BEHIND THE MASK, July 21

1. Solidarity. Solidarity?
 


Consider this quote: “Most people’s economic situations would determine whether they stayed home from work. voluntarily. If their workplace was open and they needed the money to pay their bills, people would drag themselves to work. … The only sure ways to prevent this state of affairs would be to force workplaces to close or to pay workers to stay home.”


 
This is taken from Rosemarie Tong’s 2008 memoir about serving on an influenza task force convened by the North Carolina Department of Public Health. It’s quoted by two public health legal scholars in an article (https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/how-the-law-harms-public-health/) about the current legal regimes around employer protection – how they are insufficient to encourage a socially attuned approach (rather than a behavioral/blaming approach) to pandemic control, and how they must change to emphasize solidarity. Like many legal articles, it’s heavily empirical rather than theoretical. The alternatives it presents are promising, but don’t fully develop what “solidarity” means when considering the adversarial employer/employee relationship.


 
How do we consider workers as part of society, and how can we acknowledge every worker’s daily needs? Who are we in solidarity with – and who not? Can we decline to be in solidarity with those who might hate us or wish us ill?


 
Suggested action: Consider what it would take to achieve solidarity with a group with whom you don’t usually interact. It will involve asking them what their priorities are. (Note to self!)
 


2. The Kingdom of the Bereaved
 


An article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/07/09/2007476117#T1) estimates what the authors call a “Covid bereavement multiplier”: how many kin members are bereaved by the death of one family member to Covid. (The estimate, based on demographic simulations, is around 9.) I don’t know what number I expected. 9 plus the person lost to Covid is ten, which (in my tradition) is a prayer quorum. So when we consider death statistics, we are actually shadowed at the same time by the penumbra of those numbers. I can’t give a suggested action except that we mourn properly, perhaps as a national, weekly observance. Consider also those who our government is murdering through negligence, whose 9 bereaved are across a border or a sea. (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/07/whistleblowers-say-ice-detention-center-used-deceptive-tricks-to-conceal-covid-outbreak/)
 


3. Living Situations
 


From the Annals of Internal Medicine: “More than 1 in 5 U.S. homes, housing about one quarter of all Americans, lack sufficient space and plumbing facilities to comply with recommendations to isolate or quarantine to limit household spread of COVID-19. This proportion is particularly high among homes occupied by minority and poor individuals and among apartments, a pattern that mirrors both the high incidence of COVID-19 in those groups and racial discrimination in access to housing that was federal policy until the 1960s and persists today.”


(https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-4331) Suggested action: Will people get evicted because of job loss in your community? Learn and act


 
4. School and solidarity
 


People are hiring tutors for their kids to supplement, replace, or provide alternatives to on-line education. Considering the above discussions of solidarity, who does this leave out?