The New Megatrends: Seeing Clearly in the Age of Disruption by Marian Salzman

Author:Marian Salzman [Salzman, Marian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780593239704
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

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The story of Amy Acton’s brief tenure as director of Ohio’s Department of Health serves as a reminder that female right all too frequently falls victim to male might. When Governor Mike DeWine appointed Acton to the state’s top healthcare post in February 2019, she was a licensed physician with a master’s degree in public health and more than thirty years’ experience in medicine, healthcare policy and advocacy, community service, data analysis, and more.[28]

The first COVID-19 death in Ohio was reported early in March 2020. A week later, the governor ordered bars and restaurants closed. Dr. Acton reached out to the people of her state, holding frequent and exceptionally candid press conferences that were instantly popular, especially among girls and women. A documentarian turned clips from her press conferences into a six-minute film, asserting that other leaders should pay attention to Acton’s effective use of vulnerability, empowerment, and “brutal honesty.”[29] Soon, there was a tribute video on YouTube,[30] a bobblehead available for purchase, and 130,000 fans on Facebook.

The state’s lockdown was unpopular, however, and the protests were relentless: people chanting outside Acton’s press conferences; anti-Semitic slurs; men with guns, MAGA caps, and Trump flags gathering outside her home. Republican lawmakers proposed to strip her of her powers. The governor would have vetoed that bill, but Dr. Acton did not stick around while that played out. In June 2020, she resigned. A month later, the governor appointed a new state health director, Joan Duwve. She quit hours after agreeing to the position; the job, she said, would pose a risk to her family.[31]

Amy Acton is hardly a featherweight. A mother of six, she endured her parents’ divorce, poverty, homelessness, and sexual abuse—all when she was only a child. And what she took away from those and other experiences is that anger and opposition are not how to solve problems. After stepping down from her government position, she took on the directorship of Kind Columbus, a nonprofit “dedicated to spreading the words and actions of kindness as a defining value” of the region.[32]

One state over, in Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer was being bullied even more severely than Acton because of her social-distancing and mask mandates. In May 2020, a large group of protestors—some armed with rifles—stormed the state capitol (with seemingly no objection from police), where they proceeded to pound on a door they believed to be Whitmer’s office and demand an end to the lockdowns. No one was harmed, but several months later, thirteen members of the Wolverine Watchmen extremist group were arrested and charged with orchestrating a domestic terror plot to kidnap Whitmer and overthrow the state government.[33]

Upon learning of the plot, Whitmer responded, “I knew this job would be hard. But I’ll be honest, I never could have imagined anything like this.”[34]

Writer and editor Kathleen Walsh terms the events “a window into American misogyny.” Writing in The Week, she described a Republican candidate for the Michigan House hanging an unclothed effigy of the governor by a noose,

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