Insurrection Goes to Washington
I woke up yesterday morning exhausted from watching the election returns from Georgia; I finally called it a night around midnight when they called the race for Reverend Raphael Warnock. I remember feeling joy; the first Black senator from Georgia? What an awesome sight to see. Maybe that arc is bending toward justice after all.
As we are in the midst of a global pandemic, my children are home doing virtual learning, so the day got going quickly. No rest for the wicked. I chugged down a few cups of coffee and ushered everyone to their…
Why Individuals and Structure Have to Work Together
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, we hit some grim milestones. 200,000 positive COVID tests. Over 2,000 deaths. The highest number of people hospitalized since the pandemic began. The dark winter has certainly begun.
And, yet, that same week, we saw a dramatic uptick in the number of flights around the country. People packed into airports to travel to family and friends. Photos of large, maskless gatherings packed the social media feeds. Black Friday saw decreased traffic but not pandemic decreased traffic. Lines and packed parking lots were still in plentiful supply.
In…
The Danger of Coronavirus Fatigue
As we look around, we see a real phenomenon emerging: I call it COVID fatigue. Everyone is tired. We are all overwhelmed. While we have experienced it differently, we are all suffering from trauma. Everyone wants to go back to “normal”. It can be easy to do that for an evening or even a few days. You get together, you have fun and laugh, and you go about your merry way. What COVID? We are all fine!
Until you aren’t.
The reality is pretty grim. We had a major wave of coronavirus infections in March…
“The Best Doctors in the World Around Him”
A telling thing happened today. In the midst of a major wave of coronavirus infections, the Trump team is still holding massive rallies throughout the battle ground states. On CNN, Alisyn Camerota asked the Trump 2020 press secretary, Hogan Gidley, this question: “Hospitals in WI are near capacity. Does that give you any pause about going there and holding a big rally?”. His response? “No, it doesn’t … the VP has the best doctors in the world around him”.
What?
The best doctors in the world. Let that land for just a…
As the presidential race reaches its fevered pitch, a new line of attack has emerged from the right: Joe Biden as a father. It’s a strange thing to watch because one of the hallmarks of Biden’s 40+ years in public service has been that he’s a good dad. He emerged from remarkable pain and suffering and did the work to be a good single father. We have all heard the stories of his commute from D.C. to Delaware each day and night; he simply couldn’t leave his boys when they needed him most. …
Relative Poverty and the COVID-19 Response
“How can you say that? There are children starving here!”. My student was incensed; I had just explained the concept of relative poverty to the class. The idea is that poverty is an intractable part of our society; we cannot eradicate it because there are those that will always have more and those that will always have less. We, thus, have to find a lesser degree of poverty based on our how our wealth and income are distributed. As I explained that the worst poverty in the U.S. would be considered average or even…
Being Dad in a Presidential Debate
There were so many viral moments in Tuesday’s Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Moments played over and over again because they get likes and clicks. “Just shut up, man”. “Stand back and stand by”. Words that will be burned into our history, even as we are shocked and repelled by them. It seems obvious that we have never seen a debate quite like this one; neither the moderator or one of the candidates could get a word in edgewise. As so many people noted: it was a mess.
But there was…
Education in the Time of Coronavirus
This will be a school year like no other in recent memory. To put it mildly, our children face a tremendous amount of uncertainty. Their lives were upended in March, and they haven’t been the same since. No amount of “normalcy” is going to change that.
There are arguments to be made on both sides of the school reopening debate. On the one hand, we have a raging pandemic. Its impact on children is not as clear as we would like; we have no idea what the long-term effects of this virus are. We…
#PortlandMoms Stand Up
As protests have continued around the nation, the media has largely lost interest, and so we don’t see the images on our television as much as we did a month ago. A raging pandemic and economic collapse are sucking all of the air out of the room, and an administration that is willfully trying to ignore all of it is scrambling to figure out the plan. But the protests continue.
Disturbing news emerged last week in Portland, Oregon; protesters reported an escalation in violence by unnamed individuals in camouflage. They had no identifiers and were often driving…
The Pain of Protest
I saw a quote this morning on Twitter that took my breath away; it was from a user named @_darriussimpson: “a protest with permission is a parade, y’all”. Protest is baked into our founding in the United States; there is almost nothing more American than fighting against oppression. Over and over again, we are told if we don’t stand for something, we will fall for anything. So, we fight for what believe in. But, over and over again, we are told there is a “right” way to do that. What does that mean?
Our founding fathers…
Jennifer Graham
Sociologist. Writer. Observer. Explorer.
