As Washington cutsoff desperately needed aid to the unemployed, millions of families face the reality that many K-12 schools likely arent reopening, and young adults look ahead to a bleak future, reality is setting in that theCovid-19 crisis was not a blip. This week on Intercepted: Guest host Naomi Klein argues that its time for some big bold thinking about how we can safely live, work, and learn with the virus and maybe even enjoy ourselves. She takes us to visit friends in Oakland, California, who have been living in a multi-family housing compound for years. Longtime environmental justice organizer and co-founder of Movement Generation Gopal Dayaneni explains that living in a democratic community with friends, rather than a single-family home, has meant far more capacity to deal with the labor of lockdown, and far less isolation for everyone. Klein is also joined by Rutgers UniversityNewark historian Neil Maher to discuss how a reboot of the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps could provide opportunities for young adults to find work, battle climate disruption, and live in their own communities of peers.

Jonathan Swan: Mr. President, thank you for joining us.

Donald Trump: Thank you very much.

JS: When can you commit that every American will have access to the same-day testing that you get here in the White House?

DJT: Ahah Let me explain. The testing. You know, its called science, and all of a sudden somethings better. I really dont know.

JS: I The figure I look at is death.

DJT: Were going to look.

JS: Lets look.

DJT: And if you look at death per

JS: Yeah. It started to go up again.

DJT: Heres one. Were last. Meaning were first.

JS: Last? I dont know what were first in.

DJT: The top one, thats a good thing, not a bad thing. The top Jonathan. Dont we get credit for that? They are dying. Thats true. And you ha And it is what it is.

JS: You said youve done so much for African-Americans.

DJT: I have. I did more for the Black community than anybody with a possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.

JS: Who says that?

DJT: Oh, just read the manuals. Read the books.

JS: Manuals? What manuals?

DJT: Read the books.

JS: What books?

DJT: Ah

JS: You told Fox News recently that you couldnt say whether youd accept the results of the 2020 election.

DJT: Jonathan, have you been watching television? Jonathan, I have heard that ah I dont want to tell you that. Good luck.

[Musical interval]

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

Naomi Klein: Welcome to Intercepted. Im your guest host, Naomi Klein. Im senior correspondent here at The Intercept and this is episode 140 of Intercepted.

DJT: It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away. We want to protect our shipping industry, our cruise industry cruise ships. We want to protect our airline industry. Very important. But everybody has to be vigilant and has to be careful. But be calm. Its really working out. And a lot of good things are going to happen. The consumer is ready, the consumer

NK: Way back in March, in the early days of the Covid era, I called up my old friend Jeremy Scahill, the actual host of this podcast, and we hatched a plan.

Both of our families would do strict quarantines for two weeks, wed make sure nobody had the virus, and then wed all get together and hang out. Itd be fun. Itd be fine. Just give it a couple of weeks.

I actually made similar plans with at least three other friends. We were all so confident back then. So in control of our lives. Or so we thought.

Five months later, Ive seen only one of those friends. And that took two months, not two weeks.

We all now understand that we know basically nothing. We dont know if there will be a vaccine. We dont know if we are headed for a second wave that will make the first one look tame. Thanks to shoddy antibody tests, we dont even know if we already had the virus or, if we did, what that means.

I dont know if my sons elementary school will be open one month from now. Or if it will stay open. The students I teach at Rutgers University dont know if theyll be going to school in person ever. They have no idea how they are going to pay off their student debts since the jobs they thought they were preparing for have vanished.

Families and loved ones, separated by continents and oceans, have no idea when they will see each other again. And as of this week, 25 million Americans are set to lose $600 a week in federal jobless aid and millions have no idea how theyre going to survive that.

All that we know for certain is this: Contrary to those early optimistic plans we all made, the virus, and all of the other crises it has deepened, arent going anywhere soon.

Even if a vaccine is developed, we are many months and perhaps even years away from seeing it rolled out at scale.

So how do we live with a highly contagious, deadly virus one that surges every time we go back to anything resembling normal?

Capitalism is already offering its answers and theyre bleak: a range of dehumanizing and isolating new adaptations. In Amazon warehouses, screens start flashing and machines start beeping when workers get too close to each other. In factories in China, workers are prevented from looking at each other while they eat, and theyre scanned and examined multiple times a day with the information fed into a central tracking system. Many schools are preparing to reopen by putting students inside plexiglass cubicles.

In short, systems that were already pretty dehumanizing before are being retrofitted to strip out the little bits of joy they once offered. A chat with a colleague in a break room. Recess with friends after hours spent in an overcrowded airless classroom.

Meanwhile, the body count from the virus keeps rising, because none of these measures are actual solutions. Theyre performances of solutions designed to get the profits flowing again.

But its not enough to reject this dystopia. If we dont like capitalisms version of living with the virus and we shouldnt then its on us to advance real alternatives for how we can live with it, how we can work and learn in genuinely safe, fulfilling, and maybe even joyful ways despite the virus. To have any chance of success, these ideas will need to be as radical as the times we are living through.

