Coronavirus: "Operation Christmas Drop" -- The Must-See, Feel-Better Christmas Movie

We are being whipped into the Christmas frenzy by a combination of capitalist marketing devices and our profound cultural traditions. And part of the tradition is that we gather -- "I'll be HOME for Christmas" is not apocryphal.  

Of course, this Coronavirus Christmas we are being urged in the strongest possible terms to stay home, or as Samuel L. Jackson put it, "Stay the F**K at home."  

These two HOME messages are actually contradictory so all of the people who observe Christmas are in a bind.  

Happily, Netflix has a must-see holiday movie which helps us with this: the film explains that "old traditions are great, but it's fun to make new ones."  

I took this to heart today when I was at the garden store where I get my Christmas tree every year.  It helped me have new ideas about what to do.  Specifically, it helped me think about an outdoor Christmas -- they had wood for my fire pit, and trees that seem perfectly happy to be outside.  I remembered, back in the old days, when my mother and I would string cranberries and popcorn, which perhaps the birds would like.  (I don't know if this is actually OK, but I'm going to check with the Audubon society).  

It will be a new tradition -- gathering outside and enjoying our "outside" tree.  Thanks, Operation Christmas Drop, for the inspiration!  And wait -- it's a true story! or at least "based on a true thing that has gone on every year since 1952." 

Coronavirus: The (unforgiving) Thanksgiving spike in New Jersey

I called Dr. Deborah Goldson's office today to get an appointment and was told all appointments are now virtual because the virus is spiking.  I looked this up and was shocked. 

On July 17th, there were 50 cases. On November 17th, as we call see, there were 4.026. That qualifies as a spike in anybody's book. Couple that with a growing number of infections among my friends, and I would say that the virus is creeping along, relentlessly and inexorably.  

Dr. Goldson gave me sound advice at the beginning of the pandemic, basically to stay home. Don't go food shopping, don't go anywhere. Samuel L. Jackson had that the same advice -- with stronger wording -- in this video (rated: MA, strong language). This hits just as we turn the corner to Thanksgiving, which, even as a reduced gathering, means we would want to go out to the supermarket, etc. I've been going to various doctor visits, thinking I was ahead of the spike, but clearly I was just not keeping a close eye on the pattern. 

What are we to do? 

NYC says: Always keep in mind the “Core Four” actions to prevent COVID-19 transmission: 

• Stay home if sick: Monitor your health and stay home if you are sick except for getting essential medical care (including COVID-19 testing) and other essential needs. 

• Practice physical distancing: Stay at least 6 feet away from people who are not members of your household. 

• Wear a face covering: Protect those around you. Wearing a face covering helps reduce the spread of COVID-19, especially if you are sick and don’t have symptoms. For more information about face coverings, visit nyc.gov/health/coronavirus and look for "FAQ About Face Coverings." 

• Practice healthy hand hygiene: Wash your hands often with soap and water or use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer if soap and water are not available; clean frequently touched surfaces regularly; avoid touching your face with unwashed hands; and cover your cough or sneeze with your arm, not your hands.

I make it the Core Five, and add:

• Follow Dr. Goldson's advice. I'll pass it along to you here.

Coronavirus: Of battered spouses and rioters

Herbert Aptheker, the Marxist historian and author of American Negro Slave Revolts, was my professor in college and I often wrote to him in years after graduation to discuss things that were on my mind. One of these was how to name civil unrest. He always used words like "rebellion" to describe the events of the long, hot summers of the 1960s. As my studies of psychiatry progressed, I resisted such language. I thought that "riot" was a better description of the chaotic events that unfolded on the streets, as tempers boiled over and people took their feelings out on storefronts.

Because "riots," "rioters" and "rioting" are used so disparagingly, there has not been much reason to press the point but it has been rattling around in my brain for a long time. A conversation today with anthropologist Edgar Rivera Colón helped me articulate my thought that those inchoate moments are  speaking an emotional language, asking us to listen with our hearts, not our judgements. I think they convey scream, and we are meant to hear and feel all the terror and impossibility held in that scream. I am writing "scream" in italics to make it a neologism, an emotion word.  To me, the word "riot" -- defined as "public violence, disorder or tumult" -- has a core of scream that the word "uprising" does not contain. 

As a psychiatrist, that scream is the deep and essential communication and it should neither be denigrated nor prettied up. It is, I realized in the conversation with Edgar, like domestic violence, like the moment when the battered spouse picks up a rolling pin and bashes in the head of the abuser. We are supposed to hear the breaking point in the act, the straw that broke the camel's back, "no worse there is none, pitched past pitch of grief," as the poet wrote. 

If we could hear the scream, and hear in it the years of torment, we would understand that the battered spouse and the rioter are acting in self-defense. We would honor the courage of their refusal -- which I think is what Dr. Aptheker was trying to get at -- and we would see from their acts the structural violence that was and is the real danger threatening all of us.  

I worked with Hannah Cooper for two years on our book, From Enforcers to Guardians: A Public Health Approach to Ending Police Violence. I read a lot about the kinds of brutality that define policing at its worst. The key analysts of the issue, like Shaun King and Paul Butler, have helped us to see the vast and insidious system of support for this brutality, so extensive that it is nearly impervious to change, and hence the scream.  

But we know that this scream at this moment holds much more than the rage at police brutality: the path of the coronavirus has revealed the dense fabric of inequality in a manner we have never seen before, the Grim Reaper striding the paths of social stratification to take the weak, the marginalized, the exposed, while those with wealth and power tweet their derision and deny shelter to the terrified.  If this were all going to end in this tenth week of shelter-in-place we might feel some hope, but we see 40 million unemployed, jobs disappearing not to return, and mass evictions and hunger looming on the horizon.  

