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Four years ago, a respiratory virus out of China was dubbed COVID-19, and quickly spread around the world.
Nearly everything changed in the wake of this. Egregious violations of American civil liberties, with hundreds of thousands of small businesses permanently shuttered and untold numbers of lives destroyed, were just the start. There are many candidates for “worst” aspect of the wreckage left in its wake, but my vote would go to President Biden’s September 9, 2021 speech wherein he informed Americans that his “patience is wearing thin.” The President of the United States informing Americans that they must submit to having their bodies penetrated with a medical instrument to receive an injection of his choosing, like it or not, was enough to make me decide that I would never get vaccinated. Period. The government can try, if they’d like. In my case, at least, if they send cops door-to-door, a scenario Sam Harris is so fond of describing in masturbatory detail, they’d better have guns.
Speaking of that particular Presidential address—Megan McGlover had the best response imaginable, and I will be grateful to her forever. (You should click and watch that — it’s short, and hilarious, — but the language is not for little ones.)
Four years on, many things have changed, and it’s starting to look like some of the changes are permanent: a true “new normal.” Recently I’ve observed three aspects of new normal that I want to chronicle here, simply because it’s important that we not forget. Things were not always this way and they don’t have to continue to be this way.
Formerly Functional Systems Becoming Unreliable
Most of the people I’m closest to live far enough away that their Christmas presents are getting mailed. So far, here’s the consequences of mailing:
A package from Vermont to Massachusetts took a Florida vacation first, requiring nine days to get one state over.
Two packages to the San Juan Islands of Washington State, that were mailed at the same time, arrived together, and went “Out for Delivery” together were delivered thusly: one on the promised date, the other two days later. Perhaps the second package requested to spend time in the truck for extra sightseeing?
A package to Tennessee that was mailed from Vermont on December 6, with a promised delivery date of December 11, just left New Hampshire this morning, on the 10th.
If it gets there by Thursday or Friday, I will consider myself lucky.
I’ve mailed five Christmas boxes so far, of which three have had difficulties of this sort, one arrived on time, and one appears to be on track for arriving on time—we’ll see. Either I have abominably bad luck or the post office is quickly becoming unreliable in the extreme.
Kafkaesque Nightmares of Digital Dead-Ends
I’m applying for jobs, in search of a new opportunity. Many companies use a platform of software called Workday. When applying on Workday, if you don’t fill out required aspects, you can’t advance. I’ve been running into this problem (the same problem each time, with several companies, and from several browsers on two devices, so the problem is definitely with Workday, not on my end or that of the companies using it).
I have to put in my degree. I cannot advance without doing so. But I cannot put in my degree, because the drop-down is malfunctioning.
There’s no way to contact Workday, and in most cases no way to contact the company with the listing. All links on their “Careers” pages just go to their workday jobs site.
All I can do is wait for a sufficient number of companies to figure out that they’re getting fewer applications than they think they should and contact Workday, and then for Workday to figure out that the problem is on their end — which is going to take a long time. Workday is notorious for believing their software to be perfect and reacting to any suggestion of imperfection with snark about the stupidity of the companies and end users.
So the one thing that would make my current (extremely stressful, depressing, and extraordinarily difficult) work situation easier to bear — knowing that I was doing everything possible to save myself from it — is unavailable to me.
New Normal.
Kids, For Whom New Normal Is Just Normal
This one is tragic.
I employ a 16-year-old neighbor to run errands for me. My bad shoulder makes things like shoveling my car out or carrying groceries upstairs extremely difficult, and he’s a responsible, bright boy who is reliable and eager to earn money. He’s got fabulous parents—the kind of sensible people who don’t let their kids have smartphones until age 16, even if the kids can pay for them.
I send him with a list and with back-up choices for almost every item, because the unreliability of stores to keep inventory means that finding everything I want is a rarity. This morning he went to two stores for me. I like the Wal-mart brand of seltzer water, and he looked for the other things on my list there, even though the need for fresh vegetables (our local Wal-mart is not a supercenter) meant he would definitely be going to the grocery store, too. We were texting because one of my items was not available — and neither were either of my backups.
We had this exchange (I’ve blacked out his name):
When he got to my apartment, we talked. He, as his text implies, thought I was kidding.
An American child, age 16, has no concept of an America in which going to only one store, with a list of only first choices, is normal.
To him, having backup choices, and backups for the backups, and going to multiple stores, is just normal life.
Think about that. How will people his age ever appreciate the miracle of capitalism? How will they ever properly appreciate what the push for socialism risks destroying?
Conclusion
We may never get old normal, or anything like it, back. I hope I’m wrong. I hope we find a way. But it’s important that we not give up on the possibility. That we not forget.
New Normal is not the way it has to be.
Old normal was good, and we should be fighting to get it back.
I am waiting. I have not forgotten.
About Me and My Substack: I’m a data scientist whose great love is mathematics, but I also enjoy writing. My posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.
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Ha! You just previewed my next column. COVID broke or exposed a lot. None good.
How do civilizations crumble? Slowly at first, then all of a sudden.