Month: May 2020

Over the weekend, a man assaulted a clerk at a Leander HEB store because the groceries he placed on the conveyor was over the limit the store imposed on meat purchases.

The limit was five packages of meat. He had seven. He got mad when she wouldn’t let him check out with that much. He threw packages of steak and lettuce at the young woman, then stormed off.

At least he didn’t spit on her. Or wipe his nose on her smock. Or shoot her.

Yeah, that’s happened, more than once in this fine country, and at least one man is dead as a result. A security guard wouldn’t let a customer in a Dollar General without a face mask. So, the customer got angry. She left, then came back in the company of her son who shot the security guard in the head.

Then there were those demonstrations of civil disobedience featuring people dressed in cammo and toting long arms into state capitol buildings screaming their unmasked frustration and spittle into the faces of police officers.

Social media is swimming with examples of what I can only describe as childish outrage at guidelines established to let us open back up safely. People chafe at having to wear a mask or keep any sort of social distance. Many refuse to wear one and loudly denounce any business that insists customers do so.

When one of our reporters took a look around our area, he was appalled at how few people wore masks — maybe 25% of those he saw wore them.

In general, Texans take this pandemic seriously and aren’t quite sure we’re ready to open it all back up. In general, Texans support continued efforts to slow the spread. That’s according to a UT/Texas Tribune from late last month.

But, when you start parsing the poll results by partisanship, it is obvious that folks on the right of the spectrum are less than supportive, to put it mildly. That’s played out on social media, which often the only measuring stick we have for local public opinion as our reporters have been told to keep their distance.

If social media was sometimes toxic before this struck, it can be positively vile now. The way some people refer to those who aren’t ready to go back to work or insist on wearing a mask when they do go out … or businesses that enforce masks and other measures for the protection of their customers and staff … well, I don’t know how they sleep at night.

People who prefer the safety of home and go out only behind a mask are labeled as whiners and scaredy-cats. Wearing a mask makes you weak. Your mask infringes on my liberty and I’ll never again darken the door of a business that forces me to wear one.

And, thus, this pandemic has devolved into just another particularly viscous partisan mess.

Here’s the thing. We’re experimenting with how much we can open while also protecting our population against a spike. Partial capacity, social distancing and face masks are part of that strategy. If we can keep it together, if we can maintain that distance, protect others by wearing a mask and help businesses enforce guidelines, we can open up more of the economy.

If, on the other hand, we over-crowd theaters and restaurants, ignore those practices which have proven somewhat effective, and shame (or assault) those who try to do this right thing, we will see a huge spike of new cases and hospitalizations come the first of June.

I’m not sure what happens after that but it brings to mind a meme I’ve seen: The idea behind staty-at-home was not to stop the spread. It was slow it down to make sure that when you catch it, there will be a hospital bed for you.

This crisis could have united us against a common foe. Instead, it revealed just how deep the partisan divide truly is.

How did we let it get to this?

Have you thought about what it would be like to be tested for the coronavirus? Very few of us have been. Until recently, you had to exhibit Covid-19 symptoms, have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive or have been on the front line to even be considered for a test.

But, those tests are becoming more and more available. The Williamson County Cities and Health District has set up several free drive through sites and getting an appointment is relatively easy. In fact, during a recent press call, County Judge Bill Gravell encouraged people to be tested.

So, I got one.

Not to worry. I haven’t shown any of the typical — or even atypical — symptoms. Since this  mess began, I’ve largely avoided social interactions, kept my distance and observed proper hygiene. I wear a mask when I go in public. But, as a 63 year-old lung cancer survivor with COPD and high-ish blood pressure, I can reserve a pair of 6-inch swabs, a bit of re-agent and a the services of a professional to administer the test, whether I exhibit symptoms or not.

So, I did. In the interests of reportagè, of course.

You can’t just drive up to any of the testing sites so, the first thing to do is get an appointment. There’s a link on wcchd.org that sends you to the Austin Public Health website. That’s where you take the self-diagnostic. April Kelley’s related story walks you through it.

For various reasons, I wanted to have my test administered Saturday in Taylor. That location was run by the Texas Guard with support from WilCo’s Emergency Management Office. I had to jump through an extra hoop or two to get the appointment but the hassle was not onerous.

The test site was set up at Taylor’s Regional Park. It was the model of military efficiency. Earnest young men and women decked out in BDU’s, face masks and colorful latex gloves kept careful watch over the traffic areas. Their obvious competence and confidence was reassuring.

When I arrived, I stopped at the check-in station where a young man verified my ID and case number. He directed me forward. Every time I rolled my window down, I was asked, politely but firmly, to roll it back up. I simply cracked the window enough to communicate and pressed my drivers license against the glass.

At the next stop, another young man verified my ID again (through the window), then handed me a packet that contained information on the virus and guidance on what I should do if I suspected I was infected. Tucked inside of the folded copy paper was a good mask and a sheet of tissue.

