What Patriotism Is Not

Dear right-wing "patriots,"

I know all of you taking to the streets to protest business closures think you are great American patriots. But guess what?

• Walking around wearing a T-shirt or bandana printed with the American flag on it does not make you a patriot. 
• Attending a rally demanding that businesses be allowed to reopen despite the known risks of spreading the coronavirus does not make you a patriot. 
• Attending a rally with an assault rifle strapped across your chest does not make you a patriot. 
• Blocking streets to prevent critically ill patients from getting to a hospital does not make you a patriot. 
• Preventing medical personnel from getting to the hospital to treat critically ill patients does not make you a patriot.  
• Making threats against governors, mayors and other elected officials because you disagree with their decisions does not make you a patriot.
• Waving an American flag does not make you a patriot. 
• Waving a Confederate flag does not make you a patriot.
• Ignoring social distancing requirements does not make you a patriot.
• Crowding beaches just because the weather is nice does not make you a patriot.
• Protesting business closures while dressed in scrubs when you're not a doctor or nurse does not make you a patriot.

Exhibiting loyalty to and being willing to fight for the United States make one a patriot. Members of the military who fight for, and too often die for, their country are patriots. Keeping doctors and nurses from getting to the hospitals where they put their lives on the line every day is NOT patriotism.

Notice what I said: fighting for the United States. Patriotism doesn't mean doing what you think is best for you, or what you want, but what is best for the country you profess to love.

You want to be able to get back to work? Great! Everybody else wants this, too. But the way to do this is to stay home and help health care workers get this deadly virus under control so when businesses do open, everybody will be safe. If you don't do that, the next outbreak of coronavirus is likely to be much worse.

Rather than wasting time protesting because you don't like something, how about doing something helpful such as helping out an elderly neighbor (while maintaining social distance) or learning a new skill, or broadening your mind?

People of my father's generation went to war to protect America. All we are being asked to do is to stay home. While you're home, do some reading about some of America's true patriots. And please stop defiling the American flag by wearing it on your sweaty body!

A New Perspective

A few weeks ago I received an e-mail from a young Ethiopian man I met while visiting that country a couple of years ago.

He had been hired to help my tour group, which he did by carrying my heavy camera and big telephoto lens. He also took my hand as we walked over bumpy and often steep terrain to make sure I didn't fall. This young man, Assfa, reported that the coronavirus pandemic had not reached his village. He added that the rich people were isolating themselves in their homes, while the poor people (the majority) brought food to the wealthy. There isn't a lot of food available, and he said the situation makes him angry.

A few days ago I received an e-mail from Nairobi, Kenya. The message was from the education director at Save the Elephants, through which I am sponsoring the high school education of a student from a poor, rural area of the country. 

Because of the pandemic, all the students (who live at their schools) were sent home by bus. Unfortunately, due to lack of electricity and computers, they are unable to continue their studies online. I thought of the stark contrast between education in rural Kenya and the fact that Albuquerque Public Schools just bought 18,000 Chromebook laptops that are being distributed to students who don't already have a computer at home. Rio Rancho Public Schools is doing the same thing. These students can continue their learning online. Many have educated parents who can offer homework assistance.

Just imagine the challenges these Kenyan students are facing. They don't have the option of distance learning. They don't have computers. Many don't even have electricity in their homes. And many don't have educated parents, so homeschooling isn't an option. Educational outings have been canceled. Students were gearing up for their end-of-term exams, which have now been postponed. The student I am sponsoring was struggling in school before the pandemic hit. I hope she won't let the delay in her schooling be the end of her education.

So while we may complain about stay-at-home orders, at least our students can continue their education. We have electricity. We have the means to stay in touch with the outside world. We can order groceries online and have them delivered to our homes, or we can pick them up curbside. We can get take-out meals. We may not be able to get exactly the food or the brands we prefer, but we won't go hungry. For people who have lost their jobs because their employers had to shut down because of the pandemic, finding food is a challenge. Food banks report record numbers of people seeking assistance. Across the country, people are waiting in their cars for hours to receive a couple boxes of food.

