The dangers of a conflagration engulfing the Middle East are high. A thoughtful approach to the annual Passover Seder is critical now.
The first night of Passover this year is April 22nd, when the first Seder is held. The Passover Seder retells the story of when the Israelites, who had been slaves for Pharaoh to build the pyramids, were finally allowed to leave Egypt.
The youngest child comes forward and asks, “Why is this night of Passover different from all other nights of the year?” Four answers follow that explain the Seder. The primary and first answer is that on this night we retell the story of the Exodus of the Israelites who were held captive in Egypt.
And, in the Haggadah, the text of the story that I have read every year since childhood, it is written that this story “is not ancient, but eternal in its message, and its spirit. It proclaims mankind’s burning desire to preserve liberty and justice for all.”
This year there is another question that will hang over every table—why this year is different from all other years. So the fifth question becomes how to conduct the Seder this year, recognizing the horrors on all sides, while keeping hope for peace alive.
With the excruciating war grinding on in Gaza, it is going to be a difficult Seder this year. Some 130 hostages remain in captivity in Gaza that were taken from Israel on October 7th, 2023 when Hamas attacked Israel and killed at least 1200 in unspeakable brutality and wounded more than 3,300 that day. Now thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are dying.
These are all innocent victims of war.
To make any statement is to engender arguments. So the question becomes how to honor our own pain and that of others without contributing to cycles of anger, violence and calls for retribution.
You can go back days, weeks, months, years; tens, hundreds, and thousands of years to argue about who started what when, why and how. As generations gather together with differing perspectives, these arguments are likely to continue over the Passover Seder meals. So the question becomes how to be gentle with others with whom we disagree.
Perhaps at the table there will be someone to remind us that there were and are many times when Jews and Arabs did and still do today live peaceably among one other.
What is it then, that we want to ask for, to pray for? To me it is, to pray for the best possible outcome for all concerned, with peace and justice for all. As Rodney King simply said, “Can’t we all just get along?”
We don’t have to know what exactly that should look like, what to envision, we don’t have to know how it will be possible, what are all the questions, what are all the answers.
Will we need to pray that a nuclear war doesn’t break out? Will it be then that a two-state solution is arrived at? We just have to start by asking that the best balanced outcome prevails for all.
In the immediate the specific question is still, how to conduct the Seder this year? For some it may mean leaving out any political discussions altogether. For others it may mean asking each person to share their thoughts, one by one, around the table, in a careful and thoughtful manner.
To reach a clarity of mind and of thought, follow your breath. This is a simple form of meditation. It physiologically slows down and relaxes you so that, after a minute or longer you will find yourself often able to arrive at more clarity of thought. A clear question may form. Or, an answer to a question.
To follow my breath, I breathe in with my mouth closed, and see that the breath rises first in the abdomen, and then in the chest. This is also a good exercise to strengthen and relax the muscles that control the lower back and helps to dissipate back pain. In this way, at the beginning of and end of the day, and while driving or standing in line, I regain control of my thoughts and reconnect with my body.
A Navajo elder told me that at the end of prayers dealing with harmful elements that create destruction and disharmony, “We bring in the Blessing Way, saying “Let there be peace and harmony from all four directions, from every direction. Now peace and harmony has been restored.”
In Judaism we pray, “May the One who causes peace to reign in the high heavens, let peace descend on all the world,” and I will picture a cool quiet rain falling gently down upon all the world. _________________________________________________________
This essay was published as “The Fifth Question” in the Gallup Independent newspaper’s Spiritual Perspectives column, the Times of Israel Blogsin Israel, and here in the NM Jewish Journal, on April 13, 2024 and subsequently on April 20th in a shortened version in the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper’s My View as “On Passover, ask a fifth question around the table.”
Published January 23, 2023 by Memoir Monday: a weekly newsletter featuring the best personal essays from around the web. Memoir Monday anthologizes “Wounded Healing” personal essay from Tikkun Magazine: the Prophetic Jewish, Interfaith & Secular Voice to Heal and Transform the World, in “Emancipatory Spirituality” section, and in Highlights of Tikkun Magazine. see links below article as published here.
Wounded Healing
I made arrangements to watch a new film about the Holocaust that sounded interesting, Three Minutes—A Lengthening. But then, it operated on me like a surgical procedure: it brought unconscious deep fears to the surface that I didn’t even know I had. It upset me so much that two baby bull snakes and two gigantic Wolf spiders came into the house that night, as if my fear had reverberated down to awaken them in their nests and touch their webs, summoning them up from the depths to come for a visit.
So then I didn’t think I could write about that film and decided instead to view Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song. Currently in limited release in theaters, it will be available for sale on DVD on Oct. 11th.
This film Hallelujah reconnected me to myself. It acted like a key that opened new doors of creativity. But somehow first I had to be broken.
The painful film that I didn’t want to write about, Three Minutes, brings an awareness of the Holocaust without ever actually showing what happened—the film footage was shot just on the edge of what was about to happen.
In 1938 Kodak came out with an amateur version of their 16-millimeter Cine Kodak film camera. Spring-loaded, you popped in a cassette, black and white or color, cranked it up, and it would run for a few minutes. That year, David Kurtz, who had left Poland in the 1890’s, having done well in America, decided to make a grand tour of Europe, and on a side trip, revisited his ancestral village of Nasielsk. He shot 3 minutes of film there.
His grandson Glenn Kurtz went on a hunt for the film 70 years later, and found it, moldering away in his parents’ closet, in 2008, just before it would be lost forever. The old film’s base was dissolving, but because someone had transferred part of it onto VHS tape in the 1980’s, he could see what it was. He sent it to be restored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and published a book about its significance, Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film, published byFarrar, Strauss and Giroux in 2014, and heralded as one of the best books of the year by the New Yorker and others. This year, Dutch filmmaker Bianca Stigter, together with her British producer husband Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), released a documentary film based on Kurtz’s book to international acclaim. The film has a curious intensity—it contains no talking heads, just a deep examination of the moments in the footage and each of the faces it documented, narrated by a woman’s voice.
In August of 1938, crowds of happy children mugged for the novel movie camera. They excitedly ran down the street to remain in its eye as the man panned along the houses. Never in their wildest nightmares did they dream of what was to come. In September 1939, Germany swept over Poland and took away and killed almost all the Jewish people living there, the children, the mothers and fathers, in every little town and village. The entire Jewish population of Nasielsk was rounded up, held in the synagogue for three days, and then taken away and deported, mostly to Treblinka.
As I watched this film in a sunny late summer afternoon, I spotted a young girl who stood front and center for the camera in a crowd. I recognized myself, my features, in hers. In that way, in that moment I connected with the reality of what had happened. I was swept into the horror of what was to come, thrown into a time machine eight decades back.
Later, I had a feeling—I looked on a map. The town, Nasielsk, Poland, where David Kurtz was born in about 1880, was 35 miles northeast of Warsaw. Another 35 miles northeast from there, practically the next town over, Raciaz, is where my grandmother was born in the early 1880’s. She left Poland with my great-grandparents when she was five. My mother remembered her writing letters in Yiddish for my great-grandmother to a relative back in Poland. After 1939 they heard nothing.
A girl flips her bobbed hair back and forth, sitting at a window looking out. The film replays this. Then, a blurred screen. A voice narrates what happened then in Nasielsk when the Germans came.
The record of what happened was because Emanuel Ringelblum, a Jewish historian, organized teams in the Warsaw ghetto who wrote down eye-witness testimonies from Jews as they streamed in from the countryside. These oral histories were buried in boxes and three large milk cans in the cellars of buildings. They also contained the only eye-witness account, by an escapee from the death camp of Chelmno in 1942, about the mass extermination in gas vans, which was smuggled out that year to England. Ringelblum and his family later escaped, but were captured and shot in 1944. After the war, boxes and two of the milk cans were found.
Eventually, Kurtz would locate 7 survivors from Nasielsk. They had been children in the film. Today, viewers feel a sense of immediacy, that presence that home movies capture. One survivor said that viewing the film gave him back his childhood. The narrator suggests that for the survivors, the images we are watching are just a token of a whole world they had lost.
Hallelujah
The documentary film, “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song,” directed by Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, traces the evolution of his most famous song, “Hallelujah,” through focusing on Cohen as a seeker, a spiritual searcher. At one level, the essence of Judaism is in asking questions.
Watching this film I found myself mysteriously reconnecting to a part of myself that also had been buried a long time. The patina of life’s mundanity was replaced with the deep chords of the soul’s search. After seeing it, I felt good in my heart. And that night, attending a life-drawing class, I drew like I never had been able to draw before— the strokes emanated from inside of me, sweeping through my arm into my fist that held a bit of charcoal against the paper.
Judaism teaches about the paradoxical nature of things – the ineffable, the unknowable, the name of God that cannot be named – and yet, here we are, commanded to sing His praises. And still yet, “Hallelujah” sets you up to go one way, then throws you another. In that very experience, Cohen gives a taste of that paradoxical, contradictory, nature of things. The song begins:
I’ve heard there was a secret chord that David played to please the Lord but you don’t really care for music, do you? It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth the minor fall, the major lift; the baffled king composing “Hallelujah.”
About songwriting, Cohen is shown saying, “It is, it is a gift—of course you have to keep your tools, keep your skill in a condition of operation but the real song, where that comes from, no one knows, that is grace, that is a gift, and that is, that is not yours. If I knew where songs came from I would go there more often.”
The film then cuts to his rabbi, Rabbi Finley, who says, “There’s something called the Bat Kol, which in the Torah is the feminine voice of God that extends into people. The Bat Kol arrives. And if you’re in her service, you write down what she says. And then she goes away. So the baffled king is ‘I just wrote this secret chord, I don’t know how I got it, but what I think I did is, I made myself open to the Bat Kol.’”
It took Cohen four years or more to write “Hallelujah,” and he reportedly wrote somewhere between 80 and 180 verses. At one point he found himself banging his head on the floor of his hotel room, despairing of ever finishing it.
Finally, he selected four verses, with the refrain Hallelujah repeated four times between each verse, and recorded it in 1985 on the album Various Positions. It then came as a great shock when the new head of Columbia Records rejected the album and refused to release it.
The film follows the song’s slow torturous rise from this obscurity—Bob Dylan recognized its brilliance and would sing verses of it in concert; John Cale, of Velvet Underground fame, asked Cohen to share more of the verses with him, which he performed in a solo concert in 1991. Then, in 1994, Jeff Buckley recorded it on his album “Grace,” the version that ultimately brought “Hallelujah” into national prominence.
Cohen was a spiritual seeker, but he was also tormented by terrible depressions, which he treated by drinking too much. He retreated to a Zen monastery outside Los Angeles for five years, but apparently, he and the Roshi would drink whiskey at night together there, so it was only later when he went to India and learned another form of meditation there that he finally found respite.
Cohen draws holiness into the world, into the act of love. And this unusual and rare humanity is what draws people to him, to this song, as a safe harbor, a place where we can find ourselves, in our own struggles. He reveals his struggle as an artist—to despair, to fail, to persevere, to keep going. A later verse goes like this:
Now maybe there’s a God above But all I ever learned from love is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you. And it’s no complaint you hear tonight, and it’s not some pilgrim who’s seen the light It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.
Cohen rarely explained his work. He shared this: ”You look around and you see a world that is impenetrable; that cannot be made sense of. You either raise your fists, or you say ‘Hallelujah.’ I try to do both.”
After seeing the film there were certain things I wanted to learn about Leonard Cohen’s heritage: He was born in Montreal on September 21, 1934. His paternal grandfather came from the city of Suwalki in northeastern Poland in the 1870s; his mother was born in Lithuania. His family was very successful in the clothing business in Montreal. They liked to wear suits.
Here are some other things I learned along the way: Cohen’s parents gave him the Hebrew name Eliezer, meaning, God helps. He was brought up Orthodox, and with the idea that he was a direct descendant of Aaron, the first High Priest. At times throughout his life, he saw himself as a messianic figure, infusing spirituality in the masses. The film shows footage of his concert in Tel Aviv on September 29, 2009, when he gave the Priestly Blessing to the thousands gathered at Ramat Gan Stadium.
I wondered if he ever performed in Poland. He did. He performed in Poland, in 1985. Everyone there wanted him to say something about Solidarity founder Lech Walesa and the political turmoil going on at that time. Before singing Who by Fire, he said to the audience, “When I was a child and I went to synagogue every Saturday morning… And once, in this country, there were thousands of synagogues and thousands of Jewish communities which were wiped out in a few months. In the synagogue which I attended there was a prayer for the government.[…] I sing for everyone. My song has no flag, my song has no party. And I say the prayer, that we said in our synagogue, I say it for the leader of your union and the leader of your party. ‘May the Lord put a spirit, a wisdom and understanding into the hearts of your leaders and into the hearts of all their councilors.’”
I think this approach is helpful. It is forward-looking. It reflects Jewish values. To pray that all will be spiritually guided by wisdom.
