The Covid-19 pandemic has been a series of highs and lows for me. I’ve gotten much closer with my girlfriend and developed a festering hatred for my smoker neighbor. I’ve gotten cats, and I’ve gotten fat. I’ve caught up on the tv shows I wanted to see and caught a bad case of inside-itis. I miss my parents, my friends, sunlight and fresh air, physical activity, and a world not gripped by fear and xenophobia. I even miss work (just a little), but mostly I miss not having to worry about whether I have enough in my savings account to make it through this disaster, and how I’ll come out the other end of it destitute. 

The pandemic has been an exercise in compounded desperation, frustration, and futility that I have been feeling since before the 2016 election. I feel hopeless, helpless, and sad, not because I am trapped in my apartment, not because every day is a game of roulette to see which loved one might fall ill and die prematurely and in agony, but because I am stuck in a nation populated and run by monsters and buffoons. Corruption, greed, hatred, and stubborn anti-intellectualism guide an alarmingly large portion of the country which has a disproportionate amount of say in the election of like-minded corrupt, greedy, hateful, and willfully ignorant government officials. I speak only from my perspective as an American, but I am also fully aware of idiocy, fascism, and despotism taking root all over the globe. This is the true pandemic.

It feels as though the world is ending, and we are stuck with it. We made this bed, and now we must sleep in it. The worst part of it though, the extra twist of the knife, is that this is not the end. Humanity will carry on, bruised but unbroken, and we will continue to hit ourselves in the face as if a part of some sick cosmic Marx brothers routine for many decades to come. Covid-19 is not the final fatal blow to end us, it is merely a minor symptom of the much greater untreated disease- US!

We stand at a crossroads - there is a real opportunity to implement long-needed programs like universal basic income, free healthcare, and a Green New Deal now. Knowing humanity though, and the system we’ve put in place for ourselves, it’s not hard to imagine which direction we’ll take. We walk the road to a dystopia; modern day slavery, in mind, wallet, and body. It seems so obvious, yet we as a people do nothing to stop the bleeding, to change the course.

We are doomed, and we’re too goddamned stupid to see it.