Clare Elsewhere

The best laid plans. How often have you heard that? Often followed by an ellipsis, or likely a verbal ellipsis... a thought left unsaid, because we all know what it means. That even the best laid plans oft go awry. So here we are. With a global pandemic. With soaring unemployment. With political unrest. With doubts that anyone, let alone anyone in power, has solid plans, let alone the "best laid plans". And if even the best laid plans go awry, how can we find confidence in the lack of a plan? I'll start by saying that I have faith in the Centers for Disease Control. They understand this disease, and its risks, better than anyone. It is exactly their purview to advise the general public how to control disease. We have a disease that needs control. The connection seems clear. When they advise social distancing, and masks, that's what we should do.  Where my faith falters is in the rest of our government, our economy, our society- and our ability to play within those lin

I've started and stopped this script far too many times- sometimes the cycles reaching a few paragraphs in my mind before they ever met the dreaded cursor on my keyboard, dancing forward a few strokes before an inevitable retreat. A retreat from the ramble that's been pent up for months, and now has too many thoughts to coherently structure into a single post. So, here we are. Staring at the computer's impatient heartbeat, the blinking text cursor that  at least has the decency to remain private between the two of us, rather than iMessage's betrayal of a thought still in process. We're here to capture the human side of things, the personal reflection of the current reality- that history is underway. It's an arrogant thought, and a daunting one, but I can't see it being anything but the truth. History is underway. We are living through a time that our children and grandchildren will one day read about. So how do we react? Do we chronicle it, documenting t