Adaptation to COVID world

Late last week I had an evening where it all caught up with me. Depression and worry hit me hard. It felt like I knew a bus was going to hit us and I was trying to build a shelter out of cardboard boxes. Just in a funk, you know? Worried for my family, for my brothers far away, for my friends, for us all. So I'm sitting at my computer and browsing Google News to see what was out there (probably not the best anti-depressant I could have thought of, but there it is) and I clicked on an article about India. Prime Minister Mohdi had declared a shelter-in-place for the entire country with little to no warning, and the country was in the early stages of chaos as a result.

I clicked on an article about India's migrant workers. One of the biggest unintended consequences of Mohdi's order was that India's millions (not an exaggeration, literally multiple millions) of migrant workers had gathered as much of their belongings as they could carry and started walking the hundreds of kilometers to get back home. The immediate and obvious problem was that when it was important to shelter alone and limit exposure, they were packing twenty people into the back of a truck or marching, camping, traveling in large groups. They're being fed on the charity of people who live by the roads. Social distancing is out the window for them.

The pictures. My God. The pictures with the article about killed me. Families walking together, wearing cheap sandals, carrying packs and bundles of all they had in the world. The man who was carrying his wife with a fractured leg on his shoulders as he walked. The sheer determination to get home combined with the enormous misery of the thing made me bleed inside.

I looked around. I have a solid, climate controlled house with a roof over my head. All my possessions. My immediate family is safe and healthy. I have bought provisions, have a freezer full of food and have a bit of a safety net if it gets bad. I have some basic meds and access to health care. There are several supermarkets full of food a few minutes away. I have information and access to support if it is needed. Hell, I even have a $1,200 check coming soon. Sure, Covid-19 may infect any or all of us, and how well we come out of it is unknowable, but that fear is shared across my country and we're all dealing with it as best we can, in our own ways. What the HELL am I so freaking depressed about, you know? It was the sort of swift kick in the ass that I really needed to shake it off and push me to do more to make things better and safer, as well as to reach out to the neighbors that we see but seldom interact with. We're going to deal with it, whatever comes. Screw Covid-19. We're going to ride this out together.





Photos: In locked down India, poor migrants are on a long march back home

Modi seeks 'forgiveness' from India's poor over COVID-19 lockdown

 

Good. We no longer need the middleman with all of his pomp and pageantry and excess and rings to be kissed and scepters. While we're at it, go all "Shoes of the Fisherman" and let's get churches to divest themselves of their wealth and use it to feed the hungry worldwide. (Good movie ... make it a point to dial it up while you're home).

 

I'm beginning to think it will take months if not longer for the restaurant industry to recover.

Chef Hugh Acheson: "My real worry is for all the people that I promised to provide for and can't"

But we’re all screwed. Everybody’s like, “Well, we’ll recover.” No. Fifty percent of the restaurants that just shut down across this country will never reopen. Small business is being abandoned. It’s been abandoned for a long time in this country. Nobody has any inkling about how much hurt this is going to do. Next month when unemployment figures come out at 25 percent, that’ll be the wake-up—and that we just murdered an industry.

 

It will be interesting how things shake out with another month (at least) to go. What is it they say - it takes two months before things become a habit? What won't we see much of when we return. Handshakes? Hugs? More people working from home to allow companies to downsize their real estate expenditures? There are also more than a few things that people are realizing were more "habit" than things they particularly "wanted" to do that have gone by the wayside and may not return.

 

We won't read about it much in newspapers, another industry which has been murdered.

 

Who knows. After WWII though, attendance at sporting events exploded. And I do miss eating out once a week, if only for the social aspect. I think people are gonna be champing at the bit to get back out in public, although it might take until fall or even winter for many to feel totally safe.

I think being stuck at home for 2-3-4 months is gonna show people just how much it absolutely sucks to be stuck at home for 2-3-4 months.

 

My father is convinced this may be the end of civilization as we know it. Perhaps.

But I'm more inclined to consider it a "global reset." I think there's a great re-prioritizing under way, and the things we thought were high on the list of importance may be classified as "not really that necessary" once we reach the other side. Some activities we've done in the past -- commuting to a central business district, sending children to multiple schools teaching the same cirriculum, gathering for large events -- are remnants of an era when technology wasn't available to connect us.

I'm enthused by the people who have found ways to escape the need to get in an automobile, just because it's convenient and available. We waste a mind-numbing amount of time in our cars, running errands or sitting in traffic jams. We have so many better ways to utilize our time, as we've all found out. Perhaps saving the environment will be the happy by-product of the suffering we're having to go through right now.

Now, the thing that's missing from all this is our need for socializing, both as children and adults. Our society thrives when we share. Perhaps we'll find ways to do that without feeling like life is just an assembly line, mindlessly toiling at a brick-and-mortar school or workplace, just because that's the way we've always done it.

I hope smart people in the future will use this experience to create new ways of educating and working that won't even occur to us now, just like how 2020 seems so different to those of us who went to school or worked in 1970.

Better? Worse? I'm hoping for the first. But I can't see the world just dusting itself off in 18 months and carrying on as if nothing happened.

 

"champing at the bit"

Thank you for not writing "chomping."

 

I agree with this take in theory, but with this caveat. A whole lot of people who might like to go out and do something will be flat stoney broke.

 

You son of a ...