Compassion and politics in the time of coronavirus

This is not the post I want to write today. I feel like I’m watching my country disintegrate. Throughout all the crises in the past thirty years, the situation in the United States has never felt more desperate, and I wish I could write only words of encouragement and hope.

In these days of coronavirus, racist violence, political tyranny and thoughtless posturing, we wish we had a president like Theodore Rosevelt or Abraham Lincoln, one who would call the country to courage and mutual aid. My home town was recently hit with a massive spike in COVID-19 infection because of the unwise and politically motivated actions of church leaders, including laying on of hands to heal the sick and large group events.

Among most people I know, there is so much fear. Fear of the virus. Fear about the election. Fear over lost jobs and economic collapse. Fear of the police. Fear of rioters. Fear of people with guns. Fear of people reacting to fear.

And yet the thing that makes me most afraid isn’t coming from strangers or Republicans or a virus. It’s the desperation and anger numbing those people I identify with most to suffering other than that specifically sanctioned by the cause. And that’s why this isn’t just an encouraging post about banishing fear.

Creative Commons image by Matthew Kenwrick

I can’t speak for American conservatives and Republicans, but those of us who are in the US called “liberals” or “progressives” like to think of ourselves as the good guys. I mean we really REALLY like to think of ourselves as the compassionate, nicer side of the political divide.

I don’t mean that we just think that we’re right. I assume everyone thinks they’re right. But we also think we’re nice and empathetic too. It comes with the political territory.

And I am not above this hubris. I not only think that being anti-racist, pro-universal health care, proactive on climate change, anti-corporate and so forth are all factually and morally correct. I also think these positions are more compassionate than the alternatives available.

Those who call themselves “conservatives” often make noises about how compassion is good and all, but sacrifices must be made for some other greater good, usually economic prosperity, and that it is more important to ensure that people who work hard get what they deserve than it is to be compassionate for those seen as being less hard working.

Every issue that comes up in America is supposed to be drawn between these lines. So, when Trump belittled the threat of COVID-19 and delayed the US response to it, liberals and progressives were quick to raise the flags of compassion for those most vulnerable to the virus.

In Europe the political sides haven’t been so clearly drawn on COVID-19. Many liberals cautioned against draconian lockdown measures that were likely to harm the most vulnerable and conservative goverments enforced lockdowns, workplace and school closures as well as masks. Europe has a culture in which listening to doctors and scientists is the default, regardless of one’s political stance—at least in theory.

Large scale lockdowns were enforced for more than two months in most places and they proved effective, even in places like Sweden where personal social distancing wasn’t mandated for those at low risk. Except for parts of Italy and Spain where the virus struck before it was even remotely understood, Europe has avoided chaos and massive death tolls.

Over time, European doctors have determined which measures are most effective and which are unnecessary or have harmful side effects, and some measures have been phased out. In the US media and blogosphere there is a lot of discussion about how masks and social distancing are likely here to stay, even beyond a specific vaccine for COVID-19.

But Europeans have loosened up interpersonal interaction already in favor of large scale-social distancing in shopping centers, public transportation, mass events, crowded factories and other hotbeds of contagion. Interpersonal interaction was relaxed a month ago where I live and no spike in COVID-19 cases has resulted.

The Atlantic divide has meant that I get some flak from American friends for discussing which measures have been phased out locally due to nasty side effects or ineffectiveness. I find myself with a sudden, uncomfortable insight into why conservatives often scoff at liberal claims to compassion because of our vehement (and yeah, sometimes self-righteous) insistence on particular social norms.

In American liberal circles, it is mandatory to be compassionate about the two to four percent of the population (depending on the strength of your healthcare system), who could die from COVID-19. It is not so encouraged to be compassionate about people with anemia and other blood-oxygen conditions who are at risk while wearing masks or about the relatively young and healthy people who have experienced cardiac arrest due to attempting to run or cycle wearing a mask or about the countless people pushed into psychological instability and suicide risk due to extreme isolation.

It is not okay in liberal circles to voice compassionate concern over the people hit by the economic crisis, if that entails any criticism of COVID-prevention measures. Voicing compassionate concern for people who cannot stay home with their children and survive at the same time is not much encouraged.

It isn’t good to mention that social distancing, which we blithely predict will be permanent, is devastating people who are already socially isolated due to mental illness or disability. It is definitely not okay to talk about the rising tide of suicide figures or to compare any of this to the number of COVID-19 deaths, which while equally terrible, are still a small fraction of the preventable deaths in our society. (And I’ll get flak for that statement alone, despite the facts.)

While I do think I’m personally compassionate, I have never felt that this requires tolerance and empathy for everyone. I am not tolerant toward intolerance and never have been. I am not even very compassionate toward people who are clearly suffering under a burden of too much privilege and too little introspection. But still the current compassion exclusivity is disturbing, even more so because it is fueled by feelings of desperation and political anger.

It has become more about politics than about compassion. Compassion is now rarely referenced unless it suits the cause. Do we truly care about protecting the vulnerable or just about combatting Trump and his supporters, because of everything else Trumpism has brought?

Each camp in the US wields the virus like a political weapon. The conservatives are suddenly into hugging strangers in crowds. (Just imagine explaining that to a time traveler from a year ago.) And liberals are into putting a cold hand in the face of anyone who doesn’t wear a mask, regardless of the circumstances.

It isn’t hard to generate empathy for my freaking-out liberal friends and family. This is a depressing year for American liberals and progressives. We are facing a grim election in which all we can hope for is the defeat of a horrible regime by a somewhat less horrible one and we won’t succeed even at that unless we can muster a lot of enthusiasm for it. That likely plays into the politicization of COVID-19 response.

But even so, the speed with which we began erecting walls on compassion leaves me cold. In some ways this is lonelier than all the months of coronavirus lockdown.

Given my vision impairment, social distancing and masks really do mean that I can’t interact with people in person. If people sit six feet away, I can no longer sense their mood or emotions. If people wear masks, their voices are usually so muffled that I can’t hear the non-verbal cues. I can pay for groceries, but I can’t have a real conversation.

Sitting close, an occasional hand on a shoulder, the subtle tones of voice—that’s my version of eye contact. Social distancing has taken that away entirely. And I’m told it will never be back.

I worry about the people with disabilities like mine who don’t have a spouse and kids at home. If social distancing is here to stay, will they never feel the touch of a human hand again? So many people with disabilities live alone without a lot of family or community support. People talk big about caring, but the truth is that mostly people only hang out with those they think are popular, successful and attractive enough.

A lot of people who are just as friend-worthy fall through the cracks even in normal times. And now… I don’t even want to contemplate it.

I am not saying we shouldn’t do social distancing or wear masks. In many places, particularly in the US right now, we have to. Listen to medical advice. Be careful particularly in areas hard hit by the virus. But let’s also sit a moment in stillness and think on what protecting the vulnerable really means.

