Truth and 2020

I have a vivid memory of reading about each of the lives of the people killed in the Sandy Hook shooting. For some time, I had taken to doing this for every mass shooting - as if knowing more about the people killed by massive gun violence would be another thing I could do to end the needless deaths.

Sandy Hook was especially hard for me because so many children were involved.  But I did it, convinced that this time things would be different.  Surely, I told myself, this nation would not bury so many 1st graders without taking action to prevent more mass shootings.

I was wrong, of course, and to this day I remain stunned by our callous national indifference to a preventable phenomena.  After Sandy Hook, I continued to support anti-gun measures.  But I quit reading obituaries.  It was too hard on my heart.

I think of this as I mark our approach to 100,000 American dead because of COVID-19.  This morning’s New York Times sits on my desk, its tiny font showing me just of fraction of the people we have lost.  

It’s not as if I didn’t know.  New Jersey has been hit hard by the virus.  I know people who have died of COVID-19.  I know people who are grateful to have survived it.  But the depth of this loss is powerful when viewed in this fashion.

When this new year began, I wrote in my journal that I was glad of the arrival of 2020 because it would be the year that we discard Donald Trump and elect a new president.  I’m not the only person who breathed a sigh of relief that we had made it this far without an epic disaster made far worse because of Donald Trump.

And here we are.

In all fairness, a pandemic is bound to leave its mark on our nation and the world - that’s why its called a pandemic.  Trump is not directly responsible for each of the 100,000 dead in this nation.  But his failure in leadership matters to all of the dead, to the families they leave behind, to all of us.  

The United States is, at best, an imperfect nation.  But our leadership in the world has mattered; it still matters.  In this time of universal need, we could be making a difference.  There is a need to coordinate a worldwide effort to create a testing regime, to organize a national system for contact tracing that could serve as a model for other nations to follow, to organize our own national resources to look after states’ needs for medical supplies so that the supply of ventilators, medications, and PPE needn’t fall short.

The list is long; much longer than this.

Instead, our president has lied and dissembled; has dodged responsibility, and has purposely failed to lead.  He has settled for 100,000 dead as if that is not an epic failure.  Under the NYT headline read the words, “They Were Not Simply Names on a List.  They Were Us.”  We must hold this truth close as we find our way forward.