25 December 20
So This Is Christmas and What Have You Done?
Christmas Day, 1971 - 2020
Yoko Ono and John Lennon
(Happy Christmas Kyoko)
(Happy Christmas Julian)
So this is Christmas
And what have you done
Another year over
And a new one just begun
And so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young
A very Merry Christmas
And a happy new year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
And so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong
And so happy Christmas
For black and for white
For yellow and red ones
Let's stop all the fight
A very Merry Christmas
And a happy new year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
And so this is Christmas
And what have we done
Another year over
A new one just begun
And so happy Christmas
We hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young
A very Merry Christmas
And a happy new year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
War is over, if you want it
War is over now
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25 December 20
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Jesse Jackson | The True Meaning of Christmas Is of Vital Importance in These Divisive Times
Jesse Jackson, Chicago Sun Times
Jackson writes: "On Friday, millions of people across the world will celebrate Christmas. Here and abroad, safety - staying home, social distancing, wearing masks, being sensible - requires limits on the gatherings and parties. Yet the bells still ring, music is in the air, lights on homes and lampposts shine, blessings are shared."
With the pandemic raging and millions unemployed, this Christmas will witness tears among the smiles.
For so many, this holiday is a difficult time: the cold and hungry, those separated from families, those alone or imprisoned or sick. With the pandemic raging and millions unemployed and on the verge of eviction, this Christmas will witness tears among the smiles. Each year at this time, I use this column to remind us of the true meaning of Christmas.
Christmas is literally the mass for Christ, marking the birth of Jesus. He was born under occupation. Joseph and Mary were ordered to go far from home to register with authorities. The innkeeper told Joseph there was no room at the inn. Jesus was born on a cold night in a stable, lying in a manger, an “at risk baby.” His earthly father was a carpenter, not a prince or a banker.
Jesus was born at a time of great misery and turmoil, with his country under Roman occupation. Prophets predicted that a new Messiah was coming — a King of Kings — who would rout the occupiers and free the people.
Many expected a mighty warrior, like the superheroes of today’s movies, who would mobilize an army to defeat Rome’s legions. Fearing the prophecy, the Roman King Herod ordered the “massacre of the innocents,” the slaughter of all boys two and under in Bethlehem and the nearby region.
Jesus confounded both Herod’s fears and the peoples’ fantasies. He was a man of peace, not of war. He gathered disciples, not soldiers. He began his ministry by quoting Isaiah 62:1: “The Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” We will be judged, he taught us, by how we treat “the least of these,” by how we treat the stranger on the Jericho Road. He called us on to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to care for the sick, to offer aid to the refugee.
Jesus was the great liberator, but by his words and example, not by his sword. He converted rather than conquered. He accumulated no worldly wealth. He threw the moneylenders from the temple. He owned no home, no land, and had no regular paycheck. His time with us was too brief, and he was crucified for his ministry.
And yet, Jesus succeeded beyond all expectation to transform the world. The Prince of Peace, he taught us that peace is not the absence of violence; it is the presence of justice and righteousness.
These days, Christmas too often becomes a stressful holiday rather than a prayerful holy day. It is a time of sales, shopping and Santa. Yet Jesus taught us to focus on the most vulnerable among us.
This is even more vital today. Poverty is rising, not falling. Food kitchens are overwhelmed. Millions of hard-working people have lost their jobs through no fault of their own. Millions more are deemed “essential workers,” risking their lives for us, yet many receive the lowest pay and the fewest benefits.
And at the same time, the economy is rigged so that the very richest — the billionaires in America — have added over a trillion dollars to their fortunes in the midst of the pandemic.
Jesus praised the Good Samaritan who cared for the stranger on the Jericho Road. Yet today, racial inequities — too often structured into our institutions — continue to cost lives and waste futures. Demagogues fuel fears and hatreds of the other; harsh immigration policies — separating children from their mothers in the extreme — violate our own values. We continue to lock up more people than any nation in the world.
Ignoring the climate crisis that increasingly threatens all of God’s creation now costs us daily in lives, in the destructions of extreme weather, in economic disruptions that already generate millions of refugees.
In this secular age, let us remember the message of Christmas. Jesus demonstrated the astonishing power of faith, hope and charity, the importance of love. He showed that people of conscience can make a difference, even against the most powerful oppressor. He demonstrated the strength of summoning our better angels, rather than rousing our fears or feeding our divisions. This Christmas, this surely is a message to remember.
Merry Christmas, everybody.
Amy Coney Barrett. (photo: Samuel Corum/NYT)
Amy Coney Barrett Is Already Putting Her Mark on the Supreme Court
Dahlia Lithwick, Slate
Lithwick writes: "On a recent episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick spoke with Steve Vladeck, professor at the University of Texas School of Law, about the emerging 'shadow docket' at the Supreme Court, wherein the conservative justices are signaling their intentions - and sometimes laying precedent - with quickly dashed off opinions."
