everything changes
everything changed yet almost
nothing changed at all
I’ve come to think of our current condition as a kind of long Covid, a social disease that intensified a range of chronic problems and instilled the belief that the institutions we’d been taught to rely on are unworthy of our trust.
The result is a durable crisis in American civic life.
Just look at the election cycle we are about to fall into: It seems like the world turned upside down several times, and yet here we are facing the prospect of another contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as though the country hasn’t moved forward an inch.
Everything changed, and yet almost nothing changed at all.
From the Guest Opinion essay, “Why America Can’t Recover From That First Awful Covid Year” by Eric Klinenberg in the New York Times (Jan. 31 2024).
I live near the seashore and I walk the beach whenever I can.
One of the redeeming aspects of my job is that the office where I work is about 5 blocks from the beach and I can walk down to the east coast of the United States of America on my lunch break.
Over 330 million people in America and a fairly small percentage can be found actually standing on either the east or west coast at any one moment.
I understand and embrace the privilege.
Being this close to the ocean, it is odd that the tide becomes such a part of your life.
You are aware of its highs and lows.
Here in the low country of South Carolina, known as the low country as it usually less than 10 feet about sea level, when the tide is out the pluff mud, the top layer of land in the salt marshes is exposed.
You don’t need to see low tide to know its low tide, you just have to smell it and it smells like pluff mud.
One of my grand daughters got a good whiff and said ‘someone farted.’
I told her nope, that down here that just means its low tide.
Twice a day, the tide comes in and goes back out.
The beach is made and remade as the tide power washes the beach and scours everything in its path.
Tons of seawater plow across the sand and wipes away everything and then retreats, leaving a brand new beach.
Everything is changed.
At the same time, though.
It is the same beach.
Nothing changed at all.
More and more, history I realize, is just as subject to the tide as is the beach.
No Haiku For You 