When My Library Closed Four Years Ago

If we're looking back to four years ago:

March 17th 2020 was a Tuesday night, and I work the evening shifts at my library those Tuesdays. That meant I have a desk turn at the Information desk, which also doubles as the checkout desk. There's often two of the part-time Library Assistants working the shift with me: one on desk and the other performing book processing, special project works, or reshelving.

The library itself was rather quiet. The COVID-19 pandemic had gone global back in January and by February we were seeing the signs in Florida. One interesting thing to note was how most our patrons (library users) are seniors from the surrounding retirement communities, and a lot of them had already begun sheltering at home well before March as the early reports had COVID being near-fatal to older people.

It may have been quiet but I had been busy all day, handling administrative duties as our Library Director position was vacant since 2018 (My previous experience as head of a library in another county did not go well, so I took it as a temp). I recall working on collection management of one of the non-fiction ranges, and then prepping for a One-On-One tutorial session (duties as the Reference Librarian) that ended up cancelling (they weren't sick, I remember that, they just didn't want to risk it).

When I started my desk shift at 5:00PM, I checked my work emails. I had two: Library and City. The Library email kept up with staff's last-minute schedule changes, any reports for what our Children's Librarian was lining up for that June's Summer Reading Program, notifications about patron complaints, in-house stuff. The City email was for the directorial duties to the city's operations, any notifications from the Manager, reports from the City Clerk, administrative stuff. The library system for the county used a different network than the city, hence the separate emails.

So it wasn't until 5:20PM when I got to the email from the City Manager's office sent at 4:00PM that everything was shutting down citywide due to the pandemic at 5:00PM.

/headdesk

<--- always the last to know

I told my part-timers as soon as I read that email. We roamed the library floors informing any remaining patrons - there were two on computers, a mother and child in Children's shelves, one reading in the Magazines area, nobody upstairs - that the library had to close early that night. One of the assistants checked the book drop while I worked on signage for the front doors, and then sent emails to all the staff about our work situation the next morning (library was closed to public, staff still had to work).

We had been expecting something about closing down. Other city libraries - we have a cooperative system, the cities manage their own library - had already closed a week or two prior. Those were the small libraries, with few staff - some of whom had caught COVID ergo the closings - on hand. They had every reason to close earlier in the month.

Thing about a library: we were... are a public facility, with hundreds of people going in and out all day, a pandemic hotspot, one of the worst places a virus could spread. As federal and state emergency agencies were begging elected officials to do the right thing, it was just a question of when, and that Tuesday afternoon was it for us.

By the time we finished locking up and shutting down, it was after 6:00PM. I remember standing in the parking lot, staring at the library and then circling around at everything else - a city lake behind the library, the little league ballpark across the street, the civic center just a ways over, one of those retirement communities to the far side of the ballpark, all part of a small quiet town in the middle of Florida - and just wondered what the hell was going to happen next. There was nobody else outside, even at sunset there were usually families in the surrounding neighborhood walking around the parks but not that night. Everyone was at home (or the grocery stores raiding whatever toilet paper was left), everyone was waiting for the next terrifying thing.

The day after we got instructions from our city's Emergency team - the firefighters did double-duty on that - about how we had to clean our workplaces, perform daily check-ins for fever and cough, required masking even as we were closed to the public. The plan - the hope - was to reopen to the public by late April, depending on how we could restructure the library to cut down on viral spreads.

We transferred everything we had on hold to Books-by-Mail as best we could. We started book pickups for drive-thru to the front door. We wiped everything down with cleaning solutions as much as possible. We dealt with co-workers calling in sick - some with COVID itself - though thankfully we never shared an outbreak amongst ourselves. We obeyed the recommendations and performed our duty to the library patrons.

That was four years ago. Everything changed, and some of it didn't get better.

Especially as trump - driven by ignorance, desperate to restart a shut-down economy to avoid making himself look bad, and unable to project any semblance of calm leadership - kept getting worse as COVID got worse.

But that's for another time.

Four years ago, everything for me shut down.

Better Off Now

It's a question that comes up every Presidential election cycle whenever there's an incumbent running for a second term: "Are you better off now than four years ago?"

The party in opposition tends to ask that question to highlight how "terrible" the current President is, while the incumbent party asks it while pointing to any signs of economic, social, or international standing improvements.

It's a question we're getting now, as it becomes official that Joe Biden is the Democratic candidate and donald trump - who was President Loser of the Popular Vote four years ago - is the challenger looking to unseat Biden by claiming we are worse off today.

It's not a smart move by trump or his Republican allies to ask, however: Exactly four years ago the entire planet was in a terrible crisis with a global COVID-19 pandemic crashing into everything - the economy, our society, our health care system, our schools, our families - and leaving us scrambling for basic necessities like toilet paper.

And it was exactly four years ago this March 13th when donald trump went before the national media and declared he "wasn't responsible for anything at all."

#FourYearsAgoToday https://t.co/zyP3iW6bNv

— Emily L. Hauser @emilylhauser.bsky.social 🟣 (@emilylhauser) March 14, 2024

What I wrote back in March 2020 right after that press conference:

So for this Friday, in order to present himself as in charge and in control, trump scheduled a big televised press conference, timed exactly just as the stock markets were closing... just so he could end up showing how little control he had and even worse openly admit he was in charge of nothing...

"I'm not taking any responsibility at all." Doesn't matter what he's avoiding responsibility for, the fact that he's AVOIDING responsibility ought to anger every American living and past...

So here comes trump, facing a global pandemic health care crisis that requires bold thinking, getting out ahead of the problem, staying in touch with all players to make sure things get done properly and to the good of all.

Unfortunately, trump's spent the last three years dismantling the government systems, understaffing agencies if not outright sabotaging them. Redirecting efforts towards projects that won't help in this crisis or any other. He oversaw the dismantling of a National Security panel tasked with coordinating pandemic responses, which left much of the federal and state agencies in the dark on who was in charge during the first months of this crisis (starting back in December 2019).

trump's response to all of this? Shifting blame on Obama instead of admitting his own involvement. Arguing that it's Obama's fault there's not enough test kits for this crisis when it should have been something trump's administration ordered done the minute it became clear - mid-January - that the coronavirus was going global. Like Obama would have known back in 2016 this particular virus was going to erupt three years after he left office.

"I'm not taking any responsibility at all."

THIS was where our nation was at four years ago. Four long stressful years ago, when the months of March and April felt like years themselves.

A President takes an oath of office "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States;" and yet four years ago there was trump refusing to faithfully execute his duties, refusing to take charge of a national emergency requiring leadership. Not doing his best at all except shift the blame on everybody else.

