"Are You Feeling As Humbled As I Am?" Frank Bruni, New York Times

 

People wait in line to fill propane tanks in Texas.David J. Phillip/Associated Press February 24, 2021 Are you feeling as humbled as I am?

By Frank Bruni Opinion Columnist

A freak pandemic swept across the world, testing the preparedness of nations’ public health systems, the competence of their governments and the levelheadedness of their citizens. How did the wealthiest and most powerful country of all do?

We have recorded the highest number of coronavirus infections and the most Covid-19 deaths — by a lot. That isn’t because we’re so large. It’s because we’re so lost.

A freak winter storm descended on this country’s second most populous state, whose leaders crow about its rich natural resources and economic vitality, and disparage what they view as growth-choking regulations and excessive public meddling elsewhere. What happened?

Millions of Texans lost power — for days. Millions shivered. Millions didn’t have safe drinking water. Desperately thirsty, many of them boiled snow. Some Texans died. Meanwhile, politicians spun lies and pointed fingers rather than own their mistakes.

“The energy capital of North America cannot provide enough energy to warm and power people’s homes,” Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman from El Paso, said on MSNBC, identifying the cognitive dissonance and lunacy of it all and surging back into the limelight. “We are nearing a failed state in Texas.”

A presidential election ended as presidential elections do, with one group of people elated about their candidate’s victory and another group upset about their candidate’s loss. In a healthy democracy, voters move on.

In ours, thousands traveled to Washington, where many of them attempted an insurrection. Lawmakers fled for safety. The U.S. Capitol was vandalized. People were killed. The president told the perpetrators of this violence that they were “very special” and that he loved them. An overwhelming majority of Republicans want him to continue playing a prominent role in their party.

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling pretty humbled right now.

And I was feeling that way last Thursday, when David Nather and Scott Rosenberg took the thoughts right out of my head in an article for Axios with the headline “America’s can’t-do spirit.” Ouch. And touché.

“From Covid to the election fallout to the utter collapse of Texas’ electric grid, America is no longer showing the rest of the world how to conquer its biggest challenges,” they wrote. “Instead, there’s always another uncivil war to be fought — even when democracy, global health and now climate change are on the line.”

My fellow Times Op-Ed columnist Tom Friedman must also have been reading my mind, because as I was proofreading these paragraphs this morning, I spotted his new column, with the headline “Can You Believe This Is Happening in America?” The “this” is the litany of debacles I described above, and Tom focused on Texas in particular to make the irrefutable case that one of America’s overarching problems is the sacrifice of science to partisan politics and short-term convenience.

We have to own that if we’re going to change it. We have to lose our unwarranted arrogance, get past our current inwardness and recognize that the longer we fail to patch up this country and get it working again, the worse the odds that we’ll ever do so are.

We remain remarkable, a repository of so much talent and such big dreams. Look at Apple, look at SpaceX, look at Operation Warp Speed, which propelled us in record time toward coronavirus vaccines.

Look at our most recent mission to Mars. I just wish all these excursions beyond the stratosphere didn’t feel on some level like contingency plans.

We have all the potential that we ever did, but we’re not going to realize it unless we reflect seriously on how low we’ve been brought, and that means, for starters, recognizing it.

At his CNN town hall last week, President Biden marveled at what the pandemic had done to this proud nation, at scenes of “people lining up in their automobiles for an hour, for as far as you can see, to get a bag of food.”

“This is the United States of America, for God’s sake,” he added, his voice comprising equal measures of incredulity and outrage. The incredulity is something that he and the rest of us must lose: Yes, this is the United States of America. But the outrage is good. It can be converted into determination, and we badly need that.

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