Phthursday Musings: Big O Blues

It’s 10 degrees out, with the weekend’s snow still hanging around. It looks cold, it is cold, cold enough that nobody wants to be outside.

Or, as it so happens, much of anywhere. Nobody wants to be anywhere. Everybody just wants Things To End. Alas, Big O is here, and Things Are Not Ending.

I have some thoughts on a particular ugly situation which has come up this week and I will springboard from there into a more general - but, of course, meta - look at How Things Are and How We Are Feeling.

A lot of people have caught Omicron. It is highly contagious. Vaccinated people are getting it. It is spiking higher in some places than in others. We all know all this.

School is back in session this week. Most places, that has seemed to mean that school started back up on Tuesday. In Illinois, at least, I’m aware of some school districts which preemptively went remote for the first week or two weeks of January. I’m aware of at least one district which went remote only after seeing how many absences there were this week. Most districts seem to be trying whatever they can to avoid going remote.

Chicago Public Schools is one very large district which tried very hard to just open schools up as though everything is normal. Well, things are not normal. Tuesday night, the Chicago Teachers Union voted to go full remote. Immediately following that, CPS essentially canceled classes for Wednesday, and went so far as to lock teachers out of their work email accounts.

I understand CTU’s high level position, as well as it can be understood by someone who hasn’t set foot in a CPS classroom recently.

I understand CPS’s high level position, at least in so far that I understand they were trying to get the kids back in the classrooms. Clearly they did try some things. They sent over 10,000 test-at-home kits with kids before winter break.

The bottom line is that CTU does not trust CPS, nor should they. They do not trust that the classrooms will be safe, because they know better. It doesn’t require that CPS be deceitful or anything quite like that. It merely requires that CPS not be sufficiently competent. And CPS has demonstrated, over and over and over and over and over, that they are simply not competent when it comes to things like facilities management, and I can’t imagine how they could be shining right now either.

Let’s say that there’s a range, where one end of the range is We did our best and the other end of the range is We did pretty, pretty good, and then outside that range is everything from We did alright all the way down to We didn’t even try.

CPS, as I see it, is arguing that they did pretty, pretty good, and that should be recognized as good enough.

But I think the reality is that if CPS did their absolute best, it wouldn’t be good enough for CTU.

Personally, I trust CTU to make an informed decision to such effect. I know some teachers in Chicago (and elsewhere). I spent four years serving as a member of a Local School Council in Chicago. These people are not going to make flippant decisions. If they’re saying that shit ain’t safe, it ain’t safe.

I dismiss the most extreme criticism of CTU. I don’t necessarily dismiss all criticism. In fact I think it is eminently fair to raise the argument that however unsafe things might be in the classrooms, there’s a balance to be stricken against what it means to go remote, how it impacts families, etc. I think in the abstract this all makes a lot of sense.

In the particular, though, I think the reason why going remote is so problematic is because CPS refused to prepare for it. “We can’t do that, because we weren’t planning on doing that!” You can see the circular logic at play. Is remote schooling ideal? Of course not! But wouldn’t you want to be ready for the potential? And do it as well as you possibly could? Apparently not.

Here’s the other thing though: I also think that CPS was in the unique position that if they did think it was correct to go remote, they could expect CTU to take the fall for it. I absolutely believe that CPS at an institutional level is that cowardly. I’m not necessarily saying that this is something the CPS CEO or the Mayor of Chicago is actively thinking. Rather, I think that kind of cowardice is baked in to the system. I think the Mayor controlling the schools is an integral aspect of that cowardice. It’s just a bad, bad setup. Maybe when the elected school board comes into being things will improve. We can hope.

To be clear: I have interacted with CPS administrators who I think are good people, good at their jobs, who care deeply about the kids. It’s just not enough. The system as a whole is wrecked and the political will doesn’t exist to truly fix it.

The system as a whole is wrecked and the political will doesn’t exist to truly fix it.

CPS is hardly unique, now is it?

The one thing that does make CPS unique is that, within the system, the core workers are strongly organized. Oh, there are plenty of people that don’t like what CTU did this week. But what I think they really don’t like is that CTU had the power to do that.

What if health care workers had power like that, in the face of what some of their employers have tried to pull? What if teachers in most parts of the country had that kind of power? It might not manifest in the same way. But just imagine if workers had that kind of power, here, there, everywhere. Imagine how much different things might be right now, in terms of responding to the pandemic.

There’s a lot of griping about what’s being called the Great Resignation. Here’s the deal: Most people have been so thoroughly deprived of collective agency that the only agency available to them is… to quit. For whatever those reasons are. And increasingly they have been doing so. And some people think this isn’t going to slacken, Ed Zitron being one of them:

People are fed up. They’re fed up with the virus, they’re fed up with the pandemic, but they’re fed up for a lot of other reasons too. The gross profiteering so many companies have engaged in during the pandemic is infuriating. The supply chain breakdowns - often a direct result of gross profiteering - have been maddening. Now there’s inflation - which is caused in no small part by that very same corporate greed, as Matt Stoller has forcefully argued:

I realize that some people who are fed up cite how they feel government has overreached, they feel like their freedoms are being violated. I think the idea of blaming government is how a lot of people have been trained to express their fears of losing control. Or, perhaps more directly, that the notion of control is completely caught up in the notion of being able to make discrete individual choices, i.e. whether to wear a mask, whether to get vaccinated. People who think like this are, for example, most likely to denounce CTU.

