Opening up

With mom having two shots of Moderna under her belt, she and I ventured up to Roxboro yesterday to meet with a broker and a contractor to look at some work that needs to be done at some rental units we own. Mom had said what a disturbing and crazy mess it was. It looked less bad than she had led me to believe it was going to be, but that's another topic best discussed between mom and myself. The woman has high standards!

It was interesting to get out there and see what's up in rural communities, to add the impressions of this drive to the one Mary and I took to High Point. First off, there's a fair amount of Trump and aligned stuff out there, but it's dialed back a little. Mary is utterly scandalized that anybody could still support him after what happened at the Capital, but honestly if four years of his craziness wasn't going to change people's minds, what on God's green earth could? The fact is that he represented his constituency fairly well and gave them a lot of what they wanted and still want, a need to feel validated and represented. I think we need to take heart from the fact that expressions of enthusiasm for him are moderated now. We just need to serve people, manage through, keep fervor down, save lives, create jobs, etc.

Friends and contemporaries are finding shots. Jonathan and Sharon heard some where available in Jacksonville and went down there yesterday for shot #1 of the Moderna. Somebody else got a JNJ shot in Durham. It is interesting that, with all the focus and hand-wringing about equity and access blah blah blah, how people will hustle off to grab whatever shot's available at the drop of a hat. While, on the one hand, we don't want doses to go to waste and maybe it's an efficient market function where the aggressive and informed are assuring that few shots get wasted, it's also a little funny. It's not unlike how liberals talk about how taxes should be higher but work hard to max out their mortgage interest and home office deductions, 401ks, IRAs, 529s, donor-advised funds, etc, before you even get started with complex tax strategies. People with money are the only ones who can afford CPAs who can study the tax Code and figure out how to make it work for them. This is the kind of thing that pisses off working class people and gives rise to terms like "liberal hypocrites," and it's not all wrong.