He presses for more, asking why school has closed. It’s a big, messy question, so I take an abstract out, gesturing vaguely toward the front windows of our apartment. “The world.”

My son thinks about that for a few seconds. Then, with the sincerity of a monk, he says, “I want to hit the world.”

I laugh, filled with admiration for his spirit.

But my amusement would soon give way to something else. I realized that my toddler’s instinct very neatly matched how my country had responded to the crisis of my youth: Sept. 11, that tender, bloody scar of a day that has begotten so much death and ruin in the 19 years since.

Hitting the world in 2001 seemed a fine solution for America. Time has proved otherwise, of course. Our reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks — getting sucked into the kind of forever wars every history book warned against, destabilizing the Middle East in the name of freedom, curbing domestic civil liberties in the pursuit of security — has now joined the annals as yet another cautionary tale.

The 2001 attacks changed our way of life for good. The pandemic will, too. How could it not? Anyone offering a return to normalcy is trying to sell something.

It seems quaint now, I know, but it wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was there at 18, a rawboned ROTC cadet, watching the Twin Towers burn and collapse again and again on another TV screen and believing this would be our new calling, a 21st-century Pearl Harbor. The people I knew who joined the military then weren’t stereotypes: We didn’t want to kill. We wanted to serve. We weren’t losers. We were idealists. We sought to do something bigger than ourselves. We sought do something just.

Things, well — things went awry.

We’ve already lost far more Americans to the coronavirus than we lost on Sept. 11, more than the number of service members we have lost in the Afghanistan war. It’s going to keep getting worse before it gets better. Yet already we have political leaders like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, himself a veteran of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, calling for “a reckoning” and retribution against China.