I liked the 2018 Queen biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but one thing about it bothered me: It left out the part of Freddie Mercury’s life that inspires me as much as the music itself — his descent into illness and how, the weaker he got, the harder he worked.
In interviews, the surviving members of Queen recount how Freddie, barely able to stand up, continued to slave away on new music and videos. Guitarist Brian May tells of how he worried Freddie wouldn’t be able to handle the vocals for “The Show Must Go On” off the “Innuendo” album. Freddie, he explained, said “fuck it,” downed a vodka and nailed it:
The last video he did for that album was for “These Are the Days of Our Lives,” and you can see how frail and in pain he was:
The last song he ever recorded was “Mother Love.” The band has noted that in that period, Freddie was close to the end. During the recording he had to stop because he couldn’t do anymore. He planned to finish it but never did. That’s why May sang the final verses.
I write this amid violent unrest across the nation. Angry masses are protesting police brutality after the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died after being pinned down by a White officer. That officer, Derek Chauvin, was charged with murder Friday.
With the internet full of pictures of a police station set aflame, overturned cars and rage-filled faces, I see some people on social media worrying that this is just another byproduct of a larger problem years in the making.
More than a couple people have suggested that this is a slowly unfolding civil war.
Mood Music:
The latest violence comes a few weeks after protests over the pandemic lockdowns, including a series of gatherings where armed protesters flooded the Michigan statehouse.
The civil war predictions usually show up in the comments of such threads. In more than one, I’ve voiced my own worry about it.
This thought is always in the back of my mind. In the early ’90s a lot of armed militias threatened violence. Some acted on it, the most tragic example being the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
But in the last decade, the political divide has become starker. The left and right fringes have become louder and angrier. We have a president who likes to fan the flames on Twitter. More than ever, it feels like America is imploding.
One such illustration is the Boogaloo movement, whose right-leaning anti-government members actively prepare for a second American Civil War. Another example is in the tactics of the left-leaning Antifa movement, founded as an anti-fascist entity but whose tactics have been branded as terrorism by some (Trump declared it a terrorist organization).
Are those fears justified? Time will tell, but let’s step back, take a breath and put things in perspective.
I don’t see the threat of civil warfare as out of the question. But I work in an industry whose job is to consider and plan for scenarios that seem crazy and improbable. Indeed, some crazy things have come to pass. Who would have thought, even four short months ago, that we’d be living in a world of pandemic-fueled lockdowns and an almost-complete freeze of the global economy?
One friend was warning of lockdowns and a depression-caliber economic calamity in late February and I thought he was being over the top. Yet here we are.
We should note a few things about what we see in the real world and online:
Everything is hyper-magnified online. When your Facebook and Twitter feeds are full of pictures of armed protesters and buildings on fire, it’s easy to feel like the world around you is truly coming apart.
The internet has given us more access to data than we’ve ever had before, but that data never truly shows the full picture and it’s easy for us to cherry-pick the bits that fit into our preconceived views. There’s a term for that: confirmation bias.
We’ve always had violent civil unrest in this country. The aftermath of the MLK assassination in 1968 and the L.A. riots in 1992 are but two examples.
Other things worth remembering:
Despite all the vitriol online, there are still a lot of good people in the world who will drop everything to help those in distress, even those with whom they passionately disagree when it comes to politics. I see people who don’t agree on a lot of things stepping up to help each other, like one guy who donated to an online fundraiser to help someone he argues with all the time, after they lost their home in a fire.
Though social media makes it easy for people to say angry things, most of the people I’ve seen do it don’t act on it. It’s not crazy to suggest that the ability of some to blow off steam online has helped them stay nonviolent in reality. Of course, the same can be said for those who take their anger from social media to the real world.
What to do with all this information? I don’t know. I only know what I’ll do with it — try to continue doing the right things through my daily actions.
The world will continue to resemble a Dumpster fire for some time to come.
We can’t fix everything on our own, but there are things we can do each day to make the world a better place.
