We got blindsided when we were already reeling
America gets hit with its most challenging catastrophe in at least a generation, and it's never been less equipped to deal with it
Those among us who are contracting COVID-19 when compromised health - pre-existing conditions, if you will - had already rendered them perilously vulnerable serve as an apt metaphor for America’s predicament.
A roaring economy during the just-concluded winter only masked the weakness that was going to manifest itself eventually. While happy talk about living in a time of peace and prosperity abounded, it had a whistling-past-the-graveyard kind of feel to those who were looking unflinchingly at the totality of our circumstance.
While the freezing of our economy in response to the coronavirus has been absolutely necessary, as has the aid package crafted to address it, the burden it adds to our $23.6 million debt and our $984 billion deficit hastens the day of fiscal reckoning that resulted from a century of distorting America’s original view of the scope and size of federal government. Had we not assumed that government ought to be about the business of addressing the two great givens of human life - sickness and old age - in general circumstances, we would not be so encumbered by unfunded liabilities in a unique situation such as this.
Had we not sidelined, indeed, mocked, that which used to be central to our national character, a humble regard for our Creator and his guidance and protection, we would not now be peddling insipid trivialities as the currency of mutual encouragement. We’d have something of substance to assuage our desperation.
The polarization resulting from identity politics and ideological tribalism likewise hobbles our ability to offer our fellow citizens a hand up. The sewer that comment threads under social-media posts and opinion-site pieces had become in recent years has seen a ratcheting-up of the savagery of its inhabitants since the pandemic has become daily life’s predominant characteristic.
Our culture, which has been steadily rotting for seventy years, is in no position to offer us inspiration. We’re left with reflections from Madonna in a bathtub of rose petals, or a montage of contemporary “celebrities” singing perhaps the bleakest ditty in popular music, “Imagine,” ever composed.
“Political leaders” is a parodical term to apply to the cast of pathetic narcissists and miscreants arrayed across the spectrum.
Those on the left can barely conceal their glee at the opportunity to make permanent the new degree of state intrusion into the affairs of ostensibly free men and women. Indeed, California governor Gavin Newsom quite explicitly speaks of an “opportunity for reimagining a more progressive era.”
On the “right,” or what’s left of that obliterated stretch of the ideological landscape, a completely unfit president makes plain at daily press briefings and in his interminable tweets his utter incapability to muster the requisite seriousness to lead.
One thing that Americans are coming to agree on is that this is a watershed moment and that the nature of the American experiment is going to come out of this permanently changed. That said, we envision the shape of that change in various ways. There is a range of assessments of how sunny or dark it’s going to be. Anyone who thinks that we will, in the not-too-distant future, merely dust ourselves off and resume our lives of distraction and inconsequentiality is not taking stock of just how late in the day it is.