Articles like this from the New York Times are a fascinating view into a worldview where the frame is just shifted (off, I’d say) by a little bit. (Search the link in Google to read the article if it’s blocked when you click.)
In a Northern California school district, the superintendent is taking shifts as a lunchroom monitor. In Louisville, Ky., nonprofit groups are losing social workers to better-paying jobs at Walmart and McDonald’s. And in Rhode Island, child welfare organizations are turning away families from early-intervention programs because they are short of personnel.
The nationwide labor shortage in recent months has led to delayed shipments, long waits at restaurants and other frustrations for customers and employers alike. But many for-profit businesses have been able to overcome their staffing difficulties, at least in part, by offering higher wages to attract workers.
This is the problem with “non-profits.” They’ve been set up as if they’re some unique creature with a special blessing upon them. The reality is that you cannot suspend price mechanisms. If elected officials cannot find support for increases, then it’s a signal that the community only values the service at the rate that employees are willing to accept, when considering pay in combination with rewarding work.
When things are processed through the political system, everybody seems to conclude that the laws of reality (including economics) are suspended. It’s very strange… but it does facilitate useful rhetoric for self-serving activists.
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The Cato Institute’s Freedom in the 50 States index has Rhode Island slipping to 41st most free (i.e., 10th least free) for 2021, with the following ranks in its three major subcategories:
- Fiscal, #27
- Personal, #33
- Regulatory, #43
Keep in mind, of course, that this is freedom as defined by the libertarian Cato Institute, and people across the political spectrum may disagree with aspects of the organization’s approach. For example, Cato gives big points for state laws related to same-sex marriage, whereas others see those same laws as government intervention in the culture, forbidding people from distinguishing between different relationships, which is the opposite of freedom and, moreover, is an attack on a fundamental social structure that supports our freedom more broadly.
Be that as it may, it’s interesting to track Rhode Island’s trends on the index over time. Since 2000, the Ocean State has never done better than 32nd most free, and our current ranking is our worst. Unfortunately, Cato doesn’t make it easy to drill down and see what policies affected scores, and we have to keep in mind that (1) other states’ becoming more or less free will affect our ranking and (2) Cato is surely adding and removing policies by which to judge the states, which could change the ranking even if no policies changed.
That said, we’ve generally been on a long decline, although 2012 gave us a boost. Clicking through the subcategories shows that boost came thanks to “personal freedom,” specifically:
- Marriage, from 14 to 1 that year, owing to the state’s radical redefinition of the institution
- Education, from 48 to 8, probably having to do with charter schools and tax credit scholarships, although it’s important to remember that there isn’t much educational freedom in the United States, so it’s not hard to be top 10
- Health insurance, from 42 to 17, which I can’t explain except to speculate that other states went in an even worse direction
- Cannabis, from 14 to 8
So, as much as it’s possible to say, Rhode Island’s boost nine years ago may have been a function of the arguable aspects of Catoian freedom and the mildly more sluggish radicalism that leads Rhode Island progressives to proclaim the state government “conservative.”
In any event, we’ve lost all that ground in the years since, with no sign that our local society can muster the will to improve.
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I see Glenn Reynolds shares my concerns about charging forward with cures for every nuisance illness.
On the one hand, a universal flu vaccine would be great. On the other, say it works for several decades and then a strain of flu evades it. Wouldn’t it be an ugly “virgin field” epidemic at that point?
The variability of having your body develop its own immunity to a bunch of different, but related, bugs helps it prepare for other variations. I single shot would necessarily have to focus on one commonality among them all, which creates the risk that a bug will come along that lacks that one commonality, although it may have similarities with other illnesses.
This is the idea of the “black swan” event that comes along and wipes you out because it contradicts important assumptions with a low-probability event.
Vaccines are great, but it might be better to work on cures rather than preventions… and then use them only when necessary.
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This complaint in the Declaration of Independence came to mind while reading Democrat Governor Dan McKee’s executive order on the calculation of unemployment insurance fees for businesses:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
Here’s the relevant text from McKee’s order:
References to “computation date” contained in R.I. Gen. Laws § 28-43-8 as the term is defined in R.I. Gen. Laws§ 28-43-1(2) are hereby suspended and shall be replaced with a date no later than November 30, 2021 to be determined by the Director of Department of Labor and Training
Look, this isn’t the biggest issue on the table, and it might even be reasonable policy, but if emergency orders are going to be perpetual for years on end, we really need to keep an eye on their scope. Declarations of states of emergency are not meant for long-term management of events that challenge existing systems.
