Hispanic Fanatic

In a few weeks, the US government will end COVID-19 emergency declarations, meaning that the pandemic will officially be over.

Hey, that wasn’t so bad, was it?

You know, aside from the years of death and madness and depression and trauma and societal unraveling, it wasn’t that big of a deal, right?

Ahem.

In any case, the pandemic provoked behavioral changes that we could not have imagined in 2019, like carrying a mask everywhere or washing your hands incessantly or sticking those weird clamp things on your fingers to check your oxygen levels.

Those were called pulse oximeters, by the way, and they were “a crucial tool for tracking the health of COVID-19 patients.”

Yes, pulse oximeters helped gauge the severity of the illness. They were a sterling example of medical knowledge, technological innovation, and white supremacy.

OK, that last one is an unpleasant addendum. But unfortunately, it is true.

You see, pulse oximeters were often “inaccurate when measuring oxygen levels in people with dark skin tones.”

This is because medical products are often developed using data from “trials that involve primarily white individuals.” As a result, pulse oximeters were designed to work well on white people. For the rest of us, however, not so much.

Experts say “it’s not possible to know how much pulse oximeters have contributed to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on people of color.” But considering Latinos and blacks “experienced higher rates of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 compared to white people,” it was likely a factor.

Of course, the assumption that white is the most common skin color, or even the only skin color, has a long history in America.

Until the 1960s, Crayola crayons had a pinkish hue that was labeled, “flesh.” 

And as we all know, band-aids don’t come in dark brown, which has “long been a point of contention among people of color who have questioned why white skin is the default shade for a range of flesh-toned products, including nude bras and other garments.”

Why, indeed?

But you will be happy to know that the baseline for the human experience is not just white people, but white men specifically.

We’re not just talking about the fact that white men hold over 60% of all elected offices, despite being just 30% of the population.

Or the fact that most films and TV shows focus on a white male protagonist. 

Or that white men are apparently the only group whose opinions matter, and that the rest of us are pretty much at their mercy.

No, I’m talking about air conditioning.

Yes, you heard me correctly.

Back in the 1960s, when air conditioning became common in office buildings, engineers needed a standard to ensure the temperature would be comfortable.

And of course, they based this standard on the preferences of white men in wool suits — the Don Drapers of the era. 

These temperatures “favor the thermal preferences of men,” and are the baseline to this day, which is why women in office settings often feel like they’re freezing.

It’s because they are.

But don’t worry. Those white guys in suits are perfectly comfortable.

It seems that “everything in our society is centered around preserving white male power regardless of white male skill or talent.” And this is not just annoying. It’s also detrimental to our nation.

You see, the “rewarding of white male mediocrity not only limits the drive and imagination of white men; it also requires forced limitations on the success of women and people of color in order to deliver on the promised white male supremacy.”

When everyone just assumes that a certain group should be in charge (i.e., white guys), members of that group don’t have to excel to succeed, while members of other groups struggle, and the culture as a whole stagnates.

In this way, “white male mediocrity harms us all.”

Unfortunately, this situation is unlikely to change any time soon.

But hey, at least the pandemic is over.

It’s bizarre how often Americans are forced to prove themselves.

You must have a full-time job to prove that you are worthy of health care.

You must take on crippling debt to prove that you deserve a college education.

If you’re a woman, you must prove that you understand your own body.

If you’re an immigrant, you must prove that you love this country better than people who are born here.

If you’re homeless, you must prove that you are drug-free to get housing (even if the exact opposite approach works better).

It goes on and on. But you’ll be glad to know that there are exceptions to all this proving. 

For example, if you’re a lunatic millionaire racist who led the country into unprecedented disaster, you deserve another chance.

Also, if you’re a toddler in Missouri, you can openly carry a gun in the street. We trust you.

Yes, Americans seem like a skeptical bunch, always demanding proof. But they are actually quite discerning about what requires evidence.

For example, most Americans emphatically believe there is a man in the sky who controls the universe, despite the fact that he has never revealed himself.

They are mixed, however, on the whole concept of climate change, despite vast amounts of solid data obtained over decades 

They may or may not believe that vaccines cause autism, or that covid exists, or that JFK is actually alive and working to overthrow a vast conspiracy run by lizard people. Really, millions of Americans believe that last one.

And still the contradictions mount.

Consider that many people think Biden stole the election (despite the absence of evidence), but these same individuals refuse to believe that giving people money or free food helps alleviate poverty (despite an abundance of evidence).

Of course, it doesn’t help that we are deeply suspicious of how poor people spend their cash, even while bursting with admiration for wealthy jerks who blow obscene amounts of money on egotistic endeavors and grotesque trivialities. There is quick judgment for what a poor person puts in her grocery cart, but foot-kissing praise for billionaires who spend the equivalent of Denmark’s GDP on themselves.

Other beliefs similarly defy reason.

For example, a high percentage of Americans believe that racism is dead, except if it’s directed at white people. But they also believe in blatant racist stereotypes so strongly that it affects public policy.

Yes, American life is a strange combination of superstition, illogical thinking, and skewed beliefs that are mixed with vociferous demands for objective proof that is usually ignored.

For many of us, there will never be enough evidence to change our minds. 

And that’s a fact.

Yes, things have been grim in America for the past few years. To be honest, they haven’t been that great for a couple of decades now.

In fact, a serious case can be made that the nation’s high-water mark was the 1990s, when we had grunge rock, the X-files, a booming economy, and a conservative movement that was going crazy (but not yet fully psychotic). 

Also, I was still young, which is, when you think about it, really the most important thing.

But in the spirit of optimism — and before we get too far into 2023 and allow it to crush us like the other 2020s so far — I will point out several positive developments.

First, child poverty has “dramatically decreased in the U.S. over the past 25 years.” The chief reason may be the Child Tax Credit, which helped cut child poverty by roughly 30 percent. 

Of course, that tax credit has now been eliminated, so there is a chance the rate will go up again. And compared to “other developed nations, child poverty rates in America remain higher than the rest.”

But hey, let’s not kill the vibe.

Moving on, we see that the rates of cervical cancer have “dropped an astonishing 65% among women in their early 20s.” This is primarily because of vaccinations against the human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes this type of cancer. So many women have taken advantage of the HPV vaccine that herd immunity has kicked in, and “rates have dropped among unvaccinated women as well.”

It’s true that many religious zealots refuse to let their teenage daughters get vaccinated because they would literally rather have their kids get cancer than engage in premarital sex, but… ha, I see what you did there. Almost got me to go negative, didn’t you?

Nope, we’re going to continue on the good-news train.

Here’s something: inflation is slowing down, and the federal budget deficit has fallen significantly, going from $2.6 trillion to $1.4 trillion.

These are very positive economic developments, and everyone can cheer them. Well, except for Republicans, who are determined to drive America into default and wreck the economy out of some bizarre desire to punish Biden or parade their ignorance or just burn everything down. Who can tell anymore?

No, we are staying positive. 

So ignore all that GOP nonsense and move on to this intriguing fact: The racial gap in death rates of covid has disappeared.

We all know that the pandemic hit ethnic minorities far harder than white people, but “in a country with deep racial inequities, where covid was initially another tragic example, the virus is no longer disproportionately harming Black and Hispanic Americans.” This improvement is due to “passionate advocacy and hard work by many community health officials.”

That’s uplifting, right?

Don’t be a buzzkill by pointing out that “this accomplishment continues to receive relatively little attention,” probably because “the remaining pool of unvaccinated Americans is disproportionately Republican, and Republicans are disproportionately white.”

You see, white Republicans don’t want to admit that vaccines work, and that the pandemic was real. And the mainstream media does whatever white Republicans say, which is another example of the lobsided balance of power in this country and how we all bend over backward to appease ignorance.

It doesn’t even matter that Latinos “suffered more COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people than most other racial and ethnic groups for most of the pandemic” and that “the Latino community’s rising prosperity may be in jeopardy” because of the devastation that the virus wrought. 

