Set aside for a moment that our government was woefully unprepared to deal with a freak virus like the new one straight out of China because, more importantly, our culture almost set us up for it.

There’s no other way to explain so much of the response to it that seems less like an urgent fear of seeing the COVID-19 virus spread and more like an aggressive backlash to anyone who might say, You know, maybe Americans should be a lot more skeptical of foreign countries that don’t really see things the way we do.