And now here's trump back again, running again for a job he didn't do right the first time around, trying to gaslight and bully and steal his way back into the White House. Not because he wants the responsibility - he never wants that - but because he needs that office's legal immunity to keep his ass out of prison.

So are we better off now, four years later?

Four years later, we have a President in Joe Biden who's doing his best to oversee an ongoing struggle with COVID's continued presence, to where the pandemic shifted into a shamefully tolerable endemic to where most Americans try to keep up with vaccines and ignore the relatively high annual death count we've come to accept as normal.

Four years later, we have a President Joe Biden who undid most of the damage of trump's tariff wars with our global trading partners: A tariff fight that negatively affected our own economy and one that trump will insist on restarting should he regain the Presidency.

Four years later, we have a President Joe Biden who restored America's international standing with our allies, who is trying to support Ukraine's fight against an invading Russian force - something a majority of Americans support - while trying to manage the bloodshed of the Israeli/Hamas war that's disrupting the Middle East. All of which trump would undo in a reckless raging heartbeat.

Four years later, we have a President Joe Biden who's presiding over one of our nation's greatest financial recoveries; with a thriving economy where employment rates are at their best, wages for lower- and middle-income workers are going up, where inflation is currently at an ebb, and a lot of it tied into Biden's signature infrastructure bill.

Four years later, we have a President Joe Biden who will not avoid or ignore the responsibilities of the office the way donald trump did.

How's that answer, Republicans?

Vote four more years of Joe Biden, thank you.

DeSantis as Bully and Panderer to Hate

Update: Many thanks to Driftglass for adding this article to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. Please do me a favor and help me figure out which blog pieces I should submit to the FWA Royal Palm Literary Awards, thank ye.

There was a time I felt there was no way any human being could be worse as Florida Governor than Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott, who bought and bullied his way into office back in 2010 and immediately mismanaged the state through ignorance and greed.

And then Ron DeSantis showed up.

This week alone revealed how bullying, callous, sadistic, and craven DeSantis can be.

First, DeSantis openly called to permanently block any pandemic prevention efforts that the federal government may mandate in the future (via Steve Contorno, Kit Maher and Chris Boyette at CNN):

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis called on state lawmakers to make permanent existing penalties for companies that require all employees get the Covid-19 vaccination, his latest move to curtail pandemic mitigation efforts.

The proposal would extend indefinitely measures DeSantis signed in 2021 that made Florida the first state in the country to threaten businesses with fines if they required workers to get the Covid-19 vaccine. Those measures pitted DeSantis and Florida against the federal government over President Joe Biden’s efforts to get the country’s workforce inoculated – a standoff that helped boost the Republican governor’s popularity among conservatives.

Now, as DeSantis considers running for president, he is re-instigating that battle.

This time, DeSantis has encouraged skepticism of Covid-19 vaccines altogether, staking out a position far to the right of his top potential rival for the GOP nomination, former President Donald Trump, who continues to count the development of the vaccines as one of his administration’s chief accomplishments...

In addition to proposing permanent prohibitions on strict mask and vaccine mandates, DeSantis also wants to prevent doctors from losing their medical license if they stake out positions that contradict medical consensus. During Tuesday’s event in Panama City Beach, DeSantis welcomed to the stage a local dermatologist who has spread unsubstantiated Covid-19 conspiracies on Twitter...

In other words, DeSantis wants to allow uncertified, decertified, and unqualified "medical experts" to shill anti-vaccination conspiracy bullshit to scare the uninformed away from Covid vaccines that honestly work. This is how DeSantis hopes to win over the QAnon audience away from trump. In the process, he's willing to spread bad information that can get people killed.

Then, DeSantis issued an order to cancel high school programs offering AP African-American classes, claiming they offered no "educational value," all part of DeSantis' attacks on anything teaching our teens about racism as "Woke". From Abene Clayton at the Guardian:

Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, has rejected a new advanced placement course in African American studies from being taught on high school campuses. He argues that the course violates state law and “lacks educational value”.

This move is the latest in a series of actions to keep conversations and lessons about race, sexuality and gender identity off the state’s school campuses.

DeSantis officially banned the course in a letter from the state education department to the College Board, the organization that administers college readiness exams like the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). They also oversee advanced placement (AP) courses, which allow students to earn college credits in subjects like English and chemistry.

In the summer of 2022, the College Board announced a pilot program to “offer high school students an evidence-based introduction to African American studies” would be launching in 60 high schools across the country during the 2022-23 school year and will be set to expand to other campuses the following year.

“Like all new AP courses, AP African American Studies is undergoing a rigorous, multiyear pilot phase, collecting feedback from teachers, students, scholars and policymakers,” the College Board said in a statement.

DeSantis, a one-time Donald Trump ally, plays an active role in stoking social and political anxieties, primarily among white Americans, that stem from conversations about race and gender that occur on K-12 public school campuses. In April 2022, he signed the Stop Woke Act, which severely limits “race-based” discussions at schools...

If DeSantis wants to shut down any AP program - which has educational value by encouraging student research, debates on topics, and college-level study that all earns high schoolers college credit for passing the tests - he better be ready to shut down AP American History. When I took that in high school, AP American covered the factual history of slavery, racism, the causes of the Civil War, the rise of Jim Crow segregation, and the Civil Rights movement. 

This is Republican DeSantis: Refusing to let history be real about the damage racism has done to America, and relying on hitting us all over the head with comforting White Affluence lies.

And this afternoon, it's reported that DeSantis is demanding the public universities give him information on which college students are transitioning genders (AP News via the NBCNews website):

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is asking state universities for the number and ages of their students who sought or received gender dysphoria treatment, including sex reassignment surgery and hormone prescriptions, according to a survey released Wednesday.

Why he’s conducting the survey wasn’t completely clear. DeSantis has been criticized by LGBTQ advocates for policies seen as discriminatory, including banning instruction on sexual and gender identity in early grades and making it easier for parents to remove books related to the topic in public schools.

The survey is similar to one the governor is forcing state universities to complete regarding spending on diversity, equity and inclusion and critical race theory programs.

The current memo asks universities to “provide the number of encounters for sex-reassignment treatment or where such treatment was sought” as well as data for students referred to other facilities. It says to protect students’ identities when completing the information.

The survey requires a breakdown by age, regardless of whether the student is age 18 or older, of people prescribed hormones or hormone antagonists or who underwent a medical procedures like mastectomies, breast augmentation or removal and reconstruction of genitals...

One would think that there are federal laws in place - such as HIPAA - that protects individuals' privacy rights regarding their health care treatment.

But this is DeSantis as bully, running roughshod over the rules and regulations in order to score political points with a rabid religious Republican voting base eager to expose, embarrass, and even arrest trans and gay people for simply existing.

