Just happy being a beaver, doing his beaver thing.
Oct 21, 2022
Worth Noting
I'm not saying we should constantly ruminate on it and beat ourselves up forever because we've caused pain and heartache, but we should be trying to move past whatever it was instead of just putting it out of our minds altogether. How do you learn from something you don't remember?
Here's the story of a guy whose dad was born enslaved in Virginia. He grew up hearing the first-hand recollections of a man who lived some of America's worst history, but never gave up on the promise of a more perfect union.
And something that really sticks in my brain is that we don't even know how many people there are with a background similar to Mr Smith's.
(pay wall)
He grew up hearing stories from his father, who was born into bondage during the Civil War. Decades later, he marched in Washington and Selma with fellow civil rights activists.
Growing up in the 1930s, Daniel R. Smith would listen to stories from his father, as young boys often do. He was not supposed to hear these stories — they were meant for his older siblings, not for a child as young as 5 or 6 — but after dinner on Saturday evenings he would sneak out of bed and listen to accounts of the “whipping and crying post,” of the lynching tree and the wagon wheel.
These were brutally vivid stories of bondage, for his father had been born into slavery in Virginia during the Civil War and had toiled as a child laborer before making his way north to Connecticut, where the Smiths were among the only African Americans in their town.
“I remember hearing about two slaves who were chained together at the wrist and tried to run away,” Mr. Smith recalled decades later. “They were found by some vicious dogs hiding under a tree, and hanged from it. I also remember a story about an enslaved man who was accused of lying to his owner. He was made to step out into the snow with his family and put his tongue on an icy wagon wheel until it stuck. When he tried to remove it, half his tongue came off.
“My father cried as he told us these things.”
Mr. Smith, who was 90 when he died Oct. 19 at a hospital in Washington, was one of the last remaining children of enslaved Black Americans, and a rare direct link to slavery in the United States. Born when his father was 70, he was part of a generation that dwindled and then all but disappeared, taking with them stories of bondage that were told firsthand by mothers and fathers who, after enduring brutal conditions on Southern plantations, sought to build a new, better life for their families.
Historians say it is impossible to know how many children of enslaved people are left. But while researching her book “Sugar of the Crop: My Journey to Find the Children of Slaves” (2009), author Sana Butler was able to track down about 40 who were still alive. All have since died. Mr. Smith was not featured in the book, although he later met Butler, who helped edit his forthcoming memoir, “Son of a Slave: A Black Man’s Journey in White America.”
His story was “a reminder that slavery was not that long ago,” Butler said. “You talk about the transatlantic slave trade, you talk about Reconstruction, and people really think that it’s history,” something that happened in the distant past and has little relevance today. “Mr. Smith,” she added, “is a reminder that it’s impossible to ‘get over it,’” to move past slavery and act as if it is no longer matters, “because it’s still [present] within these families’ lives.”
It was in part through his father — Abram “A.B.” Smith, who died in a car accident when Daniel Smith was 6 — that he developed a fierce pride and resilience that he carried into his work on civil rights, health care and education. “A lot of Black children grew up in a world where they didn’t know who they were and where they came from,” Mr. Smith told The Washington Post in 2020, “but we were A.B. Smith’s children, and that sustained us through anything.”
After a childhood in which he and his siblings were “poor as church mice,” Mr. Smith served as an Army medic during the Korean War, marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, linked arms with fellow civil rights activists on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, and ran literacy and anti-poverty programs in rural Alabama, where he once outraced a carload of white supremacists on a dark country road, not stopping until he found shelter at a service station.
Mr. Smith later settled in the Washington area, where in the 1970s he ran a federally funded program called the Area Health Education Centers, working to improve health care in underserved communities across the country. His work took him to apartheid-era South Africa, where he met Archbishop Desmond Tutu and, upon his return, said he was propositioned by a CIA officer who wanted him to spy on the African National Congress liberation movement. (Mr. Smith turned him down.)
Decades later, Mr. Smith was standing in the crowd, moved to tears, as Barack Obama was sworn in as America’s first Black president. He was privileged, he said, to be a part of so much history — “A friend of mine calls me the Black Forrest Gump,” he told the Economist last year — and for a time, at least, he thought little about his family’s own history and his legacy as one of the last surviving children of a man who was considered property rather than a person.
“Quite frankly, I’ve just grown up and been busy,” he told The Post. “And I’ve never thought much about it.”
The fifth of six children, Daniel Robert Smith was born in Winsted, Conn., on March 11, 1932. His father was a janitor at a clock factory. His mother, Clara (Wheeler) Smith, was 23 at the time. Little information was available about her life, but Mr. Smith said she was White, with Scotch-Irish and Cherokee ancestry.
After his father’s death, she became a housekeeper and raised Mr. Smith and his siblings with help from a trio of surrogate fathers, including a White veterinarian who gave him a job at his clinic, encouraging Mr. Smith’s lifelong love of animals. He was especially drawn to dogs — Dobermans in particular — and became a member of the county dog obedience training club, taking part in American Kennel Club competitions at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where he was one of only a few Black trainers, according to his memoir.
Although he had hoped to serve in the Army’s K-9 Corps, he was told it wasn’t taking Black soldiers, and instead he served as a medic, drawing on his veterinary training while working at a military hospital in Korea.
By 1955 he was back home in Winsted, where flooding killed nearly 100 people throughout Connecticut in the aftermath of Hurricane Diane. The death toll would have been higher were it not for Mr. Smith, who rescued a truck driver from the floodwaters, an act of heroism that was documented by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter John Hersey, who was covering the storm for the New Yorker.
About two years later, Mr. Smith found himself in another life-or-death scenario while working at a YMCA camp near Winsted. During a trip to a reservoir where he had once gone swimming, he tried to help a young woman who had disappeared into the deep water and was pulled out by another swimmer. Mr. Smith found that she still had a pulse and began performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Then a uniformed police officer began ordering him to stop, insisting that the woman was already dead.
It was immediately clear, Mr. Smith recalled, that the officer was wrong. She still had a pulse. Yet she was White; he was Black. “This remains the most racist incident I have ever experienced in my life,” he wrote in his memoir. “To this day, telling this story brings tears to my eyes. To think that someone would rather have anyone die rather than have her white lips touch my Black mouth. Incomprehensible.”
Mr. Smith graduated in 1960 from Springfield College in Massachusetts and was a psychiatric social worker before being accepted to veterinary school at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
By 1963 he had turned from medicine to civil rights, deciding he could contribute more to people than animals. He led an antipoverty program in Lowndes County, just outside Montgomery. The church office he worked in was burned to the ground, and a local judge who helped him get phone service and electricity faced retribution from local residents, who poisoned 21 of his cows, according to an account by journalist Martin Dobrow.
Weeks before King was assassinated in 1968, Mr. Smith moved to the Washington area, where he worked for federal agencies including the Health Resources and Services Administration and raised two children with his first wife, the former Sandra Hawkins. Together they bought a home in Bethesda, Md., that had a racially restrictive covenant — which was no longer being enforced — barring Black or Jewish ownership.
After he retired in 1994, Mr. Smith volunteered at Washington National Cathedral, where he escorted presidents including Bill Clinton and George W. Bush while serving as head usher. His first marriage ended in divorce, and in 2006 he married Loretta Neumann at the cathedral.
