Writing During a Pandemic 

Impressions:  Early March, 2020

What the pandemic does is freeze where we are and shine a light on it.   For people over 60, we are now those at higher risk; over 80, even higher risk and in critical places like Italy, triaged out of life, it appears.

Those of us who began to study aging in the 1960's and 1970's because we saw something wrong with age categories as ways to organize and control society and who wanted to demonstrate the value of all human life throughout the lifespan, are aghast at this triage and all the language being used in the media that doesn't question it.

At the same time, municipalities encourage everyone to check on their neighbors, especially older ones, who must be more careful during the pandemic, as if there is a real community.

Mutual aid efforts are springing up or expanding from already existing ones, in response to the pandemic, outside of official directives and charitable efforts, by informed and radical activists who recognize the limits of government as it exists and fear a more controlling, even militaristic or fascist deployment of government resources during this crisis.

It is a challenge to wake up out of individualism and begin to act collectively.  Many are ready and willing.  Others not so much:  hard-core individualists,  demanding above all, their property, their guns, their "freedom".



Poem:  April 3, 2020 

A Compulsion to Make Lists

I've stopped making the lists now--

sometimes three a day

with revisions,

merging into two,

then one,

seeking control.

Walking on a moving sidewalk

to save time,

then they stopped.

The lists became names.

The hierarchy of needs 

moved to others: now, the unknown

of all of us.