Susan Corso's Blog — iAmpersand

Day 81 Why Silence Equals Violence; and, Complacency is Complicity

“As protests spread from coast to coast, mayors in more than two dozen cities declared curfews—the first time so many local leaders have simultaneously issued such orders in the face of civic unrest since 1968, after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” 1968 was 52 years ago, and while there have been incremental changes in some parts of the country for some persons of color, the predominant narrative is no different now than it was then. As one protestor said, “I’m not here to fight someone,” said Eldon Gillet, 40, who was on the streets in Brooklyn. “I’m here to fight a system.” Another said, “I’m out here so that my two kids never have to be.” In “a country already ragged with anger and anxiety,” as one story had it, “With a nation on edge—ravaged by a pandemic, hammered by economic collapse, divided over lockdowns and even face masks, and continuing to be convulsed by racial discord—President Trump’s instinct has been to look for someone to fight.”

Day 80 Everyone Answers to Someone; and, A Common Denominator for a New Day

The Quitter-in-Chief resigned the United States’ membership in the W.H.O. “‘We helped create the W.H.O.,’ said Dr. Thomas Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has worked with the organization since its creation in 1948. ‘Turning our back on the W.H.O. makes us and the world less safe.” No wonder the Accuser-in-Chief is scrambling; he’s killing off his dragons faster than they can appear. Now he no longer has the W.H.O. to blame. Now you and I know that W.H.O. stands for World Health Organization, but what if it didn’t stand for anything? Except the word that the acronym spells: who. Because the irony doesn’t escape me at all. Of course. The I’m-the-Most-Important-and-Only-Important-Person-in-the-World-in-Chief has resigned from all the who[s] in the world.

Day 79 Rise Up, Rise Up for Justice; and, Outrage and Fury for Peace

Larry Kramer is dead. Larry Kramer. It seems impossible. He was eternally accused of being too ornery, too angry, too stubborn to die. Artist and peacemaker Brad Heckman posted his portrait of Mr. Kramer on Instagram this morning: hecksign Be outraged, offended, angry and intolerant of any discussion or any one who describes you as unequal, undeserving or unnatural for being just as you are. RIP, #LarryKramer His quote applies to so much in the news right now that I’m shaking. Unequal. Undeserving. Unnatural. Epithets hurled round the world. For all sorts of spurious, specious reasons.

Day 78 Heroic Narrative Becomes Passé; and, Its Replacement Can Only Be Power-With

I always appreciate Letters to the Editor from The New York Times. Rachel Lucas from Hickory, North Carolina weighed in this morning. “When I read President Trump’s recent tweets insulting Nancy Pelosi, Stacey Abrams and Joe Scarborough, it occurred to me that given our leader’s great skill in attacking others, he should write a sequel to ‘The Art of the Deal’ called ‘The Art of the Insult,’ describing how to pick on people for their physical traits. “One chapter could focus on ‘Assigning Nasty Nicknames’ and another on ‘Fabricating Crimes.’ He could complete his trilogy with ‘The Art of the Lie,’ with chapters including ‘How to Rewrite History’ and ‘Never Admit a Mistake.’” I couldn’t have said it better myself. What a mish-mash of a horror show is the news this morning. Everywhere I went in the media, I found ratcheting reports of, as another letter-writer had it, “President Trump ... outdoing himself on the depravity index, if that’s possible, simultaneously checking a number of boxes as to how a monumentally failed leader and malevolent human being behaves when cornered, and in a time of crisis.” I wonder what a rodentologist would say about the Vermin-in-Chief?

Day 77 Hidden in Plain Sight; and, The Revelation of Healing

George Orwell wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Perhaps. The long-standing and almost sea-to-shining-sea illusions have been ripped away. There is no longer a curtain in front of the Wizard. We have met the Wizard and it are us. Consider these off-the-top-of-my-head examples: Face masks are revealed to be a political sticking point rather than an assumed, civic necessity. Climate change is revealed to be the actual reality it is, and it isn’t going anywhere unless humans behave differently.

