An Open Message to America’s Youth

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The Danger is Yet to Come

With his world-class medical care, Donald Trump claims to have beaten Covid-19. Our media are busy pointing out that he’s needlessly putting others at risk with his bogus euphoric and triumphalist advice. But the peak danger to Trump himself is still to come. Scientists studying Covid know the statistics. Even when initial symptoms are mild, the risk of a health crisis peaks some seven days or so after the first positive test for the virus. Trump’s minions claim that his first positive test came at 1:00 a.m. last Friday morning, October 2. So the risk of serious disease will peak this coming weekend. The worst may be yet to come. We don’t yet know the reasons for Trump’s “kitchen sink” treatment. His medical team may have recommended it because Trump is president and the nation needs a functioning chief executive. Or Trump himself may have demanded it as the patient and the Commander-in-Chief. But there are reasons why doctors and scientists tend to avoid a “kitchen sink” approach. Each drug and treatment has its own risks, side effects and unknowns. That’s especially so in this case, where most or all of the several treatments are experimental. If you give all together, it’s hard to sort out which is at fault and which is helpful if things go south. You’re flying blind. Legal and ethical considerations also caution against a “kitchen sink” approach. Nevertheless, Trump received three still-experimental treatments simultaneously: (1) developmental monoclonal antibodies offered by the biotech firm Regeneron; (2) the antiviral drug remdesivir, which has been shown to cut hospital stays in serious cases; and (3) the steroid dexamethasone, which is used to ameliorate cytokine storms in serious cases. Except for (2), none of these drugs has established uses at the time or under the circumstances in which Trump received them. Steroids like dexamethasone do have one well-known side effect: feelings of euphoria. So Trump’s ebullient mood and triumphalism have pharmaceutical origins; likely they have even less basis in reality than his usual ever-shifting moods. The simple truth is that Trump’s life and recovery still hang in the balance, and they will for several days. He could still get seriously ill. He could die. Or he could recover “miraculously,” leading the medical community to scramble to prepare broader access to the “kitchen sink” treatment, which at present is much too expensive and in too short supply for the vast majority of Covid-19 patients. The key here is caution and patience. Statistics and viral replication times demand watchful waiting through this weekend and beyond. But a nation whose leaders and media have a child’s attention span is already moving on to the next big thing.

The principal post follows:

Hi!

Are you worried about your future? Do you fret about college, jobs, our economy, the pandemic, and what lies ahead? Do you wonder how you’ll survive, let alone have a family and enjoy life as you should?

Then I’ve got three things to tell you. First, your education doesn’t have to be so hard or so expensive.

I got my basic higher education from the University of California, Berkeley, our nation’s premier public university. It cost me only $100 per semester, or $800 for all four years.

Inflated to 2020 prices from 1966 (when I graduated), that would be only $6,418 today. Yet today’s average graduate of a four-year public university ends up with $26,900 in debt, over and above what he or she was able to pay. That debt alone is four times everything I paid in school fees.

So what happened? Ronald Reagan and the so-called “Republican Revolution” happened.

My generation, the Baby Boomers, got greedy. Reagan told us “It’s your money,” and many of us decided they didn’t want to pay much tax. So on Reagan’s watch the top individual federal tax rate dropped to 28% from a high of 92% in Ike’s time.

Second, things don’t have to be this way. Raise the tax rates back up—even by a much smaller amount than Reagan cut them—and there’ll be money for lots of things. There’ll be affordable higher education, a better safety net, and money for child care and family leave. Then working parents won’t have to leave their newborns for others to tend and bond with. They won’t have to go to work when they’re injured or sick.

Most other developed nations have much better family leave and much more universal health insurance than we do. Getting there is just a matter of money. Raise taxes, maybe a bit more heavily on the rich, and we can take the hardship and worry out of so many lives.

It really is that simple. But Republicans have made a religion out of cutting taxes—more at the top than the bottom—so that bosses and the rich can get richer. Without their relentless greed, it would be easy to make life better for the vast majority of American working families.

The Americans who paid up to 92% in Ike’s time weren’t foreigners or socialists. They were us—our parents and grandparents. Our voters were just more provident and sensible and less selfish then. They cared more about our youth. What kind of society doesn’t pay to educate its youth and support growing families?

My last point is also simple. Now’s the best time in sixty years to take our country back—back to the time when we all looked out for each other and working adults helped take care of our youth.

