BONUS: Our collective amnesia forgets what really happened 5 years ago
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We citizens have an incredibly short attention span.
All of us.
Whether its what President Trump did during his first term, the beatings that police officers suffered on January 6 or the reality that 400,000 Americans died from Covid-19 by the end of 2020.
We have collective amnesia.
We push it out of our thoughts unable to remember the one universal emotion we all experienced five years ago - fear.
For the past few weeks, there have been regular stories about the five-year anniversary of when the earth stood still at the beginning of Covid; the shutdown of the country; how families huddled together in what many might define - depending on your family - as a gift or a curse.
The ramifications on children and their education will be studied for years.
We forget we drove 100 miles to Plattsburgh to get a vaccine administered by the National Guard.
We forget we all began wearing masks almost overnight.
We forget about being afraid to fly, church in parking lots, the lines on the floor of the supermarket to keep us all apart and staying at least six feet away from every person we encountered in public.
If you were suspected of having Covid, you were tested in the parking lot by a Hazmat-attired team of medical professionals.
It was right out of a science fiction book.
When I was wrapping up my first collection of columns - The Last American Editor, my last selection included in the book was, ironically, the last column I wrote for The Post-Star and it was about the beginning of the pandemic.
It was titled "Doctor does the right thing" and was published on March 29, 2020 - five years ago today.
At the time, I thought it was important to remember the horror we were going through. I thought it would be instructive.
The column recounted how a New York City doctor named Colleen Smith escorted two New York Times reporters into the emergency room of Elmhurst Hospital in Queens to show them first hand what was happening.
It violated hospital and HIPAA privacy laws.
She talked to reporters about things she wasn't supposed to talk about.
She told the world about her daily reality of death and helplessness.
The world needed to know, she said, that 13 of her patients had died in one day.
You may have forgotten that fact.
The Times reporters took videos and photos of patients - they were later blurred out - to show the conditions at the hospital.
It was bleak.
“The frustrating thing about all this is that it feels like it is too little, too late, like we knew, we knew it was coming,” Smith says in a video then. “Leaders in various offices (in the New York City medical community) are saying, ‘We’re gonna be fine, everything’s fine.’ And from our perspective, everything is not fine. I don’t have the support that I need. Even the materials I need to physically take care of my patients. This is America and we are supposed to be a first-world country.”
Her emergency room was seeing twice the normal number of patients - 400 instead of 200 - each day.
She talked about the refrigerated tractor trailer that was parked outside, just in case, and her colleagues who were becoming ill.
Within a week, Smith had Covid too, but it was mild and she recovered.
I wrote at the time, "I’m hoping the carnage we are seeing in New York City will be a wake-up call for those of us in this community that we need to do more to prepare. We need to be staying home all the time. Our contact with outside world needs to be non-existent to slow this virus down."
Five years later, some say I overreacted, that I panicked. They say we all did, including the federal government.
I don't think so.
More than 83,000 died in the state of New York from Covid. The total for the United States stands at 1.2 million.
“The anxiety of this situation is really overwhelming,” Dr. Smith said at the time. “We get exposed over and over again and we don’t have the protective equipment that we should have.
"What is scary now is that the patients we have are getting much sicker,” Dr. Smith said. “Many of the young people who are getting sick don’t smoke, they are healthy. They are just young regular people between the ages of 30 and 50 who you would not expect to get this sick.”
Five years later, you wonder if we've learned anything.
The Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare is a vaccine skeptic.
There is a measles outbreak that is raging in Texas and New Mexico where two children have died and the government are cutting the very safeguards we desperately needed at the start of the epidemic.
I ended my column this way:
You need to listen to this young doctor and take this more seriously.
“I don’t care if I get in trouble for speaking to the media,” Dr. Smith finally says.
That’s bravery.
That’s a real heroine.
There are so few people who stand up for the greater good. Dr. Smith did that here. That may be what is most inspiring.
“I want people to know this is bad. People are dying,” Dr. Smith says. “We don’t have the tools that we need in the emergency department and in the hospital to take care of them.
“And...,” she says, starting to choke up. “It is really hard.”
Over 100 million people - a third of the United States population - eventually got Covid. Most recovered, but we didn't know that at the time.
Oscar winner assaulted
If you watched the Oscars this year, you saw a Palestinian director share the best documentary prize with an Israeli director. Their film No Other Land shows a first-hand account of the abuse Palestinians are subject to at the hands of Israeli settlers trying to take their land. The film has been so controversial that it has been unable to find a distributor in the United States.
