The Coronavirus

[pbrower2a]

Dallas (CNN)South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem questioned the grit and instinct of fellow GOP governors who enacted Covid-19 measures like mask mandates and business closures to stop the spread of the virus in their states last year, warning that some of them are now "rewriting history" about their records as the threat wanes across the country.

"We've got Republican governors across this country pretending they didn't shut down their states; that they didn't close their regions; that they didn't mandate masks," said the potential 2024 White House contender as she drew an implicit but obvious contrast to leaders like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who took a more restrictive approach in their states. "Now I'm not picking fights with Republican governors. All I'm saying is that we need leaders with grit. That their first instinct is the right instinct."

"Demand honesty from your leaders and make sure that every one of them is willing to make the tough decisions," added Noem, who repeatedly touted her hands-off approach to Covid-19 throughout her speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference -- highlighting the fact that she never ordered a "single business" to close. "South Dakota did not do any of those (measures). We didn't mandate. We trusted our people and it told them that personal responsibility was the best answer."

Even when cases surged in her state last November, Noem refused to mandate masks and chose not to put in the precautionary measures that many other governors were taking to slow the spread of Covid-19. She insisted that her state had been most effective by swiftly identifying and isolating cases. As of this weekend, South Dakota had 230 deaths per 100,000 people, according to data from Johns Hopkins University -- ranking the state 10th in that metric among the 50 states. The state had 14,090 cases per 100,000 people, ranking South Dakota with the third highest rate in the nation.
But in an October op-ed in the Rapid City Journal, Noem rejected "mandatory masking" by noting that some had questioned the effectiveness of masks, calling on each family to make "informed decisions for themselves."

"As I've said before, if folks want to wear a mask, they should be free to do so," she wrote in that piece. "Similarly, those who don't want to wear a mask shouldn't be shamed into wearing one. And government should not mandate it."

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/11/politics/...index.html

[pbrower2a]

South Dakotans got a fair warning with her driving record -- huge numbers of speeding tickets, including 57 in a 25 zone (probably a school zone).

[Eric the Green]

The fifth wave of covid is well and truly launched. Delta variant is hitting the unvaccinated hard. Most new cases yesterday in these countries:

1. Indonesia 47,899
2. Brazil 45,094
3. Spain 43,960
4. India 40,215
5. UK 36,475 (but still relatively fewer deaths)
6. USA 28,923
7. Russia 24,702
8. Iran 22,750
9. Argentina 20,023
10. Colombia 17,532

Southeast Asia, Africa ramping up; Europe and USA getting worse after their recovery.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

[pbrower2a]

Well. the days of multiple-thousand deaths from COVID-19 that we thought were over once-and-for-all will be back in a couple weeks.

Catch COVID-19.
Get on a ventilator in a desperate effort to save one's life.
Maybe suffocate.

[Bob Butler 54]

The part I don't get is that Trump originally devised his no response reaction to Covid to keep the economy going.  Any attempt to save lives in the early days would hurt the economy and thus Trump's chances for reelection.  These days, vaccination helps the economy, but the red culture still suggests taking no precautions.

But I guess putting politics ahead of lives is Trump's way.

[pbrower2a]

(07-14-2021, 05:09 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: The part I don't get is that Trump originally devised his no response reaction to Covid to keep the economy going.  Any attempt to save lives in the early days would hurt the economy and thus Trump's chances for reelection.  These days, vaccination helps the economy, but the red culture still suggests taking no precautions.

But I guess putting politics ahead of lives is Trump's way.

I was going to compare him to segregationist pols of the 1960's, but those indirectly caused few deaths. Some of those pols came to recognize how harmful segregation was and recanted, like the late Alabama Governor George C. Wallace. who eventually recanted his racist past on the grounds that (1) segregationist policies were wrong, and (2) they really did no good even for the white people that they supposedly favored. 

I don't see Donald Trump ever deprecating his economic corruption, his sadism, his lechery, or his bigotry. He may have to account before God (if there is One), but it is far safer, by just about every religious tradition, to confess and repudiate grave sins while alive than when some Entity decides whether one goes to Heaven or Hell. I can easily imagine Donald Trump ending up in a very bad Afterlife unless he should get some very cheap grace.   

Keeping the economy going? What a sick joke! he could have pushed a relief package that  rescued small businesses that had to close due to COVID-19. (My solution: we would all get relief checks from which we could designate a part going to favorite closed businesses like restaurants, stores, golf courses, bars, and movie theaters -- before we could get any other aid). Trump could have pushed a nationwide shutdown analogous to those in Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky so that one would not simply go to Iowa, Tennessee, or Missouri (maybe Arkansas, which at its northeastern-most point, isn't that far from Cairo), where of course 'Rona awaited one.

Dead people do not generate profits except for undertakers, and for undertakers only when the Dearly Departed is solvent before dying or making arrangements. 

People who got sick from COVID-19 ended up with high-cost medical treatment (often at taxpayer expense) and often an expensive funeral. Supposedly the Post Office was going to supply everyone with a mask... and had Trump thought of it, maybe  everyone could get some postage stamps paid for out of the budget. probably with messages that tell people how to be safe. "Stay home... wear a mask if you must leave home... etc.)

[David Horn]

(07-14-2021, 05:09 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: The part I don't get is that Trump originally devised his no response reaction to Covid to keep the economy going.  Any attempt to save lives in the early days would hurt the economy and thus Trump's chances for reelection.  These days, vaccination helps the economy, but the red culture still suggests taking no precautions.

But I guess putting politics ahead of lives is Trump's way.

Case in point via Ron DeSantis:

[pbrower2a]

(07-15-2021, 12:12 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(07-14-2021, 05:09 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: The part I don't get is that Trump originally devised his no response reaction to Covid to keep the economy going.  Any attempt to save lives in the early days would hurt the economy and thus Trump's chances for reelection.  These days, vaccination helps the economy, but the red culture still suggests taking no precautions.

But I guess putting politics ahead of lives is Trump's way.

Case in point via Ron DeSantis:

Not much is worth mass death. Even military victory at great cost assumes that defeat implies even greater death. Figure that America's war deaths are much smaller than the Jewish population of the United States at the time, and we all know what Satan Incarnate would have done to America's Jewish population had he had the chance. 

The SARS-2 virus is arguably the most destructive enemy that America has faced since Hitler and Tojo. Say what you want about our Commie rivals during the Cold War, they at least valued their own lives about as much as our economic elites cherished theirs, which explains why the principle of Mutually Assured Doctrine made life far safer than rabid chauvinism. 

