Day 25 of Nat'l Emergency: Living in Epoch Times

Perhaps your postman, as mine did, brought to your mailbox an unexpected publication—The Epoch Times. From its front page it was obvious the special edition of this 20-year-old newspaper was devoted to China bashing, specifically attacking the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for its malevolent actions, particularly as they now relate to the spread of the pandemic COVID-19. 

A quick check of Wikipedia revealed the paper is printed in eight languages. It was founded by John Tang and a group of Chinese Americans “associated with the Falun Gong spiritual movement” that China has attacked. It is a staunch supporter of Donald Trump and other far-right politicians. Indeed, Wikipedia says a 2019 report found that only the Trump campaign funded more pro-Trump Facebook advertising. The Epoch Media Group also is big into conspiracy theories, being among the disseminators of stories on QAnon and anti-vaccination propaganda. 

Well, we can’t expect every publication to be The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times or The Washington Post. That said, I was intrigued by one particular representation that might be a more accurate count of the dead in China from the coronavirus, or what The Epoch Times calls the “CCP virus” (it prefers to tag the China Communist Party with the identification rather than place any stigma on the innocent people of China or Wuhan where the virus originated). 

Instead of the absurdly hard to believe statistic supplied by the CCP that only a little more than 3,000 deaths occurred in China from the virus, The Epoch Times says many more perished as seven cremation centers in Wuhan were operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In addition, open air pits in some villages burned bodies and 40 mobile furnaces were shipped to Wuhan. Such descriptions are reminiscent of Nazi Holocaust measures. 

The Epoch Times says its sources suggest CCP virus deaths have exceeded one million. But then the paper teases the total could be catastrophically greater. As everyone in China by law must have a cell phone, records released by China’s three cellphone carriers reveal that over the last three months the number of cellphone users dropped by 21 million!

Now that I’ve possibly shocked the bejeezus out of you, some provisos: First, I have no way of validating or corroborating anything in The Epoch Times. Second, even the newspaper hedges its bet by stating that since China allows each person to have up to five cellphone accounts, many of the dropped users could be workers who were laid off and chose to disconnect one or more of their lines to save money. 

There’s a world of difference between 3,000 and 1,000,000 and 21,000,000. Based on our country’s  experience, the actual mortality in China probably is higher than the government figure. But then, even our government cannot supply a true figure as it has been reported that many deaths during the time of the pandemic, at home or in nursing homes, have not been attributed to coronavirus because authorities lacked the manpower or facility to autopsy them all to determine if the deceased were infected (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/us/coronavirus-deaths-undercount.html?referringSource=articleShare).

One of the more troubling aspects of the national spread of the plague has been some of the comments coming from our elected politicians. I won’t bore you with repeating Trump’s blindness to the pending disaster. He has the excuse, however flimsy it be, that his initial reluctance to believe in the intensity of the danger was because he wanted to give confidence to the public and it was still not clear how bad it would be. What’s more, he hailed his decision to close travel with China. Yet, according to The NY Times, 40,000 entered the U.S. from China in the two months after Trump imposed the ban, including thousands who flew directly from Wuhan (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/us/coronavirus-china-travel-restrictions.html?referringSource=articleShare). 

More troubling, perhaps, are the comments from governors and mayors late in commanding shelter-in-place directives for their jurisdictions. The mayor of New Orleans said Mardi Gras was allowed to go on unfettered because the city never received any warnings from the federal government. Georgia’s governor claimed he didn’t know until a few days ago the widely distributed news that people without symptoms could spread the pandemic. Florida’s governor waited until pressure from the Trump administration forced him to act. In each of those cases officials put the health of their area’s tourism economy ahead of the public’s health. Ain’t capitalism grand?

The U.S. Surgeon General has compared the pandemic to the attacks on Pearl Harbor and on September 11, but with higher casualties. He’s right, but probably not for the reasons he wants us to acknowledge. Pearl Harbor and September 11 were thought to be surprise attacks. But warnings were known before they occurred. Known and ignored, or at least downplayed. 

