Learn to Die With It: A New and Tragic Phase of the Pandemic has Begun
Florida is on fire.
Cases of coronavirus have been skyrocketing for weeks, leaving the Sunshine State reeling. Hospitals are at capacity. Response is failing and growing worse by the day. And yet, an order from the state’s Education Commissioner has mandated that all public schools reopen in the next few weeks with in-person instruction across the board, no exceptions.
“There is a need to open schools fully to ensure the quality and continuity of the educational process,” the order read, noting this haphazard reopening would also contribute to “Florida hitting its full economic stride.”
This is Donald Trump’s America and Governor Ron DeSantis’s Florida in perfect encapsulation. Plowing forward with no plan besides sacrificing lives in order to protect their political futures and serve an economy that is, in theory and practice, inhuman and cruel. In this case, reopenings are proceeding even as cases mount and tragedies multiply, all because our leaders have no interest in fighting the pandemic or pushing necessary reform.
America is failing. Not only failing in its fight against the pandemic, but failing as a state. Our government has lost any ability and all its willingness to serve the interests of the people, having been co-opted by special interests, the exorbitantly wealthy and powerful, and perverted by the Republican Party, a death cult obsessed only with power. All that Trump and governors like DeSantis have to offer is for Americans to suffer and die and learn to “live with it.”
This is what has concerned me from the beginning. That America might simply look away from this worsening crisis and let it become “normal.” That we might return to our pre-pandemic existences while people suffer and die, getting lost in entertainments and sports and our own routines. This is certainly what Trump wants. His fanciful fantasies of the virus “simply disappearing” have always worked toward this goal, as have his conspirators at Fox News, who have hemmed and hawed and treated the virus like nothing more than an unnecessary hysteria. It very well may come to that and next month, with public schools and universities opening despite cases growing and tragedy mounting, might be the first moment where we see if that is the case.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
The only reason we’re arguing about reopenings versus closings is because the wealthy and the powerful do not want to have a conversation about reforming the economy to make it fairer, safer, and more stable. This system of economic inequality is specifically designed to create vast divides between everyone else and the wealthy. It creates independent nation states of corporations and monarchs of the rich. Time and time and time again we have seen where this top-down, hypercapitalistic approach naturally leads to market meltdowns and economic crises. But, while that system works, it creates excessive wealth and unbelievable power.
We could change this system. We could shut America down and still prosper. We could right the machine and save so many lives. The question is whether we are willing to fight for that alternative, or if we are happy watching our loved ones die unnecessarily. The Trumps and DeSantis’s of the world have given their answer. “Live with it.”
Or, rather, “Die with it.”
This isn’t a solution. It’s a tragedy.
Jared Yates Sexton is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. He currently serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.
