Miriam,
I run hot and cold on the subject of our Species survival chances.
Last night was one of those nights when I awoke at about 1:30 A.M. and
lay awake until turning on Democracy Now, at 5:00 A.M. So here I sit
at 11:30 A.M., half asleep and feeling flat. So the bottom line is
that I am not in a neutral frame of mind and I will avoid commenting
on our Human Chances.
We're still undecided as to whether to continue serving the Older
Blind and Low Vision folks. We can do quite a bit via telephone, but
we still need to have some face to face contact. I am quite nervous
about entering any of the many Retirement Apartments or Assisted
Living Facilities, or Rehabilitation Facilities. No matter how
careful the staff try to be, these places depend upon individual
services, which means that staff members must go from room to room,
and eventually I suspect meals will not be delivered to the resident's
door.
I had hoped governor Inslee would make a decision by Memorial Day, but
it's not looking that way. Besides, even if they partially open back
up, we won't know whether the COVID-19 will increase its numbers or
not.
Some reports tell us that the virus has yet to peek in the rural
areas. So far our county has only 30 cases of COVID-19, with no
deaths. I want to do my part in keeping the number of cases at 30,
with no deaths.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/22/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I think things are different now. I think we're at the end of human history.
Climate crisis, impending nuclear conflict, and technology which is very
different from fire and stone implements.
And speaking about disappearing emails, after all of my technical help:
Londa, and Microsoft Disability twice, just now when I returned to the
computer, I saw that the emails had stopped arriving at 9:30 this morning.
Thank God, all I had to do is reboot the computer to get new ones. But it
seems like this nightmare will never end!
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, May 22, 2020 11:21 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Class War - Not the Media Hokey Pokey - Is
What It's All About
I had written one of my early morning long, rambling notes...and then it
went away. No sign of it anywhere.
But I was moved to note, after reading the email, that our current class
struggle is noteworthy only because it is our current class struggle. The
pages of my history books tell of one class struggle after another.
The story is always the same, the rich become fat and sluggish, and the poor
take over, and begin the story from the beginning, with new characters but
the same old plot.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/22/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Class War - Not the Media Hokey Pokey - Is What It's All About By
Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
21 May 20
Journalists aren't supposed to "bury the lead." But when death is the
topic and corporate power is the culprit, the connection routinely
goes unmentioned.
Class war - waged methodically from the top down - is so constant and
pervasive that it might seem unremarkable. The 24/7 siege to make
large companies more profitable and the wealthy more wealthy is going
on all around us. In the process, it normalizes avoidable death as a
cost of doing business.
Overall, news media are part of that normalization. While negative
coverage of Donald Trump has been common due to his handling of the
pandemic, media outrage has been muted in relation to the magnitude of
the dying in our midst - at a time when most of the dying could have been
prevented.
Deaths tend to become less "newsworthy" as the numbers mount and shock
gives way to tacit media acceptance. A new lethal reality is built on
dominant structures that keep serving the financial priorities of the
powerful.
Emphasis is often less about saving lives and more about saving the
stock market. The storyline becomes more about "opening," less about
dying, even though opening is sure to cause more dying.
Patterns of economic injustice are so basic to U.S. society that they
amount to deep cracks in its foundation. Under the weight of
catastrophe, whether hurricane or recession or pandemic, the cracks
split wider and wider as more human beings - disproportionately poor
and people of color - fall into the abyss.
Corporate media narratives routinely bypass such core truths about
cause and effect. Heartbreaking stories have scant context. Victims
without victimizers.
Fueled by ultra-greed, Trump's approach is a kind of scorched-earth
nonstop campaign, an extreme version of the asymmetrical class warfare
going on all the time.
"The world before COVID-19 was a deeply unequal place," the
progressive publisher OR Books noted in an email to supporters this
week. "Now, in the pandemic, those inequalities are only more stark.
Across America and around the globe are fabulous riches for a tiny few
and deepening immiseration for everyone else."
A swiftly infamous Instagram post by David Geffen ("net worth" $8.7
billion)
in late March, showing his $590 million yacht at sunset as the
pandemic took deadly hold in the United States ("isolated in the
Grenadines avoiding the virus . I hope everybody is staying safe"),
became a symbol transcending avowed politics. Geffen is no
right-winger. He's a liberal. In the 2018 election cycle he gave $1
million to Democratic Congressional super PACs.
He
went on to become a donor to Pete Buttigieg's presidential campaign.
But the most pernicious and ultimately destructive actions of the
super-wealthy are not so overtly gauche. The poisons are laced with
soothing PR, while the rich movers and shakers play by the rules that
capitalism has constructed for the voracious acquisition of wealth at
the expense of everyone else. In that sense, the worst class-war
crimes are the ones that adhere to the rules and don't get singled out
for condemnation.
Consider the pathology of Jeff Bezos, reputedly the world's richest
person, who commented that he couldn't think of much else to spend his
money on besides programs for space travel, while back on planet Earth
the extent of misery due to poverty is staggering. Said Bezos: "The
only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by
converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it."
For the likes of Bezos and other elite winners of riches, in the words
of songwriter Tracy Chapman, a future awaits: "I won't die lonely /
I'll have it all prearranged / A grave that's deep and wide enough /
For me and all my mountains o' things."
A few months into 2020, capitalism is running amuck in tandem with the
coronavirus, like some headless horseman galloping over dead bodies.
Meanwhile, for U.S. news media, accustomed to covering faraway
disasters, a reflex has set in close to home - turning the page on
deaths, increasingly presenting them as numbers. An anesthetized pall
of acceptance is descending on us.
"For the person who dies there is an end, but this is not so for the
person who grieves," psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz has pointed out. "The
person who mourns goes on living and for as long as he [or she] lives
there is always the possibility of feeling grief." In his book "The
Examined Life," Grosz
wrote: "My experience is that closure is an extraordinarily compelling
fantasy of mourning. It is the fiction that we can love, lose, suffer
and then do something to permanently end our sorrow."
The corporate system is looking for its own forms of social "closure"
in the midst of this pandemic's colossal deadly upheaval. Already,
we're supposed to accept.
Maybe you don't want to call it class war. But whatever you call it,
the system always makes a killing.