I am starting to fully absorb the fact that what is happening here is unprecedented in our lifetime. Here in privileged parts of the world like the United States, we’ve been able to take the view that life goes on essentially unchallenged by the natural world.
Sure, there have been terrible natural disasters in particular regions, like the tragedies of hurricanes and earthquakes.
But in these modern times, the entire human world has never faced this kind of full-on attack by Nature itself. We’ve never been asked to think so deeply about just how fragile is the fabric of our everyday human life.
If we do manage to get out of this, I hope we will emerge with greater humility and wisdom.
Very interested to learn how you move forward through this. How are your students going to recover what they can of the semester?
Actually I did my first on-line streaming lecture of the semester this morning, and I think it went really well. It’s definitely a different experience, but not a terrible one.
Watching Stephen Colbert perform without an audience is definitely one of the more surreal events of this episode.