Children vs. the GDP?

“History will judge us by the difference we make in the everyday lives of children….”

— Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)

The Trump Administration is promoting full opening of schools, backed by Betsy Devos, Secretary of Education. This to help parents get back to work and the economy rolling again, and to get children back into the classroom with teachers. These actions might be good ones without a pandemic in which children ARE at risk and can bring the virus home. It is another blinders-on recommendation from an inept and reckless Republican administration. (Note: Many Republicans are currently distancing themselves from a Toxic Whitehouse.)

I wish to reflect on Nelson Mandela’s quote which is pertinent to the present moment as leaders suggest using children as political vectors.

A new academic book, The Ecology of Childhood, by Barbara Bennett Woodhouse, was published early this year and then swiftly subsumed into the background as the Covid-19 Pandemic broke into our awareness. Yet it is a book relevant to the present moment. This I cannot emphasize enough.

Woodhouse is L.Q.C. Lamar Professor of Law at Emory University and director of the Emory Child Rights Project. She has devoted her career in law to defending the rights of children while studying the systems that impact children’s worlds. Read a biography.

The true measure of a just and sustainable society is whether it meets the basic needs of children and whether its policies foster environments in which children, young people, and families can flourish. ~ The Ecology of Childhood

Using this as a basic premise, Woodhouse presents a compelling argument for reexamining the values which inform our social contract with each other. The book analyzes the macrosystems that impact a child’s microsystem. These are: globalization, unrestricted capitalism, technological change, rising inequality, mass migration, racial conflict, and human-made climate change.

Do our policies foster environments in which children, young people, and families can flourish? If we the people create the macrosystems (which Woodhouse writes are comprised of the “ideas, values, prejudices, and powers that create hierarchies that can damage children”), then we the people can reform and reshape those macrosystems.

Listen to an NPR program rethinking the values that underlie the economy. Here are TED Talks with innovative ideas. Discussion is about stakeholder capitalism rather than shareholder capitalism.

Related are TED Talks by innovators thinking about how to reform the economy to reflect valuing people. See the TED Talk on this page and go to another one by Kate Ravorth here.

I believe that the current Black Lives Matter movement, which is now a rising wave of aligned movements joined in awareness that this IS the moment for such reform, then we can gain focus from Woodhouse’s approach which is to work with children’s rights in mind.

What should be our Covid-19 policies toward the health and welfare of children and families? I suggest that using the GDP as the prime measure of how we answer that question IS an example of a policy that needs reform.

The lack of proper healthcare, inadequate income, missing maternity and sick leave policies for every person and worker, racial inequalities, and climate change — these are harmful outcomes of errant policies that are currently under scrutiny in the piercing spotlight of the pandemic.

Read a review of The Ecology of Childhood.

Buy the book for your legislator, candidate, or changemaker.

Supporting Young Voters

Rock the Vote seeks to maximize the power of young people by supporting, educating, and providing tools for them to vote, organize, and grow in numbers to realize their collect power to shape the future.

Among the rich resources provided on the website is Democracy Class. This is a curriculum that can be taught at schools to educate youth about all aspects of voting in America. It teaches the history of voting in the U.S. and preregisters and registers young people to vote. The curriculum is nonpartisan. The website, resources, and messaging demonstrate how to effectively organize and use social media. There are numerous virtual tools.

As I have watched young protesters across the country grieving for criminal justice reform and an end to the racists roots that plague the body politic, I am so encouraged. Young Americans today are much less caught up in stereotypes, fluid in their acceptance of diversity among themselves, indeed celebratory of their differences. THAT is the direction we must follow.

Take Action to Assure Safe Voting for 2020.

I am from the Boomer generation, turning 75 in just a few days. The world being born is one that belongs to young Americans and I can be a part of its realization by helping their new world birth itself. Not for myself, but for young Americans who will make this a healthier nation. With them we’ll realize the dreams written in the Constitution which our forefathers never truly understood yet made possible. Young Americans will realize the dream more fully, and on and on, as a nation devoted to freedom grows in understanding of what that means and can possibly bring to everyone.

Go to Rock the Vote and engage in all the opportunities there. I am going to work on a Democracy Class for Bowling Green students.

See About Rock the Vote

GONE POSTAL!

As a little girl I had complete trust in the Post Office as I mailed an envelope filled with babysitting money to invest in what I hoped would be a lucrative business: selling holiday cards.

