The professor visits yet again.
I have several threads that are nearly ready but not quite ready, for publication that I just stopped working on due to the Pandemic. They seemed entirely superficial in context. As the pandemic has worn on, of course, the blog has been slowly returning to superficiality, as those who stop in here have perhaps noted, but there's no escaping the fact that things are weird right now, and they may continue to be for a long time.
Added to my failure to post this one, as things moved on, and the pandemic went from being a major event, to an epic event, to one of those events that has the appearance of being a multi year event, much of what I originally thought about here has changed in some ways.
Primary among the changes, and a reason I've been slow to get around to this, the simple fact that while some people become incredulous during a crisis and others become heroic and heroically virtuous, some of the incredulous become heroic if things are really long lasting and some of the heroically virtuous sink into disorder and vice.
We're a complicated species.
I should further note, however, before I blather on that not only have I put some things on this blog on the shelf for awhile, with those things now coming back off, I've started this thread something like three times. The first two times, moreover, where before the tragic death of George Floyd. While Mr. Floyd's death wouldn't seem to be related to the Coronavirus story, I think it is. Something in this long hot summer simply boiled over, and now things I would have predicted earlier on I don't know that I would. After his death, things in some quarters really started going in a different direction.
Big events of this type, i.e., the Pandemic, and this one is of course huge, are like that. They refocus things enormously. And in turn people reassess, at least at first, although as already noted, some lapse in their reassessment and fail in their resolve. Entire societies actually do both of those things, and whether we like to admit it, or what the results were or are, we can look towards some big events in the past and note that things changed dramatically because of them,
and not just the ways that I noted a while back on this blog.
Finally, and regarding the synchronicity aspect of this, I recently began reading World War Two on the Great Plains and I'm seeing a lot of what we're going through now reflected in that, which I'll either explain in this thread, or more likely in another one. We'll see as I move along here.
As a minor note, which may explain the odd way that some of this probably reads, I originally started two threads on this topic, and given that, I combined both of them into one. The second one was motivated by the same thing I noted in this Memorial Day 2020 thread:
That is;
I'm a member of an email list serve that discusses the Second World War. It's populated by academics and writers. Often the threads are pretty active around this time of year because of the holiday that, this year, falls on this date.
Normally I won't quote from there here, and I'm not going to do so directly now, as its a private list. But a member just posted the news that the new Tom Hanks movie Greyhound is going to be released on Apple TV, which I lack.
I was really looking forward to the film.
The first thread (i.e., not the one above) started off as a commentary on a blog entry by Fr. Dwight Longnecker on his blog. In starting off that original entry, I noted that one of the things that events like this serve to do is to sharply focus what's important and what isn't. And they also bring this about in people as well, i.e., you can tell what is important and not important to them.
Things of this type caused Father Dwight Longenecker, as noted, to publish an interesting item (everything he publishes is interesting, and I'd comment there but I'm too cheap to become a subscriber) on his blog called
Life After the Pandemic in which he looks at some of these questions. In that, he notes:
That's a good place to start on this thread.
The Covid Recession
Longnecker went on in his post to note that he's fully expecting a major recession, or maybe a depression.** That's not what this thread focuses on, but I'll comment on it anyhow.
In his comment he stated:
So the virus may be the first blow that many have to endure. That second blow has already come to many. Indeed, I read in a morning paper when I was first drafting this that 41,000,000 Americans were out of work, indicating a figure that's well over 10% of the nation's population and an even higher percentage of the workforce. And in spite of the economy opening up, things still seemed to be getting worse. That's reversed right now, but that reversal depends on the country remaining open, and there are serious suggestions that it should be reclosed, with those suggestions being ones that cannot be discounted.
Should that occur, we're going to see a major change in the relationship between the government and its citizens as it will be absolutely necessary that a huge element of government assistance come in. The question wouldn't be if, but how much, and much of that may turn out to be of a very long lasting nature the way that British support of its population post World War Two turned out to be.
Turning from the plight of people to individual people, one of the things an event like this does is to put the flame to ore and as a result, people will see who had quiet virtue and whose expressed values were nothing more than paint over their real core values. Lots of employers will keep people on the payroll as long as they can. People with critical employees or who aren't in the shutdown states will go the extra mile to try to give employees options and protection. Quite a few of these employers will hurt as a result of this but their sacrifices won't be forgotten at least by the generation that received them. Indeed, it brings home to me comments that I received in praise of my grandfather in regards to the Great Depression decades and decades after he had died, by people who were still grateful for what he had done.
Conversely, there are people who will be shown to have values that really stopped at their pocket books. Their actions won't be forgotten by others either, and for those who experienced that first hand, that will pretty much define them for the rest of their lives.
In large measure, these things will confirm expectations or at least suspicions that were held for a long time. But in some cases, both positive and negative, they'll come as a surprise.
Moving on from this, however, and bringing it back up to date, the economy in fact now appears to be recovering. Getting a recovery rolling is the primary focus of the Trump Administration and its becoming a focus of the election. No matter how a person may wish to slice it, the basic thing in contest is the degree to which we'll plow forward with risk, if that means a recovering economy, vs., how much should we shelter, even if it retards the economy. It's a moral question as well as an economic one.
Added to all of that, the Summer of 2020 has become a summer of protests, and that's impacting the economy as well. Like him or hate him, Victor David Hanson is completely correct when he points out that agitators arguing to burn down a Burger King in a city are going to be complaining a decade hence when Burger King corporate still won't relocate back to that city. And that's part of what we noted above, but only a little bit of it, in virtue sliding into vice. The movement towards destruction, and the counter movement towards restriction of destruction, are moving toward the extremes and the violence of the era is getting worse. We Can Get Through this is surrendering in some places to a them v us mentality when, as we're all the same country, it's all us.
Risks, Acceptance, Rejection and Resignation
One thing that will has come as a surprise to me already are the degrees to which some people accept risks and others eschew it, which frankly can stand in stark contravention to their declarations on acceptance of risk, although few speak of it in this fashion. It's been very interesting.
Note, that when I'm speaking of "risk", I'm speaking of actual acknowledgement of risk. I don't mean the denial of the existence of risk. Denying the existence of risk is something completely different. People can and often are completely aware of the risk of something while still choosing to encounter it in some fashion.
In this instance, that breaks down two ways. One is the acceptance of personal risk, and the other is the willingness to have others encounter risks.
