Doing the necessary, and thinking the unthinkable

We live in a different world today than we did a month ago.

That's not news to anybody, at this point. Yes, the pandemic that we were warned to expect decades ago, the one which would spread like wildfire because inexpensive air travel would move asymptomatic carriers from country to country around the globe, that pandemic is now here. We'd dodged this bullet twice before; SARS, H1N1, Ebola, and Zika outbreaks had all prompted fears of pandemic, and calls to prepare for the event that experts ensured us would inevitably follow. But in far too many places around the world, political ideology and political expediency had repeated trumped good policy, leaving the world less prepared for this outbreak than we were for the above-mentioned four.

In China, an authoritarian government spent precious weeks attempting to control the flow of information, rather than controlling the spread of COVID-19; they finally accepted the reality of their situation, and enacted a lockdown which looked draconian to those of us outside their borders... at the time. But they also paired that with an unprecedented mobilization of material and personnel, building entire hospitals in days, and ramping up testing, tracking, and isolation protocols on a scale never seen before. They got their outbreak under control, to such an extent that frightened people the world over are now urging us to follow their example.

However, while their eventual response and mobilization was impressive, there's no way around the fact that they spent weeks denying the problem, and years denying the festering viral breeding grounds of the wet markets which birthed the COVID-19 pathogen in the first place. Have you read any news of China moving to do away with those wet markets, or establish standards of cleanliness and sanitation in them which might prevent the next COVID-19? Me, neither. With their crisis now past, the Chinese government is back to the bad behaviours that led to disaster in the first place. They were even trying to re-open theatres just a week ago; thankfully, they've since put that plan on ice, but it won't be on ice for long.

Other authoritarians around the world have fared even worse. Italy's far-right government steadfastly ignored the problem until their outbreak was raging out of control, and their hospitals, morgues, and cemetaries had all collapsed. Iran's mass graves are visible from space.

And, then, there's Trump World: the United States of America, whose lack of unity and by-design governmental dysfunction have resulted in a lack of testing kits, N95 masks, ventilators, and crucial personnel in the hardest-hit areas, with a lack of consistent controls ensuring that COVID-19 will spread to areas that haven't yet been hard hit. And still, Trump is playing games with the response, continuing to treat the worst crisis to face his nation in peacetime as if it were all about his reelection chances, and not about the hundreds of thousands of Americans who are about to die. Did you wonder what sort of monster talks about the deaths of 100K - 200K of their fellow citizens as a success story? Well, wonder no longer.

Even Trumps intransigence couldn't last in the face of the heartbreaking videos coming out of New York City, where hospitals are already collapsing, and the dead are already being housed in refrigerated 18-wheelers because morgues can't hold them all. And the outbreak hasn't even peaked yet; the situation is going to get much, much worse there before it gets better, and it's going to spread nation-wide because the nation isn't responding in any sort of coordinated way to the crisis. I've written before about the generational damage that Trump and his acolytes were doing to the institutions, infrastructure, and international standing of the United States, but COVID-19 has accelerated everything. Now, the collapse is happening at light speed.

With a global pandemic raging, and a pandemic-caused global economic collapse right behind it, is it time to finally start doing the necessary? Do we finally start taxing the rich to pay for robust health care systems, for robust social assistance programs, for scientific research to supply policy-makers with actual facts on which to base reality-based policies that address our actual problems? Do we finally start talking about Universal Basic Income, not merely to ease the pain of job loss from rapidly evolving automation technologies, but to ensure that the most vulnerable among us are actually a little less vulnerable when the next crisis hits?

Do we finally start thinking the unthinkable: that the worship of share prices and profit margins over all else has led us to the brink of disaster, that largely unrestricted corporate excess is in the process of cost millions of human lives, and that it's maybe, just maybe, time to start looking at a different way of organizing our society?

I think it is, and I can prove it. All you need do is look at places where the virus has hit less hard; places like Canada, where I'm fortunate enough to live. Where decades of pragmatic, mostly centre-left governments have left us with a legacy of strong social programs, robust health care systems, and an ethos in which we expect our society to care for the weakest among us, rather than just leaving them to fend for themselves. In Canada, the spread of the virus is largely under control, and social distancing is mostly working, in no small part because our governments have stepped up to ensure that people can meet their basic needs while the crisis lasts; as a result the health care system is under strain but still coping, and the Prime Minister is a daily presence on our media feeds, calmly informing us of each new way his government has found that can help Canadians get through this.

In the United States, by contrast, social Darwinism is the dominant paradigm, a state of affairs which is about to kill a significant percentage of their population as their population ignores isolation orders because they can't afford to stay home, and their entire heath care system collapses while the President hurls insults and invective at anyone who dares to suggest that he should be doing more. Celebrities had to hold an online telethon to raise money to feed America, the richest nation on earth, and event might have been heartwarming if it wasn't so infuriating.

The worst has happened. The apocalypse has arrived, and the world we knew has ended. The question we're now faced with is: what sort of new world are we going to build now? Do we just patch the cracks on the status quo, continuing to feed the rich, and only the rich, while essentially cutting everyone else loose to die in the next pandemic? Or do we acknowledge that social services aren't just a matter of social justice, but of the very survival of our society?

There will be those who will say that it's too early to start talking about how we move forward after COVID-19. They are wrong; the urgency to fix our global society is more urgent now than ever, and the price of delay is now starkly apparent. Now is the time to start thinking the unthinkable: that the way we were living, which we've known for decades was unsustainable, has now become an active threat to our continued survival. The status quo is a clear and present danger. How we respond will determine the future of humanity, and possibly whether humanity has a future at all.

Now is the time to start reading up on Universal Basic Income; on Universal Health Care if your home doesn't have it; on the transition from a fossil fuel economy to one based on renewable energy sources; on reducing our plastic pollution; on reducing our food waste; and on ensuring that the billionaires giant corporations in our lives shoulder their share of the burden of paying for it all. All of those things, and more, need to be on the table. Start thinking about it, and start writing about it; write letters, physical, snail-mail letters, to your elected representatives. Even if you can't post them right now, you probably have some time available right now to write them, and you can mail them afterwards. Spend it lobbying for the world you want to have after the COVID-19 cloud has passed over us.

And vote, dammit. Because if, after all of this, you still can't bring yourself to care who actually gets to form your government, and what policies they'll enact as they govern, then God help you.