Normal
But it's realism not pessimism, just as my not climbing on the forced smiley-face 850Strong bandwagon after Cat5HMichael near two years ago was and still is realistic. Things are different, better in some ways, others not so. Normal is a moving target and we delude ourselves if we think to get back to How It Was before 2020.
Rushing back to reclaim our healthy economy is fools gold, too much has collapsed, businesses, industries, crowded ways of life, crushing into airplanes. Infrastructures, including America's education system. Aside from the foolhardiness of danger to health in trying to force-restart the old economy in the new age of a growing virus, it's putting people's lives at risk, especially the lives of children and young people. Yes, Black, and Blue, and All, and also Our Lives Matter.
We can't go back, we have to be imaginative and conceive new ways of life and living it, just as our local school system is doing with two or three or four new ways of children going to public school. In all this inconvenience of Shelter in Place, people will and are finding out that we didn't need to do all that we were doing, or the ways that we were doing them. There are other ways of learning besides busing to school and sitting in a classroom. Already the nine-month school year for an agricultural society and a world that was not air-conditioned for hot summer classrooms was proving poor use of facilities and resources. Going to the office is obsolete, we knew that anyway, it was becoming more and more obvious. Life has more important possibilities than this is the way we've always done it, which isn't true in any event. Previous generations did not fly and drive long distance for vacations, and what damn fool will now risk three days much less two weeks on a cruise ship? Or hours on a crowded airplane to get to a booked up hotel in Cancun. What's called the Hospitality Industry will dry up or change.
We didn't need a new car every two or three years anyway, and now the cars are garaged and not being driven, we've experienced and realized that, so the transportation, automobile manufacturing, marketing, servicing, and oil industries that in the twentieth century came to define the American economy and lifestyle will change as in my time did railroads for long distance, streetcars and buses for getting around locally.
Already I've realized that we don't need two cars, shall we give one away, anybody want a fifteen-year-old Cadillac V8 station wagon? one car is enough locally and we have no idea of traveling out of town again. In Pensacola a century ago, my grandfather rode a bicycle from East Hill to his shop downtown off Palafox and home every day. His family walked to the local grocery and druggist shop. Life changes and we're seeing it. If some of it seems like regressing, maybe so, but life was different and more simple. And church, East Hill Baptist Church was four blocks walk for my mother's family. St Andrew's Episcopal Church a ten minute stroll for my father's family, hitch up the horse or drive the car? How absurd!
Groceries? it's not as much fun as pushing a cart and browsing Publix aisles, but all things considered it's safer and cheaper to shop online and have them delivered, Hey! I don't need to buy a car and its gas, oil, tires, depreciation, maintenance and insurance to grocery shop. In concept, back to somewhat like was done here in town by folks in the Cove phoning Lefty Syprett's mom and pop grocery store across Cherry Street from the Cove Hotel to order delivery of the groceries, a boneless chuck, two pounds of new potatoes, three onions and six carrots to cook today's dinner. See, it's not all new.
And how will L L Bean survive now that I no longer need their new shirts that I loved ordering?
But back to church, what about church, my concern? Church is an institution, religion is an industry, a career field, a business that, from terrorizing fear of hell in the Middle Ages, now requires marketing and is slipping. A church service that Normal attracted a-hundred-fifty-two worshippers now has seventeen, maybe twenty-one, and people find out they can stay in pajamas and with coffee, burping and getting up to go pee, watch, join in via online streaming and even comment about the music and the sermon. You don't need to comb your hair or make sure your stockings are straight. Stockings? Churches in Europe already were empty, and ever since WW2 church membership and attendance in America have been dwindling rapidly. In the past generation, youth soccer leagues have conquered Sunday mornings in America, that segment of our culture has long been in transition, every year more Nones and less Christians ("Fewer." "Shhhh, don't call me Füehrer in public yet.") Is covid19 the closing chapter of the church, to be fought desperately to the last bishop, diocesan and national headquarters staff? In our denomination fewer and fewer clergy looking to make a living, but also fewer and fewer parishes that can afford a priest anyway: has our Time come, and covid19 will give us something besides soccer to blame it on? Do Americans still consider the Message essential, or was it way off track for a generation that's not worried about going to Hell? After Easter and the Ascension, the Medium wasn't the Message anyway. I confess, as an insider, this is chiefly on my mind, organized religion, church in America going the way of the Model T Ford, cave drawings, carbon copies, and mama wringing a chicken's neck to fry Sunday dinner.
Where there are people there will be an economy, and as civilizations change, people shift to accommodate. Industrial revolution, automation of factory work, mechanization of agriculture, revolution of transportation and mobility of life. Evolution of warfare from close order formation, to hiding behind trees, to long range artillery; to guided weapons and remote control by technicians on bases in middle-America sipping coffee and monitoring computer screens of reconnaissance aircraft and deadly accurate armed drones over targets in Afghanistan.
There is never returning, we never go back. Something, many things, new factors arise and motivate change to accommodate. That's the way it will be, and will have to be, as humans survive this pandemic. There's no going back to "Normal" or it will be like the Black Death. Prayer? Put it in God's hands? God helps those who help themselves by exercise of freewill, imagination and intelligence that God created in us.
RSF&PTL
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