Oxford University Press's Blog, page 148

Why anti-vaxxers are rising again

In the midst of a health crisis when our only hope is a new vaccine, many have begun to wonder how those with anti-vaccination sentiments might respond to the current COVID-19 crisis. Many have guessed that the only natural, rational response would be for anti-vaxxers to change their minds and wholeheartedly embrace the prospect of a new vaccine. After all, there is a prevailing theory that anti-vaccine sentiment arises at least in part from a collective amnesia about the true scourge of vaccine-preventable diseases. Vaccines, so the argument goes, are a victim of their own success, resulting in a situation in which people do not remember why they are getting vaccinated because the diseases that the vaccines prevent against have been absent for so long. If this theory is true, then in a situation in which we are face-to-face with the ill effects of an infectious pathogen, we should all readily embrace a new vaccine.

It turns out that the anti-vaxxer response to COVID-19 and the prospect of a new vaccine, much like science denialism more generally, is much more complex than that. The response also seems to suggest that the idea that amnesia about diseases that have been largely conquered by vaccines is probably not the primary reason for anti-vaccine sentiments. So how have people with anti-vaccine tendencies responded to COVID-19? While it’s still too soon to have a complete picture of this, especially since no new vaccine has been rolled out yet, several interesting patterns have emerged.

Staunch anti-vaxxers still oppose vaccines, including potential new coronavirus vaccines, and are active at spreading misinformation. Those who have not made up their minds about whether vaccines are safe are now wavering more than they were previously. Whereas before they may have been slightly more inclined in the anti-vaccine direction, now they are questioning those viewpoints more. They do seem to remain amenable to being persuaded.

Public figures, such as politicians and musicians, who are staunch anti-vaxxers are facing more opposition now. Crisis situations have the tendency to bring certain background issues into high relief. People who may have found anti-vaxxers to be somewhat irritating but not a direct threat are now viewing them differently and thus more social pressure is being placed on anti-vaxxers to abandon their views and change their behaviors.

Still, anti-vaxxers are very active and very vocal, both about potentially refusing a new vaccine for coronavirus but also increasingly voicing conspiracy theories about coronavirus itself. These conspiracy theory claims run the gamut, from claiming the virus is not as bad as public officials note to warning people that public officials and government bodies like the CDC are not to be trusted.

Another very disturbing development is the migration of objections to a putative coronavirus vaccine away from a scientific and health basis and toward a more general political basis. Anti-vaxxers are now linking stay-at-home orders and the hoped-for vaccines as assaults on liberty and freedom. Although anti-vaxxers have always made personal liberty a part of their message, by incorporating objections to a coronavirus vaccine into the broader context of freedom, they have taken this link to an extreme.

Heidi Munoz Gelisner, a leader in anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown protests, told a reporter at the New York Times, “we have always been about freedom.” This adds a new dimension to our efforts to ensure that there is swift uptake of a coronavirus vaccine as soon as it becomes available. Targeting the pro-vaccine message on issues of vaccine safety and efficacy may not address this broader issue. Of course, the notion that vaccines involve a personal liberty aspect is faulty: it is long recognized that no one has the right to jeopardize the health of others, especially children, and therefore that democracies can legitimately enforce vaccine requirements. Nevertheless, Americans are perhaps more insistent about a broad range of personal liberties than citizens of any other country and therefore we will have to consider ways to address this aspect of anti-vaccination sentiment as well.

More than 90 vaccines against the virus that causes COVID-19 are now in various stages of development and the most optimistic predictions would give us a viable one in a year to 18 months. Research by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, indicates that we can no longer rely on debunking myths about vaccines after they have been promulgated throughout the media. Rather, her work calls for “proactive messaging,” in which groups of experts begin to thwart anti-vaccination messages before a crisis promoted by misinformation begins. Thus, we need to start immediately to use evidence-based communication methods to preempt the different varieties of misinformation about a vaccine for COVID-19. There is no time to waste.

Featured Image Credit: Photo by pressphoto via Freepik

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Why the Eurovision Song Contest still matters in 2020

What would be left of the Eurovision Song Contest once wrenched from the spectacle and ritual of its annual Grand Finale in May? Could it survive, stripped of glitz, pyrotechnics, and camp, its penchant for ever-expanding excess? Would the legions of fans worldwide, who love the contest, retain their passion and return in 2021? Such were the questions that were real and not rhetorical when the European Broadcasting Union, the largest global broadcasting network and sponsor of the contest, reluctantly announced on 18 March 2020 that it was canceling the 65th return of the longest-running televised musical competition in the world on 16 May, when it should have taken place in Rotterdam. 

With the cancellation of the 65th Eurovision Song Contest, the rupture between two Europes opened once again, exposing the political divisiveness between nations and the aesthetic pluralism in the musical representation of Europe. The songs for the 41 competing nations had been chosen through national competitions well before the March cancellation, and they were circulating on numerous internet platforms as both official and bootleg videos. The sound of this contest, from the tried-and-true clichés to the attempts to push the boundaries of a three-minute song as far as possible, was fully available for all wishing to engage the competition months in advance. The old Eurovision sound was evident in the abundant songs that intentionally reminded listeners of earlier Eurosongs, styles that clearly signified the national and styles that deliberately eschewed nationalism. As always, many songs openly expressed the politics of diverse sexualities (e.g., Azerbaijan’s Efendi, singing “Cleopatra”), while virtually all songs heeded the strict European Broadcasting Union directive to avoid nationalist politics at all costs (e.g., Russia’s Little Big, performing “Uno”).