I’m not saying you have to empathize with everyone. Compassion fatigue is a thing and likely part of the culprit here.

If someone is flaunting risky behavior—forcing people into hugs, breathing in people’s faces in public, intentionally creating large gatherings to make a political point—you’ll have to protect yourself first and save compassion for those who are just struggling. Still, a less biting reaction toward conservatives might just help them come down off of their very dangerous wall on COVID-prevention.

Most importantly, let’s think about compassion for those who fall through the cracks in these very troubled times. Let’s be gentle. Let’s include as much as we can. Let’s remember that human contact is a basic human need. Long-term denial of human contact has documented, medical effects and can eventually lead to death, and not just through suicide.

My class of mostly elderly women studying English as a foreign language met just once last month. I offered my veranda, which has a table and chairs and a canopy of lush grape leaves. Attendance was definitely voluntary, given that several students are over seventy and one over eighty. But everybody came. They seemed very much in need of the in-person connection.

One of the students has a husband who has had a bone-marrow transplant and is at substantial immunological risk. She sat an extra distance from the rest of the group and we all wore masks at first. But then several students are hard of hearing and they rely on watching my mouth for English pronunciation. I was also having a lot of difficulty hearing the students and reading their level of comprehension with the masks and the distance.

In the end, the one with the vulnerable husband and the one who is a nurse decided we could do without the masks but remain at a distance. Everyone was gentle and considerate.

As the teacher, I am able to set the tone in these classes and I have always set a standard in which everyone’s needs are heard and cared for. If compromise is made, it is initiated by those most vulnerable and not imposed upon them. I think it is part of why the same students come back year after year.

Most of my European students would likely identify themselves as conservatives, though they take universal health care for granted and are serious about COVID-19. I wish their culture of consideration was more widespread in all political camps.

We are living with terrible risks every day. COVID-19 is just one more factor. It isn’t a small one, but it isn’t the only one by far. Saying “we are all in this together” should mean more than just thoughts and prayers. It should mean real care for those hit hard by the virus and by our attempts to combat the virus.

The first nine days in COVID-19 lockdown

So, that happened. School is cancelled for the foreseeable future. As a kid I would have thought it was a dream come true.

But as a kid, I would have received some basic assignments, done them in thirty minutes and been out playing for the rest of the day.

Now I live in the Czech Republic, where teachers generate lists of essays and exercises with scant explanation for my third-grqader and fourth-grader. I’m also a parent, not a kid, and I’m stuck with the endless mandatory assignment lists, screaming kids, twice the cooking, nothing on the store shelves and a business I have no time to run.

It will be at least two weeks, likely a month, possibly several. months. I am already hoarse and my body feels like someone beat me with a stick. But my hubby is home at the moment, and I’m going to put down a few words before I collapse because I can’t see how there will be a blog by the new moon, if I don’t.

Image by Arie Farnam

As far as I can tell ours was the first school in Europe to close outside of Italy, where there is a real epidemic of COVID-19. (Note from the future: In the Czech Republic, there were ten cases when the school closure was first announced, but by the time of this publication there will be a thousand cases in this country of ten million.)

At first writing, this is the third day I'm home with two extreme ADHD, moderately dyslexic kids and the demands of authoritarian teachers. It’s only the first day of national quarantine, but ours was the only school in the country to close two days early. Our school closed fast before kids even returned from spring break and parents had a three-hour window—announced quietly online and missed by most—to pick up books and supplies

Still, for most people this is day 1, so I’ll call it that.

Day 1 of National COVID-19 School Quarantine

We take the train down to a town 20 miles away to get Marik’s (age 9) first set of braces. This was planned well in advance. At 7:50 a.m. the orthodontist’s waiting room is packed. So much for quarantine. The braces go on fine. We get lessons in how to tighten them and leave. There are no sinks for washing hands, so we don’t eat on the way home on the train.

9:15 am - The train arrives in our little town, Mnichovice, and it is pouring rain. We walk home through rivers of mud and arrive drenched on the path that leads to our chicken coup. The chickens are wet too. The two new ones have a nasty habit of breaking all the other eggs in the coop for fun. I mentally schedule chicken gravy for next week.

9:45 am - We get inside, hang up wet coats and hats and warm up and wash hands. I sit down at the computer to check the latest batch of dispatches from the teachers, still officially working but mostly not.

I was relatively okay for the first two days of our local “quarantine.” I put “quarantine” in quotes because there hasn’t yet been a single suspected COVID-19 case in our town or even in our county. There are a few in hospitals in the nearby city, but the schools there stayed open until today.

Marik’s teacher sent a page and a half list of assignments for today and admonitions about the consequences of not keeping up: five blocks of 15 math problems of various types, four blocks of grammar and spelling exercises, a chapter of foreign language memorization and some online exercises.

The Internet says Czech teachers are giving kids plenty of work in hopes of keeping them occupied. No one seems to be considering that children working means some adult has to be working twice as hard supervising them. Do the teachers actually think parents need more work under these circumstances?

Shaye (age 11) has four blocks of 20 math problems, three pages of grammar exercises, an online history memorization exercise, two pages of foreign language spelling words and instructions to “prepare a presentation about ecosystems.” All of this is typed in a dense block of single-spaced text, no line breaks for easier comprehension, let alone bullet points.

I spend the next hour and a half rounding up all the required books and materials, messaging teachers back with questions about things that were so sloppily written as to be unintelligible and restructuring the chaotic, disorganized lists of teacher fantasies into bullet points that kids can actually read.

11:15 am - Time to get kids off of WhatsApp chats with their friends and to work. A half an hour of yelling and protest ensues. No thrown objects and nothing but a few pencils broken. Hey, maybe this won’t be so hard.

11:45 am - The kids are actually seated at their desks with their assignments and their school books. I’m a goddess! And they’re hungry, so I head downstairs to heat up lunch. Thank the gods for leftovers.

12:15 pm - Break for lunch. I also have a moment to breathe, which I use to call Shaye’s teacher to ask for some teacher engagement during school hours and some help with explaining assignments and checking work, considering that I am 95 percent blind and cannot physically read the textbooks or handwriting.

The teacher, who happens to be a man, says he is too busy to deal with students directly. What is he busy with? Well, that’s not really any of my business.

I ask him point blank if I can write in my documentation that he refuses to discuss the work with my child on the phone or through WhatsApp or similar technology. He blusters and diverts but after three repetitions of my question, he “threatens” that if we don’t just do the work ourselves, my daughter will be required to visit him in person for an hour each day. I cheerfully attempt to schedule these visits at which point he quickly backpedal’s and agrees to a five-minute consultation with her later in the day.

