Week Nine

It's been nine weeks, as of Friday I am staying at home. Parting from work was reasonably decent and I am mostly confident of being able to return at my convenience, that last week was hard though. Anyway, being at home is nice, I will try to get a routine of some sort going after about a week, but until then I am gonna fuck around. I've done so successfully and have pretty much completely lost track of the passage of time already so I guess that's fine.

I actually am kind of disappointed with myself, all it takes is a four day weekend for me to decide I need a routine, I've never thought of myself as someone who needs routine or to be working to function so I hope I get over it soon.

I put in for unemployment, I give it even odds of success there, but worst case scenario I end up with a month long unpaid vacation and then dive back into it, which we can afford. We won't be thrilled with it, but we can afford it.

It's possible it will be a moot point, the Governor's emergency orders were struck down by a Baker City Circuit Court judge yesterday, however the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that the order stays in effect until arguments are heard in front of them. I am guessing the orders will be upheld in the end, but it is evidence, along with the reopening of most of Oregon's counties, that political willpower for the shutdown is waning fast. Oregon has been one of the top states in containing the outbreak, which is great on the one hand, but on the other hand it is increasingly hard to keep people taking things seriously when things are going well. This is of course a problem across the country as states move to re-opening and will almost surely doom us to a cycle of lockdowns and preventable deaths, but I'm not in charge.

I've been saying for a while that no one is thinking long enough term on this, but I have to admit that neither have I in some ways. Like two months working through the crisis was more than enough for my own mental health, but even in the best case scenario unemployment isn't gonna last me much past the summer if that, so I still have to confront the issue of returning to work eventually, how am I going to manage it? Can I afford to work two or three months at a time and then take a month off? Maybe but that doesn't make life easy for sure, I don't know if it's sustainable as the money runs out but I kinda thought people would slow down on buying pizza after a couple of weeks and that didn't happen either.

My sports radio was dominated last week by discussions of baseball possibly getting it's season going at some point this summer, discussion of that was giving me anxiety for a number of reasons but mainly because, well, we need some background. Okay so the players and owners have to reach an agreement on how to reopen right? So they have tentatively agreed in principle to the idea of a short season, some changes to how the teams play each other, and no fans in the stadiums, the sticking point however is money, the owners want the players to take a pay cut since there is no fan revenue coming in, the players understandably are not super in favor of taking a pay cut to work during a pandemic.

Now some might say why do I care what happens in the fight between rich people? Well in any conflict between billionaires and millionaires I am on the side of the millionaires, or rather I am against the billionaires under any circumstance, but put yourself in their position, your work is not essential but your boss wants to reopen anyway, turns out they can but they want you to take a pay cut, would you agree to that? To endanger yourself and others for less money than you had previously agreed to make? Why would anyone do that?

Back to my point, the commentary I hear from the radio is "I really hope that money isn't the reason baseball doesn't come back." They always follow it up with, as long as they can do it safely, but come on, we all know they don't really care about that. They think the optics of rich people fighting over money is bad if it is keeping the nation from watching sports. But fuck that, money is a damn good reason to keep the sport from returning and the only people who should be compromising here should be the billionaires.

The above is basically the argument used to reopen the economy without actually doing anything financially for the people who have to do real work of reopening. We shouldn't let money stop us from reopening, which is why we won't be mandating hazard pay, or instituting rent forgiveness or considering basic income, or, or, or. We should just work and everything will just take care of itself.
It's worth paying attention to these arguments because it shows who is actually benefiting from our work, when it is an absolute requirement for the good of the country that we work, but not an absolute requirement for the good of the country that we be paid commensurate to our risk, then we are not the beneficiaries of the country reopening.

So, so many people are going to die and we are going to just get used to it, by this time next year we won't have a vaccine but I'll bet you any amount of money that there will be virtually no restrictions on anything by then.