As a kid I did not get the holiday blues. This was the best time of the year, dammit! Present and mountains of candy and cookies and parties. As I have aged it has come into focus how the holiday season forces reflection, and that's not always a fun thing. I think every year of Christmases past, and the people I celebrated with who are dead now.
I also tend to think about what I've done over the past year. In this second COVID year it has been a bitter reflection. The year started with the dark COVID winter and it is ending with the Omnicron surge. Back in June I was naive enough to think it was ending. Oh how wrong I was.
That also coincided with the end of the end of the 2020-2021 school year, one where I had to completely alter my teaching practice from top to bottom not once but twice. First to go remote, and then to go hybrid. I worked twelve hour days every day and dealt with having to go to work when my kids' school still had them remote.
My reflection has become bitter because I have realized that all of this labor has added up to nothing.
I am not getting a single extra penny of compensation from my job. I have not been given any more respect, either from my employer or my students and their parents. All that effort and work was appreciated by my students in the moment, but its long-term impact is basically zero.
Meanwhile my kids' education horribly suffered, and I failed to halt it because I was spending all my efforts teaching other people's kids. What reward did I get for this? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Looking back on it I can't believe what a complete sucker I was.
Well, as the old saying goes, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, same on me. The days of heroic sacrifice for no reward are over. I wonder when school leaders are finally going to figure this out.
Like a lot of other people I have been thinking a lot lately about work and its meaning. After four decades of neoliberal propaganda proclaiming workaholism a necessary condition rather than a disorder, the centrality of work to our lives looks increasingly perverse and unbalanced. The fact that teachers like me in particular have worked harder under more stressful conditions than ever without any additional compensation or respect or workplace power has been especially glaring.
Back when I was a callow undergraduate I had decided that whatever I did with my career, it would be something I enjoyed and that made the world a better place. Goodbye law school, hello grad school. Even after I jumped ship from academia I landed in secondary education. I know I am smart enough to have gone to law school and started making more money than I do now after decades of teaching in my first year at the bar. Despite that I opted to join one of the lowest paid of the educated professions. (I think only social workers have us beat.)
It is certainly true that despite the difficulty and stress of my job, that I enjoy it most of the time and feel like my hard work is having a positive impact on the world. At the same time, my older worries that educators are exploited through the love we give have only intensified. Last year I was an "essential worker" riding empty commuter trains, trying to juggle teaching other people's kids when mine weren't allowed into their school until May of 2021. The question thus arises of whether I would be better off in a meaningless job that I do not "love" with much lower stress and better pay. This is a calculation that a lot of teachers are making.
There is one thing staying my hand, however. While I am very sympathetic to the voices saying that we need to be working less and centering our lives around things outside of work, they sometimes miss a crucial fact. Work is the thing we do more than anything else with our waking hours upon this earth. When you have a shit job (I have had some in my day) you feel like the hours of your life are being stolen from you, spent in boredom and empty toil. It is an absolutely soul-crushing feeling, a kind of emotional torture.
(Notice, of course, that the journalists and writers saying we should not look to work for fulfillment aren't quitting their writing gigs to become line cooks or HR specialists.)
If I had to spend eight hours of my day (or more, most likely) doing something I didn't believe in I would probably fall into a state of suicidal depression. Having a soul only when the quitting time whistle blows is not how I want to go through life.
In the meantime I keep asking myself how to stop my work from taking over my life. Last Saturday, for example, I decided I just wasn't going to do any schoolwork, I needed to rest. I wonder if I can allow myself to take longer to grade my students' work, to be more willing to recycle suboptimal lessons rather than spending several evening hours constructing a new one that may not even work. Teachers are always told to do these extra sacrifices "for the kids' but I never hear doctors being told to do uncompensated labor "for the patients" or lawyers to not bill for all their hours "for the clients."
My hope for the "Great Resignation" is that all of these individual refusals can somehow add up to a collective reorientation around work expectations. I love what I do, but I will not be suckered. Those days are over.
Last Tuesday we had a proper Mardi Gras in my house. My wife made a king cake and we danced around to Professor Longhair and Dr John. My kids donned beads and joined in on the fun. It was just the kind of break that we needed from a crushing daily routine that involves my wife and I having to leave our homes for our jobs while our children's school has yet to re-open. We've spent a year having to work several more hours a week at our reinvented jobs while acting as de facto teacher's aides for our kids. All the usual outlets on the weekend have been closed off to us this whole time.
That's why I even surprised myself by leaning into Lent this year. Loyal readers know I have a complicated relationship to the Roman Catholic faith of my upbringing. Regardless of how I feel about doctrines and institutions, however, a part of my soul still REQUIRES me to take Lent seriously. This year I decided to give up alcohol (my idea) and yelling at my kids (their idea.) I tried helplessly to explain to them that giving up the former will make giving up the latter much harder.
It feels strange to lean into Lent because we have been living in Lent since last March. So much has been given up and sacrificed. The clarity that comes with Lenten sacrifice has been bestowed on me in abundance this past year. I have received many a lesson in what matters and what does not matter in this life. I have spent months preparing for a new Easter where I can slough off the hairshirt and live the more fulfilled, purposeful life I know I am ready to have once the burdens of COVID have ceased. That end is in sight. This Saturday I am getting my second shot of vaccine. The transmission rates are trending down. Spring is coming.
So why all the Lenten sacrifice? Because all of what I have learned about what matters has ultimately taught me that the more distractions I eliminate, the better off I will be. I can't control the pandemic, the political situation, my children's school's policies, my employer's demands, or much else. Alcohol is an easy way to put a wall between myself and reality. It has been a very helpful wall in my adult life, especially in the last four years. Now it's time to stop building walls, to face the world straight, and yes, sober.
I am preparing my soul for the life beyond pandemic, and pushing myself to fulfill the promises I have made to myself. As the past year has painfully illustrated, there's only so much life to go around.
No music suits the dark cold post-holiday winter doldrums better than early New Order. Before their music got more of a cold, sparkly sheen in the mid-80s it was the aural equivalent of an electric blanket or space heater. It makes me want to curl up next to the speaker the way I used to do by the heat vent in my childhood bedroom. While crouching there in that little pocket of warmth the cold hand of winter could be kept at bay as long as I didn't move a single muscle.