The court has embraced the shadow docket.
n a recent episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick spoke with Steve Vladeck, professor at the University of Texas School of Law, about the emerging “shadow docket” at the Supreme Court, wherein the conservative justices are signaling their intentions—and sometimes laying precedent—with quickly dashed off opinions. It shows what the conservative branch of the high court is willing to do now that they have the votes. A portion of their conversation, edited and condensed for clarity, has been transcribed below.
Dahlia Lithwick: I wanted to talk about the COVID cases. I know that it is a strange and wending path that we are on, where we’ve gone from, at the beginning of the summer, John Roberts voting with the liberals did not want to second-guess public health measures that are being instituted by states. Suddenly we’re in a whole new court, whole new world, and we have the archdiocese decision that is now being relied upon in all of its nonexistence for further decisions, including Thursday’s Kentucky Christian schools case. Parse out with me your thinking on why the court has been so aggressive on these cases, particularly when a lot of them are moot.
Steve Vladeck: First of all, this to me is Exhibit A so far of how Amy Coney Barrett has already put her mark on the Supreme Court. You mentioned the two big cases from the summer where Roberts joined the four lefties in leaving intact orders from California and Nevada. And this is a shift since Barrett came along. Now it’s 5 to 4 the other way. I was struck, especially in the New York case, by the chief’s dissent, because first of all, he doesn’t write dissenting opinions that often, and second, he doesn’t usually use them to attack his colleagues and yet here’s what happened.
I think part of what’s going on is that at least some of the five justices who are in the majority in the archdiocese case—Justice Neil Gorsuch, perhaps foremost among them—really are in the camp that states are being irrational in some of these COVID restrictions. Some of the lines they’re drawing just don’t make any sense. And insofar as the lack of logic in those line drawings implicates religion, here’s a perfect moment to look like you are a libertarian while also nodding toward the future of the court’s religious liberty jurisprudence. They already have this case on the docket from this term, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, about whether they should overrule Employment Division v. Smith. Even if that’s not coming in Fulton, Gorsuch’s concurrent opinion in the archdiocese case is a pretty powerful sign that it’s coming sooner or later.
There’s this broader debate about whether we should be applying ordinary modes of scrutiny to COVID restrictions or whether we should be more deferential to public health authorities. And I think the reality is that the Supreme Court and some other judges are being less deferential and they’re holding government officials and public health experts to a higher standard than we would usually hold them in other cases. And that’s really alarming. Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in the New York case that the majority relies to some degree on statements Gov. Andrew Cuomo made to find sort of a discriminatory intent—and in the exact context where Donald Trump’s statements about the Muslim ban were pooh-poohed by most of the same justices. So I think it’s a confluence of three things: It is justices who buy into the narrative that some of the COVID restrictions have been overbroad, justices who are looking for opportunities to establish a foothold for this new religious liberty jurisprudence, and justices who for the first time in a very, very, very long time have the votes.
It knits back to your shadow docket concerns that when you have justices who are relying on shifting doctrine that was coughed up in a hairball late at night and is two paragraphs in per curiam and doesn’t fully grapple with the facts of the case, you are building a really kind of alarming house of cards because the reliance on cases that we don’t fully know even what the reasoning was, much less what the implications are. The shadows in the shadows are extra, I think, pernicious.
Not only that, but the court is starting to embrace them. I am a super procedural nerd when it comes to the Supreme Court and I don’t think anybody else cares about this, but one of the remarkable things that’s happened after the archdiocese case is there were cases from, I want to say, Colorado and California, where the churches had applied for emergency writs of injunction, and rather than granting them, the court treated the application as a petition for cert before judgment. So basically a direct appeal of a district court decision, granted them, vacated the district court injunction, and remanded for instructions to consider the impact of the archdiocese case when the whole point of the archdiocese case was that Cuomo got carried away. And so the court itself is now sending the message that when we’re issuing these rulings in COVID cases with either no reasoning or in the archdiocese case a short unsigned opinion, even though those are fact specific cases, we want lower courts to be taking those very much into account.
I have two sets of problems with that. One is I actually think it’s a real issue on the merits, but two, I mean, you said mootness. The notion that the court has taken up these moot cases and is handing down vague guidance that it’s then using to instruct lower courts to reconsider nonmoot cases. It’s hard to explain to the layperson why that’s so offensive as an exercise of judicial power, but it is really. It is the court being much more aggressive in this context than it has previously. And I think a large part of that is because the speed brakes on that kind of aggressiveness were Anthony Kennedy and then to a lesser degree John Roberts, and the brakes are no longer there. And I don’t see a Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a speed brake here, and I see Gorsuch as almost leading the charge.
