Life is unfair. We may take meaning from that.

You don't get average. You get what you get.

     "There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation has a rendezvous with destiny."  

      FDR, July 1936, to the Democratic convention

Notice to new graduates

People alive ten years from now will likely have settled on a name for what is happening now. For us, today it is just the news, life.

The virus era might be a blip and over soon. Or, we might be the beginning of something that lasts a year, a decade, or a century. 

Under the best of circumstances it is a semi-vacation for some people, a school holiday for kids, and an inconvenience for retired people. In business and stock market news, it could be the "V-Bottom" and we are already past the worst of it, with businesses and investors anticipating a big rebound this fall. Some people are predicting that and betting that way.

Or, this might be understood as the opening moments of a worldwide catastrophe, the way 1929 is understood in relation to a dozen years of Great Depression, or 1914 or 1939 are understood as the opening moments of long wars.

This could be the beginning of an era of warfare going back to catapults throwing bodies of plague victims over walls of cities in siege. Politics by other means may now mean cyber war, power grid war, and biological war. One need not bomb a factory to shut it down. Send a virus and an enemy will shut it down themselves. Tanks and missiles are so 20th Century.

People speculate. A meme circulating is that it was an accidental escape of a virus in beta-testing, one created before the vaccine to protect the home country was ready, with secret laboratories creating economic destruction of their neighbors. It is cheaper than an aircraft carrier, and indeed the cheapest way to take out an aircraft carrier.

We will hear more of this. Suspicious minds connect dots. There was a laboratory not far from the "wet markets" in Wuhan. An early death was the young, presumably healthy doctor who realized early that a virus was loose, treated the disease, and reported it. He was hushed up and shamed by the Chinese government, an odd first instinct by the government if this were totally innocent and random. Or maybe it was just what the Chinese always do, squelch news of disharmony.

We do not know the wider implications of present era until after we have lived it.

People get dealt different hands, and the hands change with the moment. People who survived the many hazards of their first 80 years are now alive to face this virus threat. Good luck, then bad luck. People graduating from college a year ago entered a robust job market. People graduating this spring cannot get interviews, and jobs disappeared anyway. 

I graduated from high school in 1967, into what we now understand to be the "Vietnam War era." At the time it was expected to be a short skirmish. Men who were college bound largely escaped being drafted into what turned out to be an ugly, long, unpopular, losing war. College youth cheered or protested, largely from a place of comfort and safety.  Non-college bound men faced the draft. Some went to Germany, where they now tell stories of good beer. Others went to Vietnam. Again, experiences divide. Some had pleasant-enough duty far from danger. Others carried rifles in the jungles. Luck. You get what you get.

A prediction and hope.

An ongoing challenge of my work as a Financial Advisor was to communicate how deeply misleading is the financial planning software that made long term projections based on averages. One does not get a 10% nominal return from the US stock market, compounded year after year, even if that is the average. Few people get average. One gets what one gets.

The stock market fell 30% between December 31 and March 31. The long time employee who scheduled retirement on March 31 and locked in a pension annuity based on values on that date is no smarter, nor less smart, than is the person who retired three months earlier. 

The optimists about the virus describe the next two weeks in America as the height of the virus era. Maybe. Some people will get the virus with little effect, and some people will die, including some young, presumably healthy people. It is unfair. It offends our sense of justice. The hardworking, prudent, and virtuous are supposed to be rewarded with good fortune. Sometimes they do, sometimes not.

The randomness and ubiquity of the virus may send a message through the political system. The idea of personal responsibility and results based on personal behavior may be shaken by this virus. Libertarian Rand Paul had symptoms then swam in the Senate pool anyway. If some senators die, people may extract a message. 

The virus might inspire a wave of suspicion and accusation. We will wear masks and gloves. Anyone and everyone could kill us. That may be the takeaway that spreads through the political culture. Or it may go the other way and inspire a new sense of unity and common risk and purpose in a united nation. People may conclude that we share a giant body of life, of germs, of antibodies; we get by because of the behavior of people around us; we are in this together. 

We will see. I suspect we are at an inflection point.