The March Demonstrates: We WILL Get By

1/21/2017

Voting Monitors Celebrate Productive Harvest (Photo: Diane Tuman)

As rain began to fall Friday in DC, we went out to lunch on Long Island -- a modest Afghan restaurant, on the theory that the place would not exactly be humming with inauguration buffs.

We had appetizers laced with yogurt and garlic, curry, rice, salad and nice crisp bread – the kind of cuisine new people bring to this country.

Across from us, three young women in head scarves were talking excitedly, giggling occasionally. They seemed much like our own grand-daughter, sitting across from us in the booth – bright, hopeful, their lives ahead of them. America.

Somebody in our family had turned down the chance to watch the Inauguration from a privileged site -- couldn’t pretend to be enthusiastic.

However, on Saturday we did have loved ones in Washington and New York, mingling with the hundreds of thousands. From afar, it looked like good fun. No fire hoses, no dogs, not yet.

The new President, who makes up everything, later said the press invented the figures for the two events. Yet I kept getting photos on my iPhone. Guess those multitudes were photo-shopped – with banners appropriate to this day.

My email included a blessing from the Rev. Dr. Susan Henry-Crowe, the General Secretary of the United Methodist Church, for the departing President and his family, and the incoming President and his family.

Her blessing included: “For the good of the earth and all of creation, which God has given us, and for the wisdom and will to conserve it, let us pray to the Lord. Lord, have mercy.”

Another email was from an old friend, Roy Lloyd, one of the thoughtful religion commentators on WINS 1010 AM in New York. Roy described the pink caps worn by many marchers, adding: “The participants demonstrated something said by Helen Keller: ‘One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.’”

Speaking of prayers: On the same gorgeous Saturday back home, I went for a fast walk on the high-school track, listening to the Grateful Dead on my headset. As I circled the soft red track, I blurted out the punch line in “Touch of Grey.”

“We will get by” – emphasis on the “will.”

In repetition, it becomes a prayer, just like the haunting punch line in George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun” – “It’s all right.”

After this epic day all over the world, we can repeat this mantra in days to come:
It's all right.
We will get by.

Photos by Diane Tuman

Peter Lee

1/22/2017 06:41:29 am

Congratulations. Did you know that my book is in the Axinn Library? It's also in the Suffolk County Library system.

Hansen Alexander

1/22/2017 03:58:37 pm

George,

Reporting from Washington, or about yesterday's march. It was inspiring to be around America's future, these committed young women, trying to break the political glass barrier, historically fashioned by women's lack of access to political money, and realistically why Senator Clinton was the first woman to win a party's chance at it.

The unprecedented savaging and smearing of Clinton is now understandable, it could only have endured against a female for so many decades. These young women understand they too are being held to a higher standard and are prepared to meet it.

As many women now admit, their own success led to a taking for granting of their hard won rights, and young women now realize that they can't take any of those rights, including the right to choose an abortion, for granted.

This was my first March as a participant after having covering these events 40 years ago. There have been many changes due to the enormous security measures put in place. Besides the Fuhrer's high handed tactics that forced the March into the narrow Independence Avenue, the metal fences guarding and surrounding such departments as Agriculture, Transportation, Energy, greatly reduces the space to march in.

The Fuhrer was raving about his audience count, but in reality there is no way he (or any future President) would be able to match numbers of people either along the inaugural route or ceremony due to all these security fences and barriers. Pennsylvania Avenue alone has been cut off to cars for decades now, reducing the number of people that can watch the parade from there. The sidewalks have become practically non existent due to these steel barriers. The Ellipse where the the Women's March ended has been cut in half by white fencing that separates it as the White House tour now begins, instead of East Executive Avenue, a former street now cut off by security.

An ugly metal security zone, It is the new National Mall.

George Vecsey

1/22/2017 08:00:30 pm

Hansen, thanks for the report from the front. We have been catching up with our family members who were there, and friends. We saw 2-3 pink caps while sitting in a window seat at Sotto Voce in Park Slope today. We mimicked applause through the glass.
Numbers are tricky. In ROTC, they taught us how to estimate crowds -- count individually to a working cluster -- 20, 50. Then keep multiplying those clusters.
The fallout from Saturday is huge. Our Office Temp Leader seems obsessed with size.
GV

Richard Taylor

1/22/2017 04:10:03 pm

A quote in the Toronto Star from a woman protester in NYC regarding
Donald Trump. With apologies to Mary Poppins

“Super callous fascist racist extra braggadocious."

