By Melissa Walsh

The secret sauce of good fiction, as food for the soul, is didactic, curious prose sprinkled with generous pinches of empathy. Claire Luchette cooked up a soul's delight in her debut novel Agatha of Little Neon.

Yearning for Community
Agatha, a young sister (not "a nun"), narrates. She's a young woman growing self-awareness about her identity and troubled past as she serves a small community of recovering alcohol and drug addicts in a halfway house known as Little Neon. She serves with three other young sisters, whom Agatha presents to the reader from behind a veil of private pain and an emerging sense of identity that could prove inconsistent with her sisters', and the church's, religious values. This sense of herself comes into focus when she serves as a math teacher at a girls parochial high school, in addition to her service at Little Neon. She manages both roles without training in social services or education. Empathy and dedication to study and prayer seem to qualify her well as an impactful servant leader. She is mindful to pray for others; when she prays for herself, it is for understanding and loving others better. 

The story is less about religion than about how dedication to loving others grows wisdom and about the strength required for profound kindness. Agatha values a practice of treating each person as valuable, as a unique human being designed for purpose. Perhaps, for her, this is the most direct approach toward achieving sacred community.

Myth of Comfortable Holy Community
Agatha's approach is inconsistent with the conventional American dream. We know that many, or most, Americans are conditioned to laud the success of the individual, measured in dedication to one's work, paying one's bills, spending time with one's family. This American breed of individuals fence themselves into what they mark as “mine” and worship what’s locked up there — apart from holistic society, or segregated from parts of society they perceive as dangerous or in conflict with their ideal for American society. They seek to remove themselves from random bad luck by pulling their weight. To those who struggle, they say, "Just pull yourself up." In doing so, they generate what is noted by analysts and journalists as “marginalized groups,” or "broken families, or "at-risk youth," or "the homeless," or "displaced families," or "underserved communities." Their approach to community breaks it, because it is selfish, self-serving.

Those who worship the American myth of the comfortable life with a happy ending are those who marginalize the marginalized, fossilizing conditions for people labeled as such for generations. They would like to put the marginalized in a box to dwell outside the white picket fence, where they are to remain until they are no longer viewed as unsafe or unholy. They flee with their families and churches from aging neighborhoods to new havens, leaving behind empty shells of schools and churches for a neglected, broken community left behind. They seek walls to safeguard their homes, schools, and churches as sacrosanct. They determine that strangers behind these walls are unsafe and treat them that way, citing the Second Amendment.

By Melissa Walsh
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My “Happy New Year” wish this year has never been more sincere.

As an individual and matriarch and four sons, I’ve experienced difficult years, emotionally and financially. When arriving at the close of those years, I would reach deep and find hope for a better year ahead — for myself and my sons. I felt this sense of combined sadness, relief, and hope acutely for my own family, leaving little room for a healthy empathy for the struggles of friends, acquaintances, and strangers.

In 2020, I grew a much deeper longing for healing for my community, nation, and world. I evolved healthier love. Though my own losses and struggles over the years had cultivated in me an appreciation for relationships, 2020 grew in me a new gratitude for community kinship and desire to always be kind, no matter how tired or inconvenienced I become going through life’s mundane activities. I had thought that my 53 years had already given me enough love for others, but this past year showed me how much more I needed to learn about connecting with community, treating strangers as precious, and loving my family and friends better.

The past year presented humans in the light of vulnerable being. It was important for me to see that vulnerability and study my reaction to it. When staying home became an act to protect others against the physical suffering brought on by this COVID-19 plague and protecting those who love them against grief, I was able to see deep into my heart. I saw a will to do good, but I also saw fear, selfishness, hypocrisy. I saw my own vulnerability and a buried resistance to sacrifice for strangers that I needed to dig up and destroy in order to truth in doing what’s right for promoting the general welfare, not doing what is most consistent with my individual pursuit of happiness and comfort.

The blessings of liberty will not survive in a society plagued by arrogant, selfish, and willfully ignorant citizens who choose to feel threatened by wearing a mask to contain a pandemic. Blessings of liberty thrive only when we view our neighbors and strangers as the most sacred objects of Liberty, exceedingly more dear than our homes, our guns, our church buildings, our comfort.

In his essay "The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis put it this way: "It is in light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations -- these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit. ... Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”

Amen.

© 2021 Melissa Walsh

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By Melissa Walsh

I'm an extreme centrist. This doesn't mean that I am necessarily “moderate” on all issues or ever “on the fence.” I'm not apolitical or apathetic (as anyone who knows me will tell you). I strive to center my political propositions in preserving inalienable rights of individuals while remaining true to the duty of protecting the common good, as prescribed in the U.S. Constitution.

