Sound like a lot? It’s one small part of Sweden’s extensive “Vision Zero” project, an initiative begun in the late 1990s to eliminate all deaths and serious injuries from traffic accidents. Coordinated across multiple government agencies, Vision Zero ambitiously prioritizes the safety of residents from preventable tragedies. And while it’s paying off—the clear trend is decreasing deaths and injuries—we’re not at zero yet. In 2009, 358 people died in traffic accidents in Sweden; in 2019, that number was 221. (By comparison, the U.S. states Georgia and North Carolina, which—like Sweden—have a population of approximately 10 million, had more than 1,500 and 1,400 traffic deaths, respectively, in 2018.)

As an American immigrant in Sweden, I find this focus on safety admirable, even utopic. Similar examples of Swedish regulatory cultures around safety abound. Every new private home is required to have a locked medicine cabinet. Employers pay for protective glasses for workers suffering from too much screentime. Alcohol is highly taxed and only available at the federal store known in Swedish as “the System.” And hitting closer to my own crunchy, homesick-for-Whole-Foods-Market tastes: Only whole flax seeds are sold in Sweden (even though our bodies can’t take in their beneficial nutrients that way). Alas! The crushed ones carry a tiny risk of cyanide poisoning.

In Swedish society, the precautionary principle reigns: When we lack evidence for the safety of a given issue, we proceed with caution to protect the public from harm. This bedrock principle informs all of the safety regulations above, and more—especially when it comes to health care. Sometimes infuriatingly so, doctors here are cautious in prescribing everything from hydrocortisone to antibiotics, and unless there is clear evidence a treatment will not cause you harm, you will have a hard time finding a Swedish doctor who will prescribe it.

Soon after our family moved here for work in 2015, I fell in love with the sensible, progressive attitude of most Swedish governmental policies, gladly shedding my distrust of institutions. A chronic worrier about immigration matters (among other paperwork stressors), I adopted the comforting, if naïve, mantra: “If it’s wrong, Sweden will find a way to make it right.”

All of which is why, when the novel coronavirus began to break into the news cycle early in 2020, I watched the Swedish response with curiosity. Sitting in a doctor’s waiting room on February 28, a small, professionally printed (and impeccably designed) cardboard table tent informed me that the overall risk level for an outbreak in Sweden was “relatively low.” I felt soothed by this news. Sweden was taking care of it. The authorities had said so. And they had time to make table tents!

Just 12 days later, the first person died of COVID-19 in Sweden. The infection rate, here as elsewhere, climbed steeply. At the end of March, one month after the table tent, Sweden reported 4,834 people had documented cases of COVID-19; by the close of April, that number had jumped to 21,602 cases. (It’s worth noting that Sweden did not offer widespread testing until late June; in the spring, only those admitted to the hospital were offered COVID-19 tests, so these numbers are likely an undercount.) In the fall, following six weeks of population dispersal into the Swedish countryside, case numbers dropped significantly. Starting in September, about two weeks after school resumed, cases appear to be climbing again—albeit slowly, while intensive care beds occupancy and deaths are way down compared with the spring.

Sweden’s pandemic approach has garnered outsized attention in the English-speaking press considering its relatively small population of 10 million. I watched with incredulity as tiny Social Democrat-ruled Sweden was celebrated at home by Trump supporters who urged, “Be like Sweden!” Meanwhile, on the left, our high death rate became a cautionary tale for the dangers of “herd immunity.” When a community achieves herd immunity through prior infection or vaccination, vulnerable individuals (even the unvaccinated) gain protection because the disease can’t find new hosts and thus can’t spread as easily. Explained in this way, herd immunity sounds quite Swedish: Collectively, we can protect the members of our “herd” unable to protect themselves. (Yet interestingly, Sweden does not mandate vaccinations for newborns, relying on parents to make that decision for their children. Compliance is reliably around 97 percent.)

Officially, Sweden never adopted a herd immunity strategy, although several of its policies seem to have it in mind, at least as a side effect. Sweden in fact chose a mitigation strategy: The Public Health Agency (FHM) aimed not to stop the virus but to control its spread so that the health care system, especially intensive care beds, would not be overwhelmed. In the beginning, this mitigation strategy—aka “flatten the curve”—was the goal of many nations, but as we learned more about the dangers of surviving COVID-19 (including sustained damage to the heart, lungs, and kidneys), and more about its transmission, many nations similar to Sweden (such as its neighbors, Denmark, Norway, and Finland) shifted course to a “crush the curve” strategy of “test, trace, and isolate.” FHM, however, persisted in emphasizing mitigation measures (wash your hands, keep your distance, stay home if you’re sick), avoiding panic, and protecting our most vulnerable, those who are over 70 years old and/or those with risk factors that exacerbate COVID-19.

But at the time I write this, Sweden has one of the highest death tolls per capita in the world: 57.3 deaths per 100,000 residents, just under the United States’ 57.39. By comparison, in Italy, ground zero for the European pandemic, that number is 58.77; in Norway, a more comparable nation to Sweden in terms of demography, that number is 4.97. Perhaps more alarming is Sweden’s high case fatality rate (6.9 percent), more than double that of the United States. Some of the most vulnerable in Sweden—those in nursing homes—were not protected under the mitigation strategy. In fact, of the 5,731 people killed by COVID-19 in Sweden, 5,137 were older than 70, and 2,855 of those deaths were people over age 85.

Reports have emerged in Swedish media of family members being informed their loved ones were being placed in palliative end-of-life care instead of being treated for COVID-19 in the hospital. According to the National Board of Health and Welfare, a mere 17 percent of Swedish elders in care homes were provided hospitalization, and public documents show that instead of attempting to fight the virus, the National Board of Health and Welfare advised health care workers to treat these patients with anti-anxiety medications as well as morphine and other opioids. As I watched this failure of compassion and infection containment in real time, I became saddened. Then enraged, then disillusioned by my adopted country, or my idea of it. I asked Swedish friends, “Would your reaction to these deaths be different if it were children who suffered disproportionately instead of elders?”

Their silence was informative. And the policies around education followed suit: Schools remained open for the under-16s throughout the pandemic. FHM has also advised parents to send children to school even if someone in the household has a confirmed case of COVID-19, so long as they are symptom-free. At first, FHM reasoned, and most Swedish media agreed, that if the children stayed home, we’d suffer from lack of personnel in essential services, particularly in health care. (Never mind the extensive child-care system in place for school breaks designed just to meet this purpose). But recently, leaked emails between state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell and other high-level public health advisors belie this public position. On March 14, Tegnell wrote, “One point in favor of keeping the schools open is to reach herd immunity faster.”

Yet these leaked emails, and the assumptions they make about the more vulnerable relatives and school staff to whom children could transmit the virus, barely made a splash with the stoic Swedish public.

It may be that elementary school-aged children face a relatively low risk of serious health consequences from COVID-19. But since we don’t know the long-term effects the virus has on young people, and we also don’t know their role in spreading the disease to the adults in their lives, shouldn’t the precautionary principle apply?

Apparently not: Parents who in good conscience wished to protect their children or themselves by educating them at home were not only denied that opportunity, but they were also in some cases threatened with reports to social services for neglect for violating the skolplikt requirement. Literally the “duty to school,” skolplikt prohibits homeschooling and mandates education of all school-aged children. Like much Swedish public policy, it’s meant to provide a common standard for education and health, regardless of socioeconomic status. Skolplikt is there for the greater good of children, and thus, for the whole of Swedish society.

But during the pandemic, exactly whose greater good is Sweden considering?

COVID-19 is serving as a magnifying glass of our societies’ vulnerabilities. And what is magnified in Sweden is that this question of the greater good requires constant focus, revision, and holistic framing in the face of new challenges.

