My Blog Week: March 22 to March 28

Posted by ractrose on 29 Mar 2020 in The Latest

A black cat, nicknamed Nortie, who serves as Torsade's site ambassador.

All the Latest from Torsade!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cartoon of conversation on gaslighting

Cartoon of the Week: Campfire Tales

 

 

 

 

A Word on the Week

 

Oil painting collage with hosiery portraying dead fishPart and Parcel

 

 

 

 

It’s not a question of whether the environmental benefits of coronavirus lockdowns count as an upside to the pandemic.

We’re far enough along in this that we need to consider the future. Even the idea that a bad response can be muddled into an eventual success is too much a luxury, bearing in mind that nothing prevents coronavirus from simmering down and returning in a fresh wave next winter. Refugee and homeless populations, people denied care or too isolated—from trust for authority and/or receipt of information—to obtain care, raise the possibility of bodies in waste areas, abandoned buildings, roadsides, lying undiscovered…

The virus was transmitted first from animals to humans; it could go from humans back to harbor in an animal host. 

Quarantines in reverse aren’t economically bearable. The U.S. can draw on resources now to produce this record-breaking stimulus package, which still falls short and leaves millions without help. Properly, at the signs of an epidemic breaking, we should identify who has it, and quarantine the carriers. Shutting indoors all the people who might potentially become carriers…well, we have learned (are still learning) how that goes. We’ll need new laws to prevent lax officials from slowing the next effort; we’ll need stockpiles and distribution mapping, new protocols, a panel of epidemic specialists required to be given oversight of the response plan.

The ominous thing about COVID-19 is the spectrum of severity this disease produces. While many don’t need hospitalization, what trajectory will play out for you if you get sick is, aside from known vulnerabilities, often surprising, and in a bad way. Smoking and vaping, working in transportation, in agriculture, in any dust or fume-producing industry, are compromising to people’s respiratory health. But also, the air and water quality in a lot of countries have been truly miserable. Let’s not let this lesson go by; let’s recover and then insist on addressing what is as clear as the blue sky, so much irrefutable proof of the killing nature of fossil fuels. 

 

 

 

On Monday, Cartoon Stories, some history-based humor. Tuesday, a new Eight, another Bushido virtue, “Respect”, and an exercise in Elizabethan diction. Wednesday, a poem reissue from The Poor Belabored Beast, “Zealots”; Thursday, Frédéric Boutet’s “Hypnotism” part one, in which the craze for mystical practices troubles a marriage. Friday, “When You See God”, a poem from Rattus. Saturday, another, “The Smell of the Crowd”. 
Images on my posts often have a link to related information (click first image), sometimes serious, sometimes whimsical, sometimes in answer to a direct reference. Since people can be leery about links, I include them here: what they are, what sites they point to.

 

 


 

 

My Blog Week: March 22 to March 28

 

Cartoon Stories: Historical Hijinks
March 23

 

Respect (poem)
March 24

Poetry Foundation: Alice B. Fogel, “Which Way the Winds Blow”

 

Zealots (poem)
March 25

 

Frédéric Boutet: Hypnotism (part one)
March 26

 

When You See God (poem)
March 27

Poets.org: Allan Michael Parker, “The God of Draperies”

 

The Smell of the Crowd (poem)
March 28

The Spruce: “How to identify the beautiful, endangered Luna moth”

 

 

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