We’ll Be OK — By John Reed

We’ll Be OK
Regular readers know I’m an optimist. Even as current events seek to turn our eyes downward, I remain convinced things will be ok in the long term.
I believe the virus-related efforts at cleanliness and antiseptic procedures will help with other infectious diseases too. Maybe the flu and the common cold will be less prevalent from now on.
Business models will permanently change. Drive-through, curbside pickup, and home delivery will drastically change the customer experience. Hopefully there’ll be more jobs for delivery drivers.
Our education system has already been in transition; the centuries-long effort to learn and memorize facts and figures is already irrelevant. As students now have the entire world’s breath of knowledge at their fingertips, we should now concentrate on problem solving, strategies for connecting disparate data from different sources, and synthesizing new ideas from the terabytes of old ones.
Some things will remain relatively unchanged. Group activities like team sports and marching bands rely on communal participation. There no way to pull off a concert or a football game with each member “phoning in” their part.
I’ve said before our relative isolation insulates us from national politics. We might see gas prices rise some or cotton prices drop some. But just as we lived through Reconstruction, the New Deal, various wars, even Obama, even Trump…regardless if my neighbors are Democrats, Republicans, Greens, or Socialists, they’re first and foremost my neighbors.
Sure, pessimism will run rampant. Loud voices will proclaim gloom and doom. Sure, we’ll continue to debate governance, we’ll still wear our masks, we’ll still try to manage life in the current wilderness.
But we’ll be ok.