Good morning, everyone.
Before we get into pundits, I have to get something out.
Huh?
(I am not assessing the veracity of Ms. Reade’s claims against Joe Biden.)
I am old enough to remember that prior to Miss Reade’s claim that Mr. Biden did something in the summer of 1993, there were the Clarence Thomas-Anita HIll hearings, the Tailhook scandal, and the Bob Packwood scandal; all of those scandals involved various forms of nomenclature like “sexual harassment” or “sexual assault”; headlines that had dominated the national news for two years prior to the summer of 1993.
Yes, while the Wikipedia page for sexual harassment says that “The term was largely unknown (outside academic and legal circles),” I pretty much knew what sexual harassment consisted of and I had not read much about it in any academic or legal books.
It was around 1993 or so that many companies (including the non-profit organization that I had begun to work for in the spring of 1993) further codified various aspects of employee policy concerning sexual harassment (definitions, actions that could be taken, complainant privacy, etc.). I was specifically briefed about sexual harassment during my hiring process at that time.
Sexual harassment law goes back to the 1970’s.
I know this, more or less, off of the top of my head. How can a so-called “Editor at Large” at the New York Times specializing in “women, culture, politics” not know something like this?
Or at least double-check with Wikipedia?
Ms. Bennett’s tweet is misinformation. Or disinformation. Or something.
I mean, I’m on furlough from my regular job at the moment. I like doing fact-checking and using the GoogleBoomTube. Surely, the Old Grey Lady can toss a brotha a coupla two three bucks to do very basic fact-checking work. ‘Cause it sure looks like that they need someone to do it.
Just sayin’.
OK. Time to read some pundits!
Dhruv Khullar writes, for the New Yorker, with a reminder that for so many people, the economy has never “closed.”
In New York City, social distancing is working. The virus has claimed at least twelve thousand lives, but single-day deaths have declined steadily since April 7th, when nearly five hundred and sixty people died of COVID-19. New cases and hospitalizations have also fallen in recent weeks, even though many hospitals remain nearly full.
But, as this wave of the coronavirus starts to slow, I can’t help but notice that many of the people still getting infected are those who don’t have the luxury of distance—those who, by necessity or by trade, expose themselves and their families to the virus every day. We’re now debating whether it’s safe to reopen the economy, but for essential workers it never closed. Each morning, during the apex of the deadliest pandemic in a century, these men and women have been venturing out into the epicenter of disease, to cook and clean, deliver food and carry mail, drive buses and stock shelves, patrol the streets and tend to the ill. Many have paid with their health—some with their lives.
On the other hand, for workers that fit the general profile of former PBS NewsHour correspondent Ray Suarez (writing for the Washington Post), the economy is closing up. Fast.
An eye blink ago, I was anchoring a nightly program for the cable news network Al Jazeera America. Before that, I had long tenures with “PBS NewsHour” and NPR. When I read warnings that workers could face sudden and catastrophic losses of income in their final years of employment, I was empathetic but concluded it could never happen to me. After all, I had worked hard to build in bumpers around my life, and my career, to avoid that. I climbed the ladder in a very competitive business to jobs of greater renown, greater responsibility and higher pay. I did all the things that would have made me the hero of a financial advice column: got married and stayed married, paid off my mortgage years early, fully covered three college educations so my kids wouldn’t have to borrow. Then the wheels came off. After Al Jazeera pulled the plug on its young network, I headed to Amherst College as a visiting professor while beating the bushes for jobs in radio, television and print. I shoved down the rising panic, kept one eye on my bank balance as I started freelancing, and kept the other eye out for the next big thing. Like hundreds of thousands of men in their early 60s across the country, I had to get used to the idea that the marketplace might have already decided I was “done.” Many men my age are “job bound,” more convinced than their young co-workers that they couldn’t find a comparable position, even in a tight labor market.
Wendi C. Thomas reports for ProPublica that the “essential workers” designation (and all that the designation seems to entail nowadays) seems to apply for low-wage and temporary workers in a “make-up and jewelry” warehouse.
...workers have been told twice that coworkers have tested positive for the coronavirus. The first time was April 10 at a warehouse just across the state line in Southaven, Mississippi. The next was April 16 at the warehouse in southeast Memphis where Meeks worked, several temporary and permanent workers told MLK50: Justice Through Journalism and ProPublica.
In interviews, the workers complained of a crowded environment where they shared devices and weren’t provided personal protective equipment. The company has about 500 employees at its four Memphis-area locations, according to the Memphis Business Journal.
In right-to-work states such as Tennessee and Mississippi, where union membership is low, manual laborers have long said they are vulnerable, and workers’ rights advocates say the global pandemic has underscored just how few protections they have.
A spokesman for Tennessee’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration confirmed that the department received an anonymous complaint about PFS in April.
“A few of (sic) people have tested positive for Covid-19 and the company has not taken precaution to prevent employees from contracting the coronavirus,” the complainant wrote. “As of today (04/13/2020) no one have (sic) come to clean or sanitize the building.”
Wendy Dean at STATnews writes about the mental health and even trauma care that health-care workers need now and will especially need when the COVID-19 emergency passes.
