The NY Times launched a series of investigations and articles Thursday around this theme:

It may not feel like it now, but out of this crisis there’s a chance to build a better America: the America we need.

I look forward to reading every single one of the articles—yesterday’s were about our broken health care system and why the rich fear pandemics—but the introductory piece, which is rich in historical examples of sweeping change, made me ask: What good things might come out of this pandemic?

Certainly not the trust in our government that the German people have, the confidence that made them follow the rules, flatten their curve and listen to Mrs. Merkel.

You can already see the folks in power itching to return to the way things were six weeks ago. They’re restless, fretting about an economy that’s rewarded them and left the rest of the country one paycheck and one dangerous job away from disaster.

They are not going for a new normal, one that’s more equitable, with safety and reward spread across the population. They’re trying to figure out how to benefit from the crisis, play the angles.  From the POTUS, yesterday: Once we OPEN UP OUR GREAT COUNTRY, and it will be sooner rather than later, the horror of the Invisible Enemy, except for those that sadly lost a family member or friend, must be quickly forgotten.

Well. I want to open up our great country, too, once it’s safe—but I want this horror to serve as a reminder, forever, of all the things that need changing. Out of this crisis, we really could get a better country, but only if we are willing to fight for it.

My ideas about things that might emerge and stick, if we’re lucky and if we hustle, from this pandemic:

1.  Science becomes sexy again and brings math along for the ride. Merely observing social media attempts to calculate the mortality rate of this virus is enough to give any math teacher a headache. Data analysis has become a daily life-vs-death task. And you have to love a world where Anthony Fauci is everyone’s new hero.  Coping with a virus is expanding vocabularies, building scientific literacies and a respect for genuine, factchecked expertise—for nearly everyone.  Every teacher now has a valid and compelling answer for: Why do we have to learn this stuff?

2. Better air and water quality. You may have seen the pictures of Venetian canals, deep blue and transparent for the first time in a century. You may have read about temporarily clean air over the smoggiest cities, or about citizens in India, now seeing the Himalayas for the first time. But did you know that breathing polluted air makes it more likely that you’ll get COVID-19, and less likely that you’ll survive? Wouldn’t it be great if we got used to cleaner air and water and decided to do whatever it took to keep it that way?

3. Renewed friendships. One of my husband’s oldest school friends just organized a one-hour Zoom meeting for the gang of guys who hung out together, in their madras shirts, in the 1960s. No special reason—just an hour of catching up, hearing about kids and grandkids, laughing. There is an underlying message, however, to every phone call out of the blue, every event planned for fall or 2021: You matter to me. Let’s make it through this. I love you.

4. A Complete re-do of American elections. This one is multi-layered and complicated. For once, the hype is true: this election matters more than any in your lifetime. If the Democrats hang tough (and they should), we might get national mail-in voting with other policies that make registration and voting easier for the November election. Americans overwhelmingly want this.

There could be even more, given a Democratic Congress and Executive branch in the fall. We could jettison or alter the Electoral College.  We could also pass a law limiting the presidential primary, given the headaches, unnecessary spending and ultimate results we got this time. Canada, our closest and most similar neighbor, elected its last prime minister in eleven weeks.

Thought experiment: Imagine that Congress passed a law limiting primaries to six months, still way longer than other first-world nations, and set a national primary date with top-three, rank-order voting. That would mean campaigning for November 2020 would begin next month! Knowing what we know now about the world—would debates be about more than the horse race and which state votes first and gotcha questions? If we overturned Citizens United, and set spending limits (again, like other nations), we might ultimately get ourselves a reasonable set of qualified candidates and a fair election.

5. Return of the Post Office and other federal institutions that should not be privatized or replaced by for-profit services. I live in a remote area. ‘One-day’ deliveries from FedEx and UPS often go an extra day or two—and if something needs to be returned, it’s a 50-mile round trip. But the lady from the local Post Office, driving her own adapted car, comes up my driveway. I love the USPS. The Post Office—through no fault of its own—needs a debt bailout. The USPS is now incredibly important for vulnerable and sequestered citizens and will become, God willing, the centerpiece of the November elections. We could stop flirting with privatizing any number of public services (including prisons, schools and the military). We could fund them adequately, paying workers reasonable salaries and benefits. Some things are public, and need to stay public, that’s why.

