It’s Super Bowl Sunday. Does that mean I should write about football? No, it doesn’t. I got tired early last night, I thought of going to sleep before 11 PM. I didn’t because I wanted to record Gord’s Gold first. Why didn’t I record it then? It was too loud. I was waiting for things to quiet down. I did something I usually don’t do, moved into my bedroom where I could be behind a closed door. Even that didn’t help. My upstairs neighbors sounded like they were picking up heavy boxes, moving them across the room, and dropping them. It is not that unusual for them to do that. I had to wait them out. I got a lull and wanted to record and saw I had no internet. I keep much of what I need on the cloud. I went over and saw that the modem and Wi-Fi had no power. I’m not even sure where they are plugged in. First I had to figure out how to get enough light on the area. Then gain access to where I needed. Somehow while doing that the power came back. I didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Of course, as soon as I got back to my computer they started dropping boxes upstairs again. I was finally able to record at 1 AM. I worked a long time on getting the volume right. For many shows it was too low then last one too loud. I’m still learning what I’m doing. I did many test recordings before the real thing. I sing, “Testing testing 1-2-3/Testing testing 4-5-6. There’s a melody to it.
It ended up coming out well, at least to my ears. I talked about The Ladles. My only regret is not being funnier. I make bullet points of the things I need to say and vamp the details. This is the first time I wrote about a band that I’ve never seen live. Their album, The Line, was on my top 10 list for 2020. You can hear what I said along with music by them on Folk Music Notebook on Wednesday at noon, 6 PM, and midnight EST.
I got two musical packages in the mail this week. Bob sent me a CD of Richard Thompson’s performance at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival and a DVD of RT’s and Dave and Tracy’s set. I’ve never ripped a DVD; can you do that? I’m assuming there is a way, I have the will. I also got a copy of The Bright Siders‘ album A Mind of Your Own. I already had it digitally. I’ve been asking for my music digitally; it’s the form it has to be in for me to play it. Getting the physical CD in the mail reminded me of the downside of it. Kristin and Kari are my friends, so it came signed and personalize to me. As they live in different states I’m sure that Kristin signed Kari’s name but that’s fine. It is utterly irrational, but it still made me happy to see it. That’s not an irrationality that I’m ashamed of. It’s irrational to spurn a harmless pleasure just because it’s irrational. I like to be logical but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be human. I have a transmale friend that made the guilty confession, “I miss my super-hot days. Making men act stupid with my pretty face was really fun.” I told them that’s natural. Not only that but I’m human too and I miss looking at them when they were super-hot. There is nothing wrong with being physically attracted to someone. We shouldn’t deny our humanity. Some guys ruin it by taking a woman being attractive an invitation to objectify them and worse. The problem is not being attracted; it’s acting like the woman’s feelings are not important. I also added that I act stupid without seeing their pretty face. I have to keep on brand.
I hope that you’ve read that blacks have been getting a disproportionately small share of the COVID-19 vaccines while suffering more than their share of deaths. There has been lots of speculation as to why. Is it because blacks are less plugged into the country’s health care system? Less experience online? Because they are more hesitant to take the vaccine because of a history of unethical treatment of blacks by the medical establishment causing distrust? Is it where they live? Is it prejudice? The answer is, “yes.” As in every aspect of the black experience disparities are caused by a plethora of interconnected reasons. None of them are independent of the rest. The social system is path dependent, how we got to a point matters. My go-to example of this is the American employment-based health insurance system. Why do we have it? During WWII there were wage controls. Companies couldn’t compete for workers by offering higher salaries so instead they offered health insurance. This created a large population with a vested interest in keeping the system we have. Unions fought hard for better health insurance often at the expense of higher pay. People are risk averse, so they are afraid of switching to a system of national health insurance.
So, let’s get back to the black vaccination rate. There is a 400-year history of blacks in America; for more than half of that they were enslaved. This baked into everyone’s black and white’s attitude. What people think of as normal is the status quo. This has affected how everybody, white, black, and others, think. We make race-neutral decisions that do not lead to race-neutral results. Decision makers base things on their own experiences, and disproportionately few decision makers are black. Even more so the systems that have been developed, the way things have always been done, were created with little black input. Even when blacks are put in positions of power, the way they have learned institutions are run, has been affected by race. People feel, usually justifiably, that things are done for a reason. The problem is that conditions have changed since the systems were created and it’s difficult to sort out what parts of the system are out of date. People love to come in and change things then discover that the things that thought of as anachronisms weren’t. They work in practice. There are also things people are loathe to change, that should be.
What that means in practice is that there are countless factors, many that we won’t be aware of, that lead to blacks receiving unequal treatment in all areas, and that includes getting vaccinated. You’ll fine people that blame blacks for being reluctant to get vaccinated and ignore the rest. You’ll find others assuming that the reason is racial animus and neglecting everything else. We are never going to tease out all the different threads. What we can do make directed effort to get more blacks vaccinated. If that means doing education and PR, then do it. If that means changing the methods of distributing the vaccine to make it more convenient to blacks, then do that. We need to keep the embedded inequalities in mind in all phases of the vaccination process. Worry more about fixing things than assigning blame. People hate being blamed and then they resist change.
The subject is blacks and vaccination, but this holds in all cases of [name of group] and [costs and benefits]. Want to get women better represented in folk music? Same thing. Want to reduce substance abuse in Indigenous Americans? Same thing. Want to lower the rate of deaths by despair in working class whites? Same thing.
I’ll get off my soapbox now and start preparing for the Super Bowl. That just means figuring out when to start on making my chicken wings so they will be ready before kickoff. While I was writing this, I got some DJ related emails I have to deal with. I’ll do that first. I love having DJ related emails.
Wise Madness 