I just saw video on CNN on the computer (I am no longer on cable, so video breaks up) in which a COVID-19 widow saw her husband in his late stages as his oxygen-saturation went into the critical zone in the low 70's. He pled that his children get inoculated... and they were inoculated the next day. Minot, North Dakota. No previously-existing conditions. 

People are still dying, almost all of them the ones who did not get inoculated.     

Over four million people have been murdered by this virus. A few months ago I compared it to the death toll of the most horrible battle (Stalingrad) in modern times. You know what obvious comparison is next.

[nguyenivy]

(07-15-2021, 02:21 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(07-15-2021, 12:12 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(07-14-2021, 05:09 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: The part I don't get is that Trump originally devised his no response reaction to Covid to keep the economy going.  Any attempt to save lives in the early days would hurt the economy and thus Trump's chances for reelection.  These days, vaccination helps the economy, but the red culture still suggests taking no precautions.

But I guess putting politics ahead of lives is Trump's way.

Case in point via Ron DeSantis:

Not much is worth mass death. Even military victory at great cost assumes that defeat implies even greater death. Figure that America's war deaths are much smaller than the Jewish population of the United States at the time, and we all know what Satan Incarnate would have done to America's Jewish population had he had the chance. 

The SARS-2 virus is arguably the most destructive enemy that America has faced since Hitler and Tojo. Say what you want about our Commie rivals during the Cold War, they at least valued their own lives about as much as our economic elites cherished theirs, which explains why the principle of Mutually Assured Doctrine made life far safer than rabid chauvinism. 

I just saw video on CNN on the computer (I am no longer on cable, so video breaks up) in which a COVID-19 widow saw her husband in his late stages as his oxygen-saturation went into the critical zone in the low 70's. He pled that his children get inoculated... and they were inoculated the next day. Minot, North Dakota. No previously-existing conditions. 

People are still dying, almost all of them the ones who did not get inoculated.     

Over four million people have been murdered by this virus. A few months ago I compared it to the death toll of the most horrible battle (Stalingrad) in modern times. You know what obvious comparison is next.

The other thing is time: Over 4 million dead in ~19 months (the vast majority really in the last 15 months). There are wars which killed fewer people & lasted longer. Even within just the US - projections have us around 1 million dead since March 2020. The Civil War was 4 years long & about 750k died there. I wonder how many people would've been saved had the world treated this with a war-like attitude of 'stop this thing using whatever tools it takes'. Would a worldwide 30-day shutdown/stay home order followed by 6 months of totally closed international borders in March 2020 have caused more harm than what we got? The virus at that time had only a 14-day incubation period, so if everyone on the planet didn't leave home for 30 straight days, it would've automatically stopped circulating.

[Eric the Green]

(07-15-2021, 10:15 PM)nguyenivy Wrote:

(07-15-2021, 02:21 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(07-15-2021, 12:12 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(07-14-2021, 05:09 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: The part I don't get is that Trump originally devised his no response reaction to Covid to keep the economy going.  Any attempt to save lives in the early days would hurt the economy and thus Trump's chances for reelection.  These days, vaccination helps the economy, but the red culture still suggests taking no precautions.

But I guess putting politics ahead of lives is Trump's way.

Case in point via Ron DeSantis:

Not much is worth mass death. Even military victory at great cost assumes that defeat implies even greater death. Figure that America's war deaths are much smaller than the Jewish population of the United States at the time, and we all know what Satan Incarnate would have done to America's Jewish population had he had the chance. 

The SARS-2 virus is arguably the most destructive enemy that America has faced since Hitler and Tojo. Say what you want about our Commie rivals during the Cold War, they at least valued their own lives about as much as our economic elites cherished theirs, which explains why the principle of Mutually Assured Doctrine made life far safer than rabid chauvinism. 

I just saw video on CNN on the computer (I am no longer on cable, so video breaks up) in which a COVID-19 widow saw her husband in his late stages as his oxygen-saturation went into the critical zone in the low 70's. He pled that his children get inoculated... and they were inoculated the next day. Minot, North Dakota. No previously-existing conditions. 

People are still dying, almost all of them the ones who did not get inoculated.     

Over four million people have been murdered by this virus. A few months ago I compared it to the death toll of the most horrible battle (Stalingrad) in modern times. You know what obvious comparison is next.

The other thing is time: Over 4 million dead in ~19 months (the vast majority really in the last 15 months). There are wars which killed fewer people & lasted longer. Even within just the US - projections have us around 1 million dead since March 2020. The Civil War was 4 years long & about 750k died there. I wonder how many people would've been saved had the world treated this with a war-like attitude of 'stop this thing using whatever tools it takes'. Would a worldwide 30-day shutdown/stay home order followed by 6 months of totally closed international borders in March 2020 have caused more harm than what we got? The virus at that time had only a 14-day incubation period, so if everyone on the planet didn't leave home for 30 straight days, it would've automatically stopped circulating.

That's right. Instead we got poor leadership from you know who, and that guy in Brazil, etc.

[pbrower2a]

Avoid Missouri.

This state has handled COVID-19 badly, and parts of the state have become a veritable slaughterhouse.

Delta Is Driving a Wedge Through Missouri
For America, the pandemic might be fading. For places like southwest Missouri, this year will be worse than last. (Ed Yong, the Atlantic)

The summer wasn’t meant to be like this. By April, Greene County, in southwestern Missouri, seemed to be past the worst of the pandemic. Intensive-care units that once overflowed had emptied. Vaccinations were rising. Health-care workers who had been fighting the coronavirus for months felt relieved—perhaps even hopeful. Then, in late May, cases started ticking up again. By July, the surge was so pronounced that “it took the wind out of everyone,” Erik Frederick, the chief administrative officer of Mercy Hospital Springfield, told me. “How did we end up back here again?”

The hospital is now busier than at any previous point during the pandemic. In just five weeks, it took in as many COVID-19 patients as it did over five months last year. Ten minutes away, another big hospital, Cox Medical Center South, has been inundated just as quickly. “We only get beds available when someone dies, which happens several times a day,” Terrence Coulter, the critical-care medical director at CoxHealth, told me.

