To compound the COVID-19 crisis, we have a cultural crisis. It is a crisis of our individualism.

That cultural element — precious and special, of the individual against adversity, the individual against authority, the individual against any limits imposed on free action — is at odds with the need to behave. Worse, our individualistic trait has been politicized, dragged to the right.

This aspect of American exceptionalism is now killing us, on a per capita basis, faster than people in any other country. We are in a health crisis that demands collective action from people who revere individual freedom over the dictates of the many, as expressed by the government.

Simply, we must wear masks and stay away from groups. It works; it is onerous but not intolerable.

There is a hope, almost a belief, afoot that by the end of the year there will be a vaccine, and that the existence of a vaccine will itself signal an end to the crisis.

A reality check: No proven vaccine yet exists. Although all the experts I’ve contacted believe one will work and several might.

Another reality check: It may take up to five years to vaccinate enough people to make America safe.

My informal survey of doctors finds they expect one-third of us will be keen to be vaccinated, one-third will hold back to see how it goes and one-third may resist vaccination because they’re either opposed in principle or consider it to be a government intrusion on their liberty.

If their expectation holds true, COVID-19 is going to be with us for years.

No doubt there are better therapies in the pipeline to deal with COVID-19 once the patient has reached the hospital. But that won’t affect the rate of infection. The assault on our way of life and the economy will continue; the price our children are paying now will escalate.

If you’re pinning your hopes on a vaccine, several may come along at the same time and jostle for market share.

That happened with poliomyelitis: Three vaccines were available, but one failed because of alleged poor quality control in manufacture. If there is a scramble among vaccines, look out for financial muscle, politics, and nationalism to join the fray. None of these will be helpful.

So far, there has been a catastrophic failure of leadership at the White House and in many statehouses. “Say it isn’t so” is not a policy. That is what President Donald Trump and Republican governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Brian Kemp of Georgia have, in essence, said — resulting in climbing infections and deaths.

Americans sacrificed on a politicized cultural altar.

We know what to do: A hard lockdown for a couple of weeks would stop the virus in its tracks. It worked in New York.

We are in a war without leadership. We have governors forced to act as guerrilla chiefs rather than generals of a national army under unified leadership with common purpose.

Right now, we should hear from the political leadership about what they plan to do to slow the spread of COVID-19 and how, when this is over, they plan to rebuild: What will they do to help the 20 million to 30 million people in hospitality and retail whose jobs have gone, evaporated?

Refusing to wear a mask may have deep cultural significance for some, particularly in the West, but for all of us, restaurants are part of the fabric of our living. For most us, the happiest moments of lives have been in a restaurant, celebrating things that are precious milestones in life, like birthdays, engagements and anniversaries.

We can’t give one cultural totem precedence over another.

More than half the nation’s restaurants may never reopen — employing 10 percent of the nation’s workforce and accounting for 4 percent of GDP — and the biggest helping hand to them would be to throw the Defense Production Act at manufacturing millions of indoor air scrubbers. It would increase livability for all, ending our isolation from each other.

Wash your hands, America. Don’t wring them. We can beat the virus when we fight on the same side with science and respect the commonweal.

Dimly through the fog of the future some structures are emerging. Some of the purely physical are becoming discernible. The changes in work, collective consciousness and play are harder to bring into focus.

We — call us a ravaged generation — will face a future, the future indicative, radically different from that past that we have known.

The obvious is that work is changed, rearranged and at times lost. A lot of real estate will be begging for a mission or will have to face the wrecker’s ball. Shopping centers will see huge change, maybe devastation.

Those big-box stores that anchored shopping centers will be fewer. Some might be converted to gyms or old-fashioned markets with dozens of small stalls. But these uses are limited, and those cinder-block behemoths are many.

Some have suggested that big-box stores can be converted to affordable housing. But architects say it is easier to knock them down and build new homes on their sites. Like the bomb craters that dotted London after World War II, these will be a kind of ruin for some time, a reminder as to how life was.

After the shopping centers, come the office buildings — the very symbol of a modern city, from the grand Empire State Building in New York to the flashy, all-glass Shard skyscraper in London to the wildly imaginative buildings that were built as symbols around the world as much as needed work space. Now they’ll be sentinels of the city of the past.

