Divided we fall ill: Pandemic not enough to heal our split

The protests and violence roiling America’s cities speak to a tragically missed opportunity of the nation’s response to the pandemic that has killed more than 100,000 of us, providing a grim backdrop for the strife. Apart from the need for apartness, and in contrast to the racism rending us all over again, the contagion could hardly be a more potentially uniting crisis.

Unlike too much of our law enforcement, the pandemic is by definition indiscriminate, affecting all 50 states and every populated continent. Bill Gates has aptly described it as a world war in which we all are — or at least should be — on the same side. The coronavirus cares not whether one lives in a coastal metropolis or heartland town; drinks kombucha or Coors; voted for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or (God forbid) Jill Stein. All it wants is a warm trachea.

This is both the horror of our time and the hope. We’re all in danger, but we’re all in — or we would be with a modicum of leadership.

It’s a test of our leaders but also a gift to any with a right to call themselves such a thing. Few considered Santa Clara County health officer Dr. Sara Cody as a leader — or considered her much at all — until she, San Francisco Mayor London Breed and other Bay Area officials imposed the mainland’s first shelterinplace order, taking the lead on a national crisis from decidedly local perches.

Most sentient public servants who find themselves confronting a crisis, whether it’s a snowstorm or a war, realize that managing it competently is the obvious policy and political choice. Those who do are rewarded not just with reelection but also with a degree of approbation unavailable to those cursed with governing in good times.

Think an ailing FDR on his way to an unprecedented fourth term (a now unconstitutional feat with which our current president is disconcertingly obsessed). Think Reagan shouting across the wall at Gorbachev. Think George W. Bush standing on the rubble of the World Trade Center with a bullhorn, his approval rating hurtling toward 90% — at a moment so fraught that a figure as repugnant as Rudy Giuliani could briefly become “America’s mayor” just for doing a halfway decent job.

All these polarizing figures reaped immense political benefits from the national will to unify against an existential threat — while at the same time doing the nation the favor of attempting to lead it in some direction.

Sure, San Francisco, Silicon Valley and environs had a head start in this instance. The home of a tech industry preoccupied with stamping out every form of interpersonal contact as well as a liveandletdie approach to housing and homelessness, the Bay Area has more resting social distance than any place I’ve ever been — and I’ve been to New Jersey.

And yet even here, distancing has been difficult. Teenagers congregate in parks and parking lots, supermarket shoppers absentmindedly queue up in prepandemic proximity, and enough joggers crowded onto the Embarcadero at one point to draw a scolding from

CNN — even though the Bay Area was taking the task seriously sooner than almost any other place in the country.

Indignation may be the kneejerk and, given the lifeanddeath stakes, appropriate response to those flouting distancing orders. But the resistance to isolation, willful and otherwise, speaks to our natural inclination to congregate, especially amid calamity. Hence the efforts to cast separation as a collective project, invoking our sense of solidarity in keeping our distance from each other for each other. Hence the postMinneapolis protests that have cast all that aside at great risk.

But what if division is utterly intrinsic to one’s politics? What if our putative leader never had anything else to offer? What if our halfheartedly elected president built his entire public career — from TVfiring hasbeens and neverweres to demanding the first African American president’s papers to calling Mexicans rapists and drug dealers — on pitting people against each other?

President Trump vainly tried to answer the pandemic with that strategy, his only strategy, despite its inherently unifying nature, uselessly blaming foreigners, Democrats and other contrived categories. That is how we got the “China virus” and “bluestate bailouts.” It’s how we got #FireFauci and presidential prescriptions for chloroquine and Clorox. It’s how we got Gavin Newsom, Andrew Cuomo, Gretchen Whitmer and countless other state and local officials acting as our provisional presidents. It’s how we got “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” And it’s how we got the deadliest plague on the planet.