And maybe just the final layer to this worrisome trend has to be the dissenting justices saying, yeah, yeah, we get it. It’s moot. We’re afraid it’s going to come back. That’s kind of strange: We acknowledge there’s nothing left to decide, but unlike any other case, we’re going to just do something aggressive in advance of actual new moves.
There was a line in there in Gorsuch’s concurrence that Cuomo might decide to reinstitute this thing. So problem No. 1 is that is usually a consideration that goes into whether a case is jurisdictionally moot and comes as part and parcel of analysis that the government’s policy is capable of repetition yet evading review, or that there was voluntary cessation. Fine, but on the question of whether the Supreme Court should issue an emergency injunction when no lower court did, the party seeking the injunction is supposed to show irreparable harm. And I’m still trying to figure out how someone can be irreparably harmed by a policy that isn’t in effect. The court is basically taking procedural shortcuts through the shadow docket to send messages because they know they have a majority that wants to send these messages. They don’t have a suitable merits case in which to do it and so they’re pulling cases off the shadow docket, where they can say what they want to say.
That’s why I keep using the language of signaling, because it seems as though this is weird flashing lights. There’s nothing to affix it to other than No, we’re really, really serious about religious liberty and assuming animus whether or not it exists. Part of what you’re grappling to explain and I’m grappling to explain is that in some ways it has no effect, but in some ways, it is built on nothing. And so it has an effect, even if it’s just a signal.
The archdiocese case is a great example: The Supreme Court’s decision actually requires Cuomo to do nothing. And yet the Supreme Court’s decision is going to affect how so many local and state officials going forward think about these kinds of restrictions and how many lower state and federal court judges analyze these kinds of restrictions in future cases. And I’m the last person to say the court lacks the power in this context. Formally, I think they have the power to do it, but there are reasons why there are these prudential constraints on their power to issue these kinds of injunctions and these kinds of orders.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. (photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg News)
Businesses Will No Longer Have to Provide Paid Leave for Workers With COVID After Mitch McConnell Objected
Paul McLeod, BuzzFeed
McLeod writes: "Employers will no longer have to provide paid sick leave to workers who get infected with COVID-19 after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked that extension from being included in Congress's latest coronavirus aid package."
Congress did not extend the paid leave mandate in its $900 billion COVID aid bill. Democrats hope to try again next year.
In March, Congress passed a law mandating that workers are able to draw two weeks of paid sick leave if they contract COVID, two weeks of paid leave to care for a quarantining relative, and up to 10 weeks of paid family leave to care for a child whose school or daycare is closed for COVID-related reasons.
BuzzFeed News previously reported that McConnell was pushing to block the paid leave mandate from being extended. Congressional aides in both parties confirmed Monday that the extension was left out of the aid bill as a concession to McConnell.
The bill does extend a refundable tax credit that fully subsidizes the cost to businesses of paying out sick leave until the end of March. Essentially, the federal government will continue to foot the bill for businesses that offer paid leave over the next three months, but it will be optional for businesses to opt into this program and let their employees take time off.
The bill is set to pass on Monday night and President Donald Trump is expected to sign it into law soon thereafter.
The United States is an outlier in not requiring any form of paid sick leave. The Center for Economic and Policy Research analyzed the sick leave policies of 22 wealthy nations and found that the US was the only country without some form of paid sick leave.
The paid leave mandate had already been watered down in the March bill. Big businesses with over 500 employees were exempt from the requirement, while businesses with under 50 employees could apply for exemptions.
Back in March, the paid leave mandate was projected to cost $105 billion. But as of the end of October, businesses had only claimed $1.3 billion in tax credits, according to a Health Affairs study. The study found that paid sick leave lowered the spread of COVID and projected an extension of four to six months would cost $8 billion to $13 billion. That would be about 1% of the cost of the $900 billion package passed Monday.
A Senate Republican aide said a deal on a COVID aid bill could have been reached Saturday night, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi held it up because an extension of the paid leave mandate was not included. The aide said Pelosi held out until Sunday when she settled for the tax credit alone to be included.
Democrats said they would keep pushing for paid leave. The party hopes to pass another COVID aid bill next year after President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January.
“Businesses can use these tax credits to provide paid sick days to their workers, and I hope they do — but it’s not nearly enough,” said Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Health Committee. “This crisis has made it clearer than ever why paid leave for every worker is so important to families, communities, and our economy as a whole.”
State and local governments were not eligible to receive that subsidy but were still mandated to offer paid leave. That mandate will end in the new year.
Under the mandate, employers must provide two weeks (up to 80 hours) of leave at full salary if an employee is infected with COVID. Employers must provide two weeks (up to 80 hours) of leave at two-thirds of an employee’s salary if they must care for an individual subject to quarantine due to COVID. Employers must offer up to an additional 10 weeks of paid family and medical leave at two-thirds of an employee’s salary if they must care for a child whose school or daycare was closed for COVID-related reasons.