Last week, Katie Towns, the acting director of the Springfield–Greene County Health Department, was concerned that the county’s daily cases were topping 250. On Wednesday, the daily count hit 405. This dramatic surge is the work of the super-contagious Delta variant, which now accounts for 95 percent of Greene County’s new cases, according to Towns. It is spreading easily because people have ditched their masks, crowded into indoor spaces, resumed travel, and resisted vaccinations. Just 40 percent of people in Greene County are fully vaccinated. In some nearby counties, less than 20 percent of people are.

Many experts have argued that, even with Delta, the United States is unlikely to revisit the horrors of last winter. Even now, the country’s hospitalizations are one-seventh as high as they were in mid-January. But national optimism glosses over local reality. For many communities, this year will be worse than last. Springfield’s health-care workers and public-health specialists are experiencing the same ordeals they thought they had left behind. “But it feels worse this time because we’ve seen it before,” Amelia Montgomery, a nurse at CoxHealth, told me. “Walking back into the COVID ICU was demoralizing.”

Those ICUs are also filling with younger patients, in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, including many with no underlying health problems. In part, that’s because elderly people have been more likely to get vaccinated, leaving Delta with a younger pool of vulnerable hosts. While experts are still uncertain if Delta is deadlier than the original coronavirus, every physician and nurse in Missouri whom I spoke with told me that the 30- and 40-something COVID-19 patients they’re now seeing are much sicker than those they saw last year. “That age group did get COVID before, but they didn’t usually end up in the ICU like they are now,” Jonathan Brown, a respiratory therapist at Mercy, told me. Nurses are watching families navigate end-of-life decisions for young people who have no advance directives or other legal documents in place.

Almost every COVID-19 patient in Springfield’s hospitals is unvaccinated, and the dozen or so exceptions are all either elderly or immunocompromised people. The vaccines are working as intended, but the number of people who have refused to get their shots is crushing morale. Vaccines were meant to be the end of the pandemic. If people don’t get them, the actual end will look more like Springfield’s present: a succession of COVID-19 waves that will break unevenly across the country until everyone has either been vaccinated or infected. “You hear post-pandemic a lot,” Frederick said. “We’re clearly not post-pandemic. New York threw a ticker-tape parade for its health-care heroes, and ours are knee-deep in COVID.”

That they are in this position despite the wide availability of vaccines turns difficult days into unbearable ones. As bad as the winter surge was, Springfield’s health-care workers shared a common purpose of serving their community, Steve Edwards, the president and CEO of CoxHealth, told me. But now they’re “putting themselves in harm’s way for people who’ve chosen not to protect themselves,” he said. While there were always ways of preventing COVID-19 infections, Missourians could have almost entirely prevented this surge through vaccination—but didn’t. “My sense of hope is dwindling,” Tracy Hill, a nurse at Mercy, told me. “I’m losing a little bit of faith in mankind. But you can’t just not go to work.”


When Springfield’s hospitals saw the first pandemic wave hitting the coasts, they could steel themselves. This time, with Delta thrashing Missouri fast and first, they haven’t had time to summon sufficient reinforcements. Between them, Mercy and Cox South have recruited about 300 traveling nurses, respiratory therapists, and other specialists, which is still less than they need. The hospitals’ health-care workers have adequate PPE and most are vaccinated. But in the ICUs and in COVID-19 wards, respiratory therapists still must constantly adjust ventilators, entire teams must regularly flip patients onto their belly and back again, and nurses spend long shifts drenched in sweat as they repeatedly don and doff protective gear. In previous phases of the pandemic, both hospitals took in patients from other counties and states. “Now we’re blasting outward,” Coulter said. “We’re already saturating the surrounding hospitals.”

Meanwhile, the hospitals’ own staff members are exhausted beyond telling. After the winter surge, they spent months catching up on record numbers of postponed surgeries and other procedures. Now they’re facing their sharpest COVID-19 surge yet on top of those backlogged patients, many of whom are sicker than usual because their health care had to be deferred. Even with hundreds of new patients with lung cancer, asthma, and other respiratory diseases waiting for care in outpatient settings, Coulter still has to cancel his clinics because “I have to be in the hospital all the time,” he said.

Many health-care workers have had enough. Some who took on extra shifts during past surges can’t bring themselves to do so again. Some have moved to less stressful positions that don’t involve treating COVID-19. Others are holding the line, but only just. “You can’t pour from an empty cup, but with every shift it feels like my co-workers and I are empty,” Montgomery said. “We are still trying to fill each other up and keep going.”

The grueling slog is harder now because it feels so needless, and because many patients don’t realize their mistake until it’s too late. On Tuesday, Hill spoke with an elderly man who had just been admitted and was very sick. “He said, ‘I’m embarrassed that I’m here,’” she told me. “He wanted to talk about the vaccine, and in the back of my mind I’m thinking, You have a very high likelihood of not leaving the hospital.” Other patients remain defiant. “We had someone spit in a nurse’s eye because she told him he had COVID and he didn’t believe her,” Edwards said.

Some health-care workers are starting to resent their patients—an emotion that feels taboo. “You’re just angry,” Coulter said, “and you feel guilty for getting angry, because they’re sick and dying.” Others are indignant on behalf of loved ones who don’t already have access to the vaccines. “I’m a mom of a 1-year-old and a 4-year-old, and the daughter of family members in Zimbabwe and South Africa who can’t get vaccinated yet,” says Matifadza Hlatshwayo Davis, who works at a Veterans Affairs hospital in St. Louis. “I’m frustrated, angry, and sad.”

“I don’t think people get that once you become sick enough to be hospitalized with COVID, the medications and treatments that we have are, quite frankly, not very good,” says Howard Jarvis, the medical director of Cox South’s emergency department. Drugs such as dexamethasone offer only incremental benefits. Monoclonal antibodies are effective only during the disease’s earliest stages. Doctors can give every recommended medication, and patients still have a high chance of dying. The goal should be to stop people from getting sick in the first place.

But Missouri Governor Mike Parson never issued a statewide mask mandate, and the state’s biggest cities—Kansas City, St. Louis, Springfield, and Columbia—ended their local orders in May, after the CDC said that vaccinated people no longer needed to wear masks indoors. In June, Parson signed a law that limits local governments’ ability to enact public-health restrictions. And even before the pandemic, Missouri ranked 41st out of all the states in terms of public-health funding. “We started in a hole and we’re trying to catch up,” Towns, the director of the Springfield–Greene County Health Department, told me.

