America’s Social Contract Is Broken.
The protests across the country are about more than police violence.
"These people obviously do not care about what is going on in this country. It has become a commonplace to describe America as a failed state, but I’m not sure that term quite captures what is happening here, this strange combination of decadence and suffering. It is not just that the federal government is doing almost nothing to address the pandemic, relying instead on the bluntest of measures—an economy-destroying lockdown—and praying schools and businesses will reopen in time for the election in November. It is not just that the pandemic has exposed every institution in American life, including the once-esteemed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. military, as being hopelessly incompetent. It is the wanton greed and corruption on display: the insider trading by U.S."
"But it is not enough, not for a pandemic. It is difficult to describe the feeling of helplessness this engenders—its vastness, the crushing weight of it. Even if we know, on an intellectual level, that government is broken, that our society’s privileges extend only to a lucky few, that no one is going to save us, it is another thing entirely to feel it as soon as you wake up in the morning. The surreal drift of the quarantine era, its neverendingness, is the essence of our political situation."