If these universities want to curry favor - and not lose any state funds - they will find ways to disclose the information DeSantis wants, and then those poor adults - college students are 18 and thus adults - are going to suffer harassment, discrimination, or worse. Considering most of the college boards and presidents are political appointees, they are beholden to DeSantis and the Far Right already.

This is all happening because the Republicans are obsessed with Culture War bullshit. All because DeSantis wants to out-pander trump in the 2024 Republican Race to prove who can be more sadistic.

Cruelty is not only the point with DeSantis, it's his goddamn campaign strategy.

I Survived Orlando MegaCon 2022, I Hope

It's been awhile since I've done one of these blog reports from the cosplay front lines, hasn't it?

A major reason has been, well, from 2020 until now it's been insanely unsafe to host a massive crowded shindig due to this little thing called the COVID-19 GLOBAL PANDEMIC. Skipping 2019 may have been by choice - I recall that year there were no major celebrities that interested me to attend - but 2020 and 2021 were not.

Even going to THIS year's MegaCon ran the risks because 1) Not everyone is yet vaccinated, especially in Florida and 2) There is yet another uptick in COVID cases due to a new variant spawning again.

And yet, even with the vax and the boosts, even with some assurance that if I do catch COVID it - knock on wood - won't be dangerous to me (I have several health risks, I decided this year to go.

So hold onto yer steampunk hats, kiddos, there's a ton of photos and videos to document the atrocities!

Just because 90 percent of the attendees weren't masked,
didn't mean I had go unmasked. I'm still trying to observe
the niceties, thank you.

 This year's MegaCon was not at the West Concourse but the North/South building. It made for an odd alignment of space - the middle area for the vendors and artists/celebrities, the North Concourse for certain events and promotions, and the South Concourse for cosplaying and other events - meant you had to run back and forth if you wanted to partake of one event and then another.

The line to get in, after the outdoor line to get tickets, which
this year involved getting a sensor badge for some reason, and involved
jumping through 5-8 more hoops than usual to get things verified.

Always taking pictures of the escalator lines to show the variety
of cosplay at work. Saturdays are the big costume contest days,
so LOTS of cosplay...

It's R2-D2!
Always rolling the comic con like a pimp.

The local Lego fan club setup with their models and
cityscapes, complete with working trains!

The cosplay area on the Third Floor of the South Concourse.
One of the hardest parts of the con to reach, and difficult
to walk through once it got packed with cosplayers.

One of the many cosplay groups - this one the DC villains
(with maybe Beast Boy?).

The Lego room got busier as the day progressed.

One of the big draws of any Con: The celebrity autographs
and photo lines. It's difficult to even get close enough in these lines
to see who the celebrity is, for this line it's Dante Brasco!
(pause) Zuko. (pause) You never watched Avatar? NO, NOT 
THE ONE WITH THE GIANT CAT SMURF ALIENS.
(sigh) Rufio from that Robin Williams
Hook movie, okay?

 This was around 12:00 PM. Saturdays are usually the busiest of any weekend Comic Con.

In a nice personal surprise, I had found out my nephews
Tommy (right) and Drew (middle) had gotten their own tickets to attend MegaCon
on their own (they are now in college!!!) (Guy on the left is Drew's friend Garrett).
I had worried that I had dragged them to the Tampa Bay Con years ago,
but it turns out they liked the experience and wanted to visit the Orlando
one. Nephew Drew (middle) is even in cosplay this time, can you guess
which character/movie he's cosplaying?

Back up at the Third Floor Cosplay Zone,
this time all the Scarlet Witches are gathered
to promote THE MULTIVERSE!!!

You don't see that many winged cosplay, so when I saw that
redbird outfit I rushed to get a picture from the escalator.
I should have gone back around to get a closer pic.

All that walking since 8:30AM and by 2:30PM I was a mess.
Dammit, MegaCon, where are the benches
to help a tired old fart rest???

There weren't that many Q+A sessions this year, so this one by
Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti was a treat!

Taken by 6:30PM, as I was waiting for the
Jay and Silent Bob show at 7:30PM.
This is where most of the Con begins to shut down
for the day... and half of everybody was
heading out before the thunderstorms rolled in!

One of the draws this year was an evening performance by Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes, better known as Jay (Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith). It's something my brother Phil enjoys, so I offered to buy him a ticket for the evening event. There were headaches involving the reality the special event was separate from the comic con, but I got them straightened out by the time Phil showed up at the door. Still this was more complicated than it needed to be, con organizers... 

Brother Phil, proof of life that he was here for
the chronicles of Bluntman and Chronic!

One of the pains of any comic con: The waiting is the hardest part. Coordinating scheduled events to cope with any emergencies - or the overwhelming size of crowds that packed MegaCon as a return to post-pandemic normalcy - meant the scheduled start of the show (7:30PM) didn't happen. The autograph lines for the View Askew 'Verse cast - especially for Smith and Mewes - were longer than expected, so they were caught wrapping that up so as not to offend those fans. But that meant the fans at the show were stuck.

This was actually the cleanest the restless crowd had gotten during
the hour-long wait. When you got a crowd that grew up on 30 years
of dick and pot jokes, some of the antics could get pretty risque.

The MegaCon organizers did what they could to appease the masses, with a couple of giveaway contests and a brief trivia quiz that surprisingly stumped a lot of people. But finally, after the autographs were done... Jason had to go pee and Kevin had to go unwind (let's just say it was a herbal relaxant and keep it at that, trust me it was for medicinal purposes!). THEN, we finally got the show we waited for.

Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith!
(pause) OH CMON YOU HAD TO HAVE SEEN
MALLRATS BY NOW!!!

As always, it was Kevin spending half the night extolling his fellow Hollywood celebs and being a genius storyteller (some people have a fcking knack for it), with the second half of the show turned into a Jay and Silent Bob script read for a comic short story, where they brought up volunteers to use weird-ass voice impressions. All I can tell about that is one guy voiced his character like Forrest Gump to huge laughs, the woman voice did a decent Southern drawl, a second guy did a brilliant Scottish brogue, and then they called up a third guy who, Gods help us, nailed a Walken impression for the ages. IT BETTER BE ON THE DAMN PODCAST, KEVIN.

By then, it was 10:30PM, long fcking day, I dropped Brother Phil off at the hotel - he was sticking around for a Sunday breakfast with the nephews - and I braved the I-4 traffic to make it home and feed the kittehs.

Actually surviving the whole day, getting home by 12:05AM
just so Mal could hit me in the face with his tail.

There ye have it, fair mortals. What do ye think?

Should I brave the Tampa Bay Comic Con later this August (That is, if I haven't caught COVID at this one? We'll see in 5-12 days...)?

