In the traditional Western (i.e., Christian) calendar, a week ago was "Midsummer Day" (midway between May Day and Lammas Day), which was also, in effect, the mid-year day (midway between last Christmas and next Christmas). Our civil calendar (for curious reasons connected with the terms of ancient Roman consuls) runs one week later. So today, July 1, is midway between the last New Year's Day and the next New Year's Day. So where are we today, with the first half of this unhappy year behind us?
When the year began, the covid pandemic was still our primary reality. Hope had appeared on the horizon in the form of vaccines, but those vaccines were still virtually inaccessible to most people. For me personally, the pandemic had put me into quarantine over the New Year. So, what was originally supposed to be my last day doing the work I loved - before my descent into the soulless state of retirement - was instead involuntarily wrenched from me by covid's casual creep into my home. Fortunately spared infection myself, I then had to endure the further risk of infection by having to travel to my new home in New York, where I was then subjected to a second quarantine. (Thank God for Netflix!) Then, seemingly just as suddenly, the possibility of a saner future opened up in the form of access to the life-saving vaccine; and, by the beginning of March, everything (or, at least, many things) started to change.
That, of course, represents a narrow self-referential view of how this year began. But the public stage was comparably tumultuous. Our public space was shared somehow by the dangerously bad (January 6, and mask and vaccine resistance) and the encouragingly good (January 20, and widespread vaccine access). As the pandemic went from seemingly inexorable spread to the possibility of containment, our politics progressed from lies, cruelty, and unprecedented incompetence to our new president's conventional moral decency and normal governance. Even so, sadly, the pandemic remains a real threat in much of our country and most of the world, while the political cult of cruelty and hatred, hopefully exorcised by the 2020 election but actually kept alive by lies, remains a real force fully engaged in undermining our present and future prospects for constitutional governance and a more humane society.
Meanwhile, as if all that weren't enough, we find ourselves in one of those appalling summer heatwaves that remind us that climate change is not only really happening but is already here and now. In the northwest, where once summers were much milder than our local annual northeastern ordeal, the temperature has risen to unprecedented heights, while the rest of the west in general continues to experience unprecedented drought. How long before heat and drought combine to make significant sections of our country completely unlivable?
Yet, in spite of all this horror that increasingly surrounds us - so much of it our own fault - the second half of the year is beginning on an exhilarating note as more and more of the vitality of urban life returns, and with it a revived hope in the future's possibilities. Having crossed the rubicon of lunch with a friend in Manhattan a week ago, today I plan to go to a movie - my first trip to a movie theater anywhere in some 16 months!
On one level, that may sound as self-referential as the whining of elite narcissists who, having spent the past year in a state of casual dress and are now traumatized by the prospect of dressing properly again - a level of self-absorption that must seem absurd to most people who still did have to show up in real life on at least some level even during the pandemic. On the other hand, every return to normal human activity and conventional standards of behavior, however modest and merely individual, is one more step back to social civility and should be celebrated for the significant step it is.
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