Of all the bizarre turns life can take...
I recognized when I began to write this that at any time this scourge could have a direct personal impact, such that my wry sense of humor would fail me and I would need to cease and desist for a period of time. Or that I could suddenly become ill and pass away myself, making further posts a moot point.
But it never occurred to me in any vivid way that the reason to halt my flow of words might be something other than the current worldwide plague. At the same time, I was cognizant of the stark reality that there are many other things to worry about, and many other ways for people to leave this world, and they do not dry up and step aside waiting for COVID-19 to pass. You know these things as background information, but they don't seem real until something happens.
Just a couple of hours ago we learned that a very close friend of hours had gone out for a walk this morning, and never returned. I won't go into the circumstances, to the extent we even know them - we are just too devastated for me to make an essay out of it. I might venture to say that being confined or constrained in the way we all are may have effects well beyond what we might imagine. Whatever the ultimate truth may be, a loss is a loss.
Our friend was a social center of our lives for almost two decades, and will be missed in more ways than I can begin to state.
Everyone stay safe, and do not let our present, temporary condition make you less vigilant of life in its infinitely varied hazards and vicissitudes.
I had already put together a couple of other posts, featuring my irreverent wit, when we got the news. They can wait for a more appropriate time. I will let you know if and when I resume.
Friday, March 27, 2020
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
Not Remotely Like School
Well, it's Day 3 of "Remote Learning", and I have learned a lot. Or at least confirmed a lot that I suspected before.
I taught college courses for 16 years, and sometimes made liberal use of electronic tools like Blackboard. I occasionally had the pleasure of online tutorials in the context of my day job in computers. I thought I had a pretty good feel for what technology could and couldn't do as a substitute for the classroom.
I thought it could provide an integrated bunch of tools for linguistic interaction, and visual observation, without the important social interaction that makes education what it has been since at least Plato and Aristotle. I still think it can, but it has a long way to go. I also think I underestimated the importance of what it doesn't and will never do.
Of course, you can present videos; we knew that. There are a zillion of them on YouTube, on everything from how to cut a dado joint to how to play a scale on a sousaphone. I saw one yesterday on how to clean N95 masks for re-use. No idea of the person's credentials, but he spent about 15 minutes explaining that you could soak them in alcohol or diluted bleach and dry them quickly. Which is to say, you can do a 15 minute educational video whose basic content is the equivalent of a 12-word sentence that most people could have figured out by themselves. That doesn't mean there aren't some that are much more useful. I don't actually know how to play the sousaphone, so if I happened to find myself in possession of one a video might be just the thing.
Schools are closed in NYC until at least the end of April, and the way the epidemic is going I'm not sure I believe kids are going back to the classroom by the end of April, as the Mayor and the Department of Education aver. Google Classroom is the virtual substitute, and I have to hand it to the DOE, the staff and the teachers: they have made a Herculean effort to do something better than give the kids an extended spring vacation. They had to identify software, train the teachers to use it, provide the technical means to access it for those who did not have it (or have enough of it - what do you do when there are several school age children in the house?), create accounts for all the teachers and children for each of the online tools they would need, come up with a curriculum and schedule, write dozens of emails to keep parents informed, and a lot more.
It might not be totally unfair to point out that DOE could have been better prepared for a situation like this. They might have created an online learning environment that could be more seamlessly switched on in the event of school closings. But they were hardly the only ones caught unawares by this situation; the entire society has been caught napping about a threat that has happened before, even though we have been warned that it could happen again. Of course, this is hardly the only reason schools might be closed; natural and manmade disasters come in many forms. But we have spent billions protecting ourselves against terrorism, which never has claimed, or possibly could, the number of lives a serious pandemic can, while cutting funding for health care and education. So why should DOE be better prepared than the rest of our society?
It is heroic that they got this together, and certainly not a wasted effort. As parents, we appreciate almost any amount of structure that we don't have to provide ourselves. That is mainly because children have a natural instinct to treat structures created by non-parents as far more critical to their well-being than those created by parents. I don't know how Leopold Mozart managed with little Wolfgang, but trying to give my daughter piano lessons was a losing proposition; we finally signed her up with a piano teacher. I suspect the only sustainable home schooling method is terror, which I am not personally capable of, except occasionally.
In other words, I am happy for the school to provide a structure. But it was a hundred times easier, and took a lot less of my time, to tell my daughter "Do these five pages from your math book" and things like that a few times a day, check the work, and call it "home schooling", before "Remote Learning" began.
Google "classroom" is not really even an online classroom, much less a substitute for a real one. It is a space to create accounts for different teachers and allow them to post assignments. This is by design: according to Google, "Classroom helps students and teachers organize assignments, boost collaboration, and foster better communication." That's not even a virtual "classroom" but a visual organizer for links. Aside from that, it is not even remotely, or virtually, or in any sense at all, an environment that young kids can interact with on their own.
It is not just that even on a good sized laptop, many if not most of the text, both native and embedded in other links, is so small that students don't even bother to read it. Nor that to be useful, every assignment contains a variety of links, icons, buttons, images and video links that students just will not read thoroughly. That is enough to derail this as a learning environment for young kids, but the difficulties go well beyond that.
To take one example: videos can be run from Google Classroom, technically; but they are not, in our case, because that requires students accessing the teacher's Google Drive account, which according to the teacher posed security and communication issues. So they have to be run from YouTube, which requires the following sequence of actions, putatively by the student:
I created Toolbar links for the five or six web sites the children are told to utilize; still, navigating to them while keeping the Google Classroom page visible requires opening a new browser tab, something even I forget to do, and entering passwords, all different - none of them have a "make password visible" option, so plenty of opportunity for children to make errors and get frustrated before they even get access to the site. Then they have to follow the specific navigation for each site in order to get to the assignment.
Marking assignments as completed looks as easy as clicking a button in Google Classroom. But half the time we clicked the button the assignments were still marked as not completed. Is it a Google bug? It seems rather to be a design issue, which is resolved by learning even more navigation tricks.
My daughter reports to me that she is "done" with an assignment. It is five minutes since she started it. I have to go through the entire 30 page Powerpoint presentation myself, and I notice that it specifies activities she is supposed to do around the house, which she has overlooked. I might say "conveniently" overlooked, but I am not sure about that; these endlessly varied text-based online instructions are just not the kind of thing children have the attention-span for.
Google Classroom presents several tabs and views, and assignments are visible in more than one of them; but some contain a confusing sequence of assignments interlaced with student and teacher comments, and others have just assignments, but they either have every assignment that has been posted, or just the ones that are upcoming. To get to a particular view requires clicking one of several types of tabs or links.
When I used to manage computer applications, the programmers working on the project would sometimes come up with ingenious ideas for features that could give the users more options or flexibility. Often I had to reluctantly ask them not to do it, or even to remove them. (Getting programmers to do just what the specification say can be a little like trying to keep marbles on a glass coffee table - though in all fairness, there are times when the motto "be careful what you ask for, you might get it" applies especially well to system designs.) More options and features offer more ways for users to get confused, and to produce results that they do not understand. You have to judge the level of the typical user before you add features. The level of my six-year-old is amazing; for example, without any help, she can locate and play YouTube videos that seem specifically intended to drive parents nuts. But even I have trouble navigating the features of Google Classroom.
