On this eve of my birthday, I find myself in not the best spirits as I wish I could be. Not because I’m normally in better spirits because its my birthday. The birthday has nothing do with it. At least not since I was…I dunno…ten. No. I am normally in good spirits this time of the year for entirely different reasons. I like the notion of added good holiday cheer among friends, family, and neighbors. I also like the arriving cool temps and nippiness in the air, and even some “manageable” snow to quiet things down a bit. I also like the new beginnings on the horizon as the calendar flips to a new year. There’s always hope in every new beginning. Maybe its my birth period, as opposed to my birth day,that feels comfortable to me in a familiar sort of way.
But, this season its different. I’m down. I know I got company. Plenty of company. I’m struggling with a variety of challenges. Some very personal. Others freely shared. Some are physical. Others psychological. And of course, there is the universal struggle that the entire human race shares with this horrible Covid pandemic. That alone is enough to throw anyone’s game off.
So, no, I am not in the best of spirits this 2020 birthday period/season. I want to say it loud and clear, and I want to feel “normal” about feeling shitty. I have a right to feel upset and anxious and depressed as all hell. We all do. Whatever it is we are struggling against.
If I am here to do anything at this very moment, in this blog post, it is to tell people to be okay with feeling shitty about things as they might be at this given moment in time. It is not necessarily wrong. It is not necessarily self defeating. It is more normal than it is not. It is, at the very least, honest.
On the other hand, there is the gratitude camp. The people who might tell you to be grateful for what you have, and not dwell on the negative. That all you have to do is be grateful for any other positive things in your life. Even if its just the moment to moment pieces of stability to appreciate what we have. Or, maybe to think of someone else who is less fortunate, someone who is homeless, lives in a tent, or someone else paralyzed, blind, cancer stricken, and so on, and so forth. Stay focused on this checklist, and it will set you free. I have to part ways with this groupthink mantra which seems to have pervaded the well-being culture to a fault. Its okay to a point. But it is not a magic pill. It is not a real approach to many challenges we all face. It is a treatment, but it is only a part of treatment.
Getting through tough times often requires several things to happen, or, be accepted in our individual circumstances in order for us to feel better. It often takes work of some sort. The kind of work that may not be so easy to do, or to accept. But for sure, it takes more than just saying positive affirmations to yourself, or hearing them from someone else. Fighting off depression, anxiety, and fears, requires understanding where they come from, both within ourselves, and from those who want to help.
I have gratitude. I have compassion, kindness, sympathy. I have humility. I have appreciation. I have some measure of peace in my soul that I can muster right now to get me through my days. It has been hard won. I just wish it were more.
>MB
The Overselling of Gratitude
Always being positive makes no more sense than always being negative.
Being told that all of us should regularly take time to list the things we’re grateful for sets my teeth on edge. It took me a while to figure out why.
I realize that anyone who criticizes gratitude (Really? Gratitude??) risks being labeled not merely a contrarian but a curmudgeon, and even the fact that I wrote a book some years ago called The Brighter Side of Human Nature may not be enough to immunize me from that label. So I probably should start by offering reassurance that there are plenty of things for which I feel grateful. If someone does something nice for me, I appreciate it and don’t hesitate to say so. What troubles me, by contrast, is the idea, propounded with evangelical fervor these days, that generic gratitude should define our way of being in the world.
No doubt such a stance makes sense for people who believe that an invisible, supernatural Being watches over them, decides what happens to them, and responds to their requests. In that case, it’s probably not a bad move to keep glancing at the sky while saying, “Hey, thanks!”—and also maybe to sacrifice a goat periodically, or at least buy a dead turkey once a year and invite one’s extended family over to eat it. One isn’t just grateful for but grateful to, which is why the vast majority of quotes and aphorisms about gratitude that you’ll find online are religious.
Conversely, if you don’t believe sunsets were deliberately created for their beauty, it would make no sense to respond with gratitude. Pleasure, sure. But not gratitude. Which leaves us to ponder why so many secular folks—particularly those who like to describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” and enthuse at length about meditation and mindfulness—have accepted a fundamentally religious idea like living a life of gratitude.
For some, the answer appears to be self-interest. Just as certain psychologists have argued that generosity confers emotional and physiological advantages on the giver—a defense of altruism for which the most polite word would be “paradoxical”—we’re now hearing that gratitude will make you more content, more optimistic, less selfish, better able to defer gratification, and even a sounder sleeper.
Maybe.[1] But “count your blessings in order that you’ll have more of them” is a bit instrumental as justifications go, and there’s something suspect about feelings of gratitude that one has adopted with just such objectives in mind. In any case, more important than whether this posture will pay off is whether it’s intrinsically justified—that is, whether it makes sense in its own right. And I’m not at all sure that it does.
Look at it this way: If there’s something wrong with being perpetually sour and discontent, why wouldn’t we also object to erring in the opposite direction? If we think those who are constantly carping should take stock of what they have and quit their First World whining, why not push the habitually happy (“There must be a pony in here somewhere!”) to contemplate what isn’t satisfactory, to express displeasure when doing so is the apt response to a given turn of events? And if their own lives really are a nonstop delight, couldn’t they summon some indignation on behalf of all those humans whose lives clearly suck?
On the last Thursday of November 1931, about 200 people gathered near Union Square in New York City for what was billed as the First Annual Blamesgiving Service. “While others are expressing their gratefulness for the good things of the past year,” their leaflet said, “there can be no harm in making a similar list of things that were not so good.” I say amen to that—and also to Yossarian’s ready rebuttals in Catch-22 to each of his friend’s chiding reminders of the blessings he should be counting:
“Be thankful you’re healthy.”
“Be bitter you’re not going to stay that way” [he replied].
“Be glad you’re even alive.”
“Be furious you’re going to die.”
“Things could be much worse,” she cried.
“They could be one hell of a lot better,” he answered heatedly.
My point, of course, is not that we should be relentlessly negative but that we should stop being relentlessly positive—and tiresomely stoic. I’m thinking here of people who never admit to being dissatisfied, who declare that the glass is one-tenth full, who insist that we keep quiet if we don’t have something nice to say, who respond to a ghastly tragedy with, “Hey, it could have been worse…” It’s enough to put one in mind of the unforgettable set piece at the end of Monty Python’s Life of Brian: rows of unfortunates nailed to crucifixes who bob their heads while singing (and then whistling) a cheerful tune called “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
When someone loudly offers thanks to his or her preferred deity for the fact that a handful of people “miraculously” survived a disaster, nonbelievers can’t help but wonder why this god simultaneously saw fit to abandon the vastly greater number of souls whose lives were pointlessly extinguished. But isn’t a secular version of unbalanced positivity also contrived? Yes, of course you’re relieved beyond words if you (or your loved one) was lucky enough to recover from a horrible injury or illness. But what of the meaningless, awful, excruciating injury or illness itself? Again, I say this not to be a killjoy or a cynic but simply because I believe it’s better to see things as they really are—and respond accordingly—than it is to adopt any reaction a priori, particularly throughout one’s life. Neither an Eeyore nor a Tigger be.
My first objection to gratitude as an across-the-board stance, then, is that it’s disproportionate, unearned, and therefore inauthentic. Even if training oneself to be constantly grateful really did boost what psychologists call subjective well-being, I’m not sure that’s a sufficient reason. As the psychological researcher Ed Deci put it, “When people want only happiness, they can actually undermine their own development because the quest for happiness can lead them to suppress other aspects of their experience. … The true meaning of being alive is not just to feel happy, but to experience the full range of human emotions.”
Making children express gratitude they don’t feel, meanwhile, just like forcing them to apologize when they’re not sorry, mostly teaches them insincerity. Subjecting them to exercises in which they must manufacture gratitude—and, yes, some schools, in the name of “positive psychology,” really do make kids cough up lists of things for which they’re grateful—strikes me as deeply wrongheaded.
I realize that to insist on seeing things as they are—and expressing gratitude, outrage, sadness, delight, or whatever reaction is called for—is to venture out on thin ice, epistemologically speaking, particularly when we turn our attention to the human condition itself. Does it make sense to speak of an “accurate” assessment, a properly balanced view? Can life be objectively classified as x percent good (and worthy of gratitude) and 100-minus-x percent horrible? Don’t we decide what to make of life and how to feel about it? After all, making meaning is what we humans do. The trouble starts when we deny that the meanings come from us, when even adults persuade themselves that “everything happens for a reason”—just because it’s too unsettling to acknowledge that things actually happen for no reason at all and nothing is actually “meant to be.”
If it makes you nervous that all possible purposes and moral guidelines for our lives are invented by humans, well, join the club. People are fallible, biased, often irrational. But it won’t do to toss our meanings and principles up to the heavens and then point in that direction as if they had originated there. That doesn’t bestow on those meanings and principles a status of absolute, eternal truth. It just proves we’ve acted in bad faith by denying our authorship. As Sartre and Camus reminded us, to see clearly and live honestly means we must begin by recognizing the fundamental futility of our condition. Camus urged us to embrace all that is precious and ennobling about life—beauty, love, humor—as a defiant “metaphysical rebellion” against the absurdity of our existential situation, one in which you and I and everyone we know will, before long, be utterly extinguished, and it will be as if we never were.
So, yes, the degree to which human existence is worthy of delight or rage is indeed a function of the meaning we construct and the reaction we choose. But the fact that this is the only meaning that exists provides a crucial context in which to understand the artificiality of unqualified positivity. As a default state, gratitude simply doesn’t ring true—not when our individual circumstances sometimes demand a very different response, and not when the human predicament itself has an irremediably tragic dimension.
But I think there’s a second reason to push back against simple-minded gratitude, and this one is more political than philosophical. It evokes my favorite Latin question: Cui bono? Who benefits when we’re persuaded to live life that way?
Consider an analogy. One of education‘s current fashions is the celebration of “grit,” a notion that basically just updates the idea of stick-to-itiveness commended to us by Aesop’s fables, Benjamin Franklin’s aphorisms, and Christian denunciations of sloth. Elsewhere I’ve argued that the more we focus on getting children to persist at whatever task they’ve been given to do—to treat grit and self-discipline as inherently laudable—the less likely we are to question what they’ve been given to do, to ask whether it really has any value, and who gets to decide.
Impressing on people, particularly young people, that they ought to keep working (in general, not just at what seems meaningful) is a conservative precept in that it helps to perpetuate the status quo. My point now is that exactly the same is true of reminders to be grateful for whatever one has. In fact, these two positions aren’t just analogous; they mesh beautifully. Cui bono if we’re persuaded both to count our blessings and to never give up?
In the last few years, the Templeton Foundation, long committed to religious and free-market causes, has given millions of dollars in grants to support the study and promotion of gratitude, including to the Greater Good Center at the University of California, Berkeley. (As Barbara Ehrenreich drily observed, “The foundation does not fund projects to directly improve the lives of poor individuals, but it has spent a great deal, through efforts like these, to improve their attitudes.”) Right around the same time, the ultraconservative Walton Family Foundation—created with Walmart money—gave millions to study and promote grit and persistence in schools. As the New Testament might have said, Ye shall know them by their funders…
The holiday devoted specifically to the cultivation and expression of gratitude didn’t sit right with the puckish creators of Blamesgiving back in 1931, and it has troubled others as well. Jon Hanson, a professor at Harvard Law School, writes, “The norm of Thanksgiving seems to be to encourage a particular kind of gratitude—a generic thankfulness for the status quo. Indeed,” he adds, “when one looks at what many describe as the true meaning of the holiday, the message is generally one of announcing that current arrangements—good and bad—are precisely as they should be.” And he proceeds to prove his point by quoting from official Thanksgiving proclamations from George Washington to George W. Bush as well as a variety of blog posts and articles.
So, too, for gratitude as a year-round stance. The implication seems to be that it’s impolite for any of us, including the have-nots and victims of various forms of oppression and exclusion, to be dissatisfied, let alone to speak up against existing conditions. Social scientists have found that politically conservative people are more likely to emphasize the value of politeness.[2] As Richard Eibach, a social psychologist, and his colleagues pointed out, “Critics of social justice movements…[have characterized] activists’ demands for fundamental changes in the system as petulant expressions of ingratitude….Gratitude norms that discourage people from expressing dissatisfaction … may function to inhibit citizens from voicing complaints about shortcomings and injustices.”
Is it possible to feel grateful while also speaking out against what’s wrong? Of course. But it’s worth asking about the uses to which gratitude is put, the questions it quiets, the interests it serves. We can appreciate a welcome development and thank those who make our lives more satisfying—and still offer a realistic appraisal of what isn’t worth celebrating. Perhaps instead of “count your blessings,” a better motto would be: A place for every feeling and every feeling (including gratitude) in its place.
NOTES
An association between gratitude and one of these states doesn’t necessarily mean that the former caused the latter. And even when there is evidence for a causative role—for example, regarding generosity—the strength of the effect depends on whether we’re talking about gratitude as a characteristic that people attribute to themselves on an ongoing basis or a (presumably transient) state induced by experimental manipulation. Other such doubts and caveats emerge when you look carefully at the relevant research rather than accepting at face value simplistic summaries about the benefits said to derive from being grateful.
Conservatives also tend to be somewhat more content than liberals—perhaps, as two New York University psychologists argue, because they’re more inclined to justify or dismiss potentially disturbing concerns about social and economic inequities. To that extent, it may not be surprising if chronically grateful people also turned out to be happier. As Deci pointed out, though—echoing philosophers from the ancient Greeks to John Stuart Mill—happiness shouldn’t be our sole criterion for deciding what to believe and how to act.
Excellent points here on the dishonest, and/or, incompetent ruling and opinions from the Conservative Supreme Court justices. When opinions like this are heard from anyone, most dismayingly, from federal judges, it really is impossible to believe they are literate. MB
Supreme Court’s scientifically illiterate decision will cost lives
Opinion by Jeffrey D. Sachs
November 27, 2020
(CNN)Last month, I wrote that Amy Coney Barrett would help to usher in a new post-truth jurisprudence on the Supreme Court. While I had cited her anti-science statements on climate change, her arrival on the court has created a new 5-4 majority against public-health science at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
When it ruled this week against New York state’s decision to limit religious gatherings in a few high-incidence parts of New York City, the court proved the dangers of scientifically illiterate judges overturning government decisions that were based on scientific evidence.
The immediate effect on New York City is moot because the state had already lifted the particular orders under review. The grave, imminent danger lies in the rest of the country, where public health authorities will feel hamstrung to restrict religious gatherings even when the virus is spreading out of control.
The two cases under review were brought by two religious bodies: the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox Jewish group. Both objected to stringent limits on religious gatherings in particularly hard-hit neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The court’s five conservative justices, a new majority with Barrett now on the bench, argued that the state’s limits on religious gatherings violated “the minimum requirement of neutrality” to religion under the First Amendment.
The court majority characterized the violation of neutrality this way:
“In a red zone, while a synagogue or church may not admit more than 10 persons, businesses categorized as ‘essential’ may admit as many people as they wish. And the list of ‘essential’ businesses includes things such as acupuncture facilities, camp grounds, garages, as well as many whose services are not limited to those that can be regarded as essential, such as all plants manufacturing chemicals and microelectronics and all transportation facilities.”
In his concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch opines as follows:
“So, at least according to the Governor, it may be unsafe to go to church, but it is always fine to pick up another bottle of wine, shop for a new bike, or spend the afternoon exploring your distal points and meridians. Who knew public health would so perfectly align with secular convenience? … The only explanation for treating religious places differently seems to be a judgment that what happens there just isn’t as ‘essential’ as what happens in secular spaces. Indeed, the Governor is remarkably frank about this: In his judgment laundry and liquor, travel and tools, are all ‘essential’ while traditional religious exercises are not. That is exactly the kind of discrimination the First Amendment forbids.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued similarly:
“The State argues that it has not impermissibly discriminated against religion because some secular businesses such as movie theaters must remain closed and are thus treated less favorably than houses of worship. But under this Court’s precedents, it does not suffice for a State to point out that, as compared to houses of worship, some secular businesses are subject to similarly severe or even more severe restrictions … Rather, once a State creates a favored class of businesses, as New York has done in this case, the State must justify why houses of worship are excluded from that favored class.”
The problem is that the apparently scientifically illiterate majority on the court missed the entire point of the restriction on religious services. Gorsuch mistakenly claims that New York state deems laundry and liquor as essential but religious services as not essential. That is false. Kavanaugh mistakenly claims that New York state failed to justify why houses of worship are excluded from the “favored class” of businesses with lesser restrictions. This too is false.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, writing in the minority, explained the basic scientific facts that were completely overlooked by the majority:
“But JUSTICE GORSUCH does not even try to square his examples with the conditions medical experts tell us facilitate the spread of COVID-19: large groups of people gathering, speaking, and singing in close proximity indoors for extended periods of time … Unlike religious services, which ‘have every one of th(ose) risk factors,’ … bike repair shops and liquor stores generally do not feature customers gathering inside to sing and speak together for an hour or more at a time. (‘Epidemiologists and physicians generally agree that religious services are among the riskiest activities’). Justices of this Court play a deadly game in second guessing the expert judgment of health officials about the environments in which a contagious virus, now infecting a million Americans each week, spreads most easily.”
In fact, the great risks for transmission are indoor places like religious services, restaurants, concert halls and theaters where large groups are together for a considerable period of time, typically an hour or more. As Justices Sotomayor and Kagan point out, “New York treats houses of worship far more favorably than their secular comparators,” by “requiring movie theaters, concert venues, and sporting arenas subject to New York’s regulation to close entirely, but allowing houses of worship to open subject to capacity restrictions.”
A recent study by Stanford University researchers published in Nature Magazine made the same point regarding the highest risks of viral transmission: “on average across metro areas, full-service restaurants, gyms, hotels, cafes, religious organizations, and limited-service restaurants produced the largest predicted increases in infections when reopened.”
What is especially disappointing in the Supreme Court decision is that the lower court had made the correct points very clearly in a decision that was brazenly overlooked by the majority decision. The Federal District Court had noted that: “Among the other problematic features of religious gatherings, congregants arrive and leave at the same time, physically greet one another, sit or stand close together, share or pass objects, and sing or chant in a way that allows for airborne transmission of the virus.”
None of this is to argue that New York state’s regulations were perfectly drawn. That is not the point. The point is that the Supreme Court should be on the side of saving lives and urging rational, science-based behavior by all, especially at this moment of maximum peril to the population. Even more than the Supreme Court, religious groups should also be siding actively and energetically with public health authorities, both to protect their own congregants and all of society. Pope Francis succored Catholics around the world by shifting to an online Mass in response to the quarantine. His recent New York Times op-ed eloquently makes the point that the common good takes precedence over simplistic appeals to “personal freedom” in protests against justified public health measures.
Our religious faiths are the great teachers of the supreme value of human life, and they can be great healers for those in mental distress during the pandemic. The message to the American people should be a united one, with the nation’s faith leaders, public health specialists, the politicians and, yes, Supreme Court justices using scientific knowledge combined with compassion to end the pandemic with the maximum speed and the least further suffering and loss of life.
Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com wrote “by handling this story so intelligently and by opening its heart to a very complicated idea of good and evil, Wild Wild Country has a profound, mesmerizing power itself”.
Remarkable, remarkable story. Even those of us who recall this happening, won’t remember it as comprehensively as it is presented here. Outstanding production. Highly recommended.
As you watch this tale unfold episode to episode you will at first find yourself swerving back and forth between two sides of an argument. Or question if neither has any argument at all here.
You will recognize familiar bigotries, age old fears, insecurities and threats of provincial mindsets. You will witness unseemly power grabs, brazen law breaking, arrogant manipulation, and exploitation of innocents. You will question motives of everyone and anyone from start to finish.
From one interview, one discovery, one observance to the next, you will be forced to reckon with opposing states of mind that often live side by side. The belief in nirvana and heavenly prophets, at almost delusional levels, and the rejection of both in our more earthbound states.
There are clear legal arguments presented here with no rational defense against the laws that were broken. It is this reality that undermines the higher thoughts one could have about the honest pursuit of spiritual elevation and community with the lower thoughts of exploitation and power over others. Probably the saddest form of these human transgressions occurs in spiritual communities.
Still, as you watch the interviews and hear certain words, you will alternate your judgements of both sides with disdain and repulsion. You will call out both sides for disgraceful behavior.
There is always a difference between spiritual leaders of vision and those who would follow them. Perception, interpretation, are all subject to differences within the latter group.
In some cases, the communal visions of followers and later messengers diverge so much from the original ideas that what was once a basic lifestyle choice to peacefully share with others instead becomes a perversion of power co-opted to serve those whose personal needs get in the way.
Other times, the visionaries and practitioners are so alike that the only real difference between the two is nothing more than the chance outcome of one becoming a leader through no deliberate intention, and the other simply listening to them with reverence. Neither owns more integrity simply by their position.
The idea of spiritual enlightenment, community and sharing remains a personal goal to lots of people. How they try to get there is a matter of who’s selling it and when, but it remains a high ticket item. Such is, in fact, all religion, all spiritualism. Because of that, every proposition, every promise, every sermon, will, and should always, be questioned.
At the end of it all, after you hear all the arguments, all the philosophies, all the justifications, all the facts. After you take all of this in, you will find your place. It may be the opposite place you thought you’d be in the beginning. No matter where you do land, it will be unsettled. It will be conflicted.
Disturbingly important to watch. Produced in 2018, here is a palpable demonstration of what has been happening in plain sight these last four years. There is no mystery that Donald Trump has emboldened the Alt-Right movement, and borderline psychotics like Richard Spencer. Whether Trump has done so by ruthless premeditated formula for his own personal gain, or by empowering hate groups by sheer cluelessness of his irresponsible speech no longer matters. The damage has been done. The only thing left to wonder is whether the Alt-Right presence will shrink in relevance and attrition over the next few years just as Trump’s legacy and influence hopefully does, or provokes yet another crescendo of violence across this country in its final gasps of desperation.
There are so many articles about the Donald Trump Presidency that serve as a springboard to larger discussions, its no effort to search them out. They hang out there every day with the next load of news.
Donald Trump will try his best to co opt the RNC for himself with help from the same enablers who sold their souls to him from the start. What is clear, is that in spite of the feverish support he has from millions of his followers, and their expected social media barrage, Trump will face longer odds to resurrect himself without the machinery of the Republican Party. That platform is the single biggest asset he has to potentially exploit as he leaves office.