Although our medical staff and facilities are straining under the onslaught of coronavirus cases, medical help is available to most of us. Such is not the case for people in the most rural parts of our nation, however, and for those on reservations. The large Navajo Nation has been hit particularly hard.

These e-mails from different parts of Africa certainly made me look at the pandemic in a new light. They again reminded me of how fortunate I am to live where I do. I isolate myself at home, but I am able to go for walks in my neighborhood. I have plenty of food in my freezer and pantry. I can get medical care if I need it. For people in other countries, and for too many people in America, such is not the case. 

I learn so much from the people I have come to know from my travels. And I wish all of them good health during these challenging times. Their struggles not just during the pandemic, but even in better times, put any challenges I may face into a whole new light.

If you can donate money or food, please give to your local food bank. Please stay safe, everyone.

Life in the Time of Coronavirus

Life as we knew it before the pandemic won't return for several months, if ever.

Widespread stay-at-home orders and social distancing have created changes in nearly every aspect of our lives. Schools are closed. People are either working from home or they are suddenly unemployed. Financial worries are growing. Small business owners wonder whether their businesses will survive. Medical personnel and facilities are overwhelmed. Personal stress is through the roof. Domestic violence has increased dramatically. Lines to get food from food banks are endless. One woman in San Antonio, Texas, waited in her car for 18 hours to get a box of food -- and she was first in line. Even the best minds in medicine and epidemiology have no real idea how long this pandemic will last.

I am very lucky that the coronavirus pandemic has not caused a major change in my life, as I have been retired for nearly 10 years and I am used to spending a great deal of time at home. And as an introvert by nature, not being around lots of people is fine with me. In fact, it is what I prefer. I am still able to go outside for walks in my neighborhood. I live in an area where each house sits on a 1/2-acre lot. So social distancing isn't an issue. I have a large yard where I can do yard work while hanging out with my dogs. I have lots of books on my Kindle to keep me occupied. I continue to work on learning photo editing software.

But there are a couple of areas where I have felt the impact of the pandemic. The first is travel. I typically take eight trips every year, including a couple of international trips. I managed to get in a short hiking trip to Georgia in early March, but my planned trip to Greece this month and to Yellowstone National Park in May have been canceled. And I expect that other trips will be canceled or rescheduled before this is over. 

Another area of impact is grocery shopping. I no longer do my shopping in grocery stores. I have placed three grocery orders with WalMart and one with Albertson's, and used curbside pick-up. I never get everything on my order, as a couple of items have been out of stock each time. And it takes from one day to several days to get a time slot for picking up the groceries. That's OK, as I have plenty to eat in the meantime. I am doing all I can to stay out of public places. Shopping and paying online, and having the groceries placed into the back of my SUV, allow me to do that.

The downside to online grocery shopping is the limited selection of brands and sizes, as most of the store inventory is not online. And of course, comparison shopping is impossible. I also can't wander the aisles looking for sales and for things I might have forgotten to put on my list. I am spending a lot more on groceries during the lockdown than I ever did before. I know why: it’s because I am maintaining my stockpile of groceries due to uncertainty about when or whether I will be able to buy replacements. It's an inconvenience, but a at least I can afford to buy groceries.

With sporadic shortages and unavailability of certain foods at different times, I am much more aware of my food supply than in the past. As an example, I wanted to make a cake recently, but the recipe called for three eggs. I have eggs, but I thought about whether I wanted to use three of them in a cake when I wasn't sure I would be able to buy more eggs the next time I went shopping. I opted to save the eggs for breakfast meals. The same is true of butter.

This all reminds me of grocery shopping when I lived in Moscow in 1999. My colleagues and I would shop at the American embassy's commissary every Monday. That was the only place I could get favorite American foods such as peanut butter and Dr Pepper. I bought fresh bread (really good but without preservatives, so it had a very short shelf life) and vegetables from local women who operated small stands in busy areas. I also sometimes shopped at a Japanese-owned, Russian-operated grocery store a few blocks from my apartment. I could buy packaged food, including frozen pizzas, from Israel, Poland and Finland. So grocery shopping was an ongoing, multi-step process.

