Together Apart

Technically I am still on Work From Home until the middle of August, but lately more and more I have been having to go into the office to do things and today I will head in and be there all day. The particulars are unimportant, but I will be around what feels like a lot of people throughout the day. I’m vaccinated and they are all vaccinated, everybody will be wearing masks, socially distanced, all the things. 

It’s strange the way that this country is coming back on line. I live in California and as of June 15th all of the Quarantine measures are basically gone. That is different in workplaces and some other places, but out there in the world, all bets are off. I went to Target on June 16th and I was still wearing a mask because I honestly just didn’t think about it when I got out of the car. Putting on the mask is just part of the routine now, you know?

In the store people were mostly still wearing masks, except for white men. White men were just all like, “Fuck your feelings.”

I am a white man and man, I gotta tell you, most of the time I feel like I’m adopted.

I don’t wear baseball caps or watch football or go in for libertarianism or gun ownership or the KKK. I know that I am infected with that toxic white masculinity that you hear so much about and sometimes it still comes out even though it is something that I work on. And keep in mind, I have basically three English degrees. You know how much of my life I have spent reading and thinking about Critical Theory? You know how much time I have devoted to figuring out what my brain is doing and why? I’ve said to people before that I am still running 20th Century white American male software no matter how many fixes and updates I try to install.

And yet, walking into Target the other day and looking at these pale baseball cap wearing football dudes, I was all like, “Do you not see how much of an asshole you look like, dude?”

Look, I get it, these are MAYBE vaccinated and so not actually doing anything illegal, but I think that the thing that has so completely shaken my faith in humanity over the last 15 months has been discovering how many people (sometimes people close to me) just lack actual human empathy. We are members of a society and that means we have obligations to one another, which means that we are all supposed to give a damn about other people. 

So maybe read the room, my dudes. We have all experienced trauma since this virus thing started, but we have not all experienced the exact same trauma and we certainly have not experienced it collectively. We should have though, but we didn’t navigate it that way. That’s what the “Together Apart” slogan was supposed to be about, but that was a slogan, not a description of what we did.

I’ve really been shaken the last 15 months about the way people behaved, especially since it was so clear that the solution was so simple: choose to care about other people and then make all of your pandemic decisions downstream of that.

As our society comes back to life, I don’t know what the next few months are going to feel like, especially once we start getting pocket spikes among people who have refused to get vaccinated. I fear we are going to be stretched even further apart. People are still dying in this country, but now there is even less that any one of us can do about that individually.

Vaccine Summer is going to be fantastic for some of us, but terrible for others. 

The worst parts of this may be behind us, but this next part is still going to be weird.

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The Memory Hole Mindset.

One day someone is going to write the definitive Covid-19 book. It will be big and heavy and heavily footnoted, meticulously researched. We are all going to buy it and none of us will actually ever finish reading it. The author will hit all the morning shows and all the news shows and all the late night shows and Trevor Noah will ask her, “So what should we have done differently?”

That’s the part that I know will make me angry all over again. Because there isn’t going to be anything new. There aren’t going to be any revelations, not really. We should have worn masks earlier, we shouldn’t have worried so much about disinfecting our groceries.

But Trevor will nudge her a little more, “Let’s imagine that you run the world in January 2020, but you get to know everything you know now …”

She won’t want to go there, but she will and she’ll say that we should have done all the things we know that we should have done: that we could have contained the virus in a couple of months if we’d actually shut the country down. If we had done what they did in South Korea where the government was delivering food to people’s doors. If we had done what they did in New Zealand and just sent people gobs of money to stay home. That we could have suppressed it by limiting people’s movements, by contact tracing their movements using cell phone data. That the NSA should have been involved. We should have had testing mobiles driving up and down every street in America like ice cream trucks. That we should have shut down every single Target and Walmart in the country. That we could have been reasonably safe in about two months. That we could have opened schools again by the summer of 2020, but it would have meant keeping bars closed.

“Why do you think we didn’t do that?” Trevor will ask thoughtfully.

She’ll say something about the American character. About the tradition of individualism in America. About the fact we are actually a libertarian country, we just don’t know it.

Then Trevor will pause and say, “So we’re assholes?”

And she’ll laugh, but then sheepishly agree. Then Trevor will throw it to a commercial.

As we begin to return to something like life, I think that we will collectively do everything we can to never have to talk about Covid again. We aren’t going to want to talk about all the ways we failed and why. We aren’t going to have any of the hard conversations about people’s behaviors. We’re going to want to put it all behind us and I understand that inclinations, but I think it is the wrong one.