In the face of a deadly virus with unknown long-term consequences, why didn’t caution reign here? Where was and is the Swedish regulatory state in this question of safety? (For this virus is surely more deadly than crushed flaxseeds, and even more deadly than traffic accidents.) In a country where the good of the many often supersedes the rights of the few, why are Swedes content with a policy that instead puts so many burdens on individuals, particularly the most vulnerable? And, most disturbingly, why do so many accept, without question, the government’s policy to allow an unknown virus to spread freely through our shared society?

Even after five years in Sweden, I can only begin to speculate on answers to these questions. I know I’m not alone: Thousands of Swedes are members of secret Facebook groups advocating for changes to the Swedish strategy, and more than 7,000 have signed a Change.org petition asking the World Health Organization to intervene in Sweden’s relaxed policies.

My own love affair with this nation has finally encountered its first real conflict. As Sweden’s National Day approached in June, I looked for speeches acknowledging the thousands of lives lost or for Swedish flags at half-mast. Finding none of these, I grieved privately for the souls lost. I grieved for the soul of a nation lost. I grieved for the Sweden, or the idea of Sweden, that I had proudly embraced: of a nation that cares, equally, for all.

The post A Letter From Sweden, Which Deems Flax Seeds More Dangerous Than the Pandemic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But my teenage dreams have now come true in a time when I cannot enjoy them without guilt. It started in the last days of February, just after Carnival—our most famous festivity—when the National Department of Health confirmed the first case of coronavirus infection in the country. Twenty days later, all schools and stores were closed to prevent the spread of the disease. TV drama production and all cultural events were suspended because of this disease that spreads fast and could kill up to 200 thousand people by August here in Brazil.

Since then, I’ve been teaching my college classes online. I’ve managed to keep my job, which I find surprising, because the other industries I’ve worked in have all suffered recent disasters, leaving my friends out of work. For many years I had worked as a screenwriter, but I gave it up for an old dream of dedicating myself to the low-paid profession of novel writing. So I started to work part time as a college instructor, saving some free hours in the afternoon to write. Teaching proved to be a wise choice last year, when a far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, assumed office and suspended federal funding for films. Film festivals, new productions and even films in post-production were paralyzed in the president’s “culture war.”

Things were no better for the book industry. Publishers and bookstores were in deep financial crisis due to five years of poor national economic conditions. Even children’s books became targets in the trophy hunting of a president who declared school textbooks have “too much writing on them.” He chose an education minister“ready for battle” to “clean up” textbooks of the “filth” they see, for example, in the picture of a healthy and happy kid with LGBT parents. We were sure these problems were unbearable enough.

No one expected things to get even worse.

Just a week into quarantine it was clearer than ever that my steady job was a privilege. Newspapers reported that 13 million people lost their income overnight and didn’t have savings that would cover more than a week of food. In Brazil 40 million people work in the gray economy. I used to see some of them selling corn, pizza, beer, and brigadeiros (local chocolate sweets) on the sidewalk right in front of my college, at the end of the day. With the students at home and no one on the sidewalks, all these people lost their already meager earnings.

I also know my assured monthly salary won’t last long. College tuition is already too expensive for many families and students. With unemployment rising, many of them will quit studying. Almost every day, my department head sends emails asking teachers to be extra dedicated, sympathetic, and charming to avoid student dropout. We had to come up with homework they could do at home with their cellphone cameras. Acting teachers perform alone in front of the computer to show how well or badly a scene can be done. We cannot ask for too much work from students, otherwise they will get stressed. We cannot take attendance, because it would be unfair to students with internet connection problems. But as hard as we tried, two or three students dropped out every week—in a department with only 150 of them to begin with.

Worrying too much about tomorrow is of no help. For today I have a job, so the best I can do is to sit down and work. In the first week of the quarantine I was a bit nervous about handling a whole class of 30 students in an online platform. It turned out to be much easier than I expected. Screenwriting programs are about exchanging ideas, and that works online. I talk for 60 minutes, show my notes on slides, and ask them to watch short films and selected episodes of national web series. That’s how I try to prepare them to work in the entertainment industry that I quit.

My desk is in the TV room, the same room where my partner and I read, write and watch our favorite films and series. We both have indoor personalities. We both love to stay home and do exactly what I am doing in this quarantine. But I keep this contentment to myself, because I don’t want to sound like the fitness influencer who posted a video of her party, shouting “Screw life!” My comfort now comes with guilt.

Meanwhile, I am moved by the stories about poor neighborhoods that I read in online newspapers. A father buys hand sanitizer for his kids and is left with no money to eat. A mother works as a cleaner for a doctor and keeps going to work on a bus full of people; her employer won’t pay her if she doesn’t work.

Unemployment is a sensitive matter for me. The shadows of poverty still hover over my family, which reached the middle class not that long ago. My mother and father were the first generation in their families to finish high school. When I was a teenager, my mother made bread at home and sewed our sweaters herself to save money to pay for our English classes. The year I graduated from university, my father lost his job and could never find proper work again.

If not for my partner, Dani, maybe I wouldn’t even think about why all of this is happening. While the quarantine has secluded me, she works for a large university hospital that offers free, high-quality healthcare for everyone who needs it.

As a psychiatrist in the mental health institute, Dani is not on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis. Appointments with regular patients have been suspended, but emergency cases still show up. In the first weeks, psychiatry patients suspected of COVID-19 infection were transferred to the “covidario,” a unit prepared for the illness. Now this unit has reached full capacity, so the mental health institute have to admit its own suspected cases. But short supplies and bureaucracy make it hard for psychiatrists to get protective wear—even though we live in the most prepared state to handle the outbreak. Some of Dani’s colleagues have become infected. “Doctors feel the anguish of knowing the danger, even when they can do nothing to prevent it,” she told me.

Dani comes home every evening with news from the hospital. I feel myself changing, as the world changes dramatically outside my apartment. I read with great sadness that many artists I admire are dead now from COVID-19: Naomi Munakata (64), Daniel Azulay (72), Rico Medeiros, Aldir Blanc (73), Abraham Palatnik (92), Sérgio Sant’Anna (78). Journalists warn us that young people can also have severe symptoms, but the unexpected death of old people strikes me more. It is terrifying to realize that our elected president is insensitive to all this danger and pain. He makes things worse by inciting people to “go back to normal” and forcing doctors to use some medicine that does not help and could even be harmful. He stated before the election that he had no sympathy for gays, women, black, and poor people. Now it is clear that he does not even care for old and sick people. Arnaldo Lichtenstein, technical director of the hospital where Dani works, declared in a live news broadcast that this cruel reasoning has a name: eugenics.

For Bolsonaro, “the rain is there” and “some people will drown.” He says families should put their “grandpas and grandmas in a corner of the house.” How do we react to that?

My mother is 72 now. My father is 76. My stepfather is 81. They all live in the city of Curitiba, where I was born, 250 miles south of where I live now. They are all healthy, smart, and funny as always. We talk on the phone every week, and from their voices I hardly notice they are getting older. In my mind they are still 50, and I easily forget that I am nearly 50 now myself.

When the quarantine began, in the third week of March, my mother was part of a group touring Brazil’s southern wine routes. She sent a photograph of herself and my stepfather smiling behind a fountain of red wine in Bento Gonçalves, Brazil’s “wine capital.” They were having dinners in large hotel restaurants with 200 or so other retired travelers.

I was suddenly worried. She had to come back and protect herself.

Dani’s parents live nearby, so she meets them every Saturday, at safe distance, when she brings them groceries. She is attentive to any sign of bad health: a hoarse voice, a complaint of fatigue. Since we’ve been together, I have become aware that parents may hide minor symptoms of weakness because they don’t want their children to worry. They don’t want to waste our time together talking about suspicions of diseases. It is we, the adult children, who must stay aware and offer help before being asked.

