Christmas is coming up, and we are in a Crisis Era. This carol comes from another Crisis Era, the American Civil War, the worst military carnage in American history. It was an ugly war even if it eventually led to the emancipation of enslaved people.
I now have and obsession with another carnage, this one now in hospital wards instead of the battlefield. Instead of youth who see themselves becoming something if they survive the war and get land on the frontier or inexpensive college or subsidized home-ownership, maybe getting the opportunity to show their competence early instead of getting stuck in a dead-end minimum-wage job, this is often of people still productive, people in their peak years of earning. It is COVID-19, and it kills like a war in volume.
Few of us can enjoy Christmas as we usually do because of COVID-19. If invited to any Christmas parties I will have to pass this year. Next year -- fine.
The late Johnny Cash offers this version.
I now have and obsession with another carnage, this one now in hospital wards instead of the battlefield. Instead of youth who see themselves becoming something if they survive the war and get land on the frontier or inexpensive college or subsidized home-ownership, maybe getting the opportunity to show their competence early instead of getting stuck in a dead-end minimum-wage job, this is often of people still productive, people in their peak years of earning. It is COVID-19, and it kills like a war in volume.
Few of us can enjoy Christmas as we usually do because of COVID-19. If invited to any Christmas parties I will have to pass this year. Next year -- fine.
The late Johnny Cash offers this version.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.