Where Oh Where Have My In Person Students Gone? Covid Chronicles XIV: Different Places, Every One.

 

I am teaching two undergraduate sections of History and Systems of Psychology this fall.  All of the students are juniors or seniors.  The classroom is a “split” classroom with students able to come to class by Zoom on all days and there is a variable schedule for in class days.  Due to social distancing, only half of the students in each section can be accommodated in the physical classroom in the first class of the week – so there is a rotation schedule for that class, but all students can be in the classroom for the second class in the week. 

The mean scores on the midterms are comparable to prior years, but attendance in the physical classroom has been decreasing and both Monday and Tuesday I was the only person in the physical classroom and I facilitated a discussion (a focus group if you will) about the diminishing physical presence.  Every student in each section who was present contributed to the conversation.  They seemed genuinely interested and open about the discussion.

There are a variety of factors that are playing into students not coming to the physical classroom.  The factors vary from student to student and while for some students there is an overriding factor and some tertiary factors, for others there are multiple factors, different ones of which might come into play on any particular day.  I think there was a general consensus that, for most of the students, all other things being equal, the physical classroom is the optimal learning environment.  The problem is that all other things are not equal and the zoom classroom is an acceptable alternative – not optimal, but passable (or better).

The factors for not coming that were articulated include:

·       Being in quarantine because of a roommate’s illness.

·       Being ill (whether COVID related or not).

·       Being personally at high risk because of health conditions and limiting contact.

·       Living with or regularly spending time with others at risk – including parents and grandparents.

·       Living in high contact settings (e.g. dorms) and not wanting to expose the class.

·       Having all online classes that make it hard to commute between home and classroom.

·       Quality of the physical classroom interactions being compromised by a much smaller class size – there isn’t the same buzz in the classroom (and in the building) with masks and social distancing contributing to the awkwardness of interaction (the latter was added by me and there was some assent to it – I’m not sure how much that is a factor – but the smaller class attendance was spontaneously brought up by the students – and there are far fewer people in the building than usual – it feels like a morgue to me).

·       It being inconvenient to come to class on some days for a variety of reasons (on both days when talking to the students it was raining, though the weather was not mentioned as a contributor – waking up at 9:57 for a 10 am class was mentioned as a factor).

·       It being more convenient to come to class virtually for a variety of predictable reasons – e.g. work schedules or only having this one class on campus on the day when the class meets.

My summary impression is that the physical classroom, while a better place in principal for synchronous learning, is, in the current climate, an increasingly difficult option to choose for a variety of reasons as the semester has worn on.  Students are still involved in the class as a virtual classroom, and the comforts (which include everything from physical safety to convenience) outweigh the risks and inconvenience of coming to class – especially as the qualities of the classroom diminish as the number of people present there goes down.

All that said, the students want me to keep coming to the in-person site so that it is an option for them when they want to opt in to it – and on the class after this discussion two students were in the classroom with me.  In some ways it might be a better class if we were all virtual than it being a missed classroom.  It is hard for people on zoom to participate in class than when people are in the classroom – which is a hard enough place to participate – so the in class people become the people engaged in conversation and the zoomers become wallpaper.

The students also noted that this class was easier for students to engage in than students they were in with first year students.  They were concerned about those students because they were having to learn how to make use of a zoom class at the same time that they were learning how to “do the college thing.” 

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.

Free Association – A Basic Psychoanalytic Concept

 

 

Free Association is the sole directive that Freud offered his patients.  He gave this directive in various forms, but the essence of it was: lie back on a couch and tell me everything that goes through your mind: all of your thoughts, feelings, and any sensations that might occur.  At one point he offered a metaphor.  He asked the patient to imagine that they were on a train ride in their mind and they were looking out the window the way you would on a train and they were to report to him what they saw going through their mind, just as they would report the trees and mountains and villages that they saw going by if the two of them were riding on a train together.

 

First of all, let’s acknowledge that this is impossible.  There’s just too much that takes place in our minds to fit through our mouths in form of words.  And we reference things in our mind that require a lot of explaining for them to make sense of to another person.  And some of what we think and feel simply can't be turned into words - those this directive encourages us to try to do that.  And, try as we might to do follow the directive, every time the analyst speaks, he or she interrupts us and we have to start all over again.

