ClaimDream

SIOUX FALLS — In September 2020, a farmer in Divide County, North Dakota, suffered a heart attack during harvesting. While he was in critical condition in a local hospital, nearly 60 of his neighboring farmers came to his aid — halting their own harvest so that his crops could be gathered in time.

This is the Dakotas that I know.

I am a transplant here in South Dakota. Over 10 years ago, I arrived as a new physician who had graduated from an Ivy League school and had lived for several years in New York City. Truth be told, I came with preconceived notions of this community.

I could not have been more wrong. What I found here was a community more caring, more willing to sacrifice, and more willing to take on hardship for each other than I have witnessed anywhere else.

The story of this farmer is not unique.

During my time in South Dakota, I have lost track of the acts of selflessness I’ve witnessed in our intensive care unit, of the innumerable times that a community rallied around a sick child. This spirit of community and shared sense of duty are felt in many areas of the country, from small towns to large cities. We come together in a crisis and look out for our neighbors.

But over these past several months during the COVID-19 pandemic — the most significant professional challenge I’ve faced as a pediatric critical care provider — I’ve lost sight of the Dakotas I’ve come to know and love.

The Dakotas I knew would do anything for their neighbor. The Dakotas I knew would bear any burden if it helped their community. The Dakotas I knew would sacrifice anything to protect their kids.

Recently, I admitted a child from North Dakota with COVID-19. Unfortunately, because of the surge in critically ill pediatric patients, all pediatric critical-care beds in North Dakota were full and he was transferred to South Dakota, hours away from home.

He was not old enough to be vaccinated and he contracted COVID from his community. He ultimately survived and returned home, but he required treatment and aggressive respiratory support in the intensive care unit.

Across the U.S., my colleagues in pediatric intensive care units face a remarkably unique illness. We know how to limit its spread and we have a way out — through a deeply tested and proven vaccine. Yet this is an illness that has overrun numerous pediatric intensive care units in the South and Midwest.

The Dakotas I knew and love would do anything to prevent this from happening.

But the Dakotas I see now are fighting over the science of masking while accepting that all surgeons wear masks to prevent infections in the operating room. The Dakotas I see now are arguing against COVID-19 vaccine mandates even when, in our own states, many other vaccinations are required for school entry. The Dakotas I see now are challenging the scientific knowledge and integrity of providers yet expecting the same overwhelmed providers to provide them the best possible care based on science when they become ill.

This is not the Dakotas I knew.

Divide County, North Dakota, the county where so many farmers came out selflessly to help their neighbor, currently has a vaccination rate of only 42%. COVID cases in the county, similar to other parts of the country, have skyrocketed in recent weeks to levels not seen since December 2020.

I have a simple request: Please bring back the Dakotas I knew. We can do this by:

• Caring for the kids in our communities who are too young to be vaccinated or are immunocompromised by masking and limiting the spread of COVID.
• Supporting masking in schools so that kids can continue their education in person without fear of being taken out of schools for quarantines or illness.
• Getting vaccinated so that a COVID hospitalization doesn’t overwhelm the local hospital to the point that kids must be transported to another state for care.

The Dakotas I knew and love would do anything to prevent suffering in their community.

I long to see those Dakotas again.

Dr. Benson Hsu is a pediatric critical care physician in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and the chair-elect to the Section on Critical Care at the American Academy of Pediatrics. He wrote this for Tribune Content Agency.

No idea is more dearly held by political activists than the notion that voters will reward elected officials who enact an ambitious policy agenda. But it’s entirely possible that what voters really want, especially in a time of political and social insecurity, is competence and stability.

Two of the most popular governors in America are Larry Hogan of Maryland and Charlie Baker of Massachusetts. Neither can be said to have a signature accomplishment or celebrated failure. In both cases, a Republican with moderate affect narrowly won a governor’s race in a huge Republican wave year and then spent four years mostly checking the excesses of a Democratic legislature. For their trouble, they both won with landslide victories.

Conversely, Kansas has a Democratic governor because the state’s Republican Party decided to enact supply-side economics. It was an unpopular disaster, and led to a backlash in an extremely red state. Something similar happened in Vermont in 2016, when Gov. Peter Shumlin made an ambitious push for single-payer health care. The legislature suffered sticker shock over the price tag, and a Republican got elected basically on a promise to not rock the boat too much. He then cruised to reelection and remains popular based on his competent handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Americans are just more complacent than activists on either side of the aisle want to believe.