In my late 20s, I watched the serious illnesses of my grandparents in their last years. I saw how my mother and father were worried and stressed. Still absorbed by my youthful fantasies, I thought my parents were overreacting. Losing health and lucidity in your 80s is nothing but normal, I told myself. We should just accept that life will end someday.

Today I’m old enough to know how wrong I was then. I want my mom and dad alive and happy for our weekly phone calls and our holiday reunions, for as long as possible. I don’t even want to think that it could end someday, and the possibility that a sudden disease could take them away terrifies me.

The fear invades my silent and peaceful landscape. Inside the apartment, one day after another, I see the quiet city from my window. The air is cleaner and the sunsets are beautiful. The irony is that I was just beginning to write a fantasy novel about a future when the human population was drastically reduced. I have spent most of my adult life creating strategies to stay at home alone, with my books and my ideas—ideas such as a wish-fulfillment story of a more empty world.

Now there’s no need to fantasize. I gave up the fantasy novel and started a short story about a woman during the quarantine. She finds the courage to confess an old secret love for her closest friend. Declaring our deepest feelings is what matters for me now.

In a good story, the hero often goes after his goal only to find out he was wrong from the very beginning. That’s how I feel. I hope for my partner to come home by the end of the day. I call my parents to hear their voices. And I wonder what Patricia Highsmith would say about these days, if she were still there, in her stone house in Switzerland.

The post A Letter From São Paulo, Where the Definition of ‘Unbearable’ Has Shifted appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Courtesy of Ching-Ching Ni

The post A Letter From Beijing, Where There Is No Normal to Go Back to appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

These questions are just as timely today. Not only is the country dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, it is also facing a political crisis. And on top of these global and national issues, there are often painful personal matters, such as the sort of health crisis that my own family recently experienced. In each instance, neighborhoods have a critical role to play in easing adversity and averting disaster.

The inspiration to write my book came from the murder-suicide of a couple—both physicians—who lived on my suburban street in Rochester, New York. One evening the husband came home and shot and killed his wife, and then himself; their children, a boy, 11, and a girl, 12, ran screaming into the night.

What struck me—besides the tragedy—was how little it seemed to affect the neighbors. A family who had lived on our street for seven years had vanished, and yet the impact on the neighborhood seemed slight. No one, I learned, had known the family well. Few of my neighbors, I later learned, knew each other more than casually; many didn’t know even the names of those a door or two away.

Do I live in a neighborhood, I asked myself, or just in a house on a street surrounded by people whose lives are entirely separate? Why, I wondered, in this age of instant and universal communication—when we can create community anywhere—do we often not know the people who live next door?

To see if I could connect with my neighbors beyond a superficial level, I asked them if I could sleep over at their houses and write about their lives on our street from inside their own homes. Somewhat to my surprise, about half the neighbors I approached said yes.

Getting to know my neighbors in this way enlivened the experience of living there. It helped me forge connections that enriched my life, and made it easier for the people on my street to look out for each other.

After I told my story in the book, I heard from people all over the world about how much they missed close neighborhood ties. They also told of more recent times when they’d managed to connect with their neighbors, and how gratifying those experiences had been.

Interestingly, many of those happy connections between neighbors occurred in response to natural disasters. On the West Coast, readers recounted earthquakes and fires; in the South, hurricanes and floods; in the North, massive snowstorms. “When the power went out,” a Florida man wrote me of his neighborhood during Hurricane Andrew, “we began to cook our meals in the street. We enjoyed getting to know each other and learning each other’s stories. After a few days the power came back and we all went back inside. It’s funny, but I find myself looking forward to the next hurricane so we can catch up.”

Today, we’re all living through an unfamiliar kind of natural disaster—the coronavirus pandemic—and I see that neighbors are connecting, once again. We’ve read and heard a lot of these stories, so I’ll share just one from my own family.

Just after New Year’s 2020, my 4-year-old granddaughter, my daughter’s child, was diagnosed with a rare form of childhood cancer. Suddenly, her life and the lives of her parents and 2-year-old sister were upended. What had been the happy, busy life of a growing family was now beset by fear, anger, uncertainty, trips at all hours to the hospital, increased medical bills and two parents trying to work remotely from home.

My daughter’s family lives in a suburb of Washington, D.C., where the response to their 4-year-old’s health crisis was… nothing. This was not because the neighbors were unkind; it was mostly because my daughter and her husband, after living in their home for nearly four years, knew few, if any, of their neighbors well.

But the COVID-19 pandemic came just three months after my granddaughter’s diagnosis. Suddenly everyone in the neighborhood was living with fear and uncertainty, working remotely from home, and struggling with unknowns including reduced income. On a neighborhood listserv, someone offered to buy groceries and other supplies for anyone especially vulnerable to the virus.

My daughter responded:

Hi neighbors-
Some of you have offered so generously to pick up groceries for those of us who are immunosuppressed. I’m pregnant and one of my children has cancer. If anyone happens to be at a store this week selling toilet paper, tissues, or paper towels, please pick up some extra for us! Happy to pay, of course.
Thank you!
Valerie

The response was swift and strong:

My daughter will deliver items shortly (I’ll wear gloves when I put the items in the bag, so nothing will have been touched by anyone in the house).
Amy

We dropped off some tissue boxes a few mins ago. 
Allison & Michael

I have a couple smaller boxes of tissues I’d be happy to drop off to you. Oh and I can give you a container of Clorox wipes too.
Betsy

I just dropped off paper towels and tissues at your front door.
Fran

And that was only the beginning. For weeks, my daughter has been finding bags of groceries and paper goods on her doorstep; in most cases, the neighbors decline payment. “Don’t be silly,” one wrote. “There will surely come a time when I need a favor from a neighbor.”

Today, my granddaughter’s treatments continue and her prognosis is good. Her family’s life is still upended, but now at least they are aided and comforted to know they live among people who know and care about them. Once again, it took a terrible event to bring neighbors together.

Can we find ways to connect with each other without a disaster?

As Americans we have an independent streak; our impulse for freedom and self-reliance often comes more naturally than the desire for community. Social trends also work against connections. Two-career couples mean fewer people are at home or have the leisure time to interact with neighbors. Larger suburban homes—and the lots they sit on—increase physical distance. Ever-increasing hours of screen time leave us less time to socialize. And the persistent fear we call “stranger danger” steers us away from meeting others—even those who live nearby.

I’m afraid it would be naïve to think that—in the absence of a new disaster—we will all just reach out to our neighbors because it’s a nice thing to do.

So, let me offer a different incentive.

Pandemic aside, this country is experiencing a crisis: Politically, we have torn ourselves in half. Whichever side you’re on, half the country thinks you’re not only wrong, but insane.

It’s a crisis that poses a threat greater than any hurricane, fire, earthquake, or pandemic. Left unchecked, I fear it can rip us in two and in the process—regardless of which side prevails—destroy the very protections we rely on for our freedom.

What is the answer? History suggests if we want to begin to repair the social fabric, a good place to start is our own neighborhoods.

Like the meetinghouses and common greens of earlier times, neighborhoods long have been the building blocks of a healthy civil society. Today, they are a place that allows us to get to know, regularly and intimately, people who may think differently than we do. With effort, we can come to know our neighbors beyond a superficial level, to know their challenges and the fullness of their lives. Once we do that, it becomes hard to mark them only with political labels.

For example, there’s a couple that lives near me. Over the years, I’ve seen them work long hours to build their own businesses—he in sales and she in consulting. I’ve come to know the two children they adopted, and for whom they’ve made a loving home. I watched as they remodeled a spare room for her mom to live in when she could no longer live alone. So, I’m not inclined to dismiss my neighbors—and certainly not to think them evil or insane—merely because they’ve posted a lawn sign supporting a national candidate with whom I disagree.

