Let's talk about cause and effect again

Our national tragedy of the moment may boil down to a simple refusal to acknowledge cause and effect.

Let's see. When did the great disruption begin? Ah, about the end of February, 2020, when the country and world started shutting down to slow the rise of Covid. 

That caused many businesses to cut back and certainly shifted consumer spending from services (like restaurants and travel) to "things" they could put in their homes (where they were suddenly spending much more time).

When the big industries cut back on buying from manufacturers, who could be surprised when restarting the entire supply chain ends up messy and spotty and frustrating?

A large number of people get a flu shot, but still get the flu. Their first thought is that the shot is to blame, despite the fact that the flu shot does not contain live cells. No matter. Many people settle for correlation and never go farther. The cliché among those who think about logic is "Correlation does not equal causation." 

Yet a majority of Americans appear to blame Joe Biden, of all people, for our ills. I get it. He is the president and his decisions have SOME effect on the economy (though not as much as some people think).

The federal government really did distribute trillions of dollars in aid to help everyone manage, and there is more to come. Yes, inflation is higher than it has been in three decades, though still far less than I recall from the mid-1970s, when we had an 18 percent mortgage rate for some years.

But here's the bottom line, and few seem to be willing to focus on this: If we can overcome the virus, many of our supply chain issues, our missing worker issues, and inflation itself will soon return to something approaching normal.

Here's my modest proposal: Everyone wear a mask indoors for four weeks, vaccinated or not. Cut the rate of transmission of the virus. Get those new Pfizer pills out in every doctor's office and hospital... the ones that cut hospitalization rates by 90 percent. 

I am well aware, however, that common sense and even a basic understanding of cause and effect is not happening in our "greatest nation on earth." Our myths and our tribalism have overwhelmed basic logic.

That is why I have come to believe that we are in for a decade's worth of pain and upset and changing mores and expectations. That, and gerrymandering, which warps our representation and which only happens every ten years. 

I am constantly surprised at how many times life comes down to accurately assessing cause and effect. 

I am hopeful that the new infrastructure money will make a difference for decades to come in our lives, and the Build Back Better bill may improve many lives in this country.

But everything balances on that root cause: the pandemic shut down the world and the world is having trouble restarting. I hate to oversimplify, but there it is.

Tamp down the virus. It is the most direct action that will improve lives.