CTU engages in collective agency though. What I am calling “control” is something bigger, broader, more abstract. Control isn’t the same thing as freedom, not exactly. The ability to collectively make an informed decision about what is and isn’t safe might be scary to people who don’t want to participate in collective decisionmaking. Oh, it might also be scary to people who think the collective decisionmaking will run counter to how they personally think things ought to be. But collective power is imbued with a lot more ability to manage control levers.

Covid has attacked both the individual control and the collective control. The balance between the individual and the collective is an age-old tale. At times like this it is harder than ever to maintain such a balance.

And yet the reality is that America has never been more powerful than when it has come together and acted in concert. Even the most ardent pacifist would surely recognize that the war mobilization effort for World War II was astonishingly successful. Strong leadership emphasizing strong collective and collaborative responses to the pandemic, with the attendant emphasis that it is through collective strength that we can all most successfully pursue individual initiatives… well, that is sorely lacking right now. Even at the smallest levels I glean an increasing deemphasis on the simple notion of working together. It’s not just that nerves are frayed. It’s that one of the things we’re telling ourselves to do in response to the pandemic is to rely solely on ourselves. That just further compounds the already immense tragedy of these times.

I’m president of our school’s PTO. We’ve had a harder time getting volunteers this year. The circumstances don’t make volunteering easy, of course. But I think there’s something more to it. I feel like the notion of the resilient community just isn’t out there. Parents used to walk their kids to school, and stay and chat for a few minutes. The pandemic has made it so that if we do walk the kids to school, we immediately flee the premises as soon as they’re in line. I feel like, when the day comes where there’s no need to flee, when we’re not wearing masks and can truly see each other again… we’re still going to flee. That will simply be what we’ve gotten used to, and it will take real effort to overcome those tendencies.

There is a lot of despondency out there. I see it on social media, I see it in chatting with closer friends. It’s not just that there’s a virus out there. It’s that Things Are Not Ending.

For the sake of my family, for my own sake, I have to fight the impulse to get swallowed up by the darkness from the Covid clouds. Many of you no doubt feel the same way, even if some days it’s really hard to feel that way, even if you really don’t know what you’ve got to fight with, even if you really truly have no idea how to pick up the pieces when the opportunity avails itself.

I want to offer some hopeful thoughts.

First, I continue to be inspired by CTU, if not for a given action, at least for how I see that there is still the potential for empowering collective action, and action at that which is led primarily by women and largely by people of color. I’m a smart white guy, I suppose… smart enough to know that things are not going to be solved by a bunch of smart white guys, especially not by the very same smart white guys like that goddamn tool Larry Summers who got us into a lot of these ugly messes in the first place.

Second, I’ve seen this pandemic wear a lot of people down, but thankfully I don’t see it on the faces of children the way I see it on the faces of grownups. The kids know things are screwy but they also know their parents are screwy and what’s one screwy versus another? I know it’s harder on older kids. And my point isn’t to minimize that. Rather it’s just that I think younger people will prove to be more resilient and I am hopeful in our long term future.

Perhaps this is too optimistic… I also think that there are some paths opening up for how to make getting back to normal work better for a lot of people. I think that there are some community institutions which have held up alright and which could become even more important anchors of their communities. I’m thinking about libraries and parks, places where communities can truly gather again. A school community is another where, once we can be outside together, I can imagine a lot of things which we might be able to do together, low key things, just basic community engagement things. Things which maybe have been taken for granted before.

Personally, though it’s been uneven, I’ve spent more time in different kinds of outdoor places than before. I’ve been to forest preserves I’d never seen before. I’m eager to visit more of them. A month ago there was a small school related outing at a forest preserve, and there weren’t a lot of kids, but it went so well, with just a few boys hanging out, running around, finding black walnuts, being silly. I think we will do more of that. And will keep on doing so even when the pandemic finally settles down.

It might seem naive to some. I don’t think of it that way. No matter how difficult it gets, we’ve got to stay optimistic. It’s too easy to get sucked into a doom vortex. We will get through this insanity. We have lost a lot and will lose a lot more in the process and the last thing I mean to do is sugarcoat that. But we have to keep moving forward. Our families, our neighbors, our planet, for all of them, we have to keep moving forward.

I really do believe we have unexercised collective agency to bring to bear to make our towns, our states, our nations better places to be. I remain optimistic that while it feels right now like Things Are Not Ending that, truly, Things Will Improve. It’s getting better all the time. Can’t get no worse!