"Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago?"
Republicans are so far up Donald Trump's rectum that they don't recognize this question is not the one they want people asking.
It started with Elise Stefanik, upstate New York’s answer to Marjorie Taylor Greene, who got in front of cameras after helping to torpedo the immigration bill, and decided to channel Ronald Reagan in 1980. “As Ronald Reagan famously asked us, “are you better off today than you were four years ago?” The answer for hardworking Americans across the country is a resounding NO.” Putting aside the fact that Stefanik is the typical Republican House member these days, acting as nothing more than an empty vessel for the wishes of Cheetolini, this is a particularly stupid rhetorical question to use this year.
As I’m writing this, it’s just an hour after midnight on March 12th. Four years ago at this time, I was working as a front-end developer, and I was in a hotel room in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I was down there conducting a second round of reviews with our biggest client, a multinational aerospace company, on the application that I was revamping for them. One of my colleagues, a SQL engineer, was also on the trip. For he and I, COVID had been something we had been tracking for weeks as it marched through China, because we both knew it wouldn’t stop there. We had offered to delay the trip, or host the review via videoconference. The client insisted on moving forward, and as a small business, we could not refuse the client. The day before I left, though, I went to Costco and spent $331 (yes, it’s one of those things burned in my brain) on stocking up with nonperishable foods, batteries, and yes, toilet paper. No, I did not know that would become such a scarce commodity—I simply didn’t want to leave anything to chance.
So here I was, in my hotel room, as then-President Donald Trump had just announced that international flights would be shut down in two days time. Other nations were following suit. Because of that, I was frantically working to find a flight to bring home my wife’s best friend, Kerry, who was literally on a safari in Rwanda. She didn’t think COVID would be as bad as it became, and that night, it was quite clear it was going to be that bad and more. Once I found her a way home, she literally rode on the back of a motorbike to the airport and flew nonstop for over a day, barely making it back to America before the lockdowns took effect.
As for myself, we cut the final day short with the client, who themselves were readying a work-from-home system. The NHL and NBA were shutting down. My colleague and I drove to Greensboro to catch a flight home, passing the famous Greensboro Coliseum along the way as banners for the cancelled ACC tournament were being removed and media milled in the parking lot. At the airport, as we waited in the lounge, Governor Roy Cooper was announcing the shutdown of all nonessential businesses and gatherings the following day. My colleague and I suddenly wondered if our flight would be cancelled and we’d have to drive all the way home. Thoughts of Tom Clancy’s Executive Orders danced in my head, where a similar outbreak led to the shutdown of all interstate travel. We’d flown to North Carolina just a few days earlier, having gotten the only masks we could find (not very protective ones!) and sanitizing wipes to clean every surface we’d touch in our seats on the flight. It somehow seemed insufficient for this return trip.
We arrived that night at Detroit Metro Airport, and as we walked into the terminal I was stunned at how crowded it was, how nearly nobody was wearing a mask or having any sort of protective measures in place. I could not understand why nobody seemed to be taking it seriously. The next day, my colleagues and I packed up anything we needed to work and headed home, with at least a two-week lockdown looming. Before we’d wrapped up with the client on that last day, I remember one of the engineers saying, “Don’t worry, this is all overblown and it’ll all be over in a few weeks.” A month after that, he was required to take two non-paid furlough days a month. Three months later, after his company and my other clients had cancelled their contracts with us, I was out of a job. Six months later, 15,000 employees of that aerospace company were too.
I have yet to return to the salary I was making at that time. I watched friends grieve as their spouses died from COVID. My own wife was on a ventilator in January 2021 when the insurrection began and I was terrified a civil war was erupting and she was unable to move. This nation has been frayed to the breaking point by an ignorant, loud, violent one-third of its population. I am not better off than I was four years ago, but it’s the man that Elise Stefanik and the Republican Party support that is responsible for that, and I will not forget it.