CSotD: Morbid-19

We’ll start the day with Steve Sack‘s commentary on working at home, because he acknowledges the challenge without going overboard.

With about half my career having been freelance, I’ve worked at home both with kids under foot and after they were long gone, and I do recognize the fact that my deadlines have been far enough out that I have always been able to schedule things accordingly.

In fact, yesterday I sent what I thought was a four-page PDF to a client only to have her call later because I’d forgotten to reset the exporter to “All” and she’d only gotten one page.

“Are you at the park with your dog?” was her opening question, and I was, and I would have rushed home but we’ve worked together nearly a decade and she didn’t expect it and so I didn’t cut things short and somehow we all survived.

I suppose if everything has to happen by 5 o’clock, it’s not all that laid back.

Ann Telnaes offers some advice for those working at home which is a multi-pager you have to go here to see, and it is at once practical and funny.

My take? You’re allowed to grouse about any change in your workplace but giving the impression that you hate your children is uncool and revealing that you have no influence on their behavior ought to be the sort of humiliating things you keep to yourself.

Because it means you’re responsible for this

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Steve Sack)

(Al Goodwyn)

I touched on the Spring Break phenomenon Thursday and stand by my comments then, but I’m inclined to expand on it because we’re still falling into some unjustified generalities.

When Sack posted his cartoon on Facebook, it drew this comment: “YO!!! These kids are just like you were at there age.Young, Dumb, and full of c – m.”

Maybe the guy knew Steve Sack, but my guess is that he was assuming that everyone is selfish and stupid at that age, which makes you wonder how old those people were who were on beaches not at Daytona or Miami but at Gold and Juno and Omaha and Sword.

Or who risked death at the hands of the Klan to register voters in the South.

Or who spent a year or two helping Third World people in the Peace Corps.

Not everyone in the Greatest Generation was a hero, just as not everyone in the current generation is a brain-dead nitwit.

It reminds me of my 10th college reunion, when a bunch of the football players came up to me laughing and said my name had come up at the Monogram Club dinner.

They were discussing how the Class of ’71 had picked the wrong time in history to be football players at Notre Dame because the girls were all flocking to long-haired guitarslingers.

They were right that each generation has its own media image, but they were laughing about it because they weren’t dumb enough to actually believe the hype.

And I know some pretty bright, responsible people who are in the post-Millennial demographic today but have neither the time nor inclination to accept Madison Avenue labeling.

 

Speaking of which, Dave Whamond pokes a pin in another unfulfilled wishful bit of hot air.

Bernie’s supporters are still attacking Biden on social media to the point where you’d think they prefer a Trump victory out of sour grapes, though I think it’s because they feel if they ramp it up even further, there will be some miraculous turnout in the remaining primaries.

It seems that, just as crowds of kids on the beaches are not indicative of an entire generation, neither are the large number of intense posts on social media.

This article goes into more detail, but here’s the basic point:

“For example, in North Carolina, overall turnout was up 17 percent — youth turnout was down 9 percent,” John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Institute of politics told Power Up. “There’s not evidence to suggest that Sanders has expanded the electorate among young people in important ways.”

There’s more to it than that, but the bottom line is that cutting away the number of competitors in the race simply drove voters to Biden, with Sanders remaining more or less where he was to begin with.

According to Volpe’s figures, the greatest increases in turnout among 18-29s were in Iowa, where Bernie finished in a dead heat with Buttigieg, and Virginia, where he got his ass kicked.

Perhaps Linus Van Pelt could provide some tips on how to sit out in the dark alone, waiting for sincerity to triumph.

 

Meanwhile, back at the iceberg

I’ve had enough Titanic cartoons, but Dave Granlund‘s reminds me of the opening days of the second Iraq War, in which Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld blew off the problems of GIs with no adequate defense against roadside bombs, saying

 You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.

The difference between that and “Let them eat cake” being that Marie Antoinette never said that and Rumsfeld really did.

Now we’re seeing people with Cadillac health coverage and who are in no particular danger of missing their next meal brushing off the problems of people whose insurance and financial resources are both inadequate.

You often hear people suggest that some of those plutocrats spend a month living on minimum wage to see what it’s like, but, of course, they’d know it was only a month and they’d also know that, if things got desperate, they could pull the rip cord and go back to their mansions.

Which is to say, they wouldn’t learn a thing and they might even come back thinking poverty was an adventure.

 

And the current crop of oligarchs are worse than that: As Nick Anderson points out, these guys haven’t even cleaned up the despair they created themselves, much less taken time to consider the kind that is always with us and is never adequately addressed.