1:00 pm - During the five-minute consultation, the teacher asks my daughter if she understands everything. She lies and says yes. She doesn’t actually want to do the work after all. He asks a few questions to check that she actually has the assignment list in front of her and that’s the end of the call. It takes her four more hours to do half of the work, and that’s just all that’s going to happen today.

1:30 pm - My son Marik is doing a bit better in that he is making an effort, but his new braces are driving him crazy and no one can understand a word he says. Most of his work looks like chicken scratch. It is hard to tell if it’s right or wrong, since I can’t read it.

2:00 pm - After multiple emails describing my vision impairment, Marik’s teacher relents and does a real consultation call and spends 45 minutes talking to him over WhatsApp and helping him through several sets of problems. I actually get to drink half of a cup of tea.

4:00 pm - I go through the foreign language work with the kids, which I can actually do, since the foreign language is English and we have long since left their curriculum in our dust. Then I listen to the kids read.

5:00 pm - I’m hoarse, can barely stand and I’m getting dinner ready when my hubby comes home. I hand everyone a tortilla.

6:00 pm - I collapse into off-duty mode. Papa is in charge for the evening. I vehemently wish the teachers would either start work themselves or curtail their expectations a little. At this rate, I will do nothing but sleep, cook and try to force kids to do assignments and even then I won’t come close to finishing each day.

Day 2;

8:00 am - We get an earlier start today. Marik’s teacher actually sent assignments overnight. Shaye’s teacher hasn’t gotten up yet but there are things to work on from yesterday. Marik’s teacher has been a bit more realistic in the amount of work assigned today, and she calls to get him lined out for the day.

10:00 am - Shaye’s teacher calls and asks pro forma, if she has any questions. Then he tries to hang up, when she mumbles something negative. I stop him and let him know that Shaye has her list of written questions in front of her on her desk. He is clearly unhappy but he grudgingly gives vague replies as she grudgingly asks the questions that she spent the morning using as excuses not to do her work..

11:00 am - It takes me several hours but I manage to order groceries. I can’t drive and shopping is a nightmare for a blind person even in the best of times.. Now, the stores are packed with people and the shelves are empty. Even the online stores have no more pasta, rice, granola bars or toilet paper.

I’m not joining the panic, mind you. I mostly just need to do the weekly shopping as usual, but in the end I decide to buy an extra bag of salt, that being the old prepper standby, and useful if civilization does end and the electricity goes out and I have to make pemmican out of our freezers full of meat and blackberries.

The order arrives later with a third of the items missing, but at least we get something, including the salt.

1:00 pm - I sent Shaye to the tutor’s house. She is a private tutor and we pay her a goodly sum to help with the kids learning struggles. She can at least make a dent in Shaye’s pile of assignments. And I get to drink most of a cup of tea, while Marik actually gets an hour of relatively calm study time.

2:30 pm - We go to Shaye’s therapy appointment by train. The kids see someone in a medical mask on the train and I explain that some people have immune disorders that make the current situation specifically dangerous to them, but we don’t really need to be afraid.

The therapist chuckles over the fact that her office has officially banned shaking hands. She then forgets and reaches out to shake before we leave. Automatically, my hand comes out and I remark, bemused, that we have just broken the new rule. Shaking on meeting and again on departure is so ingrained in this culture that it will be a hard habit to break.

4:00 pm - Now the government has declared a state of emergency. All gatherings of over 30 people are banned with the singularly alarmist exception of “funerals.” Restaurants, bars and clubs must close at 8 pm. Swimming pools, fitness centers and any other body-oriented businesses are closed. All educational institutions are now closed.

The Czech Republic is still one of the least hit countries, with less than ten confirmed cases of COVID-19. A student I haven’t seen in two weeks texted to cancel her next business English lesson because one of those cases turned up in her company. She had no physical contact with him that she knows of, but she is still on two-week mandatory quarantine and cannot leave her home.

5:00 pm - When we get off the train coming home, it is pouring rain once again. Cars speed by through sheets of water, spraying fans of dirty sludge across us as we walk home. I imagine their discussions inside the vehicles. “Look at that idiot, out on the street in the rain with those poor children! And with this sickness going around! They’ll be sick for sure! This is not a time for a stroll in the rain!” Their contempt for people with more troubles than them pours off of them along with the sheets of muddy, oily water. No one slowed to spare us even one wave..

Day 4:

Saturday. At last. No massive assignment lists. I haven’t been this happy it’s Saturday, since middle school.

5:20 am - I wake up with the first gray light, scattered thoughts sorting in my head. I finally have enough mental space to remember some things, like today is the day a local chicken breeder brings hens to the square and my phone beeped with the message yesterday that I am supposed to pick up two 20-week hens at 9:30 sharp.

But unfortunately my hubby (and the only one in the family who can drive) is gone for his annual weekend with his buddies, scheduled way before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19, so that means I’ll have to get there without a car and get the hens home again. With kids, of course.

More details flood in. We need some basic supplies and ordering groceries on line hasn’t worked. The system is overloaded with all the people actually under house quarantine. That number is growing rapidly. Everyone (and their entire family) who had any possibility of contact with one of the confirmed COVID-19 cases is under mandatory housebound quarantine and cannot physically shop for food. So, I should try to get some milk, cabbage, flour—just the basics, while I get the hens.

5:40 am - I can’t sleep anyway with all that going on in my head, so I roll out of bed and do my morning meditation, get tea and take care of the animals before 7:00.

7:00 am - Marik is up and needing intensive attention and reassurance. We haven’t paid much heed to the panic about the virus, so he isn’t really afraid of it, but the restrictions have started to get intense enough that it is impossible not to notice that it isn’t just school being out. He’s clingy and afraid to be in a room with dark corners, like he was as a little kid.

I get him set up cracking eggs and running the mixer for waffles. At least we have eggs. Those are in very short supply in stores but even if the chickens are eating theirs, we still have the ducks.

9:00 am - It takes longer to leave the house than usual, given that “usual” with my kids is utter chaos. By the time we finally get down to the road, I’m afraid we’ll miss the chicken truck. I try duct-taping a cat carrier to the footboard of my electric scooter for the hens, but it is far too large. In a hurry, I grab a small paper box, slap on some duct-tape and tear down the road after the kids, who have already started the trek to town.

The scooter is my main form of transportation. When I say “tear,” I guess I mean a brisk walk by anyone else’s standards. I can see just enough of shadows and shapes to keep the scooter on the sidewalk. Once we’re in town, I’ll have to slow down to avoid hitting anyone or anything. But beyond being nearly blind, I have crooked legs and can’t walk without extreme pain for more than a few miles a day.

I notice immediately that the roads are eerily empty, even for a Saturday morning and the sidewalk is even emptier. We pass two children, a few hundred yards apart. Not another soul.

