Journally Speaking: Awake at the wheel

We’re living a moment in US history that, for many of us, is starting to feel like what every carefree soul strapped silently and unaware in the passenger seat of a car driven by someone else must feel when—after rolling along, seemingly safe, for some time—he or she is shocked into hyperconscious awareness of experiencing the inescapable split second of the car’s fatal crash.

Perhaps the self-involved driver is to blame for the crash. Maybe the oblivious passenger should have said something. Probably both. Either way, assigning blame is inconsequential when the outcome—one way or another—harms everyone involved.

As the US weathers effects of the continuing spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) and its impact on American lives—and as this OGJ editor watches longtime industry colleagues losing their jobs and livelihoods—the more important question becomes how this has become our new normal. Why hasn’t it stopped? Who stands to gain from it persisting?

Amber waves of gain

Deep into quarantine life as the US celebrates its national independence from what its forebearers deemed the oppressiveness and tyranny of a controlling monarchy, this editor decided to revisit the history of “America the Beautiful,” a song—originally a poem penned by Katherine Lee Bates in 1893—that has become a beloved anthem of American patriotism.

The popular song most of us have come to know differs markedly from Bates’s original version, which—written against a backdrop of the rising political and economic power of robber barons of the US Gilded Age, as well as the US Supreme Court’s institution of its “separate but equal” doctrine—intended to advocate for an America that crowned its “greatness with goodness” and its “bounty with brotherhood.”¹ Noticeably missing from today’s popular version is Bates’s hope in the original fourth verse that “…selfish gain no longer stain, / [America’s] banner of the free.”²

The omission in our popular version attests to another invisible but very real virus that’s plagued our history since its inception: prosperity for some at the sacrifice of many. Multiple theories are swirling as to why the US is failing to control the COVID-19 outbreak, but at the core of all is the unsettling notion that our leaders—political, corporate, and otherwise—stand to somehow gain from the crisis. While many of us don’t want to believe that, the continued hemorrhaging of the energy sector—now a cornerstone of the US economy—means none of us can remain the passive, sleepy passengers we once were.

Some corporate leaders have stepped up to slash their pay in lieu of letting their workforce go; many, however, have not. And while greed—in its array of degrees and disguises—may well have been a pillar on which the American way of life and economy were built, it’s no longer a foundation on which these can survive.

Tough questions for all

For most Americans, the COVID-19 pandemic is a first experience with mass-interruptions to the normalcy of everyday life. For others of us—particularly those that live along the hurricane-prone, oil-rich, and refinery-laden US Gulf Coast—the health crisis is a prolonged version of long-term disruptions many Texans weathered during Hurricanes Ike and Harvey in 2008 and 2017, respectively, and that Louisianans endured—and some, these nearly 15 years later, still endure—in the wake of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.

With a predicted above-average 2020 hurricane season now in full swing alongside what inevitably will be another round of measures to stem the COVID-19 spread, it’s time to ask some tough questions of ourselves, our leaders, and our nation.

1. Clay, L., ‘Sisters In Song: Women Hymn Writers,’ 2013, AKA-Publishing, Columbia, Mo.
2. Bates, K.L., “America. A Poem for July 4,” The American Kitchen Magazine, Vol. VII, April-September 1897, p.151, 1897.