The rent moratorium finally expired, just as the Delta variant is climbing and businesses are fearing another shutdown, plunging people back into unemployment (if they ever got out in the meantime) just when the UI benefits are due to expire for many. What remains for those who have nowhere else to live, and no viable employment options? The sad fact is that in this country, no one with the money or power to help these people give a damn. They would let them starve on the street, and only intervene with police if the homeless directly threatened their neighborhoods.

Humans are a often a heartless species, from the English royalty exploiting serfs to the caste system in India to the periodic genocides for religion or other differences, and I expect that once again there will be tragic consequences. Politicians will wring their hands, the wealthy will jet off to another country to escape the repercussions of having to live where the poors are impacting their way of life, and many of those falling through the wide slashes in our tattered social safety net will die from deaths of despair and untreated medical conditions.

We as a society should be better than this, but America has proven time and again that we cannot muster the empathy for our fellow humans as a whole to make sure people have their most basic needs tended to. I'm lucky that I have paid my landlord in full when I moved out, have my parents to fall back on and live with, and that I can (sort of) afford health insurance through the exchange, but I ache for those who have none of those things.  

And to be honest, if some sort of appropriate backlash begins as evictions ramp up, the best course would probably be for the tenants and small landlords to actually band together against the system that created this crisis and demand change. Demand higher wages for people who do go back to work, and universal basic income better than SSDI for those who can't work, so that tenants can afford rent. Demand functioning government that should have disbursed the funds for rent relief that landlords should have been paid during the moratorium. Demand that the predatory practices of the large landlords, in cahoots with private equity and too-big-to-fail banks, stop illegal practices and act in the tenant and individual property's best interests. 

We all need to demand more, because it sure as hell isn't given to us, and never will be if we don't act in the best interests of society as a whole.