Here are just a few of the ways the habits of the rich are making life more difficult for everyone else
Photo: Gary John Normam/Getty Images A pandemic demands public acts of solidarity. We alter our lifestyles with the well-being of our neighbors in mind. We stay home as much as we can, we sew masks for health professionals who need them, we set up mutual-aid groups to assist our sick and elderly neighbors. In some people, though, the novel coronavirus inspires more selfish sentiments. The crisis exposes social fissures that have existed for a long time.
Below are just a few of the ways the habits of the rich are making life more difficult for everyone else.Ventilators aren’t the only items the wealthy are trying to stockpile. One local doctor recently told the New York Post that he’s had to inform his more privileged patients that they cannot actually build ICUs in their homes. Others have contacted their doctors to ask if they can skip the line for an eventual vaccine.
The wealthy don’t quite have the unlimited freedom to fill bunkers to the brim with equipment we all need. But the fact that they’ve tried only sweetens the idea of a wealth tax.Vacation destinations may look like Brigadoons, reappearing at fixed intervals that mysteriously coincide with ski season or summer break or, say, a terrifying outbreak. The instinct to flee is understandable.
Through Amazon, Bezos is complicit in exploitation on a mass scale. But outside the rarefied circles inhabited by Silicon Valley’s tycoons, other privileged households are also guilty of smaller-scale abuse. People are firing domestic workers without offering them any severance, the New York Times reported last week. Many of these workers are undocumented, and already struggled financially.
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