But no, let’s talk about how white Republicans can’t have their feelings hurt and…

Stop. Stay calm. Ok, moving on.

Another upbeat development is that there has been mild progress on climate change, as “renewable power soars, vulnerable ecosystems gain rights, and climate protocols start to pay dividends.”

That’s almost enough to make you forget that “the oil giant Exxon privately ‘predicted global warming correctly and skillfully’ only to then spend decades publicly rubbishing such science in order to protect its core business.”

It turns out that “the only thing Exxon did better than predicting the future was lying about it.” If you need a refresher on how evil corporations can be, and how climate denialism indicates sheer idiocy, this is “your umpteenth reminder that we’ve known about the coming (now here) disaster for decades.”

Well, my quest for positive news is getting shaky now. Perhaps I can combine my last two items — the pandemic and climate change — into one hopeful story.

Yes, here it is: As global temperatures rise, it becomes “more likely that viruses and bacteria locked up in glaciers and permafrost could reawaken and infect local wildlife.” This means that the next killer pandemic may not come “from bats or birds but from matter in melting ice.”

So if the heat doesn’t kill us, the viruses will.

Damn. There goes all my optimism.

Ok, what was I saying about the 1990s? Yeah, I guess those were the motherfucking days.

At least we’ll always have Soundgarden.

What would you give for an extra year of life?

Most of us would sacrifice a fair amount for that luxury. Everyone is on limited time, after all, and we likely want as many days on Earth as we can get.

However, if you are Latino, you are not in a position to angle for additional time. Hell, you’re lucky to be alive enough to read this.

Yes, in addition to the fact that we perpetually lag behind other groups when it comes to mortality, there is the disturbing truth that COVID-19 hit Latinos harder than other demographics. And just how devastating was the pandemic to Hispanics?

To continue reading this post, please click here.

With luck, this will be the last time I write about Covid-19. 

You see, some experts believe that we may finally be nearing the end of this wretched, soul-crushing, nation-defiling pandemic. That means no more news stories about thousands of Americans dying daily, no more anti-maskers punching people out, and no more Facebook posts about robots in your bloodstream (ok, that last one will probably stick around).

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the virus will magically go away. Hey, it was supposed to do that 18 months ago.

To continue reading this post, please click here.

Conservatives don’t like carrots. And it’s not just because they hate vegans, or that metaphorically, they like being thrown red meat.

No, it’s because when deciding between the carrot or the stick, conservatives will choose the stick every time. And not just for themselves, but for you and me as well. It’s stick stick stick nonstop.

For example, progressives have begged conservatives for months now to get the vaccine, appealing to their sense of reason, patriotism, and compassion for others. We have offered them money, nodded respectfully when they spewed conspiratorial nonsense, and presented heart-wrenching stories of right-wingers on their death beds who regretted their anti-vaxx stance (and there have been a lot of those guys).

Their response has been to scream in our faces, move the goal posts yet again, and chug horse medicine.

The message is clear: Being nice to conservatives doesn’t work.

To continue reading this post, please click here.

There’s an iron law in politics: Regardless of the actual reason for a crisis, Republicans will always blame immigrants.

Yes, as we all know, the GOP leaders of Florida could not unleash more death upon their state if they hired snipers to shoot at random cars on the freeway. But they deny that their disdain for vaccines and refusal to mask up has, in any way, led to the completely predictable and totally preventable surge of the delta variant that is consuming their residents.

No, according to the GOP, it is once again all those filthy Hispanics swarming across the border (and then presumably swimming across the Gulf of Mexico) that are infesting the brave patriots of Florida.

This pathetic deflection is typical of a political party that has to come up with increasingly ludicrous excuses for being so obviously, painfully, and catastrophically wrong about the coronavirus. They are furiously scrambling to come up with yet more convoluted explanations of how two plus two equals nine. We can practically hear the self-doubt and see the flop sweat.

To continue reading this post, please click here.

Just over one year ago, the United States suffered its first known Covid-19 death. At the time, many scientific experts were concerned that a pandemic would erupt, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Those experts were pretty much ignored, in favor of just wishing that the virus would magically go away.