Let's say my daughter doesn't understand how to complete an assignment, and I can't explain how to do it myself. She can communicate with the teacher by typing into a message box. She might well explain her difficulty in passable typed English by the time the schedule says to be doing something else. I had better email the teacher instead.
Yesterday she was supposed to do a search for "blends and digraphs". Those are not terms I learned when I went to school ("diphthong" yes, "digraph" no, "blend" I just looked up - "brunch" is a blend, get it?) Presumably the terms were explained in a video, if not before the schools were closed. But here's where you begin to appreciate what cannot be done in a video: the student raising a hand to ask a question, or the teacher seeing the puzzled look on children's faces and trying again, or walking around the room to see how kids are doing, or adding reminders of key points at an appropriate time. For young children, the option of typing a question in a box is a klunky substitute if it is a substitute at all.
A completely interactive online classroom would help to some extent. It is not practical unless DOE can guarantee that each student in each family has not only the device to access the instruction at the time the teachers are online, but the space not to interfere with each other, so that three schoolchildren in a household not only have their own devices but either their own rooms, or their own headphones with built-in microphones. This is a tall order, and it would not solve most of the problems. My daughter says again and again, "I'm done". But the teacher is not there to check that, and only a few of the assignments are online or uploaded. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, so I can generally check my daughter's 1st grade work. (I can even look up "diagraph" if I have to.) But I don't know if all the Spanish-speaking or Mandarin-speaking households of my daughter's classmates have someone who can. And it is not how school is supposed to work: one teacher is supposed to guide a group of children to roughly the same level of learning, or to at least a common denominator, not 30 parents in isolation with their kids.
Not to mention that if my daughter fails to read some of the small print, or thinks she has completed an attendance form but forgets to submit it , or fails to go back to complete one of the multiple forms posted for a single assignment, she will be marked as having failed to complete her work. The fact is that virtually every assignment so far has required parental intervention of one sort or another. This is classroom for student-parent units, not for students. But many parents are supposed to be working from home at this time. How is that supposed to be practical?
This is to say nothing of the fact that an online environment can't possibly replace organized physical activities like songs and dances and gym and performances and the like. Or the enforced addition to screen time for children who strongly gravitate to online entertainment when they are not doing structured educational activities.
The best part of the day is a 30-minute video conference the teacher runs during what is supposed to be lunch hour. The kids seem to love it. Not much teaching goes on, but it's like one big Facetime playdate. Only, consider the risks: the computer's camera is on, looking into all the students' homes. It may be that not every household member is informed of the session, and people breeze by in whatever they happen to be wearing as they "shelter in place". It may be that adults don't realize they are in earshot and say inappropriate things. It may be, as happened yesterday, that a student forgets to hang up the call, and the computer is sitting there in webcam mode as life in the household goes on, oblivious to being propagated into other households. Illegal activities piped onto children's video screens courtesy of a DOE-sponsored video chat? I'm waiting to see how long this lasts before the liabilities begin to pile up.
"Remote Learning", "Online Education", "Virtual Classroom" - these are promising phrases whose content, I think, is not completely vacuous only because they occur in the context of a society where real learning environments are the norm. They are better than nothing for filling in cracks and crevices and providing short term alternatives which, for young children at least, require enormous amounts of parental support.
Hurray for DOE for coming together with something to provide a semblance of a virtual learning environment on short notice. And hurray for Aristotle's Lyceum, where classes on scientific and philosophical topics were held in the context of a devotion to physical and social development of the individual. I visited what remains of the Lyceum (not much) on a trip to Greece just a few months ago, and was overcome with emotion at the thought: I am standing by a bit of soil and a few old stones where Aristotle once stood, presenting to his students the views that would guide Western science and education for nearly 2000 years.
As we weather the current crisis, we may come out of it appreciating more than ever the value of that DOE real estate, those bricks and mortar, and not overestimate what can be done without them. And that might even help us with the resolve to improve our readiness for virulent bugs so that it doesn't have to come to virtual learning again.
I taught college courses for 16 years, and sometimes made liberal use of electronic tools like Blackboard. I occasionally had the pleasure of online tutorials in the context of my day job in computers. I thought I had a pretty good feel for what technology could and couldn't do as a substitute for the classroom.
I thought it could provide an integrated bunch of tools for linguistic interaction, and visual observation, without the important social interaction that makes education what it has been since at least Plato and Aristotle. I still think it can, but it has a long way to go. I also think I underestimated the importance of what it doesn't and will never do.
Of course, you can present videos; we knew that. There are a zillion of them on YouTube, on everything from how to cut a dado joint to how to play a scale on a sousaphone. I saw one yesterday on how to clean N95 masks for re-use. No idea of the person's credentials, but he spent about 15 minutes explaining that you could soak them in alcohol or diluted bleach and dry them quickly. Which is to say, you can do a 15 minute educational video whose basic content is the equivalent of a 12-word sentence that most people could have figured out by themselves. That doesn't mean there aren't some that are much more useful. I don't actually know how to play the sousaphone, so if I happened to find myself in possession of one a video might be just the thing.
Schools are closed in NYC until at least the end of April, and the way the epidemic is going I'm not sure I believe kids are going back to the classroom by the end of April, as the Mayor and the Department of Education aver. Google Classroom is the virtual substitute, and I have to hand it to the DOE, the staff and the teachers: they have made a Herculean effort to do something better than give the kids an extended spring vacation. They had to identify software, train the teachers to use it, provide the technical means to access it for those who did not have it (or have enough of it - what do you do when there are several school age children in the house?), create accounts for all the teachers and children for each of the online tools they would need, come up with a curriculum and schedule, write dozens of emails to keep parents informed, and a lot more.
It might not be totally unfair to point out that DOE could have been better prepared for a situation like this. They might have created an online learning environment that could be more seamlessly switched on in the event of school closings. But they were hardly the only ones caught unawares by this situation; the entire society has been caught napping about a threat that has happened before, even though we have been warned that it could happen again. Of course, this is hardly the only reason schools might be closed; natural and manmade disasters come in many forms. But we have spent billions protecting ourselves against terrorism, which never has claimed, or possibly could, the number of lives a serious pandemic can, while cutting funding for health care and education. So why should DOE be better prepared than the rest of our society?
It is heroic that they got this together, and certainly not a wasted effort. As parents, we appreciate almost any amount of structure that we don't have to provide ourselves. That is mainly because children have a natural instinct to treat structures created by non-parents as far more critical to their well-being than those created by parents. I don't know how Leopold Mozart managed with little Wolfgang, but trying to give my daughter piano lessons was a losing proposition; we finally signed her up with a piano teacher. I suspect the only sustainable home schooling method is terror, which I am not personally capable of, except occasionally.
In other words, I am happy for the school to provide a structure. But it was a hundred times easier, and took a lot less of my time, to tell my daughter "Do these five pages from your math book" and things like that a few times a day, check the work, and call it "home schooling", before "Remote Learning" began.
Google "classroom" is not really even an online classroom, much less a substitute for a real one. It is a space to create accounts for different teachers and allow them to post assignments. This is by design: according to Google, "Classroom helps students and teachers organize assignments, boost collaboration, and foster better communication." That's not even a virtual "classroom" but a visual organizer for links. Aside from that, it is not even remotely, or virtually, or in any sense at all, an environment that young kids can interact with on their own.
