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…week/month/year. This is all I have today but sure! Bring on July.

This was in Sunday’s paper:

As I said on Monday, what a time to be alive. (I’m saying it with a different inflection here, but still. Things are going on. I saw something on Twitter the other day along the lines of, “Future historians will have to pick which quarter of 2020 to specialize in.”)

Our nation’s capital looks like a military dictatorship, 100,000 people are dead from a pandemic we could have been prepared for, nearly 40 million people are out of work but corporations got over $500 billion in stimulus money, everything from policing to educational systems are dysfunctional… this could be a really long list.

A friend sent this last week and I have been watching it on repeat when I can’t mentally add to that list any more.

Listen

Tag yourself, I’m the freight train at :12.

To paraphrase a post Doc showed me, “You know things are bad if Utah is rioting.” And things are bad. As someone whose race and privilege has made sure all my interactions with police are safe and cordial, I have no right to talk about “the right way” people should protest.

But this isn’t right, either:

Nor is this:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

No justice. No peace. One of the men 4 men who killed George Floyd has been charged with third-degree murder. It doesn’t feel like a victory. A man is still dead and police officers know that most of the time, there will be no repercussions for the violence they inflict. When you see this whole image, when you don’t slice it up into 10 small pieces, all that’s visible is one long bar. Killing after killing that goes unpunished. That’s why people are still protesting *after* the news that Derek Chauvin has been charged. It’s not nearly enough. Let’s go back to the start and look at the 25 times that police officers supposedly had to face consequences for their actions. History tells us that even if all four men who killed George are convicted, their sentences will be generous (unlike the way the criminal justice punishes black men). Here is a breakdown of the sentences that were given those 25 times: ➖ Unknown sentence = 4 ➖ Just probation = 3 ➖ 3 months in jail = 1 ➖ 1 year in jail, 3 years suspended = 1 ➖ 1 year in prison = 1 ➖ 18 months in prison = 1 ➖ 2.5 years in prison = 1 ➖ 4 years in prison = 1 ➖ 5 years in prison = 1 ➖ 6 years in prison = 1 ➖ 16 years in prison = 1 ➖ 20 years in prison = 1 ➖ 30 years in prison = 2 ➖ 40 years in prison = 1 ➖ 50 years in prison = 1 ➖ life in prison = 3 ➖ life in prison without parole, plus 16 years = 1 Source: Mapping Police Violence (run by @samswey, @iamderay & @MsPackyetti)

A post shared by Mona Chalabi (@monachalabi) on May 30, 2020 at 5:19am PDT

It’s more than “one bad cop.” It’s more than police brutality, even. It’s this:

(and if that quote makes you feel immediately defensive, can I suggest reading White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo? I read it last year and yeah, it’s uncomfortable, but that’s the point)

Some things from the ‘gram:

Lisa Congdon, with the wise advice yet again

Did you know Mary Engelbreit was still making art? And has an Instagram account? And is super liberal?!

Julie Houts‘ mix of FASHUN illustration and anxiety is pretty great.

THIS. All of this. I’m sure we can all relate. (El Arroyo restaurant and their famous sign.)

We hit 40 days of staying home to self-quarantine yesterday and I just learned about the origin of the word, so let’s talk about that today. From Science Friday, The Origin Of The Word ‘Quarantine’:

Officials in the Venetian-controlled port city of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik, Croatia) passed a law establishing trentino, or a 30-day period of isolation for ships arriving from plague-affected areas. No one from Ragusa was allowed to visit those ships under trentino, and if someone broke the law, they too would be isolated for the mandatory 30 days. The law caught on. Over the next 80 years, Marseilles, Pisa, and various other cities adopted similar measures.

Within a century, cities extended the isolation period from 30 to 40 days, and the term changed from trentino to quarantino—the root of the English word quarantine that we use today.

Also, the more things change…

For others, especially those with money, quarantine could be optional. “There are people who are able to evade quarantine, there are people who were able to buy their way out of quarantine, there are people who were able to just leave when a quarantine was imposed and not come back until it was over,” says [science historian Karl] Appuhn. “So, the people who suffered under quarantine tended for the most part to be poor—people who had no choice.”

I don’t have the attention for thoughtful essays right now and everyone’s just writing about the ‘rona anyway. So here’s some things from Instagram that look pretty and made me happy:

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(source–the caption on this one is worth a read.)

I’ve managed to stay off Twitter, where I follow journalists, and mostly keep to Instagram, where I follow people who sew and random funny accounts:
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And if I feel bad about spending too much time scrolling Instagram, there’s this to remember:
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As my anxiety ratchets higher and the world gets crazier, this post from Allyson Dinneen (the “Notes From Your Therapist” Instagram account) is gonna be my new motto:

If you’re tired of the internet giving you things like “politics” and “global pandemics” and “the collapse of civilization,” take a look at this. As the intro says, this is why the internet was invented.

Finally found a purpose for the internet pic.twitter.com/7BsM6q9oiL

— Kevin W. (@Brink_Thinker) February 25, 2020