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Mr. Smith and his wife, Loretta Neumann, in 2020. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Mr. Smith, who lived in the Takoma section of the District, was preceded in death by his five siblings. His death was confirmed by his wife, who said he had cancer and congestive heart failure. She survives him, in addition to two children from his first marriage, April Smith Motaung of Columbia, Md., and Daniel “Rob” Smith Jr. of New York; and a granddaughter.
Neumann said that she and Mr. Smith were finalizing his memoir while he was in the hospital and that she planned to self-publish it in the next two weeks through the D.C. bookstore Politics and Prose.
Mr. Smith told interviewers he thought the country had made great progress since he was a boy, although he had grown increasingly worried about the future during the Trump administration, especially after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. He noted that his father, at least, would have maintained a positive outlook, despite all he had experienced as a child.
“We could never talk negatively about America in front of my father,” Mr. Smith told the Economist. “He did not have much but he really, really loved America. Isn’t that funny?”
It was immediately clear, Mr. Smith recalled, that the officer was wrong. She still had a pulse. Yet she was White; he was Black. “This remains the most racist incident I have ever experienced in my life,” he wrote in his memoir. “To this day, telling this story brings tears to my eyes. To think that someone would rather have anyone die rather than have her white lips touch my Black mouth. Incomprehensible.”
Mr. Smith graduated in 1960 from Springfield College in Massachusetts and was a psychiatric social worker before being accepted to veterinary school at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
By 1963 he had turned from medicine to civil rights, deciding he could contribute more to people than animals. He led an antipoverty program in Lowndes County, just outside Montgomery. The church office he worked in was burned to the ground, and a local judge who helped him get phone service and electricity faced retribution from local residents, who poisoned 21 of his cows, according to an account by journalist Martin Dobrow.
Weeks before King was assassinated in 1968, Mr. Smith moved to the Washington area, where he worked for federal agencies including the Health Resources and Services Administration and raised two children with his first wife, the former Sandra Hawkins. Together they bought a home in Bethesda, Md., that had a racially restrictive covenant — which was no longer being enforced — barring Black or Jewish ownership.
After he retired in 1994, Mr. Smith volunteered at Washington National Cathedral, where he escorted presidents including Bill Clinton and George W. Bush while serving as head usher. His first marriage ended in divorce, and in 2006 he married Loretta Neumann at the cathedral.
Mr. Smith, who lived in the Takoma section of the District, was preceded in death by his five siblings. His death was confirmed by his wife, who said he had cancer and congestive heart failure. She survives him, in addition to two children from his first marriage, April Smith Motaung of Columbia, Md., and Daniel “Rob” Smith Jr. of New York; and a granddaughter.
Neumann said that she and Mr. Smith were finalizing his memoir while he was in the hospital and that she planned to self-publish it in the next two weeks through the D.C. bookstore Politics and Prose.
Mr. Smith told interviewers he thought the country had made great progress since he was a boy, although he had grown increasingly worried about the future during the Trump administration, especially after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. He noted that his father, at least, would have maintained a positive outlook, despite all he had experienced as a child.
“We could never talk negatively about America in front of my father,” Mr. Smith told the Economist. “He did not have much but he really, really loved America. Isn’t that funny?”
Oct 20, 2022
COVID-19 Update
"COVID seemed like
other people’s problems —
until it wasn’t."
Pro Tip: There are no "other people. We're all us.
(pay wall - this is a long one)
Whites now more likely to die from covid than Blacks: Why the pandemic shifted
SOMERVILLE, Tenn. — Skill Wilson had amassed more than three decades of knowledge as a paramedic, first in Memphis and then in Fayette County. Two places that felt like night and day.
With only five ambulances in the county and the nearest hospital as much as 45 minutes away, Skill relished the clinical know-how necessary to work in a rural setting. Doing things like sedating patients to insert tubes into their airways.
But when it came to covid-19, despite more than 1 million deaths nationwide, Skill and his family felt their small town on the central-eastern side of Fayette County, with its fields of grazing cattle and rows of cotton and fewer than 200 covid deaths since the start of the pandemic, was a cocoon against the raging health emergency.
“It was a lot easier to stay away from others,” his widow, Hollie Wilson, said of the largely White and predominantly conservative county of about 42,000 residents. “Less people. Less chance of exposure.”
Covid seemed like other people’s problems — until it wasn’t.
The imbalance in death rates among the nation’s racial and ethnic groups has been a defining part of the pandemic since the start. To see the pattern, The Washington Post analyzed every death during more than two years of the pandemic. Early in the crisis, the differing covid threat was evident in places such as Memphis and Fayette County. Deaths were concentrated in dense urban areas, where Black people died at several times the rate of White people.
“I don’t want to say that we weren’t worried about it, but we weren’t,” said Hollie, who described her 59-year-old husband as someone who “never took a pill.” After a while, “you kind of slack off on some things,” she said.
Over time, the gap in deaths widened and narrowed but never disappeared — until mid-October 2021, when the nation’s pattern of covid mortality changed, with the rate of death among White Americans sometimes eclipsing other groups.
A Post analysis of covid death data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from April 2020 through this summer found the racial disparity vanished at the end of last year, becoming roughly equal. And at times during that same period, the overall age-adjusted death rate for White people slightly surpassed that of Black and Latino people.
The nature of the virus makes the elderly and people with underlying health conditions — including hypertension, diabetes and obesity, all of which beset Black people at higher rates and earlier in life than White people — particularly vulnerable to severe illness and death.
That wasn’t Skill.
The virus also attacks unvaccinated adults — who polls show are more likely to be Republicans — with a ferocity that puts them at a much higher risk of infection and death.
That was Skill.
He joined the choir of critics opposing vaccination requirements, his rants in front of the television eventually wearing on Hollie, who, even if she agreed, grew tired of listening and declared their home “covid-talk free.”
So, she said, Skill commiserated with like-minded people in Facebook groups and on Parler and Rumble, the largely unmoderated social networking platforms popular with conservatives.
“We’re Republicans, and 100 percent believe that it’s each individual’s choice — their freedom” when it comes to getting a coronavirus shot, Hollie said in January. “We decided to err on the side of not doing it and accept the consequences. And now, here we are in the middle of planning the funeral.”
Capt. Julian Greaves Wilson Jr., known to everybody as Skill, died of covid Jan. 23, a month after becoming infected with the coronavirus. He fell ill not long after transporting a covid patient to the hospital. At the time he died, infection rates in Fayette County had soared to 40.5 percent among people taking coronavirus tests.
‘A different calculus’
When the coronavirus appeared in the United States, it did what airborne viruses do — latched onto cells in people’s respiratory tract, evaded innate immune responses and multiplied. The pathogen, free of politics or ideology, had a diverse reservoir of hosts and found fertile pathways for growth in the inequalities born from centuries of racial animus and class resentments.
Unequal exposure, unequal spread, unequal vulnerability and unequal treatment concentrated harm in communities that needed protection the most yet had the least. Cumulatively, Black, Latino and Native American people are 60 percent more likely to die of covid.
But as the pandemic progressed, the damage done by the virus broadened, and the toxicity of modern-day politics came to the fore.