Stephanie Mohr pleads her case to Newsmax earlier this month. (photo: Newsmax
Trump Pardoned a Former K-9 Police Officer Who Was Convicted of Releasing Her Dog on an Unarmed Homeless Man
Ashley Collman, Business Insider
Collman writes: "A former Maryland K-9 police officer who served 10 years in prison for setting her police dog on a homeless man was among the 29 people who were given pardons or commutations by President Donald Trump on Wednesday."
Stephanie Mohr was 30 years old in 2001 when she was convicted of a felony civil-rights violation. On September 21, 1995, Mohr set her police dog on Ricardo Mendez as police officers investigated a burglary. The dog took out a chunk of his leg, The Washington Post reported.
It turned out Mendez was not a burglar - he had been sleeping on the roof of the business that officers were staking out that night.
"She served 10 years in prison for releasing her K-9 partner on a burglary suspect in 1995, resulting in a bite wound requiring ten stitches," the White House said in a statement about Mohr's pardon on Wednesday. "Officer Mohr was a highly commended member of the police force prior to her prosecution.
"Today's action recognizes that service and the lengthy term that Ms. Mohr served in prison."
Earlier this month, Mohr appeared on Newsmax, a pro-Trump conservative news outlet, to plead her case for a presidential pardon, saying she had been scapegoated.
Mohr said charges were pressed one day before they were set to expire under the statute of limitations. She also said she was targeted because a federal investigation into brutality in the Prince George's County Police Department failed to result in any other convictions.
She called her 10-year sentence "harsh." She also said she had a 2-year-old son when she was sentenced and was separated from him for most of his childhood.
"I got 10 years, basically one year for every stitch that the suspect received on his calf," she said.
Mohr was traveling with her parents and her partner on Wednesday when she heard she had gotten a pardon, USA Today reported.
"So many emotions flooding through me. It's been a long, long, long battle for this. I'm just so grateful," she told the outlet.
The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund and the National Fraternal Order of Police, the biggest police union in the US, helped push for Mohr's pardon. The National Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
Among the 28 other people to whom Trump issued pardons and commutations on Wednesday were Roger Stone, the longtime Republican strategist who was convicted of seven felonies last year; Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman who was sentenced last year to 7 1/2 years in prison for multiple crimes; and Charles Kushner, the father of Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Charles Kushner was convicted of tax crimes, witness tampering, and illegal campaign contributions.
Trump also pardoned or commuted the sentence of 20 other people on Tuesday. They included two Trump campaign associates who were ensnared in the FBI's Russia investigation, four Blackwater guards who were convicted of killing Iraqi civilians, and two Border Patrol agents who were accused of shooting an unarmed immigrant and covering it up.
Sesame Street. (photo: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images)
Sesame Street, 2020, and Me: A New York Story
Anna North, Vox
North writes: "Episode 4116 of Sesame Street, which first aired in 2006 but which premiered in our apartment in the spring of 2020, starts with Elmo playing school."
The city I loved was shut down this year. I found comfort in the beloved TV show’s idealized version of it.
Elmo has paper and crayons but needs a teacher, so he recruits Alan, the human who runs the convenience store on Sesame Street. It’s stressful for Alan not only because he has never taught school before, but also because he still has to deal with the store. Just as he’s starting to get used to his new role in Elmo’s life, a Muppet bus driver delivers at least a dozen human students to the convenience store, backpacks on, ready to learn.
“I hear you’re up for Teacher of the Year,” the bus driver barks in a New York accent as Alan blinks in confusion and defeat. “Congratulations!”
I watched this episode in fragments, like so many things I did this spring, this year, this season of my life. We started watching Sesame Street last November because our baby, then about 18 months old, had been diagnosed with asthma. He needed twice-daily nebulizer treatments, which required him to sit still for a seemingly endless 15 minutes with a mask over his face as a machine blew steroid steam at him. The baby did not want to sit still under any circumstances, least of all these. The only thing that worked was TV, and one of the least unpleasant options, from my perspective, was Sesame Street.
For a long time, the solution worked for both of us. He liked Elmo and repetition; I liked the Yip-Yips and the gentle humor I remembered from my own youth. But in March, when we took the baby out of day care, sheltered in our apartment, and started watching his breathing (and our own) obsessively for signs of Covid-19, Sesame Street stopped feeling comforting. It started feeling bizarre.
Episode 4116, for example, featured two activities — attending school and going out for a meal — that had just been banned in the real New York City. Every episode gave me whiplash: A kid bounds happily out of the subway, friends laugh together on the playground, a gregarious orange Muppet visits iconic Manhattan sites and chooses people gathered there for a casual, mask-free interview. Especially in March, with the city still in strict lockdown, Sesame Street felt like a joyful celebration of every formerly fun, or at least normal, New York activity that had now become suspect, dangerous, even fatal.
