“The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long.”
This is by no means an uplifting piece to read, but what I enjoyed about it and am thinking about a lot is the way in which Packer takes our current situation and puts it in context of what's gone on so far this century in the US. On the one hand it makes me sad to read these things, but on the other hand I'm also trying to work out how we got here and how we go forward.