Quarantine Diary #118 7/10/2020 The thing that we don't want that we have.

This week I requested books from the library, picked them up, walked back home, and started reading.

One book is a lawyer/detective book that is 850 pages long. It’s a great read in that American gum-cracking, fast-talking, everyone has an angle kind of way. I was 150 pages in before I accepted I don’t even like gum and I quit it.

Next I started The Women of Copper Country by Mary Doria Russell.  

Russell is an amazing writer who does an extraordinary amount of research and then writes historical fiction around real characters who lived through a real time. (She’s also done a science fiction series that I could not wrap my head around but maybe you could.)

I loved A Thread of Grace. https://www.supersummary.com/a-thread-of-grace/summary/ It’s about northern Italians saving European Jews at the end of WWII. My dad was in the American Army slowly battling its way up the Italian peninsula, characters in this novel are waiting for Americans and allies to get there to finish the war. The Nazis know they are coming and are using those last months to exterminate Jews and their allies. It’s a harrowing, amazing story based on the real exploits of real heroes.

Russell writes brilliantly about people in fraught historical moments. The Women of Copper Country is about unionizing the copper mines of the Upper Peninsula, circa 1913-1915. That struggle was led by women and is an under-known piece of powerful American history. The book is excellent but at a hundred pages in, I see the violence and loss that is coming and last night - I just couldn’t. I put the book down and went out to the porch to watch lightning.

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So that’s where I am. I don’t have the patience for page-turners. I don’t have the courage for real literature about real events.

Do you know what I mean?

I bet you do.

The beginning of Quarantine was Friday, March 13th which was the second Friday of that month. Today is the second Friday of this month. We are four full months into this heartbreaking, tedious, mean-spirited, chaotic catastrophe.

We can’t bear to pay any more attention. We can’t turn away. Many of us are fine because we’ve been cautious since the beginning. We have enough imagination and resources to take care of ourselves and to watch out for family and friends. We also realize we are okay due to the diligence of “essential workers” and a $5 tip truly isn’t enough to pay back for what so many are doing for us.

Then, just this week, we learned how much federal aid went to Trump, his family and cronies, to massive corporations, and to mega-churches.

The Catholic church received 3.5 Billion which they can now use to cover shortfalls from paying pedophile victims. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/catholic-church-coronavirus-aid-lobbying/ 

As a person rich in friends who are Catholic, this is just one more reality I cannot comprehend – how a institution will wrap itself in the loving, generous, giving, prophetic reputation earned for it by people who have no say in this sinful boondoggle. Obviously, there’s plenty of this kind of greed masquerading as religion to go around.

Last night while watching the news I just kept muttering, “Shame on you.” Shame on the privileged, arrogant people who, in the name of fake patriotism, set us against each other. Shame on those who did nothing or worse to manage this fierce and dangerous societal crisis. Shame on ‘leaders’ who use their positions to make them selves richer than they already were.

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A crisis is when the reality we were counting on … breaks. A crisis is upheaval and loss. A crisis is the thing we don’t want, that we now have.

But here is the other thing a crisis is.

It is a mandate and an opportunity to do things different. To learn new stuff (sourdough!). To protest and lobby for something better, more just, and stronger. To endure, know ourselves better, become tougher on our own behalf and for others.

I keep thinking about how Pearl Harbor stunned and broke us.  Yet by the end of WWII we knew enough to offer free college education to our vets and that powerful investment made us so strong and so rich for so long.

This is a time to learn new stuff. To share resources. To build new things.  Read better books. Cook better suppers. Walk longer walks. Bring the weird neighbor cookies. Sign up for a YouTube tutorial in something we always wanted to know. Give a senator hell.

It won’t ever go back to what it was. Those who insist on learning and building  and sharing add to what is next.