I didn't have the strength to continue

I finished the book Southern. Gay. Teacher. A Memoir by Randy Fair. He is as described in the title. He started teaching high school English in the Atlanta school system in the late 1980s and was still teaching when he finished the book. It came out this year. For much of the time it was a balance to make sure LGBTQ students were not harassed by other students or even teachers and administrators while also not saying he was gay. For much of his career he didn’t dare come out. Though officially closeted he demonstrated he was a progressive and the gay students would find him and confide in him because they knew they would be safe around him. The first school where he taught had quite a race problem. The students were rather evenly split between black and white. A few times one side rioted because of what the other side had done. Fair got along better with the black students because he knew oppression. After a few years he transferred to a second school. The mood towards gay people varied, better when Clinton was President, worse when Bush II was. He was quite an advocate. He knew the law and would use it to prompt or threaten the administration to do something, such as start a Gay Straight Alliance. Though when the group was started he willingly let straight teachers sponsor it so people wouldn’t question his orientation. He started a gay teacher alliance chapter in Atlanta and did a few great things with it. He let another guy take over. Then the national alliance demanded more money and it collapsed. Through the book Fair talked about the LGBTQ students he encountered and helped. A transgender student helped him understand what that meant. At this second school he felt he had to be careful about what he said or he would be fired. He began to see how homophobic much of the staff was. He transferred to a third school just three years before he could retire. This school was the dream job. He could be out. The LGBTQ students could be out. The students were multi racial and had no problems. He saw how welcoming they were when he gave an analogy using football and one young man said, “I didn’t get that analogy. Could you rephrase it in terms of hair and makeup?” The students laughed, but it wasn’t a malicious laugh. I had one issue with the book. It seemed distant, like he was holding back. I have two primary examples. In one, a student asked if a particular character in Canterbury Tales was gay. Fair said he did research to show the character was not gay. But he didn’t share the research with the reader. In the other, he was at a conference (one he set up through the gay teacher alliance) and a student speaker brought many in the audience to tears. But he didn’t tell us what the student said. I felt this sort of thing through much of the book. Overall, a good book documenting what it was like to be a gay teacher in the conservative South. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos discussed that the Moscow Mitch led Senate and the nasty guy administration have been doing nothing to help Americans through the pandemic, especially with many relief programs ending in a month. As part of that she quoted former ICU nurse Janet Campbell-Vincent. McCarter wrote:

Here's what she'd tell McConnell on his Thanksgiving vacation: "I wish medical workers could take vacation days, too. I ran out of those months ago, when I contracted Covid-19 treating patients in the ICU. I'm exhausted. I'm angry. I'm sick of watching patients die. I'm tired of comforting families feeling guilty over the birthday party that cost their loved one's life." She just quit her job providing direct patient care because, she writes, "Without sufficient personal protective equipment and staffed hospital beds, a national plan for testing and sufficient relief for those hardest hit by the virus, including hospitals, I didn't have the strength to continue." She speculates that her colleagues are reaching that breaking point as well, and warns of a "mass exodus" from nursing. "Our leaders have left it up to medical workers to save American lives, but they've denied us the resources to do so," she writes. "I can't fathom why they're on vacation when there is so much work to do."

A “mass exodus” from nursing? That will be a huge and deadly problem. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos quoted Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post. Robinson noted that when the nasty guy won in 2016 there was a high interest in what nasty guy voters thought with reports seemingly from every diner where men wore overalls.

Never mind that nearly 3 million more of us voted against Trump four years ago; no one seemed terribly interested in our inner lives, our hopes and dreams. This time, however, the gap is too big to ignore — Biden, the president-elect, beat Trump by more than 6 million votes and counting. He won back the heartland of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. He won Georgia, for heaven’s sake. Logically, then, we should put aside those dog-eared copies of J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” and subject “the Biden voter” to the same kind of microscopic scrutiny. Venture out of your bubble, Trump supporters, and try to understand how most of America thinks.

Jake Tapper of CNN tweeted:

Let’s take a moment to acknowledge 4 Republican officials who despite pressure from the president and his party remained allegiant to facts and truth and democracy and integrity... and math: @Commish_Schmidt @GaSecofState @CISAKrebs Aaron Van Langevelde

The last one is the GOP member of the Michigan State Board of Canvassers who voted yes to certify Michigan’s election results.

The system worked only because conservatives like Aaron Van Langevelde in Michigan and U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann in PA had more integrity than most GOP Officials in Washington DC combined. There will be an attempt at revisionism. The news media cannot let that happen.

Laura Clawson of Kos reported that a month ago the nasty guy signed an executive order allowing him to purge nonpartisan civil service workers in the government. I wrote about it when it happened. The reason for the purge is, of course, so he can replace them with people loyal to him, not the government. Russel Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, has determined that 88% of his department, or 425 workers, can be shifted to the designation that would allow the nasty guy to purge them. This risks doing great damage to the function of government, as the nasty guy no doubt intends. If there are lots of hires before Joe Biden is sworn in, it could be difficult to remove them – the new people would claim protections that were taken away from the old people. It is another part of the nasty guy’s efforts to trash the entire federal government on his way out the door. In another post Clawson discussed a report from the Brookings Institute that shows several companies whose profits soared since the start of the pandemic and who have not shared those profits with their workers. In many cases they also eliminated hazard pay. One example:

The bottom line is this, according to the report: “Amazon and Walmart could have quadrupled the hazard pay they gave their frontline workers and still earned more profit than the previous year.” They didn’t.

Just over a week ago I discussed musings by Kos of Kos. He proposed the idea that the people who voted for the nasty guy who didn’t show up in polls aren’t really Republican or conservative. Instead, they are people, mostly white, who have been left out of the system. They see in the nasty guy someone who will burn it all down to pull everyone else to their level. Kos wrote about an article that supports his theory with a bit of explanation. The article is by Daniel Cox of the American Enterprise Institute. A survey had looked at the strength of social networks. Of those surveyed 17% reported having no one they were close to. That’s a big jump from 2013. Those disconnected people were far more likely to vote for the nasty guy.

Isolation isn’t an absolute. You can’t turn it on and off. It’s a scale, and it’s easy to see how the further on the isolation scale someone is, the less likely they are to properly interact with society and its institutions … that is, until a Trump emerges speaking to their pain and anger. It certainly explains our own bewilderment that Trump got 10 million more votes than last time. Of course we don’t see these people. No one sees these people. That’s the point.

Why are they so angry they want to burn it all down? They’re lonely. How do we change them? Seek them out and, as unpleasant as they may be to be around, help them join the community. I didn’t say this was easy. Patience. McCarter of Kos reported Dr. Fauci counsels patience. Yeah, the first vaccine will be available by the end of the year. But that doesn’t mean it will be available to me or you. It takes a while to ramp up production of the vaccine and the first doses go to healthcare workers, then to such agencies as the Bureau of Prisons and State Department. The general public might begin to get the vaccine in April. But getting it widely distributed to the public will take a while because state and local governments don’t yet have the funding to make it happen. And funding depends on Moscow Mitch. Even with proper funding all of our existing pandemic protections, such as masks and indoor gatherings, must be maintained until about 75% of the population is vaccinated. And that could take until next fall. While the vaccine makers show the vaccine will prevent a person from getting sick, they didn’t test whether a vaccinated person could spread the virus to others. So don’t plan on any big gatherings until 2022. Patience. We’ve come this far. Don’t give up or give in now.