The Post analysis revealed the changing pattern in covid deaths. At the start of the pandemic, Black people were more than three times as likely to die of covid as their White peers. But as 2020 progressed, the death rates narrowed — but not because fewer Black people were dying. White people began dying at increasingly unimaginable numbers, too, the Post analysis found.
In summer 2021, the nation saw some of the pandemic’s lowest death rates, as vaccines, shoring up the body’s immune response, became widely available.
Then came the delta variant. The virus mutated, able to spread among the vaccinated. As it did, an erosion of trust in government and in medicine — in any institution, really — slowed vaccination rates, stymieing the protection afforded by vaccines against severe illness and death.
After delta’s peak in September 2021, the racial differences in covid deaths started eroding. The Post analysis found that Black deaths declined, while White deaths never eased, increasing slowly but steadily, until the mortality gap flipped. From the end of October through the end of December, White people died at a higher rate than Black people did, The Post found.
That remained true except for a stretch in winter 2021-2022, when the omicron variant rampaged. The Black death rate jumped above White people’s when the spike in cases and deaths overwhelmed providers in the Northeast, resulting in a bottleneck of testing and treatment.
When the surge subsided, the Black death rate once again dropped below the White rate.
“Usually, when we say a health disparity is disappearing, what we mean is that … the worse-off group is getting better,” said Tasleem Padamsee, an assistant professor at Ohio State University who researched vaccine use and was a member of the Ohio Department of Health’s work group on health equity. “We don’t usually mean that the group that had a systematic advantage got worse.”
That’s exactly what happened as the White death rate surpassed that for Black people, even though Black Americans routinely confront stress so corrosive it causes them to age quicker, become sicker and die younger.
The shift in covid death rates “has vastly different implications for public health interventions,” said Nancy Krieger, professor of social epidemiology at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Officials must figure out how to connect with “communities who are ideologically opposed to the vaccine” while contending with “the cumulative impact of injustice” on communities of color.
“Think about the fact that everyone who is age 57 and older in this country was born when Jim Crow was legal,” she said. “What that did was intersect with covid-19, meaning that embodied history is part of this pandemic, too.”
So what contributed to the recent variation in death rates? And why?
The easy explanation is that it reflects the choices of Republicans not to be vaccinated, but the reasons go deeper. The Post interviewed historians and researchers who study the effects of White racial politics and social inequality on health, spoke with relatives and friends of those lost to covid, and compiled data from federal databases and academic studies.
What emerged is a story about how long-standing issues of race and class interacted with the physical and psychological toll of mass illness and death, unprecedented social upheaval, public policies — and public opinion.
Resilience gave way to fatigue. Holes left by rural hospital closures deepened. Medical mistrust and misinformation raged. Skeptics touted debunked alternatives over proven treatments and prevention. Mask use became a victim of social stigma.
Many Republicans decided they would rather roll the dice with their health than follow public health guidance — even when provided by President Donald Trump, who was booed after saying he had been vaccinated and boosted.
Researchers at Ohio State found Black and White people were about equally reluctant to get the coronavirus vaccine when it first became available, but Black people overcame that hesitancy faster. They came to the realization sooner that vaccines were necessary to protect themselves and their communities, Padamsee said.
As public health efforts to contain the virus were curtailed, the pool of those most at risk of becoming casualties widened. The No. 1 cause of death for 45-to-54-year-olds in 2021 was covid, according to federal researchers.
“I still remember when I was doing the mayor’s press conferences a few months into this, and I made note of the fact that most of those people who had died look like me,” said James E.K. Hildreth, president and CEO of Meharry Medical College, one of the nation’s oldest and largest private, historically Black academic health sciences center, in Nashville. Hildreth played a central role in the city’s pandemic response.
“I wondered aloud if it were reversed, would the whole nation not be more galvanized to fight this thing?” recalled Hildreth, an immunologist and member of an expert panel that advises the Food and Drug Administration on vaccines, including coronavirus shots.
After it became clear that communities of color were being disproportionately affected, racial equity started to become the parlance of the pandemic, in words and deeds. As it did, vaccine access and acceptance within communities of color grew — and so did the belief among some White conservatives, who form the core of the Republican base, that vaccine requirements and mask mandates infringe on personal liberties.
“Getting to make this decision for themselves has primacy over what the vaccine could do for them,” said Lisa R. Pruitt, a law professor at the University of California at Davis who is an expert in social inequality and the urban-rural divide. “They’re making a different calculus.”
It’s a calculation informed by the lore around self-sufficiency, she said, a fatalistic acceptance that hardships happen in life and a sense of defiance that has come to define the modern conservative movement’s antipathy toward bureaucrats and technocrats.
“I didn’t think that that polarization would transfer over to a pandemic,” Pruitt said.
It did.
A lifesaving vaccine and droplet-blocking masks became ideological Rorschach tests.
The impulse to frame the eradication of an infectious disease as a matter of personal choice cost the lives of some who, despite taking the coronavirus seriously, were surrounded by enough people that the virus found fertile terrain to sow misery. That’s what happened in northern Illinois, where a father watched his 40-year-old son succumb to covid-19.
For Robert Boam, the increase in White deaths is politics brought to bear on the body of his son, though he’s reluctant “to get into the politics of it all, but it all goes back to that.”
Brian Boam was a PE teacher at an elementary school in suburban Chicago. On Christmas Eve, the entire family gathered at the elder Boam’s home in an Illinois town where the first Lincoln-Douglas debate was held. Brian Boam was there with his 10-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son.
Robert Boam said his son had survived covid the year before, so “we got on his butt to get that booster shot when he was here for Christmas.” And he did — but got sick again, the 73-year-old said. “Being vaccinated, and all that, and getting covid again kind of bummed him out.”
Just after the new year, Brian Boam, who was hypertensive, went to a hospital feverish and vomiting. It took 10 hours to be seen and even longer for a bed to become available. As he waited, he sent what would be his last text message to his parents. Thanks for all you do. I love you.
He went into cardiac arrest in the emergency room and was transferred to Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, one of the nation’s top academic hospitals. There, his family hoped he would be healed, but his organs began to fail. He died Jan. 8.
“The thing that gets me is the people who still don’t believe it’s serious or even real, but when they get sick, they run to the hospital,” Robert Boam said. “You’re taking away from heart attack patients and stroke patients.”
The pandemic, he said, “should’ve been taken seriously from the very beginning, and it wasn’t. It was denied. It was downplayed. And it all goes back to one person, as far as I’m concerned.”
Asked who that was, Boam would say only: “I’ll give you three guesses. The first two don’t count.”
“I wondered aloud if it were reversed, would the whole nation not be more galvanized to fight this thing?” recalled Hildreth, an immunologist and member of an expert panel that advises the Food and Drug Administration on vaccines, including coronavirus shots.
After it became clear that communities of color were being disproportionately affected, racial equity started to become the parlance of the pandemic, in words and deeds. As it did, vaccine access and acceptance within communities of color grew — and so did the belief among some White conservatives, who form the core of the Republican base, that vaccine requirements and mask mandates infringe on personal liberties.
“Getting to make this decision for themselves has primacy over what the vaccine could do for them,” said Lisa R. Pruitt, a law professor at the University of California at Davis who is an expert in social inequality and the urban-rural divide. “They’re making a different calculus.”
It’s a calculation informed by the lore around self-sufficiency, she said, a fatalistic acceptance that hardships happen in life and a sense of defiance that has come to define the modern conservative movement’s antipathy toward bureaucrats and technocrats.
