Words. Ideas. Actions.

21 March 2023

Earlier tonight, I was watching an episode of American Masters about Dr. Anthony Fauci. It was a retrospective of his career, looking back not just at his role in recent years fighting the spread of COVID-19, but his earlier work during the start of the AIDS epidemic as well. It was a lucky coincidence for a couple of reasons. The first, and easy reason to explain is the fact that the title of today’s post was one of the Soundgarden song titles I had no idea how I was going to work into these. But the other reason is because I’ve been thinking about how and why we make the choices we make in the face of pandemics. The only conclusion I’ve come to is that, like a lot of our other choices here in the United States, it comes down to power and influence. 

If we look at the start of both the AIDS and COVID-19 outbreaks, it seems like we didn’t take them seriously until they started entering our personal lives. And if you didn’t have someone close to you who was sick, from either of these, you had the luxury to almost ignore them. Or worse, blame people who were sick. We do this a lot, I feel like, and not just with epidemics. 

Look at what’s happening to our banking system. In the last few weeks, a certain demographic of people in the U.S. basically caused institutions to fail based on nothing more than their emotions. But where was all this manic energy to save people’s money in 2008? Back then, it would have been just as prudent — and probably less expensive — to pay off the home mortgage loans for people who were being steamrolled by banks deemed “too big to fail” which were packaging and repackaging their homes and hopes for generational wealth in insipid schemes to pad the billions they were already making. 

Over and over, we elect and reelect leaders who make decisions for the median demographic of their constituent population. We repeatedly ignore the marginalized in our communities, despite the overwhelming evidence that when we invest in those who are most in need, everyone ends up doing better. Just look at the work of Judy Heumann. But there’s no immediate profit in helping people. No financial gain in investing in teachers and school staff and students. No dividend in weening people off drugs. No cash in rehabilitating criminals. But when we don’t, these underserved students aren’t prepared for the work ahead of them. Those who are addicted pull services and resources away from other city needs. And our incarcerated population is left with few choices outside of shackles, if we ever even let them out. 

Watching the Fauci story was just a reminder of what a missed opportunity these last few years have been. We could have made better choices. Selected more compassionate leaders. Rethought what and who is important. But instead, we’re back where we started. And heading in the wrong direction. If we’re not going to learn our lessons after 2020, then will we ever?

See you tomorrow?

13 January 2023

Last night, just after getting yesterday’s post up, I caught the beginning of “Amanpour & Co.” which featured a segment with Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious-disease physician and epidemiologist, senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the editor at large of Kaiser Health News. She’s also Grant Wahl’s wife. After her recent piece in the New York Times, Amanpour had her on to talk about misinformation, specifically around COVID-19 vaccinations, and how her loss became a central piece of propaganda for purveyors of misinformation online.

This led me to look for her other recent appearances on the topic. She’s been on NPR, CBS, and the “PBS Newshour,” among other outlets. She tells the story of how she wanted to get the truth about Grant’s death out to the public as soon as possible. Her quick efforts seemed to tamp down a lot of the initial misinformation, but after more misinformation started filling social media sites following Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin’s cardiac arrest on the field just a few weeks later, she felt it was important to head into the breach once again. 

One of the ways she recommends fighting these conspiracy theories is by pairing facts with empathy. But how do we do it at scale? Not all of us have access to the New York Times op-ed page. And with companies like Twitter gutting their content moderation teams, even the entities which were once trying to battle mis- and disinformation at a large scale are throwing in the towel under the guise of “free speech.” 

I wish I could be more hopeful about these efforts, but the game of Whac-A-Mole we have to employ to combat all that’s out there is just not sustainable. And the pending machine-learning revolution is only going to bake our existing shortcomings into the ones and zeros of machines repeating the same poor decision making which got us into this predicament in the first place, only now at potentially quantum speeds.

I was stunned when Grant died. I wrote about it as best I could shortly after it happened. I still shake my head in disbelief when thinking about what a shock it was. And is. If there’s one good thing to come out of all this it’s Dr. Gounder’s efforts to cement Grant’s legacy in a beneficial, meaningful way. By protecting and empowering Grant’s memory, whether it ends up being through a journalism award or scholarship, and potentially putting out an anthology of his work, the ideas and ideals he stood for can live on long after his final whistle.

See you tomorrow?

05 January 2023

First a caveat: I think I understand the rules for voting on the Speaker of the House. The following fever-dream scenario only works if I have an accurate understanding of them. If you know better, please enlighten me. And with that, let’s go.

Last night, I had one of those “ideas that come to you in the middle of the night and keep you from falling back asleep” moments that I just couldn’t get out of my head for the rest of the day while watching the vote for Speaker on C-SPAN. I noticed that most of the members in the House, whether negotiating or voting or just generally creeping people out, are doing so without masks on. After everyone has gathered for the holidays. And traveled from their home states. And been confined in the same chamber for hours on end, day after day. Taking into account the latest COVID-19 infection rates in DC, it’s safe to assume that of the 434 currently voting members, 52 will probably test positive in the next day or two. 