The story linked below is yet another trigger for the exhaustingly redundant questions I’ve tried to answer for myself of how this man got elected, and how it is possible he could continue to infect our sociopolitical system years after he’s gone from the White House.
Concurrent with the devastating coronavirus sweeping the globe, is an equally virulent disease that has infected millions in America. Trumpism. In this case, the answer is not a vaccine, but a broad scale comprehensive treatment of the disease carriers that is even more monumental than administering a nationwide Covid vaccine.
It’s hard to imagine a single individual as the proverbial patient-zero being capable of super spreading an infection, which then goes on to cause a chain reaction in a country’s entire political system, but, that is what this country is fighting off right now with Donald Trump and, arguably, his victims.
The origin of the disease is not an immediately transferable comparison with a physical virus because it’s not physiologically originated. It is psychological. Likewise, it is not a contagion that one gets, or not gets, through random unexplained immunity, or inherent physical vulnerability. Instead, this psychological disease needs to be understood from its earliest days within each individual’s initial infection, and then, tracing contact backwards through family, friends, parents, co-workers, as far back as necessary, and of course, including the overlay of technology and social media.
I have ruminated on this, and other “psychological diseases” afflicting humanity long before this dude in his red cap and red tie showed up. He’s nothing new. He is a human character that’s been re-incarnated many times from others who have come before him. He’s nothing new. Nor are his followers. He, and they, are simply this time’s version of the same play and theater that had its curtains raised on what’s always been there among all of us. Fear. Fear of powerlessness. Fear of weakness. Fear of loss. Fear of irrelevance. Fear of the other. Fear of confronting fear.
Humanity is prone to a panoply of fears on a daily basis. Small fears. Medium fears. Larger fears. Each of these fears has a root perhaps in a single universal fear. Unfortunately, honest deliberation among all of the earth’s citizens on subjects of this depth, rarely occur outside of deeply religious enclaves, often with dogmatic approaches. They form communities of coping and perseverance in the name of one religious or spiritual movement or another, but, in most cases, the end result is the same. Separating us from each other in judgement. No matter how gentle the language used in defining those who “believe” and those who do not. This will also be the struggle of humanity. The struggle to feel part of something universal, of a higher meaning, and of an equal inherent value among all the others in the same grand scheme.
Donald Trump may be easily diagnosed with deeply rooted psychological problems, but tens of millions of his followers are not as easy to dismiss. Understanding them is no different than understanding any critical mass of humanity that is stirred into action at any given time in history. Its nothing new. It happened before. It will happen again. What have we learned? What will we learn?
MB
“Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights” ― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” ― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The following article was originally published in July as cities started reopening. Opposing personal views on safety at that time caused ruptures among many families, friends and partners. Today, nearly five months later, the pandemic is back with a vengeance, and returned lockdowns across the globe. Disagreements that existed in July with a lower viral risk, are now magnified with a more serious risk of consequences from people’s actions outside of their households. Beyond the vaccine and the indefinite future after that, this reality is not going away any time soon.
Beautifully simple and straightforward to follow.
MB
Tackle Reopening Choices as a Couple
By Amelia Nierenberg, NYTimes
Around the world, couples are struggling to cope with the stress that comes with reopening cities and towns (and the pausing or rolling back that, in some places, has ensued). For some, tension has run high for months: As Eric Spiegelman, a podcasting executive based in Los Angeles, tweeted in April, “My wife and I play this fun game during quarantine, it’s called ‘Why Are You Doing It That Way?’ and there are no winners.”
That might’ve been in jest, but with the possibility of resuming certain pre-lockdown activities — going to restaurants, seeing friends, working out at gyms — couples are in the process of addressing differing comfort levels.
One partner might have parents who are older and at higher risk of complications from the coronavirus; the other might be an extrovert who thrives on being around other people and is, emotionally, at a breaking point. And, together, they could face questions like: Should we go to a friend’s barbecue, even though it probably won’t be rigidly socially distant? Who do we invite to our daughter’s birthday party, if we even have it at all?
“The traditional marriage vows are ‘for better or for worse,’” said Jean Fitzpatrick, a relationship therapist based in Manhattan. “This is for worse. And so how do we navigate a time like this? Our relationships will either grow as a result, or they will be harmed.”
Below, some strategies you can use to find a path forward that works for both of you.
Remember that you are on the same team.
Soujanya Sridharan, a recent graduate of a master’s program in Bangalore, India, had started to plan her wedding before the lockdown; she and her fiancé expected 300 people to celebrate with them. Then, the coronavirus hit India, now one of the worst affected countries. She wanted to go forward with fewer guests, but her fiancé was more reluctant: Some of his family members wouldn’t be able to come, and he is more worried about contracting the virus himself.
“When he resisted the idea of going ahead with the wedding, it made me wonder if the lockdown had actually changed his mind about going ahead at all, as opposed to getting married at that time,” said Ms. Sridharan, 23.
They talked through it and worked together to find solutions — whittling down their guest list, showing outfits to each other over Zoom and developing safety measures. He wanted to wear masks in the wedding photos, but saw how much it meant to his bride-to-be to have keepsakes that didn’t reference the pandemic, so he took off his mask for a few pictures.
“Once you feel respected and heard, you usually can negotiate anything,” said Deb Owens, a licensed therapist specializing in relationships who is based in the Philadelphia area. She has been regularly speaking with couples struggling during the lockdown.
In difficult situations, therapists often recommend thinking not just of “you” and “me,” but talking about your relationship as a third entity.
“It’s not, ‘My needs versus your needs, and let’s negotiate,’ but asking the question and having the posture of: ‘What is best for our relationship?’” said Jennifer Bullock, a psychotherapist based in Philadelphia.
Important, too, several psychologists and counselors recommended presenting a united front when explaining shared decisions to friends and family. Any sort of “I would, but he’s afraid” seeds resentment and can amplify the problem far past the boundaries of your own home.
Stay away from ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’
It’s always tempting to drop some knowledge when you’re in the middle of an argument. But some therapists think appealing to data, in lieu of listening to the emotions and concerns of your partner, is a losing strategy.
“People just need to consistently ask themselves: ‘Would you rather be right, or would you rather be in a loving, connected relationship?’” said Jenny TeGrotenhuis, a licensed mental health therapist and certified clinical trauma professional based in Kennewick, Wash.
David Woodsfellow, a licensed psychologist and the director of the Woodsfellow Institute for Couples Therapy in Atlanta, agreed. He said that thinking about things in terms of “right” and “wrong” is often less helpful than trying to understand how and what the other person feels.
“Try to understand what they are saying and why they are saying it,” Dr. Woodsfellow said. “It is totally possible to understand things you don’t agree with.”
Of course, facts and concrete information are helpful and often necessary when considering joint decisions, like how safe it is to send children to camp or how long another family would have to quarantine before you became a pod. But when you’re offering data, make sure you’re doing it in the spirit of educating and working with your partner, rather than hammering your own point home.
Don’t assume you can read your partner’s mind.
Some of the most common things that the psychotherapist Matt Lundquist hears are: “I already know what she is going to say,” or, “I already know what he thinks.” It’s almost always untrue, though.
“I will plead with them to suspend their disbelief and really work to deeply and sincerely engage in curiosity,” said Mr. Lundquist, the owner and clinical director at Tribeca Therapy in Manhattan.
In any fraught situation, sit down with your partner and listen. Instead of offering rebuttals, try to treat it more like an interview about where he or she is coming from. Ms. Fitzpatrick suggests asking only open-ended questions — which can’t be answered with a simple “yes” or a “no.” Some of the most tense discussions might be about work or money. You could try, “How are you feeling about our finances right now?” Or if you have been working from home: “How should we approach our safety when you go back to the office?”
Karen Osterle, a couples therapist based in Washington, D.C., said to give your partner the benefit of the doubt. She suggests using language like: “I know you probably don’t mean to come across as dismissive or condescending right now, but when I hear you say I shouldn’t worry, I find myself feeling disregarded.” Or, “Can you see what I mean, even if you don’t mean to make me feel that way?”
A partner’s need might come across as just a preference — for example, if one of you wants to visit family in a different state, it might seem like something that can be postponed. But it could be that a parent really needs help, or your partner is overwhelmed. You’ll find out what’s going on only if you ask.
You’ll know you have truly listened when you can describe your partner’s perspective in a supportive way — regardless of whether you agree with him or her.
Find a way to do both things.
Just as fights about the dishes aren’t ever just about the dishes, fights about going to a birthday party post-lockdown aren’t just about the party. Look deeper into the anxieties and frustrations undergirding each position and see if you can fulfill the emotion without doing the precise activity.
“It’s looking beyond ‘I want to go to this restaurant and sit on the patio’ to: ‘What might that mean to you? What does that represent?’” said Samuel Allen, a licensed marriage and family therapist with Keith Miller Counseling & Associates, a private practice based in Washington.
The good news is that there are creative solutions. If one person really needs to get out and see friends, a socially distanced day at the park might be an option.
“This is not just like, ‘What is a middle ground?’” Dr. Allen said. “It’s, ‘What is another method, what is another way that we can meet the need that prompted your original request?’ Ask: ‘What will that bring you, and what are other ways we can achieve it together?’”
Don’t forget, though, this is a pandemic.
Maybe you’re tired of cooking for yourself and another person, and restaurants nearby have tantalizingly reopened. Or you could be exhausted from running after your kids and hear of a summer camp with space available. Ultimately, your well-being and others’ should take precedence.
“Everyone’s concerns need to be respected, and all of the adults in a family system need to be respected as full voting members, but that doesn’t mean that each of the adult concerns are equivalent,” Mr. Lundquist said. “I do generally feel that the person who is more concerned about an issue of health and safety needs to be given a lot of deference.”
(Feb. 13, 2020 file photo) President Donald Trump’s nominee to the Federal Reserve, Judy Shelton, appears before the Senate Banking Committee for a confirmation hearing, on Capitol Hill in Washington. President Donald Trump’s controversial nominee to the Federal Reserve is facing a razor-close vote in Congress. The Senate is voting Tuesday on the nomination of Judy Shelton to join the Federal Reserve’s powerful board of governors. Shelton is an unusually caustic critic of the Fed and is opposed by three Republican senators. Expected absences from two other Republicans could block her from advancing in Tuesday’s vote. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite,)
Encouraging news from a recent Senate not known for any. MB
Senate Blocks President Trump’s Controversial Nominee To The Federal Reserve Board
by Vanessa Romo
NPR – November 17, 2020
The 47-50 vote came as Sens. Mitt Romney and Susan Collins sided with Democratic senators to preserve a filibuster of Judy Shelton’s confirmation. Two other Republicans missed the vote.
I don’t need to add much more to Bill Mahr’s acerbic wit on this point. If there’s anything that kills off a political party’s strength, let alone any group supposedly unified for a common goal, it’s divisivness. For Democrats right now, here is their problem…
There are thousands of cults in America, some harmless and some that can be very dangerous. A cult is a group or movement held together by a shared commitment to a charismatic leader or ideology. It has a belief system that has the answers to all of life’s questions and offers a special solution to be gained only by following the leader’s rules. It requires a high level of commitment from at least some of the members.
How Do Cults Start Up?
There’s four dimensions to a cultic group that is seen across the board…
Cults come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Not every person’s experience will fit neatly into these following categories, but this list should provide some idea of the range of cults and their reach into every walk of life.
Eastern cults
Eastern cults are characterized by belief in spiritual enlightenment and reincarnation, attaining the Godhead, and nirvana. Usually the leader draws from and distorts an Eastern-based philosophy or religion, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, or Sufism. Sometimes members learn to disregard worldly possessions and may take on an ascetic and/or celibate lifestyle. Practices and influence techniques include extensive meditation, repeated mantras, altered states of consciousness, celibacy or sexual restrictions, fasting and dietary restrictions, special dress or accoutrements, altars, and induced trance through chanting, spinning, or other techniques.
Religious cults
Religious cults are marked by belief in a god or some higher being, salvation, and the afterlife, sometimes combined with an apocalyptic view. The leader reinterprets Scripture (from the Bible, Koran, Talmud, or Cabala) and often claims to be a prophet, if not the messiah. Typically the group is strict, sometimes using such physical punishments as paddling and birching, particularly of children. Often members are encouraged to spend a great deal of time proselytizing. Included here are Bible-based, neo-Christian, Islamic, Jewish or Hebrew, and other religious cults, many of which combine beliefs and practices from different faiths. Practices and influence techniques include speaking in tongues, chanting, praying, isolation, lengthy study sessions, faith healing, self-flagellation, or many hours spent evangelizing, witnessing, or making public confessions.
Political, racist, or terrorist cults
Political, racist, or terrorist cults are fueled by belief in changing society, revolution, overthrowing the perceived enemy or getting rid of evil forces. The leader professes to be all knowing and all powerful. In some cases, adherents may be more drawn to an extreme ideology rather than a leader per se. Groups tend to operate as secret cells. Often the group and/or individuals are armed and engage in violent activities, including arson, kidnapping, bombing, and suicide bombs. Such groups typically meet in secret with coded language, handshakes, and other ritualized practices. Members consider themselves an elite cadre ready to go to battle. Practices and influence techniques include paramilitary training, reporting on one another, fear, struggle or criticism sessions, instilled paranoia, violent acts to prove loyalty, long hours of indoctrination, or enforced guilt based on race, class, or religion.
Psychotherapy, human potential, mass transformational cults
Psychotherapy, human potential, mass transformational cults are motivated by belief in striving for the goal of personal transformation and personal improvement. The leader is self-proclaimed and omniscient, with unique insights, sometimes a “super-therapist” or “super-life coach.” Practices and techniques include group encounter sessions, intense probing into personal life and thoughts, altered states brought about by hypnosis and other trance-induction mechanisms, use of drugs, dream work, past-life or future-life therapy, rebirthing or regression, submersion tanks, shame and intimidation, verbal abuse, or humiliation in private or group settings.
Commercial, multi-marketing cults
Commercial, multi-marketing cults are sustained by belief in attaining wealth and power, status, and quick earnings. The leader, who is often overtly lavish, asserts that he has found the “way.” Some commercial cults are crossovers to political and religious cults because they are based on ultra-conservative family values, strict morals, good health, or patriotism. Members are encouraged to participate in costly and sometimes lengthy seminars and to sell the group’s “product” to others. Practices and influence techniques include deceptive sales techniques, guilt and shame, peer pressure, financial control, magical thinking, or guided imagery.
New Age cults
New Age cults are founded on belief in the “You are God” philosophy, in power through internal knowledge, wanting to know the future, or find the quick fix. Often the leader presents herself or himself as mystical, an ultra-spiritual being, a channeler, a medium, or a superhero. New Age groups, more so than some of the other types, tend to have female leaders. Members rely on New Age paraphernalia, such as crystals, astrology, runes, shamanic devices, holistic medicine, herbs, spirit beings, or Tarot or other magic cards. Practices and influence techniques: magic tricks, altered states, peer pressure, channeling, UFO sightings, “chakra” adjustments, faith healing, or claiming to speak with or through ascended masters, spiritual entities, and the like.
Occult, satanic, or black-magic cults
Occult, satanic, or black-magic cults are generated through belief in supernatural powers, and sometimes worship of Satan. The leader professes to be evil incarnate. Animal sacrifice and physical and sexual abuse are common; some groups claim they perform human sacrifice. Practices and influence techniques include exotic and bizarre rituals, secrecy, fear and intimidation, acts of violence, tattooing or scarring, cutting and blood rituals, sacrificial rituals, or altars.
One-on-one or family cults
One-on-one or family cults are based in belief in one’s partner, parent, or teacher above all else. Generally an intimate relationship is used to manipulate and control the partner, children, or students, who believe the dominant one to have special knowledge or special powers. Often there is severe and prolonged psychological, physical, and sexual abuse. Practices and influence techniques include pleasure/pain syndrome, promoting self-blame, induced dependency, induced fear and insecurity, enforced isolation, battering and other violent acts, incest, or deprivation.
Cults of personality
Cults of personality are rooted in a belief that reflects the charismatic personality and interests and proclivities of the revered leader. Such groups tend to revolve around a particular theme or interest, such as martial arts, opera, dance, theater, a certain form of art, or a type of medicine or healing. Practices and influence techniques include intense training sessions, rituals, blatant egocentrism, or elitist attitudes and behaviors
Who Joins Cults and Why?
No particular psychopathology profile is associated with cult involvement, in part because cults, like many effective sales organizations, adjust their pitch to the personality and needs of their prospects. Although cult members appear to have a somewhat higher rate of psychological distress than nonmembers, the majority seems to lie within the normal range. Nevertheless, clinical experience strongly suggests that certain situational or developmental features appear to make people more receptive to cult sales pitches, including:
a high level of stress or dissatisfaction
lack of self-confidence
gullibility
desire to belong to a group
naive idealism
Fulfillment (the cult provides something that they are missing)
cultural disillusionment
frustrated spiritual searching
Mental Illness
For decades there have been studies about the various mental issues that cult leaders and their followers have. Most cult leaders have Narcissistic personality disorder, Symptoms include an excessive need for admiration, disregard for others’ feelings, an inability to handle any criticism, and a sense of entitlement. As for the followers, most people who join a cult are just going through a mental crisis and that cult seems to offer relief or fulfillment. Many ex- cult followers have issues adjusting back to society and have a number of mental illnesses. For the most part, the mental state plays an important role in people who join a cult or is a cult leader.
The scores for the six prevalence and nine access to treatment measures make up the Prevalence and Access to Care Ranking.
The 6 measures that make up the Prevalence Ranking include:
Adults with Any Mental Illness (AMI)
Adults with Dependence or Abuse of Illicit Drugs or Alcohol
Adults with Serious Thoughts of Suicide
Youth with At Least One Past Year Major Depressive Episode (MDE)
Youth with Dependence or Abuse of Illicit Drugs or Alcohol
Youth with Severe MDE.
Religion
The 1960s counterculture movement which was all about peace, love, and happiness lead to freedom of expression. That freedom of expression lead to people starting there own religion, groups, cults, etc. Religious cults started off being about religion but transformed due to narcissistic leaders. In almost every cult there is a higher being, whether that is the leader or that being. Cults are almost like religion except they are not granted tax-free status from the government.
Four years ago I wrote the following post mortem on Donald Trump’s election win. A few of the names have changed, but the accuracy and spirit of my words is as true as ever as we stand once again on a tipping point in American history. Today, even though he was resoundingly defeated for re-election, it remains hard to look back because the phlegm of his influence continues to drip over everyone unpersuaded by the vacuous cult figure that possessed Donald Trump.
Most anti-Trumpers are not, and never were puzzled about who this man was in 2016 and remains today. The early and now fully bloomed anxiety of his ascendancy in those quarters was, and remains, about his people, his supporters, his enablers. That was the conversation to have in 2016. It is still the conversation to have now. If the reality about our divided country, regardless of the personal criticisms of each side, isn’t addressed by a rationally organized and collaborative government unified for public outreach, as well as, honest introspection among all of us (so far proven impossible) expect more tipping points ahead and potentially dangerous destabilization in the foreseeable future. It won’t be pretty.
For many years, Nathaniel Branden has remained a major influence on my life with his incisive writings, and rationale on the subject of romantic love.
Branden was a pioneering psychotherapist and historic voice on the study of self esteem, and its inextricable ties to the destinies of romantic love.
I’ve read much of his writings on the subject of love and relationships, always waiting to come upon something I might question, or disagree with. It never happens. Reading Branden on this subject was, and still is, like hearing a second heart beat. A kindred soul and passionate thinker who helped me years past, and today, feel validated about my own intensity and beliefs.
~MB
A Vision of Romantic Love, by Dr. Nathaniel Branden
The passionate attachment between man and woman that is known as romantic love can generate the most profound ecstasy. It can also generate, when frustrated, the most unutterable suffering. Yet for all its intensity, the nature of that attachment is little understood. To some who associate “romantic” with “irrational,” romantic love is a temporary neurosis, an emotional storm, inevitably short-lived, which leaves disillusionment and disenchantment in its wake. To others, romantic love is an ideal that, if never reached, leaves one feeling one has somehow missed the secret of life.
Looking at the tragedy and confusion so many experience in romantic relationships, many persons have concluded that the idea of romantic love is somehow fundamentally wrong, a false hope. Romantic love is often attacked today by psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists, who frequently scorn it as an immature, illusory ideal. To such intellectuals, the idea that an intense emotional attachment could form the basis of a lasting, fulfilling relationship is simply a neurotic product of modern Western culture.
Young people growing up today in North America take for granted certain assumptions about their future with the opposite sex, assumptions that are by no means shared by all other cultures. These include that the two people who will share their lives will choose each other, freely and voluntarily, and that no one, not family or friends, church or state, can or should make that choice for them; that they will choose on the basis of love rather than on the basis of social, family, or financial considerations; that it very much matters which human beings they choose and, in this connection, that the differences between one human being and another are immensely important; that they can hope and expect to derive happiness for the relationship with the person of their choice and that the pursuit of such happiness is entirely normal, indeed is a human birthright; and that the person they choose to share their life with and the person they hope and expect to find sexual fulfillment with are one and the same. Throughout most of human history, all these views would have been regarded as extraordinary, even incredible.
Only during the past nine or ten decades have some of the educated classes in non-Western cultures rebel against the tradition of marriage arranged by families and looked to the West and its concept of romantic love as a preferred ideal.
Although in Western Europe the idea of romantic love (in some sense) has had a long history, its acceptance as the proper basis of marriage has never been as widespread as it has been in American culture. As Burgess and Locke (1953) write in their historical survey The Family: From Institution to Companionship, “It is in the United States that perhaps the only, at any rate the most complete, demonstration of romantic love as the prologue and theme of marriage has been staged.”
Why the United States? The answer, at least in part, is philosophical. What was distinctive about the American outlook and represented a radical break with its European past were its unprecedented commitment to political freedom, its individualism, its doctrine of individual rights, and, more specifically, its belief in a person’s right to happiness here on earth. Both the individualism and the secularism of this country were essential for the ideal of romantic love to take deep cultural root.
Even now, in the midst of the rampant cynicism of so many people today, and notwithstanding the attacks on romantic love by American intellectuals, men and women continue to fall in love. The dream dies, only to be reborn. Moved by a passion they do not understand for a goal they seldom reach, men and women are haunted by the vision of a distant possibility that refuses to be extinguished.
What, at its best, is the nature of that vision? And what does its realization depend on? That is the subject I wish to address.
