COVID times bring the unexpected and the unwanted. But I never expected to get a good set of deltoids out of them.
Yes, my late-sexagenarian shoulder muscles are now as buff as they can be. And yours would be, too — if you were doing your laundry with a plunger and two five gallon plastic buckets. (All are new and clean; the buckets are food-grade.)
This started a couple of weeks ago when my wife fed a thick wool blanket to the old top-loader. The machine had handled that task well enough a year or two back; but we all get older. This time it barfed and died.
Well, we all had 28 good years together. Rust was breaking through around the rim of the tub. We invited in a heavily-masked repairman, but all he could offer was grief counseling.
So now my wife and I are exactly where we didn’t want to be: waiting for a major appliance in the midst of world-wide supply chain chaos. The new washer is 27 days out— on a schedule that’s already slipped once.
But we’re old. Vaccinated, but old. We don’t want to risk the laundromats. We really don’t go out much. Every house in the ‘hood is a self-contained survival habitat. So hand-washing — or plunger-washing — it is. I’m very grateful that the clothes dryer’s hanging in there. It’s older than the washer.
A little help is on the way. My wife ordered a stand-up clothes plunger called “The Magic Wand” so that I can now wash clothes in the bucket while standing up straight and using both hands. Or more precisely, I will be doing that if the Magic Wand thingie ever leaves Needles, California, where it has inexplicable paused in its travels. Perhaps it’s taking the sun. There’s a lot of that in Needles.
As for wringing out the water — we have a mop wringer for that. (Yes, new and clean.) Pressing the big handle down hard on a load of wet socks especially benefits the muscles of my rear shoulders. You want balanced development between front and posterior delts, or you get problems. Problems that hurt.
It’s little enough to complain about. Compared to so many, we’re privileged and we know it. We’re housed; we have money enough; we’re getting by. We’ve isolated together in a tiny house since March 2020 and haven’t gone mad or called the divorce attorneys. If the government wanted to send old people on a several-year trip to Mars, the two of us could give it a go.
And we might be up for it, because Earth isn’t doing so well. COVID isn’t the problem. We are the problem. The problem behind all other problems.
Our washing machine will be a long time coming in part because everyone wants one — right now. You think washing machines are bad? Try refrigerators: three months out, at least.
This is America, the world’s consumer; if they stare at the wall long enough in isolation, people want to buy something. What else do they know how to do? Those old appliances? Yeah, they’re working, but the bored thought occurs: why not replace them now?
A sudden decision — made simultaneously by millions of households. And then even more orders pile up from people who want to “beat the shortage.”
Which is caused by other shortages. Shortages of workers, for one: our washer’s being made in North Carolina. Most appliances sold in America are made in the American south or the Mexican maqiladora zone along the border. COVID is running wild in all these places. North Carolina in particular made the COVID news today with a bad outbreak. This may (ahem) affect production. Though I’d rather they shut down entirely than endanger workers.
And there’s the shortage of chips: you’ve heard of that, right? Turns out that making computer chip plants is expensive, so somehow a world system evolved where most of the chips made in cars and other appliances are made by a very few companies in Asia. In areas that are having their own COVID-related production problems.
It also turns out that in the interest of efficiency, the standard “just in time” manufacturing philosophy decrees that companies keep no reserves or backlogs of material on site: just order as you need them and they arrive “just in time.” It means more profit. And many parts besides chips come from all over the world.
Interesting to read this week that Toyota, perhaps alone among car companies, had ignored the “just in time” nonsense and built a reserve of chips. But even Toyota’s now cutting production by 40 percent thanks to the chip shortage — and COVID problems.
Washing machines don’t have many chips, but they have some. And some models use more chips than others.
Our final choice was between two machines. We did NOT choose the Internet-connected machine that could automatically send orders to Amazon for detergent and bleach and other consumables when it calculated that supplies had run low. You the proud owner would of course give it the ability to debit your checking account.
