{"id":9015,"date":"2020-07-20T18:45:41","date_gmt":"2020-07-20T18:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adhc.lib.ua.edu\/pandemicbook\/?page_id=9015"},"modified":"2021-12-15T21:23:13","modified_gmt":"2021-12-15T21:23:13","slug":"07-20","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/adhc.lib.ua.edu\/pandemicbook\/07-20\/","title":{"rendered":"07-20"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Monday, July 20<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tUS Cases 3.84 million
US Deaths 141,882<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Jul 19: Florida reports<\/a> more than 10,000 COVID-19 cases for 5th consecutive day. Trump hints<\/a> that he might not accept election results if he loses. During an interview with Chris Wallace on\u00a0Fox News Sunday<\/em>, President Trump calls<\/a> Fox’s Chris Wallace “fake news” after the two debate the U.S. coronavirus mortality rate.\u00a0 Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, says<\/a> COVID-19 tests are taking too long to be processed in the U.S. Officials in Oregon demand<\/a> that federal agents, including tactical teams from Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Marshals Service, leave Portland after several documented cases of unidentified agents in military outfits grabbing people off the street and putting them into unmarked vans.\u00a0<\/p>

Jul 20: President Trump defends<\/a> his administration’s deployment of federal law enforcement agents in Portland, Oregon, to target protesters, and threatens to send agents to more cities. “We’re looking at Chicago, too. We’re looking at New York,” he says. “All run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by the radical left.” Missouri prosecutors file a felony charge against Mark and Patricia McCloskey<\/a>, a St. Louis couple who made national headlines by pointing guns at a group of protesters walking past their house in a gated community. Trump calls<\/a> masks ‘patriotic’ after resisting wearing them publicly. The next several years could bear witness to thousands of\u00a0additional deaths from cancer<\/a>\u00a0that could have been prevented through routine diagnostic care that was delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, delays in referrals and screenings for breast, colorectal, esophageal, and lung cancers were indicated in a pair of studies published in\u00a0The Lancet Oncology<\/em>\u00a0to potentially lead to almost 10% (n = 3291-3621) more deaths in England over the next 5 years.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\tFrom the Cutting Room Floor ...\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Unlabeled paramilitary forces led by commanders who have not been approved or elected by their civilian governing body, are now pulling people off the streets with no more than a loose suspicion that they may have lit fireworks or sprayed graffiti on a federal building. <\/span>According to acting (there\u2019s that title again; so little respect for protocol) Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli, these actions that seem a lot like state-sponsored counter-terrorism kidnappings deployed against American citizens, are completely fine.<\/span>[1]<\/a> The officials involved are Federal Protective Services agents, who are being supported by both Customs and Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. It is hard to understand what these sorts of government agents are doing arresting people in the middle of Portland. It is a violation of ordinary Constitutional rights — an articulation of state-sanctioned intimidation?<\/span>[2]<\/a> As <\/span>Mark Morgan, <\/span>Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, \u2014an Orwellian title if ever there was one\u2014intimated, these paramilitary forces will not be individually identifiable so that \u201cAntifa\u201d cannot seek them out for retribution. Nevermind that the looting is minimal, that BLM marchers are not a part of the limited vandalism that has happened, and that there is absolutely no evidence that any government official is being targeted for retribution. It feels as if Fox News-pedaled conspiracies are driving government policy.<\/span>[3]<\/a> Then again, wasn\u2019t it Herbert Hoover who said back in the 1920s that justice is incidental to law and order? It does not appear that our current policing system is interested in justice.<\/span><\/p>\n

[read_more id=”1″ more=”Read more” less=”Read less”]<\/p>\n

Strangely, the very crowd that was decrying their loss of individual freedoms earlier in the pandemic\u2014who have been yelling about government over-reach for months\u2014remain conspicuously silent about federal and local violence against American citizens in Portland. Police are arbitrarily kidnapping peaceful protestors off the streets and deputizing agents from the border to beat unarmed, middle-aged mothers. For those who are claiming to take a principled stand<\/em> against government overreach, these would seem to be issues worth fighting over. This is a moment for the Shelley Luthers of the country to stand up and say, \u201cJust as I condemn the government ordering me to close my business and wear a mask, so too do I condemn this intimidation and violence by the government against protestors who are exercising their first amendment rights.\u201d Instead, these folks continue to arm themselves with semi-automatic rifles to protest the injustice of mask orders, like the one put in place in Ohio.[4]<\/a> One might be tempted to think that in fact theirs is not<\/em> some sort of principled stand about governmental power after all. That in fact it is law and order and the maintenance of the status quo that they are most interested in defending.<\/span><\/p>