On personal risk, I've been really surprised to see some who have flat out refused to encounter any personal risk at all even when their stations in life would seem to essentially require that. Not everyone, by any means, has the luxury, and it is a luxury, to do that, and I'll address that in additional detail below. But here I mean instances in which are real, great or slight, and somebody can and does avoid them.
Now, there are plenty of people who don't need to encounter risks at all, and don't. Conversely, there are those who can avoid them, and ignore them. I'm not really dealing with either category, in full, but then also both in part.
But starting with those whose positions would seemingly require encountering risks but they avoid them anyway, I've recently been in two similar legal situations in which these matters were handled very, very differently. In the first, all of the lawyers in a matter elected to make a personal appearance out of state, some driving, some flying, so that they could be at a matter in person. That entailed risk, and they knowingly encountered it, myself included, as they thought it was in the best interest of their clients.
In another, however, one lawyer refused, with their being the provision that others could go, even though that made it awkward at best.
Can we criticize that lawyer for that? I guess you have to conclude.
Along the same lines, I've also seen those subject to company travel restrictions in other industries go to enormous lengths to try to find a way around them as they thought it in the best interest of what they were working on. They not only didn't have to encounter risk, they actually were under instructions to avoid it.
On that, I've seen a couple of instances in which internal instructions on avoiding risk were frankly extreme and way beyond what it seems to me to have been warranted. In instances in which an institution has a public mission, foregoing it in the interest of safety is questionable at best and very misdirected at worse. Those who gave such orders will have to live with them later, and that is likely not to be particularly pleasant.
The flip side of that is that there were also such entities where those in authority attempted to even contravene public orders, which is another matter entirely.
On a very local level, I've been surprised by how some very simple matters become politicized, the most surprising being the wearing of a mask.
In some places mask wearing is mandatory and most people comply. Some refuse, however, as if its a really serious trampling of their rights, which it is not. Where masks aren't required, or aren't required yet, there are those who harass others who wear them. Some view masks as some sort of odd conspiracy.
I'm not one of those who wear a mask all the time, and I feel odd wearing one. But any business, in my view, has an absolute right to require people entering their premises to wear one.
The whole mask thing is strangely reminiscent of the gun control debates at the extreme end, and often with the same people. It's hard to explain. People who otherwise would be the first to defend property rights aren't, in this category, in regard to firearms and, it seems, masks.
I should note that this same phenomenon seems to occur all over the world. There have been protests about masks everywhere.
As noted, it's all been very interesting. In terms of "impacts", its sharpened or even formed my opinions of certain people distinctly, with their being lumped into wise, unwise, brave or cowardly.
Going beyond that, however, the mask topic has now cemented into a sort of malaise, and that's there the reference to the book above comes in. People have gone from fear or rejection to resignation, and now that's impacting how they behave.
It's one thing to think "I'll do this and help us get through" to "this is never going to end". Lots of people have become completely resigned to the concept that this is now permanent, and like the legendary Honey Badger of meme fame, "they don't care".
In the last few weeks all of the grocery stores here have put in a mask requirement. AT first, everyone was complying and the stores were insisting where those who refused in the name of individual protest, or simply forgot, attempted to enter with no mask. Now, however they've clearly given up. I was in a grocery store over a recent weekend and most of the people in it were maskless. I was wearing one.
That actually repeats the history of the Second World War in a way that we don't often recall and don't like to recall, as it doesn't fit our personal image of it. In our collective memories everyone rose to the occasion both at home and in the service.
In actuality, at home, people quit paying attention to the war at some point. They knew it was going on, but unless they had an immediate family member in the service, they got tired of rationing and the like and complained about it. People quit pitching in. Indeed, they cheated extremely widely on the ration system. I don't know what percentage of Americans cheated on the system during the war, but I'll bet that if you looked at overall, it was more than 50%.
And that's sort of where we are now. People have a dull disinterest and try to slog through their Coronavirus world days living with the restrictions that the government and institutions have put in place. Not because they're excited about it, not because of a spirit of sacrifice, but because they have to, and they often cheat where they can.
Going out. . . and to work. . . or not. . . forever.
I'll leap back, from here to the email list above and noted what I first posted on that list, in response to this occurrence, which was the following:
Well darn it, I was really looking forward to this movie.
Having said that, just yesterday I made my first out of
state day trip since shut in orders started coming down and I found that it
really does impact the way I view things, and my state never had a shelter in
place order (although it instead had and still has specific business closure
orders and crowd restrictions orders that are/were in effect shelter in place
orders).
I went to Denver where usually I'll just fly in super
early and fly out super late. Flights
were cancelled early and late due to the pandemic, so driving was the only
option. Normally for an 8:00 a.m. matter
I'd drive down the night before and stay, but it got closer, I decided to drive
down in back in one day, avoiding the hotel, which I was feeling a little odd
about, particularly after I found out that the hotel kitchens are closed.
Point being that I modified my behavior where I wouldn't
have otherwise, and I suspect that theater openings may be pretty anemic for awhile. Indeed, I've heard my 22 year old son say on
several occasions he's not going to any movies for awhile and not going to any
restaurants even though they're now back open.
The first reply to this item was:
I hope that movies might get a second run at theaters in
ten future.... some movies are meant to be seen on the big screen.
My reply in turn:
Just before the
orders started to come down everywhere, They Shall Not Grow Old was back in
town as a second run. I saw it when first released in the US in Laramie, where
it was being shown (this is a real Plains/Rocky Mountain Region thing. . . drive 140 miles to see a movie. . . why
not?).
I thought about seeing it again as I knew it was only a
matter of time until the theaters closed and that thought didn't bother me
until about two or three days before the theaters closed on their own, before
there were any orders at all.
Now? I'd not go.
Of course, lots of people will have the same views, which
will really have an impact on the economy, etc.
Shoot, I saw the local press breath a bit of a sigh of relief here
yesterday when oil climbed to $30/bbl, even though it has to be twice that
before its economic to produce here.
That then went into this:
Up until this thread, I didn't realize that Apple TV was
separate hardware, which shows how little I follow tech developments. Shoot, my family keeps begging me to upgrade
my current Iphone (I don't even know what version of Iphone it is) before it
dies.
While off topic again, I'm really beginning to wonder how
many things we've seen go into Covid mode will every really come back out.
Either I'm going to be surprised, and we'll be back to
our regular selves, for good or ill, within the next year, or some changes are
going to be really deep. I'm predicting
the latter. Some of that may be that
people have permanently altered some of their habits and modes of living
permanently due to the Covid enforced downtime.
