“AMERICA TODAY: Where do we stand?"

By Dana Bahng

It is currently mid-August, 2020. We're four months away from a new year - one which a lot of us are hoping won’t continue along the rails of this never-ending train wreck.

It’s impossible to consider the scope of the pandemic without first addressing how much it has taken from everyone (massive damages to human life, lost functions of daily life, and the global economy). We can also recognize its effect on the younger generations. My full sympathy goes out to the Class of 2020, as all their years of hard work and anticipation have led up to a huge letdown.

On a brighter note, it’s impressive to see the adaptability of the graduating class - final ceremonies set up on Zoom, Animal Crossing, Minecraft, and more. It's so admirable to see such versatility in schools, teachers, and students. Back in the spring, everyone learned to use Zoom, Google Meet, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and the like in a matter of weeks to substitute fully interactive classrooms. Google Classroom, which was already in use before the pandemic, has become a reliable hub for organizing lessons, assigning and receiving scheduled schoolwork, and keeping teacher-student contact convenient with notifications.

This is a phenomenon that I think we overlooked in all the chaos of the early year. Whether or not we’ve noticed it, we are now (unavoidably) growing dependent on these platforms, and education as a whole will never be the same again. Entire organizations dedicated to virtual tutoring matchups have popped up over the past few months. Summer program directors have learned to design their virtual programs to be just as teachable, learnable, interactive and fun as they would have been in person. And of course, something more familiar: kids are able to stay in touch with new friends during and beyond camp through social media.

COVID-19 has taken so much, but it’s also highlighted our strengths in maintaining connections and stimulating our passions. More seriously, it has shed light on some major issues that’ll soon be taking the stage in the American social and political sphere.

The failure of the US pandemic response has spawned neon arrow signs pointing out weaknesses throughout our system. The refusal of the federal government to place clear quarantine regulations and penalties, as well as setting a standard for mask-wearing, has rendered proper and effective social distancing impossible. Our healthcare system is way past capacity, as our infection and death counts have plateaued. Doctors and nurses are still working up to 12 hours at a time and taking consecutive shifts, and putting the health of themselves and their families on the line to try and save lives despite a constant flood of new patients. Essential workers are being put at growing risk as infection counts continue to shoot up in new states every day, disproportionately affecting lower-income individuals. Smaller local businesses everywhere are closing up permanently. 50% of the jobs we will have lost by the end of this are never coming back. All of this has also very obviously shaken up public opinion on our current president and his administration, which has created a rocky landscape for the election coming up this November. 

Obviously, nearly every country in the world has taken a hit from the pandemic - but the U.S. is within the top 10 worst outbreaks globally, and the worst among the advanced nations. A prime example is South Korea, which despite its small size took the initiative on widespread testing back in the spring and beat down its infection rates. It is now combating “aftershock” outbreaks, while the U.S. continues to struggle with maintaining its first set of outbreaks.

Worse yet, fall is coming. Before we even consider the threat of a second wave (when we aren’t even past our first), this means that school is starting up again. Fall 2020 reopening plans everywhere are still unknown territory, and September is only 2 weeks away. Protecting children’s lives, as well those of older and more vulnerable teachers, is somehow not the unconditional priority, and most proposed plans for in-person schooling include an unspoken acceptance that a number of participants are going to get sick. The questions of who gets the responsibility of covering testing and treatment, as well as protocol for schoolwide testing after a student or faculty member tests positive, remain unanswered. Unless parents want to begin signing waivers.

I pose another question - this one aimed at everyone who comes after our most recent graduating class. What’s going to happen to us? Or more importantly, how will we choose to work around it?

Right now, we’re shark bait. We’re the guys sent out of the underground bunker to scope the damages of a post-apocalyptic world. Experts say that the whole of the pandemic in America may only be over in early 2022. (This is the author’s graduation year.) We keep asking when we’ll be going back to normal. When things are going to be the same again, right again. But have we considered that maybe that “normal” was never normal in the first place?

Before COVID-19, we already had enough on our plate. If you haven’t forgotten with the chaos 2020 brought, we were coming out of a terrifying cluster of school shootings that sent everyone into a quiet trepidation last fall. I remember discussing plans with my family for what I should do if the same happened at my school. Looking back at all of this, which I mostly forgot about in the past few months, crushes me. It crushes me that this March was the first time in decades we went without a school shooting - It took a nationwide school shutdown.

This was our normal. Our normal was confusion and violence. Our normal was hearing about the impending climate crisis. And now, our normal is isolation. Every day, wherever we turn in our own homes, every screen shows death, loss, and injustice. We see, every day, how our leadership is flawed; we see how the world we came to know may not be so right. None of this is right, but we’ve spent so long in the chaos that it all just turned to static. Now, as we sit in the quiet of our homes, perhaps we’ve been given more time to reflect.

You may be wondering where your place is in the here and now - during the pandemic; during the resurgence of BLM and social movements across the country, if not the world; and during Trump’s first term of presidency in America. Where are we? And in this limbo, will we ever reach our future? Will we ever reach the end?

To that, I say, we’re moving towards our future right now. There won’t really be an end, whether that’s a comfort or a curse. Things are changing, and we’re not going to be able to go back. The playing field of American politics, and the conversations we’re going to have about the way things work here, will never be the same. Education is changing, social conventions are changing, and we are changing.

Of course, the person writing this is not you - nor do they claim to know your story, your ups and downs, and how your personal life is going in this trying time.

But I do encourage you to share that story. Document your daily experiences, save your messages to friends and family, record news broadcasts, and be present, both physically and mentally. This is something our parents, and likely even grandparents, have not experienced before. We don’t have a leading light. We don’t have a handbook to all of this, but it’s okay.

This year, and everything that it brought with it, has tipped the world on its precipice. It’s not something we can wait out until it’s balanced again; we are past the point of return, we are past the event horizon. What comes next is not “back to normal”. What comes next is our future.

The area we’re stepping into is unexplored territory, and we are the pioneers of this upcoming era. It may be our duty, but this is our opportunity.