I have just finished a couple of weeks on the road in Texas, during which time the coronavirus pandemic blew up across the American landscape. The best sign that something serious was happening while I was on the road was the number of guys in truck stop and convenience store restrooms washing their hands after taking a leak who looked like this was a first-time experience for them. Otherwise, there is nothing funny about what is going on.
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It will be quite some time before America
and much of the rest of the world will be able to put this pandemic behind
them. In the meantime, we will all be touched in some way by this disease and
many are likely to lose friends and loved ones. In the short-term,
most of us will have to live more modest and restricted lives. Surely,
some of the touchstones of well-being will be badly disrupted. Some will learn
more about hygiene. Some will experience personal vulnerability for the
first time. And many will have their routines disrupted, their meager
incomes stretched beyond the breaking point, and their “safety net” melt away
because it never existed in the first place.
It is way too early to tell much about the
progression of this pandemic in America, and much must be done each day to try
to reverse its course. However, it is also a really good time for a long
overdue reality check on the state of the union.
Health
Care in America
The best news is that it may be the end of
Trump and the Republican Party. The right-wing in America has had its day,
and now the country will pay a heavy price for buying into the notion that
government is the problem. Ever since Ronald Reagan dropped that poisonous
pill into the political mix, it has become a mantra for way too many, even as
those among them greedily seek government assistance when it
seems to benefit them. Only the most crazed tell the cops to go away while
the home invasion is ongoing in their own home.
Now we have a massive collective need for a
strong federal response to a very dangerous pandemic, and nobody is at the
helm. Not only has there been no leadership, but the ranks of those who
could respond have been dangerously thinned and available federal resources
mindlessly diminished. Responsible state and local governments will try to
pick up the pieces, but way too many states and localities have fallen prey to
the diminished governance syndrome.
Maybe in this time of need, leaders will step up. But they will have decades of negligence to overcome in the health care “system” alone. Bernie Sanders has reminded us almost every day that there are over 87 million human beings in the United States who are uninsured or underinsured, severely limiting their access to meaningful health care. Now, all of sudden, a lot more people are listening because it is them and disease is at their door. Others are listening because they understand that both the human and economic cost of a dysfunctional health care “system” will now be borne by all of us. Even some who have insured access to meaningful health care are likely to suffer when that access is denied amid the chaos.
The
Coronavirus Pandemic
No one knows how long this pandemic will
extend, nor how damaging it will be to the nation and the world. However,
one thing we can hope for in America is that this time, finally, the nation has
had to confront its demons and somehow will manage to find the resources to do
so.
When this is over, please don’t tell me
again that we can’t afford universal access to meaningful health care, that we
can’t afford to eradicate homelessness and hunger from our land, that we can’t
afford to educate every child seeking to learn, and that we can’t afford to
meet the now-obvious infrastructure demands of a modern nation. This time,
the only thing we can’t afford to do is quickly forget what we learned and
quickly forget the often-forgotten and most vulnerable among us.
After the present crisis touches so many,
including many who often seem immune from crisis, the challenge will be to
mobilize the caring to overwhelm the indifferent. This will require, at a
minimum, getting Trump and the right-wing zealots out of the way quickly so
that the hard slog can begin toward a reassertion of good governance and a
rebirth of good government. This is the essential driver of the collective
will to simply make things better for so many with so little.
I worry that America is so deeply divided
that even a common enemy cannot unite us and that each camp will learn vastly
different lessons from its own echo chamber. It is still hard for the
“Make America Great Again” crowd to absorb the slowly emerging awareness in
their bubble that maybe America was never so great at meeting the
fundamental needs of its citizens, likely not even as good as South Korea and
maybe just as bad as Italy.
What went wrong is that Americans stopped
demanding good governance, rushing instead to less government. Our democracy
failed when government was driven to failure. Those who invested throughout
America’s history in a faith in democratic norms understood that the balanced
institutional framework they created and nurtured was fragile.
It is broken now. When this pandemic crisis
passes, America will have to pick up the pieces of its failed institutional
foundation and rebuild it to be much better equipped to meet the modern
challenges of the nation and the globe. If we can succeed at this, maybe
America can be truly great for the first time.
*[A version of this article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]
The views expressed in this article
are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial
policy.
The post America Called Its Government, But No One Answered appeared first on Fair Observer.