And then the expected changes started to be posted by the list members. I'm going to take the topics here out of order, for my own purposes.
And I'm starting with changes to the workplace, where I noted the following:
And one thing I'm already seeing is that traveling
occupations are seeing quite a few people who got used to Zoom
and the like opting to keep on keeping on in that fashion. Lots of lawyers I know who stepped out of the
office during shelter at home period are staying out and are keeping on that
way.
I was in Denver Tuesday at a large law firm yesterday
that occupies two full floors of a downtown building. It was still less than half staffed. Some office manager has to be looking at that
empty office space and wondering about why they're paying all that rent if
people can work from home. The next day,
yesterday, I had a conversation with two lawyers from a firm that still hasn't
opened back up and they were pretty clearly not all that eager to do so.
This brought a response from a list participant who noted that his son commutes a large distance in Texas every week, living in one part of the state and working in another. Where he works the IT staff was sent home to work from there. This evolved into a "stay home forever" decision by his company, as the working from home IT people proved in short order that they can do that every bit as efficiently as they did when they came in the office. Internal forces in the operation had fought that, apparently for years. The virus changed it.
Another respondent noted the same switch, and that his own firm has had a work from where you are policy for over a decade. Some people who couldn't work from home, he noted, were provided with timeshare offices if they couldn't make the switch. There was some coordination, and even discrimination problems, he noted, between the two. My bet is that COVID 19 resolved those conflicts.
Indeed, I've known at least one industry, the insurance industry, that completely made this switch for large losses about two decades ago. I noted that in one of my replies, but this major sector of the American economy moved in this direction at least twenty years ago and it continues to.
Years ago insurance companies fielded local offices for their adjusters, and to some extent they still do. But about twenty years ago, as the Internet came in things moved in a new direction, and permanently. As I noted in a post the adjusters went home for the most part, newly equipped with really good Internet capabilities. Most of them now work from their homes except for a very few who work in home offices. Thousands upon thousands of rental spaces formerly occupied across the country by insurance carriers now no longer are. And that move made all the sense in the world.
Now it's spreading. In the thread I noted:
Watching law firms has been interesting. My state never went into a full shut down but
instead closed things by category (it's been impossible for the national press
to follow, and I've seen us listed as a location where a "shelter in
place" order, which we never had, was still in effect, or a "didn't
do anything" state, which was completely untrue). Law firms never really fit into a category
but most of them allowed people to work from home if they wanted to and most
people, including staff, did. Now that
things are opening back up that's changing.
I never worked from my house, however, as with two university aged kids
who came home when the campus closed, the entire internet resources of the
house were being used. So I was one of
the very few still coming in, which was nearly as good as a shelter in place as
nobody was there anyway.
Anyhow, courts closed, etc., and the state to our south
went into a shelter in place. They're
now out of it and we have a lot of interaction with them, and it's been
odd. At the beginning of last week I was
in an office where most of the staff and lawyers were still out working from
home, and my adjuster contact was in another city with a no travel order. That worked okay, however. The week before that I worked on a similar
project where my client flew up from a state that just had its quarantines
lifted, but the opposing counsel and their client stayed there. Late last week I received a proposal from an
opposing counsel that I go to their client's office in the neighboring state,
where their client will be, but they're not coming as they're going to Zoom in,
even though its in their own city, as they have orders from HQ not to go
anywhere
It's going to take a while to sort this all out, and one
of the things I'm seeing is that some people really don't want to come back in.
. . ever. It varies by person, but some
people will self-isolate by inclination if allowed to do so.
Some people openly mused, or analyzed, what this shift would mean. One astute colleague noted that he was worried about the increased blending of home and work life that this would seem to entail, and that is something to worry about.
Indeed, I've found that to be something that's been increasing quite a bit every since the Iphone arrived, and I wish it hadn't. Iphone's can check email and most people, I find, set theirs up to download their email as it arrived. Some even keep the alarm feature on so that it lets you audibly know when email has arrived.
I don't do this. In fact, I have the email feature of my Iphone disabled so it never downloads my email unless I set it to do that. My personal makeup is such that if I receive electronic mail, I respond to it and I can't ignore it. Having that feature on, in my case, would mean that I'd be working, effectively, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Well, a lot of people are doing just that. That was already the case prior to the crisis but its very evident now. Over the Memorial Day weekend, for example, I found that there were those sending and responding to emails on Sunday with the expectation of setting a meeting Tuesday morning. I only discovered this as I had to work Monday morning. This means these people were hard at it on Sunday and thought everyone else must be at least near their Iphone and checking the mail.
I really hate that and I fear where that is leading.
To some extent, oddly enough, although little appreciated, this may all be a return to a former pattern of living. It was once the case that a lot of people lived in their places of employments, with that varying all the way from occupations like that of mechanic to that of doctor and lawyer. This had become quite rare by the late 20th Century and indeed zoning laws in many places prevented it or tightly restricted it. Now that's effectively reversing for those who can work from their homes. And we've just learned that this category is a lot bigger than we believed before.
Indeed, I wonder if the law will move rapidly in this direction. Huge numbers of lawyers have been working from home and its worked. Given that, I wonder if office managers will be shutting down regional offices or regional firms will shut their offices down. Solo's may lead the way and just go home. The latter category of lawyer slowly dispensed, in many cases, with their staffs years ago, or have very small staffs. That trend may continue as well. I could see a situation in which a small firm could remotely connect with their staff and maybe only the staffers would routinely go into the office. Indeed, I already know some busy practicing lawyers who have effectively made that transition. Added to that, the computer has made some of the staff that was formerly required unnecessary and this entire crisis may have emphasized that.
And that's only one example. Lots of industries are similar.
Not all are, and there's been some concern already that this new trend is creating a sharp divide between those who can work at home and those who can't. It remains to be seen if this will really create a true divide, but it is easy to imagine a future in which there are fewer professionals downtown and those businesses which are downtown are either smaller or are service businesses in which somebody must be there.
One of the industries that has been really hurt already by the pandemic and which this trend would hurt further would be the restaurant industry.
It'd be tempting to imagine that this isn't a major matter, but as we've already discussed, 50% of the American food distribution system is located in the restaurant sector. Over this crisis people have adjusted to eating at home We've already discussed this here:
That thread goes on from there.
