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How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.

23 Sept 2020. GENERAL. We are in the third week of teaching classes on line -- classes plus meetings, other seminars, etc. have me on zoom much of the day everyday -- eye fatigue and general fatigue is something that periodically forces nap-taking to revive. The weather has been mercifully nice and so am able to go for hour long walks. Among the places in my walk routine is a great park with some five playing fields populated in the good weather by many people by many of many kinds (ethnically, racially, age-wise, probably gender-wise -- though mainly young under 30ish, lots of tots in strollers and sitting around on the ground with them), soccer games, volleyball, many little kids, many dogs of all sizes and varieties, mostly cute; and a koi fish pond which both of us find relaxing, kind of meditative space, even though the pond is up against industrial-style buildings and serves as part of the plumbing -- but it is gentrified old factory spaces that now are wonderful loft apartments (remembering from when they were new and we could look inside, nowadays relatively few people about). Little kids have been coming to visit the fish. [...] they are on schedules and need food 4x a day, though as the weather gets cooler they will eat less and gradually go into semi-hibernation). We've eaten out three times in the last six months, take out one sushi restaurant a few times. We have friends come and sit in the garden six feet apart, offer water and nuts, but no sharing of food -- one group of all elders who have been meeting monthly and before the pandemic it was potluck dinner. TEACHING & WORK. Zoom meetings have some great advantages of seeing people from around the world, so some seminars are extraordinarily enriched. Two of my classes are intense graduate seminars (with a few undergrads) and these are enriched by people coming in from all over the world. The one intensive undergraduate class is minutely timed by my co-faculty and it is an enormous amount of backstage work and coordination, particularly at the beginning when we took seriously all the guidelines beginning with such admonitions that students attention span is (of course there is 'scientific data') only 1.5-2 minutes and videos should be made but not longer than 5 or 10 minutes at most. This proves to be just silly -- the students are engaged and attentive, ask questions, answer them. There are small break out rooms for short exercises -- this helps get to know them and to bond. Some 40 students total divided into four groups. DEATHS. Deeply mourning and grieving the death of RBG, but also at the same time a close philosopher friend, a less close but anthropologist friend, a few weeks ago close literature scholar friend, and a few weeks earlier a member of the Staying Put group of elders who meet monthly. Of these, he was one of the first to die of COVID-19 from our circle of closer friends, and one of the first to suddenly die from one day to the next in the nursing home that shortly experienced almost 100% of the residents infected, a high profile case of a high end care facility which was not spared. We did a shiva for his widow standing on the sidewalk outside her house, and only five people were allowed to accompany him to be buried; there was then a zoom shiva with relatives who from around the country. The deaths of George Floyd, Breona Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tamir Rice, Treyvon Martin, Eric Garner, Rayshard Brooks, Botham Jean, Daniel Prude, Freddie Grey, Alton Sterling -- many now recorded on video, puts structural racism and police violence on the agenda and contributes to a general state of rage and anxiety compounded by: ANXIETY. The whole country is in a state of nervous breakdown in part through the criminal and negligent dismantling of pandemic preparedness infrastructure and a racist President and police departments that seem intent on restoring Jim Crow white supremacy in the nation, and in part through the violation of laws and constitutional obligations by the President, facilitated by his cabinet, Republican senators who refuse to curb him in any way, and a raft of "acting appointees" running agencies of the government to avoid vetting and Senate confirmation. This is not only Jim Crow racism, but also capitalist greed, and a total lack of any sense of public obligation or service on the part of so many of those who have become rich, and deny even basic relief for those who have lost their jobs and health care thanks to the pandemic. Everyone on all sides is agitated by the upcoming Presidential election thanks to the President and Republican Governors open effort to suppress voting, the packing of the courts with right wing judges (and the coming effort to appoint a right wing Supreme Court justice to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, tilting the court 6-3 to the right), and the President's open refusal to legitimize the election process, already saying that he will only accept the election results if he wins, and, worse, today saying in answer to a reporter's question if he will ensure a peaceful and smooth transition in the elections saying that there should be no need for any transition, the votes should be dispensed with, and continuity will reign; he has also made rally speeches about his desire for an unconstitutional third term or more. We are watching the destruction of democracy in slow motion, that the system of democratic checks and balances we have long prided ourselves on be allowed to be destroyed. We seem to be learning that our system depended on norms of civility and good will rather than a strong institutional structure of enforceable law. We may well survive if the elections bring a Democratic Senate as well as a Democratic President, to begin to rebuild; but no one seems confident of such an outcome, and the voices of the gun-toting rabble and informal militias grow louder. To make things even worse, much of the world seems to be following suit in the polarization between populist-nationalist forces and international cooperation and interdependence. With the acceleration of climate change migration, and ecological destruction, the pressures will only intensify. FASCINATION: We cannot stop watching the video footage of all the above. We take hope where we can, above all in the incredible democratic moblizations of marches in the streets led by Black Lives Matter, My Brothers Keeper and other organizations (the hard organizing work getting less attention than it deserves, not least because if there was more attention people would feel more hope and join in more easily). We contribute money, write postcards to voters to reassure them that their votes will be counted, do phone banking, plant signs -- but it all seems too little. ACADEMIC & COMMITMENT: Zoom meetings on the technical biology and the policy-politics of COVID-19 provide some sense of stability, that we are making some progress in unpacking the virus and its effects on the body (endothelial cells, damage to the heart, not just respiratory and the lungs as stressed earlier) and the terrible and largely still puzzling effects suffered by the "long haulers" (those who allegedly come out of severe infection, but suffer severe debilitation for months after), and the dynamics of infection and shedding by asymptomatic carriers; and some better understanding of the rearrangements of habitats that cause the spilling over" of the virus into human populations; and even more so that contact tracing and other "public health efforts" (when not disabled by the CDC and FDA under pressure from the White House) are revealing the social components of pandemics being the most important predictors of who lives and who dies. In the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, Paul Farmer reminded us in a seminar to day, key drivers of the epidemic were the care-takers and the people who had to bury the dead. We too in the more affluent world have lost all too many of our most courageous physicians, nurses, hospital staff, and other care-givers. Among the points of hope are where things have gone well: the preparedness of Uganda and other less affluent countries, the role that care-taking as well as contact tracing plays (checking in repeatedly, helping arranged daily needs, be it food or child care or translating), the commitment of places like Singapore to provide monetary relief for people being unable to work as well as to commit to more rapid diagnostics development. TODAY the sun was out, and we count our blessings.