We are always living through history, but some events end up being more momentous than others in hindsight. Covid-19 is starting to loom as potentially the most momentous thing I have lived through, something that could affect most of the humans now living.

At the risk of unmasking myself as a female codger, I have lived through quite a few momentous events. Even though it was afoot before I was born, the early space race placed me into a generation of kids given an educational system that enabled us to pursue careers in science and engineering. Being born between the Gilded Age and the Triumph of Capitalism allowed me to experience upward mobility and to accumulate wealth. During my lifetime our country moved from government-trusting to government-averse, for so many reasons: the Vietnam war, Watergate, the de-emphasis of civics as a school subject, identity politics, and well-funded disinformation campaigns. We also changed from mostly healthy to mostly ill, primarily because of the removal of nutrients from our food supply, which happened because market-driven profits trumped science in agriculture and in medicine.

When I was a young adult, an airline ticket was a scrap of paper no more personalized than a concert ticket, and airline passengers were barely scanned for weapons. I think. Did we have to walk through a metal detector? I flew fairly frequently during college, and I’m not sure. All that changed after 9-11, as did our willingness to submit docilely to various indignities we have been told thwart terrorists.

My career coincided almost perfectly with the rise of the Internet. I used punch cards in college, had a summer job working with the precursor of HTML on minicomputers, used email at work starting in 1985, and had a Unix-based personal home computer by 1987, which I could use to log in remotely to work. It feels like I was an extremely early adapter when I lay it out like that, but I certainly did not a) cash in or b) predict the spread of misinformation and rise of networks of hate groups that primarily characterize the Internet today.

Do you disagree? If so, have you been trying to get information about Covid-19, and getting hits like, The virus was caused by 5G? If not, lucky you. Your computer must really know how to search.

I started off this blog in a serious mood, then I veered away. In case Covid-19 turns out to be a major reset of the lifestyle of humans, I think I will try to capture it as it happens, rather than just living through it, though living through it is also very much my intent.