Anyhow, one of the commenters noted that they don't expect a lot of restaurants to come back, and I suspect that he's right, although so far, most have been.
And if people start vacating downtowns for their basements and spare bedrooms in large numbers, that's going to be al the more true. If thousands of white collar workers aren't stopping by for lunch everyday, or breakfast, that makes a big difference. In a place like Denver, the impact would be massive.
Indeed, I'd note that in the trip to a big city, which was Denver, that I mentioned in the thread above, the change even after weedy Colorado started opening up was gigantic. I managed to drive right downtown and find a parking space in a nearly empty downtown parking lot. It was so empty that I had no trouble at all parking my Dodge 3500, which is a big truck.
At the end of the day when I left, the lot was still pretty open.
Lunch was served at that event from some place downtown that was open for curbside. So some eateries are keeping on keeping on. But I'll note that my own practices had changed and this demonstrates this impact. The event I was at started at 8:00 a.m. Normally I'd have taken the airline redeye and then the A Train and have been there right about starting time. The early flight had been cancelled. Normally, given that, I would have driven down the afternoon before, caught dinner in the hotel, got up early and caught breakfast at the hotel or the bagel shop downtown, and have gone to the event. But as the hotel noted that you had to have food brought in as their kitchen was closed, I just bagged the whole thing. I'm up almost everyday by 4:00 a.m. anyhow, so I drove. That means that I didn't eat breakfast out and I didn't eat dinner out the day before and I didn't even have a hotel room.
The same fellow who mentioned restaurants noted that there will be a lot of new modes of doing business, and the thing I noted about curbside is really one. Lots of local restaurants adapted to curbside within a couple of weeks and soon the laws were temporarily changed to allow for expanded curbside.
People like curbside, and so I wonder if this is another way things will be permanently changed. Lots of people who were acclimated to sitting in a restaurant for dinner out are now acclimated to getting food from a restaurant and eating in. For introverts like me, that's a pretty easy shift. Indeed, for noontime, I so rarely eat out in my own hometown I'll be that it's less than a dozen occasions a year I do that. Maybe less than half a dozen.
As an aside, the Federal Government has warned that the drop in restaurant dining has lead to a big drop in city disposed food which in turn has made urban rats really aggressive. They've been warning about it.
The Haves and the Have Nots
Before moving on, in this topic, I'm going to leap back to the divide between those who can work at home and others. Some of the others are the large American homeless population.
One of the things some commenters have been noting is that this crisis is putting the deficiencies in American culture into sharp focus, and nowhere is that more evident in the existence of a large homeless population. In weedy Denver this was obvious before but its glaring now. In the recent trip downtown the only people really out in numbers are those who live on the streets.
There's something desperately wrong with American society that so many people are living on the streets. It's a national disgrace. There are a lot of reasons that this has occurred but no matter what they are, a major effort needs to be undertaken to end this. That involves ending the loose American association with addictive drugs of all types, ending the fantasy that expanding social drugs like marijuana aren't massively destructive, and getting over the free market delusion that a rising tide raises all boats.
Indeed, computerization in recent years, combined with exporting jobs outside of the country, has simply tossed lots of people off the boats entirely and some of those people, usually younger, have taken refuge in drugs and living on the streets. It's inhumane and intolerable. I won't propose a solution here, but those white collar, often academic, populations that have been harping endlessly about "sheltering in place" need to realize that there are lots of people in this country with no shelter at all.
And then there's school
University of Wyoming geology main lecture hall, 1986. This was empty as the photograph was taken on a Saturday.
The operation of schools will change and in fact already has.
For anyone my age going to school meant going to school. I walked every day to one of the three schools I attended, i.e., grade, junior high, and high school. I don't know how many days of school I missed in the years I was going to public school, but if you added them all up, it likely wouldn't be many.
Universal school attendance is really a post World War Two thing for Americans, but it was coming on throughout the 20th Century. Prior to World War Two most Americans attended at least up until high school, but at the high school level dropping out was much more common than it is now. Societal changes during the war changed that and an enormous emphasis was placed on finishing high school and then going on to college. Home schooling only came in during the 1990s and as a conservative reaction to the perception that public schools had become infected with alien ideas. When I was of school age, home schooling was completely unheard of, and only a few years later it meant that a person even was growing up in an extremely remote environment or that a person's parents were part of a very small religious group of one kind or another that basically had a strong opposition to something being taught in schools. By the 90s, however, that latter aspect had a much wider spread in society.
Recently there's been push back against home schooling and some it, oddly enough, has come from teh extreme left for the very reason that those in the right have been doing it. At least one academic publicly came out in opposition to home schooling on the basis that schools in fact taught their students left wing ideals and that children needed to be separated from their right wing parents to learn them. That sort of thing more or less made the playground an open ideological battlefield.
And then came the virus.
The virus shut the schools down last spring and sent he students home. Lot of them were educated via some sort of internet resource with the probably result that they were badly educated at the public school level. It's an open question what will occur this fall. Most schools are starting, but haltingly. Some kids aren't likely to come back due to concerns held by their parents. If schools shut down, a lot never will.
This will result in a major conflict over homeschooling. It makes sense but there will be conflict between homeschoolers and traditional public school supporters. As the nation struggles over the reopening of schools this will become more and more apparent. Lost in the mix is that the more children that are educated remotely, the worse the education will become. The vast number of public school teachers in the system aren't really prepared to educate children this way, yet. Developing that skill will take some time, at least a few years. And frankly most parents likely aren't the best teachers, at least the higher up their children advance in school.
And this doesn't touch the situation in colleges and universities.
Remote learning, i.e., learning via an internet connection, has been something that's been developing now for at least two decades. What is suddenly different is how it went from being an adjunct method of teaching for mainstream colleges and universities, and the only method by some on line "universities", to being the principal lecture method for everyone.
How this will playout remains to be seen. If it just continues through this fall or part of it, chances are that it will end up in an extension of "extension" learning, but not replace the class room. If we go beyond that, however, the change will be more permanent. And with that change, we'll be seeing fewer, I suspect, students and universities.
That development would also create a major dent in the decades long trend of universalization of university education. There's been very little talk, as there was only a while ago, about "free" universal university education. Now the talk is just what will be open and what will not be. University enrollment will drop way off in the 2020-21 school year and some of those leaving may never return ever. That will have an impact on employment and what people are employed doing for decades to come.
