PANDEMIC SHOULD NOT BE AN EXCUSE FOR EXACERBATING INEQUALITY, A LETTER FROM THIS WEEK'S GAZETTE--MORE FROM THE GOOD ENOUGH FOR THEE BUT NOT FOR ME VIRUS CHRONICLES

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PANDEMIC SHOULD NOT BE AN EXCUSE FOR EXACERBATING INEQUALITY, A LETTER FROM THIS WEEK'S GAZETTE--MORE FROM THE GOOD ENOUGH FOR THEE BUT NOT FOR ME VIRUS CHRONICLES

To the editor:

At the start of the Covid pandemic, we were stuck indoors watching Hollywood celebrities sing “Imagine no possessions” and lecture us about how we are all in this together. This Sunday we will see once again the hypocrisy of Hollywood, and the willingness of Andrew Cuomo to use his extraordinary emergency power to favor the wealthy and powerful here in New York State.

Regular people arriving in New York are met at the airport and forced to quarantine under threat of 15 days in jail and a $10,000 fine. If you refuse to give your cell phone number and consent to “daily monitoring messages” then the NYS Contact Tracing Program will come knocking on your door, as they have done with more than 2,000 recent arrivals. But if you are a celebrity? Fly your Gulfstream into Teterboro and roam about at will.

Most people reading this paper are not Hollywood celebrities. We cannot even do a Lady Gaga karaoke. But if you are Lady Gaga herself: you can fly in to NY, not be bothered with quarantine, and sing live on national television as part of a splashy award show production.

Look, I get it. Lady Gaga and her fellow performers such as Miley Cyrus and Ariana Grande are suffering. Music is their job. They can’t do touring and so they are having trouble paying for those mansions and fleets of private jets.

I feel less heartbroken for Hollywood celebrities than for the guy in Queens or Westchester who owns a karaoke bar and is facing bankruptcy. And make no mistake: the amount of small business bankruptcies is going to be a financial and personal disaster for many New York families. But regardless of whether your sympathies lie with the glitzy A-listers or the small business owners, the pandemic should not be an excuse to further exacerbate inequality.

Just because wealthy people like Gaga (net worth $320 million), Cyrus (net worth $200 million) and Grande (pauper of the group with a mere $150 million) need to work does not mean that they should be exempt from the rules the rest of us have to follow. We all need to work, since most of us don’t have hundreds of millions of dollars socked away.

The science is what it is. It should not be a tool for rewarding friends and punishing the working people.

If it is too dangerous to have karaoke in a bar, then it is too dangerous to have hundreds of performers and stagehands gathering to sing live. If it is a scientific necessity for people to quarantine for 14 days when arriving on that fresh hell known as Delta Airlines, then it is a scientific necessity for people to quarantine for 14 days when arriving on a $40M private jet.

Even if you don’t care about the MTV Video Music Awards, you should care about what this year’s telecast represents: we are not all in this together. Sunday night will be the latest proof of that sad fact.

--Paul Steinberg, Croton-on-Hudson

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SEE MORE GOOD ENOUGH FOR THEE BUT NOT FOR ME VIRUS CHRONICLES AT  https://everythingcroton.blogspot.com/2020/08/more-good-enough-for-thee-but-not-for.html