21st Century Citizenship, April 2020: Pandemic (re-send)

"It's too much to expect, but not too much to ask..."
--Joe Diffie, 1958-2020

Wash your hands frequently (correctly, musical accompaniment optional). Avoid touching your eyes, nose, or mouth. Maintain a distance of at least six feet from others. Stay home if you're sick. Cover coughs and sneezes with the inside of your elbow. Wear a facemask if you're sick--if not, caregivers need them more. Clean AND disinfect frequently touched surfaces daily. Pray for us all. Especially those in ICUs, all alone. And those trying to save them.

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood..."
--Robert Frost

Boom Or Bust?
As we head into the elections, we're increasingly hearing a tale of two economies. Has it been a boom or bust for workers? It depends, and neither... Read More...

http://bit.ly/boom_bust

Not Socialism. Not Capitalism.
They're just tools in the toolbox, and neither the box nor the jacks and janes of all trades needed to create the society we want are economic systems at all... Read More...

http://bit.ly/notsoc_notcap

While viewing phenomena such as violence through the lens of epidemiology has produced valuable insights, the New Yorker's Paul Elie urges us, for our own safety, to resist metaphorical interpretations of the new plague ... Learn More... And More...

bit.ly/against_meta
bit.ly/violence_disease

As surely as it's stripped our biological defenses, Slate's Dan Kois contends, the coronavirus is revealing the many ways government and big business, out of mindless greed, indifference, even mean-spiritedness, have been gratuitously making life unecessarily difficult for the rest of us... Learn More...

bit.ly/us_sham

One thing COVID has hopefully taught is that it pays to look at least a month or two ahead. Politico recently gathered 30+ thought leaders from across many fields to consider how life will be different when the fomites clear... Learn More...

https://bit.ly/after_covid

"The only thing we have to fear...is fear itself..."
--Franklin D Roosevelt

One of the rare silver linings of 9/11 was increased respect for doctors, first responders, even teachers. Could we be in the moment when service workers, so often treated as if they didn't even exist, finally win some appreciation for the risks they've taken for us all, and everything else they do? They're certainly not invisible any more... Learn More...

bit.ly/svc_workers

Originally developed as a fail-safe form of communication in the event of nuclear attack, this is the closest the Net's ever come to fulfilling that function, whether reporting metrics around the world, generating compelling visualizations to help advance understanding, fitting us for the microbe's crown, even determining the results of sporting events that had to be cancelled...

http://bit.ly/world_meter     https://bit.ly/pla_gue
http://bit.ly/epi_compare   https://bit.ly/2020_champs

The event to which COVID-19 is most often compared to is the 1917-18 influenza pandemic. John M. Barry, author of the definitive account, The Great Influenza, has been sharing what we feels we can learn from it, once we free ourselves from the many misconceptions about what actually happened... Learn More...

bit.ly/1918_barry bit.ly/1918_misses