Whitcomb: Home Health Care Looks Better and Better; Dooley Did Well; You’ll Miss the Office

Sunday, May 24, 2020

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

”I had a blueprint

of history

in my head —

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it was a history of the martyrs

of love, the fools

of tyrants, the tyrants

themselves weeping

at the fate of their own soldiers —‘’

 

-- From “Blueprint,’’ by Tom Sleigh, a New York-based poet and journalist

 

 

“Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices’’

 

-- Laurence J. Peter, (1919-1990), writer, professor and creator of "The Peter Principle’’

 

 

“History is the unfolding of miscalculations,’’ historian Barbara Tuchman (1912-89), in Stillwell and the American Experience in China

 

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This will, of course, be a very unusual summer and as unpredictable as the spread and contraction (and then spread again?) of COVID-19. But when was anything really important in human events predictable?  One thing that we can be fairly certain about: We’ll be eating outside a lot more.

 

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About a decade ago, my wife and I bought long-term-care insurance. The selling point was that the newer policies provided much more coverage of care at home – such as paying home health-care workers and providing some medical gear – and so would make it easier to avoid going into a nursing home. The idea is to do almost anything to stay out of nursing homes. The COVID-19 disaster has displayed the dangers of residing in these places, which, whatever the efforts to keep them safe, still can become Petri dishes of infection.  Those HVAC systems!

 

Of course, not that many decades ago almost all old and ailing people stayed at home, to be cared for by members of the big extended families that were common before World War II. In recent decades, we’ve gone from the post-war “nuclear family” of two parents and two or three kids to a vast increase in the number of one-parent (usually the mother) families with what used to be called “illegitimate children’’ with bad socio-economic effects on society as a whole.

 

But the difficult economics of low-and-middle-income families seem to be bringing back some of these multigenerational “extended” families to live together. And the aging of the population and America’s astronomical medical costs will compel many more families to care for people at home. COVID-19 has given them another reason. Which isn’t to say that multigenerational families living together can’t create hot spots, too.

 

The pandemic will slam the huge nursing-home industry.
 

 

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URI President Dooley leaves in 2021

Dooley a Great URI Leader

David Dooley has been a great president of the University of Rhode Island.  He’ll retire in June 2021.

 

He’s helped bring in the strongest and most diverse student body and faculty the university has ever had, who have done widely recognized research in URI’s nationally, and in some cases internationally, known centers of excellence. He’s overseen the construction of functionally superb and architecturally important new buildings while improving the aesthetics of the already bucolic campus.  And he’s been very adept at raising money.

 

What makes the achievements of Mr. Dooley, a chemist by training, all the more impressive is that his tenure started in July 2009, a very difficult time because of the Great Recession. He’ll face new and familiar issues as he helps guide the university and his anointed successor through the next year, which is bound to be very difficult for American academia.  The university is lucky that he’ll be in charge as this crisis rolls on.

 

 

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Scooters in the river PHOTO: GoLocal

Suggestion Box

More than ever, Providence needs alternate forms of transportation, such as rentable “micromobility’’ vehicles like Jump bikes and Lime scooters, whose companies have fled the city after an epidemic of thefts and vandalism, mostly by youths. What can police do to better oversee the use of these bikes and scooters? Can’t punishment of these crimes be stiffened and widely publicized? Can stronger electronic surveillance systems (including more video cameras on the streets) can be adopted?  New alarms? Can high school principals help put the fear of God in some of these young criminals?

 

This is a serious problem of quality of life. Suggestions, please.

 

 

New England Kelp Farming                                         

We New Englanders think more about lobsters as we head into summer. But they’re disappearing from much of the southern New England coast, apparently mostly because of warming waters. Waters are warming in the lobster heartland of the Maine Coast, too, but not too much yet to slash harvests. At the same time, key finfish species are declining. So to find other ways of continuing to work on that storied coast, some former and current lobstermen and other fishermen are getting into oyster and other shellfish aquaculture, and now kelp, which is sold as a very healthy food.

 

The kelp farms have another attribute:

 

Our fossil-fuel burning is loading carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, much of which goes into the oceans, where it makes the water more acidic. Among other damage, this harms the development of the shells of oysters, and hurts lobsters, too. But kelp farms reduce the acidity of the water around them, creating sites not only better for shellfish but also for other creatures.

 

 

Patriotism Under the Elms

Something I miss about Memorial Day, the greenest holiday: The elms that elegantly shadowed the streets of New England towns as the holiday parades moved through, with the mingled smells of wet cut grass and spectators’ cigarette, pipe and cigar smoke.

 

I overheard this explanation by a radio talk show host to a kid a couple of years ago of the difference between Veterans Day and Memorial Day: “The ones today {Memorial Day} are all dead; some of the Veterans Day people are still alive.’’