The short story is fewer people will be going back to work in offices. Telecommuting has rapidly come of age; it is acceptable and even desirable. Many, like myself, won’t like it.

Human contact has been part of work since urbanization began. Indications are that we’re going to be less urbanized, more suburbanized and ruralized.

People who have commuted vast distances into cities — like those who left home at 4 a.m. in Connecticut to be at their desks in Manhattan at 8 a.m. — will sleep in without guilt.

It isn’t just that COVID-19 has forced us to work differently, at home and separated, it’s that digitization has matured enough to make it possible, almost in confluence with the demands of life under the virus. Magically, Zoom has changed just about everything. It’s been not only a liberating force but also a force for change.

But huge change and the innovation that will accompany it will have a price.

One survey found that 53 percent of the nation’s restaurants will never reopen, and a lot of wonderful people will be out of work — for a long time. Restaurateurs are the most entrepreneurial of people, and many will open new venues. But that takes time and capital.

This loss of traditional work, which applies across the hospitality industry, will have deleterious effects elsewhere. For example, the fishing industry can’t sell all its catch. It has always depended on the restaurants for sales.

COVID-19 isn’t alone in reshaping the future. For years digitization and artificial intelligence, which have made telecommuting possible, have been subtracting jobs.

Farming, for example, is undergoing relentless change. Today’s farmer is more a systems manager than the renaissance figure of the past who could help a cow give birth, repair a tractor, taste soil to determine its pH, and handle the harvest with migrant help.

Now tractors and farm equipment are fully digitized and can operate from a laptop on a kitchen table, and the harvest is increasingly automated by sensitive robots with multiple sensors guiding kind claws.

It’s a new world, and we need to be brave and imaginative to master it.

There are worries afoot in the electric utility world.

The issue is the integrity of the grid and the possibility that foreign suppliers of bulk power equipment (BPE) may have introduced the technical equivalent of Manchurian candidates into the hardware that manages the system.

This represents a departure from previous concerns that have emphasized software and paid more attention to attacks aimed at the computer systems of electric utilities than to their hardware. They get millions of these attacks every day and have worked relentlessly to protect against them.

Now a new front has opened.

The battle has moved from the world of internet technology to the hardware itself, to BPE. Leading the charge to draw attention to systems whose vulnerability may have been overlooked is Joe Weiss, a professional engineer, a veteran of the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, and now an independent consultant.

Weiss said in a blog, which went viral in the world of utility engineers last week, “Why would attackers hit defenses head-on when they can simply bypass them?” And that is exactly what they’re doing, he believes.

On May 1, President Trump issued the far-reaching Executive Order 13920, which prohibits the purchase of major BPE from potential adversaries, later named by the Department of Energy as China and Russia, among others.

China is the primary supplier of BPE to American utilities.

Then, on July 8, the department issued a request for information about what the electric utilities purchase and from where. It appears the government is attempting to scope the problem.

Initially, many in the industry thought the executive order was just another shot in the Trump administration’s trade war with China. But not so. It signaled what may be a big vulnerability not only in installed equipment but also equipment that is on order.

China has become the primary supplier of heavy equipment for utilities, particularly big transformers. While these have no moving parts, Weiss believes they can have “backdoors” through which an adversary could catastrophically alter their operation.

The key, he says, may be the sensors that can send false readings and bring about major disruption, and send parts of the grid haywire.

Transformers are critical to the distribution of current. They boost voltage to compensate for line losses and ultimately step down the voltage for local distribution.

This vulnerability story began after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when a trend to look at the security of the electric grid turned to a greater concentration on IT and, some argue, away from the old regime of operational technology, where engineers took responsibility for the security of their equipment.

A cultural division opened, as I was told by the one of the nation’s top computer experts in academia.

Underlying this shift in responsibility are the workhorses of modern industry, programmable controllers, part of the larger Industrial Control Systems. These are the automated systems that do the work of managing operations in modern industry, including utilities.

The worry for the electric utility industry is that these devices that manage the grid could be manipulated without showing up as an attack.