 

Freud’s hunch, and it turned out to be a pretty good one, was that the random thoughts that occur to us (and if you have never recorded your thoughts, sit back, take a pen or keyboard and record your thoughts and you will see that they go all over the place), are not as random as they appear.  They form patterns and make sense, just as the crazy images from our dreams do.  And, at least initially, Freud saw his job, the job of the analyst, to make sense of these ideas – to point out to the patient what was really driving the thoughts and actions of the patient – and he believed that explaining the organization of their mind to them would lead the analysand, through insight, to realize that there was a better way to do things.

 

This model did not stand the test of time.  First of all, insight didn’t always lead to behavior change.  And secondly, having a passive analysand is as ineffective as having a passive student.  In order to improve as an analysand or a student we both have to be active agents in the work.  We, as analysand and student, have to make the material our own – and it is even better if we can begin to both ask and address the questions ourselves.  Then we are no longer students but well on the way to becoming able to self-analyze or to be lifelong learners.

 

Freud begrudgingly allowed that his patients needed to be collaborators in the analytic process – but it was more recently – at the end of the last century – that analysts like Paul Gray, Anton (Tony) Kris, and Fred Busch articulated what the implications of that were.  And, as is often the case, even though these three analysts were working on closely related concepts, each of them put their own spin on them and the ways that they end up working analytically are very different.  But for a moment, I will treat them as a group.

 

From the perspective of this group, more or less, the goal of treatment is to facilitate free association – not a condition of treatment.  Freud’s exhortation to freely associate is not a condition of treatment, but the result of it.  And, again more or less, this group suggests that we can best understand the analytic process as a process of helping the patient realize when they are engaging in bound rather than free associations – and to explore what why we didn’t follow a certain thought.

 

Paul Gray, the “leader” of this group, suggests that an analyst should closely follow a patient’s thinking and point out when they deviate from a line of thought.  This, he suggests, indicates resistance to freely associating – or the presence of defensive functioning.  Once the analyst and analysand agree that something is being defended against, they can speculate about what that is.  The process of unearthing thoughts that we are uncomfortable with teaches us that they are more survivable than we imagined them to be and also helps return executive control to us.

 

Tony Kris relates free associations to the functioning of the mind – that there is a “thrust” (this is Freud’s instinctual drives) and an opposition (this is Freud’s repression – but we can think of it as defenses in general).  He is relating free association to Freud’s first, topographic, model of the mind – a model in which there is consciousness and a pre-conscious space, and an unconscious.  The opposition lies with consciousness and the thrust lies in the unconscious.  For Kris, the goal is to obtain a balance between these two forces so that, at the conclusion of treatment, a person can be vibrant – meaning their drives animate them, and they can be focused, meaning their opposition directs those drives to useful ends.  The “free association” of the patient at the end of treatment is not simply saying whatever comes to mind (that is psychosis), but articulating their experience clearly and directly.

 

Fred Busch applies the principles of free association to the second and more familiar of Freud’s models of the mind.  The structural model, with its ego, id, and superego, operates based on signal anxiety (not the anxiety of containing a dam of emotions that is swollen to bursting, as in the first model).  Anxiety is a signal to the ego (frequently a signal that we are not conscious of) that unacceptable material is emerging.  It is this signal that leads to the telltale switches of direction that Gray would have us attend to.  What Busch adds is that the collaborative engagement in tracing the functioning of the mind opens the analyst and analysand to cooperative endeavors that allow them to both address the issues that lie within the analysand that are causing anxiety, but also opens them up to collaborative work that allows for the kinds of growth in interpersonal as well as intrapsychic functioning that the relational psychologists focus on.

 

Free association is, thus, a technical cornerstone of analytic technique, but also a plays a key role in understanding the form and function of a healthy mind – and of understanding what gets in the way of a mind being able to self-correct and thereby grow – and thus helps us understand one of the critical ways in which psychoanalysis can help us function more adaptively.   

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The Social Dilemma: Social Media should be Governed!

