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SURVIVING THE PANDEMIC: Living in Your Living Room (Good news, bad news)

Published: Apr 15, 2020
Category: Pandemic: Dispatches and Essentials

GOOD NEWS: DON’T NEED YOUR STIMULUS MONEY? WANT TO HELP? PLEASE BOOKMARK THIS
GiveDrectly.org identifies households that desperately need money. Why? “We believe people living in poverty deserve the dignity to choose for themselves how best to improve their lives — cash enables that choice.” Each household gets $1,000. GiveDirectly has recently helped 1,204 households in 17 states. (If you like, you can donate to a specific city.) Legitimate? “Since 2009, we’ve delivered over $140 million in cash directly into the hands of over 130,000 families living in poverty. And no, people don’t just blow it on booze.”

GOOD NEWS: JOIN A CSA
Community Supported Agriculture supports small farmers and brings you fresh-from-the-farm vegetables. Modern Farmer is compiling a list of CSAs in all 50 states. Click here. Or here.

GOOD NEWS: JILL BIDEN
Melania Trump obtained US citizenship on a EB-1 visa reserved for immigrants with “extraordinary ability” and “sustained national and international acclaim.” Nicknamed the “Einstein Visa,” the EB-1 is in theory reserved for people who are highly acclaimed in their field – the government cites Pulitzer, Oscar, and Olympic winners as examples – as well as respected academic researchers and multinational executives.

Jill Biden also has “extraordinary ability.” She has been a substitute teacher, taught English and reading in high schools for 13 years, earned a PhD., taught adolescents with emotional disabilities at a psychiatric hospital, and is now an English professor. She married Joe Biden four years after his wife and daughter were killed in a car crash. Last year she wrote a book, “Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself.” In the acknowledgments, she thanks Lisa Dickey — some of you read her book, Bears in the Streets: Three Journeys Across a Changing Russia — “who listened to my stories for hours and hours and hours. She skillfully shaped the framework for all of my stories, prodding invaluable perspective. Lisa is a master of her craft. Ultimately, she offered friendship, and for that I am grateful.” [To buy the book, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

Here are two excerpts from the book:

It’s hard to know what you owe a spouse who died before you came along. A lot of people wrestle with the fact that the love of their lives loved someone else first—and perhaps never stopped loving that person. Some people feel jealousy. Some people feel inadequate. Some people let questions of what would have been eat away at their peace of mind. As President Theodore Roosevelt is rumored to have said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”

I understand those complicated emotions, but I have never felt threatened by Neilia. Joe has always made sure that I feel his love for me—in fact, he often jokes that he loves me more than I love him. How can he measure that? I don’t know, but from the beginning, I knew that if he could love Neilia that deeply, that completely, then maybe I could be loved that completely too. And that this could be the love I had long been looking for—the kind of love my parents had.

Joe used to tell the boys that “Mommy sent Jill to us.” He believed it, so the boys did as well. How else could they make any sense of the injustice of losing their mother and sister? They had to have faith that the incredible love Neilia had for them could keep going—could somehow bring them a person who would love them as much as they needed. The boys clung to that faith as they grew up. It was a gift Joe gave them—a way to make sense of the world.

I didn’t want Neilia’s memory hidden away. I didn’t want the boys to think they had to choose between us or feel like they had to put aside that part of themselves. And so we made space for her. We didn’t live in the home Neilia had shared with Joe, but she was there, nonetheless. We kept her pictures displayed around the house. She reappeared in Joe’s stories. I knew the boys carried a piece of her with them, and I caught glimpses of what I knew must be her laugh, the crinkle of her nose, the curve of her brow in their faces. I wanted Joe to remind them over and over again just how much she loved them. Because she would always be their mother. There was no “us” without her.

Every December 18, the day of the accident, we let the world stop. Joe stayed home from work and the boys went in late to school. We went together to the 7 a.m. Mass at our parish, St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Wilmington. After that, Joe and the boys would go to the cemetery, while I went home and prepared coffee, bagels, fruit salad, and yogurt for the extended family—Jack and Val, Mom Mom and Dada, and whoever else wanted to come by. Joe had told me that Neilia loved white roses, so I would buy a grave blanket and add three white roses with baby’s breath – one for Joe, Hunter, and Beau. I put it in the back of Joe’s car so he didn’t have to think about it. When they got to the cemetery, he and the boys could share their moments and memories together.

For years, I never joined them; it was their time with Neilia. But the year after Beau died, for the first time, I went with Joe. I held his hand as we stood there in the chilly December morning, and I thought of the words I knew were spoken at her eulogy: “Death lies on her like an untimely frost /Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.” I thought about the family we had made together—the three of us. I owed her so much: my loyalty, my gratitude for the gift of these beautiful boys, and yes, my love. And if, indeed, she had sent me, I hope she’s grateful she did.

[As second lady, Dr. Biden continued to teach classes at Northern Virginia Community College]

For the Secret Service, this was a whole new territory. At first, they wanted to be in the classroom with me, but I couldn’t have them sitting right there in the front row—the students would be too intimidated. I hoped not only that would my students would not notice there were Secret Service agents nearby, but also that they wouldn’t even realize I was the Second Lady. And as unlikely as it seems, many of them didn’t.

