Lexual Says: Coronavirus Edition (Patreon)

Hello everybody. This has been an INSANELY long and stressful month for almost everybody, myself included. In addition to dealing with family health issues and vicious Georgia pollen, COVID-19 has wrecked my work ethic in a terrifying way. Nevertheless, I did manage to finish writing a 4,300-word script analyzing the COVID-19 pandemic. While I do wish to film it (probably by this weekend) I didn't want to let the final day of March pass without giving you guys a post-- so I'm making the script available. Writing this script has been difficult because the news cycle is so fast and every time I complete it, it needs to be updated. 

I apologize for not posting more content this month, but I am fucking BEAT up. I'm slowly regaining my will to work, and I am hoping to give you at least four posts in April to entertain/inform while you relax in isolation. 

So let's dive into my thoughts on COVID-19.

If you are someone who believes that nearly 200 countries and multiple independent health organizations and media outlets, along with millions of people employed as doctors and nurses across the world are colluding together to implant chips into human brains for tracking despite the fact that you can easily be tracked through the mobile device you’re probably holding right now, click out of this video. If you think this global pandemic is all about shutting down the 2020 presidential election, you may also see yourself to the door. This fact-based and nuanced discussion about the COVID-19 pandemic from a global perspective will do nothing but confuse and enrage you. If you are someone who believes that staying informed is akin to being fear-mongered, and you believe praying or manifesting the pandemic away is a possibility, you may also exit. 

Back in February, I warned you guys that we would pay for the Trump administration’s incompetence— and this was not “just the flu.” COVID-19 is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is available, and the subject of vaccinations is a whole other can of worms and budding conspiracies. For now, I want to explore how the COVID-19 epidemic has wildly exacerbated classism, racism, ableism, and Trump authoritarianism. But because America is just ONE of 195 countries, I also want to take a glimpse at the global impact of COVID-19. Before any of that though, let’s address how pandemics have altered history in the past. 

Diseases have always shaped humanity, for better and for worse. The most notorious of all the pandemics, the bubonic plague, did more than purge the earth of over 25 million people— it also led to the end of peasant serfdom in Western Europe. As the available workforce shrunk, leftover laborers got higher wages and were less tied to their traditional lands. The bubonic plague also ushered in new styles of art and literature. When Europeans arrived in the New World and brought along smallpox, roughly 90% of indigenous people would die, accelerating the process of American colonization. The Haitian Revolution was successful in part due to the fact that  “The West Indies was, quite simply, a deathtrap for whites without immunity to yellow fever.” French troops were sickly and dwindling in number throughout the duration of the rebellion, and couldn’t crush the formerly enslaved population, who eventually declared independence in 1804 after French forces surrendered in November 1803. 

Cholera was a reoccurring pandemic during the 19th and 20th centuries. Cholera is spread through contaminated food and water. When cholera spread in 1832 New York, it mainly affected the poor— those with the least access to fresh food and water. The upper class, therefore, viewed cholera as a result of the morals and mindsets of the poor, and no link was established between sanitation and the disease. It wasn’t until the 1860s that a group of New York doctors investigated the link thoroughly and established the Metropolitan Board of Health. Cholera would go on to infect thousands more, but it eventually gave way to better public sanitation in well-resourced nations. More recently, the outbreak of HIV/AIDS added homophobic fuel to already burning fires, reversing positive momentum gained by LGBT activists during the 70s. Homophobic politicians and activists latched onto the epidemic and weaponized it as a reason to demonize and punish homosexuals, to the detriment of millions of heterosexual humans who would succumb to the virus. HIV/AIDS also changed how Americans viewed and engaged in safe sex, with condom use becoming a more prevalently endorsed product for sexually active adults and teens.

In all of these examples, we see links to our current crisis. Can you point them out? Here’s how to look at coronavirus through five crucial lenses.