Where is our legislature?
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On October 1, Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee ordered the enforcement of a vaccine mandate on Rhode Island healthcare workers.
Governor McKee’s vaccine mandate would almost certainly sideline healthcare workers (who did not get vaccinated), though the number would not be knowable at the planning stage. And there would be a corresponding impact on public health by restricting the availability of healthcare. Accordingly, did the administration conduct an analysis before implementing such a mandate? Anchor Rising reached out to Governor McKee’s press office and asked,
What analysis did the McKee administration do before implementing the vaccine mandate for health care workers? This could be anything related to the challenges facing the administration and/or the effects that the mandate might have. As part of this, was there evidence that patients were catching COVID-19 from providers?
A spokesperson from the governor’s office responded,
… Either I or RIDOH will get back to you.
The second response from Governor McKee’s press office on December 16 to a follow up contact was
RIDOH will be getting back to you on this. Thanks for your patience.
There has been no communication from RIDOH or the governor’s office since then.
The purpose of any Executive Order pertaining to healthcare is presumably the maximizing of public health. Rhode Island was already experiencing a healthcare worker shortage, with a corresponding negative impact across the board on healthcare, before Governor McKee implemented this mandate. It would have been prudent for Governor McKee and his Director of Health, Dr. Nicole Alexander Scott, accordingly, to conduct an analysis before proceeding with such a mandate. One of the big issues to look at would have been the negative impact on public health of allowing healthcare workers not vaccinated (not vaccinated against a disease, it is important to note, that has a 94% – 99% survival rate) to continue working versus the negative health impact of depriving a percentage of the public of healthcare, or delaying access to healthcare, by removing altogether those healthcare workers and the vital care they provide from Rhode Island’s healthcare system.
It is inexplicable that the McKee administration apparently did not do so, especially in the face of known healthcare staffing shortages in the state. The formation of a study commission, announced by the governor on December 15, which
will explore additional short- and long-term solutions to the health care staffing challenges facing Rhode Island
not only underscores this misstep but has a distinct feel of locking-the-barn-door-after-the-healthcare-workers-have-bolted.
[Image courtesy Free Image.]
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At different times in my life, I’ve found my ability to focus on brainwork hindered by various things. Sometimes, it’s been videogames. Sometimes, binge-watching television shows. Sometimes, social media. Even simplistic games like solitaire, mahjong, 2048, or sudoku.
Recently, my chief distraction has been contemplating the construction of reality, especially around the point at which the objective rules that govern the interaction of materials make a leap and become the subjective intentions that beget the actions of entities. This seems to me to be the exact point of conflict between those who investigate the universe to understand why the rules require this reality and those who believe that beings observe Creation as this rather than that for the reason that the beings are that way.
I expect that normal people (a group from which I cannot do otherwise than exclude myself) will find the above paragraph to be a string of words without meaning or relevance… although they might intuitively feel that such contemplation is a step up from 2048. I did not expect, however, to wake up on the day before Christmas feeling… bland.
All my existential contemplation over the past several months, meandering through the substance of quantum particles as well as the metaphysical origin of existence as an abstract concept made real, has not only enhanced my facility for meditation, but has also reinforced my Catholic Christianity. One would think such advances would elevate a celebration of God’s birth as a human baby into emotional radiance.
My first thought upon recognizing that emotional radiance had not appeared was that my Christmas habits must be insufficient to capture the fulness of meaning. That is surely a deficit to work on going forward. It’s a Wonderful Life is a great movie and a well-spent couple of hours every Christmas Eve, but a satisfactory representation of the Incarnation, it is not. Superficially, I wished I could find a new movie but could think of none. What I wanted was the feeling of magic, and even the idea that pre-recorded video could generate such a thing felt off.
This is the problem we face — as individuals and, we’re discovering to our detriment, as a society — when we feel like we’ve figured something out. It ceases to be magical. We know the trick. Making a candle burst into flame with a mere thought would be magic. Using a cheap plastic lighter for the same purpose is not.
