COVID-19 is 21st Century Smallpox
The powerfully wealthy and privileged are using the pandemic to reshape the world to kill off “the burdensome masses”.
At best, this is a mix of honest tone-deafness and cluelessness — mixed in with absolute deliberate action and careful guidance. The ratio cannot be any less than 40–60% and more likely is 5-95% or higher. No greater illustration of what I mean exactly exists than the continued fumbling and tone-deafness of the Democratic National Party. First, we have “our hero”, Joe Biden. Biden is dangerously unequipped to handle race issues, especially relevant for the pandemic for reasons I’ll get to (or you already figured out from my alarmist headline). Biden, however, is merely symptomatic of how increasingly out of touch the “mainline” DNC is, not an outlier. We also have one of the most important figureheads of the party, de facto or otherwise, Nancy Pelosi. She and her twin $24,000 each refrigerators filled with ice cream perfectly reflect the “let them eat cake” mentality the DNC leadership has of the pandemic and quarantine. There’s absolutely no reason why stay-at-home shouldn’t be a breeze; just enjoy your own luxurious prepper-ready stocks (ready to be restocked at the click of a mouse) and bespoke amenities that make you rarely leave the home for non-work related outings anyway even during the best of times.
There is a minority of Americans who are able to enjoy a practically COVID-free life; not just from the disease itself but from all the other fallout, sheltered from the harsh realities of a dead economy and fear that stepping outside their property boundaries will kill them and countless others. They can do this because their property boundaries are a few if not several acres, and the “great outdoors” (in a carefully manicured, perfect form) begins immediate outside their sliding kitchen door and windows; their financial reserves are great, and their hedge funds are constantly manipulated to avoid the worst of the economic pitfalls. These are often the same people protesting to reopen the country, not for the sake of simply being outside and (which you can do anyway, at any stage of the quarantine) or reconnecting or rebuilding society as a social good, but merely to restart the production lines and get back to what America is really about: productivity. For many, it’s because the country has made financial health with all other forms of health synonymous, itself an incredibly major problem and one that’s been festering as a fatal cancer for not years or even decades but now close to centuries; for many others, it’s almost because “economy = good” has become a severe mental habit. These are the people most comfortably weathering the quarantine; financial health is a side habit made possible by massive wealth already accrued and by God, why doesn’t anybody else understand that those who haven’t already built up a nest egg of a million+ deserve to die anyway?
After all, isn’t that the lesson of the ant and the grasshopper? The ant worked his ass off and earned a million dollars to comfortably live off on for the rest of his life, while the grasshopper pissed away his life playing a fiddle and voting for socialism to save everything.
Not that I believe Biden or Pelosi take that sentiment that far (although millions of voting Americans do, clearly) but there is a clear disconnect between the policies they approve and advocate and their actual voting bloc — hence the rise of real political heroes like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris, Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sanders and even Andrew Yang and that voting bloc’s frustration when we’re delivered just more Biden. Even John Oliver (who, it needs to be pointed out, is indeed wealthy and privilege) isn’t invulnerable to this, going from highlighting underappreciated by important issues (including coronavirus itself, back in early March) straight into falling along the same tone deafness, being consumed and reporting the same coronavirus news as everyone else and offering little more advice than to allow a special 30 seconds to scream about all the stuff people are missing.
I believe the French translation comes out something along the lines of “let them eat cake.”
But make no mistake, there’s a clear correlation between wealth/privilege (or lack thereof) and quarantine suffering. Wealthy, privileged people sit on their multi-acres of artificially manicured nature and wonder what’s the big deal about COVID-19 anyway; those living in low-income highrise “projects” are only doomed by stay-at-home orders as the coronavirus circulates around their very air or by their landlords threatening to kick them out of a home to stay in. Those that can afford to or are able to are recommended to take up gardening or play video games to take their minds of pandemic panic; those who live in the aforementioned projects, without backyards or much room to speak of and no income to afford such lavish distractions, venture out into the work world to keep supplying the wealthy with those very same distractions. People are advised to homeschool their kids or engage in “distance learning,” but aside from potentially being the death of cultural diversity through personal exposure after many decades of hard-fought victories such threatens to deprive minorities of a higher-ed, quality or even fundamentally basic education even more so than what had occurred before.
And that’s the thing; minorities are suffering gravely disproportionately from coronavirus than white populations. Yes, John Oliver has mentioned it; but Trevor Noah, a man who himself has experienced the depths of being purposely disadvantaged despite whatever privilege he gets to experience now, has made it a very specific point, time and time again, and how deadly the pandemic is for minorities no matter what precautions they’re advised or even forced to take.
Gee, it’s almost like this is on purpose.
This isn’t the first time a disease or pandemic has been used to widen wealth and privilege gaps. Although not strictly pandemic-related, many profiteered during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of a decade ago, and indeed the cause of both is firmly rooted in policies specifically designed to widen wealth and privilege gaps. Persons of Color also suffered disproportionately during the 1918 epidemic, even when technology and (lack of) scientific understanding didn’t necessarily inherently protected wealth and privilege. But most infamously, smallpox had been deliberately used during America’s colonial period to try to wipe out Native/First People populations through biological warfare as genocide, using white population’s greater resistance to the disease to their advantage. Smallpox would continue to ravage even white populations even well beyond the early 19th century when Louie Pasteur invented a vaccine (in the process, inventing the very concept of vaccination itself) but at least once the British colonizers took a calculated risk in order to deliberately wipe out a native population; and the disease was especially ravaging for native populations throughout the British Commonwealth for centuries to come.
Gee, I wonder if that’s a coincidence?
The most dangerous ramification of the pandemic may be far removed from the pandemic itself, but in using the pandemic and quarantine — whether by deliberate calculation or tone-deaf, blind ineptitude — to vastly widen the existing wealth and privilege gaps, especially among Persons of Color, the LGBTQIA+ community and other disadvantaged minorities. This presents a very real and frightening possibility that the country and these communities may never recover from and a serious erosion of equity and freedom. There are no lack of heroes willing and prepared to stand up against this — the aforementioned Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Harris, Sanders — but they’ve been thoroughly rejected by the DNC “mainline.” More than ever, we need to be prepared to completely change and turn over the very fundamentals of the federal government itself.