Diane Joy Schmidt is an award-winning writer and photojournalist. A seven-time Rockower Award winner, her journalism has appeared in the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, Hadassah Magazine, Lilith, and regional papers Intermountain Jewish News, New Mexico Jewish Link, Navajo Times and Gallup Independent and her flash picture stories have recently been published in literary journals Another Chicago Magazine, Sweet and Geometry. Her debut screenplay Turquoise Mountain has just placed in the “Top 100 Screenplays” from Scriptapalooza. She is the recipient of a NEA Fellowship in Photography and her photographically illustrated books, The Chicago Exhibition and Where’s Chimpy have been best-sellers. In 2020, she received an M.F.A. in New Media and Screenwriting from Antioch University. Please visit her at https://www.dianejoyschmidt.com.
A jury decided on August 2, 2023, that the shooter in the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania should be put to death. I recall the enormous international outcry when the shooting happened in 2018, and a reaction I’d heard: “What’s the big deal? There was a worse mass shooting where I live.” It was not the first time I’d heard a “what about” sentiment about a hate crime. And it can come from both the right and left. We need to be reminded what hate crimes are, and affected communities need to stand together. As the planet heats up, tempers are rising. And with it, prejudice and intolerance are increasing. Hatred of the other manifests. Social tensions are being exacerbated, sometimes deliberately, and racism is now a popular ploy for votes. In 2010 a developmentally disabled 22-year-old Navajo man was assaulted in Farmington, New Mexico, USA, and branded with a swastika. The victim finally escaped to a convenience store, where police were summoned. The Farmington police, who’d been trained to recognize hate crimes by the Anti-Defamation League, contacted the FBI. It was the first federally prosecuted case under President Obama’s new Shepard/Byrd hate crime law; the principal offender was sentenced to 8 1/2 years in federal prison. I’d reported on the trial for the Navajo Times. It was also tried at the state level, and when I interviewed a district court official in Aztec, New Mexico, he said, “What’s the big deal? Navajo people are always beating each other up and worse.” It was fortunate that the Farmington Police had the awareness to report this to the FBI as a hate crime.
In 2018, an avowed white supremacist and antisemite entered the Tree of Life Synagogue during prayer services and shot and killed 11 Jewish congregants. It is the worst antisemitic act of violence against Jews in the United States. In July, the jury determined that the shooter was guilty on all counts, including hate crimes, and was capable of forming intent to commit the crime, making him eligible for the death penalty. The jury heard testimony from survivors and family members, and also from relatives of the shooter and a psychiatrist for the defense. The jury decided to recommend the death sentence rather than life in prison. The governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, announced 6 months ago as the trial got underway that he would not issue any execution warrants during his term. When the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting received international attention, I wrote for the New Mexico Jewish Link about how religious leaders here came together in condemnation of this act. A friend in Europe, whose country had experienced a terrible mass shooting some years earlier perpetrated by a political extremist, wrote me, at some level annoyed by the attention this shooting received, saying essentially, “What’s the big deal?” There is an important difference between a political act and a hate crime. A hate crime is motivated by bias against race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability, and it is felt widely by the group that the victim may be perceived to be a member of. After 9/11/2001, members of the Sikh religion, who wear distinctive turbans, were targeted in many cities with acts of violence, including murder. After COVID began, following a tweet by the former president calling it the “Chinese virus,” there was a surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans. Historically, Native Americans, African Americans, and other people of color have been the target of hate crimes. Hatred of Jews is a hate crime called antisemitism. An anti-vaxxer running for president in the US, whose father was a notable Kennedy, just made the racist and antisemitic claim that COVID was genetically engineered to target Caucasians and Blacks, but not to affect Asians and Jews. That is untrue. One to one and a half million Chinese citizens died from COVID as reported in “How Deadly Was China’s Covid Wave?” (New York Times, 2/15/23). Their graph showed that internationally, the U.S. was number one, and Israel was seventh in death rates. Speaking personally as a Jew, I and other relatives of mine got COVID. False accusations are particularly egregious to Jews, who for centuries have been massacred over inane accusations scapegoating them. In the 14th century they were accused of spreading the Black Plague, because they were not dying as much as their Christian neighbors. Jews put fresh straw in their bedding every Friday to honor the Sabbath, inadvertently removing flea-carrying rats, the real source of the Plague. We must all must find common cause against the rise of hatred in all its forms.
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Diane Joy Schmidt is a writer and photojournalist in Albuquerque who was raised in the traditions of Reform Judaism and is an admirer of all things spiritually resonant.
What’s the big deal about hate violence? TIMES of ISRAEL 8.3.2023 with photo, Scattered clouds by moonlight, 800 words,
What’s the big deal?Gallup Independent “Spiritual Perspectives,” September, 2023 Society of Professional Journalists Top of the Rockies Medium Newsrooms Columns/Personal 3rd – 3 Columns
Let’s come together against hateSanta Fe New Mexican, “My View,” Opinion Page B3, 8/6/23. 600 words Blog of Anna Redsand 8.7.23
The great disruptor mocks perfection and introduces disorder into creation and why AI won’t have the answers we’ll need.
Gallup Independent Spiritual Perspectives September, 2023 The Times of Israel Blogs September, 2023 Featured Post
Single Commentary 2024
Rockower Award for Excellence in Jewish Journalism for Single Commentary, American Jewish Press Association, 2024 for Times of Israel.
When I swung open the back door to let the dogs out late at night, cold rushed in around my ankles. Bright stars glittered through the cottonwoods. The quarter-moon was up, dancing its way across the sky. It wasn’t just a flat sliver of a disk. In the clear night I could see the startling roundness of the moon, make out the dark craters on the shadow side, and picture the sun just below the horizon hitting it. And the stars were raining down in the firmament, the bright ones closer, the faint ones further away, giving me a glimpse of the vastness of the universe.
As I climbed back into the warmth of my bed, I began wondering if we know what we’re giving up as we turn more and more of our lives over to computers and artificial intelligence. I know that on days when I’ve spent too much time staring at screens, reality has a certain flatness. I forget that the moon is a sphere and that it has a dark side, hidden from view.
As each generation goes by, that connection to the natural world becomes less and less. Why does that matter? It’s important to ask. A computer won’t know to ask that, to ask what is missing from our lives.
All cultures tell stories about the origin of creation, and their cosmologies are fundamentally different. Artificial intelligence may contain the text of this information in a computer, but does it understand, or comprehend the implications of, these differences?
In the Jewish spiritual tradition, in the beginning there was nothing, the void, and then there was creation, when cyclical time came into being. The Hebrew calendar is divided into lunar months, and the holidays coincide with agricultural seasons. This week, Rosh Hashanah, the Hebrew New Year, marks the beginning of the year 5784.
Hindus think in terms of cycles of creation and parallel universes, and this universe is not the first or the last. Native Americans, generally speaking, have beginning and emergence. Buddhists have flux and multiple universes, with no beginning nor end. Still, in all traditions, there is potential for something. A sense of hopefulness permeates life.
