A Poet And Classics Scholar On ‘Working With Hope’ And Facing The Flood Of Bad News
POLITICS & SOCIETY
Rachel Hadas, Rutgers University - Newark
Patience is wearing thin. Not only are we all bone-weary of the pandemic; rising hopes have made the current precarious state of confusion and fear, vigorous variants and stubborn vaccine rejection all the more frustrating.
We thought we were almost out of the woods, but there’s no clear end in sight to this forest. And there’s no shortage of other bad and worsening news too, notably the dramatic daily evidence of the catastrophic results of climate change.
How do we weather this welter of bad news? How do we adapt?
The same ways human beings always have adapted – grudgingly or stoically, fearfully or fatalistically or frantically. We’re in a prolonged period of maddeningly, scarily bad news – and if we follow the 24-h...