surrender to a new dawn.
By JACK COMSTOCK
FOR OVER A MONTH, I sleep only five hours a night as I keep the 3D printers (owned by the school and contributed by parents, libraries, and local businesses) running. We’re determined to get the much needed personal protective equipment (PPE) directly to the nurses who need them. I set the final print job each day at 11:30 pm, sailing to school on my bike, a bright patch of the night lit up by my powerful headlamp, illuminating the denizens of the night: possums, skunks, porcupines and deer nestled here and there, or grazing lazily in the early spring evenings.
Each day, the creatures become more accustomed to me, and soon I fly by with only a nod of their heads. They seem to understand that I’m not a threat. My tired mind imagines that they sense the noble cause for which I ride. I’m up at 5:00 am to unload and reload the printers, readying as many visors to be outfitted with elastic and protective shields as we can each week. I don’t spend much time thinking about why, as a teacher, I have found myself with this task. I do it because I know it needs to be done. I know that for every shield we produce, we might prevent the infection of one healthcare worker and allow him or her to save who knows how many more lives. As the most essential of workers, these nurses and doctors have been failed by the institutions that could have protected them.
The weeks pass, and we slow production as the needs for face shields are met. Now, it’s 10:30 pm, and I should be reading my students’ essays on the future of science, but instead, I find myself sinking into my third hour of preparation for my World History class. I’m searching for patterns, for parallels, for facts and figures that will help my students to make connections. We’ve been studying the modern era and have been grappling with the complexities of economics. We’ve explored the Protestant roots of the capitalist ethic, considering how the “innate depravity of man” relates to a tacit justification of “greed is good” in Adam Smith’s vision of a free market system. We met Karl Marx, who warned that the bourgeoisie, “compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production.”
We encountered the Robber Barons who consolidated empires of steel and vast banking fortunes, ushering in a time of inequality in America that has not been matched, until today.
We’ve explored the harsh reality that, from the Great Depression to the 2008 Financial Collapse, those with wealth and power have circled like vultures when the chaos of disaster ensues, growing fatter off the suffering of the masses — snatching up businesses, property, and the wealth of the nation.
Finally, the question comes into clarity: Why, in a nation with so much wealth, did so many of us have to take on the second job of “rescue workers,” sewing masks and manufacturing protective shields? Undoubtedly, there is great beauty, satisfaction, and learning when communities come together in a common cause. Still, I’m left asking: How is it that time and again the system fails us and continues to reward those who already have so much?
Today, just as in 2008, with a manufactured collapse brought on by greed of biblical proportions and presided over by a Republican and then-Democratic government staffed with accomplices in all the right places, money flows to the top, rather than to the people and businesses that are in true need. Here at the Homestead School, days and days were spent on PPP loan applications and phone calls, only to find out that the funds had dried up overnight.
In the second round, we secured a loan, but the stipulations and confusing clauses, the exacting rules, did not inspire a deep breath of relief knowing that we could keep all of our staff employed. In the same “caring act,” no-strings-attached loans were granted to mid-sized and large businesses: Billions of dollars, as happened in the 2008 Great Recession, will likely fund the buying up of failing companies and will un-doubtedly find its way into the pockets of executives as they reward themselves for their “hard-earned” profits.
I catch myself sounding cynical. It’s easy to fall into cynicism, but then I remind myself, as I constantly remind my students, “Go back to the story!”
What narrative have we agreed to as a culture that promotes this extreme self-interest? How has that story shaped our laws, our ideologies, our politics, our corporations? My goal here is not to dishearten. As in the classes I teach, I first must set the context.
If we approach history as a collection of events to be
merely understood and we don’t hold them up to the light of today, looking for how their silhouette mirrors and reflects elements of the present, then we will never gain perspective on the story we are living.
Whether it is a war on our rights, on the environment, or economic warfare, we are all under attack. Those who have been traditionally most marginalized fall victim first. The signs are pointing to an awakening, to a recognition of our collective struggle, the existential crises that face us all. This holds out the possibility of setting aside divisiveness and embracing unity.
Isn’t this what our world needs as the sun beats down hotter on streets filled with protests and riots? I believe the years to come will challenge us as a community in an even greater way as we respond to the continued challenges of COVID, institutionalized racism, economic struggle, and let us not forget, another problem we have also failed to address for decades, climate change. As we slowly emerge, clad in masks, storms are already raging across our country, and we sense a more profound uncertainty, darker, threatening clouds on the horizon. How do we move into the light while fortifying ourselves for the turbulent weather that will inevitably continue?
We must all examine the ideologies that we have swallowed along the way, identify them, and then set them down gently, thanking them for giving some structure and meaning to our confusing world. Let’s start to create a new story for how we can live and thrive and educate our children. In this, there is no room for the limiting scripts and prepackaged explanations that come with the doctrines that have been sold to us. While elements of wisdom can still be found within these, they grossly misrepresent the actual world we live in, the real crises that we face, and certainly blind us to a way forward that might work for all of us.
So, where does this leave us in this narrative? To me, the answer always seems to point back to community and local resilience. As E.F. Schumacher once said, “Economics is not an exact science; it is, in fact, or ought to be, something much greater: a branch of wisdom.” My students understand that in our world today, economics is far more ideology than science. If we are to create a new economic system, then I think we had better get started.