As long as we’re assessing structural issues that shape our democracy, let’s not forget to keep an eye on the census even as we ask focus on the mechanics of mail-in voting.

In addition to everything else, this election will determine a redistricting — and the census will determine what those elected to Congress will be working with when they begin that project.

Until and unless the Supreme Court forces a fundamental redrawing, this is probably going to be a multi-decade fight: this redistricting will set the terms for the next decade, which might yield a Congress in 2030 that’s willing to consider writing sane district-drawing reform into law.

I’d rather not wait that long to see a change, but I definitely wouldn’t want to let the current problems ossify into accepted reality for another decade.

By far the most common assessment I’ve heard of the election is that there’s not much to be excited about, but the choice is clear. Let’s pause and think about excitement for a moment.

In the past 30 years, almost everything has gotten more tailored, local, “curated,” or “bespoke.” The most successful companies that Millennials have grown up with have figured out how to do this at scale: Apple made better design relatively accessible, Google and Amazon can find anything and know just what you like, and Facebook allows you to feel connected to the whole world while also curating your own little bubble. We’ve (re-)learned to eat local; shop small; and emblazon cars, laptops, and t-shirts with symbols of HOME^®.

The notable exception to this pattern is the presidency, which still follows the old three-network model. Even as the primaries have exploded to upwards of a dozen candidates per side, the final decision still boils down to NBC or CBS.

For people trained to eat more (local) kale, despise the first president we remember (but couldn’t vote for), and hang all our hopes and dreams on the first president we could vote for, this doesn’t match our expectations of the rest of life. Why shouldn’t we be excited? Even our co-working spaces urged us to “Do What You Love!” — and this is the presidency, for crying out loud.

Two rejoinders should be obvious by now.

First, be careful what you wish for: fringe presidents elected by a tiny, rabidly devoted group aren’t a good pick for a job that involves an awful lot of symbolic leadership of everybody. This isn’t just “I’m a Mac”/”I’m a PC” stuff; this is chat-room conspiracies vs. the New York Times.

Second, what’s the point of (and where’s the excitement in) “burning it all down” if not to be able to build afresh? Heaven knows we haven’t untangled every messed-up system we inherited, but it’s also clear that we’ve burned a lot: reputation, credibility, guardrails on the discourse of the world’s most powerful nuclear state (and, by imitation, a whole lot of wannabes).

There will always be radicals demanding more, faster. And that’s to be welcomed: dreamers and gadflies and prophets have always helped keep people in power honest and accountable, and they’ve pushed the Overton Window open.

And so, now that the choice is clear and we enter the final months of the race — and after five years of existential dread — how much more excited do you really need to get?

The other night, as I put supper on the table, I looked out the window for the umpteenth time.

After an afternoon walk and another masked dash through the grocery store, home felt more or less normal: all the usual conveniences worked, the street outside was peaceful, and the downstairs neighbors were partying loudly.

Sitting down to eat, I thought — once again — that Covid has changed everything, yet not much has changed in some important ways. If, for example, some major U.S. cities are underwater by midcentury, or if parts of the continent become essentially unlivable, we’ll have to make some adjustments that far exceed anything we’ve done in the past five months.

Might now be a good time to take a closer look at the longer term?

This past week, I enjoyed digging into the Oxford American‘s summer-fall issue on place. I imagine I wasn’t the only reader waiting to see what “a magazine of the South” would have to say in the summer and fall of 2020; as soon as I saw the cover, I thought they got it right — and the first several articles haven’t disappointed.

You can choose for yourself here; my favorites thus far have included “A Lesson in Acceptance” (on the Houston food scene mid-pandemic), “Ways to Keep Breathing” (a raw and searing take that goes way beyond “self-care”), and “Joyride” (on driving and singing and “speaking beauty into … children”).

One of my favorite tricks in the historical method is called “placement:” the process of reassembling someone else’s worldview. Who and what shaped them? How do they think the world works? Why?

The more I look around these days, the more I think about placement — in the obvious places, of course (how could he/they possibly think that way?), but also in the less obvious ones.

My own assumptions and expectations, for example, were deeply shaped by mid-20th century writing. I was into the Hardy Boys books by fourth grade and Tom Clancy by fifth; plenty of World War II books filled in around yarns of Soviet submarines.

Other people’s expectations — my parents’, my grandparents’, my peers’ — were shaped by their environments and narratives, too. And, talking with friends recently who are parenting a year-old daughter in the midst of Covid, I wonder how their little girl’s expectations are being shaped by everything happening around her.