Imagine that somebody hacks your “connected” washing machine and tells it to order 50 cases of detergent and direct them to a flea market in Davenport, IA. My wife and I would keep that “feature” turned off; but we don’t even want the functionality in the house. Somebody we don’t know might find a use for it.
That’s all beside the point. (Or is it?) Another issue is transportation. People are staying home. They’re ordering by mail. The post office is not in great shape, and the other shippers and online sellers like Amazon are having trouble keeping up.
Some of these outfits have just now decided that maybe they should pay a little more money on wages, and spend more on COVID protection for workers. It took a lot of shaming and screaming to make that happen. Oh yes, and people quitting.
Left to themselves, these outfits would just book their profit and mutter that “People don’t want to work.” (“For you,” the answer is. “They don’t want to work FOR YOU.”) But if COVID gets worse, the supply chain could sputter again in any case, as badly as last year.
And why shouldn’t it? We’ve been attacking COVID all wrong. The wealthy nations take care of themselves with vaccines — where people don’t refuse to take them for political reasons. But even if everyone did, COVID’s not over anywhere unless it’s over everywhere.
It keeps mutating. And if mutations don’t arise in America, they’ll arise elsewhere and come here. Stronger, more transmissible, perhaps more deadly. Delta is only the latest mutation to do well. More will come out of the vast, poorer regions of the world where little or no vaccine is available. And it’ll happen, and happen, and happen again.
This bugs me, because it didn’t have to be that way, on any level. Many scientists thought that treatments, not vaccines, were the way out of this. I’m a recent retiree from the University of California system — just a paper pusher. And while I have certain nuanced memories of the place, it does good research.
UC San Francisco, a world-renowned medical research university. came up with a cheap COVID treatment: a synthetic antibody — a nanobody — that would prevent the virus from taking hold if inhaled daily through the nose; and, if you were already sick, immediately attack the virus. It could be made in mass-quantities, freeze-dried, and shipped around the world at room temperature. They did tests. It worked. And again, it was cheap. They went out to interest industry in funding full trials — stage 1, stage 2, stage 3, the whole bit.
And nobody was interested. They were more interested in selling high-priced vaccines and monoclonal antibody treatments to the government. That monoclonal antibody treatment that the government is now pushing costs $1200 a pop just for the drug. There’s no money for corporations to make in a cheap treatment. No drug company is interested. Read about it here.
Meanwhile, the radical-conservative Supreme Court majority has torpedoed President Biden’s eviction moratorium. Landlords are very happy; several hundred thousand people may be homeless in the midde of a pandemic, but who cares?
This wondrous neoliberal capitalist world tells us that everybody should do what’s absolutely best for them personally, and somehow it’ll work out for the best for all of us. It’s like trickle-down economics on steroids, and as neoliberalism rules the world, that’s what we’re going to get.
COVID isn’t killing us. We’re killing us. COVID is just the latest and most dire of our neoliberal follies. More are coming home to roost. You know what they are. In the meantime, enjoy this weekend’s Cat 4 hurricane as it comes onshore right in the middle of a COVID hotspot. Ida, it’s called: that was my mother’s name. Kind of glad she’s not here for this.
We learn slowly as a people. We always want to do what’s easy for us, not what’s hard, and certainly not do hard things for others unless we absolutely have to. What’s in it for us, ask some people I know? As the smoke from a million acres of drought-fueled forest fires streams through the skies overhead and cities are endangered.
This: if we don’t care about this whole interconnected world, the world will continue to suffer — and you, and me. Pain is the great teacher, they say: perhaps when enough of us are in enough distress we will as a people begin to do the right thing — as usual, when all else has failed.
Otherwise: even if COVID somehow fades away by itself, it will have beaten us. Because we were not equal to it. And if we are not equal to COVID, can we be equal to any of our problems? Can we learn? Again, it’s an open question.
In the meantime, I’ve got another load of laundry waiting. I will at least face our possible future of interlocking armageddons with good upper body strength. And clean socks. And — eventually — a new low-water-consumption washer that’ll help us beat next year’s planned severe water restrictions here in town if our drought doesn’t break. Which it may not. And the beat goes on.