Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
From the Tribune of India:
Montreal physician Sanjeet Singh-Saluja and his brother Rajeet, a neurosurgeon at the McGill University Health Centre’s (MUHC) Montreal General and Royal Victoria hospitals, decided to shave their beards after consulting with religious advisers, family and friends, the Brantford Expositor reported.
“As a Sikh man, his beard is an important part of his identity but it was impeding his ability to wear a mask. After much thought, he made the difficult decision to shave his beard off,” the MUHC said in a statement.
“We could choose not to work, but in a time when healthcare workers are falling sick, we would be adding stress to an already taxed system. We could decide to simply refuse to see COVID-19 patients until viable protection is available to us, but that goes against our oath as physicians and against the principles of SEVA,” he said in a video posted on the MUHC website.
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
“It was lonesome, the leaving. Husband dead, friends buried or held prisoners. I felt that I was leaving all that I had but I did not cry. You know how you feel when you lose kindred and friends through sickness—death. You do not care if you die. With us it was worse. Strong men, well women and little children killed and buried. They had not done wrong to be so killed. We had asked to be left in our own homes, the homes of our ancestors. Our going with heavy hearts, broken spirits. But we would be free…. All lost, we walked silently on into the wintry night.”
~~Wetatonmi, sister-in-law of Nez Perce Chief Joseph (Hinmatóowyalahtq̓it). She told this story years after the 1877 surrender of the tribe following an 1,170-mile running battle with U.S. troops sent to enforce the broken promise of four years earlier that the Nez Perce would forever be allowed to live in the Wallowa Valley of northeastern Oregon. At least 200 of the 750 Indians were killed during 18 engagements as they made their fighting retreat on their way to Canada, where Sitting Bull and his Hunkpapa Sioux had fled after the bloody U.S. response to Plains Indians after the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876, a fight the Nez Perce had had nothing to do with.
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2018—Michigan Medicaid work requirement proposal is designed to hurt black people and spare white ones:
Michigan Republicans are pushing work requirements for Medicaid with a bill that’s passed the state Senate and is being considered in the state House. That’s yet another cruel move designed to deprive poor people of health care—and it’s also designed to spare poor white people and hurt poor black ones, Nicholas Bagley and Eli Savit write in the New York Times. How so?
Many of the legislators supporting Michigan’s work requirements come from rural districts with high unemployment. Many of those districts are predominantly white. To protect their constituents, these legislators have included a safety valve in the bill: If you live in a county with a high unemployment rate (over 8.5 percent), you’re exempt from the work requirements. The rationale? When there are no jobs to be had, it doesn’t make sense to punish you for not working.
Yet that safety valve does not apply equally. Specifically, it does little for Michigan’s black residents, who are concentrated in cities like Detroit, Muskegon and Flint. Those cities suffer from chronically high unemployment rates, but they’re all in counties with low rates. The city of Flint, for example, has an unemployment rate of 10.4 percent; but in Genesee County, where Flint is located, the rate is just 5.8 percent. The upshot is that no one in Michigan’s biggest cities can take advantage of the safety valve — even if there’s no work to be had.
They’re barely even trying to hide the discriminatory intent here.