Pirates

For more than two years of the COVID pandemic - from April 2020 to June 2022 - I wrote a blog called The New World. I had this bizarre fantasy that the world would be shaken up so much that it would come to its senses and everyone would realize that we couldn't go on like we have been.  That the pandemic could somehow be a world-changing opportunity.  At the top of the blog, I pinned this thought, provided by Peter Baker in the March 31st edition of The Guardian:  

But disasters and emergencies do not just throw light on the world as it is. They also rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we glimpse possibilities of other worlds.

This was exciting to me.  Thus, The New World. I read and wrote and followed trends and ideas and speculations and predictions and told a joke or two.  It got me through COVID.  That's about all it did.

After two years, and nearly 250 posts, I gave up.  Apparently, no one learned anything at all.

From my last post, in June of 2022:

But mostly I'm giving up because I'm giving up.  There is no New World... I wanted to live in the "possibility of other worlds."  I wanted the massive pandemic's disruption to wake us all up and move us forward into a new set of possibilities, where we were more able to see each other, treat each other kindly and fairly, help each other, and all benefit from "working together for the common good."  I had hoped we would come out the other side of the pandemic and say, "Wow!  We don't want to go through that again!  Let's see how we can use the world's massive resources to make life safer and more enriching for everyone."

Or something like that.  But it didn't happen, not even something vaguely like that.  Oh, things changed all right.  We're now more divided and bitter, entrenched and intractable, and as a society, we're less likely to work for the common good than we were two and a half years ago.  You've been there.  You've watched it happen.  You know it's true.

So there is, I guess, a new world.  It's a world in which those who were able to benefit and profit by the "disasters and emergencies" have consolidated those gains and become even wealthier, while those who have felt the power of those calamities are left in ruins, or, at best, left without a single lesson learned.

In America, the pandemic is not over, but it might as well be.  We have learned nothing, and are in the process of setting our clocks back 50 years.  Living in America continues to mean tolerating child murder, living without adequate healthcare, aiding and abetting historic income inequality, and elevating those who live by hypocrisy.  Here's the new world:  An America where over one million Americans died, and nothing changed.

So, welcome to the new world, same as the old world, but worse.  

This is Juan Quintero, third mate of the Pinta, adrift in some ocean, somewhere, signing off.

Just for fun, I would occasionally take on the persona of a member of Columbus' crew - Juan Quintero (the third mate's actual name) - and used the analogy to illustrate where we might be in our journey.  Say what you will of Columbus - he found the new world, and we didn't.

So we're still adrift on some ocean, somewhere - and - OMG - it's pirates.