The same is true for the new coronavirus invasion. The Trump administration ignored advice on how to deal with a pandemic and how critical supplies needed to be stockpiled. It also at first refused to believe how vulnerable we were. 

Unlike Pearl Harbor and September 11 we do not have a physical enemy on which to launch a counterattack. Our “wartime” president has nobody to blame but himself and his cronies for how unprepared we have been for this deadly assault. 

Twenty Years Ago Today

Temperatures modulated in the mid-50’s in White Plains today. How different from this past weekend when wind chill temperatures dipped below zero. How different from conditions 20 years ago today when a blizzard dumped 10 inches of snow, stranding me in New York, preventing me from flying down to Orlando for the annual SPECS conference produced by my magazine, Chain Store Age. 

For six hours that Friday morning I sat in the Courtyard Marriott in Rye waiting for an airport shuttle to trudge its way through the snow. None came. All around me vacationers and business travelers expressed their frustrations. One couple vented they had planned three years to fly to New Orleans to partake in the following Tuesday’s Mardi Gras festivities. The blizzard was sure to deprive them of their once-in-a-lifetime experience, they lamented. 

Ordinarily, a delay traveling south would have been an inconvenience easily overcome the next day. But more distressing news happened that day 20 years ago. When I called Gilda to inform her I was returning home she told me my mother had passed away that afternoon in a hospital in Washington, DC, as she awaited surgery to amputate a second leg below the knee because diabetes and smoking had impeded circulation to her limb. She was 78.

Twenty years. I look out my kitchen windows and the memories of my mother are slowly melting away like the remnants of the snow on the grass in our yard. Our children were 17 and 14 when she passed away. How much do they remember their grandma, who, sadly, suffered from mild dementia her last few years? Dan recalls he loved her chicken soup. As a young child, he knew whenever we went to my parents’ home in Brooklyn he would be fed well. And he always knew when they would be visiting our home for, miraculously, cake appeared on our kitchen table. 

As a light snow trickled down Monday I queued up a tape my brother Bernie recorded of our mother 30 years ago. With each passing sequence another of our treasured family stories tumbled into the realm of folklore, assuming, of course, that the testimony I was viewing was the real history and not her memory of the moment.

We had always been told the first time our father eyed my mother, in his store on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, he fell off a ladder, not because of her beauty, but at the sight of her wild and frizzy hair. Not so, Mom related, though she did not disagree with the description of her hairdo that day. 

Nevertheless, Kopel walked her to the subway station and secured a date for that Friday night. When he rang the doorbell of her family’s apartment, he failed to recognize the now dolled up Sylvia. That part of the story rang true to form.

The next part contradicted family lore. We had been told they went to see Die Fledermaus, an operetta composed by Johann Strauss II. Perhaps not. According to the tape, they went to a production of a different Strauss operetta—The Gypsy Baron. 

During their whirlwind courtship—six weeks from first date to a Sunday, September 6, Labor Day weekend wedding, with two weeks or more apart due to separate vacations they took over the summer—a favorite story of our mother was a time our father took her to a friend’s apartment. 

Speaking Yiddish, his friend asked if they would like to be alone, to which my father replied, also in Yiddish, “No, this one I am going to marry.” Unbeknownst to my father, Sylvia was fluent in Yiddish. Only on the tape, Mom said they spoke German which she also understood. 

A story about one of Mom’s late teenage boyfriends also came under revision. She’d often tell us that after her father moved the family to an apartment on the Grand Concourse in The Bronx, a beau stopped calling on her. Years later when she met him by chance, the fellow, an apprentice linotypist, explained the Grand Concourse address had placed her above his station in life. 

An interesting commentary on social status, but the version on the tape had Mom relating that the move that sabotaged their relationship was to an apartment on West 99th Street off Broadway in Manhattan.

Elsewhere on the tape, Mom’s laudatory stories about my high school days evoked no corresponding corroboration within my memory bank.