Politics aside, how I aim to treat others is grounded in my belief in and understanding of moral law. To know moral law, I follow C.S. Lewis’ test in checking moral beliefs: they must be accountable to reason, and reason must be accountable to science.

'Cognitive Dissonance'
What moves us off from centrism is what Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris identify as "cognitive dissonance" in a July 12, 2020 article in The Atlantic — "the motivational mechanism that underlies the reluctance to admit mistakes or accept scientific findings — even when those findings can save our lives." They present this phenomenon in the context of how wearing a mask during a pandemic became politicized. Cognitive dissonance, I would add, is the refusal to dissent from unconstitutional practices or unreasoned or immoral statements and activities driven by prevailing forces, or voices, in a political party, church, or other faction we belong to. It explains why "good" Germans tolerated Nazism and why anti-fascist freedom fighters accepted Stalinism. These shifts to the extreme right or the extreme left, we know well from history, are dangerous, which is why I periodically tweet #makeamericareadhistoryagain. Those who simply read history again, sans identity-politics denial, are bound to have an aha moment about how grave American unrest is today.

We are witnesses in real-time, in living history, to the dangers of identity-based politics, or populism, in the United States. This populism is not driven by a true identity with being American, but with belonging to a special faction of Americans, a sloppy ideology that narrowly divides Americans by identifying each citizen by race or religion or income level or education, etc. In 2016, I forewarned against the ugly events we're witnessing today (and hoped to be proven wrong), as I listened to the statements (and read the tweets) from the hyperbolic fear-based canon of Donald Trump, the regurgitation of hate speech, which was devoured by his base. Trumpian populism initially attacked Latin Americans and Middle Easterners (and continues to). Then it launched an attack on the press (even turning "media" into a singular word to describe a monolith rather than a plural word to describe voices accountable to verification in a free press). It purged centrist judges. It gave legitimacy to the unreasonable, formerly concealed inhumane biases among a base that takes pride in being poorly educated, anti-science, pro-conspiracy theory, so-called “pro-life,” pro-gun, Evangelical, and pro-white power. Five years ago, who in this nation could have conceived of crowds of American citizens proudly waving Confederate flags, Nazi crosses, and AR-15s in public spaces while professing to be Christians and patriots.

It took some time — too long — for centrists with a microphone or many Twitter followers, including Never-Trump Republicans, to grow a backbone and vigorously stand up to this asinine and nefarious take-over of the GOP. Thanks to The Lincoln Project, they've found a forum and gained momentum. Those to the far left were way ahead of these moderate, or reasonable, Republicans, reacting fiercely, courageously even, but also unrefined, many of these activists too young to have cultivated the wisdom that comes with decades of adulting. And Democrat POTUS candidates were unable to achieve commonality on critical issues, most notably on healthcare, and ended up with essentially an incumbent as the 2020 POTUS candidate. I consider Joe Biden a centrist, but what will he do to stop the bleeding? My hope rests in his skill in gathering a great team of thinkers and doers, including those who can see and understand how to meet the economic needs of Trump's base.

Reagan Democrats and Me
I grew up in the land of the (over-analyzed and under-heard) Reagan Democrats in the near-east suburbs of Detroit among the first wave of gen-Xers (our older siblings were baby-boomers) raised by autoworkers. Many of my peers entered one of the last classes of automotive skilled-trades apprentices and moved onto a long career of turning a wrench for good pay and benefits, thanks to the UAW. They have recently retired or are about to retire with pensions, the last Motor City generation to reap the promise of retirement after more than three decades of working in a blue-collar shirt with a Big Three branding. They voted for Trump in 2016.

Why would they support a whiney narcissistic blue-blood like Trump? Mainly because he’s the alternative to Democrat candidates who have been talking over them and past them for decades. They feel seen by Trump. They feel unseen by the Democratic Party. The truth is that they remain unseen by both parties. They’re misunderstood. They’re undervalued. Trump strategists, including the Breitbart and FoxNews ilk, seized this void, and these Reagan Democrat heirs were sucked into believing the hype, the fear-mongering, the need to build a wall, the need to make America great again.