And now here we are, 12 months later, with no pandemic problems whatsoever (as long as we don’t count the 450,000 dead Americans).

Hey, what do those egghead “experts” know, right?

In any case, it’s worth noting that while the coronavirus doesn’t care who it infects, we Americans most certainly do. And our top priority is ensuring that affluent White people do not get sick.

But Covid-19 can devastate entire Latino communities without Americans getting upset about it. We know this is true because that’s exactly what has happened.

Coronavirus hospitalization rates for Latinos are more than quadruple the rate among Whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and “in almost every state in the nation, the number of Latinos affected by the disease is higher” than their percentage of the population.

Furthermore, Hispanics get infected at a higher rate than other groups and often suffer worse effects. This is because, for starters, we are more likely to have underlying health issues, and less likely to have health insurance.

But it is also because Latinos often work in jobs that potentially put us at risk. And yes, many of those jobs are on the fabled frontline.

This is especially true among the undocumented. In fact, “more than two-thirds of undocumented immigrant workers have frontline jobs considered ‘essential’ to the U.S. fight against Covid-19.” And nearly one million essential workers are Dreamers protected by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

So if you’re keeping track, Latino immigrants are keeping the country afloat, and putting themselves at enormous risk to do so, in exchange for being demonized, threatened, and blamed for all of the nation’s problems.

Sweet deal, huh?

It would be nice, of course, if the country acknowledged the huge debt that it owes to Latinos. But many Americans are too busy shouting slurs at us, or calling 911 over minor slights, or just cheering on ICE raids. So they haven’t gotten around to writing out the thank-you notes yet.

Maybe they’ll be more grateful during the next pandemic, when no doubt, Latinos will once again be tasked with rescuing a nation that hates them.

And speaking of the next viral outbreak, remember in the early days of coronavirus, when many people said that diseases like SARS and bird flu seemed like a test run?

Well, it’s quite possible that SARS and H1N1 were not warnings about Covid-19. It may be that Covid-19 is itself a warning of something much worse to come in the future.

Next time, I wonder if we’ll listen to the experts.

When this horrific era of death and isolation and lockdowns and screaming men with guns and infinitely long Zoom meetings finally ends, I know the phrase that will encapsulate it for me:

“Can I please share?”

That’s what my seven-year-old son says approximately 3,862 times a day. He yells this while he is in his remote-learning class, when he is one of two dozen second graders vying for the teacher’s attention.

“Can I please share?” he will shout while waving his artwork or math sheet or grammar lesson at the computer screen. Of course, many of the other kids in the class also want to share their work, or just be the first one to give the right answer. So they all start shouting, “Can I please share?” or “I want to share” or “It’s my turn to share.”

And then it turns into an online Lord of the Flies, but with arguments about adverbs and improper fractions.

In any case, I’m grateful that my son is doing ok in his virtual classroom. Because the same cannot be said about many American kids.

Although early studies of online learning indicate that “the Covid-19 pandemic and the learning disruptions it caused have been less detrimental than researchers had expected,” it could be years before we know “the true educational toll of the pandemic — and the effects could be long-lasting.”

And we know that for many “Black and Hispanic students, as well as those in schools that serve low-income populations, the situation is more concerning — with marginalized students falling further behind in reading and math.”

This, of course, means that the educational gap between ethnic minority children and White kids is only widening.

Now, that’s grim news, to be sure. But hey, won’t everything get back to “normal” after all those kids get vaccinated and return to the classroom?

Well, this presupposes that Black and Latino kids get vaccinated at the same rate as White kids. And the truth is that “America’s history of racism in medical research and a lack of trust in the federal government is making some Black Americans and Latinos hesitant to take the vaccine.”

It’s almost like the Tuskegee experiments, the forced sterilization of Latinas, and the unethical testing of procedures “that caused health complications or death” have left ethnic minorities distrustful of the medical establishment.

I mean, what are the odds?

