Amazon is sold out of toilet paper and the Boston Marathon is postponed.
The president has declared a state of emergency and there are calls to close NYC's schools. The Met is closed--as is the MFA in Boston.
I am about to get an up-close and personal experience of what my dogs lives are like.
I am glad we* are all taking a proactive approach to the prevention
of the spread of Corona Virus. However, I am worried about which measures adopted
in crisis may become normal business activities.
Not all of these are bad things—companies adopting paid sick
leave policies are long overdue and any steps we take toward providing universal
healthcare are also good.
My concern is with other things—crisis measures adopted that
”prove” that whatever services are withheld or replaced were never really necessary.
I’m worried about in-person classes. It’s great that we can offer distance
learning so that students (from grade school to grad school) do not have their education
thoroughly disrupted, but these are not replacements for in-person classes in
the same room as the other students and the professor.
Museums and libraries are closing as a way to stop
infections—this does not mean that we don’t need museums and libraries.
The City of NY has banned gatherings of more than 500
people. As a stopgap to disease spread this is a great idea, but this does not mean
that we do not “need” the ability to gather more than 500 people in one place
ever again.
It is a good thing for the moment to allow hospitals to
relax rules on where they can treat patients, but in the long run this is a
terrible idea—this is why rules about this were set up in the first place.
Working from home—It’s awesome that we are now in a position
(technologically) where many of us can work from home. Is it a good thing that
this proves that many jobs don’t need in person attendance? I love getting back
3 hours a day because I don’t have to commute, but this plan relies on employees
using their own internet service and their owns phones and their own second
monitor—there’s a lot of BYOD** in there. I am also worried that this will “prove”
to cities and states that they don’t need to invest in infrastructure such as
public transit or highways as this crisis proved we all could work from home.
Crises are times when we need to try out new ideas (because
the old ones don’t work—see also “Crisis”) some of these innovations are leaps
forward that never would have been
possible in normal times (think of all of the surgical advances made during the
Civil War.) Crises are also a chance for the powers that be to erode our civil liberties or present us with reality TV.
*in this case “we” means our corporate maters
**SAHAUYOD (Stay At Home And Use Your Own Devices)
**SAHAUYOD (Stay At Home And Use Your Own Devices)
