But preparation has to happen on all levels, doesn’t it? Two weeks ago somebody might have deemed a practical guide to life in a pandemic hysterical, if not unthinkable. You still might feel that way. But we’re here, right on the brink, and we need to look at that guide anew and start thinking about the steps we take to make the prospect of a radical shift to our day-to-day lives as even-keeled and as kind-hearted as possible.
Now, here’s hoping I’m wrong about everything and we can keep living life as normal!
I wasn’t wrong.
I wish I was.
I made sure I had all of my stuff off campus yesterday so I don’t have to go there after the college starts conserving power to the academic buildings and shutting down computers. It’s an obvious move; none of us faculty are going to be working there at this point, we’re all at home doing education literally around the world. I have students in New Zealand and Spain, in Florida and Wisconsin and Colorado and Greeneville, Tennessee. This isn’t the type of student population I ever bargained on when I got interested in online education.
I’m social distancing in a part of the world where stubbornly continuing life as usual (or at least the illusion of life as usual) is the order of the day. I’m taking a pandemic seriously where my friends and neighbors are alternately cavalier and convinced the whole thing is overblown and furious and fuming that students who returned to our campus after Spring Break brought the virus with them.
I’m watching the collapse of my religious heritage accelerate between the continued evangelical support of this president as he self-evidently is increasingly clueless about how to lead, the willful and foolish reopening of the supposed evangelical flagship over the objections of its city leaders, and the editor of a leading evangelical journal actually write “The Eucharist itself is now subordinated to the false god of ‘saving lives'”, which is one way to put a stake through the heart of the entire pro-life movement.
The preparations to do this “remote learning” we’re going through right now is the one thing I feel like I can still control, and where I still feel a measure of comfort working. The shelter-in-place necessity is in all honesty the easy part; the work of making online learning happen is pretty straightforward. It’s all the other garbage that is wearying.
I’ve never been shy about loving rural America, or about embracing the challenge that comes with being a scholar within rural America. But it’s work that comes with a measure of isolation and solitude; there are precious few other people who comprehend the tension that comes with the work. Right now I feel as isolated as I’ve ever felt in my life, and while I miss being in the midst of the classroom and the lab with my students, the social distancing has comparatively little to do with that. I’m personally closer to the scholars who don’t understand why I’ve stayed here. The people who live around me reject the expertise that I represent.
I hear all kinds of people in my sphere of influence being wistful about a time in the future where things return to normal. But by living here, I know things haven’t been that kind of “normal” for a very long time. The fact that we have this president, and that so many of my neighbors embrace him and support him even now, in the midst of such spectacular failure, is evidence of that.
I’m supposed to be hopeful. I got complimented yesterday on how calm I’ve been and how affirming I’ve been in the midst of all of this. There are a lot of people who I’m around whose lives have been thrown into an upheaval that they didn’t deserve, and that is doing damage far beyond the inconveniences of a closed school or a workplace remanded to the home. I owe it to them to be kind and to be positive.
But none of that changes how utterly alone I feel, and how persuaded I am that the current crisis is going to get far, far worse for everyone before it gets better – how very real the prospect is that decades of neglect and selfishness have created not merely a world I will be fortunate to survive unscathed, but a world I will be fortunate to survive at all.
And meanwhile I continue to work from this couch like I’m a normal college instructor whose course load was simply coincidentally shifted suddenly from all in-person to all online.
At least my own personal normal was destroyed a long time ago. Everything else is just gravy.
