Covid-19 Is Peeling The Veneer Off Of American Exceptionalism
Some Americans are surviving Coronavirus just fine. But many are perishing in an economy that was already making their lives miserable.
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by Justin Rosario
It’s been a while since I’ve written an article about privilege but as the national suffering from Covid-19 continues to mount, I thought it might be a good time to revisit the topic.
Unlike a very significant percent of the country, my family happens to have avoided the worst social and economic effects of the pandemic (so far). Part of this was through preparation (as I mentioned last week, we started stocking up three weeks before the national meltdown) but a lot of it was simply luck.
For instance, both my wife Debra and our next door neighbor Claudia have government jobs that allow them to work from home. That means we still have money coming in to pay the bills. It also means they’re not being exposed to infection outside the home nearly as much as essential workers.
At the same time, since we’ve been acting as an extended family unit for the last three and a half years and our apartments are literally next to each other (by design), we have a lot more room. We’re not confined to a single apartment for the duration of this pandemic. This is especially important for the kids because being able to move freely from one apartment to the other removes the feeling of being trapped.
We’re not “lucky” in the sense that we needed good fortune to be in this particular arrangement. Both Debbie and Claudia worked very hard to get where they are. And we all put in a lot of effort to build our extended family unit to be the close-knit group we are today. We are, however, lucky in the sense that all of this just happens to make it relatively easy for us to weather this particular global catastrophe.
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Not Everyone Is So Lucky
Ironically, even as Bernie Sanders drops out of the running, the nation is experiencing first-hand the kind of problems he based his campaign on fixing. Unemployment, poverty, food insecurity, etc. These are all significantly worse than they were just two months ago and they’re spreading.
More than 17 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits in the past four weeks, a rapid and unprecedented deterioration in the U.S. economy that the nation has decided is necessary to combat the deadly coronavirus by keeping as many people as possible at home.
That’s not counting the millions of people who were unable to apply because the systems were overloaded. Some systems were simply too antiquated while others were deliberately sabotaged by Republicans to deny the unemployed the help they needed. Because, you know, Republicans.
That number will continue to grow as businesses run out of money and continue to let people go. That, in turn, will lead to a downward spiral of second and third-tier losses and this recession/depression (depending on who you talk to) will grow worse.
WaPo continues:
The nation has not experienced this magnitude of layoffs and economic contraction since the Great Depression, many experts say, and recovery is unlikely to be swift. President Trump and Congress are racing to pass more relief money, but they failed to strike a deal Thursday on the details. Meanwhile, the $2 trillion package Congress approved last month is barely starting to get out as states and federal agencies that have been gutted for years struggle to process millions of aid applications from small businesses and the newly jobless.
So even as we put a plan (inadequate but still a plan) in place to keep the country aloft, thanks to Republican anti-government stupidity, it’s barely gotten off the ground.
No wonder people are freaking out.
Put aside the fear of infection for the moment. Over 17 million people have lost their jobs and have no income. Unemployment has been beefed up but that’s assuming you can apply for it. And even then, will it be enough to keep you going for the duration?
Very few landlords and management companies are putting rent on hold of their own accord. While the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development has paused evictions and foreclosures until the end of April, there is no guidance on a national level pushing private landlords to do the same. There are also no programs in place to help them with the expense involved in doing so.
In other words, there will be landlords who even if they want to suspend collecting rent, can’t afford to.
This has led to “rent strikes” where tenants are organizing to simply refuse to pay rent. One of these efforts is going on just up the block from us in a very large apartment complex with several hundred apartments and I hope they succeed. The West end of Alexandria is not exactly wealthy.
Our particular complex has not gotten to that point but I suspect it might. Our management company is completely unsympathetic to the plight of its residents. When Debbie was caught up in Trump’s stupid government shut down, they threatened to take us to court after just asking about one month’s forebearance. We’re one of their few long term renters (most last 1-2 years. We’ve been here for 6) and in very good standing. None of that mattered. They wanted their money.
