Trying again

[intrepidity]

I posted this several weeks ago, wanted to repost to get people's thoughts on this now.

I'm really hoping we learn some valuable lessons from this and somehow manage to substantially change our society for the better.

Can we?

Maybe we as a society come out the other end better off?

I've said this before, but this may really be a once in a multiple generation to have a societal paradigm shift, for the better. It's up to us

When vast swaths of Americans see that the world didn't end when they stepped off the treadmill for a few moments, when businesses realized they can adjust to having a substantial portion of their workforce telecommute, when millions finally see first hand the value of a strong public health policy and infrastructure, and that it's not "socialism" but sound social structure, maybe the scales start falling away from our collective eyes, the spell that the corporate and political class have hoodwinked us into trading our lives for starts to crack, when we experience again for more than a brief weekend what it's like to spend time with our families not on a hurried vacation but at home. Well, maybe we will all realize at once that things don't have to be the way we have allowed them to become. That we can slow it all down and if corporations have to settle for smaller profits, so be it.

Maybe we, those of us that make it, come out the other side with a renewed sense of how things could be. You won't get another chance like this.

[Cattledog]

1. Nope.

Didn't happen after the 1918 flu, WW I, The Great Depression, WW II, JFK assassination, RFK assassination, MLK assassination, 9-11.
People have short memories and always make these type of wishes but never stick to them.

[Karadeniz]

2. It would be nice to think that the times are different. More people are aware of the negative

Consequences of our previous profligate behavior. Progress rarely happens by leaps and bounds. It'll be hard, but we must hold Trump up as the exemplar of everything bad that we've allowed to happen.

[malaise]

3. The first change required will be to replace market with society

Unless neo-liberalism is buried with the dead this madness will continue

[HotTeaBag]

4. I think it all depends on how bad things actually get.

The Great Depression did have an enormous effect on those who lived through it - they became a generation who viewed 'things' differently and as a result their values were radically altered and stayed altered. They went from living it up in Roaring '20s style to soup lines in a few short months and it changed them. Not everyone, but enough.

Italians I would submit will never live their lives the same way going forward - at least until this is a very distant memory.

I know that I've been giving this a great deal of thought, and a lot of what I thought was important and necessary isn't, and when live resumes a lot of the things that were in my life (materially and emotionally) won't be coming back by choice.