It’s not about real estate, stocks, getting obscenely rich, tax avoidance or even dogs.
This blog’s theme, in one word, is ‘balance’.
Lately a bunch of us have lost sight of this. The tilt is more in evidence every day. The site’s suffering ethically as a result. Maybe it’s because bully voices have pushed out the moderate ones. Perhaps it’s the toxic influence of the American election. It could be economic stress, job loss and recession. All understandable. This year has sucked from the get-go. The elephant in the room is a tiny little bug. A virus. Now it’s weaponized.
Flash back to March and April. When Covid burst on the scene turning into a global pandemic, the blog was overrun with amateur epidemiologists and armchair infectious disease experts telling us the body count would be in the millions – within weeks. The federal health minister said forty or sixty per cent of us would get it. And yet the recovery and mortality rates suggested something more akin to the flu. So was it really a balanced approach to shutter the entire economy?
I closed my building for six weeks, until the pandemic was better understood and I had ample evidence work-from-home is not a thing everybody’s good at. So we resumed operations, making sure employees had space and choices. That seemed balanced. People work better when they can yell at each other.
For context, I don’t know anybody with Covid. Today I am writing from beside the sea, in the Atlantic bubble. There are only three people in NS who are sick. Two of them got it from travelling outside Canada. One person in hospital. No deaths for a long time. Virtually all victims lived in one urban seniors’ residence – an avoidable tragedy. In short, there’s no virus here. Yet everyone is in masks. And the tourism, travel and hospitality sector has been nuked. It’s an unhinged time – commercial properties hitting the market as desperate owners bail out, and residential listings selling in hours, no showings, to desperate buyers thousands of kilometres away. No balance there.
Now it’s October. Month eight. Unemployment is 10%, four million people are on the dole, federal finances are shot, six in ten restaurants are closing and we have a second wave in Europe, growing infections in 30 US states and new shutdowns in Ontario, BC and Quebec. Globally 36 million people got the bug and a million have died. In the US the virus is the biggest single election issue, and again Monday night the president downplayed it, despite 210,000 American fatalities.
This disease, for which there is yet no cure or vaccine, is now politicized, divisive and socially destructive. An entire society has lost its balance. Blaming China and pulling out of the World Health Organization while doubting mask-wearing and rushing reopening are Trump’s ways of showing strength and defiance. Even after he got it. Democrats, public health officials and people terrified of disease are appalled. The polarization grows. ‘Don’t be afraid of this,’ says the president. And 210,000 families cannot believe their ears.
Now, about us.
Lately I’ve pushed back against those claiming this is, actually, a glorified flu or minimizing the victims because they’re mostly old, fat or compromised. The kids called it Boomer Remover. Then they started getting infected.
After eight months of something we thought would last six weeks, it’s clear this world was ripe for a pandemic – too many living too close, travelling too much, loving crowds and causing congestion. The virus will be here for months more, maybe years. If a vaccine magically appeared next week and worked, it would take a long, long time to administer to four or six billion people. Until herd immunity occurred, or Covid was contained quickly with effective therapies available to all of humanity, normal is further off than seemed possible in March.
How do we deal with this in a balanced way?
Not as Trump is, evidently. Ripping that mask off as he entered the White House – infected – Monday night was all the evidence one needs. Not as Trudeau is doing, either. Doubling our national debt in one year with off-the-charts spending will shackle us long after C19 is a memory. The world had a chance to come together and fight a common foe, and we blew it. For some unknown reason, we’ve picked a sad, myopic, dipstick crop of leaders.
So you railing against lockdowns, face coverings or infectious socialism won’t change a thing. Dismissing victims as weak or inconsequential only diminishes you. Ignoring the threat will probably make it worse. Last longer. Cost more.
When this regional bubble descended, trapping me inside (no coming back in without a quarantine), I hated it. There are colleagues I can’t see, a home I can’t visit, clients and friends I want time with. But there are no deaths here now in four provinces, no community spread, no hint of more restrictions, no red zones. Schools open. Restaurants. Sports. Gyms. Hotels. Bars.
My views have changed. Maybe it’s the Screech.
Apparently a lot of people hated yesterday’s survey. Tough. Here are the results, based on 4,746 total responses.
(click to enlarge:)