My kids comment that every driver who passes us glares at me intensely. Again, they are coming to conclusions about the crazy lady out riding a scooter with her kids during what has quickly become “national lockdown,” not just school quarantine.

9:30 am - The chicken guy is not impressed with my paper box and duct-tape approach to chicken transportation. Neither are the hens. The box is torn and I have to duct-tape it back together around them, but eventually they settle down and think they are in a laying box. I duct-tape the box more solidly to the scooter and we’re almost ready to go home.

9:50 am - But we swing by the main grocery store in town and I leave Marik outside to watch the hens while Shaye and I go in. I’ve heard rumors about some frantic buying over the past two weeks and seen the havoc caused in the world of online groceries, but I am shocked at the scene inside the store.

Unlike the sidewalks, the store is packed with more people than I had ever seen in it before. All of them move in grim silence. Pairs of people whisper urgently together and everyone passes strangers and neighbors alike with averted gazes. Shaye was definitely the only child in the store.

I veer toward the baked goods, but stop before I quite get there. Even I can see the shelves were entirely bare. Two women are searching for the last few bread rolls that had fallen between the boxes on the bottom shelf.

I turn into the dairy aisle. Here too, whole sections are bare. Not a single bottle of milk of any variety. Shaye finds the last buttermilk carton, tipped over in the back of a cooler shelf. We’ll need that if we are to make more waffles. I find ultra-pasteurized, eternal shelf-life milk in the canned goods section. It tastes bad, but does the trick, especially for baking.

No hope of cabbage. I send Shaye to search for flour while I take a quick detour into the chocolate department, realizing that the Spring Equinox is coming up in a week and at this rate, I might not have chocolate treats to hide in the kids’ plastic eggs. Even here the pickings were a bit spare, though still relatively abundant. In the end I have to settle for large chocolate bars with breakable sections.

I give the harried but still rosy-cheeked cashier a bolstering smile and wishes for continued strength. Then we are off toward home. We stop in at a tiny specialty shop and manage to get a bottle of maple syrup, liquid gold even at the best of times.

11:00 am - The new hens are in the coop and seem no worse for their unconventional trip home. The sun has actually come out and it looks like spring. The kids are huddled by the cold wood stove whining that they want computer games and more waffles instead of lunch. I lay down the law. There is a bit of weekend homework to be done and they need to play at least one non-electronic game for the first time all week… before electronics.

Little do I know what my rules will start. As I start getting lunch, they grudgingly begin, first with a card game and then with board games all over the table. As they warm up, they become more enthusiastic and by the time lunch is ready they are outside, climbing on the side of the house and trying to rig up the summer-time swing.

After lunch, they are back out there. I have a fright when Shaye falls off of the jungle gym mounted on the side of the house and comes in screaming in obvious pain and limping badly. There couldn’t really be a worse time for an ER visit, unless you count being snowed in.

Fortunately, it turns out to be just a bad shin bruise, already turning black and purple with blood seeping through a small cut. Disinfectant and a bandage will have to do.

2:00 pm - To my astonishment, the kids play outside most of the afternoon. I actually get to drink a whole cup of tea while wrestling with the online teaching platform finally chosen by Shaye’s grumpy teacher. It is mostly based on Adobe Flash, which I didn’t realize went out of fashion about the time I graduated from college.

The teacher has an old Microsoft desktop computer, so he thinks it’s fine but all of his students are on Android phones and iPads, none of which are going to work well. It takes me a few hours, but I finally find an Android solution and send it to him. He has started to give me a bit of grudging respect as he sees that my demand that he actually work, if he wants the kids to work, is coupled with a willingness to help.

4:00 pm - My phone pings with another message. The sender isn’t in my contacts but is marked ominously as “The Government.” They must be sending mass messages to the entire population now via cell phones. This time they’ve locked down all stores and businesses other than grocery stores, pharmacies, pet care shops, newsagents and electronics stores. I wonder about the electronics stores for a moment, until I realize that the entire country is going virtual and not everyone is well prepared in advance. It’s actually a reasonable exemption.

Now we are truly on national lockdown. Anything more and you’d be courting humanitarian disaster. But how long can we realistically hope to make this work and how long will be long enough to make a difference? There still hasn’t been a single COVID-19 death in this country, but there have been several hundred seasonal flu related deaths in the past week, not to mention as-of-yet uncounted stress-related suicides and heart attacks.

Day 5

As of midnight last night, the whole country is quarantine. No more therapist appointments. No more tutor to help drag Shaye kicking and screaming (literally) through her schoolwork. No one is allowed to leave home, except to go to work or to shop for food. There is an exception for individuals to go to natural areas to commune with nature alone. But neighborhood kids are not allowed to play together. Even private tutors are banned from teaching.

Shaye has three times as much schoolwork today as she can realistically handle in a day—write a short story containing seven words the teacher randomly selected, do several grammar exercises, write an essay on the Central Bohemian region, do four whole sets of math problems, do two pages of foreign language exercises, and read for a book report.

She does part of it, throws books and chairs and refuses to do the rest. I’ll dock her time on phone games and social media because iron consistency is the only way with her, but on the other hand, the amount of work handed out for a fourth grader with multiple learning disabilities is beyond excessive.

Marik does manage to finish most of his third-grade work by afternoon. It is sunny again, so he spends the afternoon bouncing on our trampoline and hollering back and forth with the boy two houses away also bouncing on his trampoline alone. I’m sure the neighbors in between are not happy, but I am passed the point of caring. Those neighbors have five dogs which are so starved for attention that our lives constantly have the irritating backdrop of incessantly barking dogs. Now with the quarantine the whole situation feels even more claustrophobic.

On the bright side, I manage to get the grocery order I put in last week today. We are now well supplied for as long as two weeks if necessary, and I got chocolate eggs. Toilet paper may only last about ten days but I have lived in places and times where one had to use newspaper. That too could be survived.

As usual, the real conditions of hardship—such as the distant virus or low toilet paper supplies—are much less troublesome than the purely human-caused problems—such as overzealous teachers, cruel motorists and irrational fear.

With that thought, I summon the last shreds of my energy and call the elderly woman `i know with fragile health and message a couple of friends with chronic health problems, who could be in danger from the virus. I don’t really know what I can do to help, if any of them are in crisis, alone or without supplies. Without a car I’m not likely to be that much help, but I’ll think of something.

As it turns out, they are all doing okay so far

Day 7:

I’ve never been a real “prepper” but I have leanings in that direction. For once, no one in my family is criticizing me for it.

Today’s halfway-prepper menu:

Breakfast: Oatmeal with dried fruit and boxed ultra-pasteurized milk that lasts forever unopened.

