we are still living in a material world

In the midst of a global pandemic* – is that redundant? When pan means global but without a quantifying word it seems to carry less gravitas.

In March of 2020 we boiled down our society to the bare essentials. Basically anything that didn’t feed, heal or clean us is closed.  Meaning our fate rides, largely, on some of the lowest paid workers.  We also created a two tier system in which those with a credit card could, to a certain degree, buy safety.

As a society we are daily, and rightly so, lauding healthcare workers and teachers – oh yeah we had to shut down schools in an attempt to slow this bugger down and this was in the midst of an Ontario wide claw back to education funding. Doesn’t seem like that much of a cost to anyone anymore now does it.

But what about the home care workers who earn low wages and have been forgotten on the PPE distribution circuit? How about the ‘essential’ workers who have employers slow to respond with safety measures and have not monetarily compensated them?  Technically no one has to add excess compensation - there’s no law stating this is the case – but many have stepped up, mostly under public pressure and done so, mainly, I assume, to assuage staying-a-home CEO’s what I hope is crippling guilt. (Yeah, yeah I know that’s not what they are feeling but it makes me feel better if I think they are.)

And the pinnacle of a mostly online world? The credit card. Without one navigating our current world is tough. It means shopping in store. It means not having some things just because you can’t access them.  The recent shut down of pet food stores meant a strange bit of transaction over a weekend. Fortunately this story has a great ending. The pet store I use, Global Pet Foods, had stated on their site that eTransfer and PayPal were a payment option. A lovely soul answered my emails and confirmed payment on a Sunday night at 8 p.m. so that I could go pick up the food on my day off that week. But if they hadn’t offered that service I guess I would have had to go purchase a prepaid credit card, in a store, to make that payment. Which would mean another potential exposure. And that’s what I mean when I say a credit card buys safety. 

It’s my personal opinion that we’ve reached a point in our technology where if you have a bank account you should be able to purchase things online. Of course that gets into a huge discussion of internet security and bank fees. I’m not going there except to say, banks, massive profiteers already, really need to be legislated to allow anyone a no fee account.

Veronica Mars fans will recognize “normal is the watchword”. We’re in the midst of a radical change to what used to be normal. And some of it will be painful. Some of it might be amazing. But we have a lot of discussions to have from Basic Income to better pay for everyone to whether or not we hug people. As the old adage says...

*Merriam- Webster defines pandemic (noun) as ‘an outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area and affects an exceptionally high proportion of the population’ so i guess to answer my own question yes and no. A wide geographic area is not necessarily the globe. But it could be.