“In this age of bitter partisanship and social division,” writes Ryan Streeter, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, “unity and social healing are not only possible but happening every day when we work with and rely on those who are closest to us.”

In the 2019 Survey on Community and Society, Streeter and colleagues found that most Americans get a stronger sense of community from those they’re close to, including neighbors, than from “their ethnicity or political ideology.” Moreover, they found we’re 11 times more likely to report high levels of confidence in our neighbors than in the federal government, and five times more than in our city councils. Seventy-three percent of us say our neighbors can be counted on to do the right thing.

So let’s not wait for the next natural or even man-made disaster to get to reach out to our neighbors. We have a strong enough motive: healing the bitter partisanship that infects our country.

How to get started? I think it’s just one neighbor at a time. You don’t even have to sleep over. All it takes is making a phone call, sending an e-mail, or ringing a bell.

The post Your Neighbors Can Help You Battle Adversity and Disaster appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Last night, United States Poet Laureate emeritus Juan Felipe Herrera, poet and author Inez Tan, and Arizona Poet Laureate Alberto Ríos visited Zócalo to speak about reading and writing poetry. The conversation, which asked “What can poetry offer us in distressing times?,” was moderated by Carla Hall, Los Angeles Times editorial board member, and aired on Zócalo’s YouTube channel.

The event sparked a lively conversation between the panelists and audience members, who wrote in via a live chat. Just like a poem, a conversation like this one has no real ending, and this morning Inez Tan wrote to share the two poems that she read during the evening to further the dialogue.

To share your favorite poems, please write us a “Letter to Zócalo,” or let us know on social media at @ThePublicSquare. You can also read more from Juan Felipe Herrera, Inez Tan, and Alberto Ríos, and moderator Carla Hall in our virtual Green Room.

Sitting in the Rubble
by Inez Tan

Still, outwardly,
I go to work, I cook my meals,
I do my laundry, as though
my life consisted of acts like these.
Six of my friends lose a child,
three get into car accidents,
two survive shootings,
and only one says,
“It’s not a competition,” meaning
we shouldn’t believe we have to win
as if only the winner gets to grieve
while the rest of us bleed empathy.
Through it all, I think of you.
Every day, I miss you.
Happy are the brokenhearted,
for they do not condemn
what they have come to understand.

A Quiet Night Alone
by Inez Tan

Tonight, let others consume themselves
in a panic of meteor dust. This evening
the owls have no quarrel with the stars.
A quiet night alone is like a secret mission
to restore a hidden weft of heirloom threads.
Endless summer, lights at sea, a cream quilt
when the wind sifts the soft offerings
of the unhurried earth. Linger over
second supper, butter the bread, pour another
glass of wine or cup of wild chamomile.
Forget everything as you read but the pleasure
of reading itself. In the gentle glow of such solitude,
shadows are only shadows, thoughts are only thoughts.
How strong you are to sustain this stillness,
the hours slow, the phones dead and the wolves
a quiet curve on the threshold.

Want more poetry? Also check out Inez Tan’s own “Letter to Zócalo,” which lists 10 of her favorite poems for being present and 10 of her favorite poems for dwelling “elsewhere.”

The post Poetry’s Unique Power to Change Its Readers and Sustain Them Too appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We’re now more than six weeks into the “enhanced community quarantine” for Luzon. Just as the Milky Way is an archipelago of stars, the Philippines is a nation of islands, with Luzon being its largest. I live in Quezon City, on the northeast side of greater metropolitan Manila.

As I’ve learned to live the life of a recluse, my vision has improved—I see more clearly my own neighbors. I can see more of those Milky Way stars in the newly clear sky. And I more clearly see myself.

For weeks, I have kept to a simple routine. Wake up at five a.m. Attend to personal needs and do some exercises. Have coffee while surfing the internet, then eat my breakfast and have some social-distanced conversations with family, before heading back to the laptop and modern multi-tasking. I work with an NGO called Institute for Political and Electoral Reform, which is collaborating with Congress and the executive on constitutional reforms. And so I write papers and articles; attend to my emails, Facebook posts, and Viber messages; and sometimes join a Zoom conference with colleagues or have a phone patch interview if the media calls. In between such work, I have fun with video games or watch a Netflix movie or a YouTube video.

After lunch, I try to get in a nap. Then at four in the afternoon, as temperatures drop into the 80s, it’s time to monitor the update from the government on the COVID-19 situation. These updates are fascinating, covering the march of the pandemic across our country and changes in government policy, with an emphasis on the enhanced community quarantine here on Luzon. Afterwards, I have an early supper, then head back to my refuge of reading books and watching TV, before heading to bed for at least six hours.

This routine at first was voluntary and precautionary. I chose to seclude myself because I’m 64 and have some health issues. But recently it became stricter, as the unseen virus insinuated itself into our subdivision. A confirmed COVID-19 case was found right next door.

She is a doctor and she was infected in the hospital, right along with the head of the health unit, who died. She underwent hospital treatment and survived; she was able to come home just the other day.

In the meantime, her family members were considered Persons Under Investigation (PUIs), a euphemism for people who had a history of travel to virus hotspots or were in contact with confirmed cases. Protocols kicked in—the whole household was put in quarantine, and barangay (village) health workers started monitoring the occupants and bringing them food.

The authorities also stationed a 24-hour watch on our street to prevent people from roaming around outside. Authorities issued one quarantine pass per household to permit departures. And only one person per household was allowed to go out to purchase food, go to the bank, or to buy other necessities.

Suddenly, sticking to my indoor routine became a requirement, and a deadly serious one at that. According to the protocol, my age meant that I should not leave the house at all. There went my outdoor exercise, which consisted of walks and jogs within the subdivision. Now I’m limited to walking up and down the stairs and doing calisthenics on the third-floor balcony.

One luxury does allow me to get around: I have a service car from the office. With it, my driver and I are able to go out and see for ourselves what life is like in the region, as long as we stay in the car. This has allowed me to see the nearby neighborhoods with new eyes.

The village outside my subdivision is a relatively poor community with a lot of informal settlers eking out a hand-to-mouth existence as vendors, tricycle drivers, small shopkeepers, or itinerant workers. In normal times, such people may be easily ignored and dismissed. But now that they must stay inside, I see a void where a wealth of human interactions and enterprises once filled the street.

Today, the village still teems—but with barricades and checkpoints, standby ambulances, and police and barangay tanod (village watchers) who implement an Extreme Community Quarantine (ECQ). It’s extreme because the village has the unenviable status of having the highest number of confirmed cases in the whole city. It has become a COVID-19 hot spot.

This depressing reality is not just local; it’s our new normal. Authorities have just announced the extension of the month-long quarantine of the whole island of Luzon until May 15. Even if the quarantine is lifted by then, authorities are speaking of a gradual return to normal economic activity, with lots of precautionary measures until the pandemic is over and we have a vaccine. President Duterte himself predicts a two-year process.

Adjusting to this reality, I’ve turned inwards. I’ve taken stock of my priorities; I’ve found that I could do without unnecessary things in life, like electronic gadgets, and have seen how much I need human relationships. I already feel like I have new priorities—family affairs and legacy work that will survive me.

Many experts here in the Philippines—economists, political analysts, social scientists—are forecasting direr things to come in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Among these are slower economic growth, even a recession, far from the Philippines’ consistently six-percent annual growth in gross domestic product (GDP) for the past 10 years. In my middle-class subdivision, my neighbors whose businesses are tied to the globalized economy could feel the strongest impacts; in the villages outside the subdivision, those with poverty-level jobs in the formal economy, which also has global ties, are most likely to suffer.