Now, let’s get another few caveats out of the way: The first is that all the members are testing regularly. I honestly don’t think we can assume that, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, shall we? Second, let’s also assume that if a member or Representative-elect does test positive, they’ll do the right thing and stay away from the House chamber. Again, I hope that we can trust them on this, but it’s hard to take some of them at their word. Lastly, let’s make a conservative estimate about infection rates, cutting it in half to 6%. That means that of the 434 voting members, 26 will have positive tests.

With all this in mind, we’ll keep going. My understanding of the House rules is that a Speaker needs a majority of the votes cast. So, as the House stands today with 434 votes, the nominee needs 50% plus one [(434 ÷ 2) + 1 = 218] votes to win. Which also explains why, despite continually getting a plurality of the votes (212 to 202, for most of the 11 rounds of voting), Hakeem Jeffries also falls short of the threshold for the majority of votes. 

Here’s where the fever dream starts to really kick in. Going back to the COVID positivity rates, and assuming it hits both Democrats and Republicans in equal measures, that means 13 people from each party would have positive tests and would be unable to vote. In this scenario, that would leave 199 Democrats and 209 Republicans to vote for Speaker, making the total number of votes 408, lowering the majority needed to 205. And, extending the positivity rate to the 20 holdouts, that means at least 1, but probably 2 of the never-McCarthy voters would be unable to continue casting their protest votes. That scenario would play out in vote totals something like this:

Hakeem Jeffries 199
Kevin McCarthy 191
Other nominees 18

As you can see, this means there’s still no majority for Speaker. But I don’t think that’s the end of the story. It means that the Democrats are only a handful of votes from winning the Speaker’s vote. And if we make another leap and assume “Those least likely to worry about getting covid (Republicans) have been those most likely to get covid,” then we might also speculate that positivity rates for the House might hit Republicans in a slightly higher percentage than Democrats. And if it‘s only by 1 or 2% more, that could be all it takes for my fever dream to become a reality.   

Now, I want to be clear here: I don’t think that this is going to happen. But I watched a lot of the West Wing marathon on HLN over the holidays, and I have a feeling that some Sorkin may have gotten into me. But these numbers are very possible. And also, very unlikely. Nevertheless, I’ll keep watching each and every vote, running the numbers to see if everyone is still voting (did you notice the last few votes were cast by only 432 members?), wondering how many members are going to keep showing up, repeating the same process over and over until a majority prevails.

See you tomorrow?

06 December 2022

Today felt very fragmented. It reminded me of reading Tweets for hours at a time, constantly context shifting. It’s been a while since I felt like this. And I’m not a fan. Let’s start with the number of items on my mind. There are a lot. And when I get like this, I need an outlet. But first, a story: 

During my senior year in college, my best friend and I won a trip to Mexico. One of the many memorable things that we came back with was the concept of worry dolls. As I remember the explanation, when you have something you’re worried about, you whisper it to one of these small, woven figures, place it in its box under a pillow, and then get a good night’s sleep. Ideally, in the morning, the doll did the worrying for you while you got some sound sleep. 

If you’ll allow, I’m going to spend a few minutes using these paragraphs as today’s worry dolls, in the hopes that leaving them here will help with my discomfort. 

In an homage to a recurring theme here, let’s start with Twitter. The news there keeps getting worse. And more surreal. All while I have this nagging burden to help as many people as possible find new roles, especially people in The States on visas. 

Let’s move on to my current role. We had what’s been termed as a “lift and shift” reorganization, meaning they took my entire org, from Director all the way down, and placed it under a different leadership team. It’s left me feeling unsettled, both literally and figuratively, while I wait for a better understanding of new goals and priorities while staring at an unfinished 2022 to-do list. 

Now, to politics. As I type these words, results in the Georgia senatorial run-off election are looking good for Senator Warnock’s re-election. But even as I breathe a sigh of relief, I see a gathering storm on the horizon in the form of the 2024 election. It’s like we’re always holding our breath, on constant alert. And I just want to come up for air.

Then, there are the self-imposed expectations that the holidays bring. I know this is an area where I can do a lot of work in relief on my own, but I keep putting pressure on myself to overdeliver, probably overcompensating for my perceived shortcomings as a father and husband by over-purchasing gifts. Nothing is sufficient, and everything falls short. Not to mention the cost of absolutely everything is way higher than we budgeted. 

And that brings us to the bigger, uncontrollable items, which I’ll just list because I can’t even fathom where to start finding solutions for them (which is probably why they vex me in my sleep). There’s the probably-pending doom from climate change. And the dire economic outlook for the upcoming one, maybe two, years. Oh, and the fact that hundreds are still dying every day from a pandemic which is much worse than people care to admit. And the fact that those health outcomes are, in part, due to the racial disparities so rampant in our healthcare system (more aptly characterized as our insurance empire). 

Unfortunately, I think I could keep listing items for another hour, or so, but I do want to let these worry ’graphs get to work so that I can get some sleep. I hope my worrying out loud doesn’t add to your own list, but if it did, please find some worry dolls of your own, and take care of yourself tonight. 

See you tomorrow?