nd it just has to be pointed out.

I hate to be divisive, but there's something that's worth noticing in the public reactions to things. I've said that this is a time when everybody seems to be volunteering to do whatever it is they can do. You know what I can do is not that much. I can do this. So I do this. But I've never been jumping in to do what they could do. But the people who are least equipped for this situation in many cases are artists, writers, journalists, musicians, poets, etc. They may not have the skill set that is immediately available.

Now I think artists are very important and they'll certainly be part of getting us back to normal and making us feel right. So artists are a gigantic part of our experience and what makes life good. And it's important. So artists are wonderful. And sometimes I pretend to be one. But during the crisis, we're noticing that the artists sort of default to what they can do. And nobody cares about the art they're creating at the moment because we've got bigger things to worry about. And I think they're defaulting to criticism because it's sort of what artists can do.

So just a shout out to artists. This isn't the time. There will be a time when the artists are actually very important to our well-being, our mind, our public sense of who we are, all that stuff. Art's terribly important. But not now, which in terms of priorities. So artists, I know you've got some opinions, and how about just hold them now and help the national mind to get to some sort of comfort and some sort of confidence and do what can be done. That's good. So cringy videos and criticisms of things that aren't going to change just are not helping.

All right, here's a perfect example of bad behavior by an artist. Now I'm using artist to mean writers and anybody in that field. This is something that somebody said in a CNN opinion piece: "By not anticipating the catastrophe we are now living, Trump joins a pantheon of American leaders whose failures of imagination have come at great cost." The perspective was very different indeed in the Obama administration. Alice Hillel writes for CNN.

And I'm thinking, is this the right time to pretend we know what somebody's imagination was doing? It seems again not reading the room. Later this would be great. Let's do our autopsy later. But this kind of a weak, generic, conceptual level, I think I read his mind. But compared to the person I imagine who doesn't exist who was doing the job at the same time i