So, we’ve been asked in the United States to begin “social distancing” and that’s what I’m doing. Thankfully, very thankfully, I have a job that expects me to telework to achieve this, while completing our mission for our customer. And get paid. There will be many not so fortunate…
There will be many disruptions, be they economic, social, or medical, and we’ll have to watch it all unfold with little that we can do about it. Self-Isolation seems to make logical sense as something to do, but with this thing lurking in many people without even a sign, where it shows up to bite us will still be surprising I expect.
For myself, I’ve collected up supplies that should be enough to keep sequestered for at least a couple of weeks. And even beyond, really, as I find myself not all that hungry, so the food will last, and water isn’t something I’m worried about with the tap water and filtration at my disposal. Basic medicines and other supplies, and of course soap and cleaners to please any OCD man alive. Even then, the way this looks to go, if the American people can just sit tight for a little while, and stop draining the point-of-service retail outlets, the “stuff” will be back if more is needed at the end of the ordeal.
I blame globalism. We sent everything overseas to cheaper, less-visible sources of supply, assuring ourselves that is was less burdensome on us, and somehow more efficient. Well, thermodynamics bit us in the ass. We thought we could bottle up all of our entropy and chaos and send it East. And we thought they’d love it there, as they really had so much less then we did. We were helping them while we were helping ourselves, right? Of course we were. And no rapidly-enriched nation with extremely different geopolitical goals would ever exploit that arrangement, of course not…
Of course, they did. And we paid a higher and higher cost to place our manufacturing over there just to ship it back home to buy. How utterly stupid. We made an adversary very, very rich, and assumed that it wouldn’t someday snap back on us. CoronaChan is the product of a enemy with more money than sense, and less honesty than hubris, and whether on purpose or by accident, we all get to meet her. We have to white-knuckle our way through it, hoping our supplies hold out, because we may not be getting nearly as much from China as we once did, and certainly not while in the throes of a pandemic.
There’s the silver lining I find myself contemplating today. May we learn to keep a healthy distrust of the friendly enemy. This is not to say that I don’t someday want a friendship with the Chinese people, but we need to learn a damn hard lesson that we can’t hand them all of our necessities and expect them not to hold us hostage over it. We must make our own “stuff” especially the critical “stuff”. Again, how stupid we have been.
So, it’s CoronaChan Day One for Outbound. I should be able to stay in for a couple of weeks, and I’m now starting the “Is CoronaChan In My House?” clock. They say it takes between 2 and 14 days from infection to get symptoms, if you’re going to get them. We’ll see…