Musings in a Time of Crisis IX

They speak of milk and

Honey, but I dream of clean

Water in Flint, Michigan

~ Morgan Russell, Rhetorician and Poet

"Promised Land"*

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I have been thinking a great deal about discrimination in our culture, how it is always present in one or another way, and what happens to those who suffer injustice in a pandemic like the one we're experiencing:

✦ What justification do you find for allowing a teenager infected with the vector causing COVID-19 to die because he lacks health insurance? Do ethics no longer matter? Who decides?

✦ Where do the women and children, and in some cases, men, find shelter from domestic violence, which our current news reports tell us is increasing as people are confined to their homes and every available space is being turned into a hospital?

✦ How and what level of care is owed to the individual experiencing homelessness, addiction, mental illness? How do you balance one need against another? How do you ensure that no one is overlooked?

✦ When you take that last package of spaghetti, after placing four other boxes in your cart, what excuse do you give for making your need greater than my own?

✦ Why do we favor the corporation over the individual, the dollar over human life? How do we begin to create a new paradigm to shift thinking away from consumerism and supply-side economics?

✦ What makes us take the word of an inept and ignorant man over that of a woman with a doctorate in a field of science?

✦ Which of us is willing to raise our voice against ? Who can explain remaining silent?

✦ Who among us, once we reach the other side of this global crisis, will argue for sociocultural change and work at the individual, local, state, and federal levels to make change happen?

Post-crisis assessment and planning are critical. We have so much work to do, so many lessons to learn and apply.

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Can you imagine the enormous database that could be curated and assembled from the many separate Coronavirus/COVID-19-related resources now online and made available to citizens of the United States and countries around the world? Local communities, city and county governments, state governments, the federal government, artists and writers, art therapists, medical professionals and institutions, scientific organizations, policy analysts, ethicists, crisis managers, economics, nonprofits, including churches, social justice organizations, researchers, newspapers, all levels of schools, public and private businesses, and periodicals of all kinds have contributed a wealth of data that explain, track, suggest, advise, and help us understand the crisis besetting us. Perhaps the Internet Archive or the Library of Congress will collect these resources so that next time — and there will be a next time — such materials will not have to be re-created.

~

Of all the technology available to us during this crisis, a landline telephone and a cellphone may be our most reliable means for "visiting" friends and family and keeping communication open while we all are confined to our homes.

~

My reading over the last week has produced a number of disparate, if nonetheless curious, facts that might help a conversation along at a virtual cocktail or wine party; to wit:

✦ The cover of Rebecca Solnit's memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence (Viking, 2020) shows the writer dressed in a reversed man's vest and skirt, one of her go-to outfits for special occasions that she completed with elbow-length black gloves and a hat with a veil. One stand-out feature in the photograph is Solnit's tiny waist: just 20 inches.

✦ On enactment of the 1934 National Firearms Act, civilians in this country were prohibited from owning fully automatic weapons. (Patrick Blanchfield, "Top Guns", Review of Frank Smyth's The NRA: The Unauthorized History,  BookForum, Apr/May 2020) Interested to know what kinds of weapons were at issue at the time, I learned through research that the ban extended to shotguns and rifles with barrels less than 18" in length, machine guns, mufflers and silencers, and "certain firearms described as 'any other weapons'." Subsequent amendments to the law expanded the definition of "machinegun" and added "destructive devices" (e.g., bombs, grenades, mines) and bump-stock-type devices for semiautomatic firearms to the definition of "firearm". 

✦ That same BookForum review by Blanchfield also revealed that Wayne LaPierre, chief executive and executive vice president of the National Rifle Association was a substitute special-education teacher and a former campaign volunteer for George McGovern, the Democratic Party's nominee for president in 1971.

✦ The Smithsonian magazine's first issue appeared on the same day as the first Earth Day: April 22, 1970. Both are 50 years old this year. A number of other events, such as the environmental awareness education event known as "Project Survival" (January 23, 1970, Northwestern University) and a "Teach-In on the Environment" that included the cast of Hair and folk singer Gordon Lightfoot, as well as a workshop on "Spiritual Perspectives on the Environment" (March 11, 1970, University of Michigan), preceded national Earth Day. The April 2020 print edition of the magazine features a story about the mock trial of a 1959 Ford Sedan at the March "Teach-In". (See "The Case Against the Car" by Kate Wheeling.)

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* The poem by Morgan Russell is in Section IV of Take A Stand: Art Against Hate (The Raven Chronicles, 2020). See my review.