To the Editor:

COVID’s ravages are revealing to us the unacknowledged, sordid underbelly of this nation’s claim to greatness: its systemic racism, its systemic poverty, and now its tolerated genocide.

Over the past four decades, significant portions of our population have been made fragile, even destitute, as the inequity in wealth and economic security ballooned between classes and color. Millions live from paycheck to paycheck, or as undocumented peons, or as incarcerated thousands, or as the literally homeless on the streets of this nation. These people are now dying at a rate eight to nine times that of white middle and upper classes.

Over a quarter million persons are dead and families grieving, because our federal government and its agencies and the banks they favor have refused to supply the resources, and enact the regulations, which would have stemmed this plague. Even now the GOP Senate blocks the Heros Bill, which imperfect though it may be, would send aid to desperate unemployed millions, struggling hospitals, and states. This crisis calls for legislation that cancels rent and mortgage debt, that forbids utilities shut-offs, and orders emergency financial aid to those at the bottom of our class pyramid. Trillions have been given this year to the nation’s major banks and giant corporations in order to subsidize the stock market.

The subsidies so far allocated to small business and to millions of Americans with no income, have been difficult to access, trickle through a maze of required proofs of eligibility, and are woefully inadequate in scope.

I cannot stop my rants, because I am outraged!

Polly Brody

Heritage Village, Southbury November 24, 2020