“Money makes money,” said Benjamin Franklin, “and the money that money makes, makes money.”

That might be the shortest economic history of the past 40 years of U.S. policy and society. Once wealth starts flowing uphill, math dictates that it will flow faster and faster if unchecked. And when you compound policy choices and circumstance along with interest, the results get even starker.

By now, the results are staggering. Every American should study those charts (from the St. Louis Fed) and ask themselves, Who and what is this society really for? What’s the promise, and how are we measuring?

Meanwhile, the math hasn’t changed (of course), and both policy and circumstance have tended to reinforce existing trends.

I can’t think of a way out other than to change the math, which means changing the policy.

A lot of people are discovering edges right now, particularly when it comes to what feels uncertain and what feels scary.

Often, the limits aren’t where we thought. The familiar suddenly looks less certain, and therefore less safe.

But even when so much of life is lived above our uncertainty threshold, it can’t all be lived beyond our fear threshold. Otherwise, of course, we’d never walk, drive, or fly anywhere even when we could.

The opportunity is to see inherent uncertainty more clearly, to live more comfortably in that newly expanded zone of not-knowing and, gradually, to push back the limits of fear.

In wilderness medicine classes, I was taught that everybody gets one free puke.

Maybe you ate something funky, maybe the fear or shock just caught up with you, maybe you’re overheated and under-hydrated. Doesn’t matter: puke once, and we’ll stay focused on the presenting problem — but puke again and I’ll presume you’re even sicker than you look.

Since 2016, a lot of countries have puked at least once.

The first puke might not be pretty (it never is), but it’s still get-past-able.

But the second and subsequent pukes are where things really get unpleasant. India, Hungary, and Poland are democracies on their second puke. Too much of Europe is looking green around the gills, and let’s just say the UK is dry-heaving. (China and Russia were and are in different categories.)

And then we come to the Americas, where the United States and Brazil are fast approaching their next electoral tests, in 2020 and 2022, respectively.

Here’s where the metaphor breaks down a little bit: what’s already happened is path-determinant in ways that a “free puke” might not be. The old version of “normal” is no longer an option.

But what is on the table is a decision about whether or not to reinforce the current direction of travel. And if other democratic-authoritarians are any guide, the first term hurts, but the second term kills.

We’ve had our puke, and it won’t be free.

But democracy means we get a vote about what comes next.

First, via Longreads, Wesley Lowrey’s sweeping essay on “Why Minneapolis Was the Breaking Point.”

And, from Fr. Bryan Massingale at Fordham, an excruciating examination of “The Assumptions of White Privilege and What We Can Do About It.”

Both essays point, as Dr. King did long ago, to the mutuality of destiny, and the need to set each other free. As with so much contemporary writing, they make clear that white folks have the key. Forgiveness might still be possible, but we’re going to have to really work for justice first.

A tall order, to be sure, but, writes Fr. Massingale, “As James Baldwin believed, despair is an option that only the comfortable can afford to entertain.”

“Trust me,” the businessman Donald Trump told sportswriter Rick Reilly way back in 2004, “one day with me is more than enough.”

Reilly heartily concurred after 18 holes. And, 16 years later, several billion people no doubt agree.

We’ve been living with this guy’s voice — and face — in our heads for years, from The Apprentice to the amateur in the White House. And although Trump can’t be un-presidented soon enough, the chances of his simply disappearing “like a miracle” are about the same as wishing away the coronavirus.

So it’s not too soon to do a thought experiment: more than four years on, we still don’t have a model for how to deal with a President Trump, so how will we deal with an ex-president Trump?

Consider:

• The Twitter feed: We’re still not sure if it’s official policy, lawful order, private bigotry, or just plain hate speech. As a private citizen, he’ll lose the (lessened) imprimatur of office, but not the microphone nor the audience. Assuming he doesn’t follow the accustomed code of silence and reticence (!!), will what he has to say be worth covering? If not worth covering, who’ll be listening anyway, and what directions might they be taking?

• Transfer of power: Our democratic republic promises a peaceful and predictable transfer of power. Former presidents can be global statesmen like Jimmy Carter or reclusive watercolorists like George W. Bush, but they can’t call balls and strikes on the incumbent, nor — worse — offer an alternative reality to their supporters. We’re going to need to come up with a way to prevent even the semblance of an alt-presidency, while still acknowledging …

• The changed narrative: Both parties spent two decades talking about how great and indispensable we were while letting the market replace the government. Trump accurately pointed out the hypocrisy, and brought forth the nastiness that matched too many people’s daily experience of the United States. We’re not going to unsee that for at least a generation, yet establishment-manufactured alternatives too often boil down to “The 1980s called — they want their domestic policy back.”

When Trump will leave the White House is indeed a pressing question, and the answer had better be 2020. But how he will leave office — and how we’ll live with him afterward — isn’t getting enough careful attention.

We’re already stuck with Trump for the rest of his days. And we absolutely must find a way to avoid putting marginal Trump voters on death ground.

But Cliven Bundy’s political views with Jimmy Carter’s stature?

We don’t need even one day of that.

