Duty Now For The Future (part six)
Small and mobile
There’s a Venn diagram to be made of the overlap among --
These are all reactions to a capitalism driven consumer economy:
Buy real estate! Build big house! Fill them full of stuff! Buy more real estate! Build bigger house! Buy more stuff! (Go deeply into debt paying us high interest rates on the inflated prices of your purchases.)
Somewhere in that diagram -- more to the tiny house side of the equation -- sit those who make a conscious choice of “Hold! Enough!” and take steps to reduce their footprint and baggage.
At the other end, people forced out of homes and apartments desperately trying to keep their lives together long enough to get a roof over their heads.
In the middle (and I think this is a huge overlap in the nomad community) are those who, faced with the prospect of losing their permanent residence, tell others (and let’s be honest, themselves) that they voluntarily made the choice to take up the nomad lifestyle.
Now there’s a fourth overlap to add to the diagram:
People who won’t / can’t afford to travel abroad.
Soon-ok and I are extremely fortunate that we got to take some trips to Europe over the last decade or so, as well as going together to Korea, plus a few trips to Hawaii.
We are -- and will remain -- extremely leery of traveling anywhere by air in the future (by train or bus, too).
Unless and until there’s a vaccine, we’re a little leery of cramming ourselves into a metal tube with strangers for hours on end, then traveling to crowded tourist spots.
Even before the coronavirus we’d discussed when we should stop traveling by air for our trips and start traveling by car or train.
We enjoy Canada and would be delighted to return there, and the US still offers many under visited regions and attractions we’d love to see.
With tourism and airline travel taking a massive hit -- one from which they will not speedily recover due to lack of consumer confidence and high unemployment -- more Americans will opt for domestic travel and trips, driving their own vehicles.
Vans and SUVs will remain a favored vehicle since they can be easily converted or adapted to self-sufficient long distance traveling and tourism.
Campgrounds and trailer / RV parks already exist; the large amount of underused / abandoned shopping mall space offers opportunities to provide similar services for small scale urban travelers who don’t want to sleep out in the wild under the stars but in the comfort and safety of their own van, on a parking lot patrolled and maintained well enough to be safe.
This is good news for the domestic auto industry and the various companies that support it.
It will also put enormous pressure on bringing the price of self-driving vehicles down low. Insurance companies will offer lower premiums to folks and families who let the car do the driving, and that, coupled with the appeal of just being able to sit back and enjoy the scenery / watch a video / read a book / take a nap / get ring-tailed drunk, will push that market forward.
Eventually we’ll reach a tipping point where a lot of people and their families will see more sense and cents in living in a vehicle than owning a home, and then real estate will take another tumble. (What about the children, you ask? Remote learning; the Australians have been doing it successfully in the outback for generations).
It’s not for everybody, but it’s sure gonna be for a lot of people.
. . .
Sports are broken and need to get fixed
Captain Lou Albano, when asked if professional wrestling was fixed, famously answered, “It wasn’t broken.”
Sports now are broken.
(I want to differentiate between sports in the forms of athletics, as in team sports for students, neighborhood bowling leagues, city marathons, etc., and sports as a business where personalities and icons are marketed to fans and the revenues derive less from the gate and more from advertising and merchandising incomes; we’ll be discussing primarily the latter here.)
I’m surprised that with all the numerous sports games and simulations out there, ESPN or some other entity failed to see the potential of wholly digital sports, pitting classic era teams against one another in a competition decided purely by AI.
Seriously, for the average fan sitting in front of their TV at home, what separates a digital team from a real team?
The personalities?
Okay, fine, you can recruit and groom real life personalities for the fans to idolize, but then you can stage everything else safely (and less expensively) in the digital realm.
Don’t raise your eyebrow at me; this is essentially what professional wrestling does.
People really interested in sports for the grace and skill watch amateur competitions as well as professional ones.
Fans interested only in proving their tribe is superior to other tribes, not so much.
You can still keep national / regional / state / city chauvinism going through digital imagery.
Of course, it will be argued that the opportunities for fixing such an event are rampant.
So?
The chauvinist fans just want to win, they don’t care how.
The Boston fans can view a streaming channel where their teams wins the playoffs all the time; the New York fans get their channel where they win, etc., etc., and of course, etc.
Amateur athletics will reman unfixed, of course (well, officially unfixed). People will watch those because (a) children or relatives are playing or (b) they play themselves.
The (b) group will watch televized tennis and golf because those are sports they enjoy and they hope to pick up pointers.
The (a) group will go to games and meets because that’s what family does.
(By the way, expect track and field, golf, tennis, volleyball, and related sports to rise in popularity among students and other amateurs; they allow play while social distancing.)
. . .
Capitalism is fixed and needs to be broken
Capitalism works when it’s kept on a leash with a muzzle and we pick up after it when it poops on people’s lawns.
What we face now is rabid coyote capitalism.
A big hunk of the problem will be self correction as major corporations will face a rapidly changing future and divest themselves of everything they consider marginal.
That’s gonna be a lot of stuff.
Dominos falling now will topple other dominos we can only guess at, but rest assured, corporations do not flourish when dominos topple.
Another part will be the realization that despite almost a century of lies by the 1% and their alt-right / cryptofascist stooges, less government is not better government.
For all the claims that a free market economy could respond more nimbly to changing circumstances, we now face a brutal pandemic that could have been blunted and was blunted by nations with a better handle on their economies.
The response to the COVID-19 pandemic couldn’t be effectively mounted by a market based system for the brutally simple reason that there was no market for such a response before the pandemic occurred.
That’s the job of a government; to look ahead and anticipate and plan and prepare and at least have some coherent response to any number of threats that might suddenly arise.
In the past we had national governmental agencies that tracked pandemics and the spread of disease so as to minimize both their loss of life and the impact on the economy.
For all his sins and shortcomings, George W. Bush and his administration realize the threat pandemics posed and took great strides to organize America’s response so them should they occur. Barack Obama built on that, organizing it even better, learning from mistakes made in earlier pandemics to make the response to the next one more efficient.
Donald Trump tore all that down in a fit of pique in order to pass the savings along to his billionaire donors.
It’s as if he closed down the fire department and then, when a five-alarm blaze broke out, asked his cronies to start designing smoke alarms.
A rising tide lifts all boats, but it drowns those who can’t get in one.
The other side of the COVID-19 pandemic will want a return to “normal” not “greatness”.
There is, of course, no genuine “normal” to return to.
What we can do is progress, move forward, make the next model of American society better.
A lot of people -- old white people, primarily -- aren’t going to like that.
COVID-19 may be trying to tell ya sumthin’, folks…
”I was born by a river, oh man, in this little old tent, oh
Just like this river, I've been running ever since
It's been a long, long time coming
But I know, but I know, a change is gotta come
Ooo yes it is”
-- Otis Redding
© Buzz Dixon
