Consent Withdrawn.

by Joseph Segal

They want us all to go back. Go back to work, get back to “normal”. We’re told this pandemic has laid bare the fragility of our broken social compact, especially where race is concerned. And they seem to believe passing a few laws requiring police not to choke or shoot unarmed people of color to death will do. They are telling us to go back and “reopen” what was.

What was, what we all were part of before Covid19 was a social and economic system that even the wealthiest beneficiaries of that system acknowledge now is unsustainable and ill-conceived. It was and still is a system that demands the majority of people to work at jobs trading the precious commodity of our healthy working hours, days and years of our life for wages so we can pay our debts to society in the form of interest on loans, rent and healthcare insurance.

I’ve purposely used the term they use to describe an inmate in a prison, “paying their debt to society” because we have been imprisoned in a system where almost all of the benefits gained have gone to those who are already wealthy. We’ve become a society where only the rich get rich and the rest are told to go back to work.

This multinational corporate economic system in the United States with its corporate rule that puts shareholder gains above health and wellness of people, communities and our…