Good. I always wonder if posting this stuff has any impact at all.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, August 10, 2020 9:52 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: How Not to Lose the Lockdown Generation
As always, Miriam, thank you. Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges all on the same day!
I'm posting Naomi Klein's article on the ACB chat list. I'm not changing any
minds, but some of my posts do get reactions.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/10/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
How Not to Lose the Lockdown Generation By Naomi Klein, The Intercept
07 August 20
Lessons from the New Deal point the way forward in the era of Covid-19.
Picture this: You live in rural Arkansas and tragedy strikes. A family
member has fallen ill with that contagious respiratory illness that
has already killed so many — but you don’t have enough space in your
small home to quarantine them in a room of their own. Your relative’s
case doesn’t appear to be life-threatening, but you are terrified that
their persistent cough will spread the illness to more vulnerable
family members. You call the local public health authority to see if
there is room in local hospitals, and they explain that they are all
stretched too thin with emergency cases. There are private facilities, but
you can’t afford those.
Not to worry, you are told: A crew will be by shortly to set up a
sturdy, well-ventilated, portable, tiny house in your yard. Once
installed, your family member will be free to convalesce in comfort.
You can deliver home-cooked meals to their door and communicate
through open windows — and a trained nurse will be by for regular
examinations. And no, there will be no charge for the house.
This is not a dispatch from some future functional United States, one
with a government capable of caring for its people in the midst of
spiraling economic carnage and a public health emergency. It’s a
dispatch from this country’s past, a time eight decades ago when it
similarly found itself in the two-fisted grip of an even deeper
economic crisis (the Great Depression), and a surging contagious
respiratory illness (tuberculosis).
Yet the contrast between how U.S. state and federal government met
those challenges in the 1930s, and how they are failing so murderously
to meet them now, could not be starker. Those tiny houses are just one
example, but they are a revelatory one for the sheer number of
problems those humble structures attempted to solve at once.
Known as “isolation huts,” the little clapboard houses were
distributed to poor families in several states. Small enough to fit on
the back of a trailer, they had just enough space for a bed, chair,
dresser, and stove, and were outfitted with large screened-in windows
and shutters to maximize the flow of fresh air and sunshine — considered
essential for TB recovery.
As physical structures, the TB huts were an elegant answer to the
public health challenges posed by crowded homes on the one hand and
expensive private sanatoriums on the other. If houses were unable to
accommodate safe patient quarantines, then the state, with
Washington’s help, would just bring an addition to those houses for the
duration of the illness.
It’s worth letting that sink in, given the learned helplessness that
pervades the U.S. today. For months, the White House hasn’t been able
to figure out how to roll out free Covid-19 tests at anything like the
scale required, let alone contact tracing, never mind quarantine
support for poor families. Yet in the 1930s, during a much more
desperate economic time for the country, state and federal agencies
cooperated to deliver not just free tests but free houses.
And that is only the beginning of what makes it worth dwelling on the
TB huts . The cabins themselves were built by very young men in their
late teens and early 20s who were out of work and had signed up for
the National Youth Administration. “The State Board of Health
furnishes the materials for these cottages and NYA supplies the
labor,” explained Betty and Ernest Lindley, authors of a 1938 history
of the program. “The total average cost of one hut is $146.28,” or
about $2,700 in today’s dollars.
The TB cabins were just one of thousands upon thousands of projects
taken on by the 4.5 million young people who joined the NYA: a vast
program started in 1935 that paired young people in economic need, who
could not find jobs in the private sector, with publicly minded work
that needed doing. They gained marketable skills, while earning money
that allowed many to stay, or return to, high school or college. Other
NYA projects including building some of the country’s most iconic
urban parks, repairing thousands of dilapidated schools and outfitting
them with playgrounds; and stocking classrooms with desks, lab tables,
and maps the young workers had made and painted themselves. NYA
workers built huge outdoor pools and artificial lakes, trained to be
teaching and nursing aides, and even built entire youth centers and
small schools from scratch, often while living together in “resident
centers.”