The new Eurovision sound was most clearly audible and visible in the diversity of the performers. Never before in its history had so many singers of color performed. The Czech Republic, Israel, Malta, the Netherlands, San Marino, and Sweden would have sent performers of African heritage to Rotterdam, representing that heritage to different degrees—Sweden’s female trio, the Mamas, with gospel, the Netherlands’ Jeangu Macrooy, African American hymnody, and Israel’s Eden Alene, a mixture of African and Caribbean musics.

The several crises faced by Europe in recent history—the rise of right-wing populism, the migration crisis, and the rapid spread of COVID-19—were almost entirely absent from the official videos, though a few subsequent videos turned directly to these crises, reimagining the old Eurovision sound as the new. The initial version of the Italian entry, Diodato’s “Fai rumore” (Make Noise), in traditional Sanremo style and filmed as a sexually-charged dance scene, was resituated to the Roman arena in Verona, where Diodato sang alone, symbolically isolated in a nation struggling against the pandemic. “Fai rumore” would become a hit across Italy, sung every evening from balconies. One of the boldest transformations from old to new occurs in the video of Malta’s entry, Destiny, singing “All of My Love.” With clear references to the desperate plight of refugees traveling across the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe—the island nation of Malta is the first European country at which they can find refuge—the actors in the video increasingly don masks in what becomes a life-and-death struggle in search of the Promised Land.

Destiny, “All of My Love” (Malta)

Whether we are witnessing a transformation of the contest itself at this moment of uncertainty, from the old to the new, remains an open question. Even as fan clubs throughout the world cobbled together alternative competitions to replace what they were missing (e.g., with #EurovisionAgain), the European Broadcasting Union produced a two-hour broadcast that located the contest in the present. Competition had been eliminated, and there was no voting. The drama of nation vying against nation disappeared as entries from one country covered those from other countries. The intermission acts, with their massed ensembles and dance troupes, gave way to intimate solo performances by past winners, addressing the social, psychological, and physical struggles of people during the pandemic. The old was made new, which is to say present in real time, and with stunning beauty as, for example, Sweden’s Måns Zelmerlöw sang “Heroes” (2015) from his backyard in London and Serbia’s Marija Šerifović sang “Molitva” (Prayer) in the empty streets of Belgrade, both of them with superimpositions of healthcare workers at the front lines. The 2018 winner, Netta, from Israel composed a new song, “Cuckoo,” directly engaging the fragility of mental health and singing from the confinement of her own bedroom.

Måns Zelmerlöw, “Heroes”

Marija Šerifović, “Molitva” (Prayer)

Netta, “Cuckoo”

A Europe united in common voice swelled throughout the evening, culminating with a gallery of all national entries joined in the chorus of “Love Shine a Light,” Katrina and the Waves’ winning entry for the UK in 1997. And so, the Eurovision Song Contest 2020, “Europe Shine a Light,” came to an end that was not a conclusion, but rather a chorus of European nations in the midst of uncommon uncertainty affirming that Europe would survive to sing again: “Long live the Eurovision.”

Featured image: screen capture from “Love Shine A Light” performed by the artists of Eurovision 2020.

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How violent images can hurt us

In January 2020, the world became aware of a novel coronavirus spreading beyond the borders of China. We saw bare supermarket shelves, hastily taped Xs on pavements outside shops, empty streets and parks juxtaposed against overrun emergency wards, the bruised and exhausted faces of healthcare workers and makeshift hospitals and burial grounds amidst what once were bustling cities. While these images conveyed anxiety about what was happening and yet to come, viral social media images of people flocking in the thousands to Sydney and Florida beaches provoked anger and frustration at those who flouted lockdown restrictions.

The attention given to images of COVID-19 illustrates the political power of images. Images mediate our engagement with the world. We live visually saturated lives; these visuals can represent reality and condition how we come to understand events.

Even more so, what COVID-19 images illuminate how what we see is often imbued with violence. Whether spectacular or mundane, horrific or alluring, inflicted physically on bodies or enacted through policy and practice. We are attuned to noticing violence when it is physical and graphic, yet we frequently fail to notice the ways that everyday encounters with violence visually appear in our daily lives. Whether we notice them or not, the impacts of such moments resonate politically and can play a role in policy development. Yet limited attention has been explicitly paid to the connections between visuality, violence, and policymaking in global politics.

Take for instance how structural violence is visualised: how we see development practices normalises unequal power relations, which further depoliticises relations of politics and power. For example, media images depicting China-Africa relations often reproduce dominant discourses of development. Yet these same images make invisible to the viewer some of the underlying forms of violence sustaining development planning.

Furthermore, tropes of masculinity and femininity frame the ways in which violence is understood as alluring or pleasurable. Videos produced by Islamic State depicting life in the Caliphate produce particular visions of gender, which underpin its recruitment of young men and women in the West. Imagining and seeing violence can work in similar affective ways. Audiences viewing Islamic State videos may experience pleasure from identifying with and imagining themselves as part of a hypermasculine world shaped through transgressive violence. Even more so, the gendered aesthetic of these Islamic State videos interacts with their gendered spectatorship. Such sites reveal the importance of paying attention to the gendered implications of violence and visuality.

Popular culture provides an important vector through which violence can be embodied by the viewer. Those who watch horror films may imagine themselves in the position of the victim, to experience the human consequences of extreme violence. How the aural and visual are co-constituted in these films underpin the powerful affective impacts of visualising horrific violence. Yet this is not unique to horror films; similar intersections of images and sound in war music videos, created by fighters or militia organisations and circulated widely across social media platforms, frame viewers’ understanding of what war is.

Contemporary technology amplifies and extends the impacts of images of violence. The greater accessibility and instantaneity of images of violence has posed new challenges to leaders and policymakers. From the November 2015 Paris attacks to the Christchurch mosque massacre, the viral sharing of images of horrific violence has shaped how governments respond to acts of terror. Social media has also played a key role in disseminating photos of the consequences of violence in Syria’s protracted conflict in recent years. Images of injured or dead children have had a particular impact on foreign policy decision making by world leaders, including US President Trump. While it is often assumed such images will prompt empathetic, humanitarian responses, less examined but they can also provoke more bellicose foreign policy reactions. Social media posts thus facilitate not only the widespread sharing of images, but the collective resonances of emotive reactions such as fear, empathy, and anger.

