Spring Awakening

(or, Insurrection 2.0)

Last September, I published a piece in this blog called “Summer’s End,” in which I lamented the end of that season — weird though it was in 2020 — and expressed my anxiety and dread about what loomed ahead: the election, the resumption of remote schooling and all its difficulties, the looming descent of a (second) dark, cold COVID winter with its isolation, claustrophobia, a potential lockdown, and all the attendant psychological ills, not to mention a possible spike in cases and deaths. It was a feeling I think a lot of Americans shared.

But we weathered it.

We beat Trump at the polls, despite his worst efforts to cheat. We survived an attempt at a violent coup d’etat, shocking as it was. We saw the resumption of sane, competent governance that slowly began to reverse the damage of the previous four years. We faced the much-feared rise in coronavirus cases and deaths, but we rode it out, and subsequently experienced a speedy and effective vaccine rollout that exceeded even our most optimistic hopes, thanks to that new adminsitration. On the back of that success, we saw the economy rebound — boom, in fact. We even saw some small measure of accountability in the George Floyd case, which one hopes will be the beginning of a broader and long-overdue reckoning.