A Note from Beth
My friend, Jen, is an excellent photographer. She’s also a concerned citizen, watching the new administration and its ripple effects in our community with something between worry and horror. Like so many of us, she’s found herself wondering what to do. She knows the answer isn’t an absolute verb. She can’t solve or stop or prevent or fix. But she can still do something to put good into the river, and she’s doing it.
She’s worked with contacts in the wedding industry to put together an amazing elopement opportunity for LGBTQ+ community on April 27. Everyone involved is donating their time. The $250 ticket price for couples (a beautiful wedding for $250 makes me so excited in so many ways!) will be donated to a local advocacy organization.
I love everything about this. I love that Jen wants to contribute in a positive way. I love that she is doing it in a way that uses her gifts. I love that she brought her community together. I love that she’s just doing it.
If you’re in the Cincinnati area, I hope you’ll share Jen’s event. Folks who are interested can buy tickets here. And I hope you, like me, are inspired by Jen’s love-letter to a better, kinder world.
Today, we shared a Valentine's treat with the Spice Cabinet. This is a conversation we recorded last Fall with Ed O’Keefe about his book The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt.
Bonus: The Women Who Created A President
Surprise and Happy Valentine’s Day! We’ve got a special holiday bonus for you. We’re sharing a wonderful conversation Beth had with Ed O’Keefe about his book, The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt.
From the Spice Cabinet
Our longtime listener, Mike commented on our Tuesday episode:
We expect government to be perfect. We won’t say that, but we behave that way. When any small to medium (let alone large) mistake could end up at the top of the news, that is telling government workers that nothing less than perfection will do. Empowering workers to streamline processes is fine, but it won’t do anything as long as the implicit standard is perfection, and mistakes are punished publicly and repeatedly.
He kindly followed up with a note that put some context around the kinds of programs that are getting slashed and burned in the current wave of government purges. His perspective (and all of yours) is so useful to us as we bear witness to what is happening and plant the seeds of what we hope will come next.
I have worked for the government at some level for basically my entire career. Starting as a lowly Park Service employee, and now nearly 20 years with state government. I'm sure that my perspective is skewed, but so be it. I chose and continue to choose public service.
My previous job was funded by the Public Health Emergency Preparedness (PHEP) grant. You may recognize that because it was namechecked in "Lessons from the Covid War." As I watch the administration slash and burn, that is the grant that I think of. I'm sure that it was caught in the spending freeze. It's also a CDC grant, and who knows what is happening there. It does work to promote some health equity, so that's a dirty word. It was a complicated grant, providing funding for lab techs, epidemiologists, pharmacists, medical doctors, lawyers, veterinarians, and others. Thinking that Elon can absorb enough nuance to determine what parts are necessary just by sleeping at the office is pure madness and really insulting to those people who are experts.
As fun as it is to say that we're in the "Find Out" part of "F***ing Around," the trouble with programs like this is that there is no guarantee that we will see any change by gutting and cutting. As Sarah says, life is a chaos lottery. Sometimes your number comes up, and sometimes it doesn't. I hope that, after whatever Trump and his cronies do to the public health infrastructure, we are able to rebuild it before the next Big One strikes. I fear that won't be the case.
I think the hardest part about "selling" so many government programs is that they are meant to be forward-looking and preventative. It's hard to talk about attacks that didn't happen, or disease outbreaks prevented. It's especially hard to talk about those things over a very short time horizon. Public health is a long game.
Finally, I bet if you asked the civil servant public health workers about their lessons from Covid, you would get multiple books full (and I have read some of them!) They are clear-eyed about what worked, what didn't, and where they failed (mostly). Political leaders are maddeningly not.
A long past podcast used to sign off with "In Trump-adjusted terms, I'm alright." (or similar) and that's where I'm at today.
Thanks for all you do.
Mike
Something Nice to Take You Into the Weekend
Not nuanced, but I would play this game (and any bipartisan and other follow up editions)
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THANK YOU, Mike. A thing it feels like we always forget... Nobody is more critical of the work being done in an industry than the actual people doing the actual work. Yes, we get defensive when we're backed into a corner, or when people miss the nuance and complexity. But I've never talked to a person who said, "we're perfect and I see no change needed."
That MAGA Guess Who is AMAZING.