1. A Definition of Love
Let us begin with a definition. There are, after all, different kinds of love that can unite one human being with another. There is love between parents and children. There is love between siblings. There is love between friends. There is a love made of caring and affection but devoid of sexual feeling. And there is the kind of love we call “romantic.”
Romantic love is a passionate spiritual-emotional-sexual attachment between two people that reflects a high regard for the value of each other’s person. When I write of romantic love, this is the meaning I intend.
I do not describe a relationship as romantic if the couple does not experience their attachment as passionate or intense, at least to some significant extent (allowing, of course, for the normal ebb and flow of feeling that is intrinsic to life). I do not describe a relationship as romantic love if there is not some experience of spiritual affinity, by which I mean some deep mutuality of values and outlook, some sense of being soul mates; if there is not a deep emotional involvement; if there is not a strong sexual attraction (allowing, once more, for normal fluctuations of feeling). And if there is not mutual admiration—if, for example, there is mutual contempt instead, (which can certainly coexist with sexual attraction)—and again I do not describe the relationship as romantic love.
Let it be acknowledged that almost any statement we make about love, sex, or man/woman relationships entails something of a personal confession. We tend to speak from what we have lived. I have shared some of the life experiences that lie behind my thoughts on love in The Psychology of Romantic Love 1980/1981) as well as in What Love Asks of Us (written with my wife and colleague, Devers Branden, 1987). But the personal context aside, my writing about love draws on two primary sources. First, it represents an attempt to reason about and understand man/woman relationships on the basis of facts and data more or less available to everyone, the material of history and of culture.
Second, as a psychotherapist and marriage counselor, I have had the opportunity to work with thousands of people over the past thirty years and to see something of their struggle to achieve sexual and romantic fulfillment. I have been keenly interested in the question of what people seek from love—as well as the question of why some people succeed in their quest while others fail.
2. The Emotional Experience of Love
Love is our emotional response to that which we value highly. I am speaking now of love in general, love as such, of which romantic love is a special case. Love is the experience of joy in interaction or involvement. To love is to delight in the being whom one loves, to experience pleasure in that being’s presence, to find gratification or fulfillment in contact with that being. We experience the loved being as a source of fulfillment for profoundly important needs. (Someone we love enters the room; our eyes and heart light up. We look at this person; we experience a rising sense of joy within us. We reach out and touch; we feel happy, fulfilled. Note that this might describe our relationship to a spouse, a lover, a parent, a child, a friend—or a pet).
But love is more than an emotion; it is a judgment or evaluation and an action tendency. Indeed, all emotions entail evaluations and action tendency. Emotions by their nature are value responses. They are automatic psychological responses, involving both mental and psychological features, to our subconscious appraisal of what we perceive as the beneficial or harmful relationship of some aspect to ourselves (Branden, 1984/1985).
If we consider any emotional response, is a dual value judgment. Every emotion reflects the judgment of “for me” or “against me”—and also “to what extent.” Thus, emotions differ according to their content and according to their intensity. Love is the highest, the most intense expression of the assessment “for me,” “good for me,” “beneficial to my life.” In the person of someone we love we see, in extraordinarily high measure, many of those traits and characteristics that we feel are most appropriate to life—life as we understand and experience it—and therefore most desirable for our own well-being and happiness.
Every emotion contains an inherent action tendency. The emotion of fear is a person’s response to that which threatens his or her values; it entails the action tendency to avoid or flee from the feared object. The emotion of love entails the action tendency to achieve some form of contact with the loved being, some form of interaction. (Sometimes a lover will complain, “You say you love me, but I could never tell it from your actions. You never want to spend time with me, you don’t want to talk with me, so how would you act differently if you didn’t love me?”)
Finally, and in a sense more fundamentally, we may describe love as representing an orientation, an attitude or psychological state with regard to the loved being, deeper and more enduring than any momentary alteration of feeling. As an orientation, love represents a disposition to experience the loved being as the embodiment of profoundly important (conscious or subconscious) personal values—and, as a consequence, a real or potential source of joy.
What is unique about romantic love is that it incorporates or draws on more aspects of the self than any other kind of love—our sense of life, our sexuality, our body, our deepest fantasies or longings regarding man or woman, our self-concept, the cardinal values that energize our existence (Branden, 1969/1971, 1980/1981). Our spiritual-emotional-sexual response to our partner is a consequence of seeing him or her as the embodiment of our highest values and as being crucially important to our personal happiness. “Highest,” in this context, does not necessarily mean noblest or most exalted; it means most important, in terms of our personal needs and desires and in terms of what we wish to find and experience in life. As an integral part of that response—and this differentiates romantic love from the love for a friend, a parent, or a child—we see the loved object as being crucially important to our sexual happiness. The needs of our spirit and body melt into each other; we experience a unique sense of wholeness.
3. What Romantic Love Is Not
In light of the widespread misunderstandings on this subject, I want to say a few words about what romantic love is not.
Many of the commonest criticisms of romantic love are based on observing irrational or immature processes occurring between people who profess to be “in love,” and then generalizing to a repudiation of romantic love as such. In such cases, the arguments are not in fact directed against romantic love at all—not if we understand its roots in genuine appreciation and admiration for the person of another. There are, for example, men and women who experience a strong sexual attraction for each other, conclude that they are in love, and proceed to marry, ignoring the fact that they have few values or interests in common, have little or no admiration for each other, are bound to each other predominantly by dependency needs, have incompatible personalities and temperaments, and, in fact, have little or no authentic interest in each other as persons. Of course, such relationships are doomed to failure. But they do not represent romantic love.
To love a human being is to know and love his or her person. This presupposes the ability to see, and with reasonable clarity. It is commonly argued that romantic lovers manifest a strong tendency to idealize or glamorize their partners. Of course, this sometimes occurs. But it is not in the nature of love that it must occur. To argue that love is necessarily blind is to maintain that no real and deep affinities of a kind that inspire love can really exist between persons. This argument runs counter to the experience of men and women who do see the partner’s shortcomings a well as strengths and who do love passionately.
Infatuation differs from love precisely in that, whereas love embraces the person as a whole, infatuation is the result of focusing on one or two traits or aspects and reacting as if that were the total. I see a beautiful face, for example, and assume it is the image of a beautiful soul. I see how kindly this person treats me and assume we share significant affinities. I discover we share important values in one area and expand this area to include the whole sphere of life.
It is sometimes argued (by Freud, for example) that the experience of romantic love is generated solely by sexual frustrations and, therefore, must perish shortly after consummation. True, frustration can create obsessive want and can foster a tendency to endow a desire object with temporary value. Yet anyone who argues that love cannot survive sexual fulfillment is making an extraordinary personal statement and is also revealing extraordinary blindness or indifference to the experience of others.
Since romantic love, in literature, is dramatized through lovers battling obstacles to their love, some writers have concluded that these obstacles are essential to the experience. “Romantic love,” writes Arnold Lazarus (1985), “thrives on barriers, frustrations, separations and delays. Remove these obstacles, replace them with the everyday-ness of married life, and ecstatic passion fades.” What is one to say, then, to couples who have been married for twenty years and who have preserved their vision of each other as well as their devotion—to say nothing of their sexuality? Such couples exist. Is psychology to have no place for them? “Romantics,” says Lazarus, “ignore the fact that people grow weary of each other unless thy have cultivated common interests and values.” Do they ignore this fact? And is such blindness essential to the romantic experience? I do not think so. This is the kind of straw-man version of romantic love that is typical of its critics.
It is sometimes argued, too, that since so many couples do in fact suffer feelings of disenchantment shortly after marriage, the experience of romantic love must be a delusion. Yet many people experience disenchantment somewhere along the line of their careers, and it is not commonly suggested, therefore, that the pursuit of a meaningful and fulfilling career is a mistake. Many people experience some degree of disenchantment in their children, but it is not commonly supposed that the desire to have children and to be happy about them is inherently immature and neurotic. Instead, it is generally recognized that the requirements for achieving happiness in one’s career or success in child rearing may be higher and more difficult than is ordinarily supposed.
Romantic love is not omnipotent—and those who believe it is are too immature to be ready for it. Given the multitude of psychological problems that many people bring to a romantic relationship—given their doubts, their fears, their insecurities, their weak and uncertain self-esteem—given the fact that most have never learned that a love relationship, like every other value in life, requires consciousness, courage, knowledge, and wisdom to be sustained—it is not astonishing that most relationships end disappointingly. But to indict romantic love on these grounds is to imply that if love is not enough—if love of and by itself cannot indefinitely sustain happiness and fulfillment—then it is not the ideal of romantic love, but in the irrational and impossible demands made of it.
4. The Many Needs Of Love
Let us now consider what are the psychological needs that romantic love satisfies?
There are, I believe, a network of complementary needs involved.
1. There is our need for human companionship: for someone with whom to share values, feelings, interests, and goals; for someone with whom to share the joys and burdens of existence.
2. There is our need to love: to exercise our emotional capacity in the unique way that love makes possible. We need to find persons to admire, to feel stimulated and excited by, persons toward who we can direct our energies.
3. There is our need to be loved: to be valued, cared for, and nurtured by another human being.
4. There is our need to experience psychological visibility: to see ourselves in and through the responses of another person, one with whom we have important affinities. This is, in effect, our need for a psychological mirror. (The concept of psychological visibility, developed in considerable detail in The Psychology of Romantic Love, is basic to my understanding of man/woman relationships.)
5. Three is the need for sexual fulfillment: for a counterpart as a source of sexual satisfaction.
6. There is our need for an emotional support system; for at least one person who is genuinely devoted to our well being, an emotional ally who, in the face of life’s challenges, is reliably there.
7. There is our need for self-awareness and self-discovery: for expanded contact with the self, which happens continually and more or less naturally through the process of intimacy and confrontation with another human being. Self-awareness and self-discovery attend the joys and conflicts, harmonies and dissonances of a relationship.
8. There is our need to experience ourselves fully as a man or woman: to explore the potentials of our maleness or femaleness in ways that only romantic love optimally makes possible. Just as we need a sense of identity as human beings, so we need a sense of identity related to gender—of a kind most successfully realized through interaction with the opposite sex.
9. There is our need to share our excitement in being alive and to enjoy and be nourished by the excitement of another.
I call these needs, not because we die without them, but because we live with ourselves and in the world so much better with them. They have survival value.
This list does not seem to me to be the slightest bit speculative. I believe common experience, observation, and reason support it. But if I were to be speculative, I might posit a tenth need— the need to encounter, unite with, and live out vicariously our opposite-gender possibilities: the need, in males, to find an embodiment in the world of the internal feminine; the need, in females, to find an embodiment in the world of the internal masculine (Sanford, 1980).
5. Behaviors of Successful Couples
There are couples who remain deeply in love for many, many years. Even allowing for setbacks, frictions, times of estrangement, and the like, they preserve over time the essential meaning of romantic love. And there are couples for whom romance, whatever that term signifies to them, vanishes almost from the moment of marriage.
Psychologists seem to know a good deal more about the failures than the successes, just as they know more about pathology than health. The danger of such one-sided knowledge, of course, is that it may blind us to life’s positive possibilities. The temptation is to believe that sickness is normal and health abnormal. Far more attention needs to be paid to these men and women for whom romantic love does not end in disenchantment.
My own studies suggest that there are at least some behaviors we can clearly isolate as being far more characteristic of successful couples than the average. Couples who remain happily in love over long periods of time more consistently exhibit these behaviors:
1. They tend to express love verbally or through behaviors the partner understands to be an expression of love. Sometimes this means saying, “I love you” or some equivalent (in contrast to that attitude best summarized by “What do you mean, do I love you? I married you, didn’t I?”).
“Saying the words,” one married woman remarked, “is a way of touching. Words can nurture feelings, keep love strong and in the forefront of the relationship.” Her husband commented, “Saying ‘I love you’ is a form of self-expression. It’s putting a bit of myself out there. So my feelings are in reality, not just inside of me.”
2. They tend to be physically affectionate. This includes handholding, hugging, kissing, cuddling, and comforting—with a cup of tea, a pillow, or a wooly blanket.
“Aren’t we all touch animals?” one husband remarked. “An infant first experiences love through touch. I don’t think we ever lose that need.” His wife added, “For me, cuddling is as important as talking or making love.”
3. They tend to express their love sexually. People who are happily in love are inclined to experience sexual intimacy as an important vehicle of contact and expression. Sex remains vital for them long after the excitement of novelty has passed.
This does not mean that they regard sex as the most significant aspect of their relationship. They are far more likely to regard their connection at the level of soul (for want of a better word) as the core of their relationship. And there are great variations in frequency of lovemaking among couples who are happily in love. And yet the expression “With my body I thee worship” is one they understand and relate to. Sex is integrated with, rather than alienated from, their feelings of love and caring. The importance they attach to sex is to be found in the emotions with which they invest the act.
4. They express their appreciation and admiration. Happy couples talk about what they like, enjoy, and admire in each other. As a result, they feel visible, appreciated, valued. “My husband has always been my best audience,” a woman said to me. “Whether I’m telling him about what I did at work that day, or a remark he liked that I made to someone at a party, or the way I dress, or a meal I’ve prepared—he seems to notice everything. And he lets me see his pride and delight. I feel like I’m standing in the most marvelous spotlight—his special way of being aware. That kind of awareness—and then talking about it—is what love means to me. I only hope I give as good as I get, because I’ll tell you something: being loved may be the second best thing in the world, but loving someone, really being able to appreciate and admire someone—as I do my husband—is the best. And I do let him know that.”
5. They participate in mutual self-disclosure. There is a willingness to share more of themselves and more of their inner lives with each other than with any other person. They share thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams, aspirations; hurt, anger, longing, memories of painful or embarrassing experiences. Such couples are far more comfortable with self-disclosure than the average and, as a corollary, more interested in each other’s inner life.
Often, of course, one partner is more verbal than the other is. One partner may be somewhat awkward at times about verbalizing intimate thoughts and feelings. And yet, on a relative scale, he or she reaches out to the partner as to no other person, and trusts the partner above all others, and listens to the partner above all others.
6. They offer each other an emotional support system. They are there for each other in times of illness, difficulty, hardship, and crisis. They are best friends to each other. They are generally helpful, nurturing, devoted to each other’s interests and well being.
7. They express love materially. They express love with gifts (big or small, but given on more than just routine occasions) or tasks performed to lighten the burden of the partner’s life, such as sharing work or doing more than agreed-upon chores.
The desire to give pleasure to the partner is powerfully in evidence here. As regards gifts, price and income level are not relevant; what is, is the underlying intention. The reward is to see an expression of joy or satisfaction on the partner’s face.
8. They accept demands or put up with shortcomings that would be far less acceptable in any other person. Demands and shortcomings are part of every happy relationship. So are the benevolence and grace with which we respond to them.
Another way of thinking about this point is to say that couples who know how to live together happily do not torment themselves or each other over “imperfections.” Each knows he or she is not perfect and does not demand perfection of the other. They are clear that, for them, the partner’s virtues outweigh the shortcomings—and they choose to enjoy the positives rather than drown the relationship in a preoccupation with the negatives. This does not mean they do not ask for—and sometimes get—changes in behavior they find undesirable. But they do not catastrophize difficulties they know they can live with.
9. They create time to be alone together. This time is exclusively devoted to themselves. Enjoying and nurturing their relationship rank very high among their priorities: they understand that love requires attention and leisure.
Such couples tend to regard their relationship as more interesting, more exciting, more fulfilling than any other aspect of social existence. Often they are reluctant to engage in social, political, community, or other activities that would cause them to be separated unless they re convinced there are very good reasons for doing so; they’re clearly not looking for excuses to escape from each other, as is evidently the case with many more socially active couples.
“We’ve been called selfish for wanting to spend so much time alone together,” one woman said to me, laughing; she was obviously untouched by the accusation. Her husband added, “But we’ve never heard that from anyone who’s happily married.” His wife continued, “I once pointed that out to someone who was trying to give me a hard time. Do you know what she answered? ‘Happiness is so middle class.’ A loser’s consolation prize if ever I heard one.”
It can require considerable independence of a couple to treat their relationship as a major priority. But we find that kind of independence among couples who know how to sustain love across many years.
Once, following a lecture in which I was discussing the importance of time and intimacy for a relationship, a young man and woman came over to me, very enthusiastic about the talk, and proceeded to tell me how happily in love they were—which was how they looked. Then the man said to me, “but there’s one thing that troubles me. How do you find the time for that intimacy?” I asked him what his profession was and he told me he was a lawyer. I said, “There’s one thing that troubles me. Given how much in love you are with your wife, and looking at you both it seems clear that you are, how do you find the time to attend to your law practice?” He looked disoriented and nonplussed. “The question is incomprehensible, isn’t it?” I said to him. “I mean, you have to attend to your law practice, don’t you? That’s important.” Slowly a light began to dawn on his face. I went on, “Well, when and if you decide that love really matters to you as much a your work, when success in your relationship with this woman becomes as much an imperative as success in your career, you won’t ask: How does one find time? You’ll know how one does it.” This, of course, is what happy couples understand perfectly.
In my observation the biggest time threat comes not from our work but from our social relationships or what we tell ourselves are our social obligations. Often it is against these that our love needs to be protected. The time that we and our partner spend in the company of relatives, friends, or colleagues can be a source of pleasure, but it is not a substitute for time spent alone together. Nothing is. Evenings spent with people who do not matter to us, or do not matter nearly as much as the one we love, cannot be reclaimed at a later date, cannot be taken back and relived. Successful couples seem to know it is now or never.
Now the characteristics I have outlined are not equally present in every happy marriage or love affair. Even within a relationship each partner does not exhibit them equally at all times. But I strongly doubt that anyone could point to a happy relationship that did not show most of these traits.
6. Romantic Love and Self-Esteem
I have already suggested that if romantic love is to succeed, it asks far more of us in terms of personal evolution and maturity than is ordinarily understood.
The first thing it asks is a reasonably good level of self-esteem. If we enjoy healthy self-esteem—if we feel competent, lovable, deserving of happiness—we are very likely to choose a mate who will reflect and support our self-concept. If we feel inadequate, unlovable, undeserving of happiness, again we are likely to become involved with a person who will confirm our deepest vision of ourselves.
If we enjoy good self-esteem, we are likely to treat our partner well and to expect that he or she will treat us well, which tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We will not see ourselves s a martyr or a victim. We will not feel that suffering is our natural destiny, and we will not put up with it in passive resignation—let alone go looking for it. If we lack good self-esteem, we are unlikely to treat our partner well, despite our good intentions, because of our fears and excessive dependency. And if our partner treats us badly, some part of us will feel, “But of course.” And if and when our relationship ends and we go looking for a new partner, despair can make us not more thoughtful but more blind—so our self-esteem goes on deteriorating and so does our love life.
If we are to choose a mate wisely, we need to feel that we are deserving of love, admiration, and respect—and that only someone we can truly love, admire, and respect is appropriate for us. If we are to treat our relationship with the care and nurturing it deserves, we need to feel that we are deserving of happiness—that happiness is not a miracle or a mirage but our natural and appropriate birthright.
Our sense of self, the way we perceive and assess ourselves, crucially affects virtually every aspect of our existence. That has been the central theme of all my work. As regards love, the first love affair we must consummate successfully is with ourselves. Only then are we ready for other relationships. And how well can we practice “mutual self-disclosure” if we are strangers to ourselves, alienated from our inner life, cut off from feelings and emotions and longings? Self-alienation is the enemy of intimacy and therefore of romantic love (or any other kind of love). Or if we are estranged from our sexuality, or in an adversary relationship to our body, we lack the mind-body integration that romantic love celebrates. If we have not attained a reasonably mature level of individualism and autonomy, chances are we will overburden our relationship with demands that can’t be met—such as to create (rather than express) our self-esteem and our happiness or to support the illusion that we are not ultimately responsible for our own existence.
Romantic love requires courage—the courage to stay vulnerable, to stay open to our feelings for our partner, even when we are temporarily in conflict, even when we are frustrated, hurt, angry—the courage to remain connected with our love, rather than shut down emotionally, even when it is terribly difficult to do so. When a couple lacks this courage and seeks “safety” from pain in the refuge of withdrawal, as so commonly happens, it is not romantic love that has failed them but they who have failed romantic love.
7. In Conclusion
I regret there is not space here to develop in more depth the view of love I am presenting or to discuss in detail how it differs from traditional views.
I do not, for example, share the assumption of some champions of romantic love that reason and passion are antithetical. I do not believe that “true love conquers all.” Nor that there is only one soul mate for each person on earth. Nor that love necessarily entails marriage or that marriage necessarily entails children. I do not believe it has necessarily failed if it does not last forever. I do not insist that romantic love, under all circumstances and conditions, necessarily and always entails sexual exclusivity. I do not see romantic love as the prerogative of youth. I do not identify it exclusively with the excitement of what is merely it first phase: the phase of novelty.
To say it once more, I see its success over time as a triumph of psychological maturity. I see its essence as the encounter of two selves who see in each other a mirror, an opportunity for the celebration of self and of life, a doorway to our ultimate psychological (including spiritual) home, and a challenge to the best within us.
Nathaniel Branden
REFERENCES
Branden, N. (1969/1971). The Psychology of Self-Esteem. New York: Bantam Books.
_____. (1980/1981). The Psychology of Romantic Love. New York: Bantam Books.
_____. (1984/1985). Honoring The Self. New York: Bantam Books.
_____. (1987). What Love Asks of Us. With D. Branden. New York: Bantam Books.
Burgess, E.W., & Lock, H.T. (1953). The Family: From Institution to Companionship (2nd ed.). New York: American Book Co.
Lazarus, A. A. (1985). Marital Myths. San Luis Obispo, CA: Impact Publishers.
Sanford, J.A. (1980). The Invisible Partners. New York and Ramsey: Paulist Press.
One year ago tonight, this little girl came into my life. She was sick, frail, and half blind, but holding on, and irresistibly cute even in that sorry state. I had to take her. Today she is all good, and all cat. She exceeds both fantasies and nightmares. We’re working on the nightmares. In the meantime, I’m happy she’s safe and with me. She’s not going anywhere, and I want her to know that. >MB
I really hate posting this stuff. I can think of countless other topics I would prefer. I’ve drained my tank of political diatribe. That ship sailed out of my emotional dock many months ago when I decided it was healthier to take a breath and envision the next election which is closer in sight now.
So much for that plan.