Her team flattened last year’s curve through testing, contact tracing, and quarantining, but “Delta has just decimated our ability to respond,” Kendra Findley, the department’s administrator for community health and epidemiology, told me. The variant is spreading too quickly for the department to keep up with every new case, and more people are refusing to cooperate with contact tracers than at this time last year. The CDC has sent a “surge team” to help, but it’s just two people: an epidemiologist, who is helping analyze data on Delta’s spread, and a communications person. And like Springfield’s hospitals, the health department was already overwhelmed with work that had been put off for a year. “Suddenly, I feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day,” Findley said.

Early last year, Findley stuck a note on her whiteboard with the number of people who died in the 1918 flu pandemic: 50 million worldwide and 675,000 in the U.S. “It was for perspective: We will not get here. You can manage this,” she told me. “I looked at it the other day and I think we’re going to get there. And I feel like a large segment of the population doesn’t care.”

The 1918 flu pandemic took Missouri by surprise too, says Carolyn Orbann, an anthropologist at the University of Missouri who studies that disaster. While much of the world felt the brunt of the pandemic in October 1918, Missouri had irregular waves with a bigger peak in February 1920. So when COVID-19 hit, Orbann predicted that the state might have a similarly drawn-out experience. Missouri has a widely dispersed population, divided starkly between urban and rural places, and few highways—a recipe for distinct and geographically disparate microcultures. That perhaps explains why new pathogens move erratically through the state, creating unpredictable surges and, in some pockets, a false sense of security. Last year, “many communities may have gone through their lockdown period without registering a single case and wondered, What did we do that for?” Orbann told me.

She also suspects that Missourians in 1918 might have had a “better overhead view of the course of the pandemic in their communities than the average citizen has now.” Back then, the state’s local papers published lists of people who were sick, so even those who didn’t know anyone with the flu could see that folks around them were dying. “It made the pandemic seem more local,” Orbann said. “Now, with fewer hometown newspapers and restrictions on sharing patient information, that kind of knowledge is restricted to people working in health care.”

Montgomery, the CoxHealth nurse, feels that disparity whenever she leaves the hospital. “I work in the ICU, where it’s like a war zone, and I go out in public and everything’s normal,” she said. “You see death and suffering, and then you walk into the grocery store and get resistance. It feels like we’re being ostracized by our community.”

If anything, people in the state have become more entrenched in their beliefs and disbeliefs than they were last year, Davis, the St. Louis–based doctor, told me. They might believe that COVID-19 has been overblown, that young people won’t be harmed, or that the vaccines were developed too quickly to be safe. But above all else, “what I predominantly get is, ‘I don’t want to talk to you about that; let’s move on,’” Davis said.

People take the pandemic seriously when they can see it around them. During past surges in other parts of the U.S., curves flattened once people saw their loved ones falling ill, or once their community became the unwanted focus of national media coverage. The same feedback loop might be starting to occur in Missouri. The major Route 66 Festival has been canceled. More people are making vaccine appointments at both Cox South and Mercy.

In Springfield, the public-health professionals I talked with felt that they had made successful efforts to address barriers to vaccine access, and that vaccine hesitancy was the driving force of low vaccination rates. Improving those rates is now a matter of engendering trust as quickly as possible. Springfield’s firefighters are highly trusted, so the city set up vaccine clinics in local fire stations. Community-health advocates are going door-to-door to talk with their neighbors about vaccines. The Springfield News-Leader is set to publish a full page of photos of well-known Springfieldians who are advocating for vaccination. Several local pastors have agreed to preach about vaccines from their pulpits and set up vaccination events in their churches. One such event, held at James River Church on Monday, vaccinated 156 people. “Once we got down to the group of hesitant people, we’d be happy if we had 20 people show up to a clinic,” says Cora Scott, Springfield’s director of public information and civic engagement. “To have 156 people show up in one church in one day is phenomenal.”

But building trust is slow, and Delta is moving fast. Even if the still-unvaccinated 55 percent of Missourians all got their first shots tomorrow, it would still take a month to administer the second ones, and two weeks more for full immunity to develop. As current trends show, Delta can do a lot in six weeks. Still, “if we can get our vaccination levels to where some of the East Coast states have got to, I’ll feel a lot better going into the fall,” Frederick, Mercy’s chief administrative officer, said. “If we plateau again, my fear is that we will see the twindemic of flu and COVID.”

In the meantime, southwest Missouri is now a cautionary tale of what Delta can do to a largely unvaccinated community that has lowered its guard. None of Missouri’s 114 counties has vaccinated more than 50 percent of its population, and 75 haven’t yet managed more than 30 percent. Many such communities exist around the U.S. “There’s very few secrets about this disease, because the answer is always somewhere else,” Edwards said. “I think we’re a harbinger of what other states can expect.”

The Atlantic’s COVID-19 coverage is supported by grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.


Do you like this writing? Then by all means subscribe to Atlantic Magazine!
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...ge/619456/

[pbrower2a]

Missouri outside of the St. Louis and Kansas City metro areas, perhaps Columbia and Jefferson City, and majority-black communities in the Bootheel (the southeastern corner of the state) is very much Trump country. The shark is circling the beach, and the corrupt officials have not closed the beach because the community "needs" the tourist dollars. OK, technically speaking, Branson is not a beach resort, but it apparently did not have to shut down.

[Dustinw5220]

(07-16-2021, 12:04 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(07-15-2021, 10:15 PM)nguyenivy Wrote:

(07-15-2021, 02:21 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(07-15-2021, 12:12 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(07-14-2021, 05:09 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: The part I don't get is that Trump originally devised his no response reaction to Covid to keep the economy going.  Any attempt to save lives in the early days would hurt the economy and thus Trump's chances for reelection.  These days, vaccination helps the economy, but the red culture still suggests taking no precautions.

But I guess putting politics ahead of lives is Trump's way.

Case in point via Ron DeSantis:

Not much is worth mass death. Even military victory at great cost assumes that defeat implies even greater death. Figure that America's war deaths are much smaller than the Jewish population of the United States at the time, and we all know what Satan Incarnate would have done to America's Jewish population had he had the chance. 

The SARS-2 virus is arguably the most destructive enemy that America has faced since Hitler and Tojo. Say what you want about our Commie rivals during the Cold War, they at least valued their own lives about as much as our economic elites cherished theirs, which explains why the principle of Mutually Assured Doctrine made life far safer than rabid chauvinism. 

