We have failed in our Pandemic Response, but America Failed us First.
The US population makes up only 4.4 percent of the world’s population, but 21 percent of all Covid-19 cases. But that shouldn’t be a surprise to us, no matter the false ideals of American Exceptionalism that have been forcefully driven down our throats.
The United States has had the worst response to the coronavirus pandemic in the entire world. Last Friday, the world saw its most positive reported Covid cases of all time — at least 350,000. Fifty-nine thousand of them came from the US or nearly 17 percent. The US population makes up 4.4 percent of the world.
But that shouldn’t be a surprise to us, no matter the false ideals of American Exceptionalism that have been forcefully driven down our throats.
We have failed, but they failed us first.
How could that be a surprise for a country that makes up 4.4 percent of the world’s population, yet 22 percent of the world’s prisoners? 4.4 percent of the world’s population, but 38 percent of the world’s money spent on war and military. We were the country most hellbent on separation and isolation long before quarantine and that’s exactly why we’ve failed.
It shouldn’t be this hard for us as members of families and communities — for people who love and are loved — to isolate and prioritize the people we know and even the ones we don’t know, but we live in a world that has programmed us not to care about each other. In return, we’ve found ourselves as cogs in a society that feeds on, and maintains, oppression and inequalities through punishment, violence, control and isolation of millions of people both in and out of prison.
On the day the world saw the most positive Covid cases of all time, I sat in my own personal sickness and agony as I watched post after post of folks who I care about, folks who are cared about by others, out and about at clubs and bars — living their lives. I felt sick not because of jealousy or envy, but that we live in a world where joy can be deadly.
And for that, we have failed, but they failed us first.
As other countries, such as Vietnam, implemented rigorous coronavirus protections, America let people die.
We used young folks and those on the fringes of society as frontline workers, feeding us and pampering us. We denied its existence as it hit those most vulnerable and forgotten— nursing homes and jails and prisons. It's not lost on me that those who our society has viewed as most expendable were erased in front of eyes, yet we still pretended we didn’t see the bodies pile up.
We’ve chosen a world where not everybody is free. Where people are dying because they don’t have access to food, while warehouses across the globe sit bountiful with food that is destined to rot so arbitrarily created food prices can make a few people a few more bucks. A world where dozens of cities across the US have thousands of people living on the streets, with even more homes sitting empty as the housing “market” stabilizes.
This world has convinced us that these dangers and inequalities are natural, and not manmade, so once again its no surprise that it has also convinced us that this new virus is not dangerous, too. Though it should have shown us that to survive we need to take care of one another and keep each other safe because we share the air we breathe and are the collective embodiment of the Earth we grace and want to see grow.
So when I sat in my home, sick and tired, last Friday it wasn’t just because people I know were participating in the world’s latest preventable genocide, but because for many of them, they saw no other choice.
It didn’t have to be this way.
We shouldn’t have to choose between joy and death, yet here we are. But still, I dream of a world based on communal care and understanding — one where joy does not mean someone else's death.