The NYA served as a kind of urban complement to FDR’s better-known
youth program, the Civilian Conservation Corps, launched two years
earlier. The CCC employed some 3 million young men from poor families
to work in forests and farms: planting more than 2 billion trees,
shoring up rivers from erosion, and building the infrastructure for
hundreds of state parks. They lived together in a network of camps,
sent money home to their families, and put on weight at a time when
malnutrition was epidemic. Both the NYA and the CCC served a dual
purpose: directly helping the young people involved, who found
themselves in desperate straights, and meeting the country’s most
pressing needs, whether for reforested lands or more hands in hospitals.
Like all New Deal programs, the NYA and CCC were stained by racial
segregation and discrimination. And the gender roles were — let’s just
say that the girls discovered they could sew, can, and heal; and the
boys discovered they could plant, build, and weld. Black girls in
particular were streamed into domestic work.
Yet the scale of these two programs, which together altered the lives
of well over 7 million young people over the course of a decade, puts
contemporary governments to shame. Today, millions upon millions of
young people are beginning their adulthood with the ground collapsing
beneath their feet. The service jobs so many young adults depend on
for rent and to pay off student debt have vanished. Many of the
industries they had hoped to enter are firing, not hiring. Internships
and apprenticeships have been canceled via mass emails, and promised
job offers have been revoked.
These economic losses, combined with the decision of many colleges and
universities to close residences and move online, have abruptly
severed countless young adults from their support systems, pushed many
into homelessness, and others back into their childhood bedrooms. Many
of the homes young people now find themselves in are under severe
economic strain and are not safe or welcoming, with LGBTQ youth at heightened
risk.
All of this is layered on top of the pain of the virus itself, which
has spread grief and loss through millions of families. And that is
now mixing with the trauma of tremendous police violence directed at
crowds of mostly young Black Lives Matter demonstrators, compounding
the murderous events that precipitated the protests in the first
place. In the background, as always, is the shadow of climate
breakdown, not to mention the fact that when members of this
generation first heard terms like “lockdown” and “shelter in place”
related to the pandemic, many of their minds immediately turned to the
terrorizing active shooter drills U.S. schools have had them practicing since
early childhood.
It should be little wonder, then, that depression, anxiety, and
addiction are ravaging young lives.
According to a survey conducted by National Center for Health
Statistics and the Census Bureau last month, 53 percent of people aged
18-29 reported symptoms of anxiety and/or depression. Fifty-three
percent. That’s more than
13 percentage points higher than the rest of the population, which
itself was off the charts compared with this time last year.
And that still may be a dramatic undercount. Mental Health America,
part of the National Health Council, released a report in June based
on surveys of nearly 5 million Americans. It found that “younger
populations including teens and young adults (25<) are being hit
particularly hard” by the pandemic, with 90 percent “experiencing symptoms of
depression.”
Some of that suffering is finding expression in another invisible
crisis of the Covid era: a dramatic increase in drug overdoses, with
some parts of the country reporting increases over last year of 50
percent. It should all be a reminder that when we talk about being in
the midst of a cataclysm on par with the Great Depression, it isn’t
only GDP and employment rates that are depressed. Huge numbers of
people are depressed as well, particularly young people.
This is, of course, a global crisis. U.N. Secretary-General António
Guterres recently warned that the world faces “a generational
catastrophe that could waste untold human potential, undermine decades
of progress, and exacerbate entrenched inequalities.” In a video
message, he said, “We are at a defining moment for the world’s
children and young people. The decisions that governments and partners
take now will have lasting impact on hundreds of millions of young
people, and on the development prospects of countries for decades to
come.”
As in the 1930s, this generation is already being referred to as a
“lost generation” — but compared to the Great Depression, almost
nothing is being done to find them, certainly not at the governmental level
in the U.S.
There
are no ambitious and creative programs being designed to offer steady
income beyond expanded summer job programs, and nothing designed to
arm them with useful skills for the Covid and climate change era. All
Washington has offered is a temporary break on student loan
repayments, set to expire this fall.
