<
https://www.salon.com/2025/03/14/masks-off-the-lessons-we-didnt-learn-from/>
"When the SARS-CoV-2 virus first began spreading across the globe five years
ago, some predicted that it could take five years for things to recover. Now
that we've reached this seemingly impossible point, it seems some of those
warnings were correct. Though infections are at a relative low these days,
we're still dealing with COVID-19, which kills hundreds of Americans per week
and disables countless others.
To date, the death toll from COVID is approximately 1.2 million Americans, the
most deaths of any country, across two administrations. The fact that this was
essentially allowed to happen, and that Americans were at greater risk than we
could have imagined, is an eye-opener. So too is the fact that there has been
no accountability. And that people continue to die from, and be disabled by,
SARS-CoV-2 infection without any movement to change the situation.
But it’s not just our life expectancy at birth that COVID has changed, or our
probable risk of dementia. The pandemic has been a broader un-masker as well.
Since perhaps FDR's New Deal and World War II, the interests of the average
American have been understood to be inseparable from U.S. democratic
capitalism. But since the pandemic, those interests have diverged sharply from
the interests of the leaders and power-brokers of that system, regardless of
whether they are Democrats or Republicans. (In other countries there's been a
similar divergence between a wealthy minority and the majority most negatively
affected by the pandemic.)
Of course, the arrival of COVID five years ago merely accelerated and
facilitated existing trends of inequality, commodification and ownership
consolidation of housing and agriculture (and everything else). It spurred
massive geopolitical shifts, a class of increasingly precarious workers drawn
from what was once a heartier middle class, the rise of tech authoritarianism
and proto-fascism along with old-fashioned xenophobia, and the decline in
public health and the scientific literacy, interest, trust and funding that
support it. Perhaps most of all, these trends include acceptance of mass death,
and of huge suffering among one identifiable group after another."
Via Violet Blue’s
Threat Model - Covid: March 20, 2025
https://www.patreon.com/posts/covid-march-20-124753023
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