It might also start to reverse the decades old trend of every occupation needing a college education. That might occur as some degrees aren't much more than technical degrees that can be accomplished through some other sort of program. Chances are trade organizations and unions can provide just as efficient on line training in some fields as colleges now do. And degree that some to have utility now simply because people receive them on a campus aren't likely to if people do not. If that's the case, the plethora of "study" type degrees could see a decrease while more traditional fields of study would not.
The return of Science
University of Wyoming Department of Aeronautics building, now, and long, part of the Department of Engineering's building.
One of the most amazing occurrences of my life is the incredible decrease in respect for science and fields closely related to science. I wouldn't have thought that possible when I was young.
When I was a grade school kid a common answer of a child to the question "what do you want to be when you grow up?" was "a scientist". Kids didn't really understand how many scientific fields there were, but they did grasp that science was a thing and it was an admirable thing at that. Scientist were held in esteem in all their branches, and when a respected scientist said something, he was listened to. Nobody thought about doubting the veracity of a scientific statement. If medical scientists said to get vaccinated, we did. An anti vaxxer would have been regarded as a complete and total nut case. If scientists said that some chemical was good to use for something, it was. And so on.
There's no doubt a variety of reasons for how things were viewed at the time, not the least of which is that our parents had seen scientific revolutions that couldn't be sanely questioned. Medical scientists had wiped out polio and invented penicillin, big deals to those who had grown up in fear of going to the swimming pool in the summer or who watched common colds and infections kill people. Scientists of other types had developed an amazing array of weapons that allowed us to defeat the Germans and Japanese in World War Two, including such things as radar, sonar and the atomic bomb. And during the Cold War, which was raging at the time, we understood that it was really our scientists who were keeping the Reds at bay while Soviet scientists were working night and day to find ways to defeat us.
And then somehow in recent years that all fell apart.
It started to during the 1980s, although it wasn't really obvious at the time. The roots of that were to be found in the 1960s, however. With a flood of university students on campus in the 60s the first weak dilution of university degrees occurred while at the same time the close association between university and arms manufacturing came under scrutiny. In the 1970s the first "environmental" scientific information, much of which proved to be later inaccurate, came out which polarized the populace in regard to what it wanted to believe scientifically for the first time. Books like Silent Spring had a major impact on policy in the 1970s but by the 1980s a counter reaction was setting in. Ironically, at the same time, the field of physics became to be disdained by the left as it represented weapons development. By the 1980s there were those on the right who doubted all sorts of environmental science and medical science while there were those on the left who disdained fields of hard science that had military application.
This lead to the Reagan Administration being able to dramatically cut funding for science and the funding has never returned. In the meantime the fields were picked up in foreign universities which made up lost ground but which gave science, which in the 1960s seemed to be an American thing, a certain foreignness. While this was occurring thousands of students who would have entered science and engineering disciplines instead entered others, with the field of law being a notable recipient. Later graduates who would have worked in scientific and engineering fields instead flooded the the legal field with the result that endless new categories of lawsuits were developed including ones that preyed on the public's lack of scientific knowledge. By the arrival of the COVID 19 in 2019 a population which, had it been 1959 or 1969, would have grasped the meaning of a pandemic immediately reacted in partial denial.
Now, all of a sudden, scientists are heroes again.
It'll be really interesting to see how this plays out. We're now so far behind in science education in our culture that there's a big gap to fill. Much of what is done may depend on the upcoming election. It's unlikely that the current administration, if it succeeds in being reelected, will make much of a shift in emphasis. It's highly likely, however, that a Democratic administration will.
Based on past experiences changes like this are reflected in education surprisingly rapidly. A boom in aeronautics, for example, produced a Department of Aeronautics at the University of Wyoming, a field that's long departed from the Laramie campus. If the renewed emphasis in science carries on past the development of a vaccine, and it seems likely to me that it will, this may result in a fairly serious shift in American culture. Indeed, with the Democratic emphasis on it generally, it could rival the atmosphere of the 50s and 60s in this regard. If that's the case, we can expect to see a lot more Americans being educated at all levels in the sciences, and universities starting to produce a lot more BS, MS, and PhD recipients in them, with a decline in a lot of the softer disciplines that have been created since the 80s and a probable decline in JDs.
We are also likely to see an upcoming huge negative reaction to the anti vaxers who are already signaling their unwillingness to be vaccinated with the time comes. In the 60s and 70s vaccinations were largely delivered at schools and parents hardly consulted. That won't repeat, but my suspicion is that the public is now so educated in the role of vaccines that deniers are not going to be widely tolerated. That may in turn be the first advance in a societal rediscovery of scientific absolutes and displeasure with those who resist them. We'll see.
A return to the past in modes of living. . . and in relationships?
Yup, these folks again.
Lots of folks have been holed up in apartments now for weeks and months. Those with jobs who are going back to the office are often returning to less occupied places of employment.
And that brings up this:
On another note, one thing that I wonder about is the
degree to which some older patterns of living, still very much with us but not
really in vogue, will start to return.
Sheltering in place is fine, I suspect, for most people, if there's
somebody else to shelter with. If you
are just holed up in your dwelling all by your lonesome it probably would be
lonely.
I also noted:
I’d like to think that the entire quarantine experience will result in some reflection on a lot of things that perhaps needed attention. One may be on how to reach people in a parish who are just sort of floating through, which is always a problem.
Society wide, I’d like to think there’s be some serious reflection on quite a few things that this experience should have focused us on.
Here's where we'll tie in the blog article by Father Dwight Longnecker. In his article on changes he anticipated included this long item:
However, I am more interested in the psychological and spiritual effects of the pandemic. What this disease must to is sober us up. I expect, at least for a short time, Americans will be more aware of their health and more aware of the shortness of life. Perhaps more people will start taking care of themselves physically. I hope more people will be alert and open their hearts and minds spiritually. They say there are no atheists in foxholes. I expect, when facing the chance of serious illness and death the voices of the atheists will fall silent. With this added seriousness I wonder whether some of the silly, absurd and downright wickedly foolish things we had been up to will wither away and die. I’m thinking of all the “alternative sexuality” the crybaby bullies, the faux victims and shallow ideologies that were floating around like scum in a pond. Those ideas and ideologies were a luxury–part of the vomit thrown up by on overly indulgent culture.
