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How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.

ANGER. Re. the New York Times long investigative piece on the Trump-Bolsonaro alliance (a) to get 8,000 Cuban physicians to leave the embattled Indigenous populations of the Amazon; and (b) to defund the Pan American Health Organization which is the most effective and experienced anti-pandemic organization in Latin America. This is one of those things that we, as an educated citizenry, should have been aware of but that slipped under the radar thanks to our enfeebled news media, but also our tendency to protect ourselves from disturbing information and recognitions. I am particularly aggrieved this week about this after having finished a strong article on the Brazilian film, Bacurau, and finding even at the worst in metaphoric recognitions in the reading the film, I underestimated the venality and cruelty of the Trump regime. The attack on Amazonian Indian land rights and general health care (once guaranteed by the Constitution) was an open policy of the Bolsonaro regime, as were the departures of two health ministers in protest against Bolsonaro's promotion of hydroxychloroquine at Trump's encouragement (and supply). But the active dismantlng of health care and pandemic resistance capacity is venality beyond mere corruption (for which both regimes are despised). There is underlying even more dark -- non-conspiracy -- policies routed through our military and Brazil's -- the ideology that all communal land-holdings (such as the Indians') must be be destroyed in favor of individually owned property rights (really!) so as to dispossess the weak through "legal" market tactics; and the apparent intentional dissemination of hybrid-cultural warfare (the destruction of supply chains of verifiable information) in order to create chaos that can be opportunistically taken advantage of by those with the corrupt power means (apparently written into US military manuals taught to Brazilian officer forces). ANXIETY. Of course, it is not just Brazil, but the COVID-19 virus fueling the hysteria (chaos, see above) surrounding the U.S. Presidential elections, which the Republicans are doing their utmost to disrupt through voter suppression in a replay of the Jim Crow backlash against Reconstruction. There is a heartening determination of millions of voters to vote early, but an astounding closeness in the polling with half the American populace cheering Trump on. (Good news from Bolivia which was able to hold an election despite a polarized country.) The COVID-19 rates continue to rise (or perhaps are rising again) -- Massachusetts had 1200 cases again yesterday. Trump has so politicized the wearing of protective masks that one can see crowds without masks bunched together at his political rallies, while others wear masks and socially distance, and the Biden campaign has popularized the drive-in rally. The battle of my virus against your immune system! Among our own friends, a psychiatrist colleague is recovering from a two week but mild case of COVID-19 (he's itching to get back into the hospital); another anthropologist friend lost her father to COVID-19 in India and cannot go to the funeral, just like our American Indian colleague who lost his father a week ago and had to watch the funeral on zoom. Meanwhile. Trump continues to dismantle the government, most recently attempting to take civil service protections away from government employees, and continuing a long term struggle to disempower the prosecutors in the Southern District of New York from pursuing a large-scale gold smuggling operation between Tehran-Ankara-the UAE- and China, in violation of sanctions against Iran. I have no love for the sanctions, but Erdogan's game of enmeshing the Trump regime in its own corruption has been hovering around the Trump administration since day one and General Flynn's work for both Erdogan and Putin. Soon we took will be in the position of the village of Bacurau. INTELLECTUAL NOURISHMENT. Today we had a wonderful 3 hour long Friday morning seminar on the fungibility of ghosts and repressions of painful pasts that are powerfully stirred up by events in the present, from the fear in Gus Dur's efforts to deal with the massacres of 1965 while keeping the "dark forces" at bay, to Charlottesville's calling forth of KKK and Nazi psychodynamics, to exorcisms as benign templates (even when both entertaining and terrifying) for viewing people (hardly entertaining but equally displaced) as intimate traitors and evil maop (ghosts), and such return to U.S. repression as hinted above and pictured allusively in the film Bacurau. How to live responsibly in a world where the forces at play are hidden and the very subject of psychology is a "barred self" unable to discern when it is acting out of haunted displacements. RENEWAL. And yet we live by revenants, pledging to do better and live more justly in their name and in the name of generations to come.