Category: Current Events

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All This Has Happened Before…

…and is, unfortunately, happening again.

From I Should Be Laughing:

We've been here before, you know, and clearly, we have learned nothing.

Picture it. America, 1918. The first World War was winding down and officials across the country were under enormous pressure to sell war bonds. But how do you attract attention to your bonds? Hold a parade in major cities to rally the public behind the war bond effort.

Trouble is, or was, America was in the throes of a pandemic—the Spanish Flu—and people were dying all over the place; when it was all said and done 675,000 Americans died of the Spanish Flu—50 million people globally—compared to 116,708 Americans killed in World War I.

Doctors were at a loss as to what to recommend to their patients; many urged people to avoid crowded places or simply other people, and also told people to keep their mouths and noses covered in public.

Sounds vaguely familiar, no? That September 1918, in Philadelphia, 600 sailors and 47 civilians had been diagnosed with the flu, and some had already perished. But, hey, there were bonds to sell the fund the war, and on September 28, 1918, Philadelphia held a parade to sell war bonds.

On the 28th, a line of Boy Scouts, marching bands, women's auxiliary groups, and troops 2 miles long wound its way up Broad Street in front of a crowd of over 200,000 people. Within three days, every bed in Phil­a­del­phia's 31 hospitals was occupied. Within a week, 45,000 citizens were infected, and the entire city had shut down. By the second week in November, 12,000 Phila­del­phians were dead, and the phrase "bodies stacked like cordwood" had become commonplace among the survivors. Within six months, 16,000 were dead, and 500,000 Phil­a­del­phians had fallen ill with the flu.

Now, I don't wanna bash Philadelphia, because that wasn't the only city to hold a parade or to urge citizens to come out in droves and mingle with one another, but …

Take Milwaukee, for example; they had the lowest death rate of any large city in America during the pandemic, because the city's health commissioner, Dr. George Ruhland, had ordered schools closed, saloons and public spaces shut down, and told people to stay home.

And yet here we are again, in the midst of a pandemic where we are told that social distancing, self-isolating, will stop the spread of COVID-19 and we have not learned one goddamned thing.

[continue reading]

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Not a Good Day

Being a cancer survivor, I'd always believed that I could handle pretty much anything life was going to throw at me after that ordeal. Yes, it completely upended my life in ways that wouldn't be immediately obvious for years, but as I've written several times before, I came through it a better person than I had been going in.

That's why the current COVID-19 pandemic has thrown me for a loop. I'm not handling it well. The quarantine, the lifestyle changes came fast and furious and I was not mentally prepared for this nearly as much as I'd believed I would be when all this started last month.

Yeah, I'm adapting, but it's not pretty. I'm swinging from emotional highs to lows on an almost daily basis; something I most certainly do not remember going through seventeen years ago. Today, after getting up to let the dogs out and feed them, I went back to bed and slept—if you could call it that—until nearly 11. When I finally got moving, Ben and I headed out in search of lunch, settling on take-out from Chili's. We pulled into a shady spot after picking up the food, but it became quickly apparent that eating in the car wasn't going to work. We deemed to take it home, knowing full well the fries would be mush by the time we got there.

This was a minor inconvenience, but it was also one. more. thing. assaulting my already frazzled emotional state. I apologized to Ben for my distance today, and he asked what's wrong. "Everything," I said. "Just everything."

We got home, tossed the fries in the toaster oven, and even though we had selected a conservative time and temp to reheat them, they ended up burning.

I didn't openly cry, but I was stifling the feelings of absolute helplessness welling up inside me, and I realized just how different this is from what I'd gone through while battling cancer.

In 2003, all I had to concern myself with was the cancer; I could focus all my attention on wiping it from my body. Sure, I'd simultaneously lost my job—that ironically allowed me to qualify for Medicaid and have all my medical expenses covered—and was scraping by on unemployment insurance and the kindness of friends and family, but not even that caused the level of anxiety and the helplessness I'm feeling right now.

And that's because I knew my care was in good hands; I had competent people guiding my treatment and recovery.

