The New World of Thrift

If you're my age, your parents lived through the Depression. The impact of that experience – the trauma – remained once prosperity returned. The new world was different because of it – for instance, the ingrained impulse toward thriftiness and anxiety about scarcity.

I was reminded of this today as I chatted with some extended family (distanced and masked). Some of us (Peter and I) tend to feel that human nature will steer us back to the status quo in fairly short order, but – the Depression (thanks, Pam). An excellent, pared-down example of lifelong change brought on by a traumatic transition to a new world* – one that my generation has observed firsthand.

What will be the 21^st century equivalent of the impulse toward thriftiness? Given the major impact on our lives during the pandemic, it will surely have to do with how close we are willing to come to other people, to share accommodations, foods, chairs, airspace. How willing we are to gather indoors. How we approach strangers? People – even people we know – from far away?

I think that those of us with no personal connection to the virus – for whom all these precautions are abstract – will return to normal pretty quickly. Even though our “coronavirus naivete” (to steal a phrase from the opiod crisis) – our freedom from illness and death – is probably a direct result of those very precautions.

How will the trauma express itself in individuals? How will life change?

Stay tuned.

- *The new world that emerged after the Depression was, of course, World War II, and the new world after that was profoundly different from the before, in many (really – very many) ways, including the further trauma of the Holocaust. And then the Cold War. Many new worlds cycling through lifetimes that began in the nineteen-teens or twenties – now there's a book waiting to be written. Or at least another post or two down the line.

What It Comes Down To

                     "Utopian future, dystopian future, utopian future, dystopian future..."
                                                                                      (from the New Yorker - May 28, 2020)

Reports of the Handshake's Death are Greatly Exaggerated

Life is different now, while we are in the midst, than it was before. We work from home; we wear a mask; we perform in our kitchens in front of the webcam; we get our groceries delivered; we cook a lot more.

And we don't touch other people. Not only because we need to stay away from their aerosols, but because the actual touch makes us a disease vector.

A Time magazine article* by Mandy Oaklander speculates whether we'll ever touch one another again. You should read the article and decide for yourself, but it seems like it's another one of those “we changed our behavior because of the virus and we'll never change back” articles that generates clicks, fills space but doesn't leave us significantly further along in our understanding of the new world than we were before we read it.

The handshake comes under particular scrutiny, with at least two doctors weighing in against it. I didn't know that there was anyone who was anti-handshake. “Hands are warm, they’re wet, and we know that they transmit disease very well,” says one. “I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you,” adds no less a luminary than Dr. Anthony Fauci. One anti-handshake doctor, Dr. Mark Sklansky, a pediatric cardiologist, took it further:

In a 2017 study, he describes setting up handshake-free zones by posting signs depicting two clasping hands, crossed-out, and encouraging the doctors, nurses and residents to try different nonverbal greetings. While about a third of providers were resistant—especially physicians, and especially men—nearly all of the patient families were in favor of not being touched by their doctor. 

“Not being touched by their doctor?” Really? Is medicine ready to give up a fundamental diagnostic tool? These results were gathered in a study of handshaking, but it seems that the problem for patients was that, in the course of the handshake, the doctor touched them. Let me know if this makes sense to you.

As for me, I'm a handshake guy. I'm not a hugger, and not a toucher in general. A human touch researcher notes that the Me Too movement and cell phones have reduced touching so much that she was looking for a new area of human behavior to study. But I think that, in the new world, we need not be concerned for the handshake; the handshake will abide.

After all, without it, how will you know I'm not armed?

---------------------------

* - The name of the article is “The Coronavirus Killed the Handshake and the Hug. What Will Replace Them?” What? The handshake is dead already? We're not in the new world yet, Mandy. Not yet.

What I Am Talking About

From a recent “Guardian” article about the new world by Peter C. Baker (which I may have more to say about later), writing about Rebecca Solnit's 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell:

Solnit used case studies of disasters – including the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, the 2001 terror attacks and Hurricane Katrina – to argue that emergencies aren’t just moments when bad things get worse, or when people inevitably become more scared, suspicious and self-centred. Instead she foregrounded the ways in which disasters opened up human reserves of improvisation, solidarity and resolve, pockets of purpose and joy, even in the midst of loss and pain. The book was not a call to celebrate disaster – but to pay attention to the possibilities it might contain, and how it might shake us loose from old ways. In Solnit’s telling, “official” disaster responses had a tendency to muck things up by treating people as part of the problem to be managed, not an invaluable part of the solution.

