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History Has A Way Of Repeating Itself

Did you ever notice when some kind of disaster happens, it's almost immediately compared to something similar in the past? The financial collapse of 2008 was compared to the depression of the 1930s. This current pandemic is often compared to the Spanish flu from the early 1900s.

Is it that we don't learn from these things or that they get so far back we can't think of them as anything we should be worried about. Survivours of the German concentration camps, tell us we should never forget the evil men can do to each other if they fall under the spell of madmen like Hitler. We had numerous genocide outbreaks since then.

When this pandemic is sufficiently controlled, we will all start to feel better, celebrate for sure, and move on with our lives. But are we going to learn anything?

We could and should put practices and policies in place that anticipate and plan for another pandemic. We should be on a constant war footing against these bugs, because like it or not we will be. Compare it if you will, to The Cold War. If we can plan for every possibility of foreign and hostile attacks against us, we can do the same for germs of this nature.

There is so much of the infrastructure that has failed us. All of those beautiful highways sat empty for weeks on end because no one needed them.

Our medical community bent but did not break. The death toll for that to happen was too high. Then again, there are always casualties in War. Typically military leaders are still trying to figure out how to minimize losses while getting the desired outcome. We need to overhaul our healthcare system. Ours doesn't work for everyone, and it has to or what we are witnessing now will happen again.

We've realized something that, for many of us, was uncomfortable. We ask a lot of faceless, low paid, unappreciated people to risk their lives for us. The grocery store clerks and restockers who, if you went to a grocery store during the pandemic, were in an environment that was waiting for the next infectious person to walk in and possibly spread discomfort at best and death at the worst.

Of course, they aren't the only ones. The bus drivers, the drug store clerks, the delivery service people, the warehouse workers, the police officers, the firemen, the list goes on and on.

We did get a lot of work done from home. Although working without building comradeship might be sterile and not as satisfying. However, we know there are ways to incorporate online meetings and physical get together to fill that need.
We can not go back to the way things were. Our game plan for life got sucker-punched by something we can't even see.

There needs to be a reassessment of our values. We need to look at what works and make it happen. No matter what political party or wing of such parties comes up with a good idea, we have to consider it. If it doesn't work, we have to fix it or try something else, but we can't be pining away for the good old days. The good old days are over. The only thing left for us to rebuild for the brand new days.

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