In a life after COVID-19, people of good will must seek common ground

Just knocked off 85. I could do this for a living.

The easy part has been sheltering in place since mid-March, a high-risk retiree with steady income. Not one of the drowning millions of unemployed, uninsured, struggling to stay safe, lacking necessities, abandoned by heartless millionaires in Washington.

I concentrate on improving my physical and mental well-being, with regular exercise indoors, riding a bike outdoors, walking Little Dog in unpeopled spaces.

I read diverse non-fiction, but indulge my addiction to crime novels, publishing one and starting a new one. Writing really helps.

Oh, and in the not so late afternoon a cold IPA or wine. Then cooking.

But coping with the news in the time of COVID-19 is a challenge. We watch no television news. But every day for an hour or so I plunge in and out of bouts of depression and outrage. As a politics junkie I read the Herald-Leader and the New York Times.

We have had trying times before, the violent repression of the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam stand out.

But nothing like the chaotic drumbeat of sledge-hammer blows causing suffering to millions of fellow Americans. Putting aside political analysis, “the news” delivers compassion overload.

Long standing systemic racism throughout institutions from the legal system to banking searingly exposed by the never-ending wanton police killings of African Americans and lack of accountability and justice.

Over 225,000 Americans and 1,400 Kentuckians dead and counting, so many avoidable; bereaved families, truncated funerals, murderous wildfires destroying people, homes, habitat, the unprecedented devastation of millions of forest acres up in smoke.

Hurricanes and floods driving thousands from their homes, record droughts, high temperatures so extreme as if on some other planet.

Millions of unemployed or underemployed and low-income workers forced to expose themselves to the virus. Layoffs by the tens of thousands.

Sixty million filings for unemployment insurance, close to 200,000 small businesses failing, restaurants closing and many of those still open gouged by delivery services.

The stock market booms as giant companies feed off the carnage of smaller competition. Economic inequality grows as the virus feeds on it, ravaging the poor, Hispanics, Blacks.

A deliberately crippled United States Postal Service. Veterans waiting for late checks, elderly for vital meds, and nearly 500 chicks delivered dead to a small farmer in Maine. Fear that millions using mail-in ballots will be disenfranchised in November.

I carefully select what to read but cannot escape the headlines.

The Science section brings relief, seldom read pre-COVID-19, with amazing hummingbirds, smiling turtles, bees with big brains, desert shrimp, helpful fungus, the ocean deep, migrating birds (who knew there were over 500?), a parade of wonders.

But sadness there too. Elephants poached or dying, whales losing their way, bees poisoned, the oceans and coral reefs whacked out by climate change, global warming. On our present course, a dystopian future.

Can this no longer “exceptional” American people recover, and help Mother Earth recover? Can restoration overcome the partisan tribalism of two different realities, one of which, a fiction promoted by Fox News, reactionary billionaires, and their political servants, is sure to remain an obstacle.

Their pseudo-reality rejects science, refuses to believe what Grouch Marx called “your lyin’ eyes.” But when those in thrall to demagogues’ “alternate facts” get sick, do they reject their doctor’s advice? For tooth pain do they consult a dentist or a carpenter? If antibiotics will save their child’s life, they agree and accept science.

Our polarized partisan tribes share other commonalities that need cultivation. Any advance of reason on common ground might help diminish the growing numbers with minds in thrall to poisonous conspiracies.

COVID-19 time makes it difficult to remain in the party of hope and not curse the darkness. But people of good will on all sides must seek common ground.

Ron Formisano is the author of a new novel “Thorne’s Hazards: A Kentucky Reporter’s Fight Against Drug Trafficking.”