Now is the winter of our discontent…
William Shakespeare, Richard III, Act-I, Scene-I, Line 1
This scourge has carried on for two years, through what feels like a never-ending cycle of lockdowns and isolation, through information wars spawned from within and without, leaving us with uncertainty and doubt. Many are ready to give up. Nearly six million dead world-wide [1], and 36,000 in Canada [2]. We have all been touched, if not directly ourselves, then someone we know. The danger seems real, yet many deny. Risk is an intangible beast that few understand or can measure. It’s bad, but is it worse than otherwise? Resistance to accept information contrary to one’s belief, one’s mental model, infects all sides.
The battle between science and empiricism has created a division so wide, it’s hard to reach across the middle ground. Authenticity-propaganda, good-bad, right-wrong, black-white. This endless pandemic has spawned resistance with even the meek participating simply out of frustration. Their participation in protests expressing legitimate concerns are a way of acting out. But some protests are usurped by the extremists who use the frustrated as a cloak under which they plan and execute their agenda of division, supremacy, rebellion, and insurrection. They mock our symbols and words by appropriation to legitimize themselves and their actions.
Our political leaders taking a stand on their respective side, encourage actions to benefit themselves, to select their voters, to bolster their chance for re-election. Re-election to do what? The pandemic, science, conspiracy theories have been weaponized. Yet as controls and restrictions are lifted, we hope; we hope to return to some form of normality. But that will be a place left with the scars of division, we can only wonder what will it be like? These scars are amplified by our fragile mental state, battered by isolation, confusion, frustration; we are susceptible, and unbalanced. We strive for normalcy. We anticipate a summer of warmth and unencumbered air, but what will the later seasons bring? Are we ready to simply give up on the precautions and live our lives?
Blog Posts
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The Pandemic: 2 Years Later
We are approaching 2 years. In a post from October 2020, eight months into the pandemic, a time before there was a vaccine, a time when we were still learning about this virus, the death toll for the coming few months was estimated to reach 200,000 in the US. At the time, the US Administration…
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Isolation
In an earlier post, I assembled a selection of dots connecting an increase in social isolation and certain trends in technology adoption propelled by our tendency to privilege left-brain thinking. Some have noted this trend towards isolation began with the emergence of the mobile phone, around 2008 or so. Now after two years of intermittent…
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Now is the Winter …
“Now is the winter of our discontent…” William Shakespeare, Richard III, Act-I, Scene-I, Line 1 This scourge has carried on for two years, through what feels like a never-ending cycle of lockdowns and isolation, through information wars spawned from within and without, leaving us with uncertainty and doubt. Many are ready to give up. Nearly…
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Frailty
“Flight 704 from Chicago to Los Angeles will be cancelled unless there is a passenger who can provide the flight crew with a rubber band” — Urban myth announcement at Chicago O’Hare *** I had not thought too deeply about the term vigilance, but as it has emerged as one of the more popular words during…
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Uncertainty
I have come to see uncertainty as a cousin of frailty. As the pandemic emerged the danger it presented was unclear, whether it was simply on the scale of the flu or something more, it was unclear how it spread, whether by touch or by air, and how we might protect ourselves. This lack of…
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Balance
Balance is a state of equality, a system in balance is an optimization of sometimes just two parts, but often among many, gently positioned such that no one element supersedes any of the others. Ideally the elements are positioned so that minor shifts in one can be accommodated and adjusted to by the others. How…
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Recrudescence
It is the recurrence of this undesirable condition; becoming raw again. Two years ago this week we returned from Costa Rica only to enter a two-week lockdown a few days later. It was widely accepted that if we all stayed home, the spread of the virus would be nipped in the bud … regardless of…
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The Big Hope
I’m finding it trying to follow the news of this “Putin’s War”. It’s not just the carnage and savagery we are able to witness each day, each hour, each minute, but it has provoked an immediacy, a visceral connection by putting images of the present to the stories of the past told by my parents…
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Power to the People
This information war we are currently experiencing, as part of Putin’s incursion, whose combatants are the various governments, news agencies, pundits, etc. is a battle for public opinion. The military assets are [factual] information, dis-information and censorship. While it may be sad to think that the one with the most “likes” wins, there is a…
