What really matters | thearticle

Admittedly there haven’t been many moments of levity during the Covid-19 crisis, except for the funny videos that get sent around in lieu of meeting friends. We’re in lockdown in Toronto

with everything closed, including the US-Canada border. People won’t travel, but the ban will exclude goods moving across the 49th parallel. Over the past few months, it’s been a terrifying

journey for people, communities and nations. In the most recent clip that a friend from London sent to me, a man goes to the counter at a cafe, picks up his coffee. In the background, ABBA’s

“Money Money Money” plays. He asks the server for his bill, looks at it, and from his back pocket removes half a roll of toilet paper. He rips off three squares and hands them over. The

server picks them up, counts them and gestures that this isn’t quite enough. The customer reconsiders, and then he carefully detaches a lone square and places the gratuity in the grateful

waiter’s top pocket: what is valuable in our society changes, and in this case, fast. We’re all seriously self-isolating here, much like grizzly bears in hibernation, reviewing our now

non-existent portfolios and taking stock of life. The oligarchy, the super-rich, the private jets, the mega-yachts all seem part of another era, as grotesque as Marie Antoinette and her

court. If Brexit, such a distant memory, was a wake-up call to the metropolitan elite, this virus is a wake-up call to the world. When my father became extremely ill at the end of February,

I was grateful and astounded at the kindness and generosity of my parents’ neighbours. They brought food, they offered help, and they meant it when they said to call any time. We did, and

they were there. All of a sudden, everything else seemed unimportant. During that hideous episode, nothing mattered except making sure my father was in the hospital and getting the care he

needed. All the extraneous things melted into oblivion. Who cared what people did for a living or how big their house was or what connections they had? All this took place on the cusp before

the WHO declared coronavirus a pandemic. It’s not that this comes as a total surprise. All my friends and family have a moral compass at the core, but we do get side-tracked by consumerism

and the urge to keep up with the Joneses. I have closets full of clothes and shoes — far too much of everything. All of us are re-evaluating our habits and patterns, knowing that the future

will be different. We don’t need as much as we have. We don’t need dozens of outfits, especially as we stay home in leisurewear, watching movies. We will need to consume less. On the way to

the hospital, I asked my mother if she had HBO. In crisis-mode, she thought long and hard about whether or not she or my father had been diagnosed with “HBO” and if so, what it was. When

times were better, we worried about what our more significant legacy would be. Would it be something on the world stage? Would it be establishing a charity and making a difference in

people’s lives, would designing an architecturally astonishing house make the grade? Now, it’s enjoying the fact that good friends care about you and you care about them rather than counting

the number of Chanel bags in your closet. It’s about making sure you can pay your bills instead of whether you can build a mausoleum. It also begs the much broader question of how the hell

we got here. By now everyone has watched Bill Gates’s 2015 prescient Ted Talk where he forecasts that this coronavirus situation would occur and that we had better prepare for it. Which,

clearly we didn’t, and it segues nicely into Michael Lind’s long piece in _Tablet_. On this American platform, the professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs has written an article

called, _The Coronavirus Didn’t Cause This Crisis by Itself. McKinsey Helped_. His argument is that “the pandemic has exposed two weaknesses in contemporary American society: the loss of

critical manufacturing capabilities and the decline of the one-earner family.” One mistake, of many, was outsourcing the manufacture of “critical medical supplies and life-saving medicines”

to China, an authoritarian state hostile to the US. And, while Lind doesn’t defend 1950s society where the homemaker mother stayed home, he rebukes a later system that made the two-income

family the norm. His conclusion is that American business, helped by libertarian ideologues lowered wages. Lind begins with offshoring and the definition of “unbundling”, a term popularised

by McKinsey. Consulting firms of the 1990s dismantled “vertically-integrated industrial behemoths like GM and IBM. Vertical integration had been a mistake; the consultants claimed with the

passion of evangelists.” The sweeping ideology of the time was for businesses to focus on their “core competencies.” In his book _The New Class War_, “the pattern of offshore outsourcing to

China, Mexico, and India is explained almost entirely by labour arbitrage — that is, the search for cheap, non-union labour, the same search that has led the parallel transfer of

manufacturing by US corporations from high-wage, pro-union states in the Northeast and Midwest to the anti-union, low-wage states of the former Confederacy.” As we know, it’s not the

high-school educated, working-class that makes up the bulk of the American population who have benefited but the executives and shareholders. As we face our mortality, reconsider our

penniless futures, have time to think about what is truly important, and get our life in order, it’s time for society also to get its priorities right.