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Friend of ours was driving from the upper Midwest to the East Coast the other day, with family. They left at night, got hungry for breakfast around dawn, and then remembered:
“Yikes, we’re in Indiana.” Indiana, with the new law permitting bigots to refuse to do business with gays – on religious grounds. Just for the record, this is not a family that is going to arouse the deep fears and prejudices of the smugly religious. But this is a family with quite American values. So they kept going, 153 miles from west to east on Interstate 80/90, heading east, toward gasoline and biscuits. That is the way to go, while Gov. Mike Pence makes a total ass of himself on national television, trying to explain what is so obvious from the hard look in his eyes. He is standing up for his base, the rabid core, that will say it loves everybody but doesn’t want to make a wedding cake for two men or two women who love each other, or sell coffee to them, or gasoline. The reaction from major companies like Eli Lilly and Cummins Engine Co. has been instructive. I can speak about Cummins a bit. When we lived in Louisville, Ky., one of our most beautiful outings was on a crisp fall Saturday, visiting the great architecture of Columbus, Ind. -- a Saarinen church, courtesy of Cummins. Just memorable. I loved the southern part of Indiana, near the Ohio River, even with its county-by-county time zones that could make you nuts. Loved the stone county courthouses. Loved the hills of Brown County. Loved the great music from Indiana University. But these are new times. The base is threatened by having to do business with the emerging America, the minorities-becoming-majorities, plus the gay couples getting married, many of them raising children. Indiana has made its statement. Drive on.
John McDermott
3/31/2015 06:30:53 pm
Living on the West Coast means I can usually just fly over Indiana. What a cowardly and ignorant decision. I can't believe this will stand for very long.
George Vecsey
4/1/2015 12:37:01 am
Indiana meant no harm. It just wanted to protect the religious freedom of its folks to be prejudiced. It's the rest of us who are distorting their lofty aims. GV
bruce
4/3/2015 03:57:53 am
George,
George Vecsey
4/3/2015 04:03:43 am
You missed the doofus from Wisconsin., Over his head in UK,
bruce
4/3/2015 04:33:30 am
George, 7/17/2015 05:59:51 am
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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 |
