Taylor and Nova Ride in on a Horse

Remember watching the World Trade Center fall? First, one plane struck. TV heads marveled and speculated, and most of us thought the attack was over and that we were already in the response phase. Then the other plane struck. Then journalists, who are generally neither bright nor knowledgeable about practical matters, tried to guess what would happen next. They wondered aloud about the future of the buildings. How bad was the damage? Would they be repaired?

Of course, every witness who had ever held a tool in his hand knew the buildings were coming down. It was obvious. But when the first tower collapsed, journalists were shocked. It also shocked some responders who had made the remarkable mistake of setting up near the bases of the towers.

Watching what’s happening to America is a lot like watching coverage of 9/11. Things we thought would last forever are being dismantled like props being torn down by invisible stagehands.

It turns out the press is ignoring a lot of what’s happening. In particular, they’re ignoring the transformation of liberal-dominated cities.

A man named James Altucher wrote a blog post about New York, and people all over the net are talking about it. He’s a New York hedge fund manager and entrepreneur. He has mentioned some things the press has surely witnessed yet chosen not to discuss. His blog post is titled, “NYC is Dead Forever…Here’s Why.”

I can give you the basic gist. New York is turning into a ghost town because coronavirus has shown people something that should have been obvious several years ago: we no longer need office buildings to do many of our jobs. People are using a service called Zoom to have virtual meetings, and presumably they also use email, texts, and calls. They’re realizing they are not merely nearly as productive, but more productive, working at home.

That’s a very big deal. Office buildings and commuting are extremely expensive. City rents are obscenely high. Even if human beings resist giving up their comfort of their old ways, and even if stodgy managers push back against telecommuting, accountants will see to it that businesses do whatever makes sense economically. If buildings are unnecessary, many people who used to work in big cities will never return.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of the problem, I’ll share this quotation: “The Time-Life Building can handle 8,000 workers. Now it maybe has 500 workers back.” He uses it as an example when he says there are buildings that are 90% empty.

You have to think about the ramifications.

When you own a big building like that, you make income from it, so you pay taxes. You also pay huge sums of money for maintenance and repairs. You may make mortgage payments to a bank. A lot of money goes in, and a lot goes out. If your occupancy rate drops by 90%, what happens? You end up in a situation where you can’t pay your taxes or your lender. You can’t pay to keep your property up. You have to slash rents in order to maximize your income. You end up with substandard tenants who can’t begin to keep you afloat. Then you abandon your property, and your corporation declares bankruptcy. If Altucher is right when he predicts people will not return to New York, we could be looking at a future in which New York looks just like Detroit.

Detroit is an amazing place. It’s strange that Americans pay so little attention to it. I suppose the liberal press suppresses information about Detroit because it’s a beautiful example of a city utterly destroyed by leftism. If conservatives had ruined it, we would hear about it every day.

As everyone knows, Detroit used to be a prosperous city. Wealthy people and companies built beautiful structures. Now many of the places look like sets from post-apocalyptic movies. That’s not hyperbole. It’s exactly what they look like. These properties can’t be given away. I’ll root around and find videos for you.

It’s not just an inner-city thing. In 2018, the median price of a Detroit house was $35,000, and that represents a huge increase from a few years earlier. I can buy a house in Detroit for less than it would cost me to renovate my kitchen in Florida, and the odds are high that I would lose money, because Detroit property values are probably benefiting from temporary optimism related to a dubious renewal campaign.

I’m not sure, but it looks like suburbs depend on cities to a large extent. If a city dries up, presumably many people, who only live in its suburbs so they can commute, will leave.

Ten years ago, people had to live in New York in order to keep corporations running. Now we are getting close to a model in which a big percentage of people can literally live in Egypt, work in New York, and never, ever have to meet their coworkers.

There are things people like about commuting. It gets you out of the house. You can socialize. You can have lunch at restaurants. You can shop after work. On the other hand, people really, really like working from their couches while wearing stained sweatpants. You don’t have to dress up. You don’t have to be around annoying coworkers and bosses. You may be able to set your own hours. You can forget about trains and traffic. You may save enough money in one year to go to Europe twice. Not that you can go to Europe in 2020, but still. You can buy nicer sweatpants and a bigger SUV.

If Altucher is right, and he surely is, then Manhattan residents should get used to blank storefronts, shuttered restaurants, and a theater scene that looks more like Knoxville than Broadway.

What will happen to the hordes of perennial government sucklings? Many, many New Yorkers live off the labor of others. Who will bums beg from? Who will fund hobby philanthropy organizations? What will happen to locally-funded poverty projects?

If the dogs leave, what will happen to the fleas? They can’t go to the suburbs or the country. People move to those places to get away from them. Dependent people have to have cities in order to thrive. Maybe they’ll be able to get by on what the feds give them.

We already knew the Internet would devastate stores. Now it looks like it will work in concert with coronavirus hysteria to gut cities and suburbs.

Many years ago, I predicted that with the advent of online retailers, people would start moving to the country. It didn’t happen. At least not when I predicted it. It was hard for me to relate to people who actually liked cities, so I think I projected my own desires onto the general public. Many people love city life. Now we may see the abolishment of that lifestyle in many places. We also see how unpleasant life is in cities during crises. Maybe my prediction will finally come true.