I am leaning extra hard into that music this year. I find myself mentally curled up, my trust in others beyond my immediate circle questioned. I hate winter but this one is the worst yet. The vaccines are coming and the end is in sight but the current wave is fearsome.
In this environment I find "Ceremony" especially comforting. Tonight before bed one of my daughters and I took turns sharing songs with each other. (She loves k pop.) I chose "Ceremony" after she played BTS's COVID comfort song, "Life Goes On." I couldn't put my finger on why, and it came to me while I told her why I like the song.
I don't really know what it's supposed to be about, it's more of a mood for me. And when I listen to it I can't help thinking about Ian Curtis and how the members of Joy Division found a way to keep going after his suicide. (All I told my daughter was that he died suddenly.) To me this song has always been about finding hope after sorrow. It's an emotional mixture I've experienced a lot recently.
It's one of those songs that my body has to respond to. When I hear it I bang my fingers against the table in its space between the lines rhythm and nod my head along. The unspoken message courses through my body: "this too shall pass."
This wretched year of 2020 is finally coming to a close. Unfortunately, the forces of nature and history do not recognize dates on the calendar. The coming winter months will lead to a lot more COVID deaths and potentially more violence from right wing extremists. Nevertheless, I want to honor the dates on the calendar as a tool for some reflection.
Between the pandemic and the election, I consider 2020 to be the Great Unmasking. The realities of our society and a lot of the people I know have been revealed. This has been horribly disheartening but there have been a couple of bright spots. Some of the unmasking involves things I knew to be true but was loathe to confront.
For example, a lot of people I have known my entire life voted for Trump in the 2016 election. To a person those I had the most respect for did not vote for him in the primaries, and seemed to be voting for him in the general election out of their hatred of liberals (HRC was someone some of these folks had intensely hated for decades) or religious imperative to be anti-abortion. I thought that many of these people, after seeing the damage wrought by the past four years, would reconsider or maybe not vote. Instead they started openly praising Trump on social media and going to local rallies. I reproached myself for being so completely naive. Conservatism has become an authoritarian personality cult, why should I surprised that conservatives in my life, no matter how virtuous they are otherwise, would be taken in? Trump losing the election has helped me cope, but I know there's a lot of people in my life that I will never be able to view the same way ever again.
The same goes for responses for the pandemic, which are not easy to break down along political lines as you may think. I have seen a lot of selfish, irresponsible behavior from outspoken liberals with comfortable lives who did not need to break quarantine out of necessity. There's also people like the guy who owns the local comic book store, who never wears a mask or shield. I won't be patronizing that store anymore. There are also those in my community who quickly turned to demonizing teachers when they did not want to go back into the classroom out of health concerns. These are steadfast New Jersey liberals, not Trumpers I am talking about.
On top of this, of course, are the innumerable jackasses on public transit and in other crowded areas who refuse to mask up for some inscrutable reason. If the pandemic has taught me anything, it's that I should be very careful about who I trust. I learned this lesson before during my ill-starred time in academia, but I think after recovering from that experience I let my guard down a little too much.
Our society's hierarchies have been exposed this year like never before. In terms of race it was telling that many people in my life expressed angry outrage about looting in the aftermath of George Floyd's death and absolutely zero concern that his life was taken. The widely disparate impacts of the virus based on race and class have shown just how much racism and classism literally kill. I remember when the virus first hit, and the wealthy of New York City decamped to their second homes in the country while working class people of color stuck in overcrowded housing died in fearsome numbers.
We have also seen in the past year who actually does the most valuable work and how badly exploited they are. Delivery and truck drivers, nurses, warehouse workers, and grocery clerks have kept the country afloat. Teachers have completely changed their practice in impossible circumstances. What all these "essential workers" have received for this is just lip service. In fact, when someone calls you an "essential worker" you should run for the hills. It means you are about to be put in the line of fire to do grueling work with little regard for your safety. These essential workers will be facing layoffs and pay cuts (educators already are) when their work will no longer be considered so important. All the while the stock holders are still raking it in and university administrators whose only role has been to add to the burden of the educators on the front line are making top dollar.
(All this talk of "essential workers" should also have us asking some hard questions about the people whose work has been exposed as inessential. They should be feeling much, much more afraid than they are.)
The worst part is I do not see much changing positively after the pandemic. As the election showed, America's constitutional system and geography make sweeping change very difficult and 40% of the country is dead-set against any changes and will in fact burn the country down if they are attempted. Plenty of people who voted against Trump are still committed to the status quo. Since I work on the Upper West Side I have been exposed to multiple "liberals" who thought it was good that Biden won but the Democrats did not win the Senate. The class solidarity of keeping taxes on the wealthy low is not going to break anytime soon. Six months after the streets of America were full of more protest than I have ever seen in my life, many who paid lip service seem to have forgotten that moment even happened, and are secretly glad about it fading, too.
On a bigger scale, the pandemic was a test that this country has failed. We never had a national response, meaning the virus has never been under control. People refuse to cooperate with contact tracing, authorities refuse to enforce restrictions, and many worn down by months of sacrifice have understandably given up right at the moment when it's worse than ever. And so the deaths keep piling up, another 9/11 every two days in a country where many still say "it's no big deal."
It's the same country where our life expectancy was falling before this happened. The same country where suicides, drug overdoses, and gun deaths were epidemics that were also "no big deal." Plenty has been unmasked, but America's status as a nation that any other country would want to imitate is perhaps the biggest. I have never been more convinced that I stand a fair chance of outliving the United States. Currently doses of the long awaited vaccine may expire before they can be distributed. This country does not have much of a future, but it just might keep dragging its wrecked carcass around for a century more.
This year even I, a middle class cishetero white guy, got to experience what it's like when your own government abandons you. I remember how back in March and April, when the hospitals were overflowing in New York and New Jersey and the death totals spiked, yet the federal government did little to help. I remember people in other parts of the country acting as if it was our problem, and not theirs. They were fine letting people die here. Most people -including those in the Tri-State area- have forgotten about this. I never have, and I never will.
