Here's What Happened...

 For the past 45 years (or so - no reason to take a specific measurement on it all...), we in America (and, because of the US's soft imperialism of the latter-20th Century, to a lesser extent, the world) have been in a state of civilizational decline.  It's easy to see now, looking back, that this has happened - and I think it's easy to look around our world today and see modern technologies and say "It's Tik-Tok / FaceBook / CRT" or "It's cancel culture / hyper - wokeness / Trump" and these are all, of course, symptoms of the decline, but to think that the symptom is the root cause and the thing to be treated is - well, is essentially modern American medicine under late capitalism, really.

And - i know i know - virtually anyone reading this is now saying, "wait a minute, you can't lump ______ in there with _______", and that's sort of also the point (see my point about writing things from a few weeks ago), but I would say in response that if you find yourself within a civilization in decline, all aspects of it are symptoms of it, not just 'the good ones' or 'the bad ones'.  Decline isn't necessarily a negative thing (I mean, for the civilization or whatever thing it is that is in decline, sure, it's probably not great, but), rather it is always also making space for whatever might simultaneously be arising or entering the emptying space...

But this, here, post is a look back rather than a look forward.

I finished Dan Carlin's book, The End is Always Near, "a couple months ago", and while Carlin's scope is (as always) much grander than my smaller [self]sample here, his take is that our current run as Western Civilization could be coming to a close here any day now...

We've had a pretty good run... whether you start to measure from, say, 1066, and we've been on a roll now for the last 960 or so years, or maybe 1776 and we're about to host our 'quarter of a millennium' party - or maybe the much more closely relevant to me, 1978, and it's halfway to 90!  And don't get me wrong, it's not over (hopefully) for all or most of us, but that word "Near" in Carlin's title has always been a bit squishy.  Nothing seems close, historically, except for the recent past.  A future shift always looks further away than it is.

That "our" moment of historical pre-eminence is at an end or in jeopardy or at least at a crucial moment has been widely accepted (or bemoaned or lauded depending on the perspective) for many and many a now.  From 'the end of the American Century' or the coming (stroke current) Chinese Century to Strauss-Howe's assurance that we're due for a Fourth Turning, there seems some agreement that 'we're due' for something.

It's often tempting, I think, to try reading history as 'tea'leaves' - learning from prior collapses just what might happen next.  We have a shorthand for this in the clichéd aphorism "those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it."  But I tend to think it's a lot more complicated than that - (more of a "history doesn't repeat itself, but it does often rhyme" or Marx's "first as tragedy, then as farce" situation).  

I just finished Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (ikr!?), a book written during our last great Crisis Turning, and while I find Hayek's conclusions quite mystical, I think his read on the structures that are coming to an end and what they might look like coming out of World War II.  It's the difference between predicting 'what is going to happen' (which I don't think tends to turn out very well) and guessing 'what it might be like'.  

I've lived all of my life within an Unraveling and a Crisis Turning - starting with Watergate and Reaganomics and continuing through to 9/11, the Great Recession, Trump and then who knows what's next in the back half of this decade or so... If nothing else, I suspect the next 6 years won't be boring...

We have this narrative narrative desire to make history into something where decisions are made about 'what comes next', and to be sure I think the end of this next Crisis (if it isn't the end of all of it) will be a kind of tipping point - where history might lead us to one of several sorts of underlying superstructures: a new oligarchic royalty; or a next-gen AI authoritarianism (this one seems more likely if quantum computing gets discovered and then owned by one company) or perhaps a new new deal... (so, basically we're looking at Dune, or Terminator, or Star Trek... You Choose!)

Sometimes it seems like all sorts of pseudo-intellectuals are constantly bemoaning the imminent fall to come if ________________ is allowed to occur, but really it's only been that way for the last 45 years or so :(.  A real retrospective perspective will see that it's all just part of a cycle.  The end of this cycle might just end up being quite a bit bigger than the ones we've seen somewhat recently.

This is COVID-2 of COVID-19, not COVID-1...

 I have once again contracted the hottest not so new infection, COVID-19, and similar to my last encounter with the biological assault, I am finding the social ramifications amongst the most noteworthy. 

But first, at the strictly physical level, man this version that I had this time is so much worse than the 2020 model.  I'm feeling okay now (thanks), but these new strains really kick your butt - even your vaxxed and boosted butt...

The confirmation process of "having COVID" has changed a lot - In November 2020, I drove to Miller Park, and sat in my car in in hundreds - of - cars - long line, and had an armored (in PPE, as if for a minor nuclear disaster) health care professional stick a seemingly far - too - long swab up my nose, and collect a sample that would eventually confirm my diagnosis (which was, pre-vaccine, to be sure, a very very minor case).

This time around, when my wife suggested I take a test because I was coughing and sneezing on Friday afternoon, I walked upstairs and grabbed the little box - read through the instructions (this was just the second time I'd taken an at - home test), and set all the bits and bobs out to be ready to take it.

And so I took my test downstairs in the kitchen whilst Brooke was working in our upstairs "home office"* and I stuck a short-ish swab up my nose and rooted around a bit (quite a bit, as the instructions encourage).  And then I was standing there downstairs and I had (one line, two lines? a dot and and a line?) a positive result... And I was like, "oh fuck" [not, to be clear, because I was any longer worried about getting COVID having been vaxxed and boosted^), "I am going to be in trouble with my wife" because her work had specific protocols for close contacts testing positive.

So I thought - I have a choice here... Obviously, I had COVID, but that knowledge was now entirely in my own control.  I didn't report my positive test to the State or Federal government (and didn't have any sense of how to do that if i had wanted to), and it was entirely up to me to whom or whether at all I report this latest contraction...

See, as we enter the post-pandemic phase (and I think the US government is planning to make it official in a couple month's time) and the disease itself is no longer a terrifying and life threatening affair in most cases (at least for those properly vaxxed and boosted) the disease has become a socio-economic one.  Because I am presently working health care adjacent, a positive test necessitates missing work (unpaid) until I secure a negative test.  Similarly, the day I tested positive preceded a week for my wife's work where she was meant to be heading out to several in person events (and not the fun, celebratory kind, but the work your ass off for whomever happens to be in charge of this one kind).

As an earnest and conformist person, I followed the rules, and missed out on a week of work (and also forced my wife to renege on her work obligations... but it easily could have been different had I made a different choice.  I think this has become a common theme for me here, but we seem to be building a culture that is primarily driven by resentment and shame.  When I was back at work a couple weeks later, and telling people why I had been absent, the most common question I heard was "where did you get it!?" (even from people who had had it several times!) as if it were a social shortcoming to have gotten it once again.  As long as this is our collective response to COVID (to ills of all sort, really be they medical, cultural, economic, etc.) those people who 'just have allergies' are going to creep back in to workplaces all over, and we're going to continue to get unhealthier in all sorts of ways...