It could be worse. For a while it looked like both Marco and Laura could come ashore at the border between Texas and Louisiana. Two hurricanes at the same place in the same week would be cruel. The upper Texas coast is not going to have a great week. But Louisiana’s week looks very soggy.
Here we go again. In light of the pandemic, nobody is surprised. How can you put yourself in the okay group that gets through this as intact as possible?
What does this mean for you when you are starting or acquiring a business, or taking on a leadership role in any type of organization? To borrow a trite phrase, it means you can grow the organization more readily if you “start as you mean to carry on.”
Government permission to ease lockdown does not mean it is safe, especially where the government is more focused on the economy than on the safety of its people. Please look after yourself and people you care about accordingly.
Don’t expect to find a candidate or a political party that you agree with perfectly. That rarely happens. But somebody will stand out as behaving in a way you respect more than the others. Somebody will tend to act not only for you, but for neighbors and friends and the whole community they are asking to represent. That’s who you want.
Where operating in this pandemic is feasible, the businesses faring best aren’t simply lucky or even simply resilient. Look at the character of those businesses and the trade-offs they chose to be that way. I don’t know a single word for it, but perhaps that’s the new ideal.
But they are still missing a connection with people who have been living for years with other chronic illnesses. That means they are having to reinvent the wheel about how to live with many of their symptoms. The spark that made CI Forum so valuable was the overlap between what people with different illnesses went through. People with MS, chronic Lyme disease, ME/CFS, systemic lupus… turned out to have a lot of challenges in common, from symptoms to stigma to getting through the day. Forum members shared coping methods across illness boundaries.
Governments are still responding to the immediate crisis. It’s up to us to look ahead, make plans, and start putting together a better solution for COVID-19 long-haulers… and, while we’re at it, for all the other chronically ill people in a similar pickle.
Any country that does not wrestle this novel coronavirus down to low prevalence is making its population a viral reservoir. By doing so, each such country endangers the entire world. It may spawn a mutation that is even worse than what we face now, more lethal or more disabling.
Do this protesting with the knowledge that when enough people do it—peacefully, persistently, insistently, unrelentingly—change happens. This is the way The People can push a nation (the USA or another) to become better than its authorities want it to be.
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