The last few issues of The New Yorker have been filled with articles I really loved reading, and which provoked my own thoughts.
In this latest one, from February 26, Adam Gopnik had an essay called "Four Years Later," about "What we can't learn from 2020 "--- the COVID Pandemic. He says "when normal life stopped in mid march of 2020. He reminded me that a million Americans died before a vaccine was accessible .
He says "What if the Pandemic, rather than knocking us all sideways and leaving us briefly unrecognizable to ourselves, showed us who we really are?"
"KLINENBERG'S own figure on the pandemic ground is that America's exceptionally poor handling of the crisis exposed the country's structural selfishness: tell people that they are on their own."
I need to say more on this, but glare on the pages got to me tonight. our country's structural selfishness.... that really hit me.
"The pandemic exposed the geological faults in American society, which now threaten to split the earth and plunge us inside."
Then he asks: "Did 2020 change everything? Perhaps those big, epoch-marking years
are tourist traps of a kind. The year 2001 may, in historical retrospect, be remarkable first as the year when, at last, more American homes had Internet access than did not.
A life spent online is a permanent feature of our modernity."
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