A Country With No Memory

In 10 years, no one will talk about COVID

To date, more than 640,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. We’ve endured an astounding 39,300,000 cases. More than 1 in 10 Americans have caught COVID at some point. Its victims have been disproportionately nonwhite, poor, and urban, and even its survivors can expect to live with lung scarring, heart and auto-immune disorders or even long-term neurological conditions known as “brainfog.”

The scale of this suffering — impacting every American from kids who learned remotely to Amazon workers who caught the virus — should be enough to inspire massive uprisings. It should be enough to justify demonstrations at every state capital; it should be enough to spawn new electoral and dual-power movements seeking to displace the political and economic elite which ineffectually responded at best and actively spread COVID at worst.

Hundreds of thousands of people, each with names, loved ones, dreams, and legacies died painful, totally preventable deaths. Millions more are permanently scarred. And for what? So Bezos and Musk could get richer while their employees were forced out of quarantine?

Ten times as many Americans have died from COVID as died in Vietnam. The total civilian and military cost of the unjustifiable war in Afghanistan was less than half of the COVID…