I am SHOCKED by the amount of people (mostly white people) who have decided that states’ decisions to “reopen” mean that the pandemic is over. Actually, I should take that back. Of course it’s white people who go out for nonessential reasons, attend house parties, and go out drinking in crowded bars. Who else would be that selfish and destructive to the rest of society??? Whenever there is an opportunity to kill off a large portion of the population and spread disease, white people are first in line! This is the only thing they’re good at!
If you’re mad at me for the above statements, then good. I’m pretty mad at you for endangering the rest of us. I’m mad and I don’t care how you feel. Fuck you.
Normal life isn’t coming back so stop wishing it would. To pretend otherwise is just going to get more people killed. It’s so selfish, it’s pathetic. “So many red and purple states seem content to carry on as though the coronavirus never happened. It doesn’t matter that the epidemiological data doesn’t support reopening. People have gotten bored with quarantine. Without businesses to frequent and objects to amass, many Americans are left without a means of expressing their identity, or of connecting with the outside world. They can’t tolerate that. The existential emptiness of it is too profound. And so they are going to go back to the malls and the movie theaters, pretending life is as it once was. Normal life is dead. It had to die so that millions of people might live.” (Devon Price, I Refuse To Kill People By Pretending Things Are Fine)
Just because you’re sick of being in quarantine and you’re bored of not being able to go out to eat or go shopping, doesn’t mean it’s safe to go out again. It doesn’t mean that the pandemic is over. Far from it. With no mass testing, no contact tracing and no vaccine, it’s not going to be safe for months. If they are cancelling sporting events and concerts and festivals as far off as September and October, I don’t understand why on earth people think it’s ok to go shopping for non-essential items, go wandering on the boardwalk or attending parties right now. I’ve been in quarantine with my family since March 11th. I’m prepared for all of us to stay in quarantine until 2021 if that’s what it takes.
“Korea, China, Vietnam, and Taiwan executed sophisticated, high-tech responses, but the basic principles are the same. Even poorer Mongolia figured it out and ended up with zero local transmissions on their soil. Small nations like Trinidad and Tobago just did a series of similar things and ended up fine. This has happened all over the world, especially in Asia and the global south. The western (white) media treats success as the exception. If you literally pick a country at random they likely did better than the west. It’s really not hard. The question is not, what went right, this is not a mystery. The question is how the west got it so wrong. With a few exceptions, the non-western, non-white world is perfectly fine. Europeans and their descendants in America and Brazil have been the total fails. What do they all have in common? 100% of this leadership is white.” (Indi Samarajiva, Fighting Covid Isn’t A Mystery, White People Are Just Dumb)
Compare the US response to Beijing’s as we find ourselves headed towards the second wave.
The correct way to respond to this pandemic is a combination of things much of the rest of the world has done.
Lock everything down. Wait for cases to peak. Freeze debt, guarantee personal and business incomes, offer people unconditional, lasting support in the form of hard cash. Then, once the peak has clearly been reached, cautiously, gently, slowly — very slowly — reopen. One activity, one sector, one domain at a time. Not like America’s doing. Pretty much the exact opposite of what America is doing.
If you’re going out and socializing in the midst of this whole pandemic, then yes, you are a bad person. Let’s just call them all the “pro-virus people.” That second wave is coming and it’s going to be brutal and America is not ready for it because as a country, we couldn’t even follow the most basic instructions for the first wave.
“To outsiders, the way Americans have resisted all measures for controlling the spread of COVID-19 — and successfully pushed for “reopening” in a good many states, despite testing failures and the absence of a vaccine — must seem ludicrous. Has any culture lived in such denial, or appeared so bent on self-destruction?” (Miles Klee, Mel Magazine)
"In my mind, it's inevitable that we'll have a return of the virus,” Anthony Fauci, the U.S.’s leading infectious disease doctor and member of the White House coronavirus task force told Bloomberg in late April. “When it does, how we handle it will determine our fate.”
Part of the problem is framing social distancing as a set of individual choices which lets our elected leaders off the hook. It should not be optional to wear a mask when going out in public. And it shouldn’t be up to the states to decide whether or not to reopen. Everything nonessential should remain closed until a vaccine is available — this means we need universal basic income on a monthly basis and Medicare For All (with the amount of people filing for unemployment, it’s time untether employment to healthcare — 43 million people are about to be without health insurance). Oh, and that vaccine had better be free to the public rather than allowing some private corporation to profit from it. Yes, I am basically calling for socialism. There is no other answer moving forward.
