A Promisingly Hopeful Anniversary

One year ago today, we were officially declared to be in a pandemic. It was Lent, and all our ordinary parish Lenten activities already were in full swing. By the next weekend, however, the obligation of  Sunday Mass attendance had been lifted and by mid-week all public Masses and parish activities had been cancelled. And thus we began a year unlike any that any of us had ever experienced.More than half a million Americans have died. Many more have suffered serious sickness, some of them still even after the immediate danger has passed. All of us know people who have died or been sick. All of us have experienced extreme disruption in our families, in our work, and in our community commitments. Some of those most in need of work have been unemployed. Children have missed out on necessary schooling. And all of us have endured social separation and the stunting of our interpersonal lives and life-enriching interactions. Today we pause to remember all this, even as the amazingly rapid development of vaccines makes this a promisingly hopeful anniversary.

But today's hope goes beyond the accessibility of vaccines. The passage of President Biden's $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill may be the biggest such socially progressive legislation in generations, something almost on a par with the Great Society legislation of my youth, moving forward into the 21st century by recovering the mid-20th century's commitment to greater equality through renewed faith in the efficacy of political action - the faith that has been so consistently undermined since the moral disaster of Reagan's election in 1980. When President Biden gives us his first prime-time address tonight, he can celebrate this wonderful fact that government is back as a positive force for social progress and great economic equality.

The end of this pandemic will not come in one great moment of common celebration. We won't all be gathering in Times Square or in front of Buckingham Palace as if it were another V-E Day. Rather the end is coming is a series of singular separate steps to eliminate by medical means the health threats posed by this particular virus and  and to address by political means the social inequities and economic dysfunctions this pandemic had highlighted. But they are happening, and they are good

It is, in Churchill's famous words, "the end of the beginning" - and then some.

psoed by  threats