The US in 2020 has no competent people in charge. As Karen Black famously screamed in Airplane 1975, "There's no one flying the plane!" And if anything, the people in the highest echelons of government seem to be going out of their way to burn the country to the ground. The abject ignorance, selfishness, and insouciance displayed by the Orange Caligula's followers is even more alarming. If they were only going to infect themselves and die off I'd be happy to be rid of them, but their callous, uncaring attitude is going to end up killing a lot more people than just their red-hat wearing bretheren.

AND THIS DIDN'T HAVE TO HAPPEN! If we didn't have a narcissistic sociopath occupying the Oval Office, this would not have happened.

And there's nothing I can do about it until November. The 25th Amendment will never be invoked; the Republican Senate will never impeach the bastard. He literally could stand in the middle of Fidth Avenue and shoot someone and get away with it as he so famously bragged. This is why I'm feeling so helpless right now.

The infection curve was starting to flatten, but because of these knuckle-dragging Trumpsters demanding that the country open back up, we're probably looking at an even longer lockdown that we were facing before. (And BTW, have you noticed how many of these assholes are wearing masks to these protests? If the virus isn't a threat any longer, why do you need masks?)

The level of cognitive dissonance is off the charts.

I'm so thankful that Ben and I are together at this point in history to give each other the distance, or the encouragement, or the hugs we both need when we need them during this insanity.

I take some solace in knowing I'm far from being the only one experiencing these emotions right now, and the optimist in me is telling me we'll make it through this, but it doesn't do much for days like today when I just can't.

UPDATE: After initially posting this I was nodding off at my desk and that, combined with the deep funk I was in lead to an afternoon-long nap with the doggies. While not a perfect cure, it definitely helped on many levels and I'm feeling much better now.

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A Month In to this Nightmare, and it's STILL True

Of course, it doesn't help that our I.T. Security group decided to roll out a brand new VPN client, rendering everything else obsolete and locking out anyone using a personal device to connect to the corporate network…

And no, I am not kidding.

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What a Tragedy

From Wil Wheaton:

America had come together, setting aside all of our own wants and needs, to engage in the single greatest act of human kindness in history. We all stayed home, at great expense and inconvenience, so the most vulnerable among us wouldn't die a preventable death.

I want you to think about this for a moment, before I continue: there is someone you love, who is at risk of serious infection and death,right now. I am staying home for that person, so you don't lose someone you love. I am not the only person doing this. You're doing this. Your family and your neighbors are doing this. We are, all of us, doing this, together, even though it is hard, it is scary, it is frustrating.

But we are doing it, together, because we care about our fellow humans.

A strong, moral, ethical, worthy leader will look at this tremendous sacrifice and ask themselves how they can honor it, how can they keep this going as long as possible, so the sacrifices we've made for a few weeks can be extended into months. We are doing this so people do not die.

That bears repeating: we are doing this so people we love do not die a preventable death.

America has the resources to ensure that staying home does not financially ruin anyone who is making this incredible, unprecedented, unselfish sacrifice right now. What America does not have, is the leadership to use those resources.

What America has is a vicious, selfish, incompetent, cruel, abusive, autocratic, impeached president who looked at all this sacrifice, who looked at Americans of all demographics and political beliefs, and saw an entire country setting aside its differences to work together so innocent people — people we love — do not die.

This man looked at that, and saw that it was a threat to his ambitions. Forget for a moment that it is entirely his fault that thousands of preventable deaths have occurred, and just reflect that his impulse is NOT to encourage and comfort millions of people who are scared and stressed out, but to hurt us, to abuse us, to risk our lives and the lives of our loved ones, because that man has no empathy, no compassion, no morality of any kind.

Thirty-three thousand humans have died in America since this pandemic hit our shores. According to scientists, 90% NINETY PERCENT of those deaths would not have happened, if only Trump had listened to experts and taken this seriously. If only Trump was a real leader, with compassion, empathy, and competence, tens of thousands of families would not be mourning the loss of a loved one.

America had come together to fight this. We mustered ourselves quickly and we were ready for a leader to help us take this commitment to join together and focus it, so we could get through this crisis as quickly as possible, with minimal disruption.

