Skyrocket.
Friday, March 27th, 2020
There was unanimity of sentiment from the nation’s papers today, the last Friday in March, 2020. Job losses soar. They skyrocket. They have surged. They have done so with so much visual drama that newspaper graphics people played the spike large on the page, taking up most of a column.
If you’re connected with food, or entertainment, or anything involved with the social clustering of human beings, you can feel this—it’s probably old news to you—and more likely than not you have simply lost your job as your workplace has been shuttered. If you are one of the lucky, lucky few where your bosses have vowed to keep people on the payroll in some shape or form, then you have a thread or two of hope that you can come out the other side with a recognizable way of making a living.
Congress and the President, in what seemed like a glacial week-plus of finagling, finally passed a coronavirus relief bill that Speaker Pelosi will be the first to tell you is really only a preamble for the work ahead. It’s huge, and it will help some of the right people and a lot of corporate America that I have less human empathy for at the moment, but at least it’s done and the guy who got elected President attached his illegible sharpie-scrawl to it and it is done. Kind of sounds like they’re now headed for their respective bunkers, although Speaker Pelosi on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show friday night sounded like she didn’t want to take any victory laps—even those surrounding her 80th birthday—until she and everyone can freely hug their loved ones wherever they are.
Sure wish them luck in that challenge.
