Some have said that the coronavirus pandemic will be for my generation what 9/11 was for the last. There are plenty of differences, of course, but the two events share one fundamental thing in common: their devastation will be forever known as paradigm-shifting alterations in the fabric of our time.
Sept. 11, 2001, is my very first memory — I was so young that my mother doesn’t believe me when I tell her that I remember the events of that day. But I recall, though the picture is hazy, coming down the stairs in our suburban Massachusetts house and wondering why my parents were staring at the television, transfixed by the rush of images on the screen. Two pairs of teary eyes, watching the same blurry video play over and over again: a plane crashing headlong into a tall tower, followed by another, shattering the comforting bounds of possibility in a single dreadful moment.
But whether or not we remember the event itself, my generation was shaped by 9/11 and its ramifications for American politics. The phrase “9/11 changed everything” is a cliche, but like many cliches, it’s true.
From the darkness and the fear, the grief and the deep suffering, emerged an America at its very best. In a country divided by partisan bitterness, citizens of every color and creed found one another. We held each other close, suddenly understanding that what we had to lose, collectively, was worth fighting to protect. Bent but not broken, our republic persisted.
And yet, in stark contrast to the remarkable unity that followed the 9/11 attacks, our contemporary political culture is so broken that many of our leaders know no other way to respond to the novel coronavirus than to treat it as we would any other partisan food-fight, blaming the other side for the pandemic and reacting to the crisis as political tribes rather than as a unified nation.
The New York Times publishes opinion columns advocating that we call the infection “TrumpVirus,” with the caption, “If you’re feeling awful, you know who to blame,” while major right-wing commentators such as radio host Rush Limbaugh falsely claim that the entire debacle is largely being manufactured by left-wing partisans in an attempt to hurt the president.
Furthermore, the virus itself (along with the widespread misery it will surely cause) has been weaponized to score cheap partisan points. Depending on one’s political affinities, the incapacity of the federal government to effectively respond to the outbreak is proof that either the executive bureaucracy is bloated and inefficient — or, on the other hand, that it’s not nearly big and well-funded enough.
“See,” both sides yell at each other from across the partisan divide. “I told you so!”
And, in the meantime, America suffers.
Is this really the best that we can do? Have the last few years of bitter division so infantilized us that we are unable to put aside our differences for a moment to protect our own people?
Average citizens, by and large, have responded to the pandemic in the same way that we did to the 9/11 attacks: putting aside our differences for the sake of our communities and working together to support one another. We can take hope in the fact that this defining characteristic of American civil society hasn’t changed.
However, the difference is the way that our leaders in the political arena and cultural tastemakers in the media have responded to the crisis, using it as a platform for vitriolic tribalism rather than attempting to bring together a country in desperate need of unification.
But what our chattering classes forget is that the virus doesn’t care how you vote, and it doesn’t discriminate according to whether one watches Fox News or MSNBC. If for nothing else than the lives of countless innocents, partisan finger-pointing must be momentarily brought to heel in service of the national interest.
In a famous moment from the day of the World Trade Center attack, while standing on the still-warm ashes of the twin towers in the hours following the tragedy, President George W. Bush gave an impromptu speech from a bullhorn to the exhausted masses of firefighters and first responders. The bullhorn was turned all the way up, but it still wasn’t loud enough. As the young, newly elected president was speaking, a thick New York accent from out of the frame yells — “George! We can’t hear you!”
Bush pauses, his arm draped around a New York fire chief. He leans back, tilting his bullhorn to the sky.
“I can hear you!” he bellowed.
The crowd of drained, ash-drenched New Yorkers erupted in cheers.
“I can hear you,” Bush continued over the crowd, suddenly finding his voice. “The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
In the midst of the headlines, the tweets, the dueling news conferences, and the sneering opportunism of a profoundly decayed political culture — can our leaders hear us now?
Nate Hochman is an undergraduate student at Colorado College and a Young Voices contributor. You can follow him on Twitter @njhochman.
