The U.S. is hitting its sixth month of social distancing and safety measures. Along with dramatic adjustments to work and personal life, daily mental, fiscal, and physical health challenges, not to mention a certain climate of uncertainty, anxiety, or loneliness, life in a pandemic has inspired a change of pace. Between people and between activities there is more space—uneasy space, difficult space, but space all the same. This same summer, demands for climate action, and demands for social action against the white supremacy of our country have taken center stage across digital platforms and local communities.$^1$ Are these national focuses merely concurrent, or are the changes we are experiencing personally involved in shifting us collectively?
In my newfound space, I cannot help but recall my Febmester. I cannot help but remember the boredom, the dumb curiosities that would occur to me, the recurring thought, well, why not? when an opportunity came along. But unlike my Febmester, this summer my curiosities (and Google searches) have been less about my own ambitions, or in any case, less focused on learning Scottish dancing or novel-writing. My thoughts this summer have been on friends and strangers, health-care workers, what leadership means, our planet’s future and my part in it. This time I am very much aware that I am not the only one around twiddling my thumbs. This time I am also not the only one watching for opportunities, and thinking, well, why not now?
Expressions of community are not hard to find in this summer of separation. It seems making a call to extended family members or expressing love to old friends occurs more frequently, and with less formality. New traditions have sprung up, with towns and cities across the country instigating scheduled times to applaud health workers from windows, or to howl towards each other in the evenings like wolves.$^2$ Rumors about seeing a lockdown-induced drop in carbon emissions from space or dolphins returning to Italian coasts—even though the latter has since been debunked—swept through social circles in March.$^3$ These moments were not lost to the usual din of daily life and news (activity that seems deafening in retrospect). These topics and events lingered in the air, spread across the internet, permeated all manner of conversations, and remained a part of common interest for days. I remember these events not because they were remarkable, although they were, but because they gave the impression that the nation and I were watching the same world, one day to the next.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the focus of my attention, among other aspects of my life, has changed. My content intake has turned more toward articles for white readers on becoming anti-racist and TED talks on the roots of prejudice. Social media platforms engage in one overwhelming discussion, my book group now reads solely James Baldwin essays. It hardly needs to be said that this time, the calls for racial justice feel different. Is it coincidence that this sense of breaking ground around the American foundations of white supremacy is happening in a groundbreaking period itself?
Our world (call that our country, our globe, our school, our neighborhood) was not only “unprecedentedly” disrupted by the Coronavirus, but unprecedentedly unified in that upset. Approximately 1.7 percent of the U.S. population has contracted COVID-19, a devastating number.$^4$ But, of less severity yet far greater magnitude, the entire community has shared in the daily experience of its appearance in our lives. Millions feel the effects of extended isolation, have caught a view of empty streets, have tried to smile behind a facemask, have not hugged someone they love. These things have made the months surreal, but more surreal to me was the continued realization that we are all similar, today, as we never have been before. What has felt historic to me, sitting here, is the sensation of listening for once as a collective.
It does not feel irrelevant, then, that acts of brutality, are rattling White Americans this time. It is not nearly so plausible, upon seeing footage of police murdering innocent men, of cars driving into protesters, to return to the busyness of personal life. For life in a pandemic, we are full-time witnesses. In the newfound space—the space outside of the hospital—of May, June, and July, incredible occurrences, particularly those which speak for life or against it, seem amplified. What we might realize is that it is not only the acts themselves that are shocking, but that they are able to linger: thanks to widespread lockdown, they arrive in a setting already built on collective focus; thanks to personal isolation, they sit here with me and discomfit.
Change like this does not happen. No matter how important the mission, people are busy and there are many problems to fix. It is hard to get anyone, let alone everyone, to honestly contemplate a singular crisis. Not even climate change has gotten the world talking about the same subject: not even imminent inhabitability has gotten world-leading countries to stop, refocus, and work to solve the issue.
But here we are. This total, stranger-than-fiction upset to our lives is also a world precedent when it comes to united experience and united action. The COVID-19 era has brought losses, but it has also demonstrated new consciousness, new focus when it comes to the allocation of energy and time, and new unanimity in the face of questions about our joint life. This phenomenon, this ability of the human race, is also something we, as students, are witnessing.
I do not think the changes taking place externally, in our social groups and our movements can be separated from the pandemic. A community depends on the palpable experience of being in the same boat. In busyness, change is hard to see, hard to hear, and hard to carry out. Pause is a better conduit for action. While marching in a protest in Burlington last month, I could not help but think about the word “Febiness”—and I don’t mean the stereotype of being a Feb. It may be trite but it is undeniable that there is a Feb community at Middlebury. The common factor in that community is not a shared love of knives. Realistically, it is simply having had to traverse months of space before we got to Middlebury. I believe it made our college careers, us as individuals, and us as a community different than they would otherwise have been. This year, our country must, along with suffering, difficulty, and loss, confront space. But it need not be merely an absence, it may be the space that is necessary to cultivate choice, to consider “what comes next” before it is realized.
What this space will make us into and take us into, I cannot say, but that there will be an “us” is not so absurd to imagine as it once sounded. We are already beginning to move like one.
Nimaya Lemal is a senior Feb majoring in Comparative Literature with German and English as her languages. She is the copy-editor and an illustrator for TWIMC (and possibly responsible for the club’s acronym). Because it is fall now in Middlebury, you can usually find her frolicking (literally or metaphorically) between tasks and locations.
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