The visuality of violence extends from the embodied experience of violence to the collective making of meaning and the exercise of power. Violent images permeate and shape the daily lives of us all. Their influence is intimately entwined with our affective responses. Policymakers are regularly confronted with images of violence that shape how the public understands and responds to complex political and social realities. Visuals represent reality and condition our reactions to it; paying close attention to the visual constitution of world politics can expand our field of view and make us more aware of the manifold forms and effects of violence.

Featured Image Credit: “Man Wearing Gas Mask Standing Beside Store Facade” by Oscar Chan. CCO public domain via Pexels.

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How working from home is changing our economy forever

The virus lurks on car door handles, on doorknobs and the floor, on the breath of others or in a friend’s hug, on onions in the supermarket, and on the hands of the valet who parks your car. If you venture outside, everything and everyone is a threat. So, it is better to stay home, safely locked away with your previously disinfected computer which connects you to a world that is innocuous because it’s virtual and therefore harmless. What makes you sick lurks outside your door. The fear of what we know to be real, but which only materializes in suspicion, is enough to keep us locked away. This individual sensation of anguish in the face of a threat leads to voluntary confinement and that is the success of social control. Fear is used as a disciplinary device.

The strategies used to make bodies docile for the purpose of social control is what the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault called discipline. In the context of COVID-19, there are those who do not initially choose self-discipline since there is an even higher level of discipline: mass deaths in foreign climes. But those who have yet to discipline themselves will do so once these deaths increase or occur closer to home. China and Korea didn’t wait for the second stage and went directly to surveillance through apps. In the end we have the shocking images of deserted New York and Venice which show that discipline has been successful: Nobody goes out anymore. We initially resist discipline – as Foucault pointed out in the case of schools and the army – but in the end we confine ourselves to the home as an institution of isolation for biopolitical purposes.

Returning to Foucault, self-enclosure is a technology for disciplining bodies for the governmentality of mobility, permitting the same rhythm of consumption and growth for the productive and market sectors that sustain current neoliberalism (mining extractivism for the digital industry and bio-work for the production of big data) without continued damage to the planet, which is now a source of natural resources rather than life itself.

We face the disciplining of bodies as part of a global biopolitics to change the working model and limit the mobility of the elite. The mobility of the most precarious, economic and forced migrants, has already been managed for some time, leading them to death in what I have called the necropolitical apparatus of production and administration of forced migration. This refers to the set of policies of death that force people to leave their countries for the benefit of extractive capitalism, eventually dying on the way or being disposed of in spaces characterized by legal limbo.

We know from Foucault that in governmentality there is no necessary intention in the cause, or at least there is no direct intention, it is always the management of behaviors: inhibiting, procuring, annulling, reversing, manipulating, controlling or assuring the actions of the other leading to self-care, self-regulation, or, in this case, self-imposed immobility. The important thing about behavior management is productivity, the benefits it brings and who benefits from them. At this point in quarantine we are already beginning to see that not only virtual tours to famous museums or online courses for yoga or quantum physics are offered, but platforms that facilitate meetings for offices, businesses, politicians, high school and college students.

While only a few months ago few people knew about platforms like Zoom, Jitsi Meet, Meet, and Google Hangouts, today everyone uses them. In the future there will be others that will come to replace them, but these platforms establish the production model for which we are being disciplined. We are facing a change in the importance of the transition from Fordism to Toyotaism. The goal of this change is to immobilize us sufficiently to control human mobility without bringing production and consumption to a halt. A microeconomy of self-enclosure is already in place: Zoomism.

Fordism was the model of mass industrial production that replaced Taylorism and guaranteed full employment and universal or employment-linked social security, as occurred in Mexico among other countries. Toyotaism, which replaced Fordism, established piece-rate, hourly work without compulsory social security. Zoomism would be the mode of production for self-enclosure, which also increases added value since the operating costs of corporate offices are transferred to workers: electricity, the internet, water and even coffee. Without the need for time to travel to work or even to venture outside, we become more productive. The current quarantine disciplines us to immobility, to seclude our bodies and project our professional avatars through digital platforms, reformulating the perception of time and space of globalization. David Harvey conceptualized this as the compression of space and time through information technology, as well as through low-cost flights that increased and changed tourism, business and work. We will progress from a relative perception of global space-time as something compressed, to a perception and experience of space-time in absolute terms: a materially immobile present and space that moves only virtually.

Zoomism, of course, has a major class component, just as the spread of COVID-19 did initially – being spread throughout the world by tourists and elite travelers. This virus was propagated by first-world travelers and middle class foreigners from  around the world, not by poor forced migrants. For the latter, the necropolitical device of production and administration of forced migration is still in place. For them, it is business as usual. Change comes with the disciplining of the middle classes to introduce Zoomism, which has various social control objectives, of which the following are just a sample:

Trips that contribute to global warming and spread viruses will stop. This gives the planet a chance to breathe without decreasing current rates of production and consumption. We have already seen that the quarantine standstill has reduced carbon emissions in China. Immobility stops people, not the industries that sustain neoliberal capitalism.Many will be excluded. Middle-class people who live from day to day and without a job that can be done virtually will be the new losers of neoliberalism. Small businesses will also go bankrupt, but that will open up opportunities for transnational industrial and service conglomerates.Self-enclosure and self-control will be used to eliminate community and resistance, starting with the global feminist movement, which until a few months ago had achieved an influence and hegemony never before seen at a global level, from Chile to India and running through Mexico. What was gained in recent years has been lost during quarantine.Women will be returned to the home. The anguish of the epidemic does not end in women’s bodies, but continues in the bodies of our children, and/or the people we care for: partners, mothers, fathers, neighbors, friends, and relatives. Women who do not return to the home via Zoomism will be confined by a fear of exposing their children or those they care for. The public space we had gained will be lost again and we will become full-time mothers and caregivers.Women, as well as others engaged in social movements such as the environmental movement, will have to restrict themselves to cyber activism, which we thought we had already overcome. However, digitally litigating injustices remains a strategy of social movements and it is good that it is increasing because there is no doubt that political marches and rallies on health issues will be banned.

