I forgot to open a new thread yesterday. I'm at work today, so I had the ordinary commute of fifteen minutes instead of the 15 second commute into my library. I'm in today & possibly tomorrow, and then work from home Weds through Friday.

My two days off helped me to clear my head a bit. Processing through this thing has kept my mind racing.

Have you guys read this essay?

Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting

If you have a few minutes, read it. I'd be really interested in discussing it with my BL friends.

Reply to post #1 (show post):
There is a meme going around on FB that asks people to really think about whether the old normal is really worth getting back to and whether this isn't a good opportunity to assess which parts of the old "normal" we really want to get back.
I'm not usually one for memes and FB images, but that one I thought was thought-provoking and asking the right questions.
I am under no illusion, however, that any one will take this time to make that assessment and drive any change, and as the article hints at, I am sure that there will be a powerful drive to revise how people will remember this is time in their lives and in the generations to come.

Reply to post #1 (show post):
Seeing things from Italy I share some of the skepticism of BrokenTune, though for different reasons. Here the pushback against the system that has led to the pandemic being so disastrous seems to be coming from many different groups and people, so it will be difficult to put that genie back in the bottle right away. What I really fear will happen is that the protest might just be used by whatever faction will prevail by screaming the loudest, and then the push to revise history and give people the impression that now problems have been solved will start.

Talking about the US in particular, like that essay does, I get the feeling that a lot of the rewriting the accounts of what happened is already ongoing, mostly out of disbelief. In the last few days has been strange reading Italian media trying to explain half the crap that Trump is pulling as US president. Most of it sounds unbelievable, more like something out of a heavy-handed satire, and I can imagine that people will have issues wrapping their minds around that.

I definitely think that the essay is right about the efforts to gaslight us into getting back to "normal" as quickly as possible. I've also had serious doubts about our ability to run an economy on based on endless growth through over-consumption for years, especially coupled with climate change and the massive inequality that has developed both globally and locally in Westernized economies. Constant consumption of unnecessary schlock is not sustainable in the long run.

We should be asking those questions. And there are some people are asking those questions. Unfortunately, at least in the U.S., we are so politically polarized that even the question - which is frankly non-partisan - is perceived as being a "liberal" question.

I think that we are going to need to depend on individuals to ask the questions, and answer them as individuals as well.

And, yes, here in the U.S., there is a movement to restore BAU (business as usual) in an effort to save our "American way of life." One might think that "American way of life" includes more than just work and consumption, but I have come to the realization that it doesn't. In fact, just calling it "business as usual" is incredibly telling. We don't say "life as usual" or "leisure as usual," after all. America is an economic state, useful for making the wealthy wealthier, nothing more (or less). That's why climate change is ignored, widespread poverty is an individual moral failing not an indictment of the system, and we are all just units of labor divided by the value of our consumption.

Am I cynical? More so every single day.

Reply to post #1 (show post):
Gaslighting seems to have become normal in the US and is being heavily pushed in the UK, so I'm sure the article is right about the push to go back to normal and to re-write history.

But 'Americanism' is only normal for Americans and even then, I think it's only normal for people in the big cities. Reading Sarah Kendzior has left me with the impression that there are lot of people who already feel that they are excluded from and or failed by the old normal.

Our old normals are not the same. Each country thinks something different is normal.

When I lived in Switzerland, I saw Americans coming for their two-year stint at the global headquarters of the world's largest food company and struggling to come to terms with 90 minute lunches, 20 minute commutes and leaving work at 18.00. They would do brown-bag lunches and hang around after quitting time until someone took them under their wing and explained that missing lunch was a sign of failure and not going home to your family was a sign of poor prioritisation.

Working in Germany, I had difficulty persuading colleagues to commute to the next city. The clients mostly wouldn't work on weekends.

I had a client in Denmark where most people cycled to work and many went home for lunch.

Coming to England while based in Switzerland, it was hard to adjust to the day starting late (09.00ish) because the commutes were so long and that people thought lunch was a sandwich and bag of crisps from Pret à Manger.

But there will be a push and perhaps a desire to go back to whatever our old normal was.

I don't think it will happen, for three reasons:

1. The economic damage will make 2008 look like a blip. Banks will strangle lending. Savings will attract no interest. Pension funds will struggle to meet their commitments, The ecosystem niche of small and medium enterprises has been devastated. The big corporations will be cautious in their investment. Retail chains and restaurant chains will target only the more affluent cities.

