James M. Redwine

COVID-19

Sans Sand

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Just when it looked like it might be safe to leave the beach and go back in the water the beach is disappearing. After more than a year of masks and isolation Peg and I finally got our second Pfizer shots last Friday. We just need to avoid all human contact for one more week. We were anticipating a return to a normal life. Then I read of an alarming new and totally unexpected world crisis, a sand shortage? Yep, that was the cautionary tale screaming from the Internet. I know I should not use my iPhone for anything but ordering from Amazon, but I find it impossible to ignore the AOL pop-ups in my email.  I know better but still click on the cleverly worded come-ons beseeching me to read about global warming, COVID-19, politics, sports or even Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex. This morning as the sun rose I was dinged with an exposé about our planet’s disappearing sands. Had I been aware of the situation I wouldn’t have recognized it even was a problem until I read the CNBC article shouting out the impending catastrophe of sans sand. So, Gentle Reader, just in case you might not have been panicking over this issue either, let me share my newly found angst.

Until this morning about my only concern in regard to sand was Peg’s complaint that I traipse it into our cabin after I have been out walking on the sandstone covered prairie. Peg demands that I leave my boots at the door and slide around in my socks on our bare floors. Now I can tell her I am helping to save the planet when I accumulate sand on her clean floors. She just needs to start bagging it up. Anyway, here’s what the Internet says is as significant to the world as fighting the pandemic.

According to an article on CNBC by Sam Meredith, sand is the world’s most consumed raw material after water and it is, “… an essential ingredient to our everyday lives”. In a “coals to New Castle” type comment the article goes on to say the United State government is hauling in countless tons of sand to protect Florida’s beaches that have been decimated by global warming. Apparently this is a world-wide dilemma and just as some people blame China for COVID-19, China’s over use of sand in massive construction projects accounts for almost 60% of the world use of sand as it is mixed into cement. It takes 10 tons of sand to produce 1 ton of cement.

You, as did I, might think that with such deposits as Sahara or Death Valley or the front yard of JPeg Osage Ranch, we would never run out of sand. However, it turns out that not all sand is created equally.

Desert sands, those created from wind instead of water such as by the seas and rivers, are too smooth to be used for construction so we are depleting our “good” sand too rapidly. There is even a huge illegal enterprise in sand excavation in some countries that has led to mafia type activity or so says CNBC.

As for me, I have resigned myself to continuing to pour cement into fence post holes and hope there will be enough to circle our new barn. If Peg does her part we might be able to make it stretch.

 

 

A Goat Roping

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Last Thursday morning at 8:00 a.m. Peg and I joined supplicants from numerous Oklahoma communities at the Grant County Health Department in Medford, Oklahoma, population one thousand. Medford is 105 miles from our home in Barnsdall, Oklahoma but there were pilgrims there from even further away. The convocation had the feel of a Hadj with the tiny health department being the Ka’bah and Medford being Mecca. Instead of seeking a later reward we were all beseeching the higher authority, our government, for salvation here and now from COVID-19.

The congregation consisted of a continuous stream of persons all of whom had the same color hair, were of similar size and shape and shuffled along as if in fear of falling. Because Medford’s Health Department is staffed with small-town Oklahomans who were born in the 20th century they were unfailingly friendly and efficient. Peg and I arrived early, of course, as did many others and were welcomed in out of the forty mile per hour cold wind gusts into the 10’ x 20’ reception area. We were there about 45 minutes, most of that time being required to see if either of us had a bad reaction to the shots; we did not. However, since these supplicants were mainly friendly refugees from an Oklahoma of the 1940’s and 50’s, in that time we learned more about them and they about us than any government census worker ever would.

Our experience with the fine folks of Medford, most of whom were unpaid volunteers, was difficult to reconcile with America’s over all response to COVID-19. Whereas our federal government should receive praise for developing vaccines in record time, we have fallen way, way short in delivering the vaccine. Every day the battle we are in with the constantly mutating virus becomes more dangerous and ’Ole 19 has already killed over 450,000 of us.

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) has her main character, Milkman, in her novel Song of Soloman thinking, “Perhaps all human relationships boil down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?” Morrison clearly understood Franz Kafka’s (1883-1924) anguished frustration with the legal system in his novel The Trial. Kafka’s main character, Joseph K, cannot even get the legal system to explain what he is charged with or why. William Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) Macbethsums it up: “Life is a tale told by an idiot”. Apparently Morrison, Kafka and Shakespeare were trying to get their governments to provide something as essential as a COVID-19 vaccination or whatever basic public service they needed then.

