Good morning folks. I can report that everything is good here in my house. I will admit my anxiety levels are high but other than that, nothing major has happened with me or any of my immediately family. I hope that you all can report the same and chances are pretty good that you can. Let’s keep it that way.
Work is frantic in a way that I’ve never seen before. Information seems to change almost hourly and we keep having meetings to talk about things that we just talked about in the last meeting because we have added a small change to the procedure or to the message we are sending out.
Each new message from leadership gives us two new fires to put out. Our jobs aren’t about planning and implementation, they are all about firefighting.
I don’t blame leadership; they aren’t doing this to give us busy work; they care about the students; they want to keep everyone safe; they are putting out much larger fires. But we are all reacting, rather than acting. And mostly we are just reacting to those above us, all the way up the chain.
The proactive thing to do would be to shut down everything, like I said last week. But I suppose you can’t really do that when there are so many things to shut down and such a complicated web of interdependent pieces.
If you shut down schools, that just means parents need to either stay home or find child care. And since the parents often can’t “just stay home” because they are living from paycheck to paycheck, that means that they will either find childcare or they will get their elderly parents to care for their children.
And so what if you shut everything down? In a society which has a safety net, which has a strong commitment to families and providing for the people, they enact measures to keep people from going homeless. But in the USA where there is no safety net and which has been told that “socialism” is evil, and trickle down works, we give away all of our aid to Wall Street.
I would like to think that this is it. This is the end of this one, rather pernicious, myth – that if you give rich people more money, they will give it willingly out to the poor. In America, the country which ostensibly sought to overthrow monarchy, the ruling class slipped in the back door and replaced “noblesse oblige” with “trickle-down-economics” and the rubes didn’t even notice.
In the oft-overlooked yet brilliant comedy “History of the World Pt. 1” Mel Brooks paints a picture of the noble class; stepping on the bodies of peasants; firing peasants from trebuchet for skeet; taking gluttonous treasure baths; and pissing on the art of the average man. This was a movie written in the 70s just when the economy in the USA was about to hit the tank. And yet the reaction then was the same as the reaction now – give money upward and it will “trickle back down”.
It never has. They hoarded their wealth like Smaug. The divide has grown. People are more desperate than ever.
I helped a student yesterday with Panopto. She was completing her final project and needed to record a presentation. I asked her if she was a business student and she said, no. These Panopto recordings are almost always for business school. It turns out she’s in her last quarter of her undergrad degree. I congratulated her but that’s when she said “thanks, but I don’t know what I’m going to do.” Her plan was to go to Pharmacy school this fall. But she’s got two kids at home, both young, under 10 and she was working as a waitress. “I was working as a waitress, until yesterday. No shifts now.”
She’s luckier than most. She said she was going to apply for some pharmacy tech jobs and that all of this just puts her plans on hold. She was nervous, though, anxious actually. I didn’t have anything funny or smart to say, I went with “well, I’m sorry.” I don’t know what’s going to happen to her, I hope she’s gong to be ok. I know that a lot of people are not going to be ok.
I had some ideas for fun blog posts but I can’t remember them. I think there was something like “which current manager is most like which Star Wars character?” Or maybe it was “which kind of key would each football manager be if he was a key in Key House?” And I thought about revisiting all of the Arsenal matches that I’ve been to in person – visiting them through memory because a lot of those posts are gone.
I might watch a classic Arsenal match tonight, if anyone is interested, Tottenham v. Arsenal, 1999. They have David Ginola, we have Anelka, Kanu, Bergkamp, Vieira, Seaman, Adams, Keown. They haven’t lost at home to Arsenal since 1993.
I won’t ruin the scoreline. Don’t go look it up either. Watch along tonight and I’ll make a post about it in the morning.
https://footballia.net/matches/tottenham-hotspur-arsenal-fc-premier-league-1998-1999
Qq
Life!
So much has happened in the interim that football – indeed all sport – seems like ages ago. I’m wondering if it’ll slip on like an old shoe once this is all over or seem weird.
Life is slower, there are no crowds anywhere, traffic is non existent, the air is cleaner and it feels surreal…
‘It’s the end of the world as we know it
And I feel fine”.
As a person living in mainland Europe, I just wanted to comment on the USA-Socialism debate.
First of all, I think that we can all agree that the politico-economic structure of the United States is kind of extreme. I would use the term “Anarchocapitalism”,. And although that someone more knowledgeable than me can criticize me, but what I mean is basically that the role of the state is limited to basic functions like courts, army and police, while everything else is left to sort itself out.
But as the opposite of “love” is not “hate” and the opposite of “fascism” is not “communism”, the opposite of any form of extreme government is not the other extreme. It is the “normality”.
A “normal” state doesn’t need to take out all the market-driven principles and replace them with top-down centralized decision-making. It is not needed to privatize all the spheres of public life, it is enough to act as a middle man, aiming to ensure a healthy and functioning “ecosystem” where rich, poor, workers, intellectuals, scientists and artists can live calm and content life.
If you look at many European countries, you can see the state exercising its redistributing agenda to different extent. Scandinavia is a very consensus-driven society, where it is acceptable to have high taxes and allow the state to be in charge of such things like monopolizing the alcohol trade. Such approach will never work in US. The people are different, even the leftiest of Americans won’t feel well in such environment.
What I am trying to say is that if America wants to correct it’s too skewed political system, it doesn’t need to jump to the complete opposite. It will be enough if it takes back some of the military funding and allocate it into public health-care and education system. And not forget that it takes time to change mindsets.
That absolutely won’t even close to enough. If you really think that is all that is needed to “fix” this neoliberal behemoth of gangster capitalism, you don’t understand the United States at all. I’m not saying we should rush to communism, but your oversimplification is ridiculous.
That was unnecessary insulting.
I have tried twice to post something which at the end doesn’t appear, so I believe it has been automatically moderated. The content is political, so I wonder which words might have been considered harmful — for my own consideration in the future. I couldn’t find any list on the Akismet website.
The word is “socialism” – not sure why.
Surprising that the site doesn’t let you edit your own moderated list of words.
It might if I paid for it, lol