My wife, Susan, and I taught a course last spring at BOLLI. It was essentially a guided study-group looking at issues such as racism, prejudice, social justice, and how to cope with the world we live in. When it was clear that we were in a pandemic and needed to isolate ourselves, my thoughts went to the science of COVID-19. What could I do? As a retired physician, a man of science and compassion, my first reaction to the shelter-in-place mandate was to think of ways to bring strength and inspiration and joy into the lives of the participants in our class. I sent them links to music, thoughtful quotations, links to Bill Gates, a humorous link to a video satirizing how people stocked up on items such as toilet paper. The most inspiring of the links was to Queen Elizabeth II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2klmuggOElE on April 5, 2020. The Queen gave an extraordinarily statesman-like response to the scourge.
With reminders of our humanity, the class went very well. Yes, we had a burden, but it was tolerable and we could do our best to follow the dictums of science to combat COVID-19. There is now so much to combat, least of all how to preserve our democracy. I took a course on the process of writing the Constitution. I learned a lot about how inchoate the document was, how it was meant to be looked at and revised, at least every twenty years. My advice to all of you is that we must study our origins as a nation, all of them, the good and the bad. Know who we are. You will see that we are at an inflection point, a moment when we can restore our nation and its place in the world.