Whereas most of us are amazed that our government ramped up vaccines in about one year, the euphoria over discovery appears to have interfered with actually inoculating us. It is as if we have been so proud of finding a potential prevention of the plague that we have failed to develop a plan to employ the prevention. At the rate we are inoculating ourselves ’Ole 19 will mutate us out of existence. Supposedly millions of doses of vaccines will soon be shipped to CVS, Walgreens and Walmart. That is great but if our government has to use the existing Internet portal system, the virus will outpace us. We must be able to sign up “at the door” of the pharmacies or have the vaccine delivered and applied at our doors. We have already appropriated trillions of dollars to respond to COVID-19. We have spent enough taxpayer vaccination money to send a trained UPS, FedEx, Amazon worker or National Guard soldier to every one of our 330 million citizens with a needle and a vile of vaccine and the knowledge, training and emergency supplies to check for and respond to any bad reactions. Although in the millions of shots already given there have been virtually no deaths reported. We are allowing an extremely unlikely deadly reaction to the vaccination to interfere with the delivery of the vaccine and the almost guaranteed possibility the virus will continue to kill us in huge numbers if we do not quickly vaccinate a large percentage of our population. Another possibility would be to have the vaccines delivered directly to us and then allow us to contact medical providers of our choice to inject them. After all, millions of us receive billions of doses of medication by mail already.

We inoculated the whole country for polio without so much as a ripple. We all have had shots for smallpox, measles, TB, etc., etc. without this bottleneck. As Jonathan Reiner, Professor of Medicine at George Washington University, said back in January 2021, “The bottleneck is actually the logistics of vaccinating people (not the supply of the vaccine)”. And former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb stated in The Wall Street Journal, “New variants of the virus that appear more contagious increase the urgency to deploy the vaccine as fast as possible”.

The craziness of signing up on Internet portals, waiting in lines of vehicles or waiting in lines outside in the weather adds another level to Dante Alighieri’s (1265-1321) Inferno. Americans can order everything from food to computers over the Internet and get them sent overnight right to our doors with simple instructions on how to use them. A packaged, pre-loaded syringe packed in dry ice is not a space shot problem. A looped YouTube video and public TV demonstration would get to 99% of our cell phones and homes for those who wish to DIY.

If our government does not think we, their bosses, are competent to give ourselves or our families shots then why not use each state’s National Guard or our 2 ½ million regular military personnel. When I joined the United States Air Force fifty-eight years ago, they gave us enough inoculations in one day to save the world from all known diseases and some not even thought of. Surely we can adapt from that system.

By the way, in a week or two after we get the promised email notices from the Oklahoma Board of Health, Peg will have to get back on the online portal to schedule appointments for our second shots at a location somewhere around the state. Hopefully it won’t take a month of checking daily/hourly to schedule the second dose as it did with the first. And, of course, we each have to get a separate appointment within the three to four week allotted period before the next dose is due. All this must take place while the virus continues to out fox us.

Attenuation

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From The Ford Library Museum Website

The season of our discontent is set to begin February 08, 2021. Soon we will be forced to talk to our spouses again and eat an actual meal instead of gobble chicken wings during commercials or at half-times. I can feel the ennui closing in. ♫ It is a long, long time from February to September ♫ when football season returns. It is not that I have no interest in other sports, but other than the Olympic downhill ski race and the baseball World Series I just do not want to watch them on television. On the other hand, I will gladly spend four hours watching Goadie Bowl Tech and Reyfert Hogart Junior College drop passes and fumble kick-offs. Such pursuits as yard work and household chores quickly fade in the afterglow of a football game. Ah well, perhaps it will give me an opportunity to ask Peg what she has been doing since September 2020. Also, I might give some thought to such things as our battle with ’Ole 19 and our political malaise.

Perhaps I can combine my concerns about the end of the football season, the Corona Virus and such political madness as the January 06, 2021 assault on our Capitol including its impending impeachment imbroglio. After all, President Gerald Ford was the hero or villain, choose one, of the President Richard Nixon impeachment controversy and President Lyndon Johnson often alleged Ford’s decisions were affected by Ford’s having played too much football without a helmet. Gerald Ford played center on the University of Michigan football team. Ford graduated from college in 1935, an era when leather helmets were in vogue. For safety reasons leather has been gradually replaced with the rock-hard plastic we now use. Hello, spearing or targeting penalties and TIB’s (traumatic brain injuries). However, from an esthetic viewpoint, the hard plastic provides a better surface for team logos and sticker awards for hard hits.

