She is a latter-day version of the Pietà – a stricken child, held by her mother.
Yet the expression on her face seemed too mature for an infant. This was the riddle of Maria Isabel Bueso, when her pictures first appeared. The babe in arms is actually 24, ravaged by a rare condition that will kill her if she is taken off treatment. She is also a summa cum laude college graduate who teaches dancing to other afflicted students, and actively participates in research into her condition, to help others. When the public encountered this cherubic-looking activist, she became the prime example of undocumented people whose lives are being prolonged by American medicine and compassion -- a throwback to when Americans felt they were the good guys, when we cared for The Other. However, the so-called “Administration,” with its dead eyes and presumably similar souls, had decreed that these foreigners, these free-loaders, all surely rapists and robbers, had to go. Pull out the plugs, cut all the tubes. Never mind that Maria Isabel Bueso had been invited from Guatemala at the age of 7 to participate in this program in the California Bay Area, and was here, dare we say it, legally. The heartless ones had not counted on a young survivor, with unique credentials, catching the attention of this divided nation. Somebody explained to the President, the bloated old man with the permanent look of a spoiled child, with his millions of followers, that condemning this young scholar and medical volunteer to death would be bad publicity that could get in the way of all the other plots he has in mind. After a few days, the “Administration” decreed that medical patients like Maria Isabel Bueso could stay – at least until the government thinks of something else. Or, nobody is looking. * * * Original story: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/us/immigrant-medical-treatment-deferred-action.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Fmiriam-jordan&action=click&contentCollection=undefined®ion=stream&module=inline&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=collection When compassion and common sense intervened: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/02/us/trump-immigration-deferred-action.html Another perspective: https://www.wonkette.com/maybe-donald-trump-can-explain-how-killing-this-woman-will-make-america-great-because-we-sure-cant
Randolph
9/4/2019 10:10:07 pm
George,
George Vecsey
9/5/2019 10:20:56 am
Randy, remember the scene in John Sayles' movie, "Matewan," where the locals are worried because the "Eye-talians" are being brought in to work the mines? Now we've got Ken Cuccinelli vying with Stephen Miller for most vile Trumpite (beside Trump, that is.)
Randolph
9/5/2019 01:43:38 pm
George,
bruce
9/5/2019 10:42:10 am
george,
george
9/5/2019 12:25:15 pm
Bruce: quite right. Lot of “Good” Christians went scurrying our to vote for that guy because their pomaded pastors told them he is a man of God who is against abortion. Evangelicals have a Chernobyl life of blemish from this. GV
bruce
9/5/2019 01:09:02 pm
george,
Ed Martin
9/7/2019 09:30:21 pm
George and all, thank you for being part of a process of compassionate truth telling and for having human decency. 9/6/2019 01:58:35 pm
George, Randolph and Bruce—Thanks for the sane and insightful comments.
Randolph
9/6/2019 08:42:54 pm
Alan, 9/7/2019 12:12:41 pm
Randolph-thanks for your kind words.
Altenir Silva
9/7/2019 05:29:35 pm
Dear George, Comments are closed.
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QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html Categories
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