The people are ahead of leaders
The following is an excerpt from a column in the New York Times by David Brooks:
Online life gives you the impression that America is bitterly divided. We in my profession primarily cover conflict. We all click on items that play to negative emotions, so there’s a powerful negativity bias online ...
In real life, people are less dogmatic and more uncertain — just trying to feel their way toward a way forward. They’re seeking the right balance between safety and normalcy.
They’re not waiting for politicians to tell them what to do. People locked themselves down before the governors acted and they’re staying home even where governors have opened up. The important decisions are not being made in statehouses. They are being made at the family and community level, as networks of people try to figure out what to do.
Online, humility is rare. People trained in the art of rigid ideology aren’t doing well with a disease that is so mysterious and seemingly random.
But so far as a country we are hanging in with one another. And we’re in a process of discovery. We’re slowly learning the strange features of this disease, slowly improvising what will be a wide variety of local ways forward. Endurance is not static. It’s slowly learning, slowly adjusting.
The pandemic has revealed the rot in many of our political dogmas and institutions, but also a greater humanity, a deeper compassion in the face of suffering, and a hidden solidarity, which I, at least, did not know was there.