Being able to ask the question, ‘What’s next, what’s missing from this picture?” seems to be an essential, fundamental, creative act. It is something that computers and artificial intelligence—aside from pattern-recognition software we might supply them with—won’t be asking.
Can artificial intelligence come up with new questions? Isn’t that the truly intelligent human act, to ask good questions? If you don’t even ask new questions, you won’t get the answers you need either. AI has a lack of true reasoning capacity.
AI also cannot understand the world through the senses. It can’t be nostalgic for the smell of things, of decaying leaves turning to rich black topsoil. Likewise, if a person’s childhood is only spent indoors playing computer games, something fundamental will be missing. I think I was fortunate to have been born a few years before television became ubiquitous. My childhood memories of playing outside, climbing trees, digging in the dirt, give me a deep, strong reality to draw on now, later in life, a shield for the psyche and immunity from the sharp, fast infectious busyness of modern culture.
On Star Trek, Captain Kirk always ribbed Mr. Spock for being too logical. Spock would reply, “What is the purpose of something illogical?”
Indeed. Navajo people, whose ceremonies work to restore balance, also have a great appreciation for Coyote, the Holy Person who is always disrupting things. He introduced disorder into creation when he mocked at a perfect calendar of stars being arranged on a blanket by a gathering of the Holy People, and he impatiently grabbed the blanket and tossed the stars skyward, where they landed in a pleasingly natural randomness.
This is a wise and important story, because asymmetry is necessary to existence. Things that are too perfect are lifeless. While predictable fractal geometric patterns are found even in the untamed branching of stream flows and the chaotic distribution of galaxies, Coyote will be relieved to hear, the patterns peter out at the distance of super-clusters.
But our profit-driven culture wants to sell us on a deathless, perfectly ordered existence, a conformity of desire to be filled only by mass-produced electronics instead of something human-made.
If I am missing faith, I can at least sense its absence and hope to find it. If I know that some magical quality has gone missing from my life, I can at least hope to feel it again. When I saw the dark of the moon it was like waking up from a dream. Now I need to wake up from the artificial simulacrums, the false representations on the screens, seducing me away from the natural world.
Perhaps we all need to wake up—especially to help our children and grandchildren do the same. We know that Microsoft technocrat Bill Gates strictly limited screen time for his children, and Apple’s Steve Jobs didn’t allow his children to use iPads at all, saying he thought they were too dangerous. We can hardly expect government to regulate the use of AI, or corporations to tell us to stop binging on what they are so fervently selling us. We must remember that artificial intelligence cannot care for us or ground us or heal the soul.
Diane Joy Schmidt is a writer and photojournalist in Albuquerque who was raised in the traditions of Reform Judaism and is an admirer of all things spiritually resonant. Read more at www.dianejoyschmidt.com. FEATURED POST The Times of Israel Blogs September, 2023 https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/coyote-tosses-the-stars-and-why-ai-cant-help-us/ The Gallup Independent, Spiritual Perspectives September, 2023 Society of Professional Journalists Top of the Rockies Medium Newsrooms Columns/Personal 3rd – 3 Columns
Gallup Independent As published Coyote Tosses the Starts
Diane Joy Schmidt Spiritual Perspectives April 8, 2023
It’s Passover again, beginning at the full moon of the springtime lunar month of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, and my apple tree usually blossoms now, though this year it seems to be a little late. Passover often falls close to Easter. Passover is to me the best Jewish holiday. The best memories, the best food, the best ritual—the Passover seder means the ritual order of telling the story of Passover with sweet wine, bitter herbs, matzoh and apples, a roasted shank bone, a roasted egg, parsley, salt water, and prayers and songs, which we can hold in our own homes, and lead our own ceremonies.
There is something healing about saying the same words over every year, and every year the story of Passover becomes richer and deeper. At heart, it is a timeless story, of freedom from bondage, from darkness to light, emerging from the narrow places and embarking on a journey.
We read the Haggadah together aloud, the prayer book that tells how the Israelites were released from slavery in Egypt. Towards the end of the seder, we read that “each age uncovers a formerly unrecognized servitude—requiring new liberation to set man’s soul free.” That line always inspired me. This timeless, cyclical ritual affirms that humanity is evolving. However, this year I have to ask, are we evolving, or devolving?
“We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective,” is a quote attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, the novelist. Well, maybe we aren’t the first—a similar story is told about other civilizations that misused their power, like the Anasazi and Atlantis. Our technology is doing us in, while promising that it will make us more competitive. For example, we knew we could have gone with ethanol instead of leaded-gasoline to fix engine knock, but you couldn’t patent ethanol, so we flooded the planet with lead.
But in truth we know now that we can save the planet, cost-effectively! The most important and devastating report of the 21st century from the world’s 150 top scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that includes those from the worst oil-producing countries, was released this week, and shows that we can avoid raising the temperature of the planet beyond the point of catastrophe, and, that it can be done cheaper with wind, solar, reforestation, and methane reductions, than with fossil fuels and nuclear power. All that is missing is… the political will to do so.
Harmony has become increasingly out of tune, the music is going faster and faster and we dancers simply can’t keep up. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and now the stock market is careening towards a reckoning with inflation. We have a death wish disguised as ambition.
While there is an increasing sense of powerlessness and loss of control, we do need to inoculate ourselves against propaganda. The new big threat is that, with advances in artificial intelligence, computers can now spit out plausible essays—perhaps even smoother than this one. What does this means? As we churn through the next presidential election cycle, we will be exponentially flooded with false information, deliberately intended to increase polarization in this country—provocations seemingly from both the right or the left—a technique perfected in Russia—and tensions here will rise to an all-time high. At the least, we can remain aware of that.
I always have the nagging feeling I’m never doing enough. My friend, a psychologist and son of Holocaust survivors, told me his philosophy of life is, if I remember correctly, for him that the purpose of life is to do whatever you can with whatever you’ve got, to the best of your ability, to offer as much of yourself, despite whatever problems you might have.
Even if we may not be able to control our destiny, we can choose how we face it. Viktor Frankl, survivor of four concentration camps, taught this and helped a lot of people in the camps to not commit suicide there. He later wrote a book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” that millions more have read. At base, we have the freedom to choose how we face life, and in that way not just be a victim of circumstances.
Anna S. Redsand wanted to help the students she was counseling in Cuba, New Mexico, who were giving in to despair and drugs. She wrote a book for them and other young people, “Viktor Frankl, A Life Worth Living” (Clarion Books, 2006). Frankl became a pilot in his late 60’s, and in a lecture to youths, she wrote that “he told how, in a crosswind, a pilot must aim the plane higher, or farther north, than his goal in order to reach his actual destination. He said it was like this with human beings. If we expect something higher of ourselves, we will reach what we are actually capable of. If we aim only for what we are capable of, we are likely to achieve beneath our abilities.” This is a challenge to us, to do better.