We are facing an epochal shift. Social control in the face of the pandemic provides diverse opportunities to be faced from self-enclosure, and quite possibly via communication platforms like Zoom.

Featured image credit: ‘Zoom call with coffee’ by Chris Montgomery via Unsplash.

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“The devil to pay” and more devilry

It is amazing how often the Devil is invoked in English idioms: he has certainly been given his due. Some phrases must go back to myths. The Devil and his dam reminds us of the ancient stories in which two monsters play havoc with human lives. A famous example is Grendel and his mother (Beowulf), but folklore is full of similar examples. For whatever reason, the female was always stronger and harder to vanquish. The protagonist’s career in The Great Gatsby is summed up in the words: “Poor bastard.” Perhaps a more genteel variant would have been poor devil (of course, lucky devil exists too!). Some collocations are less transparent. For instance, it remains somewhat unclear why an apprentice in a printing establishment, someone on the lowest rung in that hierarchy, is (or was) called the printer’s devil.

This harmless plant is called Devil’s grandmother! Elephantopus tomentosus, photo by Theresa Thom. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

With regard to the folklore of the Devil, the thickest folder in my database of idioms is pull devil, pull baker. An article in Notes and Queries 198 (1953) and another on the website World Wide Words have informative essays on this phrase, but I’ll tell my story anyway, because I have some interesting material from American Notes and Queries and The Spectator. I hope that my explanatory and etymological dictionary of select English idioms, which is almost ready, will appear in the foreseeable future, and then my database will become available to all who may care to use it.

So here goes. The phrase is an instigation to two contestants, with the spectators encouraging now one, now the other. Two tales have been cited to explain it. According to one, an evil baker supplied a ship’s crew with bad biscuits. On the voyage back, the ship suddenly stopped, and the sailors saw the culprit fighting with the Devil, who was trying to pull his victim down. But the baker fought so valiantly that the sailors forgot their chagrin and, depending on who was winning, shouted: “Pull, Devil; pull baker.”

Pull, Devil, pull, baker! US Navy sailors play tug-of-war. Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Todd Stafford. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Another tale has it that a baker is detected making short weight. The Devil enters and carries off the light bread and ill-gotten gold. The baker pursues the Devil, and the tug of war begins. This is the content of an old play. In both versions, the Devil wins, and both go back to puppet plays. An Elizabethan ballad “The Devil and the Baker” was known, so that the characters in popular performance may be medieval. I have no information on whether the struggle ever formed an episode in the Punch drama. Perhaps some of our readers know more about the subject. The phrase surfaced in print late (no citations antedate 1764 in the OED). In the nineteenth century, the idiom must have still been fairly common as an invitation to a fierce fight. Here is a dialog from John Galsworthy’s 1897 story “Villa Rubein”: “—Give her up, eh? Harz shook his head. –-No? Then it’s ‘pull devil, pull baker’ between us.” Today, few people will understand this exchange without a note. (The phrase baker’s dozen has nothing to do with pull baker. I have some edifying information on it, but not for today.)

Some sayings are enigmatic (no less so than the words about which dictionaries say: “Origin unknown”), because there is a story behind them, and we do not know it. One of them is the Devil overlooks Lincoln. In the past, I have had more than one chance to refer to Thomas Fuller’s famous book The History of the Worthies of England (1662; it is now available online), the first English encyclopedic and biographical dictionary. Fuller mentioned the incomparable height of the cathedral and gave a long comment on the odd saying. The image of the devil that stood many years on the top of the college or over Lincoln Cathedral seems “to have given occasion for that proverb,” which was known at least as early as the middle of the sixteenth century. The reference is to Lincoln College, Oxford. The figure of the Devil was removed in 1731. As Ebenezer C. Brewer (Dictionary of Phrase and Fable) notes, other sayings of the same type exist, for instance, the Devil overlooking Durham.

Lincoln College with no Devil in view. Photo by Steve Cadman. CC-by-SA 2.0, via Flickr.

Above, I mentioned the strange reference to the printer’s devil. Yes, the lowest rank; yes, always on the run, but why devil? Analogous questions turn up elsewhere. The title of this post contains the words the devil to pay. The full phrase is the Devil to pay and no pitch hot, known in books since at least 1500. It means “service expected, and no one is ready to perform it.” Perhaps the devil means “the seam between the covering board and the deck planking,” but no authority of such a suggestion is given. However, one immediately recalls the saying between the Devil and the deep sea “exposed to danger on both sides.” The earliest quotation in the OED goes back to 1621 (with dead for deep).

The most authentic printer’s devil. Photo by Richard Croft. CC-by-SA 2.0 via Geograph.

I am quoting from my source: “The expression is made use of by Colonel Munroe in his Expedition with Mackay’s Regiment [pronounce –kay as –ki!], published in London, 1637. In the engagement between the forces of Gustavus Adolphus and the Austrians [during the Thirty Years’ War], the Swedish gunners, for a time, had not given their pieces proper elevation, and their shots came down among Lord Reay’s [pronounced as ray] men, who were in the service of the King of Sweden. Munroe did not like this sort of play, which kept him and his men, as he expressed it, between the devil and the deep sea. So an officer was sent to the batteries with the request that the guns should be raised, but several of Lord Reay’s soldiers were killed before the mistake was rectified. Munroe’s meaning seems to be that he was in a fix, exposed to danger from friends as well as foes—and that there was no means to escape.”

Since the OED has undug the same phrase dated to 1621, Munroe, we conclude, did not coin it. This is a well-known catch: we find an early quotation and are tempted to believe that the author invented a certain expression occurring in it. Countless pithy sayings are attributed to Shakespeare, but we’ll never find out whether he was their creator. Between the Devil and the deep sea…. The alliteration makes our search for its origin especially hard. Similar but not identical expressions exist in many languages. Some of the English synonyms are between a rock and a hard place and between the hammer and the anvil, while in Latin they said inter sacrum et saxum, approximately “between the shrine and the victim.” Some such proverbial sayings go back to the Classical antiquity (compare between Scylla and Charybdis). Others are native and often almost forgotten, like between hawk and buzzard.

For curiosity’s sake, I’ll quote the following: “It has been suggested… that this phrase [the one discussed above] was adopted, if not originated, by the Royalists in allusion to Cromwell, ‘the deep C.’, the relationship of the devil to the deep ‘C.’ being implied in a book or pamphlet of the time entitled A True and Faithful Narrative of Oliver Cromwell’s Compact with the Devil for Seven Years on the day on which he gained the Battle of Worchester…” The famous battle, won by Cromwell, was fought on September 3, 1651. Naturally, the Royalists knew the phrase and only used it punningly for the occasion. (One is tempted to mention Pavarotti’s title “King of the high C’s.)

I have quite a collection of curious notes on the Evil One, but perhaps this will do for today.

Feature image credit: Witches’ Sabbath by Francisco Goya. Collection: Museo del Prado. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Pandemic practicalities and how to help teenagers manage time at home

It’s May and many of us have fond memories of springtime when we were in high school. There was some stress from exams and final papers to be sure, but also more outdoor activities, sports, banquets or awards assemblies, proms, and most of all, looking forward to the summer. High school students today, however, have lost all of that. Seemingly in an instant, they are confined at home, with little access to friends, no organized sports, arts, music, journalism, or other activities. Education via teleconferencing is of variable quality and is no substitute for the interactive learning with other students and a skilled educator. Most of all, our students face an uncertain future. It is especially difficult for teens to foresee or plan for a future with the current disruption. Adolescents may well not be able to deal with these multiple concerns, so it’s predictable and understandable that many high school students are struggling with anxiety and depressed mood. Even before the pandemic adolescents had high rates of clinical anxiety and depression. We are facing an enormous mental health crisis.

As parents there’s a lot we can do to help support our teens. Here are some practical tips to alleviate anxiety and promote stability during this uncertain time.

Create a schedule. Maintaining a regular schedule can provide a sense of stability for the whole family. Teens still have school; many parents are working and those form the basic skeleton of the day. Online learning can be draining so I suggest periodic breaks, at least 15 minutes of stretching, running in place, or going outside (if possible) every two hours or so. Teens with attentional issue may need more frequent breaks.  Add structured time for meditation, pleasant events, and physical activity. Many schools, online programs, and apps can support a meditation practice.  At the minimum we can teach our children to take just a few minutes to breathe deeply as a break from the stresses of the day. I am partial to Dr. Andrew Weil’s simple 4-7-8 approach, breathing in for four seconds, holding the breath for seven seconds, and then exhaling very slowly for eight seconds.  I can feel a sense of relaxation at about number five during the exhale. This small exercise is helpful to everyone and can quell anxiety. Evenings might be a time to reclaim long-forgotten family activities from when the teens were younger: baking, doing puzzles, working on family history projects, or even watching television together can foster connection and emphasize the family as foundational.

Limit access to the news. Normally I think that high schoolers learn about government and global issues and develop a critical eye from reading or watching the news. Right now, however, it can be overwhelming to see the stories, not only of death and pain but also unemployment and the plight of our most vulnerable citizens. You can share with your teen why watching too much coronavirus or political news can be demoralizing. Everyone is different, but 30 minutes is plenty of time to catch up on the news and you can add some time for discussion. You can also help yourself and your teen by being a good role model of having boundaries about watching the news.

Help them stay connected. Teens can continue to find ways to relate to their friends even during this time of social distancing and sheltering in place. In the past I viewed too much time on social media as destructive, especially to young women. However, in the current situation, social media can, if used responsibly, provide a sense of connection, shared goals, and distraction. I recommend being more flexible about screen time.  Email, texts, and even writing letters will help (and older relatives will appreciate the letters). In addition to connections to their friends, we can encourage teens to form connections to the larger community. We’ve seen that teens can be creative and generous by volunteering, whether making masks, raising money for charity online or contributing art work.

Foster self-efficacy. In isolation, it is can be difficult for teenagers to feel any sense of competence other than academics. Teens with learning differences may be having an especially difficult time adjusting to virtual learning. Assign tasks at home, including daily chores and longer-term ones like organizing family photos, building a table, creating new menus, and so on.  Older teens can help their siblings or cousins with schoolwork. Ask your high schoolers how they think they can help out; their creativity may surprise you. All these activities help the family and teens still appreciate your acknowledgment of a job well done. Learning a new skill or completing a project also elicits the “I’ve got this” feeling, that leads to improved mood and can foster independence.

Featured Image Credit: by Anastasia Gepp via Pixabay

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How a stork helped the UK get through the First World War

Harry Perry Robinson was elderly (age 54) and infirm at the outbreak of the First World War. But he was also a senior correspondent of The Times with a distinguished service record; a confidante of the proprietor, Lord Northcliffe; and a rabid patriot long convinced of the German threat to world peace. There was really no stopping him from crossing the channel and heading to the Western Front.

