The American “Untouchables”

In America discrimination isn’t based upon a caste system like in India. Discrimination is usually based upon something tangible such as the color of your skin, your gender or your criminal background. But is it? After reading an article in the April 2022 issue of Wired magazine (Caste Away by Sonia Paul) describing how Indian immigrants continue to experience caste discrimination from other Indian immigrants I realized that this reporter’s writing about the Indian caste system could be applied to certain Americans too. A caste system is alive and well in the US!
Remember the Aids epidemic? Anyone who tested positive in the 90’s before our current “miracle” drugs were available were considered “untouchables” and shunned. And gays had to be careful not reveal that they were gay because, by association, ALL gays were Aids positive. Times changed and gays are no longer stigmatized as untouchables. Plus laws were created banning such discrimination. Then came COVID-19.
In 2020 when the COVID pandemic ran rampant, lockdowns, quarantines, etc. were attempts to contain the virus and impacted most everyone, healthy or sick. Then came the “miracle” vaccines. And that is when a whole cohort of individuals became untouchables. Governments created vaccine mandates that banned individuals who refused to be vaccinated from almost every aspect of society. The fear was they could have the virus, and thus transmit it making you sick and die. Isn’t that the very definition of an “untouchable”?
Just like the Indian caste system, there is no real way such as skin color that can “out” our unvaccinated untouchables. So governments came up with a system that solved the problem: vaccination cards. As part of the vaccine mandates that were passed anyone who didn’t have this proof of vaccination was now prohibited from entering their workplace, going to museums, etc. Unlike the Indian caste system based on birth, for people not wanting to “get the shot” there are many, many different reasons. And yet all unvaccinated were lumped into one “caste”, the “unvaccinated”.
We are not yet out of the pandemic. Vaccine mandates have faded away. However, there are other ways to remind the untouchables of their status. We continue with public service announcements on TV about getting your “booster shot” be a good citizen and protect the “vulnerable”. And even if an unvaccinated person can enter, say an art exhibit, and then has a discussion with someone about their unvaccinated status or vaccine hesitancy, just watch the reaction…
We now know that even the “fully vaccinated” can catch COVID and transmit it. Recently a White House gathering, and a huge social event for journalists, has shown how easily this occurs. Fully vaccinated and tested, permitted entry to these highly selective gatherings, yet days later the virus was spread with attendees testing positive. But the “unvaccinated” caste system still prevails! It is the unvaccinated who continue to be seen as the threat.
At the start of all this it was thought that the courts would side with eliminating the mandates, seeing them as a form of discrimination. That failed. The law was never and will never be on the side of this American caste because fear and control is at the bottom of it all. Just like in the Aids epidemic, you don’t want to have contact with someone who might make you sick. So if you are unvaccinated you hide your caste status just to survive another day “…you are forced to hide your identity to be somebody different than what you are…a violation of one’s basic rights.” (Milind Awasarmol, quoted in the April 2022 Wired article Caste Away by Sonia Paul)
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Are we really, anymore, “the Land of the Free”?

A Thanksgiving Day Poem

Come to the Table
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Gather ye people, ye lost and alone.
Come and join us, make this your home.
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Whatever they call you, we do not care.
As children of God, come hither and share.
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Shunned and banned as outcasts you be.
You belong to the Lord in this land of the free.
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They call you murderers, lies tinged with hate.
It’s excuse for power to separate and discriminate.
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So come to the table and receive the Lord’s meal
We’ll surround you with love, acceptance you’ll feel.
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We fear not the virus or what others say.
Jesus our Lord is with us on Thanksgiving Day.

What kind of an Hallelujah are we singing now?

I love Leonard Cohen’s Allelujah which has been song by numerous artists. It has been song joyously, sorrowfully at funerals, with glory and praise to God at Masses and other religious services.  I wrote this poem to its music to show how an hallelujah has morphed for our Nation over this last year.
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Hallelujah 2021
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The fires burned the western shore
The plague was pounding on our door
We couldn’t take it anymore.
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We looked to him to end our pain
He turned his back and played his game
The lies falling like toxic rain.
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Hallelujah, Hallelujah,
It’s a broken Hallelujah
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A man lay dead under a knee of blue
It mattered to us but not to you
What’s our Nation to do?
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The votes were in, new things to come
But counting up he denied the sum
His falsehoods continued to run.
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We pray the man who won the race
Will rise above the lies in place
And rule with truth and grace.
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Hallelujah, Hallelujah,
It’s a timid Hallelujah
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Two weeks before Biden’s swearing in
Trump urged the crowd to commit the sin:
Storm the Capitol, block his win.
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The insurrection will be a bloody stain
The Nation’s trauma from Trump’s reign.
With our new president, leadership we regain.
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Hallelujah, Hallelujah
A triumphant Hallelujah