Some are saying a political crisis is in the offing, particularly if the nation’s leadership is perceived to have bungled the pandemic response and if the people find the new hardships unacceptable. We have crucial presidential elections in 2022, an active rebellion, and a restless poor.

It is too early, I think, to dwell on those things until we have “flattened the coronavirus curve” and decisively defeated it. The time to take stock of the damage to the country and assess the probably profound impact on our lives is still in the future.

In the meantime, I live for each day. In this time of the coronavirus, one has to see and appreciate the silver linings. I suddenly have the time on my hand to write all the things I always wanted to write, to read all the things I’ve always wanted to read, and watch all the things I’ve always wanted to watch.

But my favorite pleasure is that of the sky above. Manila is one of the most polluted cities in the world. In normal times, one can barely discern the Sierra Madre mountain ranges to the east of the region, or the Bataan Death March cross that sits atop Mount Samat in the west. But thanks to the coronavirus and the quarantine, the skies have cleared up, and air has freshened up. And I can see these landmarks, sharply and clearly, from the subdivision.

I find myself thinking back to my boyhood days in the provinces, when communing with nature was the norm. Could the future be more like that? I savor the pleasurable leisure of looking at the night sky in the evening. Now, despite the glaring city lights, I can see the planets and even the faint smudge that is the Milky Way. And it is full of stars!

The post A Letter From Quezon City, Where the Stars Have Come Back appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This was hardly welcome news a scant five miles to the northeast, where experts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were warning that such a move would be extremely risky until “the incidence of infection is genuinely low.” Although these same Atlanta-based experts had cautioned in mid-February that people who contracted the virus but remained asymptomatic could still infect others, Kemp claimed to have heard that early warning for the first time only on the eve of his grudging and long-overdue April 2 announcement that he was imposing restrictions in the first place.

The CDC has been in Atlanta since its beginnings in 1946. Its rise to prominence as one of the world’s most respected public health protection agencies has long been a point of pride for the city’s perennially image-polishing, growth-obsessed leaders. By the 1970s their ardent courtship of the approval and capital investments of Fortune 500 executives had led disgusted rural Georgians to complain that Atlanta had been surrendered to the Yankees yet again, and this time without a single shot being fired. 

But rural antagonism toward Atlanta is hardly of recent vintage. It has been a defining element in Georgia politics for almost 150 years. And therein lies much of the story behind the story of the Georgia governor’s apparent aloofness to the health jewel in his own capital’s crown, and to all the CDC expertise that could have helped avoid the healthcare disaster that may soon envelop his entire state.

The physical and financial devastation of the Civil War left Georgia’s farmers, white and black alike, trapped in an accelerating down swirl of dependency and debt. But by 1900, Atlanta, which had been a modest railroad hub of some 9,500 in 1860, had blossomed into a flourishing state capital and commercial and transportation center of 90,000. Atlanta was not only Georgia’s largest city. It had risen from the ashes, and proudly so. Its biggest booster, editor and orator Henry W. Grady, declared it a gleaming embodiment of a “New South.” With Atlanta as its guiding light, Grady predicted, the rest of Georgia would quickly shed its dependence on agriculture to embrace industrialization, urbanization, and commerce and soon be savoring the fruits of an unparalleled prosperity.

This divergence of urban and rural economic fortunes and momentum did not go unnoticed in the countryside. As the largest state by land area east of the Mississippi, Georgia already had 123 counties by 1870. Growing unease over the growth of Atlanta’s population and potential political clout helped to explain why the rural majority in the legislature took the lead in adding of another 29 counties over the next half century. But the sense that even this further dilution of Atlanta’s potential clout might be insufficient to safeguard rural prerogatives gave rise to one of the most blatant and brutally effective anti-urban political artifices ever devised.

Used informally for over a decade before it gained legal sanction in 1917, the “county-unit system” supplanted the popular vote as the means of determining the outcome of statewide elections in Georgia. This arrangement was basically a downsized and even more egregiously anti-democratic version of the national Electoral College. Under the system, each county, no matter how tiny its population, was assigned at least two unit votes, while no county, no matter how populous, was granted more than six.

The effectiveness of this device in neutering Atlanta politically was proven in countless elections, including the 1946 Georgia gubernatorial primary, when fewer than 1,100 votes cast for one candidate across three of the state’s most sparsely populated counties effectively countered more than 58,000 votes cast for his opponent in Atlanta’s home county of Fulton. The beneficiary of this particular thwarting of democracy was Eugene Talmadge, who was elected governor four times between 1932 and 1946 by appealing to rural voters with such proven stratagems as inviting them to join him on the front porch of the governor’s mansion in Atlanta so they could “piss over the rail on those city bastards.”

It was a point of pride for “ol’ Gene” that he had never campaigned in a county where there were streetcars. And he relished his studied role as nemesis to all things cosmopolitan and erudite, intimating more than once that he felt that any home boasting a Bible and a Sears, Roebuck catalog had as much of a library as it needed.

Understandably enough, as a historian of that era reported, upper-class Atlantans embarrassed and repelled by the buffoonish mockery of their refinement and expertise that emanated from the countryside were “quite evidently not proud of [the rest of] Georgia.” Such feelings were hardly a secret, and, if anything, served only to stoke the Atlanta-bashing that remained a fixture of Georgia gubernatorial politics between 1920 and 1962, when not a single urbanite managed to claim the state’s highest office.

Carl E. Sanders, who hailed from Augusta rather than Atlanta, managed to break that protracted dry spell in 1962, after the courts had finally forced Georgia to scuttle the county unit system for good. Finally free of its anti-progressive clutches, Georgia saw a rapid and vitally important expansion of Atlanta’s generally moderating political influences within the state—which, despite the ranting of rural politicians determined to preserve segregation at all costs, may ultimately have kept Georgia from joining the full retreat that wrought such havoc and horror in Alabama and Mississippi.

The demise of the county unit system seemed to point to a more sophisticated approach to statewide campaigning, but old habits die hard. Even more progressive candidates were still not above pandering to enduring anti-Atlanta, or at least anti-urban, sentiments. These included Jimmy Carter, who portrayed himself in the 1970 gubernatorial primary as just a simple, hardworking country peanut farmer, while referring to his principal opponent, former governor Sanders, as “Cufflinks Carl,” an elitist, country club liberal wholly out of touch with the common folk of rural Georgia.

Although Carter proved the exception, gubernatorial candidates who used Atlanta as a punching bag historically reserved a few licks for African Americans and other minorities as well. None in recent memory has sunk so low as Eugene Talmadge, whose deliberate attempts to inflame racial passions in the 1946 campaign set the stage for the lynching of two black couples in rural Walton County shortly after the votes were cast. Race-baiting was Talmadge’s stock-in-trade, but his rhetoric was especially heated in 1946 because, courtesy of a recent court decree, that contest was the first truly meaningful election in the 20th century in which more than a relative scattering of black people had been allowed to vote in Georgia.

Black voting would remain limited, especially in Georgia’s rural counties, until Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which quickly boosted black registration from 34 to 55 percent of the eligible population, rendering outright race-mongering a bit risky for any white candidate in a statewide contest. The Voting Rights Act also accelerated the exodus of white Georgians from Democratic Party. During the 1964 presidential election, a few months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the state moved into the Republican presidential column for the first time. Save for three elections, two of them involving Democrat Jimmy Carter, it has remained there since, paving the way for a Republican takeover of both houses in the state legislature in 2004.

Because this political revolution was so overwhelmingly race-driven at the outset, Republican strength in Georgia has been most apparent, not in Atlanta or its immediate environs, but in the majority-white counties most geographically and culturally distant from them. Meanwhile, over a strikingly short time, metropolitan Atlanta counties have seen a massive influx of more affluent white and African American people from outside the state, and upwardly mobile black people have also left the city proper for the suburbs and even the exurbs. The result has been a decided “purpling” of these heavily populated counties adjacent to Atlanta, reflected in the Republican Brian Kemp’s meager 1.3 percent victory over Democrat Stacey Abrams in the 2018 gubernatorial election.

