As everyone my age knows, the holidays are just around the corner. Meanwhile the presents which traditionally help us mark the holidays are stuck in containers off of Long Beach, straining to find their way onto our shelves. Logistics people the world around are sleeping poorly, if at all.
Early in the pandemic everyone developed a newfound appreciation for service workers: waiters, delivery people, the people who restock shelves, nurses, etc. We realized how at risk they were and how much we needed them. People tipped more and were more supportive of higher wages.
The global supply chain snarl offers us another opportunity to appreciate how utterly interconnected everything is and how everyone has a place. Small COVID outbreaks in ports or factories 12,000 miles away now are impacting whether or not a toy or a sweater makes its way to your tree this December. Or maybe it's not the outbreak itself, but the policy response to the outbreak or even the extent to which the local population complies with masking rules/norms. We really don't know. It is the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in China, or Kazahkstan, or somewhere in the Pale of Settlement. Wherever and whoever it is, we now know we depend on them too.
And the absence of new things to purchase very much brings home the import of tending and mending the old things we already have, so we appreciate anew those who can do that and those things that allow themselves to be fixed. The one thing that is really hard for us to understand is that we need more people, which means immigrants, and that we need culture and means to bring them into our fold, which means schools and community colleges that are nimble and responsive and places for them to live, amongst other things.
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