6. Rethinking the purpose of schooling. I wrote another blog about this—here. Short summary: The attempt to move schooling online has revealed chasms of inequity, and made clear that what K-12 students need, first, is trust in their teachers, a human connection to learning. There are a half-dozen policies that could change—unnecessary testing, useless standardization, grading, uses of technology and so on—but all depend on a national change of heart, re: public education. Once we have generally agreed that the purpose of public education is to offer every child, no matter what they bring to the table, a free, high-quality education, then we can start re-shaping our practice.

7. Recognition that bandwidth and technological access are the 21^st century equivalents of electricity. The Rural Electrification Administration was created by the Roosevelt Administration in 1935 to bring electricity to rural areas. Only 10% of farmers and rural dwellers had access to electricity in the 1930s. Private companies didn’t want to spend the money to run lines to poor people. In 10 years, the REA had improved that statistic to 90%, connecting rural citizens and farmers to running water, refrigerators, modern sanitation and the radio. The Superintendent of Schools in Michigan just reported that a full third of our students do not have access to the internet or devices to use it. It’s time to recognize that access to the internet is equivalent to bringing electricity to farmers and rural areas in the 1930s.

8. The United States become united, rather than 50 competitors. Our president, of course, is operating on precisely the opposite principle: divide and conquer. The more competition and hostility he can generate—through supply theft, preferential distribution of necessities, and plain old nasty remarks—the more he thinks he’s solidifying his base. But there is significant evidence that states aren’t having it. Governors, Republican or Democrat, interviewed on TV, talk about the outstanding leadership of their gubernatorial colleagues without regard to party. They are sending critical supplies from their own stocks to where they’re needed. They’re stepping up, forming networks, generating trust and cooperation between states. It’s the states who are moving to build the unity necessary to federalize the response. Remember how it felt after 9/11? We could have that ‘one country’ feeling again.

9. Factual news becomes the go-to source for Americans. OK, this one’s a stretch—and depends on election outcomes. But even the Wall Street Journal, bastion of bankers and corporate interests, has sharply criticized the President’s fact-free daily rallies. VP Mike Pence backed down from his demand that CNN air all of the President’s baloney sausage, and not just the qualified public health authorities’ segments. Maybe facts matter now more than ever. Because when the lying stops working, we will all understand what is and is not fake news. And can go back to valuing a free and fair press.

10. Widespread inequality and economic hardship—one paycheck away from disaster—is finally brought home and understood. And addressed. From the NYT piece (above): Executive pay has skyrocketed, and shareholders have enjoyed rising stock prices, at least until recently, while most workers are falling behind. If individual income had kept pace with overall economic growth since 1970, Americans in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution would be making an extra $12,000 per year, on average. In effect, the extreme increase in inequality means every worker in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution is sending an annual check for $12,000 to a worker in the top 10 percent.

It’s time Americans stopped thinking that a rising stock market and low unemployment represents prosperity. The safety net is shredded. Even social distancing is an economic perk. Our very fates—including whether or not we get dinner—are in the hands of underpaid and underappreciated workers. Income inequality is worse in America than any other first-world nation. (This is what Elizabeth Warren kept bringing up, by the way, when everyone was trying to decide whether she was a shrew or a schoolmarm.) That $12K extra per year figure keeps resonating—what would life be like if every lower-income American made another $12,000 per year? A completely different society, and lots more discretionary income pumped into the economy?

11. A rising social justice movement, led by young people. We’re just seeing the early evidence of this. The outsized American health crisis is grounded in residual white supremacy and xenophobia. The costs and agony of the pandemic will be unfairly borne by people of color and young people. And, as Ta-Nehisi Coates said, last night: The bill comes due, eventually.

12. America finally gets universal health care. This is the biggie, of course—the cornerstone of all these other hopes and dreams. We can lay our highest-in-the-world rate of COVID-19 transmission and unprepared health systems squarely at the feet of our inequitable, employer-funded policies. It will be painful and bitterly contested, but it must happen. It’s both ironic and tragic that universal coverage will be pushed into place, despite the kicking and screaming, not by political leadership but by disaster. But I simply cannot imagine Americans looking at how terrible our system is, compared to all other nations, and all the pain and heartbreak it’s caused, and not demanding something better. What that better is remains to be seen, but we will certainly see change.