Where I work the process is beginning to return workers back to face-to-face work and while I am happy about that, I have coworkers who do not want to go back. And why would they? The commutes? The cramped little work spaces? Being around other people? Not being around their kids or their dogs throughout the workday? I completely understand why someone would want to continue working from their kitchen table in their PJs. What has been weird though is that the management class keeps creeping right up to the line of saying, “Well, you CAN’T do your job from home!” 

The problem of course is that these jobs have been getting done from home for more than a year. But we have not collectively LEARNED that. It has not become something that is universally understood as true. In the rush to forget all that we have experienced in the last year, we are leaving behind the lessons of the last year.

That concerns me because it also means that we are not going to address the collective trauma of the last year. This has been hard for everyone and hard in different ways and it really seems like we should all just get a month off over the summer to clear our heads and get our shit together, but that insn’t going to happen either.

I fear that when this is all said and done, we will have learned nothing.

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Sky Butlers.

Back in 2019 I was flying back to Arizona after a job interview in California and at that point I had already not gotten several jobs I’d interviewed for and I was feeling pretty bad about myself. I ended up getting the job in California, it’s the one I have now. The plan had landed and we were sitting on the tarmac and I was sitting in the back of the plane because I prefer to sit in the back of the plane and I was watching over the top of the seats as the passengers did that slow and frustrating thing where they both take forever to gather their stuff and also try to push past the people in front of them. You can learn a lot about a person by watching how they behave during this small moment. You can learn who is organized or not, who is pushy, who is patient, who is kind, who is self-important.

I was sitting at the vert back of the cabin and I could overhear a couple of the flight attendants chatting about what’s next and what city they would end their day in that day and I thought for a moment that I would enjoy that life. The notion of spending the day hoping from city to city, looking at hundreds or thousands of strangers, getting to watch them all in these liminal moments, getting to study strangers for a living, that all seemed really appealing to me. Plus, it would be an excuse to live a slim and streamlined life, since my days would have to fit into a single bag that I traveled with each and every day. I imagined having a cool little studio apartment that I barely ever lived in. I imagined nights at odd bars in strange cities. Having friends in lots of places. Having a life that took place mostly in the air.

Obviously I’m romanticizing that life, but I was having a tough time then getting the kind of work that I wanted and so it was probably healthy to think outside the box of my own expectations. After all, people do live a life like the one I’d imagined. Probably it is more grueling and stressful than I’d imagined. I’d heard before that flight attendants are actually extensively trained and actually highly skilled and have to be knowledgeable about their aircraft, but that they spend 90% of their time doing 10% of what they’re trained for. Most of the time they’re sky butlers, but every once and a while they have to save someone having a heart attack. What a weird job.

That weirdness appealed to me and, if I’m being honest, kind of still does. I even looked into it some, but before I could spend much time on it, I was offered this job and then it was off to California to do what I am doing now. 

And lucky me, because a few months later Covid hit and lots and lots of airline employees lost their jobs and the ones that didn’t were hurtling around the skies in sealed steel tubes with strangers who were so poor at risk assessment that they were on the plane in the first place. It must have been complete terrifying hell there for a while. I really feel for people who had to do that work, it must have been a total trauma and I haven’t really heard people talk about that. Honestly, we have kind of stopped having discussions about the sacrifices that front-line workers made. Probably because as we draw nearer the end of the pandemic, if we talked about them more, we might be asked to actually reward them in some way, which I think we should do, but which this country will never do because we are kind of a nation of assholes. But I digress, that is a topic for another time.

As we creep ever so slowly back toward some kind of normalcy, I have been thinking more about a life spent in the air. My own employer has been making plans about returning to face-to-face work and there are committees and proposals and waivers and union negotiations and clarifications of terms and underneath it all is the implication that some work simply can’t be done from home even though that work has been getting done at home for 15 months. I have been thinking more about a life spent in the air perhaps because we are approaching a point where many of our lives will return to something like normal, like we are all coming in for a landing, or maybe we already have landed (I remember hearing the whooshing noise of a 737 engine when I got my second vaccine injection) and so now our whole society is just sitting on the tarmac and we are learning a lot about each other while we sit here waiting. We are stuck here waiting and thinking about all the things we’ll need to do once we deplane. We are thinking about the lives we live when we are not up in the air, we are getting ready for our return and so we are thinking about what exactly we are returning to.

It is good to think on what we want to return to and what we don’t

It is good to spend this time thinking on the other lives we could be living, it is good to think on the world of possibilities that will be opening to us as the world is reopening to us. 

A lot of lives will be completely different a year from now, not just because of the vaccines, but because of what coming back to life will mean for so many of us. A lot of marriages are going to end. A lot of people are going to quit jobs that they realized they don’t want. A lot of weird little businesses are going to get started because people will realize that life is brief and if they really do want to open that cupcake shop, they had better get on it.

I doubt I will become a flight attendant any time soon, but I’m certainly thinking on it. And that is a good thing.

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