This particular scream has risen from the streets to reach into the hearts of all of us.  Maybe ten weeks ago our ears might have been stoppered with the certainty of the next paycheck, but not now.  Now we see, now we hear, now we are so hurt.  In this moment we both feel the scream and see the system that is hurting all of us.  I find, for myself, that it is only in drawing on spiritual resources that I can do both of these tasks.  As Chogyam Trungpa said, "Hold the sadness and pain of samsara in your heart and at the same time the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun.  Then the warrior can make a proper cup of tea."  

Put another way, in the immortal voice of Odetta, "Another man done gone," a song which is so precise in conveying the pain it has survived decades and crossed cultures, giving us in music an understanding that defies words, yet she holds us to it, helps us face it. In the embracing power of her art, we go deep, which opens time to think.

We need time to absorb these ten weeks of revelation, to digest that we aren't going "back to normal," but to somewhere else, somewhere new. One step forward is to get on the "bus" and go the Poor People's Assembly on June 20th. RSVP now. You can come on the "bus" of 400 Years of Inequality which will board at 9:30am for the 10am rally. You have to bring your own cake, though we will provide recipes. And you have to make your own signs, though there will be lots of models. You could also organize your own "bus" with your friends and relations.  We have to be there, in the space of indignation and planning, so that we can move forward together, in a massive moral fusion coalition, towards a new future that reflects what we are FOR.  

Coronavirus: Getting with the program and other things I don't like to do

In my blog post "Getting through this moment," I wrote about five tasks that Lourdes Rodriguez, Nupur Chaudhury and I had identified as tasks of collective recovery in this moment.  These are the five:  

• Turn on the Love
• Pay attention to this week’s needs
• Fight injustice 
• Extend and strengthen your network
• Build a personal foundation of spirit

The University of Orange Digital Campus has been examining these tasks, one at a time, and directing people's attention to what each involves.  I want to talk in this post about this week's needs.  

NY Week Seven has  brought to our attention care for our bodies which are suffering in a variety of ways.  Being cooped up in a small space -- with limited interactions with other people and many of those via the digital world -- is wearing on us.  Our bodies are strained.  

Therefore, notes from providers, newspaper articles and newsletters have been full of advice.  I've seen: Get some tech for your "home office,"; Do self-massage at night so you can sleep is another; If you're elderly, walk up and down the hallways while talking on the phone and swing cans of food; and, of course, wear a mask and observe physical distancing when outside.  

We might or might not be in a financial or social position to follow all of this excellent advice, but what worries me is not that we need self-massage, but that our spirits are low, and we are getting irritated with the restrictions the pandemic has triggered.  I was shocked, while driving around the nearby wealthy suburb, to see dozens of people out without masks, or with their masks dripping around their neck.  And I've heard many friends express impatience and irritation with the way we are living now.  Even more than our bodies it is our willingness to accept our dire situation that is being tested in this moment.  

What are we supposed to do about this?

Channeling my parents, who were members of the Greatest Generation and survived the Great Depression, World War II and the McCarthy Era, "Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and give unto God that which is God's," which loosely translated meant, "It is what it is."  

The corollary of that was that I was supposed to get with the program.  As a teen I preferred pouting to recognizing such limits.  But with age I've come to see their point.  I get it.  Not wearing a mask does not get me out of the situation.  Nor does getting angry because I don't like Zoom eight hours a day.  But how do I get from "pouty" to "serene"?  I think these are the three steps:  

First, I feel what I feel.  I don't think it helps people to tell them not to feel what they feel.  At least it never helped me.  

Second, I also have to see that it is what it is.  If my feelings are real, so is my reality.  

Third -- and this is the paradoxical part -- I need to thank the Universe for everything, including both my feelings and my reality.  My dear friend Pam Shaw sent me this quote by Chogyam Trungpa: 

Hold the sadness and pain of samsara in your heart and at the same time the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun.  Then the warrior can make a proper cup of tea.

Just as I was writing this, a parade of cars, blaring their horns, came passing by.  It was Hazel Strong, a parade for the students and teachers of Hazel Avenue School which is near my house.  So this leads me to add a fourth step!

Fourth, Don't be afraid to cry when the parade passes by!  Even Governor Cuomo cries sometimes.  

Coronavirus: A Turn Must Be Made

At the 1951 founding convention of the National Negro Labor Council, Southern union leader Viola Davis said of Jim Crow and reactionary politics in the South, "A turn must be made." This important civil rights organization was particularly focused on equal opportunity in employment; my father, Ernest Thompson, was one of the founders and told me many stories of the Council's highly successful work, including stunning efforts, like the Gateway to the South campaign, that fought employment injustice in the Southern states.

Ms. Davis's words echo for me today, and remind me of a dream I had back in January that humanity had hit a wall and our only hope for survival lay in making a turn. One article in the news today really reinforced that this is not a dream I had but a reality I glimpsed.  It was a piece about forcing the meat packing factories to open, without requiring strong protections for the workers, thousands of whom are infected with coronavirus and many of those people are dying.

This broke my heart open. I have seen so much injustice in the past two months: poor hospitals held together with duct tape and verging on bankruptcy; tribal peoples with horrendous rates of infection and death; essential workers with no protections; a loan program for small businesses raided shamelessly by multinational corporations aided by their bankers. And these are not the stories in the radical press.  These are stories in the Times and the Washington Post.

Perhaps the task of the managed retreat was two-fold.  To pause, as best we could, to save as many lives as possible.  And in that pause -- that boom against the wall of the ecosystem which can't take much more of our abuse -- to have time to hear and see how it all works.  To watch squirrels get fat and goats frolicking in cities because they aren't afraid, and the vulnerable dying because of the weight of all the deprivations and deprecations.

Having seen, having felt, can I -- can you -- just go back to the life that produced this moment?

I say no.  Perhaps you are thinking so, too.  When Viola Davis said to the NNLC, "A turn must be made," it lit a fire in the organization, and sent sparks throughout the South that ignited the Civil Rights Movement.  We can ignite the Turn.  And we now know -- if we weren't sure before -- that it must be made.

