My mother—from time to time—would sum up social, economic or political discord with the phrase, “May you live in interesting times.”
According to this online age’s unbesmirchable universal source of ultimate truth, Wikipedia, “’May you live in interesting times’ is an English expression which purports to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse. While seemingly a blessing, the expression is normally used ironically; life is better in ‘uninteresting times’ of peace and tranquility than in ‘interesting’ ones, which are usually times of trouble.
Despite being so common in English as to be known as the ‘Chinese curse,’ the saying is apocryphal, and no actual Chinese source has ever been produced. The most likely connection to Chinese culture may be deduced from analysis of the late-19th-century speeches of Joseph Chamberlain, probably erroneously transmitted and revised through his son Austen Chamberlain.”
The above may or may not be apropos, depending on your affiliation, in light of the “China virus” controversy, but the fact remains that at least for the foreseeable future our lives have been significantly disrupted. Learning is predominantly handicapped as universities and schools are closed and the lucky scramble to develop or reshape online coursework. Non-media-relayed Culture is unavailable to those without hefty book collections, as libraries, museums and galleries are shuttered. Broadway is dark. Concerts are cancelled, optimistically rescheduled for sometime in the fall. Mickey and Minnie have been forced to self-quarantine. Vegas is a ghost town. Across the country bars are closed and restaurants are scrambling to make ends meet somehow, limited to only carryout and delivery in an atmosphere where fear of the virus obtained through the food preparation itself must still nag at the minds of the willing. As a sports fan it seems surreal that all sports are absent. It’s a good thing that Tony Romo got that $17 million TV contract, because I haven’t seen a Corona commercial in over two weeks. I feel like I’ve been sucked back through time to a Groundhog Day weekday before ESPN.
Please pardon the “gallows humor.” Inconceivable to me are the huge numbers of unfortunate people who aren’t able to sit on their asses and type out an editorial piece at their kitchen tables. The vast majority of workers in vocations mentioned herein and in countless other occupations have absolutely no dependable idea of when they will be able to return to work, and must now pray for previously suspect bureaucratic efficiency to provide them some measure of speedy relief. My friends in the service industry are quite justifiably scared. And they aren’t the only ones.
Your clients are quite likely scared too, although they may just cop to “concerned.” Besides the balances in their brokerage accounts, and variable and indexed product performance, both their mortality and anxiety over their ability to postmortem provide for their families just became at least somewhere between .06 percent to 3.4 percent more acute. Please read Dave Murphy’s lead editorial beginning on page 10 for ways you can help reassure your clients in this no longer face-to-face miasma.
Dozens of questions swirl around our industry relating to COVID-19 that I’m waiting to hear broached and examined—not the least of which are what steps are being taken or will be taken in underwriting departments regarding testing, what the considerations will be for a positive test, and even perhaps what the mortality projections will be for those who test positive but then recover. Long term effects of contracting the virus can only be postulated at present. The question hasn’t even been definitively answered whether those who have recovered can still spread the virus.
What does seem certain at this writing is that the lack of sufficient testing supplies, cautions delivered from the media and health professionals to stay at home even if symptomatic, and a significant portion of the public suspected of actually having the virus and able to spread it but being asymptomatic and unaware, means that the numbers of positive cases, and deaths from the virus, are surely to increase dramatically in the coming weeks. And despite the projections of the experts hosted by national and local news outlets, no one really has any positive idea when this crisis may dependably ease. What we have is hope and prayer.
By my observation our country is in the midst of a still fairly well controlled panic. But firearm sales are spiking. Shelves in my city have been empty of Lysol, hand sanitizer, liquid hand soap and sanitizing wipes for weeks. Grocery store supplies of canned goods, pasta, rice and beans are infinitesimal. On my last trip to a very large store in my neighborhood there was one breached jar of Skippy and one squeeze bottle of sugar free Welch’s grape jelly. That was it for PB&J fans. We certainly are living in interesting times.
My sister-in-law Christy, my gustatory comrade-in-arms, half-jokingly posits that this is the beginning of the Zombie Apocalypse. With the nationwide run on bath tissue, perhaps it’ll be Mummies instead. I currently have four packages of toilet paper well hidden in my garage, but please don’t tell my neighbors—at least not until I can get to Cabela’s to buy more ammunition. [SPH]
