It's Only a Crisis if You're Sick
What Covid-19 Tells Us About Our Response to Climate Change
I left my house to take a bike ride around the neighborhood on a hot, humid, but still very enjoyable Sunday afternoon. Some darker clouds hovered on the horizon over the bay, but the threat of a storm felt very distant.
I saw crowds of people out enjoying their leisure time in the sun. They strolled down sidewalks, popping in an out of shops, restaurants, bars, and galleries. Old men walked with rods and buckets toward the end of the pier. Young people splashed in the warm water beneath the pier and dug their toes into the white sand. Parents lounged in the park under the shade of massive banyan trees, while children climbed through their gnarled roots and branches that held up the green canopy overhead. There was an energy in the air; the sense of hundreds of people savoring the chance to be outside once again.
I enjoyed being out among the people and communing with them from the vantage of my bike seat. However, I couldn’t forget that the pandemic still loomed over us all; invisible yet always palpable.
I knew that, just blocks away, dozens of people were lying in ICU beds. I knew, also, that many of them would never leave those beds. That reality felt very distant, though; it felt like, in effect, those people were relegated to the status of “acceptable losses.” We have had to push the thought of those occupying ICU beds far back into the recesses of our minds to go on enjoying our lives in the light of the sun.
Those people are, in short, the sacrifices we’ve come to accept.
Where we Now Stand
As I write, it’s been nearly eighteen months since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic on March 13, 2020. We’ve endured a year and a half of shutdowns, reopenings, partial closures, and botched responses.
Vaccines are now widely available in several countries, including my home country, the United States. There is, of course, a wide discrepancy between wealthy and poor nations in terms of general vaccine distribution and availability (this will be discussed in greater detail later).
We’ve collectively endured millions of deaths from the pandemic. We’ve had to stand by as friends, family members, neighbors, and coworkers suffer and die, choking out their last breaths afraid and isolated. Millions more among those who have survived thus far are experiencing serious mental and physical health consequences. According to data published by the Kaiser Family Foundation, roughly four in ten US adults reported symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder in February 2021 (up from one in ten in 2019). Many reported difficulty sleeping or eating, increased substance abuse, and other phenomena that suggest a mass experience of trauma reminiscent of the aftermath of September 11.
But, even as more and more vaccine doses go into arms...new infections are on the rise. In early July 2021, we saw the 7-day average of new reports of Covid-19 infections in the US drop to their lowest point since March 26, 2020. Over the next two months, though, reports of new infections surged, coming dangerously close to the all-time high rates of infections that we saw around the end of 2020.
The pandemic is far from over. In fact, it’s now far worse than it has been in a long time. And, with the prospect of new variants of the disease appearing as a result of natural genetic mutations within a fast-reproducing virus, we face an agonizingly long wait until we can truly say that the Covid-19 pandemic is “over.”
Even still, we pretend that the virus is beaten, and that the pandemic is over. We do this because believing the fiction is easier than acknowledging the truth. We have, in effect, accepted that the suffering and death is simply not happening.
Your Comfort is Contingent
I recently wrote a series of posts for the Pinellas DSA blog arguing in support of the Green New Deal. In the second part of that series, I spoke for a moment about so-called “right-wing environmentalism,” and how it serves as a means to launder white nationalist and fascist ideology. The post explores how the far right frames militant nationalism and hostility to immigration and ethnic minorities as rational responses to the threat posed by climate change.
These bad actors seek to draw a distinction between the perceived national “in” group and the foreign hordes of the “out” group. That, while climate change may ravage the planet, we can secure a comfortable and sustainable existence for ourselves here in the core of empire by simply pulling up the draw bridges and watching as the out group drowns at our doorstep. To them, these deaths would be a regrettable, yet necessary sacrifice to secure our own way of life.
The underlying assumption, of course, is that your status as a member of the “in” group is secure.
There are two key lessons we must take from the Covid-19 crisis, though. First, the absolute incapability of a global-capitalist system to manage a widespread crisis. Second, that one’s status as an “in” group member is always negotiable and contingent.
During the bike ride I mentioned earlier, I could scarcely identify anything to suggest that there was a global crisis underway. The reason why is simple: it’s not a crisis if you’re not sick.
