Sonoma pulse check

April 19, 2020 by Fred Allebach

Sonoma had a regime of opulence. It was on autopilot, sanctioned by the city, playing the tourism card as much as possible. Some chafed at the intensity of uses and congestion, but  businesses couldn’t get enough. Climate and working class activists called for limits, full cost accounting, and equity. The situation was not ideal; steps aimed at overall sustainability and resilience were under way, but slowly. Changes were resiste   

Then a virus pandemic shut the whole thing shut down. Gathering to shop, revel, and party, the bread and butter of the Sonoma economy – all ceased. An economy based on consuming alcohol, food, goods, and associated services all of a sudden seized up. Small businesses were torpedoed; after three years of fires and power shut-offs, there were no more rainy day funds. Servants were out of work, their meager hand-to-mouth existence exposed as untenable. 

No kind of economy can survive a pandemic shut down like this. Now the whole system has inverted; workers previously at the bottom are heroic and essential. As with the fires, the city has cast an emergency safety net over the whole lower valley, surmounting a municipal fragmentation many see as a major source of local inequity. 

We all see what government at all levels can do now and wonder: why can’t they do this all the time? Why allow the 1% to run away with all the benefits when a healthier order for all can be had? 

As our particular economic house of cards collapses, all interests will be conceiving of ways to go forward and put things back together again. People who liked business-as-usual will want that back. People who wanted structural changes will be thinking of that. Yet the cold hard facts are that we are likely going into a period of serious austerity, where current class divides will become more extreme, and where stimulus efforts will have bad polluting consequences. When eviction moratoriums expire, a major displacement of the working and middle classes is foretold. When everyone exhausts their reserves, city and county included, we’ll default to a mode of simple, bare-bones survival. The most vulnerable are already there. 

We’re still in the thick of stage one, the initial shock. Where we go from here is anyone’s guess. All kinds of things can be imagined. Whatever happens, we’ll have to play the hands we’re dealt, and do the best we can with what we’ve got. Hopefully we can pull together and not fall apart. 

In the short term, Valley resiliency is showing. Local government and the nonprofit sector have done their best to address food and emergency needs. But at some point soon reserve funds will run out and local governments will have to retract; the private sector, volunteers, and the people will then have to make things work out. Much will depend on the type of federal government we have: arbitrary and capricious, or benevolent and giving?  

 The general status quo has been to accept an American-style, winner take all, boom and bust, free-market capitalist economy. The current bust now threatens to plunge us all into an economic depression where only New Deal-type socialism and barter will fix things. Maybe as things come further undone, so will previous ideological barriers, and a new sense of cooperation will emerge. Maybe our fate is to forever be caught on a tragic pendulum of competing interests that prevent the cooperation everyone can see is necessary. Hope springs eternal, even as a dark uncertain night looms.