I venture most Americans have a fond relationship with the P.O. that emanates from a lifetime of taking it for granted that, like a basic organ of the body politic, will always function as essential to life as we know it.

Yet, the United State Postal Service needs $89B to stabilize its critical infrastructure which has grown and reinvented itself continuously with population growth, globalization, and technology innovation since its founding in 1775 by the first Continental Congress. Covid-19 has only added to its woes.

Benjamin Franklin was appointed the First Postmaster General. He and his family members established the first business model and infrastructure. Read the history of his leadership here.

Many of us cannot imagine our lives without the USPS which remains a trusted service that connects us to the federal government and to each other. With the likelihood of its key role in the upcoming Presidential election in November, it is a critical institution for our continued smooth transition of power. Yet it is teetering and our current leader has called it out as a joke and has not included it in the Covid-19 bailout.

[A personal note here about the recent Kentucky Primary: the automatic clock device at the P.O. marked mail-in ballots by the next day’s date as they counted ballots through the night. It was caught by the postal personnel, who set aside the ballots processed past midnight and thus were counted in the primary vote. If it were not for their oversight, an unexpected technological blurp would not have been identified. this served to alert Post Offices across the country to adjust for it.]

Jason Linkins, deputy-editor of The New Republic, writes in the July-August issue, “Going Postal”: “But, we shouldn’t stop at merely providing the $89 billion it has asked for. Rather, this is a moment when we can revitalize the agency and use it to restore our faith in America.”

Linkins suggests that we see the revitalization of the USPS as a critical infrastructure project. He supports not only postal banking services (especially important to millions of Americans without banking services) to an advisory office for federal agencies through which Americans can get advice on things like a government-provided health plan, or learning about available federal grants.

Linkins points out that the USPS is one of the largest employers of veterans and suggests that these Americans are experts at navigating bureaucratic agencies and experienced in overcoming life challenges. He writes, “instead of laying asphalt or stacking concrete, it would deploy human potential and the spirit of civic duty.”

His article heartened me and gave me hope that we as citizens, communities, and a nation can look at the current challenges we face with renewed imagination and build the postal service, as Franklin did, to meet the needs of a nation inventing itself.

Not by cynicism as Trump displayed in his glib suggestion that the USPS bleed Jeff Bezos’ Amazon to pay higher fees. Unlike our privileged president, most Americans rely on the USPS as a kingpin of their life as citizens in this great but wounded nation. Let’s get rid of this cynical leader and reinvent the Post Office to work for all of us!

https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/people-gallery-details.htm?#p=9

Poverty is the Elephant

For most of my adult life I have worked to end the violence of poverty. The most frustrating part of this work is entrenched misperceptions among at least half of Americans about “the poor”.

Poverty is multidimensional and not confined to any group of people, while its historic prevalence among “minority” populations is tolerated by American culture as if a natural condition of families in its grip. There is nothing natural about poverty. Poverty results from policies, practices, and prejudices.

The dictionary defines poverty as “The state of being extremely poor” and poor as “lack of enough money to live at a standard considered normal by society. During this pandemic, many more Americans are experiencing poverty–perhaps for the first time. Some might have become homeless except for the national moratorium on eviction during the COVID19 pandemic. Losing a job and having few or no savings, usually substantial debt — describes at least half of Americans today. Are they poor due to laziness or lack of ambition? No. They are poor due to circumstances beyond their control. COVID 19 for example created widespread unemployment and/or work at low hourly rates that are below living standards. The pandemic revealed the lack of resilience to events that strike at being able to work. Most Americans are running just ahead of an economic and health avalanche of poor outcomes.

Poverty in America draws on stereotypical associations with minorities or poor whites (lazy, unmotivated, less able). Poverty is endemic racism resulting in less opportunity to obtain a good paying job and poor education in neighborhoods that receive less funding for schools and public amenities such as grocery stores, parks, clinics, public transportation, libraries and museums, and so on, that build resilience and provide opportunities.

Yet there are other forms of poverty that we typically do not recognize– other dimensions of the poverty elephant in the room of democracy.

Poverty of justice is a pernicious form that is being scrutinized now in the face of blatant racism in police practices that single-out black citizens as culprits and typically resulting in outright murder on public view. This is a form of poverty that has been present for 400 years in America but never identified as such. Lynching is present today.

