Tag Archives: COVID-19

Freedom: yours vs mine

When people object to the requirement to wear a mask in public, smoke starts coming out of my ears. Freedom comes with responsibility. You are free to risk your own life if you want to. But since when is it okay to risk other people’s lives? If you are free to refuse to wear a mask, you are free to stay the hell away from the rest of us.

Every older American, every person with heart disease or diabetes, is scared right now. We’re scared to leave home. We’re scared of crowds. We don’t go inside anywhere unless we have to. Too many in this country are in denial about COVID-19, encouraged to be stupid by a reckless, ignorant president. Just because we all wish like anything it was over, doesn’t mean it’s over. Has anybody missed seeing the spike on the graph?

You might be young and healthy. Others are not so lucky. Do you think you can be a good person if you endanger people less fortunate than yourself? Do you think other people’s lives mean less to them than yours does to you? Maybe you don’t notice older people or those with disabilities. We are even less visible than usual these days. But we’re here; there are people who love us, and people who depend on us. We want to live just as much as you do. You see going maskless as freedom; we see it as life-threatening.

I’m not just talking about COVID parties, insane though they are. I’m talking about people who walk through neighborhoods with their masks below their noses. I’m talking about bikers and runners wearing masks down around their necks. Nobody likes having to wear them but that’s the best way to control this pandemic. Are you saving that mask for conversations? When you’re exercising, you’re breathing harder than usual. You know you could have no symptoms and be shedding the virus whenever you breathe, right?

Sure, you’re free. Be free like a grownup. Wear the damn mask.

The stock market isn’t the economy

The stock market dropped in late March when it hit Americans all at once (except Trump, who knew months before) that COVID-19 was a deadly plague which demanded a quick response. The real economy, where people go to work and get paid, and then go out and spend their money, largely shut down. Suddenly 1 out of 4 Americans was out of a job.

The stock market has recovered. The real economy has not. Why does Dow Jones seem not to care that the Jones family can’t pay the rent? Because the Jones family is not rich and does not own stock. They are the poor relations that the Dow does its best to ignore.

But another stock market crash is almost inevitable. The Jones family’s unemployment checks will run out. They will not be able to find new jobs. No matter how much Trump denies it (and because of his denial), COVID-19 is raging through the US and people are rightly afraid to start their businesses back up. The Jones family’s landlord will stop forgiving the rent, because he can’t afford to pay his mortgage without getting it. They are all in danger of losing their homes.

The only reason the stock market cares about the 40 million Americans who have lost their jobs is that pretty soon, those people will stop spending money, because they won’t have any.

The capitalist economy depends on the American consumer. Nonstop advertising has trained us to want new things constantly. We buy every plastic gimcrack and follow every new fashion. Without our shopping, the whole house of cards will come tumbling down.

That house of cards hasn’t been sheltering most people very well anyhow. Capitalism only works if you have capital. Put another way, it takes money to make money. People who have never had a chance to accumulate wealth, like most Americans of color and those born into the lower classes, get stuck in jobs that don’t pay enough to live on. When the real economy shuts down, they have no savings and no collateral.

The US is about to face hunger and homelessness on a scale we have not experienced since the Depression of the 1930s. The federal government under Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded to the Depression with laws, jobs programs, and public works projects known as the New Deal. Slowly, the New Deal programs put Americans back on their feet.

We know the only Jones that Trump cares about is the Dow. He is perfectly willing for the rest of the Joneses to die of coronavirus, or lose their homes, or starve, as long as his rich buddies continue to make more money. With a normal president, Americans could expect the federal government to help us get through these bundled crises. Now we know we can’t expect any help until we elect a new president. If we lose everything meanwhile? Trump will just call us losers.