Post 97 - June 16, 2020

Day 97…

I cannot remember us regularly sitting in our apartment in New York with the windows open. 

There is a low-level thrum outside, but nothing like the steady roar we used to live with. Traffic is certainly up but still nowhere near the level it was.

The weather in NY has also been, for the most part, perfect. One of the reasons we chose to live where we live was because of its cross-ventilation. We seem to get any late spring breeze that happens to blow by.

There have been more helicopters in the air over the last couple of days. Black Lives Matter demonstrations, which had started to lessen, started up again after the shooting of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta on Saturday. These demonstrations, here in New York, have remained peaceful. Angry, but peaceful.

It is incredibly moving to see how energized people around the country and, indeed around the world have become. And they are having an effect..

Governor Cuomo signed three new pieces of police reform legislation yesterday.

Now, every time a police officer fires their weapon, a report must be filed within six hours. Something called the STAT act was passed that requires the courts to publish racial and gender demographic data in regard to the cases they are hearing, including those for misdemeanors and other low-level violations. Under this law, police departments are now also required to report any arrest-related death to the Department of Criminal Justice Services and compile an annual report.

The third new law requires all law enforcement representatives to provide medical and mental health attention to anybody in custody.

None of these laws, on the surface, seem earth-shattering but they are all hard-won victories. The lack of accountability and basic transparency in police departments all across the country has been a shield that racism has been able to hide behind. African Americans and other people of color are typically arrested and charged with minor crimes at a much higher rate than White European Americans are.

Black and Latinx people make up 34% of the population of New York state yet account for 75% of the prison population here. White people make up 58% of the state’s population yet account for only 26% of the prison population.

Are people of color more likely to commit crimes? I don’t honestly know, but I do know that they are far more likely to be caught. I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating, I have NEVER ONCE, in forty years of living in New York City as a tall, white man been stopped by a police officer for walking or rushing through a public area. I don’t think that many of my friends of color can say the same.

These new laws make it harder for the Authorities to hide their ugly little secrets. Shedding a strong light on a problem is often a major step towards solving it. That the third statute, the one about providing medical and mental assistance to anybody in custody, actually needs to be a law is an indication, right there, of what is going on in our police departments. Really? Shouldn’t that just be common sense and basic humanity? You’d think so but, no, apparently it isn’t. A law needed to be passed.

On the coronavirus front, eighteen states are now reporting increases in their case numbers.

The five largest known clusters of the virus, now, are actually not in nursing homes, but in prisons. Over the past month the number of cases in the prison system has risen to 68,000 - it has nearly doubled. The death rate in prisons over the same period has risen by 73%. The majority of the inmates being African American, the majority of these new numbers are also African Americans.

Whereas, cruise ships, nursing homes and meatpacking plants have implemented new safety measures and cleaning protocols, that hasn’t happened in the prison system. Inmates are still indoors and crowded together.

Demonstrators from the Black Lives Matter marches, who were at far less risk marching outside, once arrested, were placed together in over-crowded indoor holding cells by the hundreds and thousands.

Nationwide, we are now doing 400,000 tests a day. The Administration is claiming that the rise in cases around the country is due to the increase in testing.

The President actually said, “If we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”

That jaw-dropping line would have been hilarious had it come out of Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live, but it didn’t. That line came out of the actual President of the United States of America. It’s chilling.

Yes, increased testing means that more cases are being discovered, but if they weren’t ACTUALLY HAPPENING, they wouldn’t be there to discover.

In a call yesterday, the Vice President urged the nation’s Governors to downplay the spread of the virus in their states and attribute the rise in their numbers to their increased testing.

In the last 24 hours we had the highest national death rate from COVID-19 that we’ve had here since this started.

The President is desperate to get back to rallying. His national appearances have been disastrous. The utter travesty of his photo op in front of St. John’s Church which followed the government’s attack against peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square is one which will hound him for the rest of his life. The blow back from his daily briefings have brought them to an end. The White House coronavirus task force has been utterly marginalized. The President is trying to do anything he can to shift the focus off of his failures in handling the pandemic.

He wants this rally in Tulsa. He will not acknowledge the potential danger the people who will attend it will face. He knows it’s there. He’s making them all sign something that will indemnify his campaign against lawsuits should anyone get infected.

Last week, Oklahoma’s case rate continued to spike.

Last week saw one fifth of the total number of people who have been afflicted in Oklahoma get infected.

“If we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”

There is no doubt that we are living through a pivotal moment in our history. Some of it is terrifying and some of it is hopeful and incredibly moving.

Not all of the sky is falling.

The majority opinion on the LGBTQ ruling that came down from the US Supreme Court yesterday was written by Judge Gorsuch who was actually put on the bench by this President.

His decision wasn’t partisan. He didn’t rule on the case based on his feelings about Gay and Trans people, or on his loyalty to the Administration. He based his decision on his interpretation of the current laws.

Imagine that - a judge basing his ruling on THE LAW.

Standing at our window, it looks to me as if the sky is still up there. At the moment, it is vividly and startlingly blue. Clouds are on their way in much the same way that more of what will eventually be our history of this extraordinary time, is coming.

We have to take the successes as they come and build on them. There will always be setbacks but there will also always be victories. Focus on the victories.

The sky is not falling. Not only is it still up there, it’s also a tiny bit cleaner than it was three months ago.

That’s a small victory worth savoring in and of itself.