Now that we already have maxed out hospitals and still-rising Covid infection and death rate, mass evictions in winter with many times more looming, and have learned that, actually young people are dying from the virus...

Now that we know these conditions —viral and social—are also killing people at much higher rates through accidents, untreated medical conditions, overdose and exposure ....

Now that we know that warnings haven’t stopped people from traveling or large gatherings at anything like the degree needed and that going to work is a major cause of the continuing intensification of the pandemic

You’d think that a discussion of travel restrictions and more rigorous closure of unnecessary construction, retail, in-person instruction, gyms, restaurants and the like , with actual funding and rent/mortgage freezes to make this possible, would be, at least, on the table

But it’s not. The ruling class is literally banking on another couple hundred thousand preventable deaths.

Cost of doing business

For comparison, since march the USA has seen preventable pandemic deaths comparable to those caused by *decades* of willful neglect of HIV in South Africa during the denialist years

Or—about 6x the number of usa casualties during the Vietnam War

Those deaths have long been considered by mainstream poli sci types to have been so numerous and therefore intolerable to usa political class as to have transformed politics and method of warfare ever since

But here we are, on a path to a number of Covid deaths that will more closely resemble the cataclysmic number of Vietnamese casualties in that war.

It’s hard to know exactly but that number is closer to 2 million, though those deaths are considered by the same poli sci types to be more or less irrelevant wrt to those previously mentioned changes to the calculations of politicians and generals

In fact-the specific change in war strategy was to trade fewer usa deaths for more foreign civilian ones

Which is to say that when it comes to COVID , (even) USA-citizens are being treated by the government and its corporate constituents as an enemy population, whose lives are basically worthless in relation to the pursuit of profit and power

Which makes me think

Perhaps it wasn’t mass usa casualties that made Vietnam such a game-changer

But actually, the mass movement against the war, one which was actually motivated in large part by consideration and empathy for “the enemy”

And by the difficulty the generals had in “motivating” troops to kill and be killed in an unnecessary war that was dragging on with no clear aim, but inevitably toward more mass death.

Kind of like this continued “battle” to stick to normal operations of production, commerce, rent and austerity in the absence of a functioning health care system.

We could, as soldiers, then, did; make things more difficult.

Because it’s not our war. It’s just killing us.

Turn on, tune in & drop out. Sabotage, strike and solidarity.

Maybe those traditions are more relevant this year than getting the gang together for honey-baked ham and Covid-laden choral endeavors. Maybe!

@threadreaderapp unroll please