It is not just that even on a good sized laptop, many if not most of the text, both native and embedded in other links, is so small that students don't even bother to read it. Nor that to be useful, every assignment contains a variety of links, icons, buttons, images and video links that students just will not read thoroughly. That is enough to derail this as a learning environment for young kids, but the difficulties go well beyond that.
To take one example: videos can be run from Google Classroom, technically; but they are not, in our case, because that requires students accessing the teacher's Google Drive account, which according to the teacher posed security and communication issues. So they have to be run from YouTube, which requires the following sequence of actions, putatively by the student:
- Click on the video
- You then get an error message, "Video unavailable", and a link, "Do you want to run this in YouTube?", which opens YouTube in a new tab.
- Click on the full screen icon or run the video.
- Click on the small screen icon when it's done if you enlarged it.
- Close the new YoutTube tab.
- On the Google screen, click outside the error message box to close the box and display the assignment screen again.
- Navigate back to the page from which the assignment was posted.
I created Toolbar links for the five or six web sites the children are told to utilize; still, navigating to them while keeping the Google Classroom page visible requires opening a new browser tab, something even I forget to do, and entering passwords, all different - none of them have a "make password visible" option, so plenty of opportunity for children to make errors and get frustrated before they even get access to the site. Then they have to follow the specific navigation for each site in order to get to the assignment.
Marking assignments as completed looks as easy as clicking a button in Google Classroom. But half the time we clicked the button the assignments were still marked as not completed. Is it a Google bug? It seems rather to be a design issue, which is resolved by learning even more navigation tricks.
My daughter reports to me that she is "done" with an assignment. It is five minutes since she started it. I have to go through the entire 30 page Powerpoint presentation myself, and I notice that it specifies activities she is supposed to do around the house, which she has overlooked. I might say "conveniently" overlooked, but I am not sure about that; these endlessly varied text-based online instructions are just not the kind of thing children have the attention-span for.
Google Classroom presents several tabs and views, and assignments are visible in more than one of them; but some contain a confusing sequence of assignments interlaced with student and teacher comments, and others have just assignments, but they either have every assignment that has been posted, or just the ones that are upcoming. To get to a particular view requires clicking one of several types of tabs or links.
When I used to manage computer applications, the programmers working on the project would sometimes come up with ingenious ideas for features that could give the users more options or flexibility. Often I had to reluctantly ask them not to do it, or even to remove them. (Getting programmers to do just what the specification say can be a little like trying to keep marbles on a glass coffee table - though in all fairness, there are times when the motto "be careful what you ask for, you might get it" applies especially well to system designs.) More options and features offer more ways for users to get confused, and to produce results that they do not understand. You have to judge the level of the typical user before you add features. The level of my six-year-old is amazing; for example, without any help, she can locate and play YouTube videos that seem specifically intended to drive parents nuts. But even I have trouble navigating the features of Google Classroom.
Let's say my daughter doesn't understand how to complete an assignment, and I can't explain how to do it myself. She can communicate with the teacher by typing into a message box. She might well explain her difficulty in passable typed English by the time the schedule says to be doing something else. I had better email the teacher instead.
Yesterday she was supposed to do a search for "blends and digraphs". Those are not terms I learned when I went to school ("diphthong" yes, "digraph" no, "blend" I just looked up - "brunch" is a blend, get it?) Presumably the terms were explained in a video, if not before the schools were closed. But here's where you begin to appreciate what cannot be done in a video: the student raising a hand to ask a question, or the teacher seeing the puzzled look on children's faces and trying again, or walking around the room to see how kids are doing, or adding reminders of key points at an appropriate time. For young children, the option of typing a question in a box is a klunky substitute if it is a substitute at all.
A completely interactive online classroom would help to some extent. It is not practical unless DOE can guarantee that each student in each family has not only the device to access the instruction at the time the teachers are online, but the space not to interfere with each other, so that three schoolchildren in a household not only have their own devices but either their own rooms, or their own headphones with built-in microphones. This is a tall order, and it would not solve most of the problems. My daughter says again and again, "I'm done". But the teacher is not there to check that, and only a few of the assignments are online or uploaded. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, so I can generally check my daughter's 1st grade work. (I can even look up "diagraph" if I have to.) But I don't know if all the Spanish-speaking or Mandarin-speaking households of my daughter's classmates have someone who can. And it is not how school is supposed to work: one teacher is supposed to guide a group of children to roughly the same level of learning, or to at least a common denominator, not 30 parents in isolation with their kids.
Not to mention that if my daughter fails to read some of the small print, or thinks she has completed an attendance form but forgets to submit it , or fails to go back to complete one of the multiple forms posted for a single assignment, she will be marked as having failed to complete her work. The fact is that virtually every assignment so far has required parental intervention of one sort or another. This is classroom for student-parent units, not for students. But many parents are supposed to be working from home at this time. How is that supposed to be practical?
This is to say nothing of the fact that an online environment can't possibly replace organized physical activities like songs and dances and gym and performances and the like. Or the enforced addition to screen time for children who strongly gravitate to online entertainment when they are not doing structured educational activities.
The best part of the day is a 30-minute video conference the teacher runs during what is supposed to be lunch hour. The kids seem to love it. Not much teaching goes on, but it's like one big Facetime playdate. Only, consider the risks: the computer's camera is on, looking into all the students' homes. It may be that not every household member is informed of the session, and people breeze by in whatever they happen to be wearing as they "shelter in place". It may be that adults don't realize they are in earshot and say inappropriate things. It may be, as happened yesterday, that a student forgets to hang up the call, and the computer is sitting there in webcam mode as life in the household goes on, oblivious to being propagated into other households. Illegal activities piped onto children's video screens courtesy of a DOE-sponsored video chat? I'm waiting to see how long this lasts before the liabilities begin to pile up.
"Remote Learning", "Online Education", "Virtual Classroom" - these are promising phrases whose content, I think, is not completely vacuous only because they occur in the context of a society where real learning environments are the norm. They are better than nothing for filling in cracks and crevices and providing short term alternatives which, for young children at least, require enormous amounts of parental support.
Hurray for DOE for coming together with something to provide a semblance of a virtual learning environment on short notice. And hurray for Aristotle's Lyceum, where classes on scientific and philosophical topics were held in the context of a devotion to physical and social development of the individual. I visited what remains of the Lyceum (not much) on a trip to Greece just a few months ago, and was overcome with emotion at the thought: I am standing by a bit of soil and a few old stones where Aristotle once stood, presenting to his students the views that would guide Western science and education for nearly 2000 years.
As we weather the current crisis, we may come out of it appreciating more than ever the value of that DOE real estate, those bricks and mortar, and not overestimate what can be done without them. And that might even help us with the resolve to improve our readiness for virulent bugs so that it doesn't have to come to virtual learning again.
Monday, March 23, 2020
What and Who Will Run Out When?
Okay, we got the memo: you should have 2 weeks of groceries on hand to survive a shelter-in-place situation. We have about 2 weeks worth of rice and pasta. and enough tomato sauce to guarantee freedom from prostate cancer and lots of acid indigestion.
But as I look into it, the question is, what is going to convince me that I need to make a death-defying trip to a supermarket? Or will I have to do that at all? See below.
