Tag: futurism

Part Five: The Shopping List for the Future That Has It All

Playing by the same set of rules is a sound set of rules because the same ones apply to you and me. Other agreements are on the table. But this is the only one we’ll need to understand across that table our mutual commitment to social contract number one.

In our last install we considered what could happen if all the bread and circus distractions died down long enough for common people to share in their economic insecurity?

“Emptiness is not something to fear but to explore as a spiritual reality that leads to detachment from self-interest and greater compassion for the world.

Fr. Steven Paulikas, The New York Times, April 11, 2020

That cleansing embrace of that blank canvas sounds nearly as courageous as it does naive for anyone teleporting within the vicinity of “now.” In fact, if I had…

(1) Read up on the future in the maternity ward where I was born, and

(2) Been magically transported to 2020, I would have …

(3) Done a 360 degree crawl back into mom’s womb.

Future shock set in when what do you want to be when you grow up becomes the answer to a test score. And those answers are limited to a shrinking number of professions that are drawing from a declining range of cognitive strengths, artistic skills, and uniquely human traits.

What if the same career ambition could be expressed as social stability, and not mere social status? This promising societal aspiration starts with a wholesale rewrite of the social contract number one. That’s where Father Paulikas’s brave, defiant act of detachment begins. That’s from where we assess our relationship to our communities, peers, and juries without prejudice.

Playing by the same set of rules is a sound set of rules because the same ones apply to you and me. Other agreements are on the table. But this is the only one we’ll need to understand across that table our mutual commitment to social contract number one.

Only problem is that the contract is voided, no one’s in charge, and our responsibility to each other is decided by someone with no skin in the game. And when the contract is voided there are no winners and losers. Just suckers who never had a chance of winning. Also, your handshake is channeling my inner germaphobia. Perhaps we can lock our gazes in with an iris scan? What are the terms and conditions for lying through our irises?

Technopolists: Can we look at clouds from both sides now?

Given this loss of mutuality, personal responsibility is being tested in ways not previously relied upon to form agreements, let alone social cohesion.

Coordination used to be how humans in groups navigated their way through anticipated changes. But it’s also how we coped with the unknowable, as-in… if I take a bullet from the enemy, my loved ones will accept my death as a noble sacrifice in the defense of family honor. In these pandemic times there have been many great and minor sacrifices. But not in the public spirit and inner solace offered by a shared understanding of a common good. These virtues are not available to us in 2020.

In the past the enemy was foreign. The threat concerned more than enlistment or rationing or conforming to a defensive crouch while the storms of hostility roared overhead. It was the threat of what could be taken from us:

    • from our freedom to assemble,
    • to the abundance in our supermarkets, and
    • the shape-forming potential of our futures.

These fascist/commie/[blank] fundamentalists were all gunning for our way of life.

The Simpsons” predicted a Donald Trump presidency in the 2000 episode “Bart to the Future.”

Now that the threat has advanced to a largely domestic one, the cupboard of American treasure is largely a rite of privilege, not a under the lock and key of such former givens as…

    • An entrepreneurial spirit,
    • Expanding middle class,
    • High quality public education,
    • Widespread home ownership, and
    • The fruits of a well-earned retirement — the grand prize afforded to anyone with a lifelong appetite for hard work.

Food fight!

Our wounds are self-inflicted these days. The petty slights of self-involved indignation are now serviceable as both: (1) social media business model, and (2) the national conversation. We’re lashing out impulsively for optimal reaction. Somewhat like how a virus tempts an immunity system to over-correct in its compromised state. And we’re not defending our honor when we’re returning incoming fire with table scraps.

More importantly, we’re not defending an American Way of Life. Those defenses are way down in a time of declining life expectancy, climbing obesity rates, downward economic mobility, overpriced housing markets, the highest rates of chronic disease among our peers, a safety net in the shredder, and one uninsured medical condition away from an incurable credit report.

But before we figure out with what’s worthy of defending and from whom, let’s ease up on the gas? Perhaps a slice of humble pie served ahead of the bacon cheeseburgers and the chest-thumping? Maybe even a little gratitude for the small graces that have endured, or even strengthened under the strain of our COVID exile?

Here are a few collective blessings we’d all be well-advised to consider ahead of the next flash point for intolerance:

    • COVID is worse than the flu, less contagious than the measles, moves stealthily through populations dense and scattered, and about as lethal as a dirty bomb dropped in any single population center on earth today.
    • Your internet has gone down several times since the virus hit. But not for months at a time. (Can you imagine?)
    • The Pacific Coastal fires and the Gulf hurricanes have lived up to their “Hell AND High Water” billing in the coming attractions of climate changes to come. And most of us still possess the time, resources, and intelligence to rebuild … elsewhere.
“is this year really HAPPEN-ing?” © Scott Richard, 2020

Are We Done Here? (What Sounds Like a Plan and Sounds off Like a Platoon)

My wife calls it the 5-5-5 rule. That $5 dollar garment will ship for an additional five dollars. Upon arrival, it will be worn five times before it enters the pile-on of pre-washed un-wearables. Planned obsolescence is what happens when we flush our last trip to the printer cartridge store down the pipe of shredded fashion statements. Unplanned unemployment is what happens when the middle person is removed from the transaction. That job is not coming back. The newly disintermediated are not the cartridge repair guys of the future. There is no return policy for faster and cheaper when there is no “better.”