There is precedent for this kind of attack: The Stuxnet virus that disabled centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility in 2010. The United States and Israel didn’t go after the facility’s computer system — an attack that would’ve been detected — but rather after the controllers governing the centrifuges.

Last year, something big was discovered, and details are sketchy: A Chinese-made transformer at a large investor-owned utility was found to have counterfeit parts and, perhaps, backdoors through which the integrity of the grid could’ve been compromised.

Alarm bells rang at the departments of Homeland Security and Energy.

A similar or identical transformer made by JiangSu HuaPeng Transformer Company Ltd., a family owned company with a small office in San Jose, California, was seized by agents of the DHS and DOE and hustled straight to Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, upon its arrival at the Port of Houston.

This transformer had been destined for the Western Area Power Administration’s Aluit Station, near Denver. WAPA is one of the power distribution systems owned by the government through the Department of Energy.

What, if anything, has been discovered in the transformer hasn’t been disclosed.

Everything is cloaked in secrecy, my sources tell me.

The good news is that if you get COVID-19, you stand a better chance of getting better sooner, without having a long, if any, stay in the ICU, and you may not have to suffer on a ventilator.

The bad news is there may be no silver bullet of a vaccine by the end of the year, and if one is approved, there may be a free-for-all among vaccine developers, countries and special interests.

For the improvement in treatment outlook, thank a process called exaptation. The term has been appropriated from evolutionary biology and means essentially work with what you have, adapt and deploy. The most quoted example is how birds developed wings for warmth and found they could be used for flying.

One of the great exponents of exaptation, Omar Hatamleh, chief innovation officer, engineering, at NASA, says, “There is an abundance of intellectual property that can be repurposed or used in areas and functions outside of their original intended application.”

There are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of medicines — generally referred to as “compounds” in the pharmaceutical world — that have been developed for specific purposes but which may be useful in some other disease, “off label” in the pharmacologists’ vernacular. An example of this off-label use is the steroid Dexamethasone. It has been found to reduce death among critically ill COVID-19 patients.

It is a good idea to look outside the box, as we are constantly advised. But it is also a good idea to look inside the box as well.

Inside every hospital, for example, is a radiation department. Radiation is a medical tool universally used in cancer treatments.

Now comes word that radiation can save lives and cut hospital stays for COVID-19 patients. James Conca, a Tri-Cities, Wash.,-based nuclear scientist, explains to me, “This treatment is critical because severe cases cause cytokine release syndrome, also known as a cytokine storm, causing acute respiratory arrest syndrome, which is what kills.”

Dr. Mohammad Khan, associate professor of radiation oncology at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, gave patients at the university’s Winship Cancer Institute a single, very low dose of radiation (about one-hundredth of the dose given cancer patients) and they began to show almost immediate improvement. The radiation reduced the inflammation — and in COVID-19, as in other diseases, it is inflammation that kills.

The use of radiation in this way opens the door to the treatment of many diseases where inflammation is the killer.

The Emory experience fits with a burgeoning field of study where sophisticated physical and engineering techniques intersect with medicine.

Dr. James Welsh of Loyola University Medical Center, Chicago, and a consortium of doctors and hospitals are hoping to launch nationwide clinical trials on the use of radiation in combating killer inflammation.

The sad thing, Conca says, is that the benefits of radiation in treating pulmonary disease, especially viral pneumonia, were known 70 years ago. In treating the pneumonia, he said, success rates were 80 percent, but the rise of antibiotics and antiviral drugs, combined with public concern about radiation, led to its being confined to the treatment of cancer.

Generally nuclear medicine tends to mean cancer treatment, but nuclear scientists have chafed at this.

While the outlook for therapies — for things that will save your life — is bright, the outlook for a vaccine, so hoped for, is confused. Assuming that a vaccine is perfected, that it works on most people and across a range of mutations, the stage is set for chaotic distribution.

One man and his company, Adar Poonawalla, CEO of Serum Institute of India, may hold the key to who gets the vaccine first. He has signed pacts with four vaccine hopefuls, including the one from Oxford University, considered by many to be the frontrunner.