Coronavirus: "Don't put off 'til tomorrow what you can do today"

How many times did my parents suggest that I attend to today's chores today?  Millions.  I was and remain a procrastinator, but that sneaky sort of person, always busy and so seemingly perfectly justified that I can't get it all done.  Of course, I'm busy with the work I like, while the work I dislike languishes on my desk.

This has caught up with me. That my washing machine was not functioning properly didn't matter for long time because I could take the clothes around the corner to laundromat.  Now I'm caught in my house -- I mean safely sheltering in place -- with a washing machine that has to be coaxed to do its job.  And you would think I've learned my lesson, but no, there's still work I don't want to do and that isn't getting done as promptly as it should.

I raise this issue here because it seems to me that pretty much everybody in the world is facing this problem. We have to change the way we live to avoid mass extinction, possibly including our own species, and it is actually something we can't put off.  I read in The New York Times about a study of the risks we face from climate change.  If we hit the fateful increase of two degrees centigrade, we could face a sudden catastrophic loss of species that form our ecosystem, possibly including our own.  Reporting on a study that appeared in the scientific journal Nature, the Times article said:

The study predicted that large swaths of ecosystems would falter in waves, creating sudden die-offs that would be catastrophic not only for wildlife, but for the humans who depend on [them].

"For a long time things can seem OK and then suddenly they're not," said Alex L. Pigot, a scientist at University College London and one of the study's authors. "Then, it's too late to do anything about it because you've already fallen over this cliff edge."

This is my experience of tolerating a dysfunctional washing machine.  It was fine until suddenly it wasn't and I couldn't do anything to fix it.  While the problem of my washing machine is not threatening my life, our collective threat to the world-as-we-know-it is a threat to you and me and all seven billion of us humans and gadzillions of other living beings.

The coronavirus that we're grappling with is a both a warning of troubles to come and a roadmap for the changes we can make and what will happen if we do.  In this short time of human retreat. BBC reported, animals have started to embrace more parts of the world and the skies and waters have become clear.  Our changes have had a rapid and positive impact on the state of the ecosystem.

I have learned how optional much of the busy-ness of my life was and that I could make do with much, much less. Yesterday I planned to record a lesson on making brownies for the University of Orange Digital Campus.  When I pulled out the box, I found it contained only one egg.  I thought, "There has to be a substitute for eggs on the internet."  I found that the small amount of applesauce in my frig was a perfect replacement for the other egg.  The brownies were not quite the same, but they proved the point that I could make do with what I had.

In this regard, one of the greatest things that's happened to me is that Amazon Prime is not one day delivery.  In fact, who knows how many days Amazon will be.  That leaves plenty of time to look around and find alternatives.  The other great thing is that conferences and conventions are canceled and I don't have to fly here and there.  I can sit in my house and join meetings by Zoom.  That frees up time to spend watching the happy animals frolicking in my backyard.  The squirrels in particular are getting so fat because they don't have to scurry off every time people come!

In this sudden break, I have gotten to see that the way my life was woven into the world contributed to the intolerable burden humans place on the ecosystem.  I have been forced to live more mindfully for now. but what will happen when the all-clear sounds?  The temptation will be to forget that this ever happened and to act as if my old life were acceptable.  But my old life, which depended on excess consumption of many, many things, contributed to looming catastrophe.  Better to change and avoid the cliff's edge of our species and all others!

Resisting the status quo will take backbone.  The other thing I've seen in this period is great courage, not only the sublime courage of the essential workers, but also the bravery of leaders who showed the way forward.  I am reminded of the photo of healthcare executive Bruce Greenstein who offered an elbow to Donald Trump, rather than shake his hand.  What role models these people have been!  The pathmakers of ecological respect will be the ones to watch for in the months to come.

Reverend Cynthia Bourgeault pointed out that the word "courage" comes from the French, coeur, which means "heart."  She said that it is the clarity that we get from love that gives us the strength to do what we have to do.  As one of the tasks of getting through this moment in time, my colleagues Lourdes Rodriguez, Nupur Chaudhury and I suggested that we needed to "turn on the love."  It now seems even more useful, as the more love we feel now, the more courage we'll have to turn away from the status quo towards a new way of life, in harmony with the Earth.  I put this sign on my door and in my yard to remind passersby and me of that great truth!

Coronavirus: Everybody's praying

I woke up in the middle of the night and thought, "Everybody in America is praying."  Then I went back to sleep.  The thought returned in the morning.  "Praying" includes, I think, opening an email by saying, "I hope you are well," or closing a phone call by saying, "Stay safe!"  This is very Shakespearean: "I pray thee, good Sir, don't get sick."  In that sense, I am praying all the time -- when I think of my children, my nieces and nephews, my friends, my neighbors, it is with the prayer, "Be well, stay safe" in my heart.  It helps me understand the phrase, "Pray all the time," which the Apostle Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, a small group of early Christians living in the frightening circumstances of their time. "Pray all the time" hardly fits with the busy-ness of ordinary life (you know, last month).  Who had time to pray all the time?  But now I think of it as breathing in, "Be safe," and breathing out, "Stay well."

Apostle Paul also suggested to the Thessalonians, "Thank God no matter happens."  Which raises the question, "How is God related to coronavirus?"  But then the answer that comes to mind for me is that They (God)* created everything, including evolution, ergo, newly emerged viruses fall into that category.  But why thank Them for newly emerged viruses that are shutting down the world as I know it?

I think about this a lot.  The best answer I can come up is that the world is what it is, which is to say complicated, and it has good and bad and stupid in it.  I especially don't like stupid, but it seems to have been part of human societies since forever, posing profound questions.  Which reminds me of a Facebook post I saw, with a photo of a man carrying a donkey across a minefield.