He directed me to lane four.

There, a young woman in full PPE, including goggles, what I gathered was a full-on N-95 face mask and a face shield, asked me to open the door of my car, turn sideways so I nearly faced her and lower my face mask from my nose. Only my nose.

She warned that the procedure might be uncomfortable and asked that I not push her away if it became too uncomfortable. The warning was needed.

Gently, she stuck a 6-inch swab up one nostril and, as she twirled it around, she chanted, “Almost done. Almost done. Almost done,” over and over again.

It was all I could do to not recoil. I grabbed the steering wheel in one hand, and the car seat in the other. I teared up.

The swab withdrew. I wanted to sneeze, terribly …

I tried to. I shook my head and squinted against the tears.

Then, after I took a breath, she did the other nostril. The chant returned. “Almost done. Almost done. Almost done.”

I thought I would levitate out of my seat while she twirled the swab deep in my sinus.

Please understand something. It was not at all painful. It was more like … have you ever had to sneeze so much, so intensely, that it was … well, not exactly painful but very, very uncomfortable? And, at the same time, I felt a terrible itch. I wanted to shove a wadded up tissue up my nose to scratch it.

Yeah. It was like that.

It was also over in moments.

Before my eyes had cleared, still another earnestly competent young man waved me forward and out of the queue.

I’m sure I saw Judge Gravell, standing under a tree, masked, smilezing at as I left.

The only real surprise was that mine was the only car in the area. The Guard had set up multiple traffic lanes and four testing stations. The WilCo Mobile Incident Command Center was prepped and Taylor fire and police personnel crawled all over the place. I know that they were prepared to administer 130 tests Saturday. They were expecting a crowd.

I am many things but, all by myself, I am not a crowd.

But I have had a test for the Rona. I was told that the results would be back within 96 hours.

Now, we wait.

(… to be continued … )

“Yes, it costs to have good, aggressive journalism. But it costs even more when you don’t.”
— Leonard Pitts

This quote flitted across my mind as I listened to the brief back-and-fourth between WilCo commissioners Cynthia Long and Terry Cook last Friday.

The two were discussing whether or not some of the federal CARES Act money that landed in the county’s lap last week should be spent buying newspaper ads. After all, as Cook pointed out, newspapers have been beat up as badly by this pandemic as any other small county business and we depend upon them to help us get information out.

Long was dismissive. She said folks could get the word about the county’s new WilCo Forward grant program by other means like social media and, hopefully, Chamber websites (our website had the story Friday afternoon).

“Don’t take it personally, newspaper people, but I don’t think we need to pay for a print advertisement,” she said. “Hopefully they’ll do a story on it.”

Of course we will. That’s what we do.

It’s difficult to tell if Long intended any real snark with her comment. I’m trying to give her the benefit of the doubt.

As you likely noticed, our industry had its struggles before this global pandemic. Things have gotten rapidly worse since mid-March.

But, we’ll keep reporting because that’s what we do.

We can’t just close up and wait for the pandemic to sweep by. We are at a point in our history when our community’s need for accurate, local information is critical. We know you consume our stories because our web traffic has nearly doubled in the last six weeks, engagement on our social media posts has never been higher and our membership list grows by the day (thanks, guys!). But, we’re doing it with one hand tied behind our back and one leg shackled to a concrete slab.

But that’s what we do.

Researchers for recent report at Duke University were startled to learn that, while newspapers represent only 25 % of local news outlets, they produce more original local content than all other media outlets combined. Online newsrooms, TV, radio … social media. None of them produce the kind or amount of critical content as a local newspaper.

The study found that, though outnumbered three to one, newspapers cranked out 60% of all those useful stories in circulation, with none of the other newsrooms producing more than 15%.

You, and those researchers, may have been surprised. I wasn’t. It’s what we do.

We’ve had a lot of experience with what happens when a local newspaper folds in this country. More than 1,700 newspapers have shuttered in the last decade or so, and every study shows that it winds up costing taxpayers in real dollars.

You don’t have to look very far to find a local example. Hutto hasn’t had a newspaper regularly report on its activities for at least three years. Oh, sure … that monthly thing has one of its young reporters monitor online meetings from time to time, and our Big Bad Sibling in Austin shows up when council members throw chairs at each other … which happens rather frequently in Hutto, these days. But, no one with any real background with Hutto’s government has darkened the doors of City Hall since the Hutto News folded in early 2017.

And, it shows. I don’t have the room to detail all of the shenanigans, nor is my remembery up to the task of detailing how much money the city has lost since then but it’s in the millions. Many, many millions.

They had to lay off 30 or so employees before Hutto even felt the effects of the pandemic. What city does that in the middle of a budget year?

