I don’t mean to break up anyone’s pity party, but if you care to know what is happening to our country, I’d suggest stepping way back to learn how Donald Trump and at least four separate crises may very well be bringing back the American Dream.

In my humble corner of the world,   we lazy, timid and complacent citizens are getting the ass-kicking we need and deserve to awaken us to the promise of our quite wonderful country, still great after all these years.

The grim part is our daily, round-the-clock awareness of so many national failures at once – the tragic and unnecessary bungling of the coronavirus, racism, a hallowed out federal government, health care, and the crumbling economy.

It’s a lot to endure.

But as always happens with challenge, there is a great opportunity. “A Republic, if they can keep it,” said Benjamin Franklin.

Donald Trump, who has chosen to be an avatar of racial resentment and human neglect, has been outed and revealed by the crises he faces.

He’s sinking by the day, proving almost every time he opens his mouth that his niece Mary Trump got it right; he is not fit to lead.

Yesterday, the father of the Chlorox Cure looked an interviewer right in the eye and said he had been right about the virus much more than anyone, including Dr. Fauci.

He can’t empathize, he can’t manage his way out of a paper bag, he surrounds himself with amoral sycophants and has wedded himself to the failed and darkest impulses of our tormented country.

It doesn’t get much lower than that. History will know him for it.

But look at the good he has spawned.

White Americans have suddenly awakened to the startling news that blacks have been right all along – racism in America does exist, and if you don’t believe it, there are some videos for you to watch.

The pandemic, along with the video,  has become a deadly but powerful force for truth and change. I wonder if, in some Biblical way, this year is the price we had to pay for electing someone like Donald Trump in the first place.

If you believe in voodoo, someone stuck a doll in us. We had it coming.

Americans are learning how important government can be, and how crucial free health care is. There’s a difference between shaking things up and recklessly destroying them.

As they get furloughed and laid off by the millions, their health care cut off, their savings gone, they know how important a fair and balanced economy is, and how much a rational and caring leader can mean.

And perhaps most important, Americans are learning that you aren’t to blame if you find yourselves poor and vulnerable.

We are learning that the country can’t work any longer if it’s just for the white, the male, the rich. More and more of us are accepting that. The culture of whiteness is fading out, even dying. They will not go quietly, and they are not going quietly.

But still, some form of affordable health care reform is now inevitable, immigrants have never had more sympathy and support, the Dreamers are still with us,  communities all over the country are re-imagining, not defunding,  policing, and the President is lying and denying himself into the biggest imaginable kind of hole.

His many enemies didn’t figure out how to do him in, he did it all by himself. Go figure. Perhaps he will learn that he isn’t a stable genius after all.

I know the pundits love to say anything can happen, but I think it’s too late for this poor and broken man. Just look at him, his face tells all of it. He’s done.

I have no crystal ball, but the evidence is pointing to a landslide by Joe Biden, and there is great momentum building for a takeover of the Senate as well.

None of these things would be happening if we didn’t have such a lousy year or such a nasty, loony-toons leader.

When the country is clamoring for truth and guidance, he offers none.

When the country needs to hear from doctors and scientists, they are silenced and undermined. When the country needs to learn how to heal its racial wounds, they are being opened almost daily.

And when the country needs to stop honoring the defenders of slavery, they are being guarded by roving men in green, who hide behind their federal riot gear, they are the President’s new personal palace guard.

President Trump has gone off the rails, his ranting about saving our civilization sounds like cartoon dialogue out of Batman or Dick Tracy.

What he is doing is persuading more Americans every day that voting him out of office is what saving civilization means.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is three times more popular than the President, and a hundred times more respected.

And he’s right about Trump: the President’s cowardly and juvenile campaign against him is hurting him, not helping.

Some politicians speak out of both sides of their mouth, Trump speaks out of five or six.

Why is this bad news a reason for hope and excitement?

Because all of it is awakening much of the country to what it means to be in a democracy, to care for the poor, to staff government responsibility, and to spread the wealth to people who are learning every day what it means to have none.

