By SUZANNE DOWNING
Imagine, if you will, what it was like to sit down at a rough-hewn table in 1621, the first Thanksgiving on a frosty, damp Cape Cod celebration.
On the one side, the Protestant Separatists, who left England to create a non-Anglican Christian colony in the New World.
Chances are, their clothes were by then tattered, their hair smoky and greasy, and they all could have used a bath. Of the 102 who came on the Mayflower, 45 of them had already died of scurvy and other disease.
They were not a glamorous bunch. Like a lot of Alaskans we know, they were rough and tough, but the first words of the Mayflower Compact said it all about their values:
“The In the name of God, Amen.”
On the other side, or perhaps squatting on the ground or sitting on a log around the fire, were leathery-skinned Natives dressed in deer hides, first inhabitants of the land, who had somehow seen the wisdom of helping the wool-clad newcomers get through their first winter, planting, and harvesting season.
They, too, lacked the benefit of civilized grooming. There were no Manscaped tools. Chances are, their hair was matted, smoky, and greasy, and they all could have used a bath. The Wampanoug were spiritualists who believed Mother Earth was their god, and they would thank the earth and any living thing for the gifts they gave the people.
Perhaps it wasn’t the first multi-cultural dinner in the New World, but it was one of the first documented. It had to have been a motley crew of two extremely different cultures, with not much evident in the way of shared cultural norms or values, finding a way to come together and break bread, if only for a moment.
Fast forward to 2020, a time when we are more multi-cultural than ever, and many of us sit down at tables this Thanksgiving with people from different backgrounds and understandings. It’s not just Natives and Europeans anymore. We are one big variety show when it comes to cultural norms.
In Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city and by far its biggest Native village, people come from across the planet — from Nome to Phnom Penh, Utquagvik to Upolu. Anchorage residents live in a functional city, but not so much a knit-together community. We’re a collection of communities.
Indeed, we are a mosaic that attends school, clocks in at jobs, and shops for groceries, and retreats to our tribal safe place.
Then came the virus from hell. And the importance of community cannot be overstated, when it comes to crisis response. A community of shared values is one of the essentials for recovery from a disaster.
In this case, the acting mayor of Anchorage has put forth yet another harsh set of mandates, her second since she took the reins of the city. Austin Quinn-Davidson does not have the earned authority of an electoral mandate; she is merely a fill-in mayor, appointed by the Assembly.
This makes it more difficult for her to convince a collection of cultures that she has any authority at all to force her will upon them. All they see is an imperious queen telling them they cannot work or go to school or even play sports.
That lack of elected authority may create a backlash, as the city’s economic underpinnings are knocked from beneath it — restaurants closed, people told to stay home, and children slipping further and further behind. Enforcers from the imperial mayor’s office are on the prowl, looking for offenders to fine.
The single institution that could have held our community of Christians, Atheists, Pagans, Buddhists, Jews, and Muslims together was our schools. This is true in most of Alaska, especially rural communities.
But since March, our schools have been shut down. That’s 260 days without the most formative part of our children’s days. It’s a long time for parents to watch their children fall apart. There’s no guarantee in January that the teachers union will agree to return to the classrooms.
It got worse. At the end of June, former Mayor Ethan Berkowitz mandated masks for everyone inside buildings in Anchorage, or wherever they come within 6 feet of others who are not in their households. Five months of mask wearing has yielded poor results. If the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage is to be believed, 87 percent of Anchorage residents say they are wearing masks when outside the home and around others.
On Wednesday, after five months of compliance, Alaska reported more than 700 cases of COVID-19 statewide, another record day in a parade of record days. Most of those cases were in Anchorage.
Eight months of shutdowns and hunker-downs, and five months of mask wearing have only made the poor among us even poorer, and the anxious among us even more anxious, and the angry among us even angrier.
So how is Anchorage doing? A transient city filled with people from all cultural norms, Anchorage is an example of what happens when a settlement doesn’t have shared values first, before the crisis hits. Without that shared sense of community, pulling together is almost an impossible feat.
Mayor Austin Quinn-Davidson, who inherited the virus-management problem from Ethan “Booty” Berkowitz, didn’t start this war with COVID. She was plopped into the Mayor’s Office in the middle of one of the biggest crises Anchorage has encountered in its 100 years. Berkowitz bowed out during a crisis, and she became the unelected leader with the power to ruin people’s lives.
