In 2020, post-America's basic illness remained uncured

Symptoms came and went, but the underlying malady persisted

Obviously, much about the world, our nation and whatever community you reside in looks markedly different from a year ago. Words and phrases haver entered our lexicon we couldn’t conceive of using in late December 2019. Streets of major cities across the continent are strewn with the rubble of a summer of frenzied nihilism. The core of the cult that formed around the current president when he was still just a candidate five years ago still adamantly insists that the larger society confer legitimacy on its delusions, even as that president was unarguably defeated in November. Children in their key formative years are isolated from peers, struggling to absorb school instruction via computer screens in their homes. Our culture, not in good shape for years, ground to a halt, as the music, stage-performance, and cinema worlds have feebly tried to stay viable with online substitutes for their products. Sports teams, when they can gather a suitable roster of players not testing positive for COVID, play to empty venues. Open restaurants have become a rarity. Long-standing festivals, parades and customs in communities large and small did not take place this year.

The basic issue, though, is what it was a year ago and what it has been for decades, and most of us remain oblivious to it.

Trumpism, the cult mentioned above, clings to its diagnosis of a nation beset by globalist elites, the Deep State, uniformly agenda-driven news media, Antifa and pockets of the Republican Party that were never brought to heel. And, now, the phenomenon’s namesake, via his still-ubiquitous tweets, has added such factors as until-recently-stalwart allies such as the Supreme Court, three seats of which are occupied by his appointees, Georgia governor Brian Kemp, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to the list of contributing malevolencies.

If one had to slip a one-sentence note to one’s late-December-2019 self stating a bottom line regarding how all this has shaken out over twelve months, it would be this: the defeated presidential incumbent is trying everything in his power to overturn a legitimate and secure election.

Now comes the part that requires some craft in depicting. So much discussion of the real and pernicious effects of the Left’s latest lease on life comes from the above-discussed Trumpists, and therefore has an oh-look-a-squirrel quality to it. They hope it makes for an effective distraction from the ugliness and ineffectuality of their Dear Leader’s last days.

But the leftist contribution to our steady national deterioration over the last several decades has been as significant a cause of this year’s ravages as that of Trumpism.

Some plain facts about what the deaths of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks and Jacob Blake all had in common still cannot uttered in polite company. Two of the three were perilously loaded on hard drugs, and Brooks was drunk behind the wheel of his car. All three resisted arrest. And all three had violent criminal histories and records of abnegation of the responsibilities of fatherhood.

And what has put that beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse? A tacit understanding among those behind Black Lives Matter and the 1619 Project, as well as a bevy of major corporations and sports leagues that to mention it brands one as hopelessly inhuman.

And so the implicit-bias workshops, diversity circles and various other forms of “uncomfortable conversations” continue apace. Police morale plummets and crime rates spike. What product that continues to come out of Hollywood continues to shame us for any residual resistance to the complete upending of thousands of years of understanding of how human beings organize themselves into societies.

The incoming administration is peopled with those chomping at the bit to join the global push toward a “Great Reset,” which would assume a consensus that the global climate is in dire trouble necessitating a halt to human advancement, as well assume that privately owned business entities have responsibilities beyond providing their shareholders a return on investment.

It’s also made clear its interest in some form of forgiveness of student loan debt, thereby infantilizing those who assumed such debt. Human agency gets further eroded and the chasm between choice and consequence widens.

It’s at this point in an essay of this sort that it might be the tidy thing to do to move toward a conclusion by offering some sort of we-need-to-turn-back-to-God message. While that nice, terse truism glares unavoidably, its execution is fraught with problems. Another way in which 2020 exacerbated our national malady was the further corruption of institutional religion. Ravi Zacharias was shown to have sexual issues that have set his ministry organization back on its heels. Jerry Falwell, Jr. was forced resign as Liberty University president for a mess resulting from the same sorts of weakness. Ands then there is the swath of evangelicalism that remains in thrall to the Very Stable Genius, as evidenced by the speeches at the recent Jericho March in Washington.

Institutional Christianity has even flirted with exacerbating the divisiveness that widely recognized practices for countering the spread of the coronavirus, practices such as wearing a mask and social distancing, had proven dismayingly inevitable. “Hey, bars, gyms and nail salons get to stay open” is, in and of itself, a valid argument against the total abolishing of worship services, but there has been a lot of mask-courtesy defiance among those who want to gather as Christ’s body.

The spectrum of responses to societal attempts to deal with coronavirus gives us perhaps the clearest insight into why we’re never able to move off dead center as to what really, at the core, ails us collectively.

Throughout this entire pandemic, the cutting of slack, the extending of grace, has been in desperately short supply. Those with the argument - and it’s a valid, compelling argument - that lockdowns and phased reopening have exacted a cost in terms of economic statistics, educational drift resulting in lost years of developmental progress for an entire generation, and damage to human hearts, minds and homes - diminish it by refusing to take a square look at public-health data and what it’s telling the country’s best experts. Now that we’re deep into the second wave of this situation, there’s no denying that it’s a grim national plight. Conversely, there’s precious little indication that the health experts really understand the profound cultural impact of the decidedly abnormal last nine months.

We venerate stubbornness in 2020 post-America. There’s no market for a voice that acknowledges that we’ve had to learn on the fly as we responded to this unprecedented crisis. No one wants to be the first to say, “Your motives have been laudable. I know you want to see this resolved with a minimum of long-range alteration of the way we live.”

That would require humility, and humility is equated with weakness as never before.

But humility is the only thing that would commence a real turning toward our Creator. It’s the essential remedy for the disease at the core of all the real and perceived ailments that every side in our national crackup points to as the problem.

We are starved for a willingness to acknowledge a Truth bigger than our own perspectives.

In 2020, the one arguably new factor in American life, Trumpism, was forced to play itself out to a pathetic end. There’s nothing left but the tweets and feeble talk of a January 6 game-changer. But everyone but the sad remnant can see that there was never a coherent center on which some kind of ideology to compete with conservatism and progressivism could be established. The attempts at journals and think tanks that would flesh out a new worldview are going to have ever more difficulty finding something to defend as the whole movement’s raison d’être becomes ever more ridiculous and marginal.

So the two main forces remain the ones with long-term places at the table: a Left fiercely determined to impose collectivism and militant identity politics on the country, and a Right that has so lost sight of what holds all its principles together - a certainty about the transcendent - that it is ill equipped to counter the Left’s agenda - or avoid being disfigured by Johnny-come-lately crazes like Trumpism.

The first task at hand is the one that we never put on our lists of ways to set ourselves aright.

Everyone’s arguments will remain hollow until someone looks inward.