The current crisis is not simply an infectious disease ripping through a global population. It is an illness that outpaces our society’s capacity to offer care. This is a crisis of public health driven by a lack of civic responsibility. American society has no use for any form of care, be it physical or economic. Our government has shown itself — as it did during the AIDS epidemic — to be uninterested in becoming an institution that saves instead of one that kills. Yet the American state isn’t the only organization unwilling to take responsibility for the current crisis, and they shouldn’t be the only one that takes the blame. Today’s capitalist regime is one that exists in all of us: we all negotiate its murderous values, engaging when we must and turning away when we can. How long has every level of American culture harped on about doing more with less, wittingly or unwittingly benefitting the few, deregulating and cutting to turn a $1 into $1.01? How long have American corporations and institutions wanted work without workers? Production without responsibility? How long has the American healthcare industry concerned itself with denying care to create profit? Corporations, institutions, and organizations of all scales in America have played a critical role in allowing these values to become true: whether because of indulgence of or participation in the hollow gig economy, consistent acts of economic and political irresponsibility, and decades of empty sloganeering. These veredictions have existed long before the appearance of the virus COVID-19.
These memes make clear the tacit fact beneath every anxious conversation since mid-March: there is no going back to normal. How ridiculous virtue-signaling careerists look now, when the primary questions for many are: Can I pay rent? When, where, and how will I buy food? How can inane industries pivot to selling the softest sweatpants for working from home with the unemployment rate poised to hit over 30%, lifestyle food-bloggers tout the benefits of fresh produce, neighbors drive eachother crazy doing at home HIIT workouts, all violently denying the that normal patterns of consumption and precarity are dangerously unsuited for today’s crisis. These rituals contribute to a feeling of normalcy when normality is exactly what we should be fighting against. The opportunity to institute radical change founded on physical and economic care and accessibility has never been greater. But as of today — considering the content of the federal government’s heinous first COVID bailout — it seems most likely that this shock-doctrine will result in doubling-down on a necrophiliac form of neoliberal authoritarianism.
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