Are parents mad about “woke” teachers injecting critical race theory into the classroom? Some of them, probably. But 73% of parents say they are satisfied with the education their children are receiving.

Or consider the U.S. health care system, which virtually every analyst on both the left and right says is wracked by huge irrationalities and inefficiencies. Most people are satisfied with the health insurance they have — whether from the public or private sector. Famously, a single national health insurance system polls very well until people learn it would involve eliminating private insurance or shifting health cost payments into the tax system. Indeed, Americans aren’t even that bothered about the amount of taxes they pay — though woe betide anyone who tries to raise taxes on the middle class.

The mistake activists make is confusing an inchoate sense of public anger at the system with a desire for sweeping policy change. In reality, it probably goes the other way: Amid mass disillusionment with politics, voters are suspicious and fearful of change.

It’s not a coincidence that the worst poll numbers of Donald Trump’s presidency came when media attention was focused on his proposed changes to tax policy rather than his scandals or outlandish behavior. Nor is it a coincidence that former President Bill Clinton’s approval ratings improved enormously once Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 and he was able to position himself as standing against their efforts to cut Medicare and Medicaid.

None of this is to say that it’s never a good idea to try to change things. Creating Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 didn’t win Democrats any votes in the 1966 midterms. But once the programs are in place, they are very difficult to dislodge — and those who try get punished.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s statement during the debate over the Affordable Care Act fight that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it” was widely mocked at the time, and certainly didn’t help Democrats in the 2010 midterms. But in the long run she was vindicated. Once the ACA had been in place for years, the public’s basic aversion to change made it very difficult to repeal.

Even in countries such as Canada and the U.K., with a less clunky legislative process, it’s unusual for the policy pendulum to fully swing back and forth. Margaret Thatcher didn’t dismantle the National Health Service, nor did Tony Blair renationalize industry.

Of course, people generally get into politics because they want to change things. It’s a risky pursuit, but it can also be quite rewarding. And an incumbent politician who accomplished literally nothing might have trouble cutting convincing reelection ads.

But it’s a question of scale. Clinton was widely mocked by contemporaries (and his successor Barack Obama) for dedicating so much time to school uniforms, the v-chip and so on. But people really liked Clinton. The v-chip sought to address a widespread parental concern in a minimally disruptive way. It often doesn’t take much to scratch the public’s itch that something be done.

Which brings us to the presidency of Joe Biden. During the Democratic primaries, Biden was portrayed — accurately, mostly — as the safe, boring, electable choice. (If you wanted “big structural change” or a “political revolution,” you favored another candidate). In the general election, Biden’s main message was that he would be a steady and compassionate pair of hands to guide the country through the COVID-19 pandemic.

To much of the public, Biden fundamentally fulfilled his core campaign promise the day he took the oath of office — delivering an unremarkable speech full of patriotic bromides. That’s true as far as it goes, but his campaign also had an actual policy agenda — and it was surprisingly sweeping and progressive.

Democrats’ struggles this fall reflect the tension between these two promises of the Biden campaign. One is genuinely committed to trying to deliver major policy change — above all else on climate, which progressive elites care about enormously. The main sales pitch of the other promise was that the president would no longer tweet bizarre things.

The best way forward from here is for Democrats to make their strongest case for action on the merits, but recognize the political reality: When it comes to change, less is often more.

I’m quite attached to the idea, for example, of making the newly enhanced child tax credit permanent, which would greatly reduce child poverty. But the Democrats’ proposal contains so much more than that — sliding-scale subsidies for child care, investments in preschool for three and four year-olds, a half-baked paid parental leave plan, a huge investment in at-home care services for Medicaid beneficiaries, and more generous subsidies for various Affordable Care Act programs.

These are all fine ideas, but are they really necessary if Democrats want to say they accomplished something? Each of them has its own constituency, and it would be painful for the party to break the news that it’s not going to happen. But the public simply isn’t demanding rapid advances on every policy front.

