Where We Are At!

We have been in a struggle against COVID- a world-wide pandemic that attacked us all. And now it has become  endemic in the world we live in. Of course it hits hardest where people are not aware of what was going on. And in too many places it has become politicized. Should I mention China, preferring its own less-effective vaccine, fought it by closing down their economy. Now facing popular protest, they opening up and are letting it kill millions. And when their people travel, and other countries insist on testing them because so many are carrying the virus, the Chinese government is threatening to retaliate. Was Trump’s handling in the beginning any better? It became politicized for narrow political ends. More people died than had to. More people died than should have. Many millions would not have, if we had gotten it right.  

What about global warming, rising seas and those hurricanes, threats to our future because of environmental change?

We know that across the street and just over the horizon there are all those people who are having it much tougher than we are, putting bread on the table, taking care of their kids, struggling to stay alive. We’re not thinking too much about it most of the time because, let’s face it, we have our own row to hoe. We are more than fully occupied.

Then there is Putin and the Ukraine to aggravate matters. Putin becomes the villain we always thought he was with those tricky-Dickie mannerisms and sly smiles, riding a horse bare-chested. Only now he has people riding tanks and throwing bombs and missiles at helpless civilians because he wants to re-establish the Soviet Empire.

Putin knows that Russia is facing a cataclysmic decline in population, with death rates doubling from the aging population and birth rates cut in half among those who can have children. That is why he’s working on kidnapping kids and populations because he’s so concerned about Russia’s aging dynamic. He wanted the Ukraine’s population as much as he wanted their territory.

Claiming he’s in danger from the big bad Americans, (who have proved to the world that they are wimps,) he wants to make sure he has a bigger land barrier between Russia and its neighbors. That includes the countries that used to be Russia’s vassals and are shivering with fright behind a thin line of U.S. soldiers.

Then there is the economic story. Because governments shoveled out money to counter the impact of the pandemic on business, causing an imbalance between what we wanted to buy and the curtailed supply of goods available, (the war in Ukraine, playing its part,) we had the rise of world-wide inflation. Now Central banks are trying to stifle that by raising the cost of borrowing money. We see economic suffering and higher unemployment, reversing the current scarcity of labor. We can expect lots of people will face hardship.

A big problem is that America, the one we have relied on for the last seventy-five years to lead us in doing the right thing, has wimped out in a way we would never have believed possible. America is in a crisis at this moment about who they are.

After World War II Americans organized a conference at a place called Bretton Woods. At the meeting a new world order was established aiming for international free trade. Tariff barriers were eliminated over time with the aim of providing consumers, particularly U.S. consumers, with lowest possible cost for the goods they wanted to buy. The U.S. became primarily a service economy and its industrial base became the Rust Belt. Countries around the world, China and others, became the goods suppliers for western markets.

Now in the 22^nd century we have discovered how vulnerable we are if we are reliant on countries like China and Russia for vital supplies our economies cannot do without.

America is now busy re-establishing some elements of its industrial base and finding reliable suppliers of crucial products. It has become self-sufficient in energy. It has reliable partners in Canada and Mexico, its neighbors. It is turning to other Asian countries for products once supplied from China, and new sources for rare minerals. It is establishing a domestic supplier of computer chips, formerly centered in Taiwan, now under Chinese threat.

Some companies are withdrawing from China because of government threats to their unique technologies. Increasingly Chinese products are under sanction in the U.S. The Chinese government is now concentrating on developing a more self-sufficient Chinese economy less reliant on exports. The world is still dependent on Chinese purchases of products and services.

China is also facing a cataclysmic population decline because of its one-child policy for decades.

So, back to the perplexing present! We are on our way to proving that Trump is the criminal we always thought he was. It’s an agonizingly slow process because America is exposing its ugly underbelly of fascist tendencies and millions ready to turn the county into a dictatorship. How vulnerable are democracies to anti-democratic forces willing to discard it rather than surrender power to the popular will! These forces are now in control of the U.S. House of Representatives. We can expect that productive legislation will be non-existent for the next two years.

We still have to thread our way through our daily grind, preparing food for our crowd, showing up on the job, meeting our crew for walks, exercising, and/or a schmooze. Still wearing a mask just in case, phoning the kids, asking who died, who is sick, who is coming to visit, and where we are going this weekend. We need to stock up on groceries because prices have risen and are rising further.

Maybe I’ll go down to Tim Horton’s and find someone I can  complain to about things! And I used to think of myself as a hero!