Trump’s supporters will get the shake-up the asked for, but perhaps not the one they wanted.

There is growing evidence that at least some of his supporters are beginning to see that he is their problem, not their solution.

But it doesn’t matter anymore. Trump has awakened us, and also the Democratic Party, suddenly drowning in money and volunteers from all over the country.

Joe Biden’s campaign motto ought to be: “Do No Harm, Stay Home.” It isn’t the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but it’s sure working.

It’s hard to see things when we’re too close. Sometimes you just have to step back.

In America, the working class has become the new poor, and a powerful new coalition is forming that could dramatically alter the course of our history – white women, African-Americans, Latinos, college-educated white men,  disenchanted working-class people, reluctant young people with nowhere else to go.

A couple of decades ago, the Republican Party, Richard Nixon, and the conservative political movement all decided together that black people, immigrants, and poor people had become dependent on a government gone soft.

The timing was right for them. Americans have always been afraid of blacks, but more so in the ’60s.

Blacks were rioting in some cities, the South was looking for a more compatible political party, and working-class whites were beginning to feel betrayed and abandoned.

The conservatives believed it was within the power of the poor of the needy and vulnerable to pull themselves up to good health and prosperity all by themselves, an act of will,  just like the pilgrims were alleged to have done when the country was founded.

At its worst, these policies were blatantly racist. At their best, there was a belief that the government could smother ambition and drive if it did too much.

Conservatives and Republican legislators began a fierce and relentless movement – still very much underway – to cut back the size of government, reduce benefits, block health care reform, remove all restrictions on runaway wealth, undermine the unions that helped build a middle class that was the envy of the world, and flood the political process with money and conservative judges,

These judges allowed even more corporate money to flood our political campaigns, marginalizing individual citizens who weren’t wealthy.

The idea was that the economy would grow so quickly that everyone would get a slice of the pie. They forget to do the last part.

To accomplish this, billionaires, Republicans, CEO’s and business lobbies first had to convince the white middle and working-class- at the time prosperous and relatively secure –  that African-Americans and other people of color were a grave threat to their well being and were getting the help they weren’t getting, but that belonged to them.

They succeeded. Now, nobody is getting any help except wealthy corporations with their tax breaks.

Working-class white people swear to this day that an elitist spoiled billionaire President (who wouldn’t be caught dead hanging out with working people at Mar-A- Largo) and who is totally in the grip of the billionaire class, is their friend and advocate.

The Republican Party now opposes and blocks welfare programs, food programs for poor children, immigration, job training, universal or even affordable, health care, gun control, massive opioid interventions, or any of the things that might elevate the poor and needy.

To do this would almost certainly require raising some taxes on the one percent of the country that now owns 40 percent of the wealth. Those people would rather die.

This war on the needy has been successful beyond Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan’s wildest dreams.

But here’s what no one expected: in the past 40 years, working-class whites and rural Americans have been hit as hard or harder than most African-Americans, immigrants, and people of color.

Today, the middle-class has traded places with the people they feared: they are the working class and are increasingly needy.

Last year, a Federal Reserve study found that almost 40 percent of American adults wouldn’t be able to cover a $400 emergency with cash, savings or a credit card charge that they could quickly pay off.

These government policies have left the United States the only advanced country on earth without universal health care, some gun control, or unlimited paid sick or maternity leave.

When white working-class people had money, they didn’t care about those things, they were persuaded that paying to help the poor was treasonous in some way. So are the millions of people losing their jobs in the layoffs that continue as the virus worsens.

The pandemic is persuading them to care. They are as vulnerable as any other group without resources to spare. And the economic reality is right up in their faces. White people can need help, too.

This isn’t just about them. It’s about all of us, or 99 percent of us, anyway.

The middle-class, black and white,  has been eviscerated by these failed economic policies. The great irony is that so many working-class people haven’t figured out who has screwed them again.

