If we were going to put a pumpkin face on 2020, it would be a frowny one with missing teeth. This has been a year from Hell. The nation was attacked by two plagues: an infectious disease that seemed for most of the year beyond the reach of medical science, and a government led by a delusional and incompetent head of state and his enablers. To have been cursed with one would have been punishment enough. We got two. The Norns really had it in for us this time.
Times have been hard, but Thanksgiving is a holiday for hard times. It asks us to remember our blessings. This is something we often forget to do when the sun is shining and blessings seem plentiful, but that is all the more reason to give thanks when skies are dark. The country has been damaged—we don’t even know how badly—but it still has a soul. We should feel gratitude this week for some of those through whom it shone:
Health-care workers. The modern Hippocratic oath says, “I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.” In treating the infected, health-care workers were serving the healthy, as well. By September 16th, more than seventeen hundred of them had died from Covid-19, two hundred and thirteen of whom were registered nurses. And yet, even as millions of Americans were being given license by the federal government to refuse to take precautions, and even when the President explained to his followers that hospitals were letting patients die because they got more money, health-care professionals showed up. They took responsibility even when political leaders did not. That is the definition of care.
State election workers and officials. On November 4th, a couple hundred Trump supporters, some carrying firearms (whom did they expect they might be obliged to shoot?), gathered outside a Maricopa County Recorder and Elections Department office, in Phoenix, chanting “Stop the steal.” Intimidation of this kind was carried out in other states, and received nothing but encouragement from top government officials: from the President and his lawyers; from the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who saw fit to place calls to three states to inquire about vote-counting procedures; and from the Attorney General, who directed federal prosecutors to investigate allegations of voting “irregularities” before the results had been certified, an unprecedented order. It was a campaign, still under way, to smear the integrity of people who were working long hours to tabulate votes during a pandemic. When the federal government’s agency in charge of election security signed a statement saying that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” the head of that agency was immediately fired. In spite of the intimidation and the smears, the count held, and democracy survived. We owe that to men and women who did their jobs without fear or favor.
Anthony Fauci. The President is a destroyer of careers and reputations. That is how he wins policy disagreements. In April, crowds in Texas were already shouting for Anthony Fauci to be fired. In November, the former chief executive of the 2016 Trump campaign posted a video on Twitter proposing that Fauci’s head should be stuck on a pike on the White House grounds. As the Administration purged or publicly undercut public-health officials whose advice the President found insufficiently flattering to his own judgment, Fauci stayed out of the sandbox. He did not change his tune under pressure, and, even after he had been scapegoated and sidelined, he never tried to score political points. He became virtually the only person in the national government whose voice could be trusted. Without his willingness to speak out and his commitment to public health, the past ten months would have been much harder to bear.
Philonise Floyd. On June 10th, a little more than two weeks after George Floyd was murdered under color of law in the city of Minneapolis, his younger brother testified before the House Judiciary Committee. In a few hundred heartfelt words, Philonise Floyd gave memorable expression to the emotions of anger, compassion, and grief. He made people feel both that a great wrong had been done and that an opportunity for redemption was at hand. “If his death ends up changing the world for the better, and I think it will,” he said about his brother, “then he died as he lived. It is on you to make sure his death is not in vain.” It was an authentic and eloquent speech by a man who would probably never in his life have imagined himself speaking in front of television cameras to lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Nandi Bushell. O.K., she’s British. But the ten-year-old ball of fire’s online drum battle with the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl was somehow the tonic that the world needed. She laughed; she made faces; she stuck out her tongue; she screamed—she embodied the spirit of the music she played. “The Rock Gods of old are happy!” she tweeted, before Grohl conceded. Let Bushell stand for all the artists, musicians, entertainers, athletes, and teachers who made the most of the sad simulacrum for human contact that is Zoom (though where would we have been without it?) and kept art and ideas in our lives. For millions stuck at home alone, they brought a hint of the many things that went missing this year.
The pharmaceutical industry. Long one of the world’s least-admired businesses, it nevertheless stepped up to accomplish something few people thought possible this past spring: vaccines that may bring much of the world out of lockdown. Despite ham-handed attempts by the Administration to co-opt the process, the companies that are developing the vaccines appear to have operated independently of politics. Even the decision to announce the results of trials after the election seems not to have been a political one. No doubt the companies’ executives will reap the benefits, but, however much they make, the remedy is worth far more.
The New York Times. After being played, four years ago, by the Russians, Julian Assange, and Trump goons like Roger Stone, and covering Hillary Clinton and John Podesta’s mundane e-mails as though they were the Pentagon Papers, the Times dedicated itself to justifying its self-appointed role as “the paper of record.” It patiently enumerated the Administration’s lies, and it tracked the pandemic day by day. It traced the sources of the President’s wealth and obtained his tax returns. It covered the plight of immigrants and the lives of the disadvantaged and, at the same time, ran recipes to try out and lists of movies to stream for its upscale readers. Especially in its arts coverage, it embraced the demand for greater diversity. As its editors would be the first to insist, the Times was not the only organ of the press to rise to the occasion. But, amid a deluge of hype and spin, it kept its head.
Joseph R. Biden. He did it. He slayed the dragon. And it was not really a close fight. He flipped five states from 2016, won six million more votes than his opponent, and beat a sitting President. Biden’s previous entries in Presidential primaries ended in early defeats, and every time he opens his mouth, his supporters get a knot in their stomachs. But he ran a disciplined and nearly flawless campaign. He brought together the Clinton-Obama and Warren-Sanders wings of the Democratic Party, something that did not seem to be within the realm of the politically possible twelve months ago. Biden has lost a wife, a daughter, and a son, and he had to hear his opponent carry on about the “Biden crime family.” He had to listen to charges that he was senile, and that his running mate was a Communist and a monster. He did not let these pass, but he declined to return the insults. He let the President punch himself out. There are probably few Biden lines destined for immortality, but, during the first Presidential debate, he spoke for millions when he uttered the words “Will you shut up, man?” They say that there is a man or woman for every moment. Joe Biden showed himself to be the man for this moment. We should give him thanks, take a deep breath, and hope for the best.