That’s an obvious thing to say. But in a world gone mad, the words need repeating.
With all the turmoil going on in the world — a pandemic, polarized politics — it’s important to remember that every day, even amid the bad, good things are happening. Here’s the current slice of that from where I sit.
We’ve entered a new phase of space exploration
NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley blasted into space Saturday in the first launch from U.S. soil since the space shuttle program ended nine years ago. Unlike past launches when NASA ran the show, this time a private company, SpaceX, is in charge of mission control. The company, founded by Elon Musk, built the Falcon 9 rocket and the capsule, Crew Dragon.
The curve is flattened
We still have a long way to go in this pandemic and it’s widely expected that we’ll see a second wave in cases — and deaths — later in the year. But for now, there are clear indications that the COVID-19 virus is slowing down, showing that we can gain the upper hand. (How best to keep that upper hand will be a fierce debate for some time to come, but the optimist in me feels more confident that we’re going to get better at learning to control spread without keeping everything shut down.) This New York Times chart tells the story:
We’re rediscovering old pleasures
One example I’m excited about: the return of drive-in movies, something I remember doing as a kid in the 1970s.
Business owners struggling with the shutdowns are increasingly repurposing their properties for this old pastime. Outdoor cinema venues are popping up all over the country.
Retirees are beating isolation by hosting a radio station
Radio Recliner is an online pirate radio station hosted exclusively by elderly DJs from assisted living communities across America. It was started in April by marketing firm Luckie to entertain lonely seniors and keep their spirits up.
The Good News Network notes that Luckie only planned to air daily 60-minute shows for a month, but the project has taken on a life of its own. Radio Recliner now has a team of 18 senior DJs.
When bad things happen in the world, good things happen, too — always. The pandemic is just another example of that. We can take solace in knowing that in the midst of such uncertainty, humans continue to shoot for the starts and achieve acts of innovation large and small.
I recently wrote about how COVID-19 has sparked a deluge of conspiracy theories, most notably those at the center of the “Plandemic” documentary making the rounds. But as I think of my own OCD-driven behaviors over the years, I find that it’s not entirely fair to dismiss these people as cranks and villains.
Mood Music:
I came across a Vox article that drives home the point. In “I Was a Conspiracy Theorist, Too,” Dannagal G. Young, associate professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware, describes the crazed internet rabbit hole she traveled down as she desperately sought answers for why her husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor. As she jumped from one potential answer to the next, she wrote:
Each time I landed on a possible culprit, my anger reenergized me. Instead of making me feel hopeless, it gave me a target and suggested there might be some action I could take. If it were from his work or from an old factory site, maybe I could file a lawsuit. Maybe I could launch an investigation or trigger some media exposé. If I could just find the right person or thing to blame, I could get some justice. Or vengeance. Or … maybe just a sense of control.
Take something like the COVID-19 pandemic and its lockdowns, with multitudes stuck at home looking for answers on how we got here and where it all might end, and you get radioactive yet fertile ground for conspiracy theorists. Lots of depressed, increasingly paranoid people with the internet at their fingertips. Lots of rabbit holes to explore.
There’s plenty of gasoline to stoke the flames. The government response has been full of contradictory advice. At the beginning of the pandemic you had the surgeon general tweeting about how masks won’t help. Then states started mandating that people wear them in public. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, tells Congress one week that it would be a huge mistake to end lockdowns now, only to be quoted a week later saying continued lockdowns would cause “irreparable damage.”
Then there’s the fact that the virus began in China. Given the Chinese government’s sinister actions over the years, it’s easy to wonder if it either created Coronavirus in a lab or accidentally let it leak from a lab where it was being studied.
Isolate people, knock their normal lives off their axis, and this is what happens.
The resulting emotions remind me of what it was like when I was first diagnosed with OCD but hadn’t yet brought it under control. I was paranoid all the time, seeing conspiracy everywhere. In those cases, the paranoia usually manifested itself as the perpetual belief that people at work were conspiring against me, or, at the very least, were constantly talking about me behind my back.
