I have tried keeping politics and current events away from this blog, but since Twitter is no longer an outlet for me, I find myself wanting to express certain things here.
Let's start with a film. Late December I watched a political thriller, The Parallax View, starring Warren Beatty. I strongly recommend it, although the reason I watched it then was that it was leaving Amazon Prime, so you'll have to find it elsewhere.
I won't spoil the film for you, but I have been repeating one episode in it to people when I try to explain my exasperation at the discourse about COVID19 and "going back to normal". In the film, Beatty's character chases someone onto an airplane. He runs from a cab, through the terminal, up the stairs, into the airplane, and only then, after takeoff, does a flight attendant come over to ask him for his name and whether he'd be doing a round-trip or taking them one way. See, back then you didn't need to have pre-paid for a ticket, checked your luggage with your ticket, gone through security, then have your boarding pass checked before you were let on a plane. Planes were a lot more like buses.
Now imagine the following pitch for a new airport design: once we're done with terrorism and airborne smuggling, surely we'll go back to those good old days as expressed in the film above, so let's use the latest in soundproofing technology to allow the gates to be a dozen feet away from departure drop-off, so people can very easily get on the plane. TSA is just a temporary measure, right? Airliner hijackings are a thing of the past, right? We'll go back to normal, and then we can just make things so much smoother.
This may sound ridiculous, but that's exactly how policymakers and business leaders sound when they discuss COVID19. It's all about "going back to normal", "getting people back in the office", dozens of op eds concern trolling about the ills of working from home, the psychological effect of physical separation of children from their classmates - all potentially legitimate concerns, but not comparable to the horrors of suffering from a serious disease or watching classmates, siblings, parents, colleagues, teachers, suffer or perish.
We can't just pretend things are going back to normal. Nothing says that we won't still be dealing with it five years from now. And we'll still only have solutions designed for a world that pretends that this plague doesn't exist.
Imagine a different path. Imagine if, six months into the pandemic, world and local leaders had actually sat down and thought how a functioning society could work while taking this disease into account. We have all these tools that allow us to work and study remotely. We have the constraints that are very acute for parents with children. What could we do with this? Maybe the government could incentivize households to pair up so that work and childcare can be shared. Maybe the office buildings which will no longer consistently hold in-person businesses can instead be used to significantly reduce class counts to make in-person schooling actually safe. Maybe some effort could've gone into modernizing ventilation systems and adding air filtering to classrooms and businesses, and training more healthcare workers to deal with expected surges. Maybe there are better solutions for these and other problems that have come up that I can't even imagine, because I'm a software engineer and RPG crank whose highest academic training was in theoretical physics. But we'll never get there if we keep pretending that this is just a temporary speedbump.
We are beginning Year 3 of the Plague. Let's not pretend it's going to just dissipate. It'll even be economically more sensible long-term to actually adapt instead of constantly pushing off the inevitable by insisting on normalcy and then disrupting this normalcy as case counts make it untenable again.
No comments:
Post a Comment