Will it happen everywhere? My guess is that leftist cities that reacted hysterically to coronavirus will be hit hardest. They destroyed their economies and forced people to experience a new web-based lifestyle they might otherwise have avoided trying for years. They killed businesses that were necessary to lure people back. It looks like New Yorkers don’t have much to return to. Maybe that’s true in other leftist strongholds where mayors and governors overreacted. Eventually, though, I would expect the trend to spread to other places. Freedom to choose and design your own environment and social circle is very seductive, and financial concerns are compelling.

I saw an interesting Internet comment the other day. Someone mentioned polio. The commenter said a relative had gone through a polio epidemic, and people hadn’t reacted like little girls in a room where a rat has been released. They didn’t kill local economies. People took reasonable measures and accepted the risk. We do the same thing with the flu every year, and the seasonal flu has killed millions of us over the years.

Death is bad, but it’s part of everyone’s life, and liberty and prosperity are very important.

Americans were wrong to flip out over coronavirus. If we hadn’t panicked, we probably would have lost more people, but the effects on our way of life would have been more tolerable. Look at Sweden. They didn’t have lockdowns. They’ve had a fairly high rate of infection, but so what? It has not been catastrophic, and the country keeps chugging along, just as countries do after wars and natural disasters.

It’s interesting to see how coronavirus continues to hit leftist areas more severely. My county has had an explosion in the official infection count, but it’s not a disaster, and we haven’t seen the severe shortages or economic problems places like Chicago have endured. I can think of a few things that have been hard to buy. Disinfectant wipes, alcohol, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, paper towels, and eggs. There are probably some other things I’m not recalling because they have had no significant effect on my life. I never ran out of meat. I was always able to eat nearly anything I wanted. I never had to go home because I couldn’t get in a store.

My cousin in Chicago still can’t get toilet paper. She went through a period where it was nearly impossible to go to stores. Getting inside her local Walmart took hours. Once inside, she couldn’t get meat. For all I know, she still can’t. A few weeks back, long after talk of meat shortages had ceased, I sent my cousin near Atlanta a photo of steaks on sale, and he said it had been months since he had seen anything like that.

I’ve been predicting this county would hit something like 9,000 known cases and then see a sharp dropoff. I based this guess on the New York figures. It looks like I won’t be far wrong. I was mistaken when I thought the US-case collapse we saw earlier in the year would continue, and I didn’t think this county would blow up the way it has, but even true hot spots calm down eventually, and surely that will happen here, in an area where things have never gotten very bad.

Much of our virus-figure explosion is atypical and not useful for drawing conclusions because we increased testing dramatically and because we have a big locked-down prison population that got hit very hard.

To get back to the point, it seems like God has been much gentler to rural and conservative people. We’re getting virus upticks after the nationwide shortages abated and after better ways of addressing the epidemic were learned through the painful lessons endured by New Yorkers, Bostonians, and other subjects of the leftist elite. There is no panic. There is no real deprivation. Economic damage is minimal. As an example of the contrast, South Dakota never had a lockdown, and their governor just turned down a round of government handouts because they don’t need it.

It seems like ungodly people are much more likely to suffer, and they’re much more likely to give up their freedom and dignity because they’re much more afraid of death. This is something to think about as America continues to deteriorate. We will continue to see two different schools of thought. We will see the fear-based, desperate, selfish, bestial mindset of leftists, and we will see a calmer, more altruistic, less hostile attitude among people in areas that are heavily Christian.

People who don’t love God will do nearly anything in a crisis. During famines, they have been known to kill and eat their children. That kind of thing makes sense to people who think this life is all there is and that you have to make the most of it. Real Christians, on the other hand, have a history of allowing themselves to be martyred during prosperous times. Real Christians are less likely to panic. To us, death is like being sent home from a war zone, and maltreating others in order to stay alive is a frightening, off-putting idea.

When I think about leaving this earth, I don’t get scared. I long for it. My body is not what it used to be. I use reading glasses. My appearance is deteriorating. I forget things more often. The thought of being in a renewed body far superior to my earthly body at its best moment makes me wish the end were closer, as does the thought of getting cataracts and arthritis and being unable to do the things I enjoy. I don’t want to be a 75-year-old on this earth, shuffling around in this body. The thought of making it to 90 is genuinely disturbing.

People don’t believe in God generally want to hold onto whatever they have, regardless of the cost. It’s undignified. Look at Joe Biden, with all of his age-denying cosmetic procedures. Sometimes I think he smiles just so he will have something to show the IRS in case they object when he deducts his dental expenses.

I wonder if Hollywood stars are panicking because it’s harder to get elective surgery now. The pandemic must be harder on female stars because they have much shorter shelf lives than men. It’s not unusual for an actress to get her breakthrough during a certain year and be supplanted by younger, more attractive women 5 years later. One season of diminished activity could be very hard on certain female stars; especially those in their mid-thirties.

It will be interesting to see how Altucher’s predictions hold up a month from now. It would really be something, seeing Fifth Avenue turn into the South Bronx.