Wall of Text: COVID lockdowns

Wall of Text: COVID lockdowns. At the first sign of COVID, film and TV studios shut down, and they stayed shut down for the better part of a year. Some shows are still being done from home. I love how COVID-19 turned The View, The Price is Right, The Daily Show, and every other professional TV show into a youtube channel. I think it shows just how bloated and unnecessary Hollywood is. What’s been lost in the noise is how Americans sat at home and watched their favorite celebrities do their shows from home, like a vlog, complaining about how difficult it was to self-isolate for a year in their 500-acre mansions. Meanwhile, I had to go to work as if nothing was wrong. I worked through the entire pandemic. I watched every single celebrity in Hollywood complain about how difficult lockdown was, and I’m thinking what lockdown? I never got to lock down. I never got to take time off from work. I was working with the public before masks were required. Before the term “social distancing” existed in the American lexicon. I had to risk my life during a pandemic while the rich went on camera complaining about the hardships of staying at home and self-isolating. The difference between Hollywood’s experience with this pandemic, in plain sight for all to witness, and everyone else’s experience should be enough to ignite a class war, but it isn’t. Americans are still going to work. We just accept the rich got to self-isolate and complain about confining themselves to their mansions for a year while the rest of us went to work during a pandemic that has taken a million American lives, at least. At my particular place of employment, we received a text message warning us every time a positive case of COVID was reported in the building. For a year, we had to go in as if nothing was wrong, and then we watched while everyone on TV did their jobs from home in self-isolation because of one positive case at their studios. The difference between the rich and the poor is plain to see. It hasn’t been the same pandemic for all of us. The rich got to self-isolate while the poor had to work through it. Some of the poor also had to self-isolate, and they did not receive the relief they needed to get through it, meanwhile we’re supposed to identify with our celebrity friends on TV complaining about how hard they have it living in voluntary isolation while they had the money to go without work for a year. We should be rioting over this. We should wonder what exactly the rich have done to earn their wealth, and why we had to keep going to work while they sat at home for safety reasons. Why giant corporations lined up at the government’s door asking for a $500B handout at the first sign of an interruption to the business cycle while the rest of us beg for $1400 so we can afford rent. Why the rich got to be on camera telling us how the poor should be willing to risk their lives and go to work for the good of the economy while they got to do their jobs from home within their gated communities. Eventually the poor will start to question why they’re working so hard for so little, risking their lives for the good of the economy, and they will question what exactly the rich are doing to earn their position of privilege and isolation. If the myth of the hard-working rich person were true, then the rich should have been off camera working hard to get the country through the pandemic, while the poor self-isolated at home. I like to think it’s only a matter of time before the poor realize this, and then the guillotines will come out again.