Welcome to New Frontier
This is back to the future time for America.
We look around us and see a broke-down junker that only a few months ago was a well-oiled humming machine.
We thought we had a finely-tuned system spurting out plenty of moolah and broohaha for all.
But within the space of a few months, an invisible invasive monster has changed all that.
Now We turn our masked heads and look around to see what was a reasonably productive national economy that has damn-near stalled out.
So we conduct nonstop public verbiage about how to fix this post-covid wasteland. Our Congress attempts to bail us out with stimulus checks. Even large corporations are begging at the public trough.
There probably isn’t enough of anything to really go around any more, especially that federal reserve liquidity that has for so long greased the wheels of our great fat ’n happy perpetual motion prosperity machine.
Not as perpetual as we thought.
Nope. Now that great fine-tuned set of wheels throttles down to a slow idle while we wait for the big red-light of Covid clearance to turn green again.
People are getting antsy, stir-crazy, hot-to-trot, ready to throw all caution to the wind.
So where the rubber hits the road the terrible reality comes down to this: Widespread debilitation of our institutions due to defunding and large-scale layoffs is epidemic. Recovery will require a widespread renewal of personal responsibility.
We are going to have to wean ourselves from some of our institutional expectations. The days of hot-wired circuits and safety nets are over. Mighty Casey has struck out, the jig’s up, the well’s run dry, the bell has tolled for me and thee, and the ole gray goose is dead. It died of Covid-19.
Peering ahead, around the corner of inconclusive data and through the distant windows of expert directives, I think we find in this new juncture a brave new world:
A world in which we will have to be brave.
We will have to discipline ourselves to step out of our den of entertained comfort, and back into the wild, wild west of real-world uncertainty.
While wearing a mask and keeping distance, no less.
So whatever you need to do to provide for you and yours — just do it. Don’t think of it as an inconvenience or a pain in the arse; think of as it trekking out into a New Frontier.
As a nation, we’ve done this before. We did it back in the 1930’s.
But even before that, before we had all these built-in institutions. governmental safety nets and consumer comforts . . .
Beginning over two hundred year ago, our nation expanded through a grand, 3000 mile frontier. We had no traffic lights to tell us when to stop and go; we didn’t even have any streets! No hospitals, no fast-food, no grocery stores, no drug stores, no twitter, no facebook, no netflix, nor amazon (We did have to cross the Ohio, the mighty Mississippi, the Missouri, the Platt, the Colorado, the Columbia rivers. . . but no bridges!)
Wide open spaces and vast prairies of untilled land were converted, by blood, sweat and tears, into productive resources.
Although the challenges of this present unanticipated phase are very different from that grand 19th-century expansion time, we can — we must! — find a way to enter and pass through the terrible terrain ahead.
Before there were massive agencies and corporations with vast safety nets and padded payrolls, individual citizens had to accept personal responsibility for their own provision and well-being.
Now with governmental budgets bleeding dry, and corporate payrolls thin, with Main Street looking like a ghost town and Big Business as if they had just seen a ghost, citizens will find themselves having to perform without a safety net, having to juggle the budget without a regular paycheck, without that commission or bonus we were counting on. . .
Time for all us couch potatoes and lounge lizards to step up, and step out!
Into the future, into the New Frontier. Let’s make it a Jubilee of cooperative harmony!
So Just Do Now whatever is necessary and legal to provide for you and your people. Step up your Personal Responsibility to offset the shortfall of Institutions.
Just Do It! as Michael Jordan would say.
But keep in mind that 3-pointer we’ve been practicing; it’s most likely the arc shot that will pull this game out of the defeat column for us:
Six feet apart — or six feet under.
Don’t be a dope. Grab the soap.
No need to ask,wear your mask.
