Post 87 - June 6, 2020
Day 87…
Last night, for the first time in nearly three months, I set an alarm to wake up. We are participating in a march today that a friend of ours has helped to organize, and it starts later on this morning. Having done that, I ended up waking up a good half hour before it went off anyway.
In the early days of all of this, as the pandemic started spreading, the choices in front of us seemed to be much clearer than they are now. Even though there was a lot of fear and confusion, our directive was brutally simple - stay home.
Stop working. Stop traveling. Stop meeting.
I think that, in a way, the utter simplicity of that is why it worked. Stop EVERYTHING is a much easier sell than stop a couple of things under certain situations and then make the choice yourself whether or not to stop based on your own assessment of the risks.
As human beings our nervous system responds to acute distress with a fight or flight response. Once that’s triggered, hormones are released and the body responds on its own, circumnavigating the circuitry of our brains. Last week, when I was in Times Square during a demonstration and the phalanx of police in riot gear surged towards us, I ran. I didn’t think about it, I just… went. It wasn’t until many seconds later that the thinking part of my brain turned back on again and I could see that the immediate danger was passed. I could stop running, lower my heartbeat, and start to think about where I was.
When we were all told that the virus was serious enough that the entire planet needed to shut down, we all just ran - chased by the images of over-crowded hospitals in Italy where doctors were having to choose who lived and who died. Then more information started to trickle in. It didn’t matter that much of the information was false, it was information and it started to override our initial fight or flight response.
Our instinct for fight or flight is pretty universal. It doesn’t matter what our race, what our gender, what our cultural nationality is. We are all human beings and we’ve all been designed to bolt in the face of extreme danger. When the immediate danger passes and we regain the ability to think rationally again, that’s when all bets are off. That’s when our differences kick in.
The more the information came, the more complicated everything became. A lot of the information seemed contradictory. A lot of the information was completely inconclusive and really just led to the asking of more questions. The information started being politicized and distorted.
My cousin in South Africa has been trying, since the pandemic began, to mathematically chart the trends of the virus in his country. In theory that should be a fairly straightforward undertaking. What he’s found, however, is that the raw data is hard to find and once found, hard to quantify. Different areas are underreporting cases or classifying them in different ways.
Here in the US, that problem is magnified 50-fold. We have 50 separate states, each with its own government. Plus Washington D.C.. Plus several protectorates. Each of them has a different mechanism for calculating their data and each of them have a different political filter that their data is being run through before it is released.
So, what is going on?
The answer is, I don’t think that we really know. 23 different states plus Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico are seeing their cases of coronavirus rising. In most of those places, the increase is at least 10%, in some, much more. The case rise is not happening uniformly in any area but in clusters. Many of the states that moved to reopen the soonest seem to be seeing their numbers go up. Some of them, however, are not. Given the differences in how these disparate areas quantify and report their case numbers, it’s hard to tell for sure. There is also a wide difference from area to area in the amount of testing being done.
Memorial Day was May 25. People around the country left their homes and gathered in large groups. On that day, George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis.
A day or two after that, in response, different people around the country left their homes and started gathering in large groups. We are starting to see what both of these events will do to the virus numbers but in all likelihood, we are going to see a rise.
Politicians will assign the blame for this on whichever group serves their ends, but both the Memorial Day celebrations and the protests are going to contribute to the inevitable rise in infections.
Our initial fight or flight response to COVID-19 has now evolved into something else entirely.
More than 1200 medical professionals just signed an open letter that was drafted by the University of Washington stating that the need for civil protest outweighs the health risk posed by the large gatherings.
We are having to make the choice ourselves whether or not to stop congregating based on our own assessment of the risks.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer joined a march on Thursday wearing a mask. Is this hypocrisy? Yes, absolutely. But is it justified?
Where does the moral responsibility to protest against injustice lie in relation to the moral responsibility we have, to keep each other safe? That is the question we are being confronted with.
Michael and I are marching today to show our support for the Black Lives Matter movement. We are going to wear a mask and we’re going to do everything within our power to maintain social distancing. I’m guessing, we will, ultimately, likely fail at that. Given that Michael and I both have antibodies to the virus, there is a good chance that we have some resistance to both transmitting and getting COVID-19. It’s not remotely a sure thing by any stretch of the imagination, but it seems like it will, at the very least, offer SOME protection. Being outside with people seems to be less dangerous than being inside with people.
That is how we have assessed our risk.
Yesterday, I talked about the “Defund the NYPD” idea that’s being floated during these demonstrations. It turns out that it is a terrible phrase that represents a very interesting idea. It isn’t about abolishing the police force, although there are some who are, indeed calling for that. It is, instead, about empowering other areas of the system to handle issues that are now under the purview of the police department.
The city’s proposed budget for 2021 which is set to be approved in July, includes massive cuts that are largely due to the economic ramifications of us shutting down. The budget includes $2 billion less to a wide range of agencies that includes, education, housing, parks, health and social services. The proposed cuts to the NYPD, however, are minimal - .03% of their current budget.
Public advocates are calling for a 16% cut to the Police Department so that that money can be reallocated to the already massively compromised social services arm. What they are saying is that police involvement in areas such as homeless outreach should end and that social services should take over. If more money were put into housing, there would be fewer homeless on the streets. If there is a mental health issue on the street with a homeless person, send a trained social worker, perhaps with a policeman in tow, to deal with it.
At the moment, that doesn’t happen. Untrained police officers are sent to deal with the problems so, of course, conflicts ensue.
“Defund the NYPD” is a cry to remove the police department from the aspects of policing the city for which they have no training. It is a cry to allocate resources to attempt to cure the disease rather than just strong arm the symptoms. As I said, it is a terrible way to describe what is being advocated, but what is being advocated is truly long overdue.
Michael has already left the apartment for the march. Every time one of us leaves the apartment, the other waits for a few moments until they come back having forgotten something. Sure enough, a minute later he was back for his wallet.
“I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.”
So ends the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley that sustained Nelson Mandela through his incarceration on Robben Island.
We ultimately have to choose our own paths forward through these confusing and terrifying times. We cannot make those choices recklessly.
Will they be the right decisions?
I don’t know. Will they?