“I didn’t think that that polarization would transfer over to a pandemic,” Pruitt said.
It did.
A lifesaving vaccine and droplet-blocking masks became ideological Rorschach tests.
The impulse to frame the eradication of an infectious disease as a matter of personal choice cost the lives of some who, despite taking the coronavirus seriously, were surrounded by enough people that the virus found fertile terrain to sow misery. That’s what happened in northern Illinois, where a father watched his 40-year-old son succumb to covid-19.
For Robert Boam, the increase in White deaths is politics brought to bear on the body of his son, though he’s reluctant “to get into the politics of it all, but it all goes back to that.”
Brian Boam was a PE teacher at an elementary school in suburban Chicago. On Christmas Eve, the entire family gathered at the elder Boam’s home in an Illinois town where the first Lincoln-Douglas debate was held. Brian Boam was there with his 10-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son.
Robert Boam said his son had survived covid the year before, so “we got on his butt to get that booster shot when he was here for Christmas.” And he did — but got sick again, the 73-year-old said. “Being vaccinated, and all that, and getting covid again kind of bummed him out.”
Just after the new year, Brian Boam, who was hypertensive, went to a hospital feverish and vomiting. It took 10 hours to be seen and even longer for a bed to become available. As he waited, he sent what would be his last text message to his parents. Thanks for all you do. I love you.
He went into cardiac arrest in the emergency room and was transferred to Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, one of the nation’s top academic hospitals. There, his family hoped he would be healed, but his organs began to fail. He died Jan. 8.
“The thing that gets me is the people who still don’t believe it’s serious or even real, but when they get sick, they run to the hospital,” Robert Boam said. “You’re taking away from heart attack patients and stroke patients.”
The pandemic, he said, “should’ve been taken seriously from the very beginning, and it wasn’t. It was denied. It was downplayed. And it all goes back to one person, as far as I’m concerned.”
Asked who that was, Boam would say only: “I’ll give you three guesses. The first two don’t count.”
Stress, and its burden
While almost three years of chaotic public health crises have left Americans of all races uncertain about the future, they have also revealed the enduring nature of racial and class politics — and the cost they exact, including for White Americans.
Those triggers are layered upon each other, stoking stress, said Derek M. Griffith, who co-leads the Racial Justice Institute and directs the Center for Men’s Health Equity at Georgetown University.
“Whether it’s ‘I can’t pay my rent and mortgage as easily as I used to,’ or ‘I want to show I’m not worried about covid,’ your body doesn’t care where the stress is coming from. It’s just experiencing stress,” he said. “Then add to that how people are coping with the stress.”
When it comes to racism, most people think of something that occurs between individuals. But it’s as much about who has access to power, wealth and rights as it is about insults, suspicion and disrespect. Prejudice and discrimination, even if unconscious, can be deadly — and not just for the intended targets.
A growing body of research, outlined in the book “Caste,” by Isabel Wilkerson, shows that even the most anodyne of social exchanges with people of different races, such as glancing at faded yearbook photos, can raise White people’s blood pressure and cortisol levels.
Stress is a hard-wired physiological response, triggered at the first sign of danger. The brain sounds an alarm, setting off a torrent of neurological and hormonal signals. Persistent surges of cortisol and other stress hormones can wear down the body, increasing the risk of stroke, diabetes, heart attack or premature death by damaging blood vessels and arteries. Overexposure to stress can weaken the immune response and can make it harder to develop antibodies after being vaccinated against infectious diseases.
Sometimes, the harm is not just biological but also behavioral.
Researchers at the University of Georgia found that White people who assumed the pandemic had a disparate effect on communities of color — or were told that it did — had less fear of being infected with the coronavirus, were less likely to express empathy toward vulnerable populations and were less supportive of safety measures, according to an article in Social Science & Medicine.
Perhaps, the report concludes, explaining covid’s unequal burden as part of an enduring legacy of inequality “signaled these disparities were not just transitory epidemiological trends, which could potentially shift and disproportionately impact White people in the future.”
Translation: Racial health disparities are part of the status quo.
Researchers at the University of Georgia found that White people who assumed the pandemic had a disparate effect on communities of color — or were told that it did — had less fear of being infected with the coronavirus, were less likely to express empathy toward vulnerable populations and were less supportive of safety measures, according to an article in Social Science & Medicine.
Perhaps, the report concludes, explaining covid’s unequal burden as part of an enduring legacy of inequality “signaled these disparities were not just transitory epidemiological trends, which could potentially shift and disproportionately impact White people in the future.”
Translation: Racial health disparities are part of the status quo.
And because of that, government efforts to bring a public health threat to heel are seen by some White Americans as infringing on their rights, researchers said.
“This is reflective of politics that go back to the 19th-century anxieties about federal overreach,” said Ayah Nuriddin, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University who studies the history of medicine.
Us vs. them
Questions about the government’s role in ensuring the public’s health and well-being hang heavy with historical inflections in states such as Tennessee, once home to the president who argued that Reconstruction-era legislation to help and protect newly freed enslaved people violated states’ rights.
And so in many ways, the roots of the consternation over recent pandemic-control measures began sprouting a century and a half earlier.
But that hasn’t stopped people such as Civil Miller-Watkins from wondering why those roots are choking so many now.
The former Fayette County school board member, who possesses an abiding belief in the power of the common good, said she finds the mind-set “I know what’s good for me, and if it’s harmful for you, you’re going to have to deal with it” worrisome amid a pandemic.
“Living in a rural county is not for the faint of heart, especially as a Black person,” the 56-year-old said. Still, she can’t help but wonder, “if I’m the same neighbor you give sugar to, and you know I have an 84-year-old in my house and a little-bitty baby at home, why wouldn’t you wear a mask around me?”
It’s a question that dogged her over Christmas when two of her grandchildren were infected with the coronavirus days before they were scheduled to be vaccinated.
“We put it on Republicans and politics,” she said, “but I think we should dig deeper.”
That’s what Jonathan M. Metzl, director of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Medicine, Health, and Society, did for six years while researching his book “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland.”
Published in 2019, it is a book about the politicization of public health and mistrust of medical institutions. It is a story about how communal values take a back seat to individuality. It’s an exploration of disinformation and how the fear of improving the lives of some means worsening the lives of others.
“I didn’t know it at the time, but I was writing a prehistory of the pandemic,” Metzl said in an interview. “You’re seeing a kind of dying-of-Whiteness phenomenon in the covid data that’s very similar to what I saw in my data.”
Metzl and Griffith, a Vanderbilt professor at the time, conducted focus groups on the Affordable Care Act throughout middle Tennessee including White and Black men who were 20 to 60 years old. Some were small-business owners and security guards. Others were factory workers and retirees.
The divergent medical experiences of Black and White patients permeated Metzl’s focus groups, particularly when the conversation veered toward the politics of health and government’s role in promoting well-being.
“Black men described precisely the same medical and economic stressors as did White men and detailed the same struggles to stay healthy,” Metzl wrote. “But Black men consistently differed from White men in how they conceived of government intervention and group identity. Whereas White men jumped unthinkingly to assumptions about ‘them,’ Black men frequently answered questions about health and health systems through the language of ‘us.’ ”
Tennessee has yet to expand Medicaid under the ACA, a decision fueling rural hospital closures at a rate that eclipses nearly every other state because there isn’t enough money to keep the doors open. Not only would expanding Medicaid have saved hospitals, Metzl wrote, it would have saved thousands of lives — White and Black.
