WORKING COMFORTABLE.

Philadelphia area columnist and radio talker Chris Stigall is no fan of upscale quarantine chic.

How else can you explain the complacency among many in Pennsylvania today? A governor who has the economy in a headlock, limiting the movements and activities of every citizen young and old.

He shows no sign of restoring normalcy or constitutional liberties because, you see, “it’s too risky.” He’s moved the objective from flattening the curve and keeping our hospitals from being overwhelmed to “eradicating the virus” or waiting for a vaccine.

Those goals cannot be achieved. There can be no eradication of a virus. It will mutate as the flu does every season, or it will fizzle out as SARS did years ago. But Gov. Wolf can’t control that outcome. A vaccine might never be developed. They haven’t found one for HIV, for example.

Still, my suburban neighbors seem largely unmoved. Why? Because they don’t feel the pain or the hurt of a lockdown. Oh, sure, maybe they’re scared of getting sick, or maybe they’re afraid of their elderly loved ones getting sick. I worry about that, too.

But that’s a well-off, suburban person’s worry because they have nothing else to worry about.

So many of these people have jobs already based out of their homes. Six-figure incomes tied to some large corporate entity that still operating as they always have. One parent brings home the handsome direct deposit while the stay-at-home parent posts on social media about every day being a holiday now that the “kiddos” are home full time.

The political economy in his column might or might not be correct.  But the phenomenon of keeping the upscale compliant and bought off while the precariat suffers appears to be part of the narrative these days.  A few days ago, Chicago's WMAQ television station ran a public service announcement (I couldn't find it in a quick pass through their website) apparently intended to reassure kids.  Something like "do what you have to do now and you can enjoy life as if nothing has happened."  The kids themselves: quite-well-scrubbed, in a setting tidier than even the most fertile imagination of Architectural Digest.  The privilege check, when it comes, might be way nastier than the appalled indignation of the Student Affairs types.