Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good
“They’ll miss that time in the past — it really did exist — when kids used to mess around outdoors. Go off and just do stuff. Build forts, have wars, die, hang out.”
Garrison Keillor, The Future of Nostalgia
In the first of our five part series, we plotted the coordinates of “now.” Defining where we on-board that journey is critical for determining how we leave this world a better place than it found us; hence fulfilling our mission of reckoning with the terrible afflictions of COVID-19 pandemic virus as a force for achieving that ultimate good.
In this installment, we wrestle with what came last:
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- Not for the sake of repeating a settled chronology of causes and effects
- Not as a sobering reminder of squandered passions and dissipating pipe dreams
But to issue a heightened awareness on the temptations of wasting a perfectly acceptable crisis: the allure of the “return to normal” when there’s no such return.
The Landfill of Nostalgic Futures
Recently I’ve revisited a museum-full of mid-20th century prophesies. Full disclosure: the ones I grew up with as a kid. The ones that told me what promises beckoned as an adult.
Which cultural institution please?
One privilege, if not promise delivered by the virus is the blessing of keeping my unessential job and conduct it remotely. Others like me have been granted this bubble of time — the one reward we’re always falling short on. And now this time surplus. One way I’ve decided to shape this unstructured transition between past and future is a revisit to The Future of the Past Museum. That’s the place where the rose-colored glasses get the telescopic look-over.
In the days of the great World’s Fairs, unabashed horizon-gazing was a kind of sport: Which fair sponsor could star in its own show under the dome of the sunny tomorrow pavilion? Goofy corporate galaxies and crass depictions aside, why this hankering for hindsight of the future — 2020 edition?
Well for one, this hurdling down the highway routine was old even when our retractable tires were to grow hovercraft fins and glide across the take-offs and landings of our choosing:
Prediction #1 — When tubular is the closest distance between two points…
“The shape of our means of transportation will not be rectangular as today but round or tubular, like the shape of a cigarette.”
Anon, The World in the Year 2058 (As Predicted in 1958), Translation by Patrick Casiano, Yiddish Book Center
That was when we were late for our future destiny appointments. Now that we’ve been living in this future, it’s taken on the air of the familiar — the more there’s nowhere else we’d rather be. And then the virus arrives and we realize that this holding pattern is not some transitional shorthand to the next placeholder:
“Every telephone will be connected to a television so that the persons speaking can see each other. It will be possible to make a phone call from anywhere in the world; you will even be able to connect while out on the street.”
ibid
Why am I more excited than anxious? Why is it that I’m not reserving my place for more preferential positioning when the checkered flag waves us off the starting blocks? This is an unscripted skip in the narrative. We’ve jumped the track. What if I teleport to a tent city of Rip Van Winkles?
“According to the opinion of experts the clothing in 100 years will be protected against stains and damage. Clothing will come with a net of metal thread and micro tubes for all kinds of needs, such as cooling and heating.”
ibid
It’s the past as prologue or what Mr. Keillor speculated as “yesterday never [looking] better than it will tomorrow.”
I didn’t venture out for a cheap source of campy nostalgia or smug superiority. I did it to inform the most grounded way to build sustainably — something that won’t be swept away by the next set of election returns, unscheduled climate event, or media conspiracies. With another nod to Father Paulikas who was introduced in our last installment: Having emptied ourselves, what do we really want to fill our world with once we rebuild?
Settling for the Return to Sub-Normal
When we know the virus-cancelling ride we were taken on is angling for curbside pickup in the resumption of the usual? When do you know that the calming message of getting-back-to-our-lives should be panic to your ears?
There’s the economy, the politics, and the toys that enable them, a.k.a. devices. All three are poised to interrupt our irregular programming to commandeer normalcy’s return.
The economy crackling through your supermarket PA system is fixated on one thing: unemployment. This simple calculus indicates three things:
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- a disregard for investments other than their rate of return,
- obliviousness to the dormant capital that accumulates outside the economy, and
- little appetite for how unsustainable the last extra helpings of normal turned out to be.
But it’s a funny thing about deep, overnight unemployment looking for a safe employment harbor to land in. Recent times have been all about individuals. We’re now free to pick religious traditions, no faith at all, sex partners, gender identities, and schedule our offspring in accordance with preferential chromosomal patterns. That’s all well and good for individuals who have the means to exercise these freedoms.