Political scientists like Alberto Alesina of Harvard argue that investment in these kinds of safety nets and human capital – the kinder America we miss and now dream about – were tainted and shaped by bigotry, okay, racism.

Nixon, Reagan, and the conservative political movement spread the widespread belief among working-class whites that African Americans and immigrants were benefiting more than they were and at their expense.

These fears played nicely into the stereotype of blacks and immigrants as being lazy and without ambition.

When African-Americans talk about racism, they aren’t just talking about police brutality. Racism is a system, not just a knee on the neck.

Nixon’s timing was good decades ago. The South was looking for a new political party to follow, they were still seething from the government’s support of the civil rights movement. Working-class whites were soon to be enraged by the damage the trade agreements did to their lives and communities.

At least one demagogue sniffed the air and smelled an opening.

But Trump’s timing is not as good as Nixon’s was. This is 2020, not 1968.

The country is going through a very different kind of awakening; it is far more diverse and racially conscious than it was 40 years ago.

The policies of racial resentment have made millions of people poor, not self-sufficient, and independent. And more and more, their faces are white.

The confederate statues are a symbol of nothing but what they appear to be – monuments to treason and cruelty.

Nobody but our broken President and a few of his cultish supporters want those statues to stay up.

NASCAR, The NFL, the NBA, even Coca-Cola, are blowing Trump off and ignoring him. And these kinds of institutions don’t ever lead, they follow. Their fingers are always up, trying to catch the direction of the wind.

The CEO’s know something Trump seems unable to learn.

People on the wrong side of history lose every single time.

Trump has now aligned himself with every hateful and destructive ideology in America, from white nationalists to angry old white men to secret government agents in masks and camouflage to brain-damaged conspiracy theorists, anti-vaccers, anti-maskers,  and historians deniers.

He loves them, “good people all.”

He loves his new militarized militias and their Mutant Ninja Turtle outfits and masks. They crash uninvited into troubled communities like Portland and snatch people off the streets without warrants or identification.

They make everything worse, wherever they go. What a lesson in what we don’t want and won’t tolerate. You may not be powerful, but you are far from powerless.

He’s even re-tweeting white crazies who think Democrats are really a secret nest of pedophiles.

No group is too extreme, hateful, or dishonest for him. He doesn’t want to be Andrew Jackson. He wants to be the Joker, laughing and thrilling to the cries of the wounded and the fearful.

But what he is really doing is empowering an army of Hobbits to march out and confront the Orcs. It is already an epic battle.

“There was something about seeing a man’s knee on another man’s neck that woke people up,” Helene Gayle, chief executive of the Chicago Community Trust. “People think I’m crazy, but I have a sense of possibility.”

Me too, I see signs of awakening everywhere.

Harvey Weinstein did the same thing for women that the video did for blacks. People are listening to women’s stories in a completely different way. Things are changing.

And Weinstein is in jail, something many women thought would never be possible.

The lie the new economists peddled was that the poor could work if they only wanted to and that all immigrants were lazy or worse (Trump, ever healing, suggested many were rapists).

It was absurd to say that caring for the poor was now the problem of religious institutions, not the government. Or that the poor would be inspired by government neglect to heal the broken social structure of a country.

How is that working out? The Evangelical movement is not interested in the poor; they are into political power, telling other people how to live, discrimination against gays and trans people, and real estate.

The good Christians, like the good citizens, are numb. But religion has somehow failed, and to my surprise, we miss it.

This idea that the poor and the needy want to be poor and brought their suffering upon themselves proved to be a disaster for almost all Americans, especially the working class.

Marginalized groups like African-Americans and Native-Americans have suffered the worst, but white working-class Americans are catching up, even surpassing them in some ways.

American children today are 57 percent more likely to die by age 19 than European children are. Suicide and drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for white rural American males, whose life expectancy is plunging.

This awful distinction for young white men in the country puts them more likely to die young than any other social group in America.