Let’s try to be honest for a moment about the idea of “essential work” in the American economy.

Work has always been essential, but our culture has never been honest about who’s doing it or how.

[To be clear, the dominant culture has never been honest with itself: we consistently try to obfuscate the terms of the contract, but our “essential workers” throughout history have always been clear about their end of the deal.]

Follow the ubiquitous war metaphors to their conclusion, and it’s clear that workers and cotton swabs are essential to the fight against the coronavirus in the way that soldiers and bullets are essential to a real war effort: valued collectively for their potential expenditure, but individually quite expendable.

Let’s assume that the rate of ordinary sickness is just about what it always is — if anything, perhaps somewhat higher given the added stress and changed lifestyles of quarantine.

And let’s further assume that a lot of Americans no longer have health insurance (previously provided by the jobs they don’t have), and that nobody is going to a doctor or dentist these days if they can possibly avoid it.

Play all that 12–18 months forward (the very best case for a coronavirus vaccine), and it’s not hard to imagine a sizable wave of deferred care and undetected conditions suddenly requiring treatment. It’s also not hard to imagine an awful lot of people struggling to pay for the treatment they need.

And all of this is to say nothing of potential subsequent waves of Covid infections.

It took decades to design a country in which too many people couldn’t afford to get sick in the first place, and now we’ve taken away even more insurance even as the whole world is getting sick.

As with so many things, coronavirus has speeded up the journey to the point where we can see the destination: of health, of food, of economics, of education, of politics, of culture …

If we don’t like where we can now clearly see that we’re headed, how quickly might we make some changes?

Dan Carlin, in his excellent (if niche-y) podcast Hardcore History, likes to pose a question:

What’s it like to come after a civilization that could do things that your civilization can’t?

We have better information than the ancients did. We’re not going to find ourselves literally in the desert, encountering the ruins of cities and structures bigger than any we’ve dreamed of. We have the photos, video, and audio of doing big things — “not because they ah easy, but because they ah hahd.”

But we don’t live in the same civilization as President Kennedy, do we?

When we talk about doing the thing that everyone knows must be done and yet which we all know won’t get done, we talk about going to the moon.

And when we [white people, corporate chieftains, those for whom the status quo is our status] talk about social justice, we far too often do so in the same safely cynical way — usually by lifting a quotation out of context from Dr. King, or perhaps Maya Angelou.

Yes, a culture called the United States won some wars, put a man on the moon, and emerged better from the Civil Rights Movement.

But that was then, and it was them — whoever they were.

Are we merely a post-Brown v. Board society that could never make that decision again? Or are we the inheritors of Brown, with a long, long way still to go toward equality?

And if we’re going to go that way, could we do it in our own words?

Normally, I write about what I’ve been reading on Sundays.

But, thanks to an email this weekend from the always-excellent Farnam Street, I want to highlight one of the best arguments I’ve read recently.

It’s by Michael Pollan, in the New York Review of Books, and it’s about “The Sickness in Our Food Supply” due to Covid. (To be honest, I wish it had been “food system,” since that’s what the article is really about, but let’s give plenty of credit where it’s due to the excellence of the article itself.)

The whole thing is worth a few minutes of your time, but the three essential theses I want to meditate on for a few moments are these:

1. “[E]ven when our food system is functioning ‘normally,’ reliably supplying the supermarket shelves and drive-thrus with cheap and abundant calories, it is killing us — slowly in normal times, swiftly in times like these.”
2. “The food system we have is not the result of the free market. (There hasn’t been a free market in food since at least the Great Depression.) No, our food system is the product of agricultural and antitrust policies — political choices — that, as has suddenly become plain, stand in urgent need of reform.”
3. “It’s not hard to imagine a coherent and powerful new politics organized around precisely th[e] principle” of “address[ing] the many vulnerabilities that the novel coronavirus has so dramatically exposed[.]”

So where does this leave us?

It leaves us with the essential elements of debate: values, systems, and choices.

And those leave us with some questions:

• If we were starting today, would we build this food system, this health system, this transportation system, this political system, this economic system?
• If we wouldn’t choose these systems tomorrow, why are we choosing them today?
• Who’s making and reinforcing those choices?
• Who has — and where lies — the power to design, build, and choose better?

The scale of our problems is such that we have to look at and deal with systems. Food is just one, but it’s a pretty good bellwether for where we are and how it got this way.

And, of course, our food system is hardly the only one that kills slowly in normal times and fast enough (or broadly enough) that we can’t ignore it now.

Moving faster has brought our ends into clearer view. It’s time to turn the ship.

Shoot the moon
Right between the eyes
I’m singin’
Take me back to sunny countryside

— John Prine, “Clocks and Spoons”

***

It’s amazing what good a weekend offline and outdoors can do — and especially a few hours in the mountains looking out over sunny countryside.

In these fraught days, it’s tempting to note how fortunate we are to be able to enjoy such things, but I hope we can all agree that we are all fortunate that public lands still exist, and that we can visit them … and that even when we can’t, a little sunlight and fresh air and movement and the sight of life happening around us can be powerful reminders that life goes on.