Lunch: Romani Halušky - grated potatoes and wheat meal and one egg, mixed with a little water and boiled in small bits, then tossed with smoked meat and sauerkraut. Sauerkraut has all the fiber and vitamin C you need when fresh food is hard to come by. It also lasts months packed into a large urn and can tide good preppers through the winter, but I didn't make mine last fall, so this is the last of what we bought at the store when stores still had such things.

Dinner: Half a hen with buckwheat noodles and broccoli. This is good if you have frozen broccoli or manage to get some. Then you kill the hen that has been eating all the other hens’ eggs (hopefully it’s only one of them), pluck it and boil half of it all day in the slow cooker to make gravy. Freeze the other half for next week.

Snacks: Celery and peanut butter (because ... celery = what you happen to have that needs to be eaten while its fresh.)

Dessert: Chocolate zucchini cake, cause you haven’t quite run out of flour and you managed to save a few eggs and you did freeze grated zucchini in bags last summer, didn’t you? (The kids rebel because they just saw me get an order including a bunch of packaged food, but that’s all for when the flour and sugar run out. Flour and sugar were among the things even the online stores are out of.)

Day 8:

Yesterday I was almost joking about being a “halfway prepper.” Today it feels a lot less funny. Major factories are closing. There are 30 mile lines of trucks at the borders. They are checking all the drivers and the loads before letting anyone cross. The food shortages are widening and deepening.

People have started buying up seeds and gardening supplies as well as just food and toilet paper. I’m starting to think that a little hoarding might have been a good idea while I had the chance. Now there are quotas on everything and you can’t buy large amounts anymore.

I know that with my root cellar potatoes, chicken eggs, pantry and freezers we can get by for two more weeks easily, probably a month with creative cooking. But there is no sign that the crisis will be over in a month. Estimates put it at “six weeks at least.”

The government comes out with a new, tighter rule every day, as if reminding the population of their fear is somehow going to help. Hubby went downtown to see if he could get some supplies and came back mainly with an armload of face masks. As of 6:00 p.m. the new rule is that anyone who goes out to shop or go to work must wear a mask.

I have to wonder how that will play out if/when the looting starts. A little seed of fear has started to creep in, and I find myself sternly admonishing the kids not to waste their cups of yogurt. I’ve never been one for wasting food but this is different.

The kids schoolwork is still a problem, but whatever consequences the school hands us are starting to seem less important. It’s almost becoming routine, and Marik goes to his studies almost without protest. He has also started to help out in moments of family chaos, making the fire or washing off the table according to my rapid-fire requests. Sometimes he complains that his older sister refuses to help, but as kids have always done in hard times, he is starting to rise to the challenge.

Shaye still screams and carries on about schoolwork and refuses to help unless she is bribed with something specific that she desperately wants, which adds up to it being more of an educational experience for her than a help to the adults around. But this evening she was serious for a moment before bedtime and promised to try not to throw fits..

Day 9:

6:00 am - It is the Vernal Equinox. I get up and walk up to let the chickens out of their coop, only to discover that all the ducks, which don’t tolerate being shut in for the night, are gone. I find a fox tunnel under the fence.

I sit down heavily on a boulder and curl around the knot of sorrow, frustration and, yes, even fear in my chest. I don’t cry, even though I usually cry easily. I don’t know why no tears come.

I go back to the house to do my spiritual practice and meditation before the kids get up, but I have little heart for it. This is usually one of my favorite seasons. I love the budding life of spring and I relish the fresh, cool breeze and only slightly warm sunshine. I usually feel full of hope and energy at this time of year, but not today.

Now I sit in front of my altar and candles and I feel nothing but exhaustion and sorrow. I do feel some shame for being selfish and not wanting my children home all day every day. But mostly it’s just sorrow. In all the years I’ve had animals I’ve never had a loss this massive. Hardship and bad luck always seems to come in waves. It never rains but it pours.

Gods, why? Was it something I did? I don’t believe in vengeful Gods, but I do believe in reaping what you sew. Still I don’t see how my careful and conscientious actions could lead to this.

I go through the traditional words of hope in the Equinox ritual, but I don’t feel it. My faith is sometimes like that. I have to fake it til I make it, but this has happened before. I’ve been through despair more times than I care to remember.

8:30 am - Shaye takes a swing at me with the broom while she is supposed to be sweeping as her daily chore. She walks around dragging the broom behind her with one loose hand. I firmly but constantly explain to her how she needs to sweep and stand in her way so that she cannot simply walk around the room dragging the broom loosely. That’s how she takes a swing at me. I catch it but it’s close.

9:00 am - Shaye’s teacher calls an hour early and is harshly critical that her phone was turned off. He has my phone number and I have told him repeatedly that she does not have unlimited access to a smartphone because she developmentally has no capacity for self control about YouTube and other time-waister apps. He doesn’t accept this and hangs up, refusing to help her today.

10:00 am - Shaye is sitting at the kitchen table struggling through a test sent by her teacher. I couldn’t help her cheat much even if I wanted to. I don't know this level of Czech grammar. I can hear Marik upstairs talking to his friends on WhatsApp instead of doing his schoolwork. I’m too exhausted to intervene. I make myself a cup of tea and drink all of it.

1:00 pm - After heating up lentil soup for lunch and listening to the kids squabble, make farting noises and complain over it, I manage to get outside for a moment to clean up and check on the chickens again. There were two eggs yesterday and one today but more importantly there are no little piles of shells and slime showing where eggs have been eaten. That doesn’t mean they haven’t become more sneaky about it, since there should be a few more eggs, but it is possible that the chicken gravy did the trick. It better have, since there will be no more duck eggs.

I take a deep breath of the free clear air and smile up at the slightly warm early spring sun. There seems to be less air pollution. Most planes aren’t flying, cars are few on the roads and many large factories are shutting down. The things we wanted to happen to combat climate change are coming true in an odd way.

It does make me wonder why it is that the world can come together to save a small percentage of people who could die from a COVID-19 infection, but we were never willing or able to make similar sacrifices for the entire next generation which stands to lose everything to clearly demonstrated danger. Climate change already kills far more humans than the seasonal flu and COVID-19 combined.

Of course, I know the answer before the question is even fully formed. Those in danger from COVID-19 are at this point wealthier and more powerful than those who die every year from extreme heat, drought, floods and famine.

3:00 pm - The kids are finally finished with their schoolwork, which means I’m free as well. I get out my favorite Equinox decorations—blown eggs colored with waterproof acrylic paints. Back in February when the kids were away skiing, I had a little time and I painted a few more to replace those broken last year. I was so proud of myself, getting the jump on Equinox preparations. Little did I know then that those little touches would be the only preparations I would get a chance to do at all.

