Dear ones,
It is a mournful Monday. I hope you didn’t spend the holiday stuck in an airport or worse, a hospital. Judging by a non-random sample of friends and family members, some of your loved ones may have been quarantining after a positive test or exposure to Covid.
Desmond Tutu died this weekend.
The Archbishop was a towering force for love and justice. Tutu became internationally prominent at a formative moment in my own political awakening, as he called on other nations to divest from apartheid South Africa. He spoke often of the moral obligation to educate children, and urged us to talk with those we hate in order to make peace.
My favorite Tutu quote is one that I had believed to be my own, original thought:
Dumisa Ntsebeza, a human rights lawyer, former TRC commissioner, and friend of Desmond Tutu, explained the power of amnesty, which many people misunderstand as ‘cheap’ justice:
"In fact, amnesty was a kind of justice even weightier than what we would have got through the criminal justice system.
"In an amnesty application, you would say yourself what you did, in detail. It came out of your mouth, with your own lawyer sitting next to you. It's a sentence for life. You can't wash that off."
As the January 6 committee bears down on those responsible for the insurrection, I vacillate between wanting the perpetrators punished and wanting the truth, unrestrained by the fear of self-incrimination.
Of course, some South Africans, denied amnesty because they would not admit what they had done, avoided prosecution and were never held accountable. The government failed to follow through on the Commission’s recommendation of a one-time tax on assets to redress South Africa’s extreme economic equality.
No one was more vocal in their criticisms than Tutu himself.
"How we deal with the truth after its telling defines the success of the process," he wrote 20 years after South Africans of all races took part in the country's first democratic elections in 1994.
"And this is where we have fallen tragically short.”
South Africa was a sick patient, he wrote, and in the middle of the healing process, the government had chosen to withhold further treatment.
It seems unrealistic to imagine truth, reconciliation, and reparations as part of our national reckoning.
The principles of restorative justice and reparations, which are widely practiced in indigenous societies around the world, are taking hold among a very small segment of Americans, but they are still deeply unfamiliar to most of the population.
Learn more about racial reconciliation and the Fund for Reparations Now.
Make reparations your New Year’s resolution.
I took a lovely walk with a friend on Friday and she recommended that I read this powerful piece about “ambiguous loss.” The article focuses on the work of Pauline Boss, who has spent decades examining grief. The relevance of her work for this moment cannot be overstated.
Ambiguous loss is a wide-ranging concept, encompassing the large and small losses during the pandemic and the absences we feel when people in our lives become psychologically or cognitively unavailable to us. It also includes the devastating effects of “societal bereavement”:
The harrowing video of George Floyd’s murder catalyzed an intense outpouring of grief and anger, a manifestation of omnipresent racial trauma. That continual trauma, Boss suggests, is where ambiguous loss lies. Scholars have long studied racism as a source of stress and grief but now family scientists are finding new resonance in Boss’s work to explain how racism can produce ambiguous losses in Black families and communities.
Among Boss’s many important ideas is that we don’t advance through the stages of grief on a timeline or even in their ‘proper’ sequence. Her new book, The Myth of Closure, addresses some important questions for all of us:
Can you mourn someone whose body is present, even if the mind isn’t? Or whose death is unconfirmed? Can you grieve a foreclosed future?
I’m sure that my longing for a time when we could agree on some plain facts — that vaccinating against a deadly illness is an effective way to save lives, or that white supremacy is pervasive in our history and culture — falls into the category of ambiguous loss.
To misquote Ronald Reagan, we’re mourning in America.
Read this account of local politics and national identity.
If people without masks are pissing you off, don’t yell or call people stupid or mutter under your breath. These are not useful strategies. You can give them a wide berth on the streets or try to engage them in respectful conversation.
If some of your friends and acquaintances seem overly-cautious about Covid, remember that they are not wrong.
[I]t’s been abundantly clear for more than a year that even asymptomatic infection brings a significant risk of long Covid – a wide spectrum of more than 200 symptoms and conditions that can appear months after initial infection or apparent recovery, and leave children, adults and elders disabled, chronically ill and desperate for medical care, income, housing or even recognition that their suffering is from real physical conditions.
Let’s try to do something constructive today, to make meaning out of grief.
There are 31,000 people in New York State prisons, and almost one-fourth are over 55.
Pleas for early release are a matter of life and death in the age of COVID. In the past week, two people perished at the Mohawk/Walsh prison hospice in central New York, marking a total of 39 prisoners killed by the virus while in state custody since the pandemic struck, according to the Department of Correction and Community Supervision. Fifteen DOCCS staffers have died from the disease as well.
Those numbers are certain to rise. With the arrival of the highly infectious Omicron variant, the number of positive COVID cases among state prisoners recently shot up 35 percent in a single week, according to the Release Aging People in Prison Campaign.
The Governor granted clemency to one New Yorker on Christmas Eve. Although she announced plans to create a process that is on-going, rather than annual, her paltry gesture is still hard to accept.
Call on Governor Hochul to act with mercy and release aging people from prison.
with love,
L