Watching Trump at these daily briefings is mental and hair pulling torture. When asked a question he can’t answer, with no shame or hesitation, he makes things up, invents reality, attacks the press. It’s not simply scary. It’s criminal in the first place.

To think that we spent so much time studying the internal contradictions and crisis tendencies of global capitalism —there are books, studies, and papers galore by many scholars and think tanks — and then, to the surprise of nearly all of us, the triggering mechanism of a global economic crisis turns about to be a lethal and transmittable virus that is undetectable to the human eye.

Life, as we are finding out once again, surprises, or said differently, takes very unexpected turns. And that should be a warning against closed systems of thinking and acting. At this moment, we find ourselves in a wholly unimaginable situation. And it will entail some altogether new ways of understanding, interacting, and changing if we hope to escape it and live in a livable, egalitarian, and sustainable world.

“There is no road, no simple highway between the dawn and the dark of the night.” A Great Song that the Greatful Dead brought into our lives, or at least some of us.

We could easily become an example of Naomi Klein’s “disaster capitalism” on a grand scale in the coming months and maybe longer as the predatory nature of capitalism attempts to turn a pandemic and human misery into a profit windfall.

Robbie Robertston of The Band wrote this iconic song and The Band, of course, arranged, played and popularized it. Robertson is from Canada. As a child he and his mother would visit their family living on the Six Nations Reserve southwest of Toronto, Ontario where his mother was raised. It was here that Robertson was mentored in playing guitar by his older cousin Herb Myke. The Band, in my estimation, was our Beatles. In the movie, Last Waltz, which, if you like good music, you should see, The Band performs, The Weight, with the Staples Singers. And that’s special too.