I think that’s what magic comes down to: the power of intent. Knowing how to make something unlikely happen simply because you want it to happen is knowledge of magic. Obviously, that means a sense of the magical requires a sense of another person making the thing happen.
Seen this way, that “blah” sensation we sometimes have is the feeling that we’re not connecting with other people in a meaningful way and, more broadly, that there is no intent — no person — behind the universe. In this, the surest signal of another person really being there is surprise. If things become less magical in proportion to the extent that we understand how they work, it follows that they become more magical when we have no explanation other than somebody else’s desire that they be so.
The savior of humanity’s quietly arriving in an animal keep to unknown parents far from their home, heralded only to some nearby shepherds and drawing three mysterious men from a distant land, is pretty inexplicable. Even if you’re pretentious enough to think you’re on your way to figuring out the secrets of the universe, the mechanism doesn’t explain the details. Knowing how something could have happened is not the same as understanding why they happened the way they did — why this time and place and those people. The answer, there, is simply that Somebody wanted it that way.
With that sort of magic in mind, one might even tear up at the generous gratitude of George Bailey’s community for the quintillionth time.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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The strangest thing that’s ever happened to me as a Eucharistic minister, distributing communion at Catholic Mass, was the time shortly after I’d started doing it that an elderly man threw coins in the ciborium* with his right hand as I placed the Eucharist in his left. I didn’t know how to react or what to think. Was this some sort of satanic assault or an indication of aged confusion. None of the limited training for the ministry had prepared me for such an action. When I told the priest about it as I handed the vessel to him, I almost expected him to say that it happened all the time.
Tonight brought the second-strangest experience in this particular ministry.
Not quite knowing how to interpret the rules for Catholic Masses in the Diocese of Providence this weekend, my family decided to bring in masks but only put them on if everybody else was wearing them. Our doing so would be for their comfort, not for ours… or the governor’s… but the discomfort to us of masks wouldn’t quite outweigh the disruption of others’ experience of the ceremony of a single rebel family. At first glance, it looked like everybody was wearing masks, so we put them on.
Then the priest came out, and he was not wearing a mask. I looked more carefully around the church, and a significant (albeit, still small) minority of the congregation was also maskless.
Bishop Tobin had said, I recalled, that those serving in the Mass shouldn’t be expected to wear masks, and while not serving as a minister, I was sitting in the front row, easily ten feet from anybody not in my family (and facing away from them, at that). In those circumstances, the mask felt like superstition, so I took it off while sitting in the pew.
In a ritual as richly symbolic, deeply considered, and long evolved as a Catholic Mass, whether and when a minister covers his or her face is not a merely incidental question. And since the priest did not put a mask on while distributing the Eucharist next to me, neither did I.
Whether this contributed to or detracted from the comfort of those receiving the Eucharist on my side of the church, I obviously cannot say, but about halfway through the line, a young man, probably college aged, received the Eucharist in his hand and, as he stepped to the side, mumbled, “You should be wearing your mask.” I almost wasn’t sure whether I’d heard what I’d just heard.
What a fascinating moment! As a matter of appropriately conducting the religious service (which is distinct from public health policy), I honestly don’t know who was in the right. We’re all kind of muddling through this experience. If my conduct did require correction, however, this did not seem the appropriate moment to offer it, either for my sake or for the young man’s.
Then there’s the psychology. Somehow, I suspect the fact of the mask hiding his face made it easier for him to rebuke me, which (I’d say) is not unrelated to the reason it might be ceremonially inappropriate for a person conveying the Body of Christ to have his face covered while saying, “The Body of Christ,” to the recipient.
Putting aside questions of timing and propriety, however, the interaction seems to me to have been oddly appropriate. Whether I erred in my confusion about the liturgical context of the moment or he erred in his presumption of chastisement, the moment illustrates the deep need we humans had and have for God to send us an exemplar — to take flesh in order to instruct and model the behavior that He would exhibit were He human.
In a way, this strange experience was a reminder of exactly what Christians celebrate this weekend, and while I disagree with both the young man’s suggestion and his approach, I’m grateful that he brought these thoughts to my mind on Christmas Eve. I only hope he isn’t torturing is family with progressive politics from the campus.
* The ciborium is the bowl that holds the Eucharist while in the tabernacle, and it may also be used by one of the ministers serving the Eucharist.
