My blog represents my personal experiences and perspectives. This includes many anecdotes from my life and from my medical practice. I have been scrupulous to anonymize all medical anecdotes and to avoid ever belittling or making fun of patients. (I often make fun of and criticize myself, my colleagues, and the institutions where I have worked.)
Today is Thanksgiving, when we celebrate the day that Americans fed illegal immigrants from Europe.
I'm a Hannah Arendt fan. She often took two words that were often used as synonyms, identified a difference, and then found meaning in that difference. For example, consider the words action and behavior:
Feeding chickadees
(February 2020)
It’s not that far, really.
Just off my back deck and down the hill
Through what I still remember as pasture for our mare,
To the little wooden foot bridge o’er the stream.
No, it’s not that far in steps, though in full winter
When the snow is newly deep, the going is slow and makes you wish
You’d bothered with your snow shoes.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic across multiple spheres of American society is a novel event. Some have used the term black swan, Taleb's term for an event that can't be anticipated because it is outside the realm of experience. I prefer to think of it as a gray rhino, Michele Wucker's term for the big and obvious thing coming at you that you don't want to acknowledge. I think of this as a threat to our society writ large, not just as a threat to our economy or even just to public health. I think those narrow framings guarantee inadequate analysis and response.