malevolence, even occasionally from the former
president himself.
And for a while, there weren’t large crowds.
Except when there were.
For weeks in those early days, Americans
in many corners of the republic all but shut
down. Faces disappeared as masks went
up against the invisible adversary — if you
could actually obtain them. Hand sanitizer
was squirted so liberally that some distilleries
pivoted from whiskey to alcohol antiseptics.
People discussed ventilator shortages over
family meals. Zoom became, for the nation,
a household word; suddenly your colleagues
were arrayed on a screen in front of you
like personalized, workaday “Brady Bunch”
opening credits.
All these things were new once.
In the weeks that followed, as the scope of
things revealed itself gradually, there were
questions we knew to ask, and questions
we didn’t.
The ones we knew to ask: How does it spread,
and how easily? Can we keep it out? Can I even
go outside safely? Should I wash my groceries?
Will there be a vaccine, and if so, how quickly?
The ones we didn’t: How to combat the
extreme mountains of mis- and disinformation
surrounding the virus and the vaccines that
emerged from the scientific community
astonishingly quickly? How to manage the
anger, and the national division, that poured
from the political arena into the protracted
virus discussion and burned in conversational
trash fires across the land? How to navigate the