George Vecsey

1/22/2017 08:01:50 pm

Brilliant. I will send that to my Ontario pal Bruce who often writes in this seditious little space.
Thanks GV

Hansen Alexander

1/22/2017 06:19:21 pm

George,

Forgot to tell you what I discovered in putting together my press kit to promote "The Life and Trials of Roger Clemens." I assembled a list of approximately 200 of the top college newspapers in the country and I can tell you that at least half, if not a plurality, of sports editors of the college papers are women. Furthermore, the diversity would amaze you. Lots of editors from Chinese and Vietnamese families, surprising number of editors from Middle Eastern background, Latin American, South American, Russian, Nigerian, etc. Amazing but a look at the changing background of the American sportswriters of the future: and they ain't white males like us, LOL.

George Vecsey

1/22/2017 07:56:04 pm

Hansen, it's a good point but I would like to think that being a sports writer in college is a rite of passage, like getting drunk or other gettings and then they get better-paying jobs with more future. First thing I tell sports-minded students who ask what to study in college: I say, business/pre-law/science/math. These days I add, a language -- Chinese, Arab, and of course, Russian.
GV.

Hansen Alexander

1/23/2017 10:36:18 pm

George,

I don't know what these young people will do. When I was youngest doing radio at GW and Georgetown, college newspaper kids mostly did go on to other pursuits. Maybe that's an Eastern education thing. It was certainly NOT the case at the University of Texas which has always been a journalism factory. Obviously guys named Cronkite and Moyers and Willie Morris stuck with it. From my class Lisa Beyer became the Managing Editor of Time Magazine. And most of the kids on our famous Daily Texan did at least some time in the newspaper business. And the Broadcasting program has been even more prolific, turning out a healthy percentage of the local TV talent across the country.

Hansen Alexander

1/23/2017 10:51:46 pm

George,

A week ago I would have agreed with you that young people should stay away from journalism and get a business education and learn Chinese and get rich.

But after seeing what I saw this weekend, I'm going to advise all the young folks to avoid law, which is no longer an honorable profession, and forget business which will ruin your soul, and study journalism. That's right. Study journalism. Learn budgets. Get out and interview people. Because journalism is the last line of defense against fascism and the decline of democracy. Everybody else is going to business school. Business degrees are becoming a dime a dozen.

Start their own press, start their own paper, their own broadsheet.

Gene Palumbo

1/23/2017 12:58:08 am

Headline on New York Times home page:

Crowd Scientists Say Women’s March in Washington Had 3 Times More People Than Trump’s Inauguration
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/22/us/politics/womens-march-trump-crowd-estimates.html

George Vecsey

1/23/2017 09:07:00 am

Gene, it was really an epic day. We knew so many people who were there. On Sunday we met good friends for brunch at the same place in Park Slope where we met. We saw some pink caps walking past the window -- and we gave them silent applause. The reaction to this guy reminds me of 1967...and I remember LBJ slinking out of campaigning the next year. I'm sure this guy doesn't remember. He was busy running his restricted buildings back in those days. GV

Joshua Rubin

1/23/2017 12:41:54 pm

We were in DC on Saturday as well. Very inspiring. Enormous crowd full of great people and hilarious signs. Pink "pussyhats" everywhere. Hard to capture it all in a comment. This is the best reporting on what it was actually like to be there on Saturday:

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/22/14348746/womens-march-on-washington-celebrities-alicia-keys-gloria-steinem

But now the real work begins. .

George Vecsey

1/23/2017 02:01:49 pm

Josh, thanks for the link. Good on you for going down there. Sure, the work begins. But now millions of people know they are hardly alone. GV

Brian Savin

1/24/2017 08:14:07 pm

Had a daughter and daughter-in-law participating in the event on the Mall Saturday. Well organized. Signs had to be hand held -- no sticks allowed. Smart. No one arrested. Bikers for Trump in attendance watching over helpfully. The "kids" couldn't hear Ashley Judd or Maddona. That's good. Participants themselves concerned but with positive attitudes. A good group.

Except for one serious mistake (Ajit Pai as FCC Chair) our President is doing not badly. Time will tell.

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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

The March Demonstrates: We WILL Get By

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