Stimulus checks started rolling out seriously last week, and buy howdy did people want pizza now that they have a little money, I try hard not to judge people's spending habits, not least because my own have historically been terrible, but I cannot fathom fifty bucks worth of Domino's being the thing someone wants the instant they get a windfall.
My check hasn't come yet, my household has owed taxes for the last two years, which means the IRS doesn't have my direct deposit information, we did the required thing and gave it to them via the website set up for it so I imagine it'll show up at some point between tomorrow and after we have forgotten about it. As always we are fortunate enough that we likely won't need it right away, which means we get to have savings again so that will be nice.
Both of my friends at work left last week, one quit because she moved, the other got fired because he is furious about capitalism and just couldn't contain himself anymore, he had a talk with the owner, things were said that I think maybe he wishes he could take back, and that was it. I am a bit jealous that he gets to stay home, on the other hand I have a lot more hours now, it's a bit of a mixed blessing if I am honest. I am going to do my best to keep in touch with these people this time so we'll see how that goes.
I know I keep banging this drum of "We are underestimating how long this whole crisis will last." But I am now starting to realize it might not ever end in many ways. Oh we'll get back to unrestricted access to parks and restaurants and all that at some point, but practically speaking we are unlikely to be fully free of risk for a year or two more, with stay at home orders going out periodically as virus cases spike, that is a long enough time for us to adapt to a new way of living and I am interested in seeing how it turns out. I don't think it necessarily is a bad thing that we learn to step apart a little bit now and again, and we've forced our society to embrace remote work and networking like never before.
We talk about how after 9/11 everything changed, I can't stand that shit, nothing changed, we were always going to go to war with Iraq, remember the official justification ended up being WMD's when all was said and done, but the war didn't require any societal realignment or anything. For those of us not involved with the military life went on in much the same way as it had before and our slow slide into an essentially fascist state was only slightly accelerated if at all.
This shit is different, surviving it requires us to change our whole way of life, and in so doing we are discovering that the backbone of the economy remains the individual worker, the billionaires will not save us, and the federal government has the power to do so but is actively choosing not to use it. Every argument to reopen the economy, every protest, comes from the people who benefit from the status quo and people I have to tell you, they are so fucking terrified of us getting used to not needing them that the mask is coming off.
We see arguments now coming from people who aren't "the alt-right" talking about how we should be willing to sacrifice a certain element of the population to put the country back to work or that that element of the population should be happy to die if that has to happen. The goalposts for what success against the Coronavirus means keeps moving too, according to some a body count of a hundred thousand means we have the best president to ever exist. Think of that, a hundred thousand people dead and that counts as a win, we topped 40k today, what is the next measure of success, two hundred thousand, a million? We lost three thousand or so in the 9/11 attacks and that was considered a reason to wreck two countries, during which we lost another five thousand or so soldiers, but now a hundred thousand are acceptable losses as long as the Dow Jones Industrial Average gets to keep going up.
The fact is the numbers don't matter, money is an illusion, at least on the level these people care about, the Coronavirus changed everything, and whether they consciously understand it or not the powerful are finding their positions shakier than ever before.
That said, odds are we get through this and have a world that broadly looks the same as it did before, but here's the thing: The virus isn't going away, and even if we do manage to completely eradicate it there will be another one probably much sooner than anyone thinks, and the old ways are not sufficient to deal with it. Change will happen and it will happen as always on the backs of dead workers, the only question is how many die. We have only a small amount of control over that, but it's growing.
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