The crucible of a crisis provides the opportunity to forge a better society, but the crisis itself does not do the work.

What America needs is a just and activist government. The nature of democracy is that we are together responsible for saving ourselves.

The wealthy and famous and politically powerful have laid first claim to the available lifeboats: Senators Richard Burr of North Carolina and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia secured their own fortunes by selling off stock holdings as the virus spread in January and February, even as they reassured the nation that everything was going to be OK; the billionaire David Geffen posted on Instagram that he planned to ride out the crisis on his 454-foot yacht, Rising Sun, adding, “I’m hoping everybody is staying safe”; large corporations lobbied successfully against a proposal to provide paid sick leave to every American worker, pleading they couldn’t afford the cost.

Advocates of a minimalist conception of government claim they too are defenders of liberty. But theirs is a narrow and negative definition of freedom: the freedom from civic duty, from mutual obligation, from taxation. This impoverished view of freedom has in practice protected wealth and privilege. It has perpetuated the nation’s defining racial inequalities and kept the poor trapped in poverty, and their children, and their children’s children.

The goal, of course, was never realized in full, but since the late 1960s, the federal government has largely abandoned the attempt. The defining trend in American public policy has been to diminish government’s role as a guarantor of personal liberty.

The wealthy are particularly successful in blocking changes they don’t like. The political scientists Martin Gilens of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Benjamin Page of Northwestern have calculated that between 1981 and 2002, policies supported by at least 80 percent of affluent voters passed into law about 45 percent of the time, while policies opposed by at least 80 percent of those voters passed into law just 18 percent of the time. Importantly, the views of poor and middle-class voters had little influence.

The hedge-fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin paid $238 million last year for a New York apartment overlooking Central Park. He plans to stay there when he happens to be in town. Meanwhile, 10.9 million American families barely can afford an apartment. They spend more than half of their incomes on rent, and so they scrimp on food and health care. And on any given night, half a million Americans are homeless.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyFor those at the bottom, moreover, the chances of rising are in decline. By the time they reached 30, more than 90 percent of Americans born in 1940 were earning more than their parents had earned at the same age. But among those born in 1980, only half were earning more than their parents by the age of 30.The erosion of the American dream is not a result of laziness or a talent drought. Rather, opportunity has slipped away. The economic ladder is harder to climb; real incomes have stagnated for decades even as the costs of housing, education and health care have increased. Many lower-income Americans are born into polluted, impoverished neighborhoods, with no decent jobs to be found.

African-Americans make up just 14 percent of the state’s population but 40 percent of the dead. Jason Hargrove, who kept driving a Detroit city bus as the virus spread, posted a Facebook video on March 21 complaining about a female passenger who coughed without covering her

Between May and July 1862, even as Confederate victories in Virginia raised doubts about the future of the Union, Congress and President Abraham Lincoln kept their eyes on the horizon, enacting three landmark laws that shaped the nation’s next chapter: The Homestead Act allowed Western settlers to claim 160 acres of public land apiece; the Morrill Act provided land grants for states to fund universities; and the Pacific Railway Act underwrote the transcontinental railroad.Nearly 75 years later, in the depths of the Great Depression, with jobs in short supply and many Americans reduced to waiting in bread lines, President Franklin Roosevelt proved similarly farsighted. He concluded the best way to revive and sustain prosperity was not merely to pump money into the economy but to rewrite the rules of the marketplace. “Liberty,” Roosevelt said at the Democratic Party’s convention in 1936, “requires opportunity to make a living — a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.” His administration, working with

“He mostly says the things you’re thinking in your head.”

that would get them into hot water

Watching Mr. Simmons in action in the tank, it’s natural to flinch in 2019 — to scan the crowd to see if anyone is truly angry, to see which fairgoer is stomping off to the office or firing up a tweet to amplify their outrage.

The somewhat tamer African Dip drifted away from fairs around the 1950s, after states banned them.

the weight of a man’s date, or the cheap finish of a woman’s fake gold hoop earrings.

His is a role that a more sensitive and inclusive world is now sweeping into the dustbin, not long after we did away with gawking at the bearded lady and two-headed boy.

Is there any demographic information that you should keep in mind?

if you write for them within a specific shared context.

Knownaudiences can include people with whom you’re familiar as well as people you don’t know personally but whose needs and expecta-tions you do know.

expectations

You may make statements that seem obvious to you, not realizing that your instruc-tors may consider them assertions that must be proved with evidence

all are influenced by the audience you envision. And your audience will interpret your writing according to their own expectations and experiences, not yours.

What does this writing task call on you to do?

Many readers find it helps to annotate as they read: highlighting keywords, phrases, sentences; connecting ideas with lines or symbols; writing com-ments or questions in the margin or on sticky notes; circling new words so you can look up the definitions later; noting anything that seems note-worthy or questionable.

You may have had the experience of read-ing a text and suddenly realizing that you have no idea what you just read.

As much as possible, you want to keep your opinions from interfering with your understanding of what you’re reading, so it’s important to try to identify those opinions up front

If you had no particular reaction, note that, too.

But do try always to read quickly enough to focus on the meanings of sentences and paragraphs, not just individual words.

As you read, look for cues that signal the way the text’s ideas are organized and how each part relates to the ones around it.

Does your mind wander? If you realize that you haven’t been paying attention and don’t know what you just read, what do you do?

if you know what you do when you read, you’re in a position to decide what you need to change or improve. Consider the answers to the fol-lowing questions: