Reflections on a Year in a Pandemic
Mid-March 2020 was, for Americans, the moment everything changed as coronavirus lockdowns swept across the country and the reality of the pandemic set in. As March 2021 marked that anniversary, there have been many reflections on that one moment of realization and what has come after.
For me, that moment was when my husband and I cancelled our son's 3rd birthday party late in the evening of March 13th, mere hours before we were scheduled to convene with a few of his friends at an art activity center. Throughout the week as we started to come to terms with the reality of the pandemic, I had looked at that birthday party as our one last hurrah before we committed ourselves to “social distancing” (then a new term to us). But as the doom set in, we realized that even that one last hurrah could be too dangerous.
The two weeks of preschool school closure turned into four months (short compared to the many other school age kids in Oregon who will first set foot in their schools this month). And our reality and idea of what is "normal" changed like that. It's a week I will not ever forget where it held so much uncertainty. It was the calm before the storm. In the last year, we've certainly lived in that storm, and we're learning a lot from it.
With that in mind, there have been some beautiful and important reflections over the past few weeks about this pandemic and we want to share some of those here. The goal of this project is to look beyond what we thought was "normal" and to look far beyond that to possibilities we may not have thought were possible before. We are heartened by the beautiful reflections that are showing us how so many advocates, researchers and community members are seeking radical change through this questioning of what was once considered "normal."
Here are a couple of articles that spoke to us recently. Both are a part of the New York Times' series from March 14, 2021 called The Week Our Reality Broke.
"We Longed for the The 'Before Times'" by Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison reflected in her beautiful essay on nostalgia and those feelings we had wanting to go back to pre-pandemic times.
One of the resonant concepts she draws upon is the idea of "reflective nostalgia" vs. "restorative nostalgia" that scholar Svetlana Boym focuses on in her book The Future of Nostalgia. The idea of longing for the times before—which weren't so great for most people—can actually be harmful. But restorative nostalgia, that gets at the idea of what opportunities and possibilities the future can hold that are better than what the "before times" held.
"While restorative nostalgia wants to recreate the idealized past," Jamison writes, "reflective nostalgia interrogates the very image it longs for. Restorative nostalgia is drawn to monuments; reflective nostalgia to ruins. The protests—many of them committed to taking down monuments—asks us to turn our pandemic nostalgia away from restoration and toward reflection and remaking."
This reflective process and the potential to remake our world as we know it is why we started Portals of Possibility. For that, this essay hits home in the best way possible.
"We Built Community as Neighbors" by Maira Khwaja, Trina Reynolds-Tyler, Dominique James, and Hannah Nyhart
In light of our inaugural newsletter topic, it's no surprise that this story by Maira Khwaja, Trina Reynolds-Tyler, Dominique James, and Hannah Nyhart about mutual aid spoke to us. These writers and mutual aid organizers in Chicago illustrate in detail how revolutionary and important mutual aid projects in a community are. They show in great detail how these early pandemic efforts also led to caring for one another through protest and beyond.
"When mutual aid efforts weren't directly supporting protests," they write, "they shared in the same work: Like the crowds in the streets, our projects were demanding we find better ways to keep our communities safe."
Mutual aid continues to be one of the most important and powerful elements that have kept people safe and fed and thriving in their communities. It’s why we focused our inaugural newsletter on the topic.
This story, by Chicago mutual aid organizers, shows the power and the possibility in mutual aid.