Beads 5/172020 to 5/23/2020
In lockdown I have begun a discipline of capturing pull quotes from articles I have read through through the week and wondering how they might string together. The beads/quotes I gathered from nine articles pose a significant challenge. If you would like to know where the beads came from you can read the footnotes on my blog https://rexmcdaniel.net/millers-outposts
“Informed by science and attention to the facts, the coronavirus emergency has forced us to make sacrifices for the common good. Inside those sacrifices are real pain, real loss and real loneliness.” (1) “Our collective psyche is under unprecedented siege and will be for some time.” (2) We are alone but there is togetherness — if only in the fact that we are all laboring under the same condition, which is the frailty and uncertainty of being human (3) “If there is a silver lining, we’ll have to work hard to find it. (4) “Human beings want to feel that they are on a power walk into the future, when in fact we are always just tapping our canes on the pavement in the fog.” (5) Can we keep tapping and not follow those who have “retreated into cynicism.” (6) We could, after all, “we’re the only creature who can decide not to do something we’re capable of doing. That’s our superpower, even if we exercise it too rarely. (7) There is “a moment when you can change the trajectory of a life. This can be that moment.” (8) “..the identity that grows up in the shadow of the plague can have the humanity of shared vulnerability, the humility that comes with an understanding of the precariousness of life and a fierce solidarity that emerges during a long struggle against an invading force. (9)
(1) Cate Blanchette, in an article in the NY Times about the power and purpose of art to help us experience life from the perspective of someone far distant from us in time, space and/or values.
(2) Jonathan Sherin, Director of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health writing then LA Times about the effort to treat the follow on epidemic of mental health disease.
http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=5ebdaff1-4983-42eb-84b9-d96d6467abe2
(3) David Ulin expressing the paradoxical discovery of authors that the more particularities of an experience are brought to the surface the more universal the experience proves to be.
http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=8a4b4d9f-a4c0-434c-ba85-98fc055fee1d
(4) Farhad Manjoo brought this line as if this case were exceptional. But it isn’t. Kate and I have grown more and more acquainted with details along the way in our morning walk. As we leave our home, for roughly the first quarter of the walk we lose altitude, we descend. From the “low point” there are ups and downs but it is uphill from there all the way home. In any story the protagonist must always work to return home from the low point.
(5) Mark Lilla brooks no nonsense. His metaphor, “tapping our cane in the fog” merits keeping at hand. We so want things to be easy and clear.
We Want to Know the Future of the Coronavirus. Too Bad.
(6) Gale Holland wrote the obituary in the L A Times for Larry Aubry, “the voice of Black LA” Aubry’s strength - although his efforts to see freedom and justice for Black people in Los Angeles often met demoralizing resistance and consistent setback he never retreated in to cynicism - humbles me.
http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=67467d73-1b0f-4f0e-b2c3-2cff93c16bb1
(7) Bill McKibben, climate change activist brings this powerful insight about what our super power is, in spite of the fact that we “are tapping on the pavement in the fog” as Lilla asserts. We can not do things. We can chose like Larry Aubry to become better not bitter.
https://cac.org/the-possibility-of-restraint-2020-05-22/
(8) Nita Lelyveld interviewed former L A County Council member, Zev Yaroslavsky about his course in public service and policy at UCLA this spring. Yaroslavsky has a sense that lives have inflection points...and the trajectory can change. http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=31c1cbe7-237d-41f7-a0bb-5869735117a2
(9) David Brooks picked up the themes of shared vulnerability, humility and possibility in an essay reflecting on Covid 19 as the first enemy to truly invade the United States.