Decisions for the Future

Tax day, 2020. 

Except that it’s not tax day this year, because the deadline for filing income taxes has been extended to July 15 because people can’t get all their records and tax professionals can’t meet with their clients to find out what all those little bits of paper stuffed in a shoebox really mean to fill out the forms and submit them to the government.

Mostly.  Unless you live in North Carolina, where our legislature’s most recent rush to punish all the citizens of this state says you have to pay the taxes you can’t calculate or you have to pay penalty and interest later in July, when they are now actually due.

Some of us have long subscribed to the theory that the government wouldn’t offer those automatic extensions if they didn’t intend for you to use them, so the change isn’t that big a deal.  It is worth noting as a landmark date, though.

I’ve written here about how a hunch helped us plan for the pandemic.  A hunch, Twitter and NPR – they all get credit.  Because of these, the potential for problems came on the radar early and we were able to get the house in order and as ready for an extended lockdown as possible. 

So mark today – this is the day that people should start to recognize that getting “back to normal” is not going to happen magically on May 1 like some would have us believe.  Impacts instead are going to go on well into the fall of 2020 and likely beyond.

Medical experts and others who study the pandemic and restart of our society indicate that if we simply “flip the switch” on any day it will not solve the problem but will rather likely set us back weeks or months.

The economic predictions are that many small businesses, especially, are not going to be able to survive a three month shutdown, much less a longer one. 

Even if the businesses survive and we’re told that it’s fine to go to events again, people are going to be wary of that for a while.  For many of us, if all restrictions were lifted at midnight tonight there would be little or no change in our actions tomorrow. 

Seniors, especially, who have seen their worlds circumscribed to become smaller and smaller have given up church services and community theater.  They’ve withdrawn from baby showers, book clubs and even standing dinners with another couple or breakfast at the diner once a week.  They, especially, are unlikely to come to a large wedding or graduation event, even for a favored grandchild and much less for the grandchild of a contemporary, no matter how dear that person is.

The personal risk is simply too great.  From the other side, who wants to go through with what should be a happy event to realize that their decision meant that Dad died?

Hardly the best way to mark an anniversary!

There is an old saw along the lines of, “Whenever you start thinking too much of yourself, remember that attendance at your funeral will largely be governed by the weather that day.”

Today is the day to start re-thinking how our society operates, at least in the short term.  And that means that while we are sitting home, responsibly socially isolating from others, it’s time to make some decisions about how our futures will look.