A brave new world

ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND — It is November, and winter is around the corner, and Thanksgiving turkey is in the air in the Washington DC area.

Some time ago, I wondered why Filipinos do not celebrate Thanksgiving the American way. The answer must be that each country has her own traditions. Time to take stock now that the pandemic seems to be ending.

Rip Van Winkle comes to mind. It is as though we woke up after two-plus years of magnificent isolation in Dumaguete to a world of ‘revenge travel’ as the airlines finally got governments to ‘open up’ for vaccinated folks.

This liberality was for everyone else, too, if they have no obvious symptoms, given that airlines couldn’t be the pandemic police.

That doesn’t stop some airlines from having ‘policies’ that look like requests; if you disobeyed, you may be ejected off the aircraft.

A particularly jarring rule is a ban on the use of personal air purifiers, the kind that allows you to clean up the air entering your face mask. I was told that gadgets of this sort had ‘battery’ issues. It didn’t help me to try to argue that the Transportation Safety Authority had inspected and cleared my personal gadgets.

But I digress. Amidst the pandemic, we suffered a weird interlude when some fearless OFWs visiting home blew hard-earned money on almost useless stays in ‘quarantine hotels’ and on ‘gold-plated’ PCR tests.

Tourism was virtually dead, schools were conducted online, or by low-tech distance learning mode (called ‘modules’ whereby teachers gave out paper assignments for take-out and delivery, and that was pretty much the same way that restaurants survived), churches held services via Zoom, and call centers adjusted to permit more remote ‘work from home’ jobs.

We had a boom in online shopping with their ‘rider’ delivery services. In many ways time moved slowly.

The economy has now supposedly recovered some of its pre-pandemic trends. Urban traffic problems are back. The early hysteria regarding the infectious spread of the virus and its dire consequences on lives and premature deaths has calmed down, if only because the most vulnerable have received vaccines and vaccine boosters.

People wear masks if they are careful, but the reckless go about their lives as though the pandemic never was.

The economic harm remains. Governments spent much on health care, and on shoring up their domestic economies, putting pressure on prices.

We now have unwanted price inflation pretty much all over the globe. Financial markets look like they want to crash. Debt problems are on the horizon, and currency turmoil is back, with the Philippine peso hitting record lows.

Our modern day Rip Van Winkle should look back to the strange new worlds that attended the end of the two great wars of the previous century.

There were then certain ‘unrealities’ that gave way to the Roaring Twenties or to the post-WW2 boom of the 1950s and 1960s.

If history is a guide, we will (eventually) see a renaissance of sorts, at least in the few countries where economic policies make sense.

The IMF staff are less comforting; they think that “a growing share of economies are in a growth slowdown or outright contraction,” and that what is needed is a “successful calibration of monetary policy” (to deal with global inflation), given that uncertainties remain with respect to the effects of the Ukraine war, debt problems in much of the developing world, and the risk of still possible “pandemic-related supply-side disruptions, for example, in China.”

Two years ago, I wrote about why Filipinos do not celebrate Thanksgiving the way that Americans do. Cynics may say that they have little to be thankful for. Others see that the glass is now back to ‘half full’ and consider that acts of gratitude are good for the soul.

It’s not the end of the world; it could be a new beginning.

Happy Thanksgiving all.