Robinson was, in fact, the oldest correspondent who covered the entirety of the war, writing up to two-thousand words a day for The Times, articles that were also syndicated in newspapers around the world. He was part of a coterie of correspondents at the front, including Philip Gibbs and William Beach Thomas.

As there were often long stretches between battles, correspondents searched for topics to write about to satisfy a public hungry for news. Robinson, keenly interested in the natural world, turned his reporter’s eye to the war’s impact on flora and fauna. “Strips of waste land by the roadside are ablaze with wildflowers, ragwort and milfoil and toadflax and evening primrose,” he wrote. “A single chiffchaff – plucky little thruster that he is! – was singing impatiently not far behind the battle-line.” Dispatches like these offered readers a respite from the horrors of war and hopeful signs of a postwar return to normality.

One of Robinson’s articles began, “A stuffed bird seems a queer object to have a place in the Imperial War Museum; but few things have a better right to be there than the old stork of the Hotel du Rhin at Amiens.”

During the Battle of the Somme, Amiens was the meeting place for French and British armies and the center of fraternization was the Hotel du Rhin. Behind the hotel was a walled garden with a small pond, home to a faithful stork and a gull for many years. “They were great friends,” Robinson noted. “The stork never paced across the grass without the gull pattering close in attendance.” The birds became animated by passing aircraft piloted by the “Boche,” the pejorative for the German enemy:

Aeroplanes interested them most. Before the human bystanders had heard even the throb of an engine, the stork would catch sight of the strange bird in the far-off sky and, with beak pointed heavenward, it would clatter its long mandibles – rat-tat-tat-tat – just like the rattle of a machine-gun … Officers have been known to lean out of their windows and shout to him: “Good old bird!” He undoubtedly hated the Boche.

During the German offensive in March 1918, Amiens was heavily bombed and largely destroyed, including most of the Hotel du Rhin. On 29 March, Robinson and his fellow correspondents toured the ruins and decided to rescue the birds, returning them to their billet at Château Rollencourt. “There, turned down in the park, they had a beautiful stream with wide reedy backwaters and shady tree-sheltered lawns to roam in, and they seemed to settle down in happiness,” he recalled. But their idyll was short-lived:

One day the stork fell ill, being found lying with half-closed eyes in shelter of a bush. He was taken into a warm hut and wrapped in flannel, and every effort was made to induce him to eat or even to swallow a few drops of brandy and water. Perhaps war correspondents and Press officers and the like do not know the right way to doctor storks. Perhaps it was no physical malady, but a broken heart because of the course the war was taking in that dreadful April of 1918. At all events, nothing availed; and in the morning the patriotic bird was dead. That same evening the gull vanished, gone, doubtless, to seek his comrade.

A message was dispatched to General Headquarters  about the famous stork of the Hotel du Rhin. The correspondents suggested it be stuffed and preserved for the Imperial War Museum, newly established in London.

“Later in the day, a major-general, splendid in scarlet and brass, came all the way from Montreuil and, with all honours, took the stork away with him reverently in his Rolls- Royce car,” Robinson wrote. “If there had been a band it would have played a funeral march. Now the stork stands, in a glass case all by himself, with a label telling briefly his history, in the nave of the Crystal Palace. He is a noble bird, gloriously black and white in the full spring plumage of early April. When visitors look at him he peers at them out of his beady eye and is plainly saying: ‘Let me see! Did I know you in Amiens in the old days?’”

What happened to the stork? It’s not in the Imperial War Museum collection today, and curators have no idea of the bird’s fate.

Featured Image Credit: “Harry Perry Robinson (standing, center) strikes a pose with his fellow war correspondents at the Western Front in 1916”; public domain, provided by the author.

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The persistence of white supremacy 50 years after the Jackson State tragedy

In the early morning hours of 15 May 1970, the Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol and the Jackson city police marched deep into the campus of the historically black Jackson State College in Jackson, Mississippi, leveled their weapons at students gathered outside a women’s dormitory, and let loose a 28-second barrage of bullets and buckshot killing two young people—Phillip Gibbs and James Earl Green—and injuring 12 others.

On 23 February 2020, a white former policeman and his son accosted and shot dead a young African American man, Ahmaud Arbery, in the suburban neighborhood of Brunswick, Georgia. Though fifty years separate these two events, the parallels between them are chilling.

In both cases African Americans were simply living their lives, not threatening anyone before they were shot and killed.  Arbery, who loved to run, was jogging when Gregory McMichaels and his son, Travis, attacked him. At Jackson State College law enforcement had been called to handle a minor disturbance on the edge of the school, but with the situation under control marched to the center of campus to confront students, uninvolved in the earlier unrest, hanging out enjoying a warm Mississippi night before graduation.

In both cases the white assailants imagined their black victims as criminals, imposing their own racist stereotypes of African Americans as inherently dangerous onto young people who were nothing of the sort. The two men who shot Arbery believed he matched the description of the suspect in recent break-ins in the neighborhood. At Jackson State, law enforcement believed when a group of young people lit a dump truck on fire on the edge of campus that students might “start burning building[s]” next, and imagined a riot where none existed.

As a result of their perceptions, warped by white supremacy, the attackers in both cases brought an inappropriate level of firepower to their encounters with the victims. The two men charged in the death of Arbery grabbed both a .357 magnum and a shotgun. At Jackson State College, law enforcement armed themselves with shotguns loaded with heavy buckshot, two sub-machine guns, two rifles with armor-piercing bullets, and an armored tank owned by the city.

