Think That You Might Be Wrong
Monday, September 7th, 2020After the 2005 Federal Flood, handmade signs started appearing on telephone and electrical poles around New Orleans that said: Think That You Might Be Wrong. There was a randomness to their placement, which added to the mystery. The signs were around long enough the word wrong was scratched out on one placed prominently on a telephone pole by the Dumaine Street bridge over Bayou St. John and now read: Think That You Might Be A Robot, which always tickled me.
It has been 15 years from the time of the Flood, and one thing I’ve learned is a lot of what we think is wrong. In March of 2020, we entered the time of the Pandemic, and for the last seven months some friends of mine have voiced a desire for us to go back to normal. As if that were possible.
What if normal is not where any of us need to go? Normal for most of my friends was working like a banshee to afford a middle class life without any time to enjoy it. Or, for me, it was trying to connect one low paying project to the next to create a financial tightrope that even a pregnant flea would be nervous to traverse.
Normal was my son in a school that had 27 students, seven with special needs, and every year a teacher spinning off into the atmosphere – one had a nervous breakdown mid year and would sit at her desk crying (my friend’s daughter journaled about this one), one left after the school year because it was so untenable and unsatisfying that he couldn’t bear to continue the profession, one told me when I asked her if she thought my son belonged in this school that she wasn’t sure if she belonged there either. And then the Pandemic hit, and my son was home doing distant learning and for the first time in four years he was learning something.
Then summer came and COVID-19 didn’t go away and seven months in we returned to distant learning again this fall. Some parents decided it was much better to home school for three hours a day rather than follow the school’s criteria of sitting in front of a screen for seven and a half hours. Some parents are now working remotely for the first time, and have had an easier time accommodating distant learning. Some leave their children to their screens home alone and returned to work, some threw their hands up in the air and wished for schools to reopen. No family seems to want or need the same situation.
What if we are all wrong? What if parents who are now with their children at home are experiencing something most Americans never had – time with them? What if working remotely becomes a way of life for most and it engenders flex time for working parents? What if school isn’t where our children need to be spending the majority of their time? What if they are not missing much by being out of school?
All the ranting I’ve heard from some parents that kids need socialization seems off the mark as well, because it could be had with a smaller pod of friends in their neighborhood. Children could seamlessly move into the weekend without a need for parents to shuffle back and forth to organized playdates with students who live across town? What if bikes on the streets, meet ups on the porch steps, and running in and out of neighbors’ houses came back in style?
What if COVID-19 doesn’t miraculously go away at some particular date? What is lost by continuing to be cautious, open and welcoming the changes to normal?
