As always, Miriam, thank you. Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges all on the
same day!
I'm posting Naomi Klein's article on the ACB chat list. I'm not
changing any minds, but some of my posts do get reactions.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/10/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
How Not to Lose the Lockdown Generation
By Naomi Klein, The Intercept
07 August 20
Lessons from the New Deal point the way forward in the era of Covid-19.
Picture this: You live in rural Arkansas and tragedy strikes. A family
member has fallen ill with that contagious respiratory illness that has
already killed so many — but you don’t have enough space in your small home
to quarantine them in a room of their own. Your relative’s case doesn’t
appear to be life-threatening, but you are terrified that their persistent
cough will spread the illness to more vulnerable family members. You call
the local public health authority to see if there is room in local
hospitals, and they explain that they are all stretched too thin with
emergency cases. There are private facilities, but you can’t afford those.
Not to worry, you are told: A crew will be by shortly to set up a sturdy,
well-ventilated, portable, tiny house in your yard. Once installed, your
family member will be free to convalesce in comfort. You can deliver
home-cooked meals to their door and communicate through open windows — and
a
trained nurse will be by for regular examinations. And no, there will be no
charge for the house.
This is not a dispatch from some future functional United States, one with
a
government capable of caring for its people in the midst of spiraling
economic carnage and a public health emergency. It’s a dispatch from this
country’s past, a time eight decades ago when it similarly found itself in
the two-fisted grip of an even deeper economic crisis (the Great
Depression), and a surging contagious respiratory illness (tuberculosis).
Yet the contrast between how U.S. state and federal government met those
challenges in the 1930s, and how they are failing so murderously to meet
them now, could not be starker. Those tiny houses are just one example, but
they are a revelatory one for the sheer number of problems those humble
structures attempted to solve at once.
Known as “isolation huts,” the little clapboard houses were distributed to
poor families in several states. Small enough to fit on the back of a
trailer, they had just enough space for a bed, chair, dresser, and stove,
and were outfitted with large screened-in windows and shutters to maximize
the flow of fresh air and sunshine — considered essential for TB recovery.
As physical structures, the TB huts were an elegant answer to the public
health challenges posed by crowded homes on the one hand and expensive
private sanatoriums on the other. If houses were unable to accommodate safe
patient quarantines, then the state, with Washington’s help, would just
bring an addition to those houses for the duration of the illness.
It’s worth letting that sink in, given the learned helplessness that
pervades the U.S. today. For months, the White House hasn’t been able to
figure out how to roll out free Covid-19 tests at anything like the scale
required, let alone contact tracing, never mind quarantine support for poor
families. Yet in the 1930s, during a much more desperate economic time for
the country, state and federal agencies cooperated to deliver not just free
tests but free houses.
And that is only the beginning of what makes it worth dwelling on the TB
huts . The cabins themselves were built by very young men in their late
teens and early 20s who were out of work and had signed up for the National
Youth Administration. “The State Board of Health furnishes the materials
for
these cottages and NYA supplies the labor,” explained Betty and Ernest
Lindley, authors of a 1938 history of the program. “The total average cost
of one hut is $146.28,” or about $2,700 in today’s dollars.
The TB cabins were just one of thousands upon thousands of projects taken
on
by the 4.5 million young people who joined the NYA: a vast program started
in 1935 that paired young people in economic need, who could not find jobs
in the private sector, with publicly minded work that needed doing. They
gained marketable skills, while earning money that allowed many to stay, or
return to, high school or college. Other NYA projects including building
some of the country’s most iconic urban parks, repairing thousands of
dilapidated schools and outfitting them with playgrounds; and stocking
classrooms with desks, lab tables, and maps the young workers had made and
painted themselves. NYA workers built huge outdoor pools and artificial
lakes, trained to be teaching and nursing aides, and even built entire
youth
centers and small schools from scratch, often while living together in
“resident centers.”
