interviews
Water and the American West
by Richard Frank
October 25, 2021
This interview with Richard Frank, professor of environmental practice at the UC Davis School of Law and Director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you tell me a little bit about the story of water and how it's tied to the West, and to California in particular?
Richard | A friend of mine who's a Court of Appeals Justice here in California wrote an opinion on a water law dispute and started it with the quote, "the history of California is written on its waters." And I think that the point is true of the entire American West.
Water policy and legal issues are inextricably tied to the development of the Western United States; water is the limiting factor in so many ways to settlement, to economic development, to prosperity, and to the environment and environmental preservation.
Can you talk about the difference between groundwater and surface water– and the policies that regulate each?
There are really two types of water when it comes to human consumption. There's surface water: that is the water that is transmitted by lakes, rivers, and streams. Then there is groundwater, and a substantial amount of water that Americans and the American West rely on is groundwater. That is water that is stored in groundwater aquifers, which are naturally occurring groundwater basins. Both groundwater and surface water are critical to the American West and its economy and its culture.
Traditionally a couple of things are important to note, first of all, water is finite. Second, water gets allocated in the Western United States generally at the state level. There's a limited federal role. Primarily, policy decisions about who gets how much water for what purpose are made state by state.
I think allocation is really interesting in that it's more state-level than federal. How was water and the allocation of water in California designed? Is it a public-private combination? What goes on in terms of the infrastructure of water?
Another very good question. The answer is it depends. Most of our water infrastructure is public in nature.
Again, in the American West, the regulation of water rights is generally done at the state level, but the federal government, historically, has a major water footprint in the American West because it has been federal dollars and federal design and management that really controlled much of the major water infrastructure in the American West — you know, Hoover Dam, and the complex system of dams and reservoirs on the Colorado River in California, with the Central Valley Project that was built and managed by the federal government with Shasta Dam on the upper Sacramento River as the centerpiece of that project. But we also have a California State Water Project, the key facility being the Oroville Dam and reservoir on the Southern River that is managed by state water managers. If we were starting over, that kind of parallel system would make no particular engineering or operational sense.
But, we are captive to our history.
And then you have these massive systems of aqueducts and canals that move water from one place to another throughout the American West. They are particularly responsible for moving water from surface water storage facilities to population centers. In the last 50 to 75 years, these population centers have really expanded dramatically, so you need massive infrastructure to deliver water from those storage facilities, the dams, and reservoirs, which generally are located in remote areas to the population centers. So it takes a lot of time and energy to transport the water, from where it is captured and stored to where it is needed for human use.
California has faced continuous drought – what measures is the state taking now to manage water?
Just to frame the issue a little bit — we have, as I mentioned, a growing population in the American Southwest at a time when the amount of available water is shrinking due to drought and due to the impacts of climate change. We have growing human demand for residential and commercial purposes and at the same time, we have a shrinking water supply. That is a huge looming crisis.
And it is beginning to play out in real-time. You see that playing out in real-time. For example, several different states and Mexico rely on Colorado River flows based on an allocation system that was created in the 1920s, which is overly optimistic about the amount of available water. From the 1920s until now, that water supply has decreased, and decreased, and decreased. Now you have interstate agreements, and in the case of Mexico, international agreements that allocate the finite Colorado river water supplies based on faulty, now obsolete, information. It is a real problem.
What measures do you take now, knowing this information?
If you look at the US Drought Monitor, it is obvious the problem is not limited to the Colorado River. We are in a mega-drought, so cutbacks are being imposed by federal and state water agencies to encourage agricultural, urban, and commercial water users to cut their water use and, and stretch finite supplies as much as possible through conservation efforts.
In California, we have the State Water Resources Control Board, the state water regulator in California, and they have issued curtailment orders. Meaning, they have told water rights holders, many of whom have had those water rights for over a hundred years, that, for the first time, the water that they feel they are entitled to, is not available. Local water districts are also issuing water conservation mandates; the San Francisco water department is doing that, in Los Angeles, the metropolitan water district, is urging urban users to curtail their efforts.
And then agriculture. Agricultural users — farmers and ranchers — have had to get water rights in many cases through the federal government, as the federal government is the operator of these water projects. They have contracts with water users, individual farmers, ranchers, or districts, and they are now issuing curtailment orders. They're saying, we know you contracted for X amount of water for this calendar year, but we are telling you because of the drought shortages we don't have that water to supply. Our reservoirs are low at Lake Shasta or at the Oroville Dam.
