Where all sides (will) meet
It’s the worst the pandemic has ever been, I’m in one of the states with the worst numbers and the most resistance to public health measures, where education isn’t the highest priority even in the best of times, and I just signed up my last remaining virtual learner to return to in-person learning, effective yesterday. And I feel great–and terrified.
Depending on where you live, it’s been about nine months since the coronavirus pandemic first caught up to the United States.
It’s been nearly fifty years since the release of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, the landmark album on which he set aside love songs to sing about social issues, such as war, poverty, racism, police brutality, and environmental destruction.
Most Americans are in agreement: 2020 is nobody’s favorite year. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only sickened 11 million Americans and killed a quarter of a million. Its wreaked financial havoc and ruined livelihoods across the country, as we’ve shut down schools and much of our economy trying to stem deaths and illness.
“Age old wisdom” asserts that the young grow more conservative as they get older. In many ways for many people, that is true, sometimes drastically so. But it’s also sometimes true, and often advised, that as adults grow even older, they lose their need to conserve a world they will some day leave behind, instead entrusting that world to the young.
It’s the most important election of our lifetime. What will it mean for America?
Drop everything, listen to this, and ease your soul.
The coronavirus pandemic has left us without a great many things. Most of us live in a nebulous state of suspension grief, for all the previous normalcy we’ve left behind, and for the uncertainty of its return. But on a brighter side, some things we’ve left behind, dare we say, happily?