A former Athens businessman, Kemp appeared to reach straight back into the old Gene Talmadge playbook in that campaign, presenting himself as a rural superhero who flaunted his disdain for political correctness and other city-slicker signifiers. This persona came through vividly in his ads. One showed him, clad in cowboy boots and jeans, pointing his shotgun at his daughter’s supposed boyfriend; in another, he sat behind the wheel of the slightly dented pickup truck, which he promised to use to round up undocumented migrants.

Kemp’s calculated rusticity served him well in the 125 predominantly rural counties where he racked up an average victory margin of 38 percent, but it almost backfired on him statewide. Abrams persuaded her metropolitan base of minorities and moderate whites to turn out in large numbers. With the county unit system gone, it makes a difference that some 60 percent of Georgia’s voters now reside in the fast growing, larger metro Atlanta counties, where, on average, Abrams bested Kemp by 17 percent in 2018. Kemp’s narrow escape illustrates why he and his Republican colleagues have dedicated themselves to suppressing minority voting, a role he embraced with bravado in his previous post as Georgia’s Secretary of State. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, (another local entity not high on his list) reported that in 2017, as he prepared to run for governor, he had managed to purge the rolls of some half-million, largely black and Hispanic would-be voters.

Kemp’s hostility to immigrants seemed to put him solidly in step with President Donald Trump, at least until the governor declined to appoint ardent Trumpite Republican Congressman Doug Collins to fill the seat left vacant by the resignation of U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson. Kemp’s eagerness to get back into Trump’s good graces may help to explain why he leapt well ahead of other Republican governors to respond to White House pressure to re-open their states during the COVID crisis. Another explanation might be that much of the lobbying for the sheltering in place and restrictions on business operations came from in and around Atlanta—rather than the less populous rural counties where Kemp’s political biscuits are buttered.

Up to this point, residents of Georgia’s rural areas have been noticeably more inclined than their metropolitan counterparts to see social distancing and cutbacks in business operations as unwarranted disruptions instigated by outsiders, including scientists and liberal politicians, with no sense of the importance of maintaining the familiar economic and social rhythms of their communities. Ironically, with reported cases now on the rise in rural Georgia, it is there that the worst fears about Kemp’s decision to reopen the state early may be realized.

Rural black counties—with older and poorer-than-average populations beset by heart disease, lung disease, and diabetes, and lacking ready access to health care—have already registered death rates from the virus that are 50 percent higher than in metro areas. These same health problems are also well-known in many of the white majority counties claimed by Kemp in 2018. More than a third of these white counties are currently without a functioning hospital.

Kemp’s country cracker guise worked just well enough to get him into the governor’s office. But it also may have obligated him to artificially distance himself from the CDC. If so, his stiff-necked resolve to adhere to the Georgia political tradition of defying the Atlanta intelligentsia, rather than heeding the most informed advice available for combating an epic medical emergency, may wind up being more catastrophic for his political supporters than for those who opposed him.

The post How COVID-19 Exposed the Deep Divide Between White Rural Georgia and Atlanta appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And, thankfully, it’s going to be even worse than I had hoped.

For the record, I love and revere local government. In most of the world, it’s the most democratic, participatory, and effective level of government, and it deserves to be the most powerful and best-funded.

But in California, local governments are too weak and too small to be of much use. Why? There are simply too many of them. And so, for the past decade—in columns, speeches, and a book I co-authored—I have pined publicly for an “extinction event” that would kill off thousands of California local governments. Now COVID-19 is fulfilling my awful wish, causing declines in local tax revenues so steep that many cities, counties, and school districts may never recover.

Heartless as it may seem, the only way to save local government in California is to eliminate some local governments.

Our ship of state is barnacled with governments. In addition to the state, with its hundreds of agencies and commissions, we have 58 counties, 482 cities, 977 school districts, 72 community college districts, and nearly 5,000 special districts, governing everything from mosquitoes to cemeteries.

Taken together, all these governments resemble nothing so much as San Jose’s Winchester Mystery House, with an incoherent design and an overabundance of rooms that produce feelings of frustration and futility.

Our myriad local governments struggle to come together to solve regional problems like crime, transportation, or economic development. Indeed, they usually get in each other’s way. Citizens are represented by so many different governments that neither they, nor our shrinking local media, can monitor agencies’ behavior. With so little scrutiny, our local governments produce corruption, unsustainable retirement benefits, and other fiscal messes.

Our messy conglomeration of governments doesn’t represent the people’s will. Instead, it saps their trust. And it is this distrust of local government that has led Californians to limit the powers of local officials—especially the power to tax, via Prop 13 and related ballot measures. The result is that our city councils and school boards are among the weakest in the U.S. And developers and public employee unions exploit local governments’ weakness to suck out most of their money, leaving few resources, even in good times, for parks, libraries or arts.

Local government weakness also has centralized California power at the state level. Our cities, counties and school districts spend much of their time begging for cash in Sacramento, where local governments are the biggest lobby.

COVID-19 only deepens this dysfunctional dynamic. Our local governments lack the resources or expertise to decide how to respond to the crisis by themselves; Sacramento makes the big decisions. And with financial support slow in arriving from the federal government, local governments are already cutting services and laying off employees. Local bankruptcies of cities, and state takeovers of school districts, are now on the horizon.

In all this pain lies great possibility. The local apocalypse is so big and that every local government may need a bailout to survive. But there are simply too many governments, and too little money, to save them all. In this moment, we need two enormous changes in the nature of our local governments.

First, we will need to have fewer of them—that’s the extinction for which I pined. Second, we must make remaining local governments more powerful and resilient, so they can give us more in good times, and hold up in future crises.

To do these two things requires confronting a great California curse. Yes, we have the economy, size, and population of a large nation—we’d be the 35th most populous on Earth if we were independent (something Governor Gavin Newsom’s highly publicized brag that California is a “nation-state” acknowledges, in a backward way). But because we’re a state within a larger country, we don’t have our own regional governments—our own states—like real nations do.

We should. Our regions—the North State, the Bay Area, the Central Coast, Sacramento’s Capitol Region, the San Joaquin Valley, the Inland Empire, greater Los Angeles, and greater San Diego—have the size and character of American states. And in our daily lives, we Californians are really citizens of those regions. Our economies are regional, our sports teams have regional fan bases—and our biggest problems are regional. But, unfortunately, instead of having powerful regional governments, we’re split up into tiny shards of local governments instead.

Let’s fix that, by allowing California citizens to establish regional councils—an idea first suggested by California’s constitutional revision commission in 1996. These regional councils could form plans to consolidate our local governments and build real power.

A good start would be folding our thousands of special districts into existing city and county governments. Fiscally weak local governments could be merged into stronger ones. It also would make sense to combine small, contiguous counties, cities, and school districts.

My home county of Los Angeles, with 88 cities, is ripe for this. Do we really need both an El Monte and a South El Monte, a Covina and a West Covina, a Pasadena and a South Pasadena? Artesia, Cerritos, and Hawaiian Gardens already share one school district—why not a City Hall, perhaps with Lakewood and Norwalk as well?

To avoid having newly combined cities become larger versions of our current local weaklings, consolidation must be accompanied by restoring local government power—above all, the power for local officials to tax whatever they like. Local governments would then have control over their fiscal destinies, and could provide better services and more stable employment. In each region, local governments should jointly enact taxes to address regional concerns like transportation, public health, economic development—and disaster preparation.

More powerful local governments would be more democratic and accountable. Watchdogs are more likely to emerge when governments have more power to reach into our wallets. These newly consolidated governments also could more easily eliminate of outdated programs, and produce more responsive, technology-based systems for providing services.

