Posts by Tanya Hayes Lee
Split Second
As we slog through these long months of Covid and, now, the darkest time of the year when the ancient fear that the sun will disappear forever still lurks in some part of our brains, I am nonetheless reminded that everything can change—in a split second. The text that says a grandchild has…
Read MoreA Great Nation Shattered
A nation exhausted by eight months of bungled, intentionally ineffective attempts to fight a pandemic, devastated by nearly a quarter of a million preventable deaths, and ripped apart by a president and a plutocracy pledged only to their own vision and greed—this is the United States tonight. The country that brought the ideal of democracy…
Read MoreA Road Not Taken
So many roads were not taken in 2020. So many opportunities were squandered. There was the road where someone in the administration actually read the federal government’s 2016 Pandemic Playbook. The road where instead of lying President Trump told us how bad it was going to get so we could prepare and take precautions. The…
Read More“We Hold These Truths”
Jay Samit, innovator, artist, author, and internationally-acclaimed public speaker, usually spends a lot of time on airplanes and in hotel rooms, but the pandemic has restricted him to his home for more than 200 days, and counting. He has used these months to deliberate on the cultural meanings and implications of our current global crisis…
Read MoreShipwreck
A few weeks after lockdown started I made arrangements to vacation on Plum Island on Cape Ann in Massachusetts for two weeks. It was March; surely by July the lockdown would be over and I would go paint on the beach and eat ice cream and lobster rolls, lots of lobster rolls. Lockdown wasn’t over,…
Read MoreFlight
The pandemic is decimating the airline industry. In addition to Americans having been banned from several countries because of our inadequate response to Covid-19, the airlines themselves have contributed to this debacle by selling all seats on flights and not demanding that people wear masks. This is my personal experience: I flew from PHX to…
Read MoreSummer in the City
The summer of 2020 will live in our collective memory for decades to come. A global pandemic becoming more deadly by the day, a country beginning its reckoning with centuries of abuse and racism, potential worldwide economic collapse, a new, more powerful women’s rights movement just in its fragile infancy, and the world’s foremost democracy…
Read MoreIn the Time of Corona: The Gossamer Veil
Two days after the first case of Covid-19 was diagnosed in Washington state on January 21, 2020, my husband of 25 years was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He passed away on February 22, six days before the first Coronavirus death in the U.S. was reported. In early March, a few days after I returned home…
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