recordfromherekn

[recordfromherekn]

How does a society value education?

Over the last couple weeks in California, we have seen the majority of our economy close for a second time in about as many months. The definitive reversal of the hopeful, if naive, optimism of an economy’s last lifeline came as a crushing defeat for many small business owners, restaurateurs, and families trying to survive the current economic moment multiplied by a pandemic.

But we were never really set up to successfully reopen an economy in a society that had not yet gotten its priorities straight. Like a teenager who had been grounded, we had not thought about what we did long enough in our rooms to reemerge any wiser. Education comes first. Or at least it should. 

The way that we signal the worth of education and public education in this country comes in many forms. The most basi, of course, is what we pay our public school teachers. In a capitalistic society that speaks in salaries, the people who dedicate their lives to supporting, shaping, and challenging the young people in our societies to think harder, dream bigger, and try again, are relegated to occupational trash. 

We say nice things about teachers and the work they do when called upon for soundbites or statements of solidarity, but when given the chance as a society to show them that we value their public service, we fail to show up for teachers and for education in this country over and over again. 

The panic around reopening schools a month before its doors were set to reopen is therefore no surprise. If we showed priority for getting back to our bars and our gyms before backwards planning from the necessity of our schools, our youth, our future, how were we ever going to reopen our economy safely? If parents have nowhere to bring their kids every day, how are the majority of American adults expected to get back to work? 

The reality is that it was not even considered because of how little thought we give to K-12 education in this country. We treat it as something we sprint through to survive and never look back on to revise. But any talk of reimagining a future built on more equity will never exist if we don’t fix education first. The saddest truth in the fight around #defundingthepolice is that we have already been defunding education that way in this country for years. 

[recordfromherekn]

Until We Can Get Past the Fear, COVID Was a Waste

I don’t always believe in the binary theories of statements that start out, “There are two kinds of people in this world.” But there are two kinds of people in this world: Those that are crippled by COVID, and those that are creating through its constraints.

It really goes back to how comfortable individuals are with the unknown, or in rethinking what they know to be true on a day-to-day. Do you go through life following the motions or do you wake up charting your path every day?

Of course I don’t want to sound like I am ignoring the very real consequences of the current pandemic and racial uprisings that account for a wide range of reactions and rightful grief. But for a moment, pretending that all doesn’t exist, I’m talking just about the element of quarantine.

This has been an historic time. Even before George Floyd’s death prompted a much bigger global movement amidst the pandemic, we were living through history. In the two and a half months we were safer at home, you could already see the wild range of reactions your closest friends had to the order to stay put.

Something wasn’t working. We were all feeling it, and had been feeling it for a while now. I would never say that COVID was meant to happen or that it’s good that it did when so many people have died and continue to die from this horrible pandemic. But I do believe we can learn from most things that happen, but it seems like we were in too much of a panic and stuck in too much fear as a society to let go into the space where we could take in any lessons as a society of this great silence.

And isn’t that a symptom of a society that had become completely sick? That even amidst a global pandemic, we could not slow down because of the impending catastrophe of most things in our society barely balancing on a pin.

How will we ever get to a more sustainable place if we are unable to rethink, reimagine, and reconstruct the inequity of institutions and industries—from restaurants to healthcare—if we will not even allow ourselves the breaths it takes to get away from the broken systems of today?