Waking up in the Dark

Thanks to our absurd annual fetish for changing the clock (sometimes supported in lieu of a coherent energy policy), we are again waking up in the dark this week. Of course, we are supposed to wake up in the dark during the winter. When winter slides into spring, however, dawn is supposed to start arriving earlier. Such is the marvelous mechanism of the change of seasons, which I for one generally enjoy. (The variety of the different seasons is, I think, one of the more attractive aspects of living in the non-equatorial latitudes.)

A year ago, the unwelcome annual arrival of Daylight Saving Time meant a few extra weeks of driving in the morning in the dark. Now that I am no longer a commuter, that concern is no longer mine. Maybe that is why, since it matters to me less now, Daylight Saving Time came upon me almost unexpected. That said, as public policy, this semi-annual ritual of tinkering with the clock continues to inconvenience many with no obviously greater contribution to the common good.

And now there are proposals to make DST a year-long thing. The measurement of minutes and hours is inherently an artificial convention of civilization. Time zones, which standardize minutes and hours over a wide distance (approximately a full hour's course of the sun from the time zone's eastern end to its western end) add additional artificiality, deviating to some degree from what the local "sun dial" time might be. (Interestingly, I have lived virtually all my life at the more extreme ends of the time zones - most of the time at the eastern end of the Eastern Time Zone, for the last 10 years and more briefly in the mid 1980s at the western end of that same zone, and once for four years at the end of the 1970s at the eastern end of the Central Time Zone.)

So year-long DST would add an hour's worth of artificiality to an already artificial system of "standard" time. I would personally prefer junking DST altogether and sticking with standard time all year round, with what seems like just the right amount of getting up in the dark. Given the choice, however, I would personally prefer even year-long DST to the present nonsense of switching back and forth, with all its unnecessary disruption and inconveniences.

(Photo: Daylight Saving Time 101 National Geographic)

The Ides of March Then and Now

A year ago, the Ides of March fell on the Third Sunday of Lent. By then, the Covid-19 pandemic, which had already been insidiously making its way around the world for months, was now an established presence in the United States, and we were suddenly (and somewhat unwillingly) being roused from our lethargy and complacency to acknowledge the increasing threat. Whereas a mere one week earlier, it had been more or less business as usual, by that Sunday, attendance was already noticeably down and and the first precautionary adaptations were being implemented.  

It all happened so fast. A year later, the return to "normal" (whatever "normal" might mean) is happening slowly, in fits and starts. Encouraged by increasingly widespread access to the new vaccines, more and more we are stepping back out into something like an ordinary world. Meanwhile, we wonder, what have we learned, and what difference has it made?

The more I look back on this past year, the more perplexing the whole experience seems. Notwithstanding the historical memory of plagues past, including the last proper pandemic, the 1918 Spanish Flu, such horrors seemed alien to modernity, more like the stuff of science fiction. The last big polio scare of the the early 1950s is remembered, after all, for being the last, before Jonas Salk saved the world with the first polio vaccine. My generation had all been vaccinated against smallpox, polio, and more recently shingles. Diseases were preventable now. Pandemics were for far away places where people intermingled too freely with wildlife, and diseases like ebola resulted. But, then, what was Lyme Disease or Zika?

Then suddenly we were surrounded on all sides by this new virus for which we had neither vaccine nor any anti-viral medication, and we were as exposed and endangered as our ancestors were when the Bubonic Plague arrived, equally uninvited, in Europe in October 1347.

Except that we had Zoom - and Facebook. Imagine if a year ago anyone had told us we needed to learn how to celebrate Mass on Facebook! Who would ever have thought of such a thing, apart perhaps from some obsessive technophile eager to equate evangelization with the latest soul-destroying technological upgrade? Then, all of a sudden, it was something we were all expected to do - and right away. (Actually it took us a couple of weeks to get up to speed. It was Palm Sunday already when we celebrated our first Facebook Mass.)

