I guess the hard thing is, this has all crept up on us so gradually, it’s hard to fully understand what is happening.

This is a historically consequential moment. Imagine The Depression plus the AIDS crisis, maybe throw in a dash of US Civil War.

People have died. 130,000 of them.

More people will die. What’s to stop it from hitting a half a million? Nothing, so far, is on the horizon to help us pump the brakes.

Families are desperate. Unemployment is surging.

Businesses are collapsing. Government is struggling.

This is a moment of calamitous structural failure and it has a body count.

What they don’t tell you when you’re learning about these periods in history class is how much everyone is forced to keep going about their business.

You have to find ways to pay rent, to eat.

One of the foundational elements of the American economy is state-subsidized child care in the form of the public school.

Not only was that pillar yanked out months before the school year ended,

We still don’t have a clear idea of how to safely, sustainably restore it.

So on top of everything else, people who are responsible to children have extra burdens while raising them.

And kids were already such an expensive proposition in this country, we’re seeing limited fertility as a consequence.

This is a shitshow of historical proportions.

They’re going to have endless period movies about it. It’s going to have an ominous name and it will cast a shadow on following generations.

Those of us who live through it will be considered sturdy, bordering on the heroic.

Because make no mistake. Some of us are demonstrating heroic courage in the face of this.

Some of us are lined up for the first times at food banks, hoping for a hand-up. Others are intimate with the process, and now find other challenges piling up.

People are losing loved ones. People are saying good bye to them over the fucking phone because they can’t travel or can’t enter the spaces where people dear to them draw their last breaths.

People are finding their physiology ravaged, well beyond a mild couple weeks of symptoms

And when we look to our systems, what do we see but crumbling, burning edifice?

Feeble-minded tyrants, craven careerists, spineless toadies, and the systems designed to support us hijacked or destroyed.

That’s a lot of failure weighing on everyone’s shoulders at once.

MEANWHILE, centuries of a racial caste system have created disproportionate outcomes in all of this.

And grievances around that caste system have come to a boil.

So on top of everything else, we watch the moment be weaponized to harm people according to their racial identity.

Folks were wringing their hands about riots destroying fast food franchises.

But meanwhile, Indigenous, Black and Latinx communities are dying at disproportionate rates. And it’s all legal!

Supporters of the old, dying racial caste system, meanwhile, are angrily on the march.

My god that’s stressful.

Can you believe all that?

That’s what we got.

Here’s the thing.

No one is going to make a nicely edited movie about this, with soaring, heroic score battling ominous cues, for some years.

We can’t make narrative sense of this yet because we have no idea how it ends.

But it’s here, it’s now.

From now on, everyone you meet is either a survivor of a deeply traumatic period in history

Or someone who will succumb to the cruelty of the moment, desperately missed by those who love them.

I can’t even tell you the proportion of one to the other. But those are the options.

So that means:

You’re going to have to start giving yourself the grace of someone going through a horrific time.

You’re going to need to move on from there, giving those around you the grace of someone going through a horrific time.

That is the only to get through this intact.

Grace for everyday people living through everyday struggle is different than how we address the powerful

Leaders are responsible for meeting this moment. If you are hurting because of the indifference, cowardice, or greed of someone with power in the equation, your beef is valid

Those who have civic or cultural influence, those who have legislative or executive authority, those who operate businesses—

Their positions are not entitlements. If they do not responsibly serve their constituencies, it is valid and appropriate to elevate new leaders who will.

So we have to back up our neighbors.

We have to listen to those who don’t have the power to protect themselves.

We need to demand more from our institutions.

It’s a big project.

So it starts with you.

Give yourself the kindness of someone surviving something.

Because you literally are.

You will tell stories of this time, with luck, in better times. You will wonder how you got through it.

Recalibrate your self talk with that in mind, yes?