The New Normal

[kimberlysteele]

We may be at peak Coronapocalypse, because Buzzfeed finally featured an article about people who were diligent savers who were wiped out by the panicdemic. In other words, a good seven months after every lower middle class person realized that shutting down every restaurant, bar, concert hall, and sports arena would decimate an already fragile economy, the geniuses at Buzzfeed managed to put together the puzzle pieces. Yes, collapse ripples from the bottom up. Yes, the financially responsible types who save every spare penny are feeling the pain right now. Yes, the Professional Managerial Class is next in line.

They Only Wanted Rest

I understand why the Professional Managerial Class was gung ho about shutting down the economy. When I was a kid, my family had more disposable income than we do now. I was upper middle class in the 1980s and I gradually fell down into the lower middle class. This isn't hard to do nowadays. I don't mind though, because I remember being an upper middle class child. Though I had all the ingredients for a happy childhood, it was hell. I had great parents, a nice house, the best schools, and plenty of food and perks. I was academically gifted and I was blessed with good physical health. What made it hell was the lack of sleep. I was cursed by my own night owl temperament. Insomnia was exacerbated by electric lights and constant stimuli. The TV was always on. Between electronic inputs and my mammoth imagination, I couldn't sleep. I wasn't alone. I had friends in high school who opted out of lunch so they could cram in more pre-college classes for credit. Nobody slept. Sleep was for wussies.

Insomnia Takes Its Toll

What happens when you don't sleep? Physically, the eyes become bloodshot and bleary. Everything itches. The ears ring. The gastrointestinal tract gets extremely messed up -- count on gas, bloating, acid reflux, constipation, diarrhea, anything but normal digestion. In the upper respiratory, inflammation is the name of the game. Phlegm: every kid I knew had issues with it, to the point where we all had boxes of tissues in our desks. The body aches. There are migraines.

I existed in a mental fog most of my youth. I was almost always tired. I was often grumpy because of blood sugar issues caused by lack of sleep. On Friday night and Saturday night, from the age of 8 - 17 I slept twelve hours both nights, midnight to noon, as my body and mind frantically tried to make up for sleep debt. Irritation at being forced to conform to the morning-centric schedules of others led to despair and eventually suicidal nihilism. Like many, I retreated to a toxic indoor world. For me, dysmorphia and obsession with my appearance plagued my teenaged mind. For the modern teen, it is often videogames, porn, or social media that becomes addictive.

Insomnia may be bad physically and mentally, but its worst effects happen in the astral plane, otherwise known as the realm of imagination, emotion, and feeling. Deep sleep cleanses the imagination, ridding it of junk. The reason light sleep is often not refreshing is because it's a surface clean. Five hours a night for me was superficial sleep -- the state of constant anxiety and misery I dwelled in as a young person only went away once a week on Saturday and Sunday.

Enter the Panicdemic

The Corona closures that were supposed to last two weeks and have ended up dragging on for most of a year were, among other things, a one size fits all solution to a nearly universal insomnia problem. Before the pandemic, the Professional Managerial Classes (PMC) were the most sleepless of them all. To be upper middle class is to give up on sleep as a human need. I have already explained how I didn't sleep as a PMC child. PMC adults sleep even less. In the PMC household, dad most likely gets up before dawn to face a grueling commute, or at least he used to before COVID. Mom's job is to manage the children, so of course she doesn't get to sleep in.

The pandemic solved all of this by ending dad's commute and cancelling the trip to school as well as all extracurricular activities, including in-restaurant dining and about half to three quarters of all brick and mortar shopping. Plane travel, an activity that used to be de rigueur for PMC families every holiday and summer break, was also cancelled without further notice. The PMC had two weeks of no school, no clubs, no sports, no dance, yet plenty of money to pay for Uber Eats, Netflix, and Amazon.com. Best of all, they had the guilty pleasure of times long past: adequate sleep. COVID was paradise; all they had to do was give plenty of lip service to "essential" workers and order their takeout food from struggling independent restaurants instead of the usual chains once in a while. Some convinced themselves COVID was lethal to large swathes of the population and not just the elderly and severely immunocompromised. Mainstream media was right there to help them gin up death estimates and foment hysteria.

