Some people acquire and retain information best through the written word and others through the spoken word and looking at images. I'm pretty sure I'm one of the latter tribe and here's the latest evidence of that. At some point yesterday I read The Washington Post's excellent story headlined "The covid-19 Recession is the Most Unequal in Modern U.S. History" by the terrific team of Heather Long, Andrew Van Dam, Alyssa Fowers and Leslie Shapiro. It's an excellent piece that details the hugely disparate economic impact of what we insist on calling the Greater Recession of 2020 on people of color, mothers, young workforce participants, and low-wage workers.
The words on the page were fine and the individual stories told to the reporters by actual people were effective illustration, but the animated info-graphics in the on-line version made a somewhat stronger general impression on my frontal cortex.
Then, in the evening, I caught the PBS News Hour segment in which the very sharp anchor Amna Nawaz interviewed the verbally- as well as keyboard-gifted lead author of the piece, Heather Long. I have to say the conversation (accompanied occasionally by still screen-shots) of the same charts riveted me in ways the written piece didn't as much and has stuck with me through the night.
Of course I knew intellectually that this pandemic-driven Greater Recession was worse for most every group that I - a privileged white male - am not a part of. But the video version of the same story made me know and understand this terrible point viscerally, as well as intellectually.
So what are the principal emotions that go along with this deeper, gut-level understanding? For me, they include principally anger that we've all let this happen on my generation's watch, frustration with our leaders who aren't thinking big (or is 'bigly' the preferred
form now?) enough about addressing these disparities, and fear for the future of our country, no matter who wins the Presidency (and control of the Senate), come November 3.
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