THANKSGIVING 2020 -- FLOWERS IN THE FALL

I remember the day we buried my best friend's baby.  

His wife was lucky to be alive.  Well into her ninth month and with the birth mere weeks away, her uterus burst internally, killing their son and almost killing her as well.  My friend was by then a prominent New York attorney, well-acquainted with late nights and long trips.  That night, however, he was home.  Had he been away, he would have come home to two tragedies.  

One was enough.

At the funeral, as he began his sermon, the priest looked out over a small group of familiar faces.  

He knew us all.  He knew we were ambitious, hard working, take-charge types, unwilling and unable to let mere fate take its course, always prepared to intervene, to move life in the direction we wanted, to shape the future rather than simply await it. He knew this because, decades before, he had been one of the Jesuits who taught us the skills we'd use to do so.

Now, in the still, silence of a small chapel in Manhattan, he was teaching us something else.

We highly educated, ambitious, hard-working citizens of early 21st century America control things.

"But," he said, "not everything."

Welcome to 2020. 

The year of lost control.

Covid, a quintessential manifestation of lost control at so many levels, has killed over 250,000 in America and more than 1.3 million worldwide.  Bookended by a dysfunctional politics that has made things even worse, we approach Thanksgiving in circumstances very similar to those that existed in 1863 when Lincoln first proclaimed the last Thursday in November a national day of thanks.  Then, we were on our way to killing 763,000 in a war with ourselves over whether one man had the right to own another.  Now, we are marching toward a projected number of deaths of anywhere from 350,00 to over half a million largely dependent upon whether all of us are willing to wear masks, stand apart, and occasionally quarantine until an effective vaccine is widely distributed.  

In 1863, Lincoln asked us to thank God for the fact that war had not "arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship." The economy, it seemed, was doing rather well wherever armies were not creating the first killing fields of modern warfare. At the same time, acutely aware of the war's toll in "widows, orphans, mourners [and] sufferers", Lincoln demanded that the day's prayer be one of "humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience."  He knew that the Civil War was at its core the product of both.

In 2020, our prayers should be similarly schizophrenic. The genius of American science and American business is on full display as three companies complete testing and are on the verge of issuing an effective vaccine. The US military is poised to deliver it to the initial wave of recipients within 48 hours of final approval.  The speed with which this likely remedy was produced is unique, breathtaking really, and conjures a reality that buttresses all those (often exaggerated) claims of American exceptionalism.

Be thankful for that.

Covid did not "arrest", as Lincoln would put it, our ingenuity.

After thirty years of over the top right-wing rhetoric, it also did not arrest our ability to embrace the necessity of effective, even big, government.  

One of the principal reasons Pfizer and Moderna and AztraZeneca were able to generate their vaccine at the bureaucratic equivalent of the speed of light is that the federal government -- the one so many of us now habitually hate -- guaranteed their market.  It's a lot easier to get on with the business of discovery, testing and production when you have already been guaranteed payment.  In economic terms, it pretty much eliminates risk, or what is worse in the capitalism of contemporary America, shareholder derivative suits.  For the time being, we also can ignore the fact that, in truth, this whole guaranteed governmental purchase thing is a form of socialism for shareholders, a truth that uncovers a bee hive of hypocrisy in our current zeitgeist.  As is always the case when socialism adds to corporate profit margins, we must put that aside.  

And just . . . 

Thank Uncle Sam.

Not unexpectedly, our current but soon to be ex-President is demanding we thank him as well.  When not inventing election fraud claims his own lawyers -- lest they lose their licenses -- refuse to repeat in actual courts before actual judges, he now asserts that his FDA never would have fast tracked a vaccine without his insistence. Hard to know if this is the case, but even a "perhaps" deserves a nod of approval.  The problem, however, is that Trump insists upon so much, and so much that is false, that it is hard to tell whether anything he says generates progress rather than chaos.  The other problem is that, even assuming he deserves credit for lighting the bureaucratic fires that got this (almost) done, he is now impeding the incoming Biden Administration's ability to distribute the vaccine by refusing to share the data and plans the new President will have to implement.  

I have no idea what, specifically, Trump said to the FDA.  Or even if the agency listened.  But I am certain that, if something goes wrong between now and when the first vaccine is delivered, Trump's insistence claim will vanish.  I am also certain that Trump will never concede his loss to Biden and have tired of waiting for Republican office-holders and appointees to do their jobs regardless.  The head of the GSA is still pretending she cannot "ascertain" that Biden won the election and thus free up transition funds, and every day she waits is one lost to a seamless vaccine delivery after January 20.

So, no thanks, Mr. President.

My original intention in this year's Thanksgiving missive was to thank my Mom.  She is 91 and Covid has been difficult for her and my sister, both of whom live together about two hours from me in New Jersey.  She misses her grandchildren and me and her daughter-in-law.  On Mothers Day, we drove down to surprise them and assembled (socially-distanced) at their coop's picnic area.  With the new spikes, the area has been closed.  She is (fortunately) healthy and we all intend to keep it that way.  She is also a nurse and understands better than most what is at stake.

Most adults have a hard time with change.  My mother, however, is different.   I am not certain she always accepted change.  But she certainly navigated it.  In 1947, she graduated from an elite NYC high school but did not have the chance to go to college. In 1950, she became a nurse, a profession she practiced into her 80s and one for which she was perfectly suited.  Principally because she had a natural empathy for others, a natural aversion to judgment, and a respect for intellect and science.  Illness, especially mental illness, was a fact, not a fault.  And she nursed everyone, including herself, through it.

In 1955 she married my father, who she loved. He, however, loved martinis a bit more. Which, generally speaking, ends badly.  At 50, she was newly divorced and wondered whether she'd grow old poor.  At 56, she married my step-father, who loved her (and not martinis). They took care of each other.  At 72, however, she buried him.  Like her sister, she had had sixteen years of a very good marriage.  

The only problem was . . .

It ended too soon.

Instead of resenting reality, however, she surfed it.  She always found the next wave.  And when she washed out, she always got back on the board.  She passed her dreams of higher education onto her children.  Both of us.  Gender did not matter.  She refused to assume that a bad marriage could not be followed by a good one.  Or that the death of loved ones made it impossible to be sustained by the memory of their love.  In Landslide, Stevie Nicks asks "Oh, mirror in the sky what is love?/Can the child within my heart rise above?/Can I sail through the changin' ocean tides?/Can I handle the seasons of my life?"  

She needs to meet my mother.  

Whose life is a resounding "Yes!"

Someday I'll say all of this in a church.  I hope that day is a long way away.  In the meantime, I'm reminded of another priest who wrote my mother a letter once praising her work and explaining that bouquets were not just for funerals.  

So, Mom, this Thanksgiving . . .

This bouquet's for you.