If you watch the news, the country seems deeply divided about the coronavirus. But polls have shown an uncommon unity among Americans.
On this episode of the podcast Social Distance, the staff writer James Fallows joins to share some historical perspective and answer the question he’s found himself grappling with across his decades-long career: Is America going to make it?
Listen to the episode here:
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What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of their conversation.
Katherine Wells: Is this the worst time ever?
James Fallows: The unemployment rates are going to be the highest that almost any living American has ever seen. I say almost because there are people who were around, of course, in the depths of the depression.
When I was a little kid, just before I went to kindergarten, polio was still an active fear. I remember the summers when we couldn’t go to the pool and couldn’t go out and picnic, because of the fear. This is the first time since then where we’ve had such a widespread public-health fear.
I would say that right now is not even the worst time overall for the U.S. in even my lifetime; 1968, I think, still has 2020 beat as the worst year in modern American history, with Martin Luther King Jr. being killed and Bobby Kennedy being killed and a president stepping down and all the tumult of Vietnam too. That was a worse year overall than this has been so far, but it’s only late May.