When you drive from San Francisco to LA on the five, you see a lot of signage from the agricultural farming community about water. There's apparently some frustration about this. What are the other options for them?
About 80% of all human consumed water goes to agriculture. That is by far the biggest component of water use, as opposed to 20% used for urban and commercial, and industrial purposes.
Over the years, ranchers and farmers, and agricultural water districts assumed that the water would always be there — as we all do.
And the farmers and ranchers have, in hindsight, exacerbated the problem by bringing more and more land into production. You see on those drives between San Francisco and Los Angeles, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley, all these orchards are being planted. Orchards are more lucrative crops than row crops — cotton, alfalfa, and rice. But, if you are growing a row crop, you can leave the land fallow in times of drought.
We don't have to plant. If the water stopped there, or if it's too expensive to get, it may make economic sense, but if you have an orchard or a vineyard it's a high value, those are high value crops, you don't have that operational flexibility and they need to be irrigated in wet years and in dry years. Now, you see these orchards, which were only planted a few years ago, are now being uprooted because the farmers realized that they don't have the water necessary to keep those vineyards and orchards alive. For ranchers, the same thing is true with their herds. They don’t have enough water for their livestock.
The water shortage has never been drier than it is right now. Farmers and ranchers are being deprived of water that they traditionally believed was theirs and they're very understandably, very unhappy about it. They see it as a threat to their livelihood and to the livelihood of the folks who work for them. Their anger and frustration are to be expected, but it's nobody's fault.
To say, as some farmers do, that it is mismanagement by state and federal government officials, I think is overly simplistic and misplaced in the face of a mega-drought. Everybody's going to have to sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to be more efficient in how they use water. All sectors are going to need to be more efficient with the water that does exist.
Looking at this percentage breakdown of water use – is it actually important for individual users to change their water habits?
Well, every little bit helps. When you're talking about homeowners, about 70% of urban water use is for outdoor irrigation. So we're talking parks and cemeteries and golf courses and folks' yards. You know, that used to be considered part of that American dream and the California dream — you would have a big lawn in front of your house and behind your house. Truth be told, that has never made much sense in an arid environment. That's where the water savings in urban areas is critical in the way it really involves aesthetics rather than critical human needs, like water for drinking and bathing and sanitation purposes. There is a growing movement away from big lawns, and away from the type of landscaping that you see in the Eastern US — there is no drought in the Eastern United States. As Hurricane Ida and other recent storms have shown, the problem is too much water, or rather than too little in most of the Eastern United States. So it really is a tale of two countries.
We just need to recognize that the American West is an arid region. It has always been an arid region, we can't make the desert bloom with water that doesn't exist. We need to be more efficient in how we allocate those water supplies. And it seems to me in an urban area, the best way to conserve and most effective way is to reduce urban landscaping, which is the major component of urban water use.
You also write about water markets and making them better – for those who don’t know, what is the water market?
Water markets, that is, the voluntary transfer of water between water users, is more robust in some other Western states. Again Arizona and New Mexico come to mind. California somewhat surprisingly is behind the curve. We are in the dark ages compared to other states. Water markets are kind of anecdotal. There is not much of a statewide system. It is done at the local level, through individual transactions without much oversight and without much transparency. And I have concerns about all of those things.
I believe conceptually watermarks are a way to stretch scarce, finite water resources to make water use more efficient. I can, for example, allow farmers or ranchers to sell water to urban uses or commercial usage or factories in times of drought.
Farmers sometimes can make more money by farming water, than they can by farming crops.
There are efficiencies to be gained here.
The problem in my view is really one of transparency. The water markets are not publicly regulated, and some of the people who are engaging in water transactions like it that way, frankly, they want to operate under the radar.
In my opinion, water markets need to be overseen by a public entity rather than private or nonprofit entities. We need oversight and transparency, so that folks like you and myself can follow the markets to see who's selling water to whom, for what purpose, and make sure that those water transfers serve the public interests and not just the private interests.
There have been a number of stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Salt Lake City Tribune about efforts in some parts to privatize water transfer. Hedge fund managers are buying and selling water, as a means of profiting. And it strikes me that when you're talking about an essential public resource — and in California, it is embedded in the law that public water is an inherently public resource, that water is owned by the public and it can be used for private purposes, but it is an inherently public resource — the idea of commoditizing water through the private, opaque markets is very troublesome to me. I think it represents a very dangerous trend and one that needs to be corrected and avoided.