Instead of the interpersonal joy of meetings, there was zoom. Instead of a quick stop at the supermarket, there were pre-planned excursions to the store, maybe at certain, early morning, "senior" hours, armed with mask and gloves and sanitizer, followed by the ludicrous washing and sanitizing of groceries and even mail. Such "hygiene theater," as it later famously came to be labelled probably contributes less than we hoped to our health and safety, but it somehow reassured us in some obsessive-compulsive way. 

Meanwhile, as we slowly learned what precautions really did matter and really might make a difference in keeping one alive or out of the hospital or even better not sick at all, we found ourselves surrounded by foolishly fearless folks, for whom the precautions mandated for public health were an intolerable burden on their inalienable right to oppose the common good. Even now, one year later, when I go out for a walk or to do an errand, I still find myself uncomfortably walking past the occasional unmasked person or (just as bad) someone with his or her mask on wrong, as if the mask were a useless fashion accessory rather than a practical health precaution.

And, for all the talk about being all in this together, we all know, because we have seen it, how this pandemic has affected different people and different communities in very different and unequal ways, and how our morally corrupt "system" of health care continue to prioritize making money. A year ago, during pre-pandemic presidential primaries, the issue surfaced of the need for something like "Medicare for All." The pat year has highlighted our need for that, but are we any closer.

And so it goes. Of course, we all want to see family and friends again and go out to dinner on occasion and go to a movie. But do we want to enrich airline companies by flying again, now that we have all survived a year without flying? There are so many such questions that we need to be asking. And, not just asking, but answering.

Laetare

Some Thoughts on this 4th Sunday of Lent, March 14, 2021.

God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes I him might not perish but might have eternal life [John 3:16]. This sentence may be one of the best known in the entire New Testament. I guess that’s good publicity for the Gospel! And what could count as better news, in a world like. ours so starved of good news? God loved the world so much, that he gave us who life in this world his only Son, so that we might have eternal life. The grammar of the sentence suggests cause and effect. So much does God love the world that this is what he has done for it!

Of course, it should hardly come as a complete surprise that God loves the world. He is, after all, the one who created it! On the other hand, we may easily enough be tempted to forget just how much God loves the  world, when we see so much that seems so wrong with our world. Left to itself, the world can seem to be a dreadful place at times - much of the time, for many maybe most of the time. With all the world’s natural calamities, of which the current pandemic is just the most dramatic contemporary example, to which must be added all the misery directly attributable to human behavior, much of it intensely illuminated by the bright light this pandemic has shown on our social and economic and cultural inequities and dysfunctions, the world must seem a horrible place indeed - if left to itself. 

Listening to today’s 1st reading [2 Chronicles 36:14-16,19-23], we sense how little seems to have changed in the world. The point of the story – certainly the point of including it in the Lenten liturgy on this Mid-Lent Laetare Sunday– is to remind us of the long and loud legacy of human sinfulness, and to remind us that the one piece of good news is that God has not abandoned the world and left it to itself. God’s compassion on his people and his dwelling place, led him to inspire Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, to let the Jews return to Jerusalem. That same divine compassion ultimately led him to send us his Son – because, as Saint Paul assures us [Ephesians 2:4], he is rich in mercy 

Yet how easily tempted are we to escape from the burdens and responsibilities of this messed-up world which God loves so much? How many sects and cults have tempted people to try to avoid the messy, complicated burdens of society, work, and citizenship, the human burdens that define our life in the world – rather than accepting, healing, and renewing our relationships with others and with the created world [Cf. Placuit Deo (2018), 2]?

In classical mythology, when Pandora opened the box that released so many evils into the world, she closed it just in time to trap hope in the box - thus effectively leaving the world to itself. The book of Chronicles, in contrast, highlights how the long cycle of human misbehavior and its consequences was broken by God’s not leaving the world to itself, by his surprising choice of Cyrus to be a beacon of hope in the midst of so much misery and wickedness.