 

Still In a 2016 Nightmare, Searching for a Wakeup Call in 2022

Saw this on Twitter today from Emma Lord (the Tumblr is from Deadnightguard but I can't find the original post so):

this tumblr post deserves to be put in history textbooks pic.twitter.com/FNf8NgwZNk

— emma lord (@dilemmalord) January 18, 2022

And GODDAMMIT THE WHOLE THING MAKES SENSE.

Looking back, everything went to hell the moment donald trump came down that escalator to a paid crowd announcing his Presidential campaign.

I mean, we can look back at when it happened in June 2015, the sheer madness of it seemed like it would quickly go away like a bad fart. I can still remember how Rude Pundit described the scene (seriously NSFW). I can't even sharequote from that, as brilliant as it was, due to the sheer vulgarity. Not from Rude's vivid descriptions, but from the reality that trump himself WAS THAT VULGAR to begin with.

And yet, the absurdity of trump never dissipated. Lacking any political record to run on, he ran on himself, his own racism and sexism and vulgar consumption. trump overwhelmed the election cycle, running on the sheer fact that the mainstream media - some of them controlled by his closest allies like Jeff Zucker, who turned out to share trump's sexism and amorality - gave him free coverage 24/7 that he fed from like a soul vampire.

Everything in my life still feels like it's been on hold since 2016, since that dark election result where Hillary still won the Popular vote but the Electoral vote was rigged in favor for trump. I can't be the only one who feels this way, even in 2022. Even with trump officially out of power, even with Biden sitting in office trying to get this nation back on track.

All because trump hasn't gone away. The remnants of his January 6th Coup Attempt haven't ended, the ongoing investigations revealing just how deep the rot sank into trump's White House, trump and his allies are still threatening to call out for more violence, and the Republican Party is pretty much running on this madness for their 2022 Midterms (and beyond).

None of that madness is going to end until trump himself is in handcuffs for his criminal bullshit, and even then THAT will trigger the Far Right violence we can all sense is right there on the edge of our nightmares.

Thing is, we dare not look away. We dare not pretend we can avoid that nightmare. We dare not - not as a nation, not with the danger to our individual rights - ignore the Far Right Fascist storm that's coming. 

We may be stressed out by six (or seven) years of trumpian disaster, but the disaster isn't over and it's threatening to get worse. We need to steel ourselves, prepare for the moment when destiny stares us in the eye, and we have to stand up and keep everything that's right about America - our families, our friends, our personal honor, our best selves - from getting taken away or burned in the firepits of fascism. 

It's all hard work. But our liberty and our rights are worth fighting for. Thomas Paine told us that centuries ago:

THESE are the times that try men's souls.

The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

Those lessons have not changed. Our rights as Americans - our need to express ourselves by vote, by voice, by conviction, by community - are still a celestial good, and dare not let it get stolen by that Eternal Grifter trump.

Tories Partied Like There Was No Tomorrow...

...and for Boris Badhair, there might not be a tomorrow the rate the current scandals are overtaking his UK government.

When last we left the United Kingdom/Brexit news (my last full comment on it was 2019): Boris Johnson had pulled off an electoral stunner over Labour in spite of his unpopularity, and was poised to make a hard No-Deal exit from the EU to fulfill his dream of an economically-independent UK happen. 

What happened since then got a little overwhelmed by this minor inconvenience of a COVID-19 PANDEMIC, but since then the news about the UK's economic hardships piled up fast and often. Some of it tied to the overall economic hardships of surviving a global pandemic, but a lot of tied to Johnson's and his fellow Conservatives' (Tories) delusions about how to pull off their Brexit policy changes without hassles. (P.S. If you want better details, please follow Chris Grey's excellent blog updates for more)

The biggest problem has been their nation's supply chain woes: As predicted by several pro-EU critics, Brexit created a staffing shortage with truck (or lorry, in their terminology) drivers that the existing UK population can't sustain. 

Overall economic growth has been sluggish, even against what the pandemic did to bring a lot of business to a temporary halt: It is all well below the promises Johnson and other Leave advocates made from 2016 onward.

And now piling onto that is an energy crisis during a hard winter where energy bills for many residents are skyrocketing, creating conflict over Brexit ideology that Johnson's intraparty factions can't resolve.

So speaking of parties... Guess what it is that's pulling Boris Johnson and his political allies downward to the brink of resignation/no-confidence votes/all-out government collapse?

If you hadn't heard - and I think there's two ensigns on Deck 39 who haven't heard yet - Johnson is facing harsh scrutiny for allowing office parties to take place at 10 Downing Street and elsewhere back in 2020/2021 during the COVID Pandemic when rules were issued to the whole United Kingdom to disallow such gatherings. In short, the Tories - and Boris himself, who got caught on camera indulging in the shenanigans, oh Boris no, not with a LIGHTSABER - partied like the rules didn't apply to them.

From this Guardian opinion essay from Andrew Rawnsley:

The defenestration of a prime minister between elections is usually triggered by a seismic event. Neville Chamberlain was forced out after Norway was gobbled up by Hitler. The national humiliation of the Suez debacle did for Anthony Eden. The epic unpopularity of the riot-provoking poll tax impelled Margaret Thatcher towards her unwilling exit. David Cameron felt compelled to quit when he lost his gamble on the Brexit referendum. If Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson soon joins the gallery of toppled PMs, it will be because he attended a “bring your own booze” party in the back garden of Number 10 and his aides had a lockdown-busting piss-up in Downing Street the night before the Queen buried her husband...

True, the optics of that - Queen Elizabeth II, the human symbol of Great Britain's storied history and global importance, the Crown, beloved mother figure to an entire kingdom, and Doctor Who Number One Fan, sitting alone at her husband's grave while Rome burned Tories partied - should have caused mass resignations out of sheer British decency, but I digress. Back to Rawnsley:

No other premiership has had such a pathetically shabby ending. No finale to his slummy reign would be more appropriate. It has always been highly likely that cavalier and blatant rule-breaking, and then lying about it, would be the undoing of a prime minister with a career history of casual contempt for truth and integrity.

In its relatively short life, his premiership has been splattered with scandal. There was the “crony express” that sped lucrative Covid contracts to Tory mates down a “VIP lane”, which the high court has just ruled unlawful. There was the decanting of infected elderly patients from hospitals into vulnerable care homes at the height of the pandemic. Nor should we forget the multiple-sourced accounts that Mr Johnson callously declared that he would let the bodies “pile high in their thousands” in the winter of last year rather than take timely action to contain a resurgence of Covid, an appalling choice that resulted in many avoidable fatalities and has left Britain with the highest death toll in Europe.

