crises

Working Age Adults

/ Carla M. Burzyk / Leave a comment

This is an odd adjective to be paired with “adult”. I can think of an exception to the rule of it: I was working when I was fourteen, not an adult but a holder of a social security card. What are the parameters for “working age”? Maybe it’s a typo and should read “working “ages” adults, because in many cases it does.

Especially now in these coronary-inducing COVID-19 times. Health care workers (first responders) are tributed with thanks and accolades for the time and expertise they’re supplying in caring for patients during this bizarre time. I can’t fathom the depths of their strength that they reach into every day in order to report to their jobs. Or what they think on their commute: Will I catch it today? Was my husband’s cough last night something I need to watch more closely? Am I going to be a stand-in family member to comfort someone who’ll pass over this day or night?

Each unanswered question carries the weight of anxiety that can’t be easily lifted or carried for too long. But they do bear it and it ages them physically and mentally and emotionally. It makes me worry about them and their families. On a daily basis, they are providing care for the health of tens of thousands. They are an extremely critical component in how this nation proceeds forward amidst this health crisis.

When we’re over it or through it, enough to go back to normal, will their efforts go unrewarded? It was they, not hedge fund managers or NFL Quarterbacks, or Hip Hop artists or cosmetic surgeons who had to keep showing up in increased numbers to care for the sick and the dying. Shouldn’t their compensation reflect the criticality of what they bring to their jobs? 

Sadly, I think it won’t. The general public will go back to spending hundreds of dollars on sports shirts and concert tickets, but would most likely balk at a proposal to double health care workers’ salaries. Yet another lesson in questionable priorities that we as a Nation will collectively not have learned.

 

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Simulated World

/ Carla M. Burzyk / Leave a comment

Why do these words strike a kind of terror in my soul? I guess it’s because of the sort of simulated world I find myself living in in 2020. Because of a global pandemic, we don’t touch other humans anymore. “Virtual Hugs!” is a normalized form of address.

Instead, we interface with computer monitors and we have total strangers “running” for our groceries. This is not the cool kind of “simulated world” all of us 6 year olds in the 60s dreamed of after watching The Jetsons. 

No, this is a simulation borne of disease, depression and deficient and possibly demented politicians. We huddle indoors and watch the world go by. No RoBo maids cook and launder for us. Food is available, but some strangers gets it an delivers it for you and we have to pay a $20 surcharge.

And now, instead of staying with the program until we as a world community are victorious over this virus, the Nut Job in the Oval is declaring a victory which no scientific, demographic or medical data support.

Instead he moves on to focus on “restoring” the economy. Get production up and running again (three words: meat packing plants). Money over lives. Greed and dualistic action over empathy and courageous leadership. Get out there and get back in the swim (15 words: 100 person Church service with one person with COVID exposing all the rest to it)!

I personally felt that he wasn’t the right person for the job in 2016, and God bless him, he hasn’t proven me wrong. I still shake my head. Hard. Hard enough to encourage a concussion.

Do I understand him as saying better to have more lonely painful deaths of citizens than to see a dip in the sacred stock market?  We live in a simulated world that would make Rod Serling’s head spin.

Food Stamps 

/ Carla M. Burzyk / Leave a comment

My first real paying job was a check-out girl in a small supermarket in Massachusetts.I was painfully shy, 15 years old and petrified of making a mistake. “Scanning” was about two decades away in the future. We had cash registers with melmac greasy number keys  and a huge key to enter each item priced. I always hit it harder than necessary; I liked the feeling of power and that finality of the register advancing the paper tape, ready for the next action.

I became confident and proficient at my job and was one of the top cashiers in the store, even without looking at the keys. I also bagged my own groceries with the precision of a 7 year old working on a Lego starship: cold items with cold; produce with apples on the bottom and parsley on the top; a Jenga-like construction of boxes (rice, cereal, jello). I took pride in packing well, not making the bags too heavy and ensuring that the customer would arrive home with her eggs intact.

On one of my shifts, Jackie, who was also a cashier at the store, got off early and was checking out a few items before going home. She came though my aisle with a few items, bread, milk, spaghettios and a carton of Newports. I rang her through and as I entered the carton of butts, the manager drifted over to my register not unlike a hunter who was tracking his prey. He was the manager and co-owner of the store. Pot bellied, bald, black teeth from the pipe he constantly smoked, half shaven, and a lisp so pronounced that you’d get sprayed if you were within 7 feet of him.

He pounces up at my right and wriggles behind the cash register yelling “Did you ring up those cartons of cigaretes?!” “Yes I did.” Then he yelled for the benefit of everyone in the store “Jackie! Are you again using (lisp) food stamps (lisp) for this (lisp) carton of cigarettes? (lisp) You can’t use (lisp) food stamps (double lisp).”

