This year has served as a terrible reminder that there’s no such thing as normalcy—for many individuals and for society at large, crisis is a permanent state of affairs, and what’s normal, alas, is the systemic failure to recognize and respond to it. Richard Brody in The New Yorker.

Burning down the establishment seems controversial? Our lives have been burning into flames while the two-party system holds us hostage! Our lives have been on the balance while the corporate media holds us hostage! We have to take our lives BACK! Paula Jean Swearengin @paulajean2020 West Virginia Dem. Nominee for U.S. Senate, Mountain Mama, and Coal Miner’s Daughter fighting against the corrupt political machine. UniteOurFight#UnionStrong Coal City, WV PaulaJean.com

I live in a bubble and that point was driven home when I realized my Twitter feed was full of people Tweeting about a New Yorker cover Michele and I thought was particularly amusing and had been talking about. I live in a world that is very small and very homologous and has become more so under quarantine and – probably – as I’ve gotten older. My view of the world is primarily informed by the New York Times-NPR continuum with occasional jumps over to Fox, Aljazeera, and The Guardian. In my world, my personal world, 2020 has been strange but, actually, pretty good. I don’t know anybody who has gone hungry, I don’t know anybody who has been shot by the police, and I don’t know anybody who has been kicked out of their home.

Only, seeing the world only from inside that bubble distorts it. If I drive five miles, to El Camino in Palo Alto – average home price $3,112,592 – I see miles of rundown RVs parked along the side of the road in what can only be called an encampment. They are everywhere, these encampments, communities of homeless people; under the freeways in San Francisco, under a random overpass in Redwood City. This is a different bubble containing a different world. A world that was devastated before the Covid pandemic and is now whatever the step beyond devastated is. From my place of privilege, I can only guess what it must be like to live like this. The fear, the hunger, the anger. I used to think these homeless people were an anomaly and would soon get better, now I don’t think so. This is not the result of a few people falling through the cracks, this is what a non-functioning state looks like.

I have hopes that President-elect Biden will start to change this, but, after reading in my usual sources, how good and important it is that Congress passed the $740 trillion defense bill in a nonpartisan fashion, I am growing dubious.