National Perspective: COVID-19 reveals deeper, more enduring tragedy about America

The last several weeks have been hard, the last week perhaps the hardest. Feeling more confined than confident, Americans nonetheless itched to get out, on bike trails, amid neighborhood streets, in stores, at picnic groves, by the shore or lakeside. And it was at those venues — trails, streets, stores, groves, shoreline and lakeside — that it became clear to all of us that months into the COVID-19 calamity, we remain full of questions and bereft of answers.

It became clear, too, that many of the questions we harbor — maybe unexpressed but surely felt — are vital questions about personal and public character, about the country's resolve and national purpose. These uncertainties always have lain beneath the country's surface, visible only a handful of times — during the Revolution and the Civil War, to be sure, but also during the two world wars and, vividly, during the Vietnam struggle. And in the civil rights era and again during Watergate.