In the short term, I try to find hope. Trump will soon no longer be president. The vaccines are coming even if their distribution is being botched. A young generation took to the streets to demand justice this year, and their commitment gives me the most hope of all.
In my personal life I have tried to cling to what is good and sustaining. I have been able to spend so much more time with my wife and children, usually rare during the school year with our impossible commutes and schedules. I have strengthened friendships with friends who live both far and near. During the pandemic I fell in with a group of local dads and we started watching backyard movies every week together. For the first time since moving here seven years ago I feel like I am actually a part of the town I live in, rather than a temporary sojourner.
I have thrown myself into the work of distance and hybrid teaching and am quietly proud of how well this old dog has learned new tricks. I have had the joy of teaching sustain me through some difficult straits. Forget all the "essential worker" lip service, I am just glad to be doing work that actually matters. Not many people who make more money than me can actually say that about what they do.
And so I take joy in my family, take heart in my work, and spend my free time reading stimulating books and listening to music and getting a lot better at making pies and cornbread. My hope for the wider world is dim, but life is a short shining moment and I aim to make the best of it. Perhaps 2021 will be better. I am certainly mentally prepared for it to be worse.
Back in September as the school year began I likened the difference between teaching in March when the virus hit to going back for a new year to the difference between World War I and World War II. The first time out I was full of the vigor and enthusiasm of taking a leap into the unknown, as dangerous as it could be. My attitude was all Rupert Brooke "swimmers into cleanness leaping" and all that. After surviving those months of remote learning to be thrown into hybrid learning in the fall, my enthusiasm was gone. All that was left was a devotion to duty. In September of 1939 there were no jubilant crowds on the streets of the combatant countries, just fear, resignation, and some quiet resolve.
I have done my best to fulfill that duty all while hoping and praying that this all ends soon. I have been uplifted by the spirit of my students, which has truly impressed me, as well as many of my front-line comrades, and even some of the commanding officers.
This morning I had enough time to actually reflect, and something hit me really hard. I have become inured to the ridiculous demands of teaching hybrid while parenting children in remote school with a spouse required to go to school every class day. I get up in the morning and shoulder the burden and get to work not even thinking about how impossible the task is or how ridiculous any of this would have been to conceive of a year ago. I just do it.
I realized this morning that this attitude is what has kept me from having a nervous breakdown. At the same time, I feel like part of my soul has died and won't be coming back. The same thing happened in my last years in academia, where some of my natural generosity and openness got permanently destroyed after it led me to be taken advantage of. The experience made me a harder person, and definitely not a better one.
Right now I am starting to get tunnel vision. For example, I am no longer bothered when I hear and see people I love and care about being reckless in their behavior towards the virus. They are adults. Just let them do what they want. If they want to be careless, fine. I can't stop them and trying to will just make them mad. I can only hunker down and protect the people in my household and hope all turns out well. It's really the only thing I can control.
So the war goes on, with no end in sight. The only thought that fazes me anymore is the idea that there never will be an end. I find that unbearable but I have little reason to think otherwise. Tonight I will rest and try not to think about it. Tomorrow I will be back in the trenches doing the impossible, but at least the work occupies my mind and gives me a reason to care. See you at the front, comrades.
The education workplace feels more and more like Gosford Park
COVID has been a test of American society, one that we have completely failed. It has also further exposed pre-existing realities that were not as close to the surface. If anything, it has exposed what a grossly unequal and stratified society that we live in.
In areas where public schools have been closed, private schools have been open (including the one where I teach.) Actually opening schools in a safe manner under COVID requires monetary support and funding, something being deprived from public schools. Poorer students are less likely to have reliable internet and to live in place where schooling from home is comfortable. It's more likely that their parents have to work outside of the home. They were already struggling, now they are underwater. Meanwhile, wealthier parents in schools that are shuttered can afford to be pod people and pay someone to be their children's governess. It's like a return to the 19th century. On top of this, they have the kind of white collar professional jobs that allow them to work from home, allowing them to avoid steep day care costs if they are not pod people.
Others are not so lucky. Not only must they work outside of the home and sometimes confront angry customers who refuse to cover their faces, they are more likely to live in the kind of crowded circumstances where the disease spreads easiest. That's the result of the country's crisis in affordable housing, which was hurting people before but is now killing them.
Those of us who are lucky enough to have better housing and steady work during this mess can still see the hierarchy play out in more subtle ways in the workplace. This is especially the case in education. Administrators get to sit in their offices without being exposed, often without their masks on, while teachers are there in the trenches in the classroom. The admins also get to make decisions about opening and closing, which impact them the least. They can make those choices without bothering to take the concerns of their faculty into account. After all, they're just the people teaching the students.
Meanwhile those teachers have completely altered their pedagogy and teaching materials. We have been forced to do our jobs in entirely different ways that we were never trained for. In the hybrid classroom we get to try to teach in two different worlds at once, real and virtual. Sometimes this means constructing two lessons for the same class. Our reward will be firings, furloughs, and pay cuts. The government is refusing to help state and local governments, meaning public schools and universities are screwed. Private schools are seeing students leave due to the cost and fund-raising dry up in the midst of a recession.
In higher ed there are stories of universities slashing whole departments and tenure track faculty members. Those same institutions still have football coaches who are the highest paid public employees in their state. They still possess an army of deans whose only purpose in life is to make their faculties do stupid shit just to justify their useless positions.
I know a lot of teachers and profs who are furious about this situation. I know multiple educators very close to me who contracted COVD at institutions that were irresponsible in their handling of the virus. Without any radical action the inequalities in education, already festering, are going to defeat any possibilities for future change. I foresee a scenario where teachers start quitting en masse due to burnout, and public schools start de-professionalizing teaching by plugging in untrained employees who can at least apply a pre-set digital curriculum. At the college level adjunctification will overtake the totality of entire disciplines. Those fortunate enough to live in the right zip code will still have a good public school education, and will get accepted into universities what have not been converted into glorified vocational schools.
