Let us give thanks

The call for vigilance must be answered

“The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

— Matthew 26:41

In the biblical telling of Jesus’ final days on earth, he travels with his disciples to a garden. He told three of them to “keep watch with me,” then walked a short distance to pray privately in an intense moment of overwhelming sorrow at the events playing out around him.

Stay vigilant, Jesus was saying. It’s a message similar to what public health and political leaders have delivered to Arkansans in recent days, as the state’s “second wave” of covid-19 cases swells into what may seem more like a tsunami before those precious days when vaccines can stem the tide.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson, typically drawn toward optimism in a stay-thecourse approach to balancing economic needs and efforts to reduce infections, sounded downright ominous. Quoting a White House Coronavirus Task Force report, Hutchinson said the previous two weeks’ trends put Arkansas on the “precipice of a rapid accelerating increase in cases which will be followed with new hospital admissions.”

“Now that’s a statement that will get your attention as a leader,” Hutchinson said. “We look at the holiday season that is approaching and we have to be mindful that if Arkansas continues at the present pace over the last two days, then Arkansas will have an additional 1,000 Arkansans that will die as a result of covid-19 between now and Christmas.”

Hutchinson hoped the daunting predictions would inspire Arkansans to follow public health guidelines “to do everything we can to break that trend.”

The week just got worse, though. By Thursday, Hutchinson was announcing a one-day tally of 2,238 new covid-19 cases within the state. Worse still, the number of covid-19 patients in intensive care units, the tally of active cases and the number of people on ventilators hit all-time highs.

Back to that biblical story. After his prayers, Jesus returned to his disciples to discover they had nodded off, perhaps exhausted by the day’s events. He urged them further to keep watch, but recognized how difficult a chore that might prove to be when the “flesh is weak.” The next time he returned? A snoozefest. Staying vigilant is hard. In occasional updates from Northwest Arkansas’ hospitals, the recurring message lately has been an intensified concern for what could be ahead amid pleadings for residents to also stay vigilant into the holidays and winter months.

“We are concerned that with covid fatigue, going into colder weather and the holidays that people will relax the safety practices that help combat the virus,” said Eric Pianalto, president of Mercy Hospital Northwest Arkansas. “I’ve had to have tough conversations with my own family members about not being able to have our traditional large holiday gatherings this year. It’s difficult not to be able to see our loved ones like we once did but the risk of contracting the virus is too great. Especially for those that are older or with underlying health conditions. We’ve seen hard situations with the covid-19 patients in our hospitals. Large gatherings just run up the risk of becoming gravely sick or worse.”

Thanksgiving is just four days away now. What are your plans?

Is vigilance within us in late November 2020, eight months into this life-changing pandemic and its demand for constant attention lest we fall victim to its aggressive nature?

Americans have certainly faced difficulties before, demonstrating, for example, sacrifices made at home after sending “the boys” off to fight the Nazis in Europe and the Japanese Empire in the Pacific. They understood vigilance to mean a real difference in the war effort. In the years leading up to that, though, many of them had also carried on through a Great Depression and “Dust Bowl” conditions in the Midwest. From Hoovervilles and breadlines to worker strikes and rumors of war, scarcity and uncertainty plagued life in the United States. By the time the war came along, understandably weary Americans could have given up.

But they embraced vigilance and responsibility to a greater, common purpose.

Do we have even a fraction of that within us today in the face of a common, though unseen, enemy?

Maybe we don’t. Maybe the generations of Americans alive today have become spoiled. Perhaps the decades of television and now Twitter have eroded our attention spans so much that staying committed to a common mission is simply not within us. Has our online-shopping, delivered-to-our-doorstep culture whittled away our capacity for the kind of long-term dedication necessary to achieve a greater purpose?

What our public health experts are telling us is that this week, this holiday to express thankfulness for the bounty of life, is critical. As vaccines near approval, they’re pleading with us to hang on, to never give in, to push through weariness. As sick as we may all be of hearing it, they’re urging us to wear masks, to maintain the distances necessary to thwart this virus, to wash hands frequently with soap and warm water and avoid large indoor gatherings.

Yes, we’re being asked to sacrifice, but nothing compared to the hardships faced by the World War II generation. Sacrifice isn’t missing out on getting to sit down in a favorite restaurant. It can be argued it’s a sacrifice to give up a cherished time with family over a celebratory dinner amid prayers of thanksgiving.

But it is unquestionably a sacrifice to take the steps necessary to protect loved ones, even to go so far as to avoid the kinds of large Thanksgiving gatherings we all love. In doing so, we’re also protecting the greater community. Maybe, just maybe, if enough of us take such extraordinary steps, we can ease the strain on those who truly sacrifice much — the front-line first responders, doctors, nurses and support staff of our health care systems. They step into the line of fire every … single … day. Can we stay vigilant? Can we sacrifice by shrinking our Thanksgiving Day observances, keeping our distance, wearing masks and washing hands frequently? By thinking small, can we achieve great things together?

