Break a Leg

I drove by the theater today, and, to my surprise, it was open. I knew that it wasn't going to remain closed indefinitely, but I really hadn't expected it to open now, given that there is a general increase in the SARS2-CoV infection rate expected as people head back indoors after the start of the rainy season. To be sure, I'd stopped paying attention to the reopening plan some time ago; the whole exercise struck me as opaque. It turns out that in the four-stage plan, theaters could reopen (at 25% max capacity) in Stage 2. Not that I'd realized that we'd moved to Stage 2...

As one might imagine, not everyone is pleased with this turn of events. I don't blame them, even though I don't really understand what the alternatives were; there are no systems in place to manage something like this. To some degree, the show always has to go on. People working various industries may become sick, but if they all go home and hide from the disease, the rest of society hits the wall, and hard. And while theaters don't fall into that category, living on unemployment benefits long-term is not a simple task; if they try to go home and hide from the disease, eventually they hit a wall, especially given that many of them are young people who haven't had the chance to build up months and months of savings.

The global pandemic is said to have revealed a lot of things about society. Which may be true, I'm not sure. A number of these things struck me personally as only hidden from people who never bothered to look for (or at) them in the first place. But one of the things that was revelatory for me was how people's understanding of the economy had become unmoored from how an economy actually works. While I'd always met people who didn't understand the difference between money and the economy more broadly, it suddenly went far beyond the odd person here and there, as it had been before. But in a society were the primary, and often only, barrier between a person and simply buying something that strikes their fancy is their checking account or credit card balance, it's easy to fall into thinking that money simply makes things appear on its own, nothing else required.

In any event we'll see how long it all lasts. If infection rates jump during the fall and winter, Stage 1 might be waiting in the wings, to be called out for an encore. I suspect that there won't be much applause.