The only way forward is to join together and fight. It's time to tell the "bone spurs" types among our colleagues that they need to orient their dissatisfaction away from unproductive spite towards action. It's time to tell the "company men" among our colleagues that the company will throw them away if they feel like it. It's time to tell our bosses that they need to make a shared sacrifice, and if they want our labor, they have to listen to us. It's time to demand that the government actually fund public education and do right by our students.
This Thanksgiving is not one I could have ever anticipated. Back in March when my school went remote I was shocked when the head said we might be remote to the end of the school year. Now I wonder when the next day I teach all of my students in the classroom will come, if it ever will. Sometimes I think of the World War I trench soldiers who thought about the war just going on forever, an eternal hell.
This month has given hope and fear in equal measure. The election and news of successful vaccines has lifted my spirits, but inauguration isn't until January and the drugs have yet to be administered. In the meantime the infection rate has skyrocketed and the winter weather will only make things worse. Millions have decided to have a "normal" Thanksgiving in these circumstances that will probably kill more people than Sturgis did. Your move, Christmas.
In the past week things have been hitting closer to home. The households of friends have been hit by the disease, including in the house literally next door to mine. This feels like the proverbial darkest hour before the dawn. Well, at least I hope there's a dawn.
In the midst of this gloominess comes Thanksgiving, a time of reflection. As I take stock of things, I certainly have plenty to be thankful for. In this time of economic anxiety I still have my job, and my employer has to my estimation done a good job of keeping me safe even though I am going in to school. Because of quarantine I have been able to spend a lot more time with my wife and children, and I am glad for that. During normal work weeks my commute made it so I barely saw them, and that when I did I was either stressed trying to get to work or exhausted coming home from it. I know I am fortunate and am planning on making some donations to help people who have not been as lucky.
I am also feeling thankful on a slightly different level. This week I started reading Thoreau's Walden, a book I had been circling around for almost thirty years. I had heard such conflicting things about it, but in September we took a trip to Cape Cod and I picked up his travelogue of the area at a local bookstore. I found that I really liked his prose style, so often derided by others.
Some books that are assigned to high school students never should be, and Walden is obviously one of them. The issues it raises only become clear once one has gone far into adulthood. At a certain point, usually middle age, most people realize they are no longer becoming the person they will be, but have already become the person they will be for the rest of their lives. This reckoning can be a tough one, and one no teenager on earth can truly comprehend. (And that's to be expected! Let them have their days in the sun because the sun will soon be clouded.)
The question the book forces the reader to ask, again and again, is "What am I doing with my life?" The one true gift the horror of COVID and the boredom of quarantine has given me is the clear knowledge that I am not wasting it. My work as a teacher, especially under the demands of quarantine, is difficult and draining. But it is also meaningful. I know what I am doing makes a positive impact on my students, and the paper shufflers, bureaucrats and salesman that make double and triple my salary really can't say that. All the time with my family has brought home to me that I have made the right choices in my priorities.
When this all started I had a couple of days of deep reflection, wondering if my soul was prepared if my life were to be taken in the pandemic. I have so much more to live for, but if the universe doesn't have that in the cards for me I know I did a lot with the time I managed to eek out. For that, I am thankful.
With the closure of NYC public schools today there is a familiar feeling in the air. The same air of panic and uncertainty I felt in March has returned. Here in Jersey we experienced the worst of the pandemic early on and have mostly been spared since, dodging the spike that happened in much of the country in summer. Now the cases are shooting up, as well as hospitalizations. Soon I am sure the deaths will follow.
The last time, eight months ago, feels like a distant era. It's hard to remember a time when I went out in public without a mask or went into a full classroom to teach. At times it feels like "normal" is never coming back.
Back in March I was overwhelmed and depressed but I got a certain spark from the feeling that I had a mission to complete. Like a German student volunteer in 1914 I went into battle singing. Now in November it feels more like Verdun. I think of the British trench soldier's morbid singing of the chorus of "Auld Lang Syne" as "We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here."
Going remote happened to coincide with my "spring break," so I helped my kids navigate those first difficult weeks of distance learning while I read books and listened to music and desperately tried to get my classes converted to the new format. In terms of books I leaned on 19th century novels and started reading Middlemarch. In terms of music, I threw myself back into classical, particularly Mozart.
Something about Mozart fills me with the joy of being a human alive on this planet. His music is not only sublime, it never sticks with the expected direction. Mozart has a seemingly endless bag of tricks, yet he makes all of his twists and turns sound completely natural and expected. In Mozart I hear the pure bliss of human creativity in all of its potential. It completely blows my mind that a single human being was capable of creating such an expansive body of music, all before he turned 36 years old.
So today I find myself listen to the overture to Figaro again, a piece of music that will always bring a smile to my face. Life is short. Most of it is tedious and stupid. Looking at death in the face I am leaning on the things, like Mozart, that make me proud ever to have lived as a human being on this earth. I already have nine more years than he did, so I should count myself lucky. Stay safe out there, everyone.
Today came the news that my daughters' school may not be open until January. Meanwhile, I am going in part time at my school, and my wife has to go to school every day. This, as you could imagine, creates a bit of a conundrum for us. We are relying on a combo of overpriced part-time day care and grandparent help to make this possible. Time will tell if this holds together.
We are not being given any help from our employers, our daughters' school district, or our local, state, and national government. What we are told, over and over again by those same entities, is that we need to practice "self care." "Self" as in "handle it yourself." As in "Fuck you we aren't going to help you." "Self care" is a heinous neoliberal plot to make people think that problems like not having proper child care can be solved with mindfulness meditation.
I am through with it. You can take your self care and shove it up your ass. It sure feels good when I order Chinese take-out and wash it down with some French wine, but it does absolutely nothing in regards to the underlying problems I am facing. It's less than worthless, since not only do my problems remain, I am made to feel as if it's all my fault for it getting me down.
If this moment has taught us anything, it's that the ethic of capitalist individuality does not work when the shit goes down. We don't need self care, we need social care. We need a society that takes care of its members, that offers them basic protections. If we had social care we could close down businesses and compensate workers to get the virus under control. We could avoid parents having to quit their jobs in order to take care of their kids. We could have schools refurbished to be more spacious and ventilated, and for children to be learning in them.
