In a past post, the case was made that the coronavirus pandemic has revealed that America is a failed state when the measurement is serving the vast majority of its citizens. Unlike western European nations, America has a very poor social safety net and how well one survives the pandemic crisis could ultimately come down to how much money one has if not working in an industry deemed essential and still providing an income. Before the pandemic, upward social mobility in America had fallen precipitously and now one has been chances of upward mobility in "Old Europe" - a Republicans term of derision. Blinding too many is the continued myth of American exceptionalism - a term bandied about by politicians of both political parties - that ignores and seeks to gloss over America's many systemic economic and social problems. As the pandemic grinds on, the wealthy know they will survive while the least fortunate wonder where their next meal will come from. A long piece in
New York Magazine looks at this reality and makes one wonder if Americans will ever demand the system be improved. Here are highlights:
There was
the pandemic,
then there was the storm. Of all the natural disasters, tornadoes lend
themselves the most to being read as Providence. Like hurricanes and wildfires,
they can level everything in their path, but those paths can also be narrow
enough, forgiving enough, to grind one house into debris while leaving the
neighboring structure untouched. Metaphors become redundant in the face of such
calamity; the thing to which you’d otherwise be comparing it is, too often,
what it already is.
But
when disaster looms, we grasp for deeper meaning. When the disaster is
unfamiliar, our imaginations retreat to more familiar terms, even primordial
ones, as with the notion that celestial forces control our fate. The need to
ascribe our misfortunes to some grand plan makes it hard not to look for cosmic
significance in the tornadoes that ripped through the American South on Easter
Sunday, months after the novel coronavirus made itself known on U.S. shores and
several weeks after any of us had left the house.
But
if recent months have proved anything, it’s that most disasters we otherwise
understand as “natural” have an uncanny way of reflecting human design.
Randomness isn’t justice, even a perverse form, distributed equitably. It is a
test of vulnerability — of your wherewithal to prepare, escape, recover.
The
wrong lesson, of impartial vulnerability, will always be there, tempting. As,
understandably, will be metaphysical rationales for physical phenomena — faith,
myth. These have been instrumental in helping people navigate the otherwise
unspeakable. But alongside them an insidious form of self-deception can take
root: the lies we tell to reconcile our behavior, good and bad, with our
idealized conceptions of who we are as individuals and as Americans. Faced with
horrors so vast they make us feel impotent, we tell ourselves that crises
invariably bring out our best; there’s no shortage of heroic anecdotes to
reinforce this narrative, encompassing emergency response, provision of health
care, neighborliness. But more often, these displays are too diffuse, too
renegade, to overcome the scale of the disaster itself. The long list of crises
that have taken America’s most brutal inequalities and enhanced them suggests
the opposite conclusion, that a motivating shame should be our main takeaway
from hurricanes Katrina and Maria, the 2008 economic crisis, the forever wars
in which we’re now ensnared. For elected officials, in particular, pressure is
high to sell a more flattering vision of U.S. culture — one defined by an
unshakable belief that America, as a project, is singularly good, noble, and
ripe with opportunity even in the toughest of times.
This
vision regularly finds itself at odds with reality. Governor Cuomo knows as
well as any that the coronavirus isn’t really “the great equalizer,” that
generations of inequality cannot be erased simply by giving two people of
differing economic backgrounds the same disease. You’d have to bury your head
in the sand to ignore the obvious: By almost every metric, those getting the
sickest and dying most frequently and being plunged into dire financial straits
at disproportionate rates are the same people who were vulnerable and
marginalized before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic.
A
brief accounting: Hungry people have been stuck in traffic jams at the Forum in
Inglewood, California, as thousands of motorists wend their way through the
parking lot to pick up free groceries. Twenty-six million Americans have
filed for unemployment since the middle of March, and a nationwide strain
on food-bank
capacity has resulted, with demand increasing by an average of 40 percent.
“Lower-income workers, minority communities, communities of color, folks
working in service jobs, folks living in public housing, folks with kids who
are on the free, reduced lunch programs” . . . . “those are the folks who are
really feeling the pain on this. And they were already in pain before.”
One
could drive just off the Las Vegas Strip and see dozens of homeless people
asleep in a taped-off parking lot while empty but still gaudily lit luxury
hotels loomed above them. County officials have been unable to reach a deal
with casino owners to house the houseless in their unused hotel rooms, where
they might enjoy a modicum of safety and hygiene. Recent actions by the Vegas
city council had already criminalized resting on sidewalks for even brief
stretches of time; pressed for lodging options, many people were forced into cramped
shelters that have since become hotbeds of infection.
