Macon Street, Brooklyn 2020
My neighbors on Macon Street are laughing and chatting. Dogs are being walked and dinners are being picked up at nearby restaurants, delis, bistros. Most of my neighbors wear their masks with a kind of fierce stylishness that I totally admire. Like, yeah there’s a vaccine and all but Covid is out and about and infecting people.
I was not in New York City last year when everything but “essential services” shut down. I can’t know how disorienting and frightening that was–I watched endless episodes of CNN and PBS and read notices on Facebook. I was in Virginia in “faculty housing” on an almost deserted college campus. I really got to know birds and a variety of critters, mostly squirrels, but rabbits, even foxes and one day people were riding horses. Oddly, I did not see deer. And in its own way, it was also frightening. Wearing a mask while walking across campus to online teach my class was odd but necessary. So much of the past year has been about the odd but necessary. And so much of it gave our planet a chance to sort of re-calibrate. Fish returned to rivers and streams. Cougars showed up. Shocking how much humans disrupt until you see what happens when we walk lightly on the planet.
Now we have a new President, who does not tweet and is not particularly entertaining. This is now reflected in ratings loss for cable television. So glad President Biden stands up, talks directly and then gets back to the actual business of governing.
But the nation he so loves and has wanted to lead for a long time is a wounded nation. Close to 600,000 people have died from Covid and it is only now that the nation because of Biden is seeing this as a national tragedy. Many of those deaths were hastened by the poor policies of the Trump administration and Republican governors who yanked away public health requirements and opened up states before the virus could be reduced. I despair for family and friends in Texas, in Florida, and Tennessee. These same governors make getting vaccinated a bloodsport. But let’s be real, this pandemic has shown just how bad many political leaders really are. When any of them actually do what they are supposed to be doing for the public health, it’s like a miracle.
But everyone wants to get back to normal like my neighbors. They want to dance like its 1999. They want barbecue like it 2005. It’s 2021 and normal is not new. And yet, some things have returned with a vengeance: race hatred and misogyny in the killings of 8 people (7 women, 6 of whom were Asian) in Atlanta and 10 people in Boulder, Colorado, one of whom was a police officer, father of 7 children! Mass killings are back. Assaults on BIPOC remain vicious. Refusal to deal gun regulations are back.
Oh how I hope this not all that new normal does not persist. Because in many ways the past year has given many of us a serious lesson in how to handle a sustained crisis; how to grow in spirit; how to truly self-reflect; how to make community in different ways (zoom anyone); how to be patient; how to fight (social justice protests) and how to start a serious conversation on a future differently lived. We have this amazing opportunity to go beyond visions into the concrete. We do not need to return to “normal”. We need to recognize that the ways in which most people are governed (brutal and anti-democratic); how we care for this planet (lot of talk, little action) and how difficult it is to end inequities (capitalism is a problem) must change. It is that how, and in that I have not one answer.
RR Crossing Forrest City, Arkansas