Instead we have given everyone a little bag of self care magic beans, and told them to cheer up while their neighbors choke to death. To quote Gang of Four, return the gift. Fill that bag with gasoline, light it on fire, and throw it back.
Edward Dwyer, singing a song teachers know well right now
This week on Thursday I had my first meltdown since the school year started. My last one came during the pre-school year prep and endless meetings, and the feeling that I was about to confront an impossible task. This one came as I thought about all the things I had to do that day, how difficult it would be to complete those tasks, and that every day for the foreseeable future would be this same dance of stress and anxiety.
That thought weighed on me until I quietly flipped out on the inside. (My last meltdown was more vocal.) I kept asking myself, "How many days in a row of living to just get to the end of the day will there be until I just snap?" I went to bed that night in a daze.
When I woke up on Friday with the news of the president's diagnosis, the combination of the coming weekend and the frenzy of news distracted me long enough to not fall into another trough. The weekend has been great; my wife's sister is visiting from California and it's been lovely to catch up and for my daughters to have her around.
Now the Sunday night blues are looming. This week I not only have to teach my students in a difficult format and be a teaching assistant for my kids, I have to go into my school for two days of training to prepare for our hybrid launch in November. I am teaching asynchronous classes on these days, so I am basically pulling a double shift while enduring my grueling commute on top of it. Needless to say, I am not happy about it.
Thankfully I have a new mental frame of mind. A Gulf War marine vet who is also an educator posted something on Facebook about the crushing mental load, and discussed the motto in the service of "embrace the suck." This was reminding me of my mentality before the beginning of school year meetings broke my morale. Teachers are soldiering, but not in the way our politicians think by sending us into a deadly situation.
I am talking more about mentality. I've read enough front-line memoirs that I think I understand the mental attitude needed to survive the test my fellow teachers and I are being put to. Unlike some of those soldiers, I even deeply believe in the cause I am fighting for: my students' education. As is often the case in war I am being sent in to do the job without proper support, but I will have to do it anyway. I may be given contradictory and sometimes downright nonsensical orders from superior officers, but I will have to follow them. It doesn't mean I have to like it or respect the people giving me the orders or refrain from complaining, though. That's always a soldier's prerogative.
To use another well-worn soldier's phrase, "Shit rolls downhill." The officers in the rear avoid the shit details during peacetime, and now during wartime they are safe from any of the flying shrapnel and aim to keep it that way. That's certainly unfair, but there's also a war on, and though I have resigned to grumble and complain, I've also resigned to embrace the suck and fight.
Teachers have discovered that we are basically on our own in this. Nevertheless, we have to soldier on. Keep up the fight so we can win, but when it's over it's time to demand a lot more from our schools and from our country.
My birthday present to myself finally came in the mail yesterday: an 8 CD box set of Richard and Linda Thompson's music together. Many of their albums are not available on streaming or easy to find elsewhere, so this is sort of like harpooning the white whale for me.
I first got into them when I was living in Grand Rapids and enduring my first brutal Michigan winter. The long cold nights and dark days came as I was working long hours as a "visiting assistant professor" getting paid little money. I was also in a long distance relationship with my now wife, and being so far apart from her was really tough. The Thompsons' music, especially I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight gave me comfort.
It's a special kind of comfort, one rooted in the knowledge that this is a broken world, rather than cheerily trying to pretend everything is okay. This sentiment is best expressed in "The End of the Rainbow," taking the title from a famously hopeful, yearning song and putting it on a dirge. It's a song sung by a parent to a newborn, letting them know that this world is cruel and hurtful. "There's nothing at the end of the rainbow."
The released version was sung by Richard, but the box set has an unreleased one with Linda on the vocal. She's a much stronger singer, but hearing the words from a mother as opposed to a father makes the song almost too chilling to listen to. Listening to it last night I felt all my emotions of dread about the virus, election, and police killings welling up. At the same time, there was comfort. Sometimes I feel crazy when I look around and other people seem to be far less upset by the current situation than I am. Their false hope in this world is hard to take most days.
The Thompsons also had a knack for romantic songs that acknowledged the ups and downs of long term relationships instead of the giddy electricity of love's first moments. A song like "Don't Renege On Our Love" takes the "please don't leave me" song and makes it feel much more real. This is adult stuff, not teen angst. "Just give me an ounce of sympathy."
That came from the Shoot Out The Lights album of 1982, their biggest seller and their last. You can hear the signs of a faltering marriage in the songs and their tour after the album's release marked the end of the line. Richard Thompson has gone on to make a lot of great music. In fact, he might be the member of his generation who has made the most good albums, and has done it pretty quietly at that.
As good as he has been, however, I still prefer his work with Linda. He is an amazing guitar player, but a middling singer. Linda's voice has a haunting quality that makes me feel the yearning and disappointment in the songs. Their interplay is where the real magic happens.
There's also just something so *adult* in their music together. Blues and country music is for adults, with songs about adult problems. Pop and rock music are for kids, and for old people still pretending to be young. The Thompsons' music faces the reality of adult life instead of running from it. Sitting here in quarantine, facing what seems to be an insurmountable task of just getting through the day and doing it over and over again makes me want music about the struggle of daily existence. That's what Richard and Linda Thompson provide me, and I thank them for it.
The virus has me feeling like Clive Candy right now
I'd like to indulge in some historical metaphorical thoughts today, as dangerous as that often is.
As a teacher, spring of 2020 felt a lot like World War I. Everything changed in an instant once the looming problem went from a far-away threat to a deadly reality. With the fear of the future there was also a lot of fighting spirit in the trenches. Teaching distance style with just a little training felt like being one of those green neighborhood boys from Manchester or the East End joining up in a "Pals" battalion and getting straight to the Somme out of training camp. I still remember leaving the school building on March 12, 2020, after a day of helpful training. I was scared but ready for the challenge.
I did my turn at the front lines and felt satisfied when it was over despite the stressful 10-12 hour days. Contrary to our assumptions (molded by hindsight), when the Great War ended the majority of people in the UK felt good about it. They were proud to have won, and while they mourned the dead they also thought that victory would bring a peaceful postwar order where such a conflict would never be necessary again.
