Covid-19 is trying to be a special close friend to America. One of the cutest, most wonderful things about humans is their mammalian proclivity for physical closeness. This virus appreciates that closeness. It thrives on our neglect of disregarded and disenfranchised humans.

Covid is trying to be your friend, America: Covid loves your appetite for youth and money. It visits your grandparents in their nursing homes, because you don’t. Covid takes a holiday in the wonderland of crowded for-profit prisons that you’ve constructed to elaborately torture instead of rehabilitate 2.3 million of your citizens. Covid crashes on the couch in your packed tenements and homeless shelters. It’s joyriding through your factory schools, so the kids can bring it home to show their parents. Covid is really enjoying its tour of America. And sure, Covid’s a capitalist. It’s charging a death tax on its travels- we’re just not sure what percentage we’ll end up paying.

Covid really likes your Trump! Trump is an inspiration to Covid, and has been a valuable ally. Covid would like to have a beer and a hotdog with Trump, and congratulate him. Covid has a plan to help Trump get reelected by keeping people scared and away from the polls, and Covid appreciates that Trump’s currently the reason half of them don’t have a doctor, in the for-profit health system that works perfectly for Covid. I don’t know if you noticed, but while you were waiting for your tiny stimulus check- are you still waiting, really?- Covid gave most of your insufficient retirement fund to some other close friends of Trump’s.

Inspired, Covid is now a real-estate developer! It’s taking your undeveloped assets: like the single-owner shops and galleries and restaurants that you can’t fund right now while you’re desperately trying to order staple foods online from Walmart, Amazon and other giant megacorporations, or the homes that you can no longer afford, or the schools that will be closed and replaced with for-profit online learning systems, and Covid’s going to flip all that stuff directly to the very people who deserve it most: You know, the very people who need it the least.

Covid is turbo-charging the American Dream, if the American Dream is the nightmare that we’ve been living in the working class for the last forty years or so. If the American Dream is as simple as complacency, capitulation, obeisance and diminishing expectation of a decent life for our children while engaged in simple worship of celebrity because celebrity. Covid does not believe in a middle class. It’s all or nothing, baby.

Covid is democratic, like America is democratic.

We’ve been digging into the dirt floor and looking up at the diamond ceiling for a long time now, and Covid’s going to lower the floor and raise the ceiling, again, unless we find a cure.

To be clear, I don’t expect to cure Covid-19, and that’s not the cure we need, anyway- I do have some hope of an anti-greed vaccine. I’m pretty sure it’s made up of empathy for the underclasses, doing good works for the sake of doing good, active support of civic engagement and specific humans in your close community, true representation by those elected officials that choose to go against the dominant regressive wealth-based paradigm and speak plainly and honestly, active refusal to acknowledge structures of corrupt authority or their instruments, and active antagonism against targeted policies and organizations that pretend to take something that doesn’t exist- money- from us all for the unnecessary enrichment of few.

That vaccine won’t be funded by major pharmaceutical corporations- we’re pretty much going to have to crowdfund it, while discrowdfunding the disease, in 329.5 million ways.

Covid is trying to be your friend, America. It’s a special friend that shows up unexpectedly, that spikes your drink, throws you down the stairs, sells your kid’s TV to buy some meth and leaves your car wrecked in the parking lot of a seedy massage parlor.

With friends like these, who needs unfettered capitalism?