These and other outrages ought to have deeply troubled Tories, but many in his parliamentary party responded to scandal after scandal with a dismissive shrug... When previous charges of moral turpitude bounced off him, Tories told themselves that their leader was coated with a lacquer of Teflon so thick that nothing could stick. Some cynically opined that voters knew that Mr Johnson was a mendacious scoundrel when he won the election in 2019 and so appalling behaviour was expected and – ghastly phrase – “in the price”. It was often averred that a substantial chunk of the public enjoyed having a “lovable rogue” at Number 10. “Everyone loves a sinner.” So one senior Tory chortled to me last autumn when his party was still sitting on a poll lead even as Wallpapergate and several other scandals were on the boil. He went on: “If Boris was caught shagging a goat in Downing Street, people would immediately make a goat beer and drink to his health...”

If this all sounds familiar, to a certain person's claim in the States that he could "shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and I wouldn't lose voters," you wouldn't be wrong. What you are reading/hearing/seeing is the arrogance of a political elite that holds themselves above all rules even their own, at the expense of any ethics or integrity we should expect from our elected leaders. Again, I digress:

It is hard to say which is the more jaw-dropping. The flagrancy of the rule-breaking. The arrogant stupidity of it. Or the stunning frequency with which the denizens of Number 10 behaved as if laws did not apply to them. The prime minister’s feeble plea in mitigation for the garden party that he admits to attending is that he thought it was a “work event”. This laughable excuse asks us to believe that he failed to notice that alcohol was flowing and that his wife and her chums were present. He had to fall back on such a risible defence because the alternative is to confess that he flouted his government’s regulations and afterwards sought to dupe the public and deceive parliament...

Even if he (Boris) was not physically present for all the parties, he was at every one in spirit. What possessed Number 10 staffers to think that it was sensible or decent to turn Downing Street into a drinking den while people were dying? As I like to remark from time to time, the culture of organizations is greatly shaped by the character of the person at the top. The most egregious rule-breaking became habitual at Number 10 and that is surely directly connected to the fact that the most senior person in the building is a compulsively shameless rule-trasher. “Fish stink from the head,” remarks one former Tory cabinet minister. “So does Number 10...”

It seems a bit off that with all of the chaos afflicting the United Kingdom right now it would be a set of ill-advised drunken bacchanals that would drive out a sitting Prime Minister, one of the most politically powerful figures across the world.

Under other circumstances, such rule-breaking would likely involve the civil workers caught partying to quit or get fired, a shake-up of the lesser Cabinet seats of expendable party members to bring in more "reform-minded" replacements, and then brush it all under the rug of "I apologize, lesson learned."

But it seems Boris and his ilk are receiving the full force of national outrage, with 63 percent of the general UK population calling for his resignation. While the intraparty support isn't wavering - it never will until the party faithful are told it's okay to support someone else - the Conservative Party itself is under serious threat. Two recent by-elections to fill seats vacated by this scandal both went Liberal-Democratic (a staunch pro-EU party) in what were heavily-Conservative gerrymandered districts (well, not rotten boroughs but along the same lines).

From where I'm sitting, the PartyGate situation has less to do with the rule-breaking and more to do with the general outrage most Brits were feeling after several years of Brexit follies and COVID mishandles. Unable to express full anger over the supply woes, unable to express outrage over rising costs both Brexit and COVID related, all because a strong plurality of the population are Conservative-leaning (what we'd call Center-Right) and couldn't complain about a Brexit process they supported, these party scandals seem like an outlet granting the citizenry their chance and their right to vent at bad leadership caught lying to them over and over again. And not just the leadership under the clownish Boris Johnson, but a decade or more of questionable leadership from the likes of Theresa May and David Cameron who held onto hard-line Conservative values that left the UK unprepared for the crises happening today.

Yes, leadership ought to be held accountable. Yes, leadership needs reminding that they themselves are not above the laws. But this outrage is a rupture of scope and anger somewhat disproportionate to the damage actually caused by these reckless parties the Tories sought to indulge in.

Not that I'm complaining. I'm breaking out the popcorn - well, okay, the Nestle Buncha Crunches because I got out of eating popcorn as a teenager, damn you braces! - watching all of this just like everybody else who's Center-Left enjoying the schadenfreude of the Right-leaning wingnuts crash and burn.

There's supposed to be an official government report investigating these parties due next week. Thing is, as Prime Minister Boris will get the first look at it, and God knows if he'll try to redact it or suppress it in some way. Of course, something this big will be bound to leak out, so any suppression effort will hurt him anyway.

(keeps munching on those Buncha Crunches) Would it be tacky of us to throw a Farewell/"GET THE FOOK OUT" party if/when Boris is forced to resign...?

Bring on that tomorrow, Tories. It's the bill for decades of mismanagement and self-entitled bullshit come due.

The Omicron Overwhelm and DeSantis Deceit

Welcome to Hell, Florida United States (via Ian Hodgson and Christopher O'Donnell for the Tampa Bay Times): 

The omicron variant is spreading like wildfire across Florida and infecting a record number of people.

The state averaged nearly 57,000 COVID-19 infections a day from Dec. 31 to Thursday, according to the weekly report released Friday. That is the highest weekly infection rate thus far during the 22-month pandemic. It is also more than 150 percent higher than the peak of the Delta wave that swept through the state last summer.

Florida accounted for one out of every 10 infections in the U.S. last week and had the seventh-highest rates of infection per capita, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...

Florida hospitals are seeing the effects of omicron firsthand: There were 8,548 confirmed COVID-19 cases filling state hospital beds as of Friday, four times as many as two weeks ago, according to federal data.

There were 12,353 patients admitted in the past seven days, a nearly 75 percent jump from last week. It’s the highest number of new COVID-19 hospitalizations since the end of August. That number includes 570 children under 18 — the highest number of kids hospitalized in one week throughout the pandemic...

I said earlier, before the holidays, that a kind of pandemic fatigue has settled in, that too many Americans have given up on masking in public and enough of a minority of us have refused to get vaccinated out of misinformed belief or intentional partisan spite.

Making this situation with the Omicron variant wave worse than the earlier pandemic spikes has been the failure of leadership - including Biden and the CDC - caving to pressure to force our schools to stay open guaranteeing that our teachers and students - our families! - expose each other to COVID that even in its mildest forms can leave damage in its wake.

But that's nothing compared to the outright sabotage committed by Republican / Red State Governors refusing to take the pandemic serious and stubbornly refuse to admit there's still any problem at all. Especially Florida's governor Ron DeSantis, who has been flailing and FAILING to lead the state as the pandemic overwhelms our hospitals again.

It's particularly horrifying that DeSantis and his administration were caught WASTING test kits for months that could have helped people track their health. From Stephen Adams via the Tampa Bay 10 Action News:

Back on Dec. 30, (Agricultural Commissioner Nikki) Fried accused the Florida Department of Health of storing a large number of a particular type of COVID-19 tests that were about to expire.

