Opinion

Over the past few weeks, I have emailed out a number of very powerful pieces that were written by very respected journalists and researchers. (See the list of three of them at the end of this piece.)

Following this flurry of postings, I received the following complaint about the length of the emailings (all of them were about the COVID-19 issue) from a fellow anti-war, anti-tyranny activist. It went something like this:

“Gary there's too much to read, with all the other stuff I feel I need to keep up with.  I wish I had more time.  But, quickly reading over the piece, the 1% figure caught my attention.  If it was likely I'd die once in every 100 times I went somewhere with the car, I'd feel that was too high of a risk to take. The coronavirus seems to fall into that 1% category, if not higher.”   

My answer went something like this:

Dear Mr. Katstra,

First of all, thanks for your terrific work on the greatest team ever which I think we are all safe in assuming would have repeated last year’s championship this year if the season hadn’t been shut down. Maybe I’m biased. The point is I’m a fan and an alumnus who found very disturbing an article titled “Virginia’s Austin Katstra lays the foundation for a career in counterterrorism.”

"The vet in the mirror may be wounded in the soul—and it is your duty to carry this one last vet for help."

This is not an easy reach—into the soul of the loneliest man or woman on Earth, which is the definition of everyone who is on the brink of committing suicide. For decades, Roland Van Deusen has been reaching out to a particularly endangered subgroup of such people: abandoned veterans, left with nothing but their own traumatic memories, their shame and guilt.

The words above are from a two-minute video that is suddenly, in this time of lockdown, his only means of reaching out to vets. A counselor and psychiatric social worker as well as a Vietnam-era Navy veteran, Van Deusen has been working with vets and supporting veterans’ groups for years, telling the lost they are not alone . . . that the moral injuries of war can be healed.

The nation’s, and the world’s, moral injuries are still present and hidden, silently continuing to destroy people’s will to live. 

The Lieutenant Governor of Texas is happy to sacrifice the lives of old people for “the economy.” A Congressman from Indiana doesn’t discriminate; he’s willing to let anybody lose their life to maintain what he calls their “way of life.” How they can have a way of life without a life becomes clear when he explains that by “way of life” he means the economy. The President of the United States is afraid that the cure of isolating ourselves is worse than the disease, even though the latter is deadly for some who get it.

Two years after Donald Trump won the presidency, the author of “How Fascism Works” assessed him in a video. “It might seem like an exaggeration to call Trump a fascist,” Yale professor Jason Stanley said. “I mean, he’s not calling for a genocide or imprisoning his own people without due process. But . . . if you use history and philosophy as a guide, it’s easy to see parallels between Trump’s words and those of the most reviled fascists in history. That scares me, and it should scare you too.”

Drawing on his decade of studying fascist propaganda, Stanley concluded: “If you’re not worried about encroaching fascism in America, before long it will start to feel normal. And when that happens, we’re all in trouble.”

We don't want to go back to the way it was. Normal was devouring the planet, devouring all of us. 

COVID-19 has changed the world, but the world apparently wants to go back to the way it was. We should find that intolerable. Out of this pandemic crisis, this is our opportunity to create a better world. Corporate capitalism itself should be the target under attack.  

COVID-19 has taken our attention off of climate change. Changes were happening in the oil market when COVID struck. With so many fewer cars and airplanes in use, the price of oil has plummeted. Let's keep our level of usage what it is today as we transition to renewable energy. Let the oil companies be the victims of the pandemic. We all want to get back to work, but we don't need to continue our dependence on fossil fuels. Some things do not need to come back. Business travel is now proven to be unnecessary. It is now time to move to green energy.

Margaret Sarber-Nie passed away today. Many people whose lives intertwined with hers are mourning. Margaret was a hippie, an activist, a militant. Her resume includes involvement with some of the most radical organizations of the 60s and 70s. She was one of the founders of Community Festival, edited the Columbus Free Press, worked with the Indochina Coalition, SDS, and participated in demonstrations and actions – fighting for a revolution.

I can remember the first time I met Margaret. It was at Community Festival in the early 90s. I had just begun publishing the Free Press and she told me she was a former editor of the paper and I should look it up in the newspaper’s files. If I wanted to talk to her, I could call her at 268-FUCK. I did call her.

Margaret was a great storyteller and fascinating as the stories were – they were all true. From her being one of the Free Press staff arrested in 1972 for inciting riot during the Vietnam War to openly carrying a rifle to protect the community from law enforcement and the FBI (wearing a beret, of course).

Remember Rockefeller’s best employee, Kissinger once said, "Make the economy scream!”

The 24/7 intensified media coverage of the coronavirus story has meant that other news has either been ignored or relegated to the back pages, never to be seen again. The Middle East has been on a boil but coverage of the Trump administration’s latest moves against Iran has been so insignificant as to be invisible. Meanwhile closer to home, the declaration by the ubiquitous Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that current president of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro is a drug trafficker did generate somewhat of a ripple, as did dispatch of warships to the Caribbean to intercept the alleged drugs, but that story also died.

Disease, poverty, and hunger encircle the globe. Even U.S. citizens (we are special, aren't we?) are marked as chattel for the corporate monster consuming lives like a meat grinder on steroids.

Ten companies dominate the market in food production and other companies consolidate without anti-trust enforcement, kowtowing to their hedge fund managers and vulture capitalists pushing for politically "nuanced" gains wherever they can grab them. 

Some are denying science, threatening lives and property of private citizens for oil and fracking rights. (see PA/OH/AUS). The call came down, drill baby drill, while they only wanted to make America free from oil imports. It now has become a huge profit-making export market forcing pipelines through private property by eminent domain as a "public utility."