April
16, 2020
Today’s
observations – We learned - we, being the dorm parents here - that one of our
seniors was flying home to China tomorrow. Today was his birthday, so all reason for
hoopla. This student has been with us
for a while, here since the school began admitting boarding international
students. With his graduation day only
seven weeks away, I couldn’t help but feel a little sad and still understanding. The news about Covid in the US is rather
bleak. I’ve been excited about and for this senior class, but there will
probably be no graduation ceremony. At times, the end of the school year feels like a rope fraying in the wind. Which
is such a pity because they deserve that community right of passage and because the
commencement speaker is brilliant. She
is a young woman who grew up in Kabul during the rise of the Taliban. After completion of a patchwork of clandestine
schooling from parents who were dedicated to it happening, she enrolled at
Middlebury College. And after graduation, she returned
home and founded Sola (School of leadership Afghanistan), a girls’ boarding
school in Kabul. I don’t think she will come now, and I admit, I was looking forward
to meeting her. Divine intervention, I
suppose. And that ceremony is another piece of collateral damage, one more upended
affair. So, our senior leaving tomorrow
is leaving for the year and perhaps for good.
I hope he will find his way back to visit. Making him a cake and singing Happy Birthday
is not the sendoff, I’d pictured. Feels
more like witnessing an escape. These strange times conjure countless unintended
outcomes. I know that he can finish his
academic year and receive his diploma, and that he will continue in a good way whether
he walks across the stage and tosses his mortar board or not. The diploma will,
most likely, be delivered by FedEx instead of the headmaster and he will
celebrate that with his family and old friends.
As I remember, he has a new little brother, maybe two years old now,
that he has spent very little time with, who will now get to know him. Divine intervention.
Today’s image – the snare of lethargy. We are all out of sorts and often unmotivated
around here. It is probably a side
effect of the pandemic everywhere. Feeling as if we have entered the Twilight
Zone. The pace and flow of Spring Break
seems only slightly different, as we try to reengage our academic lives. With just
about one third of class offered live with a teacher, what remains must feel
like the never-ending study hall. One
could say that students are getting a taste of college life. Well, without all the fun outings and parties
and other what not. More and more,
though, I detect that these kids are fighting a rising tide of melancholy, even
depression – the lethargy is palpable. Time to teach them how to make lemonade.
Today’s idea – Warning – another rant! How disappointing, if things just returned to
the way they were before. What a
deflating feeling. As if we’d miss the
best chance and grandest opportunity for retrofitting our social and economic
designs to incorporate fixes for the things that are revealing themselves to be
malfunctioning and out of date by the stress test that we’ve been
undergoing. What would a higher
civilization do? Gather our best scientists, economists, social thinkers, community
planners, agriculturalists, technologist, educators, statesmen and women and philosophers. Hold regional community input meetings. Get it begun before the Great Gaslighting consumes
us. Call it a pipe dream, but dreams find cracks of light, light feeds plants,
who are the most evolved of us, plants grow roots that have power, they can pulverize
a road or sidewalk, they can swallow buildings. We can upend the old regime
with a global tree planting campaign, and talking as we plant, we could come to
know one another better, such an act of civil disobedience. We could heal another
infection, this propagation of rumors that to be happy, buy more stuff. The
stuff needs materials, and naturally, the natural world is our pantry and
storeroom. I just read how constitution has guaranteed our right to gather, to
ignore the mandates for social distancing, to rally at a drag race in the
middle of Little Rock or a house party in Rapid City, even during a pandemic of
unknown parameters and outcomes. They
want us to call it freedom of expression, the American Way. And our right to feed the corporate giants? Call that pursuit of happiness. Oh!!! Where are those tree ents when we need
them?
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