Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Jennifer Senior: What One Doctor’s Suicide Taught Us
Physicians are perfectionists who suffer in silence.
Just over a month ago, I got a call at 10:30 at night from a doctor friend who works in one of the busiest emergency rooms in New York City. She’d just returned from a brutal shift, a miserable slog of impossible intubations and fruitless C.P.R. One patient, more or less her age, died just minutes after she’d placed him on a ventilator. She was so stunned she burst into tears.
My friend is not the type to burst into tears. She is generally a model of towering nerve. [..]
In the months and years ahead, we’re going to have to train ourselves to be especially attentive to the mental health needs of our first responders to this pandemic. In the aftermath of a disaster, they’re at a far greater risk for post-traumatic stress, substance abuse and major depression than the average civilian. Yet seeing themselves as vulnerable is disruptive — antithetical, even — to their self-concept. They’re the healers in this equation, not the ones who need to be healed.
It wasn’t just my friend who taught this to me. Last week NBC ran an interview with the sister of Lorna M. Breen, the medical director of the emergency department at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital who died by suicide on April 26.
“I know my sister felt like she couldn’t sit down,” she said. “She couldn’t stop working. And she certainly couldn’t tell anybody she was struggling.
One wouldn’t want to extrapolate too much from Breen’s case. Suicides can be idiosyncratic, individual, painfully mysterious; the data on the incidence of suicide in frontline workers is mixed. But it ought to be noted that Breen was the second American health worker to die by suicide in this pandemic — the first was a 24-year-old Staten Island E.M.T., on April 24 — and she did not have a known history of depression or suicidal ideation.
Here are some facts about physicians that should put us all on notice. In general, doctors die by suicide at more than twice the rate of the general population, the highest of any profession. They also experience far more burnout. And the specialty with the highest levels of burnout? Emergency medicine. [..]
For what it’s worth, here’s what helped my friend.
You were trying to help.
You did the right thing.
It was the disease. Not you.
Charles M. Blow: Covid-19’s Race and Class Warfare
This crisis is exposing the savagery of American democracy.
People — mostly white, sometimes armed, occasionally carrying Confederate flags or hoisting placards emblazoned with a Nazi slogan from the Holocaust — have been loudly protesting to push their state governments to reopen business and spaces before enough progress has been made to contain the coronavirus. This is yet another illustration of the race and class divide this pandemic has illuminated in this country.
For some, a reopened economy and recreational landscape will mean the option to run a business, return to work, go to the park or beach, or have a night on the town at a nice restaurant or swanky bar. But for many on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, it will only force them back into compulsory exposure to more people, often in occupations that make it hard to protect oneself and that pay little for the risk. [..]
This pandemic is likely to not only expose inequalities, but also exacerbate them.
America has never been comfortable discussing the inequalities that America created, let alone addressing them. America loves a feel-good, forget-the-past-let’s-start-from-here mantra.
But, this virus is exploiting these man-made inequalities and making them impossible to ignore. It is demonstrating the incalculable callousness of wealth and privilege that would willingly thrust the less well off into the most danger for a few creature comforts.
This crisis is exposing the class savagery of American democracy and the economic carnage that it has always countenanced.
Robert Reich: Donald Trump’s four-step plan to reopen the US economy – and why it will be lethal
The president and his allies are hiding the facts and pretending ‘freedom’ conquers all. As a result, more Americans will die
Donald Trump is getting nervous. Internal polls show him losing in November unless the economy comes roaring back.
But much of the economy remains closed because of the pandemic. The number of infections and deaths continue to climb.
So what is Trump’s re-election strategy? Reopen the economy anyway, despite the risks. [..]
The truth
The biggest obstacle to reopening the economy is the pandemic itself.
Any rush to reopen without adequate testing and tracing – far more than now under way – will cause a resurgence of the disease and another and longer economic crisis.
Maybe Trump is betting that any resurgence will occur after the election, when the economy appears to be on the road to recovery.
The first responsibility of a president is to keep the public safe. But Donald Trump couldn’t care less. He was slow to respond to the threat, then he lied about it, then made it hard for states – especially those with Democratic governors – to get the equipment they need.
Now he’s trying to force the economy to reopen in order to boost his electoral chances this November, and he’s selling out Americans’ health to seal the deal. This is beyond contemptible.
David Cay Johnston: To Republican officeholders: Dump Trump now
Before it’s too late for you, your party or the country
Now is the moment for elected Republicans held hostage by Donald Trump to break free. The political gun he has held to their heads, threatening to end their careers unless they cravenly bowed down, is out of bullets.
Trump’s own polls show that Joe Biden will trounce him. Behind closed doors in his classic privileged-boy style Trump shouted at his own campaign staff as if it’s their fault.
Scaredy-cat Republicans who made a pretense of respecting Trump for the last four years now face the opposite problem. If they stick with Trump, voters will turn on them come November.
And what of Trump loyalists who don’t take advantage of this opportunity to return to the tattered remains of Republicanism, a conservative party now of tax cuts for the rich and gentle regulation of industry?
The remaining loyalists are the moral jellyfish of American politics — spineless, blind and drifting aimlessly in the waves of chaos and craziness flowing from the Trump White House. [..]
That Trump cares for himself and no one is clear is so obvious now that it’s hard to understand why every Republican has not joined (Ohio Governor Mike) DeWine in separating themselves from Trump. That some Republicans have said the economy matters more than human life shows the depravity and immorality of the self-proclaimed party of family values now that it has descended into the Trump’s Dante-esque circle of mass death.
For cowed Republican officeholders, the time has come to climb out of the Trump hellhole or be consumed by its flames.
Richard Wolffe: Trump the commander-in-bleach has been stripped of all feeling
As the death toll rises, the president seems incapable of empathy. Maybe the disinfectant knocked it out of him
Donald Trump kindly obliged when a reporter asked last month if our commander-in-bleach saw America as being at war against the coronavirus.
“I do. I actually do,” he admitted, as the official death toll reached just 145 Americans. “I view it as a, in a sense, a wartime president. I mean that’s what we’re fighting. I mean, it’s – it’s a very tough situation. You’re – you have to do things.” [.]
Lots of stories have affected Donald Trump. The story about his inaugural crowds. The story about him losing the popular vote by historic margins. The stories about his corruption and incompetence. The story about Russia conspiring to manipulate American voters to elect him. The story about his impeachment for trying to corrupt November’s election.
But the death of another person affecting him?
“Well, I have – I have many people. I know many stories,” he warmed up. “I’ve spoken to three, maybe, I guess, four families unrelated to me.”
Since he first embraced the notion of being a wartime president, another 58,800 Americans have died from the pandemic. But our wartime leader could only find three, maybe four families to talk to. He is, you know, a busy man.