The hard truth is that poverty of justice arises from a poverty of soul among citizens who do not resist the violence and work to eliminate injustice of any kind in the Republic of America. This is another way of saying it: you are either part of the problem or part of the solution.

James Baldwin defines the “Negro story” of White America (aka “the Indian problem”) as emotional poverty among white people who need to perpetuate a myth of superiority to maintain white hegemony.

A new form of poverty is lack of access to the Internet and lack of technology (computer, printer, cell phone). The pandemic created a chasm among school children and college students by virtue of the an unequal access to these basic tech resources. Americans of means have been content to allow poorer kids to find these resources at libraries and other public institutions that closed during the pandemic. Students dropped behind richer contemporaries during the pandemic while wealthier families were able to keep their children progressing and even excelling with homeschooling by at least one or two parents at home or able to keep working at home. So, technological poverty is a new form arising that will further divide who progresses and who does not unless Americans intervene to bring everyone along in access to technology. This would mean we have a spiritually enlightened perspective, another important dimension of equality for all, and also an economically smart policy.

Another important area of “poverty” that has received scrutiny from researchers and sociologists is the basic need of human beings for a “roof over their head”. A house–so fundamental to Americans as essential to well-being and wealth-building–is denied to many citizens through unfair loan practices and keeping people working at below living wages, making it impossible to buy that first house. I think of all the college grads with student loans on their backs like Sisyphus from the Greek myth whose punishment was to carry a heavy stone on his back up a mountain with no end in sight. That seems a ready financial metaphor for all Americans under the age of 50 today.

What’s so important about safe housing? Today we know that it is the best predictor of a person’s physical and mental health. Stable housing is a basic human need, and it’s just silly that something like that need be stated at all, like the need for food. Yet, if you study the issue, it is true that America has an affordable housing crisis across the nation. A form of societal poverty that with all the wealth sucked up into this system, we have failed to provide even that guarantee. Once upon a time we as a society guaranteed it with the GI bill, with fair loan and hiring practices, with laws that worked to assure a great education for every child. But, much of that has been stripped away as white culture got scared again. The gig could be up on the perceived conceit of greed and privilege as their working dynamic.

Until we see all the dimensions of “poverty” as a creation of how we treat each other, we’ll always have poor among us. But, that is not inevitable, only probable, as long as American citizens tolerate it.

Being in this moment

If you are like me, everyday is a work in progress attempting to understand this moment of converging forces. It is an understatement to write that this is an inflection point culturally in the U.S. and other countries.

Black Lives Matter is bringing us to a startling moment of truth: who we are and where we might go as a democracy through collective action to understand and dismantle racism and racists ideas.

In our country, this cuts deep to the fact that racism is built into policies and practices present at the founding and continually refreshed by our collective lack of understanding about what racism is and how it operates in us and the culture.

Ibram Kendi, in his book, How to Be an Antiracist, defines racism as our actions or lack of action that support ideas, policies, and practices that support inequality. So by commission and by omission. If we are not working for a more equitable society by defending each person’s rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then we are supporting racism.

Imanyi Perry, Princeton Professor, interviews the author here. Watch and then get the book. I particularly like the audio version read by the author. It is a highly personal story and yet works as an instructional guide for U.S. citizens who wish to understand the moment and be a part of moving the nation forward to achieve its high ideal of equality for all.

Observation Deck of the USS Pandemic

FROM THE OBSERVATION DECK OF THE USS PANDEMIC

Report Submitted March 31,2020

Skies clearing; increased visibility; waters clearing, increased depth perception.
Fault-lines in leadership and economic security readily observable.
Man in the White House teeths on the Presidency; ingenuity and capacity for loving from American families and citizens observed. Leadership flipped: mayors, governors, and institutional leaders rise to the top.
The youth of America sing in their nests like spring fledging ready to fly into their new lives and destinies.
The elders reflect on time past, time of their parents, of the great war, the depression, and the war of the world. They search for its lessons. They fear death for the virus has found a particular berth in their cabins. They await the outcome.
Sunrise at 6:39 a.m. EST and Moonset at 1:29 a.m. EST. Birds and mammals move free and unburdened. They build their nests and hunt on soft paws among the trees. Bees appear, rotund and smeared with yellow pollen. Dolphins rise.
Humans huddle in their homes waiting, wondering, mourning, and angry. It is their turn. The viral hordes rage with insatiable greed and ambition, good capitalists all.
Doctors, nurses, emergency technicians, receptionists, firemen, and all the frontline warriors are risking their lives with no time to wonder about it.
Nets of commerce are tangled on the waves for all to observe. Barrels line docks; mountains of boxes press upon the earth; an eerie silence encompasses the market places. All those lampshades, trash baskets, ric rac, thumbtacks.
The landfills grow as humanity burns through it’s useable goods.The top layer is PPG: effluvium of the pandemic. The next layer isTP and hand wipes.