There's a lot to unpack in Longnecker's statement here, which is a testament to his effective writing. I'm going to cut just a part of this back out to get back into what I was intending to note here, that being:
With this added seriousness I wonder whether some of the silly, absurd and downright wickedly foolish things we had been up to will wither away and die. I’m thinking of all the “alternative sexuality” the crybaby bullies, the faux victims and shallow ideologies that were floating around like scum in a pond.
There's still a lot to unpack there, and in unpacking it, I'm going to make reference to another Catholic cleric, that being Fr. Hugh Barbour. Unfortunately, I can't recall in which of his recent Catholic Answers Focus podcasts I heard it, so I can't cut and paste it.
Barbour has spoken a couple of times on that forum recently in which the topic of friendship and marriage have come up. Barbour is a brilliant and deep thinker, and presents clearly and often in a way that's not only clear, but original. In recent discussions on that forum he's spoken on the topics, as noted, of love, friendship, sex and marriage, all of which are connected but none of which is really the same thing.
In very recent times all of these things have become blended and confused to the point where, as in his most recent discussion, the direction relationship between children and sex and sex and marriage, all of which are in fact directly connected, have become confused. Longnecker, in his comment above, doesn't expand on his comment on sexuality, but Barbour does brilliantly noting both the complementarity of the sexes and how that related to natural marriage. Barbour, probably contrary to what some may expect, also talks briefly in one of these podcasts, and has spoken in others elsewhere before, on the topic of same sex attraction. Barbour notes that the attraction that some experience has always existed but that the sexualizaton of it in its current form is actually very new. Indeed Barbour has noted that we've actually reached the state where the attraction is now combined with a societal sexual expectation, which I'd note exists society wide for all sorts of relationship (Barbour also correctly notes that the term "homosexual" is actually a very new one to describe this and it actually mis-describes it, something that we've noted here previously)*** That's what is meant, in part, by Longnecker's critical comment noted just above, and its most definitely what is meant by his comment:
Those ideas and ideologies were a luxury–part of the vomit thrown up by on overly indulgent culture.
What Longnecker has correctly noted is that an entire society that is so focused on its genitals and how to self entertain with them is one that is exceedingly wealthy. And that excess may now very well be gone and is certainly gone in the short term.****
Emblematic of that is the self identification of a person by how they intend to so identify themselves, which is part of what Barbour was pointing out and part of what Longnecker also points out. That is, people may be a lot of identifying things, including members of ethnicities, religions, philosophies, etc., but to actually base your principal identify on sexual function is, frankly, strangely shallow. That doesn't mean the attraction doesn't exist for some but to define your existence as a human being based on it is really bizarrely self indulgent, as if it means that your needs and purpose is otherwise so fulfilled that now you are down to climax alone. And this is a pressure or development that has spread to all areas of this topic.
Well, if that was true for anyone that era is at least temporarily over now and with it is comfort provided by being able to self indulge. But another way, a person's immediate needs are now a lot more paramount.
Immediate needs have a really high traditionality to them. It'll be interesting to see the extent to which that becomes really obvious. People now look back at the 19th Century when some marriages were advance contracted, particularly in the Western United States. This is different from the Russian mail order bride of today by quite some margin, I guess, and was never anywhere near as common as might be supposed. Where it occurred, and again it was more limited than supposed, the couple nearly always shared a large set of commonalities going into the relationship, including those of age, culture and religion. Indeed, it was really isolated in certain ethnicities and completely absent in others.
The point of bringing that up, however, is that the bonds of bringing up that type of union are so deeply ingrained that they're really irreplaceable. Barbour has gone into it in another podcast on the topic of marriage but, permanent male/female relationships in the form of union are beyond merely convenient to society but are in fact elemental to human beings. Most people who fail to successfully enter into one end up really missing entire chunks of the human puzzle.
This gets, and gets for religious and non religious people alike, to what's related in Genesis, Chapter 2, where its stated:
And the Lord God said: It is not good for man to be alone: let us make him a help like unto himself. And the Lord God having formed out of the ground all the beasts of the earth, and all the fowls of the air, brought them to Adam to see what he would call them: for whatsoever Adam called any living creature the same is its name. And Adam called all the beasts by their names, and all the fowls of the air, and all the cattle of the field: but for Adam there was not found a helper like himself.
Then the Lord God cast a deep sleep upon Adam: and when he was fast asleep, he took one of his ribs, and filled up flesh for it. And the Lord God built the rib which he took from Adam into a woman: and brought her to Adam. And Adam said: This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man. Wherefore a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh.
Since the late 1960s, or maybe since 1953, large elements of Western Society have been at war with this view and since some point in perhaps the 80s or 90s American society, lead by the sewer of the American entertainment industry, has been in a scorched earth campaign in that war against it. The battlefield casualties of this Sexual Revolution are everywhere, but now the metastasized downsides of that revolution have crept into countless houses and apartments around the country.
It is not good that man should be alone, but lots of them us are. Thousands have engaged in the delusion that having a "fur baby" is like having a real human in the house, but it as comforting as a pet is, and they are, they're not human. And thousands upon thousands have engaged in a hook up life style in which they kept the opposite gender at arms length lest things get too real. Now everyone is at more than arm's length. Lots of people are now miserable as a result. Some in their misery will resort to more misery, as in pornography, drugs and alcohol. Indeed, it's been reported that visits to pornography sites are way, way, up.
But what those visitors are seeking, weather acknowledging it or not, is what they're missing, a permanent connection with a permanent opposite. Many now feel that very keenly. Some are adjusting accordingly, if not necessarily fully traditionally. It can be expected that will continue and it'll be interesting to see how that's reflected in statistics.
For those now imprisoned in their homes and apartments the lesson of not having "help like unto himself" are now blistering obvious. Marriage, for all its faults and difficulties, is the default human state. Careerism isn't. It'll be interesting to see to what degree that has become increasingly obvious.
Finding joys in small things. . . .like hobbies, avocation and deeper vocations.
And that leads us to this comment by Longnecker.
Maybe with a new seriousness and new austerity we will be able to focus on the most important things in life. I would love to see us pay more attention to what is local–to look again at our own families, our parishes, schools and communities and invest our time, money and resources with the people closest to us. With increased austerity maybe we will stay home a bit more and realize that we don’t actually need to get on a jet and fly away to some exotic location to have a wonderful time. Maybe we will learn to take on new project and learn new skills rather than settling for cheap entertainment 24-7.
