Work Has Changed and So Have We
Sacrificing ourselves for a dying economy is not required
Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ May 11, 2020
We don’t need to return to work. Many of us never left; we just moved online. What does this mean?
Many also remained at work because the nature of their job doesn’t exist online. Work that cannot move online, I think, is not as simple as it appears and needs serious evaluation. What things must happen in close physical proximity in a world of climate disaster and planetwide pandemics?
Those that were genuinely essential are also exploited and underpaid. Many of the crucial people have never had a choice, but that absence of choice is now deadly. Those of us whom we casually ignored now die for the delivery of our dinners, our laundry, and our healthcare.
We didn’t realize that our privileges’ have such a high and immoral price tag as a constant and growing threat. The world where we could ignore this reality is gone.
The disproportionate death of the essential people for our economic ‘success’ makes it clear who holds these dangerous positions. They are our black, brown, and immigrant populations who are now publicly defined as expendable.
A depressing number of the people advocating for the sacrifice of essential workers have infested our governments. They have been allowed to hide behind the thin veneer of conservatism, not in the classic liberal sense of care in financial and public change matters, but redefined as racist, xenophobic, misogynist, and bigoted. They are fascist copies from darker age brought back to life in the fetid swamp of the hypercapitalist collapse.
The long, violent, and unrepressed themes of racial privilege and oppression in American culture has now destroyed the concept of a shared national community. Decades of political racist innuendo has built an under culture of lies and hatred claiming to be the real culture protected from criticism by the denial of all logic and all science.
What began under Reagan as a practical tool to replace membership losses in the long decline of a pseudo-conservative political party became an uncontrollable cult. In the steady disappearance of any relevant policies for the postmodern era, the old conservative, financial focus became only hatred and willful ignorance.
As with any system based only in denial of other’s rights, the group becomes ever smaller and more demanding of purity in absolute belief. The explosive transformation of human society into directly connected diversity eliminated any pretense of logic or science for the group’s racist bigotry requiring continuously manufactured threats.
Power and greed became the only values with cult belief requiring ever more absurd displays as proof of membership. As we see, an acceptance of death, initially for the unworthy to support the real value of the believers becomes, inevitably, the suicidal cult.
Belief in irrational power comes to haunt the cult group with the leader and the ‘true’ members who must prove they are more potent than a deadly, pandemic virus.
In the end, they prove that they risk death at the same percentages as anyone else in the face of an uncontrolled and novel virus. As the majority in the US recognize the Trump call for sacrifice for greed is the call to line up for the poison Kool-Aid.
Within the hardship of a collapsed economy, preventing hundreds of thousands from suffering and a pointless death is a small price to pay. As in many other countries, we must minimize the problems and support the population until an effective treatment and vaccine are mass delivered.
Forcing massive hardship in order to force a return to an already failing economy is ridiculous. The resources are available for everyone to ride out this disaster and it is only the beginning of many more. Change is what we need, not a return to what has already failed.
With COVID-19 now rampant in the White House, the seat of insanity, the end of the death cult is near. Let’s hope that this death cult dies quietly. The White House is a good place for that to happen..