Of course, this was true of all media this year, when it became strange to watch people hug on TV like it was nothing, or to see a train station framed as anything other than a superspreader event waiting to happen.
But Sesame Street was especially wrenching. Launched in 1969, the show became popular with kids (and adults) across the country but has always been rooted very specifically in New York City. Many of its storylines revolve around the kind of neighborhood relationships that can be fostered by city living, like the ones between Alan and the Muppets and humans who live near his convenience store. These are idealized on the show, of course, but still likely familiar to a lot of New Yorkers. A few years back, for instance, the manager of our local convenience store mused to me that at his job, he can track his neighbors’ whole lives — he sees mothers come in pregnant, then watches their babies grow up.
The show’s New York connection is very much by design. Its setting is a fictional block based on real ones — the show’s original set designer scouted Harlem, the Upper West Side, and the Bronx for inspiration, according to Smithsonian magazine, and populated its world with brownstones and garbage cans recognizable to any New Yorker. Sonia Manzano, the actor who played the long-running character of Maria, has said that she recognized her own Bronx neighborhood when she first saw the show in college: “Hey,” she said, “that’s my street!”
One of the joys of the city — one that Sesame Street documents so well and so sweetly — is the way it brings people together. But when togetherness became dangerous, this joy turned to grief and fright, and Sesame Street felt almost like a memorial, a relic of a New York that was never coming back.
Sesame Street, then and now, is all about a tight-knit New York community. The original set included Luis and Maria’s Fix-It Shop, the convenience store, and 123 Sesame Street, the apartment building occupied by Bert and Ernie and their various human neighbors. Crucially, it also included the front stoop of 123, where the Muppets and people all hung out. “Our set had to be an inner-city street, and more particularly it had to be a brownstone so the cast and kids could ‘stoop’ in the age-old New York tradition,” producer Jon Stone told Michael Davis, author of the Sesame Street history Street Gang.
The set has changed a bit over the years; in 2015, for example, scenic designer David Gallo added a community garden. But the stoop, and its spirit, remain. The show is all about neighbors coming together — helping, teaching, amusing, and exasperating each other.
In the real New York, by mid-March, the kind of neighborhood life celebrated on Sesame Street felt like a unique danger, rather than a distinct pleasure, of city living. The corner stores and apartment buildings were outbreaks waiting to happen. Laundromats, once a mundane weekly gathering place, had become a locus of fear for many New Yorkers; those who could afford it were buying in-home washing machines, while others did laundry in their bathtubs. Parties were banned. Even the gates to playgrounds were padlocked shut.
As March turned to April, I started taking walks in the early morning. When someone else approached, one of us would usually cross the street to avoid the other. No distance seemed safe. Once, the baby coughed during a walk in the park; a jogger, hundreds of feet away, turned around and ran in the opposite direction.
And no wonder we feared each other. At the first peak of the epidemic, in mid-April, more than 800 New Yorkers were lost to the virus in a single day. The hospitals were overwhelmed. Refrigerated trucks drove in to hold the dead. Sirens were never-ending. At night, I could hear coughing all up and down my street.
Politicians and pundits talked about New York as though its residents and their lives were the problem. The apartment building, the laundromat, the subway, the corner store, the stoop — it was not the virus, but our perverse insistence on living in close quarters with one another, that was killing us. Even Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) tweeted in March that “there is a density level in NYC that is destructive,” calling on the city to develop an immediate plan to reduce it.
It was a strange thing to ask of a city in crisis, but wealthier residents did their part, decamping for country houses and suburbs and launching a thousand trend pieces about the end of cities.
Those were quickly met by critics pointing out that it wasn’t cities themselves but inequality within cities that was causing much of the death and devastation during the pandemic. I never really believed New York was “over” (for starters, most people couldn’t afford to simply take off for the suburbs even if they wanted to), but it was still hard to imagine a return to the kind of blithe hanging out depicted on Sesame Street. And even the silliest storylines felt to me like reminders of everything we were missing — Muppet fairy Abby helps her friend get ready for a party (parties?!); Elmo and his friends make up a song about the number 3 (singing is one of the most dangerous things you can do!); kids discuss what they learn in preschool (if only).
Of course, in the scheme of this dark year, what my family had lost barely registers. My husband and I could work from home, where we took care of our son in shifts, I the morning and he the afternoon. Like so many in New York this spring, we got sick, but then we got better. We’ll probably never know for sure what we had. And the baby’s medicine worked, or his youth did — despite his asthma, he played his way through our March illness, the least affected of any of us. This winter, as the virus surges past its spring peaks in much of the country, we’re sheltering in place, watching the numbers anxiously but aware that, for the time being, New York is actually one of the safer places to be.