Metzl said watching the pandemic unfold felt like a flashback to past battles over federal health-care reform. Messaging that leaned into quantitative data about masks and vaccines sounded eerily similar to the mistakes made, “at least for this part of the country,” with the ACA, he said.
“The minute public health infrastructure started to talk about the statistical public health benefits of the mask” and not how everyone needed to be on the same page to stay safe, Metzl said, “I just knew that it was going to open a door for the same kind of anti-ACA stuff, which is ‘the government’s telling you what to do.’ ”
As Metzl conducted research for his book in 2016, a 41-year-old uninsured Tennessean named Trevor who was jaundiced and in liver failure told him “I would rather die” than sign up for the ACA. When asked why, Trevor, who was identified by first name only, said: “We don’t need any more government in our lives. And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.”
Now during the pandemic, there are people like 39-year-old Chad Carswell of North Carolina whose kidneys functioned recently at just 3 percent. He was denied a new kidney in January after refusing to take a coronavirus vaccine as required for the transplant at the time, saying: “I was born free. I’ll die free.”
Much like protests to “repeal and replace” the ACA, Metzl said rejecting public health measures is about dogma more so than a mistrust of the science of vaccines or masks.
“We’ve oversimplified this with morality tales about the vaccine is good, and anti-vaxxers are bad, and they’re automatically racist,” Metzl said. “Being anti-vaccine or anti-mask is part of an ideology. When people get more desperate, they get more ideological.”
A funeral, a cause
Skill Wilson’s funeral in January was a public testimony to the complexity of people. The room was draped in the unmistakable symbols of patriotism, a steely declaration that this was someone who believed in service and sacrifice for country and community. Firefighters sat in row upon row, their dress uniforms — crisp white shirts and formal blue blazers — marking the solemn occasion. Maskless faces abounded.
His urn, embossed with the firefighters’ “thin red line” flag — a black-and-white U.S. flag with a single red stripe across it — sat between two firemen’s helmets. It is a flag that some have come to see as a political statement, while others view it as a way to honor fallen firefighters. Behind them, a burial flag folded into a crisp triangle.
A succession of eulogies told the story of a man who could make you drive past your highway exit in a fit of rage, who harassed the fire chief until every station in the county had a flagpole that displayed the Stars and Stripes, who loved sneaking up behind his children and yelling, “Boo!”
Husband. Father. Friend.
Sarcastic. Goofy. Joker.
“Skill was one of the constants in my life. For people who didn’t really know our friendship, they’d think we hated each other,” said Debbie Patterson, a division chief with Emergency Medical Services at the Memphis Fire Department. “We were constantly going to battle and name-calling. Some of them are dork, idiot, slacker. But our true term of endearment for each other, for years, has been ‘b----es.’ ”
He would call at 6 a.m., even when she wasn’t on shift, to “wake me up and tell me I was a slacker for being on vacation,” she said, laughing.
During those phone calls, they figured out the day’s menu for lunch, bragged about their children and personal lives, and solved the fire department’s problems “as firefighters do.”
“Of course, we rarely saw eye to eye on anything,” she said. “The best part about Skill was he could laugh at himself for being a dumb ass, too.”
It was a scene of mourning and hope, of bravado and brokenness. There was as much laughter as sorrow, wounds healed by scripture and classic ’70s rock. It was a paragon of Southern, White masculinity.
Last to the lectern was Hollie’s uncle, who looked out at the sea of uniforms, at the men and women in government service, and assured them that the uncomfortable truths he said he was about to share were not directed at anybody in the room.
Skill, he said, was a warrior who put his faith in the system that “betrayed him and left him laying on this battlefield” during a “war he was willing to fight.”
“How many more good men and women — fathers, brothers, mothers and sisters — will be sacrificed on the altar of money before we all stand up and say this is enough?” he continued, adding that “Skill and I were on the same page. We had the same worldview.”
He never specified the war, though he said it was one we’re all fighting “no matter what lines they try to draw between us.” Faith, he said, lies with God and each other, “not in those who are solely motivated by profit.”
Skill Wilson’s funeral in January was a public testimony to the complexity of people. The room was draped in the unmistakable symbols of patriotism, a steely declaration that this was someone who believed in service and sacrifice for country and community. Firefighters sat in row upon row, their dress uniforms — crisp white shirts and formal blue blazers — marking the solemn occasion. Maskless faces abounded.
His urn, embossed with the firefighters’ “thin red line” flag — a black-and-white U.S. flag with a single red stripe across it — sat between two firemen’s helmets. It is a flag that some have come to see as a political statement, while others view it as a way to honor fallen firefighters. Behind them, a burial flag folded into a crisp triangle.
A succession of eulogies told the story of a man who could make you drive past your highway exit in a fit of rage, who harassed the fire chief until every station in the county had a flagpole that displayed the Stars and Stripes, who loved sneaking up behind his children and yelling, “Boo!”
Husband. Father. Friend.
Sarcastic. Goofy. Joker.
“Skill was one of the constants in my life. For people who didn’t really know our friendship, they’d think we hated each other,” said Debbie Patterson, a division chief with Emergency Medical Services at the Memphis Fire Department. “We were constantly going to battle and name-calling. Some of them are dork, idiot, slacker. But our true term of endearment for each other, for years, has been ‘b----es.’ ”
He would call at 6 a.m., even when she wasn’t on shift, to “wake me up and tell me I was a slacker for being on vacation,” she said, laughing.
During those phone calls, they figured out the day’s menu for lunch, bragged about their children and personal lives, and solved the fire department’s problems “as firefighters do.”
“Of course, we rarely saw eye to eye on anything,” she said. “The best part about Skill was he could laugh at himself for being a dumb ass, too.”
It was a scene of mourning and hope, of bravado and brokenness. There was as much laughter as sorrow, wounds healed by scripture and classic ’70s rock. It was a paragon of Southern, White masculinity.
Last to the lectern was Hollie’s uncle, who looked out at the sea of uniforms, at the men and women in government service, and assured them that the uncomfortable truths he said he was about to share were not directed at anybody in the room.
Skill, he said, was a warrior who put his faith in the system that “betrayed him and left him laying on this battlefield” during a “war he was willing to fight.”
“How many more good men and women — fathers, brothers, mothers and sisters — will be sacrificed on the altar of money before we all stand up and say this is enough?” he continued, adding that “Skill and I were on the same page. We had the same worldview.”
He never specified the war, though he said it was one we’re all fighting “no matter what lines they try to draw between us.” Faith, he said, lies with God and each other, “not in those who are solely motivated by profit.”
But it wasn’t about what he said. It was about what he left unsaid: the far-right extremist views that go beyond the bounds of traditional conservative politics and ideals of patriotism.
Online, he and the family have shared social media posts and, until recently, sold customized insulated plastic cups bearing the insignia of Three Percenters, a decentralized militant movement named after the myth that just 3 percent of the population fought the British in the American Revolution. It’s founded on the idea that armed “patriots” should protect Americans from the tyranny of big government, including gun laws, pandemic shutdowns and racial justice protests.
