Five years ago today I left my classroom for Spring Break. We’d had to put our sweet dog Zelda down a few days earlier, the pandemic was just starting to be real for most of the country, and we entered a lockdown of our own choosing after learning Michael may have been exposed at his workplace.
We sat in the house that weekend numbed by loss and uncertainty. There was no dog to take for a walk, no treat to feed her, no plans to see family since we had no idea if being together might literally kill someone. We looked at each other a lot. We talked. We tried to make sense of the nonsensical.
Something, friends, feels familiar.
While I know I’ll return to work on the 24th—barring the closing of all public schools between now and then thanks to the absolute idiocy of the current administration—I don’t know what’s coming. Every day feels like another link in a chain of horrors. Birthright citizenship, the right to protest, the existence of transgender people—all under attack. And for what? So rich assholes can loot the government for their own gain, yet no one seems to have the power or will to put up a fight.
Familiar.
How do you fight a virus? How do you fight a systemic and brutal take over of the foundation you’ve believed in for so long? During the pandemic, I feared for my immunocompromised family and friends. Today, I fear the entireThe infection of misinformation and apathy and the wholesale acceptance of oligarchy over democracy is fatal.
The country is compromised.
I fear for us all.
I’ve spent the morning writing letters of recommendation for high school seniors. Trying to give words to their promise, work ethic, ambition. Lending my voice to the chorus that says yes: reward these humans, but I can’t help but wonder what they’re hurtling toward.
The last time I felt like this, in 2020, I turned to books and movies and streaming content, things to distract myself from the terror. Today, I find I can’t read. I can’t focus on anything.
It’s the way I felt on September 11. Everything I’d believed about this country, rather naively to be fair, was shaken. I came to realize that my life, all 25 years of it then, would never be the same again. That has proven true and untrue a thousand times.
And now I wonder: are we there again? Has this country altered so much that, in 23 years, we’ll look back and say we didn’t do enough? We didn’t know what to do. There was nothing we could do. We did what we could. Nothing was good enough.
I don’t know the answer, but it is all so very familiar, and so utterly heartbreaking.
Shannon Carriger 