Badlands

“Talk about a dream
Try to make it real
You wake up in the night
With a fear so real
You spend your life waiting
For a moment that just don’t come
Well, don’t waste your time waiting

Badlands, you gotta live it everyday
Let the broken hearts stand
As the price you’ve gotta pay
Keep pushin’ ’til it’s understood
And these badlands start treating us good”

From Badlands, Springsteen

Sounds right

This sound about right. According to the NYT Maggie Haberman, the so called “protest rallies” against the stay at home orders of a handful of governors “have been relatively small and scattershot, organized by conservative-leaning groups with some organic attendance. It remains to be seen if they will be durable.”

Goes nasty

Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is a favorite target of Trump. She’s “that women” and worse in Trump’s words. Consistent with past form, he goes nasty when he is challenged by a women. The only good thing that comes out of this Trump’s routine misogynist behavior is the sight of Michigan women wearing shirts, inscribe with “That Woman'” across the front.

 

Crony capitalism

Much more needs to be done. But expect push back from Republicans in opposing new appropriations for states, cities, and the tens of millions of people in need. Even the money appropriated for small business is ending up, for example, in the hands of big restaurants chains. If Trump and the Republicans had their way, the stimulus measures would go nearly exclusively to their biggest supporters in the corporate world. Is there a better example of crony capitalism.

Build the human alternative

The late E.P. Thompson, the brilliant British historian, who had little patience for dogma and cant, once wrote, “We need now to learn what religions have always taught: how to achieve the wisdom, the largeness of heart, the strength of character to build the human alternative in the midst of ongoing catastrophe.”
 
Thompson didn’t have a pandemic in mind when he wrote these words, but they nevertheless speak to us in this time of pandemic. The key phrase is: “build the human alternative in the midst of ongoing catastrophe.” Not a word about stoically carrying the cross or enduring the undurable.
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