The post said, "The moral of the story is that during difficult times the first ones you have to keep under control are the jackasses who don't understand the danger and do as they please."  With deepest apologies to donkeys, who have a lot of wisdom but might not know about minefields, it is an interesting observation.  And so instead of wondering about why evolution included viruses, I am wondering why it included people who ignore danger?  So far, no answer to that, and no answers as to why I should be grateful for them.  But maybe the whole point of being grateful for everything is that the world is one whole web of interdependent life (and not just the particular way of life I had March 1, 2020).  I can't pick and choose parts of the web I like, leaving out the parts I don't like.  I can't see the web unless I accept the principle that it is one thing.  I can't get the point except through gratitude for the whole.  

Which brings me back to the idea that woke me from sleep, that we are all praying.  And what I can conclude for sure is that in world with stupid people and evolving viruses, I really do need to pray all the time!

*I heard somebody refer to God as "they" and I thought it was profound and useful.  

Coronavirus: “Man bites dog” or “Dog bites man”? (Hidden Figures I)

Journalists have often emphasized to me the difference between news and not-news by comparing, “Man bites dog” which is news, to “Dog bites man” which is not.  So the growing number of headlines about disproportionate death from Covid-19 among African Americans strikes me as not-news.  This is perhaps because I started to do AIDS research in 1986 looking at the question, “Why was there excess risk for AIDS among Blacks and Hispanics in the United States?”  After some years of work, I could confidently say that the answer lay in the dismantling of the communities of color, a process that was vicious then and has not stopped since.  While gentrification has been temporarily driven out of the headlines, it is the latest form that this disruption has taken. 

In fact, even if you don’t know about serial forced displacement and deindustrialization – the prime movers of excess risk for anything – it’s obvious from the simple observations of who can get out of the way of infection and who can’t, who can pay the rent for some months without work, and who can’t, who can get prompt access to excellent medical care and who can’t.  Those are the people who are at greatest risk, and Blacks, Hispanics and immigrants are over-represented among them.  That they are likely to die in outrageous numbers is a foregone conclusion.  We can parse the disparities among those at highest risk, if we need to.  Many immigrants, for example, are younger and in excellent health, even if terribly poor.  They are in better shape to survive than the African American population, which includes older people and people with a high rate of chronic illness from “weathering,” as Arline Geronimus styles it.  While some are saying that the issue is a desperate lack of data, I am reminded of my colleague Dr. Jennifer Stevens Dickson, who, at the end of her dissertation on the failure of AIDS care to reach poor women of color, declared, “No further research is needed.”

That was stunning.  That was news. 

Dickson broke with tradition, which always says more research is needed.  She concluded that the patterns were too entrenched to need more study.  What we needed was sound policy to address the underlying structural causes.  That our society did not do that – in fact, the trends of serial forced displacement and concentration of wealth have made things worse – brings us to this moment and the “discovery” that Black people are at excess risk for death from coronavirus.  As a scholar who has been writing about this for decades, I can only shake my head.

Paul Krugman has said of this moment that we have put our economy into a medically-induced coma, and what we need is disaster relief, particularly for those most at risk. This is hampered by neoliberal policies that have dismantled much of the safety net and left us all inadequately sheltered from this storm.  Still we must try to fill the gaps, such as opening access to health care for all, supporting weak health systems, getting money in the hands of all the poor – not just some – and protecting the vulnerable from eviction.  The call in Britain to support the National Health System brought out hundreds of thousands of volunteers.  We could do the same.  Many are willing to deliver food to the housebound, raise money so the poor can eat, and carry out other tasks that make it possible for those at most risk to get the help they need. 

We could do this.  The question is not, “What is the data?” The question is, “Will we act?”

Coronavirus: True or false: "We're all in this together"?

A perspective on the pandemic written by Robert Fullilove III and Mindy Thompson Fullilove, April 6, 2020. 

There is a growing contemporary debate about the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.  Some contend, “We are all in this together.”  Others argue that we are not all in this together because "Some of us face much greater suffering.”  We turned to the rules of logic to understand the relationship between these ostensibly contradictory propositions.  We would argue that, because both propositions are true, this is not a contradiction but an antinomy. An antinomy occurs when two ostensibly opposing, even contradictory, arguments are held to be both valid and true (valid meaning that the argument’s conclusions have been generated correctly and true meaning that the conclusion describes the true and correct state of the world). For example, the expression, “There is no absolute truth,” is a statement that appears to assert an absolute truth – mainly that there is no such thing – but is itself presented as an absolute truth (“It is an absolute truth that there is no absolute truth.”)

Let us examine the two propositions to see if, indeed, they are each valid and true.  We are all in this together, we would assert, because of two facts: that wealth, fame, good fortune will not spare anyone the impact of this virus and that we will not get out of this horrific situation without solidarity. If only the poor and disadvantaged were being slammed, if the cases of the novel coronavirus were only in impoverished and medically underserved communities, the notion that we are all in this together would seem sharply and obviously false. But the headlines belie this notion. If the prime minister of the United Kingdom, one of the most powerful men on the planet, can be infected and even hospitalized, it is evident that the power of his office did not spare him the ravages of this virus.  At present, our efforts need to be in solidarity with everyone who has been sickened and is at mortal risk from Covid-19. To support efforts to combat this virus wherever it exists, here or overseas, is to express the will to fight together, not just from the confines of our own communities, to assure that we have a future worth living for. The rules for social isolation have to be followed and demanding a cogent national response from the president on down are all responsibilities that each of us must shoulder. A cogent collective response means that the places that have been hardest hit become our top priority and committing ourselves as a nation to do what we must to prevent a future tragedy of this dimension becomes our mutual responsibility.

