What happens when the irresistible need to get kids back in school meets the immovable reality of a deadly health pandemic?

Just as paper products have begun to return to grocery store shelves, the United States — a vast swath of it, anyway — is edging back into shutdown mode due to the coronavirus.

One thing I would think we all can agree on nowadays is there’s so much bad news floating around — between mass protests, looting and rioting, eruptions of violence committed by and against police, a deadly pandemic, and, not least of all, a U.S. political system tottering on the brink — that it’s hard not to look away from daily outrages against the domestic tranquility. Bad acts roll in like hurricanes. Who among us can be faulted for wanting to tune everything out?

Since we’re all supposed to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, it also shouldn’t be too hard to hold two different thoughts in mind at once.

At this writing more than 100,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, a loss that overwhelms our ability to appropriately mourn the dead. With no vaccine and no known treatment in sight, the plan moving forward seems to be to hope for the best, even if by now we should all know hope is not a plan.