A Tale of Two Countries
“There were a few folks who showed up that didn’t qualify…but then there were those who showed up and said, ‘I heard this was happening. I didn’t know I had to register, but I need food. I am a hotel worker and I was laid off.’ Those are the stories we heard from a lot of people who showed up.” The San Antonio Express-News with the shocking numbers and photos that represent the surge in demand hitting food banks. “We just can’t feed this many.”
+ “Now, as he so rightly points out, we are great with death—we are mighty with it. There is a fear, when all of this is said and done, that America will lead the world in it. And yet, perversely, the supposed democratic nature of plague—the way in which it can strike all registered voters equally—turns out to be somewhat overstated. A plague it is, but American hierarchies, hundreds of years in the making, are not so easily overturned. Amid the great swath of indiscriminate death, some old American distinctions persist.” Zadie Smith in The New Yorker: The American Exception.
+ “With every day that goes by, it becomes more clear that the virus isn’t an equalizer at all. Instead, it is exacerbating the inequalities in American society, taking a disproportionate toll on low-income Americans, people of color, and others who were already marginalized before the crisis hit.” Vox: Every aspect of the coronavirus pandemic exposes America’s devastating inequalities.
+ It’s not just America. The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner talks to David Miliband, the president and C.E.O of The International Rescue Committee. “No country will be able to ease its restrictions, to return to any kind of normality, if it is a walled fortress. And so, when I say there are thirteen ventilators in the whole of Sierra Leone for 7.5 million people, when I say that there are four ventilators in the whole of South Sudan, when I say that there are three ventilators in the whole of the Central African Republic, I’m making the point that we can’t rely on the health system to keep this disease at bay.”
