Maybe one motivation behind the rush to re-open the economy is that the spell of 'the rat race' only lasts so long before it wears off?

Does accepting certain things require, perhaps, constant inoculation, before a vague confusion and questioning creeps in: is this the only way to manage a society?

Maybe it's not just the air that is clearing a bit, but also our heads, or at least some of our heads?

I think of friends and relatives who talk about the small pleasures of work from home. Walk the dog at lunch. Hear birds through an open window. Don't miss that commute.

I think of friends with children who are cooking, building, gardening, and getting involved in deep imaginative play.

I think of how inequities are more vivid and painful right now, how obvious the distance is between those who can work remotely and safely those who can't.

I've thought for decades about the final chapter of Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. Do you remember the title? I think it's: The Coming Revolt of the Guards.

Zinn wrote about how the brutalities and inequities that benefit a tiny elite in America have always resisted change because the 'guards' of the system, those who aren't quite elite, benefit enough, are comfortable enough, in the current order of things to support the status quo.

That's who Zinn called the guards, as I remember it.

It's us (I count myself in this ethically compromised group) the guards, who are working from home, in comfort, in relative safety, dazed by the brutality out there of people being sent back into unsafe jobs but not being too unsafe ourselves, at least at the moment.

It's us, the guards, noticing, perhaps, some of our own conditioned behavior.

Zinn thought there would come a time when the guards would see that they too were being taken advantage of, and also that they were living lives that were ethically questionable.

As I remember the chapter (it's been a while and I don't have a copy of the book anymore) Zinn thought that that moment of the guards switching sides was what would eventually transform America.

He didn't live to see that moment, but I wonder if this pandemic pause might be inching us ever so slightly closer? What do you think?