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Time Passes

via Wikimedia Commons

Carter at the Commonwealth Club in California, 2013.

Former President Jimmy Carter turned 97 years old on Friday. The oldest-living president in American history celebrated his birthday quietly at his home in Plains, Georgia with his wife of 75 years, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter.

Given his age and concerns for the COVID-19 pandemic, Carter didn't make any public appearances for his birthday. However, the Carters' spokeswoman said the public can send their birthday wishes to the former president at the Carter Center website. On the page, you'll find countless birthday wishes from people around the world.

Send your birthday wishes to Jimmy Carter here.

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We all know history has a habit of repeating itself, but the fact that we find ourselves in a global pandemic almost exactly 100 years after the last major one feel almost too on the nose.

While the coronavirus outbreak differs from the Spanish flu pandemic in some important ways, there are also some striking similarities. The same uncertainty of how to handle it. The same differences of opinion on how bad it could get. The difference now is that we have a whole lot more science to help us figure it all out—but also a massive information machine that feeds off of people's misunderstandings of how science works and makes it easy for misinformation to spread like wildfire.

Good times.

But it can be eye-opening to look at historical documentation of a similar event, especially through photographs depicting the details of daily life. As we're all in various stages of lockdown or reopening, mask-wearing and physical distancing, it's fascinating to see people a century ago dealing with the same things.

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Photo by Sonder Quest on Unsplash

We've been "locked down" for nearly two months, and people are are understandably tired of it. Millions of Americans are out of work, which means many have also lost their employer-provided health insurance. Our economy has slowed to a crawl, businesses are shuttered, and everyone is worried about the sustainability of it all.

"We can't let the cure be worse than the disease," people say. The president himself has repeated this line, the implication being that the impact of the lockdowns will be worse than the impact of the virus. Just today in his press briefing the president mentioned suicides and drug overdoses as tragic consequences of the lockdowns, stating that more Americans could die of those causes than the virus if we fall into an extended economic depression.


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Are people in general innately good or innately bad? Does humanity skew toward self-service and savagery or compassion and cooperation?

People have explored these questions in various ways over the centuries, and while we have plenty of examples of humans acting on both ends of the spectrum, there is still debate to be had about how we humans average out. Are we more likely to tilt toward helping or hurting?

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