Ordinary life before the pandemic was already a catastrophe of desperation and exclusion for too many human beings, an environmental and climate catastrophe, an obscenity of inequality.
My question after this passage is , should we worry about the future now that we are seeing clearly where we are living?
it acknowledges that hope can coexist with difficulty and suffering.
We can not live hopeless, otherwise we will die from anxiety and fear.
When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, it dissolves itself, quite literally, into liquid. In this state, what was a caterpillar and will be a butterfly is neither one nor the other, it’s a sort of living soup. Within this living soup are the imaginal cells that will catalyse its transformation into winged maturity.
I like the metaphor.
Reports say the air above Los Angeles, Beijing and New Delhi is miraculously clean. Parks all over the US are shut to visitors, which may have a beneficial effect on wildlife. In the last government shutdown of 2018-2019, elephant seals at Point Reyes National Seashore just north of San Francisco took over a new beach, and now own it for the duration of their season of mating and birthing on land.
One of the positive side of this pandemic, is that earth began to breath.
So what? I want to live a good life and I want to risk my life, because I can also lose my life in one night.’ You realise that life has to be lived well or is not worth living. It’s a very profound transformation that takes place during catastrophes.” I have found over and over that the p
I like this passage. People become more conscious during a catastrophe, and their thoughts are more realistic.
Although staying put is hard, maybe we will be reluctant to resume our rushing about, and something of the stillness now upon us will stay with us.
It was weird to know that we have to shelter in place and once the pandemic is over it will be awkward to go out and do things that we used to do for years.
When we are no longer trying to unlink ourselves from the chain of a spreading disease, I wonder if we will rethink how we were linked, how we moved about and how the goods we rely on moved about. Perhaps we will appreciate the value of direct face-to-face contact more. Perhaps the Europeans who have sung together from their balconies or applauded together for their medical workers, and the Americans who came out to sing or dance on their suburban blocks, will have a different sense of belonging. Perhaps we will find a new respect for the workers who produce our food and those who bring it to our tables.
From now , we will appreciate things that seem normal to us.
depredations
damage or harm that is done to something
Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.” We have withdrawn from each other to protect each other. And people have found ways to help the vulnerable, despite the need to remain physically distant
I like this passage. I totally agree.
When a storm subsides, the air is washed clean of whatever particulate matter has been obscuring the view, and you can often see farther and more sharply than at any other time. When this storm clears, we may, as do people who have survived a serious illness or accident, see where we were and where we should go in a new light.
I think that after this pandemic everyone will think differently .
The billionaire evangelist who owns the arts and crafts chain Hobby Lobby claimed divine guidance in keeping his workers at their jobs when businesses were ordered to close. (The company has now closed all its stores.) At Uline Corporation, owned by billionaire Trump backers Richard and Liz Uihlein, a memo sent to Wisconsin workers said: “please do NOT tell your peers about the symptoms & your assumptions. By doing so, you are causing unnecessary panic in the office.” The billionaire founder and chairman of payroll processing corporation Paychex, Tom Golisano, said: “The damages of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse than losing a few more people.” (Golisano has since said his comments were misrepresented, and has apologised.)
Unfortunately that poor people who are working for rich and are the source of their fortune, they are not recognized as human but as machines that make their economy goes up.
uch elites often prioritise profit and property over human life and community. In the days after a huge earthquake struck San Francisco on 18 April 1906, the US military swarmed over the city, convinced that ordinary people were a threat and a source of disorder. The mayor issued a “shoot to kill” proclamation against looters, and the soldiers believed they were restoring order. What they were actually doing was setting inexpert firebreaks that helped fire spread through the city, and shooting or beating citizens who disobeyed orders (sometimes those orders were to let the fires burn down their own homes and neighbourhoods). Ninety-nine years later, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’s police and white vigilantes did the same thing: shooting black people in the name of defending property and their own authority. The local, state and federal government insisted on treating a stranded, mostly poor, mostly black population as dangerous enemies to be contained and controlled, rather than victims of a catastrophe to be aided.
That is so sad to see that people with no power are the one who suffer most during a crisis, catastrophe. They have the right to live like every other human in this earth and instead of understanding what they are going through , they are just treated as looters.
looting
to steal things from houses or stores during a war or after a disaster such as a fire or floof I think the meaning here would be people are buying a lot of food because of the uncertainty of the future.
Those who benefit most from the shattered status quo are often more focused on preserving or reestablishing it than protecting human life – as we saw when a chorus of US conservatives and corporate top dogs insisted that, for the sake of the stock market, everyone had to go back to work, and that the resultant deaths would be an acceptable price to pay. In a crisis, the powerful often try to seize more power – as they have in this round, with the Trump Department of Justice looking at suspending constitutional rights – and the rich seek more riches
People with power are just trying to make benefit from this crisis and seek for more money and power instead of thinking about human life.
often think of these times as akin to a spring thaw: it’s as if the pack ice has broken up, the water starts flowing again and boats can move through places they could not during winter. The ice was the arrangement of power relations that we call the status quo – it seems to be stable, and those who benefit from it often insist that it’s unchangeable. Then it changes fast and dramatically, and that can be exhilarating, terrifying, or both.
I found it hard to understand what the writer means by this paragraph.
At moments of immense change, we see with new clarity the systems – political, economic, social, ecological – in which we are immersed as they change around us. We see what’s strong, what’s weak, what’s corrupt, what matters and what doesn’t.
It is when there is a big shift in life, it is when we can notice who has power who has not, who was ready for this kind of transformation who was not.
We were adjusting to the profound social and economic changes, studying the lessons disasters teach, equipping ourselves for an unanticipated world.
I think everyone now is used to work from home, to study, to cook their own meal, to spend more time with the kids, these things that seemed before the pandemic impossible to be adjusted to, and I think that it is a good lesson fro us.
As the pandemic upended our lives, people around me worried that they were having trouble focusing and being productive
It was my case on the first couple weeks of the pandemic, It was hard for me to focus on my study. All I could think about is if something happened to my kids or my family, what should I do?
Our sense of self generally comes from the world around us, and right now, we are finding another version of who we are.
At this time, we are discovering our true self that the everyday has always hide.
We have reached a crossroads, we have emerged from what we assumed was normality, things have suddenly overturned
we are living the true meaning of these words, these words that we never try to understand deeply.
Disasters begin suddenly and never really end. The future will not, in crucial ways, be anything like the past, even the very recent past of a month or two ago. Our economy, our priorities, our perceptions will not be what they were at the outset of this year.
I agree with Solnit, but we should be hopeful about the future, it might take time to comeback to normal.
The word “crisis” means, in medical terms, the crossroads a patient reaches, the point at which she will either take the road to recovery or to death. The word “emergency” comes from “emergence” or “emerge”, as if you were ejected from the familiar and urgently need to reorient. The word “catastrophe” comes from a root meaning a sudden overturning.
I like the metaphor using here to make a connection between the words we are hearing a lot right now and there meaning.