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Here Comes the Pain, Shared and Otherwise
The real story of this present crisis is not the numerical one, but the human one.
“There is no new experience in life,” wrote Horace McCoy, bed-rocking the brutal fatalism of his Great Depression-era story They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? “Something may happen to you that you think has never happened before, that you think is brand new, but you are mistaken. You have only to see or smell or hear or feel a certain something and you will discover that this experience you thought was new has happened before.”
A global pandemic idling the engines of economy is a new variation on the theme, but the economic pain that will be the byproduct is not new. Neither are economic hard times, just the wide swath of folks that are experiencing them reaches farther. The current pandemic shutdown, similar to the Great Depression, has an effect on groups that usually do not have to consider such hard times. Such pain is newly discovered because instead of some group of “them” — the usual high risk groups that seem perpetually poor such as the disadvantaged, the elderly, the disabled, the troubled, the demographics most prefer to not consider outside of charity reasons a few times a year, if at all — this period of troubles will be shared by many, many more.
