The Ideas That Won’t Survive the Coronavirus by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Pulitzer-prize winning author and NY Times columnist, a refugee who has written about his experience in both fiction and nonfiction, shares these thoughts about the coronavirus response in the Sunday Review.

Our real enemy does not come from the outside, but from within. Our real enemy is not the virus but our response to the virus — a response that has been degraded and deformed by the structural inequalities of our society.

America has a history of settler colonization and capitalism that ruthlessly exploited natural resources and people, typically the poor, the migratory, the black and the brown. That history manifests today in our impulse to hoard, knowing that we live in an economy of self-reliance and scarcity; in our dependence on the cheap labor of women and racial minorities; and in our lack of sufficient systems of health care, welfare, universal basic income and education to take care of the neediest among us.

The full article is worth a read.

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