 The Social Dilemma, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Documentary, Movie

The documentary “The Social Dilemma” is a less than captivating film that doesn’t clearly deliver its message, but even a botched delivery job has caught a lot of well-deserved attention.  The message at the heart of the film should have been:  “We are both social creatures who crave connection AND we are anxious creatures who deeply fear the problems that inherently accompany connection.  The Social Media Nerds set out to create an Eden – a social world where we only get good connections.  But it turns out that this turned out to be a feeding feast for predatory advertisers and for predatory idea mongers who happily build worlds that are enthralling and apparently risk free, all the while tipping us into the trap of being addicted to apparently risk free contact that is actually bleeding us dry.” 

 

The film labors to get the message across in what seems like a very long hour and half of talking heads and a really bad dramatization of this with a suburban family being played like puppets on a string into getting arrested for the protests by the Extreme Center (!).  (Who in the center is Extreme?  Why did they put in a politically correct and therefore oxymoronic set of evil characters – and bleed the characters in the dramatization of what little humanity they might have had at the beginning of the film?)  The writer’s apparently didn’t trust the talking heads to convince us and they thought that seeing this “dramatization” would help us.  Oddly, the image of a lifeless puppet being manipulated by mechanical miscreants is haunting, but the general tenor of the story seems lifeless and unbelievable to me...  

 

The writers and director, by including this dramatization, don't seem to trust us to apply what is discussed to our own lived experience.  Don’t we know that we are being eaten alive by our devices?  Don’t they think we are horrified by ways in which we have become fractionalized in the last decade?  Don’t they think we would actually resonate more with the graphs and data they present?  Or do they think that would be too nerdy?  That we would turn away from something that is so clearly based on thinking, data, and logic.  Do they think that we need a particular dramatization to bring this to life?

 

In my own world, I am more than aware of how much work I put into getting readers and how driven I am by writing posts that are likely to draw readers versus those that I know ahead of time will not, but that I am passionate about writing about.  The numbers matter to me way more than I am comfortable with.  I certainly have railed elsewhere about advice I have been given to put more white space in my blogs and make myparagraphs one sentence long so that I can appeal to readers who are on cellphones and don’t want to be troubled to think.  I take some comfort from thinking that the producers and writers of this film believe that we are further gone than I believe us to be – at least at this moment.  I also think that their lack of belief in our ability to track what they are saying – to withstand controversy – is symptomatic of what they fear Social Media is doing to us.  And it may mirror how the speakers built the internet in the ways that they did and the criticisms that they now have of it - and that they are reluctant to articulate as clearly as they might.

 

A central analogy in this film that is that the capitalist need to continuously expand access to capital – which has driven us to deforest vast stretches of the earth, harmfully burn irreplaceable resources, and voraciously consume scarce minerals – is leading us to taking the same approach to our minds.  As capitalists, we want to inhabit an ever greater quantity of our minds – we want to mine the mind.  The way we do this is to expand the time that we spend with our devices and therefore with the products we would advertise – whether they are commercial or ideological – that we are promoting.

 

It is not just that our devices are sucking up more time, but the means of mining us are scary.  The greatest fear that we have for our sons and daughters is that some suitor with recognize what is good in them and will pretend to love them – will shower them with attention and affection and gifts – not so that they can live together happily ever after, but so that the suitor can control our child – so that the child will become the puppet of the suitor and vulnerable to being used or enslaved by them.

 

The human suitor that we fear for our sons and daughters is the toxic narcissist.  The person who is so damaged that they feel they must have the attention of everyone around them or they will be destroyed.  So they sweep others into their maw the way that strip mining cranes suck entire farms into their shovels in a single sweep.

 

But the predators in the social media drama are not human beings who might come to realize that they are, in fact, dependent on the creatures that they would dominate and control.  The predators in this drama are mechanical – and they have not been curtailed by the moral code written into every one of Asimov’s creatures in I Robot.  The mechanical predators are run by the naked rules of acquisitive capitalism – get more time – this will turn into more advertising clicks which will turn into more revenue.  Behind the capitalists who are seeking more time and clicks stand more capitalists who are happy to pay the revenue because this process has delivered the perfect buyer to their marketing.  They don’t have to buy Super Bowl Ads that have to captivate everyone.  They just have to write an ad to capture the imagination of the used car hobbyist who is looking for a vintage Holley Carburetor.  Not hard to do!  And much cheaper.  All is good – or is it?

