People

Despair is sometimes difficult to distinguish from all those other sad words that begin with a D like depression, despondency and desolation. It’s all of these and none of these, omnipresent in this doubly difficult time that stresses the physical, mental and emotional health of our institutions as well as our individual selves to their limits.

Rather than rail against the “Little Sara” nickname that she was tagged with thanks to her 4’11” stature, she embraced it, reversed it and turned it into Sara Little, which became her professional identity. That was an early example of the creative problem-solving style that informed her approach to everything she did.

The Seattle-California connection established in 1852 continues as strong as ever. In some ways Seattle is fated to be the eternal little sibling to the Bay Area and the Los Angeles area: smaller, less glamorous, frequently ignored, sometimes disdainful, sometimes envious.

I believe it is extremely important for white people to be aware that right now is not the appropriate time to ask black people and people of color in our communities, “So… what can I do to help?”

Maybe this forced awareness of housework inequality will engender greater appreciation for the unpaid labor of women and maybe men will celebrate this Father’s Day by manning up to a larger share of the unpaid work load.

Saul Bellow: “It is hard to see how modern man can survive on what he now gets from his conscious life — now that there is a kind of veto against impermissible thoughts, the most impermissible being the notion that man might have a spiritual life he is not conscious of which reaches out for transcendence.”

I’m only 30 years old and I’m about to live through my second economic collapse. Oh, and this one is paired with a global pandemic. So all you Boomers out there who love to complain about my generation need to all calm yourselves down and chill because we’re a little busy right now.

What is really happening is that we have been given a rare chance to experience – live, in person – a change that used to happen once in every generation or two – a massive shift in living patterns, in technology, in social life. When there is a sudden and unexpected shift in human life -- whether personal or cultural – some people choose to reflect; others choose to re-invent themselves or the institutions around them.

My subversive thought is that large swaths of our society are not afflicted primarily by low expectations, so much as unrelenting, burdensomely high expectations.