[This post is from a series written during the first days of the COVID crisis.]
What are we going to do about everything?
Some (many) are out of work. Some live with the fear of a first responder never coming home at night. Some are sitting at home doing nothing.
What does it take to walk in someone else’s shoes, when it is so hard to find your own?
We live in peace. We live in fear.
We navigate the surreal and try to provide a buffer for our children.
It’s a quiet assault on our perspective—with sudden janglement—like the attack of some predator.
Time will tell, but, as Jeff Goldblum says in Jurassic Park: The Lost World, “Oh, yeah. ‘Oooh, ahhh,’ that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming.”
Will it get worse. And what is worse?
Walking Dead worse?
Everything is shouted at you, like some 1930’s headline.
Leaders bluster and complain like some three-year-old unhappy that the birthday cake has been taken away.
Other leaders (successfully) talk to us like kindergarteners. Is this the best we can expect?
In between are the dispatches from the front: the exhausted health care worker, the worried doctor, the parking lot penguins clumsily moving on land in protective gear to gently administer nose swabs.
Will a toilet paper fort solve anything?
Is there such a thing as having too many puzzles?
The puzzle of this pandemic will be broken into many pieces, and from those pieces, a solution will arise.
But when.