“Just 17% of Americans say they trust the federal government.” Really? That many? “‘I don’t trust these people, I don’t believe them,’ said Curtis Devlin, 42, an Iraq War veteran who lives in California, referring to national political leaders of both parties. ‘The people whose interests they represent are donors, power brokers, the parties.’” Mr. Devlin is not alone. If the poll numbers are to be believed, 83% of us agree with him. Can you blame us? “Inside the White House, doubts about the official numbers [of Covid-19 deaths] are pervasive, though they come in different forms. Mr. Trump is in search of good news to promote his administration’s response to the pandemic and to press states to reopen.” There’s a whole article on how these numbers are compiled which is so convoluted that I could barely understand it. The bottom line, though, is that if the Calculator-in-Chief doesn’t like the numbers, he demands that they go outside the usual data channels of the federal government to find numbers that he likes. End run, anyone?

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Ever since the beginning of the journey of the coronavirus pandemic, opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof has been using the word “humility” as part of his recommendations for how to proceed. He did it again yesterday morning. His headline “Let’s Remember That the Coronavirus Is Still a Mystery” had a subtitle, “Respond to it with humility, and apprehension, too.” “The odd thing about reporting on the coronavirus is that the nonexperts are supremely confident in their predictions, while epidemiologists keep telling me that they don’t really know much at all.” He praises the humility evidenced by epidemiologists and laments more humility in our public discourse. What a relief that would be, wouldn’t it? But humility isn’t exactly at the top of the list of Character Traits We Think Worth Cultivating, is it? At least not in the West. In fact, I would venture to say that genuine humility is in the reject pile. Humility looks to a lot of us like weakness.

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