“That’s against the law!”. He didn’t call the police, but he made damned sure that everyone in the store heard what he was saying. He told me to “void” the cigarette ring and total it. I did and Jackie peeled just about the entire amount of food stamps for so few groceries. The manager went out of his way to shame her and her face showed it.

Jackie gingerly pushed the carton back to me and asked for one pack of Newports. Not wanting another “void” on my shift, I didn’t ring them up until I knew that she had the money to pay. I would have rung them up myself but cigarettes could no be sold to minors, especially by minors.

Jackie searched through her ripped pleather purse, hoping to find enough coin that would complete the transaction. So, with with a ratty dollar bill and a pile of coins, she bought her pack of cigarettes. I felt miserably small in that moment. And sad for Jackie and her family who depended on her as the breadwinner 

The manager continued to glare at me and at Jackie to make sure that he didn’t lose one penny in revenue. I hated the smirk he wore as Jackie fumbled her groceries, coins and self esteem into a bag. But even though Jackie knew better than to buy cigarettes with food stamps she couldn’t help but try. Monopoly-money

Chief of Staff

/ Carla M. Burzyk / Leave a comment

A homonym for “staff” is “staph”, as in infection, as in sickness, as in being made to feel weak. And the Chief of this country right now is making all of us with a decent IQ and with a high EQ very sick and weak. Or maybe weary is a better word. Weary of his bald-faced lies and frightening egoism and narcissism. Whenever he opens his mouth (according to those who still listen to him; I do not.), the focus of what he says is entirely on 1. him; 2. himself; 3. what a wonderful job he’s doing in the white house; 4. castigating leaders who outperform his leadership; and 5. invecting string of non-sequiturs starved for punctuation or resolution.

The man is a farce. But one can’t laugh at him because he is responsible for the growth of illness and its resultant deaths. Although he says he’s not responsible, he’s in the number one leadership position and with that seat comes: RESPONSIBILITY. He’s responsible for ignoring or suppressing information related to the COVID-19 VIRUS coming into our country. He is a literal image of Alice falling through the tunnel on the other side of the looking glass and ending up on his bottom in the middle of the Queen of Heart’s croquet match in which he has blocked any escape himself. 

The real and quite present danger is that this nonsensicality is taking lives, costing money and unseating the social norm. And the shame of it is lost on him or has the shelf life of a dog’s thought.

But we will not forget it. We saw it coming. We saw the danger it threw at our health care system, food supply chain and economic well-being.

And we who’ve suffered at his hand’s folly will not forget.

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The Lessons

/ Carla M. Burzyk / Leave a comment

Lessons. Sessions. Confessions. Hessians. Tensions. Scrambling up letters to make new words. “Scrambling” is a such a great word, whose arrangement of letters and sounds resemble the act of “scrambling”.  Scrambling is a good and safe word when used in concert with eggs, word games and magic tricks (which I really hate; all the willful conniving).

It is not a word to use with expectations for or of leadership. Leadership can be wise, determined, empathic, experienced, capable, heroic, but not scrambling like a crab on the beach. Leadership has to possess a strong prow with an assured course that stays despite any turbulence it encounters. 

Leadership should be designed and built for turbulence and crisis. And if it’s absent these, then it isn’t leadership. Rather, it’s a group that scrums, heads in hiding, with members moving against each other and getting nowhere. Think rugby. A gaggle of ruffians hungry for one ball and using only muscle to get it.

But just like faith without works is dead (thank you, James), so, too is muscle without a brain. As is leadership without character and experience. Leadership like we see on display daily in the White House and parts of Congress. The country’s ship of state has become unseaworthy at a very inopportune time.

While the nation writhes under the strain of an unprecedented epidemic, there is no succor to be found nor action by this government for the suffering and out of work and the exhausted. No relief or future aid plan in sight. Instead, “pop-ups” around the world are working piecemeal to develop solutions to address the lack of medical equipment, procedures for not allowing the dying to die alone and ways to contain the virus with a vaccine.

The United States in crises past exhibited strong and fearless leadership for the world.The US provided support, guidance and ingenuity to tackle the challenges facing humankind for centuries. And now, we have to show only a blathering administration that disregards medical information and scientific fact, reason and empathic humility. 

Instead of uniting and leading the country and the world out of this miasma, the “President” of the United States seems only interested in TV coverage and ratings. That’s where his energy goes, while the cities of the country wither away with disease and desperation. He’s the dunce overseeing the emergent dystopia.

