It feels good to give everyone making less than $65,000 some money, as our government is planning to do in the most enormous bailout in American history.

This week, the government is playing God and acts like God, and perhaps that is the best and only way to fight a virus like this one. They are wielding a lot of power, and most people are grateful for that.

Understandably, they just want to be safe.

I can’t say it makes me comfortable. I see this bold and decisive give away at least partially a magic trick, an illusion. since it pretends to really help the most vulnerable.

We’ve been down this road before in my lifetime, during crises everyone talks about helping the poor and pressured.

But I remember that after every hurricane, fire or tornado, it’s the people at the bottom of the rung who get drowned in paperwork, smothered in bureaucracy, given token or too little money to make a difference, or who end up filing papers and writing angry letters for years about what they were promised.

These are not the people with slick lawyers and media contacts and lobbyists and politicians they have given money to. Everyone can stomp all over them, and do.

According to the federal government, more than a million people remain homeless from storms and fires, some going all the way back to Hurricane Katrina. It’s one thing for politicians to get up in front of cameras and promise to get relief for everyone who suffers.

But it’s not what happens.

And there is no evidence this government and Congress will re-write this history.

I could never argue against giving shattered people $2,000. And nobody is.

But I don’t wish to be fooled into thinking it will save them from the storm, or that the long and sad history of the poor is about to change.

It is one thing to help our hemorrhaging economy.

It is quite another to help people who suffer the most.

Boeing is asking for a $60 billion check, and individual airlines and hotel and travel companies and restaurant chains – who have turned flying and employment and customer service into a greedy and uncomfortable morass – are getting much more, and will be asked for nothing in return.

Trillions of dollars in aid to banks and businesses are already flowing into the system. We all just assume the system is what needs saving, not the people who live in it.

The waitresses at Jean’s place never screwed up like Boeing did, never killed anyone through their greed and incompetence, never got people tossed out of their homes, never triggered a recession.

They just came to work every day for decades, patched up their trailers,  paid their bills, took care of their children, paid their taxes,  lived without benefits or IRA’s to fall back on.

Who, exactly, is going to make them whole and get them rough the next hard years? Not the people giving them $2,000, for sure. They don’t need a mortgage payment, they need their lives back.

Boeing and the hotel chains and the airlines have a lot greater access to interest-free credit than anyone at Jean’s place and the many thousands (or millions?) of small business owners and hourly workers whose lives are being shut down and upended for a very long time.

Free health care might be helpful, so would paid family leave and subsidized daycare for the years it would take the economy to recover, for them to live without regular paychecks. These aren’t socialist or utopian ideas, they are about survival and dignity.

These are the challenges the waitresses at Jean’s, and millions of others face urgently and immediately. And not for a month or two.

Real help isn’t coming, it’s not in the planning, not unless you are a big corporation with a lot of lobbyists in Washington and a lot of politicians in your iPhone contact list.

Kelly, Kelsie, and Kevin don’t have a lobby. I think we all know this is true if we think about it and free our minds from the media static and the politicians if that is still possible.

I guess I just don’t feel as great about the bailout that is not being called a bailout. Who are we kidding? It seems to me it misses the point – there is no net beneath the people who most need one.

The relief money will be unevenly and unfairly distributed. That is already clear. It is wildly out of balance if one thinks it should go to corporations and the needy in equal numbers. Or, God forbid, help the people who need it the most the most.

Compared to what the airlines and hotels are getting, $2,000 is a tip. It will not last long in our country if it has to go to food, daycare, rents, car payments, dental work, and overdue mortgages.

I’d love to get that check in the mail, but I don’t fool myself into thinking it would last very long, or alter the trajectory of my life. Like almost all of you reading this, I am on my own.

There are no fairies in Washington coming to pull us out of the muck if we get sucked in.

And I am better off than a lot of people.

There are many ways in which the coronavirus is a moral disease because it raises so many moral and ethical questions about medicine, politics, and the individual choices we are all being asked to make.

Our government is telling us how to live in every conceivable way, including the most personal details of our lives. Right now, we are dependent on a government that is all-powerful and is dominated by the opinions only of the “left” or the “right,” two tragically narrow options.

I wonder if they are not hiding behind a genuinely lethal threat to play their cards and shape our “truth” as they usually do. As my first boss in journalism told me, there is only one story in the world: the rich screw the poor, every time.