Currently, only 14% of Black Americans trust that a coronavirus vaccine will be safe. Latinos are more optimistic, with 34% saying they trust the vaccine to be safe. But compare that to the 61% of White people who are eager to be vaccinated.

The result is that “vaccine hesitancy could result in some Black and Latino Americans not being vaccinated as Covid-19 continues to batter their communities at disproportionate rates.”

Latinos have the additional burden of being fearful of the government, which is something that just sort of happens when a president spends his entire term demonizing Hispanics. Indeed, the Trump Administration’s “anti-immigration policies, public charge rules that create barriers to citizenship, and threats to the Affordable Care Act have made some Latino families reluctant to receive healthcare.”

As a final handicap, keep in mind that many ethnic minorities live “in poor and urban neighborhoods that don’t have doctors or healthcare facilities near their homes.”

So we have a situation where Black and Latino kids are suffering the most from the pandemic, and are the least likely to come out of it quickly.

For those kids, it will 2020 for years to come.

In theory, by this time next year we will all be vaccinated against COVID-19. And then we’ll hug and clap hands and laugh about the silly virus.

“That whole killer pandemic thing,” we will chortle. “What was that all about anyway?”

Well, before we banish the coronavirus and the entirety of 2020 into the deep, dark memory hole where we bury all our unpleasant thoughts, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the here and now.

You see, because of the Trump Administration’s unique combination of incompetence, hubris, idiocy, and depraved indifference, we are now at about 14 million Americans infected, with over 270,000 dead. We are seeing higher numbers of death on a daily basis, and soon we will endure the equivalent of “a 9/11 every single day.”

In response, the administration has fluctuated between doing nothing, embracing denialism, promoting quackery, and dismissing the experts, which is “in keeping with their guiding philosophy that there is no problem so great that it cannot be solved by knowing lessa bout it.”

Of course, this is not a recent collapse. Months ago, the administration basically gave up fighting the virus and hoped that “Americans will go numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day.”

And that’s pretty much what conservatives have done. Hey, over half (52%) of Republicans believe that “the U.S. reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic is overblown,” which is double the percentage of Democrats who think the same thing.

So if you’re in the GOP, overflowing hospitals and widespread death is no reason to get all excited. This is despite the fact that “only cancer and heart disease will kill more Americans this year” than coronavirus. In fact, the bug has already “killed more than twice as many Americans as either strokes or Alzheimer’s disease, about four times as many as diabetes, and more than eight times as many as either gun violence or vehicle accidents.”

Again, none of that is reason to be concerned — if you’re a Republican.

If you are not, and you actually respect science, you might be interested to know that recent studies verify “what health officials have been telling us for months: Masks do work by significantly slowing the spread of COVID-19.” In fact, there may be up to “a 50% reduction in the spread of COVID-19 in counties that had a mask mandate compared to those without.”

But of course, our disease-ridden president mocked facemasks for months, and provoked the stupidest culture war of all time, apparently because masks weren’t manly or would hurt the economy or something similarly incoherent.

Oh, and speaking of Republicans and their favorite subject — the economy — keep in mind that mask mandates lead to “greater confidence and spending among consumers,” and “are also linked to higher consumer mobility.”

So if conservatives really wanted to rescue the economy, and not just kill grandma in a futile ploy to boost Wall Street, they would be clamoring for everyone to wear a mask. Also, the conservative insistence that lockdowns would destroy the economy looks even more pathetic now, considering that most economists say “the U.S. would be in a better economic position now if lockdowns had been more aggressive at the beginning of the crisis.”

In essence, the Trumpian approach killed more people and made the economy worse — a win-win only if you are a delusional Republican or a cackling demon from the underworld who loves human suffering.

Yes, the virus was always going to be bad, but this level of calamity is the direct result of an infantile, self-obsessed president and his “incessant destruction of reason, evidence and science in the service of his personal whims, conspiratorial mindset and political requirements.”

In future generations, there will be myriad books, documentaries, and feature films about American life during coronavirus. And they will all come to the same conclusion:

It didn’t have to be this bad.