The Pandemic and George Floyd: The Rebirth of the True American Left

The most privileged are being paid to work from home, own or are on their way to owning a home and are within reach of food centers, while the least privileged have lost their jobs and cannot go on the hunt for another and may now have rent due and mouths to feed. The least privileged were living paycheck to paycheck and have been the victims of a sadistic, racist capitalist system of loan sharks, predatory landlords and disastrous healthcare infrastructure long before this pandemic started. Instead of facing the unsheathed system head-on to help their underprivileged brothers and sisters, the subordinate worker and the privileged American middle class, backed comfortably by the property-owning capitalists who own 70% of all of America’s wealth, wish to clothe this monster once again because the horrors are far too appalling to confront (2). They wish to reopen the economy and keep themselves busy to avoid looking at the problem in the eye. In reality, it was never about the pandemic, it was about the pandemic revealing a truth that both the powerful and the privileged do not care to know exists. You tell me that it has everything to do with the number of unemployment, that it is demonstrably high, and the economy is hurting. Putting people back to work for a system that is constantly fucking them over is only to put the privileged at ease. The unemployment numbers will go down, the stock market will recover and the price of oil will rise again, but a large portion of the United States will wake up to forced evictions, unpaid medical expenses and to an inaccessibility to food that they’ve experienced for far too long. And as always, people of color are feeling the brunt end of this pandemic, disproportionately making up a large number of COVID-19 hospitalizations while the privileged, often the white, rich minority of this nation call for a ‘re-opening of the economy’. You reopen too soon amid this pandemic and people will die so you can go to your office and perhaps get a haircut later in the evening. You reopen as the world sees a surge in cases and you risk your own health and the health of those that you love (3). Nurses and doctors beg to hold off from re-opening, mentally breaking down and some dying from the disease they are trying to treat but you don’t listen because it was never about health and well-being, it was about this lustful drive for profit and the orgasmic sensation you get from watching the stock market rise (4). The powerful, politically right-leaning conservatives, such as the Save Our Country Coalition, have even gone so far as to recruit “’pro-Trump’ doctors to go on television to prescribe reviving the U.S. economy as quickly as possible, without waiting to meet safety benchmarks proposed by the CDC to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.” (5) The CDC, standing behind Dr. Fauci, have stated that the number of cases and death is most likely “an undercount, with the true number being much higher. Meanwhile, Trump has suggested, without providing evidence, that the official death toll from the virus is being inflated” (5). To reopen the economy without properly assessing both the health risks and innate flaws of the current financial, judicial and healthcare system attached to American capitalism that have become so extraordinarily apparent in every way, is to let injustice be perpetuated in the name of an abstract notion of ‘the economy’. The very people that make up this ‘economy’ are not pawns or abstractions and it is time that their convictions are felt by all.