The Declaration of War

The Professional Managerial Classes went to war with the classes beneath them because those classes started demanding to take their pandemic away. The PMC are not dumb. They know that rest time is over once everyone is allowed to go back to movie theaters and soccer games. For now, the essential workers have picked up the slack as they toil fulfilling Amazon orders and stocking grocery store shelves. Make no mistake -- anyone who wants to live in a country where you can hug your grandma without taking weird and special precautions and/or see the high school musical where the unmasked protagonists share a funny albeit brief stage kiss is literally Hitler and most likely a Drumpfen SS sympathizer who kills puppies as a hobby. Eight months into a pandemic that peaked within three weeks of its arrival, the cozy PMC lauds the holy grail of a vaccine by Big Daddy Government that will save us all from a flu that kills a third of a percent of the people it infects.

The New Normal the PMC thinks it wants is a state of permanent rest courtesy of lower class work (the grocery stores and delivery services aren't closing anytime soon) and government handouts. The PMC believes this can happen without a total collapse of the economy. When they pass a permanently shuttered restaurant, they shake their heads and mutter a vacuous incantation about how a vaccine could have stopped the closure if only it had been rolled out in time, or they spit a bit of foul language about people who don't compulsively cover their noses and mouths with masks. There is never an acceptance of personal responsibility such as "Fear did this and I am one who lives in fear." What they have failed to put together is how they've amputated most of the vital parts of the culture in which they used to take pride. As an artist, I have straddled the bohemian gap between lower class pragmatism and high art; I like to think I have a decent perspective of both sides. Like the underfunded inner city public schools that cut out their art and music programs, the PMC has managed to chop away the arts and all who would aspire to work in them for the whole of American society via COVID. The New Normal means no dad will be able to take his kid to a crowded baseball game ever again. It means there won't be any careers being made on New York's Broadway because Broadway will cease to exist. It means no more rock concerts, Olympics, or Nutcracker ballets at Christmastime. The New Normal is an introvert's utopia, a glass snow globe of government welfare, solitary confinement, and Zoom meetings, every man, woman, and child for himself. The New Normal is the ultimate in luxurious quiet desperation, deaf to the cries of the deplorables who aren't well-off enough to similarly virtue signal from a safe window view.

Comments

[lincoln_lynx]

This won't last for much longer. When I, a introverted germaphobe, am weary, then the average person must be nearing the breaking point.

Trump's lackadaisical attitude on the virus might actually win him the election.

[kimberlysteele]

Yep! My idea of a good time is Saturday night at home on the couch with a book, a cup of herbal tea, and the cat curled up on my lap. If I'm sick of this crap, everyone else is tearing their hair out.

[methylethyl]

Ditto. I'm so glad I live in a state that's already said "to hell with all that" and ended the lockdowns and mask requirements. I think we've still got extra nursing home precautions but that's about it. No business restrictions.

But the remaining vestiges still feel tiresome and oppressive: the scared people still wearing masks in the grocery store, the ridiculous circus routine at church with temp-taking, masks, sanitizer... our bishop is in another state, and handing down the same rules for all parishes, so we're stuck with whatever rules they have to follow at the metropolis. Sigh.

[kimberlysteele]

I think there is going to be karmic hell to pay for all the people who forced churches to shut down and then make all the parishioners and clergy jump through a bunch of hoops in order to remain open. I don't see the same stringent rules being applied to rioters ahem I mean protestors.

[allenlincoln]

That sounds so much saner than here! We have masks required in all indoor spaces until January; parks closed for the rest of the year; and quite substantial restrictions on businesses. All of it is being justified by the need to keep schools open, which I just find baffling. They could just keep the schools open....

[brendhelm]

And, of course, it doesn't, because however little they realize it, their own jobs are at least partially dependent on all these "non-essential" parts of the economy. Since the immediate effects were positive for them (as you've described - more sleep, less day-to-day stress), they were all for it.

But when a business - any business - shutters, it no longer needs all the stuff it used to need - electricity, internet, supplies, etc. This lowers sales of other businesses even in stable or "essential" industries that were not immediately affected. But because of the inherent lag in finance and the economy, this isn't necessarily apparent - the 2008 recession actually started in 2007 and didn't really bottom out for most until 2010.

That is happening here, the stock market notwithstanding. Even if COVID disappeared today and all restrictions everywhere were dropped tomorrow, the economy wouldn't immediately roar back. Too much damage has been done; it simply hasn't percolated through the system yet and so far, the herculean efforts they've been trying have been enough. But eventually, the banks are actually going to NEED those loan payments they've been allowing people to put off, or they themselves will collapse.

I don't know how much longer the disease or the fear regarding it will last - I suspect it's driven by the Jupiter/Saturn/Pluto conglomeration and will start to fade away as that separates (come February, Saturn will be 10 degrees away from Pluto, and by mid-March Jupiter will be more than 10 degrees away from Saturn, let alone Pluto, and by mid-May Jupiter will no longer be in a sign disposited by Saturn, although it does retrograde back in) - but I'm not sure.

