TIM KOWAL: PEACE IS A MIRACLE.

In the bad old days before Year Zero, some Americans used to know about something called the Miracle of 1800. The reason America’s first transition of power from one political party to another was called a “miracle” was because the peaceful transition of political power in a democracy was not something that had been known to work. There is, in fact, no particularly good reason to think that it should work. And yet, miraculously, it did work. Perhaps it was that Americans, still fresh with patriotic feeling for their new country, forged in a Revolutionary War, willed that it work. Who knows?

But even when it did work, there was no real reason to assume it should go on working. Yet, Americans saw it go on working. Perhaps there was something exceptional about America. Who knows?

In fact, the peaceful continuation of American democratic governance went on working so well, and for so long, that Americans began to take it for granted. They began to see peace as a sort of natural state of their political life. And political violence as something, strange, foreign. Something that, if ever we should observe it, could be explained only as something that must have been imported.

Violence, we came to assume, was not among America’s gross domestic products.

In the bad old days, too, Americans used to acknowledge death as a fact of life. Illness was commonplace, and it took from all groups, not just the old. Poverty, too, was a typical and certain condition. If a person did not work, he would not eat. And then, almost suddenly, there came a point when Americans could expect good health, and a long life, as the rule and not the exception. And to accompany that good long life, Americans could assume a comfortable and satisfying job, and settle in somewhere in the broad middle-class. These became nearly as certain as the Laws of Thermodynamics. Exceptions to the rule prompted questions that someone was to blame for upsetting the natural order of things.

But then came 2020, a year wreathed in horror. That year upset the presumptions of perpetual good health, perpetual prosperity, and perpetual peace.

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