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Virus America, six months in: Disarray, dismay, disconnect

For years, Erin Whitehead has been a committed fan of the crisis-fueled medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy.” She has watched its doctors handle all manner of upheaval inside their put-upon hospital — terrifying diseases, destructive weather, bombs, mass shootings, mental illness, uncertainty, grief.

Today, she turns to the emotionally draining show as a salve, something to take her mind off of … well, off of everything this jumbled year has delivered to her nation, to her society, to her front door.

“Sixteen seasons of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’. That’s what the past six months of 2020 have been,” says Whitehead, a podcaster and full-time mother in Pace, a town of 34,000 in Florida’s panhandle. “We’ve all just been in triage. Nobody can sustain that level of stress.”

On Friday, March 13, 2020, a COVID curtain descended upon the United States, and a new season — a season of pandemic — was born. Now we are half a year into it — accustomed in some ways, resistant in others, grieving at what is gone, wondering with great trepidation what will be.

New conflicts and causes have risen. Anger and death sit in daily life’s front row. A sense of uncertainty reigns. Great chunks of the national emotional infrastructure are buckling. We are locked in a countrywide conversation about control — who has it and who should.

And as the most contentious of presidential elections approaches, the very notion of what it means to be an American — and to be the United States of America itself — is perhaps the biggest contention point of all.

“Six months in, we are in a different place,” says Alicia Hinds Ward, an entrepreneur in Washington, D.C. “We don’t want to stay in this place. It’s ugly, it’s dark and we know we have to change.”

Nearly 200,000 Americans who were with us on March 13 are here no longer. A debate over pandemic policy has aligned itself in exacting fashion with already sharply drawn political lines. A reckoning on race in American life — one set off by a spate of Black Americans dying at the hands of police but with far deeper, more systemic roots — is unfolding vigorously.

School district by school district, neighborhood by neighborhood, sometimes house by house, those who are telling the American story to each other are spinning very different yarns about the country and its purpose.

“We are in a pitched battle between narratives,” says Evan Cornog, a political historian who has written about how presidents and candidates assemble and manage their storylines.

Uncertain times often produce uncertain people. But a strange paradox tends to emerge as well: In uncertain moments, human nature is to seek out certainty. That points to politics, where being absolutely sure is a feature, not a bug. This year, in this republic, that is no exception: In September 2020, the American earth is pocked with the marks of dug-in heels.

There is certainty that Donald Trump is right and has handled the pandemic adeptly, and that a Joe Biden victory in November would end America as we know it. There is equal certainty among others that the reverse is incontrovertibly true.

There is certainty that Black Lives Matter is on history’s and justice’s sides, riding a wave of much-needed change — and certainty, too, that those protesting are part of a violent leftist movement to undermine police, sow disorder and bring down the country.

In the middle of all that intransigence, Frederick Gooding Jr. sees an opportunity to understand. Gooding, an associate professor of African American studies at Texas Christian University, finds an irrefutable link between a coronavirus spring and a summer of protests against racial injustice.

The coming of COVID-19, he says, created an overlay of apprehension in millions of American lives — the fear of harm if you go out, the general unease built into daily life — that Black Americans have long found familiar.

“I think many people were able to experience what people of color were experiencing on a more frequent basis as normal interactions become exacerbated through the additional layers of anxiety and stress,” Gooding says.

This period of uncertainty “provides more connection points to other people,” Gooding says. “Perhaps this current time period can be leveraged as a time when more people can understand and appreciate where we want to push society forward when it comes to sustained racial progress.”

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