“It’s come to my attention that Governor DeSantis’ Department of Health has a significant number of COVID-19 tests stockpiled that are set to expire imminently," Fried wrote at the time.

"Given the Governor’s lack of transparency throughout this pandemic, there’s no known public information about these tests or how soon they expire," Fried continued in her prior statement. "With omicron infections exploding throughout Florida, I beg of him to release these tests immediately to local counties and cities, and to stand up state-sponsored testing sites. To let these tests expire while Floridians anxiously wait for hours in testing lines is negligent at best, and heartless at worst...”

Some clarity on the matter came during a news conference DeSantis held on Thursday in West Palm Beach. Asked by a reporter about Fried's claim the state was stockpiling tests, DeSantis turned the podium over to Florida Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie.

“We had between 800,000 and a million test kits – Abbott rapid test kits in our warehouse – that did expire," Guthrie explained. "We tried to give them out prior to that, but there was not a demand for it...”

DeSantis and his spokespeople are, by the by, gaslighting like brazen children caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

NO DEMAND FOR THE TESTS?! Nearly every store in Florida had run out of them before Christmas. If you drove out to the drive-through rapid test locations, you ran into lines of cars that circled the testing area and sometimes blocked traffic on the nearby highways. We're still dealing with long lines this weekend:

I need to mention when I drove by the Bartow FL Medical Center yesterday, the rapid test drive-thru line was all the way out to US 98. It was the longest I'd ever seen that line.

— Witty Librarian (@PaulWartenberg) January 7, 2022

DeSantis is LYING when he claims that demand for the test kits is low. Demand is so high it'd be easier to find toilet paper in March 2020 than it is to find a home test kit at Walgreens today.

And why is DeSantis lying?

Because he wants to project the illusion that Florida is safe, that COVID-19 isn't ravaging our population, that the numbers are down so he can lie later when he's campaigning - for the Governor's office this November, for the Presidency in 2024 - that he beat COVID... when the truth is he's letting the pandemic run wild to appease the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers who make up the rabid GOP voting base.

To quote my fellow Floridian survivor Betty Cracker:

I think the state almost certainly sat on those tests and is now issuing this guidance that contradicts the public health expert consensus because they want to limit political damage to DeSantis for his ongoing mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis. DeSantis claims he didn’t know about the stockpile of now-expired tests, and possibly that’s even true.

But DeSantis has loaded every state agency with Republican hacks, sycophants and donors whose primary job is to turn the organizations into political assets for DeSantis as he gears up to run for president...

I keep hoping the growing evidence that DeSantis is focused on self-promotion at the expense of everything else — our health, our university and K-12 education system, the state’s economy — will finally motivate Floridians to kick his ass out of office later this year...

It all depends on if people see past DeSantis' deceit. It all depends on if every Floridian gets hit hard - either themselves or their families or their closest friends - with this Omicron wave and make them realize DeSantis allowed this all to happen because he sacrificed our health for his benefit.

Goddamn him. We ALL can't be blind to the idiocy coming out of the governor's office.

So What To Expect for 2022?

In the THINGS THAT MATTER Category:

We should expect the COVID pandemic to continue on. The massive upturn in cases due to the Omicron variant means this January we're going to see overwhelmed hospitals and ICUs again with no foreseeable relief for our health care professionals.

The United States is heading into the Congressional Midterms, meaning the damned Beltway obsessions over the horse races between Republicans and Democrats are going to obscure everything else going on. The maddening drum beats of political warfare, with unhinged mudslinging and "gotcha" moments of increasing absurdity, is going to deafen and blind us all (again).

And still voter turnout is a necessity - despite all the storm and fury trying to drive voters away out of fatigue and anxiety - because Gods help us the Republicans are gerrymandering the districts and suppressing the voters like never before... and good old turnout is still the best way to overcome all that.

Our schools are going to be overwhelmed by the Far Right groups pursuing another round of book banning and ideology purging, such as the schools in Oklahoma getting threatened with a law weaponizing the bounty system to gift offended parents $10,000 per book in school libraries that offend them. Just think, an outraged grifter parent can complain about five different titles - hell, one of them can be the DICTIONARY that happens to include curse words like "hell" - in one week and steal earn $50k of easy money from our financially-strapped schools - an amount that's roughly an annual income for most Americans - without breaking a sweat.

Did I mention the ongoing COVID pandemic? Because it feels like this should be big news every night instead of getting overlooked while our HOSPITALS CROWD UP AGAIN.

The House Investigation into trump's January 6 Insurrection is reportedly looking at issuing more subpoenas, starting to look into the financial backing of the war rooms and overall organization that planned the riots. But they need to hurry: The committee needs to get all their criminal charges filed to the Department of Justice before any possibility of the Republicans retaking the House after November...

Speaking of investigations into trump, there are rumors that he's facing tax evasion and even racketeering charges from the New York federal prosecutors digging into trump's business misdeeds. It would be pretty to think so, but I'll believe it when I see trump himself perp-walked with handcuffs into the courtroom for the official charges.

And it would be nice to hear about any results from the criminal investigation in Cobb County regarding trump's effort to interfere with the ballot counting there.

There is little sign of sanity or calm returning to our corner of the universe this coming year.

So strap in kiddos, it's going to be a fight all the way in all day every day.

(Did I forget anything...?)

Year 2021 As Tragedy And Farce

(Update: With many thanks to Driftglass for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please do me a favor and review my best articles of 2021 for submission to Florida Writers' Association's annual Royal Palm awards!)

As the year ends, today becomes a moment to look back and wonder at how we survived it at all.

(Christ. As I type this I just got word that Betty White passed away. FUCK YOU, 2021, DIE IN A FUCKING FIRE WILL YA)

Ahem.

The tragedy of the year stems from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, now rolling into its second year. Even with a vaccine program in place, even with all we know about how to fight COVID and how to reduce the risks... we're ending this year with a dangerously effective Omicron strain that's threatening to force shutdowns of workplaces and schools in spite of the Far Right forces obsessed to ignore the risks to stick to their own crazed Narrative.

The tragedy of 2021 got worse as donald trump - stinging from his Electoral losses in 2020 - refused to play by the rules of the Constitution and sent in mobs of insurrectionists into the halls of Congress to force that body from confirming the vote counts. For all the digging into the events of January 6th, we're barely seeing major arrests and serious punishments of the rioters and the culprits that we know so far who planned the whole attack.

If there'd been anything major going on all year long, it was the war of attrition between the madness of the Pandemic and the madness of trump's Big Lie. A lot of other crazy things happening in 2021 tended to tie into either ongoing crisis.

If there was any saving grace to this past year, it was how much of a farce the trumpian War On Reality could become.