PandemicSusan CorsoMay 27, 2020metaphysics, coronavirus, COVID-19, #GlobalVaccine, hypocrisy, hypocrite

Day 76 What’s Good, What’s Bad; and, Manna From Heaven

Many years ago I had a friend with a truly annoying habit. She’d tell me about something that happened in her day, or her life, or the life of someone we knew, and then she’d add, “So that’s bad,” or “So that’s good.” At the time, I had just admitted to myself that I really was an intuitive, and I had begun my first tentative steps onto the path of living a spiritual life. I’d known her for more than a decade when I noticed her habit. Everything from finding a lucky penny, “So that’s good,” to losing her keys, “So that’s bad,” to finding them, “So that’s good,” got a rating. Rating? Is that what I mean? A judgment. A commentary. A qualification? Maybe quantification is better. Point being, she tacked on a judgment at the end of every story like some constant binary report card. When I was stronger in my own spiritual studies, a journey which she not only witnessed with me, but quasi-participated in, three or so years later, I asked her if she knew that she judged every experience or if she was unconsciously keeping a tally. She looked at me as if I had just landed from Planet Q, and responded, clearly astonished, “I do?” The United States has just passed a stranger-than-usual Memorial Day. The news is full of the good and the bad.

Day 75 An Offensive Defense; and, How Vulnerability Fuels Generosity

Notice the shadowy flag in the picture. Opinion columnist Charles M. Blow is not known for mincing words. “Trump put politics, his own political fortunes, over the lives of the American people, and the result has been catastrophic.” Nothing new here, right? The Outbreak aggregator went with this. “While the country neared six digits of death, the president who repeatedly criticized his predecessor for golfing during a crisis spent the weekend on the links for the first time since March. When he was not zipping around on a cart, he was on social media embracing fringe conspiracy theories, amplifying messages from a racist and sexist Twitter account and lobbing playground insults at perceived enemies, including his own former attorney general.” Again, just a yawn. Predictability is just so ... predictable. Columbia University researchers put forth a distinctly different model of the disease trajectory this week the theme of which is that had the U.S. acted just two weeks earlier, the death toll would be more than two-thirds less than it is. Mr. Blow again, “But Trump had spent the previous week downplaying the severity of the virus and blaming growing coverage of it and alarm over it on the media.” On the media. On testing itself. On China. On Obama. Or the governors. Or immigrants. Or the epidemiologists. Or the inspectors general. Or the airlines. Or any other of his flavor-of-the-moment pet scapegoats. Meh.

Day 74 The Curious Bonding of Loss; and, The Luxurious Bonding of What Remains

The six, solid, black-and-white columns of words—names, and the occasional salient detail that makes human lives out of them—that comprised the front page of The New York Times today was characterized in the second half of the headline: An Incalculable Loss. The smaller print: “They Were Not Simply Names on a List; They Were Us.” Us. “Each one is more than a name. Each one had a unique life story. Each one succumbed to the coronavirus pandemic that swept across the globe, devastating families and industries and dealing a crippling blow to the world’s economy.” One. Hundred. Thousand. Humans. Parents. Grandparents. Aunts. Uncles. Daughters. Sons. Brothers. Sisters. Nieces. Nephews. Friends. Lovers. Co-workers. Acquaintances. Strangers. One Hundred Thousand American human beings are dead because of Covid-19, and we, the us that remain, are bonded in loss, in crisis, in fear, and, sadly, in some cases, in loathing.

PandemicSusan CorsoMay 24, 2020metaphysics, coronavirus, COVID-19, #GlobalVaccine, Love, Kinsey Sicks

Day 73 The Erosion of Trust; and, The Ponzi Avalanche

“Just 17% of Americans say they trust the federal government.” Really? That many? “‘I don’t trust these people, I don’t believe them,’ said Curtis Devlin, 42, an Iraq War veteran who lives in California, referring to national political leaders of both parties. ‘The people whose interests they represent are donors, power brokers, the parties.’” Mr. Devlin is not alone. If the poll numbers are to be believed, 83% of us agree with him. Can you blame us? “Inside the White House, doubts about the official numbers [of Covid-19 deaths] are pervasive, though they come in different forms. Mr. Trump is in search of good news to promote his administration’s response to the pandemic and to press states to reopen.” There’s a whole article on how these numbers are compiled which is so convoluted that I could barely understand it. The bottom line, though, is that if the Calculator-in-Chief doesn’t like the numbers, he demands that they go outside the usual data channels of the federal government to find numbers that he likes. End run, anyone?

