COVID-19 reveals deeper, more enduring U.S. tragedy

The last several weeks have been hard, the last week perhaps the hardest. Americans itched to get out, on bike trails, amid neighborhood streets, in stores, at picnic groves, by the shore or lakeside. It was at those places that it became clear that months into the COVID-19 calamity, we remain full of questions and bereft of answers.

It became clear, too, that many of the questions we harbor are vital about personal and public character, about the country’s resolve and national purpose. These uncertainties always have lain beneath the country’s surface, we have lived on the relatively blank pages of history. But this season we are living in pages crowded with history. We know our grandchildren and their children will read about our great coronavirus challenge, just as we’ve learned about the Black Death. But we don’t know how they will view our answers to two elemental questions:

Did this country have a united spirit and vision?

We have not had one at every national turning point. Otherwise, history would not linger on Shelburne, Nova Scotia, one of the first havens for Tories fleeing the Revolutionary colonies. Nor would there have been a Civil War, to say nothing of Reconstruction and more than a century’s struggle to redeem the “created equal” promise of the Declaration of Independence.

And though there were dissenters to American involvement in both world conflagrations, the country basically held together, especially in World War II. It was then that President Franklin Roosevelt said:

“There is one front and one battle where everyone in the United States — every man, woman and child — is in action, and will be privileged to remain in action throughout this war. That front is right here at home, in our daily lives, and in our daily tasks.”

If World War II reminded Americans of their common purpose, the virus war is reminding us of our divisions.

The nation’s leaders are divided. The victims of the virus are divided, with more in states that voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton than for Donald Trump. The deaths from the disease break down in economic and racial divisions, slamming the poor, the black and the brown harder than the white; African Americans, for example, account for about 1 in 7 people in Illinois, but nearly half the deaths in that state are among black people.

The contrast between the American and Canadian experiences is illuminating.

A study released this month by the University of Toronto and McGill University found that Canadians — bitterly divided in both world wars over conscription — are more united on this issue than they have been at any other time in their history.

The authors found “no evidence of a relationship between the partisan leanings of municipalities and interest in the coronavirus.”

That may be because of a second enduring question that is part of the American character but absent in Canada: Did this country resolve the meaning of the words “liberty” and “freedom”? Those words appear in all our sacred texts.

Today the debate about freedom is intense. Does it mean the freedom to walk the streets without impediment or mask, or the freedom to avoid contact with deadly germs? Does it mean the freedom to congregate or the freedom to live in a society that protects public health?

The answers generally break along partisan lines, with the party that once symbolized social restraint advocating broad freedom, and the party that once worked for broad social freedom now calling for restraint.

This is a twin tragedy: Even on the question that defined America — the quest for freedom — Americans today are irredeemably divided.