The Covid virus situation has now supplanted my short lived peace of mind and once again made it difficult to contain my stress because of other people’s behavior. Again, I am challenged to channel myself away from it all, but this time, its harder.
Its harder, because, unlike confrontational political creatures who we can physically distance ourselves from, we can only distance ourselves so much from the behavior of people flouting social distancing guidelines in a pandemic. The inconvenient truth is that flouters of social distance guidelines affect our public health risk. In a big way. In a (Knock! Knock! Hello! Is anyone home??) PANDEMIC kind of way.
What’s really disturbing to me is how people around me in my own community, and circles, and clearly too many other parts of this country, seem to think there is a straight line from deciding, or not deciding, to observe social distance guidelines. Their rationale appears to be, if I don’t want to relax my own social guidelines, then I don’t have to be around those who are willing to relax them, and I should not be lecturing, or spoiling anybody else’s fun.
I don’t recall seeing “teacher” show up on the career compatibility test I took when I was twenty-one, but I am called upon to play that role now.
Today’s lesson begins and ends with the simple formula of how a pandemic starts…
Person #1 observes social distancing tightly, controlling contact outside their household to essential purposes.
Person #2 observes social distancing loosely, interacting in social gatherings beyond household members.
Person #2 contracts the Covid-19 virus from the social gatherings.
Person #2 then comes in contact later with Person #1.
Person #1, who practiced tighter social distancing than Person #2, is now exposed to the same Covid-19 virus because of Person #2.
All of this potentially takes place in a single day or two with no one knowing it because the symptoms take 1-2 weeks to appear, which then allow both Persons #1, and #2, to unknowingly transmit the virus to someone else. The rate of transmission is reported to be 3 to 1. Do the math. Presto! Pandemic!
If the above crash course lesson doesn’t explain why someone else’s behavior is completely relevant to mine, and exponentially, everyone else, who is trying to hold the fort here, then I can’t help you any further. You may think social distancers like me are spoiling your fun, but if this trend below plays out further, you will be the ones spoiling it for everybody.
>MB
From ABC News:
Why People are Flouting Coronavirus Social Distancing Precautions That We Know Save Lives
Experts say factors like risk aversion play a heavy role.
By
Ivan Pereira
May 30, 2020, 10:57 AM
10 min read
People packed into a pool at Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri.Parks in New York City, the epicenter of the outbreak, jammed with sunbathers.A crowded brunch spot in Colorado with diners celebrating Mother’s Day.With more than 100,000 Americans dead and rising from the novel coronavirus, health experts and other leaders have been pleading for people to adhere to their strict guidelines to keep people safe.But all too recently, these and other examples, large and small, have emerged of people blatantly defying social distancing and face-covering rules.
Psychology experts said they haven’t been surprised by this type of behavior, since it’s been a long-standing issue with public health: the ability for people to assess risk. Rajita Sinha, a professor of psychiatry at Yale University and the founding director of the Yale Stress Center, said the uncertainty about when the pandemic will end, access to information and one’s underlying beliefs can influence someone to flout precautions.
“Those features of the current pandemic really put into gear people’s need for control which is an important aspect of coping,” she told ABC News. “Gaining control is a basic way we cope.”
Sinha and other health experts say there is no easy solution to the problem, but there are ways to help those individuals see the need for health precautions.
She noted that risk is a very abstract concept to people. While some people may look at the COVID-related news and feel fear from the images of sick patients, others may want to take their chances, Sinha said.
“If you’re in a bad scenario where there is a lot of danger…if you worried you may not be able to get yourself out, there is a mechanism where we just plow along,” she said.
Joshua Ackerman, associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, who has studied behaviors related to infectious diseases, said individualism also plays a part in adhering to guidelines.
“If people think masks are self-protection and you don’t think you’ll need protection, you won’t wear them,” he told ABC News.
Sten Vermund, the dean of Yale School of Public Health, likened the behavior to running a red light.
“They don’t perceive enough personal risk and they don’t have a sense of altruism that is acute,” he told ABC News.
Attitudes on masks and social distancing are mixed in the U.S., according to polling from ABC News and Ipsos. At the end of April, a large majority of the country (82%) were concerned about coronavirus and just 14% thought stay-at-home orders restricted personal liberty. Earlier in April, an ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 55% of Americans had worn a mask in the last week.
While guidance on social distancing has largely been consistent and long-standing — staying 6 feet away from others to prevent the transmission of respiratory droplets, avoiding large gatherings and staying home — wearing a mask has been has been much murkier. Public health officials initially suggested that people not wear masks and instead reserve them for health workers, but on April 3, they recommended that people wear cloth masks in public to prevent asymptomatic transmission.
That message has been further confused by President Trump generally refusing to wear a mask, despite the CDC recommendation.
Information, particularly that which is circulating in one’s immediate circle, is an important factor for people’s behavior’s during the pandemic, according to Ackerman. Even though the U.S. leads the world with over 1.7 million cases, there are whole counties, particularly in rural communities, where there are few or no cases. The pandemic looks very different in those places compared to hotspots such as New York City.
Ackerman said the lack of centralized and consistent health-related messaging from local, state and federal leaders and the polarization of news sources will lead people to make different choices.
“People listen to information and they use that to calculate their own risk. In situations like this, sometimes the accuracy of the information is far less important to the availability of that information,” he said.
Tune into ABC at 1 p.m. ET and ABC News Live at 4 p.m. ET every weekday for special coverage of the novel coronavirus with the full ABC News team, including the latest news, context and analysis.
Sinha said that the sometimes lax response to COVID can be amplified where others act similarly for the same reasons. She pointed out the examples of rallies and other demonstrations of people who have expressed frustration with the rise in unemployment and the loss of other social norms.
“They’re worried about work and unemployment and other stressors affecting them and family. They’re not paying attention to everything else,” Sinha said. Many protesters at reopening rallies around the country have, however, worn masks.
Vermund said there are also Americans who don’t have direct connections with the people most vulnerable to COVID, like the elderly or immunocompromised, so it may take longer for them to grasp the need for precautions. Although the true number of infected is unknown, just a fraction of the country has had confirmed COVID cases and a vast number of those have been concentrated in the urban Northeast.
“We lived through this during the HIV era,” he explained. “During the early years, 1981, 1982, people were not changing their behaviors because they weren’t so close to people who got ill. By 1985, the pandemic was so striking and so many people got to know people who got ill and died, that behaviors started to change.”
Ackerman said there will likely be increasing cases of people not adhering to social distancing and face-covering precautions as states being to reopen their economies. He noted the psychological notion of “goal completion” — in this case, the sense that the pandemic may be over because life appears to be returning to normal — may give some people a false sense of security.
“If we think about the information provided to people…one of the goals given was that we have to flatten the curve. To the extent that people think that the curve has been flattened, they might think the worst is behind them,” he said.
He and other health experts, however, said the public can still turn things around and increase compliance with social distancing rules. Sinha said people are more prone to comply with health orders if they have a clear understanding of how it affects the people around them.
Even if it is just one person articulating to a friend or family member that the face masks and distracting practices help the greater good, it could get them to change their minds and pass it on, according to Sinha.
“There is no reason it can’t be done if you can build a narrative around it. If you articulate the full narrative that we are shifting gears and preparing for the next phase, some people will listen,” she said.
First off, contrary to the posed question of the headline below, I am most certainly NOT ready to expand my quarantine bubble. I’ve been off the radar for any social hubbubs for three months. I don’t see any compelling reason to return to the fray at this moment in time. It ‘aint gonna kill me to wait awhile longer. My id, ego, superego, and other parts of my psyche will survive intact. I’m not going to decline some dark rabbit hole of shrinking self worth because I can’t drink bloody mary’s and or martinis in meetups for another few weeks. It ‘aint gonna kill me. And it ‘aint gonna kill you. On the other hand, if you don’t want to wait to do your social thangs, shop, eat out, and pocket your mask in confident defiance, that could kill you. And, it could kill me. I didn’t write this script, folks. Somebody else did. I’m just not interested in re-wrtiing it.
“Why not?” You may ask. To which I would answer with another question to you…”Why should I?” To which you may answer…”Well, the state is reopening and relaxing social guidelines.” To which I would say…”Oh really? Why are they doing that?” To which you would answer “Positive test results have gone down.” To which I would say,..”That is an unreliable marker at this time, which may not reflect the true viral presence. You need to read more about how higher testing volume skews reality, plus the bad testing itself, which is only 50% accurate, plus bungled CDC and state testing results.” To which you might answer…”I don’t have time for this banter, or to read these things. I miss my friends. I miss shopping. I miss eating out!” To which I would say… “Good luck, take care, and I’ll see you every two weeks between your forays.”
Ready to expand your quarantine bubble? Here’s what you need to know
The answer, experts say, depends on where you live and what social precautions you practice.
As states reopen, the public is grappling with how to have safe social interactions. (Getty Images.)
TODAY
By Maura Hohman
With restaurants and other nonessential businesses reopening across the country, many Americans have taken this as a sign it’s safe to return to behavior from before the coronavirus lockdown.
The truth is, though, whether you can socialize freely depends largely on where you live, Dr. Sten Vermund, dean of Yale’s School of Public Health in New Haven, Connecticut, told TODAY.
For example, in towns where the case count is zero, it may be safe “to go back to life normally,” he said. For areas with relatively low circulation of the virus, he added, the question for public health professionals becomes: What’s the probability that social interaction will “rekindle the forest fire” of widespread transmission?
Regardless of the state you live in, knowing the case counts and local guidance for your area is paramount. Vermund recommended websites like COVIDcommitment.org and HowWeFeel.org.
This data should inform how you decide to socialize, if at all, as nothing right now is “100% risk-free,” Robert Bednarczyk, PhD, professor at Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, told TODAY.
Here’s more specific guidance to determine if it’s safe to see friends and family now and in the future.
Is it safe to see friends right now?
Again, the answer depends largely on where you live. If that’s an area that still has stay-at-home orders in place, like New York City or Los Angeles, then you should stick to socializing just with people in your household, Hilary Godwin, PhD, dean of University of Washington’s School of Public Health in Seattle, told TODAY.
Right now, most if not all states have banned mass gatherings, like you’d see at a bar or concert. So continue to avoid these settings, even outdoors, and don’t have large groups at your home.
For interactions less packed than parties but aren’t outdoors with 6 feet, Bednarczyk explained that there’s “spectrum” of safety. “It’s not necessarily a good-versus-bad type of situation … Having one person over to your house is at a lower end of the spectrum.”
Godwin also stressed that the physical distance aspect is the most important part of reducing risk.
“The most frequent way (COVID-19) seems to be spreading is people in close proximity to each other indoors for extended periods of time,” she explained. “The perfect way to reintroduce getting together socially with friends would be sitting out on your front porch on chairs that are 6 feet apart … hanging out with good separation outside where there’s air circulating.”
How can we socialize safely in the coming weeks to months?
Following guidance from local health departments is the best way to gauge what’s safe, Vermund said, adding that until there are explicit changes, take as many precautions as possible.
In the absence of specific rules, Godwin advised expanding social interactions slowly so authorities can determine whether they’re impacting the spread of the coronavirus in the community. It’s not “a light switch” where groups gathering will suddenly be safe, she said.
Before meeting up with friends, look for signs that your community can handle the risk, Godwin continued. For example, if you live in an area with sparse testing or frequent news coverage of an overwhelmed health care system, these are signs it’s not a good time to expand your circle.
If you choose to socialize with people outside your household, she recommended picking “COVID buddies” — people who only interact with each other and have similar risks related to the coronavirus and behavioral patterns. You also want people with similar “philosophies on precautions,” she said. This way, if one person takes risks, there’s no unnecessary exposure for others because the rest of the group behaves the same way.
But again, keep an eye on your local health department’s website. It can take weeks for the effects of reopening to materialize, and it’s possible that restrictions will tighten again, Vermund said.
What will the rest of the year look like for social interactions?
“What we’re all hoping for is in the next month or two, most regions will start shifting into this limited social interaction phase,” Godwin said. “While we’re in that phase, we’ll check to make sure the number of cases don’t get out of control, and then we’ll start allowing slightly larger gatherings.”
In the mean time, pay attention to state and local guidance, and follow the big four, as Vermund called them:
Physical distance of 6 feet
Face coverings
Hand hygiene
Opting for the outdoors
What if you’re high risk for the coronavirus?
For demographics who could become severely ill from COVID-19, like people over 65 or with underlying conditions, the inevitable risks of social interaction are greater. These groups “need to avoid getting infected at all costs,” Vermund said.
So, be “aggressive” about precautions, he added. Tell people around you to wear masks and maintain 6 feet of distance. In addition, Godwin encouraged these individuals to self-isolate ideally until there are no cases of the coronavirus in their area.
Connecticut is but one single solitary state that has clamped down on public activity, business operations, and asserted itself in cautious messaging to its residents for the last two months.
There are 49 other states in our country. Many have done the same, if not more. Some have done less. Still other state governments, in doing little from the start, or acting late, have cemented their reputation as lands of questionable judgment.
I am fortunate to live in a community with a leading educational institution that publishes articles such as these to remind readers to stay vigilant, and stay smart. But, there’s more to it than that. People can not wait for articles like this to magically drop from the sky into their lap. We need to proactively follow writers and dispensers of information that are interested in our public health and knowledge scores. Not politics and commerce interests. I “choose” to subscribe to, and trust, posts and information lines like these.
As I drove through a couple neighboring towns in New Haven this past “re-opening” week, I noticed some things that changed literally overnight. Restaurants have set up outdoor tables wherever they can in hailing distance of wait staff. At one of these outdoor table, sat four diners kicking back in their summer shorts, golf shirts, and sleeveless dresses, crowing, laughing, having a good ol time while throwing back beers as if all were finally as it should be. I couldn’t help thinking this group, as many others, felt it should’ve been this way all along since early April. Just down the road, at a popular tequila bar, sitting at a single hi-top table positioned directly on the sidewalk, just aside of its main entrance, and inarguably, encroaching on foot traffic passing by, sat five people elbow to elbow indulging in happy hour. Over the next days more of these sightings were obvious. People sitting together in parties of four, or five, just barely six feet apart from more tables with other people having food and drinks brought out to them. In virtually all of these scenarios, the tables were directly on the sidewalk, sometimes, not always, separated by a waist high iron or wooden fence, where pedestrians were walking by close enough to pick a french fry off a table.
I know I’ve got company who would find both these scenes unsettling at this time and place. I also know there are others who are next in line to grab a table and damn the torpedoes. Thus is the pervasive contradiction of human behavior which opposes as much as it embraces, sometimes with careful deliberation, sometimes with thoughtless impulse.
Ever since this viral mess reached its second month in April, no less June, there’s been as much discussion about the social casualty of isolation, as there has been about the economic and health casualties. There have been so many stress points trying to reconcile these very different vested interests, that the conversation inevitably degrades into conflict, judgment, and lost tempers among people who might not otherwise be colliding in their lives.
The question was glaringly obvious. How is it possible to prioritize these three distinct focal points affecting human beings in such direct and powerful ways, each of which has its own intertwined impact on the other? To me, it is almost impossible. Where does impossible leave us?
It became clear to me months ago, and remains so, that these challenging times are at the top of the list of what organized central government was conceived to address. For instance, conceiving and executing comprehensive plans to address major issues impacting our economy, our public health, and our societal well being. Sadly, during this time, it also became clear, that our federal government would fail us spectacularly in this fundamental mission.
So, are we back to impossible after all? I don’t believe it is impossible IF reality is faced, sacrifices are made, and the inevitable losses are accepted. If we as individuals, as groups, as calm, meditative thinkers, with respect for ourselves, and life around us, gather credible information about this public health risk, and act responsibly, we can salvage the best outcome for ourselves. Even given inevitable losses, there’s a control for a better or worse outcome. Its horrible. Its been horrible. People died. More will die. Business closed. More will close. People lost jobs. More will lose jobs. Still, I ask, you want better, or worse?
Covid -19 is still here. It still gets people sick, and it still kills. As true as it was in February and March, it is true now. Any single action by any given individual in the public space has the potential to trigger a transmission contact, and that person to the next, and so on, and so forth. In case any of you have lost sight of this. This is how an epidemic, and pandemic works. It’s how we got here in the first place. It’s not just about what one person does, or one small group of tipsy teenagers throwing back shots at a crooked table outside a dive bar. It still is about all of us. Its still the same. The virus is still here in plain sight. And there’s still no cure for it.
Let’s all just say for the millionth time. It sucks. It sucks thinking about this all the time. But, we still have to think about it. We still have to think twice before we decide to act like we used to act.. So let’s do that. Think twice.
“Risk of Resurgence” in COVID-19 Epidemic if Connecticut Reopens Too Quickly, YSPH Report Finds
May 22, 2020
by Michael Greenwood
As Connecticut tentatively reopens this week after a two-month shutdown, a new report by the Yale School of Public Health warns that if people resume normal activities and contacts too quickly there will be a “sharp resurgence” in hospitalizations and deaths in the coming months.
Associate Professor Forrest Crawford and postdocs Olga Morozova and Zehang (Richard) Li created a mathematical model to predict COVID-19 transmission, hospitalization and deaths in the state under “slow” and “fast” reopening scenarios.
If the state reopens too quickly, a second wave may be unleashed, the effects of which could be worse than what has already happened. It could result in an estimated total of over 8,100 deaths by September 1 in Connecticut. More than 3,500 state residents have already died from coronavirus.
“If contact rates return quickly to levels seen in early March, the number of new cases could rise dramatically over the summer” said Crawford, the report’s lead author. “Connecticut decision-makers need to closely monitor data on new cases and hospitalizations, as well as transmission model projections, in order to reopen the state safely.”
Under a slow reopening scenario (defined as relaxing restrictions so that contact increases at a rate of 10 percent each month) the incidence of the disease will still increase slightly in the coming weeks but will taper off and stay at lower levels. Hospitalizations for the disease will continue to decline, rising slightly in August and the number of coronavirus-related deaths will rise slowly, with an estimated total of 4,600 to 7,100 by September 1.
Under the fast scenario (defined as increasing contact at a rate of 10 percent every two weeks), Crawford and colleagues found that the number of new infections is likely to spike throughout the summer, potentially exceeding hospitalization capacity and resulting in anywhere from 5,400 to 13,400 total deaths by September 1.
“These projections are based on the latest available data and knowledge from the scientific community,” said Li. “As we gather new evidence about transmissibility of the disease and effectiveness of interventions, our model projections will improve.”
If contact rates return quickly to levels seen in early March, the number of new cases could rise dramatically over the summer.
The researchers attributed the recent decline in hospitalizations to the reduction in contacts following distancing measures implemented by the state officials. “It is too early to return to normal. As some businesses reopen, it is even more important for people to continue practicing social distancing and avoid traveling to highly affected areas, most importantly New York City,” said Morozova.
Yale School of Public Health Professor Albert Ko co-chaired Gov. Ned Lamont’s ReOpen Connecticut Advisory Group, which strongly advised a cautious and conservative schedule as the state starts to return to normal.
“These model projections of the future risk of COVID-19 resurgence directly informed the recommendations made to mitigate this risk,” Ko said. The advisory group, which recently completed its work, was not involved in the preparation of the report.
Other key points from the report include:
Real-time metrics (such as hospitalizations, case counts and deaths) may not provide adequate warning to avoid a resurgence.
Closure of schools and the state’s stay-at-home order greatly reduced transmission of the virus.
There are substantial gaps in knowledge about critical aspects of the disease, including the proportion of infected individuals who are asymptomatic, infectiousness of children, the effects of testing and contact tracing on isolation of infected individuals and how contact patterns may change following reopening.
As I’ve written previously, the decision on how we as individuals react to official reopening announcements should be taken in a serious context first, and foremost, within actual virus transmission rates, and testing volume, and ongoing testing access. I’ve said it before. I will say it again. This virus is still a significant threat to public health, with virtually all the same risk factors that were there from the beginning. What’s changing now is not the virus risk, but the way specific businesses are going to operate within the risk environment. Whether you as an individual feel safe enough with those changes to re-enter these environments, just because there is a legal allowance of sorts, is a question you’ll have to answer in your private deliberation. Don’t expect it to be easy. Personally, I’m with the 72%. -MB
The Country Is Reopening—Now What?
Yale Medicine expert answers commonly asked COVID-19 questions as states begin to reopen.
For many, news that the country is reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic is met with a sense of anxiety and confusion.
Summer is coming. Usually, the season comes with thoughts of beach days, ice cream, baseball, and day camp. But for many, the prospect of summer during the COVID-19 pandemic is met with an overall sense of anxiety and confusion—and questions.
Is the beach safe? The ice cream shop is open, but should I really go? And more importantly, how are we any better off, in terms of infection prevention and treatment, than we were in mid-March, when stay-at-home orders were first put into place?
In other words, why are we reopening now, and how do we make sense of it all?
“I think it is hard for all of us to wrap our heads around reopening,” says Jaimie Meyer, MD, MS, a Yale Medicine infectious disease specialist. “There is nothing magically ‘safe’ about May 20, and very little difference in epidemiologic risk between May 19 and May 21. Only a public health approach that is data-driven will dictate a slow and measured reopening.”
Reopening criteria confusion
Part of the confusion may lie in the number and scope of documents detailing the suggested criteria required for reopening the country. The White House has a protocol called “Opening Up America Again,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has its own version, in addition to six one-page infographics, and some states, including Connecticut, have their own plans, some of which are more or less stringent than the White House’s protocol.
The idea, in theory, is that once the state-specific version of the reopening criteria has been met, it will be safe to begin what’s called a “phased reopening”—in other words, a gradual relaxing of some restrictions, as well as the opening of some businesses. With a phased reopening, state officials (working with county and local officials) are presumably able to monitor the number of COVID-19 cases, and can move forward with—or stop, if need be—further reopenings, or phases, based on changes in those case numbers.
But many states have opted to overlook federal criteria—or create their own smaller-scale benchmarks—and move forward with a phased reopening anyway, leaving it up to individuals to make their own decisions about when and how to venture outside safely.
Most Americans are worried about this. According to a recent Reuters national poll, 72% of adults in the United States said people should stay at home “until the doctors and public health officials say it is safe.”
With that in mind, we spoke with Dr. Meyer, who provided answers to frequently asked questions about COVID-19, especially as it relates to the reopening of the country.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Why is it important to have a consensus on the criteria for reopening?
