The Great Unleveler

You might think that a pandemic would be a great leveler -- after all, viruses don't care who are what you are. But I spend a lot of time thinking about how Covid19 is going to be a Great Stratifier. And even that highlights and emphasizes divisions. I've commented previously about how it's clear that there are at least three--let's call it four--classes with regard to employment (with a number of subclasses depending on personal situation): those who are able to continue their regular jobs working from home (with variation for learning curve); those who have "non-essential" jobs that cannot be done remotely and so are unemployed against their will; those who have "essential" jobs that cannot be done remotely and so are unable to quarantine; and I'll add a variant of that last category, those who have "essential" jobs that put them in direct contact with infected people and so put them at much higher risk than otherwise.

But that's just the immediate un-leveling. There's also the long-term that operates both on a personal and an institutional level: those whose professional/financial life is unaffected by The Current Unpleasantness, who can ride it out and come out of it essential in the same place; those whose employment (whether self-employed or via an employer) is badly damaged or even destroyed by the long-term shutdowns; and those who--as always--find a way to profiteer off the current social and financial disruptions. I think a lot about that last category and how badly our society is structured to control them or call them to account. We've seen it in the stock market insider trading by politicians with advance access to information on how bad it was going to be. We see it in the businesses being given favorable treatment by corrupt administrations (at all levels) so they can push all the risk onto their employees and customers while jacking up profits. We see it in the way big corporations have pillaged the funding intended to support small businesses during the shutdown. We see it in the way essential services and supplies that should be managed by the government are handed off to middlemen. And we've gotten used to this sort of corruption being "normal" because the institutions that should be calling profiteers to account are instead working hand in hand with them.

There's the un-leveling of the genders because so much of the moment-to-moment maintenance of households that could be outsourced (thus participating in class-based un-leveling) now must be done solely within the household, and as always, the majority of that labor is both gendered as feminine and utterly discounted as economically valuable.

There's the un-leveling of resources among students, as inequities of family resources (communication equipment, parental coaching, etc.) widen gaps that communal public schooling are, in part, intended to address. There's the un-leveling among households depending on how many extra functions the adults need to take up, which impacts how able they are to focus on long-term career activities.

At every step of the way, rather than being a "leveler," the pandemic and resulting quarantine is fracturing the systems intended to provide more equal opportunities. The most effective government actions to address the crisis boil down to "more socialism". I hope we could learn the lesson that, to make ourselves stronger and more able to face a similar crisis in the future, we need to strengthen and normalize those socialist solutions, but what I'm afraid will happen is a backlash, where "getting back to normal" means calling for the dismantling of even programs that have been wildly successful.

I think about this a lot, and my place in it. Because at every step of the way, except for profiteering, I'm in the privileged group. And that means my understanding of the long-term consequences of the pandemic is mostly intellectual. And I'll be in danger of coming out of it thinking, "Well, that wasn't so bad, was it?"

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Saturday I finished the last details of the automated watering system, and since I had to go to Home Depot to get some relevant equipment, I also filled in the last couple of empty spots in the vegetable beds with a variety of eggplants. I do have three beds currently unused, but those are the ones where I want to seriously tackle the Bermuda grass before planting anything. And for now I want to relax about the yardwork for a little while and move on to other projects.

I'm in the process of doing my first real bread batch with Sourdough Sara, as well as finding easy things to do with the starter discard. It means I'm eating a bit more starch than usual and I'd like to back off on that a bit once I have the rhythm of the culture maintenance figured out. So far the discard has made crumpets, waffles, and pancakes.

I keep promising myself to do a serious session of editing all the podcast recordings I currently have in hand, rather than scrambling at the last minute. In theory, I could get all of May set up today if I make it my priority. I also need to do an author newsletter (skipped last month) and post the new releases mini-reviews on Patreon for the last couple months. Those are tasks that don't actually have hard deadlines, but I feel like clearing them off my plate would let me move forward with other stuff.

I took a load of groceries over to Stockton yesterday late afternoon. Chatted for a while, but couldn't stay as long as I'd like because the coffee I'd had on the drive over was taking the express route through my system and I didn't want to undermine the whole social-distancing thing by going in the house to use the bathroom. Generally I like the habit of swinging by the Starbucks drive-through on the way out of Concord for that drive, but I guess I should skip it in the future.

I keep thinking how this slower, laid-back, nesting sort of life would be more enjoyable with someone to share it with, but that's a different highway than the one I ended up on.