Sometime around early May, our son began to get tired of Sesame Street. He’d twist in our laps and yell “Skip!” when Elmo had barely spoken a word. We switched to Daniel Tiger, then to a show called The Bumble Nums about little aliens who are great at cooking. But as we moved further from Sesame Street in our daily routines, real life started to look more like Sesame Street again.
First, I noticed people saying hello to the baby. A constant occurrence before the pandemic, it had all but stopped in March and April, as his neighbors clearly regarded him (perhaps rightly) as a vector of disease. But in the park one May morning, a man asked me, from behind his mask, how old my son was.
“Almost 2,” I said from behind mine. Not a baby anymore.
Businesses began to reopen — the taco place, the coffee shop where I’d sat with copy edits of my book in early March, wiping the table before setting down the manuscript. We started going back to the corner store, buying chocolate, bleach wipes, and beer. The manager and his family were healthy, he said, though he was stretched thin. Like Alan, he’d suddenly found himself a de facto teacher, helping his three kids with their online school at night while running the store during the day.
The truth is that neighborhood life never actually ended in New York City, even if its most privileged residents sheltered from it for a time. Thousands of workers rode (and ran) the subways every day, even at the height of the pandemic. Thousands more still took their children to day care — facilities set up by the city and the YMCA to care for the kids of essential workers operated for months without an outbreak.
Meanwhile, the kind of stoop socializing celebrated by Sesame Street rebounded quickly as it became clear that outdoor interactions were safer, from a Covid-19 perspective, than indoor gatherings. “Stoop drinks” and block parties became a summertime escape from the monotony of quarantine (though, as always, Black and Latinx New Yorkers who got together outdoors were vulnerable to targeting by the police).
And all around the city, all of this year, New Yorkers have been coming together to help each other. You see it in small things — our rates of mask use remain some of the highest in the country — and in bigger ones, too. When the pandemic confined many older and immunocompromised people to their homes, mutual aid organizations sprang up to get them groceries. When millions around the country rose up to protest police violence and the killings of Black Americans, New Yorkers marched with their neighbors, handing out masks and hand sanitizer all the while. When the mayor imposed a curfew, New York community groups stepped in to give bail money, legal help, and medical care to protesters arrested or hurt by police.
The problems of New York run deep — the lack of affordable housing, the segregated schools, the underfunded public transit system that’s lost even more money during the pandemic — and they’ll probably get worse before they get better. And the working-class Black and Latinx communities that Sesame Street intentionally set out to celebrate, in a way that was groundbreaking for network TV at the time, have been especially hard-hit by Covid-19 and are especially underserved by the economic relief handed down by the federal government so far.
But the communal spirit that Sesame Street champions hasn’t disappeared from the city of its birth, even if it often seems absent from the halls of power. As the country lurches into a long winter with relief from the virus still feeling far away, I’m drawing from the show a certain fragile hope.
I didn’t stop watching Sesame Street when my son got sick of it. Instead, I went back to the archives.
I remembered that even though most of the episodes I watched in the spring were sunny and fun, Sesame Street is actually famous for something all too relevant in America right now: talking about death.
One of the show’s most iconic episodes — indeed, one of the best-known episodes of children’s TV ever — is Episode 1839, which deals with the death of the beloved Mr. Hooper, the original owner of the convenience store (the same one Alan later managed and had to turn into a school). Will Lee, the actor who played Mr. Hooper, died in 1982, and instead of ignoring his departure, the creators of Sesame Street decided to address it by having the characters explain death to Big Bird, compassionately, but accurately.
The segment is deeply sad. At first, Big Bird doesn’t understand and keeps asking why Mr. Hooper isn’t coming back. Then he wants to know, “Who’s going to take care of the store, and who’s going to make my birdseed milkshakes and tell me stories?” One of Big Bird’s neighbors, David, reassures him: “I’m going to take care of the store,” he says. “Mr. Hooper, he left it to me. And I’ll make you your milkshakes, and we’ll all tell you stories, and we’ll make sure you’re okay.”
At the end of the episode, Big Bird’s neighbors all envelop him in a hug.
I can’t hug my neighbors now; when I meet friends in the park, we do pathetic “air hugs” around each other. Still, the episode feels like a template for how New Yorkers can care for each other in bad times as well as good.
Whether it’s Alan starting a school to help out Elmo or David stepping in to make milkshakes for Big Bird, Sesame Street is, at its core, about a true community whose members won’t let each other down, no matter what. New York isn’t that in 2020, and America certainly isn’t that. But amid the devastation of this year, I see glimmers of recognition that we’re going to need those kinds of communities if we’re going to come back from this. I see it in calls to support child care and other care workers, in the evolution and expansion of mutual aid groups (and others inspired by them), and in ideas for building a more equitable city. And while Sesame Street isn’t exactly a policy document, we could do a lot worse than to turn to it for guidance.
