I finally read this NYT editorial, and it’s amazing. It makes me think that a coalition is taking shape across the country that goes beyond well beyond the “movement” as we understand it. I could cite other examples of a similar kind to buttress my point. Obviously, the movement, if it is smart, will adjust to this new reality. It would be a mistake not to. More could be said, but the sky is blue, the sun is out, and it’s time for my daily walk.

If Trump had to make a choice between reducing employment levels and restoring corporate profitability in the short term, that is, between now and November, I suspect he would chose the former over the latter. Why? Because lower unemployment rates, which was one of his claims to fame before the pandemic, are probably essential if he is going to win reelection in November, Even his billionaire backers, I suspect, would go along with this trade off, knowing that it is temporary and that nothing will be better for their bottom line than 4 more years of Donald in the White House.

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.