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Suffering is not a competition. The pandemic bestows trauma and tragedy on everyone. Yet it's also true that catastrophic events expose societal fault lines. In the USA, the 2020 plague is crushing some far more cruelly than others. The poor. People of color. Old people. Disabled people. Female people.

In the days immediately following 9/11, I wrote three descriptive email dispatches to friends. They shared them, and the dispatches wound up going around the world, garnering the name Letters from Ground Zero. Then, in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy devastated the New York area, I wrote Letter from Ground Zero IV. This is Letter from Ground Zero V.

A year ago this planet's population got our first vision of a black hole. Now it feels as if we’re in one. We need a comfort zone. Somewhere.

How many times does black America have to step up and save the republic it built? African Americans did it again on Super Tuesday. They did it with a vote that was unequivocal, pragmatic, and politically sophisticated.

The lilac bushes in my little garden were in bud by mid-January. Parts of Australia are still burning. Kenya is battling its worst desert locust outbreak in 70 years and this time the infestation—a huge dark gray umbrella against the sky—has spread through the eastern part of the continent and the Horn of Africa. I know. You didn’t want to read that. I didn’t want to write it.

Maybe this blogpost should bear a label, warning: Check with your pharmacist before ingesting, to be sure the contents do not conflict with other information prescribed for you.

No witnesses, no documents. No surprise. The first impeachment trial in the history of the United States to forbid the presence of factual evidence and witnesses is now drawing to a close.

Because as a writer I work mostly at home; because I'm both a news junkie and a political junkie; because being female, double tasking comes second nature to me; because how often do we get to watch living history in which we have standing, a stake, and a part?; because of all this and more, I watched virtually every boring, exhilarating moment of the first week of Donald Trump's Senate impeachment trial. I know that others didn't have that enviable privilege or didn’t choose that tiresome challenge, depending on how you view it. But I know that I also reorganized my closets and drawers, paid bills, watered and fed numerous plants, wrote these notes, made soup, organized a podcast, had three meetings, interviewed two people and was interviewed by a third, dealt with a bathroom-shower-small-flood disaster, and answered mail, all with one eye and ear glued to the TV. ...