Republicans have spent decades creating a perfect storm of hardship and uncertainty for our struggling middle class. They’ve sold our manufacturing jobs abroad to get cheaper labor for bosses and shareholders. They’ve also sold our industrial infrastructure abroad, so that we don’t make enough personal protective equipment to protect our doctors and nurses in a pandemic. (We hardly even make nuts and bolts anymore.)

They’ve killed our workers’ ability to organize labor unions to protect themselves from oppression. First they did so by enacting anti-union “right to work” laws. Then they sold our factories abroad where workers have no unions.

If you’re not white, they made things tougher still. They created a monstrosity of unequal justice. They allowed Black people to be incarcerated and killed in custody at rates much higher than whites.

Republicans’ lax oversight of business allowed bosses to squeeze nonwhite people out of good neighborhoods with financial trickery. The bosses swindled minorities out of land and wealth, and they rigged the system to keep them down. Much the same wrongs hurt Hispanics, Native Americans, (East) Indians and just about everybody else who doesn’t look, sound or act white.

But don’t kid yourself. There are a lot of white people, just like me, who think all this sucks. We might not have been out there marching in the streets, but we hate to see what our country has become. When the knee came down on George Floyd’s neck, a lot of us did take to the streets. Yet the ones marching were only a fraction of the ones who were there in spirit.

Trust me on this. The vast majority of old white geezers are not the kind of people who object to pulling down the Stars and Bars and statues of racist traitors. We were raised on songs protesting racism at home and military imperialism in South America and Asia. You will see just how many like me there are when the votes come in.

To add to all their greed-based policy, the Republicans have given us the worst president in our history. He’s crude, insulting, erratic, arrogant, and bullheaded. He doesn’t read his briefing papers, and he listens to no one. He’s a racist, misogynist and homophobe. He coddles white supremacists and says they’re “good people.”

After failing to handle the pandemic, this sad excuse for a leader went on to catch Covid-19 because he was too stupid to see the cost-benefit of masks and social distancing. His own hand-picked Secretary of State, whom he later fired, reportedly called him a “fucking moron.”

In foisting this walking disaster on the rest of us for four years, and in failing to remove him when they had the chance and good reason, you might say the Republicans “overreached.” Even many lifelong Republicans are now fed up. Therefore now is the best time in two generations for a new broom to sweep clean.

So you don’t have to fight or die for your country. You don’t have to bleed for it. You don’t even have to sweat for it. And you certainly don’t have to cry for it.

All you have to do is vote—and register to vote if you haven’t already. All together, registering and voting might take you a full day. And that’s in the worst case.

I know, I know. You might not think Joe Biden is progressive enough. You might see him as too moderate. But compared to Nixon, Reagan, Trump and every Republican in between, Joe Biden is progressive, selfless and empathetic enough to be canonized.

For two generations, the Democrats have wanted to “invest in people.” The Republicans have wanted to cut taxes and privatize everything to invest in the rich and the corporations they run. Joe Biden may not be the most forceful or progressive Democrat, but he’s worlds away from any Republican, let alone Trump.

Under his leadership, we can all awaken from this two-generation nightmare of greed, oligarchy and middle-class squeeze. If we all work together, we can begin to see the changes we all want by early next year.

At the end of the day, the choice is pretty simple. Vote for the guy who wants to raise taxes and spend the money on our people, including young people like you just struggling to afford a higher education and to get started in life. Vote against the guy who wants to cut taxes so that the 1% can get even richer by privatizing our health insurance, our safety net, our retirement, our Post Office and everything else.

Vote early or vote by mail, if you can, so you don’t have to stand in line and risk the pandemic.

All this goes double if you live in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Maine, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Vermont or Wisconsin. These states are up for grabs and near evenly split. If you vote in any of them, your vote will have extra weight. It will help determine the outcome. And if you live in Texas, you can help deliver a real prize: a final decision on election night.

So do your part, spend the single day (or less) to take your country back. Take voting seriously. The life you spare from hardship and suffering may be your own. Our country will be a much nicer place for you to live in and raise a family after you help take it back.

Whatever your racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual background, this country is yours, too. All you have to do is vote for candidates for president and members of Congress who think that you and yours belong.

There are lots of pols who think that way, just as there are tens of millions of white men and women who are on your side. Together, we can turn this disaster around and rebuild a nation that all of us can be happy to live in. But to do so, we’ve all got to vote.

Yours in the hope of victory,

Jay

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