Someday, when my son is a little older, I hope we watch the show together again. I hope that we, as his parents, live up to the standards set by Alan, David, Mr. Hooper, and the rest. And I hope that when he sees the characters having fun together and helping one another, he finds something he recognizes in his own neighborhood.
The deal comes more than four years after a slim majority of Britons voted to quit the EU in a June 2016 referendum. (photo: Paul Grover/Reuters)
After Months of Negotiations, UK, EU Secure Brexit Trade Deal
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "The United Kingdom and the European Union have agreed on a post-Brexit trade deal after months of torturous negotiations, averting the prospect of a chaotic and acrimonious divorce at the end of this year."
Announcement marks the end of a key chapter in the Brexit saga, and comes just one week before the UK exits the EU’s single market.
The deal, announced on Thursday, came just one week before the UK is due to exit the EU’s single market and customs union on December 31.
“The deal is done,” UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted, as he posted a photo of himself with both thumbs raised in celebration.
Delivering a televised address, Johnson hailed striking what he called “the biggest trade deal yet”, adding that the UK had taken back control of its laws, borders, and fishing waters.
“We have completed the biggest trade deal yet, worth 660 billion pounds a year, a comprehensive Canada-style free trade deal between the UK and the EU,” he said.
Johnson urged Britons to make the most of what he called the country’s soon-to-be status of a “newly and truly independent nation”.
Addressing the EU, he added: “We will be your friend, your ally, your supporter and indeed, never let it be forgotten, your number one market.”
The deal will ensure the UK and the 27-nation bloc can continue to trade in goods without tariffs or quotas, smoothing trade worth hundreds of billions of pounds – and euros – a year between the pair.
Still, there will be some major changes come January 1, when more rules and increased bureaucracy will come into effect. How Britons and Europeans travel, live and work between the country and continent will also change.
EU and British negotiators were up all night working on the agreement, reportedly fuelled by takeaway pizzas, as they hashed out final details at the Berlaymont in Brussels, the headquarters of the European Commission.
Johnson and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, meanwhile, spoke several times by phone.
“Parting is such sweet sorrow,” von der Leyen said in Brussels shortly after the deal was announced. “It is time to leave Brexit behind. Our future is made in Europe.
“We have finally found an agreement. It was a long and winding road but we have got a good deal to show for it.
“It is fair, it is a balanced deal and it is the right and responsible thing to do for both sides.”
EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, speaking alongside von der Leyen, said: “Today is a day of relief, but tinged by some sadness as we compare what came before with what lies ahead.
“The clock is no longer ticking, after four years of collective effort and EU unity to preserve peace and stability on the island of Ireland, to protect the citizens and the single market, and to build a new partnership with the UK.”
The deal comes more than four years after a slim majority of Britons voted to quit the EU in a June 2016 referendum on membership of the bloc.
The agreement document is said to be about 1,500 pages long. In essence, it is a narrow free trade pact surrounded with other agreements on a range of issues including energy, transport and police and security cooperation.
The pact will not cover services, which make up 80 percent of the UK economy, including a banking industry that positions London as the only financial capital to rival New York.
Access to the EU market for UK-based banks, insurers and asset managers will become patchy at best.
What next?
Both sides must now move quickly to ratify the pact.
The UK Parliament, in which Johnson’s governing Conservative Party has a strong majority, is expected to sign off on the deal before December 31, when the Brexit transition period ends.
Johnson said he hopes the agreement will be put to members of Parliament for a vote next week, on December 30.
But things are more complicated on the EU side, with the leaders of its 27 member states required to approve of any agreement before it can then be sent to the European Parliament for its consent – a challenge made more difficult by the Christmas holiday period and amid a worsening coronavirus crisis.
EU law does, however, include a provision for agreements to be provisionally approved by its 27 member states, without its parliament’s consent.
European Parliament President David Sassoli on Thursday confirmed the institution will analyse the deal “in detail” before deciding whether to give its consent in the new year.
“We will act responsibly in order to minimise disruption to citizens and prevent the chaos of a no-deal scenario,” Sassoli said on Twitter.
EU ambassadors will meet at 10:30am CET (09:30 GMT) on Friday, Christmas Day, to begin reviewing the post-Brexit trade deal clinched on Thursday.
“The German EU Council Presidency has just convened a COREPER meeting for tomorrow 10.30am. EU Ambassadors will start reviewing the EU-UK agreement,” an EU spokesman for Germany, which holds the bloc’s rotating presidency, said on Twitter. COREPER is the name given to meetings of EU envoys.
The EU’s Barnier will provide a briefing on the EU-UK negotiations, the spokesman said.
