What we never expected to happen, has finally happened in America. It is something we have heard about in other countries, but never imagined in our wildest dreams could ever happen here, as doomsday prophets try to convince all of us that the end is coming, or those who misread Bible prophecies claim God has sent a scourge on the planet in the supposed last days before the second coming.
Let us take a few minutes to pause and see what our new reality looks like in America in 2020.
The ugliness of scared people grabbing the last package of toilet paper, paper towels, or hand sanitizer from shelves is part of the American response to the worldwide pandemic that is COVID-19, now seared into our collective memory.
Amid the bad, we can also take heart in the many good things that are happening. A pandemic that has shuttered schools, closed museums, stopped trains from running, turned people into teleworkers and otherwise upended our daily lives from coast to coast, is also bringing out the best in people. And, unfortunately, the worst in others.
In Colorado, we see strangers on Facebook and Twitter offering to shop for groceries for people considered high risk and offers of child care coming from those with more free time than parents who have to work from home and watch children who will not be going back to actual schools and have to rely on virtual learning to make it to the end of the academic year and beyond.
Local businesses are going to be hard hit as people follow the smart precautions to stay isolated and flatten the curve of disease spread.
As cases multiply - which is what happens in a pandemic - there will be further opportunities to help our neighbors. Check on the elderly and offer to go to the store, especially those offering special shopping times for people at higher risk of contracting the virus. Buy gift certificates from local businesses to help keep their cash flow going.
Many restaurants still offer take-out services with limited human contact - if you use one, tip generously.
The disruption in our lives is just beginning. To get through this with grace, we must stay strong, united and, most of all, be kind to each other and to ourselves.
But, we do need to ask ourselves, could this be the moment that finally changes our politics?
There is an apocalyptic feel to Trump’s America in 2020: commerce and society are shutting down, markets have been plunging despite dramatic intervention and gains as a dangerous virus spreads exponentially - and the government flails with confusion and mixed messages led by a White House operating under what one former senior administration official describes as an “ad hoc free-for-all”.
The government, and the United States political system, had failed for years at such routine tasks as balancing its books and forging policy consensus. Now, it is failing catastrophically at its most basic function: protecting the American people. It is tempting to blame Trump for the dysfunction, and he has unquestionably made things worse. But he merely exploited a political system that has been unraveling for a quarter century or more. There are many causes: the realignment of parties along racial lines and into ideologically opposite blocs; the passing of the Greatest Generation which, having experienced war, knew that political opponents were not enemies; the toxic injection of unaccountable money into politics; and the polarization, vitriol and disinformation spread by social media and cable news voices.
As I speak to people outside the realm of journalism, I have often been asked what it would take to fix things. My standard response: a crisis beyond anything we have ever seen.
The 2001 terrorist attacks healed us briefly with what Franklin Delano Roosevelt once called the “warm courage of national unity,” but that fell apart in the campaign of 2002 and the Iraq War. The crash of 2008 did not unify us at all.
But this crisis could be bigger than both. And its early days showed the American political system at rock bottom. Both sides defaulted to finger pointing, and Trump treated the public to a barrage of false reassurances and disinformation. The government lost crucial time to prepare the country for the virus as a botched testing program let the illness spread unmonitored and unchecked.
Instead of rising to the moment, as President George W. Bush did with a bullhorn in the rubble of the World Trade Center, Trump spoke of a “hoax”, compared the pathogen to an ordinary flu, said it would “miraculously” disappear and then informed Americans, “I take no responsibility at all” for testing failures. Trump allies Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh amplified the disinformation, while another, Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr., suggested that the virus is a North Korean plot.
There can be no warm courage of national unity with this happening. Seventy-one percent of Republican primary voters believe the virus has been exaggerated for political reasons, and only a bare majority of Republicans were convinced the virus is definitely not a hoax, according to a recent poll.
Elsewhere, though, there are hopeful signs. The House passed its Coronavirus relief bill, with paid emergency leave, by an overwhelming bipartisan majority, 363 to 40. And Democratic voters are flocking to steady leadership offered by former vice president Joe Biden over the ideological purity of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Biden said, “This is like a war, and in a war, you do whatever is needed to be done to take care of your people.”
At times, Trump seems to grasp that this is what a leader should do. “Everybody is so well unified and working so hard. It is a beautiful thing to see,” he said on Twitter not too long ago. Alas, this followed a post on Twitter where he declared Joe Biden a “train wreck” and said, “sleepy Joe is SO CONFUSED.”
Trump will not bring about the repair and recovery of our way of governing. He cannot. This crisis has only highlighted his ignorance, his hucksterism and his incompetence. The White House chaos brings to mind Eliot Cohen’s prophetic words from November 2016 when the national-security expert warned fellow conservatives joining the Trump administration they would find “rabble rousers and demagogues, abetted by people out of their depth and unfit for the jobs they will hold, gripped by grievance, resentment and lurking insecurity. Their mistake - because there will be mistakes - will be exceptional.”
Now it is time to focus on Trump, Vice President Pence and in-over-his-head Jared Kushner. For now, they are the leaders we have.
But, as we contemplate economic collapse, mass death and the fracturing of our way of life, let us also resolve to rebuild our political system so this never happens again.
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