I just saw video on CNN on the computer (I am no longer on cable, so video breaks up) in which a COVID-19 widow saw her husband in his late stages as his oxygen-saturation went into the critical zone in the low 70's. He pled that his children get inoculated... and they were inoculated the next day. Minot, North Dakota. No previously-existing conditions. 

People are still dying, almost all of them the ones who did not get inoculated.     

Over four million people have been murdered by this virus. A few months ago I compared it to the death toll of the most horrible battle (Stalingrad) in modern times. You know what obvious comparison is next.

The other thing is time: Over 4 million dead in ~19 months (the vast majority really in the last 15 months). There are wars which killed fewer people & lasted longer. Even within just the US - projections have us around 1 million dead since March 2020. The Civil War was 4 years long & about 750k died there. I wonder how many people would've been saved had the world treated this with a war-like attitude of 'stop this thing using whatever tools it takes'. Would a worldwide 30-day shutdown/stay home order followed by 6 months of totally closed international borders in March 2020 have caused more harm than what we got? The virus at that time had only a 14-day incubation period, so if everyone on the planet didn't leave home for 30 straight days, it would've automatically stopped circulating.

That's right. Instead we got poor leadership from you know who, and that guy in Brazil, etc.

Cases are going back up here in Los Angeles due to the Delta variant (and almost ALL of them are from the unvaccinated), a new indoor Mask Mandate was ordered yesterday (set to go into effect Saturday night at 11:59 PM), and it's probably only a matter of time before other restrictions will need to be restored (I wouldn't even rule out another lockdown if things continue to get worse in the coming weeks and months, especially as we head into Fall and Winter). We are officially going backwards in our progress, the Republicans and the anti-vaxxers have crucified us yet again!

I'm really starting to lose faith in the idea that we're ever really gonna be able to get this pandemic under control (my gut feeling was already telling me we ended restrictions too soon and we were probably just gonna end up back at square one)! The entire (or most of the) population needs to be vaccinated to end the pandemic, if even us Californians are incapable of doing our part, what hope is there for the rest of the world?

[pbrower2a]

The problem is that too many places failed to enact any of the appropriate measures. I have seen billboards in Michigan that read "Have fun in South Carolina!"

Yes, 'Rona will be stalking you there.

Suffocating while hooked up to a ventilator is not my idea of good consequences for anything.

[Dustinw5220]

(07-16-2021, 05:10 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The problem is that too many places failed to enact any of the appropriate measures. I have seen billboards in Michigan that read "Have fun in South Carolina!"

Yes, 'Rona will be stalking you there.  

Suffocating while hooked up to a ventilator is not my idea of good consequences for anything.

And their inaction may all but insure that it takes us at least the rest of this 4T Crisis era to fully defeat the global menace known as Covid-19! As long as the Republicans and the anti-vaxxers are allowed to have their way, there will likely continue to be more variants (possibly even ones that are more resistant against the vaccines), things will get worse again (they already are in many parts of the country and the world), and we'll be right back at square one in our fight against this pandemic!

As always, I enjoy your insights and analysis Mr. Brower.

[pbrower2a]

(07-16-2021, 07:18 PM)Dustinw5220 Wrote:

(07-16-2021, 05:10 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The problem is that too many places failed to enact any of the appropriate measures. I have seen billboards in Michigan that read "Have fun in South Carolina!"

Yes, 'Rona will be stalking you there.  

Suffocating while hooked up to a ventilator is not my idea of good consequences for anything.

And their inaction may all but insure that it takes us at least the rest of this 4T Crisis era to fully defeat the global menace known as Covid-19! As long as the Republicans and the anti-vaxxers are allowed to have their way, there will likely continue to be more variants (possibly even ones that are more resistant against the vaccines), things will get worse again (they already are in many parts of the country and the world), and we'll be right back at square one in our fight against this pandemic!

One of the ironies is that after the usual drama of a 4T that forces fundamental change in political structures and ways of doing things, a 1T is a placid, conservative, and comparatively-uneventful time. Each 4T is different. Because the Big Enemy this time is a virus instead of a hyper-villainous person, this one may end in a whimper instead of a bang.  The SARS-2 virus isn't going to agree to some treaty that confirms a reality beyond denial (Treaty of Paris, 1783), dissolution of an enemy because it has no viable means with which to fight (the Confederacy after it ran out of troops with which to defend Petersburg and hence Richmond), offs itself in a dreary bunker as one of the major enemies closes in (we all know who), or sees itself in economic and military collapse. That enemy will not surrender; it can only be exterminated. 

People are going to pay a high price even if they survive the virus. There will be organ damage. People will get diabetes. People will endure sexual dysfunction. Is brain damage a possibility?

People will have shortened lives, and they may be far less competent at what they did before they got COVID-19. Those who did the right things may be in a far better position in which to pick up the pieces in a  world that better favors them. 

Ideas that prove to be on the wrong side of history die. The United States came into existence because the recently-independent former colonies  could have become republics competing for the same turf only to sell out to some foreign power to get what they want. The vast tract of territory west of the Appalachians could have been big trouble had the states as independent republics warred against each other to decide who would control what turf. The Civil War demonstrated that slavery was inconsistent with Christian morality and modern economics. Fascism has become one of the vilest words in the political lexicon because of Axis atrocities... and even if there are alienated fools adopting Nazi symbols and rhetoric such people are obvious losers who impress us all the wrong way. 

It may be hard to imagine America becoming a more collegial, rational, and egalitarian society that does far better in spreading the prosperity than it has been... but that would solve many of the problems that we now have. When political polarization puts cherished institutions at risk from domestic terrorism, then it must go away. 

Doing things on the cheap may be satisfying for powerful people for an indefinite time, but indefinite times come to an end. Neoliberal economics came with a promise to create such extreme prosperity that economic inequality would be a triviality. It has culminated in severe regional differences in prosperity, with many communities once prosperous  (like Rochester, New York; South Bend, Indiana; Dayton, Ohio) being ravaged economically and people who got consigned to cheap labor finding increasing distress as life goes on. Neoliberal economics depended upon the proposition that the only way in which to reliably create prosperity was to make people already filthy-rich even more filthy rich, to indulge the worst tendencies of the very rich, and to enforce the will of the economic elites. 

