emotional rubble of an entire generation of kids
whose lives and educations would be upended?
Those questions are the ones that, right now,
don’t seem outdated. They seem fresh and
immediate, and they remain largely unanswered
today — a time when it can be difficult to
summon memories of the beginning of this
thing because of all that’s happened since, and
all that’s still happening.
The American memory is a strange beast. The
nation, which is younger than most societies
on the planet, loves to trumpet its storyline
of action but has long had trouble reckoning
with or even acknowledging its history —
whether it be racial or military, gender or
economic. Pandemic history, even in the two
years since those days in March 2020, is hardly
an exception.
Do you remember those moments when people
were talking about working together, when
daily life was thrown off its axis enough that
Americans were, for a time, a bit gentler with
each other? When the word “COVID” was barely
used yet, and everyone was just talking about
the coronavirus?
“If we avoid each other and listen to the
scientists, maybe in a few weeks it will be better,”
Koloud “Kay” Tarapolsi of Redmond, Washington,
on March 11, 2020. Exactly two years later, this
week, she said of those early days: “I just wish we
would have taken it more seriously.”
And now: More than 6 million souls lost across
the world. In the United States, nearly a million
dead — and the polarization that was already
poking at the fabric of American society
redeployed into pandemic anger, setting masked