Dear Progressive Reader,
This has been a week of closures and social distancing. As cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates, we are all being asked to do something that is unnatural for our species – to keep away from each other. It was the Greek philosopher Aristotle who perhaps first said that we are, by nature, “a social animal.” And yet, for an indeterminate time moving forward, we are being asked to keep to ourselves. As Mike Ervin explains this week, that is not so easy for people whose lives depend on contact with other human beings. “There are some things,” he writes, “that you just can’t do online.” And his is just one of the many stories we are hearing of people who perform essential roles in our cities and our lives that, before the current crisis, often went unnoticed by the majority of society.
The current social, economic, and political crisis also highlights the stark inequities in our current system. Our next issue of the magazine, being prepared right now, will focus on many of these. Over the past several days, in spite of working remotely, we have re-shaped the content of this issue (much of it in the works for months) to make it as current as possible. If you don’t already, please subscribe now to get it delivered to your door as soon as it is out.
Jim Hightower writes this week, “There’s nothing like a rapidly spreading pandemic to bring home the fact that all of us need a generously funded, fully functioning government.” Bill Blum notes, “If the first duty of a President is to level with the American people and tell the truth in times of crisis, Trump has been a colossal failure. Whether that failure is due to ineptitude, malfeasance, a psychological impairment, or some combination of factors, the country needs to remove him from office.” And, Professors Judith W. Leavitt and Lewis A. Leavitt remind us that “The history of epidemics and pandemics shows how racism, sexism, and xenophobia detract from efforts to control disease—coronavirus is no exception.”
As Josue De Luna Navarro points out this week, “If we can learn one thing from the pandemic, it’s that the United States must provide high-quality health care for all.” It is a call that has resonated in the pages of The Progressive and our original publication, La Follete’s Magazine, since January 1917, when Irving Fisher noted that “At present the United States has the unenviable distinction of being the only great industrial nation without universal health insurance.” Today, that need seems more apparent than ever. As sustainability scientists Ann Kinzig and Shade Shutters state this week in their op-ed on public good, “You may not agree that ‘health care is a human right,’ but it should now be more obvious that everyone is safer if the sick can get treatment and stay home when ill. In other words, we protect ourselves by protecting others.”
We have gathered all of our coverage of COVID-19 under one tab on our website for quick access. Keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
P.S. – If you like what you are reading on our website and in our magazine, please share it with your friends and neighbors and through your social media networks. We exist because we want people to read our content, but we survive because they do. As Christopher Dale wrote earlier this month in an op-ed for our Progressive Media Project, “News deserts present a civic danger, since the information vacuums they create diminish the public’s ability to hold elected officials and business leaders accountable. Corruption is far easier when no one is looking.”
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