It’s Time To Eat The Rich (A Merely Modest Proposal)
It has been a meme for some time, but I think we have finally reached the point. We have an infrastructure in this country built on the backs of slave labor. We have an economy that is built on the backs of the working class. A system that is so unstable that all it took was one week of businesses closing, and an uncertain future for the stock market to crash at an unimaginable rate. We are watching our 401k’s melt away, and all the while the people on the frontlines (besides those in the medical field) are the laborers making dirt for pay; grocery store clerks, fast food workers, gas station attendants, food delivery drivers. It would seem that the class of people that are really making the world go around, are the ones that have been ignored, the ones that are told they aren’t worth more than a minimum wage. Yet, just take a look at how much we depend on them.
In this time of a pandemic, the answers are clear. We have had time to prepare, yet we didn’t. We are watching other countries do the right thing, and yet we won’t. The country needs to be quarantined, in order to stop it. We need a Universal Basic Income of $2,000 per month for EVERYONE for at least the next few months. We need drive through food banks, and testing stations. We need the Defense Production Act to create masks and ventilators. We need major corporations to donate what supplies they have. We need hazard pay for all of those that must continue working with the public. We need a massive hiring event for all of those who are out of work currently to have the option to help make deliveries, work at food banks, shelters, etc. We need to put a freeze on rent, mortgages, loan repayments, etc. We need to stop making money and the economy more important than human life. What do we get? Congress is having trouble even getting everyone $600-$1,200 without also providing a blank check of a bailout to corporations and Wall Street. The ones that least deserve even more money than before.
There are politicians, pundits, even the President himself, that are so faithful and consumed by this made up currency that has no intrinsic value, that they are actually proposing we get back to work. We lift the quarantines and return to normal. Everyone go about their business, let the virus run its course, and whoever dies, dies. This is an inhumane idea. A sacrifice to the alter of the money gods. The thought that average Americans that happen to be the most susceptible to this illness are not worth protecting. Even if we did this, there has been study after study showing that letting the virus run rampant in this country would result in millions of deaths. Hospitals would be completely overrun, there would be a huge shortage of supplies. Those that returned to work would get sick, and continue spreading it to coworkers so most of the work force would end up home anyways. A sick economy isn’t a healthy economy. We can’t go back to normal now.
This virus gave us a chance. A chance to see what matters. To become human again. To realize the vast difference between those that can easily work from home, while barking orders to a minimum wage worker that is providing them their essentials. This is our chance to see how us pausing production effects the environment. We get to see how a lot of people are working from home, and ultimately had no reason to be stuck in an office for 40 hours a week to begin with. This is our chance to see what is important. Do we really care about the stock broker on Wall Street making big money predictions on consumer behavior, more than the veteran bagging up our groceries? It may take all types, but we are seeing that one type is much less valuable than the other, yet the less valuable seem to be making more money. We have to enter a great depression, we have to spend a crazy amount of federal money to bail out the working class citizens of this country.
They want us to die for their economy? They want you to sacrifice your grandparents for their stock portfolio? No. There are more of us than them. We can organize a general strike, and it would work. We can organize a rent strike and it would work. This pandemic is showing us that. It just takes a majority of us saying enough is enough. They can’t take all of our jobs away, they can’t make us all homeless, because as we are witnessing right now, our labor is what makes them anything. Withholding our labor has sent them into a tailspin, and instead they act like it is privilege, it is our duty to serve them. Not anymore.
We shall kick down the doors of the board rooms. We will knock down the gates to their communities. We will bring the guillotines to them. There has never been a better time to take back this country. To organize, revolutionize and change the fundamental structures that are so weak that this was all it took for them to throw in the towel and tell us we are doomed. While they sit in their mansions, waiting for us to make it all work again, we fear for our lives. We are watching our families die. We are watching our partners struggle. We are watching ourselves be worked to death. We can’t survive like this any longer. We can’t return to their normal. It’s time to eat the rich.
