Xavi Benjamín He/They

It Wasn’t 2020, It Was The Rul­ing Class Try­ing to Kill You

What need­ed to hap­pen here in the US was the imme­di­ate imple­men­ta­tion of a sys­tem of nation­al health­care, a cam­paign to guar­an­tee wide­ly acces­si­ble and free test­ing, and the deploy­ment of a trained army of con­tact trac­ers track­ing infec­tions and help­ing peo­ple into paid, catered quar­an­tines. There should have edu­ca­tion­al cam­paigns – not just tele­vi­sion ads and offi­cial announce­ments but brigades of doc­tors, nurs­es, and med­ical stu­dents going door to door nation-wide, explain­ing the basics of the sit­u­a­tion in lan­guage the peo­ple could under­stand just as Cuba was able to do. There should have been rent and bill freezes, mas­sive free food dis­tri­b­u­tions, and recur­ring month­ly sur­vival pay­ments. There should have been a com­pre­hen­sive long term plan to con­trol the spread and make sure that peo­ple could stay home and social dis­tance with­out bring­ing down eco­nom­ic and emo­tion­al dev­as­ta­tion upon them­selves and their loved ones. That is, of course, not what happened.

Basi­cal­ly every oth­er coun­try has the pan­dem­ic under con­trol. We’ve had a whole year of our lives stolen, and yet there’s no end in sight. Will Democ­rats pass the bold type of leg­is­la­tion need­ed to get out of the hell­hole we’re in? I’m not par­tic­u­lar­ly hope­ful. It’s more impor­tant than ever to orga­nize and par­tic­i­pate in direct action.