 

 

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BMW

They Never Really Could Afford Them

Many of the cars lined up for their recession-hit drivers and passengers to get stuff at a food bank the other day in affluent Fairfield County, Conn., were expensive – Mercedes, BMW’s, Land Rovers, many huge SUV’s, etc.  It was a spectacle that suggests that far too many Americans are still trying to keep up with the Joneses.

 

 

Private Equity vs. Your Health

Rapacious private-equity firms have ravaged many firms and sectors,  including my own former industry the newspaper business. They soak companies they take over in debt, which results in cost-slashing that can, over time, destroy the very assets that made them valuable. But private-equity firms are not it in for the long haul; they seek a 20-30 percent annualized rate of return within three to five years. And now they may be ruining health care.

Please hit this link:

 

 

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Are we Zoomed out?

The Isolation of ScreenWork, Continued

It’s expected that many more people, what with Zoom, Skype, etc., will be permanently working at home, as employers seek to reduce the danger of infectious disease they might be held responsible for and save a lot of money on real-estate costs.

 

There are some big drawbacks. Workers will have less idea of what’s going on in their enterprises: they’ll lose some of the ability of understand what their co-workers and bosses are up to; they’ll have fewer opportunities to develop friendships with, and learn from, their co-workers, and they’ll lose the advantages of in-person training.

 

Body language can speak volumes.

 

The post-World War II period to about 1995 was the great age of the American office. For much of that time, the economy was healthy, and many folks expected to have long-term work with the same employer.

 

All the offices I worked in had their social benefits. My first office job, for several summers, was at a shipping company overlooking Boston Harbor and Logan Airport.  Much of the work was boring – e.g., filing multi-colored bills of lading – but it had its charms, too, such as talking with truckers at the loading docks, being sent on some errands in downtown Boston, which at that time didn’t look much different than it had in 1937, and going on a lunch boat.

 

With the newish IBM Selectric typewriters clacking away in the background, I’d chat every hour or so with my office mates, who came from all over Greater Boston and had, for a little office, a remarkably wide range of backgrounds. Most of the men seemed to have served in World War II or the Korean War, and they’d tell me stories about it. The women would often talk about their children, of whom these mostly Irish-and- Italian-Americans, tended to have many, and what was going on in their parishes. But everyone would talk about the news, most of which they’d get from newspapers, which were strewn around the office.

 

I learned in that office whom to avoid and whom to seek guidance from. One of the latter was an older man, Mr. Gookin, who had had a managerial job at the parent company that didn’t work out and now was a sort of clerk.  (Big companies then didn’t fire folks with the abandon they do now.) He took me under his wing. Once, someone, maybe in the cleaning staff, stole $45 I had stuck in a drawer. I told Mr. Gookin, who responded: “You’ll lose a lot more than that in this life.’’

 

I think of my time in the crowded, smoke-filled and un-air-conditioned newsroom of the old Boston Record America, with its gruff and rumpled scandal-seekers but also with the courtly and natty writer Joe Purcell, who got me the job; the spacious newsroom of the doomed Boston Herald Traveler, which crazies off the streets would sometimes stagger into; the cool and austere newsroom, divided by cubicles, but with many funny people, of The Wall Street Journal, across the street from the doomed World Trade Center; the Art Deco offices of The Providence Journal, peopled by a mix of very provincial and very worldly employees, and the modernistic but claustrophobic and smoky home of the International Herald Tribune, with its airport terminal-like collection of characters from around the world.

 

 

Life in person!

I think that the millions of people who now must work at home will miss a lot of life and learning working at home, though commuting is rarely much fun.

 

And maybe our entrapment by COVID-19 will lead some of us to consider just how fake our social-media “lives’’ really are.

 

 

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Declining birthrate

The Birth Busts. Birthrate Falls to Record Low

Last year the U.S. birthrate fell to the lowest level since the federal government began compiling such statistics, in 1909. It was 58.2 births per 1,000 women ages 15-44, while the number of births in 2019 was about 3.75 million, the lowest number in 35 years.  I expect the birthrate to fall further.

This may suggest pessimism and economic anxiety, as well as more emphasis on individuals’ interests. But smaller population growth is, overall, good for the world.

 

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As the Trumpers continue to assail Blue States in general and their big cities in particular in the COVID-29 crisis, readers might bear in mind these numbers from the epicenter (so far) of the disease in America, New York City:

 

In 2017 New York City life expectancy reached 81.2 years, up a full year over a decade, much better than the national figure --- 78.6 years, which has been flat for years.
 

One reason was improvements in the very transit system that anti-urbanists denounce.

 

As Governing magazine noted: “Last year, New York City had 221 traffic deaths, with the number having fallen steadily from a record high of 701 in 1990. Largely thanks to its largest city, New York State’s traffic fatality rate is 4.8 per 100,000, just a third of Florida’s 14.7 deaths per 100,000.’’