In the pandemic, with my OCD under better control, I’m not given to conspiracy theories. Not that my management of the disorder has been perfect. The compulsive actions that go with it have continuously surfaced, and I’ve had to play whack-a-mole with them. Compulsiveness makes you do a lot of stupid things, and I’ve certainly questioned my sanity and self-control in these last months.
The world is full of fear and uncertainty right now. People want answers and have gotten mixed messages. Economic uncertainty, health concerns, lack of contact with friends and loved ones — all ingredients for conspiracy theories. It’s not a matter of good versus evil or even smart versus stupid. It’s simply what happens in a global environment like this.
We’re all in varying degrees of pain and our collective sanity is fragile. We need to do better looking out for one another.
The last time I saw Kevin Flanagan (his friends called him “Flan”) was at a bar about a decade ago.
We had been in touch after years without contact and were trying to reconnect. That night, his wry sense of humor was as sharp as I remembered from our days growing up in Revere’s Point of Pines. The evening was the result of our talking on the phone after 20 years. He reached out to me, and I remember the voicemail he left clearly:
“Mr. Brenner, I just want to say sorry for being such a punk when we were kids and for taking so long to call you.”
We had a lot of laughs that night. I went home, and I haven’t seen him since.
Tuesday, I was informed of his passing.
Mood Music:
After the initial shock, the sadness settled in. My mind rewound to memories of days spent smoking on Revere Beach, bantering on the bus to and from the Voke, where we were briefly in the same shop, and the summer we hid behind boxes in my father’s warehouse, avoiding work and smoking, as always.
He was always in my orbit growing up, straight back to elementary school. He grew up a few streets from mine. He was among the friends who tried to offer me sympathy when my brother died in 1984.
We fought a lot as kids, mostly because we were both awkward and would sometimes pick on someone else to make ourselves feel better. At one point when we were around 16, I boasted to my under-the-bridge friends that I could take him in a fight.
They held me to it. They brought the two of us down onto the beach, carved a boxing ring into the mud and we went at it for a good hour. We didn’t really fight, mind you. We just circled each other, waiting for someone to throw the first punch.
Flan and I smoked a lot of cigarettes behind this wall, photographed during a recent visit to the old neighborhood.
We worked out those kinks as we got older. We settled into a pattern of smoking cigarettes on the boulders behind the sea wall at Carey Circle, occasionally drinking. He was a regular in my basement, which sometimes resembled a neighborhood bar for minors.
Then he went his way and I went mine.
Turns out he’d been living in Atkinson, N.H. — the next town over from me — for years.
I’m glad he came back in my life, if only for a little while. You can never have too many good friends, and he certainly was one.
“Don’t assume villainy where it is merely different goals.
Andy Ellis, CSO, Akamai
The conference presentation of a friend and former boss has been on my mind as I’ve watch people argue about how we should conduct ourselves during a pandemic.
Mood Music:
Andy Ellis is CSO at Akamai, where I probably leaned more about the technical nuts and bolts of security in three years than I had in the previous decade of writing about it as a tech journalist. His presentation, “Humans Are Awesome/Terrible at Risk Management” covers how people make decisions concerning risk.
He uses the OODA loop decision-making model developed by U.S. Air Force Col. John Boyd to explain why humans are “awesome” at risk management.
The model frames decision-making as a repeating cycle of observing what’s happening, orienting (filtering what’s happening through past experiences and values), deciding what to do next and acting on that decision.
Humans are horrible at risk management! How are we even still around?And yet, we are still around. Humans are awesome at risk management; we’re now the dominant species on the planet.
Andy Ellis
Andy cites humanity’s advantages in making rapid, generally correct risk choices, even when those choices seem baffling to others. To understand the other person’s decisions, he suggests:
Unpacking how risk choices that appear unreasonable from the outside may not be.