But the impeached president and his allies failed us. As they have done all along, they have put their narrow self interests ahead of the interests of the country, and ahead of the value of your life.

He is, right now, celebrating a fake "protest" that was organized and paid for by a right-wing organization controlled by the DeVos family. Right now, he is taking people's fears and anxieties, and instead of using both the bully pulpit and a working relationship with congress to reassure and help them, he's pouring gasoline on a fire.

And he is doing it because it's all he knows how to do. This man doesn't know how to be a leader. He doesn't know how to be a human being who cares about others. He looked at an entire country coming together, and his impulse was to tear it apart.

Donald Trump looked at the single greatest act of human kindness in the history of our species, and he felt threatened by it. So he is doing everything he can to destroy it, to destroy us.

And for what? To consolidate his own money and his own power.

Rick Wilson says "everything Trump touches dies". For tens of thousands of innocent Americans, he's right.

A leader looks at the best impulses of their people in a crisis, and they celebrate, encourage, and support those impulses. A president cares about protecting their citizens above all else.

Trump is neither of those things. Trump is an abusive despot, out of his depth, incompetent and unqualified.

May history record that, when millions of Americans came together, unselfishly, in the greatest act of human kindness in history, Trump saw a threat to be destroyed.

We are nowhere near the end of this. We are probably not even at the end of the beginning of this. Trump, his fearful supporters, and his angry cultists, are going to make things so much worse than they would have been, because it's all they know how to do.

What a tragedy.

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We're Never Getting Back to Normal, America

As usual, John Pavlovitz nails it with an eloquence I could never hope to match:

Ever since the restrictions and cancellations and changes in response to COVID-19 began a few weeks ago (back before we regularly used terms like social distancing, self-isolation, and flattening the curve), we've all been asking the same question:

"When will things return to normal?"

They won't.

Returning to normal, would involve some precise dividing line by which we could cleanly delineate the end of this event and the beginning of something else coming. It would also suggest that if there were such a line, that we could cross it unencumbered without carrying those days with us. That of course is an impossibility. We can't ever leave anything we experience fully behind, can we?

We're all walking around with the emotional souvenirs of every day we've lived here:
Our experiences all renovate us and reshape us.
We absorb and internalize everything we walk through.
It all gets stored up in our minds and our bodies.
You are the sum total of the blessings and the bruises of this life.
You're collecting both as we speak.

So today you might want to ask yourself:
How are these days renovating me?
What new thoughts am I thinking?
What old wounds and fears are resurfacing?
How am I different than I was a few weeks ago?

Yes, hopefully soon, the spread of the virus will slow and we'll see some of the recognizable rhythms of our life return (going to work, to school, or to sporting events—or being able to find toilet paper without selling an organ on the dark web)—but none of those familiar activities will go unchanged and neither will we.

For months we'll be contending with social distancing, we'll likely be wearing masks when we're shopping and working, and large public events will include all kinds of safety protocols we've never had to contend with.
We'll probably approach air travel and general public spaces very differently, being wary or at least more conscious of other people around us.
If we're responsible human beings, we'll all have to change our social patterns and use caution and restrain ourselves until vaccines are available.
Many of us will have to find new jobs or alter our spending habits or make adjustments in our lifestyles.
We'll need to reschedule events and plans that were interrupted and gain professional momentum that we've lost.
And we'll have to do all this—while heading quickly into the most important election in our lifetimes, with all the upheaval and turbulence that will bring.

Maybe normal is a lot to expect.

I was on a video chat with a group of friends last week, and one of them said, "I don't think we're prepared for the PTSD counseling we're all going to need after this is all over"— and she's right. For a long time we're going to be unpacking the fear and the grief of this season, from the relational collateral damage of being in close quarters with people or from being separated from them, from the time we've lost with those we love, from the anger and resentment we've accrued seeing people around us downplay the tragedy or enable it with carelessness, from the widened political fractures.

So, I'm not sure normal (or the way things were) is a possibility.

Instead of worrying about rewinding back to who you used to be before all of this, consider who you're becoming:
What are you learning about what matters to you?
What are you finding out about yourself?
How are your relationships changing?
What news skills have you acquired?
What old loves have you returned to you?
How are you more aware or appreciative or compassionate because of this?
How are you more fearful or anxious or impatient?

