Christmas is just two days away and Hanukkah is ongoing, so I could offer you the standard-issue, saccharine, count-your-blessings holiday greetings in the last Morning Jolt newsletter until December 27.
But two days before Christmas is also the date of the pseudo-holiday “Festivus,” marked by the “airing of the grievances.”
And perhaps it’s the Jets’ flopping for the fourth straight week — congratulations to Charlie Cooke and Jaguars fans everywhere — but I find myself in a mood to lay out everything that isn’t going right as 2022 is coming to a close, and the giant national and international to-do list in the year ahead.
The Airing of the Grievances
Over in The Dispatch, Nick Catoggio, the artist formerly known as Allahpundit, writes, “You can tell a lot about someone’s priorities by what makes them angriest,” writing about the populists who sound a lot more angry about Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to not wear a suit in the White House than the Russian military’s ongoing campaign to exterminate Ukrainian civilians wherever they can.
So, what makes me angriest, besides Zach Wilson’s inability to perform within a light year of his pre-draft hype?
Yesterday, the U.S. Census Bureau unveiled its updated numbers for the U.S. population, covering from July 1, 2021, to July 1 of this year. Growth picked up a tiny bit from its all-time low during the pandemic:
The U.S. added 1.3 million people in the year that ended July 1 for a total population of 333.3 million. That included 245,000 more births than deaths, a surplus that has long supplied much of the nation’s growth. The other component, which measures people moving in and out of the country, grew by one million.
But you can’t characterize this report as good news, any more than you can plausibly claim that 7.1 percent year-over-year inflation is good, or that the national average price of a gallon of gasoline a few days before Christmas at $3.09 is good. It represents a very small improvement from a historically abysmal figure, and still has ominous ramifications for a lot of places:
Kenneth Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire, noted that 24 states had more deaths than births in the year covered by the report. “That is a staggeringly high number,” he said.
Before the pandemic, Mr. Johnson said it was unusual for even five states to record what demographers call a natural decrease between years.
“Clearly, Covid produced most of this natural decrease by pushing death rates and the number of deaths up,” he said. “But long-term birthrates were already declining and deaths were rising prior to Covid.” . . .
After dropping 20 percent from its recent-history peak in 2007, the U.S. birthrate edged up again in the year that ended June 30. It was 2 percent higher than a year earlier and reached 56.4 per 1,000 women age 15 to 44, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
Meanwhile, U.S. life expectancy has declined by two years from its pre-pandemic level.
In a separate report released Thursday, the CDC said life expectancy in the U.S. fell again last year to its lowest level since 1996, after the pandemic and opioid overdoses drove deaths higher. Covid-19 was the third-leading cause of death for the second consecutive year, helping cut life expectancy to 76.4 years in 2021, down from 78.8 years in 2019, before the pandemic.
The U.S. birth rate remaining low is hardly surprising news. The last few years have been particularly challenging ones, and it’s understandable if people are hesitant about starting a family. (As Cam and I tried to tell people back in 2015, this is one of the greatest blessings in life, despite being hard — or perhaps because raising a child is consistently challenging.) We’ve been subjected to one destabilizing force after another: Covid-19, the widespread economic effects of the lockdowns, the George Floyd protests and riots that seemed to mark a turning point in so many of our cities, the closing of many public schools for a year or more, intense political, social, and cultural divisions, a rise in the crime rate in many places, supply-chain disruptions that have your local store out of random goods at unexpected times, and runaway inflation that has grocery price skyrocketing and charts of gas prices looking like a profile of Mount Everest.
I think living through all of that shook a lot of people. Sometimes it’s overt, in the form of increased demand for mental-health services or calls to suicide-prevention hotlines doubling since the start of the pandemic. But I think for a lot of other Americans, the consequences of the past few years are more subtle. That shut-down local restaurant you liked that never reopened. The other restaurant next to it raised prices in a way that made going there tougher to justify, and they’ve seemed understaffed for a long while now. Stretches of downtown in the city where there just aren’t as many people on the street, and with more tents of homeless people in the park. I think a lot of Americans greet the news — assuming they haven’t chosen to tune out the news — with a sense of dread, a sense of “What now?”
Our inability to confront and solve serious, lingering problems is exacerbated by those in leadership at the local, state, and national levels who need to believe that they’re doing a good job, which means they reflexively insist everything is going fine. President Biden insisted that the country had “zero percent inflation one month” and that “prices have been essentially flat.” During a debate with Lee Zeldin, New York governor Kathy Hochul scoffed at the idea that bail reform could possibly be part of the state’s crime problem: “Anyone who commits a crime under our laws, especially with the change we made to bail, has consequences. I don’t know why that’s so important to you.” Remember, the guy who tried to stab Zeldin was charged with attempted assault in the second degree and then immediately released on bail.
