#53 | None of us are OK

“None of us are the people we want to be right now.” – me, talking to the 7-year-old.

Today is the 56th day since I held an in-person meeting. It has been 67 days since I drove the kiddo to school.

The early days are a blur now – the hunt for the supplies, the postings on Facebook where people had found toilet paper, artists doing online sharing of their work, companies announcing waivers of payments, or free offerings. In a tiny way, it felt like the way the US “came together” after 9-11, for us old enough to remember that.

But as is almost inevitable here in the US, that is now behind us as the virus has become politicized. Of course, that isn’t true for everyone, but the drive to “reopen the economy”, while our numbers of cases and death continue to climb, and the extreme right’s demand for their “freedom” has pushed science and fact-based decision making to the sidelines.

And it is frustrating. In some ways, it would be easier had this happened back in 1995 or so, before the proliferation of online media when every idiot with a cell phone wasn’t a potential broadcaster, when a discredited doctor couldn’t make a video filled with disinformation and it just goes viral, when I didn’t know how awful people were being in some other state. However, that means we wouldn’t know each other either, you and I.

For those who are wondering, my own life is going pretty well. I have developed a routine, and my natural introversion and homebody ways are doing OK with this. I go for long walks each day with the kid, I am getting home projects done, and our family eats together every day. My income is varied enough that I am OK – at least for a while – economically, and no one in my inner circle has gotten sick.

But just because I am not sick does not mean I am OK. None of us are OK, and I wish we were at a place as a country where we could deal with that.  But until that happens, I will just look for the beauty where I can find it.

Five beautiful things

• The Amplifier project has dozens of high resolution justice oriented posters made by a variety of artists, some very well-known such as Shepard Fairey (of the Obama Hope icon) available for free download. (We have three of them framed in our dining room).
• This is perhaps the most beautiful essay I have read about living in the world right now.
• This short animation is astoundingly beautiful: The Story of Flowers
• A drone disguised as a hummingbird gets an, uhhhm, bird’s eye view of a monarch butterfly swarm and it is literally breath-stopping.
• Many of us are making more bread these days, but this baker made theirs beautiful as well.