Because the truth is, we don't have normal, we only have the present.

Yesterday, my ten-year old had one of those aha moments children get so frequently, that she wanted to share with me.

"Daddy," she said excitedly, "did you know that the the second you say, 'Now,' it's in the past? Now—now—now!" See—that's already all gone!"

"Yes" I said. "Now is a really difficult place to stay."

We can't really pinpoint when this nightmare season began, because it didn't happen in an instant for us. There were a series of cascading waves of news stories and anecdotal information and announced restrictions, mixed with decisive moments of layoffs or high profile deaths or major cancellations. It all encroached on us steadily but slowly—which is why it isn't going to simply end suddenly. There is no sharp dividing line between this horrible time and a less horrible coming season. There are just a series realizations and realities and connected moments within this day in which we get to choose.

You've been changed by these days and you can't unchange yourself.
People you know are different and they're not going back to who they were.
Families have been altered and they're never going to be the same.
Our communities have been renovated and they can't be restored to their former condition.
Our nation has been irreparably damaged and a full repair isn't possible.

Even when we begin to feel something resembling normal—another threat or challenge will come to interrupt our plans and comfort and security and routine—and we'll have that series of presents to choose within.

So while we're not going to be the same—we can be better.
We can come through this with a different appreciation for the people we love.
We can find gratitude for the simple joys we'd forgotten were so readily available to us.
We can have a greater compassion for the pain of the people around us.
We can aspire to live more intentionally, given that we recognize how fragile life is.

I'm not sure normal is an option, but if we do this right, we'll embrace the new abnormal together.

Be present in today—it's all you have.

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A Recap Of The Last Three Weeks

AMERICA: Oh my god! Coronavirus! What should we do?

CALIFORNIA: Shut down your state.

AMERICA: Wait… what? Why?

CALIFORNIA: Because 40 million people live here and we did it early, and it's working.

OHIO: Whoa… whoa… let's not be hasty now. The president said that this whole coronavirus thing is a democratic hoax.

CALIFORNIA: He also said that windmills cause cancer. Shut down your state.

TEXAS: But the president said that we only have 15 cases and soon it'll be zero.

CALIFORNIA: The president can't count to fifteen. Nor even spell it. Shut down your state.

NEW JERSEY: Us too?

CALIFORNIA: Yes, you guys too. Just like when Christie shut down the bridge, but it's your whole state.

FLORIDA: But what about all these kids here on spring break?? They spend a lot of money here!

CALIFORNIA: Those kids invented the tide pod challenge. Shut down your state.

LOUISIANA: But wait let's have Mardi Gras first. It entertains people.

CALIFORNIA: It also kills them. Shut it down.

GEORGIA: Ok well how about we keep the state open for all of our mega churches? Maybe we can all pray really hard until the coronavirus just goes away!

CALIFORNIA: Which is working like a charm for mass shootings. Jesus told us to tell you to shut down your state.

OKLAHOMA: What about the tigers?

CALIFORNIA: What about a dentist. Shut it down.

WYOMING: Hold up, maybe we should go county by county like the president said.

CALIFORNIA: Stop acting like there are counties in Wyoming. There are no counties in Wyoming. Wyoming is a county. Shut it down.

PENNSYLVANIA: But big coal.

CALIFORNIA: But big death. Shut it.

WEST VIRGINIA: But we were the last state to get coronavirus!

CALIFORNIA: And don't make us explain to you why that was. Shut it down.

NORTH CAROLINA: But the republican national convention is coming here!

CALIFORNIA: SHUT… ok fine do what you want.

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Prepare For The Ultimate Gaslighting

Ben and I were just discussing this last night.