The results of these combustible mixtures were, in both instances, the deaths of young black men beloved by their friends and families.  Arbery, 25, was known for his easy smile and his generous and loving personality. He had been a talented high school athlete. In 2020, he was living with his mother and working a couple of jobs, with dreams of becoming an electrician. Phillip Gibbs, 20, was a junior at Jackson State where he was studying political science and contemplated becoming a lawyer. His wife and their child, Phillip Jr., were living in their hometown of Ripley, Mississippi, to save expenses. He was outside the women’s dorm visiting with his sister and her roommate through the window. James Earl Green, 17, is still remembered by his family for his caring personality and his sense of humor. He had just gotten off a shift at the Wag-a-Bag grocery store, where he had worked since he was eleven to help out the family. His route home took him through the campus.

And in the aftermath of both attacks, the white shooters flipped the story to portray themselves as the victims. The McMichaels pursued Arbery in their truck, confronted him with a loaded shotgun, but claimed self-defense, a story the elder McMichael’s former colleagues in the police department accepted. At Jackson State, law enforcement purported they “would have been killed by the mob had they not fired,” and soon concocted a story about a sniper.  Both of those claims were disproven by the evidence and entirely false.

The shooters in the death of Ahmaud Arbery have finally been arrested, but this action has come more than two months since his death and only after significant mistakes and missteps by the state. The complete failure of the justice system in the aftermath of the Jackson State shootings suggests just how important it is that we continue to closely observe the proceedings in the Arbery case.

Though the Justice Department initiated a special federal grand jury, it was presided over by District Judge William Harold Cox, a segregationist who had thrown out the felony charges for “conspiracy to deprive the victims of their civil rights” against seventeen suspects in the murder of three civil rights workers abducted and slain in the early days of Freedom Summer. Cox brought his white supremacy with him to the Jackson State case and told jurors that his district would “not provide safe sanctuary for militants or for anarchists or for revolutionaries of any race. The processes of this court,” he declared, “shall not be used to appease and placate such lawless pressure groups.”  The federal grand jury produced neither indictments nor a written record of its findings.

Concurrent with the federal grand jury, Hinds County, Mississippi convened its own grand jury.  Things went little better there.  Judge Russel D. Moore III branded the Jackson State students as “anarchists,” and raised the specter of “government . . . by mob violence rather than by law.” Reiterating Judge Cox’s words, he told the jurors, “No person participating in a riot or civil disorder or open combat with civil authorities, or failing to immediately disassociate himself from such a group or gathering, has any civil right to expect to avoid serious injury or even death when the disorder becomes such as to require extreme measures and harsh treatment.” The grand jury returned only one indictment, scapegoating a local black man and charging him with “inciting to riot.”

Civil court remained the only legal recourse for those victimized by the shootings, and in 1972 three of the wounded joined the families of Gibbs and Green in a lawsuit. Defense lawyers employed the same white supremacist stereotypes that had produced the shootings, falsely portraying the police as defenders of law and order who had acted in self-defense, the plaintiffs not as responsible students but as senseless and even criminal troublemakers, and the circumstances that led to the shootings as a riot in which law enforcement had faced down a deadly mob. These depictions bore no relationship to the actual events that took place in the early hours of 15 May 1970. That did not matter to the all-white jury, which found for the defendants. The plaintiffs successfully appealed to a higher court, but a ruling of sovereign immunity protected the guilty.  In 1974, the US Supreme Court refused to hear the case, ending the Jackson State victims’ chance quest for justice in the legal system.

Half a century has passed, but the white supremacist stereotypes that framed the students at Jackson State College as dangerous criminals continue to lead to devastating murders, such as that of Ahmaud Arbery. Fifty years after the shootings at Jackson State, no police officer or highway patrolman has been charged in the deaths of Phillip Gibbs or James Earl Green. Neither the city of Jackson nor the state of Mississippi has offered an apology to the victims. It is not yet too late for justice in the case of Ahmaud Arbery.  We must ask for accountability not only from those who commit such acts of white supremacist violence, but also from our justice system.

Featured Image Credit: “Black Lives Matter window banner, Greenwich Village, New York” by Billie Grace Ward. CC BY SA 4.0 via  Wikimedia Commons .

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How to prepare for death

The main challenge in reflecting on one’s own death is the way the various aspects of death and dying are intertwined which make it difficult to discern personal mortality.

First there is the prospect of me dying; of me entering whatever is in store at the end of my life. How long will it last? Will there be pain? What will I leave behind? How do I say goodbye? Next there is the prospect of other people dying, particularly the death of loved-ones and the painful absence their loss leaves behind. How would I cope with the death of a close friend, a partner, a child? But thinking about my dying and other people’s deaths are different. Dying is an event in life, admittedly an important event, but still one that happens within the course of life. Similarly, coming to terms with the loss of a loved-one is an important process, but it belongs to a different domain than my death.

Another temptation is to think of my death as though it is like the death of others. I imagine myself in the shoes of someone as they approach their death. Maybe it would be my soul that is absorbed into a zone of endless tranquility. Maybe it would be my body lying motionless in the coffin. I conjure up images of love-ones with shocked expressions as they are told about my death, I visualize their forlorn looks as they watch my coffin descending into the grave and I picture their reactions to constantly interacting with the spaces I now no longer occupy.

But thinking about my death in terms of what happens when others die does not fully capture what happens when I think about my own death. When I die, looking at myself from the outside, my brain will stop working, my senses will cease to operate, I will no longer have any voluntary control of my muscles, and my body will lie limp and lifeless. This is undeniably what will happen.

Looking at this from the inside is more complicated. If my brain and my body cease to function, then it makes sense to consider my emotions, my consciousness and all those aspects that make up my subjective world, as ceasing to operate as well. My consciousness surely relies on input from my senses plus the processing power of my brain, so without them it is hard to think of how consciousness might persist. I might reassure myself that my consciousness will continue in some form in another realm, but I can’t be sure. It makes more sense to say that when all the conditions for consciousness are no longer present then my consciousness will no longer be able to function.

