August 20, 2021 Update

 

I finally signed a contract to work for another year. The next day, I received an email saying that the first month of classes would be online.  In the small university town that I work in, I estimate conservatively that another one-hundred small businesses will permanently close. If I apply the same estimate to all of Taiwan, we’re looking at an additional 12,000 small businesses that are likely to permanently close their doors this year. While small independently owned businesses are increasingly being forced to go out of business, large businesses are thriving. This situation is rapidly going to become unsustainable.

 While they’re saying that we’re just going to have the first month of classes online, I’m guessing that we’ll be having classes online for the next 3-4 years — if we're able to have classes at all. About ten million or 41% of the people on this island have already received their first dose of a so-called vaccine. Aside from government representatives (who look like talking zombies, if you ask me), the scientists, doctors and specialists that I listen to all say essentially the same thing, it’s not a vaccine, but a bioweapon.

 After two months of unsuccessful attempts to persuade my partner not to get injected, I recognize that she is probably going to do so sometime next week, and that she has made her own decision, perhaps at a very deep level. The only compromise I could get out of her (for better or worse) was for her to switch from a foreign made vaccine to a Taiwan made one. Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, is also apparently scheduled to receive her first injection of the same vaccine, next week. The good thing is, as I’ll be working from home, I’ll be able to care for my partner in case the so-called vaccines turns out to be a problem. Perhaps I’ll even get to see if those spike proteins have any effect on me. Fascinating times.

 My summer vacation has not gone as well as I had planned, I didn’t get to go swimming for the first two months, and I wasn’t able to convince my partner to just say no to the vaccine. Nevertheless, I apparently still have a job, and I’m told that the swimming pool may open this week. Thus, as I’m now planning to teach online, at home for the foreseeable future, perhaps I’ll be able to go swimming every day. That would be cool.

 While there is much more that I could say (for the umpteenth time) about where we are and where we’re heading, I feel that the time for talking is pretty much over. It appears to me that a time of reckoning will soon be upon us, and I’m quite sure I’ll have something to say about that.