But I do know that we are at a crossroads. The unbearable history of these shootings has exhausted us, but it has also given us a hint of a way forward. Have we suffered enough sorrow to consider it?

Whatever emotion emboldens people in these moments tends to wear off as the frenetic news cycle turns its attention elsewhere.

For 381 days, at great burden to themselves, the Black citizens of the city walked and carpooled and otherwise put in the hard work to organize themselves so they could avoid taking the bus. This kind of self-sacrifice not only built an enormous sense of solidarity; it also allowed them to win.

A walkout with enough students involved and taking place over days, not minutes, puts concrete pressure on officials,

The walkouts of 2018 may seem forgettable now, but they did point to a tactic that, used more aggressively, could genuinely get under the skin of some grown-ups.

The protests were moving but happened haphazardly and only for a brief, emblematic period of time;

Why does this keep happening? Do something!

Dave Cullen, who covered the Columbine shooting in 1999 and later wrote a book about it, has said that in the days and even weeks after the attack, none of the survivors wanted to talk about gun control.

mustering

and, I repeat, this is what a majority of Americans want.

The faces of those children. The unfathomable anguish of those parents, of those broken towns.

while we seem locked in this house of horrors, a schoolroom of slaughtered children around every turn, with no way out?

It also buys us time to enhance our understanding of the virus, and improve our tools to fight it. “The more we know about COVID when we get COVID,” the better off we’ll be, she said.

It’s true that the body’s bulwarks against infection tend to erode rather rapidly;

“I’m nervous about reinfection,” he said. “I have reason to be.”

Some other microbes, when they reinvade us, can fire up the immune system in unhelpful ways, driving bad bouts of inflammation that burn through the body, or duping certain defensive molecules into aiding, rather than blocking, the virus’s siege.

he thinks that people who have caught the virus twice or thrice may be more likely to become long-haulers than those who have had it just once.

Every time the body’s defenses are engaged, it “takes a lot of energy, and causes tissue damage,” Thomas told me.

But the body is flush with other fighters that are much tougher to bamboozle—among them, B cells and T cells that can quash a growing infection before it spirals out of control. Those protections tend to build iteratively, as people see pathogens or vaccines more often.

But considering our current baseline, “less dangerous” could still be terrible—and it’s not clear exactly where we’re headed. When it comes to reinfection, we “just don’t know enough,” says Emily Landon, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Chicago.

The fact that colds, flus, and stomach bugs routinely reinfect hasn’t shredded the social fabric.

sluggish

You’re not just likely to get the coronavirus. You’re likely to get it again and again and again.

Will the danger mount each time, or will it fade away?

The median salary of a child-care worker is $25,510. The median salary for a home health aide is even lower, at $17,200.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York tweeted, “Paid leave is infrastructure. Child care is infrastructure. Caregiving is infrastructure.” Jarome Bell, a Republican congressional candidate from Virginia, was thrown. “Taking care of your own kids is infrastructure,” he replied.

If care work makes the economy possible, and its absence makes the economy impossible, what is it if not infrastructure?

Iceland outlawed gender discrimination the following year. Five years later, the country elected Vigdís Finnbogadóttir as president—the first time a woman was elected as a head of state anywhere in the world.

Men were left scrambling, unsure of how to manage their children. Many men called out sick to spend the day taking care of their kids, which caused more shutdowns.

The New Zealander economist Marilyn Waring made this claim in her 1987 book, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth, which argued that GDP was a poor measure of national economic health because it ignored women’s “nonproductive” care work.

The Italian Marxist feminist Silvia Federici advanced the notion of care work as essential to the productive-labor economy in 1972, when she founded Wages for Housework, an organization that called for the state to pay for domestic work.

But the inclusion of care work under the infrastructure umbrella is more than just semantic sleight of hand.

“There’s this semantic debate that’s opening up,” Buttigieg said on MSNBC. “To me it’s a little bit besides the point … If it’s a good policy, vote for it and call it whatever you like.”

Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee tweeted a graphic that featured the $400 billion figure in an ugly black-and-yellow scheme, set against an ominously blurry legislative document.

Infrastructure, they argue, consists only of the physical things that make the American economy run: roads and bridges built by men in hard hats, which nearly all politicians in Washington agree require more investment and are usually prefaced with the adjective crumbling.

Care work is just as essential as roads and bridges.