Football and politics do have some similarities, and when it comes to dealing with misdeeds in either, the legal concept of attenuation is relevant. With football a hard hit with his helmet by one player against the head of another player can be analyzed by re-tracing backwards from the hit. While not even the player himself, or now perhaps herself too, may know for sure if he intended permanent harm, the referees and the re-play booth can carefully review and discuss the event. This may disclose guilt or innocence of the player but is he the only one to blame?

The fanatics who cheer on teams often call for the players to “fight’ or even “kill ’em”. One’s teammates may urge super aggression. Coaches spend months in conditioning drills and two-a-days pre-season practices explaining how starters push the limits while bench setters are more timid. And what about the player’s parents? Who is responsible for engendering mayhem instead of mercy?

The same type of analysis is an element of our criminal justice system. When there is a lynching, how far back the causal chain should punishment go? Is it just the one person who slips the noose over the victim’s neck? What about the on-lookers, the news media that fanned the flames, the leaders who gave rousing speeches, the sworn law officers who did not intervene and the rest of the community who acquiesced in silence either during or after the lynching? Perhaps an entire country might be responsible or even a silently accepting world. How do we decide whether we are applying appropriate punishment or simply burning a few witches to shoulder the blame for everyone?

Then, of course, we need to look at the dynamics of the attenuation itself. Who is making the choices about whom to burn? Are the decisions just or are they just decisions because the ones who execute them have the power to do so? And most importantly, are we a better society because of the choices or are we simply fomenting more targeting? Finally, where and how does it end?

Briefly Speaking

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I.

The Salient Issue 

One method of grappling with what are the most vital issues America must resolve is to first eliminate those issues that blur our thought process. Five years of partisan ill will have sapped our nation’s psyche. Our health and our economy have suffered as we have found it more entertaining to castigate those who disagree with our political views than to make the hard choices required to battle COVID-19 and its devastation of our society. The events of January 06, 2021 and our reactions to them will either continue us on our downward spiral, or perhaps, America can remember and apply the healing lessons from our history.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Gerald Ford (1918-2006) would address the January 06, 2021 attack on our Capitol Building differently. Kant, the great German legal philosopher, would hold it immoral to not require retribution against President Trump for the death and destruction that occurred after Trump’s call for a march on Congress even though President Trump had only fourteen days left to serve when the riot took place. Kant’s position on the legal duty to punish is set forth in the following example. If we envision an island society that decided to dissolve itself completely and leave the island at a time prisoners sentenced to be executed were awaiting their fate, it would be immoral to leave the island without first carrying out the executions. Kant’s rationale for this seemingly needless act was that the blood guilt of the prisoners would attach to the general society if justice was not administered. An eye for an eye would be called for according to Kant.

In contrast, President Ford invoked the wisdom and healing of Jesus when Ford issued a pardon to disgraced ex-President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) for Nixon’s role in covering up the burglary of Democratic National Committee Headquarters. Ford issued the pardon in September only one month after Nixon resigned in August 1974 to avoid impeachment. Instead of retribution, Ford chose mercy, but not just for Nixon; America needed relief too.

Of course, neither revenge nor mercy can, by definition, be perfect justice. However, when it comes to crimes against the State there are larger issues than justice for individuals. The greater good may require a more involved response. Fortunately, we have the wisdom of our Founders and the courage of such leaders as President Ford to aid us in our decision-making process. 

II.

Separation of Powers

Our Founders built our Constitution on the general theory of three equal branches of government. The events since the election on November 03, 2020 give evidence of the abiding legacy left for us in 1789. After the election the Judicial Branch rendered numerous decisions that upheld the Rule of Law. Vice President Pence in the Executive Branch has refused to use the 25th Amendment for political purposes, and the Legislative Branch has resisted attempts to usurp the will of the electorate to de-certify the Electoral College results. Our governmental framework has been stretched but has accommodated pressures from many angles.

All three branches are working together to identify and prosecute those individuals who violated our seat of government with physical destruction and death. With the cooperation of numerous law enforcement agencies and the courts, along with the laws previously enacted by our federal and state legislatures, those who brought nooses, pipe bombs and twist-ties to their pre-meditated crimes are being identified; and if probable cause to commit crimes is shown, and guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is proven using due process of law, just punishment should result. Gentle Reader, next week, if you are available, we can consider the differing treatments of individuals and the issue surrounding the legal concepts of attenuation of culpability. As to President or ex-President Trump, I respectfully submit that continuing to have our country divided about half and half concerning Donald Trump is akin to President Lincoln’s prescient declaration that a house divided against itself will not stand.

