What becomes of the trauma?

rises in depression among young people, financial stress and the staggered levels of disruption and death?

Take, for instance, a report released last week by the Pew Research Center, which found that economic hardships in the first nine months of the pandemic fell hardest on lower- and middle-income families. “From 2019-20, the median income of lower-income households decreased by 3% and the median income of middleincome households fell by 2.1%,” the researchers wrote. “In contrast, the median income of upper-income households in 2020 was about the same as it was in 2019.”

While the well-off shopped online and dreamed of delayed vacations, whole swaths of America were falling into an even more desperate state. The pandemic wasn’t an inconvenience but instead a life-altering experience, a complete reordering of things, a gateway to more suffering, not just from illness but also from society’s ills.

Hunger, trauma, violence. The pandemic exacerbated all three, and more. But we don’t center therapeutic remedies in our discussions of what’s next. We center crackdowns and handouts. We center moving on over getting back up. We center a “return to normal” over the plights of those for whom normal was never enough.

An America now plagued by endemic disease faces a real challenge: Will we behave differently and do better, will we care for people rather than cuff them or will we resort to the response we too often have — of not allowing ourselves to truly register need so that we don’t have to truly contend with it?