They’re also not top-of-mind for individuals with a declining number of options for feeding and sheltering their families. Making it in a world of dwindling incomes and job prospects is not an abstraction for most of us. Increasing our choices for socially productive job options at a sustainable wage is not a given. It is not close-at-hand. For many, this humble exchange of services for goods remains an out-of-range aspiration.
What will happen after the shareholder classes thank the working classes for their service? If that question is rhetorical, the only answer will be in the form of lip service. If our economy actually recognized its marginalized participants, their true worth would be measured not by a competing laborer’s wages in a developing country but in the actual cost of food, shelter, transit, health, and childcare: the stuff of earning what used to be called an honest living.
The political u-turn back to subnormal deviates from the calls for economic normalcy’s return in one essential way: Those are the circus of distractions to steal attention from economic insecurity. The ease by which voters can be disconnected from their income streams is both:
(1) The strongest, tangible bond shared by most Americans, and
(2) Potential unraveler of the known political order.
Take a brief trip with me to the recent past.
In the winter of 2017/18 our existential threat was a government shutdown and a looming trade war with China. Shuttering the federal government was not a winning issue for President Trump. Not only did his approvals dip to levels lower than the march on Charleston, Mueller reports, impeachment hearings, or a vacuum on post pandemic leadership. It also triggered arguably the only binding setback for his party since taking office: Delivering the lower house back into Democratic hands the following fall.
Another reason for the ratings dip? The Tax Reform Act of 2017. How unpopular? A majority-rule GOP exploded the same deficits that had given rise to the Tea Party in the first Obama Administration. The result? More stock buybacks for shareholders, even greater disparities of wealth, and an impact on GDP that came nowhere close to delivering the growth predicted — unless growth was measured by the revenues the donor class got to keep.
Now citizens across the globe could face higher taxes and/or fewer services in order to pay for the $10.6 trillion committed so far to bringing the moribund world economy back to life.
The global strategy consulting giant McKinsey writes…
The public will expect—indeed, demand—that their money be used for the benefit of society at large. This raises complicated questions. What does it mean for businesses to do right by their employees and customers? If a financial institution accepts a bailout, how should it think about calling in loans? When, if ever, is it appropriate to resume buybacks and switch out declining death rates for a return to higher dividends?
In other words, when can the world’s least terrible system for distributing goods and services revive the animus and predatorial spoils that passed for the power structure of the pre-infected social order? When will the social fractures revealed by the virus pass once again into the widespread acceptance of a force beyond organized human control?
An insurmountable supernatural power beyond scope, explanation, or responsibility, let alone a plan for addressing.
The Black Box on Our Doorsteps
In recent years this mysterious tide of overwhelming forces has begun to resemble what used to be reined in, even shutoff or sent packing. Some like surveillance capitalism was simply unthinkable except in the most fatalistic of Orwellian prophesies prior to the dawn of smartphone world. On the surface: a screen full of apps. Below? A shadow army of prods and probes for exploiting our cognitive pleasure centers. Now it’s a done deal — no handshake or any terms of acceptance required.
This too has come to pass in our where-is-now reckoning.
Other supernatural forces like “cloud computing” or “two day delivery” sound ushered in like the two tablets contained in the Ark of the Covenant and written by the finger of God.
Where does your data go during your time on earth? It goes to the same place your spirit ascends after this one. In the meantime, pay your bills and anything that can be boxed in the Ark of Amazon will mysteriously appear within 48 hours of your sending for it.
Certainly the long-term business plans of oligarchs like Jeff Bezos are predicated on us delivery destinations not planning ahead more than 48 hours into that foreseeable future.
The shortness of breath given over to anxiety provides a more certain course for panic than creative, long-term problem-solving. Fortunately for us, we’re holed up in earth base abodes. Our launch pads idling in our driveways.
These days I’m rolling listlessly out of bed just when I used to be barreling into rush hour congestion.
Assuming the virus isn’t waiting for me in the kitchen, am I really going to toss the pandemic into the dread pile and remove it from the commuter traffic that awaits me in tomorrow’s edition of return to yesterday?
Stay tuned for more Foresight: Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good. Part 3’s What Comes Next covers the blind-spots and instinctive habits that limit our choices. 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.
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?
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.
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.