Congratulations, You Survived 2020!

I write this as 2020 rapidly approaches its final hour here in Ohio. Oh boy, what a year it has been.

It’s hard to even know where to begin, but the end of the world seems like as good a place as any. I don’t mean the literal end of the world, although to be honest a lot of 2020 felt like the end of the world was not far off. Like many others, I am looking forward to wrapping up 2020, or as some people affectionately call it, the year of the “dumpster fire.” Seriously, I have friends with some variation of this ornament on their trees!

I’ve had a unique perspective on 2020 thanks to my End of the World class, which I have been teaching at CSU Chico since the world began sliding into a global pandemic in the spring of 2020. Thanks to the timing, I’ve basically spent all of 2020 thinking about the end of the world and global pandemics. Gotta say, as 2019 was wrapping, up I had no idea what was in store for the world or how my end of the world class theme would find an important new resonance, transforming some idea from the realm of theory into an embodied everyday experience. The coronavirus has been the ultimate shared experience for students to reflect on.

When I think back on the chaotic experience that was 2020, a few things stand out.

Humans Are Resilient

The first, and probably most important, is a reminder of just how resilient we are as a species. 2020 has thrown a lot at us–every aspect of our lives has been disrupted in some way this year–from the social distancing and quarantine restrictions of covid-19 to historically unprecedent wildfires in Australia and the US west coast to the resurgence of racial justice and white supremacist political mobilizations in the US and around the world. It’s no exaggeration to say that much of the United States was both literally and figuratively on fire for much of 2020. It’s a point beautifully made in the Netflix mockumentary Death to 2020.

Becaue I’ve been teaching online for a university in northern California the wildfires have added an extra layer to the covid-19 story that many parts of the US have not experienced. (One of the benefits of remote teaching is that I’ve been far away from the fires.) Yet through all of this my students have persevered, which is a real testament to their resilience in the face of disaster. Aptly enough, that was a theme we explored the last 2 weeks of class when we read a chapter from Rebecca Solnit’s book A Paradise Built in Hell focused on the 1906 Earthquake and fires in San Francisco. As Solnit wrote in her book:

“Many fear that in disaster we become something other than we normally are–helpless or bestial and savage in the most common myths–or that is who we really are when the superstructure of society crumbles. We remain ourselves for the most part, but freed to act on, most often, not the worst but the best within. The ruts and routines of ordinary life hide more beauty than brutality.”

I don’t think 2020 really supports the claim about the “beauty” over “brutality” disaster claim, but I completely agree with Solnit’s point about how disasters create opportunities for tomorrow that seemed impossible yesterday. There is something unique about these disaster ruptures which 2020 illustrates clearly. I literally can’t imagine the world as we knew it in 2019 ever existing again–it’s just not possible–and I’ve heard many other express similar feelings.

Human history moving forward be defined by as pre and post-coronavirus–the Daily Show and the Daily Social Distancing Show. In the same ways that we teach our students today about the Black Death of the 16th century or the Spanish Flu (aka the Kansas pig flu) of 1917-18, fifty years from now, when you and me and many others reading this will be dead and gone, students will be reading about how the world was brought to its knees by a new strain of SARS-CoV-2. We are living world history, literally.

 

Black Lives Matter vs. MAGA

Another important thing that stands out is the resurgence of a more vocal and visible politics of resistance in the US.

Alongside covid-19, historians will record the explosion of Black Lives Matter uprisings in the US and parts of Europe, and their countervailing white supremacist and white nationalist protests, as a defining part of 2020. Fueled by an emboldened MAGA World/Proud Boys “stand back and stand by” racist rhetoric emanating from Trump’s White House, an apt name for the political home of its soon to be former president, white America showed its ugly, festering underbelly for the whole world to see.

As I’ve been  putting together my class on Religion, Ethics, and Ecology over the winter session at CSU Chico I’ve been thinking a lot about how to bring in all of the experiences of 2020 and beyond. As part of that I’ve been reading a lot of articles about Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin and some of their debates over tactics and morality during the Civil Rights era and how those debates and issues continue to resonate just as powerfully today–in some cases even more powerfully because of the historical weight of their insights. As Malcolm X argues at the end of one of the clips I’m having my students watch, where Malcolm X responds to the police brutality and killings that had  just happened at one of the Nation of Islam mosques in Los Angeles in 1967:

“Tell him how you feel. Tell him what kind of hell you have been catching, and let him know that if he’s not ready to clean his house up, if he’s not ready to clean his house up, he shouldn’t have a house. It should catch on fire, and burn down.”

