I. Aisha S. Ahmad has a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education with advice for how to think about and deal with this crisis.

She is a professor of political science who has lived on multiple occasions in hot spots and in places and times of long-running crisis. Her advice is aimed at academic colleagues, but it is applicable to anyone.

First a hard truth (emphasis added):

For the tl;dr, Jason Kottke excerpts some of the choice bits from Dr. Ahmed’s piece.

II. That discomfort you’re feeling is grief.

This piece is an interview with one who may be our foremost expert on grief, David Kessler, co-author with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross of On Grief and Grieving.

He says we are dealing now with multiple levels of grief: grief for “the loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection”; and a more pervasive and amorphous “anticipatory grief”:

Naming it is the beginning of gaining power over the feeling.