The last day of school this year felt like Armistice Day. I had put my blood, sweat, and tears into the fight and somehow managed to be an effective online teacher despite the odds. I assumed, like people in the Allied nations on November 11, 1918, that the future would be better. At that point in June infection levels were down and perhaps the virus would be pushed back before the school year.
Just as the post-Great War order failed miserably (in large part to its poor conception and factors beyond the control of its architects), so too did the initial fight against covid. Now August of 2020 feels a lot like September of 1939. There were no cheering crowds in the squares when World War II started, only fear and that muttered resignation of "not this shit again!" Even in Germany, where the war was supposed to be a liberating act of revenge for the humiliations of the last war, no one was enthusiastic. They all knew what was in front of them.
The feeling of accomplishment I had in June is gone. The dizzy feeling of a new challenge to rise to I had in March is gone, too. All that's left as I face a new school year during covid is quiet determination mixed with a huge dose of fatalism. (I feel like now is a good time to reread Marc Bloch's Strange Defeat.) I also know that my students need me, and that this battle has to be fought even if my heart doesn't burn like it did in March. My resolve is still there, as I am sure it is for the rest of my friends and colleagues coming back to work right now. Once more into the breach, comrades. Stay safe out there.
This week marks five months of quarantine and the most time I have ever spent with my children. It was been good to be with them so much, but at this point in the quarantine and summer my patience is completely shredded. I have so much work to do to prepare for school, and I can't work for more than ten minutes at a time without being interrupted. In past summers when this happened I would take a couple of hours and go to a coffee shop and bang out what I needed to do. Under covid, that's not an option.
It's not just that I can't work on school stuff, reading for pleasure or doing my own writing is a constant exercise in stress and frustration. (Just now one of my daughters came to bother me about how long her pizza would take in the oven. And to ask what anchovies are. There are no anchovies on her pizza.) The only surefire way to get my children to leave me alone is to let them take their iPads to their rooms. (Between the last sentence and this one my kids got into a screaming fight with each other.) This strategy has a lot of problems, not least of which that my children will just watch YouTube videos that are essentially toy commercials, or play games that make them even more agitated. My wife and I eventually hid their iPads for a week and removed YouTube from our Roku.
The effect has been mostly positive. They no longer act like crazed junkies without their screens and have stopped constantly asking to look at toys online to buy with their allowance money. Desperate for distraction, we have also discovered that there's pretty much only one activity that soothes them and makes them less difficult: watching The Brady Bunch. One morning my wife put on the first episode for them, and they were completely hooked. It's a comforting nostalgia trip for me, since I used to watch The Brady Bunch every day in reruns after school when I was young.
This is also why I was surprised that my kids like it so much. The 70s wood panelling and houndstooth pants in the Brady household looked old-fashioned to my eyes in the 80s, and the traditional family sit-com themes could not be more dated. My daughters love the overheated, self-consciously hip live action Disney TV shows full of obnoxious tweens and teens, which could not be further away from the earnest, unironic world of the Bradys. I expected my children to be even more put off by the show than I was as kid. I soon realized that while the show comforts me as nostalgia, it comforts my children in a different way.
My daughters are more than aware of how the coronavirus has upended their lives. They know it's why they haven't been inside their school for five months. They know it's why we didn't have a vacation this year or see their grandparents in Nebraska. They know it's why we barely ever leave the house and haven't been able to do all kinds of things they love to do. They don't express a lot of outward emotional anguish about this, but I know it isn't easy on them, either.
One consistent theme on The Brady Bunch is that the children are always loved and cared for. There are problems, but they are always so small that they can be fixed. In a world that is so uncertain, that must be really comforting. As my wife told me, it's also a sign that my daughters have felt loved and protected in their own home during all of this. With everything going to hell around me and nothing being certain, that's pretty much the best I can hope for right now. I'll take it.
The opening day of baseball season is usually one of the happiest days of the year for me. It comes in with the spring, a sign of hope and new life. During the season baseball is my daily friend, a needed and consistent quotidian diversion.
This spring was the worst of my life and there was no baseball to cut through the despair. April, when even the Mets could be in first place, brimmed over with mass death and fear. That month here in my Jersey town the obituaries came fast and hard. I longed for any kind of dumb distratction and my favorite go-to was gone.
It is surreal to see a baseball season starting today in the blazing heat of the dog days of summer, which is normally the fulcrum of the long 162 game slog. I guess that's only appropriate, since every other facet of our lives has been thrown into flux. Now's usually about the time that the teams that have failed to reach contention pack it in and sell of their parts for prospects at the trading deadline. As a Mets fan I normally start to lower my expectations and look forward to seeing how well the late-season call-ups from the minors can do. Sometimes there's a moral victory or two to be had, like Dominic Smith finally getting able to play again after an injury and smacking a walk-off home run in the last game of the 2019 season.
Opening Day is always a time for unreasonable hope, when every team is in contention and reality has yet to dash any dreams. I am less concerned this day about my team, however, than in the players and personnel of all the teams being safe. Just as my fears are different this year, so are my hopes. I hope less for a pennant, than for a sign that we can somehow return to life and that our efforts to start opening things with safeguards in place can actually work. (As a teacher, I am particularly vested in this.)
I honestly don't know if trying to have a season in this conditions will work or not. Right now I just need some hope and something positive to look forward to every day, so I will just try to forget about the stakes and enjoy having my daily friend back again. This morning my daughters made little banners for Opening Day, and one of them is growing into a certified baseball nut. I look forward to hot summer days inside watching the games and talking baseball together. I haven't felt this cautiously hopeful in weeks.
Play ball
Baseball Ephemera To Enjoy
This gospel song using baseball as a metaphor for living the good life by Sister Wynona Carr gets my hands clapping every time.
If being a Mets fan means being satisified with moral victories, that Dominic Smith home run to end last season is one of the all-time great moral victories.
I love lame, shoddy baseball cards, and the 1983 Fleer card of Jim Kaat may be the best.
YouTube exists so that people can make a video re-enacting the end of game 6 of the 1986 World Series with Nintendo's RBI Baseball.