This should make overachievers feel good that, even if they never achieve their most grandiose goals they will have contributed to the healing of the world, rather than adding to its problems. This is the task before us that Jews call Tikkun Olam, repairing the world. I think we can do this. We have to.
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Diane Joy Schmidt is a writer and photographer in Albuquerque who was raised in the traditions of Reform Judaism and is an admirer of all things spiritually resonant. Schmidt’s Spiritual Perspective columns penned for the Gallup Independent received a first place in the New Mexico Press Women Communications contest this year. Visit her at www.dianejoyschmidt.com.
Published Gallup Independent; Times of Israel Blogs, 4/8/2023
New York Times Magazine – “The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes” by Steven Johnson https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/magazine/cfcs-inventor.html
The Guardian newspaper- “The path to radically lower emissions tucked away inside the devastating IPCC report” by environmental editor Damien Carrington, Dealtown newsletter, April 6, 2023
Vanity Fair April 2023 p. 34-35 “Journalists see artificial intelligence bots like ChatGPT as a potential threat–and an opportunity,” by Joe Pompeo.
“Viktor Frankl, A Life Worth Living” (Clarion Books, 2006) by Anna Redsand. Quoted with permission of the author. pp. 118-119.
Quote attributed to Kurt Vonnegut was seen posted as a ‘meme’ on Facebook (tried to verify but was not able to)
Reference to Anasazi, with wording “misuse of power” – suggested by copyeditor F.M.
Inclusion of NMPW 1st place suggested by and worded by Christina Tsosie, Managing Editor, Gallup Independent.
I just lost a friend, she didn’t die, but I feel she is lost, and I’m not able to save her—she’s joined the anti-vaxxer movement. When we met 45 years ago we were young, new in the city, both very gullible, very lost, very much needing a strong person to follow. We met during that intoxicating wave of New Age spiritualism, in a group led by a woman spiritual teacher promising answers; we were the perfect suckers. I eventually grew out of it and moved away; she moved into an urban ashram and worshipped another guru for decades, which helped her to maintain a foundation in her psyche. Still, we stayed in touch — I thought she was bright and creative and we shared a background that we were both Jewish.
Then, out of the blue last week, B. emailed and asked me why more Jewish people weren’t speaking out against the vaccine mandates — she’d been listening to some ‘rich podcasts’ that ‘exposed’ people like Fauci. I was shocked. I sent her an article by a Jewish journalist explaining why comparing public health recommendations to Nazism was so very disturbing to Jews. As one non-Jewish friend of mine said when I told her about this, “How is being told to wear a mask and get a vaccine so you don’t make everybody sick worse than being hunted down and killed in a concentration camp?”
B. also told me she was concerned that the vaccines would do something to her. I sent her a solid scientific explanation of how the vaccines work, they signal the cells in the body to fight the Covid virus. B. said she would share this information with her friends and they’d discuss it. I was happy, I was satisfied she’d listened to reason.
But then, a few days later, she emailed me with the excited note— ‘things are moving,’ about an anti-vaxxer march in Washington D.C. that was coming up. I realized then, she was lost.
This all made me so very angry, and made me feel quite hopeless, and really shocked me that someone I actually knew and respected, was succumbing to this sort of group madness.
As it turned out, the demonstration was very sparsely attended, but one obscene statement by one speaker, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (yes, son of assassinated Bobby Kennedy), has lingered in the press: he said that being asked to wear masks and get vaccinated is worse than what Anne Frank was subjected to in the Holocaust. As I write this, today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Two out of every three Jews in Europe were murdered during World War Two by the Nazis. I am reminded of the importance of teaching about the history of genocides, and how they begin with the rise of autocratic populist leaders.
But what to do, even when my friend B. is falling for this? I found one article, “Why people believe in conspiracy theories, and how to change their minds,” by Mark Lorch, a professor of science in Great Britain. He said, don’t mention the misconceptions, that’s what people will remember. Then he explained what I had just experienced with B—the boomerang effect: “To make matters worse, presenting corrective information to a group with firmly held beliefs can actually strengthen their view, [and] tend to invoke self-justification and even stronger dislike of opposing theories, which can make us more entrenched in our views. This has become known as the ‘boomerang effect.’” The article recommended not challenging opponents’ worldviews, and to use stories to make your point. Ad agencies understand this. So, where are the public service campaigns to promote masks and vaccines?
Then, I read about “The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness,” by Greg Boyle, S.J. in “America, the Jesuit Review.” The book reviewer, Mary Gibbons, quotes Boyle: “We’ve mistaken moral outrage for moral compass,” Boyle writes. “Moral compass helps you see with clarity how complex and damaged people are… I suppose if I thought that moral outrage worked, I’d be out raging. But rage just means we don’t understand yet.” He recounts an incident when 10 people were killed in a Texas high school shooting a number of years ago. Senator Ted Cruz said, “Once again, Texas has seen the face of evil.” But Boyle remembers the words of another commentator: “[A] teenage girl and fellow student of the shooter said, ‘The one who did this must have been carrying a world of pain inside.’ Understanding love is who our God is. Love this way announces the Tender One.” I think again about B., who’d had an abusive upbringing that left her fragile, and how today in joining a new, seemingly ‘fringe’ community, she’s found that intoxicating draw again; ‘We’re in on a secret that no one else is. We’re special.’ I feel frustration that someone so close to me would fall prey to this madness and that I wasn’t able to stop them, that they didn’t listen to me. I know she needs something, to hang on to. I am sad though, that this is what she chose. It worries me.
#
Diane Joy Schmidt is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter in Albuquerque who was raised in the traditions of Reform Judaism, and is an admirer of all things spiritually resonant. Visit her at www.dianejoyschmidt.com.
New U.S. Government settlement for individual Navajo farmers
Navajo farmers with poisoned lands and waterways waited seven years for justice. Now, they may finally get some justice. A settlement offer is on the table for the individual farmers who suffered losses and joined in a mass tort case against the government. In 2015, the Gold King Mine spill poisoned the Animas and San Juan rivers and shut down farming and ranching for Navajo farmers. It was devastating.
The EPA asked people to file Form 95 tort claims to document their losses. After some initial reservations about trusting the EPA, eventually close to 300 Navajo farmers and ranchers filled out the forms. Then, the EPA turned around and denied the claims.
At that point the Navajo administration under Russell Begaye determined that, if the individual farmers and ranchers were going to recover, they had to pursue a lawsuit. They reached out to a law firm in Santa Fe to see if they would take on the individual cases of the farmers.
