COVID-19. Word of the year. The decade. Perhaps the century.
A 9-11esque triptych of death, destruction, and destitution, COVID is World War Three. Both quantitative and qualitatively, it is decimating life, all the while presiding over every thought, action, and imagination going forward. It is Panopticon realized: the most evil of jailers simply existing to feed its appetite for destruction.
Regarding COVID and economics, people have one of two choices: remain jailed in its path, or sneak into the shadows. The economically disenfranchised have no choice: anchored to their COVID-afflicted fate, they are bound to whatever materializes via infection, starvation, or how they can survive within whatever skeletal public infrastructure exists once the jailer leaves.
The rich, of course, are not immune. They too are facing this reckoning, and many bad apples will fall. But at least they can afford the shadows, whether that means veritable self-isolation palaces, food to sustain themselves, and the capacity to manipulate tech to push self-righteous agendas and/or garner ill-deserved sympathy.
The world has never been financially fair, and even COVID’s cold, ruthless objectivity cannot interrupt the ceaseless economic genocide. Thinking about it, perhaps that’s what COVID is: The physically-manifested reality that neither prayer nor promises nor parliaments can usurp the elitist status quo, which is so simple that everyone understands it:
The rich live, while the poor never had a chance.