“We continue to provide [government services] without adequately re-examining their fit for the world we live in today,” former Santa Monica city manager Rick Cole recently told the Planning Report. “If we were starting from scratch today, we would design a government that looked more like the iPhone than the rotary phone.”

One blessing of this terrible pandemic is that we can redesign our nation-state. The politics are more favorable, too. The statewide interests that protect centralized state power—our labor unions and corporations—are also reeling from the effects of COVID-19. Any bailouts for them should be conditioned on their support for empowering local government.

The local apocalypse is here—whether we wanted it or not. Let’s make the most of it.

The post Why California’s Weakest Local Governments Should Not Survive COVID-19 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But pressure from athletes and national sport bodies finally forced Bach’s hand. Olympians—including big-name stars like U.S. decathlete Ashton Eaton, reigning Olympic pole vault gold medalist Katerina Stefanidi of Greece, and Canadian hockey standout Hayley Wickenheiser, who is also a member of the IOC and its Athletes’ Commission—demanded postponement. Then Canada announced a de facto boycott, vowing not to send its athletes to Tokyo, soon followed by Australia, Germany, and Portugal. With the five-ring dominoes falling, the IOC and organizers in Tokyo relented to reality on March 24, issuing a joint statement that the Games would in fact be delayed.

It was the first time in the history of the Olympics that the Games were postponed. But it was not the first time Tokyo had its Olympic experience scuppered by calamity. In 1940, too, the city had been slated to host the Summer Olympics—before misguided IOC management exacerbated external circumstances and got in the way.

It’s a pattern we’re likely to see again, because the Olympics are rooted in arrogant fantasies about the power of the Games to soar above the rules and limitations of other human enterprises. The Olympics could not transcend war in the 1940s, and it can’t transcend epidemiological science today.

The modern Olympics were the brainchild of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a French aristocrat who believed that the rigorous discipline and outward displays of masculinity embedded in sporting culture could help reinvigorate France after its humiliating drubbing in the Franco-Prussian War. In 1894 he assembled a hodgepodge of officials from sports organizations in Europe and North America along with a gaggle of fellow aristocrats—including the King of Greece, the Prince of Wales, and a Russian grand duke—to restore the Olympics. The Games were built on a bedrock of contradictions: the Olympics were to symbolize peace but were also a way to toughen up “a flabby and cramped youth” for war, as the Baron put it. The Games were anchored in a rhetoric of inclusion even as Coubertin railed against the participation of women. The Olympic rings were to represent the continents of the world linked in peace, but the Games were organized by nation, thereby encouraging chauvinism.

The first Olympics were staged in Athens in 1896, and for years thereafter they were attached like a sporty barnacle to the more popular World’s Fair. It wasn’t until the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm that the Games finally achieved solid footing.

In 1936, the IOC picked Tokyo to host the 1940 Games, over Helsinki. It was a controversial choice. In 1931, Japan had aroused international consternation when it invaded Manchuria and installed a puppet government. The IOC’s oft-proclaimed aim of fostering peace and goodwill apparently didn’t outweigh its desire to spread across the globe—Tokyo would be the first city in Asia to host the Games. Rome had also expressed interest in hosting the 1940 Olympics, but behind the scenes, the Tokyo bid team cut a deal with Benito Mussolini: Il Duce backed their bid in exchange for a promise of Japanese support for Rome’s effort to secure the 1944 Games. In the end, IOC members chose Tokyo over Helsinki by a vote of 37 to 26.

But imperial aggressors are going to aggress—and many within Japan viewed the Olympics as “an opportunity to demonstrate Japan’s growing imperial might, to stake a place on the world’s sports fields as well as its battlefields,” as sports historian David Goldblatt has noted. Japan attacked China in July 1937, setting off the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Critics from the international community—like the Japanese Peace Society and the American League for Peace and Democracy—demanded that Tokyo be forced to relinquish the Games. Athletes from France, Great Britain, and the United States threatened a boycott. But the IOC didn’t budge. It was never particularly bothered by Japanese bellicosity, and doubled down on its support for Japan by handing the 1940 Winter Games to Sapporo in June 1937, even as threats of war filled the air. The IOC averred, as it still does, that when it comes to the Olympics, politics, and sports shouldn’t mix.

The IOC also seemed smitten with Tokyo’s dedication to honoring Olympic tradition. Grandiosity and pomposity are the IOC’s id and ego—and Tokyo bidders had plans to spend 10 million Yen (more than $61 million today) to enlarge stadiums. The Tokyo Prefecture plunged an additional $100,000 into the city’s bid, no small sum at the time (it would be nearly $2 million today). Tokyo also planned to repeat the Olympic torch relay, a ritual instituted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis at the 1936 Berlin Games.

Hitler initially derided the Olympics as “a plot against the Aryan race by Freemasons and Jews.” But De Coubertin’s rhetoric could be persuasive in Nazi circles. The Baron wrote that “the athlete in antiquity honored the gods. By doing the same today, the modern athlete honors his homeland, his race, and his flag.”

Such talk of homeland, race, and flag chimed with Hitler’s political project—and propaganda minister Josef Goebbels convinced him that the Games would bathe the swastika in the Olympic glow on the world stage. The Germans concocted the Olympic torch relay, which wound its way from Olympia, Greece to Berlin, as a way not only to magnify the Olympic spirit but also to spread the Nazi gospel. In the final days of the relay in Germany, the torch bearers were exclusively blond and blue-eyed, textbook exemplars of the supposed Aryan “master race.” De Coubertin deemed the performance “gallant and utterly successful.”

In promising to continue the tradition, the hosts in Tokyo fortified the IOC’s good favor.

But Tokyo 1940 was not to be.

Tellingly, the Japanese, not the IOC, pulled the plug. As Japan funneled more resources into the fighting in East Asia, the country’s Minister of War, General Gen Sugiyama, insisted that Tokyo withdraw its Olympic responsibility in order to focus on the war. Eventually, leaders in Tokyo issued a statement that read, “We deeply regret to have to abandon temporarily the privilege of holding the first Olympics in Asia.” They added, “We promise to make every effort to bring the 1944 Olympics to Japan as we firmly believe peace will return to the Far East before long.”

The IOC shifted the 1940 Summer Games to Helsinki, and the 1940 Winter Games to Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany, thus demonstrating the Olympics had no qualms about the Nazi regime. Eventually, both 1940 Games were canceled after Russia invaded Finland in 1939. The Olympics wouldn’t be held again until 1948 in London.

Much has changed in Olympics Land since the 1940s. The Games are much bigger, with the Summer Olympics now convening some 11,000 athletes. In the process, the Games have been transformed into an expensive, money-making behemoth; an exercise in trickle-up economics that typically sends public dollars from a city or country to well-connected economic and political elites that organize and broadcast the Games.

The economic stakes are higher for host cities. When Tokyo postponed in 2020, it had already plunged billions more than intended into the Olympic project. During the bid phase of the Tokyo Games, the price tag was $7.3 billion, but today, according to an audit carried out by the Japanese government, the Olympics are on pace to spend more than $26 billion. The recently announced postponement will add another $2 to $6 billion in costs, say Japanese media. And we should expect that number to climb.

Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso recently suggested that the Olympics were cursed every 40 years—from the 1940 Tokyo cancelation, to the boycott-plagued 1980 Moscow Games, to the Tokyo 2020 postponement. But the problem is nothing so magical: What has truly cursed the Olympic Movement is its dismal combination of outsized ambition and subpar leadership.

