[NOTE: The serialized memoir called "The Day Everything Stopped" will continue after a short break.]
It's back to the present tense today after a week where my recollections of the early days of the pandemic suddenly took over my writing impulse completely. Maybe the seemingly sudden end of the Covid crisis led to my obsession with how it all began.
In both fiction and nonfiction, you often discover you can't really begin a story properly until you know how it ends. That's why so many murder mysteries start with the body of the victim. Knowing how the story ends makes everything leading up to that conclusion a quest for logic, for meaning.
For everyone's sake, you want it all to make sense. That's what I'm trying to do with the pandemic and also with my life story.
It feels like I've been asleep for the past 15 months or so, but now I'm awake, I'm wondering whether things really happened as I remember or whether it was all just a dream.
***
Friday started out with my daughter Julia's graduation from Goucher College in Maryland. The president of the college in his commencement remarks cited Bureau of Labor Statistics data predicting that the class of '21 will have an average of 11 different jobs during their careers. Starting now.
Also at the ceremony, the mayor of Baltimore noted that the graduates are entering a world where racism, poverty, gun violence, and other severe problems await new leaders to propose new solutions.
Indeed. And we need to be hopeful for their sake and ours as we welcome the next generation of 22-year-olds to the struggle to make our only partially democratic society much more equitable, peaceful and inclusive.
Their work is cut out for them. That is a cliche and it is true. At least eleven jobs each -- that's what it will take to reach retirement, the experts believe. Personally, I hope Julia can retire a half-century from now knowing she did her best to make this a better world to the best of her ability.
But for now she stands where I did in May 1969. Did I do everything I could have done to make the world a better place?
Not by any measure. Like most people my most idealistic self struggled over and over with my pragmatic self, and sometimes pragmatism won out. I can rationalize that as well as the next guy, but the universal battle seems to be how to balance self-realization with loftier work on behalf of everybody else.
***
The news:
* The mess in Maricopa -- Votes are still being counted in Arizona. It won’t change the winner. But it might change America. (WP)
* The Justice Department under President Donald Trump secretly obtained the phone and email records of CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, Barbara Starr, according to that news network and a Justice Department spokesman, again illustrating how the previous administration was willing to seek journalists’ data to investigate disclosures of information it preferred to remain secret. (CNN)
* First They Fought the Virus. Now They Battle the Medical Bills. -- Insurers and Congress wrote rules to protect coronavirus patients, but the bills came anyway, leaving some mired in debt. (NYT)
* After more than a year of separation and isolation, Americans are reuniting. (WP)
* Even Amid a Pandemic, More Than 40 Million People Fled Their Homes -- Storms, floods, wildfires and to a lesser degree, conflict, uprooted millions globally in 2020 — the largest human displacement in more than a decade. (NYT)
* A highly contagious disease originating far from America’s shores triggers deadly outbreaks that spread rapidly, infecting the masses. Shots are available, but a divided public agonizes over getting jabbed. Sound familiar? Newly digitized records — including a minister’s diary scanned and posted online by Boston’s Congregational Library and Archives — are shedding fresh light on devastating outbreaks of smallpox that hit the city in the 1700s. And three centuries later, the parallels with the coronavirus pandemic are uncanny. (AP)
* Arizona's secretary of state told Maricopa County officials that hundreds of vote-tabulating machines should no longer be used because of their handling by the "amateur, uncertified" company hired by state Senate Republicans to recount ballots cast in November's presidential election. Cyber Ninjas broke the "chain of custody" for machine possession, Katie Hobbs said. [HuffPost]
* China is tightening its grip on the global supply of processed manganese, rattling a range of companies world-wide that depend on the versatile metal—including the planet’s biggest electric vehicle makers. (WSJ)
* Europe regulator sees first flying taxis in 2024 or 2025 (Reuters)
* After signing two bills into law targeting transgender people over the past week, Tennessee’s Gov. Bill Lee has approved legislation that bans gender-confirming treatment for young minors despite objections that the series of bills unfairly discriminate against an already vulnerable population. Tennessee becomes the second state to enact such a ban, after Arkansas.[AP]
* As fragile cease-fire holds, eyes turn to suffering in Gaza and Netanyahu’s political future -- Hard-right Israeli politicians lambasted the agreement ending 11 days of violence and Hamas warned of hands “on the trigger” amid a dire humanitarian situation in Gaza. (WP)
* In climate push, G7 agrees to stop international funding for coal (Reuters)
* A massive slab of ice, nearly six times the size of New York City, has broken off of an ice shelf in Antarctica, creating what is now the largest iceberg in the world, scientists recently announced. Christopher Readinger, the lead analyst for the USNIC’s Antarctic team, said the break was “not unexpected ... but it did come out of the blue, sort of.” [HuffPost]
* Europe regulator sees first flying taxis in 2024 or 2025 (Reuters)
* How Violent Cops Stay in Law Enforcement (New Yorker)
* A recent law unsealed police misconduct and use-of-force files in California. A new podcast, “On Our Watch,” from NPR and KQED, digs into the files and explores how the opaque system of police accountability works in the state. (California Today)
* Could humans really destroy all life on Earth? Studies have shown that for most species, evolutionary adaptation is not expected to be sufficiently rapid to buffer the effects of environmental changes being wrought by human activity. And our own species will be no exception to this. (BBC)
* Iconic Mint-Condition 1933 Babe Ruth Baseball Is Expected To Shatter Auction Records -- Auctioneers hope it will sell for over $5.2 million, part of a sports collection that could fetch $20 million for the heirs of a man whose mom threw out his first baseball cards. He never got over it. (NPR)
* Historians Discover Thomas Jefferson May Have Secretly Fathered Multiple Other Countries (The Onion)
***
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