Most of our expectations are being challenged now. That’s been true for a long time for some people, and it’s more recent for others, but reality — if we can look at it clearly — obviously doesn’t match the predominant narratives of the past century or so. (Looking at a photograph of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt the other day, I realized they lived in a country that’s almost completely foreign to the one we have now.)

Each of us is placed differently, but we’re all placed somewhere, somehow. No matter what we were taught or conditioned to believe, though, the question is, how might we create new narratives and expectations that are better guides to the world, the country, the communities, the families we actually live in now?

The White House is, by and large, the last bastion of change.

Depending on how you count, it took 20 or 40 or 50 years to get to where we are.

Biden-Harris might not be the ticket you want, but it’s officially the ticket we’ve got — and, even if it looks behind the times today, consider how different it is from four or eight or 12 years ago.

The U.S. government is really, really, really big. It has been for decades, and the growth has been one of the few truly bipartisan efforts during that time.

But I don’t want to focus on the size of the administrative state or the seriousness of the claims against it today. (Though it might be worth asking what a smaller, less regulatory government would do about Big Tech, given how little the current government has been able to govern.)

Instead, I want to ask when was the last time you were able to not think about government.

Somehow, we’ve ended up in the perverse paradox of being under-governed and over-governmented: after five years of practice, we still can’t wrest our attention away from the first shitposting presidency.

Dominating every waking moment of our attention (and a chunk of our sleeping ones, too) is an encroachment of a whole other degree and magnitude.

So, yes: we need to be more engaged, and we ought to demand and receive better services. But, first, let’s insist on a government that allows us to think about something else from time to time.

Remember the recurring gag in Team America, in which one character says something would be “9/11 times X” and another replies, in a tone of awed horror, “That would be [nine hundred eleven times X]”?

Sadly, the past several months have provided a real-life version of this. With more than 171,000 deaths due to the coronavirus as of latest count (by the New York Times), we’re at 9/11 [approximately 3,000 deaths] times 57.

As Scott Galloway pointed out a couple of weeks ago, the United States has been averaging a little over 800 deaths per day due to Covid — or approximately the Civil War (~500 deaths/day) plus World War II (~300).

That’s unprecedented. And it should be more than reason enough for an “unpresidenting.”

Imagine you’re running a company with 1,000 workers. For sake of example, it’s powered by a waterwheel, which is operated by three people.

Here’s the catch: the sluiceway empties into the office itself. At present, the office can’t function without the water and the waterwheel — but, the longer the water flows, the soggier the office gets. Sooner or later, it’s clear that the office might have power, but everyone and everything in it will be underwater.

Those three workers are in an interesting position. You can’t fire them today, since that would put everyone out of work as soon as their laptop batteries die. But you can’t keep them in their current jobs forever, either: not only will everyone be out of work, but the flooded laptops will be ruined, too. What would you do in this situation?

***

The truth is, we’re about to find out. According to the Financial Times, in a recent analysis of Joe Biden’s proposals for climate and energy policy, the fracking industry sees the presumptive nominee as an existential threat to their industry. If enacted, Biden’s policies might cost 600,000 jobs.

That’s a lot of people. A lot of livelihoods. (And, yes, a lot of swing voters, if you want to look at it that way.) But here’s the thing: 600,000 jobs represent about three and a half thousandths (0.36 percent) of the total U.S. labor force, which was right around 165 million before Covid struck in earnest.

And so we face the choice: what do we do with and for these people, whose jobs might embody 20th-century American progress but whose continued work is making the world less livable for everyone — and helping to give political cover to other countries that don’t want to break up with fossil fuels yet, either?

I hope that one of the lessons of 2016 is that we shouldn’t try to write people off or pretend to buy them off with vague ideas of retraining. Dignity matters, and our culture has hooked work awfully close together with dignity.

But I hope we can also agree that the overriding need for dignity does not mean we can’t also have priorities and act on them. We don’t still have a whaling industry, and that’s a good thing.

Which is more American: risking the future of the planet to preserve the already-tenuous jobs of 0.36 percent of the labor force with outsized political clout, or finding new ways for 600,000 people to contribute to a future that’s more sustainable in every way?

I recently came across the quip that living in Canada is like living in an apartment over a meth lab.

It’s easy to focus on the precariousness of that situation: who wants to live above a seedy spot that could explode at any moment?

The question I keep coming back to, though, is: what would you do if you found yourself living in the meth lab?