This Moment

What is there to say at just this moment about the ongoing and interlocking dramas of the day, which we could label simply as "coronavirus" and "the 2020 election", although they are hardly that simple?  The answer for me is not really very much.  Most has already been said, and is being said in the journals of the day.  For example, I've been writing about the prospect of pandemics especially as an effect of climate disruption, about the importance of public health readiness etc. for at least ten years in this space alone.  Now it is or isn't playing out in the real world.

That's in fact what I think is particular about this moment: we see and sense the fateful possibilities that are only beginning to emerge and form and play out.  We'll know more about the virus tomorrow and next week and next month.  We'll know more about the election on Wednesday (after the Super Tuesday voting) but we really won't know anything until we know the final election outcome of November.  What we will be watching, along with the separate consequences of these two dramas, is how they will (or won't) begin to interact and change each other.

Then there are the separate questions about our personal actions in response to these dramas: preparedness and attitudes to the one, and political activity in the other.  But I doubt I have anything to add to what's being said about those either.  So basically I'm heeding Wittgenstein's advice, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."  And I guess I've said all that in order to say, I'm not ignoring it all, at all.  I just don't have anything to add at this moment.