Here in North Texas, store shelves are rapidly emptying. City leaders in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex have now followed suit with other large cities by banning gatherings of people in excess of a certain number (presently 50) and closing bars, restaurants, theaters, health clubs, and so on. All public schools and all but a couple of colleges and universities in the whole region -- and perhaps the whole state (I've mostly been paying attention to local conditions around me) -- are closed, with most of them extending their spring break by a few days to a couple of weeks and then planning to resume instruction in an online-only format.
The college where I work was one of the last to make this decision, but now we're there. I've spent the past week engaged in a flurry of emails, texts, phone calls, and meetings to plan how we're going to accomplish this momentous transition. All college events and gatherings have been canceled indefinitely, including sporting events and the May graduation ceremony. Official employee travel has been limited to our service area. Several employees are presently experiencing flu-like symptoms and are quarantined at home.
I happen to agree with a writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education who has
said she thinks the impact of COVID-19 on higher ed represents a genuinely transformative black swan event with dramatic and permanent implications.
My wife and I started to get a sense of where this was all headed two and a half weeks ago. We went to local stores in my town (a small rural community of about 15,000) three times in one weekend to stock up and prepare for a possible extended time at home and/or an extended time during which some goods and services may not be readily available. We also ordered quite a few things online. Two days ago we went back to shop for some elderly family members, and conditions at the town's two main grocery stores looked like something out of the first 45 minutes of an apocalyptic disaster movie, minus the open panic and fighting among the crowd. Everybody was calm and focused on the task as hand-- in fact, much calmer and quieter than usual; the absence of some of the customary friendly Texas banter was noticeable. Nobody appeared to be buying to hoard, as shopping carts weren't sagging with mountains of items. But shelves everywhere were beginning to be stripped bare. There were still thousands of goods left, but every aisle had enormous empty gaps, and certain categories -- toilet paper (of course) and other paper goods, fresh meat, frozen meat, canned meat, frozen vegetables, bread, tortillas, rice, beans, eggs, butter, hand sanitizer (of course), cleaning supplies, cold and flu medications, certain vitamin supplements (e.g., vitamin C), and several more -- were either mostly or completely wiped out. One employee told us her store had found 100 people waiting to get in when the doors opened that morning, and within 17 minutes they had bought all the toilet paper. (I agree with Stephen King, who tweeted yesterday that it looks like people at large are preparing for the shitpocalypse.)
A family member several hundred miles away in Southwest Missouri reports that things are the same there.
A family member in Massachusetts reports that things are the same there.
In short, things are getting strange. Some members of my family are getting fairly freaked out.
For one long-term, broad-scope, doom-oriented observer's take on the specifically American version of this situation, which he is viewing as the proverbial "big one" that will catalyze a transformative societal collapse over a span of years, see James Howard Kunstler's latest
blog post. (Advisory notice: Kunstler's general outlook has taken a rightward turn in recent years, so aspects of that perspective are on display in this piece.) TL;DR version: All bets are now off in the US, as government has successfully made itself ridiculous and superfluous; the economy is a giant, inflated, hallucinatory racket that is now being deflated and dismantled by reality; cultural life has degenerated; the nation's collective investment in a suburbanized, economically globalized, big box store way of life is now being fully exposed as a fatal journey down a dead-end road; and what lies on the other side of all this is a vastly different way of life that's closer to the bone. As with all things, we'll see.
PS and BTW: I still can't make up my mind whether I think the novel coronavirus itself is really the major threat it's made out to be, or if the problem is the spreading panic, incited by obsessive and sometimes sensationalistic mass media coverage and the amplified echo chamber of the social media world. The thing is, the on-the-ground events I've described here are still the same either way.
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