The Horrible Depression in Watching Society Unravel

America is burning and all I can do is watch

All things considered, the lockdown has been fairly good to my household. While I had been in a bit of a funk for…well, a few years, being forced to work from home and shake up my routine has, somehow, helped improve my mood.

Don’t get me wrong, all the pressure and more is still there. My job is fairly busy right now, and there is a pandemic out there, after all, but I feel fairly good about things in general. Better than I have in a long time, actually.

And yet, there is still a lot of depression simmering below the surface of my brain. My mood is better, yes, and I don’t feel hopeless anymore, but at the same time, the country is slowly tearing itself apart in the face of a global pandemic as the world watches in horror.

People are dying, you see, by the tens of thousands. There is no timeline for when things will get better. We have the vague hope for a vaccine or treatment that shows potential, or something of the sort, but medical testing takes time. Even under the best circumstances, it’s likely to be a year or more before we can roll out a vaccine.

So, the world sits in quarantine, waiting for a sign that it’s safe to go outside again, even if only for a little bit. At least, most of the world.

Here in America, the land of the free, people are taking to the streets to fight for their god-given right to go out into the world and die on the altar of capitalism. At least, that’s what it looks like to me.

You see, in America, the economy rules all. Anyone could be rich if they only work hard enough, but their work will likely only line the pocketbooks of those already at the top. Don’t worry — it will trickle down to you eventually.

We are defined by our work here — how often do you meet someone and get asked “what do you do for a living?” as if that’s all that mattered about you. We also work a lot, with no guaranteed sick time or paid leave, and those who have paid time off often don’t use it for fear of looking like a bad worker. And, if you get sick, you’d better be unable to get out of bed before you even think of calling off.

So, we work, day in and day out, in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad, for better or for worse, for richer or (much more often) for poorer. We put in our time in the hopes that we may one day retire if our 401(k) is in decent shape since Social Security won’t be enough on its own. Hopefully, that day will come, although we know in the back of our minds that for many people, maybe even us, it may never come at all.

And now, in a world where tens of millions are suddenly jobless, and where tens of millions have job titles that describe them as essential and paychecks that say otherwise, some people are upset.

I understand. We as Americans often define ourselves by what we do for a living. I am guilty of that — I am a writer, a nonprofit fundraiser, a person who earns his living making sure people with less get the things they need. People like me don’t go into the nonprofit world because it pays well. It’s a badge of pride for us when we say we work for a charity.

But this system is precarious, and the pandemic doesn’t leave anyone unscathed. Millions who work in the food and hospitality industries, jobs that rely on people doing things outside their homes, simply can’t work if nobody goes out. You can’t be a waiter if there’s nobody to wait on.

So, for those people, their already terrible wages and tough jobs get eliminated to save money, and they’re forced into unemployment in a system that doesn’t provide much and wasn’t meant to handle this many people. They often don’t have much savings, and their meager unemployment checks don’t cover much, and the rent is still due.

So, to fill in the gaps, we got a $1,200 one-time check to get us through the next *checks notes* ten weeks, and a boost to the unemployment payments that tens of millions now rely upon that is temporary through the next few months. Unemployment checks aren’t much use to people whose hours got cut; I’ve heard many stories of people who would rather have been laid off since unemployment checks would’ve been bigger than their reduced hours.

Then there are the “essential workers,” the people that weren’t good enough for a $15 minimum wage six months ago but are now powering this country. These are people who “should’ve stayed in school,” who “do jobs a monkey could do,” who are now bagging groceries for Karen and her five kids and getting thanked for working during this whole thing. Never mind that they don’t have a choice — they work jobs they would come to even if they were sick because the alternative is to starve.

Main Street got a highly-touted relief package that got pushed through congress, which was designed to save small businesses throughout the country. However, it wound up going to a lot of bigger businesses who probably didn’t need it, and the outcry has been huge. Either way, there are predictions of a retail apocalypse for mom-and-pop shops and restaurants that may have a lasting impact.

Meanwhile, there is a whole class of people who are rallying to state capitols to demand that businesses reopen and the country returns to normal. People want to return to work, they say, which is both true and endemic of the American work culture I described above. Lockdowns equal government tyranny, they say, as though the pandemic was a mere afterthought in the equation, and they bring their giant guns in a show of patriotism and government resistance.

This display of resistance to “government tyranny” is broadcast for the nation and the world to see. To many of us locally and most of the civilized world, the protestors look like urban terrorists along the lines of the Bundy family, waving their privilege in everyone’s faces by lugging their ARs into state buildings with nary an issue. It is not lost on many of us that middle-aged white men carrying rifles face no repercussions, while underage black teens carrying toys get gunned down in the street.

As all of this is happening, our president causes chaos with his statements and tweets, sowing discord throughout the nation. The states need to be liberated, he tweets, the lockdowns need to end! No, the Georgia governor is ending it too soon and without enough data! Antimalarial drugs are the miracle cure we need right now! No, you need to inject bleach into your veins and shine a UV light up your ass!