When buses of migrants started arriving in Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser argued that the city — with a budget of $18.4 billion — was being asked to handle an unfair share of the cost of illegal immigration: “We’re not a border town. We don’t have an infrastructure to handle this type of and level of immigration to our city. . . . We’re not Texas.” As if El Paso and other cities do have the kind of infrastructure to handle this type of and level of immigration. (For perspective, the city budget of El Paso is about $475 million.)
You can trace a lot of these problems back to the Covid-19 pandemic, which was beyond the control of America’s leadership. But how we chose to react to that crisis — from attempting to fire unvaccinated workers, to arresting paddleboarders out in the ocean, to shutting down most public schools for a year because, as American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten asserted, “Kids are resilient” — was within the control of America’s leadership.
I’m particularly angered that our country has, by and large, decided it doesn’t really want to know how the pandemic got started. (You know where I come down on this.) I suspect that a lot of people would contend we do “know,” and that those who believe the lab-leak theory believe it is now so obvious that it’s effectively proven, and those who believe the natural-origin theory believe it is now so obvious that the virus originated from an animal sold at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan.
Of course, Chinese “wet markets” have operated for a long time. That’s more or less how SARS came along. We’ve had a bunch of contagious viruses over the past few decades — MERS, H1N1, Zika. None of those required us to effectively shut down society so thoroughly that the earth literally became quieter for a stretch. But the one that came out of Wuhan, SARS-CoV-2, was dramatically different — unusual because it was so efficient and effective for infecting human beings. It was like this bat virus had somehow gained a function somewhere along the way while moving from a bat to a human being. But I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the city had not one but two secretive government-run laboratories studying coronaviruses found in bats.
Meanwhile, as 2022 closes and 2023 begins, war continues in Europe. Back in 2014, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and John Kerry led the U.S. response — and by extension, the response of NATO and the West — to Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea. Kerry acted like he was simply stunned that Putin could possibly do such a thing: “It’s an incredible act of aggression, it is really a stunning willful choice by president Putin to invade another country. . . . You just don’t, in the 21st century, behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text.” But, Kerry assured Bob Schieffer at the time, the situation wasn’t another Cold War.
Well, from the perspective of 2022, it sure looks like another Cold War was starting, and the Obama administration just didn’t want to believe it or admit it. And throughout those months, Kerry kept talking about trying to get the Russians to take an “off ramp.” But Vladimir Putin didn’t want an “off ramp.” He kept making it clear, over and over again, that he wanted to occupy Crimea and had eyes on much more Ukrainian territory. Years later, CNN’s chief national-security correspondent, Jim Sciutto, wrote a book about the U.S., China, and Russia; Sciutto had served as chief of staff and senior policy adviser to U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke in the early years of the Obama administration. Sciutto recognized that, “U.S. and European diplomats and policymakers would persist in mirror-imaging their Russian counterparts, while Putin and his lieutenants were playing by very different rules.” Sciutto quoted Geoffrey Pyatt, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2013 to 2016, in some scathing assessments of Obama and Kerry:
“Kerry was still talking in terms of ‘Russia must not overstep,’” said Pyatt. “And it was while they were already running the place.
Inside the Obama administration, discussions focused on providing Moscow with a diplomatic ‘off-ramp’ to defuse the crisis and eventually exit Crimea in a face-saving way. . . . “The Russian objective was not to win the argument,” Pyatt emphasized. “It was to win a war.”
Why is the world facing this bloody, deadly mess in Ukraine? A big reason is that the self-professed “smart power” set couldn’t understand what was happening right in front of their eyes eight years ago. Putin paid no significant price for seizing Crimea, and he expected the same once the leftovers from the Obama years were back in power. The disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 only reconfirmed his suspicions that America was becoming an exhausted, weakened, hesitant, internally divided power.
Our challenges and the world’s are getting more complicated and difficult, and our leaders keep flailing around, looking for easy answers, insisting that whatever they’re doing is working gangbusters. (You may have noticed that theme in a particular recent work of fiction.) That’s the grievance I’d like to air.
Oh, and hey . . . Merry Christmas.
ADDENDUM: Apparently, no one in any U.S. or European authority is all that sure that Russia was behind the attack on the Nord Stream undersea pipelines built to carry natural gas from Russia to Europe.
(Back in September, I chuckled that perhaps the U.S. had done it, which the usual paranoid minds interpreted as a confession.)
Maybe the perpetrator was the Supreme Court leaker, or the IRS leaker, or the perpetrator who left the pipe bombs on Capitol Hill on January 6, or. . . .
I know Netflix rebooted the old NBC show Unsolved Mysteries, but I’d still like to see the late Robert Stack in a trench coat at night, inviting us to help solve a mystery.