Young people are discussed, of course. But it is almost exclusively to
shame them for Covid partying. Or to debate (usually in their absence)
the question of whether or not they will be permitted to learn
in-person in classrooms, or whether they will have to stay home, glued
to screens. Yet what the Depression era teaches us is that these are
not the only possible futures we should be considering for people in
their late teens and 20s, especially as we come to grips with the
reality that Covid-19 is going to be reshaping our world for a long
time to come. Young people can do more than go to school or stay home;
they can also contribute enormously to the healing of their
communities.
While guest hosting Intercepted this week, I dug into what it would
take to launch youth employment programs on the scale on the NYA and
CCC — programs that, like their predecessors, addressed broad social
needs while giving young people cash, skills training, and
opportunities to work and possibly live in each other’s company. Put
another way: What are the modern day equivalents of the home-delivered,
NYA-built tuberculosis isolation hut?
Delving back in the history of New Deal youth programs, I was struck
by how many of its projects have direct application to today’s most urgent
needs.
For instance, the NYA made huge and historic contributions to the
country’s educational infrastructure, with a particular emphasis on
low-income school districts, while training many young women as
teaching assistants. It also provided significant reinforcements for
an ailing public health system, training battalions of young people to
serve as nursing aides in public hospitals.
It’s easy to imagine how similar programs today could simultaneously
address the youth unemployment crisis and play a significant role in
battling the virus. As just one example: We sure could use some of
those nursing aides if there is a new surge of the virus this winter.
A New York Times investigation last month quoted several doctors and
nurses who are convinced that significant numbers of the Covid-19
deaths that took place in New York’s public hospitals could have been
prevented if they had been adequately staffed. In emergency rooms
where the patient-to-nurse ratio should not have been higher than 4 to
1, one public hospital was trying to get by with 23 to 1; others
weren’t doing much better. Nightmare stories have emerged of
disoriented patients pulling themselves off of oxygen machines and
other vital equipment, trying to get up, and with no one there to stop
them, dying alone. More nurses would have made all the difference.
Then there are the public schools, similarly understaffed after
decades of cutbacks, that will be trying to enforce social distancing
this year. If we weren’t in such a rush to get back to a bleak and
diminished version of “normal,” there would be time for a NYA-style
program to train thousands of young adults to help reduce class sizes
and supervise kids in outdoor education programs.
And since we know that the safest place to gather is still outdoors,
some college-age students could pick up the work begun by the NYA and
expand the national infrastructure of trails, picnic areas, outdoor
pools, campsites, urban parks, and wilderness trails. Thousands more
could be enrolled in a rebooted CCC to restore forests and wetlands,
helping draw planet-warming carbon out of the atmosphere.
Creating these kinds of programs would be complex, and costly. But the
individual and collective benefits would be immeasurable. And as was
the case during the Great Depression, many young people would be given
the chance to do something they desperately want and need to do right
now: Get the hell out of their childhood homes and live with their peers.
On Intercepted, I spoke about this prospect with Neil Maher, professor
of history at Rutgers University–Newark and the author of a definitive
history of the Civilian Conservation Corps, “Nature’s New Deal.” He
told me that in his research into the CCC, he came across many
participants describing their time in the program as a kind of
sleepaway camp or even an outdoor
university: a unique chance to live collectively, away from their
families and the city, and become adults. But unlike so many actual
university campuses that can’t reopen safely — given the daily
commutes of faculty, staff, and many students — modern-day
CCC-inspired camps could be designed as Covid “bubbles.”
The program would have to test participants on the way in, quarantine
anyone who tested positive for two weeks, and then everyone would stay
at the camp until the job was done (or at least their part of it). It
could be that rare triple win: Heal some of the damage done to our
ravaged planet, offer an economic and social lifeline to people in
need, and design what might be one of the most Covid-safe workplaces
around.
In the panic about this “lost generation,” there has been a lot of
talk about how there is no work for young people. But that is a lie.
There is no end of meaningful work that desperately needs doing — in
our schools, hospitals, and on the land. We just need to create the jobs.