A. The purpose of having standards for a phased reopening is to ensure that the response is data-driven. I strongly believe that if criteria are not met, we risk an uptick in new cases and a setback in terms of progress with this disease.
Q. What does a data-driven public health approach to reopening look like?
A. Five things, really. 1) The presence of protective immunity. There are a number of people (depending on where you live) who have now been infected with SARS-CoV-2, recovered, and have potentially developed antibodies against the virus. Although it’s not clear yet whether these antibodies will completely protect them from reinfection, at what level and for how long, there is likely some protective immunity; 2) The ability for hospitals to care for patients. As hospitals reduce their overload, they will have expanded capacity to care for people who become sick; 3) Adequate testing. Testing is expanding (or should be) in most states, increasing the potential to identify people who are sick and isolate them; 4) Contact tracing. This is also scaling up (or should be) in most states, increasing the potential to identify even more people who are infected and isolate them; and 5) Careful restrictions on social distancing, cleaning and disinfecting, and PPE [personal protective equipment] in public spaces, all of which reduce the spread of disease.
We need all of these components together to keep the curve going down and to prevent a second wave.
Q. Before a safe and effective vaccine is developed, is the goal to make the virus disappear or to let people get infected, but at slower rates that hospitals can keep pace with?
A. The goal of the combined public health measures I just mentioned is to reduce the number of new cases which, in turn, reduces the number of hospitalizations and the number of COVID-related deaths. No one can expect that these measures will “disappear” the virus, or that everyone will eventually become infected. The truth will likely lie somewhere in between, but only the data will tell us exactly where.
Q. How can we be sure that testing is accurate across all states?
A. It’s hard to know. There are a wide variety of types of tests being used across health systems, and they have varying degrees of sensitivity—meaning the ability to pick up ‘true positives’ for people who actually have the disease—and specificity, which is the ability to tease out ‘true negatives’ for those who do not have the disease.
Tests generally fall into three major categories: tests that look for the genetic material [RNA] of the virus; “antigen” tests that look for a particular part of the virus; and “antibody” tests that look for the human body’s response to the virus.
Some of these tests have been fully vetted and validated before they were approved by the FDA [Food and Drug Administration], and others were authorized under an emergency use authorization [EUA] but have not yet been fully vetted and validated. We are really learning on the fly.
Q. Why is there still a delay in the number of tests being made available?
A. This relates to the capacity to collect the samples, availability of materials to run the tests (nasal swabs or liquid reagents to process the samples, for example), and certified labs to analyze the tests.
Q. The FDA issued two EUAs for at-home tests, one for a nasal swab sample and, more recently, one for a saliva sample. Does that mean we will be able to pick these up at a drug store for routine testing?
A. Yes, home collection kits are likely headed our way. This is exciting because it will not only make the tests more widely available, but also reduce risks of exposure to health care workers that can happen during the collection process. But, I believe home collection kits will still need to be ordered by a health care provider instead of being available over the counter.
Q. What is contact tracing? If I am contacted, does that mean I have the virus?
A. Contact tracing is a way to identify those who have been exposed to people with confirmed cases of COVID so they can get tested—it’s a key component of disease containment strategies. Departments of Public Health everywhere, including in Connecticut, are ramping up their ability to conduct contact tracing. They already have systems in place for other highly communicable diseases, such as syphilis, so I imagine it will operate in a similar way.
If you are contacted, it means you had a potentially high-risk exposure to someone who was infected with COVID. This is not a reason to panic, but rather a reason to self-isolate and get tested.
A. We may have to have some sort of barrier protection for our faces, like cloth face coverings, until we have highly effective vaccines available.
Q. So, it could be for a while—years, even.
A. Yes.
Q. How does wearing a surgical mask or a cloth mask protect others if small particles carrying the virus can still get through?
A. I like to think of facial coverings as putting your thumb over a hose—some water may escape, but the major flow is blocked. Facial coverings like cloth masks prevent many particles from being disseminated into the environment, but not all. That is why we need social distancing and other prevention strategies, like hand washing and cleaning or disinfection, in addition to cloth masks.
Q. The six-foot physical distance is based on previous coronaviruses, correct? Is it enough? If I am around runners or people who are coughing a lot, should I move farther away?
A. Yes, that’s true. If people are coughing, sneezing, or breathing heavily they may aerosolize more droplets, which may be propelled further. That is why we ask people who are sick to stay home, wear facial coverings, and remain socially distant.
Q. If you’re running for a long distance behind someone, though, wouldn’t that increase your risk? Is it better to move across the street?
A. There is no data on whether it is better to run behind, in front of, or to the side of someone while running. The best bet is to run at least six feet apart, regardless of the direction.
Q. There was a study in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) about SARS-CoV-2 being in aerosols and remaining in the air for three hours. Is that the same as airborne transmission?
A. This means that once virus-coated droplets are sprayed into the air, they can remain there and survive for up to three hours. This facilitates airborne transmission of the virus from person to person, because that live virus can infect someone else if it enters their respiratory tract.
Q. Wouldn’t that mean that we are all susceptible to potential infection in any enclosed space, even if we all wear cloth face coverings?
A. We have to be careful when we translate lab experiments into real-life scenarios. The experiment discussed above found that live virus could be recovered from aerosol for up to three hours, but it’s not known whether the quantity is enough to actually cause infection in someone else.
As the state/country reopens, however, we know that better-ventilated spaces result in less distribution of the virus-laden droplets. This is the reason for states recommending reopening of outdoor spaces first, where transmission is less likely, especially with social distancing.
Q. That means that two families who are on separate blankets six feet apart at the beach would be relatively safe, even if they stayed on their blankets for 8 hours or so, breathing in the same air.
A. Yes.
Q. Some people think they’ve already had COVID-19 in December or January. Is there a way for people to know if they had it? And if they did, do they have some immunity?
A. People who have COVID-19 (whether or not they were ever officially diagnosed) and recover often develop antibodies against the virus. Antibody tests have been developed but are problematic because of high rates of false negatives and false positives. So, right now it’s not recommended that they be used to make individual decisions about personal health or safety. We suspect that antibodies will offer some protection from reinfection, but it’s not known what level of antibodies is sufficient and how long that protection will last.
So, we don’t want people going out to get tested for antibodies and then feeling falsely assured that they are protected.
Q. When returning from the grocery store, is it really a smart strategy to wipe down packaged food with bleach wipes, or is it overkill? If a delivery driver with COVID sneezed on or near my cardboard Amazon package and then dropped it off on my doorstep and I picked it up immediately and opened the box, could I get sick?
A. I think we need to balance anxiety with practicality and safety. I suggest that people practice reasonable precautions. This means unpacking groceries/deliveries from their containers or boxes, washing hands, and wiping down countertops with bleach. Even though the virus can be found on cardboard for up to 72 hours, the NEJM article suggests viable [live] virus is probably on cardboard for closer to 8 hours. Your best bet is to wash your hands after handling potentially contaminated surfaces.
Q. Do we know how long someone is contagious when they’re asymptomatic?
A. People can shed virus (and potentially infect others) for three to five days prior to developing symptoms. Those who don’t develop symptoms at all can shed virus for approximately 14 days at high enough levels that they may be contagious to others.
People can shed virus for weeks following recovery, but we think that this is either dead virus or virus at low enough levels that they are not contagious to others.
Q. In Connecticut, gatherings of 5 or fewer are OK, and most people have been sheltering-in-place for about two months. So, is it safe for one person to have an indoor visit with someone else if both have sheltered-in-placed for two months and have not had any symptoms for 14 days?
A. Data from over 1,000 people hospitalized in a single week in New York showed that the majority of people infected and newly admitted were people who identified as “mostly staying home.” The likely reason for this discrepancy was that there were gaps in home isolation behaviors—social visits with others, being in public spaces without face coverings or appropriate hand hygiene, interacting with others without taking precautions, etc. I know many people who would say they are fully isolated, but are still spending time in public spaces. So, if both people were truly isolated, it would be reasonable to have a visit without any additional risk. Ideally, people could get tested before they gather together.
Q. Some have missed a mammogram or a colonoscopy or a dental procedure, and they’re afraid to go to the doctor. Is there a safe way to get these things done?
A. Over the next few months at Yale New Haven Hospital, we are looking towards reopening ambulatory services and elective procedures, as are places elsewhere that are on the downside of their COVID curve. I think telehealth will be with us for the foreseeable future at least to some extent. In the earliest phases of reopening, in-person care will likely be prioritized for urgent health concerns. But please don’t miss your routine vaccines and health screenings as we move forward in reopening. General preventive healthcare remains important for long-term and overall health.
Q. What do you think needs to happen before you’re confident that we can get this under control?
A. Expanded testing and contact tracing. Safe and effective vaccines. Effective treatment. All are on the horizon and scientists globally are working at a breakneck pace to make these a reality.
Q. Anything you want people to know as we start to reopen around the country?
A. People who have underlying health conditions that place them at higher risk of severe COVID-19 will need to practice precautions for the foreseeable future. I know everyone has COVID fatigue. We have message burnout, are tired of being home, and mourn our “regular” lives. But reopening must be paced and careful and responsive to data so that we don’t backtrack.
Everyone is eager to get back to normal life. But what does it mean for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) crisis to be over? It’s not a matter of flipping a switch and going back to life as it was before. As long as the virus persists—even at a lower level—the norms of our daily life will be different. This video explains what you need to know about transmission rates, surveillance testing, pandemics, and the second wave that experts are anticipating. It points to the unified efforts and outbreak preparedness that are needed to help conquer COVID-19 and other infectious diseases—now and in the future.
Written and created by Yale Neuroscience PhD student Clara Liao in collaboration with Yale Public Health PhD student Mary Petrone.
I’d like to believe most people don’t need to read articles like this one in order to understand common sense and perspective. I’d like to.
What’s about to happen this week is based in gigantic proportion on economics. That’s a super valid concern. It deserves some kind of response. But, it should NOT be a significant signal about the reduction of public heath risk to widespread Covid infection.
A reasonable, common sense approach to understanding what the risk reality is right now in this country lies not in solely listening to commercially funded TV or radio news programs, most politicians, vociferous family members, friends, or even, business owners.
The intelligent and rational way to decide when, where, how, and why all of us re-open our own lives, is by reading and understanding transmission rates through public health sources, publicly funded news outlets, respected epidemiologists, science and medical professionals, closely studying and following the arc so far.
We all want to return to normalcy, but this crack of daylight in the wall of sequestering, should not be mistaken for any meaningful symbol of all clear. Not by a long shot. NOT by a long shot.
If you’re on the fence, get off it by reading and sourcing good info, data and opinions, as far away as possible from vested interests, or anyone who has a bone to pick for/against political entities. Let knowledge and fact be your guide, not pressure by friends, family, retailers, politicians, or a weakness of will.
This is a public health issue. It is your health issue. It is my health issue. This is the priority for where it should begin and end.
MB
Article below reprinted from Business Insider
How to decide if it’s worth the risk to return to malls, gyms, salons, and more as states reopen but experts remain cautious.
AP Photo/David J. Phillip
Shops, restaurants, salons, gyms, and even bowling alleys are opening across the US as states loosen their shelter in place orders.
Experts say it is important to realize that returning to businesses can still be risky, and answers on safety are far from black and white.
You can determine risk by weighing factors such as if you can stay six feet away from others, if everyone is wearing masks, and what the prevalence of the coronavirus is in your area.
Different types of businesses come with different risks, meaning that concerns about returning to restaurants, stores, salons, and gyms need to be examined separately and together.
As businesses reopen across America, many people are confused about what exactly is safe and what isn’t.
Experts say that just because restaurants, stores, and even nail salons are open, does not mean that they are necessarily safe to visit. Instead, it means that people have the ability to choose if they want to take the risk of returning.
“The one thing we do know is the virus is still out there,” said Dr. Celeste Monforton, a lecturer in public health at Texas State University. “When some governor said, May 1, we’re opening things up — It’s not like the virus had a calendar and said, okay, I’m going underground again.”
Monforton and Dr. Jaimie Meyer, an assistant professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine, told Business Insider that they understand why people are confused, as the CDC, the White House, and state governments have released different and sometimes conflicting guidelines.
AP Photo/LM Otero
Both Meyer and Monforton also understand the economic argument for businesses to reopen. And, neither believes everyone should avoid all businesses, all the time.
“I almost would never say anything in absolute, because I think when you say things like that, people just tune out,” Meyer said. “It’s too hard for people to lose that much control over their lives.”
However, Meyer says people should be aware of COVID-19 cases and the risk of infection in their communities, not simply if it is legal or not for businesses to reopen. While different people have different tolerances for risk, Meyer says she personally is advising family and friends to err on the side of caution.
“There are so many unknowns here,” Meyer said. “Everything that I do, I ask myself, if I got sick from doing this, was it really worth it?”
Certain factors can help determine if a business is safe.
AP Photo/David J. Phillip
As states reopen, these experts say that risks exist on a spectrum.
Meyer and Monforton resisted saying any type of business was definitively more risky than others. For example, a bowling alley where there is constant cleaning and social distancing could actually be safer than a grocery store that hasn’t added any new safety measures since the pandemic.
Instead, there are a few big-picture factors you can use to determine if a business is safer — though not 100% risk-free — to visit.
Questions that can help determine how risky it is to visit a business include:
Can you stay at least six feet away from other people in the space?
Is everyone wearing masks? Wearing a mask doesn’t necessarily prevent you from catching the coronavirus — but other people wearing masks reduces the likelihood they will spread it.
Can you stay outside or minimize your time indoors?
Are workers regularly cleaning the space?
Are employees and customers able to wash their hands?
Have the number of COVID-19 cases in your community decreased over the last two weeks?
Is there limited community spread of the coronavirus in your area?
If you can answer “yes” to all of these questions, there is less of a risk of catching the coronavirus, whether you are considering visiting a restaurant or a mall.
You can also take steps, such as washing your hands and wearing a mask, to make your community safer even when businesses and governments do not require it.
Waiting a few more weeks to go shopping or get your nails done could also help everyone understand the situation better.
AP Photo/LM Otero
At this point, Meyer is encouraging people to behave as if everyone in public is infected with the coronavirus and act accordingly — maintain six feet of distance, wear a mask, and wash your hands regularly if you’re leaving your house.
“If you don’t practice social distancing and hand washing and wear masks, we’re going to experience a major setback and there will be a second wave,” Meyer said.
Still, planning to stay inside for 18 months is a daunting idea.
Instead, Monforton says that she is encouraging people to take things week by week. Every week, scientists and healthcare professionals find out more about the coronavirus. Even one extra week of knowledge can help customers and business owners make better decisions as states reopen.
“We’re going to learn a lot in the next couple of weeks and that’s going to be continuing to inform people about the risk — whether the risk is higher than we expected when things opened up [or] less than we expected,” Monforton said.
Older people and those with preexisting conditions should take more steps to reduce their risk, avoiding activities that people with a higher tolerance for risk may be willing to participate in. Everyone should understand that when they make a nonessential trip to a store, restaurant, or gym, it might not only impact them — if they haven’t been tested recently, they could unknowingly spread the coronavirus in their community as an asymptomatic carrier.
While no specific type of business is necessarily riskier or safer than others, we already know that each category carries different types of risks.
Here is a breakdown of some of the risks that come with different types of businesses, as well as some ways a risky situation can become safer.
Restaurants can be risky, but there are ways to support your favorite spot without endangering yourself.
AP Photo/Russ Bynum
The good news for restaurants is that experts say even if a worker coughs or sneezes directly in your food, you won’t catch coronavirus from eating the meal.
The bad news is that customers crowding into a restaurant or bar could put everyone at risk of catching the coronavirus. Social distancing can be difficult for workers in kitchens. Many restaurants will not be able to maintain necessary social distancing while also bringing in as many customers as they did pre-coronavirus.
The National Restaurant Association has extensive guidance on how restaurants can reopen relatively safely.
These adjustments could make restaurants safer:
Serving food via drive-thru, takeout, or delivery.
Adding more sidewalk and curbside pick-up options.
Adding outdoor dining.
Reducing the number of tables.
Requiring reservations to limit the number of customers.
Training staff to monitor for symptoms.
Shopping malls and stores will need to limit how many people are allowed in.
AP Photo/LM Otero
Monforton says she expects stores of all types to follow grocers’ blueprints. Even if Macy’s is selling dresses instead of shoes, things like plexiglass barriers, new cleaning routines, and hand sanitizing stations will transfer over.
Malls create different issues, as customers are likely to visit several stores during one trip. This can make it more difficult to limit how many people enter a store, something that is crucial for social distancing.
Ultimately, the biggest differences between essential and nonessential stores is what they’re selling — not the risk levels. Meyer is encouraging friends and family to avoid unnecessary risks, such as shopping for nonessentials. But, retailers are trying to accommodate those willing to take the risk that is associated with any type of shopping trip.
The National Retail Federation has a full guide for what stores should do to reopen.
Here are some changes that stores can make to become safer to visit:
Limiting how many people are allowed inside to allow for social distancing.
Promote “contactless” shopping, such as self-checkout and curbside pick up.
Ban people from testing beauty products, unless they are using single-use testers.
Stopping services such as alterations and ear piercing.
Risks associated with working out make gyms and fitness centers especially dangerous.
Maranie Staab/Reuters
Meyer said that people should be “especially cautious” at gyms, fitness centers, and other places where people work out as businesses reopen.
“When people are working out and breathing hard, they are more likely to transmit droplets,” which could spread the coronavirus, Meyer said.
This makes cleaning practices and social distancing even more important. So, if you’re willing to take the risk of returning to work out, make sure you can stay at least six feet away from other people and that the business has a strict cleaning schedule in place.
How fitness studios and gyms can make things safer:
Offer virtual classes, instead of having people attend classes in person.
Limiting the size of classes or providing one-on-one classes.
Offering outdoor workouts.
Taking people’s temperatures and making sure they don’t have symptoms before entering a studio or gym.
Having people bring their own equipment, such as yoga mats and weights.
Requiring people to wear masks while working out.
Salons and barbershops make it difficult to social distance.
Associated Press
One of the biggest risks associated with barbershops, as well as hair and nail salons, is that the nature of the activity makes it impossible to keep six feet in between people.
“If you’re one of these high-risk individuals … it’s probably not safe yet,” even with changes, Meyer said.
The American Industrial Hygiene Association acknowledged that nail and hair salons have been “very challenged” during the pandemic in their guidelines for reopening.
A few ways salons and barbershops can make things safer:
Disinfecting between visitors.
Limiting how many people are inside the salon or shop at one time.
Employees and customers should wear masks and gloves.
Closing the reception area and having people wait outside until it is time for their appointment.
Bowling alleys, arcades, and other interactive indoor spaces are extremely risky.
“Entertainment is important and, for many people, perhaps bowling alleys are very important entertainment,” Meyer said.
However, Meyer continued, the problem with bowling alleys, arcades, and similar businesses is that they are closed in and high-touch.
In a bowling alley, you are going to be in an enclosed space with other people for a significant period of time, which is risky in and of itself. Additionally, you are touching things that a lot of other people are touching. It is basically impossible to sanitize items like bowling balls every time they touch people’s hands or other potentially contaminated spaces.
At this point in time, places like bowling alleys — as well as anywhere with crowds of people — are high on the list of places to stay away from if you want to avoid catching COVID-19.
Bowling alleys are never going to be the safest choice. Here is how they can be safer:
Constant sanitation.
Making people bring their own balls.
Having people wear masks.
Requiring people to stay six feet away from each other.
Business Insider, Kate Taylor, May. 15, 2020, 07:24 PM
It’s common to use anger to deny feelings of vulnerability
Via Psychology Today, Leon Seltzer, Ph.D.
This is Part 1 of 3 parts. Parts 2 and 3 will be posted soon.
Part 1–Denying Vulnerability: “You’re Really Making Me Angry!”
To feel anxiety and not back away from whatever’s causing it requires marked self-control. Resisting the temptation to avoid anything we experience as threatening takes considerable courage.
We humans are so wired that the slightest perception of danger leads to feelings of vulnerability, setting into motion the impulse to flee, freeze or dissociate. And that sudden flash of trepidation can be prompted by anything that threatens our sense of control.
It could, for instance, relate to sharing ourselves personally in a way that exposes us to the other’s indifference, disapproval, or anger. When we confide our thoughts and feelings in another, we may also fear that our sharing won’t be reciprocated. Or that it could be used against us. Or that it won’t be empathized with, or validated. And our deepest sense of vulnerability arises when we find ourselves in situations that tap into primal fears of abandonment. Or evoke its opposite, engulfment–where our personal boundaries feel so threatened that we fear losing our very self.
Finally, whether our self-protective impulse to escape such situations is blindly followed or consciously withstood depends on our ability to stay calm during periods of emotional imbalance. And such composure isn’t at all “natural.” Rather, it’s a strength–or power–that we need to deliberately cultivate.
Frequently, when we stand firm in menacing situations, we’re able to do so only through the anaesthetizing emotion of anger. Getting angry with people who provoke our distress enables us to blame and negate them, and thus neutralize the uncomfortable feelings they’re causing us. But reactively becoming angry isn’t about overcoming our anxiety so much as covering it up. All we’re really doing here is masking feelings of uneasiness or insecurity by summoning up a self-vindicating sense of righteousness.
For example, when a person experienced as crucial to our welfare (say, our spouse) sharply criticizes us, we’re likely to feel threatened, our emotional equilibrium suddenly turned upside down. Very few of us can simply “sit” with the criticism, objectively evaluate its merits, and respond accordingly. On the contrary, unless we depressively slink away from our mate, we’re likely to experience a strong urge to react antagonistically–attempting to protect against the felt assault to our self-esteem by either strenuously defending ourselves or by attacking them right back. Thrown off balance by the criticism, desperate to restore a positive sense of self, we look for a way–any way–to discredit our “assailant.”
But the immediate sense of strength our defensive anger yields is finally much less like bravery than bravado. And beyond allaying our anxiety, it doesn’t solve a thing. We haven’t coped with the threatening situation by sharing honestly and directly about how it made us feel (i.e., vulnerable), but merely substituted a much less disturbing feeling to camouflage our distress. For the moment, we’ve successfully resorted to anger to quiet our fears, but this anxiety reduction has been achieved mostly at our partner’s expense. And when we get into the habit of alleviating uncomfortable feelings by getting mad at our spouse, we invariably end up creating more discord in our relationship–setting ourselves up for continuing conflict (and of course the need for more and more anger).