With that in mind I submit for your consideration a Gavel Gamut article I wrote right after President Ford died in which it was suggested Ford sacrificed his political career for his country in 1974. I have slightly modified the original article:

III.

Pardon Me, President Ford

(First published 08 January 2007)

President Gerald Ford died December 26, 2006. In a life filled with public service, he will always be best known for his pardon of President Nixon in 1974. President Nixon had personally chosen Gerald Ford to replace the disgraced Vice President Spiro Agnew who resigned in 1973 amid disclosures of bribery while Agnew was Governor of Maryland. Vice President Ford served under President Nixon until Nixon resigned in August of 1974. One month after Nixon resigned, President Ford issued him a full pardon for any crimes Nixon may have committed while president.

At the time, many Americans, including me, were calling for a complete investigation of the Watergate debacle and especially Nixon’s involvement in it. It was a time of a media feeding frenzy and blood in the water. President Ford took the unprecedented step of going personally before Congress and flatly stating that President Nixon and then Vice President Ford had no deal to pardon Nixon if Nixon would resign.

I recall how dubious I was when President Ford stated that he issued the pardon only to help our country to start healing from the loss of confidence caused by Watergate. Yet, after a few months I began to have second thoughts about my initial reaction to the pardon. I realized how much courage it took for President Ford to go straight into the anti-Nixon firestorm sweeping the United States. As a country, we were almost paralyzed by the partisan fighting at home and the War in Vietnam. [Insert 4 years of partisan bickering during the Trump presidency and include at least 1 year of COVID-19.] We needed a new direction and a renewed spirit in 1974 just as we do today. Surely President Ford with his twenty-two (22) years in Congress knew he was committing political suicide by not giving us our pound of flesh. Still, he put his country first. Of course, the country rewarded his sacrifice by booting him from office and electing President Jimmy Carter to replace him.

But during the campaign of 1976, when President Ford came to Evansville, Indiana on April the 23rd, I took our son, Jim, out of school and we went to the Downtown Walkway to see the man who put country above self. For while William Shakespeare almost always got his character analysis right, when it comes to President Ford, “The good he did lives after him.” Julius Caesar, Act III, sc. ii.

Even President Carter, one of America’s most courageous and best former presidents said of his erstwhile political opponent President Ford: “President Ford was one of the most admirable public servants I have ever known.” And when it came to the pardon of President Nixon, Senator Ted Kennedy, while admitting that he had severely criticized the pardon in 1974, said that he had later come to realize that:

“The pardon was an extraordinary act of courage that historians recognize was

truly in the national interest.”

Taking Sides

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There was a time when the largest class of immigrants to the United States came from Great Britain. A large number of those erstwhile Englishmen and their descendants fought two wars with their one-time homeland. In spite of the British going so far as to burn down part of Washington D.C. during one of those wars, we still cleave to Great Britain as our closest ally. Neither we nor the British held grudges.

Then about one hundred years after the War of 1812 against our British cousins we joined with them in WWI against Germany. At the end of WWI, even though there were a great many citizens of the United States who traced their lineage to Germany, we signed on to the mean-spirited Treaty of Versailles in an effort to punish the Germans. Of course, as with many such badly intentioned actions, we also ended up punishing ourselves; WWII resulted. But thanks to such charitable American actions as the Marshall Plan, we made great allies out of modern Germany, Italy and some other WWII adversaries at the end of that conflict.

While Reconstruction and the aftermath of the American Civil War could have been handled much better, it also could have been much worse. Thanks to such attitudes as expressed by President Lincoln and others in both the Union and Confederacy, malice was held down and charity was exhibited. Even with hundreds of thousands of deaths and carnage throughout our country we managed to pull together and build what would become a living monument to ideals that had once been only dreams. America needs much more work to become that more perfect union but nowhere else have humans got so near the brass ring and a generous volksgeist has made that possible.

The spirit of openness, generosity and optimism that pervaded much of America after WWII might be helpful today. While such vital interests as equal rights and due process still require much work by all of us, a cooperative attitude and an impulse to be helpful might assuage our current social and political disagreements. What is less likely to be productive is the placement of unnecessary distance between United States citizens and their governments at all levels: federal; state; county; local and areas generally under government regulation such as transportation.

After 9/11 some governments and industries reacted out of fear and concern. Whereas citizens had normally seen their governments as there to serve them, with the restrictions of 9/11, governments appeared to fear those whom they were instituted to serve and who paid their wages. We began to develop a culture where many in and outside of government and the industries regulated by government felt we lived in an “us versus them” environment.