Having considered the situation from a rational point of view, here in something like order of priority are the things I expect to tip the scale toward some sort of purchasing action:
1. Chocolate: Dark, mainly, though my daughter prefers white chocolate, which I don't really think of as chocolate. On a recent trip to Costa Rica we took a tour of a farm that grows cocoa beans, among other things, and heard about the ancient uses of chocolate as an antibiotic, along with other healthy properties. Now, antibiotics don't do a damn thing against viruses. But they do help with other illnesses that might cause symptoms that make you think you have the Novel Coronavirus, which may then cause you to die of heart failure. And chocolate has been shown to lower your blood pressure, which somehow seems like a thing to do when you are unable to see your mother-in-law, your ex-wife, or... hold on, maybe I could live without the chocolate a little longer? Nah. Anyway, I think it works out to about one degree of BP per ounce, consumed daily, so in order to have a really significant impact I would need more chocolate than I have room to store. But that's just a detail. So chocolate is #1 priority, on purely rational grounds.
2. Bananas: An accompaniment to my breakfast cereal or key ingredient of smoothies for years, until the last one on hand was consumed a few days ago. Nature, that unrepentant drug doser, has secretly suffused them with vitamin B9, which causes the body to release seratonin, the so-called "feel-good" hormone, which relieves stress. Why would I have any stress? Now that my daughter has started Online Learning all my stress from last week is gone. Instead, I am getting lots of exercise, running back and forth between what I have to do and my daughter's computer, with the million things she is supposed to log in to, click on, open, close, type, draw and upload, none of which is particularly intuitive. Nevertheless, a shot of seratonin in the morning seems warranted. And maybe a bucket of it by evening.
3. Almond butter: At some point in the history of evolution, trees stop providing almonds at reasonable prices, and started charging farmers $3 per almond, so that they started charging distributors $6 per almond, who in turn charged grocers $12 per almond, who then decided to charge consumers $237 for a jar of almond butter. Double that for organic. This problem is partly mitigated by Trader Joe's, the Ikea of food: by putting their own name on the label instead of, say, Once Again, they have managed to reduce the price to a mere $53. (Apparently the late, lamented Joe found a way to use cheaper ink to print his brand name. If you prefer the organic ink, please buy Once Again.) But that depends on getting to Trader Joe's. So running out of almond butter is a financial disaster. Nevertheless, since I don't eat peanut butter, this is a key source of protein, which I need in order to convince my body that this is a normal life. So it will have to be replaced sooner or later.
4. Desserts and snacks: We're talking cookies. Pie, pastries, cupcakes, scones, hamentashen. Things from the bakery that I am terrified to eat because someone may have touched them, or coughed on them, or at least looked at them. And that's before the Novel Coronavirus. Now I can't even imagine touching the box they're packed in. Wait. Take a Clorox wipe to the box, wash your hands, and then put it on the counter and let it sit there for two days without going within six feet of it. After that, dig in, because they are supposed to expire after 2 days (the viruses, not the pastries). Of course, this requires dropping any concerns about eating dead viruses. I think I am willing to do that for the sake of my pastries, which either release endorphins in unparalleled quantities, or do such a good job of making me believe they do that I am willing to suspend my disbelief and indulge.
5. Bread: Some days I feel like all I have really eaten all day, when you add it all up, is bread, milk and tomatoes, in 17 different forms, which I convince myself really constitute a balanced diet. You throw a piece of lettuce on a sandwich and call it a day. Bread is what they call a staple food, which means a lot of people eat it. Which means chips and salsa are also a staple food, but people are more likely to venture out into the field for bread than for chips and salsa. Maybe.
6. Alcohol: Beer was officially a staple food in England in the 19th century; that's why they have rollicking folk songs about pub owners who illegally water down the beer. Scotch is a staple food among university professors. Wine is a staple food among some of my friends - the ones who don't prefer beer or scotch. Rum is a staple food among sailors - I think, though I don't actually know any sailors. More importantly, a recent study found that between 1 and 13 drinks a week lowers your probability of developing dementia. Since my probability of developing dementia is increasing as the quasi-lockdown goes on, I am strongly inclined to keep my drinking within the prescribed limits. Maybe closer to the upper limit, in case that helps. In short, whoever you are, other than a teetotaler, alcohol is not a good thing to run out of at a time like this.
Stand on line, or shop online? That's the big question. The last time I went out to a supermarket, frankly, I was sorry I did not stay home and go hungry, there were so many people crowding the aisles and checkout counters. The next day I saw a PeaPod truck on my block, apparently carrying groceries for delivery. What the hell is PeaPod? It is Stop and Shop's home delivery service. Shoprite has one too, and both of those supermarket chains, in case you didn't know, have fairly extensive lines of house brand all-natural and/or organic foods, at well below the prices of organic brand-names at either health food stores or supermarkets.
Another thing you probably didn't know: you can get plenty of Trader Joe's products on Amazon. (Just search for "Trader Joe's" in the search bar.) But don't expect the prices to be what you pay in the stores, because the products are sold by resellers, who often charge a substantial markup. So - sadly - that $7.99 jar of TJ's almond butter is $17.99 on Amazon, which is too close to $237 for my budget.
Anyway, the lists below are a good way to get started with online or telephone delivery options for groceries in NYC. (Most of the information below also applies to other locations.)
Now, before we go there, one last thing, I know some of my Bay Ridge neighbors will be inclined to suggest that supporting my local supermarkets, some of which also deliver, is better than sending people to Amazon or Shoprite. In my opinion, these supermarkets are an unconscionable ripoff, every single one of them, and if they all went out of business I'd need method acting lessons to shed a tear - except for the hardworking people to whom they pay oppressively low wages. I shop at them for what is on sale, which barely brings them down to everyday prices in other stores, and almost never for anything else. There is no product sold by any of them that I cannot get at 20% below their everyday prices (sometimes less than a block away), and most I can get for a lot less than that by going to a few ethnic markets or TJ's. That is a difference of $2000-$3000 a year for a typical family - money that I see some of my neighbors fork over to these super-swindlers as they load up their baskets with overpriced goods. Real estate costs are lower in Bay Ridge than many other places in Brooklyn, so stores can't complain of higher overhead, but somehow a small local fruit stand or ethnic supermarket can sell the exact same products, often the same brands, for substantially less than a large chain supermarket like Key Food, C-Town or FoodTown. Order from them if you want, but if quarantine means people discover ways to get the same products for less elsewhere, my message to local supermarkets is that they have earned this.
Shop 'till you drop your Internet connection:
Timeout NY: Best ways to Get Your Grocery Delivery in NYC
Mercato: A wide variety of grocery stores that deliver in Brooklyn You can localize the search to whatever city you live in or to specific neighborhoods.
Shoprite: Shoprite From Home
Sunday, March 22, 2020
Rainbows Can't Be Quarantined
This is a reprint from the NY Times - I would link to it but the link starts with a number of other COVID-19 updates from yesterday:
"Even as life slowed and streets emptied, New York City retained a bit of its quirky charm.
In
Brooklyn, the pandemic has prompted a heaven-sent scavenger hunt.
Children home from school began hanging drawings and paintings of
rainbows in windows. As word spread, an interactive “quarantine rainbow map” sprung up for walking tours.