We are going to need to change environmental policies just to prevent such a disaster as the heat wave that recently bedeviled the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. What is to say that the next such heat wave won't appear over the Great Lakes region? -- at least I think this in Michigan. We will need changes in tax laws to promote the foundation of small businesses that have some potential for growth instead of propping up businesses on the downside of their corporate lifespans. (Those firms make high profits as the result of monopolistic concentration or cartelization of their markets or sweetheart deals with the government and they have large bureaucracies staffed with glorified clerks who would rather drive a Buick and live in a McMansion than question the meaning of life). Yes, I have a thread on the business lifetime. Do you remember when the brand-names Sears, Kodak, and Polaroid impressed you? They don't now.  

(I have a thread on the lifecycle of businesses, and I can tie that to the Crisis. In the last 1T, the Silent did relatively little formation of small businesses. The most prominent figures of Silent founders of big businesses were Dave Thomas (fast food), Ross Perot (government contracting), Mike Milken (insider trading), T. Boone Pickens (oil wildcatting), and Warren Buffett (shrewd buys-and-holds). The rest is entertainment and professional practices. Professional practices can make life great for the professionals, but they create comparatively few jobs after their formation. The Silent did little to found manufacturers that could create the blue-collar jobs that really underpin a prosperous society. Consider this: the factory is the most reliable means out of individual poverty. Educated people have proved more job-takers than job-creators.

A 4T brings to an end many failures -- practices that have either limped along until the reality of one last 4T euthanizes them... and recent fads that fail. Many of the assumptions that we have held throughout our lives are going to prove unsustainable. Many of those will not be missed.

[Dustinw5220]

(07-17-2021, 04:54 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(07-16-2021, 07:18 PM)Dustinw5220 Wrote:

(07-16-2021, 05:10 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The problem is that too many places failed to enact any of the appropriate measures. I have seen billboards in Michigan that read "Have fun in South Carolina!"

Yes, 'Rona will be stalking you there.  

Suffocating while hooked up to a ventilator is not my idea of good consequences for anything.

And their inaction may all but insure that it takes us at least the rest of this 4T Crisis era to fully defeat the global menace known as Covid-19! As long as the Republicans and the anti-vaxxers are allowed to have their way, there will likely continue to be more variants (possibly even ones that are more resistant against the vaccines), things will get worse again (they already are in many parts of the country and the world), and we'll be right back at square one in our fight against this pandemic!

One of the ironies is that after the usual drama of a 4T that forces fundamental change in political structures and ways of doing things, a 1T is a placid, conservative, and comparatively-uneventful time. Each 4T is different. Because the Big Enemy this time is a virus instead of a hyper-villainous person, this one may end in a whimper instead of a bang.  The SARS-2 virus isn't going to agree to some treaty that confirms a reality beyond denial (Treaty of Paris, 1783), dissolution of an enemy because it has no viable means with which to fight (the Confederacy after it ran out of troops with which to defend Petersburg and hence Richmond), offs itself in a dreary bunker as one of the major enemies closes in (we all know who), or sees itself in economic and military collapse. That enemy will not surrender; it can only be exterminated. 

People are going to pay a high price even if they survive the virus. There will be organ damage. People will get diabetes. People will endure sexual dysfunction. Is brain damage a possibility?

People will have shortened lives, and they may be far less competent at what they did before they got COVID-19. Those who did the right things may be in a far better position in which to pick up the pieces in a  world that better favors them. 

Ideas that prove to be on the wrong side of history die. The United States came into existence because the recently-independent former colonies  could have become republics competing for the same turf only to sell out to some foreign power to get what they want. The vast tract of territory west of the Appalachians could have been big trouble had the states as independent republics warred against each other to decide who would control what turf. The Civil War demonstrated that slavery was inconsistent with Christian morality and modern economics. Fascism has become one of the vilest words in the political lexicon because of Axis atrocities... and even if there are alienated fools adopting Nazi symbols and rhetoric such people are obvious losers who impress us all the wrong way. 

It may be hard to imagine America becoming a more collegial, rational, and egalitarian society that does far better in spreading the prosperity than it has been... but that would solve many of the problems that we now have. When political polarization puts cherished institutions at risk from domestic terrorism, then it must go away. 

Doing things on the cheap may be satisfying for powerful people for an indefinite time, but indefinite times come to an end. Neoliberal economics came with a promise to create such extreme prosperity that economic inequality would be a triviality. It has culminated in severe regional differences in prosperity, with many communities once prosperous  (like Rochester, New York; South Bend, Indiana; Dayton, Ohio) being ravaged economically and people who got consigned to cheap labor finding increasing distress as life goes on. Neoliberal economics depended upon the proposition that the only way in which to reliably create prosperity was to make people already filthy-rich even more filthy rich, to indulge the worst tendencies of the very rich, and to enforce the will of the economic elites. 

We are going to need to change environmental policies just to prevent such a disaster as the heat wave that recently bedeviled the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. What is to say that the next such heat wave won't appear over the Great Lakes region? -- at least I think this in Michigan. We will need changes in tax laws to promote the foundation of small businesses that have some potential for growth instead of propping up businesses on the downside of their corporate lifespans. (Those firms make high profits as the result of monopolistic concentration or cartelization of their markets or sweetheart deals with the government and they have large bureaucracies staffed with glorified clerks who would rather drive a Buick and live in a McMansion than question the meaning of life). Yes, I have a thread on the business lifetime. Do you remember when the brand-names Sears, Kodak, and Polaroid impressed you? They don't now.  

(I have a thread on the lifecycle of businesses, and I can tie that to the Crisis. In the last 1T, the Silent did relatively little formation of small businesses. The most prominent figures of Silent founders of big businesses were Dave Thomas (fast food), Ross Perot (government contracting), Mike Milken (insider trading), T. Boone Pickens (oil wildcatting), and Warren Buffett (shrewd buys-and-holds). The rest is entertainment and professional practices. Professional practices can make life great for the professionals, but they create comparatively few jobs after their formation. The Silent did little to found manufacturers that could create the blue-collar jobs that really underpin a prosperous society. Consider this: the factory is the most reliable means out of individual poverty. Educated people have proved more job-takers than job-creators.

A 4T brings to an end many failures -- practices that have either limped along until the reality of one last 4T euthanizes them... and recent fads that fail. Many of the assumptions that we have held throughout our lives are going to prove unsustainable. Many of those will not be missed.

What are some of your theories on how our upcoming 1T will be different compared to the last one, and how will it be different compared to what I've known my whole life (I was born in 1992, basically smack dab in the middle of the Millennial generation)?