Thas what I'm talkin' 'bout.

Liminal

We get e-mails from the woman who runs the arts-community center in the next little town. They're part program guides, part reflections, part virtual community-building, part eclectic. Here's what she led with today:

Liminal is an adjective that relates to a transitional or initial stage of a process; occupying a position at, or on both sides of a boundary or threshold.

She goes on to say that “these are liminal times.” I'm not sure I agree.

We are certainly on our way to a new world – thus this blog – and so we agree on both the journey and the destination. But if “liminal” means anything like “cusp,” I think we've got a way to go before we get there.

I started this blog with the image of the third mate on the “Pinta.” halfway between the settled world of Europe and the unknown. To beat that analogy to death, I think we are now enduring the long, monotonous Atlantic crossing, trying to be hopeful as well as fearful about what lies ahead. We are all, or most of us, spending most of our waking hours thinking of that future.

So we certainly are between A and B, but I don't believe we are in the boundarylands. We are sailing and sailing. Things are generally getting worse, but in a predictable way: food and water in short supply, no certain hope of resupply, economy in shambles, death tolls rolling over us, no certainty anywhere.

The liminal moment in 1492 was the moment, at dawn, just before the lookout cried “Tierra! Tierra!” They knew that everything that was to happen from then on was founded on that sight of that island, the new world which rose slowly out of the sea as the sun brought everything into focus. They had context. They had somewhere to land. They would figure everything out from there.

We're still sailing. We could be approaching any one of many unexplored lands. We have no context, nothing to stand on. Anything can happen, but it will not happen tomorrow. Or the next day. Or next week.

The new world is a long way off.

Buggy Whips

Lots of thinking about how things will be in the new world consists of taking trends that had already started in the before, and projecting them into the future. Sometimes it was something that was clearly necessary in the time of the COVID (WFH, for instance), and other times the COVID was used as an excuse to slip in a change that needed to not get a lot of press attention (backing off on a whole variety of environmental regulations at EPA).

Online learning became necessary when all the schools were closed, and as far as I can make out, it was not a rousing success. Or, more accurately, it was designed and applied very unevenly, and saw a wide variety of outcomes, usually less than successful. Sort of like the US's approach to the pandemic in general.

This time, I just want to point you to a post put up today by Kevin Drum, a blogger of politics, economics and cats, who I've followed since the run-up to the war in Iraq. He has a pretty extensive, and interesting, list of characteristics of all-online higher education in the new world that you should just go and read.

Just a couple of notes: First, his leading bullet point is: Every existing university will go out of business. To which I say: buggy whips. And furthermore, I can't think of anything in my on-campus undergraduate experience that I would miss if it all disappeared. Except theater, which I spent every free minute doing.

Which brings us to our second point: how do you do hands-on learning online? Theater and music are his first two examples, and his solution is: I don't know.

I do. Students would audition and participate in community or regional theater or musical groups (choir, orchestra, garage band) for as long as it takes to learn the important skills. This would strengthen these groups, especially if they could be accredited by some sort of national accrediting organization, and therefore provide credit for work done.  These organizations and the community performance groups would share in tuition fees.

As for lab work - again, local, decentralized (but digitally networked) independent research labs could fulfill this need.  

Why should bright kids from towns and small cities leave their communities for good in order to learn and get experience?  Local kids participating in, and developing their talent in, local production companies could change our relationship with the arts altogether.  Local kids doing research in smaller towns might even change the character of our relationship with science.  Imagine that.  Win-win.

No one cares about this, but at the beginning of my freshman year of college as an education major, the class was tasked with taking apart public education and putting it together better. I suggested that we focus our attention on making sure everyone can read, write and do basic math, and then let kids learn whatever they're interested in, at their age level . Eventually they'd find what they really loved and get really good at it(I have to say I wrote this before I read Summerhill, which was on the reading list).

Anyway, if we have the astounding good luck to have to rebuild our creaky, elitist, 120 year old public school system for some reason, then after the huge celebration, I would like to take that basic approach and make it work.

Portraits for the Future

Even though I am a student of history, I tend to approach real life in the future tense, not the past tense. I want to find the good in people and situations. And I'm much more of a “working together for the common good” kind of guy than a “I've got mine so **** you” kind of guy.