My Eastside Detroiter, Reagan Democrat instincts were radically altered and sharpened while earning my degree in International Studies. (I was the first in my family to earn a bachelor’s degree.) During and after college, I lived briefly in different European cities. I spent a semester in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, in 1988. (I also had spent two weeks in Sarajevo in the summer of 1987 and travelled there a few times while living in Vienna, Austria, in 1989.) In 2016, this pre-war Yugoslav experience gave me foreknowledge of the decline our nation would sustain if this sleazy real estate mogul and populist with no government experience were elected. On social media and during cocktail-party conversation, I could not be silent in 2016. I sensed a calling to warn against the fear-mongering and hateful scapegoating of the other spewing from Trump’s campaign. So I posted and stated my observations that Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-muslim rhetoric struck me as gravely similar to the hate speech, dressed as ethno-religious nationalism, I heard among Serbs and Croats in former Yugoslavia.

A handful of hearers of my warnings agreed that Trump was bad news, but said, “Well, that (ethno-religious violence) can't happen here.” I responded, "If the economy fails, the violence will follow."

Several others revealed themselves to be Trump supporters and broke ties with me, or I broke ties with them due to their posts and statements that I viewed as ignorant and hateful.

​In 2020, it IS happening here. Our American union grows more fragile.

Smrt fašizmu... ('death to fascism')
I saw 2016, 2017, and 2018 from the perspective of my young-adult self in 1987, 1988, and 1989. I saw 2019 from the frustration and pain of watching footage from Sarajevo in 1992. I grieved before the images and tragic accounts of families separated at the U.S. southern border and of immigrants rounded up at their homes, schools, or places of business for incarceration and deportation — many of them my neighbors here in Detroit who have lived in this nation for decades after leaving their middle eastern homelands.

Today, in 2020, with more than 140,000 American lives lost to the pandemic, which the Trump administration denied and did little to contain, I'm weighted down by the overwhelming sorrow of so many souls who lived and then died so suddenly that we can't even list all of their names on the newspaper obituary pages. Now the Trump administration seeks to control that information — the data on those who remain to be infected by the COVID-19 virus, an invisible non-partisan enemy that Trump seeks to will away with despotism and whose effects he wishes to conceal from scientists.

Concurrently with the federal government's coup and dismissal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Trump unleashed paramilitary troops wearing unnamed military swag and egressing from unmarked vans to arrest citizens in Portland, Oregon, at will, without charge, and without regard for the U.S. Constitution or moral law. As in Sarajevo in 1992, a city known for youth, art, progressiveness, energy, and hope, Portland is being attacked from the outside by irregulars sporting camo and clutching ammo.

And if that wasn’t enough to bring a tear to your eye, the news broke that John Lewis died.

'Get in good trouble'

It’s time for extreme centrists in this nation to exert the same courage John Lewis did, to move past fear and cognitive dissonance and hold tight to our nation’s founding principles, to "get in good trouble," as he defined it. To do that, we must vote Trump out. We also must support the non-partisan pro-Constitution advocacy of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is good centrism that insists on pursuing common sense, reason, and care for one another as we stand against the identity politics that are obstructing the cause of America.

“The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense in January 1776. “Many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all Lovers of Mankind are affected, and in the Event of which, their Affections are interested. The laying of a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling; of which Class, regardless of Party Censure, is”

Trump’s America is unAmerican. Make America Great Again today is the Make Germany Great Again of 80 years ago and the Make Croatia Great Again and Make Serbia Great Again of 30 years ago.

Looking forward from the past and today's ugly present, the inclusive, universal call to action ought to be what Thomas Paine urged, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” For after all, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
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As Americans, we are obligated to strive for a more perfect union. The key word here is “union.” American extreme centrists must remain steadfast to the cause of America by knowing and revering the U.S. Constitution. They must boldly reference it as the premier primary source to defeat the defective opining by those with ulterior political motives rooted in power and greed (in Trump’s case, power and greed plus narcissism).
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​And as citizens of the world, we must live in harmony with a moral law that does not divide our shared humanity or scorn science.
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#AmericaOrTrump

​​​© 2020 Melissa Walsh

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By Melissa Walsh

From my yard where I’m caring for sprouting perennials, I hear the great lake at the end of my street, beckoning me. My dog and I walk to it. We hear it shouting and watch it spitting, reminding us of its power. My dog wants to jump in. I say, “Stay. Leave it.”

The lake is still too cold. I hold onto hope that the sun’s spring strength will warm it soon. We will swim again.

We walk through our still neighborhood like ghosts. The neighborhood “Eye Spy” scavenger hunt theme this week is holidays. We walk past a jack-o-lantern, a grinch, and several easter bunnies.