It was snowing in Santa Fe this Friday, November 4th, when Kate Ferlic, partner in the politically well-connected Santa Fe law firm of Egolf Ferlic Martinez Harwood, shared in an interview with the Navajo Times the first news that a settlement offer has been made by the United States government to these Navajo farmers, known as the Allen plaintiffs (because someone named Allen filed the first Form 95 after the spill).
Attorney Kate Ferlic discusses the settlement offer now on the table for the Navajo farmers who sued the EPA over the Gold King Mine spill in 2015.
Ferlic had hinted Monday that she had some news but was tight-lipped until the plaintiffs had all been notified and she had checked with the U.S. government lawyers and gotten the green light, so she was now ready to share the news:
“The Allen plaintiffs have reached a settlement in principle with the United States,” said Kate Ferlic, lead attorney for the now 200-plus farmers and ranchers who had previously been denied by the EPA for their losses.
She invited another lawyer to join in the meeting, Mark Cox, who also “put blood sweat and tears into this litigation,” and both agreed, “Seven years is a long time to wait.” She added, “We are thrilled for the farmers and ranchers.”
Ferlic and lawyer Mark Cox confer on the settlement offer. “Seven years is a long time. We are thrilled for the farmers and ranchers.”
What exactly is Form 95? The Department of Justice states that, “The Standard Form 95 is used to present claims against the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) for property damage, personal injury, or death allegedly caused by a federal employee’s negligence or wrongful act or omission occurring within the scope of the employee’s federal employment.”
Eventually the government admitted negligence. Ferlic explained that those who had originally filed a Form 95 that was denied were eligible to be included in the mass tort suit.
Originally there were about 290 claimants. Now there are about 224. Ferlic explained that initially some dropped out who chose not participate in discovery; in other words, they didn’t fill out the forms they were sent asking for information specific to their losses. And, over time others passed away, many from Covid. She said they reached out to the heirs, and there are some estates in the suit, but not all responded. She said they made every effort to contact families, saying “We sent them dozens of letters.”
She said, “If everyone can sign and send back releases by the end of November, then we can have, or I should say, we hope to have checks to them in January.” said Ferlic.
Ferlic says the law office will be coming to the Navajo Nation to host meetings the week of November 14th to answer questions or discuss specific settlement offers. Ferlic explained the meetings are only open to their clients — “That means you can only attend if we are your lawyers,” but she wanted to make sure the information was printed in the paper.
The meetings will be held at the following places: Shiprock Chapter House, Tuesday November 15 from 10-12 San Juan Chapter House, Tuesday November 15 from 2-4 Nenahnezad Chapter House Wednesday November 16 from 10-12 Red Mesa Chapter House Thursday November 17 from 10-12 Aneth Chapter House Thursdav November 17 from 2-4
Notification letters went out
Ferlic said that notification letters were mailed out on Saturday, October 29th to all the farmers in the suit detailing the terms of the settlement. She would not say how much the settlement is—yet. She explained that the total amount of the settlement remains confidential until the settlement is finalized. Then the total amount will be public knowledge when the case settles.
However, she did indicate that the response from the confidential letters she sent out has been positive. “The response has been positive from what we’ve heard so far. Folks probably got their letters Tuesday. The office has been flooded with calls all week, we’ve heard back from about 25% so far,” she said. And they have already received back a number of signed agreements.
It has clearly been a very personal case for Ferlic. “I have been out to Shiprock,Hogback, Nenahnezad, Aneth, all of these people, all of these places, throughout the litigation. Phone calls, mail, all of that. I really have met some of the most incredible people of my career through this litigation.”
Ferlic understands that the expected settlement win is bittersweet. Over this long seven years, “Fields go fallow, people sell up equipment in order to live. I really hope that this settlement goes through, and two, that farming flourishes again in those areas. And it’s expensive” to revive a farm, she said.
Different amounts
Individual farmers will receive different amounts. Ferlic explained that to figure out how much each person would receive, they had a person with special expertise work on it. “Our expert agricultural economist considered a whole bunch of factors in determining individual amounts, and standardized prices in determining those amounts. Like, an acre of melons was worth the same across all of the farmers and ranchers. We provided the rubric (a type of scoring guide) to all of the individuals through the discovery process. Each of the farmers and ranchers provided individualized information, detailing their losses.”
New settlement
This mass tort settlement is separate from the $31 million dollar settlement the Navajo government reached with the EPAback in June.
Ferlic indicated that the Navajo Nation is going to go after additional compensation from the U.S. government for the farmers.
What is a mass tort? A mass tort iskind of like a class action lawsuit, only it’s different, because in a mass tort, through a claims process, it is determined what each individual member gets. Mass tort suits are more commonly done now than class action lawsuits, and lawyers usually work on a contingency basis, meaning, they only get paid if they obtain successful results. Ferlic said their firm took the case on a contingency basis.
A bit about Ferlic During the interview, Ferlic took one call. “That was my child,” she explained. “I have two sons, a 14-year-old and a 10-year-old.” Ferlic grew up in South Bend, Indiana. She studied philosophy and theology at Georgetown University as an undergraduate, and later moved to New Mexico (“it’s a long story”) to work as a journalist at the Santa Fe New Mexican and then, at Outside Magazine. She met her husband here, and decided to go to law school at the University of New Mexico where received her law degree in 2006. She worked as special counsel to former Governor Bill Richardson before joining this firm. She welcomed the snow coming down outside and said, “I love to ski.”
In summing up her career as a lawyer, she says, “I’m an advocate for social justice. I think that through litigation, you can change the way either corporations or governments behave. I certainly think that litigation is a tool for social change.” #
Awarded: 1st place Agriculture Reporting, New Mexico Press Women, 2023.
Eugenia Charles-Newton, Navajo Nation District 9 delegate representing Shiprock, is running for re-election. Navajo Times, November 3, 2022 – A10 Story and photo by Diane Joy Schmidt
Corrales Comment Oct. 28, 2022 Story and photos by Diane Joy Schmidt
Cottonwoods along Corrales Road from Mira Sol heading north. Oct. 19, 2022. Photo by Diane Joy Schmidt After a beloved Cottonwood at Corrales Road and Uva was brought down, irate villagers left notes and flowers. Photo by Diane Joy Schmidt
A beloved cottonwood that graced Corrales Road at Uva Road to the west was cut down on September 7th. Irate tree lovers left notes and flowers on the stump for weeks, including prominent cardboard signs, one read ‘murderer.’ A final note provocatively asked “WTF?”
Did this impressive tree have to be completely cut down? Who was responsible? What does this mean going forward with other trees along Corrales Road?
