Covid Reflections

 Covid Reflections

Folks have done a lot of reflecting through Covid. Here are some of my takeaways, brain farts:

Neanderthal theory: Trump is a dinosaur. We can proactively decide, based on science, who is fit to lead a nation of 330 million and who is not. Our politicians, our senators, our process is a dinosaur that needs to be modernized, else we will get eaten alive by other nations.

We are in the clutches of a madman. What we hold dear about democracy could be lost.  It places a weight, unnecessary weight upon each of us. We must search our feelings for the will to rebel against fascist demonstrations of power and consolidation of power at the highest levels of government and justice.  What job opportunities for our children will be available in a world controlled by Trump and people like him?   

Covid is actually the perfect opportunity/demonstration for Rawlsian justice: if you don’t take care of the poorest, the richest will get sick, as opposed to aids, poverty, race, etc. that can be segregated to a defined group and the group can be made to suffer. In fact the people that are least compliant, least likely to wear masks, are most likely to feel the pain of this wrathful Covid gd.     

We have made the robots that have taken over and they are corporations with one primal directive: profit over human health, wealth, or security. Corporations globally need to adhere to a new set of rules.

Instead of it's the economy stupid, it's the stupids, stupid. Why would people ignore the dangers of Covid. It's way way too complicated for them to wrap their heads around (e.g. how it's transmitted, etc.)

For decades after the fall of Hitler, Germans had intense shame that they could have followed a fascist into a war a that murdered 6 million+ people and destroyed their country. What needs to happen for Republicans to wake up? Do we need to get invaded by another country? Do we need to go bankrupt? Does everyone need to lose a family member or friend to Covid?

If you make over 100K, your should be thinking about how you can get involved in public governance. Folks are vastly underequipped to step up.  We need to raise wages for elected officials so they are competitive with the best and brightest industries. We need competency over here. 

The idea that normal, everyday people would have to be charged with the idea of remaking society or bringing back the equity of another generation, which was never good, blows my mind.

We are destroying the earth, that much is clear. This is the point at which the smallness of the earth is catching up to us. We have had stupid, pigheaded leaders before, but there was only so much destruction they could wreak.

Towards a new model of global governance. Trump and leaders like him are dangerous to the health and well-being of the world. Simply from a personality characteristic point of view, he would most certainly get us all killed quickly if he or someone like him were to reign despotically for a long time. What are the characteristics of despots and potential despots and how can they be identified early?

We need to make a commitment to stopping global warming in its tracks, whatever the cost, and devising new strategies to live at a high quality of life for a long period of time, including population control.

The lesson from Collapse (Jared Diamond) is not simply that the world could fall apart, but the scale on which it could happen.

We are re-imagining the world and a government ready for the 21st century and not living in the 19th or 20th. We have a 18th century Constitution for a 21st century Republic. Time for a 2.0.

Silence is complicity.

I wish we had a 10-year anti-poverty pledge in Durham that had some teeth.

Take as an assumption that instability has been more common in Human history than stability

So why do we assume that we will get out of this jam of global warming, resource depletion, global governance, war, without new solutions?

Covid has helped me see with a great clarity that the political process is inherently broken, that a governor might decide how many people live or die in a state, based on when they put a stay-at-home order in place or whether they hired more or less contact tracers and testing infrastructure.

(April 2020)

Why don't we have sophisticated contact tracing?

Why don't we know where covid patients live?

What is going to be the result of 2 trillion dollars worth of assistance

Epidemiologist academics have failed us. The industry is engineered to generate papers, not praxis.

Why is there not more (bilingual) community and state-level messaging?