American life expectancy overall is continuing to decline sharply, especially in rural areas, according to the Center for Disease Control’s latest statistical release.

Americans are dying at an average age of 78.6.  The drop has been driven significantly by 70,237 deaths from drug overdoses. For comparison, that number’s nearly equal to the entire population of Bismarck, North Dakota’s capital.

In 2016, a fifth of the deaths among Americans aged 24 to 35 in rural areas was due to opioids. Where do we get off sneering at Democratic socialists?

Between 2001 and 2015, suicide rates among white adults increased 41 percent in the U.S. between 2001 and 2016, reported the CDC. Over those eighteen years, 453,577 adults aged 25 to 64 died, 77 percent of them male.

This catastrophe was neither noticed nor responded to by the federal government or the media.

There is a town just a few miles from me where 35 percent of one small high school graduating class had died of suicide or opioid abuse by the time they were 35.

In his new and shocking book,  Dying Of Whiteness, Dr. Jonathan Metzl writes about the boomerang of racial resentment.

The very people who so violently objected to helping the needy have become them instead. People die in the United States from drug overdoses at a rate of one every seven minutes. And most of these deaths are not in the suburbs or cities; they are in rural America.

People get frustrated with me when I defend Trump supporters, who certainly know how to appear hateful. But the truth is they have every right to be angry, as do African-Americas and Native-Americans and so many women.

People say we are more divided than ever, historians say this is not true. The Civil War was far worse, so were the 60’s. I was there. In a warped and ironic way, much of the anger and hatred is digital, a kind of toilet bowl of grievance.

Demagogues appear when a government lies to its people. Perhaps its time for the government to tell the truth. A lesson for Biden.

We seem to have a long way to go to be the country we want to be and hoped we were. But change is blowing the doors down now; I can hear the noise.

A 76 -old- woman, a long time reader of mine, and someone I have come to care for,  e-mails me often to express her alarm about socialism and the danger of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with whom she is obsessed.

She learned about how dangerous Cortez was on Fox News, she said, which her late husband watched all day for years.

Her name is Jane, and she is sick and has no health care. She lives in New York State, way up near the Canadian border. We agree on just about nothing, but we haven’t given up on each other.

She has a good heart. She loves my dogs and donkeys and overlooks my values and beliefs.

I’m no doctor, but her illness could be the virus.

She won’t get tested because she’s afraid she will not be able to afford it or pay for hospital care.

For years, she’s gone to a government-subsidized food bank to buy the groceries she can’t afford. I’ve been urging her to get help.

She is a fervent Trump supporter; she doesn’t’ want the country to fall in the hands of leftist Democrats who would give everyone free health care; her taxes would then, she says go to people who should work and immigrants who shouldn’t be here.

She’s never met an immigrant, and she admits to having no idea what socialism is.

Why would free health care be so bad? I messaged her about the politics of racial resentment and sent her Dr. Metlz’s book through Amazon.

I said I am not a socialist, but would be proud to have such a caring and bright and knowledgeable young person for a daughter or friend as Cortez.

Why would you make her a demon just because you disagree with here?

Connect the dots, Jane, you’re not foolish or stupid.

She e-mailed me yesterday Thanks for the book, she said, my first-born son died of an overdose three years ago. Her neighbor’s son tried to commit suicide. Nobody did anything to help.

Thanks for telling me, I said. Think of your son. And think for yourself.

I live in the present because, for me, the past is a trap and the future is not knowable. But I think the great irony of this political campaign – and with the help of a killer global pandemic – a window is opening, another chance for a wonderful country which has lost its way.

I hope we move forward and think of reconciliation, not vengeance. There are a lot of victims in this story; nobody has a patent on being mistreated.

In Sunday’s New York Times, Elizabeth Cohen, a respected historian, told a reporter that “it is possible that the best thing that could have happened to make progressive change possible is the crass, self-interested, ineffective politics of Donald Trump.’

We all have choices to make this year; I choose hope, not gloom. And with good reason.