To the Editor:

My granddaughter, Maya, graduated from Mount Holyoke College this May, without a celebration with a rejoicing band of colleagues; they all were sent home with Covid barking at their heels.

What a profoundly different reality we are experiencing now. Those of us who’ve lived with privilege, or at least known dependable security as our quotidian “normal,” both of which class and color allowed us, have in these past two decades watched one institution after another falter and fail: a cooperatively governing Congress; rectitude in our highest Court; pensions/retirement provisions once honored by employers; regulations that earlier curbed rapacious business practice, both in finance and corporations; legitimacy attending our electoral process; traditional authority vested in governors, lately brought to its knees by the executive. We’ve been habituated to pervasive surveillance, intrusions upon our personal privacy, and made acquiescent to official policies that brutalize whole factions of our population.

But NOW Covid-19, the pandemic to which no person is immune, falls upon us. It has torn the veil from many eyes. It is bringing into sharp focus our nation’s delinquencies, malpractices, the magnitude of social cruelties, unexamined by those of us who have not borne any.

I am about to complete my 87th year. I fear for this republic as I have never feared before.

Polly Brody

Heritage Village, Southbury August 3, 2020