It's Brian Lehrer, and this is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Friday, May 22nd.

Well, it's Memorial Day weekend starting later today, right? And it will be the weirdest Memorial Day weekend most of us will

ever have experienced. If you're newly unemployed, like almost 900,000 people in New York City

alone over the last two months, what do you do differently with another three days off? If you're

working from home and generally staying home, what do you do for a three-day weekend under the same roof as your two-day weekends? If you're working from home and generally staying home, what do you do for a three-day weekend

under the same roof as your two-day weekends?

If you're an essential worker, delivering for Amazon or cleaning apartment buildings or working

in a hospital, or you're an NYPD officer or a firefighter, and you get the three days,

do you go out and interact some more or take your turn

to just stay home and chill without exposures? Or what? What a weird Memorial Day weekend. And as we

pause, hopefully to remember our war dead, the real reason for Memorial Day, let's also this year

remember the 123 MTA workers who have died

from COVID-19, according to the latest stat released yesterday, at least 89 nursing home employees

in New Jersey, and all the other frontline workers and all the other lines of work who may have

gotten their deadly cases of the virus as they

enlisted or were drafted to keep society going, like soldiers in a war. And of course, all the

civilian casualties who we don't officially mourn on Memorial Day, but probably should, the bystanders

in humanity's wars who are in the wrong place at the wrong time, right?

Today we can say people in jails and prisons, nursing homes and other long-term care facilities,

workers and meat processing plants.

That's who the president used the Defense Production Act to force to remain at work nationwide.

More hamburgers, billions and billions served

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