How can I ‘stay at home’ if I will soon be homeless?

By Alex P. Vidal

“Was I always going to be here? No I was not. I was going to be homeless at one time, a taxi driver, truck driver, or any kind of job that would get me a crust of bread. You never know what’s going to happen.”—Morgan Freeman

ANOTHER 30 days, huh.

President Trump has ordered us to prolong our “social distancing” until end of April.

This means we will extend our “stay at home” sacrifice in compliance with the universal guidelines and call for cooperation to help halt the spread of coronavirus and save more lives.

This means no work for another 30 days.

No work for ordinary “isang kahig, isang tuka” (one strike, one meal) workers like me means no livelihood.

No livelihood means no income.

No income in the United States means no grocery and no cash to pay our staggering bills, including payment for our most precious and important “hideout” during the Armageddon: apartment.

Due to the severity of the situation, “stay at home” has gained currency as a dyed-in-the-wool slogan and tossed as the benchmark to assuage our fears, confusion and outrage as the coronavirus decimates a large portion of our population at a mind-blowing pace these past weeks.

 

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After April 30, what if the virus refuses to throw in the sponge and authorities will be forced to make a perpetual social distancing order this time to save all the inhabitants in the planet?

Whoa.

How can we “stay at home” now if we have no more homes? If we lose our homes after our landlords/landladies have kicked us out for non-payment of arrears?

People normally think those living in America, or workers in the ”Land of of Milk and Honey” siphon moolah in the trees, thus they can be exempted from a veritable global economic meltdown as a result of any harrowing pandemic.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

COVID-19 has drastically changed our lives—rich or poor.

There’s nobody to blame, of course, but the wicked coronavirus why people all over the globe now cringe in disbelief and confusion, why there’s a sudden adrenalin rush as the world breaches the one million mark of infected cases and grapples to understand the difference between existentialism and romanticism now that our mortality is in the emergency room.

This development came as President Trump dangled last week the possibility of reopening the U.S. economy by Easter.

Now he has changed his mind. At a White House Rose Garden briefing, Trump extended the current guidelines on social distancing until April 30, keeping the United States in line with measures taken by other nations gripped by the coronavirus pandemic to keep their populations at home.

 

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The United States has the highest number of coronavirus cases worldwide at 239, 630 (as of April 2), according to Johns Hopkins University.

How high will the death toll be? A senior member of Trump’s coronavirus task force, Anthony Fauci, said the outbreak could cause 100,000 to 200,000 deaths in the United States alone before qualifying his estimate, “I just don’t think that we really need to make a projection, when it’s such a moving target that you can so easily be wrong and mislead people.”

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo)