Captivity

POLITICIZING A PANDEMIC

There is no more savage display of America’s representative form of government than the politics in a Presidential election year.

This year is profoundly a first in American history: an election held in the midst of a killing pandemic in which a virus essentially unlike any seen before is killing more Americans than we know and at a rate that exceeds our seemingly endless regional wars.

You might think that this situation would have a sobering impact on the politics. Forget it.

Because nothing lasts forever, it is obvious that what this natural enemy has exposed instead is the weakness of the systems that are the foundation of our government in ways that can no longer be ignored, excused away or dismissed as not existing at all. We’ve got trouble everywhere we look.

The most obvious of all is with the capitalist system which finances our system of government.

With the seeming collapse of how Americans work to earn a living, with 40 million people now unemployed and layoffs being announced by our largest corporations and industries, it is clear that the foundation of capitalism – supply and demand – is meaningless if there is no money to keep that system running.

It is also clear to those of us who believe that government is the only entity strong enough to work through and mediate this disaster that there is a corruption of government now so clearly entrenched that the American people have lost control of what we want to believe still exists…America as the land of opportunity.

To know that the current Republican-led administration doesn’t plan to help the States damaged most by disease because the people in those States essentially vote Democratic is a stunning example of how our government no longer represents anything but the rich, the powerful and the well-connected. And that this is especially true when the Republican Party’s President is maniacally fearful of becoming a one-term President by losing in November.

At its beginning and for centuries afterward, America’s government was generally led by those attempting to provide a public service. For the past forty years or so – years in which America stopped successfully teaching its young people – America has been led by men and women who seek public office as a lifetime job, fundamentally corrupting the value system established by our Founders. We fool ourselves about this fact as we fool ourselves about our exceptionalism going from a country which once led the World in manufacturing everything, selling to the World and welcoming immigrants to a country which produces only soybeans and weapons, keeps immigrants away and depends on China for everything we buy and use – even masks and gowns for healthcare workers whose lives are being threatened.

This corruption and the attitudes on display threatens the lives of people more so than this killing disease. Remember that government is America’s largest employer. If States are forced to lay-off police and firemen, sanitation workers, teachers, administrative employees and even healthcare workers what exists just ahead of us is not a disaster but a catastrophe.

FAILING SYSTEMS

The pandemic threatens to change ‘normal’ everywhere we look: how and where we work; how we attend school at all levels and what school will look like; where we live; how we relate to each other and when masks and social distancing will no longer guide our everyday actions outside our living quarters.

We are captives of a disease which our scientists still cannot quantify and explain even as they scramble to produce successful tests, vaccines, the reality of immunity and whether the mutations of the disease will ever truly fade away much as flu does from year to year.

It is from this captivity however that we are now able to see how weak our systems have become. Everything has been infected.

FINANCIAL
We read of unemployment unknown in modern times but more importantly see no one providing an answer or programs or plans or policies that will employ people who may no longer have a job or a small business to run.

Such plans existed before. Caught in the depths of America’s first Great Depression, FDR’s brilliant Cabinet led him to introduce essential job programs for everyone, even for out of work writers, musicians and actors.

The Obama led stimulus programs, though often misused, combined with the bailouts of the financial system and even General Motors led America out of the fraudulent mortgage programs which brought on the recession of 2008.

But none of these previous experiences have the weight of a worldwide Depression and the reality that unless millions are put back to work in one way or another, there will be no demand to meet any supply and the very essence of our endangered economic-financial system will be brought to the edge. No plans in sight.

HEALTHCARE
We now know that a healthcare system based on supply and demand could not provide basic material to protect the doctors, nurses and attendants who are the foundation of what we mean by healthcare. The failure has caused death to the very people in charge of making us well.

Hospitals all across the country are in financial trouble because Covid stopped normal activities and now people are literally afraid to go to a hospital for fear of infection even if that hospital no longer has any Covid patients.

Our healthcare system has been based on a lie for years now. While our doctors and medical scientists continue to win Nobel Prizes, our healthcare system has slid down the line of industrial nations mired somewhere near the bottom. Our model has failed but until now we could continue to be concerned about high drug prices and whether we should all live within a Medicare for All system or not.

Spilled milk and a barn door closed after all the horses are gone.

EDUCATION
Today our children of all ages continue to learn in a make-believe public education system which failed decades ago but continues as if all is well.

The perpetrators of this crime against our children are the Schools of Education which have consistently failed to properly prepare teachers to teach, the teacher unions which know this and ignore it, the administrators of our public schools with good jobs to protect…and parents who simply don’t see the failure.

If there ever was a better example of this failure it is what is happening now in New York’s public schools.

Caught completely unaware by a disease which caused the sudden closing of all public schools, teachers who never learned how, were instructed to quickly turn their lesson plans into ‘distance learning’; schools provided computers to those who didn’t have them but not necessarily systems which could be connected to them; teachers were told to teach and children were told to be on their computers to learn.

Sounds good. But it doesn’t work.

The guitar-playing NYC Schools Chancellor and the Mayor who hired him tell us that 180,000 children are expected to attend a Summer School program although nothing will obligate them to attend. It is already predicted that many won’t even if it means moving them out of the school system entirely – graduate or not.

There is absolutely no plan in any school system in America to help our public school students make up four months of learning subject matter. They will be moved on as if they know what they should whether they do or not.

Failure begets failure.

It would be dramatic – and a gift – if we could end our captivity to develop a better place than we are in now. While more than 100,000 deaths is a ridiculous price for such a reality, at least America would be on a path to the kind of life we expect as Americans…and no longer have.

But that possibility does not and cannot exist without leadership.

Where is it?