It was the morning of Sept. 11 and I was driving east on Interstate 70, trying to get home to my family in Columbia, Missouri.
I’ll never forget the look.
I was passing another driver, or he was passing me, and we locked eyes.
I don’t know if he was a Republican or a Democrat, a liberal or a conservative, but it didn’t matter.
There was a nod of recognition that we were in this together.
We were all Americans.
This time it’s different.
The America that is reacting to the coronavirus pandemic is a far different one than the America that responded to a terror attack nearly two decades ago.
We don’t have a president who went to an elementary school and consoled students. America’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, has become a punchline of his former self. While it’s a good thing that President Donald Trump has reversed his early denials that the coronavirus pandemic was going to amount to anything more than a seasonal flu outbreak, it’s impossible to get past the fact that those early missteps caused serious damage to America’s ability to react.
People are also reading…
In Missouri, for instance, Trump’s early dismissal of the pandemic surely affected the actions of Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican who has consistently expressed his fealty to the president. Parson was one of the only governors in the nation who, until Saturday, hadn’t used emergency state powers to close schools, leaving that to local school districts. Some didn’t announce their closure until after the state recorded its first COVID-19 death.
Even after Parson had declared a state of emergency — the day after he said one wasn’t necessary — he was ignoring the reality of the crisis, inviting dozens of sheriffs from around the state to the Governor’s Mansion in Jefferson City for a Sunday afternoon gathering. There, according to the pictures posted by one of the sheriffs, they shook hands and embraced. They violated the spirit of all the social distancing measures being modeled by the best leaders around the country, and then headed back to their individual counties, where the COVID-19 cases were mounting, one by one.
One state over, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, has closed schools for the rest of the school year. In Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, has been a national leader in using sweeping gubernatorial powers to try to battle the spread of the coronavirus.
The virus doesn’t know political parties, it just knows how to spread like wildfire and kill the weakest prey who cannot escape its reach.
In the Republican-controlled Missouri House in 2020, Democrats are still treated like lepers, ignored as they offer amendments to the budget seeking to increase the amount of aid to a state that historically ranks last in the country in public health spending, or fix the election system that doesn’t allow any sort of serious absentee voting to protect voters, government officials and election judges from infection.
In Washington, D.C., during an all-hands-on-deck crisis, Trump still won’t even meet with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, whose Democratic-led House majority is leading the way on legislation to spend federal money combating the crisis.
There is no Republican or Democratic solution to battling this pandemic and trying to limit the economic damage that has already begun. There are only American solutions.
Over the past few months, during the presidential campaign, Republicans have blasted Democrats as being socialists, and yet now many members of the GOP are lining up behind proposals to write $1,200 checks to Americans, and even take federal government ownership stakes in companies that seek billion-dollar bailouts.
That’s, um, socialism.
And if that’s what it takes to ease the pain, to limit the disaster to come, so be it.
But we won’t get there, we won’t pull ourselves back from the brink, if we can’t find a way to get past the unrepentant division that has infected our political system.
If Trump wants the American people to listen to his current, improved tone on the pandemic, then he should cut out the attacks on the free press, and anybody else who tries to hold him accountable, as the enemy of the people. If the elected officials at local, state and federal levels of government want to make a difference in this historic and fearful time, then they should embrace the best of all ideas, no matter who presents them.
And for those of us wandering in our neighborhood grocery stores like zombies, now is not the time to shake hands and seek forgiveness for the nasty Facebook posts of the past few years. You know, social distancing.
But share a look while standing 6 feet apart. Maybe a silent nod. Recognize that we’re all Americans, and we can get through this together.