There is a growing sense today in the US and elsewhere–or at least I would argue based on my research on social movements–that things can no longer hold. That the center is shifting. A new orientation for the world is necessary, and at least in the US, the nexus of racism-capitalism-settler colonialism is finally starting to stress at its seams. We still have a lot of work to do, but there are slowly emerging crack in the American racial psyche that can no longer be ignored. 

I suspect that 2021 will continue this theme in spades.

2020 has been an especially challenging year for me as one of many people stuck between graduate school and whatever is supposed to come next–hopefully a job that allows me to teach full time, but these days I’m have second thoughts about whether that will ever happen. A global pandemic and the disruptions of learning around the world made finding a job in higher education worse than usual. But I’m also grateful to have any opportunity to teach and work because I know this is something not everyone is fortunate enough to have–it’s another of the invisible privileges that supports middle class white intelligentsia. For the security and peace of mind this stability has offered me in a pandemic I can only give thanks to the universe. It’s a welcome gift, and one I intend to return in kind.

Reconnecting with the Land

A third thing that stands out is my relationship with the land.

This is obviously a more personal theme, but this was the first year I had a chance to really dig into both a serious garden project and some forest restoration work after more than a decade away from semi-rural living, and it felt great! Being more intimately connected with the land is one thing I have really enjoyed and appreciated about my time in northern Ohio and being stuck at home  socially distancing. 

 

 

Being able to spend time in the remnants of Ohio’s Great Black Swamp forests that is my temporary backyard is pretty cool, as you can see from the shot below. It’s been great not only to watch and explore the forest and its many ihabitants throughout the year, but also to see how my own relationship with the land has developed during this time.

Being more rooted in a physical place is one of the things I have really struggled with due to my uncertain future status and a precarious living situation-3 states in 3 years. It’s challenging to build relationships with a place that you know is just a temporary abode, no matter how cool it is.

 

 

Despite these reservations, my time here has really been magical. The people there are great (thanks Sabrina, Ryan, Kat, Mr. Kittles, Bagheera, T’Challa, Erik, and Shadow). I’ve been through crazy storms. I’ve seen elusive foxes prancing through the forest. And I’ve seen oodles of birds and squirrels, as well as some owls, bats, frogs, and other critters. And I’ve wandered among the fallen ancients of the forest, climbed their mammoth trunks and played as if I was a ginormous chipmunk.

 

Pandemic Pedagogies

A fourth thing that stands out is how the pandemic and technology interacted. Thanks to the shift to online learning at CSU, Chico and most colleges, all of my classes were fully online in 2020. I joined a Pandemic Pedagogy group on Facebook, which has been a real treat. It’s good to know that many of the challenges you wrestle with as an educator are shared by others, and it’s nice to have such a rich brain trust of active educators to engage with.

One of the cool things that I did this fall in response to covid was to start a podcast series, The End of the World, which I created around my weekly class lectures as another medium to engage students. I had a lot of fun doing these podcasts, and plan to continue them in some revised form in 2021. (Stay tuned for more on that!) I’ve played around with pod and webcasts before, but never really seriously, so this was my first real foray into trying to produce a weekly radio show. It’s a lot of work, but also a lot of fun! 

When I think back on 2020, it has been a wild ride of highs and lows.

Politically it has been a nightmare, one that hopefully will wake from soon. The kind of politics that dominated 2016-2020 just isn’t compatible with democratic politics. I’m no fan of Biden/Harris, but they’re a heck of a lot better than Trump/Pence. I’m still a Green Party kid at heart, and probably always will be.

As I look towards a new year I’m hoping my own life/work situation finally gets a kick start in 2021. I’ve certainly been putting out a lot of energy into the universe. Who knows where I will be a year from now, looking back on 2021, but I’m looking forward to writing that new story in another 365 days!

One of my 2021 resolutions was to tell myself I need to throw off the decades-long slump I have been in and try to start dancing again. I think watching the Club Quarantine shows that D-Nice has been doing this year really reminded me of how much I miss dj’ing and music. 

So with that in mind, I decided to welcome 2021 with some dancing!

Happy 2021 everyone