In the context of the current legislative battle, it would be better for Democrats to focus on the climate provisions, which are in many ways the motivating force for Democrats and are a distinct minority of the spending proposed in their $3.5 trillion budget package. The idea of pairing them with a few spoonfuls of sugar in the form of cheaper prescription drugs and dental and vision benefits for senior citizens makes a lot of sense. The sooner something is done, the sooner Biden can pivot to seeking the 21st-century equivalent of the v-chip.

Once you’ve got your most important idea and you most popular idea, how much more do you need?

Matthew Yglesias wrote this column for Bloomberg Opinion.

Here’s an experiment to try. Order a pumpkin spice-flavored drink from your local coffee shop. Without telling them what it is, ask a friend to try it while holding their nose. Do they know what it is? How about when they can smell it?

If your research subject is anything like mine, they won’t know what they’re drinking until after you’ve said the magic words: pumpkin spice.

That’s understandable, according to researchers with Johns Hopkins University, who explain the appeal behind the flavoring that dominates fall.

It’s not the taste of pumpkin spice we love so much as the smell and its associations, says Sarah Cormiea, a Johns Hopkins doctoral candidate studying human olfactory perception, and Jason Fischer, a professor of psychological and brain sciences.

Of all the senses, smell is uniquely tied to memory. “There’s a kind of special access to the memory system in the brain that odor perception has,” says Fischer. The part of the brain that processes odors sits “right up against memories in the brain,” he said.

In fact, just reading the phrase “pumpkin spice” can summon scents and memories of fall. The phrase can be particularly enticing when reinforced by things like leaves changing colors and kids going back to school.

There’s a whole world of pumpkin spice-flavored items in stores, from Cheerios to hummus. Hunt Valley’s own McCormick & Company first released their pumpkin pie spice blend in 1934. Two years ago, it was the company’s fourth best-selling retail spice during the fall.

But coffee giant Starbucks claims credit for the phenomenon, which they trace back to their 2003 launch of the pumpkin spice latte. The drink is topped with pumpkin spice, a blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, clove and ginger.

“For nearly two decades, the return of pumpkin at Starbucks has signaled the start of the fall season and inspired a cultural phenomenon around fall flavors and products,” reads a news release on their website. This year, Starbucks stores began selling pumpkin spice lattes and other autumnal beverages and snacks on Aug. 24.

“There’s a reason they don’t have [the pumpkin spice latte] available all year round, right?” says Cormiea. “It’s because people get excited and buy it.”

Despite the linkage between scents and memories, Cormiea says people typically have a hard time naming smells — as if trying to name an acquaintance whose face they recognize at a party. That changes once they hear what something is.

In tests with research subjects, she finds that introducing labels to smells “changes how people experience it. Something like snaps into place once you get the label.”

When it comes to pumpkin spice and other things nice, there’s another factor at play called “the familiarity effect,” says Fischer. “The more you’ve been exposed to something, the more it ingrains itself in your preferences,” he said. “So simply by experiencing pumpkin spice every year, over and over again… it takes on that sense of familiarity.” Add in all the other positive associations with fall, it “can really cause us to find some sort of nostalgic comfort in it.”

Trust that advertisers know all about the familiarity effect, which is at play behind other nostalgia-based food trends like the craze for “birthday cake”-themed items.

“It’s not just because birthday cake is a tasty thing, it’s because by co-opting that you can use all those positive associations,” says Fischer. “You can take advantage of them.”

Cormiea added: “Otherwise, they would just call it vanilla.”

In 2017, a school in Fells Point was evacuated after students detected an unusual smell they couldn’t quite place. It turned out to be a pumpkin spice scented air freshener. Had someone told the students it was pumpkin spice, perhaps things would have been different.

People take their sense of smell for granted, says Cormiea. But it plays a major — if underappreciated — role in day-to-day life.

Those who lose their sense of smell, including people suffering long-term effects of COVID-19, are at risk of being not able to detect gas leaks, fires and food going bad. Additionally, loss of smell can be associated with a feeling of emotional disconnection and problems with memory.

“I’ve seen tons of studies where they ask people: ‘If you had to lose one of your senses, which one would you pick?’” she said. “People always say they would give up their sense of smell. And I would like to suggest that that is not the right decision.”

Back to that experiment: After the first sip, while holding his nose, my research subject said he was drinking hot chocolate. After the second sip, where he was permitted to smell the drink at the same time, he pronounced it “gross hot chocolate.” He did not know that it was a pumpkin spice latte.