“A
lovely reminder for all of us that in a storm there is still something
to look forward to,” an organizer wrote. Lovers and dreamers can expand
the rainbow connection map by adding addresses here."
My daughter has just completed her contribution:
After you do it you can click on the "here" link and add your address to the spreadsheet. (I guess it takes a little while to show up. I added ours but it's not on the map yet.)
Here's another article on the project from House Beautiful.
If anyone finds a pot of gold, please share. (The virus can't survive on Leprechauns.)
Germophobes and Germophiles
Am I a germophobe? I didn't think so, but there is some way in which this is not very different.
Before there was anything more than a flu flying around out there, I would wash my hands when I came in. Yes, about 20 seconds, though who was counting or singing "Happy Birthday"? I would grab subway poles at the elbow joint and push revolving doors with my knuckles, assuming I couldn't get some visitor ahead of me to do all the work.
I would gladly shake the hand of a new acquaintance or an old friend I hadn't seen for a while. And discreetly run to the bathroom to wash my hands.
As the waiter was reading out the specials I would gently move my glass of water to the other side of the table, particularly if the selections included things like PoTaToes, or PoT roasT (which I don't even eat). If I failed to move it in time I would ask myself why I didn't bring one of those tablets you use when you're backpacking, to kill the bacteria from beaver poop and the like. Probably I would not drink the water. Or I'd say a prayer when I did.
Work in the basement? Wash hands. Clean up after visitors? Wash hands. Take out the garbage, or bring the cans back from curbside? Wash hands. Put the dirty laundry into the washing machine? Put my hands into the sink next to it. What's so different?
One thing I can think of: now, when I put the laundry in and wash my hands, it's because of the coronavirus, not the stains on the underwear or the smudge of unknown origin on my pants cuff. That all seems like such casual, friendly dirt, who cares anymore? The unseen menace, sitting on a plastic bag, floating in the window on a warm breeze, tracked in on the bottom of my shoes after a trip to the fruit and vegetable store. Wash it! Kill it! Throw everything in the microwave for two minutes! And then wash your hands because you touched the microwave!
I go out for a walk and come back without hands or face coming into contact with another person or physical object. That is now an obvious reason to take a Clorox wipe to the four or five door handles.
Is it possible to be a germophobe in coronaland? Yes! And only the germophobes will survive!
Wipe down the pizza box with a Clorox wipe, because an unpublished research paper says the virus can last for 24 hours on cardboard, and as far as I could tell, the delivery person was still breathing.
I'm touching my keyboard; better wash my hands. In the two hours since I've been up, you never know, it could have come in through the bathroom vent.
Maybe your left hand can contaminate your right hand even when you're doing nothing at all? Better at least wash one of them! But how many hands do you need to wash just one hand? Three, right? Two to wash the hand and the other hand to stay six feet away.
I recall that just before this began, President Trump was being described in the media as a germophobe. Now I understand why he thinks the media is full of fake news. He is obviously nothing of the sort, but rather a germophile, having steadfastly resisted efforts to prevent germs from spreading, except as it supported his efforts to keep racial and religious minorities from entering the country. He has shared microphones without wiping them down, stood within inches of his coterie of germophiles, and played down the risk of contagion while playing up his own vanishingly thin efforts to deal with the crisis.
But he is not, strangely enough, a Germanophile, even though his pure, redblooded American family hearkens from that foreign country. I have to admit that I myself am a bit of a Germanophile. Not just because I have a very good German friend who regularly risks his life to report on things like coronaviruses - and germophile Presidents, and Latin American drug gangs, and the like - but because Germany has ironically become a bastion of democracy and good sense in a wacked-out world full of xenophobic strongmen.
And by no coincidence, Germany has an extremely low death rate from COVID-19: currently less than 100 fatalities out of some 24,000 infections. There is no doubt a reason for this, and it is easy to discover. As stated in Wikipedia:
"According to the Euro health consumer index, which placed it in seventh position in its 2015 survey, Germany has long had the most restriction-free and consumer-oriented healthcare system in Europe. Patients are allowed to seek almost any type of care they wish whenever they want it.[10] The governmental health system in Germany is currently keeping a record reserve of more than €18 billion which makes it one of the healthiest healthcare systems in the world."
Germans, apparently, are not germophiles. And I am just going to venture a guess that they wash their hands fairly often. Not like President Pontius Pilate, but under one of those $400 Grohe faucets, with soap and water.
Before there was anything more than a flu flying around out there, I would wash my hands when I came in. Yes, about 20 seconds, though who was counting or singing "Happy Birthday"? I would grab subway poles at the elbow joint and push revolving doors with my knuckles, assuming I couldn't get some visitor ahead of me to do all the work.
I would gladly shake the hand of a new acquaintance or an old friend I hadn't seen for a while. And discreetly run to the bathroom to wash my hands.
As the waiter was reading out the specials I would gently move my glass of water to the other side of the table, particularly if the selections included things like PoTaToes, or PoT roasT (which I don't even eat). If I failed to move it in time I would ask myself why I didn't bring one of those tablets you use when you're backpacking, to kill the bacteria from beaver poop and the like. Probably I would not drink the water. Or I'd say a prayer when I did.
Work in the basement? Wash hands. Clean up after visitors? Wash hands. Take out the garbage, or bring the cans back from curbside? Wash hands. Put the dirty laundry into the washing machine? Put my hands into the sink next to it. What's so different?
One thing I can think of: now, when I put the laundry in and wash my hands, it's because of the coronavirus, not the stains on the underwear or the smudge of unknown origin on my pants cuff. That all seems like such casual, friendly dirt, who cares anymore? The unseen menace, sitting on a plastic bag, floating in the window on a warm breeze, tracked in on the bottom of my shoes after a trip to the fruit and vegetable store. Wash it! Kill it! Throw everything in the microwave for two minutes! And then wash your hands because you touched the microwave!
I go out for a walk and come back without hands or face coming into contact with another person or physical object. That is now an obvious reason to take a Clorox wipe to the four or five door handles.
Is it possible to be a germophobe in coronaland? Yes! And only the germophobes will survive!
Wipe down the pizza box with a Clorox wipe, because an unpublished research paper says the virus can last for 24 hours on cardboard, and as far as I could tell, the delivery person was still breathing.
I'm touching my keyboard; better wash my hands. In the two hours since I've been up, you never know, it could have come in through the bathroom vent.
Maybe your left hand can contaminate your right hand even when you're doing nothing at all? Better at least wash one of them! But how many hands do you need to wash just one hand? Three, right? Two to wash the hand and the other hand to stay six feet away.
I recall that just before this began, President Trump was being described in the media as a germophobe. Now I understand why he thinks the media is full of fake news. He is obviously nothing of the sort, but rather a germophile, having steadfastly resisted efforts to prevent germs from spreading, except as it supported his efforts to keep racial and religious minorities from entering the country. He has shared microphones without wiping them down, stood within inches of his coterie of germophiles, and played down the risk of contagion while playing up his own vanishingly thin efforts to deal with the crisis.