Quinn-Davidson is no better or worse than the rest of us. But, as she was not even challenged during the 2020 municipal election, she reflects the values of her liberal district, not the values of the entire community.
As we break bread this Thanksgiving, and reflect on where we started as a nation, this writer is reminded that those of us who are from the stock that blazed west and finally north are of a rebel spirit. We are not staid New Englanders who remained behind to manage the shops and mills of the East Coast. We are fiery and we are independent. Mandates do not suit us.
In small ways, we in Alaska are like the Pilgrims who left it all behind to make our mark in a new place. We are still the Wild West.
Our elected leaders must figure out how to not ruin us as a people, or destroy our spirit, but unite us in a way that honors the one thing that ties us together: Our sense of independence. So far this year, our civic leaders have only united Anchorage residents in opposition to their leaders. It’s a start, but that’s not building community.
The way back to a sense of community is to either open the public schools in Anchorage, or to give every family vouchers to allow them to create their own unregulated home-based or church-based (or back of the pizza parlor based) schools.
If Quinn-Davidson has the power to shut down restaurants, bars, bingo halls, and gyms, she has the authority to also set parents free to create their own schools this year. The school board will never do such a thing. But Quinn-Davidson actually could issue vouchers. It’s a way to return to a sense of control to families over their lives, and a pathway to a sense of community.
Suzanne Downing is the publisher of Must Read Alaska.
BREAKING: Supreme Court votes 5-4 to grant Catholic Diocese and orthodox Jews’ request to block Gov. Cuomo’s attendance limits at houses of worship in New York.
Newest Justice ACB broke the tie with Roberts voting consistently liberal. But common sense and liberty wins out. Must Anchorage comply?
Oh yeah, I’m thankful that the Democrats will probably never have to cheat as much again after securing these Ill-gotten wins.
Wonderful piece Suzanne. It reflects much work, empathy, understanding, research, and excellence. Happy Thanksgiving.
This Thanksgiving You will enjoy going over on to Focus on the Family and listen to its radio audio ‘Celebrating The Miracle of Thanksgiving.’ It will make the reader at heart inspired into reading the pilgrim writings about Squanto, a man of faith whose tragedy that could had broken him and put him as a woe as me person nothing is right in the world, and he is going to die a lonely man, but what man meant for evil, God used for good. The story between him and those pilgrims coming over on the Mayflower is the least known miracle Americas are unaware occurred that shows God had his hand on America and attended setting apart this land to be a blessing over the world over.
I must apologize to the Anchorage community. It was I and my neighbors that put the current Mayor, A. Q-D on the Assembly. Suzanne, we not a liberal community within the city of Anchorage. She did not run unopposed, but the two candidates who ran against her did not put up positions capable of unseating her. I went to her opponents’ websites in research. Her female opponent was as flaky as she was. Her male opponent gave me a little confidence he was capable of managing our city. I chose to vote for him.
The real question and the foundation of my apology is, how did she get elected to her first term? I was asleep at the wheel. I know I voted, but I can’t tell you who I voted it for. I did not do any research. I simply fulfilled my civic duty at the polls. Upon your forgiveness, I vow to not be complacent again as I fulfilling my civic duty to the city of Anchorage.
Relax, KDM, you’re not to blame.
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Assembly members who forced Anchorage’s easily corruptible mail-in voting scheme on voters are to blame.
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You (we) realized Anchorage’s Assembly members, including Peoples Mayoral Candidate Dunbar, forced this scheme on voters for reasons having nothing to do with “convenience”.
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Our belief is every step of Anchorage’s mail-in voting process is, and has been since inception, vulnerable to the same mail-in vote corruption issues emerging nationwide.
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Productive Anchorage residents now have no means of valid, bipartisan election oversight. Nothing prevents ballot harvesting, for example, from corrupting municipal elections.
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So, how this Hyphenated-Being got its nose under the tent is hardly your fault.
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Then we have Anchorage’s Charter which is clear:
“A vacancy in the office of mayor shall be filled at a regular or special election held not less than 90 days from the time a vacancy occurs. If less that 90 days remain in the term when the fancy occurs, the vacancy shall not be filled. When a vacancy occurs in the office of mayor, the chair of the assembly shall serve as acting mayor until a successor is elected and takes office.”
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That went well, didn’t it? Anchorage’s Assembly members, including Peoples Mayoral Candidate Dunbar, said screw that, and forced Anchorage’s very first unelected Hyphenated-Mayor on voters.
