Harvey Wasserman hosts a meeting with organizers from around the country trying to protect our elections.

President Trump,

Dear Editor,

As COVID-19 continues its spread, one thing is clear: Ohio and the nation need paid family and medical leave.

As a mother of two, this need was front and center for me after the birth of my second daughter Ellie. Home alone with Ellie a week after giving birth, I became so sick that I couldn’t get out of bed. I had no way to take care of her, let alone myself. My husband and parents had either exhausted their paid leave and vacation time or simply had none. Things escalated when I had to go back to the hospital for treatment, forcing my husband to come home from his job to help get me there.

During that time I felt so alone, frightened and frustrated. I was told by well meaning people — who couldn’t help because they had no time off left — to just stay in bed all day. That’s a fine option for someone who has adequate assistance at home, but I had a newborn and myself to care for alone. How was I supposed to eat if I couldn’t make it downstairs to get food? How was she supposed to eat?

Palestine can never be truly understood through numbers, because numbers are dehumanizing, impersonal, and, when necessary, can also be contrived to mean something else entirely. Numbers are not meant to tell the story of the human condition, nor should they ever serve as a substitute for emotions. 

Indeed, the stories of life, death - and everything in-between - cannot be truly and fully appreciated through charts, figures and numbers.  The latter, although useful for many purposes, is a mere numerical depository of data. Anguish, joy, aspirations, defiance, courage, loss, collective struggle, and so on, however, can only be genuinely expressed through the people who lived through these experiences. 

The greatest impediment to doing anything, for homo sapiens, is often that it hasn’t already been done. “Well, sure, that sounds easy enough, but I just don’t know. I’ve never seen it done and my cousin’s friend heard it was impossible.”

The greatest means of smashing through that impediment is for the thing that needs doing to have already happened. “Impossible or not, we just did it 3 feet from where you are standing, while you were standing there. Here’s the video.”

The best chance homo sapiens has of surviving includes converting the resource-draining, environment-destroying, climate-collapsing, hatred-fueling, oligarch-enabling, secrecy-justifying, nuclear-holocaust-facilitating, murderous war industry to peaceful enterprises aimed at protecting and benefitting humanity and the earth. But who doesn’t have a cousin whose friend has heard that that’s impossible?