Learning how to identify the hidden factors in someone’s risk choice that most influence it.
Finding out how to help guide people to risk choices that you find more favorable.
I’ve been trying to follow those suggestions as I navigate the seemingly endless arguments on social media about how to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
On myriad Facebook threads, people share articles and make statements that fall into one of two camps:
That in a health emergency like this, the best decision is to stay home and minimize the virus’ spread — thus saving lives
That the current lockdowns are tyranny: massive, fear-driven overreactions that have allowed authorities to exert unprecedented control over the masses
My own views are somewhere in the middle. I believed the lockdowns necessary at the beginning to slow the spread long enough to give hospitals time to bulk up on supplies and workers to take care of everyone who is sick. I also believed it necessary to buy us time to ramp up testing so we’d have a better picture of who was infected and who wasn’t.
Three months in, we’ve slowed the spread in places but don’t appear much better off. We don’t have nearly enough data points to know what we’re dealing with. I’ve begun to question the wisdom of staying locked down, thinking instead that we must figure out a way to re-open carefully and learn to live in a pandemic without staying seized up.
Along the way I’ve found myself exasperated by how people in the two camps above have vilified each other. Camp 1 brands Camp 2 as a bunch of selfish right-wing thugs who care more about their economic pursuits than protecting grandma. Camp 2 sees Camp 1 as a bunch of government-controlled sheep who submit to tyranny as easily as past generations submitted to Nazi and Soviet subjugation.
One good friend, from Camp 2, suggested that those who support the lockdowns support tyranny and should renounce their American citizenship. I called him out on that. Another friend in Camp 1 repeatedly attacked people on my wall for being OK with people dying. I rarely unfriend people I disagree with but did so in her case.
Along the way, I keep coming back to what Andy said: “Don’t assume villainy where it is merely different goals.”
It’s good advice.
Most of us have rigorously thought-out reasons for staying home or arguing for a re-opening. We all weigh the risks on criteria colored by our personal experiences. There is no villainy in that.
People will believe what they will believe and act on it. Their intent is good, though sometimes distorted by a lack of reliable data.
In the weeks and months to come, I hope for more common ground.
I have a friend who has shared a lot of wisdom in the 12 years I’ve known him. We’ve disagreed plenty along the way, but it’s been constructive. In personal matters like family and well-being, we’ve been in lockstep.
I even value the disagreements, because I know my views are only as solid as the pressure testing they receive. But on Facebook recently, he shared a view that crossed the line.
Mood Music:
His post was built around an article about how Americans were made of sturdier stuff during past pandemics, most notably the 1968–69 Hong Kong Flu, when citizens didn’t let the contagion stifle their freedoms. Hell, the article says, we had Woodstock during that period.
After moaning about how weak we Americans have become, he suggested those who agree with the current COVID-19 lockdowns should move to Europe and stop calling themselves American:
Let’s unpack this:
CDC records estimate that the Hong Kong flu killed 1 million worldwide, including 100,000 in the United States. That was for the entire two-year run of the pandemic.
The earliest COVID-19 cases are believed to have surfaced in November and in barely six months has killed nearly 300,000 people globally, including close to 83,500 in the U.S. alone. That’s all in the early months of this pandemic.
Basing what we now know about COVID-19 — which isn’t much — and the 20/20 hindsight we have on the Hong Kong Flu, that flu wasn’t as lethal. It had a slower infection rate, people got sick right away and a vaccine came along much sooner.
Comparing that pandemic to this one, especially with the piss-poor data we currently have, is both comical and unfortunate. Suggesting those who “made America great” are long gone and that those still here are “wimps” — that’s more than a little insulting to people who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.
My friend has said much that I’ve agreed with in recent months. I don’t believe open-ended lockdowns are sustainable. I saw the lockdowns as necessary to keep the healthcare system from getting overrun — to give it time to build the resources and processes needed to handle the caseload. From my limited knowledge of the medical profession, I believe a couple months of this should have been enough.