What isn’t in doubt is the positive influence she had on the lives of her children. When most wives stayed at home, our mother worked full-time as an equal partner with our father in their factory that produced half-slips and panties sold mostly to chain stores across the country. At the same time she actively participated in PTA programs and other social groups while also cooking family holiday dinners that could serve as many as 40 participants.  

She taught my brother and me to play ball. She made sure we went to Broadway shows and the opera. She took us to the Catskills. She enrolled us in private Hebrew schools and eight week sleepaway Jewish summer camps. She made our house the center of activity featuring Friday night poker games with my brother’s friends. 

She opened our door to overnight guests, prompting her to call our home Malon Forseter, malon being the Hebrew word for hotel. Her dinette table was never too full. Unexpected guests were met with the standard retort, “I'll just add another cup of water to the soup.”

Sylvia was a confident, independent woman, best exemplified by travel to Israel and Europe by herself in the mid 1950s when she was just 40. 

I looked over what I wrote two years ago in a Father’s Day tribute to our mother and thought I’d conclude with the same last paragraph: 

My brother, sister and I don’t dwell on the last decade or so of her life when she no longer was the vibrant source of our family life. It is enough to know that together with our father she molded us into the people we are today. And we are happy with the results.

Traveling Together

Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz caught flak, and a $20,000 fine from New York City’s Conflicts of Interest Board, for taking his wife, Jamie, on three overseas trips paid for by outside entities. Though it appears he technically violated the law, Markowitz’s argument that his wife was an asset on two trips to Turkey and one to The Netherlands resonates with me, and not just because I, too, am a Brooklyn native.

From my very first year as a business journalist I took Gilda (and subsequently our young children) along on as many multi-day conference trips as possible. Building rapport with customers, clients and sources is among the most important part of any relationship. A spouse is an invaluable asset in forging those ties.

Gilda’s first trip with me was to New Orleans for a restaurant conference produced by the trade newspaper I worked on. She wound up seeing more of the Big Easy than I did, visiting a plantation outside the city as well as the Garden District and a warehouse where the floats used in the Mardi Gras parade were stored. The pattern of her seeing the sights, or just lounging by the pool, while I worked the conference sessions repeated itself on subsequent convention visits. More importantly, the contacts she made with the spouses of retailers and suppliers turned into introductions to company executives during cocktail receptions and dinners I would have had difficulty making.

We started taking our children with us when Dan was just two. At the Del Coronado Hotel outside San Diego, he learned to say “croissant,” as every morning he and Gilda would breakfast on the French pastry while dining on the balcony outside our room. One of my favorite pictures has me wearing a straw cowboy hat, plaid shirt and jeans while carrying Ellie, her head in a bandana, asleep on my shoulder during a cocktail reception during a conference at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix when she was barely one.

The kids traveled with us through elementary school. Most of these excursions were during the school year. Gilda and I earned a deserved reputation as parents who blithely took their children on trips without caring what classes they missed. Guilty, with the explanation that our credo was they would learn long division two weeks later, but the educational experience of seeing different parts of our country, and one time even Japan, far outweighed any classroom instruction they might have received.

I was fortunate to work for a company that appreciated the value a spouse brings to the business environment. After I became a chief editor, my employer footed the bill for Gilda’s presence at many of the conferences I attended. Perhaps business has become less intimate (though I doubt successful people would say that), but I never understood why more executives didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to bond in a more personal way with their contacts at other companies. Yes, more spouses had jobs of their own and perhaps could not get away; not everyone could be as cavalier as we were about their kids missing school.

The bottom line for me, however, was the chance to share with Gilda the thrill of seeing a new environment—San Antonio, Marco Island, Tokyo, New Orleans, Oakland, Nashville, Dallas, Kyoto, Maui, Luxembourg, Strasbourg, Stratford-on-Avon, Brussels, Boca Raton, Palm Beach, Paris, Prague, Phoenix, Scottsdale—venues we might never have experienced together.