The warning whistle blows. The crew awaits the captain’s call. Will it be new coordinates to awakened ports of call?

The crew stands All Hands A Deck

Our environmental practices make pandemics like the coronavirus more likely

Love in the Time of Covid-19

The title of this post is a play on the title of a novel written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Love in the Time of Cholera. Marquez’s novel in turn was inspired by Daniel Defoe‘s A Journal in the Plague Year written as an eyewitness report during the 1665 Black Plague in London. (Here is an online e-version from The Project Glutenberg.)

So there is precedent for writing about plagues which in “our” time is novel coronavirus. We have yet to learn the outcome as indeed it is just getting started. What will our generation “write” for future generations?

The Spanish flu of 1918 is perhaps the most recent pandemic affecting the U.S. at the scale of the one we are in now. However, the outcomes could be vastly different IF WE HEED THE LESSONS OF PAST PANDEMICS.

Don’t squelch the truth

Even the Black Plague in London, which DeFoe’s story chronicles, shows that when it first broke out, families and then city officials tried to suppress it to control public panic. That should shake us up. We are unprepared to combat the novel coronavirus because we didn’t react immediately by listening to health experts and the experience of China and Korea. There is even rumbling in the White House that we should let up on the quarantine to save the economy. A curious absence of Dr. Stephen Fauci, who heads up the NIH Immunology section and who has helped keep the correct information disseminating from the Hill, does not bode well either. He notably has corrected the erroneous statements of the President which as we have seen is sure to get him dismissed or fired. This should raise an alarm.

Act quickly

During the 1918 Flu Pandemic, because countries were embroiled in WWI, a horrible war with massive death and dismemberment, the city of Philadelphia held a big parade to pump up national patriotism, and, as a result of the crowds, caused a surge in the flu pandemic from which the city never recovered. Loss of life compared to other cities which acted quickly, was 30x’s higher. I am thinking now of the beaches in Florida that stayed open for Spring Break until just a couple of days ago. How did those crowded beaches, hotels, and restaurants magnify the spread of Covid-19? We have yet to learn that. More so, the impetus to save the economy, whether localized or national, can kill people by putting them second to the GDP. The pandemic highlights that pure capitalism does not have a human face.

Kindness and compassion build resiliency during and after the pandemic

Love abounds in America, however, all across the country, in individuals, local leaders and Governors like Andy Beshear, in my state of Kentucky. He has been on top of the latest health information and acted quickly which is probably why we have a low rate of infection comparatively to other states that hesitated This kind of loving care (for it is loving to assure the safety of people) is in contrast to the President who is mostly concerned with the economy. While he does talk about keeping jobs for people by keeping business open, he ignores science. What good will it do if people die by going back to work and causing this pandemic to rage through America? We are on a path to be the center of the pandemic globally.

A lesson from past pandemics is good public compliance to health recommendations is essential. Right leadership at all levels of government and society is consequential.

This is a time to accept the scientific information coming to us from many trustworthy sources AND the living example of countries that were slow to act: Italy being one where the death rate is very high.

A very good summary of the complex 1918 Flu Pandemic can be heard on NPR’s On Point which aired today, March 24, 2020.

Meanwhile, the citizens, families, and individuals, and some businesses are acting with bravery, compassion, and creativity, i.e. love.

RIGHT NOW WE ARE WRITING OUR STORY OF THIS PANDEMIC.

See what has been planned to make a response on this scales: The National Response Framework – which is not currently being used. NRF_FINALApproved_508_2011028v1040

Write about how your community is responding with love and creativity. Submission to Yes! Magazine’s Call for Submissions (deadline April 3).

