Was Normal That Great?
By: Remington Write
Tags: History, Covid 19, Change, Death, Life

The first weeks were so bizarre and completely outside anyone’s experience that we all kind of zoned out. Each day the numbers got more terrifying. We sat tight, washed our hands a lot, and ate too much ice cream (speaking only for myself here).

Humans are nothing if not supremely adaptable. We got into our new rhythms, worked on new strategies, reached out to each other.

On the coasts, we managed to slow the trajectory. We came close to shutting the transmission down by staying indoors. We lost jobs, stormed the Dept. of Labor’s website and phone lines, took up cribbage, worried about how to cover the rent/mortgage, slept during the day, paced during the night, and did as the damned doctors and scientists said.

Now it’s looking like tables are turning after the comfortable ones in the middle decided that enough was enough. They wanted their hair cut and it was their God-given right as Americans to celebrate Memorial Day the way it was meant to be celebrated — at the beach, God damn it. The fire was bad but we’d gotten things tamped down a bit. Clearly, it was time to go shopping.

Oops. Now the whole damned thing could be burning down and all anyone seems to want is for things to go back to the way they used to be.

Really???

We had it that good, did we?

We really want to go back to a system that is rigged to extract every bit of value from the productivity of underpaid, under or uninsured people and pour it into the offshore accounts of the 0.1%? Apparently a fairly large number of people do want that even if they’re kind of clueless as to the mechanics of this system.

In New York people are actually sitting in the street, next to parking meters and fire hydrants so they can be served food prepared by anyone other than themselves or their partners.

Talk about desperate

We’ve been desperate before and in much worse straits. Think of the fragility of life when society relied on hunting and gathering to stay fed. Or the false notion that “rain follows the plow” that has been roundly refuted by drought after drought. We’ve also been mired in centuries’ long systems of societal organization that were heavily reliant on the exploitation of the powerless. Remember feudalism?

For centuries people benefitting from that system and those shouldering the burden of it believed that nothing else was possible. The Church and the guy who’d managed to “own” the land held all the power. No one thought that it would change until it did. What knocked it down? Many things were weakening the power held by the guys with horses and metal, but it was the waves of plague, The Black Death, that raged across Europe in the 14th century that undid that system.

What could the powerless do to unseat a system that, for centuries had brutally exploited their need to feed their families? It turns out that they could die. By the hundreds of millions. It is estimated that 30% to 60% of the population died.

What happens when no one’s left to do the actual work?

Clearly, we’re not even close to the seismic upheaval that the Black Death brought to Europe and North Africa when suddenly there were very few peasants left to plant and harvest.

But we could be.

We think we’re so smart and modern and intelligent. Those people were ignorant and illiterate. We won’t be like them. Except look at how the United States, after an initial pause in the spread of the coronavirus, decided that it was time to open the economy. That hasn’t worked out well, has it? As of this writing, the U.S.A. has hit a seventh consecutive day of record-breaking infections and now deaths are now starting to climb again.

While that’s going on, today’s guys with horses and metal are cleaning up. Record-breaking infections are translating to record-breaking profits for folks like Mister Bezos and Mister Zuckerberg. This virus thing is working out very well for them.

Now.

Judging from the irrational behavior exhibited across the country regarding such basic safety measures as mask-wearing and continued physical distancing, the peasants would seem to be determined to die out in sufficient numbers to give those Masters of the Universe pause. Not that they will, of course. They still haven’t realized that they’re on the same sinking ship as the rest of us and that all efforts to get this ship seaworthy again are futile.

We’ve been on a collision course with reality at least since the steam engine roared into life and it was time to convince the ladies of the house to get out there and buy things.

Unsustainable

The beast of unfettered capitalism with its vast jaw unhinged and ready to keep feasting on the productivity of people intent on getting the bigger car, the nicer home, the newest electronics, has basically been eating its own tail. There’s always the chance that the hammer will come down and someone will demonstrate the power and foresight to shut things down in order to stop transmission of the virus.

Whoever has that power and foresight to successfully get this bunch of greedy, fear-driven, short-sighted peasants to wear their masks and stay away from the bars and beaches almost certainly has a vested interest in returning things to “normal”.

And the peasants want things to go back to normal, too. Hence you see people happily ordering expensive meals with SUVs and delivery trucks whizzing by them as they sit at their fancy tables set up in the street.

We don’t have to go back to that normal

We do have a choice. But it’s not looking likely what we have the determination, the imagination, the fortitude, or the unity to stand up to the guys with horses and metal. We had the kids at Occupy Wall Street as well as Seattle’s short-lived Autonomous Zone and now they’re occupying City Hall, but true to form, the high ideals get muddied and chaos starts inching in until the police are called in to “restore order”.

What would a completely different version of normal look like, anyway? There are certainly kids in the various movements, BLM and Occupy among them, who have ideas.

Let’s hear them. Let’s listen and pay attention to those with the most on the line today. The kids whose entire future is in the balance. Can we in some way tame capitalism to be a servant rather than a tyrant? Or do we need to ditch that and come up with an entirely new way to ensure we all have enough to eat and get to sleep indoors every night? Certainly no system so far has managed that up to now.

But remember. Humans are nothing if not supremely adaptable. Let’s hope we’re able to adapt without the impetus of losing 30% to 60% of the population.

Who knows? We could conceivably pull it off. I’m up for doing my part.

© Remington Write 2020. All Rights Reserved.