What is to be done with the state of our country?

The view from K Street has special meaning this month. Offices and storefronts are boarded up from 14th St. to 22nd and beyond. From our (unoccupied) office near Connecticut and K, you can see the looted CVS, struggling to reopen.

Around the corner, on I St., things are worse. Across Farragut Square, the signs of protest are everywhere, from the Black Lives Matter Plaza to the blackened front of the AFL-CIO headquarters. The whole world watched as Lafayette Square and St. John's Church were turned into a fume-filled "battlespace." The towering fences girdling the White House are a fitting symbol of the chasm between government and a newly energized electorate. All this, as the coronavirus rages most brutally away from the camera's eye in rural America, where journalists rarely visit and disaster is just one more ICU patient than hospitals have ICU beds.

This was supposed to be a time for cautious optimism. An impatient populace took the first steps of "reopening." A welcome increase in employment brought even more positive feelings despite many millions still idle. Those concerns now seem as far away as the Himalayas. The murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police thrust the harsh realities that have oppressed and continue to confront black Americans into the common consciousness of us all. The demand that America make good on its promise of equal treatment can no longer be deferred.

It's our government's job, and we must be that government