Notes from my Knapsack 10-15-20

Notes from my Knapsack 10-15-20

Jeff Gill

 

Changes in processes & preferences

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Everyone who hates change sure loves 2020, because at the very least they've found they have company.

 

Forget about face coverings and social distancing. Never mind about half capacity restaurants and bars, or aisle arrows at the big box stores. Dismiss the new numbers on the news about infection rates and test positivity.

 

We all knew that there was a push on to move towards a more paperless, wireless, online and app oriented economy. But now, it's not just here, it's the whole ball game in many places.

 

Younger people already rarely carry what us olds call "money" and checks are turning into a near curiosity as we move towards cashless everything. And a few of us who intentionally avoided using taps on our phone home screen to pay for items are now finding that's about the only way we can conduct certain transactions. I've heard people say "I'm just not going to use any business that tries to force me that way," but while I wish them a certain defiant luck, I doubt that history is moving their way.

 

My wife and I were credit card holdouts for a very, very long time, far past most of our peers, age-wise. But we reached a point where if we wanted to travel at all, we needed to get one. We did, but committed to using it sparingly, and thoughtfully, and I think we did well to be as careful as we were . . . but now we have two, and we buy groceries and gasoline with them. Travis McGee in John D. MacDonald's wonderful series of largely Florida-set mysteries speaks near the end of his run (with the author's death in 1986) about having to get a credit card and feeling the net come down across his elusive and vagabond lifestyle, and that's only become more true in the decades since.

 

Yet I think I speak for my wife and many others when I say I really don't miss having to trudge into the gas station or mini-market to pay and then pump. It simplifies things (especially when it's raining), but now the whole business model changes for how to sell stuff to us, and you get little TVs on the pumps and ads on the hoses.

 

Elections are a process just like economic procedures. I never imagined I'd not get up and go to a polling place to vote. That's how I was raised, that's what I've done, and frankly I've enjoyed that visceral thrill of throwing the lever over to . . . ah, but now we tap and click and whirrrrr (the levers have been gone for years) and so why not by mail or downtown on a day preceding Election Day? And how soon will some kind of a validated app on our phone become our polling place? Yes, it changes the whole process, but it makes some new opportunities open up as well, even to encouraging new participants.

 

None of this is about loving change, but from elections to economics we've gotten an opportunity this year to figure out how we want to approach the steamroller of change, and steer it as best we can, rather than fight it fruitlessly as it simply rolls over us. We can't stop it, but we can shift its direction into a better road, less traveled or no.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still ambivalent about credit cards. Tell him how you adapt to change at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.