Everything needs to be on the table reimagining our schools, our food systems, our health care systems, housing. Its way too much for one podcast episode. So today, were going to zero in on just two areas that could use a radical Covid rethink.

Later on, in the show, well look at what our society should be offering to the millions of young people who are just leaving high school or university, beyond brushing up on their Zoom skills while applying for non-existent jobs.

But first, well rethink something even more fundamental the private single-family home. Because look: If sheltering in place is the new norm, then shouldnt our respective places feel less like containers for our bodies and more like communities?

Now Ill be honest with you. I dont live like this, at least not yet. Since Ive been an adult, Ive always either lived alone, in a couple, or in a nuclear family.

But early on in the pandemic, as my husband and I did our best to juggle our jobs, homeschooling our kid, caring for sick friends, making every meal, and being engaged politically, it really hit hard. In a pandemic that confines us to our homes for work, school, and leisure, the single-family home is a really bad technology.

Not only is it isolating its an absurdly wasteful use of resources. Millions of us have noticed it: Without school or babysitters or grandparents to pick up the slack, just keeping everyone fed, sheltered, and possibly educated, while trying to do your job, takes pretty much every waking moment. If someone actually gets sick, with the virus or with something else serious, all bets are off.

And thats not just bad for us as individuals, its bad for society because it means we have less time to show up for our neighbors or to fully participate in a democracy that is hanging on by a thread.

DJT: Somebody got a ballot for a dog. Somebody got a ballot for something else. You got millions of ballots going, nobody even knows where theyre going. You look at some of the corruption having to do with universal mail-in voting Absentee voting is ok. You have to apply. You have to go through a process.

JS: You have to apply for mail-in.

DJT: Absentee voting

NK: All of which is why I have been thinking a lot about the people I know who have chosen to house themselves differently in various co-housing setups of multiple families and friends. Usually, this involves accepting a slightly smaller home for you or your individual family in exchange for more ample shared spaces, like gardens and common rooms.

What struck me when I checked in with these folks is that when the Covid shock came, they werent knocked back like the rest of us. To use a much-abused phrase: They were resilient.

They had enough kids and adults to run a halfway decent home school without it being anyones full-time job. They had extra hands to share those daily tasks.

I want to introduce you to a few of the people Im referring to friends from the climate justice movement who live in Oakland, California. They are activists, educators, and artists who have already been living in a pod for years. Its a community that includes four small family units, a big backyard, a communal space for common meals and meetings, a garden, and so many fruit trees they call it The Orchard. Here are some of their voices, recorded by Producer Laura Flynn.

Gopal Dayaneni: My name is Gopal Dayaneni and I live here at The Orchard, which is along the Temescal Creek Watershed in unceded Ohlone territories and the birthplace of the Black Panther Party, also known as Oakland. I am one of the founding members of the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project. Im an organizer, activist, parent, and I live in an intentional community.

We are four families, nine adults and eight kids I guess half those kids are adults now because its been a while who live together, share housing, share common space, share meals. Were all really close, close comrades and friends. Were educators, organizers, activists.

Lets take a tour. This building was here but it was three feet lower and six feet in a different location and we ripped off the back third of it, gutted the interior, lifted it, moved it, and then completely rebuilt it in order to have two families upstairs, a single individual unit for my housemate Mary, who is the elder in our community, and a common space that we could use as shared space. And then of course all of the yard is common space.

-Garden salad!

-Garden salad!

-Weve been having so many garden salads.

-Did you eat some cucumbers, the lemon cucumbers?

-Yes.

-Yes, we did.

-The lemon cucumbers are delicious.

Deirdre Tansey-Chamberlin: So Im Deirdre Tansey. Were sitting in our beautiful yard and were sitting around our patio table enjoying happy hour, which we do, I dont know, in the summertime, more than once a week

GD: Literally surrounded by the fruits of our labor.

DTC: Yeah. And enjoying some appetizers and drinks. And were surrounded by our wonderful trees here, our apple and persimmon and apricot.

Mary Tansey: Mary Tansey. We often check-in and I think well probably do that more regularly again, every so often to truthfully, in the morning, say, you know, how are we? And thats Not too many people have even anyone to say that. You can maybe say it on the phone but thats not like here.

Kristi Laughlin: Im Kristi. So I think weve all been committed to and invested in the model, but for me I feel like were reaping the benefits almost of all those years of investment to say, Oh community is made for this moment. And co-housing is made for moments like this when you realize that what you have built has really bearing fruit.

DTC: You know, weve been here on this property for 10 years. We completely remodeled, you know, built a house practically from the ground up and have been through deaths and births. And sometimes it felt like going to that meeting this Sunday it was going to be really hard to discuss this topic, but it always comes out, like, OK at the end, you know, because I think we all I mean, I know I do love everybody here. Were a family and were going to get through anything together.

Robert (Bob) Chamberlin: Bob Chamberlin. You know, I have a number of single parents that are raising children that instead of asking me, Whats it like to live in community? asking me, How can I find a community? Do you have resources so that I can change the way Im living. Because the kind of, you know, theyre realizing how powerful this is, as far as not just for raising families, but also for crises. You know, in a time of crisis, its something to have numbers. Its safe to have numbers. Its really nice.