Coronavirus and.. Authoritarianism

Slowing the spread of COVID-19, or “flattening the curve” has been accredited to two major practices- social distancing and rigorous testing. This has been easiest in countries with authoritarian governments like China, South Korea, and Singapore. Countries with relatively less authoritarianism have been faced with the choice of adapting or not. In America, where Trump played down the crisis and ultimately forced states like Washington to go around the CDC and do their own testing and tracking, we are only now realizing that we must adapt and enforce quarantine and self-isolation more seriously. Meanwhile, several other countries are putting human rights to free movement on the back burner. For instance, the Schengen Area, comprised of 26 European countries that don’t require passport checkpoints for interstate travel, have stopped admitting non-EU citizens. Poland has shut down its borders, leaving citizens stranded outside. In Kenya, police fired tear gas t ferry commuters in Mombasa BEFORE the 7PM to 5Am curfew even went into effect. In South Africa, where a three-week lockdown has been implemented, soldiers fired rubber bullets at hundreds of grocery shoppers. Tens of thousands of people have been fined in Italy, and in Paris you must fill out a form before leaving home. In India, citizens are being beaten in the streets with sticks for breaking curfew and movement restrictions. This reality leaves us on a fragile perch just above a slippery slope of politicians and leaders seizing a public health crisis to further their own agendas. Humans rights groups like Amnesty International are reporting numerous violations.

In Hungary, the government just gave the prime minister the power to ignore any laws and act without consulting government officials in the name of emergency. In Israel, the current prime minister has been given the power to postpone his own criminal trial, and the power to prevent the Israeli parliament— mostly made up of his political enemies— from meeting. Meanwhile, in the US, the Department of Justice asked Congress for the power to detain Americans without trial. Though this is unlikely to go over in a democratic house, the alarm and outrage that emanated from many white and middle-class Americans after this revelation reveals an ironic crack in the veneer of American freedom and justice. The many crowded jails in America made up of disproportionately black, brown, and poor citizens shows us that states already have the power to detain Americans without trial. 

Though it’s only Spring, COVID-19 is already impacting upcoming elections for some countries. The UK, for instance, has postponed local elections for a year at the direction of the polarizing, far-right, bad-hair-cutted prime minister twin of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson. American states that have postponed presidential primaries include Maryland, Kentucky, Georgia, and Louisiana, while Wyoming, New York, and Ohio have altered their voting procedures. Political scientists with a grim outlook of the future say COVID-19 could be used to further Trump’s authoritarian interests. Voting is a fundamental constitutional right, but the constitution does not give Americans the right to vote for the president. All 50 states grant residents the right to vote for president, and then the people’s vote selects the electors from each state to elect the president. But if the pandemic were to worsen and in-person voting became less and less feasible, any state could change its law and allow its legislature to choose which electors vote for the president. In the 30 states where Republicans control the legislature and the minority and poor citizens are routinely kept from the polls with a lot of red tape and gerrymandering, it wouldn’t be too hard for this to happen. In Bush v. Gore, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled that the state “can take back the power to appoint electors” at any time. The Supreme Court is even more conservative now. Two Democrat senators introduced the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act to quote “encourage states to make early voting more widely available, making it much easier to vote by mail, and require states to create contingency systems for voting and counting ballots during a period of emergency.” After all, we aren’t just due to vote for a president this Fall but also for 35 senators, 11 governors, and 435 house of representatives members. 

But before you go thinking COVID-19 is a conspiracy to impact worldwide elections, remember that many countries, including Italy which is being disproportionately impacted, doesn’t have any elections until 2023.  

Coronavirus and… Hidden Agendas

Just like with any economic, environmental, health, or similar public crisis, countries and political leaders will seek to advance their own agendas, from the good to the bad. 

Ima start off with a matter near and dear to my heart— reproductive rights. Ohio, Alabama, and Texas, three states that have both passed “heartbeat abortion” bills that seek to criminalize abortion before the time most women know that they’re pregnant and force women to face waiting periods for abortion, have deemed abortion as medically unnecessary and elective surgeries.“The truth is abortion, for the most part, is an elective procedure that can be done later,” said the Attorneys General of Texas. As those of us with uteruses know, abortions are not something that can be delayed, especially when states like Texas and Ohio want to make it illegal after six weeks of pregnancy. In Texas, providers who cease to stop operations can face fines of up to $1000 or 180 days in jail. In Mississippi, a state reeking of conservative neglect and racism, the governor has said that abortions would be halted to conserve medical supplies. It’s worth noting that Mississippi has a SINGLE abortion clinic. This is the same governor who insisted that there would be no mandatory lockdown in Mississippi because he rejects dictatorships like China. Rightttt…. Mandating social distancing is dictator-like but forcing people to carry unwanted fetuses to term isn’t dictatorial. Access to abortions is further being impacted by other realities of COVID-19. According to Time Magazine, "Pending airline furloughs and schedule decreases are making it far more difficult for the approximately 100 doctors who travel the country to provide abortions in more restricted states to find flights into rural areas to keep those clinics open.” People forced to be pregnant in Ohio, Texas, Mississippi, and potentially other states would have to self abort or end up in increasingly overwhelmed hospitals for prenatal care, even though people are being encouraged to stay away from hospitals. The good news is that right before publishing this, it was reported that a federal judge blocked the anti-abortion plans in Teas, Ohio, and Alabama. The bad news is that as COVID-19 continues to spread, I see reproductive rights further being attacked in states already hellbent on taking them away. 

