Two months in
By 
Read this essay by Sabrina Orah Mark:
I send my sons on a scavenger hunt because it’s day fifty-eight of homeschooling, and I’m all out of ideas. I give them a checklist: a rock, soil, a berry, something soft, a red leaf, a brown leaf, something alive, something dead, an example of erosion, something that looks happy, a dead branch on a living tree. They come back with two canvas totes filled with nature. I can’t pinpoint what this lesson is exactly. Something about identification and possession. Something about buying time. As I empty the bags and touch the moss, and the leaves, and the twigs, and the berries, and a robin-blue eggshell, I consider how much we depend on useless, arbitrary tasks to prove ourselves. I consider how much we depend on these tasks so we can say, at the very end, we succeeded.
Tomorrow, on day fifty-nine, I will ask my sons to “find me an acre of land / Between the salt water and the sea-strand, / Plough it with a lamb’s horn, / Sow it all over with one peppercorn, / Reap it with a sickle of leather, / And gather it up with a rope made of heather.” I will tell them if they perform each one of these tasks perfectly, they will be rewarded with more tasks. And if they perform each of those tasks perfectly, they will be rewarded with more. Until, at last, they will not be able to tell the difference between their hands and another boy’s hands.
Over the years I have applied for hundreds of professorships, and even received some interviews. I’ve wanted a job like this for so long, I barely even know why I want it anymore. I look at my hands. I can’t tell if they’re mine.
“Of course you can tell if your hands are yours,” says my mother. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I have no real job,” I say. “Of course you have a real job,” she says. “I have no flour,” I say. “Fuck the bread,” says my mother again. “The bread is over.”
A lot of things feel over. (Seriously, read it. It’s a great piece of writing. This person cannot get an academic job of course).
Something a lot of well-intentioned aka non-fascist upper class white people seem not to be getting at the moment is that “stay at home” isn’t a viable long or even medium-term option for, oh, I don’t know, 200 million Americans, give or take.
“But that’s why it’s so immoral for the Republicans to be blocking any kind of significant economic help for people who have lost their jobs and are going to lose them!”
Yeah, it sure is. But they’re not going to stop because they never stop. They’re like the virus that way.
People will literally starve if they don’t get back to work because Capitalist Jesus says that’s the way it has to be, so they’re going to go back to work sooner or later (probably sooner). Moscow Mitch doesn’t care: he’s all about dragging Obama for being uppity. Donald Trump has never cared about anything in his entire life except whether or not people are talking about Donald Trump, so forcing people to choose between starvation and getting the virus is A-OK with him.
You can’t ask people to stay home if they have no money and they have to go out to get some. Locking down for two months made sense in the context of a plan to do something else afterwards, but there was and is no plan, because this is a third world country with ten thousand nuclear weapons and a literal madman in charge of them and us.