From Medium:

From one citizen to another, I beg of you: take a deep breath, ignore the deafening noise, and think deeply about what you want to put back into your life. This is our chance to define a new version of normal, a rare and truly sacred (yes, sacred) opportunity to get rid of the bullshit and to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes our kids happier, what makes us truly proud. We get to Marie Kondo the shit out of it all. We care deeply about one another. That is clear. That can be seen in every supportive Facebook post, in every meal dropped off for a neighbor, in every Zoom birthday party. We are a good people. And as a good people, we want to define — on our own terms — what this country looks like in five, ten, fifty years. This is our chance to do that, the biggest one we have ever gotten. And the best one we'll ever get.

We can do that on a personal scale in our homes, in how we choose to spend our family time on nights and weekends, what we watch, what we listen to, what we eat, and what we choose to spend our dollars on and where. We can do it locally in our communities, in what organizations we support, what truths we tell, and what events we attend. And we can do it nationally in our government, in which leaders we vote in and to whom we give power. If we want cleaner air, we can make it happen. If we want to protect our doctors and nurses from the next virus — and protect all Americans — we can make it happen. If we want our neighbors and friends to earn a dignified income, we can make that happen. If we want millions of kids to be able to eat if suddenly their school is closed, we can make that happen. And, yes, if we just want to live a simpler life, we can make that happen, too. But only if we resist the massive gaslighting that is about to come. It's on its way. Look out.

Read the whole thing here. It's worth your time.

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Further Adventures in Cluelessness

Skype me Daddy!

And the beat goes on.

It's said some people as adults have the awareness of a typical three-year old; i.e. their awareness extends to a three foot radius around them and then abruptly ends).

About six weeks ago—before the madness started—we got a request to upgrade the a/v equipment in the main conference rooms on three floors. We were all busy at the time so it got put on the back burner and life went on. Well, today we got an email from one of those perpetually-clueless individuals asking when these upgrades were expected to be completed because, "we have meetings with the public coming up."

Excuse me? Meetings with who? Who is this "public" and who, exactly, is going to be physically coming back into the office to conduct these meetings?

My colleagues and I maintain a group chat via Skype during the day, and even before anyone said anything, I could hear their collective eyes rolling. Finally, my supervisor's boss said, "I. just. can't ," immediately followed by, "I'll take care of it." Less than a minute later we all received a cc'd email to the user reminding her that there was a spending freeze in place for all non-essential purchases and laying out exactly why this project was non-esssential and now officially on hold for the foreseeable future.

I swear that some people—even in the midst of this crisis—continue to think only about about themselves and their needs; that everything is still "business as usual."

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Done With It

It should come as no surprise that the same people who wait until the last minute to request VPN to work from home are also the most clueless individuals in our organization.

Those higher up the IT chain have decided that in the interest of corporate security, they need to lock things down a bit, so as of last week we were no longer able to request VPN access for users who were using their personal computers to get on the enterprise network via VPN. Makes sense, considering how vulnerable to attack the vast majority of home PCs are.

So the new protocol requires getting the name of the enterprise PC the users will be taking home, their personal cell number (for 2-factor authentication required for the initial install of the client), and a list of applications they need to access that would be inaccessible if they weren't granted VPN access. Simple stuff, right?

In theory, yes. But then I end up with users like the guy I had today who was requesting VPN for three of his direct reports. First email request asking for these three items was returned with only the PC name for one of his reports. Second was only the list of applications that the three employees would be using. Finally, when I told this user his request could not be fulfilled without the other PC names and cell phone numbers did I get all the info required. "I guess you guys are really busy right now, huh?"

Why yes. Yes we are. Because of people like you who can't read an email all the way through.

After the accounts were created, I sent out emails to the employees, telling them they were set up on the back end and providing instructions on how to install the client on their company devices. As a courtesy I cc'd the guy who'd put in the initial request for them.

I immediately get an email from the genius saying, "[Employee Name] isn't in the office today."

So? SO? How does this affect ANYTHING I just emailed you?

But you know what irritates me more than this generic brand of cluelessness? It's the people that somehow think everything is still business as usual and can't understand that certain things they used to take for granted simply cannot be done at the moment.

No Karen, you can't just "stop by and pick up a projector for a meeting."

Firstly, there's a skeleton crew in the office to begin with and absolutely no one in I.T. is onsite, and secondly, who are you scheduling a meeting with considering no one is in the office?!

SMDH.