Can concern for community overcome tendencies toward wanting what we want and wanting it now?

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, these are not dark days; these are great days if, according to our own stations in life, we Arkansans and our fellow Americans across the land, play our part in making them memorable, not because of the pandemic’s harsh effects, but because of our victorious response.

Thursday will be a watershed moment in this nation’s fight against covid-19. Will it be so because indifference or even obstinance helped to feed its spread, or because Americans intensified their vigilance and stole away the virus’ capacity to do greater harm?

“This is like a boulder rolling down a hill,” Arkansas Secretary of Health José Romero said last week. “There will come a time that we cannot stop it. It will continue to escalate and will eventually overwhelm our health care facilities. Now is the time to act. I cannot stress enough the importance of the Three W’s. I’ll say it again: Wear your mask, wash your hands and watch your distance.”

The flesh is weak, but the spirit can be strong.

Stay vigilant, Arkansas.

Railing against the electoral college is futile, but one more time won’t hurt. A fact-based diatribe seems called for, in fact, by a recent and flawed editorial defense of our antiquated loser-glorifying presidential installation system.

The futility stems from the fact that Republicans can’t win the presidency fair-and-square by the people but they control enough states to rebuff any proposed constitutional amendment changing this antiquated loser-glorifying electoral college.

So we’re stuck with a system designed in part to protect slave-owning states that, twice already this century, has taken the Republicans’ second-place nags to the winner’s circle, even as one had Al Gore’s dust in its face and the other had a lot more of Hillary Clinton’s.

One of those nags started a war on a lie. The other is still at work defiling our White House and undermining fact, truth, decency, decorum and democracy.

The Washington Post chose to call editorially the other day for the abolition of this embedded atrocity of an electoral college. That caused a closer-tohome newspaper near and dear to us to reply with a sneer and a scoff.

The near-and-dear editorial dismissed the second-place victories granted the Republican war-starter and democracy-underminer by saying that nobody said anything when Bill Clinton became president without a majority of the vote.

The basic, profound and compelling difference is that, in his race in 1992, which included an uncommonly popular third option in Ross Perot, Clinton finished … now follow me on this … in first place.

He got more votes than anyone else running, which George W. Bush and this democracy underminer called Donald Trump didn’t.

Clinton indeed got only 43%. But that was more than the 37% George

H.W. Bush got, and more than the 19% Perot got.

Exceeding 50% is not the point. The point is second place being called first place, producing twice recently the horrible presidents the wise American rejection portended.

The near-and-dear editorialists also raised that lingeringly odd argument that abolishing the electoral college would mean little states would never again see in person the presidential candidates.

Beyond the obvious question — who cares? — the fact is that 40 or 42 states of all persuasions don’t see the candidates now. The candidates spend all their time in the eight or 10 states that are battlegrounds and thus decide the presidency. If the candidates know that a state’s electors are a lock, then they won’t bother, whether that state be California with 55 electors or Arkansas with six.

In a popular-vote system, all of us would matter the same — one vote. The near-and-dear editorialists also profess to worry that, without the electoral college, the big states could get together and conspire to pick the president every time. But they could do that more readily now with the electoral college. They’d just rig their electoral college delegations. They wouldn’t have to bother with their … you know … people.

Beyond that, California, Texas, New York and Florida are not going to agree on one person. California and New York might settle on Andrew Cuomo. But Texas and Florida would insist on countering with someone more pro-virus.

One curious right-wing argument against relying on the national popular vote to choose the president is that Hillary Clinton’s national margin over the democracy underminer was solely provided by California. It is that there are full-fledged American people and then there are these lesser things called Californians.

That’s like saying Pulaski Countians shouldn’t count in Arkansas, which, actually, they don’t, though not because of an unfair system, but because of the people statewide, who rule, as the motto says — in Arkansas, but not the nation.

Anyway, it turns out that, this time, Joe Biden beat the democracy underminer by 5.9 million by latest count, but only by 5.1 million in the state that the right wing says doesn’t count.

In other words, Biden beat Trump in the 49 real-people states, too.

Still, consider: With a rearrangement of a mere 80,000 votes, Donald Trump could have been reelected in the electoral college this time though defeated by the people by a margin pushing 6 million. That’s like declaring whatever nag finished second to Secretariat by 31 lengths at the Belmont in 1973 the Triple Crown winner.

The near-and-dear editorialists advised that we should not blame the electoral college when the people can’t name a clear winner. But the people did name a clear winner, by right at 6 million votes, meaning Arkansas times two.

For that matter, Hillary Clinton was a clear winner by 2.8 million votes. And Gore’s victory was narrow, but clear, by 530,000 votes. If you want something unclear, look at a couple of Pulaski County state legislative races.

Meantime, begin learning to say President Biden. And get this: He’s neither preposterous, nor second-place, nor Russian-endorsed.