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

Most of my journal entries have been pretty personal, but I also want whoever reads this journal — my kids, my grandchildren, anyone else — to have a window onto the kinds of headlines we’ve been seeing and news we’ve been reading. I’ve found myself thinking more than ever about how family-centered and emotionally intense a holiday Christmas is, for good or for bad, for so many people around the world. Although it’s not my holiday, I’ve been thinking a lot about how devastating it must be to be apart, or to be navigating family fights about whether it is or isn’t ok to be together, or even — like hundreds of thousands of families around the world, including some interviewed for the WaPo article below — trying to celebrate after having lost a loved one, or even several. Lots of moving stories in that article, but I was really struck by the story of one woman who’s resident of the Atlanta area and an only child, and who lost her father and both of her grandparents to Covid in recent weeks. The article describes how instead of preparing traditional Christmas foods together this year with them, they’re all buried side by side in a family plot. - Merry ‘Covid Christmas’? https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/christmas-gatherings-covid/2020/12/24/f6232ade-456e-11eb-90fc-79662011cb49_story.html Here’s another piece I read earlier today — about how confused and uncertain we all are about how to even protect ourselves and those we love. Also in the Washington Post: - All I want for Christmas are covid-19 mandates - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/23/all-i-want-christmas-are-covid-19-mandates/ Two other items in the news are burning in my mind. One is the death this week of Dr. Susan Moore, a Black physician in Indiana who was hospitalized for Covid, denied pain meds she needed, and treated in not only a disparaging but ultimately a fatally dismissive way by physicians — professional colleagues in the medical guild! — who denied her voice, dismissed her authority (both of her own body and professionally), and quite frankly denied her humanity. She leaves behind a 19-year old son and two elderly parents struggling with dementia. She was the sole breadwinner for all of them, and now she’s gone because of COVID and racism — racist doctors, racist institutions, racist system. I first learned about her death on Twitter, and a day or so later it was written up in the New York Times. She posted a video about it on social media in which she talked about how she’s been treated, essentially predicting her own demise. - Black Doctor Dies of Covid-19 After Complaining of Racist Treatment: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/us/susan-moore-black-doctor-indiana.html The other news item I can’t get out of my mind is actually something I read about in a post here — about a social worker in Chicago, also a Black woman, who was arrested and handcuffed in her own home, naked, by a swarm of police who forced their way into her apartment in search of a suspect she didn’t know. The officers didn’t have a legitimate warrant, as one of the officers eventually admitted after stepping out of her apartment, with the bodycam running. This happened in 2019, but it sounds from the local Chicago coverage like she still hasn’t seen justice. In the journal entry I read here, a white woman (like me) wrote to express the horror and terror that this could happen, as well as the clear sense that it almost certainly would not happen to someone like her in the US because she’s white. - CBS News: “Chicago Police handcuff innocent, naked woman in botched raid”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zdmRkN_WW0g This fucking country is so deeply fucked up.