Now I string the blown eggs on embroidery thread and hang each one carefully from the branches of my favorite lilac bush in the front yard. It is a bit too shaded by our massive oak tree but it is what I want now—a little tree with colorful eggs on it. Usually it is a cheerful welcome for people coming to our home at this time of year.

This year few visitors are likely to see it. I sit on the grass and smile up at it, feeling unduly happy. Marik runs over from the trampoline and sits beside me, cuddling into my side. “Ids priddy. When do we ged tocolade eggs?” he lisps through his braces. His speaking and eating has gotten a little faster over the past nine days, but he is nearly impossible to understand.

“Maybe tomorrow if it doesn’t rain to much the Ostara bunny will hide chocolate eggs for you,” I say, hugging him close.

That was one tiny moment of calm and bliss in the chaos. That little bit of decorating is the only non-essential, non-food-related, non-school-related task I have done in a week and a half with the exception of this blog, which barely counts as a task.

That’s all I’ve got, folks. No great inspirational thing about hope and peace and humanist love. Just this bleak and unpleasant survival. If this post has a message, it is a plea to remember those who are vulnerable in this crisis—and not just those who might get sick.

If you are happily alone and able to binge watch everything you usually can’t, spare a thought (and maybe a phone call) for those who are alone because of age, disability or family rejection and who feel the isolation of quarantine more bitterly. If you are happily amid your family, spare a thought (and maybe a care package) for single parents with several kids trapped in small city apartments and others with too great a burden of care-taking.

It isn’t that thinking of the misery of others should make you feel better about your own situation, no matter how hard it is. But it is worth remembering that some people have it harder than others. And your elected representatives need to know what is happening to the most vulnerable in these times.

What is hard for me is easy for many. I have only two kids and we can go outside in our yard. For me it is hard because of my physical disability and my daughter’s behavioral-developmental disabilities. What is easy for me may bring another family to the brink. I wonder how people are fairing who don’t know how to cook and are used to buying packaged food and eating out.

Similarly I may be stuck in lockdown, but unlike many people I don’t have any pressing need to go somewhere. I’m an introvert and the fact that I haven’t seen anyone but my husband and my two kids in a full week doesn’t really bother me. My main problem is no alone time, rather than social isolation. But that’s just my specific situation. So if things are easy for you now, consider that many others are already enduring serious hardship.

I don’t know how long I can keep this up. For now, I’m truly just taking it one day at a time.

Remember why: A note from my past self in Extinction Rebellion

This post is time travel. It’s a message from the past.

Really. I am writing this in mid-August. The sun is hot. The days are slow and lethargic. The Czechs call this season “cucumber season,” because in our short growing season mid-to-late August is the only season when cucumbers are ripe and so many people spend their time pickling.

My pickling cucumbers all died of mold, so my children will go without pickles this winter. Such is life.

But the other thing about this season is anticipation. And this year that is more true than ever before. We’re working up to what we grandiosely call “the Autumn Rebellion.” It is supposed to be a massive worldwide uprising of people demanding truth, justice and action to avoid ecological disaster.

Creative Commons image by Carl Nenzén Lovén

In London, Paris, Berlin and other western cities, it is supposed to bring transport and industry to a screeching halt. It is supposed shake the major state and corporate structures to their foundations and wake up their CEOs and legislators to the crisis. In smaller and less progressive places, like my own Prague, it is supposed to be the first major rallying cry, the days of love and courage with crowds of protesters, arrests and media coverage.

That’s the plan.

In the midst of a cucumber season with no cucumbers, I am filled with a bit of trepidation. Every day brings a fresh wave of new Extinction Rebellion volunteers. More than anything else, I fear they will be disappointed. They have finally risen, most for their first time doing anything even remotely activist. It’s the first real rising of public demand for change in a generation here. There were small protests, sure, but nothing that captured the hearts and minds of regular people beyond a committed (eccentric) few.

Beyond that, I am putting in far too much time and effort, more than is good for me. And I’ve already encountered some of the social ostracism I dread in any kind of group situation. I can’t help but look ahead with hope and anxiety side by side.

What will the first weeks of October bring? Will our dreams be realized? Will real change come at last? Will it be worth all the effort and sacrifice? Will anything happen at all?

That got me to thinking about sending a message to my future self. Because I know how hard it can be—in the midst of things—to remember the most basic reasons why we throw ourselves into something like this. I could so easily get caught up in worry, get freaked out over failures or be torn up over social rejection. So, if that’s the case, I hope this may help.

Here are the reasons I am doing this:

1. All last winter I was so depressed I couldn’t move. Every day I took a nap for an hour and a half or two hours because nothing seemed worth it and my body and mind were saturated with grief and despair. When I found Extinction Rebellion that changed overnight. Finally there was something worth doing.

2. I wasn’t in it to win. When I first joined in April there were ten active people in the entire Czech Republic. They were nice people, but I didn’t really think they could have hundreds or thousands of people active by the autumn. Neither did they. They just said that because it was a sort of goal to put out there. “A thousand people in the fall,” that’s what they said. But I was in it for the moment, for those ten and for whoever came each day.

3. My role in Extinction Rebellion quickly became that of hearth mother. I am among the older members and that’s a new experience for me, the first time I’ve ever been considered “old” by any standard. I also know how to cook. It’s fun to bring cake, carrot sticks and homemade hummus to a meeting and hear the cries of genuine gratitude from a dozen twenty-something vegans who can’t get a decent meal most places in this city. All of my work has been about feeding the earth defenders, holding hands, nurturing, reassuring, even hugging, as well as teaching empathy and first aid. And no matter what happens in the end, that endless, nearly invisible work will have gone on the same way a mother’s nurturing work goes without guarantees, just because it is needed.

4. We knew that a thousand people wouldn’t change government climate policy, even in one tiny little Eastern European country. We were doing it because it was the only reasonable and logical thing to do. We did it to be able to get up, look at ourselves in the mirror and not sob with shame and rage.

5. So, now we have 250 active rebels and it’s August. While I was a raw recruit in April, I am now considered a hardened elder and as such I have to play politics and fend off criticism. But I still have to get up every morning and look in the mirror. So, my reasons haven’t changed that much.

Some people have great hopes for this fall. All around the world people are gearing up and hoping for a massive uprising to force governments and corporations into real action, so that we can survive climate change.

I am among those who hope. I cannot help it. But at the same time I know that no plan survives contact with reality and that things could go haywire in a dozen different ways. It could be far bigger than we expect. It could get ugly with police or football rowdies or impatient drivers. It could be depressingly apathetic and small. We don’t know.

I also know the foibles and imperfections of humans. Extinction Rebellion has built a structure meant to foster a regenerative culture with equity, inclusion and ethics at its core. But still the people running it are just as human as the rest, coming from and living in a society that is toxic, ego-driven and unethical. Will this structure, which looks so good on a flip chart, hold? Will we live up to our ideals?