KL: Ok, who was it that makes the wonderful sorrel hors doeuvres? Bob, is that you?

GD: Isnt that the wraps?

NK: Its not a coincidence that this particular group of friends chose to pool their resources and live this way. As people who work at the intersection of ecology and social justice, they knew that we were headed for some kind of crash. On some level, we all knew it. But unlike most of us, they decided to prepare. And for them, preparing didnt mean stocking up a private bunker with hundreds of cans of baked beans. It meant pooling space, labor, and skills with people who shared their values. Thats what I wanted to dig into further with my friend Gopal Dayaneni. That and what it would take to liberate land and housing from the speculators so that everyone can have the chance to live in their communities of choice. Welcome to Intercepted, Gopal, and thank you so much for opening your home to us.

Gopal Dayaneni: Thank you for having me.

NK: I feel like, for so many of us who dont live in [an] intentional community like yours, its just been such a lonely time. Weve missed our friends. Weve missed our extended family. Our kids have missed their friends. And, you know, I found myself thinking a lot about the way youve chosen to live.

GD: We are just so blessed and privileged to be navigating this pandemic not alone. You know, we are all a single germ pod, or however you want to think about that. And thats been just enormous for our children, who have their peers to spend time with, for each other, for dealing with the rapidly changing information and just having regular check-ins every day or every other day to navigate, like, the constantly changing dynamics and to create the capacity to do that well. And then to also do that with an eye to the larger community.

DTC: When we first had to go to shelter in place and it was so unnerving and there was so much I know I was experiencing so much anxiety about, like, whats going to happen. All of sudden it was Friday and it was like, Oh, youre not going back to work on Monday, and now nobodys going back to work. And I really appreciated being a part of this community during that time, because it wasnt just my husband and myself just sitting together having this anxiety and maybe not being able to figure, you know, having to figure it all out ourselves.

KL: I feel like you guys have been my anchor and my saving grace for how to process everything that keeps happening and I really felt unmoored, I think, a little untethered, I think, not having like, Wait this is the second surge! Its not getting better, its getting worse! And what do we You know, how do we integrate that, and now what does it mean for all of us?

NK: What is different about living in community and being prepared for something like this. Lets start with just, like, supplies and shopping.

GD: I think many of us have been reflecting on, here at The Orchard, is just how quickly and easily we were able to pull ourselves together, sit down, make decisions about what we needed, how to get it, how to minimize the risk and minimize the number of people who were out and being exposed. How to consider at the same time that we were getting our food for ourselves and having it available in our basement and making sure that our very, very, very large earthquake shed was up-to-date and stocked and ready to go because its more than just an earthquake shed.

At the same time that we were, you know, that that was happening, I think we all were just very quickly realized like, oh yeah, the daily practice of self-governance over the last, you know, 15 years of living together and raising kids together and building buildings together and making hard decisions together has made us incredibly prepared for responding in a responsible, timely, just manner to the moment that were in.

NK: I just want to underline, Gopal, like, theres so much pod drama going on right now because people dont have these skills. Where its like, you know, you make a decision to be in a pod with another family so that your kids can play and then you find out that somebody in that pod has been doing reckless things and didnt tell you because people just arent used to thinking about their decisions beyond just themselves, right?

GD: You know, I always say the idea that the individual is the smallest unit of society is a lie. And I dont say that, like, from some ideological perspective. Its just simply the case that the smallest unit of society is the relationship between two or more individuals. That its the complex of relationships that make up society and community, not the individuals because we cant make meaning of ourselves without each other. And weve just been practicing that for a really long time.

In some ways, we take for granted the fact that we know how to make decisions and we, you know, regularly walk out of our homes to get together to just have a check-in and see how each others doing, and many times very formally and a lot of times informally grapple with big, hard questions about what were going to do about this or that thing.

In this moment, we realized that we have been preparing ourselves for being able to make hard decisions in these kinds of moments in ways that actually increase our capacity not just to care for ourselves but to care for others as well. The better we take care of ourselves, the more latitude we have to accommodate the needs of others.

And I think thats been something really important to us. Like, being able to live in community in this way makes it easy for us to mobilize into the streets to support Black liberation and, you know, engage in the mobilizations that are happening. The more were able to have this space for ourselves, the more were able to open it up for others. We do really, really regular check-ins about how the conditions are changing and what that means.

DTC: We manage it through WhatsApp.

MT: We have a WhatsApp.

BC: Product placement.

MT: And I go, Oh, ok, thats whats going on today. Thats what may happen today.

GD: Thats whats for dinner.

BC: Thats whats for dinner.

MT: Inno gives us the report of the Covid situation every day.

DTC: He does.

MT: I think he does it at 6:30 in the morning because my phone goes bing. Oh, thats whats happening with Covid.

GD: The key is, if you want to make pasta for the community dinner, you got to get it in early in the day because every once in a while, youll have a community dinner where theres like six meats and then theres no vegetables if you dont communicate.

Martha Hoppe: Or all pasta.

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Escape From the Nuclear Family: Covid-19 Should Provoke a Rethink of How We Live - The Intercept