This might have caused just ennui and nostalgia had COVID-19 not arrived. But with the absolute necessity of all-out governmental and societal warfare against COVID-19, the distances between citizens and their governments have become almost complete. We must have some governmental services and we cannot expect people to perform those tasks if we do not provide for their protection. And we are still months away from a return to normality. But we may want to guard against a possible permanent condition of a bifurcated country with the citizens on one side and their governments generally inaccessible on the other.

With that in mind our current imbroglio involving our national government might be placed among these other lessons from our past. What is not called for is more distance between citizens and their elected and appointed representatives. Perhaps instead of a mean-spirited partisanship a mutual sense of charity tempered with common sense might be more in our country’s long-term best interest.

Scat 2020!

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How was that for a New Year’s Eve? On the other hand, just about anybody who chose to could attend a masked ball in 2020-2021 where many of the loud, inebriated strangers eschewed the masks. But one could still engage in or be subjected to rude behavior and wake up at noon thinking “Oh, no!”. ’Ole 19 may have changed our social interactions but human nature does not metamorphosize so quickly; we are still capable of making poor decisions to which we have given hardly a thought. After all, if we have no regrets have we really lived? With memories of such moments in mind, Peg and I spent New Year’s Eve in front of the fireplace, just we two and a bottle of medium-priced red wine. We gratefully rang out 2020 and truly welcomed 2021 as we reprised some of what the Lone Ranger might refer to as “Those thrilling days of yesteryear!”

In December 1999-January 2000 we decided to ring in the new millennium with a ski trip to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. We skied all day on December 31st then partied at a live music gala to usher in 2000. There were no masks and no temperature checks; where did that world go? Regardless, Peg and I replayed that New Year’s Eve from twenty years ago as this past Saturday we sat in large rockers before the fire and compared 2000 to 2020.

Instead of skiing during the day on New Year’s Eve this year we attended a physical therapy session to help us deal with the aches and pains brought on by the broken bones we each incurred on ski trips after 2000. Then, instead of dancing and drinking as in days of old we returned to our cabin and found a skunk in the live trap I had set. The skunk was not in a festive or forgiving mood. No live music was in the offing. Surely Peg and I have not changed that much in a mere twenty years but I confess I felt no call to celebrate Auld Lang Syne after enduring body manipulation and skunk odorification. Things called out to be dealt with.

There was a time I enjoyed hunting then I lost interest in it. Somehow getting up at o’dark thirty and immersing my body in the vicissitudes of weather for the possibility I might shoot some creature that I would then need to eviscerate and skin before cooking lost out to packaged, store-bought meats. Therefore, for several years about the only wild animal I have communed with has been the occasional hapless house mouse. Then Peg and I bought this cabin in the woods. It came fully furnished with an abundance of spiders and scorpions inside and a plethora of raccoons, armadillos, opossums and skunks outside. My hunting years are now being revisited.

In the two years we have lived in our cabin we have seen our yard extensively cultivated by digging animals and fertilized by scads of their scat. And with the skunks there has often been an accompanying aroma. It may say more about my character than it does about our furry frequenters but I keep watching Bill Murray’s slide into groundhog insanity while I cheer for Murray to take the nuclear option in Caddyshack. At least Murray only had to deal with one invasive specie on that golf course. My war with Mother Nature has been fought on several fronts.

The casualty count so far has been 8 raccoons, 10 opossums, 6 armadillos and 9 skunks. The most recent skunk was the one that joined us on New Year’s Eve. I found it in one of my “humane” live traps near the foundation to the cabin. The skunk was at least as upset as I was; he exuded his displeasure in the manner you might expect.

Now I know some people trap such critters, drive out to the countryside and then release them with a self-righteous feeling of humanitarianism. Of course, then the pests become a problem for innocent other residents. I uncharitably expect such misguided miscreants are the same type of people who throw their trash out on the public right-of-ways without a thought of who must endure their boorish behavior and put up with their scat. How about just putting the refuse in a trash bin and not imposing their nuisances on others? The only satisfaction I find as Peg and I pick up the trash along our county road is that most of the trash I see is beer and soft drink cans and empty fried food containers. I content myself with the thought that the slobs who defile our environment may end up with health problems and indigestion. As for their release of varmints instead of properly disposing of them, I can only hope some other thoughtless soul is doing the same thing to them.

In that regard, I suggest two New Year’s Resolutions for general consideration: (1) properly dispose of trash, and (2) do not impose pests on others. And, by the way, Happy New Year! Let’s hear it for the passing of 2020 which was pretty well filled with plenty of scat of its own.