{"id":211843,"date":"2020-11-30T10:19:22","date_gmt":"2020-11-30T15:19:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/?p=211843"},"modified":"2020-12-07T10:05:54","modified_gmt":"2020-12-07T15:05:54","slug":"unhappy-holidays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/blog\/unhappy-holidays\/","title":{"rendered":"Unhappy Holidays!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We\u2019ve surely had some sad Christmas seasons during the Civil War (I spent Christmas of 1862, for example, in a muddy, frozen army camp in the woods outside Fredericksburg, VA) and other times in our nation\u2019s history, but I fear this one is shaping up to be among the worst.  The food lines are only getting longer, with little prospect of getting any help from Washington lawmakers until after the first of the year\u2014well after people\u2019s unemployment insurance has run out and the eviction moratorium has ended.  And if the experts are correct, the rate of Coronavirus infections will increase exponentially based on hundreds of thousands of ill-advised Thanksgiving celebrations, making our situation even worse by Christmas and New Year\u2019s.  Many hospitals can be expected to turn patients away, and forced shutdowns are only going to make the economy worse. As much as everyone will be happy to say goodbye to 2020, it\u2019s hard to envision people shouting \u201cHappy New Year!\u201d with much conviction as we usher in 2021.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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An estimated 50 million Americans are currently \u201cfood insecure,\u201d someone\u2019s modern-day, politically correct term for being in danger of going hungry. What\u2019s worse, a quarter America\u2019s children can be counted among them, a pretty sad commentary on the state of our country in 2020, which goes well beyond \u201cinequality.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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People aren\u2019t going to be getting back to work in the coming weeks; more people are going to lose their jobs.\u00a0 The only way to relieve people\u2019s suffering in the short term\u2014with the effects of the vaccine(s) unlikely to be felt until well into spring\u2014is with the help of more government stimulus and, as I\u2019ve addressed before<\/a>, I fear that obstructionist Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell isn\u2019t going to be any more agreeable to reaching a deal now than he\u2019s been in the past.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

People of Color are Still Suffering Disproportionately from the Coronavirus Pandemic.<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n
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I get the impression that too many white Americans see people of color at the food banks\u2014remember, a disproportionate number work in the hard-hit restaurant and hospitality industries\u2014and dismiss their suffering as somehow being less \u201creal\u201d than that of white people, as if their jobs, lives, and families aren\u2019t worth quite as much.  In particular, there is a tendency to suspect Hispanics of being illegal immigrants, people who therefore got what they deserved, aren\u2019t entitled to government assistance, and should go back to where they came from.  It\u2019s possible my 150+ years of observing human behavior has made me unduly cynical, but I fear that, not unlike the early days of the pandemic\u2014when white America saw people of color falling victim disproportionately and thus dismissed the Coronavirus as a disease of the \u201cother\u201d\u2014our country\u2019s worst character flaws are once again on display.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I had my druthers, I\u2019d rather be addressing positive, progressive issues that can change our country for the better than talking about an old fart like McConnell every week (something almost as unpleasant as feeling compelled to talk about Donald Trump every week!), but how can we tackle the challenges of the 21st<\/sup> century when we\u2019re suffering some of the worst poverty and inequality since the Great Depression, when it could be months or even years until we can even get back to the unacceptable status quo?  It took the Great Depression to spawn the \u201cNew Deal,\u201d and I increasingly fear that only an initiative of that scope will get us out of the hole we\u2019re in this holiday season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019ve surely had some sad Christmas seasons during the Civil War (I spent Christmas of 1862, for example, in a muddy, frozen army camp in the woods outside Fredericksburg, VA) and other times in our nation\u2019s history, but I fear this one is shaping up to be among the worst.  The food lines are only […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":211846,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","pgc_sgb_lightbox_settings":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-posts"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211843"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":211852,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211843\/revisions\/211852"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}