So as this new world unfolds, we have the opportunity to watch how we respond to personal and economic trauma of historic proportions. Our character – as a society but, more importantly, as individuals – will be revealed by the character of this response.

We've already seen the initial battles – almost, in some cases, literally – between opening and caution. We've seen those who rush toward the danger, risking everything to do what needs to be done, and we've seen those who try to profit from the madness and chaos. But there is no clear consensus. What will be our overriding message to the future?

A piece on NPR this morning sparked these thoughts. In Texas, as in many states, there has been a statewide 'no eviction' order, acknowledging the devastating effect of sudden job loss on millions of Texans. However, today that order ran out, and is not being renewed. Someone speaking from Houston – America's largest city without eviction protection – described a “tsunami of evictions” and the resulting crisis in homelessness that has been set in motion.

Aren't we better than this? Just askin.' We can drive a vehicle around Mars, sequence the human genome, create astounding virtual worlds, transplant bone marrow that wiped leukemia right out of my sister-in-law's bloodstream. We can find ways to shovel ever-increasing billions to an ever-shrinking group of the usual suspects.

Can we find a way to help each other – every one of us – through this crisis, without devastating trauma and with some modicum of respect and hope? What we do now will be a portrait we paint for our grandchildren to interpret. What do we want that portrait to look like – the dark and condescending portraits from the past, projecting wealth and arrogance, or the portrait of Michelle Obama which so delighted and inspired a little girl who will grow up to mold the world of her generation?

On the radio yesterday, we heard of a corporation who reported that they couldn't help people in trouble because that might require them to lower the dividends they paid to their investors.

It almost seems like we're not all in this together.

End of rant, I guess. Maybe not.

I Know Nothing But I'm Not Sgt. Schultz

In one way, we're already living in the new world. In the new world, we have long, thoughtful, sometime-heated conversations about whether we will willingly enter the same room with the people we love most in the world.

I've been sheltering with my wife and my son from the beginning. I'm going to be 70 in July; my wife is not far behind. We both take medication for high blood pressure. We will definitely not volunteer as tribute to herd immunity.

My primary goal is simple: Don't get the coronavirus. Nothing is more important. Does that mean, then, that we don't spend time in the same room as our other son, daughter-in-law, and first-and-only grandbaby? Does that mean that my wife does not enter a room containing any of her four siblings and/or their large families?

My wife and I are active in the regional theater community, and she remarked the other day that most of our social life consists of the very pleasant and satisfying interactions we have with them as we construct a performance. There will come a time when theater is “opened up,” but the virus will still be among us. What then?

Like so many somewhat complex problems, the way to work through this one is step by step, examining the data and probabilities. Place values on what you want, and what the risks are, and do the math.

But to do that you need data. You need to know things. In this new world – as opposed, we hope, to the new world of six months or a year from now – we know almost nothing. Every day it's something new, and something old is wrong. Numbers turn out to be not only inaccurate, but purposefully manipulated to obscure meaning. Models come and go with dizzying speed. Authorities we look to for leadership and information consciously disagree and undermine each other. When it really comes down to it, no one actually knows anything.

So for now, it's Zoom, and quick, careful missions to the grocery store. And sitting on the cold, windy beach, far apart from my wife's sister and her family, wondering when we'll ever get to share another meal.

Chapter Break

Again, the Atlantic: an article laying out a wide variety of scenarios dealing with the geopolitical balance (and lack of it) in the wake of the current pandemic and, especially, in the wake of the second wave.

This is one that actually stimulates the brain cells if you're a policy wonk, primarily because it takes complex factors and processes which are already in motion and examines where the current shocks, and many (mostly unique and unexpected) second-wave shocks will take them. Much is made of China's new position of strength in the world, and how it can make a broken-field run through all this chaos and end up with a more substantial role in much more of the world – Russia, certainly (Putin will drive Russia into disaster, because he cannot stand still, and China will move in, giving it a foothold in Europe) but also in much of the developing world where China does not already have influence.

And if things get military, and another coalition of the willing is necessary, most developed countries cannot mount the kind of force they could even twenty years ago. And given the way they've been treated by the US in the last three years, why should they?

Oh – and everyone's going to be broke. Countries, I mean.