Now let us examine the second proposition that “Some of us face much greater suffering.” There is no question that Covid-19 mortality follows the fault lines of all societies, not just ours. Several synergistic factors raise the risk of morbidity and mortality for the poor and people of color:  their higher rates of existing chronic conditions which exacerbate the risk of death from Covid-19; the likelihood of living in crowded conditions; the disproportionate employment in high risk jobs; and the lack of access to preventive measures.  The failure to have a rational, early response to this pandemic that would have provided high levels of testing, isolation of those who are ill, and contact tracing – indeed, the failure to rush aid of all kinds to the most vulnerable – is particularly significant in such settings because much of this illness and mortality might have been prevented.

Thus, we have established that both propositions are valid and true. How does thinking of this issue as an antinomy help us to confronting the pandemic? Too much of what is occurring in the discourse about this pandemic is engaged in trying to affix blame. But we need to be clear: naming those who have failed us in this battle is not a cure. It will not save a life today that is currently at enormous risk from this virus. We must be about a united response in which we allocate treatment and prevention resources rationally. Such an approach will obviously assist to lessen the impact in communities that are especially hard hit by this pandemic. And we all need to be clear that we face an enduring and ongoing struggle to resist and attack the evils of American Jim Crow capitalism which has created the vulnerabilities that Covid-19 is exploiting.

Coronavirus: This new togetherness

My friend Cynthia texted me that she was walking her dog and I texted back that I was walking myself.  She texted back, "We are alone but together!"  Which reminded me of Robert Frost's poem, "Tuft of Flowers," which ends with the lines, "All men work together... whether they work together or apart."

It was three blocks further in my neighborhood walk when I saw this door:

I stopped to read the sign:

I really appreciated the message, in the face of the grim news from the Centers for Disease Control that, at a minimum, they expect 100,000 deaths from coronavirus.  A friend in Britain texted that the death rate had risen 50% overnight.  At-risk workers are going on strike for protection.  And the New York Times reported on the weaknesses in our national supply chain of food.  

If only that were all.  Another friend asked, "When were the fires in Australia?" 

We pondered that for a minute, and I wanted to say, "Last summer," but it was only two months ago.  Years ago, I defined "root shock" as losing all or part of one's emotional ecosystem.  I would include "climate change" as a process that, in changing the ecosystem of the world, has caused all of us root shock.  Coronavirus comes on top of the stern confrontation with climate change that we had when the continent of Australia was burning and a billion animals died.  This series of massive upheavals fits with what I have called "serial forced displacement," a repeated ripping apart of communities and ways of life.  The psychological ramifications are powerful: we are disoriented, disconnected and stripped of the part of our identity that came from knowing our place in the world.  

In such moments we are open to fears but also to new truths.  I feel hit over the head with all these realities, which are stripping away my illusions and pretenses and myths, until I see the sparkling atoms that spin in and around us in webs of connection I have only just begun to imagine. I used to ask my class in Urban Space and Health, "Who is more important to city, the bus driver or the doctor?"  Trick question, of course, as they are equally important, but my students would routinely fall into the trap and say, "Doctor."  And as a person who lusted to go to medical school so that I would be important, I must say I have spent a good bit of my life climbing out of that hole, slowly learning to see the dance of the universe.  

However far I had gotten on that journey to ecological consciousness, this moment in history has shoved me forward.  The poet Mary Oliver spoke to what this series of events -- these displacements from the known universe -- is opening for me and perhaps to all of us:

“I tell you this 

to break your heart,

by which I mean only

that it break open and never close again

to the rest of the world.”

If my heart is open to the world, then I can see and show that I stand with us all.  People have been proclaiming their solidarity in myriad ways, but I plan to follow the lead of my neighbor: I'm going to make a big sign that says, "We're all in this together," and put it on my door.  

Coronavirus: Pandemic Prevention

A synopsis of work by Dr. Rodrick Wallace and colleagues, prepared by Robert Fullilove and Mindy Thompson Fullilove, March 27, 2020.  This is for those who want to strengthen their minds.  

We are public health researchers who started studying epidemics in 1986, looking at the AIDS epidemic among Black and Hispanic people in the US.  One of the most important articles to shape the work we have done in public health is A Synergism of Plagues by Rodrick Wallace. This 1988 opus is widely cited in the annals of public health because it demonstrated with careful logic that the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Bronx was largely driven by public policy decisions and actions. Wallace demonstrates that the decision made by city leaders in 1972  to close 32 fire houses in poor neighborhoods of color in New York City crippled efforts to effectively battle the decade-long epidemic of apartment building fires that followed on the heels of that decision. The city’s inability to mount successful efforts to confront apartment fires in communities such as the South Bronx and Harlem, resulted in a substantial loss of housing and the repeated forced displacement of residents who lost their dwellings in these conflagrations. This loss of housing impacted many members in networks of drug users in these neighborhoods. As network members were constantly forced to move from one dwelling to another, they also formed and reformed syringe-sharing networks where the transmission of HIV infection was substantially facilitated. Dr. Wallace points out that this public policy decision ultimately initiated a chain of events whose end result was an efficient engine for the spreading of AIDS in these communities.

Fire in Harlem.  Photo by Rodrick Wallace 

Similarly, in his current research into the key factors driving the current COVID-19, Dr. Wallace has identified the subtle but significant role that political and economic support of international agrobusiness may have played in our current pandemic. These enterprises rely on techniques to deforest landscapes to make grazing lands for cattle, or to use the same crops on the same soil year after year, thus limiting biodiversity. The loss of biodiversity makes crops in these settings vulnerable to pests and pathogens. To combat these intruders, more and more pesticides and more and more fertilizer must be used to make the land productive. Having usurped Mother Nature’s ability to maintain ecological equilibrium, we have crippled the planet’s ability to create the necessary barriers that can prevent the emergence of a species-ending pathogen. The critical line of defense that biodiversity provides has been substantially weakened.

