Carl,
I might have problems, living off the grid, I have to admit. I remember all the
times you didn't have internet or the generator wasn't working and you had to
wait for someone to come and fix it. I'd be able to get out on that deck of
yours with my walker, I think, and enjoy the fresh air. But I haven't gotten
over not being able to see the sky or flowers or greenery or colors yet. You're
able to describe that beautiful scenery and truly enjoy it vicariously. Maybe I
could do it in 30 more years, if I lived that long. But if I were living in
your house right now, I'd be mourning what I couldn't see, every day.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, August 11, 2020 6:04 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Miscellaneous, was How Not to Lose the Lockdown
Generation
Hi Miriam,
Living here, nestled next to the Olympic National Forest, was our dream come
true. And I certainly could not have pulled it off without Cathy's
determination. When we bought the ten acres back in 1987, I figured it would
be our "get away". And for 7 years it was exactly that. While I was preparing
to take early retirement from the Services for the Blind, Cathy began designing
the sort of house she'd like to retire to.
She planned well. But as the years passed, stuff wore out. We needed a new
roof. Finding companies that would come out and do an on site estimate was
hard enough, let alone actually doing the job. Right now we're needing to find
a builder who will realign the deck supports, narrow the deck to about ten feet
wide, and put on a new railing. The deck is 100 feet long, and will require
new footings to set the support posts on Opening onto the deck are five sliding
glass doors. The entire side of the house facing the deck is glass. We spend
a great amount of time on the deck since the house sits halfway up a very steep
hill and we do not keep a lawn. In fact, about all we do is beat the jungle
back. But from the deck, as we grill burgers and steaks, we gaze out across
our horse pasture, past the horse barn, past ripply Creek and the Beaver pond,
to the Olympic mountains rising above an Evergreen forest. To say that it's
beautiful is a gross understatement.
Still, living in a remote area has its problems. As I've said before, we are
off the grid. With the addition of three racks of solar panels, along with a
large generator and twelve large batteries, It is a bit more costly and
trouble, but we get along about the same as if we lived in town...except when
we do stuff like hosting the annual Thanksgiving family extravaganza which
usually runs from Wednesday through Sunday, and all the grand children run
about turning on every light in the house, turning up the heat and standing
with the outside doors wide open...oh yes, lots of showers and piles of laundry.
I hear myself sounding like my parents, "Close the door. Were you born in a
barn?...When you leave a room, turn the light off...If you're too hot close the
refrigerator door and go stand outside."
Speaking of old parental sayings, my all time favorite is, "Shut your mouth and
eat your dinner."
Once again I've forgotten where I was going with all that, so I'll stop and
simply go away.
Stay safe.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/11/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
I envy your ability to take advantage of nature, especially the
location where you're doing it. Before I forget, Mary Trump's book
went up on BARD, either on Friday or Saturday. I think that you and
Cathy might enjoy reading it. It isn't really political. It's more
like reading a novel about a family, one with a good deal of
psychopathology. I read the book when it first came out because it was on
Bookshare.
I appreciate your omitting my identifying info from the articles that
you forward. I don't want to receive hate mail. (smile)
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, August 11, 2020 12:04 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: How Not to Lose the Lockdown Generation
Miriam,
I probably will be spending less time on the computer as long as the
weather is decent, and now that I'm no longer doing client reviews and
resource searches.
But I do file your posts, and get around to most of them in a few
days. I'm still having a problem with my computer not completing the
email addresses, but I'm just putting them in a file on my Braille 'N'
Speak, and then copying them as needed. It's not as easy, but then
what is?
When I do post one of the articles you send out, I delete this address
and your name and email. I think a couple of times I messed up, but I
try to be more careful these days.
And now, as you look toward lunch, I am going to head for the kitchen
and a late brreakfast, and I'll listen to Thom Hartmann's opening rant.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/11/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.