“Never let a good crisis go to waste,” goes the old tongue-in-cheek political yarn. The assault of coronavirus has laid bare something that should’ve been obvious for the last decade—that chaos and terror and destruction have not been banished from our history, but instead are always there on our doorstep, waiting to catch us off-guard. And yet, as has always been the case, the present generations of Americans have the opportunity to do as we have always done when these old gods came knocking. We can roll up our sleeves, circle the wagons, brave the elements, and get to work.

Bear in mind that in the century after Frederick Jackson Turner published his famous thesis on the closing of the frontier, Americans peopled their continent more fully, pioneered flight, electrified and motorized their cities, amassed greater fortunes than ever before, constructed a welfare state compatible with democratic capitalism, built the materials and provided the manpower to vanquish two totalitarian empires and exhaust another, split the atom, put a man on the moon, pushed towards a post-racial society, and pioneered an international order that still sputters on in our new millennium.

The frontier never ended. We just found new frontiers, of all sorts, to challenge us, and organized ourselves for the challenge. Our current moment is so unprecedented, so daunting—and yet, in a strange way, so familiar.

Luke Nathan Phillips is an editor at Better Angels.