Getting Deliberate with What's Next
This morning, as I attempted to catch up on my long neglected magazine reading, I picked up my newest issue of Museum, published by the American Alliance of Museums. The title: Empathy. And before I even got into the articles, I was struck by a line from the president, Laura L. Lott. "Let’s be hopeful and energized for a new horizon. But let's also be deliberate in building what's next."
Since the beginning of the pandemic, there seems to have been a relentless drive to figure out what's next. What's next for our safety, what's next for fighting the virus, what's next for rebuilding our tourism, museum and hospitality sector, what's next for reopenings and what's next for normalcy. And despite the tsunami of predictions about what future will bring and what the ‘new normal’ will look like, at this point I think I've accepted that no one really has any idea. This is a path we will discover for ourselves, both independently and together, one step at a time. This morning, after reading the news that what’s next for my town includes mask mandates in city buildings, and many businesses, I found myself thinking about the twin needs of community and empathy.
Getting vaccinated brought me a wild feeling of euphoria and invincibility along with my second shot. Ok - first I had to get over feeling rotten for a couple of days, but THEN! Then the feeling of invincibility that let me go see my aging parents for the first time since 2019. That let me think of visiting friends in Europe, Canada and Costa Rica if restrictions were lifted. Heck - that let me enjoy coffee with a friend, in my favorite coffee shop, less than six feet apart, unmasked.
But I also have friends who remained at higher than average risk. So, despite my own status, I would happily wear a mask when I visited them and we would get together outside, six feet apart. That may have been why I felt little more than a sense of calm cooperation when I would see businesses requesting masking by the vaccinated. As my favorite coffee roaster stated on their sign, we never know about each other's situation, and who might be at risk. We the vaccinated can still contract and spread covid, and it seems obvious, however uncomfortable it may be, that we have a responsibility to the communities in which we live to be faithful partners in society's overall well-being.
We already compromise our personal freedoms in many ways by obeying laws or accepting the consequences. We wear shirts and shoes in restaurants. We don't drink and drive. We don't steal from one another. We carry car insurance to protect our victims if we cause an accident. And we have vibrant, intense conversations when new rules are proposed that strive to protect the many by asking all to compromise a personal freedom. Where is that story in our interpretive landscape? Where do we feature the role of 'the commons' and the way it helped/helps communities thrive?
As a professional interpreter, I've been thinking about the relationship between some of the stories we celebrate about American individualism and individuals and the fact that we also like living in societies. Membership in a society means that we compromise, make and change rules and laws, observe or challenge customs, and work together for the common well-being. And that is a story worth exploring, understanding, and telling in all of its messy complexity. It's rarely a story I hear when I take tours, visit museums, or spend time at historic sites (although I celebrate it when I find it). What I typically hear, even in stories about communities come together for survival or to fight for freedom, are the personal narratives of individuals who make things happen. Rarely a mention about how difficult alliances and compromises are forged despite misgivings, unwelcome sacrifices and frustrations. Or how we balance our responsibilities to one another when that bumps up against individual liberties.
Which takes me back to my original observation. What's next will be discovered one step at a time. We will discover it as individuals. We will discover it in community with one another. We will probably have to balance those discoveries and we can be deliberate about our choices as we rebuild. As interpreters, we have opportunities to be part of restoring the importance of civil discourse, of compromise, of community with one another, and of the commons to the stories we tell. Over the last year we all got a first-hand look at what it felt like to be isolated from our communities, families and social structures. This is a time when so many of us are helping our institutions recover missing voices, histories and ideas. As we do this together, let us also work together to restore our pride in some of the many roles we can only play together. As parents, children, neighbors, congregations, teams. As community.