- No Palm Sunday. We're in a pandemic, people.
- Passover? Not passing over me, it ain't!
- Good Friday? Please.
And, what is more, the possibility of opening the economy by May 1st is being raised. It behooves me to make the obvious observation that this is an astronomically poor idea. Whether we like it or not, quarantine must carry on until a vaccine is developed and vetted.
It's a painful and unhappy observation. This pandemic, like history, like the Internet, like the state of the world, can not be fully apprehended in its entirety. Domestic abuse cases are skyrocketing. Children are missing school. A whole generation of children is going to grow up with half of a missing year, or a full missing year, or more, of education. (Yes, they are, because plenty are poor and do not have computers or sufficient Internet access.) We are headed, inevitably, into the sort of unemployment rates that will exceed the Great Depression. Millions of people are dead, and millions more will die. Elections are being delayed. How exactly November will work is an open question.
And yet it must be done. What are the alternatives? A surveillance state to trace contract which would exceed anything seen on earth before? With what infrastructure will this be accomplished?
And in the midst of this, still, people wish to talk about reopening the world. Now, look - I'm not a revolutionary socialist (yet) but I sympathize with the viewpoint. "But Terry! Surely revolution would entail death, violence, etc.?" Probably it would, unfortunately. Yet, the moral calculus is now being made: how many deaths are acceptable to reopen the economy? What once was the province of ideologues and fanatics is now the domain of the functioning, "realistic" adult.
It is infuriating.
I don't have the solutions. All I can say is this:
• People need to be taken care of, food, water, shelter, safety, education, etc. They should be in general. We need to stay home and care, and you're not going to see that in the mainstream or right-wing media because if that thought becomes acceptable, then it might occur to people that we should take care of each other when there isn't a pandemic going on. I mean, there is food and dairy being thrown out in very large quantities because no one is there to purchase it.
• All elections need to move to a mail-in system. Not just during the pandemic, but forever. That we must show up in-person is absurd and silly. Most non-voters do not vote because their vote is suppressed, by the long wait times, by inaccessible polling locations, by the bullshit need for voter ID, by an inability to get time off of work. Turn-up would go up dramatically, and I, for one, am suspicious of any election result in which less then 70% of the population does participate.
• Chamath Palihapitiya made an excellent point over on the news, which is that airline industries and hedge funds, "zombie companies," should get wiped out, because when those companies go bankrupt they go through what's called a pre-packaged bankruptcy, and its employees w/ pensions typically end off better then before. It's the speculators that get wiped out.
Just be clear, who are we talking about? We're talking about a hedge fund that serves a bunch of billionaire family offices? Who cares? Let 'em get wiped out, who. cares. [pause] They don't get to summer in the Hamptons, who cares.He also makes the cogent point that these sorts of hedge funds' stocks are owned less by employees so much as amorphous, globular entities and speculators, employees owning only a few hundred or a few thousand dollars of stock.
I agree with him. The person who says "how am I going to pay my bills?" is the person who deserves a "bailout." The CEOs, the investors, the shareholders, the speculators, the Boards...nope. No bailout. Don't care. Neither millionaire nor billionaire needs one. Their wealth is sufficient to survive this. If my family, five people, can survive and indeed thrive (to some degree) on sub-$40,000, year after year, then a billionaire can survive on sub-$1,000,000,000.
• A whole lot of people are now being faced with the choice between Joe Biden, an incompetent man whose record is execrable and who bears a credible rape accusation, and Donald Trump, an incompetent man whose record is execrable and who bears multiple credible rape accusations. I'm not going to dig too deep into the ways that both are awful, suffice to say that they both are considerably so!, but many people on the left are saying they will not vote for Biden.
When your house is fire, you need to put out the fire before you replace the walls, unclog the toilet, fix the broken appliances, repair the roof, finish the basement, etc. I hope my meaning is sufficiently obvious.
• A narrative is already being set up to blame the left and to blame Bernie voters if Biden loses in November. (Sanders' defeat has been called the defeat of an entire theory of politics. What, then, to make of Hillary Clinton's defeat, I wonder.)
C'mon, guys, if you're going to blame people, you're picking the wrong targets. How about the Obama/Trump voters? Or, better yet, direct your rage at voter suppression so effective and thorough that the last time election turnout was greater then 60% was in 1968!
Over here at home, life goes on. Incipient madness lurks upon the horizon but does not stride too close. Music, literature, occasional walks and cycling, and food, provide what comfort they are able to. That, combined with my bearable (and sometimes better then bearable) family, is just about enough, so far.
I am, as indeed anyone with any sense of sanity is to some degree or another, afraid. Right now, I am not afraid for us. It is friends, and strangers, that I worry for. It is the future I worry about. The world will be a different place after all this, that much is obvious. What I worry about is different in what way.
And all that is but grains of sand to the ocean of present, current, immediate human suffering. Sigh.
Anything less pitchforks, crimes against humanity tribunals, and massive reforms after this would be a travesty of the highest order. (So it won't happen. Oh well.)
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