When you hit bottom, when you are at the end of your rope, when you're in true despair, you can’t imagine getting out.
America is at the bottom. We’ve found that what we said about ourselves was tissue thin. The economy has collapsed around our ears. Death is all around us.
But better days are coming.
We can beat COVID-19. We know how to do it. Other countries have done it. Europe and much of Asia are opening, coming out of their cellars, living again.
The key is cooperation.
That’s all it takes. Wear a mask when you go out, or a face shield. Try to stay home. Wash your hands. Stay away from other people. Love thy neighbor.
The virus travels on the droplets you expel when breathing. It travels fastest when you sneeze, but even those droplets don’t travel much further than 6 feet. If 95% of us cooperate with each other, then the rate of transmission will drop below 1 and we’ll be back on the downward slope again.
The fact that people haven’t done this, that they’ve called it an impairment on their “freedom,” just shows how stupid they are. It shows they shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near power, ever. It shows how truly un-American and un-Christian they are.
In standing for these fake ideas Donald Trump has done more for the cause of liberalism than Hillary Clinton ever could. His failure has proven that ideas matter, cooperation most of all. He has proven the failure of the “conservative movement,” all of it, now and forever.
Democrats are going to win in November. Bigly. Everywhere. What happened when Trump came out of his bunker, holding a Bible, behind tear gas, was the last straw for the people who matter. The military won’t participate in a coup. Lawyers will remain true to their oaths. Most state elections will be run with some degree of competence. There will be exceptions, it will be messy, but Trump and Trumpism are going down.
Racial justice is rising, slowly. Guaranteed health care is coming, slowly. The fairness of future elections will be assured. Trump-era judges won’t be able to stop it, and the corrupt ones will be impeached. It won’t happen all at once, but all of this will happen.
Meanwhile, 10 years of technology change have been compressed into one by the virus. The online world will retain most of the market share it gained during the pandemic. Millions of people have stopped commuting forever.
A lot of jobs won’t come back. Many functions formerly performed by people are now being performed by software, at no great loss. That value will be captured, but not just through equity. A lot of it is going to be captured by various levels of government. It must be, because unemployment will remain stubbornly high, in both Techland and Trumpistan, and we’ve learned that if we don’t care about everyone, no one is going to be safe.
Watching even CNBC these days or reading the business publications I’ve served my entire career I’m shocked they don’t see what’s coming. They’re like the Indians before Columbus. But business must realize they’re part of society, not the rulers but among the ruled.
Europeans learned the value of cooperation from America over the course of 6 decades, and they’re benefitting right now. Even the worst-hit countries are seeing lower caseloads, and their economies are opening, safely. South Korea got the virus the same day we did. They’re capitalist and democratic, because of us. But they have cooperated with one another, and with public health authorities. They lost about 325 people. We’ve lost 122,000 and counting.
You know what? Fuck your freedom. Fuck your libertarianism. Fuck you. Wear a damn mask. 
Wash your hands. That’s how we get through this alive. Think of your face as a loaded gun, which might be firing blanks but, once infected, is throwing bullets everywhere. At your friends, your family, the people you do business with, and at perfect strangers. Don’t be Typhoid Murray. I don’t want you in my America.
Yes. South Korea and Europe are more “socialist” than we are. They have national health care. They guarantee income. They leave no one behind, so they can afford to cooperate when the need arises.
They need to be our model, now. We’re learning that lesson the hard way. But, by God, we’re learning it.
Cooperation is more than something neighbors do. It’s more than something you do with public health authorities or with your government. It’s also something governments must do with each other. Government at all levels needs to learn that lesson. If Texas acts like an asshole, New Yorkers are going to die. If America acts like an asshole, Europeans won’t let us visit them, nor should they.
This is the lesson. Cooperate. Or die.
Once we all learn the lesson, once we’re clear on that, come 2021, we can start acting on it. We can begin, again, to use government as a tool to enforce cooperation, but only if it’s run by people who are expert in the things that government does. We need the Cloud Czars most of all, to give our decision makers the data they need to do their jobs. Once they have that data, once they know what works, educators should be educating our children, public health experts managing our health, peacekeeping experts put in charge of policing.
Most important, we need massive amounts of cooperation to begin addressing the climate crisis. We need cooperation with what our government experts will be saying, and we need cooperation between governments. The countries that should be isolated should be those which are killing us, the governments that think burning shit is their right. Isolate them, contain them, invade them if you must, but shut it down.
There is so much to do. Yes, we’re walking through fire right now. Yes, it’s horrible right now. But all of us are learning these hard lessons. We’re going to come out of this, forged in the blood of those we have lost, ready for the fight that’s ahead.
The future days won’t be easy ones. But they will be better. We'll be going forward.
