Opinion: Nursing our public institutions back to health after the pandemic

Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, April 10, 2021. We are exactly 100 days into 2021, or more accurately, 466 days into 2020. Let’s take a look back at the week in Opinion.

Reopening day in California is tentatively scheduled for June 15, likely close enough for you to contemplate which pandemic practices to take with you into the summer (one that will be required: masking), which to phase out slowly, and how quickly you might return to “normal” in other ways. One such area of my life has to do with transit, so bear with me while I step back and get a little personal.

Last year, figuring I could contribute nothing more than a warm body with a working immune system to help end the pandemic, I signed up for the Pfizer-BioNTech trial, and in September I was injected with two doses (three weeks apart) of what was later revealed as the experimental mRNA vaccine and not a placebo. All appointments for the study have been (and will continue to be, through at least 2022) at Kaiser in Hollywood, including my six-month checkup this past week. Pre-pandemic, I’d make almost any trip to Kaiser on a bus or a train, given the ample transit accessibility of the location, and before The Times moved from downtown Los Angeles to El Segundo, I was a daily bus or bicycle commuter.

Now, it’ll take a bit more herd immunity and a lot more personal bravery for me to leave the electric car plugged in at home and take the bus to these appointments or anywhere else. I say this because I’ve been thinking a lot about the resilience of our institutions and public agencies after the pandemic, a topic that Nicholas Goldberg addresses this week in his column about public transit. Goldberg notes that for transit to work, it needs a lot of riders, and Los Angeles County’s Metro system was shedding riders before the pandemic and will face serious challenges long after June 15. You could also apply this grim analysis to our local public school systems, which were plagued by declining enrollment before the coronavirus forced campuses to close more than a year ago.

This isn’t to suggest that public transit, public schools and other such institutions face certain insolvency because of the pandemic (and speaking personally, I can’t afford losing my kids’ public school). What this does suggest is that these public services will need some nursing back to health after June 15, and it will require some conscientious opting in by people who don’t typically use transit or send their children to public school.

Are you ready for California to reopen? None of us is like Rip Van Winkle, writes David L. Ulin, awakening to a new reality that came about as we slept. We’ve watched as much of the world functioned even while we were home, but that doesn’t mean the prospect of functioning in the post-COVID world isn’t unnerving: “This is where we are, on the cusp of a future that still seems impossible to imagine, just as it would have once been impossible to imagine where we’ve lately been.” L.A. Times

Derek Chauvin’s prosecutors may be on a glidepath to conviction, but exactly what will their victory be? Chauvin, writes former federal prosecutor Harry Litman, faces multiple charges. Which of those he will be convicted of — and punished for — rests on arcane standards having to do with determining a police officer’s intent. Chauvin may well be convicted of killing George Floyd last May — but depending on exactly what charge, this trial could go down in history as either a triumph or another failure to hold police accountable. L.A. Times

The Klan is a California institution too, and not just as a dangerous menace in Huntington Beach. Several reports from 1868-70 of violent incidents attributed to the Ku Klux Klan targeting Chinese immigrants in California read as if they could have taken place in the Reconstruction-era South: Churches were burned to the ground, politicians were assaulted and insurers canceled policies because of Klan threats. “White supremacy obeys no regional boundaries,” writes historian Kevin Waite. “The early KKK was a national, not local, phenomenon. Then, as now, hate wasn’t a southern problem; it was and is an American problem.” The Atlantic

We need to start acting like adults with our roads, and that means taxing ourselves enough to pay for them, writes columnist LZ Granderson: “Biden’s $2-trillion infrastructure plan is enormous. But so are our infrastructure issues. Let there be a spirited debate. But let it be between adults who at least understand a gas tax increase is long overdue and not between fearful grownups who want to kick this proverbial can down the road another 30 years because honestly, we don’t have another 30 years.” L.A. Times

President Biden can’t do much by himself on firearms, so let’s hope the policy wish list on gun control he presented this week spurs Congress to take action, writes The Times Editorial Board: “These are all common-sense approaches to reduce gun deaths, and it’s disturbing that they are such heavy lifts in a Congress so beholden to the myth that an armed nation is a safer nation. But that’s the political reality that Americans, and Biden, are confronted with. Let the fight begin.” L.A. Times