No matter your age or situation, this pandemic will change many things for you in fundamental ways. None of us will be getting out of this one unscathed.
It is not my intention for this to be interpreted as a dire warning. Rather, it is a statement of fact. Besides, not all of the changes will be bad. Some will be wonderful.
During the very early years of the web, which was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee (he also created the first browser in 1990), I was still actively involved in the traditional forms of media work -- newspapers (as an editorial writer), magazines (as a managing editor), books (as an author), radio (as a news director) and TV (as the supervisor of a weekly news show).
So you might conclude that I would have been heavily invested in the old, and suspicious of the new. Actually, the opposite was true. I was intrigued by the explosive potential of a new Information Age, where our journalistic skills would be sorely needed.
By the mid-90s (1995 to be precise), I'd made the transition to the web, getting involved in launching some of the earliest journalism web sites and managing the young people who rushed to staff them. It would be a stretch to say that most of them had journalistic experience. They didn't. Instead they were coders, designers, producers, project managers, marketers and visionaries.
One of the amazing people I got to know during this period was Louis Rossetto, the co-founder of Wired. One of his mottos was "Change is good!" That is a philosophy worth embracing now.
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Last night my grandchildren dyed Easter eggs. If I have got this right, today is Good Friday and Sunday is Easter. It is also Passover. I'm always reminded at this time of year and at Christmas of what I believe and what I don't believe. Let's put it this way: I believe in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. I believe in magic.
This pandemic is an opportunity for people of faith to embrace those who hold different or no religious beliefs. It is not a time to proselytize; it is a time to accept. That can be part of the great coming together that is needed in a state of moral crisis. But if we are careless, there will be many losers coming out of this dark period and few winners.
Already, the pattern is clear. the $2+ trillion in pandemic relief mandated by Congress is rhetorically meant to help the little guy -- renters who can't pay their rent, small businesses that cannot afford payroll, the unemployed who feel hopeless and abandoned.
But most of that relief money will flow through the large banks and they are imposing their own rules on who gets what. Wells Fargo closed the application process for "payroll relief" loans after one day. Beware of history here. How did Bank of America become huge and rich? It scooped up the property lost by millions of people during the Great Depression.
Currently, unemployment in the U.S. is more than half the rate it was during the Depression. It will soon be climbing higher.
Will those who need relief get it or will the big banks once again simply get richer and more powerful? Who will be watching?
Investigative reporters, that's who. Now more than ever, we need our journalists to be the aggressive watchdogs on power they are entitled to be under the First Amendment to the Constitution. Bob Dylan got all of this right a long time ago: "The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind."
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