Why is California so behind?
There's no good reason for it. It's largely inexplicable that since the state was created on September 9th, 1860, we've been fighting over water. In the 19th century, it was miners versus farmers ranchers. In the 20th century, with the growth of urban communities, the evolution of California into one of the most populous states with 40 million Californians, it has been a struggle between urban and agricultural uses of water.
In the second half of the 20th century, there was a recognition that some component of water had to be left in streams to protect ecosystems, landscape, and wildlife, including the threatened and endangered wildlife. That suggestion has made agricultural users in California angry. You will see those signs that allude to the idea that food and farming are more important than environmental values. I don't happen to believe that's true. I believe both are critically important to our society. But the advocates for the environment have a proverbial seat at the water table. So that's another demand for water allocation that exists.
Do you maintain optimism?
Yes. I think it's human nature to look on the bright side. I try to do that through research scholarships and teaching. There are models for how we can do this better in the United States. Israel and Saudi Arabia and Singapore are far more efficient with their water policies and efforts. Australia went through a severe megadrought. They came out of it a few years ago, but they used that opportunity to dramatically reform their water allocation systems. That's an additional model. I think most people would agree in hindsight that their previous system was antiquated, and not able to meet the challenges of climate change and the growing water shortage in some parts of the world.
Here in the United States, we can learn from those efforts. There are also some ways to expand the water supply. Desalination for one. Again, Singapore and Saudi Arabia have led the world in terms of removing the salt content from ocean water and increasing water supply that way. In Carlsbad, California, north of San Diego, we have the biggest desalination plant in the United States right now, and that is currently satisfying a significant component of the San Diego metropolitan areas’ water needs. It's more expensive than other water supplies, but the technology is getting more refined, so the cost of desalinated water is coming down at a time when other water supplies, due to shortages and the workings of the free market are going up.
At some point, they're going to meet or get closer. Unlike some of my environmental colleagues, I think desalination is an important part of the equation.
In a proposal that came up in the recall election, one of the candidates was talking about how we just need to build a canal from the Mississippi River to California to take care of all our problems. That ignores political problems associated with that effort, as well as the massive infrastructure costs that would be required to build and maintain a major aqueduct for 2000 miles from the Mississippi to California. That's just not going to happen. Some of those pie in the sky thoughts of how we expand the water supply, I think, are unrealistic.
interviews
We Can't Help You
by Adia Benton
April 10, 2020
This interview with Adia Benton, an associate professor of anthropology and African studies, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Her work focuses on epidemics and government responses to them. Specifically how social inequalities that exist play out in institutional responses to health, health interventions, and humanitarian aid.
frank | Most of your work focuses on West Africa - did you anticipate your work being this central to a conversation in the United States?
Adia Benton | Yes and no, because, even if my research is based in Sierra Leone, a lot of what I study is about how foreign governments like the U.S. and British deliver aid. I happen to know things about the national stockpile or pandemic preparedness, because I would have to also understand the U.S. policy. The U.S. policy dictates the Sierra Leonean one. All humans are actually intimately connected through these kinds of policies, but we often don't see that until we're faced with a similar crisis that these policies are supposed to address.
There’s this assumption this sort of horrible thing could never happen here.
Or that it's going to come from somewhere else and that we’re just going to stop an outbreak by stopping it at the border, you know? That's like the movie version. We're envisioning the movie version of our pandemic where we have a special force that can defeat the virus through sheer force and will once it has entered.
When you talk about response, I hear it in two ways. Part of it is mechanics and logistics, and part of it is narrative – the outloud response from the government.
Right. There's a process, or roadmap, and a practice – what we actually do. They inform each other.
When it comes to the roadmap, one of the things I've been thinking about a lot is the war and military metaphor, which I speak out against all the time. This metaphor was particularly acute during the West African Ebola outbreak. Obama said, we're going to stop Ebola at its source: fight the virus over there to keep it from affecting us over here. His actual words and talking points to high-level officials at the time. His proposal was to send three thousand troops to Liberia – which turned out to be a more literal use of war and military than I would've expected. Usually we phrase disease as we are fighting a war against this virus, but the mechanics of the response – diagnosis, contact tracing, hygiene, protective barriers – remain the same. But to actually send troops is another level. It's like what are we going to do? Kill the virus?
Shoot the virus?
Viruses live in bodies.