Denial, minimizing, and compartmentalizing are essential strategies for coping with a crisis. They are the psychological tools we reach for over and over to get through harrowing situations. Health care workers learn this through experience and by watching others. We learn how not to pass out in the trauma bay. We learn to flip into “rational mode” when a patient is hemorrhaging or in cardiac arrest, attending to the details of survival — their vital signs, lab results, imaging studies. We learn that if we grieve for the 17-year-old gunshot victim while we are doing chest compressions we will buckle and he will die. So we shut down feeling and just keep doing.
What few health care workers learn how to do is manage the abstractness of emotional recovery, when there is nothing to act on, no numbers to attend, no easily measurable markers of improvement. It is also hard to learn to resolve emotional experiences by watching others, because this kind of intense processing is a private undertaking. We rarely get to watch how someone else swims in the surf of traumatic experience.
Those on the frontlines of the Covid-19 pandemic, especially those in the hardest-hit areas, have seen conditions they never imagined possible in the country with the most expensive health care system in the world. Watching patients die alone is traumatic. Having to choose your own safety over offering comfort to the dying because your hospital or health care system doesn’t have enough personal protective equipment to go around inflicts moral injury. When facing the reality of constrained resources and unthinkable choices, working to exhaustion, and caring for patients at great personal risk, the only way to get through each shift is to do what is immediately at hand.
Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, writing for the New York Times, wonders: Where are the intense visuals of the dying?
What are we missing by not having images that represent the full impact of the coronavirus crisis? In the United States, the frequently recurring pictures in the media are of the president, the virus itself represented as a spiky ball, health care and front line workers deemed essential and visuals conveying economic disarray (empty businesses, winding unemployment lines).
While there have been some professional images from inside medical zones, they remain rare. “Make note of what we can’t see,” the CNN commentator Brian Stelter said in March. “That’s the suffering happening inside hospitals.” He went on to discuss a video that was taken covertly in a hospital. What it means, he said, “is that we’re not seeing this crisis with our own eyes.”
Mr. Stelter also interviewed Dr. Esther Choo in Portland, Ore., who argued that unfiltered images revealing the stark conditions in hospitals are a matter of public health.
Medical privacy laws in the United States can present obstacles to this kind of viewing. Instead of images, we have daily briefings of statistics presented in pie charts and bar graphs. During news conferences, officials such as Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany have illustrated how social distancing can flatten the curve through
clear numerical analysis.
I agree with Ms. Lewis. Leaving aside the medical privacy laws, I think that I would feel uncomfortable seeing someone dying on my laptop screen knowing that their loved ones could not be there with them.
Maybe feeling that kind of discomfort is part of the exact point that Ms. Lewis is making.
Frances Coleman, writing for AL.com, breaks down the difference between normal people and downright fools in the times of COVID-19.
When they’re upset about a government’s policy, normal people write letters or make phone calls to their elected officials. Sometimes they attend town hall meetings so they can speak their piece in public. If those tactics don’t seem to be working, they may even march on City Hall.
But normal people don’t dress up in militia costumes, sling rifles over their shoulders and barge into the Michigan state capitol building because they’re angry about the governor’s stay-at-home order. They don’t shout at state troopers and assert that the governor is a Nazi.
Similarly, normal people don’t defy the Alabama governor’s decision to keep restaurants, barber shops and nail salons closed for a little while longer. They don’t post signs like the one in front of a restaurant near Mobile that said, “Kay, let my people go, or else.”
“Or else”? What the heck is that supposed to mean? Is it simply a reminder that they and other Alabamians might vote Gov. Kay Ivey out of office if she runs again in 2022? Or is it meant to suggest something more sinister, that she might actually be in physical danger because she’s not re-opening the state’s economy fast enough to suit them?
Read the rest of the column. I like Ms. Coleman’s voice. For what it is and what it is not.
John Cassidy at the New Yorker sees a society at a crossroads. American society could become more progressive...or more dystopian
So far, the big winners from the covid-19 shutdowns are a handful of tech giants whose monopolistic power was already a major concern. As old-economy firms like Hertz, J. Crew, and AMC Theatres flirt with bankruptcy, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft have all just reported that their over-all revenues increased during the first quarter of 2020. Facebook’s revenues rose eighteen per cent, as homebound people everywhere flocked to its services. “In Italy . . . we’ve seen up to seventy per cent more time spent across our apps,” Mark Zuckerberg, the firm’s founder, chairman, and chief executive, said in a conference call with Wall Street analysts. “Instagram and Facebook Live views doubled in one week. And we’ve also seen time and Group video calling increase by more than a thousand per cent over March.”
Zuckerberg said he didn’t expect this huge spike to be sustained as the pandemic recedes and economies reopen. “But in some areas,” he went on, “I think we are seeing an acceleration in preëxisting, long-term trends like the dramatic increase in online private social communication that is likely to continue.” Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, agrees. “There is no turning back, for example in telemedicine,” he said during Microsoft’s earnings call. “If you look at even what has happened in this first phase with A.I. bots powering telemedicine triage. That’s going to change, I think, what health-care outcomes look like. Same thing in education.”
Everyone have a great morning!