After the Storm

     Well I’ll be damned. It seems like it was just the other day that I was just sitting around with my buddies wondering if we would ever get through this mess and what would happen after. Now, here we are, a couple years later already (time really does fly when you get to be a certain age) and it turns out all of us were a little right and also a little wrong. Okay, a lot wrong.

     I'm shocked! Despite all those folks hoarding toilet paper and buying guns we made it without total collapse. It was touch and go for a while there around the time of 2020 election – a little mass hysteria going on there - but in the end it all worked out. Not everything is going well, of course, it never does. For example, the economy – and my IRA – still haven’t recovered but it seems to be getting better. Also, a lot of jobs never came back because a lot of industries never came back so there's tons of change there - can you say too many restaurants and retail stores? But there’s a lot of change a foot anyway, which shouldn’t be too be a shock; after every earth-shaking event like this including, the Civil War, Great Depression and both World Wars, left behind was a very different, usually better country. That, and a whole generation who will never forget lessons they learned during the Great Pandemic of 2020 (like never take their job or going to the grocery store for granted again and that maybe having savings isn't so stupid after all.) 

Anyway, here’s some of the things that surprised, amazed or shocked my buddies and me.

    Our peerless leaders finally saw that this never-ending cycle of boom/bust/bailout is not a sustainable model. A country built on debt, debt and more debt is not healthy and perhaps we need to get rid of policies that encourage bad behavior by everyone and especially big business. So the Fed is finally trying to normalize interest rates and the rest of us start to be smart. (Pretty sure this is happening but hard to tell in current mess of economy.)

    I guess we’ve lost our taste for consumerism. After weeks or months of social distancing or sheltering in place we've learned that it isn’t necessary to go shopping – online or otherwise - for every new, shiny object and that we really can live without many of the things that have consumed us as we consumed them in the past. (Remains to be seen what this means for the economy that depends 70% on consumerism not to mention jobs in retail.)

    Apparently, our experience spending so much time together just talking, thinking and enjoying simple pleasures like a walk actually became a regular part of way of life for lot us. (And becoming even more hooked on streaming - much to the chagrin of theaters.)

A big shock is that we seem to have developed some empathy for each other and differing views. The extraordinary partisanship and anger about things that, weighed against millions of us getting a disease and thousands dying, just don’t seem that important anymore. Hopefully we will see people starting to think more about what’s good for their community and country, like my mom and dad and grandparents did, and not just our own individual interests. (Hope this is true but way to early to tell.)

    Looks like some of the practical solutions that were seemed necessary during our fight with the virus have become mainstream – hallelujah! Talking to your doc on the phone - telemedicine – proved it works and helps reduce costs for millions of people and God knows we need it! And I was right, online learning goes mainstream!  Note: I taught online college classes for several years and knew it works when done right. Not sure what the education-industrial complex thinks of this but oh well. I'll bet there a lot more things like this going too.

    Who knew?! It seems this mess has finally taught us that we need to streamline, simplify and reduce costs of our whole healthcare system.  I guess watching millions of our friends and neighbors losing their healthcare along with their jobs finally convinced us that our crappy system is no way to run healthcare in a modern country. Sadly, the healthcare-industrial complex is still fighting it but the wheels are turning.

   Well, well apparently experts aren’t so dumb and science seems to work afterall. Maybe using actual data and facts in our decisions is okay. When the facts change so do their conclusions – duh! e.g. face masks. All of a sudden we seemed re-learn something that we shouldn’t have forgotten in the first place, it is better to listen to smartest among us then the dumbest. (The quick acceptance of the new Covid 19 vaccination by anti-vaxxers maybe helped this along.

    I have to admit that this kind of surprised me, a closet cynic: there actually seems to be a renewal of hope. Instead of cynicism, anger, fear or despair there is a sense that there is a reason to believe. Call it a belief in God, belief in reason, belief in ourselves or, I don’t know, simply the belief that there is always a reason to go on and . . . . . . . . . . . . .

    Ouch, Prudie, get off me! Damn it, dog, you woke me and I was having such a great dream. 

   Okay, okay, I know it’s time for your walk. I need to find my mask and my rubber gloves before I can take you out. Crap, I hope this last shelter in place order since the stupid virus started again in October ends by the end of year and really is the last one cuz we need to get out of here for FL!

   I may not know much and no one has ever called me Pollyanna but I say hang in there, friends, the sun will return and if even only half of these things come true it would still be a great dream.     

            Beatles    Here Comes the Sun