Life is just one damned thing after another, whether it is private or public life. And looking back upon history (which in reality, of course, has never stopped happening, even during our brief halcyon days), one can see that in almost every age in almost every part of the world, human beings have had to live their normal lives and do their normal business under conditions of uncertainty, danger and distress. . .
-Arthur Toynbee
This morning after Peg left for work I spent a few minutes, as is my custom, scrolling through the paper via Drudge, Flipboard, and the NYT app. In case you hadn't noticed, there isn't a lot of good news out there lately, what with war, famine, political turmoil, and an economy that appears headed for the tank.
But the historian in me wonders how all these macro-level developments reflect themselves in the events of our daily lives here at Tara. I sit here on a sunny morning sipping coffee and trying to fend off the affections of Dean the Cat, with money in our bank account and all our bills current. Have all the crises piled at our doorstep like Amazon boxes filled with merde really changed anything for us, for P and me?
Maybe if we list the events making headlines, the effect on our daily lives will become more clear.
The War in Ukraine. I'm too old to fight, and P's humanitarian urge to fly over there and provide anesthesia has finally waned. The biggest change in our lives from Putin's foolhardy invasion centers on the radical change in our relationship with Jim, my oldest. We helped him and Anna escape from Moscow in the opening days of the war, and they're now in Istanbul with thousands of other Russian refugees trying to assemble the immigration paperwork for a new life somewhere else. He and I have not been so close in years, and he's now met Peg and Issac and dipped his toe into life with his new family. The war set all that in motion.
Oh, and I had a trial continued because opposing counsel claimed she had to attend to a daughter, a trauma nurse recently returned from Ukraine with PTSD. Of course.
The Pandemic. We wouldn't be in Corning right now but for Florida's botched early non-response to the pandemic (freedom!), which forced me into remote work and led Peg to rejoin a staff of friends here in the upstate. The ability to practice law remotely has revolutionized my profession, although the old-timers still hold sway and their resistance to this new way of working drives my crazy travel schedule back-and-forth to Florida. Still, the fact that I'm not typing this as a prelude to a long commute in crawling traffic to an office where I'll sit all day and bill is what I hope will be a permanent legacy of those early pandemic days.
And the pandemic has radically changed P's professional life, accelerating the imminent collapse of our health care system. Finite supply and exploding demand in the CRNA community means economic consequences that likely can't be passed on to the consumer or his or her insurer, so it's only a matter of time before the whole thing falls in on itself, but for now P's living in the salad days of being an experienced and respected provider in a profession heavily in demand. Her phone rings off the hook with calls from recruiters, each offering more money than the one before, but I don't see her going anywhere soon.
In the most direct sense, the pandemic has affected us because we've both had Covid, likely twice, although we are both walking around quadruple vaccinated. That's just going to be how things are, I guess.
The Recession. I don't want to jinx us, but both P and I work in a world that's largely recession proof. Folks don't stop needing their gallbladders removed because inflation runs rampant or economic growth falls flat. Likewise, some of my busiest and most lucrative days were spent litigating the fallout from the Great Recession over a decade ago. As we like to say in the litigation community: when things are good, people sue each other; when things are bad . . . people sue each other.
So P and I still ride around hitting golf balls every now and then, still are able to put gas in the plane at $8 a gallon, still had a steak last night for my birthday without worrying about how to pay for all that beef that's made us both miserable this morning (a massive mound of red meat, consumed by someone whose biome has been conditioned for arugula, can have explosive consequences a few hours later. Who knew?).
The Workforce Crisis. I think this one hits me more than P, although she tells me that ORs are shutting down around the country for sheer lack of trained help. We're engaged in a constant bidding war for talent in small town, medium-sized firms like ours. My associate quit and moved to Miami to follow his heart, but I imagine his paystub got a lot more robust as well. Paralegals and legal assistants are almost impossible to find, and we spend months training up staff only to realize why they were available in an economy with a three percent unemployment rate when they show up for work smelling like pee, if they show up at all. I've never worked so hard, and find myself staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m. trying to figure out how to deal with the growing backlog of work in an unforgiving, deadline-driven work environment.
Global Warming. The obvious marker on this topic was the complete destruction of our homes and lives in PC as a result of Hurricane Michael. Now we pay a lot more for insurance on the condo and the farm, and I marveled yesterday with a friend of mine who owns an insurance agency in Florida that there's property insurance available at all. The summers have become a lot hotter down there, and a lot drier up here apparently. But this horseman of the apocalypse is plodding along slowly enough that we two may not feel the most dramatic effects in our lifetime. And those, I imagine, will center on the masses of humanity who've already started leaving the places we've rendered unlivable in search of new homes, your homes. Can you blame them? And that rising tide of the dispossessed is only going to make our fractured politics that much more acrimonious and just plain mean, us against them.
But down here at the Mike and Peg level, life goes on, albeit with fewer clothes and more need for air conditioning.
The Cold Civil War. This one has led to a collection of little cuts that each would hurt a little, but altogether have radically changed our life over the years since DJT bullied his way to the top and his behavior became the model for a whole swath of our country. Facebook friends lists have shrunk. Families have fractured. I don't go to squadron reunions anymore as the officer ranks, active and retired, have swollen with insurrectionist neo-Confederates. My old notion of an arc to my life that would lead to a denouement on the bench trying to give back to a profession and a community that have been very good to me have fallen by the wayside, and now is just a story I like to tell at cocktail parties. We go overseas on vacation, not to hike mountains or bask on some beach, but to discern whether this is a place we could live and keep our sanity after the 2024 election. And we've already fled up here, largely as a result of the political radicalization of the South.
Yep, this one is no abstraction for us. It and the pandemic have probably changed our lives more than anything else.
So that's life in the calamitous third decade of the twenty-first century, at the P & Me level. Ironically, these have been the happiest days of my life, much more so than those halcyon days a couple decades back, or the decades before, remembered through our internal lens that washes away most of the painful stuff.
To quote Dickens, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
Or, more accurately, Michael Stipe: "It's the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine."
Always a bright and sunny blog to start the morning off right :)