“What I Know For Sure”

I feel that this excerpt from the “What I Know For Sure” column in the July/August 2020 issue of Oprah magazine says it all on how we need to approach 2021:
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First she quotes Haroon Rashid: “ ‘We fell asleep in one world and woke up in another. Suddenly Disney is out of magic, Paris is no longer romantic, New York doesn’t stand up anymore, the Chinese wall is no longer a fortress, Mecca is empty.
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Hugs & kisses suddenly become weapons, and not visiting parents & friends is an act of love. Suddenly you realize that power, beauty & money are worthless and can’t get you the oxygen you’re fighting for.
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The world continues its life and it is beautiful. It only puts humans in cages. I think it’s sending a message:
You are not necessary. The air, earth, water and sky without you are fine. When you come back, remember that you are my guests. Not my masters.’ ”
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Then Oprah wraps up with saying: “We got a time-out. We required a reset so we could see without obstruction what is essential.
I hope we all get the lessons we most needed – as individuals and as a collective world consciousness – so we can move forward with a desire to heal ourselves and our planet. I know for sure that if we don’t learn from being literally sent to our rooms, when we finally come out, the next challenge will be even harder.”

I think we could all use a laugh

Who is the official mascot of 2020?  The raccoon!
What makes him so?
            He always wears a mask and he compulsively washes his hands!
So follow his example…and also vote!

Remembering 9/11 in the midst of a pandemic

Each year around this time I write some poems about remembering 9/11 and the year that’s past. In this poem I put 9/11 and the pandemic side by side:
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Déjà Vu
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8/18/20
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Ghosts of yesteryear
Walk hand in hand with fear
Across the silent plaza
Where once the Towers fell.
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The terror of that day
Rears its head in another way.
We flattened the pile
Now we must flatten the curve.
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Essential workers today
Hold the line against the virus’ sway.
Like the First responders of 9/11
They think of others not themselves.
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Empty Ground Zero
Shuttered even to heroes.
It’s worse than that horrible day
When rubble was all that remained there.
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Never the same
World changed and rearranged.
Let us never forget
The sacrifices made both times.

Quote of the Week

A couple of quotes reflecting on these trying times

President Trump says: “If you don’t test you won’t know and if you won’t know, you won’t have a problem.”

Governor Coumo, in his Monday July 5 briefing, said: “Not knowing doesn’t mean you don’t have a problem…so don’t test for cancer and you don’t have cancer?…We are NOT the ‘United States of  Denial’ !”

A Grief Too Big To Bear Alone

“All pain can be borne if it can be shared.” The philosopher Schopenhauer is credited with that quote. The “pain” on my mind, as I write this, is that of not being able to grieve for your dead, to communally share that loss. We might not be a society that focuses on death as the Victorians did, but we do desire to give our loved ones a decent burial. We wish to gather at the hour of their last breath and hold their hands. We wish to dress them and lay them out in a funeral home surrounded by friends and relatives, remembering the lives they lived. The pandemic took all of that from us.
We were not allowed to touch our loved ones let alone be in the same room as they drew that last breath. Funeral gatherings were prohibited and even worse, when funeral homes ran out of space to process the bodies, they were stacked like meat in refrigerated trucks. And for those who had no relatives or friends to claim the body, it was placed in a box and then buried in an unmarked grave. As the pandemic wore on, as the deaths mounted daily, it was impossible to avoid hearing of these reports on social media, internet news sites, and nightly news telecasts. People were crying “For God’s sake let us give our loved ones a decent burial.” COVID-19 would not let that be.
I lost no one to the virus but these reports disturbed me. Then came the George Floyd murder and the unleashing of the masses in protest. These people, myself included, were angry that something like this could happen in America. The protesters and even the governors who had passed all those “executive orders” banning gatherings, said yes, go out and protest. But it wasn’t until I read an article I had saved, written in October 2019 before the pandemic, that made me see these protests from another angle. George Floyd had died and he was not going to go to his grave unnoticed! He was going to be remembered by thousands, here and all across the globe.
The article I reread this morning talked about this need to share grief, only than can it be bearable. It also went on to discuss that we need new rituals because nobody has ever lived in this kind of world before. It was as if Fr. Ronald Rolheiser, the author (The Last Word, Creating a space for our brokenness, Catholic Herald, Oct 4, 2019), was given a view of the world 3 months hence! All of these protests had become one big communal funeral procession! Day after day, a new form of the “wake” was taking place. And this wake would continue well after his televised funeral, well after his interment was completed!
Many of the interviewed protesters mentioned their own personal losses to police violence. Some even alluded to a deeper running grief over old personal losses that they now saw reflected in this death. The pandemic had denied a basic human way to mourn, and now this murder of an innocent black man gave them a way to process, to share grief once again.
It is often said that God, or the Universe, works in mysterious ways. George Floyd was one man among the many black men and women murdered throughout recent history. But he didn’t die in vain. His death came at a pivotal time. It not only gave rise to this country finally seeing and starting to rectify all of the social injustices against non-whites but it also freed us to come together without the fear of a virus standing between us. A time to grieve collectively was the gift George gave us. And a way to grieve that deals with the fact that today’s society mostly leaves us alone with our brokenness. “We are pioneers in new territory, and pioneers have to improvise…” Rolheiser wrote. Indeed, the world will never be the same, and neither will the way in which we mourn our loved ones. One thing is certain, we will not do it via Facebook or Zoom as here can be nothing “virtual” about it… As humans we must come together, virus be damned!

