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Hi Subscriber First Name, In normal times, two weeks would barely be a blip on our radars. The river of our lives would be flowing, mostly tranquil and uneventful. Now, so much of what we always took for granted already feels like a distant past. We were watching the latest episode of The Plot Against America last night (well two nights ago as you read this). It’s a new show on HBO, set during World War II but in a dystopian reality where Charles Lindbergh becomes president of the United States through an anti-war, America First agenda. Yes, there was another America First. How original. Of course we can see events coming from a mile away: Lindbergh has aligned with Hitler, there’s a “Bureau of American Absorption”, Nazi slogans appearing in jewish neighbourhoods...it won’t be pretty. But it’s a line spoken by a very secondary character that jumped out at me: during the London raids, a british nurse muses, smiling, on the way wartime has transformed the repeating banality of life, into an everyday adventure into the unknown. Well, yes. I can’t help thinking of our grandparents or great-grandparents, living through the reality of war, either directly or from afar. I imagine they felt this same sense of a surreal shift over which they had no power. They probably accepted the transformations, adapting, the way we’re forced to adapt right now. I also think of immigrants and mass displacements, of humans forced into conditions that are unimaginable...and how they cope, how they accept. Because eventually acceptance is all there is. You fight, but the foundations you relied on no longer exist and life takes on an wholly different colour. I must admit to being sort of amazed at the speed of it all. At how it now seems perfectly normal to spend our entire days and weeks together as a family, barely speaking to neighbours and then only from a safe distance. I see gatherings of people in movies, folks shaking hands or hugging, eating at a restaurant...and I instinctively cringe. A new reflex, already deeply embedded into my psyche. So far, I don’t believe our kids feel it the same way we do. Probably because their baggage is so much lighter than ours and they haven’t yet fully absorbed the mechanics of society. What will they write about, ten years from now? How different will their world be? Geez...I didn’t mean for any of this to be a downer. I guess I just got carried away a bit. Let’s switch gears.
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