But he is not, strangely enough, a Germanophile, even though his pure, redblooded American family hearkens from that foreign country. I have to admit that I myself am a bit of a Germanophile. Not just because I have a very good German friend who regularly risks his life to report on things like coronaviruses - and germophile Presidents, and Latin American drug gangs, and the like - but because Germany has ironically become a bastion of democracy and good sense in a wacked-out world full of xenophobic strongmen.
And by no coincidence, Germany has an extremely low death rate from COVID-19: currently less than 100 fatalities out of some 24,000 infections. There is no doubt a reason for this, and it is easy to discover. As stated in Wikipedia:
"According to the Euro health consumer index, which placed it in seventh position in its 2015 survey, Germany has long had the most restriction-free and consumer-oriented healthcare system in Europe. Patients are allowed to seek almost any type of care they wish whenever they want it.[10] The governmental health system in Germany is currently keeping a record reserve of more than €18 billion which makes it one of the healthiest healthcare systems in the world."
Germans, apparently, are not germophiles. And I am just going to venture a guess that they wash their hands fairly often. Not like President Pontius Pilate, but under one of those $400 Grohe faucets, with soap and water.
Worst Press Conference?
I should have used a blog that gives you voting buttons - maybe I'll figure out how to do that.
What I really want to know is: which press conferences, or perpetrators of press conferences, did you find the most unbearable over the last few days? There are really three choices, at least if you live in NYC:
POTUS: The reality t.v. star who frequently seems to be living a different reality from the rest of the world. His press conferences often reflect that, in the form of statements that substitute his own self-appraisals for less reliable things like facts and nearly universal scientific opinion.
GONYSS: That is the son of the former Governor of New York State, a.k.a. the Governor Of New York State. He believes that "words matter", and therefore makes sure that when they are used they always depict him as the friend we didn't know we had in Albany.
MONYC: This moniker applies to the Mayor of not two cities, but one, i.e., the one that almost universally finds him unbearable, but is equally incapable of finding someone who is both more bearable and willing to lead this melting (and damn near melted) pot.
I don't want to belabor this, because if you live in the Big Apple, which is now trying to get rid of the Big Worm, you have seen these Mouth Units holding forth in the past few days, and you have formed your opinion. I just want to know, for example:
- Who makes you hit the Pause button the fastest or slowest?
- Who makes you scream "Shut up!" the loudest or softest?
- Who seems to have the most or least inaccurate view of his own failings, as a mostly preventable situation grew day by day into a human disaster?
- Who seems to be the best at finding scapegoats in (a) the other two, (b) the Chinese, (c) the "novelty of the situation" or (d) previous administrations?
For me, it is no shock that my gag reflex is most easily set off by the sight and sound of POTUS, but I am somewhat surprised that I can tolerate at least a few more minutes of GONYSS than I can of MONYC. I mean, there I was not too long ago ready to tell GONYSS to take the state troopers he stationed in NYC and shove them up his royal gonads, to say nothing of another royal fiasco by the name of MTA, whereas suddenly I'm feeling like he at least makes a little more sense than MONYC, who first moans about shutting down the schools and then stands on a table shouting "Shelter in place! Shelter in place!" Words matter, dimwit; actions matter even more. If you were seriously worried that kids would go hungry if they didn't have the god-awful lunches served in public school cafeterias then the thing to do was take the necessary action to keep kids, parents, teachers and staff apart, and then get the food deliveries ramped up as soon as possible, not the other way around as the epidemic spins out of control.
As for POTUS, there he was in one of his typical press-bashings as he referred to NBC 's Peter Alexander as a "terrible reporter", because Alexander had suggested that Americans are "scared". Alexander was right, of course, he just had the wrong object of terror. Most Americans are not exactly "scared" of the virus - a dozen other words make more sense than that. What we are really "scared" of is being in a situation where sensible people are begging Donald Trump to invoke Emergency Powers acts! That is truly one of the scariest things I have ever experienced in my life! And he is refusing - why? Because he doesn't believe in "big government"? Or is he actually hoping this will get so bad that he has "no choice" but to declare martial law, cancel the next election and declare himself President-For-Life? Scary! Just ask the question the right way next time, Peter: "What do you say to Americans who are scared of having an infantile, inexperienced, self-centered, bigoted, failed real estate mogul guide the nation through the worst health crisis in the last 100 years?"
"I say I'm a smart guy and I feel good about untested drugs."
Thank you Mr. President.
So tell me about your favorite news conference moments. Or make your own voting buttons in the Comments section.
What I really want to know is: which press conferences, or perpetrators of press conferences, did you find the most unbearable over the last few days? There are really three choices, at least if you live in NYC:
POTUS: The reality t.v. star who frequently seems to be living a different reality from the rest of the world. His press conferences often reflect that, in the form of statements that substitute his own self-appraisals for less reliable things like facts and nearly universal scientific opinion.
GONYSS: That is the son of the former Governor of New York State, a.k.a. the Governor Of New York State. He believes that "words matter", and therefore makes sure that when they are used they always depict him as the friend we didn't know we had in Albany.
MONYC: This moniker applies to the Mayor of not two cities, but one, i.e., the one that almost universally finds him unbearable, but is equally incapable of finding someone who is both more bearable and willing to lead this melting (and damn near melted) pot.
I don't want to belabor this, because if you live in the Big Apple, which is now trying to get rid of the Big Worm, you have seen these Mouth Units holding forth in the past few days, and you have formed your opinion. I just want to know, for example:
- Who makes you hit the Pause button the fastest or slowest?
- Who makes you scream "Shut up!" the loudest or softest?
- Who seems to have the most or least inaccurate view of his own failings, as a mostly preventable situation grew day by day into a human disaster?
- Who seems to be the best at finding scapegoats in (a) the other two, (b) the Chinese, (c) the "novelty of the situation" or (d) previous administrations?
For me, it is no shock that my gag reflex is most easily set off by the sight and sound of POTUS, but I am somewhat surprised that I can tolerate at least a few more minutes of GONYSS than I can of MONYC. I mean, there I was not too long ago ready to tell GONYSS to take the state troopers he stationed in NYC and shove them up his royal gonads, to say nothing of another royal fiasco by the name of MTA, whereas suddenly I'm feeling like he at least makes a little more sense than MONYC, who first moans about shutting down the schools and then stands on a table shouting "Shelter in place! Shelter in place!" Words matter, dimwit; actions matter even more. If you were seriously worried that kids would go hungry if they didn't have the god-awful lunches served in public school cafeterias then the thing to do was take the necessary action to keep kids, parents, teachers and staff apart, and then get the food deliveries ramped up as soon as possible, not the other way around as the epidemic spins out of control.
As for POTUS, there he was in one of his typical press-bashings as he referred to NBC 's Peter Alexander as a "terrible reporter", because Alexander had suggested that Americans are "scared". Alexander was right, of course, he just had the wrong object of terror. Most Americans are not exactly "scared" of the virus - a dozen other words make more sense than that. What we are really "scared" of is being in a situation where sensible people are begging Donald Trump to invoke Emergency Powers acts! That is truly one of the scariest things I have ever experienced in my life! And he is refusing - why? Because he doesn't believe in "big government"? Or is he actually hoping this will get so bad that he has "no choice" but to declare martial law, cancel the next election and declare himself President-For-Life? Scary! Just ask the question the right way next time, Peter: "What do you say to Americans who are scared of having an infantile, inexperienced, self-centered, bigoted, failed real estate mogul guide the nation through the worst health crisis in the last 100 years?"
