A Year Out The Window
We Don’t Need Another Hero (Retiro Way #1999)
This title refers to two communities performatively hailed as heroes by a society that failed to reciprocate as good conscience would have required. The first of these groups were the farm workers, forced by poverty and job insecurity to work through the pandemic in spite of not being given any protections from contagion by their employers, sometimes not even after alarmingly high rates of contagion were reported among them. The second of these groups is that of the frontline healthcare workers, who risked contagion on the daily for a society that failed to deliver the minimum courtesy of strict, nationwide adherence to contagion-reducing measures, all while expecting them to continue providing top-notch life-saving care whenever contagion landed the citizenry in hospital emergency rooms — as exemplified by former President Trump himself, who refused to don masks and observe social distancing yet received our country’s foremost VIP care after falling ill with COVID-19 himself. As per the Tina Turner song of the title — written for the film Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, which is set around the year 1999 — “I wonder when we are ever gonna change.”