Life in the Time of COVID19
When the plague descended on the world I felt it coming even before it was officially Obviously no social distancing called. As I watched the red dots expand on the map across wide swaths of the world in my mind the pandemic was declared. It took days before the press and government followed suit. For the historians among us I knew what what was coming. In my library there is a book called ‘A Nest of Corsairs.” It is a brilliant account outlining the story of the Barbary pirates and the early elements of the Marine Corp. This all occurs in the setting of North Africa and in my mind images of Lawrence of Arabia flourish. Sand storms and never ending stretches of a lifeless world extending outward into infinity. Swollen, cracked lips as men with their heads wrapped in cloth trudge across expanses of the world so vast they are seemingly impossible to comprehend. There is a moment in the story when a consular officer describes his life locked away in an outpost of Ameri