Many, at least 3 million more people that voted against and not for him in 2016, thought his skill set to be insufficient to take the sacred Oath of Office of President of the United States. Those misgivings have now proven to be valid given his lack of commandeering the talents and resources of OUR government to handle the problem.

He demonstrates time and again that he’s gained no mastery of his job as a public servant (yes, he IS a servant to the public, not chairman of a for-profit board). He’s shown time and again that he has no useful instinct or talent to navigate this COVID-19 risis. And without navigation, either an internal compass or external sextant or radar, our Nation is rudderless and lost at sea under his sorry command. foggy departure3

Political Crisis Too

/ Carla M. Burzyk / Leave a comment

In this sentence fragment, what would be the next word I’d use to finish it? Political Crisis Too large to comprehend? Too obscene to merit news coverage? Too regrettable to have happened given the easier course that might have been taken? And changing “too” to “two” would be a gross under-calculation by an order of magnitude going back to November 2016.

The then President-elect hadn’t taken the oath of office yet, but had already engaged in activities creating crises that if not illegal, were certainly against the rules and regulations of an orderly transition of government. For an example, only two weeks after the election, the Government Ethics Office which serves as a partner and “parameter setter” during transitions of power, had lost all contact with the President-elect’s Transition Team. The Transition Team and its President-elect was sending envoys all over the globe to do…? This supplanted the then incumbent Administration’s ability to conduct its foreign policy.

The transition between Administrations and the details and regulations governing them are seen as arcane procedures hardly noticed by the general public. It’s the “making sausage” part of accomplishing the government’s service.

Since its inception, the United States government has gone through, as stated by Ronald Reagan in his first inaugural address: “The orderly transfer of authority as called for in the Constitution…” The transfers have gone smoothly, with a few occasional pranks, such as when incoming staff of George W. Bush arrived in the West Wing to find all of the “W” keys removed from computer keyboards. 

The 45th President’s transition was unlike any other, with all sorts of agents storming into cabinet-level departments and running policy. Instead of the transition being likened to picking up the needle from a record mid-song and placing it on another song, the current Administration scratched the needle across all of the vinyl and didn’t even select a song. And with each disregard for policy and protocol, the new Administration all but ensured that crisis would be the way of governing.

And now it’s the new normal, this defensive, unapologetic and at times, vengeful public policy management. One might be inclined to ask: “Is this management style partly responsible for the current crisis related to COVID-19”? The responses would be subjective, depending on whether you’re an elephant, donkey, green blade of grass, or liberated free thinker. But the underlying undeniable fact in common is that this is a crisis, with no obvious end in sight.

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Referring To

/ Carla M. Burzyk / 1 Comment

What? There could be myriad items on a referral list, assuming one might use such a list as a keepsake of conversation points. So much to talk about these days. These corona virus, lack of human empathy, warming planet, gender inequality, cruelty to animals, shortage of life supplies, failure of central leadership, social distancing, preservative-laden food, apathetical attitudes about truth, disdain of facts and science ridden days.

Pick one, any one and I’d wager that a few minutes’ discussion would raise the blood pressure of even the most serene and “awoke” person. I don’t consider myself close to membership in that group, but I do some pondering on occasion.

This morning while walking in the neighborhood with my family, I thought: “What if this is the end of days?” And I envisioned the world emptying itself of life, not with bang as a bookend to its beginning, but with a winnowing out, a slow recession back into the cosmic ectoplasm with not so much as a whimper. 

Social distancing is the new rule: Stand at least ten feet away from other humans. Stay in your house. Wash your hands until and even after they crack. Don’t touch your face. Is this the beginning of a long goodbye? 

Or is it a second chance for the world  community to assess its behavior and start acting civil to one another? To realize how fragile our social and emotional infrastructure is and then go to great pains to protect it?

I lived in DC when the post 9/11 quarantine happened. The eerie absence of flying aircraft was unsettling. And no traffic on the streets, and empty shelves in stores. Hoarding food and medical supplies and arming up with guns for self-defense was the norm. As was xenophobic treatment of Muslims.

This time, though, it’s different. We can’t see the “enemy”. We’re waiting at home for a cataclysmic change in society. Anticipating the metaphorical asteroid to crash into the planet and to decimate it entirely. And the response of the vox populi is not united, as was the case in previous crises.

Some hoard, some hide, some disregard what’s happening, some freeze and are haunted by anxiety or worry. Strange times indeed. Lives will be lost, Social structures irretrievably changed. People groaning and pointing at the air in search of someone to blame.

I’ve taken myself physically out of the world at large, given my risk factors for the virus. But I also am vehemently present to my inner self. Hoping for guidance, inspiration and serenity. And contemplating how I can be better for my world community when this crisis goes off of the present’s referral list.