The Good news of the Gospel is the hope God has offered us not in another Cyrus-like political figure but in Jesus his Son, who, far from leaving the world to itself, has become part of it. The hope he offers is thus not a license to abandon the world but a challenge to move forward with the task of living and working in the world. This Good news – which the Church is in the world as part of the world in order to proclaim to the world – is the hope offered us in Jesus in whom we have been transformed into agents of God’s grace for the transformation of the world which God loves so much.

For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in him [Ephesians 2:10].

A Promisingly Hopeful Anniversary

One year ago today, we were officially declared to be in a pandemic. It was Lent, and all our ordinary parish Lenten activities already were in full swing. By the next weekend, however, the obligation of  Sunday Mass attendance had been lifted and by mid-week all public Masses and parish activities had been cancelled. And thus we began a year unlike any that any of us had ever experienced.More than half a million Americans have died. Many more have suffered serious sickness, some of them still even after the immediate danger has passed. All of us know people who have died or been sick. All of us have experienced extreme disruption in our families, in our work, and in our community commitments. Some of those most in need of work have been unemployed. Children have missed out on necessary schooling. And all of us have endured social separation and the stunting of our interpersonal lives and life-enriching interactions. Today we pause to remember all this, even as the amazingly rapid development of vaccines makes this a promisingly hopeful anniversary.

But today's hope goes beyond the accessibility of vaccines. The passage of President Biden's $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill may be the biggest such socially progressive legislation in generations, something almost on a par with the Great Society legislation of my youth, moving forward into the 21st century by recovering the mid-20th century's commitment to greater equality through renewed faith in the efficacy of political action - the faith that has been so consistently undermined since the moral disaster of Reagan's election in 1980. When President Biden gives us his first prime-time address tonight, he can celebrate this wonderful fact that government is back as a positive force for social progress and great economic equality.

The end of this pandemic will not come in one great moment of common celebration. We won't all be gathering in Times Square or in front of Buckingham Palace as if it were another V-E Day. Rather the end is coming is a series of singular separate steps to eliminate by medical means the health threats posed by this particular virus and  and to address by political means the social inequities and economic dysfunctions this pandemic had highlighted. But they are happening, and they are good

It is, in Churchill's famous words, "the end of the beginning" - and then some.

psoed by  threats

Lucky (The Book)

 

Four years ago, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes gave us Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign. That title played on the Clinton campaign's mission to shatter what she herself labelled "the highest, hardest glass ceiling," but which instead ended up leaving that ceiling solidly in place, shattering instead both Clinton's and the Democratic party's hopes and expectations for 2016 (meanwhile saddling the country with the disaster that was the Trump presidency). The book recounted how everything that could go wrong did go wrong - a set of trials and tribulations virtually unlike any other in American campaign history: a partisan congressional investigation; a primary opponent who attacked her character; a rogue FBI director; the rank misogyny of her Republican rival; a media that scrutinized her every move while failing even to get that Republican rival to turn over his tax returns; and even a Kremlin-based campaign to defeat her." That book becomes a kind of autopsy of what is rightly called a "doomed campaign," in which according to one staffer, "We're not allowed to have nice things."

Four years later, Allen and Barnes have given us Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely won the Presidency, in which the authors show how, whereas four years before everything went wrong for Hilary Clinton, in this alignment of political time and space everything Joe Biden needed to right for him went his way. "It is the story of a candidate whose life, politics, and message best met the moment, as judged by the collective wisdom of the 155 million-plus Americans who cast ballots." Whereas Hilary "had used her platform to try to define Trump, but everyone already knew Trump’s flaws, Biden thought. If you’re going to take on Trump, he told confidants, people want to know what you’re for."

Despite the obvious roadblocks to his party's nomination, including his age and the party establishment's antipathy to his candidacy, time, "Biden put a lot of faith in his own charm as a tool for bridging personal differences and substantive divides." Biden, we learn was always quite confident that he could beat Trump and win the general election, but recognized that his problem would be winning the nomination. As for theObama, et al., establishment, "Biden most resembled the establishment, and the establishment had reacted to him by turning up its nose. It was painful, and embarrassing, that even when he led in the polls, Democratic insiders did not seem to believe in him." And, then, there was his age: "a courtship-era candidate operating in a Tinder world" (something which, again turned out to be less of a disadvantage than might otherwise have been the case).

