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TPM Reader AA went back through his records and sent me a tick-tock of the lead up to lockdown in early March. He’s planning the trip of a lifetime to Japan for he and his wife’s 25th wedding anniversary. That’s in late March. Son is home from college. A stream of anecdotes, most of which are captured in this sentence of his: “We couldn’t decide if we were being smart or paranoid.”
And then he comes to this …
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From TPM Reader AM …
My wife and I are both (or were) freelance musicians in Chicago. At this time last year, I was playing in the pit of a musical at a theatre in downtown Chicago. I had been following the news about the coronavirus with increasing dread throughout February—partly because there were early covid cases in Chicago in January, partly because I was playing in front of 500 people 8 performances a week, but most of all because it was easy to see that the federal response was currently and was going to continue to be maliciously incompetent. Our first panic grocery shop was the third week of February, by which point I had insisted that my octogenarian parents cancel all possible outside activities (including the choir they sang in) and skip the performance of the show that they were planning on attending on March 15.
From TPM Reader SW …
I suppose, in retrospect, my “COVID moment” came a little late. I’m a union lawyer by trade, and at the moment I represent performing artists who work for non-profit arts organizations across the country. I was dealing with any number of quotidian crises in early 2020 and, as an long-suffering hypochondriac, I had more or less outsourced worrying about COVID to family and friends until it forced itself into my consciousness. So my reckoning came, along with a lot of the country, on March 11, though I think I probably had a few hours’ head start.
From TPM Reader PL …
I lived in Beijing for 5 years and had just left a job working for a Chinese company involved in international trade’s New York office. I saw all my friends in China reacting and realized that it was a big deal, and my wider social network of people who were from or had lived in China were all paying attention to it starting in January. I’d been in Beijing during the swine flu outbreak and knew the Chinese government didn’t fuck around with outbreaks. But when they locked down Wuhan and surrounding areas during Spring Festival, by far the largest travel holiday in the world, I knew it was going to be enormous. It’s not just that it’s an enormous metro-region, but it’s a huge rail transit hub and hundreds of millions of people travel by rail during the holiday. Imagine shutting Chicago O’hare Airport down during Thanksgiving times a thousand.
Sweeping Democracy Overhaul Bill To Make Final Push In The House
Just F’ This Guy?
Even though I wasn’t the one covering it for TPM, I was waiting to hear ex-President Trump’s speech last night because he remains, even after the presidency, a looming presence in our national politics. I watched. I listened to him brag. I listened to his standard barrage of lies about immigration. And then I thought, “Fuck this guy. I don’t need to hear this.” I turned off the feed and went to work on a woodworking project.
This might be a normal response for some. But it’s not for me. When everyone else was treating Trump as a joke I said it was folly to ignore him. Within weeks of his getting into the race in 2015, I thought he’d win the Republican nomination. Indeed, long before Trump, in most everything written at TPM I’ve pressed a basic point. There is a breed of quaint liberal myopia that says that if we just ‘don’t give oxygen’ to awful people that will somehow make them go away, like a toddler who think covering his eyes means you can’t see him. We’re told we shouldn’t “amplify” the likes of Donald Trump. This is all congenial, well-intentioned nonsense – the sort of head in the sand thinking that lets you wake up one day and not now how we ended up with Donald Trump being President.
And yet here, nope.
Where Things Stand: The Problem With Just Asking Questions
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) chose to use his time during a Senate hearing on the Capitol riot last week to read a Federalist column that made unsubstantiated claims about antifa being involved in the insurrection — giving a national megaphone to conspiracy theories about the deadly attack that have been floated by Republicans since Jan. 6.
But now he claims he’s just asking questions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m reading through your descriptions of your ‘moment’ with COVID, as we hit the one year mark. They are fascinating to read and incredibly edifying for me in putting the story in context as news and history. Please keep them coming. I will be publishing many of them, as you can see below.
From TPM Reader JT …
For me, the day the stock market crashed—March 9th. I went to the grocery store (HEB in San Antonio) and found it in bedlam. I’m afraid I acted like a Karen–I sent a letter of apology to the manager later–but it was just like being slapped in the face seeing everyone scrambling for milk, eggs, and toilet paper. Sheer panic mode.
I went home and stayed inside. My sons brought groceries for the first month or so, but when we saw how long it was going to last, I began doing curbside pickup, and have continued that to this day.
There’s an interesting preview in Israel right now of what we might see over the summer months as vaccines allow the US to unwind the patchwork of restrictions and mitigation of the COVID epidemic. A stunning 82% of the over 50 population has already been vaccinated. Israel is far away moving the fastest to vaccinate their whole population. But in recent days they’re seeing an uptick in the spread coefficient of the disease. The “R” value is now at .99 and that’s before the impact of Purim, which may be seen as roughly equivalent of Thanksgiving or Christmas in terms of people congregating together.