Since autumn only began Wednesday, he still has time to get with the pumpkin spice program.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The newly installed chief of the U.S. Capitol Police says the force, still struggling six months after an insurrection that left its officers battled, bloodied and bruised, “cannot afford to be complacent.” The risk to lawmakers is higher than ever. And the threat from lone-wolf attackers is only growing.

In an interview with The Associated Press, J. Thomas Manger said his force is seeing a historically high number of threats against lawmakers, thousands more than just a few years ago. He predicts authorities will respond to close to 9,000 threats against members of Congress in 2021 — more than 4,100 had been reported from January to March.

“We have never had the level of threats against members of Congress that we’re seeing today,” Manger said. “Clearly, we’ve got a bigger job in terms of the protection aspect of our responsibilities, we’ve got a bigger job than we used to.”

Manger touted changes that have been made in intelligence gathering after the department was widely criticized for being woefully underprepared to fend off a mob of insurrectionists in January. Officials had compiled intelligence showing white supremacists and other extremists were likely to assemble in Washington on Jan. 6 and that violent disruptions were possible. Police officers were brutally beaten in the insurrection.

The events of that day have redefined how the U.S. Capitol police and other law enforcement agencies in Washington approach security. Extreme measures put into place two weeks ago for a rally in support of those jailed in the riot aren’t a one-off, they might be the new normal. Propelled by former President Donald Trump, the awakening of domestic extremist groups and the continued volatility around the 2020 election have changed the calculus.

Manger said putting up temporary fencing around the Capitol and calling in reinforcements was a prudent decision. It may not be the same for every demonstration.

“It’s really going to depend on the intelligence we have beforehand,” he said. “It’s going to depend on the potential for violence at a particular demonstration.”

With Manger, the police force got a longtime lawman. He served as chief in Maryland’s Montgomery County, outside Washington, from 2004 to 2019. Before that, he led the Fairfax County, Virginia, police department. Those jobs, as well as a leadership position in the Major Cities Chiefs Association, have made him a familiar face in Washington law enforcement circles and on Capitol Hill.

He took over in late July, months after the former chief resigned amid the fallout from the insurrection. The Sept. 18 rally was Manger’s first test — and he was taking no chances.

“We just were in a position where we could not allow another January 6th,” he said. “And I really needed to ensure that the men and women of the Capitol Police department understood that we had the resources we need, the training that we needed, the equipment that we needed, and the staffing that we needed to ensure that they could do their job and do it safely.”

In the end, police far outnumbered the protesters and the Capitol officers were mocked by some for going overboard. But Michael Chertoff, a Homeland Security secretary during the George W. Bush administration, said it’s just smart policing to learn from mistakes and be better prepared the next time, and so what if there’s too many police milling around — if the result is no one is killed or hurt.

“When you get demonstrations that are advertised or pitch to right wing or left wing extremists, I think you’re going to see that they’re going to lean into a visible show of protection, maybe more than they need but enough to make it clear they won’t be overwhelmed again,” he said.

Chertoff, who now runs the Chertoff Group security and cybersecurity risk management, said such fortifications won’t be necessary for every free speech event planned in the nation’s capital, but law enforcement must be better prepared when it comes to people who have expressed sympathy for Jan. 6, because there is strong reason to believe they’re sympathetic to the idea of using violent force to disrupt government. Because it already happened.

The Capitol Police are part security agency, part local police — it has an annual budget of approximately $460 million and about 2,300 officers and civilian employees to police the Capitol grounds and the people inside the building, including all the lawmakers and staff. By contrast, the entire city of Minneapolis has about 800 sworn officers and a budget of roughly $193 million.

On Jan. 6 at least nine people who were there died during and after the rioting, including a woman who was shot and killed by police as she tried to break into the House chamber and three other Trump supporters who suffered medical emergencies. Two police officers died by suicide in the days that immediately followed, and a third officer, Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, collapsed and died after engaging with the protesters. A medical examiner later determined he died of natural causes.

The Metropolitan Police announced this summer that two more of their officers who had responded to the insurrection, Officers Kyle DeFreytag and Gunther Hashida, had also died by suicide.