Power struggles in relationships are in fact mostly efforts to get our dependency needs met without ever confessing to our mate the anxiety their refusal would cause us. And typically we’re not at all conscious of how much our deepest feelings of security hinge on our partner’s positive response. Yet even if we were aware of the primal source of our relational fears and frustrations, it’s unlikely we’d be willing to take the risk of straightforwardly admitting these unmet needs–whether for attention, reassurance, empathy, support, validation, or simple warmth. The readiness to honestly and unashamedly admit these needs simply calls for more psychological courage than most of us have available.
To betray just how dependent on our spouse we were (with all the vulnerability such dependency implies) would likely only exacerbate our most secret fear that we couldn’t be sufficiently cared about–or that maybe we weren’t even worth being so cared about. And if we were actually to reveal just how much power our partner had over our feelings, how could we avoid further endangering our sense of personal safety in the relationship?
Along with our fears, most of us also feel a certain shame about divulging our dependencies. After all, as adults it’s almost always considered a virtue to be autonomous and self-reliant, whereas the mere suggestion of neediness is generally associated with being weak. So even though all of us may have quite legitimate dependency needs left over from childhood, revealing our hurt feelings when they’re not being met would expose our susceptibility to a degree that hardly seems tenable.
And so we’re far more likely to criticize our partners when they ignore or deny us–or angrily demand from them what they’ve already refused–than to openly confess feelings of deprivation. But by self-protectively reacting to them negatively and taking out our frustrations on them, we decrease yet further the chance that in the future they’ll be more inclined to provide us with the succor we may so desperately need from them.
Anger is certainly one of the most common ways we protect against feeling vulnerable (and here, note my piece, “Feeling Vulnerable? No Problem—Just Get Angry“). But how do we counteract such feelings without defaulting to the pseudo-empowering reaction of anger? When we’re feeling accused, devalued, powerless, rejected, or unloved, how do we stay in touch with the anxiety these feelings typically generate and literally think ourselves out of anxiety–eventually getting to the other side where we’re able to feel safe and okay? How, in short, can we muster the strength to deal more openly with all the things that imperil our sense of well-being?
Psychologically, accomplishing this feat of staying present and holding onto our emotional poise when it feels under siege may well be one of our greatest challenges in life. But if we can develop this ability, we’ll likely discover a sense of personal power greater than any we’ve ever experienced. And in learning how to share our hurts–and our fears of being hurt–we may at last realize our potential for emotional intimacy, one of the greatest rewards of a committed relationship.
Cultivating such an invaluable personal resource–one that may well represent the ultimate in self-control–lies in our ability to (1) self-validate, and (2) self-soothe.
NOTE 1: Part 2 of this post centers on how we can become more self-validating, while Part 3 takes up the various ways we can learn how to better soothe ourselves.
NOTE 3: To explore other posts I’ve written for Psychology Today,:please click here.
About the Author
Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and the author of Paradoxical Strategies in Psychotherapy. He holds doctorates in English and Psychology. His posts have received over 39 million views.
Considering the man that millions of Americans elected their President, it should come as no surprise, that the same shortfall of common sense is happening all over again with the Covid-19 situation. Political tribalism is bad enough, but when one side mutates into outright denial and stupidity about health concerns, we really are headed to damnation. MB
A mantra to embrace: “This sucks I’m unhappy with what’s going on.”
Via The New York Times, By Micaela Marini Higgs, January 9, 2020
Even though it may come naturally, griping isn’t necessarily always a good thing. Ruminating on negative feelings, and reinforcing them through constant discussion with other people, can lead to catastrophizing, which “is something that can contribute to depression,” said Margot Bastin, who studies communication between friends at the department of School Psychology and Development in Context at the Belgian university KU Leuven.
This can happen because “the more you do something, the more entrenched that path becomes in your brain and the more you continue to do it,” said Angela Grice, a speech language pathologist specializing in the use of mindfulness-based practices and who previously researched executive functions and neuroscience at Howard University and the Neurocognition of Language Lab at Columbia University.
Constantly complaining can be an easy way to frustrate our confidantes, but there is research that shows it can also be a useful tool in bonding and helping us process emotions like stress and frustration.
“In short: Yes, it’s good to complain, yes, it’s bad to complain, and yes, there’s a right way to do it,” Dr. Kowalski said.
The trick to doing it right starts with understanding how the word “complaining” is often misused to describe a variety of behaviors, with some being more harmful or helpful than others. Teasing apart these distinctions requires vocabulary that varies between experts, but there are roughly three categories: venting, problem solving and ruminating, otherwise known as dwelling. Knowing which behavior you’re engaging in, and with what purpose, can help you put in place habits that will not only make your complaining much more strategic, but also help improve your emotional health and build stronger relationships with the people around you.
Why we do it
“We’re not very good at expressing our feelings as a society, so it’s pretty common to complain in order to express a feeling,” said Tina Gilbertson, a psychotherapist and the author of “Constructive Wallowing.” And since, as she said, “any time we are sharing emotional content with someone, that is a vehicle for bonding,” we’re especially fond of using complaining as a social tool.
“People do feel closer to one another, so the friendship really gets stronger by doing it,” Dr. Bastin said. Still, she warned, making complaining the primary focus in our relationships can make us dwell on our problems for longer, triggering a stress response. Bonds built over mutual dissatisfaction can also prove brittle once one person’s problem has been resolved.
But the most obvious reason we complain? Life isn’t perfect. That’s why expressing negative feelings is not only normal, but also healthy, Dr. Kowalski said, adding that the unrealistic expectation that we should always be happy can make us feel worse. Inhibiting the disclosure of our dissatisfaction “can produce a negative effect,” she said, because it not only stops us from naming our problem but also prevents us from getting to the root of it.
That’s why “complaining is, ideally, totally solutions focused,” Ms. Gilbertson said. Though venting is not as focused on solving problems, “there are also really positive benefits,” Dr. Grice said, because it allows us “to get things out in the open and get our feelings heard so they don’t build up and cause stress.”
Can you avoid complaining and venting altogether? “In theory, yes,” Ms. Gilbertson said, “but it’s important to be able to vent at least to yourself on the inside. To be able to say: This sucks I’m unhappy with what’s going on.”
Why it’s good to complain
Negatively obsessing over something isn’t healthy, but Dr. Kowalski said that “expressive complaining” — blowing off steam — and “instrumental complaining” — which is done with an actionable goal — can both be beneficial. Venting can help us gain perspective and put words to our feelings, Dr. Grice said. When done effectively, it can even help you clearly realize what, specifically, about a situation is bothering you.
Research on experiential avoidance backs this up, since trying not to feel bad is associated with negative physiological effects. The simple act of naming your feelings can help reduce your distress around them.
“Acknowledging feelings is healthy, it’s good for you physiologically and it’s good for your emotional health,” Ms. Gilbertson said.
On top of social bonding, feedback from others can help us gain perspective — like figuring out if a boss’s comments were truly out of line — or notice patterns in the things that bother us, which might point to a larger unidentified problem.
Co-reflection and “not just passively waiting and dwelling, but really trying to grasp the problem better” is important because it helps you do something to improve your situation, Dr. Bastin said.
How much complaining is good for you? How long is a piece of string? You want to avoid what Dr. Grice calls wearing “muddy glasses,” where no matter what’s going on you always find something to complain about. The same goes with rehashing a problem over and over again, whether with friends or in the echo chamber of the internet.
Ultimately, Dr. Bastin said, “emotional disclosure is important,” but “the way in which you disclose” is what determines whether the interaction has a positive or negative impact, not just on the complainer but also the person who is listening.
How to do it right
“Complaining is honestly just part of the social fabric of our lives, it’s part of how we communicate,” Dr. Kowalski said. As in every type of communication, there’s an appropriate place and time.
Start by paying attention to how often you complain, and who you’re doing it with. “You can’t modify behavior until you become aware of it,” Dr. Kowalski said.
While trying to go cold turkey is probably an overambitious goal, “mindfulness has been shown to be very effective in decreasing rumination,” Dr. Bastin said. Even just the act of paying attention to our habits can start shifting them. If you take a breath before calling a friend to vent, or reflect quickly on if you really need to act on your impulse to complain, you’ll be more mindful of your behavior and be able to make choices accordingly.
“It’s crucial, if you’re venting, to know that you’re venting and to tell the person you’re venting,” Ms. Gilbertson said. Whether you just want to blow off steam or actually need help solving a problem, clarifying what you want from the interaction will make the receiver of your venting more comfortable, and it will better prepare them to give you the support you need.
Building the habit of consciously thinking about the purpose of your conversation, rather than going into negative autopilot, is a simple way to take off those muddy glasses. It also keeps your complaint sessions short and sweet, which is important for building relationships that aren’t solely focused on negative emotions, Dr. Bastin said.
You’ll also start to notice just how often other people complain, creating an opportunity to contribute positively to those conversations and ask questions to help generate solutions, she added.
Journaling can be another great way to facilitate these discoveries, Dr. Grice said. “Sometimes we have feelings and we’re not quite sure where they came from,” she said, and “allowing yourself some space and time to sit and organize your own thoughts” can help us self-regulate our emotions and figure out how to express and work through them. For smaller complaints, journaling can help you flush feelings out of your system, and for larger ones it allows you to document and find trends in what you’d like to change.
Journaling also gives you another outlet to let off steam and helps you approach conversations more strategically. Asking yourself questions through journaling offers added perspective, especially if the people you usually complain to are reinforcing your negative viewpoints rather than helping you find solutions. Building these habits of mindfulness and reflection will help in keeping your complaining balanced and on the right track.
And if you’re finding it hard to perfect the art of strategic complaining right away? Don’t leap to judge yourself; it’s not constructive.
“If you get any of this wrong,” Ms. Gilbertson said, “there’s always the apology.”
“Bill Gates is worth 96 billion dollars. He has been personally funding world healthcare for most of his middle life, but he alone is not capable of funding the trillion dollar + government initiative required to fight these killer virus pandemics. That is, and always has been, the responsibility of the government and individual healthcare and research industries. Now we will pay and hopefully learn our lesson.
Let us pray, now, for science. Pray for empiricism and for epidemiology and for vaccines. Pray for peer review and controlled double-blinds. For flu shots, herd immunity and washing your hands. Pray for reason, rigor and expertise. Pray for the precautionary principle. Pray for the N.I.H. and the C.D.C. Pray for the W.H.O.
And pray not just for science, but for scientists, too, as well as their colleagues in the application of science — the tireless health care workers, the whistle-blowing first responders, the rumpled, righteous public servants whose long-ignored warnings we will learn about only when the 12-part coronavirus docu-disaster series drops on Netflix. Wish them all well in the fights ahead. Their weapons, the weapons of science, are all we have left — perhaps the only true weapons our kind has ever marshaled against encroaching oblivion.
It may sound paradoxical to plead for divine sanction of scientific pursuit. But these are dicey times for science and for scientists, and they need all the help they can get. As the coronavirus spreads, it is exposing the fraying seams of our overextended world. In societies as different as China and the United States, those seams are starting to look similar. The failures to contain the outbreak and to understand the scale and scope of its threat stem from an underinvestment in and an under-appreciation of basic science.
Sure, this is not exactly breaking news; decades of global environmental heedlessness paint a grim picture of modernity’s responsiveness to scientific foreboding.
But this novel coronavirus illustrates the problem more acutely. If it doesn’t kill us it should at least shake us out of the delusion that we can keep ignoring the science and scientists who are warning about the long-term dangers to our way of life. Religious texts say that societies face destruction when they forget God. The coronavirus, like the accelerating climate-related disaster, shows what we face when we decide to blind ourselves to science.
This is what happens when you ignore and silence front-line doctors who warn of impending disaster, as authorities in China did in the early days of the outbreak: a possible global epidemiological and economic catastrophe.
This is what happens when you gut the United States’ pandemic-response infrastructure, as Donald Trump has spent the last few years doing: a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that botches the most basic defense against disease — testing for it.
I wish these were one-off errors that we could attribute to authoritarian Chinese Communism or routine Trumpian incompetence. But they point to an underlying global dysfunction, one that transcends political parties and styles of government.
Science has always faced threats. Its purpose is to shed light on truth, and there have always been those who would stifle the dangerous facts scientists unearth. But today the stakes are higher. How we’ll fight the gravest threats humanity faces will depend on how governments and citizens understand and interpret the findings and cautions of science.
Our collective inability to communicate about science has thoroughly perverted our politics. Because science has become so deeply intertwined with partisan dogma, people’s very conception of scientific expertise has been hijacked by tribal reflex. Today, a lot of people seem to determine how much they trust scientists based on their political ideas, which is backward and bizarre.
What we’re left with is a society embarrassingly ignorant about the world around us. The vice president thinks smoking doesn’t kill, condoms are “very poor” protection against disease, and the best way to curb an H.I.V. outbreak is through prayer. The president says global warming is a hoax and attempts at conservation are making American life too inconvenient.
Hence my call for divine intervention. Science and scientists face crushing opposition. In addition to silent-spreading disease and a burning planet, they must take on the moneyed, the godly, the dictatorial and Mike Pence.
If we won’t support them and won’t listen to them, the least we can do is pray.
I heard Adam interviewed recently, and a few snippets from his Ted Talk. He’s a really smart guy. Eye opening and great practical knowledge. But also, just plain enjoyable to learn. 😉
Some people want to be the king. Their personality patterns suggest the future.
Bill Eddy LCSW, JD, Via Psychology Today
“Presidents are not kings,” wrote Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on Monday, in requiring a White House lawyer to testify in response to a congressional subpoena.1
Last month, The Nation reported about British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson: “The allure of supreme personal power has always been strong for Johnson. As a child, he told a family friend that it was his ambition to be ‘world king.’”2
An oped in the Wall Street Journal last month was titled, “Putin Is the New King of Syria.”3 Not too long ago, a book was published called The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin.4 Similar books and articles are being written about at least a dozen other world leaders.
Is there a “Wannabe King” personality? Did all of these leaders want to be a king since childhood? If so, what is their personality pattern of behavior? Can we predict some of their tendencies for the coming year?
I believe we can. The following is based on the research I did on a dozen world leaders for the book Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths—And How We Can Stop!
Fantasies of Unlimited Power
Wannabe Kings appear to have one and only one goal: unlimited personal power. This is one of the traits in the DSM-5 for Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).5 It is not an unusual characteristic, as many people in families, communities, and at work will recognize it. Yet as world leaders, they appear to take it to an unusual extreme. They co-opt a political party—on the far left or far right—and give the appearance of having like-minded policy agendas in order to gain followers on their road to power.
Yet they have no loyalty to party or policy. When they get into power, their policies are based on what will gain them more power and their whims along the way to demonstrate how powerful they are.
In 2020, expect seemingly inconsistent, unpredictable, and at times whimsical policies, yet each of which is designed to ultimately give the Wannabe King more power.
Targets of Blame
In order to gain power, Wannabe Kings are preoccupied with blaming others—their targets of blame or fantasy villains. They consciously select these targets based on several characteristics, including that the targeted individual or group is somewhat familiar but relatively few in number, and politically weak, yet alleged to be secretly powerful.
Historically, examples of fantasy villains were Jews (Hitler), Kulak peasants (Stalin), and Communists in the federal government (McCarthy), to name a few. In modern times, they have been drug addicts (Duterte in The Philippines); gay people (Putin); journalists (Erdogan, Trump); and immigrants (Orban, Johnson, Trump, and several others)—even though immigrants are the weakest group, with no political power and little wealth.
In 2020, expect Wannabe Kings to increase their blaming of old and new targets in speeches, tweets, and Facebook posts that sound realistic and masquerade as political issues to be endlessly debated. Yet as we have learned about all high-conflict people, “The issue’s not the issue—the personality is the issue.”
Taking Over Legislative and Judicial Power
Wannabe Kings try to take over the functions of the legislature and the judiciary, so they can rule without restraint. Maduro of Venezuela replaced the National Assembly with his own legislature, filled with loyalists, who were empowered to re-write the constitution. Orban of Hungary forced the retirement of senior supreme court justices (who were opposed to his power grabs) to make way for his own appointees. Putin took over most of the power to fire governors and appoint legislators in his first few years in office. Boris Johnson suspended parliament this year, although the British Supreme Court overruled him. And Donald Trump has worked to sweep in a one-party judiciary, with hundreds of conservative judges appointed who are more likely tolerate the expansion of presidential power.
Wannabe Kings will not stop after unsuccessful power grabs. but will try one political issue after another. When they win, they gain power, and when they lose, they quickly announce a victory and move on to the next pursuit.
Fantasy Crises
All Wannabe Kings claim there is a terrible crisis that needs a heroic leader to fight against an evil villain. This is how they gain wide public support: fear of this villain. This is a typical con artist maneuver of distraction; the crisis tends to be a fantasy that they pump up with dramatic, highly exaggerated, or non-existent details.
Hitler used the Reichstag Fire (a small, non-threatening fire) to claim a crisis that convinced the parliament to give up all their power to him. Stalin used a grain crisis (which he primarily caused) to help him force peasants off of farms to collectivize the Ukraine and Russia. Putin said there was a crisis of politicians who were pedophiles, which he used to attack his opponents while making the public think this was a real issue. In the U.S., there has been the border wall to be built against a fantasy immigration crisis. In 2020, there will be new fantasy crises which will look like real political issues to debate on the surface, but the real goal is increased power for the Wannabe King.
Elimination of Those Around Them
Like kings of old, Wannabe Kings demand loyalty but give little in return. In fact, they attack those who have helped them when they become inconvenient or unwilling to bow down fully to their power. In extreme cases, they kill off their associates, like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao did, as well as Pol Pot in Cambodia and Idi Amin in Uganda in the 1970s.
In modern times, Putin is widely believed to have disposed of some of his former associates and critics this way, and Kim Jung-Un is widely believed to have killed his half-brother. Donald Trump is well known for turning against numerous associates and cabinet appointees, dismissing them via Twitter and publicly humiliating them.
In 2020, expect a further narrowing of decision-making and schemes to a small group of like-minded associates working directly out of the Wannabe King’s office.
Lying to the Public
Wannabe Kings lie constantly and successfully. What most people don’t realize is that such chronic lying and conning is a characteristic of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), and not narcissistic personality disorder (which mostly involves exaggeration). In fact, the DSM-5 states that deceitfulness is a characteristic of ASPD and not NPD.6
While most people recognize traits of narcissism in Wannabe Kings, they usually miss the antisocial traits, which explains why they are highly aggressive risk-takers who lack remorse, may enjoy others’ pain, and are generally persuasive con artists. This dangerous combination of narcissism and antisocial behavior in leaders has also been called malignant narcissism by Erich Fromm and many others.7
In 2020, the lies of these Wannabe Kings will increase for two reasons: They are empowered by getting away with it, and they feel threatened by the limits that their nations are beginning to set on them and the questions that their followers are asking, so they lie more to support their previous lies. They will work hard to recruit an army of loyal followers to fight the ever-widening number of people who realize how dangerous and deceitful they are. They have so many secrets that more are bound to be revealed in 2020.
Conclusion
2020 will be a very interesting year for Wannabe Kings and those who want to understand them. People with personality awareness will be less surprised and more able to make wise decisions—as voters, public figures, and associates of Wannabe Kings. We will see which nations realize that “the political issue’s not the issue, the personality is the issue” and will take power away from them, rather than giving them more.
It may have started with a bat in a cave, but human activity set it loose.
By David Quammen, Via NYTimes
Jan. 28, 2020
A normally busy shopping district during the Chinese New Year holiday in Beijing.
The latest scary new virus that has captured the world’s horrified attention, caused a lockdown of 56 million people in China, disrupted travel plans around the globe and sparked a run on medical masks from Wuhan, Hubei Province, to Bryan, Texas, is known provisionally as “nCoV-2019.” It’s a clunky moniker for a lurid threat.
The name, picked by the team of Chinese scientists who isolated and identified the virus, is short for “novel coronavirus of 2019.” It reflects the fact that the virus was first recognized to have infected humans late last year — in a seafood and live-animal market in Wuhan — and that it belongs to the coronavirus family, a notorious group. The SARS epidemic of 2002-3, which infected 8,098 people worldwide, killing 774 of them, was caused by a coronavirus, and so was the MERS outbreak that began on the Arabian Peninsula in 2012 and still lingers (2,494 people infected and 858 deaths as of November).
Despite the new virus’s name, though, and as the people who christened it well know, nCoV-2019 isn’t as novel as you might think.
Something very much like it was found several years ago in a cave in Yunnan, a province roughly a thousand miles southwest of Wuhan, by a team of perspicacious researchers, who noted its existence with concern. The fast spread of nCoV-2019 — more than 4,500 confirmed cases, including at least 106 deaths, as of Tuesday morning, and the figures will have risen by the time you read this — is startling but not unforeseeable. That the virus emerged from a nonhuman animal, probably a bat, and possibly after passing through another creature, may seem spooky, yet it is utterly unsurprising to scientists who study these things.
One such scientist is Zheng-Li Shi, of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a senior author of the draft paper (not yet peer reviewed and so far available only in preprint) that gave nCoV-2019 its identity and name. It was Ms. Shi and her collaborators who, back in 2005, showed that the SARS pathogen was a bat virus that had spilled over into people. Ms. Shi and colleagues have been tracing coronaviruses in bats since then, warning that some of them are uniquely suited to cause human pandemics.
In a 2017 paper, they set out how, after nearly five years of collecting fecal samples from bats in the Yunnan cave, they had found coronaviruses in multiple individuals of four different species of bats, including one called the intermediate horseshoe bat, because of the half-oval flap of skin protruding like a saucer around its nostrils. The genome of that virus, Ms. Shi and her colleagues have now announced, is 96 percent identical to the Wuhan virus that has recently been found in humans. And those two constitute a pair distinct from all other known coronaviruses, including the one that causes SARS. In this sense, nCoV-2019 is novel — and possibly even more dangerous to humans than the other coronaviruses.
I say “possibly” because so far, not only do we not know how dangerous it is, we can’t know. Outbreaks of new viral diseases are like the steel balls in a pinball machine: You can slap your flippers at them, rock the machine on its legs and bonk the balls to the jittery rings, but where they end up dropping depends on 11 levels of chance as well as on anything you do. This is true with coronaviruses in particular: They mutate often while they replicate, and can evolve as quickly as a nightmare ghoul.
Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a private research organization based in New York that focuses on the connections between human and wildlife health, is one of Ms. Shi’s longtime partners. “We’ve been raising the flag on these viruses for 15 years,” he told me on Friday with calm frustration. “Ever since SARS.” He was a co-author of the 2005 bats-and-SARS study, and again of the 2017 paper about the multiple SARS-like coronaviruses in the Yunnan cave.
Mr. Daszak told me that, during that second study, the field team took blood samples from a couple of thousand Yunnanese people, about 400 of whom lived near the cave. Roughly 3 percent of them carried antibodies against SARS-related coronaviruses.
“We don’t know if they got sick. We don’t know if they were exposed as children or adults,” Mr. Daszak said. “But what it tells you is that these viruses are making the jump, repeatedly, from bats to humans.” In other words, this Wuhan emergency is no novel event. It’s part of a sequence of related contingencies that stretches back into the past and will stretch forward into the future, as long as current circumstances persist.
So when you’re done worrying about this outbreak, worry about the next one. Or do something about the current circumstances.
Current circumstances include a perilous trade in wildlife for food, with supply chains stretching through Asia, Africa and to a lesser extent, the United States and elsewhere. That trade has now been outlawed in China, on a temporary basis; but it was outlawed also during SARS, then allowed to resume — with bats, civets, porcupines, turtles, bamboo rats, many kinds of birds and other animals piled together in markets such as the one in Wuhan.
Current circumstances also include 7.6 billion hungry humans: some of them impoverished and desperate for protein; some affluent and wasteful and empowered to travel every which way by airplane. These factors are unprecedented on planet Earth: We know from the fossil record, by absence of evidence, that no large-bodied animal has ever been nearly so abundant as humans are now, let alone so effective at arrogating resources. And one consequence of that abundance, that power, and the consequent ecological disturbances is increasing viral exchanges — first from animal to human, then from human to human, sometimes on a pandemic scale.
We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbor so many species of animals and plants — and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses. We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it.
The list of such viruses emerging into humans sounds like a grim drumbeat: Machupo, Bolivia, 1961; Marburg, Germany, 1967; Ebola, Zaire and Sudan, 1976; H.I.V., recognized in New York and California, 1981; a form of Hanta (now known as Sin Nombre), southwestern United States, 1993; Hendra, Australia, 1994; bird flu, Hong Kong, 1997; Nipah, Malaysia, 1998; West Nile, New York, 1999; SARS, China, 2002-3; MERS, Saudi Arabia, 2012; Ebola again, West Africa, 2014. And that’s just a selection. Now we have nCoV-2019, the latest thump on the drum.
Current circumstances also include bureaucrats who lie and conceal bad news, and elected officials who brag to the crowd about cutting forests to create jobs in the timber industry and agriculture or about cutting budgets for public health and research. The distance from Wuhan or the Amazon to Paris, Toronto or Washington is short for some viruses, measured in hours, given how well they can ride within airplane passengers. And if you think funding pandemic preparedness is expensive, wait until you see the final cost of nCoV-2019.
Fortunately, current circumstances also include brilliant, dedicated scientists and outbreak-response medical people — such as many at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, EcoHealth Alliance, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.), the Chinese C.D.C. and numerous other institutions. These are the people who go into bat caves, swamps and high-security containment laboratories, often risking their lives, to bring out bat feces and blood and other precious evidence to study genomic sequences and answer the key questions.
This good luck may not last. Nobody knows where the pinball will go. Four days from today, the number of cases may be in the tens of thousands. Six months from today, Wuhan pneumonia may be receding into memory. Or not.
We are faced with two mortal challenges, in the short term and the long term. Short term: We must do everything we can, with intelligence, calm and a full commitment of resources, to contain and extinguish this nCoV-2019 outbreak before it becomes, as it could, a devastating global pandemic. Long term: We must remember, when the dust settles, that nCoV-2019 was not a novel event or a misfortune that befell us. It was — it is — part of a pattern of choices that we humans are making.
David Quammen is an author and journalist whose books include “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.”
Americans haven’t been this siloed since the Civil War. Here’s how to prevent a bigger breakdown.
By LAWRENCE LESSIG, Via Politico. (Orig. published 12/7/19. First paragraph excerpted for context.)
…it’s easy to assume this is a path the nation has walked before. After all, impeachment is outlined in the Constitution, and we’ve lived through one as recently as 1999.
But that’s the wrong way to see it. Impeachment is a profoundly disruptive event, and when we think about what could happen to the country, we need to recognize just how different this time is. The nation has never entered impeachment proceedings in a media environment—and hence a political environment—like the current one. That difference will matter profoundly to our democracy. And as the process unfolds, it’s not just elected leaders but our media institutions that need to consider how to limit the potential damage.
When Republicans impeached Andrew Johnson for obstructing Reconstruction in 1868, there was no broadcasting. There was no polling, at least not in the scientific sense of today. “Media” in America meant newspapers, which were largely partisan, but whose effect on the public was hard for politicians to gauge. The trial of Johnson was thus conducted by a relatively small political elite that, because they focused on the crisis, at least understood the facts.
The impeachment of Richard Nixon a century later was critically different, in part, at least, because the technology of culture had become importantly different. Democracy had become what Markus Prior calls “broadcast democracy,” with an astonishing 85 percent of Americans tuning into at least part of the impeachment hearings via the three major broadcast networks and PBS. And the public had become persistently polled, meaning that politicians in Washington knew what voters were thinking.
As the Watergate hearings progressed, Americans weren’t just focused on the story: They were focused on the same story. The networks were different in how they broadcast news, but not much different. And thus, as widespread polling would reveal—to the public and the administration—views about the president were highly correlated across a wide range of America. When support for Nixon fell among Democrats, it also fell among Republicans and independents at the same time. America had heard a common story, and what it heard had a common effect.
The impeachment of Donald Trump will happen in a radically different media environment — again. (In Clinton’s impeachment, standing between Trump’s and Nixon’s, the effects were consistent but muted relative to today.) Polling persists, indeed it has expanded, and so politicians will know how the proceedings are playing among their own voters. But as information channels have multiplied, real “broadcast democracy”—the shared and broad engagement with a common set of facts—has disappeared. An abundance of choice means fewer focus on the news, and those who do are more engaged politically, and more partisan. No doubt, there is more published today about impeachment across a wide range of media than before, but it lives within different and smaller niches.
That division will have a profound effect on how this impeachment will matter to Americans. In short, it will matter differently depending on how those Americans come to understand reality. In a study published last month, the research institute PRRI found that 55 percent of “Republicans for whom Fox News is their primary news source say there is nothing Trump could do to lose their approval, compared to only 29 percent of Republicans who do not cite Fox News as their primary news source.” That 26-percentage-point difference is driven not just by politics but by the media source.
This means that as the story of impeachment develops, it will be understood differently across the network-based tribes of America. The correlation among conservatives and liberals alike that drove Nixon from the White House won’t be visible in 2020—because it won’t be there. Regardless of what happens, on one side, it will be justice delivered. On the other, justice denied.
That difference, in turn, will radically constrain the politicians who Americans have entrusted to render judgment on the president. The reality of Fox News Republicans will be persistently visible to red-state representatives. More idealistic, less inherently partisan senators, such as Ben Sasse of Nebraska, might have a view of the “right” thing in their heart of hearts, but they will be forced to choose between what they know and what they know their very distinctive voting public believes. So far, few have faced that choice with courage.
Though the president was wrong to invoke it in this context, the Civil War may well have been the last time we suffered a media environment like this. Then, it was censorship laws that kept the truths of the North separated from the truths of the South. And though there was no polling, the ultimate support for the war, at least as manifested initially, demonstrated to each of those separated publics a depth of tribal commitment that was as profound and as tragic as any in our history. That commitment, driven by those different realities, led America into the bloodiest war in its history.
We’re not going to war today. We are not separated by geography, and we’re not going to take machetes to our neighbors. But the environment of our culture today leaves us less able to work through fundamental differences than at any time in our past. Indeed, as difference drives hate, hate pays—at least the media companies and too many politicians.
In a nation dedicated to freedom of the press, it’s impossible—not to mention undesirable—to legislate limits on political speech. That cannot be the role of government if democracy is to remain free of state control.
But the nation could use some temporary, if voluntary, restraint. The business model of hate may well pay for both politicians and the media. But the cost to the republic of this profit will be profound. This is a moment to knit common understandings, not a time to craft even more perfectly separated realities.
That knitting could begin with both networks and digital platforms asking not what is best for them, individually, but what would be best for us all, together. Which network or platform strategies will enable a more common understanding among all of us? And which strategies will simply drive even more committed tribe-based ignorance? The norms should be different in the context of impeachment, even if that means networks and platforms would be less profitable. Not because this president, in particular, must be respected, but because any president charged with impeachment deserves a nation that at least understands the charge. If we as a people are to be persistently polled and our views so persistently legible to our representatives, then at least we should know enough in common to make judgments in common.
That would mean that television networks take impeachment as seriously as a civic matter as they now treat it as an entertainment matter. Fox, MSNBC and the others should push opinion-based reporting to the side and place journalism-based news in prime time. They all must take responsibility for their audience understanding the facts, more than simply rallying its side to its own partisan understanding. Partisan networks may not be a bad thing in general. They are certainly a bad thing in moments like this.
Social media platforms have responsibilities here as well. We don’t yet know the consequences of those platforms forgoing political ads in the context of an entire election season—even as some experiment with doing so. But impeachment could be an important moment to experiment even more fully. This is precisely the kind of question for which we do not need interested ad-driven spin. It is precisely the moment when Facebook and Twitter together could take the lead in turning away ads aimed at rallying a base or trashing the opposition. Whether or not political ads make sense on social media platforms during an election—at least for races not likely to be targeted by foreign influence—there is no reason for them here. America’s understanding of this critical event could come through the organic spread of the views of Americans—and it is just possible that the organic spread alone is not as poisonous as the spread spiked by advertising.
More fundamentally, platforms could block falsity better. Intellectual property on the internet has long been protected by a notice-and-takedown regime. If a platform gives copyright owners an easy way to tell it about copyright violations, and if it removes those violations quickly, then the platform is not liable for the infringement. It is time we extend a similar mechanism to defamatory speech. If a platform has been shown the falsity in what it continues to publish, its continued publication should be considered “actual malice,” and thus no longer immune from liability. It’s unclear that the Supreme Court would accept a legislature redefining the scope of this constitutional privilege alone—it should, but the court has been jealous about guarding its jurisdiction before. But at least the court could acknowledge the difference between an initial publication and a continued publication and focus immunity on the former. Let the platforms establish the mechanisms against malicious claims of falsity. The law might even allow the platform to demand a bond that the person complaining would lose if an independent process determines the complaint was baseless. But platforms without editors cannot be immune from responsibility—especially when the incentives of clickbait become so central to the business model of online publishing.
None of this, of course, is likely to happen anytime soon, even with an impeachment crisis standing right in front of us. But we should not underestimate the potential for leadership here. There is an equivalent to peaceful nonviolent protest—to an act that so surprises the other side that it forces a recognition that otherwise would be missed. Any prominent actor in the midst of this mess who stepped above the common play might surprise enough to trigger a change. Or even prominent actors not in the midst of this mess—here, at least, is a role for former presidents. Why don’t we see George W. Bush and Barack Obama standing together on this, not by directing a result but by counseling the process?
No doubt, all this is a big ask—lucrative networks and social media platforms unilaterally disarming or agreeing to a new set of rules. But there’s another way to look at it. Businesses succeed by managing risk, and the risk of a truly destabilizing event here—a fractured America because of siloed information—is much greater than the risk of losing some ratings for a few weeks or months.
Because impeachment is different, we cannot take for granted that the nation will get through it unharmed, regardless of what anyone does. There is no mechanism that guarantees a democracy’s safety. There is only, and always, the courage of individuals to be better than anyone expects. We saw that with the first witnesses who were called to testify publicly. We need to see it with politicians, ordinary citizens, and corporations as well.
Lawrence Lessig is Roy L Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, and author of They Don’t Represent Us, from which this essay is partly adapted.
A small number of people at a few federal agencies have vast power over the protection of American air and water.
Under the Trump administration, the people appointed to those positions overwhelmingly used to work in the fossil fuel, chemical and agriculture industries. During their time in government they have been responsible for loosening or undoing nearly 100 environmental protections from pollution and pesticides, as well as weakening preservations of natural resources and efforts to curb planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
Of 20 key officials across several agencies, 15 came from careers in the oil, gas, coal, chemical or agriculture industries, while another three hail from state governments that have spent years resisting environmental regulations. At least four have direct ties to organizations led by Charles G. and the late David H. Koch, who have spent millions of dollars to defeat climate change and clean energy measures.
Gretchen Goldman, research director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, noted that many Republican administrations had brought in people from regulated industries. “There’s nothing inherently wrong with hiring people from the private sector. But we need to make sure they are making decisions in the public interest,” she said.
The Trump administration has said it is focused on ending government overreach, and agency officials said it should be no surprise the administration has tapped people who have dealt first-hand with regulations and share President Trump’s deregulatory goals. Administration press officers added that top agency officials had spent years in public service as well as in the private sector; that all agency officials undergo ethics training; and that those who have worked for industry had signed recusal statements.
“Senior administration officials, an overwhelming majority of whom the Senate has given their advice and consent to, understand that economic growth and environmental protection do not need to conflict,” Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said in a statement.
The Environmental Protection Agency
When Cleveland’s heavily polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, it galvanized the nation and helped lead to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Since then, the E.P.A. has tracked pollution and enacted regulations to guide clean air and water laws and reduce levels of toxic substances. The Trump administration has argued the agency’s rules have become too onerous — particularly for the fossil fuel and agriculture industries.
Andrew R. Wheeler
Head of the E.P.A.
Former fossil fuel lobbyist. Now in charge of regulating (and deregulating) industry.
PAST LIFE
As a lobbyist, Mr. Wheeler represented an electric utility, a uranium producer and, most significantly, a coal magnate who paid Mr. Wheeler’s former lobbying firm more than $2.7 million over eight years to loosen restrictions on coal companies.
WHAT HE GETS TO DECIDE
Mr. Wheeler’s job is to enforce clean air and water laws. During his tenure, he has rolled back regulations and made it easier for highly polluting coal plants to keep operating.
Peter Wright
Head of land and emergency management
Previously represented Dow Chemical in the cleanup of toxic Superfund sites. Now oversees E.P.A.’s Superfund cleanup program.
PAST LIFE
Mr. Wright spent 19 years as an attorney at Dow, one of the world’s largest chemical makers. He fought to lessen Dow’s responsibility to contribute to the cleanup of a toxic waste site in Midland, Mich.
WHAT HE GETS TO DECIDE
Mr. Wright oversees the E.P.A.’s ongoing cleanup of thousands of Superfund sites, as well as emergency response and waste programs.
Anne Idsal
Head of air office
Former attorney at Texas environment agencies that fought federal regulations. Now oversees regulations that limit air pollution at the E.P.A.
PAST LIFE
Ms. Idsal worked at Texas state agencies that sued the E.P.A. over a plan to reduce air pollution in the state and require new controls on coal-fired power plants. In 2017 she told the Texas Observer she wasn’t sure whether humans had an effect on climate change.
WHAT SHE GETS TO DECIDE
As head of E.P.A.’s air office, Ms. Idsal now oversees decisions on regulating air pollution and climate change, including whether to impose controls on coal-fired power plants.
Alexandra Dapolito-Dunn
Head of chemical safety
Former attorney and law professor at nonpartisan state environmental organizations and universities. Now oversees chemical regulations at the E.P.A.
PAST LIFE
Ms. Dapolito-Dunn spent several years working in nonpartisan organizations focused on the environment, including as executive director and general counsel for the Environmental Council of the States and the Association of Clean Water Administrators.
WHAT SHE GETS TO DECIDE
Under Ms. Dapolito-Dunn, the E.P.A. has decided not to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to impaired brain development in children, and has proposed new restrictions on asbestos that agency scientists said did not go far enough.
Nancy B. Beck
Principal deputy head of chemical safety
Previously worked in the chemical industry against regulations of chemicals. Now in charge of chemical regulations (though currently in a temporary position at the White House).
PAST LIFE
Ms. Beck ran the E.P.A.’s chemical office for the first two years of the Trump administration but is now temporarily at the White House Council of Economic Advisors. Before joining the E.P.A., she served at the American Chemistry Council, which lobbies to weaken regulations on chemicals.
WHAT SHE GETS TO DECIDE
At the E.P.A., Ms. Beck pushed to weaken rules on toxic chemicals like the pesticide chlorpyrifos, as well as the review process for other toxic substances like the paint stripper ingredient methylene chloride. David Fischer is filling in for her at the E.P.A. while she advises the White House.
David Fischer
Deputy head of chemical safety
Previously helped chemical companies navigate chemical safety laws. Now oversees federal implementation of chemical safety laws.
PAST LIFE
Mr. Fischer held several positions over a 10-year span at the American Chemistry Council, including serving as senior director in the chemical products and technology division. He later joined a public relations firm.
WHAT HE GETS TO DECIDE
Mr. Fischer has stepped into Ms. Beck’s previous E.P.A. role during her temporary move to the White House, and is now a top policy adviser on chemical regulations.
David Ross
Head of the water office
Previously sued to block an E.P.A. clean water rule. Now runs the Office of Water.
PAST LIFE
Mr. Ross represented industry clients like the American Farm Bureau against E.P.A. water regulations before entering state government. As an assistant attorney general of Wyoming, he challenged the E.P.A.’s clean water rule.
WHAT HE GETS TO DECIDE
Mr. Ross has led efforts to restrict the scope of the Clean Water Act and to weaken an Obama-era clean water regulation known as the Waters of the United States.
Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta
Head of research and development
A career E.P.A. scientist, who now serves as E.P.A.’s top science adviser.
PAST LIFE
Dr. Orme-Zavaleta has been with the E.P.A. since 1981, working with Republican and Democratic administrations on a range of issues including water pollution and chemical exposure risk.
Former chemicals expert for Koch Industries. Now oversees federal research on toxic chemicals that will determine if more regulations are required.
PAST LIFE
Mr. Dunlap previously served as a policy chief at Koch Industries, focusing on water and chemical management. Earlier, he served as a vice president of the Chlorine Institute, which represents producers and distributors.
WHAT HE GETS TO DECIDE
Mr. Dunlap is the top political deputy overseeing E.P.A.’s pollution and toxic chemical research at the Office of Research and Development. Mr. Dunlap helps to review chemicals to determine if they require new restrictions. He has recused himself from work on one particular chemical, formaldehyde, because Koch Industries is a major formaldehyde producer.
∴
Department of the Interior
The Interior Department manages more than 500 million acres of land and 1.7 billion acres of ocean floor, as well as the plants and animals living there and the oil, gas and other minerals that lie below. Under the Trump administration, the agency has removed regulatory obstacles to fossil fuel development.
David Bernhardt
Head of the Department of the Interior
Former lobbyist for oil, gas and farming interests. Now oversees all federal land and natural resource use.
PAST LIFE
Former lawyer and lobbyist for oil and gas companies including Halliburton, Cobalt International Energy, Samson Resources, and the Independent Petroleum Association of America.
WHAT HE GETS TO DECIDE
Mr. Bernhardt leads the Interior Department, overseeing millions of acres of federal land and waterways. Under his tenure, the agency has weakened protections for endangered species, rolled back regulations on methane fought by the oil and gas industries, and weakened protections for fish in order to divert water to California farmers.
Douglas W. Domenech
Oversees oceans, coasts and American territories
Previously worked as an oil lobbyist and on lawsuits to weaken environmental policies. Now oversees policy decisions over oceans and in U.S. territories.
PAST LIFE
Mr. Domenech was the director of the Fueling Freedom Project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a Koch-funded group that promotes fossil fuels. Before that, he was the secretary of natural resources in Virginia, where he supported oil drilling off the state’s coastline.
WHAT HE GETS TO DECIDE
Mr. Domenech has been closely involved in most major policy decisions at the Interior Department, including scaling back national monuments in Utah and reversing endangered species protections.
William P. Pendley
Acting chief, Bureau of Land Management
A conservative attorney who has advocated selling off public lands. Now oversees 250 million acres of public lands.
PAST LIFE
Mr. Pendley has long beencritical of public lands and the environmental movement, and has compared government regulation to tyranny. He once compared climate change to a “unicorn” because “neither exists.”
WHAT HE GETS TO DECIDE
Mr. Pendley is in charge of all federal public land across 12 western states, and decides whether or not to grant leases to fossil fuel companies for oil exploration and mining. He currently is overseeing the move of the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters to Colorado.
Scott A. Angelle
Head of offshore safety and enforcement
Previously opposed former President Barack Obama’s halt on drilling after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Now oversees safety measures put in place after disasters.
PAST LIFE
As Louisiana’s secretary of natural resources, Mr. Angelle pushed to lift the Obama administration’s moratorium on Gulf Coast drilling imposed after BP spill. Shortly after being appointed to the Interior department, he told a group of oil and gas executives, “Help is on the way.”
Previously worked for the agrochemical giant Monsanto. Now oversees the recovery of threatened and endangered species.
PAST LIFE
Ms. Skipwith co-founded, with her fiancé, and served as general counsel of an agricultural consulting company, AVC Global. She previously worked for agricultural companies like Monsanto.
WHAT SHE GETS TO DECIDE
The Fish and Wildlife service oversees most wildlife protection in the United States as well as 150 million acres of land conservation and development projects on the nation’s wildlife refuges.
James F. Reilly
Director, U.S. Geological Survey
Used to be a geologist for an oil and gas company. Now he oversees an initiative to restrict the way the government uses climate change models.
PAST LIFE
Dr. Reilly worked for 15 years as the chief geologist for Enserch Exploration, an oil and gas company based in Dallas. He also worked at NASA and was an astronaut for 13 years.
WHAT HE GETS TO DECIDE
Dr. Reilly has ordered that scientific assessments from the U.S. Geological Survey focus on climate models that project the effects of climate change through 2040, rather than 2100, which had been the previous standard. Federal scientists say that would be misleading because the major impacts of current emissions may be felt after 2040.
Daniel Jorjani
Solicitor of the Department of the Interior
Formerly an adviser to organizations led by the Koch brothers. Now a top attorney overseeing President Trump’s policy of encouraging fossil fuel production and development.
