As we struggle with #COVID19, emotionally, financially, socially, & with our lives, we should consider that this pandemic is a dress rehearsal for something bigger, and we’re failing. Old, bad, ideas need to be retired. Spoiler alert: we have a lot of those old bad ideas to retire.

America has shown that its desire to make a buck on everything by refusing to adopt Universal Healthcare, is killing its own citizens and making a dreadful disease worse for the entire world. For profit hospitals, health care, education, justice, etc, is hurting us all. Ayn Rand and her idiotic ideas be damned, winner take all just means that you live while everyone else dies. Hate to break it to you, but “last man standing” makes for a shitty world to continue trying to live in.

As for most of the developed countries on this planet that do offer universal health care, let’s admit that the ‘tried and true’ economic systems don’t work here and won’t help for the foreseeable future. Those countries, and I include my own country of Canada, need to adopt Universal Basic Income (aka UBI) to help support the economy as we sink from recession into depression. If you want to help the economy survive, and you want basic services to survive, either we do away with this collective fantasy we call “money” entirely, or we give people money.

I’m not starry-eyed enough to think we can pivot from those other collective fantasies, capitalism and consumerism, quickly enough. That leaves UBI to fill the gap and allow our economy to maintain some semblance of normalcy.

One of these days, we’re going to face a real pandemic, one that will make this COVID-19 episode feel like the opener to a horror show that builds up, over the course of a season, to the real danger, one that leaves unthinkable damage in its wake, if the heroes of that dystopian story are lucky enough to survive. This is just the dress rehearsal, folks.