All week long I’ve watched various social media feeds clog up the airstream with language that this week marks the 5th anniversary of the Covid Emergency.
On March 13, 2020 Donald Trump announced a National Emergency for Covid Response. This forced the closure of businesses, large and small, and set the pace for a 21st century digital system that oscillates between control, surveillance and clown world.
You can’t have normal conversations anymore in the online world or even in the real world. People’s phrasings and lifestyle choices have radically shifted in ways that are anti-life. (“I can’t go to the party because my cousin tested positive and I am not feeling well so I don’t want to infect anyone.”) Some have fought these changes tooth and nail: refusing to even download Lyft apps on their phones, refusing to use ATM’s and generally being as off the grid as possible. I’ve noticed, though, that it’s only the privileged that can afford to be off the grid. Try telling a minimum wage worker, or even someone like us, that if they don’t use Lyft to get to work or their mandatory unemployment orientation appointments when the buses break down or when their car is in the shop to just get rid of their Lyft app because of surveillance, and principles, etc., they’ll spit in your face. “Are you kidding?” They might say. I gotta get to my shift. If not, I’m fired. Then what? You gonna pay my rent?”
The poor, I’ve noticed, in the last five years, have more moxie and grit than even your most successful venture capitalists. Sadly, though, it’s really expensive to be poor. Only the well-off, privileged and gainfully employed can afford to keep their assets tightly within their control.
What have we learned since March 13, 2020?
Not much, unfortunately.
The selfish are getting more selfish. The poor and destitute are dead. The Middle Class are now poor and desperate.
I’ve learned it’s about compressing the Middle Class down into humiliating, debilitating and soul-crushing poverty. I learned this back in 2018 when we emptied our life savings and retirement in order to buy a house in the ghetto just so we could have a roof over our head and survive when my husband couldn’t find work for an entire year in 2017, the same year we got married.
But most people haven’t really learned anything.
After finally being hired in 2021 and being employed as a contractor without pay raises, benefits or bonuses, we noticed no one was even talking about how over the last five years actual, steady jobs are few and far between. People were stuck working at jobs where they were underpaid and because they’re labeled as “contractors” no one has to pay them severance when they’re let go, for instance. Over the last five years, since the onset of the Covid Emergency on March 13, 2020 the gig economy has ramped up.
And another topic has ramped up. Death. Everyone’s died. Friends. Family members. Friends of friends. Favorite teachers. Sure, people die. But the announcement of death notices ranging from celebrities to musicians to people of interest have swelled over the last five years.
And, over the last five years one kind of death isn’t even being discussed by the Covid or vaccine-obsessed: drug overdose deaths have spiked in every demographic in existence in this country. Over the last five years, since the onset of the Covid Emergency on March 13, 2020 over half a million Americans have died of fentanyl overdoses or drug-related overdoses in general.
This is the true epidemic that no one will acknowledge and which I believe the announcement of the National Emergency five years ago, was covering up.
Over the last month, for instance, since my husband’s department at Optum was unceremoniously closed and we lost our main source of income, he and I have been talking openly about death.
We recently had a friend stay with us and behind closed doors at night, while she was in the guest room, he and I were talking about how if I suddenly die, he won’t have any way of surviving and paying the mortgage or have any money at all since my life is tied to my paltry income. So, we realized I need to start a life insurance policy so if and when I die he will be taken care of.
If he dies accidentally then I am taken care of. Well, that is, if the insurance company we’ve paid into over the last few years recognizes his death and awards me the benefits. They often don’t and many beneficiaries have to spend money they don’t have to take the insurance companies through a corrupted and complicated legal process in order to be awarded the benefits they deserved in the first place. That is, if the judge or jury finds in favor of the beneficiary.
The stories you hear about people being awarded back-pay and damages after being fired for refusing to take the Covid shot are few and far between. Yet, on social media they trend and are blown up out of proportion.
