Usually the beginning of school brings some happy exhaustion with it and an overall sense of things being right with our little part of the world. This year I am increasingly feeling that we are wandering in a thick fog and can't see the way ahead. It seems to me that every decision we make about the virus is wrong in some way. I fear that we will be in our current fog and isolation for quite awhile.
Perhaps this state of affairs is coloring the way I am reading--or perhaps it has suddenly given me clarity of something. I am doing a read-along of I Think You're Wrong (But I'm Listening), by Beth A. Silvers and Sarah Stewart Holland. I'm not too far in to it, but a quote from the Introduction has stayed with me all week:
"We are choosing division. We are choosing conflict. We are choosing to turn our civic sphere into a circus. We are choosing all of this, and we can choose otherwise."
In the same way COVID is a virus that seems to morph so that every symptom becomes part of it and it is constantly changing, seemingly just ahead of anything we can do, we seem to have become infected with a zealous social virus that is becoming stronger every day. I have said for a long time that we will need to be patient and wait for things in the big political world to re-set themselves because politics is a cycle, but I now believe that we have allowed ourselves to catch a virus of rage and despair, and division, and we have chosen to use the current medical model as our paradigm for this as well.
We have chosen to quarantine ourselves with those we feel--rightly or wrongly--agree with us, and, at a faster and faster rate, if my social media accounts are anything like the rest of yours, we are culling those who are not like us from our herd.
To quarantine ourselves in this case means that we are choosing not to change. The quarantine model keeps us frozen, unable to be creative or to connect with others outside our tiny sphere. This ensures that change will not happen. Let me say that again--This ensures that change will not happen.
This is a summer where many people feel that enough is enough and we need to change our country. My fear is that our social virus is working hard to maintain the status quo. I would go so far at to say that this virus underlies all of the systemic horrors of our world. We have chosen to ignore that there is a threat or quarantine, not to put a mask on and go out safely. We aresaying no to any vaccine suggested to us.
This may seem very simplistic, but it has been something of a revelation to me this morning. We must change our paraidgms or we will be hurt by our social virus more than by COVID. We are at the tipping point.
" osing wedivision. We are choosing conflict. We are choosing to turn our civic sphere into a circus. We are choosing all of this , and we can choose otherwise."
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