Month: April 2020

SEARCHING FOR HOPE IN A PANDEMIC

I was drunk through most of the 1970s. As I twelve-stepped my way into sobriety 40 years ago, I severed all ties with pessimism.  Granted, there wasn’t much about the ‘70s to get all giddy and gaga about, unless you really adored leisure suits. My negativity and cynicism mixed much better with a beer and a bump than it did with AA meetings and bad coffee. The lesson learned was that we can’t always control the events in our lives, but we can chose how to react to them.  So I’ve been a registered optimist since 1980 and, as a result, a lot happier.  

These past couple of months, however, have posed the single largest challenge to that world view since my conversion to hopefulness. With apologies to Thomas Paine, these are the times that try the optimist’s soul. 

How do you find even a thin ray of light in the darkness of our new existence? The soaring numbers of coronavirus infections and deaths are baked into the daily metrics of our lives, like the pollen count and chances of measurable precipitation. More than 26 million American jobs have been lost. Economists predict that 21 million of us will be pulled into poverty.  Food bank waiting lines stretch for miles throughout the country.  Not exactly the kind of stuff that lends itself to an optimistic spin.

The basic contours of any crisis are pollenated with an abundance of pessimism.  Yet, with effective, focused, purposeful leadership, we can optimistically and hopefully work our way out of the abyss. On a national level, however, those were not the cards we were dealt.  Instead, 2020 will forever be known as the confluence of two hideous events: the most deadly pandemic in a century, and the reign of our most unhinged and incompetent president ever.  

Donald Trump addresses the crisis in protracted daily news conferences.  I challenge you to find even the tiniest needle of genuine hope in his haystack of delusions, reversals, fabrications and other cognitive constipations he brings to the table.  The diabolical intersection between Trump and this pandemic was on full display Thursday when, on that single day, our country’s COVID-19 body count surpassed 50,000, and warnings rang out to ignore the president’s soliloquy on injecting bleach. 

It’s not just his crisis management incompetence that clouds any path to optimism. Trump failed miserably at what should have been his easiest task: pulling this fractured and wounded nation together, united – despite political differences – in the singular goal of working together to survive this virus.  History offers an abundance of precedence for that approach. For most of us, a threat to our survival outranks partisan and policy differences. Our humanity, in the broadest sense of the word, becomes our loadstar.  

Donald Trump, however, was born without a humanity gene. Not once has this president showed a modicum of empathy for those who lost their lives or their livelihoods in this pandemic.   The closest he comes to expressing grief is when he ruminates about the loss of an economy he thought would buy him reelection. 

It’s the same old story. Unable to pivot, Transactional Donald sticks with the schtick that brought him to the party: an unnatural enthrallment with himself, and intense grievances with everyone not wearing a MAGA hat.  Although the virus infects without regard to party affiliation, the national response is all tangled up in red and blue.   To mask or not to mask became a political litmus test as soon as Trump announced he wouldn’t wear one.

Given all that doom and gloom, you may be wondering whether I have abandoned my vow of optimism.  No, not even close.  The optimistic viewpoint is not a snapshot in time. It’s not looking at a train wreck and calling it “fantastic,” (as Trump might if he thought it would get him votes).  That’s being delusional, not optimistic. Optimism is being hopeful that the horror of now can eventually be converted into a better place.  No successful movement for change has ever been propelled by the hopelessness of pessimism. 

The most hopeful sign lies in the answer to this constantly asked question:  When will we get back to normal?  Never.  When normalcy left us, it did not buy a return ticket. It’s not coming back. And that is very good news.  What is happening to us right now is so deep and pervasive that it will change us in profound ways, and give us a unique opportunity to create a brand new normal. 

Those New Deal programs of the 1930s that lifted up millions of poor and working class Americans didn’t just serendipitously appear one day.  They evolved as the new normal from out of the ashes of the Great Depression, a disaster every bit as devastating and painful and game-changing as this pandemic.  Then, like now, the crisis dramatically identified the cracks, strictures and gaping holes in our body politic.  There was no going back to normal again.

Through the audacity of pain, this pandemic has drawn us a road map for change. Things like wealth redistribution, universal health insurance, paid sick and family leave for workers were mocked as “socialist tropes” by many on the right just months ago. Yet, the multiple trillion dollar relief bills passed by Congress recently made strides in all of those directions. Even some Republicans are pushing the Trump administration to confront the pandemic’s disparate impact on people of color and to address racial disparities in health care. As we eventually attempt a reset on normal, it’s hard not to see momentum on those issues continuing.  

There is something else to be guardedly hopeful about.  For the first time in his presidency, Trump is struggling – really struggling – to shake off his brazen ineptness and idiotic stumbles. This is decidedly not normal.  This is the man who boasted about sexually assaulting women. He put children in cages. He colluded with Russia. He obstructed justice. He tried to force foreign countries to help him win reelection. He was even impeached, and then acquitted.  Through it all, his approval ratings, although low, were relatively constant.  Recent polling shows that the president is rapidly losing the public’s confidence in handling the pandemic.  

Just think about that: The guy who says he could get by shooting someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue is politically done in by a virus he said would be gone by April.  That’s the meaning of – that’s the beauty of – optimism. 