If things continue to get bad enough over the next few years, do you think there's any chance some of the restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic will end up becoming permanent, or at least until the next Awakening Era starts to relax social mores again? I know that's not what happened after the 1918 flu pandemic, but that took place in a 3T Unraveling Era, our deadly global pandemic is happening in a 4T Crisis Era (when the consequences and impact on society could potentially be much longer lasting).

[pbrower2a]

First, Boomers will be present in large numbers -- a much larger share at the end of this Crisis (even if it ends as late as 2030) as it was with the Missionary generation at the end of the Second World War. Older Boomers are generally following the pattern that GI's set in the 1970's and that the Silent have continued: staying actively engaged in life as long as possible. We are not going like sheep into the nursing home so that we can be out of the way of out juniors as the Lost did. We are not going to give up our cultural influence. We might downsize in housing and on jobs... and of course the horrid Boomer executives who saw executive roles solely as means for enriching themselves by enforcing the misery and poverty of workers will be shown the door. That is the Boomer legacy that Americans cannot afford.

Some Boomers might even appear from seemingly nowhere. The Boomer Right has largely suppressed the Boomer Left, and X and Millennial liberals might find some of us very useful. We know a few things that the Boomer Right suppressed that Millennial and X leaders might not know.

Some of us might even redefine conservatism to transform it from a pretext for exploitation of people that elites render helpless to one in which people have the responsibility to make things good for themselves. That is libertarianism over semi-fascist corporatism. America needs more enterprise and less bureaucracy, and more innovation and less entrenchment of power. Small business creates opportunity and jobs; Big Business generates profits and executive compensation.

In any event I see Barack Obama more the harbinger of political life of the post-Crisis Era. Sure he is liberal on human rights and economic fairness by standards of the neoliberal Reagan-through-Trump era... but he proved a staunch conservative in style and practice on many things. The coming 1T may be a rejection of populism that has shown how badly it can work on behalf of the Right against anyone else. Obama was more subtle than the usual chest-pounding types on law and order. "Do the crime and do the time" is his attitude, as shown by the rarity of pardons on his part.

I have often compared Obama to Eisenhower in temperament. This said, a conservative President is going to act much more like Obama than like Trump in practice. Maybe we will see that America is not so much a struggle between tradition and some super-modernity but instead alternative sources and expressions of tradition. Is Trump compatible with Chinese, Korean, Jewish, Arab, or Hispanic tradition? Not in the least!

I'm not sure of what my tradition is in view of being about half German or Swiss and about half English or Welsh... but all I can say about Donald Trump is "Damn you! Damn you! Damn you!" I hate his business techniques, his abusive sexuality, his demagoguery, his contempt for legal tradition, and his solipsism that tells him that what he wants to be true is the truth. I have no children or grandchildren, but I will say this: I would do everything possible to prevent them from becoming like him. If that means getting them to join the Armed Forces or to do salesclerking, factory work, farm labor, or domestic service before they ever set forth into college, then so be it. Human suffering is one way to learn empathy for people who, due to their limited talents, are compelled to endure it all their lives. Being a good person matters far more than being spectacularly competent at what one does for a living. Take that, Bill Cosby, Phil Spector, Jeffrey Epstein, William Jefferson, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jim Bakker, Kent Hovind, Harvey Weinstein, etc. Moral disgrace from doing bad things to people should be personal ruin.

To that end, I expect most people to be concerned that their kids or grandkids become good people -- the old Boy Scout ideal

"A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent."

That rejects being out for oneself alone, cynical, cruel, destructive, and wasteful -- 3T behavior at its worst. Much dies in a Crisis era, but most of what dies other than moribund institutions like businesses limping along as they consumer their assets is fads and crazes from the 3T. Society finds that it can't support those. (By the way -- the Multiversity that offers intellectual rigor but no coherent program of predictable learning from the 2T will die, too). We are going to see more shopping malls... die. We are going to see televangelists lose their relevance; although religion will be on TV it will be more like church services and educational programs or panel shows than the flamboyant Wealth Cult and ignoramuses ridiculing science because of "evil-u-shun".

The upcoming 1T will be a fairer, safer more equitable world with more opportunity for more people. Institutions will enforce that. People will be happier. Maybe it won't be quite as bland as the last 1T; there will be far more old boomers who draw attention for the right reasons. I hope to be one of those.

I predict that more and more Americans will deprecate Donald Trump over time. The liberals already do for his degradation of civil liberties and human decency that are grossly illiberal. We are seeing some conservatives reject him for his rejection of necessary traditions -- like respect for protocol and precedent (in that Obama is the conservative and Trump is the radical), valuation of a hierarchy of talent (liberals aren't really against that), and insistence upon rational thought. Such is better for a society that recognizes political polarization as a dead end.

COVID-19 will color attitudes of all people who remember it, whether they be Silent who will likely go extinct around 2060 or children in early-elementary years of life who cannot avoid seeing the major disruptions of their lives. The youngest who remember the lessons of COVID-19 will have the sharpest impressions. I expect it to color the political culture and even entertainment. Consider that for years after the French Revolution, aristocrats had parties in which the mocked the Reign of Terror. Consider also that very old people, the last survivors of the Holocaust, keep reminding us of what they went through. We will see that exclusively in print and video as survivors die off. Time extinguishes human memories.

[Dustinw5220]

(07-18-2021, 11:13 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: First, Boomers will be present in large numbers -- a much larger share at the end of this Crisis (even if it ends as late as 2030) as it was with the Missionary generation at the end of the Second World War. Older Boomers are generally following the pattern that GI's set in the 1970's and that the Silent have continued: staying actively engaged in life as long as possible. We are not going like sheep into the nursing home so that we can be out of the way of out juniors as the Lost did.  We are not going to give up our cultural influence. We might downsize in housing and on jobs... and of course the horrid Boomer executives who saw executive roles solely as means for enriching themselves by enforcing the misery and poverty of workers will be shown the door.  That is the Boomer legacy that Americans cannot afford.

Some Boomers might even appear from seemingly nowhere. The Boomer Right has largely suppressed the Boomer Left, and X and Millennial liberals might  find some of us very useful. We know a few things that the Boomer Right suppressed that Millennial and X leaders might not know.

Some of us might even redefine conservatism to transform it from a pretext for exploitation of people that elites render helpless to one in which people have the responsibility to make things good for themselves. That is libertarianism over semi-fascist corporatism. America needs more enterprise and less bureaucracy, and more innovation and less entrenchment of power. Small business creates opportunity and jobs; Big Business generates profits and executive compensation.

