Coronavirus has become a show I watch on TV. It has quickly become a background event happening somewhere else. My initial, almost overwhelming, desire to know and undertand it has been largely satisfied and I am now more able to focus on other things.
But I think this is the calm before the storm in Mexico and Lakeside. COVID-19 is coming and it will bring with it all the misery we see around the world. However, for us at this moment we have found a new normal that is surprisingly comfortable.
There is now a routine, a new routine, in our lives. Pat and I have a daily coffee together on the terrace. We both exercise on our treadmill. I help Pat with the ordering and delivery of food and household items which are going smoothly. I enjoy working in my garden. I spend time working on this website and on my other projects. And I continue to read and learn more about the coronavirus and its impact around the world.
I began organizing a zoom meeting for the Ajijic Book Club and I was pleased with the response. After losing interest in reading Slime in March, I have now finished it. In the next few days I will write my book report which I will publish on the ABC website.
I wrote 2020 - Earth Day - Wednesday, April 22 - Preamble in preparation for a Lakeside Pathfinders meeting that I am organizing.
My webmaster has added an enhanced photo album feature to this website. I created albums of my favorite pictures of Nikki taken during her visits in 2018 and 2020 https://johnstokdijk.com/1951-2011/my-family/my-sister-nikki/. Her visit here in February seems like such a long time ago already because of how greatly the world has changed since then.
Sometimes I read articles from a conservative perspective to deliberately expose myself to alternate points of view. I read the National Review as a teenager and I was an admirer of Bill Buckley, Jr. in those days. Occasionally I still go to the NR website and recently I read Is America a Roaring Giant or Crying Baby?
The heading of the article reads, "Post-virus America can awake from this epidemic and economic shutdown in one of two different ways." This is an example of rampant binary thinking in an extremely polarized society. No, America does not have only two choices. There are many possible paths to a future beyond the coronavirus pandemic. Many people want America to awaken and emerge as neither a roaring giant nor a crying baby.
My brother Peter posted a link on facebook to an article written by Ben Rhodes, The 9/11 Era Is Over - The coronavirus pandemic and a chapter of history that should have expired long ago. Rhodes echos a growing desire for radical change, "we need a transformation of what has been our whole way of looking at the world since 9/11."
I shared the following article by Zachery Stein with the InterSpiritual Agnostics facebook group.
COVID-19: A WAR BROKE OUT IN HEAVEN
"History is unfolding in real time. This is it: we have arrived at the end of the world. Finally. Now we can start to build a new one. This is our chance to reshape ourselves as spiritual, scientific, and ethical beings."