"I say I'm a smart guy and I feel good about untested drugs."
Thank you Mr. President.
So tell me about your favorite news conference moments. Or make your own voting buttons in the Comments section.
Saturday, March 21, 2020
Morning Anxieties
Every day for a week or so now when I wake up I walk to the bathroom, and look in the mirror. To confirm I am still here? I'm not young any more, so it is a reasonable thing to check even without a pandemic.
Then I assess my metabolism. Not with an instrument; I just reflect: Do I feel okay? Do I have the energy I would expect to have after a good night's sleep? Or, not-so-good - my anxieties typically come out in my dreams. During the day my emotions can be like a mountain lake at sunset on windless day. Not always, of course; but usually. Then at night all the demons jump out in the form of nutty adventures that make no sense but wake me up with a pounding heart. Not to mention I sometimes stay up until all hours and don't get that much sleep, so why would I not feel run down? But still - how do I actually feel?
Okay. Fine. Not feverish. Not run down. Maybe a little groggy. Overall I'm good. Then I clear my throat. How's that doing? The usual morning scratchiness, especially this time of year. I'm not going to make myself over about it.
Then I cough. Uh-oh. And then I remind myself, I've been doing that for weeks - once or twice a day, a cough. Maybe three times. Probably spring allergies, I've had them all my life.
Or could I be one of those more or less asymptomatic carriers? That would be good for me - hey, I'm immune now, hurray! But if I were I would have already given it to enough people around me and they would not all be asymptomatic. Yet I don't know anyone who believes they have the "novel coronavirus". There may be a few who are writing coronavirus novels - I guess there will be enough of those in years to come. There have been enough in years gone by. But if everyone I know is asymptomatic then I cannot be a carrier. Which means I am not immune now. Oh well. Better stay home until we need milk or something.
Is all this introspection making me crazy? Or was I a hypochondriac already? Maybe the situation just brings out our worst underlying fears, our paranoia and hypochondria and claustrophobia. Maybe I'm introspecting to avoid giving in to that. Or maybe that is giving in to it. There are no answers to this, only questions. And lots of well-meaning web sites and politicians and health organizations with helpful advice about managing your anxieties - all of which it is more helpful not to have to hear.
Really what I think is that if we would introspect a lot more about our moral choices and our personal flaws instead of our physical stamina we would be better people, make better decisions and stop blaming others for our bad ones. If we could redirect our anxieties into this kind of channel the world would be a better place. But if I can imagine myself doing it only rarely, I can't imagine most people doing it at all. Look who's running the country, a guy whose entire political life is built on getting people to blame others for their problems. A guy who has to mention "Chinese virus" at least 17 times in a press conference. Donald Trump "introspecting"? Self-criticizing? LOL! But seriously, not Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren either. I know which ideologies I prefer, but what I prefer most is no ideology, just honesty. Supplies of this are lower than hand sanitizer or face masks.
Could the health crisis make us more honest with each other by giving us practice in looking at ourselves, our common mortality, our universal humanity, the boat that we all have to row together? It's a nice thought, at least.
Then I assess my metabolism. Not with an instrument; I just reflect: Do I feel okay? Do I have the energy I would expect to have after a good night's sleep? Or, not-so-good - my anxieties typically come out in my dreams. During the day my emotions can be like a mountain lake at sunset on windless day. Not always, of course; but usually. Then at night all the demons jump out in the form of nutty adventures that make no sense but wake me up with a pounding heart. Not to mention I sometimes stay up until all hours and don't get that much sleep, so why would I not feel run down? But still - how do I actually feel?
Okay. Fine. Not feverish. Not run down. Maybe a little groggy. Overall I'm good. Then I clear my throat. How's that doing? The usual morning scratchiness, especially this time of year. I'm not going to make myself over about it.
Then I cough. Uh-oh. And then I remind myself, I've been doing that for weeks - once or twice a day, a cough. Maybe three times. Probably spring allergies, I've had them all my life.
Or could I be one of those more or less asymptomatic carriers? That would be good for me - hey, I'm immune now, hurray! But if I were I would have already given it to enough people around me and they would not all be asymptomatic. Yet I don't know anyone who believes they have the "novel coronavirus". There may be a few who are writing coronavirus novels - I guess there will be enough of those in years to come. There have been enough in years gone by. But if everyone I know is asymptomatic then I cannot be a carrier. Which means I am not immune now. Oh well. Better stay home until we need milk or something.
Is all this introspection making me crazy? Or was I a hypochondriac already? Maybe the situation just brings out our worst underlying fears, our paranoia and hypochondria and claustrophobia. Maybe I'm introspecting to avoid giving in to that. Or maybe that is giving in to it. There are no answers to this, only questions. And lots of well-meaning web sites and politicians and health organizations with helpful advice about managing your anxieties - all of which it is more helpful not to have to hear.
Really what I think is that if we would introspect a lot more about our moral choices and our personal flaws instead of our physical stamina we would be better people, make better decisions and stop blaming others for our bad ones. If we could redirect our anxieties into this kind of channel the world would be a better place. But if I can imagine myself doing it only rarely, I can't imagine most people doing it at all. Look who's running the country, a guy whose entire political life is built on getting people to blame others for their problems. A guy who has to mention "Chinese virus" at least 17 times in a press conference. Donald Trump "introspecting"? Self-criticizing? LOL! But seriously, not Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren either. I know which ideologies I prefer, but what I prefer most is no ideology, just honesty. Supplies of this are lower than hand sanitizer or face masks.
Could the health crisis make us more honest with each other by giving us practice in looking at ourselves, our common mortality, our universal humanity, the boat that we all have to row together? It's a nice thought, at least.
Twin Traumas
On the morning of September 11, 2001 I left my house in Brooklyn as usual, and headed for the Beverly Road train station, where I waited on the outdoor platform for the Q train. It was such a beautiful morning that I was only a bit surprised when I heard my wife calling to me from the station above the platform. She was standing there with a stroller that presumably contained my infant daughter.
"Tony, Tony... two planes just crashed into the World Trade Center."
"What?"
She repeated what she had said.
"Really?"
"Are you sure you want to go into Manhattan?"
"Sure, why not?"
"They're calling it a major terrorist attack."
"Well, how do they know that? I think I'd better go to work."
"Okay..."
I may have had many things on my mind at that moment. One was that an airplane had once crashed into the Empire State Building, and aside from the plane and its pilot, as far as I could recall, nothing much had resulted from it. Another was that I was working as a bicycle messenger in Midtown Manhattan when a helicopter all but tumbled off the roof of the Pan Am building; someone died from falling shrapnel, a thousand emergency vehicles raced to the scene, but again, not exactly an invasion from Mars. Not another Pearl Harbor. Let's not go crazy here.
My train rose out of the tunnel in downtown Brooklyn and ascended the arc of the Manhattan Bridge. I had not even thought about it as I stood on the platform, but there I was, not half an hour later, facing the Twin Towers: black smoke shot out of them like two giant coal-fired smokestacks, and from the one I had the clearer view of, objects seemed to be falling. I could not make out their exact forms at that distance, but it seemed to me quite likely that I was witnessing the final moments of human beings, alive or already dead, as they were expelled from the inferno across the river.