Featured image by Casey Horner on Unsplash.
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If I were a teacher or professor of creative writing, I’d save headlines like the following from a WPRI story by Melanie DaSilva for class assignments. English is wonderful for ambiguities, which makes it an excellent language in which to embed two, three, or even four layers of subtext, but a sometimes-challenging language with which to communicate an unambiguous statement concisely without the risk of being misunderstood.
The assignment would be to seize upon the humorously unintended way in which the headline could be read in order to craft a work of fiction:
Man who confronted security guard, broke into home naked to undergo mental health evaluation
Honestly, I’d advised people who break into homes for mental health evaluations to do so clothed. Securing an appointment might be even better, although doing so wouldn’t make the nature of your problem quite as obvious.
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Rather than simply proclaiming doom and destruction at the hands of the unvaccinated, Patrick Anderson dug a bit more deeply into Rhode Island hospitals’ capacity issues for the Providence Journal:
Hospitals have lost thousands of employees since March 2020 — to retirement, to less-demanding professions and to lucrative contract health-care work in other states.
And yes, they’ve also lost employees who quit rather than accede to the demand they be vaccinated, although it appears to be a small percentage of the total staffing shortfall.
Lifespan, for instance is down 2,000 employees, from 17,000 in 2019. Of that, 200 (or 10%) were lost because of the vaccine mandate, which I wouldn’t consider to be “a small percentage” in this context. Still, the key point is that many more people are leaving for other reasons. Among the biggest is a nationwide shortage of such workers and an ability for them to make more money elsewhere.
The disappointing thing is that the “solutions” section of Anderson’s article pulls up way too short. There’s a little bit about easing the challenge for nurses elsewhere to work in Rhode Island, echoing what I wrote in this space a couple weeks ago, although Anderson doesn’t go into the recently passed minimum staffing requirement for nursing homes.
That points to the direction Rhode Island decision-makers really need to head.
What we’re seeing in healthcare is just an early indication of the crisis that could hit Rhode Island in just about any other industry. It’s a leading indicator.
For a while, yet, the establishment will continue to be able to present each crisis as a distinct problem, but it’s all the same problem floating from industry to industry. During a healthcare crisis, we’ll have nursing shortages. Some other sort of crisis will reveal a construction-related crisis. Sometimes, it won’t be a worker crisis, but a supply crisis or an investment crisis or an infrastructure crisis.
Gradually (or not so gradually), it will just seem as if nothing is working.
Nursing is a great place to start, though, because it’s so visible and so obviously important. Rhode Island needs to start by pulling together a comprehensive collection of all regulations affecting nurses and hospitals. Look at each one and ask if it is necessary. Every time something looks as if it might be excessive and/or has insufficient justification, change it. But don’t stop there: look in other industries for something similar and eliminate it there, too.
Ultimately, this is a problem of the whole and requires a wholistic solution. Attracting nurses to Rhode Island requires more than taxpayer-debt-funded bonuses and the easing of some regulations. It requires an atmosphere of opportunity, great education, low cost of living, drivable roads, and so on. The longer we take to recognize this, the harder it will be to turn around, even as more people suffer.
The featured image of this post is of “Burrillville/Zambarano Hospitals” and is part of a promotion from the RI Film & TV Office, advertising Rhode Island as a location for filming. When the state government thinks the best use of a hospital building is as a filming location for zombie movies, we should all agree on the need for change.
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This is a notably aggressive tweet, responding to provocations from progressive gubernatorial candidate Matt Brown, from the historically reserved Senate President, Dominick Ruggerio:
Mr. Brown claims to know working people. I’ve fought for working people my whole life, and I just got done fighting for wage bonuses equating to $15/hr for childcare workers.
Matt, you live in one of RI’s richest zip codes & swindle money off millennials to pay campaign debts.
Here’s Brown’s opening salvo, responding to a Boston Globe interview with Ruggerio:
“I don’t think anyone who is working right now is getting less than $15 an hour” —
@SenatorRuggerioStunning ignorance. The corrupt, conservative politicians running our state have absolutely no idea what life is like for working people.
Except for the silly comment that the politicians running our state are conservatives, I’d say they’re both right about each other. RI’s insiders are fighting over who gets to soak Rhode Islanders for their own gain.
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