The Next Phase

This virus ain't goin' away
My guess it's here to stay
All we can do is cope
Living with it day by day

Here's the deal: Wearing masks, avoiding crowds, staying a safe distance apart is how our lives will be lived going forward well into the future. It no longer is reasonable to hope for a return to "normal." Because this way of conducting our affairs is what's normal now.

A huge question looming over us is how will we continue to connect with each other? How do we continue our relationships when we can't see friends in person?

I'm not the answer guy; I'm the not sure guy. All I can speak of is what's happening in my own social life. Friends are calling, friends are emailing, friends are texting or posting comments on this Facebook feed. Sometimes they drop by, masked, and stay for a chat.

I'm reaching out to many people, seeking to renew acquaintances that had languished. It is wonderful to reconnect, especially when the silence between us is marked by years.

It's never too late to renew a friendship as long as you are both still alive. I don't know what happens after people die -- I'm not sure about that.

As time passes, so do friends.

In February I lost one, not to Covid-19 but to cancer. We had worked closely together on a  daily basis for seven years after sharing the loss of a mutual friend to cancer in 2013.

We were both there at his side in his final days. Then she and I found some comfort in being in touch every day, producing the stories our friend would have loved.

When I was very ill myself last fall, she came to my house with another friend and visited with me. She wanted to help take care of me in case I wouldn't be getting better. We didn't know then. Soon after, I learned the horrible news that she was herself very ill and we started corresponding weekly by email.

My plan was to visit her as soon as I was well enough. I assumed she would get better. But that never happened. She just got worse and worse and then she died. As for me I got better and lived on.

What stays with me is that I never got to tell her goodbye.

***

Another old friend tracked me down yesterday after a gap of years. She was a colleague at Wired twenty-five years ago, a beautiful soul who is as spiritual as anyone I know, though I don't think she practices any specific religion.

As my second marriage broke up, I was broken up, and she took over to  help me find a flat where I could live on my own and have my youngest children with me three nights a week. I put in a bunkbed for the boys and a single bed for my daughter. They were 9, 7 and 5 that year, which was 2003.

I got good at doing laundry, making school lunches, and cooking big dinners.

My friend got to know the kids and she also attended my oldest daughter's wedding a few years later. She got to know my girlfriends as they came and went from my life; we'd often have brunch in the Mission.

We worked together professionally on an especially creative project with mutual friends and made sure we stayed in touch the best we could as the years began to pass.

Now we are finally back together; maybe we'll find a project to work on again, and I'm so happy she is back, present in my life. I love her.

***

Just connect. That's what we need to do. If there is one enduring motive behind my words in these essays it is about human connection through time and under strain. We're living this pandemic; it's not going away. It's here to stay. All we can do is cope and live it day by day.

Part of that connecting with each other now is to recognize and support those marching for justice. We are at a critical juncture in that regard. Last night, I watched some of the documentary "1968" about the tumultuous events of the year I reached voting age. It was 1968 when a group of us went to Memphis to cover the sanitation workers' strike just before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed there. It was 1968 when Bobby Kennedy was killed. It was 1968 when campuses and cities erupted in violence at the pent-up frustration about the slow pace of progress on civil rights and the lack of an end to the war in Vietnam.

It feels like we have reached another such turning point in 2020. It's taken over half a century to get back to the place we were then. Will this time turn out differently?

This time around, there are more people in the streets, most of them young. Three generations of youths have come and gone since 1968. Many struggle to stay true to their youthful ideals in a society that features the greatest inequality of wealth in history.

Millionaires are a dime a dozen; billionaires are everywhere. Thanks to the Supreme Court's horrible decision, Citizen's United, these richest people can buy elections if they wish to. Forget the Russians, Ukrainians, and Chinese -- look at the guy at the top of the hill.

It's no accident that in a time of unchecked wealth for a few and widespread misery for the many, we end up not with true leaders but money-grubbing, narcissistic snake-oil peddlers holding high office. There isn't a single major politician today who deserves a statue.

As the torn bits of our dreams float away with the wind, the only fitting memorial to these imposters is to spit in their eye.

Still, if we stop hoping and dreaming and demanding change, it will stay like this forever. Balzac said  "behind every great fortune lies a great crime." He got that right.

Let's prosecute those crimes and throw the snake-oil salesmen out of office.  And let's not let go of our dreams.

"You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one

I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one"

-- John Lennon

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