Watching coronavirus fail to live up to its hype, in a state where hospitals are not at all at risk for being overwhelmed, a strange feeling has come over me. I've noticed that our efforts to 'flatten the curve' are also widening said curve, transforming an acute crisis into a long emergency. I've watched our government scramble to give big companies trillions while the IMF prepares to loan trillions more to countries whose economies have been sent into a tailspin by social distancing measures. I'm seeing tech companies preparing to roll out insanely intrusive digital monitoring of our population. These things and more make me feel strange, like I'm living through the dawn of some dystopian hellscape.
Perhaps that sounds hyperbolic. It is not. The recent botched Wisconsin election illustrates the hellscape I'm talking about. So does the footage of Philadelphia police pulling a man off a public bus for not wearing a mask. And Nevada's painting of six foot squares on a parking lot to keep the homeless sleeping in a socially-distanced manner. These things and more show the degree to which inhumanity is already being rationalized by fear of a virus that is killing an order of magnitude fewer people than medical errors do.
So now, at the dawn of this dystopia, a third of us are unemployed, a third are working from home, and a third are 'essential'. I personally fall somewhere between working at home and unemployed. As an independent author, I rely on in-person book sales for part of my income. These sales take place at my favorite coffee shop, as well as at a neighborhood bookstore. When COVID-19 closed these establishments, in-person sales of my latest book became impossible. When I applied for unemployment to try and make up for some of this lost income, I was told that I didn't make enough money to qualify for benefits. Fortunately, I still have a gig summarizing news reports which provides me with sufficient income to survive. But millions of others are not so lucky.
Right now, these unlucky millions are doing everything they can to stay afloat. Many are finding that government programs are insufficient to meet their needs, and will not know what to do as their lives begin to unravel. This unraveling will take months, just as it will take months for the true scope of the economic problems created by social distancing to become apparent. In the fall, once these unraveled lives and intractable economic problems have come into full view, people are going to start getting angry. Really angry.
The news media will do everything in its power to spin this anger into bullshit partisan politics, but this spin will not quell the anger. Some will try airing their grievances by traditional protests, but our natural right to freely assemble is no longer being protected by the government, and the widened virus curve suggests that exercising this right could become impossible indefinitely. So what will happen, in our broken democracy, when the problems that have just begun come to a head? I don't know. I do know that our government won't solve these problems. We can solve them, if we work together, but how that might look is an open question.
The whole idea of goverment deciding who is 'essential' and who isn't is quite new.
Oh, wait...