We are also seeing that in response to this crisis. Governor Cuomo, during a press conference, announced they were going to “kick the virus’ ass”. There was a piece in the New York Times today, where people were outraged about that Navy ship in the New York City harbor. Everyone's freaking out because there are no patients in there. Those on the other side of the debate argue that it was never intended for COVID patients, it was always intended for overflow.
The issue is that we are using military medicine and military logistics to address what's essentially a public health problem. This is partially because of the disproportionate allocation of funding to the military versus public health. It becomes the ‘natural’ solution to any logistical problem during a crisis. And when we use the military to solve certain kinds of problems, we have to accept all of the things that come with that. Which is this – if this is a war, the military objective is to keep the enemy at bay, while also protecting military assets. Military assets are not simply ships and hospital beds and weapons, but also the people who are deployed. Which in this case, means that for all of the training that military physicians might have received in areas of biohazards and infectious diseases, they cannot be sacrificed. They are never going to be seeing COVID patients, because the U.S. government is too afraid to put their assets at risk. Which says something about who they are willing to put at risk.
[Side note: someone recently reminded me that soldiers were forced to purchase their own shields and armor for their deployments to Iraq in the early 00s, so one has to wonder about the relationship between risk and value within the military itself – even when it is strong and well-financed.]
This month was originally supposed to focus on the intersection of humanitarian aid and military. But we didn’t frame it domestically, so I hadn’t thought through the scenario you just described.
When I was studying the role of the national and foreign militaries during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, I read a brilliant essay by political scientist, Laleh Khalili, who writes about infrastructure and capitalism. She shows how militaries pave the way for colonial governance and capitalist extraction. If they build roads, bring water, put up hospitals, if they make it possible for a place to be habitable by outsiders, it also becomes easier to move and circulate goods, natural resources, or whatever they're extracting, in and out. Where I work, Sierra Leone, extractive industries are a major source of the country’s revenue, so it’s interesting to think about how.
Preserving capitalism at all costs is important for the Trump administration, though this administration is not unique. He marketed himself first and foremost as a businessman, and I think that connection is really salient and important to think about. Do we want our country to be run like a business? That’s how we get derailed into a false decision about when we can “open up America for business”. What's also very fascinating about the way the military works, and particularly how it works under our current regime, since 9/11, is that we also contract a lot of our military labor out to private companies.
We're also going to see the challenge and problems of that gutting of in-house expertise, in-house capacity, to do a lot of things that would fundamentally need to be done under the circumstances. Not only in the military, but also how that impacts how our public health system functions. It is one of the reasons we cannot mobilize a massive health campaign rapidly.
When Trump stands up there during his daily press briefers and says, I have the guy from Honeywell, I have the MyPillow guy...
It's insane.
Right? He's essentially talking about outsourcing or subcontracting what could be in-house expertise and capacity. Do we really need a call center that basically handles pillow orders? Probably not.
Back to the question of language – what language would you like to hear when we discuss public health?
I feel like the Sontag exercise where she was like, I hate when people talk about the fight against cancer or whatever.
The problem is that we, as humans, seem to need metaphors. That’s what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote about, what, 40 years ago?
But I've been trying to think about care, because it feels the farthest from the military metaphor. I do wonder if we thought about care and safety and protection outside of war and combat, would that allow for community forms of care? Would we have had the opportunity to ramp up testing in affected communities early on, or build up sufficient solidarity around social service provisions?
I was reading this piece about the Italian physicians and they were talking about how we have been too patient centered in care, and we should think about community modes of caring. I had some problems with it because I think the issue is that the starting point was that clinical work and public health necessarily sit on opposite ends of the spectrum. That’s a privileged position. I think it's because the imagination is that public health is about populations and clinical care is always about the individual. But I liked the idea of thinking communally.
I definitely have heard about communities that set up a spreadsheet and started to note which of the neighbors and community members were not capable of going out and getting their own stuff and people who might be struggling financially. That support system seems quite important here when the intervention is physical distancing.
While this community thing is I think necessary and possible, we've also been privatizing our quarantines, domesticating them, as a way of making up for the shortcomings of national pandemic preparedness. We've been told, you absolutely have to stay home indefinitely because we messed up.
We are learning what constitutes ‘essential work.’ And it’s often the people who are poorly compensated for their labor; it is service and caring labor. We have received some guidance from the agencies responsible for public health. But they are not always adequate. The CDC has some guidelines, and if you have the space to section off everything, great, but if you don't have that space, which is the case for many people, you're basically ensuring you will have clusters of infections that are localized to households. Someone asked me very early on what happens if someone in my house gets sick, what should I do?
