The gap in posting is not due to lack of interest. It's due to bewildered fatigue.
I'm reading and talking and writing about the new world, but it's looking less and less like we'll get there. That's a little hysterical, I know, but that's what it looks like. No one believes in a vaccine in 2020, and no one believes we can settle into a post-pandemic new world until there is a vaccine. Will that be too late?
Every day, my wife and I take a walk around the city park we live next to. Today, after we had listened to a particularly grim and depressing discussion on WAMC radio's Roundtable panel, we walked around the park and talked about the dystopian future which, as time goes on, seems less and less... well, hysterical.
We've been doing this for a long time, "this" being sheltering at home, avoiding the tangible aspects of the outside world, including everything that ordered our lives and got us out of the house; watching the numbers and reading the articles every day. This blog will be three months old next week. After all that, there is not a single clue about the new world resolving itself from the mists of the future.
However, time moves on, and each day contains more and more damage that will have to, one supposes, have an impact on the new world. Abbey spun a hypothetical tale that, for the first time, I found plausible:
Really dangerous and destructive decisions and actions continue to be made by some of our highest level leaders, decisions and actions which guarantee the growth of the virus. The economy and the schools open anyway, and continue to stay open. Vast numbers of Americans, goaded on in part by those same high level leaders, make choices that guarantee the spread of the virus. Eventually, things get bad enough that there is no choice but to shut down again - both the economy and the schools. But this is done with the same disregard for the science and for actual citizens, and the same unfathomable incompetence that we have seen already, and the virus continues to dominate the life of Americans. Rinse and repeat.
Everyone who knows anything about all this has been telling us that opening and then re-closing will be worse than biting the bullet and locking down the virus from the start. This turns out to be true (imagine that!) and what used to be an economy starts grinding to a halt. Workers have to stay home with their kids, and more and more companies, concerned about productivity, forbid their WFH employees to engage in childcare. Countless others lose their jobs entirely, or are furloughed without pay. Government money goes just so far, and that money is more and more authorized only on the condition that larger and larger tax breaks and other advantages be provided to the already-advantaged. Other than that money, none of the vast resources of the Federal government are brought into play.
Eviction freeze programs age out and rents come due. Homelessness increases, and becomes a significant problem for those who have managed to hold on to a place to live. Homelessness is treated as a crime, and homeless individuals as criminals. This takes them on a never-ending spiral downward: they emerge from prison with a record, so find it hard to find work (or somewhere to live); they have fees to pay, but with no job, they're back in prison. And so forth. This is a cycle already evident and repeating itself in our cities; imagine - oh, let's say ten times more homeless individuals, and let's also remember that over one third of them are children.
Those who find themselves still afloat at this point realize that they need protection from those who have not been so lucky. Walls begin to appear around neighborhoods; the police become even more militarized, and less accountable to the public at large. An entirely new kind of wealth inequality emerges, where the difference is a home and a relatively reliable income - or not. And even if you've got money, there are fewer and fewer things to buy, including the things you need.
We've all seen this film before. But tell me - which part is hysterical? Which part couldn't possibly happen, given where we are right now and where we're heading? We haven't even talked about the impact of the chaotic fall and winter of 2020, when, after unsuccessfully attempting to strip Americans of their right to vote, the current Administration destroys as much as possible before they leave.
Maybe this is why I'm seeing fewer and fewer articles speculating about the new world. It's just looking more and more dystopian. We're in a train, and when we look out the window, and see where we're heading...
Is it time to get out and start laying track?
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