Weeks of being home forces us to find ways to pass the time.  My wife now works from home, so she has business hours five days a week.  Both my sons are in school, one in college and one in middle school -they are given daily work and have various online activities.  For them, the ability to just hang out is moderated by their daily activities.  Free time is still sweet to them, it’s a break from doing work.  My situation is very different.  My business is home-based but all my events have been cancelled for the foreseeable future.  I do what I can from home, I constantly am in contact with potential customers and retailers looking to make sales.  It’s not easy in the reality of a socially distant world.

I find myself watching TV, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime.  With the amazing variety you would think this would be a wonderful way to pass time.  Instead I feel like a victim of a campaign to brainwash me into thinking that we in society are all in this pandemic together.   In this new reality, first responders are heroes and those who fail to follow social distancing protocols are bad.  Every news station tells citizens of the importance of staying home and wearing a mask, and that “We are all in this together!” I want to know: Since when have we been anything together?

The world has moved towards a capitalistic system where resources are of prime focus, and the plight of individuals are for local areas and regions.  Capitalism doesn’t care about winners and losers, it just wants to utilize resources to produce goods and services to create wealth.   There is a hidden fact about this system - it’s fixed! Those who control the wealth, control society’s resources, politics, and economics.  If we truly were in this together, it would be a communist government of the people, not a representation republic where money buys influence. 

If we were in this together, then food wouldn’t be wasted.  How is it possible we have so much food waste but have millions of individuals who are food insecure?  How is it that we have whole cities and communities with empty houses and buildings and in other places have homeless and overcrowding?  It sounds like we aren’t in this together, it seems like we serve those who control society.  If GM fails, someone else will come in and buy it, for cheap, and there will be many buyers.  The wealthy will lose their capital stake in the company. The workers, who are essential for the business, will be kept by the new owners. In a massive economic downturn, it’s the very rich that take the biggest hit. 

What are we in together? We only know capitalism, no other system has been thought to transform society faster, but there is a massive cost to that progress.  Poverty, disease, misery, are all a byproduct of wealth, it’s the other side of those who win and many must lose. Add a bloated, wasteful government and citizens are given little chance to effectively navigate through the impossible business landscape to become successful and accumulate wealth.  Then this pandemic happened and millions of people lost their jobs in a few short weeks.  The world was told to close and it did, mostly. 

So many PSAs tell us that we are all in this together. Yes, we are all in “THIS” together, but a good percentage of the wealthy NYers left the city to the Hamptons, upstate, and other luxuries that only the affluent have.  The other folk, the ones we are in it together with, are required to socially distance themselves from others and stay home.  Not so easy in a fully occupied apartment building, where most have no balconies or free space and only a few small rooms where whole families must live.  The parks, the buses, the sidewalks, are these folks’ place to be. Take them away from the people of Queens, Brooklyn, The Bronx, or any city that has high population density, and you have a created a perfect method of passing a virus.

The Coronavirus has revealed the ugly truth of Capitalism: few win, most lose!   Now, the foundations of the financial system are ready to break, the illusion of money is being shown, and that the US government can keep printing money, but can that feed people!  It was the wisdom of our government and financial system to allow China to manufacture goods vital to daily life in America.  With it’s flood of cheap goods, it decimated the manufacturing base that is essential to the safety of any nation.  The gig economy that seemed to be a boom for many has turned into a death sentence for millions.  The secret of the gig economy is that little skill is needed to accomplish the task.  This allowed easy entry to millions of workers looking to make more in their free time.  Now, these workers are left out in the cold, no $1200 dollar stimulus checks for them, no health insurance, and the rent is still due. 

Are we still in this together? No! The wealthy control the media and they are on full attack mode.  Stay at home… while the rich enjoy life.  The poor of the world are dying, the unhealthy of the world are dying, the rich folk, not so much.  What would it look like if we were all in this together? Governor Cuomo said it best, “Now is the time to change things.  We NYers must move to a more self-sufficient way of living.  Now is the perfect time for change, but we must do it together for everyone!”