[As I draft this
series in late March, the Covid-19 pandemic continues to devastate the United
States and the world. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of prior
epidemics, leading up to a weekend post that I’ll wait to draft until we know
more about where things stand in early May.]
On two very
different sides to life in a pandemic, and the central questions that remain frustratingly
unanswered.
For me, the
hardest part of the day-to-day over these last two months (ie, of the
experience of everyday life in this altered moment, rather than the horrific
effects and extremes that the pandemic has likewise brought) has been the
absence of in-person conversation. Indeed, the only people in my life with whom
I’ve had in-person conversations over the last 8 weeks have been my sons and
their Mom; all my other conversations have been through online messages or over
Zoom, FaceTime, or the phone. [Of course I’ve exchanged brief thoughts with
delivery folks, supermarket employees, and the like, but while those have been
pleasant they’re not the same as conversations with friends and loved ones, or
in classrooms.] I’m certainly grateful for what those technologies have meant
(and well aware of how much more isolated things would have been and be without
them), including for the kinds of educational realities I’ll discuss in my
end-of-semester series next week. But I’ve never understood more clearly, nor
felt more viscerally, the value of face-to-face conversations more than I now
do in their thoroughgoing absence. To put it simply, there’s a fundamental
shared humanity that, much as I value online conversations of all kinds, we feel
and express more fully and potently when we are with others. I miss those
moments deeply.
At the same time
(literally), these locked down weeks have required us to find new ways to
occupy our days, and one of them has yielded surprising and meaningful benefits
for me. I’ve been taking daily long walks (accompanied by my sons when they’re
with me, solo when they’re not) around my relatively new (this time around) town
of Needham, Massachusetts; the boys
have spent much of their young lives in Needham, but I lived
in Waltham from 2013 to 2019 and moved back here last summer. Back when the
boys were young I used to walk with them in the stroller quite a bit, but that
was around the residential neighborhood we lived in then; my new apartment is
in a different part of town, much closer to the downtown area. Or so I thought,
but on the course of my walks around the neighborhood I’ve realized that this
part of Needham also features strikingly wooded, swampy,
and even agricultural
areas. All of them have made for very pleasing vistas on my walks, but they’ve
also—and for this AmericanStudier most significantly—changed quite a bit my
perspective on this town and community that I thought I knew well. I thought of
Needham as entirely suburban, in contrast to both more urban neighboring towns
(like Newton) and more rural ones (like Dover). But it’s got a more rural side
than I realized, and now I’m determined both to explore those areas more fully
and to help the boys better appreciate that side to their hometown.
So that’s a bit
of where I’ve been over these eight locked-down weeks. As for where we go from
here, well, that’s the question, isn’t it? As I draft this piece, I’ve been reading
both about states reopening or planning to soon (like my home state of
Virginia, which currently plans to begin
reopening on May 15th) and about the Trump administration’s
private prediction of 3000
deaths a day as of June 1st. I know cognitive dissonance is our
new default state of existence in May 2020, but how can I be reading both of
those things at the same time? It’s one thing not to know what the situation
will be in July or September or November—like all of us, I for damn sure do not
know, and have gradually (if intermittently) made my peace with such profound
uncertainty about the future. But for the present to be so profoundly uncertain
and contested in even its most basic realities is both an amplification and
deepening yet an extreme explosion of the way things have long felt here in
Trump’s America. What has happened? What is happening now? What will happen
next? For an analytical person, and an AmericanStudier to boot, the first two
questions have always felt crucially important, on their own terms and for our
ability to address and answer the third. But I suppose learning to live with
the absence of any clear answers to them—and most especially to “what is
happening now?”—is yet another effect of life under COVID-19.
Reflections on a
very different semester start Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other thoughts on this epidemic or any prior ones?
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