 

The movie points out that the advertising of products (and ideas) should be being regulated by the government.  While they don’t talk about how dysfunctional our government has become, they do point out how the government used to protect children watching Saturday morning cartoons from predatory advertising.  They don’t point out that our government, as it focuses on defense and not education has lost an appreciation of how complicated – and how valuable – it is to create a citizenry that is capable of belonging to a Democratic Society.  And the Social Dilemma of the title can be characterized in part that Social Media is accelerating the failure to adequately protect and socialize our young citizens.  Instead it is promising them fame and power that is unreasonable – and creating a space where the lack of opposition to the ideas of the children prevents them from learning to craft arguments that make sense – and to be reined in when those ideas are too extreme and/or self-centered.

 

As much as we fear social engagement because it might include others who differ from us and therefore might hurl insults – or spears – in our direction – it is essential that we engage in the process of having our ideas given a trial by fire.  We need to hear opposing positions – in order that we can craft/hone/sharpen (so many of those words bring up images of warfare) our own ideas so that we can attack back – or recognize that it is time for a truce so that we can come up with a compromise solution.

 

What the talking heads in the movie don’t seem to me to recognize is that this system of Social Media was created by Nerds.  And Nerds have some characteristics that get played out in the Social system they create.  Nerds were not well received, by and large, on the playground (or at least I, as a young Nerd, was not).  But the world of computers is very different.  Computers do what they are told – and, when you tell them nicely and write your code clearly, they do your bidding.  The Nerds – and I don’t mean to be disrespectful – want to create a world that is as responsive as the computer is.

 

One of the characteristics of Facebook initially was that you could only approve of the posts that your friends put up.  It was to be a place of happy affirmation, with all of your friends “liking” what your posts.  But the computer itself does let you know when the program you have written has bad syntax and.  Similarly, other people do this.  The most loyal reader of this blog, my enthusiastic mother, who taught English for years, points out my syntax errors.  I hate this.  And I am greatly appreciative of it.  Some of the chronic mistakes that I make have changed a bit as a result of her (and the reluctant son) explaining how to spot those errors.  And when she points out that there are multiple errors in a particular post (more than usual), it is useful to go back and edit that post rather than having those errors continue to glare (even though some other readers have had to slog through them – and anything you have had to slog through here is entirely my fault, btw). 

 

The point here is that social interaction is messy and uncomfortable and difficult.  And I, every bit as much as the next person, wish this weren’t the case, but we can’t constructively engage with other people without risking the possibility of criticism – and thereby allowing the possibility of growth – no matter how painful that might be.  In an adult interaction, people learn to be tactfully responsive in ways that recognize the positive intent, but that also point out our failures to achieve that intent.  They suggest means of achieving success without too deeply wounding the person who is being critiqued – a word that rests right next to criticized. 

 

The Reluctant Wife has just started watching the new season of The Great British Baking Show.  The feedback that the judges give is direct and clear.  "This tastes good."  "You failed here."  The contestants work both with and against each other.  When they say they are pleased to just to have been on the show, you believe them.   They have been treated with respect, including with the negative feedback – and it is not offered to harm, but as a measure of achievement or lack thereof.  Just this week, sitting in as I sometimes (OK, maybe often) do, we both disagreed with who should have been kicked off the show – but we did agree on who the two to choose between were – and we don’t doubt that both of them would have been gone soon (though I think that my disagreement was the one who left wasn’t teachable and the one who did leave was – unfortunately we’ll only know if that is the case for one of them…).

 

Social Media has created a monstrous world that is playing on our wishes to be loved, to be a member of a community, and to care about others.  These wishes have been responsible for our rise to the top of the food chain and, when manipulated, have caused us to go to war, to exterminate species and, now, threaten the survival of the species on the planet.  The rules of social engagement – necessary rules that help us constructively engage and allow us to build tremendous works – including the interconnected world that Social Media exploit – have not been applied to Social Media.  This movie, flawed though it may be, makes a much needed and evidence based plea for us to do that. 

