Last week, I got on the phone for a long-overdue catch up with a friend. When she picked up, she asked, “How are you?” Silence. Then we both started cracking up because—what is there to say? What else can you do when your brains are melting out of your ears?

One refrain I’ve heard about lockdown is that every day feels the same. The past few months have blurred together in a gooey blob of naps, takeout food, masked-up trips to the grocery store, and emails wishing me well “in these uncertain times” right before they try to sell me loungewear.

But I think the opposite is true, too. A public health crisis also makes every day feel vital, in the sense that the most mundane decisions now carry life-or-death repercussions. These weeks have had a clarifying quality; how we choose to spend our time reveals what’s really meaningful to us. The same applies to the government. Crisis and catastrophe pare nations down to the core, underscoring their values, exposing fault lines, distilling strengths, and exaggerating weaknesses that are overlooked or downplayed in ordinary times.

Quarantine is hard enough from a “humans need to go outside” perspective. But even more demoralizing has been the slow drip of realizing, irrefutably and completely, that what lies at the core of my nation’s heart is hot rotting garbage. It’s easy to blame Trump, but the failures of 2020 are larger and deeper than one wretched person. Trump can only be Trump to the extent those around him enable his abuses. The truth that the pandemic and the protests have laid bare is that when too many of our elected officials and business leaders are called upon to act in the public interest, they respond with greed, cowardice, incompetence, or willful ignorance. We live in a place that is more prepared to mobilize against its citizens than to take care of them.