Actually, the future of the post COVID world is down right depressing. A lot of people are assuming that once everyone gets vaccinated and herd immunity is supposedly achieved the world will go back to normal.
Except, that’s not what is going to happen.
A “return to normalcy might have been possible if the United States had had a normal President in 2020 – instead of a raving psychopath. Alas, we did not and as a result, over half a million Americans died needlessly from bonafide recklessness and incompetence.
And there is probably more damage that is yet to come.
That is what John Cole over at Balloon Juice thinks.
In a Twitter thread written about a month ago, Mr. Cole laid out what awaits us as our Galtian overlords will continue to exploit this tragedy for profit. His comments in the thread are thought-provoking, depressing, and most assuredly, correct. I’ve transcribed the Twitter thread to make it easier for you to read without having to skip from Tweet to Tweet.
What follows are John Cole’s words, not mine. I wish I had been savvy enough to write them. I really think everyone needs to read them, however, which is why I am quoting them here:
“Life is never going to return to normal. This pandemic will become an endemic and coronavirus and variants will be with us for decades and with deforestation and the other shit there will be a new virus in the next decade if not sooner.
The best (worst?) way to look at what has happened to the poor and young financially is to look at how black families, a century and a half after slavery, have nowhere near the familial wealth as white people. The financial realities of the kids and the poor today will echo for generations in the future. Unless, of course, there is major structural change. Which will not happen in the US where the rich and powerful own everything.
Additionally, life will not go back to normal. The MBA’s are already hard at work crunching the numbers and determining how to exploit what they have learned about employment. They will learn that much can be done with fewer people, that office space is not as important. So employers will employ fewer people, all while spending less on hard spaces to do business, so Commercial Real Estate will take a permanent hit.
This will funnel more wealth to the upper tiers. Also, much like the NRA and Republicans learned after Sandy Hook that we can literally murder kids and do nothing about gun control, the business class has learned that we can literally kill “essential workers” and half the country and the majority of our politicians do not give a fuck. Just masturbate publicly about frontline heroes then order them to charge back into Somme. It’s not their fucking kids, so screw them.
We have also seen that our government and our politicians seem relatively ok dismantling the things that keep us safe in times of crisis. The Texas power debacle and the fact that NOT ONE POLITICIAN has been forced to resign is additional evidence. States and localities will be drained for quite some time from the additional expenses of the pandemic and the decrease in tax income, and fire and rescue, public works, sewage, education, and everything else will see additional funding cuts. Cops and the military will be fine.
And this is before what is going to be the biggest shock to our country, automated trucking and the loss of millions of jobs held mostly by young and middle-aged men in the decade. Massive unemployment and layoffs of an already volatile group. The next decade or two, with all of the chaos and the complete unmooring of social norms and lack of faith in institutions, is going to be bloody and crazy.
Life is never going back to normal.”
The Twitter Thread can be found here
It’s a dystopian vision, to be sure – but you know in your heart he is right. The very fact that the GOP is racing to hide the blunt truth of Trump’s hideous record on COVID and other things tells you that it is so.
Even worse are the people – who had a higher oath to try to save lives – now admitting that they were more afraid of displeasing the orange monster than of the consequences of letting people die for no reason.
Read the article. If you have ANY decency whatsoever, as Charles Pierce points out, you can and should be enraged.
Now go back and reread John Cole’s words. Perhaps other nations may return to the world they left behind – but not the United States.
We could be so much better.
But we won’t be.