Meanwhile, the internet is filled with film showing federal troops beating and gassing military veterans and even yellow-t-shirt-wearing moms chanting \u201cBlack Lives Matter.\u201d<\/span>
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Notes<\/span><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> NPR All Things Considered, \u201cDHS Official On Reports Of Federal Officers Detaining Protesters In Portland, Ore.,\u201d NPR.org, July 17, 2020, https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2020\/07\/17\/892393079\/dhs-official-on-reports-of-federal-officers-detaining-protesters-in-portland-ore<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Tatiana Cozzarelli, \u201cTrump\u2019s Federal Police Are Kidnapping and Brutalizing Protesters in Portland,\u201d Truthout, July 18, 2020, https:\/\/truthout.org\/articles\/trumps-federal-police-are-kidnapping-and-brutalizing-protesters-in-portland\/<\/a>; David A. Graham, \u201cAmerica Gets an Interior Ministry,\u201d The Atlantic<\/em>, July 21, 2020, https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/ideas\/archive\/2020\/07\/americas-interior-ministry\/614389\/<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Josh Marshall, \u201cCuccinelli: Totally Legal and Totally Cool How CBP and ICE Now Control Your City,\u201d Talking Points Memo, July 18, 2020, https:\/\/talkingpointsmemo.com\/edblog\/cuccinelli-totally-legal-and-totally-cool-how-cpb-and-ice-now-control-your-city<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Vivek Saxena, \u201cAnti-Mask Protesters with Armed Militia Stand up to BLM in Ohio: \u2018I Will Not Wear Someone Else\u2019s Fear,\u2019\u201d BizPacReview, July 19, 2020, https:\/\/www.bizpacreview.com\/2020\/07\/19\/anti-mask-protesters-with-armed-militia-stand-up-to-blm-in-ohio-i-will-not-wear-someone-elses-fear-948687<\/a>.<\/span> [\/read_more]<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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“Resilience in the Garden”<\/span><\/p>

Normally, my life resembles that of a squirrel. On the move, I dart here and there, scurrying in a blur of lecture halls, trains and planes. With the pandemic my life became plant-like. Like a seed tossed on the ground I lay there inert, in shock. Slowly aligning myself in the new, grounded state, I started to reach out in two directions; down into the cool moist earth and skyward toward a new awareness of what constitutes stillness, growth, and regeneration in Washington, DC, where I have lived for two decades.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

With a friend, we got started. On a small terraced slope in front of an apartment building we planted spring crops\u2014peas, radishes, greens. We dug into fallow beds along the grade school across the street, broadcasting seeds up the hill. We pulled out dead shrubs and replaced them with blackberry bushes, fig and paw paw trees. People were gardening all over the U.S. Seeds were sold out. No backyard chicks to be had. We propagated our own saplings and scavenged seeds from last year\u2019s crops.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

About the time the peas blossomed, a Minneapolis policeman calmly knee-murdered George Floyd. On the first day, the Black Lives Matter protest in front of the White House was small. It skewed young and POC. The protestors faced the police and cursed them. Hoarse voices made spontaneous speeches. I remember thinking\u2014I write this now with a wince\u2014that the young folks on Lafayette Square could use a leader and a message. Where was MLK or Malcolm X? Who had the dream and who the light?\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Preparing\u00a0for the\u00a0long summer, we spaded up the school\u2019s courtyard and dropped in seeds that can stand the heat and drought\u2014okra, long beans, corn, amaranth. The soil was deeply dispiriting\u2014urban ground smashed by heavy wheels, littered with foreign objects (nails, glass, plastic), poisoned with heavy metals. Driving my shovel in, I looked down to see a field of extinction\u2014no worms, insects, fungi, little in the way of microbial life.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