Serum Institute is partnering with the British-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca to manufacture and supply 1 billion doses of the Oxford vaccine in India and less-developed countries. AstraZeneca says it is working on equitable distribution. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said Britain should have first dibs on British-developed vaccines.

The World Health Organization is the only international organization that might be able to orchestrate distribution, and the United States is withdrawing from that body.

Science may be forging ahead — exaptation at work — but human folly is as virulent a strain as ever.

We are in the shadow of an economic collapse of 1930s proportions. That is the awful reality of the current and relentless surge in COVID-19 infections. What looked bad a few weeks ago now looks worse.

The first horror is the coronavirus itself. The second is the devastated economic and social order it will leave behind: a landscape where the structures of society are leveled and will have to be replaced not by the old, broken structures but by new ones.

The economy won’t come roaring back in a classic V, as so many hope and even believe.

Parts of the economy are undergoing massive leveling of near-biblical proportions. Tens of millions of us are raring to get back to work, to resume where we left off. But for many, there will be nowhere to return to: They will be economic refugees, contemplating a swath of destruction where their jobs used to be. They’ll find there is no there there.

Jobs in retailing, restaurants, bars, hotels, cinemas, sports facilities, and travel have already vaporized. Behind those subtractions from the economy are their supply chains. Visible jobs lost are just the beginning. When economic collapse begins, it spreads as devastatingly as COVID-19 in a crowded barroom.

There is brutal irony when, after the virus, the second subject on the national agenda is the plight of minorities. Sadly, they are overrepresented among the workers at the low end of the economic food chain. It is those who make the minimum wage or just above, those who live off tips, day work, commissions, pick up assignments — the whole shaky lattice that makes up the employment pyramid — who are set to be hurting badly when unemployment runs out.

Every damaged industry, like retail, has its collateral damage. Close a mall and the hurt spreads after the clerks and warehouse workers are gone, from cleaners to building maintenance workers, to supply chain workers, to advertising professionals and the newspapers where those ads might have appeared. Like the coronavirus itself, economic contagion spreads wide and fast.

Politicians and social engineers keep trying to promote the working class to the middle class, but they remain at the bottom — those who feel every bump in the economic road.

Across the nation, a debt bomb is about to explode with huge consequences for those who are now or about to be jobless — and by extension the whole economy. Delayed rents are going to come due with a concurrent wave of evictions affecting millions. Credit cards — the modern slavery for those with little money — must be paid, except they won’t. At almost 30 percent interest, which is what many are paying, the debt will overwhelm the users. In time, as accounts fall into arrears and payments cease, it will begin to drag down the issuers.

An incendiary component of the debt bomb is health care. People rushed to hospitals are going to have medical bills in the tens of thousands of dollars. They won’t be able to pay. No money, no pay, no choice. If the pandemic goes on long enough, the insurers, for those who are insured, will begin to hurt.

But mostly, it will be the hospitals that will go after the patients for payment because they’ll have no choice. Real inability to pay is the fuse that will light the debt bomb. Multiply this by those who need other health care and are not insured.

Most thinking in the political class has revolved around an expectation that come the fall, there will be a vaccine that will be available and affordable by all and it will turn night into day, ending the horror. That isn’t assured. Already, to be sure, we are finding therapies for use in infected patients, the steroid Dexamethasone, for example, and other off-label uses of existing drugs. But that doesn’t immunize the population, and whether immunization is possible and how fast it will come isn’t known.

What is known is the unfolding economic catastrophe for tens of millions of Americans and their possibly permanent loss of jobs.

When Europe lay in ruins after World War II, the United States stepped in with the Marshall Plan and wrought an economic resurrection. A Marshall Plan for America? I think so. The need will be very great.

It was ailing before; now in the age of the coronavirus, it’s at death’s door.

I write about men’s fashion. Long before we’d ever heard the dread word COVID-19, the decline in man’s way of dressing had begun.

Fans of old movies can marvel at how we once togged ourselves out: hats, suits with vests or double-breasted suits and, at night, black or white tuxedos. In movies and real life, people smoked cigarettes as though the very act of lighting a cigarette was a fashion statement. Yes, good guys (and gals) smoked cigarettes, now it’s only bad guys.

