Covid – The Endless White-Collar Vacation
(And why a Nationwide Sanitation Strike Makes Sense)
By
David Gottfried
Mortality from covid has been at its most severe in places like New York City, where it is estimated that 1 in 400 people have been killed. Of course, most of those people were elderly, obese or diabetic.
(In New York, as in phony liberal California, much of the death was practically engineered by State Government: To shore up the solvency of Nursing Homes, Cuomo in New York, and the bourgeois, liberal, fraudster Governor of California, transferred patients with Covid from hospitals to nursing homes so the nursing homes could garner the more sizable revenues Medicare provided for active Covid cases. Putting a covid patient in a nursing home was like putting a lit cigarette into a sweat shop ala the infamous Triangle Shirt-Waist Fire of 1912.)
Actually, a death rate of 1 in 400 isn’t so bad. A much greater proportion of the population was killed by the Spanish Flu, and through most of human history people worked through epidemics even though man was bereft of vaccines, antibiotics, and even antiseptic solutions.
Most people in London stayed in London during the Nazi blitz, even though one risked getting bombed in the middle of the night, because going to work was an obligation that couldn’t be shirked. Although Londoners worked through the blitz, affluent New Yorkers used covid as an excuse to retreat to their country and summer homes and consume. Given their affluence, they can consume a lot, and their profligate ways make them resemble a breed of very huge, rapacious rats.
Go to an old cemetery. Look at the headstones. Most people didn’t make it to sixty.
Through most of recorded history people toiled round the clock. Tubercular tailors sowed clothes in dank and sunless tenements. Mine workers got black lung disease and limped through life on very meager provisions. The peons of Europe starved for centuries and were struck down by smallpox, by plague, by every witchy ailment nature could inflict.
However, in America, most sedentary workers have benefited, courtesy of Covid, from a very long vacation. More people are baking bread, spending more time cooking gourmet meals, and lolling around in luxury than ever before. They are spending thousands of dollars on exercising equipment for their personal, home gyms. They are having the time of their lives.
Doctors have become addicted to video visits. Very often even though both doctor and patient have been vaccinated, the doctor will insist on a video visit. In such visits, the abdomen is not palpated – of course, nothing is palpated -- the heart is not listened to, we have no idea what the lungs sound like, the skin tone and musculature can only be imagined and unless the image is very clear, we really can’t assess the patient’s color. When one sees a doctor via Video Visits, one will get the sort of medical care that can be dispensed by Ann Landers. Jesus Fucking Christ, reduce compensation to video doctors. All they ever do is preen before their computer cameras as if being a doctor meant imitating Dr. Kildare.
Of course, the purchasing power of the rich is still sky high because the market has been soaring, and the juxtaposition of fat pocketbooks with fewer goods and services, courtesy of the endless vacation, means higher prices. The upper middle class can stomach the increase in prices; the bottom four fifths can’t.
In the annexed video, a father in Loudoun County, Virginia, waxes with rage because the schools have been kept closed for so long. He notes that sanitation workers face a much bigger threat of infection.
Garbage, in case you forget, is something that is usually filthy. Perhaps, you need more vivid verbiage: Garbage can consist of dead rats, the vomit of heroin addicts, rotting chicken parts swarming with salmonella and hypodermic needles.
Arguably, sanitation workers are entitled to work in a safe environment. Arguably, sanitation workers are entitled to be free of microbial risks.
Since the rich won’t come to work because they are afraid of getting covid, sanitation workers shouldn’t pick up their garbage.
Sometimes, sanitation strikes have resulted in calamitous increases in rat populations. Although the election of Biden meant, most unfortunately, that we would not see the sort of CLASS WAR that this country so desperately needs (We have only had a class war of the rich assailing the poor), perhaps we can get a good measure of my kind of class war when rabid rats bite the heels of the pampered pricks of the rich.