This is my note to my future self. Keep to your values. Welcome each one. Defend the vulnerable. Stand in your own strength. Seek authenticity.

Remember your reasons. Remember that we do this beyond hope, not for what it might bring in the future but for our self-respect here and now. Don’t lose sight of empathy. non-violence and love.

I will publish this at the midst of it—just before the full moon—when I will likely be too busy to write. It will be a note from the past to myself and to all those working hard the same way.

P.S. This is present-day me again. I’m glad for the reminders. There are now 400 organizers. If they all bring a friend or two, we’ll have a thousand at the big event on Saturday. But the most famous Czech pop singer has died and his memorial service will compete with our actions for media coverage. A massive soccer match will draw six thousand drunk Brits and who knows how many drunk Czechs to the city. And the local Extinction Rebellion group is fractured by factions banning this or that person, including me, from key information channels. Much of it looks like utter chaos. And yet, I have vegan chocolate cake, a fresh batch of hummus, camping chairs, a tent and first aid supplies. Come what may.

Islands at war: Strong women in a sea of patriarchy

Behind every community organization there is a strong woman… but usually only one.

I started noticing this uncomfortable reality once I got to be about thirty-five. When I was younger, I saw strong women as my mentors and leaders. I looked up to them, especially those who led groups, almost worshipfully and they usually responded with a bit of motherly advice and a job for me to do. But once I became clearly middle-aged, I started running up against their hard edges.

I was probably a bit oblivious in the beginning. It didn’t occur to me that we should be in competition. I had my plans and didn’t have any designs on their jobs or positions, but let’s face it. I’m opinionated, loud-mouthed and energetic. Wherever I got involved a hot friction quickly ignited between me and any strong women in leadership roles.

Creative Commons image by Tee Cee

For awhile, I thought there must be something about me that simply irritates capable, educated and professional women, who I viewed as my natural peers and potential friends. But gradually I realized that if I was in an organizational role of authority above another strong woman, we were fine and often friends, and if I wasn’t part of their organization or social group, we were also usually fine. It’s only when I encounter strong women on a similar level or as a superior in an organization or social hierarchy that we run into trouble. And frankly, there aren’t any meek women in these roles.

I observe other women interacting. There are often smiles and hugs that quickly turn to vicious jockeying and betrayal that usually ends with all but one woman out the door and gone.

After I recently joined a group and quickly rose through the men to lead my city’s branch, the head of the national office (also a hard-working woman) called me to say we would be working together closely. But the close cooperation never materialized. A few weeks later, another woman started making waves in my branch with my support and the national head was telling her that she was the new “go to person.” And within a few days, the new girl was in tears and supposedly leaving the organization. I watched the same cycle happen with several others.

So many women leaders say they want to support other women, but they will only extend that support if the women near them have no opinions or gumption. Can we so quickly forget that you don’t get to be in leadership roles if you’re female and NOT strong, opinionated and feisty?

It is possible that we strong women rub one another the wrong way precisely because of the fact that we are pre-selected by the patriarchal system to be the competitive, enduring and assertive individuals of our gender. If we didn’t have these qualities, we wouldn’t be successful in a world run by men. And it is also these qualities that make us difficult to get along with.

But I doubt that is all there is to the antagonism between strong women. I see a lot of evidence that women in leadership tolerate opinions and challenge from male coworkers much more than they do from female coworkers. And apparently I’m not alone. When I finally decided to write about this, I googled “women leaders hostile to female coworkers” out of curiosity as to whether or not I’d come up with any random anecdotal hits. Instead, I got a flood of articles, studies and surveys including:

“Why do women bully each other at work?” a massively researched investigation from The Atlantic

“Female coworkers: Allies or Enemies” from Forbes

“The dark side of female rivalry in the workplace and what to do about it”

And even from the Yale Law Journal, “Hostility to the presence of women: Why women undermine each other in the workplace and the consequences for Title IV”

So, apparently this is “a thing” and not just my experience. Strong women fight one another, compete, undermine and bully one another and presumably also women who are not quite as tough.

Our feminist mothers didn’t tell us about this when they told us we could be anything and we were as good as any man. When I was a girl, going through a rare rite of passage with a supportive circle of older women I felt that i had been given a promise: “We will stand by you. The world may be made for men and men may still hold most of the economic and social power but you are the generation that will push beyond the barriers and we older women will be here urging you on.”

I went out into the professional world completely unprepared for the backlash from women. I saw women as allies and supports and some early experiences seemed to confirm it, possibly because I was nerdy and not sexually attractive to most men and as a younger, disabled woman I didn’t seem like much of a threat.

A male colleague recently told me that at least one woman higher than me in professional authority expressed feeling terribly threatened by me.

Threatened? By me? I am not only almost blind, I have a disabled child and I am socially awkward. I not only couldn’t be a threat to anyone if I wanted to, I don’t have any competitive designs on anything. I’m happy to be barely hanging on to my little bits of work and social engagement and have no intention of expanding anywhere.

And yet, the fact is that some feel threatened. That feeling isn’t nothing.

My first reaction is to think it is a byproduct of patriarchy. The over-competitive world of men has taught us to be this way. Or maybe it is that the tokenism of a lot of disingenuous affirmative action has forced us to operate in a world where most organizations would accept one high-ranking woman and one high-ranking person of color and that’s it. Maybe it is simply that the Old Boys Network lets only those women with very hard edges through.

I don’t know exactly what the reason is or even whether or not I am part of the problem. I don’t feel like I am competitive with other women. I generally feel safer and happier when I’m working with a lot of women… until the fighting starts, that is. I don’t tend to have conflicts with women who are below me in any formal or informal hierarchy. I am known as a good mentor. But then again I do have some hard edges and I can’t say that I didn’t get them the same way other women did.

What I do know is that only strong women can solve this. If we can look at ourselves and see what we are doing to one another and how it feeds into a system that is still keeping women underpaid and disempowered, we should be able to find a way to change it.

Let’s look for healing—for ourselves and for other women.

The kind of rite of passage to womanhood that I had as a young teen is crucial and it is sad that it is still rare. Let us openly express support for younger women, tell them we support them and then do so, even when feelings of insecurity creep in. Yes, sometimes they will be “too much.” They will be louder, more entitled, less self-sacrificing than we were at their age. It’s a good thing that they don’t have to work three times as hard and juggle both work and family without a hair out of place, as our generation did. When they look like a million bucks, let’s not forget that we support them.

