HOT AIR BALLOON FLIGHT

After an extreme law banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy and empowering citizens to enforce the law themselves took effect in Texas Wednesday, Frida Ghitis called out the hypocrisy of state Republicans. "The same politicians who declare that mask requirements are an intolerable intrusion by government into sacrosanct individual freedom, have just imposed the country's most restrictive abortion law since the Supreme Court made abortion legal in the landmark 1973 decision, Roe v. Wade."

 

And after the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 midnight order, allowed the law to stay in effect despite "serious constitutional questions," The Nation's Elie Mystal urged Democrats to "get creative to protect women's rights. They will need to be willing to challenge 'norms,'" he wrote (citing as one possibility federalizing abortion providers to protect them from private civil actions in the state). His bottom line: Instead of throwing up their hands, Democrats "will need to act like Republicans."

 

Legal historian Mary Ziegler wrote that the Supreme Court's refusal to stand in the way of Texas's dystopia spotlights the long-game strategies the anti-abortion movement has been building at the state level for years. Not only is there nothing "stopping other states from following the playbook Texas has developed," which is sinister in its "genius" according to Ziegler, but other state abortion challenges loom on the horizon, most notably a Mississippi case that will be argued before the Court in the fall.

For many Americans, Labor Day weekend signals an official end to summer; many K-12 and college students are already back in their classrooms, and more will soon follow. Parents, teachers, students and the medical community are all facing a steep rise in cases of the Delta variant as what began as a summer of hope transforms into an autumn of anxiety.

 

It's a lot for anyone to process, acknowledged Luke Winkie in The New York Times. He asked: "Is it possible to be hoodwinked by a respiratory disease? This is a question I never thought I'd need to ask. God, I miss that ignorance. Remember the short period of euphoria when the whole nation believed that the pandemic had been defeated for good? Remember how we danced on its grave?"

 

Dr. Susannah Hills, a pediatric airway surgeon, pointed to the hospitalization of children in Texas and Florida and observed that children, as they return to school, could be at higher risk for a combination of Covid and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus -- one of the most prevalent pathogens that can damage young children's airway and lungs). Hills wrote: "While we wait for Covid-19 vaccines to be approved for kids younger than 12, political leaders must allow our school systems access to the essential protection of mask mandates. They must also facilitate strategies to help vaccinate every eligible person -- instead of obstructing these efforts," Hills writes.

 

Nicole Hemmer put the increasing cases of companies instituting vaccine mandates in the context of the long history of private industry's role stepping in to push public policy goals when governments don't. "The private mandate saps some of the polarized politics from the vaccine," she noted.

 

History professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, meanwhile, mourned the loss of what is normally a joyful time for faculty, staff and students as they return to college campuses. Outbreaks across the country, and uneven use of vaccine or mask mandates have left many vulnerable, she argued. Some instructors have resigned or been fired amid this tension. "Asking faculty to participate in practices that can jeopardize collective well-being is untenable in a moral as well as public health sense ... No matter the individual policies in place at a particular school, many faculty feel in a broader sense that they, their students and the staff who work alongside them are being treated like guinea pigs in an experiment predicated on a refusal by most universities and colleges to entertain a return to remote teaching, no matter what happens."

Hurricane Ida devastated Louisiana, smashed across the South and left dozens dead in the Northeast amid shocking images of flooded subway stations and swamped basements. Alexandra Kane, a New Orleans resident who fled to Mobile, Alabama, before Hurricane Ida made landfall, said the decision to evacuate wasn't easy: "The truth is that evacuating is a privilege -- one that requires money, transportation and a safe place to flee to." Kane and her neighbors had come to rely on each other during the pandemic, creating a tight-knit extended family. They frequently gathered on their building's porch -- eating, talking and celebrating. She described tears, paralysis, preparation: "I bought supplies in case we stayed, and I packed in case we left ... I know leaving was the right thing for me to do but the thought that I could have been of help in any capacity haunts me."

 

Jesse M. Keenan, who also evacuated from Louisiana, wrote that politicians and bureaucrats are too quick to point a blaming finger at a so-called lack of community resilience instead of connecting storm suffering to the dire need for action on the climate crisis, especially the curbing of fossil fuel emissions.

 

On top of this pain and fear, scientists in Ida's path expressed anger and frustration. As ecologist Carl Safina put it: "Like most scientists, I'm not an alarmist and I don't jump to conclusions. If anything, I am a 'wait and see' kind of guy. But there is an undeniable pattern here: more extreme weather is happening more often, and we are its cause." Adam H. Sobel emphasized: "The nonstop, compound environmental disasters of this summer alone -- the fires, heat waves, droughts, floods and hurricanes -- would probably have been enough to shock us. But they also come after a year and a half of a pandemic. Even worse, they come atop an ongoing crisis for our democracy that is preventing us, as a nation and a species, from effectively meeting any of these challenges ... With a retrograde faction as powerful as it is in our national politics, we're supposed to solve the climate problem?"

 

More smart takes:

 

Mitch Landrieu: From Katrina to Ida, what has Louisiana learned?

 

Merissa Nathan Gerson: I fled Ida. Are we truly all together in a storm?

With the 20th anniversary of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 days away, Kimberly Rex wrote that the refrain of "never forget" rings hollow for those like her -- her father perished in the World Trade Center's north tower. There is no forgetting, ever, for families of victims, for anyone who fled those buildings, who responded first or who searched for victims, she wrote: "We are haunted by what we remember, 20 years later and likely 20 years later ... As if each year, when the calendar slowly moves toward September, the little things -- like the slight chill of a fall breeze or the scent of the leaves at my feet -- don't settle in my stomach, hard and knotted. As if my body doesn't remember. Muscle memory of grief ... As though it's easy to forget that your strong, stocky father was whittled down to only pieces. That when we buried him, only my mother knew how much of him was inside the coffin. As if we'd forget that this actually makes us lucky. That others have only empty plots filled with knickknacks, mementos instead of remains ..."

 

More commentary:

 

Jonathan A. Greenblatt: ADL head: On NY Islamic center, we were wrong, plain and simple

Peniel E. Joseph weighed in on the ouster of Mike Richards as executive producer at "Jeopardy!" -- deeming it tellingly overdue -- and described what it would mean to see LeVar Burton on the screen as permanent host: "many fans (myself included) wondered why Burton, former star of 'Roots,' 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' and beloved children's show 'Reading Rainbow' -- the closest thing America has to a Black Mr. Rogers -- was not named the permanent host, even after a very visible campaign of public support for him unfolded on social media. The image of Burton as 'Jeopardy!' host is a deliciously subversive one. A Black host of a game that appeals to intelligence, curiosity, a love of books and learning would visibly refute stereotypes about Blackness and intellect that have remained stubbornly powerful in American society."