THE CURRENT POLITICAL DIVIDE IN THE US IS DANGEROUS

 

                            …We did learn just how “essential” some workers are today

 

But we can still learn more and come together from the difficult year of 2020

It is true that humans learn more from their bad experiences than the good ones. This will obviously make 2020 one of the most instructive human years in a long time

We cannot undo the overall tension and the economic pain, suffering and the deaths.  However, we can possibly learn how to make life better for generations to come.

The following is a personal attempt to consider some of the mistakes we have made this year, and some of the exceptional ways we put things together collectively for dealing with the years catastrophes.

I must of course begin with the pandemic that has ravaged our country.  While millions of Americans suffered economically, a significant part of our citizenry, (those with large stock holdings), they proceeded to become much richer.  The Dow Jones industrial average is up roughly 60% since mid-March. 

There was nothing abstract about the stark inequality between those who could work from home and those who couldn’t.  And those that couldn't work anywhere.

In resolving to address those inequities, we should begin with those who gave the most during the pandemic.  It was those “essential workers,” from delivery drivers to health-care staff, from supermarket employees to meatpackers.  Without them, our society would probably have collapsed.  As to those lessons I referred to, we need to remember those workers long after the pandemic is finally over.

We must learn how to repay our debt to these essential workers.  We should consider their ideas of receiving better pay, better benefits and working conditions.  That would reflect the most justifiable way to say “thanks.”

A pandemic also reminds us of the social nature of healthcare.  When sick people go untreated, they can then infect others.  I have always believed that all Americans should have access to good, affordable health care as a basic right.  But even if you don’t share that view philosophically, we all have a practical interest in having a far better and improved public health system.

The next lesson is realizing that today, this nation is more politically polarized than ever.  Our democratic experiment is under one of the most difficult situations it has ever experienced.  Hopefully the new administration will be able to bring the two political parties back to again, working together.

All over the world, citizens have learned that having a government that works really does matter. It needs to be competent, efficient, creative, agile and focused. Under this administration, that has not been the case.  

We need to learn from those other countries that handled the virus better than we did.  We also need to respect the work of our real public servants more than we do. 

It has become critical that we need to build that better public sector.  We should also see how rapid government intervention, to the tune of trillions of dollars throughout the world, prevented economic collapse.  We saw that across the world, austerity was pushed aside. Thus will the economist John Maynard Keynes’ ideas get a new lease on intellectual influence?  In his Keynesian Economics, his general Theory of Employment, Interest and Money advocated that the remedy for economic recession was based on the government to sponsor a policy of supporting and helping finance full employment.

I will join those free-market conservatives in praising those “supply-chain managers and operations chiefs” who worked this year in “trying to make sure the we had what we needed.”  Under our newly elected president, we will learn from how organized science and public/private partnerships they produced a vaccine with such speed.

We did discover that in many areas, there were better ways to organize work.  We learned that working from home does not have to decrease productivity.  It can also save time once wasted on commuting while it contains the environmental damage caused by all that traffic.

At the same time, as was observed in the Financial Times, we missed the opportunities that working in the same place we live provides the social capital and trust that all enterprises need to operate effectively.  We’ll need to get the balance between these work-situations correct.

On a related note, we now see the inadequacy of our non-system of child care more clearly than ever.  We also learned that remote teaching can work, but not in all circumstances.

We did wonder how we could hold a democratic election during a pandemic?  We solved this problem by expanding the voting opportunities, particularly through mail and drop boxes.

All Americans responded. In 2016, 136,669,276 of us voted, and in 2020’s latest count: 158,394,605 voted.

The high stakes of this election obviously drew more people out, but making voting easier did matter, and in a bipartisan way. Joe Biden got 15.4 million more votes than Hillary did in 2016, but even the GOP President did receive 11.2 million more votes than he did four years ago.

Rather than roll back this year’s election reforms, we should push those reforms even further.

Finally, there is all the gratitude that comes from realizing the total value of our families and our friends.

It doesn’t take a pandemic to remind of us of the costs of loneliness and isolation.  But each of us might consider a New Year’s resolution to reach out to people who are alone.

2020 taught us just how fragile life can be.   That burden is better borne in increasing our relationships with each other.

That’s one of the largest lessons we should take from the difficult year: 2020.

Copyright G. Ater 2020