[kimberlysteele]

Thank you! Thank you especially for the astrological indications -- I know the stars incline and do not compel, but they've been pretty much dead on so far into this thing from what little I can figure out, haven't they?

One thing I forgot to mention was the cruddy astral state of both work and school. The astral plane is a cesspit right now, with swirling vortexes of hatred and toxicity in most workplaces and schools. Part of the reticence to go back to work is the fact most people hate their jobs, PMC or otherwise, and the reason most people hate their jobs is due to the crummy astral state of everyone around them. Of course the way of fixing this is not to give up on work but to work on yourself, but try telling that to an atheist or a Christian-in-name-only type. They don't know where to start.

[allenlincoln]

Nor do they want to start: working on the kind of self-knowledge needed to clean up your astral environment is hard, and deeply unpleasant. It's far easier to blame someone, anyone else. Of course, it also requires admitting that there is something greater than humanity, which seems a nonstarter for so many people right now.....

[kimberlysteele]

however little they realize it, their own jobs are at least partially dependent on all these "non-essential" parts of the economy.

Also, they have put themselves into precarious positions. Everything goes to hell for them if the main breadwinner spouse becomes permanently unemployed. They have huge mortgages, they aren't allowed to do reasonable things to their own homes such as grow food in the backyard, and those who have the freedom and the space on their property would rather maintain an in-ground pool that gets used 3x a year, tops. They are the ones who won't fare well in a collapse and they usually know it. Yet they engage in brinksmanship. It's like they're suicidal.

[allenlincoln]

Well, it's even worse in that a lot of them are dependant on two incomes to afford the house! It's amazing how financially precarious a family with two 6 figure incomes can be, but I've seen it first hand. And I suspect a lot of them are suicidal individually, and as a class, I think a lot of them subconsciously hope that this brinkmanship will destroy them since they don't want to live the way they have been, but the idea of making a change is terrifying....

[allenlincoln]

I have a friend who works as a doctor in Toronto, who's told me that it's common knowledge in the field that hospitals in quite a few cities across the country are actually struggling to find enough work for people right now. The reason is simple: Covid and stress related to it can't make up for improvements in health caused by the dramatic improvement in air quality in nearly every urban area, mixed with improved sleep for millions.

Granted, here in Canada things are different, with generous financial support going out to cover the costs, so people aren't worrying about whether they can pay rent: I know plenty of people in the wage class who's incomes have gone up, since the government pays more than their jobs did.

But I find the evidence we were literally killing ourselves looks so clear, and yet so many people are going out of their way to avoid noticing it....

[kimberlysteele]

I too know people in the wage class whose incomes rose and were upset when they were called back to work. The wage class for the most part cannot afford to stay home and the government $$$ gravy train has mostly ended for them.

PMCs are still using positive test results to take time outs from work, and many are of a perpetually terrified mindset. They're convinced they'll be on a ventilator if everything re-opens.

[allenlincoln]

I think that's where the difference in reaction lies: a lot of us in Canada are looking at this going, something "Well, the government gravy train is still running; we can put up with a lot of the insanity as long as it means I make more money than I did before."

Even so, a lot of people's patience is starting to run thin here. I don't expect the lockdowns can last much longer. A month, maybe two, and then things will start getting ugly.

masks ...

[(Anonymous)]

What is disturbing to me is, I am noticing how ppl now are actually 'enjoying' wearing
a mask...

it's become something of a trendy fashion.

The other day I saw a couple walking together, holding hands.. and wearing masks.

So I think that, even if restrictions are
removed, ppl will continue wearing them like
a trendy 'blanky'..

It's really eerie, what effects this has all had on society..

This coming Halloween with the blue full moon should be very interesting.

I am getting everything I need to do all done Friday morning, and I am staying home
the rest of the weekend!

But yeah, I dont think ppl will be willing
to give up their sense of security and 'new fashion statement' very easily...

Re: masks ... as a status symbol

[open_space]

I am coming very late to the discussion but I just saw your link on the previous MM and wanted to share something I've been writing about, though will wait to post until the dust settles.