The tree was on a right of way that the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (MRGCD) is responsible for. The easement is now completely barren as you enter Corrales until you get to Mira Sol, where the ditch and the district’s easement veers away from the road. There the right of way becomes the provenance of New Mexico State Highway 448, aka Corrales Road. This can be seen on a state survey map, provided to the paper by Corrales P&Z administrator Laurie Stout.
At that point, a lush if unpruned canopy of cottonwood trees provides a peaceful coolness as the road continues deeper into Corrales. The cottonwoods coexist with the telephone lines running through them. On the east side of Corrales Road are the high voltage power lines that are the responsibility of PNM.
MRGCD CEO Jason Casuga said, “We went to look at the the tree and saw it was was within our right of way and overhanging the road. We’ve recently had several claims related to trees from our right of way, that overhang private property and we’ve ended up being responsible for those trees. We had the tree assessed by an arborist, who found that 50% of the tree was hollowed and dying in the structure, and there could be a structural integrity issue.”
Based on this report, he said that once they knew this, the agency had no other choice than to have the tree removed.
Casuga said he prefers not to cut down trees—he cited a situation in the North Valley where an arborist came out to look at a tree overhanging a home. The arborist told him, “this tree is structurally fine. Just take these limbs down, and the tree has got many year left.” He said, “We paid the money to have the tree limbs just trimmed and the tree stayed.”
In the case of the Corrales cottonwood, they had to make a determination that if the tree was a hazard going forward, that just trimming the overhanging limbs was not recommended. Casuga pointed out that no one likes seeing a tree cut down, “But what happens if we don’t cut it down and then it hurts somebody? Which is worse?”
Corrales Fire Chief Anthony Martinez said that the MRGCD contacted him to remove the tree. He said that they work together and that the fire department maintains the trees on both rights of way in conjunction with their Public Works Department.
Martinez said, “We’ve seen a need over the years, of trees encroaching on roadways,” and where they interfere with fire equipment access. “So, years ago, we applied for funding to try to get a truck with a boom. We don’t have the resources or budget to hire an arborist or a tree trimmer.”
Finally the legislature came through with funds, and they were able to make the purchase of an urban forestry truck. “We’ve been training, and last year alone I calculated, we probably saved the village between seventy and eighty thousand dollars.” Chief Martinez added, “I own it. I’m the one who cut it down. If there’s a hazard tree, and it’s dangerous, then we just want to remove it.”
Chief Martinez said that last spring when there were high winds, that trees were sparking on power lines, and “we had multiple fires from power lines with trees.” He is very concerned about what could happen. He said he goes out with his 500-gallon water truck and waters the trees in the bosque regularly, and they have a pilot program planting new trees. He would like all private property owners made responsible for their trees, throughout the village.
In Ruidoso in southern New Mexico, this spring a tree fell on a power line and started a fire that eventually burned 200 homes. Two older residents died. A state agency report later determined that “wind gusts of up to 80 mph toppled a 49-foot-tall drought-stressed tree on April 12, causing electrical lines to arc and ignite the fire,” the Albuquerque Journal reported. Lawsuits have ensued against the power company.
Our drought-stressed trees are drying out. Thomas Neiman, a long-time Corrales resident, certified tree arborist and master gardener said, “We are in a drought. And winter drought is really awful. In the wintertime the trees are really suffering with more stress.” He said that during winter months, trees should be watered once a month when the ground is not frozen. “Tree roots can die in the winter just as they can in the summer.”
Neiman was shown the arborist’s report to the MRGCD, and concurred with their decision that the cottonwood had to come down. He said “it’s always going to be a question of “point-counterpoint.” Neiman recalled the controversy many years ago over an historic cottonwood at the Old Church that was dropping limbs. Two separated arborists determined that it had to come down. Nevertheless, when it was cut down, the village tree committee resigned in protest.
Chief Martinez was asked if the canopy of Cottonwood trees heading further north from Mira Sol could be a problem. He indicated that in the future they could be slated for removal.
What can be done proactively? We all admire our leafy corridor. Could the citizens of Corrales come together and raise funds to prune and care for these trees along our public roadways that we so admire, to ensure the beauty of our village? #
As published Corrales Comment October 28. 2022.
3rd Place, Green/Environmental Reporting, New Mexico Press Women
New Mexico Jewish Link Spring, 2021 view as published here Rockower Award Winner, 2022 Social Justice and Humanitarian Reporting, American Jewish Press Association, Magazine Division.
By Diane Joy Schmidt
In case you’ve become complacent after our year-long lockdown, opening the newspapers on any given day will reawaken you to the urgency of the pandemic. Sometimes personal stories hit the hardest – an anesthesiologist writes about looking into the eyes of his terrified patients as he intubates them, knowing that some may not wake up again; in Brazil, where the president has followed no health policy, when the oxygen ran out at a hospital, the intubated patients suffocated and died. Now news reports are slowly beginning to surface revealing how Trump, simply wanting to make states look bad, deliberately slowed access to PPE last spring and then in the fall, refused funding to the states to prepare for the vaccination program.
A radiologist, Dr. Bailey, who has been working with Covid patients since December, 2019, has been in touch with the Sephardic Heritage Program here while applying to the Portuguese citizenship program. She offered to share her experiences as a radiologist, and to share the latest recommendations for what preventive measures we all can be taking now. She also has been personally and actively involved in trying to bring shipments of PPE here from overseas, and relates how they were confiscated by the Trump administration.
Bailey explained that as patients come into the hospital with the Covid virus, they first will get a chest X-ray. But, she explained, “it’s very difficult, sometimes to actually discern what’s happening on a chest X ray, the chest x-ray may look normal, but the patient is very, very symptomatic,” having difficulty breathing, “so they move on to a CT scan (a CT scan, or computerized tomography scan, often pronounced ‘cat scan,’ is a method of making multiple X-ray images of parts of the body with a computer). It’s not uncommon to have a normal chest X ray and a very abnormal CT scan with the virus.”
“We’re getting a lot of CT scans looking for thrombus (blood clots) in the lungs. This virus is an inflammatory disease, and so it attacks organs. Blood vessels are considered an organ system, and it’s causing clots. And so sometimes the shortness of breath may be more because you’re really having blood clots. So, the x-rays are followed by the CT of the chest, specifically looking not just for the COVID pneumonia, but also making sure that there’s no additional blood clots, you know, pulmonary embolus along with it.
“When you get a clot, if it’s big, and if it’s sitting in the wrong place, people immediately succumb to that because they can’t breathe, there’s something blocking their arteries. And, this can affect even younger people, it can affect all populations, because no one knows how this inflammatory disease will affect you. And we look at ultrasounds of the lower extremities, the legs, to see where those clots are coming from.”
