Their Lives Mean More Than Ours
What happened to the capitol was terrible and scary, and had many elements I recognized from my work with protests and angry crowds in America and around the world. I’m not going to say it wasn’t tough, but I can say from experience it wasn’t rare. It just happened to people who believe they shouldn’t be subject to the kind of trauma that afflicts the rest of us. It happened to people who understand themselves to be the elites, America’s patricians.
Afterwards, Congress bathed itself in righteous self-pity, while displaying a disturbing lack of self-awareness. The whole impeachment is a farce, they knew they didn’t have the votes, they always knew the exercise was futile, purely symbolic. They may be assholes, but they can do math. As someone who dies on hills professionally, I understand standing up for a principle when all hope is lost.
But I’m not in charge of taking care of millions of people in the midst of the worst crisis we’ve seen in generations.
It would be bad enough during a normal political cycle, in America, with its normal poverty, normal deaths of despair, normal uncounted cruelties. But right now is not normal. People are losing their homes, they are going hungry, whole communities are teetering on bankruptcy while medical systems fail piece by piece, burying their own staff. Thousands of people are dying every day of Covid-19 while congressional democrats express their horror at having something scary and violent happen to them. The business of the people during the height of what will likely be the most deadly disaster in the history of this nation barely made the news. Congress didn’t act quickly to save lives, they didn’t care to act until they’d thrown themselves a pity party.
The impeachment made something clear: this Democratic government isn’t going to be much of a change. There will still be patricians, and there will still be plebeians, and the plebeians still don’t matter. Congress is working on a 1.9 trillion dollar relief program but for so many it’s already too little, too late. They’ve all but given up on raising the minimum wage to 1970s levels (adjusted).
In the month that work was delayed to put on this useless impeachment circus between the House and the Senate, close to 3000 people a day died of Covid-19 on average. Probably ten times that ended up with serious long term problems from getting Covid-19, looking at years or decades of disease while fighting with insurance companies and sky rocketing costs neither party of patricians are willing to reign in. More people are dying of drug overdoses and other deaths of despair. Bezos is richer than ever, but most people are poorer. America stinks of desperation and misery, brought on by poverty and wealth inequality and the basic functions of society like education and medical care becoming out of reach for more and more of its people.
When Nancy Pelosi called for a “9/11-style commission” for the capitol attack citing the trauma of that day, I thought about the 9/11-style commissions that never happened for Flint Michigan, for the 19 years of Chicago police torture, for the years of silence around AIDS deaths, for the nearly 800,000 dead in the opioid crisis. Even 9/11 was so tragic in part because it happened to the wrong people: to American patricians, in a fiery and public way, and so there was a 9/11 commission for 9/11, but still nothing for the victims of police shootings, the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused or hastened annually by industrial pollution, or a commission for the victims of climate change. These are not things that threaten people working in capitol buildings.
I know that politically, as a pleb who mainly loves the other plebs, I am supposed to be happy about the dems being in power. But I am not. The first move of this new government was so self-regarding and outraged, so lacking in any self-consciousness about taking this time for an empty gesture while their constituents suffered and died. And I am supposed to join their pity party in the midst of a mishandled pandemic, and the worst poverty and misery to visit America since the great depression? Yes, the last administration was awful, but that’s a reason to get to work, not delay it. So far, this election has moved us from a party actively trying to kill people like me to one that will passively let me and mine die. Given everything, both branches of Congress and the White House, the dems first move was to pour there energy into losing their first issue, putting off aid to a suffering nation, and putting the Senate opposition into a position where working with them on needed relief could endanger their seats or worse. That’s not standing on principle, that’s standing on self-pity.
A pox on both their houses, until they start taking the actual pox seriously.
