Something a college friend from South Carolina said I’ll never forget. She got her master’s at NYU and lived in Brooklyn for a stretch in the early 1980’s. She said she learned to navigate the city, learned where to go and where not to. But when she rode the subway each day packed in with hundreds of strangers at rush hour, she said, “I knew I was different.” She said, “I knew … I didn’t have to live this way.”
We are all having similar experiences now. At least, those of us who don’t have to worry about losing everything we were struggling to pay for when the COVID-19 nightmare began.
Writer/director Julio Vincent Gambuto invites us to consider what months of social distancing and staying home from work reveals about the madness of living the way we have. The pandemic reveals we don’t have to live lives we have come to accept as “normal.” The COVID-19 deaths and suffering are widespread and horrible. But The Great Pause has revealed that when the treadmill abruptly stops life doesn’t:
What the crisis has given us is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see ourselves and our country in the plainest of views. At no other time, ever in our lives, have we gotten the opportunity to see what would happen if the world simply stopped. Here it is. We’re in it. Stores are closed. Restaurants are empty. Streets and six-lane highways are barren. Even the planet itself is rattling less (true story). And because it is rarer than rare, it has brought to light all of the beautiful and painful truths of how we live. And that feels weird. Really weird. Because it has… never… happened… before. If we want to create a better country and a better world for our kids, and if we want to make sure we are even sustainable as a nation and as a democracy, we have to pay attention to how we feel right now. I cannot speak for you, but I imagine you feel like I do: devastated, depressed, and heartbroken.
Gambuto warns that the people whose profits depend on us returning to normal as soon as possible will soon gaslight us into believing all this never happened. Feeling devastated, depressed, and heartbroken? They’ve got a product to sell you to fix it. Marketers will spend billions to coax you back into that packed subway. Back onto the pollution-filled freeway. Back into the cube farm. Back into that hazardous workplace. Back into the crowded parking lot of the big-box store. Back into a pattern of consumption in which you are too busy surviving to imagine anything different, anything better. Too busy to question.
What Americanism has built is not all evil, Gambuto allows, but the blessings of metastasized capitalism are cruelly capricious. And the system is far more fragile than advertised:
Brands and their products create millions of jobs. Like people — and most anything in life — there are brands that are responsible and ethical, and there are others that are not. They are all part of a system that keeps us living long and strong. We have lifted more humans out of poverty through the power of economics than any other civilization in history. Yes, without a doubt, Americanism is a force for good. It is not some villainous plot to wreak havoc and destroy the planet and all our souls along with it. I get it, and I agree. But its flaws have been laid bare for all to see. It doesn’t work for everyone. It’s responsible for great destruction. It is so unevenly distributed in its benefit that three men own more wealth than 150 million people. Its intentions have been perverted, and the protection it offers has disappeared. In fact, it’s been brought to its knees by one pangolin.
Brace for an “all-out blitz to make you believe you never saw what you saw.” What “the market wants” is to wipe our memories as if with the wave of a Jedi’s hand or the subliminal marketing of aliens walking among us. This is not the life you’re looking for. Get back on the treadmill. Work yourselves to death. Conform. Consume. Obey.
Even now, the White House is desperate for things to get back to something called normal, for people to get back to work making rich investors richer, for the economy on whose plantations we work to recover by November so Trump can avoid jail for another term. The bombardment is coming, Gambuto warns:
From one citizen to another, I beg of you: Take a deep breath, ignore the deafening noise, and think deeply about what you want to put back into your life. This is our chance to define a new version of normal, a rare and truly sacred (yes, sacred) opportunity to get rid of the bullshit and to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes our kids happier, what makes us truly proud. We get to Marie Kondo the shit out of it all. We care deeply about one another. That is clear. That can be seen in every supportive Facebook post, in every meal dropped off for a neighbor, in every Zoom birthday party. We are a good people. And as a good people, we want to define — on our own terms — what this country looks like in five, 10, 50 years. This is our chance to do that, the biggest one we have ever gotten. And the best one we’ll ever get.
The economy has no clothes.
[h/t JR]
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.