A scathing internal report earlier this year found that serious gaps in tactical gear including weapons, training and intelligence capabilities contributed to security problems during the Jan. 6 melee. In his report, obtained by the AP, Capitol Police Inspector General Michael A. Bolton cast serious doubt on the force’s ability to respond to future threats and another large-scale attack.

But then a second task force later charged with reviewing Jan. 6 said the Capitol Police already has the ability to “track, assess, plan against or respond” to threats from domestic extremists who continue to potentially target the building.

The report recommended a major security overhaul, including the funding of hundreds of new officer positions and establishing a permanent “quick response force” for emergencies.

But those changes would require massive influx of money. In a $2.1 billion measure in July, Congress delegated nearly $71 million, with much of that funding going to cover overtime costs.

Still, Manger said, “I think that what we have in place today is an improvement over what we had a year ago or nine months ago.”

The event, which Republican lawmakers and Trump and his allies have sought to downplay and dismiss, has prompted a surge in applications to join the force. Manger likened it to police and firefighter applications after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Manger also defended keeping on Yogananda Pittman, the Capitol Police official who led intelligence operations for the agency ahead of January’s attack. Pittman, who was elevated to acting chief with a tenure marred by a vote of no-confidence from rank-and-file officers on the force and questions about intelligence and leadership failures, is back in charge of intelligence and protecting congressional leaders.

“This notion that I should come in and just fire everybody on the leadership team because they failed on January 6th … first of all, this department was in enough chaos without me firing everybody,” he said, “and then where would I have been without any experience on my leadership team to rely on and to assist me going forward?”

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BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union’s general court on Wednesday annulled the 27-country bloc’s approval of agriculture and fishing agreements that allow Morocco to export goods from Western Sahara.

The ruling could damage the EU’s relationship with Morocco, although the court said the effects of the 2019 agreements would be maintained over a certain period “to preserve the European Union’s external action and legal certainty over its international commitments.”

The EU is Morocco’s leading trade partner and the biggest foreign investor in the North African kingdom, according to the bloc.

The case was brought to the court by the Polisario Front, the movement seeking Western Sahara’s independence from Morocco. The movement challenged decisions by the European Council, the body that acts on behalf of EU member countries.

In its findings, the court determined that the Polisario Front was “recognized internationally as a representative of the people of Western Sahara,” and that the EU did not ensure it secured the consent of the Saharawi people before sealing the agreements with Morocco.

In a joint statement, the EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, and Morocco’s minister of foreign affairs, Nasser Bourita, said they will take measures “to ensure the legal framework which guarantees the continuation and stability of trade relations.”

Oubi Bachir, the Polisario representative to the EU, celebrated “a great victory for the desert cause” in a message posted on Twitter.

The European Court of Justice ruled in February 2018 that a fisheries agreement between the EU and Morocco could not include the waters off Western Sahara.

Morocco considers the vast, mineral-rich Western Sahara its “southern provinces” and rejects any actions it regards as a threat to its territorial integrity. The territory’s status is one of the most sensitive topics in the North African kingdom.

Morocco annexed the former Spanish colony in 1975 and fought the Polisario Front independence movement. The U.N. brokered a cease-fire in 1991 and established a peacekeeping mission to monitor it.

But the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice said Western Sahara isn’t part of Morocco, so its waters aren’t part of the EU-Morocco agreement. In 2018, the court said including those waters would contravene “certain rules of general international law” such as the right to self-determination.

Morocco and Spain are the countries most affected by the ruling. On the fishing agreement alone, Morocco is set to lose about 52 million euros annually, for four years, in exchange for allowing 128 vessels from 11 European countries fishing in the waters off the western African coast. Ninety-two of those vessels are Spanish.

The ruling came as the governments of Spain and Morocco have picked up contacts to try to solve the diplomatic crisis that led to the sudden arrival of some 10,000 migrants, including unaccompanied children, at the city of Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in North Africa.

The humanitarian crisis started as Morocco and Spain argued over Madrid’s decision to provide COVID-19 care to Brahim Ghali, the leader of the Western Sahara pro-independence front, which angered authorities in Rabat.

Moroccan authorities, meanwhile, denied that they encouraged people to try to enter Ceuta without authorization.

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Lorne Cook in Brussels, Aritz Parra in Madrid and Tarik El-Barakah in Rabat contributed to this story.

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