What’s going on by Ruth Neuwald Falcon

I’ve been, as you may have noticed, unable to write recently. I don’t want to add to the negativity but I don’t know how not to acknowledge what’s going on. Since writing is what keeps me sane (or sane-ish), I pushed myself to sit down at the keyboard tonight and just talk about what’s happening.

In scathing opinion, federal judge dismisses Trump campaign lawsuit in Pennsylvania—WaPo

The Coup Stage of Donald Trump’s Presidency—The New Yorker

Ben Carson Confirms Trump’s Friends Get Better Coronavirus Treatments Than Regular Citizens—Slate

November 21, 2020

What’s going on
by Ruth Neuwald Falcon, Seattle, Washington

I just talked with a friend in California. “It’s really bad here,” she said. According to the Los Angeles Times, there was a “staggering rise in cases” last week.

This morning, I got a text from a woman I’ve been friends with since the 70s who now lives in Florida. “I’ve been feeling crummy since last weekend,” she wrote. “Aches and pains and shortness of breath.” Yesterday, she had a COVID test and a chest X-ray. According to the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the White House task force says Florida is in the midst of COVID-19 “viral resurgence.”

“Hospitalizations jump” in Westchester County, where my oldest friend lives. “The bad news is overwhelming,” she texted this afternoon.

One of the local public radio stations in the Seattle area, KUOW, aired a piece about how bad things are getting locally: “Almost 20% of all the cases we’ve had in King County during the whole pandemic have been just in the past two weeks.”

The Washington Post published a piece yesterday about their analysis which “shows that communities of color continue to die from the coronavirus at much higher rates than Whites.”

Meanwhile, 13 minutes into this morning’s G7 conference, CNN tells us, the current president started tweeting about “his efforts to overturn the results of the US presidential election,” which he still claims to have won. Then, while Macron, Merkel, Moon Jae-in and other world leaders attended a session about the pandemic, he left the White House for his “namesake golf club.” 

In Michigan, the Republican National Committee and state GOP leaders ask the election board to delay certification.

The good news is that the judiciary is still doing its job. U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Brann just ruled that the Trump campaign’s efforts to stop officials from certifying Biden’s Pennsylvania win was “unsupported by evidence.”

That’s about it on the good news front. Oh, and Joe Biden will be president in two months. We just have to last that long. And we all have to do our part in order to get there. Every single one of us in this country. Let’s show our gratitude on Thursday by staying inside our bubbles.