By Chris Satullo

In 40-some years of covering the things that happen in America, here’s one of the main truths I’ve learned:

Politics is Newtonian.

That is, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This rule is playing out now amid pandemic and presidential election, at the cost of confusion and, worse, lives.

The First Newtonian Law of Politics works this way: The hotter the take and the more extreme the rhetoric from one side, the more likely the other side will respond by turning up the heat and dialing back on reason.

This is the syndrome the Internet troll loves to foment. Goad the other side into a spluttering, ill-considered reaction – then mock the reaction, hoping to juice the combat magma-hot. The troll has an advantage. He gets what others are slow to figure out: Heat and smoke, not sense or solution, are the goals of this Newtonian exercise.

Soon enough, some on the other side will conclude that, to win, they need to ape these troll moves. So on and on, it spirals down.

Donald Trump acts quite intentionally, nihilistically and effectively as Troll-in-Chief. Many who adore him do so precisely because he’s so good at it. His singular (and pretty much only) skill is “owning the libs. Trump Derangement Syndrome is not a by-product; it’s the aim.

It was bad enough when this behavior merely put our Constitution and the rule of law at risk. Now, amid pandemic, it endangers people’s very lives and livelihoods.

Still, I worry that, with regard to the shutdown – how strictly, how long, how widely it needs to be maintained – the sensible, science-oriented part of America may be overreacting to the ceaseless MAGA-esque provocation. I detect problematic signs of this in myself – the raging urge to shame a mask-less jogger; the fleeting, shameful wish to see a conclusive spike in cases in the states that have re-opened with a reckless swagger.

This is what happens when your cortex gets colonized by a president who every day displays breathtaking ignorance of public health basics, touts quack cures, cares about pandemic deaths only to the degree they affect his poll numbers, and has made refusing to wear a mask a badge of partisan identity…and when his dangerous fulminations are parroted by captive media and chanted from statehouse steps by AR15-toting fools.

So much toxic nonsense is being spouted, from barstools to court benches, about “tyranny” and “stolen liberty” and “being willing to die to save the economy,” about depicting the stupid, selfish gesture of not wearing a mask as a token of “warrior courage.” 

In response, is it any wonder that people who sincerely want to limit the anguish and wreckage caused by the virus tend to double down on lockdown, not wanting to endorse any easing, any sense of optimism, any questioning of dire strictures?

Who wants to risk being perceived as aligned in any way with the idiocies emanating from the White House, talk shows and the far right side of the congressional aisle? So we stock up on masks, stiffen our resolve to shun our grandchildren for as long as it takes, and mutter curses about people who “put money ahead of lives.” To do otherwise seems tantamount to enlisting in the army of the selfish and the ignorant, of greed worship and science doubt.  

This Newtonian standoff means, though, that we inadequately discuss and haphazardly answer a host of fair questions about how, when and where to reopen parts of the nation and the economy.

Not everyone who frets about how the lockdown has shredded small businesses and small-town livelihoods is an unfeeling, money-hungry brute. These pains are real; concerns about the untenability of an endless lockdown are not ridiculous.

Plus, we now know a lot about Covid-19 that we didn’t know when stay-at-home orders were first issued, prudently, in March. Those of us who scold impatient politicians for ignoring science would do well ourselves to track how the data and the science keep evolving.  

Not in a way, to be sure, that supports premature declarations of victory or packing them in at bars, boardwalks and arenas. But in ways that, at least, could prompt some refiguring of the calculus of risk and care.  

Consider these points:

• If you ask a lawyer whether a proposed action offers any risk of a lawsuit, the answer will always be yes. Because that’s the safest answer for him to give. Ask an epidemiologist if any easing of strictures poses a risk of infection and the safest answer is also yes. But you can’t stop at that first question, nor should you consult just one form of expertise. You must explore how big a public health risk the action poses and whether measures short of lockdown can mitigate it. You also must factor in other types of real harm from an extended lockdown (and by this I don’t mean some shrinkage in a hedge-fund manager’s fortune). I find it significant that some top medical experts – e.g. the New Yorker’s marvelous Dr. Atul Gawunde and Dr. Julia Marcus of Harvard Medical School – have suggested we can and should offer people balanced “harm-reduction” strategies that would enable expanded human contact – in doses, outside, with masks and distancing.

• Somewhere between 33 and 40 percent of those whom COVID-19 has killed lived in nursing homes or assisted living facilities, mostly in urban areas. While the overall death toll in America is terrifying and heart-breaking, have we adequately tailored our strategies to reflect where the risk seems to be concentrated – and where it clearly is not?

• The way the pandemic has devastated communities of color in particular is a national shame –  and some arguments for rapid re-openings reference that disparity in a manner that drips with racism.  Neither you nor I want to indulge that. But then I try to think how I’d explain to a shop owner in an upstate New York village who faces bankruptcy why policies needed to calm the agonies of the five boroughs must be enforced identically in his community, which hasn’t yet seen a case. Wanting to save his business doesn’t make him racist or greedy. It makes him human. Unless we work harder – through both aid and information – to help him find a fact-based way to get some business, he’s going to flock to the demagogues pushing the recklessness we now see in Texas, Wisconsin, Florida and Georgia.

Here’s what’s so maddening: More and more it becomes clear that masks are the key. The eased-up advice being offered by Gawunde, Marcus et. al. boils down to this:  If everyone masks up, takes it outside, in small groups, at a distance, with sanitizer at the ready, some ramping up of social interaction can occur without intolerable risk. 

Not high fives and bro hugs at a jam-packed Buffalo Wild Wings – but more than virtual toasts on Zoom.

It’s about the masks. Your mask protects me and my mask protects you; inside that compact resides hope for a new – less lonely, less devastating – pandemic normal.

So, of course, the Troll-in-Chief has chosen masks as the hill he wants others to die on. He’s made a bare chin and naked nostrils the fealty test, the identity badge of MAGA-dom, the proof that you’re a real American stud, not a wimpy lib.

Faced with such ignorant evil, let our response not be Newtonian. Let us not react to the mask-less with rage and insult; let us instead reach out with calm and friendly counsel. Explain that we too want businesses to survive, sunny days to be savored, grandkids visited.   

But be clear: Masking up is the swiftest, surest path to that happy result, while going bare-chinned is the biggest obstacle, the economy-crusher.

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what your mask can do for your country.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.