Yes, it was one hell of a week, literally.
I was put in mind of a situation five years ago involving a couple of the bad actors we heard so much about this past week. Of the seven times I’ve been able, on behalf of this newspaper, to travel to New Hampshire during a presidential caucus and to report on it from there, the occasion of 2016 was most brutal, weather-wise, with temperatures always in the oughts or teens.
Jackson Baker
Ted Cruz drew big in a blizzard in 2016.
On the first night I was there, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, one of the leading Republican candidates then (and the protagonist of this week’s “Flyin’ Ted” melodrama), happened to be having a town hall in Dover, where I was holed up, on the state’s southern rim. Cruz, who at the time was Donald Trump‘s best positioned GOP rival, also happened to be doing his thing in a sleet storm.
Inching along cravenly in my rental car on streets of ice, being honked at by locals who somehow were able to whiz by me, it took me more than an hour to get to the site, which was only blocks away. When I got there, I was astounded at the size of an overflow crowd, eager (or curious) to hear Cruz’s sternly right-wing views.
Every venture I undertook anywhere that week to catch up with the candidates, Democrat and Republican, I experienced as a life-and-death matter. I fell on the ice and almost broke my back at a Hillary Clinton event. The climax of the week was a 26-mile trek in a bona fide blizzard to Manchester, the state capital, to catch frontrunner Trump’s performance at a downtown auditorium.
The candidate was an hour late, and came in complaining about the blizzard and the many traffic accidents it had already caused. He tough-loved the crowd: “You have to do me a favor. I don’t really care if you get hurt or not, but I want you to last till tomorrow. So don’t get hurt!” The crowd loved it and reveled even more when Trump agreed with a woman supporter’s shout that opponent Cruz was “a pussy.”
The sadomasochism of the thing — of the whole week, actually — was in retrospect a perfect precursor for the four years that were to come. Survival of the fittest, every man for himself, trust to your luck and pluck. All that.
And there was the moment, over this past weekend, when I finally hazarded a trip out of the house, hopeful of buying some bottled water. I didn’t make it the first time or two. Not only was the still-unthawed ice too rough in the sloped part of my driveway, but as I looked around at the expanse of snow all around me, the glare of all that empty crystallized whiteness seemed about to annihilate my field of vision. And I suddenly knew what the term “snow-blind” meant.
Eventually I would get out and get my water, not at a store (they were out) but through the kindness of a friend. Eventually the ice would begin to melt and the stressful whiteness of the landscape would begin to fill in with renewed color. This may not seem to be much of an epiphany, but it happened simultaneously with, or in the wake of, the decision of city and county governments to open new vaccination sites and, of all overdue things, to offer guaranteed vaccine doses to the public school teachers who had been expected, martyr-like, to rush back to in-person teaching without them.
On Monday, the County Commission was scheduled to strike down residential requirements for the hiring of a new corps of vaccine workers to augment and step up the vaccination process.
In Washington, a new president, with a new commitment to the role of government in sheltering the lives and livelihoods of citizens, began to roll out an enhanced COVID-19 plan — a national plan, at last! — and declared, as well, a resolve to fix a cruel and xenophobic immigration system and a commitment to a stimulus plan capable, perhaps, of restoring a bleached-out nation’s economic hopes and of returning it to normalcy. Yes, the plan is ample, having what County Commissioner Reginald Milton says is the “girth” that government needs to survive lean times.
In many ways, the snow is melting, and our vision, fixed too long in icy indifference, may be returning.