The Post-Pandemic

As is sometimes the case, regular commenter Formerly Amherst got me to thinking a bit on a different tangent. I don't like the idea of prognostication where serious events are concerned all that much, for the most part, because I think people have a tendency to ascribe their own meanings and desires on things. Where the coronavirus is concerned, I've already noticed with distaste that some people are viewing it in "cleansing" terms--always a bad sign. I don't think much of people who imagine that a random RNA replicant was sent by some fate to rid the planet of, well, you name it. Old folk. The sick. The poor. The Blue State liberal menace. The Red State conservative menace. The people of XYZ religion. The lousy secularists. To give us something greater than war to worry about. To wipe out the lesser virus, humans, who have been mucking the planet up. Etc. It's a very ugly game some people play--and the only way to win at being human is not to play.

I also don't like the habit of thinking that a sufficiently tragic episode of history will necessarily be didactic. The idea that "Now people will--(do the thing I've always really hoped they would)" is natural, but people often do carry multiple, mixed, and even muddled messages away from events. There is a logic to assuming that people will, after a massive worldwide healthcare crisis, come away with dramatically different opinions about how health care is managed, such as incurring an interest in truly universal "free" (as in "provided as a fully-funded right of all planetary citizens") healthcare--but logical assumptions seem to have little to do with actual human behavior. The human mind has a weird trick of using current events to reinforce one's own priors, even when counter-intuitive.

We're talking monkeys. If that sounds like I'm shrugging at the business of guessing what folks will do--bingo. Look at the differing responses people are having right now to the potential for disaster staring them in the face. The aftermath won't look much different. Fingers of blame will be pointed, but it will be spread around enough to be thinned out. Some people will look back, after a plausible or even implausible interval, to say "Things weren't even all that bad."



I don't think major differences will necessarily occur, but I'd like to guess at some of the lessons that might, on a micro-level, be picked up. For one thing, I'd like to imagine that people will generally be more appreciative of hygiene and general safety. We have the capability of providing the entirety of humanity safe food and water with the right logistics, and have probably had that ability for some time, and just--haven't? There isn't really an excuse to let any people be cut off from the two things that are most genuinely responsible for increased lifespans in the 20th century, The Roman Empire had plumbing and food distribution ideas--why aren't we super-geniuses at feeding people and getting them drinkable water and baths by now?

That needs to change. We are also going to have a foofaraw about who pays for it and it'll get set aside. (Yeah, we need to get the government on this. I hope this means people appreciate we all have skin in the game and participatory citizenship rises like a tsunami.)

I think near-term, travel will change. I've loved going to Italy in a personal sort of way, and I have thought about travelling more extensively if I could afford it to see different sites with historical/archeological interest, but things like going to Disneyland or cruises never clicked with me as being desirable. Why would I want to spend two weeks or so on an upscale floating retirement home with a few stops at beach bars? What exactly is the appeal of village fete rides but with mascots, lines, and so much bigger and more crowded? So this could very well be my own bias, here, but travel destinations and care-free vacation tourist trap shit might be killed dead, here. Has, be it ever so humble, home, ever looked so sweet? Appreciation for one's local everything, from trattorias and cafes to grocery shops to resting under one's own fig tree and vine should seem more comforting. People will still travel, but the impulse will have to be more than "because I can".

Maybe hen parties and stag dos that have gone off to odd resorts in recent times, will settle back in their proper sphere, as pub crawls and club dates. (But will social distancing make these gatherings more fraught? If tables were less crammed together in my local spots, I'm sure I'd manage better. Aren't intimate settings better than arena shows? Maybe a lot of what we get off on will be down-sized in terms of entertainments.)

What I'd expect is that workplaces will become more flexible about time scheduling and work-from-home and child-care, now that it's been demonstrated people can manage, if forced to--why not do it year-round? This would be a boon to lots of people in terms of commuting and family caring. What is a little more of a challenge is I hope employers become more conscious of thinking in terms of contingencies and continuity. What happens when the "grizzled veterans" of your workplace, the go-to subject matter experts, are on the bench or permanently off the field? Do you have people adequately cross-trained to step into key positions? Can you think of a "workplace" as nonlocal? What if multiple people at different locations are in synch through technology? How are you communicating? It's a good shift that could make work/home life balancing better for individuals, but can also encourage teamwork and improve overall group activity.

And what about things like "just in time" inventories and "streamlined" utilities? People have been driven by the idea of costs to think of "redundancy" as a bad word. But what if it just meant--back-up? As in, let's be sure that if our current system fails, we have...back-up. Fail-safes are great. They save against things, um, failing. Surpluses and warehousing aren't problems, they are opportunities to have things on hand if needed. Excess staff is more of a deep bench. Why shouldn't the grid be "gold-plated"? Gold is very conductive and doesn't corrode. Is it so bad to think "belts and suspenders" for important systems that must work in order to facilitate the needs of the many?

The idea of "costs" itself should change, from our thinking of value as being about things but about time and service. What is the cost to people's time? The US has become more of a service economy than a manufacturing one, but have we properly understood that service to others is an end unto itself? And one with intrinsic values because people need other people for many things we hardly now think about, but without which our day-to-day experience is unimaginable?

I think health care should be more spread out to more local facilities, in various locations, more accessible, and we need to have more practitioners of various kinds in operation (just as there are so-called "food deserts" there are health care deserts, resulting in things like high maternal and infant mortality here in the US, among other things that should be unthinkable in a developed nation) , and I think only a National Health Service set-up would facilitate that kind of transformation. I think we need to think about a way to provide a basic healthy living possibility for the millions of people who are unhomed. And higher education might come to focus less on dorm and campuses, but also be more nonlocal, team-centered, cooperative, and focus on students' practical performance as much as tests.

We could stand to become less of a disposable society and more of a maker society. That means repurposing, recycling, gardening, canning, smoking, doing.

We could value the time we spend together better and take it less for granted. We could make more memories for ourselves and less for Facebook. We could tell each other "I love you more", and wish we said it when we had the chance less.

I both dislike the idea of seeing tragedy as opportunity and of seeing any opportunity to do better be wasted. But I can't pretend I really know where we'll all go from here.