I’ve kept a wallet in my left rear pocket all of my life, stuffing it with cards and lucky bills and photos I never looked at and didn’t need to carry around with me.

As I sit on my butt most days to write, the wallet was often too close to me.

Nobody thought twice about this until the pandemic, during which the Holtz Leather Co. of Alabama sent me an e-mail describing the wallet I have dreamed of but never thought possible.

Its made of prime leather holds up to eight cards and documents – my license and health care card, and fits easily in my shirt pocket or front pants pocket.

Honestly, it has changed a good chunk of my life, made sitting down and writing much more comfortable, and cost about $35.

I love it and appreciate it.

Why did it take so long for this to happen, and what does the sudden appearance of these new, straightforward, and revolutionary wallets mean for a country emerging from a devastating trauma?

If you watch even the so-called “best” of our media, you would be forgiven for expecting doom. But what if that idea of America is dead wrong, and we are heading for a Renaissance instead?

The Republican and Democratic parties look stale to me, calcified, frightened, and confused.

The Democrats, ruled by an affable octogenarian, still engage in some policy ambitions; however, beyond reach the yare, and the Republicans, the official party of Donald Trump,  are in awful trouble, raging about Dr. Seuss, being “awoke,” cancel culture and Jewish lasers from space.

When Marjorie  Taylor Greene and Donald Trump are the faces of your political party, then big change is on the horizon. Congratulations, Rep. Greene, for learning that the holocaust was bad.

The people responsible for informing us seem not to realize what I hear and feel every day.

People want government actually to do something for them and their children and the world.

Like wars and earthquakes, pandemics tend to shake up countries and wash away the stale and dysfunctional institutions that have blocked real progress for years.

I might have found the answer to some of those questions at least partially in a column written Sunday in the New York Times by one of the most thoughtful surviving people in media, David Brooks.

He’s missed the memo; he’s not hateful or outraged yet, just thoughtful.

Here is part of what he wrote; it struck me as exciting, important, and possibly true. It felt right:

“Covid-19 has disrupted daily American life in a way few emergencies have before,” wrote  Brooks in his column.

“But it has also shaken things up and cleared the way for an economic boom and social revival. Millions of Americans endured grievous loss and anxiety during this pandemic. Still, many also used this time as a preparation period, so they could burst out of the gate when things opened up. After decades of slowing entrepreneurial dynamism, 4.4 million new businesses were started in 2020, by far a modern record. A report from Udemy, an online course provider, says that 38 percent of workers took some additional training during 2020, up from only 14 percent in 2019.”

I wondered why I sensed this but hadn’t read about it anywhere else?

Much of our media has become a 24/7 catastrophe, outrage, and grievance machine.

CNN doesn’t seem to know that a tiny fraction of the American public – 2.2 million viewers in prime time broadcasts in a country that numbers more than 330 million people. And Fox News doesn’t seem to know that CNN has a little more than half the circulation of Fox News.

So you do the math. If 3.5 million Americans are watching cable news and more than 327 million people are not, who’s paying attention to them?

When did a cosmic failure become such an awesome success?

I’m sorry, but this is not where the future of America is going to be decided. Contrary to the news, most Americans are not railing against vaccines or fighting against masks. It just feels that way. They are a lot louder than us, and the number one rule of media is to go for the loudest—every time.

The craziest and angriest, and most ignorant among us do not get to speak for the rest of us.

The most interesting thing about Donald Trump and the Culture Of Outrage is that it is about as vibrant as a Southwestern water reservation. I don’t think Donald Trump has won over a new voter in years.

His movement is full of grievance and anger, but it is not growing. It is just loud.

And it has never been and is not now big enough to take over a country like America.

It couldn’t do it in 2020 when no one was paying attention, and it certainly can’t do it now, when everyone is paying attention.

Trump’s movement is only a few years old to me but smells and feels like month-old cheese. There has not been one new idea from them other than Joe Biden is a demented socialist.  And that is not a new idea.

We should be so lucky.

The progressive movement isn’t much better than the far right, trafficking blindly in decade-old mega-proposals that never seem to pass and few people seem to want. So, no, we won’t be defunding the police.

Brooks is definitely swimming upstream when he writes that “The American Renaissance Has Begun.” I hadn’t heard about that.

But it’s a stirring idea. And he makes an excellent case for it.

Businesses were stunned when people didn’t want their lousy minimum wage jobs anymore and held out for something better.

CEOs were outraged at the temerity of people who wanted to eat and pay their rent simultaneously, but when they started raising salaries, they were flooded with applications.

Duh.

Economists will tell you that people who make more money spend more money.

The smart money in Washington and Wall Street says the economy will explode early in September. And yes, there will be some inflation.

Brooks is also correct when he says the biggest shift in American consciousness may be mental.

People learned during the pandemic that life is short, and we need to make our time country and worry about money. We learned that science can’t fix everything.