News of a deal has meanwhile brought a sense of relief for many in the UK and across Europe.
Had the UK and the EU failed to compromise, a no-deal Brexit scenario would have forced them to default to trading under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules from January 1.
WTO rules would have brought financial tariffs, quotas and other regulatory barriers to trade into play.
Christmas presents. (photo: Grist/Anna Efetova/Robert Kirk/Getty Images)
Is Wrapping Paper Wasteful, or Is It the Least of Our Problems?
Eve Andrews, Grist
Andrews writes: "Present wrapping is sort of the apotheosis of an environmentalist nightmare. You're taking a gift (symbol of consumerism!) and dressing it up in shiny paper and bows and frills (single-use products!) that will be immediately discarded (landfill waste!). This is probably why environmentalists have long been considered 'no fun.'"
. Dear Umbra,
My family compulsively reuses wrapping paper, to the point that I think we’ve got some from decades ago. What is wrapping paper made from, how scary is it, and most importantly, should everyone become hoarders like my family?
— Giving In Family That Expects Reuse
A. Dear GIFTER,
Present wrapping is sort of the apotheosis of an environmentalist nightmare. You’re taking a gift (symbol of consumerism!) and dressing it up in shiny paper and bows and frills (single-use products!) that will be immediately discarded (landfill waste!). This is probably why environmentalists have long been considered “no fun.” Because wrapping — and, perhaps more accurately, unwrapping — presents is fun! It’s an experience replete with surprise, beauty, generosity, and other good stuff.
There are more environmentally sound ways to do it, of course. As you already do, keeping and reusing wrapping paper and ribbon and gift bags over and over again, for years and years, is an admirable option. Avoid metallic and glittery paper, because those contain plastic or aluminium that prevent them from being recycled with paper products and therefore go straight to the landfill. (And try to strip excess tape and sticky tags and whatnot from the paper before you recycle it, but a couple of stray pieces probably won’t hurt.) Fabric ribbon is preferable over the plastic curl-able kind, because you can more easily keep and reuse it. The more hardcore enviro-heads use brown kraft paper, which is eminently recyclable, compostable, and reusable, and you can draw stuff on it, stick some pine sprigs in the ribbon, go wild!
As to how scary wrapping paper is, let’s break things down quantitatively. A popular figure that flies around is that the average American household’s waste increases by 25 percent between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, but that’s not specific to gift paraphernalia.
Paper and paperboard waste make up about 14 percent of all municipal solid waste — an umbrella category that includes trash, recycling, composting, and other kinds of refuse — according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and we can probably assume that percentage is higher over the winter holidays. But paper products are easier and less energy-intensive to recycle than the dread plastic and metal items, so a relatively low percentage of paper — around 15 percent — ends up decomposing in landfills.
Paper products look even better compared to other kinds of holiday waste. Food waste — all those stale holiday cookies, unsolicited fruitcake, leftovers from the elaborate Christmas meal that you made for two people — is a far greater scourge; about two-thirds of all residential food waste goes straight to the landfill, where it breaks down into harmful greenhouse gases like methane. Online shopping for 2020’s holiday season is up by 33 percent over last year, which means 33 percent more of all that plastic packaging that’s most likely not recyclable, to say nothing of the emissions from the ships, planes, and trucks that move all that stuff around.
Is there anything wrong with your hoarding habits? No, of course not. It is never wrong to reuse something as benign as wrapping paper as much as you can or want to. When I talked to Erin Gagnon, a retail sales manager for the West Coast waste management company Recology, about your family’s practice, she said, “I love it, I love it, I love it.” (Three times! She really did!) “We love that people are really thinking through the circular economy,” referring to a system that minimizes waste and maximizes reuse.
But the mantra of any environmentalist’s life, as I’ve said in various ways many times before, should be to not lose sight of bigger, systemic problems, such as the large slice of emissions that come from transportation and manufacturing. If your family members are wrapping 100 Amazon Prime-shipped items in 20-year-old paper, for example, there’s a bit of cognitive dissonance there.
The holidays are theoretically supposed to be about being thankful for the love and generosity in your life, giving what you can to others, and enjoying a lot of warmth and comfort. In practice, there’s often an enormous amount of guilt over the whole rigmarole of gifts — what you paid for them, where they came from, how much they will be enjoyed — and often a healthy dose of depression and inadequacy. Given these existing pressures, I would suggest not holding yourself to absolute environmental purity in every aspect of your holidays.
That said, it’s not that hard to do eco-conscious gift wrapping, and I don’t think it’s an unreasonable burden for most people to make drawers of carefully preserved gift bags and ribbons and sheets of colorful paper dating back several presidential administrations a part of their annual holiday tradition. But I will say it probably matters more, both in a planetary and emotional sense, what’s underneath the paper.
Glitteringly,
Umbra
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