“I am merely a passer-by, it was there, patiently enduring heat and cold, rain, wind and sun, now thriving, now starving, fastened like a limpet to this strip of land, sucking in life and yielding up its dead.” Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest
The sky is that battleship gray color, a slight breeze is blowing, from which direction I can’t tell, and earlier a little rain fell. It’s Sunday, but there is no football from England, Italy or Spain. All the players are holed up, showing off their home training regimens on You Tube. Some dribble rolls of toilet paper, some have goals in their living room. Penning these athletes up is like confining the fastest horse that ever lived to a corral. The horse was born to run, and footballers have the same urge to gallop, race, leap, jump and twist. Hard to completely shut down a finely tuned athlete; the machine wants to work.
Is this the third Covid Sunday or the second? It’s the first week of April. We’re in the self-isolation rhythm. My wife and I haven’t worn down each others’ nerves yet. We are fortunate to have a large outdoor deck and a fenced yard. We can get a little distance from one another when needed. Many people are isolated in smaller, grimmer, less comfortable spaces. It’s just three of us. My daughter’s emotions have swung like an out-of-control wrecking ball, from immature 18-year-old who can only consider how this pandemic affects her, or her and her boyfriend, and blames us, her parents, for the social distancing prohibitions, to sulking for hours behind the closed door of her room. We hear her on Face Time with friends, so she’s not at all like a prisoner in solitary confinement. She’s too young at this point to turn inward for perspective and solace. She’s eighteen and in love for the first time, it’s Spring time, and she can’t see, touch, or smell her boyfriend. Every hour apart is like a week. It’s unbearable, and terribly unfair. That’s her world. The pandemic is out to get her, and only her.
Miranda acts that way until we snap her out of it with a snarky remark about her intelligence, or she pulls out of the funk on her own. It’s relatively chill for a day or two, and then the wrecking ball swings the other direction. Duck and cover time.
My wife is holding up really well. She’s even-keeled, never too high or low. We do the things we need to do, a few things we want to do, and pass as best we can these uncertain, strange, foreboding days. We change clothes regularly -- no lounging around in sweatpants and a bathrobe reeking of tequila and sweat; I’d say we are getting enough sleep. Eating with good moderation, and not much differently than we normally do. What’s different is that we’re not eating out. We typically eat out a few times a month, nothing fancy, Joe’s Cafe, Cajun Kitchen, Los Arroyos, Saigon, Empty Bowls. We watched Real Time with Bill Maher last night, and followed that with The Wife, starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Price. We’re waiting for the next episode of The Plot Against America on HBO.
Today was the first day in three weeks that I didn’t train with a 10 pound steel mace. I worked on a handstand instead.
We drove past Trader Joe’s on Milpas this morning but the line was long, so we got on the freeway headed north to the Vons on Turnpike. Traffic was light. No line of people waiting to enter the store. The floor by the check-out stations was marked in the now expected six foot intervals. The paper goods aisle was barren, sad, but by pure luck we found an off brand 4-pack of TP on the shelf in the soda aisle. Bonus. It’s the little things in a pandemic. The routine becomes miraculous. For the next two weeks or so, with conscientious use, we can defecate with confidence. We got some wheat bread, orange juice, squash, asparagus, crackers, eggs (white only). Reusable bags from outside are not allowed. Customers can have, for free, plastic or paper. We didn’t see anyone we knew.
Another month or two of self-isolation will crack some people, and they may decide that enough is enough and test the authorities by trying to gather in public, without gloves or mask or bandana. People will become exhausted, stir-crazy, anxious as hell about the rent, the car payment, food, and all the rest. My wife filed for unemployment, joining ten million other Americans who, suddenly, find themselves out of work. Before the pandemic, the Orange Menace routinely boasted about the economy, calling it, with no basis in reality, the greatest of all time. Yes, unemployment was low by historic measures, but what the Menace and his wealthy pals don’t understand is how drastically “employment” has changed. The tragedy of this economy is today as it has been for a long time, that a person can be fully employed and still too poor to afford the rent. Working-class people can’t compete with the titans of real estate and hedge fund vultures when the central bank of the United States creates another giant real estate asset bubble. I’d guess there are many more renters in America today than there were before the housing market tanked in 2008-09. Rents have gone ever higher, ever out of reach.
All the Orange Menace’s self-congratulatory boasting about the stock market and the unemployment rate have proven (surprise, surprise) to be hollow; it’s not the greatest economy ever when millions of working Americans are in dire straits after missing one or two paychecks. The politicians, of both parties, and the corporate lobbyists that fund them, have talked about economic recovery for a dozen years, and how good things have been. As proof, they point to the New York Stock Exchange, as if the stock market has anything to do with the real economy where most Americans work and live. What politicians of both parties left out of their happy talk, was that things were good -- in some cases better than good -- only if you happened to be wealthy. If you were working-class, you likely noticed a strange phenomenon: you were swimming hard but only treading water. You weren’t working to get ahead; you were working not to fall further behind.
We, the working-class, are reaping a bitter harvest we didn’t sow.
What do you do when your bootstrap is too short to pull on? Why does “moral hazard” only apply to the poor?
It’s a strange country that always rescues its wealthy first; that would never think of telling its billionaires to stop taking more than their share, but has not a second thought about telling the poor to take even less.
We are here, in this moment. The wind has picked up.
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