broken

It’s been nearly a month since I’ve updated my “daily” journal, which I have taken as a sign that my life under the threat of Covid 19 has achieved an accepted, new-normal status. My urge to document every day waned as the increasing numbers of the infected and the ratcheting up of lockdowns around the world faded into the background noise of my day-to-day. Like I said at the beginning of all of this: it is amazing how adaptable we are.

Today, the US has recorded 1,771,631 cases and 103,418 deaths. We appear to have battled back from the overwhelming case load that pushed into New York hospitals to the brink, and while the infection counts are still rising, it would appear we have managed to “flatten the curve” at this point and the country is re-opening. Now, scientists around the world are talking about risk mitigation and harm reduction strategies as we begin to re-open economies in a new reality where we all need to accept that there is risk of catching a deadly virus that – for reasons we don’t yet understand – hits some people with far greater force than others, and is particularly deadly to the elderly.

Last Sunday, the New York Times ran a full front-page of victims’ details in an effort to put a face on the tragedy. Part of the media’s job is to help people to understand a tragedy and one of the ways they do that is by humanizing it – sharing the details that help the public to understand these names are connected to real lives and families who have suffered the unthinkable tragedy of losing a loved one. It’s the same journalistic impulse that has had Anderson Cooper sharing biographies about the dead each night on CNN. Rationally, you’d think that would lead viewers to build empathy and therefore more likely to be careful with our mask wearing and self-isolating. However, I know I’m not the only one who has found it had the opposite effect. Skimming through the list of names on Sunday I couldn’t help but notice that the vast majority of the victims are in their later years. While each life lost is a tragedy, it is also the case that every storybook of life has a final page. Looking at the list of senior citizens, it starts to feel like maybe the risk is lower for those of us outside of that category?

And while we’re still on work-from-home at The Company, I’m busier than ever. My days are filled with six to eight hours of exhausting videoconference calls. It sure feels like work to sit in virtual meetings, so there’s a general feeling that it must be the right thing to do while our regular marketing activities are on pause. I’m not sure this general feeling is accurate, but we’re getting to a place where restrictions are loosening up and I feel we will return to doing things before we are overwhelmed by a need to assess how functional our current working state really is, so I’m just going with it.

So, rather than adding more computer time to my days by journaling, I have been baking in my spare time. It turns out I have a fundamental need to know something, anything, about my world and so I have replaced my pre-Covid weekly routines with new ones. I can’t control much right now, but kitchen activity remains within my purview. I have decided that on Fridays, I bake. The sourdough starter I created near the beginning of this journey, when yeast disappeared from all the stores, is bubbling along nicely in my fridge. A good loaf of sourdough requires a day of tending and an overnight rest before I can bake it, and I spend the whole week looking forward to re-starting this little journey and arriving at destination bread on Saturday morning. A friend recently forwarded a Tweet that called sourdough the Tamagotchi of the Covid era. It’s a solid observation. I have named my starter (Quaran)Tina, and she is way more interesting than any electronic pocket pet ever was.

The initial focus of my at-home baking has been on getting to know my starter’s behavior and developing an instinct for all the variables in a good loaf of bread — like gluten development and rising times and crust development. But lately, as basics like flour and butter have increasingly returned to grocery shelves, I have taken on a new and even bigger challenge: pain au chocolat. The little laminated pastries are my absolute favorite food in the world and, well, I’ve got more time than access to French bakeries right now, so I figured I might as well learn how to make them.

So, that’s the update. And the excuse for my absence — “I’m sorry, teacher, Jen has been too busy baking and working to finish her homework.”

But I’m back to writing today because that is how I process enormous, upsetting things. And now there’s something new. Stop reading here if you’d like to end your day on a lighter note.

Sociologists use the term “Othering” to describe the feeling of distance you put between yourself and groups of other people that you come to understand as intrinsically different. It’s the impulse you saw play out in elementary school when a bunch of strong athletic kids descended on a bespectacled geek in the school yard even though he was just minding his own business looking for geological specimens in the dirt. The jocks put so much emotional distance between themselves and that geek that they didn’t feel a tug of empathy as they destroyed his prized collection. In Shakespeare, Shylock tried to close the gap to the Other in his famous, “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?” speech in the Merchant of Venice. It is what American teacher Jane Elliott explored with her third-grade class in the blue-eyes-brown-eyes exercise 50-plus years ago, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. It’s the emotional reaction that I had, and that I’m not very proud of, to the biographies of senior citizens on the front page of the New York Times.

And it’s a contributing factor to what we saw on Monday when a white police officer held his knee on the neck of an unarmed black man and held it there, killing him while he pleaded for air.

The officers were fired from their jobs after news media began showing a bystander’s video, along with a longer recording from a closed-circuit camera at a nearby store that showed no evidence of an inciting incident that the officers might have used to justify rough handling of their victim. But they haven’t yet been charged with any crime. And George Floyd’s murder has followed closely the death of Ahmaud Arbery, who was shot and killed in February by a pair of white men in southeast Georgia who claimed they were conducting a “citizen’s arrest,” and the March killing of Breonna Taylor, an EMT shot to death in her Louisville, Kentucky, apartment by officers conducting a drug raid at what her family said was the wrong address.

Long-simmering anger over these and countless other episodes of racist violence has boiled over and protests have erupted nationwide. Last night in Minneapolis, rioters torched a police station after several nights of escalating demonstrations. Local authorities called in the National Guard. In Louisville, seven people were injured when gunfire broke out during protests. Attacks on news media have bled out of the White House briefing room to the streets where police in riot gear arrested a CNN reporter live on the air at 5 a.m. this morning.

It’s a national crisis on top of a national crisis on top of a national crisis, and it’s happening right now in one of the most heavily armed nations in the world, America: where people protesting the recommendation to wear face masks and stay off their jet-skis made a show of force at the Michigan capital with guns on their hips.

The president, meanwhile, seems ever-more focused on etching through the bedrock of the democracy voters elected him to safeguard. After prompting Twitter to take the remarkable step of tagging two presidential Tweets about mail-in ballot fraud with fact check notices, he signed an executive order yesterday aimed at stifling Section 230 protections for social media companies.

And as Minneapolis burns, he Tweeted again. “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!” Twitter immediately applied a public interest notice, hiding the Tweet for glorifying violence.

I cried this morning for the first time in more than a month. This feels like an incredibly important point in America’s history and it is all too much to take in. There will be chapters written in the history books about this time. But from what future version of America? How does this story end?