I am among the millions who got a good night’s sleep last night, a reprieve as it were from an ever-present state of anxiety that’s four years old. That weight is lifted with the election results and, though the country has still a rough road ahead, I am confident that a new administration will gather the very best hearts and minds to address the critical issues that challenge us.

I have been writing and speaking about operational risk for 20 years. For nearly four years, I have used my platform here as an operational risk expert to critique the current administration through the four lenses — people, processes, systems, and external events — that can assess how reputational or financial loss occurs in a company or an institution, or even a country.

As the 19th anniversary of 9/11 rolled around, I wanted to check whether progress had been made on the four unimplemented 9/11 Commission Report recommendations that I have been tracking since 2004. Unsurprisingly, the answer remains the same. On the first: Congress has failed to centralize its oversight over the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which still provides reports and briefings to something like 100 Congressional committees. On the second: the ball is still in Congress’ court on the creation of a national interoperable broadband communications network for emergency responders to communicate with one another, even though several states have managed to create interoperability for their first responders. On the third, “to provide greater authority and additional budget to the Director of National Intelligence,” both the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Office of the Director of National Security have more than sufficient budget, but dwindling authority and credibility with either the executive and legislative branches. Through natural disasters, mass shootings, and the current pandemic, we continue to make limited progress on the fourth and final recommendation – to tighten and streamline regional lines of command and authority among all critical infrastructure sectors. We had a trial run in 2009 with the H1N1 virus and learned just how rusty the supply chain components are for both the public sector and the private sector.

My colleague Anna Lauren Hoffman has organized a summer faculty reading group on technology and race, and we’re just finishing Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology. Then we’ll read Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. We conclude in late August-early September with Charlton McIlwain’s Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter. I have always considered myself as much student as expert or teacher, and with this group of texts I am an enthusiastic student .

Comingled in my thoughts these days are the pandemic and the sleights-of-hand performed as our democratic form of government is dismantled.

As Congressman John R. Lewis is mourned on four formal occasions these days, it is this image I have been waiting. No one public figure deserves such commemoration as John Lewis, who lived his entire life as a public servant fighting for civil rights and social equity. When I first met him at the University of Iowa in the 1960s, he told the story of being beaten in a stadium and outside a bus station. He had not at that point tried to march across the Pettus Bridge. When he did so in the late sixties, here is a graphic representation of what happened.

The absence of executive leadership to champion a plan to contain the coronavirus pandemic has cost this country dearly. As I write today, the Center for Disease Controls (CDC) reports 133,666 deaths, with 3,173,212 infected, a number that is up today by 66,281 new cases over yesterday. States with governors who took the CDC’s guidance on a phased, data-based approach to opening the economy back up have fared significantly better than states with governors who did not use data and opened their states early. In several of our largest states – Florida, Texas, and Arizona in particular – infections continue to multiply, and hospitals are now at capacity for treating the coronavirus. As I write this column, Florida reported more than 15,000 new cases, the highest total in a single day in this country.

It’s been about a month since I taught my last class in spring quarter. Add several weeks of tying up grading final papers and administrative paperwork and end-of-the-academic-year meetings, and then about ten days of trying to catch up on sleep and get back on a wellness program. And here we are.

Much has changed since I wrote on May 11.

This country was already in an economic recession because of an incoherent and reactive federal response to the coronavirus pandemic. Though some jobs can be performed by working from home, unemployment numbers have hit unprecedented levels. National public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) were sidelined in their attempts to present expert advice, trotted out in near daily news conferences by the president, who undercut and politicized any guidance they had to offer.

The front page of the New York Times yesterday carried the first of several pages of names and brief descriptions of coronavirus dead, one thousand persons in total recognized today out of what will be 100,000 dead by the end of this long weekend. Flags have been at half mast since Friday to honor the coronavirus victims — more of them now than in the Vietnam and Korean War combined. I call them victims because many of them need not have died if this country had mounted a proper pandemic response program, not in bits and pieces, state by state, but what we used to call a full on federal response.