Observing these times (Christensen)

Art Installation by Jules Christensen.

Jokes about 2020 and all it has thus far wrought make me chuckle, but in truth these times have no agency.

Instead it's a Taoist parable that resonates with me. The farmer in the story has neighbors who tell him he’s lucky to own a horse that helps him work his fields. “Maybe,” says the farmer.

One day, the horse runs away and the neighbors tell the farmer how unfortunate his loss is. “Maybe,” says the farmer.

Days later, the horse returns with several wild horses and the neighbors tell the farmer he’s lucky to have so many horses. “Maybe,” says the farmer.

When the farmer’s son tries to tame one of the wild horses, he’s thrown and breaks one of his legs. The neighbors say nothing could be worse than to have your son bedridden. “Maybe,” says the farmer.

Soon after, the army sweeps through the countryside, conscripting all able-bodied young men for a new war. But because of his broken leg, they do not take the farmer’s son.

While the consequences of events are unpredictable, attitude affects response. My actions are more effective when I am not immobilized by anger, fear, or self-pity. 

Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and too many others. There’s nothing new about black Americans receiving capital punishment in our streets or even in their homes just for being black. Yet this year’s murders have sparked the most potent wave of civil rights protests in decades. What is different now?

Well, for one thing, today everyone always carries a state-of-the-art video camera. Perpetrators can't deny or lie about senseless murders when we can see with our own eyes what black Americans so often told us for centuries: He wasn’t armed, he didn’t fight, she wasn’t a criminal.

And yet they were killed, often by the very people sworn to protect them, the police.

In 2016 Philando Castile was shot and killed by police in Minnesota just days after Alton Sterling was similarly murdered by police in Louisiana. Both murders were videotaped and there were protests, but nothing like what we’ve seen this year. What's different in 2020?

I didn’t wish for a pandemic any more than I’d wished for my partner to have a car accident. But I cannot control a virus’s contagion any more than I can control my partner’s driving skills. This year Covid-19 settled in for a long stay and my partner totaled his car.

All I can control is myself. Like most Americans, I seriously follow the guidelines for minimizing the transmission of Covid-19. I wear a mask when I’m in public and maintain social distancing. I minimize trips to the grocery and am not yet willing to eat at restaurants.

During these many months of restrictions there have been far fewer distractions in most people's lives, which is important. People are paying closer attention for longer not only to citizens who’ve been killed simply for being black, but also to the pervasiveness of institutional, systemic racism.

In an episode of the podcast Hidden Brain titled “Why Now?” a case is convincingly built that the #MeToo movement happened when it did precisely because Donald Trump was elected. Women who’d been sexually assaulted became energetic activists when a man who openly bragged about sexually assaulting women became the most powerful person in the world.

Women couldn’t take down Trump, the man at the top, but they could go after the men who’d assaulted them. Scores of them did, including many women who’d previously chosen to remain silent or were ignored if they hadn’t.

Twentieth-century psychiatrist and philosopher Franz Fanon described this behavior as "horizontal violence." It's like the pressure of a boiling tea kettle with a stuck lid. If the kettle can't explode at the top, it will explode sideways.

Just as the election of Donald Trump propelled the #MeToo movement in bringing down powerful men with long histories of sexually assaulting subordinate women, will there be any long-term, unexpected consequences of our first global pandemic in a century? If so, what will they be? The possibilities are many and varied:

•              A renewed trust in science and experts

•              An overhaul of policies from sick leave to health insurance to subsidized childcare

•              A recognition of how our systems were intentionally developed to benefit some people— particularly white males—coupled with the willingness to change these systems

In a recent column, I discussed the need to talk about racism. Predictably, I received a handful of angry letters full of racist tropes.

But I also received far more letters from white readers asking for resources to help educate themselves on institutional racism.

Whiteness has been the default “normal” on this continent for longer than America’s been a country. As a result, it can be hard for even open-minded whites to recognize what Americans of color live with every day of their lives: discrimination and a justifiable fear of attack simply for being brown or black (while driving, sleeping, swimming, shopping, running, sitting in one’s own apartment…).

Many things we previously took for granted, such as merrily going to crowded restaurants, concerts, and theaters, are mostly luxuries we’ve temporarily lost. Is that unfortunate?

“Maybe,” the Taoist farmer would tell us.

 Holly Christensen is an award-winning columnist at the Akron Beacon Journal and teaches composition at the University of Akron. She’s currently working on her memoir, Becoming the Mother I Wanted. Her previous columns can be found at www.whoopsiepiggle.com.