I am worried about the cultural memory that will be lost after this pandemic season comes to a close.
All the painful and long-overdue self-reflection and self-scrutiny we’ve done; all the observations about the limitations of technology after days filled with Zoom calls; all the visceral recognitions about how inter-connected our lives are, and how much we really need each other.
How long before we go back to our hyper-individualistic lives? How long before we become content to have a palatable Democrat back in the White House, meaning we no longer need to personally attend protests and fight for Black lives, indigenous sovereignty, refugees, and our abused planet?
Are we going to go back to waiting for someone else to step into a messianic role on our behalf? Are we going to keep reveling in movies that perpetuate this comfortable myth that change happens because of one or two remarkable and brave individuals who dare to make a difference? Are we really going to go back to our lives sustaining the hope that, even after the virus has demonstrated to us how interwoven our lives are, that nevertheless somehow my personal choices don’t matter on a ‘grand’ scale?
I really want to believe that we humans have learned a lasting lesson from the past months, but history tells me it could go either way.
And I’m afraid. I’m afraid that, just as people grew tired of being careful and precipitated a deadly second wave, so we will grow tired of fighting for what is right and just. Especially as the problems our planet is facing seem to keep compounding.
I’m afraid that we will forget that we are resilient. I am afraid we will forget all of our creativity from the days when we had nowhere to go. I’m afraid we will forget those quiet hours spent staring at a tabletop trying to rearrange monochromatic puzzle pieces into a sky.
I’m afraid that we are tired of being afraid. Tired of longing for more. And that for many of us, our lives are comfortable enough that we can closet ourselves in our white middle class insularity and ignore the daily havoc being wreaked upon the less fortunate that comprise most of Earth. That we can ignore the planetary fate that we will bequeath our children and our children’s children.
For many of us, the only way to make it through the pandemic was to switch into survival mode. But we can’t stay in survival mode. Nor should we try to reclaim some sense of normalcy. When this is all finally over, we need a brief season to rest but as we rest, we must remember, and we must find ways to materialise what we learned from the pandemic so that we carry it with us collectively into the coming days, months, and years. We need to preserve these cultural memories so that we pass them down to future generations.
Once we have regained some strength, we must help each other up and build upon this new foundation of cultural memory towards a new sustainable and compassionate way of living. Here is where I should say something about loving each other and fighting together for justice, but humanity seems far from that. For now, all I ask, all I hope for, is that we focus on not forgetting and live daily in light of what we have learned.
Because there are no heroes, there are only movements.
Cover image by Mick De Paola on Unsplash
