AS IF NORMAL WAS A PLACE
Monday, February 1, 2021 - daily column #6655
History reeducates: economies behave in unpredictable ways (sorry, economists, you get it wrong as often as right – weather forecasters are less-wrong).
Cross-country, petitions and protestors, citizens whose rights to livelihood are stalled/frozen – in many cases, their right to travel too – rightly or wrongly, is autocratically forbidden.
Is it safe now, to resume what we used to call normal?
Is it any safer for economies we used to call capitalist?
Normal doesn’t exist, except in our minds, our memories of an idealized ‘used to be’ – but somehow, we collectively yearn to return to it.
We all want our return to normal as if normal was a place or state of mind we could go back to. Normal was and is an imaginary place in time.
Signs everywhere.
Merchants want us back, want us to order, and pick it up at the curb.
For too many, it’s yearning for any opportunity to earn.
Whether people are getting handouts or in the queue awaiting theirs (danger – don’t hold your breath), experts see a many-year-ed global problem due to outsized inequity in vaccine distribution.
Very few countries getting it right.
Poor/third world countries waiting …
Every country, its own gong-show; Canada’s dubious statistics – seems odd because we are internationally critiqued for ordering too much (reported 5 times our dose-need for 38 million). Yet, our government cannot seem to get timely delivery from suppliers first of all, and secondly, cannot seem to get what arrived into waiting arms at an aggressive pace.
Restrictions are being eased in Alberta on February 8th – yet it remains unclear if it’s public opinion, medical opinion, political survival, or all of those.