COVID-19, it is sometimes said tongue in cheek, represents the next step in planet Earth’s efforts to save itself. This virus exploits a number of the most important components of 21^st century life. COVID-19 exploits our love of being in large crowds and in the densely populated urban environments we have constructed. It exploits our transportation hubs which move large groups of humans from one part of the planet to another in a matter of hours.  A novel pathogen like this coronavirus leapfrogs from one host to another in a densely populated urban center like New York or New Orleans and can subsequently take its act on the road via the enormous transportation webs of the 21^st century. With a significant delay in infected people showing outward signs of infection, the virus moves silently and efficiently, defying screening efforts and producing a long period of time during which infection can be transmitted silently from one to another.

What is to be done? We are left with downstream solutions. If we cannot prevent the generation of such pathogens, the only options open to us will be to do our best to treat those infected. Dr. Wallace suggests that there are other possibilities. An upstream strategy that targets the source of the problem is needed.  Asymmetric warfare, he notes, is the strategy that must be adopted if the forces of public health are to defeat – or at least limit the power of – agrobusiness interests.

In asymmetric warfare, two armies with very different resources and capabilities are pitted against each other. Given that they are not equals on the battlefield, who wins the war? Students of asymmetric warfare are fond of citing Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state under Richard Nixon, who noted that in guerilla warfare, the guerilla wins as long as he/she does not lose, while the modern army loses if it does not win. Losing for the guerilla army means they can fight no more; similarly, if the modern army cannot win and end the conflict, the prospect of endless engagement and battle is the same as a loss. There is no withdrawal, there is only the prospect of interminable battle, which ultimately makes the war a costly, worthless enterprise.

What are the asymmetric warfare lessons that can be applied to our need to successfully confront this viral pandemic and prevent, if possible, the emergence of the next one? Public health institutions lack the resources to take on agrobusiness directly in the world of finance and have few tools to limit the power that such corporations exercise over legislators, the courts, and the marketplace.

Nonetheless, the aftermath of this pandemic will take place in a world that will have been fundamentally altered by the steps that will have been taken to defeat this threat. There will be an inevitable series of post-mortem investigations into the whys and wherefores of this unprecedented series of tragic events. The inevitable question that will be posed is, “Why did this happen and what can we do to prevent a recurrence? Dr. Wallace asserts that the prevention question will take on particular urgency because, “…in the USA, emergence of a pandemic human analog to African Swine Fever, with a fatality rate of some 50%, seems inevitable.”

The asymmetric strategy here might well be to use the recollection of the terror of this pandemic to force dramatic changes in the way our treatment of Mother Earth has primed the planet for outbreaks such as this. If human activity in the form of agrobusiness has created this threat, the moment may be soon here to create the political will to resist and to enact the strategies that will reduce the threats it poses. The horrors that we are yet to endure with this pandemic will be more than enough motivation for us all to ask the key questions: how did things get out of control and what must be done to insure that this never happens again?

[For even more exercise for your mind: Here's important paper analysis from Dr. Wallace and his colleagues.]  

Coronavirus: Just for Today

Successfully settling in to isolation requires a certain suspension of the future, but the idea that we should NOT think deeply about the future (will there even be one?) goes against the grain.  One has to commit to the here-and-now: play games, stream opera, dance your head off, bake -- whatever your thing is, do it with focus.   As one pundit told to me, "We don't want to make people think harder and more broadly at this time."

But, based on the advice of Al-Anon, I think it's OK to use a few brain cells to think.  I take this from the Al-Anon prayer for hard times, "Just for Today. A highly effective guide to managing hard times, it opens with the line, "I can do something for 12 hours that would appall me if I felt I had to keep it for a lifetime." It seems incredibly apt for this period of managed retreat in which we find ourselves.

"Just for Today" has nine sets of suggestions: keep it in the day, be happy, adjust to what is, strengthen my mind, exercise my soul, be agreeable, have a program, have a quiet half hour to myself, and be unafraid.  Notice it's all phrased as "my": the heart of Al-Anon, as you might imagine, is that you can't fix the other person, but you can fix yourself.

The advice of particular interest is this:

Just for today I will try to strengthen my mind. I will study. I will learn something useful. I will not be a mental loafer. I will read something that requires effort, thought and concentration.

The topic I want to propose for deep thought is this: we are in this crisis of pandemic disease because of longterm and profound abuse of the natural world.  Sonia Shah's article in The Nation has the provocative headline, "Think wild animals are to blame for the coronavirus? Think again."  She points to the massive destruction of habitat that caused species to interact in ways they did not before.  She points out,

The problem is the way that cutting down forests and expanding towns, cities, and industrial activities creates pathways for animal microbes to adapt to the human body. 

Adding to the insult of clearing forests and wild places is the widespread introduction of factory farming, which introduces a host of other ecological pressures on living species.  Dr. Robert Wallace has called this process "farming pathogens."  Such farming, by overriding natural protections, accelerates the production of deadly viruses, bacteria and fungi.  Aided by globalization, these germs can easily travel the globe in a few weeks, as coronavirus has done in this pandemic.  While these are difficult -- and often technical -- concepts, understanding that we have to begin to face these longterm dangers is a mind-stretching exercise that is worth some of your mind-strengthening time.  I'm working with Dr. Robert Fullilove of Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health to share the important work that Drs. Rodrick, Deborah and Robert Wallace -- a family of geniuses -- have done on the issue.  Here's the pandemic prevention concept they are putting forward. 

Coronavirus: Love, not sheer madness

The Latino Community Foundation, headed by Jacqueline Martinez Garcel -- I'm so proud to say she was my student at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health -- has launched a campaign to support organizations serving the Latino community, called the "Love, Not Fear Fund."

Its goal is to raise funds for organizations serving the elderly and the most vulnerable in the Latino community in California.  The Fund issued its first grants this past week, helping an array of organizations throughout the state.  

The Fund's beautiful name -- Love Not Fear -- has a message for all of us.  

We can't be afraid that our economy is slipping into a "recession."  We have to LOVE that managed retreat is going to keep us alive. 