AMERICA THE UNEXCEPTIONAL

As we bury our COVID-19 dead, let us dig the deepest grave of all for the only victim that deserved to die:  American exceptionalism.  

For more than 200 years, we have clung to the dangerously delusional notion that our country is vastly superior to all other nations. The myth of American exceptionalism has found its way into every Fourth of July parade, every Veterans Day memorial, every politician’s rhetorical flourish.

Ronald Reagan called America a “shining city on a hill.”  Thomas Jefferson referred to it as the world’s “empire of liberty.”  Abraham Lincoln said it was the “last best hope of earth.” 

And then came the Great Trump Pandemic of 2020.  The president spent months dismissing the approaching plague as a “Chinese virus” that would pose no problem for Americans.  Despite his rosy, it’s-nothing-to-worry-about prognosis, the White House, according to the New York Times, knew in January that the coronavirus would strike us so hard that the death toll could hit 500,000.  

Trump’s administration was also aware that the country seriously lacked sufficient medical equipment and gear to deal with the pandemic’s magnitude.  Yet, it did nothing in January or February to prepare for the coming avalanche.  By late March, the only sign of American exceptionalism was that the United States had more cases of the deadly virus than any other country in the world. On Saturday, it also claimed the trophy for the most COVID-19 deaths. 

The concept of America as innately superior and exceptional has long been a deeply embedded national illusion. The dynamic is reminiscent of George and Martha’s imaginary child in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf. On some level we knew it wasn’t true, but like Albee’s quarreling protagonists, the more we pretended that it was, the better we felt, and the more real it seemed.  

In a deliciously ironic twist, the term American exceptionalism was coined quite sardonically in 1929 by Joseph Stalin. American communist leaders had argued that the country’s unique brand of capitalism was an exception to universal Marxist laws.  Stalin’s response was to condemn the “heresy of American exceptionalism” and expel the U.S. delegation from the Communist International.  

As the years passed, however, American exceptionalism was thoroughly drained of any trace of Stalin’s sarcasm.  Instead, it reflected a deeply held – if misguided – belief that our country was somehow divinely inspired to be the very best the world has to offer. A 2017 Pew Research poll showed that only 14 percent of Americans believe there are countries better than ours. Obviously, this view that America is and always has been superbly exceptional, ignores a number of ignoble chapters in America’s story. To name just a few: massacres of native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow Laws and rampant, ongoing discrimination on the basis of race, sex and national origin. 

Even before the Trump pandemic, the data consistently refuted the claim of American exceptionalism. According to a variety of studies, America ranks 33rd for political freedom, 19th for happiness, 13th in quality of life, 45th in infant mortality, 46th in maternal mortality, 36th in life expectancy, 27th in healthcare and education and 48th for protecting press freedom. Of the G7 nations (U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK), America’s income inequality is the highest. 

Whatever lingering doubt there may have been about America’s status as the world’s shining city on a hill was decisively resolved by our country’s despicable bungling of the biggest crisis in our lifetime.  Many other nations, with far fewer resources, have totally out-shown the United States in marshalling a response to the pandemic.  For example, to name just a few, the governments of South Korea, Germany, Finland, Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand, Canada and Denmark have far and away surpassed the U.S. in battling this virus (here and here).

Amazingly, the United States had as much if not more information about the Coronavirus as those other countries.  They succeeded because they acted quickly and decisively based only on the scientific data, not on the political optics of a leader’s reelection campaign. Donald Trump, on the other hand, spent more than two months ignoring that data and rejecting repeated warnings to prepare for what would be the plague of the century.

As a result, one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world, is still scrounging around for ventilators, personal protective equipment, hospital beds and body bags.  The president performs on his daily reality television show, spewing forth false information, mixed messages, and nauseating self-promotion. Anxiety-stricken Americans tune into this spectacle looking for guidance on this terror that has gripped our lives. Instead, they see a president insulting his political opponents, accusing hospital employees of stealing protective equipment, and boasting about his television ratings. 

Hardly American exceptionalism.  Yet, America used to do some exceptional things.  At the very start of the Ebola crisis in 2014, the Obama administration sent thousands of medical workers to fight the disease at its epicenter in West Africa, an effort that not only slowed the disease in that country, but blocked its spread to the U.S.  

Not surprisingly, Trump has done just the opposite.  Not only has he failed to establish a cohesive national plan to combat the virus, the president has avoided any effort to coordinate with other countries, preferring instead to slam doors in their faces.  He tried – unsuccessfully – to buy a German company working on a Coronavirus vaccine so that the U.S. could horde the medication.  He ordered companies making masks and ventilators not to comply with contracts to deliver some equipment to other countries.  One of those countries was Canada, which has been sending medical personnel from Windsor, Ontario into Detroit to help care for COVID patients.

No country is inherently and permanently bad or good.  Like people, nations are mixed bags, package deals, the contents of which depend on all sorts of variables, like polices, resources and leadership.  The notion that we as a nation are exceptional, that we are the best, blocks our ability to grow, to become better, to learn from other countries. 

As our 45th president has so ably demonstrated, the narcissistic illusion of perfection is a virus of the soul that disposes of the need to change.  Until we come up with a vaccine, let’s keep our social distance from American exceptionalism.