As I wrote about earlier this year, I want to reflect more on my experiences and try to learn from them. This includes the bigger moments that happen to us collectively as well as the smaller stuff in my day-to-day life. So yes, while it’s May and we’re already 5+ months into 2021, I still want to reflect a little on 2020.
When we look back on 2020 there are so many things we will remember. The pandemic and the astonishing loss of life looms large. The way we all adjusted our lives to COVID-19 is remarkable. The uprisings in response to the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd are inspiring. They inspire in the same way that their gruesome murders are rage-inducing. I think (or hope) we will look back on the leadership of organizers and the number of people in the street as the beginning of monumental changes in fundamental values of the United States.
Pandemic Response
Mutual Aid
The response to the pandemic from the federal government and from lots of corporations was, to be polite, a disaster. However, the response from regular people and communities was inspirational and shows what we can do to support one another. Mutual aid pods appeared in neighborhoods for people to share resources and share workloads like grocery shopping. People banded together to help each other care for kids in their neighborhoods. We found ways to collaborate with one another which overturned some of our socialized capitalistic competition. I plan to continue to learn about mutual aid and, more broadly, community care as the organizing principles around it are super important as we try to find new paths to challenge the status quo. (Here’s a quick video about mutual aid and a book by Dean Spade).
Telework
I had to learn entirely new ways to do my work, which in many ways was a privilege that I know not everyone shared. Like many educators, I was in the midst of a semester-long course and had to figure out how to deliver my course (Introduction to Student Personnel, a class designed to provide foundational training to incoming resident assistants at my institution). My course featured a lecture portion and a discussion section that focused on active learning strategies.
I had to figure out how to shift the lectures to effective online videos and find ways to do asynchronous learning and create guides for 12 different discussion sections and multiple instructors. And I had to figure out how to support the student organizations I advise in moving through membership inductions, elections, and their day-to-day operations. These experiences taught me a lot about my own flexibility, problem-solving abilities, and comfort with technology. I learned a lot on the job about educational video creation and curriculum design. These skills I developed and the adjustments I made will be with me for the rest of my life. These experiences have been challenging but, in retrospect, I have a sense of gratitude for them.
Uprisings
The people organized in response to the police and vigilante murders of people. The Movement for Black Lives encouraged local community demonstrations around the Juneteenth weekend. These demonstrations were a decentralized effort but carried consistent demands that included “that police officers be held accountable for the murders of Black folks, putting pressure on elected officials to Defund The Police and instead invest in the people and community control, and on the national level calling for Trump’s Resignation.” These demands were well-reasoned and relevant to what was happening. The Movement for Black Lives has been pushing for the creative reimagining of systems in our country for years now and the summer of 2020 was a continuation of that. And I’m looking forward to what the summer of 2021 brings in pushing action, policy, and all of the conversations on how we get to collective liberation.
Organizing Work
2020 was a year of thoughtful development in an organization that I work in. We’re attempting to build something that specifically brings white men into movements for collective liberation. We think we know that has to be done and a small group of us got together and dreamed up what we believed to be a really great structure that would transform what we were doing with the men in our organization. It was challenging and fulfilling work that I believe, in retrospect, was flawed. We spent a lot of time dreaming up structures rather than values and processes in which those desired structures could thrive. This became more obvious to me when we received feedback on our ideas from some leadership in different parts of the network. We hadn’t involved many people outside of our group in discussions prior to this moment and I did a poor job of presenting my part of the vision of the network. I did not make it clear that we were still forming this vision and that our hope would be to gather some feedback and continue to build with people. So that was a huge lesson in clear communication and in creating actual participatory methods for involvement early on in processes. I think it’s easy to fall back on feedback as theater and involve people when it’s too late for their input to matter.
Family
Our time together increased and became more precious. The weight of the pandemic and the anxiety we had about whether Molly’s stint in the hospital when she was 4-5 months old for a severe case of RSV. We also had to navigate, like many families across the world, how we would care for our daughter while also keeping up with work. I’m grateful for the balance that Laura and I were able to find in structuring our schedules to make time for each other and Molly while also taking care of the responsibilities we had at work. We spent more time in nature together at a local park and found ourselves slowing down to enjoy the time additional time we had together.
Conclusion… sort of
I’m very confident that this is not all that I learned in 2020. I’ll probably look back on this right after it is published and realize I left out some monumental lesson. But another thing I’m working on is letting go of perfectionism. There are also so many people who shaped my year and learning to whom I am grateful and I hope they know who they are. And yet, they may not… this is another thing to work on. My next post will be sharing a little bit of my intention setting for the year (which will be good since the year is almost halfway gone already!)
I hope you’re able to find lessons in your 2020 experiences as well. I think we have to be able to find them even when it’s difficult, maybe especially when it’s difficult.