Hunger is swelling across the country, reports the NYT. But the Republicans could care less. Let our children starve, they say. While Democrats want to expand the Food Stamp program for the duration of this awful pandemic and economic implosion, McConnell and gang resist.

If anybody is operating on the assumption to “never waste a crisis,” it is this gang. It is strikingly evident in the negotiations around stimulus packages addressing a cratering economy, massive unemployment, and human hardship on an unimaginable scale.

The planet needs stewards who understand we are an interwoven (and to a degree contingent) part of the web of life and then act accordingly. But the pandemic is a forewarning that ecological mutuality and dependence isn’t yet our lodestar. This cognitive deficit, if it continues, will make the present pandemic nothing but the first act of a real life drama in which nature will become the main protagonist and exact its revenge on humanity in ways that are unimaginably deadly and disruptive.

Set aside Trump for a moment, the pandemic that is taking so many lives and disrupting the world as we know it forcefully tells us that nature, if turned into a thing outside of us — an object — that we relentlessly exploit and abuse with no limits, will sooner or later exact its revenge. Nature it isn’t premeditative or vengeful, but it does act according to its own laws of reproduction.

In memory of George Meyers and Fred Gaboury on this May Day. It was a great privilege to hang out with the two of you for many years. Once Fred and I left NYC on a road trip. First stop was Pittsburgh for a meeting in the mid-afternoon and then immediately on to Cleveland for another meeting that night. Upon finishing we jumped back into the car and drove to St. Louis overnight for a day time meeting there and then sped off to Chicago for another gathering that evening.

But with weariness creeping in, we had the good sense to bunk down there. But as the sun rose the next morning in Chicago, we grabbed some breakfast at McDonald’s, one of Fred’s favorite food stops, and headed to Detroit for another meeting in the late afternoon. After eating dinner there, we got back into the car and drove overnight, arriving in NYC as the sun was rising. As exhausting as it was, Fred and I were quite proud of our whirlwind road trip. Only once did we stop the car on an interstate highway to settle a heated argument. Fred was a “trip.” And better yet, great company.

On this May Day, I tip my hat to the many Communist autoworkers in Detroit who I had the great honor of knowing and working with years ago. They are in the front rows of the “Greatest Generation.”