I’ve been going on for some time about my intuition that we (meaning all of Western civilization—I don’t know enough about the rest to comment,) are due for a massive paradigm shift. I wonder if this pandemic might be the trigger that does it.
Our current ‘normal’ way of doing business simply isn’t holding up very well.
By way of example, consider the number requirements for ICU hospital beds, as opposed to the number of actually available ICU hospital beds. We’re short, by a bunch. Why? It’s my contention that much of the answer is because “Just-In-Time”….which was ok as a manufacturing logistics idea, has been applied to oh-so-many things it was never intended for.
Like hospital beds.
Or highly educated and trained infectious disease docs/nurses/technicians.
Another piece of the answer may be found as parents all over the planet (but especially in the US) try to become primary & secondary school teachers...and computer techs...as they try to teach their children at home. Particularly in places that are severely lacking in computer infrastructure. (I could just about manage up to fourth grade, I think.)
Maybe we need to provide a lot more support for the people going into teaching (and a bit of respect, too!)
Maybe, as people begin losing their jobs, and thus the ability to pay their rent/mortgages, we need to think about the relative consequences of putting millions of people on the streets (and into unsanitary conditions) or the relative consequences of losing some profit margin at, oh, Goldman-Sachs. (I’m not anti-profit per se, but money isn’t everything. A healthy community is a profit in itself—a non-monetary one, but a profit nonetheless. A sick community will turn into a monetary loss.)
Even the calls to involve the military in logistics and field hospitals…folks, we’ve been undercutting DoD for years. I know ships (that shall remain nameless) who have guns rusted to their mounts, for lack of hours & bodies to maintain them. Like everything else, there’s always something new and ‘sexy’ that gets funded, but the maintenance doesn’t.
It strikes me as weird. The Puritans, who were our northern group of Founders, were great believers in in education (being Dissenters, they were locked out of education in the old country.) Yet somehow, we’ve acquired a large number of people who regard education (especially in the sciences) as unnecessary, suspicious, or ‘elitist’.
I think that paradigm shift may be upon us. Let’s hope it goes forward, and not backward to the ‘new dark ages’.
