scenes from a pandemic, pt. ii

Last night, Governor Inslee ordered bars and restaurants to close, except for delivery and take-out; when I called out from work this morning, my store was still open; it's never been primarily a dine-in place, so I suppose the order won't make much more of a difference than the pandemic already has. (As for me: the mild cough lingers, the malaise/fever/whatever seems to have subsided. It feels kind of like the last day or two of a cold now.)

When this first started happening, I don't think I anticipated that one of the side-effects would be that my comrades working at restaurants and bars would be suddenly trying to navigate the bureaucracy of unemployment. My housemate, who works (or worked, I guess) as a cook at a restarant/bar, said that as he was trying to fill out the application online last night, the server crashed, presumably as food service workers across the state all tried to fill it out at the same time so they could make sure they could still pay their bills this month.

We will spend the duration of this crisis wondering if the measures that have been taken were too much, or if they were too little too late. Is the economic suffering caused by this measure worth the lives it might save? On some level, of course, that suffering would have happened with or without the measure, but for many, this will never be enough.  What are they planning to do when the order expires at the end of the month? Do they hope the crisis will be over by then?

The most important question, though: will they actually take measures to protect society's most vulnerable from the economic fallout of all this? Will they take measures to protect those workers who are still forced to go to work and interact with the public because their services are considered too essential to be shut down? Or will the interests of the ownership class prevail, and the underclass ultimately be left, as America is so fond of leaving them, to live or die by the whims of fate, protected only by a woefully inadequate social safety net?

COVID-19 will lay bare, has laid bare, the inherent cruelty of our society. I will leave it as an academic exercise for the reader whether this revelation will lead to any meaningful change towards a kinder world.