But this is a terrible thought; a horrifying realization with alarming consequences. My consciousness is always present whenever I look out at anything in the world. I never experience anything around me without being conscious. When I am unconscious, such as when I am asleep or knocked out, I assume the world continues under its own steam, but this is an assumption which I can never fully trust. What I can be surer about is that the world and my consciousness are always paired; they are always together, each interacting with and enabling the other, and participating together in allowing what is going on around me to continue to take place.

What this throws up is the possibility that without my mind the world, and all that it contains—objects, animals, people, loved ones—will cease to exist. In other words, from the standpoint of how I experience things, when I die the conditions that enable the existence of both my consciousness and the world around me will, most likely, no longer be present. In this way, the prospect of my own death highlights the possibility of the end of everything.

The unthinkable and unspeakable nature of my death forces me to walk repeatedly down a conceptual dead-end; a dead-end which discourages any further attempts to think along the same track. Even if we were to consider it important to form some sort of relationship to my death, there is no identifiable object to connect with, there is nothing to cling on to; it stands there as a conceptual black-hole; an emptiness which we can only approach with insecurity and foreboding.

Here lies the true challenge of reflecting on my death; the idea of it as an unthinkable, unspeakable nothingness. But, despite this, thinkers, poets, and artists have, over the centuries, still had a lot to say about personal mortality. It is just too big a part of the rhythm and structure of life to be ignored.

It is, similarly, important for each of us not to turn our backs on death and, despite its unintelligibility, to seek out ways of engaging with it. What is needed is some sort of provisional handhold that allows each of us to reach out and grasp onto something that can enable us to pursue a lifelong relationship with personal mortality.

Featured Image Credit: by Ehud Neuhaus via Unsplash

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Quantitative thinking during a pandemic

Today is not right. The weather is fine. My family and friends are healthy and waiting to hear from me, ready for ordinary things like coffee and conversation. Normally, I’d be taking my grandkids to daycare and checking up on grocery and laundry lists. Then, a bit of reading and some writing. But, instead of my usual activity I sit alone in a world of similars. No driving grandkids to school, no personal contact, no “I’ll-pick-it-up-when-next-I’m-at-the-store.” How peculiar this sudden-forced life. We live at the mercy of the coronavirus, specifically the COVID-19 strain. Now, our life is dictated by the statistical models for infection and survival rates, as calculated by mathematicians working with arcane algorithms. Our thoughts are about “flattening the curve” and “opening up,” terminology we have learned to express the theory of having fewer people get sick at once so that needed medical facilities do not become overwhelmed. We accept the restrictions to our daily activities because we believe them to be in our best interests; and, of course, they are enforced to some degree. Then, too, we each know we are not alone. Virtually all countries in the world—140 or so sovereign regions—have experienced coronavirus.

Soon, the statistical modelers tell us, some businesses and public places will be open, following a phased plan that progresses stepwise toward normality. But each day the modelers posit new predictions. We react by revising our expectations. Millions of people have lost jobs and income, savings are wiped out, many businesses have no expectation of restarting much less thriving. The psychological stress has been devastating. Depression, torn relationships, drug use, and alcoholism are rising to unprecedented levels.  But, for other millions, families and partners have grown closer. Couples and individuals spend time with their children—time together that otherwise would not have happened.

Our circumstances are led by the statistical modelers with their continuous flow of information to medical experts who hope that politicians will follow their recommendations. So . . . where are we?  Safer, or have we just endured the most colossal mistake in the history of mankind?  All because of statistical predictions. The statistical models are recalculated to currently reveal a less severe, but not brightening, future. The infection-and-survival models follow the available medical data and standard biometric risk-analyses assumptions. Technically, the information is processed by various types of regressions, odds-ratios, and correlational relationships. One presumes these algorithms are accurate and reliable.

Interestingly, we do not imagine that we are victims at the mercy of these statisticians—in fact, quite the opposite.  We look to them for truth and guidance. We believe their calculations, trusting that they get the math right. Even when their projections do not materialize with exactness, we realize they are working with a paucity of data and that their assumptions are presumed from an unprecedented and unknowable circumstance. We trust science as the most accurate route to truth that we have. We live with a quantitative perspective.  Apart from ages past, we do not perceive ourselves as beings who are at the whim of fate or providence. For us today, quantification is our moment-by-moment reality. With this viewpoint, we live with an internal sense of odds and probability.

There is a truly remarkable story of how these maths (and specifically, probability theory) used by today’s modelers came about. It was not through the slow progression of technical advances across the centuries. Rather, the formulas these statistical models employ were developed within a short period of time, and not too long ago: about 130 years or so, beginning during the last (but most significant) years of the Enlightenment through the first third of the twentieth century, roughly the 1790s through the 1920s. It can be traced that the period’s history drove many of the technical developments.

Even more astounding is the fact that the measurement of uncertainty—statistical modeling—stem from the work of a very few men and women (fewer than about fifty principals), each of almost unimaginably high intellect and most working in about the same time period. Many of the major characters knew one another personally or at least were aware of the others’ corresponding work in prob- ability theory or statistics, and more broadly in mathematics. Yet, aside from knowing one another and their reputation in intellectual circles, most of these individuals worked in relative obscurity and were not popularly known. Even today, most of these individuals are still not well known, except to biographers and scholars. But, as we shall see, their influence on us today is nothing short of astounding. In large part, this is what makes the story of quantification so interesting.

Our quantitative mindset—how we view things today—is what brings us hope and despair. The outcome is simultaneously both.

Image by clay-banks-U0-r0JMypE0 via Unsplash.

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