The arguments trump forced his handlers to take - in arguing over stolen votes that were never stolen - led to those handlers and lawyers getting taken to the woodshed by judges who cut through every gaslighting lie they offered. These were lawyers who showed no sign of understanding the Constitution or election laws from beginning to end. The next sight we need to see of these inept lawyers should be them losing their license - like Giuliani - to practice law.

Everything coming out about how trump's inner circle coordinated and planned the January 6th Insurrection would be pure comedy if it didn't involve serious crimes. The very idea that they created a PowerPoint presentation to show trump how they planned it - and a sloppy PowerPoint at that - would be the crowning moment of funny whenever future Hollywood producers film the streaming miniseries about the riots.

As for the efforts in 2021 to fight the Pandemic, trump's early drum beats to push an anti-vax agenda to humiliate Biden and keep the nation in chaos led to the growing realization that trump's actions were literally killing off their own Far Right voting base... forcing trump's more recent calls to vaccinate falling on deaf - even hostile - ears.

Both nightmare and comedy at the same time in the same crises.

No wonder 2021 feels like a bad dream refusing to end.

Gods help us in 2022. 

COVID Fatigue At the End of 2021

So here we all are as a planet, rushing out of 2021 headlong in 2022 with the slow realization that this latest COVID-19 variant called "Omicron" - why yes, it COULD be a Transformers villain - is rampaging across humanity as the most virulent and infectious variant yet.

And the collective response of at least the American population is "What the hell, now? On the holidays??? Let me at least fly home next to 180 maskless passengers on this plane so I can see my relatives before we all turn up positive for COVID."

Yup. That's where we're at.

It's been more than two years now - if you date the outbreak back to November 2019, at least back to March 2020 when even trump couldn't ignore it anymore - that the entire planet has been coping with this lethal virus and we honestly can't keep up with it, if we ever did.

The isolation / cabin fever of lockdowns early on - combined with the overwhelming over-reliance on social media (Hi, Twitter!) that numbed our common sense - generated what could be best described as "COVID Fatigue," this jaded ennui of losing a certain amount of empathy or concern for self-care and the care of others. 

As a set of vaccines showed up that could combat the spread of the pandemic, a lot of people took that to mean they could get the shots and become fully protected even though what the vaccines DID were to slow the transmissions and reduce the more lethal side-effects - like shredding your lungs and hearts - to prevent more death. It's still not really safe to go about unmasked even if you are vaxxed.

It did not help matters that a sizable chunk of our humanity is made up of contrarian nay-sayers, people like anti-vaccinators who think every scientific medical treatment is a lie or a scam - or in some cases, a Biblical prophecy to Mark us all for the Beast - and would prefer to treat themselves to "holistic" or wholly implausible "natural" cures that did more harm than good. The efforts by Fox Not-News and other Far Right outlets alongside a number of Republican governors like Florida's DeSantis fighting CDC guidelines and federal vaccination mandates - pushed by a Republican party leadership that wants the pandemic to continue under Biden's administration so they could blame HIM for the hundreds of thousands dead and dying - have only added to that contrarian reality where too many of our neighbors and family members are still unvaccinated and fully vulnerable to a lethal fast-spreading disease.

This latest flareup - the Omicron variant that's proven to transmit faster than previous COVID versions, and those were already quick - is just happening to occur during the part of the year in America that happens to involve our busiest family-oriented holidays: Thanksgiving through Christmas/ Hanukkah/ Saturnalia/ Kwanzaa/ New Years. Given how nearly everyone gave up those holidays for 2020 - as the vaccines had yet to clear safety protocols - it is looking like too much to ask for everyone to give those days up again for 2021.

So here we all go, driving off to visit with the folks or the kids/grandkids, traveling to exotic locales for the holidays and New Year's Eve, easily carrying viruses with us that won't show any symptoms until it's too late, and a lot of us refusing to mask up even as we mingle among the thousands of us who haven't gotten vaccinated to prevent further spread.

And count me among those people who selfishly went out in public just as the Omicron numbers are multiplying faster than they ever did with Delta.

My twin brother, like myself, attended University of Florida (Go Gators). Unlike myself, he could afford season tickets to home games, which qualified him to a good deal on bowl game tickets to Tampa's Gasparilla Bowl this year hosting UF playing against University of Central Florida (where his son, my nephew, attends right now). So there was a family reason - I received the invite, thank you Brother Phil - to pack into Raymond James stadium with 60,000 other sports fans of both schools Thursday night to see which in-state school program could beat the other's (DAMMIT GATORS YOU HAD ONE JOB! /cries).

I had gone to a comic con this past November, but it was to a small, city-level event with maybe a couple hundred people. It was also before the Omicron variant was out there and when the Delta variant seemed to have burned itself out. I still dreaded it, and took enough precautions to avoid physical contact and maintain social distancing, and I masked whenever I could.

I used to be a heavy movie goer, attending a new film release - or occasionally rehashing a film I liked - nearly every weekend right up until February 2020 - last movie I saw in the theaters was "Harley Quinn/Birds of Prey" how that's for a trivia answer - and one of the things I hoped to do after getting the vaccine shots was going back to the theaters. Except I haven't. Even as the blockbuster movies I want to see - Black Widow, Shang Chi, Eternals, Godzilla vs Kong, The Suicide Squad - on the big screen came and went, I could not work up the nerve to go to see a single one of them. The latest Spider-Man movie, MAYBE I might go see that while it's out now, but I still cannot bring myself to risk going to a crowded, cramped theater. 

The bowl game last night, I took the risk, and I am so regretting it. Last night was different. Multiplying-the-attendees-into-tens-of-thousands different. Granted, much of the game-watching is spent outdoors where the spread of COVID is less likely to happen, you're still in a situation where there's NO social distancing available and a high risk of being too close to an asymptomatic person long enough to get exposed. It was like being in twenty movie theaters at the same time, and I dreaded hearing anybody coughing to spike my paranoia any higher.

The good news, I've been vaccinated and boosted. I also took a mask with me and wore it as often as possible (only taking it off to eat a hot dog and drink bottled water).

Bad news is, I might have been the only one at that game who stayed masked for much of the night. Maybe one other guy was masked in our seating section, but nearly everyone else I walked past getting in and out of the stadium - other than vendors and staff (and NOT security!) - went without a mask. Even my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew only wore their masks heading into the game: Once it started and after it ended, they went unmasked.

Yes, I am that paranoid about mask-wearing anymore. Working in a public library will do that to you during a pandemic.

That's how bad it is right now with the Omicron variant bearing down on all of us. Too many of us uncaring, unworried with the responsibility of doing even the bare minimum of protecting ourselves and others against a virus because those minimums - wearing a mask over our faces - has become too much a burden.

