As illusions and excuses crumble under the weight of COVID-19, we find a moment of truth: What new world will we create for our kids?
/By Matt Halvorson
We paused the game. Isn’t it strange?
I’m in Seattle, and like most of the country — most of the world? — everything seems at once familiar and completely different.
Above all, it’s quiet. It’s not that I live in a ghost town, exactly. I see our neighbors across the fence and across the street more than ever. In fact, it’s much more common to see people walk past on the sidewalk than to see a car drive by, and the once-constant criss-cross of planes overhead has slowed to a dotted line.
The machinery is on standby. Life goes on, but the game, for the moment, is paused.
For some of us, it’s almost calming. Those of us with the privilege of steady shelter and safe relationships are clearing out junk drawers and tilling up gardens and taking walks with our kids. We’re wearing slippers and cooking meals at home instead of going out, and it almost starts to feel wholesome.
But then I think for a moment about what’s really happening, and it all starts to feel more eerie than calm. Is it the same for you? This deadly, invisible virus apparently lurks anywhere and everywhere, and of course it is having disparate impact based on race and income, as well as age and physical health. It is keeping people stuck in abusive homes, trapping others in the well-worn tread-marks of addiction, and for all of us it is exposing the deeply inhuman flaws and gaps inherent in the capitalist, imperial, racist systems that create a permanent state of instability and barely contained peril.
Being tucked in at home with my partner and kids for the long haul is somehow simultaneously the warmest nest and the strangest cage. It’s hard to fully comprehend the fact that I am not legally allowed to leave the area, even if I wouldn’t choose to during this time. That I am at home perhaps by choice — and am more aware than ever of how lucky and privileged I am to have stable housing — but that I am also definitely home by law for the first time in my life.
All of this feels strange, but strange isn’t always bad. Change is usually hard, even when it’s for the better, and we are experiencing a collective crisis — deep change, now, whether we wanted it or not. That we are dealing with tragedy that just keeps escalating only makes things that much more difficult.
The word “crisis” itself, interestingly, comes to us from the Greek word krisis, which means “turning point in a disease, that change which indicates recovery or death.” And that word’s root, krei, is a Proto-Indo-European word meaning “to sieve, to distinguish, to discriminate.”
In crisis, then, opportunity is thrust upon us. We are forced to heal and recover, keeping only what is worthwhile, or to sink further into disease and death. The middle ground is gone, the illusion of neutrality evaporated.
So, as we ourselves experience this crisis — alone together — what are we learning? It can be hard to look to the future when tragedy seems so heavy and present, but it’s an important part of maintaining hope in such wearying, worrying times. We are watching the old world crumble. What will we choose to keep? What do we appreciate more than ever? What else will we find we’ve let go of as time stretches on and new habits form?
We are learning, for one thing, that if healthcare workers are on the front lines fighting this novel coronavirus, the people standing as our second line of defense by providing essential services in our neighborhoods are underpaid, under-insured and under-appreciated, putting their health and their families at risk to keep our grocery stores stocked and staffed, our packages delivered, our garbage collected.
For all of us parents suddenly in at-home crisis mode with our kids, we are also finding that we love and appreciate our teachers more than ever, even as we are more aware than ever of the artificiality of the systems that have suddenly stopped spinning around us. We can’t help but know now that there is more than one way to live.
“My child is not a disruption,” Andrea Landry wrote on her Indigenous Motherhood blog. “Because the real disruption occurred when we began to think that sending our children to school was the better choice in the first place, rather than having them us with us, in the presence of our kinship systems, at all times.”
We paused the game, and the illusions are tumbling down. The illusion that we are somehow separated by borders or beliefs crumbles under the weight of a virus that knows no bounds. The illusion that we must work to live falls apart as life goes on despite so much work being labeled non-essential. The illusion that we are divided within our pursuit for educational equity evaporates as the ideological constructs that stand between us grind to a halt — as in-fighting reveals itself to be just another form of non-essential work.
The old excuses are wilting as well. What excuse will there be for our schools to return to “normal” once all of this is said and done? What excuse will there be to let things go on for another second as they were? How will they possibly convince us to keep waiting?
How many times have we been told that systems don’t change overnight? That change takes time? That people can’t handle too much change at once? To focus on progress as opposed to all that remains unsatisfied?
Thankfully, the illusion that those excuses held water has crumbled as well.
The wheels don’t have to keep spinning after all — not if they’re not serving us — and now we know from experience that we are able to stop everything if it’s for the greater good. We know firsthand that we can clamp down and make really hard personal choices for the sake of protecting the most vulnerable and most overlooked people in our communities.
This crisis will pass eventually. Someday, we will once again be able to gather together, to reclaim our freedom of movement and our joyful in-person communities. We will have the opportunity to once again begin fully exercising our judgment when it comes to educating our kids, and folks working in education will have the opportunity to fully begin their work once more.
But as we look forward to that day, the status quo is being erased. We can’t move backward. When our schools closed last month, despite all the good intentions being poured in, it was an inequitable system that ceased operation. The primary spigot feeding the school-to-prison pipeline was turned off. The sorting mechanism designed to condition a predictable, placid population was put on pause.
I believe we would never have designed the system we inherited, and now it’s up to us to prove me right.
In this time of unexpected crisis and forced solitude, we are given the opportunity to construct a new future.
We’ve paused the game. Soon it will be time to press reset. We might even find it’s time to put down the controller and stop playing games altogether.
Regardless, we know who we used to be when it comes to educating our kids. The question is, when all of this is over, who will we be?
Matt Halvorson is a musician and writer living in Seattle with his partner, Lindsay, and their four kids. He is the founder of Rise Up for Students, a blog advocating for equity in education in Seattle and beyond, and of the Rise Up Music Project, a collectively owned record label and socially conscious music platform. Matt’s most recent album, “Sermons,” is available everywhere except Amazon.