The three women who founded the BLM movement explicitly rejected the idea of a single, charismatic leader. The co-founders\u2019 names have not become household words, and that is telling. Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal\u00a0Tometi represent Female, Black, Queer, working-class and immigrant Americans. They work behind the scenes in that nameless way that a growing majority of Americans are quietly building movements.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Regenerating the soil involved hauling: buckets of kitchen compost, home-made microbial inoculants, leaf mulch, coffee grounds, worm casings, and wheel barrows of cooked, human manure from the DC waste treatment plant. Layered over the raw clay and gravel the organic matter worked as food for a crowd of microbes who invisibly got to work restoring topsoil to the beds. Plants have a reputation for slowness, even sloth, but soil microbes work at a good clip. They\u00a0adapt\u00a0 by\u00a0swapping genes. Passing on whole strands of DNA, they transform themselves. Some microbes have learned not only to survive in toxic environments, but have figured out to eat heavy metals and PCBs<\/span>\u2060<\/span>1<\/span><\/a>\u00a0for dinner! Microbes are a model of resilience. Thanks to beneficial microbes, our soils regenerated in a vegetative blink of an eye. The plants followed, emerging from the ground in the rains of early summer.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Our neighbor Richard had a habit of standing on his porch each evening. Richard grew up on the street and clocked fifty years watching it. As we dug, he asked us what we were planting. After a while, Richard asked if we wanted to garden his front yard. I was happy about that. I had been hoping our expanding gardens would become infectious. Plants, tended and nourished,\u00a0I\u00a0 dreamed, could repair bit by bit some of the social and health problems of our city. \u201cSlow hope,\u201d Christof\u00a0Mauch\u00a0calls it.<\/span>\u2060<\/span>2<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Two nights of looting and glass breaking. The protestors knew their history and did not repeat 1968 when crowds lit up the Black shopping district on 14<\/span>th<\/span>\u00a0Street. This time they broke windows on Connecticut and Wisconsin Avenues in predominantly white and wealthy neighborhoods that locals call \u201cupper Caucasia.\u201d The next day a moat of armed, bullet-proof bodies circled the White House; hundreds of officers from dozens of law enforcement agencies. That was the day of Donald Trump\u2019s bible walk. At 6:30 pm, a half hour before curfew, a phalanx of Secret Service officers moved from behind the blockade into the crowd. I hurried to unlock my bike and flee home.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

I watched on my cell phone the sickening thud of blows and cries of protestors \u201ckettled\u201d that evening. I wasn\u2019t the only one connecting the bodies\u00a0beaten by police with bodies \u201cweathered\u201d by stress, poverty, and environmental toxins that were falling ill at high numbers from COVID.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

The following day the protests swelled. The crowds skewed whiter and older. Like the virus, unleashed state violence threatened everyone.\u00a0Again\u00a0I left Lafayette Square just before curfew. As I pedaled home a steady current of resistors,\u00a0their\u00a0 faces\u00a0set with grim determination, flowed downtown to defy the curfew.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0My friend and I kept going, vacuous lawn beckoning. We set down more saplings. Tiny paw paw sent tap roots deep underground. Fig trees spread broad leafs up, airborne hands seeking communion, breathing. The pole beans did not require poles. The beans reached out\u2014clearly not blindly\u2014and found walls, sticks, and fencing to string together little, green rope bridges. A firetruck lumbered down our hill, stopping in front of Richard\u2019s house. For two weeks Richard had been missing from the porch. From the asparagus patch I asked if everything was all right, Richard\u2019s mother and brother slowly shook their heads no.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

The problem with slow hope is that unfolds in vegetable time, while the virus moves at the speed of jets.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

The second week the crowds on the yellow asphalt of Black Lives Matter Plaza turned their backs to the army boys and municipal police and faced each other. Black protestors shared their experience of being Black in America. Some sang and more danced, expressing joy after months of isolation. Surrounded by tanks painted beige for Middle Eastern wars, white allies came to better understand how Black survivors of systemic racism are models of courage and resilience. Like a microbial colony getting organized, inspiration and resolve passed horizontally, tiny genes encoding the DNA of the movement.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

1\u00a0<\/span>http:\/\/nautil.us\/blog\/in-the-black-mayonnaise-of-brooklyns-gowanus-canal-alien-life-is-being-born<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

2\u00a0<\/span>https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/we-need-slow-hope-in-a-world-of-accelerating-ecological-change<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

\u2014 Kate Brown, Boston<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tUnmasking America! \nFacebook group suspended for spreading misinformation about masks\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLyons, Kim. \u201cFacebook Suspends Anti-Mask Group for Spreading COVID-19 Misinformation.\u201d The Verge, July 20, 2020. https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2020\/7\/20\/21331060\/anti-mask-groups-facebook-misinformation.\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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John Oliver, “Coronavirus: Conspiracy Theories,” Last Week Tonight, HBO, July 20, 2020, https:\/\/youtu.be\/0b_eHBZLM6U<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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