Dear Progressive Reader,
This week marks a sad anniversary, the murder, a year ago today, of Breonna Taylor by police in Louisville, Kentucky. In August 2020, The Progressive chronicled some of the horrifying statistics on police murders of Black men and women in the United States. Again in our February/March 2021 issue we listed the names of many of the 1000 unarmed people killed by police during the previous year. As Sarah Lahm reports, this week also saw the beginning of jury selection in the Minneapolis trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer responsible for the death of George Floyd in that city on May 25, which sparked national and international demonstrations for racial justice.
March 11 this week marked another grim anniversary. On that date one year ago, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared COVID-19 an international pandemic. The death toll in the United States alone has now surpassed 545,000 (about 80% of the U.S. death toll during the 1918 “Spanish Flu” pandemic over the course its twenty-seven months). The 1918 pandemic was named for Spain not because it originated there, but because U.S. press restrictions at the time of World War I meant that information about the deadly virus was suppressed in this country, so only the Spanish press gave information to the world about the disease.
The first documented cases of the 1918 influenza pandemic ironically occurred on the same day, March 11, in Camp Funston (now Fort Riley), a U.S. Army training camp in Kansas (although earlier cases appear to have been seen in another Kansas county as early as January 1918). The spread of the 1918 pandemic around the globe was thus hastened by two familiar factors – government secrecy and military adventurism. In “Blast from the Past” in the April/May 2020 issue of The Progressive, we looked back to our coverage in 1917-1920 of efforts to protect public health, in which a January 1917 article noted (a full year before that pandemic began), “At present the United States has the unenviable distinction of being the only great industrial nation without universal health insurance.”
So many lessons that we could have and should have learned from 1918 (masking, isolation, social distancing) remain contested today. As Mike Davis explains in The Monster Enters (a book that he first wrote in 2005 in response to the Avian Flu, and revised for the new coronavirus pandemic), “This new age of plagues, like previous pandemic epochs, is directly the result of economic globalization.” And that means, Davis clearly tells us, more than vaccines to conquer it. Hopefully, this time around, we will “avoid learning the wrong lesson[s].”
This week, President Joe Biden signed the “American Rescue Plan Act,” designed to provide much-needed economic relief to individuals, families, and communities hard-hit by the virus. At the same time, as Mark Fiore illustrates, Republicans in Congress are engaged in pointless distractions. However, as Nicolas J.S. Davies and Medea Benjamin point out, Biden must also not allow himself to be dragged down the wrong path of a failed militarist agenda. “By and large,” they write, “President Biden’s foreign policy already seems stuck in the militarist quagmire of the past twenty years—a far cry from his campaign promise to reinvigorate diplomacy as the primary tool of U.S. foreign policy.”
Meanwhile, the new President’s agenda has several other pending priorities, including immigration and the climate crisis. As Myrella Gonzalez notes this week in an op-ed for our Progressive Media Project, “As we settle into a new presidency, we must ensure that early promises of immigrant reform are brought to fruition.” And the recent symbols of human-caused climate change, including the Texas power-grid collapse and the water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi, highlight the urgency of action on the promises of the Biden platform for both proactive climate legislation and infrastructure improvements. As Wenonah Hauter says, “Our nation is facing multiple crises—the pandemic, an economic downturn, a climate crisis, and a water crisis. President Biden has an opportunity to lead the nation through all of these. To do so, however, requires real leadership and a comprehensive agenda.”
Finally, if you are looking for book to read, or a gift to give, check out the new additions to our online giftshop. A donation in support of The Progressive could get you a interesting book as our thank you for your support of this non-profit magazine.
Keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
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