Later, outside in the parking lot while smoking a cigarette, Hollie’s uncle clarified that the battle is against covid and shared the popular — yet false — conspiracy that potentially lifesaving covid medications are being withheld by the health-care system. What he wouldn’t do was provide his name, saying he didn’t want “little black SUVs showing up at my house.”
Online, he and the family have shared social media posts and, until recently, sold customized insulated plastic cups bearing the insignia of Three Percenters, a decentralized militant movement named after the myth that just 3 percent of the population fought the British in the American Revolution. It’s founded on the idea that armed “patriots” should protect Americans from the tyranny of big government, including gun laws, pandemic shutdowns and racial justice protests.
Later, outside in the parking lot while smoking a cigarette, Hollie’s uncle clarified that the battle is against covid and shared the popular — yet false — conspiracy that potentially lifesaving covid medications are being withheld by the health-care system. What he wouldn’t do was provide his name, saying he didn’t want “little black SUVs showing up at my house.”
A Golden Oldie
A Sacred Right Remains Threatened
January 26, 2015
In November, we released a video featuring several Harvard students as they struggled to pass the 1964 Louisiana Literacy Test. While the project has received overwhelmingly positive feedback, in the comments sections of many sites across the web, several debates have been sparked in response to the video. Some commenters have questioned the comparison between literacy tests and voter identification laws and others have even questioned the purpose of this project.
With this op-ed, we hope to explain exactly why this project is so important and why the comparison between literacy tests and voter ID laws is absolutely valid.
Five decades ago, states in the American South gave literacy tests to any voter who could not “prove a fifth grade education.” In reality, the only people who ever saw this test were blacks and, to a lesser extent, working class whites. In order to pass the 1964 Louisiana Literacy Test, voters needed to answer all 30 questions correctly in 10 minutes. Just one question wrong was grounds for disenfranchisement.
While it may be disturbing to read about barriers to voting such as poll taxes and literacy tests in history books, it is an entirely different experience to stand in the shoes of a black voter who had to take this test in 1964. We asked a group of Harvard students to take the test under the conditions stipulated in the directions of the original test. Thirty questions. Ten minutes. Not a single question wrong. If anyone could pass a basic literacy test, it would be Harvard students, right?
As brilliant as the students who took this test are, none of them passed it. None of them passed because no one can pass. The 1964 Louisiana Literacy Test, like the other literacy tests given to black and poor white voters at the time, did not have a legitimate answer key. Most of the test’s questions seem purposely ambiguous. No matter what was written down, the registrar official would simply say the person’s interpretation of the question was wrong. These literacy tests were devious and instituted to disenfranchise people who had the wrong skin tone or belonged to the wrong social class.
Literacy tests and other mechanisms used to disenfranchise citizens were outlawed by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but the primary purpose of this project is to bring attention to the fact that the sacred right to vote remains threatened. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act, empowering Southern states to change their election laws without federal oversight. Eight states have established strict voter ID laws that disproportionately prevent people of color and the poor from voting. Just last month, the Supreme Court upheld Texas’ voter ID law, which potentially disenfranchised as many as 600,000 people in the 2014 midterm elections alone.
What motivates voter ID laws today is no different from what motivated past malicious barriers to voting. Those who support voter ID laws are claiming to be sincerely guarding against voter fraud in the same way that those who supported literacy tests claimed to be issuing a legitimate test of one’s literacy. Loyola University Law School Professor Justin Levitt’s comprehensive study of over 1 billion ballots cast in general, primary, special, and municipal elections across the nation from 2000 to 2014, could only find 31 possible incidents of voter fraud.
Another study by the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School has found that the costs related to obtaining an ID to vote can range from $75 to $125, a sum that disproportionately burdens minority and working class voters. This is a cost that, when adjusted for inflation, is significantly higher than the poll tax that was explicitly established to prevent blacks and working class whites from voting. To put it simply, voter fraud is an imaginary problem being used to justify discrimination by another name.
We created this project because we want everyone to understand that the right to vote has never been guaranteed and should never be taken for granted. Lawmakers have been devising clever schemes to disenfranchise American citizens since the earliest days of this country’s founding. The voter ID law is only the most recent ploy in a long legacy of voter disenfranchisement efforts in this country’s history.
We must remain vigilant in the face of dishonest laws that are disenfranchising our fellow citizens. The midterm election has passed, but our message remains the same. The right to vote is sacred and we all have a responsibility to protect it.
Today's Brian
Rubio is trying to argue that government can't do anything about the gun problem because government can't do anything.
It's another swipe at government itself - the concept of government. Republicans aren't just saying the Democrats' gun safety proposals are bad. They're saying "the government is bad".
Rubio is not as dumb as we like to think he is. Ain't none of 'em that dumb - not dumb at all.
What they're doing is working - it's having the desired effect.
Brian Tyler Cohen
Val Demings showed some real guts, and more than a little brain power. I like it when Dems get up on their hind legs and fight like there's something worth winning.
Today's SMFH
Somewhere in Texas, there's a well-connected brother-in-law who's recently discovered he has a burning passion for DNA Testing, and that he'll be needing another vacation home.
BTW, there's nothing here to change my thinking that Republicans are doing everything they can think of to make public schools disappear.
Texas schools send parents DNA kits to identify their kids’ bodies in emergencies
After the mass shooting in Uvalde, the kits are making many parents feel even more anxious about sending their children to school.
The state of Texas is sending public school students home with DNA kits designed to help their parents identify their children “in case of an emergency.”
In 2021, the Texas state legislature passed Senate Bill No. 2158, a law requiring the Texas Education Agency to “provide identification kits to school districts and open-enrollment charter schools for distribution to the parent or legal custodian of certain students.”
The law passed after eight students and two teachers were shot and killed inside Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas, and almost a year before 19 fourth-graders and two teachers were gunned down inside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
The Texas public school system will provide ink-free fingerprint and DNA identification cards to all K-6 students who are eligible. Parents are not mandated to use the kits.
The three-fold pamphlets allow caregivers to store their children’s DNA and fingerprints at home, which could then be turned over to law enforcement agencies in the event of an “emergency.” According to the legislation mandating the kits be provided to qualifying Texas families, the fingerprint and DNA verification kits were intended to “help locate and return a missing or trafficked child.”
In the wake of the second deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history and the botched police response that left 19 students and two teachers dead, Texas parents are apprehensive about the kits and the message some are saying it sends to Texas families.
Many of the children gunned down inside Robb Elementary were not easily identifiable as a result of their catastrophic injuries. Some close family members provided DNA swabs in order to positively identify the children’s remains.
Tracy Walder, a former CIA and FBI agent and current college professor who taught high school history for 16 years, said she was “devastated” when she heard her second-grade daughter would be sent home with a kit.
“You have to understand, I’m a former law enforcement officer,” Walder, who has lived in Texas for 14 years, said. "I worry every single day when I send my kid to school. Now we’re giving parents DNA kits so that when their child is killed with the same weapon of war I had when I was in Afghanistan, parents can use them to identify them?”
Walder said she has tried to “find the right words” for how she feels, but she doesn’t think she can “because sometimes it’s beyond comprehension.”
