Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good
Sometimes you get to stay home from school and your homework becomes your life’s work. Your life’s work is your own personal cure-world-hunger crusade. The assignment? Leave the world in a better place than it found you.
That’s the inspiration for 2020 Foresight. It’s a love letter to the not so distant day when a middle-aged American white male will expire. On that day he will have nudged the forward progress of his member species towards a slightly better place than self-preservation can provide or a clear conscience can afford. The essay is broken into five parts:
1. Where is Now: Put your finger on the inflection so we share that same in-between ‘before’ and ‘after’. Where is now plots our GPS location of collective experience. This is our sense of time knocked off all alarm settings. Our sense of scheduling … of equilibrium itself a transitional proposition. Only time will tell. But what will time be telling?
2. What Came Last: What’s lingering in the rear view that’s easily mistaken for a “return to normal” when there’s no such return. What came last is the residual expectation. The what-is-supposed-to-happen-next side of regaining normalcy. Spoiler alert: This was a challenging status quo even when upholding it was business as usual.
3. What Comes Next: What are the blind spots and instinctive habits that limit our choices and how do we overcome them in rethinking what’s possible? What comes next is the struggle to fill the void of today with a new balance of personal and collective responsibility. It’s not an indulgence, a temporary reshuffling, or an accommodation with a sunset clause buried in legalese.
4. What Needs to Come Sooner (If there is to be a later): What are the viable choices that will arise? What alternative conditions will be imposed on us if we choose not to. What needs to come sooner moves the clock up on the agreements required for drafting a new social contract. What new social contract? The one needed to earn public trust and redefine governance for the greater good.
5. Knock Ourselves Out: Consider it the shopping list for the future that has everything. The wish list arrives. It ships from a future touched by all of us with skin in the game. No skin to spare? Surely some will prefer their future arrives through forces beyond their shaping. The rest of us will be left to ponder: What kinds of victories are possible when every battle is not based on a zero sum fight to a stalemate?
Each part builds on the temporary respite afforded to those of us spared from direct harm of the Covid-19 virus. Its indifference to the suffering inflicted presents the healthy, the sheltered, and the enduring a sobering opportunity: To rethink society on a scale that pushes our collective strengths beyond the comfort zone territory of individual choices.
Where do we know we’re not just rethinking but redoing? When we center on a definable and prevailing public interest for which we all have responsibilities and the reward of a brighter future.
When will we see evidence of that world taking shape? When we connect the larger forces of human affairs to our own sense of how we as individuals contribute to those systems. Not the invisible hand of markets, the black box of technology, or the anonymity of dark money. Not how these seemingly supernatural forces operate with indifference to the wider society. But how they are operated by humans with a clear reciprocal need for involving the rest of us. Hello? There is no future for the rest of us without the surfacing clear risks and rewards in a shared outcome.
PART ONE: WHERE IS NOW
Summer is descending in a curtain of heat upon the northern hemisphere. It marks the third change in season that COVID-19 has danced freely on all expectations of normal.
We’re in a record-setting heatwave of new Coronavirus cases. There is no end in sight. And yet the beginning is plain to see.
Are we there yet?
Where does a person find that safer harbor. Not to defend the shifting grounds below us, or even prepare for the newer versions of normal that will prevail through the news cycles of the foreseeable. Want to see the future? Wait five minutes.
Where is the refuge where we seek to plant our feet in a world that bends towards a better one for the greater good? One not as fragmented, breakable, or hostile to the vast majorities of those seeking such refuge?
When changes are sweeping, their jarring power is absolute and the impact fills us with dread. Some of that is wanting to spare loved ones from suffering. Even more foundational is the lack of control over what happens next. When do we wonder out of our quarantines and how much can these new routines blend in with the crowds, events, and routines that signifies the return of that control?
How about soon?
For many of us stay-at-homers, the pandemic odyssey resembles those long, device-less car trips of yore. Inquiring minds narrow in on the cure: “When are we getting there?” we fidget from the backseat. The fact we’re actually home when we implore this means our destination is more highly in question than the long, strange trip we’ve been on since late winter: Friday, March 13th if you’re keeping score at home.