We were never quite as dress-conscious as the British, but we had our standards: always a hat, a necktie and a jacket. You couldn’t get into a decent restaurant, club or social gathering without a tie and jacket. Restaurants and hotels maintained loner-jacket closets for patrons.

Church meant Sunday best: a suit, no matter how worn and bedraggled. These days men go to church dressed for the gym or the beach, wearing cutoff jeans, Hawaiian shirts and sandals.

This dressing demise began, I’m afraid to say, with President John F. Kennedy.

JFK had a fine head of hair and seemed to want us to know it, so he went bareheaded, everybody else followed. This must have thrown tens of thousands out of work: felt makers, hat designers, milliners and shops that sold only headgear. Gone without even a shout in Congress, a mention on the stump or a bring-back-the-hat movement.

One could say baseball caps have taken over, but really! What is a baseball cap compared to a fine Homburg, a derby or a sporty tweed cap? Not in the same league, you might aver. Brim up or brim down, hats counted, defined, identified and introduced the wearer.

You lifted your hat to women, to superiors or older people and took it off and cradled it indoors. Hats had their own rules and standards. The place where you now put your rollaboard on planes started as a “hat rack.”

As to the tie, it died slowly at first and then fast. It was pop musicians who gave it a huge shove in the 1970s. They didn’t wear ties. Then high-tech honchos in the 1980s dressed down. Think Steve Jobs in those turtlenecks.

In the last year, ties have gone the way of hats. Only evening newscasters still wear them, and not all of those. Ties are out on most television shows and were going out in business before the lockdown.

Who decried that a man would be a fossil if he wore a tie? Who thought we’d look better without them?

The shirts men wear are clearly designed to be worn with ties, so all those tieless men you see everywhere look robbed, incomplete, underdressed, as though they forgot something when they left the house in the morning. Or were disturbed doing something naughty.

Why make life so hard for those who love men? What are they to give us for birthdays, Christmas, anniversaries? The tie served magnificently. They were the perfect gift: easy to give, easy to receive, and nearly always welcome. They eased the social ritual of thanking dad, husband or boyfriend for being there.

There is, I notice, some attempt to save the day because those who feel it’s now old-fashioned to wear a tie are sporting showy pocket squares. Maybe this works. To me it just emphasizes the nakedness around the neck, where something is missing.

Of course, ties have no use whatsoever except to vary the sameness of suits and, for the odd philistine, to be pressed into service to wipe eyeglasses.

After the coronavirus what? Suits may not come back at all, we may all wear only those things that can go into the washing machine and be worn without pressing.

Fashion for men seems to have been hanged by the neck.

There is fear that you’ve been appointed Postmaster General (congratulations, by the way) to downsize and privatize the post office. I’m here to plead for the post office. It is a great institution and –yes, yes, yes –incredibly efficient.

How can I say that when for generations it’s been the butt of jokes, a standard applause line when denounced by politicians as an example of government run amok?

Simple: personal experience.

For 33 years, I published professional newsletters in Washington. The champion in my stable was The Energy Daily. Its success — and it was very successful in the 33 years from its founding until I sold it — depended on the absolute reliability of first-class letter service from the post office.

Every evening we mailed the paper in a No. 10 envelope at a post office in the Washington area. Every morning, I received one in my mailbox in The Plains, Va., 50 miles southwest of District. It was extraordinary. So, too, was its delivery across the country.

Not only did we deliver subscribers their copies by first-class mail, but we also did all the promotion the same way. Over the years we mailed hundreds of thousands of first-class sales letters, and it paid off.

Even now, in the internet age, mail is more trusted and taken more seriously. The head of a large cancer charity told me they still rely on mail solicitations for most of their fundraising: They raise $15 million a year through it.

Years ago, the president of a large, Mid-Atlantic electric utility told me, “The post office is one of the most efficient organizations in the country. Every month we mail more than a million bills, and they all get delivered.” So, I asked, why it is cited as an example of why the government can’t do anything right? He answered, “Have you heard about the alligators in the New York sewers?”

