{"id":4028,"date":"2020-05-02T04:41:45","date_gmt":"2020-05-02T04:41:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/?p=4028"},"modified":"2020-05-02T04:41:45","modified_gmt":"2020-05-02T04:41:45","slug":"we-are-living-in-a-failed-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/2020\/05\/02\/we-are-living-in-a-failed-state\/","title":{"rendered":"We Are Living in a Failed State"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sobering summary of our current state from The Atlantic’s George Packer<\/a>: <\/p>\n

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills\u2014a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public\u2014had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity\u2014to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…<\/p>\n

The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don\u2019t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target\u2014you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we\u2019ve tolerated for so long. When tests for the virus were almost impossible to find, the wealthy and connected\u2014the model and reality-TV host Heidi Klum, the entire roster of the Brooklyn Nets, the president\u2019s conservative allies\u2014were somehow able to get tested, despite many showing no symptoms. The smattering of individual results did nothing to protect public health. Meanwhile, ordinary people with fevers and chills had to wait in long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away because they weren\u2019t actually suffocating. An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person\u2019s face.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sobering summary of our current state from The Atlantic’s George Packer: When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills\u2014a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public\u2014had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7,9,2308,11,2520,13,14,15,17,18,19],"tags":[2559,567,2560,2563,988,2561,2562,2558,2556,2557],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-sergneri","4":"post-4028","6":"format-standard","7":"category-ethical-and-green-living","8":"category-faits-divers","9":"category-finanace","10":"category-future-of-work","11":"category-it-failures","12":"category-pandemic","13":"category-politics","14":"category-racism","15":"category-science","16":"category-thinking-about","17":"category-this-day-in-history","18":"category-trump","19":"post_tag-boasts","20":"post_tag-donald-trump","21":"post_tag-failed-state","22":"post_tag-heidi-klum","23":"post_tag-lies","24":"post_tag-petain","25":"post_tag-sarah-palin","26":"post_tag-scapegoating","27":"post_tag-virus","28":"post_tag-willful-blindness"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4028"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4030,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4028\/revisions\/4030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}