Joe Biden invoked it Thursday evening to sum up the year-long pandemic

When Ernest Hemingway was finishing a novel in Paris in 1929, he let a fellow writer read the manuscript.

F. Scott Fitzgerald responded with 10 pages of handwritten comments.

Among them: "slow and needs cutting...rather gassy...definitely dull...offensive...too glib." But in his notes, which are now among Hemingway's papers at the JFK Presidential Library, he also called it a "beautiful book" and urged Hemingway to end what would eventually be titled, "A Farewell to Arms," with a "wonderful" passage that included these lines:

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially." Hemingway rejected that suggestion and wrote at the bottom of Fitzgerald's letter, "kiss my ass." The "broken places" passage wound up tucked away in Chapter 34.

But President Joe Biden invoked it Thursday evening to sum up the year-long pandemic: "Finding light in the darkness is a very American thing to do...We have seen front-line and essential workers risking their lives, sometimes losing them, to save and help others, researchers and scientists racing for a vaccine, and so many of you, as Hemingway wrote, being strong in all the broken places."

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The President held out hope that every adult American could be eligible for a vaccine by May 1 -- and that people could safely gather in small groups for traditional July 4 family barbecues. "When Biden speaks about the pandemic, when he implores Americans to do their part, when he speaks about losses, and about his determination to defeat the virus," wrote Frida Ghitis, "there's a striking earnestness in his demeanor. He promises to tell the truth. We've all learned to become cynical, skeptical of politicians, but Biden sounds, as he might say, like the real deal."

Joe Biden's 'broken places'

Ghitis saw Biden's words, along with the signing of a landmark $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill, as vital after an "excruciating, dystopian year, during which the worst public health challenge in a century overlapped with a narcissistic, incompetent presidency."

Likening Biden's speech to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats and President Ronald Reagan's speech after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, historian Julian Zelizer wrote, Biden's "ability to speak to Americans in a direct and familiar manner, along with his knack for showing genuine empathy for the challenges they face as individuals and families, will help guide the country toward the next stage of recovery."

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"The relief package is groundbreaking," Jill Filipovic noted. "It sends $1,400 stimulus checks to close to 90% of American households, directs billions to small businesses and schools, pours necessary resources into vaccine distribution, extends unemployment benefits and offers parents an unprecedented child allowance -- a cash benefit for families with children. No, it's not everything progressives wanted. But it's the most ambitious cash assistance plan I've seen in my lifetime."

Dr. Scott Hadland, an addiction expert based in Boston, observed that the "pandemic has pushed already economically vulnerable Americans into even greater despair" and that "overdose deaths are now surging to record highs." Addiction "preys" on "lost jobs, worsened poverty, housing and food insecurity and lapses in education." To oppose the relief package "is to overlook the possibility of hundreds of thousands more lives being lost to addiction for years to come."

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The bill put members of the opposition party in Congress in an odd position: Covid relief is widely popular. Most Americans are going to welcome the arrival of thousands of dollars in their bank accounts, and businesses, schools and local and state governments will benefit. But not a single Republican legislator voted for it. As CNN's Manu Raju noted, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi even tweeted in support of $28.6 billion in aid to restaurants -- despite having voted against the bill.

Scott Jennings, a CNN commentator and Republican strategist, argued that "the merits of this bill are more than debatable, as less than 10% of the $1.9 trillion plan is spent on direct Covid spending and just 1% is for vaccine distribution" and that it is "hard to see" how provisions in the bill are "worth further mortgaging our children and grandchildren's future with all this new debt."

Ron Brownstein wrote that "although every House and Senate Republican voted against the rescue plan, it has not generated anything like the uprisings against new government spending and programs that engulfed Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama during each man's first year in office. Indeed, throughout the legislative fight, congressional Republicans and conservative media outlets like Fox News appeared more interested in focusing attention on peripheral cultural issues, like whether Dr. Seuss had become a victim of liberal 'cancel culture.'"

For more on politics:

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Pandemic anniversary

For many, this week's anniversary of the declaration of the pandemic was an emotional moment, a time to look back at all that has been lost and to look ahead at our aspirations for a return to normal life.

Julie Gallagher was Zooming with friends she hadn't seen in person for more than a year when one said, "'I'm just scared to feel hopeful.'" And when someone revealed that she had just gotten her first vaccine dose, the "news ricocheted across our screens like a shot of electricity. We buzzed about who else in our lives has been vaccinated, who has had trouble booking an appointment, who was eligible in our home states. We went through our bucket list of what we will do first once the majority of Americans have been vaccinated and our worlds return to 'normal.'"

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When Tess Taylor found out she was eligible for a shot, she took her 9-year-old son, "put on our favorite music in the car, got celebratory frozen yogurt and headed out" to the Oakland coliseum where FEMA workers directed them through a maze of traffic cones to a tent where "Keith, the masked man with kind eyes, was jabbing my shoulder, and I didn't have to look. He said something nice to my son -- 'I bet you're quite a slugger!' -- and poof, we were pulling ahead to the place where we could honk our horn in case anything goes wrong, except no one was honking...."

"The 15 minutes we are suppo