 

More to the point, some cities even more densely populated and mass-transit-dependent than New York – Hong Kong and Taipei – have very low COVID-19 caseloads, mostly because they have tougher controls than seem possible in libertarian, fragmented America. That will change, at least in big Blue State cities.

 

Meanwhile, reports are coming in that people are driving faster now, with roads less crowded. Watch out!

 

 

His Lies Brought Him Far – Why Stop Now?

“You have, I think, sir, something of a genius for creating confusion, creating turmoil in the hearts and minds of the country.’’

 

-- Boston lawyer Joseph Welch to Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy in a 1954 Senate hearing.

 

 

Trump lies all day, every day. So I don’t believe he’s actually taking, as he asserts he is, hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial pill (heavily promoted by some people on Fox “News”) he touts as a COVID-19 preventive. I think he’s just saying it because he was touting the medication as the pandemic reached (we hope) its height and doesn’t want to admit now that he was wrong and that the drug can be dangerous, even lethal. But some of the Fuhrer’s followers will take whatever he says he takes. Trump’s modus operandi, inculcated in him by his mentor the corrupt New York lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, is to never apologize, to deny responsibility for any mistakes he makes and to attack, attack, attack.

 

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Ah, class! The very affluent town of Wellesley, Mass., has stopped CVS from doing more COVID-19 testing at the company’s store in a particularly spiffy part of town. I guess the fear is that it will bring in too many members of the lower classes.

 

 

Trade Tradeoffs

We ought to remember that the U.S. and world economies had some big troubles well before the pandemic, and that the long recovery that started in 2009 was getting tired. The troubles included the continuing explosion of debt; the slowing of international trade because, especially, of Trump’s trade wars; demographics, and other factors were pushing us toward recession.  And growing government corruption in America and abroad haven’t helped either.

 

While it’s true that trade deals since the ‘90s have killed many U.S. manufacturing jobs, they also brought Americans cheap goods that offset to some extent sluggish-to-none existent wage growth. Some will soon be complaining about the higher prices and fewer products that will go along with the constriction of trade. Meanwhile, the pandemic will speed job-killing industrial automation. Can new sorts of jobs replace them?

 

Investors, however, have greatly benefited from the trade deals.

 

COVID-19 has only accelerated the move toward economic nationalism and a very reasonable desire to be more self-reliant in such crucial things as medical supplies.  Some of our supply chains are just too long and exposed. But, again, trade wars curtail economic dynamism around the world.

 

See this pre-pandemic warning on debt:

 

Meanwhile, the near-monopolization of some sectors by a few big companies and the associated slowdown in new-business creation (which generally has been falling since the late ’70s) will also continue to limit innovation, wage increases and economic growth. Hit this link:

Hit here too.

 

 

Paid to Lie About Abortion Stance

Norma McCorvey, known as “Jane Roe” in the landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion in all states, said she was lying when she later joined the anti-abortion movement, saying she had been paid to do so. I’m not surprised.

 

In a new documentary, made before her death in 2017 and broadcast Friday on  the FX cable channel, McCorvey made what she calls a “deathbed confession.”

“I took their money and they took me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say,” she says on camera. “I did it well too. I am a good actress. Of course, I’m not acting now.”

“If a young woman wants to have an abortion, that’s no skin off my ass. That’s why they call it choice,” she added.

I often wish that abortion had remained entirely in the purview of the states so that cynical pols were less able to use this intensely emotional issue nationally as cover for promoting their own special economic and political interests.

 

 

Local-Book Shelf

Two new books of local creation but wider interest:

 The first is Wherever I Go, with text by Mary Wagley Copp, of Westport, Mass.,  and lovely illustrations by Munir D. Mohammed, of Providence. It’s a children’s book about a girl and her family living in a refugee camp in Ethiopia, beset by dangers. Unlike most of their fellow refugees they eventually find refuge in America. While this is a kid’s book, it doesn’t ignore the grim reality of their situation even as it evokes the girl’s charm, resilience and imagination.

“Forever homes are in strange and faraway lands,’’ she says.

 

The other book is Bruce K. Berger’s collection of poems called Fragments: The long coming home from Vietnam. Mr. Berger served in the Army in what the Vietnamese call the “American War,’’ after which he eventually became a public-relations executive and then an academic.  The book includes some vivid and ingenious art contributed by Providence Art Club members thanks to the efforts of longtime Berger friend Nickerson Miles.

As a “next of kin editor’’ in Vietnam, Mr. Berger wrote hundreds of letters of sympathy to grieving families back in America.

These poems provide a ground-level view of war and its aftermath over the decades that you won’t forget. Brutality and compassion, the exotic and mundane. And as the end of Mr. Berger’s poem “Five Seasons for Soldiers’’ goes:

“Time runs forward, back

memories loop endlessly –

Storms have no season’’

 

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It might be a good time to read or reread Thomas Mann’s great  1924 novel The Magic Mountain about people quarantined in a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Alps before World War and the state of Western Civilization at that time.

 

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