“This sends two messages: The first is that the government is not going to do anything to solve the problem. This is their way of telling us that,” Walder said. “The second is that us parents are now forced to have conversations with our kids that they may not be emotionally ready for. My daughter is 7. What do I tell her?”
Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old son Uziyah Garcia was killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting, shared his frustration over the kits on social media.
“Yeah! Awesome! Let’s identify kids after they’ve been murdered instead of fixing issues that could ultimately prevent them from being murdered,” Cross posted on Twitter.
Texas State Sen. Donna Campbell, who sponsored SB-2158, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for the Texas Education Agency said in a written statement provided to TODAY that “Senate Bill 2158 established the Child Identification Program, a grant to supply child I.D. fingerprint and DNA identification kits to school systems to provide to families in their respective school communities,” adding that “parents can voluntarily request these kits.”
“To fulfill this statutory obligation, TEA is collaborating with the Safety Blitz Foundation, National Child Identification (I.D.) Program, Education Service Centers, and school systems to provide families who had children in kindergarten through sixth grade during the 2021-2022 school year and kindergarten during the 2022-2023 school year with child I.D. fingerprint kits,” the statement added.
Some parents say they feel uncomfortable sending their children’s DNA to anyone for privacy reasons. And after the tragedy in Uvalde, the kits are making many moms and dads feel even more anxious about sending their children to school.
“It makes me physically sick,” Wendi Aarons, a mom of two who has lived in Texas since 1999, told TODAY Parents. “I have a hard time even grappling with this as a real thing that is happening. Parents of school kids should be worrying about (parent-teacher organization) sign-up sheets and grades and if their kid likes whatever they’re serving in the cafeteria that day, not their child’s murder and if they’re shot so many times their body cannot be identified.”
Aarons has two children, ages 18 and 20, who attended Texas public schools from the time they were in kindergarten until they graduated high school. She said she’s grateful her children will not be sent home with DNA and fingerprint kits, and said she “can’t imagine the panic and anxiety parents face sending their kids to school every day not knowing if they’ll return.”
“It’s astounding, to realize that not only has the state of Texas done absolutely nothing to protect our kids and teachers, they’ve taken the callous, heartless, cruel measure to send DNA test kits so we can identify their bodies if or when they’re victims of a massacre,” Aarons added. “It sends the message that guns are more important than us.”
In June, Emily Westbrooks and her family moved to Texas from Ireland, where she said “gun violence is negligible and sending children to school wasn’t a daily terror.”
“It infuriates me that these kits are being sent to families in lieu of any concrete action to prevent such terrorizing tragedies from occurring,” said Westbrooks, who has a 5-year-old in kindergarten and a 7-year-old in first grade. “I think the only way you can reasonably send your children to school is simply to tell yourself this won’t happen to your kids, which is of course just lying to yourself.”
Westbrooks adds that the kits shatter that lie and are an “incredibly triggering, in-your-face reminder that our kids are at risk of being obliterated by automatic weapons to the point they won’t be recognizable.”
“Elected officials, both national and Texan, have given up,” she added. “They’ve decided our kids aren’t worth restricting guns, but they’re offering us this as some kind of consolation. It’s disgusting that they can’t do any better than to admit that they won’t protect our children.”
BTW, there's nothing here to change my thinking that Republicans are doing everything they can think of to make public schools disappear.
Texas schools send parents DNA kits to identify their kids’ bodies in emergencies
After the mass shooting in Uvalde, the kits are making many parents feel even more anxious about sending their children to school.
In 2021, the Texas state legislature passed Senate Bill No. 2158, a law requiring the Texas Education Agency to “provide identification kits to school districts and open-enrollment charter schools for distribution to the parent or legal custodian of certain students.”
The law passed after eight students and two teachers were shot and killed inside Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas, and almost a year before 19 fourth-graders and two teachers were gunned down inside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
The Texas public school system will provide ink-free fingerprint and DNA identification cards to all K-6 students who are eligible. Parents are not mandated to use the kits.
The three-fold pamphlets allow caregivers to store their children’s DNA and fingerprints at home, which could then be turned over to law enforcement agencies in the event of an “emergency.” According to the legislation mandating the kits be provided to qualifying Texas families, the fingerprint and DNA verification kits were intended to “help locate and return a missing or trafficked child.”
In the wake of the second deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history and the botched police response that left 19 students and two teachers dead, Texas parents are apprehensive about the kits and the message some are saying it sends to Texas families.
Many of the children gunned down inside Robb Elementary were not easily identifiable as a result of their catastrophic injuries. Some close family members provided DNA swabs in order to positively identify the children’s remains.
Tracy Walder, a former CIA and FBI agent and current college professor who taught high school history for 16 years, said she was “devastated” when she heard her second-grade daughter would be sent home with a kit.
“You have to understand, I’m a former law enforcement officer,” Walder, who has lived in Texas for 14 years, said. "I worry every single day when I send my kid to school. Now we’re giving parents DNA kits so that when their child is killed with the same weapon of war I had when I was in Afghanistan, parents can use them to identify them?”
Walder said she has tried to “find the right words” for how she feels, but she doesn’t think she can “because sometimes it’s beyond comprehension.”
“This sends two messages: The first is that the government is not going to do anything to solve the problem. This is their way of telling us that,” Walder said. “The second is that us parents are now forced to have conversations with our kids that they may not be emotionally ready for. My daughter is 7. What do I tell her?”
Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old son Uziyah Garcia was killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting, shared his frustration over the kits on social media.
“Yeah! Awesome! Let’s identify kids after they’ve been murdered instead of fixing issues that could ultimately prevent them from being murdered,” Cross posted on Twitter.
Texas State Sen. Donna Campbell, who sponsored SB-2158, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for the Texas Education Agency said in a written statement provided to TODAY that “Senate Bill 2158 established the Child Identification Program, a grant to supply child I.D. fingerprint and DNA identification kits to school systems to provide to families in their respective school communities,” adding that “parents can voluntarily request these kits.”
“To fulfill this statutory obligation, TEA is collaborating with the Safety Blitz Foundation, National Child Identification (I.D.) Program, Education Service Centers, and school systems to provide families who had children in kindergarten through sixth grade during the 2021-2022 school year and kindergarten during the 2022-2023 school year with child I.D. fingerprint kits,” the statement added.
Some parents say they feel uncomfortable sending their children’s DNA to anyone for privacy reasons. And after the tragedy in Uvalde, the kits are making many moms and dads feel even more anxious about sending their children to school.
“It makes me physically sick,” Wendi Aarons, a mom of two who has lived in Texas since 1999, told TODAY Parents. “I have a hard time even grappling with this as a real thing that is happening. Parents of school kids should be worrying about (parent-teacher organization) sign-up sheets and grades and if their kid likes whatever they’re serving in the cafeteria that day, not their child’s murder and if they’re shot so many times their body cannot be identified.”
Aarons has two children, ages 18 and 20, who attended Texas public schools from the time they were in kindergarten until they graduated high school. She said she’s grateful her children will not be sent home with DNA and fingerprint kits, and said she “can’t imagine the panic and anxiety parents face sending their kids to school every day not knowing if they’ll return.”
“It’s astounding, to realize that not only has the state of Texas done absolutely nothing to protect our kids and teachers, they’ve taken the callous, heartless, cruel measure to send DNA test kits so we can identify their bodies if or when they’re victims of a massacre,” Aarons added. “It sends the message that guns are more important than us.”