Life in the time of a pandemic is different, but I am very fortunate that I have a full freezer and pantry, and I can buy food when I want to. For so many people who have temporarily lost their jobs, getting food is a real challenge. Hundreds, even thousands, of people in cars line up outside food banks, which are struggling to keep up with the demand.

I have done more writing since the pandemic started. It's a wonderful emotional relief for me. I check in on female friends who live alone. I try to find interesting things to photograph in my neighborhood. I do a lot of reading. I listen for, and appreciate more, the sounds of nature. Some early mornings I can hear a great horned owl. Night often brings the sounds of coyotes howling and yipping. I hear quail and most recently, song birds. I spend time looking at, and sharing online, some of the many beautiful photographs I have taken during my travels.

Staying home all the time and being unable to travel have made me irritable at times. I miss photography. I miss travel. But I am grateful that I live in a sparsely populated state, one that has a governor who continues to take steps to protect the citizens as much as possible. During my rare trips to pick up groceries, I am pleased to see people wearing masks or other face coverings. Neighbors I encounter during my daily walks observe social distancing even when we stop to chat. 

No one knows how long this pandemic will last. So life's 'new normal' in the time of coronavirus will continue for the foreseeable future. We cannot count on our federal government to provide guidance, or on all governors to put sane policies into place. The governor of my state, and several others, has acted swiftly to put policies into place that are designed to protect its citizens. Now some misguided -- or are they simply selfish or stupid -- citizens in several states are demanding to be allowed to return to work and for businesses to reopen. Experts say we aren't ready for this yet, and returning to business as usual will almost certainly result in a spike in Covid-19 cases and more death. Even when my state does reopen, I plan to stay at home, limit trips to public places, and wear a mask when out and about until I feel that it is safe to venture out.

We have a clear example of what may, and likely will, happen if life returns to normal too quickly. Large crowds gathered to celebrate the end of World War I during the great flu pandemic of 1918. Thousands of people then got sick and died after being in large crowds. 

I am already in a high-risk group. I'm not going to do anything to shorten my life, regardless of Republican calls to open the economy and sacrifice human life to do so. There is no 'acceptable' level of human deaths in the name of economic gain. We are all in this together, and together we will survive or perish.

I'm Tired

You know what? I'm tired.

I'm not tired physically, but mentally and emotionally. I am tired of being under lockdown, of course, as are hundreds of millions of other people in the US and around the world. But I accept the need to be under lockdown, just as I accept the reasons why two of my spring trips have been canceled. We are in a public health crisis, and drastic actions must be taken.

What I am really tired of is the gross incompetence of the federal government that is supposedly leading the fight against this pandemic. I am tired of the fact the president ignored warnings of the coming pandemic. I am tired of knowing that he slashed the budget of the Centers for Disease Control. That he disbanded the high-level commission established by Barack Obama to deal with pandemics, and that he disbanded it solely because of his hatred and jealousy of Obama. 

I am tired of non-stop news coverage of the pandemic. I am tired of watching the nation's death toll climb every day, day after day. As I write this post, the US death toll is at 39,084. I am tired of public health officials and epidemiologists and other experts being ignored by a bunch of clueless politicians.I am tired of seeing healthcare providers without proper personal protective equipment. I am tired of stories about our most vulnerable, the frail and elderly, dying in nursing homes, their bodies piled into an extra room. I am tired of hearing about COVID-19 patients dying alone on hallway floors because there are no more hospital rooms available.

I am tired of Republican governors refusing to issue stay-at-home orders. I am tired of Republican governors opening beaches despite high numbers of people being diagnosed with Covid-19 in their states. I am tired of these same politicians putting money over human life. I am tired of comments by -- who else? -- Republicans that there is an acceptable number of deaths if it means the economy will return to normal. I am tired of the president encouraging civil disobedience by armed groups with his tweets to "Liberate Virginia!" or Michigan or Minnesota, all states with Democrat governors. 