I'd be skeptical that this will occur wholescale, but I think it is occurring on a small scale, and for that matter pretty wide, basis. Lots of people who normally are focused on other things have been posting on social media about finding joy in small things. I've been amazed how many people have taken to cooking, based on Twitter and Reddit, and are excited to be making things that I thought were fairly routine but which apparently aren't. "I baked bread!" is a common thought, for example.
An area where this has developed, as we now know, is a huge boom in interest in traditional outdoor activities. Applications for hunting and fishing license are way up. There's a shortage of fishing gear. Whether this continues now that people have been exposed to it is an open question, but as we approach the fall we can now imagine having lived with COVID 19 for a year, and we might live it it for a second year. The longer this goes on, the more likely that there's a permanent shift in views.
I'd frankly like to see a massively permanent one, and I posted on that awhile back.
Longnecker hope for a renewed focus on the divine. He noted:
Most of all, maybe we will give more time to prayer, worship and spending time with God. Maybe facing illness and death will bring us face to face with the need to pray more. Sadly, it is only when we have out of our own strength and resources that we turn to God.
Now would seem to be the time.
Now would be a good time, and perhaps that will occur.
This also gets into a quote I recently heard repeated from Michael O'Brien, a Canadian novelist, which was made back in 2016 prior to the pandemic commencing, but perhaps in some odd way prescient regarding it.
Christians in general need to ‘un-plug’ from the nearly universal dominance of commercial entertainment culture, by which I mean electronic culture. If we were to do so, we would no longer fear silence, and we would experience a new richness of life as we move away from the psychological cosmos of frantic consumerism. We would also grow in gratitude, reverence, and attentiveness to the holy, which is all around us. But we first have to recognize that we’ve been drugged—yes we believers, no less than unbelievers. If we hope for a true new renaissance, we will have to first of all deal with our addiction to mediocrity, and at the same time keep our eyes open for those creative buds of new life that rise up, against all odds, in the midst of the soul-killing tsunami of contemporary culture. We must encourage this new life wherever it appears. We must give the coming generation the courage to believe in the impossible.
I heard the quote on Catholic Stuff You Should Know where it was being attributed to a Bishop who had quoted it with attribution to O'Brien in a commencement speech.
This gets to something that's deeply existential. To quote Dylan, a person doesn't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing, and it's been a pretty foul wind blowing for some time. What exactly has caused this can be and is being widely debated, but that something is very badly remiss in Western Culture is pretty evident. It's hoping a lot for people to draw a lesson from a singular horrific event, no matter how prolonged, but 2020 has evolved from one horrific historical event, the Pandemic, into an entire series of horrific events.
Politics and Policy
If this has revealed something deeply existential, we should hope that it will reflect back in politics, which is an extension at its best of philosophy and always, in any event, a reflection of culture. And we on the catalyst for change and conservatism, as discussed above, in spite of the return of outdoor activities and pursuits, and the reawakening of old examples and truths, we can, I suspect, politics to lurch to the left for a while.
The American left is a lot better in reacting to crisis than the right is, and the left has been making real political hay out of the Coronavirus and the George Floyd tragedy. While it isn't November yet, at this point something really dramatic would have to occur in order for President Trump, who was never popular with a lot of Republicans anyhow, to survive the fall election and remain in office. It's very questionable right now if the Senate will remain in Republican hands. If the Senate goes to the Democrats, it will go to a newly invigorated left leaning Democratic party that will definitely use its elevation to office in order to leap the country to the left. Whether people like it or not, and in spite of the trends otherwise noted above, that would mean that the country will seem fairly pronounced gun control for the first time in a long time, and it'll be permanent. It'll also mean the legal normalization of what were only recently regarded as unconventional sexual unions of all sorts. The country will become a governmentally left nation in a way that it hasn't been since the Roosevelt Administration, and perhaps a left leaning nation to a greater extent than it has in any time in its history. We will have, therefore, the oddity of having a population that really is no more left leaning than it it was in 2016, but a government that will be vastly left leaning and willing to act on that impulse. In other words, we may have a center right country with a far left government, in American terms.
Some of the changes this will bring about will be permanent and others will not be, but will be very long lasting. One of the ironies of this political season has been that by and large the political right, even though it's facing a Tet Offensive moment, is wholly ignoring it.*****
As I noted here the other day, there's some political banners in support of the President that are not only brash, they're offensive. I won't repeat those here, but another one I've been very commonly seeing is one that says:
Trump
2020
Make Liberals Cry Again
From the perspective of Wyoming, stickers that say something like that probably seem really clever and funny, but after the November election its highly likely they won't. The build up in left wing political steam, fueled in part by the pandemic and the Summer of 2020 is likely to result in a political tide that washes a lot of things out with it that people have grown accustomed to. If the Democrats take the Senate, they definitely will.
Among those it its now almost inevitable that the Government will have a much more active role in the lives of average people than it has since at least the 1980s, and if the Democrats take the Senate, since the 1940s. The analogy of the New Deal by left wing Democrats is going to apply a lot more than to environmental policy, although its highly likely that the US will see a much more active environmental policy than it ever has before. Social policy will take a large leap to the left for some time, although some of the current popular social trends are anti natural and inevitably will not last, something that's discussed in a different context above. One thing that will come as a shock to locals is that the decades long retreat from gun control is going to almost certainly rapidly reverse irrespective of what the data may support. The long dominance of the NRA by the same leadership that has been in power for decades is either going to wane or collapse and the intentional choice of the organization to emphasize military arms for the past two decades is going to result in almost no sympathy for the organizations plight as it slips into trouble. All of this will be hugely unpopular in this region of the country but there's going to be nothing that can be done about it.
The operation of schools will change. This will result in
a major conflict over homeschooling. It makes sense but there will be conflict
between homeschoolers and traditional public school supporters. As the nation struggles over the reopening of schools this will become more and more apparent.
This will also create a major dent in the decades long trend of universalization of university education. There's been very little talk, as there was only a while ago, about "free" universal university education. Now the talk is just what will be open and what will not be. University enrollment will drop way off in the 2020-21 school year and some of those leaving may never return ever. That will have an impact on employment and what people are employed doing for decades to come.
Conclusion
This thread has now become so incredibly long that its doubtful anyone will read it, other than me. But we are now far into an abnormal time. That time started before the pandemic, but the pandemic has brought those things in the culture that were simmering to a full rolling boil. We're not going to be going back to "normal", if normal is the state of things in December, 2019, before any of us had heard of COVID 19.
