World eyes are turned on Covid-19. The different parts of it are parsed, how “front-line” workers are affected, who front line workers are, in a constantly expanding definition that always includes doctors, nurses, EMT, police, but rarely janitorial crews, health assistants who clean units, kitchen staff, but that sometimes acknowledges public transit workers, nursing home staffs, grocery clerks, retail cashiers, and delivery people, but rarely notes garbage collectors, street sweepers, or 911 operators. This is a growing list of who is an essential worker. Yet who defines essential? What defines essential?
Reports are made on who is impacted most, elders, those with already weakened bodies, the poor, with, as usual, black people, brown people, and indigenous people bearing the larger proportion of illness and deaths. And what about the incarcerated, what about the imprisoned immigrants, what of those who labor as unacknowledged slave labor in sweatshops not just in far off countries, but in every country, in this country. What of those who have eluded the virus but are struck down as some of the surging numbers of domestic violence victims? Maybe it rates a day or two of mentions but then on to the latest Trumpet blaring out lies or idiocy or massaging his own ego with the bestest of whatever he is tooting.
And then there are those who see only a politics of conservative versus liberal in the virus, those who see wearing masks as one line of defense and those who see them as a threat to personal freedom. Those who see that a certain amount of physical distancing is needed to reduce the scourge and those who see the idea of sheltering in place as a new age bondage. Those who see the washing of hands and cleansing of surfaces as actions of wimps and cowards and those who view them as obvious strategies for survival. There are so many strands to this virus of crowns.
Capitalism is slowed down, except for the pharmaceuticals that rake in ever larger profits and yet government does not step in creating jobs as during the Great Depression, to make sure that “we the people” do not starve or become unhoused. Indeed, the massive layoffs create a climate where employers can ask for more and pay less because there is such a paucity of jobs. Work at home and yet the employer does not up one’s salary for using their own home instead of the office. So the worker pays (office) rent, pays the cost of utilities used for work, pays for garbage and water, heat and/or cooling systems in their new work space and the employers expenses are reduced. Many employers are now looking at ways to make this relationship more permanent for as many as possible. A virtual wage cut in this age of virtual communication, virtual contact, virtual meetings and virtual office parties. Public conversations are being held to on turning the masses of unemployed into the fields to bring in the harvest that so many immigrants used to shepherd in, that so many immigrants still sow and gather while living in conditions prime for the spreading of Covid-19.
And then democracy is in a stranglehold with official and unofficial autocrats reshaping their countries, hampering free elections, creating decrees that profit 
themselves and their cohorts and weaken the masses. There is a fairly quite but very aggressive war going on to diminish democracy to an annoying itch going on around the wo0rld and most definitely in the United States where majority ideals and demands are ignored by the ultra-conservatives holding the reins of the U.S.A. and its move to becoming an oligarchy of authoritarians.
The casualties of Covid-19 are many. One begins to wither under the statistics of the dead and dying, the sick and healing, the hungry and homeless. Blame is sprinkled everywhere like salt on fried potatoes and stuffed into tongue-less mouths so no flavor or texture will be absorbed. Views of how Covid-19 came to be are aired, but mostly only the accepted versions, various transit routes and a tale of open-air marketplaces and bats. But there are alternative stories, though banned from popular outlets.
And there are some histories of pandemics, the fact that most were spread through war or as an act of war. What then are we to learn from this pandemic, from pandemics of war and pandemics as war?
Let’s consider a very brief history
A Pandemic Count-Off
Where does one start counting
Before Bogdahvista Torah, Bible, Koran,
before Ifa oracles and First people prognostications
these unseen killers of humans came
and ravished the people and left graveyards
spread in roped scars across the land
This is then an abbreviated list
of pandemics passed through the ragged sieve of war
of conquest, of dominion, of the planning for war
or the execution of war when all
who died, soldier and civilian were collateral
sacrifices to the cause of dominion and oppression
In 430 B.C. Athens Greece
the Peloponnesian War raged as people died
in Libya, Ethiopia, Egypt Athens
This was not the first pandemic
but its swath was broad and deep
Then the 164 C.E. Antonine Plague
was spread by the Huns who pressed
and warred and conquered and spread
death like freshly harvested grain
In 541 C.E. the Plague of Justinian arrived
with rats inadvertently shipped to Constantinople
with tributes demanded of the recently defeated Egypt
Hundreds of years later in 1347
The Black Plague found Europe
again riding on fleas housed on rats
hidden in ship bowels
returning from the failed Crusades
Jump to the 1600’s
in what was renamed the Americas
when smallpox was draped on blankets
and given freely by the colonizers
who made it one part of their
war against all indigenous souls
1817 brought the First Cholera Pandemic
when British soldiers spread
its water borne elements
throughout the world
as it conquered and colonized
The Spanish flu of 1918
Travelled via soldiers
spreading the virus to Spain
where it traveled west
landing across the Atlantic
2013 SARS
again a pandemic crosses oceans
and scales mountains
again there is dying
And we war with the virus
even as we war among ourselves
2020 Covid-19
Perhaps gleaned from animals and developed
In the quiet laboratories of biohazard research
by accident or strategy leaked to the public
killing hundreds of thousands
sickening millions many of who will be left
with lifelong diminished health,
compromised lungs, palsied limbs, weakened muscles
no continent unscathed
no generation untouched
The pandemics come faster and faster
delivering the same message
era after era-
Find a better way and you may live
Find a better way to live
Find a better way to live a better way
See the other as the self
See that the self is the other
or prepare for the next pandemic
and the one after that
Next posting a few of my Covid-19 poems.
Please comment on what information on Covid-19 effects are not getting enough attention and what alternative actions you see for a healing of our families, communities, nation. Add links if you have them. We need to tell a fuller story