President Trump — to whom you, Mr. DeJoy, have made financial campaign contributions of over $2 million (a mail carrier earns just over $45,00 a year) — wants to see the post office punished; presumably because it has a contract to deliver for Amazon whose CEO Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the country, owns The Washington Post, which isn’t kind to Trump.

Now, I’ll agree, that the post office must stop losing so much money. Those first-class letters are few, shredding revenues. The package business is the future.

But the problem is, as much as anything, micromanagement from Congress.

When I lived in The Plains, there were a dozen nearby post offices: rural ones, close together, serving few people. Democratic and Republican congressmen get overly attached to their local post offices and fight their closure, even when it is clear there should be consolidation. Likewise, Saturday delivery; for reasons long forgotten, six-day-a-week delivery has become sacred. A private company would stop that on day one.

Besides, you can understand the attachment to your local post office: It is part of the community. You get and send your mail there, maybe buy some stamps, and catch up on the gossip — postmasters know everything.

People don’t hang out at the FedEx office. Remember that. You damage the post office and you take away something from American life.

Also, what corporation would support rural delivery? The rural electric cooperatives were created as a part of FDR’s New Deal because there was no other way the farms would be electrified. Even in this day and age, there is little broadband availability in rural America because it doesn’t pay to lay the cable. What will happen to the mail?

Here is a true story about the post office in The Plains. A stray village dog, one well-fed and well-known as Downtown Brown, became attached to the post office. He decided he owned it and barred people he didn’t like from entering. Downtown Brown had to be rusticated to a farm so that the people of The Plains — population 238 — could once again use the post office.

It wasn’t decided then that the post office should be closed because the dog was affecting the mail. If you privatize the post office now, that is what you’ll be doing.

Do be careful. You are stepping in to take control of something very American, since 1775. It has social value as well as being an innovator, from stagecoaches to airplanes to automated sorting.

The post office helped make America great. Save the post office. About Downtown Brown: I’m told he lived a long and happy life and never went postal again.

Cordially,

Mail Customer

Reform is in the air. Beware of it. Often it evaporates as the generation that spawned it moves on.

I take you back to the 1960s when reform was everywhere. We came out of that tumultuous decade with high hopes for a better deal. Some reform movements left a lasting effect, but others faded away.

Here, in no order, are what I see as the seminal reforming events of the ’60s.

The anti-Vietnam War movement; the environmental movement; the civil rights movement; the women’s movement; and the prison reform movement. Considering what’s happening on the streets of America now, it can be argued that the biggest disappointment was in civil rights, despite what’s been achieved.

To be sure, schools and colleges integrated, big institutions offered some colorblind promotion. Legislation guaranteeing civil rights, voting rights and banning overt segregation in housing, for example, was passed.

But social integration failed. After the riots of 1968, triggered by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., whites left cities in droves for the suburbs. It was termed “white flight.”

Much of the civil rights legislation over time has been whittled away, particularly that associated with President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. It was often replaced with harsh policing and an attack on welfare.

It became a myth that The Great Society failed. It didn’t. The Great Society wasn’t given a fair shake before it was replaced with The Great Lockup Society.

Fear of drugs and related crime was greeted in the 1970s and 1980s with a philosophy that it was best to lock people up for a long time with mandatory sentencing and zero tolerance. The burden fell disproportionately on young African-American and Hispanic men.

The young people who’d marched around the White House in opposition to the Vietnam War, and belonged to what was called at the time “the new class,” were going to bring in a new society. They were articulate idealists who wanted a better world.

However as other problems gripped the national attention, like energy, the new class matured into the old class. They forgot the heady hopes of the ’60s when they’d dreamed of utopia.

Our politics hardened, too. The whole political apparatus moved to the right. If blacks were thought of at all by whites, it was as though their problems had been solved: Heck, there were black people all over television.

The big issues of healthcare and education weren’t addressed and if they were, the answer was unhelpful: private healthcare and private education.

We started graduating an almost unemployable class through the broken public-school systems. Then we said, “See, they’re unemployable, ignorant, and fit for a few minimum wage jobs like hamburger flipping.” If you are born into poverty and have little enlightened parenting at home, failure is nearly guaranteed.