In June, Emily Westbrooks and her family moved to Texas from Ireland, where she said “gun violence is negligible and sending children to school wasn’t a daily terror.”
“It infuriates me that these kits are being sent to families in lieu of any concrete action to prevent such terrorizing tragedies from occurring,” said Westbrooks, who has a 5-year-old in kindergarten and a 7-year-old in first grade. “I think the only way you can reasonably send your children to school is simply to tell yourself this won’t happen to your kids, which is of course just lying to yourself.”
Westbrooks adds that the kits shatter that lie and are an “incredibly triggering, in-your-face reminder that our kids are at risk of being obliterated by automatic weapons to the point they won’t be recognizable.”
“Elected officials, both national and Texan, have given up,” she added. “They’ve decided our kids aren’t worth restricting guns, but they’re offering us this as some kind of consolation. It’s disgusting that they can’t do any better than to admit that they won’t protect our children.”
A Minor Win
(pay wall)
Opinion
Biden just pulled off a big diplomatic victory — and almost no one noticed
International diplomacy is inherently difficult, usually unglamorous and often unsuccessful — but nevertheless essential. The Biden administration has seen for itself how hard it can be to achieve results: It has failed to entice Iran back into the nuclear deal or to convince Saudi Arabia to increase oil production. But last week the administration’s diplomacy hit pay dirt — and almost no one noticed.
On Oct. 11, Israel and Lebanon announced an agreement that would demarcate their maritime boundary. This sounds narrow and technical but is a major achievement given that the two countries have been formally at war since 1948. (And that has sometimes led to actual military conflict — most recently in 2006.) The two countries don’t have an internationally recognized land border, and they have not had a maritime border, either. That has been an invitation to conflict and an impediment to the exploitation of the large natural gas fields off their coasts.
Israel has been producing offshore natural gas for years, but its latest field — known as Karish — lies perilously close to the disputed maritime boundary with Lebanon. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, threatened to attack Israel’s oil rig in the area. Lebanon, for its part, has not been able to extract any natural gas at all because oil companies don’t want to drill in disputed areas. That natural gas is desperately needed by a country in economic meltdown whose citizens receive only an hour or two of power every day from the electrical grid.
U.S. administrations have been trying for a decade to broker an agreement — with no luck. It was hard to make progress, given that officials of these warring states refuse to be in the same room with each other. Lebanon does not even recognize Israel’s right to exist.
Enter Amos J. Hochstein, a former Senate staffer, energy industry executive and veteran of the Obama State Department who is the presidential coordinator for energy security. He launched a fresh round of shuttle diplomacy at the beginning of the year, commuting from Tel Aviv to Beirut — a trip that usually required stopovers in a third country because there are no direct air or road links between Israel and Lebanon. “I’ve worked a lot of hard problems,” he told me. “This is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
He noted that “suspicion is really extreme on both sides” and the timing hardly appeared propitious: Israel is led by a weak caretaker government as one election after another fails to produce a durable majority. Lebanon is perpetually divided among different religious groups and in recent years has been on the brink of economic and political collapse.
Hochstein told me, in a telephone interview, that he changed the dynamics by going from asking who would win and who would lose under any agreement to asking how both countries could safeguard their vital interests. Israel’s government, led by centrist Prime Minister Yair Lapid, made concessions on the boundary line. Lebanon’s government, led by President Michel Aoun, recognized Israel’s control of a three-mile stretch of water close to shore and agreed to pay Israel its share of the proceeds from gas taken from the Israeli side the Qana Field, which lies in both countries’ exclusive economic zones. (The payments will go through an intermediary, the French energy company Total.)
The resulting deal was hailed as “historic” by both sides. Former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is trying to return to power in the Nov. 1 election, predictably denounced it as a “disgraceful surrender.” It was also attacked by the former U.S. negotiator who tried and failed to get a deal in the Trump administration.
But this looks very much like a case of “sour grapes,” as my Council on Foreign Relations colleague Martin Indyk noted. Trump and Netanyahu couldn’t get a deal done; Biden and Lapid did. Israel’s security establishment is firmly in favor of the deal not only because it will help safeguard Israel’s natural gas fields but also because it will help bolster the Lebanese government and economy. Israel does not want a failed state next door.
This agreement is not as dramatic as the Abraham Accords struck under the Trump administration in which three Arab states (the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco) recognized Israel. But it is, in some ways, even more surprising.
The UAE, Morocco and Bahrain weren’t at war with Israel. Hezbollah, the Iran-allied Lebanese militant group, by contrast, has long been, and remains, one of Israel’s main security threats. It is also the most powerful political entity in Lebanon with a de facto veto over government decisions. So, it’s pretty extraordinary that Hezbollah is allowing the Lebanese government to sign a deal that could turn Israel and Lebanon into business partners. “Lebanon has, for the first time, entered a kind of de facto recognition of Israel and its borders,” writes Daniel B. Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel.
That’s something for which the Biden administration deserves a lot of credit — just as the Trump administration deserved credit for the Abraham Accords. It just goes to show that diplomacy does pay off sometimes — even if we don’t always give it the attention it deserves.
Political Dodge Ball
Matt Schlapp goes on Ari Melber's show to try out the new GOP bullshit talking points.
- Biden was sworn in as president because Democrats committed fraud, but no - I'm not saying the election was stolen.
- The GOP's What-About bullshit du jour: Vandalism during the BLM protests of 2020 was just as bad as MAGA sedition on Jan6.
Oct 19, 2022
DIY Cult
There's one question that gets us out of the trap that religions and other cults set for us:
ie: What does god want?
- If the answer is "nothing", then both of us - that god and I - can just go about our business, each requiring nothing from the other.
- If the answer is anything but "nothing", then that god wants for something, which means that god is not complete, which means that god is not god.
And we have to keep in mind that every cult will set itself up so that something or someone is the "god" - the object of all the devotion and sacrifice and effort. It can be a person, or an ideology, or a business plan, or whatever. But it's always going to end up being sold to the devotees as "The Perfect [INSERT ENTITY/CONCEPT HERE]".
And no matter what else, when the inevitable collapse of the fantasy comes, the cult leaders will always always always try to fall back and regroup with:
- Communism didn't fail, we failed communism
- The plan didn't fail, we failed at executing the plan
- The policy didn't fail, we failed to fully implement the policy
- Conservatism didn't fail we failed to be sufficiently conservative
BTW, all that stuff about "it didn't fail, we did" is co-opted and adulterated and perverted, but it rings true because there's actually a small kernel of truth in it, having been derived from a universal truth:
Democracy fails
when we fail democracy
So we have to crank up the critical thinking, and make some decisions.
- What do we want to devote ourselves to?
- How do we differentiate between something decent and equitable vs something perverse and uncivilized?
From 23 years ago, Carey Burtt Films:
Ukraine
The Russians are in the process of some kind of evacuation in and around Kherson trying not to get slaughtered because Putin refuses to allow strategic retreat.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are pushing towards highway P66, which is the main supply route for the Russian operations in the northern area.
Prof Michael Clarke
Artur Rehi - Estonian Soldier
- Russian Orthodox priests are spying for Putin
- The convicts recruited from Russian prisons are (as suspected) being used as expendable decoys
- Russian moms are brainwashed
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