On January 20th, the peaceful transfer of power took place on the same steps of the United States Capitol that had seen a mob charge into the building on January 6th, after having been encouraged by now former President Trump. Most of the images we have from January 20th do not show the 26,000 National Guardsmen or the fencing and barriers around the White House, the Capitol, and the Supreme Court building, but make no mistake: they were there for a reason.

It has been a difficult first week back to teach online. As has been my practice for about a year, I begin each course with a single slide that encapsulates the latest information I have on the pandemic. To that, I added an introduction to the SolarWinds data breach for my emerging cyber topics course on Monday. On Thursday, I created several slides on the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th for my information ethics, policy and law course, where we had started with an examination of the foundations of our government, including its seminal documents — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

I've been reading more about the sacrifices that Americans made without much hesitation during World War II. Many of those sacrifices can be traced to President Roosevelt’s powerful fireside chats (1933-1944), for which families gathered around a radio to listen. Newsreels shown in movie theatres added pictures to the wartime messages, showing us the beaches of Normandy, the ruins of London, and the wartime conferences between the Allies.

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.