Occasionally, a neighbor ghost emerges with a friendly, distant greeting, usually directed at my dog, who is renowned in our neighborhood for his athleticism. In summer, neighbors watch his outstanding jumps into the lake to catch a jettisoned stick. They marvel at his endurance as he swims back to shore over the great lake’s waves.​

We will emerge from this pandemic changed in character, like the perennial buds in my yard, but each with a new color as we rise from an environment fertilized with loss and forbearance. Each person’s new color can become an iridescence in a post-pandemic landscape if living in light and receiving water.

Without dismissing real fear and grief, our time in isolation, if we are fortunate to stay healthy, is a remarkable opportunity for self-improvement. It is precious time in the sacred space of solitude — a place of prayerful reflection and listening to what we have always yearned to hear from nature and beyond. It is a place for processing and healing, a battleground where one spins strategies for confronting and defeating inner demons of anxiety, anger, and despair. It is where we set a path in our mind for moving alone into each new day. We nestle with our pets before books and television. We discipline our body with a workout and reward it with a leisurely walk and a good meal.

We seek ways to make company with our own mind. Some dabble in pandemic conspiracy rumors. Others complain on social media about forced solitude. But the strong show gratitude for each new breath and find #StayHome ways to make living more mindful and better.

Those quarantined with family, roommates, or partners find themselves on this battlefield of aloneness with others. No matter what our Stay Home circumstances are, we have this time to chase curiosity and grow knowledge. We can hone skills by practicing our chosen crafts. We can nourish our bodies with exercise and clean eating. We can cultivate richer relationships with family members, and deepen our appreciation for genuine friendship.
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My Stay Home company includes my youngest son, my boyfriend, and my cat and dog. I would love to play chess with my son or boyfriend, a former past time from my youth I haven’t enjoyed in decades. Neither my son nor my boyfriend has ever played chess. With the Stay Home order extended yesterday in Michigan until May 1, this might change.

Wednesday night, I fell asleep crying on my boyfriend’s chest for a woman I knew who lost her life to COVID-19. She died suffering and alone. I knew her as an extroverted “people person.” For her lovely gregariousness, she had been designated our office greeter, a role she excelled in. What were my last words to her? I wondered. Surely, her last words to me had been kind. Hers were always kind words.​

With many others, we also mourn the death of John Prine, the singer/songwriter who taught fans how to be “unlonely.” My boyfriend had tickets for us to see Prine’s upcoming Louisville performance May 22. The cancellation email arrived Thursday.

“During our next road trip, let’s listen only to John Prine songs,” I said.

Of course, there are no trips planned, but we’re keeping the faith that there will be. We sense a new urgency in experiencing more of the world.

I think about my three grown sons whom I haven’t seen in several weeks. I want them to fear the spread of this disease enough to stay home but not to live in fear. My wish is that they’ll be unlonely — that they’ll discover authors and musicians as remote friends, that they’ll spend hours each day immersed in a hobby, and that they’ll learn with the rest of us what we value most in our human relationships. During this time of isolation, I want each to invite his mind to be his friend and to appreciate each new breath.

​​© 2020 Melissa Walsh

By Melissa Walsh

As I write this, leaders and healthcare workers of my home community of metro Detroit, and other communities around the nation, are faced with rising casualty counts due to the spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19. In the past 24 hours, 1,719 new cases were reported in Michigan 78 Michiganders died, most of them in the tri-county area of metro Detroit, tallying 337 deaths. In the state, 9,334 people are infected.
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The virus is in the air, as is fear. Now we can imagine the horror faced in the fall of 1918, when Detroit's Department of Health reported 18,066 cases of influenza between October 1 and November 20, during which 1,688 people died. The disease reemerged in December and continued throughout January 1919. Another 10,920 cases were reported by late February 1919.

What's especially eery, is that Michigan's rate of increase of contraction of disease from COVID-19 infection and rate of flu-induced death in March 2020 are uncannily similar to the numbers released by the state in October 1918 due to the spread of the Spanish flu. Like today's spread of the Covid-19 flu virus, the Spanish flu virus hit hardest in the state in Detroit and its surrounding suburbs. What Detroit history of fall of 1918 teaches us is that the rescindment of closure of public spaces and businesses too soon will lead to another wave of horror. While new cases of the Spanish flu of 1918 slightly waned by early November, the disease found new momentum only weeks after public spaces were opened the week of November 3. The curve wasn't flattened and sustained in 1918, leading to a deadly W pattern of the disease.

