Day 334…
Central Park was as beautiful as I have ever seen it yesterday.
It snowed for most of the day in big sticky flakes that stuck to everything. The whole park was outlined in white making a stark contrast between the fluffy snow and the dark outlines of the leafless trees.
Had we gotten any more snow everything would have just been covered. Had it been windier or warmer, nothing would have stuck. As it was, conditions were perfect, and photographers were out in droves. As much as I didn’t want to go out in the storm, once I did, I was more than happy to be there.
We don’t get this much snow in the city in most years. Yesterday’s snow was the third of the season and we are already meant to get some more starting tomorrow and then again later in the week. Some years it feels like we don’t get any snow at all.
Cross-country skiers also took advantage of the new soft snow lying on top of the packed older snow from last week and were out and about all over the place. The pandemic has, of course, seriously impacted people’s ability to travel, meaning skiers from here have been largely thwarted this year. Yesterday, gave all of them a chance to get out there.
I’ve only been cross-country skiing once and that was when I was in college, spending my Junior year abroad. I went with some friends over a break to a small ski resort in Switzerland. The conditions there were much as they were here yesterday - a fresh dusting of snow over packed older snow.
We had a blast skiing on picture-perfect trails through the Alps. Everywhere we were looked like the picture on a tin of Swiss chocolates. As fun as it was, cross-country skiing is exhausting, and I ached for days afterwards. Central Park was every bit as beautiful as the Alps, yesterday, more so, maybe, because it was so unexpected.
The snow is already out of the tree branches that I can see from our apartment. It must have been windy last night because this morning they are completely bare. It has also gotten extremely cold again.
If I hadn’t gotten off the couch yesterday and braved the elements, I would have missed the whole thing.
Late yesterday, it was announced that South Africa has halted its rollout of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine. It does not appear to be effective against their particular variant of the virus.
That vaccine has not yet been approved for use here in the US. They are in the middle of clinical trials here that could take another 4-6 weeks to complete before they can even apply to the FDA for emergency authorization.
The study that calls its effectiveness into question is not necessarily definitive, but it is not a good sign at all. The AstraZenica-Oxford vaccine is cheaper to produce and easier to transport than either the Pfizer or Moderna one and it was hoped that it would be the one that could be used in developing counties with limited resources. Many of those have yet to receive any vaccines at all. Certainly, in Africa, this may now not be a solution.
In addition, millions of people in the UK have already been vaccinated with it. If this vaccine, indeed, proves not to be effective against the South African variant, then those people won’t be covered. As of this morning, 147 cases of the variant have already been detected in Britain, so it is there already.
And it is here. Two cases in South Carolina and one in Maryland as of a week ago. We are so far behind much of the world in this kind of genetic tracing (61st globally according to an expert on TV this morning) that there are sure to be more.
Here in the US, both our new case rate and our hospitalization rate are at the lowest point that they have been for the last three months. Still too high but moving in the right direction. Over 40 million people have now been vaccinated, having at least received their first shots.
So far, the two vaccines that we are using both appear to be effective against all of the existing variants. The fear is that both the South African and the UK variants replicate much faster so that in a few weeks that downward trend could reverse.
Thankfully, we are finally getting seemingly unfiltered information from our national healthcare professionals. The tri-weekly briefings from Drs. Walensky and Fauci are informative and clear. They are direct, to the point, and not always good news. Obstacles and problems are not being hidden from us. Best of all, they are apolitical.
Behind the scenes, there may be plenty that we aren’t being told, but it, at least, doesn’t seem that we are being lied to.
After the last four years, all of us can easily tell when we are being fed untruths. People who have no compunction about lying tend to double down and assert their alternate facts with a direct and uber-controlled insistency. It is the rare individual who can lie to a crowd with complete and total ease.
Our former President is one of those people. He was the only one in his Administration who was able to lie in such a completely relaxed way. Almost everything out of the man’s mouth was a lie and he seemed to believe all of it even as he was making it up. Those around him who were tasked with supporting everything he said were not nearly as skilled. As the ex-President gently lobbed his never-ending series of lies out into the world his flunkies were left scrambling like crazy to keep them all up in the air.