2. This won't be the last pandemic / global natural disaster. Climate collapse is coming and no country can respond to it alone or survive it by doing only what we do now. The drought is the Western US is not going away. Floods and fires will take out large chunks of land around the world. Coastal erosion and flooding will continue in the UK.

3. Surveillance technology, the move away from cash, and the introduction of AI and Robotic Process Automation feed into a Disaster Capitalism agenda that is aimed at increasing the concentration of wealth, introducing neo-serfdom amongst workers and eroding the power of the state and all forms of international cooperation between states.

I think that some changes are inevitable, I'm just not sure what they will be and when they will take hold.

Is there anyone who seriously thinks that this is the last of these? Because I think we're at the beginning of something entirely new. And I don't want to be overly dramatic, but we've seen so many more viruses transferring from animal to human in the last couple of decades, that I think that this will be an ongoing part of our lives from here forward (and, actually, it's been a part of our lives already - we just haven't really known it because we haven't had a virus that combined lethality with contagiousness in this way before now. It could get much worse, actually.).

Do you (the royal you, question for everyone) think that you will make changes? Do you plan to make changes? What are they?

I can't really wrap my head around what's going on in the US, but things in Canada are particularly shocking and troubling after last weekend.

Mike, I think your post is right on, especially #2.

MR & Mike: Agreed.

ETA: Particularly the part about this not being the last "global" disaster.

Gaslighting is already happening and the masses (in the US) are eating it up and a minority swinging their automatic penises, I mean weapons, around state capitols. I give up on Americans; great experiment, but we are at a point where we are too far gone to make any real change as a society or government. Now I will raise my kids with a new sense of what normalcy can be - that's it.

Char: 15 or 16 crime scenes, I've heard. I don't even know what to say.

I know I will be making more changes so my new normal will be different from the American standard. I am tired.

Reply to post #4 (show post):
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell," Edward Abbey said.

Consumer capitalism depends on continued growth.

I make no secret of the fact that I consider myself a socialist, lower case.

TSR, I will also be making changes, although they are just a continuation and enhancement of the changes that I have been making, since I really started the process about 18 months ago. Right now, what I'm looking for is security, which means that the more money I can stash in savings, the happier I feel. Right now, my income is unaffected. I have no idea how long that will last, though, because I'm a public employee and government receipts are going to be way down. As much as I can save now, I'll have in six months, if I need it.

Linda, at this point, I don't know what I consider myself. I just know that what we are doing now is destructive. Inequality, insecurity and exploitation are features, not bugs, of the current winner-take-all capitalist system practiced in the U.S. (and probably the UK and Australia as well). But many socialist systems also have histories of inequality and brutality.

Certainly you're right about consumer capitalism. And constant growth is unattainable and ill-advised as a goal in and of itself.

I'll need some time to chew over these very thoughtful posts, but I do have a couple of quick thoughts related to Moonlight's OP. I agree that there will be a sustained push to get us back to spending money we don't have on things and services we don't need. But gaslighting is already rampant, from governments, from political think-tanks and their minions, from corporations. Superman may believe in "truth, justice, and the American Way" but that saying has become an oxymoron. Or maybe it always was.

I still watch the president's daily COVID updates, and I do think that the news channels should still show them as long as they continue to include journalists like Weijia Jiang, Paula Reid, and Jeremy Diamond, who ask tough questions, call him on his conflicting and inaccurate statements (ie lies), and refuse to be put off or distracted until the president finally goes into redfaced meltdown mode, babbling incoherencies and heaping grade school insults and abuse on their heads. They need to keep doing this, and airing on TV for all citizens to see him for what he is. Then that footage needs to be aired over and over again leading up to elections to remind us all what happens when we don't take elections seriously and allow them to be hijacked by angry racist nihilists.

As for me, not much will change as long as I have a job and a paycheck. I'm an introvert by nature and not much of a shopper. The biggest impact will likely be that I will have to stay in my current home rather than selling and moving closer to downtown this year as planned, since my company is moving our offices down there. Housing prices here were already on a bit of a bubble, and I'm willing to bet there will be a housing collapse at least similar to 2008, so it's unlikely I'll be able to get enough value out of my house to help pay for a home or condo in town, where a middling one bedroom apartment rents for more than my monthly total mortgage payment. My commute will just increase to 3 1/2 hours round trip. :(