We need to be forced, a la the old public service message, to sample things that are outside of our narrow purview.  We need to know that there are other perspectives.  We need to get into the "Artificial" Intelligence and include morality as subroutine.  This will be messy and imperfect.  Sometimes the wrong person will be thrown off the show.  But if we don't take up messy tasks and work on them, we will have far bigger messes on our hands.  This movie articulates a few of them; increased suicide, violent supression of minorities, skewing of our personalities in subtle and imperceptable ways.  As scary as the articulated ones are, I fear there are far bigger ones ahead.  The speakers in this film have taken powerful psychological principles and put them in the hands of ruthless entities with essentially infinite resources to exploit them.  We are thus using our knowledge about ourselves against ourselves in ways that we are not controlling.  A recipe for disaster if I ever heard one.

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COVID Chronicles XIII: Ennui

 

Donald Trump has been diagnosed with COVID and the feeling that I experience is sadness.  I don’t think it is “SAD”, in Trump’s disdainful voice, but sad.  Just sad.  Lance Dodes, a psychoanalyst who has been quite critical of Trump, maintains that Trump is not a politician – and cannot be – because of a mental condition.  Dodes has diagnosed Trump with malignant narcissism, a form of psychopathy that, in Dodes opinion, prevents Trump from being able to empathize with others.  This means that he is incapable of functioning as a politician – because he is incapable of being a functional member of a polis because his concerns are centered only on himself and his own survival.

 This was apparent in the debate this week.  Trump’s tactics, such as they were, were to prevent meaningful speech from occurring.  His extemporaneous speech, as was pointed out to me by an analyst friend, is not a means of conveying thoughts, but a means of acting.  In the debate he was acting to prevent Joe Biden from stringing together coherent words, and he did this by using words as weapons – hurling them at his opponent the way that a kid in elementary school would hurl words – or sticks – at an enemy.  A patient texted me the next day that, “The debated was terrible and scary.”  I had to agree with her.

 Chris Wallace took heat for not managing the debaters better (though combatants may be more appropriate).  One psychiatric wag suggested that someone versed in treating personality disorders should have been the moderator.  The problem with this idea, to go back to the malignant narcissist idea, is that to manage the behavior of such individuals you have to have some sort of leverage over them.  The NYT reports on Trump's finances suggest that the only people who may be able to do this are his creditors.

Trump has belligerently trumpeted his independence and I think this is one reason that we "enjoy" him so much - whether are for or against him, we cannot seem to get enough of him.  Trump believes himself to be above the law.  He can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not be prosecuted for it.  He has also, apparently, believed himself to be above the laws of science - both in his failure to address climate change and in his failure to wear masks or to insist that those around him do.

The feeling of sadness rather than something like anger or vindication comes out of a feeling of depletion.  I went to a college reunion some years ago and I was dismayed that one of my favorite teachers talked about the “slog” of the year.  I loved – and idealized – my college experience.  Each week there was new stuff to learn.  I think I forgot that, at a school without semesters but classes that went throughout the year, I would frequently fall behind in the third or fourth week and never quite catch up.  Talk about a slog!

 This year of teaching has been a different kind of slog, though.  We consistently have around thirty or thirty five cases of COVID on campus at any given time.  This is about 5% of the cases in the county, btw.  I’m sure the larger state school across town accounts for an even larger percentage.  Schools are super spreader sites…  And my students know that.  We are meeting in person, at least in theory.  In fact, all of the in person classes are being broadcast on zoom as well – and, at this point, I have two students or so showing up for class in person while the other 20 are online.  Some of them are staying home, I’m sure, because it is easier, but some of them are concerned about becoming infected. 

Teaching to a mixed group in person and on line is terrible pedagogically – the people online, with a very few exceptions, don’t participate very much – they become part of the wall paper – unless I come up with exercises that force them to participate.  OK, this isn’t terribly different than in regular in person teaching.  I have to prod people to participate there, too.  But I can see them and their reactions – the ways that they nod their heads – or turn their noses up – at something I say or that someone else in the class says.  And we can do exercises where we get up and move around the room.  And I’m not wearing a mask…

But more importantly, I think it is the feeling that the slog is shared by the students without the offsetting benefits I used to observe – seeing them standing in knots in the parking lot after class – and joining them for a moment as they connect with each other and enjoy each other’s company.  This is all gone.  I have described it as grim before, and it still is, but it feels increasingly like Groundhog Day (the Movie) in which the same predictable series of events occurs day after day with no end in sight.

