American Fecklessness in the Time of Pandemic

By Jim Miller

After waiting a week for California’s and San Diego’s glacial election returns, I had planned to write a post-election column.  Then the COVID-19 pandemic got real and everything changed.  As a professor at San Diego City College and as the father of a high school student, I was thrust into the chaos that “social distancing” brings to educational institutions and family.

In between planning for teaching virtually for three weeks (or perhaps the rest of the semester) and dealing with the contradictory stew of confusion, panic, fear, hostility, sadness, as well as with the personal courage, compassion, and community solidarity that arose all around me, I talked to friends and family who were slow to respond and watched their retirement and/or college funds collapse before they had time to act as the stock market went on its manic roller coaster ride.

Poof! the markets were gutted.  Would they come back in time?  Nobody knows.

As for my working-class students, mostly of color, the scary thing was not the stock market, but their lack of healthcare and their need to work for survival despite the potential peril, and that many employers are still disregarding the necessity of adequate sick days.  That and the fact that there is still a significant digital divide in this country will make both my students’ and many others’ economic and academic lives even more difficult.

Nationally, the news cycle was insane as Trump’s bizarre, narcissistic incompetence and cruelty was on full display.  People were getting sick and starting to die in the United States while the commodity spectacles of sports and entertainment that keep us distracted went dark before our eyes.  In sum, the bubble burst and we were left to see the poverty of our collective political and social lives.

As Mike Davis recently observed of the present crisis :

The outbreak has instantly exposed the stark class divide in healthcare: those with good health plans who can also work or teach from home are comfortably isolated provided they follow prudent safeguards.  Public employees and other groups of unionized workers with decent coverage will have to make difficult choices between income and protection.  Meanwhile millions of low wage service workers, farm employees, uncovered contingent workers, the unemployed and the homeless will be thrown to the wolves.

Even if Washington ultimately resolves the testing fiasco and provides adequate numbers of kits, the uninsured will still have to pay doctors or hospitals for administrating the tests.  Overall family medical bills will soar at the same time that millions of workers are losing their jobs and their employer-provided insurance.  Could there possibly be a stronger, more urgent case in favor of Medicare for All?

But sadly, as we know, the champions of universal health care as a human right, have been vanquished in the name of a political pragmatism largely rooted in fear.  Of course, the irony of this is that even if Biden rides into office in the wake of Trump’s inability to deal with his first national crisis, Joe is not the man for the job. The majority of Democratic voters may have voted to restore normalcy, but normalcy in the form of the neoliberal status quo is part of the problem.

The hard truth is that “normal” is what helped get us here. Younger primary voters 40 and under, who are used to getting the short end of the stick, understand this, but they didn’t show up in the numbers needed to help Bernie Sanders. Older primary voters may agree with Sanders’s goals, but can no longer imagine anything outside of the current hegemony. As one of the smug, Sanders hating talking heads on MSNBC gleefully put it, “this is a post-hope election.”

Indeed, if crisis is opportunity, this chance to move the ledger in the direction of big progressive change that might actually address our systemic problems has been lost for the short term despite the fact that, as Davis again notes:

The current pandemic expands the argument: capitalist globalization now appears to be biologically unsustainable in the absence of a truly international public health infrastructure. But such an infrastructure will never exist until peoples’ movements break the power of Big Pharma and for-profit healthcare.

And this painful reality sits side by side with our looming climate catastrophe that will, as David Wallace-Wells documents in “The Uninhabitable Earth“,  unleash a host of new diseases as the temperature rises.  Hence, if you are digging this pandemic, you’ll love the future we have in store unless we miraculously act with a boldness and courage we seem unable to summon.

As a friend of mine ruefully observed about last week’s news that the polar ice caps are melting six times faster than they were in the 1990s, we’ll act on that problem as effectively as we are now with the coronavirus pandemic — we’ll get fired up once Miami is underwater.

Never has it been clearer that our problem is much bigger than Donald Trump–and we simply don’t seem up to the challenge.

Once, we stumble our way through this national emergency, if we are lucky, we’ll elect Joe Biden who will surely bring a basic decency back to the White House, but will require a lot of external pushing to get even close to where we need to be if we want the dystopian feeling many of us have at present to give way to a reasonable shot at building a more just, sustainable future.

In the end, our current political reality is on the fast track to colliding with a whole range of grim truths that most of us simply don’t want to face.