Letters ... October 19, 2022

Covid-19: capitalist genocide continues
On Sunday, September 18, President Biden declared that the pandemic has ended, and the U.S. can now return to “normal.”  Yet, The People’s CDC reports that over 98 percent of the U.S. population live in areas with high rates of transmission (pcdc.org, 9/19). The Lancet, the British medical journal, confirmed that the world’s response to Covid-19 is “a massive global failure” (Washington Post, 9/18).

Is Covid-19 over? If you are one of the 400-500 people in the U.S. who die each day, or the one person in five living with long Covid, or a person living in a previously-colonized country where only seven percent are fully vaccinated, or one of millions with chronic disease or advanced age, Covid is not over.

Returning to “normal” is as appealing as Trump’s “make America great again.” Normal is billions without healthcare, paid sick leave, housing, a job, food, safety, racial and gender justice, energy, clean air, education, social connections, and other critical components for a good life. While all workers experience these problems, Black, Latin, and indigenous workers around the world suffer in disproportionate numbers. We are all connected. The denial of vaccines to poor people endangers their lives as well as ours as variants develop and travel across borders.

We can prevent future diseases by stopping climate change, deforestation, and dangerous farming practices. We can mitigate Covid-19 with masking, ventilation, free universal vaccination and health care, free test kits, medications like Paxlovid, and accommodations for people with disabilities.

This will take a concerted fight to prioritize health and create a better normal around the globe. And that will take a communist society organized by the working class with no profiteering.
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Red seniors are living libraries of antiracist history
Feeling a bit down during the long dark night period of Covid-19, capitalist climate destruction, war, racist, sexist violence and, because of a comrade’s suggestion, I am writing about positive developments at my New York City senior center. Because of Covid and fear, our center lost most seniors that formed regular discussions where I got to discuss communist ideas and showed CHALLENGE to some.

I recently got the program director to provide a weekly discussion table (with masks and cookies) which produced eight seniors who discussed homeless people in the neighborhood and Mayor Adams. The second meeting included two Black seniors and the discussion was racist shootings.

One Black senior said he was a supporter of Malcolm X and his anti-white Muslim group because they were the only Black workers that were fighting back. Another Black maintenance worker said he attended many Malcolm X rallies and Martin Luther King rallies. I got to say I was a member of a transit worker mostly Black rank and file group that joined the Harlem Unemployment Center’s picket lines to support the hiring of Black workers on all white construction jobs in Harlem. The Unemployment Center was across the street from where Malcolm held his rallies. Our transit group went over to hear Malcolm who on seeing me, the only white, said “take that honky around the corner and break his fxxking head.”

So luckily my transit buddies convinced the crowd that I wasn’t a cop and I survived. I told my senior group that after Malcolm went to Mecca and talked with many white Muslims he realized that racism was a capitalist invention used to pit workers against each other to protect the bosses’ profits. We had a lively discussion and the program director said later that she didn’t realize that seniors had such a rich history and that they were, “living libraries.”

I got a lift from the discussion and I hope the struggle continues.
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