Day 72 The Inconvenience of the Heart; and, FourSquare Humility

Ever since the beginning of the journey of the coronavirus pandemic, opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof has been using the word “humility” as part of his recommendations for how to proceed. He did it again yesterday morning. His headline “Let’s Remember That the Coronavirus Is Still a Mystery” had a subtitle, “Respond to it with humility, and apprehension, too.” “The odd thing about reporting on the coronavirus is that the nonexperts are supremely confident in their predictions, while epidemiologists keep telling me that they don’t really know much at all.” He praises the humility evidenced by epidemiologists and laments more humility in our public discourse. What a relief that would be, wouldn’t it? But humility isn’t exactly at the top of the list of Character Traits We Think Worth Cultivating, is it? At least not in the West. In fact, I would venture to say that genuine humility is in the reject pile. Humility looks to a lot of us like weakness.

Day 71 The Religious Exception; and, In God We Trust, Of Course

New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced yesterday that religious ceremonies of no more than ten people would now be permitted in New York State as long as those who gather wear masks and practice strict social-distancing. In his daily news conference, he said, “I get it. Former altar boy.” Mr. Cuomo said of faith leaders, “‘I understand their desire to get back to religious ceremonies as soon as possible. I think that even at this time of stress and when people are so anxious and so confused, I think those religious ceremonies can be very comforting. But we need to find out how to do it, and do it safely and do it smartly.” He’s working with his Interfaith Advisory Council to get it done. The roots of these United States are deeply bound into the concept of religious freedom. It’s a fact that most Americans—persons of faith or not—are taught to be proud of when we learn American history. The founding of this country could, arguably, be said to rest on the freedom to worship as one is guided. Remember those words, freedom to worship.

PandemicSusan CorsoMay 21, 2020metaphysics, coronavirus, COVID-19, #GlobalVaccine, religion, In God We Trust

Day 70 Culture War, Drug War, Civil War; and, The Real Common Denominator

In my lifetime, there’s been a War on Drugs, a War on Terrorism, even a War on Illiteracy. In the history of the United States, the Revolutionary War is the matrix out of which the country was forged. When we managed to handle our exterior enemies enough, we turned to the differences within our own borders, et voila! The American Civil War.Then there are the Culture Wars. In this morning’s Times, San Francisco-based technology commentator Farhad Manjoo, a self-confessed optimist, writes, “Let us not squander another crisis. We need to take a long, hard look at all the ways the pandemic can push this little planet of ours to further ruin—and then work like crazy, together, to stave off the coming hell.” Whoa! What’s happened to Mr. Manjoo? I can tell you. He’s flipped polarities.

Day 69 With Authority Comes Responsibility; and, The Tomorrowland Solution

The I-Know-Better-Than-Everyone-in-Chief is taking hydroxychloroquine, allegedly preventatively, since his exposure to two White House staffers who tested positive for coronavirus. His personal physician says they weighed the “potential benefits and relative risks,” and the president decided, “What do I have to lose?” Even I know the answer to that question. The natural rhythm of your own heartbeat, Idjit. You don’t have to have heart disease for this to happen. Doctors all over the world are issuing caveats left and right, and wringing their hands over his lamentable example. But Mr. Trump doesn’t want to be an example. He doesn’t lead via good example. He wants, nay, demands, unquestioning loyalty, a willingness to be humiliated, and a self-conscious, sycophantic toadying that makes his followers not only seem weak, but be repeatedly weakened.

Day 68 A Genuine Anatomy of Caring; and, WIIFM?

Electricity, as we all know, can dry your hair, cook your dinner, and heat or cool your home. It can also electrocute you. Electricity itself is neutral. How you use it is what determines its outcomes. Strangely, caring is the same way. Caring, like electricity, is neutral. You have to go five definitions deep in the OED before you get to care in the way I mean it: 5. a.5.a An object or matter of care, concern, or solicitude. Under the entry for the verb, it means to provide for. You can actually care about anything, good, bad, or indifferent. Really, anything that matters to you.

Day 67 There's Always Been Activism; and, Now, How Can I Help?

If someone walked up to me and straight-out asked me if I am an activist, I wouldn’t hesitate to answer. “No.”I know activists, some quite well, and the ways I contribute to the social good look nothing like the passionate protesters of wrong that they are. I mean, c’mon, really, I know some of the original members of ACT UP. I know people who lived through the AIDS crisis in San Francisco in the 80s. Those people, they’re real activists. And if that’s the strict definition, then I’m definitely out. I’m not likely ever going to march in the streets, shrieking “Fairies, Faggots, and Dykes! Oh, my!” I was, however, Patience on the float for the opera premiere of Patience & Sarah in a long-ago New York City Pride Parade. But ... then I started to think a little more, dig a little deeper, go a little further into my own history, and you know what? I think I might be an activist, after all.

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

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.