Day 66 Passing the Hot-Potato Buck Again; and, What’s Really Missing

I live less than half a mile from the barber who broke the law and continued to cut hair from his home behind his closed-door barbershop from the time of the pause. No one would ever have known if he hadn’t come down with Covid-19.

A man in Michigan posed what law enforcement called multiple “credible threats” on the life of Governor Gretchen Whitmer. “It is never acceptable to make threats of violence to anyone, but our officeholders as well,” the governor said on Friday.”

Hospitals know how to make money, and their business model has perfected the maximization of just that: making money. “The coronavirus outbreak has shown the vulnerabilities of this business model, with procedures canceled, tests postponed and millions of newly unemployed Americans expected to lose the health coverage they received at work.”

Erika L. Green writes in The New York Times: “Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is using the $2 trillion coronavirus stabilization law to throw a lifeline to education sectors she has long championed, directing millions of federal dollars intended primarily for public schools and colleges to private and religious schools.” “On the Senate floor this week, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, accused Ms. DeVos of ‘exploiting congressional relief efforts.’”

Governors are one party or the other. State legislatures are the opposite. Legislators who disagree with governors pass laws that contradict the governor. Then legislatures appeal their law to the judiciary, the court systems. One sides with or against the other. Counties step in to make the granular decisions because of the gridlock upstairs. When that doesn’t work either, mayors and local governments attempt to make those micro-determinations. And the hot potato goes round and across the circle. Ad infinitum.

The whiplash metaphor is battered at this point. The reopening of the country has become a horror show tilt-a-whirl of contradictions, accusations, exorcistic head-spinning, and as much sleight-of-hand pass-the-buck as anyone can bear to witness.

Few who think through these things would argue the statement above. What I want to know, and be able to address, is why?

Why are we living in a cross between a Tim Burton and a Quentin Tarantino film? Oh, let’s throw in a little low-budget Roger Corman as well, shall we? Scorcese, anyone? Fellini? No, I know, Spielberg or Coppola—either one, take your pick, mix-and-match.

In the past week, I’ve seen words in print that I’d never seen before: truther-ism, freedom-ism, agenda-ism. Quite frankly, I think there’s a deep reason for all of these -isms raising their hydra-heads again and again. We meet one with a measured response, and wham! Someone cuts off its head, and seven more rise up like slime-riddled periscopes.

Paul Krugman lays it out plainly. “Indeed, virus trutherism—insisting that Covid-19 deaths are greatly exaggerated and may reflect a vast medical conspiracy—is already widespread on the right. We can expect to see much more of it in the months ahead. At one level, this turn of events shouldn’t surprise us.

“The U.S. right long ago rejected evidence-based policy in favor of policy-based evidence—denying facts that might get in the way of a predetermined agenda. Fourteen years have passed since Stephen Colbert famously quipped that ‘reality has a well-known liberal bias.’”

Michael Maurer writing a letter to the editor from Long Branch, New Jersey adds another dimension. “In Pennsylvania on Thursday, with stunning ignorance, President Trump explained why our nation tragically leads the world in Covid-19 deaths: ‘When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.’

“And all this time I thought chemo could save me from my leukemia. Stupid me. Had I simply never taken a blood test, I could have avoided my cancer altogether.”

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at Wharton. He writes about astronaut Scott Kelly’s psychological preparations for spending one year alone in space. His primary tool was mental time travel, visiting events—happy or sad—from his past, considering alternate presents, and imagining events in his future. Humans actually do this all the time.

A restaurateur in Wisconsin, after the state supreme court overturned the governor’s stay-at-home extension said, “Everybody keeps saying they want the freedom to decide to go out,” she said. “Well, I have the freedom to decide that I don’t want to open my restaurant.”

You do, Madame Restaurateur, you do. We all do. But as Governor Cuomo said in one of his briefings this week, “You know whose going to protect you? You are. I heartily recommend caution and diligence.”

Then there’s this about a brave retail employee named Jesse.

“The exchange was tense between the customer and Jesse, a Trader Joe’s employee sporting a white face mask and a flowery Hawaiian shirt. ‘Why aren’t you wearing the mask?’ Jesse asked the customer on a recent day at a store in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. ‘I am not here to question what you believe in. These are the rules. I am just asking you kindly to wear the mask.’

“The customer, Genevieve Peters, who was recording the entire exchange, refused. ‘We are in America here,’ she said, ‘Land of the free.’ Then she turned her camera on other shoppers, who were less than amused: ‘Look at all of these sheep that are here, all wearing this mask that is actually dangerous for them.’

