The Right to Display Pride

7/27/2012

Eileen Collins, left. Sally Ride, above.

I’ve met only one astronaut, and that was Eileen Collins on Aug. 31, 2005, after she had been the commander of the Discovery space flight.

Many of us had seen live images of Discovery gliding to a graceful landing on terra firma, with Collins in control, and three weeks later for some reason or other she and her two colleagues were in Shea Stadium before a Mets game.

Given the crush of reporters, I talked to Collins only briefly – she had been a Mets fan as a girl in upstate New York – but I did get to chat with her husband Pat Youngs, a pilot for Delta. I learned he was a good amateur golfer, knew all about Mike Piazza's sore wrist, and was very proud of his wife.

A pilot who controlled jets packed with passengers displayed obvious awe for his life’s companion, who had taken a craft where he presumably would never go.

I thought of Eileen Collins and Pat Youngs the other day when I read the obituary for Sally Ride. I am not a big follower of space travel, but I did know the name Sally Ride.

Not only was she the first American woman (and third overall) in outer space, but she also had that felicitous name that seemed to come directly from the fertile mind of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., or Joseph Heller, if they had been writing a novel about a female astronaut. Ride, Sally Ride, indeed.

The obituary also contained a reference to a former husband and a subsequent "partner," Tam O’Shaughnessy. Since then, the media has pointed out that Ride was both a business partner and life partner of O'Shaughnessy, and that the couple was rather private about the relationship, as was their right.

However, we are in a time when that most public of officials, New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, likely the next mayor of the city, can don an apron for the Times and describe her restorative weekends on the Jersey shore with her now legal spouse Kim M. Catullo.

These days, Kim Catullo will be able to stand front and center if her spouse is inaugurated as mayor, the way Pat Youngs stood in front of the Mets dugout and watched his wife chat with the media horde.

Despite the judgments of Rep. Michele Bachmann and others on the religious right, more people are able to openly live the life they want. In that earlier time, one can only hope, Tam O’Shaughnessy never felt she had to cover up the pride she surely felt in being the life partner of Sally Ride.

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7/29/2012 05:46:21 am

George

It was refreshing to see RESPECT as the focus of your latest post. Although it is woefully missing these days, particularly in politics where attack and slander has replaced policy positions, mutual respect is very much alive throughout our society.

Your examples of some of the famous apply to so many people that I know, as well as other millions we never hear about. I see this in my two children and their spouses. They each have careers that focus on the public good as opposed to higher paying ones. This is also true of their friends who are comfortable giving something back to society.

As for Michele Bachmann, she obviously has not been witness to the values of the many same-sex families that are my children’s contemporaries. I know of many “so called normal” families who could learn from them. Fortunately, the country has moved way beyond Michele and her myopic religious right buddies.

A technical note on space! My first job as a metallurgical engineer out of graduate school in 1958 was with Pratt & Whitney Aircraft in E. Hartford, CT. It was an exciting time as commercial jets had just gone into airline service and the seeds of the Apollo Program had been sown. I was evaluating high temperature materials and protective coatings, but one of my colleagues was working on fuel cells, which was the electrical life-blood for the space missions.

One day he excitedly announced that they had generated ONE MINUTE of electricity. I thought about that moment when I watched Neil Armstrong step on the moon about ten years later. Since then, regardless of our countries ills, I have the belief that the single-minded effort of the space program could be applied to many of our countries ills if congress showed some courage and political will.

George

It was refreshing to see RESPECT as the focus of your latest post. Although it is woefully missing these days, particularly in politics where attack and slander has replaced policy positions, mutual respect is very much alive throughout our society.

Your examples of some of the famous apply to so many people that I know, as well as other millions we never hear about. I see this in my two children and their spouses. They each have careers that focus on the public good as opposed to higher paying ones. This is also true of their friends who are comfortable giving something back to society.

As for Michele Bachmann, she obviously has not been witness to the values of the many same-sex families that are my children’s contemporaries. I know of many “so called normal” families who could learn from them. Fortunately, the country has moved way beyond Michele and her myopic religious right buddies.

A technical note on space! My first job as a metallurgical engineer out of graduate school in 1958 was with Pratt & Whitney Aircraft in E. Hartford, CT. It was an exciting time as commercial jets had just gone into airline service and the seeds of the Apollo Program had been sown. I was evaluating high temperature materials and protective coatings, but one of my colleagues was working on fuel cells, which was the electrical life-blood for the space missions.

One day he excitedly announced that they had generated ONE MINUTE of electricity. I thought about that moment when I watched Neil Armstrong step on the moon about ten years later. Since then, regardless of our countries ills, I have the belief that the single-minded effort of the space program could be applied to many of our countries ills if congress showed some courage and political will.

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8/20/2012 10:32:05 pm

It was refreshing to see RESPECT as the focus of your latest post. Although it is woefully missing these days, particularly in politics where attack and slander has replaced policy positions, mutual respect is very much alive throughout our society.

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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 Right to Display Pride

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