It's a pretty concise article for all that. And it contains my new favorite history quote: “Historians love chapter breaks.” Covid-19 will be, apparently, a chapter break. 

 And, I suppose, the following chapter will be called “The New World.”

Not In My Pajamas

So it turns out that I'm not the only one in the world thinking about how things will be afterwards (that was a joke). I went through an extensive article in Foreign Policy that was actually a dozen writers thinking about the future of cities, which is something that has always interested me, even before. The Atlantic offers a dedicated feature called “Uncharted,” full of links to articles about the post-pandemic world: concerts, homes, handshakes, live theater, air travel, WFH, foodie culture and more.

And others. Disappointingly, most or all seem to be writers sitting home in their pajamas, petting their dogs and speculating about something we've only seen in post-apocalyptic books and movies, which are in turn the result of writers sitting home in their pajamas speculating about life after the crisis, with or without dogs.

The teaser for the “Atlantic” piece on concerts says, “I don’t know when it will be safe to sing arm in arm at the top of our lungs. But we will do it again, because we have to.” There's a lot of this kind of thing in new world writing at this point. No, we don't have to, and even if we did, that would not be the reason we resumed.

So there's a lot of this stuff around, and it tends to waste my time. I understand that I'm doing much the same thing, but I'm not being paid to help vast numbers of readers understand their future. I hope I'm just asking questions and letting the reader take it from there.

And when I write The New World, I am always fully clothed, for some reason.

To Return to Normal, or Not

Believe it or not, in the new world, there will come a time when we don't have to worry about getting a life-threatening virus if we come to close to another person. But I've been reading a lot about predictions of an increased unwillingness to be close to other people in the new world. We are certainly avoiding physical closeness now – we've all got stories of visiting loved ones at a distance, or avoiding loved ones entirely. Or waving through the window, or from the driveway.

The question is, as we continue to stay distanced and take care about our physical space, will this tendency become ingrained, and will we come to naturally shy away from crowds and gatherings?

Probably, some will and some won't. I think most won't – in other words, most won't shy away, and life will generally return to normal in terms of concerts, restaurants, subways, beaches, church services and waiting on line in general.

But the normal we return to may be a bit different: enough people may retain their fear of closeness and build lives that are more isolated than they used to be. There may be enough of these folks that, in the new world, we will notice that groups and crowds and gatherings will be noticeably smaller.

This raises a lot of new questions. Will it be a good thing? A bad thing? Will it have an impact on the rest of us (“Where is everyone?” “Do they know something I don't know?”) Will those people who had been sociable beforehand and isolated afterwards – will they be OK? Will they need our help, or will they just be living their lives a little differently than we are?

Impossible to say, at this point, but with the opening of our societies and economies gaining steam right now, many of us are wondering how to choose: to join the return to normal, or not.

Coal

Speaking of global warming, it seems that in the new world, more coal will be burned to make electricity than would have been the case without the pandemic.

I think I understand this article (Econ101 in '68, remember?), which seems to be saying that since coal-fired generating plants in Asia, and especially China, are huge economic drivers, then a very efficient way to stimulate the economies devastated by the shutdowns is to stimulate the construction and maintenance of these dirty behemoths. The funding of renewable energy is more complex, and in a different place than coal (in development and growth, instead of being a well-established foundation of the economy). Renewables do not, apparently, create jobs and economic activity as quickly and efficiently as coal in the new world.

For just a moment, while gazing fondly at those before and after pollution pictures of China it seemed that the new world would be clearer and cleaner. Dolphins in the canals of Venice. Brand new views of the Himalayas. Just for a moment.

The South Korean Democratic Party won a landslide election last month (in the midst of one of the world's strictest lockdowns, no less) partly on the strength of its green new deal. Then it bailed out Doosan Heavy to the tune of two billion dollars. Doosan Heavy “is slated to provide equipment for coal plants in South and Southeast Asia, where emissions standards are lower than in South Korea.” And so, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, it goes.

This is ratcheting in the wrong direction, of course. But what do I know?

UPDATE - 6/30/20 - Now I know a little more:  China continues to roar into its post-pandemic world fueled by coal.

Will The Stories Survive?

