August 1, 2020: Fighting the Ideology of Inequality

Posted on August 01, 2020 at 12:00 AM

If you don’t believe that human beings are of equal spiritual value then you don’t have to care whether they get treated equally in terms of the COVID pandemic. And since the premise of government safety net programs is equality, if you are as fanatically opposed to government as Trump and his officials are, then you have even less reason to care about whether people are being treated equally. Take a recent story in the New York Times, about tycoon Rupert Murdoch, recently retired in favor of his son from his Fox News and business enterprises. At the same time the Fox News was talking about the “coronavirus impeachment scam,” Robert Murdoch was calling off his birthday party on the grounds of the risk of catching the virus.

Do not call this hypocrisy. If you don’t feel connection with the people who will catch COVID because of the messages that your media empire sends out, then it doesn’t matter what you do. Not only is there no “we are all equal in God’s eyes,” but quite the reverse: the people who will be taken away by the virus are inferior people, either people of color or the elderly. After all, it was Donald Trump who said that the virus really should be allowed to go through the population like a wave and if it took away disproportionately elderly people, then they should think of themselves as warriors in a war and happy to die for the better good.

Trump has responded to his C-suite friends in the meat-packing business by banning unions and lifting regulations, leaving workers ever more vulnerable. CEOs don’ t need help, so why aren’t they instead raising the minimum wage? Some in the class of billionaire owners belong to religious fundamentalist groups.  If their religious belief is that God has decided who is rich and who is poor, has God also decided that the rich should refuse the poor a living wage, and that God wants the rich to actively suppress others?

This is the nadir of an inequality doctrine. Trump has made everything so much about himself—one person —that it is not easy to see the underlying ideology, which is against equality and not just pro brute force authoritarianism.

We must fight their lack of information on this strange age/proclivity aspect of COVID. A recent interviewer on MSNBC spoke with a 21-year-old Florida resident who came back from enjoying an evening in the bars because of the re-opening. As a result, everybody in the household was infected and his father was hospitalized. Obviously, some people remain unaware of the difference between COVID and the flu. Information is important to us all!

— Elizabeth Spiro Clark, Chair, Human Rights and Democracy Task Force