PROTESTING THE COVID-19 LOCKDOWN: ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE AND DOING THE RIGHT THING

Citizens in Virginia, Ohio, San Diego and Michigan are protesting for the right to lift the stay at home orders and go back to work. They don’t want the cure to be worse than the illness they claim while they wave American and some conferderate flags. Poverty kills they say, I guess only learning this now.

The fact is, if this country had a decent social safety net, middle class folks would not be as anxious about making ends meet after only a month of the stay at home orders. In fiscal year 2018, the average SNAP household received only about $256 a month, and the average recipient about $127 a month — about $1.40 per meal. TANF benefits still leave family incomes at or below 60 percent of the poverty line in every state.  The median TANF payments for all the states in 2010 was $253 month and these payments vary by state.

If the average working class person, the people everyone is clapping for and extolling as heroes, the ones who keep our food on the shelves, drive the bus, take our garbage, cook meals for us – was not in a position where an unexpected $400 expense would cause hardship, maybe withstanding a month of being out of work for the sake of public health would not be so stressful.

Sure, no one wants to continue to be shut down, and we do need to start talking about what the “new normal is”,  but since when do we put the public health at risk for the sake of the economy? Ask yourself a different question: why is it that a month of being on lock down is such a financial burden on people? And what happened to the supports that would help each of us individually if we fell on hard times? These days, we have all fallen on hard times at once.

The only scientific way to beat this corona virus, without a vaccine yet, without anti-virals yet, is social distancing and stay at home orders, closing those vectors where people gather and are likely to facilitate this virus’ transmission. After 50 years of Republicans dismantling the “administrative state”,  those folks waving flags, driving their new Ford F350 trucks to the rallies, are concerned that THEY are being left behind.  A good section of the country, people who are making the Federal Minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, working 2 or 3 jobs, already understand about being left behind.

To be fair, the protestors are not wrong that this closed economy, if left closed long enough, will do serious damage to people’s lives. But gathering this way, will only result in more Covid-19 cases, causing more work for our heroic medical personnel. Besides, this has been the choice the Repbulicans made for decades as they systematically dismantled the social safety net;  when they gambled on the fact that even middle class citizens wanting to attend sporting events and eat at their favorite restaurants would never need to use the safety net.

When it was just dark skinned people who had to use the safety net, it was ok to cut those back. Now that it is all of us lining up in mile-long car lines at food banks, we are angry. But the anger is pointed to the governors who want to exercise caution. Instead, it should be at the Republicans who insist on constantly eroding the public safety net because as this pandemic has shown us, at some point, all of us will need it. 

To be sure, we should be  having these discussions about how to open the economy again in a safe manner, but not at the expense of public health, which could cause this pandemic to last even longer and result in even more deaths. What has happened to the idea of the common good? That we pull together to help each other? Sometimes, as in that scene in the movie “Moonstruck” I want to take part of the American public, slap them across the face and scream, “Snap out of it!”

Maybe instead of waving flags and demanding our tyrant governors (who are only trying to save our lives) let us go back to work at the risk of death, we need to demand viable support system for the times when we will not have access to our livelihoods, at least for a time. Whether it is UBI, or raising the miminum wage, strengthening unions (which drive wages up), or increasing programs that have been proven to have an impact on poverty like SNAP, WIC and TANF, increasing Medicaid access – it doesn’t matter. We need to redesign our human needs programs as part of an economic recovery and continuity plan, with the idea that all of us, at some point, will need to use it.  

And also because it the right thing to do. It is the human thing to do. It is the decent thing to do. And for a nation that claims to be “Christian” – it is also the Christian thing to do.