for making the shitjob of a year 2019 look in retrospect like a golden era :/
I'm hanging in there... doing sort of alright, but feeling a bit overwhelmed. Wife and I both unemployed at home due to COVID and now hustling side gigs to keep the lights turned on. The current madness, with more protests and outright senseless rioting has just taken an overall bad situation and just made things worse. No one remembers history. I don't think they teach it in schools anymore (other than evil white men = bad). Burning down your own city rarely improves the economic situation, even years later. I recently read a report that even 40 years after the LA Watts riots, that most businesses never returned to the area. Same after the Rodney King riots... economic activity permanently decreased in that area. Politicians unhelpfully telling the mobs to 'burn it all down - we'll rebuild' are being comically disingenuous. It won't be any sort of long term economic improvement.
The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal. - Aristotle
In 1969 the Hong Kong Flu came along and killed at least as many people in the USA as COVID has so far, if not far more. No social distancing then, no radical lockdown closures of the entire economy, no radical government reaction or over-reaction. We survived (as we have every other prior pandemic) by developing our herd immunity and keeping calm and carrying on. Not so much now... when it's better to close millions of businesses and put a hundred million people out of work instead :/
Good job politicos (of both blue and red states)! You've destroyed at least half of the small businesses of this country... but bailed out Wall Street (again) and made AMAZON so obscenely rich that they now have a virtual monopoly on all retail sales. Time for some old fashioned Teddy Roosevelt 'Trust Busting'... but no politician of either party has the balls to try it :(
I also wonder why Minneapolis, which hasn't elected a Republican mayor or city councilman in over two decades, is suddenly blaming the President (and everyone else other than themselves) for their own civil mismanagement?
Politically, I'm an evil Moderate... hated by both liberals and conservatives, but I have just enough sense of Reason left to know that when politicians start violently pointing the fingers of blame around at everyone but themselves, it's because the #1 main problem is visible every morning in front of their own bathroom mirror.
Bring on the guillotines, sure, but only if we can purge the herd of politicians of BOTH parties... equally! No... it won't cure the stupidity, but perhaps we'd at least enjoy a bit of different idiocy for awhile.
Anyway, the world is too strange right now for me to deal with, so I'm mostly trying not to! I'm avoiding the news, or at least as much as I can, but what seeps though doesn't improve my depression. I'm also really needing to focus all of my non-sleep hours for wrangling every little bit of extra income I can, so if I steal a few writing hours I then feel guilty about the time lost or 'wasted', when I should have been posting new sale items on eBay or Etsy instead.
Health issues... about the same. Long term pain/blood sugar issues all about the same, but can't get into my GP's office nowadays due to COVID fears. Stress/Depression issues probably worse, but I get up out of bed in the morning and carry on anyway.
I'm very behind on answering reader emails, 95% of which are 'when is the next chapter of series XXXX?' Short answer: damned if I know when.