From a global perspective, another hidden agenda that is underway is of the Chinese government. In a December episode of Lexual Says, I discussed Muslim internment camps in China and how the country has presented an increasingly activist role in its position on the UN Human Rights Council— to stop criticism of its human rights record. In 1989 in Tiananmen Square and over 400 cities nationwide, protests by Chinese citizens for democracy were squelched by martial law. 1-10,000 people were killed, and the Chinese government re-established state control over mass media. Four million people were investigated for harboring anti-party sentiments. Conservative attitudes increased towards the idea of reform, and there was increased spending on internal security with the purpose of suppressing any and all future protests. This is what I’ve been thinking of repeatedly since COVID-19 news began. China has been working to put out only positive stories, though as recently as March 14th it was reported that citizens were circulating exposes describing government coverups of neglect and a mishandled pandemic response. According to Buzzfeed, “People on WeChat, the Chinese messaging app, are evading censors by translating a viral interview from a Wuhan, China, coronavirus whistleblower by rewriting it backward, filling it with typos and emojis, sharing it as a PDF, and even translating it into fictional languages like Klingon.”

There’s a viral tweet from an alleged citizen of Wuhan that screams fake and suspicious to me, as the account was created in December 2019 and only tweets positively about China’s response, while most of China’s citizens are barred from western internet. I saw hella leftists retweeting it, claiming that America should be more like China. I don’t agree. I do believe stricter social isolation methods should be enforced here, but I don’t believe everything is all good in China either. China is known for shutting down critical reporting during national disasters, like the 2015 chemical explosion that killed 173 people. Recent reports based on cremation numbers and observations from actual Chinese citizens place the death toll from COVID-19 way higher than the country’s official number of roughly 2500. And by more, I mean potentially over 20,000 deaths. But this wouldn’t gel with China’s current campaign to come to the aid of other nations. They are re-writing the narrative to go from China’s mishandling of COVID-19 to China’s triumph over COVID-19— and by doing so, they can highlight China’s supposed generosity. 

Per the Intercept, “The government and Jack Ma, a Chinese billionaire and co-founder of the Alibaba Group, have already sent doctors and medical supplies to France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Iran, Iraq, the Philippines, and the United States.” This serves a purpose. Not only to continue obscuring China’s numerous human rights violations but to continue its quest of world domination like any other well-developed nation. According to Dr. Cheng of Cornell University, “The Chinese government has been trying to project Chinese state power beyond its borders and establish China as a global leader, not dissimilar to what the U.S. government has been doing for the better part of a century, and the distribution of medical aid is part of this mission.”

Coronavirus and… Class

In India, where I mentioned people are being beaten with sticks, millions of citizens live in slums. Hundreds of thousands of people in India are homeless migrant workers being turned away fro state borders because interstate travel is banned. Because so many people are poor and homeless, they’ve been convening on crowded soup kitchens, defeating the mandate of social distancing. At one New Delhi soup kitchen serving 8,000 people a day, homeless boys and men, some of them disabled and leaning on each other for support, were beaten by police and ordered to separate. In America, our treatment of the homeless is just as disgusting. Thousands of Los Angeles homeless for instance are being neglected by healthcare providers, going hungry, and still living right on top of each other. According to LA Times, “A new study puts the risk homeless individuals face in stark terms: It estimates that nearly 2,600 homeless people in the Los Angeles area alone will need to be hospitalized for COVID-19, and about 900 of them will require intensive care.” Right before publishing this essay, pictures of Las Vegas homeless being shepherded into painted squares of open-air for “housing” went viral.

