Monthly Archives: June 2020

Connections

Connections

Early on in this pandemic/quarantine I wrote about the need to make connections with old friends, colleagues and mentors. The immediate occasion for that advice was a trade magazine for which I write a monthly column; but like everything else I publish there it’s less about the immediate work environment and more about life in general. I’ve tried to use my time of late in a similar way, though it has not always panned out as carefully as I had advised. Rather, it’s more like I looked up around me and saw that connections had been forming all along and that I was now happily and wisely ensconced in them. That realization came over the weekend, as I was slowly trudging through a pretty complicated book called “The Human Condition” by one of my favorite political philosophers, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). It’s the kind of reading I’ve been doing lately to try to make sense of what’s been going on nationally. Not that Arendt was writing about a plague. She was, however, always writing about the capacity to be generous and creative in public, often in miserable moments of history – whether under Nazism, during the Holocaust, or amidst violent public...Read more

On Edge

I don’t know how else to describe it except by saying I feel like things are on edge. It was something I felt again very powerfully this morning, the kind of depression that descends on you and leaves you heavily curtained in, with little room out for hope or optimism and in which all things are clearly delineated in that gloomy mood. For me, however, it has less to do with my own internal emotional workings than in an understanding of the world around me. Maybe it’s just that ever since I was a kid I learned to look around me to explain what I felt inside. I found myself profoundly affected by events, relationships, politics and history around me. If it was a coping mechanism it seems to have worked. In part, it worked because I always saw some hope or some inspiration in the world that could provide more stable answers and outcomes than I alone could possibly manage. This is why I think that government can be made to work and that we are much better off when it does than when it does not. Right now it’s not coming close. And worse, yet, than the government...Read more
Arena

Arena

Yesterday was an interesting day for the sports world. Anyone who thinks that professional and college athletics will soon be leading us out of pandemic darkness and back into the light of everyday normalcy has now to reconsider. Yesterday, 23 Clemson University football players were found to have tested positive for the Coronavirus. The Philadelphia Phillies announced that five baseball players tested positive for infection and shut down the team’s training camp; they were joined by four other MLB teams who closed down their camps because of positive tests by personnel. Out on the PGA Tour, Nick Watney withdrew from the second round of a tournament after testing positive, but not before he wandered around the practice range and casually chatted up a number of his colleagues. His fellow competitors and their caddies will have to get retested. Presumably (for now) this is an isolated event. If the efforts taken for next week’s PGA Tour event in Connecticut, the Travelers Championship, are any indication, it takes a lot to create a hermetically sealed, safe bubble for an individual sport like golf, let alone for team sports. You’re monitoring athletes, their immediate assistants, coaches, referees and a stripped down cast crew...Read more
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