Hutto is probably an egregious example of what happens when the watchdog can’t afford to keep watch but the studies show time and again that, absent a local newspaper, taxes go up more than necessary, spending is less restrained and overall corruption rises.

Just knowing a newspaper reporter is sitting in the chambers (or, these days, logged on from a kitchen table) keeps elected official honest. Well, for certain values of honest.

So, yes ma’am, Commissioner. We’ll do a story on it, whether you throw us a bone or not.

It’s what we do.

WARNING: Graphic language ahead (Mom, don’t read this one).
NOTE: Resorting to profanity often weakens an argument. Agreed but, I channeled Lewis Black while writing this. It was … satisfying,

Late last week, a person close to me posted one of those memes that compares Covid-19 to the seasonal flu. You’ve probably seen it. Here. I’ll show you.

I don’t normally engage with this kind of post. I’m not a social media troll and it does no good. Further, I don’t like it when someone barges into my timeline with MAGA-inspired propaganda so I avoid posting my own agitprop on their’s.

Just scroll on by.

But, in addition to the false equivalency, you will notice this post called out “the media” for scaring people about Covid-19. That pissed me off so, I posted this in gentle response: “Covid-19 has killed at least 65,000 in six weeks. If you aren’t worried, you aren’t paying attention.”

I’da left it at that but I got a response that, among other things (including his own worries, to be fair), implored us to get things opened up because, “… the shut down is going to cause worse problems than the virus.”

Don’t fuckin’ tell me about business. Some of my best friends run brick-and-mortar businesses here in Taylor and elsewhere. They are meeting this with all the creativity and perseverance they possess but some of them won’t come out the other side.

My major contract is with a newspaper. A NEWSPAPER. Most small suburban newspapers were on rocky ground before this but, in late March, advertising simply … evaporated. Most newspapers have furloughed staff or cut their hours. We are no different. We went from three FTEs in the newsroom to one. I’ve gone without pay since the first of April.

I absolutely get the “economy” argument.

This kind of post frustrates me because it downplays the danger and, along the way, blames my chosen profession for fear mongering. Fuck that. I’m tired of that narrative. It paints every journalist and reporter with the same brush and is patently untrue, especially at the local level. If the press seems a bit hysterical, it’s because of the dearth of concrete information — and the conflicting nature of the information we do get.

Another person close to me suggests that the infection and fatality numbers are inflated, that doctors and public health officials have ascribed Covid-19 as the cause of death for all sorts of unrelated things.

That pisses me the fuck off, too. Look, I’m a 63-year old lung cancer survivor with COPD. My COPD isn’t debilitating or anything. In fact, I seldom notice it unless I over-exert or my doctor brings it up. But, I ask you: if I catch this shit then die (which, given the above, it as likely as not) what killed me? The COPD or the coronavirus?

I’ve been on my own kind of front line reporting this shit. (I’m safe because I do it all from home.) I SEE how state and county officials in Texas play fast and loose with the numbers.

We don’t know the fucking infection rate because we haven’t fucking tested enough! If anything, this shit is under reported, not inflated. I suspect Texas officials like it that way.

Community spread is a very real and dangerous thing. Nursing homes (and even worse, meat packing plants) are perfect incubators for this virus. If this shit gets loose in rural America, this is where it will originate.

Here’s a sample: we learned last week that a nursing home in Round Rock was a hotspot where 50 people tested positive. Aside from the impact on those people, not that big a deal, right? 200-bed nursing home, a quarter of the population tests positive. Sad, but not too surprising and at least it’s all contained, right?

Well, 18 of those positive tests were to staff … who go home every day. Go shopping. Maybe stop at a convenience store or pick up curb-side on the way home. All but one of those people were asymptomatic when they were tested. They didn’t know they were infected. So … how many others did those people infect? How many did the people they infected did it spread to? We don’t know and we don’t really have the resources to find out. Not in WilCo.

Now, drop that scenario in someplace like Cameron, Texas … there’s a similar nursing home there. Most small towns have something like that. But there is no hospital in Cameron, only one clinic (no doctors) and a barely-existent public health infrastructure (I know … I lived there for 15 years). At least Cameron’s close to Temple but … how much havoc could that hotspot wreck in a small town before someone discovers it?

If you are working safely and being responsible, good on you. TOO MANY PEOPLE FUCKING AREN’T! One of our reporters went out to see how “opening weekend” was going and he said he was stunned by how few people kept any kind of social distance or wore masks. Social media posts that downplay how serious this is simply enable this behavior. You might even say they are criminally negligent.

Don’t even get me going on the shining, whiny examples of white (usually male) privilege that are the armed “open it up” protests storming the country. That shit’s fucking asinine. On so many fucking levels.

I absolutely understand the desire to “open it up.” I haven’t seen my grandkids in six weeks. I need a hair cut. The company I work for is rapidly going broke but newspapers can’t just … stop. Not now.

So please … just … stop.

(Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.)