So what would better look like if we surrounded it with stable/merit and compensation? Would we publicly fund more of those “good paying jobs” the party bosses used to crow about at the ribbon-cutting? Didn’t think so. Do we elect a government that takes a healthy whack out of the trickle-free revenues that accrue to the great dis-intermediators? Now there’s a lifetime income funding source. Trickle-up the fruits of federal revenues and the cash gets spent before the capital can be hoarded.

That sounds convincing, to a point:

    • Only, what happens when the takers so far exceed the givers that the U.S. Treasury becomes a credit risk?
    • Will yesterday’s corporate tax cuts turn into tomorrow’s reparations, and loan forgiveness, and free day care for essential service workers?
    • Will emerging coalitions crumble under rapidly shifting centers of power? More acrimony and tribalism … is that even possible?
© Marc Solomon, Crash Cart, Crown Heights 2020

Forks in Roads Once Off Limits to Us

Here are seven ways that can play out as a shopping list for problem-solving. It’s all on the table. Even the table scraps. The only non-negotiable in this future is score-settling.

  1. Loosen the margins:
    The pandemic economy let’s those of us with the luxury of work-at-home status to ponder its leading mismatch: The irony of essential workers drawing marginal wages. What would happen if we expanded both? The ranks of the essential and the rewards for the privilege of being pivotal to a functional society? What could be less marketing-driven or disposable than a living wage to keep the rest of us fed and looked after? That might not boost the fortunes of capital. But it might dignify our mutual understanding of the need for community, expanding windows of public service, and survival of our better natures.

  2. Bridge the generations:
    In the sixties it was the gulf between the insurgent baby-boomers and the war handed them by the greatest generation. Nowadays those same boomers are standard-bearers of a graying nation. The new gap is based on a long delayed transfer of power and property from the ownership boomers to the resulting generations, with no sure lock on their own self-financing destinies. For starters, we boomers need to admit that we’re old, cranky, and medicated. Perhaps it’s not just golfing, cruises, and keypad access to a fiefdom of gated estates? Maybe retirement is for giving something back. Maybe that transfer is a wealth of experience to share beyond the next of kin?


    And while we’re on a lifetime of self-service, let us not forget the the rise of individualism and institutional distrust was birthed, nurtured, and ultimately flourishing under the Boomer Nation of today. Cradle to grave. The working class. The privileged. The stars and stripes of all political persuasions. It’s all about me.

    Abrasive post to newsfeed, generated without author’s consent.
  3. Stop addressing our adversaries by their social media accounts:
    Putting the needs of our base ahead of our adversaries is an entirely understandable impulse. Posturing to the converted? This drags down the chances for reconciliation with our opponents. We need to re-invent the smoke-filled backroom as a safe space. We need to go screenless. We need to face each other. Repeat back the concerns we hear. Share back how that squares with our understanding. Confirm where we’re closing the awareness gaps. Disagree on the best way forward. Agree that these views stem from honest differences, not from selling tickets to rage parades.


    “Protesting is good and needed, press conferences are good and needed,” says Councilwoman Alondra Cano, in discussing community solutions to New York City policing policies. “That third space is needed where we are committed to each other, and not the camera.”

  4. Trust won’t return before the arrival of a new social contract:
    Accountability is what happens when social contracts are honored. The better ones aren’t enforced by a huge pile-on of legal codes but by the honoring itself. The carrot is reputation. The stick is ostracism. It’s an arrangement where everybody wins with no specific winners. Social contracts don’t enforce victories. No one runs up their own trust scores.

    And no one is taking from a limited trust pile. Under the cover of trust can can protect large, sweeping allegiances to social mores and ethical conduct: Civility, common decency, the benefit of the doubt, etc.

    Accountability is the highest projection of what’s escaped through a crack in the tax, penal, and police codes. Add oaths of office to that list. No one likes to go to the back of the line.

    Accountability serves at the pleasure of a cognitive-borne contagion called insecurity. Withholding rates recede and advance. Economic insecurity however is a one-lane highway with no passing lane. We’ve driven down that road for half a century. With no signs of abating. Problem-solving needs to be protected from Twitter, permanent campaigning, and corporately-funded political parties. We need government to facilitate solutions without pitting the solvers against the insurgents.

    Branding problems aside, government needs to break free of its problem versus solution conundrum. That’s the first step in figuring out a new core strength unique to big trust governing: how to play matchmaker between problems and solutions. In any size or flavor, a big trust democracy asks the obvious:
    – A stampede of social problems angling for the top fixation slot.
    – What are the gaping holes that need the most expedient filling in our fraying safety net?
    – How do we fix that problem by strengthen the net?

  5. Skin the the Game is Under the Control of My Personal Responsibility:
    Masking the significance of top-down decision-making is at the root of “the great abdication.” The disowning of the impact of those weighted decisions on the shoulders of those who carry their consequences. For too long, authority has been consigned to the faceless, omnipotent powers of “the market” or “the algorithms” or the neighbors we never see with the wrong yard signs.


    While we have no direct recourse to address those above-my-pay-grade executive decisions, we can single handedly cast a ballot. And it will count exactly as much as the votes of the candidates whose authority we reject or favor. This is what holds us to our history and pegs us to a future where owning up to consequences becomes a collective responsibility again.