READERS: Another plague novel I highly recommend is Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders

HOPE

FOR MORE HOPE CLICK HERE

If I Were Elizabeth Warren

I wonder what Elizabeth Warren is doing right now? My hope for the leader I have backed with my money and political support is that she is in her pajamas taking it easy. If I were there, I’d serve her a good strong coffee and cook her an omelette and potatoes. Then I’d order her a bodywork specialist, and arrange for a manicure and pedicure, and lavish all manner of care upon her travel weary person. For Elizabeth is fighting The Good Fight in the American Political Arena.

Why did I support her? Elizabeth Warren has seen the truth about capitalism from very early in her career of public service: it works for the top few percent and less so as you go down the economic/social agency scale. The reason: there is a concurrent scale of opportunity shrouded by American society’s propensity to worship rich people and turn away from the poor – or rather, people perceived as poor.

Warren worked tirelessly in government to rectify that inequity. This is the Great Work. What did she accomplish? If you have credit cards, loans, bank accounts then you are benefiting today from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which she fought for over the years of her public service. She worked to create and sustain a Middle Class while making it possible for families with lesser means to educate their children for economic mobility. Warren was ever on that path to ameliorate free market economics to make it fair to all Americans. She kept kids in mind. Maternity and family leave, sick leave and medical care, a good education — these are fundamental rights of all Americans she believes.

Well, Elizabeth I bet is resting, but her mind is spinning on how to keep the Good Fight going. She has always been and always will be an American leader. As a voter and citizen I will do my part to see that she has a place in the new Administration if she wants it, a Vice Presidency or key cabinet position.

One key thing: she is persistent. Women have that. Endurance. And, our networks are ever stronger and larger. One day a woman will lead this country and we’ll be better for it. So rest, Elizabeth. And thank you from my heart.

Places – Tucson High Desert

Tucson, High Desert – 2006

Across the desert floor saguaros bake in the hot, dry air. It is the time when the saguaro fruit sets and ripens. Birds, bees, javelinas, coyotes, bobcats – and people – dine on the sweet red fruit. The Desert People will make syrup or jam and ceremonial wine for the rain dance inviting the wind and clouds to bring the precious gift of water once more.

After the harvest is the time of waiting and watching. We see voluminous clouds pile up over the mountains – swirling dark clouds over a living desert. Even their shadows cast welcome relief.

We wait … immersed in an ocean of heat. We sweat and burn in light that cuts like a hundred blades into unprotected skin. On the Fourth of July midtown rockets burst on an obsidian sky while desert creatures prowl in the cool moonlight. This day marks the arrival of the monsoon. Even the word, its utterance, a desert dweller’s mantra, offers relief: monsoon!

And then it happens … the first dollops of rain splash down! Perhaps we see it far across the valley falling in just one particular area. We are jealous, but encouraged, for we know that soon it will fall on us, too. Our lives are made more certain with the rain. No creature can live without this precious rain. No, none.

The summer rhythms of this desert remind us of our vulnerability. That is the gift of the Saguaro season. We are dependent. Humbly we may realize it. We stand outside like fools and let it fall on us, run down our faces and spine where its coolness makes us shiver when only a second ago we were sweltering.

People in their cars, navigating flooded intersections, are amused. In washes, valleys and hillsides the shallow roots of columnar cacti, the ancient trees of our land, pump in the crystal substance as it trickles or gushes through the sand and stone. Their fluted forms expand with the tidal rhythm.

It is a desert baptism among people who still appreciate the desert’s rhythmic character. They catch rainwater in barrels and dig wide basins in the earth to hold the precious rain and prepare the soil for native seeds saved from last year’s harvest of squash, beans, corn, melons, and greens. They collect the mesquite beans and pound the pods into sweet flour to make bread that heals the body. The harvest is bountiful when the gardening is blessed and prayers go forth in gratitude and hope.

When the big clouds roll up from the Gulf of California, the old women lift their harvesting sticks to pull down the clouds and bring the rain. The Tohono O’odham, The Desert People, keep vigilance over the city and the land around it and even the Europeans are learning to pray, in their own way. The Mexicans and Spanish have always kept the seasonal rhythms of land and seed and they pray to their spiritual guides, and all together raise their faces in prayerful patience as the clouds move up from Mexico over the Santa Catalinas swirling dark and black over the Old Pueblo. Somewhere I imagine there may also be a jaguar looking up in want of rain.