My inbox has been flooded with messages from almost every company I’ve interacted with assuring me that they have a plan on how to deal with the Wuhan Coronavirus (none of them use that name, of course).
The airlines, the banks, the hotels, the domain host, the lawyers, the accountants, … even the furniture store, all have sent me messages of reassurance. They will be there for me, they are spread out in various locations with various back up systems, and they can log in from home.
So consider this my message to our Legal Insurrection family of editors, authors, readers, commenters, vendors, and donors.
It sounds pretentious to say that we will be here for you, but, we will be here for you. We will continue to report as the Wuhan Coronavirus sweeps around the nation and world, and hopefully provide readers with a measure of sanity in a world gone mad. And we will continue to call it Wuhan Coronavirus.
Our office is not on lockdown, because we don’t have an office – we are virtual. with editors and authors scattered around the world, including in Ithaca/Rhode Island, Houston, Oklahoma City, the Redneck Riviera, San Diego, Massachusetts, Washington State, North Carolina, South Africa, Ohio, and more.
While we are far apart, we are closer than distance measures. We care about each other in easy times, and more so in hard times. And we care about each other’s families.
My children sent me an article, Convincing Boomer Parents to Take the Coronavirus Seriously:
I still think of my parents as the grownups, the ones who lecture me about saving for retirement and intervene in squabbles with my little sister. It took a pandemic to thrust me into the role of the responsible adult and them into the role of the heedless children….As I spoke to my peers, I realized that I wasn’t alone. A lot of us have spent the past week pleading with our baby-boomer parents to cook at home, rip up the cruise tickets, and step away from the grandchildren….Over the weekend, I tweeted my observations, asking if others were struggling to get their baby-boomer parents to take the threat seriously. More than a thousand panicked responses poured in, so fast that I couldn’t keep up with them all.
I was born at the tail end of the baby boom, and never really thought of myself as a boomer. Why are they sending me an article about boomers?
My kids are all millennials. I tend to think they are younger than they really are. They are not Gen Z.
I know, I know, we boomers all love to make fun of millennials, but my kids assure me they’ve never done the Tide Pod challenge or any of the other things we associate with millennials. I think maybe we got the millennials wrong, or at least most of them. Deep down, beneath the tattoos and body metal, they care, they really care, particularly now that their boomer parents are at risk.
The kids who thought their parents were both absurd and immortal are now facing that mortality and the prospect of being on their own. Understand what they are going through.
I don’t know much about Gen X, but many of them are portraying themselves on social media as the responsible generation, the anecdote to millennials.
I was just talking to my husband about how we are in the middle of the boomers who seem to be in denial and then the millennials who are too self important to understand why they need to stay home.
Most of our editors and authors are Gen X. Responsible people who feel sandwiched between out-of-touch boomers and irresponsible millennials. So we are in good hands here.
We also worry about our readers. Boomers are our largest demographic, according to our Quantcast stats. And we all are most at risk.
An important part of the strategy for the Legal Insurrection Foudation is to personalize the connection to readers, to create community in our house, chaos in our opponents’ house. But my Florida ‘campus free speech’ tour, and Samantha’s Northeastern U. appearance, had to be canceled. Any future trips for in-person appearances and reader events are on hold at least into the summer, maybe even the fall.
We will focus for the next few months on research and investigations, but the personal touch will have to wait until touching is cool again.
But plans are just plans, and our Legal Insurrection family is our family. We will be here for you, please be here for us.
Please take care of yourselves. We need you. Okay, boomers? Are you with me on this one?
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