When all seems lost. When it feels as if America is convulsing beyond relief.

In 1918, when James Joyce was fighting poor eyesight to bring to life an entire city, Dublin, one loving letter at a time, the world was consumed by a fourth catastrophic year of World War One.

And, Monet was creating his take-your-breath-away water lillies.

In 1918, when Joyce’s hero, Leopold Bloom, and his wife, Molly, and Molly’s lover, Blazes Boylan, and the terribly serious Stephen Dedalus, were being molded into shape by the sharp pencil in Joyce’s hand, the Spanish Flu was laying seige to countless communities.

And, Picasso was arranging shapes and colors and cubes in ways that stretched the imagination.

Today, when the remains of a U.S. Capitol police officer killed in the January 6th riots at the beacon of democracy lay in state in that same citadel, and political parties are warring and a pandemic continues to rage, somewhere a novel is being written that will change forever the way we read literature, and somewhere a painter is mixing shapes and colors and textures in a way that will chill and thrill and leave viewers awestruck long after those of us who live in these frightening, brilliant, saddening, exhilirating times, are gone.

In the end, beauty will prevail. So long as we release our demands on what beauty must look like, beauty will prevail.

. . . even when a hyphen is brought in to help.

I received early this morning a push notifiation on my phone from The Washington Post, the BBC, and The New York Times respectively, all to the effect that a dose of a COVID vaccination was proving a certain percentage effective. The first alert to arrive, from the Washington Post started with the unfortunate lead words “Single-shot” followed by “Johnson & Johnson vaccine . . ..”

As a society, we are presently in the midst of a gun epidemic piled atop a virus pandemic. Certain elected officials in Congress are claiming their right to carry guns where none rightly dared, while on the other side of the political divide, constituents are demanding the ouster of those lawmakers who cite, among other things, the extension of their 2nd amendment rights.

No sooner had I written a menatal email to the editors of The Washington Post, pleading with them to replace the word “shot” with “dose,” then, right on cue, the notifications arrived from the BBC and The New York Times, leading with the words “one-dose” and “single-dose” in lieu of “one-shot.”

In the context of the present moment, an early-morning news headline that leads with the hyphenated word, “single-shot,” is simply asking too much of the word, shot. Just because the word can do double, triple, or even quadruple duty–as an injection, or even a jigger of tequilla or a wild guess, in addition to a bullet discharged from a gun–doesn’t mean it is fair to ask it to do so. Not in the current environment. Not when context is everything.