PAST LIFE
Mr. Jorjani served in the Interior Department under George W. Bush, and then worked for three different groups connected to the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch, who have spent millions opposing efforts to fight climate change.
In addition to overseeing the country’s nuclear arsenal, the Energy Department helps to develop energy from fossil fuels as well as renewables like wind, solar and geothermal power. Under the Trump administration it has rolled back energy efficiency measures for appliances and light bulbs, and promoted the export of coal and liquified natural gas.
Dan Brouillette
Head of the Department of Energy
Former lobbyist for the insurance industry and for Ford Motor Company. Now secretary of the Department of Energy.
PAST LIFE
Mr. Brouilette was senior vice president of the United Services Automobile Association and at the Ford Motor Company. He has lobbied for the Business Software Alliance, Lockheed Martin, Time Warner, Entergy & Verizon.
WHAT HE GETS TO DECIDE
Mr. Brouillette oversees the country’s nuclear energy stockpile and the national laboratories conducting energy research and development. In December, one of his first acts as secretary was to roll back Obama-era energy efficiency standards for light bulbs.
Neil Chatterjee
Chairman, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
Formerly coordinated opposition to climate regulations as an energy adviser for Republican Senator Mitch McConnell. Now serves as the country’s top energy regulator.
PAST LIFE
As the energy policy adviser to Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, Mr. Chatterjee helped fight regulations Mr. McConnell considered cumbersome, like the Clean Power Plan rules restricting coal-fired power plants.
WHAT HE GETS TO DECIDE
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission regulates the interstate transmission of electricity, natural gas and oil. Recently the commission ruled that wind, solar and other clean energy sources can be assessed a surcharge when bidding into the country’s largest power market, a move aimed at propping up fossil fuels and potentially discouraging new investments in renewable power.
Daniel Simmons
Assistant Head of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
Used to work for an organization that called for the elimination of the Department of Energy’s office of energy efficiency and renewable energy. Now he runs that office.
PAST LIFE
Mr. Simmons was vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research, which is funded by fossil fuel interests, including Koch Industries. He held the same position at the group’s advocacy arm, the American Energy Alliance, which once called for the elimination of the office of energy efficiency and renewable energy.
WHAT HE GETS TO DECIDE
The department’s mission is to help support the development of clean, renewable and energy efficiency technologies and support a global clean-energy economy.
∴
Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
Any agency that writes a regulation — or rolls back a regulation — works with the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. This obscure but powerful division of the White House Office of Management and Budget performs cost-benefit analyses on all regulatory actions before they are finalized. Some examples include the E.P.A.’s plan to weaken regulations on coal plants and the Interior Department’s plans to loosen protections for endangered species.
Paul Ray
Head of Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
Former corporate attorney who represented Exxon and other companies that fought environmental regulations. Now he runs the agency that oversees every regulation.
PAST LIFE
As a corporate attorney, Mr. Ray’s clients included chemical, oil and gas, and pharmaceutical companies as well as the paper and wood industry.
WHAT HE GETS TO DECIDE
He will review every major regulation that the Trump administration proposes, and is responsible for carrying out Mr. Trump’s executive order directing agencies to repeal two regulations for each significant one they issue.
I try not to get too upset at this President, or his supporters anymore. I’ve had to stomach three years of this mess in our government, and by extension, the social fabric among its citizens. It hasn’t been good for any part of my physical constitution, stress levels, and pretty much, my entire well being. Sure, I have tried to ignore it for awhile, or get on to other things to preserve my sanity, but, as anyone who feels oddly strange running from everyday news, and world events around us can say, that strategy doesn’t work for sustained levels. And really, even if you can get by removing yourself for a few days, or even weeks, how much net benefit does it really yield, if you ramp up stress levels the minute you turn on the news, or read a newspaper again? Living in isolation is not normal unless you want to pursue a monk’s life. And then, you are a monk.
Unlike many of the loudest voices following politics today, who feel the compulsion to stay fully attached to daily antipathy to opposing voices, I resist the fray. That part is not as difficult. Engagement in this climate has little to offer. Even on a contrarian level, opposing views have no intellectual stimulation for conversation as they once did, because opposing views, have no interest in compromise, nor truly understanding fundamental differences without harboring fear and resentment of one another.
The argument of each sides failings are well traversed. The conservative side is formed of racial divisions, tax avoidance, corporate dominance, and perfunctory government. The progressive/liberal side focuses on universal equality, government oversight on big business, a practical tax system, and environmental laws.
I get no satisfaction from entering an echo chamber, and even less from trying to make a point to someone clearly unreachable. I’m not looking for a fight, and I don’t need any more reasons to stake my claim. It’s just boring now. It’s been long realized that a majority of us, aren’t budging from our current head spaces.
But, once in a great while, I just have to let it out. Herewith, the one point that irks me more than so many others. Our precious environment.
There is no way on this still green earth, that any Trump supporter, or Conservative/Republican can convince me they care all that much about the environment. Either that, or they are hopelessly naiive, misled, and grossly uninformed. That’s not a great excuse. For the others, which I suppose is a large enough group in its own right, they all but ignore the disgraceful actions of this administration under Trump’s directions. These are the Trump supporters who place environmental concerns so far down on their list of priorities, it really is the equivalent of not caring. There’s just no way around this conclusion. That is the true sad state of our Union. In the end, its not one man who’s going to do in this planet. Its the people.
95 Environmental Rules Being Rolled Back Under Trump
President Trump has made eliminating federal regulations a priority. His administration, with help from Republicans in Congress, has often targeted environmental rules it sees as burdensome to the fossil fuel industry and other big businesses.
A New York Times analysis, based on research from Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School and other sources, counts more than 90 environmental rules and regulations rolled back under Mr. Trump.
Our list represents two types of policy changes: rules that were officially reversed and rollbacks still in progress.
The Trump administration has often used a “one-two punch” when rolling back environmental rules, said Caitlin McCoy, a fellow in the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School who tracks regulatory rollbacks. “First a delay rule to buy some time, and then a final substantive rule.”
But the process has not always been smooth. In some cases, the administration has failed to provide a strong legal argument in favor of proposed changes and agencies have skipped key steps in the rulemaking process, like notifying the public and asking for comment. In several cases, courts have ordered agencies to enforce their own rules.
Several environmental rules — summarized at the bottom of this page — were rolled back and then later reinstated, often following legal challenges. Other regulations remain mired in court.
All told, the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks could significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions and lead to thousands of extra deaths from poor air quality every year, according to a report prepared by New York University Law School’s State Energy and Environmental Impact Center.
Are there rollbacks we missed? Email climateteam@nytimes.com or tweet @nytclimate.
Air pollution and emissions
Completed
1. Canceled a requirement for oil and gas companies to report methane emissions. Environmental Protection Agency | Read more
2. Revised and partially repealed an Obama-era rule limiting methane emissions on public lands, including intentional venting and flaring from drilling operations. Interior Department | Read more
3. Replaced the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which would have set strict limits on carbon emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants, with a new version that would let states set their own rules. Executive Order; E.P.A. | Read more
4. Revoked California’s power to set its own more stringent emissions standards for cars and light trucks. E.P.A. | Read more
5. Repealed a requirement that state and regional authorities track tailpipe emissions from vehicles traveling on federal highways. Transportation Department | Read more
6. Loosened a Clinton-era rule designed to limit toxic emissions from major industrial polluters. E.P.A. | Read more
7. Revised a permiting program designed to safeguard communities from increases in pollution from new power plants to make it easier for facilities to avoid emissions regulations. E.P.A. | Read more
8. Amended rules that govern how refineries monitor pollution in surrounding communities. E.P.A. | Read more
9. Stopped enforcing a 2015 rule that prohibited the use of hydrofluorocarbons, powerful greenhouse gases, in air-conditioners and refrigerators. E.P.A. | Read more
10. Weakened an Obama-era rule meant to reduce air pollution in national parks and wilderness areas. E.P.A. | Read more
11. Weakened oversight of some state plans for reducing air pollution in national parks. E.P.A. | Read more
12. Directed agencies to stop using an Obama-era calculation of the “social cost of carbon” that rulemakers used to estimate the long-term economic benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Executive Order | Read more
13. Withdrew guidance that federal agencies include greenhouse gas emissions in environmental reviews. But several district courts have ruled that emissions must be included in such reviews. Executive Order; Council on Environmental Quality | Read more
14. Lifted a summertime ban on the use of E15, a gasoline blend made of 15 percent ethanol. (Burning gasoline with a higher concentration of ethanol in hot conditions increases smog.) E.P.A. | Read more
15. Changed rules to allow states and the E.P.A. to take longer to develop and approve plans aimed at cutting methane emissions from existing landfills. E.P.A. | Read more
16. Revoked an Obama executive order that set a goal of cutting the federal government’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent over 10 years. Executive Order | Read more
In process
17. Proposed relaxing Obama-era requirements that companies monitor and repair methane leaks at oil and gas facilities. E.P.A. | Read more
18. Proposed weakening Obama-era fuel-economy standards for cars and light trucks. E.P.A. and Transportation Department | Read more
19. Submitted notice of intent to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement. The process of withdrawing cannot be completed until November 2020. Executive Order | Read more
20. Proposed eliminating Obama-era restrictions that in effect required newly built coal power plants to capture carbon dioxide emissions. E.P.A. | Read more
21. Proposed a legal justification for weakening an Obama-era rule that limited mercury emissions from coal power plants. E.P.A. | Read more
22. Proposed revisions to standards for carbon dioxide emissions from new, modified and reconstructed power plants. Executive Order; E.P.A. | Read more
23. Began a review of emissions rules for power plant start-ups, shutdowns and malfunctions. In April, the E.P.A. proposed reversing a requirement that Texas follow the emissions rule, with implications for 35 other states. E.P.A. | Read more
24. Proposed the repeal of rules meant to reduce leaking and venting of hydrofluorocarbons from large refrigeration and air conditioning systems. E.P.A. | Read more
25. Opened for comment a proposal limiting the ability of individuals and communities to challenge E.P.A.-issued pollution permits before a panel of agency judges. E.P.A. | Read more
Drilling and extraction
Completed
26. Made significant cuts to the borders of two national monuments in Utah and recommended border and resource management changes to several more. Presidential Proclamation; Interior Department | Read more
27. Rescinded water pollution regulations for fracking on federal and Indian lands. Interior Department | Read more
28. Scrapped a proposed rule that required mines to prove they could pay to clean up future pollution. E.P.A. | Read more
29. Withdrew a requirement that Gulf oil rig owners prove they could cover the costs of removing rigs once they have stopped producing. Interior Department | Read more
30. Approved construction of the Dakota Access pipeline less than a mile from the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. Under the Obama administration, the Army Corps of Engineers had said it would explore alternative routes. Executive Order; Army | Read more
31. Revoked an Obama-era executive order designed to preserve ocean, coastal and Great Lakes waters in favor of a policy focused on energy production and economic growth. Executive Order | Read more
32. Changed how the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission considers the indirect effects of greenhouse gas emissions in environmental reviews of pipelines. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission | Read more
33. Permitted the use of seismic air guns for gas and oil exploration in the Atlantic Ocean. The practice, which can kill marine life and disrupt fisheries, was blocked under the Obama administration. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more
34. Lifted ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Congress; Interior Department | Read more
35. Loosened offshore drilling safety regulations implemented by the Obama administration following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill, including reduced testing requirements for blowout prevention systems. Interior Department | Read more
In process
36. Proposed opening most of America’s coastal waters to offshore oil and gas drilling, but delayed the plan after a federal judge ruled that Mr. Trump’s reversal of an Obama-era ban on drilling in the Arctic Ocean was unlawlful. Interior Department | Read more
37. Lifted an Obama-era freeze on new coal leases on public lands. But, in April 2019, a judge ruled that the Interior Department could not begin selling new leases without completing an environmental review. A month later, the agency published a draft assessment that concluded restarting federal coal leasing would have little environmental impact. Executive Order; Interior Department | Read more
38. Repealed an Obama-era rule governing royalties for oil, gas and coal leases on federal lands, which replaced a 1980s rule that critics said allowed companies to underpay the federal government. A federal judge struck down the Trump administration’s repeal. The Interior Department is reviewing the decision. Interior Department | Read more
39. Proposed revising regulations on offshore oil and gas exploration by floating vessels in the Arctic that were developed after a 2013 accident. The Interior Department previously said it was “considering full rescission or revision of this rule.” Executive Order; Interior Department | Read more
40. Proposed “streamlining” the approval process for drilling for oil and gas in national forests. Agriculture Department; Interior Department | Read more
41. Recommended shrinking three marine protected areas, or opening them to commercial fishing. Executive Order; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more
42. Proposed opening land in the Alaska National Petroleum Reserve for oil and leasing. The Obama administration had designated the reserve as a conservation area. Interior Department | Read more
43. Proposed lifting a Clinton-era policy that banned logging and road construction in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. Interior Department | Read more
44. Approved the Keystone XL pipeline rejected by President Barack Obama, but a federal judge blocked the project from going forward without an adequate environmental review process. Mr. Trump later attempted to side-step the ruling by issuing a presidential permit, but the project remains tied up in court. Executive Order; State Department | Read more
Infrastructure and planning
Completed
45. Revoked Obama-era flood standards for federal infrastructure projects, like roads and bridges. The standards required the government to account for sea-level rise and other climate change effects. Executive Order | Read more
46. Relaxed the environmental review process for federal infrastructure projects. Executive Order | Read more
47. Revoked a directive for federal agencies to minimize impacts on water, wildlife, land and other natural resources when approving development projects. Executive Order | Read more
48. Revoked an Obama executive order promoting “climate resilience” in the northern Bering Sea region of Alaska, which withdrew local waters from oil and gas leasing and established a tribal advisory council to consult on local environmental issues. Executive Order | Read more
49. Reversed an update to the Bureau of Land Management’s public land use planning process. Congress | Read more
50. Withdrew an Obama-era order to consider climate change in managing natural resources in national parks. National Park Service | Read more
51. Restricted most Interior Department environmental studies to one year in length and a maximum of 150 pages, citing a need to reduce paperwork. Interior Department | Read more
52. Withdrew a number of Obama-era Interior Department climate change and conservation policies that the agency said could “burden the development or utilization of domestically produced energy resources.” Interior Department | Read more
53. Eliminated the use of an Obama-era planning system designed to minimize harm from oil and gas activity on sensitive landscapes, such as national parks. Interior Department | Read more
54. Eased the environmental review processes for small wireless infrastructure projects with the goal of expanding 5G wireless networks. Federal Communications Commission | Read more
55. Withdrew Obama-era policies designed to maintain or, ideally improve, natural resources affected by federal projects. Interior Department | Read more
In process
56. Proposed plans to streamline the environmental review process for Forest Service projects. Agriculture Department | Read more
Animals
Completed
57. Changed the way the Endangered Species Act is applied, making it more difficult to protect wildlife from long-term threats posed by climate change. Interior Department | Read more
58. Overturned a ban on the use of lead ammunition and fishing tackle on federal lands. Interior Department | Read more
59. Overturned a ban on the hunting of predators in Alaskan wildlife refuges. Congress | Read more
60. Amended fishing regulations for a number of species to allow for longer seasons and higher catch rates. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more
61. Withdrew proposed limits on the number of endangered marine mammals and sea turtles that can be unintentionally killed or injured with sword-fishing nets by people who fish on the West Coast. (In 2018, California issued a state rule prohibiting the use of the nets the rule was intending to regulate.) National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more
62. Rolled back a roughly 40-year-old interpretation of a policy aimed at protecting migratory birds, potentially running afoul of treaties with Canada and Mexico. Interior Department | Read more
63. Overturned a ban on using parts of migratory birds in handicrafts made by Alaskan Natives. Interior Department | Read more
In process
64. Opened nine million acres of Western land to oil and gas drilling by weakening habitat protections for the sage grouse, an imperiled bird with an elaborate mating dance. An Idaho District Court injunction blocked the measure. Interior Department | Read more
65. Proposed ending an Obama-era rule that barred using bait to lure and kill grizzly bears, among other sport hunting practices that many people consider extreme, on some public lands in Alaska. National Park Service; Interior Department | Read more
66. Proposed relaxing environmental protections for salmon and smelt in California’s Central Valley in order to free up water for farmers. Executive Order; Interior Department | Read more
Toxic substances and safety
Completed
67. Rejected a proposed ban on chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to developmental disabilities in children. (A European Union ban is to take effect in 2020.) E.P.A. | Read more
68. Narrowed the scope of a 2016 law mandating safety assessments for potentially toxic chemicals like dry-cleaning solvents. The E.P.A. said it would focus on direct exposure and exclude indirect exposure such as from air or water contamination. In November, a court of appeals ruled the agency must widen its scope to consider full exposure risks. E.P.A. | Read more
69. Reversed an Obama-era rule that required braking system upgrades for “high hazard” trains hauling flammable liquids, like oil and ethanol. Transportation Department | Read more
70. Removed copper filter cake, an electronics manufacturing byproduct comprised of heavy metals, from the “hazardous waste” list. E.P.A. | Read more
71. Ended an Occupational Safety and Health Administration program to reduce risks of workers developing the lung disease silicosis. Labor Department | Read more
In process
72. Proposed changing safety rules to allow for rail transport of liquefied natural gas, which is highly flammable. Transportation Department | Read more
73. Rolled back most of the requirements of a 2017 rule aimed at improving safety at sites that use hazardous chemicals that was instituted after a chemical plant exploded in Texas. E.P.A. | Read more
74. Announced a review of an Obama-era rule lowering coal dust limits in mines. The head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration said there were no immediate plans to change the dust limit but has extended an public comment period until 2022. Labor Department | Read more
Water pollution
Completed
75. Scaled back pollution protections for certain tributaries and wetlands that were regulated under the Clean Water Act by the Obama administration. E.P.A.; Army | Read more
76. Revoked a rule that prevented coal companies from dumping mining debris into local streams. Congress | Read more
77. Withdrew a proposed rule aimed at reducing pollutants, including air pollution, at sewage treatment plants. E.P.A. | Read more
78. Withdrew a proposed rule requiring groundwater protections for certain uranium mines. E.P.A. | Read more
In process
79. Proposed a rule exempting certain types of power plants from parts of an E.P.A. rule limiting toxic discharge from power plants into public waterways. E.P.A. | Read more
80. Proposed allowing the E.P.A. to issue permits for federal projects under the Clean Water Act over state objections if they don’t meet local water quality goals, including for pipelines and other fossil fuel facilities. Executive Order; E.P.A. | Read more
81. Proposed extending the lifespan of unlined coal ash holding areas, which can spill their contents because they lack a protective underlay. E.P.A. | Read more
82. Proposed a regulation limiting the scope of an Obama-era rule under which companies had to prove that large deposits of recycled coal ash would not harm the environment. E.P.A. | Read more
83. Proposed a new rule allowing the federal government to issue permits for coal ash waste in Indian Country and some states without review if the disposal site is in compliance with federal regulations. E.P.A. | Read more
84. Proposed doubling the time allowed to remove lead pipes from water systems with high levels of lead. E.P.A. | Read more
Other
Completed
85. Repealed an Obama-era regulation that would have nearly doubled the number of light bulbs subject to energy-efficiency standards starting in January 2020. The E.P.A. also blocked the next phase of efficiency standards for general-purpose bulbs already subject to regulation. Energy Department | Read more
86. Allowed coastal replenishment projects to use sand from protected beaches. Interior Department | Read more
87. Limited funding environmental and community development projects through corporate settlements of federal lawsuits. Justice Department | Read more
88. Announced intent to stop payments to the Green Climate Fund, a United Nations program to help poorer countries reduce carbon emissions. Executive Order | Read more
89. Reversed restrictions on the sale of plastic water bottles in national parks desgined to cut down on litter, despite a Park Service report that the effort worked. Interior Department | Read more
In process
90. Ordered a review of water efficiency standards in bathroom fixtures, including toilets. E.P.A. | Read more
91. Proposed limiting the studies used by the E.P.A. for rulemaking to only those that make data publicly available. (Scientists widely criticized the proposal, who said it would effectively block the agency from considering landmark research that relies on confidential health data.) E.P.A. | Read more
92. Proposed changes to the way cost-benefit analyses are conducted under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and other environmental statutes. E.P.A. | Read more
93. Proposed withdrawing efficiency standards for residential furnaces and commercial water heaters designed to reduce energy use. Energy Department | Read more
94. Created a product category that would allow some dishwashers to be exempt from energy efficiency standards. Energy Department | Read more
95. Initially withdrew then delayed a proposed rule that would inform car owners about fuel-efficient replacement tires. (The Transportation Department has scheduled a new rulemaking notice for 2020.) Transportation Department | Read more
10 rules were reinstated, often following lawsuits and other challenges
1. Weakened federal rules regulating the disposal and storage of coal ash waste from power plants. A court later ruled the administration was attempting to weaken rules that were not stringent enough. E.P.A.
2. Reversed course on repealing emissions standards for “glider” trucks — vehicles retrofitted with older, often dirtier engines — after Andrew Wheeler took over as head of the E.P.A. E.P.A. | Read more
3. Delayed a compliance deadline for new national ozone pollution standards by one year, but later reversed course. E.P.A. | Read more
4. Suspended an effort to lift restrictions on mining in Bristol Bay, Alaska. But the Army Corps of Engineers is performing an environmental review of an application for mining in the area. E.P.A.; Army | Read more
5. Delayed implementation of a rule regulating the certification and training of pesticide applicators, but a judge ruled that the E.P.A. had done so illegally and declared the rule still in effect. E.P.A. | Read more
6. Initially delayed publishing efficiency standards for household appliances, but later published them after multiple states and environmental groups sued. Energy Department | Read more
7. Delayed federal building efficiency standards until Sept. 30, 2017, at which time the rules went into effect. Energy Department | Read more
8. Reissued a rule limiting the discharge of mercury by dental offices into municipal sewers after a lawsuit by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. E.P.A. | Read more
9. Re-posted a proposed rule limiting greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft, after initially changing its status to “inactive” on the E.P.A. website. In May 2019, the agency confimed it would issue the rule. E.P.A. | Read more
10. Removed the Yellowstone grizzly bear from the Endangered Species List, but the protections were later reinstated by a federal judge. (The Trump administration appealed the ruling in May 2019.) Interior Department | Read more
Note: This list does not include new rules proposed by the Trump administration that do not roll back previous policies, nor does it include court actions that have affected environmental policies independent of executive or legislative action.
