Are We Missing the Moment?
Is the rush to get back to "normal" in the U.S. making us miss the opportunity for transformative change?
With vaccines rolling out in the United States to essentially anyone over 12 who wants one and our own personal lives starting to look more similar to pre-pandemic life, we've been pondering what this project means. If you look at air travel data from the July 4th weekend, it's as if the pandemic didn't exist. People who have been cooped up at home or close-to-home for the last 1.5 years are wanting to spread their wings and get out. We're going out to eat more and shopping more and generally spending more money.
On a personal level, we're also feeling this new sense of vaccinated freedom where we're traveling a bit more, seeing friends in person, and just generally getting out into the world. In some ways the return to "normal" life is a relief. We can go about our day-to-day activities without the constant fear of getting the virus and then spreading it to our family (while also considering the fact that we all still have small children who can't yet be vaccinated). We can see people we love (and hug them!!!) for the first time in what feels like forever.
But in our team chats, we've been wondering what this means for Portals of Possibility: Is the rush for everyone (in the U.S.) getting back into the world making us pass the opportunities for transformative growth by?
Ekemini Uwan wrote about this in a recent article in The Atlantic, worrying about this same topic.
"In the U.S. now, restrictions are mostly lifted, vaccines are available, disinfectants are abundant, and toilet paper fills store shelves, but the inequities that predated the pandemic remain unattended to," she wrote. "The world has not been remade, and there are no signs that it will be."
She reflects on how Covid-19 is most definitely not over. Most of the world still doesn't have access to vaccines and here in the U.S. the Delta variant is raging among the many (too many) unvaccinated communities. And so many people are grieving the loss of loved ones they lost in the past 1.5 years.
"The other reality," she says, "is that what we thought of as normal before the pandemic was broken in many ways. And if we continue to barrel toward it with singular focus, a transformative future will be foreclosed to us all."
This is an anxiety we share. Are we losing the chance to really take transformative action on climate change as enormous wildfires rage months earlier than the typical wildfire season and places like those of us here in the Pacific Northwest experience hotter temperatures than ever before? Are we so exuberant about reopening that we're not stopping to think critically about capitalism and how it has caused so much inequity? Are we (white people mostly) so excited to get back to what we perceived as "normal" that we're forgetting about the awakening so many of us had in the wake of George Floyd's murder last year? Are we so eager to get out of our house and our own communities that we're overlooking how we might participate in harmful practices as tourists? These are things that run through my own mind at night.
Yet with all of this running through our heads, we still feel like there are possibilities out there. We are maybe closer to the end of the "portal" we've come to use as our metaphor for this project, but we do believe there are so many opportunities out there. We still think the shockwaves of 2020 have woken a whole lot of people up and they are offering opportunities for change. We still hope for transformational change on a large scale, but we also see possibilities in the smaller-scale approaches like communities are changing the way they bring tourists in or the local programs that are re-envisioning the role of police.
It's with that in mind—and with increased urgency!—we will continue to do this work and find the places of hope through our future newsletters. We already have a slate of ideas.
And as Ekemini Uwan wrote: "This is the opportune time to act, and it’s slipping away. A new world awaits the courageous; running back to the old one is cowardice."
Author's Note: Share Your Insights With Us!
Thank you to all of you who have been on this Portals of Possibility ride with us! We invite you to share what is inspiring you, what possibilities you're seeing, and how transformational change might be happening. Email us at elizabeth@doerrandco.com for your insights and ideas and what you're seeing out there or DM us on Instagram (which, admittedly, has fallen a little silent lately, but we're still there).
And also note that we will likely publish less frequently over the summer because, well, family time calls, but we will still be here in your inboxes on the regular as we see these possibilities through this portal we are still traveling through.