 And, of course, it didn’t have to be this way.  Republican bloggers are spouting conspiracy theories because more Republican lawmakers are coming down with COVID than Democrats.  They seem to be overlooking the preventive measures that Democrats tend to take much more frequently than Republicans.  The current buzz is that the event hosted in the Rose Garden to announce the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court was a super spreader event.  Was that RGB’s revenge?  Or is it just that irresponsible – apolitical behavior – behavior that doesn’t take into account the impact on the polis – will ultimately affect us all…

Not that I am above irresponsible behavior.  Last weekend, worn out from isolation, the reluctant wife and I went to the local mall just to have some novelty and to think about how we might redecorate the house (since we spend all of our time here – except for the moments I duck out to campus to teach a class or run to the grocery store to get food).  I have no idea how good the air circulation is in the mall, and there were lots of people whose face coverings were haphazard – nose after nose peeking out of a mask.  I am in a two week waiting period to see if I was infected.

 Trump’s diagnosis was a blessing in that it is a reminder, as we are facing isolation fatigue, that this thing isn’t over yet.  We need to continue to be vigilant.  We don’t know what the immediate impact of this illness will be on us individually, and we have no idea yet what the long term effects will be.  Better to be safe(r) than sorry.  Note to self…

I think I feel tired from living in a variety of types of isolation.   Running into people on walks in the neighborhood feels like an opportunity to shout at each other across the street, not to be in touch.  Our regular dinners with close friends are gone – though we do sometimes eat with friends down the street on the porch with distance.  I miss running into other faculty in the halls, and talking before and after various meetings that are now taking place on zoom and that don’t feel spontaneous in the ways they did.  And I miss the illusion that I could meet more people for lunch than I actually do.  Not to mention missing the noontime basketball game.

 And this period of isolation seems to stretch endlessly into the future.  If we have a change of administrations, it feels like we will be working uphill again, as we did when Obama assumed office in the midst of a terrible recession.   This administration has done a good job of destroying a number of tremendously important agencies and initiatives.  Will they be reconstructed just in time for the next administration to destroy them again?  Even more concerning are the existential issues that are looming.  Climate, health care, continuing racial divides.  And the outsized influence that rural voters have on the legislative branch and the electoral college  (Btw, I really don’t understand the anti-science bias of this group – our agricultural preeminence has been driven by science.  The statistics I learned in graduate school and use in my profession were developed by agriculturalists who were invested in increasing crop yields).

This can’t last forever.  Trump's illness might, eventually, cause his supporters to see the light of the importance of prevention (He might even come out in favor of it based on this having happened to him – though I am not betting on that).  In one of the few enlightening moments in the debate, I heard Joe Biden proposing that he would demand (I don’t know if a President can do this) that the federal fleet become all electrically powered.  If that happened, that would establish electric fueling stations all over the country and we could all work on transitioning off of fossil fuels.  That would be a good thing, right?

But a little light in the tunnel does not sweep away all the darkness.  Our great American experiment in self-government – our attempt to throw off the yoke of an oppressive power – is devolving into battles over whose interests should be served.  Can we, before it is too late, realize that we are all in this together?  Or will the self-serving approach to government and living that Trump espouses continue to hold sway?  Of course, there will always be tension between these two poles – we will never resolve this tension completely, but will we, reluctantly though it will necessarily be, realize that, for the good of all, we will have to give up some of our individual freedoms?  That we will have to inhibit our drive for absolute personal power so that we can achieve a greater good?

So, rather than pathologizing Trump, perhaps we ought to, in retrospect (God willing), talk about him as an example of our shared struggle to mature.  And we need to recognize that this is a process that each new generation has to undertake on their own.  We aren't born mature.  We grow to that position.  We learn how to inhibit our worst impulses (and some other ones as well).  We also learn how to act when the time is right.  Individually and collectively, over and over, we have to struggle to get that boulder to the top of the hill - and to try to help our children prepare to do that as well.  We stumble, the boulder rolls back down, but we put our shoulder to it, and work at getting it back up there because the alternative is, as we are seeing, unacceptable.

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For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.