Take your passion and anger and channel that energy: vote with that energy, fill out your census with that energy, engage with your community and the legislative process with that energy. Instead of being on the sidelines demanding that someone else on the inside make different decisions, step into a decision making role, step into your role as a stakeholder/owner of your community, city, country. Engage!

A few weeks ago I watched the movie "Jaws" and today a PBS News story about Tybee Island, Georgia.

Similarities:

Both are islands with small populations dependent on summer tourists for income.
There's a threat to people's health (shark/virus).
Local businesses demand reopening despite threat.
In "Jaws" a shark expert comes to the island, in Tybee an expert from the government comes to help with social distancing.
Both mayors wear anchor-themed clothing.

I think the anchor-themed clothing really clinches it:



From about 3:45:

That Biden should be "staying away from a fight."

"Certainly, covering Hillary Clinton's campaign, they fell into the trap a lot of fighting that fight with Donald Trump. And it didn't work. The people didn't know what she stood for, because there were so many. you know, snarky tweets back at the Trump campaign."

I don't remember that. What snarky tweets? Okay, I have a bad memory, but I don't think that happened. Did it?

And who the hell didn't know what she "stood for"? Were people's memories erased so they didn't remember her decades of fighting for progressive policies? There was a lot of bullshit about Democrats not standing for anything except "I'm not Trump" propaganda. And a lot of complaining that Democrats weren't playing dirty enough to fight Republicans.

I don't know what Keith is talking about.

Objectivity and expertise in journalism is disappearing. Reporters now give personal opinions, used to only be on op-ed pages. Reporters shouldn't be perceived as siding with one group or the other, not being seen as objective undermines democracy. The Internet enabled people with extreme ideologies on the left and the right to be publishers potentially reaching tens of thousands of people and not half a dozen people at the bar like it used to be. It's "democratizing" journalism, but in other professions like medicine or law or plumbing, this doesn't happen, you expect expertise.

When the sweet showers of April have pierced
The drought of March, and pierced it to the root,
And every vein is bathed in that moisture
Whose quickening force will engender the flower;
And when the west wind too with its sweet breath
Has given life to every wood and field
To tender shoots, and when the stripling sun
Has run his half-course in Aries, the Ram,
And when small birds are making melodies,
That sleep all the night long with open eyes,
(Nature so prompts them, and encourages);
Then people long to go on pilgrimages ...

Garrison Keillor, "Leaving Home":

"Spring has come, grass is green, the trees are leafing out, birds arriving every day by the busload, and now the Norwegian bachelor farmers are washing their sheets. In town the windows are open, so, as you pause in your walk to admire Mrs. Hoglund's rock garden, you can smell her floor wax and hear the piano lesson she is giving, the tune that goes "da da Da da Da da da," and up by school, smell the macaroni cheese hotdish for lunch and hear from upstairs the voices of Miss Melroses's class reciting Chaucer. ... A person wants to be someone else and gets scared and needs to be known, but we ride so far on that bus, we become the stranger. Nevertheless, these things stay the same: the sweet breath, the rain, the tender croppes, and the smale fowles maken melodye ... ."