[scrumper]

This is well put. But of course it will end, and us privileged few will go back to our regular routines and our babysitters will return to work and take care of our kids after school and we'll adjust and the kids will be fine.

The longer it goes on, the more chance there is that this novel pain shared by us lucky few will motivate some structural changes that will make life more bearable for the less privileged people for whom these kinds of tensions and juggling are nothing new.

But... I doubt it. Nothing is working. My wife's 12 person company is struggling, and will probably fail, to get a PPP loan for utterly moronic procedural reasons and saturation of the system. Extended unemployment benefits seem to have been calculated to run out around the time that the average person will be able to file a claim. Businesses are evaporating everywhere, completely undermining the bedrock of the economy. There is no sense of anything from government (any part of it) other than getting back to business as usual - why? So we can do this again in the fall? In a few years' time when another displaced wild animal spits on a market trader?

Couldn't two trillion dollars - not even a once per generation level of expenditure - have been more effectively employed to build some resilience in the system?

The city is sacked by barbarians; they leave, and the survivors hold a feast instead of building a wall.