I am tired of the federal government doling out essential medical supplies based on the party to which each state's governor belongs. I am tired of incompetent family members of the president being put in charge of critical decisions about this public health catastrophe.

I am tired of calls, and protest marches, demanding that governors rescind stay-at-home orders and that businesses be allowed to reopen. If we return to normal too quickly, there will be an uptick in cases of Covid-19, and more people will certainly die..

I am tired of how this pandemic has been turned into a political playground by the current administration. I am tired of the president-whose-name-I-will-not use use his daily briefings as campaign rallies to attack his opponents. Most of all, I am tired of the rampant greed and selfishness that has taken over so much of our country. 

So the economy can open or not open. I will continue to stay at home unless absolutely necessary. I will continue to wear a mask when I do venture out. I will continue to practice social distancing. And sadly, I will continue to be oh so tired of watching our federal government and far too many citizens ignore the call to do what is right and what is best for our country.

 

Hidden Figures No Longer

Recently I watched the 2016 movie 'Hidden Figures' for the second time.

I read the book a few years ago, and later I watched the movie. I have a deep interest in space exploration, having spent 20 years working for NASA in California and in Texas. I am sad to say that until the book was published, I had never heard of Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan.

How could this be? These brilliant women worked at the NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia, across the country from where I worked. Perhaps that is the reason I never heard about them, but without their brilliance and determination, the US most likely would not have achieved what it did, when it did, in space exploration. Known as human computers, they carried out complex mathematical calculations by hand, plotting launch and landing trajectories and working to solve a variety of problems facing the fledgling field of space exploration.

Despite the obstacles that stood in their way -- they were women in fields that until then were the sole dominion of men, and they were black in a still segregated country -- they pushed ahead, demanding the same opportunities available to white men. They met every challenge, every obstacle that tried to 'keep them in their places' in the 'colored' section.

Before John Glenn's flight -- the first orbital flight by an American -- he insisted that the orbital calculations of the new IBM computer be double-checked by Johnson, so confident was he in her calculations. Jackson had to get a court order to be able to take night classes at a previously all-white school. She became NASA's first female African-American  engineer. Vaughan taught herself the Fortran programming language and became NASA's first African-American supervisor, going on to teach programming to other women, both black and white

Higher mathematics has never been my strength. I got through college trigonometry, but that was a challenge and I ended my study of math at that point. I have always been amazed by the pinpoint accuracy of orbital calculations, upon which the very lives of space crews depend. I used to watch in awe as space shuttle commanders docked their spacecraft, traveling at 17,500 mph, to the space station traveling at the same speed, with incredible and unforgiving precision. And to think that a group of women, despite the odds against them, did launch and landing trajectory calculations by hand -- without high-speed machine computers -- boggles my mind. Throw in the constant sexism and racism of the times, as well as family pressures, and their accomplishments are even more amazing.

At long last these women received the recognition they so deserved. The Mattel toy company made a Katherine Johnson Barbie doll, complete with eyeglasses, to honor Johnson, who died earlier this year at age 101. These pioneering women were honored by President Donald Trump with Congressional Gold Medals. Johnson was presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. A computational research facility at NASA's Langley Research Center, where the 'computers' had worked, was named after her.

Johnson was the last surviving original human computer portrayed in the movie. Her loss, as well as the passing of all of these brilliant, nothing's-going-to-stop-me women, is huge. I am glad they finally got the recognition they deserved, long overdue as it was.

I doubt if any of these women set out to become role models. And it's too bad their achievements and contributions as engineers and mathematicians were not recognized for so long. 

I hope the movie and the book upon which it is based inspire other girls to realize that they are just as good as, and sometimes better than, men in technical fields such as math and engineering. I hope no other girl hears the words "This class wasn't set up for women," and that no aspiring female of color ever is looked upon as less-than. Brilliance isn't determined by gender or race.

May their talents and successes be hidden no more.

Nature Is My Church

Today is Easter Sunday 2020.
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And because of the coronavirus pandemic, Christians are celebrating Easter and Jews are celebrating Passover differently than ever before. Gone are the gatherings of family and friends, the shared special meals, the outdoor sunrise services. Services in churches, synagogues and mosques have been canceled, with the exception of a few so-called pastors who insist on holding crowded services in churches regardless of the threat to the very lives of those who attend.

