So, the Senate has passed a stimulus bill. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a start. As the enormity of this crisis develops, and we really have no idea what the extent of it will be, congress and the president will have to take further action. We’ll see what happens with this present bill in the House. This postcard arrived in yesterday’s mail.
Apparently, cooler heads are prevailing in our nation’s capital. If you click on the image you will see the postcard’s back side, filled with reasonable guidelines. I ask you to notice the reference there to the CDC and note as well, an editorial in yesterday’s Washington Post.

I watched with interest yesterday morning as Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York appeared to dial back his criticism of the White House (he even praised Jared Kushner), and spoke for all the world like a teacher attempting to instruct the President of the United States in how to lead the nation in the crisis brought on by our unfolding chapter of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.

In doing this, Cuomo was of course trying to shame the White House into sending him some ventilators and also perhaps invoking the Defense Procurement Act, but he also followed in the footsteps of Anthony Fauci and other public health officials who have steered clear of at least some public criticism of the president in an effort not to undermine whatever efforts his administration may be willing to take to combat the pandemic. Joe Biden is doing the same, I think, or at least I hope he is. I take his recent statement to the press that he doesn’t want to get into a contest of recrimination with the president to mean that he is keeping his powder dry and studying how to continue his campaign without exacerbating the present crisis.

For better or worse Donald Trump is the president we have, for at least another nine to ten months. He has returned to candidate-mode behavior in his daily press conferences and continued to pursue his favorite course of dividing the country, as Republicans in the congress have seemed to do as well with their first stimulus bill that attempted to please most industry lobbyists, and in comments by some Republican lawmakers including the President, suggesting that some lives should be prioritized over others as hospitals gear up to deal with inevitable surges in demand for emergency medical care. Then of course there is the ever-present spate of conspiracy theories about the virus that are being spread by trump supporters.

But the Coronavirus is no respecter of persons. Young or old, Republican or Democrat, it attacks any and all persons regardless of race or sexual orientation or religion. And on that note it’s good to see that Liberty University is not following the example of Hobby Lobby and continuing instruction as usual in order to proclaim its president’s fear of God. I think we have reached a point of crisis at which all news-makers and all reporting should avoid sensationalism. All political campaigning should do the same and cease the opponent bashing and excessive negativity that have come to characterize American life in this age of political violence that pushes us constantly towards rhetorical excess.

Senator Sanders should be commended for re-purposing his campaign towards fundraising to assist the effort to arrest the pandemic. The “Where is Joe Biden?” campaign by contrast seems cynical. Sanders’ supporters should stop it. Biden, on the other hand, should embark on a campaign to show the public what a Biden presidency would look like, as recommended in a recent Washington Post piece by Paul Waldman.

[W]hy not put together a series of presentations in which Biden and well chosen experts and communicators explore policy challenges and consider solutions he would pursue? You could do them on health care, economic growth, labor rights, civil rights, voting rights, climate change, immigration and any number of other issues.

This will have the virtue of displaying the kind of conciliar presidency I expect Biden to institute, and to recommend enlightened federalism to whatever Trump (and Sanders) supporters might be inclined to listen. It would also fulfill the need I think Biden’s present silence indicates not to exacerbate panic about the pandemic.

If anything good comes out of this crisis for Americans, perhaps it may be a widespread realization that we are in a radically new time in our history. The world has shifted beneath our feet. The Coronavirus has been characterized as a novel virus, meaning that it produces infections against which we humans have no natural immunity since we have never before encountered it. What further novel viruses might we encounter in the future, and what worldwide imperatives do we face if we are to combat them? This fact, and our lack of preparedness here in the United States lay an additional question on our plate that only adds to the chaos we are already experiencing from the combination of climate crisis and the debasement of our politics. But it isn’t just politics any more. In the words of that sage, James Carville, ‘it’s the economy, stupid.’

We are now encountering the wholesale failure of our health care system. It isn’t failing because the president fired public health officials wholesale with no thought towards the future, though that is a contributing factor. Our health care system is failing because it is doing what it was designed to do. Our entire approach to health care in this country has been determined by our American commitment to the idea that economic entities compete. In a time like the present that calls for widespread cooperation, competition for funds and resources between state and federal agencies and hospital systems is self-defeating and destructive. It is why we have fallen behind the rest of the world in health care and why we are not coping with the challenge of present stresses. From the simplest to the most complex of stresses, from my lying on a gurney for eighteen hours in the hallway at SLU hospital waiting to be admitted recently (that is, competing for space) to the complex stresses we face nationwide as we rely on competition to distribute ventilators to hospitals, we are dealing with the breakdown of American health care. We have fallen behind the rest of the contemporary world because we are the world’s chief practitioner of late capitalism.

A couple of evenings ago, Ezra Klein declared the choice the president presented at that day’s press briefing between the piling up of deaths from COVID-19 and allowing the economy to function normally to be a false choice. But Klein said as well that he doesn’t disagree with the idea that the cost of economic suffering is a trade-up in life and “a harsh reality of simply being alive in any economy.” We “deal with this all the time in American politics,” he claimed. True perhaps, but economic suffering is only inevitable for some people in today’s world, and it is widespread in American life today. As this pandemic has progressed around the world, the story of economic inequality has been felt globally. Now, it will be felt acutely here in the United States, having already been built into the stimulus bill passed unanimously last night by the Senate. Perhaps this present bout of economic suffering will bring us closer to adopting Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, or other progressive ideas that will require us to act collectively in restraint of private (and corporate) greed.

—One can only hope.