So why are so many states reopening?
Easy answer: because the government doesn’t want people on unemployment. Because the government doesn’t want to provide more stimulus checks. Because the government needs the stock market to stay afloat. Why isn’t there any mass testing? Another easy answer: because the government doesn’t want to reveal just how many people already have COVID-19. There won’t be any mass testing in the US in the short term. Reopening has nothing to do with safety.
“36,000 people die per year in car crashes and we don’t ban cars!”
Yeah, ok, those people are still going to die this year and that’s sad. We’re also going to have extra deaths now. It’s only May and we’re already at 100,000 deaths. I don’t understand why this is ok for people. You can’t just pull people from the “cancer” and “car crash” columns and put them in the “COVID-19” column. This is not a talking point. (I imagine that there will actually be fewer car deaths this year because of all the stay-at-home measures. Also, we shouldn’t tolerate that many traffic deaths either but that’s another blog post.)
But Main Street will suffer just as much as Wall Street!
Wall Street will not suffer as long as the stock market stays afloat. And the people who really matter to Wall Street executives — billionaires — have all seen their net worth go up exponentially during this pandemic. Jeff Bezos of Amazon is about the become the world’s first trillionaire. This is not good news. We shouldn’t have ANYONE accumulating that kind of wealth in a fair and just world.
Small businesses on “Main Street” are over-glorified. They are just as abusive and exploitative as big corporations. Most people protesting the lockdowns and demanding that states reopen were small business owners (e.g. people with landscape businesses who are pissed that they can’t force their employees to go make money for them).
The pandemic had been predicted long before its appearance, but actions to prepare for such a crisis were barred by the cruel imperatives of an economic order in which “there’s no profit in preventing a future catastrophe,” Noam Chomsky points out in this exclusive interview for Truthout. Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics at MIT and laureate professor at the University of Arizona, author of more than 120 books and thousands of articles and essays. In the interview, he discusses how neoliberal capitalism itself is behind the U.S.’s failed response to the pandemic:
The U.S. is now the global epicenter of the crisis. It is tempting to cast the blame on President Trump for the disastrous response to the crisis. But if we hope to avert future catastrophes, we must look beyond him. Trump came to office in an already sick society, afflicted by 40 years of neoliberalism, with still deeper roots.
The neoliberal version of capitalism has been in force since Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, beginning shortly before. Reagan’s generosity to the super-rich is of direct relevance today as another bailout is in progress. Reagan quickly lifted the ban on tax havens and other devices to shift the tax burden to the public, and also authorized stock buybacks — a device to inflate stock values and the very wealthy (who own most of the stock) while undermining the working people.
Quite generally, policy has been designed to benefit a tiny minority. That’s how we come to have a society in which 0.1% of the population hold 20% of the wealth and the bottom half have negative net worth and live from paycheck to paycheck. While profits boomed and CEO salaries skyrocketed, real wages have stagnated. As economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman show in their book, The Triumph of Injustice, taxes are basically flat across all income groups, except at the top, where they decline. The wealthiest among us pay the least in taxes.
Nobody wants to admit that they, and many people they think of as good people, are actually bad people. After all, indifference and inaction in the face of suffering during a pandemic is horrible. I don’t know how many times I have to say this: The government and the actual people calling all the shots (billionaires and megacorporations) do not care about you or your family. They are telling you it’s ok to reopen and go out in public again because it benefits them, not you. Find a way to occupy and enjoy your time with the people you live with because the way things are going, we are in this for the long haul and once that vaccine is ready, we’re going to have to fight hard to make it free to the public.
Oh yeah, it’s Memorial Day. Fuck the flag. Fuck the troops. Fuck America. And if you’re a veteran, FUCK YOU for your service. And if you’re a cop, fuck you too, pig.
Recent Posts
I usually do a write up of the events I’ve organized or hosted and my most-read articles at the end of the year. This was an unusual year (obviously, there is no need to go into it here) so I didn’t bother. Instead I want to highlight a project of mine that I am particularly proud of — it’s my new podcast show, Unverified Accounts, that I cohost with my frequent collaborators, Chris Jesu Lee and Filip Guo. If you're a big movie/TV/book buff, have leftist sympathies, but can't stand 'wokeness' dumbing down our culture, then we're the podcast for you. So far in our 25 episodes, we’ve covered a range of contentious topics.