    No chances, © Marc Solomon 2020
  6. Tolerance is the cost of doing social contracts:
    In olden, settled times we had a system of checks and balances. It was the rock, paper, scissors form of mutually enforced deterrence from the tyrannies of one person, body, or party domination. These days, voters are given an all-or-nothing choice:

     – Either your team clubs your opposition over the head, or
    – You blockade every move they make to step over you.

    There is no tolerance built into this unaccountable system. Only the seeds of unflinching contempt and deal-breakers for negotiating on unresolvable terms. Add any hinting of compromise to the enemies list.

    Is that because our domestic enemies are so menacing or because our tolerance muscles have grown flabby? Could it be as simple as a screen-based engagement that no longer requires our in-person presence to engage in respectful disagreement?

  7. The digital natives are restless:
    Selling out used to be an accusation aimed at performers who profited outside their coterie of fans and fawning critics. Nowadays it means acknowledgement of opposing views and a striving to strike a balance. And why shouldn’t the base hold out for a better deal? They have no history of deal-making where two sides can look each other in the eye and face the mirror the following morning. Knowing that means needing to draw the new social contract…
    – Within the conflict-seeking urgency of the news media, and
    – Without the public trust in the institutions required to make that contract a binding one
(c) 2020 Business Insurance Canada
Running with rock, paper, and scissors

Eye Fixation - Definition & Concept (c) 2020 Speed Reading Lounge

Shopping List Item #1:

Have today’s Technopolies Underwrite Tomorrow’s Guaranteed Minimum Incomes

Okay. Now it’s the government’s turn to find suitors who can unleash their engineering teams to design the delivery system. But unlike an Amazon warehouse or an Apple factory or a Google data farm, the designer gig is a tax write-off, not a new profit center. Strictly pro bono, and sorry, no product placements.

And the job placements? Why that would include generous staffing counts from the ranks of those essential marginals. Yes, the folks otherwise be swapped out for robots once the solution train leaves the social problem station.

What if big tech doesn’t get on board the big trust wagon? That’s where Bezos, Zuckerberg, and associates can leave the generosity of their current brackets in place. Or this: The feds can pry open their transaction cows to fund income guarantees for those same essential marginals who could otherwise be working on the social solution railroads of tomorrow. What could be better leverage for the disenfranchised than payment for our digital identities? They may have been stolen legally. But that doesn’t indenture us to surveillance capitalists. That doesn’t bind us to the broken contract.

© Graeme Jennings, The New York Times

In Closing

As noted at the outset, a past that’s always in flux is a delay on the future. Nostalgia for the settled scores of former glories is more than the gibberish of cultural dementia. It’s a full-throated cancellation notice on the construction of future times that eclipse the selective memories of the infirmed and the entrenched.

The aging baby boomer confronts a world they have leveraged for personal gain to a degree unfathomable to prior generations. The time afforded by accruing wealth gives retiree-age the resources they need to support the efforts of future generations to make and honor their own promises. These are the markers of promises to keep in a century that is neither new nor on the cusp of greatness.

It is a future where the boomer can sunset our claims and privileges, and open our unspent endowments up to the inheritable promise of an inhabitable future. That must be our true legacy. And we will share in the faith that we tried to leave this world better than we found it.

Funny thing about the authoring of our collective history books. It’s one thing when we acknowledge that the selecting, composing, and retelling of battles and conflicts is in the voice of the victors. That’s a core conflict in itself, replayed as both “settled” or “disputed” in referential loops. Now add the rose-colored glasses to this reading of history. That’s where our memories filter out to the sacrifices, traumas, and injustices we carried to prevail within our victorious narratives. Adding a selective memory to a collection of questionable outcomes forms one shaky foundation; specifically for…

(1) unifying efforts to build a future worth living in, and

(2) for human cooperation in general.   

Which confederate statue is the reflection of local pride in regional sovereignty? Which is a hideous reminder of white supremacy?

© Marc Solomon, Rest Stop, New Jersey Turnpike 2020

You have your opinion. I have mine. Should they conflict, there’s little chance we’ll be persuaded otherwise. So let’s seek common ground on your rightful respect for my wrong-headed views.

Let’s agree that conversion is both tedious and self-defeating. Instead let’s focus on issues where we both win and share in that same victorious narrative. We can tackle the harder stuff once the base level trust level is restored.

I Want to Go Home But I am Home, © Alanna Rutledge, 2020.

Part Four: What Needs to Come Sooner

(If There is to be a Later)

Scenes from Last Episode

When we were last together in our third installment of episode three: (“Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good — What Comes Next”) we tried some perspective-taking. We slipped on the Gucci loafers of Senate Republicans to understand their resistance to helping the unemployed through the fall and winter of our pandemic discontent. We looked through the lens of Senator Rick Scott of Florida who argued that the hardball negotiation by Senate Republicans was a feature, not a bug, of keeping American labor lean, hungry, and ready to resume where it left off.

