Last weekend, my wife and I were in a restaurant and unmasked for one of the first times in three years. While we were sipping our drinks, my brother sent me a text message: “Happy third anniversary to Tom Hanks getting Covid!” Which then reminded us it had been later that same day – March 11, 2020 – that the NBA announced they were suspending the rest of the 2019-2020 season. Within a week, our children’s schools were closed. Boston’s initial closure of six weeks was three times longer than any of the neighboring school districts, which – at the time – seemed unthinkably long.
A lot can change in three years, I thought. But later I wondered: how much has really changed?
In spring 2020, after the initial shock of the closures faded, there emerged a genre of essay urging us to see the pandemic as an opportunity to rewrite our social contract – urging us to resist a “return to normal.” But the hopeful rhetoric then has not been able to withstand our overwhelming desire for normalcy. On the surface these days, we look a lot like a society that has left the pandemic years behind. Rush hour is back. Restaurants are full. School is in-person. Our political divisions are as strident as ever. Social inequality is surging.
When we were all in crisis mode – sequestered in our houses, stitching together makeshift masks, wiping down groceries – I would occasionally be snapped into a state of epiphany: here I was, here with my family and young kids, living through history. All the “I Survived” books my kids like to read so much, this was one of those times. And like those books, this history was a one of collective trauma but also one of resilience. In these moments, I would feel a sense of solidarity. What would we say to each other one day, after we had the chance to step back and examine this collective trauma together? Although we might have moments of mourning or regrets, I imagined we would also – like Mr. Rogers told us – remember the helpers and the ways we had helped each other make sense of the non-sensical.
What I didn’t expect then – and what I still find so destabilizing now – is that we would say so little about what we lived through together. That we would turn our eyes away from the recent past with such speed and plunge forward into crowded rooms again with such fervor and commit ourselves to silence, determined only to look forward and never backward.
Writer Jon Mooallem, in a breathtaking NY Times Magazine essay examining testimony from a three-year Covid oral history project, described the moments of epiphany we had in spring 2020 when we realized with a dizzying abruptness that everything had changed: “This was the spigot turning,” he said, “the pipe dripping dry, the production of normal shutting off.” These moments were still raw and so vivid, I understood intuitively why people would want to leave them in the past. “But,” Mooallem continued, “the weirdness we’ve felt since — what’s still making us wobbly now — may be the strain of trying, as hard as we can, to crank that busted machinery of normal back on.”
Moallem’s words reminded me of a virtual conference I attended in the wake of the first Omicron wave, in spring 2021. I was sharing how, in my work as a faculty member preparing school leaders, I had integrated new readings about grief and “institutional holding” – the idea that our institutions needed to privilege care over vision. The only other people in my Zoom room were a counselor and superintendent from rural Alaska. They were there to present variations on the same ideas: how they – in their moments of crisis – had elevated care and human connection. But their presentation had a twist. The superintendent then explained, with regret, how their return to in-person school in fall 2020 came at a cost: the care they had so carefully curated all spring quickly receded into the background as old pressures to perform took precedence. He was surprised at how easily he had fallen into old habits and was looking for ways to slow the backslide to normal.
Our collective silence and forgetting have not served us well, but I believe there are still valuable lessons to learn from our shared trauma in 2020 and into 2021 – as long as we are willing to remember them. Although we were physically isolated, we were also more connected to each other. School came to our living rooms. We donated to organically-grown mutual aid societies. We benefited from massive government investments in basic needs: vaccines available to anyone, no insurance required; paycheck stability with no strings attached; free school lunches and technology for all students, regardless of need. But now, driven in part by our hunger for normal, these investments are vanishing, often with devastating consequences.
As we now grasp for normal, we need to keep one hand firmly rooted in our memories of the recent past. Our memories – in particular, those memories of how vulnerable and afraid we felt and how we found comfort in each other – are powerful tools for social change. We should not be so eager to let them go.
A lot can change in three years, I thought. But later I wondered: how much has really changed?
In spring 2020, after the initial shock of the closures faded, there emerged a genre of essay urging us to see the pandemic as an opportunity to rewrite our social contract – urging us to resist a “return to normal.” But the hopeful rhetoric then has not been able to withstand our overwhelming desire for normalcy. On the surface these days, we look a lot like a society that has left the pandemic years behind. Rush hour is back. Restaurants are full. School is in-person. Our political divisions are as strident as ever. Social inequality is surging.
When we were all in crisis mode – sequestered in our houses, stitching together makeshift masks, wiping down groceries – I would occasionally be snapped into a state of epiphany: here I was, here with my family and young kids, living through history. All the “I Survived” books my kids like to read so much, this was one of those times. And like those books, this history was a one of collective trauma but also one of resilience. In these moments, I would feel a sense of solidarity. What would we say to each other one day, after we had the chance to step back and examine this collective trauma together? Although we might have moments of mourning or regrets, I imagined we would also – like Mr. Rogers told us – remember the helpers and the ways we had helped each other make sense of the non-sensical.
What I didn’t expect then – and what I still find so destabilizing now – is that we would say so little about what we lived through together. That we would turn our eyes away from the recent past with such speed and plunge forward into crowded rooms again with such fervor and commit ourselves to silence, determined only to look forward and never backward.
Writer Jon Mooallem, in a breathtaking NY Times Magazine essay examining testimony from a three-year Covid oral history project, described the moments of epiphany we had in spring 2020 when we realized with a dizzying abruptness that everything had changed: “This was the spigot turning,” he said, “the pipe dripping dry, the production of normal shutting off.” These moments were still raw and so vivid, I understood intuitively why people would want to leave them in the past. “But,” Mooallem continued, “the weirdness we’ve felt since — what’s still making us wobbly now — may be the strain of trying, as hard as we can, to crank that busted machinery of normal back on.”
Moallem’s words reminded me of a virtual conference I attended in the wake of the first Omicron wave, in spring 2021. I was sharing how, in my work as a faculty member preparing school leaders, I had integrated new readings about grief and “institutional holding” – the idea that our institutions needed to privilege care over vision. The only other people in my Zoom room were a counselor and superintendent from rural Alaska. They were there to present variations on the same ideas: how they – in their moments of crisis – had elevated care and human connection. But their presentation had a twist. The superintendent then explained, with regret, how their return to in-person school in fall 2020 came at a cost: the care they had so carefully curated all spring quickly receded into the background as old pressures to perform took precedence. He was surprised at how easily he had fallen into old habits and was looking for ways to slow the backslide to normal.
Our collective silence and forgetting have not served us well, but I believe there are still valuable lessons to learn from our shared trauma in 2020 and into 2021 – as long as we are willing to remember them. Although we were physically isolated, we were also more connected to each other. School came to our living rooms. We donated to organically-grown mutual aid societies. We benefited from massive government investments in basic needs: vaccines available to anyone, no insurance required; paycheck stability with no strings attached; free school lunches and technology for all students, regardless of need. But now, driven in part by our hunger for normal, these investments are vanishing, often with devastating consequences.
As we now grasp for normal, we need to keep one hand firmly rooted in our memories of the recent past. Our memories – in particular, those memories of how vulnerable and afraid we felt and how we found comfort in each other – are powerful tools for social change. We should not be so eager to let them go.