Why I am optimistic in this crisis

Surgeon General Jerome Adams warned us that this week would be “our Pearl Harbor moment” as we brace for the worst of the coronavirus. While some of us might certainly see light at the end of the tunnel, others stare frightfully into a gloomy corridor, haunting us with upheaval and despair.

Indeed, I am fundamentally optimistic. The United States was born out of audacious optimism in our darkest moments. I think about the first fragile weeks of our nation. In August 1776, the untested and undermanned army of George Washington had been surrounded by the largest enemy naval invasion since the Spanish Armada. One contemporary observer peered at Lower Manhattan Bay and remarked, “I thought all London was afloat.”

Facing overwhelming force, Washington lost the first engagements of the Battle of Long Island. His army was pinned against the East River. On the brink of annihilation, Washington managed to slip 9,500 soldiers quietly across the river to Manhattan in a single night. He raced them north with the British in close pursuit. He ferried them all across the Hudson River to New Jersey, marched south, crossed the Delaware River. He then daringly turned back, traversed the icy river again, and defeated the British in the Battle of Trenton. Washington lived to fight another day, and won the war.

I think about April 1862. Until that point, many of the generals under the command of Abraham Lincoln had been deeply pessimistic. On a cold and rainy evening that month, Ulysses Grant surveyed the routing of his army during the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee. Thousands of his soldiers lay dead and dying on fields of freezing mud. Subordinates assumed he would follow military doctrine and use the cover of darkness to retreat. Grant said, “Retreat? No. I propose to attack at daylight and whip them.” Grant counterattacked the next morning and snatched victory from the confederates. Within three years, Lincoln had turned slavery into liberty.

I reflect on October 1957, when two starkly conflicting events penetrated living rooms across the country. That month, the Huntley Brinkley Report jarred the nation with news that the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik. A device the size of a beach ball that orbited the earth handed communism a win in the very first lap of the Space Race. On many of the same television screens was then the debut of “Leave It to Beaver.” Sheer minutes after absorbing the reality of Sputnik, we watched a middle class family that could do it all. The gravest fear Beaver encountered that night was not Sputnik. It was that his teacher had sent him home from school with a sealed note for his parents. Civil rights and women rights had not yet been made priorities by our leaders. But that, of course, would come.

I think about my former colleague, Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who had been beaten unconscious nearly two dozen times during the civil rights movement. He kept getting up until he proudly took his seat in the United States Congress. I think about the school I attended in the suburb of Levittown. The school was named after Jonas Salk, the graduate of the City University of New York, who had discovered a vaccination for polio.

I return to the historical allusion to Pearl Harbor. Not only was our nation unprepared then, but we were in a position of military inferiority against an already mobilized Japan and Germany. We organized and mobilized, researched and developed, and engineered and assembled. We opened up factories to produce weapons, crossed oceans, stormed beaches, and leapt hills. We liberated concentration camps and freed Europe. We went to the Pacific and won there. We came home and looked up at the moon across an endless expanse of space and declared, “We can go there too.”

In September 1962 at Rice University, President Kennedy promised the nation that we would land on the moon by the end of the decade. Many remember this, but few can summon the words. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energy and skills. Because that challenge is one we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one that we intend to win, and the others too.” This message still rings true today.

The array of challenges that our nation faces this week and beyond might feel unprecedented, but the critical tools to address them have never left us. This means investing in research, expanding the middle class, keeping workers healthy, building our infrastructure, and enhancing education. We must sharpen and modernize these critical tools, but we know they have worked before. So that is why I will always be a gritty American optimist.

Steve Israel represented New York in Congress for 16 years and was the chairman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2011 to 2015. He is now the director of the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at Cornell University. You can find him on Twitter @RepSteveIsrael.