The luckiest people in the face of this pandemic are those who can work from home or stay at home without the looming possibility of foreclosure, eviction, hunger, or bankruptcy. The working class, along with the imprisoned, the elderly and immune-compromised, have all been lumped into the same category marked as expendable. Said Larry Kudlow, the director of Trump’s National Economic Council, “You can’t have a policy that says we’re going to save every human life at any cost, no matter how many trillions of dollars you’re talking about.” We’ve quickly found out as a nation that essential workers include not only doctors and nurses, but Amazon workers, grocery store employees, fast food workers, and other Americans who are routinely told they aren’t worth at least $15 an hour. Additionally, human lives have been put on the back burner for the sake of the economy, despite the legions of conspiracy theorists who insist that governments benefit from millions of people being out of work and stock markets crashing. The longer that local and state governments continue to prioritize dollars and businesses staying open over people, the longer this virus will continue to spread, which will put a serious toll on our healthcare system. One of the positive things occurring because of Covid-19 though is a renewed interest in unions and labor rights. Amazon employees have successfully organized for paid sick leave, sanitation workers in Pittsburgh are threatening a strike, Instacart workers have begun striking, poultry plant workers in Georgia staged a walkout. Right before publishing this, it was announced that Amazon employees in New York are striking for better pay. Amazon fired the leader of the strike, spinning the story to describe how he went to work while sick and endangered his fellow co-workers. Something tells me that this might intensify strike efforts. As COVID-19 spreads, perhaps class solidarity will as well.

The 1.7 trillion dollar economic stimulus bill has been by and large one of the biggest disappointments thus far. The week ending March 21st saw 3.3 million people file for unemployment, 4.7x the previous high. Millions of Americans and counting will be broke when rent is due on the 1st, and again on May 1st. The government is offering them a taxable and paltry $1200, with an additional $500 per dependent. Meanwhile, college students who are claimed by their parents get nothing. Those of us who have been concerned with wealth disparity long before this crisis have been saying for years and decades that Americans have a better chance of survival when they are paid living wages and given comprehensive employee benefits. Or, where gig workers, freelancers, and self-employed people are concerned, they should get affordable state-provided healthcare instead of being forced to work through sickness. Imagine an alternative America where all Americans could not only afford to have six months in savings in the face of a national emergency but wouldn’t feel compelled to show up to work so that they wouldn’t be homeless. COVID-19 will be exacerbated in growth because the poor do not have the resources they need to stay afloat. The stimulus bill could have included legislation freezing rent and mortgage payments to protect renters and landlords from going into debt, but it did not. Instead, “Borrowers with federally backed mortgage loans—loans under Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—who are experiencing financial hardship due to COVID-19 can request forbearance on their payments for up to six months.” They still face interest charges. The only renters who have eviction protection are those in a “multifamily building or single-family home that has a federally backed mortgage.” This leaves many renters up shit’s creek without a paddle, forced to live at the mercy of their landlords.

Meanwhile, the airline industry is getting a healthy injection of roughly $60 billion dollars, despite the fact that those companies have had high-profit margins for years due to their frequent tax exemptions and costly flights and baggage fees. Do these airlines deserve a bailout? Hell no, but it is happening. Other special interest groups managed to get their slice of stimulus pie, including casinos, which can apply for up to $10 million dollars from the $350 billion dollars in Small Business Administration loans available if they qualify as small. Larger casinos can apply for the $454 billion in treasury backed loans. It's wild how American citizens are expected to simply expire if they can’t afford to keep up while multi-million and billion dollar corporations who have flourished on years of tax exemptions and exploitative labor practices get bailed out. Meanwhile, the credit reporting industry managed to stop legislation within the stimulus bill that would totally banned negative credit reports during the crisis. Instead, consumers won’t get a negative credit report ONLY if they have an agreement with a lender to delay payments or make partial payments. There you go, Americans. You’re expected to live at the mercy of your credit lenders. 

