What I hope people are learning is that the US's supposedly dynamic, resilient, market-driven system is incredibly brittle, unimaginative and unresponsive to actual needs. Any action outside of, "Keep doing what you always do," is unthinkably ambitious.
Closing schools for a year is an incredibly obvious choice and only crazy if you believe that the limits of our political system are the actual limits of the world, which is to say if you live in a world of complete denial.
It's the same approach that leads economists to create graphs of how they think the world should work and then insist that the world actually is contained within that graph. Delusional, and dangerously so.
Cuba closed its borders to tourism to fight the virus. This is what would be considered "unthinkable" in the US; Cuba's economy depends on tourism. But the country recognized that this is what was required. If you can't make that choice, what government do you really have?
Another way of thinking of this is through Wendell Berry's criticism of "industrial" culture. The industrial system fetishizes efficiency above all else, forcing the world into its model and destroying it in the process. Humility, humanity, all else is thrown out.
The industrialized framework rejects nuance and tries to be one-size-fits-all, but one-size-fits-all by definition cannot adapt to the infinite variations that make up the real world. It's the ship that cannot turn in time. Eventually it destroys itself.