But Biden was lucky. So, for example, when he came in a poor 4th place in Iowa, the story was instead about how poorly the party primary was conducted. Then, of course, he got Congressman Jim Clyburn's endorsement, which probably guaranteed him a win inSouth Carolina and set off a massive move on the part of the party establishment to coalesce behind Biden as the only way to avoid the disaster to the party of a Sanders nomination. Then, of course, came the pandemic, which saved him from the risks of tripping over his words while running a traditional campaign while pitting him against Trump's catastrophically incompetent performance against the pandemic. For all the pre-campaign anxieties about whether he could or would run a viable campaign, the pandemic freed him from the need to campaign in a traditional way, while highlighting the contract between him and his opponent, who kept making himself look bad without any effort on Biden's part. And Biden "believed that his life, his values, and his conduct as a public servant reflected what his party preached—but didn’t always practice—and provided a black-and-white contrast with the silver-spoon president."

Biden as also, of course, especially lucky in locking up African-American support, the support of a constituency desperately desirous of defeating Trump and willing to vote strategically to accomplish that.. "Biden had already established a broader coalition among Black voters and conservative Democratic whites. Some voters of color were attracted to him because of the affinity conservative white Democrats had for him, not despite it. The chance that white voters in swing states would pick Biden over Trump—backed up by polls showing Biden defeating Trump head-to-head—appealed to many Black Democrats who were more concerned with a Democrat winning the presidency than which Democrat did it."

As for the General Election campaign, Biden was agin lucky in which he had for an opponent. "Like so much of the campaign," the authors note about the first debate between Biden and Trump at the end of September, this was not the way Biden had envisioned his bid for the presidency. And yet, once again, an unpredictable moment—an unbelievable moment—favored him."

As with the 2016 book, three authors' coverage of the election itself is riveting. And, once again, despite a clear win in the popular vote, the electoral college would be the scary challenge. Unlike Clinton in 2016, however, in the electoral college in 2020 Biden got lucky: "what was striking was how close Trump had come to pulling off another upset. In 2016, Clinton had lost the three pivotal Rust Belt states by a total of 77,736 votes. Trump lost the three states that would have given him a victory—Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona—by a total of 42,918 votes. In Wisconsin, Biden wound up with a 20,682-vote margin, topping Trump by less than two-thirds of a percentage point. In Georgia, the number would be 11,779 votes, or less than a quarter of a percentage point. And in Arizona, where Fox had doubled down on its call for Biden despite pressure from the Trump camp, it would be 10,457 votes, or less than a third of a percentage point. To get Trump to a clear victory of 270 electoral votes—adding roughly 23,000 votes to flip Nebraska’s Second Congressional District—it would still have taken fewer votes for him to win than his margin in 2016. Publicly, Biden’s team struck the posture that he had won a big victory. Privately, campaign officials acknowledged they had hung on by their fingernails."

In the authors' words, "between Trump’s pernicious efforts to invalidate the results by lying, intimidating state election officials, and inciting his followers to storm the Capitol, and Biden’s incentive to portray the outcome as a landslide, many voters didn’t realize how close the president had come to winning a second term."

In short, both Biden and the country got lucky. "In 2016, Trump had needed everything to go wrong for Hillary Clinton to win. This time, Biden caught every imaginable break."

Of course, being lucky. being the right candidate for the right moment, does not diminish the effectiveness what he himself brought to his campaign. "The key to Biden’s victory, more than anything else, was the consistency of his message about what he would do for voters—restore 'the soul of this nation'—and why he was uniquely capable of delivering on that promise. Ridiculed for so long about his lack of discipline as a candidate, Biden stuck to his theory of the case during a brutal primary slog and in the face of pressure from his allies—even members of his own staff—to change his strategy and tactics in the general election. ... Knowing who he was, and where he wanted to be politically, allowed Biden’s campaign to capitalize when luck ran his way—and it did, time and again."