Coronavirus and… Africa

Not only will African countries have to brace themselves for a global recession like the rest of us, but they are definitely at risk for a major spread of the virus because of unique issues. In the early days of COVID-19 coverage, people joked that black people couldn’t get it or insisted that because black people have good hygiene, we’d be straight. I remember seeing black and African twitter both engaging in these foolish jokes, and now both groups are being shaken into reality. Just like In America, African countries weren’t testing adequately. “Of Africa’s 54 countries, only 36 have the means to test for the coronavirus.” And while nations have prided themselves on rolling out hygiene campaigns to fight the virus, according to WHO, "in 34 African countries fewer than 50 percent of the people have access to basic handwashing facilities where they live.” The COVID-19 threat is made worse by the lack of doctors among the African populations- brought on by brain drain, in which medical and other academic professionals leave the continent for countries with better pay and opportunities. For instance, “Nigeria’s doctor-to-patient ratio is four physicians per 10,000 patients,” and “Nigeria has only five hospital beds for every 10,000 people.” Nigeria is the most populous African country. Ghana has nine beds per 10,000 people. The figures are even worse in countries like Senegal and Mali. Also, West Africa faces a special challenge. Not only is population mobility 7x higher than the rest of the world in West African countries, meaning citizens are more likely to regularly travel between state lines, but this high degree of movement exacerbated the past ebola crisis because contact tracing, or finding out who an infected person has come into contact with, is much more difficult to maintain with so much travel. Not helping matters is that authorities are finding it difficult to get people with symptoms to get tested or self-isolate. A week ago the Nigerian minister of health said that there were about 1300 people who needed to be found Exponential contact and infection growth means this number is much higher— further endangering African populations.

Coronavirus and… Our Future

Remember Mike Pence’s declaration at the beginning of March that we’d have 1.5 million tests done in a week? Over a fortnight has passed and we still have not had that many tests performed. Coronavirus task force member Anthony Fauci has said that 15-minute tests will bring us closer to lifting lockdowns. Until we have a quickly administered test that provides quick results, I will continue to worry about the looming threat to our healthcare system.

I don’t pretend to know the explicit details of what comes next. Instead, I’ve looked at the puzzle pieces on the table and came to the conclusion that this is only going to get worse before it gets better. The rise of misinformation, not unique to Trump but the key to his dominance, has not only driven panic-filled gun store shopping sprees and toilet paper hoarding, but emboldened defiant Americans to gather despite social distance mandates. Im thinking about the numerous evangelical pastors with ties to Trump who denounced coronavirus fears and encouraged their flocks to congregate. Jerry Falwell Sr, who said “You know, impeachment didn’t work, and the Mueller report didn’t work, and Article 25 didn’t work, and so maybe now this is their next, ah, their next attempt to get Trump,” re-opened the shoddy brainwashing factory Liberty University, and it was just reported that atleast a dozen of the students who returned to campus tested positive for COVID-19. The mix of anti-intellectualism and anti-science sentiments on the conservative right is just another thing adding to the serious complications of this virus. In other words, there are total fucking idiots playing with our fucking health. I predict the tribal culture war of liberals versus conservatives to further shape people’s responses to COVID-19. For example, a far-right evangelical preacher just announced he plans to hold a large “woodstock-like Christian gathering in defiance of stay-at-home-orders.” 

As I detailed the top of this episode, pandemics have always shaped human history. I have three primary concerns as a black American. First of all, would America stop at authoritarianism for the sake of public health or could it slide into something more sinister or dangerous? If the willfully ignorant defying social distancing mandates continue to show their ass, would a fearful populace call for the kind of authoritarianism seen in China and India? Or alternatively, would a far-right government obsessed with economics like Trump or Bolsonoro in Brazil, work to normalize eugenicist sentiments that mark vulnerable populations like prisoners, the homeless, the elderly, the sickly— as expendable? Both possibilities are terrifying and neither are far-fetched. My other concern is how members of the lower class will choose to move forward after this crisis abates. When tone-deaf celebrities gathered to sing to the global population and declare that we’re all in this together, the visceral reactions of disgust and hatred highlighted that we know global crisis is never evenly distributed. So can we channel our rage with class disparities into a feasible movement? Could we use this pandemic, like the Haitians against the French, to our advantage? Probably not, but a girl can’t help but to dream.

A final concern of mine is how black people would fare in a healthcare system where overwhelmed doctors and nurses had to choose who gets to live and who dies because there aren’t enough ventilators. Black people have long faced discrimination in hospitals, with no demographic more at risk than pregnant black women. 

Right now America has over 160K cases of COVID-19 and counting, with over 2500 deaths at the time that I’m filming. The future is shrouded in possibilities, some positive but many negative— and this is a pivotal time in our history. We aren’t returning to a pre-COVID19 world.