Year End Review: My View for our Society.
By: Isaac S
Tags: Policy, Politics

Alright, this year is pretty much wrapping up. Millions if not billions of people are ready to say goodbye to the year of 2020. We have seen a disturbing amount of economic and personal upheaval for everyone around the world. Many have been thriving in this era, and many others have been losing like crazy. Big companies are making billions due to people ordering more and more online for delivery. Individuals are being let go, threatened or have been evicted, and have the lights go out on them due to money running out.

Despite this year being so up and down for a myriad of people, I want to point out the plusses for this year that I believe are signs towards progress of a better America. I feel excited for these things because I believe they open up a whole new world for us, more opportunities. The writing below reflects my current opinions with the information at my disposal.

Black Lives Matter

Though this year has seen the tragic deaths of many undeserving black people, the one silver lining to that is that people are no longer ignoring it. Millions of people across the nation blew up in protest and caused politicians to finally stop and think about it. It made politicians finally take hardline sides. The number of allies has grown, the culture is taking a turn for the better. Companies were finally made to take a stand as well. Though it may just be a surface level commitment to fair treatment of all, when large companies start openly supporting a minority, it means a certain threshold has been reached and change can just take advantage of its own momentum. There is work to be done still, but at least it’s not status quo.

Identifying the cracks in our Society and Government

Though this year has seen the deaths and unfair treatment of minorities and we have seen a rise in the amount of people willing to spread disinformation, all is not bad. The elements of racist tendencies, the crazy and irresponsible church leaders and their lemmings, the abuse of government structures and the growing facist element in the White House and Congress isn’t a regression or a signal of the country going to hell. It’s a chance to see where all the cracks in our ship are. We can either watch the cracks grow bigger while the water increasingly floods in, or we can find those cracks and patch them up. All of the elements that were mentioned above have always been there. It was just hidden with code switching and the absence of a huge presence on social media. It has always been there, it’s just not been as visible as before. Now that we have identified the sickness, the damage, we can start working towards remedies.

Unexpected Experiments of Political,Business and Educational Concepts

I believe that Covid-19, while horrible for the economy and the livelihood of billions of people, has forced us to accelerate our journey of discovery into many concepts that would have taken decades to experiment and get data on. In fact, many of these concepts not only got to be manifested in experimentation, we as a society ironed out a bunch of kinks. What are these concepts you ask? They are universal income, Teleservices, working from home, and online schooling.

Universal income

Universal income is one of the concepts that I am excited about. The idea that every american would receive a set amount of money depending on their income from tax returns. I am talking about the stimulus packages. Yes, we have only done one (hopefully soon to be two), but we have identified how it would be distributed and actually did a first run through to see how our infrastructure could handle it. It turns out, we could do better with it, and my opinion is that we need to invest more in the IRS (for several reasons that I won’t go into here). The IRS was the body that actually took the legislation and made it happen. It gathered the necessary information on who and where to send checks to. We also got to see all of the mistakes, like checks being sent to noncitizens that weren’t even in this country. That doesn’t mean we should just call it a failure and stop the process. It means that we found a hole, now we need to figure out how it got there, what do we need to do to patch it up, and move on. Lesson learned for the next round. Though the stimulus checks were not meant to be a precursor to universal income, I think we as a nation got a much better glimpse of what is possible in terms of this concept. We got to see how the infrastructure for that concept would work. We got to see some of the cracks. And we roughly got an estimate of how much money that would actually cost to give money to Americans, even if it was just one check last time. Now we can decide if we want to go further with this concept or drop it because now we have a much clearer picture on if it’s possible or not.

Teleservices

Teleservices are the next thing that we have seen in action. What do I mean by teleservices? Telehealth (doctors). Many people do not have access to doctors because there are not many services provided in their local areas. Some areas just don’t have a big enough population to support a hospital. People who are prone to illnesses, people with disabilities, or people who just have a hard time finding transportation can visit a doctor now in increasing numbers, not because a doctor just moved into town, it’s because we can now do basic check ups with telehealth. Yes, it has limitations, but it’s a much better alternative to no services at all. Now we can talk to doctors about our symptoms and show them things (within reason) without having to step out of our house, or even go to the next city. I’m hoping that this will increase the demand for doctors and nurses across the nation especially as our WiFi network is expanding and strengthening with 5G networks. This isn’t just restricted to doctors and nurses, it can also be counselors and psychologists as well.

Working from Home

Before the Pandemic, I am sure there were millions of people who thought “man, I could just do this at home, why do I have to be in the office?” while at their jobs. There are many jobs that could be done from home. But before the pandemic, the popular belief was that most if not all work should be done at a place of work. Mostly because it’s how it’s always been done, not because there was actual comparative data on job performances from home and at the office. But there were some legitimate concerns: how can we know you’re actually doing your job? What if you had to collaborate with someone or meet another employee or supervisor? I’ve also seen some bullshit reasons for not working at home as well: it’s not fair to the other workers who actually have to do their work from the office. We can have meetings via Zoom or Gmeet. We can present our projects and findings via these same things. We may see the fall of conference rooms if we can all just do it from our home computers.

