There really is a new normal.
People are working from home more, or at least in a hybrid work mode. Health care workers—including doctors and nurses—are in short supply in places, largely because many walked away, had had enough after weathering Covid.
Workplaces are suffering, or at least the work force is shifting—certain places are thriving, many others never reopened after the quarantine. Online ordering is going through the roof, in part because it’s just easier, but also because there’s less chance of being shot by daring to do business in public at a mall or a fucking Walmart.
Wages are up, way up—at places like Burger King and Dunkin’. But you still need a second job if you want to work full time at a daycare center and work your ass off while taking care of other peoples’ children all day.
The unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been since 1969, but what kind of jobs are being filled?
Teachers are walking away, in part because Covid exposed weaknesses in the system, because Covid exacerbated the behavior and discipline issues, because no one wants to put up with the shit from students and parents and inept administrators. And in part because the younger generations are neglected or really into themselves and don’t have a clue what it means to behave or sacrifice anything.
Certain segments of the airline industry are years away from recovering financially, or so I read. Car dealerships are just now starting to recover, from the standpoint of inventory, though think about it… do we really need to keep cranking out gas-guzzling vehicles and filling the lots with more stuff that depletes raw materials and poisons the air, all the while considering this a sign of… health? We are scarring the land and digging our own graves.
Tradespeople are in short supply, doctors and nurses are in short supply, police officers and fire fighters are in short supply, EMT crews are in short supply, because no one wants to put up with the anger and bad behavior anymore. No one needs that shit. Fewer want to work that hard. There seems to be a looming crisis of selfishness—people are figuring someone else will do it, whatever it is.
People are buying assault weapons because they can, and way too many are using them to kill others, because they are sick and angry and… bored?!?!!
Health care succumbs to the marketplace. Rich people with no ties to local communities, along with big conglomerates with no ties to local communities continue to buy community hospitals and run them into the ground. It’s a big house of cards, wouldn’t take much for the whole thing to implode.
It’s like people had a brush with death, in the form of a pandemic, and have treated it as a wake-up call of some sort—they’ve decided to live life on their terms from here on out, and to hell with a civil society and sense of shared burdens, sense of community. As long as I get mine, whatever that looks like.
Everyone wants an easy life.
3 Cents' 