(THREAD) Two days ago, New Hampshire had about the same number of new COVID-19 infections as the nation of Iraq. New Hampshire has a population of 1.2 million; Iraq's population is 38.4 million. But you can go outside in New Hampshire and easily find folks who don't "get it" yet.
1/ I'm not actually a pessimistic person. It takes an incredibly dire situation—like this presidency or this global pandemic—for me to be a pessimist. But I'm increasingly *severely* pessimistic about the course of this pandemic in the United States. And I think with good reason.
2/ With a dangerous presidency, the math is clear. If you have a majority of the House and two-thirds of the Senate, you can remove a dangerous president via impeachment. If you have a plurality of voters, you can remove a president via a national election.
A virus is different.
A virus is different.
3/ Because viruses don't respect ballots or borders, it means *nothing* if 50% of America "gets" how dangerous our current situation is. It means *nothing* if two-thirds of America "gets" how dangerous our current situation is. We need *more than 98% of Americans* to 100% get it.
4/ The GOP has spent *25 years* ensuring that whatever one-half this country says, the other half will say the opposite. That's the only discourse structure—what we call a "dialectic"—within which Republicans can win. You get folks to the polls because they *hate the other side*.
5/ By the same token, our free-market economy and federalism create a dialectic that diversifies the interests of groups in America in a way that makes it impossible for them to cooperate. The government is set against industry. State government is set against federal government.
6/ The only way to resolve our perpetual rhetorical wars is a common understanding that we face a century-defining event that may kill millions of us, collapse our economy, and end America as we know it.
It would take *incredible* leadership to achieve that common understanding.
It would take *incredible* leadership to achieve that common understanding.
7/ We don't have that leadership. And we're not *going* to have that leadership. And in an odd way, that isn't even a partisan observation. Even if you love Trump, you have seen him make clear that his plan is to have the states fend for themselves and compete against each other.
8/ From the start, our response to this pandemic needed to be *national*. There needed to be a national understanding of the threat, a national pool of critical resources from which to draw strength, a national gameplan, and a national will to pull our oars in the same direction.
9/ Instead, we can't even agree on public health being a priority. Even where people agree on public health being a priority, we can't get people to agree on the means to achieve that end. And even when people agree on the means, the resources to achieve the end aren't available.
10/ The people who are tasked with getting us to agree on even the simplest things—the science and the data and the best practices for pandemic response—are spending much of their time trying to placate the president's whims, play politics, and please 100 *other* masters at once.
11/ We're months into this crisis, and no one appears to be learning any lessons or getting any better at doing anything or solving any of our systemic obstacles. You have a large number of heroes in our hospitals and communities trying to save lives, and *chaos* everywhere else.
12/ People are walking around New Hampshire without masks and without social distancing because they have been wrongly told that some parts of the country are not under threat. People are protesting in large groups because they have been wrongly told COVID-19 is minimally lethal.
13/ The *only* conversation we're having is the one that benefits Trump politically: how quickly we can "reopen," no matter the risk to public health. The result: we're having a conversation about *hospital capacity* under the guise of a conversation about *keeping people alive*.
14/ There's virtually no dispute about the fact that it's not safe to be close to other Americans until we have near-universal testing, universal tracing and significant therapeutic treatments for COVID-19. But the national conversation pretends those stark realities don't exist.
15/ Under such circumstances—many people ignoring social distancing guidelines, many people ignoring face mask use, many people gathering to protest without any regard for the public health risks, many politicians acting in their own self-interest—why would *anything* get better?
16/ I'm increasingly mystified by people who see our daily infection rates staying at the highest level in the world by far, and our daily death toll staying at the highest level in the world by far, and conclude that things will ease up this summer. What's the evidence for that?
17/ We just had our worst day of new infections, and our worst day death toll-wise. Declining infection and death rates in cities are now being eclipsed by outbreaks in places that were told they had nothing to worry about. And now we're going to relax restrictions in the cities?
18/ It seemed to me—and to millions of Americans—early on that all our lives were going to be turned upside down, and relocated to unfolding largely inside our homes, through the end of 2021. Has anything that's happened given us any reason to think that that assumption is wrong?
19/ We keep being told that real leadership is about telling hard truths and demanding hard sacrifices from people in times of crisis. But we are being told this by people who are still painting for us a much rosier picture than any of the data or science is currently projecting.
20/ The evidence suggests that we'll either be indoors until a vaccine arrives in 2021 or 2022 or outdoors and at great risk of contracting an incredibly contagious, significantly lethal virus. If we *accepted* this, we could start making real plans about how to save our economy.