We’ll pay our rent because we can (and therefore should) but if the rest of the building calls for a strike and asks for solidarity, they’ll have it.
Meanwhile, people who own their homes aren’t having it any easier. The major banks are negotiating on a state-by-state basis to suspend mortgage payments. So if your governor doesn’t think you should get a break on paying the mortgage just because you’ve lost your job due to a pandemic, tough noogies.
As far as I can tell, though, only California has managed to pull this off. Pressure from the Federal Reserve, who is pumping literally trillions of dollars into the economy to keep it going, would be nice but that doesn’t seem to be coming any time soon.
Welfare for the banks, figure it out yourself for the rest of us. How very American.
Housing Isn’t The Only Problem
We recently discovered that we can order fresh fruits and veggies from a local famer’s market online. They box it up and toss it in the trunk. Social distancing accomplished. That means I don’t have to go grocery shopping but once every two weeks and if we really decide to lock it down, we have enough food from our pre-pandemic stockpiling to last us a couple of months without ever coming into contact with other people.
Even if we can’t pick up fresh fruit and veggies, we have enough canned and frozen to get by for a while. It’s not ideal but it’s better than nothing.
But that took money to do. Not a ton of money but more than people working minimum wage have. And if they’re now unemployed, ordering from a farmer’s market is out the window. In fact, it’s probably out the window even if they’re still working. Sure, it was fresh but it was painfully more expensive than our normal grocery bill for the same foods.
Assuming they have the money to buy groceries the normal way, that means going to the store and risking infection week after week.
And if they get infected? Will they have any kind of healthcare? Depends. Was it tied to their job? Can they afford the outrageous prices of COBRA? Did they even have insurance before? Can they enroll in Medicaid or did their Republican governor curtail the ACA expansion?
For millions of people, healthcare just became a top shelf concern where it wasn’t before.
What about childcare? Schools are closed across most of the country and parents are suddenly discovering that, if childcare is even available, it is prohibitively expensive. Not everyone has the luxury of working from home and someone has to keep an eye on the kids.
This is the case for our neighbors across the hall. Both are still being forced to go to work everyday and they have no family in the area. We volunteered to watch their son while they’re at work but how many people are willing to take that risk? With two adults working, that’s twice as many chances at bringing Covid-19 home and kids are the ultimate germ carriers, the filthy little buggers.
Luckily for our neighbors, we’re the “pay it forward” kind so they get free childcare but most people don’t have a family of socially-minded liberals across the hall from them. If people were given the option to stay home to care for a family member, this would be less of a problem but we’re not doing that. Meanwhile, Japan is literally paying parents to stay home to look after their kids.
Covid-19 Is Peeling The Veneer Off Of American Exceptionalism
In every conceivable way, what is unfolding now is a manmade disaster. No other country has allowed Covid-19 to spread as unchecked as we have. No other country has thrown its people to the wolves like we have. No other country is on the brink of ruin because they shredded their safety net like we have.
No other country is openly talking about sacrificing millions of lives for corporate profit like we are.
An exceptional country would have stopped the virus before it spread without annihilating its economy and throwing over 20 million people out of work at once. But we couldn’t do that because we are exceptional at nothing besides breeding political extremists and even more apologists to cover for them.
When this is all over, the only thing that is going to be more horrible than the toll Covid-19 has taken on America will be the rush to downplay the nightmare we’ll have gone through. Republicans are already doing it and we’re still in the middle of the first peak of the pandemic.
For those of us who have the luxury of not being unemployed or not being forced to risk our lives every day, we have an obligation to understand our privilege. We have to remember that this didn’t have to happen and push to make sure that the next pandemic, because there will always be a next pandemic, does not wreak the same kind of havoc on people’s lives that we are witnessing now.
The first step is to vote Republicans out of power in November. Think of it as a vaccine for the nation.
(AP Photo/Chris O’Meara)
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