It appears that hasn’t been the case.
But the suggestion that the current situation is simply a tyrannical power grab by local, state and federal authorities? Laughable. No official in their right mind wants a frozen economy. How they might benefit from this is the stuff of impossible-to-prove conspiracy theories. Calling people wimps for wanting to protect lives? I don’t know the right word for that, but it’s nothing good.
The suggestion I find most objectionable is that people who disagree — who believe the lockdowns are the right thing — should stop calling themselves Americans and leave.
One of the best things about America is our right to disagree without being thrown in the gulag.
My friend, when you talk like that, I conclude that you love America — indeed, you fought for it on the battlefield and I respect you for that — but have contempt for Americans who don’t share your worldview.
You like to complain about so-called liberal elitists who look down their noses at the ordinary working folk, telling them how stupid they are.
But that particular brand of elitism goes both ways, and you’ve displayed plenty of it from your right-wing perch.
People continue to share opinions as scientific fact, shouting down those who question them. Liberal Democrats do it, so do conservative Republicans. Libertarians do it, as do socialists. As I said in my last post: Yelling at each other and pushing conspiracies won’t end COVID-19 any sooner.
Mood Music:
We need to figure out how to re-open society while continuing to protect as many lives as possible. The simplest solution is mass testing and contact tracing. But the nation’s testing capability is horrendously broken. So what can we do?
Contact tracing. This will help us identify more of those who are sick and create an environment where the healthy get out of the house and conduct the business of life while the sick and vulnerable remain sheltered. It will require strong measures to protect privacy. We also need to demand measures to curb the runaway increase in government power that comes with mass surveillance.
Varied levels of continued social distancing. In cities where infection rates surge, people will have to do more social distancing and sheltering in place. When cases grow somewhere, targeted lockdowns will be necessary. In areas where cases are low, restrictions can be eased. States will have different dances between opening places back up, closing them again as needed, and eventually opening again. When we return to the offices, we’ll be wearing masks. On it goes.
When I was younger, I thought the ability to opine meant I was smart. Through time and experience, I’ve learned that talk is cheap. Opinions don’t mean action.
Since the start of the pandemic, I’m done my share of talking. Now I’m thinking harder about how I can take action to help. Here’s what I have so far:
Doubling down within my profession. I’ll use my skills in research-gathering and writing to help information security practitioners keep their organizations’ defenses strong amid all the disruptions of the pandemic. This is a no-brainer. I’ve already been doing it. But I can always work on ways to do it better.
Using this blog. Not to be an armchair pundit, but to share information readers can use to take constructive action and to try and be a voice of reason. There’s a lot of fear, anxiety and depression, and someone must provide perspective. I’m not perfect at that. Far from it. But I’ve had some luck there and will continue to do my best.
Sharing a balanced perspective on social media. With so much disinformation circulating on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere, I’ll continue to share articles I find useful and distill the takeaways to help people make sense of what’s happening.
Helping provide resources to my community. Along with my family, I’ll continue to do my part to ensure basic needs are met. Stepping up contributions to our parish food pantry is the biggest example right now.
A few things I’m considering:
Volunteering some of my time as a contact tracer. Though in my state, this is a paid position, so I’d want to leave those opportunities for folks who are unemployed.
Delivering groceries to those who can’t get out.
Volunteering more directly at the food pantry.
Getting involved in efforts to acquire and distribute masks, gloves and other safety gear for both hospital workers and people who don’t have the luxury of staying home.
By sharing this, I hope to inspire more of you to stop shouting, opinion-flinging and arm flailing. And I welcome your ideas as to how else I can help.
If we sit here doing nothing, our words will mean nothing.
We’ve reached the toughest part of this lockdown yet. Anger and anxiety are so high that some of us no longer trust our friends and see conspiracy around every corner.
Our discourse is like a van full of clowns swerving all over the road, picking up speed and running people down along the way. There’s a sudden, steep decline in the kindness I recently wrote about. Everyone yells. Nobody listens.