Senator Scott’s pumping on the economic relief brakes is understandable. The wealthy underwrite elections, the parties protect their donors and in Mr. Scott, we’ve got a two-for-one sale displayed proudly in the C-SPAN store window Remember that return on investment in GOP majorities a.k.a. The Tax Reform Act of 2017? Turning the clock forward to the pandemic zone shot us clear past the final solution:

1. Neutering and defanging the federal government.

2. Turning the clock back to a world of unrestrained capital

3. Fleecing, before fleeing the republic, for which it stands.

No Life Boats in Coach

Of course, once the plane crashes, fixing the auto pilot is a luxury for the survivors. Even those survivors in first class who can float their own way to safety. Even recovery of the flight recorder is a distraction to the stranded hoards in coach. Would the most unfit be voted off the island by the libertarians watching at home? What would women and children first look like to the crew piloting this rescue plane?

Wake up from the scripted nightmare and a cold splash of aspirational reality could revive us. According to former Treasury Richard Rubin, federal revenues were already running a full two points below normal when the pandemic hit. Compared to the glory days of the dot.com heyday and tax revenues are now 16.5% of GDP, compared to 20% in the late nineties.

My point? A narrow post-contested victory this November still brings the of wiggle room needed to reverse the 2017 tax holiday for those likeliest to make it a working vacation. That consequential first step has the public, and history on its side.

Confidence in paying for what exactly?

  • The freedom for taxable income to do the most good for the most salary-dependent people.
  • The priority shifting from American Color War to a national obsession with a shared precondition called economic insecurity.

That’s where capital in search of a home goes. Not its reflexive old normal routine: the highest return on the hoarded investments of insistent shareholders. That’s the bottom-line for the underwriters at the crash sites of broken auto pilots.

U.S. is Them

There are limits. Soaking the rich does nothing to broaden the commonweal. We all need skin in the game. Even the self-dealers and self-makers who think they can redirect highway funds to repair their imperial driveways. It can’t fall on the losers of a prior election. We need to move away from winner-take-all to a renewed spirit of shared sacrifice. Replacing one echo chamber with another extends the cycle. The concussive bluster of who gets to govern returns to the mutual respect of governing effectively. The new adversaries are not those in disagreement but dissolution: the enemies of compromise.

Here are the counter-arguments to Senator Scott’s tough winners-don’t-negotiate love from Rubin himself, a former Goldman Sachs-plated lion of Wall Street, and the furthest voice from the Bernie Bro Choir of any corporate-respecting Democrat:

Prediction #3 — The economy as a manageable problem to solve in a plausible way…

There will be ample room to increase revenues, on a highly progressive basis, for example, by increasing corporate taxes, restoring individual rates, repealing pass-through preferences and imposing a financial transactions tax. — Robert Rubin, Bringing the Economy Back to Life, 4.17.20, The New York Times

The calculation extends to health coverage:

We should also pursue universal health care coverage, preferably through a public option, while at the same time reducing  our system’s overall costs, which far exceed other developed economies’.  Ibid.

And that credit card balance!

Addressing our debt/G.D.P. ratio is in our longer-term economic interest and also benefits us in the nearer term, as greatly increased debt could impede the recovery. Ibid.

Some of these resentments began spilling into the public square over the summer. The backlash against systemic racism for starters. Remember that post racial society that Chief Justice Roberts used to justify the gutting of key provisions in the Voting Rights Act?

Perhaps those same rose-colored blinders are what justified the left’s lethargic turnout during off-year Obama era elections. Either way, that pendulum swing is in full counter-punch. Pendulum whiplash. Darkest midnight to highest noon.

A Petition to Replace Faster, Better, Cheaper

Why is it that economic inequality is not a bug of an unjust society? It’s a feature of a smoothly-running free market economy. For me, the answer is personal and simple. I feel lucky to have a job. And it’s not just any job so I double down on gratitude. I experience feverish gratitude that the job pays enough to sustain a family and a modest retirement savings. Head over heels on a slow day, really.  My appreciation reflects the precipitous fall from office to service worker. Concepts like recognition, generosity, or even job performance do not factor into this equation. Income flow for most of us is a precarious thing. There is no actual bump in pay for superior effort. Maintaining income flow is reward in itself.

Performance reviews aside, a former colleague summed up his amazement at another widening gap. It’s the one between

… How stubbornly we defend our pocketbooks against scams, knock-offs, and mark-ups… versus …

How cheaply we discount our own value to a contracting labor market. 

The connection here is more than personal. When every labor is justified as an exchange of assets, the cheaper the transaction, the more marginalized the laborer. We get this theoretically for buying cheap T-Shirts and jeans from Pakistan. Does that rationale find its way home when it’s our work product that finds its ways into the software code, legal contracts, marketing collateral, or even health care coverage consumed by our employers?

The corona-infested economy may well in fact settle for a continuation of faster, better, cheaper; especially if we don’t find a replacement for the race-to-the-lowest reduction-based logic. That’s a return to the humming along economy that dropped us like a stranded passenger that forfeited their free Two Day shipping flight home from planet Amazon.

