The New York Times
The lessons of one of the worst years in American life
WASHINGTON – The 365 days between the panicked withdrawal of United States offices and schools from President Joe Biden’s speech Thursday night, which marks the prospect of an end to a pandemic, may prove to be one of the most important years in American history be. People learned about national vulnerabilities that most have never considered, and about the depth of resilience they never imagined, except in wartime. Even the attacks of September 11, 2001, because of all their horrors and the two decades of war they instituted, did not change daily life in every city and town in the United States like the coronavirus. Subscribe to The Morning Newsletter of the New York Times One president lost his job mainly because he mishandled a crisis he first denied. His successor knows that his legacy depends on the quick conclusion to the disaster. The halting response showed the worst U.S. government, and then from Operation Warp Speed’s ten-month sprint to vaccines to the wildest rate of vaccinations in recent days, the very best. The economic earthquake when cities and towns changed politics so much that Congress did something that would be unthinkable a year ago. Legislators spent $ 5 billion digging the country out of the economic hole created by the virus, and almost as a political aftershock introduced an expansion of the social safety net that was larger than what has been seen since its inception. of Medicare nearly 60 years ago. No country can go through this kind of trauma without being changed forever. There were indelible moments. In the spring, the race bill arose from the death of George Floyd after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes. On January 6, the mob attack on the Capitol makes many people wonder if American democracy is still capable of self-correction. But Biden’s message on Thursday was about the theme that the country has finally come together in a general cause – vaccines as the way to normalcy – and from that a spark of unity can emerge, as an ever-divided nation seeks comfort in millions of tiny jabs. in the arm. In his speech, Biden held two separate dates of hope: May 1, when all adults in the United States are eligible to receive a vaccine, and July 4, when modest celebrations of Independence Day may seem like life. Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian whose book “These Truths” follows the changing dynamics of technology and society in America since its discovery, asked her whether Americans unknowingly viewed the new year as the end of March, as in Britain and its colonies until March. the calendar changes in 1752. ‘Or it might start the day when you get vaccinated,’ she said. “Or the day we’re enough to get a vaccine.” For Biden, the question is when he will be able to turn from what he called the “rescue phase” of the pandemic, to the “recovery” phase after the pandemic. In his speech Thursday, the president made it clear that the rescue is still underway. His goal, his chief of staff, Ron Klain, said in an interview: ‘set out the next steps in this rescue and what we are going to do in the coming months to get this bill approved to return to a more normal way of life in this country. ‘All of Biden’s instincts tell him it’s dangerous to recover too quickly. This would indicate that states could follow the example of Texas, eliminate mask mandates, open restaurants and pubs too quickly, and make themselves vulnerable to a revival – what Biden calls ‘Neanderthal thinking’. He said just as much in the speech, saying, “This is not the time to stop.” “We all need to be vaccinated,” he said, an unspoken acknowledgment that there will soon be more supply than willing people. “Keep wearing a mask” because “beating this virus and getting it back to normal depends on national unity.” Although Biden did not mention it, his top cabinet members stressed that even eliminating the virus is not enough. As his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said last month: ‘Unless anyone in the world is vaccinated, no one is really completely safe, because if the virus is there and continues to multiply, it will also mutate. . “‘And if it mutates,’ he will also come back and bite people everywhere. ‘But the subtext of Biden’s message Thursday night was that people could start imagining a world after COVID for the first time. After a year behind closed doors, the government can reflect on the management of the virus to the point that it does not drive every policy decision, and families can find a way to go to dinner, or to visit grandparents, without wondering if it’s a life-or-death decision. This raises the question of what will be permanently changed and what, when writing the history of this national trauma, will be recoverable. And what will the country have learned? The past provides a mixed guide. Too few lessons were learned from the 1918 pandemic, an event that most history books missed, and which many Americans first heard in detail a century later, when it once again plagued the country in a different form. . But in 1918, just as in 2020, the president’s instinct was to diminish its seriousness and invoke the strange logic that Americans would be upset by the truth, even if their family and friends succumbed to them. President Donald Trump has never been a student of history (although his grandfather Frederick Trump died of the flu in 1918), and he told journalist Bob Woodward: ‘I always wanted to finish it. I still like playing it, ‘because’ I do not want to panic. ‘No one will know how many thousands of lives it cost, as Trump mocked wearing the mask and did so little to promote the vaccine in the last days of his government when it went from the lab to the market in record time. moved. “Denials for days, weeks, then months,” Biden said Thursday night without ever mentioning his predecessor by name. “It led to more deaths, more infections, more stress and more loneliness.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, who deliberately made Biden his best medical adviser, also referred to the unnecessary deaths on Thursday when he spoke on NBC a year ago this week. “It would have shocked me completely” to know that more than half a million Americans would die from the disease. But he noted that the country had paid an awful price for its political divisions. “Even simple common sense health measures have a political connotation,” he said. It was not a public approach to public health. It has been greatly affected by the divisions we have in this country. “When Trump and his wife received the vaccine in January, they did not disclose it. It was left to Biden and members of his government to vaccinate on live television as an encouragement to Americans who are afraid of the vaccine. The second great lesson can, if well organized, the same government that mobilized for World War II and landed men on the moon, could in fact save lives on a large scale. For Biden’s government, this means that taking the vaccines have been developed in record time and an important distribution is being considered. Operation Warp Speed ”was very important work, and I do not mean to minimize it,” Klain said. “But there was no plan for how we are not going to get this vaccine in the arms of tens and eventually hundreds. of millions of Americans. When writing the history of this strange moment, Biden will almost certainly be admitted that he vaccinated a quarter of the adult population in his first 50 days with at least one shot and 10% in full. After years in which the government was dismissed as an obstacle to national greatness as a vehicle of progress, when conspiracy theories about a pernicious’ deep state ‘were still abundant, he on Thursday night made the case that a simple proof of government power itself’ was a turning point. “do not know, is whether it encourages people in public service, or at least trusts that the government can do something,” said Richard Haass, a longtime diplomat and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations. After 9/11, we started fighting global terrorism. After COVID-19 we got another task. “It remains to be seen,” he said, “whether we can also use the moment to reduce the effects of domestic divisions.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company