Tag: democracy

Pandemic postcard #50: Help along the way

Julie Fanselow

There are plenty of reasons to cheer as the Senate seems poised to pass the latest — and let’s hope final — pandemic stimulus package, from ramping up the vaccination campaign to cutting child poverty in half to offering help with daycare costs so parents can get back to work. Personally, I am glad because I’ve already spent my next stimulus check.

I didn’t wake up the other day planning to buy a new laptop. But after a few weeks of increasingly sluggish performance, a Microsoft warning that I could no longer update my cloud-based Word software was the nudge I needed to replace Tom’s late-2011 model MacBook (which itself had come out of the closet to replace the 2013 Mac desktop that had hemorrhaged on me last year). With luck, I will get nearly a decade of use from this nimble new machine. Meanwhile, I’m marveling at the speed with which I’m opening and saving files.

It definitely feels like we’re accelerating out in the world, too. And much as it helped to have spring arrive just as we were locking down last March, the longer days and warming temperatures are welcome harbingers of better times ahead. But we’re not out of the dark winter yet, despite what certain governors would like to think. Ask the essential workers who haven’t yet been vaccinated as variants of the virus continue to spread, or grocery store staff working hazardous jobs for $10 an hour, or the kids who are eager to return to school before fall. Ask the folks in Jackson, Mississippi, who haven’t had water to drink or even flush their toilets for three weeks.

We’ve learned a lot of lessons this past year. One is that official inaction kills people, as it did with weeks of insistence that the virus would magically disappear. Another is that government can do a lot of good, as it did with the first round of stimulus relief, passed last March like the emergency bill that it was. Yes, the national debt is piling up, but with near-zero interest. Economic activity will replenish the coffers as we spend money and pay taxes. It’s smart to go big, especially to help the littlest and the least among us.

Self-sufficiency is a myth that deserves to die, and it sometimes feels like a more humane form of capitalism may be within sight, if only we can learn the lessons of 2020. Wouldn’t it be great to live in a country where people didn’t need to choose between food and medicine? Where people have help — via a reasonable minimum wage, for example — affording rent and child care, not just when emergencies happen, but to prevent them?

The government rescued me and millions of others last year with the first-ever unemployment assistance for freelancers, and now it has helped me replace the main tool of my wordsmithing trade. I am happy to have my first new computer in nearly a decade. Thank you, Uncle Sam. I’ll pay you back soon, I promise.


Thank you for reading Surely Joy. You can find the first Pandemic Postcards and my earlier writings here. If you’d like to get future posts via email, look for the link on the right side of this page (or maybe below this post, if you’re on a mobile device). I write for a living, so if you’d like to support my work, please hit the tip jar. Thank you.

Pandemic postcard #44: Let’s go, Joe

Julie Fanselow

I’ve never understood people who loudly dislike and distrust government yet still seek to run it–or, more likely, run it into the ground (or drown it in the bathtub, to quote Grover Norquist). But a whole bunch of them have lost power in the past week, and thank goodness for that. Government alone can’t solve all our problems, but its might can do plenty of good. We’ve seen glimpses of that this past year in the pandemic relief packages and in government support of vaccine development, but not nearly enough was done under our dire circumstances.

And now comes President Joe Biden, who clearly loves government and who has stocked his White House with people who, like him, know how to use big government to get big things done. In his first two days on the job, Uncle Joe–no stranger to the West Wing–got right down to work. Even with just a narrow Democratic majority in Congress, we could be in for one of the most productive times for our government–and by extension, our country–that we’ve witnessed in decades.

But arresting the pandemic and its accompanying economic fallout is Job One. Biden refers to the fight against the mutating spread of COVID as a war, and he noted in his inaugural speech how the pandemic has already killed more Americans in one year than died in all of World War II. On Thursday, officially releasing his 200-page pandemic response plan, the new president noted that COVID will likely claim its 500,000th American victim by February.

As Biden said, the “brutal truth” is that it will take many months before most Americans get vaccinated, especially since the current supply can’t easily be increased when the manufacturing capacity simply doesn’t exist. But our new national CEO has already ordered other steps that should help in the near term, including using the Defense Production Act to produce more testing supplies and protective gear and even a special syringe that ekes another dose from every vaccine vial; mandating masks for federal employees and on interstate travel; and asking FEMA to open community vaccination centers.

Taken together with his swift actions on other policy priorities–especially advancing another economic relief package and rejoining the world community’s fight against climate chaos–I am excited by Biden’s commitment to action. Joe Biden is a get-it-done guy, Kamala Harris is a formidable partner/tie-breaking Senate president, and that’s exactly what we need now: as much progress as possible, as fast as possible.

I was working in politics the last time we had one party holding power in both the executive and legislative branches, in 2009 when Barack Obama became president with Biden as his VP amid another economic crisis. (Here’s a remembrance of that year’s inauguration, which I attended.) Within days, Obama and Biden faced Republican stonewalling over the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that Obama nevertheless signed into law within a month of becoming president. Within months, the Tea Party–unfortunately abetted by some “Blue Dog” Democrats–rose up to oppose most of what Obama wanted to do, especially the Affordable Care Act. “Obamacare” passed in March 2010 but Democrats lost the House in that year’s elections and the Senate in 2014.

In the past dozen years, as Biden so memorably put it, hyper partisan politics has become “a raging fire destroying everything in its path.” (I blame Fox, MSNBC, and especially antisocial media, for enabling this decline.) But Biden said it doesn’t have to be this way, and I’m inclined to think that most Americans–weary of a fight that has nearly cost us our country–will agree that we can disagree on plenty of issues and still accomplish a lot of good.

As Charlotte Alter writes in her upcoming cover story for Time magazine, “Unity is not the same as uniform opinion or even widespread agreement. By these standards, the United States of America has rarely been unified, and never for long.” But earlier generations still managed to pass social safety net programs, environmental protections, and voting rights for women and people of color (which, extensively rolled back in recent years, must now be restored and strengthened).

“Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for war,” as Biden put it.

How refreshing.

Let’s go.

I’m sure you watched the inauguration, but you might want to read President Biden’s speech. Here you go.  And of course you want to hear the incandescent Amanda Gorman perform her poem again. See below. I’ve also included two of my favorite highlights from the “Celebrating America” show. Thanks for reading.