Growing up in my family we often visited the graves of our relatives and ancestors on Memorial Day weekend. The holiday was just as much about our personal need to pay respect to the dead we knew as it was a time to remember fallen soldiers from America's wars. I still can remember looking at the German inscriptions on the grave of my great-great-grandmother, coming face to face with a heritage that had been drained from my family's life through assimilation by the time I was born. This practice by my family is certainly not the norm.
In America's public life the holiday is either the unofficial start of the summer, or in recent years has become Veterans Day II and Armed Forces Day II rolled together, the remembrance of death forgotten in favor of jingoism. This year, in the midst of 100,000 covid deaths, I think we should celebrate the holiday differently.
There's been a lot of talk, especially from the president, about how fighting the disease is some kind of "war." However, the dead have gone unmourned, including health care workers sent out to face the disease without proper supplies. The president and so many others have failed to mourn these dead, as many as fell in all of America's wars since World War II, because they would rather dodge responsibility and pretend that this isn't a big deal.
Because of the restrictions forced by the virus, these dead died mostly alone without proper funerals. For those reasons, it is especially important that the dead be properly remembered. I propose that Memorial Day this year be a national day of mourning and remembrance for the dead of this virus. The dead soldiers of America's wars are certainly in no danger of being forgotten.
The vast majority of people in this country are in favor of social distancing, but the ingrates who break it get all of the press coverage. Our national leadership directly undermines any sense of shared civic responsibility, even though it is something that we are all living out on a daily basis when we elect to stay quarantined. The president won't do anything to mourn the dead, but WE can.
So tomorrow on Memorial Day I plan to wear all black and to set time aside to mourn and remember the dead. I will give myself a moment of silence at 3:11, since it was on March 11th that the enormity of the situation sank in for me. I'll listen to Barber's Adagio and Albinoni's Adagio and cry for awhile.
You might think this is silly, that my lone action is pretty meaningless. Well to quote one of my favorite lines from the Dada art movement, it is meaningless, just like everything else. In this cruel world ruled by capricious fate we can only make it bearable by being in solidarity with our fellow human beings. This Memorial Day, let's not forget to do that.
Every now and then I stop and think about how I have been living in quarantine for over two months. It's been such a long time, but at the same time, as recently as early March my life was going on in its usual fashion. In terms of the number of days, it hasn't been that long, really. But the basic contours of my life have been radically altered.
I spend a lot of time in despair contemplating the deaths, the uncertainty, and the knowledge that years of economic hardship await. I am dying to see my parents and have no idea when that will be a possibility. All that being said, my hour by hour existence in quarantine is far happier than what came before.
The challenge of having to teach online has been an invigorating one to rise to. I have a real sense of accomplishment over having done it. Before quarantine I was afraid that my teaching was getting stale, but now I feel like I have managed to stay fresh.
This transition has meant a lot of work on my part. I work many more hours in the week than I did before. However, I don't mind the tradeoff because I no longer have endure my awful commute. Not only have two and a half hours returned to my life, the stress of making trains, dealing with transit delays, and the overall grind are gone. This experience has taught me what a horrible burden my commute has become on my soul.
During the school year before quarantine I felt like I was about to crack under the strain. What made it worse was seeing my children so little. I would get back at the end of the day feeling completely wiped, spending the two hours before my children's bedtime frantically getting dinner on the table then collapsing on the couch. On those days I felt to tired to actually spend time with my kids. Now I get to see them all day. Despite the annoyance of having to get them to do their school work, I really treasure all of this time with them.
I have learned that my life before quarantine was less than ideal. After that knowledge I really don't know if I can go back to facing Penn Station on a daily basis again. I also don't really know what I can even do with this knowledge, since now is not really a good time to leave a steady job. This is a paradox I am sure a lot of other people are feeling right now.
The English monarchy might be more revered than ever before. Meghan and Harry's wedding drew a massive audience. The Queen's coronavirus message to the people was watched by millions not living in the UK or even the Commonwealth. The Crown is (forgive the pun) one of the crown jewels of prestige television.
In a weird way, the Sex Pistols predicted that forty-three years ago. "God Save the Queen" was a message that England had to future, and was instead condemned to cling to its glorious and faded past. No one represents that more than Her Majesty. In a country that elects someone like Boris Johnson to be Prime Minister, who wouldn't want to praise a steadfast monarch and remember how things used to be?
When I first listened to the Sex Pistols in my teen years, this was the song I loved the most. Johnny Rotten's mad prophet sneer never sounded better, and the drum and guitar assault of Steve Jones and Paul Cook was never more pounding. As a Gen Xer living in a pretty turgid and listless 1990s, I certainly got a thrill out of such daring music so critical of a complacent society.
This song has become even more relevant in the past two months. When I look at how America has failed to formulate a proper response to the virus, how it is incapable of collective action, and of how it has such a complete and utter malicious fool at the top refusing to do anything about it, I realize that there is no future in America's dreaming, either.
Our response to this has mostly been just to give up, so that people can get haircuts and tattoos. If a bunch of people die, so what? That is a stance far more nihilist than the most shocking punk rock band.
[Note: I have been wanting to write an angry, profanity-laced rant on Facebook and have managed to hold myself back. Now that I have calmed down, this is what I'm posting to my feed.]
I have been wanting to post an angry, profanity-filled rant, but that's not good for anybody. So here's what I hope is a more measured way of saying how I am feeling about all of this.
The virus didn't start in this country, but America's decades of rot have made the virus far deadlier than it has to be. Look abroad to countries like South Korea and Germany to see how it could have been handled. Instead, our flim-flam man president tried to deny its lethality, and once he could no longer do that, he took to the airwaves to rant every day without providing relief to the worst hit areas.
I live in one of those areas. New Jersey has almost lost eight thousand people. Essex County, where I live, has lost well over a thousand. Maplewood, the town where I live, has lost over 20.