The NYA served as a kind of urban complement to FDR’s better-known youth
program, the Civilian Conservation Corps, launched two years earlier. The
CCC employed some 3 million young men from poor families to work in forests
and farms: planting more than 2 billion trees, shoring up rivers from
erosion, and building the infrastructure for hundreds of state parks. They
lived together in a network of camps, sent money home to their families,
and
put on weight at a time when malnutrition was epidemic. Both the NYA and
the
CCC served a dual purpose: directly helping the young people involved, who
found themselves in desperate straights, and meeting the country’s most
pressing needs, whether for reforested lands or more hands in hospitals.
Like all New Deal programs, the NYA and CCC were stained by racial
segregation and discrimination. And the gender roles were — let’s just say
that the girls discovered they could sew, can, and heal; and the boys
discovered they could plant, build, and weld. Black girls in particular
were
streamed into domestic work.
Yet the scale of these two programs, which together altered the lives of
well over 7 million young people over the course of a decade, puts
contemporary governments to shame. Today, millions upon millions of young
people are beginning their adulthood with the ground collapsing beneath
their feet. The service jobs so many young adults depend on for rent and to
pay off student debt have vanished. Many of the industries they had hoped
to
enter are firing, not hiring. Internships and apprenticeships have been
canceled via mass emails, and promised job offers have been revoked.
These economic losses, combined with the decision of many colleges and
universities to close residences and move online, have abruptly severed
countless young adults from their support systems, pushed many into
homelessness, and others back into their childhood bedrooms. Many of the
homes young people now find themselves in are under severe economic strain
and are not safe or welcoming, with LGBTQ youth at heightened risk.
All of this is layered on top of the pain of the virus itself, which has
spread grief and loss through millions of families. And that is now mixing
with the trauma of tremendous police violence directed at crowds of mostly
young Black Lives Matter demonstrators, compounding the murderous events
that precipitated the protests in the first place. In the background, as
always, is the shadow of climate breakdown, not to mention the fact that
when members of this generation first heard terms like “lockdown” and
“shelter in place” related to the pandemic, many of their minds immediately
turned to the terrorizing active shooter drills U.S. schools have had them
practicing since early childhood.
It should be little wonder, then, that depression, anxiety, and addiction
are ravaging young lives.
According to a survey conducted by National Center for Health Statistics
and
the Census Bureau last month, 53 percent of people aged 18-29 reported
symptoms of anxiety and/or depression. Fifty-three percent. That’s more
than
13 percentage points higher than the rest of the population, which itself
was off the charts compared with this time last year.
And that still may be a dramatic undercount. Mental Health America, part of
the National Health Council, released a report in June based on surveys of
nearly 5 million Americans. It found that “younger populations including
teens and young adults (25<) are being hit particularly hard” by the
pandemic, with 90 percent “experiencing symptoms of depression.”
Some of that suffering is finding expression in another invisible crisis of
the Covid era: a dramatic increase in drug overdoses, with some parts of
the
country reporting increases over last year of 50 percent. It should all be
a
reminder that when we talk about being in the midst of a cataclysm on par
with the Great Depression, it isn’t only GDP and employment rates that are
depressed. Huge numbers of people are depressed as well, particularly young
people.
This is, of course, a global crisis. U.N. Secretary-General António
Guterres
recently warned that the world faces “a generational catastrophe that could
waste untold human potential, undermine decades of progress, and exacerbate
entrenched inequalities.” In a video message, he said, “We are at a
defining
moment for the world’s children and young people. The decisions that
governments and partners take now will have lasting impact on hundreds of
millions of young people, and on the development prospects of countries for
decades to come.”
As in the 1930s, this generation is already being referred to as a “lost
generation” — but compared to the Great Depression, almost nothing is being
done to find them, certainly not at the governmental level in the U.S.
There
are no ambitious and creative programs being designed to offer steady
income
beyond expanded summer job programs, and nothing designed to arm them with
useful skills for the Covid and climate change era. All Washington has
offered is a temporary break on student loan repayments, set to expire this
fall.