Those of us less fixated on the “when” can focus on the “there.” It’s a place filled with hope about where there can lead. Here are two places it can’t if our hopes are to arrive there with us:
1. Where we just were: The business-as-usual state of that last turn-off on the exit to Covid-19
2. Wake me up when we get there: A future based on the fantasy escape from the present
We need a better appreciation of our past limitations If hope has a fighting chance at building a better world. Put with more eloquence and less judgment:
“The world is empty now. How should we fill it? writes Steven Paulikas, an Episcopal Priest from Park Slope Brooklyn.
One way to answer Father Paulikas is to look at our shopping cart of hopes and dreams in the not-so-distant past. It’s striking how implausible a resumption of our regularly scheduled future now appears.
Individuals had their run of the place in the immediate past. Two entire political parties were either devoured or cowed by one reality show star. He won the highest office in the land while proclaiming a rigged election. A victim that emerges victorious not only in spite, but because of his victimhood.
It’s hard to write a more doom-affirming or personal narrative than that. And the victory was the creation — not of a plan or a vision or even a plausible conspiracy but of a vacuum. The loss of a common connection between the government, the governed, and a win-win outcome for the courageous and the practical. Key to its revival: a newly discovered appreciation for the act of reaching an impure, evolving, and empathic compromise.
Individuals were on the receiving end of our collective distrust of institutions. Enfeebled regulators? Lower corporate tax rates? No trickle-down in the bonus pool? That’s because the rain only fell on the highest earners. The trajectory of this growth? The showering of dividends on the expected future earnings of trillionaires-in-their-own-lifetimes. A scale where oligarchs command more wealth than many sovereign governments. Arguably, it will take a private fortune in the future to seriously dent a looming monster like climate change. And it will take the deepest, most aggressive state imaginable to siphon those accounts before tomorrow’s barons leave earth entirely.
This windfall for individuals is the single defining feature of yesterday’s competitive landscape and incentive to start cooperating through groups. What groups exactly, earthlings?
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- The followers of the meme originators of the most recent monster sightings on social media?
- The gatekeepers of College Admissions for the post corruption elites?
- Our own freely-associated congregations, fan clubs, and identity profiles?
The sooner a majority of Americans can separate our views on culture war issues from the divisions sowed by these differences, the sooner we can sign-up as charter members of the economically insecure.
Ready, Reset, Go
Give the dreamer a canvas to paint a post-pandemic do-over and your creative writing assignment casts society in role of populist-snorting addict with a long overdue withdrawal from … you guessed it: the economy we just came from! For the clear-eyed horizon gazer, perhaps the road before us weaves somewhere between playing out the doomsday clock and a wholesale Quentin Tarantino rewrite where vengeance sides with angels.
In either projection, power without accountability is the price we will pay for a wanton rejection of political elites. There is no return to the America we once knew. And the sooner we lose the idea of a nostalgic guidepost, the sooner we’ll get to know a country where most Americans willingly exceed the boundaries of today: A country that defines its greatness by limiting …
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- The sacrifices of those best positioned to make the most lasting of contributions.
- The participation of the marginalized.
- The agency of the taxpayer.
Imagine a revenue collection system where taxpayers can channel a small portion of their payments towards those areas of the public trust they wish to see funded. Imagine acknowledging that many of our working poor are service providers as well as receivers. Consider the problem-solving capacity of our most profitable enterprises. Why limit their genius to shareholder wealth when they can serve the broader public in ways that government-run programs cannot.
And who says that time gets reset according to the quarterly earnings clock? Who says that debtors need to assume all the risk for their loans? Who says that our greatest shared experience as Americans is the looming shadow of economic insecurity? That’s the group that would have most of us as members.
It’s curious that the federal poverty rate has declined after the bottom dropped out of the economy. Let me repeat that. The post-Pandemic spending designed to prop up the economy has done more for the country’s bottom earners than the wages earned through their own labors. Not working in a teetering economy? I can pay my bills. Working for the man? Not so much.
Now that’s a reset whether you’re defining where now is these days or deciding to leave that dead-end job because you see better opportunities. For those of us with more footing, a little wiggle room can reduce the impoverishment of our imaginations. Instead of outlasting our cash, perhaps it’s the prevailing economic insecurity of America we should be outliving.
Next installment: What Came Last is a deconstruction of the gravitational pull from the recent past. That’s the allure of the familiar in these lock down times. How do we get back on our feet with the confidence to stray past the road of no return?