This pandemic has forced us to actually move our jobs home. Yes there are alot of jobs that have been proven in this climate that they just don’t work out at home for a myriad of reasons (just the sheer incompatibility no matter the circumstances at home), but there are a lot more jobs than we initially thought that could be done at home. A lot of our work can be done online. Majority of jobs had to be done on computers anyways. Reports, data input, analyses are all done online or on computers. And a great many of us have computers or laptops at home. Even storage of data is online in different clouds. The shelter in place orders have allowed us to actually experiment and see if we can actually take that all home with us. And it looks like this new work culture is here to stay. Many people have moved out of the cities because they could do their jobs at home. A large number of people have bought homes in the suburbs or in the rural areas because they can now do their jobs anywhere there is an internet connection. Companies are also shifting to downsizing because it’s just more profitable if they don’t have to pay for upkeep and rent of office space. The buying of houses and the move of companies to downsizing work spaces all point to the expansion of at-home-work and will change what our world looks like after the COVID pandemic. I am excited about this because it opens up opportunities for people who previously did not take high paying jobs because they didn’t want to commute or live in specific cities. I think this will reduce housing costs and property costs in cities because workers are now spreading out and buying properties. I think this will also raise the overall housing costs across the states while reducing the morbidly high costs of cities. This is both good and bad for people. Good for people who are a little further from the cities because they will see an uptick of more people and rising property values. These people will see a rise in their local economies because of new services being added to their localities because of the rise in population. This will also see a rise in education because property taxes are rising which means more money for schools. Working from home also opens up a lot of opportunities for people who are homebound. People who have to stay home for their kids, people with disabilities, and people who wouldn’t even have made enough to justify moving to the cities to work now have access to jobs because they can now do it at home. I think this will also increase the number of highly paid migratory workers because people who were previously bound to their desks now have the ability to work wherever there is electricity and internet. Yes, the majority of people may just stay at home, but I think this will increase the amount of migratory people overall. Which means more tourism revenue! People in rural areas can also now be part of the global market and global workforce. With the move of people from the cities to the rural areas because they can work at home, people who lived in rural areas can now access these high paying jobs as well because they can work from their place of origins, the rural areas. And with the improvement in internet technology, more and more people can have access to the internet.

Education

This is a double edged sword. I think Distance learning has shown us both extreme good and extreme bad of distance learning. First, the bad. We have all seen, nation-wide, that our scores in testing are going down, and the amount of F grades are going up. As a teacher myself, I see that a lot of kids take advantage of the decreased oversight over their education. I’ve caught a few playing video games. There are quite a few who actually just turn their camera off and aren’t engaged or not attending. There are kids who will try to be fully engaged, but they have the worst environment to learn in. Many of the students I have seen have a lot of siblings or cousins with them and all of them are on distance learning too. It can be super noisy and alot going on in small rooms or apartments. There are also many students who just aren’t able to engage at all with a computer screen and do way better in person. But, the worst off are the students who not only have all of these issues, they also suffer from living in poverty. They either don’t have a place at all to do distance learning or don’t have the right technology to engage with learning. Many times they don’t even have access to the internet. We see on the news that many students in different states are going to McDonalds just to get the wifi to do work. These kids are fighting uphill battles. Now for the good things about this pandemic for learning. It has made every teacher expand their teaching medium. Before the shelter in place, I knew of Google classroom, and some teachers were already implementing that tool into their curriculum. I knew about Google Docs and used it myself, but never really used it with my kids. Now? Every teacher is using one form or another of online technology and broadening their horizons on what they can do to help teach the kids. For me, my students with disabilities especially are benefiting because they are able to access more accommodations that they needed just to access the curriculum. My nonreaders are now able to access their books because their readings are online with text to speech capabilities. These nonreaders are also now producing more work since they can use the voice to type feature of google docs, whereas they produced very little work because they didn’t know enough to spell simple words like “word” or “often.” While a great many kids are not doing well with Distance learning, there are quite a few kids who are actually benefiting from Distance learning because it is their preferred medium. Many schools have oftentimes limited the home-schooling options in the past. But now with shelter in place orders, many kids who would have been stuck in the brick and mortar buildings of schools can now manifest their compatibility with online learning. It’s not all bad, but it’s also not all good.

Overall, we now have data of initial experiments and data after fixes to initial infrastructure issues with government and education ideas/concepts. We also have a consolidated cultural awareness of the wrongs being visited upon the black community it American. When we finally get the vaccine in enough numbers to safely go back outside, we will not be stepping into our precovid world. Opportunities have been uncovered, infrastructures of companies in all sectors have made permanent changes, people have moved away from cities but keep their jobs has pretty much locked down the infrastructure changes in many of the economic sectors in the US.