I'm hip, but only a hip boomer, so I don't know how to link to Twitter threads that I saw on an aggregator blog. If I did, I'd send you to a series of tweets by journalist and author Maryn McKenna. I do know how to copy and paste, so here's some of what she said about the dearth of literature (both fiction and non-fiction) about the 1918 flu pandemic:

The 1918 flu was so devastating that its society could not figure out how to verbalize it, and submerged it instead.
We are now in the worst epidemic since 1918.  With no historical model, how can we learn how to make sense of now?

My dad fought in World War II and all my long life with him, I only heard three or four humorous stories that had little or nothing to do with actual war. World War II has been extensively documented, but with few exceptions (Ken Burns, for instance) the personal experience is gone. So too in the case of the inaccurately-named Spanish Flu.

So will this happen again? Will the new world contain few hints of the tectonic shift that created it? Will it disappear in one or more important ways?

I don't think so. So much has changed since 1919, since 1945. Everyone writes – or “verbalizes,” in McKenna's words – about everything now (even, apparently, me). What I am more concerned about is: which story will be told? There's obviously the choice between the stories that will be told by the bitterly divided political factions in the US. But we'll also have the different stories told in each country around the world, stories that differ because of ideology, certainly, but also because of perspective, experience, level of coping skills, distance from the crisis, age, status, and etcetera. And then there are the stories told by the numbers, which have been inexact – apparently, not even close – since the beginning, and continue to be. The numbers will tell stories about the various motivations of those who assembled the numbers, but will not be able to tell stories (not accurate ones, anyway) about how many of us were struck down.

Will the true, personal stories survive?

Will a young frontline doctor or nurse who worked tirelessly through the crisis days in New York City or Wuhan or Moderna tell their children their story, twenty years later, or will they say, “There was this funny thing that happened in the break room...”

Quiet Part

Can I say the quiet part out loud?

In the new world, the numerical advantage that registered Democrats have over registered Republicans will decrease. Why?

Because the virus is killing more registered Democrats than Republicans.

Just sayin'.

UPDATE:  You don't have to take my word for it.

Lose-Lose

It's impossible to miss the most polarizing debate of the moment: “open now and take our chances (which are good because the whole thing is over-hyped”) and “opening too soon will be a disaster of indescribable proportions.”

Although I tend toward the latter, there is, so far (as of this date), no data to support it. I see no trends in early-open states and municipalities that are indisputably causes of concern.

If this continues – if the apocalypse does not materialize – the new world will be noticeably more anti-science than even the remarkably anti-science world of the last three years. Science took the riskiest stand in our lifetimes – and it was wrong. No one will forget that. The history of this era will feature that failure, and our children and grandchildren will wonder what we were thinking.

It looks, from this vantage point, like lose-lose. Either increasing death and devastation, or the invalidation of scientific expertise for a generation.

Imagine the chances of addressing climate change in that environment.

Videophones

I'm on an advisory council that works with our County's Office for the Aging. All of the members are seniors, well past 60. I just got an e-mail from the OFA Director about a Zoom meeting next week, asking if that kind of meeting would work.

All the members responded and they're all familiar with Zoom. We've all done it, all learned how to make it work.

The new world will contain so many hip boomers.

UPDATE:  But, apparently, not hip enough to figure out how to publish a blog with consistent fonts.

Healthcare Ratcheting

More on ratcheting: healthcare. Or, more accurately, accessible/affordable healthcare.

Of course, millions of people suddenly unemployed means (at least in America) many millions of those are suddenly without affordable healthcare – in the middle of a global pandemic. Losing health insurance without a safety net is more likely in states which did not expand Medicaid, but there is more than enough pain to go around.

This is a fascinating opportunity to observe ratcheting first-hand. We had A, and suddenly, B. To what extent will we return to A? Will the ratchet slow the return to coverage as in A? Most of American business and commerce is shut down. Employees are laid off or furloughed. Many businesses will go under, and others will rise to fill the void. Whole segments of the economy will be re-built from scratch (especially, if the experts are right, if the virus won't be gone for a very long time).

Time for innovation! It's near impossible to eliminate healthcare coverage for an industry unilaterally, during normal times, but when you're building companies and economy segments up from nothing – anything is possible! And since labor unions represent only about 10% of American workers, the decision can actually be unilateral!

Those who know me are aware of how I feel about capitalism, so it shouldn't be a surprise that I feel sure that industry leaders are thinking about this very issue right now. How will it turn out?