People had time to think during all that time at home. And when you have time to think, you find time to change.

They also learned that old-world politics is both corrupt and deadly. So they don’t want to devote their whole jobs to work.

According to story after story, millions of Americans seem ready to embrace nature, face climate change, and examine their values.

Economists report that America is approaching the best job market in 25 years; the country has 50 percent more openings than before Covid-19.

And many millions of Americans have left the frantic life of cities and Amazon warehouses and long commutes and heavy traffic and

headed to the country to re-acquaint themselves with each other, with Mother Earth, and a quieter and more meaningful life.

( For once, I was ahead of the curve. This is why I came up here nearly 20 years ago, I highly recommend it, and my little town is filling up with New Yorkers who really wanted a change.)

The mainstream media – and certainly the ideologues on the left and right – are too busy sticking their noses up the asses of useless and clueless politicians to see what might be a huge and radically different picture than the one we get from Washington every day.

Mostly our media is good at screaming. However, there are still a few people committed to thinking.

Many people think we are heading for a catastrophe. However, more and more people think we may be heading for a renaissance instead.

Our political leaders seem to think the stuff they see on the news is reality; that has hardly ever been true, and it is certainly not true now. So who saw Donald Trump coming?

Power has begun shifting from employers to workers. During the first quarter of this year, U.S. start-ups raised $69 billion, 41 percent more than the previous record, set in 2018.

These are not the stories you see and hear on cable news or when Donald Trump holds a rally. There are much bigger stories you are probably not seeing at all.

Me,  and people who are smarter than me, are beginning to see that real change may be coming, and it may be both transformative and unstoppable, much bigger than the narrow-minded politicians and institutions trying to block it.

Sadly for the White Christian Nation fighting for their positions – they didn’t learn about sharing –  all those women, black and orange and brown people, and gay people and young people are not going back where they came from. Because where they came from is here.

The great battle to preserve white America is doomed; it can’t be won. Trump is not their victory; he’s their Battle of Thermopylae. What has he ever won but one election and a bankruptcy filing? They can delay it and block it, but it is not a battle they can ultimately win.

When you stoop to passing laws prohibiting kids from bringing Grandma a soda while she waits in line to vote, you are committing an act of desperation.

The pandemic did a staggering amount of harm, but it may also have simply blown away many of the cement blocks that made change impossible.

People liked being home during the pandemic. They liked seeing their kids and being with them. They liked buying dogs and cats and re-discovering trees and nature.

In Alabama, the Stolz family was looking for new products to market when the pandemic ended. They hit on a good idea. They learned that Babe Ruth carried a tiny wallet in his pocket that they thought might sell for them.

They started making the very compact wallet that Babe Ruth used when he played baseball.

His family threatened them with a lawsuit, but the family called them up, and they worked it out and decided to go into business together instead.

The Babe Ruth wallet is a huge bestseller. The company is a big success.

To me, that’s a pandemic story. A new wallet was waiting to happen. Now it has. That story, say, economists, is being repeated countless times every day.

No, people don’t want the suckass jobs they had made $7.50 an hour. They want to make a living and control more of their own lives. As businesses figure out a money-maker for them, they will – and are- get the message and change.

This is called the American Dream, the American promise. It’s wonderful to see it again; the big companies will have to get their knees off the backs of starving workers.

The Chamber of Commerce’s worst nightmare is the American Dream reborn. Only a pandemic could pull that off.

The people fighting change are the same people lying about our democracy and plotting to steal elections away from black people. I didn’t work in 2020, and it won’t work now.

It’s boring to spend the rest of my life watching Donald Trump make bigger and bigger holes for himself and fail in increasingly ugly and pathetic ways. To support this man again, people would have to be too dumb to pose a genuine threat.

And they liked reading books. Book sales are up nearly 300 percent since April, and that has not happened in many years.

Maria and me went to my bookstore, Battenkill Books, today, and Connie Brooks, the very savvy owner, told us that nature books are selling like crazy, more than ever before.

She just put in a new section devoted to nature books. She says people finally had the time to look around them and see what they have missed and could lose.

The people in Washington are too busy lying about January 6 to know what their own constituents are feeling.

People who already lived here and people who have moved are obsessed with nature; they want to read and know everything about it.

For half a century, rural Americans have watched their cities and towns and back account and families wither or flee. Today, homes in Trump country are selling as soon as they go on the market, often for cash. There is hardly any property still left for sale in my county.

People are sick of working in jobs they hate, listening to politicians who hate, watching their kids grow up with Instagram for a best friend. So they are shifting their lives all across the country to address the other pandemic in America – loneliness, and loss of community.

It looks like COVID-19 was more than a medical calamity; it was a social tidal wave, and as these waves have receded, there is a feeling – I now share it – that we are just beginning to imagine how much change is just around the corner.