Part of the issue that government leadership – particularly those who are given the task for developing a massive response to this outbreak – is understanding how people live in the day to day. This means calibrating guidelines that reflect people's lived realities and experiences, but also understanding the way that expertise gets constructed and communicated in this particular moment.
Right. And there are a lot of different realities to consider.
I was thinking about China. One of the questions I originally asked, and this was months ago, was how would household structure shape these transmission dynamics? When they started talking about age related mortality, that kids weren’t substantially driving transmission, one of the things that troubled me was, is anyone thinking about the fact that China has a particular, and significant, childbirth policy? Is anyone talking about the fact that for a long time you could only have one kid? Let's think about what that might've looked like with respect to community transmission dynamics. Let's talk about the fact that there's migrant labor housing. There are people who live in work housing who may be sleeping with 10 bunk beds in a room, who are perhaps cleaning up for the jet-set types who were the first to get sick.
What does your household look like? What does your work look like? Is it ‘essential’?
A lot of my friends have three or four year olds. They work, their partner works, and then they have the parents living in the house to help take care of the three year old and the baby. Those kinds of households are actually going to be the households we see all kinds of issues in.
Americans on the whole have a lot more health problems than any of those other places. We might not smoke as much as the Italians or Chinese, but we're much more hypertensive. A lot of us have other comorbidities. Diabetes, cardiovascular disease and asthma. And these conditions vary by region, which is why we're going to see huge spikes at different times in the South and midwest. In terms of deaths we have rural populations who are actually at heightened risk because they don't have ready access to healthcare, rural hospitals have closed, local health departments have minimal resources.
A lot of people have been screaming about this for decades now with respect to community health centers, rural health centers, and their relationship to deindustrialization and depopulation. These are really old questions and they've been exacerbated by different administrations in different ways.
You wrote about sports in relation to Corona. I feel athletes occupy this god-like stature in the U.S., so, of course we test them first. Are athletes less precious commodities in other countries? What does it say about our culture?
It's interesting that you say that because I feel like for a second, people were actually quite willing to sacrifice these folks because they're young and healthy. I think we questioned their privilege when it came to being tested.
It also depends on the sport. For example, tennis. We all know tennis is mostly people who have tons of money. Occasionally you get the person who has been able to recruit the “poor kid” who shows unusual talent at a young age. That is probably why we saw reluctance at first from tennis to shut down their major events, but then really quick, they agreed that things needed to be shut down. Nobody's going to really suffer if we shut down these tournaments for a year. I mean, except for the sponsors probably.
Even the sponsorship is like, Rolex.
Right? But then we look at places like the NFL, NBA those are different. They’re team sports; they have “ownership” – actually the NFL are the only ones who talk about ownership.
It's so weird.
Yes, it's slavery. Okay. It's like can you be a $2 million slave? Yes. I think you can.
It's a bunch of 60, 70, 80 year old white men who call themselves owners. Young guys sacrifice their bodies and their lives all the time for our entertainment. The idea is that if they're compensated well enough, it shouldn't actually matter.
When we see the NFL taking a stand about this disease, it's because they are worried about the health of the players as the commodities in which they have invested and also about the health of their paying customers. As opposed to tennis, the NFL’s original response was, we'll just have them play, but then we'll just have everybody else watch from home.
But here's the thing. NFL league owners couldn't meet when they were supposed to because of flight restrictions. Scouts weren't able to travel because of flight restrictions. It ultimately shaped their ability to actually staff a team, to actually fill their roster. This is how all of that trickles down. They couldn't do the business of football. They couldn't do the back end of football to give us the pleasure of entertainment.
Then take the NBA. The players association is better at arguing for their safety. In fact, one of the things that this episode revealed was that the NBA takes health so seriously that they make all kinds of extra allowances and pull out all the stops to ensure the health of players, which is why they were able to get state tests in Oklahoma when Gobert tested positive. That set off a cascading of 58 other people being tested that day, that day. The NBA, I think, was the first league to just shut down, postpone the season.
So, yes, it reveals hero stuff, but also there's value placed on life, and particularly on young black men that wouldn't otherwise have been placed there because they are entertainers, because they are athletes, because they occupy a particular space or place, not necessarily in our eyes, but value in the eyes of people who run a very big business.
