I wanted to pass along one passage from Salman Rushdie rather agonistic Washington Post op-ed:
To repair the damage done by these people in these times will not be easy. I may not see the wounds mended in my lifetime. It may take a generation or more. The social damage of the pandemic itself, the fear of our old social lives, in bars and restaurants and dance halls and sports stadiums, will take time to heal (although a percentage of people seem to know no fear already). We will hug and kiss again. But will there still be movie theaters? Will there be bookstores? Will we feel okay in crowded subway cars?
The social, cultural, political damage of these years, the deepening of the already deep rifts in society in many parts of the world, including the United States, Britain and India, will take longer. It would not be exaggerating to say that as we stare across those chasms, we have begun to hate the people on the other side. That hatred has been fostered by cynics and it bubbles over in different ways almost every day.
What will prove irretrievable in the wake of the pandemic other than the lives that have been lost? I think the reputation of the Centers for Disease Control, for one. New York City may be among the casualties. We will know in due course.
Not much. We will be back to doing everything we used to do soon. The CDC will still be relied upon and absent the poor leadership from 2016-2020 I think it will go back to being fairly useful and usually correct.
Steve
Like always, events of tomorrow will overtake the news of today.
But what I think has changed will be our ability to even agree on what those events are.
What is the truth, what actually happened, who’s the good guy, who’s bad, who’s side are we on.
Are we even on our own side?
A people like us, who have now lost our historical truths, our moral confidence, our self respect as a people, will be easy pickings for confident propagandists seeking our destruction.
We need leadership, not apologetics, Obama 2.0.