We can't be afraid that managed retreat is going on too long.  We have to LOVE every strange day of this epic challenge.

We can't be afraid that our children will miss out on learning.  We have to LOVE that they can learn that the foundation of civilization is to care for one another.

We can't be afraid that we will be damaged by the strain of this.  We have to LOVE that we can (and will) continue to care for one another until everyone can smile again. 

Here's a link to donate to the "Love Not Fear Fund" and to help the Latino Community Foundation mobilize the powerful force of the Latino community to fight for what we LOVE.  

Coronavirus: The Pandemic and The Seven Sins

A perspective on the pandemic written by Robert Sember and Mindy Thompson Fullilove, March 22, 2020. 

On October 20, 2019, Rev. Dr. William Barber II delivered a homily at Riverside Church in observance of the 400th anniversary of the first Africans arriving at Jamestown to be sold into bondage.  His sermon, entitled “Stolen Hands, Stolen Lands,” enacted a trial of the United States  (you can find a transcript of the sermon here).  He presented the following seven charges, or sins, that America had committed as it sought to justify slavery and prevent the eradication of its harms: bad biology, sick sociology, political pathology, corruptible courts, evil economics, militia madness, and heretical ontology.  His explication of the historical appearance of these actions provided a sound basis for linking the harms of slavery to the crisis of the coronavirus pandemic now sweeping the world.  As the pandemic hits America, we believe that the seven sins are titling us toward worse case scenarios. These need to be understood and fought by a moral fusion coalition.  

The novel coronavirus, COVID19, was identified December 31, 2019, as the cause of a new upper respiratory illness, characterized by cough, fever, and shortness of breath.  As cases accumulated, it became clear that the illness was highly infectious and deadly, causing respiratory distress.  The initial outbreak in Wuhan, China, was briefly hidden by the government, but as cases and deaths mounted the nation instituted population-level quarantine, eventually affecting 750 million people.  The nation sent supplies and health care workers to Wuhan and its surrounding province, which was most severely affected.  New hospitals were built in as little as two days, providing space for the care of those who could not remain at home.  Clinicians and other scientists worked around the clock to describe the virus, including sequencing its genome and immediately sharing this information with the world (including the CDC in the USA), and describing the clinical features of the disease and the outcomes for the first hundreds of patients.  These efforts helped to contain the epidemic: at the time of this writing, only a few new cases were being reported. As of March 22, 2020, China had experienced 81,093 cases and 3,270 deaths.  

As the rest of the world watched this unfold, societies took different steps in their response.  South Korea identified its first case in mid-January and immediately instituted a full array of public health measures, including widespread testing, contact tracing and population-level quarantine for hot spots, effectively containing the epidemic to one city.  Italy was slower to respond, and was quickly overwhelmed: the number of deaths there from coronavirus surpassed those in China on March 19, 2020.  

The United States also had its first case in January. More like Italy than South Korea, the US made minimal use of the early days of the epidemic to prepare effectively.  In particular, the US bungled early efforts at disseminating tests for the virus, making it impossible to deploy much of the rest of the epidemic control tool kit.  Cases spread, following the classic geography of hierarchical diffusion, spatial contagion and network diffusion.  President Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that the epidemic was not a problem, praised himself and his administration for their successes, and declared that, like the flu, it would disappear with warmer weather.  Thus his administration dallied while infection spread silently and exponentially, by March 15th reaching the point of inflection at which the number of cases began to shoot up and those with advanced infection to overwhelm the hospitals.  As of this writing there were 22,000 known cases in the United States, but, because of the failure to implement widespread testing, there are probably 10 times that number, or 220,000.  Models suggest that we may see 2.2 million infections in the weeks to come.  

We turn from this short history to examine the ways in which Reverend Barber’s iteration of America’s seven sins reveals how we come to be on this terrible path of excess death, economic distress and loss of faith in government. To illustrate the concepts, we have selected examples of each of the seven sins; there are many others that could be included in this list.

1. As evidence of bad biology we have a litany of denials, distractions, falsehoods, and arrogant magical thinking that led the CDC to turn down the WHO’s offer to provide test kits, only to find that its self-designed tests were faulty.  The resulting delay hampered public health workers’s efforts to develop an accurate map of where and how infections were growing locally, regionally, and nationally.  This bad biology continues in the failure of the federal government to implement, in a timely manner, the full panoply of public health containment efforts.  Then, prematurely thrust into the mitigation phase of the epidemic, we faced and continue to face equivocation regarding the production and distribution of PPE and ventilators and the building of temporary hospitals. Reports suggest that the administration is more interested in adhering to its “small government” and “free market” ideology than using the resources at its disposal.  Instead, we are offered the promise of treatments, even cures, that lack the evidence-base to support such claims.  Testing potential therapies and vaccines is essential but premature, exaggerated, and unfounded claims of efficacy is not helpful.  Equivocation fuels ambivalence and confusion.  This contributes to the “don’t worry and carry on” attitude some are practicing as they ignore calls for social distancing and gather for recreation and worship.

2. The formulation, “China Virus,” is subjecting us to yet another episode in this administration’s spectacle of othering.  By casting an entire nation or population as the cause of the epidemic, the president and his apologists have dashed weeks of efforts by local officials to combat anti-Chinese racism and the falsehoods upon which those ideas and practices rest.  This sick sociology will surely make us sicker in body, in spirit, and in community.  Thus, in addition to addressing the legitimate challenges of this moment, we also have to deal with these efforts to blame the epidemic away and set peoples against one another.  