The truth is, the people whose businesses were closed because they refused to obey the March 13, 2020 Covid National Emergency announcement have never recovered and are paying huge fines in court for that disobedience. And, people who were told to exit their offices or their places of work on March 13, 2020 have never been able to find work again. And, individuals who were fired for refusing to take the Covid shot spent a long time looking for work at a time when no one was hiring.
The downward spiral since March 13, 2020 is palpable, in our bank account and in our lives and in the bank accounts and lives of 7 million employable Americans who now have exhausted their unemployment benefits, emptied their savings and retirements and their only hope is to sell their house and move into Section 8 Housing in poor neighborhoods.
Here’s something else no one is talking about that’s trending since the onset of the National Emergency for Covid Response on March 13, 2020.
Generosity.
Let me set it up:
When we moved from San Francisco to a Pittsburgh ghetto in 2018, my husband was actively seeking work long before we even loaded up the U-haul and took off. But, Pittsburgh simply wasn’t hiring UX Designers. So after two months of living in the new house with no income, he took the only job he could get: a part-time driver for troubled youth in a broken down van held together by duct tape and super glue. The van was in such bad shape that I often wondered if “the system” was purposefully trying to send these poor kids who live in the ghetto to an early grave.
It’s not some sophisticated remote controlled explosion that you see in movies that kill people. It’s benign neglect and poor kids are at the front of the line.
Despite this private bus company, who would scream at my husband for being 10 seconds too late or too early on his time punch card, going out out of their way to attempt to murder innocent children (and him) in what I affectionally refer to the as the “murder van”, he is an exceptional driver and an articulate recorder and when he instinctively knew the van would be too dangerous to park at the bottom of an icy hill in the middle of winter near one of the children’s homes, he parked it in a safe spot, and held the child’s hand and walked her to her front door to make sure she got in her home safely. Since his time was obsessively monitored by the company, this may have made him late arriving back to the shoddy, makeshift “office” (which was more like a converted mobile home) for his expected punch-out time, but he didn’t care.
It was during this time that we started producing video essays on an outdated laptop and when 2020 came and the bus company had to close “because of Covid” and he was out of a job, we ramped up the production of material.
This is where the generosity poured in.
A few patrons signed on to our Patreon page and for a while we were earning as much as $200 per month. We received PayPal donations, from large to small, and the messages said, “Keep it up. We love how you synthesize what’s going on in the world. No one else is doing it like this.” We received checks in the mail and on occasion, gift cards so we could buy groceries.
When he started working as a contractor in 2021 we felt it wasn’t as important to depend on those who had been so generous to us. Some of the most generous people, we noticed, were the ones who were struggling themselves.
We turned it around and over the last few years have given back, enormously: we’ve purchased plane tickets for friends, donated cash to a family up the street whose house burned down, donated cash to a friend whose son was recently released from a long prison sentence for a crime he didn’t commit, we’ve opened our home to friends and made ourselves very available for everyone. Since my husband’s contract jobs were steady over the years, we were able to move out of the ghetto and move into a home we really love on the gulf coast.
Now that he is unemployed as a direct result of the continuous down-turn of our economy over the last five years, kicked off by the National Emergency announced on March 13, 2020, we’ve received some donations.
One of my husband’s personal long-time friends dipped into her own savings account so our utilities wouldn’t be disconnected.
Over the last month, we find ourselves in the exact same position we were in, in 2018: desperate to keep our utilities on and worried about keeping a roof over our head. But this time we don’t have the safety net of a savings account or a retirement we can empty to buy a place in the ghetto for the price of a used Toyota. We have a mortgage, and we are desperately trying not to lose our house. We don’t want to be a part of that statistic: over one million unemployed professionals have lost their homes in 2024. So, in between hours and hours of applying for UX jobs on-line, and satisfying the most bizarre unemployment requirements I’ve ever seen, my husband started The Daily Report. Our utilities are about $300 – $500 per month and this daily live-stream, is what will pay that, if we make our $500 monthly goal:
The Daily Report
·
Mar 11
So far we have officially raised $180. We are still $320 short of this month’s (March 2025) goal.