It’s not enough to blame the status quo for this predicament. We need to intercept faster, better, cheaper at the factory gates before escorting it out of the board room. We need to knock innovation off its trajectory enough to factor the greater good into the disruptions to come. Only then can we justify a future that includes us in business-as-usual. Three next chapters have yet to be written. Blame their stripped-down open-endedness on the allure of alternative arrangements and these bloated time bubbles:

    • What’s an economy for? This is not the question that comes to mind in the reinsertion of the prior default settings of manufacturing and distribution. Plug and play makes sense to the owners of capital than the holders of debt, let alone the 50% who were a few off weeks from belly-up when the prior economy was purring along. How do we get from a trillion dollar cash injection to more of it actually circulating as we enter that tentative, post coma rehab phase?
    • What’s our collective sense of security? Is it to beat back the advancing hordes of the bad hombres? Perhaps it’s no longer about who’s: (1) labeling who the terrorists or, (2) determining the greater of two evils … global, or homegrown (you pick ’em!) Perhaps it’s about an America first that favors the nationalizing of the medical necessities we’ll need as more of us are victimized by changing climates, dissipating resources, and heavy hand of the unforeseen to come.
    • What’s the role of the individual in all this? Prioritizing what brings us together in shared sacrifice was a pipedream before this pandemic. It becomes almost graspable if we can re-establish the guiding clarity of the greater good. That’s no drug-induced high. That’s corona phoning in a sick-out from the Oval Office last evening. But that begs the biggest-picture question looming on the great post-pandemic horizon. How to see each other as individual contributors to that greater good, and not its dilution.

Will the pivot back to a road ahead be engineered outside the exclusionary interests of the muscular capital elites? Until offshore means: (1) a full-time residence in a private island tax haven, or (2) different planet to occupy, we have a shared outcome in a mutual controlling interest.

A Poverty of Professions

Part of that mutual interest is to occupy the time on earth of those whose needs suddenly outpace the capital formation of their labors. A paucity of wealth-providing trades and professions is a seldom mentioned scarcity in the recently completed run of the bull market. It’s also curious that our oligarchy-favoring leadership decides that throwing unregulated profits at corporations is the shortest distance between record-setting unemployment and mission accomplished.

What future economy will open the door of career choices for the able-minded people of an entering workforce?

Prediction #4 — Amazon needs workers until … they don’t

In 2020, they’re arriving into workplaces where their labor is both urgently needed and conspicuously treated as a problem to be eventually solved.” — John Herrman, Amazon’s Big Breakdown, The New York Times, 5.27.20

Easy access to short bursts of cash works out great for the connected and the corrupted. For the rest of us, writing the rules requires a new way to tie three laudable goals long buried under an unsustainable pile of Better, Faster Cheaper: compensation, merit, and stability. OK, merit cuts both ways and the current steadiness in direction is taking us to some pretty unstable territory. How about if stable keeps merit honest? That leaves an open slot for “better” to climb back in… so long as we unmoor it from the  greasy downslide to the cheap farm that globalization wins no matter who’s racing.

You Don’t Have to Worship a Dollar (to Go to Work Everyday)

I’m a part-timer nanny who drives for a ride-sharing service when I’m not pinch-hitting for a local caterer.

How many gigs are you holding up? Are they even consistent enough to be counted the same from one pay period to the next?

What if the social contract wasn’t bleed-me-dry in exchange for a chance of a promotable event in some foreseeable future? What if there was an actual dependency between the personal fortunes of the big tech elites and my take home pay? What if the downstream impact of decisions were felt firsthand by the folks who make them? Would they make those same decisions if they had to live with those decisions?

Returning to Senator Scott’s cautionary “do better someplace else” tale on the Senate floor, when was the last time you personally were moved to refuse the terms of your employer? That’s the leverage needed for economic recovery. And it’s not a return to work or the ethic of hard work. It’s the dignity of work that provides for the workers and their managers. Not simply for owners and shareholders.

The dignity of work: Step one in our long national recovery to come.

2020 Foresight | Part Three: What Comes Next

And now we are not returning to our normally scheduled programming.

Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good

The Oasis of Normalcy

When we’re knocked for a loop, normalcy is the comfort food of the disoriented. It’s allure comes from the reordering of so many misplaced pieces. We won’t have to walk barefoot and blindfolded through this pool of shattered fragments known to many as Ground Hog Year, known to some as an unyielding series of cancellations, and known to all as the year the media told time according to a scoreboard of accumulated deaths and new Covid cases.

Flirting with the sudden, unannounced resumption of normal ends the uncertainty, clarifies our work schedule, sends our children back to class, and buys us a drink at the watering hole we used to call bumping into someone. The bipartisan prayer for a cure-all vaccine is an understandable as the natural inflating of expectations around a pay-off delayed. Even a promise so universal that it can’t be politicized.

But the funny thing about normal is this: As we begin our inevitable return to the creature comforts of indoor dining, commuter transit, karaoke nights, nail salons, movie theaters, and preassigned theatrical seating, we find that our audience antennas are tuned to once remote signals we hadn’t picked up before.

We begin to insist on safety platinum plus deluxe edition. There should be six sanitizing stations from the time the gel enters our fingers until the moment the card reader ca-chings. The sound piped into our ears is the breathy ventilation that infuses our lungs with a purified whiff of mountain spring breeze. Anything less and it’s the stale, recycled scent of someone waiting to exhale the memories of the now bankrupt perfume counters of department stores from the zombie malls of the 20-teens.

Funny how the normal we insist on has as little to do with those pre-pandemic aerosols from sample perfume spritzes at Macy*s or a whiff of cotton candy-scented mesh teddies at Victoria Secret. In the world to come, we are practically punch drunk from bombardments of judgment about the state of our containerized orifices. It’s not just a lack of will for taking on further changes. It’s the thinning air under that facial mask that limits our abilities to imagine a world we want to publicly engage in.