Not only are we graduating students who can hardly read, but we aren’t telling them what reading is about: living a whole life.

My wife and I were filming a television program at the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston, S.C., a few years ago. This private college should be a template for the future of small colleges. Students study liberal arts in tandem with a trade: blacksmithing, carpentry, classical architecture, plaster, stone carving and timber framing.

One student we interviewed — who was a little older than most college students (like most of the student body) — was an African American who had served in the Marine Corps. “What do you like about college?” I asked. “Dickens,” he replied.

He loved the literature component of the liberal arts education. Then, with a winning smile, he added, “They don’t teach that sort of thing in the high schools around here (Charleston).”

Students with a trade tend to start businesses. We were told that about a third of ACBA graduates start a small business within five years of graduation. Business is within the grasp of anyone who has a trade to sell like carpentry, stone carving or metal working.

Dignity is beyond price and it comes with success in small business. The key is the right kind of education: teaching down-home skills while lighting up the mind.

There is disquiet in the soul of America.

It has been expressed night after night on the streets of more than 100 towns and cities. That number of urban sites, with all those tens of thousands of people, are a cry from the hurting heart of America — yes, over the death of George Floyd, the proximate cause, but it is about more.

The demonstrations are the sum of multiple grievances that roil America: grievances over police excess; over the plight of those at the bottom with poor wages, little or no health care, and crushing debt from credit cards that they will never earn enough money to pay off in all of the years of their lives.

John Butler, professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, describes this debt as “technological sharecropping.”

It is the frustration that is the underside of the American Dream; the frustration that however hard one works, one will never escape the vise of debt, the squalor and degeneration of poverty with its cramping of the spirit and breaking of the will.

It is a well-founded sense of victimhood, for there are real victims — not only the victimhood of race, but also the pervasive victim status that settles upon all on the lowest rung of the economic ladder and even many rungs above, reaching well into the struggling middle class.

It is about despair: despair over money, despair over jobs, despair over squalor.

It is about agony that morphs into anger at not being heard, at being used but not respected — being the target of economic opportunity for those who own the corporations that seem to exploit, from the usurious pay-day lender to the large corporations that hide behind technology for comfort, to avoid confrontation, and to present any dispute as an assault on their right to do as they wish.

In this vein, it is the phone company that makes it onerous to report a fault on the line, the cable company that overcharges for its services, taking advantage of its natural monopoly status.

It is about the insurance company that sends you a computer-generated letter, assuring that you will not be able to deal with an individual, speak to a human being. (Bank of America will not give out phone numbers for officers.) The wretched must go in person to get near anonymous help.

It is knowing that the rich have numbers to call, specialists to see, detours around difficulties, and the glorious knowledge that they will have the more questionable of their deeds shielded from scrutiny.

It is about the rigorous greed of the few who must ensure their wellbeing through droves of lobbyists. It is about the taxes that the wealthy do not pay, and the unfortunate do pay.

It is about politicians who talk about freedom but perfect the freedom not to hear the whimpers of need from their constituents: their need for health care, employment security, affordable housing, and functioning schools. It is about a whole stratum of our society, from the very bottom to the middle, that feels that society has robbed them of everything, from respect to a hearing to simple dignity.

I have covered demonstrations, from those for self-government in colonial Africa to those against nuclear armament in London to the riots on the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington and Baltimore (they also went nationwide) to the repeated protests against the Vietnam War and the bombing of Cambodia.

There is in a demonstration a kind of camaraderie, a feeling of fellowship, a sense of human warmth and kindness that is powerful and invigorating — and, yes, intoxicating, which can trigger bad behavior. Sadly, if violence erupts, the demonstrators hand over the keys to their futures to those they are protesting.

The people in the streets are there not only because of police brutality, injustice and economic anguish but also in protest of the president of the United States.

Donald Trump has fanned the embers of differences between people, emboldened excesses in police forces and encouraged conflict over harmony, ridicule over appreciation, and introduced the vernacular of the street into the political dialogue.

It is oddly appropriate that it is in the street that Trump’s presidency is being reviled and where it may founder.