Around January of 2020 I did an interview with The Daily, a student newspaper at Northwestern. I was interviewed about my thoughts on COVID-19. At the time I was pretty confident it wouldn’t be a big deal. Every couple years there is a news cycle about the next pandemic and they generally amount to very little. Ebola got plenty of coverage, and infected only a handful in the United States. When have we last seen coverage on Zika? I figured the US health agencies are generally pretty good at keeping these contained and I told the student reporter that I thought the whole thing was overblown.
It goes without saying that I am somewhat embarrassed about this ‘hot take’. However, I think it was a good exercise! I committed myself to a position, and now can look back on it and adjust how confident I should be in my predictions based on my prior success. Someday I am going to have to make political decisions of some kind or another and I hope I have practiced enough to learn from my failures before things go drastically wrong.
This blog will be an important part of that practice. I will summarize political thoughts and debates which I am thinking through, exercise my skills as a writer, and record bits and pieces of my emotional journey throughout my life for the foreseeable future. I’m hoping this will help make me a more thoughtful and confident person. If not at least I’ll be able to say I have a blog which is pretty cool!
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