Is it completely out of the question to suggest that, at the end of the worst pandemic in living history, we will emerge to find that Americans have greater access to affordable healthcare than before?

In the new world, will we be closer to A or B? Or can we hope for C?

PSA

Just a note: I am fully aware of the fact that politics will play a huge part in determining the landscape of the new world. Depending on who is elected President, and who wins the Senate, the world will be drastically different. But that's always been the case. Imagine a different outcome to the Presidential elections of 1860, or 1932. Imagine a Republican Congress for most of the second half of the last century. I'm thinking, and writing, about differences which, for their content and speed, we have never seen before.

And besides, I'm just sick to death of politics.

The New Neptune

I find this question interesting: who will make money from the crisis, and emerge into the new world stronger – and what effect will that have on wealth inequality?

Answer: I don't know. I hope we can ratchet inequality of all kinds back a little in the new world. But the weight of all that wealth – really, it has a gravitational pull on everything, similar to the Sun's grip on the Solar System – is very resistant to any other forces available. A lot of inertia there.

I took Economics 101 as an undergrad in 1968, and that was it. It's not my strong suit. But it seems like trillions of dollars have changed hands in the last month or so. Where will that wealth go? Who will benefit, when it is spent or leveraged? Will a money aneurysm begin bulging out of the side of our world in a place where it hasn't been before? Things have been disrupted, maybe as if another Neptune has come barreling into our gravity well.

Or maybe all that cash will just be absorbed into the Sun with no more effect than a couple of solar flares, and that will be that. Status quo ante bellum.

Stay tuned.

Ratchets

OK. Back to talking about the new world.

You probably know what a ratchet is. It's a device you put on a tool so that when you make progress, you don't lose that progress. When you're tightening something, the ratchet makes sure it doesn't untighten itself.

I think the new world will include the results of the ratchet effect. However, in these cases, the ratchet will both keep progress from backsliding, and keep progress from progressing.

Right now, we have discovered that we can provide resources to people in need quickly and simply – enhanced unemployment, resources for lost business, and even simple cash payments so bills can be paid. Who knew? (Ans: many of us. For a long time). Anyway, it is up to us to build ratchets around these progressive initiatives so that, in some way, they survive the crisis. They represent a sudden acknowledgment that we can best address a disaster by everyone helping everyone else. Anyone who has ever filled a sandbag on a levee knows that, but I digress. The new world must not look like the old world in this respect.

And, of course, the crisis is being used to ratchet us back and destroy or diminish our impulse to work together for a common cause. The stimulus bills have shoveled unimaginable billions to the usual suspects, who add it to the billions they already have. Somehow, they want still another payroll tax break in the next bill. If I'm reading this all correctly, even the USPS is being pulled under, allegedly to help pay for the stimulus bills but really to further voter suppression so vote by mail won't work. And here in my home county, the use of plastic grocery bags was banned starting March 1. By March 20, the ban had been lifted – apparently, bringing your own bag to the grocery store helps spread the virus. Sure it does.

Anyway, we've got to look for the ratchets, and then carefully observe in which direction the screw is being turned. The new world will depend on how good we are at this.

Meta

One of the reasons for the gap in posts is what some would call “meta.” As each day goes by, I'm less and less sure of what is going to happen, and therefore, what it is that is being written about. We seem to be caught in a stasis: numbers wash over us, unending, but nothing changes.

Are we headed for a long drawn-out battle, led by disinterested and incompetent generals? Will this all go away, slowly but surely? Will we descend into calm, only to have the next storm break around us?

We are lectured by epidemiologists and those who share their opinions and world-views, and they seem unanimous: disaster, considering our approach to this crisis so far. But disaster is neither here*, nor on the horizon – just predictions and speculations. And we are also told that this disease is unpredictable, due both to its apparent character as a rule-breaker, and the long time it takes to know something this new. So we plan with last year's knowledge for the unknowable future.

Which means that the makeup of the new world will depend on which future will find us. Right now, there is no actual evidence that any of them are inevitable – or even highly probable.

By the way, not that you should care, but this make me angry. Come on. Come at me.  Show me what you've got. Don't tease me, don't make me wait. I'm ready for whatever comes – but come on – come.

* - UPDATE - Yes, I understand that 300,000+ deaths qualifies as a disaster.  I'm talking about the predicted responses to our shoddy pandemic response, which are not, at this moment, "here."