How do we overcome these instincts towards self-protection for rethinking what’s possible and not just what’s preventable? How do see this transition as a respite from carrying forward the former burdens we needn’t carry into a more enduring future? What comes next is the struggle to fill the void of today with a new balance of personal and collective responsibility. What does that look like?

When Taking Care of Business Means Business as Usual

Prediction #1 :  “I think Jeff Bezos is going to offer the COVID-19 test as part of every Prime membership. I think that’s where we’re headed.” — Scott Galloway, New York Magazine, May, 2020

Destabilizing is bad. We get that. Even our most skydiver selves are clutching our parachute cords when confronted by the no tomorrow future of street violence spilling its way into living room, kitchen, and utility mud room mayhem. What’s not so easy to navigate is where an unquestioning return to flawed assumptions about how normalcy clears the destabilizing bar at any low, medium, or high bar setting.

Perhaps no evidence trail is more tread upon in the service of stability than social contract number one: Playing by the rules is good for me and for you. Like any prevalent notion, this agreement is presupposed. It is ingrained in both our better and second natures. This accommodation is primal. It is transcendent. It is central to how we conduct ourselves within a society held together by the same reciprocal understanding.

What pre-COVID assertion has risen up to challenge social contract number one? Is it that a vote for my opponent is a vote for chaos? Is it that I’m a chump for playing by the rules and the social contract was never followed in the first place? Is it that democracy is too unpredictable to be left in the hands of a public electorate? Nope. It’s about our uncompromising push for a return to normalcy. We’re talking finger-in-the-socket mental-distancing. It’s no longer getting back to the life we know. It’s more personal than that. It’s getting back to the life we miss. That’s one selective memory and it lingers long past any expired social contracts.

Put down your gun, your phone, your remote, your thumbs, and the jewels and metals around your ring finger. There is no negotiation. There is no commentary. There is no rehash of a status quo consensus. Just an insatiable appetite for the ending of this moment. And in its place? The comfort of the expected.

The Pursuit of Human Misery

One thing that no one expects in America is justice: The notion that social contract number one is back in force, and binding, regardless of our social strata. We can miss the ideal of working towards a more just society. We can strive again towards that more perfect union. But until our measurement systems are refactored to include such goals, our pursuit of human happiness will be limited to trading averages, credit risks, hedge funds, and score-keeping perfected through the relationship between our online behavior and purchase histories.

How else to explain a financial scoreboard of booming stock markets and depression level unemployment numbers? And those are just the job consumers, i.e. people in need of a pay check or two. What about the small business owner who just sank a ton of dough into an unessential business? What’s their sense of what comes next?

Three-point-five-percent (3.5%) unemployment it turns out was no better firewall against our shuttered economy and its after-effects than if it hadn’t come down at all these past record-breaking 112 consecutive months. There is no social distancing the loss of a paycheck from the arrival of a rent bill. All those jobs created over those 9 years? Gone within a matter of weeks. In early June unemployment plummets to 13.5%! So much winning? You’re probably bored with so much winning!

The next set of financial health tests needs to focus less on corporate earnings and more on personal assets. Forget about another tax break encouraging big ticket investments of putting capital to work in employment-generating enterprises. Save your breath. Wear your mask.

Instead we need to scorecard how well the massive outlays from our next government find their way into a dynamic and re-awoken economy. For instance, what if money was not a contest of who’s richest but a travel log for what happens after it leaves the treasury? It certainly doesn’t find it’s way back if we look through the tax records of Amazon, Starbucks, and Chevron. But it might if instead we were tracking more graspable indicators of personal financial health:

(1) How many paychecks away from homelessness?

(2) The rate of adult children still living with their parents?

(3) The savings rate of all?

How much are these trends reversible, sustainable? Is there even a place at the policy-making table to seat for sustainability? Other than an incumbent’s need to stay in power?

That Deer in the Headlights is Yesterday’s Road Kill

If the capital outside of circulation is being sold as credit to poor people, the next election won’t be between two candidates from two parties. That’s no longer plausible when the business of America is politics. Elected leaders cease to govern or persuade in terms of electorates. They had been working the ballroom, not the big tent.

Now it’s the breakout room on Zoom. That’s a frank and open exchange compared to the headspace between an itchy Twitter finger and the inaudible scream factory. That piercing incitement you don’t have to unmute. The dog whistling to the same wind that catches cryptic QAnon jabbering and late night punch line chortles alike. Loud and clear.

What about your own internal chatterbox? The voices that escape from the scream factory into your own fingers. You want convenience? You’ll find your instant cash-out at the ATM located near the slot machines.

Oh, you said voting machines? Sorry. Some hearing loss is inevitable at the scream factory.

You’ll hope there’s enough time between jobs to get cross-town for the privilege of waiting hours for a crack at expressing your power. Exiting stage left: Evacuations of the donor class to their own bunker islands, sheltered from the pitchforks of the disenfranchised, income-challenged, followers on Facebook, and former homeowners-turned-refugees.

And now we resume our regularly unsustainable programming

Do we want to continue feeding an economic engine that halts to a sputtering stop once the perpetual motion brakes get pumped? That’s no simple brake job with the plumes rising under the hood.

Here’s what a good corporate citizen would say about what comes next for the recirculated capital that lands on their own balance sheets:

Prediction #2:  “With many businesses likely to be operating to some extent with public money, the scrutiny will be intense. There will be real effects on the relations between government and business, and between business and society. — McKinsey & Company, The Future is not what it used to be: Thoughts on the shape of the next normal, April 14, 2020

Remember, this ante-raising of untapped corporate responsibilities is a warning from the same preeminent consulting group that captains of industry retain to lessen their collective loads; to make social problems (and larger payrolls) disappear.

In fact it’s the separation anxiety of reliable labor pools from their steady pay checks that makes the American unemployment experience the towering shadow presence in the national psyche. Outfits like McKinsey rush to fill the void between the terminators and the terminated. It’s vital to organized lay-offs that a third-party luxury brand like McKinsey validate the decision. So vital, that paying McKinsey’s exorbitant fees is a relative bargain to the executive boards paying these fees from one ledger and justifying their workforce reductions from another.

None of the terminators want the social contract muscling in here. That’s the nuanced conversation between labor and management that once sought common ground and goes like this:

(1) No one gets everything they wanted.

(2) Nobody leaves empty-handed.

I’m not aware of such a meeting. Maybe McKinsey shouldn’t be faulted for keeping the guest list to clients only.

Here’s another meeting I wasn’t invited to that I can overhear going down in my kitchen. It’s a Zoom call between public school administrators and staff in the district my wife teaches in. She and her unionized colleagues are being duly informed that they’re simultaneously teaching virtual and classroom school. The choices here for public school teachers? Do what I tell you. Maybe you’ll keep your job. Maybe.

Nobody ever said the business of America is labor. Not even Bernie, right? What about restaurant owners, pet groomers, and local farmers? What about the local repair shop, the nail salon, and the micro brew? Let’s compare the difference between the smallness and the largesse that passes for American business.

The $25 billion the Senate scrounged up to address the zero balance of the small business rescue fund is also the same sum marketing the increase of Jeff Bezos’ net worth since the beginning of the pandemic. Percentage-wise that’s a second place finish for eye-popping according to Americans for Tax Fairness.

New York Post | April 30, 2020: Activists painted “Protect Amazon workers” in giant print on a street outside CEO Jeff Bezos’s Washington mansion to protest the online retail giant’s treatment of workers during the coronavirus crisis.

The winner is Mark Zuckerberg whose personal net worth has soared by nearly half of his pre-corona fortune. So has Zuckerberg’s capacity for recouping perceived losses at the hands of his labor force, like the popularity of working from home:

“If you live in a location where the cost of living is dramatically lower, or the cost of labor is lower, then salaries do tend to be somewhat lower in those places.“

These veiled suggestions of salary reductions for not shouldering the same real estate costs as one’s corporate keeper is astonishing both for its miserliness and rejection of one of few remaining cards a remote worker has left to play: The cost differential between where they settle and the more urbane locations of their office commutes.

In one career-span, we’ve seen “people” downgraded from their employer’s “most prized assets” to their costliest. What rounding error does management solve? The margins they can’t deliver to the board without those pink slips. The rewards are obvious: a bigger share price and sudden drop of interest in next year’s bonuses. Good thing too. A raise is no longer a justified investment in human capital. It’s an arrow on your back that follows you to the next downsizing.

Who’s essential in that equation? It’s cash horses like Zuckerberg. It’s the boss who identifies with putting their capital assets to work — not their workers, and certainly not themselves. That could create even costlier, unplanned liabilities as-in small tokens of empathic understanding: Let them work from worksites of their choosing? Sounds consistent for a tech giant that…

(1) Mines the emotional surveillance of its users regardless of location, and

(2) Outsources its editorial function to faceless, underpaid offshore contractors.

Stealing the Future from the Social Ordering Economy

For all this doomsday forecasting, why am I then more optimistic about making promises than pensive about holding onto the ones no longer worth keeping?  Because, however you define 2020…

      • We’re in it together
      • We’re all fighting the same real enemy
      • Gated communities are not immune from it
      • Winning that fight is more important than pleasing shareholders
      • Many of the newly invented enemies are jokers in the deck of an overplayed hand. They are seen for the distractions that they are.

What happens when disruptions are visited on us by viruses instead of innovations?

Anger fuels the patience many voters will need to wait their turn long after the polling stations close on November 3rd. Less angry and the might have surrendered. More satisfied and they may have … Satisfaction? What does that even look like under the banner of the face mask?

1) Capital in search of its next home: Perhaps it means that money expands its role beyond the value of its investment potential for top-heavy holders of excess capital.

2) It’s the density, stupid: Maybe it’s that we stop knowing what’s best for people living in density settings that differ wildly from our own sense of place and community.

3) An under-cushion in lieu of safety net: And if economic insecurity ceases to be the isolated desperation of individuals, perhaps our societal concern can become the cohesion-forming kick we need to re-unify our country. Even if it means that the unemployed don’t have to choose between their next job or their next rent payment.

For all of us privileged with the gift of health, COVID-19 has some overlooked, silver linings. It’s provided us…

(1) Clearer skies,

(2) Puttering around the residence, (a.k.a. home improvement),

(3) Plummeting crime rates,

(4) Accelerated time tables for the demise of coal, and fossil fuels, and the,

(5) Boatloads of time we never had to reflect on the contrived clutter of our double-bookings and self-serve regular approach to hitting already congested highways.

But wait, you say. What advantages our idle minds to serve an economy in toxic shock? Is there no higher calling than reviving that social-ordering economy? And what of the spoiled appetites of our newly enfranchised non-workforce? Isn’t the disrepair of our unemployment systems enough incentive to settle for the entry floor of the big box stock room?

Here are three what comes next game-changers to keep those end-of-the-tunnel lights set to sustainable and away from our personal stash of unpaid bills. This is what the social contract to address economic insecurity looks like in three bold strokes:

1) Guaranteed minimum income (GMI): The GMI proposals floated by Andrew Yang in last fall’s primary season predated the generous unemployment package attached to the passage of last spring’s CARES Act. Both The unsqueezing of the already marginalized means giving workers the ability to better determine where they invest their labor.  Perhaps one guy standing in the way said it best: “The moment we go back to work, we cannot create an incentive for people to say, ‘I don’t need to go back to work because I can do better someplace else.’” — Senator Rick Scott

Those of us less tormented by notions of sloth may not agree with Senator Scott that our work ethics are in the balance so much as the fighting shape of our beleaguered American middle-class. There is no better color, race, or red/blue state-blind bill than the economic security provisions it contains.

Without those? Remove the last vestiges of that frayed social fabric and you have more than skin in the game. You have exposed bone striking against raw nerve. Or, what we already had before the pandemic.  That’s where the terminators lose their ability to float undesirable jobs for unsustainable wages. That’s where the gravity of the virus speeds into the passing lane; then swerves into the oncoming rattle of foreclosures, bankruptcies, and a prolonged loss of appetite for all but the essentials.

2) Education as Equalizer | The return to social mobility — Somewhere along the lines of self-interest, we lost sight of higher education as a win/win proposition for its graduates and a future depending on their success.

The end of the college campus as party central and the intimacies of classroom instruction means a refocus on learning and away from the emptiness of the overachieving: boilerplate recommendations, standardized test scores, an over-scheduled crush of extracurriculars, “and middling students who play arcane sports.”

Our future notions of leadership, community, and a responsible citizenry should not rest on a winner-take-all competition for acceptance to elite colleges and universities. A virtual education depends on access to technology, not the trappings of privileges that come with SAT coaching, bribing, or the boasting of what NYU Professor, Scott Galloway refers to as the luxury brands of higher education: The lower the admission rate, the more bullet-proof the Harvards, Princetons, and Stamfords of this stardom-ticketing enterprise.

A return to admissions based on the capacity of each students’ willingness to better themselves is not some vain hope or fabled stepping stone. It’s what used to pass for a college degree:

    1. Its restoration will scale to social mobility for the graduate and the greater social good for the world they pass on.
    2. What they will learn there is not to be traumatized by the debating of ideas. There they will learn to hold two opposable views in their heads while considering the respective merits of competing explanations.

That both of these aspirations are no longer even offered as electives these days is reason enough to ride roughshod over the glimmering towers of the ivory-coated fortresses. Yes, end the tax-exempt status of institutions that stockpile bloated endowments for the single purpose of inflating them further.

3) Gamify the IRS | From Tax Avoidance to Aspiration Spending — Looking for redress from that ransacked social contract? The one that says we’re all equal under the law? The one that says our treasury is funded by the size of our incomes, not our loopholes? Sorry, next party in power. But soaking the rich does nothing to broaden the commonweal. That’s skin in the game we need to move away from winner-take-all to a renewed spirit of shared sacrifice. Replacing one echo chamber with another extends the cycle. The empathy, perspective-taking, and context needed to govern effectively is replaced by the concussive bluster of who gets to govern.

We don’t have a demand-side system based on need. It’s a want-based system based on the incentive to opt-out. Where’s the justice in that? The only ones left holding the treasury afloat is a declining base of taxpayers; too affluent to avoid taxes, and too poor to stash their incomes under said loopholes.

One way to spend-down our debts and shortfalls is to give taxpayers the agency required to address policy issues of their own choosing: Immigration, defense, housing, Medicare, early childhood education… (as if the list ever shortens).

Given the monopoly-sized influence of the lobbies on tax policy, we taxpayers must insist that we file our returns with the added calculation for where to direct those funds. Need to gin-up the stakes? Market the choices like a Power Ball Lottery? Fine. Go gamify the thing. Give every thousandth return collected a free pass. The more skin, the better the game.

Now that you see what happens next, how can I bait your breath for more?

Stay tuned for more Foresight: Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good. Our next installment is Part 4’s What Needs to Come Sooner (if there is to be a later) and petitions the innovation orthodoxy of faster, better, cheaper with a supply chain that squares with accountable demand-side outcomes of compensation, merit, and stability.

2020 Foresight | Part Two: What Came Last

The allure of the “return to normal” when there’s no such return.

Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good

Wernher von Braun, with JFK pointing at Saturn I at Cape Canaveral, November 16, 1963. Wikimedia Commons

“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:

    • 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

Visitors look down on the animated model of the city of the future: “[Democracity] wouldn’t need a police force since a city devoid of slums and poverty will breed little crime.”

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:

    • 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.

Mad Magazine#144 July 1971, back cover

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. 

 

2020 Foresight

Only time will tell. But what will time be telling?

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? 

    • 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 …

    1.  The sacrifices of those best positioned to make the most lasting of contributions.
    2.  The participation of the marginalized.
    3.  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?