Here’s Hoping Time Wounds All Heels…

OK, new year. Great. I had plenty of the one we just finished.

The holidays create an opportunity to gather the family for some reflections on what has transpired during a given year, what counts as a personal, academic or professional growth marker, and what might have been opportunities lost. And to look ahead a bit and dream.

So when one of the teens at home asks me what I hope 2021 will bring, I boil it down to a single word: Healing. A great many wounds were opened in the year past. It’s time to treat them, let the recovery process begin, and start building again.

But heal, precisely . . . what? Here’s a wish list:

• Public discourse. I share the disappointment of all who watched American vs. American duking it out inside the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6. The fact that two people met violent ends in that building is truly revolting. But the widespread blood-lust call for recriminations won’t help. We’re not going to get to any “healing” as a nation if one side is held to a higher standard of assembly than the other (looking at you, here, Minneapolis, Portland, Kenosha, Seattle and about 600 other cities).

And that goes for the virus debate, too. I can deal with people from opposing parties taking a policy issue and spinning it, torturing the data or flat-out lying to us to meet political expediencies. Hell, that’s what politicians have done for eons. But there’s a big difference between a spending bill and a health crisis being blamed for a third of a million deaths.

It’s beyond comprehension to me why anyone would think that Donald Trump—or any other individual, by dint of office held, including Joe Biden—could pull the levers behind some curtain to contain a global pandemic. It’s a virus, people. We can try to avoid it, but only a fool will insist that it can be “controlled.” Michael Crichton made a fortune writing about mankind’s hubris in the face of scientific challenges and nature’s immutable wrath. My hope is we’ll come to accept this curse for what it is and deal with it in a rational, united fashion.

But this environment too toxic for that. If Trump last February had made an impassioned appeal for all Americans to wear masks, close up shop for a while and hunker down at home, some would have accused him of rank totalitarianism and wholesale shredding of the Bill of Rights. Think not? Check out reaction to his travel ban from China early on. Things are very, very sick out there.

• That damnable virus itself. Can’t say I’m crazy about the prospects of being vaccinated after seeing and reading about some of the, uh, unintended consequences and risks associated with a rushed-to-production preventive. Still, coverage of COVID-19 has given me a working familiarity with concepts like viral load, transmission rates (we all know R0 and Rt now, right?) the challenges of building correct forecasting models, hospital utilization, PCR testing and lab cycle thresholds. The disturbing part of that coverage has been the willingness to label people “science deniers” just because they asked those in power for data-driven metrics to support lockdown orders. That creates a rift that won’t easily be closed, leading us to: 
• Public trust. A big reason why people are screaming at one another over things like failure to mask up or respect distancing is that the “science” has been all over the place with its recommendations. We can thank the “experts” for that. When people can’t readily see objective truth, they’ll choose  their own. You really want to tell me that we’ve had nearly zero flu deaths this season? Or pretend that financial incentives to providers handling COVID-19 cases couldn’t skew the tallies? What about cases of lab procedures that even some virologists said wildly exaggerated positive-case counts?

“Bend the curve” was—rightly—about protecting health-care workers at the onset. But somehow, “control” of the virus became the overarching goal. What nation with an open economy has been able to “control” it? It was always a false hope that we could do anything more than slow the inevitable spread. Those who insisted otherwise helped create a trust gap that will be hard to close.

• The woke movement and cancel culture. Never put it past Americans to take noble concepts and turn them into social cancers. Thanks to the lynch mobs at Twitter, we now are able to wreck the lives of people for things they did, thoughts they expressed or jokes they shared a decade ago—or more. Even if those thoughts or deeds were considered “progressive” at the time.

I’m a big believer in equal opportunity and policies that level playing fields twisted out of shape long before most of us were born. But the lowest of the low points in our culture today comes courtesy of those who have turned American ideals into a system of grievance claims ranked by the number of boxes one can check off on an “intersectionality” scorecard, then go on the attack against people for conforming with social mores of generations gone by.

Can healing come from all that? Scares me to think this, but I’m starting to have my doubts.