We all need - myself included - to be more careful during this winter as COVID flares back up again. At least mandating wearing masks in public. Lockdowns would help but too many Red States will fight those again as economy-killing, and given the holidays situation we won't see any move on THAT until after January 2nd.

So here we are, waiting for COVID to get worse again.

Gods help us.

Stay healthy.

Strange Days Inside the Job Lines (w/Update)

(Update: Many thanks to M. Bouffant at Crooks&Liars to include this blog article in Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please visit the site and check out the vacation pics from Virginia!)

What with the ongoing COVID pandemic happening, and the power struggles between Blue America and Red America over masking and vaccines and everything else, the American economy seems to be chugging along at a normal pace... except that it's doing things that are freaking out the economists and setting off red flags that make no sense to them. This article from Derek Thompson in The Atlantic is one of the latest OMFG essays from the punditry trying to make sense out of nonsense:

Americans are buying more stuff than ever before. That’s good. But because of supply constraints, it can feel like there’s a painful shortage of just about everything. That’s bad. Economic growth is booming, but the president’s approval rating on the economy is falling, which is a historically odd juxtaposition. Businesses everywhere are struggling to fill jobs, which sounds bad, but employer pain is workers’ gain, and wages are rising, which is wonderful. But because prices are rising too, inflation-adjusted hourly-wage growth actually declined in September, which is not wonderful...

The great mystery of this moment is the labor shortage. America’s GDP is larger than it was in February 2020. But the total economy is down about 7 million workers. That’s akin to the entire labor force of Pennsylvania sitting on the sidelines. In September, the number of people working or actively looking for work mysteriously declined, which is not what you would expect to see in a rapidly growing economy with simmering inflation. Wages are rising. Job openings are everywhere. But we’re running out of people who seem to want a job right now...

This seems to be the thing at the crux.

Thompson tries to go through the usual list of suspects: The reality we're still in a pandemic where a majority of Americans don't WANT to go into a workforce that would expose them to COVID, and the ghoulish realization that the 700,000 (and going) deaths in the United States put a dent in that workforce is another likelihood. That's not even counting the hundreds of thousands of Americans suffering from the long-term effects of COVID that could well keep them out of employment. 

But Thompson thinks that's not enough of a reason: The numbers of vacancies (7 million) don't match up to the COVID numbers (a tenth of that). So he goes pointing to a potential solution with the financial aid packages passed in 2020 and early 2021 that eased money woes for much of the working class:

The most complete explanation is that the massive fiscal-policy response to the pandemic reduced the urgency of looking for work. The United States has spent trillions of dollars to help families get through the economic deep freeze, via stimulus checks, expanded unemployment benefits, and the moratorium on student-loan interest payments. National eviction bans have taken pressure off renters. Then there’s the record-high surge in savings among families who haven’t gone on vacation or splurged on experiences in more than a year. Add to that the fact that job openings have hit record highs—which means people know that if they wait a month or three, there will still be jobs aplenty to apply to. Seeing this whole picture, more Americans clearly feel like they can take a more leisurely approach to going back to work...

Except that might not be it. The stimulus checks were nice but they barely took care of two-three months' worth of rent, and the most recent checks were back in March/April of this year. The moratorium of student-loan payments doesn't cover the entire population that's still avoiding the open job market. The eviction bans ended during this summer, and the rental aid meant for those families are backlogged by state bureaucracies. Those expanded unemployment benefits might still be helping out in Blue states, but many Red states had cut back on those benefits in a mad attempt to force people back into the workplaces (guess what, didn't work).

What might really be at work (for lack of workers) here is the shift in workplace realities. The ability to work from home for half our households seemed to have convinced two-income families they didn't have to sacrifice to the demands of businesses to commute, waste nine hours in a cubicle, and then struggle to race home to deal with latch-key children stressing over schoolwork (from Thompson's earlier article about the fall of office space):

If the past year and a half has taught us anything, it’s that white-collar workers can do hard work from home just about as well as they can do it in the office—and maybe even better, precisely because their colleagues aren’t interrupting them...

For a decade or more, productivity experts have been telling us that cross-group collaboration and weak ties are the skeleton key to unlocking radical creativity... This sounds like a loud endorsement of the office. But the internet does all of this at a much larger scale than any office floor... What’s more, if today’s corporate conventional wisdom were true, the pandemic would have created a hellscape for productivity. Instead, corporate earnings are rising, wages are rising, and official measures of productivity are rising too, in practically every state...

This points to the possibility that a lot of workers - many of them part-timers who held two jobs at the same time - want to stick with the at-home jobs that may have well paid better with fewer expenses that would have necessitated those second jobs. I'd love to see if anyone's done surveys on how many part-time employees before 2020 - those who juggled multiple jobs - decided to just stick to one job during/after the pandemic and found they did well enough financially to not seek a second.

There is also the possibility that the pandemic forced a number of workers to find alternatives to the established job markets by going into self-employment. Monetization of performing arts, creative arts, crafts - all things you can do from home and upload to the Internet, hello TikTok! - seemed to increase during the pandemic, and a lot of that from the younger populations that would otherwise fill those job vacancies.

There is one other thing that would explain the jobs gap, and Thompson points it out a little later in his article: The United States is seeing a gap in the workforce numbers due to the decrease in immigration that would have filled those jobs under normal circumstances. As he notes:

Whether or not today’s worker revolt becomes tomorrow’s worker revolution, what’s abundantly clear is that America needs more workers. America’s prime-age population stopped growing more than a decade ago, and because of declining fertility rates, it’s unlikely to recover through natural growth alone. If the U.S. needs more workers, the arithmetic is straightforward: We need more immigrants.

Welcoming immigrants is more complicated than putting up a help wanted sign at the border. Democrats are looking for ways to expand legal immigration—a matter of moral and long-term economic urgency—while avoiding a xenophobic backlash from the right. One great way to do this would be to “recapture” surplus permanent-residency visas, or green cards, that went unclaimed in previous years. Since 1992, hundreds of thousands of green cards authorized by Congress have not been issued because of administrative hiccups; last year, unused green cards reached a record high...

I wouldn't call it a hiccup: The pile-up of unused green cards was due to an overall lack of travel due to COVID restrictions, but before that the unused green cards was a policy decision by trump's anti-immigrant agenda. That's been 4 years already of the Trumpian Far Right putting the screws to a jobs market seeing dwindling population numbers before the pandemic hit. We're just now seeing the results of that.

Whether or not this screwy jobs market gets straightened out, there ought to be honest benefits out of this long-term: desperate corporations and businesses realizing that their decades-long refusal to pay workers better is going to have to end, and they're going to have to start paying Americans - and any immigrants still wishing to move here - better if they want those jobs to get done.