In any event I see Barack Obama more the harbinger of political life of the post-Crisis Era. Sure he is liberal on human rights and economic fairness by standards of the neoliberal Reagan-through-Trump era... but he proved a staunch conservative in style and practice on many things. The coming 1T may be a rejection of populism that has shown how badly it can work on behalf of the Right against anyone else.  Obama was more subtle than the usual chest-pounding types on law and order. "Do the crime and do the time" is his attitude, as shown by the rarity of pardons on his part.

I have often compared Obama to Eisenhower in temperament. This said, a conservative President is going to act much more like Obama than like Trump in practice. Maybe we will see that America is not so much a struggle between tradition and some super-modernity but instead alternative sources and expressions of tradition. Is Trump compatible with Chinese, Korean, Jewish, Arab, or Hispanic tradition? Not in the least!

I'm not sure of what my tradition is in view of being about half German or Swiss and about half English or Welsh... but all I can say about Donald Trump is "Damn you! Damn you! Damn you!" I hate his business techniques, his abusive sexuality, his demagoguery, his contempt for legal tradition, and his solipsism that tells him that what he wants to be true is the truth. I have no children or grandchildren, but I will say this: I would do everything possible to prevent them from becoming like him. If that means getting them to join the Armed Forces or to do salesclerking, factory work, farm labor, or domestic service before they ever set forth into college, then so be it. Human suffering is one way to learn empathy for people who, due to their limited talents, are compelled to endure it all their lives. Being a good person matters far more than being spectacularly competent at what one does for a living. Take that, Bill Cosby, Phil Spector, Jeffrey Epstein,  William Jefferson, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jim Bakker, Kent Hovind, Harvey Weinstein,  etc. Moral disgrace from doing bad things to people should be personal ruin.  

To that end, I expect most people to be concerned that their kids or grandkids become good people -- the old Boy Scout ideal

"A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent."

That rejects being out for oneself alone, cynical, cruel, destructive, and wasteful -- 3T behavior at its worst. Much dies in a Crisis era, but most of what dies other than moribund institutions like businesses limping along as they consumer their assets is fads and crazes from the 3T. Society finds that it can't support those. (By the way -- the Multiversity that offers intellectual rigor but no coherent program of predictable learning from the 2T will die, too).  We are going to see more shopping malls... die. We are going to see televangelists lose their relevance; although religion will be on TV it will be more like church services and educational programs or panel shows than the flamboyant Wealth Cult and ignoramuses ridiculing science because of "evil-u-shun".

The upcoming 1T will be a fairer, safer more equitable world with more opportunity for more people. Institutions will enforce that. People will be happier. Maybe it won't be quite as bland as the last 1T; there will be far more old boomers who draw attention for the right reasons. I hope to be one of those.  

I predict that more and more Americans will deprecate Donald Trump over time. The liberals already do for his degradation of civil liberties and human decency that are grossly illiberal. We are seeing some conservatives reject him for his rejection of necessary traditions -- like respect for protocol and precedent (in that Obama is the conservative and Trump is the radical), valuation of a hierarchy of talent (liberals aren't really against that), and insistence upon rational thought. Such is better for a society that recognizes political polarization as a dead end.

COVID-19 will color attitudes of all people who remember it, whether they be Silent  who will likely go extinct around 2060 or children in early-elementary years of life who cannot avoid seeing the major disruptions of their lives.  The youngest who remember the lessons of COVID-19 will have the sharpest impressions. I expect it to color the political culture and even entertainment. Consider that for years after the French Revolution, aristocrats had parties in which the mocked the Reign of Terror. Consider also that very old people, the last survivors of the Holocaust, keep reminding us of what they went through. We will see that exclusively in print and video as survivors die off. Time extinguishes human memories.

I look forward to seeing the positive impact super elder Boomers have in the next 1T, at least I am for 'true' authentic Prophet/Idealist Boomers like you and Eric who are on the right side of history and stand for the right values, the Hard-Right neoliberal Boomers (including a certain ex-president) have had far too much power and prominence for far too long! With so many older generations following the pattern the GI's set, I would honestly be shocked if even Generation X (as an elderhood Nomad/Reactive generation) was quite as willing to go off into that good night as their Lost predecessors were (and I hope they don't, we're gonna need continued positive influence from the best kind of Nomads/Reactives to stop the potential excesses of the next Awakening Era from getting too out of hand)! 

You know, I actually had a similar discussion with Eric about this recently. Only in our case, we were talking about the next Unraveling Era, because chances are many of us Millennials are still gonna be around during that time. If there's enough of us left, we might be able to stop civic/institutional life from entirely decaying in the next 3T. As you pointed out before, older generations are living longer now, suddenly the archetypal/societal role that used to be mostly absent depending on the turning continues to play a pivotal role in the turning they were once largely missing from (old Prophets/Idealists in a High Era, old Nomads/Reactives in an Awakening Era, old Heroes/Civics in an Unraveling Era, and old Artists/Adaptives in a Crisis Era). The fact that all four archetypes now get to have an influence in cultural/public life in each turning is not only completely unprecedented but a whole new ball game, perhaps continued influence from an older generation would help curb some of the worst aspects/extremes of each turning, thus hopefully making the next saeculum calmer and less disruptive than previous ones. If continued influence from an old Prophet/Idealist generation can keep the inner world from fully decaying in a 1T, couldn't continued influence from an old Hero/Civic generation keep the outer world from completely decaying in a 3T?

How do you think Covid-19 might specifically color the attitudes of the Silent (they grew up during the last Crisis Era, and now they're experiencing another Crisis Era from a late life perspective), Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z (they're the Artists/Adaptives who are experiencing this Crisis Era as children and teens, and many of them will probably live long enough to see the next Crisis Era unfold) respectively?

[pbrower2a]

I already see a huge difference in the economy: Big Business seems to be seeking industrial labor again, offering pay much higher than I recently remember. Super-cheap labor, a pattern of the neoliberal era, may be at an end.

If anyone thinks that people get treated better because they are overworked and underpaid -- think again. Economic exploitation entrenches itself with the exploiters finding ways to make it sting all the more and make it harder to escape. The workers recruited are, I presume, young ones. Maybe we will see some of America's best and brightest do this before matriculating in college. Someone who has done real work before attending college may think differently about the proletariat if he has ever been part of it. Those who have never done such work might see proles as expendable people whose happiness is never a legitimate objective in life and may see anyone who has ever endured hardship to be flawed for such.. and untrustworthy.