How long will the shadow of the Corona
Virus pandemic darken future history? We do not know. Therefore, there's no way to know how much I should exposit COVID-19 in this here paragraph. Obviously, if I'm talking to readers in the short term, you're all sick of hearing about it. But did the pandemic gets cured by, say, 2021? Do I have to go back over what it was like for audiences in the 2030s? Or is it indelibly ground into the pages of history textbooks like the
1918 Spanish Flu was? Just from this point, you can already see how Corona Virus affects media. There are things we could normally talk about that we can't talk about now. In
my freelance online writing career spanning its third decade now, I've seen disruptions that I never would have seen before. Yet insight from my experience has helped me maintain a grip on the situation, and I'll start bypassing some of these aphorisms on to you: Disaster-Proof
Freelance Axioms: #1:
Money always goes SOMEWHERE. No matter how much the…
This may well be the year when the American people learn to appreciate street smarts over book smarts. Because kids right now can learn important lessons about how badly the adult world has lost it right now. We have Betsy
DeVos in charge of the Department of Education, which is like putting a fox in charge of the henhouse. We have the
"demon seed" lady replacing Dr. Fauci as our national pandemic expert. The US is heading into the
worst peaks of COVID-19 infection while the rest of the world is recovering. We've had a whole eight months now to come up with a plan for back-to-school this year… and we
just don't have one! It might be too late for most of you already, but parents, please understand that the US public school system is not the police. They can't enforce doodly squat. You are the parent, and in the absence of any safety measures to protect your child, you are well within your right to demand the schools enact those measures or just pull your kid out and home-school. …
Your
humble author grew up reading science fiction; it was my first passion and continues to be an enduring comfort. I was also born within the ranks of Generation X, so I came along at the right time for the cyberpunk wave in science fiction. I do write for a living now (oh… you noticed?), but as a teen I tried scribbling some sci-fi stories of my own. That turned out to be a bad idea, but you have to find these things out the hard way. And let me tell you:
Had I come up with the ridiculous plot which I am about to lay out
here, I would have ripped the paper out of the typewriter (we still
used those then), crumpled it up and dunked it in the trashcan, and
taken the rest of the day off in self-discipline, because clearly I
would have needed a rest. Had I read the plot of the COVID-19 virus
in any novel at the time, said novel would be digesting in the guts
of the nearest trashcan before long. If I may borrow a
turn of phrase from the late Kurt Vonnegut: this story is a crock…
Score: 1.27
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