Silver linings. The Up-side of Bad.

 Merry Christmas. Really.

Now it's the season of joy. "Merry, merry, merry, merry Christmas." 

Now is also the winter of our discontent. COVID.

The greetings of "happy holidays" seem discordant in this winter of frustration and grief. There is so much misfortune mixed into the 2020 Christmas season. Some people get infected and die, while others seem to do fine. Unemployment is real, even if many of us are safely retired or able to work remotely. Food banks are busy, and the stock market is at record highs.

COVID is a tragedy, for individuals, communities, businesses, the country, and the world. But there are some good things that have come out of COVID, and in the Christmas spirit let's take a moment to look at them.

America discovered we can fast track vaccines. Something we thought took years to do can, in a pinch, take months. That is a good thing.

America learned that a great many voters do not object to authoritarian rule- breaking in a president. Good to know. Maybe we can pass some laws to make it harder in the future for a president to deny an election result, and the time to do it is when the president in office has no intention of doing so and supports the change. A president can tie his own hands, with perhaps the support of both parties, in preparation for making it harder for himself and future presidents to overturn an election to maintain power. Republicans in Congress who would not stop Trump may be willing to stop Biden--and thereby a future Republican president--from doing what Trump is trying. America caught a break with this head's up. 

We owe the head's up to COVID. Trump would have rolled to re-election were it not for COVID. His brand of populist ethno-nationalist authoritarianism would have been associated with prosperity. We see this in China; their public accepts anti-democratic authoritarianism so long as China's government brings prosperity. It turns out, so do Americans. COVID revealed Trump's incompetence, with the result that Trump broke the mental link between presidential-rule-breaking and prosperity. Now Trump behavior is associated with out of control pandemics and economic distress. We were lucky. 

COVID accelerated a trend on remote work, which has some benefits. We have seen that lots of jobs do not need to be done at an office after all, not every day, at least. This has countless and unknown effects, with some winners and losers. Downtown office and commercial space may lose; suburban and rural spaces may win. Residences with home office space may get more valuable. Commutes may be fewer, which will affect traffic, auto sales, drive-time radio, podcasts, and more, with winners amid the losers. 

Generally, metropolitan areas have been harder hit than small cities and rural areas. This reverses a trend that has led jobs to the cities and a hollowing out of exurban and rural America. COVID reveals some of the benefits of wide open spaces. Broadband makes having those areas suitable for many jobs now concentrating in cities. Employment synergies had accelerated trends toward urbanization, but if employment can be dispursed--and COVID has shown it can--then this trend may moderate or reverse. Housing costs in cities may moderate.

Willamette Week, Dec. 24, 2020

Some adult children who moved from suburban areas to the big city to work have come back to live at their childhood homes. Empty-nest seniors discovered why they kept the house with two or three empty bedrooms. For better or worse, the nuclear family has been pushed back together, and in some cases families will decide they like multi-generational living, now that the social stigma of "living in your parents' basement" has been muddled.

COVID reminded Americans about public health. Communicable disease had been a primary cause of death throughout human history--and America's. Vaccines, antibiotics, antivirals, modern water, sewerage, and septic rules made death by infectious disease rare in the past fifty years. The communicable infections that got attention were STIs, Sexually Transmitted Infections: AIDS, gonorrhea, herpes, chlamydia. There was a stigma to infectious disease. 

That changed with COVID. Within Republican circles, led by White House example, there was a kind of too-tough-to-care macho element to getting COVID. Among Democrats and COVID-worriers, the COVID-infected were unfortunate victims, indeed, possibly heroes, because they were people who caught COVID by doing essential work in food, health care, policing, utilities, and other front-line work. 

Stigma-free-COVID has a silver-lining consequence. We want the COVID-infectious to stay home, we want them to get health care. They are, in a sense, injured soldiers in a war we all are engaged in. It opens the public mind to our own interest in stricken strangers isolating themselves and regaining their health. Americans who would recoil from "socializing" paid sick leave or health care observe our own interest in the health of strangers. We share the air in grocery store, hallways, work places, and restaurants. It is an opportunity to make progress on widening access to health care, and it is underway. The COVID vaccine is free.

COVID is an ill wind, but bits of good are coming out of it. This will be remembered as the COVID Christmas. There is something under the tree, even this year.