Almost all of that energy is now absent from our daily political discourse. The President outlines his plans, and his team moves forward to enact them. They don’t seem surprised or caught off guard by what he says.
Drs. Walensky and Fauci don’t seem to be talking to us during their briefings at gunpoint. They just seem to be doing their jobs.
As an audience, it’s easy to listen because we aren’t all physically and psychically clenched waiting to have to read between the lines of everything that comes at us. They say something and, more or less, we can accept it. Imagine that.
The ex-President’s impeachment trial starts tomorrow. It’s going to suck a lot of air out of the room.
His defense team is likely going to focus on whether or not impeaching a President is constitutional as their main argument.
According to a conservative constitutional lawyer named Charles Cooper, that is a mistake. In an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, he says that the argument might have some merit if his removal from office was the only punishment that is provided for in the Constitution. It isn’t. The ex-President can be disqualified from ever holding another elected office again.
In addition, there is precedent in the Senate for trying people who are no longer in office. Senator William Blount was tried in 1797 and Secretary of War William Belknap was tried in 1876. Neither of those men were still in office.
As much as we are all sick of hearing about the insurrection and even about the ex-President, himself, it is important that the results of this trial be definitive.
In 1923, Adolph Hitler attempted to launch a revolution in what was called the Munich Putsch. The country was suffering from deprivation due to hyperinflation. The Nazi party, at the time, had over 50,000 members.
Similar to what we are experiencing here in the US, different geographical areas of what was then the Weimar Republic had different political views. The majority of Bavaria was Catholic and conservative. They saw the Weimar Republic as being weak.
Hitler plotted with two nationalist politicians to take advantage of this and take over Munich, the capital of Bavaria, using his loyal followers. At the last minute, the two politicians changed their minds and called the whole thing off. Hitler then broke into a meeting and holding them at gunpoint, forced them to change their minds. Hitler and his brownshirts marched on Munich but the two politicians had alerted the police and army to be ready and he was defeated.
The response to this was to ban the Nazi party and Hitler was prevented from speaking publicly until 1927. He was sentenced to five years in jail. He only served eight months of the sentence in a relatively comfortable prison during which he wrote Mein Kampf. It was read by millions of Germans.
The leniency shown him indicated that there was support for him among the higher authorities. Once out of prison, Hitler changed tactics. Instead of armed revolution, he figured out how to gain power using the political system. He rearranged the Nazi party, and, well, we all know the rest.
It is possible to look back at that trial in 1923 and see that had he been more forcibly punished and removed from the public eye and his revolution taken more seriously that history might be very different.
Tomorrow’s trial is potentially a similar sort of pivotal moment. How this attempted insurrection and the ex-President’s part in it is dealt with is going to have very serious long-term repercussions. As much as me must focus our attention on the virus and our economy, we ignore and discount this impeachment trial at our peril.
It seems impossible that such monumental history could be unfolding on such a beautiful day. After a few days of wearing my next-to-warmest coat, I’ll be back to wearing my warmest one today - it is cold. It is cold but it is bright and clear.
I suppose I should mention the Super Bowl.
We didn’t watch it.
We did, however, watch the half-time show and Amanda Gorman’s opening poem. The half-time show seemed like somewhat of a wasted opportunity to celebrate, I don’t know, maybe our resilience, or the fact that we have all gotten this far… something. Instead, it didn’t really seem to register as being about much of anything. I don’t know who should have performed in his place but The Weeknd seemed an odd choice.
Amanda Gorman, however, had all of the magnetism and force that the half-time headliner seemed to lack. She became the first poet to perform at a Super Bowl when she spoke at the beginning of the game. She is a thrilling artist.
At 43 years old, the game’s most valuable player, quarterback Tom Brady is considered ancient.
With my birthday coming up in a couple of days, all I can say about that is, just wait.
I'm looking forward to your pics of yesterday's snow!
❤️So you’re an Aquarian? A birthday in a few days? The genius of the Zodiac, fyi! 🎈🎁 my favorite line of your post today “ They are just doing their jobs”... sounded like a church hymn 💞