Older people have been especially imperiled: for instance, the outbreak
at the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington, which killed 43 people and
vivified COVID’s lopsided threat to the elderly. In nursing homes across the
country, 11,000 have already died.
But the suffering is larger still than the dying. Recent
polls indicate that as many as two-thirds of Latino adults have lost their jobs
or seen their incomes reduced as a result of the economic downturn. Much of
this is attributable to Latino workers’ high representation among wage laborers
in service and hospitality industries, which have been decimated. Even as
American life retreats indoors, ICE raids continue, bringing armed agents into
people’s homes and risking the spread of infection, then transporting those
they capture to detention facilities known for incubating diseases. In a cruel
twist of irony, many undocumented agricultural workers, demonized for years by
nativists, have been deemed “essential” for their role in maintaining the
food-supply chain. Grocery employees, home health aides, social workers — the
essential economy under the coronavirus is rife with traditionally
undercompensated professions staffed largely by people of color, especially
women . . .
Preliminary
data points to some of the bleakest
outcomes for black Americans, as anyone might have predicted even before
that data began rolling in. Homeless, imprisoned, and impoverished people in
the U.S. have and continue to be disproportionately black, with the
accompanying health risks: higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, and heart
disease, all reliable indicators of whether an otherwise manageable case of
COVID could turn fatal. Black victims compose 40 percent of Michigan’s infected
dead but 14 percent of the state’s population, for instance. They’re 70 percent
of the dead in Louisiana, one of the country’s biggest epicenters outside New
York, but just 33 percent of the population.
These
are the people whose suffering is neglected when terms like equalizer
are reduced to platitudes. But neglecting it in practice, as many officials
have, also shapes our expectations of what returning to normal looks like.
Social conditions that seemed intolerable six months ago have since acquired
the sheen of an idyllic recovery. Getting back to work, earning wages again —
these are broad improvements over what we have now that, nevertheless, won’t
repair the long-standing circumstances of millions whose bigger problems were
always structural. That many of us can’t even begin to expect or even
conceptualize this — in a moment so desperate, so damning to the notion that
America’s best feature is its ability to manufacture prosperity, a reopening
where black doesn’t mean sicker, Latino doesn’t mean lower wages, and poor
doesn’t mean unreliable food or housing — reaffirms that for millions,
normality is cruel enough.
This
is where the history that produced America’s undercastes is hardest to escape,
where the flattering delusions that neglect suffering look less like personal
coping mechanisms than a national inheritance. When Trump’s surrogates urge
people to sacrifice their lives to resuscitate the economy, they aren’t just
protecting his reelection prospects; they’re advancing a culture war fueled by
resentment toward people who’ve long been understood as unworthy. It’s why
Trumpist protesters brandishing the Confederate flag can
storm the Michigan capitol calling on the governor to rescind her
stay-at-home orders and have the emblem not seem incongruous.
Deception
that obscures inequality isn’t just expedient. It infuses tragedy with a tacit
moral dimension, where the worst suffering is presumed to be reserved for those
who deserve it — whether by being too poor, too black, too proximate to either.
What
happens when this magnitude of crisis befalls the entire country? There’s a
liberal impulse to treat these disasters as emancipatory, freeing us from the
illusion of an equitable status quo, the better to pursue the real thing with
our vision unclouded. This might be true for some, though whether their
awakening produces the requisite policy response is less clear. I’d say, in
fact, it’s doubtful. The reality thus far, rather than solidarity, has
overwhelmingly been individuals left to manage the fallout alone, in many cases
owing to the absence of infrastructure whereby they might help one another.
Dairy farmers in Wisconsin dump thousands of gallons of milk a day, citing less
need from schools and restaurants, while food-pantry lines in San Antonio and
Dallas stretch for blocks, and there’s no public entity to connect the two.
How
societies mitigate the pain they cause at the margins is far more revealing —
how much we invest, as Americans, in catching the vulnerable when the floor is
ripped from beneath them. We may tell ourselves the pandemic is asking this
question of us, but if we had the courage to look clearly, the answer was
evident long before this crisis: in how our society distributes suffering, the
stories we tell to make it compatible with our national self-regard; how
aggressively so many insist on overlooking the foreseeable. The depth of havoc
that the coronavirus wreaks on its inevitable victims was, and is, within
America’s capacity to determine. We have few insights into the path it’s
cutting today that we haven’t had for years and that we weren’t already
ignoring.
