(ThyBlackMan.com) In the hit musical Hamilton there’s a song called, “The World Turned Upside Down.” That’s a bit how the last one hundred or so days have felt. The pandemic has seemingly changed everything about the way things were, and we have yet to determine what the new normal will be.
Exhibit A: In the last eighteen weeks, fifty-two million people have signed up for unemployment compensation. And what was the administration’s response to that crisis? A payroll tax cut! That’s crazy. What good is a reduction in the payroll tax if you’re not on anybody’s payroll?
Most of the economic news has been like that. Touting a rising stock market. The market cheered when the last jobs report showed five million jobs created. If my arithmetic is right, if we had lost twenty-five million jobs at that point in the beginning of June, we were still twenty million jobs in the hole.
Exhibit B: Renewing his Coronavirus Task Force briefings, the president says everything is going well except for in a few places. When cases, hospitalizations and deaths are going up in 30 out of fifty states: let’s see, more math. That means sixty percent of the country is on fire. We’re doing so badly, Mexico closed its border to us. Maybe they will pay for that wall.
Perhaps craziest of all, the president seems convinced that if we stopped testing, we’d have less cases. As one of my nieces put it, “I might as well throw away my bathroom scale and I’ll never gain any weight.” Hell, why not stop testing for cancer, heart disease and the other leading causes of death, we’d all live forever. He took a cognition test where he had to identify an elephant and one of the questions was, “What day is it?” Incredulously, he’s saying how hard it was, bragging he “aced it.” Ridiculous.
Has the pandemic really changed everything, or has it revealed the world the way it really is? Maybe the fantasy was the way the world was portrayed by some before COVID-19 hit.
The Red Pill
The greatest economy in the history of the world? Bullshit. These same essential workers were toiling away without paid sick leave and for wages that would not allow them to pay the accepted standard of thirty percent of their income for rent: in fact many are paying up to fifty percent which impacts how much is left for other necessities like food and medicine. Now, researchers at Princeton University project that twenty-eight million of them will be facing eviction as the national moratorium expires.
In the middle of a pandemic, and historic job losses leaving workers without healthcare, the Justice Department is suing to repeal the Affordable Care Act, taking away healthcare from another twenty million people, with no replacement. In different parts of the country you can’t tell which line is longest; the food line, the unemployment line, or the coronavirus test line.
The Attorney General calls the peaceful protesting of a man murdered by police, in broad daylight, and in front of witnesses filming it “extreme”, but not the actions of armed troops tossing stun grenades and spraying tear gas at them to clear the way for a presidential ‘photo op.’ Holding a Bible upside down.
No, the pre-COVID world was crazy and now we can see the real world around us much more clearly. With an ignorant and corrupt leader, surrounded by a bunch of incompetent sycophants, driving the country off a cliff. Time to take the red pill.
In one hundred days we have a chance to turn the world right-side up. Let’s not blow it.
Staff Writer; Harry Sewell