'Spanish flu' Hindsight
Though leaders, news reporters, and residents referred to the virus as a "grip" or influenza "epidemic," history tells us it was in reality a pandemic of the H1N1 strain of viral pneumonia, with symptoms much like those brought on by infection by the COVID-19 strain of viral pneumonia. The assumption among scientists and doctors in 1918 was that the Spanish flu was caused by the spread of a bacterium. Scientists reacted accordingly and released a bacteria-killing serum to be administered via inoculation. The virus, which was too small to be detected by the microscopes of the day, could not be destroyed and was not contained, thereby infecting an estimated 500 million people around the world, or one third of the world's population. It killed an estimated 50 million people. Lives lost in the United States amounted to close to 700,000.

One theory published in 2004 asserts that the virus originated at a military camp in Haskell County, Kansas, in the spring of 1918, after soldiers set fire to a large mound of manure, expelling billows of toxic smoke into the air. Scores of soldiers died of pneumonia weeks later.

However, other scientists uncovered and analyzed reports of a mysterious and deadly respiratory affliction in Europe as early as 1917. We know from history that the first brutal wave of the disease struck in the United States on its East Coast in early September 1918, beginning in Boston, where soldiers on furlough arrived by ship from Europe.

Children under 5-years old and adults over age 65 are normally the most vulnerable to succumbing to harsh flu symptoms. Yet, in 1918, a high mortality rate among healthy adults from the late-teen years to mid-30s baffled heath care leaders and scientists. The casualty rate among soldiers on furlough supported the notion that the the virus spread via soldiers returning home, a narrative that fed a larger political debate of whether America's sons should have been in the European fight at all.

The flu hit hard during the fall of 1918, then waned, then reappeared, then waned, then reappeared. This W curve baffled doctors and scientists, as well as community leaders, who reopened public gathering places when the worst of the epidemic had seemed to pass. In 2018, scientist Michael Worobey explained this W-curve and the high mortality rate among the young. Immune systems are usually able to battle viruses first encountered in childhood. In 1889, the spread of an H3N8 virus caused a pandemic — the so-called "Russian" or "French" grip/flu. Young adults in 1918 would not have been exposed and therefore had not developed an immune response. And the fact that children fared better in surviving the 1918 flu outbreak suggests that less deadly flu viruses of the same strain were in the air several years prior to 1918.

Other scientists attribute the high fatality rate among young adults to their strong immune system, which sends cytokine proteins to build inflammation to protect an attacking virus. The resulting inflammation in the victims' lungs— as a natural guard against a rapidly multiplying virus -- led to the fatal increase of fluid in the lungs.

In 2018, the CDC embedded this statement in an article on its website about the 1918 influenza pandemic:

"Since 1918, the world has experienced three additional pandemics, in 1957, 1968, and most recently in 2009. These subsequent pandemics were less severe and caused considerably lower mortality rates than the 1918 pandemic. The 1957 H2N2 pandemic and the 1968 H3N2 pandemic each resulted in an estimated 1 million global deaths, while the 2009 H1N1 pandemic resulted in fewer than 0.3 million deaths in its first year. This perhaps begs the question of whether a high severity pandemic on the scale of 1918 could occur in modern times.

"Many experts think so. ..."
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Unfortunately, Trump and many in his administration, as well as his supporting media pundits, did not agree, dismissing the potential deadliness of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 for American residents throughout January, February, and part of March 2020, as the disease found its initial victims in the United States.

Residents didn't hear much from President Woodrow Wilson about the influenza pandemic in 1918, as he was at capacity as Commander-in-Chief of American troops fighting in Europe during the final weeks of the Great War. He also was immersed in Fourteen Points-based peace talks with world leaders. However, U.S. Congress passed an emergency million-dollar package for funding scientists to come up with a vaccine. Of course, not knowing the disease was caused from a virus, science failed to protect the population from this deadly flu.

As Reported by the Detroit Free Press

I searched the Detroit Free Press (Freep) database (remotely from home) at the Detroit Public Library for news articles about the 1918 "Spanish" flu pandemic written in October and November 1918.

Like what we’re experiencing today, schools and businesses were closed, concerts and sporting events cancelled. Medical workers worked to exhaustion. Controversy brewed about the spread, risk, and graveness of the disease. Health officials and government leaders disagreed about whom to quarantine and what to close and when and how.

To appreciate how harsh things for Detroit's flu victims in 1918, it's critical to understand what life in Detroit was like in 1918. The United States was at war. People were grieving the deaths of young men in Europe. Residents were coping with wartime rationing of goods and fuel. When the influenza pandemic hit the home front, politicians did not discuss a stimulus package of money given directly to citizens.