Dear Progressive Reader,
On Thursday, Bob Dylan released a new song, his first in eight years, via a post on Twitter. The nearly seventeen-minute song, which chronicles the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, may seem incongruous when all the talk today is of the current pandemic. But in fact, for those who came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Kennedy assassination was the shaping moment of a generation. It was, for many, a shocking moment of vulnerability for a nation that felt invulnerable. Dylan recognizes this in his short note to followers, “Stay safe, stay observant, and may God be with you.”
For a later generation, that feeling of vulnerability came on September 11, 2001, when U.S. soil was attacked by a foreign force for the first time since Pearl Harbor. That morning changed our lives forever in many profound ways—how we travel, how we view others. Today, COVID-19 and the coronavirus pandemic is a new moment of vulnerability. This moment, too, will have long-term effects on how we live our lives. As Negin Farsad says in her column for the April/May issue of The Progressive, “There are valuable lessons here and, if we’re not shortsighted and ridiculous, we’ll come out of it stronger.” Bill Lueders echoes this thought in his Editor’s Comment: “We cannot and never will go back to the way things were before this pandemic erupted. It will change the nation’s future direction forever, possibly for the better. If the most sensible strategy during a health care crisis is to make sure no one goes untreated for lack of funds, why can’t we always take this approach? If cooperating as a global community to survive an existential threat makes sense now, why can’t we do it to fight climate change?”
Many of the solutions to ease our current crisis have been proposed on the campaign trail over the past six month (and longer)—universally accessible and affordable health care, paid sick leave, a better social safety net. As Ruth Conniff describes in her column in the magazine, “The longer the coronavirus emergency goes on, however, the clearer it is that a New Deal style rethinking of our whole society is in order. . . . the revolution in our politics is about more than winning a single election. We have to keep building power at every level, pushing the idea of a saner, more humane nation. More people are listening to progressive ideas, as the inequities of our current system become increasingly indefensible.”
In an unprecedented move, spurred by the urgency of the moment, we released the entire new issue of The Progressive early in digital form. You can read it or download it at progressive.org/AprilMay2020pdf or read it on a mobile device here. We hope you will share the link with others who would like to read this month’s articles as well.
We have been gathering all of our coverage of COVID-19 under one tab on our website for quick access. Keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
P.S. – If you like what you are reading on our website and in our magazine, please share it with your friends and neighbors and through your social media networks. We exist because we want people to read our content, but we survive because they do. As Christopher Dale wrote earlier this month in an op-ed for our Progressive Media Project, “News deserts present a civic danger, since the information vacuums they create diminish the public’s ability to hold elected officials and business leaders accountable. Corruption is far easier when no one is looking.”
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