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They stole Anchorage’s election, disenfranchised Anchorage’s voters, –knowing– voters can’t do a thing about it, and nobody in city or state government will do a thing about it.
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Perfect crime, yes?
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So, you’re off the hook KDM. Crime like this takes a special kind of evil bast… (whoops! can’t say that), and you ain’t it.
Elected officials only have the power the people convey on them, unelected officials have even less power. Bending to these tyrants only begets more tyranny.
A majority of business owners and citizens must practice civil disobedience! It’s past time to tell these petty dictators NO MORE! If you want to commit economic and cultural suicide, go ahead, but don’t take the rest of us with you!
I’m not sure what vouchers will do to help the so-called children who are falling apart at the seams. And I’m positive that Vikings made it here a few hundred years before the Pilgrims did as evidence of blue-eyed native Canadians on their East coast and stone structures. It was in a surviving civilization but nonetheless it possibly could have been the first. Then there’s the picture of an armadillo in a Chinese tomb many hundreds of years old. The only place an armadillo is from is Central America, so a Chinaman way back we had must have actually said eyes on one to draw a picture of it in his tomb. Egyptians had coffee from South America thousands of years ago. Yes the world was a busy place back then as it is now. Even though Anchorage has the greatest numbers of covid infection, smaller villages are impacted greater when the virus shows it’s dirty little face in the village proper. It has the opportunity to wipe out generations of native heritage with the killing off of elders. Much more of a lasting impact than a few hundred people getting sick in Anchorage where there are thousands living. Parents have the ability to self-educate their children. Homeschoolers do it all the time and consistently score higher on tests. I would suggest everybody calm down and do whatever they need to do to get through the next few weeks. Get outside when they can and get some fresh air . These rough and tough alaskans are certainly capable of weathering this storm. All the commercials today that I got on my phone and on TV about Black Friday sales, reminds me that if we’re so hard up why are they trying to get everybody to spend their last few pennies on a computer monitor or some other damn thing? yes I know some people are hard up I’m not saying they’re not but the media, the local news channels who promote these commercials on one hand while on the other claim the sky is falling in are hypocrites of course we already knew that during and after the election.
I agree that chopping a year out of a kid’s education is a travesty. School children aside, the greater issue is mandates.
If you have a perfectly watertight bucket and then drill a hole in it; your bucket is broken.
Mandates are the bucket.
The Supreme Court’s nod to religious nutters insistent on congregating is the hole.
If 5% of the city goes to church, one in twenty of us attend a giant petri dish every weekend spreading that virus as rapidly as an STD amongst the rainbow community. Killing local restaurant and service businesses is akin to rearranging deck chairs on a sinking Anchorage.
What we need is a thinking individual at the helm. One that can see obvious issues and respond in a clear manner. Her Hyphen doesn’t posses that skill and instead simply follows in the footsteps of her predecessor; a man that repeatedly demonstrated a limited ability to understand cause and effect on multiple levels.
Now a question for you. If you see a person in a position of authority that clearly lacks the capacity to address this and similar situations in a logical and lucid manner, do you comply? How about another question? Since when does the public get put on restriction by a business? That’s what’s happening when local hospitals announce through the media that they’re ‘39% full and it’s bad… it’s really bad’. Many aspects don’t make sense and among them are the flawed and ambiguous sources used to form a collective view. You can bet that those 39% are riddled with unspecified self inflicted co-morbidities.
You do not kill the economy to protect those that largely don’t contribute to it and you shouldn’t feel guilty for not going through the same sequestered treatment regimen as they. If a 74 year old orange haired fat guy can whip it in a couple three days exactly how big is this bogeyman we’re all being hidden from?
There’s a foreseeable shift on the horizon and it will be introduced at that point where risk and reward intersect for hospitals.
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Let’s examine the numbers for fun.
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Alaska has a population of about 734,000
Using largely unpopular stereotypes lets say that about 1/3 of Alaskans are indigent and don’t contribute directly to the economy. About another third would be children, non-working spouses, retirees, etc. That leaves you somewhere around 250,000 people for whom work is a critical component of life.
About 40,000 Alaskans rec’d unemployment during the last week of September. That would be 16% of our normal workforce and about 16% of those that helped pay the health insurance for the other 84%.
Once the hospitals reach that tipping point where the number of incoming patients with the scary virus and no health insurance surpasses profitability garnered from those that still have jobs and insurance… suddenly the virus will not be so scary and reasonably healthy people can go back to being alive.
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