The Great Pause

On March 11, 2020, the world was turned upside down and the great machine we call capitalism came to a grinding halt as the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 as a Pandemic citing 118,000 cases across 110 countries. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s Director General sat in front of a microphone announcing to the world, “This is not just a public health crisis, it is a crisis that will touch every sector.” Indeed it did.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the pandemic came in during a period of high tension in politics. President Donald Trump was three years into his controversial presidency. Across the world, different types of degrees of shutdowns took place. In a race against time, scientists around the world worked around the clock to develop the world’s first mRNA vaccine in the fight against COVID-19. In a record time of less than 12 months, vaccines began to be distributed. Slowly things began to open back up. By then, the damage had been done. Party lines, politics, ideology, and theology had divided the country. Many people died. And every relationship was looked at through a lens of how you voted and whether you took the vaccine or not.

Something else emerged during this time of “The Great Pause.” People were looking around examining their lives wondering what they were doing with their lives. The death of George Floyd sparked The Black Lives Matter movement onto center stage. Highlighting the injustice minorities face. But also, after vaccines were distributed and people were asked to come back to work, many hesitated. Obviously from a personal and public health, but many were wondering, “What’s the point?” Why return to what anthropologist David Graeber called, “Bullshit Jobs.” Not only that, why risk your life for such a thing!

Since then, we have seen droves of workers “Quiet Quitting” when employees continue to put in the minimum amount of effort to keep their jobs but don’t go the extra mile for their employer or workers and we also saw workers join “The Great Resignation” movement. The working class had been exploited enough. For many decades now, the working class has been exploited to benefit the few. If you work a job long enough, it isn’t hard to see that the people who actually produce and do the labor don’t actually get the profits. This has been systematically engineered for over 100 years in the making.