So the agents dressed like college students, and even carried backpacks — of course, the backpacks had their “equipment” in them rather than books. The average age of students at NOVA is 28, so the agents didn’t look out of place. There was a seating area just down the hall from my classroom, and they’d sit there while I taught, alongside students who were studying and reading—and no one was any the wiser. Their ability and willingness to do their jobs while seamlessly blending in was remarkable.

We had decided in advance that when students signed up for classes, mine would be listed as being taught by staff, rather than Dr. Biden. On the first day of class, I’d write my name on the board and say, “Hi, I’m Jill Biden—but just call me Dr. B.” The vast majority of my students are first-generation arrivals from other countries, and for many of them, English is their second language. Most didn’t notice the Biden name, and if they did, they didn’t put together that I was married to the vice president.

Every so often, a student would figure it out. She’d raise her hand and say, “Excuse me, may I ask you a personal question?”

“Nope!” I’d say, and change the subject.

Once, a student came blowing into my office, exclaiming, “Dr. B! I saw you last night on the television! I said to my mother, ‘Mom! Mom! Look! That’s my English teacher with Michelle Obama!’”

I just looked at her, smiling. She went on: “Then my mom rolled her eyes at me and said, ‘That’s not your English teacher. That’s the Second Lady!’” This student had gone the whole semester not having a clue who I was, but I laughed and admitted it. She clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide, and laughed too.

Once, a student in her mid-sixties—a woman who was studying to become a drug counselor—came up and whispered in my ear, “I know who you are. And no one else here does.”

I looked at her out of the corner of my eye and whispered back, “That’s right. And we’re gonna keep it that way.”

TODAY’S MUSIC
“Yellow Submarine,” performed by Zen monks

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE: A HISTORY CLASS
Students: David Spade, Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, John Candy
Teacher: Jerry Seinfeld

BAD NEWS: NEW YORK UPDATE
from the Times: There are more COVID fatalities in New York than the city had been counting.
The city has added more than 3,700 additional people who were presumed to have died of the coronavirus but had never tested positive.
Far more people have died in New York City, on a per-capita basis, than in Italy — the hardest-hit country in Europe.

Translation: About one in every 800 New Yorkers has died of the coronavirus.
In just the five boroughs, the deaths are equivalent to 47 Boeing MAX jet crashes.
Ten more MAX crashes expected in the next 24 hours.

BAD NEWS: JUST WHAT YOU THOUGHT, MAYBE WORSE
A Butler reader, frustrated by the daily White House press conferences, poses a question. A simple question. Not yet asked: “How come, Mr. President, when you are doing such a great job managing this pandemic, the USA has so many cases and so many deaths, way more than any other country and in particular way more than China, where it all started?”

If Trump were to answer truthfully: “In January and February, I held 9 rallies and played golf 6 times. Yes, I was impeached, but that ended February 5. I paid no attention to the scientists who said mass testing was priority #1. Now the plague is killing Americans, and it’s too late to test. That’s for the states. The federal government will confiscate masks and ventilators so my friends can auction them. To answer your question, I have all of the authority but I take no responsibility. Blame? Next question.”

You never expect candor from the White House. You can from Dr. Fauci, but he’s now forced to stand, mute, wasting his time, as the President rants. Truth lies elsewhere. Like Harvard. This is from today’s edition of Harvard’s Daily Gazette. (You don’t need a Harvard connection to get it. Sign up here.)

These findings, published online in the journal Science, were produced by scientists from the Harvard School of Public Health’s Departments of Epidemiology and of Immunology and Infectious Diseases.

Harvard researchers examining the common cold for hints about how the COVID-19 virus might behave said that summer may not save us and that repeated periods of social distancing may be needed to keep serious cases from overwhelming the hospital system.

Short-term immunity like that conferred by colds lasts less than a year and would, after the initial pandemic peak, lead to annual COVID-19 outbreaks. Permanent immunity, on the other hand, would eliminate the virus from circulation for five or more years after its initial outbreak.

Researchers also looked at the impact of single and multiple episodes of social distancing on keeping patient numbers low enough that the health care system can handle them. The most effective intervention is a series of social-distancing periods, coupled with effective testing that monitors illness resurgence so measures can be reinstituted before cases overwhelm the system.
Such a scenario, researchers said, not only results in the fewest deaths, it also allows the population to gradually gain immunity to the virus.

Ashish Jha, K.T. Li Professor of Global Health and director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said those who see U.S. business interests and public health interests as pitted against each other are wrong. In fact, he said, the two need each other to manage a smooth transition to whatever the new normal may be.

“If there is a way for greater engagement between public health and business, I think that’s how we get out of this,” Jha said. “If it becomes us versus you guys, we all lose. We have both a horrible number of deaths and a wrecked economy.”

Before social distancing can be eased, Jha said, the number of new cases should have declined for two weeks and there should be ample testing — as many as 500,000 per day nationally, three to four times the current rate. In addition, he said, the health care system should be beefed up and exhausted doctors and nurses given a breather before taking steps that will likely cause cases to rise again.
Large gatherings such as baseball games would still have to wait, Jha said, but restaurants, bars, and workplaces would likely be able to open, albeit with adjustments made to keep people a safer distance apart. He also predicted that in-person college courses, also limited in size, could restart in the fall.

Even air travel could resume, he said, with steps such as pre-flight automatic testing for the virus and periods of self-quarantine on return.

“There’s a lot we can do to make opening a reality, but it won’t be back to ‘normal’ until we have a vaccine, which I think is a good 12 to 18 months away,” Jha said.