How Spanish Can Help Us Survive Viral Times
(Tom Dispatch.com)

“Una nación bajo Diós, indivisible, con libertad y justicia para todos.”

When Jennifer López shouted out that last line of the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish during Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony, like so many Spanish-speaking Latinos in the United States I felt a sense of pride, a sense of arrival.  It was a joy to hear my native language given a prominent place at a moment when the need to pursue the promise of “liberty and justice for all” couldn’t be more pressing.

Writers of the past turned suffering into literary masterpieces. They might help us understand how to meet the challenges of our day.
(Washington Post)

It is a sad paradox, but perhaps not surprising, that some of humanity’s greatest writing has been born in times of turmoil. In an effort to make sense of painful encounters with death and loss, authors have always tried to turn their sorrow and confusion into enduring monuments of beauty among the ruins, masterpieces that stubbornly surface in the wake of natural and man-made catastrophes, wars, civil strife, revolutions and political and economic upheaval.

Will it be so in our own times of pandemic, suffering and grief?

Words of encouragement for Donald J. Trump from James Buchanan, 15th president of the United States
(Los Angeles Times)

Sir: How long have I waited for your advent, prayed for someone like you to come along? All these years, since my death in 1868, I have watched each election cycle, hoping that finally my savior would appear, a man — heaven forbid it should be a woman! — who would rescue me from my status as the worst president in the annals of the United States.