I was once a kid.  I remember feeling trepidation the day report cards were issued.  A report card is an evaluation, derived from the aggregation of grades of your progress in the subjects which you have attempted to learn.  Kids do not volunteer for the role of student, as learning is difficult work.  They’d rather play, amuse themselves.  (Adults are often the same)  Yet, living well demands many skills, so wise and loving adults insist that children “go to school.”  Becoming a student, under supervision, one engages mastery of language, of math, of how to think critically, etc.  In truth learning never ends.  Survival depends upon “getting” the lesson.

The last few months have been particularly trying.  Here is a lucid summation of the rigorous examination that we’ve all taken:

The pandemic.
Corresponding outbreaks of conspiracy theories and magical thinking.
A booming economy…then a collapsing one.
Civil unrest.
Illiberalism.
The passions of a mob.
Authoritarian leaders.
Natural disasters.

Unlike an exam at the end of the school term, this exam does not end.  You could say that we are tested each and every day by life itself.  An interesting note, this list of slow-moving crisis is similar to the experience of living in the ancient world.  We know this is true from the writings of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. 

A grade earned, received at the end of a school term is intensely personal.  A grade is a measure, an assessment of progress.  How am I, how are you doing?

The road is long.

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As always we need a song to get us through the day.  This one gets the job done.  I’ve never been ordered to pick cotton under a hot sun for hours, in a field on a summer day.  I know that the work was exhausting, fingers cut and bleeding from the sharp edges of the cotton bolls, — and all for no pay.  That’s the form-of-life that Muddy Water’s people come from.  Presently Blacks are yet subjected to state sponsored violence, as the killing of Ahmad Arbery and Breonna Taylor attest.  What does one do with such a history, such pain?  One expresses pain in a tune of manifest resistance.