This reporter asked if taking baby aspirin might be a good preventative measure if you test positive for the virus. Dr. Bailey said that while aspirin is a blood-thinner, people must first check with their doctor, “because any medication you take always has a side effect.” Generally speaking, doctors say you should not take aspirin if you are already on blood thinners, if you have gastric issues like ulcers, or if it will interfere with other medications, like chemo, for instance.
Dr. Bailey does however, without hesitation, strongly recommend Vitamin C for everyone, along with Vitamin D. “Vitamin C acts like an anti-inflammatory agent. We know that we’re all supposed to be taking vitamin D, but perhaps we need to also be telling people that Vitamin C is necessary.” She explained that prophylactically, you are getting your body strengthened to fight this virus.
“One thing the hospitals are doing now is giving COVID patients IV vitamin C. there are physicians who are treating their patients with vitamin C. Vitamin C definitely works as an anti-inflammatory, it’s something you can take. It’s easy enough to get. It’s not a medication, you can’t overdo it.”
According to NIH reports and other medical sources, the current daily recommendation is 1000 milligrams of Vitamin C and 5000 milligrams of Vitamin D. Dr. Bailey also said the liquid form, liposomal Vitamin C, is absorbed better by the body, and a brand, Lypo-Spheric Vitamin C, can be purchased online.
“If your immune system is really at the top of where it could be, you’ll decrease the the worse effects that could possibly happen if you get the virus. And some people will just get COVID and go right through it. Vitamin C is one of the best things that everyday people can do for themselves, besides wearing a mask, to prevent getting the virus. I would love to see more people aware of Vitamin C.”
What does Dr. Bailey think about double-masking? “The medical community suggested to double-mask about six months ago, but this message never got out to the wider community. And part of that, I believe has been more because medicine has been politicized, rather than just being there for telling the facts.
“Here, we have been double masking all along, and now we have the different strains. Getting the right masks is important. A bandana around your face doesn’t protect you. It’s better than nothing—it protects others if you sneeze, but it doesn’t protect you if someone else is talking to you. But it’s not like an N-95 masks, Of course, it would help if the country actually gave out masks to people. What has to occur now is for people to be double masked, take their vitamin D, take their vitamin C. Those are the prophylactic things people can do.”
Is Bailey hopeful that the Biden administration will handle the rollout of the vaccine better? “I do think they will handle it better. Studies are coming out, that only 60 to 70% of front-line workers are choosing to take the vaccine.” She says that has been due to a lack of transparency, and that the medical community now has a chance to get the word out so that people understand the research. “Still, this country won’t be back to where it was, until, we’re predicting, the fall of 2022.”
Dr. Bailey also expressed concern that vaccinations need to reach everyone. “We have to be able to reach marginalized communities…on the Indian reservations across this country, we already know they’re a population that’s always vulnerable, with regard to receiving medical care.”
In the last week of January, the Navajo Times did report that the Navajo health system had reached 10% of their targeted vaccinations. At that time, according to a New York Times data map, New Mexico was at 6%.
Dr. Bailey wanted to stress how devastating it has been that the messages about masking were garbled over the last year. When asked if it looks like we’ve dodged a bullet now, she said,
“No, I don’t. What’s dodging the bullet? By the end of the year of 2020, 2021, we’re looking at 700,000 people. Could we say that we dodged the bullet? No, I think that we just we just didn’t do the right thing here.”
Dr. Bailey has been personally actively trying to get shipments of need masks delivered, but those efforts had been blocked. “In the spring of last year, what we were bringing in was being confiscated by the Trump administration. We’ve had shippers who have stated that they could not bring it in. Hospitals were scrambling for PPE. And not because there was a lack of getting it from other countries who were selling it. China, Thailand or anywhere else, but, you just could not get it in, and that helped to spread this virus. People could not protect themselves early. With this new administration, I will try again. But under the Trump administration, we could not get them.”
Bailey said that they were not able to ascertain what happened to the shipment that she had ordered that was confiscated. She said, “The sender didn’t get paid, and it wasn’t returned to them, and we didn’t receive it.” They tried to track it down but, “it’s a quagmire coming through very busy ports, in Boston, New York, Miami, it’s very difficult to track down. So we’re hoping that Biden can look at that process. The question remains, what happened to all of those PPE’s that were taken? Where did they go? We hope someday there’s an investigation, we figure that out. So we don’t know what happened to them. But we do know that all of this action, or inaction, led to where we are today.”
Indeed. Medical personnel all across the country have struggled, watching patients and colleagues die, baffled that the Administration was not able provide emergency supplies. But more really could have been done.
In The New Yorker on Sept. 28, 2020, Jane Mayer wrote up the story of how Robert F. Kennedy’s grandson Max, recently graduated from Harvard, volunteered in March to help out with the White House Covid-19 Supply-Chain Task Force. He was shocked to discover that he and the 20 or so inexperienced volunteers were not there to help out, they were expected to be the task force, the front-line against the pandemic. Disgusted, knowing medical workers were having to wear garbage bags and reuse masks, within weeks he became an anonymous whistle-blower to Congress. Even though he had signed a non-disclosure agreement, Kennedy said, “‘If you see something that might be illegal, and cause thousands of civilian lives to be lost, a person has to speak out.’ The Administration’s coronavirus response, he said, ‘was like a family office meets organized crime, melded with ‘Lord of the Flies.’ It was a government of chaos.’ ”
Another story published in Stat, the medical newsletter, on January 31st, 2021, titled, “Trump officials actively lobbied to deny states money for vaccine rollout last fall,” is based on new information coming out now from former Trump aides. Trump’s people kept insisting that 200 million dollars they had already handed out to states hadn’t been spent yet, so they shouldn’t get any more. The states hadn’t spent it because the vaccines hadn’t arrived yet, but obviously that was a drop in the bucket of what is needed to administer vaccinations to 350,000 million people.
The Sephardic Heritage program, based at the Jewish Federation of New Mexico under the leadership of Program Director Dr. Sara Koplik, is unique in assisting those around the world in getting Spain and now Portuguese passports for those whose families were forced out by the Inquisition of 1492 in Spain and then the Portuguese Inquisition in 1536. The program has saved the lives of peoples fleeing Venezuela, and is bringing additional kudos to New Mexico.
Bailey has learned her husband’s family left Catalunya, Spain at the time of the Spanish Inquisition, then went to Portugal, then was forced to leave again, and moved to Constantinople, Turkey, and later moved within the Ottoman Empire to what would later become Romania. Following a pogram in 1906, half of fthe family left Romania and went back to Constantinople, and the other half joined the first Zionist settlement in Palestine, Rishon LeZion, which in 1882 was still part of the Ottoman Empire. At the end of World War I the British took over. The journey continues.
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