My mistake in phrasing that question was in interpreting NFL response as care for players rather than as protecting a commodity. Why the discrepancy between NFL and NBA?
Basketball teams are smaller. They tend to play longer. Most NFL players only have a few years in them.
They're more disposable.
They're absolutely disposable and interchangeable. They go through a different kind of pipeline. Even though you still kind of need to go to college for basketball to move up, there is still the avenue to be able to bypass or at least accelerate through that pipeline. Harm to the body is slightly different. I don't know if it's that they're not commodified in the same way, but that the value is rooted in different kinds of temporalities.You're investing in someone for a much longer period of time. You're investing in fewer people over time.
As an anthropologist, what are the indicators of lasting change? Socially or politically.
This is fundamentally going to show us new things about work and care. I'm wondering the extent to which some forms of labor will be valued better and differently. Are we going to rethink child care, nursing, home health aids and all of those things – not as casualized and low paid work, but as necessary work for our society. Those would be my structural questions.
My other question would be about the extent to which we will be advocating for those things. Are we going to be more open to the political possibility of fairly compensating people, of reconfiguring debt relations? Are we going to be more grateful when we encounter people who perform this labor? I'm used to interacting with and engaging with people digitally, but I don't use that as a replacement for other forms of social engagement. I’m not sure I could get used to it in the long term.
But there are other things that we didn’t think we would accommodate but end up doing it anyway. One of the examples I use is TSA in the airport. If you watch a movie from the 90s, you'll always see some dude, usually a dude, buying a ticket and running right to meet her at the gate or to stop her plane or whatever.
To ruin her life!
You watch it now you go, Oh my God, that could never happen or it looks strange, and you realize that you've been completely acculturated or socialized to think that it is perfectly okay to take your shoes off or put your laptop in an X Ray machine. There are all these little things that we look back on and go, huh, when did this become normal?
I was talking to a sports journalist and he asked something like, will we feel okay to even go back into a stadium and watch a game? I don't know what that looks like, but I'm thinking about the fact that the last game I went to was a White Sox game and I had to put my purse through a machine and I was like, this is what constitutes “community safety” at the ballpark. I mean, I don't think that's going to be the thing that stops something like a shooting from happening. What would that look like for a disease?
I mean we are already acclimating by standing six feet apart in the grocery store with masks and gloves on like it’s normal.
Right, like are they going to have temperature checks at the stadium gate? I could totally see that becoming a new normal or at least something that can be reverted to. So they may not necessarily always have temperature checks, but if there's an outbreak or an epidemic or the potential for one, they may have temperature sensitive cameras that will allow them to better assess your risk to others. These are the kinds of things I worry about too, the extent to which we come to accept certain invasions, certain forms of violence, that otherwise might not have been acceptable or normal.
How do you balance public safety, community, and personal privacy?
I think that's what epidemics challenge us to do. At some point we're forced to think about the things we could do without. It's possible we may see absolute change in what it is that we do. That actually also scares me. What if we never get to go back to see the White Sox or The Bulls or Rage Against The Machine? It sounds selfish but these are things that bring so many of us pleasure. I think that was one of the points of Station Eleven, what forms of sociality, artistic production, entertainment, will become obsolete as a result of our efforts to survive an epidemic, as a result of our dying off in huge numbers?
I don't know about indicators, but I think, more broadly, it's about the things that we thought we never imagined or we thought impossible or we thought were temporary. There are a lot of things that I think we feel like we do them just as a way to deal with the problem at hand, but then we ultimately adopt them as practice. We didn't have a TSA or Homeland Security 20 years ago.
But I also wonder if this is an opportunity to move to new ways of thinking, new ways of being in the world with each other. I want to believe that maybe a Bernie candidacy felt less threatening to a democratic base as a result of his actually saying, look, now you see what I'm talking about when I talk about Medicare for all. Now you see what I'm talking about when we talk about the militarization of everyday life.
Yeah. Now you see where the money is.
Right. You see that it's not helping us, they're not saving us.
I have also been thinking about how we are displacing all of this sort of heroism to the frontline responders and experts right? Like, suddenly Fauci is a saint, I mean, I've literally seen him on votives and on candles.
Clearly it means we're starved for something because we are in a vacuum of expertise, a vacuum of good management. We are also socialized to believe that there is some magic bullet there. There's a singular solution, there's a singular hero, when in fact, we are who we are waiting for. We are the ones that have to work our way through this.