Reopening is the story now. Over 40 states are making some kind of attempt to reengage their economies in the midst of a pandemic. None of them met the Federal guidelines of two weeks of declining cases before opening the doors. Not one.
This is a free-for-all. There are no rules that apply to the nation. Individual fiefdoms are making decrees of how their subjects can best serve their betters. There is no plan, no unified strategy to heal a country in disarray.
Arizona had its highest death toll less than a week ago. They are opening. Virginia’s cases are near their peak. They are loosening restrictions. Their testing has been some of the lowest in the country and the trajectory of cases has been nearly continuously trending up. Texas is opening as the straight line of cases continues up and the Governor says the state is in a position to expand their already in place tentative opening strategies. Georgia is starting to see new hot spots that have halted any downward trend for the virus in that state and seen it start ticking up again.
These are high level decisions being made by people we will never meet that will have life and death consequences for a percentage of those affected. Sometimes they are made in what I perceive as misplaced good will, and others as cynical economic terrorism against their own populations, constituents drafted into a war they don’t wish to fight.
That leaves us at home making other calculations, other decisions. Your state tells you it’s time. What do you do? Maybe you have asthma, or maybe you’re in your sixties and have high blood pressure. Maybe you simply disagree with the safety assessment being sold. You are basing it on the data, and it isn’t grey where you live.
What do you do? Well, the truth is that is a decision that wealth distribution in this country has probably already made for you. If returning to your job is optional, you can stay home and receive unemployment and limp along for a bit, but there is a risk to that. As people are offered their jobs back, businesses are very quickly going to discover that right now they don’t need as many people as they had needed before this pandemic. Not everyone will be going back, so it becomes a math problem, figuring the angles and the percentages, trying to figure out how long you can stay home before you are actually unemployed and entering a non-existent job market.
That’s when the food starts to run out. In July, even if you were able to collect unemployment and survive awhile, that ends too. The economy will not have rebounded in a couple of months from now. There will not be businesses all over the country clamoring for workers. They will be struggling to survive, shrinking to a size that is sustainable.
I don’t see this being talked about at all in the press or in the halls of government. The medical professionals in the Administration have alluded to it at times, but almost in code so as to get it under the radar of the President, and he is frequently too stupid to notice, but the code is so arcane the public doesn’t notice it either.
People with a few bucks in the bank, and I don’t mean millionaires, just folks with a little bit of savings they have killed themselves to acquire over decades, have been lulled into a complacency that doesn’t recognize what is on the horizon. They suggest ignoring the state-supplied opening decrees and staying home until you have confidence that things are more under control. This is a privilege that has led to lovely bromides about how the crisis will lead to a new beginning, a rebirth of love and caring and economic justice and so on.
Most are not aware of the suffering that has already begun. Many are blind to the suffering to come. This is not an academic symposium. This is not Spring in America. This is a nuclear winter.
It will be a year before some folks understand that this has changed us fundamentally. There is a growing group of people that have let their impatience and fear minimize their understanding of the gravity of what is happening. Open at all costs, the economy can’t withstand the sudden near complete shutdown of our economy. People die everyday, this is just one more thing, no big deal. Many of these folks DO know there is a risk involved but feel the risk to the country if we don’t open is even worse.
Maybe they’re right. Maybe this system we have created is worth saving, our serfdom to a ruling class that flourishes from our labor the best system yet devised. This moment of unbearable insecurity must end so we can go back to the more constant but recognizable insecurity we have been trained to believe is our birthright.
Working people, regular folks, have been revealed to be the most critical component to making our gargantuan machine operate, grind on and on. Much has been written about how that revelation will be a major influence on the way the economy re-aligns after Covid-19. The worker will be financially recognized for the contribution they make to the whole. They are lovely aspirations and help to calm the unsettled beast of the population. A new dawn for the working man!
What levers of power will support this fantasy? How do you see that being enacted in real terms? Federal laws dictating to the private sector? The goodwill of businesses seeing the evil in their former ways? One of the biggest expenses any company has is payroll, and as businesses struggle to survive in an economic downturn, a collosal understatement, where will the money come from to create a working person’s New World Order? Isn’t it more likely that payroll must be kept to a minimum as production remains constricted?
Opening the economy in a way that is entirely disconnected to the size of the crisis is not the beginning of a New World Order for the working person. It is the defense of the Old World Order, and a push to make it even older. To make the value of working people equate to a dollar figure. How much is one worth? How many can we afford to have die?
There are very sinister forces acting on these questions. The medical professionals have come up with models of where we are heading that are quite dire. That is clearly not acceptable, so the Administration is operating on a different model, one they will not reveal the details of, or even where it came from. The President has declared that the virus will claim 95,000 lives here in the U.S. He made the statement when the death toll was about 67,000, a few days ago. We are now over 80,000 and counting. But his model just doesn’t agree, and GOP governors have been allowed to see the new model and make their decisions to open the states based on these recommendations and predictions.
And they are.
His base has no other source of truth but Him. Everything, literally everything, is untrue if it contradicts anything he says. His models are the real ones. His medical solutions are miracles. The panic is ridiculous. If we are under 60,000 deaths (or 80k or 95k or a million) then our response was a huge success. What we are experiencing is the best it could have possibly been. You can only do so much. We have to open! Hundreds of calls came in to state governments wondering if it was really ok to sip a little Clorox now and again. Hundreds! Nothing he says alerts his base that he is completely unhinged. His fealty to big money interests is unrecognized. His army is on the march. They are marching on courthouses and statehouses and they are armed with semi-automatic weapons. The President is praising these patriots, warriors for America First.
There are no counter-protests. Folks following the data have determined that such demonstrations are too dangerous, too likely to cause new outbreaks that would undermine the message. Their wisdom may prove costly, as the only images speaking to these issues are angry voices yearning to be free. Though the demonstrations are relatively small, they are the only ones taking place, and the perception is this is what the public wants and the President is encouraging this perception every single time he is anywhere near a microphone.
This is what it looks like when the Phoenix rises?