Young people are discussed, of course. But it is almost exclusively to
shame
them for Covid partying. Or to debate (usually in their absence) the
question of whether or not they will be permitted to learn in-person in
classrooms, or whether they will have to stay home, glued to screens. Yet
what the Depression era teaches us is that these are not the only possible
futures we should be considering for people in their late teens and 20s,
especially as we come to grips with the reality that Covid-19 is going to
be
reshaping our world for a long time to come. Young people can do more than
go to school or stay home; they can also contribute enormously to the
healing of their communities.
While guest hosting Intercepted this week, I dug into what it would take to
launch youth employment programs on the scale on the NYA and CCC — programs
that, like their predecessors, addressed broad social needs while giving
young people cash, skills training, and opportunities to work and possibly
live in each other’s company. Put another way: What are the modern day
equivalents of the home-delivered, NYA-built tuberculosis isolation hut?
Delving back in the history of New Deal youth programs, I was struck by how
many of its projects have direct application to today’s most urgent needs.
For instance, the NYA made huge and historic contributions to the country’s
educational infrastructure, with a particular emphasis on low-income school
districts, while training many young women as teaching assistants. It also
provided significant reinforcements for an ailing public health system,
training battalions of young people to serve as nursing aides in public
hospitals.
It’s easy to imagine how similar programs today could simultaneously
address
the youth unemployment crisis and play a significant role in battling the
virus. As just one example: We sure could use some of those nursing aides
if
there is a new surge of the virus this winter. A New York Times
investigation last month quoted several doctors and nurses who are
convinced
that significant numbers of the Covid-19 deaths that took place in New
York’s public hospitals could have been prevented if they had been
adequately staffed. In emergency rooms where the patient-to-nurse ratio
should not have been higher than 4 to 1, one public hospital was trying to
get by with 23 to 1; others weren’t doing much better. Nightmare stories
have emerged of disoriented patients pulling themselves off of oxygen
machines and other vital equipment, trying to get up, and with no one there
to stop them, dying alone. More nurses would have made all the difference.
Then there are the public schools, similarly understaffed after decades of
cutbacks, that will be trying to enforce social distancing this year. If we
weren’t in such a rush to get back to a bleak and diminished version of
“normal,” there would be time for a NYA-style program to train thousands of
young adults to help reduce class sizes and supervise kids in outdoor
education programs.
And since we know that the safest place to gather is still outdoors, some
college-age students could pick up the work begun by the NYA and expand the
national infrastructure of trails, picnic areas, outdoor pools, campsites,
urban parks, and wilderness trails. Thousands more could be enrolled in a
rebooted CCC to restore forests and wetlands, helping draw planet-warming
carbon out of the atmosphere.
Creating these kinds of programs would be complex, and costly. But the
individual and collective benefits would be immeasurable. And as was the
case during the Great Depression, many young people would be given the
chance to do something they desperately want and need to do right now: Get
the hell out of their childhood homes and live with their peers.
On Intercepted, I spoke about this prospect with Neil Maher, professor of
history at Rutgers University–Newark and the author of a definitive history
of the Civilian Conservation Corps, “Nature’s New Deal.” He told me that in
his research into the CCC, he came across many participants describing
their
time in the program as a kind of sleepaway camp or even an outdoor
university: a unique chance to live collectively, away from their families
and the city, and become adults. But unlike so many actual university
campuses that can’t reopen safely — given the daily commutes of faculty,
staff, and many students — modern-day CCC-inspired camps could be designed
as Covid “bubbles.”
The program would have to test participants on the way in, quarantine
anyone
who tested positive for two weeks, and then everyone would stay at the camp
until the job was done (or at least their part of it). It could be that
rare
triple win: Heal some of the damage done to our ravaged planet, offer an
economic and social lifeline to people in need, and design what might be
one
of the most Covid-safe workplaces around.
In the panic about this “lost generation,” there has been a lot of talk
about how there is no work for young people. But that is a lie. There is no
end of meaningful work that desperately needs doing — in our schools,
hospitals, and on the land. We just need to create the jobs.