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Daniel Goldin asked that we reflect on our Apocalypse conversation held three months ago. While I’m now on the other side of the first shock of COVID, my footing on life is still quite wobbly because every day delivers another aftershock. I know how the Egyptians in the Moses story must have felt what with political rebellions and plagues and natural disasters piled one on top of another. So, every day seems like Passover: Virus, police killings, deadly hurricanes, firestorms, and air that sears your lungs with every breath. I wish all this were landing solely on our modern-day Pharaoh in the White House and not on me; but like the Biblical Pharaoh, this one has a very hard heart. Hence, we suffer, and he doesn’t, and his continuing presence is a rumble in my life that keeps me off kilter. No, I don’t think I have moved very far from when we were conversing online – still filled with grief and uncertainty and simmering anger.
I no longer think the metaphor apocalypse for COVID works for me: this isn’t the end of days or the ushering in of some supernatural revelation. Rather, it feels like a gigantic perturbation, an earthquake in human history, a natural biological event that has uncovered and set in motion social, economic, political, racial, and cultural tectonic plates. In the process it’s shaken everything up and made a mess; and it’s this mess that has revealed what previously was hidden or dimly seen. But I have hope that there will be a new stability in the future; that’s the way of earthquakes even when they take ages to resolve.
Here are some of my musings about the mess; be warned, they’re barely formulated musings and in no particular order:
Mostly it seems folks are managing this earthquake in characteristic ways and mobilizing and falling back on their habitual defenses. This seemed true in our conversation last May in which we each spoke from our dominant default position: some from a political perspective; some from a rational, didactic place; some from