Recent history brought one pandemic, two traumas

Four years ago this week we made history. I’m not celebrating the anniversary. 

Four years ago this week we shut it down: We stayed home. We worked remotely. We homeschooled our kids. We closed our businesses. We had our food delivered. We wore masks when we absolutely had to go out. We kept our distance. We braved “essential worker” designations. We hoarded things. We ran out of things. We gathered in a place called Zoom. We bleached and scrubbed and Lysoled our worlds, which grew very small as COVID-19 marched across the globe and our psyches.

We waited. We worried. We wondered. What was to become of us?

Some of us railed at our circumstances, confusing incredulity for bravado, bravado for patriotism. We thirsted for good information. Amateur epidemiologists and assorted quacks popped up, from the halls of government to social media. An ocean of misinformation washed over us. True medical experts worked against the din. Doctors and nurses were at once heroic, then hated. 

Having never experienced a deadly pandemic before, even the best and brightest among us were never exactly sure of the path forward. When they told that truth, we sometimes called them fakes and frauds. Plus, too many of us struggled or completely failed to understand the underlying principle of surviving a pandemic with its communicable connectivity: We were mutually dependent on the decisions of everyone else … whether we liked it or not.

Research shows that during lockdowns and health protocols such as masking and social distancing, some of us further lost faith in our institutions. That included church, where attendance continued its steady decline; government at all levels, from the White House and Congress to state legislatures to school boards; and, perhaps most especially, traditional news media sources, already viewed with increasing skepticism fueled in part because too many modern readers and viewers prefer news they already believe or want to hear.

We held a national election four years ago, too, bolstered by mail-in ballots, which proved safe and effective despite evidence-free claims to the contrary. Even though the 2020 presidential  election — in the middle of a pandemic — was the largest, most accurate in our history, accusations of cheating found an audience unwilling to accept the facts.

Of all the facts related to COVID, the most important is this: We have buried over one million American souls, lost to the virus since early 2020. 

While we have rallied our economy and our health and to some extent our attitudes, make no mistake: We as a nation suffered a trauma.

Then, as the calendar turned to 2021, when optimism was afoot with vaccines and a measured re-opening of our lives, we suffered a second trauma: the attempted overthrow of the government on Jan. 6, 2021. You may quibble with that assessment, but where on the continuum of criminal acts should we put violent rioters breaking into the nation’s Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power, threatening to hang the presiding officer and extend power to the losing candidate who was leaving office 14 days later?

As we mark these four years and prepare for another presidential election, we should ask ourselves as a nation, but also as individuals, what we have learned? 

We have, with vaccines and increased degrees of immunity, clawed our way out from COVID being the death sentence that it once was for some populations and the danger it was for any population. That said, the virus still kills. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, 577 people died from the virus during the week ending March 2. Nearly 1,000 died the week before. Death rates both weeks were more than three times that of influenza. Nevertheless, management of the virus has fallen into a process similar to that which we use to protect ourselves against the flu.

Monthly data clearly shows the economy has rallied and is robust despite lingering public perceptions to the contrary, a gap sometimes called a “good feel-bad economy.”

Schools are digging themselves out of the hole that closing their doors created, perhaps ending the debate on whether online education measures up to in-person learning.

Perhaps we’re washing our hands better than we did, and perhaps we’re more aware of a public cough, ours or others. Perhaps we’re more willing to stay home when we’re sick rather than infect our co-workers.

Perhaps we’ve accepted just how close we came to our politics, indeed our way of life, being inalterably changed through violence.

Which is why any amnesia about 2020 and its ensuing traumas — both of them — is the most dangerous of any possible malady.