A pandemic can never be regarded as a good thing, but change can be good or bad, including change brought about by a crisis. We're going to be getting that change. Forced to look at where we are, perhaps some of that change can be hoped to be positive.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Still, I wonder if this one might. There's been a bunch of things people have been forced to ponder that they didn't have to before, not all of which were commented on by Fr. Longnecker and, moreover, not all of which he would likely agree with me on.
**In Wyoming, we're already there. Even prior to the pandemic there were major problems with the price of petroleum and coal, and the pandemic made that worse.
We've likely muddled that here a bit with our running
Casualties of the Covid Recession thread, which has blended all the economic news. But to a degree, they are mixed. The recently depressed price of oil, for example, is partially due to oversupply, which dates back well prior to the pandemic, but it's also partially due to an increase in oversupply as people aren't driving anywhere.
***Cultural based definitions are something that Western societies have a hard time grasping as application of them are spread throughout all of the Western World. It therefore surprises us when other cultures lack a definition for the same conduct or define it completely differently. We tend to think of the definition of something describing it on an existential basis, but in fact the description is only that, a description, and tends to have as much contemporary culture baked into it as anything else.
That definitions change, sometimes describing completely different conditions from what they later come to mean, is something we also have a hard time grasping. Certain behaviors and attractions have always existed, but we imagine ourselves to really fully understand them now in part simply because we've been defining them, when simply defining something actually doesn't create a reality for anything. Descriptions can be accurate, or inaccurate. Very often, on conditions we don't understand well, they're inaccurate even if we are completely confident in their accuracy at any one time.
****Related to this, we're really learning what our personal vices are, and it's not pretty.
All over the country businesses have been closed due to shelter in place orders, with essential businesses being left open. Uniformly, however, liquor stores and marijuana dispensaries have been left open.
There's no way in a healthy society that either of those are "essential". That's nonsense. Booze and dope aren't groceries and people can live without them. . . unless they're addicts.
Addicts can't live without them without risk, and the reason that these stores were left open as we now have so many alcoholics and so many deadhead dopers that they can't close safely.
We ought to be awake as to that, and admit it. And we ought to admit that the addition of dope to the list of "essentials" or even the list of things legal is an American tragedy. Panem et circenses was the Latin cynical phrase for how to distract the people. In the United States its video entertainment and drugs. It's pathetic.
I don't think that this event will serve to wake people up on this much. But I am concerned that the doped up class we've encouraged will join an alcoholic one if this virus busts out and achieves a big attack curve, which right now it does not look like it will. If it were too, those who are really going to be hurt in a massive way, in addition to the elderly and those with compromised immune systems, are those with compromised social systems, which will mean the addicted and the poor. Legislators who voted for addiction ought to be presently ashamed of themselves.
Likewise, some thought on the preservation of poverty in the United States really ought to come about due to this. Maybe it will.
Focus on poverty really ramped up in the 20th Century as a result of the Great Depression, which threw many middle class individuals down into it. This is going to do the same. Joining the poor focuses on the poor and the reasons that people remain poor.
We've done a really bad job of addressing poverty over time in the U.S. in some ways, while a very good job of addressing it in others. By and large, the American "poor" include a large number of individuals who actually aren't poor by world standards or historical standards, they're only poor by American standards. At the same time, we have a large number of street people who are desperately poor (and often addicts, that once again) and entire demographics that are poor generation after generation.
We actually know a lot more about how to tackle these problems than we dare admit. We just don't do it. Indeed, we actively operate to keep a certain portion of the urban African American poor, as well as the Native American poor, just that by the importation of cheap labor that we really don't need. It's dressed upon liberal terms as "helping the poor" when it harms our native poor, and it's dressed up as necessary for the economy, which in no way shape or form is it, in conservative terms.
The poor stand to be really hit by this pandemic and indeed it's already the case that African Americans make up a large percentage of victims of the disease in areas in which they are a significant demographic. The border, in turn, has been shut down. Reported cases in Mexico are miniscule, less than 3,000, which if true (when this was first written) would give a really good reason for Mexico to shut the border down with the U.S., but which suggests that Mexico likely doesn't have a grasp on the infection rate. It is possible, however, that the infection rate is that low as Mexico would not have been subject to the introduction of the virus in the same way as the U.S., not being a location for the receipt of much in the way of things Chinese and being lower on the travel rate with Europe. Indeed, the U.S. may have been the source of the introduction into Mexico.
Be that as it may, when the country pulls out of this in the summer, assuming it does, it may be the case that a full blown economic disaster is in progress. At that point continuing on with the large scale immigration policy in place in the United States, which was a policy that was really obsolete by the last quarter of the 20th Century, will be foolish. It may not matter in and of itself, for the short term, however, as there will be little in the way of work to attract immigrants at former rates.
At the same time, maybe some grossly overdue attention might be paid, once again, to the American endemic poor. Such attention did come in prior eras after large events, but with policies that proved to be only partially successful and partially detrimental. It'll be interesting to see if something more effective, or anything at all, is tried this time.
Another thing that some places have done is to keep open pornography shops, although I don't know how widely that has been done. It has been done in some places. Such enterprises clearly aren't essential, but as noted, things like this bring out people's virtues and their vices. Obviously some governments have chosen to allow the engagement by people in their vices, which perhaps serves to distract them but also serves as a discredit to those governments. Indeed, the closing of businesses in general save for necessary ones, with the inclusion of the three noted above as necessary, is a broad discredit indeed.
Running counter to what I've otherwise noted in this post, but related to this, apparently the Internet pornography business has received a big boom due to the pandemic. Again, this makes sense. Men, the main customers of it, are oriented towards women overwhelmingly and part of that is the physical component. Locked in apartments and working from home is making people lonely and part of that will be expressed negatively. On a deep level, every guy surfing Big Boob Website imagines the female subjects as their own in a way that transcends mere lust, but as its all phone, and lust based, it's going to be inevitably permanently destructive to some.
In this context, however, its important to note that the Tet Offensive not only played a pivotal role in changing American attitudes towards the Vietnam War, it was a major step on a leftward lurch in American politics that had long lasting permanent effects on the country. What was advanced politically by Tet was soon advanced further by the release of the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate break in, which brought about the downfall of Richard Nixon. The left shift in politics received a push back from Ronald Reagan's administration but the country never returned to the politics of the 60s, and indeed much of the current polarization started then. The point is that legislative and cultural changes brought about by the events of the late 1960s and early 1970s were partially permanent.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Related threads:
