Goodbye, "3 1/2 T"

[pbrower2a]

(08-04-2020, 03:05 PM)sbarrera Wrote: What's crazy is Trump actually uses Septemeber 12th logic as part of his attempt at being a "law and order" President. He is trying to label protesters as terrorists or associate them with foreign adversaries, and even called sending his DHS goons into cities with protests a "surge" - ie. the same language we used fighting in Iraq. It's like he's trying to rope his political opponents into Bush's Axis of Evil to treat them like enemy combatants.

This happens when one divides a nation into people who believe like one and "real Americans". We all know who does that: dictators who want to reshape their countries to fit their ideas of what their country should be. 

The response to September 11 was characteristically 3T. Think of all the sports stars and film stars who joined the Armed forces. Glenn Miller took his Big Band into the Armed Services to entertain the troops. Jimmy Stewart and Ted Williams flew for the Army Air Corps. I can think of only one prominent sports, music, or film start who enlisted after 9/11 -- the unfortunate Pat Tillman. Our President told us to go shopping and traveling -- exactly the opposite of FDR after Pearl Harbor. Luxury production for the consumer market practically shut down in America soon after the Pearl Harbor attack. Rationing became the norm. 

OK, COVID-19 isn't quite a war... and American responses were uneven at best. Some of us stayed at home to the extent possible. Some of us quickly donned masks. We knew what we were giving up and saw COVID-19 as a menace not to be treated lightly. Many Americans didn't.  I got the message when NHL and NBA teams shut down, sacrificing a lucrative business to save their players, fans, staff, and themselves. It was easy to stay home, of course, when there was no place to go but the gas station, food store, fast food place, and medical clinic. 

Many Americans live on their impulses. For most of the preceding Saeculum they have gotten away with that. That comes to an end in a Crisis, and often abruptly. COVID-19 is horrible. Killing about a twentieth of the people that it infects. One chance in twenty of doing something. 

Quote:Can we get over this mentality and re-prioritize? I sure hope so, but Trump supporters (some are on this site) seem hell-bent on treating the left like some big violent threat. And if we get entrenched militarization and no economic re-structuring then we are in for a saeculum-long dystopia of oppressive rule by the 1%. 'Cause they sure don't care about us dying of coronavirus.

We set new priorities in a Crisis Era or we become objects of shame and ridicule. Maybe what we used to get away with is no longer available. We will see changes in society. We have a death toll characteristic of a very nasty war in a short time. We have had people treating COVID-19 as a myth... only in some cases to be proved wrong. DEAD WRONG!

We have gotten complacent about respiratory infections to the extent that we trivialize them. We can't trivialize this one into harmlessness! We have gotten into a cultural habit of expecting people to work through anything -- work sick, if necessary, because anyone who takes sick time must be a malingerer. We sweat the people who process the cheap food that lets many of us live well on the cheap, and maybe we can't get away with that any more.  We treat rationality as an option, and reality strikes those who reject it -- hard. 

We have many things going wrong at the same time. The "retail apocalypse" hs been killing large numbers of marginal jobs that marginal workers used to hold. The declining share of manufacturing  in the American economy has shown that a work ethic is not enough to ensure that one has work that makes a living. Elites have become increasingly ruthless, rapacious, and unforgiving from the start of the Reagan Presidency to now. Low, rigid glass ceilings are the norm in organizations of all kinds, and the tax code favors monopoly and vertical integration. The biggest growth business seems to be what used to be called vice  -- gambling, pornography, night clubs, and strip clubs.  Yuk! Want some family entertainment? It will be fiendishly expensive if it is an amusement park. We get high-priced amusement but come back from it with far less in our bank accounts (or deeply in debt) and are no better for doing it. An amusement park may not be classic vice in the sense that a whorehouse is, but it is a raw deal for a customer who comes out of the experience none the better for it. 

Much of the economy seems dedicated to the devouring of middle-class assets. Corporate farms are squeezing out family farms. Advanced college education becomes necessary for the professions that still pay-- and it becomes increasingly expensive. If you remember the bumper-sticker that read "We're spending our grandchildren's inheritance" -- nursing homes now do that. Life is getting drearier and grimmer... and the delights are more exploitative and ephemeral. That cannot last.   

Trump is of course horrible, the sort of leader that one gets if a country has scorpions in its souls. I have said enough about him. I hope to see our society promoting more rationality and equality of results, an anathema to Donald Trump and the Tea Party types who presaged him. 

COVID-19 will leave us with a changed culture. Too many people have died for any other consequence to be possible.