Just as the International Olympic Committee mismanaged wartime politics in 1940, it has mismanaged its response to the 2020 pandemic. Bach, the IOC president, claimed he was slow to act to postpone the Tokyo games because he was listening to people like President Donald Trump, who contended things would be back to normal by mid-April. That Bach would listen to Trump instead of experts from the World Health Organization and other medical bodies who refuted that rosy outlook, should be alarming to anyone who cares about athletes and the Olympics, let alone wider public health.

City officials who agree to host Olympics are already signing up for problems; questionable spending, militarization of public space in the name of security, and the displacement of existing homes or businesses to build facilities. The gamble is that the Games will somehow rise above these problems, and transform a place. The fact that these wishes rarely come true is why anti-Olympics activist groups pop up in nearly every city that contemplates hosting the Games.

These activist groups are coming together to create an international counter-Olympics movement of their own. NOlympics LA, which is leading the charge against the Los Angeles 2028 Games, worked last summer with anti-Olympics activists in Tokyo to stage the inaugural transnational anti-Olympics summit, featuring activists from Olympic host cities around the world, past, present, and future.

The way the Tokyo 2020 pandemic postponement transpired will only stoke these anti-Olympics groups. And if history is any guide, the 2021 Games—assuming they can be held in our age of coronavirus—will almost certainly provide additional grist for critiques of the Olympic movement.

The post Are the Tokyo Olympics Cursed? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As I take a slight turn to the right, a woman and her German Shepherd appear, walking towards us from the opposite direction. She hesitates. The path is narrow, and for both of us to keep the required distance, someone will have to leave it. We both step aside, drifting apart from each other, but the dogs have a different plan. Skeletor wags his tail; the other dog does, too. They come close and sniffle, happy to see each other. The woman peers at me over her mask. How does she feel meeting another person? Is she even slightly glad to see me? Am I?

This situation has repeated itself a lot in the past few weeks. The dogs are always eager and approach without fear, and I start to feel as if Skeletor is walking me instead of the other way around.

I’ve never been good at keeping track of days. But since March 22, when the lockdown began in Athens, I am counting as if never before. Date and time have taken on a new urgency, as I try to calculate the right moments to leave the house.

For each outing, we are required to fill out a form or send a text message to the government. We must specify which of four activities we will engage in: an emergency visit to the doctor, grocery shopping, exercise, or walking a dog. The penalty for being a pedestrian outdoors without one of these reasons is a fine of €150. I’m choosing to fill out the form for now, but rumor has it that the government will require text messages from everyone soon.

So these days it takes me much longer than usual to prepare for a walk with Skeletor, because I’m fretting over what time to write on my piece of paper. How much time is enough to walk a dog in the morning? My usual morning walks would take an hour, and Skeletor needs them to let off some steam—but now an hour seems too much, a luxury. I try to bargain—maybe half an hour is good enough if I climb up the most remote part of the hill and make sure nobody is around. If I am late because I took too long to get ready, will I be lying to the police?

Skeletor appreciating the view from his walk. Courtesy of Eugenia Triantafyllou

Every few days, Greek social media and TV bulletins tell us there will be an extension of the lockdown. A few days ago we were doing well, but now the same measures are not enough anymore. We need to stay inside for longer. To be more specific about how much time we spend outside of the house, more frugal with our outings. “The next couple of weeks are critical,” the leading epidemiologist says.

But they said the same thing the week before, and the one before that.

People are confused. And worried.

My worries are not only about the authorities. In the mornings I wait until I hear my neighbor, an elderly woman with severely compromised health, go outside to feed the stray cats who depend upon her. I gave her some latex gloves a few days ago. Living in an apartment building makes it difficult to avoid bumping into each other in the entrance. So I listen for her usual sounds, imagining the scenario of not hearing her one day at all, and what I would do then. When I am sure she has finished her morning ritual and I hear the lobby door close, that is my signal to leave the house.

A few days ago, I read about an old woman in another city. She was seen walking her sheep downtown. Not a dog or even a cat. A sheep. A photograph showed her next to a building complex, the sheep grazing on some grass that grew on the lot right next to it. Her face was pixelated by the news media for privacy.

Had she always done this, before the quarantine? Perhaps. Nobody noticed then, or if they did it might have registered as something rural people did, something bucolic and colorful. Now, it is scandalous enough to make the news, one of many suddenly suspicious characters.

Another article describes a woman who was caught hiding one of her small children in the trunk of the car to escape being fined because only two people are allowed to ride together in a car. A man filled out a permit for personal exercise but was discovered by the police many kilometers away. A woman swimmer was forced to come out of the sea to be fined. The violations, according to social media, have reached 40,000, amounting to a total of €6,000,000 in fines, another number to count.

There are even priests who break the quarantine, insisting that the gathering of the congregation for the Divine Liturgy, including the Holy Communion itself, cannot possibly be a source of contagion.

Still, most Greeks are following the rules as best they can.

Greeks on Facebook protest that the government focuses too much on serving fines and policing instead of healthcare. One day the medical personnel were hailed as heroes; the next, police tried to break up their peaceful World Health Day protests. Gatherings of more than ten people are forbidden after the lockdown. Doctors and nurses gathered in the forecourt of Evangelismos, one of Athens’s big hospitals, protesting the shortages both in personnel and equipment that has been happening even before the coronavirus crisis. The government promises radical restructuring of healthcare in the next couple of months. There are plans for 500 mobile medical units that will test people for the virus at home.

As Orthodox Easter approached, the government also promised to enforce the lockdown with drones and raise the fine to €300 to deter people from leaving the cities. So people celebrated Easter on balconies and rooftops, where the traditional roasting of the lamb took place in pairs or alone.

On social media, we Greeks argue over every single piece of news. That’s nothing new. But somehow it feels more important, more pressing, to be right, to maintain a sense of control now in this chaos of information. Many call the opposite side “sheep,” an old expression for gullibility that feels as common nowadays as it is to roast one for Easter, if not to take one for a walk.

Contrary to how it might seem, we Greeks are not obsessing over sheep. But the irony of the imagery is not lost on me. People are afraid of being lambs, of being herded mindlessly and corralled inside their homes, an uncertain future ahead of them. But more than that, they are afraid of dying.

In our apartment, we don’t have a working stove yet—one of the perks of moving in just a couple of weeks before the coronavirus crisis reached Greece. We try to manage with cold food: sandwiches, fruit, some snacks from the grocery store. As Skeletor and I returned from our walk, we stopped by the small pizza place on the square. Exarchia—the neighborhood I was raised in and the only place I have lived in Greece—has a long history of anarchism and clashing with police forces. Here the lockdown, though necessary for public health, sometimes ends up scratching wounds that never healed. The virus has achieved what decades of police intervention haven’t: The square is empty except for a small squad of policemen, standing next to their motorcycles at the south side as a warning to unnecessary wanderers. They have not stopped me yet, although I carry my ID and papers with me at all times.

It’s almost eleven. I greet the woman behind the plexiglass and place my order. She offers hand sanitizer and tells me I am her first customer since she opened at 7 a.m. “It’s only pocket money now.” She shrugs.

There is talk on the news about a coronavirus subsidy for the private sector. I hope it reaches all the people who need it so they can endure for now. It’s important for everyone to endure as long as needed, to stay healthy and alive until it is okay for us to return to the world and take a look at it anew. Perhaps we’ll appreciate things we took for granted—a home cooked meal, brushing against strangers on the streets, having a cup of coffee in the sunlight, a long walk with a dog. It will be strange at first, resuming life after such a long pause. Maybe we’ll start the count anew: Which things remain lovingly, reassuringly, the same. Which ones broke during the pandemic and will need to be fixed. And which ones have always been broken but we refused to see it.

And I do hope in this restored world, the sheep will keep taking walks.

Editor’s Note, May 1, 2020: Since this piece was filed, Greece’s low death rate during the lockdown has prompted prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to announce a time frame for easing the restrictive measures imposed last month.

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