Last week, Hamdan Ballal - the Palestinian director - was beaten up by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, then taken away by Israeli soldiers and detained overnight according to CNN reporting.
After his release, his lawyer said he had been "arbitrarily" held by police and had been beaten while in custody by Israeli soldiers. He was hospitalized afterward.
Ballal's wife told CNN that he had been attacked in front of their house by three settlers.
Book festival
The New Orleans Book Festival - this is a big-league book festival - kicked off Thursday evening and in a complete and utter coincidence the opening panel was editors and reporters from The Atlantic magazine, including Editor Jeff Goldberg. You may have seen he was in the news this past week.
By the time I got to the Tulane University campus, there was a line 200 yards long to get into the event. The audience filled the 1,800-seat auditorium and then a 350-seat overflow classroom, but I did not make it inside until later.
Television coverage showed several standing ovations for Goldberg during the evening.
I finally got in with about 10 minutes left in the session.
I did get to hear one great line as Goldberg related this, “One of. my kids said the most amazing thing about this whole story is that `Dad, has learned how to take a screen shot,’” Goldberg said.
I could relate to that.
Great slogan
The slogan for this year's New Orleans Book Festival was "Mardi Gras for the Minds."
Great slogan.
Another great line
Oskar Eustis, artistic director for New York City Public Theater which does free programs in Central Park, talked about the challenges getting people to embrace theater after Covid.
"You don't change people's minds by rational argument," Eustis said. "You change their hearts and souls and their minds eventually catch up."
He also said that in the next few years after covid were critical for theater. He said theater is either going to matter to a lot more people or a lot fewer people.
Go out and support community theater, high school musicals and the Adirondack Theater Festival.
They make a community better and stronger.
Manning and Manning
Archie and Cooper Manning, the father and brother of famous quarterbacks Peyton and Eli Manning, held court in another session filled with great old football stories and a couple more good lines.
Archie was sporting a cane and when someone asked him about it, he said, "Remember, I was the quarterback for the New Orleans Saints for 12 years."
Archie said the most intimidating player he ever played against was Chicago Bears' middle linebacker Dick Butkus.
And the best quarterback ever was Johnny Unitas.
Political discourse
The session was titled "Bridging the divide: A bipartisan discussion on America's future and featured Barack Obama's political strategist David Axelrod and George Bush's political guru Karl Rove.
It lived up to the billing with the pair of political contemporaries agreeing on some things, but disagreeing on others.
Rove was roundly booed several times for his opinions, but when one person began shouting loudly, moderator Elaina Plott Calabro, a staff writer at The Atlantic, immediately jumped in and demanded there be quiet. And there was.
Both panelists agreed the future of the country would be in the hands of a presidential candidate who did not re-litigate the past, but showed a vision for "what could be."
At the end of the session, Calabro said, "You two really are the model for what public discourse should look like in this country," and with that we heard the loudest cheers of the session.
Ken Tingley spent more than four decades working in small community newspapers in upstate New York. Since retirement in 2020 he has written three books and is currently adapting his second book "The Last American Newspaper" into a play. He currently lives in Queensbury, N.Y.
Amnesia is a luxury many of us were not afforded during and after the pandemic. Having to say goodbye in 2021 to my brother Paul in Tampa, while he was still lucid and able to hear me on my brother Bill’s iPhone, is a haunting memory I will always hold.
Yet, I was more fortunate than untold numbers of other family members whose loved ones died while muted on ventilators. Paul managed to voice his last words…”All will be well, Sue…all will be well…”. He died 2 days later.
Thank you for all you do, Ken, to keep our collective memory alive, despite the personal and collective flashbacks we may endure. It makes all the difference in learning new coping skills, in knowing we are not alone within the anguish perpetuated by this regime. There is safety in numbers, both in online forums from you and Will, and with select kindred spirits elsewhere.
Although it is really painful to remember those times, thank you for the dose of reality, a vaccine of truth to build up immunity to the cruelty of the virus and the carelessness of the administration, who we have invited back in again. Thanks for repeating the name of the woman, Dr. Colleen Smith, who was brave enough to risk showing us.
A quote from the piece lingers: "The anxiety of this situation is really overwhelming," Dr. Smith said at the time. "We get exposed over and over again and we don't have the protective equipment that we should have." How apt for the daily anxiety fostered by this current Trump administration. We should have built an immunity over the past five years, because this version of Trump cruelty has evolved into something much more deadly, and our Supreme Court and the GOP has left us unmasked and assisted the Trump virus to mutate into something even stronger and more deadly. The refrigerated tractor trailer sits waiting in the global parking lot. Is there a body bag big enough for our democracy?