Mood Music:
Conspiracy theories have gotten wilder, including the “Plandemic” video that keeps appearing, getting pulled down by social media sites, then re-appearing again.
The 26-minute “Plandemic Movie” is set up as an excerpt/preview of a larger documentary to come. It’s thesis is that COVID-19 was created so Big Pharma could rake in big profits from vaccines. It also claims sheltering in place breaks down our immune systems and masks can make people sicker.
A couple people I respect peddled the video on their Facebook pages yesterday in what amounted to a trolling exercise. Other friends who believe the lockdowns are necessary responded with anger and name-calling. The comment threads on those continue to grow longer and more nonsensical.
This loss of perspective was inevitable. No matter how comfortable we are in our homes, several weeks of staying inside with no end in sight is going to turn us into crazed cats in cages.
I’m feeling it, too. The Facebook name-calling I mentioned above? I can’t remember for sure, but I suspect I’m guilty of contributing to some of it.
That’s the other thing with life these days: You can’t remember things you did from one day to the next, even when you’re sober and taking care of yourself.
I have no answers, but I know this: Yelling at each other and pushing conspiracies won’t get us out of our cages any sooner.
I promise to keep reminding myself that we’re all human and that kindness is crucial in these difficult days.
My sister-in-law Sharane created the new blog header you see above. I asked her to do so after following the work she’s been doing during the lockdown.
Mood Music:
I’ve never seen anyone else do what Sharane does: turn drawings from my nephew into her own epic expressions of pandemic life.
I asked for some narratives describing the circumstances behind each piece, and she kindly obliged. This strange, new world is hard, and she truly nails it.
Panda-Emic
3/27/2020
This is the piece that restarted my drawing. As a mother of two, a full-time childcare worker and a part-time student, I rarely find time or energy to draw. That changed, like everything else.
We had just started quarantine and my everyday routine had come to a complete stop virtually overnight. No work, no school, no after-school activities. COVID-19 had begun to consume my days and would soon consume my nights. I stopped being able to sleep, riddled with the “what ifs” of the pandemic.
One afternoon, I was sitting down with my son drawing and drawing and drawing. I finally felt stress-free — focused on something other than the pandemic. He drew this one picture of the sun and moon battling each other while a third monster tried to suck up all their power. It expressed what I was feeling.
This piece represents how the pandemic had all at once devoured every hour of my day, my mind and my energy. Like the small black-and-white figures, it’s the small things and everyday people that are the true heroes in this battle.
Yeah, that could happen
3/30/2020
Half the inspiration for this came from some doodling I was doing with my son, the other half was me just wanting to draw a giraffe. His picture just screamed giraffe to me, so I screamed back, “Yes, I will draw a giraffe!”
Why a giraffe in a ski mask with technicolor, bear-like creatures latching onto its neck, you ask? If the world can shut down, then why not have a giraffe robbing people.
This piece was inspired by my son’s artwork and my daughter’s spirit.
As a parent with children that live in an era where technology is ever-changing and all-consuming, I struggle at times to find balance. I grew up without easy access to the internet and computers. Most of my young life was in a cellphone-free world.
So I try to help my children strike a healthy balance between imaginary play and technology. This became more difficult with the early closing of schools and social distancing.
Robot-Sitter
4/13/2020
My son drew a robot trying to take over the world. In our new normal of social distancing and a quarantined mom, I related to that robot.
I found myself overnight being given a whole new list of job titles plastered on top of my already vast library of existing titles, mainly the all-consuming job of mom. Now I’m an elementary school teacher, camp counselor, fort architect, etc.
Sketch book
4/27–29/2020
I’ve had sketchbooks in the past but I rarely used them to their fullest and was more prone to doodling ideas on napkins and random pieces of paper. Ninety percent of my art up till this new wave of inspiration was mainly fine liner to paper with no plan, no pencil, no eraser. I would start with a circle or line and see where it would take me.
