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The Appeal: "Will the coronavirus push us from cruelty to a ‘politics of care’?"
via The Appeal:
What does the growing coronavirus pandemic teach us about the United States? About our vulnerabilities and priorities? In the Boston Review,
Yale Law School professors Amy Kapczynski and Gregg Gonsalves assess
that, here, the virus “is a crisis of social solidarity and social
investment,” one that “shine[s] a light on the cruelty of American life
as it has been constructed for much of our lifetimes.” That
cruelty is reflected in how we divide, blame, punish, and exploit the
vulnerable, pushing people down while at the same time screaming at them
to get up. Our healthcare system is “rapaciously profit-driven”
and excludes huge segments of people. We are, Kapczynski and Gonsalves
write, “austerity-ravaged,” without an adequate social safety net or
investments in public health programs. And we use a racist system of
mass incarceration to deal with widespread health problems like mental
illness and addiction. On the whole, it’s a system that leaves people to
fend for themselves and then punishes those who falter. That’s
a terrible state of affairs when a public health crisis exposes our
shared vulnerability. Successfully fighting or preparing for an epidemic
disease requires understanding “that we’re all in this together, that
what affects one person anywhere affects everyone everywhere,” Snowden told the New Yorker. “We need to think in that way rather than about divisions of race and ethnicity [and] economic status.” The good news is that, according to new polling, American voters are thinking that way now. A new report
from The Justice Collaborative and Data for Progress (I co-authored the
report) shows broad bipartisan support for responding to the pandemic
with aggressive government intervention to protect the most vulnerable
and at-risk. That includes paid sick and family leave for all workers,
along with free testing, vaccines, and comprehensive care. Some of these
policies are included in the federal relief bill
that cleared the House of Representatives over the weekend, though the
polling supports relief that goes further—for example, by providing
no-cost vaccines in addition to testing, and extending paid leave
protections to freelance workers and employees at large corporations,
two groups currently excluded from the relief legislation. This broad demand for care in response to crisis echoes what Rebecca Solnit described in her book “A Paradise Built in Hell,”
about how disasters—whether fires or earthquakes or epidemics—can
unearth a spirit of collective good buried beneath a prevailing politics
of individualism and unbridled capitalism. Ordinarily, she writes, we
give in to the economic presumption that “we seek personal gain for
rational reasons,” and we “refrain from looking at the ways a system
skewed to that end damages much else we need for our survival and desire
for our well-being.” But when disaster strikes, and “all the ordinary
divides and patterns are shattered, people step up—not all, but the
great preponderance—to become their brothers’ keepers.” In the process,
“our sense of what is possible” can change. “If paradise now arises in
hell,” she writes, “it’s because in the suspension of the usual order
and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another
way.”
Kyle C. Barry is senior legal counsel for the Justice Collaborative.
The Daily Appeal and The Appeal are editorially independent projects of
the Justice Collaborative.
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