Health Trotter

April 21, 2021 at 04:30PM Forty years ago, as I was leaving my friend’s house to throw a baseball outside, his father stopped us for inspection. “Where are you going?” Peter’s father asked. “When will you be back?” And most pointedly: “Have you done your homework?” Peter had, but I had not. “I’ll get around to it,” I said. “Ah, well, here you go.” Peter’s father put a small round disk in my hand. I turned it over, and on the back printed in green was the word Tuit. “You said you’ll get around Tuit,” he laughed, every bit the corny dentist he was, “now here you go.” I still have my Tuit. It sits on my bookshelf, gathering questions. Did Peter’s father go to a woodworker to have these printed? Did he keep a bag in his car and refresh his pockets daily? Did anyone ever give it back? I wish there were more Tuits in the world, reminding us of what we have yet to do. We’d all have a few. All of us would have received a few when it comes to climate action . After all, when sci...

April 21, 2021 at 04:30PM However differently we register this pandemic we understand it as global; it brings home the fact that we are implicated in a shared world. The capacity of living human creatures to affect one another can be a matter of life or death. Because so many resources are not equitably shared, and so many have only a small or vanished share of the world, we cannot recognize the pandemic as global without facing those inequalities. Some people work for the common world, keep it going, but are not, for that reason, of it. They might lack property or papers, be sidelined by racism or even disdained as refuse—those who are poor, Black or brown, those with unpayable debts that preclude a sense of an open future. The shared world is not equally shared. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière refers to “the part of those who have no part”—those for whom participation in the commons is not possible, never was, or no longer is. For it is not just resources and co...