 | From the Editor's Desk
It's time to build In the U.S., we don't even have the ability to get federal bailout money to the people and businesses that need it. Tens of millions of laid off workers and their families, and many millions of small businesses, are in serious trouble *right now*, and we have no direct method to transfer them money without potentially disastrous delays. A government that collects money from all its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system to distribute money to us when it̢۪s needed most.
Why do we not have these things? Medical equipment and financial conduits involve no rocket science whatsoever. At least therapies and vaccines are hard! Making masks and transferring money are not hard. We could have these things but we chose not to specifically we chose not to have the mechanisms, the factories, the systems to make these things. We chose not to *build*.
You don't just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally. You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life.
You see it in housing and the physical footprint of our cities. We can't build nearly enough housing in our cities with surging economic potential - which results in crazily skyrocketing housing prices in places like San Francisco, making it nearly impossible for regular people to move in and take the jobs of the future. We also can't build the cities themselves anymore. When the producers of HBO's "Westworld" wanted to portray the American city of the future, they didn't film in Seattle or Los Angeles or Austin - they went to Singapore. We should have gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular living environments in all our best cities at levels way beyond what we have now; where are they?
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'I am so afraid': India's poor face world's largest lockdown A skinny, soft-spoken 30-year-old with a carefully trimmed beard, Mohammed Arif was working as a guard at a Mumbai apartment building when he got a call on April 1. His 60-year-old father had suffered a brain hemorrhage, and was battling for his life in a hospital in Rajouri, a small town in the Himalayan foothills of Kashmir.
By then the lockdown had begun. Buses and trains sat idle. Flights had been cancelled, though he couldn't have afforded a ticket anyway.
So Arif bought a Hero Ranger bicycle with fading purple paint from a fellow guard for about $8, and set off the next morning with the equivalent of $12 in his pocket and a small rucksack with clothes, a loaf of bread and a water bottle.
His destination was 1,300 miles (2,100 kilometers) away.
"What choice do I have?" Arif said in a phone call at the end of his first day, when he still had more than 2,000 kilometers to go. "He has no one else."
"Poor people suffer always and face tribulations. There's no escape," he said. "But at least my conscience is clear."
Repeatedly, Arif stumbled onto people who helped him. In one town, a man running a tiny tire-repair shop offered him chicken and rice. A couple days later, a truck driver shared his lunch.
One of the biggest surprises: the police. The Indian poor often fear the police, who regularly demand bribes and beat people with their bamboo staffs. But while police stopped Arif a few times, they always let him pass once he told his story.
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