Historians and philosophers know there is not nearly as much difference between the “left” and the “right’  as they would like us to think, and as so many people do think.

Citizens rage back and forth on social media,  tearing our country apart, tricked into thinking they ought to hate one another but never see the real villains in their lives. Somehow, they manage to keep us divided. Imagine what might happen if we got united?

By pretending to fiercely debate each other, they obscure the truth in plain sight: there is really not much debate at all, as the bailout package suggests.

As long as they pretend to hate each other, the corporate-political-media triad is safe and getting richer by the day, even now. CNN and Fox News rail at each other all the time, but they are both run by corporate media, not ideologues, they are both making billions of dollars profiting off our differences.

Looked at it one way, it’s awful creepy.

Do we buy the idea that they are different from one another, or enemies?

In our country, there is a very limited range or spectrum of ideas to debate, something that is so obvious watching the political debates, every one sponsored and directed by corporate-owned media. Debate after debate, hour after hour, they fight about nothing really. Can anybody reading this claim otherwise?

Does anyone believe they will explore changing the system in those debates?

Actual citizens have to sit in the audience and be quiet, spectators at their funeral. Sometimes, we are gifted with questions from “authentic” voters,  how quaint.

So the government is offering trillions of dollars now to pay off the mushrooming virus-driven corporate debt and billions more to quiet and anesthetize the people getting clobbered and facing poverty, illness, child care, and debt.

The $2,000 won’t go too far if somebody gets sick or falls a few months behind in the mortgage, or no longer has enough money to buy food. Get some money into their hands before they get angry and start speaking to each other.

Tens of millions of people will soon be in that category, and they will be losing their homes while Boeing is back, making sloppy and dangerous airplanes and enriching stockholders.

When I write this, I feel like some aging leftie spouting radical ideas, but I am not, except in contrast to the very narrow range of ideas we are permitted to see and hear.

I am a fairly middle of the road, even conservative Libertarian who feels uneasy about the disparity of support between what the wealthiest corporations are getting – the rich already got their tax cut – and what the people who are genuinely in need are going to get. This is the illusion part, the trickster’s a sleight of hand.

If you ask them, they will tell you they know that they are going to get nothing in practical terms, like they always get. They know the story, so do their parents.

They already know their $2,000 tip isn’t going to get them jobs,  daycare, health care, or more than one or two mortgage payments. It’s better than nothing, but it’s not the revolutionary or caring burst of government passion the media is telling us it is, or the pols are claiming.

FDR, who knew what it cost to lift the suffering and the poor, will be spinning in his grave.

We have been manipulated into accepting the idea that any other idea – Democratic socialism, parliamentary government, re-structuring of wealth – is a heresy, a Communist plot to destroy our great country.

There is no real debate about the morality or fairness of these “aid” packages, the permissible discussion offered by the corporate/political/media alliance only enhances the strength of our assumptions.

It implants them in our minds as the entire possible range of opinions and ideas that exist.

The only debate is about how much money to toss out, and how quickly, not whether the system is inherently fair or balanced.

At times like this, watching the great charade of debate, it becomes apparent to me is that the “left” and the “right” are not two things but one thing, conspiring to give the impression there is a fierce struggle going on when there really is none.

We are thus fooled into believing there is a debate at all.

When the shit hits the fan, everybody in the system knows what it is they need and want to do. Above all, the order must be protected. Our President, who is a life-long insider, has brilliantly convinced tens of millions of people that he is a radical disrupter. But of what?

The hardest working people in the country believe he is the solution, not part of the problem.

I am not a particular fan of Bernie Sanders, I am much too middle-class,  but it is interesting how quickly and forcefully he has been shoved to the fringes and pushed out of the way.

How could this 79-year-old Socialist/Leftie whose family fled Poland to come to America, be such a menace? Because he thinks outside of the box and promotes change. He doesn’t fit in the plan.

I found some of his ideas farfetched and unworkable, and impossible,  but at least he had some ideas that nobody else had, and many people love.

His followers embraced his programs and saw some justice and value in them. Elizabeth Warren is already screaming about the new bailout. No one is listening.

The free thinks are doomed, pushed to the edges, and out of sight.

Goodbye, Bernie, real mercy for the poor is too extreme a position in our country. I’m wondering if I’ll get a check soon, the mortgage is due.