Electricity, as we all know, can dry your hair, cook your dinner, and heat or cool your home. It can also electrocute you. Electricity itself is neutral. How you use it is what determines its outcomes. Strangely, caring is the same way. Caring, like electricity, is neutral. You have to go five definitions deep in the OED before you get to care in the way I mean it: 5. a.5.a An object or matter of care, concern, or solicitude. Under the entry for the verb, it means to provide for. You can actually care about anything, good, bad, or indifferent. Really, anything that matters to you.
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Melania Trump’s picture in a face mask in The New York Times this morning was telling in marked contrast to the man she married who refuses to wear a mask because “it will look bad.” Remember Governor Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island? Outcomes, not optics. I spent over an hour yesterday on the phone with a client talking her off a metaphorical roof.
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You might know this, or you might not, but every day I post a spiritual haiku to Instagram. Here is yesterday’s: The health of the world/depends upon the health of each/one. How could it not?/ Today is United Nations World Health Day—say a prayer for the health of everyone in the world—no exceptions! Uncanny. I wrote it weeks ago. That’s how it goes for intuitives sometimes. All the more reason, then, when I read Amanda Hess’ “Health Is in Danger. Wellness Wants to Fill the Void” in The New York Times, I thought it was, quite frankly, grotesque.
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Hans-Georg Kräusslich, the head of virology at University Hospital in Heidelberg, Germany nailed it as he explained why Germany’s death toll is so low. “Maybe our biggest strength in Germany,” said Professor Kräusslich, “is the rational decision-making at the highest level of government combined with the trust the government enjoys in the population.” Hmm, rational decision-making. Hmm, trust in the population. This sounds distinctly utopian compared with, say, this: …
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