3. As indicated above, a political pathology fuels bad biology, sick sociology, and the other structures named by Rev. Barber.  This crisis underscores the costs of the political calculus underlying attacks on the Affordable Care Act and related efforts to extend medical care to all in this country.  Conservative forces are exploiting this crisis to further diminish women's reproductive rights by designating abortions "elective" and, therefore "nonessential" surgical procedures that must be delayed.  This administration’s budget proposals have also repeatedly included sizeable cuts to the CDC (The CDC’s staff has decreased by 591 positions, or 5.4%, from December 2016 through March 2019) and NIH, and then there is the confusion and lack of knowledge in the executive branch regarding whether and how the directorate for global health security and biodefense on the National Security Council (NSC) was either eliminated or reorganized.  The Obama administration established this position in response to the Ebola crisis wake-up call.  The debates regarding what actually happened to this position underscore a basic lack of planning and preparedness.  And, we see political pathology in the emerging stories of how certain politicians used their insider knowledge to leverage their own profiteering by claiming that the crisis was not a crisis while selling off their investments ahead of the inevitable plummet in the stock market.

4. Contestations regarding the responsibilities and accountability of the state can be arbitrated by the courts.  The current administration has been very clear, however, that this is not its understanding of the function of the courts, which it is aggressively populating with ideological purists.  Corruptible courts are more likely to obey than dissent.  And so, under the guise of this crisis, while other arms of the justice department work to promote social distancing and other practices that will help curtail and eventually end this crisis, immigration and deportation hearings continue.  The crisis is already being used to heighten border restrictions and to restrict asylum claims.  Reports are also emerging that while the administration is not using its vast emergency powers to accelerate production and distribution of essential emergency equipment--devolving those responsibilities to the atomized albeit well meaning efforts of the private sector and already overburdened state governments--it is keen to use the crisis to push for controversial policy changes, including the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies.

5. The economy is heading for recession, and here we show how this is linked to evil economics.  Millions are facing unemployment and production and consumption flows are severely curtailed.  The path plotted by politicians, industry, and corporations as the way through this will reveal what is considered the country’s priority.  While a proposed corporate tax cut promises to compound income inequality, this crisis has afforded us the opportunity to elevate consideration of long-standing economic crises that have either been continually ignored or deferred: homelessness, a growing part-time and, therefore, precarious workforce, real estate speculation, student loan debt, rising rents as a result of national corporate consolidation of rental properties, food insecurity, digital divides, etc.  The culture of greed and exploitation is endemic to our society as evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of people who took it upon themselves to hoard hand sanitizer, masks, and other supplies or to market counterfeit products so that they could use fear and panic to coerce consumers to pay exorbitantly inflated prices.  Similarly with the hoarding of food by those who have the disposable income and “me first” inclinations to do so.  The images of revelers permitted to celebrate spring break on the beaches of Florida at risk of spreading infection further throughout the nation was another sign of evil economics.

We also see evil economics at play in the vastly skewed value we place on labor in our society: the service workers that are now cleaning, driving buses and trains, delivering mail and packages, and stocking shelves struggle to make ends meet at the best of times and usually only do so by working more than one job. 

6. Violence is a time honored strategy for dealing with a crisis.  Militia madness is what lies behind racist maneuvers, such as intentionally referring to the Novel Coronavirus or COVID-19 as the “China Virus.”  Violence is done when the number of people incarcerated in prisons that are often already beyond capacity is not reduced, and when individuals and families continue to be detained and deported.  We enter this crisis as a country that is deeply and violently divided. Our militia madness ensures that many are excessively armed and will be ready, as they have been in the past, to act to preserve the power and privilege of the few.  Gun manufacturers and gun merchants are thriving in this crisis as people purchase new and additional weapons and stock up on ammunition convinced that things will get so bad that only the violent will come through.  Given the history of this militia madness it is hard not to think that this fear may be a wish.

7. In Rev. Barber’s review of the history of inequality, heretical ontology, the notion that inequality is at the very heart of our nation, functions as the system’s bedrock and its blueprint.  To succumb to heretical ontology is the greatest defeat of all for it means that we both accept and collude in the production and enforcing of inequality.  This belief blinds us to other ways of being and relating to others, including the realization that we are all in this together, that as we act to protect others we are protecting ourselves.  To manifest the tenderness imminent in shared vulnerability means that we affirm that everyone is worthy, valuable, and deserving.  Inequality, such as the assumption that extraordinary measures are not required to protect homeless men and women from the risks of infection, is heretical, a betrayal of our shared life.  Medical professionals are going to find themselves in fiercely difficult situations in the coming weeks as they determine how best to use limited resources.  They will likely be accused of rationing care when, in fact, it is actually the existing rationing of inequality managed through bad biology, sick sociology, political pathology, corruptible courts, and evil economics that undergirds this all.  

We outline this analysis in the spirit with which Rev. Barber presented his sermon on the seven charges against the United States on October 20, 2019.  He framed this call to account for the legacy of slavery and settler colonialism as an opportunity for “learning from the sins of the past so that we might embrace a better future.”  This current crisis is another opportunity to take up this work.  Indeed, the word “crisis” is derived from the Greek word “krisis,” used to name that "turning point in a disease" when a patient could get better or worse.  It's a critical moment.  As we work to prevent illness, care for and heal those who are ill, accompany with compassion and mourn those who do not survive, so must we attend to the social ills of inequality that shape this time of crisis.  This is a political “turning point” and a “critical moment” for justice.  

Rev. Barber foreshadows this juncture by punctuating his review of the history of racist ideologies and practices with James Baldwin’s incontrovertible challenge: “We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over again.”  In this period of crisis, we confront a most American of paradoxes: our deeply exercised capacity for, on the one hand, discrimination, exclusion, privilege, and dehumanization--we are not, as some in power claim, “all in this together”--and, on the other, the spirit of justice, equity, emancipation, and horizontalism--indeed we are “all in this together” if our intention is our collective wellbeing.  Within this paradox lie crucial questions of spirit and being, existential questions, questions of community and society.  We have an opportunity to look at who we are and to envision who we might become.  “I am committed to working with you all to build a moral fusion coalition in the 21st century,” declared Rev. Barber as he concluded his sermon.  Then he asked: “Is there anybody else in here ready to build?”