September 26, 2020: Breathing -

My insightful childhood buddy points out that “I can’t breathe” is the theme song for 2020:

COVID-19 victims? Check.

Victims of police violence, choked, knelt upon, and/or tear-gassed? Check.

Victims of the wildfires and the smoke? Check.

Lots of burnt over ground and the taste of ashes out there.

Plus there’s all the gasping we find ourselves doing.

Remember after Trump was inaugurated, some pundit (maybe many pundits) wrote that in any country where power shifts between parties, there will come a time when your party is out of power, and you mustn’t get too worked up if the other guys do their thing, when they get the chance. If Republicans do regular Republican things, and you aren’t a Republican, let it go. If they do outrageous things, un-American things, terrible things, then make a fuss. But don’t waste your breath on stuff they were always going to do.

I’m saving my breath on the appointment of a conservative to the Supreme Court. Republicans have been filling judgeships with conservatives for decades, and Mitch’s proudest legacy may be the way he kept hundreds of federal judgeships from being filled under Obama, so that he could fill them all with conservative judges and create a judiciary far more conservative than the country as a whole, which will legislate, often in opposition to the will of most Americans, for decades to come.

It is a recurrent and slightly curious theme, Republicans abjuring the majority of the country, putting people into power, either through gerrymandering, voter suppression, or appointments, who are older, and whiter, and preponderantly more male, and socially far more conservative than America is. 

(On every measure, the Democratic representatives in the House and Senate look more like America than the Republicans do. It seems like a strategy that is doomed to fail, over time, as demographics change. But it sure hasn’t changed yet.)

You know all of this. It just seems as if it is, or at least should be, unsustainable. Here’s the Pew Research Center reporting that in all 50 states, the share of non-Hispanic White eligible voters declined between 2000 and 2018, and that Gen Z eligible voters reflect the growing racial and ethnic diversity of U.S. electorate.

In other words, the Republican party isn’t just unrepresentative of America, it is increasingly less and less representative. It should be hard to sustain that situation. But it’s not impossible.

When Lindsey Graham said that “the courts” will decide the next election, I gasped. No, the voters will decide! But he may be right. (LONG rant excised here. You are welcome.)

ANYWAY.

Our Supreme Court nominee, who was nearly pre-ordained, is a done deal. If there are even hearings, rather than an instant floor vote, they probably won’t reveal that she drunkenly assaulted anybody, and even if she did, guess who wouldn’t care?

So we may as well move on and save our strength, I’m thinking. There are plenty of things happening right now, on the ground, from which her confirmation is only a distraction.

For instance, take a look at the COVID Hardship Watch, from the (nonpartisan! founded in 1981! focused on how federal budget choices affect low-income Americans! still, somehow, in biz!) Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Here’s the latest from their COVID Hardship tracker. I’ll just give you two of the graphs, and let you decide whether you can bear reading the article.

Thanks to the bungling of the pandemic, thanks to the unemployment crisis and the failure of Republican legislators to extend benefits, much of the country is hurting. Over 20% of Black and Latino households are struggling with food insufficiency. 

And it's worse for our kids. Amongst our citizenry, 42% of Black children currently live in households that are either behind in rent or food insecure.

Forty-two per cent.  There's an "I can't breathe" situation equal to any fire.