I’m enjoying having my daughter here with me this week. By the time I adjust to her being here with me, she’ll be on her way back to New Jersey. She had originally planned to stay through the week, but she now has a video job interview on Friday and would like to be back home so that she has some nicer clothing and her own laptop. For me the adjustment is more about general schedule. I don’t think I’ve exercised since she’s been here, and the amount of time I spend reading and writing has gone down. They say (not sure who they are) it takes thirty days to establish a new habit… My guess is that it would take a while to adjust if this were a semi-permanent situation. It’s a good reminder of how overwhelming it might have been for my ex-fiancee to go from being on her own with the dog to being in a house with two other people and two cats. I sometimes wonder if it would have been easier for me to move in to the city.
The preamble is a way of saying that yesterday was another day in which little got done. I think the challenge is that when you’re the host (or the parent), you spend some of your time and energy anticipating needs – which, for me, means, maybe not getting in to things that will take my full attention. I did go for a walk yesterday – took this nice picture of the sky over the river.
I also made a pretty kick-ass shrimp and grits dinner. Sadly, I think those might have been the highlights of the day. I spent the morning (yesterday) trying to write. I edited a little bit in the afternoon, and noodled around on the internet. I read an interesting article on the differences that ended the friendship between Camus and Sartre. The best lines were these:
Albert Camus was French Algerian, a pied-noir born into poverty who effortlessly charmed with his Bogart-esque features. Jean-Paul Sartre, from the upper reaches of French society, was never mistaken for a handsome man.
Ouch…. But what really struck me about the article was the influence these men, along with some of their contemporaries, were having on their country and the world.
Newspapers reported on their daily movements….
Europe had been immolated, but the ashes left by war created the space to imagine a new world. Readers looked to Sartre and Camus to articulate what that new world might look like. ‘We were,’ remembered the fellow philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, ‘to provide the postwar era with its ideology.’
I can’t imaging our world today in which people turn to thought leaders to imagine a new world (we certainly need it). And this isn’t to bash pop culture and the need for escapism, but our media splits its time between following a petulant man-child king who holds our country’s highest office and some dude who owned tigers.
Ever since this pandemic hit, I’ve been reading and thinking that it is shining a light on how unjust our system of capitalism is. This isn’t a new way of thinking for me – there was a reason when given the choice of being director of education, financial stability, or health, I chose to head up the financial stability programs. There’s a reason when I worked on a book project I asked to edit the volume on the right to a living wage. For quite some time, maybe a decade or more, I’ve been of the mindset that our system of trickle down is just wrong. It strips away basic rights and puts them in the hands of the people who have wealth. Through their economic power as shareholders and “producers,” they get to determine what and how much trickles down. As recently as the last election, poor people were being described as the “takers” – meaning that they are a drain on our system – they don’t produce for society. Meanwhile, 3 weeks ago the US market sell-off netted short sellers (people who are not producing anything other than “wealth”) $344 billion.
I wish we paid attention to thoughtful people on how we might build a more just system. The calls are out there. We’re starting to see just how stupid it is to have health insurance tied to employment. We saw during the last crisis how dangerous it is to tie everyone’s retirement to a market that can be manipulated and suffer terrible crashes. There are smart people talking about how we could do better. In addition to reading the Camus vs. Sartre article, I hopped on over to Yes! Magazine to read ideas on how to build a better post Coronavirus America.
We could decide to continue to support our small and local businesses, we could decide to give more to charity, we could decide to support more sustainable business practices (things that would reduce travel and pollution), we could decide to go to something like a 30-hour work week (which would not only give workers more time with their families but employ more people), we could all push back and simply demand better. I’d love to see someone re-issue John Lennon’s Imagine with new lyrics that turn it in to Re-Imagine. But so long as we continue to put profits above people, these things will not be possible. As I look for my next gig, I’m thinking maybe this is the fight I want to join – the fight for economic fairness and freedom for more people (I know I’d like some of it myself).
That was a semi-weighty few paragraphs. I’ll close on a lighter note because cats and the internet. Nick (my cat) has pretty sharp claws that get stuck in everything. Last night, he kept stretching his front paws out – on a table, on the cushions. He got his claw stuck in the sofa cushion. I caught him making a face as he tried to free himself.