For those of you who have made personal donations and dipped into your own savings accounts and checking accounts, we thank you. We want to acknowledge that your sacrifice for our well-being is something that resonates very deeply with us. If we weren’t in crisis-survival mode right now, we’d take more time to acknowledge this. Because of you, we have been able to pay our utilities and avoid a disconnect. Because of you we were able to afford to buy two weeks of groceries.
Since the National Emergency was declared on March 13, 2020 it feels as if most Americans have lost the plot and don’t even understand that the simplest explanation is almost always the correct one. We noticed one of the most informative, popular Covid-era influencers (who doesn’t really use simple explanations) announced just this week that she is stepping away from her informative series and perhaps abandoning it altogether. Her frustration with how people just aren’t “getting it” is something I can totally relate to, even if my opinion about why the March 13, 2020 National Emergency was declared differs from hers. After all, when i talk about class war on Twitter or YouTube or the extraordinary rise in unemployment, I mysteriously lose dozens of followers.
Human Capital Markets, a term that started trending after the March 13, 2020 National Emergency declaration was made, is nothing more than indentured servitude at best, or chattel slavery at worst. Each and every day of our personal lives we feel this in very real ways. The degrading of our lives, grinding down into a swallowing mass of sleepless nights, anxiety, nightmares, poverty and pain is what we have experienced and what we have to look forward to in our collective futures.
We barely had enough money to drive our friend to the airport after they stayed with us for the week of Mardi Gras, a vacation they had planned for months. This is what the National Emergency Declaration of March 13, 2020 has produced: even the most banal and benign non-concerns have become emergency situations, where the $10 gas in cash we put into the car would make or break us being able to make our mortgage this month.
The unemployed in the professional sector are looking at a 6 – 8 week interview process, as contractors, not full-timers. They are up against millions of other equally qualified applicants looking for the exact same job and also going through the lengthy and grueling interviews and background checks. Yes, background checks. Even for 6 month remote contracts where you are never in an office. Because, like Covid, the Unemployment Industrial Complex is looking to exploit the desperate. With Covid, the pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, testing kits and technology sector were all bankrolled when the Emergency Declaration was made on March 13, 2020. The Unemployment Emergency will open up a funding stream for background investigators and the investigations of applicants will take longer than ever since there are more applicants applying for jobs than there have ever been.
State unemployment agencies will now hire low level individuals to require upstanding corporate careerists who are now unemployed to apply for jobs at McDonald’s, or go through training, and prove it through an actual interview, in order to justify sending that unemployed professional their $199 weekly unemployment check.
That’s why the early optics of Trump working at McDonald’s was trending so hard. After all, Trump isn’t too proud to go work at McDonald’s! So, there’s no reason why for instance, my husband’s boss who was a director for a large corporation for a decade and made about $225,000 per year and is now unemployed, couldn’t also just go get a job at McDonald’s.
Right?
One of the most strident trends since the National Emergency for Covid Response was declared on March 13, 2020 is the marketing industrial complex. Billions of dollars went into marketing campaigns on “How To Play Americans.” It worked. Most of you are being played. If you’re not talking about the rise of drug related or fentanyl deaths that have taken over half a million innocent American lives since March 13, 2020, you’ve been played.
The National Emergency of 2020 was not only cover for the remarkable, shocking and troubling spike in the production and distribution of deadly drugs which caused a death count over the last five years the likes of which we’ve never seen, it also normalized the indentured servitude life.
I’m watching my husband, who has been a professional UX Designer for over 20 years, twist himself into a gnarled pretzel to satisfy the gibberish-ey, nonsensical requirements of trying to find work and handle it without losing his shit. It must have been what chattel slavery experienced while they were building this country.
Never has a society been so nostalgic and this too resonates along the airwaves, the conversations, the prayers and the extraordinary rise of suicide in the wake of the National Emergency for Covid Response of March 13, 2020.
People seem to forget that what happened on March 13, 2020 is just part of the American cycle of life. But this time, it wasn’t covered up or sugar coated.
On March 13, 2020 a declaration was made. The declaration was an open, naked announcement of attempted murder.
The response to this declaration?
You’re living it.
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