Just 3 Little Words

I Can’t Breathe

Breathing is what keeps us alive. Cease to breathe within 5 minutes your brain dies from lack of oxygen. In yoga, breathe in, breathe out, prana goes up and down your charkas with each deep full breath. Put your hands around a person’s wind pipe, cut off their ability to breathe, death ensues.
The chant of George Floyd, his last words, rings out through the canyons of our cities Voices everywhere taking it on as the mantra of 2020. It is an exhaling of frustrations, of anger, of pain. The world is listening, these three small words, they will make a big difference in the days, months, and years to come.
As these words pound through my TV and computer’s speakers I can’t help but think of other meanings they have. Ironic meanings, surreal meanings, that only in this time of the Covid-19 pandemic could such a phrase mean so much in our lives.
At the beginning of the pandemic people were dying because they couldn’t breathe. Lungs were unable to do their jobs. So we learned about ventilators, those miracle machines that breathe for a person. The rallying cry of pandemic ravished states across the nation became “we need ventilators so that the sick can breathe”.
Three plus months into the pandemic the cases and death rates have fallen. But we can’t breathe a sigh of relief yet. It’s not over until either a miracle from God or a vaccine arrives. So we do social distancing and wear our protective masks and stay home as much as possible.
Masks…we are ordered to wear them when in public or entering a place of business. Yes, they are what protects us from spreading the virus to others. But for some of us, it’s like someone holding a hand over your mouth and nose and you just can’t breathe! I have asthma and it doesn’t matter what the mask is made out of, after 15 minutes I start choking for lack of fresh air.
Also all this “sheltering in place”, this extended isolation smothered us psychologically. Connecting with fellow humans in real time, touching one another, denial of this human necessity is akin to wrapping a person in a plastic bag (a body bag for a dead soul?). It’s denying the social breath of being human! From those months of holding one’s breath as to when things will return to normal came the great exhaling when Floyd was murdered. Why do you think thousands of people stopped being afraid of the virus and rushed into the streets? The social necessity of standing up for what was right, outweighed the chance of being infected. Social injustice was not going to smother us any more…
So what’s in the meaning of these words? Let’s examine each one: I…not just me but the larger I of all of us together…Can’t…stating it’s impossible, unable to do, an impediment sits in front of movement…Breathe…in and out, inhale life giving oxygen, we all do it, every creature on this planet does it. We now must join spiritual hands and breathe together, pray that the ’t will vanish and the WE come out of this horrible time alive…WE CAN BREATHE again. We Can change the world.

America is Burning

This poem was inspired by Billy Joel’s When the Lights Went Out On Broadway

Downtowns never reopened
Even though the virus had gone away.
The mobs looted and pillaged stores
Insurrection was here to stay.
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Disney World was to set to open
Until the sky turned a bright red
From the flames of an angry nation
Mourning another black man dead.
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The lights went out on Broadway
For all who didn’t stand a chance
Against senseless police violence
And the bogus legality dance.
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I stood across in Jersey
Watched Manhattan’s skyline fall
As our governors begged the rioters
To cease looting and end it all.
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America is burning
To whom do we lay the blame?
After months of fear and quarantine
Is rage and anger the only game?
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The lights went out in Washington
The white house burned to the ground
The president fled to Florida
Where now he couldn’t be found.