I took advantage of a beautiful, but cold (40 F) morning before the winds started to howl and the threatened rain arrived, taking my dogs on a longer than usual walk. We encountered one vehicle, one bicyclist and one woman walking her dog. I really enjoyed the quiet. I heard song birds singing (a rarity in the high desert) and the unique calls of some quail. I looked at the gorgeous blue sky and the clouds hovering over the Sandia Mountains. I enjoyed the warmth of the sun on my jacket. I noticed that many trees are budding a vibrant green.

I don't need a church in order to worship. While the fellowship is important to some, and some need a spiritual leader or guide, I think of nature as my church. Nothing created by human hands can compare with the beauty, the tranquility, the splendor of Mother Nature's creations. I would rather hear the howling of wolves, the yipping of coyotes, the hooting of owls, the singing of birds and the rushing of rivers, than to hear the music created by humans, magnificent as some of it is.
 
If the purpose of attending formal services is to honor God in whatever form the worshiper believes, or to feel closer to God, what better place to worship than outdoors, surrounded by the Creator's best work?

Growing Older, Growing Bolder

I recently ran across a Facebook post by a woman with whom I used to work.

It included a link to an article in a magazine called Growing Bolder. I've read only the one article, but the magazine is about people discovering -- and living -- their passions in life. The article I read was about a group of women who get together for a variety of outdoor adventures, some taking them out of their comfort zone. Sometimes this group of women went hiking someplace new. Sometimes they went kayaking or engaged in other outdoor activities.

This is a very appealing idea to me. Sadly, I don't have women in my life who are interested in such activities. But I really like the idea of not just growing older (something I can't do anything about), but also of growing bolder (something I can do something about).

I'm not really a bold person. Doing new things can make me uncomfortable. But sometimes I like to push myself and once in a while step a toe or two out of my comfort zone. This is why, years ago, I signed up to run the San Francisco Marathon (all 26.2 hilly miles of it). This is why I signed up to do a three-day, 60-mile walk (from San Jose to San Francisco) to raise money for breast cancer research. I went to Ireland on a bicycle tour despite having not ridden a bicycle for many years. (I did get a bicycle and I trained before the trip). I volunteered to represent the federal government agency for which I worked for 3-1/2 months in Moscow. Then I settled into a comfortable, not very challenging life.


But in the past few years I went snowshoeing for the first time (I had a blast). I rode a camel twice, in Jordan and in Morocco. I hiked in Ethiopia at more than 12,000 feet, even spending a short amount of time at 14,000 foot elevation. I walked 50+ miles of Spain's Camino de Santiago (the Way of St. James), a pilgrimage route through Spain and France since the Dark Ages. 

I have, since retirement, rediscovered my passion for photography. I also have discovered a passion for travel, especially international travel. Despite rarely traveling with someone I know, I have decided that it's much more important to travel with strangers than not to travel at all.

These things are not exceptionally bold, but they're not bad for a single woman in her 70s. I traveled alone on each of these trips, but I met up with other travelers taking the same trip. My excursions would have been much bolder had I traveled on my own, arranging hotels, transportation, etc., on my own. But I'm not that bold.

One trip that I do want to take before I get too old is to ride the Trans Siberian Railway across the massive breadth of Russia. This is something I have wanted to do for a long time. I do speak Russian, not fluently but passably, so that would be a big help.

Being bold means different things to different people. I am happy with where I am now. I have a full schedule already booked for 2020 (or I did until the coronavirus pandemic hit), as well as a couple of trips scheduled beyond that. I will continue to travel for as long as I am able. I will continue to enjoy photographing beautiful places and wonderful wildlife, and use the proceeds from sales of photographs and calendars to support charity.

So maybe what I'm doing isn't really bold. That doesn't really matter. What does matter is that I am living my best life, enjoying myself, pursuing my passions and contributing to make the world a better place.