Whiplash isn’t good for businesses or people

Several decisions announced by SCOTUS during the past few days have upset a number of apple carts in addition to the ones overturned a year ago disrupting women’s health care. So doctors and medical schools are deciding how to best respond at a time when there’s an estimated shortage of 100,000± physicians projected for the near future, Locally, we’ve noticed we have to schedule getting sick 2 or 3 months in advance when, not too long ago, we only needed lead time measured in weeks.

There’s now a number of businesses wondering if they have to accept every customer that makes an inquiry: infants at “fine dining” or pacifists at police academies? Speaking of academies, we’re now looking at a system for which the payoff may well not sufficiently reward the investment risk except for the legacy admissions. This at a time when there is growing concern about a need for STEM graduates to maintain our economic competitiveness.

Stay On Path

Photo by J. Harrington

Meanwhile, AI and social media are contributing to misinformation, disinformation and alleged copyright violations and, before Minnesotans, and others, can figure out how to adjust their finances to resume repayment of student loans, while those who had their PPP loans forgiven tsk, tsk from the sidelines, the Biden administration is planning a different approach to forgiving student loans that, we hope, won’t be subject to constitutional misinterpretation.

We’ve been here before, according to some, several times: constitutional conventions, world wars, civil war, new deal. But those times we weren’t also facing growing disruptions from climate breakdown’s effects and the disruptions that result from wholesale changes to the energy sources of the global economy, plus the continuing loss of biodiversity. Yes, Virginia, the sky is falling, sort of literally.

All of the preceding precedes consideration of the implications of Paris experiencing a George Floyd moment and chaos in the air travel system this holiday weekend and whatever comes next. We have met the future and it doesn’t work. It’s time for a convention of cosmologists to make up a new world view that we can all, or at least most of US, accept. Or, we can accept that we are dooming our descendants to subsistence-level living until they’re rescued by the space aliens who figured our that cooperation works better than competition.

Fritz Perl had a version we should carefully consider, captured in the Gestalt Prayer. There’s also

I Am Waiting

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am waiting for my case to come up   

and I am waiting

for a rebirth of wonder

and I am waiting for someone

to really discover America

and wail

and I am waiting   

for the discovery

of a new symbolic western frontier   

and I am waiting   

for the American Eagle

to really spread its wings

and straighten up and fly right

and I am waiting

for the Age of Anxiety

to drop dead

and I am waiting

for the war to be fought

which will make the world safe

for anarchy

and I am waiting

for the final withering away

of all governments

and I am perpetually awaiting

a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Second Coming   

and I am waiting

for a religious revival

to sweep thru the state of Arizona   

and I am waiting

for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored   

and I am waiting

for them to prove

that God is really American

and I am waiting

to see God on television

piped onto church altars

if only they can find   

the right channel   

to tune in on

and I am waiting

for the Last Supper to be served again

with a strange new appetizer

and I am perpetually awaiting

a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for my number to be called

and I am waiting

for the Salvation Army to take over

and I am waiting

for the meek to be blessed

and inherit the earth   

without taxes

and I am waiting

for forests and animals

to reclaim the earth as theirs

and I am waiting

for a way to be devised

to destroy all nationalisms

without killing anybody

and I am waiting

for linnets and planets to fall like rain

and I am waiting for lovers and weepers

to lie down together again

in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed   

and I am anxiously waiting

for the secret of eternal life to be discovered   

by an obscure general practitioner

and I am waiting

for the storms of life

to be over

and I am waiting

to set sail for happiness

and I am waiting

for a reconstructed Mayflower

to reach America

with its picture story and tv rights

sold in advance to the natives

and I am waiting

for the lost music to sound again

in the Lost Continent

in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the day

that maketh all things clear

and I am awaiting retribution

for what America did   

to Tom Sawyer   

and I am waiting

for Alice in Wonderland

to retransmit to me

her total dream of innocence

and I am waiting

for Childe Roland to come

to the final darkest tower

and I am waiting   

for Aphrodite

to grow live arms

at a final disarmament conference

in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting

to get some intimations

of immortality

by recollecting my early childhood

and I am waiting

for the green mornings to come again   

youth’s dumb green fields come back again

and I am waiting

for some strains of unpremeditated art

to shake my typewriter

and I am waiting to write

the great indelible poem

and I am waiting

for the last long careless rapture

and I am perpetually waiting

for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn   

to catch each other up at last

and embrace

and I am awaiting   

perpetually and forever

a renaissance of wonder

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