The divisions in this country are even deeper than they were before the crisis. People in my circles have had to unfriend people because they claimed that the virus wasn’t as bad as people think it is, that the media is lying to us. The right-wing fringe pushes the notion that it’s just a mild thing, no need to shut down the country, and even if it is bad, we need to put our lives on the line to keep the economy going. There is no talk of fixing the system that was obviously broken before the crisis; no, we need to hurl workers and consumers headlong into the economic blood machine.

Meanwhile, the left-wing anti-vaxxers are pushing their crystals and essential oils, advocating that we just need to get everyone to catch the plague to build up immunity as we did in the olden days. You know, the days before we injected our children with toxins that increased the general health and quality of life in this country for decades to come before we drove illnesses like polio to the brink of extinction.

So, with the clowns to the left and the jokers to the right, most of the country is stuck in the middle, watching the shit fly. America is divided in the face of a pandemic, with the cult of Trump organizing the power structure against science and reason. We aren’t world leaders at anything right now except discord.

As somebody with a mental illness, the past few years have been a challenge. I’ve watched a madman dismantle many of the things about my country that I think are good while committing atrocities against immigrants and destroying our international image. The onset of a pandemic has only driven the wedge deeper in our country, and it makes me lose hope that it will be fixed anytime soon.

I had hoped that we could recognize the failings of American society, see the things that are wrong with our country — the lack of affordable healthcare, the rampant inequality — and fix them. Make the country better for everyone living here, but especially the marginalized, the underprivileged, the black and brown, the women, the LGBTQIA folx, anyone who isn’t a rich white male.

And yet, there is a whole group of people who are pushing us to accept that this broken system we have built, this Frankenstein’s monster of a political and economic system that we call American capitalism, is working as intended. And they have a whole legion of followers, the economically downtrodden who have found a scapegoat in the same black and brown folks, the immigrants, the LGBTQIA folx, who tune into Fox News and tune out the rest of the world.

My country, right or wrong, they say, as if to claim that America is incapable of being wrong at all. I find it ironic how they ignore the last part of that statement: if right, kept right, and if wrong, made right.

So, I look at this situation we’ve found ourselves in, and I despair. The Republican Party, which once stood for something at least decent, sold its soul to a conman in exchange for fool’s gold. The Democrats are infighting over whether we stick to the centrist policies that haven’t accomplished much or follow the young people as they move to European-style democratic socialism.

I voted for Obama in 2008 and again in 2012, and I appreciated the Hope and Change he sought to bring. And hope and change he brought — along with political division and a Republican Party aligned against the first black president with slightly liberal policies.

In 2016, I voted for Sanders in the primary, seeing him as the beacon of a better future. I ignored the people comparing him to the USSR and saw him for what he was — a harbinger of Scandanavian-style democratic socialism that needed to happen here. To me, it was obvious: America has gone its own way for decades, and as a result, we rank towards the bottom of most scales for developed nations. This would turn it around.

I voted for Hillary in November, because anything was better than Trump. How true that has turned out to be. Now, as we are in 2020, I look back and see that Obama’s presidency, while a turning point, had its issues and problems. He didn’t push back hard enough, wanting to appear as a uniter, when it was clear that he could never unite a country such as this one. He stuck to centrist policies, which I appreciated at the time but have come to recognize only entrenched the wealthy and upper class.

And, as America’s image on the world stage has been battered and bruised beyond repair by the man-child at the helm, I worry that there is nothing left to be done for us. We are a broken country, and this pandemic has only served to highlight just how broken we are. It makes me sad to know that I’m going to have to hold my nose and vote for Biden this year. I want to think that four more years of Trump would doom America to a fiery end, but I’m not convinced that Biden can solve that problem. I’m not convinced anyone can solve that problem anymore.

Right now, there is little to be done. I’m sheltering at home with my wife and cats, working from my home office, writing the odd article here and there, and playing lots of Animal Crossing. As I’m sitting at my dining room table writing this, it’s peaceful outside. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and it seems like a good day out there. I don’t know how many good days we have left.

Now’s the time where I give you the call to action, and I wish I had advice that didn’t sound trite and overwrought. If you agree with the things that I’ve said in this article, then vote. Vote at the ballot box in your primary and general elections. Vote with your wallets and shop at small businesses and companies that share your values. Vote with your feet at rallies and protests of injustice everywhere (maybe only after the pandemic is taken care of, though).

We as Americans have the power of the vote. There is a powerful image of the electoral college map from 2016, showing that if “did not vote” was a candidate, it would’ve won in a landslide. We can’t let that happen again. We need to show the world that we, as Americans, value the country we live in and the people that live here. We need to show them that hatred, bitterness, and vitriol will not win out in the end.

America is the land of opportunity, and for me, it means the opportunity to shape it into something better. We have the opportunity to build America into something far better than it is now, for America is an ever-changing story of heartbreak and triumph, never static, always growing. It doesn’t always grow in the best ways, but like a bonsai tree, we can help shape and guide its growth into something beautiful. It will never be perfect, but the constant striving to be better, to become a more perfect nation, is I think what defines us.

I can’t do it alone, though. I need you, and your friends, and lots of people like you, to help build us into what we can be, what we strive to be. We should not be content to sit back and watch the world burn, but use the flame as a catalyst to grow stronger from the ashes of discord and despair.

Yes, the country is unraveling and falling apart, but now is the time to build something stronger from the pieces. We can do it.