21/ Let me give an example: higher education. The *second* the novel coronavirus hit, higher ed—which was *already* in the midst of a sea change—altered forever. Dramatically. Permanently. And it moved us like a lightning bolt toward distance learning. But academia is resisting.
22/ It's a vicious circle: colleges and universities haven't told students that their worlds just *permanently* turned upside down, so students expect a return to normalcy; and because students expect that, colleges and universities must promise they'll open in the fall as usual.
23/ I say this, mind you, just from reading the CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION—which lists school after school as reciting that it's "planning" to reopen as normal in fall. It seems clear that no one wants to say, "Look, everything just changed—we'll work together to navigate it."
24/ But—and this is just my personal opinion—what we *really* need to do in *every* field, from education to restaurants to live performance to voting to everything else, is *accept* that there's "Before COVID" and "After COVID" and we must now prepare *24/7/365* for the latter.
25/ This doesn't mean that, in 2 or 3 years, when there's full deployment of a vaccine and the other things I mentioned—the #3T requirements of testing, tracing, and therapeutics—we can't bend our "new reality" slightly back toward *certain* aspects of the "Before COVID" period.
26/ But the period between now and what we're all shooting for—i.e. #3TV (testing, tracing, therapeutics and a vaccine)—is simply *too long* for us not to transform our society and then, on the back end, decide what from the "Before COVID" period we can fold back into our lives.
27/ If we can broadly get on the same page, here's what we'll see: some "Before COVID" things were stupid; (handshakes); some were already changing beneficially and will now just change faster (higher ed); some changes are wholly *new* but will make the world we live in *better*.
28/ Our leaders now—outside of government—should be the futurists who have been working for *years* on how to beneficially transform our world to adapt to (and, as necessary, *tackle*) the realities of this epoch: emerging tech, globalization, pandemics, climate change, and more.
29/ Whatever your politics, if you look deep inside yourself you should see *some* recognition that—his politics aside for a moment—when you look at Trump what you're looking at is an old man set in his ways, his psychoses, his biases and his ignorance. Not a man for this moment.
30/ To be clear, I'm not going to pretend that Biden is some future-oriented savant, either. What I'm saying goes beyond politics—our leaders need to be *thought leaders* who *understand something about the moment we're in and the future we're hurtling into so fast it scares us*.
31/ A big part of the reason every industry is now in a major stage of grief—*denial*—is because there's no one stepping to the forefront of each industry who has any idea what's coming next. So the old leaders implicitly or explicitly pretend *nothing has fundamentally changed*.
32/ I teach entire university courses around the idea of "generative collapse"—the notion that *after* an infrastructure has collapsed (meaning, after a collapse no one sought or deliberately contributed to) there are philosophies that can be adopted that aid in *reconstruction*.
33/ The first step in "reconstruction" is the significant one: understanding that what exists now is *not* a binary between APOCALYPSE and NORMALCY. Reconstruction only occurs, indeed, after a *deconstruction* that requires an *entirely new frame* for any subsequent construction.
34/ Higher ed can survive and thrive—but it'll be in a context and form and under philosophies that must be imagined from the deconstructed pieces of the Before COVID-19 era. The same is true for dining out. Movies. Voting. *Every facet* of American culture. I'll give an example.
35/ TROLLS WORLD TOUR—a movie I can't imagine any person ever wanting to see, and I *love* kids' films—just set a digital record for sales and way outpaced how its predecessor did in theaters. They're saying this *one event* could change Hollywood forever. wsj.com/articles/troll…
36/ A week ago Hollywood thought it might collapse post-COVID-19. And now—with a single, seemingly obvious realization (that people may *prefer* to choose when and where they see movies)—the whole paradigm of *what Hollywood is and how and why it works* may have changed forever.
37/ My *personal* opinion is that any college or university that announces—boldly, proudly, maturely—that it is transforming itself into what education looks like *now*, and doing so to ensure it is always best serving its students, will in *at least* the middle-term be rewarded.
38/ And what we're seeing in our leaders is the same. When Andrew Cuomo gives seemingly *bad* news that we see is accurate and honest, we—most of us—admire him for it. And if he tells New Yorkers that their lives will *not* go back to the way they were, they'll respect that also.
39/ So because of the philosophies, gameplans, biases, tendencies, knowledge deficits, rhetorical tug-of-wars, and so on I'm seeing in America now, I—and millions of Americans, I suspect, who work in certain industries—am seeing my life as being an indoor life until 2021 or 2022.
40/ But I *also* think it's incumbent upon *all of us* in that situation to try to brainstorm, collaborate, and signal-boost those future-oriented leaders who are trying to reconstruct America (*ASAP*) in a way that allows *all* of us to thrive in the "After COVID-19" epoch. /end