And just as crucially, the next time we feel threatened, criticized or bossed by an older women, let’s stop and really think out whether or not the same behaviors and words would seem threatening, critical or bossy if they came from a man. Let’s slow down our judgement of older women and err on the side of compassion. When they look hard-edged or overdressed or frumpy or bitter, take a moment to recall that we are culturally conditioned by every Disney cartoon about evil queens and by all the social expectations of women to see their exhaustion, stress and capability as negative. And let us remember how and why they got to where they are. These older women who made it from generations past had to be tough and even ruthless at times to fit in a male-dominated world. Their gentler sisters often had to sacrifice their dreams and their very selves to have a family or a basic non-career job. And the patriarchal world taught all of us to be harsher than we would have naturally tended.

I don’t know how to heal it, not exactly, but I’m trying.

Strong women, you are sisters and you are needed—without perfection, without being goddesses, without winning—you are enough.

Jokes that hurt without meaning to

This post is not about racists, homophobes, ableists, sexists and other recognized deplorables telling deplorable jokes that we can all agree are damaging and not funny.

Sorry. It’s been done. Here are some links (on people who get mad that women don’t fake laugh at sexist jokes anymore. and how bigoted jokes change who it is socially acceptable to hate), if you need a post about that. It is also a real issue.

This is the “dig a little deeper” post.

We—and here I mean progressive, kind, good-hearted people who don’t want to hurt anyone—need to think about what happens when we accidentally or carelessly tell a joke that hurts someone.

There’s a Facebook meme that says, “If I ever confuse ‘their’ versus ‘there’ and ‘its’ versus ‘it’s’ in the same post, you should take it as a sign that I have been kidnapped and I’m signaling for help.”

I’m a linguist, a grammar buff and an ESL teacher. I get why this is funny.

Those who know and care about the differences in words and who feel that the integrity of language matters get frustrated with the apparent lackadaisical attitude of many on social media toward the written word.

To many of us, sloppy spelling and grammar is the equivalent of going out in public with your fly down, food on your chin, morning breath, body odor and your hair not brushed for three days. It reflects poorly on the person posting a message and discredits what they have to say.

Meanwhile, to many people on social media, typing is simply a different way of talking and the faster it’s done the better.

The joke is funny because:

1. The person who posts the joke is poking some fun at her/himself for being a bit of a grammar nerd,

2. We all know a lot of people online who just don’t care whether they make those mistakes and there is a light rivalry between them and the grammar nerds.

3. Some people’s grammar and spelling is really hilarious.

Um… What? Wait just a minute there.

Number three is a problem. If poor grammar on social media is the equivalent of going out in public disheveled, then laughing at people who present poor grammar is the equivalent of ridiculing a person in public who looks disheveled.

And that person might just be homeless.

Or in the online version, they might be dyslexic, blind, an ESL learner, uneducated due to generational poverty or so stressed by difficult life circumstances that they can’t check over their posts.

Imagine if you will a similar Facebook meme stating, “If I ever start stuffing my face and turn into a fatty, you should take it to mean that I’m trapped in an abusive relationship under threat of violence and that’s how I’m signaling for help.” Imagine a really slim friend posting this.

Okay, it is no longer funny at all. We can probably all agree that this would be insensitive and cruel.

The analogy is closer to home than you may think. Obesity is often considered a product of lazy, lackadaisical habits, just as poor spelling is. But both are often actually caused by or exacerbated by factors beyond a person’s control. Both are also the focus of a lot of overt harassment and ridicule.

I cannot count the number of times someone has called me out online for mixing up a homonym, for a dropped comma or for not catching a bad autocorrect. My specific reasons for these mistakes are being 90 percent blind, using voice recognition to type and being a stressed-out parent on modest means. I’m geographically isolated enough to need social media for both work and social interaction. So I try anyway, but my online escapades are far from perfect.

I’m a professional writer and I graduated suma cum laude in linguistics, so I shouldn’t be sensitive about this

But... ridicule is hard to take, and growing up with a disability I’ve received my full measure. When I see other people ridiculed for it online, even when they are my political opponents, I feel threatened.

Okay, I’ll agree that a president really should check over his tweets. If I were president, I wouldn’t be sending out anything I hadn’t had checked by someone else. There’s having a text disability and there’s being smart about your personal strengths and weaknesses. Presidents can afford line editors and so there isn’t much excuse beyond arrogance and lack of care.

But I still don’t engage in those particular jabs at 45.

I think I did once find that grammar meme funny, years ago, when I first got on social media. I had the same problems I have now with text, but I had not yet encountered the online ridicule over it. A person’s experience of having been ridiculed about the point of the joke does matter.

I recently overreacted to such a joke and called out a friend over it. I felt bad later. I don’t want to be harsh or mean, especially when I’m pretty sure the person who posted it had the first two reasons for humor in mind, not so much the problematic third.

But it is an issue worth thinking about. I have seen my friends who are only intermediate in English be dismissed and laughed off of social media, when it took significant courage for them to speak up in a foreign language. I have been ridiculed for posting in the language of the country where I am an immigrant. It is also a second language for me and I know I make mistakes.

And this is by far not the only joke that many of us may find funny, while it hits someone else like a sucker punch. Some jokes about family relationships may really hurt people who have lost family through adoption or estrangement. Some jokes may reference something sensitive for one group that the individual telling the joke genuinely didn’t realize would be sensitive. Think bananas, jungles and “gypsy” fortune tellers for instance.

I may be experienced enough to personally avoid these, but I’ll guarantee you one thing. There is a joke out there somewhere that I will think is hilarious and either laugh at or share, which will actually hurt someone. And I can pretty much guarantee that the same is true for you.

We don’t know for sure and we’re all likely to make this mistake, no matter what our personal background is. A lot of people will take that as a reason to dismiss the whole thing and say that we should all grow thicker skins and learn to take a joke.

But we know where that leads.

If we say it is all right to tell jokes that hurt people with invisible disabilities or ESL learners, we will be that much closer to social acceptability of overtly racist jokes.

And yet laughter and humor is in desperately short supply. Our hearts cry that the solution cannot be that we walk on eggshells around sharing anything funny.

The best I have for you is this:

1. When I am hurt by such a joke or comment in the future, I will say simply, “That hurts. Here’s why.” I will go back to psychology 101 and use statements starting with “I” rather than accusing the other person of something. I invite you to join me in this resolution.

2. When that unhappy but inevitable day comes when I am told that my humor hurt someone else, I will listen and truly think it through. I will delete jokes that hurt people if it’s online. And I’ll apologize for hurting that person, even if I had no intention of doing so, even if I don’t quite think they are justified.

The experience of hurt is a fact. If it comes from me then I did the hurting. Intention is not irrelevant but it is also not everything. Neither is reasonableness. Saying, “I’m sorry my joke hurt you. Thanks for letting me know. I will try not to hurt you in the future,” costs little.

This isn’t going to solve all the problems of social media or dinner party discourse, let alone the broader world. But it can make our personal circle of social interaction more aware and safer for those who have already had their full measure of hurt.