The “In” Group / “Out” Group Distinction
Although we don’t do it consciously, we relegate those who die of Covid-19 to an “out” group. This compartmentalization lets us continue to enjoy our lives in the sun as if nothing were happening, while feeling no meaningful sense of obligation to those suffering outside of our sight. This is especially troubling because many of the people who’ve suffered and died from Covid-19 did not do so because of personal recklessness. Many millions of people right here in the United States exposed themselves to the virus because they simply had no choice to do otherwise.
There have been some successes in our fight against Covid-19. We managed to manufacture and distribute vaccine doses to millions of people within just one year of the virus’s genetic sequencing. Overall, though, our handling of Covid-19 has been a fiasco.
The federal government offered a pitiful safety net for workers in response to Covid-19. The main planks of this response included:
An eviction “moratorium” helped prevent some workers from being evicted. This is assuming they could prove that their economic hardship resulted directly from Covid-19, and could navigate the labyrinth of paperwork and faulty websites needed to secure an official declaration of that point.
The Paycheck Protection Program, which handed out billions of dollars to business owners in forgivable loans to keep staff on their payroll. In effect, a federal bribe not to layoff workers, which many businesses did anyway despite taking PPP dollars.
Increases to unemployment benefits, all of which were unreliable and insufficient to replace lost income for millions of families. Plus, these benefits were unreliable, as they were contingent on state governments who are responsible for administering their own unemployment systems.
Given the failure of the capitalist system to provide protections for working people against the virus, millions of workers simply could not afford to stay home. They were forced to put themselves—and their loved ones—in danger to earn a paycheck. In effect, they had to choose between keeping themselves housed and keeping themselves healthy.
What’s on the Horizon
None of this bodes well for the future.
We can view the pandemic as a “dry run” of sorts for the rising sea levels, extreme weather, and mass global refugee crisis that will result from climate change in the coming decades. Compared to the radical, transformative impact that climate change will have on our planet by the end of the Twenty-First Century, Covid-19 will seem like a small blip on the radar. And, if we struggle this much under our current mode of production to to rise and meet a challenge like Covid-19, what does that suggest for our capacity to tackle these monumental challenges?
There is only one conclusion we can draw from our response to Covid-19: if these shadows remain unchanged, they suggest that we will fail to act. Instead, we will simply condition ourselves to accept mass death and horror.
I mentioned earlier the disparity in vaccine distribution across the world. In many cases, the least-vaccinated countries tend to be poorer nations historically exploited by colonialism. This is significant because these are also the countries most likely to experience adverse effects of climate change, and the least likely to be able to contend with these challenges.
We will learn to tolerate devastation. We will look away from genocide, either deliberate or by inaction. We will do these things to preserve our short-term interests within the imperial core, telling ourselves each time we look into the mirror that there is no alternative. We will sit by as millions drown outside our windows until, at the end of this line of humanity marched toward death, the water finally starts to seep under our own front doors. The “in” group will grow smaller and smaller until, inevitably, there is no one left to preserve.
The Moment to Organize is Now
Of course, things do not have to be this way. The working masses viewed as “disposable” do not have to wait for their turn to be sacrificed for the comfort of the global bourgeoisie.
Our response to the Covid-19 crisis threw the class distinctions and inequities of political power present in our system into stark relief. We, the protean “Left” present in the United States, can’t afford to let this clarity go unnoticed.
Crises like Covid-19 will become increasingly common as climate damage worsens. With each one, the “in” group will become smaller, while more of us will find ourselves cast into the “out” group, where we can be left to die. Stopping this demands conscious resistance and a clear distinction of our interests from those of the ruling class. This is not just the ruling class as embodied by national politicians, but every form in which the bourgeoisie extract wealth from workers.
This exploitation takes place in our workplaces, in the homes we rent, in jails and prisons, and in halls of local and state government. The working class must take a clear-eyed view of their material interests at this moment, in particular, now that all the baffles and illusions have been stripped away. They must organize along class lines and demand that the value of their lives be recognized, and that they, as the masses who produce value and who outnumber their exploiters, are the ones who hold true political power.
The bosses, landlords, and political grifters are not neighbors and fellow travelers; they’re antagonists. And, as long as these parties feel confident in their ability to dictate terms, they will continue to do so, right up until the moment the waves of the raging sea rise over their head.