Scientific and medical research would be severely limited leading to Draconian public health regulations as well as environmental crises. EPA officials call the plan a step toward transparency, but it is clearly designed to limit important scientific information that should drive policy related to clean air and water, among other health-related environmental impacts.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump pledged to roll back government regulations as part of his pro-business “America First Energy Plan.” Once in the White House he immediately signed executive orders approving two controversial oil pipelines and a federal review of the Clean Water Rule and Clean Power Plan. Shortly thereafter, the Clean Water Rule was repealed.

The administration is allowing drilling in national parks and other treasured venues and opening up more federal land for energy development while the Department of the Interior plans to allow drilling in nearly all U.S. waters, opening up the largest expansion of offshore oil and gas leasing ever proposed. This year the administration completed plans for allowing the entire coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to be made available for oil and gas drilling as well.

You have only to look at who Mr. Trump turned to or appointed to head key agencies that deal with energy and environmental policy. For example, three of four members of a transition team mandated to come up with proposals guiding Native American policies had links to the oil industry and his first head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, challenged EPA regulations in court more than a dozen times. Pruitt also hired a disgraced banker with no experience with environmental issues to head the Superfund program, responsible for cleaning up the nation’s most contaminated land.

Other departmental gems include Andrew Wheeler, who replaced Pruitt. He was a coal industry lobbyist and a critic of limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Then there’s Rick Perry who was tasked with developing more efficient energy sources and improving energy education. At Interior, Ryan Zinke who didn’t last long. He was followed by an attorney and oil industry lobbyist who put his personal energy into deregulation and increased fossil fuel sales on public lands. At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a scientific agency that warns of dangerous weather, monitors atmospheric changes, oceans, and more, Trump’s guy was a lawyer and businessman who had advocated against NOAA.

In August, Mr. Trump instructed Sonny Perdue, Agricultural Secretary, to exempt Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest intact temperate rain forest, from logging restrictions and mining projects. The president had already told the Department of the Interior to review more than two dozen monuments with a view to reducing the size of Bears Ears National Monument and other sacred land.

National Geographic has been tracking how the administration’s decisions influence air, water, and wildlife. Here are just some of the ways environmental policies have changed since Trump became president. The U.S. has pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, loosened regulations on toxic air pollution, rolled back the Clean Power Act, revoked flood standards accounting for sea-level rise, green-lighted seismic air guns for oil and gas drilling that disorient marine mammals and kill plankton, and altered the Endangered Species Act.

A recent New York Times analysis counts more than 80 environmental rules and regulations “on the way out under Mr. Trump.” So far 53 rollbacks have been completed and 32 are in progress. The Trump strategy, the Times points out, relies on a “one-two punch” in which rules are first delayed, then overridden by final substantive rules. It packs a big punch any way you look at it.

Not long ago I visited Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts where the philosopher, writer and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau lived for two years in a solitary cabin in the mid-19th century. Often credited with starting the environmental movement, he articulated a philosophy based on environmental and social responsibility, resource efficiency, and living simply. He believed fervently that we must keep the wild intact. “What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” he asked.

It’s a question we should all contemplate in the runup to November 2020.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health, politics and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com

Why Harriet Tubman Belongs on the $20 Bill

The lengths this administration will go to in order to erase decisions made by the Obama administration or insult Blacks while signaling white supremacists are nothing short of stunning.

Those can be the only reasons that Treasury Secretary Steven Minuchin announced to a House Financial Services Committee meeting in May that the Obama administration’s 2016 decision to substitute Harriet Tubman for Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill would “not be an issue that comes up until most likely 2026.”

Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the U.S. who was elected in 1828, owned about 300 slaves. He is connected to the Trail of Tears, the forced relocations of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to areas usually west of the Mississippi River designated as Indian Territory. He was impeached for attempting to dismiss his Secretary of War, narrowly escaping conviction by the Senate.  Ironically, he opposed both the idea of a National Bank and paper money, yet his face still appears on America’s currency.

Compare Jackson to Harriet Tubman, the extraordinary woman who was born a slave and became the abolitionist and activist most well known for rescuing slaves, family and friends via at least a dozen trips on the network of safe houses known as the “Underground Railroad.”

Tubman, born into slavery in Maryland in 1820 or 1821, once said of her own journey to freedom, “I had crossed the line, I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land.”  But she saw to it that others, whose tears she had seen and whose sighs and groans she had heard, as she put it, found welcome on their difficult and dangerous journeys, because she had vowed to “give every drop in my veins to free them.”

In 1850, having escaped slavery, she returned to Maryland after learning that her niece was about to be auctioned off.  Leading her to safety, she went on to rescue more than 70 other slaves at that time, continuing her mercy missions until the Civil War broke out. She is thought to have saved as many as 3,000 slaves and she never failed in a single rescue, earning the name “Moses.”

Tubman, who was illiterate, often used disguises, sometimes pretending to read a newspaper or dressing like a field hand with chickens in tow. She also used spirituals and other songs as code for her followers. She managed to avoid police, dogs, mobs, and slave catchers, and often slept in swamps, moving on only at night. Known as the “black ghost,” the bounty on her head was about $12,000 or $330,000 in today’s terms.

During the Civil War she served as an army nurse on the Union side, and scouted or spied behind enemy lines. On one famous mission in South Carolina, she helped free 700 slaves in one go. Having worked for the army for three years, she applied for veteran’s compensation when the war ended. It took 34 years for her to get it after President Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward intervened. She was 78 years old at the time.

Although impoverished after the War, Tubman became active in the women’s suffrage movement, traveling to New York and Washington to give speeches despite having occasional seizures resulting from a childhood injury.  In the 1890s she underwent brain surgery to alleviate lifelong headaches, refusing anesthesia for the operation as she had seen soldiers do.

Harriet Tubman’s life came to an end in 1913 in Auburn, NY in a home for the aged that she had founded. She was 91 years old and was buried with military honors not far from the grave of William Seward. She had lived an amazing life, especially for an African American woman at that time.

This is the woman the Trump administration refuses to honor on the $20 bill.

New Yorker Dano Wall, an artist who's been working with 3D printers since 2012, has created a stamp that allows users to superimpose Tubman's face over Jackson's on the $20 note. Previously available online as an act of civil disobedience, it has quickly sold out since the delay was announced by Minuchin. Wall reported in May, shortly after the announcement, that he’d received over 2,000 requests for more stamps.  Apparently, the notes with the Tubman stamp have been used successfully in vending machines, although shops and banks may not recognize them as legal tender – yet.

Still, if $20 Tubman bills keep turning up, it’s enough to send a signal to the Treasury Department and the Oval Office. Who knows? It might even make the racist Andrew Jackson turn over in his grave. Holy Moses!