Masks stopped being about public health about two weeks after --and I like how you put it-- The McNothingburger hit worldwide. I knew this when I saw ads about sexy masks, sporty masks, colorful masks, anime masks, masks for couples, masks with memes on them, masks with a political agenda, designer masks; that is, masks that do everything but the thing they are supposed to do. This is because after two weeks the real danger went out the window, the end of doctors and scientists that are not stupid know this. If real danger was there would they actually have the time, or the headspace, to make all this nonsense? No. In times of danger survival is the key, not fashion. Fashion is way up on Maslow's pyramid. As with socio-political movements like environmentalism, which got hijacked; as with the defense of people of color, which got hijacked; as with feminism, which you guessed it, also got hijacked and many more. When the very thing they were supposed to do is no longer happening you know that it is just a façade to parade on the status acquired thus far by such movement, and this is crucial, of something that has already happened .

It is not only trendy to wear a mask today, it has become a symbol of status and whoever can't afford to follow or agree with these excessive norms is frowned upon and denied entrance, excluded socially and shamed publicly. Don't get me wrong, Kimberly and all, there is a vast gray area in the middle. People that follow out of fear, people that do it because they have someone at risk on their families (quite sensible, now and with the seasonal flu), people that just don't care, like me, and just do it to flow smoothly through my very modest social interactions and people that just don't know what the hell is going on but there is a very particular stench which smells of implanted thoughts, from the true believers and I find it quite distressing. It has become a way to easily identify their clan from The Other and most important of all, it has become a tool to provide the mindless a sense of security and social acceptance. I think that is why the propaganda is pushed so hard on it, because if the governments can still exert some form of control, peace of mind comes to the people that fear a shift in the status quo, which is of course, the well to do and the PMC...

That said I do think that wearing masks is sensible sometimes. Here in Mexico the panic is at least 5x more than in the US. Following the classical Mexican mindset of "If big brother is pushing x, we should do so with triple glee!" but I find it sad that people that do need to stay safe, as a friend of mine, which is the actual people that are thinking about the public health issues are left in the dark because the whole thing is now political. Aaaaah the nonsense of binaries. *Sigh*

Re: masks ... as a status symbol

[kimberlysteele]

Thank you for the outlook on Mexico! I was extremely curious as to how Mexicans were reacting to the nothingburger flu. Sorry to hear they're no wiser than their neighbors to the North. My neighbors are mostly Mexican or Mexican-American, and up here nobody is wearing masks except one person and his immunocompromised wife.

You touched on a very important point: the mask is a class signifier.

I wrote more about the class war in my most recent post:

https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/20678.html

[(Anonymous)]

A quarter million Americans are dead.

[kimberlysteele]

1.35 million are dead... from car accidents. Every year. Should we go back to the horse and buggy? Additionally, car accidents are equal opportunity destroyers. They don't just snuff the elderly and severely immunocompromised.

[kimberlysteele]

327,096,265 in the US in 2018 alone.

[brendhelm]

And 2.5 million Americans die every year.

Consequences

[kimberlysteele]

Mask-fetishizing and locking down in the name of being "safe" has caused more death, disenfranchisement, and despair than little old COVID. This is just one of Pam Popper's Consequences videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-6p3OtzfVc

In it, she talks about real stories. A grandma recently died alone in a nursing home. Because of COVID bureaucracy, she did not get the rehab care that could have extended her life. Thanks to COVID paranoia, she died surrounded by masked strangers. All of her terror and suffering is karmically on those of you cling to your mask like a talismanic binky. There are school age kids committing suicide because of loneliness. Their suicides also belong to the COVID-clutchers. Dare I mention all the people who are now homeless because COVID freaks thought everyone and her aunt could afford the luxury of sitting at home binge-watching Netflix for the next five decades? Their homelessness is also now your karma. Until you COVIDaholics figure out how not to be afraid of your own shadow (especially in the Jungian sense) you will have to reap the consequences of the particular set of actions you have put in place. For this reason, I have done my level best to distance myself from the lot of you. I want no part in what you've got coming in lifetimes of payback for your sniveling cowardice.

[(Anonymous)]

..that was a great post, Kimberly..

fully agree.

[kimberlysteele]

Thanks!

[jpc_w]

Another sign of PMC doom.

From an IT mailing list I belong to, robotic automation is now set to take a chunk out of their class, and not just the Deplorables:
https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/robots-may-replace-managers-in-several-industries-according-to-new-study/438033?utm_source=DIW&utm_medium=enews&utm_campaign=DIW&scid=af6555c2-3d4b-8d1c-a74c-4e600f596662

[kimberlysteele]

Nice. If Biden manages to finish the Dem election steal, we're all looking down the barrel of a Great Depression, including Canada, which is the US's largest source of oil. 98% of Canada's oil yields go to the US. I could be wrong, but if the Dems pull off this heist, it's quite likely their heads could end up on pikes in four year's time.