“Jesse, identified only by his first name in the video, telephoned the police, who did not arrive. Finally, when Ms. Peters left the store, others customers burst into applause.”

According to David Brooks, we Americans are not really as divided as the online bubble makes it appear. As he said, “There’s a powerful negativity bias online. Online is the place where partisans go to be partisan.”

Back to Trader Joe’s, “‘We have individual rights, we don’t have community rights,’” said Ms. Peters, 56, the customer at the Trader Joe’s store, in an interview this week. Public health experts said this argument was misguided. ‘I never had a right to do something that could injure the health of my neighbors,’ said Wendy E. Parmet, the director of the Center for Health Policy and Law at Northeastern University.”

I keep looking, I keep digging. Why? What’s at the core of this segment of our society that is in such resistance? It came to me almost immediately that maybe it’s not just them. In fact, likely, it’s not just them. Remember, there really is no them, only an us.

So all of us have this moral infection, this ethical pathogen, this spiritual abyss. And there, right out of the fingers of my very own hands, I find the answer that satisfies me.

We are unmoored. Not only coronavirus unmoored, but unmoored from many of the things, ideas, concepts, beliefs that gave us a philosophical scaffolding from which, within which, to make safe, healthy, good decisions.

Think on it, Beloved. Fewer and fewer people are tethered to religious practice. Fewer and fewer of us are tethered to the necessity of education. Fewer and fewer of us are tethered to social constructs like marriage as a commitment, or family as worth protecting. Fewer and fewer of us are tethered to the value of loyalty, honor, nobility, truth, justice, even freedom.

We—and no, not all, but most—are missing a sense of a spiritual center within ourselves. A spiritual center is what gives us both roots and wings, both past and future, both scars and hope. The less we are connected to one another, the less we are able to consider one another.

And then, there are the sane words of David Brooks in “Ordinary People Are Leading the Leaders.”

“But in real life, America is less divided than it was before the pandemic. In a Washington Post/Ipsos survey, only 16 percent of Americans say their state isn’t opening up fast enough. Three-quarters say we need to keep slowing the disease even if it means keeping businesses closed. The big story now is that regular Republicans are not following the Trumpian Taliban in their shrill cries to reopen everything immediately.

“They’re not waiting for politicians to tell them what to do. People locked themselves down before the governors acted and they’re staying home even where governors have opened up. The important decisions are not being made in statehouses. They are being made at the family and community level, as networks of people try to figure out what to do, based on their particular local context.”

This very fact gives my heart reason to swell with hope. There is, somewhere, in each of us an inner backbone, a spine, a spiritual center which could, if heeded, help us to navigate this pandemic and beyond. And that’s why, again and again, when others want to pass the hot potato buck—again—I say unto you, start with you, at home, where you are. You, and only you, are what will make a difference in your world.

This week whistle-blower Dr. Rick Bright testified about his complaint. “Democrats painted Dr. Bright as a prescient man of courage. ‘It all adds up to one inescapable conclusion: It didn’t have to be this way,’ said Representative John Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland. ‘Things are upside down. In you we have someone who made the right call in the early days, who has been removed from your position, when so many people who made the wrong call still have their jobs.’

I agree with the Representative, and I don’t think it matters that he’s a Democrat. Dr. Bright is taking my advice. He’s started with himself, at home, right where he is.

Astronaut Kelly is home after 340 days in space alone. “Taking mental trips to the future, to the past and to an alternative present can help build resilience. But it isn’t something we do alone. Mr. Kelly’s greatest lesson from his travels is that we find strength together.

“‘When we’re in space and you look down at planet Earth, and the planet is incredibly beautiful during the daytime, you don’t see political borders. It looks like humanity is all part of one big team,’ he explained to me. The virus has shown him that the world is ‘more interconnected than I really realized’ and has made him ‘absolutely confident that we will get through this, but it’s going to take all of us working together.’”

All of us working together. It’s gotta be. There really is no other alternative, and, well, I’ll make my promise to you right now that I’ll be thinking about how to get a spiritual center installed in every one of us, and when I figure it out, you’ll be the first to know. FWIW, I’m pretty sure it has to do with one word.

And.

Dr. Susan Corso is a metaphysician and medical intuitive with a private counseling practice for more than 35 years. She has written too many books to list here. Her website is www.susancorso.com

If you have friends that would benefit by reading my words,
please feel free to forward this missive in its entirety.

If you are in need of support during this time of crisis,
visit here to start the process of working with me.