Thoughts in general are vague and fluid things, but my thought at that moment was as solid as stone and far more so than a steel skyscraper: "Oh my god, I never imagined it could be this bad."
It is 2020, and most people alive today remember that day, and when they first heard the news, and saw the pictures, and felt the sting of what it meant. So here we are, one day into the Big Apple COVID-19 Lockdown, exactly two months after the first reported case of the new coronavirus in the U.S., and if you somehow missed the opportunity 19 years ago, why not just let it out: "I - NEVER - IMAGINED - IT - COULD - BE - THIS - BAD!"
Okay, done. Now for something completely different: a line I love to repeat, by the songwriter Betsy Rose - a line that seems to make its own context, over and over, as long as the world spins on its weirdly tilted axis: "We may have come here on different ships, but we're in the same boat now."
The thing is, while every terrorist attack affects us all in some way, the direct effect is much more local. Now we have something that is not local at all. Though it affects people more or less directly depending on whether you or someone you know gets sick, as long as it's around, every one of us is a potential victim, a potential fatality. The idea that "I'll be okay because I'm young" , "I'll be okay because I'm healthy", "I'll be fine because I had a flu shot," etc. is turning into the much less reassuring "I have a lower probability of..." And what that means is that we are, literally, all in the same boat.
Well, it's a very strange boat. The kind that we can only collectively row out of treacherous waters by... staying away from each other?? Physically speaking, yes. But people are coming together in other ways. There was no Internet during the Spanish Flu outbreak in 1918. Kids could not have Facetime playdates in the Middle Ages. Scientists couldn't sequence the genetic code of a virus when the Panama Canal was built. As big a mess as we seem to be making of the world, we are also making the tools to fix it. There is some question whether we'll get so far ahead of ourselves that the damage can't be undone. This, I think, is not that occasion - though that is little comfort to the people who don't make it through this crisis.
In any case it's a good reminder of just how bad things can get in a world so interconnected that a virus is killing people all over the planet a few weeks after the first infection in a Wuhan market. One reason the U.S. signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty is that it became clear that radiation released anywhere in the world could end up in the air we breathe here. Just as the fuel we burn here can melt polar ice caps, flood cities and destroy coastal economies all over the globe.
********************************
I decided to create this blog, not because I thought I had anything profound to say about our current predicament, but because all day today I was having perfectly mundane thoughts, funny thoughts, hopeful or depressing or obvious thoughts that I wanted to share. Absurd thoughts, like "This feels just like 9/11, only different."
I imagine there are plenty of others out there putting their thoughts online. Those who have 2000 Facebook friends may not need a blog to do so; I think I had 58 at last count. I don't spend much time on Facebook. I don't do Twitter, but I might if I ever have a thought I can fit into 280 characters (140 was out of the question). If you are blogging about the lockdown, shutdown, meltdown, or whatever you want to call it, and you want me to link to your blog I'd be happy to. Subscribe if you're interested. Comment if you have thoughts. (Comments are moderated, due to bad experiences on some of my other blogs.) Thanks for reading.
"Tony, Tony... two planes just crashed into the World Trade Center."
"What?"
She repeated what she had said.
"Really?"
"Are you sure you want to go into Manhattan?"
"Sure, why not?"
"They're calling it a major terrorist attack."
"Well, how do they know that? I think I'd better go to work."
"Okay..."
I may have had many things on my mind at that moment. One was that an airplane had once crashed into the Empire State Building, and aside from the plane and its pilot, as far as I could recall, nothing much had resulted from it. Another was that I was working as a bicycle messenger in Midtown Manhattan when a helicopter all but tumbled off the roof of the Pan Am building; someone died from falling shrapnel, a thousand emergency vehicles raced to the scene, but again, not exactly an invasion from Mars. Not another Pearl Harbor. Let's not go crazy here.
My train rose out of the tunnel in downtown Brooklyn and ascended the arc of the Manhattan Bridge. I had not even thought about it as I stood on the platform, but there I was, not half an hour later, facing the Twin Towers: black smoke shot out of them like two giant coal-fired smokestacks, and from the one I had the clearer view of, objects seemed to be falling. I could not make out their exact forms at that distance, but it seemed to me quite likely that I was witnessing the final moments of human beings, alive or already dead, as they were expelled from the inferno across the river.
Thoughts in general are vague and fluid things, but my thought at that moment was as solid as stone and far more so than a steel skyscraper: "Oh my god, I never imagined it could be this bad."
It is 2020, and most people alive today remember that day, and when they first heard the news, and saw the pictures, and felt the sting of what it meant. So here we are, one day into the Big Apple COVID-19 Lockdown, exactly two months after the first reported case of the new coronavirus in the U.S., and if you somehow missed the opportunity 19 years ago, why not just let it out: "I - NEVER - IMAGINED - IT - COULD - BE - THIS - BAD!"
Okay, done. Now for something completely different: a line I love to repeat, by the songwriter Betsy Rose - a line that seems to make its own context, over and over, as long as the world spins on its weirdly tilted axis: "We may have come here on different ships, but we're in the same boat now."
The thing is, while every terrorist attack affects us all in some way, the direct effect is much more local. Now we have something that is not local at all. Though it affects people more or less directly depending on whether you or someone you know gets sick, as long as it's around, every one of us is a potential victim, a potential fatality. The idea that "I'll be okay because I'm young" , "I'll be okay because I'm healthy", "I'll be fine because I had a flu shot," etc. is turning into the much less reassuring "I have a lower probability of..." And what that means is that we are, literally, all in the same boat.
Well, it's a very strange boat. The kind that we can only collectively row out of treacherous waters by... staying away from each other?? Physically speaking, yes. But people are coming together in other ways. There was no Internet during the Spanish Flu outbreak in 1918. Kids could not have Facetime playdates in the Middle Ages. Scientists couldn't sequence the genetic code of a virus when the Panama Canal was built. As big a mess as we seem to be making of the world, we are also making the tools to fix it. There is some question whether we'll get so far ahead of ourselves that the damage can't be undone. This, I think, is not that occasion - though that is little comfort to the people who don't make it through this crisis.
In any case it's a good reminder of just how bad things can get in a world so interconnected that a virus is killing people all over the planet a few weeks after the first infection in a Wuhan market. One reason the U.S. signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty is that it became clear that radiation released anywhere in the world could end up in the air we breathe here. Just as the fuel we burn here can melt polar ice caps, flood cities and destroy coastal economies all over the globe.
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I decided to create this blog, not because I thought I had anything profound to say about our current predicament, but because all day today I was having perfectly mundane thoughts, funny thoughts, hopeful or depressing or obvious thoughts that I wanted to share. Absurd thoughts, like "This feels just like 9/11, only different."
I imagine there are plenty of others out there putting their thoughts online. Those who have 2000 Facebook friends may not need a blog to do so; I think I had 58 at last count. I don't spend much time on Facebook. I don't do Twitter, but I might if I ever have a thought I can fit into 280 characters (140 was out of the question). If you are blogging about the lockdown, shutdown, meltdown, or whatever you want to call it, and you want me to link to your blog I'd be happy to. Subscribe if you're interested. Comment if you have thoughts. (Comments are moderated, due to bad experiences on some of my other blogs.) Thanks for reading.
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