On the national level, those deaths have gone unmourned. I am sad to say that this fits a pattern. This is a nation where suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdoses have actually brought life expectancy DOWN in recent years, without very little public comment or political action. Americans kill themselves and each other with guns at a fearsome rate but calls to limit gun proliferation lead to armed mobs descending on state capitols and a lack of action. The police commit murder, especially against African Americans, at a fearsome rate, but a sizeable portion of the country responds with Blue Lives Matter bumper stickers. Our country illegally invaded Iraq and established torture prisons there and most people in this country have basically forgotten that ever happened, or that they enthusiastically backed that invasion.
It's hardly a mistake that the virus has been most lethal in assisted living facilites, prisons, and meat packing plants. Our lack of a social safety net means that millions get thrown on the scrap heap or are forced to work under horrendous conditions. The nation's biggest mental health facilities are in prisons. The undocumented workers villified by the president who make the coutnry's meat are now being told they have to risk death at work without any choice in the matter.
On the national level we have not flattened the curve, and in the intervening weeks the national government has failed to increase testing and tracing, blunting the effect of our sacrifices. This weekend has nevertheless seen quarantine restrictions lifted across the country. This despite a majority of public support for these measures across political lines. Why is this?
It's because the Republican Party has ceased to be a political party, and has become a vehicle for an extremist ideology of corporate capitalism and Herrenvolk nationalism. So many Republican officials have made it plain that they see the sacrifice of thousands of lives to pad the stock portfolios of their wealthy donors to be entirely acceptable. After all, they were more than happy to send soliders to die for a lie and to deny health care to poor Americans, so this should hardly be a surprise. The mobs who have come out to demand "re-opening" are in thrall to a dime-store libertarianism that sees any kind of sacrifice for the common good as oppression. Furthermore, there is nothing a conservative hates more than thought of having to do a thing a liberal wants them to do. They have an entire conservative media landscape that defines its own reality and confirms their worst tendencies. Basic public health measures are not polticized like this in other countries that have managed to actually handle this problem.
But I do not want to let other people off the hook, either. The opposition to the Trump regime's malicious neglect has been an ineffectual joke. (Bill de Blasio for one ought to resign in disgrace and Andrew Cuomo getting praise after he failed to act is a sick joke.) This crisis has shown the necessity for universal health care, and that STILL seems to be an impossible ask for the Democratic party's leadership, including its presumptive presidential nominee. So many rank and file opponents of this regime spend all their time getting mad at whatever idiotic thing Trump has said that day without actually DOING anything about it. ( I will admit some guilt here.) Part of that reason is that the party leadership has offered absolutely nothing and completely lacks any kind of alternative vision. The self-styled "left" has perhaps been even more ineffectual. This supposed movement of the masses mostly attracts people with graduate educations, and is inexplicably committed to returning to the ideologies of the failed revolutions of the 20th century. Meanwhile they spend all their time tearing down Democrats because they are so irrelevent that that's the only real power they can exercise.
Beyond all that, too many people in this country refuse to make any kind of collective sacrifice, and the man who embodies the absolute worst of the selfish, greedy invidualism that has infected this country's culture in the last forty years occupies the White House. Once this crew realized that the virus was disproportianately killing the elderly and poor people of color they decided it was time for others to sacrifice, but with their lives.
Honestly, how does a country like this even have a future? I certainly don't really think it does. Living in a dying empire really sucks, doesn't it? If this pandemic can't unite the nation behind common cause, then absolutely nothing ever will.
COVID is the British gunboat blasting America's junk fleet to pieces
For about twenty years now I have been saying that America has entered its Brezhnev period. The thing is, Brezhnev was in power for eighteen years. We are well past the Brezhnev years now.
Back in 2016 I felt that the election of Trump represented something far worse than the stasis and rot I had witnessed for so long. As I said at the time, we were all headed into the fire. Some of us would get burned, some would be consumed, none would be the same. And so, almost four years later, a pandemic is raging through the country enabled by incompetence and malice. I live near the epicenter, but because I live in a "Democrat state" the lives of my family and neighbors are not worth saving. There are armed mobs descending on state capitols, as in Michigan today. In states where the infection rate is going UP they are sending people back to work.
My day to day existence has become so completely frantic that I haven't had as much time to contemplate what it all means. However, right now I see clearly that the American empire is in its death spiral. Perhaps a Diocletian is on the way to pump in some blood to reanimate the corpse, but maybe that was who Obama was. I used to think that America was headed the way of the UK. In the early 2000s I figured the over-extension of the empire in the GWOT would soon be manifest, and the US would quietly move to the second rank, consoling itself with memories of past glories.
Now it is obvious that the United States has gone for the hard crash. Our gerontocracy resembles that of the Soviet Union. The president is in his 70s, Joe Biden is even older, and Bernie Sanders, the supposed breath of fresh air, is even older than him! The opposition party is paralyzed and stuck in the past, its leadership aged and incapable of adjusting. The "left" that fancies itself to be the future is also stuck in the past, wedded to the dead ideologies of the 20th century's failed revolutions. All the while the Republican Party is waging an all-out assault on the public sphere. There is no political force capable of stopping them. Even if Biden gets elected, they will not go away. As under Obama, they will use their state governments and the power of the filibuster to prevent any forward progress.
Of course, there's a good chance Trump still gets reelected, considering the fact that Biden is MIA and hasn't addressed the Tara Reade accusations, and that so many on the left want to throw a temper tantrum and undercut him because it's the only political power their failed movement has. If he is elected I do not see any kind of program capable of meeting the challenges of the current crisis or the tactical ruthlessness needed to combat conservatives.
I had once thought there would a slow decline and muddling through, but the coronavirus has been like an out of control ship slamming into a rotting dock. The rate of collapse has been drastically accelerated. We see that this nation's failure to provide health care, its failure to treat its workers with dignity, and its failure to be able to come together in times of crisis is completely toxic.
At this point I just pray for a managed decline, not an outright collapse. It might be fun for some folks to root for the end of the American Empire, but knowing what Russia was like in the 1990s, I take no pleasure in such a possibility. I also wish more people were willing to face up to this reality. Before the first Opium War, China saw itself on the pinnacle of the world. The same goes for the Soviet Union before Chernobyl, Britain before the Suez Crisis, and Napoleon before he invaded Russia.
In the meantime I will just try to put my shoulder to the wheel and to salvage what can be salvaged. That's really the best we can hope for.
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